suddenly he felt the front wheels bogging down in an unexpected morass of red gumbo. “Damn!” he muttered as he gunned the engine. The little roadster slewed sidewise, settled deeper. And there it stuck.
“Guess I’ll have to deflate the rear tires for traction,” he said sourly. He scrambled out, his feet sinking into the mire. He leaned over a back wheel, feeling for the valve—
Something leaped at him from the surrounding darkness, and a bludgeoning blow took him over the skull. Blinding lights cascaded through his brain, and he felt himself falling. As if from some other world, he heard Brenda shrilly screaming. He tried to right himself, to go to her aid. But smothering blackness swooped down on him, enfolded him. He toppled into the mud and lay there, unconscious.
* * * *
How long it was before he regained his senses, he had no way of knowing. But when at last he staggered drunkenly to his feet, he was quite alone. Brenda Lemoyne wasn’t in the roadster. There was no trace of her anywhere. “Brenda!” he shouted thickly. “Brenda!”
She didn’t answer. He heard only the soughing of the wind, the hissing pelt of raindrops in the scrub oak. Sickened fear assailed him, then; fear, not for himself but for the girl he loved. He remembered the dark, sinister threats uttered by Lige Ludwell, and he recalled how Lige’s daughter had died; how Edith Paxon had died. Maybe Brenda was even now hanging suspended head-downward somewhere, her life-blood being drained from her veins, either by vengeful clansmen or by something worse…such as an undead vampire-corpse…
Until tonight, he would have scoffed at such an eldritch, hellish fancy. But in view of what had already happened, a cold slime of horror slid into his marrow when he considered the possibility that the Ludwells had been right in accusing Eula Starko of vampirism. And while his reason rejected such an idea as fantastically impossible, his instinct compelled him to find out for himself; to learn the truth, one way or another. He started running through the storm.
The ridge lay to his left, and a tortuous footpath traversed it, precariously leading to the Starko cabin in Haunted Hollow. Up this treacherous path he stumbled, while branches flayed his face and snagged at his bathrobe and pajamas. Panting, winded, he presently gained the summit and started down, his feet slipping in the oozy muck. Then, dead ahead, he saw a light and realized that he had gained his destination. The Starko shack was before him.
Silently he stole toward it; reached the uncurtained window. He peered in—and felt the short hairs prickling at the nape of his neck. “My God!” he breathed.
Eula Starko, whom he had last seen lying in death back at the hospital, sat upright in a chair before a plain deal table. There were bowls before her; bowls containing thick red fluid that couldn’t be anything else but blood. She was staring at the window, her eyes glassy and expressionless—and crimson streaks drooled from her mouth, down her chin, onto her breast.
Then, from somewhere up on the mountainside, there came a thin, wailing scream—a woman’s scream, terror-spawned and hideous, as if ripped from the throat of a girl whose reason topples close to the brink of horrified insanity!
“Brenda!” Tim Croft choked. He turned and hurled himself back along the path, seeking the source of that keening sound.
As he ran, he heard it again; it seemed closer, this time. To his right he noticed a faint flicker of yellow light that seemed to glow from the mountain itself. He knew there were no cabins perched in that direction; the terrain was too steep, too inaccessible, for human habitation. Yet the light was real, and the scream was repeated again. “Tim—Tim—Help me—!” It died out abruptly, as if muffled by throttling fingers.
Tim Croft scrambled off the trail and started clawing his way toward the light, grasping at boulders and scrub oak to keep himself from falling into the hollow. Once a rock went out from under his foot, almost pitching him headlong to the creek-bed that brawled and seethed far below him. But he regained his footing and pressed onward with a madman’s singleness of purpose; and at long last he came to the seeping light.
HE saw, then, that it emanated from the mouth of a cave that burrowed worm-like into the mountain’s dank bowels. Within the cave, lanterns gleamed and men muttered quietly to drown the sobbing moans of their feminine prisoner. Tim Croft crouched low as he crept toward the sounds. Then a frantic fury gripped him, and his nails dug blood from his palms. “Brenda—!” he shouted.
She hung suspended by her ankles from an iron spike driven into the cave’s left wall. Her clothing had been torn from her lilting body, leaving her charms exposed to the eyes of four Ludwells who hunkered down behind boulders beyond her. But at least there were no fang-marks on her sweet throat, and she seemed unharmed. Writhing and twisting, she was trying to raise herself in order to reach her fettered ankles. She saw Croft coming. “Tim—oh, thank God!” she moaned.
But he didn’t reach her. As he sprang, the quartette of clansmen tackled him and threw him heavily to the floor of the cavern. He fought them like a maniac, striking out with fists and elbows and feet; but in the end, they subdued him, tied his wrists and ankles with rope and dragged him back behind their barricade of boulders. “Be quiet, unless you want us to kill ye right here an’ now.”
“You fools! Let go me! What’s the meaning of this?”
“We-uns air a-trappin’ the witch-vampire, an’ we’re a-usin’ your gal as bait for the trap, that’s what.”
“Where’s Lige? He’s the one I’ve got to find! I—”
“Lige is out a-scoutin’ around. Now will ye shet up, or must we-uns crack your skull with a rock?”
“God! You men don’t know what you’re doing! If you persist in this thing, Miss Lemoyne’s blood may be on your hands! You’ve got to cut her down, I tell you! A trap isn’t necessary. I know the answer to—”
They hit him, then. A fist caromed off his jaw, dazed him into silence. Dimly, over the buzzing in his ears, he heard one of them say: “Reckon mebbe we’d better put out them lights. I’ve heerd tell witch-vampires like the dark better.” There came the shuffle of footsteps, and one by one the lanterns were extinguished. Blackness as solid as anthracite settled upon the cave, and a silence broken only by Brenda Lemoyne’s muffled moans.
A sharp fragment of rock dug into Tim Croft’s ribs, painfully, like the pressure of a blunt knife. He twisted aside, and a plan leaped into his brain. He pressed his bound wrists against the edge of the rock and began sawing the rope back and forth. He knew, now, that it had been the Ludwells who felled him back on the road; who had kidnapped Brenda and brought her here. And he realized Lige Ludwell’s schemes; knew what the consequences would be unless something could be done at once.…
A frayed strand parted, and then another. He worked with increased vigor, unmindful of the pain that coursed through him when he scraped his flesh against the jagged bit of rock. And then, finally, his fetters gave way. His hands were free. Silently in the darkness he leaned forward to attack the knots at his ankles. He plucked at them until the tips of his fingers were white-hot agony and his nails peeled back from the quick. It was just as he was untying the last loop of rope that he heard someone entering the cave.
He gathered himself; prepared to leap. A match flared. Lige Ludwell was the newcomer. He was approaching the suspended girl, studying her, leaning toward her pulsating throat and holding the match close to her flesh. Terror slithered into her widened eyes. She screamed out her panic.
Tim Croft catapulted himself at Ludwell’s broad, bowed back. And as he struck, Ludwell’s match went out. The burly mountaineer squirmed
