She spun around, stared and sprang away. It was not her stepfather that stood there. The form was human to some degree—it had arms and legs, and a featureless head; but its nakedness was slimy wet and dark, and about it clung a smell of blood.
“That is useless,” muttered once more the voice of Persil Mandifer. “You do not hide from the power that rules this place.”
Behind the first dark slimness came a second shape, a gross immensity, equally black and foul and shiny. Larue?
“You have offered yourself,” said Persil Mandifer, though Enid could see no lips move in the filthy-seeming shadow that should have been a face. “I think you will be accepted this time. Of course, it cannot profit me—what I am now, I shall be always. Perhaps you, too—”
Larue’s voice chuckled, and Enid ran, toward where Lanark had been fighting. That would be more endurable than this mad dream forced upon her. Anything would be more endurable. Twigs and thorns plucked at her skirt like spiteful fingers, but she ripped away from them and ran. She came into another clearing, a small one. The moon, striking between the boughs, made here a pool of light and touched up something of metal.
It was Lanark’s revolver. Enid bent and seized it. A few feet away rested something else, something rather like a strangely shaggy cabbage. As Enid touched the gun, she saw what that fringed rondure was. A head, but living, as though its owner had been buried to his bearded chin.
“What—” she began to ask aloud. It was surely living, its eyebrows arched and scowled and its gleaming eyes moved. Its tongue crawled out and licked grinning, hairy lips. She saw its smile, hard and brief as a knife flashed for a moment from its scabbard.
Enid Mandifer almost dropped the revolver. She had become sickeningly aware that the head possessed no body.
“There is the rest of him,” spoke Persil Mandifer, again behind her shoulder. And she saw a heart-shaking terror, staggering and groping between the trees, a body without a head or hands.
She ran again, but slowly and painfully, as though this were in truth a nightmare. The headless hulk seemed to divine her effort at retreat, for it dragged itself clumsily across, as though to cut her off. It held out its handless stumps of arms.
“No use to shoot,” came Persil Mandifer’s mocking comment—he was following swiftly. “That poor creature cannot be killed again.”
Other shapes were approaching from all sides, shapes dressed in filthy, ragged clothes. The face of one was divided by a dark cleft, as though Lanark’s saber had split it, but no blood showed. Another seemed to have no lower jaw; the remaining top of his face jutted forward, like the short visage of a snake lifted to strike. These things had eyes, turned unblinkingly upon her; they could see and approach.
The headless torso blundered at her again, went past by inches. It recovered itself and turned. It knew, somehow, that she was there; it was trying to capture her. She shrank away, staring around for an avenue of escape.
“Be thankful,” droned Persil Mandifer from somewhere. “These are no more than dead men, whipped into a mockery of life. They will prepare you a little for the wonders to come.”
But Enid had commanded her shuddering muscles. She ran. One of the things caught her sleeve, but the cloth tore and she won free. She heard sounds that could hardly be called voices, from the mouths of such as had mouths. And Persil Mandifer laughed quietly, and said something in a language Enid had never heard before. The thick voice of his son Larue answered him in the same tongue, then called out in English:
“Enid, you only run in the direction we want you to run!”
It was true, and there was nothing that she could do about it. The entities behind her were following, not very fast, like herdsmen leisurely driving a sheep in the way it should go. And she knew that the sides of the gulley, to north and south, could never be climbed. There was only the slope ahead to the eastward, up which Lanark must have gone. The thought of him strengthened her. If the two of them found the king-horror, the Nameless One, at the base of Fearful Rock, they could face it together.
She was aware that she had come out of the timber of the ravine.
All was moonlight here, painted by the soft pallor in grays and silvers and shadow-blacks. There was the rock lifted among the stars, there the stretch of clump-dotted plain—and here, almost before her, Lanark.
He stood poised above a hole in the ground, his saber lifted above his head as though to begin a downward sweep. Something burly was climbing up out of that hole. But, even as he tightened his sinews to strike, Lanark whirled around, and his eyes glared murderously at Enid.
XV
Evil’s End
“Don’t!” Enid screamed. “Don’t, it’s only I—”
Lanark growled, and spun back to face what was now hoisting itself above ground level.
“And be careful of me, too,” said the object. “It’s Jager, Mr. Lanark.”
The point of the saber lowered. The three of them were standing close together on the edge of the opened grave. Lanark looked down. He saw at the bottom the two areas of loose white.
“Are those the—”
“Yes,” Jager replied without waiting for him to finish. “Two human skins. They are fresh; soft and damp.” Enid was listening, but she was past shuddering. “One of them,” continued Jager, “was taken from Persil Mandifer. I know his face.”
He made a scuffing kick-motion with one boot. Clods flew into the grave, falling with a dull plop, as upon wet blankets. He kicked more earth down, swiftly and savagely.
“Help me,” he said to the others. “Salt should be thrown on those skins—that’s what the old legends say—but we have no salt. Dirt will have to do. Don’t you see?” he almost shrieked. “Somewhere near here,
