THE CITADEL OF FEAR Francis Stevens (Gertrude Barrows Bennett) The Dunyazad Digital Library www.dunyazad-library.net The Citadel of Fear Francis Stevens (Gertrude Barrows Bennett) First published 1918–19 The Dunyazad Digital Library www.dunyazad-library.net The Dunyazad Digital Library (named in honor of Shahrazad’s sister) is based in Austria. According to Austrian law, the text of this book is in the public domain (“gemeinfrei”), since all rights expire 70 years after the author’s death. If this does not apply in the place of your residence, please respect your local law. However, with the exception of making backup or printed copies for your own personal use, you may not copy, forward, reproduce or by any means publish this e- book without our previous written consent. This restriction is only valid as long as this e-book is available at the www.dunyazad-library.net website. This e-book has been carefully edited. It may still contain OCR or transcription errors, but also intentional deviations from the available printed source(s) in typog- raphy and spelling to improve readability or to correct obvious printing errors. A Dunyazad Digital Library book Selected, edited and typeset by Robert Schaechter First published December 2019 Release 1.0a · August 2020 2 About the Author Gertrude Mabel Barrows was born in Minneapolis in 1884. In 1909 she married the British journalist and explorer Stewart Bennett, and they moved to Philadelphia; he died the following year while on a treasure hunting expedition. With a new-born daughter to raise, Gertrude Bennett continued working as a stenographer as she had before her marriage. When her father died toward the end of World War I, she assumed care for her invalid mother. Much earlier, at the age of 17, she had written a science fiction story which got published in 1904 in the Mazazine Argosy, now she resumed writing to add to her income, her short stories and novels getting published in various magazines. A few early works apart, all of her work dates from the period of 1917–1920; in 1920, after her mother had died, she stopped writing. Little is known about her later life. In the mid-1920s she placed her daughter in the care of friends and moved to California, where she died in 1948. In the short period in which she was active as an author, Gertrude Barrows Bennett wrote five novels (The Citadel of Fear, The Labyrinth, The Heads of Cerberus, Avalon, and Claimed) as well as a number of short stories and novellas. Though she is little known today, her texts, still very readable, occupy an important space in the history of fantasy and science fiction literature — Gary C. Hoppenstand has called her “the woman who invented dark fantasy,” Scott Lazarus “possibly the most important female writer of speculative fiction that you’ve probably never heard of” and “one of the founders of the weird tales tradition, and the most important woman writer of fantasy in the early 3 pulp era,” and adds that “The Heads of Cerberus is sometimes noted as the precursor of the entire parallel worlds tradition in fiction.” Gertrude Barrows Bennett deserves recognition as a major author, and her work can still fascinate and entertain. 4 About this Edition The version of this text that I have access to (originally it had been published in 1918 in a pulp magazine, The Argosy, in serialized form) had a few obvious errors, whether already having been in the original or having crept in later. I have done my best to fix them — for instance: Well over six fit [feet] in height … The fathered [feathered] serpent. Here come[s] Topiltzen, Nacoc-Yaotl’s master priests [priest] … Rhodes pointed at to [at the] turf in front of them. … this section of suburbia [was] one vast and trackless forest. And so on. There probably remain errors which I have missed — if you find any, please let me know. The division of the text in parts I and II is mine. Chapters and scene breaks of the present edition do not deliberately deviate from the original, but a few scene breaks may have been deleted or added. Genitives of personal names ending on s are, according to present rules, written with a second s after the apostrophe (Boots’s shout of mirth, Rhodes’s automatic pistol, instead of the original Boots’ and Rhodes’). The hyphens in to-day and to-morrow have been removed. The spelling of fantom has been modernized to phantom. Italics may not always conform to the original; I have not italicized the words débris and focus, as they can be considered to be part of regular modern English vocabulary. 5 Table of Contents I Chapter 1: Hidden in the Hills 9 Chapter 2: The Moth Girl 26 Chapter 3: The Guardians of the Hills 35 Chapter 4: Tlapallan or —— 50 Chapter 5: Gold 61 Chapter 6: The Black Eidolon 70 Chapter 7: The Cloak of Xolotl 78 Chapter 8: Before the Black Shrine 87 Chapter 9: Maxatla Speaks 98 II Chapter 10: The First Visitation 111 Chapter 11: The Red-Black Trail 126 Chapter 12: The Opinion of Mr. MacClellan 134 Chapter 13: The Bungalow Sold 139 Chapter 14: The Second Visitation 146 Chapter 15: The Third Visitation 151 Chapter 16: Admitted 161 Chapter 17: A Surprise and a Disappointment 177 Chapter 18: A Voice 188 Chapter 19: Cliona Receives a Guest 202 Chapter 20: The Fourth Visitation 221 Chapter 21: Cliona Meets a Stranger 236 Chapter 22: A Herder of Goblins 243 6 Chapter 23: The “Lord of Fear” 249 Chapter 24: A Lonely Traveler 255 Chapter 25: The White Beast-Hand 256 Chapter 26: To Undine 276 Chapter 27: Strange Victim — Stranger Conqueror 280 Chapter 28: Rival Claimants 282 Chapter 29: A Golden Flask 293 Chapter 30: The Gate Lodge Again 300 Chapter 31: A Strange Battlefield 304 Chapter 32: The Battle of the Doorway 309 Chapter 33: As One Triumphant 325 7 I 8 Chapter 1 Hidden in the Hills “Don’t leave me —— All — in ——” The words were barely distin- guishable, but the tall figure in the lead, striding heavily through the soft, impeding sand, heard the mutter of them and paused without turning. He stood with drooped head and shoulders, as if the oppres- sion of the cruel, naked sun were an actual weight that pressed him earthward. His companion, plowing forward with an ultimate effort, sagged from the hips and fell face downward in the sand. Apathetically the tall man looked at the twitching heap beside him. Then he raised his head and stared through a reddening film at the vast, encircling torture pen in which they both were trapped. The sun, he thought, had grown monstrous and swallowed all the sky. No blue was anywhere. Brass above, soft, white-hot iron beneath, and all tinged to redness by the film of blood over sand-tormented eyes. Beyond a radius of thirty yards his vision blurred and ceased, but into that radius something flapped down and came tilting awkwardly across the sand, long wings half-spread, yellow head lowered, bold with an avid and loathsome curiosity. “You!” whispered the man hoarsely, and shook one great, red fist at the thing. “You’ll not get your dinner off me nor him while my one foot can follow the other!” And with that he knelt down by the prostrate one, drew the limp arms about his own neck, bowed powerful shoulders to support the body, and heaved himself up again. Swaying, he stood for a moment with feet spread, then began a new and staggering progress. The king- 9 vulture flapped lazily from his path and upward to renew its circling patience. After years in hell, where he was doomed forever to bear an intol- erable burden across seas of smoking fire, the tall man regained a glimmering of reason. It came with the discovery that he was lying flat on his stomach, arms and breast immersed in liquid coolness, and that he was gulping water as fast and as greedily as swollen tongue and lips would permit. With a self-control that saved two lives, he forced himself to cease drinking, but laved in the water, played in it with his hands, could scarcely believe in it, and at the same time thanked God for its reality. So sanity came closely back, and with clearing vision he saw the stream that meant salvation to sundrained tissues. It was a deep, narrow, rapid flood, rushing darkly by and tugging at his arms with the force of its turbulent current. Flowing out from a rocky gorge, it lost itself again round a curving height of rocks. What of the white-hot torture-pit? He was in shadow now, blessed, cool, revivifying. But — alone. Dragging himself by sheer will-power from the water, the tall man wiped at his eyes and stared about. There close by lay a motionless heap of brown, coated with sand in dusty patches, white sand in the tumble of black hair at one end of it. Very cautiously the tall man got to his feet and took an uncertain step toward the huddled figure. Then he shook one dripping red fist toward a wide, shimmering expanse that lay beyond the shadow of the rocks. “You missed us,” he muttered with a chuckle almost childishly triumphant, “and you’ll never get us — not while — my one foot can follow the other!” 10 Then he set himself to revive the companion he had carried through torment on his shoulders, bathing the face, administering salvation by cautious driblets on the blackened, leather-dry lips and tongue.