10-Story Detective Magazine Cover — page 53: what you’re looking at

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

DISASTER SNARE about himself. The hours passed. Mid- night came, and still the tomblike quiet of the square had not been broken. He sat down in a chair for a few moments to rest his legs, facing the window, his gun near his hand. An- other hour ticked by. He dozed. Then a sound wakened him, a sound that seemed nothing more at first than a faint, mouselike scratch- ing. But his eyelids opened, his head lifted up; and if he hadn’t been a man with nerves and muscles under supreme control he would have cried out; shrieked aloud in the wave of stark horror that gripped him. The square of the window, dimly illuminated by the street lights be- low, was now blotted out. In it was a huge, vague form; a black something with hairy legs entering the room. He found himself staring at two red eyes set in a black, indistinct head. Then the thing came into the room and lunged toward him. A sense of loathing mingled with the horror he felt, as though at a presence un- speakably evil. Against the window now he saw a black claw with gleaming points at the end reach upward and outward to- ward him. He hurled himself sidewise in the chair; dropped noiselessly to the floor and reached for his gun at the same moment. The thing seemed to hear him. Hart heard a scraping movement across the floor, saw the black bulk leap backwards toward the window. He fired just as the light was again blotted out as it went through. But the indistinct bulk made a poor target. Yet it seemed to him that his bul- let must have struck home, that the killer must have fallen. He leaped to the window half expecting to see it lying on the street as he had seen the body of Faith Tashman. But it was not there, and the night was empty, except for a strange whis- per of sound that seemed to fill the air, coming from everywhere at once S1 as the surface of the buildings reflect- ed it. The uneanny whisper died away as Hart listened. It died, and he heard only the running feet of the detectives coming at the sound of his shot. | & ART ran to the door of his room. it: That strange whispering sound —the powdered magnesia—the two things set his brain working, gave shape and substance to the theory his mind had been evolving. He went out into the hallway, but instead of descending to the street to meet the detectives and tell them what had happened he turned and ran up the stairs to the roof. Like a wraith he stole across the roofs toward the higher bulk of the building where Jack Baron had his apartment. A fire escape, not visible from the street, snaked up the side of this. There was one landing at the rear which could be reached from the roof Hart was on. He climbed the iron ladders, pass- ing window after window. There were no lights in Baron’s apartment. He was more cautious than ever as he went up the last slender ladder to the roof. The masts and aerials of the experimental radio station showed. Hart stopped and listened. A faint noise came, so faint that if his ears had not been alert for it he would not have detected it. It was the scrape of metal on metal, the soft clicking of well-oiled cogs. And high above him a shadow was moving. Like the boom of a derrick, one of the steel radio masts was lifting upward, lifting from an inclined position which had brought its top over the center of the small square. Hart stole forward toward its base. His- gun was out now, his fingers elenched over the hard-rubber butt like the talons of a hawk. He crouched, went forward on hands and knees, and suddenly leaped. A cry of terror broke the still- ness of the night as he jabbed his gun forward, jabbed it against a man who COmMicloookKks (C@