10 Short Novels Magazine — page 92: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

he 7 ae 90 * * * Ten Short Novels Magazine With the fascination of icy horror, I ‘watched silently while he went to the old forge beneath the link, and with an an- cient, wheezing bellows, fanned the glow- ing coals to a cherry heat. He selected a pike from a collection racked against the wall, and thrust its tip into the fire, work- ing ‘the bellows methodically, its eerie — a At last he drew forth the pike, its orange-yellow heat throwing a nimbus of hellish light on his grinding, satanic face as he the still motion- mae “hn of my adored one. hastly paralysis held me motion- eae dean f wo as umed ler ta interval as any inmate of a violent ward —with a madness that had stricken me with impotence to move a muscle. My jaw stared like an left My body contracted like a many-coiled spring, as if that brutal iron had touched my flesh instead of Marion’s. The weight of my horror had driven me mad—and now it gave me the strength of a mad- man. With one titanic surge I crashed out my chains as though they were cob- webs, and hurled myself across the floor Marion’s torturer aoe fury cf =. - : tH F 4 4 S : Fis, crashing with agonizing force into my I staggered and went down, falling on ‘the staff of my axe as I did so, and break- ing it off short in my hand. Instantly the black-garbed fiend was at me. He flung himself upon my body and lifted his sword high in the air. Fas- cinated, my eyes watched it rise aloft, begin to descend. Then ‘I realized that the blade, and about two feet of the axe staff yet remained in my hand. As the sword crashed down I thrust upward at the throat of my adversary, and saw the point of the axe bury itself in his neck, just as the sword struck the side of my head and a sheet of white fire seemed to blan- ket my skull before darkness and un- consciousness flooded over it .... HEY told me that it was all a delu- sion brought about by my nervous break-down. The psychiatrist, whose special charge I was, told me I must be- lieve that, or I would never get well. Time after time he pointed out to me that the things I had raved about in my periods of hysteria, and that I insisted upon re- iterating even in my more rational mo- ments, could not have occurred. had merely become the victim of an obsession—a common enough thing. The state of my nerves, coupled with the hold on my imagination exerted by the armor of the museum, had resulted in a series of hallucinations that had seemed remark- ably real to me. I was not convinced. — the evidence continued to pile a psychiatrist pointed out that the things I[ insisted had taken place in the torture room of the museum would inly have left some sign of their having occurred. But the force gave no evidence of having had a fire in it; the link had not been lighted for centuries—and showed it; the chains of the rack remained as they had been for innumerable decades—rusty and weak- ened, but not broken. It was true that I had wandered into the museum after nightfall—appar reptly by means of a door left open by a ca guard—stumbled about in the dark and fallen, hitting my head against an old sword that lay on the floor. But that sense nothing but that my obsession had of extraordinary strength .. Because this all sounded very reason- able—and because, at length, I knew I must believe the psychiatrist if I were to recover—I tried to force the proposi- tion into my consciousness that, indeed, it had been just an hallucination. But it was slow work, and it was many weeks before my mind and my heart would ac- cept it—and it was my heart that was the more reluctant. For, impervious to all reasoning and explanations, love for Marion lingered, inconquerably. Somehow, I felt that she was not totally lost to me, if some shred of faith remained. But at last I steeled Gomichboo cS co ~ me, ~~ ~~ . . - a wee ee “ee, os TO... ~*~