Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 6 (1925-12).djvu/49

 socket, staring straight at me, the hideous, bloody eye I had torn from Herrington’s head on that tragic, never-to-be-forgotten or expiated night!

“As I looked into that awful orb and as it looked back at me, I felt my reason go. Fascinated, I gazed on and on; and the more I looked, the more hideous became the stare that met my stare. How long I sat there, spellbound, hypnotized, I do not know. Finally, it seems hours afterward, I rose, and with a wild, hysterical laugh, lifted the eye out of its socket in that awful box and, putting it between my teeth, crunched it, spitting it out upon the floor a mangled pulp.

“Then, laughing deliriously, I took the box itself and hurled it through the window—into the night. I heard the glass tinkle, I heard the box strike on the ground below. Then I flung myself into a chair and laughed loud and long. It seemed as if I should never stop laughing.

“And there they found me. Ha, ha! Even yet, when I think of it, I must laugh. Ha, ha! Ha, ha!”

back, sickened, as Ainsworth’s maudlin laughter rang through the steel corridors of the madhouse.

That is all. Shortly afterward I left him. Three months later he died—died laughing, laughing insanely.

We parted at the door.
 * No angry word was said.

One found you stark upon the floor.
 * And told me you were dead.

Yet never moon shall rise,
 * Nor sun at evening set,

But I shall feel your flaming eyes
 * Whose fire I would forget.

And when the shadows creep
 * Along these ghostly walls,

A phantom wakes me out of sleep
 * With eery voice that calls.

Alas! am I to blame
 * Because you love too well?

Why should you nightly call my name,
 * Your sorry tale to tell?

To that mysterious bourn
 * Where happy souls abide

Return again, that I who mourn
 * May know that you have died!