Deliver Us From Wolves by Leonard Holton

Author:Leonard Holton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dell

CHAPTER

8

There was no moon that night, and the stars, which always shone so much brighter in the mountain country, were partially obscured by clouds sailing darkly in across the Atlantic. Father Bredder, plodding down the road from the castle, watched them for a while. When he was a boy, he had loved to watch the clouds constantly changing shape in the great silence of the sky. The shapes they made now were fearful rather than beautiful. One large finger of cloud, exuding from a dark mass, stretched over the village from mountain to mountain like some doom which had come from the outer darkness and was about to descend on the village. The village could hardly be seen at the foot of the road leading up to the castle. There was here and there a suggestion of a white wall and a dark roof. But the houses seemed huddled and crouched to the ground, trying to hide from whatever it was above that menaced them.

When he was a few hundred yards on his way, a bell boomed from the castle behind him, nearly frightening the priest out of his skin.

Father Bredder had decided not to go through the village to get to the cemetery, which lay on the third corner of a triangle which it formed with the castle and the village. The village was full of dogs. They would set up a frightful barking as he approached, and even at this distance they seemed to sense his presence, for one or two of them howled, affrighting the night with the noise and making his skin crawl.

By cutting across the flank of the mountain through the furze and cactus, he could get to the cemetery without entering the village and he toiled along, looking now at the village, now at the sky, and now at the grim castle which, as he got more distant from it, seemed to turn into a huge rock, capping the peak on which it stood.

He got to the cemetery sooner than he expected. He topped a rise and suddenly its high wall was before him, so unexpectedly that it gave him a start. He first circled the exterior of the wall, examining the ground about carefully. He had brought a small flashlight for this purpose, and spent half an hour making the circuit, but found nothing of interest. When he came to the place where the carcasses of the lambs had been found, he got down on his hands and knees to look the ground over very closely and also the portion of the cemetery wall adjacent. It was about eight feet high at this point, rather lower than elsewhere, because the ground rose in a small hill.

Nearby between the road and the cemetery wall was the grave of Pedro da Malveira. He found it by stumbling over the pieces of the stone cross which lay on it. There was a clump of furze and cactus and in the center of this, the grave. The

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