Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 1 (1925-01).djvu/78



HE moon's stealthy searchlight extended long, ghostly fingers into the darkened bedroom on the second floor of a fine old house that huddled between encroaching warehouses on a street that had known better days. They fell on a girl, asleep in her canopied bed. She stirred restlessly, then sat up among her pillows. Both slender hands pressed hard against her face. Her indrawn breath held suspended the scream that struggled to escape. The elfin face, framed by its dark hair, stared out in terror; the black eyes were haunted wells in its deathly pallor.

The girl looked down at her hands, and turned the strangely chased band on the third finger of one of them. In the shadow of the canopy, where the rays of moonlight did not penetrate, the ring gave off a faint phosphorescent radiance. The intricately chased wings that elongated themselves in the circlet of the ring glowed faintly, but the lump of greenish gold in the center, no less intricately chased, which, like a jewel, formed the beetle's body, shone with a strange and steady radiance. Desperately the girl tried to pull the ring from her finger, but as she worked it up over the first knuckle, some power seemed to be pulling against her, and she quickly slipped it back into place.

She crossed the room to look out upon the garden below. The lawn near the house was in shadow, across which lay two slanting oblongs of light. As the girl at the window caught sight of the blocks of orange on the grass, she shrank back in terror. They narrowed to the merest line, as she made her way back to the bed.

"It is he," she murmured, as if the whisper might somehow reach the man of whom she spoke. "It is he, at work again! What can there be about these strange activities in his laboratory to terrify me so?"

Then, as if some unseen hand had placed itself heavily on her shoulder, confronting her for an explanation of that whisper, the girl huddled fearfully against her pillows. She pressed against her eyes those pale hands, on the third finger of one of which the ring gave out its strange emanation.

At the same moment, Professor Kurt Maquarri turned from a window in the cellar of that house. In his long laboratory coat, the bearded hunchback needed only the peaked hat to make one think irresistibly of some malevolent alchemist of the middle ages. Dank hair hung in strands