The Black Mask Magazine (Vol. 1, No. 5 - August 1920), page 10
part #5 of The Black Mask Magazine Series
The priest hesitated, then — "Even though I perceive thee to be in sore need of succor, I can not allow thee to enter without the permission of the Grand Lama. Stay here, brother, and perchance he will have compassion upon thee…"
After the door closed behind the shaven-pated priest, Tremaine slipped to the cold ground before the entrance, feigning unconsciousness.
Presently the door opened again. Following that Tremaine heard voices and from beneath lowered lids he saw the Lama with the white silk scarf emerge, accompanied by three others, the latter number wearing mitre-shaped hats.
"His pains have caused him to swoon," reported one of the Lamas, having bent over Tremaine. "Look ye, his camel lies yonder."…
After a moment of whispered consultation the four Lamas lifted Tremaine and carried him inside the monastery. Following the harsh clang of the closing portal, he was borne some distance — up nights of stairs and through dark, incense-laden corridors — and at length placed upon something cold and hard, a kang, he imagined.
Three of the Lamas retreated, leaving, the fourth, the one with the scarf, to light a candle and examine the American; and during this performance it required great control on the part of Tremaine, for a single twitch of a muscle might have betrayed him.
Presently one of the monks returned bearing ointment, a cloth and a bowl of water. The latter he passed to the other Lama and whilst the priest of the white scarve held the receptacle he bathed and dressed the cut in Tremaine's arm.
When this was done they departed in silence, taking the candle and closing the door easily behind them.
Tremaine opened wide his eyes. Instead of the darkness that he expected as the natural result of the withdrawal of the light, a long iron-barred window allowed the stream of moonlight to crust the floor beneath the casement with pearl and bring into vague outline the walls and ceiling of a small cell-like room. There was no furniture other than the kang upon which he lay.
A raw chill pervaded the atmosphere, making him shiver and shake. Too, the ordeal through which he had just passed had left him with a feeling of physical weakness. He wondered if he would ever forget the piteous whine of the camel… A shudder swept him.
Rising from the stone bed, he crept to the door, his hand closing over the knob. To his surprise the door was not bolted, but swung inward with a mild whine of hinges, disclosing a gloom-strictured corridor.
As he started to step over the threshold his ears caught a faint pat-pat-pat — a sound that suggested the padded footfalls of a feline animal — coming from somewhere in the dark passage.
He drew back into the room, hesitated; closed the door and returned to the kang.
He had scarcely stretched himself out upon the cold stone when from beneath lowered lids he saw the door open slowly — saw a misty figure take birth in the maw of darkness. His sensation, as the person entered, was not unlike an electric shock, for, he perceived, it was a woman.
She wore something that coruscated in the moonlight and her hair, the shade of a Tibetian night, was unbound in a black flood about her shoulders. And the face! In the moonlight it was clear-cut, like a piece of marble — an alluring manifestation of a hundred voices, a face more wickedly lovely than any he had ever beheld. The lips were full, smears of dark in the wan light, and flames of jet burned in the heavy-lidded eyes.
She moved across the crusting of pearly light, her garments shimmering sinisterly, and bent over him, her body radiating a warmth that was sweet, like bruised sandalwood.
She laughed, the musical peals suggesting shattered crystals.
"My white mummy!" he heard her murmur in the Sürtüng Mongol dialect. Her voice held a lure — promised paradise… and a sweet hell.
She bent lower over him, lower, until the fragrance of bruised sandalwood dulled his senses into a lassitude.
"My mummy!"
Then she allowed her hand to caress his forehead and at the touch a thousand electric volts sent a charge through his whole body.
"O white mummy!" she crooned, "Thy brow is crowned with the pallor of flaming snows! I long to love thee, to smother thee with kisses, to let thee perish in my embrace, but not tonight, O white mummy, another time…"
Her face sank lower… until her lips met his… and in that terrible moment he was possessed of a desire to reach up and crush her to him, to return the pressure of that mouth…
Suddenly she sprang back, retreating into he full clarity of the moon. The flames of jet in her eyes leaped high; her body grew rigid, tense; she flung back her arms, the shining draperies spread as wings of woven-stars; and thus she stood for a brief instant, like a huge scintillating bat above the throat of prey.
"Red — red… like burning rubies!" fell from her lips.
A look of hellish exultation swept her face — a typhoon of emotion. She took a single step toward him, her eyes upon his arm where the skin was slashed; then conquered herself by sheer force of will — a battle that was evident in her face. He heard her teeth snap together.
The typhoon was spent.
She whirled; he saw the flash of her draperies… dust in the wake of a silver tempest… and the door clanged shut.
Once more he was alone in the cell of the Lamaserie.
III
Cold perspiration stood out on Tremaine's body. How he had been able to master himself while she fawned over him he did not know, but he did realize that he could not endure another such ordeal.
For a long time he lay there, his body quivering with reaction; and at length he rose, determined upon a course of action.
Moving to the door, he lifted the latch. The ponderous portal swung inward, revealing the blackness of the corridor — a sable flood that swam visibly before his eyes. The black-dark suggested frightful things — hidden horrors. His jaw tightened; he ground his teeth together.
Another step, a whine of unoiled hinges and it was done — the door closed and he adrift in the fluid darkness.
He still wore the sheepskin coat; the dagger and the automatic rested in his inside pocket; and his hand crept beneath the heavy garment, closing over the cold steel of the revolver. Thus armed, his unengaged hand extended to avoid a collision with any objects that might lurk in his path, he started forward.
He had advanced not more than five yards when instinct warned him to halt. His unengaged hand slipped into the pocket where the box of matches lay; a mere instant — and following a splutter, a tiny blaze was born in the Cimmerian blackness.
What he saw caused a vacant sensation in the pit of his stomach.
He was at the top of a flight of stairs that wound down into a well of darkest night. He shuddered — and the match expired.
One hand slipping over the smooth wall, the other gripping the pistol, he began the descent and after what seemed to him a deathless æon of downward steps, he emerged from the winding stairs into a corridor that was half-lit by a flickering oil lamp in a niche in the wall.
Upon reaching, the end of the hall he found, on one side, huge iron-hinged double-doors, and opposite them, another stair that sank into deep oblivion. Here lie halted, undecided which course to choose.
Stairway or doors?
The fearsome aspect of the former promised dark revelations. The double-doors could come later… He stepped into the mouth of the stair.
The descent was steep, straight as a flame, and when he reached the bottom he found himself again in a flood of sable. The atmosphere was foul — smelled of freshly turned earth.
Once more he removed the matchbox from his pocket and ignited one.
With the small flare, a mere spark in a great void, he strained his eyes.
At first he could make out only vague shapes, formless shadows; but soon his vision became accustomed to the poor light and he beheld what was evidently an unused chapel of the Lamaserie — a chapel that was fast surrendering to ruin, the walls being broken and seamed and grown in places with a loathsome fungi. The floor was strewn with rubbish and broken stones, and along the center of the chapel, placed at regular intervals, were twelve oblong boxes.
All this he glimpsed before the match went out.
He lit another immediately.
This time the twelve wooden boxes claimed his attention; they were all the same size and shape and built like coffins.
To the nearest he moved, aware of a pregnant dread within him. The lid was half off, thus revealing only a portion of the interior and its contents; but that was enough to make him fall back a step, nauseated.
"God!"
The word left his tongue involuntarily.
Again he looked — to verify what he had first seen, hoping that some sorcery of the shadows had fashioned in ironic jest the Thing that he had beheld; but no; It was there…
The match died, burning his fingertips.
"God!"
Again the word was wrung from his lips.
He struck another match and moved to the next box, peering in. He repeated this performance until he had examined the entire twelve — and the contents of each proved the same.
"T'su chü ti fang!" The Valley of Vanishing Men! He understood now and the terrible truth spread like a deadly poison through his brain.
Miriam Amber's words came back to him—
"They say The Shining One has never tasted food…"
The Shining One! And who could The Shining One be but that dark-eyed priestess of Hell who had bent over him in the room above?
The match expired. As darkness shut down upon him he resolved to continue his explorations, to penetrate the mysteries beyond the double-doors opposite the mouth of the stairway, and, if possible, exterminate this monstrous menace to the world.
The Valley of Vanishing Men! The full horror of it sent his soul reeling with nausea. That such a Thing existed on this earth he would not have believed before.
He groped his way past the oblong boxes to the stairs, ascended to the corridor where the oil lamp flickered in the niche in the wall, and paused before the massive double-doors.
Suppose there were persons within, suppose…
He steeled himself, lifted the bolt and the doors swung open under the pressure of his weight.
A single glance showed the chamber to be without occupants — a vast rectangular hall it was, from its appearance, a place of worship such as he had seen in some of the Lamaseries of the Gobi and Northeastern Tibet, its four walls ornamental with yak-horns and grotesque devil-masks and hung with cloths woven of the hair of the yellow camel. In the shadow-sunken corners, outside the intimate radiance of a globular lamp that burned on a reed table in the center of the room, were prayer-wheels and drums made of human skulls — myriad Lamist devices.
On one side of the grim apartment stood a black screen with the form of the destroying god Varchuk embroidered in gold upon it, and opposite on the left of an iron door, a large lacquered chest was pushed against the wall.
At the extreme end of the hall low steps rose between files of gray urns — relics of the Shun-lai Imperialists — to the foot of crimson, silver-threaded tapestries.
Tremaine first moved to the iron door. It opened readily and he stepped out on a small balcony high on the walls of the monastery, overhanging a dreadful chasm in the mountains — an abyss so deep, so shuddersome that the moonlight failed to penetrate its fearful depths.
He withdrew from the balcony, closing the door behind him, and crossed the hall of worship to the Urn-lined steps. At the top he faced the crimson, silver-threaded tapestries. Without hesitancy he gripped the heavy cloths and jerked them aside, the movement rattling the rings from which they hung. At his touch they seemed to spring apart.
A broad band of light cast from the gobular lamp fell over his shoulders stretching to the side of a stone sarcophagus, and here shattering to bits of argent; and into the illumination he moved, reaching the side of the sarcophagus and bending over the form therein. As he looked he throttled a cry, for the face, paler, older than when he had last seen it, was the face of — Miriam Amber.
His whole body went numb — but the following instant he realized that it was not she, that the body lying in the sarcophagus belonged to a man clad in a long black robe, his thin hands clasped across his breast.
Such a likeness! The face was the same but for a suggestion of more maturity, was, he knew, the face of her brother, Lance Amber.
Instinct prompted him to feel the heart. To his surprise, for the body lay as one dead, it was throbbing. He was alive — but that thin, haggard face! Something about it, tragically young, wrung his soul.
"Amber," he called, "Amber! Can you hear me? Can you speak?"
He returned the revolver to his pocket and began to chafe the cold hands. For fully ten minutes he employed various means to awaken the man, but he remained in the repose of the dead, silent, motionless.
Tremaine was at loss what to do next. Several minutes passed as he stood above the sarcophagus, his gaze wandering helplessly about the hall.
A faint sound aroused him to action — a sound that he identified with the bolt outside the double-doors — and his eyes quickly searched the vast chamber for a hiding place, finally alighting upon the black screen embroidered with the likeness of Varchuk.
Hastily drawing the curtains together behind him, he moved down the steps and attained the temporary security of the screen just as the ponderous double-doors swung open.
A lone figure entered — a figure in a gown of Chinese gold tissue. Tremaine caught his breath voluntarily, for it was the creature who had bent over him while he lay in the cell.
Her gilded form seemed to swim in the glow of the globular lamp as she drifted toward the crimson tapestries. Reaching the top of the steps, she thrust apart the curtains and stood for an instant with her draperies spread wing-fashion, looking >i down upon the man in the sarcophagus; then she bent over him, her dark hair cascading about her white neck, a laugh rippling from her lips.
"My king!" Tremaine heard her murmur in liquid tones.
Then she moved back, shoulders against the crimson tapestries, her eyes upon the face in the sarcophagus.
"Come forth, O Moon-brow!" she commanded.
Tremaine watched breathlessly…
Slowly, very slowly, the black clad figure in the sarcophagus sat up, his face burning with an unearthly pallor in the shadowy alcove.
"Come, O my king!" continued the caressing voice.
With a dream-like movement Lance Amber abandoned the stone sarcophagus and stood erect between the crimson tapestries, his eyes open, glassy, his black robe dragging on the floor about his feet.
The woman in the Chinese gold tissue backed down the stairs, step by step, never removing her eyes from those of the man, and with a slow tread he followed… across the hall to the lacquered chest.
"Be seated!" she commanded.
He obeyed and as he sank on the chest she bent low — lower yet — until her jet-black eyes were on a level with his…
Tremaine, watching the strange performance from behind the screen, was beginning to grasp a tangible solution for Amber's condition. Hypnosis! This gold-robed woman exerted that power over her victims. He understood now the lassitude that he had felt when she bent over him in the cell.
She was speaking again — "Now — awaken!"
At her evocation the eyes of Lance Amber lost the glassy expression, became almost normal, and he lifted one thin white hand, passing it over his brow — as if to wipe away the remaining tangles of a nightmare.
The woman laughed again, alluringly and low. He got to his feet, staring at her.
"You, you again?" he said in the half drowsy voice of the recently awakened sleeper, "Good God!"
"And why should not I be here, beloved?"
Amber dropped on the chest, his haggard face falling in his hands, and the woman knelt, locking her white arms about him.
"Art thou not glad to see me, O Moon-brow?" she purred, "Am not I fair to look upon? Does not the sight of me stir in thee some flame of love?"
A sob broke from the man.
"Love you," he echoed fiercely, thrusting her away, "Knowing you to be what you are?"
She only laughed — that siren laugh.
"I am white like thee, O Moon-brow," she went on, "My mother was white — was from a great country beyond Tibet, called Russia. This I know, for the Lamas have told me of her, of her death here, in the monastery, just after my birth… O beloved, when I could have sent thee below with my white mummies I let thee remain here — for I knew that we were made for one another. Ah, Moon-brow, thou shalt be a king! Here I am called The Shining One — I talk with the gods! Neither the Dalai Lama or the Tashi Lama, nor that spineless fool at Urga, has so much power as I! And I offer to share this glory with thee! To be the consort of The Shining One! Does that not tempt thee?"
Again the man pushed her roughly away.
"Leave me alone to die!" he entreated piteously, "My God — love you! The touch of you is like that of a leper! You are unclean, foul, accursed, a creature damned!"
The fires of jet in her eyes rose. She laughed sharply. Her hands went to her throat and unclasped a necklace of pigeon-blood rubies — a thing that shone like threaded drops of fire.
"Ah, beloved, behold these!" she cried, extending the jewels to him; "In the treasure vaults of the Lamaserie there are gems more costly than these, jewels such as are rarely seen, and all are thine if—"
"Stop!" he fairly shrieked.
With a spring he got to his feet and snatched the necklace from her hand, hurling it to the floor where it broke, scattering in tiny pools of flame.
"God in heaven, leave me alone!" he shrilled, "You have undermined my life, murdered my soul, kept me here in this damnable place until my vitality is sucked up! Now for Christ's sake let me die in peace!"
