Pigeons from Hell | Page 4

A strong shudder shook Griswell.

"God, how evil that house looks, against those black pines! It looked
sinister from the very first - when we went up the broken walk and saw
those pigeons fly up from the porch---"
"Pigeons?" Buckner cast him a quick glance. "You saw the pigeons?"
"Why, yes! Scores of them perching on the porch railing."
They strode on for a moment in silence, before Buckner said abruptly:
"I've lived in this country all my life. I've passed the old Blassenville
place a thousand times, I reckon, at all hours of the day and night. But I
never saw a pigeon anywhere around it, or anywhere else in these
woods."
"There were scores of them," repeated Griswell, bewildered.
"I've seen men who swore they'd seen a flock of pigeons perched along
the balusters just at sundown," said Buckner slowly. "Negroes, all of
them except one man. A tramp. He was buildin' a fire in the yard,
aimin' to camp there that night. I passed along there about dark, and he
told me about the pigeons. I came back by there the next mornin'. The
ashes of his fire were there, and his tin cup, and skillet where he'd fried
pork, and his blankets looked like they'd been slept in. Nobody ever
saw him again. That was twelve years ago. The blacks say they can see
the pigeons, but no black would pass along this road between sundown
and sunup. They say the pigeons are the souls of the Blassenvilles, let
out of hell at sunset. The Negroes say the red glare in the west is the
light from hell, because then the gates of hell are open, and the
Blassenvilles fly out."
"Who were the Blassenvilles?" asked Griswell, shivering.
"They owned all this land here. French-English family. Came here from
the West Indies before the Louisiana Purchase. The Civil War ruined
them, like it did so many. Some were killed in the War; most of the
others died out. Nobody's lived in the Manor since 1890 when Miss
Elizabeth Blassenville, the last of the line, fled from the old house one
night like it was a plague spot, and never came back to it - this your

auto?"
They halted beside the car, and Griswell stared morbidly at the grim
house. Its dusty panes were empty and blank; but they did not seem
blind to him. It seemed to him that ghastly eyes were fixed hungrily on
him through those darkened panes. Buckner repeated his question.
"Yes. Be careful. There's a snake on the seat - or there was."
"Not there now," grunted Buckner, tying his horse and pulling an
electric torch out of the saddle-bag. "Well, let's have a look."
He strode up the broken brick walk as matter-of-factly as if he were
paying a social call on friends. Griswell followed close at his heels, his
heart pounding suffocatingly. A scent of decay and moldering
vegetation blew on the faint wind, and Griswell grew faint with nausea,
that rose from a frantic abhorrence of these black woods, these ancient
plantation houses that hid forgotten secrets of slavery and bloody pride
and mysterious intrigues. He had thought of the South as a sunny, lazy
land washed by soft breezes laden with spice and warm blossoms,
where life ran tranquilly to the rhythm of black folk singing in
sunbathed cottonfields. But now he had discovered another,
unsuspected side - a dark, brooding, fear-haunted side, and the
discovery repelled him.
The oaken door sagged as it had before. The blackness of the interior
was intensified by the beam of Buckner's light playing on the sill. That
beam sliced through the darkness of the hallway and roved up the stair,
and Griswell held his breath, clenching his fists. But no shape of lunacy
leered down at them. Buckner went in, walking light as a cat, torch in
one hand, gun in the other.
As he swung his light into the room across from the stairway, Griswell
cried out - and cried out again, almost fainting with the intolerable
sickness at what he saw. A trail of blood drops led across the floor,
crossing the blankets Branner had occupied, which lay between the
door and those in which Griswell had lain. And Griswell's blankets had
a terrible occupant. John Branner lay there, face down, his cleft head

revealed in merciless clarity in the steady light. His outstretched hand
still gripped the haft of a hatchet, and the blade was imbedded deep in
the blanket and the floor beneath, just where Griswell's head had lain
when he slept there.
A momentary rush of blackness engulfed Griswell. He was not aware
that he staggered, or that Buckner caught him. When he could see and
hear again, he was violently sick and hung his head against