A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, December 1949 — page 101: what you’re looking at

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

CREEP, SHADOW! 101 streaming loose in the wind, eyes flaming with the violet witch-fire. She saw me, and raised her whip and screamed, reining in the stallion so that he danced. fore-feet high in air. Again she screamed, and pointed to me: From behind the stallion poured a pack of huge dogs, a dozen or more of them, like stag-hounds.. . like the great hounds of the Druids— __ They raced down upon me like a black wave ...and I saw that they were shad- owy, but in the blackness of their shadows red eyes gleamed with the same hell-fires that were in Dahut’s. And behind them thundered the stallion with Dahut—no longer screaming, her mouth twisted into a square of fury and her face no woman’s, but a fiend’s. They were almost upon me before my paralysis broke. I raised the automatic and shot straight at her. Before I could press the trigger again, the shadow pack was on me, . They had substance, these shadow hounds of Dahut. Tenuous, misty—but material. I dropped my gun and fought with bare hands. From the dogs came a strange and numbing cold. They tore at my throat with red eyes burning into mine, and it was as though the cold poured into me through their fangs. I was weak- ening. It was growing harder to breathe. The numbness of the cold had my arms and hands so that now I could only feebly struggle against the black cobwebs. [I dropped to my knees, gasping for breath. Dahut was down from the stallion and I was free from hounds. I stared up at her and tried to stagger to my feet. The fury had gone from her face, but in it was no mercy and out of its whiteness the violet flames of her eyes flared. She brought her whip down across my face: “A brand for - your first treachery!” She lashed me again: “A brand for your second!” A third time: “A- brand for this!” I wondered, dazedly, why I did not feel the blows. I felt nothing ; all my body was numb, as though the cold had condensed within it. Slowly it was creeping into my brain, chilling my mind, freezing my thought. She said: “Stand up.” Slowly, I arose. She leaped upon the stallion’s back. She said: “Raise your left arm.” I lifted it, and she noosed the lash of the quirt around my wrist like a fetter. She said: “Look. My dogs feed.” I looked. The shadow hounds were coursing over the meadow and the shadow things were running, hopping from bush to bush, squeaking, piping in terror. The hounds were chasing them, pulling them down, tearing at them. She said: “You, too, shall—feed!” She called to her dogs and they left their kills and came coursing across the meadow to her. The cold had crept into my brain. I could not think. I could see, but what I saw had little meaning. I had no will, except hers. The stallion trotted away, into the lane. I trotted at its side, held by the fetter of Dahut’s lash, like a runaway slave. Once I looked behind. At my heels was the shadow pack, red eyes glinting in their bodies’ mark. It did not matter. And the numbness grew until all I knew was that I was trotting, trotting— Then even that last faint fragment of — consciousness faded away. CHAPTER 20 “Creep, Shadow!” HERE was no feeling in my body, but my mind was awake and alert. It was as though I had no body. The icy venom from the fangs of the shadow hounds still numbed me, I thought. But it had cleared from my brain. I could see and I could hear. All that I could see was a green twilight, as though I lay deep in some ocean abyss looking upward through immense spaces of motionless, crystal-clear green water. I floated deep within this motionless sea, yet I could hear far above me, its waves whispering and singing. I began to rise, floating up through the depths toward the whispering, singing waves. Their voices became clearer. They were singing a strange old song, a sea- song old before ever man was .. . singing it to the measured chime of tiny bells struck slowly far beneath the sea... to measured tap, tap, tap on drums of red royal coral deep beneath the sea . . . to chords struck softly on harps of sea-fans whose strings were mauve and violet. SS Eomicboo com