Page:The Mask.pdf/6

THE TATLER hid behind those long slits in the lean and terrible countenance, wreathing now into a faint but significant grin of knowledge and understanding as those dark holes, alight with horrible life, stared back into Trelawney’s own? Gripping the edge of the mantel-piece hard with his trembling hands, the man tried dimly to pull himself together, to withdraw his gaze from those awful hollows, where his very soul seemed to be sinking, disappearing, being drawn into some wild and dark and horrible vortex, where sanity, decency, all that made him a man, must inevitably drown and vanish. Wider and wider wreathed the sardonic grin on the lean, leathern face, crossed and recrossed with lines of age-old evil, as the awful, blank black eyes glared into his; from them there seemed to flow a sort of spiritual miasma, a dark, slow flood of mental poison that was gradually, insidiously, flowing, trickling round and over Trelawney’s soul, slowly but with ghastly sureness sucking down, drowning, extinguishing all that went to make a strong, sane, well-balanced man. Heavy shudders shook the man’s body; his face was deathly white and shining with tiny beads of perspiration as he gripped the mantel-piece, the straining knuckles starting out white against his brown hand—staring, staring into the black hollows where surely flamed two dark and terrible eyes, twin points of the magnet that was drawing out his soul!

The clock ticked slowly, distinctly, into the dead silence; the tiny flop of a breaking coal, the cheep and scutter of a mouse behind the wainscot—otherwise, not a sound broke the hush of the waiting-room where Jack Trelawney—clean, healthy Englishman—clung to the stone mantel, drawing little sobbing breaths that barely stirred the warm air, his eyes blank and fixed, his mind wandering at large in strange and dreadful lands…. Dim temples lit by pale torches, and strange masked figures that crouched, all silent, round an altar on which burnt a blue-green flame … the sound of faint chanting, a thin and awful laughter, and at last one high-pitched scream of shrill and ghastly agony, as the blue flame leapt high and showed in the flash of a moment a knife dripping blood above a writhing form…. Then swifter and more swiftly before the dulled eyes of the hypnotised man fled horror upon horror—dark glades where strange figures followed a faint flickering light to a distant hilltop, leaving the path behind them bloody; a whirl of cruel pale faces daubed with a crimson that stained more deeply than any dye; and again the blue flame rose thin into the midnight