Page:Weird Tales Volume 24 Issue 4 (1934-10).djvu/68

 of the moon, slaking my thirst at the mossy pools which mirror the rosy dawn; the eternal granite crags my rough-hewn throne, the starlit vault of heaven my justice-hall. And wo to him that falls under my displeasure. Wo to you, who have made me what I am! Look well upon your handiwork, Silas Marie, and tremble! When next you look upon me you will know that your last hour of life is speeding to its close!'

'With a swift, threatening gesture of his naked arm, he turned and slipped from my sight, leaving me like a man who suddenly awakens from a nightmare and asks himself if it be nothing but a vision of the night. I turned and looked at the familiar room—my book lying where it had fallen from my hand, my pipe smoldering unheeded on the carpet.

"Moved by a sudden thought, I snatched up the lamp and hastened to the door. Heedless of what might be lurking in the shadows, I threw back the bolts and passed outside, lowering the lamp until its rays fell on the spot where the apparition had seemed to stand. Then indeed did I know that it was no figment of my fancy. In the deep snow was a trail of footprints made Gy cloven hoofs!

, I have nearly come to the end of my long story, and you who read this must form your own conclusions as to the real meaning of the events which I have here set down as fully and as exactly as my memory serves me. I myself was completely at a loss to decide whether the thing I had seen and conversed with was Jake's corporeal body, restored to life by some unprecedented feat of surgical science, or a supernatural form that had taken his shape.

"One thing at least was certain: the Thing—be it what it might—possessed memory and the power of speech. Its denunciation of me proved that it remembered the events which preceded the explosion—what if it remembered the secret of the composition of the human detonator which had been the cause of its assuming its present awful form? Even in my perplexity I remember being struck by the quaint and novel problem, whether it was likely that a person insane during life would appear after death as an insane ghost? Previously he had been but feeble-minded; now he was a hopeless maniac. His egoism, his grandiloquent utterances, his vain-glorious assumption of an imaginary kingship, even the sonorous phrases of the sustained rhetoric in which he proclaimed himself Monarch of the Moor, were nothing but so many symptoms of the most pronounced form of megalomania. Here was a predicament such as I had not anticipated in my utmost thoughts. Instead of being safe, my secret—the formula that could devastate a world and rend humanity to smoking fragments—was in the possession of a raving madman!

"Prudence bade me flee from the Moor and hide myself in some populous, well-policed city where I could laugh at the threats of the fantastic monster. But, although I toyed with the project, I could not leave Exmoor until I had safeguarded my secret by destroying the Terror of the Moor. It was to be a duel to the death between us, and I hope you will not accuse me of empty bravado when I say that I was fighting for something far more precious than my own life.

"It would be superfluous for me to detail the precautions with which I surrounded myself, for you have already seen them. I converted Moor Lodge into a veritable fortress and always kept a loaded weapon within arm's reach. I wished to face my ordeal alone, but my dear wife resolutely refused to leave me,