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

PIT OF MADNESS, by E. Hoffmann Price
Bayonne seemed incredibly ancient and lovely to Denis Crane as he headed
from the wine shop to the Biarritz Highway and across the sombre parkway
toward the Gate of Spain. The cathedral spires were silver lance-heads reaching
into the moonglow, and the city was a pearl gray enchantment afloat on a sea of
writhing river mists: yet that blood soaked soil whispered to Denis Crane as he
walked.
This was unholy ground, honeycombed with crypts in which Roman
legionnaires had worshiped Mithra, and watched frenzied devotees slash and
mutilate and emasculate themselves in honor of bloodthirsty Cybele. This corner
of France was the home of witch and wizard and warlock.
A shiver rippled down Crane’s lean, broad-shouldered body as he glanced to
his left and saw the ominous cluster of ancient trees that overshadowed the low
gray cupola of the spring where Satan and Saint Leon once had met—
Another medieval legend. Well, and here is the causeway, and just ahead, rue
d’Espagne, with the yellow glow from the windows of Basque wine shops
breaking its narrow gloom.
But the scream that came from his left told him how far from warm humanity
he was, however near the lights might be. It was the sobbing, desperate outcry of
some woman whose last gasp could not quite voice her terror.
Crane’s suntan became a sickly yellow in that spectral, mist-filtered moonlight.
He wheeled, stared into the swirling grayness of the dry moat that girdled the
thirty-foot city wall. His face lengthened, tightened into grim angles, and his
eyes narrowed as he listened. Silence—sinister…poisonous.…Then that dreadful
wail again. It was closer now, and though it was inarticulate he knew that the
woman was crying for help and despaired of getting it.
An everlasting instant, and she burst from the mist and into the foreground at
the foot of the causeway that blocked the moat. Her abrupt appearance shocked
Crane, though he knew that it was but the illusion of fog and moonlight.
Her hair was a streaming blackness, and her body a pearl-white glow. Her feet
and legs were as bare as her torso. All she wore was a flimsy shawl caught at the
shoulder, draping slantwise to veil one breast, and flaring out, to shroud the
opposite hip. Crane distinguished no feature but her mouth. It was distorted in a
cry she could not utter.
He plunged down the steep slope of the causeway and into the moat. Her legs
gave way, pitching her headlong to the sand. She lay there, arms sprawled out.