Page:Weird Tales Volume 29 Number 1 (1937-01).djvu/93

 "Funny thing," he grinned horridly, "but it was a-lyin' right there where I was a-settin'."

The firelight scintillated on the bright steel. "It doesn't look so very old," I commented, more to myself than anyone else.

The black gums bared. "I reckon it ain't so old. Only a mite over four hundred years, I reckon. This is the knifethat old Kobold's whelp used to sculp his old dad—and to cut off his haid! Feel that edge."

He extended the blade to me. I drew back.

The cyclops cackled mockingly, "Gran'pap Kobold, he warn't feared of man nor devil!" The eye winked confidentially. "He'd as soon slit your throat as look at ye. That's the kind of man he was! Iron-fisted! He couldn't be puttin' up with the law. 'Cause he was the law hisself! That's why he come across the water. Not that he wanted to much, I reckon!" His laugh rattled through the room like loose bones. "But y' can't do much when the Devil sends a storm that blows ye across!"

" [sic]The cyclops laughed hissingly and spat into the fire. His gaze swung back to my face with a sudden intensity.

"But, like I tole ye, he was a-needin' new blood new blood The cold was a-creepin' into his bones." His taloned fingers curved and slowly clenched.

As I stared into that writhing face glistening with sweat, it seemed to take on a glow, an uncanny, greenish aura. The slack chin seemed to strengthen, to grow heavier, and in those grotesque, shriveled features burned a mad, brutal virility!

"But they caught him one night!" The cyclops' voice clattered with a harsh note of fury. A chill malaise crept over me as I stared into that terrible visage. "They caught him!" the cyclops snarled. "They caught him and drove him out! And we run, my boys and my three daughters—we run! And then"

The great burning eye closed slowly. And as I stared in sick horror it seemed that it was not really an eye at all. No—no eye at all, but a swollen scar—a scar from whose ends stretched two finer, dead-white lines that completely encircled the base of his scalp—the mark of the scalper's knife!

"The young scound'el stabbed me!" the horror roared in a strange, deep voice—a voice that I heard as if through a vast stretch of space and time. "He stabbed me!" he screamed madly.

I stared into the sunken blank walls of flesh covering the eyesockets. And, even as I stared, they lifted and I was gazing into a pair of mad, burning, red-rimmed eyes.

The knife flashed, and before my very eyes the creature had slashed his own throat, sawing the knife back and forth until the head dropped off, hit the floor, and rolled across the boards. I stared at it as if in a dream. I remember vividly an instant of crowning horror when the head, as it came to rest on the floor, looking at me, closed one eye in a ribald wink.

I got out of that accursed house, across the moonlit crater, up the face of the cliff, and back to civilization is a confused nightmare of terror and madness. I can recall only flashes of my mad flight—the gibing creaking of the spinning millwheel, the dull crash of some heavy object as I fled from the room—an object that brushed my coat-tails as I passed under the door-lintel—the goblin laughter of the brook, the searing pain of my hands and knees as I tore them on the cruel cliff rocks, the eery moonlight sifting through a forest gasping, stum-