Beyond the Black River. Robert E. Howard
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not apparent to the sight. Controlling his jumping nerves, he pressed them as Ballville had instructed him, and felt each give slightly at the third pressure. Then, holding his breath, he grasped the bar that was welded in the middle of the door, and pulled. Smoothly, on oiled hinges, the massive portal swung open.
They looked into a wide tunnel that ended in another door, this a grille of steel bars. The tunnel was not dark; it was clean and roomy, and the ceiling had been pierced to allow light to enter, the holes covered with screens to keep out insects and reptiles. But through the grille he glimpsed something that sent him racing along the tunnel, his heart almost bursting through his ribs. Ali was close at his heels.
The grille-door was not locked. It swung outward under his fingers. He stood motionless, almost stunned with the impact of his emotions.
His eyes were dazzled by a gleam of gold; a sunbeam slanted down through the pierced rock roof and struck mellow fire from the glorious profusion of golden hair that flowed over the white arm that pillowed the beautiful head on the carved oak table.
“Constance!” It was a cry of hunger and yearning that burst from his livid lips.
Echoing the cry, the girl started up, staring wildly, her hands at her temples, her lambent hair rippling over her shoulders. To his dizzy gaze she seemed to float in an aureole of golden light.
“Bristol! Bristol McGrath!” she echoed his call with a haunting, incredulous cry. Then she was in his arms, her white arms clutching him in a frantic embrace, as if she feared he was but a phantom that might vanish from her.
For the moment the world ceased to exist for Bristol McGrath. He might have been blind, deaf and dumb to the universe at large. His dazed brain was cognizant only of the woman in his arms, his senses drunken with the softness and fragrance of her, his soul stunned with the overwhelming realization of a dream he had thought dead and vanished forever.
When he could think consecutively again, he shook himself like a man coming out of a trance, and stared stupidly around him. He was in a wide chamber, cut in the solid rock. Like the tunnel, it was illumined from above, and the air was fresh and clean. There were chairs, tables and a hammock, carpets on the rocky floor, cans of food and a water cooler. Ballville had not failed to provide for his captive’s comfort. McGrath glanced around at the Arab, and saw him beyond the grille. Considerately he had not intruded upon their reunion.
“Three years!” the girl was sobbing. “Three years I’ve waited. I knew you’d come! I knew it! But we must be careful, my darling. Richard will kill you if he finds you — kill us both!”
“He’s beyond killing anyone,” answered McGrath. “But just the same, we’ve got to get out of here.”
Her eyes flared with new terror.
“Yes! John De Albor! Ballville was afraid of him. That’s why he locked me in here. He said he’d sent for you. I was afraid for you —”
“Ali!” McGrath called. “Come in here. We’re getting out of here now, and we’d better take some water and food with us. We may have to hide in the swamps for —”
Abruptly Constance shrieked, tore herself from her lover’s arms. And McGrath, frozen by the sudden, awful fear in her wide eyes, felt the dull jolting impact of a savage blow at the base of his skull. Consciousness did not leave him, but a strange paralysis gripped him. He dropped like an empty sack on the stone floor and lay there like a dead man, helplessly staring up at the scene which tinged his brain with madness — Constance struggling frenziedly in the grasp of the man he had known as Ali ibn Suleyman, now terribly transformed.
The man had thrown off his turban and glasses. And in the murky whites of his eyes, McGrath read the truth with its grisly implications — the man was not an Arab. He was a negroid mixed breed. Yet some of his blood must have been Arab, for there was a slightly Semitic cast to his countenance, and this cast, together with his oriental garb and his perfect acting of his part, had made him seem genuine. But now all this was discarded and the negroid strain was uppermost; even his voice, which had enunciated the sonorous Arabic, was now the throaty gutturals of the Negro.
“You’ve killed him!” the girl sobbed hysterically, striving vainly to break away from the cruel fingers that prisoned her white wrists.
“He’s not dead yet,” laughed the octoroon. “The fool quaffed drugged brandy — a drug found only in the Zambebwei jungles. It lies inactive in the system until made effective by a sharp blow on a nerve center.”
“Please do something for him!” she begged.
The fellow laughed brutally.
“Why should I? He has served his purpose. Let him lie there until the swamp insects have picked his bones. I should like to watch that — but we will be far away before nightfall.” His eyes blazed with the bestial gratification of possession. The sight of this white beauty struggling in his grasp seemed to rouse all the jungle lust in the man. McGrath’s wrath and agony found expression only in his bloodshot eyes. He could not move hand or foot.
“It was well I returned alone to the Manor,” laughed the octoroon. “I stole up to the window while this fool talked with Richard Ballville. The thought came to me to let him lead me to the place where you were hidden. It had never occurred to me that there was a hiding-place in the swamp. I had the Arab’s coat, slippers and turban; I had thought I might use them sometime. The glasses helped, too. It was not difficult to make an Arab out of myself. This man had never seen John De Albor. I was born in East Africa and grew up a slave in the house of an Arab — before I ran away and wandered to the land of Zambebwei.
“But enough. We must go. The drum has been muttering all day. The blacks are restless. I promised them a sacrifice to Zemba. I was going to use the Arab, but by the time I had tortured out of him the information I desired, he was no longer fit for a sacrifice. Well, let them bang their silly drum. They’d like to have you for the Bride of Zemba, but they don’t know I’ve found you. I have a motor-boat hidden on the river five miles from here —”
“You fool!” shrieked Constance, struggling passionately. “Do you think you can carry a white girl down the river, like a slave?”
“I have a drug which will make you like a dead woman,” he said. “You will lie in the bottom of the boat, covered by sacks. When I board the steamer that shall bear us from these shores, you will go into my cabin in a large, well-ventilated trunk. You will know nothing of the discomforts of the voyage. You will awake in Africa —”
He was fumbling in his shirt, necessarily releasing her with one hand. With a frenzied scream and a desperate wrench, she tore loose and sped out through the tunnel. John De Albor plunged after her, bellowing. A red haze floated before McGrath’s maddened eyes. The girl would plunge to her death in the swamps, unless she remembered the guide-marks — perhaps it was death she sought, in preference to the fate planned for her by the fiendish Negro.
They had vanished from his sight, out of the tunnel; but suddenly Constance screamed again, with a new poignancy. To McGrath’s ears came an excited jabbering of Negro gutturals. De Albor’s accents were lifted in angry protest. Constance was sobbing hysterically. The voices were moving away. McGrath got a vague glimpse of a group of figures through the masking vegetation as they moved across the line of the tunnel mouth. He saw Constance being dragged along by half a dozen giant blacks, typical pineland dwellers, and after them came John De Albor, his hands eloquent in dissension. That glimpse only, through the fronds, and then the tunnel mouth gaped empty and the sound of splashing water faded away through the marsh.
4. The Black God’s Hunger
In the brooding silence of the cavern Bristol McGrath lay staring blankly upward, his soul a seething hell. Fool, fool, to be taken in so easily! Yet, how could he have known? He’d never seen De Albor; he had supposed he was a full-blooded Negro. Ballville had called him a black beast, but he must have been referring to his soul. De Albor, but for the betraying murk of his eyes, might pass anywhere for a white man.
The presence of those black men meant but one thing: they had followed