The Slayer of Souls

"Miles out in this almost impenetrable region lies a patch of trees called Fool's Acre.

"At Wells I heard that the only man who had ever managed to reach Fool's Acre was a trapper, and that he was still living.

"I found him at Rainbow Lake – a very old man, who had a fairly clear recollection of Fool's Acre and his exhausting journey there.

"And he told me that man had been there before he had. For there was a roofless stone house there, and the remains of a walled garden. And a skull deep in the wild grasses."

Selden paused and looked down at the recently healed scars on his wrists and hands.

"It was a rotten trip," he said bluntly. "It took me three days to cut a tunnel through that accursed tangle of matted brier and grey birch… Fool's Acre is a grove of giant trees – first growth pine, oak, and maple. Great outcrops of limestone ledges bound it on the east. A brook runs through the woods.

"There is a house there, no longer roofless, and built of slabs of fossil-pitted limestone. The glass in the windows is so old that it is iridescent.

"A seven-foot wall encloses the house, built also of slabs blasted out of the rock outcrop, and all pitted with fossil shells.

"Inside is a garden – not the remains of one – a beautiful garden full of unfamiliar flowers. And in this garden I saw the Yezidee on his knees making living things out of lumps of dead earth!"

"The Tchordagh!" whispered the girl.

"What was the Yezidee doing?" demanded Cleves nervously.

Involuntarily all three drew nearer each other there in the sunshine.

"It was difficult for me to see," said Selden in his quiet, serious voice. "It was nearly twilight: I lay flat on top of the wall under the curving branches of a huge syringa bush in full bloom. The Yezidees – "

"Were there two!" exclaimed Cleves.

"Two. They were squatting on the old stone path bordering one of the flower-beds." He turned to Tressa: "They both wore white cloths twisted around their heads, and long soft garments of white. Under these their bare, brown legs showed, but they wore things on their naked feet which were shaped like what we call Turkish slippers – only different."

"Black and green," nodded Tressa with the vague horror growing in her face.

"Yes. The soles of their shoes were bright green."

"Green is the colour sacred to Islam," said Tressa. "The priests of Satan defile it by staining with green the soles of their footwear."

After an interval: "Go on," said Cleves nervously.

Selden drew closer, and they bent their heads to listen:

"I don't, even now, know what the Yezidees were actually doing. In the twilight it was hard to see clearly. But I'll tell you what it looked like to me. One of these squatting creatures would scoop out a handful of soil from the flower-bed, and mould it for a few moments between his lean, sinewy fingers, and then he'd open his hands and – and something alive– something small like a rat or a toad, or God knows what, would escape from between his palms and run out into the grass – "

Selden's voice failed and he looked at Cleves with sickened eyes.

"I can't – can't make you understand how repulsive to me it was to see a wriggling live thing creep out between their fingers and – and go running or scrambling away – little loathsome things with humpy backs that hopped or scurried through the grass – "

"What on earth were these Yezidees doing, Tressa?" asked Cleves almost roughly.

The girl's white face was marred by the imprints of deepening horror.

"It is the Tchor-Dagh," she said mechanically. "They are using every resource of hell to destroy me – testing the gigantic power of Evil – as though it were some vast engine charged with thunderous destruction! – and they were testing it to discover its terrific capacity to annihilate – "

Her voice died in her dry throat; she dropped her bloodless visage into both hands and remained seated so.

Both men looked at her in silence, not daring to interfere. Finally the girl lifted her pallid face from her hands.

"That is what they were doing," she said in a dull voice. "Out of inanimate earth they were making things animate – living creatures – to – to test the hellish power which they are storing – concentrating – for my destruction."

"What is their purpose?" asked Cleves harshly. "What do these Mongol Sorcerers expect to gain by making little live things out of lumps of garden dirt?"

"They are testing their power," whispered the girl.

"Like tuning up a huge machine?" muttered Selden.

"Yes."

"For what purpose?"

"To make larger living creatures out of – of clay."

"They can't – they can't create!" exclaimed Cleves. "I don't know how – by what filthy tricks – they make rats out of dirt. But they can't make a – anything – like a – like a man!"

Tressa's body trembled slightly.

"Once," she said, "in the temple, Prince Sanang took dust which was brought in sacks of goat-skin, and fashioned the heap of dirt with his hands, so that it resembled the body of a man lying there on the marble floor under the shrine of Erlik… And – and then, there in the shadows where only the Dark Star burned – that black lamp which is called the Dark Star – the long heap of dust lying there on the marble pavement began to – to breathe! – "

She pressed both hands over her breast as though to control her trembling body: "I saw it; I saw the long shape of dust begin to breathe, to stir, move, and slowly lift itself – "

"A Yezidee trick!" gasped Cleves; but he also was trembling now.

"God!" whispered the girl. "Allah alone knows – the Merciful, the Long Suffering – He knows what it was that we temple girls saw there – that Yulun saw – that Sa-n'sa and I beheld there rising up like a man from the marble floor – and standing erect in the shadowy twilight of the Dark Star…"

Her hands gripped at her breast; her face was deathly.

"Then," she said, "I saw Prince Sanang draw his sabre of Indian steel, and he struck … once only… And a dead man fell down where the thing had stood. And all the marble was flooded with scarlet blood."

"A trick," repeated Cleves, in the ghost of his own voice. But his gaze grew vacant.

Presently Selden spoke in tones that sounded weakly querulous from emotional reaction:

"There is a path – a tunnel under the matted briers. It took me more than a week to cut it out. It is possible to reach Fool's Acre. We can try – with our rifles – if you say so, Mrs. Cleves."

The girl looked up. A little colour came into her cheeks. She shook her head.

"Their bodies may not be there in the garden," she said absently. "What you saw may not have been that part of them – the material which dies by knife or bullet… And it is necessary that these Yezidees should die."

"Can you do anything?" asked Cleves, hoarsely.

She looked at her husband; tried to smile: