Part 9

Again I dissembled as I had that day when I found her standing before Toi Wah’s portrait. I knew, beyond a reasonable doubt, that she was lying. I knew I had been fully awake and in my right senses when I had gone down stairs and found her there. Evidently she desired to deceive me, and until I could fathom her motive I would pretend to believe her. So, muttering something to the effect that she must be right, I got into bed also.

But not to sleep. There came trooping into my harried mind all the old youthful terrors of the dark, and I lived over all those terror-haunted days when I dwelt in fear of Toi Wah or of a shadowy something, I knew not what.

Lying there in the dark, I resolved that morning would find me leaving that seemingly ghost-ridden place forever. My peace of mind, my happiness, to be free from fear—these things were worth all the fine old country places in the world. And with this resolution, I slept.

I slept far into the day, awaking at noon to find my wife had gone out with some of our neighbors for a game of tennis and afternoon tea. So, clearly, I could not arrange to leave until the next day. I must await my wife’s return, and in the meantime formulate some sort of reasonable excuse to explain to her my precipitate return to town, after planning a year’s sojourn in the country.

And then, too, it was daylight now, sober matter-of-fact daylight, and, as was always the case with me, the terrors of the night then seemed unreal, half forgotten nightmares. So I dismissed the subject from my mind for the time being, and set out for a long walk across the fields.

It was near dinner time when I returned. As I opened the door of the dining-room, my wife turned from where she stood by the fire-place to greet me, and I was again struck by her resemblance to Toi Wah. The arrangement of her hair heightened this effect. And when she smiled!—I cannot describe it! Such a sly, secret, feline smile!

“Robert,” she said, as she came to me and put up her lips to be kissed. “Do you know what day this is?”

I shook my head.

“Why, it’s my birthday, you forgetful boy! My twenty-first birthday, and I have a surprise for you.

“The old Buddhist priest, who taught me when I was a child gave me a flagon of rare old Chinese Lotus wine, when he parted from me, which I was to keep inviolate until my twenty-first birthday. I would be married then, he said, and on that day I was to unseal the old flagon and drink the wine with my husband in memory of my old teacher who would then be in the bosom of Nirvana.

“Look!” and she turned to the serving-table on which sat a small, squat wicker-covered flagon, and handed it to me.

I looked at it curiously. It was sealed with a small brass seal, which was stamped all over with dim Chinese characters.

“What are these characters?” I asked, handing her the flagon.

She looked closely at the seal.

“Oh! One of those wise old Buddhist sayings, which the Chinese stick on everything.” She smiled. “Shall I translate it? I can, you know.”

I nodded.

“_‘Wine maketh the heart glad or sad, good or evil. Drink Oh! Man to thy choice!’_” she read.

Then she pulled off the seal and poured out the wine; a thick amber liquid, so heavy that it poured like thick cream. Its bouquet filled the room with a faint, far-off odor of lotus flowers.

“Shall we drink now, Robert, or shall we wait until dinner is served?”

“Let us drink now,” I said, curious to taste this Eastern wine, with which I was not familiar.

“Amen!” said my wife, softly.

Then she spoke, rapidly and softly under her breath, a few Chinese words, or so I judged them to be, and we drank the wine. There was not a great deal in the flagon, and we drank it all before dinner was served.

As I sat at dinner a strange comfortable feeling gradually came over me. Distrust, fear, and apprehension died out of my mind, and my heart was light. My wife and I laughed and talked together as we had done in the days of our courtship. I was a different man.

After dinner we went into the music-room and she sang for me. Sang in a sweet low voice strange weird old songs of ancient China. Of the dragon banner floating in the sun, and the watch fires on the hills. Of old Tartar loves and hates. Of wrongs that never die, but pass on from age to age, from life to life, from death to death—unhasting, unending until the debt be paid.

I sat listening, dozing in a hazy mental languor, with the feeling foreign to me of late, that all was well with the world. I was peacefully happy, and my wife’s sweet voice crooned on. Bedtime, the going up to our bedroom, and what followed after is only a blurred memory.

I awoke, or seemed to awake (now that I am in this madhouse I do not really know) far into the night.

I awoke with a feeling of suffocation, a sensation of impending dissolution. I could not move, I could not speak. I had a sense of something indescribably evil, loathsome, blood-curdling, that was hanging over me, threatening my very life.

I tried to open my eyes. The lids seemed to be weighted down. All the force of my will could only slightly open them. Through this slight opening, I saw my wife bending over me, and the eyes that looked at me _were the inscrutable eyes of Toi Wah_!

_VI._

Slowly she bent down—I could sense the delicate fragrance of her hair—and applied her sweet, soft lips to mine. Again I felt that I was suffocating, that the very breath of my life was being drawn from me.

I concentrated all my will in the effort to struggle, and with tremendous effort I was able feebly to move an arm. My wife hastily took her lips from mine and looked at me closely, with the cruel amber eyes of the great Tartar cat, whose bones lay in my garret.

Once more she leaned over and applied her lips to mine. I lay there in helpless lethargy, unable to move, but with an active mind that leaped back into the past, bringing to my memory all the old nursery tales of childhood of cats sucking the breath of sleeping children, of the folklore tales that I had heard of helpless invalids done to death by cruel cats who stole their breath from them.

I began to be aroused at last. Was my breath to be sucked from me by this half-human, half-cat that was bending over me? With a final despairing effort of my wine-sodden will, I raised my arms and pushed this soft sweet vampire from my breast and from the bed.

And then, as the cold sweat of fear poured from my trembling body, I shouted for help. At last my servant came running up the stairs and pounded on the door.

“What is it?” he called. “What is wrong, sir? Shall I go for the police?”

“Nothing is wrong,” answered my wife calmly. She had risen from where I had thrown her and was arranging her disheveled hair. “Your master has had a terrible dream, that is all.”

“It is a lie!” I shouted. “Do not leave me alone with this vampire!”

I sprang from bed, and, heedless of my wife’s semi-nude condition, I flung open the door. She shrank back, but I seized her by the wrist, beside myself with nervous terror.

And then—there on her wrist—I saw! I looked closely to be sure. Then instantly all was clear to me. I was in doubt no longer. I _knew_!

“Look!” I shrieked. “Here on her wrist! Toi Wah’s collar!” I do not know why I said it, or scarcely what I did say, but I knew it to be true!

“Toi Wah’s collar!” I repeated. “She can’t take it off! _She is changing into a cat!_ Look at her eyes! Look at her hair! Soon she will be Toi Wah again with the collar about her neck, and then—”

And then I saw my wife disconcerted for the first time. I felt the arm I had seized, tremble in my frenzied grip.

“Why, Robert!” she stammered. “I—I found this on the attic floor yesterday. And—and—thinking it a curious old Chinese relic, I put it on my wrist. It’s a bracelet, not a collar!”

“Take it off then!” I shouted. “Take it off! You can’t! You can’t, until you become Toi Wah again, and then it will be about your neck. Read what it says! It is in your accursed tongue!

“But you shall never live to madden me again with fear, to make my life a hell of peering eyes and padding feet, and then to suck my breath at last! I killed you once, I can do it again! And again and yet again in any shape the devils in hell may send you to prey upon honest men!”

And I seized her by her beautiful throat. I meant to choke her until those cruel yellow eyes started from their sockets, and then laugh as I saw her gasping in the last agony of death.

But I was cheated. The servants overpowered me, and I was brought here to this mad-house.

I said I was perfectly sane then. I say it now. And learned alienists, sitting in council, have agreed with me. Tomorrow I am to be discharged into the custody of my sweet cooing-voiced wife, who comes daily to see me. She kisses me with soft lying lips that long to suck my breath, or perhaps even rend the flesh of my throat with the little white teeth back of the cruel lips.

So tomorrow I will go forth—to die. To be murdered! I go to death just as surely as if the hangman waited to haul me to the gallows, or if the warden stood outside to escort me to the electric chair.

I _know_ it! I have told the learned psychologists and doctors that I know it. But they laugh.

“All a delusion!” they exclaim. “Why, your little wife loves you with all her loyal heart. Even with your finger-prints a bluish bruise about her tender throat, she loved you. That night when you awoke, frightened, to find her bending over you, she was only kissing you, in an effort to soothe your troubled sleep.”

But I _know_! Therefore, I am setting all this down so that when I am found dead the learned doctors may know that I was right and they were wrong. And so that Justice may be done.

And yet—perhaps nothing can be done. I have ceased to struggle. I have given up. Like the Oriental, I say, “_Who can escape his fate?_”

For I shall die by Chinese justice, a Buddhist revenge for killing the Tartar cat, Toi Wah. Toi Wah that I hated and feared, and have hated and feared through all the lives that the two of us have lived, far, far back to that time when the yellow sabre-toothed tiger seized my first-born and fled with him among the reeds and ferns of the Paleozoic marshes, a dainty morsel for her kitten.

And so—farewell!

* * * * *

“Such a weird tale!” the nurse shuddered, as the interne finished the manuscript. “Let us drive over to Cheshire Manor and—”

“Do you believe this story?” interrupted the interne, tapping the manuscript with his fingers, and skeptically lifting his eyebrows and smiling.

“No, of course not!” exclaimed the nurse, “but—the drive won’t do us any harm, and—I would like to make sure.”

As they stopped their car before the somber old mansion they were struck by the strange silence of the place. Not a servant answered their ring. And after a time, since the door stood open, they entered and began to ascend the stairs.

A strange, weird, lonesome sound floated down to them—the yowl of a cat.

They stopped for an instant and looked at each other, and then, reassured by the sunlight, and both being matter-of-fact professional people, they pressed on. At the head of the stairs they faced a long passage at the end of which was an open door.

“Look! That is the bedroom he wrote about,” whispered the nurse, grasping the interne’s arm.

They walked softly down the passage to the door and looked in. On the bed lay the man they sought, glassy-eyed, with fallen jaw and livid face—_dead!_

On his breast stood a great yellow amber-eyed cat, who faced them with an arched back and menacing snarl. Involuntarily, they drew back. The cat sprang past them and down the passageway to the stairs, uttering the same weird cry.

“My God!” gasped the nurse, with pallid lips. “Did you see? About that cat’s neck—and it was a Tartar cat; I know the breed—about that cat’s neck was—was the Topaz and Jade collar—that—that he wrote about!”

Neighbors See “Sacred Heart” in Girl’s Death Room

After the death of Lillian Daly, a very devout girl of Chicago, the report spread that a “sacred heart” could be seen on the wall of the room wherein she had died and that if any afflicted person should touch this heart he or she would be instantly cured. At once the house at 6724 Justine Street was visited by numbers of ill persons, all eager to experience the magic cure. Two priests from neighborhood parishes visited the house, but said they could not see the apparition.

Hold “Petting Parties” in Morgue

A grisly spot for love-making was chosen by a wealthy undertaker of Chicago, whose stories of “petting parties” in a morgue, wine parties in a mortuary chapel and “shimmy” dances in an embalming room caused a woman to file suit against him for $50,000. The woman claims he attacked her reputation.

_Eerie Adventure and Mammoth Treasure Were Found in_

THE GOLDEN CAVERNS

_A Condensed Novel_

_By_ JULIAN KILMAN

When Ericson quietly toppled over and the paddle slipped from his grasp, our canoe was instantly broadside in the rapids. But Zangaree immediately brought the heavily-laden craft head on, his skill once more saving our slender expedition from the disaster that had trailed us so persistently since leaving the large steamer at Itacoatiara.

A faint shout from the second canoe sounded through the din of racing water. Evidently Van Dusee and Hardy had observed our mishap. I waved a hand in reply, and then I bent over Ericson who lay with his eyes rolling. Instead of sunstroke, as I had assumed, he had been wounded; a thin stream of blood ran from his temple. Zangaree whirled the canoe to the small islet we were just passing. But we were too late. Ericson was dead.

The shock of our fellow-voyageur’s death was still on me as, amid the amazing splendor of that tropical scene, we made preparations to dispose of the body. Much later in the night, when all were sleeping, I felt a tug at my mosquito netting, and in the dim starlight I made out Hardy’s pioneer head, with its square-jawed face, peering at me.

He motioned me to follow him quietly. Wonderingly, I made my way after this soldier of fortune, who, by the sheerest good luck, we had picked up in the Brazilian capital. Presently he stopped.

“Do you wish to continue your journey?” he asked.

Despite Ericson’s death, I could not think otherwise; already we had come four thousand miles, of which the last fifteen hundred had brought us into the very interior of the South American continent. Too much capital and energy had been expended for us lightly to abandon our project. And I said so.

“You misunderstand,” he returned quickly. “It is not Ericson’s finish that made me ask, _but the manner of it_!”

The thin edge of doubt as to Hardy’s fortitude perhaps began to insert itself into my mind. He observed it.

“Damn it, man!” he exclaimed. “I am game. But you are to know that from now on we’ll have to buck not only the elements, but that toad-faced _de_ Silva as well.”

At mention of the Spaniard who had tricked and nearly outmaneuvered us at Rio de Janiero with the officials, something like a chill came over me.

“What brings him into this?” I demanded.

Hardy’s answer was dramatic enough.

“Only this,” he said. “It is a little thing. But it killed Ericson.”

I gazed at the slender blow-pipe arrow in Hardy’s hand. It had done for our archaeologist.

“That type of arrow is unknown hereabouts,” went on Hardy. “It is poisoned and is used by the Amajuca Indians six hundred miles back on the Amazon. It means that we are being followed.”

The camp fire was dying out when Hardy and I returned from our talk, both of us determined to make the additional four hundred miles that we estimated lay between us and the point we planned to reach—and to gain it by land if the water route on the gradually diminishing stream was to afford our enemies too easy an opportunity to decimate us.

I stood there, surveying the sleeping figures of my comrades: Van Dusee, the true scientist, whose interest in his beloved hemiptera seemed to render him impervious to the sting of insect pests and the pains and dangers of our journey; young Anderson, son of the president of our Institute; Zangaree, sleeping in his giant strength like a child.

And Ericson! A lump came into my throat at the thought of the gallant fellow who had so suddenly come to an end. Had I known then what was in store for the surviving members of our little band, surely I would have cried aloud, for all told, counting the mighty Zangaree, the half-breeds and Indians, we numbered only ten men.

By the time the morning sun was flooding the ravine with light, we were all astir. Caching much of our supplies, we ferried to the right-hand bank of the stream farther down. Here, with no sign of the enemy we secreted our canoes in the bushes, and, distributing among ourselves ammunition, food, a light silk tent, blankets and scientific impedimenta, we shouldered our packs and started on the long hike inland.

For two days we made slow progress, because of the luxuriance of the undergrowth; but in time this gave way to vast primeval woods. Never shall I forget the solemn mystery of it! Trees rivaling in size the gigantic redwoods of California raised themselves to enormous height, where their tremendous columns spread out in Gothic curves, which interlaced to form a great matted roof of green—architecture of the Greatest of All Architects!

As we walked noiselessly but hurriedly under the lash of Hardy’s impatience amid the thick carpet of decaying vegetation, we were hushed in spite of ourselves. Vivid orchids and marvelously-colored lichens smouldered upon the swarthy tree trunks. Climbing plants, monstrous and riotous in verdure, fought their way upward, seeking futilely at once to throttle tree-life and to reach the sunlight.

Of animal life there was little movement amid the majestic vaulted aisles which stretched from us as we pursued our way; but the slight though constant agitation far above us told of that multitudinous world of snake and monkey, bird and sloth, which lived in the sunshine and regarded with wonder our puny stumbling figures in the depths below. At dawn the howler monkeys and parrakeets filled the air with shrill chatter; and in the hot hours came the drone of insects.

As yet there had been no indication that any one was following us. Indeed, we seemed to be untold miles from civilization and I was commenting to young Anderson on the likelihood of our escape from the pursuit of _de_ Silva when I caught a look in Hardy’s eyes.

“Oh, pshaw!” I exclaimed later, slightly nettled. “You are pessimistic, Hardy. Had _de_ Silva been after us we should surely have heard from him before this.”

“No. That isn’t so,” retorted Hardy. “Our leaving the river has deceived him. I am satisfied that he planned an ambush farther along the stream. In a short time he’ll discover we have given him the slip. Then he’ll be after us.”

“And just why, Hardy,” I demanded, “is this insane Spaniard following us?”

Hardy’s expression was quizzical.

“I have a sort of hunch—that’s all,” he returned, non-committally.

The next day one of our Indians was missing. He had been sent back over the trail a mile or so to recover a small rifle that had been lost. Hardy himself and young Anderson made the tiresome hike to the rear to learn if possible the whereabouts of the Indian. Later, when the two rejoined us without the Indian, Hardy did not have anything to say.

Anderson told me afterwards that they had found the Indian curled up at the foot of a tree. He was dead without a mark on him.

Depressing as was this development, our little party found scant time to discuss it. The way had grown much more difficult, for our road persistently ascended. Huge trees now gave place to palms, with thick underbrush growing between. We traveled entirely by compass, but missed Ericson, who had been a navigator and had from time to time “shot the sun” to verify our position.

On the fifth day we encountered a tremendous wilderness of bamboo, which grew so thickly that we could only penetrate it by cutting a pathway with the machetes and bill-hooks of the Indians. It took us a long day, with only two pauses of a half hour each to get clear of this yellow-walled obstacle.

Once free of it, we were glad to throw ourselves down for the first real rest which Hardy was willing that we should take. But it proved to be of short duration, because Anderson, eternally on the move, discovered, less than half a mile away, that another path recently had been cut through the bamboo nearly paralleling ours.

That night we slept behind some slight attempt at a barricade. This protection, consisting of a circle of thorn brush piled three feet high, at least sufficed to keep out a few wailing animals that filled the air with weird noises, and most of us rested the night through without fear.

Next morning I discovered the presence of a soil that was like sand. This was consistent with the dryness of the air, but was disconcerting as I knew that the terrain and climate of the spot whither we were bound was of no such character as that which surrounded us.

It was about this time that young Anderson made a second startling discovery, and one fraught with momentous consequences for our expedition. Our compass was out of order. This defection was serious in the extreme. It meant that we were lost, for there was no knowing how long the instrument had been untrue.

The day went badly. The farther we progressed the more sandy it became. We seemed about to enter upon a great desert, and to make matters worse our Indians showed signs of discontent. Our supply of water was low; still we knew that only a day’s march behind us we had passed a stream of clear water. Study of the maps that night failed to account for any considerable expanse of desert, and it was decided to push boldly across on the chance of later picking up our route.