When his swollen, bleeding feet disappeared, the church door swung back and engulfed the revenuer's racked, gaunt bones within the ostracised temple of death. With stark eyes upward and ahead, he stared through the dark to the spot where a single lance of moonlight stabbed obliquely through the dismantled window, revealing a cross done in blood that lay p.r.o.ne athwart the untrodden pulpit floor.

Without, a white virgin mantle of peace and purity enveloped the haunted church. The honey clover, foxtail, mullein, and dill-poppies had closed over the horrible path-way leading to the church door-block. The panther was gone. A seductive south wind rippled across the blossomed clearing and a hundred families of unnamed flowers raised their heads and nodded to the stars. The far-off, drowsy baying of a hound drifted down from the ridge and trailed plaintively into the night. And from somewhere the sweet love-tale of the elusive nightingale was told over and over again.

There was utter papal peace without for several moments. Then suddenly this magic spell was startlingly burst asunder with a rising tempo of sounds issuing from within the church. It grew into a horrific, guttural clash. The noise of contending demons dead-locked. The riotous commotion of a thousand struggling, distraught fiends told of some terrible enactment inside the church.

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII

THE HAUNTED CHURCH

As the trio approached the church, Buddy hung back reluctantly. He did not relish this nocturnal invasion of the gospel-house where no human foot had trod since the killing of his father. In truth, Lem shared this apprehension also, but was valiantly cautious not to betray this aversion in Belle-Ann's presence. With this cryptic timidity, both the boys marveled at the voluble mirth and bold blithesome advance of the girl; not understanding that Belle-Ann's education had burned away all barriers of superst.i.tion.

The denizens on h.e.l.lsfork had long given this lonely, desolate structure a wide berth. Many a bold and audacious spirit, knowing no other fear, quaked with the thought of entering that dilapidated storm-battered sepulchre. Not because a man had been killed therein, but there was a ghostly phenomenon connected with that musty, bat-haunted altar, uniquely horrible.

That rubric cross had cut its ragged blight into the senses of the mountaineers to a degree that forbade all thoughts of approach. There was something at once subtle and strange and unspeakably terrifying in the remembrance of that red picture, something that inspired them with a lasting, superst.i.tious dread.

Indeed, a treasure trove could have reposed upon the dank floor of this haunted church within easy sight without fear of molestation. Weird and creepy tales were rife outlining amazing visitations here. It was told with conviction by some whose ears had heard, and whose eyes had seen, that on each moonlight night a screech-owl would flutter to the broken window of the church and call. Whereupon the red, ragged picture on the altar would stir and move and sit up; then gather itself into human semblance and stalk to the window. And old Captain Lutts' ghost would commune with the little feathered creature. Then the screech-owl would hurtle away, and the phantom would stalk back and lie down, and resolve itself again into that fearsome, crimson death-splotch that naught save fire could ever obliterate.

Belle-Ann was in the lead when the three reached the door-block of the church. Then, with a self-conscious lack of chivalry which inspired him with a sudden spurt of courage, Lem stepped in front of her, where he stood lighting the lantern, when Buddy, who had halted at the corner of the building, suddenly hissed softly and motioned for them to join him.

Bud stood pointing ominously amid the skeleton limbs of a dead sycamore tree. Belle-Ann laughed amusedly.

"Why, Buddy," she rea.s.sured, "that's only a pretty, harmless little owl."

"But hits a scrutch-owl," frowned the boy, shrinking away.

"Oh, come on, Buddy!--I really believe you are afraid of ghosts,"

returned Belle-Ann, taking him protectingly by the hand.

Re-enforced by the girl's utter absence of fear, Lem pushed the door open, and stepping within led the way, lantern in hand. Upon their approach to the altar, the bull-bats flapped their bony wings amongst the rafters. There was in the fetid gloom of the place a permeating musk of things seemingly not of this earth. Lem hung up the lantern on the hook at the end of the dingy rope suspended near the pulpit. The rope, which great spiders had converted into a swing, now felt soft and snaky beneath his touch. He turned the light up as high as he could without smoking and faced Belle-Ann. He saw at a glance that a measure of her temerity had vanished.

A smothered exclamation fell from Lem's lips. He pointed through the buff halo cast from the lantern. There against the south wall of the room some of the benches could be dimly discerned overturned,--others twisted and broken and scattered in a ma.s.s of wreckage--while one balanced perilously on the cas.e.m.e.nt as though a hand had sought to take it out through the window.

"Who yo' 'low done thet?" inquired Buddy in a tremulous whisper, clinging timorously to Belle-Ann's skirts.

"I don't 'low any human bein' done hit," predicted Lem in faint undertones that faltered with a creeping, choking apprehension. A queer brain-numbing apathy settled upon them that seemed to deprive them suddenly of the use of their tongues and limbs.

"Oh, nonsense!" discredited Belle-Ann bravely. "Some mean boys perhaps."

Disbelieving, the brothers stood rigid and shook their now pale faces in denial. Belle-Ann did not fear ghosts, but there was undeniably some strange mortal influence circulating the eery atmosphere of this place like the proximity of some menacing presence close at hand, but unseen.

She fought hard to repel this unknown fear that was stealing upon her, but, despite her valiant struggle, it was fast seizing upon her nerves and permeating her whole being with singular insistency.

With an effort she gathered herself together.

"Now hurry on, boys," she directed briskly in a voice that sounded unnaturally furtive and low. "Buddy, you get in here between Lem and I--there--that's it. Now, boys, we are going to say a little prayer for pap and maw, and you, Lem, remember."

At a slight sound the three impulsively and unconsciously took hold of each other and turned blanched faces toward the window opposite the altar. At the same instant, a screech-owl closed his wings on the window cas.e.m.e.nt and sat immobile, like a creature without life, while a slender, livid finger of moonlight crossed its speckled back and, continuing on, pointed specifically to the b.l.o.o.d.y cross athwart the altar.

Little Bud faltered weakly and shook like a boy with the ague. His lips worked mutely and tried to whisper something, but his tongue cleft, paralyzed with a p.r.i.c.kly dread that stole over him, and his teeth began a forbidding tattoo. He cast an appealing look at Lem; wherefore the mere sight of Lem's white face accentuated his own fleeting courage. The grim lethargy of this subtle, contagious dread had communicated its blight to Lem's senses with equal virulence.

A pall of lethal fear deprived Belle-Ann of words and action. What with the awful thick dark, made pitchy beyond the buff circle of the flickering lantern; a fetid, curdy, musty, stifling blackness which, she now felt instinctively, held screened just there, some hidden horror reaching out to wrap its smothering terror about her.

The fan-like hiss of the hybrid bats that blundered aloft, their vicious unearthly squeaks, stabbing the dead stillness, added to her cryptic dread. Upon a sudden current of vagrant air a handful of fire-flies were driven through one of the sundered windows, whereupon they bobbed and swayed about evilly against the haunting gloom of the church like ghastly corpse candles. Together with the unblinking stare of the screech-owl from the moon-touched window cas.e.m.e.nt, all these menacing influences combined and laid hold of Belle-Ann's will like overpowering hands of living agencies crowding her remorselessly to the verge of panic.

She stood rigid, listening with a natant, sickening consciousness that something terrible hung at her back. Then, ashamed of her exposition of timid indecision and fear, she valiantly strove to disguise with action the sudden racking shudder that compa.s.sed and rippled over her being, like the chill of an icy current.

Belle-Ann summoned all her failing faculties and levied upon her will to proceed with the ceremony of the sacred mission that had led them to this G.o.dless place. But she only stood fixedly, rigid and helpless, growing paler with each succeeding moment, and gazed blankly at Bud and Lem alternately. Their nerves were as yielding as jelly strings. Other than the silky rustle aloft, punctuated occasionally with the thin needle-like anathemas of the bull-bats, there was now not the slightest sound within to disrupt the death-hush of this place. Nevertheless, Lem craned his neck, edging closer to the other two, and whispered portentously:

"Ded yo'-all heer anything?"

"No," returned Belle-Ann faintly and uncertainly.

Buddy could only shake his head. Then sharply and, oddly enough, in unison, impelled by a sudden common instinct, the trio wheeled about, facing the wrecked benches. What they saw in that instant congealed the warm flow in their veins to currents of ice and drove their very breaths away.

Three hearts smote their ribs a single whack; then seemingly, melted away and sank downward and out of their bodies, leaving a trio of lifeless, inanimate mummies, frozen into horrified, stony att.i.tudes. An awful thing hung there on the edge of the grommet of light. A blurred, half-naked, grisly monster sprawled on its loathsome haunches before them,--a thing topped with a blood-mottled, hideous head, made frightful by two luridly igneous, horrible eyes. Eyes girded and shot with a b.l.o.o.d.y film bulged fixedly up at them, glaring through the flickering orange light. The eyes--the eyes!

Divided by the part in the middle, one half of the wiry hair stuck up, the dead white hue of chalk, admitting its stains of red. The other half bristled, an ebon black blighted with its share of gore. At once it gave the startling impression of separate semi-faces filched from two different rawheads and slapped together thus, in smeared, mismated makeshift, that was hideous. Had only its fearful Nemesis stayed his devil-genius and spared the torrid eyes,--monstrous ember eyes that flamed like live coals against the dark,--mad-red eyes that burned and sparkled and sputtered up from their dancing depths, emitting and vomiting over the brims, a changing l.u.s.ter, blended with all the fevered fires of h.e.l.l--eyes that eroded a nauseous path with their abhorrent stare. The accursed thing crouched there as immobile as the owl. A limp, blood-oozing tongue protruded from an addled, unspeakable mouth, distended and heinous with jagged teeth askew. Girding the besmeared forehead at the hispid white and black hair line of this festering scourge-scathed visage, just where the scalp separated and curled apart, a revolting ribbon of pure skull shone,--a strip of skull drained dry and clear and white as polished ivory; shimmering out like the badge of a death-head from some grim grot of perdition.

The three tried to flee from the awful, withering presence of this nameless thing. They tried vainly to cry out; to vent the horror that was upon them, depriving them of all utterance and action.

They only clutched each other nervelessly and stared insanely.

Thereupon, in an unlooked-for instant before their livid faces, this ghastly misshapen thing struggled to its naked feet and lurched past them toward the altar, with the faltering wabble of a foundered ox. Up across the corner of the pulpit it clambered, and, reeling too near the edge, tumbled off the other side and struck the floor with a heavy, resounding thud, where, amidst jerky groans that were not human enunciations, it panted and floundered and arose once more.

Up again with a mighty torturous effort, the hulk mounted the platform a second time, and with head dangling at the end of a limp neck, crawled to the ragged cross, etched out with the blood of old Cap Lutts. Here it mumbled gutturally and labored crazily to gather up the crimson altar-piece into its seared, torn arms. Then again up to its feet it reared, and, standing thus with arms upflung, the stillness was shattered with frantic echoes of a broken word-spluttering, h.e.l.l-twisted cackle, carrying a faint gleam of coherency and culminating in ravings that made the night hideous.

"I say--I say--I say--" gathering stress, louder and louder it shrieked until the very air curdled with these eery cries. "I say--you there, you there--you G.o.d--you G.o.d--I say the law's here--the law's here--the law, the law, the law I say--hear me?--hiding, hiding?--no, no, no, I have never hidden from men--I'll not hide now from my G.o.d--I'm here now, G.o.d--'Thou shalt not kill--thou shalt not kill'--but I done it--I done this--these hands done it--see, G.o.d? They are wet with this deed--but I swear the law drove me to it--the law saddled a hundred offenses to my life--but I'm here now, G.o.d--I bring these offenses here--I done it--I done it--these hands done it--these two blood-stained hands--the law made me--I swear it--listen--you can't get me--you can't rend me--you starved heathens--stand back--stand back, you dungeon-dogs--stand away there, you ratty jail-birds--you can't get at me, ha, ha, ha!--gnaw your iron cuffs apart first--bite your cuffs in two--gnaw them until your teeth shatter, and your gums flood your felon throats--ha, ha, ha!--Oh, my head, my head--Christ, the world's afire--the world's burning up--listen--listen----!"

Hereupon the screech-owl awoke to quick animation. With trembling wings slightly lifted, it thrust its head through the broken window-pane and uttered a scathing arraignment--a long-drawn, graduating, derisive t.i.tter that raked the ghoulish solitude of the church like perdition-music--a mockery medley wafted from a cortege of the doomed.

As the last p.r.i.c.kly notes dropped down and trailed like a thread of sin back into the owl's speckled breast, the gory raw-head blundered around and fixed that mawkish, ghastly h.e.l.l-mask full upon the girl and two boys, whose feet were locked immovably to the floor with terror. Then in emulation, seemingly, of the owl's t.i.ttering, it belched its awful laugh into their faces. Such a laugh--its chilling, unhallowed screech launched a petrific measure of untold vocal wickedness, an awesome, direful gamut of echoes that gathered volume, scattered and split, crossed and recrossed; reverberating through the death-still atmosphere like the hysterical chattering of a band of stricken, tortured souls.

CHAPTER x.x.xIX

THE FLIGHT

Human senses could not withstand such an onslaught. It startled the three to instant action. The tide of self-preservation ebbed back into their bodies; with one accord they reared their arms upward across their faces to ward off the shock of that accursed sound, as though its very effluvium scorched its scar into their flesh. There was an utterance of mingled gasps. There was a sudden rush of jumbled, panic-stricken footsteps. A tumbling, sc.r.a.pping, frantic confusion. A groan--a half scream--a sob and the door banged.

The church was empty, save for the mumbling, croaking, mad lazar.

In getting out Lem had stumbled in the door and fallen heavily over his rifle. When he scrambled to his feet again, he beheld Belle-Ann and Buddy fleeing across the moonlit clearing. He started to follow, but checked himself and stopped short; he stood combating the superst.i.tious fear that had dropped into his senses and sapped away his equanimity.

"Gawd'll Moughty," he muttered audibly, "air this ole Cap Lutts' boy runnin' away. Not by a dern sight--I'll go back an' finish em." Then he hallooed l.u.s.tily after Buddy.