Page:Weird Tales Volume 9 Number 5 (1927-05).djvu/99

 he had forgotten his sister and Vida. He had forgotten everything but that certain faces were familiar—as mine. But he was now a cruel animal. He caught the cat I kept in my office, and had I not stopped him in time would have dismembered it in sheer cruelty. He was a monster!

"I let him go. God forgive me, I let loose this hideous thing upon humanity, believing it would soon destroy itself. For a long time it disappeared and I believed that the monster was dead. Then I received a letter from—him!

"He had recovered his memory—but his evil nature was still supreme. He knew instinctively what had happened because I had often aired my theories to him. And he wished only to wreak vengeance on me. Not, he carefully explained, because he regretted losing the slight remnant of good that had remained in his consciousness but because I had tricked him and employed him as a subject for my experiment! He meant to kill me and—Vida! He bade me beware of his powers, of his hypnotic strength, by which even at a distance he could control his victims. He proved this—as you have recently had cause to know—when he subjected Vida to his will, sending her with that stick to—kill! For the stick contains a wicked blade which only a spring in the handle releases. You had not discovered it. And that blade is steeped in deadly virus. But he reckoned without Vida's essential goodness. He could not compel her hypnotically to commit a crime, for it was not in her nature to do so.

"He failed in his attempt but I am ahead of my story. For months he pursued us with threatening letters. For myself I cared little, but I dreaded what might come to Vida. For latterly, the letters conveyed the suggestion that she would be the one to suffer and that through her he would reach me. But as yet the manifestations, if I may so describe them, were witnessed, or felt, by me only. At night I would awake to feel a hot breath in my face; to detect a fetid odor too horrible to be endured; to become aware of something that mopped and mowed in the shadows of the room. It came, I know, like that thing tonight, from the abyss itself—from the very pits of hell! It was wearing me down even as I told myself it could not be so. At least, it was the quintessence of hate, focused upon us, and against this hideous thing even my science was helpless.

"You know now why I could not explain, Tom. You would have thought me mad! But you saw—you saw for yourself, tonight. That awful shape which shrank and vanished before the words I spoke, a formula learned at the cost of diligent research in the ancient volumes known to but few living men, remembered—thank heaven!—tonight in time to save us all. By certain incantations, creatures from that netherworld may be summoned forth, I verily believe. And by opposing words they may be driven back whence they came. You may say it was all hypnotism—that we saw only as the audiences of Hindoo fakers see their marvelous feats, such as the fabled rope trick—but I know better.

"We came here to escape, a few months ago. It was the last stand in this unequal fight, literally good against evil. I could not touch him with the law—I waited for him to come that I might kill him and by the words I had learned, drive his evil companion back to the abyss. Then I sent for you—I needed a strong arm. Vida needed more than my frail protection—Vida who knew only that the creature once known as her uncle had become an implacable enemy.

"And, as I had hoped, on the failure of his hypnotic effort to influence