As twilight overtook her, the girl paused to rest her fatigued limbs. Each step had been agony for her stone-bruised feet. She had munched handfuls of blackberries from the thickets that grew along the streambed. Blackberries had been her only nourishment, and they barely assuaged her hunger. The sun had been warm on her shoulders, but now with twilight the chill mountain breeze was biting through her thin silk dress. Kirsten shivered and wished again for the lighter in her lost handbag. She hated fire, but right now a fire would have been welcome.
Then she heard the eerie howl, echoing along the rocky streambed. She froze in terror. The sound came from back along the direction she had wandered. Could it have been the wind?
Again the ululant cry, closer.
Desperately Kirsten forced her overtaxed legs to stumble a few score yards farther downstream. The pain of her feet made her gasp through clenched teeth. Her knees were rubbery with exhaustion. Flight was hopeless.
Dragging her fatigue-racked body into the damp shadow where two massive boulders leaned together, Kirsten waited in heart-stopping fear for her pursuer to appear.
The howling came closer. She could hear the crunch of a heavy tread on the polished gravel, approaching her refuge.
John Chance stood pensively gazing at Moore’s bookshelves, waiting for the other man to return. From the bathroom, sounds of dry-retching no longer grated, and he could hear water running in the sink. Chance drew down a thick black volume stamped in red and gold. He was paging through it when Moore returned.
“I see you have Guy Endore’s new translation of Hanns Heinz Ewers’ Alraune,” Chance commented. “Do you know Ewers?”
Moore found a cigarette and struggled to light it. His face was drawn and pallid, his lips a bloodless line. The hand that held the match shook a little, but his red-rimmed eyes were sober.
“I met Ewers socially in Berlin,” he answered. “At Kirsten’s mostly. We hit it off pretty well, but I wouldn’t call him a bosom friend.”
Chance nodded. “He’s a fascinating man — a genius, however twisted. We’ve talked together throughout the night a time or two. I’ve never been sure where the line between genius and madness lies with Ewers.”
He read aloud from the opening lines of Alraune:
“ ‘You cannot deny, my dear friend, that there are in existence creatures who are neither man nor beast, but strange unearthly creations, born of the nefarious passions that arise in distorted minds.”’
Chance thoughtfully closed the book and returned it to the shelf. “I’ve often thought of those lines,” he said, “as an apt portrayal of Dread.”
Producing a lighter from the pocket of his tweed trousers, Chance reignited the cheroot he’d set aside an hour earlier when Moore had collapsed. Harsh whiskey and strong colfee had first rallied his old friend’s sanity, then purged his benumbed senses. Chance judged Moore to be rational enough now, though not long ago he had conjectured whether or not this time the man had pushed himself past the brink.
But then, Chance reflected, he had himself been past the brink. And, after a fashion, he had returned.
“I don’t remember very much of the first few months after the crash,” he began, involuntarily rubbing his artist’s fingers over the hairline scars that seamed his face. “You were there when that Fokker dropped onto my tail out of the sun over the Somme. Ironically it was ground fire that did it for me — after I leveled off from the dive that tore the tripe’s wings off. I got hit over the trenches and went into a spin. Low. Full engine. Hit the mud like a shell going off. Reported dead.
“Instead I went out of the cockpit into mud hip-deep when I smashed. The Huns were amazed when they pulled what was left of me out of the slime and found I was still alive. It was novelty enough to rate evacuation from the field hospital to a special hospital deep in the Harz Mountains.
“Jerry was interested even then in ‘superior beings’—wondered what made a fellow tick who could survive all I’d been through. I won’t attempt to go into the things that were done — a lot of it I have no memory of myself, thank God! They rebuilt me from the scrap parts I was — stuck me back together, taking microscope slides and lab notes each step of the way. I suppose I should be grateful to those soulless doctors for saving my life. I’m not, really.
“There were others of us there — other ‘experimental subjects.’ I think most of them died — or I hope they did. I later learned that the Germans had destroyed all records of that hospital shortly before the Armistice.
“I became friends of a sort with one of my fellow inmates — a Dr. Gerhard Modred. I never learned all that much about his life before the War — we were all a bit distant and reticent. But I gathered he’d been an up-and-coming physician and researchist. Volunteered as a battlefront surgeon. Shells don’t recognize red crosses, and the Huns picked what was left of him up after a successful push.
“Dr. Modred was not one of their most successful reconstructions. I never saw him except with his upper face enswathed in bandages. I think he rather resented the fact that the surgeons used techniques perfected on such as him to reconstruct my own physiognomy.
“The hospital was in an old half-ruined castle — isolated in the Harz. The Huns didn’t want publicity. There were certain experiments… But I’d rather not dwell on it. Many of us died and were better so. It was somewhat like a transition back into the dark ages…
“Dr. Modred and I used to discuss this at length. Oh, they gave us some little freedom — liberty to bemoan our plight among ourselves. I’m certain none of us were ever intended to be released, regardless of the outcome of the War. Modred was an incredibly well-read, erudite person. In my sophomoric flush, I felt rather his disciple. Modred would go on for hours on his pet subjects. I always wondered how such a medievalist of Modred’s brilliance ever ended up in the area of medical research. Lord, the things we’d lie there in the darkness carrying on about — quite mad, most of it. Here in this hell-world of barbed wire, machine guns, poison gas, tanks, dysentery, aeroplanes, mud and patriotism and wholesale slaughter — Modred would rant on and on about a spiritual Helclass="underline" a Hell of actual demons and devils and elemental creatures and dark forces who shaped man’s destiny…
“‘Why talk of reason and free will!’ Dr. Modred would shout, ‘I’ll show you artists and accountants, Calvinists and drunkards, beggars and baronets — name the class and intellect — who’ll rise from vermin-infested trenches and march like puppets into machine gun and shell! Why? Why! Out of reason? Out of free will?
“‘Damn it, man! We are not creatures of reason and of free will! We are prisoners of nameless powers and hidden forces who move us about like chess pieces! What do they care of our suffering? With a yawn, they can scrap the whole board and begin the game anew!’
“As I say, we were all a bit mad there. Dr. Modred more so than most of us, perhaps. But I agreed with him — and that bound us together. For among these drudges, Modred and I had, in theory, volunteered to die for our personal ethical rationale. And neither of us was pleased with the blow our high aspirations had dealt us. When one seeks martyrdom, after having seen the pious smiles of the saints, it comes as a shock to see the reality of pain and death…
“So we were agreed on the insane injustice, the evil portent of it all. Man, we agreed, has little or no idea of the hostile cosmic forces that play with him. He believes himself to be rational, and his universe to be logical and bound by laws of science — but this is a lie. Mankind is but a struggling swimmer, perilously floating over a vortex whose depths and currents are beyond his comprehension.