/vicevise &

• a daring story of
Devil-worship— the Black
Mass — strange suicides
By SEABURY QUINN

H. P. Lovecraft
Henry Kuttner
Thorp McClusky
Jack Williamson

W. T— 1

257 ,

A MAGAZINE OF THE BIZARRE AND UNUSUAL

REGISTERED IN U.S. PATENT OFFICE.

Volume 31 CONTENTS FOR MARCH, 1938 Number 3

Cover Design M. Brundage

Illustrating "Incense of Abomination "

"Like one, that on a lonesome road” Virgil Finlay 257

Pictorial interpretation from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner "

Incense of Abomination Seabury Quinn 259

A daring story of Devil-worship, strange suicides, and Jules de Grandin

The Poets Robert E. Howard 279

Posthumous verse, by a late master of weird literature

The Thing on the Floor Thorp McClusky 280

The story of an unscrupulous hypnotist, and the frightful thing called Stepan

Dreadful Sleep Jack Williamson 298

A romantic and tragic tale of fearsome beings that lay in slumber under the antarctic ice

The Shadow on the Screen Henry Kuttner 320

A weird story of Hollywood and the silver screen

Beyond the Wall of Sleep H. P. I.ovecraft 331

What splendid yet terrible experiences came to the boor mountaineer while he slept?

The Hairy Ones Shall Dance (end) Gans T. Field 339

A novel of terror and sudden death, and the frightful thing that laired in the Devil's Croft

Guarded Mearle Prout 354

A brief tale of murder — by the author of "The House of the Worm"

The Teakwood Box Johns Harrington 358

San Pedro Joe found the secret in that intricately carved Oriental box

To Howard Phillips Lovecraft Francis Flagg 361

Sonnet to a late master of weird literature

The Head in the Window . . . Roy Temple House 362

A brief tale, adapted jrom the German of Wilhelm ton Scheie

Weird Story Reprint:

The Girl from Samarcand E. Hoffmann Price 367

A favorite tale by a master of fantasy, reprinted by popular demand

The Eyrie 378

Wherein the readers of WEIRD TALES voice their opinions

Published monthly by the Popular Fiction Publishing Company, 2457 East Washington Street, Indianapolis, Ind. Entered
as second-class matter March 20 , 1923, at the post office at Indianapolis, Ind., under the act of March 3, 1879. Single copies,
25 cents. Subscribtion rates : One year in the United States and possessions, Cuba, Mexico, South America, Spain, $2.50 ;
Canada, $2.75; elsewhere, $3.00. English office: Otis A. Kline, do John Paradise, 86 Strand, W. C. 2, London. The pub-
lishers are not responsible for the loss of unsolicited manuscripts, although every care will be taken of such material while io
their possession. The contents of this magazine are fully protected by copyright and must not be reproduced either wholly or ia
part without permission from the publishers.

NOTE — All manuscripts and communications should be addressed to the publishers' Chicago office at 840 North Michigan
Avenue, Chicago, 111. FARNSWORTH WRJGHT, Editor.

Copyright 1938, by the Popular Fiction Publishing Company.

COPYRIGHTED IN GREAT BRITAIN *

WEIRD TALES ISSUED 1st OF EACH MONTH

258

By SEABURY QUINN

A daring story of Devil-worship, .the Black Mass , strange suicides, and the
salvation of one who had sinned greatly, yet was truly
repentant — a tale of Jules de Grandin

**. . . incense is an abomination unto me."

— Isaiah, 1 , 13 .

D etective sergeant cos-

TELLO looked fixedly at the
quarter-inch of ash on his cigar,
as though he sought solution of his prob-
lem in its fire-cored grayness. *' ’Tis th'

damndest mixed*up mess I’ve iver hap-
pened up against,” he told us solemnly.
* 'Here’s this Eldridge felly, young an’
rich an’ idle, wid niver a care ter ’is name,
savin’ maybe, how he’d spend th’ next
month's income, then zowie! he ups an’
hangs hisself. We finds him swingin’
259

260

WEIRD TALES

from th’ doorpost of his bedroom wid
his bathrobe girdle knotted around ‘is
neck an’ about a mile o’ tongue sthickin’
out. Suicide? Sure, an’ what else could
it be wid a felly found sthrung up in a
tight-locked flat like that?

"Then, widin a week there comes a call
fer us to take it on th’ lam up to th’ house
where Stanley Trivers lived. There he is,
a-layin' on his bathroom floor wid a cut
across ’is throat that ye could put yer foot
into, a’ most. In his pajammies he is, an'
th' blood’s run down an’ spoilt ’em good
an’ proper. Suicide again? Well, maybe
so an’ maybe no, fer in all me time I’ve
niver seen a suicidal cut across a felly’s
throat that was as deep where it wound
up as where it stharted. They mostly gits
remorse afore th’ cut is ended, as ye
know, an’ th’ pressure on th’ knife gits
less an' less; so th’ cut’s a whole lot shal-
lower at th’ end than ’twas at th' begin-
nin*. However, th' coroner says it’s sui-
cide, so suicide it is, as far as we’re con-
cerned. Anyhow, gintlemen, in both
these cases th' dead men wuz locked in
their houses, from th’ inside, as wus plain
by th’ keys still bein’ in th’ locks.

"Now comes th’ third one. ’Tis this
Donald Atkins felly, over to th’ Kensing-
ton Apartments. Sthretched on th’ floor
he is, wid a hole bored in 'is forehead an’
th’ blood a-runnin’ over everything. He’s
on 'is back wid a pearl-stocked pistol in
'is hand. Suicide again, says Schultz, me
partner, an’ I’m not th’ one ter say as how
it ain’t, all signs pointin' as they do, still

” He paused and puffed at his cigar

till its gray tip glowed with sullen rose.

Jules de Grandin tweaked a needle-
sharp mustache tip. "Tell me, my ser-
geant,” he commanded, "what is it you
have withheld? Somewhere in the history
of these cases is a factor you have not re-
vealed, some denominator common to
them all which makes your police instinct
doubt your senses’ widence ”

"How’d ye guess it, sot?” the big Irish-
man looked at him admiringly. "Ye’ve

put yer finger right upon it, but' ”

He stifled an embarrassed cough, then,
turning slightly red: " ’Tis th’ perfume,
sor, as makes me wonder.”

"Perfume?” the little Frenchman ech-
oed. "What in Satan’s foul name ”

"Well, sor, I ain’t one o’ them as sees
a woman's skirts a-hidin’ back of ivery
crime, though you an’ I both knows
there’s mighty few crimes committed that
ain’t concerned wid cash or women, savin’
when they’re done fer both. But these
here cases have me worried. None o’
these men wuz married, an’, so far as
I’ve found out, none o’ them wuz kapin'
steady company, yet — git this, sor; 'tis
small, but maybe it’s important — there
wuz a smell o’ perfume hangin’ round
each one of ’em, an’ 'twas th’ same in
ivery case. No sooner had I got a look
at this pore Eldridge felly hangin’ like a
joint o’ beef from his own doorpost than
me nose begins a-twitchin'. 'Wuz he a
pansy, maybe?’ I wonders when I smelt
it first, for 'twas no shavin' lotion or toilet
water, but a woman's heavy scent, strong
an' swate an’ — what’s it that th' ads all
say? — distinctive. Yis, sor, that’s th'
word fer it, distinctive. Not like anything
I’ve smelt before, but kind o' like a mixin’
up o' this here ether that they use ter put
a man ter slape before they takes 'is leg
off, an’ kind o’ like th’ incense they use
in church, an’ maybe there wuz sumpin
mixed wid it that wasn’t perfume afther
all, sumpin that smelt rank an' sickly-
like, th’ kind o’ smell ye smell when they
takes a floater from th’ bay, sor.

"Well, I looks around ter see where
it’s a-comin’ from, an’ it’s strongest in th'
bedroom; but divil a sign o’ any woman
bein’ there I find, 'ceptin’ fer th’ smell o’
perfume.

"So when we runs in on th’ Trivers
suicide, an’ I smells th’ same perfume

INCENSE OF ABOMINATION

261

again, I say that this is sumpin more than
mere coincidence, but th' same thing hap-
pens there. Th’ smell is strongest in th’
bedroom, but there ain’t any sign that he’d
had company th' night before; so just ter
make sure I takes th’ casin’s off th’ pil-
lows an’ has th’ boys at th’ crime lab’ra-
tory look at ’em. Divil a trace o’ rouge or
powder do they find.

"Both these other fellies kilt their-
selves at night or early in th' mornin’, so,
o’ course, their beds wuz all unmade, but
when we hustle over ter th’ Kensington
Apartments ter see about this Misther At-
kins, 'tis just past three o’clock. Th’ doc-
tor says that he’s been dead a hour or
more; yet when I goes into his bedroom
th’ covers is pushed down, like he’s been
slapin’ there an’ got up in a hurry, an’ th’
perfume’s strong enough ter knock ye
down, a’most. Th’ boys at th’ crime lab
say there’s not a trace o’ powder on th’
linen, an’ by th’ time I gits th’ pillows to
’em th’ perfume’s faded out."

He looked at us with vaguely troubled
eyes and ran his hand across his mouth.
" 'Tis meself that’s goin’ nuts about these
suicides a-comin' one on top th’ other, an’
this perfume bobbin' up in every case!"
he finished.

De Grandin pursed his lips. "You
would know this so strange scent if you
encountered it again?"

"Faith, sor, I’d know it in me slape!”

"And you have never met with it be-
fore?"

"Indade an’ I had not, nayther before
nor since, savin’ in th’ imayjate prisence
o' them three dead corpses."

"One regrets it is so evanescent. Per-
haps if I could smell it I might be able to
identify it. I recall when I was serving
with le surete we came upon a band of
scoundrels making use of a strange Indian
drug called by the Hindoos chhota maut ,
or little death. It was a subtle powder
c which made those inhaling it go mad, or

fall into a coma simulating death if they
inspired enough. Those naughty fellows
mixed the drug with incense which they
caused to be burned in their victims'
rooms. Some went mad and some ap-
peared to die. One of those who went

insane committed suicide ”

"Howly Mither, an’ ye think we may
be up against a gang like that, sor?”

"One cannot say, mon vieux. Had I a
chance to sniff this scent, perhaps I could
have told you. Its odor is not one that is
soon forgotten. As it is" — he raised his
shoulders in a shrug — "what can one
do?”

"Will ye be afther holdin’ yerself in
readiness ter come a-runnin’ if they’s an-
other o' these suicides, sor?" the big de-
tective asked as he rose to say good-night.
"I’d take it kindly if ye would.”

"You may count on me, my friend.
A bientot," the little Frenchman answered
with a smile.

T he storm had blown itself out earlier
in the evening, but the streets were
still bright with the filmy remnant of the
sleety rain and the moon was awash in a
breaking surf of wind-clouds. It was
longer by the north road, but with the
pavements slick as burnished glass I pre-
ferred to take no chances and had throt-
tled down my engine almost to a walking
pace as we climbed the gradient leading
to North Bridge. De Grandin sank his
chin into the fur of his upturned coat
collar and nodded sleepily. The party at
the Merrivales had been not at all amus-
ing, and w'e were due at City Hospital at
seven in the morning. "Ah, bah," he
murmured drowsily, "we were a pair of
fools, my friend; we forgot a thing of
great importance when we left the house
tonight.”

"U’m?” I grunted. "What?"

"To stay there,” he returned. "Had
we but the sense le bon Dieu gives an un-

262

WEIRD TALES

fledged gosling, we should have — sapristi!
Stop him, he is intent on self-destruction!”

At his shouted warning I looked to-
ward the footwalk and descried a figure
in a heavy ulster climbing up the guard
rail. Shooting on my power, I jerked the
car ahead, then cut the clutch and jammed
the brakes down hard, swinging us
against the curb abreast of the intending
suicide. I kicked the door aside and raced
around the engine-hood, but de Grandin
disdained such delays and vaulted over-
side, half leaping, half sliding on the
slippery pavement and cannoning full-
tilt against the man who sought to climb
the breast-high railing. 1r Par bleu, you
shall not!” he exclaimed as he grasped
the other’s legs with outflung arms. "It
is wet down there, Monsieur, and most
abominably cold. Wait for summer if you
care to practise diving!”

The man kicked viciously, but the lit-
tle Frenchman hung on doggedly, and as
the other loosed his hold upon the rail
they both came crashing to the pavement
where they rolled and thrashed like fight-
ing dogs.

I hovered near the melee, intent on giv-
ing such assistance as I could, but my help
was not required; for as I reached to
snatch the stranger’s collar, de Grandin
gave a quick twist, arched his body upon
neck and heels and with a blow as rapid
as a striking snake’s chopped his adversary
on the Adam's apple with his stiffened
hand. The result was instantaneous. The
larger man collapsed as if he had been
shot, and my little friend slipped out
from underneath him, teeth flashing in
an impish grin, small blue eyes agleam.
"A knowledge of jiu-jutsu comes in
handy now and then,” he panted as he
rearranged his clothing. "For a moment
I had fears that he would take me with
him to a watery bed.”

"Well, what shall we do with him?”
I asked. "He’s out completely, and we

can’t afford to leave him here. He’ll
surely try to kill himself again if ”

"Parbleu! Attendez, s’il vous plait!” he
interrupted. ,r Le parjum — do you smell
him?” He paused with back-thrown head,
narrow nostrils quivering as he sniffed
the moist, cold air.

There was no doubt of it. Faint and
growing quickly fainter, but plainly no-
ticeable, the aura of a scent hung in the
atmosphere. It was an odd aroma, not
wholly pleasant, yet distinctly fascinating,
seeming to combine the heavy sweetness
of patchouli with the bitterness of frank-
incense and the penetrating qualities of
musk and civet; yet underlying it there
was a faint and slightly sickening odor of
corruption.

"Why, I never smelled ” I began,

but de Grandin waved aside my observa-
tion.

"Nor I,” he nodded shortly, "but un-
less I am at fault this is the perfume
which the good Costello told us of. Can-
not you see, my friend? We have here
our laboratory specimen, an uncompleted
suicide with the redolence of this mysteri-
ous scent upon it. Help me lift him in
the car, mon vieux; we have things to say
to this one. We shall ask him, by ex-
ample, why it was "

"Suppose that he won’t talk?” I
broke in.

"Ha, you suppose that! If your sup-
position proves correct and he is of the
obstinacy, you shall see a beautiful ex-
ample of the third degree. You shall see
me turn him inside out as if he were a
lady’s glove. I shall creep into his mind,
me. I shall — mordieu, before the night is
done I damn think I shall have at least a
partial answer to the good Costello's puz-
zle! Come, let us be of haste; en avant !”

D espite his height the salvaged man
did not weigh much, and we had no
trouble getting him inside the car. In

INCENSE OF ABOMINATION

2 6$

fifteen minutes we were home, just as
our rescued human flotsam showed signs
of returning consciousness.

"Be careful,” warned de Grandin as
he helped the passenger alight. "If you
behave we shall treat you with the kind-
ness, but if you try the monkey’s tricks
I have in readiness a second portion of the
dish I served you on the Pont du Nord.

"Here,” he added as we led our captive
to the study, "this is the medicine for
those who feel at odds with life.” He
poured a gill of Scots into a tumbler and
poised the siphon over it. "Will you have
soda with your whisky,” he inquired, “or
do you like it unpolluted?”

"Soda, please,” the other answered
sulkily, drained his glass in two huge
gulps and held it out again.

"Eh bien,” the Frenchman chuckled,
"your troubles have not dulled your ap-
petite, it seems. Drink, my friend, drink
all you wish, for the evening is still young
and we have many things to talk of, thou
and I.”

The visitor eyed him sullenly as he
took a sip from his fresh glass. "I sup-
pose you think you’ve done your Boy
Scout’s good deed for today?” he mut-
tered.

"Metis out, mats certaitiement” the
Frenchman nodded vigorously. "We have
saved you from irreparable wrong, my
friend. Le bon Dieu did not put us
here to ”

"That’s comic!” the other burst out
with a cackling laugh. " 'Le bon Diet ? —
much use He has for me!”

De Grandin lowered his arching brows
a little; the effect was a deceptively mild,
thoughtful frown. "So-o,” he murmured,
"that is the way of it? You feel that you

have been cast off, that ”

"Why not? Didn’t we — I — cast Him
out? didn’t I deny Him, take service with

His enemies, mock at Him ”

"Be not deceived, my friend” — the

double lines between the Frenchman’s
narrow brows was etched a little deeper
as he answered in an even voice — "God
is not mocked. It is easier to -spit against
the hurricane than jeer at Him. Besides,
He is most merciful, He is compassionate,
and His patience transcends understand-
ing. Wicked we may be, but if we offer

true repentance ’’

"Even if you’ve committed the unpar-
donable sin?”

"Tiens, this peche irremissible of which
the theologians prate so learnedly, yet
which none of them defines? You had a
mother, one assumes; you may have
sinned against her grievously, disap-
pointed her high hopes in you, shown in-
gratitude as black as Satan's shadow,
abused her trust or even done her bodily
hurt. Yet if you went to her sincerely
penitent and told her you were sorry, that
you truly loved her and would sin no
more, parbleu, she would forgive, you
know it! Will the Heavenly Father be
less merciful than earthly parents? Very
well, then. Who can say that he has
sinned past reconciliation?”

"I can; I did — we all did! We cast

God out and embraced Satan ”

Something that was lurking horror
seemed to take form in his eyes, giving
them a stony, glazed appearance. It was
as if a filmy curtain were drawn down
across them, hiding everything within,
mirroring only a swift-mounting terror.

"Ah?” de Grandin murmured thought-
fully. "Now we begin to make the prog-
ress.” Abruptly he demanded:

"You knew Messieurs Eldridge, Tri-
vers and Atkins?” He flung the words
more like a challenging accusation than a
query.

"Yes!”

"And they, too, thought they had
sinned past redemption; they saw in sui-
cide the last hope of escape; they were
concerned with you in this iniquity?”

264

WEIRD TALES

"They were, but no interfering busy-
body stopped them. Let me out of here,
I'm going to ”

"Monsieur,” de Grandin did not raise
his voice, but the look he bent upon the
other was as hard and merciless as though
it were a leveled bayonet, "you are going
to remain right here and tell us how it
came about. You will tell of this trans-
gression which has caused three deaths
already and almost caused a fourth. Do
not fear to speak, my friend. We are
physicians, and your confidence will Be
respected. On the other hand, if you per-
sist in silence we shall surely place you
in restraint. You would like to be lodged
in a madhouse, have your every action
watched, be strapped in a straitjacket if
you attempted self-destruction, hein?"
Slowly spoken, his words had the impact
of a bodily assault, and the other reeled
as from a beating.

"Not that!” he gasped. "O God, any-
thing but that! I’ll tell you everything if
you will promise ”

"You have our word, Monsieur;
say on.”

T he visitor drew his chair up closer to
the fire, as if a sudden cold had
chilled his marrow. He was some fort}’
years of age, slim and quite attractive,
immaculately dressed, well groomed. His
eyes were brown, deep-set and drawn, as
if unutterably weary, with little pouches
under them. His shoulders sagged as if
the weight they bore was too much for
them. His hair was almost wholly gray.
"Beaten” was the only adjective to modi-
fy him.

"I think perhaps you knew my parents,
Doctor Trowbridge,” he began. "My
father was James Balderson.”

I nodded. Jim Balderson had been a
senior when I entered college, and his
escapades were bywords on the campus.
Nothing but the tolerance which stamps

a rich youth’s viciousness as merely indi-
cation of high spirits had kept him from
dismissal since his freshman year, and
faculty and townsfolk sighed with relief
when he took his sheepskin and departed
simultaneously. The Balderson and Ald-
ridge fortunes were combined when he
married Bronson Aldridge’s sole heir and
daughter, and though he settled down in
the walnut-paneled office of the Farmers
Loan & Trust Company, his sons had car-
ried on his youthful zest for getting into
trouble. Drunken driving, divorce cases,
scandals which involved both criminal and
civil courts, were their daily fare. Two
of them had died by violence, one in a
motor smash-up, one when an outraged
husband showed better marksmanship
than self-restraint. One had died of poi-
son liquor in the Prohibition era. We
had just saved die sole survivor from
attempted suicide. "Yes, I knew your
father,” I responded.

"Do you remember Horton Hall?” he
asked.

I bent my brows a moment. "Wasn't
that the school down by the Shrewsbury
where they had a scandal? — something
about the headmaster committing sui-
cide, or ”

"You’re right. That’s it. I was in the
last class there. So were Eldridge, Trivers
and Atkins.

"I was finishing my junior year when
the war broke out in ’seventeen. Dad got
bulletproof commissions for the older
boys, but wouldn’t hear of my enlisting
in the Navy. 'You’ve a job to do right
there at Horton,' he told me. 'Get your
certificate; then we’ll see about your join-
ing up.’ So back I went to finish out my
senior year. Dad didn’t know what he
was doing to me. Things might have
turned out differently if I’d gone in the
service.

"Everyone who could was getting in
the Army or the Navy. We’d lost most

INCENSE OF ABOMINATION

265

of our faculty when I went back in ’eight-
een, and they’d put a new headmaster in,
a Doctor Herbules. Fellows were leaving
right and left, enlisting from the campus
or being called by draft boards, and I
was pretty miserable. One day as I was
walking back from science lab., I ran full-
tilt into old Herbules.

“ 'What’s the matter, Balderson?’ he
asked. 'You look as if you’d lost your last
friend.’

" ‘Well, I have, almost,’ I answered.
‘With so many fellows off at train-
ing-camp, having all kinds of excite-
ment '

" 'You want excitement, eh?’ he inter-
rupted. I can give it to you; such excite-
ment as you’ve never dreamed of. I can

make you ’ He stopped abruptly, and

it seemed to me he looked ashamed of
something, but he’d got my curiosity
roused.

" ’You’re on, sir,' I told him. 'What
is it, a prize-fight?'

"Herbules was queer. Everybody said
so. He couldn’t have been much past
thirty'; yet his hair was almost snow-
white and there was a funny sort o’ peace-
ful expression on his smooth face that
reminded me of something that I couldn’t
quite identify. He had the schoolmaster’s
trick of speaking with a sort of pedantic
precision, and he never raised his voice;
yet when he spoke in chapel we could
understand him perfectly, no matter how
far from the platform we were sitting.
I’d never seen him show signs of excite-
ment before, but now he was breathing
hard and was in such deadly earnest that
his lips were fairly trembling. 'What do
you most want from life?’ he asked me in
a whisper.

" ’Why, I don’t know, just now I’d
like best of all to get into the Army; I’d
like to go to France and bat around with
the mademoiselles, and get drunk any
time I wanted ’

" ’You’d like that sort of thing?’ he
laughed. ’I can give it to you. and more;
more than you ever imagined. Wine and
song and gayety and women; — beautiful,
lovely, cultured women, not the street-
trulls that you’d meet in France — you can
have all this and more, if you want to,
Balderson.’

" ’Lead me to it,’ I replied. ‘When do
we start?’

" Ah, my boy, nothing's given for
nothing. There are some things you’ll
have to do, some promises to make, some-
thing to be paid ”

" 'All right; how much?’ I asked. Dad
was liberal with me. I had a hundred dol-
lars every month for spending money,
and I could always get as much again
from Mother if I worked it right.

" 'No, no; not money,’ he almost
laughed in my face. 'The price of all this
can’t be paid in money. All we ask is
that you give the Master something which
I greatly doubt you realize you have, my
boy.’

"It sounded pretty cock-eyed to me,
but if the old boy really had something
up his sleeve I wanted to know about it
'Count me in,’ I told him. 'What do I do
next?”

"There was no one within fifty yards
of us, but he bent until his lips were al-
most in my ear before he whispered:
"Next Wednesday at midnight, come to
my house.’

" ’Private party, or could I bring a
friend or two?’

"His features seemed to freeze. 'Who .
is the friend?’ he asked.

" 'Well, I’d like to bring Eldridge and
Trivers, and maybe Atkins, too. They’re
all pretty good eggs, and I know they
crave excitement ’

" Oh, by all means, yes. Be sure to
bring them. It’s agreed, then? Next
Wednesday night at twelve, at my house.’

2 66

WEIRD TALES

T T ERBULES was waiting for us in a
IT perfect fever of excitement when
we tiptoed up his front-porch steps on
Wednesday night. He had a domino and
mask for each of us. The dominoes were
fiery red, with hoods that pulled up like
monks’ cowls; the masks were black, and
hideous. They represented long, thin
faces with out- jutting chins; the lips were
purple and set in horrid grins; the eye-
brows were bright scarlet wool and at the
top there was another patch of bright red
worsted curled and cut to simulate a
fringe of hair. ‘Good Lord,’ said Atkins
as he tried his on, ‘I look just like the
Devil!’

“I thought that Herbules would have
a stroke when he heard Atkins speak.
'You’ll use that name with more respect
after tonight, my boy,’ he said.

“After that we all got in his car and
drove down toward Red Bank.

“We stopped about a mile outside of
town and parked the car in a small patch
of woods, walked some distance down the
road, climbed a fence and cut across a
field till we reached an old deserted house.
I’d seen the place as I drove past, and
had often wondered why it was unoccu-
pied, for it stood up on a hill surrounded
by tall trees and would have made an
ideal summer home, but I’d been told its
well was dry, and as there was no other
source of ■water, nobody wanted it.

“We didn’t go to the front door, but
tiptoed round the back, where Herbules
struck three quick raps, waited for a mo-
ment, then knocked four more. “We’d
all put on our robes and masks while he
was knocking, and when the door was
opened on a crack we saw the porter was
robed and masked as we were. Nobody
said a word, and we walked through a
basement entrance, down a long and nar-
row hall, and turned a corner where we
met another door. Here Herbules went

through the same procedure, and the door
swung back to let us in.

“We were in a big room, twenty by
forty feet, I guess, and we knew it was a
cellar by the smell — stiflingly close, but
clammy as a tomb at once. Rows of fold-
ing chairs like those used at bridge games
— or funerals — were arranged in double
rows with a passage like an aisle between,
and at the farther end of the big room we
saw an altar.

“In all my life I don’t believe I’d been
to church ten times, but we were nom-
inally Protestants, so what I saw had less
effect on me than if I’d been a Catholic
or Episcopalian; but I knew at once the
altar wasn't regulation. Oh, it was suffi-
ciently impressive, but it had a sort of
comic — no, not comic, grotesque, rather
— note about it. A reredos of black cloth
was hung against the wall, and before it
stood a heavy table more than eight feet
long and at least six wide, covered by a
black cloth edged with white. It reminded
me of something, though I couldn’t quite
identify it for a moment; then I knew.
I’d seen a Jewish funeral once, and this
cloth was like the black-serge pall they
used to hide the plain pine coffin! At
each end of the altar stood a seven-
branched candelabrum made of brass, eadi
with a set of tall black candles in it.
These were burning and gave off a pale
blue glow. They seemed to be perfumed,
too, and the odor which they burned with
was pleasant — at first. Then, as I sniffed
a second time it seemed to me there was
a faint suspicion of a stench about it,
something like the fetor that you smell
if you're driving down the road and pass
a dog or cat that’s been run over and has
lain a while out in the sun — just a mo-
mentary whiff, but nauseating, just the
same. Between the candelabra, right ex-
actly in the center of the altar, but back
against the wall, was a yard-high crucifix
of some black wood with an ivory figure

INCENSE OF ABOMINATION

267

on it, upside down. Before the cross
there was a silver wine goblet and a box
of gilt inlay about the size and shape of
a lady’s powder-puff box.

‘‘I heard Atkins catch his breath and
give a sort of groan. He'd been brought
up an Episcopalian and knew about such
things. He turned half round to leave,
but I caught him by the sleeve.

" 'Come on, you fool, don’t be a sissy!’
I admonished, and next moment we were
all so interested that he had no thought
of leaving.

"There was a sort of congregation in
the chapel; every seat was occupied by
someone masked and robed just as we
were, save three vacant places by the altar
steps. These, we knew, were kept for us,
but when we looked about for Herbules
he was nowhere to be seen; so we went
forward to our seats alone. We could
hear a hum of whispering as we walked
up the aisle, and we , knew some of the
voices were from women; but who was
man and who was woman was impossible
to tell, for eadi one looked just like his
neighbor in his shrouding robe.

“^TpHE whispering suddenly became in-
tense, like the susurrus of a hive of
swarming bees. Every neck seemed sud-
denly to crane, every eye to look in one
direction, and as we turned our glances
toward the right side of the cellar we
saw a woman entering through a cur-
tained doorway. She wore a long, loose
scarlet cape which she held together with
one hand, her hair was very black, her
eyes were large and luminously dark,
seeming to have a glance of overbearing
sensuousness and sweet humility at once.
Her white, set face was an imponderable
mask; her full red lips were fixed in an
uneven, bitter line. Beneath the hem of
her red cloak we saw the small feet in
the golden, high-heeled slippers were un-
stockinged. As she neared the altar she

sank low in genuflection, then wheeled
about and faced us. For a moment she
stood there, svelte, graceful, mysteriously
beautiful with that thin white face and
scarlet lips so like a mask; then with a
sudden kicking motion she unshod her
feet, opened wide her cloak and let it fall
in scarlet billows on the dull-black carpet
of the altar steps.

"She was so beautiful it almost hurt
the eyes to look at her as she stood there
in white silhouette against the ebon back-
ground of the black-draped altar, with
her narrow, boy-like hips, slim thighs and
full, high, pointed breasts. She was a
thing of snow and fire, her body palely
cool and virginal, her lips like flame, her
eyes like embers blazing when a sudden
wind stirs them to brightness.

"The modem strip-tease routine was
unthougnt of in those days, and though I
was sophisticated far beyond my eighteen
years I had never seen a woman in the
nude before. The flame of her raced in
my blood and crashed against my brain
with almost numbing impact. I felt my-
self go faint and sick with sudden weak-
ness and desire.

268

WEIRD TALES

“A long-drawn sigh came from the
audience; then the tableau was abruptly
broken as the girl turned from us, mount-
ed nimbly to the black-draped altar and
stretched herself full length upon it,
crossed her ankles and thrust her arms
out right and left, so that her body made
a white cross on the sable altar-cloth.
Her eyes were closed as though in peace-
ful sleep, but her bosoms rose and fell
with her tumultuous breathing. She had
become the altar!

"Silence fell upon the congregation
like a shadow, and next instant Herbules
came in. He wore a priest’s vestments, a
long red cassock, over it the alb and stole,
and in his hand he bore a small red
book. Behind him came his acolyte, but
it was not an altar-boy. It was a girl,
slender, copper-haired, petite. She wore a
short surcoat of scarlet, cut low around
riie shoulders, sleeveless, reaching just be-
low the hips, like the tabards worn by
mediaeval heralds. Over it she wore a
lace-edged cotta. Otherwise she was un-
clothed. We could hear the softly-slap-
ping patter of her small bare feet upon
the altar-sill as she changed her place
from side to side, genuflecting as she
passed the reversed crucifix. She swung
a brazen censer to and fro before her and
the gray smoke curled in spurting puffs
from it, filling the entire place with a per-
fume like that generated by the candles,
but stronger, more intense, intoxicating.

"Herbules began the service with a
muttered Latin prayer, and though he
seemed to follow a set ritual even I could
see it was not that prescribed, by any
diurch, for when he knelt he did so with
his back turned toward the altar; when
he crossed himself he did it with the
thumb of his left hand, and made the
sign beginning at the bottom, rather than
the top. But even in this mummers’
parody the service was majestic. I could
feel its power and compulsion as it swept

on toward its climax. Herbules took up
the silver chalice and held it high above
his head, then rested it upon the living
altar, placing it between her breasts, and
we could see the flesh around her nails
grow white as she grasped the black-
palled altar table with her fingers. Her
body, shining palely on the coffin-pall
under the flickering candles’ light, was
arched up like a tauted bow, she shook
as if a sudden chill had seized her, and
from her tight-drawn, scarlet lips there
issued little whimpering sounds, not cries
nor yet quite groans, but something which
partook of both, and at the same time
made me think of the soft, whining
sounds a new-born puppy makes.

"The kneeling acolyte chimed a sac-
ring-bell and the congregation bent and
swayed like a wheat-field swept across by
sudden wind.

"When all was finished we were bid-
den to come forward and kneel before
the altar steps. Herbules came down and
stood above us, and each of us was made
to kiss the red book which he held and
take a fearful oath, swearing that he
would abstain from good and embrace
evil, serve Satan faithfully and well, and
do his best to bring fresh converts to the
worship of the Devil. Should we in any
manner break our oath, we all agreed that
Satan might at once foreclose upon his
mortgage on our souls, and bear us still
alive to hell, and the sign that we were
come for was to be the odor of the per-
fume which the candles and the censer
gave that night.

"When this ritual was finished we
were bidden name our dearest wish, and
told it would be granted. I could hear
the others mumble something, but could
not understand their words. I don’t know
what possessed me when it came my turn
to ask a boon of Satan — possibly he put
the thought into my mind, maybe it was
my longing to get out of school and go

INCENSE OF ABOMINATION

269

to France before the war was ended. At
any rate, when Herbules bent over me I
muttered, 'I wish the pater would bump
off.’

"He leaned toward me with a smile
and whispered, ’You begin your postu-
lancy well, my son,' then held his hand
out to me, signifying that I should return
his clasp with both of mine. As I put out
my hands to take his I saw by my wrist-
watch that it was exactly half -past twelve.

"What followed was the wildest party
I had ever seen or dreamt of. The farm-
house windows had been boarded up and
curtained, and inside the rooms were
literally ablaze with light. Men and wo-
men, some draped in their red dominoes,
some in evening dress, some naked as the
moment that they first drew breath, min-
gled in a perfect saturnalia of unrestrained
salacity. On tables stood ice-buckets with'
champagne, and beside them tall decan-
ters of cut glass filled w’ith port and sher-
ry, tokay, madeira, muscatel and malaga.
Also there was bottled brandy, vodka and
whisky, trays of cigarettes, boxes of cigars,
sandwiches, cake and sweetmeats. It was
like the carnival at New Orleans, only
ten times gayer, madder, more abandoned.
I was grasped by naked men and women,
whirled furiously around in a wild dance,
then let go only to be seized by some new
partner and spun around until I almost
fell from dizziness. Between times I
drank, mixing wine and spirits without
thought, stuffed sandwiches and cake and
candy in my mouth, then drank fresh
drafts of chilled champagne or sharp-
toned brandy.

"Staggering drunkenly about the table
I was reaching for another glass when I
felt a hand upon my shoulder. Turning,
I beheld a pair of flashing eyes laughing
at me through the peep-holes of n mask.
'Come with me, my neophyte,' the masked
girl whispered; 'there is still a chalice you
have left untasted. ’

"She pulled me through the crowd, led
me up the stairs and thrust a door ajar.
The little room we entered was entirely
oriental. A Persian lamp hung like a
blazing ruby from the ceiling, on the
floor were thick, soft rugs and piles of
down-filled pillows. There was no other
furniture.

"With a laugh she turned her back to
me, motioning me to slip the knot which
held the girdle of her domino; then she
bent her head while I withdrew the pins
that held her hair. It rippled in a cascade
to her waist — below, nearly to her knees
— black and glossy as the plumage of a
grackle's throat, and as it cataracted down
she swung around, shrugging her shoul-
ders quickly, and let the scarlet domino
fall from her. An upswing of her hand
displaced the black-faced, purple, grin-
ning mask, and I looked directly in the
face of the pale girl who half an hour
earlier had lain upon the altar of the
Devil. 'Kiss me!' she commanded. 'Kiss
me!’ Her arms were tight about my neck,
pulling my lips to hers, drawing her
slender, unclothed body tight against me.
Her lips clung to my mouth as though
they were a pair of scarlet leeches; through
her half-closed lids I saw the glimmer of
her bright black eyes, burning like twin
points of quenchless fire. . . .

“Tt was daylight when we reached the

A dorm next day, and all of us reported
sick at chapel. Sometime about eleven, as
I rose to get a drink of water, a knock
came at my door. It was a telegram that
stated :

Father dropped dead in his study at twelve
forty-five. Come. Mother.

"I hurried back to school as soon as
possible. My father’s death had startled
— frightened — me, but I put it down to
coincidence. He'd been suffering from
Bright’s disease for several years, and

270

WEIRD TALES

probably his number’d just turned up, I
told myself. Besides, the longing for the
celebration of the sacrilegious Mass with
its sensual stimulation, followed by the
orgiastic parties, had me in a grip as
strong as that which opium exerts upon
its addicts.

"Twice a week, each Wednesday and
Friday, my three friends and I attended
the salacious sendees held in the old
farmhouse cellar, followed by the revels
in the upper rooms, and bit by bit we
learned about our fellow cultists. Herbu-
les, the head and center of the cult, was a
priest stripped of his orders. Pastor of a
parish in the suburbs of Vienna, he had
dabbled in the Blade Art, seduced a num-
ber of his congregation from their faith,
finally celebrated the Black Mass. The
ecclesiastical authorities unfrocked him,
the civil government jailed him on a
morals charge, but disgrace could not im-
pair his splendid education or his bril-
liant mind, and as soon as his imprison-
ment was over he emigrated to America
and at once secured a post as teacher.
Though his talents were unquestionable,
his morals were not, and scandal fol-
lowed every post he held. He was at the
end of his string when he managed to
worm his way into the Horton trustees'
confidence and secured the post left va-
cant by the fonner headmaster’s entrance
in the Army.

"Our companion Devil -worshippers
were mostly college and preparatory stu-
dents looking for a thrill, now tangled in
the net of fascination that the cult spun
round its devotees, but a few of them
were simply vicious, while others turned
to demonolatry because they had lost
faith in God.

"One of these was Marescha Nurmi,
the girl who acted as the living altar. She
was my constant partner at the orgies, and
bit by bit I learned her history. Only
nineteen, she was the victim of a heart

affection and the doctors gave her but a
year to live. When they pronounced sen-
tence she was almost prostrated; then in
desperation she turned to religion,, going
every day to church and spending hours
on her knees in private prayer. But medi-
cal examination showed her illness was
progressing, and when she chanced to
hear of Herbules’ devil-cult she came to
it. ’I’m too young, too beautiful to die!’
she told me as we lay locked in each
others’ arms one night. Why should God
take my life? I never injured Him. All
right, if He won’t have me, Satan will.
He'll give me life and happiness and
power, let me live for years and years;
keep me young and beautiful when all
these snivelling Christian girls are old
and faded. What do I care if I go to hell
to pay for it? I’ll take my heaven here
on earth, and when the bill's presented I
won't welch!’

"There’s an old saying that each time
God makes a beautiful woman the Devil
opens a new page in his ledger. He must
have had to put in a whole set of books
when Marescha w # as converted to our cult.
She was attractive as a witch, had no more
conscience than a snake, and positively
burned with ardor to do evil. Night
after night she brought new converts to
the cult, sometimes young men, some-
times girls. 'Come on, you little fool/ I
heard her urge a girl who shrank from
the wild orgy following initiation. Take
off your robe; that’s what we’re here for.
This is our religion, the oldest in the
world; it’s revolt against the goody-good-
ies, revolt against the narrowness of God;
we live for pleasure and unbridled pas-
sion instead of abnegation and renuncia-
tion — life and love and pleasure in a
world of vivid scarlet, instead of fear and
dreariness in a world all cold and gray.
That’s our creed and faith. We’re set
apart, we’re marked for pleasure, we wor-
shippers of Satan.’ ”

INCENSE OF ABOMINATION

271

" Tiens , the lady was a competent sales-
woman,” de Grandin murmured. "Did
she realize her dreams?”

The laugh that prefaced Balderson’s
reply was like the edio of a chuckle in a
vaulted tomb. "I don’t know if she got
her money’s worth, but certainly she
paid,” he answered. "It was nearing
graduation time, and the celebrations
were about to stop until the fall, for it
would be impossible to keep the farm-
house windows shuttered so they’d show
no gleam of light, especially with so
many people on the roads in summer.
Herbules had just completed invocation,
raised the chalice overhead and set it on
Marescha’s breast when we saw her twitch
convulsively. The little whimpering ani-
mal-cries she always made when the climax
of the obscene parody was reached gave
way to a choked gasping, and we saw the
hand that clutched the altar-table sudden-
ly relax. She raised her head and stared
around the chapel with a look that sent
the chill of horror rippling through me,
then cried out in a strangled voice: 'O
Lord, be pitiful!’ Then she fell back on
the coffin-pall that draped the altar and
her fingers dangled loosely on its edge,
her feet uncrossed and lay beside each
other.

“T T erbules was going on as if noth-
AA ing had happened, but the woman
who sat next to me let out a sudden wail.
'Look at her,’ she screamed. ‘Look at her
face!'

"Marescha’s head had turned a little
to one side, and we saw her features in
the altar-candles’ light. Her dark hair
had come unbound and fell about her
face as though it sought to hide it. Her
eyes were not quite closed, nor fully open,
for a thread of gray eyeball was visible
between the long black lashes. Her
mouth was partly open,, not as though
she breathed through it, but lax, slack,

as though she w r ere exhausted. Where a
line of white defined the lower teeth we
saw her tongue had fallen forward, lying
level with the full, red lip.

“Somewhere in the rear of the diapel
another woman’s voice, shrilly pitched,
but controlled, cried out: 'She’s dead!’
“There was a wave of movement in the
worshippers. Chairs were overturned,
gowns rustled, whispered questions
buzzed like angry bees. Then the woman
sitting next me screamed again: ‘This is
no natural death, no illness killed her;
she’s been stricken dead for sacrilege,
she’s sacrificed for our sins — fly, fly be-
fore the wrath of God blasts all of us!’
“Herbules stood at the altar facing us.
A mask as of some inner feeling, of
strange, forbidden passions, of things that
raced on scurrying feet within his brain,
seemed to drop across his features. His
face seemed old and ancient, yet at the
same time ageless; his eyes took on a
glaze like polished agate. He raised both
hands above his head, the fingers flexed
like talons, and laughed as if at some
dark jest known only to himself. ‘Whoso
leaves the temple of his Lord without

WEIRD TALES

partaking of this most unholy sacrament,
the same will Satan cast aside, defense-
less from the vengeance of an outraged
God!’ he cried.

"Then I knew. Karl Erik Herbuies,
renegade Christian priest, brilliant schol-
ar, poisoner of souls and votary of Satan,
was mad as any Tom o’ Bedlam*

"Lie stood there by the Devil’s altar
hurling curses at us, threatening us with
Heaven's vengeance, casting an anathema
upon us with such vile insults and filthy
language as a fishwife would not dare to
use.

"But panic had the congregation by
the throat. They pushed and fought and
scratched and bit like frenzied cats, claw-
ing and slashing at one another till they
gained the exit, then rushing pellmell
down the hill to their parked cars with-
out a backward look, leaving Herbuies
alone beside the altar he had raised to
Satan, with the dead girl stretched upon it.

"There was no chance that Herbuies
would help. He kept reciting passages
from the Black Mass, genuflecting to the
altar, filling and refilling the wine-cup
and stuffing his mouth with the wafers
meant to parody the Host. So Trivers,
Eldridge, Atkins and I took Marescha’s
body to the river, -weighted it with win-
dow-irons and dropped it in the water.
But the knots we tied must have been
loose, or else the weights were insufficient,
for as we turned to leave, her body
floated almost to the surface and one
white arm raised above the river’s glassy
face, as though to wave a mute farewell.
It must have been a trick the current
played as the tide bore her away, but to
us it seemed that her dead hand pointed
to us gach in turn; certainly there was no
doubt it bobbed four times above the
river’s surface before the swirling waters
sucked it out of sight.

"You’ve probably heard garbled ru-
mors of what happened afterward. The

farmhouse burned that night, and because
there was no water to be had, there was
no salvage. Still, a few things were not
utterly destroyed, and people in the
neighborhood still wonder how those
Persian lamps and brazen candlesticks
came to be in that deserted house.

’ 'Herbuies committed suicide that night,
and when the auditors went over his ac-
counts they found he’d practically wrecked
Horton. There was hardly a cent left, for
he’d financed his whole grisly farce of
Devil worship with the money he embez-
zled. The trustees made the losses good
and gave up in disgust. Ours was the last
class graduated.

"They found Marescha’s body floating
in the Shrewsbury two days later, and at
first the coroner was sure she’d been the
victim of a murder; for while the win-
dow-weights had fallen off, the cords
that tied them were still knotted round
her ankles. When the autopsy disclosed
she’d not been drowned, but had been
put into the river after death from heart
disease, the mystery was deepened, but
until tonight only four people knew its
answer. Now there are only three.”
"Three, Alonsieur?” de Grandin asked.
"That's right. Trivers, Atkins and
Eldridge are dead. I’m still here, and you

and Doctor Trowbridge ”

"Your figures are at fault, my friend.
You forget we are physicians, and your
narrative was given us in confidence.”
"But see here,” I asked as the silence
lengthened, "what is there about all this
to make you want to kill yourself? If
you’d been grown men when you joined
these Devil-worshippers it would have
been more serious, but college boys are
always in some sort of mischief, and this
all happened twenty years ago. You say
you are sincerely sorry for it, and after all.
the leaders in the movement died, so— — "
Balderson broke through my moraliz-
ing with a short, hard laugh. "Men die
W, T.—l

INCENSE OF ABOMINATION

273

more easily than memories, Doctor. Be-
sides ”

"Yes, Monsieur, besides?" de Grandin
prompted as our guest stared silently into
the study fire.

"Do you believe the spirits of the dead
— die dead who are in Hell, or at least
cut off from Heaven — can come back to
plague the living?" he demanded.

D E grandin brushed the ends of his
small waxed mustache with that ges-
ture which always reminded me of a tom-
cat combing his whiskers. "You have ex-
perienced such a visitation?"

"I have. So did the others.”

" Mordieu ! How was it?”

"You may remember reading that Ted
Eldridge hanged himself? Three days be-
fore it happened, he met me on the street,
and I could see that he was almost frantic.
'I saw Marescha last night!’ he told me
in a frightened whisper.

" ’Marescha? You must be off your
rocker, man! We put her in the Shrew's -
bury '

" 'And she’s come back again. Re-
member the perfume of the candles and
the incense Herbules used in celebrating
the Black Mass? I’d come home from
New York last night, and w'as getting
ready for a drink before I went to bed,
when I began to smell it. At first I
thought it w'as some fool trick that my
senses played on me, but the scent kept
getting stronger. It seemed as if I were
back in that dreadful chapel with the tall
black candles burning and the hellish in-
cense smoldering, Herbules in his red
vestments and Marescha lying naked on
the altar — I could almost hear the chant-
ing of inverted prayers and the little
whimpering noises that she made. I
gulped my drink down in two swallows
and turned round. She was standing
there, w r ith water on her face and stream-
W. T.— 2

ing from her hair, and her hands held
out to me ’

" ‘You’re crazy as a goat!’ I told him.
Come have a drink.’

"He looked at me a moment, then
turned away, walking quickly down the
street and muttering to himself.

"I’d not have thought so much about
it if I hadn’t read about his suicide next
day, and if Stanley Trivers hadn't called
me on the telephone. 'Hear about Ted Eld-
ridge?’ he asked the moment I had said
hello. When I told him I’d just read
about it he demanded: 'Did you see him
— recently?’

" 'Yes, ran into him in Broad Street
yesterday,' I answered.

" 'Seemed worried, didn’t he? Did he
tell you anything about Marescha?’

" 'Say, what is this?’ I asked. 'Did he

say anything to you ’

" 'Yes, he did, and I thought he had
a belfry full o’ bats.’

" 'There’s not much doubt the poor old

lad w'as cuckoo ’

" 'That’s where you're mistaken, Bal-
derson. According to the paper he’d been
dead for something like four hours when
they found him. That would have made
it something like four o’clock when he
died.’

" ’So what?’

" 'So this: I waked up at four o’clock
this morning, and the room was positively
stifling with the odor of the incense they

used in the Black Chapel ’

" 'Yeah? I suppose you saw Marescha,
too?’

" ‘I did! She was standing by my bed,
with w'ater streaming from her face and
body, and tears were in her eyes’

"I tried to talk him out of it, tell him
that it w'as a trick of his imagination
stimulated by Ted Eldridge’s wild talk,
but he insisted that he’d really seen her.
Two days later he committed suicide.
"Don Atkins followed. I didn’t talk

274

WEIRD TALES

with him before he shot himself, but I’ll
wager that he saw her, too, and smelled
that Devil's incense.”

De Grandin looked at me with up-
raised brows, then shook his head to cau-
tion silence ere he turned to face our
guest. "And you, Monsieur ?” he asked.

"Yes, I too. Don killed himself some-
time in early afternoon, and I was home
that day. I’d say that it was shortly after
two, for I’d lunched at the City Club and
come home to pack a bag and take a trip
to Nantakee. I had the highboy open
and was taking out some shirts when I
began to notice a strange odor in the air.
But it wasn’t strange for long; as it grew
stronger I recognized it as the scent of
Herbules’ incense. It grew so strong that
it was almost overpowering. I stood there
by the chest of drawers, smelling the in-
creasing scent, and determined that I’d
not turn round. You know how Cole-
ridge puts it:

Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round, walks on.

And turns no more his head ;

Because he knows a frightful fiend
Dorh close behind him tread . . .

"The odor of the incense grew until I
could have sworn somebody swung a cen-
ser right behind me. Then, suddenly, I
heard the sound of falling water. ' Drip —
drip — drip!’ it fell upon the floor, drop
by deliberate drop. The suspense was
more than I could bear, and I wheeled
about.

"Marescha stood behind me, almost
close enough to touch. Water trickled
from the hair that hung in gleaming
strands across her breast and shoulders,
it hung in little gleaming globules on her
pale, smooth skin, ran in little rivulets
across her forehead, down her beautifully
shaped legs, made tiny puddles on the
polished floor beside each slim bare foot.
I went almost sick with horror as I saw
the knotted cords we’d used to tie the

window- weights on her still bound about
her ankles, water oozing from their coils.
She did not seem dead. Her lovely slen-
der body seemed as vital as when I had
held it in my arms, her full and mobile
lips were red with rouge, her eyes were
neither set and staring nor expressionless.
But they were sad, immeasurably sad.
They seemed to probe into my spirit's
very depths, asking, beseeching, entreat-
ing. And to make their plea more elo-
quent, she slowly raised her lovely hands
and held them out to me, palms upward,
fingers slightly curled, as though she be-
sought alms.

"There was a faint resemblance to her
bitter, crooked smile upon her lips, but
it was so sad, so hopelessly entreating,
that it almost made me weep to see it.

" 'Mar ’ I began, but the name

stuck in my throat. This couldn’t be the
body that I’d held against my heart, those
lips were not the lips I’d kissed a thou-
sand times; this was no girl of flesh and
blood. Marescha lay deep in a grave in
Shadow Lawns Cemetery; had lain there
almost twenty years. Dust had filled those
sad, entreating eyes long before the col-
lege freshmen of this year were born.
The worms . . .

"Somewhere I had heard that if you
called upon the Trinity a ghost would

vanish. 'In the name of the Father *

I began, but it seemed as if a clap of
thunder sounded in my ears.

" "What right have you to call upon
the Triune God?’ a mighty voice seemed
asking. ’You who have mocked at
Heaven, taken every sacred name in vain,
made a jest of every holy thing — how
dare you invoke Deity? Your sacrilegious
lips cannot pronounce the sacred name!’

"And it was true. I tried again, but
the words clogged in my throat; I tried
to force them out, but only strangling
inarticulacies sounded.

"Marescha’s smile was almost pityingly

INCENSE OF ABOMINATION

275

tender, but still she stood there pleading,
entreating, begging me, though what it
was she wanted I could not divine. I
threw my arm across my eyes to shut the
vision out, but when I took it down she
was still there, and still the water dripped
from her entreating hands, ran in little
courses from her dankly-hanging hair,
fell drop by drop from the sopping cords
that ringed her ankles.

"T stumbled blindly from the house
-*■ and walked the streets for hours.
Presently I bought a paper, and the head-
lines told me Donald Atkins had been
found, a suicide, in his apartment.

"When I reached my house again the
incense still hung in the air, but the vision
of Marescha was not there. I drank al-
most a pint of brandy, neat, and fell
across my bed. When I recovered from
my alcoholic stupor Marescha stood beside
me, her great eyes luminous with tears,
her hands outstretched in mute entreaty.

"She’s been with me almost every wak-
ing instant since that night. I drank myself
into oblivion, but every time I sobered
she was standing by me. I’d walk the
streets for hours, but every time I halted
she would be there, always silent, always
with her hands held out, always with that
look of supplication in her tear-filled eyes.
I'd rush at her and try to drive her off
with blows and kicks. She seemed to
float away, staying just outside my reach,
however savagely I ran at her, and though
I cursed her, using every foul word I
knew, she never changed expression,
never showed resentment; just stood and
looked at me with sad, imploring eyes,
always seeming to be begging me for
something.

"I can’t endure it any longer, gentle-
men. Tonight she stood beside me when
I halted on North Bridge, and I’d have
been at peace by now if you’d not come
along ”

"Non, there you are mistaken, mon
ami," de Grandin contradicted. "Had
you carried your intention out and leaped
into the river you would have sealed your
doom irrevocably. Instead of leaving her
you would have joined her for eternity.”
"All right,” Balderson asked rasping-
ly, "I suppose you have a better plan?”

"I think I have,” the little Frendiman
answered. "First, I would suggest you
let us give you sedatives. You will not be
troubled while you sleep, and while you
rest we shall be active.”

“Qhakespeare was right," I said as
O we left our patient sleeping from a
dose of chloral hydrate. "Conscience does
make cowards of us all. The memory of
that early indiscretion has haunted that
quartet of worthless youngsters twenty
years. No wonder they kept seeing that
poor girl after they’d thrown her so cal-
lously into the Shrewsbury. Of all the

heartless, despicable things ”

He emerged from a brown study long
enough to interrupt: "And is your con-
science clean, my friend?”

"What has my conscience to do with it?
I didn't throw a dead girl in the river;
I didn’t ”

" Pr easement , neither did the good
Costello, yet both of you described the
odor of that Devil’s incense: Costello
when he went to view the bodies of the
suicides, you when we halted Monsieur
Balderson’s attempt at self-destruction.
Were you also haunted by that scent, or
were you not?”

"I smelled it,” I responded frigidly,
"but I wasn’t haunted by it. Just what
is it you’re driving at?”

"That the odor of that incense, or even
the perception of the dead Marescha’s
revenant, is no optical illusion caused by
guilty conscience. It is my firm conviction
that the apparition which appeared to
these unfortunate young men was the

27 6

WEIRD TALES

earthbound spirit of a girl who begged a
boon from them.”

"Then you don’t think that she haunted
them because they'd thrown her body in
the river?”

"Entirely no. I think she came to ask
their help, and in their fear and horror
at beholding her they could not under-
stand her plea. First one and then an-
other, lashed with the scorpion-whip of
an accusing conscience, destroyed himself
because he dared not look into her plead-
ing eyes, thinking they accused him of
mistreating her poor body, when all the
pauvre belle creature asked was that they
help her to secure release from her earth-
bound condition.”

"Why should she have appealed to
them?”

"In all that congregation of benighted
worshippers of evil, she knew them best.
They saw her die, they gave her body
sepulture; one of them, at least, had been
her lover, and was, presumably, bound to
her by ties of mutual passion. She was
most strongly in their minds and memo-
ries. It was but natural that she should
appeal to them for succor. Did not you
notice one outstanding fact in all the
testimony — the poor Marescha appeared
to them in turn, looking not reproach-
fully, but pleadingly? Her lips were held,
she might not put her plea in words. She
could but come to them as they had last
beheld her, entreat them by dumb show,
and hope that they would understand.
One by one they failed her; one by one
they failed to understand ”

"Well, is there anything that we can
do about it?”

"I think there is. Come, let us be upon
our way.”

"Where the deuce ”

"To the rectory of St. Chrysostom. I
would interview the Reverend Doctor
Bentley.”

"At this time of night?”

"Macs certainement, clergymen and
doctors, they have no privacy, my friend.
Surely, you need not be told that."

T he freshly lighted fire burned bright-
ly in the Reverend Peter Bentley’s
study, the blue smoke spiraled upward
from the tips of our cigars, the gray
steam curled in fragrant clouds from the
glasses of hot Scotdi which stood upon
the coffee-table. Looking anything but
clerical in red-flannel bathrobe, black pa-
jamas and red Turkish slippers, Doctor
Bentley listened with surprizing tolerance
to de Grandin’s argument.

"But it seems the poor girl died in
mortal sin," he murmured, obviously
more in sorrow than in righteous indig-
nation. "According to your statement, her
last frantic words called on the Devil to
fulfill his bargain: 'O Lord, be piti-
ful —

Precise ment , mon pere, but who can
say her prayer was made to Satan? True,
those so bewildered, misled followers of
evil were wont to call the Devil Lord and
Master, but is it not entirely possible that
she repented and addressed her dying
prayer to the real Lord of the heaven
and earth? Somewhere an English poet
says of the last-minute prayer of a not-
wholly-righteous fox-hunter who was un-
horsed and broke his sinful neck:

Betwixt the stirrup and the ground
l mercy asked ; mercy l found.

"Me, I believe in all sincerity that her
repentance was as true as that the thief
upon the cross expressed; that in the last
dread moment she perceived the grievous
error of her ways and made at once con-
fession of sin and prayer for pity with
her dying breath.

"But she had bent the knee at Satan's
shrine. With her fair body — that body
which was given her to wear as if it were
a garment to the greater glory of the Lord
— she parodied the sacred faircloth of the

INCENSE OF ABOMINATION

277

altar. By such things she had cut herself
adrift, she had put herself beyond com-
munion with the righteous which is the
blessed company of all the faithful.
There was no priest to shrive her sin-
encumbered soul, no one to read words of
forgiveness and redemption above her
lifeless clay. Until some one of her com-
panions in iniquity will perform the serv-
ice of contrition for her, until the office
for the burial of Christian dead is read
above her grave, she lies excommunicate
and earthbound. She cannot even expiate
her faults in Purgatory till forgiveness of
sins has been formally pronounced. Sin-
cerely repentant, hell is not for her; un-
shrived, and with no formal statement of
conditional forgiveness, she cannot quit
the earth, but must wander here among
the scenes of her brief and sadly misspent
life. Do we dare withhold our hands to
save her from a fate like that?"

Doctor Bentley sipped thoughtfully at
his hot Scotch. "There may be something
in your theory,” he admitted. "I’m not
especially strong on doctrine, but I can’t
believe the fathers of the early church
were the crude nincompoops some of our
modem theologians call them. They
preached posthumous absolution, and
there are instances recorded where ex-
communicated persons who had hovered
round the scenes they’d known in life
were given rest and peace when absolu-
tion was pronounced above their graves.
Tell me, is this Balderson sincerely sorry
for his misdeeds?”

"I could swear it, mon pbc!’

"Then bring him to the chapel in the
morning. If he will make confession and
declare sincere repentance, then submit
himself to holy baptism, I'll do what
you request. It’s rather mediaeval, but —
I’d hate to think that I’m so modem that I
would not take a chance to save two
souls."

T he penitential sendee in the Chapel
of the Intercession w r as a brief but
most impressive one. Only Balderson, I
and de Grandin occupied the pews, with
Doctor Bentley in his stole and cassock,
but without his surplice, at the little altar:
". . . we have followed too much the
devices and desires of our own hearts, we
have offended against Thy holy laws . . .
remember not, Lord, our offenses nor the
offenses of our forefathers, neither take
Thou vengeance of our sins ... we ac-
knowledge and bewail our manifold sins
and wickednesses; the memory of them
is grievous unto us, the burden of them
is intolerable ...”

After absolution followed the short
service ordered for the baptism of adults;
then we set out for Shadow Lawns.

Now Doctor Bentley wore his full ca-
nonicals, and his surplice glinted almost
whiter than the snow that wrapped the
mounded graves as he paused beside an
unmarked hillock in the Nurmi family
plot.

Slowly he began in that low, full
voice with which he fills a great church
to its farthest comer: "I am the resur-
rection and the life, saith the Lord; he
that believeth in me, though he were
dead, yet shall he live. ..."

It was one of those still winter days,
quieter than an afternoon in August, for
no chirp of bird or whir of insect sounded,
no breath of breeze disturbed the ever-
greens; yet as he read the opening sen-
tence of the office for the burial of the
dead a low wail sounded in the copse of
yew and hemlock on the hill, as though
a sudden wind moaned in the branches,
and I stiffened as a scent was borne across
the snow-capped grave mounds. Incense!
Yet not exactly incense, either. There
was an undertone of fetor in it, a faint,
distinctly charnel smell. Balderson was
trembling, and despite myself I flinched.

278

WEIRD TALES

but Doctor Bentley and de Grandin gave
no sign of recognition.

"Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of
our hearts, shut not Thy merciful ears to
our prayer, but spare us, Lord most holy
. . intoned the clergyman, and,

"Amen,’’ said Jules de Grandin firmly
as the prayer concluded.

The Aiolian wailing in the evergreens
died to a sobbing, low clamation as Doc-
tor Bentley traced in sand a cross upon
the snow-capped grave, declaring: "Unto
Almighty God we commend the soul of
our departed sister, and we commit her
body to the ground: earth to earth, ashes
to ashes, dust to dust, in the sure and
certain hope of the Resurrection into eter-
nal life ”

And now there was no odor of corrup-
tion in the ghostly perfume, but the clean,
inspiring scent of frankincense, redolent
of worship at a thousand consecrated
altars.

As the last amen was said and Doctor
Bentley turned away I could have sworn
I heard a gentle slapping sound and saw
the blond hairs of de Grandin’s small
mustache bend inward, as though a pair
of lips invisible to me had kissed him on
the mouth.

D octor Bentley dined with us that
night, and over coffee and liqueurs
we discussed the case.

"It was a fine thing you did,’’ the
cleric told de Grandin, "Six men in seven

would have sent him packing and bid
him work out his salvation — or damna-
tion — for himself. There’s an essential
nastiness in Devil-worship which is re-
volting to the average man, not to men-
tion its abysmal wickedness ’’

" Tiens , who of us can judge another’s
wickedness?" the little Frenchman an-
swered. "The young man was repentant,
and repentance is the purchase price of
heavenly forgiveness. Besides" — a look
of strain, like a nostalgic longing, came
into his eyes — "before die altar of a con-
vent in la belle France kneels one whom
I have loved as I can never love another
in this life. Ceaselessly, except the little
time she sleeps, she makes prayer and
intercession for a sinful world. Could I
hold fast the memory of our love if I
refused to match in works the prayer she
makes in faith? Eh bien, mon pere, my
inclination was to give him a smart kick
in the posterior; to bid him go and sin
no more, but sinfully or otherwise, to go.
Ha, but I am strong, me. I overcame that
inclination.”

The earnestness of his expression faded
and an impish grin replaced it as he
poured a liberal potion of Napoleon 1811
in his brandy-sniffer. "Jules de Grandin,"
he apostrophized himself, "you have acted
like a true man. You have overcome your
natural desires; you have kept the faith.

"Jules de Grandin, my good and much-
admired self — be pleased to take a
drink!"

WEIRD TALES

279

Vhe

P

C/oe

oets

By ROBERT E. HOWARD

Out of the somber night the poets come,

A moment brief to fan their lambent flame;
Then, like the dimming whisper of a drum.

Fade back into the night from whence they came.

The gray fog, swirling cloak of cynic Time,
Meshes achievement in the ages’ glomb,

A moment’s mirth, a breath of lilting rime.
And then — the gray of old oblivion’s womb.

Weaver of melodies all golden-spun
The singer sings his song — and passes on.

The poet strums his lyre — then is one
With gray-hued dusk and rose of fading dawn.:

A moment’s laughter on the winds of Time,
A moment’s ripple on Time’s silent sea,

A golden riffle in the river’s slime,

And then — the silence of Eternity.

Gray dust and ash where leaped the mystic fire,
Mingled with air and wind the once-red flame;
Breeze-borne the tune, but now forgot the lyre —
Remains? — the musty thing that men call Fame.

Half-curious eyes that scan the yellowed page,

All heedless of the makers of the feast —

Why, Pierrot might have been a musty sage,
Francois Villon a staled and sour priest.

Who penned this lyric? Who this sonnet? Whence
The soul on fire that snared these stars in song?
Who knows? Who cares? A vast indifference
Is all the answer of the marching throng.

on the Floor

By THORP McCLUSKY

A strange story of an unscrupulous hypnotist and the frightful thing that he
called Stepan, who was immune to destruction while
his master lived

1 . Charlatan or Miracle-Man ?

“ ARLING,” Mary Roberts told
[ S her fiance, "I'm sorry, but I
won’t be able to go to the Lily
Pons recital Thursday night. Helen
Stacey-Forbes insists that I go with her to
Dmitri's.”

Across the spotless linen and gleaming
silver that graced their luncheon table
Charles Ethredge’s gray eyes questioned.

“It’s a subscription concert, Mary. I’ve
had the tickets for months.”

Her slender right hand reached across
the table to him. "I'm terribly sorry,
Charles. But Helen has been after me for
weeks to/ go, and Dmitri’s evenings are

always Thursdays ”

Ethredge grimaced. ”1 think it’s rath-
er silly of you two — this thrill visit to an
obvious charlatan.”

Mary shook her head. "Helen Stacey-
Forbes doesn’t think Dmitri a charlatan.
She swears by the man — claims he’s done
wonders for Ronny.”

Ethredge laughed. "Dmitri not a char-
latan? With his half-baked parlor magic
and that moving-picture brand of mysti-
cism he exudes? I’ve heard all about him.
Doc Hanlon says that if he isn’t exposed
pretty soon there’ll be a major rabies epi-
demic among 'our local psychiatry.”

For a moment Mary Roberts did not
reply, but sat quietly, her delicately oval
face profiled, her wide-set, limpid eyes
thoughtful as she gazed musingly through
280

the iron-grilled window at the row of
dw'arf evergreens in their stone window-
box beneath the sill. Discreetly, from its
palm-hidden sound shell on the mezza-
nine, the hotel’s string quintet began to
play a Strauss waltz. Abruptly Mary
turned back to her fiance, a strange little
smile trembling on her lips.

"Oh, Charles, I wish that I could be so
sure. Yes, you’re probably right about
Dmitri, darling. He’s certainly theatrical
enough — even Helen admits that. But
you wouldn’t want me to disappoint her,
would you? And she does say he’s saved
Ronny’s life.”

"Lord,” Ethredge grumbled, "I wish
to heaven Dmitri didn’t have that Vienna
degree; we’d stop him so fast his teeth’d
rattle. And by the way, where did Helen
Stacey-Forbes get the crazy notion that
he’s helped Ronny? Good grief, that fel-
low’s healthier than I am.”

"Ronny’s really been ill, Charles. It’s
not generally known, but he’s a hemo-
philiac; he’s had several severe hemor-
rhages within the past year. Dmitri’s the
only man who’s been able to do anything
for him.”

Ethredge looked startled. "Why, I’d
always thought hemophilia was heredi-
tary; I’ve never heard of it in Ronny’s
family before. Tw ; o years ago, at the Wil-
mot’s hunt, he w'as thrown, and pretty
badly bruised and cut, but he was up and
limping around the same evening. He
even danced.”

THE THING ON THE FLOOR

281

Mary shook her head. "I don’t know;
I’m no medical authority, Charles, but
it’s hemophilia, all right. It’s been diag-
nosed as such several times within the

past year. Why ”

But Charles Ethredge was not really
listening. He was recalling some of the
vague, ugly stories he had heard, in re-
cent months, of Dmitri Vassilievitch Tu-
lin — -stories which could not all be put
down to professional jealousy. And, curi-
ously, he was thinking of the twenty-
years -dead Tsarevitch, and of a mad
monk named Gregori Rasputin. . . .

2. The Spider and the Flies

and the man is a perfect ghoul

about money. You know most of the
people here, Mary; you wouldn’t say that
any were really poor, would you?”

Mary Roberts looked about this room
in which she sat. It was a long room, ex-
tending the full length of the second
floor of a brownstone, solidly aristocratic
house; obviously two interior walls had
been demolished to provide the single
large chamber. The wall to Mary’s left,
abutting the adjoining house, was blank;
red velvet drapes covered the windows

282

WEIRD TALES

at the ends of the room. Three doors, ir-
regularly spaced along the right-hand
wall, led into the second-floor corridor.
A ponderous oaken table and chair stood
dose to the drapes at one end of the
room; about sixty folding-chairs were ar-
ranged in orderly rows facing these grim-
ly utilitarian furnishings. Perhaps thirty
persons, the great majority of whom were
women, sat in small, self-conscious groups
about the room, talking among them-
selves in low tones. Occasionally someone
laughed — nervous laughter that was
quickly suppressed.

Dmitri’s evenings, Mary Roberts sus-
pected, were not particularly pleasant
affairs. . . .

Mary knew these people. One or two
were really ill, several were suffering
from neuroses, a few were crackpot fad-
dists, but the majority were merely out for
a thrill. And all were wealthy.

The man Dmitri, Mary decided as she
looked about, must be, even if a charla-
tan, certainly a personality. . . .

She turned, with a wry smile, to her
friend.

"This gathering surely makes me feel
like a poor little church-mouse,” she ad-
mitted ruefully. "Father was never a
financial giant, you know, Helen.”

Helen Stacey-Forbes smiled reassur-
ingly-

"Money can't buy character and breed-
ing, my dear. I see old Mortimer Dunlop
up there in the second row; you are wel-
come in homes he’s never seen and never
will see — except from the street. Damned
old bucket-shop pirate! Have you heard the
rumor that he's full of carcinoma? They’re
giving him from sue to nine months to
Eve. That must be why he’s here; some-
one’s told him about Dmitri ”

Mary gasped. "And people believe
that Dmitri can cure carcinoma? Why,
it's — Charles said only the other day that
Dmitri was merely a half-cracked psychia-

trist who's had rather spectacular luck
with a few rich patients’ imaginary ail-
ments. But carcinoma !”

Gravely Helen Stacey-Forbes shook her
head. "Dmitri’s far greater than his
enemies will admit. They call him a
super-psychologist, a faith-healer, and
they laugh at him and threaten him, but
the fact remains that his methods suc-
ceed. He achieves cures, impossible cures,
miraculous cures. I know, because he’s
the only man who can stop Ronny’s
hemorrhages. At five thousand dollars a
treatment.”

"Five thousand dollars!”

Helen laughed, a dry, bitter little
laugh. "Believe me, Dmitri is a monster,
not a man. Mortimer Dunlop will have
to pay dearly for his carcinoma cure!”
The words sent an odd little shudder
racing along Mary's spine. For, obvious-
ly, Helen Stacey-Forbes believed, believed
implicitly, that Dmitri could cure — cancer!

Suddenly, then, the room was silent.
The door at the upper end of the cham-
ber had opened, a man had entered.

I N the abrupt stillness the man, small,
self-effacing, bearing in his hands a
large lacquered tray, walked to the oaken
table and arranged upon it several articles
— a half-dollar, a pair of pliers, a penny
box of matches, a small-caliber automatic
pistol, a ten-ounce drinking-glass, a tin-
kling pitcher of ice-water, and a battered
gasoline blow-torch. A curious, incom-
prehensible array. . . .

The little man left the room. The
babble of nervous voices began again, as
suddenly stopped when the door re-
opened and a monstrosity entered.

The man was huge. At least six feet
three inches tall, he was as tremendous
horizontally as vertically. A mountain of
flesh swathed in a silken lounging-robe,
he slowly walked to the table, and settled,
grunting, into the big oaken chair. In-

THE THING ON THE FLOOR

283

Stantly immobile, he surveyed the room
through small, coal-black eyes set close
together in a pasty-white face. Obscene
of body and countenance, his forehead
was nevertheless magnificent, but his
scalp, even to tire sides of his head, was
utterly bald. Beneath the table his pillar-
like ankles showed whitely above Gargan-
tuan house-slippers.

This — this, Mary Roberts knew, was
Dmitri. . . .

Leisurely the monster poured a glass of
water and took a tentative sip, the glass
looking no larger than a jigger in his tre-
mendous, flabby hand. An expression
that might have been a smile — or a leer
— rippled momentarily across his fat-en-
gulfed features, revealed an instant’s
glimpse of startlingly white teeth. He
began to speak

"I see a number of new faces before
me today,” he began in a voice incongru-
ously, almost shockingly vibrant and
beautiful; Enrico Caruso’s speaking voice,
Mary thought suddenly, must have sound-
ed like that — "and for the benefit of
those who are not already familiar with
my theories I will repeat, briefly, my con-
ception of the function of the Will in
the treatment of disease.”

He paused, sipped meagerly from his
glass of ice-water. Then he w'ent on,
his speech only faintly stilted, only faintly
revealing him a man to whom English
was an acquired language:

"Speaking in the philosophical — not
the chemical — sense, it is my belief that
there is but one fundamental element —
abstract mind. Of course, that which we
term matter is, in the last analysis, energy;
there is no such thing as matter except
as a manifestation of energy. Yet it is
quite obvious, or it should be obvious, at
any rate, that mind — that attribute which
we wrongfully confuse with conscious-
ness — is totally independent of matter. A
man dies, but his atomic weight remains

unchanged; the strange force which ac-
tivated him has found its material shell
no longer tenable, and has taken its de-
parture.

"We are all well acquainted with the
axiomatic law of physics which deals with
the conservation of energy. But here we
reach a paradox — either energy must have
been non-existent at one time, or it must
be eternal — contradictory and utterly ir-
reconcilable concepts. The logical and the
only conclusion is plain: energy and mat-
ter do not and have never existed. They
are but temporary conceptions of an in-
finite, timeless Mind, a Mind of whidi
we are part ”

There was a sudden snort from the
second row. "Rubbish! What’s all this
jabber got to do with me? I came here
to be cured, not to be preached at!”

The colossus slowly poured a glass of
ice-water.

"Sir, you must understand — if you
possess sufficient intelligence — that I can
do nothing for you without your help.”
The bulbous lips writhed in a half-smile.
"You have been rude, my friend — should
I decide to treat your carcinoma I will
leave you the poorer man by half your
fortune before you are cured. That pros-
pect, at least, you can understand.”

Mortimer Dunlop, his seamed face
livid with rage, got hastily to his feet and
strode to the center door. He jerked the
door open, slammed it behind him as he
stormed from the room.

Unperturbed, Dmitri continued, "Mind
came before matter; mind is the great
motivator. Mind can conceive matter;
matter cannot conceive anything, even
itself.

"It is evident to any person who care-
fully considers these conclusions that in
each one of us exists a spark, part and
parcel of that great intangible Will which
created all things. But this reasoning in-
variably leads to a conclusion so tremen-

284

WEIRD TALES

dous that the human consciousness, except
in rare instances, rejects it,

“The conclusion is plain. The unfet-
tered Will, by and of itself, can work
miracles, move mountains, create and de-
stroy!

“Listen carefully, for Coue and Pavlov
and your own J. B. Watson were closer
to the truth than they knew. . . .

“I pick up this coin, and I place it upon
my wrist, so. Now I suggest to myself
that it is very hot. But my conscious
knows that it is not hot, and so I merely
appear, to myself and to you all, a trifle
foolish.

“Nevertheless, any hypnotist can sug-
gest to a pre-hypnotized subject that the
coin is indeed hot, and the subject’s flesh
will blister if toudied with this same cold
coin! . . .

’'Now I will call my servant ”

P lacing his two enormous, shapeless
hands on the table, Dmitri heaved
himself to his feet, and a tremendous bel-
low issued from his barrel-like chest.
That summons, though the words were
lost in a gulf of sound, was unmistakable,
and presently the door opened and the
little man, prim and neat and wholly a
colorless personality, entered.

“Yes, Master.”

Dmitri stood beside the table, his right
hand resting heavily on the polished oak.
“Sit down, little Stepan.”

The small man, the ghost of a pleased
smile on his peasant face, sat down prim-
ly in the oaken chair and looked about
the room with child-like pleasure. Ob-
viously he was enjoying to the uttermost
his small moment.

“You would prefer the sleep, little
one? It is not necessary; we have been
through this experiment many times to-
gether, you and I."

"I would prefer the sleep, Master,” the
little man said, widi a slight shudder.

“Despite myself, my eyes flinch from the
flame "

“Very well.” Dmitri’s voice was casual
and low. “Relax, little one, and sleep.

Sleep soundly ”

He turned from his servant and picked
up the fifty-cent piece. Turning it over
and over in the fingers of his left hand
he began to speak, slowly.

“I have told this subject’s subconscious
that its body is invulnerable to physical
injury. Watch!”

The little man was sitting erect in the
massive chair. His eyes were closed, his
face immobile. Dmitri stooped, lifted an
arm, let it fall.

“You are not yet sleeping soundly,

Stepan. Relax and sleep — sleep ”

Slowly the muscles in the little man’s
face loosened, slowly his mouth drooped,
half open. Small bubbles of mucus ap-
peared at the corners of his lips.

Dmitri seemed satisfied. Quietly, sooth-
ingly, he spoke.-

“Can you hear me?”

The man’s lips moved. “I can hear
you.”

“Who am I?”

The answer came slowly, without in-
flection. “You are the Voice that Speaks
from Beyond the Darkness.”

Dmitri loomed above the chair. "You
remember the truths that I have taught
you?”

“Master, I remember.”

“You believe?”

“Master, I believe. You have told me
that you are infallible.”

Dmitri straightened triumphantly and
surveyed his silent audience. Suddenly,
then, a roaring streamer of bluish flame
lanced across the room. Dmitri had set
the gasoline torch alight.

A woman was babbling hysterically.
But above the steady moan of the flame
Dmitri said loudly, “There is no cause
for alarm. Now, observe closely. I am

THE THING ON THE FLOOR

285

going to go far beyond the ordinary
hypnotist’s procedure ”

He carefully picked up, with the pliers,
the fifty-cent piece. For a long moment
he let the moaning flame play on the coin,
until both coin and plier-tips glowed
angrily.

Calmly, without warning, he dropped
the burning coin on his servant's naked
wrist!

A woman screamed. But, then, gasps
of relief eddied from the tense audience.
For, although the glowing whiteness of
the coin had scarcely begun to fade into
cherry-red, the man Stepan had shown no
sign that he felt pain! There was no
stench of burning flesh in the room. Even
the fine hairs on the back of the servant’s
wrist, hairs that touched and curled deli-
cately above the burning coin, showed not
the slightest sign of singeing!

Dmitri’s face was an obese smirk.

“In order that you may be convinced
that this is neither illusion nor trickery,”
he grunted, "watch!” Carefully he tapped
the coin with the pliers, knocking it from
the man’s wrist to the floor.

Around the coin’s glowing rim smoke
began to rise. ...

Still smirking, Dmitri poured a half-
glass of ice-water on the red-hot coin,
and the water hissed and fumed as it
struck the incandescent metal. There was
a little puff of thick smoke from the
burning wood, and now the coin was cold
— cold and black and seared.

No scar marked the servant’s white
wrist!

Dmitri rubbed his great, shapeless
hands together. And, shuddering, Mary
Roberts watched him, for she knew in-
stinctively that this was, indeed, no trick-
ery. . . .

Abruptly Dmitri lifted the roaring
torch, thrust its fierce blast full in his

servant’s face, held it there for a moment
that seemed an eternity. Then he turned
a valve, and the hot flame died.

Though the man Stepan’s face was
streaked with carbon soot, the flesh was
smooth and unharmed as though the blue
flame had never been!

Dmitri looked at his guests, and
chuckled!

"One more test,” he boomed, tKen,
"and we will turn to more pleasant things.
Believe me when I tell you that these hor-
rors are necessary if you would have faith
in me.” He picked up the small auto-
matic pistol. "Will someone examine this
weapon, assure you all that it is fully
loaded?”

No one offered to touch the gun.
Dmitri shrugged. "Do not doubt me;
the weapon is loaded, and with lethal
ammunition.” He wheeled, and for an
instant the gun hammered rapidly, and
on the breast of his servant’s shirt, over
the heart, there appeared suddenly a little
cluster of black-edged holes, beneath
which the white flesh gleamed un-
marked. . . .

Dmitri put down the gun and rubbed
his hands together affably.

"Should anyone care to examine the
back of that chair, he will find all the
bullets I have just fired, together with a
great many others fired in previous ex-
periments.” He stooped over his still,
pallid-faced servant. "You may awaken
now, little one.” Then, to the horror-
ridden group before him, "There will be
refreshments and music immediately,
downstairs. I will mingle among you,
and you may ask me any questions you
wish.”

Stepan, the slight, wholly undistin-
guished-appearing servant, had risen from
the chair and was holding wide the door.
Slowly, regally, his master walked from
the room. . . .

286

WEIRD TALES

3. The Hypnotic Lamp

“you really must meet him, Maty.

■Sl He's — he’s such an overwhelming
personality, and it would be rude, really,
to avoid him now. See, he’s looking to-
ward us ”

Casually Mary Roberts turned her head.
Across the long expanse of this almost
flamboyantly oriental downstairs room in
whidi Dmitri’s guests had assembled
she saw the man. He was seated in a
massive, ivory-armed, dragon-footed chair,
and he was talking to a group of three
or four women. But he was looking be-
yond them, speculatively, at Mary.

"Helen, I'm afraid of him. He’s — he’s
evil — blasphemous ! ’ ’

Helen Stacey-Forbes only laughed.
"Blasphemous?” she echoed. "Nonsense!
He’s only years ahead of his time. Never
fear — his interest in you will vanish as
soon as he learns that you can’t pay his
outrageous fees.” She was already —
Mary’s arm linked in her own — threading
her way through die chatting throng. . . .

The colossus, as they approached, ab-
ruptly cut short his conversation with the
group of admiring ladies and turned his
flabby bulk toward them.

"They are thrill-seekers, Miss Stacey-
Forbes,” he exclaimed petulantly. "Still
— I have made appointments with two of
them. . . . But how is your brother, Ron-
ald? And who is your friend?”

"Dmitri — Mary Roberts,” Helen Sta-
cey-Forbes said formally. "Miss Roberts
is the daughter of the Honorable James
Roberts. . . . Ronald is well; he is very
careful not to endanger himself.”

Dmitri chuckled. "Ronald is being
very careful, eh? Well, well — but acci-
dents sometimes happen — and then there
is only Dimitri.” He stared fixedly at
Mary. "You are very beautiful, my child;
our Police Commissioner Ethredge is a
fortunate man — indeed he is.”

Mary Roberts flushed. "I was im-
pressed by your — demonstration,” she
said hastily. "It was — spectacular.”

He lifted a monstrous, shapeless paw.

"Histrionics,” he said flatly. "My real
work does not deal with such fireworks.
Would you be convinced? Are you in
every respect sound and well?”

Mary tried to repress the shudder of
aversion that crept through her as she
looked at the man.

"I am in perfect health,” she said
firmly.

Dmitri looked down at his great soft
hands. Then he spoke, as it were casually,
to Helen Stacey-Forbes.

"I have wanted — since your brother
came to me a year ago — to examine you,
as well. You come from an old family;
should you marry it is possible that you
would transmit to your children the hemo-
philia from which he suffers. Today is
a propitious day; your friend can accom-
pany us while I interrogate you; then,
should she need me at some future time
she would not fear me — as she does
now.”

Helen Stacey-Forbes’ face was grave.
"I had thought — of coming to you,” she
admitted. "Perhaps — if Miss Roberts is
willing ?”

Mary objected only faintly. She was
wondering if perhaps Helen had not re-
ally brought her here because she feared
to be alone with this man. . . .

"The — guests?”

Dmitri glanced about the room, heaved
himself ponderously to his feet.

"The guests!” he exclaimed. "We will
be but a few minutes. Those in need of
me will wait; the others are better gone.
Come.”

T he chamber into which Dmitri ush-
ered the two young women was a
small room, almost monastically fur-
nished. There was a large table and

THE THING ON THE FLOOR

287

Dmitri’s usual massive chair; several
other, smaller chairs were scattered hap-
hazardly about. A faded strip of carpet-
ing ran diagonally from the door toward
the table. There were no pictures, no
bookcases or books, no filing-cabinet or
desk. A telephone rested at one end of
the table, close beside an ambiguity that
— save for its grotesquely large bulb, full
of an uncommon multiplicity of filaments
and several oddly shaped and curiously
perforated metal vanes — looked like an
unshaded desk-lamp.

Dmitri lowered himself into his tre-
mendous chair. "Sit down,” he directed
abruptly. "Compose yourselves. You,
Miss Roberts, may watch this experiment;
it is in no way new, yet it is always fasci-
nating. Notice this lamp; it is so designed
that it emits whorls of multicolored light,
which move according to a recurrent pat-
tern, somewhat in the manner of a pin-
wheel.”

His hands, hidden beneath the table,
touched a concealed switch, and the odd-
looking lamp began to glow in all its
many filaments, while simultaneously the
complexity of tiny vanes began to revolve,
slowly at first and then faster and faster,
until they had attained a maximum veloc-
ity beyond which there was no further
acceleration. And as the filaments within
the lamp gradually warmed, Mary real-
ized that they gave off light of many
colors, as varied and as beautiful as the
spectrum seen in rainbows, colors which
moved and changed in a weirdly hyp-
notic sequence of patterns. . . .

"Observe the lamp, Miss Stacey-
Forbes,” Dmitri said, in a calm, conversa-
tional tone. "Do not trouble to think —
merely observe the lamp — see how the
colors melt and run together and repeat
themselves again ”

Abruptly the ceiling light was extin-
guished. And Mary Roberts gasped at
the unearthly beauty of the whirling

lights; even beneath the cold glow of the
Mazda lamp they had been a strange
symphony, but now, glowing and whirl-
ing like a mighty nebula of spinning

suns ! Her eyes were riveted upon

them; they seemed to draw her toward
them, to suck her into themselves. . . .

"Observe the lights, Miss Stacey-

Forbes ” Mary knew that it was

Dmitri’s voice, yet it sounded billions of
miles away. And, curiously, she believed
for a fleeting instant that there was a new
note in that slumbrous whisper — a hint
of exultation. But the thought vanished
in its second of birth, lost amid the maze
of spinning lights — the lights that were
too, too beautiful. . . .

4. The Stolen jewels

M rs. Gregory luce stood surveying
herself with pardonable satisfaction
in the almost-complete circle of full-
length, chromium-framed mirrors that
glittered their utilitarian splendor in a
comer of her bedroom. It was well, she
was reflecting, that the electric-blue gown
fitted her with wrinkleless perfection, that
her hair was a miracle even Francois had
seldom achieved; today was her tenth
wedding anniversary, and tonight Greg-
ory was taking her to hear Tristan and
Isolde.

With sophisticated grace she returned
to her dressing-table and seated herself.
In her walk, languid and self -appreciative
though it had been, there was neverthe-
less a vague essence reminiscent of Mary
Roberts; Priscilla Luce might almost have
been a prophetic vision of Mary as she
would some day be — their mothers were
sisters. Only Priscilla w r as a little more
the cautious type than was Mary: Priscilla
had selected her husband with an eye to
the future; she did not wholly approve of
Charles Ethredge. Otherwise the two
young women were very much alike. . . ,

288

WEIRD TALES

Slowly, then, Priscilla Luce smiled.
Surprizingly, her marriage had turned out
an emotional as well as a financial success;
she was truly grateful to and in love with
Gregory, now. There had been an un-
suspected tinge of romanticism in him,
after all; on their wedding day he had
given her his grandmother’s emerald
brooch, set with its great, flawless, square-
cut stone — and the ruby and emerald
tiara. And today he had brought her a
Cartier bracelet, also of cool green em-
eralds. . . .

Languidly she arose and walked to the
south wall. Here, between the two win-
dows, hung a single, exquisite little etch-
ing. Priscilla Luce reached up, swung
the etching back on cleverly concealed
hinges, twirled the combination of the
blued-steel wall-safe. . . .

In the moment that she reached inside
the tiny safe Priscilla Luce knew that
someone other than herself had handled
the little leather-bound jewel-cases within.

For a moment she stood stock-still.
Then, carefully, she began to remove the
jewel-cases, opening and examining each
one.

When she had finished she walked to
the dressing-table and sat down. She
knew that she would not tell Gregory
tonight; she would wear the Cartier brace-
let, and he would not know; his evening
would not be spoiled. But she would
have to tell him, tomorrow, and they
would have to decide what to do. . . .

The emerald brooch and the priceless
old tiara were gone!

And very clearly Priscilla Luce real-
ized that the thief was someone they knew
-someone they trusted. . . .

She stared at herself in the mirror.
She was beginning to feel frightened,
beginning to feel a sick, anticipatory
dread. . . .

5. Et hr edge Hears Startling News

W hen Police Commissioner Charles
B. Ethredge received Priscilla
Luce’s enigmatic and disturbingly urgent
telephone call he lost no time in getting
to the Vermont marble and Bethlehem
steel palace the Luce millions had built,
ten years before, for Gregory Luce’s
young bride. "It concerns Mary, ter-
ribly,” his fiancee’s cousin had said, her
voice taut and strange, "but do not, under
any circumstances, tell her that I have
called you.”

Priscilla Luce met him in the library.
She greeted him with grave gratitude; as
soon as they were seated she began almost
bruskly to speak.

"I called you, Charles, because you are
both influential and discreet, and because
you are vitally concerned in what I have
to say. Charles, do you know anything
of a psychiatrist who came to town about
fourteen months ago — a man who calls
himself Dmitri?"

Ethredge nodded.

"Why, yes, I have heard of him; Mary
attended one of his Thursday evenings
a week or two ago with Helen Stacey-
Forbes. Helen is enthusiastic about what
he seems to have done for Ronald.”
Priscilla Luce smiled thinly. "It seems
strange that Ronald was never ill until
after he met this Dmitri. Do you know
anything more about the man?”

"Yes,” Ethredge grunted, "I do. Dmitri
is a sensationalist. The more conservative
psychiatrists have tried to convict him of
extortion, of making Messianic and un-
fulfillable promises, of other unethical
and even criminal practises. As he is still
practising, their attempts, needless to say,
have all failed.”

Priscilla Luce nodded.

"What did Mary say about him?”
Ethredge grinned.

"Very little. Said that she was amused
W. T. — 2

THE THING ON THE FLOOR

289

— that perhaps, beneath all his stage trap-
pings, the man might even be competent.
That’s all.”

Nervously Priscilla Luce leaned for-
ward.

"Charles, obviously you don’t know
that Mary has been after me these past
two weeks to go to Dmitri’s with her.
She hasn’t asked me merely a few times;
she’s asked me incessantly. I’ve always
refused — Gregory, as you know, would
disapprove — and since last Friday she
hasn’t asked me once. But last Thursday
evening she went again to Dmitri’s. Did
you know?"

Ethredge’s mouth was grim. "I didn’t,
no."

Priscilla Luce leaned forward and put
her hands pleadingly on Charles Eth-
redge’s lean strong wrists.

"This is going to be hard, terribly
hard, to tell you. And please, Charles,
please understand that I have not come to
you because you are Mary’s fiance; I am
not as despicable as that. I have come to
you because you arc the Commissioner of
Police, because, if anyone can, you can
help her "

"In God’s name.” Ethredge whispered,
"what is wrong? Tell me "

The woman’s face was drawn with
miser)'.

"Between Thursday last and last night
Grandma Luce’s brooch and tiara were
stolen from my wall-safe. Only two per-
sons know the combination to that safe,
and of those two persons Gregory is
automatically absolved ”

"You suspect — Mary I" It was not a
question; it was a statement — flat, life-
less. And in Ethredge's heart was a slow-
growing horror, for this thing Mary could
never have done; yet he knew, knew
already that her hands had taken the
jewels. . . .

"Yes. Gregor)- has had private detec-
W. T — 3

tives — from Philadelphia. Mary’s finger-
prints ”

There was silence in that room, then,
while Ethredge stared at Priscilla Luce’s
slender, patrician hands, still clasping his
waists.

"It was not in Mary to do this thing,"
he said at last, quietly. "There must be
some other explanation, however incred-
ible. Mary could never steal.’’

The small hands touching his wrists
trembled.

"Perhaps I was wrong about you, and
Mary,” Priscilla Luce said softly. "I was
arrogant — and ambitious for her. I am
sorry.”

Suddenly her eyes welled with tears,
the great drops falling like glistening
diamonds on Ethredge’s hands. . . .

6. Ethredge Asks Help

“|3 eters, come to my apartment; I’ve
got to talk to you."

Detective-Lieutenant Peters of the hom-
icide squad, sitting with his square-toed
boots outsplayed on the scarred top of his
Detective-Bureau desk, listened, his face
expressionless as stone, to the taut, nerve-
racked voice of his chief. Calmly he
spoke.

"O. K., Commissioner; I’ll be right
out." Carefully, leaning forward from
his hips, he set the telephone down. For
an instant he did not move; then he
sw'ung his feet to the floor and stood
erect. His face, as he crossed the room
toward the coat-rack, was still blankly
impassive.

Yet within his skull his thoughts were
seething. Through an instinct born of
long association and mutual trust he knew
that the Commissioner had at last de-
cided to confide in him; between the
Commissioner and his subordinate there
existed a peculiar — and byjnost persons
unsuspected — friendship. . . .

290

WEIRD TALES

The distance to Ethredge's home was
not great, and Peters, driving a police
sedan, covered it quickly. The Commis-
sioner, when he rang, let him in at once.

Definitely, Peters saw at once, Ethredge.
looked ill. But Peters knew, too, that
something far less easily defined than
mere illness had kept the Commission-
er away from his desk these past few
days. . . .

"Drink?” Ethredge gestured toward a
nest of bottles and an array of glasses
conveniently at hand.

"Thanks.” Peters helped himself to
two ounces of whisky, downed it neat.
The men sat down.

"Peters," Ethredge began abruptly,
"I'm up against something that I can’t
fight alone. And I can’t use the police,
because I’ve no case that would convince
a jury; I’d be thought mad. Also, Mary
is involved, and her connection with this
affair must never become public knowl-
edge.”

Peters nodded. "Better tell me every-
thing, Commissioner."

"Peters, can a hypnotist cure disease in
another man through subconscious sug-
gestion? Can an adept so control his sub-
ject’s mind that that subject becomes his
virtual slave, even to the extent of com-
mitting a theft? Can a hypnotist cause
his subject to suffer and die from a dis-
ease which heretofore has not threatened
him?”

Peters looked thoughtfully at the nest
of bottles.

"Sounds like Dmitri.”

"Yes,” Ethredge exclaimed hoarsely,
"it is Dmitri, damn him!”

Leisurely the Detective-Lieutenant rose,
poured a half-drink of amber-colored
whisky, sat down again.

"Commissioner, hypnosis, the powers
of the will, the depths of the subcon-
scious, are to a great extent unknowns —
and limitless unknowns. I cannot say that

I would definitely disbelieve anything,
anything at all, you might tell me con-
cerning them. Dmitri? Certainly I be-
lieve the stories I’ve heard about Dmitri.
Tales of men dying of loathsome diseases
after willing him their money — tales of
strange thefts and inexplicable gifts of
which he seems invariably the benefi-
ciary.”

Ethredge leaned forward.

"Yet we can do nothing — legally."

Peters shook his head. "No, nothing —
legally.”

Ethredge spread out his hands and
looked helplessly at them.

"Peters, I went to see the man. He has
Mary under his control; I’ve been watch-
ing her, following her about for days.
She doesn’t know, and I’m tired, tired
almost to death; I’ve had to do it all my-
self; I dared trust no one. Peters, a week
ago Mary took her cousin Priscilla Luce’s
jewels, and brought them to Dmitri; God
knows what he’s done with them. Since
then she’s been trying to persuade Mrs.
Leeds — Arthur Leeds’ widow — to go to
Dmitri’s with her. God, I know that the
man’s a monster, yet I’m helpless against
him.”

Ethredge paused, and slowly his hands
knotted into fists, relaxed.

"Peters, when I went to see him he
laughed at me. More, he said that so long
as Mary had access to wealthy homes he
would continue to use her, and that if I
so much as attempted to interfere with
him he would make her suffer, horribly.
She was my vulnerability, he told me, and
she was his chattel.”

Peters lifted his drink to his lips.

"A venomous fellow," he said softly,
"and a strategist, as well.”

“Yes,” Ethredge muttered. "I’m afraid
that he can do everything he says.”

Peters set down the small glass, empty.

"You are right. Undoubtedly he can
do everything he says. And yet we are

THE THING ON THE FLOOR

291

men, and when men meet a poisonous
serpent they squash it, and we must
squash Dmitri as pitilessly.” He paused,
then slowly continued, "There might even
be a certain poetic justice in the method
by which this may most safely be done.
Yes, I think so. I think that on Thursday
evening you and I will be included among
Dmitri’s guests, and then we shall see
what we shall see.”

7. The Spiders Lair

C harles ethredge sat, alone, in
Dmitri’s small, first-floor consulting-
room. He sat poised tensely on the very
edge of his hard, uncomfortable chair.
As the minutes slowly passed his fingers
drummed, now and again, with a nerv-
ous, jerky rhythm on the top of Dmitri’s
massive table. Occasionally he glanced
swiftly about the barren room, but there
was little to attract his attention within
that tiny chamber; even the cryptic lamp
in the center of the table was dark and
lifeless. And Ethredge was not really con-
cerned with the room in which he sat;
his whole attention was focussed on the
room adjoining, the theatrically oriental
reception chamber from which came,
faintly, the sensuous sobbing of Dmitri’s
balalaika orchestra and the muffled mur-
muring of departing guests.

One by one the voices dwindled, and
at last even the music of the orchestra
ceased. There was the sound of brief
confusion as the musicians packed their
instruments and took their departure, and
then utter silence.

The door opened, and Dmitri, wearing
his invariable lounging-robe and slippers,
entered. With slow, waddling shuffle he
crossed behind the table to his personal
diair, and carefully eased his flabby bulk
into its capacious depths.

"Very well, Commissioner Ethredge;
we are alone together, as you requested.

My guests have gone; my orchestra is
already drinking vodka within some wine-
shop; only my servant remains v/ithin the
house. You see that I am not afraid of
you.”

Abruptly he paused. For the door be-
hind Ethredge’ s shoulder had opened, and
a man had stepped swiftly into the room,
closing the door behind him.

Dmitri’s cruel black eyes were suddenly
war)’.

"Who are you? I recognize you; you
were among those at my demonstration,
but — you disappeared. What are you do-
ing here?”

Peters grinned reassuringly at the Com-
missioner, spoke almost soothingly to
Dmitri. "There is a narrow space be-
tween your orchestra dais and the wall,
uncomfortable, yet a sufficient hiding-
place. Who am I? He shrugged slightly.
"I am — of the police. Afraid that you
might not agree to grant us a joint audi-
ence, I took the precaution of concealing
myself.”

For a moment Dmitri sat still. Then
his fat shoulders heaved in a billowing
shrug, and he spoke almost scornfully.

"One or two or a dozen of your kind;
what does it matter? With your mujik
here to lend you courage. Commissioner,
what do you propose now?”

The words were goading, taunting, and
swiftly Peters signed to Ethredge to re-
main silent. Almost gently he murmured,
"What do we propose now? Well,
Dmitri, we propose first that you release
Mary Roberts from whatever enjoinments
you have placed upon her subconscious.”

He paused, for the obese colossus was
smiling.

"Suppose that I refuse.”

Peters literally purred his reply, "You
are an intelligent man; I assure you that
the police of this country have devised
extremely piquant methods of making a

292

WEIRD TALES

man suffer, methods which we would not
hesitate to employ upon you.”

For an instant the pupils of Dmitri’s
eyes dilated. Then, his voice blandly im-
passive, he said, "You forget that, even if
I would, I could not, in her absence, re-
lease Maty Roberts’ subconscious. I am
not a story-book magician, and I cannot
command her conscious to come here. She
will not come here again, except of her
own free will, unless she brings — another
with her. And that will be only on a
Thursday. She did not come tonight;
would you wait here seven days for her
to present herself?”

Slowly Peters smiled. "Mary Roberts,
at Commissioner Ethredge’s request, is
waiting in a small restaurant not far from
here. I will telephone her.” He rose,
took a step toward the table.

The colossus seemed to swell in his
chair like an infuriated toad. ''Stop!”
His chest heaved, and from his cavernous
interior there issued a half-shriek, half-
bellow that beat in that small room like
the scream of an ape. "Stepan! Stepan !"

Peters’ hand flicked to his hip. But
Dmitri only smiled, smiled and shook his
monstrous head.

"Your weapon will be of no avail
against my Stepan.”

8. Stepan

A bruptly the door opened, and the
k- small, wholly self-effacing Stepan
entered, glanced imperturbably about.
He carried Dmitri’s small automatic pistol
in his right hand, and instinctively Peters’
Angers moved, again, toward his hip,
then paused helplessly as his mind re-
called with sudden sharp vividness the
incredible demonstration he had wit-
nessed only a brief hour before. Too well
he knew that his gun was, indeed, power-
less to harm Stepan. . . .

Dmitri was grinning broadly.

"Watch these men closely, Stepan, and
usher them from my house. Should they
attempt any tricks do not hesitate to
shoot. After all, they are here against
my will, and they have threatened me.”

The servant Stepan, only a slight tinge
of color in his cheeks revealing that he
felt any interest whatever in the proceed-
ings, gestured with the small automatic.
And in that instant Peters whipped to
die floor, his hands grasped die end of
the strip of carpet on which Stepan stood,
his body jerked backward.

His arms wildly flailing, Stepan
plunged to his hands and- knees; the
automatic skittered across the floor. And
suddenly Dmitri, half lifting himself
from his chair, was babbling unintelli-
gible, fear-ridden words. Ethredge, as
Peters rose to his feet, had pounced upon
the outsplayed servant, pinioning him to
the floor; Peters, his right hand at his
hip, swung alertly toward Dmitri.

"I’ve — got him, Peters,” Ethredge
gasped, the little man beneath him no
match for the Commissioner’s sinewy
strength. And chill, shuddery horror ab-
ruptly swept him as he realized that this
man lie touched, this squirming, writhing
thing beneath his hands, was invulnerable
to lead or to flame, a being that could be
overpowered, but that could not be de-
stroyed! " What’ll I do with him?"

Grimly Peters snarled, "Hold on to
him. I’ll handle this death-ridden dia-
betic!”

His service automatic a blue-steel men-
ace in his right hand, Peters walked to
the table. With his left hand he lifted
the receiver from the telephone and dialed
a number. Warily he stooped over the
table as he spoke, presently, with Mary
Roberts. Then he cradled the receiver
and sat down, facing the colossus.

"She will come here, at once.”

Seemingly, Dmitri had collapsed. His
shapeless hands lay limply on the chair

THE THING ON THE FLOOR

293

arms, his great chest heaved gulpingly;
only the snaky brightness in his darting
ebon eyes warned Peters that his tremen-
dous brain was thinking, planning, calcu-
lating with chain-lightning rapidity. The
servant Stepan was only spasmodically
struggling.

Peters spoke abruptly to Ethredge.

‘'When Mary comes someone will have
to admit her. Can you keep this devil
covered while I go to the door?”

Ethredge, crouching across the serv-
ant’s chest, his knees crushing the man's
shoulders against die floor, nodded. . . .

Silence, rolling on with interminable
slowness, gripped the room. Gradually
the rattle of Dmitri’s breathing was grow-
ing quiet; he sat now in his chair like
some obscene, waiting idol, his face an
undecipherable mask.

From beyond the tight-closed door a
bell faindy tinkled. Peters edged toward
Ethredge, slipped his automatic into the
Commissioner’s outstretched hand. Then
he was gone. . . .

Dmitri did not move. A minute passed;
to Ethredge it seemed as though all the
suspense of myriad ages was bound up in
that brief span. Then the door re-opened
and Peters, followed by Mary Roberts,
re-entered the room. Mary's fair, oval
face was a composite of bewilderment and
apprehension; in the instant that she
glimpsed the tableau within the room her
slender body trembled violently and the
color drained from her face, leaving it
white as new paper. But then her
straight, strong young spine stiffened and
her firm little jaw set hard. Pale though
she was, she glanced inquiringly at Eth-
redge.

“Charles ” she whispered.

Shakily, Ethredge smiled. He nodded
toward Dmitri, bloated, swollen, hud-
dled inscrutably in his chair.

"I’ll have to tell you — now, Mary,” he
said slowly. "Try to understand. On the

night that you came here with Helen
Stacey-Forbes, Dmitri ensnared you. He
cast a — spell over you. We have come
here, we have asked you to come here —
we are going to force him to release you.”

Mary, staring at her sweetheart, was
frowning. Almost musingly she spoke.

"I have had — terrible dreams,” she
said, her voice low, “dreams in which he
told me to do — strange things; dreams
in which I — obeyed him. But I believed
that they were only nightmares. And
yet, though I loathed him, I know that I
have surrendered to the strangest im-
pulse to ask others to come here with me
— Mrs. Arthur Leeds ”

Ethredge’s eyes, as he glanced at
Dmitri, were suddenly cruel. Then, gent-
ly, he spoke again to Mary.

“We must free you now, free you from
Dmitri — for ever. But Peters believes
that you will have to go, once more, be-
neath his spell.”

For a long moment Mary stood there
quiet. Then, the words barely audible,
she breathed, “Very well, Charles. I am
ready.”

Peters, who until this moment had been
standing, hands in his jacket pockets,
with his back against the door, advanced
into the room, stooped for the automatic
in Ethredge’s outstretdied hand, and
dropped into one of the row of chairs
that faced Dmitri’s huge table.

“Very well, Dmitri,” he said, gestur-
ing significantly with the automatic, "let
us waste no more time. Proceed, and
understand clearly, that if you attempt to
trick me I will certainly kill you.”

Briefly the men’s eyes met and clashed.
Then, with surprizing suddenness, Dmitri
rolled his flaccid shoulders in an expres-
sive, acquiescent shrug; his loose lips
split in a good-humored leer.

“Shall I confess that I am beaten,
then?” he asked affably. “Yes, let it be
so; I begin to believe that I have, in any

294

WEIRD TALES

case, overestimated Mary Roberts’ value
to me. If you will sit across from me.
Miss Roberts, and look fixedly at the
lamp ”

Warningly Peters exclaimed, "Don’t
look directly at that thing, Commis-
sioner!”

Did a flicker of disappointment cross
Dmitri’s face? Peters, as he moved from
his chair to stand directly behind Dmitri,
the muzzle of the automatic inches from
Dmitri’s silk-swathed shoulders, never
knew. . . .

9. The Spider Spins

D mitri's fat fingers touched a small
button set beneath the edge of the
table. And instantly, though Peters
forced himself not to look up, he felt,
beating against his lowered eyelids, the
incredibly soothing, incredibly beautiful
monotony of whirling color produced by
the fantastic lamp. Abruptly, then, the
ceiling light went out. Except for the
diabolically cadenced, leaping reiteration
of pinwheel color dancing in the center
of the table like some chromatic dervish,
the room was dark. Grimly Peters kept
his eyes averted, kept his gaze boring into
Dmitri’s black, pillar-like silhouette.

Slow seconds passed. Then Dmitri
spoke, spoke in that vibrant, beautiful
voice of his that was like the chanting of
a cathedral organ.

"You are asleep, Mary Roberts?”
There was a moment’s pause. Warn-
ingly the police automatic in Peters’ hand
touched the sodden flesh at the base of
Dmitri’s neck.

Through the stillness came Mary’s re-
ply: "Master, I am asleep.”

By not so much as a single, involun-
tary shudder had Dmitri betrayed even
the slightest awareness of the cold gun-
muzzle. Yet Peters knew that even now

the man was planning, calculating chance
against chance. . . .

"Who am 1 ?” The words boomed like
great mellow bass notes.

Mary’s answer came unhesitatingly:
"You are the Voice that Speaks from Be-
yond the Darkness. You are the Infal-
lible One.”

Peculiarly, Peters sensed that in that
instant Dmitri had reached a decision. . . .

The strong, resonant phrases roiled on,
"You will forget the assignment that I
have given you.” There was a pause, and
Peters realized with a curious, crawling
anticipation that Dmitri was gathering
himself together, concentrating himself
upon himself, ominously.

Then the black words boomed, "Let
your nerves go mad and your muscles
tense and writhe until death releases
you!”

"Damn you!” Peters snarled the curse;
his gun-muzzle sloughed savagely into
Dmitri’s obese flesh. Yet the gun did
not speak, and Dmitri, wincing beneath
the torturing steel, chuckled. . . .

"I gambled that you would not fire,”
he gasped, his voice suddenly gloating.
"And now we are no longer stalemated;
before I will consent to release Mary
Roberts from the agony she endures you
will promise me immunity, and more
than immunity — you will promise me pro-
tection, henceforth. Take that cannon
from my neck ”

The ceiling light flashed up, the whirl-
ing of the multicolored vanes slowed and
died. And, as the eyes of Ethredge and
Peters grew accustomed to the increased
illumination within the room, the two
men felt their bloodflow pause, then run
like ice-water in their veins.

For Mary Roberts had toppled from
her chair, and now lay weirdly, unnatur-
ally sprawled on the naked floor beside
Dmitri’s table, her spine bent backward
like a tight-drawn bow, the slender heels

THE THING ON THE FLOOR

295

of her tiny shoes nearly touching her
chestnut hair beneath her chic little hat,
her throat and jaw muscles stretched like
oversharp violin strings, her teeth and
pink gums bared in a ghastly grin. Her
breasts were rising and falling spasmod-
ically; she breathed in choking, rattling
gasps. The fair, pale flesh of her oval
face was purpling.

“God!” Ethredge stumbled to his feet,
stood swaying drunkenly, his hands out-
stretched; he had utterly forgotten the
servant Stepan. For an instant the little
man struggled to rise, then sank back
weakly.

The obscene colossus grinned. “Do
not fear; she will live a long time. Her
nerves will tire; then she will relax for
a moment. She will breathe more easily,
then.”

And, as though the prophecy were a
command, Mary’s body went suddenly,
horribly limp, melted against the barren
floor as though death had abruptly col-
lapsed every straining muscle. Only her
gulping, hurried breathing and the grad-
ual fading of the terrible purple conges-
tion from her face told that she was still
alive. Mucus was beginning to run from
her loosely open mouth.

Ethredge took a slow, uncertain step
forward. “God!” he mumbled, again.
Then he found words, babbling, pleading
words. "You — devil! Free her, only free
her, and ”

"Commissioner!” It was Peters’ voice,

harsh, rasping. “Commissioner ”

With a sudden, gasping sob he paused,
for, with the sharply reiterated exclama-
tion Mary's body had once more tensed,
knotted into a backward-bent bow more
terrible to look upon than had she twisted
and writhed.

“Dear God!” Ethredge moaned. He
took a second, wavering step forward.
And then Peters found speech.

“Commissioner!” His voice was im-

placable, steely. “Stop! Do you know
what you are doing, in surrendering to
this — beast of hell? You are dishonor-
ing yourself for ever, you are promising
him immunity to torture, and murder,
and debase — yes, for he has done all of
these things ”

Ethredge’s lips were a twisted snarl,
“Peters, I would promise him my soul —
to free Mary!”

Dmitri was grinning, grinning. . . .

Peters’ words were like the flicking of
a rapier. “Mary would loathe you — if
she knew. Mary would never permit this
— sacrifice of honor.”

Ethredge took another step forward.
He seemed not to have heard.

10. A Little White Pellet

W ith sudden, grim determination
Peters plunged his left hand deep
in his breast pocket. His right hand
dropped the gun to the floor, his right
arm constricted about Dmitri’s throat
There was a small white pellet in the fin-
gers of his left hand.

"Dmitri!” he snarled, “this tablet; can
you guess what it is? — it smells of al-
monds!”

The powerful biceps of his right arm
tightened. Caught in that strangling em-
brace, Dmitri writhed weakly, horribly,
his pig-like eyes wildly staring.

Peters’ face was inches above Dmitri’s
fear-maddened eyes. The pellet moved
closer to Dmitri’s slavering, gasping jaws.

“Just a touch against the tip of the
tongue! You attempted trickery, Dmitri;
had you not done that we might have
drawn your fangs and let you live. But
now ”

Swiftly, then, he forced the bitter-
smelling pellet into Dmitri’s wide-dis-
tended mouth, crushed the man’s jaws
violently together,

296

WEIRD TALES

The taste of almond was strong on
Dmitri’s tongue.

For a split second his eyes seemed
bursting from their sockets. A horrible,
retching moan welled from his saliva-
drenched mouth; blue veins leaped on
his hairless temples. Then, like a pin-
pricked balloon, he collapsed; his massive
head rolled forward upon his flaccid
chest; he huddled there, stilly, in his
chair. . . .

"The end of you, Dmitri,” Peters was
whispering. "The end of you!”

And then he heard Ethredge’s voice,
dazed with the horror he had undergone,
yet implacable, now, with heartbroken re-
solve.

"We must kill him, Peters! You are
right; Mary would not have us sell honor,
even to save her!”

Ethredge, his eyes unseeing, his mind
near-crazed by suffering, did not know
that Dmitri was already dead. And
yet

"Dmitri is dead,” Peters said softly.
His whole attention was focussed upon
Mary r , upon the small huddled figure
that, in the instant of Dmitri’s passing,
had suddenly relaxed, lay now in semi-
conscious exhaustion. And in Peters’
heart there leaped exultation; for in his
mind had been, all along, the strange,
weird conviction that the end of Dmitri
would bring release to those he had en-
slaved. For Peters knew that Dmitri had
instilled into the subconscious of his vic-
tims the belief that he was infallible, the
belief that he was a kind of god, protect-
ing them, shielding them, curing them of
their ills. But now the man-god was
dead, and, of necessity, in each of his
dupes the blind, limitless sea of the sub-
conscious was rejecting the theories he
had taught, spewing out his broken im-
age, obliterating him, in disillusionment,
from the chasms of memory. Before
Peters’ eyes the unnatural tendency to

convulsion that Dmitri had instilled in
Mary Roberts’ subconscious, the cruel
weapon he had implanted within the core
of her being and goaded, in terror- ridden
desperation, into life, had died in the in-
stant her subconscious became aware of
Dmitri’s passing, had ceased as abruptly
as though a circuit had been broken, as
completely as though an evil light had
been extinguished. . . .

Peters, stooping over Mary, now limp-
ly, weakly relaxed, slipped his strong
right arm beneath her shoulders, mur-
mured swift, soothing words. Sanity,
he saw, was flooding back into her eyes.
And then she looked toward and be-
yond Ethredge, and she screamed — and
screamed again.

Peters’ eyes followed her rigid gaze,
and as he looked at the servant Stepan
his nerves crawled and the short hairs at
the base of his neck bristled in an ecstasy'
of horror.

'Dear — God!”

In that second of unsurpassable horror
there blazed across Peters’ mind a strange
kaleidoscope of tableaux, tableaux that
were all the same, tableaux of the obese
Dmitri and the small, self-effacing Stepan
enacting a multitude of Dmitri’s experi-
ments, experiments in which invariably
the small automatic hammered bullets
into Stepan’s chest, the blow-torch flamed
in Stepan’s face, hot coins were dropped
with seeming harmlessness on Stepan’s
wrists! That horror on the floor, that
horror that had been the servant Stepan,
that horror that had, in the moment of
Dmitri’s passing, changed!

"Dear — God!”

For the flesh-and-blood face of the
servant Stepan had vanished, and in its
place there remained only nightmare, only
a flame-charred, crimson skull! The hor-
ror lay upon its back, its arms outflung,
as it had lain while Ethredge pinioned
it down. Its jacket was open, and the

THE THING ON THE FLOOR

29 7

exposed expanse of shirt-front was a
sticky crimson smear.

"Dear — God!”

Those bullets, those hundreds of bul-
lets, that Dmitri must have fired, during
the months and years, through Stepan’s
chest! And somehow Peters knew, as he
gazed through mercifully glazed eyes
upon the horror outsplayed there, that
beneath the red-drenched shirt there re-
mained no shred of mortal flesh, but only
a bleeding, bullet-blasted hole!

And on Stepan’s wrists Peters saw the
holes, the great fire-seared holes, the
charred, circular holes the size of a half-
dollar. . . .

"Dear — God!” Peters was babbling,
over and over, inanely.

D imly, while his brain reeled and his
soul retched as he gazed upon the
ghastly thing on the floor, he yet realized
that the same release that had, in the
instant of Dmitri’s passing, loosed Mary
Roberts’ nerves and muscles from the
death-laden throes of convulsion, had
also, and in that same awful instant, freed
Stepan’s subconscious from the enjoin-
ment that his body was invulnerable to
physical injury. And with that release
had come Stepan’s doom — the long-de-
layed death that should have been his in
the instant, now perhaps years in the past,
that Dmitri had first blasted a bullet
through his heart.

In that moment Peters was hardly a
man — he was more an animal, terrified,
near mad with horror. He realized only
vaguely that his hands were clenched into
rigid fists, that his heart was pounding
with frantic rapidity. He could feel his
spine crawl and bristle; sweat, reeking
with adrenal secretions, leaped from his
pores.

But warningly, through waves of hor-
ror, some tiny figment of his brain was
reiterating the command, "Don’t let go

of yourself! Don’t let your nerve break!"

Slowly, then, he tore his gaze away
from that horror on the floor. And,
gradually, his vision cleared, his brain
resumed its functioning. He had been
close to madness. . . .

He saw Ethredge, then, standing close
beside the table, gazing at the horror at
his feet, swaying, tottering drunkenly.
Just as the Commissioner would have
reeled to the floor Peters stumbled to his
feet, grasped the man, guided him like a
shambling cretin to a chair, fumbled in
the Commissioner’s hip pocket for his
whisky-flask.

"Dear Lord!” Peters whispered, as he
forced whisky into Ethredge’ s trembling
mouth. "Dear Lord! if this doesn’t drive
him — drive her — mad ”

That horror — that horror on the floor!

But the hot, burning stimulant was
bringing color back into Ethredge’s face.
Swiftly Peters turned to Mary, tilted her
head back, poured a staggering draft
down her throat. Gently he lifted her up,
supported her to a chair, where she sat
dazedly. Mercifully, she was in almost
a comatose condition.

Ethredge was beginning to find words.
"That thing — that — thing!" he was mum-
bling.

Incisively, then, Peters spoke.

"Commissioner, you’ve got to get hold
of yourself. We must get the medical
examiner here, get Hanlon and Delaney
and men from the Medical Association;
we must hush this affair up. Thank God
we have influence; thank God the hor-
rors Dmitri has perpetrated on this man
have been witnessed by many persons.
Perhaps the story will be — a private ex-
periment that failed, and Dmitri dead — -
of heart-failure. Dmitri was, after all,
diabetic, and his heart was untrustworthy.
But — we cannot wait; we must call Han-
lon at once.” He moved toward the tele-
phone.

298

WEIRD TALES

"But Dmitri!” Ethredge whispered.
“Dmitri — dead of cyanide poisoning!
The medical examiner will know. Dmitri
— murdered!”

Peters turned. His face, as he slowly
shook his head, was enigmatic.

“No, Commissioner. Remember that
I once told you that there might even be
a certain poetic justice in the manner by
which Dmitri might be most safely —
destroyed? That pellet was harmless,
made of crushed almonds and flour;
Dmitri was his own executioner. He be-
lieved that he was tasting cyanide, and
so he died; his own weapon, the power
©f suggestion, killed him — justly.”

He was lifting the telephone to his

ear. But before he dialed the well-remem-
bered number he looked, thoughtfully,
for a long moment, at Dmitri, at the
bloated, repulsively hairless hulk that had
once housed a brilliant, utterly evil soul.

“Poor, w r arped devil!” he softly mused;
“he could treat and cure others by sugges-
tion, but he could not treat himself. And
now he is dead. Well ”

The short, stubby fingers of his right
hand were dialing the number. And, as
he listened to the small, reiterated grat-
ing sound of the whirling dial, he real-
ised, vaguely, that Ethredge had gone to
Mary Roberts, that Ethredge was stoop-
ing over her comfortingly, soothing her
within his strong, embracing arms.

^Z^readful

Sleep

By JACK WILLIAMSON

£4 thrilling tale, a romantic and tragic tale, a weird-scientific story of the.
awakening of the fearsome beings that lay in dreadful slumber
under the antarctic ice, and the weird doom
that befell the world

A N INITIAL apology seems due
the reader of this history. For I,
* Ronald Dunbar, am not a man
of letters. Three of the books that bear
my name — those entitled Antarcticana I,
11, and 111 — are merely the necessary sci-
entific records of my various polar explo-
rations. And the popular abridgment of
them called An Odyssey of the Ice was
no more than an effort (which turned out
very happily) to wipe out the deficit of
my third expedition.

It happens however, that no accom-
plished literary historian was present to
observe those mind-crushing events that
made the year I960 the most terrible in

human history. I am the only surviving
witness to much of that hideously enig-
matic catastrophe. Despite my disqualifi-
cations, therefore, as well as the natural
reluctance of an active man to spending
some months confined to on unaccus-
tomed desk, I feel it my duty to set down
a plain, simple account of what hap-
pened. If without mudi literary embel-
lishment, it will at least be accurate and
clear.

The event of June 1 1 -December 24,
I960, is already recognized to be the most
astounding and terrifying phenomenon
that ever overtook our world. It was high
noon over America, on June 11, when the

DREADFUL SLEEP

299

"The shining siren fled away before him, mocking, elusive."

summer sun abruptly vanished and the
chill blackness of a wintry midnight fell,
soundless but infinitely apalling. At the
same instant, in the eastern hemisphere,
night was turned incredibly into day.

Amid the stunned shock and panic that
followed, astronomers swiftly perceived
that the earth had moved half around its
orbit. In a split heartbeat, six months
had somehow gone. The Christmas sea-
son fell, unwarned, upon a world too
staggered and fearful for merriment.

For, inexplicably, the disaster had cost
thousands of lives. From office and home
and street, in that dazing instant, the vic-

tims had abruptly vanished. Bewildered
survivors found themselves addressing
empty air, or passing food to a vacant
plate. The vanished left no clue.

The bodies were never recovered. Near
New York, however, which had suffered
most heavily, a sinister thing was found.
Upon the Jersey Palisades lay a queer
gray area of lifeless desolation, and near
its center, where lovely Alpine Park had
been, was a wide circle of strange squat
earthen mounds.

The mounds were swiftly crumbling.
But apprehensive explorers, venturing
into the unpleasant labyrinth of burrows

300

WEIRD TALES

beneath them, found a few gruesome
relics identified with the missing persons.
No single human fragment, however, had
been found when the tunnels caved in.

The world has had no explanation of
this amazing tragedy. The astrophysicists,
it is true, put their learned heads together,
called up the shades of Einstein and
Minkowski, and spoke sagely of a flaw
in the space-time continuum. The press
caught up their magic words, and the
whole planet was soon informed that it
was a Time Fault which had made six
months seem like the winking of an eye.
Neither savants nor newspapers, how-
ever, could account for the vanished thou-
sands, or explain the grisly mounds in
that queerly devastated park upon the
Palisades.

I am the only surviving man who
knows the actual cause of the Time Fault,
who experienced all the nerve-shattering
horror of those six lost months, or who
met face to face the incredible menace
that stopped all the world. I found cour-
age, then, to go ahead, believing that the
inherent interest of what I have to tell
will make up for any lack of literary
adornment.

1. The Different Doctor Harding

O N the morning of February 10, of
fateful I960, Doctor Aston Harding
came into my room at the Aero Club. I
was just three days returned from that
season’s very successful polar flight; clang-
orous New York still seemed a shining
paradise, and any old acquaintance a wel-
coming angel. I greeted Harding like a
brother — before I discovered that he
wanted me to fly him back to the Ant-
arctic, the very next week!

I put the answer to that in pretty plain
words.

"We can’t do that, Harding! There’s
just about six weeks of twilight left at

the South Pole, before six months of
winter set in. I know what it’s like—
I’ve just come from there!”

I ignored the set determination on his
blank face.

"I’m fed up with silence and ice and
frostbitten feet. What I want is jazz
bands, and my ice in a frosty glass, and
feet tapping on waxed hardwood. Sorry,
Doctor, but it simply can’t be done — not
this season. Now, if you can wait until
November

Harding set down the whisky soda I
had mixed for him, and rose deliberately
to stand over my chair. He was a tall
man, his broad shoulders a little stooped
but powerful; he had a ruddy skin and
yellowish hair. A few years older than I,
but still under forty, he was already dis-
tinguished in both philanthropy and sci-
ence.

I had always liked Harding, for a quick
generosity and a spirit of genuine fellow-
ship, almost as much as I admired the
girl he had married: lovely Jerry Ware.
I was indebted to him, as director of the
Planet Research Foundation, for substan-
tial aid to my polar flights. He had been
a good friend — and I was deeply shocked,
now, to see the change in him.

His pale blue eyes fixed me with a
penetration that I found disquieting, and
his low voice, a new strange hardness in
it, rapped:

"Yes, Dunbar, you’re going to fly us to
the Pole — this season!” His eyes, always
before so genially mild, were suddenly
sharp as gimlets. "An explorer, you want
fame: you want to advance science: you
w'ant money for another expedition.
You’ve got a price, Dunbar — what is it?”

A very rude reply was on my tongue.
But my respect for the old Doctor Hard-
ing, my old friendship for Jerry Ware,
rose up in time to check the words. And
Harding stabbed at me with an almost
menacing forefinger.

DREADFUL SLEEP

301

“We’ve got the biggest proposition you
ever had a nibble at, Dunbar,” his harsh
voice crackled at me. “Were going to
reclaim Antarctica. We're going to thaw
the ice cap with atomic power!”

He paused a moment to let that sink
in, his keen pale eyes boring into my face.

"An invention of Meriden Bell’s,” his
rasp went on. “You know him. This is
confidential, Dunbar; I trust you. We've
formed a syndicate. Five of us. My wife
and I, Bell and Tommy Veering — and
yourself.”

At last I swallowed my amazement,
and:

“Thaw the ice!” I blurted. “Harding,
you don’t know what you’re talking about.
I've spent years there. Remember what
Antarctica is: five million square miles,
covered with ice up to a mile deep, with
temperatures seventy to a hundred below!
Thaw — that?”

“It can be done!” he rapped. "You
talk to Bell. And there are millions in it.
Billions. For all five of us. I’ve put
you down for four per cent, plus ex-
penses.” His tone became unpleasantly
dictatorial. “Get ready, Dunbar, to fly us
down in your Austral Queen — by the end
of next week.”

"If that’s all you want, Harding ”

I bit my tongue, and held open the
door. Something, some indefinable qual-
ity in his bearing, made me want desper-
ately to hit him. It was his old friend-
ship that held my arm, and Jerry Ware.

I was still hurt and puzzled by this harsh
dictatorial insolence in a man who had
been the most patient and generous of
my friends, when the phone rang again
that afternoon, and I was surprized to
hear the voice of Harding’s wife.

A discord of anxious worry marred its
old sweet music.

“Ron!” she cried eagerly. "How are
you?”

Jerry had been, and was, perhaps the
friend held closest in my lonely life. But
I must make it clear, against possible
misunderstanding, that I did not love her,
nor she me. I had sincerely congratulated
the Hardings on their marriage, believing
them perfectly mated. The change in her
husband distressed me deeply, for I knew
what it must mean to Jerry.

Her voice was quivering, now, plead-
ing.

“Ron, if Aston’s way provoked you, I
am sorry. I must explain about him. He
had an — illness, two years ago. He had
been working late in his office at the
Foundation — some Government research,
on account of the Pacific War. And one
night he — disappeared.

“I was frantic. The police couldn’t
find him. I was afraid he was — dead. It
was two weeks before he came to himself,
stumbling along a highway out in Jersey.

“It was amnesia. Still he can’t remem-
ber what happened. There was evidence
that somebody had broken into his office.
The police thought an Asiatic spy might
have attacked him, to get some secret.
But he doesn’t know. And since ”

Her low voice caught, choked.

“Since, he seems different — sharp and
impatient — sometimes cruel. And still
there are lapses in his memory, details he
can’t recall. I have to help him. For he’s
still” — she choked again — “still dear to
me. And promise me, Ron, that you’ll
forgive him, bear with him.”

“I promise, Jerry,” I told her.

“Oh, thank you.” It was a glad, eager
cry. “And, Ron, will you come out to
dinner tonight? There’s to be a meeting
of the syndicate, afterward, to discuss the
expedition.”

"I'll be there, Jerry, to see you. But I
warn you, I’m not flying back to the Pole
— not this season.”

Her gay little laugh ignored that last

302

WEIRD TALES

"Thanks, Ron,’’ she said. Doctor Bell
will pick you up at seven.”

Meriden Bell — old "Merry” Bell! I
was eager to see him, and yet dreaded
the encounter. I had known him well
when he worked at the Foundation, be-
fore the terrible events that shattered his
career and estranged him from the world.

His genius had been a flame in him,
in the old days. Radiant good spirits had
sparkled in his eyes. I knew that things
were different, now. I had hardly seen
him for two years, but the outline of his
tragedy was familiar to me: it is part of
the blackest chapter in American history.

Three years before, a day came back to
me when I had called on Bell in his
biological laboratory at the Foundation,
which then occupied a gray old building
at the edge of the Jersey meadows. Hard-
ing had already hinted that Bell’s bac-
teriological research was the greatest of
the century, but I was nevertheless sur-
prized.

All that long-past summer afternoon
came back: the air in the laboratory a
little stuffy, unpleasant with a vague odor
of formaldehyde; the north light gleam-
ing on microscopes, incubators, centri-
fuges, and specimen jars; Bell, a tall blue-
eyed man, young and slender in labora-
tory white, eagerly busy over a spectro-
scope.

He came to meet me, turned to point
dramatically at a test-tube that held a
few drops of an amber fluid.

"My triumph, Ron!” Eager elation
rang in his low voice. “That is my Cul-
ture V 13 — the perfect bacteriophage! It
is a filterable virus that will destroy any
living thing, any bacterium, any malig-
nant organism. When I have developed
the control — a specific protection for the
cells of the human body — it can eradi-
cate all disease!”

"All disease!”

Awed by the might of this slender

man’s genius, perhaps a little incredulous
before his sudden promise of universal
health, I reached out gingerly to touch
the tube in its rack. Bell swiftly caught
my arm, and:

"Don’t!” his tense voice warned. "If
one drop touched you, Ron — or the mil-
lionth of a drop — nothing could save
you! Nothing — until I have developed
the specific control.”

I turned somewhat apprehensively —
for those few brown drops seemed sud-
denly more terrible than all the blizzards
of Antarctica — and came face to face with
the most dreadful man I have ever seen.

2. Five Against the Ice

D readful — no other word so fits that
human monstrosity. Wearing a
stained laboratory smock, he stood less
than five feet tall. His back was horribly
hunched, and his great gnarled hands
slung forward like the limbs of a gorilla.
Beneath sleek black hair, his face was a
yellow, V-shaped mask. His eyes, set
deep beneath dense, bushy dark brows
that sloped to make a smaller V, were
black also — and his most appalling fea-
ture.

They held me, his eyes, in a sort of
shrinking fascination, because they were
— hideous. One was oddly red-flecked
around the contracted pupil, with an evil,
glittering red. • The other was strangely
dilated, a fearsome inscrutable midnight
orb that seemed to have no iris.

Those dark, mismated eyes were fixed
on the yellow liquid in the tube with an
intensity somehow terrifying. Beneath
the ugly blankness of the yellow, pointed
face I sensed a sinister storm of sup-
pressed emotion: a mad black yearning, a
bitter, burning hatred, a savage and tri-
umphant gloating.

I started back, appalled as if some bot-
tomless crevasse had abruptly snapped

DREADFUL SLEEP

303

open before me. Bell made a hasty in-
troduction:

“Ron, this is Doctor Kroll. Captain
Dunbar, meet Doctor Mawson Kroll, who
is assisting my biological research.”

The hunchback had started also, and
all hint of that yearning and hatred and
gloating was instantly gone from the yel-
low V of his face — though he couldn’t
erase its stifled, searing fury from my
mind. The hand he gave me was unpleas-
antly cold.

“Doctor Bell has made a remarkable
discovery.” Kroll’s voice was oily and yet
grating, unpleasant as his breath. "One
the world will not forget.”

The horror to come must have been
already in his twisted mind — perhaps I
had seen its birth. But only afterward
did 1 see the sardonic second meaning in
his words.

The Pacific War was fought during my
next polar expedition, ended before I
knew of its beginning; for the censored
radio carried no news.

The American air forces, supported by
the fleet, had already won a swift and
brilliant victory, when Bell’s “Culture V
13” fell mysteriously into the hands of
the enemy. Nevertheless, by the last
vengeful order of a defeated and mortally
wounded commander, three surviving
Asiatic planes sprayed the bacteriophage
along the Pacific coast. From Seattle to
San Diego, it took a million and a quarter
lives, hideously.

Hideously — for every droplet that
touched a human body started an incur-
able sore, a tdeeding crater of agony that
spread implacably, swiftly destroying skin
and flesh and bone, until not life alone
but every vestige of the corpse was con-
sumed.

On that terrible morning, when a
whole nation was stunned with horror
and death, high military authorities called
on Meriden Bell, at his laboratory. His

skill could do nothing: the dead were
dead, and Asiatic vengeance satisfied.
Bell admitted that his bacteriophage must
have caused the deaths, but could not ac-
count for its possession by the enemy.
He was arrested, tried by court-martial,
convicted of treason — then suddenly ex-
onerated, when the guilt was pinned upon
Mawson Kroll.

For Bell’s assistant had taken flight,
leaving a trunk filled with Asiatic gold.
In the intercepted communications of the
enemy were found letters in which Kroll
demanded, as payment for his treason, to
be made Emperor of America.

The fugitive hunchback was arrested,
two weeks later, on the Mexican border.
Stupidly he denied his guilt, even his own
identity. An alienist pronounced him
criminally insane. Tried in a military
court, he was convicted by the over-
whelming weight of circumstantial evi-
dence, shot by a firing-squad.

Bell abandoned his experiments, de-
stroyed his records and various cultures
at the Foundation, by military command.
His brilliant mind, it seemed for months,
had been shattered by the disaster. He
was forcibly restrained from suicide, com-
mitted to an asylum.

His tortured brain had assumed the
guilt of a million murders. The psychia-
trists, if they failed to unburden him alto-
gether of Kroll’s crime, at least convinced
him that he might best make atonement
by living. He had come back to the
Foundation before my last expedition, to
begin research in a newly opened field of
sub-atomic physics.

N ow, when Bell came to meet me in
die winter gloom that filled the halls
of the Aero Club, I saw that he had never
escaped the shadow of that tragedy. He
was frail and thin, his blue eyes dark
with brooding. His white pinched face
looked as if it never smiled. The eager-

304

WEIRD TALES

ness of his greeting, however, was almost
pathetic.

"Good old Ron,” he whispered, and
felt the muscle of my shoulder with his
pale fingers as if we were schoolboys
again. "You must thrive on cold — you’re
looking like a red-headed Hercules."

"But I’ve had enough of winter for
this season, Merry," I told him. "What
I’m looking for is warmth and women
and laughter." And I asked hopefully,
"Harding wasn’t possibly joking, about
this project to thaw the ice cap?”

"No, Ron." Bell’s pale thin face was
abruptly serious, almost grimly resolute.
“We’re going to do it, all right. The
equipment will be ready in a week. And
you are the only man with experience
enough to take us where we want to go,
at this season. We’re going to the Staple-
don Basin- ”

"The Stapledon Basin — right across the
Pole!" That got me. "Surely, Merry,
you haven’t considered how difficult — or
impossible — it would be to thaw a conti-
nent of ice!"

His dark eyes came gravely to my face,
and in them was some commanding
power, some deep reflection of his old
supernal genius, that silenced my protests.

"But I heive considered, Ron," he said
quietly. "And I have solved every prob-
lem. I have developed an atomic battery
that will supply ample power — it is still
secret; what I tell you is confidential."

“Atomic power?"

He nodded.

"It is a hydro-helium vacuum cell. We
call it the Atom-Builder. It builds hy-
drogen atoms into helium. Four hundred
grams of hydrogen gives you three ninety-
nine of helium, plus one of pure energy.
A gram of energy is a great deal, Ron.
A few tons of u'ater will be all the fuel
we need. We shall bum ice to thaw-
Antarctica!"

I was speechless to that. Merry went
on gravely:

"Your plane will carry all the equip-
ment we need. I have designed a heat-
beam radiator, transformers, tower —
everything. Harding has formed a syn-
dicate to put up the money. Wc are all
meeting tonight— ”

"Listen, Merry," I started to object.
"Harding is taking just a little too much
for granted. So far as I’m concerned ”

His white fingers caught my arm.

"But, Ron, old man, you don’t under-
stand." His voice was hoarse, quivering.
"This is the chance for me to make up
for what I have done. One discovery of
mine took a million lives. If another
could open up a new continent, where
millions could live, it would help settle
the score.”

He gulped. His tortured eyes searched
my face.

"That’s all I’ve been working for, Ron,
since I — came back. You won’t stop me
— will you?"

No resisting that. "All right. Merry,”
I told him.

His thin hand wrung mine.

"Thanks, old man!" He was almost
sobbing. "We’ll be ready to fly by the
eighteenth. You can have the Austral
Queen in shape? There will be five of us
going, and no others."

"But Jerry Harding!" I protested.
"She isn’t going — not into such hardship
and danger. Some of my men might be
persuaded to return ”

"No others!" An old bitterness was
hard in Bell's voice. "This tiling is secret
— there won’t be another Mawson Kroll!”
His dark eyes stared at me, so terrible
that I looked away. "And Jerry will hear
of nothing else but going," he went on.
"There’ll be just the five of us, against
the ice."

W. T.— 3

DREADFUL SLEEP

305

3 . The Dweller in the Pylon

W E found the Hardings at their up-
town apartment, and Tommy Veer-
ing. Jerry Harding was her old self : slen-
der, gray-eyed, charming; yet I could see
her deep concern for her husband. She
hovered anxiously near him, twice came
swiftly to his aid when his memory
seemed to stumble upon a momentary'
blank.

Veering was a slim, slick-haired young
chap, whose smiling brown eyes held a
diffident appeal. A new protege of Hard-
ing’s, he had been with the Foundation
since his graduation. For all his youth,
he was already distinguished in electronic
engineering.

He listened intently as Bell briefly out-
lined the momentous plan, after we had
eaten. Keen enthusiasm lit his boyish
face. Eagerly, he gripped Bell’s hand.

"Wonderful, Doctor Bell! It — it’s
great. You have given the world another
world!’’ And he began a question: "Your

precise sub-atomic formulas ?”

"If I have revealed enough to convince
you," Merry' Bell said gravely, "I shall
reserve the rest until we have reached the
site of operations.’’ Old bitterness shad-
owed his voice again. "So there cannot

be another ” He bit his thin lip. "I

have listed the equipment we shall need.”
Veering’s enthusiasm ended indecision.
We went on to plan the expedition:
plotted a schedule for the flight to the
frozen Stapledon Basin, that would be a
race against the swift-falling polar night;
listed our essential supplies and the nine
tons of Bell's equipment against the maxi-
mum capacity of my loyal old plane, the
Austral Queen.

It was two o’clock when I got back to
my room at the club, elated with this mad
dream of conquering the polar world, yet
troubled with vague apprehensions in-
spired by the change in Doctor Harding.
W. T.— 4

I was thinking moodily, too, of the mock-
ery in Bell’s old nickname, for if ever I
had seen a man walking alive in hell, it
was surely he. It was worth all the risk
and folly of the flight, I thought, to alle-
viate his torture. I went to bed, and, of
old habit, fell immediately asleep.

From this point it is difficult for me to
go on. Much of the remainder of this
histoiy must deal with facts and beings
that will appear incredible in the severe
light of established science.

I share the reluctance of the orthodox
scientist to admit anything not proven by
objective observations and beyond all
doubt, for I know too well the possible
subjective vagaries of the human mind.
I am sensitive, too, of any charges of sen-
sationalism or mistreatment of the truth.

Yet it is my obvious duty to omit noth-
ing that happened, however fantastic or
ill-supported the account of it may seem.
To leave out anything would distort the
whole. Perhaps it is to be expected, after
all, that the circumstances leading up to
the incredible phenomenon of the Time
Fault should appear equally astounding.

I woke suddenly in my dim-lit room.

The city had grown almost quiet. The
illuminated hands of the electric clock
showed five minutes past three — I had
been sleeping no more than an hour.

The sound that had waked me was
totally unfamiliar — unless perhaps it sug-
gested the song of some tiny, exotic trop-
ical bird. Its plaintive keenness held a
wail of lonely despair, yet somehow it
was heart-pi ercingly sweet.

I sat up in bed abruptly, less frightened
than merely startled although my heart
was thudding. My hand went toward
the light. Before I touched the switch,
however, I saw what was in the room.
And all movement left me.

My incredible visitor was floating a
yard off the floor, beside my bed. It

306

WEIRD TALES

shone with a pale light of its own, so
that I had no need of the electrics. A
brief high note came from it again, keen
with lonely longing, and somehow telling
me not to be afraid.

A being beyond conception, supernal!
An exquisite rosy shell, floating upright,
flushed with a living light. Its fluted
spirals tapered to a point, below. Its
gleaming lips, flared out like a vase of
pearl, held the bust of an elfin woman.

Maru — Mora!

Her tiny shoulders were covered with
a fine golden down. Her delicate head
was — or seemed — the head of a pigmy
queen. But the golden plates that
crowned it, I knew, and the plumed scar-
let crest above, were living part of her.

Her small pointed face was whiter than
alabaster, and imperial in its pride. Her
eyes were huge, purple, limpid. They
were round and sober with the innocence
of a child’s; they were inscrutable with
ageless wisdom; they were dark wells of
agony, ancient and ageless.

Her lips were a tiny crimson wound.
They were full, almost sensuous. They
smiled at me, with a faint twist of malice.

Maru-Mora. I knew that she was noth-
ing human. Yet my fancy ever made her
so, for eyes and lips and even the impu-
dent flirt of her crimson plume held all
the essence of humanity: wisdom and the
vain yearning to forget, pride and bitter
defeat, hot passion and long frustration,
hope and despair, bright courage and con-
suming fear, living joy and ultimate, in-
finite agony.

Against all that, it mattered not if she
had a golden carapace instead of hair, if
her great eyes were lidless, if her facial
economy seemed to provide no nostrils.
Bodily, she might have more in common
with the mollusk than with man, but
some fchord in her spirit touched the hu-
man, none the less.

Altogether, elfin bust and pearly vase,

she was less than four feet tall. And the
flying shell, I knew, was as much a part
of her, as much alive, as the shining crest
or her purple eyes.

I sat in the bed, staring at her, bewil-
dered, incredulous. She should have been
a dream. The fastened window — for the
room was air-conditioned — had not been
disturbed; the door was still locked. But
here she was. And I was as wide awake
as I had ever been. I heard the distant
thunder of an elevated train.

Hie red lips pouted, the keen voice
came again, like a whistling, saying, as I
sensed its wordless meaning: Do not be
afraid. The shining being drifted a lit-
tle toward my bed, settled toward me.
Over the lip of the shell readied a slen-
der arm, bright with golden fur.

The hand that reached for me was tiny,
infinitely delicate, seven-fingered. It was
thumbless, the middle finger longest.
The nails were narrow, pointed, crimson.
For all its golden strangeness, it was beau-
tiful, and, to me, a hand.

The keen piping, so lonely, so sorrow-
fully sweet, wailed again. I looked into
the infinite wells of those purple eyes.
And something made me put up my own
big hand, grasp those tiny furry fingers.

Instantly, incredibly, I was snatched
out of my body.

I know how utterly fantastic, impos-
sible, that must seem. But I had an in-
stant’s impression of my body left behind
in that dim room, sitting bolt-upright and
motionless in the bed. Then we were
plunging upward, outside, above the dark
building and the restless city.

Southward we soared — that shining
being beside me, drawing me by the hand,
for my form was still the same, even if
my body lay behind — across slumbering
continents and over dark whispering
oceans.

We swept into the frigid gray twilight
that lay upon the polar lands. I recog-

DREADFUL SLEEP

307

nized the very Mountains of Despair, of
•which my party had made an aerial sur-
vey on the last expedition, and lying vast
and desolate beyond them, the Stapledon
Basin,.

And down we sloped again, across
gray crevasse-riven glaciers, toward a tow-
ering transpolar range that I had glimpsed
in the distance, called the Mountains of
Uranus, but had never reached.

As we dropped toward those black
granite peaks, bleakly stark, frost-shat-
tered, yet rearing so majestically from the
eternal ice, I was amazed to see what
seemed a building, with twin hexagonal
towers, projecting above the naked wind-
swept ledges of a rounded summit.

This structure — I hardly know a name
for it — seemed deeply anchored in the
living granite. Its material was un-
familiar: ice-clear and richly purple, like
some unimaginable colossal amethyst. Its
low massive outline somewhat suggested
those towered gateways of the ancient
Egyptians that archeologists call pylons.
But it had no opening; it appeared door-
less, windowless, one solid block of flaw-
less crystal.

Near it, however, a wide fissure cleft
the black summit. Worn stone steps,
freshly swept free of snow, led down into
it. At their foot was a massive door of
black metal, battered and corroded as if
by the impact of ages.

W e settled down upon the barren
ledge above the fissure. I stood
upon the snow-patched granite — or it
seemed that I did, for I was still aw'are
that my body lay back in New York. And
the shining being floated beside me, the
golden tendrils of her fingers still grasp-
ing my hand.

A weirdly unforgettable scene. The
stark black mountain beneath us tower-
ing above the* gray infinity of ice. The
midnight sun burning low and ominously

red in the misty distance. The immemo-
rial mass of that towered crystal block,
strange with deep-cut glyphs, looming
above us like the enigmatic monument of
some lost and forgotten race.

But the being at my side was looking
down at that ancient black door. Her
eery piping keened out again, calling. A
little time went by. Then a girl opened
the door, and came running lightly up
the steps.

She was beautiful — slender, tall, filled
with the glory of young womanhood.
Her trim clothing was strangely cut from
some pure white fur. The one strand of
hair that escaped her close-fitting cap was
a gorgeous ruddy gold. Her oval face
was very fair, the forehead high and
white. Her wide blue eyes were burning
with some new-born eagerness.

Beautiful. . . . My stumbling words
could never convey her perfect loveliness.
I looked at her, drank deep of her vital
splendor, for some old, haunting thirst
was being satisfied. She held some elusive
perfection that I had sought, for many
weary years, in many lands, even in my
polar explorations, .and never glimpsed
before.

Beautiful. ... I knew instantly that I
wanted her, to possess and to serve, to
love, for ever. And I knew, bitterly, that
this was was only some strange dream,
that I really lay still — or my body did —
back in New York City.

"Maru-Mora!”

The girl ran to the flying being, with
that eager greeting on her tongue. She
embraced those golden shoulders, light-
ly, gently. A tiny golden-furred hand
stroked her head, affectionately. Then
the keen thin piping of Maru-Mora came
again, and the girl turned eagerly toward
me.

"I know your' name: you are Ron
Dunbar,” she said, surprizingly. She
spoke English. Her voice was low, faint-

308

WEIRD TALES

ly awkward, as if she were little used to
speech. It was soft, deeply rich, de-
licious. “I am Karalec,” she said. "Maru-
Mora brought you here to her dwelling —
or a part of you — so that I might speak
to you, for her.”

I — or the "part of me” — stood drink-
ing in her sheer, glowing loveliness.
Swift admiration had conquered my old
diffidence with women, even my present
amazement. I stood merely looking, de-
lighted, until suddenly I was afraid that
my gaze might offend or discomfit the
girl.

"I'm glad that she did,” I said. ’’And
1 wish that she had brought all of me, so
that perhaps I could stay.”

Deep and serene, the girl’s clear blue
eyes looked into mine. Her full lips
quivered suddenly; her white nostrils
flared to a deeper breath; her deep bosom
lifted.

"I wish, Ron Dunbar,” her low voice
said simply, "that you could stay.”

Afterward, I was surprized at my swift
surrender to a woman in a dream. But
emotion, as well as thought, all through
that incredible experience, seemed more
direct and clear than common. Some old
restraint was left behind.

"I’ll come again, ” I found myself
promising the girl. "Now I know the
way. I’ll fly back to these very mountains.
Next time, all of me — for you.”

Eagerness shone bright on her face.

"You will come, Ron — for me?”
Gleaming tears misted her eyes. "And
sometime — we can go out together — out
into the World?”

The sweet exotic piping of Maru-Mora
came again then, swiftly urgent. The girl
Karalee looked up at that supernal being,
and bade to me. And all die eagerness
had gone from her face. It was a pale,
bleak oval, stricken. The tears were gone.
Her eyes were dry, dark with pain.

"No, Ron, you must never come back.”

Her voice was steady and low. “That is
what Maru-Mora brought you to hear.
You must never fly your madiine into
this land again. You must promise that.”
I looked at her, sharing all die agony
written on her white face.

"But I'm coming back,” I said, "before
the sun is gone. I’m coming to take you

away, Karalee ”

Her face brightened for a moment, to
a tortured eagerness of longing. She
looked up again at the silent fantastic
shape of Maru-Mora.

"No, Ron Dunbar,” her voice came
slow and heavy with regret. "You must
not come to diis land again.” Her tone
quivered. "Never — not even for me.
Maru-Mora forbids it.”

I looked up at the shining being diat
still held my hand in her tiny furry fin-
gers, demanding:

"Why?” -

4. "They That Sleep”

Again that eldritdi, plaintive piping
Tv sobbed from the elfin woman's
head, gold-crowned and scarlet-plumed,
above that flaring opalescent shell. Again
the fair girl Karalee, so lovely in her trim
white furs, rendered translation:

"It is true, Ron Dunbar, that you are
planning to fly here again, with new com-
panions, before this sun is gone?”

"It is,” I said, surprized.

"It is true,” Karalee gave the next
question, "that your purpose is to thaw
the ice from all this world?”

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been amazed
at that. After all, Maru-Mora had come
to New York after me. It didn’t much
increase the wonder of it, I suppose, that
she now displayed knowledge of what
had occurred there, that evening, in Hard-
ing’s apartment.

For an instant, however, I was speech-
less. A strange fear chilled and shook

DREADFUL SLEEP

309

me, until I looked up into those great
purple orbs. They came down to my face,
and I felt a warmth of supernal peace.
The fear was gone.

"That’s right,” I said. "We’re going
to use atomic power. Doctor Bell hopes
to make the whole continent temperate,
and open it up to settlement.”

"Then you must give up the plan,”
Karalee rendered the swift reply. "For
the ice must never be thawed. . . . Death
is sleeping under the ice, Ron Dunbar —
the death of all the world! Take care lest
you rouse it.”

"Death?” I demanded. "What do you
mean?”

Then took place the strangest and cer-
tainly the most terrible part of all that in-
credible adventure.

We still stood together beside that
colossal purple pylon, on the naked gran-
ite of that frozen peak. Red as blood, the
midnight sun burned low in the horizon-
less distance, where the gray illimitable
desert of ice merged with the gray and
featureless sky. A bitter wind howled
and moaned about the towers of the
pylon. I was insensible of any cold, but
the girl Karalee was already pale, shiver-
ing. She had gestured toward the steps
that led down to the door in the rock.

"Let us go down into my rooms,” she
said. "It is warmer there.” Dark with
longing and regret, her eyes looked at
Maru-Mora, and back at me. "If you are
forbidden ever to return, at least ”

Maru-Mora’s piping cut her off. As if
answering a command, the girl stepped
quickly to the flying being. She held out
a mittened hand. Tiny golden fingers
clasped it.

"Come,” the girl translated. "Maru-
Mora is carrying us to see the peril that
you must not rouse. It is They That
Sleep.”

We rose again. I had the briefest
glimpse of Karalee left standing on that

frozen ledge, her arm rigidly extended.
Yet she was with us also, drawn by Maru-
Mora’s other hand — drawn out of her
body, as I had been.

W E three soared swiftly through
chill gray mists, descended upon a
rugged ice-plain from which jutted great
boulders of granite, black, naked, shat-
tered with the frost of ages. We stood at
the brink of a dark crevasse. Karalee
pointed across it.

Her lips moved twice before she could
speak, and her voice came muffled, breath-
less, choked with horror.

"There,” she said. "One of Them. It
is the Watcher.”

I shuddered at sight of that monstrous
thing. It stood upright upon a cragged
boulder, and it did not move. The body
of it was black, covered with great scales,
a swollen elongated thing shaped like an
immense barrel. It stood upon three
black tentacular limbs, whose extremities
had coiled like mighty serpents to grasp
the granite.

Head, it had none. But the bulged up-
per end of the black body was broken
with a great sharp triangular projection,
which looked like a hideous snout. Three
scaled triangular flaps, just about its swol-
len equatorial belt, might, I thought, cover
strange organs of sense.

This creature was utterly horrifying,
in a sense I can hardly define. Its horror
held nothing familiar. If Maru-Mora was
clearly non-human, it was certainly non-
terrestrial. It chilled me with an element-
al, absolute revulsion.

I knew that the girl was sick and cold
with dread. I heard her make a pleading
little whistle: her human imitation of the
voice of Maru-Mora. Her strained hoarse
whisper came to me, urgent:

"Look swiftly, Ron, so that we can go.
I do not like these things. But Maru-
Mora says you must see ”

310

WEIRD TALES

The black monstrosity, indeed, held my
gaze with a fascination of utter terror. It
had been there, motionless, a long time.
The great black scales were silvered with
frost. Snow was banked beyond it. The
ice had climbed up over the coils of its
ophidian limbs. •

The boulder was cracked, I saw, shat-
tered. Time had splintered the granite
since those giant tentacles first grasped it.
Only their frozen pressure held it from
crumbling. How many centuries?

Surely, after so long, I thought, it must
be dead — and I knew that it was not.
Nothing dead could inspire such resist-
less fear. I sensed — or fancied — a slow,
implacable beat, like a pulse of evil,
measured, menacing, mind-shattering.

I flinched suddenly, turned away, hid
my eyes with a trembling hand. I fought
a strange and elemental sickness, a new-
born horror that gnawed worm-like at the
marrow of my bones. It brought a flood
of vast relief when:

"Come,” said Karalee. "We go to see
the others.”

We left that stark eternal black sentinel
overlooking the glaciers. We soared
swiftly through the leaden mists, came
down upon ridged and fissured ice.

"The others," said the girl, "are all
about their ship, beneath the ice.”

Driven by a fascinated compulsion to
see all I could, even though the horror of
it should consume me, I was striving in
vain to peer down through the gray-white
obscurity of the ice — when suddenly we
were beneath it!

Down through the darkness of the gla-
cier we plunged, as swiftly as through the
air above. The ice was all around us, like
a blue-green liquid.

And suddenly we were standing again
on a long ridge of granite. We were far
beneath the glacier, which was like a
thick green-black mist above us. I could
see little at first, but gradually my vision

sharpened — or perhaps Maru-Mora in
some manner shared her own strange
senses with me — and 1 perceived the
great valley beyond and below us.

Dim in the green haze of the ice, I
presently distinguished a Cyclopean ma-
chine. Resting on tremendous skids
which lay far along the floor of the val-
ley, it w'as all of darkly gleaming red-
black metal. A colossal bulging hull, sur-
rounded with a confusion of struts and
braces, masts and booms and metal arms,
mysterious rods and vanes, towered even
above the ridge where we stood. It was
like the bloated body of some monstrous
spider, crouching with folded limbs, set
to spring.

Here and there about those crimson
planes and arms, frozen motionless in the
green mist of ice, I saw black and hid-
eous beings like the Watcher: scaled bod-
ies headless and bulging, supported on
triple ophidian limbs.

An alien horror touched me, as we
stood on that black ridge beneath the ice.
It was the stark menace of the Outside:
the terror of worlds strange beyond con-
ception, of powers and entities supernal,
monstrous, utterly alien. That stark, won-
dering, elemental dread — some dim in-
stinctive inkling of it, I think, is at the
basis of many primitive religions — is the
most terrible emotion a human being can
feel.

D imly through the numbness of my
dread, as if I dreamed within a
dream, I heard the piping of Maru-Mora,
and Karalee spoke:

"That is the ship that came from —
Beyond. And They are the Tharshoon.
They came to conquer Earth. That was
in another age, before the ice came here.
This was a fair world, then, and my peo-
ple ruled it. Man was not born.”

I knew that this was Maru-Mora

DREADFUL SLEEP

311

speaking, through the lips of the wide-
eyed, terror-dazed girl.

"The Tharshoon brought fearsome
weapons: giant needles that poured out
terrible red flame. Even their eyes could
stare us into — nothingness. And we had
none. We had been a people of peace.

"The invaders attacked our white cities,
overwhelmed them in horror and death.
We were without defense, until I, the
Seeker, who had long since given up my
body on the altar of science, discovered
a power that made them sleep.

"By that time, it was too late to save
my people. They all had perished. But I
lived — when rather I had died. I stopped
the Tharshoon, in the hour of their vic-
tory. And I have stood guard upon them,
whom I could not destroy.”

The half-chanting voice of Karalee —
speaking, I knew, the thoughts of the
strange elder being— had become oddly
like the piping of Maru-Mora. It was
plaintively sorrowful, weary with age-old
loneliness, piercing with a yearning be-
yond words.

"The world has changed its axis. The
ice has come to bind the sleepers more
securely. Your race of man has risen
from the northern jungle beasts. And still
I wait and watch. . . . And the Thar-
shoon shall not wake!”

However amazing that scrap of Earth-
history, it was, in my singular mental
state, somehow credible. I knew Antarc-
tica had once been tropical; it is rich with
coal seams; our survey had revealed a
rich Jurassic fossil flora of ferns, conifers
and cycads, within fifty miles of the pole;
I was familiar with the various theories
of axial shift and continental drift. For
the rest of it, the hideous forms of the
invaders and the Seeker's exotic beauty
were here before my eyes.

Yes, I accepted it without question,
then. And the ray of understanding

merely increased my shocked and reeling
dread. Maru-Mora was piping again, and
the girl said anxiously:

"Come. We must return. Maru-Mora’s
strength is low. Should it fail, we all
must perish.”

For myself, I was eager to escape. The
green mist of ice was suddenly crushing,
suffocating. And I was sick from the
overwhelming horror of that ship and its
monstrous crew.

But the tiny golden fingers tightened
on my hand, and the girl’s. We left the
black ridge beside that vessel from "Be-
yond,” drove upward through the mala-
chite haze of the ice. We swept over the
glaciers again, toward the towering black
range and the time-battered summit where
the purple pylon stood.

I glimpsed the girl’s body waiting,
rigid in its furs — not a muscle had moved
since we left. Then we were beside it,
and there was but one Karalee. Blue with
cold, shuddering, she began beating her
mittened hands stiffly against her sides.

The Seeker piped again, and she turned
to me, gasping:

"You have seen them, now, Ron Dun-
bar. The eternal Sleepers — if they are
waked, your world will die! Let them
sleep — do not try to thaw the ice — and
don’t come back again.”

"But I am coming back.” I tugged
toward her, against the strange strength
of Maru-Mora’s hand. "For I love you,
Karalee.”

The shivering girl started toward me,
eagerly. But the eery voice of Maru-Mora
stopped her. The white oval of her face
went starkly rigid. Her wide blue eyes
turned dark with dread.

"No, Ron, don’t come back!” she
sobbed. "For you will die, and I, and
all the world ”

The Seeker piped again, imperatively.
The girl turned slowly, as if in reluctant

312

WEIRD TALES

obedience. Her dry eyes looked back at
me, black with tragedy, mutely imploring.
She tried to speak, and could not. She
went stiffly, at last, down the steps in the
fissure, and through the black door.

"Karalee ” I called after her, vain-

ly. The door closed ponderously. I was
still staring at it when I felt the Seeker’s
tiny fingers tugging at my hand.

She drew me toward the side of the
pylon. The purple transparency of it
towered sheer out of the black granite.
Frost of ages had splintered and crumbled
the stone, blizzards of ages carved it gro-
tesquely. That Cyclopean crystal, how-
ever, remained diamond-hard, diamond-
polished; it was deeply graven with the
lost runes of a world dead before the
coming of the ice.

One moment she paused against that
amethystine wall. Wondrous being! A
fluted spiral vase of opalescent pearl,
holding flower-like an elfin queen, gold-
en-robed and golden-crowned, crimson-
plumed. Last and greatest of a people
lost! Maru-Mora, the Seeker!

The deep purple wells of her immense
eyes regarded me soberly, as if with un-
uttered warning. Her delicate seven-fin-
gered hand gestured toward Karalee’s
door. Her scarlet mouth pouted to a sin-
gle admonishing note.

Then her furry fingers released me. As
easily as we had entered the ice, she drift-
ed through that adamantine wall, into the
crystal pylon. She seemed to relax. For
an instant I watched her still, sinking
peacefully through its pellucid depths.

Then I turned. I tried to walk back
toward the crevice in the rock that opened
to Karalee’s ^bode. But the -world splin-
tered about me. I was crushed beneath a
black, appalling avalanche of pain. . . .

And then I was in bed again, back in
my room at the Aero Club.

5. Beyond the Pole

E ven now, writing these w r ords, I am
overcome with a black tide of guilt.
For the warning in that singular vision
had been explicit, unmistakable. Had I
but been wise enough to heed it, what
untold horror and death might have been
averted!

The silent hands of the electric clock,
when I looked, stood at three-forty. My
body, which had lain thirty : five minutes
uncovered and motionless, was stiff with
cold, yet strangely damp with sweat. A
blinding headache splintered through the
back of my brain. Clambering uncertain-
ly out of the bed, I found myself trem-
bling with nervous exhaustion, sound
heart fluttering as if it had come through
some terrific strain.

At first I could hardly stand, but I felt
better as movement restored circulation.
I wouldn't, I decided, call a doctor; what
I wanted was a chance to think over what
had happened. After a few turns around
the room, I took two aspirins, smoked out
a pipe, and went back to bed — but not to
sleep that night.

For my mind was still too full of Maru-
Mora’ s supernal wonder; of the immemo-
rial ice-drowned horror of the Sleepers;
of Karalee’s young intoxicating beauty.
Desperately I wrestled with the terrible
question: had it been real, or a dream?

It all had been absolutely convincing
as it passed; doubt had only come after-
ward. It had seemed too perfect in de-
tail, too strangely coherent, too fearfully
alien, to be a dream — for the dreaming
mind commonly reflects only the familiar
patterns of the day, creating nothing new.
But the stiff orthodoxy of my scientific
training balked at accepting it as anything
more than dream.

Could the human mind exist outside
the body? — fly ten thousand miles and

DREADFUL SLEEP

313

back in half an hour? — dive a mile be-
neath the ice cap?

That was childish superstition; any en-
lightened savage would know better.

The Seeker — was she possible? A pre-
human being as high as mankind — or
higher; ageless dweller in a crystal block;
flitting intangibly over the planet at the
speed of thought! Who would believe my
tale of Maru-Mora?

The Tharshoon — could sudi monstros-
ities be? Could sentient invaders have
crossed the gulf from some unimaginable
Beyond? Assuming that they came when
a tropical wilderness covered the present
polar continent, could they have survived
ten or a hundred million years beneath
the ice? The scientist in me answered
those questions with an outraged "No!’'

Moreover, at the risk of greater blame,
but for the sake of honesty, I must con-
fess that even if I had been fairly con-
vinced of the reality of that experience —
still I might have gone. For a kind of
foolhardiness — or it may be only egotism
— has made me ever seek danger rather
than avoid it. Not that I am fearless, at
all; merely that great peril has a resistless
fascination, even when it terrifies me.

And then, besides, I had seen Karalee.

That is all my apology. I merely hope
the reader will try to understand why I
chose to ignore that singular warning —
why I strove to credit it, in my own mind,
to a heavy supper and my worries about
Doctor Harding and our flight to the
south.

I said nothing at all to my associates
about that astounding dream. Our
preparations were completed with little
delay. On the afternoon of February 21,
the last bulky crates of Bell's atomic ap-
paratus were stowed aboard the Austral
Queen, moored in San Francisco Bay.
The next morning we took off for Antarc-
tica, via Honolulu, Suva, and Dunedin.

We were five. Remembering the loyal
faith of jerry Ware, I might have known
that no husband of hers would go into
peril without her by his side.

A strange haze that forewarned of an
early blizzard met us, as w'e came down
across the dark polar sea. In the pale
light of the low sun reddening behind us
in the north, it shimmered with a curious
pellucid saffron radiance. The towering
white-crowned icebergs loomed out of it
with a suddenness always startling.

Flying low', no more than a frail mote
lost in the ominous immensity of this ice-
walled sea at the bottom of the world, the
Austral Queen soon battled a freezing
headwind.

A big, four-motored amphibian trans-
port, she had served me loyally through
two previous expeditions. But she was
too heavily laden, now, with the five of
us, our winter’s supplies and equipment,
and the nine tons of Bell's apparatus.

The blizzard, as if to give warning of
the grim night to come, met us with sav-
age fury. Sometimes it drove us perilous-
ly close to the fangs of the ice; sometimes
its opposing violence held us motionless.

Tommy Veering had spelled me at the
controls, w'hile I got a little sleep back on
the dunnage that filled half the cabin,
but he called me forward as the wind
grew worse, in the sixties. I was tired —
for all the flight had been a desperate race
against the polar night. Yet, back at the
controls, I found an old elation. I shared
the victory of the ship as she defied the
teeth of the ice and the sea’s cold maw,
and met the blows of the bitter wind.

Floes and bergs became more frequent,
and at last the white pack was beneath
us. The desolate Balleny Islands were be-
hind. We veered a little eastward, around
Cape Adare, and battled our way along
the grim coast of South Victoria Land.

Dim-shrouded in the blizzard, the dark
masses of Mount Erebus and Mount Ter-

314

WEIRD TALES

ror crept down to our right, and at last
the Ross Barrier came marching out of
the ever-thickening saffron mists, a black
and hostile wall towering hundreds of
feet to the white desert of flying snow.

Jerry Harding had come up into the
cockpit, after Veering went back, bring-
ing hot coffee. Her brave gray eyes
scanned the wall of ice ahead; then she
looked at me, and her voice came quiet
and grave:

'We are flying very low, Ron. Do you
think ”

“I’ve been trying to keep under the
wind,” I said. "The ship is heavy, but
she’ll climb — she has to climb eighteen
thousand feet to cross the passes into the
Stapledon Basin. But she’ll pull through.”

"I hope so, Ron,” Jerry said. "Aston
has staked everything. ... So much de-
pends on us — a whole new world!”

The blizzard screaming off the ice
shelf, as I brought the ship up, struck like
the hand of a demoniac giant. She shud-
dered like a stricken thing, and plunged
down again into the mist of ice crystal
whipped off the frozen barrier.

Harding’s wife stifled her instinctive
cry of fear, but her white small hand went
convulsively tight on my shoulder. Her
gray eyes looked at me, big with that ter-
rible question.

"It’s all right, Jerry.” I tried to get
some calm into my voice. "Th e Queen has
never failed me yet. She's brave — as a
woman!”

And she didn’t fail me then. She came
up again, with motors thundering wide
open, through that flying spume of frost.
She hung, evenly battling the wind, for a
heart-breaking moment above the frozen
blade that edged the ice plateau. She sank
— lifted — leapt ahead.

"And here we are — on the world we’ve
come to conquer.”

Jerry Harding caught a breath of relief,
and her hand relaxed on my shoulder.

She leaned across to peer down at the
polar world, thickly misted with blizzard-
whipped snow, savage-fanged with hum-
mocks and pressure ridges, black-scarred
with abysmal crevasses.

Then again something happened that
it is difficult to account for in the cold
rational light of established science. A
small thing in itself, perhaps — merely the
inexplicable sensation of an instant — but
terrible in its significance.

I had looked aside at Jerry's frail love-
liness, her pale lips now parted with a
little smile. And some warning tentacle
of cold reached suddenly into the insu-
lated cabin, to touch my spine. Some-
thing, I know, made me shudder, made
my trembling hands knot hard on the
wheel.

It was a thing I could not explain, any
more than the dream of the Seeker. But
in that instant, as surely as if I had seen
her lying in her coffin, I knew that Jerry
was doomed.

She knew it, too. She felt the same
ghastly intuition — that was the terrible
part. Otherwise I should have ignored
it, set it down to fatigue and my own
vague fears, for I have never been ruled
by hunches.

Her face w r ent abruptly paler. She
caught her breath, and her white lips set
For a moment her whole thin body was
rigid. Then her gray eyes looked at me,
suddenly dark, dreadful, shadowed with
the doom I knew they had seen.

"Quite a bump, we passed,” I said, as
easily as I could. "Made me giddy for
a moment, and nearly got the controls.”

For a long, terrible moment, her tor-
tured eyes looked into my face, straining
as if to read some awful secret. I tried
not to let her know I had shared that fear-
ful premonition. At last she swallowed
uneasily.

"Ron,” she said uncertainly, "if — if
anything should happen to me, please

DREADFUL SLEEP

315

look after Aston. He needs someone. He
iso’t — he’s not quite himself.”

And she left me, in a moment, and
went back to her husband.

I tried to deny or forget that disturb-
ing, uncanny sensation. But it clung
and grew in my brain, like something
evil and alive. And the difficulties ahead
seemed suddenly a more terrible barrier
than the wall of ice we had passed. Where
lay any hope of success? What impress
could four men and a woman make upon
this eternal citadel of winter?

The tense hours passed. We drove on
into the blizzard, above the featureless
white surface of the Barrier. As our load
of fuel was lightened, I fought for alti-
tude to gain the passes and plateaus be-
fore us.

The barren summits of the Common-
wealth Range behind, we flew up the
long inlet of the Barrier, beside Quc-en
Maud’s Range. The Austral Queen la-
bored bravely upward, battled the shriek-
ing wind that hurled her at the black
crags that walled a glacier-carven pass,
and we were at last above the polar
plateau.

We passed seventy miles to the left of
the Pole itself. For two hours we fought
the tempest that raged down beside the
Mountains of Despair, across beyond the
Pole, before we reached the only pass. It
was the highest on the flight, and there
we met the most savage wind. I had to
drop half our reserve tanks of gasoline,
before the ship found courage to lift
above the barrier.

Beyond we came down into the Staple-
don Basin: the site that Bell had chosen
for our attempt to thaw the ice. It was
an ice-dad plateau nine thousand feet
high, walled on all sides with dark tre-
mendous ranges towering above the
glaciers.

Far across it, a hundred and forty miles

away and invisible in the hazy fury of the
blizzard, rose, I knew, that mighty unex-
plored transpolar range that I had
glimpsed and named the Mountains of
Uranus — on whose summit, in the dream,
I had seen the purple pylon of the Seeker.

I had resolved to discount the dream.
But now I found myself straining my eyes
through the bleak gray mist, wondering,
dwelling even upon the bright memory of
the girl Karalee — until a jutting rocky
ridge broke the ice beneath us, and it was
time to land.

Wind and altitude made that landing
difficult. The heavy-burdened plane came
hurtling down far too swiftly. A black
granite boulder loomed suddenly out of
the blinding drift-snow whipped along
the surface. Our skids crashed against the
ice crust. The ship bounced, lurched awk*
wardly around the boulder, buried her
nose in the drift beyond.

The flight was ended.

6. The Haunted Camp

I opened a hatch and dug my way to
the surface. Merry Bell followed me
up into the blizzard. It had moderated to
a mere fifty-mile gale, but still at nine
thousand feet, at forty below, it could
pierce our furs and sear our lungs.

A welter of dark outcroppings of shat-
tered granite and fantastically carved
white drifts surrounded us. The desolate
rugged ice beyond was like a wild sea
congealed in the midst of a furious storm.
The dark ranges that walled the Basin,
fifty to eighty miles away, were lost in
lead-gray mist.

Bell was staring about, shivering.

"This ridge is the summit of a moun-
tain, buried under the glacier,” I told him.
"Our survey showed the ice over most of
the Basin to be three to five thousand
feet ”

His tortured thin face was suddenly
warm with enthusiasm.

316

WEIRD TALES

"It’s just the spot I wanted, Ron,” he
was saying eagerly. "We’ll set up the
tower on the ridge. The atomic beam it-
self will reach to all these mountains.
And the Basin, when it is warmed, will
serve as a sort of furnace to moderate all
the continent, with wind-convection, and
warm rivers flowing down through the
passes.”

The breathless wonder of his dream
caught me for a moment. I saw lush ver-
dure replace the white desolation of ice,
saw green forests blanket the black flanks
of those mountains that had known no
life for ten million years. I saw busy
cities, even, rich plantations spread be-
neath the summer-long day, mines, rail-
roads, factories.

"Once this land was warm,” Bell’s
quick voice had run on. "Coal forests, in
the Permo-Carboniferous ”

That brought back my haunting dream:
the fantastic beauty of Maru-Mora, and
all the alien horror of the Sleepers. Jerry
Harding’s voice reached me faintly from
the plane, and I recalled the grim pre-
monition that had struck me as we crossed
the Barrier. I shuddered, and tried to
forget.

"Our first problem is to build living-
quarters,” I told Bell. "If we don’t —
well, this is mild summer, compared to
what is coming.”

And we set to work at once, to estab-
lish a winter camp. For the plane we
cut a sort of hangar in the ice, covered it
with protecting blocks of snow. Our liv-
ing-quarters also were hewn in the gla-
cier, walled with the packing-cases that
held our supplies, roofed with snow
packed on tar-paper.

That occupied the most of our time
until late in March — until the sun, wheel-
ing ever lower and redder and huger and
colder, peered for the last time through a
pass in the Mountains of Uranus, and did
not return.

None of the others had had any pre-
vious polar experience. All but Harding
were willing to follow my leadership in
building the camp. But he made himself
difficult, to put it mildly.

He wanted Bell to begin erecting his
atomic battery at once. But Bell said that
three months or half a year might pass
before the installation could be completed.
And during that time, I knew, without
good living-quarters we must perish. Bell
and Jerry did their best to convince Hard-
ing of this necessity, but he remained sul-
len and unwilling.

Harding’s disturbing change of man-
ner seemed always more extreme. There
was no visible physical difference in him
— unless, as I sometimes thought, his pale
blue eyes had turned a little darker. But
something had totally changed his nature.
Had I been superstitious enough to cred-
it such a thing, I should have thought
him literally possessed.

For many years he had been a close
friend of mine. The long ruddy face be-
neath his untidy mass of yellowish hair
was still unmistakably familiar. Yet
sometimes, as I caught the new ruthless
hardness in his eyes, I thought I looked
upon a stranger.

He became increasingly dictatorial,
quarrelsome, even vicious. He was sav-
agely rude, even cruel, to young Tommy
Veering. He cursed him, made rough
jokes at his expense, ridiculed his youth
and timidity. Twice I saw him knock
Veering down, when they were at work
together, with no excuse at all.

And the thin young engineer, through
some quirk of dog-like meekness, accept-
ed all Harding’s offensiveness without any
show of resentment. Indeed, so far as I
could tell, he liked the big man all the
better for this abuse. He kept Harding’s
company, and came to side with him in
any argument.

What most distressed me about Hard-

DREADFUL SLEEP

317

In g, however, was his unkindness to Jerry.
He developed a way of saying sharp cruel
things to her, displaying a venomous
malevolence that I had never suspected
in him.

One day at table, for example, saying
that his tea was cold, he flung it into
Jerry’s face, and began cursing her sav-
agely. I should have hit him, then, but
Jerry ran to me, wiping the scalding
liquid out of her eyes, caught my arm,
and begged me not to strike him.

T he rude dwelling finished at last,
we unloaded Bell’s equipment and
carried it to the chosen site: a bare out-
cropping of living granite, just above the
camp. Working beneath a canvas shelter
— for, since the sun had gone, it was
growing bitterly cold — we began drilling
holes in the rock to anchor the legs of the
tower.

As we cleared the crust of ice from this
ledge, Tommy Veering made a curious
discovery. In a crevice he found a num-
ber of tiny fossils: lichens, several small
ancient spiders, two minute degenerative
hymenopterous insects, and a small am-
monite. The specimens were not so re-
markable as their state of preservation.
For every tiny limb and segment was in-
tact, diamond-hard.

Veering showed the find to Harding,
who became oddly excited over it.

“These are the original bodies!” he ex-
claimed, peering at them with a pocket
miscoscope. "There has been no miner-
alizing, no substitution as in ordinary
petrification. They have been just some-
how — frozen!”

Mere heat, however, did not thaw
them. The effort seemed sheerest folly —
for the presence of the extinct mollusk
alone was proof that the things had ex-
isted unchanged through geological ages'
— but Harding and Veering, in our rude

little laboratory, made continual effort to
revive the fossils.

"But they aren’t fossils at all,” Hard-
ing insisted. "There has been no change
or deterioration since they were alive.
The microscopic structure is perfect, every
cell intact!”

His weeks of work only deepened the
puzzle. It was about this time, incident-
ally, that he began to wear colored glasses,
saying that the long hours at the micro-
scope strained his eyes.

"The newer physics,” he told me once,
"would say that these creatures are in a
space-time stasis. The spectroscope shows
that the characteristics of space about their
atoms has been altered, warped, so that
no change or motion is possible — not
even any time!”

Behind the dark lenses his eyes glit-
tered with a strange excitement.

"If we could reverse that warping
force, unlock the stasis, they would live
again, unaware that even a second had
passed." His voice was feverish, husky,
terrible. "And that secret, if we learn it,
will be a weapon greater than the Gor-
gon’s head.”

Frankly, I thought the project mere
folly if not insane delusion, for I had
increasing doubts of Harding’s mental
balance. But I did not discourage it, be-
cause it occupied his time and left him
less troublesome.

The erection of Bell’s automatic appa-
ratus, meantime, went steadily forward.
Veering proved himself a skilled and
brilliant technician. By midwinter, it
seemed, the battery might be in opera-
tion. All the ice would be thawed from
the Basin, Bell promised, by the coming
of the sun.

It is hard to give a true record of those
weary, dragging months of winter night.
The shadow of dire catastrophe had over-
hung us from the first. My old irrational
conviction of approaching tragedy had

318

WEIRD TALES

slowly deepened. Life in the Antarctic is
a grim enough business at best, and Hard-
ing’s increasingly evil nature made it, at
times, almost insupportable.

But, aside from all that, there had been
something else — something that Bell, and
perhaps even Jerry, must have sensed
more keenly than I.

When I say that the camp was haunted,
it sounds like superstitious nonsense. Yet,
almost from the day of our arrival, I
had a curious, uneasy feeling that it was
— that some strange intangible Presence
hung about us, alertly watching every
move we made, listening to every word
we said.

Bell and Jerry, I think, were more con-
scious of it than I. For I often saw them
silent, with cocked heads and strained
intent faces, listening.

"It’s nothing, Ron,’’ Jerry said once,
when I asked her what she listened for.
Her tired face tried to smile. "I’m just
nervous, I guess, worried about poor
Aston. He has changed so, grown so
much worse — have you noticed?”

And Bell, as we worked together about
his tower, often paused to peer away
across the ice. He laughed when I spoke
about it, but his white face remained very
grave.

"Just a feeling,” he said, "that Some-
thing is watching us — trying to speak to
us, perhaps.” His thin frame abruptly
shivered. 'Tve a queer feeling, Ron,”
he confessed, "that we shouldn’t thaw the
ice. - I’m somehow afraid.” His dark tor-
tured eyes stared away again; his voice
sank low. "Yes, afraid — of what we
might uncover.”

The warning of that singular dream
came to me again. I felt an impulse to
tell Bell about it, but checked my tongue.
He was troubled enough already; I didn’t
want to increase his anxiety.

For still I believed it a dream. I dared
not regard it as anything else. Sometimes

I found myself staring northward, toward
the Mountains of Uranus, wondering if
the Seeker’s purple pylon might indeed
stand on some summit there. But I- could
never see it.

M arch had gone, and most of April,
when the thing happened that crys-
tallized all my vague apprehensions and
shattered the routine of our life at camp
— that started the dread avalanche that
did not end until all the world had been
overwhelmed in horror.

The wjiole camp was asleep, after a
long shift spent bolting together the sec-
tions of Bell’s tower. I started suddenly
awake, alarmed, yet not knowing what
had roused me. For an instant I lay still,
listening.

The wind, which had blown steadily
for many days, had died. At first I could
hear only a soft, weird rustling — the
whisper of the aurora.

But suddenly, mingled with that eery
sussuration, I caught another sound — a
sound terribly familiar, and yet incred-
ible: a thin far wailing, infinitely sweet
and infinitely sad. It held all the heart-
broken loneliness of the world, caught
in slow eery minors, so faint they mocked
the ears.

It was the piping of the Seeker of my
dream. The voice of Maru-Mora! Or
had I merely dreamed again? For it had
ceased.

Breathless and trembling, uncertain
that I had heard anything at all, I donned
furs and hastened up out of our ice-bur-
row, into the polar night. The unutter-
able, appalling splendor of it caught me,
held me for a moment motionless.

Complete calm had fallen. The air,
curiously brilliant with frost, was abso-
lutely still. The clear sky was purple-
black, the southern constellations pale be-
yond the most brilliant auroral display I
ever witnessed. Pure silver, crystal green

DREADFUL SLEEP

319

and living rose, its curved rays sprayed
from beyond the pole. Its rustling, ban-
nered hosts marched endlessly, whisper-
ing immemorial secrets of outer space.

With an effort I broke the aching thrall
of its beauty. I stumbled up to the ledge
beside Bell’s unfinished tower, and peered
away across the snow. It lay glittering
and brilliant, dimly flushed with auroral
color, drifts massed fantastically.

Painful as the ring of glass to a violin
bow, I heard that sound again: an eery
minor threnody, a resistless call of provo-
cative promise.

And far away, beyond black grotesque
hummocks of bare ice, I saw an incred-
ible thing. Above the silver snow, plain
in the aurora’s radiance, it drifted. Flew
— wingless! A tapered spiral, flaring up-
ward. A woman’s bust, golden-furred,
cradled in its shimmering cup. An elfin
woman’s head, golden-crowned, proudly
scarlet-crested. Slim golden arms that
beckoned.

It was Maru-Mora, the Seeker of my
dream!

And the dream, then, was real. The
purple pylon did tower somewhere from
the peaks beyond the ice. And lovely
Karalee, to whom I had promised in the
dream to return, must be living reality!

A cold tide of horror flowed suddenly
over my soul; for the black Tharshoon,
the scaled and monstrous Sleepers of the
ice, must then be also real — and waiting
to be wakened, if we should thaw the
polar ice.

I had ignored the Seeker’s warning,
and Karalee’ s tearful appeal. What, now,
was to be the penalty?

Maru-Mora’s piping came again, allur-
ing with its uncanny haunting sweetness,
terrible with immemorial pain. The au-
rora flooded the sky again, and once more,
far away, I glimpsed the alien beauty of
the Seeker.

She flew low but swiftly, calling, gol-

den arms beckoning. And beneath her,
stumbling frantically after her, was — a
man!

Caught in a queer paralysis of fasci-
nated dread, I watched as he toiled up a
slippery bank, tottered perilously along
the brink of a blank crevasse. The shin-
ing alien siren fled away before him,
mocking, elusive. He followed her over
the flank of a gleaming drift. They both
were gone.

It was a moment before I could recover
myself, put down a sense of outraged
unreality. Then I shouted, ran along the
ledge toward the drift where they had
vanished.

What the Seeker might be, dream or
illusion, phantom or alien living being,
I knew not — but I did know that only
terrible death could await any man lured
out across the ice. Was that her way to
stop our work?

The aurora dimmed suddenly. In the
starlit darkness I saw nothing beyond the
drift. Thin echoes from the ice were the
only answer to my calls. The eery song
had ceased, the singer and her victim
vanished.

Shivering, from the shock of eldritch
horror as much from the bitter cold, I
stumbled back to the camp. My shouts
had roused the others. Jerry Harding,
bewildered, anxious-eyed, met me as I
came down into our burrow.

"What was it, Ron?” she whispered
apprehensively. "What happened? I
woke with the most dreadful feeling.
And where is poor Merry?”

"Bell?” I gasped.

"He's gone from his bunk,” she
told me.

And I knew that it was Meriden Bell
who had followed the Seeker across the
snow.

You will not want to miss the thrilling chapters of
this fascinating story in next month's WEIRD TALES,
We suggest that you reserve your copy at your maga-
zine dealer's now.

y V£dow

on the Screen

By HENRY KUTTNER

A weird story of Hollywood, and the grisly horror that cast its dreadful
shadow across the silver screen as an incredible
motion-picture was run off

ORTURE MASTER was being
given a sneak preview at a Beverly
Hills theatre. Somehow, when my
credit line, "Directed by Peter Haviland,”
was flashed on the screen, a little chill of
apprehension shook me, despite the ap-
plause that came from a receptive audi-
ence. When you’ve been in the picture
game for a long time you get these
hunches; I’ve often spotted a dud flicker
before a hundred feet have been reeled
off. Yet Torture Master was no worse
than a dozen similar films I’d handled in
the past few years.

But it was formula, box-office formula.
I could see that. The star was all right;
the make-up department had done a good
job; the dialogue was unusually smooth.
Yet the film was obviously box-office, and
not the sort of film I’d have liked to
direct.

After watching a reel unwind amid an
encouraging scattering of applause, I got
up and went to the lobby. Some of the
gang from Summit Pictures were loung-
ing there, smoking and commenting on
the picture. Ann Howard, who played
the heroine in T orture Master, noticed my
scowl and pulled me into a corner. She
was that rare type, a girl who will screen
well without a lot of the yellow grease-
paint that makes you look like an ani-
mated corpse. She was small, and her
ha/r and eyes a^d skin were brown — I’d
like to have seen her play Refer Ran. That
type, you know.

I had occasionally proposed to her, but
she never took me seriously. As a matter
320

of fact, I myself didn’t know' how serious
I was about it. Now she led me into the
bar and ordered sidecars.

"Don’t look so miserable, Pete,” she
said over the rim of her glass. "The
picture’s going over. It’ll gross enough
to suit the boss, and it won’t hurt my
reputation.”

Well, that was right. Ann had a fat
part, and she’d made the most of it. And
the picture would be good box-office;
Universal's Night Key, with Karloff, had
been released a few months ago, and the
audiences w'ere ripe for another horror
picture.

►"I know,” I told her, signaling the
bartender to refill my glass. "But I get
tired of these damn hokumy pics. Lord,
how r I’d like to do another Cabinet of
Doctor Caligari!”

"Or another Ape of God,” Ann sug-
gested.

I shrugged. "Even that, maybe. There’s
so much' chance for development of the
w'eird on the screen, Ann — and no pro-
ducer will stand for a genuinely good
picture of that type. They call it arty,
and say it’ll flop. If I branched out on
my own — well, Hecht and MacArthur
tried it, and they’re back on the Holly-
wood payroll now’.”

Someone Ann knew came up and en-
gaged her in conversation. I saw a man
beckoning, and with a hasty apology left
Ann to join him. It was Andy Worth,
Hollywood’s dirtiest columnist. I knew
him for a double-cros$c-r and a skunk, but
I also knew that he could get more inside
W. T. — 4

THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN

321

information than a brace of Winchells.
He was a short, fat chap with a meticu-
lously cultivated mustache and sleeky po-
maded black hair. Worth fancied himself
as a ladies’ man, and spent a great deal
of his time trying to blackmail actresses
into having affairs with him.

That didn’t make him a villain, of
course. I like anybody who can carry on
an intelligent conversation for ten min-
utes, and Worth could do that. He fin-
gered his mustache and said, "I heard you
talking about Ape of God. A coincidence,
Pete.”

"Yeah?” I was cautious. I had to be,
with this walking scandal-sheet. "How’s
that?”

He took a deep breath. "Well, you
understand that I haven’t got the real
lowdown, and it’s all hearsay — but I’ve
found a picture that'll make the w r eirdest
flicker ever canned look side”

I suspected a gag. "Okay, what is it?
Torture Master?”

"Eh? No — though Blake’s yam de-
served better adaptation than your boys
gave it. No, Pete, the one I’m talking
about isn’t for general release — isn’t com-

"Hs was

W. T. — 5

lifted through a welter of coiling, ropy tentacles."

322

WEIRD TALES

pleted, in fact. I saw a few rashes of it.
A one-man affair; title’s The Nameless.
Arnold Keene’s doing it.”

W orth sat back and watched how I
took that. And I must have shown
my amazement. For it was Arnold Keene
who had directed the notorious Ape of
God, which had wrecked his promising
career in films. The public doesn’t know
that picture. It never was released. Sum-
mit junked it. And they had good cause,
although it was one of the most amaz-
ingly effective weird films I’ve ever seen.
Keene had shot most of it down in Mex-
ico, and he’d been able to assume virtual
dictatorship of the location troupe. Sev-
eral Mexicans had died at the time, and
there had been some ugly rumors, but it
had all been hushed up. I’d talked with
several people who had been down near
Taxco with Keene, and they spoke of the
man with peculiar horror. He had been
willing to sacrifice almost anything to
make Ape of God a masterpiece of its
type.

It was an unusual picture — there was
no question about that. There’s only one
master print of the film, and it’s kept in
a locked vault at Summit. Very few have
seen it. For what Machen had done in
weird literature, Keene had done on the
screen — and it was literally amazing.

I said to Worth, "Arnold Keene, eh?
I’ve always had a sneaking sympathy for
the man. But I thought he’d died long
ago.”

"Oh, no. He bought a place near Tu-
junga and went into hiding. He didn’t
have mudi dough after the blow-up, you
know, and it took him about five years
to get together enough dinero to start his
Nameless. He always said Ape of God
was a failure, and that he intended to do
a film that would be a masterpiece of
weirdness. Well, he’s done it. He’s canned

a film that’s — unearthly. I tell you it
made my flesh creep.’’

"Who's the star?” I asked.

"Unknowns. Russian trick, you know.
The real star is a — a shadow.”

I stared at him.

"That’s right, Pete. The shadow of
something that’s never shown on the
screen. Doesn’t sound like much, eh?
But you ought to see it!”

"I’d like to,” I told him. "In fact, I’ll
do just that. Maybe he’ll release it through
Summit.”

Worth chuckled. "No chance. No
studio would release that flicker. I’m not
even going to play it up in my dirt sheet.
This is the real McCoy, Pete.”

"What’s Keene’s address?” I asked.

Worth gave it to me. "But don’t go
out till Wednesday night,” he said. "The
rough prints ’ll be ready then, or most of
them. And keep it under you hat, of
course.”

A group of autograph hunters came up
just then, and Worth and I were sepa-
rated. It didn’t matter. I’d got all the in-
formation I needed. My mind was seeth-
ing with fantastic surmises. Keene was
one of the great geniuses of the screen,
and his talent lay in the direction of the
macabre. Unlike book publishers, the
studios catered to no small, discriminat-
ing audiences. A film must suit every-
body.

Finally I broke away and took Ann to
a dance at Bel- Air. But I hadn’t forgot-
ten Keene, and the next night I was too
impatient to wait. I telephoned Worth,
but he was out. Oddly enough, I was
unable to get in touch with him during
the next few days; even his paper couldn’t
help me. A furious editor told me the
Associated Press had been sending him
hourly telegrams asking for Worth’s
copy; but the man had vanished com-
pletely. I had a hunch.

THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN

323

I T WAS Tuesday night when I drove out
of the studio and took a short cut
through Griffith Park, past the Planetari-
um, to Glendale. From there I went on to
Tujunga, to the address Worth had given
me. Once or twice I had an uneasy sus-
picion that a black coupe was trailing me,
but I couldn’t be sure.

Arnold Keene's house was in a little
canyon hidden back in the Tujunga moun-
tains. I had to follow a winding dirt
road for several miles, and ford a streafn
or two, before I readied it. The place was
built against the side of the canyon, and
a man stood on the porch and watdied
me as I braked my car to a stop.

It was Arnold Keene. I recognized
him immediately. He was a slender man
under middle height, with a closely
cropped bristle of gray hair; his face was
coldly austere. There had been a rumor
that Keene had at one time been an offi-
cer in Prussia before he came to Holly-
wood and Americanized his name, and,
scrutinizing him, I could well believe it.
His eyes were like pale blue marbles,
curiously shallow.

He said, "Peter Haviland? I did not
expect you until tomorrow night.”

I shook hands. "Sorry if I intrude,” I
apologized. "The fact is, I got impatient
after what Worth told me about your
film. He isn’t here, by any chance?”

The shallow eyes were unreadable.
"No. But come in. Luckily, the develop-
ing took less time than I had anticipated.
I need only a few more shots to complete
my task.”

He ushered me into the house, which
was thoroughly modern and comfortably
furnished. Under the influence of good
cognac my suspicions began to dissolve.
I told Keene I had always admired his
Ape of God .

He made a wry grimace. "Amateurish,
Haviland. I depended too much on ho-
kum in that film. Merely devil-worship,

a reincarnated Gilles de Rais, and sadism.
That isn’t true weirdness.”

I was interested. "That’s correct. But

the film had genuine power »”

"Man has nothing of the weird in him
intrinsically. It is only the hints of the
utterly abnormal and unhuman that give
one the true feeling of weirdness. That,
and human reactions to such supernatural
phenomena. Look at any great weird
work — The Horla, which tells of a man’s
reaction to a creature utterly alien, Black-
wood's Willows, Machen’s Black Seal,
Lovecraft’s Color Out of Space — all these
deal with the absolutely alien influencing
normal lives. Sadism and death may con-
tribute, but alone they cannot produce the
true, intangible atmosphere of weird-
ness.”

I had read all these tales. "But you
can’t film the indescribable. How could
you show die invisible beings of The

Willows ?"

Keene hesitated. "I think I’ll let my
film answer that. I have a projection

room downstairs "

The bell rang sharply. I could not help
noticing the quick glance Keene darted
at me. With an apologetic gesture he
went out and presently returned with Ann
Howard at his side. She was smiling
rather shakily.

"Did you forget our date, Pete?” she
asked me.

I blinked, and suddenly remembered.
Two weeks ago I had promised to take
Ann to an affair in Laguna Beach this
evening, but in my preoccupation with
Keene’s picture the date had slipped my
mind. I stammered apologies.

"Oh, that's all right,” she broke in. "I’d
much rather stay here — that is, if Mr.

Keene doesn’t mind. His picture ”

"You know about it?”

"I told her,” Keene said. "When she
explained why she had come, I took the
liberty of inviting her to stay to watch the

324

WEIRD TALES

film. I did not want her to drag you
away, you see,” he finished, smiling.
"Some cognac for Miss — eh?”

I introduced them.

"For Miss Howard, and then The
"Nameless.”

At his words a tiny warning note
seemed to throb in my brain. I had been
fingering a heavy metal paperweight, and
now, as Keene’s attention was momenta-
rily diverted to the sideboard, I slipped it,
on a sudden impulse, into my pocket. It
would be no defense, though, against a
gun.

What was wrong with me, I wondered?
An atmosphere of distrust and suspicion
seemed to have sprung out of nothing.
As Keene ushered us down into his pro-
jection room, the skin of my back seemed
to crawl with the expectation of attack.
It was inexplicable, but definitely un-
pleasant.

K eene was busy for a time in the pro-
jection booth, and then he joined us.
"Modern machinery is a blessing,” he
said with heavy jocularity. "I can be as
lazy as I wish. I needed no help with
the shooting, once the automatic cameras
were installed. The projector, too, is au-
tomatic.”

I felt Ann move closer to me in the
gloom. I put my arm around her and
said, "It helps, yes. What about releas-
ing the picture, Mr. Keene?”

There was a harsh note in his voice.
"It will not be released. The world is
uneducated, not ready for it. In a hun-
dred years, perhaps, it will achieve the
fame it deserves. I am doing it for poster-
ity, and for the sake of creating a weird
masterpiece on the screen.”

With a -muffled dick the projector be-
gan to operate, and a title flashed on the
screen: The Nameless.

Keene’s voice came out of the darkness.
"It’s a silent fiim, except for one sequence

at the start. Sound adds nothing to weird-
ness, and it helps to destroy the illusion
of reality. Later, suitable music will be
dubbed in.”

I did not answer. For a book had
flashed on the gray oblong before us —
tli at amazing tour de force, The Circus of
Doctor Lao. A hand opened it, and a
long finger followed the lines as a tone-
less voice read:

"These are the sports, the offthrows of
the universe instead of the species; these
are the weird children of the lust of the
spheres. Mysticism explains them where
sdence cannot. Listen: when that great
mysterious fecundity that peopled the
worlds at the command of the gods had
done with its birth-giving, when the celes-
tial midwives all had left, when life had
begun in the universe, the primal womb-
thing found itself still unexhausted, its
loins still potent. So that awful fertility
tossed on its couch in a final fierce out-
break of life-giving and gave birth to
these nightmare beings, these abortions of
the world.”

The voice ceased. The book faded, and
there swam into view a mass of tumbled
ruins. The ages had pitted the man-
carved rocks with cracks and scars; the
bas-relief figures were scarcely recog-
nizable. I w'as reminded of certain ruins
I had seen in Yucatan.

The camera swung down. The mins
seemed to grow larger. A yawning hole
gaped in the earth.

Beside me Keene said, "The site of a
ruined temple. Watch, now.”

The effect was that of moving forward
into the depths of a subterranean pit.
For a moment the screen was in darkness;
then a stray beam of sunlight rested on
an idol that stood in what was apparently
an underground cavern. A narrow crack
of light showed in the roof. The idol
was starkly hideous.

I got only a flashing glimpse, but the

THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN

325

impression on my mind was that of a
bulky, ovoid shape like a pineapple or a
pine-cone. The thing had certain doubt-
ful features which lent it a definitely un-
pleasant appearance; but it was gone in a
flash, dissolving into a brightly lighted
drawing-room, thronged with gay couples.

The story proper began at that point.
None of the actors or actresses was known
to me; Keene must have hired them and
worked secretly in his house. Most of the
interiors and a few of the exteriors
seemed to have been taken in this very
canyon. The director had used the
"parallel” trick which saves so much
money for studios yearly. I’d often done
it myself. It simply means that the story
is tied in with real life as closely as pos-
sible; that is, when I had a troupe working
up at Lake Arrowhead last winter, and an
unexpected snowfall changed the scene,
I had the continuity rewritten so that the
necessary scenes could take place in snow.
Similarly, Keene had paralleled his
own experiences — sometimes almost too
closely.

The Nameless told of a man, ostra-
cized by his fellows because of his fanati-
cal passion for the morbid and bizarre,
who determined to create a work of art
— a living masterpiece of sheer weirdness.
He had experimented before by directing
films that were sufficiently unusual to stir
up considerable comment. But this did
not satisfy him. It was acting — and he
wanted something more than that. No
one can convincingly fake reaction to
horror, not even the most talented actor,
he contended. The genuine emotion must
be felt in order to be transferred to the
screen.

It was here that The Nameless ceased
to parallel Keene’s own experiences, and
branched out into sheer fantasy. The pro-
tagonist in the film was Keene himself,
but this was not unusual, as directors
often act in their own productions. And,

by deft montage shots, the audience
learned that Keene in his search for au-
thenticity had gone down into Mexico,
and had, with the aid of an ancient scroll,
found the site of a ruined Aztec temple.
And here, as I say, reality was left behind
as the film entered a morbid and extraor-
dinary phase.

T here was a god hidden beneath this
ruined temple — a long-forgotten
god, which had been worshipped even
before the Aztecs had sprung from the
womb of the centuries. At least, the na-
tives had considered it a god, and had
erected a temple in its honor, but Keene
hinted that the tiling was actually a sur-
vival, one of the "off throws of the uni-
verse,” unique and baroque, which had
come down through the eons in an exist-
ence totally alien to mankind. The crea-
ture was never actually seen on the screen,
save for a few brief glimpses in the
shadowed, underground temple. It was
roughly barrel-shaped, and perhaps ten
feet high, studded with odd spiky pro-
jections. The chief feature was a gem set
in the thing’s rounded apex — a smoothly
polished jewel as large as a child’s head.
It was in this gem that the being's life
was supposed to have its focus.

It was not dead, but neither was it
alive, in the accepted sense of that term.
When the Aztecs had filled the temple
with the hot stench of blood the thing
had lived, and the jewel had flamed with
unearthly radiance. But with the passage
of time the sacrifices had ceased, and the
being had sunk into a state of coma akin
to hibernation. In the picture Keene
brought it to life.

He transported it secretly to his home,
and there, in an underground room hol-
lowed beneath the house, he placed the
monster-god. The room was built with
an eye for the purpose for which Keene
intended it; automatic cameras and clever

326

WEIRD TALES

lighting features were installed, so that
pictures could be shot from several differ-
ent angles at once, and pieced together
later as Keene cut the film. And now
there entered something of the touch of
genius which had made Keene famous.

He was clever, I had always realized
that. Yet in the scenes that were next
unfolded I admired not so much the
technical tricks — which were familiar
enough to me — as the marvelously clever
way in whicli Keene had managed to in-
ject realism into the acting. His charac-
ters did not act — they lived.

Or, rather, they died. For in the pic-
ture they were thrust into the under-
ground room to die horribly as sacrifices
to the monster-god from the Aztec tem-
ple. Sacrifice was supposed to bring the
thing to life, to cause the jewel in which
its existence was bound to flare with fan-
tastic splendor. The first sacrifice was, I
think, the most effective.

The underground room in which the
god was hidden was large, but quite va-
cant, save for a curtained alcove which
held the idol. A barred doorway led to
the upper room, and here Keene appeared
on the screen, revolver in hand, herding
before him a man — overall-clad, with a
stubble of black beard on his stolid face.
Keene swung open the door, motioned
his captive into the great room. He closed
the barred door, and through the grating
could be seen busy at a switchboard.

Light flared. The man stood near the
bars, and then, at Keene’s gesture with
his weapon, moved forward slowly to the
far wall. He stood there, staring around
vaguely, dull apprehension in his face.
Light threw his shadow in bold relief on
the wall.

Then another shadow leaped into ex-
istence beside him.

It was barrel-shaped, gigantic, studded
with blunt spikes, and capped by a round
dark blob — the life-jewel. The shadow

of the monster god! The man saw it. He
turned.

Stark horror sprang into his face, and
at sight of that utterly ghastly and realistic
expression a chill struck through me.
This was almost too convincing. The
man could not be merely acting.

But, if he was, his acting was superb,
and so W'as Keene’s direction. The shad-
ow on the wall stirred, and a thrill of
movement shook it. It rocked and seemed
to rise, supported by a dozen tentacular
appendages that uncoiled from beneath
its base. The spikes — changed. They
lengthened. They coiled and writhed,
hideously ' worm-like.

It wasn’t the metamorphosis of the
shadow that held me motionless in my
chair. Rather, it was the appalling ex-
pression of sheer horror on the man’s
face. He stood gaping as the shadow
toppled and swayed on the wall, grow-
ing larger and larger. Then he fled, his
mouth an open square of terror. The
shadow paused, with an odd air of inde-
cision, and slipped slowly along the wall
out of range of the camera.

But there were other cameras, and
Keene had used his cutting-shears deftly.
The movements of the man were mir-
rored on the screen; the glaring lights
swung and flared; and ever the grim
shadow crawled hideously across the wall.
The thing that cast it was never shown —
just the shadow, and it was a dramatically
effective trick. Too many directors, I
knew, could not have resisted the tempta-
tion to show the monster, thus destroy-
ing the illusion — for papier-mache and
rubber, no matter how cleverly con-
structed, cannot convincingly ape reality.

At last the shadows merged — the gi-
gantic swaying thing with its coiling ten-
tacles, and the black shadow of the man
that was caught and lifted, struggling
and kicking frantically. The shadows
merged — and the man did not reappear.

THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN

327 .

Only the dark blob capping the great
shadow faded and flickered, as though
strange light were streaming from it; the
light that was fed by sacrifice, the jewel
that was — life.

B eside me there came a rustle. I felt
Ann stir and move closer in the
gloom. Keene’s voice came from some
distance away.

"There were several more sacrifice
scenes, Haviland, but I haven’t patched
them in yet, except for the one you’ll see
in a moment now. As I said, the film
isn’t finished.”

I did not answer. My eyes were on the
screen as the fantastic tale unfolded. The
pictured Keene was bringing another vic-
tim to his cavern, a short, fat man with
sleekly pomaded black hair. I did not
see his face until he had been imprisoned
in the cave, and then, abruptly, there
came a close-up shot, probably done with
a telescopic lens. His plump face, with
its tiny mustache, leaped into gigantic
visibility, and I recognized Andy Worth.

It was the missing columnist, but for
the first time I saw his veneer of sophisti-
cation lacking. Naked fear crawled in
his eyes, and I leaned forward in my seat
as the ghastly barrel-shaped shadow
sprang out on the wall. Worth saw it,
and the expression on his face was shock-
ing. I pushed back my chair and got up
as the lights came on. The screen went
blank.

Arnold Keene was staanding by the
door, erect and military as ever. He had
a gun in his hand, and its muzzle was
aimed at my stomach.

"You had better sit down, Haviland,”
he said quietly. "You too, Miss Howard.
I’ve something to tell you — and I don’t
wish to be melodramatic about it. This
gun” — he glanced at it wryly — "is neces-
sary. There are a few things you must

know, Haviland, for a reason you’ll un-
derstand later.”

I said, "There’ll be some visitors here
for you soon, Keene. You .don’t think
I’d neglect normal precautions!”

He shrugged. "You’re lying, of course.
Also you’re unarmed, or you'd have had
your gun out by now. I didn’t expect you
until tomorrow night, but I’m prepared.
In a word, what I have to tell you is this:
the film you just saw is a record of actual
events.”

Ann’s teeth sank into her lip, but I
didn’t say anything. I waited, and Keene
resumed.

"Whether you believe me or not
doesn’t matter, for you’ll have to believe
in a few minutes. I told you something
of my motive, my desire to create a genu-
ine masterpiece of weirdness. That’s what
I’ve done, or will have done before to-
morrow. Quite a number of vagrants and
laborers have disappeared, and the col-
umnist, Worth, as well; but I took care to
leave no clues. You’ll be the last to van-
ish — you and this girl.”

"You’ll never be able to show the
film,” I told him.

"What of it? You’re a hack, Haviland,
and you can’t understand what it means
to create a masterpiece. Is a work of art
any less beautiful because it’s hidden?
I’ll see the picture — and after I’m dead
the world will see it, and realize my
genius even though they may fear and
hate its expression. The reactions of my
unwilling actors — that’s the trick. As a
director, you should know that there’s no
substitute for realism. The reactions were
not faked — that was obvious enough.
The first sacrifice was that of a clod — an
unintelligent moron, whose fears were
largely superstitious. The next sacrifice
was of a higher type — a vagrant who
came begging to my door some months
ago. You will complete the group, for
you’ll know just what you’re facing, and

328

WEIRD TALES

your attempt to rationalize your fear will
lend an interesting touch. Both of you
will stand up, with your hands in the air,
and precede me into this passage.”

All this came out tonelessly and swift-
ly, quite as though it were a rehearsed
speech. His hand slid over the wall be-
side him, and a black oblong widened in
the oak paneling. I stood up.

"Do as he says, Ann,” I said. "Maybe
I can ”

"No, you can't,” Keene interrupted,
gesturing impatiently with his weapon.
"You won’t have the chance. Hurry up.”

We went through the opening in the
wall and Keene followed, touching a stud
that flooded the passage with light. It
was a narrow tunnel that slanted dow’n
through solid rock for perhaps ten feet
to a steep stairway. He herded us down
this, after sliding the panel shut.

"It’s well hidden,” he said, indicating
metal sheathing — indeed, the entire cor-
ridor was lined with metal plates. "This
lever opens it from within, but no one
but me can find the spring which opens
it from without. The police could wreck
the house without discovering this pas-
sage.”

That seemed worth remembering, but
of little practical value at the moment.
Ann and I went down the stairway until
it ended in another short passage. Our
way was blocked by a door of steel bars,
which Keene unlocked with a key he took
from his pocket. The passage where we
stood was dimly lighted; there were sev-
eral chairs here; and the space beyond the
barred door was not lighted at all.

K eene opened the door and gestured
me through it. He locked it behind
me and turned to Ann. Her face, I saw,
was paper-white in the pale glow.

What happened after that brought an
angry curse to my lips. Without warn-
ing Keene swung the automatic in a short,

vicious arc, smashing it against Ann’s
head.

She saw it coming too late, and her
upflung hand failed to ward off the blow.
She dropped without a sound, a little
trickle of blood oozing from her temple.
Keene stepped over her body to a switch-
board set in the rock wall.

Light lanced with intolerable brilliance
into my eyes. I shut them tightly, open-
ing them after a moment to stare around
apprehensively. I recognized my sur-
roundings. I was in the cave of sacrifice,
the underground den I had seen on the
screen. Cameras high up on the walls
began to operate as I discovered them.
From various points blinding arc- lights
streamed down upon me.

A gray curtain shielded a space on the
far wall, but this was drawn upward to
reveal a deep alcove. There was an object
within that niche — a barrel-shaped thing
ten feet high, studded with spikes, and
crowned with a jewel that pulsed and
glittered with cold flame. It was gray
and varnished-looking, and it was the
original of Keene’s Aztec god.

Somehow I felt oddly reassured as I
examined the thing. It was a model, of
course, inanimate and dead; for certainly
no life of any kind could exist in sudi
an abnormality. Keene might have in-
stalled machinery of some sort within it,
however.

"You see, Haviland,” Keene said from
beyond the bars, "the thing actually ex-
ists. I got on the trail of it in an old
parchment I found in the Huntington Li-
brary. It had been considered merely an
interesting bit of folk-lore, but I saw
something else in it. When I was making
Ape of God in Mexico I discovered the
ruined temple, and what lay forgotten
behind the altar.”

He touched a switch, and light
streamed out from the alcove behind the
thing. Swiftly I turned. On the wall be-

THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN

329

hind me was my own shadow, grotesquely
elongated, and beside it was the squat,
amorphous patch of blackness I had seen
on the screen upstairs.

My back was toward Keene, and my
fingers crept into my pocket, touching
the metal paperweight I had dropped
there earlier that evening. Briefly I con-
sidered the possibility of hurling the thing
at Keene, and then decided against it.
The bars were too close together, and the
man would shoot me at any sign of dan-
gerous hostility.

My eyes were drawn to the shadow on
the wall. It was moving.

It rocked slightly, and lifted. The
spikes lengthened. The thing was no
longer inanimate and dead, and as I
swung about, stark amazement gripping
me, I saw the incredible metamorphosis
that had taken place in the thing that
cast the shadow.

It was no longer barrel-shaped. A
dozen smooth, glistening appendages,
ending in flat pads, supported the snake-
thin body. And all over that grayish up-
right pole tentacles sprouted and length-
ened, writhing into ghastly life as the
horror awakened. Keene had not lied,
and the monstrous survival he had
brought from the Aztec temple was lum-
bering from the alcove, its myriad ten-
tacles alive with frightful hunger!

Keene saved me. He saw me standing
motionless with abysmal fear in the path
of that gigantic, nightmare being, and
realizing that he was being cheated of his
picture, the man shouted at me to run.
His hoarse voice broke the spell that held
me unmoving, and I whirled and fled
across the cave to the barred door. Skin
ripped from my hands as I tore at the
bars.

"Run!’’ Keene yelled at me, his shal-
low eyes blazing. "It can't move fast!
Look out ”

A writhing, snake-like thing lashed

out, and a sickening musky stencil filled
my nostrils. I leaped away, racing across
the cave again. The arc-lights died and
others flared into being as Keene manipu-
lated the switchboard. He was adjusting
the lights, so that our shadows would
not be lost — so that in the climax of The
Nameless die shadow of that ghastly hor-
ror would be thrown on the cave wall
beside me.

I t was an infernal game of tag we
played there, in those shifting lights
that glared down while the camera lenses
watched dispassionately. I fled and
dodged with my pulses thundering and
blood pounding in my temples, and ever
die grim shadow moved slowly across the
walls, while my legs began to ache with
the strain. For hours, perhaps, or eons,
I fled.

There would come brief periods of
respite when I would cling to the bars,
cursing Keene, but he w r ould not answer.
His hands flickered over the switchboard
as he adjusted the arc-lights, and his eyes
never paused in their roving examination
of the cave. In the end it was this that
saved me.

For Keene did not see Ann stir and
open her eyes. He did not see the girl,
after a swift glance around, get quietly
to her feet. Luckily she was behind
Keene, and he did not turn.

I tried to keep my eyes away from Ann,
but I do not think I succeeded. At the
last moment I saw* Keene’s face change,
and he started back; but the chair in
Ann’s hands crashed down and splintered
on the man’s head. He fell to his knees,
clawing at the air, and then collapsed
inertly.

I was on the far side of the cave, and
my attention was momentarily diverted
from the monster. I had been watching
it from the comer of my eye, expecting
to be able to dodge and leap away before

330

WEIRD TALES

it came too close; but it lumbered forward
with a sudden burst of speed. Although
I tried to spring dear I failed; a tentacle
whipped about my legs and sent me
sprawling. As I tried to roll away an-
other smooth gray coil got my left arm.

Intolerable agony dug into my shoul-
der as I was lifted. I heard Ann scream,
and a gun barked angrily. Bullets
plopped into the smooth flesh of the
monster, but it paid no attention. I was
lifted through a welter of coiling, ropy
tentacles, until just above me was the
flaming jewel in which the creature’s life
was centered.

Remembrance of Keene’s words spurred
me to action; this might be the monster’s
vulnerable point. The paperweight was
still in my pocket, and I clawed it out
desperately. I hurled it with all my
strength at the shining gem. And the
jewel shattered!

There came a shrill vibration, like the
tinkling of countless tiny crystalline bells.
Piercingly sweet, it shrilled in my ears,
and died away quickly. And suddenly
nothing existed but light.

It was as though the shattering of the
gem had released a sea of incandescent
flame imprisoned within it. The glare of
the arc-lights faded beside this flood of
silvery radiance that bathed me. The cold
glory of Arcturus, the blaze of tropical
moonlight, were in the light.

Swiftly it faded and fled away. I felt
myself dropping, and pain lanced into
my wrenched shoulder as I struck the
ground. I heard Ann’s voice.

Dazedly I got up, expecting to see the
monster towering above me. But it was
gone. In its place, a few feet away, was
the barrel-shaped thing I had first seen
in the alcove. There was a gaping cav-
ity in the rounded apex where the jewel
had been. And, somehow, I sensed that
the creature was no longer deadly, no
longer a horror.

I saw Ann. She was still holding
Keene’s gun, and in her other hand was
the key with which she had unlocked the
door. She came running toward ipe, and
I went swiftly to meet her.

I took the gun and made sure it was
loaded. ''Come on,” I said, curtly.
"We’re getting out of here.”

A nn's fingers were gripping my arm
>. tightly as we went through the
door, past the prone figure of Keene,
and up the stairway. The lever behind
the panel was not difficult to operate,
and I followed Ann through the opening
into the theater. Then I paused, listen-
ing.

Ann turned, watching me, a question
in her eyes. "What is it, Pete?”

"Listen,” I said. "Get the cans of film
from the projection booth. We’ll take
them with us and bum them.”

"But — you’re not ”

"I’ll be with you in a minute,” I told
her, and swung the panel shut.

I went down the stairs swiftly and
very quietly, my gun ready and my -ears
alert for the low muttering I had heard
from below.

Keene was no longer unconscious. He
was standing beside die switchboard with
his back to me, and over his shoulder I
could see the shadow of the monster-god
sprawling on the wall, inert and lifeless.
Keene was chanting something, in a lan-
guage I did not know, and his hands
were moving in strange gestures.

God knows what unearthly powers
Keene had acquired in his search for
horror! For as I stood there, watching
the patch of blackness on the cave wall,
I saw a little shudder rock that barrel-
shaped shadow of horror, while a single
spike abruptly lengthened into a tentacle
that groped out furtively and drew back
and vanished.

Then I killed Arnold Keene.

“We shall meet again, perhaps in the shining mists of Orion's Sword."

the Wall of Sleep

By H. P. LOVECRAFT

What strange, splendid yet terrible experiences came to the poor mountaineer
in the hours of sleep? — a story of a supernal being
from Algol, the Demon-Star

I HAVE often wondered if die ma-
jority of mankind ever pause to re-
flect upon the occasionally titanic sig-
nificance of dreams, and of the obscure
world to which they belong. Whilst the

greater number of our nocturnal visions
are perhaps no more than faint and fan-
tastic reflections of our waking experi-
ences — Freud to the contrary with his
puerile symbolism — diere are still a cer-
331

332

WEIRD TALES

tain remainder whose immundane and
ethereal character permits of no ordinary
interpretation, and whose vaguely excit-
ing and disquieting effect suggests pos-
sible minute glimpses into a sphere of
mental existence no less important than
physical life, yet separated from that life
by an all but impassable barrier. From
my experience I cannot doubt but that
man, when lost to terrestrial conscious-
ness, is indeed sojourning in another and
uncorporeal life of far different nature
from the life we know, and of which only
the slightest and most indistinct memories
linger after waking. From those blurred
and fragmentary memories we may infer
much, yet prove little. We may guess that
in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the
earth knows such things, are not neces-
sarily constant; and that time and space
do not exist as our waking selves com-
prehend them. Sometimes I believe that
this less material life is our truer life, and
that our vain presence on the terraqueous
globe is itself the secondary or merely
virtual phenomenon.

It was from a youthful revery filled
with speculations of this sort that I arose
one afternoon in the winter of 1900-01,
when to the state psychopathic institution
in which I served as an interne was
brought the man whose case has ever
since haunted me so unceasingly. His
name, as given on the records, was Joe
Slater, or Slaader, and his appearance was
that of the typical denizen of the Cats-
kill Mountain region; one of those
strange, repellent scions of a primitive
Colonial peasant stock whose isolation for
nearly three centuries in the hilly fast-
nesses of a little-traveled countryside has
caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric
degeneracy, rather than advance with their
more fortunately placed brethren of the
thickly settled districts. Among these odd
folk, who correspond exactly to the deca-
dent element of "white trash” in the

South, law and morals are non-existent;
and their general mental status is prob-
ably below that of any other section of
the native American people.

Joe Slater, who came to the institution
in the vigilant custody of four state police-
men, and who was described as a highly
dangerous character, certainly presented
no evidence of his perilous disposition
when I first beheld him. Though well
above the middle stature, and of some-
what brawny frame, he was given an ab-
surd appearance of harmless stupidity by
the pale, sleepy blueness of his small
watery eyes, the scantiness of his neglect-
ed and never-shaven growth of yellow
beard, and the listless drooping of his
heavy nether lip. His age was unknown,
since among his kind neither family rec-
ords nor permanent family ties exist; but
from the baldness of his head in front,
and from the decayed condition of his
teeth, the head surgeon wrote him down
as a man of about forty.

From the medical and court documents
we learned all that could be gathered of
his case: This man, a vagabond, hunter
and trapper, had always been strange in
the eyes of his primitive associates. He
had habitually slept at night beyond the
ordinary time, and upon waking would
often talk of unknown things in a man-
ner so bizarre as to inspire fear even in
the hearts of an unimaginative populace.
Not that his form of language was at all
unusual, for he never spoke save in the
debased patois of his environment; but
the tone and tenor of his utterances were
of such mysterious wildness, that none
might listen without apprehension. He
himself was generally as terrified and
baffled as his auditors, and within an hour
after awakening would forget all that he
had said, or at least all that had caused
him to say what he did; relapsing into a
bovine, half-amiable normality like that
of the other hill-dwellers.

BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP

333

As Slater grew older, it appeared, his
matutinal aberrations had gradually in-
creased in frequency and violence; till
about a month before his arrival at the
institution had occurred the shocking
tragedy which caused his arrest by the
authorities. One day near noon, after a
profound sleep begun in a whisky de-
bauch at about five of the previous after-
noon, the man had roused himself most
suddenly, with ululations so horrible and
unearthly that they brought several neigh-
bors to his cabin — a filthy sty where he
dwelt with a family as indescribable as
himself. Rushing out into the snow, he
had flung his arms aloft and commenced
a series of leaps directly upward in the
air; the while shouting his determination
to reach some "big, big cabin with bright-
ness in the roof and walls and floor and
the loud queer music far away.” As two
men of moderate size sought to restrain
him, he had struggled with maniacal
force and fury, screaming of his desire
and need to find and kill a certain "thing
that shines and shakes and laughs.” At
length, after temporarily felling one of
his detainers with a sudden blow, he had
flung himself upon the other in a demo-
niac ecstasy of blood-thirstiness, shriek-
ing fiendishly that he would "jump high
in the air and burn his way through any-
thing that stopped him.”

Family and neighbors had now fled in
a panic, and when the more courageous of
them returned, Slater was gone, leaving
behind an unrecognizable pulp-like thing
that had been a living man but an hour
before. None of the mountaineers had
dared to pursue him, and it is likely that
they would have welcomed his death from
the cold; but when several mornings later
they heard his screams from a distant ra-
vine they realized that he had somehow
managed to survive, and that his removal
in one way or another would be necessary.
Then had followed an armed searching-

party, whose purpose (whatever it may
have been originally) became that of a
sheriff’s posse after one of the seldom
popular state troopers had • by accident
observed, then questioned, and finally
joined the seekers.

O N the third day Slater was found
unconscious in the hollow of a tree,
and taken to the nearest jail, where alien-
ists from Albany examined him as soon
as his senses returned. To them he told a
simple story. He had, he said, gone to
sleep one afternoon about sundown after
drinking much liquor. He had awaked
to find himself standing bloody-handed
in the snow before his cabin, the mangled
corpse of his neighbor Peter Slader at his
feet. Horrified, he had taken to the
woods in a vague effort to escape from
the scene of what must have been his
crime. Beyond these tilings he seemed to
know nothing, nor could the expert ques-
tioning of his interrogators bring out a
single additional fact.

That night Slater slept quietly, and the
next morning he wakened with no singu-
lar feature save a certain alteration of ex-
pression. Doctor Barnard, who had been
watching the patient, thought he noticed
in the pale blue eyes a certain gleam of
peculiar quality, and in the flaccid lips an
all but imperceptible tightening, as if of
intelligent determination. But when
questioned, Slater relapsed into the habit-
ual vacancy of the mountaineer, and only
reiterated what he had said on the pre-
ceding day.

On the third morning occurred the
first of the man’s mental attacks. After
some show of uneasiness in sleep, he burst
forth into a frenzy so powerful that the
combined efforts of four men were need-
ed to bind him in a strait jacket. The
alienists listened with keen attention to
his words, since their curiosity had been
aroused to a high pitch by the suggestive

334

WEIRD TALES

yet mostly conflicting and incoherent
stories of his family and neighbors. Slater
raved for upward of fifteen minutes, bab-
bling in his backu-oods dialect of green
edifices of light, oceans of space, strange
music, and shadowy mountains and val-
leys. But most of all did he dwell upon
some mysterious blazing entity that shook
and laughed and mocked at him. This
vast, vague personality seemed to have
done him a terrible wrong, and to kill it
in triumphant revenge was his para-
mount desire. In order to reach it, he
said, he would soar through abysses of
emptiness, burning every obstacle that
stood in his way. Thus ran his discourse,
until with the greatest suddenness he
ceased. The fire of madness died from
his eyes, and in dull wonder he looked at
his questioners and asked why he was
bound. R. Barnard unbuckled the leather
harness and did not restore it till night,
when he succeeded in persuading Slater
to don it of his own volition, for his own
good. The man had now admitted that
he sometimes talked queerly, though he
knew not why.

Within a week two more attacks ap-
peared, but from them the doctors learned
little. On the source of Slater’s visions they
speculated at length, for since he could
neither read nor w rite, and had apparent-
ly never heard a legend or fairy-tale, his
gorgeous imagery was quite inexplicable.
That it could not come from any known
myth or romance was made especially
clear by the fact that the unfortunate
lunatic expressed himself only in his own
simple manner. He raved of things he
did not understand and could not inter-
pret; things which he claimed to have ex-
perienced, but which he could not have
learned through any normal or connected
narration. The alienists soon agreed that
abnormal dreams were the foundation of
the trouble; dreams whose vividness could
for a time completely dominate the wak-

ing mind of this basically inferior man.
With due formality Slater w r as tried for
murder, acquitted on the ground of in-
sanity, and committed to the institution
wherein I held so humble a post.

I have said that I am a constant specu-
lator concerning dream-life, and from
this you may judge of the eagerness with
which I applied myself to the study of
the new patient as soon as I had fully
ascertained the facts of his case. He
seemed to sense a certain friendliness in
me, born no doubt of the interest I could
not conceal, and the gentle manner in
which I questioned him. Not that he ever
recognized me during his attacks, when I
hung breathlessly upon his chaotic but
cosmic w'ord-pictures; but he knew me in
his quiet hours, when he would sit by his
barred window weaving baskets of straw
and willow, and perhaps pining for the
mountain freedom he could never again
enjoy. His family never called to see him;
probably it had found another temporary
head, after the manner of decadent moun-
tain folk.

By degrees I commenced to feel an
overwhelming wonder at the mad and
fantastic conceptions of Joe Slater. The
man himself was pitiably inferior in men-
tality and language alike; but his glow ing,
titanic visions, though described in a bar-
barous disjointed jargon, were assuredly
things which only a superior or even ex-
ceptional brain could conceive. How, I
often asked myself, could the stolid im-
agination of a Catskill degenerate conjure
up sights whose very possession argued
a lurking spark of genius? How could
any backwoods dullard have gained so
much as an idea of those glittering realms
of supernal radiance and space about
which Slater ranted in his furious de-
lirium? More and more I inclined to the
belief that in the pitiful personality who
cringed before me lay the disordered

BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP

335

nucleus of something beyond my com-
prehension; something infinitely beyond
the comprehension of my more experi-
enced but less imaginative medical and
scientific colleagues.

And yet I could extract nothing definite
from the man. The sum of all my in-
vestigation was, that in a kind of semi-
corporeal dream-life Slater wandered or
floated through resplendent and pro-
digious valleys, meadows, gardens, cities,
and palaces of light, in a region unbound-
ed and unknown to man; that there he
was no peasant or degenerate, but a crea-
ture of importance and vivid life, moving
proudly and dominantly, and checked
only by a certain deadly enemy, who
seemed to be a being of visible yet
ethereal structure, and who did not ap-
pear to be of human shape, since Slater
never referred to it as a man, or as aught
save a thing. This thing had done Slater
some hideous but unnamed wrong, which
the maniac (if maniac he were) yearned
to avenge.

From the manner in which Slater al-
luded to their dealings, I judged that he
and the luminous thing had met on equal
terms; that in his dream existence the
man was himself a luminous thing of the
same race as his enemy. This impression
was sustained by his frequent references
to flying through space and burning all
that impeded his progress. Yet these con-
ceptions were formulated in rustic words
wholly inadequate to convey them, a cir-
cumstance which drove me to the con-
clusion that if a true dream world indeed
existed, oral language was not its medium
for the transmission of thought. Could
it be that the dream soul inhabiting this
inferior body was desperately struggling
to speak things which the simple and
halting tongue of dullness could not ut-
ter? Could it be that I was face to face
with intellectual emanations which would
explain the mystery if I could but learn

to discover and read them? I did not tell
the older physicians of these things, for
middle age is skeptical, cynical, and dis-
inclined to accept new ideas. Besides, the
head of the institution had but lately
warned me in his paternal way that I was
overworking; that my mind needed a rest.

It had long been my belief that human
thought consists basically of atomic or
molecular motion, convertible into ether
waves of radiant energy like heat, light
and electricity. This belief had early led
me to contemplate the possibility of telep-
athy or mental communication by means
of suitable apparatus, and I had in my
college days prepared a set of transmitting
and receiving instruments somewhat simi-
lar to the cumbrous devices employed in
wireless telegraphy at that crude, pre-
radio period. These I had tested with a
fellow-student, but achieving no result,
had soon packed them away with other
scientific odds and ends for possible fu-
ture use.

Now, in my intense desire to probe in-
to the dream-life of Joe Slater, I sought
these instruments again, and spent sev-
eral days in repairing them for action.
When they were complete once more I
missed no opportunity for their trial. At
each outburst of Slater’s violence, I would
fit the transmitter to his forehead and the
receiver to my own, constantly making
delicate adjustments for various hypo-
thetical wave-lengths of intellectual en-
ergy. I had but little notion of how the
thought-impressions would, if successfully
conveyed, arouse an intelligent response
in my brain, but I felt certain that I could
detect and interpret them. Accordingly I
continued my experiments, though in-
forming no one of their nature.

I T was on the twenty-first of February,
1901, that the thing occurred. As I
look bade across the years I realize how
unreal it seems, and sometimes half won-

33 6

WEIRD TALES

der if old Doctor Fenton was not right
when he charged it all to my excited im-
agination. I recall that he listened with
great kindness and patience when I told
him, but afterward gave me a nerve-
powder and arranged for the half-year's
vacation on which I departed the next
week.

That fateful night I was wildly agitated
and perturbed, for despite the excellent
care he had received, Joe Slater was un-
mistakably dying. Perhaps it was his
mountain freedom that he missed, or per-
haps the turmoil in his brain had grown
too acute for his rather sluggish physique;
but at all events the flame of vitality
flickered low in the decadent body. He
was drowsy near the end, and as darkness
fell he dropped off into a troubled sleep.

I did not strap on the strait jacket as was
customary when he slept, since I saw that
he was too feeble to be dangerous, even
if he woke in mental disorder once more
before passing away. But I did place
upon his head and mine the two ends of
my cosmic "radio,” hoping against hope
for a first and last message from the
dream world in the brief time remaining.
In the cell with us was one nurse, a
mediocre fellow who did not understand
the purpose of the apparatus, or think to
inquire into my course. As the hours
wore on I saw his head droop awkwardly
in sleep, but I did not disturb him. I
myself, lulled by the rhythmical breathing
of the healthy and the dying man, must
have nodded a little later.

The sound of weird lyric melody was
what aroused me. Chords, vibrations, and
harmonic i ecstasies echoed passionately on
every hand, while on my ravished sight
burst the stupendous spectacle of ultimate
beauty. Walls, columns, and architraves
of living fire blazed cffulgently around
the spot where I seemed to float in air,
extending upward to an infinitely high

vaulted dome of indescribable splendor.
Blending with this display of palatial
magnificence, or rather, supplanting it at
times in kaleidoscopic rotation, were
glimpses of wide plains and graceful val-
leys, high mountains and inviting grot-
toes, covered with every lovely attribute
of scenery which my delighted eyes could
conceive of, yet formed wholly of some
glowing, ethereal plastic entity, which in
consistency partook as much of spirit as
of matter. As I gazed, I perceived that
my own brain held the key to these en-
chanting metamorphoses; for each vista
which appeared to me was the one my
changing mind most wished to behold.
Amidst this elysian realm I dwelt not as
a stranger, for each sight and sound was
familiar to me; just as it had been for
uncounted eons of eternity before, and
would be for like eternities to come.

Then the resplendent aura of my
brother of light drew near and held col-
loquy with me, soul to soul, with silent
and perfect interchange of thought. The
hour was one of approaching triumph,
for was not my fellow-being escaping at
last from a degrading periodic bondage;
escaping for ever, and preparing to follow
the accursed oppressor even unto the ut-
termost fields of ether, that upon it might
be wrought a flaming cosmic vengeance
which would shake the spheres? We
floated thus for a little time, when I per-
ceived a slight blurring and fading of the
objects around us, as though some force
were recalling me to earth — where I least
wished to go. The form near me seemed
to feel a change also, for it gradually
brought its discourse toward a conclu-
sion, and itself prepared to quit the
scene, fading from my sight at a rate
somewhat less rapid than that of the other
objects. A few more thoughts were ex-
changed, and I knew that the luminous
one and I were being recalled to bondage,
though for my brother of light it would
W. T.— 5

BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP

337

be the last time. The sorry planet shell
being well-nigh spent, in less than an
hour my fellow would be free to pursue
the oppressor along the Milky Way and
past the hither stars to the very confines
of infinity.

A well-defined shock separates my
final impression of the fading scene
of light from my sudden and somewhat
shamefaced awakening and straightening
up in my chair as I saw the dying figure
on the couch move hesitantly. Joe Slater
was indeed awaking, though probably for
the last time. As I looked more closely,
I saw that in the sallow cheeks shone
spots of color which had never before
been present. The lips, too, seemed un-
usual, being tightly compressed, as if by
the force of a stronger character than had
been Slater’s. The whole face finally be-
gan to grow tense, and the head turned
restlessly with closed eyes.

I did not rouse the sleeping nurse, but
readjusted the slightly disarranged head-
bands of my telepathic “radio,” intent to
catch any parting message the dreamer
might have to deliver. All at once the
head turned sharply in my direction and
the eyes fell open, causing me to stare in
blank amazement at what I beheld. The
man who had been Joe Slater, the Catskill
decadent, was now gazing at me with a
pair of luminous, expanding eyes whose
blue seemed subtly to have deepened.
Neither mania nor degeneracy w r as visible
in that gaze, and I felt beyond a doubt
that I was viewing a face behind which
lay an active mind of high order.

At this juncture my brain became aware
of a steady external influence operating
upon it. I closed my eyes to concentrate
my thoughts more profoundly, and was
rewarded by the positive knowledge that
my long-sought mental message had come
at last. Each transmitted idea formed
rapidly in my mind, and though no ac-
W. T.— 6

tual language was employed, my habitual
association of conception and expression
was so great that I seemed to be receiv-
ing the message in ordinary English.

"'joe Slater is dead," came the soul-
petrifying voice of an agency from be-
yond the wall of sleep. My opened eyes
sought the couch of pain in curious hor-
ror, but the blue eyes w-ere still calmly
gazing, and the countenance was still in-
telligently animated. "He is better dead,
for he was unfit to bear the active intellect
of cosmic entity. His gross body could
not undergo the needed adjustments be-
tween ethereal life and planet life. He
w r as too much an animal, too little a man;
yet it is through his deficiency that you
have come to discover me, for the cosmic
and planet souls rightly should never
meet. He has been in my torment and
diurnal prison for forty-two of your ter-
restrial years.

"I am an entity like that which you
yourself become in the freedom of dream-
less sleep. I am your brother of light,
and have floated with you in the effulgent
valleys. It is not permitted me to tell
your waking earth-self of your real self,
but we are all roamers of vast spaces and
travelers in many ages. Next year I may
be dwelling in the Egypt which you call
ancient, or in the cruel empire of Tsan
Chan which is to come three thousand
years hence. You and I have drifted to
the worlds that reel about the red Arc
turns, and dwelt in the bodies of the in-
sect-philosophers that crawl proudly over
the fourth moon of Jupiter. How little
does the earth self know life and its ex-
tent! How little, indeed, ought it to know
for its own tranquillity!

"Of the oppressor I cannot speak. You
on earth have unwittingly felt its distant
presence — you who without knowing idly
gave the blinking beacon the name of
Algol, the Demon-Star. It is to meet and

338

WEIRD TALES

conquer the oppressor that I have vainly
striven for eons, held back by bodily en-
cumbrances. Tonight I go as a Nemesis
bearing just and blazingly cataclysmic
vengeance. Watch me in the sky close
by the Demon-Star.

"I cannot speak longer, for the body
of Joe Slater grows cold and rigid, and
the coarse brains are ceasing to vibrate as
I wish. You have been ray only friend
on this planet — the only soul to sense and
seek for me within the repellent form
which lies on this couch. We shall meet
again — perhaps in the shining mists of
Orion’s Sword, perhaps on a bleak pla-
teau in prehistoric Asia, perhaps in un-
remembered dreams tonight, perhaps in
some other form an eon hence, when the
solar system shall have been swept away."

At this point the thought- waves ab-
ruptly ceased, and the pale eyes of the
dreamer — or can I say dead man? — com-
menced to glaze fishily. In a half-stupor
I crossed over to the couch and felt of his
wrist, but found it cold, stiff, and pulse-
less. The sallow cheeks paled again, and
the thick lips fell open, disclosing the
repulsively rotten fangs of the degenerate
Joe Slater. I shivered, pulled a blanket
over the hideous face, and awakened the
nurse. Then I left the cell and went si-
lently to my room. I had an instant and
unaccountable craving for a sleep whose
dreams I should not remember.

T he climax? What plain tale of sci-
ence can boast of such a rhetorical
effect? I have merely set down certain
things appealing to me as facts, allowing
you to construe them as you will. As I
have already admitted, my superior, old
Doctor Fenton, denies the reality of every-
thing I have related. He vows that I was
broken down with nervous strain, and
badly in need of the long vacation on full
pay which he so generously gave me. He
assures me on his professional honor that
Joe Slater was but a low-grade paranoiac,
whose fantastic notions must have come
from the crude hereditary folk-tales which
circulated in even the most decadent of
communities. All this he tells me — yet I
cannot forget what I saw in the sky on
the night after Slater died. Lest you think
me a biased witness, another pen must
add this final testimony, which may per-
haps supply the climax you expect. I will
quote the following account of the star
Nova Persei verbatim from the pages of
that eminent astronomical authority, Pro-
fessor Garrett P. Serviss:

"On February 22, 1901, a marvelous
new star was discovered by Doctor Ander-
son of Edinburgh, not very jar from
Algol. No star had been visible at that
point before. Within twenty-four hours
the stranger had become so bright that it
outshone Capella. In a week or two it
had visibly faded, and in the course of a
few months it was hardly discernible with
the naked eye."

%

airy Ones Shall Dance

By GANS T. FIELD

A novel of a hideous, stark horror that struck during a spirit seance — a tale of
terror and sudden death , and the frightful thing that
laired in the Devil’s Croft

The Story Thus Far: where, says Zoberg, lives a medium who

will prove the case for spiritism.

T ALBOT WILLS, the narrator, is a The medium is an attractive girl, Susan
former stage magician. Skeptical Gird. At a seance, a bestial shape appears
of psychic phenomena, he goes in the darkened room and kills John
with Doctor Zoberg to an isolated hamlet, Gird, the medium s father. The town

This story began In WEIRD TALES for January 339

340

WEIRD TALES

constable accuses Wills, as the only per-
son able to escape the manacles which
confined everyone in the room. A mob
gathers to lynch the supposed murderer,
and he manages to escape from a cell,
fleeing for shelter to a grove on the edge
of town. This is called the Devil’s Croft,
and custom and local law forbid anyone
to enter it.

Once inside, he finds, though a blizzard
rages without, the grove is as warm and
green as the tropics. In its depths he en-
counters and fights with the same beast-
shape that killed John Gird. By a lucky
blow he stuns it, and is horrified to see it
turning gradually human. He flees from
the grove and meets Judge Keith Pursui-
vant, a scholarly recluse, who shelters him
and shows him, by logic and by quotation
of distinguished authorities, that a were-
wolf can be explained by the spiritist the-
ory of ectoplasmic materialization.

The following day Judge Pursuivant
goes to town to observe conditions, and
sends Susan Gird to his home to talk to
Wills. The two are beginning to be
drawn to each other, though in Wills’
mind lingers the possibility that Susan
Gird may have a complex personality that
sometimes materializes the beast-thing.

Returning from town, the judge tells
them that the mysterious monster, appar-
ently still in the forbidden grove, has
claimed another victim.

The story continues:

11. "To Meet that Monster Face to
Face!"

I think that both Susan and I fairly
reeled before this news, like actors
registering surprize in an old-fashioned
melodrama. As for Judge Pursuivant, he
turned to the table, cut a generous wedge
of the meat pie and set it, all savory and
steaming, on a plate for himself. His

calm zest for the good food gave us oth-
ers steadiness again, so that we sat down
and even ate a little as he described his
day in town.

He had found opportunity to talk to
Susan in private, confiding in her about
me and finally sending her to me; this, as
he said, so that we would convince each
other of our respective innocences. It
was purely an inspiration, for he had
had no idea, of course, that such convic-
tion would turn out so final. Thereafter
he made shift to enter the Gird house
and talk to Doctor Zoberg.

That worthy he found sitting somewhat
limply in the parlor, with John Gird’s
coffin in the next room. Zoberg, the
judge reported, was mystified about the
murder and anxious to bring to justice
the townsfolk — there were more than
one, it seemed — who had beaten him.
Most of all, however, he was concerned
about the charges against me.

"His greatest anxiety is to prove you
innocent," Judge Pursuivant informed
me. "He intends to bring the best lawyer
possible for your defense, is willing even
to assist in paying the fee. He also swears
that character witnesses can be brought
to testify that you are the most peaceable
and law-abiding man in the country.”

"That’s mighty decent of him,” I said.
"According to your reasoning of this
morning, his attitude proves him inno-
cent, too.”

"What reasoning was that?” asked
Susan, and I was glad that the judge con-
tinued without answering her.

"I was glad that I had sent Miss Susan
on. If your car had remained there, Mr.
Wills, Doctor Zoberg might have driven
off in it to rally your defenses.”

"Not if I know him,” I objected.
"The whole business, what of the mys-
tery and occult significances, will hold
him right on the spot. He's relentlessly

THE HAIRY ONES SHALL DANCE

341

curious and, despite his temporary col-
lapse, he's no coward.”

"I agree with that,” chimed in Susan.

As for my pursuers of the previous
night, the judge went on, they had been
roaming £he snow-covered streets in twos
and threes, heavily armed for the most
part and still determined to punish me
for killing their neighbor. The council
was too frightened or too perplexed to
deal with the situation, and the constable
was still in bed, with his brother assum-
ing authority, when Judge Pursuivant
made his inquiries. The judge went to
see the wounded man, who very pluckily
determined to rise and take up his duties
again.

‘Til arrest the man who plugged me,”
O’Bryant had promised grimly, "and that
kid brother of mine can quit playing
policeman.”

The judge applauded these sentiments,
and brought him hot food and whisky,
which further braced his spirits. In the
evening came the invasion by the younger
O’Bryant of the Devil’s Croft, and his
resultant death at the claws and teeth of
what prowled there.

"His throat was so tom open and filled
with blood that he could not speak,” the
judge concluded, "but he pointed back
into the timber, and then tried to trace
something in the snow with his finger. It
looked like a wolfs head, with pointed
nose and ears. He died before he
finished.”

"You saw him come out?” I asked.

"No. I’d gone back to town, but later
I saw the body, and the sketch in the
snow.”

He finished his dinner and pushed
back his diair. "Now,” he said heartily,
"it’s up to us.”

"Up to us to do what?" I inquired.

"To meet that monster face to face,”
he replied. "There are three of us and,
so far as I can ascertain, but one of the

enemy.” Both Susan £nd I started to
speak, but he held up his hand, smiling.
"I know without being reminded that the
odds are still against us, because the one
enemy is fierce and blood-drinking, and
can change shape and character. Maybe
it can project itself to a distance — which
makes it all the harder, both for us to face
it and for us to get help.”

"I know what you mean by that last,”
I nodded gloomily. "If there were ten
thousand friendly constables in the neigh-
borhood, instead of a single hostile one,
they wouldn’t believe us.”

"Right,” agreed Judge Pursuivant
"We're like the group of perplexed mor-
tals in Dracula, who had only their own
wits and weapons against a monster no
more forbidding than ours.”

I T IS hard to show clearly how his con-
stant offering of parallels and rational-
izations comforted us. Only the unknown
and unknowable can terrify completely.
We three were even cheerful over a bot-
tle of wine that William fetched and
poured out in three glasses. Judge Pur-
suivant gave us a toast — "May wolves
go hungry!” — and Susan and I drank it
gladly.

"Don't forget what’s on our side,”
said tlie judge, putting down his glass.
"I mean the stedfast and courageous
heart, of which I preached to Wills last
night, and which we can summon from
within us any time and anywhere. The
werewolf, dauntlessly faced, loses its
dread; and I diink we are the ones to face
it. Now we’re ready for action.”

I said that I would welcome any kind
of action whatsoever, and Susan touched
my arm as if in endorsement of the re-
mark. Judge Pursuivant’s spectacles glit-
tered in approval.

"You two will go into the Devil’s
Croft,” he announced. "I’m going back
to town once more.”

342

WEIRD TALES

"Into the Devil’s Croft!" we almost
shouted, both in the same shocked breath.

"Of course. Didn’t we just get through
with the agreement all around that the
lycanthrope can and must be met face to
face? Offense is the best defense, as per-
haps one hundred thousand athletic train-
ers have reiterated."

"I’ve already faced the creature once,"
I reminded him. "As for appearing
dauntless, I doubt my own powers of
deceit."

"You shall have a weapon,” he said.
"A fire gives light, and we know that
such things must have darkness — such as
it finds in the midst of that swampy
wood. So fill your pockets with matches,
both of you."

"How about a gun?” I asked, but he
shook his head.

"We don’t want the werewolf killed.
That would leave the whole business in
mystery, and yourself probably charged
with another murder. He’d return to his
human shape, you know, the moment he
was hurt even slightly.”

Susan spoke, very calmly: "I’m ready
to go into the Croft, Judge Pursuivant.”

He clapped his hands loudly, as if ap-
plauding in a theater. "Bravo, my dear,
bravo! I see Mr. Wills sets his jaw.
That means he's ready to go with you.
Very well, let us be off.”

He called to William, who at his or-
ders brought three lanterns — sturdy old-
fashioned affairs, protected by strong wire
nettings — and filled them with oil. We
each took one and set out. It had turned
clear and frosty once more, and the moon
shone too brightly for my comfort, at
least. However, as we approached the
grove, we saw no sentinels; they could
hardly be blamed for deserting, after the
fate of the younger O’ Bryant.

We gained the shadow' of the outer
cedars unchallenged. Here Judge Pursui-
vant called a halt, produced a match from

his overcoat pocket and lighted our lan-
terns all around. I remember that we
struck a fresh light for Susan’s lantern;
we agreed that, silly as the three-on-a
match superstition might be, this was no
time or place to tempt Providence.

"Come on,” said Judge Pursuivant
then, and led the way into the darkest
part of the immense thicket.

12. rr We Are Here at His Mercy.”

W e followed Judge Pursuivant,
Susan and I, without much of a
thought beyond an understandable dislike
for being left alone on the brink of the
timber. It was a slight struggle to get
through the close-set cedar hedge, espe-
cially for Susan, but beyond it we soon
caught up with the judge. He strode
heavily and confidently among the trees,
his lantern held high to shed light upon
broad, polished leaves and thick, wet
stems. The moist warmth of the grove's
interior made itself felt again, and the
judge explained again and at greater
length the hot springs that made pos-
sible this surprizing condition. All the
while he kept going. He seemed to know
his way in that forbidden fastness — in-
deed, he must have explored it many
times to go straight to his destination.

That destination was a clearing, in
some degree like the one where I had
met and fought with my hairy pursuer
on the night before. This place had,
however, a great tree in its center, with
branches that shot out in all directions to
hide away the sky completely. By strain-
ing the ears one could catch a faint mur-
mur of water — my scalding stream, no
doubt. Around us were the thick-set
trunks of the forest, filled in between
with brush and vines, and underfoot grew
velvety moss.

"This will be our headquarters posi-
tion,” said the judge. "Wills, help me

THE HAIRY ONES SHALL DANCE

345

gather wood for a fire. Break dead
branches from the standing trees — never
mind picking up wood from the ground,
it will be too damp.”

Together we collected a considerable
heap and, crumpling a bit of paper in
its midst, he kindled it.

"Now, then,” he went on, "I’m head-
ing for town. You two will stay here
and keep each other company.”

He took our lanterns, blew them out
and ran his left arm through the loops of
their handles.

"I’m sure that nothing will attack you
in the light of the fire. You’re bound to
attract whatever skulks hereabouts, how-
ever. When I come back, we ought to be
prepared to go into the final act of our
little melodrama.”

He touched my hand, bowed to Susan,
and went tramping away into the timber.
The thick leafage blotted his lantern-
light from our view before his back had
been turned twenty seconds.

Susan and I gazed at each other, and
smiled rather uneasily.

"It's warm,” she breathed, and took
off her cloak. Dropping it upon one of
the humped roots of the great central
tree, she sat down on it with her back to
the trunk. "What kind of a tree is this?”
I gazed up at the gnarled stem, or as
much of it as I could see in the firelight.
Finally I shook my head.

"I don’t know — I’m no expert,” I ad-
mitted. "At least it's very big, and un-
doubtedly very old — the sort of tree that
used to mark a place of sacrifice.”

At the word "sacrifice,” Susan lifted
her shoulders as if in distaste. "You’re
right, Talbot. It would be something
grim and Druid-like.” She began to re-
cite, half to herself:

That tree in whose dark shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,

The priest who slew the slayer
And shall himself be slain.

"Macaulay,” I said at once. Then, to
get her mind off of morbid things, "I
had to recite The Lays of Ancient Rome
in school, when I was a boy. 'I wish you
hadn’t mentioned it.”

"You mean, because it's an evil omen?”
She shook her head, and contrived a smile
that lighted up her pale face. "It’s not
that, if you analyze it. ’Shall himself be
slain’ — it sounds as if the enemy’s fate
is sealed.”

I nodded, then spun around sharply,
for I fancied I heard a dull crashing at
the edge of the clearing. Then I went
here and there, gathering wood enough
to keep our fire burning for some time.
One branch, a thick, straight one, I chose
from the heap and leaned against the big
tree, within easy reach of my hand.

"That’s for a dub,” I told Susan, and
she half shrunk, half stiffened at the im-
plication.

We fell to talking about Judge Pursui-
vant, the charm and the enigma that in-
vested him. Both of us felt gratitude that
he had immediately clarified our own in-
nocence in the grisly slayings, but to both
came a sudden inspiration, distasteful
and disquieting. I spoke first:

"Susan! Why. did the judge bring us
here?”

"He said, to help face and defeat the

monster. But — but ”

"Who is that monster?” I demanded.
"What human being puts on a semi-
bestial appearance, to rend and kill?”

"Y — you don’t mean the judge?”

As I say, it had been in both our minds.
We were silent, and felt shame and em-
barrassment.

"Look here,” I went on earnestly after
a moment; "perhaps we’re being ungrate-
ful, but we mustn’t be unprepared.
Think, Susan; nobody knows where Judge
Pursuivant was at the time of your fa-
ther’s death, at the time I saw the thing
in these woods.” I broke off, remember-

344

WEIRD TALES

in g how I had met the judge for the first
time, so shortly after my desperate strug-
gle with the point-eared demon. "No-
body knows where he was when the con-
stable's brother was attacked and mortally
wounded."

She gazed about fearfully. "Nobody,"
she added breathlessly, "knows where he
is now."

I was remembering a conversation with
him; he had spoken of books, mentioning
a rare, a supposedly non-existent volume.
What was it? . . . the Wicked Bible.
And what was it I had once heard about
that work?

It came back to me now, out of the
sub-conscious brain -chamber -where, ap-
parently, one stores everything he hears
or reads in idleness, and from which such
items creep on occasion. It had been in
Lewis Spence’s Encyclopedia of Occult-
ism, now on the shelf in my New York
apartment.

The Wicked Bible, scripture for witdies
and wizards, from which magic-mongers
of the Dark Ages drew their inspiration
and their knowledge! And Judge Pur-
suivant had admitted to having one!

What had he learned from it? How
had he been so glib about the science —
yes, and the psychology — of being a
werewolf?

"If what we suspect is true," I said to
Susan, "we are here at his mercy. No-
body is going to come in here, not if
horses dragged them. At his leisure he
will fall upon us and tear us to pieces.”

But, even as I spoke, I despised myself
for my weak fears in her presence. I
picked up my club and was comforted by
its weight and thickness.

"I met thaf devil once,” I said, study-
ing cheer and confidence into my voice
this time. "I don’t think it relished the
meeting any too much. Next time won’t
be any more profitable for it.”

She smiled at me, as if in comradely

encouragement; then we both started and
fell silent. There had risen, somewhere
among the thickets, a long low whining.

I PUT out a foot, stealthily, as though
fearful of being caught in motion. A
quick kick flung more wood on the fire.
I blinked in the light and felt the heat.
Standing there, as a primitive man might
have stood in his flame-guarded camp to
face the horrors of the ancient world, I
tried to judge by ear the direction of that
whine.

It died, and I heard, perhaps in my
imagination, a stealthy padding. Then
the whining began again, from a new
quarter and nearer.

I made myself step toward it. My
shadow, leaping grotesquely among the
tree trunks, almost frightened me out of
my wits. The whine had changed into a
crooning wail, such as that with which
dogs salute the full moon. It seemed to
plead, to promise; and it was coming
closer to the clearing.

Once before I had challenged and
taunted the thing with scornful words.
Now I could not make my lips form a
single syllable. Probably it was just as
well, for I thought and watched the more.
Something blade and cautious was mov-
ing among the branches, just beyond the
shrubbery that screened it from our fire-
light. I knew, without need of a clear
view, what that black something was. I
lifted my club to the ready.

The sound it made had become in some
fashion articulate, though not human in
any quality. There were no words to it,
but it spoke to the heart. The note of
plea and promise had become one of com-
mand — and not directed to me.

I found my own voice.

"Get out of here, you devil!" I roared
at it, and threw my club. Even as I let
go of it, I wished I had not. The bushes
foiled my aim, and the missile crashed

THE HAIRY ONES SHALL DANCE

345

among them and dropped to the mossy
ground. The creature fell craftily silent.
Then I felt sudden panic and regret at
being left weaponless, and I retreated
toward the fire.

"Susan,” I said huskily, "give me an-
other stick. Hurry!”

She did not move or stir, and I rum-
maged frantically among the heaped dry
branches for myself. Catching up the
first piece of wood that would serve, I
turned to her with worried curiosity.

She was still seated upon the cloak-
draped root, but she had drawn herself
tense, like a cat before a mouse-hole.
Her head was thrust forward, so far that
her neck extended almost horizontally.
Her dilated eyes were turned in the di-
rection from which the whining and
crooning had come. They had a strange
clarity in them, as if they could pierce
the twigs and leaves and meet there an
answering, understanding gaze.

"Susan!” I cried.

Still she gave no sign that she heard
me, if hear me she did. She leaned far-
ther forward, as if ready to spring up and
run. Once more the unbeastly wail rose
from the place where our watcher was
lurking.

Susan’s lips trembled. From them
came slowly and softly, then louder, a
long-drawn answering howl.

"Aoooooooooooooo! Aoooooooooooo-
0000000!'*

The stick almost fell from my hands.
She rose, slowly but confidently. Her
shoulders hunched high, her arms hung
forward as though they wanted to reach
to the ground. Again she howled:
"Aoooooooocooooooooooo!”

I saw that she was going to move
across the clearing, toward the trees —
through the trees. My heart seemed to
twist into a knot inside me, but I could
not let her do such a thing. I made a

quick stride and planted myself before
her.

"Susan, you mustn’t!”

She shrank back, her face turning slow-
ly up to mine. Her back was to the fire,
yet light rose in her eyes, or perhaps be-
hind them; a green light, such as reflects
in still forest pools from the moon. Her
hands lifted suddenly, as though to repel
me. They were half closed and the
crooked fingers drawn stiff, like talons.

"Susan!” I coaxed her, yet again, and
she made no answer but tried to slip side-
wise around me. I moved and headed
her off, and she growled — actually
growled, like a savage dog.

With my free hand I clutched her
shoulder. Under my fingers her flesh
was as taut as wire fabric. Then, sud-
denly, it relaxed into human tissue again,
and she was standing straight. Her eyes
had lost their weird light, they showed
only dark and frightened.

"Talbot,” she stammered. "Wh — what
have I been doing?”

"Nothing, my dear,” I comforted her.
"It was nothing that we weren't able to
fight back.”

From the woods behind me came a
throttling yelp, as of some hungry thing
robbed of prey within its very grasp.
Susan swayed, seemed about to drop, and
I caught her quickly in my arms. Hold-
ing her thus, I turned my head and
laughed over my shoulder.

"Another score against you!” I jeered
at my enemy. "You didn’t get her, not
with all your filthy enchantments!”

Susan was beginning to cry , and I half
led, half carried her back to the fireside.
At my gesture she sat on her cloak again,
as tractable as a child who repents of
rebellion and tries to be obedient.

There were no more sounds from the
timber. I could feel an emptiness there,
as if the monster had slunk away, baffled.

346

WEIRD TALES

IS. "Lights Our Best Weapon.”

N either of us said anything for a
while after that. I stoked up the
Ere, to be doing something, and it made
us so uncomfortably warm that we had to
crowd away from it. Sitting close against
the tree-trunk, I began to imagine some-
thing creeping up the black lane of shad-
ow it cast behind us to the edge of the
clearing; and yet again I thought I heard
noises, Club in hand, I went to investi-
gate, and I was not disappointed in the
least when I found nothing.

Finally Susan spoke. "This,” she said,
"is a new light on the thing."

"It’s nothing to be upset about," I
tried to comfort her.

"Not be upset!" She sat straight up,
and in the light of the fire I could see a
single pained line between her brows,
deep and sharp as a chisel-gash. "Not
when I almost turned into a beast!”

"How much of that do you remem-
ber?” I asked her.

"I was foggy in my mind, Talbot, al-
most as at the seance, but I remember be-
ing drawn — drawn to what was waiting
out there.” Her eyes sought the thickets
on the far side of our blaze. "And it
didn’t seem horrible, but pleasant and
welcome and — well, as if it were my kind.
You," and she glanced quickly at me,
then ashamedly away, "you were sudden-
ly strange and to be avoided.”

"Is that all?”

"It spoke to me," she went on in
husky horror, "and I spoke to it.”

I forbore to remind her that the only
sound she had uttered was a wordless
howl. Perhaps she did not know that —
I hoped not. We said no more for
another awkward time.

Finally she mumbled, "I’m not the
kind of woman who cries easily; but I’d
like to now.”

"Go ahead,” I said at once, and she

did, and I let her. Whether I took her
into my arms, or whether she came into
them of her own accord, I do not remem-
ber exactly; but it was against my shoul-
der that she finished her weeping, and
when she had finished she did feel better.

"That somehow washed the fog and
the fear out of me,” she confessed, al-
most brightly.

It must have been a full hour later that
rustlings rose yet again in the timber. So
frequently had my imagination tricked
me that I did not so much as glance up.
Then Susan gave a little startled cry, and
I sprang to my feet. Beyond the fire a
tall, gray shape had become visible, with
a pale glare of light around it.

"Don't be alarmed,” called a voice I
knew. "It is I — Otto Zoberg.”

"Doctor!” I cried, and hurried to meet
him. For the first time in my life, I felt
that he was a friend. Our differences of
opinion, once making companionship
strained, had so dwindled to nothing in
comparison to tire danger I faced, and his
avowed trust in me as innocent of mur-
der.

"How are you?” I said, wringing his
hand. "They say you were hurt by the
mob."

"Ach, it w'as nothing serious,” he re-
assured me. "Only this.” He touched
with his forefinger an eye, and I could
see that it was bruised and swollen half
shut. "A citizen with too ready a fist and
too slow a mind has that to answer for.”

"I’m partly responsible,” I said. "You
were trying to help me, I understand,
when it happened.”

M ore noise behind him, and two
more shapes pushed into the clear-
ing. I recognized Judge Pursuivant, nod-
ding to me with his eyes bright under his
wide hat-brim. The other man, angular,
falcon-faced, one arm in a sling, I had
also seen before. It was Constable O’Bry-

THE HAIRY ONES SHALL DANCE

347

ant. I spoke to him, but he gazed past
me, apparently not hearing.

Doctor Zoberg saw my perplexed
frown, and he turned back toward the
constable. Snapping long fingers in front
of the great hooked nose, he whistled
shrilly. O’Bryant started, grunted, then
glared around as though he had been
suddenly and rudely awakened.

"What’s up?" he growled menacingly,
and his sound hand moved swiftly to a
holster at his side. Then his eyes found
me, and with an oath he drew his re-
volver.

"Easy, Constable! Easy does it,"
soothed Judge Pursuivant, his own great
hand clutching O’Bryant’s wrist. "You’ve
forgotten that I showed how Mr. Wills
must be innocent.”

"I’ve forgotten what we’re here for at
all,” snapped O’Bryant, gazing around
the clearing. "Hey, have I been drunk or
something? I said that I’d never ”

"I’ll explain,” offered Zoberg. "The
judge met me in town, and we came to-
gether to see you. Remember? You said
you would like to avenge your brother’s
death, and came with us. Then, when
you balked at the very edge of this Devil's
Croft, I took the liberty of hypnotizing
you.”

"Huh? How did you do that?”
growled the officer.

"With a look, a w r ord, a motion of the
hand,” said Zoberg, his eyes twinkling.
"Then you ceased all objections and came
in with us.”

Pursuivant clapped O’Bryant on the
unwounded shoulder. "Sit dow r n,” he in-
vited, motioning tow-ard the roots of the
tree.

The five of us gathered around the fire,
like picknickers instead of allies against a
supernormal monster. There, at Susan's
insistence, I told of what had happened
since Judge Pursuivant had left us. All
listened with rapt attention, the constable

grunting occasionally, the judge clicking
his tongue, and Doctor Zoberg in abso-
lute silence.

It was Zoberg who made the first com-
ment after I had finished. "This ex-
plains many things,” he said.

"It don't explain a doggone thing,”
grumbled O’Bryant.

Zoberg smiled at him, then turned to
Judge Pursuivant. "Your ectoplasmic
theory of lycanthropy — such as you have
explained it to me — is most interesting
and, I think, valid. May I advance it a
trifle?”

"In what way?” asked the judge.

"Ectoplasm, as you see it, forms the
werewolf by building upon the medium's
body. But is not ectoplasm more apt, ac-
cording to the observations of many peo-
ple, to draw’ completely av/ay and form
a separate and complete thing of itself?
The thing may be beastly, as you suggest.
Algernon Blackwood, the English writer
of psychic stories, almost hits upon it in
one of his ’John Silence' tales. He de-
scribed an astral personality taking form
and threatening harm while its physical
body slept.”

”1 know' the story you mean," agreed
Judge Pursuivant. ft T he Camp of the
Dog, I think it’s called.”

"Very well, then. Perhaps, while Miss
Susan’s body lay in a trance, securely
handcuffed between Wills and my-
self ”

"Oh!” wailed Susan. "Then it was I,
after all.”

"It couldn’t have been you,” I told
her at once.

"But it was! And, w'hile I was at the
judge’s home with you, part of me met
the constable’s brother in this wood.” She
stared wildly around her.

"It might as well have been part of
me,” I argued, and O’Bryant glared at
me as if in sudden support of that likeli-
hood. But Susan shook her head.

348

WEIRD TALES

"No, for which of us responded to the
call of that thing out there?”

For the hundredth time she gazed fear-
fully through the fire at the bushes be-
hind which the commanding whine had
risen.

"I have within me,” she said dully, "a
nature that will break out, look and act
like a beast-demon, will kill even my

beloved father ”

"Please,” interjected Judge Pursuivant
earnestly, "you must not take responsibil-
ity upon yourself for what happened. If
the ectoplasm engendered by you made
up the form of the killer, the spirit may
have come from without.”

"How could it?” she asked wretchedly.
"How could Marthe Beraud exude
ectoplasm that formed a bearded, mascu-
line body?” Pursuivant looked across to
Zoberg. "Doctor, you surely know the
famous 'Bien Boa' seance, and how the
materialized entity spoke Arabic when
the medium, a Frenchwoman, knew little
or nothing of that language?”

Zoberg sat with bearded chin on lean
hand. His joined brows bristled the more
as he corrugated his forehead in thought.
"We are each a thousand personalities,”
he said, sententiously if not comfortingly.
"How can we rule them all, or rule even
one of them?”

O ’BRYANT said sourly that all this
talk was too high flown for him to
understand or to enjoy. He dared hope,
however, that the case could never be tied
up to Miss Susan Gird, whom he had
known and liked since her babyhood.

"It can never do that,” Zoberg said
definitely. "No court or jury would con-
vict her on the evidence we are offering
against her.”

I ventured an opinion: "While you
are attempting to show that Susan is a
werewolf, you are forgetting that some-

thing else was prowling around our fire,
just out of sight.”

" Ach , just out of sight!” echoed Zo-
berg. "That means you aren't sure what
it was.”

"Or even that there was anything,”
added Susan, so suddenly and strongly
that I, at least, jumped.

"There was something, all right,” I in-
sisted. "I heard it.”

"You thought you heard a sound be-
hind the tree,” Susan reminded me. "You
looked, and there was nothing.”

Everyone gazed at me, rather like staid
adults at a naughty child. I said, ungra-
ciously, that my imagination was no bet-
ter than theirs, and that I was no easier
to frighten. Judge Pursuivant suggested
that we make a search of the surrounding
woods, for possible clues.

"A good idea,” approved Constable
O’Bryant. "The ground’s damp. We
might find some sort of footprints.”

"Then you stay here with Miss Susan,”
the judge said to him. "We others will
circle around.”

The gaunt constable shook his head.
"Not much, mister. I’m in on whatever
searching is done. I've got something to
settle with whatever killed my kid
brother.”

"But there are only three lanterns,”
pointed out Judge Pursuivant. "We have
to carry them — light’s our best weapon.”

Zoberg then spoke up, rather diffident-
ly, to say that he would be glad to stay
with Susan. This was agreed upon, and
the other three of us prepared for the
search.

I took the lantern from Zoberg’s hand,
nodded to the others, and walked away
among the trees.

14. " I Was— 1 Am— <i Wolf ’■»

D eliberately I had turned my face
toward the section beyond the fire,
for, as I have said repeatedly, it was there

THE HAIRY ONES SHALL DANCE

349

that I had heard tine movements and cries
of the being that had so strongly moved
and bewitched Susan. My heart whis-
pered rather loudly that I must look for
myself at its traces or lack of them, or for
ever view myself with scorn.

Almost at once I found tracks, the
booted tracks of my three allies. Shaking
my lantern to make it flare higher, I went
deeper among the clumps, my eyes quar-
tering the damp earth. After a few mo-
ments I found what I had come to look
for.

The marks were round and rather
vague as to toe-positions, yet not so clear-
cut as to be made by hoofs. Rather they
suggested a malformed stump or a palm
with no fingers, and they were deep
enough to denote considerable weight;
the tracks of my own shoes, next to them,
were rather shallower. I bent for a close
look, then straightened up, looked every-
where at once, and held my torch above
my head to shed light all around; for I
had suddenly felt eyes upon me.

I caught just a glimpse as of two points
of light, fading away into some leafage
and in the direction of the clearing, and
toward them I made my way; but there
was nothing there, and the only tracks
underfoot were of shod human beings,
myself or one of the others. I returned
to my outward search, following the
round tracks.

They were plainly of only two feet —
there were no double impressions, like
those of a quadruped — but I must have
stalked along them for ten minutes when
I realized that I had no way of telling
whether they went forward or backward.
I might be going away from my enemy
instead of toward it. A close examina-
tion did me little good, and I further
pondered that the creature would lurk
near the clearing, not go so straight
away. Thus arguing within myself, I
doubled back.

Coming again close to the starting-
point, I thought of a quick visit to the
clearing and a comforting word or two
with Susan and Zoberg. Surely I was al-
most there; but why did not the fire gleam
through the trees? Were they out of
wood? Perplexed, I quickened my pace.
A gnarled tree grew in my path, its low
branches heavily bearded with vines. Be-
yond this rose only the faintest of glows.
I paused to push aside some strands and
peer.

The fire had almost died, and by its
light I but half saw two figures, one tall
and one slender, standing together well
to one side. They faced each other, and
the taller — a seeming statue of wet-look-
ing gray — held its companion by a shoul-
der. The other gray hand was stroking
the smaller one’s head, pouring grayness
thereon.

I saw only this much, without stop-
ping to judge or to wonder. Then I
yelled, and sprang into the clearing. At
my outcry the two fell apart and faced
me. The smallest was Susan, who took a
step in my direction and gave a little
smothered whimper, as though she was
trying to speak through a blanket. I ran
to her side, and with a rough sweep of
my sleeve I cleared from her face and
head a mass of slimy, shiny jelly.

“You!” I challenged the other shape.
"What have you been trying to do to
her?”

For only a breathing-space it stood
still, as featureless and clumsy as a half-
formed figure of gray mud. Then dark-
ness sprang out upon it, and hair. Eyes
blazed at me, green and fearsome. A
sharp muzzle opened to emit a snarl.

"Now I know you,” I hurled at it.
“I’m going to kill you.”

And I charged.

Claws ripped at my head, missed and
tore the cloth of my coat. One of my

350

WEIRD TALES

arms shot around a lean, hairy middle
with powerful muscles straining under
its skin, and I drove my other fist for
where I judged the pit of the stomach to
be. Grappled, we fell and rolled over.
The beast smell I remembered was all
about us, and I knew that jaws were shov-
ing once again at my throat. I jammed
my forearm between them, so far into the
hinge of them that they could not close
nor crush. My other hand clutched the
skin of the throat, a great loose fistful,
drew it taut and began to twist with all
my strength. I heard a half-broken yelp
of strangled pain, felt a slackening of the
body that smuggled against me, knew
that it was trying to get away. But I man-
aged to roll on top, straddling the tiling.

"You’re not so good on defense,” I
panted, and brought my other hand to
the throat, for I had no other idea save to
kill. Paws grasped and tore at my wrists.
There was shouting at my back, in Susan’s
voice and several others. Hands caught
me by the shoulders and tried to pull me
up and away.

"No!” I cried. "This is it, the were-
wolf!”

"It’s Doctor Zoberg, you idiot,” growled
O'Bryant in my ear. "Come on, let him
up.’’

"Yes,” added Judge Pursuivant, "it’s
Doctor Zoberg, as you say; but a moment
ago it was the monster we have been
hunting.”

I had been dragged upright by now,
and so had Zoberg. He could only choke
and glare for the time being, his fingers
to his half-crushed throat. Pursuivant
had moved within clutching distance of
him, and was eyeing him as a cat eyes a
mouse.

"Like Wills, I only pretended to search,
then doubled back to watch,” went on
the judge. "I saw Zoberg and Miss Susan
talking. He spoke quietly, rhythmically,

commandingly. She went into half a
trance, and I knew she was hypnotized.

"As the fire died down, he began the
change. Ectoplasm gushed out and over
him. Before it took form, he began to
smear some upon her. And Mr. Wills
here came out of the woods and at him.”
O’Bryant looked from the judge to
Zoberg. Then he fumbled with his un-
damaged hand in a hip pocket, produced
handcuffs and stepped forward. The ac-
cused man grinned through his beard, as
if admitting defeat in some trifling game.
Then he held out his wrists with an air
of resignation and I, who had manacled
them once, wondered again at their cord-
ed strength. The irons clicked shut upon
one, then the other.

"You know everything now,” said Zo-
berg, in a soft voice but a steady one. ”1
was — I am — a wolf; a wolf who hoped to
mate with an angel.”

His bright eyes rested upon Susan, who
shrank back. Judge Pursuivant took a
step toward the prisoner.

"There is no need for you to insult
her,” he said.

Zoberg grinned at him, with every long
tooth agleam. "Do you want to hear my
confession, or don’t you?”

"Sure we want to hear it,” grunted
O’Bryant. "Leave him alone, judge, and
let him talk.” He glanced at me. "Got
any paper, Mr. Wills? Somebody better
take this down in writing.”

I produced a wad of note-paper and a
stub pencil. Placing it upon my knee,
with the lantern for light, I scribbled, al-
most word for word, the tale that Doctor
Zoberg told.

15. "And That Is the End”

“Perhaps I was bom what I am,” he
A began. "At least, even as a lad I
knew that there was a Lust and a power
for evil within me. Night called to me,

THE HAIRY ONES SHALL DANCE

351

where it frightens most children. I would
slip out of my father’s house and run for
miles, under the trees or across fields, with
the moon for company. This was in
Germany, of course, before the war.”

"During the war ” began Judge

Pursuivant.

"During the war, when most men were
fighting, I was in prison.” Again Zoberg
grinned, briefly and without cheer. "I
had found it easy and inspiring to kill
persons, with a sense of added strength
following. But they caught me and put
me in what they called an asylum. I was
supposed to be crazy. They confined me
closely, but I, reading books in the library,
grew to know what the change was that
came upon me at certain intervals. I
turned my attention to it, and became able
to control the change, bringing it on or
holding it off at will.”

He looked at Susan again. "But I’m
ahead of my story. Once, when I was at
school, I met a girl — an American stu-
dent of science and philosophy. She
laughed at my wooing, but talked to me
about spirits and psychical phenomena.
That, my dear Susan, was your mother.
When the end of the war brought so
many new things, it also brought a dif-
ferent viewpoint toward many inmates of
asylums. Some Viennese doctors, and
later Sigmund Freud himself, found my
case interesting. Of course, they did not
arrive at the real truth, or they would
not have procured my release.”

"After that,” I supplied, writing swift-
ly, "you became an expert psychical in-
vestigator and journeyed to America.”
"Yes, to find the girl who had once
laughed and studied with me. After some
years I came to this town, simply to trace
the legend of this Devil’s Croft. And
here, I found, she had lived and died,
and left behind a daughter that was her
image.”

Judge Pursuivant cleared his throat. ”1
suspect that you’re leaving out part of
your adventures, Doctor.”

Zoberg actually laughed. "Ja, I thought
to spare you a few shocks. But if you
will have them, you may. I visited Rus-
sia — and in 1922 a medical commission
of the Soviet Union investigated several
score mysterious cases of peasants killed
— and eaten.” He licked his lips, like a
cat who thinks of meat. "In Paris I
founded and conducted a rather interest-
ing night school, for the study of diabo-
lism in its relationship to science. And in
1936, certain summer vacationists on
Long Island were almost frightened out
of their wits by a lurking thing that
seemed half beast, half man.” He chuck-
led. "Your Literary Digest made much
of it. The lurking tiling was, of course,
myself.”

We stared. "Say, why do you do these
things?” the constable blurted.

Zoberg turned to him, head quizzically
aslant. "Why do you uphold your local
laws? Or why does Judge Pursuivant
study ancient philosophies? Or why do
Wills and Susan turn soft eyes upon each
other? Because the heart of each so in-
sists.”

Susan was clutching my arm. Her fin-
gers bit into my flesh as Zoberg’s eyes
sought her again.

"I found the daughter of someone I
once loved,” he went on, with real gen-
tleness in his voice. "Wills, at least, can
see in her what I saw. A new inspiration
came to me, a wish and a plan to have a
comrade in my secret exploits.”

"A beast-thing like yourself?” prompt-
ed the judge.

Zoberg nodded. "A lupa to my lupus.
But this girl — Susan Gird — had not in-
herited the psychic possibilities of her
mother.”

"What!” I shouted “You yourself said

352

WEIRD TALES

that she was the greatest medium of all
time!’’

“I did say so. But it was a lie."

"Why, in heaven’s name ”

"It was my hope," he broke in quiet-
ly, "to make of her a medium, or a
lycanthrope — call the phenomenon which
you will. Are you interested in my pro-
posed method?" He gazed mockingly
around, and his eyes rested finally upon
me. "Make full notes-, Wills. This will
be interesting, if not stupefying, to the
psychic research committees.

"It is, as you know, a supernormal sub-
stance that is exuded to change the ap-
pearance of my body. What, I wondered,
would some of that substance do if
smeared upon her?"

I started to growl out a curse upon
him, but Judge Pursuivant, rapt, mo-
tioned for me to keep silent.

"Think back through all the demonol-
ogies you have read," Zoberg was urg-
ing. "What of the strange 'witch oint-
ments' that, spread over an ordinary hu-
man body, gave it beast-form and beast-
heart? There, again, legend had basis in
scientific fact.”

"By the thunder, you’re logical,” mut-
tered Judge Pursuivant.

"And damnable,” I added. "Go on.
Doctor. You were going to smear the
change-stuff upon Susan.”

"But first, I knew, I must convince her
that she had within her the essence of a
wolf. And so, the seances."

"She was no medium,” I said again.

"I made her think she was. I hypno-
tized her, and myself did weird wonders
Jn the dark room. But she, in a trance,
did not know. I needed witnesses to con-
vince her.”

"So you invited Mr. Wills,” supplied
Judge Pursuivant.

"Yes, and her father. They had been
prepared to accept her as medium and me

as observer. Seeing a beast-form, they
would tell her afterward that it was she.”
"Zoberg," I said between set teeth,
"you’re convicted out of your own mouth
of rottenness that convinces me of the
existence of the Devil after whom this
grove was named. I wish to heaven that
I’d killed you when we were fighting."

"Acb, Wills,” he chuckled, "you’d
have missed this most entertaining auto-
biographical lecture.”

"He’s right,” grumbled O' Bryant; and,
"Let him go on,” the judge pleaded with
me.

“/^nce sure of this power within
V-/ her," Zoberg said deeply, "she
would be prepared in heart and soul to
change at touch of the ointment — the ec-
toplasm. Then, to me she must turn as a
fellow-creature. Together, throughout the
world, adventuring in a way unbeliev-
able "

His voice died, and we let it. He stood
in the firelight, head thrown back, man-
acled hands folded. He might have been
a martyr instead of a fiend for whom a
death at the stake would be too easy.

"I can tell what spoiled the seance," I
told him after a moment. "Gird, sitting
opposite, saw that it was you, not Susan,
who had changed. You had to kill him
to keep him from telling, there and then.”
"Yes,” agreed Zoberg. "After that,
you were arrested, and, later, threatened.
I was in an awkward position. Susan
must believe herself, not you, guilty.
That is why I have championed you
throughout. I went then to look for
you.”

"And attacked me," I added.

"The beast-self was ascendant. I can-
not always control it completely.” He
sighed. "When Susan disappeared, I
went to look for her on the second eve-
ning. When I came into this wood, the
W. T. — 6

THE HAIRY ONES SHALL DANCE

353

change took place, half automatically.
Associations, I suppose. Constable, your
brother happened upon me in an evil
hour.”

"Yep,” said O’Bryant gruffly.

"And that is the end,” Zoberg said.
"The end of the story and, I suppose, the
end of me.”

"You bet it is,” the constable assured
him. "You came with the judge to finish
your rotten work. But were finishing it
for you.”

"One moment,” interjected Judge Pur-
suivant, and his fire-lit face betrayed a
perplexed frown. "The story fails to ex-
plain one important tiling.”

"Does it so?” prompted Zoberg, in-
clining toward him with a show of negli-
gent grace.

"If you were able to free yourself and
kill Mr. Gird ”

"By heaven, that’s right!” I broke in.
"You were chained, Zoberg, to Susan and
to your chair. I’d go bail for the strength
and tightness of those handcuffs.”

He grinned at each of us in turn and
held out his hands with their manacles.
"Is it not obvious?” he inquired.

We looked at him, a trifle blankly I
suppose, for he chuckled once again.

"Another employment of the ectoplasm,
that useful substance of change,” he said
gently. "At will my arms and legs as-
sume thickness, and hold the rings of the
confining irons wide. Then, when I wish,
they grow slender again, and ”

He gave his hands a sudden flirt, and
the bracelets fell from them on the in-
stant. He pivoted and ran like a deer.

"Shoot!” cried the judge, and O'Bry-
ant whipped the big gun from his holster.

Zoberg was almost within a vine-laced
clump of bushes when O' Bryant fired. I
heard a shrill scream, and saw Zoberg
falter and drop to his hands and knees.

We were all starting forward. I paused
a moment to put Susan behind me, and
in that moment O’Bryant and Pursuivant
sprang ahead and came up on either side
of Zoberg. He was still alive, for he
writhed up to a kneeling position and
made a frantic dutch at the judge's coat.
O'Bryant, so dose that he barely raised
his hand and arm, fired a second time.

Zoberg spun around somehow on his
knees, stiffened and screamed. Perhaps I
should say that he howled. In his voice
was the inarticulate agony of a beast
wounded to death. Then he collapsed.

Both men stooped above him, cautious
but thorough in their examination. Final-
ly Judge Pursuivant straightened up and
faced toward us.

"Keep Miss Susan there with you,” he
warned me. ”He’s dead, and not a pret-
ty sight.”

Slowly they came back to us. Pur-
suivant was thoughtful, while O’ Bryant,
Zoberg’s killer, seemed cheerful for the
first time since I had met him. He even
smiled at me, as Punch would smile after
striking a particularly telling blow with
his cudgel. Rubbing his pistol caressing-
ly with his palm, he stowed it carefully
away.

"I’m glad that’s over,” he admitted.
"My brother can rest easy in his grave.”

"And we have our work cut out for
us,” responded the judge. "We must de-
cide just how much of the truth to tell
when we make a report."

O’Bryant dipped his head in sage ac-
quiescence. "You’re right,” he rumbled.
"Yes, sir, you’re right.”

"Would you believe me,” said the
judge, "if I told you that I knew it was
Zoberg, almost from the first?”

But Susan and I, facing each other,
were beyond being surprized, even at that.

W. T.— 7

[THE END]

<?

uarded

By MEARLE PROUT

A brief tale of a murder and an attempted murder — by the author of
"The House of the Worm ”

T HE sound of a shot suddenly
broke the stillness of the May
morning, and echoed back from
across the valley. A puff of blue smoke
arose from a clump of green-briars and
drifted away downwind. Out in the road,
Abner Simmons dropped the bag of grain
he was carrying and, with a look of dumb
surprize, sank in a quivering heap to the
ground. Half his side had been shot
away.

The green-briars parted with a sudden
life and Jed Tolliver emerged, straighten-
ing his long form as he shambled toward
the road. As he walked he broke his
double-barreled shotgun, flicked out the
empty cartridge and blew through the
barrel, sending a thin stream of acrid
smoke out of the chamber. He stooped
over his fallen enemy.

"Said I’d get you," he reminded the
other brutally. He inserted a fresh cart-
ridge and closed the gun with a snap.

The man in the road rolled over with
a convulsive movement and stared up at
him.

"That kid brother of yours is next —
and last,” Jed continued. "Then I’ll be
through with the lot of you.”

Abner grinned. It is an awful thing
to see a dying man grin. Jed shuddered
in spite of himself.

• "You can’t, Jed — not Ezekiel "

It was not a pleading. Rather, it was
calm, assured, as though the other were
stating a known fact. Jed shuddered
again, before he felt quick anger rising.
354

"I got you, didn’t I?” he said, ejecting
a thick stream of tobacco juice. "What
makes you think I won’t get Ezekiel the
same way?”

"You won’t, Jed — you can’t — because
— I won't let you!”

He was fast weakening from the
frightful flow of blood. Overcome from
the effort of speaking, Abner closed his
eyes and lay still. A second later a sudden
convulsive movement shook his body,
and his eyes opened again. This time they
were fixed and staring.

With a grunt of satisfaction Jed
shouldered his gun and started back up
the mountain, moving with the long ef-
fortless stride of the Tennessee mountain-
eer. He did not fear punishment for his
crime. Here in the Tennessee mountains
the long arm of the law seldom reached.
The only thing to fear in a case of this
kind was the dead man’s relatives, and
now there was only one — Ezekiel, a slim
lad of twenty, who could not even shoot
expertly.

Yes, Jed reflected as his long strides
carried him through the sparse growth of
cedar and blackjack, this part of Tennes-
see would soon again be a decent. God-
fearing community. . . . Foreigners, the
Simmonses had been, from somewhere
back East — Carolina, or Virginia, maybe.
They hadn’t been like the mountain -
folk. . . .

And what was that crazy talk Abner
had made? He’d stop Jed from getting
Ezekiel? How could he, if he was dead?

GUARDED

355

Jed chuckled to himself. Here in Tennes-
see, folk didn’t believe. . . .

M ore than a week passed before Jed
again took his well-oiled shotgun
from its place on the wall and started
over the mountain. He was in no great
hurry about Ezekiel — instead, he rather
enjoyed waiting. Ezekiel was the last of
the three Simmons brothers, and knowing
that the foreigner was over there, and
that he was going to kill him, gave life
a curious sort of zest. . . . Likely the kid
didn’t even know who shot his brother.
Jed laughed silently at the thought, add-
ing to himself that the boy probably
wouldn't do anything about it if he did
know. He wasn’t like the mountain
people. . . .

But this morning all of Jed’s im-
patience had returned. The sun shone
hotly on the Tennessee hills, and raised
an almost visible veil of vapor from the
tiny branch which flowed through the
hollow. Well, he’d waited long enough.
With a grimace of distaste at the three-
mile traipse across two mountains, Jed
swung his gun over his shoulder and
started down the slope.

When, an hour and a half later, he
arrived at the small clearing which was
the Simmons place, he was not as tired
as he had expected to be. The nervous
exhilaration of the man-hunt buoyed him
up, made him tensely aware of things
around him. He paused only a moment
at the fringe of scrub oak that bordered
the clearing; then, bending almost
double, he sprinted a hundred feet to the
grape-arbor.

Safe inside the leafy bower, Jed leaned
his gun against a supporting post and
looked about. Here the vines had been
trained over a rude wooden lattice so
that a thick wall and roof of leaves now
effectively hid him from anyone outside.

Jed parted the leaves carefully and
peered out. A hundred feet behind him
was the low wall of forest he had just
left; two hundred feet in fro/it of him
was the house — a rude two-room shack;
two hundred feet beyond that the wall of
the forest began again. Jed looked at the
house more closely. There was no sign
of movement, but the thin line of smoke
which curled from the chimney told him
that Ezekiel was inside, probably prepar-
ing his midday meal. With a sigh of con-
tentment he sat down and leaned back
closer to his gun, idly listening to the
chatter of birds in the forest, and the
rustling of the leaves in the arbor.

How long Jed sat there he did not
know. Fie was suddenly aroused from a
semi-stupor by the sound of a banging
door. Startled into instant activity, he
swung around to peer through the leaves.
Ezekiel was leaving the house, swinging
in his hand an empty w r ater-bucket.
Going to the spring, Jed reckoned. If so,
his path would take him within fifty feet
of the arbor. Jed gloated.

With hands suddenly unsteady, the
man in the arbor laid his gun on the
ground, the muzzle barely extending
through the leaves. Why take a chance?
He would wait — at fifty feet he couldn’t
miss.

Unmindful of his danger, Ezekiel
came slowly down the path, bearing
diagonally nearer to the arbor. . . . Jed
suddenly wondered why he no longer
heard the aimless chatter of birds in the
forest, why the light wind no longer
stirred the broad leaves above him. It
was uncanny, this noonday quiet. Impa-
tiently, he shook off the feeling.

"So I can’t do 1 it, Abner?” he whis-
pered to the empty air, but somehow the
words clutched at his throat, and he
wished he hadn't said it. No matter, a
few seconds now

35(5

WEIRD TALES

Jed cursed the trembling of his hands
as he aimed. What was the matter with
him? He could see Ezekiel’s slender form
now above the barrel of his gun; he
nerved himself to pull tire trigger. The
top of his head suddenly gone cold, Jed
dropped the gun and looked quickly
around him. No, the day was bright as
ever — yet he could have sworn. . . . Half-
heartedly now, he picked up the gun to
sight at the form which had already
passed the nearest point. He had not been
wrong! A black nebulous cloud hovered
over the barrel of his gun and created the
illusion of darkest night!

Shrieking a curse, Jed Tolliver leapt
upright and pointed, not aimed, the gun
at where Ezekiel should be. He snapped
both triggers simultaneously, but as he
fired something clutched at his arm, and
the hot lead sizzled harmlessly through
the air.

Shaking as with a chill, blind rage
within him struggling with black fear,
the mountaineer stood irresolutely within
his leafy ambush. He was quickly aroused
to activity by a loud report and the crash
of lead against the wooden lattice. A
sharp pain burned his left arm where one
of the pellets had found its mark. Ezekiel
had fled to the house and opened fire.

Without waiting to reload his gun, Jed
crashed through the side of the bower
and fled to the safety of the trees. As he
entered, buckshot spattered harmlessly
around him.

Safe within the sheltering growth, Jed
halted to reload his gun.

"Damn you, Abner!” he shouted to
the stunted oaks. "I’ll get him yet!”

As he turned to go he thought he
heard a low mocking laugh, but reasoned
later that it was only a squirrel chattering
a protest at the sound of his voice.

J ed reached home in a blue funk. The
long tramp across the mountains in the
early summer heat had melted away most
of his fears, but his nerves were still
badly shaken. Now that he could look
at the incident in a sober light, he re-
fused to credit his senses. As the distance
between himself and the scene increased,
he had come more and more to believe
the occurrence an hallucination, brought
on by the long walk through the heat.
After all, he recalled, he had almost fal-
len asleep in the arbor while waiting for
Ezekiel to appear. Perhaps he had
dreamed part of it? . . .

However logical Jed believed his ex-
planation, he did not again go near the
Simmons place. Weeks passed. Always
he promised himself that he would soon
finish the task so ingloriously begun, but
day by day he waited, until nearly three
months had gone. At first he had feared
Ezekiel had recognized him in those few
seconds it had taken to sprint from the
grape-arbor to the cover of the woods.
Later, as he heard nothing of it, he de-
cided he was safe from that side. The
end came in an unexpected manner. One
afternoon early in August Jed had walked
to the village. He stayed longer than he
had intended, and shadows were already
growing long when he started home. Not
wishing to be out later than necessary,
he took a short-cut through the woods
which would take him within a half-mile
of the Simmons place.

The sun was setting as he entered the
Simmons hollow, a half-mile below the
house. He felt vaguely uneasy. Though
he told himself he was not frightened,
he found himself wishing for the pro-
tection of his gun. Nervously, his hand
strayed to the hunting-knife stuck in his
belt, and tested the keen edge.

Walking diagonally across the hollow,
which was largely devoid of trees, he

GUARDED

357

turned aside to go around a cluster of
young cedars which was directly in his
path. Suddenly he drew back sharply.
Again his hand tested the keen edge of
that knife, but not this time from nerv-
ousness. Jed was not thinking now of
defense.

Two hundred feet beyond the cedars,
on the smooth unbroken grass floor of the
hollow, was a man milking. His back was
turned to the cedars, but Jed thought he
recognized that slim youthful form. He
believed it was Ezekiel.

Stepping lightly, one hand on his belt
where he could immediately grasp the
knife, Jed moved into the open. Half-
way across the level space, his hand
moved yet closer to the knife, while the
ghost of a grin curved his lips. Without
a doubt it was Ezekiel Simmons. The
man milking did not look up. The milk
jetted into the half-filled bucket with a
low murmur, just loud enough to mask
Jed’s guarded footsteps.

Step by step Jed advanced. If only
Ezekiel did not see him! If only the cow
did not sense his presence and turn un-
expectedly! Step by step further — Jed
was tense with excitement. There was no
midday sun this time to blind his eyes
and fill his soul with a nameless fear. Nor
would he be unnerved by the twilight
stillness; it was always still at sunset, here
in these mountains. . . .

Ten feet now. The milk still swished
into the pail uninterruptedly, the steady
grinding of the cow's molars never
ceased.

Suddenly Jed tugged at his belt and
leapt forward.

"Got you!” he shouted aloud.

But the exultant cry died suddenly in-
to a moan of horror. The arm bearing
the knife poised high for the blow, Jed
felt something like an electric shock
course through its length. Instead of
swinging forward to strike the man in
front of him, the knife turned in his
hand, his wrist and elbow bent at a crazy
angle, and the razor-edge steel ripped
through the cords of his neck.

Staggered more by his realization of
the awful consequences than by present
pain, Jed sank to the grass, while gouts
of blood spurted from a torn jugular.
His first mad terror past, he became
aware that Ezekiel was standing over
him, scorn darkening his features.

"So it was you, Tolliver. Abner
warned me — about you.”

"I’d have got you too — only Ab-
ner ”

"Abner was a good brother. He told
me — weeks before he died — that if any-
thing happened, he’d — guard me.”

Jed felt himself weaker. His head was
strangely without weight, and objects
around swam lazily in the pale twilight.
He lay back on the grass.

"Should have got you, Ezekiel —
shouldn’t have — missed,” he murmured
sleepily as the shadows gathered.

He raised his head slightly to listen.
Was that a light mocking laugh he heard
in the grass beside him? He listened
again, before the darkness came down.
No — he could not be sure. . . ,

Vhe

eakwood Box

By JOHNS HARRINGTON

San Pedro Joe found the secret that was contained in that intricately
carved Oriental box

ITU ETTER pay the cash,” snarled
sfllow San Pedro Joe into the
telephone mouthpiece. The
speaker jerked his head to one side and
glanced from the cramped phone booth
into the almost-deserted drug store, check-
ing to see whether his conversation had
been heard. It was late afternoon — a sul-
try and stuffy summer day.

"That teakwood box don't mean much
to me,” Joe continued in a hoarse tone.
"And if you want it pretty bad, I’ll sell
it — otherwise the thing gets chucked out,
see?"

Mrs. Floyd Wright’s tiny, ill-painted
cottage in a smelly Los Angeles suburb
had been ransacked a few days previous-
ly, leaving bedding overturned, furniture
stuffings tumbling everywhere. The
teakwood box, to the fidgety old woman,
far overshadowed in importance the
amount of cash and the few pieces of sil-
ver which had also been stolen. Oddly
carved and strangely arresting, the prize
had been a gift to Mrs. Wright from her
husband, recently killed in a factory ex-
plosion where he had been night watch-
man. He had purchased the box during a
vagabond trip to China in his boyhood
days.

The teakwood container had never
been opened by either Mrs. Wright or her
husband. "Betty,” he used to say while
dozing in the parlor and studying the
box, "that thing is jinxed, just like I was
told. It’s dangerous, leave it alone. There
is a dreadful native curse on it.

"I got the box from a streetpeddler in
35S

Shanghai, who told me he bought it from
a priest; he said there was a dire curse to
anyone who opened the box, but that it
would bring power and good luck to the
owner as long as he did not try to do so.
I always have said that the box was most
likely stolen from a temple by the ped-
dler, or by some other member of the
street-scum parade,” Wright would con-
clude.

It would have been difficult to open the
box, even if someone did want to pry
into it, because its lid was apparently op-
erated by a complex series of springs and
pivoting levers. The singularity of the
object, its weirdness and strange delicacy,
gave it a curious value. When it had been
made and by whom — what exotic sights
the container had witnessed — were un-
answered queries which added to the liv-
ing personality of the teakwood box. An
evil power, dull and half asleep, yet
again glowing, awakening, seemed in-
closed within the meticulously decorated
teakwood. Though the Wrights had
been almost afraid of the box from the
start, they had nevertheless believed that
the spirit which might lie within it would
not hurt them if they did not molest it,
for they had lived good lives.

Some day, the spirit would awaken and
strike, but it would not be at a time when
they were about. Death, red, grinning,
and yellow-fanged, was a part of the ex-
otic treasure; it was not the death of God-
fearing men and women, but the bloody,
merciless deity of those who belonged in
the realm of evil. The little wooden

THE TEAKWOOD BOX

359

ghouls -which stuck forth from the sides
appeared to be tireless, unearthly sen-
tinels, waiting, watching for a suitable
offering for their drooling master within.

The stick-bodied widow, shut off in a
little corner impervious to the noisy
streets around her, had prized the six-
inch-high box much more than anything
else she owned, because of the eccentric
affection her husband had placed on it
when he w-as alive. Though he always
feared the box, he would sit and watch it
for hours, without uttering mpre than a
phrase. One time when his wife had re-
turned from shopping, she found him
standing in the little yard, blanched and
trembling.

"Never, never, can we sell or dispose
of that box!” he cried. "The devil inside
told me so; if we did, he would do some-
thing horrible!”

Mrs. Wright wondered whether her
husband had concentrated for so long on
the object that his imagination had given
him that message, but because of the
frightened look in his eyes she accepted
what he said and did not question him
about it. Wright never spoke about the
teakwood box after that, but he sat with
it oftener than before; his face, rather
than appearing curious, had a grim, hyp-
notized look as he gazed in silence upon
the treasure.

Carefully dusted several times a week,
and kept glistening with polish, the curio
had rested in a place of honor on the liv-
ing-room mantelpiece, where it some-
times glowed a mysterious, uncanny lus-
ter when a few stray rays of the sun
penetrated to it from the curtained win-
dows.

B ut Mrs. Wright could not comply
with the ransom demands of the
thief who had snatched it and realized
the esteem placed on the box by its

owner, because of the obvious care with
which it was kept. The old woman was
sniffling softly into a tiny, lace handker-
chief which she clutched in thin, ivory-
colored hands.

"One hundred and fifty bucks or noth-
in'!” sneered San Pedro Joe. These old
people got on his nerves. They were so
damned irritating and slow.

"But I can’t— can’t get that much
money,” trembled Mrs. Wright, her fin-
gers tightening around the phone re-
ceiver.

"You’re out of luck then, old woman,”
deridingly returned the thief, and hung
up. Ordinarily, he would have dickered
to get the best price possible for the
stolen object, even though it was lower
than he first demanded. But in this case,
it gave him a feeling of satisfaction to
crush brutally the faltering woman’s hap-
piness. San Pedro Joe slowly stepped out
of the phone booth, and quickened his
pace as he neared the store entrance. He
spat at the curbing.

His pasty, selfish face was set off by
thin, twisting lips. The black suit he
wore was ill-kept, bulging in the wrong
places. It was young Joe’s habit to drum
his fingers on any surface convenient
when he was uneasy, and that was most
of the time. His watery, cold blue eyes
were continually shifting, weighing peo-
ple he encountered. Joe specialized in
robbing ill-kept, run-down homes; there
was nearly always something worth his
troubles, and then his victims seldom
could afford to have much investigation
concerning their losses. He was like a
cunning spider feeding on bewildered,
fluttering moths caught in his net.

In half an hour Joe arrived at his
apartment, located in a battered, two-
story stucco in the southwest part of Los
Angeles. A brief stretch of yellow, dry
grass ran between the sidewalk and the

360

WEIRD TALES

plaster-chipped structure. Light from the
disappearing sun was shining on the
cheerless front windows. Leaving his
poorly-kept coupe at the curb, he stepped
quickly across the withered lawn and up
the cement steps of the building to his
rooms.

After a snack of cold beans and white
bread, gulped with some warmed-over
coffee, Joe brought the teakwood box out
from the place where he had hidden it
under the messy sink. Darkness had come
and the moon had not yet risen. Billows
of black, angry clouds were' scattered in
the sky. Putting the box on the kitchen
table, he stood back and regarded the
thing. It appeared ominous and resentful
on the scarred table-top under the white
ceiling light. Joe thought he sensed a
feeling of unearthly life in the booty be-
fore him. Someone down the hall was
coughing hoarsely, and the thief felt
chilled.

Suddenly, Joe returned to himself and
became intensely curious about that box.
He considered what he had found out
about it from Mrs. Wright, who, in her
desire to get her treasure back, had
breathlessly poured out the whole story
when questioned. Maybe Mrs. Wright’s
old man had cached some precious
stones or money in the container, conjec-
tured Joe, and had fabricated the yarn
about the curse in qxder to keep people
from trying to open the box. The thief,
flamed by Inis greed, decided the teak-
wood curio deserved an investigation be-
fore he discarded it.

At first, he picked up a hammer which
was kept in one of the dish-closet draw-
ers, but after a moment’s consideration,
he determined to try and open the box by
its mechanism. Perhaps he could sell it
to an antique-dealer after examining
what might be inside. Yet had that been
tine real reason for his decision to use

care? Joe wished that fool down the hall
would keep quiet; for the first time in his
life he felt uncertain, confused.

San Pedro Joe was proud of his ability
to do a neat job on breaking into houses,
opening strong-boxes, and his conceit
prompted him again to forget his fore-
bodings and test his skill by attempting
to discover the combination of the box;
otherwise, being increasingly nervous, he
probably would not have taken the pains
which he did to open it so carefully. His
fingers trembled — he licked dry, swollen
lips. After working for some minutes, he
roughly pushed the box from him. Joe
imagined the curse, the words of evil, an
idol guardian might have incanted on the
one who pried into the sacred box, for
perhaps it contained some treasured jew-
els or a temple secret, rather than being
simply a hiding-place for Wright’s pen-
nies.

T he investigator eagerly, impatiently,
bent over the shining teakwood
again, as though suddenly possessed, and
continued his manipulation of the curio's
carved knobs and queer levers. For a mo-
ment, he thought he detected a slight,
shrill cry, followed by a tiny, penetrating
whistle. Sweat broke out on Joe’s brow
as he doggedly kept at his task, fas-
cinated, now unable to pause. Shortly he
pressed an unobtrusive bump which had
been revealed by sliding a ghoulish little
figure ornamenting the container’s front -
to one side. The lid slowly raised up-
ward, as though controlled by a hidden
spring. The crook nervously pressed
harder on the button he had discovered,
in order to hasten the opening of the lid.
He was waiting for something — his fin-
ger seemed frozen to the box, his whole
body was stiffened. Sweat was trickling
down his back, yet he was somehow cold.
Suddenly, a sharp, biting flame burned

THE TEAKWOOD BOX

361

in his thumb, as though he had put it in
a fire of hot coals. A strange numbness
ran through his arm. He stared down at
the table to see a neatly-concealed needle,
probably hollow, slowly retreating into
the side of the box; in the same glance
he saw that the teakwood curio was
empty, contained nothing.

Blood was on his thumb, dripping
from under the finger-nail, where seemed
to be an inflamed, tiny wound. He heard
a peculiar, spine-stiffening cackle, on the
same penetrating high key as the whistle.

First it came spasmodically, but broke
down into a low gurgle, a sucking sound.
The thief's heart seemed to bloat and
swell, yet tried to beat faster; Joe clutched
at his hot brow with clammy, weak hands.

Young San Pedro Joe, a short time ago
successful light-finger man, fell dead on
the kitchen floor. The white light shone
on his ill-proportioned, slight body. For
a moment, there seemed a slight rustling.
A dirt}’, filth-incrusted window banged
open. But all was quiet outside in the
hot, choking night air,

Howard Phillips

Lovecraft

Master-writer of the weird, essayist, poet, 1890-1937

By FRANCIS FLAGG

He lived — and now is dead beyond all knowing
Of life and death : the vast and formless scheme
Behind the face of nature ever showing
Has swallowed up the dreamer and the dream.
But brief the hour he had upon the stream
Of timeless time from past to future flowing
To lift his sail and catch the luminous gleam
Of stars that marked his coming and his going
Before he vanished: yet the brilliant wake
His passing left is vivid on the tide
And for the countless centuries will abide:

The genius that no death can ever take
Crowns him immortal, though a man has died.

^ e in the Window

(Adapted from the German of Wilhelm von Scholz)

By ROY TEMPLE HOUSE

What strange prescience had the bearded man of his approaching
death ? An odd little story

I N THE art gallery of a North Ger-
man city hangs a lurid oil painting
which represents two Italians way-
laying and attacking a third. I will tell
you the history of the painting.

In the nineties of the last century, a
young German painter was living in the
outskirts of Rome, in an isolated little
house surrounded by a vineyard. One
fine, bright moonlight night, after sitting
over the wine till a late hour with two or
three friends down in the city, he came
home about midnight. He had to walk
some distance beyond the end of the
street-car line, through a narrow road
that ran between high walls. He never
came through that lane late at night with-
out a feeling of apprehension. He was a
poor man, he never wore jewelry, his
modest brown cape and dilapidated
broad-brimmed hat were very much like
the clothing of many of his modest
neighbors, visibly not the appurtenances
of a man of means, and he had had no
love affairs in Rome; so that it did not
seem as if any sort of ambush was likely.
He thought a good deal about his fiancee
back in Germany, and he almost always
carried a letter from her in his left inside
vest pocket, just over his heart. As he
walked home he was in the habit of
whistling to keep his courage up, of talk-
ing aloud to himself, bursting out every
now and then with "That’s certainly a
fact!” or "Yes, I think that's what I’ll
do!” And he was likely to call out at
intervals to his little dog, a Spitz who
362

never strayed far from his master’s heels.
He always carried a revolver on his per-
son, although in all the years since he
had acquired it, he had never once had
occasion to fire it off.

But when he came near his garden
gate, he never failed to find himself shiv-
ering with apprehension till his slightly
trembling fingers had the gate unlocked.
He could almost visualize a big fellow
gliding around the comer and stepping
out threateningly in front of him. He
always had his key in his hand before he
had reached the gate, and he always
pushed the key into the lock •with nerv-
ous haste; on dark nights he would hold
his lighted cigar toward the lock with the
other hand. Then he would lock the gate
behind him in a great hurry, unlock his
house door just as nervously, light the
candle which stood waiting for him to
the left of the door on the uneven tile
floor, try the door which led into the
ground-floor rooms, all of them unoccu-
pied except the kitchen and utilized as
lumber-rooms to store his artist’s sup-
plies, and climb the creaking stairs to the
upper floor where were located his spa-
cious studio and his little bedroom. The
bedroom was scarcely more than an al-
cove, and it always stood w'ide open into
the studio, so that as he lay in bed he
could see the great wide window and the
starry heavens outside.

His trip home on this particular eve-
ning had not been without disquieting in-
cidents. Nothing very definite had hap-

THE HEAD IN THE WINDOW

363

pened, and he might have attached no
importance to anything that had occurred
if he had not been made a little appre-
hensive by the eery turn die conversa-
tion in the artist group had taken. His
Spitz had stopped and barked furiously
into a linden-tree alley a few hundred
yards from his garden gate. It was true
that the dog had a nervous streak in him
and often grew excited over nothing at
all. A little earlier, as the artist was get-
ting off the street-car, a very suspicious
looking and acting man in ragged work-
clothes had asked him how to reach the
Valle San Giorgio, a lonely little valley
with a chapel in the center of it, a sort of
ravine which lay behind and below the
eminence on which his house was built
and which no human being in his senses
would have thought of visiting at diat
hour of the night. Then, as he came
through the narrow street between the
high walls, he would have sworn he
heard steps on the hard ground behind
him. The impression was so strong that
he turned and looked back more than
once. But no one was visible, and it was
only while he himself was walking that
he seemed to hear the steps. They must
have been only the echo of his own steps
in the uncanny stillness of the night.

Finally, at a turn of the crooked little
street, he had come suddenly within a
few feet of a man who was going in the
same direction, but more slowly. The
man turned and looked at him, then
walked slowly away on a path that
branched off from the little street. The
painter had had only an indefinite im-
pression of the man’s bearded face. But
his artist eye had taken in the squat,
heavy frame, which stood out plainly in
the moonlight, the peculiar swing of the
man’s walk, and even the wavering shad-
ow which showed rather distinctly on the
wall beyond him before he turned into

the foot-path. When he had himself
come abreast the path and peered fear-
fully down it, the man had disappeared.
There were no buildings along the path,
and it was distinctly visible for some dis-
tance. It seemed as if the earth had swal-
lowed the man. Or he might have dodged
behind a clump of bushes. But why
would he have done that? It was strange.

For a few minutes the young painter
had been almost uneasy. Then all at once
the artist in him had gained the upper
hand. He realized that the shape and
manner of the bearded pedestrian had
been very much what he had had in mind
for a figure in a violent night scene which
he was planning to paint, and he regretted
that he had not seen the man's face more
distinctly. He began to lay plans for
sketching what he remembered of the
face and figure before he went to bed,
and in his cheerful planning he com-
pletely forgot his apprehension — till his
dog had begun to bark frantically at the
entrance of the linden alley.

Arrived at home, the painter had
hauled his preliminary sketch out of a
corner, set it up on an easel and rapidly
drawn in with charcoal the outlines of
the man with the beard. He had origi-
nally planned to make this person the ag-
gressor in an encounter. He had thought
of him as rushing out from his conceal-
ment behind a wall and running with
drawn sword at a favored rival who had
just said good-bye to a lady at the gate of
an imposing palazzo. But some mys-
terious influence seemed to guide him
into a change of plan. He of the beard
must needs be the victim, not the attack-
er, and he must be set upon by two men.

The painter took out a fresh sheet and
sketched in the new idea. It was curious
how definitely the impression had come
to him. He knew exactly where to place
each individual, how to direct each mo-

364

WEIRD TALES

tion. But the face of the bearded de-
fender, the man whose life was forfeit to
these vicious assassins, would not come
clear to him. Finally he grew tired of
searching, undressed and went to bed.
Tomorrow, he said to himself, when I am
fresher, I shall be able to think the thing
out better.

H e went to sleep at once and slept
soundly. But in the course of the
night — he had no idea how long he had
been asleep — he started up in bed with
the definite impression that he had heard
something, a call, a cry, or voices talking
together. He listened. Complete silence.
If he had heard anything, it must have
been in his dream. It did seem to him as
if he had had a dream, and that he had
dreamed about something disturbing,
something alarming. But he could not
remember what the dream had been
about. He was in the act of lying down
again, when he glanced into his studio,
which lay bathed in the moonlight from
the great window. He saw his dog stand-
ing erect in the center of the room, his
head thrust forward and turned toward
the window, watching and listening in-
tently, without barking. He had never
seen the animal act like that before. The
painter called softly. The dog gave no
sign of hearing him. He did not change
in the slightest his attitude of absorbed
interest. Then the painter raised his eyes
to the window.

At first it seemed to him as if he must
be dreaming still. He threw the bed-
clothes aside, stared at the window,
brushed his hands across his eyes and
gazed again. There was no doubt about
it. The painter’s eyes were looking into
the eyes of the bearded man whose con-
duct had puzzled him the night before.
It looked as if the man had climbed up
and stood on something that lifted him

breast-high before the second-story win-
dow. The rough-boned, carelessly kept
face with the tangled hair and beard was
unmistakably the face he had caught a
glimpse of on his way home a few hours
before. It was frightfully distorted. The
eyes were wide open and staring, the
lips were open and drawn back from the
teeth — it seemed almost as if the man
were uttering a terrified cry for help, but
not a sound was audible. On the left
temple there was an ugly wound, with
the hair matted over it but with the blood
still trickling down over the face. There
was no sign of the hands; the arms fell
straight down from the shoulders. It al-
most seemed to the painter, as he studied
the figure and its attitude a little more
calmly, as if someone had pushed a dead
man up into the window from below.
Then, all at once, the horrible apparition
disappeared, noiselessly, and the painter
saw the trees and the quiet sky behind
and above them.

At that moment the dog’s muscles re-
laxed from his position of tense watch-
fulness. He ran to his master, cowered
against him as if he were seeking pro-
tection, turned his head back toward the
window. Then he sat down expectantly
before the painter, exactly as he was in
the habit of doing when he saw the artist
take down his hat and his caped cloak to
go out.

For a moment the distracted artist
could do nothing but stare at the rectan-
gle of moonlight where the ghastly fig-
ure had been. Then he realized the
changed attitude of the dog, and spoke
to the animal. When the little creature
saw that he had his master’s attention,
he stood up, wagged his tail, and looked
around expectantly toward the stairway.
The artist took his revolver and went to
the window. The moonlit landscape was
calm and silent. Not a sight or a sound.

THE HEAD IN THE WINDOW

365

If a gang of assassins had held a mur-
dered man up to his window, a minute or
two before, they could scarcely have made
so complete a get-away in so short a time.
The shutters on the window below were
closed and locked. There was nothing to
climb up by. And except for the feeling
that he had heard something in his
dream, the painter was sure that not a
sound had reached him from outside the
building.

The dog ran back and forth between
the artist and the stairway. Animals have
remarkable leadings, and the painter
thought seriously of making the round
of the garden. But it seemed to him, as
he thought it over, that such a procedure
would be useless at best, and that at
worst it would be courting trouble. If
bandits were about, what could one timid
citizen, armed with an old revolver that
had never been fired in its life, do against
them? All that could be expected of him,
certainly, was to watch from inside his
house till morning. He closed his win-
dow, and ordered the dog back to his
cushion.

Just before he drew the window down,
he had had the impression that he heard
steps run rapidly along the stone pave-
ment that lay just below it. He raised it
again, and looked down. No one was in
sight, and not a sound was to be heard.
He stood by the window, struggling to
get a grip on himself. He wondered if he
could be ill. He knew that various de-
lusions come from physical causes within
the one who experiences them. He had
tried so desperately hard to visualize the
head which he needed for his picture,
that his effort, combined with the effect
of the heavy Falerno wine he had drunk,
might easily have produced a psychic ef-
fect which caused him to see visions and
hear sounds that had transpired only in
his imagination. He had almost con-

vinced himself that he had found the key
to the enigma, when his glance fell on his
dog, obediently crouching on his cushion,
but still wide-eyed and excited.- It seemed
to him exactly as if someone spoke out
from right behind him: "But what about
the dog? Does your psychopathic theory
explain the way the dog is acting?”

Suddenly the painter's mood of anxiety
and puzzlement gave way to one of im-
patience. He was tired and nervous. He
was disgusted with the whole annoying
affair. He dropped on his bed again, and
in a mood of something like defiance, he
flung off the perplexity and dropped into
a heavy sleep.

N othing happened till morning.

When the bright sun shone into the
window instead of the ghostly moon, he
was ready to laugh the whole matter off
as a half-tipsy dream, and to class the
dog’s strange conduct with various other
evidences of unaccountable nervousness
which that animal had shown at various
times. He sat down at his easel and went
seriously to work at his new sketch. He
discovered that he knew the bearded face
now, feature by feature, and the task
went smoothly. It was marvelous how
vividly the face and form of the heavy
fellow came out under the artist’s eager
fingers. This would be his best picture,
he was sure of that.

As he was working, he heard some-
body knock at the door downstairs. He
made a few rapid strokes still, hastily
kicked off his slippers and pulled on his
shoes, and went down. It was doubtless
the peasant woman, he thought, who
brought him his milk every morning, but
who brought it at the most unaccountably
irregular hours. If she wasn’t willing to
follow a fairly even schedule, there was
no reason why he should discommode
himself to keep her from waiting a min-
ute or two.

3 66

WEIRD TALES

When he opened the door, there was
no woman there, and no milk-can. He
strolled down the walk toward the foun-
tain at which the milk-woman often
stopped to water her donkey. As he came
near the fountain he heard voices. When
he passed the clump of bushes that had
hidden the place from his sight, he dis-
covered an excited group arguing and
gesticulating about some object which lay
on the ground. There were two police-
men in the group.

"Has something happened?” he in-
quired as he joined the circle.

"They killed a man last night,” said
one of the bystanders. One of the police-
men asked the painter if he had seen or
heard anything that might throw any
light on the mystery. He was about to
tell bis ghost-story, when it occurred to
him how improbable it was, and he con-
tented himself with replying that as he
had walked home late at night a man in
front of him had turned into the little
side path, and that before he had left
the street-car, a man had asked the way
to the Valle San Giorgio.

"Would you know the man in front
of you if you saw him again?”

The painter was not sure. But be-
thought he remembered certain things
about him. For example, he remembered
very distinctly that the man had a beard.

The policeman looked up quickly. "Is
this the man?” he asked, and drew off the
sack which had covered the head of the
prostrate form.

The painter started back in terror, and
for a moment his voice failed him com-
pletely. There was the head he had seen
in the window, the eyes still staring wide,
the matted hair clinging about the wound
over the left temple, the wild, scraggly
beard. The look of anguish and appeal
was still in the eyes that gazed up into
the eyes of the painter, as if the deed

were not yet committed and the man
were begging him to come to his aid.
And as the living man gazed with fas-
cinated horror into the eyes of the dead
man, the expression of the eyes seemed to
change to one of reproach. The little dog
had been ready and anxious to dash out
and help defend the victim of a band
of assassins, but his master had been too
stupid, too selfish, too cowardly to come
to the succor of a fellow-being in dis-
tress.

The painter recovered his self-control
and said dully to the policeman:

"Yes, I think that was the man.”

"Did you know him?” asked one of
the neighbors with whom the German
painter had a bowing acquaintance. And
when the painter shook his head, the
voluble Italian prattled on:

"It is much better that the bandits
made away with this man than if they
had killed a gentleman like you. He
was ”

And he touched his finger compassion-
ately to his forehead.

From the general discussion that fol-
lowed, the artist learned that the dead
man, who for a good part of his life had
been a shepherd in the Alban Hills, was a
strange dreamer of a fellow who claimed
to have the gift of second sight, to be
able to foretell the future, and to have
the power to cure disease by prayer.
Members of the group told various stories
of strange proofs of his psychic powers,
notably of one instance in which he had
described in great detail a fire which was
raging *at that same moment in a town a
hundred miles away, and of which he had
no possible means of knowledge.

"It is strange,” said one of the neigh-
bors thoughtfully, "that he didn't fore-
see what would happen to him w'hen he
came out here last night!”

"Perhaps he did foresee it,” said one

THE HEAD IN THE WINDOW

367

of the policemen, who had been looking
through a handful of papers which had
come from one of the dead man’s pock-
ets. Among these papers, many of them
old and worn from long friction in the
pocket, was a clean sheet on which was
printed out very carefully: "I AM GO-
ING A HARD WAY. PERHAPS I
SHALL NOT COME BACK. BUT I
AM SAYING ANOTHER MAN’S
LIFE.”

T he murderers were caught a few
days later. They were two vaga-
bonds of known evil habits, both of
whom had already served prison sen-
tences. When they were examined, they

confessed that they had intended to kill
the painter and plunder his isolated
house at their leisure, but that in their
excitement they had mistaken one man
for another who was dressed very simi-
larly. They had intended, they said, to
break into the studio that same night,
but had been so frightened when the
dying shepherd had called their attention
to their blunder and had warned them
solemnly never to carry out their murder-
ous plan against the painter, that they
had taken to their heels in a panic.

And so it comes that the picture of the
half-crazy Italian shepherd who saved the
life of die young German painter is hang-
ing today in a German art gallery.

From Samarcand*

By E. HOFFMANN PRICE

AS HER guest set the dainty bone
/-% china cup on the onyx-topped,
teak tabouret and sank back
among die embroidered cushions, Diane
knew to the syllable the words which
were to filter forth with the next breadi
of smoke; for three years as Hammer-

smith Clarke’s wife had convinced her
that that remark was inevitable.

”My dear, where did you ever get
those perfectly gorgeous rugs?”

And Diane, true to form, smiled ever
so faintly, and luxuriated in the suspicion
of a yawn: the ennui of an odalisk hard-
ened to the magnificence of a seraglio

•* Fiom WEIRD TALES for May, 1929.

368

WEIRD TALES

carpeted with an ancient Feraghan rug,
and hung with silken witcheries from the
looms of Kashan. Diane saw the wonder
permeate her friend's soul and heard it
surge into words.

"The rugs? Why — well, I married
them along with Ham, you might say.
Yes, they are rather pretty, aren't they?
But they’re an awful pest at times ”

"Naturally,” agreed Louise, who lived
in a loft in the Pontalba Building, where
she could look down into the Plaza where
Jackson reins in his brazen horse and lifts
his brazen hat in salutation to the French
Quarter of New Orleans. "You simply
couldn’t let the maid clean "

"Maid? Lord help us, but I daren’t
touch them myself! I tried it, once. That
heaven-sent prayer-rug” — Diane indi-
cated an ancient Ghiordcs, a sea-green
splendor worth more than his right eye to
any collector — "looked a bit dingy. And
Ham caught me at it. What was left of
my hair just fell short of a close shingle.
Do you know, one day I caught him fill-
ing the bathtub with milk ”

"What?”

"Precisely. Seems some expert claimed
a milk bath improves the luster. So the
little Bokhara — that blood-red creature
beneath your feet — got a treatment fit for
a Circassian beauty. I’m just waiting for
him to bring home a duster of bird-of-
paradise plumes for this venerable
wreck.”

Diane stroked what was left of the
peachblow, sapphire and gold nap of an
age-old Senna woven on a silken warp.

"The truth of it is,” continued Diane,
"I feel guilty of bigamy. The man was
married to his rugs long before he ever
met me, 'Member how we speculated on
the pros and cons of polygamy the other
day at Arnaud’s? Well, here I am, one
lone woman competing with a dozen odd

favorites, and a new rival added to the
harem every so often."

"Good lord, Diane, what next! You
are unique. Why, one would think you
were jealous of them.”

"Well, I am!”

"Outlandish as that fantastic husband
of yours. I don’t know which is the more
outre , his mania for these beautiful things
with the impossible names, or your —
heavens above, it does really seem like
resentment against them. Now, if you’d
married Peter” — Louise laughed metal-
lically — "he'd never have given you time
to be jealous of a rug."

"That’s just it,” flared Diane, "I could
forgive flirtations and black eyes, and a
reasonable degree of non-support. But
these damned rugs — look at that!”

Diane dug her cobraskin toe into the
closely worn nap of the Feraghan carpet.

"Look at it! Just a rug, the first time.
But live with it day after day. See the
wutchery sparkling in it at sunset. Catch
yourself losing yourself in the thrill of its
three hundred years, wondering that all
the ecstasy ever lost in the entire w'orld
could be imprisoned in a rug. Then see
your one and only and otherwise adequate
husband sitting of an evening, hours at a
stretch, staring at it and dreaming of all
the richness and glamor he’s lost through
becoming civilized, learning to wear
shoes, and having only one woman, and
she his w'ife, about the house. Yes, I
called you up to have you listen to me
get the indignation out of my soul. The
truth of it is, Lou, that if I don’t get out
of this atmosphere soon, 1 11 go utterly
mad. Some day I’m going to move in on
you in your attic — anything to get away
from all this!”

"Do you mean to say,” began Louise
with wide-spaced deliberation, "that
you’d actually leave Ham because he likes
to mess and poke round with his rugs,
W. T.— 7

THE GIRL FROM SAMARCAND

369

and spend most of his waking moments

talking about them? Honestly, now ”

"Good Lord, I could stand his talking
about them. But" — Diane shuddered —
"Lou, he loves them. Sits there, trans-
figured, like a saint contemplating the
dewdrop glistening in the lotus cup."

’'When I suggested, over at the Iron
Gate, that you move in with me, I didn’t
know that you were married — they all
called you la belle Livaudaise, and you
were the life of everything — and least of
all, I never suspected anyone had you en-
shrined in magnificence like this. Better
think it over, Di — I’ve been through the
mill, and I know ”

D iane from the first had been fas-
cinated by the exotic atmosphere in
which Clarke had planted her after their
marriage; but in the end, seeing how they
had become a part of him, she half
consciously hated them and their ever-
lasting song of Bokhara and Herat of the
Hundred Gardens: an unheard song to
which Clarke listened, and replied in un-
spoken syllables. And thus it was that
Diane learned that to live in Clarke’s
apartment would be to become an acces-
sor}' to those precious fabrics that were
his hard-ridden hobby; for no woman
would fit into the dim, smoky shadows
of that titled salon unless bejeweled and
diaphanously veiled she could dance with
curious paces and gestures beneath the
sullen glow of the great brazen mosque
lamp as became tire favorite of a khan
in far-off Tartary. From the very begin-
ning, Diane fought to keep her individu-
ality untainted by the overwhelming per-
sonality of those damnably lovely fabrics
from Shiraz and the dusty plains of
Fenghan.

And Diane was right; for they
dreamed, those old weavers, of the roses
of Kirman, of the evening star that

W. T.— 8

danced on the crest of Mount Zagros,
of dancing girls in the gardens of Nai-
shapur, of fountains that sprayed mistily
in the moonlit valley of Zarab-shan; and
all this they wove into what we now
learn to catalogue as Sixteenth Century
Persian, or whatever our best guess may
be. Into his masterwork the weaver wove
his soul; so that whoever lives with one
of those imperishable sorceries that come
out of the East must in the end feel its
presence unless he be somewhat duller
than the very wood of the loom on which
it was woven.

Look upon wine as often as you wish,
but beware of a Bokhara when it is red
— red as the blood of slaughter — red as
the embers of a plundered city — a red-
ness charged w'ith the quartered octagons
of Turkestan — for in the end you will
become enslaved to the silky splendor
that once graced the tent floor of a
Tekke prince. . . .

Diane was right; though Diane never
suspected, even dimly, what in the end
really did happen to Hammersmith
Clarke. For, naturally enough, neither
she nor anyone else saw or heard the Yel-
low Girl; that is, no one but Clarke:
and he saw and heard too much.

Had she suspected — but she couldn't
have. For who would imagine Fate rid-
ing to the crossroads in a truck of the
American Express Company? It just isn’t
done; not until one looks back and sees
that it could have happened in no other
way.

But unheard-of tilings happen in Turk-
estan; and while one may pause for an
evening's glamor beside some moon-
kissed fountain in the valley' of Zarab-
shan, and then march on, forgetting,
there is that which does not forget, being
undying and everlasting; so that though
forgotten, it reaches forth across time and
space, not only clinging to the pile of a

370

WEIRD TALES

rug from Samarcand, but resorting even
to express trucks to carry it the last step
toward capturing the forgetful one. . . .

All this Diane knew without knowing
why she knew: and it seemed so reason-
able that there was nothing incongruous
in shuddering and saying as she often
had, "I’m afraid of the damned
things. . .

A s THE door clicked behind the de-
k. parting expressman, Clarke clipped
the leaden seals of the cylindrical bale,
cut its stitching, and thrilled at the
thought of the rug he was about to un-
wrap; for the bale was from Siraganian
of New York, who by dint of persistent
reaching into the East must finally have
succeeded in executing Clarke’s impos-
sible order.

A tawny, golden silkiness smiled from
the gaping burlap sheath.

Just a glimpse of that wonder in buif
and cream, with its lotus-bud border,
and frets and meanders in blue and coral
and peach, told Clarke that this of all
things was as far as possible from what
he had ordered Siraganian to get, cost
what it might. For in place of Persian
intricacies in deep wine reds and solemn
green, florid magnificence that Isphahan
had given to the world before the
splendor died, Clarke was confronted by
an ancient rug from Samarcand — silken
Samarcand in the valley of Zarabshan —
thick-napped and luxurious, mysterious
with its Mongolian cloud bands and
asymmetrical corner pieces, bats and
dragons, and five-medallioned firmaments
of blue that could come from none but
the vats of Turkestan.

"Good God! It’s silk!" marveled
•Clarke as he stroked the lustrous pile.
"Silk, and by the Rod, on a linen warp!"

He wondered how Siraganian could
have made that incredible mistake, send-
ing him such a rug in place of what he

had ordered. If it were a case of sending
something just as good — an unheard-of
procedure with that Armenian merchant-
prince — he certainly had been crafty
enough, for no connoisseur who once
touched that ridi pile, whose eyes were
once dazzled by those insinuant colors,
whose senses were stricken by the sorcery
of cabalistical designs, could ever return it
and say that he had ordered something
else. Rather would he thank Siraganian
for his error.

A silk pile on a warp of blue linen,
and woven in the days when Persian
Hafiz was called to account by that fierce
Mongol for a verse wherein the poet
bartered the prince’s favorite cities,
Samarcand and Bokhara, for the smile of
a Turki dancing girl, and the mole on
her left breast: unbelievable fortune had
sent him this incredible rug.

And then Clarke’s wondering, tri-
umphant eyes clouded as he thought of a
girl beside whom Samarcand and Bokhara
were but the tinkle of brazen anklets —
a very long time ago, when there was no
Diane, when Clarke pursued rugs for that
same Siraganian who now sought them
for Clarke.

"Egber an Turki bedest ared dili
rnara,” muttered Clarke, forgetting all
but the glamorous perils that had lured
him far into lost cities and high adven-
ture. Hafiz was right.

And for a moment the rug from
Samarcand, its five by seven feet of
tawny, silken perfection putting to con-
fusion the priceless Feraghan on which it
had been unrolled, gleamed unregarded
as Clarke’s mind whirled to the sonorous
accent with which the divine Hafiz had
enslaved the East and its savage con-
querors.

"Egber an Turki ”

Strange, how after all this time one
would remember. It must be that one
could never quite forget.

THE GIRL FROM SAMARCAND

371

The telephone rang; but Clarke ig-
nored it until the jangling became too
insistent, when he muffled the bell with
several towels and a small cushion.

"Too bad/’ he apologized, as he took
the cord from his lounge robe and com-
pleted the throttling of the almost stifled
annoyance, "but I simply can’t be dis-
turbed.”

In which he was wrong: for to con-
template that wonder from Samarcand
was more disturbing than any voice that
could creep in over the wire. He fingered
the rings of dull, hand-hammered gold
that were sewed to one of the salvaged
sides; he wondered what palace wall had
been enriched by that precious fabric — ■
and with it all came the knowledge that
that very rug had been a part of his own
past. The life that had been knotted into
its pile and the sorcery that had been
woven into its pattern were speaking to
one of Clarke’s forgotten selves. Yet he
was certain that he had never before seen
it; for one could never have forgotten
such as this, though seen but for an in-
stant. Truly, the rug was a stranger, but
the presence that accompanied it was de-
manding recognition.

In the meanwhile, Diane tired of hear-
ing the operator’s "They don’t answer,”
and abandoned her efforts to remind
Clarke of an engagement.

"I wonder,” she mused, as she finally
set aside the useless telephone, "what
deviltry my b'ten dime is devising.”

And then she sought the rendezvous
unattended, and made the customary
apologies for Clarke’s unaccountable
absence.

He might have retreated into that
dusky inner kingdom which from the
very beginning he had held against Diane
— a silence into which he plunged unac-
companied, not lacking appreciative com-
pany, but loving solitude and electing
seclusion rather than the sharing of the

fancies that twisted and the thoughts that
writhed in his strange brain.

As Diane made her well-rehearsed
apologies and frothed behind her vi-
vacious mask, Clarke noted the manila
envelope that was fastened to the web
of the rug from Samarcand, and ad-
dressed to him: a letter, doubtless from
Siraganian.

"We regret,” wrote the Armenian,
"that thus far w T e have had no success in
finding at any cost a rug of the weave
you ordered. However, we take pleasure
in forwarding you this rug which a cara-
van stopping at Meshed left with our
agent in that city with instructions to for-
ward it to our New York office and
thence to you. We are pleased that your
agent saw fit to use our facilities for for-
warding it to you, and wish to congratu-
late you on having obtained such a price-
less specimen. Should you at any time
care to dispose of it, be so kind as to
give us an option on it, for we are in a
position to offer you a better price than
any dealer or collector in the United
States. . . .”

The rug itself was improbable enough
— but Siraganian’s letter! An insoluble
riddle. It couldn’t be a jest. Then
who ?

True enough, Colonel Merbere’s expe-
dition must have passed through Samar-
cand, Yarkand, and Kashgar on its way
into the unknown stretches of Chinese
Turkestan; but his acquaintance with the
colonel was slight, and he had no friend
in the colonel's train. And what obscure
acquaintance of the "wish you were here"
post-card banality would send a rug
which in the old days served as a gift
from one prince to another?

Diane's arrival cut the thread of fancy.

"Oh, Ham, but it is gorgeous,” en-
thused la belle • Livaudaise as she entered
the roseate duskiness of Clarke’s studio.
And to herself, "Another rival. ...”

372

WEIRD TALES

Then she rehearsed the excuses she
had offered for Ham’s absence, and
hoped he'd absent-mindedly contradict
her the first time he deigned to speak for
himself. That done, one must consider
the latest addition to the seraglio.

Clarke detailed the story of the rug
and its riddle. N

"But who in the world would send
you such a gift?” wondered Diane.
"Exactly no one, Ires chere”

"Unless,” Diane pointed out, "it might
be one of your lost loves in those Asiatic
playgrounds you’ve never entirely left.”
Clarke laughed, but his derision was
unconvincing, and Diane knew that he
had been deep in the blacknesses of Asian
nights; knew that her arrival had been
an intrusion, that he was but a friendly
stranger, babbling to her, a friendly
stranger, of loveliness whose intoxication
forced him to speak of it to anyone, even
her.

The others were bad enough, with
their everlasting song of Bokhara, and
Herat of the Hundred Gardens — an un-
heard song to which Clarke listened, and
replied in unspoken syllables; they were
bad enough, they, and those monstrous
fancies which at times he smilingly ex-
pressed with deliberate vagueness, but
this yellow w'itch from Samarcand

D iane knew that more than a rug had
emerged from that bale whose bur-
lap winding-sheet still littered the floor.

At last it seemed that she was intrud-
ing on a tete-a-tete, eavesdropping on a
monologue; so that when Clarke would
emerge from his reveries, Diane resented
the inevitable thought that he was rob-
bing himself to keep her company. But
patience reaches its limit, finally. . . .

She saw it, one night, twinkle and
smile through a lustrous haze that played
over its surface, smile the slow, curved
smile of a carmine-lipped woman through

the veils of her mystery; saw Clarke sit-
ting there, eyes shearing the veil and
half smiling in return, a devotee in the
ecstatic contemplation of a goddess
shrouded in altar fumes. . . .

"Ham!”

"Yes,” answered Clarke’s lips. He had
now perfected the trick of having his
body act as his proxy.

"Are you taking me to that show
tonight?”

"What show?” Clarke the simulacrum
stirred lazily in the depths of the cushion-
heaped lounge. "The truth of it is, my
dear,” he resumed after a pause during
which some memory of the proposed
entertainment must have returned, "truth
of it is I’m awfully busy tonight ”

"Busy sitting there staring at nothing
and sipping Pernod!” flared Diane, the
wrath of months flashing forth. Then,
as she saw Clarke settle back into the
depths: "Listen, once for all: this non-
sense has lasted too long. I might as well
have married a mummy! Either get that
thing out of the house, or I’ll leave you
to your pious meditations indefinite-
ly ■"

"What? Good Lord, Diane, what’s
this?”

"You heard me. You used to be half
human, but now you’re utterly impos-
sible. And if you can’t show me a little
attention, I’m leaving here and now. For
the past many weeks you’ve acted like a
model for a petrified forest. Ever since
that yellow beast ”

"Yellow beast?”

"Exactly! That damned rug is driving
me crazy ”

"Is, or has driven?” suggested Clarke.

"Lies there like a beast of prey just
ready to wake. And you sit there, night
after night, staring at it until you fall
asleep in your chair. Does it go, or do
I?”

THE GIRL FROM SAMARCAND

373

"What do you want me to do? Throw
it away?”

"I don’t care what you do with it.
Only I won’t stay in the house with it.
It gives me the creeps. You’ve said en-
tirely too much in your sleep lately — first
yellow rugs, and now it's a yellow girl.
I’m through!”

Clarke's brows rose in Saracenic arches.
And then he smiled with surprizing
friendliness and a touch of wonder.

"Di, why didn't you tell'me sooner?
I could understand your craving alligator
pears at 3 in the morning — I might have
understood that, but hating a rug is really
a new one on me ”

"No, stupid, it’s nothing like that!
I just hate the damned thing, and no
more to be said.”

"Well, lacking the infallible alibi” —
Clarke glared and assumed his fighting
face — "if you mean I choose between
you and the rug. I’ll call a taxi right
now.”

"Don’t bother. I’ll walk.”

The door slammed.

Clarke twisted his mustache, and
achieved a laugh; not merry, but still a
laugh. And then he sank back among
the cushions.

"Yellow Girl, I thought you were fan-
tastic. . , .”

I E vieux carre wondered when the
J next morning it was rumored that
la belle Livaudaise had been seen hurry-
ing down Saint Peter Street without
speaking to any one of the several ac-
quaintances she had met; but when at the
Green Shutter and the Old Quarter
Bookstore it was announced that Diane
was living in a loft of the Pontalba
Building, wonder ceased. For Diane’s
friend Louise had been no less garrulous
than she should have been, so that the
habitues of the French Quarter were pre-
pared for the news.

And then it was said that to gain ad-
mittance to Clarke’s studio one must
know the code of taps whereby someone
who at times left a certain side door bear-
ing bottles of Pernod announced his ar-
rival; for Clarke answered neither door-
bell nor telephone. The vendor of Pernod
was certainly a discreet person; yet even
a discreet seller of absinthe could see no
harm in mentioning that his patron found
enormous fascination in watching the
play of sunlight and the dance of moon-
beams on the golden buff pile of a rug
that was more a sleeping, breathing crea-
ture than any sane child of the loom.

Finally the courier failed to gain ad-
mittance, despite his tapping in code.
And this he thought worthy of Diane’s
ear.

"He starves himself, petite — since
three days now he has not admitted me.
All the while she lies there, gleaming in
the moon, that awful rug — mordieu, it is
terrible. ...”

Diane had stedfastly denied that which
had been clamoring for recognition. But
when this last bit was added to what had
gone before, logic gave way, and Diane's
fears asserted themselves. That rug was
haunted, was bewitched, was bedevilling
Clarke; logic or no logic, the fact was
plain.

Driven by that monstrous thought,
Diane exhumed the little golden key-
ring and started up Royal Street, deter-
mined to cross the barrier before it be-
came impassable. But her determination
wavered; and before fitting the well-worn
key into the lock, she applied her ear to
the keyhole, listened, and heard Clarke’s
voice.

Diane resisted the temptation to use
her key and stage a scene that even in
the imperturbable Vieux Carre would be
sensational for at least a week. Then her
pride conquered, and she achieved a most
credible smile of disdain.

374

WEIRD TALES

"Sly devil, pretending it was a rug
he was so absorbed in. ...”

And, since it was but an amorous esca-
pade, Diane’s unbelievable speculations
were replaced by thoughts reasonable
enough not to be terrifying.

T hat very night, Clarke was sitting
cross-legged on the floor of his
studio, full under the red glow of a tall
bronze mosque lamp. Before him, shim-
mering in the moonlight that streamed in
through the French windows, lay the rug
from Samarcand, mysterious and golden,
with its pale sapphire corner pieces glit-
tering like a distant sea viewed through a
cleft between two mountain crests.

All the witchery and ecstasy that had
ever been lost in the entire world w-ere
reassembled, pulsing in the silken pile
which he contemplated. And this was the
night, the Night of Power, when Fate
stalked through the corridors of the
world like a colossus just risen from an
age-old throne of granite, resistless and
unconquerable. Clarke had spent so many
nights and days of staring that it was in-
evitable that there must be such a night.
He saw more than the wonder before
him: in place of the marvel woven by
deft, forgotten hands, there gleamed en-
chantingly as through moon-touched mist
a garden in the valley of Zarab-shan.

Then came a faint, oddly accented
drumming and piping, music to whose
tune dead years reassembled their bones
and danced forth from their graves. And
their ghosts as they danced exhaled an
overwhelming sweetness that made
Clarke’s brain reel and glow, and his
blood surge madly in anticipation of that
which he knew must follow.

Then out of the blackness just beyond
the range of the ruddy mosque lamp and
full into the moonlight that marched
slowly across the rug came a slim Yellow
Girl, diaphanously garbed and veiled.

Her anklets clicked faintly; and very faint
was the tinkle of the pendant that
adorned her unusual coiffure.

"All these many days I have sought
you, my lord,” she began, as she extended
her arms in welcome. "But in vain, until
tonight, when at last I parted the veil
and crossed the Border.”

Clarke nodded understanding!)', and
looked full into her dark, faintly slanted
eyes.

"And I have been thinking of you,”
he began, "ever since someone sent me
this rug oq which you stand. It is strange
how this rug could bridge the gap of
twenty years and bring into my very
house a glimpse of the valley of Zarab-
shan. And stranger yet that you could
esecape from your father’s house and find
me here. Though strangest of all, time
has not touched you, when by all reason
you should be old, and leathery, and past
forty. ... Yet you are lovelier now than
you were then, by that fountain in a
garden near Samarcand.”

"It is not strange,” contradicted the
Yellow Girl, as she pirouetted with
dainty feet across the moon-lapped silk.
"For you see me now as I was when I
wove my soul into this very rug.”

Clarke smiled incredulously: which
was illogical enough, since, compared
with the girl’s presence, nothing else
should be incredible.

"How can that be, Yellow Girl, seeing
that we two met one evening twenty
years ago, whereas this rug was woven
when the Great Khan sat enthroned in
Samarcand and reproved the Persian Hafiz
for his careless disposal of the Great
Khan’s favorite cities. This v/as the joy
of kings hundreds of years before you and
I were born ”

"Before the last time we were born.”
corrected the Yellow Girl. "But die first
time — at least, the first time that I can
(Please turn to page 376)

namni

WEIRD TALES

375

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37(5

WEIRD TALES

The Girl From
Samarcand

( Continued from page 374)
recollect — the barred windows of a
prince’s palace failed to keep you from
me. And eunuchs with crescent-bladed
simitars likewise failed. But in the end —
why must all loveliness have an end? — a
bowstring for me, and a sword-stroke for
you. ...”

The Yellow Girl shuddered as she
stroked her smooth throat with fingers
that sought to wipe off the last lingering
memory of a cord of hardspun silk.

"And from the first,” continued the
girl, ”1 knew what our doom would be.
So I started weaving, and completed my
task before they suspected us and the
bowstring did its work. My soul, my self,
being woven cunningly and curiously
into silk rich enough to hang on the wall
of the khan's palace, waited patiently and
wondered whether you and I could have
our day again. Tlius it was in the begin-
ning ■”

"Ah . . . now it does come back to
me,” interrupted Clarke, "as in a dream
dimly remembered. How compactly and
stiflingly they would wrap me in a bale
of silk and carry me past the guards
and into your presence. And by what
devious routes I would leave you . . .
yes, and how painlessly swift is the stroke
of a simitar. . . .”

The Yellow Girl shuddered.

"A simitar truly wielded is really
nothing, after all,” continued Clarke. "I
might have been sawn asunder between
planks. . . . Well, and that meeting in
the garden these short twenty years ago
was after all not our first ... it seems
that I knew then that it was not the first.
Though but for an evening ”

"Yes. Just for an evening. So to what

end were we spared bowstrings and the
stroke of swift simitars, since we had but
an evening?” And thinking of the empty
years of luxurious imprisonment that fol-
lowed, she smiled somberly. "For only
an evening. And then you forgot, until
this rug — this same rug I wove centuries
ago — interrupted your pleasant adventur-
ing, and reminded you.

"Death stared me in the face. The end
of life more vainly lived than the first. I
knew that I was leaving this avatar after
having lived but one stolen evening. So
I sent a trusted servant to carry this very
rug to Meshed. For when we met in the
garden, you were hunting rugs for him
who now seeks them for your delight.
And I knew that he would find you if
you still lived. Thus it is that I have
crossed the Border, and stand before
you as I did once before — this time on
that very rug which I wove centuries ago,
while living in hope of another meeting
and in dread of the bowstring I knew
would in the end find me.”

The moon patch had marched toward
the end of the rug from Samarcand, and
was cutting into the blue web at its end.
Clarke knew that when there remained
no more room for her tiny feet, she
would vanish, not ever to reappear. But
Clarke hoped against knowledge.

"Yellow Girl,” he entreated, "my
door will be barred to friend and ac-
quaintance alike, if you will but return
on whatever nights the moon creeps
across our rug. ...”

Had Diane, listening at the door,
understood, she would have used her
key. But Diane merely heard:

"And I shall wait for these nights as
long as life remains in me. For all that
has happened since then is nothing and
less than nothing; and all has been a
dream since that one night in a garden
of Zarab-shan.”

Very little remained of the moon

WEIRD TALES

377

patch. The Yellow Girl stepped a tiny
pace forward, to prolong her stay yet
another few moments. All but the moon-
lit strip of the mg from Samarcand
glowed bloodily in the flare of the brazen
mosque lamp.

"No, forgetful lover," chided the Yel-
low Girl, "I can not return. I can not
cross the Border again. , In Samarcand,
eight hundred years ago we mocked for a
while the doom that hung over us, and
in the end called the bowstring but a
caress of farewell. Again, in the garden
of Zarab-shan we met, we parted, and
you forgot: so this time I take no
chances. While I can not return, you at
least can follow me ... if you will . . .
for it is very easy. . . ."

She edged along the ever narrowing
strip of moon-bathed silk, and with an
embracing gesture, lured Clarke to rise
and follow her.

"It is so easy . . . move lightly . . .
but be careful not to disturb your body
or overbalance it. . .

Had Diane not turned away from the
door, were she not even now strolling
insouriantly down Royal Street

"Yellow' Girl, you and I have had
enough of farewells!"

Something left Clarke, tottered peri-
lously on the two handbreadths of moon-
light that remained, then caught the
Yellow Girl by the hand and took the
lead.

The blue web of the rug from Samar-
cand gleamed for another moment in the
moonlight, then sw T eltered in the red
glow of the mosque lamp.

Coming soon —

Goetterdaemmerung

By Seabury Quinn
A strange tale of the future, by the
author of the de Grandin stories

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A new thriller by <

SEABURY QUINN appears <
in WEIRD TALES i

even month ^

T HE enthusiastic reception of Seabury
Quinn's story, Roads, in our January
issue, has encouraged us to print
further off-the-trail stories from time to time
in this magazine. This story was a reverent
tale of the Crucifixion, a hetaera from the
house of Mary of Magdala, and Santa Claus.
Though there were a few dissident voices of
those who thought the Santa Claus element
childish, the chorus of praise made the vote
overwhelming in its favor.

Suited to a T

William F. Zuckert, Jr., of Washington,
D. C., writes: "After ten years as a silent
reader of WT, I take this opportunity to
drop a line to the Eyrie. As a whole, I can
find little or no criticism against our maga-
zine, because personally it suits me to a T.
Besides, on the very rare occasions when
I do have an infinitesimal gripe, I say noth-
ing because I realize that there must have
been plenty of readers who did enjoy the
piece; who am I to yelp? I like the high
literary quality of the tales, with that subtle
horror that sort of sneaks up on one. Now
for a couple of orchids to the authors. In
the December issue, I particularly enjoyed
The Sea-Witch by Nictzin Dyalhis. In my
humble estimation, this yarn constitutes one
of the smoothest bits that I’ve ever read.
It didn’t hold a dull moment nor an arid
paragraph from beginning to end. This let-
ter would be incomplete without a mention
of my favorite author and character. I refer,
of course, to Seabury Quinn with his inimi-
table Jules de Grandin — a grand pair whose
adventures I hope to be able to follow as
long as these old eyes can see the printed
ge. Flames of Vengeance in the Decem-
r issue was grand, but when the January
issue came out with Roads, I got a real sock !
What a story ! I was almost on the last page
378

before it dawned on me just who Claudius
really was! That idea was a real inspiration,
and you gave it to us at exactly the proper
time of year. Keep up the good work, Mr.
Quinn, and I can personally guarantee you
at least one family of very avid readers. I
could go on for pages extolling the virtues
of the various authors, but that isn’t very
practical, because perhaps you would like to
squeeze in a letter from some other reader.
So I close now with a big cheer for Virgil
Finlay. And thanks for listening."

The Light Was Green

Richard F. Behm writes from Los An-
geles: "Thank you for John Speer’s story,
The Light Was Green. A long time has
passed since I have read any fiction as un-
usual and fascinating as the stories written
by Mr. Speer. It is very evident he does not
write until he is definitely sure of the ground
from which his inspiration for his story
sprung."

A Letter from Miss Hemken

Gertrude Hemken writes from Chicago:
"Roads! This is by far the loveliest Christ-
mas story I have ever read. Quinn couples
the Teutonic legends of the Nativity so beau-
tifully. But one thing wonders me — Klaus,
after a tricennium, still had the fair hair and
beard; yet the Santa Claus we know is a
white-haired, white-bearded old fellow.
’Course after two thousand years most any-
one would grow gray, but — never mind.
Somehow or other I was a mite disappointed
in Dorothy Quick this time. Her witch was
somehow so very like another enchantress
in a w.-k. story by an equally w.-k. author.
I really don’t care for these supple sirens
and their frightening powers. Give me a
couple of rip-snorters like Conan and North-
west Smith — brave lassies like Jirel of Joiry.

WEIRD TALES

379

Finlay’s full page is much more to my taste
this time. The spires and skyline look so
Other worldish. Well, guess I’ll wait for
another installment of The Harry O/res Shall
Dance before I comment — somehow that
Devil’s Croft is enticing. Raggh — woof —
grrr — I like so very much this Toean Mai-
jan, but I cannot pronounce such words sat-
isfactorily. And so I am riled, in spite of a
cat tale — and such a pretty white carl I have
often wondered if a tiger would make a
good pet. And so the verriichter Austrian
is now a block of ice in the black vastnesses
of the void — and thus ends his The Voyage
of the Ner/tralia. I found the closing install-
ment rather flat, except for the Venusian
centipedes and volcano. Doctor Keller turned
out a nice one with his Valley of Bo/res —
such, I believe, is entirely possible in this
strange land of Africa. I was pleased to see
your reprint of Ethan Brand — I have read it
so many times along with others of Haw-
thorne's tales.”

Both Lusty anti Devout

Manly Wade Wellman writes from New
York Q'ty: "Let me vote for Quinn’s Roads

as the most impressive tiling in the January
WT. It gives me to think thus: does not
the world of fantasy hold its good powers as
well as evil, its saints and angels as well as
its fiends and devils? Roads was both lusty
and devout, as a good Christmas tale should
be.”

Finlay Frontispiece

Robert A. Madle writes from Philadel-
phia: "Thanks exceedingly for inaugurating
the new frontispiece department. Both pic-
turizations which have appeared have been
supreme. Virgil Finlay is unquestionably the
modern master of weird art, as H. P. Love-
craft was the unquestioned master of weird
fiction. Continue this department, and have
Finlay illustrate the entire interior of the
magazine hereafter. His covers are also
superb, but do not neglect Brundage entire-
ly. She is one of the best artists of the
decade.”

Reprints

N. J. O’Neail writes from Toronto his
selection of the fifteen best stories in Weird
Tales for 1937, and comments: “You may
notice that five on my list — one third of the

BACK COPIES

Because of the many requests for back issues of Weird Tales, the publishers do their best
to keep a sufficient supply on hand to meet all demands. This magazine was established early
in 1923 and there has been a steady drain on the supply of back copies ever since. At present,
we have the following back numbers on hand for sale:

1934

1938

1936

1931

Jan.

Jan.

Jan.

Jan.

Feb.

Feb.

Feb.

Feb.

Mar.

Mar.

Mar.

Mar.

Apr.

Apr.

Apr.

Apr.

May

May

May

May

June

June

June

June

July

July

July

July

Aug.

Sept.

Sept.

Sept.

Sept.

Oct.

Oct

Oct.

Oct

Nov.

Nov.

Nov.

Nov.

Dec.

Dec.

Dec.

Dec.

193a

Jan.

Feb.

These back numbers contain many fascinating stories. If you are interested in obtaining
any of the back copies on this list please hurry your order because we can not guarantee that
the list will be as complete as it now is within the next 30 days. The price on all back issues
is 23c per copy. Mail all orders to:

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Chicago, Illinois, U. S. A. ,

380

WEIRD TALES

total — are reprints; probably not surprizing,
since the reprints represent, in theory, and
usually in practise, the cream of bygone is-
sues. I shouldn’t be surprized if a demand
soon arose for a re-reprint section, in which
some of the reprints of eight and nine years
ago might reappear once more. . . / You
began reprinting from back numbers in 1928,
when WT was only five years old. Now it
has rounded out its fifteenth year; and it
might be reasoned that a story which was
worth reprinting once, five years after its
first publication, might merit another such
honor ten years later."

Overrated

Richard Kraft, of Allenhurst, New Jersey,
writes: "To my mind the most overrated
story you have ever published was Quest of
the Starstone. It was simply a cheap thriller
and did not compare with Paul Ernst’s Dread
Summons or Rex Ernest’s The Irm . In the
December issue Edmond Hamilton again
writes a winner: Child of Atlantis. Hamil-
ton is the best in the business and I enjoy his
work immensely. The Sea-Witch was terrible
— I can’t see what Weird Tales readers will
find in it, as it was slow and tiresome, noth-
ing like that swell story of Mary Counsel-
man’s in that issue, The Black Stone Statue.”

Virgil Finlay’s Drawings

Doctor Karl K. Webber writes from Flora,
Illinois: "This is die first time I have writ-
ten you, although I have been an avid reader
of Weird Tales for about six years. In the
December 1937 issue, The Sea-Witch is
‘tops,’ with Flames of Vengeance a close sec-
ond, and Child of Atlantis hot on the lat-
ter’s heels. One thing must be kept in your
publication and that is Virgil Finlay's draw-
ing. I’m a little bit of an artist myself and
I recognize a masterful touch when I see it.
No one can approach his subtle mastery of
pen and ink. Orchids to Virgil!”

A Million Congratulations

Julius Hopkins writes from Washington,
D. C.: " Roads is one of the most high-class
stories that WT has ever printed. Through-
out, the language is elevating, and not the
usual, pulpy kind prevalent in a great many
tales written today. I truly believe that any
magazine would have been glad to have this
stony between its covers. WT should be
mighty proud to have been privileged to

print it. A million congratulations to you,
Mr. Quinn, for a really outstanding story.”

Norse Mythology

M. W. Schauffler, of Larchmont, New
York, writes: "The Howard and Quinn
stories have been what I have bought the
magazine for, and I have been buying it for
eight years. One other thing which makes
your magazine a pleasure is that almost
always the mythology and other background
data are accurate. So please speak to Nictzin
Dyalhis, if you don’t mind, and ask him to
check a little more carefully. I don’t know
when I have liked a story better than The
Sea-Witch. But the moment when his Witch
and his hero both agreed that Ran was a
god, not a goddess, wrecked the illusion of
factuality for me to the end of the story.
And there were two other minor slips: No
viking was ever named Gudrun any more
than he was named Eliza, and for the same
reason — it is a woman's name. Neither was
Comnenus ever spelled with two n’s — though
that’s a small matter. As for the viking’s re-
frain to the rowing-song, he probably knows
more than I do about that — I am not an
authority on Norse legends. But I have a
feeling that it isn’t entirely, or at least typ-
ically, a sea refrain.”

Quinn’s Masterpiece

Bernard Austin Dwyer writes from West
Shokan, New York: "My first choice of
stories in the January issue is Roads by Sea-
bury Quinn. This is truly Quinn’s master-
piece; I have never seen anything even re-
motely so good by him. In my opinion, it
far overtops even The Phantom Farmhouse.
Apart from the story itself, which is delight-
ful and wonderful — the fetching together of
such ordinarily widely separated elements as
Christ’s crucifixion, a blond heroic warrior
from the North, a harlot from the house of
Magdalene, the Eastern and Western dynas-
ties, and the Middle Ages, the little carved
sleighs, the dwarf faery, smiths of tire moun-
tains, and the legend of Santa Claus — the
style itself is very beautiful. I love especially
the last few paragraphs with their flavor of
the iron and heroic North, the Valhalla-like
feast; how Klaus laid aside his arms, and
the final piercing and beautiful paragraph.
But I love everything — the story and the
style, from beginning to end. . . . This story
will go down as one of the very best, by any

WEIRD TALES

381

author, ever to be published in Weird
Tales. It is a masterpiece, fit to rank with
Howard’s Kings of the Night or Lovecraft’s
Whisperer in Darkness. I feel impelled to
thank Mr. Quinn heartily for giving me the
opportunity to read so satisfactory, wonder-
fully imaginative and beautiful a story. That
style is something to dream about. Next, I
will mention a very short poem — Lost
Dream , dedicated to our departed master
Lovecraft, by Emil Petaja. May I express my
appreciation of how that little poem coin-
cides with one’s impressions of the works of
Lovecraft? 'One fumbles in his scarlet cloak;
I see his slender fingers move— he turns a
key . . .’ a silver key, of course. Congratu-
lations to Mr. Petaja for his splendid little
poem. May we hope for more? My next
favorite story is Toean Matjan, by Vennecte
Herron — a very good story, well tied togeth-
er, and beautiful style. It is exquisitely writ-
ten. I don't know when I have read a more
entertaining story, written in better style. In
fact, I like the style quite as well as that of
Roads, only that it is of course shorter. I am
quite sure that I should not care to court
that lady. I like The Witch’s Mark, and The
Hairy Ones Shall Dance. In the latter, it is
already rather obvious that the wolfish ma-
terialization came from Doctor Zoberg — vide
his thick, sinewy wrists! It is right enter-
taining. Let me, too, commend most warmly
The Inn, in a recent issue. Splendid atmos-
phere.”

Compliment and Complaint

Wilfred Wright writes from Toronto:
"During the last fifteen years that I have
been a consistent reader of WT I have only
written twice to the Eyrie, submitting my
comments. But your January issue compels
me to write for the third time, to express a
compliment and a complaint. First the com-
pliment. Roads, by Seabury Quinn, stands
out as the most beautiful piece of fantasy
ever published in any magazine. From early
in the story the outcome was obvious, yet at
no time did it detract from the beauty or in-
terest of the compelling and reverent treat-
ment of a sacred theme. Mr. Quinn is in-
deed to be congratulated upon his ability,
and I wish to extend to him my personal
thanks for enriching my Christmas by his
magnificent story. Now for the complaint —
or perhaps I should say question.’ Tire story
Toean Matjan by Vennette Herron — while I

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The Cream of
Weird Fiction

• Weird Tales prints the best weird
fiction in the world today. The high
literary quality of its stories is evi-
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that have been reprinted or awarded
honorable mention in annual best fic-
tion anthologies. You are assured of
reading the best when you read Weird
Tales, The Unique Magazine.

382

WEIRD TALES

appreciate ic as a very splendid weird tale, it
should have been entered as a reprint, as I
read the same story in the magazine section
of the Toronto Star Weekly three or four
months ago. With the exception of the re-
print story, I always had the impression that
all stories published in Weird Tales were
original, and I would like to be informed
regarding the editorial policy in this matter.
As for my voting for the best stories in the
current issue, it is on this occasion impos-
sible, for with all appreciation for the other
tales in this issue, Seabury Quinn’s Roads
defies comparison.” [Toe an Matjan was sold
to us as a new story which had seen publica-
tion in England only. We did not know
that it had been printed in Canada. Like
many other publications, Weird Tales oc-
casionally buys outstanding stories that have
already been printed in the British Isles, but
we do not knowingly use stories that have
been published in North America. — The
Editor.]

Brickbats

J. Vernon Shea, Jr., writes from Pitts-
burgh: "I wish Seabury Quinn hadn’t writ-
ten Roads, for that tale for children has no
place in WT. It made me squirm. Of the
stories in the January issue, I prefer Toean
Matjan, a beautifully written version of a
familiar theme. Miss Herron is a highly
promising newcomer. Edmond Hamilton
had a novel idea in The House of Living
Music, but ruined it by his formula hand-
ling. The Witch’s Mark marks considerable
of an advancement for Dorothy Quick, but
I for one am pretty fed-up with witch-
women, especially when they go through
their all-too-familiar routines. I wish you
would caution your authors against topical
subjects as applied to weird tales. They have
not the immediacy die authors imagine them
to have, but intrude unpleasantly in a non-
realistic field. Thus, the attempted lynching
in The Hairy Ones Shall Dance, which
seems to be taken from the motion picture
Fury, seemed wildly incongruous in WT.
Don’t misunderstand me: I am very fond of
realism in a realistic story, but hardly con-
sider much realism fitting for WT.”

A New Reader

Margaret H. Gray writes from Steuben-
ville, Ohio: "Greetings from a compara-
tively new member of your circle of Weird
Tales readers. I have been reading your

magazine for only one short year, much to
my chagrin. I have just completed the Jan-
uary edition, and I say that there are entire-
ly too many days to wait until February. The
Witch’s Mark was by far the best in this is-
sue. Perhaps I am prejudiced, as I am brim-
fid of Irish and Scottish folklore, but the
translating of Deidre and Shamus into mod-
ern life, is in my eyes, a masterpiece. Some
more stories just like it, please, Dorothy
Quick! (By the way, is she Irish?) Virgil
Finlay’s illustrations are still 'splendiferous*
(that’s my own invention!) and M. Brun-
dage’s cover picture is grand. Toean Mat-
jan, by Vennette Herron, rates second in my
list. I love stories like this. May we have
some more, if you please? I am collecting
all of those illustration passages from poetry
so that I can frame them. Couldn't you
make them in color? I think I have asked
too many questions already. Good luck, WT,
and may the sun never set on your splendid
magazine.”

A Posing Tiger

Michael Liene writes from Hazleton,
Pennsylvania: " Toean Matjan, by Vennette
Herron, was a strange little tale, beautifully
written. The tiger in the illustration looks
suspiciously like the one used to advertise
Listerine mouth wash, or some such. Or did
this tiger take up posing for advertisements,
in the spare time he had, aside from jealous-
ly guarding our heroine of the story? Were
ic not for Quinn’s beautifully told story.
Roads, I would have given Toean Matjan
first place in the January issue — the story, I
mean, not the tiger. . . . Gans T. Field’s
The Hairy Ones Shall Dance serial has start-
ed out quite thrillingly. It leaves the reader
all prepared for startling events, which will
either make or ruin the story. But if the
first installment is any indication of shud-
ders, I just took my racoon coat out of
storage.”

Pie Wants a Sequel

Alvin V. Pershing writes from Anderson,
Indiana: "Would it be proper to ask for a
sequel to The Sea-Witch? That story was a
tremendous knock-out, amazing and weird.
It was one of the best stories I have ever
read. Virgil’s black-and-white frontispiece
was a real addition to the magazine.”

Quinn and Howard

J. Mackay Tait writes from Bridgetown,

WEIRD TALES

3S3

Nova Scotia: "In my humble opinion, the
most thoroughly enjoyable stories that ap-
pear in WT are those by such writers as
Seabury Quinn and Robert E. Howard (how
I miss that boy!), in which there is a little
humanity, a little humor, a little happiness.
Poe’s works are abnormal, the product (ad-
mittedly so) of a diseased mind. They
aren’t true to life. They are literary lunacy,
analogous in art to the works of Dali, or in
sculpture to those of Epstein. There is never
any situation, no matter how desperate, in
which all hope and humor are entirely ab-
sent. I served four years with the Canadian
infantry during the war . . . and although
we lived in terror a great deal of the time —
particularly I — I never once found myself in
a position where it was all fear and horror.
In this month’s WT there is a story by
Nictzin Dyalhis, The Sea-Witch, that I be-
lieve to be one of the best ever to appear in
our magazine. And my opinion is not in-
fluenced by the really splendid cover design
by Virgil Finlay — a vast improvement over
some of the misproportioned females who
have displayed their impossible charms on
covers of the past, even if the girl has mis-
placed her navel. The story deals with the
occult, it has horror, it has suspense; but it
also has love, tenderness, humor (not funni-
ness), and a delightfully unexpected happy
ending. . . . Another criticism (I might as
well be hung for a sheep as a lamb) I have
to make of a great many of your stories, al-
though not only of the Poe style, is directed
at the obviously labored attempts at main-
taining an atmosphere of gloom and im-
pending evil throughout the narrative. Why
should this be necessary? Because a man
walking along a lonely country road in a
rainstorm is to encounter, half a mile far-
ther on, a grisly werewolf is no reason, that
I can see, for the limbs of the trees to ap-
pear like skeleton arms reaching out for him,
or for die raindrops to fall with the sound
of hissing snakes bent upon his destruction,
or for the wind to howl at him with the
voices of a thousand haunted spirits. Unless
he is mentally abnormal, neurotic or a con-
firmed and industrious disciple of Bacchus,
a country road would be a country road and
nothing more. It may be the tradition to
write weird stories in that way, but it is il-
logical nevertheless. Horror rarely sets the
stage before descending upon us. I wish it
did! When it strikes, it strikes suddenly,

NEXT MONTH

The Eyes of the
Mummy

By Robert Bloch

►tIhat young writing marvel, Robert
Bloch, has never written a
stranger or more thrilling story than
this. It is a story of Egypt, a gripping
tale of flaming weird jewels in the
eye-sockets of a withered mummy, an
eery narrative that will hold your
breathless interest to the end.

►TIhis story rises to a climax so un*
-*• usual, so weird and fascinating as
to make it unique in literature. This
unforgettable tale will be published
complete

in the April issue of

WEIRD TALES

on sale March 1st

To avoid missing your copy, clip and mail this
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WEIRD TALES

without' warning. From happiness we are
switched to misery and back again almost
without knowing how it all happened. The
trouble with striving constantly for this kind
of atmosphere is that it defeats ics own pur-
pose. You are plunged into gloom with the
story’s first paragraph and are mentally pre-
pared for anything that may happen. When
I bought a volume of Poe’s works some years
ago, I naturally waded through those deal-
ing in horror first. 'Waded’ is the mot juste.
By the time I had read three of them, I was
so saturated with their atmosphere that they
had lost all value as shockers. I have never
finished the volume and I never will. (This
is sacrilege but I can’t help it.) People are
constantly borrowing my books — sometimes
they return them — but I have never had any
one of them borrow the volume of Poe al-
though it still retains its attractive red -and -
black cover. I don’t believe people like that
kind of literature. They like horror, mys-
tery, even cruelty; but they like it dished up
palatably. You can consign this to the edi-
torial waste-basket if you like, but it is my
sincere conviction that more stories of the
Seabury Quinn type would sell more copies
of WT.”

Concise Comments

T. O. Mabbott writes from New York
City: "My votes this month are for Roads,
which has the truth of a legend about it,
though curiously enough for Seabury Quinn,
it struck me as deserving a cut or two to
make the thing a little more compact; sec-
ond: Valley of Bones — simple and wholly
credible while being read, and, third, T oean
Matjan, where I wished for a stronger sug-
gestion the tiger was sometimes a man, too.”

James Whiting Saunders writes from Alex-
andria, Virginia: "In the January issue the
best story is Ethan Brand. It is an almost
timeless allegory, of course. Thank you for
printing an American classic”

Paul L. McCIeave writes from St. Peters-
burg, Florida: " The Sea-Witch was truly
the 'tops’ in the December Weird Tales.
Nictzin Dyalhis (how’d he ever get that
name, anyway?) must have a thorough
knowledge of the old Norse mythology.”

Seymour Kapetansky writes from Detroit:
"Lo veer aft’s Hypnos is one of tire late mas-
ter’s obscure- weird pieces. A grand fictional
yarn. I think that the reprint should contain

a Lovecraft as often as possible, and ditto
the early Robert E. Howards. These men
were the best weird writers ; their work
should appear often. That will be their best
memorial.”

Harold F. Keating writes from Quincy,
Massachusetts : "The Black Stone Statue by
Mary Counselman is gorgeous. Most of her
stories are excellent; but this was the best
yet.”

Howard Brenton MacDonald writes from
Yonkers, New York: "The Sea-Witch was
an exceptionally fine story. I am glad to see
some author making use of the vast treasury
of Norse mythology. Let’s have more.”

H. W. Marian writes from Union City,
Tennessee: "In the December number Vir-
gil Finlay is superb. Words fail me, and I
can only attempt to express my appreciation
for this new feature. These first two I have
already framed and they occupy a position
of honor in my room.”

Andrew Galet writes from New York
City: "I now have a double incentive for
buying WT, but, please have Virgil Finlay's
full-page drawing inside the back cover of
your magazine. Not only will his illustra-
tions be more fully appreciated but one could
always tear the cover off and have the draw-
ings framed.”

Orin S. McFarland writes from Washing-
ton, D. G: 'Tve read your magazine for the
last six years and know there is nothing like
it. Keep up the good work. There are a
few stories that don’t quite click, but so few
chat all the good ones outshine, by far, any
defect that your magazine may otherwise
possess.”

Flo M. Post writes from Guthrie, Okla-
homa: "Tales of robots with human minds
are just gibberish — and not weird gibberish
either — whether they inhabit Mars, Venus,
the Moon, or an Atlantis.”

The Most Popular Story

Readers, it will help us to keep this maga-
zine just as you like it to be,, if you will let
us know which stories you like best, and also
which ones you dislike. In the January issue,
as shown by your votes and letters, Seabury
Quinn’s strange tale about Santa Claus eas-
ily won first place. Vennette Herron’s story
about the were-tiger came next

W. T.— 8

COMING NEXT MONTH

4T THE core of the strange garden, where a circular space was still vacant amid the
/% crowding growths, Adompha came to a mound of loamy, fresh-dug earth. Beside
J. m. it, wholly nude, and pale and supine as if in death, there lay the odalisque Thulo-
neah. Near her, various knives and other implements, together with vials of liquid balsams
and viscid gums that Dwerulas used in his grafting, had been emptied upon the ground from
a leathern bag. A plant known as the declaim, with a bulbous, pulpy, whitish-green bole
from whose center rose and radiated several leafless reptilian boughs, dripped upon Thulo-
neah's bosom an occasional drop of yellowish-red ichor from incisions made in its smooth
bark.

Behind the loamy mound, Dwerulas rose to view with the suddenness of a demon
emerging from his subterrene lair. In his hands he held the spade with which he had just
finished digging a deep and grave-like hole. Beside the regal stature and girth of Adompha,
he seemed no more than a wizened dwarf. His aspect bore all the marks of immense age, as
if dusty centuries had sered his flesh and sucked the blood from his veins. His eyes glowed
in the bottom of pit-like orbits; his features were black and sunken as those of a long-dead
corpse; his body was gnarled as some millennial desert cedar. He stooped incessantly, so
that his lank, knotty arms hung almost to the ground. Adompha marveled at the strength
of those arms; marveled that Dwerulas could have wielded the heavy shovel so expeditious-
ly, could have carried to the garden on his back the burden of those victims whose members
he had utilized in his experiments. The king had never demeaned himself to assist at such
labors ; but, after indicating from time to time the people whose disappearance would in no
wise displease him, had done nothing more than watdi and supervise die baroque gardening.

"Is she dead?” Adompha questioned, eyeing the luxurious limbs and body of Thuloneah
wichout emotion.

"Nay.” said Dwerulas. in a voice harsh as a rusty coffin-hinge, "but I have administered
to her the drowsy and overpowering juice-cf the dedaim. Her heart beats impalpably, her
blood flows with the sluggishness of that mingled ichor. She will not reawaken . . . save
as a part of the garden Is life, sharing its obscure sentience. I wait now your further in-
structions. What portion . . . or portions?”

"Her hands were very deft,” said Adompha, as if musing aloud, in reply to the half-
uttered question. "They knew the subtle ways of love and were learned in all amorous arts.
I would nave you preserve her hands . . . but nothing else.” . . .

A strange story indeed is this, written in the magic words of one of the greatest living
masters of weird fiction. What happened to Thuloneah when her arms were grafted to the
dedaim tree makes a fascinating ana unusual weird story of immense interest and power.
It will be printed complete in the April issue of Weird Tales:

THE GARDEN OF ADOMPHA

By Clark Ashton Smith

Also

THE TEMPLE DANCER

By Seabury Quinn

An unusual story aboss a white girl in a Hindoo temple
and the loving arms of the gracious lady that protected her
on the night when she was to become the Bride of Siva.

THE EYES OF THE MUMMY FOREST OF EVIL

By Robert Bloch By John Murray Reynolds

A fascinating story of flashing jewels and an old A story of many thrills — a tale of weird adven-
Egyptian tomb — a story with a strange and terrible tures and dire perils in the Dead Forest of
climax. Sanaala.

THE DEVIL DEALS
By Carl Jacobi

An odd and curious story is this, about a fatal game of
cards, played with a most peculiar deck containing neither
spades, hearts, diamonds nor clubs.

April Issue WEIRD TALES Out March 1

Special Bargain Offer

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While They Last
At Reduced Price
Only Fifty Cents

Beauf ij illy
bound in rich blue
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T HE MOON TERROR, by A. G.

Birch, is a stupendous weird-scientific
novel of Oriental intrigue to gain coAtrol
of the world.

ALSO-OTHER STORIES

DIMENSION, by Farnsworth Wright, is
an uproarious skit on the four-dimensional
theories of the mathematicians, and inter-
planetary stories in general.

LIMITED SUPPLY

In addition to the full-length novel, this
bOok also contains three shorter stories by
well-known authors of thrilling weird-
scientific fiction:

OOZE, by Anthony M. Rud, tells of a
biologist who removed the growth limita-
tions from an amoeba, and the amazing
catastrophe that ensued.

PENELOPE, by Vincent Starrett, is a
fascinating tale of the star Penelope, and
the fantastic thing that happened when the
star was in perihelion.

AN ADVENTURE IN THE FOURTH

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