“Here I am,” sang Kirsten, stepping into the moonlight. “Come to me.”
She had slipped out of her clothing. Her body was silver-white in the moonlight as she stood at the edge of the stream. Her eyes were a lambent green glow.
“Come to me,” Kirsten purred. “Come to me.” Her smiling lips were red as blood, and her teeth were white and sharp.
The pudgy face went slack. The hand with the revolver drooped. Vacant-eyed, the man took a step toward her. Another step. His feet reached the edge of a deep, silvery pool. He stumbled forward woodenly, like a sleepwalker — except the icy water would awaken any sleeper.
“Come to me,” Kirsten crooned.
The water rose over his waist. He staggered as his feet groped over the uneven bottom. He reeled drunkenly.
There must have been a deep hole, or maybe he lost footing on the slippery-smooth boulders that pieced together the streambed. The fat man staggered another step, and suddenly the water was up around his double-chin. Silver water ran into his gaping mouth.
It couldn’t have been silver-white arms that rose from the water to embrace the gunman, to drag him under in a sudden swirl of ripples… It was only a trick of the moonlight, Wells told himself. Silver-white moonlight reflecting on the drowning man’s splashes. Ripples raced across the pool for a moment. Then the silver-white mirror was smooth once more.
Wells shook his head, blinking the moon-dazzle from his eyes. Mists trailed down over the ridges, night was deepening in the ravine, and it was a very ordinary full moon that shone its pale light on the two gory bodies sprawled over the polished boulders. Of the third gunman there was no trace.
Kirsten touched his arm and Wells jumped. But she was dressed in her tattered frock and looked like a smudged woodsprite, and not a silver-white Lorelei whose consuming beauty was deadly sorcery.
“Are you all right?”
Wells shook his head. Had it been a dream? Not likely. “What — what was that!” he managed to reply.
“Call it hypnotism, Mr. Wells,” the girl told him. “A very old form of hypnotism — but I think you’d better just call it hypnotism.”
Wells shrugged, his self-presence returning. “Lady, I’ll call it whatever you say, because I don’t rightly know what else there is to call it. And, because I’ve seen some other things in these hills that it’s best you just put some scientific name on it, and let the matter rest without thinking on it.”
“Like that — that teufelhund—that hound-thing they were stalking me with?”
Wells broke open his shotgun, extracted the spent shells and replaced them with two new ones from his pocket. “Did you get a close look at it, then? Well, as to that, Miss von Brocken, let’s just say it was a kind of hound most folks never see — and thank your lucky stars they couldn’t use the thing until it got dark enough for its eyes to stand being out in places where it don’t normal belong.”
The Plott hound loped back to join them, sniffed the corpses curiously. His black fur was streaked in places with blood, but from his evident satisfaction not all of it was his own.
The mountaineer whistled to him, closed the shotgun with a snap. “Guns can fight guns,” he mused, “and teeth can fight against teeth. I may look like a ignorant old hill-billy to you, but I was a sergeant overseas in the War, and I still read books and the papers. I can make sense out of words like ‘clairvoyant’ and ‘occult research’ and maybe read between the lines of what they print about such things.”
Kirsten looked at him expectantly. “And so.”
“And so I reckon I can guess why this fellow Dread is so hot after killing you and John Chance first chance he gets,” Wells said. “And now that we’ve said what we’re both of us fighting against, we’d best be getting up to my place and think about what we’re going to have to do next. These boys here can wait till morning, but I got a feeling Dread won’t.”
“No,” said Kirsten. “He won’t.”
Chance’s Duesenberg SJ bored into the night. Slumped in the seat beside him, Moore felt the wind rush past them. Its cool blast whipped over the windshield, reviving him fully from the horror and shock he had endured earlier. The lighted clock on the dash read not much after ten.
God, was that all the late it was! It seemed to Moore that it must be close to dawn. Would this night ever end? For him, perhaps not…
Was he mad? Surely this was madness. It was all a dream of absinthe and hashish. Doubtless Chance could explain it to him, but then Chance too was possibly part of the dream. But his head throbbed with the surge of the SJ’s powerful supercharged engine, and his knotted stomach cringed each time Chance took a curve or dip at daredevil speed. If he could feel pain and cold, sickness and fear, then he must be awake — and alive.
The suicide? Moore pushed it from his thoughts, or tried to. He was alive, therefore he had not killed himself that evening. Cogito ergo sum, or perhaps the reverse, and damn the fired cartridge. If his suicide had all been a mad nightmare, then why trust his memory as to the number of bullets in the clip? Or maybe he’d fired the gun unconsciously under the spell of absinthe, and tomorrow he’d find a small round hole in the floor or wall. Absinthe is a strange liqueur, and God knows his nerves were strained beyond endurance…
But the appearance of Dread — had Dread been a part of the nightmare? And how could that be? Until less than an hour or so ago, Compton Moore had never heard of this uncanny creature. Even now he scarcely knew whether he dared believe the fantastic tale John Chance had unfolded. Call it prescience? Chance perhaps could explain that too; it would interest him. Moore thought about telling him, decided against it. He couldn’t think why. Another time he’d tell him.
Chance’s insane tale. Somehow Chance had dragged him back from the black abyss of horror and despair, sobered him up, stuffed him into his unpressed linen suit, flung him still dazed into the seat beside him. Now he tore along with Chance at a suicidal clip on a madman’s mission to save the woman he had loved for the friend he hated. All because of Chance’s insane tale…
“You’re the only man I can rely on to help me in time!” Chance had argued. “The local police are either fools or under Dread’s influence! By the time I could convince the state or federal authorities to start an investigation, it will be too late to save Kirsten! It’s been almost twenty-four hours since the wreck, and there’s still no word from her — she’s in deadly danger if she’s still alive at all!”
And thus Moore let himself be dragged into the night. Chance’s plans were at best sketchy. Mainly he wanted someone he could trust to back him up in a dangerous game. Just how dangerous, Moore was only beginning to realize.
The Duesenberg sped down Cherokee Boulevard and slewed into the drive of Chance’s sprawling Tudor estate. Chance meant to gather together such supplies and paraphernalia as he deemed of possible use to them, before setting out for Dillon that night. He knew enough already to realize that Dread’s hold over the mountain region was deeply rooted and insidious — presumably reaching into levels of local government. If Kirsten still lived, Chance reasoned, then she must either be Dread’s captive or else lost somewhere in the wild desolation of the mountains. Either way, it was a question first of finding her — and that meant personal search and investigation.