Page:Weird Tales Volume 4 Number 2 (1924-05-07).djvu/140

 my flashlight. Ah-h! there he was—a crumpled, shapeless mass! Never again would he trouble me!

But why had I not heard him strike the stones? I shuddered—I must get a grip on myself, or something would break ! Rest—sleep—that was what I needed. A mild sleeping draught, and I crawled shivering into bed, comforting myself with the knowledge that—It would never molest me.

For hours, it seemed, I tossed and thought—cursing my nerves, the impotent drug, and It. Sleep! Sleep! I must have it or go mad! The draught was not strong enough—I would double the dose!

Swinging my feet to the floor, I was about to arise, when a sound from the hall outside my door—a sound as though some heavy body was being dragged along the floor—brought back all my terror! With ears straining and eyes wide with dread, I stared at the door—it moved slowly—slowly—jerkily—half open—then—I saw—It! Humping—slithering—like a monstrous worm, a hideous, gruesome mass of broken, twisted flesh, It rolled in and started for me!

Loathsome—repulsive—It flattened out with each awkward lurch—quivered sickeningly—then, swelling with waves of snaky contractions, arose for another plunge! And all the while, from the face, crushed out of all human semblance, two shiftless eyes—two eyes absolutely expressionless—dead—stared at me! Pent up terror suffocated me! I could not move—I could not cry out—I could not tear my fascinated gaze from those two fish-like eyes!

Nearer—nearer! One of the bloody hands reached out, clutched my ankle, and began to fumble upward!

A horrible scream broke the spell—I tore myself from that awful hand and sprang upright on the bed! With eyes unblinking and purpose unchanged, It grasped the bed and began to draw Itself up! Higher—higher! The shapeless head was on a level with my feet! Another heaving hunch—It hung a moment—then lost Its hold and slumped down almost to the floor!

Freed from that cold, relentless gaze, my paralysis left me! I leaped over It—fell—scrambled to my feet and rushed wildly into my study! Quick as I was, I saw It flop out of my bedroom as I slammed and locked the study door!

With my back against the door, my pounding heart choking me, and that slithering slump in my ears, hopeless despair seized me! Then in that moment of panic, the training of years of research brought a thought which sent me stumbling to my desk! My colleagues—the world must know of this horrible, unreal, unbelievable consequence of my operation! It must not be lost!

It is the end! I feel it! There is no escape from that relentless, soulless monster! I hear it now! It is at the door—pushing—sliding—

T WAS almost daylight, when Detectives Gibbons and O'Mara, responding to a wild, incoherent telephone call, entered the apartment of Dr. Horace Tremaine, the eminent brain surgeon, and were greeted by the noisy, excited barking of a little fox terrier.

Sprawled across his desk, a revolver grasped in his hand and a bullet hole in his right temple, lay Dr. Tremaine; and, upon the desk beneath him, they found a heap of closely written sheets—all clear and legible except the last page, which was scrawling and irregular, plainly indicating a terrible mental stress.

The officers reported the facts, and, the air shaft revealed nothing, and upon the operating table in the laboratory was the accumulated dust of weeks of disuse.

The officers reported the facts, and, when inquiry brought the reply that Major and Mrs. Selwyn Morris were still in France, the weird story of the manuscript was attributed to mental aberration and pigeon-holed, where I found it.

N the anatomy house of Trinity College, Dublin," says Dr. Wilkinson, "is a human skeleton of between seven and eight feet high. They told me it belonged to one Magrath, an orphan, in this county, somewhere near Cloyne. This child fell into the hands of the famous Berkeley, then bishop of that see. This subtile doctor who denied the existence of matter, was as inquisitive in his physical researches as he was whimsical in his metaphysical speculations. When I tell you that he had well-nigh put an end to his own existence, by experimenting what are the sensations of a person dying on the gallows, you will be more ready to forgive him for the treatment of the poor foundling, whose story I am now to finish. The bishop had a strange fancy to know whether it was not in the power of art to increase the human stature. And this unhappy orphan appeared to him a fit subject for trial. He made his essay according to his preconceived theory, whatever it might be, and the consequence was, that Magrath became seven feet high in his sixteenth year. He was carried through various parts of Europe, for the last years of his life, and exhibited as the prodigious Irish giant. But so disproportioned were his organs that he cantractedcontracted [sic] an universal imbecility of body and mind, and died of old age at twenty. His under jaw was monstrous, yet the skull did not exceed the common size."

R. TILLY, once the owner of Pentilly House, was a celebrated atheist of the last age. He was a man of wit, and had by rote all the ribaldry and commonplace jests against religion and scripture which are well suited to display pertness and folly, and to unsettle a giddy mind, but are offensive to men of sense, whatever their opinions may be, and are neither intended nor adapted to investigate the truth. The brilliancy of Mr. Tilly's wit, however, carried him a degree further than we often meet with in the annals of profaneness. In general the witty atheist is satisfied with entertaining his contemporaries, but Mr. Tilly wished to have his sprightliness known to posterity. With this view, in ridicule of the resurrection, he obliged his executors to place his dead body, in his usual garb, and in his elbow chair, upon the top of a hill, and to arrange on a table before him, bottles, glasses, pipes, and tobacco. In this situation he ordered himself to be immured in a tower of such magnitude and such dimensions as he described, where he proposed, he said, patiently to await the event! All this was done; and the tower, still enclosing its tenant, remains as a monument of his impiety and profaneness.