Page:Weird Tales Volume 9 Number 3 (1927-03).djvu/121

 looked into the darkness. Pear had its grip upon me, and I felt my hair begin to stand on end.

For there was something in that blackness, something visible—moving!

Scarcely had my eyes fallen upon this amorphous, ghostly thing when it rose into the air, slowly and without the faintest sound. Up it rose and up, whilst I sat watching, immovable, speechless, as though in the clutch of some uncanny charm.

Up! Up to the very roof of the cavern! Of a sudden there was a fearful change in its form. Then the ghost, now of monstrous shape, was coming down— 





HEN Lazarus left the grave, where for three days and three nights he had been under the enigmatical sway of death, and returned alive to his dwelling, for a long time no one noticed in him those sinister things which made his name a terror as time went on. Gladdened by the sight of him who had been returned to life, those near to him made much of him, and satisfied their burning desire to serve him, in solictude for his food and drink and garments. They dressed him gorgeously, and when, like a bridegroom in his bridal clothes, he sat again among them at the table and ate and drank, they wept with tenderness. And they summoned the neighbors to look at him who had risen miraculously from the dead. These came and shared the joy of the hosts. Strangers from far-off towns and hamlets came and adored the miracle in tempestuous words. The house of Mary and Martha was like a beehive.

Whatever was found new in Lazarus' face and gestures was thought to be some trace of a grave illness and of the shocks recently experienced. Evidently the destruction wrought by death on the corpse was only arrested by the miraculous power, but its effects were still apparent; and what death had succeeded in doing with Lazarus' face and body was like an artist's unfinished sketch seen under thin glass. On Lazarus' temples, under his eyes, and in the hollows of his cheeks, lay a deep and cadaverous blueness; cadaverously blue also were his long fingers, and around his finger-nails, grown long in the grave, the blue had become purple and dark. On his lips, swollen in the grave, the skin had burst in places, and thin reddish cracks were formed, shining as though covered with transparent 