Brood Of The Dark Moon Part 24

Harkness held her tenderly close. "Frightened," he rea.s.sured her, "and no wonder! That night on the pyramid left its mark on us all. Now, come; come quietly."

He was leading the girl toward the knoll that they all called home. Chet followed, casting frequent glances toward the trees. They had covered half the distance to the barricade when Chet spoke in a voice that was half a whisper in its hushed tenseness.

"Drop--quick!" he ordered. "Get into the gra.s.s. It's coming. Now let's see what it is."

He knew that the others had taken cover. For himself, he had flung his lanky figure into the tall gra.s.s. The bow was beside him, an arrow ready; and the tip of polished bone and the feathered shaft made it a weapon that was not one to be disregarded. Long hours of practice had developed his natural apt.i.tude into real skill. Before him, he parted the tall gra.s.s cautiously to see the forest whence the sound had come.

The swish of leaves had warned Chet; some far-flung branch must have failed to bear the big beast's weight and had bent to swing him to the ground--or perhaps the descent was intentional.

And now there was silence, the silence of noonday that is so filled with unheard summer sounds. A foot above Chet's head a tiny bat-winged bird rocked and tilted on vermilion leather wings, while its iridescent head made flickering rainbow colors with the vibrations of a throat that hummed a steady call. Across the meadow were countless other flashing, humming things, like dust specks dancing in the sun, but magnified and intensely colored.

Above their droning note was the shrill cry of the insects that spent their days in idle and ceaseless unmusical sc.r.a.pings. They inhabited the shadowed zone along the forest edge. And now, where the foliage of the towering trees was torn back in a great arch, the insect shrilling ceased.

As the strings of a harp are damped and silenced in unison, their myriad voices ended that shrill note in the same instant. The silence spread; there was a hush as if all living things were mute in dread expectancy of something as yet unseen.

Chet was watching that arched opening. In one instant, except for the flickering shadows, it was empty; the place was so still it might have been lifeless since the dawn of time. And then--

Chet neither saw nor heard him come. He was there--a hulking hairy figure that came in absolute silence despite his huge weight.

An ape-man larger than any Chet had seen: he stood as motionless as an exhibit in a museum in some city of a far-off Earth. Only the white of his eyeb.a.l.l.s moved as the little eyes, under their beetling black brows, darted swiftly about.

"Bad!" thought Chet. "d.a.m.n bad!" If this was an advance scout for a pick of great monsters like himself it meant an a.s.sault their own little force could never meet. And this newcomer was hostile. There was not the least doubt of that.

Chet reached one hand behind him to motion for silence; one of his companions had stirred, had moved the gra.s.s in a ripple that was not that of the wind. Chet held his hand rigid in air, his whole body seeming to freeze with a premonition that was pure horror; and within him was a voice that said with dreadful certainty: "They have found you.

They have hunted you down."

For the thing in the forest, the creature half-human, half-beast, had raised its two s.h.a.ggy arms before it; and, with eyes fixed and staring, it was walking straight toward them, walking as no other living thing had walked, but one. Chet was seeing again that one--a helplessly hypnotized ape that appeared from a pit in a great pyramid. And the voice within him repeated hopelessly: "They have found you. They have run you down."

Chet lay motionless. He still hoped that the dread messenger might pa.s.s them by, but the rigidly outstretched arms were extended straight toward him; the creature's short, heavily muscled legs were moving stiffly, tearing a path through the thick gra.s.s and bringing him nearer with every step.

Diane and Harkness had been a few paces in advance of Chet when they dropped into the concealing gra.s.s. Chet could see where they lay, and the ape-man, as he approached, turned off as if he had lost the direction. He pa.s.sed Chet by, pa.s.sed where Walt and Diane were hiding and stopped! And Chet saw the glazed eyes turn here and there about their peaceful valley.

Unseeing they seemed, but again Chet knew better. Was he more sensitively attuned than the others? Who could say? But again he caught a message as plainly as if the words had been shouted inside his brain.

"Yes, the valley of the three sentinel peaks and the lake of blue; we can find it again. Houses, shelters--how crudely they build, these white-faced intruders!" Chet even sensed the contempt that accompanied the thoughts. "That is enough; you have done well. You shall have their raw hearts for your reward. Now bring them in--bring them in quickly!"

The instant action that followed this command was something Chet would never have believed possible had his own eyes not seen the incredible leap of the huge body. The ape-man's knotted muscles hurled him through the air directly toward the spot where Walt and Diane were hidden. But, had Chet been able to stand off and observe himself, he might have been equally amazed at the sight of a man who leaped erect, who raised a long bow, fitted an arrow, drew it to his shoulder, and did all in the instant while the huge brute's body was in the air.

The great ape landed on all fours. When he straightened and stood erect--his arms were extended, and in each of his gnarled hands he held a figure that was helpless in that terrible grasp.

No chance to loose the arrow then, though the brute's back was half turned. He had Harkness and Diane by their throats, and Chet knew by the unresisting limpness of Harkness' body that the fearful fire in those blazing eyes had them in a grip even more deadly than the hands of the beast.

Thoughts were flashing wildly through Chet's brain. "Knocked 'em cold!

He'll do the same to me if I meet his eyes. But I can't shoot now; Diane's in line. I must take him face about; get him before he gets me--get him first time!"

And, confusedly, there were other thoughts mingled with his own--thoughts he was picking up by means of a nervous system that was like an aerial antenna:

"Good--good! No--do not kill them. Not now; bring them to us alive. The pleasure will come later. And where are the other two? Find them!" It was here that Chet let out a wordless, blood-curdling shriek from lungs and throat that were tight with breathless waiting.

He must face the big brute about, and his wild yell did the work.

Startled by that cry that must have reached even those calloused, savage nerves, the ape-man leaped straight up in the air. He whirled as he sprang, to face whatever was behind him, and he threw the bodies of Harkness and Diane to the ground.

Chet saw the black ugliness of the face; he saw the eyes swing toward him.... But he was following with his own narrowed eyes a spot on a hairy throat; he even seemed to see within it where a great carotid artery carried pumping blood to an undeveloped brain.

The glare of those eyes struck him like a blow: his own were drawn irresistibly into that meeting of glances that would freeze him to a rigid statue--but the tw.a.n.g and snap of his own bowstring was in his ears, and a hairy body, its throat pierced in mid-air, was falling heavily to the ground.

But Chet Bullard, even as he leaped to the side of his companions, was thinking not of his victory, nor even of the two whose lives he had saved. He was thinking of some horror that his mind could not clearly picture: it had found them; it had seen them through this ape-man's eyes before the arrow had closed them in death ... and from now on there could not be two consecutive minutes of peace and happiness in this Happy Valley of Diane's.

CHAPTER XVIII

_Besieged!_

"I've felt it for some time," Chet confessed. "I've wakened and known I had been dreaming about that d.a.m.nable thing. And, although it sounds like the wildest sort of insanity, I have felt that there was something--some mental force--that was reaching out for our minds; searching for us. Well, if there is anything like that--"

He was about to say that the trail made by Kreiss and the apes who tracked him would have given this other enemy a direction to follow, but Kreiss himself dropped down beside Chet where he and Walt sat before the front of Diane's shelter. The pilot did not finish the sentence. Kreiss had meant it for the best; there was no use of rubbing it in. But that thing in the pyramid would never be fooled as Schwartzmann and the apes had been.

Chet had told Kreiss of the attack and had shown him the body of the ape-man. "Council of war," he explained as Kreiss rejoined them, but he corrected himself at once. "No--not war! We don't want to go up against that bunch. Our job is to plan a retreat."

Harkness turned to look inside the hut. "Diane, old girl," he asked, "how about it? Are you going to be able to make a long trip?"

Within the shelter Chet could see Diane's hands drawn into two hard little fists. She would force those tight hands to relax while she lay quietly in the dark; then again they would tremble, and, unconsciously, the nervous tension would be manifested in those white-knuckled little fists. For all of them the shock had been severe; it was hardest on Diane.

She answered now in a voice whose very quietness belied her brave words.

"Any time--any place!" she told Walt. "And--and the farther we go the better!"

"Quite right," Harkness agreed. "I am satisfied that there is something there we can never combat. We don't know what it is, and G.o.d help anyone who ever finds out. How about it, Chet? And you, too, Kreiss? Do you agree that there is no use in staying here and trying to fight it out?"

"I do not agree," the scientist objected. "My work, my experiments I have collected! Would you have me abandon them? Must we run in fear because an anthropoid ape has come into this clearing? And, if there are more, we have our barricade; our weapons are crude, but effective, and I might add to them with some ideas of my own should occasion demand."

"Listen!" Chet commanded. "That anthropoid ape is nothing to be afraid of: you're right on that. But he came from the pyramid, Kreiss, and there's something there that knows every foot of ground that messenger went over. There's something in that pyramid that can send more ape-men, that can come itself, for all that I know, and that can knock us cold in half a second.

"It's found us. One arrow went straight, thank G.o.d! It has given us a stay of execution. But is that d.a.m.nable thing in the pyramid going to let it go at that? You know the answer as well as I do. It has probably sent twenty more of those messengers who are on their way this minute, I am telling you; and we've got two days at the most before they get here."

Kreiss still protested. "But my work--"