Page:Weird Tales volume 42 number 04.djvu/63

 in my too lively imagination. I fought to keep it out of my mind.

"I must get out of here, I must get out of here," I was muttering to myself. I essayed a rather shaky step towards the door, and then stopped with an indrawn gasp as though a bucket of very cold water had been thrown over me.

Between the door and myself stood a tall, yet slightly hunched, creature out of the worst of my childhood nightmares. A mad drooling thing, with a face rotten with corruption, with dead blinkless eyes that seemed to be gazing past me and yet I knew that they were not: in reality, the thing's whole attention was upon me. But it was not an intelligent attention. It was the unthinking, unreflecting, but blindly eager attention of the slavering and snuffling village idiot who slowly and deliberately pulls the legs off a spider or takes a knife to a captive sparrow and works unimaginable cruelties upon it.

And this thing was after me.

Cold sweat broke out upon me.

My conscious mind was hammering away: "It isn't real. It isn't real. It won't hurt you. It's just your own imagination. You're becoming hypnotized. Break the spell. Look away."

I dragged my eyes from it, and my gaze fell full upon Spencer lying dead at my feet, on his back, his queer eyes seeming to strive to see his own forehead. With a sob, I stumbled across him, and gained the fireplace. I clung to the mantel-shelf, still keeping my gaze averted from the direction of the door.

The stained coffee pot on the hearth was—looking up at me. It had become a face, with a grotesque spout of a nose—it was one of the leering faces I had seen last night.

With a quite uncalculated action, like a reflex kick, I lifted it violently with the toe of my shoe and it went smashing into fragments against the farther wall.

That was an unexpected relief. In sudden hope I dared a glance towards the door.

But the slobbering, staring thing was as real and as potentially murderous as ever. It had advanced considerably towards me, and now I could see details of it that I wished I could not. Its dead-white hands were reaching out ready to clutch and grip. It seemed inexorably sure of itself. And, adding to my terror, it moved with absolute soundlessness. If it breathed, I could not hear it. It approached me like an image from an old silent film, a moving shadow.

"It is a shadow," said one part of my mind. "Only a shadow that you are throwing."

And another voice was shouting, "The window! Escape by the window!"

And another voice was saying, "The window is jammed. You can't open it."

My mind was a roaring confusion of divided impulses, all overridden by the dominating rush of fear.

I knew that it was disintegrating. That my conscious mind was going to pieces under the strain, and when that salivating horror got me I should go screaming mad. As others had gone mad.

I made one last desperate effort to clear a space in that chaos in which to think connectedly.

The triangle. This was all happening through the medium of the triangle. I must find it. There was not a moment to lose. I must destroy it.

Quick, where—what—could it be?

Was it a bracket of that pipe rack? I tore it down and smashed it. But without looking, I knew that I was still pursued.

God, there were a thousand things in this room that might contain it!

I went through a brief fury of breaking every suspicious thing I could lay my hands upon, within my limited radius. But still I was forced to retreat, until I was pressing against the desk in the far corner from the door and, shaking like a paralytic, I could retreat no further.

I think I was beginning to scream voicelessly as I scrabbled in mad desperation among the books and papers on the desk, my eyes literally bulging with anxiety in their baffled search for something triangular.

In one convulsive sweep I shot a whole heap of the clutter from the desk. It revealed the blotting pad that pile had