The Slayer of Souls

"She's gone to the Ritz," repeated the agent. "No one else has come out. And I began to worry – hearing nothing of you, Mr. Recklow. So I stepped in to see – "

"You say that Mrs. Cleves went out of the house we entered, got into the coupé, and told the driver to go to the Ritz?" demanded Cleves, astounded.

"Yes, sir."

"Where is that coupé? Did it return?"

"It had not returned when I came in here."

"Go back and look for it. Look in the other street," said Recklow sharply.

The agent hurried away over the creaking boards. The four men gazed at one another.

"The thing to do is to obey her and stay where we are," said Recklow grimly. "Who knows what peril we may cause her if we move from – "

His words froze on his lips as Tressa's voice rang out from the darkness beyond the door they were guarding:

"Victor I I – I need you! Come to me, my husband!"

As Cleves sprang through the door into the darkness beyond, Benton smashed a window sash with all the force of his shoulder, and, reaching out through the shattered glass, tore the rotting blinds from their hinges, letting in a flood of sickly light.

Against the bare wall stood Tressa, both arms extended, her hands flat against the plaster, and each hand transfixed and pinned to the wall by a knife.

A white sheet lay at her feet. On it rested a third knife. And, bending on one knee to pick it up, they caught a glimpse of a slender young man in fashionable afternoon attire, who, as they entered with the crash of the shattered window in their ears, sprang to his nimble feet and stood confronting them, knife in hand.

Instantly every man fired at him and the bullets whipped the plaster to a smoke behind him, but the slender, dark skinned young man stood motionless, looking at them out of brilliant eyes that slanted a trifle.

Again the racket of the fusillade swept him and filled the room with plaster dust.

Cleves, frantic with horror, laid hold of the knives that pinned his wife's hands to the wall, and dragged them out.

But there was no blood, no wound to be seen on her soft palms. She took the murderous looking blades from him, threw one terrible look at Sanang, kicked the shroud across the floor toward him, and flung both knives upon it.

The place was still dim with plaster dust and pistol fumes as she stepped forward through the acrid mist, motioning the four men aside.

"Sanang!" she cried in a clear voice, "may God remember you in hell, for my feet have spurned your shroud, and your knives, which could not scar my palms, shall never pierce my heart! Look out for yourself, Prince Sanang!"

"Tokhta!" he said, calmly. "My soul be ransom for yours!"

"That is a lie! My soul is already ransomed! My mind is the more powerful. It has already halted yours. It is conquering yours. It is seizing your mind and enslaving it. It is mastering your will, Sanang! Your mind bends before mine. You know it! You know it is bending. You feel it is breaking down!"

Sanang's eyes began to glitter but his pale brown face had grown almost white.

"I slew you once – in the Wood of the White Moth," he said huskily. "There is no resurrection from such a death, little Heavenly Azure. Look upon me! My soul and yours are one!"

"You are looking upon my soul," she said.

"A lie! You are in your body!"

The girl laughed. "My body lies asleep in the Ritz upon my husband's bed," she said. "My body is his, my mind belongs to him, my soul is already one with his. Do you not know it, dog of a Yezidee? Look upon me, Sanang Noïane! Look upon my unwounded hands! My shroud lies at your feet. And there lie the knives that could not pierce my heart! I am thrice clean! Listen to my words, Sanang! There is no other god but God!"

The young man's visage grew pasty and loose and horrible; his lips became flaccid like dewlaps; but out of these sagging folds of livid skin his voice burst whistling, screaming, as though wrenched from his very belly:

"May Erlik strangle you! May you rot where you stand! May your face become a writhing mass of maggots and your body a corruption of living worms!

"For what you are doing to me this day may every demon in hell torment you!

"Have a care what you are about!" he screeched. "You are slaying my mind, you sorceress! You have seized my mind and are crushing it! You are putting out its light, you Yezidee witch! – you are quenching the last spark – of reason – in – me – "

"Sanang!"

His knife fell clattering to the floor. But he stood stock still, his hands clutching his head – stood motionless, while scream on scream tore through the loose and gaping lips, blowing them into ghastly, distorted folds.

"Sanang Noïane!" she cried in her clear voice, "the Eight Towers are darkened! The Rampart of Gog and Magog is fallen! On Mount Alamout nothing is living. The minds of mankind are free again!"

She stepped forward, slowly, and stood near him chanting in a low voice the Prayers for the Dead She bent down and unrolled the shroud, laid it on his shoulders and drew it up and across his face, covering his dying eyes, and swathed him so, slowly, from head to foot.

Then she gathered up the three knives, cast them upward into the air. They did not fall again. They disappeared. And all the while, under her breath, the girl was chanting the Prayers for the Dead as she moved silently about her business.

Shrouded to the forehead in its white cerements, the muffled figure of Sanang stood upright, motionless as a swathed and frozen corpse.

Outside, the daylight had become greyer. It had begun to snow again, and a few flakes blew in through the shattered windows and clung to the winding sheet of Sanang.

And now Tressa drew close to the shrouded shape and stood before it, gazing intently upon the outlined features of the last of the Yezidees.

"Sanang," she said very softly, "I hear your soul bidding your body farewell. Tokhta!"

Then, under the strained gaze of the four men gathered there, the shroud fell to the floor in a loose heap of white folds. There was nobody under it; no trace of Sanang. The human shape of the Yezidee had disappeared; but a greyish mist had filled the room, wavering up like smoke from the shroud, and, like smoke, blowing in a long streamer toward the window where the draught drew it out through the falling snow and scattered the last shred of it against the greying sky.

In the room the mist thinned swiftly; the four men could now see one another. But Tressa was no longer in the room. And in place of the white shroud a piece of filthy tattered carpet lay on the floor. And a dead rat, flattened out, dry and dusty, lay upon it.

"For God's sake," whispered Recklow hoarsely, "let us get out of this!"

Cleves, his pistol clutched convulsively, stared at him in terror. But Recklow took him by the arm and drew him away, muttering that Tressa was waiting for him, and might be ill, and that there was nothing further to expect in this ghastly spot.

They went with Cleves to the Ritz. At the desk the clerk said that Mrs. Cleves had the keys and was in her apartment.

The three men entered the corridor with him; watched him try the door; saw him open it; lingered a moment after it had closed; heard the key turn.

At the sound of the door closing the maid came.

"Madame is asleep in her room," she whispered.

"When did she come in?"

"More than two hours ago, sir. I have drawn her bath, but when I opened the door a few moments ago, Madame was still asleep."

He nodded; he was trembling when he put off his overcoat and dropped hat and gloves on the carpet.