Page:Weird Tales Volume 9 Number 3 (1927-03).djvu/115

 as a happy augury and pressed on with a lighter step. On to bitter disappointment.

Hours passed. We were still toiling down that awful tunnel.

At last—it was then 9 o'clock—the way became very difficult. The rock had been broken, rent, smashed by some terrible convulsion. The scene was indescribably weird and savage. And there we halted, sank down upon the rocky floor. Rhodes and Drorathusa evinced an admirable nonchalance, but in the eyes of the others burned the dull light of despair. And perhaps, too, in my own. I tried to hide it, but I could not disguise it from myself—the numbing, maddening fact that I had abandoned hope.

For a time I lay watching Rhodes, who was writing, writing in his journal. How could he do it? Who could ever find the record? At any rate, even though found, it could never be read, for the finder would be a Dro-man. It made me angry to see a man doing a thing so absurd. But I bridled speech, curbed that rising and insensate anger of mine, rolled over, closed my eyes and, strange to say, was soon asleep.

But that sleep of mine was an unbroken succession of horrors—horrors at last ended by an awakening as horrible.

Once more I was in that hewn chamber, once more I stood before the great dragon. But we had been wrong: the monster was alive. Down he sprang as I turned to flee, sank his teeth into my shoulder, raised his head high into the air and shook me as a cat shakes a mouse. Then suddenly I knew that it was not all a dream.

Teeth had sunk into my shoulder. I struggled madly, but the jaws only closed the harder. And, horror of horrors, the spot in which I had lain down was now in utter blackness. Then I was wide-awake: the teeth were Rhodes' fingers, and I heard his voice above me in the darkness:

"Not a word, Bill—unless guarded."

"What is it?" I whispered, sitting up. "And where are our phosphorus-lamps?"

"In their cylinders," was Rhodes' low answer. "We want to see without being seen, that is why. I can turn on the electric, of course, at any instant. I wish the Dromans had been nearer, on this side of that rock mass; I would have darkened theirs too."

"Without being seen?" I queried. "In heaven's name, Milton, what does it mean?"

"I don't know. Got your revolver handy?"

"Yes."

"Good! Keep it so!"

"But what is it?"

"Did you," said he, "notice that passage in the opposite wall, a few yards back?"

I whispered that I had.

"Well," said Milton , "there is something in there. And it's coming this way!"

, listening intently; but the place was as silent as the tomb.

"What," I asked, "did you hear?"

"I have no idea, Bill, what it is."

"What were the sounds like?"

"I don't know."

"Were they loud or faint?"

"Faint—mysterious."

"Great heaven!" said I; "what can it be? How long since you first heard it?"

"Only a few minutes. I can't imagine why the sounds have ceased. I wonder if it has discovered our presence."