Page:Weird Tales volume 42 number 04.djvu/59

 noticed for the first time a diagram traced do the back of it.

It was a pentagram, executed with extremely neat draughtmanship in very thin lines of what appeared to be green ink.

As I studied it, it seemed to stand out from the paper as though it were embossed. And then the paper appeared to fade away from around it, leaving the pentagram like a green wire frame. And the wire began to glow until the center of my vision was nothing but a blankness in which the pentagram glowed like a green neon sign, which grew bigger and bigger.

The friendly firelight was being blotted out. And now there were faces, faces, grinning and leering faces pressing all about me, an increasing crowd, and a green light brightening and glowing over everything.

The last dwindling remnant of my will just managed to snap the spell, like the wrench with which one sometimes breaks out of the hypnosis of a nightmare. And in that snap, the horrors vanished, and there I was sitting in the firelight with just an ordinary piece of paper in my hand.

But not for long. In a spasm of fear and rage I screwed it into a ball and threw it into the heart of the fire. There was a brief spurt of green flame. It might have been a pinch of some chemical in one of the logs.

I stayed awake all night, but I was not troubled further by visions.

N THE morning, I packed my things and fled back to London. Dear old dirty—but safe—Bloomsbury, with the shabby temple of the British Museum, and the little streets full of foreign dining-rooms and bookshops, and the captive trees in the grimy squares!

As soon as I had got resettled in my apartment, I marched round to Mecklenburgh Square to demand of Spencer what the hell?

Though callers for him were few and far between, he had fitted a Yale lock to the door of his big bed-sitting-room at the top of the gray house, and he kept the door shut and himself on the other side of it. But he had long trusted me with a key.

I got no answer when I knocked, so I let myself in.

There was his desk in the far corner, littered with books and papers as usual, and there was his old-fashioned wing armchair, in which he spent more time asleep than in his bed, but there was no sign of him.

Of course, he might be doing some research in the Museum Reading Room. On the other hand he might be out eating in one of the neighboring cafés. I presumed he did eat sometimes, though I had never seen him at it. But those were the only reasons that I could imagine would ever take him out of this room.

He took no exercise and had no use for fresh air. How he managed to find the oxygen to breathe in this place I could never understand. The door and window were always shut. I walked over to and had a struggle with the window, but it was quite immovable; through years of neglect, window and frame had amalgamated.

I sat myself in his armchair glancing idly about the room. Every available wall space, from floor to ceiling, was taken up with laden bookshelves—the famous library on the black art, demonology, spiritualism, and every aspect of the supernatural. There was his large double bed in the corner, unmade as always, its tangled clothes draping down on the carpet. The stained old coffee pot stood on the hearth, and there were cigarette stubs thrown anywhere about the floor.

Standing like a rock in the sea of documents, letters, files, clippings, pamphlets and allied paper matter which flowed over the desk was Spencer's typewriter. There was a sheet of paper in it half filled with typescript. Curious to learn what Spencer was working on now, I got up and had a look at it.

I found it was page four of a letter obviously addressed to me, so I looked on the desk for the previous sheets and found them. As far as the letter went, I read it with absorption:

"Dear Bill,

"I suppose when this reaches you, you will be cursing me for a sleepless night. Probably you will have found the immediate