Page:Weird Tales volume 11 number 02.pdf/79

222 off there in the lake. I was looking for Brett. He came out here. Oh, Frannie"

The two girls clung to each other. It was dark where they stood. At the moment the crowd had surged the other way. Suddenly Frannie became aware of a dark form looming beside her. A man twice the size of herself. She tried to scream, but a great palm went over her face. She felt herself being jerked from her feet

She half fainted; recovered to find herself in a thicket within a few feet of the arcade. Leela was beside her. Leela panted, "Don't scream, Frannie! They'll—kill us if we scream!"

The man was with them, and a thick-set lump of a woman. Not so large now. Almost normal in size, for they were dwindling. The man was naked to the waist, a gray-white, barrel-like chest matted with hair. A face, fearsome with menacing eyes, and a head of matted black locks. And in the thicket were four homed animals; saddled, like large horses with spreading antlers. The animals were dwindling

The man rasped a command at Leela. From his belt he drew small pellets, white like tiny pills of medicine. He thrust one at Leela, forced it down her throat. Leela gasped, "You must take it, Frannie. He says—it is harmless—but if we resist—he will kill."

Then the man thrust his fingers into Frannie's mouth, his arm holding her roughly. She gulped, swallowed. It was an acrid taste

The man pushed her roughly from the thicket. And pushed Leela. His triumphant laugh was the rasp of a file on metal. Leela and Frannie stumbled to the wall of the arcade, stood clinging together. And suddenly, with the realization of what was upon her, Leela screamed. And Frannie screamed, though she did not yet understand.

A wave of nausea possessed Frannie. Her head was reeling. Voices sounded near by—familiar men's voices. My voice, and Brett's! We came running at the sound of the screams.

Frannie held tight to the swaying Leela as Brett and I rushed up. And I took Frannie in my arms. Brett was demanding, "Leela, what is it? You're not hurt, are you? What is it?"

Frannie wanted to try and tell me. "Frank—oh" She choked; her throat was constricted.

And then Frannie really knew! Within my arms she felt herself shrinking! Growing smaller; but it was not so much that; rather was it that my encircling arm was expanding, holding her more loosely.

With the horror of it, Brett and I stood apart. Frannie's nausea was passing; her head was steadier, but dizzy with the strange movement of the scene around her. She clung to Leela, and, of everything within her vision, only Leela was unchanging. The wall of the arcade was slowly passing upward; its nearer corner was moving slowly away; Brett and I were growing. Our waists reaching to Frannie's head; and then our knees. She gazed upward to where, fifteen or twenty feet above her, our horrified faces stared down.

The mind always takes its personal viewpoint. Frannie and Leela were dwindling into smallness. But now that the nausea and dizziness were past, to them, they alone were normal. Everything else seemed changing the whole scene, growing gigantic

It was a slow, crawling growth—a steady, visible movement. The ground beneath their feet was a fine white sand. To Frannie's sight this patch of sand had originally been some ten feet, with the arcade wall on one side, and a thicket on the other. But the ground was shifting