Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 3 (1926-09).djvu/119



HERE were swimming, swirling clouds of gray and black, flecked with ruby points of dancing light. There were humming, droning sounds, broken in upon by staccato sharpnesses of speech, cracked by emotion into short but pregnant words. There was an aching of muscles, as if she had received repeated blows.

Bessie Gillespie struggled back into consciousness that did not for some time seem normal to her, for it was a strange and mysterious scene upon which her hazel eyes finally opened, half dazed.

She lay where Gretel Armitage must have flung her drooping body when the doctor had burst into the cabin with his electric flash; stretched in crumpled relaxation upon the board flooring, bruised and aching.

The doctor had stood his flashlight upon the floor in order to give light and at the same time leave his hands free for whatever action he found it necessary to take. The circles of light from the torch illuminated the ceiling and but dimly gave relief to the white faces of the doctor and his wife, as they confronted each other.

Gretel was obviously at bay. Her blue eyes were deep spheres of strange ruby fire. Between snarling red lips shone the pointed sharpness of her glistening white teeth. The expression upon that fair face was the look of a thwarted fiend. Her hands, lifted on either side of that terrible countenance, were like the talons of some unclean bird of prey. She crouched and cringed, as if in dire fear and fury.

The doctor, on the contrary, stood upright, his deep eyes glowing with what seemed to the wondering Bessie a strangely comforting radiance. His melancholy face was wearier than ever; sadder than ever; as if he had all at once found yet another burden to lay upon his soul. But behind that sadness a something surged and swelled and broke out in his few words that seemed charged with a more than ordinary pregnancy and power. It was as if he felt within himself that which would bear him on to triumph over evil, and feeling it, he had no fear for the outcome.

Painfully drawing herself into a