The Conquest of the Moon Pool/Chapter 16

EVER was there such a girl!" Thus Larry, dreamily, leaning head in hand on one of the wide divans of the chamber where Lakla had left us, pleading service to the Silent Ones.

"An', by the faith and the honor of the O'Keefes, an' by my dead mother's soul may God do with me as I do by her!" he whispered fervently.

I told him what Rador had revealed to me regarding the handmaiden and her origin. He nodded, showing no surprise whatever.

"Sure," he said. "It's as I told you. The Silent Ones are of the Tuatha De, an' they send to Ireland for the colleens. They won't have anything to do with the crowd here. Lakla's Irish—no doubt of it. Maybe she comes from one of the fairy hills, or maybe the handmaidens come straight from Tlr n'Og. One of my own ancestors married a girl of the green people, an' the O'Keefes have long been kin to the Sidh. That's why the banshee is so faithful. Why not, when she's one of the family?"

He considered.

"They probably bring them in as changelings," he decided, "They do that in Ireland to this day. An' if she thinks her frogs are beautiful, why beautiful they are! An' if she wants to take 'em with her, why, by the Lia Fail, take 'em she shall. Even if every circus man in the United Kingdom complains to the king that we're ruinin' the business!"

He relapsed into open-eyed dreaming.

I walked about the room, examining it. It was the first opportunity I had gained to inspect carefully any of the rooms in the abode of the Three. It was octagonal, carpeted with the thick rugs that seemed almost as though woven of soft mineral wool, faintly shimmering, palest blue. I paced its diagonal; it was fifty yards; the ceiling was arched, and either of pale rose metal or metallic covering. The ceiling collected the light from the high, slitted windows, and shed it, diffused, through the room.

Around the octagon ran a low gallery not two feet from the floor, balustraded with slender pillars, close set; broken at opposite curtained entrances over which hung thick, dull-gold curtainings giving the same suggestion of metallic or mineral substance as the rugs. Set within each of the eight sides, above the balcony, were colossal slabs of lapis lazuli, inset with graceful but unplaceable designs in scarlet and sapphire blue.

There was the great divan on which mused Larry; two smaller ones; half a dozen low seats and chairs carved apparently of ivory and of dull soft gold. Touching these I found that they gave an impression of warmth, indeed of living warmth, as though they were infused with a slow, mild electric current. Or rather as though one touched a warm hand, so full of vitality was the sensation communicated.

Most curious were tripods, strong, pike-like legs of gold metal four feet high, holding small circles of the lapis intagliated with one curious symbol somewhat resembling the ideographs of the Chinese.

There was no dust. Nowhere in these caverned spaces had I found this constant companion of ours in the world overhead. My eyes caught a sparkle from a corner. Pursuing it, I found upon one of the low seats a flat, clear crystal oval, remarkably like a lens. I took it and stepped up on the balcony. Standing on tiptoe I found I commanded from the bottom of a window slit a view of the bridge approach. Scanning it I could see no trace of the garrison here, nor of the green spear flashes. I placed the crystal to my eyes, and with a disconcerting abruptness the cavern mouth leaped before me, apparently not a hundred feet away. Decidedly the crystal was a very excellent lens. But where were the guards?

I peered closely. Nothing! But now against the aperture I saw a score or more of tiny, dancing sparks. An optical illusion, I thought, and turned the crystal in another direction. There were no sparklings there. I turned it back again, and there they were. And what were they like? Realization came to me—they were like the little dancing, radiant atoms that had played for a time about the emptiness where had stood Songar of the Lower Waters before he had been shaken into the s nothingness! And that green light I had noticed—the Keth!

A cry on my lips, I turned to Larry, and the cry died as the heavy curtainings at the entrance on my right undulated. They parted then as though a body had slipped through. Shook and parted again and again, with the dreadful passing of unseen things!

"Larry!" I cried. "Here! Quick!"

He leaped to his feet, gazed about wildly, and disappeared! Yes—vanished from my sight like the snuffed flame of a candle or as though something moving with the speed of light itself had snatched him away!

Then from the divan came the sounds of struggle, the hissing of straining breaths, the noise of Larry cursing. The pillows flew about as though the raging ghosts of a pair of panthers were tossing them. I leaped over the balustrade, drawing my own pistol. I was caught in a pair of mighty arms, my elbows crushed to my sides, drawn down until my face pressed close against a broad, hairy breast. And through that obstacle—formless, shadowless, transparent as air itself—I could still see the battle on the divan!

Now there were two sharp reports; the struggle abruptly ceased. From a point not a foot over the great couch, as though oozing from the air itself, blood began to drop, faster and ever faster, pouring out of nothingness.

And out of that same air, now a dozen feet away, leaped the face of Larry—bodyless, poised six feet above the floor, blazing with rage—floating weirdly, uncannily, to a hideous degree, in vacancy.

His hands flashed out. Armless, they wavered, appearing, disappearing—swiftly tearing something from him. Then there, feet hidden, stiff on legs that vanished at the ankles, striking out into vision with all the dizzy abruptness with which he had been stricken from sight, was the O'Keefe, a smoking pistol in hand.

And ever that red stream trickled out of vacancy and spread over the couch, dripping to the floor.

MADE a mighty movement to escape; was held more firmly. And then close to the face of Larry, flashing out with that terrifying instantaneousness even as had his, was the head of Yolara, as devilishly mocking as I had ever seen it. The cruelty shone through it like delicate white flames from hell—and beautiful!

"Stir not! Strike not, until I command!" She flung the words behind her, addressed to the invisible ones who had accompanied her, whose presences I sensed filling the chamber. The floating, beautiful head, crowned high with corn-silk hair, darted toward the Irishman. He took a swift step backward. The gray eyes of the priestess deepened toward purple, sparkled with malice.

"So," she said. "So, Larree—you thought you could go from me so easily!" She laughed softly. "In my hidden hand I hold the Keth cone," she murmured. "Before you can raise the death tube I can smite you—and will. And consider, Larree, if the handmaiden, the choya comes, I can vanish, so"—the mocking head disappeared, burst forth again—"and slay her with the Keth. Or bid my people seize her and bear her to the Shining One! And anger me not too much, Larree, else may I grow wroth and let the Keth loose upon you, come what may," she ended darkly.

I saw tiny beads of sweat stand out on O'Keefe's forehead, and knew he was thinking not of himself, but of Lakla.

"What do you want with me, Yolara?" he asked, hoarsely.

"Nay," came the mocking voice. "Not Yolara to you, Larree. Call me by those sweet names you taught me. Honey of the Wild Bee-e-s, Net of Hearts—" Again her laughter tinkled.

"What do you want with me?" His voice was strained, the lips rigid.

"Ah, you are afraid, Larree." There was diabolic jubilation in the words. "What should I want but that you return with me? Why else did I creep through the lair of the dragon worm and pass the path of perils but to ask you that? And the choya guards you not well." Again she laughed. "We came to the cavern's end and there were her Akka. And. the Akka can see us, as shadows. But it was my desire to surprise you with my coming, Larree." The voice was silken. "And I feared that they would hasten to be first to bring you that message to delight in your joy. And so, Larree, I loosed the Keth upon them—and gave them peace and rest within the nothingness. And the portal below was open, almost in welcome!"

Once more the malignant, silver pealing of her laughter.

What do you want with me?" There was loathing in his eyes, but plainly he strove for control.

"Want!" the silver voice hissed, grew calm. "Do not Siya and Siyana grieve that the rite I pledged them is but half done? And do they not desire it finished? And am I not beautiful? More beautiful than your choya?"

The fiendishness died from the eyes; they grew blue, wondrous. The veil of invisibility slipped down from the neck, the shoulders, half revealing the gleaming breasts. And weird, weird beyond all telling was that exquisite head floating there in air. And beautiful, sinisterly beautiful beyond an telling, too. So even might Lilith, the serpent woman, have shown herself tempting Adam!

"And perhaps," she said; "perhaps I want you because I hate you. Perhaps because I love you. Or perhaps for Lugur or perhaps for the Shining One."

"And if I go with you?" He said it quietly.

"Then shall I spare the handmaiden, and—who knows?—take back my armies that even now gather at the portal and let the Silent Ones rot in peace in their abode, from which they had no power to keep me," she added venomously.

"You will swear that, Yolara; swear to go without harming the handmaiden?" he asked eagerly. The little devils danced in her eyes. I wrenched my face from the smothering contact.

"Don't trust her, Larry!" I cried. And again the grip choked me.

"Is that devil in front of you or behind you, old man?" he asked quietly, eyes never leaving the priestess. "If he's in front I'll take a chance and wing him, and then you scoot and warn Lakla."

But I could not answer; nor, remembering Yolara 's threat, would I had I been able.

"Decide quickly!" There was cold threat in her voice. And then—

The curtains toward which O'Keefe had slowly, step by step, drawn close, opened.

They framed the handmaiden! The face of Yolara changed into that gorgon mask that had transformed it once before at sight of the Golden Girl. In her blind rage she forgot to cast the occulting veil. Her hand darted like a snake out of the folds; poising itself with the little silver cone aimed at Lakla.

But before it was wholly poised, before the priestess could loose its force, the handmaiden was upon her. Swift as the lithe white wolf hound she leaped, and one slender hand gripped Yolara's throat, the other the wrist that lifted the quivering death; white limbs wrapped about the hidden ones. I saw the golden head bend, the hand that held the Keth swept up with a vicious jerk; saw Lakla's teeth sink into the wrist—the blood spurt forth and heard the priestess shriek. The cone fell, bounded toward me; with all my strength I wrenched free the hand that held my pistol, thrust it agains [sic] the pressing breast and fired.

The clasp upon me relaxed; a red rain stained me; at my feet a little pillar of blood jetted. A hand thrust itself from nothingness, clawed, and was still.

Now Yolara was down, Lakla meshed in her writhings and fighting like some wild mother whose babes are serpent menaced. Over the two of them, astride, stood the O'Keefe, a pike from one of the high tripods in his hand—thrusting, parrying, beating on every side as with a broadsword against poniard-clutching hands that thrust themselves out of vacancy striving to strike him; stepping here and there, always covering, protecting Lakla with his own body even as a caveman of old who does battle with his mate for their lives.

The sword-club struck, and on the floor lay the half body of a dwarf, writhing with vanishments and reappearings of legs and arms. Beside him lay the shattered tripod from which Larry had wrenched his weapon. I flung myself upon it, dashed it down to break loose one of the remaining supports, struck in midfall one of the unseen even as his dagger darted toward me! The seat splintered, leaving in my clutch a golden bar. I jumped to Larry's side, guarding his back, whirling it like a staff; felt it crunch once—twice— through unseen bone and muscle.

T THE door was a booming. Into the chamber rushed a dozen of the frog men. While some guarded the entrances, others leaped straight to us, and forming a circle about us, began to strike with talons and spurs at unseen things that screamed and sought to escape. Now here and there about the blue rugs great stains of blood appeared; heads of dwarfs, torn arms and gashed bodies, half occulted, half revealed.

And at last the priestess lay silent, vanquished, white body gleaming with that uncanny—fragmentariness—from her torn robes. The O'Keefe reached down, drew Lakla from her. Shakily, Yolara rose to her feet, panting, the hatred in her eyes, the hellish mask of her face no whit softened. The handmaiden, face still blazing with wrath, stepped before her; with difficulty she steadied her voice.

"Yolara," she said, "you have defied the Silent Ones, you have desecrated their abode, you came to slay these men who are the guests of the Silent Ones and me, who am their handmaiden. Why did you do these things?"

"I came for him!" gasped the priestess; she pointed to O'Keefe.

"Why?" asked Lakla.

"Because he is pledged to me," replied Yolara, all the devils that were hers in her face. "Because he wooed me! Because he is mine!"

"That is a lie!" The handmaiden's voice shook with rage. "It is a lie! But here and now he shall choose, Yolara. And if you he chooses, you and he shall go forth from here unmolested. For, Yolara, it is his happiness that I most desire, and if you are that happiness—you shall go together. And now, Larry, choose!"

Swiftly she stepped beside the priestess; swiftly wrenched the last shreds of the hiding robes from her.

There they stood—Yolara a serpent woman, and wonderful, too. Beyond the dreams even of Phidias—and hell fire glowing from the purple eyes.

And Lakla, like a girl of the Vikings, like one of those warrior maids who stood and fought for dun and babes at the side of those old heroes of Larry's own green isle; translucent ivory lambent through the rents of her torn draperies, and in the wide, golden eyes flaming wrath, indeed—not the diabolic flames of the priestess but the righteous wrath of some soul that looking out of paradise sees vile wrong in the doing.

The O'Keefe's voice was subdued, hurt. "There is no choice. I love you, Lakla, and only you, and have from the moment I saw you. It's not easy, this. God, Goodwin, I feel like an utter cad," he flashed at me. "There is no choice, Lakla," he ended, eyes steady upon hers.

The priestess's face grew deadlier still.

"What will you do with me?" she asked.

"Keep you," I said, "as hostage."

O'Keefe was silent; the Golden Girl shook her head.

"Well would I like to." Her face grew dreaming. "But the Silent Ones say no. They bid me let you go, Yolara."

"The Silent Ones," the priestess laughed. "You, Lakla, I surmise. You fear, perhaps, to let me tarry here too close!"

Storm gathered again in the handmaiden's eyes; she forced it back.

"No," she answered, "the Silent Ones so command, and, for their own purposes. Yet do I think, Yolara, that you will have little time to feed your wickedness—tell that to Lugur—and to your Shining One!" she added slowly.

Mockery and disbelief rode high in the priestess's pose. "Am I to return alone, like this?" she asked.

"Nay, Yolara, nay; you shall be accompanied," said Lakla. "And by those who will guard, and watch you well. They are here even now."

The hangings parted, and into the chamber came Olaf and Rador—and paused in blank amazement.

"You traitor!" hissed the priestess to the green dwarf. "Be sure that you shall not dance with the Shining One!"

He gazed at her, face stern, immovable; listened to Lakla's swift explanation.

"She shall be guarded—well!" was all he said. The priestess bit her lips, turned and met the fierce hatred and contempt in the eyes of the Norseman—and for the first time lost her bravado.

"Let not him go with me," she gasped. Her eyes searched the floor frantically.

"He goes with you," said Lakla, and threw about Yolara a swathing that covered the exquisite, alluring body. "And you shall pass through the Portal, not sulk along the path of the worm!"

She bent to Rador, whispered to him. He nodded; she had told him, I supposed, the secret of its opening.

"Come," he said, and with the ice-eyed giant behind her, Yolara, head bent, passed put of those hangings through which, but a little before, unseen, triumph in her grasp, she had slipped.

HEN Lakla came to the unhappy O'Keefe, rested her hands on his shoulders, looked deep into his eyes.

"Did you woo her, even as she said?"

The Irishman flushed miserably.

"I did not," he said. "I was pleasant to her, of course, because I thought it would bring me quicker to you, darlin'."

She looked at him doubtfully; then—

"I think you must have been very—pleasant!" was all she said. And leaning toward him, she kissed him forgivingly straight on the lips.

An extremely direct maiden was Lakla, with a truly sovereign contempt for anything she might consider non-essential. At this moment I decided she was wiser even than I had thought her.

She called, and to her came the frog woman who was her attendant. To her the handmaiden spoke, pointing to the batracians who stood, paws and forearms melted beneath the robes of invisibility they had gathered. She took them and passed out—more grotesque than ever, shattering into streaks of vacancies, reappearing with flickers of shining scale and yellow gems as the torn pennants of invisibility fluttered about her.

The frog-men reached down, swung each a dead dwarf in his arms, and filed, booming, away.

And feeling in my pocket, I drew out a little silver cone, caught and slipped there by me unconsciously as it rolled from Yolara's hand—and knew then for what her mad eyes had been searching.

Decidedly the priestess's visit had added to our weapons, no matter how unpleasant her call had been.

E HAD watched, Larry and I, the frog-men throw the bodies of Yolara's assassins into the crimson waters. As vultures swooped down upon the dying, there came sailing swiftly to where the dead men floated dozens of the luminous globes.

Their slender, varicolored tentacles whipped out; the giant iridescent bubbles climbed over the cadavers. And as they touched them there was the swift dissolution, the melting away into putrescence of flesh and bone that I had witnessed when the dart touched fruit that time I had saved Rador. And upon this the Medusae gorged; pulsing lambently; their wondrous colors shifting, changing, glowing stronger. Elfin moons now indeed, but satellites whose glimmering beauty was fed by death; alembics of enchantment whose glorious hues were sucked from horror.

Sick, I turned away. O'Keefe was as pale as I. We passed back into the corridor that had opened on the ledge from which we had watched; met Lakla hurrying toward us. Before she could speak there throbbed faintly about us a vast sighing. It grew into a murmur, a whispering, shook us. Then passing like a presence, it died away in far distance.

"The Portal has opened," said the handmaiden. And a fainter sighing, like an echo of the other, mourned about us. "Yolara is gone," she said, "the Portal is closed. Now must we hasten. For the Three have ordered that you, Goodwin, and Larry and I go upon that strange road of which I have spoken, and which Olaf may not take lest his heart break. And we must return ere he and Rador cross the bridge."

Her hand sought Larry's; we passed down to a chamber in which stood a table, bearing one of the crystal ewers and goblets. From the former she poured a ruddy liquid; held a glass to me. Mischievously she kissed the lip of that she reached to Larry, and turning it he drank from the spot her mouth had touched. A weariness that I had not known was in me vanished away as I drank. I felt fortified, alert, eager—and in the O'Keefe's brightening eyes I read that he, too, had drawn to himself new force.

"Drink deep," said the handmaiden, and poured the goblet full again. "The road is strange, indeed, even to me who have followed it often. You will need all your strength to hold you steady upon it!"

But now, quaffing that second glass, I felt that there was no road that I could not travel.

"Come!" said Lakla, and we walked on: down and down through hall after hall, flight upon flight of stairways. Deep, deep indeed we must be beneath the domed castle. Lakla paused before a curved, smooth breast of the crimson stone rounding gently into the passage. She pressed its side; it revolved; we entered it; it closed behind us.

The room, the—hollow—in which we stood was faceted like a diamond; and like a cut brilliant, its sides glistened—though dully. Its shape was a deep oval, and our path dropped down to a circular, polished base, roughly two yards in diameter. Glancing behind me I saw that in the closing of the entrance there had been left no trace of it save the steps that led to where that entrance had been. And as I looked these steps turned, leaving us isolated upon the circle, only the faceted walls about us. And in each of the gleaming facets the three of us reflected—dimly. It was as though we were within a diamond egg whose graven angles had been turned inward.

But the oval was not perfect; at my right a screen cut it—a screen that gleamed with fugitive, fleeting luminescences—stretching from the side of our standing place up to the tip of the chamber; slightly convex and criss-crossed by millions of fine lines like those upon a spectroscopic plate. But with this difference—that within each line I felt the presence of multitudes of finer lines, dwindling into infinitude, ultra-microscopic, traced by some instrument compared to whose delicacy our finest tool would be as a crowbar to the needle of the micrometer.

A foot or two from it stood something like the standee of a compass, bearing, like it, a cradled dial under whose crystal ran concentric rings of prisoned, lambent vapors, faintly blue. From the edge of the dial jutted a little shelf of crystal, a keyboard, in which were cut eight small cups.

Within these cups the handmaiden placed her tapering fingers. She gazed down upon the disk; pressed a digit, and the screen behind us slipped noiselessly into another angle.

"Put your arm around my waist, Larry, darlin', and stand close," she murmured. "You, Goodwin, place your arm over my shoulder."

Wondering, I did as she bade; she pressed other fingers upon the shelf's indentations. Three of the rings of vapor spun into intense light; raced around each other. From the screen behind us grew a radiance that held within itself all spectrums—not only those seen, but those unseen by man's eyes. It waxed and waxed, brilliant and ever more brilliant, all suffusing, passing through me as day streams through a window pane!

The enclosing facets burst into a blaze of coruscations, and in each sparkling panel I saw our image, shaken and torn like pennants in a whirlwind. I turned to look, was stopped by the handmaiden's swift command: "Turn not, on your life!"

The radiance behind me grew; was a rushing tempest of light in which I was but the shadow of a shadow. I heard, but not with my ears—nay, with mind itself—a vast roaring. An ordered tumult of sound that came hurling from the outposts of space; approaching—rushing—hurricane out of the heart of the cosmos—closer, closer. It wrapped itself about us with unearthly mighty arms.

And brilliant, even more brilliant, streamed the radiance right through us.

The faceted walls dimmed; in front of me they melted, diaphanously, like a gelatinous wall in a blast of flame. Through their vanishing, under the torrent of driving light, the unthinkable, impalpable tornado, I began to move, slowly—then ever more swiftly!

Still the roaring grew; the radiance streamed. Ever faster we went. Cutting down through the length, the extension of me, dropped a wall of rock, foreshortened, clenched close. I caught a glimpse of the elfin gardens; they whirled, contracted, dwindled into a thin—slice—of color that was a part of me. Another wall of rock shrunk into a thin wedge through which I flew, and that at once took its place within me, like a card slipped beside those others!

Flashing around me, and from Lakla and O'Keefe, were nimbuses of flickering scarlet flames. And always the same steady hurling forward, appallingly mechanical.

NOTHER barrier of rock, a gleam of white waters incorporating themselves into my—drawing out—even as were the flowered moss lands, the slicing, rocky wall—still another rampart of cliff, dwindling instantly into the vertical plane of those others. Our flight checked; we seemed to hover within, then to sway onward slowly, cautiously.

A mist danced ahead of me, a mist that grew steadily thinner. We stopped, wavered. The mist cleared.

I looked out into translucent, green distances; shot with swift, prismatic gleamings; waves and pulsings of luminosity like midday sun glow through green, tropic waters; dancing, scintillating veils of sparkling atoms that flew, hither and yon.

And Lakla and Larry and I were, I saw, like shadow shapes upon a smooth breast of stone twenty feet or more above the surface of this place. A surface spangled with tiny white blossoms gleaming wanly through creeping veils of phophorescence like smoke of noon fire. We were shadows, and yet we had substance. We were incorporated with, a part of, the rock—and yet we were living flesh and blood. We stretched—nor will I qualify this—we stretched through mile upon mile of space that weirdly enough gave at one and the same time an absolute certainty of immense horizontal lengths and a vertical concentration that contained nothing of length, nothing of space whatever. We stood there upon the face of the stone, and still we were here within the faceted oval before the screen of radiance!

"Steady!" It was Lakla's voice, and not beside me there, but at my ear close before the screen. "Steady, Goodwin! And—see!"

The sparkling haze cleared. Enormous reaches stretched before me. Shimmering up through them, and as though growing in some medium thicker than air, was mass upon mass of verdure. Fruiting trees and trees laden with pale blossoms, arbors and bowers of pallid blooms, like that sea fruit of oblivion—grapes of Lethe—that cling to the tide-swept walls of the caverns of the Hebrides.

Through them, beyond them, around and about them, drifted and eddied a horde. Great as that with which Tamerlane swept down upon Rome, vast as the myriads which Genghis Khan had rolled upon the califs. Men and women and children, clothed in tatters, half nude and wholly naked. Slant-eyed Chinese, sloe-eyed Malays, islanders black and brown and yellow. Fierce-faced warriors of the Solomons with grizzled locks fantastically-bedizened. Papuans, feline Javans, Dyaks of hill and shore; hook-nosed Phoenicians, Romans, straight-browed Greeks, and Vikings centuries beyond their lives. Scores of the black-haired Murians; white faces of our own Westerners—men and women and children—drifting, eddying. Each stamped with that mingled horror and rapture, eyes filled with ecstasy and terror entwined marked by God and devil in embrace—the seal of the Shining One—the dead-alive; the lost ones!

The loot of the Dweller!

Soul-sick, I gazed. They lifted to us visages of dread; they swept down toward us; glaring upward—a bank against which other and still other waves of faces rolled, were checked, paused. Until, as far as I could see—they were like billows piled upon an ever-growing barrier—they stretched beneath us, staring, staring!

Now there was a movement, far, far away; a concentrating of the lambency. The dead-alive swayed, oscillated, separated, forming a long lane against whose outskirts they crowded with avid, hungry insistence.

First only a luminous cloud, then a whirling pillar of splendors through the lane came—the Shining One. As it passed, the dead-alive swirled in its wake like leaves behind a whirlwind, eddying, twisting. And as the Dweller raced by them, brushing them with its spiralings and tentacles, they shone forth with unearthly, awesome gloamings—like vessels of alabaster in which wicks flare suddenly. And when it had passed they closed behind it, staring up at us once more.

The Dweller paused beneath us.

Out of the drifting ruck swam the body of Throckmartin! Throckmartin, my friend, to find whom I had gone to the pallid moon door; my friend whose call I had so laggardly followed. On his face was the Dweller's dreadful stamp; the lips were bloodless; the eyes were wide, lucent, something like; pale phosphorescence gleaming within them—and soulless.

E STARED straight up at me, unwinking, unrecognizing. Pressing against his side was a woman, young and gentle, and lovely—lovely even through the mask of horror and joy that lay upon her face. And her wide eyes, like Throckmartin's, gleamed with the lurking, unholy fires. She pressed against him closely; though the hordes kept, up the faint churning, these two kept ever together, as though bound by unseen fetters.

And I knew the girl for Edith, his wife, who in vain effort to save him had cast herself into the Dweller's embrace!

"Throckmartin!" I cried. "Throckmartin! I'm here! Courage, man!"

Did he hear? I know now, of course, he could not.

But then I waited, hope striving to break through the nightmare hands that gripped my heart

Their wide eyes never left me. There was another movement about them, others pushed past them; they drifted back, swaying, eddying—and still staring were lost in the awful 1 throng.

Vainly I strained my gaze to And them again, to force some sign of recognition, some awakening of the clean life we know from them. But they were gone. Try as I would I could not see them—nor Stanton and the northern woman named Thora who had been the| first of that tragic party to be taken by the Dweller.

"Throckmartin!" I cried again, despairingly. My tears blinded me.

I felt Lakla's light touch.

"Steady," she I commanded, pityingly. "Steady, Goodwin! You cannot help them now! Steady and—watch!"

Below us the Shining One had paused— spiraling, swirling, vibrant with all its transcendent, devilish beauty; had paused and was contemplating us. Now I could see clearly that nucleus, that core shot through with flashing veins of radiance, that ever-shifting shape of glory through the shroudings of shimmering, misty plumes, throbbing lacy opalescenses, vaporous spiralings of prismatic fantom fires.

Steady over it hung the seven little moons of amethyst, of saffron, of emerald and azure and silver, or rose of life and moon white. They poised themselves like a diadem—calm, serene, immobile—and down from them into the Dweller, piercing plumes and swirls and spirals, ran countless tiny strands, radiations, finer than the finest spun thread of spider's web, gleaming filaments through which seemed to fun—power—from the seven globes. Like—yes, that was it—miniatures of the seven torrents of moon flame that poured through the septichromatic, high crystals in the Moon Pool's chamber roof.

Swam out of the coruscating haze the Dweller's—face!

Both of man and woman it was, like some ancient, androgynous deity of Etruscan fanes long dust, and yet neither woman nor man. Human and inhuman; seraphic and sinister; benign and malefic—and still no more of these four than is flame, which is beautiful whether it warms or devours, or wind whether it feathers the trees or shatters them, or the wave which is wondrous whether it caresses or kills.

Subtly, undefinably it was of our world and of one not ours. Its lineaments flowed from another sphere, took fleeting familiar form, and as swiftly withdrew whence they had come. Something amorphous, unearthly—as of unknown, unheeding, unseen gods rushing through the depths of star- hung space; and still of our own earth, with the very soul of earth peering out from it, caught within it—and in some—unholy—way debased.

It had eyes. Eyes that were now shadows darkening within its luminosity like veils falling, and falling, opening windows into the unknowable; deepening into softly glowing blue pools, blue as the Moon Pool itself; then flashing out, and this only when the—face—bore its most human resemblance, into twin stars large almost as the crown of little moons; and with that same baffling suggestion of peep-holes into a world untrodden, alien, perilous to man!

And once more the tempest of mingled terror and joy, of ineffable yearning to leap into, the radiant folds, of insupportable urge to flee from them that Throckmartin had described, and that I had felt one time before had swept through me.

"Steady!" came Lakla's voice; her body leaned against mine.

I gripped myself, my brain steadied, I looked again. And I saw that of body, at least body as we know it, the Shining One had none. Nothing but the throbbing, pulsing core streaked with lightning veins of rainbows; and around this, never still, sheathing it, the swirling, glorious veilings of its hell and heaven born radiance.

So the Dweller stood—and gazed.

Then up toward us swept a reaching, questing spiral!

Under my hand Lakla's shoulder quivered; dead-alive and their master vanished. I danced, flickered, within the rock; felt a swift sense of shrinking, of withdrawal; slice upon slice the carded walls of stone, of silvery waters, of elfin gardens slipped from me as cards are withdrawn from a pack; one by one—slipped, wheeled, flattened and lengthened out as I passed through them and they passed from me.

Gasping, shaken, weak, I stood all within the faceted oval chamber; arm still about the handmaiden's white shoulder; Larry's hand still clutching her girdle.

The roaring, impalpable gale from the cosmos was retreating to the outposts of space—was still; the intense, streaming, flooding radiance lessened—died.

"Now have you beheld," said Lakla, "and well you trod the road. And now shall you hear, even as the Silent Ones have commanded, what the Shining One is—and how it came to be."

The steps flashed back; the doorway into the chamber opened.