Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/78

598 voice came thickly, almost croaking. "Ismet!"

She stood quite still. Only her left hand moved slightly, and with a start he saw her palms and nails were stained a brilliant red with henna, and each finger dyed up to the second joint with the red juice.

He could see the small pulse throbbing in her throat, knew that she was fighting for self-mastery. At length: "Won't you take your usual seat?" she begged, motioning with her painted hand to the big wing chair he was wont to sit in when they talked.

Stepping slowly, like a man who wades knee-deep in water, he found the chair and stood irresolutely, waiting her next move.

Again she motioned him to sit and moved toward him with an effortless, gliding walk, turning her flat hips but slightly, and at each step he heard the soft clink-clong of golden anklets. Across the fire from him she halted and slipped off her heelless scarlet shoes, then dropped cross-legged to the hearth rug. As she turned her feet palm-upward he could see that they were painted like her hands with henna juice, heels, toes and soles stained brilliant red.

Her face was bloodless, almost livid underneath its overlay of make-up, and her hands were clasped together in a gesture seeming to entreat his mercy. For a long breathing-space she sat and stared at him, her large eyes seeming to probe deep into his very soul. Mysteriously beautiful with that thin white face and darkened eyes and scarlet lips she was, and when she smiled a little it increased the mystery of her countenance. A passage from Petrarch flashed through his mind:

Her clear, high voice recalled him. "Si Abernathy, you see me as I have been for the last five years." Then, as he made no comment: "For five years, till a little while before I met you, I had been like this."

More from instinct than from reason—he had no faintest notion why he said it—he replied: "And before that, what were you?"

She threw the answer at him like a missile:

"Lynne Foster!"

"Lynne Foster?" he repeated, not so much in question as bewilderment.

"Yes, Hugh, I was—perhaps I am—Lynne Foster."

evil, slimy-footed as a monstrous snail, seemed to creep into the quiet firelit room, filling it with ghastly chill, dank, cold and leering. There was no seeing it, but—there it was. He had the answer, now, and as he grasped it the abysmal iciness of realization seemed to spread paralysis through every nerve and fiber of his body. This was it, then: She was mad. The summer was a lucid interval, but with the prescience the insane sometimes have, she had realized obsession might lay hold on her at any moment. Here it was. He felt his fingers tighten on the chair-arms, in his chest beside his heart there was a frantic, suffocated feeling, he was breathless, choking, smothering

"You knew him, didn't you?" Her question called him back across the borderline of consciousness.

He had to humor her. You could not reason with a lunatic. "Yes, we grew up together, went to school together"

"And went swimming in Paint Creek on Old Man Mosher's place, and once old Anton Schilling caught us in his