Page:Weird Tales Volume 12 Issue 05 (1928-11).djvu/146

An old castle, formerly used by the Knights of the Temple in their dread rites, is removed from the island of Cyprus and set up again, stone by stone, in the State of New Jersey. Mystic ceremonies are held in its cryptic inner chapel, and the ghosts and elementals that infest the old building, strengthened by the seances of the guests in the castle, sweep out over the New Jersey countryside seeking victims for their fearsome ritual.

The state militia proving utterly ineffective against the dread menace, the little French ghost-breaker Jules de Grandin brings occult forces into play in a desperate attempt to extirpate the evil, to free the countryside of the terror, and to save the life and reason of the beautiful Dunroe O'Shane. A battle royal is waged between de Grandin and the dark forces of evil in that inner chapel of mystic horror. This fascinating story will be printed complete in the

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lad!" and so stared, and choked and died.

Dawn was flinging its white brilliance across the island when Warren and David made ready at last to leave. In the interval they had buried the anthropologist's body in the fast-freezing earth, where it had fallen, and then had taken their way slowly down from the mound and across the island, across that desert of stupendous death where the hordes of the newly released toad-men lay black and stiff and dead, struck down by the polar cold. Now, after an examination which showed it to be comparatively uninjured, they were wheeling Warren's plane into position for a take-off on the long, level beach.

In a moment Warren was in the pilot's seat and his companion stepped toward the propeller, then paused, glancing away into the island where the mound and its great cylinder rose black against the sunrise. The airman saw now that his lips were working.

"That cylinder," McQuirk was whispering, "the domes, the secrets inside them—we gain all that, the world gains that. And we lose——"

He turned, abruptly, spun the propeller, once, twice, and then the motor had caught and was roaring its song of power. In a moment McQuirk was in the seat behind the airman and the plane was rolling down the long beach, slanting sharply up into the sunlight and speeding toward the south.

Moments they flashed on, and then, with a common impulse, the two turned and looked back. Far behind, now, lay the island, a dark-brown mass against the gray, berg-dotted sea. On its surface there seemed to glitter a myriad brilliant points of light, shining, dazzling. It was the light of the rising sun, glancing off the myriad domes of metal which had held for eons the menace and the power of the polar doom.