A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, April 1950 — page 37: what you’re looking at

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

THE NINTH LIFE 37 peated in a very low and beautiful tone. “Eight-and-thirty years ago, it was a woman’s throat that was torn and clawed,” he went on deliberately. “Now it is a child’s.”’ ~ “Ab-h!” She breathed rather than uttered the exclamation. She threw her cigarette end in among the coals of the fire, and then they sat for a long time in silence, each watchful and waiting on the other. “You are strong, I know,” she said at last, ““but the stream will bear you away, while I stand on the bank and watch its flowing.” “T shall win, though. Not because I am strong, but because any deviation from the norm has its price, and in the end that price is exacted to the uttermost.” “You threaten?”? she asked, with a challenging note in the question. “Say that I warn,” he answered quiet- ly, gravely. “You must pay.” “You know that, if I willed it, you would not leave this house?” she asked, after another lengthy silence. “Then we should both be dead,” he re- torted grimly. “No—Oh, no! Look out through the window, toward the bridge.” He stood up to look. Light enough re- mained outside to reveal to his gaze the shapes of two great cats, tawny things that sat on their haunches, faced toward the house, just clear of the bridge parapets. Then he blinked, for the two shapes dissolved to nothingness as he gazed at them, and he knew the effort of main- taining the vision she had imposed on his retinae had been too much for her. The knowledge gave him intense satisfaction as he seated himself again. -“We are quite alone in this house,” she said. “You can prove nothing to others, no matter what you see or hear, alone here with me.’ “Admitted, but I have proof for my- self, now,” he told her. She laughed softly. “You needed none,” she said, “‘as I knew the moment I first saw you. We are very old, you and I.” “Even it this be my ninth life, I know E rs one,” he dissented. A) sl a “Nine lives, the ninth life—you harp of ont 2 aa she exclaimed with evident anger. Bee know only one. But we are very old.’ “Leaving me out of it, I’d be interested to know exactly how you reach that con-~ clusion,” he said. “Especially since— well, as I see it, you are not likely to get much older.” “T should be very much interested to know how you reach that conclusion,” she retorted with satiric amusement. “You want that put plainly?” he de- manded, “We are quite alone here,” she said. “You may say what you will.” “Plainly, then, the last night you spent in London, the body of a child—identified later by the caretaker at Grayenor Man- sions as that of his son—was found on Wimbledon Common after midnight, mauled and clawed as if those two vanish- ing cats of yours had got at it.” And I tell you” she spoke with an earnest sincerity that he could not doubt— “TI know nothing of the death of that child.” He sat puzzled, silenced for the time. He had been so sure, but truth sounded in her words: there is an intonation that compels belief, and it was hers then. Sue turned her head a little, and the glow in the grate reflected from her eyes, rendering them as depths of visible, velvet darkness. “Nothing,” he echoed. It was an af- firmation, not a question. “Yet I wonder —you know old magic. That trick of the cats was on a level with the rod that turned into a serpent—” “That?” she btoke in contemptuously. “T could fill this room so full of serpents that the hissing would drown your words, It is no more than a child, if instructed, could summon out by his will,” “And you, with powers like those, aim to marry Tony Briggs!”’ “Had I known that you were his friend, I would have chosen elsewhere,” she re- torted, with a trace of bitterness. “The friendship must end.” “Or the engagement,” he answered harshly. ‘Since you speak of it like that, why marry him? Obviously not for love.” No,” she said, after a long, long si- lence, “but because you were right in one re you said. I have begun he: ‘ninth 1 e 3) Eomicboo S col