Weird Tales/Volume 30/Issue 6/Child of Atlantis
Child of Atlantis
What brooding shape of horror dwelt in the black castle that topped the
sinister island on which a young American and his wife
were shipwrecked on their honeymoon?
The little yawl clove the blue waters of the sunlit sea, its white sails taut with a strong wind. Steadily it crept eastward across the vast wastes of the Atlantic, toward the Azores, still hundreds of miles away, In the cockpit at the stern, David Russell stood over the wheel, his lean, brown, bareheaded figure bent forward, his smiling gray eyes watching his wife.
Christa Russell was earnestly coiling ropes on the deck forward. Now she finished and came back toward him, a slim, boyish little figure in white slacks and blue jersey. Her soft, dark eyes, always oddly serious beneath her childish forehead and smoothly brushed black hair, met her husband's and returned his smile.
"Happy, kid?" he asked, his arm going around her slender waist as she jumped down into the cockpit to his side.
She nodded, her uplifted eyes adoring. "It's the best honeymoon anyone ever had, David. Just you and me and the sea."
He grinned. "I felt a little guilty about dragging you on a risky cruise like this, but you've been the best sailing partner I ever had. And the only one who could really cook."
He added, "Speaking of cooking, suppose you get down in that galley and exercise your talents, gal. I'm hungry."
Christa said dismayedly, "Oh, I'd forgotten all about lunch. I'll only be a few minutes."
She disappeared hurriedly down the companionway. Left alone, David Russell drew a long breath of utter contentment. His gray eyes swept the horizon happily. Sunlight and sea, a good boat and a good wind, and his young wife—what more could any man want?
They had been married in Bermuda two weeks before. And David had proposed this cruise to the Azores in his yawl as a honeymoon. Fine weather and favoring winds had made it a dream voyage of sun-drenched days and moon-silvered nights.
David suddenly stiffened at the wheel. He had glimpsed something just ahead that was—queer. It was a strange, great flicker in the air, a wavering of light like the refraction of air above hot railway tracks. The whole area just ahead of the onward-racing yawl seemed flickering oddly like that.
He felt a sudden tinge of dim fear, of alarm. He moved his hand on the wheel to guide the yawl away from that weirdly flickering area. But before he could do so, the speeding boat had run directly into the edge of the queer area. The next moment
A big island loomed dead ahead in the sea!
It was like hell-born magic to David's stunned brain. One moment he was
"He fell with outstretched metal arms crashing purposefully down against the giant crystal."
David's stupefied eyes glimpsed the isle as a heavily forested mass of land, several miles across, towering to frowning black cliffs at its center. The shores were fringed with cruel, jagged rocks that showed like broken black fangs through the foam of wild waves breaking over them.
The yawl was running headlong onto these rocks, without chance of being turned in time. David, his face a gray mask of stupefied horror, dropped the wheel and yelled hoarsely.
"Christa! Quick!"
She came darting up the companionway, face white with alarm. "David, what"
He grabbed her. At that instant, with terrific, grinding shock, the yawl struck the rocks.
They were thrown clear of its wildly tilting deck by the impact. And almost instantly they were sinking in the roaring waters, David still blindly gripping his wife.
Thunder of the rushing waves was in his ears as they went down and down in the cold currents. He shifted his grip on Christa, and fought frantically with his other arm to rise. He came up, half strangled, to be nearly smothered by white foam and deafened by the roaring bellow of breaking waves.
They were flung like chips toward the jagged shore rocks. David struck out with his free arm in mad strokes to keep them away from the cruel stone fangs upon which the waves would hammer them to pulp. His left arm still gripped Christa with frantic strength as they were hurled forward.
His right shoulder grazed hidden rock, his shirt ripping and a brand of fire seeming to sear along his arm. As he was whirled around by the wild waves that were tossing them, he glimpsed the yawl, piled on the outer rocks, being hammered by the smashing waves.
The waves were hurling them on toward those menacing black teeth with the swiftness of a mill-race. A flat, jagged ledge rose a few feet from the foaming waters just ahead. The charging waves flung them hard against it.
David took the impact on his right shoulder, and felt the flesh bruise from the savage blow. With his numbed right arm he clawed wildly to cling to the edge of the ledge, a foot above his head. His fingertips gained the rim, then were torn loose as the receding waves sucked the two helpless humans back.
Back and back—and then again they bore them forward, like raging stallions of the sea, toward the ledge of rock. David felt his strength leaving him, knew desperately that he could not hold Christa longer, that if the waves swept them back out again, they would sink together.
The rushing waters again flung them like floating puppets against the rock. David's head hit the wall and he saw blinding light, felt the last remnants of strength melting from the stunning blow. Yet knowledge of death close at hand made him claw frenziedly for the ledge.
His fingers again gripped its brink—but his nerveless body had not the strength to haul them up onto it. Through the bellowing din, icy death seemed stooping to enfold them in his cold shroud. Then before the waters sucked back, a wave higher than the others lifted David and the girl a little. With a supreme effort, he used that moment to roll with her onto the ledge.
He lay there, hearing only dimly the raging of the baffled seas just below him, the splatter of salty spray on his face. He was aware that Christa was bending frantically over him, as his consciousness darkened.
"David! David dear!" Her sobbing voice came thinly and remotely to his fading hearing. "David, we're safe now. I'll get help—get someone"
And then there was only darkness in David Russell's brain.
It was the steady showering of the stinging spray on his face that finally revived his overtaxed body and brain. He opened his eyes, and weakly struggled up to a sitting position.
He was still on the ledge at the island's shore. The incoming combers were still smashing a few inches below him, flinging up great geysers of feathery foam, and a hundred yards outward the yawl lay grinding on the outer rocks where it had been tossed.
Where was Christa? She was nowhere in sight along the rocky, wave-dashed shore. David's clearing brain remembered now her frantic attempts to revive him. She had gone to look for help, and she was not back yet. How long had she been gone? Had something happened to her on this hellish island that had appeared so magically in the mid-Atlantic? Cold fear for his bride clutched at David's heart, and forced him to stagger weakly to his feet. Wildly he looked along the shore of the island.
From the sea-beaten, jagged rocks, a narrow strip of beach lifted toward the edge of the dark, great forest that seemed to cover most of the island. He saw tracks in the sand, leading toward the forest. Christa must have gone that way. He stumbled after her, spurred by apprehension. This island, a mysterious place that should not be—what danger might not Christa meet on it?
As he toiled up the slight grade of the beach, David's mind was still dazed by the suddenness with which the whole incredible thing had happened. This island had been utterly invisible to his eyes until the yawl had almost run onto it, had reached the edge of that strange flickering area. Then the island had clicked suddenly into sight.
He turned his head and looked wildly back out to sea, as he hastened on. David received another shock. He could not see more than a few hundred feet out from the island! He could look that far out over the rocks and waters, but beyond that limit he could see nothing but a weird flickering. His vision seemed to be repelled at that limit, to be turned back upon itself.
He looked upward. The sky had changed too. It was a strange, flickering sky of very dark blue, and the sun could not be seen in it. This nightmare island! It could not be seen by anyone outside it—and neither could anyone on the island see outside.
It was all crazy, incredible. But his dazed mind clung frantically to the thought of finding Christa. David reached the edge of the forest, and stood staring haggardly into its dark depths.
Huge, black-trunked trees rose for hundreds of feet, mighty columns supporting a canopy of green foliage high overhead. Thickets of brush and snaky creepers that bore enormous white blooms, choked the space between the trees. This forest loomed strangely silent in the weird, sunless day. And he saw beyond the waving tree-tops the towering central cliffs he had already glimpsed from the yawl. On those distant, frowning bluffs of dark rock crouched a monstrous square black castle.
David stared and stared over the great trees at that somber structure of mystery on the distant heights, his gaze fascinated by its black domes and towers and unbroken, windowless walls. Then he tore his eyes from it and peered frantically along the forest edge for some trace of his wife.
"Woher kommst du?" The voice came from close behind him, with startling unexpectedness.
David spun around. Two men had come up behind him on the beach without his observing them. They were staring at him suspiciously.
The man who had asked the question in German was a solidly built, sandy-haired man of forty, with searching eyes. He was clad in a time-worn, ragged and stained gray uniform.
The other man was a huge, broad-shouldered Scandinavian in sweater and sea-boots almost as ragged, his weather-beaten Viking face a little older than that of the German, his blond head bare. Both men carried steel-pointed spears.
David Russell said, with difficulty, "I—I don't understand you." Then he cried, "In God's name, what kind of place is this?"
The German's suspicious face cleared and he exclaimed in English, "You're new here, then? Did your ship run onto the island? Were any others saved?"
To his excited questions, David answered, "We were in a yawl—my wife and I. This hellish island suddenly appeared right in front of us. Our boat struck—there it is out on the rocks. We got to shore, but I passed out, and when I came around, Christa was gone for help. And now I can't find her. I've got to find her!" he cried. "To get her away from this devilish place!"
The German shook his head sadly. "There is no escape from this island—none except death or whatever horrible fate the Master deals out to those whom he calls to his castle. I myself have been here on the island for twenty years."
"Twenty years?" cried David, appalled.
The Teuton nodded. "I am Leutnant Wilhelm von Hausman, of U-Boat 321 of the Imperial German Navy. In the spring of 1918 our boat, running on the surface to recharge our batteries, sighted a strange flickering just ahead. The next moment, this island appeared, we crashed into it, and I, who was on deck, was the only one saved."
He motioned toward the giant blond Scandinavian seaman. "This is Halfdon Husper, first mate of a Norwegian freighter that ran onto the island in 1929. There are a couple of hundred such survivors from similar wrecks—we have a little village over yonder in the forest."
David cried, "But why haven't you tried to get away? And what kind of hellish place is this island, anyway, that it's completely invisible until you're right on it?"
Von Hausman shrugged. "I know no more than you how the island is made invisible to the outside world. The Master has made it so, but how he does it, I can't guess."
"The Master?" repeated David. "Who is that?"
Von Hausman pointed to the black castle brooding on the distant cliffs. "That is the castle of the Master. He is supreme ruler of this island, but who or what he is, I cannot say, for none of us who live here have ever seen him."
"You mean—he never comes out of that place?" David asked wonderingly. "But then how do you know he exists?"
The German shuddered a little. "We know well he exists, because from time to time he calls one among us to the castle, and whoever goes into that black place never comes out again."
The torturing anxiety uppermost in David's mind burst forth. "But what about my wife? I must find her—at once."
The big Norwegian, Halfdon Husper, spoke for the first time in rumbling, heavily accented English. He said to the German, "Some other of the men may have found the girl and taken her to the village."
Von Hausman nodded rapidly, his keen eyes narrowing. He told David, "It's possible some of the others took your wife to the village, as Halfdon says. I think you'd better come with us, at once."
Half mad with torturing worry, David Russell started with the two ragged men at a trot through the forest. There was a faintly marked trail which the others appeared to know, that wound inward between the great trees and around huge fallen logs.
Even in the tense stress of his anxiety, he could not help noticing that the trees and vegetation around him were totally unfamiliar. He had never seen such trees, such huge flowers, such grotesque orange-podded fruits. It all seemed like a strange dream into which he had suddenly been plunged.
Von Hausman was telling him, "The village is not far ahead. It's a miserable little place, where we eke out life by gathering fruits and hunting the small animals, until the time comes when we die or the Master calls us."
He added somberly, "Almost I wish sometimes that the Master would call me and put an end to this wretched existence from which there is no escape."
They emerged soon into a shallow, unwooded valley at the center of the island. At the farther side of the valley rose the black, frowning cliffs, upon whose highest point squatted the brooding ebon castle.
David saw that in the valley lay a rude village of two or three score huts, built of logs and bark. The little village seemed to huddle there like a thing crouching in fear, beneath the black battlements of the cliffs and the Master's mysterious castle.
At the center of the village milled an excited crowd of men. The din of their shouting voices reached David and his two companions as they hurried forward. The lips of the German U-Boat officer tightened.
"It's as I feared—they've got your wife here," he rasped. "You're probably going to have to fight."
"Fight?" cried David.
Von Hausman nodded tightly. "Very few women ever get ashore alive on the island from the wrecks—only at long intervals. And the women go to those who can fight for them and keep them. Quick!"
They raced forward, between the rows of rude huts. Now David saw that there were perhaps two hundred men in the throng milling in shouting excitement ahead. He could see only a dozen or so women—ragged, frightened women— peering out of huts here and there.
But the mob of men! A ragged, hard-bitten throng that had been cast ashore here by the ships of every nation that had wrecked on this mysterious island. Red-faced British sailors, brown, snake-eyed Lascars, stalwart Scandinavians like Husper, swarthy Spanish and Italian and Portuguese seamen, bearded Russians and guttural-voiced Teutons, a score of other races, all milling excitedly around one central point.
David Russell and his two companions crashed through the shouting throng, David unnoticed by the ragged mob in its excitement. He burst into a small clear space at the center of the crowd. There he stopped, and shouted aloud.
"Christa!"
She was there, a slim, shrinking, boyish figure in her wet slacks and sweater. A stocky, simian, red-headed man of thirty with hard blue eyes and a button-nosed, craggy face, was holding her struggling form with one arm. He was shaking his other fist at the crowd and roaring belligerently, "I say this girl is mine! I found her there in the forest and if anyone else wants her, he can fight me for her, here and now."
A sudden silence descended on the mob at the redhead's roaring challenge. Von Hausman muttered in David's ear, "It's Red O'Riley—a gun-runner whose schooner ran ashore here ten years ago. He's the toughest customer on the island."
But David wasn't listening. Flaming with rage, he had burst from the crowd and, with a savage twist, tore O'Riley's arm away from Christa and sent the redhead sprawling.
He gritted, "Damn you, this girl isn't for you or anyone else here. She's my wife."
Christa clung to his arm, sobbing with relief. "David, I was afraid you were dead! I went to try to find help and was caught"
O'Riley had got to his feet, in a dead silence of stunned amazement on the part of the crowd. The gun-runner's craggy face split in a wide, menacing grin at David.
"So she's your wife, is she?" the red-headed man mocked harshly. "That's a good one! She may have been your wife by law outside, but there's devil a law on this cursed island except what the strongest man makes. I'm going to tear you apart and then take her."
The stocky gun-runner was savagely peeling off his raggd coat and shirt as he spoke, and stood now with gorilla-like, hairy chest bare, his great fists balled, advancing slowly on David.
David thrust the white-faced Christa back to von Hausman and Husper, at the edge of the crowd. The ragged mob was shouting now with increased excitement.
"Kill him, Red—tear the young squirt apart!" exultant voices bawled.
Von Hausman told David swiftly, "Try to finish him before he gets to you, or you won't have a chance."
David stepped out to meet the grimly advancing O'Riley. As he looked at the redhead's huge shoulders, barrel chest and simian arms, David's heart sank within him. He was still half exhausted from the battle through the waves an hour before, and he knew that even in the best of condition he would be no match for O'Riley. Yet if he were killed, Christa's possible fate in this weird, brutal place—the thought filled him with a wild, desperate frenzy.
He suddenly rushed, his left fist driving out with every ounce of his strength. It smashed against O'Riley's craggy jaw, and the Irishman rocked for a moment. David leaped in and smashed with right and left at the redhead's face with everything he had, and his enemy clawed for balance.
A wild howl went up from the mob, but David's heart was cold with knowledge that he had hit O'Riley with everything he had—and had failed to knock him down. With a bear-like snarl of rage, shaking his head as though to clear his eyes, the redhead rushed forward. David tried to sidestep but his foot slipped on the loose gravel. Then something hit him a terrific blow on the mouth, and everything was in a red mist, and he was dimly aware that his back was lying on the damp ground and that something hot and sticky was running on his lips. And O'Riley was standing there, snarling down at him.
"Get up! Get up before I beat you to death lying there."
"David!" That heartbroken sob was in Christa's voice. He recognized it through the mistiness that had seized his brain.
He staggered to his feet, lunged forward with fists balled. Crash! The crunching blows seemed to explode out of nothing against his face, and he knew he had gone to his knees this time. His brain was rocking—he felt he was done for. There wasn't an ounce of strength left in his nerveless body.
"David!" That agonized cry again pierced his numbness of mind and body, making him somehow struggle up again.
As though through crimson fog, he saw O'Riley's snarling face. David hitched drunkenly to one side, drove his right with clumsy aimlessness. The blow connected with something—there was a grunt of pain from O'Riley, and the big redhead staggered, clutching his solar plexus.
"Finish him!" Von Hausman was yelling somewhere in the shouting mob.
David summoned his last spark of strength, swayed forward and jabbed both clenched fists at a staggering, dimly-seen O'Riley. His fists crashed onto hard bone with stinging pain—and there was a wilder shout as O'Riley slumped from his feet, collapsed to a sitting position and looked up with stunned, half-conscious gaze of utter bewilderment.
David stumbled over to where Von Hausman held Christa. He was reeling, almost unable to stand, but he tried to quiet her sobbing. Suddenly a great hand tore him around, and he faced one of the brutal mob, a black-bearded, wolf-faced Russian.
"You fight me now for the girl," the Russian grinned evilly. "I want her, too."
Von Hausman's face flamed with rage and he cried, "No, Bardoff! Gott in Himmel, this man is dead on his feet! You can't"
Bardoff swept him aside with a growl, and the ragged mob cheered. "You fight, or I take her!" the Russian growled at David.
Halfdon Husper, the huge Norwegian, shouldered forward with pale eyes blazing. "You'll fight me first if you try that," he warned Bardoff.
"And me also!" snapped Von Hausman.
"Yes, and me too!" roared a third, unsteady voice. It was Red O'Riley. He had staggered to his feet, his battered, bruised face still bleeding, but his eyes were raging at the Russian. The redhead bellowed, "By heaven, this lad whipped me fairly and it's me that's with him."
Bardoff yelled furiously to the motley mob, "Do you allow them to do this? Why shouldn't we take the woman from them?"
"Yes, let's take her!" howled a score of brutal voices.
David Russell, swaying, hardly able to stand, saw Von Hausman and Husper and the bruised O'Riley bunch together and raise their fists and rude spears.
The ragged mob surged toward them, with Bardoff in the lead. Christa hid her face on David's shoulder. Then suddenly a strange, an awful thing, happened.
Bardoff, the Russian, suddenly stopped short, his whole body stiffening as though turned to stone. Then slowly, mechanically, he turned and began to walk away with strange, stiff strides—to walk toward the frowning black cliffs. And as he walked, he shrieked wildly to the suddenly transfixed mob, "The Master! His will is on me—he is calling me!"
The mob shrank back in dread. David saw that the Russian's face was now that of a soul in hell as he marched stiffly on like a human automaton toward the cliffs.
"Gott!" breathed Von Hausman, white-faced. "Another of us, called by the Master!"
"Save me!" the receding Russian was screaming wildly. "Save me from the Master!"
Not one person made a move toward him; all shrank back in horrified dread, toward the shelter of the huts. The Russian strode stiffly on, and now had started up a steep path that climbed the cliff toward the brooding castle.
David, staring with Christa terrifiedly clinging to him, and with the German and Husper and O'Riley the only others now left in the clearing, saw the doomed man climbing straight toward the front of the monstrous black castle. He saw a door appear in the blank, black front of the building. The Russian strode stiffly through, his last wild despairing cry floating faintly down to them. Then the aperture closed after him.
Through the three men beside David and Christa went a sigh of horror. Von Hausman's keen eyes were haunted as he told David, "You see now why we all dread the Master so. We never know at what moment he will call us, nor what dark, unholy doom he deals out to those whom he summons into the castle."
"But why did the man go up there, when he didn't want to?" David protested. "He was terrified, yet he walked straight on."
Halfdon Husper told him solemnly, "The will of the Master was on him and he could not resist—no human can resist when that call comes."
"Ja," said the German darkly. "Whatever thing it is that lairs up in that unholy place, it can throw its will on any of us, call us to it, whenever it wishes. It is so we shall all end in time, if we do not die first."
"Not Christa and I!" David declared passionately. "I'm going to get her away from this hellish island, somehow."
Red O'Riley's bruised face grinned approval.
"I'm with you there, lad," he declared. "Ten years I've been on this devil's place, ever since my schooner that was loaded with guns for Abd-el-Krim piled up here in the night. I've seen a plenty of men called up there by the old Satan that lives in that castle, and I'm damned if I'll sit around here longer twiddling my thumbs waitin' for him to call me. I'll risk anything to get away."
Von Hausman shrugged hopelessly. "It is useless to talk of it—you know what happens to anyone who tries to escape from the island. However, we can discuss that later. These two must have a place to live, so Halfdon and I will give them our hut."
He led the way along the street of wretched huts. It was growing dusky now. There was no sun or sunset visible in the flickering sky, but that sky steadily was darkening into a thick, strange twilight. The great forest loomed in deep shade now, gloomy and forbidding. Up on the cliff above the valley, the black stronghold of the dreaded Master bulked ominously against the dusking sky.
Von Hausman led them into a small bark cabin. It was unfurnished, save for beds of boughs, and a pile of strange-looking fruit in one corner. They sat down together in the dusky interior, and ate the fruit. David found it tasted as queer as it looked. Christa nestled nervously at his side, silent, still overwhelmed.
David could hardly yet believe in the reality of this strange place, this island invisible to the outer world, peopled by survivors of a hundred past wrecks, ruled by the mysterious, unseen occupant of the black castle. Yet Von Hausman and Husper and O'Riley ate with quiet matter-of-factness. The redheaded gunrunner had apparently forgotten all animosity against David.
When he had finished, O' Riley tossed the fruit-husks outside and stretched back, groaning, "What I wouldn't give now for a pipe and something to put in it. I swear if I ever get away from here I'll smoke for six months without stopping even to sleep."
David asked the German, "Why do you say it's impossible to escape from the island? It seems to me that it shouldn't be hard to make some sort of raft or dugout canoe, and launch it. Once away from the island, out where you could be seen by passing ships, you'd have a good chance of being picked up."
Von Hausman laughed mirthlessly. "A good many men on this island have thought that and have tried to get away in rafts or rude boats. And sooner or later in each case, before they could start, the Master called them. Whatever it is that dwells up in the castle, it does not want anyone to escape from this island—no!"
"That is so," rumbled the great Norwegian. "And that is why we no longer try to escape. It is hard to live here as we do—but it is more terrible to feel the will of the Master on you, to answer his call and go up into his castle never to return."
Christa, peering out through the doorway with wide eyes at the enigmatic black structure looming in the dusky sky, clung to her husband in shivering dread. "David, I'm afraid!"
He soothed her, yet felt as though a cold, alien wind of dread had blown over him, too. He asked, "But who or what is the Master? You say you don't know—but you must have some idea."
Von Hausman said thoughtfully, "We do not know because those who see the Master up there never come out again. But one thing I am sure of—the Master is immortal."
And as David and Christa stared at him incredulously, the U-boat officer continued, "I believe that this island has existed here, invisible and unsuspected by the world, for countless centuries; for along its shores I have found old, rotted wreckage and metal objects from ships of many centuries back, from Eighteenth Century frigates and Sixteenth Century slavers, and Spanish caravels like those of Columbus—even wreckage of a Greek galley that must have ventured into these western seas more than two thousand years ago."
Von Hausman added, "That shows the island has been here, invisible, for centuries. Now the only thing that can keep this island invisible to the outside world is some force or power exerted by the Master. Therefore the Master must have dwelt here during all those centuries."
David made an impatient gesture. "After all, I don't care who or what the Master is. What I want to do is to get Christa away from this unholy place. I'm going to do that somehow, Master or no Master."
"And it's me that seconds the motion," promptly declared O'Riley. "What the devil!—this isn't any place for a man of action like meself to be moldering away his life. We'll build ourselves a boat and launch it, and the back of our hands to the Master if he tries to stop us."
"We wouldn't need to build a boat," David said eagerly. "My yawl—it was tossed up onto the outer rocks down at the shore. I think the hull is stove in a little and the masts are snapped, but there are tools in it and we could patch it up enough to be seaworthy, in a few days." He added passionately, "Isn't it better to try it than to sit here and do nothing? It may be true that before we can escape in it, the Master will call us as he has done the others who tried to eescape. But if we just sit here, it seems that sooner or later we'll be called to the same fate anyway. So why not try to get away?"
"Sure, and why not?" echoed O'Riley. "We've got nothin to lose but our lives."
Halfdon Husper said slowly, "I say, try it then. I have a wife in Oslo, if she still lives. And I am weary of waiting for death here."
They all looked at Von Hausman. After a moment, the German said quietly, "I have been here longer than any of you. I am quite certain that this attempt to escape will mean death for all of us. And not quick, easy death, but some horrible fate at the Master's hands. It is sure that, before we can ever launch that boat, we shall be called up there to that fate." His keen eyes smiled. "Yet I also say, let us try it. I too am weary of waiting idly for death here."
"Then we four will go down and start work on the yawl in the morning," David declared. He added troubledly to his young wife, "Christa, you're going to stay here while we work. No one here will bother you now, and if you do not go with us there is less chance of the Master's doom falling on you, if it does fall."
"I want to be with you, David!" she cried. But after a little, at David's anxiety, she gave in and consented to remain in the hut while they worked.
Night passed quickly, a strange, starless and moonless night, with only the unceasing flickering visible in the dark sky. And when dawn came it was a gray, sunless dawn, a slow, gradual increase in light. Leaving Christa in the hut, the four made their way quietly out of the village and through the forest to the beach.
The yawl still lay; on the rocks where it had been tossed. David fished axes, saws and other tools from its hold, and they began the work. Halfdon Husper, most experienced of them, took charge as they rudely patched the holes in the hull.
Ever and again through the day, David glanced tensely over his shoulder at the distant cliffs and castle.
Von Hausman noticed that and said quietly, "Do not fear, mein freund, the Master is watching us. That is sure."
"Let him watch!" rasped David desperately. "We'll get away—we will!"
But when they returned into the village that evening, they saw that the ragged motley mob there now looked at them with awe and dread. These others had discovered during the day that they were working on the yawl.
"They already look on us as doomed by the Master, as dead men," commented the German.
O'Riley bristled. "Anyone who tries anything on me will find out that it's a damned tough dead man I am," he declared. "And that goes for the old devil up in the castle, too."
Christa cried softly in David's arms that night. "David, I feel that something terrible is going to happen to you. And if it did, I wouldn't want to live."
"Nothing's going to happen to me," he insisted despite the fatal foreboding in his heart. "We'll get away."
By the end of the next day, the four men had completely, if crudely, patched the holes in the yawl's hull. They got it afloat, secured it by cables to the rocks. Halfdon Husper regarded their work with satisfaction.
"Tomorrow we will cut and fit new spars," the Norwegian said. "Then"
Day was beginning to fade eerily as they returned to the village. It looked stricken, deserted—no one was abroad in it, but from the doors of the huts, horrified faces stared silently at them. Christa was not in the bark cabin. Nor did she answer David's calls.
"Something's happened to her!" he cried. "Some of these brutes"
Gripping the ax he had brought back from the yawl, he ran wildly down the rude street. He plucked a man out of the door of one of the huts, a loutish Breton sailor who stared at him with ignorant, horror-widened eyes.
"What's happened to my wife?" snarled David, raising the ax menacingly. "If some of you have harmed her, I'll kill you!"
The Breton, gasping in David's furious, choking grip, stammered an answer.
"It was not us—the girl is gone for ever. An hour ago the call of the Master came upon her, and she climbed the cliff and passed up into the castle. She did not want to go—she screamed as all they who feel the call scream, but she could not help herself."
David felt the blood leave his heart as the ghastly truth penetrated his mind. He saw infinite pity on the faces of his three friends, and heard Von Hausman whisper, "Gott, the Master has summoned her. We shall never see her again."
"I will see her again!" raved David wildly. "I'm going up there and try to get her out, if I have to go alone!"
He suddenly turned on the ragged, motley men staring from the huts, and lashed them with raging words of volcanic fury. "You men—are you really men or are you sheep, that you sit here and let whatever creature is up in that castle kill you at his will? Whoever the Master is, he must be living, and that means that he can be killed! Why don't you try to kill him, instead of submitting humbly to his will? Why don't you storm the castle and destroy him, instead of waiting for him to destroy you one by one?"
A fierce yell burst from the men before him, hard-bitten, brutal men from all the seven seas, whose smoldering hate and fear of the Master had been fanned to a quick blaze by David's raging words.
A flashing-eyed Italian sailor waved his spear aloft and cried, "By the saints, he speaks truth! Why do we not pull down the demon that crouches up there?"
"That's the stuff, lads!" cried Red O'Riley exultantly.
"Aye, death to the Master!" boomed Halfdon Husper's great voice, the huge Norwegian's eyes flaming with long-repressed hatred.
"Death to the Master!" burst a raging chorus of two hundred voices, as rude spears and swords waved thick from the maddened men.
David, his face half crazed with rage, shook his heavy ax and cried, "Up the cliff, then! We'll storm the Master's castle before he can claim my wife as another victim!"
They poured out of the village, a roaring, raging mob of savage sea-men from every nation, every man with his weapon, every man afire to destroy the mysterious being whom they had dreaded so long.
David ran at their head, his face white and set, his ax gripped in his hand, with the exulting O' Riley and the blazing-eyed Norwegian and Von Hausman, curiously calm, behind him. Close after the four streamed the wild mob. David led them straight to the cliff and up the steep, narrow path in single file. He knew that if they had time to recover from their rage, the old dread of the Master would rapidly repossess them.
Above them bulked ominously against the dusky sky the mysterious black castle. It seemed to David that as they neared the top of the cliff, the raging roar of his mob of followers lessened a little, their pace slackened.
O'Riley yelled back to them, "On, comrades! In a minute we'll be inside the Master's castle!"
"Death to the Master!" thundered back the wild, climbing horde.
Now David and the three friends close at his heels climbed onto the sheer rock shelf in front of the castle. The huge square structure loomed black and somber before them, doorless and windowless.
"There's a door somewhere in front here!" David cried. "We'll find it!"
He led them at a run toward the towering, black wall of smooth stone that was the front of the citadel.
Suddenly he stopped short, and at the same moment every man behind halted in his tracks. He could not go forward! He wanted to, for every fiber in his body was aflame with raging desire to rush forward and break into this structure into which Christa had gone. But he could not take a single step forward. It was as though his legs had suddenly ceased to obey his brain's commands, and were under outside control.
The men behind him, smitten to a halt by the same weird phenomenon, were struck silent with stupefaction for a moment. Then a cry of horror and dread went up from the ragged mob.
"The Master's will is on us!"
"God save us—the Master has us in his grip!"
David fought to move forward, making a tremendous effort of his will to move his legs even one step. Sweat stood out on his forehead, but he could not move.
He heard a confused cry of terror from the mob behind him. Then he saw that the ragged horde, and also Von Hausman and Husper and O'Riley, had begun to move back down the cliff, walking with stiff, mechanical strides down the path.
"O'Riley! Halfdon! Come back!" yelled David hoarsely. "We can still break in and destroy that demon inside."
The big Irishman, his face white and beaded with sweat, called thickly back, "Lad, we can't!"
And Von Hausman, as they marched stiffly away down the path, cried back up to David, "The Master—his will is making us return to the village!"
Stiffly striding, shouting in their terror now, David's ragged followers descended the path up which they had raged a few moments before, and stiffly his three friends followed despite their struggles. David was left standing alone in the flickering dusk before the enormous citadel.
Suddenly his legs began to move under him. Stiffly as those of a dead man, they stalked forward with him toward the front of the great building. He could not control that movement—it was another brain that was directing his forward strides. But he did not try to fight it now, for in his throbbing brain was only the desire to get into the castle where Christa was. Still gripping his ax tightly in his hand, he strode forward with those mechanical steps.
As he neared the blank black wall of the citadel, a tiny round aperture appeared in it. The aperture expanded rapidly, like an opening camera shutter, into a round door beyond which he saw a great hall filled with misty blue light. David strode on, into that blue-lit hall, and heard the door close with a sighing sound after him.
Tramp, tramp—the steady strides, which he did not himself will, took him across the great hall. He saw through the light-mists, massive, shining mechanisms of unearthly design standing about him, He passed on through them, into a huge vaulted corridor.
David's legs took him on down that corridor. Somewhere in this building the Master was drawing David to him, controlling his body by super-hypnotic force. He passed other halls and corridors, all flooded with pale, misty blue luminescence, holding weird instruments and mechanisms of unfathomable purpose. Then he emerged into a colossal domed central hall.
He stared with fascinated, stupefied eyes as he was drawn forward. At the center of this mighty chamber poised a ten-foot crystal sphere inside which pulsed a throbbing core of living azure fire, like a miniature, misty blue sun.
In front of this titan crystal of pulsing light was a throne-like metal chair he could just glimpse through a shroud of concealing light-mists. And he glimpsed or sensed someone, something, sitting upon that metal throne. Facing the throne stood
"Christa!" cried David hoarsely.
The girl stood, a wild terror frozen upon her face, her slim, childish body silhouetted against the blue light.
She turned at David's cry, tried to run toward him but could not move, rooted by the same force that was drawing him stiffly forward. Anguish had leaped into her eyes at sight of him.
"David!" she uttered in a sobbing cry. "You came after me—came to your doom"
He was beside her now. And there, without command of his own brain, his stiff strides suddenly stopped. He tried to step to Christa and take her in his arms, but could not. He could only reach out with one hand, and touch her trembling, cheek.
She stared ahead once more, horror unveiled in her eyes. David turned his head and looked forward to what she stared at, that metal throne whose base could just be glimpsed through the curling blue light-mists that surrounded it.
David gripped his ax tighter. Yet he felt utterly helpless, powerless, standing with the girl before that shrouded throne and before the colossal crystal of throbbing light.
Out of the light-mists around the throne spoke the voice of the Master, a metallic voice of chill, measured accents.
"Man from outside, you interest me," the passionless, cold voice of the Master told David. "You tried to do what no other here ever tried to do, attack me in revolt. I am sorry now I did not call you here sooner—I meant in any case to call you and your friends because of your childish attempt to escape the island."
David tried to keep his voice steady. "You can do what you want with me," he told the Master. "I know that. But I will submit willingly, gladly, if you will allow the girl to go."
"No, David!" cried Christa. "I share your fate! If you die, I die!"
The Master's metallic voice told them, "Your argument is purposeless. My will rules here and not yours—it rules even your own bodies, as you have learned. My actions are not to be disturbed by your tiny clamor. It is my intention to use the body of this girl at once as material for certain interesting experiments which I have long been performing on humans whom I called from the village. As for you, man who dared attack me, you will have the same fate, a little later."
"You're not going to use Christa's body for your experiments," said David in a thick, hoarse voice. "You're not!"
He was slowly, stealthily, raising the heavy ax. If he could throw it, if he could hurl it into the shrouding mists at the thing on the metal throne
His hand flashed up for the wild cast—and froze in midair, gripping the ax! He could not throw the weapon!
The veins on David's neck corded with tremendous effort, but his arm and shoulder muscles would not obey his will.
"You fool!" scorned the cold accents of the Master. "Did you not think that I could read your intention in your mind, that I could hold your arms powerless by my will as easily as your legs? Do you think me a stupid, blundering creature of flesh and blood like yourself? Look, human, and see!"
The light-mists drifted swiftly away from the seat of the Master as he spoke. There on the metal throne before the great crystal of throbbing light, he sat unveiled.
David felt his brain reeling as he stared. He heard a choking of horror from Christa.
The Master was a metal robot—a mechanical creature of coppery metal, formed like a horrible travesty of humanity, with metal arms, legs and cylindrical body, and a bulbous metal head or braincase out of which two glittering, unwinking eye lenses watched them.
"God, a robot!" cried David. "A machine, created by somebody"
"And a machine greater far than its creators!" came the cold voice of the Master.
There was a strange note of pride in the robot's chill accents. It was as though it was speaking, out of that resonator mouth below its eyes, not to the transfixed David and Christa but to itself.
"Yes, they were men like you who created me," he was saying, "though men wiser far than you in the craft and skill of science. Long, long ago that was, long ago in ancient Atlantis whose fertile continent stood here in the sea where now only this little island stands, and where the races of men had readied their highest civilization.
"The scientists of Atlantis had built many wonderful mechanisms, some of them completely automatic and self-sustaining in operation. And they dreamed finally of creating a machine with brain and mind.
"I was that machine. There in Atlantis, ages past, I was born in the laboratories of the greatest scientists. My body was easy to build, but for decades they worked on the metal brain they meant to give me.
"That brain, when they finished it, was incomparably more complex in its metal neurone structure than is the human brain. Because of that, it could receive and classify an incomparably greater number of thought-patterns. That meant that I had the capacity for infinitely greater knowledge and memory than any human.
"The scientists instructed me, proud of my progress. But very soon I had learned all that they could teach me, and as I passed beyond them in knowledge and power, they began to realize that they had created a being greater than themselves."
There was a brooding note of undying hate in the metallic voice of the robot.
"I became great in power in Atlantis, the final oracle in all problems. To the populace I was a god, and as such I was worshipped and had my temple. Power I loved, not for its own sake, but only because it enabled me to continue my quest for new knowledge.
"Then the Atlantean scientists who had created me regretted their work, and wished to destroy me. They aroused the populace against me and attacked my temple with the most powerful weapons they could muster. I repelled them, but they attacked me again. At last I grew weary of their harrying, and I resolved to destroy all Atlantis and its people, except for the land on which my temple stood.
"In a single night, I did the thing. For long I had gathered my powers and on that night I unchained them, and they smote down into the earth's structure far beneath the continent of Atlantis, and touched off great earth-faults that I knew existed there in the depths. And in that one night, all the continent of Atlantis and all its people sank downward and the sea crashed over the land and hid it for ever.
"All but one small portion of the continent, the portion around my temple! That did not sink, for I had provided against that, setting up certain radiated forces which sustain that small bit of land as an island above the waves. That great crystal of blue fire which you see behind me, man from outside, is the source of the radiation which still upholds the island. Were it not for that crystal's radiation, the slender pinnacle of rock which bears up this island must have collapsed long ago.
"Also there is a force mingled in the crystal's radiation which refracts light around the island, keeping it invisible to the outside world, so that I will not be annoyed by the curiosity of the barbarian races of men. Occasionally ships have crashed onto my invisible island as yours did, and men have gained its shore. I have suffered them to live down there in their wretched village because I sometimes need their bodies for my researches."
The glittering lens-eyes of the Master seemed to muse upon the stricken Christa and upon David, still standing petrified with his ax upraised.
"Man from outside, why do I speak of these things to you who can little understand them?" asked the robot. "It is for only one reason—it is because I am lonely.
"Yes, I, the child of old Atlantis, long more and more for contact with a mind equal to my own. I have resolved to create one, a metal brain as intelligent as mine. That is the purpose that engages me, and it is upon issues connected with that purpose that I am experimenting upon the bodies of humans like you and this girl."
"Not upon Christa's body—no!" shouted David hoarsely.
"Do you think to frighten me by mouthing futile threats?" asked the robot calmly. "Man from outside, you humans begin to weary me. I think it is well that the girl go now to the laboratories, where you will follow in due course."
Christa uttered a heart-torn cry. "David, good-bye"
"No, you're not going there!" David cried. He was making tremendous mental effort to free his arm from the hypnotic grip of the Master, to hurl his ax. But the Master's super-hypnotism held him powerless.
Across David's brain seared a lightning expedient, a thought that he suppressed as soon as he was aware of it. He desperately began to think, to think a lie.
He began to think of stirrings in the dim ocean depths below where wrecked Atlantis lay entombed, of mighty scientists emerging from tight chambers where they had lain sleeping, and not dead. He thought of them vowing vengeance upon the robot they had created, of assembling great weapons, of sending him, David Russell, ahead as a spy upon the robot.
The Master read the lie in David's mind and for a moment was deceived by it. For the robot leaped wildly upright.
"Then they of Atlantis are not all dead!" cried the metallic voice. "They come again against me"
For that single moment of wild excitement, the Master's mind relaxed its remorseless hypnotic grip upon David and Christa.
That one instant was enough. In it, David's muscles exploded in mad action and sent the ax in his hand flying straight toward the robot's head.
The heavy ax-head crashed squarely into the bulbous metal brain-case, between the lens-like eyes. The steel blade drove deep through the outer casing into the interior of the head, deep into the metal brain that had been created ages ago in the laboratories of dead Atlantis.
The Master staggered. His metallic voice uttered an awful, broken scream.
"Tricked! Tricked by a barbarian creature of flesh! But I will destroy you all"
Even as he uttered that dying scream, the Master was whirling, was falling. But he fell with outstretched metal arms crashing purposefully down against the giant crystal of blue fire behind him, the crystal whose radiated force alone held the island from sinking beneath the waves.
The crystal shivered beneath the cracking impact of the dead robot's falling body. The blue fire inside it dulled and died instantly. David heard Christa cry out, run into his arms.
Then they were thrown from their feet by a terrific earth shock. They heard a thunderous roar from the earth beneath the castle, and the crash of the castle's black walls as they were riven by the awful shock.
David grabbed his wife and plunged desperately across the huge halls and corridors whose walls were collapsing and crashing around him. He glimpsed daylight through a great gap in the outer wall, and he leaped with Christa through the gap out into the day. They stopped on the shelf of the cliff, for a moment appalled.
The whole island was heaving and rocking like a ship on a stormy sea. The thunderous earth-shocks were following each other at intervals of seconds, and there was a long, grinding roar from deep beneath that told of shifting, settling masses. The sun had appeared in the sky since the light-refracting force had died, but the heavens were instantly overcast with an ominous crimson pall.
The two fled down the path into the valley, David feeling nausea from the roll and buck of the earth beneath him. In the valley, the huts were in ruins and their ragged occupants were running about in mad panic. Von Hausman and O' Riley and the great Norwegian came running wildly up to David and the girl. "Gott in Himmel!" yelled the German. "What is"
"The island is sinking into the sea!" screamed David over the roaring crashes. "I killed the Master, and in dying he acted to make the island sink. Our only chance is to get to the yawl!"
"To the yawl, then!" shouted Husper, his face crimson with excitement.
They sprinted forward, into the forest, the earth still rolling and heaving wildly under their feet.
"Saints in heaven, look!" cried O'Riley, glancing back horrified.
With terrible, reverberating roll of thunder, the cliff and ruined castle of the Master were collapsing in masses of rock onto the valley they had just quitted.
"On!" yelled Von Hausman.
Fissures opened on either side of them as they plunged through the wild-waving woods. Terrific tremors crashed down trees and twice knocked them from their feet.
They burst out onto the beach. The sea before them was wild, great waves rushing madly in to shore and then out again, threatening to tear from its cables the mastless yawl that bobbed crazily on the waters.
They waded out through the rising waters, smashed by inrushing waves, shaken by the shifting of the rocks beneath their feet, and finally clambered onto the pitching yawl.
"Cut loose!" shouted Halfdon Husper.
David's ax sliced the cables. The yawl whirled crazily like a cork, then was sucked far, far back out to sea by the waters now receding at mill-race speed from the island—out and out, until the waters halted for a moment in awful dead calm. And from that distance they glimpsed the whole island, with solemn, grinding drum-roll from far beneath, sinking down into the waters.
The last black mass of the island plunged down under the sea. Then the waters around the yawl boiled terrifically and raced wildly with the little boat toward the spot where the island had been, a mad maelstrom of converging currents.
Halfdon Husper thrust the others by main force down into the cabin of the yawl, leaped in after them and slammed the hatchway shut. Next moment they were tossed violently against the walls of the dark cabin as the yawl seemed to stand up on its stern. David, still holding Christa tightly, felt his head strike the cabin wall and knew nothing more.
When he awoke, brilliant sunset light was in his eyes. He was lying on the deck of the yawl, and Christa and his friends were bending anxiously over him. Husper had a great bruise on his face, but the others did not seem injured.
David struggled to sit up, his dazed eyes sweeping the waters. The sea was still heaving and troubled, but the terrific currents had vanished. There was no sign of the island or of any other land anywhere in the tossing blue waste.
David stammered, "The yawl—it wasn't sucked down by the currents, then?"
Von Hausman, his quiet face still pale, said, "No, but it must have been only a reverse under-current that snatched us back out of the maelstrom. The yawl was actually under water when that current gripped us."
O'Riley, drawing a long breath, nodded his flaming head in corroboration. "It's me that was saying my prayers that minute!"
Christa was crying eagerly, "David, we've sighted the smoke of a ship coming—we're going to be picked up!"
His arm encircled her tightly. But for the moment his eyes were not looking at her, but gazing fascinatedly at the heaving waters, into whose green depths the lifeless metal form and shattered castle of the Master had sunk for ever. The child of old Atlantis, he had gone down at last to rejoin his creators in death.
