Page:Weird Tales Volume 9 Number 4 (1927-04).djvu/14

 transfigured by a beauty more than human. A girl of a civilization behind our own—or perhaps one in advance—I do not know. She was robed in a short, simple garment more like a glistening, glowing silver veil than a dress. Her hair was long—a tangled dark mass. She reclined there in an attitude of ease and the abandonment of maidenly solitude. I say that she was more than beautiful—oh, Frank"

Brett's voice had suddenly lost the precise exactitude of the scientist. He seemed to have forgotten his father—Martt and Frannie; it was as though he were confiding his human emotions only to me.

"Beautiful, Frank. A strange, wild beauty, with a curious ethereal aspect to it. I don't know—it's indescribable. Human—half human, but half divine."

himself; the scientist in him again became uppermost; but though he now spoke with careful phrasing, his face remained flushed.

"It was some moments before I saw additional details. And then I realized that the girl was not alone. Upon her bare feet were a sort of sandal with thongs crossing the ankle. And standing there beside one of her feet were two tiny human figures. In height, the length perhaps of her little foot. Men of human form; yet queerly grotesque; misshapen. One of them was in the act of reaching upward toward the tassel of her sandal cord where it dangled from her ankle; reaching as though to grasp it and draw himself upward. The other was watching; and both were grinning with gnomelike malevolence.

"Nor was this all, for behind the girl, a brief distance away in what appeared a woodland dell, was another figure—a man of aspect akin to the grinning gnomes, save that in comparative size even to the girl he was gigantic. Ten times her height, perhaps, he stood behind her towering into the trees about him. A man of short, squat legs, dark with matted hair; a garaient like the gnomes', which might have been an animal skin; a heavy massive chest; black hair long to his neck. A face with clipped hair upon it. He was regarding the girl; a grin, but with a leer to it—horribly sinister. And in his great hands, brandished like a bludgeon, was an uprooted tree.

"Have I given you an idea of motion in the scene? There was none. The girl was obviously wholly unaware that she was not alone. She lay motionless. But the lack of movement in her—in them all—was more marked than that. The girl's lips were parted in a half-smile of revery; but the outlines of her bosom beneath the silver veil did not move. There was no movement of breath; no change of expression. The gnomes, the giant—not the minutest change could I see mirrored in their faces.

"Yet it was so lifelike, I could not doubt it was life—and that the motion was there though I could not see it. I watched all night, shaken with this fragment of drama, perhaps tragedy, which I was witnessing—but even the girl's eyelids did not tremble. Dawn came; the scene faded.

"For a month I did not even tell Father; and Frank, the vision of that girl has never left me. The menace—gruesome, sinister—upon her—and her beauty"

"Haven't you ever seen her again?" I asked eagerly. "Was it life? How could it be life without motion?"

"Oh, he saw her again," Martt exclaimed. "I've seen her—we've all seen her."