"Let them be!" gurgled Bruckman, scarcely intelligible with his butchered tongue. "They're barbed—you'll tear my hands off. I'm dying— they hurt me in ways that don't show so plainly. Let me die in as little pain as possible. Sorry—would have warned you
Though he winced at the sting of the fiery liquid on his mangled tongue, Bruckman's voice grew stronger; and a blaze rose in his bloodshot eyes.
"I'm going to tell you everything," he panted. "I'll live that long —then you set the law on them—blast them off the earth! I've kept the oath until now, even with the threat of death hanging over me, but I thought I could fool them. Curse their black souls, I'll keep their secret no longer! Don't talk or ask questions—listen!"
Strange the tales that dying lips have gasped, but never a stranger tale than that Emmett Glanton heard in the blood-stained room, where a dead black face grinned by a smoldering hearth, and a dying man, spiked to a table, mouthed grisly secrets with a mangled tongue in the smoky light of the guttering lamp, while the black wind moaned and crawled at the rattling windows.
"When I was young, in another land," panted John Bruckman, "I was a fool. And I was trapped by my own folly into joining a cult of devil worshippers —the Black Brothers of Ahriman. Until too late I did not realize what they were—nor to what horrors my own terrible oath had bound me. I need not speak of their aims and purposes—they were foul beyond conception. Yet they had one characteristic that is so often lacking in many such cults—they were sincere—fanatic. They worshipped the fiend Ahriman as zealously as did their heathen ancestors. And they practiced human sacrifice. Once each year, on this very night, between midnight and dawn, a young girl was offered up on the burning altar of Ahriman, Lord of Fire. On that glowing altar her body was consumed to ashes and the ashes scattered to the night wind by the black-painted priests.
"I became one of the Black Brothers. On my breast was tattooed indelibly the symbol of Ahriman, which is the symbol of Night—a blind, black face. But at last I sickened of the revolting practices of the cult, and fled from it. I came to America and changed my name. Some of my people were already here—the branch of the family to which Joan belongs.
"With the passing of nineteen years I thought the Black Brothers had forgotten me. I didn't know there were branches in America, in the teeming foreign quarters of the great cities. But I might have known they never forget. And one day I received a cryptic message that shattered my illusions. They had remembered, had traced me, found me—knew all about me. And, in punishment for my desertion, they had chosen my niece, Joan, for the yearly sacrifice.
"That was bad enough, but what nearly drove me mad with terror was knowledge of the custom that attends the sacrifice—since time immemorial it's been the habit of the Black Brothers to kill the man nearest the girl chosen for sacrifice—father, brother, husband—her 'master' according to their ritual. This is partly because of a dim phallic superstition, partly a practical way of eliminating an enemy, for the girl's protector would certainly seek vengeance.
"I knew I couldn't save Joan. She was marked for doom, but I might save myself by shifting responsibility for her to somebody else's shoulders. So I brought her here and married her to you."
"You swine!" whispered Glanton.
"It did me little good!" gasped Bruckman, his tortured head tossing from side to side. His eyes were glazing and a bloody froth rose to his livid lips. "They came shortly after you drove away. I was fool enough to let them in—told them I was no longer responsible for the chosen maiden. They laughed at me—tortured me. I broke away—got to the phone —but they had ordered my death, as a renegade brother. They drove away, leaving one of them here to attend to me. You can see he did his work well!"
"Where—where did they go?" Glanton spoke with dry lips, remembering the big automobile roaring northward.
"To your ranch—to get Joan—I told them where she was —before they started torturing me!"
"You fool! You're telling me this
But John Bruckman did not hear, for, with a convulsion that spattered foam from his empurpled lips and tore one of the bloody spikes out of the wood, the life went out of him in one great cry.
IV. — CRACKLING BLUE FLAME
Table of Contents
LIKE a drunken man, Emmitt Glanton left from that lamp-lit room where a black face on the floor grinned blindly at a blind white face lolling on the table. The black wind ripped at him with mad, invisible fingers as he ran in great leaps to his car.
