Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 5 (1926-11).djvu/127

 dreamer of wild and unheard-of powers, an Edgar Poe among the Egyptians, or"

Professor Dewey, paused without stating his alternative. I presume he wanted his heresy to sink in, for he waited 'several moments before continuing:

"These crocodile gods, these cat-headed and bat-eared divinities are really more debased than anything to be found anywhere in the modern world. Even your barbarous black fellow in Africa or Australia would be incapable of worshiping anything so vile. And yet if we are to believe historians the Egyptians had a high degree of ethical culture. They would not fashion such horrors willingly. I have often thought"

Again my friend hesitated, as if ashamed to put his theory into words. My eagerness apparently reassured him.

. Why should we suppose that men are the only intelligent beings on this planet? There is so much evidence to the contrary, so very much evidence, that I feel justified in my theory. I do not think that I am a fool. My enemies" (I fear my friend suffered from a persecution complex) "would give years of their lives to overhear this conversation. But they shall only hear of the results—

Professor Dewey sank down on a chair as if exhausted. Beads of sweat stood out horribly on his high yellow forehead. His lips quivered.

"George," he stammered. "We must put it to the test. We must sleep here tonight. Unless, of course, you fear to sleep in the room with that."

"But what is that, really?" I asked, pointing with horror to the colossal mummy.

My friend did not answer me directly, but his words were dreadfully disturbing.

"Twenty or thirty thousand years ago the Egyptians buried their first kings.

was sleeping A soundly, but something made me sit up. I am not sure whether I dreamed a sound, or whether a sound had actually come from the corner of the room where the great mummy stood solemnly in its fifty wrappings. But whether the dismal noise had any basis in fact it was a profoundly disturbing thing to hear at 3 o'clock in the morning.

Perhaps you have listened to hounds baying at night across lonely moors, or perhaps you have heard in the tropics the horrid moans of small monkeys when they awake from their mindless sleep and see the stars watching them evilly. If you have heard such sounds you may have a remote idea of how vile these audibly sinister exhibitions of evil and fright seem to a normally constituted man.

The low whining that I heard (and it occasionally seemed to rise to an actual baying) did not frighten me. But had the chair that loomed unpleasantly before me out of the gloom suddenly entered into conversation with the sofa, or had the clock walked across the mantel, I should not have been more horrified.

I sat up and waited. For several moments nothing happened, but then I heard a low scratching and scraping as if something were trying to get out of the closet. Claws of some sort were indubitably at work somewhere.

"Rats!" I reflected, and I clung to the suggestion warmly. Of course there would be rats in a house given over to unhallowed and unsavory practises. "The professor is fortunate to have rats to do the really