Lying in Amalric's arms on the silk-heaped couch, Lissa opened her heart and whispered her dreams and hopes and aspirations … childish, pathetic, terrible.
"I'll take you away," he muttered. ''Tomorrow. You are right; Gazal is a city of the dead. We will seek life in the outer world. It is violent, rough, and cruel, but better than this living death …"
The night was broken by a shuddering cry of agony, horror, and despair. Its timbre brought out cold sweat on Amalric's skin. He started upright from the couch, but Lissa desperately clung to him.
"No, no!" she begged in a frantic whisper. "Do not go! Stay!"
"But murder is being done!" he exclaimed, fumbling for his sword.
The cries seemed to come from across an outer court. Mingled with them was an indescribable, tearing, rending sound. They rose higher and thinner, unbearable in their hopeless agony, then sank away in a long, shuddering sob.
"I have heard men dying on the rack cry out like that!" muttered Amalric, shaking with horror. "What devil's work is this?"
Lissa was trembling violently in a frenzy of terror. He felt the wild pounding of her heart.
"It is the horror of which I spoke!" she whispered. The horror that dwells in the Red Tower. Long ago it came; some say it dwelt there in the lost years and returned after the building of Gazal. It devours human beings. What it is, no one knows, since none has seen it and lived to tell of it. It is a god or a devil. That is why the slaves fled; why the desert people shun Gazal. Many of us have gone into its awful belly. Eventually, all will have gone, and it will rule over an empty city, as men say it ruled over the ruins from which Gazal was reared."
"Why have the people stayed to be devoured?" he demanded.
"I do not know," she whimpered. "They dream…"
"Hypnosis," muttered Amalric; "hypnosis coupled with decay. I saw it in their eyes. This devil has them mesmerized. Mitra, what a foul secret!"
Lissa pressed her face against his bosom and dung to him.
"But what are we to do?" he asked uneasily.
''There is nothing to do," she whispered. ''Your sword would be useless. Perhaps if will not harm us. It has taken a victim tonight. We must wait like sheep for the butcher."
"I'll be damned if I will …" Amalric exclaimed, galvanized. "We will not wait for morning. We'll go tonight. Make a bundle of food and drink. I'll get the horse and the camel and bring them to the court outside. Meet me there.'' Since the unknown monster had already struck, Amalric felt that he was safe in leaving the girl alone for a few minutes. But his flesh crawled as he groped his way down the winding corridor and through the black chambers, where the swinging tapestries whispered. He found the beasts huddled nervously together in the court where he had left them. The stallion whinnied and nuzzled him, as if sensing peril in the breathless night.
Amalric saddled and bridled the animals and led them through the narrow opening into the street. A few minutes later, he was standing in the starlit court. Even as he reached it, he was electrified by an awful scream, which rang shudderingly upon the air. It came from the chamber where he had left Lissa.
He answered that piteous cry with a wild yell. Drawing his sword, he rushed across the court and hurled himself through the window. The golden ball was glowing again, carving out black shadows in the shrinking corners. Silks lay scattered on the floor. The marble seat was upset; but the chamber was empty.
A sick weakness overcame Amalric, and he staggered against the marble table, the dim light wavering dizzily to his sight Then he was swept by a mad rage. The Red Tower! There the fiend would bear its victim!
He darted back across the court; sought the streets, and raced toward the tower, which glowed with an unholy light under the stars. The streets did not run straight. He cut through silent black buildings and crossed courts whose rank grass waved in the night wind.
Ahead of him, clustered about the crimson tower, rose a heap of ruins, where decay had eaten more savagely than at the rest of the city. Apparently none dwelt among them. They reeled and tumbled, a crumbling mass of quaking masonry, with the red tower rearing up among them like a poisonous red flower from charnel-house ruin.
To reach the tower, he would be forced to traverse the ruins. Recklessly he plunged into the black mass, groping for a door. He found one and entered, thrusting his sword ahead of him. Then he saw such a vista as men sometimes see in fantastic dreams.
Ahead of him stretched a long corridor, visible in a faint, unhallowed glow, its black walls hung with strange, shuddersome tapestries. Far down it he saw a receding figure … a white, naked, stooped figure, lurching along, dragging something the sight of which filled him with sweating honor. Then the apparition vanished from his sight, and with it vanished the eerie glow. Amalric stood in the soundless dark, seeing nothing, hearing nothing; thinking only of a stooped, white figure, which dragged a limp human form down a long black corridor.
As he groped onward, a vague memory stirred in his brain: the memory of a grisly tale mumbled to him over a dying fire in the skull-shaped devil ... devil hut of a black witch-man … a tale of a god that dwelt in a crimson house in a ruined city … a god worshiped by darksome cults in dank jungles and along sullen, dusky rivers.
And there stirred, too, in his mind, an incantation whispered in his ear in awed and shuddering tones, while the night held its breath, the lions had ceased to roar along the river, and the very fronds had ceased their scraping, one against the other.
Ollam-onga, whispered a dark wind down the sightless corridor. Ollam-onga, whispered the dust that ground beneath his stealthy feet. Sweat stood on his skin, and the sword shook in his hand. He stole through the house of a god, and fear held him in its bony fist. The house of the god … the full horror of the phrase filled his mind. All the ancestral fears and the fears that reached beyond ancestry and primordial race memory crowded upon him; horror cosmic and unhuman sickened him. The realization of his weak humanity crushed him as he went through the house of darkness, which was the house of a god.
About him shimmered a glow so faint that it was scarcely discernible. He knew that he was approaching the tower itself. Another instant, and he groped his way through an arched door and stumbled upon strangely-spaced steps. Up and up he went; and, as he climbed, that blind fury, which is mankind's last defense against diabolism and all the hostile forces of the universe, surged in him. He forgot his fear. Burning with terrible eagerness, he climbed up and up through the thick, evil darkness, until he came into a chamber lit by a weird, golden glow.
At the far end of the chamber, a short flight of broad steps led upward to a kind of dais or platform, on which stood articles of stone furniture. The mangled remains of the victim lay sprawled on the dais, an arm dangling limply down the steps. The marble steps were stained with a pattern of trickles of blood, like the stalactites that form around the lip of a hot spring. Most of these streaks were old, dried, and dark brown; but a few were still red, moist, and shiny.
Before Amalric, at the foot of these steps, stood a white, naked figure. Amalric halted, his tongue cleaving to his palate. It was to all appearance a naked white man that stood gazing at him, its mighty arms folded on an alabaster breast. The eyes, however, were balls of luminous fire, such as had never looked from any human head. In those eyes, Amalric glimpsed the frozen fires of the ultimate hells, touched by awful shadows.