Free Priestess of Murder by Arthur Leo Zagat

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter I. The Monster Of West Cliff!
Chapter II. The Phantom In The Trees
Chapter III. A Dreamland Of Dread
Chapter IV. Master Of The Monster
Chapter V. Into The Grisly Night
Chapter VI. Monster At Play
Chapter VII. A Bargain With The Fiend
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I. — THE MONSTER OF WEST CLIFF!
    THE house was full of whispers. Leila Monroy, pathetically
small in the huge, wing-sided easy chair, fumbled at her throat. A sob was
trying to rise there, knotting her muscles with a sort of physical pain.
    The house was full of whispers. The ancient farmhouse that always had been
her home was an abode of brooding dread, a place of dark despair. The
groaning of the old timbers' drying fibers seemed terribly loud in the
oppressive silence. They came from the very walls about Leila; from the
age-darkened rafters overhead; from the ominous gloom of the entrance hallway
that somehow repelled the living-room light; from the broad staircase
twisting upward out of that foyer to appallingly empty obscurity above.
    The house was full of whispers, shredding Leila's frayed nerves with
terrible reminders of her day's long agony. Just such a place of muted,
ominous sounds had the courtroom been. Unshed tears, through the anguished
hours, had blurred its crowded benches; and the only reality had been the
gaunt, suffering figure of her grey-faced father in the prisoner's dock. But
the whispers had been inescapable. All day they had hissed at her, as they
were hissing now: mutterings of horror as witness after witness had damned
Justin Monroy with hushed tales of brutal, unutterably savage killing; gasps
of outrage when Leila herself gave halting testimony that she had been with
her father, here in this room, all the fatal hour between the time when Shean
Rourke had last been seen alive and the time when Foster Corbett had found
his hacked and mangled corpse beneath the poplars dividing the two farms.
    Whispers had met the exhausted girl—whispers of tight-lipped
condemnation—when at last she had stumbled down from the witness chair;
and the farmer-women's Sunday silks had rustled, self-righteously, drawing
away from the defiling touch of the girl who, hostile eyes said, had lied
desperately to save a blood-guilty slayer.
    Whispers, whispers, whispers—seething out of the pulsating silence
as the stony-faced jury marched back into their box.
    And then the whispers had become a soundless scream searing Leila's breast
as the dreadful verdict soughed from the foreman's tight throat.
    "Murder! While insane!"
    Insane! The recollection flung Leila Monroy up out of her chair, held her
rigid in distress. Insane! The word hissed within her skull, hissed from the
stark vacancy in which she was so utterly alone with terror and despair.
Slithering foliage, stirred by a swiftly rising wind, hissed it at her from
the terrible outer night. Insane!
    Insane! The kindly, tender old man to whose gnarled hand she had clung as
the brown clods thudded on the drab wood of her mother's coffin; the hard-
working, weather-beaten oldster who had been father and mother to her through
so many years—a madman! Her father! From whose veins came the blood
surging now so darkly in her veins.
    Leila quivered. Tremors ran through the long, delicate curves of her slim
form. The tiny oval of her small-featured countenance blanched with a new
dismay. His blood in her veins! What if that blood were tainted with a
foul lust to kill, with an atavistic urge to tear with fang and claw, to rend
human flesh and taste the warm, salt-sweet tang of human life-fluid on
smacking, gory lips? What if she had not really drowsed that half-hour whose
lapse fatally had invalidated her testimony? Had she run, instead, ravening
by his side while a fearful heritage of homicidal madness blotted memory from
her soul as the alienists said it had blotted recollection from Justin
Monroy's?
    Abruptly the light within was paled by a blue blaze glaring in through