Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 5 (1926-11).djvu/128

 dirty work," I mused. "They save him the bother of burning the odds and ends. It must be damnably difficult to get rid of fingernails and hair and such things, unless one burns them, and of course the rats would save him that task. The professor is really very fortunate. Dear, jolly rats!"

Then I realized the fatuousness of my reflections and passed my hand rapidly back and forth across my face. My forehead was infernally warm; I was excited, feverish. "It's probably a touch of influenza," I thought. "I should never have slept in this eold room." I recalled that I had been sneezing and coughing most of the previous afternoon. The slightest touch of fever makes me delirious—in that respect I am abnormally favored.

I pulled the blankets about my neck and turned over. I think then that I slept, but I am convinced that what I saw later had some external significance. The thing was more than a mere dream and certainly more than a hallucination. It was, I think, an actual body of memories projected across the room. When I saw it I was sitting up, and I heard the clock outside strike 4.

A white immensity spread before me, and for a moment its whiteness blinded me. It was like a series of projections on the silver screen. The white substance was continually changing, now thinning, now thickening, and horrid, distorted forms moved about in it. The forms were amorphous, and I could not at first distinguish them clearly. They were not altogether human. They seemed to have the bodies of men, but.

When the vision, or call it what you will, became clearer I saw that the unmentionable creatures had formed into a solid phalanx, and that they were marching solemnly before me. They carried between them some unspeakable object which they made no effort to conceal.

If the forms of the marchers were revolting, the form of the long, distorted thing that they carried was infernal. It was covered with hair, but I never had seen anything like it under the stars. It had a sunken batlike face, and great, dog-shaped ears, and its yellow teeth glittered ominously in the strange, unnatural light. The thing was obviously lifeless, and its cheeks were sunken and hollow.

The watchers carried torches which they waved exultantly as if almost glad that the thing had died. I had a curious sympathy for these others, but heaven knows they were vile enough. The torches gave off a weird blue light and even, I thought, a mephitic smell; and as I watched, new ones were lit and the swaying, blasphemous procession moved forward more rapidly.

And then the chanting and intoning commenced, and the dreadful hymns for the dead swelled and revibrated in the room until I put my hands before my ears to shut out the ancient and obscene chants.

"Our master out of the skies is dead!" they wailed. "Deep, deep in the earth shall we bury our king. Long has he ruled us, and horrible the evil he did to us, but he was our king out of the skies, and we revere his memory. Horrible his black tongue that shot out fire, horrible the maidens he devoured, horrible the blood he drank, but he was a king. In the book of the dead it is written that he shall be judged by gods, by his peers he shall be judged. He shall appear as a snake, as a reptile before his peers, but by his ears they shall know him."

Then the picture cleared terribly, and I saw that the procession trod hot reddish sands, and a great stone effigy loomed up behind them. It was a sphinx, but a more ancient