The A. Merritt MEGAPACK ®. Abraham Merritt

breast again.

      “That night when the nurse was asleep I got up and looked into the Dragon Glass, and I saw—the claw, even as you did. The beast is there. It is waiting for me!”

      Hemdon was silent for a moment.

      “If he tires of the waiting he may send the beast through for me,” he said. “I mean the man with the yellow eyes. I’ve a desire to try one of these guns on it. It’s real, you know, the beast is—and these guns have stopped elephants.”

      “But the man with the yellow eyes, Jim,” I whispered—“who is he?”

      “He,” said Herndon—“why, he’s the WonderWorker himself!”

      “You don’t believe such a story as that!” I cried. “Why, it’s—it’s lunacy! It’s some devilish illusion in the glass. It’s like the—crystal globe that makes you hypnotize yourself and think the things your own mind creates are real. Break it, Jim! It’s devilish! Break it!”

      “Break it!” he said incredulously. “Break it? Not for the ten thousand lives that are the toll of Rak! Not real? Aren’t these wounds real? Wasn’t Santhu real? Break it! Good God, man, you don’t know what you say! Why, it’s my only road back to her! If that yelloweyed devil back there were only as wise as he looks, he would know he didn’t have to keep his beast watching there. I want to go, Ward; I want to go and bring her back with me. I’ve an idea, somehow, that he hasn’t—well, full control of things. I’ve an idea that the Greatest Wonder-Worker wouldn’t put wholly in Rak’s hands the souls that wander through the many gateways into his kingdom. There’s a way out, Ward; there’s a way to escape him. I won away from him once, Ward. I’m sure of it. But then I left Santhu behind. I have to go back for her. That’s why I found the little passage that led from the throne-room. And he knows it, too. That’s why he had to turn his beast on me.

      “And I’ll go through again, Ward. And I’ll come back again—with Santhu!”

      But he has not returned. It is six months now since he disappeared for the second time. And from his bedroom, as he had done before. By the will that they found—the will that commended that in event of his disappearing as he had done before and not returning within a week I was to have his house and all that was within it—I came into possession of the Dragon Glass. The dragons had spun again for Hemdon, and he had gone through the gateway once more. I found only one of the elephant guns, and I knew that he had had time to take the other with him.

      I sit night after night before the glass, waiting for him to come back through it—with Santhu. Sooner or later they will come. That I know.

      THE PEOPLE OF THE PIT (1918)

      North of us a shaft of light shot half way to the zenith. It came from behind the five peaks. The beam drove up through a column of blue haze whose edges were marked as sharply as the rain that streams from the edges of a thunder cloud. It was like the flash of a searchlight through an azure mist. It cast no shadows.

      As it struck upward the summits were outlined hard and black and I saw that the whole mountain was shaped like a hand. As the light silhouetted it, the gigantic fingers stretched, the hand seemed to thrust itself forward. It was exactly as though it moved to push something back. The shining beam held steady for a moment; then broke into myriads of little luminous globes that swung to and fro and dropped gently. They seemed to be searching.

      The forest had become very still. Every wood noise held its breath. I felt the dogs pressing against my legs. They too were silent; but every muscle in their bodies trembled, their hair was stiff along their backs and thier eyes, fixed on the falling lights, were filmed with the terror glaze.

      I looked at Anderson. He was staring at the North where once more the beam had pulsed upward.

      “It can’t be the aurora,” I spoke without moving my lips. My mouth was as dry as though Lao T’zai had poured his fear dust down my throat.

      “If it is I never saw one like it,” he answered in the same tone. “Besides who ever heard of an aurora at this time of the year?”

      He voiced the thought that was in my own mind.

      “It makes me think something is being hunted up there,” he said, “an unholy sort of hunt—it’s well for us to be out of range.”

      “The mountain seems to move each time the shaft shoots up,” I said. “What’s it keeping back, Starr? It makes me think of the frozen hand of cloud that Shan Nadour set before the Gate of Ghouls to keep them in the lairs that Eblis cut for them.”

      He raised a hand—listening.

      From the North and high overhead there came a whispering. It was not the rustling of the aurora, that rushing, crackling sound like the ghosts of winds that blew at Creation racing through the skeleton leaves of ancient trees that sheltered Lilith. It was a whispering that held in it a demand. It was eager. It called us to come up where the beam was flashing. It drew. There was in it a note of inexorable insistence. It touched my heart with a thousand tiny fear-tipped fingers and it filled me with a vast longing to race on and merge myself in the light. It must have been so that Ulysses felt when he strained at the mast and strove to obey the crystal sweet singing of the Sirens.

      The whispering grew louder.

      “What the hell’s the matter with those dogs?” cried Anderson savagely. “Look at them!”

      The malemutes, whining, were racing away toward the light. We saw them disappear among the trees. There came back to us a mournful howling. Then that too died away and left nothing but the insistent murmuring overhead.

      The glade we had camped in looked straight to the North. We had reached I suppose three hundred mile above the first great bend of the Koskokwim toward the Yukon. Certainly we were in an untrodden part of the wilderness. We had pushed through from Dawson at the breaking of the Spring, on a fair lead to the lost five peaks between which, so the Athabasean medicine man had told us, the gold streams out like putty from a clenched fist. Not an Indian were we able to get to go with us. The land of the Hand Mountain was accursed they said. We had sighted the peaks the night before, their tops faintly outlined against a pulsing glow. And now we saw the light that had led us to them.

      Anderson stiffened. Through the whispering had broken a curious pad-pad and a rustling. It sounded as though a small bear were moving towards us. I threw a pile of wood on the fire and, as it blazed up, saw something break through the bushes. It walked on all fours, but it did not walk like a bear. All at once it flashed upon me—it was like a baby crawling upstairs. The forepaws lifted themselves in grotesquely infantile fashion. It was grotesque but it was—terrible. It grew closer. We reached for our guns—and dropped them. Suddenly we knew that this crawling thing was a man!

      It was a man. Still with the high climbing pad-pad he swayed to the fire. He stopped.

      “Safe,” whispered the crawling man, in a voice that was an echo of the murmur overhead. “Quite safe here. They can’t get out of the blue, you know. They can’t get you—unless you go to them—”

      He fell over on his side. We ran to him. Anderson knelt.

      “God’s love!” he said. “Frank, look at this!” He pointed to the hands. The wrists were covered with torn rags of a heavy shirt. The hands themselves were stumps! The fingers had been bent into the palms and the flesh had been worn to the bone. They looked like the feet of a little black elephant! My eyes traveled down the body. Around the waist was a heavy band of yellow metal. From it fell a ring and a dozen links of shining white chain!

      “What is he? Where did he come from?” said Anderson. “Look, he’s fast asleep—yet even in his sleep his arms try to climb and his feet draw themselves up one after the other! And his knees—how in God’s name was he ever able to move on them?”

      It was even as he said. In the deep sleep that had come upon the crawler arms and legs kept raising in a deliberate, dreadful climbing motion. It was as though they had a life of their own—they kept their movement independently of the motionless