Page:Weird Tales Volume 27 Issue 01 (1936-01).djvu/37

Rh Weird Tales v27n01p35.png

men who had been conferring with Varley and were now waiting to go to lunch with him.

The six chatted in pairs to one another. The cage waited, with the operator humming a tune. Around them, in the big building, the prosaic business of prosaic people was being done. Nothing farther from the abnormal or horrible could be imagined. Yet terror and death were there, in that cage, with the others.

The glass-paneled doors to Varley's office opened. The operator snapped to attention and those in the cage stopped talking and stared respectfully at the man who came to the cage doors.

Varley was a man of sixty, gray-haired, with a coarse but kindly face dominated by a large nose which his enemies called bulbous. He wore the hat that had made him famous—a blue-gray fedora which he ordered in quantity lots and wore exclusive of all other colors, fabrics or fashions.