Three hearts smote their ribs a single whack; then seemingly, melted away and sank downward and out of their bodies, leaving a trio of lifeless, inanimate mummies, frozen into horrified, stony attitudes. An awful thing hung there on the edge of the grommet of light. A blurred, half-naked, grisly monster sprawled on its loathsome haunches before them,—a thing topped with a blood-mottled, hideous head, made frightful by two luridly igneous, horrible eyes. Eyes girded and shot with a bloody film bulged fixedly up at them, glaring through the flickering orange light. The eyes—the eyes!
Divided by the part in the middle, one half of the wiry hair stuck up, the dead white hue of chalk, admitting its stains of red. The other half bristled, an ebon black blighted with its share of gore. At once it gave the startling impression of separate semi-faces filched from two different rawheads and slapped together thus, in smeared, mismated makeshift, that was hideous. Had only its fearful Nemesis stayed his devil-genius and spared the torrid eyes,—monstrous ember eyes that flamed like live coals against the dark,—mad-red eyes that burned and sparkled and sputtered up from their dancing depths, emitting and vomiting over the brims, a changing luster, blended with all the fevered fires of hell—eyes that eroded a nauseous path with their abhorrent stare. The accursed thing crouched there as immobile as the owl. A limp, blood-oozing tongue protruded from an addled, unspeakable mouth, distended and heinous with jagged teeth askew. Girding the besmeared forehead at the hispid white and black hair line of this festering scourge-scathed visage, just where the scalp separated and curled apart, a revolting ribbon of pure skull shone,—a strip of skull drained dry and clear and white as polished ivory; shimmering out like the badge of a death-head from some grim grot of perdition.
The three tried to flee from the awful, withering presence of this nameless thing. They tried vainly to cry out; to vent the horror that was upon them, depriving them of all utterance and action.
They only clutched each other nervelessly and stared insanely. Thereupon, in an unlooked-for instant before their livid faces, this ghastly misshapen thing struggled to its naked feet and lurched past them toward the altar, with the faltering wabble of a foundered ox. Up across the corner of the pulpit it clambered, and, reeling too near the edge, tumbled off the other side and struck the floor with a heavy, resounding thud, where, amidst jerky groans that were not human enunciations, it panted and floundered and arose once more.
Up again with a mighty torturous effort, the hulk mounted the platform a second time, and with head dangling at the end of a limp neck, crawled to the ragged cross, etched out with the blood of old Cap Lutts. Here it mumbled gutturally and labored crazily to gather up the crimson altar-piece into its seared, torn arms. Then again up to its feet it reared, and, standing thus with arms upflung, the stillness was shattered with frantic echoes of a broken word-spluttering, hell-twisted cackle, carrying a faint gleam of coherency and culminating in ravings that made the night hideous.
"I say—I say—I say—" gathering stress, louder and louder it shrieked until the very air curdled with these eery cries. "I say—you there, you there—you God—you God—I say the law's here—the law's here—the law, the law, the law I say—hear me?—hiding, hiding?—no, no, no, I have never hidden from men—I'll not hide now from my God—I'm here now, God—'Thou shalt not kill—thou shalt not kill'—but I done it—I done this—these hands done it—see, God? They are wet with this deed—but I swear the law drove me to it—the law saddled a hundred offenses to my life—but I'm here now, God—I bring these offenses here—I done it—I done it—these hands done it—these two blood-stained hands—the law made me—I swear it—listen—you can't get me—you can't rend me—you starved heathens—stand back—stand back, you dungeon-dogs—stand away there, you ratty jail-birds—you can't get at me, ha, ha, ha!—gnaw your iron cuffs apart first—bite your cuffs in two—gnaw them until your teeth shatter, and your gums flood your felon throats—ha, ha, ha!—Oh, my head, my head—Christ, the world's afire—the world's burning up—listen—listen——!"
Hereupon the screech-owl awoke to quick animation. With trembling wings slightly lifted, it thrust its head through the broken window-pane and uttered a scathing arraignment—a long-drawn, graduating, derisive titter that raked the ghoulish solitude of the church like perdition-music—a mockery medley wafted from a cortège of the doomed.
As the last prickly notes dropped down and trailed like a thread of sin back into the owl's speckled breast, the gory raw-head blundered around and fixed that mawkish, ghastly hell-mask full upon the girl and two boys, whose feet were locked immovably to the floor with terror. Then in emulation, seemingly, of the owl's tittering, it belched its awful laugh into their faces. Such a laugh—its chilling, unhallowed screech launched a petrific measure of untold vocal wickedness, an awesome, direful gamut of echoes that gathered volume, scattered and split, crossed and recrossed; reverberating through the death-still atmosphere like the hysterical chattering of a band of stricken, tortured souls.