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Title: Skulls in the stars

Author: Robert E. Howard

Illustrator: Hugh Rankin

Release Date: April 13, 2023 [eBook #70540]

Language: English

Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
             Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKULLS IN THE STARS ***





                          SKULLS IN THE STARS

                          BY ROBERT E HOWARD

                    He told how murderers walk the earth
                      Beneath the curse of Cain,
                    With crimson clouds before their eyes
                      And flames about their brain:
                    For blood has left upon their souls
                      Its everlasting stain.

                                                 --_Hood_

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                       Weird Tales January 1929.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


[Illustration: "Across the fen sounded a single shriek of terrible
laughter."]


There are two roads to Torkertown. One, the shorter and more direct
route, leads across a barren upland moor, and the other, which is
much longer, winds its tortuous way in and out among the hummocks and
quagmires of the swamps, skirting the low hills to the east. It was a
dangerous and tedious trail; so Solomon Kane halted in amazement when
a breathless youth from the village he had just left, overtook him and
implored him for God's sake to take the swamp road.

"The swamp road!" Kane stared at the boy.

He was a tall, gaunt man, was Solomon Kane, his darkly pallid face and
deep brooding eyes made more somber by the drab Puritanical garb he
affected.

"Yes, sir, 'tis far safer," the youngster answered his surprized
exclamation.

"Then the moor road must be haunted by Satan himself, for your townsmen
warned me against traversing the other."

"Because of the quagmires, sir, that you might not see in the dark.
You had better return to the village and continue your journey in the
morning, sir."

"Taking the swamp road?"

"Yes, sir."

Kane shrugged his shoulders and shook his head.

"The moon rises almost as soon as twilight dies. By its light I can
reach Torkertown in a few hours, across the moor."

"Sir, you had better not. No one ever goes that way. There are no
houses at all upon the moor, while in the swamp there is the house of
old Ezra who lives there all alone since his maniac cousin, Gideon,
wandered off and died in the swamp and was never found--and old Ezra
though a miser would not refuse you lodging should you decide to stop
until morning. Since you must go, you had better go the swamp road."

Kane eyed the boy piercingly. The lad squirmed and shuffled his feet.

"Since this moor road is so dour to wayfarers," said the Puritan,
"why did not the villagers tell me the whole tale, instead of vague
mouthings?"

"Men like not to talk of it, sir. We hoped that you would take the
swamp road after the men advised you to, but when we watched and saw
that you turned not at the forks, they sent me to run after you and beg
you to reconsider."

"Name of the Devil!" exclaimed Kane sharply, the unaccustomed oath
showing his irritation; "the swamp road and the moor road--what is it
that threatens me and why should I go miles out of my way and risk the
bogs and mires?"

"Sir," said the boy, dropping his voice and drawing closer, "we be
simple villagers who like not to talk of such things lest foul fortune
befall us, but the moor road is a way accurst and hath not been
traversed by any of the countryside for a year or more. It is death
to walk those moors by night, as hath been found by some score of
unfortunates. Some foul horror haunts the way and claims men for his
victims."

"So? And what is this thing like?"

"No man knows. None has ever seen it and lived, but late-farers
have heard terrible laughter far out on the fen and men have heard
the horrid shrieks of its victims. Sir, in God's name return to the
village, there pass the night, and tomorrow take the swamp trail to
Torkertown."

Far back in Kane's gloomy eyes a scintillant light had begun to
glimmer, like a witch's torch glinting under fathoms of cold gray ice.
His blood quickened. Adventure! The lure of life-risk and battle! The
thrill of breathtaking, touch-and-go drama! Not that Kane recognized
his sensations as such. He sincerely considered that he voiced his real
feelings when he said:

"These things be deeds of some power of evil. The lords of darkness
have laid a curse upon the country. A strong man is needed to combat
Satan and his might. Therefore I go, who have defied him many a time."

"Sir," the boy began, then closed his mouth as he saw the futility of
argument. He only added, "The corpses of the victims are bruised and
torn, sir."

He stood there at the crossroads, sighing regretfully as he watched the
tall, rangy figure swinging up the road that led toward the moors.

       *       *       *       *       *

The sun was setting as Kane came over the brow of the low hill which
debouched into the upland fen. Huge and blood-red it sank down behind
the sullen horizon of the moors, seeming to touch the rank grass with
fire; so for a moment the watcher seemed to be gazing out across a sea
of blood. Then the dark shadows came gliding from the east, the western
blaze faded, and Solomon Kane struck out boldly in the gathering
darkness.

The road was dim from disuse but was clearly defined. Kane went swiftly
but warily, sword and pistols at hand. Stars blinked out and night
winds whispered among the grass like weeping specters. The moon began
to rise, lean and haggard, like a skull among the stars.

Then suddenly Kane stopped short. From somewhere in front of him
sounded a strange and eery echo--or something like an echo. Again,
this time louder. Kane started forward again. Were his senses deceiving
him? No!

Far out, there pealed a whisper of frightful laughter. And again,
closer this time. No human being ever laughed like that--there was no
mirth in it, only hatred and horror and soul-destroying terror. Kane
halted. He was not afraid, but for the second he was almost unnerved.
Then, stabbing through that awesome laughter, came the sound of a
scream that was undoubtedly human. Kane started forward, increasing his
gait. He cursed the illusive lights and flickering shadows which veiled
the moor in the rising moon and made accurate sight impossible. The
laughter continued, growing louder, as did the screams. Then sounded
faintly the drum of frantic human feet. Kane broke into a run.

Some human was being hunted to his death out there on the fen, and by
what manner of horror God alone knew. The sound of the flying feet
halted abruptly and the screaming rose unbearably, mingled with other
sounds unnamable and hideous. Evidently the man had been overtaken, and
Kane, his flesh crawling, visualized some ghastly fiend of the darkness
crouching on the back of its victim--crouching and tearing.

Then the noise of a terrible and short struggle came clearly through
the abysmal silence of the fen and the footfalls began again, but
stumbling and uneven. The screaming continued, but with a gasping
gurgle. The sweat stood cold on Kane's forehead and body. This was
heaping horror on horror in an intolerable manner.

God, for a moment's clear light! The frightful drama was being enacted
within a very short distance of him, to judge by the ease with which
the sounds reached him. But this hellish half-light veiled all in
shifting shadows, so that the moors appeared a haze of blurred
illusions, and stunted trees and bushes seemed like giants.

Kane shouted, striving to increase the speed of his advance. The
shrieks of the unknown broke into a hideous shrill squealing; again
there was the sound of a struggle, and then from the shadows of the
tall grass a thing came reeling--a thing that had once been a man--a
gore-covered, frightful thing that fell at Kane's feet and writhed and
groveled and raised its terrible face to the rising moon, and gibbered
and yammered, and fell down again and died in its own blood.

The moon was up now and the light was better. Kane bent above the body,
which lay stark in its unnamable mutilation, and he shuddered--a rare
thing for him, who had seen the deeds of the Spanish Inquisition and
the witch-finders.

Some wayfarer, he supposed. Then like a hand of ice on his spine he
was aware that he was not alone. He looked up, his cold eyes piercing
the shadows whence the dead man had staggered. He saw nothing, but
he knew--he felt--that other eyes gave back his stare, terrible eyes
not of this earth. He straightened and drew a pistol, waiting. The
moonlight spread like a lake of pale blood over the moor, and trees and
grasses took on their proper sizes.

The shadows melted, and Kane _saw_! At first he thought it only a
shadow of mist, a wisp of moor fog that swayed in the tall grass
before him. He gazed. More illusion, he thought. Then the thing began
to take on shape, vague and indistinct. Two hideous eyes flamed at
him--eyes which held all the stark horror which has been the heritage
of man since the fearful dawn ages--eyes frightful and insane, with an
insanity transcending earthly insanity. The form of the thing was misty
and vague, a brain-shattering travesty on the human form, like, yet
horridly unlike. The grass and bushes beyond showed clearly through it.

Kane felt the blood pound in his temples, yet he was as cold as ice.
How such an unstable being as that which wavered before him could harm
a man in a physical way was more than he could understand, yet the red
horror at his feet gave mute testimony that the fiend could act with
terrible material effect.

Of one thing Kane was sure: there would be no hunting of him across the
dreary moors, no screaming and fleeing to be dragged down again and
again. If he must die he would die in his tracks, his wounds in front.

Now a vague and grisly mouth gaped wide and the demoniac laughter again
shrieked out, soul-shaking in its nearness. And in the midst of that
threat of doom, Kane deliberately leveled his long pistol and fired. A
maniacal yell of rage and mockery answered the report, and the thing
came at him like a flying sheet of smoke, long shadowy arms stretched
to drag him down.

Kane, moving with the dynamic speed of a famished wolf, fired the
second pistol with as little effect, snatched his long rapier from its
sheath and thrust into the center of the misty attacker. The blade sang
as it passed clear through, encountering no solid resistance, and Kane
felt icy fingers grip his limbs, bestial talons tear his garments and
the skin beneath.

He dropped the useless sword and sought to grapple with his foe. It was
like fighting a floating mist, a flying shadow armed with daggerlike
claws. His savage blows met empty air, his leanly mighty arms, in whose
grasp strong men had died, swept nothingness and clutched emptiness.
Naught was solid or real save the flaying, apelike fingers with their
crooked talons, and the crazy eyes which burned into the shuddering
depths of his soul.

Kane realized that he was in a desperate plight indeed. Already his
garments hung in tatters and he bled from a score of deep wounds. But
he never flinched, and the thought of flight never entered his mind. He
had never fled from a single foe, and had the thought occurred to him
he would have flushed with shame.

He saw no help for it now, but that his form should lie there beside
the fragments of the other victim, but the thought held no terrors
for him. His only wish was to give as good an account of himself as
possible before the end came, and if he could, to inflict some damage
on his unearthly foe.

There above the dead man's torn body, man fought with demon under the
pale light of the rising moon, with all the advantages with the demon,
save one. And that one was enough to overcome all the others. For if
abstract hate may bring into material substance a ghostly thing, may
not courage, equally abstract, form a concrete weapon to combat that
ghost?

Kane fought with his arms and his feet and his hands, and he was aware
at last that the ghost began to give back before him, that the fearful
laughter changed to screams of baffled fury. For man's only weapon is
courage that flinches not from the gates of Hell itself, and against
such not even the legions of Hell can stand.

Of this Kane knew nothing; he only knew that the talons which tore and
rended him seemed to grow weaker and wavering, that a wild light grew
and grew in the horrible eyes. And reeling and gasping, he rushed in,
grappled the thing at last and threw it, and as they tumbled about on
the moor and it writhed and lapped his limbs like a serpent of smoke,
his flesh crawled and his hair stood on end, for he began to understand
its gibbering.

He did not hear and comprehend as a man hears and comprehends the
speech of a man, but the frightful secrets it imparted in whisperings
and yammerings and screaming silences sank fingers of ice and flame
into his soul, and he _knew_.




                                   2


The hut of old Ezra the miser stood by the road in the midst of the
swamp, half screened by the sullen trees which grew about it. The
walls were rotting, the roof crumbling, and great, pallid and green
fungus-monsters clung to it and writhed about the doors and windows,
as if seeking to peer within. The trees leaned above it and their gray
branches intertwined so that it crouched in the semi-darkness like a
monstrous dwarf over whose shoulder ogres leer.

The road which wound down into the swamp, among rotting stumps and
rank hummocks and scummy, snake-haunted pools and bogs, crawled past
the hut. Many people passed that way these days, but few saw old Ezra,
save a glimpse of a yellow face, peering through the fungus-screened
windows, itself like an ugly fungus.

Old Ezra the miser partook much of the quality of the swamp, for he was
gnarled and bent and sullen; his fingers were like clutching parasitic
plants and his locks hung like drab moss above eyes trained to the
murk of the swamplands. His eyes were like a dead man's, yet hinted of
depths abysmal and loathsome as the dead lakes of the swamplands.

These eyes gleamed now at the man who stood in front of his hut. This
man was tall and gaunt and dark, his face was haggard and claw-marked,
and he was bandaged of arm and leg. Somewhat behind this man stood a
number of villagers.

"You are Ezra of the swamp road?"

"Aye, and what want ye of me?"

"Where is your cousin Gideon, the maniac youth who abode with you?"

"Gideon?"

"Aye."

"He wandered away into the swamp and never came back. No doubt he lost
his way and was set upon by wolves or died in a quagmire or was struck
by an adder."

"How long ago?"

"Over a year."

"Aye. Hark ye, Ezra the miser. Soon after your cousin's disappearance,
a countryman, coming home across the moors, was set upon by some
unknown fiend and torn to pieces, and thereafter it became death to
cross those moors. First men of the countryside, then strangers who
wandered over the fen, fell to the clutches of the thing. Many men have
died, since the first one.

"Last night I crossed the moors, and heard the flight and pursuing of
another victim, a stranger who knew not the evil of the moors. Ezra
the miser, it was a fearful thing, for the wretch twice broke from the
fiend, terribly wounded, and each time the demon caught and dragged him
down again. And at last he fell dead at my very feet, done to death in
a manner that would freeze the statue of a saint."

The villagers moved restlessly and murmured fearfully to each other,
and old Ezra's eyes shifted furtively. Yet the somber expression
of Solomon Kane never altered, and his condor-like stare seemed to
transfix the miser.

"Aye, aye!" muttered old Ezra hurriedly; "a bad thing, a bad thing! Yet
why do you tell this thing to me?"

"Aye, a sad thing. Harken further, Ezra. The fiend came out of the
shadows and I fought with it, over the body of its victim. Aye, how
I overcame it, I know not, for the battle was hard and long, but the
powers of good and light were on my side, which are mightier than the
powers of Hell.

"At the last I was stronger, and it broke from me and fled, and I
followed to no avail. Yet before it fled it whispered to me a monstrous
truth."

Old Ezra started, stared wildly, seemed to shrink into himself.

"Nay, why tell me this?" he muttered.

"I returned to the village and told my tale," said Kane, "for I knew
that now I had the power to rid the moors of its curse forever. Ezra,
come with us!"

"Where?" gasped the miser.

"_To the rotting oak on the moors._"

Ezra reeled as though struck; he screamed incoherently and turned to
flee.

On the instant, at Kane's sharp order, two brawny villagers sprang
forward and seized the miser. They twisted the dagger from his withered
hand, and pinioned his arms, shuddering as their fingers encountered
his clammy flesh.

Kane motioned them to follow, and turning strode up the trail, followed
by the villagers, who found their strength taxed to the utmost in their
task of bearing their prisoner along. Through the swamp they went and
out, taking a little-used trail which led up over the low hills and out
on the moors.

       *       *       *       *       *

The sun was sliding down the horizon and old Ezra stared at it with
bulging eyes--stared as if he could not gaze enough. Far out on the
moors reared up the great oak tree, like a gibbet, now only a decaying
shell. There Solomon Kane halted.

Old Ezra writhed in his captor's grasp and made inarticulate noises.

"Over a year ago," said Solomon Kane, "you, fearing that your insane
cousin Gideon would tell men of your cruelties to him, brought him away
from the swamp by the very trail by which we came, and murdered him
here in the night."

Ezra cringed and snarled.

"You can not prove this lie!"

Kane spoke a few words to an agile villager. The youth clambered up the
rotting bole of the tree and from a crevice, high up, dragged something
that fell with a clatter at the feet of the miser. Ezra went limp with
a terrible shriek.

The object was a man's skeleton, the skull cleft.

"You--how knew you this? You are Satan!" gibbered old Ezra.

Kane folded his arms.

"The thing I fought last night told me this thing as we reeled in
battle, and I followed it to this tree. _For the fiend is Gideon's
ghost._"

Ezra shrieked again and fought savagely.

"You knew," said Kane somberly, "you knew what thing did these deeds.
You feared the ghost of the maniac, and that is why you chose to leave
his body on the fen instead of concealing it in the swamp. For you knew
the ghost would haunt the place of his death. He was insane in life,
and in death he did not know where to find his slayer; else he had come
to you in your hut. He hates no man but you, but his mazed spirit can
not tell one man from another, and he slays all, lest he let his killer
escape. Yet he will know you and rest in peace forever after. Hate hath
made of his ghost a solid thing that can rend and slay, and though he
feared you terribly in life, in death he fears you not."

Kane halted. He glanced at the sun.

"All this I had from Gideon's ghost, in his yammerings and his
whisperings and his shrieking silences. Naught but your death will lay
that ghost."

Ezra listened in breathless silence and Kane pronounced the words of
his doom.

"A hard thing it is," said Kane somberly, "to sentence a man to death
in cold blood and in such a manner as I have in mind, but you must die
that others may live--and God knoweth you deserve death.

"You shall not die by noose, bullet or sword, but at the talons of him
you slew--for naught else will satiate him."

At these words Ezra's brain shattered, his knees gave way and he
fell groveling and screaming for death, begging them to burn him at
the stake, to flay him alive. Kane's face was set like death, and the
villagers, the fear rousing their cruelty, bound the screeching wretch
to the oak tree, and one of them bade him make his peace with God. But
Ezra made no answer, shrieking in a high shrill voice with unbearable
monotony. Then the villager would have struck the miser across the
face, but Kane stayed him.

"Let him make his peace with Satan, whom he is more like to meet," said
the Puritan grimly. "The sun is about to set. Loose his cords so that
he may work loose by dark, since it is better to meet death free and
unshackled than bound like a sacrifice."

As they turned to leave him, old Ezra yammered and gibbered unhuman
sounds and then fell silent, staring at the sun with terrible intensity.

They walked away across the fen, and Kane flung a last look at the
grotesque form bound to the tree, seeming in the uncertain light like
a great fungus growing to the bole. And suddenly the miser screamed
hideously:

"Death! Death! There are skulls in the stars!"

"Life was good to him, though he was gnarled and churlish and evil,"
Kane sighed. "Mayhap God has a place for such souls where fire and
sacrifice may cleanse them of their dross as fire cleans the forest of
fungous things. Yet my heart is heavy within me."

"Nay, sir," one of the villagers spoke, "you have done but the will of
God, and good alone shall come of this night's deed."

"Nay," answered Kane heavily, "I know not--I know not."

       *       *       *       *       *

The sun had gone down and night spread with amazing swiftness, as if
great shadows came rushing down from unknown voids to cloak the world
with hurrying darkness. Through the thick night came a weird echo, and
the men halted and looked back the way they had come.

Nothing could be seen. The moor was an ocean of shadows and the tall
grass about them bent in long waves before the faint wind, breaking the
deathly stillness with breathless murmurings.

Then far away the red disk of the moon rose over the fen, and for an
instant a grim silhouette was etched blackly against it. A shape came
flying across the face of the moon--a bent, grotesque thing whose feet
seemed scarcely to touch the earth; and close behind came a thing like
a flying shadow--a nameless, shapeless horror.

A moment the racing twain stood out boldly against the moon; then they
merged into one unnamable, formless mass, and vanished in the shadows.

Far across the fen sounded a single shriek of terrible laughter.

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