Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/32

 known him in France where they had fought side by side. An Eddie Hughes in tin helmet, waving a Springfield with a bloody bayonet attached, the crimson stream pouring from vicious cuts in his face and body, his eyes sightless, blinded hideously by the mustard gas. Val tried to arise in his dream and found he could not—it was as though his limbs no longer refused to obey the commands of his brain. There seemed to be no feeling in them. He felt legless and armless.

Eddie Hughes gave way, finally, to a glorious girl with copper hair, arising out of a pile of books in front of his bed. She advanced to him and placed a cool hand on his brow she smiled. He tried to rise. He could not. She walked back to the books, gliding in an unreal, unnatural fashion and as he looked he saw that it was not the girl at all.

It was a man, a large man, with his back turned. He was bent among the books, clumsily putting them into a pile. The moonlight, which had been absent for a few moments, it seemed to Val, stabbed through the gloom of the chamber again, striking fair upon the person of Val’s dream and as Val looked he felt himself, even in his dream, turning cold all over, the gooseflesh pricking up over his body and the blood seeming to turn to ice in his veins.

The reason his dream-visitor was having trouble with the books was because—Val tried to arise and could not!—because he had no hands.

Where his hands should have been were two formless, pale white stumps.

Val knew he was dreaming, the way you sometimes do know even during the course of a dream, yet for some reason or other, he could hardly say why, he