Black Wind Blowing by Robert E. Howard

Author:Robert E. Howard
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781406572537
Publisher: Dodo Press
Published: 2008-02-08T07:00:00+00:00

"Let them be!" gurgled Bruckman, scarcely intelligible with his butchered tongue.

"They're barbed--you'll tear my hands off. I'm dying--they hurt me in ways that don't show so plainly. Let me die in as little pain as possible. Sorry--would have warned you he was waiting for you in the dark--but this accursed skewer--couldn't even scream. He heard your car and made ready--mirrors--always carry their paraphernalia with them--

paraphernalia of illusion--deception and murder! Whiskey, quick! On that shelf!"

Though he winced at the sting of the fiery liquid on his mangled tongue, Bruckman's voice grew stronger; and a blaze rose in his bloodshot eyes.

"I'm going to tell you everything," he panted. "I'll live that long--then you set the law on them--blast them off the earth! I've kept the oath until now, even with the threat of death hanging over me, but I thought I could fool them. Curse their black souls, I'll keep their secret no longer! Don't talk or ask questions--listen!"

Strange the tales that dying lips have gasped, but never a stranger tale than that Emmett Glanton heard in the blood-stained room, where a dead black face grinned by a smoldering hearth, and a dying man, spiked to a table, mouthed grisly secrets with a mangled tongue in the smoky light of the guttering lamp, while the black wind moaned and crawled at the rattling windows.

"When I was young, in another land," panted John Bruckman, "I was a fool. And I was trapped by my own folly into joining a cult of devil worshippers--the Black Brothers of Ahriman. Until too late I did not realize what they were--nor to what horrors my own terrible oath had bound me. I need not speak of their aims and purposes--they were foul beyond conception. Yet they had one characteristic that is so often lacking in many such cults--they were sincere--fanatic. They worshipped the fiend Ahriman as zealously as did their heathen ancestors. And they practiced human sacrifice. Once each year, on this very night, between midnight and dawn, a young girl was offered up on the burning altar of Ahriman, Lord of Fire. On that glowing altar her body was consumed to ashes and the ashes scattered to the night wind by the black-painted priests.

"I became one of the Black Brothers. On my breast was tattooed indelibly the symbol of Ahriman, which is the symbol of Night--a blind, black face. But at last I sickened of the revolting practices of the cult, and fled from it. I came to America and changed my name.

Some of my people were already here--the branch of the family to which Joan belongs.

"With the passing of nineteen years I thought the Black Brothers had forgotten me. I didn't know there were branches in America, in the teeming foreign quarters of the great cities. But I might have known they never forget. And one day I received a cryptic message that shattered my illusions. They had remembered, had traced me, found me--

knew all about me. And, in punishment for my desertion, they had chosen my niece, Joan, for the yearly sacrifice.

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