Page:Weird Tales Volume 36 Number 08 (1942-11).djvu/45

44 lights in the houses began to go out one by one. Then the streetlights vanished in a rush, and an approaching street car was blotted out, and he knew that the sound did not come altogether or directly from the thing. This was the long-predicted blackout.

He ran on with arms outstretched, feeling rather than seeing intersections as he approached them, misjudging his step at curbs, tripping and falling flat, picking himself up to stagger on half-stunned. His diaphragm contracted to a knot of pain that tied itself tighter and tighter. Breath rasped like a file in his throat. There seemed no light in the whole world, for the clouds had gathered thicker and thicker ever since sunset. No light, except those twin points of dirty red in the blackness behind.

A solid edge of darkness struck him down, inflicting pain on his shoulder and side. He scrambled up. Then a second solid obstacle in his path smashed him full in the face and chest. This time he did not rise. Dazed, tortured by exhaustion, motionless, he waited its approach.

First a padding of footsteps, with the faint scraping of claws on cement. Then a sniffling and a snuffling. Then a sickening stench. Then a glimpse again, of red eyes. And then the thing was upon him, its weight pinning him down, its jaws thrusting at his throat. Instinctively his hand went up, and his forearm was clamped by teeth whose icy sharpness stung through the layers of cloth, while a foul oily fluid splattered on his face.

At that moment light flooded upon them, and he was aware of a malformed muzzle retreating into the blackness, and of weight lifted from him. Then silence and cessation of movement. Nothing, nothing at all—except the light flooding down. As consciousness and sanity teetered in his brain, his eyes found the source of light, a glaring white disk only a few feet away. A flashlight, but nothing visible in the blackness behind it. For what seemed an eternity, there was no change in the situation—himself supine and exposed upon the ground in the unwavering circle of light.

Then a voice from the darkness, the voice of a man paralyzed by horror and supernatural fear. "God, God, God,” over and over again. Each word dragged out with prodigious effort.

An unfamiliar sensation stirred in David, a feeling almost of security and relief though he could never have told why.

"You—saw it then?” he heard issue from his own dry throat. "The hound? The—wolf?”

"Wolf? Hound?” The voice from behind the flashlight was hideously shaken. "It was nothing like that. God, I never believed in such things. But now—” Then the voice spoke out with awful certainty and conviction. "It was— It was something from the factories of hell.” Then it broke, became earthly once more. "Good grief, a man, we must get you inside.”

Then consciousness drained away.

But as it came back to him in the house to which he had been taken, he still felt that same almost tranquil sensation he had experienced when listening to the man’s words. With an effort he raised his arm, shaking his head when they tried to restrain him, and by the flickering candlelight he looked at the marks of the thing—hugh, deep pocks which had indented the flesh of his forearm for as much as half an inch without breaking the skin, each white and cold and numb to the touch. Yes, it was all true, he told himself, true beyond the possibility of disproof. But now he was no longer the only one who knew, the only one who feared, the only potential victim. There was danger, terrible danger, incredible danger, a danger big enough to shatter reality. But it was danger shared.