The Collected SF & Fantasy Works. Abraham Merritt

its base rested against the blue wall, and falling at a full thirty-degree pitch.

      The misty-edged circle had become an oval, a flattened ellipse another five hundred feet high and three times that in length. And in its exact center, shining forth as though it opened into a place of pale azure incandescence was another rectangular Cyclopean portal.

      On each side of it, in the apparently solid face of the gleaming, metallic cliffs, a slit was opening.

      They began as thin lines a hundred yards in height through which the intense light seemed to hiss; quickly they opened — widening like monstrous cat pupils until at last, their widening ceasing, they glared forth, the blue incandescence gushing from them like molten steel from an opened sluice.

      Deep within them I sensed a movement. Scores of towering shapes swam within and glided out of them, each reflecting the vivid light as though they themselves were incandescent. Around their crests spun wide and flaming coronets.

      They rushed forth, wheeling, whirling, driven like leaves in a whirlwind. Out they swirled from the cat’s eyes of the glimmering wall, these dervish obelisks crowded with spinning fires. They vanished in the mists. Instantly with their going, the eyes contracted; were but slits; were gone. And before us within the oval was only the waiting portal.

      The leading block leaped forward. As abruptly, those that bore us followed. Again under that strain of projectile flight we clutched each other; the pony screamed in terror. The metal cliff rushed to meet us like a thunder cloud of steel; the portal raced upon us — a square mouth of cold blue flame.

      And into it we swept; were devoured by it.

      Light in blinding, intolerable flood beat about us, blackening the sight with agony. We pressed, the three of us, against the side of the pony, burying our faces in its shaggy coat, striving to hide our eyes from the radiance which, strain closely as we might, seemed to pierce through the body of the little beast, through our own heads, searing the sight.

      CHAPTER X

      “WITCH! GIVE BACK MY SISTER”

       Table of Contents

      How long we were within that glare I do not know; it seemed unending hours; it was of course only minutes — seconds, perhaps. Then I was sensible of a permeating shadow, a darkness gentle and healing.

      I raised my head and opened my eyes. We were moving tranquilly, with a curious suggestion of homing leisureliness, through a soft, blue shimmering darkness. It was as though we were drifting within some high borderland of light; a region in which that rapid vibration we call the violet was mingled with a still more rapid vibration whose quick pulsing was felt by the brain but ever fled ere that brain could register it in terms of color. And there seemed to be a film over my sight; dazzlement from the unearthly blaze, I thought, shaking my head impatiently.

      My eyes focused upon an object a little more than a foot away; my neck grew rigid, my scalp prickled while I stared, unbelieving. And that at which I stared was — a skeleton hand. Every bone a grayish black, sharply silhouetted, clean as some master surgeon’s specimen, it was extended as though clutching at — clutching at — what was that toward which it was reaching?

      Again the icy prickling over scalp and skin — for its talons stretched out to grasp a steed that Death himself might have ridden, a rack whose bare skull hung drooping upon bent vertebrae.

      I raised my hands to my face to shut out the ghostly sight — and swiftly the clutching bony hand moved toward me — was before my eyes — touched me.

      The cry that sheer horror wrested from me was strangled by realization. And so acute was my relief, so reassuring was it to have in the midst of these mysteries some sane, understandable thing occur that I laughed aloud.

      For the skeleton hand was my own. The mournful ghastly mount of death was — our pony. And when I looked again I knew what I would see — and see them I did — two tall skeletons, skulls resting on their bony arms, leaning against the frame of the beast.

      While ahead of us, floating poised upon the surface of the glistening cube, were two women skeletons — Ruth and Norhala!

      Weird enough was the sight. Dureresque, grimly awful as materialization of a scene of the Dance Macabre — and yet — vastly comforting.

      For here was something which was well within the range of human knowledge. It was the light about us that did it; a vibration that even as I conjectured, was within the only partly explored region of the ultraviolet and the comparatively unexplored region above it.

      Yet there were differences, for there was none of that misty halo around the bones, the flesh which the X-rays cannot render wholly invisible. The skeletons stood out clean cut, with no trace of fleshly vestments.

      I crept over, spoke to the two.

      “Don’t look up yet,” I said. “Don’t open your eyes. We’re going through a queer light. It has an X-ray quality. You’re going to see me as a skeleton —”

      “What?” shouted Drake. Disobeying my warning he straightened, glared at me. And disquieting as the spectacle had been before, fully understanding it as I did, I could not restrain my shudder at the utter weirdness of that skull which was his head thrusting itself toward me.

      The skeleton that was Ventnor turned to me; was arrested by the sight of the flitting pair ahead. I saw the fleshless jaws clamp, then opened to speak.

      Abruptly, upon the skeletons in front the flesh dropped back. Girl and woman stood there once again robed in beauty.

      So swift was that transition from the grisly unreal to the normal that even to my unsuperstitious mind it smacked of necromancy. The next instant the three of us stood looking at each other, clothed once more in the flesh, and the pony no longer the steed of death, but our shaggy, patient little companion.

      The light had changed; the high violet had gone from it, and it was shot with yellow gleamings like fugitive sunbeams. We were passing through a wide corridor that seemed to be unending. The yellow light grew stronger.

      “That light wasn’t exactly the Roentgen variety,” Drake interrupted my absorption in our surroundings. “And I hope to God it’s as different as it seemed. If it’s not we may be up against a lot of trouble.”

      “More trouble than we’re in?” I asked, a trifle satirically.

      “X-ray burns,” he answered, “and no way to treat them in this place — if we live to want treatment,” he ended grimly.

      “I don’t think we were subjected to their action long enough —” I began, and was silent.

      The corridor had opened without warning into a place for whose immensity I have no images that are adequate. It was a chamber that was vaster than ten score of the Great Halls of Karnac in one; great as that fabled hall in dread Amenti where Osiris sits throned between the Searcher of Hearts and the Eater of Souls, judging the jostling hosts of the newly dead.

      Temple it was in its immensity, and its solemn vastness — but unlike any temple ever raised by human toil. In no ruin of earth’s youth giants’ work now crumbling under the weight of time had I ever sensed a shadow of the strangeness with which this was instinct. No — nor in the shattered fanes that once had held the gods of old Egypt, nor in the pillared shrines of Ancient Greece, nor Imperial Rome, nor mosque, basilica nor cathedral.

      All these had been dedicated to gods which, whether created by humanity as science believes, or creators of humanity as their worshippers believed, still held in them that essence we term human.

      The spirit, the force, that filled this place had in it nothing, NOTHING of the human.

      No place? Yes, there was one — Stonehenge. Within that monolithic circle I had felt a something akin to this, as inhuman; a brooding spirit stony, stark, unyielding — as though not men but a people of stone had raised the great