Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 5 (1926-11).djvu/91

Rh cry, without even a moan, he sank upon the soft grass, unconscious.

The tall, black-bearded man spoke again, calmly, to the great black beast, which had by his command remained a snarling neutral during the struggle. The great shadowy shape again crouched tremblingly at his feet, whimpering in a sudden and inexplicable fear of its master.

The tall, dark man stooped. In his hand was a tiny, bright instrument. With one hand he caught up the loose flesh on the creature's back and then suddenly plunged the deadly little instrument deep therein. A little sting, like the bite of a horsefly, was felt by the beast, then it sank to the ground, an inert, crumpled mass like the senseless man at its side.

The hyoscin had done its work well.

woke suddenly from a nightmare of horrors to the realization that he was alive and the belief that he had been dreaming. Instantly, however, a nauseating weakness seized him. His head and face throbbed painfully; his heart beat violently. He had a strange sensation of unfamiliarity with respect to his physical person; in some inexplicable way he seemed to have lost the sense of his own identity. He felt queerly ill. The acrid fumes of some powerful anesthetic arose from his lungs; its pungent odor filled the room. Dread filled his mind.

He was not in his own quarters—he was in a shaky, ramshackle bed in a cheap and dingy room. And beside him, in a drug-wrought stupor, lay the woman—his companion in sin!

Ugh! He turned from her in sudden disgust and loathing, and the quick movement brought a sharp increase of the queer pain in his face and forehead.

With trembling fingers he touched his face. Merciful heaven! What was the matter with him? In touching his face his hand had come in contact with long, coarse, bristly, animal-like hair!

"Good God!" Stannard gasped in bewilderment. This was no dream! What horrible thing had happened to him?

He sprang from the bed with a queer, catlike leap and rose to his full height in front of the the cracked mirror. For one instant only he looked in horrified amazement at the beastlike visage that glared back at him from the cracked glass, then, with an ejaculation of terror and startled wonder, he backed quickly away from the awful reflection.

For what the amazed and perplexed creature that had once been a man had now seen before him was the black, bristly, sharp-muzzled visage of a wolf—a great black wolf's head covered with long, coarse, matted hair with which his own coal-black hair seemed to mingle as though it had always been an integral part! Narrow, cruel, yellowish-black slant eyes blazed balefully at him!

Through the same mysterious, supernatural agency which had wrought the puzzling, fantastic and mind-destroying change, his chin had, in some inexplicable manner, risen to meet his nose, with which it now formed the long, sharp, horrible snout of a wolf. Black gums, rolling back from the long aperture which now formed his mouth, disclosed a great lolling red tongue flanked by rows of sharp, flashing white fangs—four saberlike incisors interlapping at the forward opening of the saliva-dripping jaws!

With a wild yelping howl, half human, half beastlike in its ferocity, the weird thing leaped madly over the bed and the silent, drug-stupefied woman who lay as one dead. Crouching for an instant, it gave vent to another maddened, terrifying howl of defiance, and then it leaped from the