III
Black Hands
A flickering light was the first thing that impressed itself upon my awakening faculties. I blinked, shook my head, came suddenly fully awake. I was lying on my back in a small glade, walled by towering black trees which fitfully reflected the uncertain light that emanated from a torch stuck upright in the earth near me. My head throbbed, and blood clotted my scalp; my hands were fastened together before me by a pair of handcuffs. My clothes were torn and my skin scratched as if I had been dragged brutally through the brush.
A huge black shape squatted over me—a black man of medium height but of gigantic breadth and thickness, clad only in ragged, muddy breeches—Tope Braxton. He held a gun in each hand, and alternately aimed first one and then the other at me, squinting along the barrel. One pistol was mine; the other had once belonged to the constable that Braxton had brained.
I lay silent for a moment, studying the play of the torchlight on the great black torso. His huge body gleamed shiny ebony or dull bronze as the light flickered. He was like a shape from the abyss whence mankind crawled ages ago. His primitive ferocity was reflected in the bulging knots of muscles that corded his long, massive apish arms, his huge sloping shoulders; above all the bullet-shaped head that jutted forward on a column-like neck. The wide, flat nostrils, murky eyes, thick lips that writhed back from tusk-like teeth—all proclaimed the man’s kinship with the primordial.
“Where the devil do you fit into this nightmare?” I demanded.
He showed his teeth in an apelike grin.
“I thought it was time you was comin’ to, Kirby Garfield,” he grinned. “I wanted you to come to ‘fo’ I kill you, so you know who kill you. Den I go back and watch Mistuh Grimm kill de ol’ man and de gal.”
“What do you mean, you black devil?” I demanded harshly. “Grimm? What do you know about Grimm?”
“I meet him in de deep woods, after he kill Jim Tike. I heah a gun fire and come with a torch to see who—thought maybe somebody after me. I meet Mistuh Grimm.”
“So you were the man I saw with the torch,” I grunted.
“Mistuh Grimm smaht man. He say if I help him kill some folks, he help me git away. He take and throw bomb into de cabin; dat bomb don’t kill dem folks, just paralyze ’em. I watchin’ de trail, and hit you when you come back. Dat man Ashley ain’t plumb paralyze, so Mistuh Grimm, he take and bite out he throat like he done Jim Tike.”
“What do you mean, bite out his throat?” I demanded.
“Mistuh Grimm ain’t a human bein’. He stan’ up and walk like a man, but he part hound, or wolf.”
“You mean a werewolf?” I asked, my scalp prickling.
He grinned. “Yeah, dat’s it. Dey had ’em in de old country.” Then he changed his mood. “I done talk long enough. Gwine blow yo’ brains out now!”
His thick lips froze in a killer’s mirthless grin as he squinted along the barrel of the pistol in his right hand. My whole body went tense, as I sought desperately for a loophole to save my life. My legs were not tied, but my hands were manacled, and a single movement would bring hot lead crashing through my brain. In my desperation I plumbed the depths of black folklore for a dim, all but forgotten superstition.
“These handcuffs belonged to Joe Sorley, didn’t they?” I demanded.
“Uh huh,” he grinned, without ceasing to squint along the sights. “I took ’em ’long with his gun after I beat his head in with window-bar. I thought I might need ’em.”
“Well,” I said, “if you kill me while I’m wearing them, you’re eternally damned! Don’t you know that if you kill a man who’s wearing a cross, his ghost will haunt you forever after?”
He jerked the gun down suddenly, and his grin was replaced by a snarl.
“What you mean, white man?”
“Just what I say. There’s a cross scratched on the inside of one of these cuffs. I’ve seen it a thousand times. Now go ahead and shoot, and I’ll haunt you into hell.”
“Which cuff?” he snarled, lifting a gun-butt threateningly.
“Find out for yourself,” I sneered. “Go ahead; why don’t you shoot? I hope you’ve had plenty of sleep lately, because I’ll see to it that you never sleep again. In the night, under the trees, you’ll see my face leering at you. You’ll hear my voice in the wind that moans through the cypress branches. When you close your eyes in the dark, you’ll feel my fingers at your throat.”
“Shut up!” he roared, brandishing his pistols. His black skin was tinged with an ashy hue.
“Shut me up—if you dare!” I struggled up to a sitting position, and then fell back cursing. “Damn you, my leg’s broken!”
At that the ashy tinge faded from his ebon skin, and purpose rose in his reddish eyes.
“So yo’ leg’s busted!” He bared his glistening teeth in a beastly grin. “Thought you fell mighty hard, and then I dragged you a right smart piece.”
Laying both pistols on the ground, well out of my reach, he rose and leaned over me, dragging a key out of his breeches pocket. His confidence was justified; for was I not unarmed, helpless with a broken leg? I did not need the manacles. Bending over me he turned the key in the old-fashioned handcuffs and tore them off. And like twin striking snakes my hands shot to his black throat, locked fiercely and dragged him down on top of me.
I had always wondered what would be the outcome of a battle between me and Tope Braxton. One can hardly go about picking fights with black men. But now a fierce joy surged in me, a grim gratification that the question of our relative prowess was to be settled once and for all, with life for the winner and death for the loser.
Even as I gripped him, Braxton realized that I had tricked him into freeing me—that I was no more crippled than he was. Instantly he exploded into a hurricane of ferocity that would have dismembered a lesser man than I. We rolled on the pine-needles, rending and tearing.
Were I penning an elegant romance, I should tell how I vanquished Tope Braxton by a combination of higher intelligence, boxing skill and deft science that defeated his brute strength. But I must stick to facts in this chronicle.
Intelligence played little part in that battle. It would have helped me no more than it would help a man in the actual grip of a gorilla. As for artificial skill, Tope would have torn the average boxer or wrestler limb from limb. Man-developed science alone could not have withstood the blinding speed, tigerish ferocity and bone-crushing strength that lurked in Tope Braxton’s terrible thews.
It was like fighting a wild beast, and I met him at his own game. I fought Tope Braxton as the rivermen fight, as savages fight, as bull apes fight. Breast to breast, muscle straining against muscle, iron fist crushing against hard skull, knee driven to groin, teeth slashing sinewy flesh, gouging, tearing, smashing. We both forgot the pistols on the ground; we must have rolled over them half a dozen times. Each of us was aware of only one desire, one blind crimson urge to kill with naked hands, to rend and tear and maul and trample until the other was a motionless mass of bloody flesh and splintered bone.
I do not know how long we fought; time faded into a bloodshot eternity. His fingers were like iron talons that tore the flesh and bruised the bone beneath. My head was swimming from its impacts against the hard ground, and from the pain in my side I knew at least one rib was broken. My whole body was a solid ache and burn of twisted joints and wrenched thews. My garments hung in ribbons, wrenched by the blood that sluiced from an ear that had been ripped loose from my head. But if I was taking terrible punishment, I was dealing it too.
The torch had been knocked down and kicked aside, but it still smoldered fitfully, lending a lurid dim light to that primordial scene. Its light was not so red as the murder-lust that clouded my dimming eyes.
In a red haze I saw his white teeth gleaming in a grin of agonized effort, his eyes rolling whitely from a mask of blood. I had mauled his face out of all human resemblance; from eyes to waist his black hide was laced with crimson. Sweat slimed us, and our fingers slipped as they gripped. Writhing half-free from his rending clutch, I drove every straining knot of muscle in my body behind my fist that smashed like a mallet against his jaw. There was a crack of bone, an involuntary groan; blood spurted and the broken jaw dropped down. A bloody froth covered the loose lips. Then for the first time those black, tearing fingers faltered; I felt the great body that strained against mine yield and sag. And with a wild-beast sob of gratified ferocity ebbing from my pulped lips, my fingers at last met in his throat.
Down on his back he went, with me on his breast. His failing hands clawed at my wrists, weakly and more weakly. And I strangled him, slowly, with no trick of jiujitsu or wrestling, but with sheer brute strength, bending his head back and back between its shoulders until the thick neck snapped like a rotten branch.
In that drunkenness of battle, I did not know when he died, did not know that it was death that had at last melted the iron thews of the body beneath me. Reeling up numbly, I dazedly stamped on his breast and head until the bones gave way under my heels, before I realized that Tope Braxton was dead.
Then I would have fallen and lapsed into insensibility, but for the dizzy realization that my work was not yet ended. Groping with numb hands I found the pistols, and reeled away through the pines, in the direction in which my forest-bred instinct told me the cabin of Richard Brent stood. With each step my tough recuperative powers asserted themselves.
Tope had not dragged me far. Following his jungle instincts, he had merely hauled me off the trail into the deeper woods. A few steps brought me to the trail, and I saw again the light of the cabin gleaming through the pines. Braxton had not been lying then, about the nature of that bomb. At least the soundless explosion had not destroyed the cabin, for it stood as I had seen it last, apparently undamaged. Light poured, as before, from the shuttered windows, but from it came a high-pitched inhuman laughter that froze the blood in my veins. It was the same laughter that had mocked us beside the shadowed trail.