Page:Weird Tales volume 31 number 03.djvu/40

 The taste of almond was strong on Dmitri's tongue.

For a split second his eyes seemed bursting from their sockets. A horrible, retching moan welled from his saliva-drenched mouth; blue veins leaped on his hairless temples. Then, like a pinpricked balloon, he collapsed; his massive head rolled forward upon his flaccid chest; he huddled there, stilly, in his chair....

"The end of you, Dmitri," Peters was whispering. "The end of you!"

And then he heard Ethredge's voice, dazed with the horror he had undergone, yet implacable, now, with heartbroken resolve.

"We must kill him, Peters! You are right; Mary would not have us sell honor. even to save her!"

Ethredge, his eyes unseeing, his mind Dear-crazed by suffering, did not know that Dmitri was already dead. And yet——

"Dmitri is dead," Peters said softly. His whole attention was focussed upon Mary, upon the small huddled figure that, in the instant of Dmitri's passing, had suddenly relaxed, lay now in semi-conscious exhaustion. And in Peters' heart there leaped exultation; for in his mind had been, all along, the strange, weird conviction that the end of Dmitri would bring release to those he had enslaved. For Peters knew that Dmitri had instilled into the subconscious of his victims the belief that he was infallible, the belief that he was a kind of god, protecting them, shielding them, curing them of their ills. But now the man-god was dead, and, of necessity, in each of his dupes the blind, limitless sea of the subconscious was rejecting the theories he had taught, spewing out his broken image, obliterating him, in disillusionment. from the chasms of memory. Before Peters' eyes the unnatural tendency to convulsion that Dmitri had instilled in Mary Roberts' subconscious, the cruel weapon he had implanted within the core of her being and goaded, in terror-ridden desperation, into life, had died in the instant her subconscious became aware of Dmitri's passing, had ceased as abruptly as though a circuit had been broken, as completely as though an evil light had been extinguished....

Peters, stooping over Mary, now limply, weakly relaxed, slipped his strong right arm beneath her shoulders, murmured swift, soothing words. Sanity, he saw, was flooding back into her eyes. And then she looked toward and beyond Ethredge, and she screamed—and screamed again.

Peters' eyes followed her rigid gaze, and as he looked at the servant Stepan his nerves crawled and the short hairs at the base of his neck bristled in an ecstasy of horror.

"Dear—God!"

In that second of unsurpassable horror there blazed across Peters' mind a strange kaleidoscope of tableaux, tableaux that were all the same, tableaux of the obese Dmitri and the small, self-effacing Stepan enacting a multitude of Dmitri's experiments, experiments in which invariably the small automatic hammered bullets into Stepan's chest, the blow-torch flamed in Stepan's face, hot coins were dropped with seeming harmlessness on Stepan's wrists! That horror on the floor, that horror that had been the servant Stepan. that horror that had. in the moment of Dmitri's passing, changed!"

"Dear—God!"

For the flesh-and- blood face of the servant Stepan had vanished, and in its place there remained only nightmare, only a flame-charred, crimson skull! The horror lay upon its back, its arms outflung, as it had lain while Ethredge pinioned it down. Its jacket was open, and the