At the window, Wells yelled defiance. His.45–70 boomed deafeningly in the tiny cabin. Again and again he levered new shells into the Winchester’s chamber, firing at the thing he saw in the cabin yard. White light glared through the windows, stabbed past chinks in the log walls. The Plott hound howled and flung itself at the door.
Desperately Chance broke open the crimping of the shotgun shells and dug out the heavy rifled slugs from two of them. The Solomon’s Seal would hold the fire-elemental for only a moment — while it gathered into itself power to overwhelm and then to cross its protective barrier.
Wells stubbornly reloaded his rifle, unable to convince himself of its uselessness. Or perhaps it was that final defiance that makes a cornered animal turn and fight against hopeless odds. The.45–70 opened up again.
Not wasting a glance outside to see what he knew must be out there, Chance carved into the inverted conical bases of the rifled slugs. His pocket knife gouged out fat slivers of the soft lead. The ten-gauge slugs were massive blobs of about an ounce-and-a-half of lead — their sides rifled so that they would pick up spin in passing through the shotgun’s smooth bore. Charged with these, the huge ten-gauge was in effect a hand-held cannon.
Forcing his fingers to work swiftly despite his growing panic, Chance inserted the fingernail-sized carnelian sigils into the hollowed-out bases of the two slugs. Carefully he jammed torn wadding over them to protect the deadly bits of carved stone and secure them in place.
Needles of hellish-bright incandescence pierced the cabin’s front wall in a thousand stinging rays — seeking past every crack and loose chinking. Ben retreated from the door and backed to the wall with frothing jaws.
Kirsten, wild-eyed as the maddened hound, abandoned her distracted attempts to complete the pentacle. Her fists pressed to her chin, she crouched in abject terror, staring at the door.
Wells swore and mechanically reloaded his rifle — pivoting toward the door from his post at the window.
The door was beginning to exude smoke.
Frantically Chance replaced the modified slugs in their cardboard shells, reset the crimping.
The thick planks of the door were warping and sagging from intolerable heat. Cracks edged in glowing coal opened with fatal progression. Streamers of blue-white brilliance stabbed past the crumbling barrier — a dozen too-bright searchlights to pick out the tableau of fear within.
Chance jammed the shells into the double-barrel, slammed shut its breech. He brought the weapon to his shoulder.
On the threshold the power of the Solomon’s Seal crumbled beneath the relentless onslaught of the fire-elemental. The cabin door collapsed in a tumble of glowing ashes.
Across the open doorway crouched the salamander — a squatting lizard-shape larger than a lion, as it drew into itself the limitless power of elemental flame. Its fat tail lashed in anger, and its eyes were blinding coals of wrath. Great wreaths of blue-white flame bathed its obscene bulk, somehow not scorching the wood of the porch. Incandescent spittle drooled from its wide jaws — as the elemental opened them to feed…
At point-blank range, Chance fired both barrels into the opening maw. The recoil sent him backward against the wall.
In that instant of horror when time slowed to eternity, it seemed they could see the massive lead slugs as they blasted into the elemental’s opening jaws. A pair of flashes marked the instantaneous transmuting of solid lead to molten to vapor. Two bright bits of red continued their path into the waiting throat.
The salamander screamed — a cry like a ton of white-hot steel dumped into the sea. Writhing back in rage — or agony — it flung itself away from the smouldering doorway, out into the night.
It raked its foreclaws into its jaws, tearing at its throat — vomiting great gouts of flame. Its hissing roar pierced the night, as the elemental rolled and bucked across the clearing. Still writhing in great spasms, the salamander turned and crawled like a broken-backed thing into the forested ridge beyond the clearing.
For a minute they saw its eerie brilliance flashing along the ridge, then the trees completely hid the creature.
Wells finished dumping water onto the smouldering wreckage of his doorway. He produced a crockery jug of his own blockade whiskey and took a long pull.
“I told you that shotgun would sure enough clear off the porch,” he managed to say, handing the jug to Chance.
High up on the mountainside, a blue-white volcano burst upward for an instant against the night — then faded slowly out.
John Chance took a deep drink.
BLUE LADY, COME BACK
This one starts with a blazing bright day and a trim split-level house looking woodsy against the pines.
Wind shrieked a howling toscin as John Chance slewed his Duesenberg Torpedo down the streaming mountain road. A sudden burst of lightning picked out the sinister silhouette of legend-haunted Corrington Manor, hunched starkly against the storm-swept Adirondacks. John Chance’s square jaw was grim-set as he scowled at the Georgian mansion just ahead. Why had lovely Gayle Corrington’s hysterical phone call been broken off in the midst of her plea for help? Could even John Chance thwart the horror of the Corrington Curse from striking terror on the eve of Gayle and young Hartley’s wedding?
“Humph,” was the sour comment of Curtiss Stryker, who four decades previous had thrilled thousands of pulp readers with his yarns of John Chance, psychic detective. He stretched his bony legs from the cramped interior of his friend’s brand-new Jensen Interceptor and stood scowling through the blacktop’s heat.
“Well, seems like that’s the way a haunted house ought to be approached,” Mandarin went on, joining him on the sticky asphalt driveway.
Stryker twitched a grin. Sixty years had left his tall, spare frame gristled and knobby, like an old pine on a rocky slope. His face was tanned and seamed, set off the bristling white mustache and close-cut hair that had once been blond. Mandarin always thought he looked like an old sea captain — and recalled that Stryker had sailed on a Norwegian whaler in his youth.
“Yeah, and here comes the snarling mastiff,” Stryker obliged him.
A curious border collie peered out from around the Corvette in the carport, wondered if it ought to bark. Russ whistled, and the dog wagged over to be petted.
The yard was just mowed, and someone had put a lot of care into the rose beds that bordered the flagstone walk. That and the pine woods gave the place a cool, inviting atmosphere — more like a mountain cabin than a house only minutes outside Knoxville’s sooty reach. The house had an expensive feel about it. Someone had hired an architect — and a good one — to do the design. Mountain stone and untreated redwood on the outside walls; cedar shakes on the roof; copper flashings; long areas of glass. Its split-level design adapted to the gentle hillside, seemed to curl around the grey outcroppings of limestone.
“Nice place to haunt,” Mandarin reflected.
“I hope you’re going to keep a straight face once we get inside,” his friend admonished gruffly “Mrs Corrington was a little reluctant to have us come here at all. Doesn’t want folks laughing, calling her a kook. People from all over descending on her to investigate her haunted house. You know what it’d be like.”
“I’ll maintain my best professional decorum.”
Styker grunted. He could trust Russ, or he wouldn’t have invited him along. A psychiatrist at least knew how to listen, ask questions without making his informant shut up in embarrassment. And Russ’s opinion of Gayle Corrington’s emotional stability would be valuable— Stryker had wasted too many interviews with cranks and would-be psychics whose hauntings derived from their own troubled minds. Besides, he knew Mandarin was interested in this sort of thing and would welcome a diversion from his own difficulties.