A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, April 1950 — page 64: what you’re looking at

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

- 64 A. MERRITT’S FANTASY the world. “I had a long talk over the phone with Inspector Crampton,” he said, “and by what he had to tell me there’s a similarity about both deaths. Except— in his case there appear to be no holding marks.” Tott nodded comprehension. “I’ve seen the body here,” he admitted. “And my first conclusion—my main conclusion, I should say—was that there were two— somethings. It doesn’t look human.” Quite so—quite so,” Perry agreed. ‘By what Crampton had to say, claw, and fang only, there. But here—the only sort of beast that could have made those grip marks on the shoulder would be one of the ape tribe, ourang or chimpanzee or possibly baboon, and none of them hunt with members of the cat family. In the same way, no member of the cat family, as far as J know, can grip to cause a bruise. I should say bruises. That awful tear in the throat might have been caused by any sort of beast, but when you add on the claw marks, it’s feline and nothing else. I make it a pretty big feline, too.” “An ordinary house cat can scratch deeply,” Tott observed. “But couldn’t leave its prey as blood- less as that poor child’s body was when it was found,” Perry pointed out. “And that reminds me. Down under Hedling- ton—literally down under it, by two hundred feet or so—is Barnby, named Barnby-under-Hedlington, from its posi- tion. To get there, you wind down the side of the hill—the body was found at the top of that hill. About halfway down the hillside becomes cliff, and the road is cut in and railed for safety. If you stop at that point and stand with your back to the hillside, you can look straight over Barnby hamlet and see what is known as the Grange.” ' “T see. And this Grange?” “Was let furnished at the beginning of last autumn—the owner went abroad—to a Miss Kefra. She’s got a sort of chauffer- personal-man, and he’s Egyptian, and she had three servants there all the time—the man went backward and forward to Lon- don with her. Pretty well-to-do, I under- stand. Well, the day before yesterday, the three maids all quit, and said it was because they couldn’t stand the cats.” Tott said, quite calmly: “That sounds relevant. Might be worth looking into.” “T thought the same,” Perry assented. “Two of the three were engaged through a Cheltenham agency, and I’ve still got to trace them—if I think it worthwhile. The third is a Mrs. Bell, a widow who had been at the Grange as cook and lives here in Hedlington with her brother. She says her reason for leaving was that she wouldn’t stay on in the house alone with Miss Kefra’s man—Sally something-or- other, his name appears to be.” “Saleh,” Gees put in, “Saleh Nahor—which means son of Nahor.” “Sally—yes,” Perry agreed. “Only one of the other two actually saw any cats, it seems, and she rushed into the other one’s bedroom in the middle of the night, too scared to stay alone in her own room. According to her, she’d heard a noise and gone out to look for the source—mind, I get this only at third hand from Mrs. Bell—gone out wondering about it, think- ing there was a stray kitten or something of the sort outside her room, and found herself face to face with two enormous | cats, smooth-coated, yellowish beasts, she — ibn - described them. “She managed to shoo at them—this is the tale she told the other girl and Mrs. Bell—and one of them growled at her. It didn’t miaow or spit as an ordinary cat does, but growled. “Then both of them came at. her and penned her against the wall of the corridor outside her room, one crouched as if to spring at her, and she gave herself up for lost—too paralyzed with terror even to scream, she said. And then they weren’t there, either of them.” ‘“Somnambulistic nightmare,” Tott said. = THE morning,” Perry went on, “she summoned up courage enough to go to her own room to dress, and swore to the other girl and Mrs. Bell that she saw the hindquarters and waving tail of one of those ghost cats as it went into this Miss Kefra’s own room—Miss Kefra was in the room at the time. ““So she waited till the other girl was dressed, and then went along with her to get dressed herself. When all three of them got together in the kitchen, she asked Mrs. Bell whether the place was supposed to be haunted, but without saying any- comicbooks:.com Pye