Page:Weird Tales Volume 10 Number 4 (1927-10).djvu/108

 you're so hard with him! You wouldn't listen yesterday"

"Dreams again, eh?"

"Yes, but he's very hoarse, too. I'm worried."

Dennison left the breakfast table impatiently.

The summer was passing; and the boy, who had come home from college in June with shadowed eyes and a puzzled frown between them, seemed more preoccupied, more listless, every day.

He was thinner, too; not in any way like the big, rollicking chap who had left them last September. He had visited a friend over the Christmas holidays, and both parents had anxiously noted the change in him, after nine months of absence.

"Keep having nightmares—guess I'm bilious!" was the only explanation they had been able to win from him; it had not seemed a sufficient one. Dennison resented the boy's lack of interest in the business (an automobile agency), and gave him hard work to do, tersely remarking that he'd sleep better for it. The tasks were well but wearily performed, and nothing gained besides.

"Morning, sir," he said as Dennison entered. He swung his slippered feet to the floor and sat up dizzily, supporting himself with a hand at each side upon the couch.

He was "his mother's boy", tall and fair; for Dennison was shorter, darker, more muscular.

"If you won't help me, Dad, I'll have to get somebody else."

"What's the matter, anyway?"

"I tried to tell you yesterday. Listen, Dad! This thing's killing me! Look here!" He showed a swollen and discolored throat; his eyes were bloodshot, and he was hoarse, as his mother had said.

"Hurt yourself?"

"It's that thing I dream about, I tell you—if it is dreaming. He—or It"

"You do it yourself, in your sleep—but that's bad enough; need more exercise."

"I exercise until I can hardly crawl to bed. No trouble about going to sleep; it's all I can do—but afterward

"Well, what can I do about it?"

"Dad"—the boy's pale face flushed—"you'll say it's babyish, because you don't know—you don't know! I—want you to stay with me tonight!"

"Babyish enough! Ever leave the light on?”

"Yes. He came just the same! I couldn't see him, but"

"Aha! And yet you're still afraid of him?"

"It was worse than ever. I can't move, you see, or fight, or even breathe; but I get wide awake, and then he goes away, but I don't sleep any more."

"Just a regular nightmare, Bob."

"Maybe. But oh, God! How I'd like to have one night of peace—one night when Bull Bayman

"Bull Bayman! So that's who it is, you think?"

"I don't know; it seems like him, somehow; only of course Bull didn't have—scales all over him."

"Scales!" There was an underlying note of panic in the man's exasperation. Was it more than dreams, then? Was it insanity?

"Honest, Dad. And claws."

His father observed in a tolerably controlled tone, "Bull Bayman was the quarterback who choked you because he thought you gave away the signals to the other team?"

"Did he choke me?" the lad returned vaguely.

"Don't you remember it? He knocked you down first. Kent Taylor told me about it; said they threw water on you to bring you out of it."

"I know we had a mix-up; I didn't play any more, of course, but in the very next scrimmage Bull got