Page:Weird Tales volume 42 number 04.djvu/55

 In the midst of my immersion in my own story of the burning of a particularly malignant witch, I suddenly noticed that the scalp muscles at the back of my head were taut and contracted and that my hair must be bristling. And I felt in my mind what my body must have been aware of for some time—that there was some creature behind me and watching me with no friendly regard.

Without seeming to divert my attention from my manuscript, I gazed up from under my brows at the mirror hanging above the fireplace. It showed the wall behind me empty, save for a framed water color of the Devil's Punchbowl at Hindhead, which was just as it should be.

With a relaxing of tenseness I returned to my work. But only for a few moments. Some words I had written earlier in the story recurred to me: "Vampires cast no refection in mirrors."

A little cold tremor passed over me. Then a spasm of fear-inspired anger at my childish timidity. Good Lord, to give a moment's credence to that Dracula clap-trap! I swung round and positively glared behind me.

There were no fearful fiends treading close behind me. There was nothing that had not been there before.

"Fool!" I addressed myself bitterly, and began to turn slowly back. En route, as it were, my eye flickered past a brass warming pan hanging on the side wall, and then abruptly flicked back to it. For I had the impression of a dim and shapeless sort of face staring from its bright round surface. I sat and regarded it.

Yes, there was certainly the effect of a face. An immobile, dead sort of face like that of the Man in the Moon and scarcely better defined.

GOT up to examine it, and it faded as I approached it, and quite disappeared when I got my nose within a yard of it, leaving just the empty surface of the pan. Yet when I sat back again in my chair, there it was once more: two round black holes of eyes, a beaky nose, a twisted gash of a mouth.

Along the top of the sideboard on the opposite side of the room to it was an assemblage of objects of ornament and utility. Prominent among them were two ebony candlesticks, top-heavy things with round, bulbous sockets for the candles. It was plain to me that the eyes of the face were simply the reflection of these two black balls, the nose a partial and distorted reflection of a vase, and the mouth—probably a dent in the pan which caught and held a content of shadow at this particular angle.

I dismissed the matter, and returned again to my scribbled pages.

In a little while I came to a passage that I judged needed wholly re-writing, and I stared thoughtfully before me while I endeavored to cast it afresh in my mind.

Subconsciously at first, and then with a start of realization, I became cognizant that I was gazing straight at another face!

It was in the carving of one of the pillars of the fireplace. From the coils of raised stone ostensibly representing climbing vines, a demoniac little visage regarded me with sharp, slanting, spiteful eyes, a vulpine face, like that of a fox cornered and snarling. So alive and venomous did it seem that I instinctively moved back a little with confused ideas of defensive measures.

That slight movement was enough to make the illusion vanish. For it was an illusion, another trick of light. Yet though I experimented by changing my attitude in my chair, I could not get the effect to repeat itself. Indeed, I even became uncertain of the spot amid the intricacies of the carvings where it had seemed to appear.

Not very surely, I returned to my business. But it was a long while before I could put those two faces from my mind.

HAD almost finished when that sickening feeling of being watched came over me again. For a little while I dared not raise my eyes from the papers that trembled in my hands. In my imagination it seemed to me that I was surrounded by a host of evil and silently threatening faces—that they leered and glowered not only from the dark corners but also from the bright surfaces of the things I had thought so homely