The Horror Megapack_ 25 Classic and Modern Horror Stories ( PDFDrive )

wings. Bat wings, it seemed. It dropped, boring headlong, toppling Crane
backward. A spicy, pungent odor, an odd blend of incense and cosmetics stung
his nostrils. Then, still grappling with the thing which had swooped out of the
upper mist, he crashed against the gray masonry of the bastioned wall. Crane’s
hard head had not a chance against a fortress built to defy a battering ram, but
his shoulders absorbed enough of the terrific impact to save his skull Some
lingering vestige of wits told him that once out of action, he no longer interested
the enemy.
Minutes elapsed before he could fight off the numbness and inertia that
clogged his will. But he finally rolled over and clambered to his knees.
He was alone in that gray, ghoulish moonglow. The girl was gone. He saw the
prints of his own feet and those of the mysterious assailants that had swooped
down on him. Blood flecked the sand, and one untrampled spot still held the
imprint of that savagely slashed girl’s breasts. It had not been illusion; but for a
moment Crane’s blood became ice.
The laundry marks and monogram on the handkerchief he had bound to the
girl’s arm would damn him beyond redemption when her body was found. And
aside from that, he could not hope to obliterate the traces of the struggle in the
moat.
The French police, inhumanly efficient, would inevitably connect him with the
outrage. When he returned to his quarters, the concierge would note the time of
his arrival. The proprietor of the wine shop on the Biarritz Road would
remember when he had left, and the direction he had taken. And every foreigner
is conspicuous in sleepy Bayonne.
Damn those experts with their omniscient microscopes! Their chemical tests
which would detect the faintest trace of blood on his clothing.
And someone, watching from some darkened window of a house on the wall,
might observe him as he left the moat, might already have heard and noted the
encounter.
Only one move for Crane: find that girl, dead or alive. Hit first before the
merciless Sûreté Générate connected him with the work of night-roving ghouls.
And find the man whose decoration she had clutched.
As he hastened down the moat, he followed the girl’s small, shapely footprints
along the sand. Wrath burned him as his first fear left. Though that gaudy shawl
branded her, she was still a woman, and the victim of something monstrous and
deadly; something too eager for her torn flesh to bother with Crane beyond
hammering him out of action.