Page:Weird Tales Volume 25 Number 05 (1935-05).djvu/122

  disappearing down the stairs to the cellar. The servants were utterly dumfounded, and watched at the head of the stairs, but their master did not return. A smell of oil was all that came up from the regions below.

After dark a rattling was heard at the door leading from the cellar into the courtyard; and a stable-boy saw Arthur Jermyn, glistening from head to foot with oil and redolent of that fluid, steal furtively out and vanish on the black moor surrounding the house. Then, in an exaltation of supreme horror, everyone saw the end. A spark appeared on the moor, a flame arose, and a pillar of human fire readied to the heavens. The House of Jermyn no longer existed.

The reason why Arthur Jermyn's fragments were not collected and buried lies in what was found afterward; principally the thing in the box. The Stuffed Goddess was a nauseous sight, withered and eaten away, but it was clearly a mummified white ape of some unknown species, less hairy than any recorded variety, and infinitely nearer mankind—quite shockingly so.

Detailed description would be rather unpleasant, but two salient particulars must be told, for they fit in revoltingly with certain notes of Sir Wade Jermyn's African expeditions and with the Congolese legends of the white god and the ape-princess. The two particulars in question are these: The arms on the golden locket about the creature's neck were the Jermyn arms, and the jocose suggestion of M. Verhaeren about a certain resemblance as connected with the shriveled face applied with vivid, ghastly, and unnatural horror to none other than the sensitive Arthur Jermyn, great-great-great-grandson of Sir Wade Jermyn and an unknown wife.

Members of the Royal Anthropological Institute burned the thing and threw the locket into a well, and some of them do not admit that Arthur Jermyn ever existed.

Tea-drinking Is a gentle art Best practised In a room serene With open windows Through which drifts Breath of wisteria, And from a cup That blends in color With the precious beverage. In the aroma Lies strange lasting peace.