FETTERED
A Serial Novel
The Story So Far
Dr. Dale Armitage warns his neighbors, Ewan Gillespie and his twin sister Bessie, who have come to the woods to spend the summer, that they must never invite his wife, Gretel Armitage, into their cabin, under pain of dire consequences so fearful they they would not believe him should he explain what those consequences were. He leaves with Bessie the key to the lodge where he keeps his wife imprisoned behind heavy bars, while he goes to the funeral of a child which has died of pernicious anemia.
Ewan, fearing the doctor's lodge may be struck by lightning, rescues Gretel in a roaring thunderstorm and brings her to his cabin, but is forced to carry her across the stream that runs between. Bessie surprizes Gretel in the dead of night, her lips pressed against Ewan's throat, and the next day Ewan is faint and white, and complains of pain in his throat from what he thinks is a spider-bite. Dr. Armitage explains to Bessie that Gretel is a human vampire, who has brought about the death of a seven-year-old child, and that she will attack Ewan against if she gets the opportunity. He places wild-rose sprays within the cabin, and orders Bessie to let her brother sleep and to admit no one; but Gretel sweeps across the stream in a cold, roaring wind and enters the cabin. Her eyes transfix Bessie, lulling her into drowsiness; and as Bessie feels Gretel's arms around her and Gretel's mouth against her throat, she utters a wailing cry of despair, and hears Dr. Armitage's answering shout from the forest.
CHAPTER 10
RESCUE
There were swimming, swirling clouds of gray and black, flecked with ruby points of dancing light. There were humming, droning sounds, broken in upon by staccato sharpnesses of speech, cracked by emotion into short but pregnant words. There was an aching of muscles, as if she had received repeated blows.
Bessie Gillespie struggled back into consciousness that did not for some time seem normal to her, for it was a strange and mysterious scene upon which her hazel eyes finally opened, half dazed.
She lay where Gretel Armitage must have flung her drooping body when the doctor had burst into the cabin with his electric flash; stretched in crumpled relaxation upon the board flooring, bruised and aching.
The doctor had stood his flashlight upon the floor in order to give light and at the same time leave his hands free for whatever action he found it necessary to take. The circles of light from the torch illuminated the ceiling and but dimly gave relief to the white faces of the doctor and his wife, as they confronted each other.
Gretel was obviously at bay. Her blue eyes were deep spheres of strange ruby fire. Between snarling red lips shone the pointed sharpness of her glistening white teeth. The expression upon that fair face was the look of a thwarted fiend. Her hands, lifted on either side of that terrible countenance, were like the talons of some unclean bird of prey. She crouched and cringed, as if in dire fear and fury.
The doctor, on the contrary, stood upright, his deep eyes glowing with what seemed to the wondering Bessie a strangely comforting radiance. His melancholy face was wearier than ever; sadder than ever; as if he had all at once found yet another burden to lay upon his soul. But behind that sadness a something surged and swelled and broke out in his few words that seemed charged with a more than ordinary pregnancy and power. It was as if he felt within himself that which would bear him on to triumph over evil, and feeling it, he had no fear for the outcome.
Painfully drawing herself into a
