Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 4 (1926-10).djvu/123

 the gates to my memory. I thought of my mistress and of my innocent children, and I sobbed despondently. I traversed and retraversed my entire life from the beginning of my miserable existence to this experience of horror. Gradually my sobs quieted and I had recourse in my God.

For about the space of a glass of sand I lay imperturbably, my lips moving in prayer. Then I became cognizant of the proximity of the lid. I did not again endeavor to reach the cover with my head after my former racking experience, but I resorted to another means of finding its proximity. I summoned what feeble strength I had left and forcibly blew air upward. At once I felt a draft on my face; the air had returned at the propinquity of the lid. At this discovery I sought to compose the feeling of haunting alarm which rose within me, but hardly had I attempted to do so, when a biting sensation in my hands and arms acquainted me with the return of the rats, increased in number. I shrieked and screamed to scare them off, but to no avail, for they attacked me as before.

Simultaneously with these dire occurrences a revolting nausea took possession of my senses. The air had become so foul that it oppressed me s with its obnoxious poison. Cold sweat stood out in great beads upon my forehead. All my strength had deserted me; I could no longer even sob, and my breathing became more and more difficult as the lid came down. My imagination began to conjure up before me horrible visions. I believed that I saw Torquemada laughing delightedly at my sorry plight; I imagined Satan grinning at me, watching greedily for my soul. There were others, too, horrible faces leering at me through the gloom. I shut my eyes hut I could not shut out these damnable sights. They grew upon me, they assumed ghastly proportions, their faces twisted into horrible gargoylesque counterparts; gradually they merged into a vague, indistinct, grotesque mass, and were swirled away by the eddying darkness.

I could feel the lid now, lightly at first, for it advanced but slowly. A space passed, and the pressure began to pain me. Then came to me a last great power, and I shouted and raved, swearing horribly, until the sweat rolled down my cheeks in great drops. The pressure beeame more and more pronounced, the air more obnoxious, the gnawing more persistent, the racking pain in my shoulders more torturous with each twitch, and at length I became oblivious of all.

am I doing here? Was I not in the iron coffin? Have I died and come to life?

The sun easts long patches of light upon the stone floor of my cell, and forms a network of conflicting shadows with the aid of the heavy bars at my window. My clothes are tom, bedraggled. I lack three fingers of the right hand, and one and a half of another of the left.

Why is my food reached toward me at the end of a pole? Why is the door of this room never opened? Why does my keeper hurl disgusting epithets at me every time he nears me? What is the meaning of all this? Why am I called such unbearable, bestial names? Above all, why am I so unjustly called that which is most oft repeated, that which, of all, I deserve the least?

"Lunatic!"

At this word there comes upon me again that horrible nausea that attacked me in the coffin of Lissa, and I shriek in terror as those memories surge over me like the resistless waves of ocean. And as my screams reverberate down the corridor, answering sereams come from other eells—and my keeper laughs and shouts filthy curses at me.