A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, October 1950 — page 41: what you’re looking at

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

40 A. MERRITT’S FANTASY of a trained scientist, he cut away the toe-stitch of the first one, then the other, with his pocket scissors. Then, most at- tentrvely experimenting till he found the right yarn, he began cautiously unravel- ing. The socks, hand-knitted from German- town wool disintegrated softly, easily, with never a drop or flaw in the stitch. As Dennison raveled them, he wound the resulting yarn into a neat ball. Each sock yielded a full hundred yards. Together, they gave him more than six hundred feet of yarn. He replaced his shoes, groped about till he found a fair-sized chip of rock scaled from the walls tied the end of his yarn to this chip; and then, carefully unwinding the ball as he went, started downward again on what he hoped might be a way leading him directly to the passage he sought. Some minutes passed. Already he had reached and passed the knot in the yarn marking the place where that from one sock had been tied to that from the other. He knew that he had made three hundred feet or so. From time to time he crossed from one wall to the other and felt for any opening, but he found none. Stil that dry, crystalline structure of the rock con- tinued ; feel as carefully as he might, nor could he discover the least traces of seep- or of moisture. Puzzled beyond all words, a sickening dread now at his very soul, he stopped to think again. It seemed to him, indeed, the steps were flatter, broader, and less worn, here, than he remembered any to have been. “Where am I?” he wailed suddenly, with terror; and, for an instant out of hand, sent yell on yell reverberating through the horrid black. The echoes died out quickly, dead- ened by the close, oppressive atmosphere which weighted upon him like a pall of lead “Ont On!” cried he, in the first rush of panic. And, letting the yarn quickly unroll, he stumbled blindly down the cury- ing stairs, blundered along a level “drift” and all at once fetched up with a dazing blow against some solid thing which was not stone. The impact sent him staggering back, his eyes filled with sparkling darts of fire. But he caught himself; and, bruised though his forehead was, stretched out his arms, his hands, to find this thing once more. As he did so, the woolen thread escaped from his fingers. HIS, however, in his excitement he did not perceive. For now exploring with hands that trembled in their eager- ness, he found that the object which barred the end of the passage was of iron—a en it seemed, which by the sense of feeling he knew was badly pitted with erosion. “An iron plate? Here?” exclaimed the doctor, his mind a daze. And, stooping eagerly forward, he ex- plored -its surface with shuddering haste. “Hinges!” On the other side he felt. “A latch!” He pressed it. For a moment it resisted. Then, exerting his new found strength, he forced it upward. Against the plate he pushed. It re- mained fixed. He set his shoulder to it. The plate vibrated ; came a creaking of the hinges. He hurled himself against it. With a complaining, grinding stridor, the plate swung inward. And though the dark, within, equaled that in the passageway, Dennison knew by the close, stagnant air and by a certain sense of instinctive per- ception, that he had penetrated into a crypt or chamber in the solid rock. For a moment he hesitated upon the threshold. A sudden fear assailed him lest, inside, there might be some well, some pit of terrifying, unknown depth, waiting sinister and black to swallow him. He listened. Nothing. No drip of water, no sound of moving air—nothing save the thick, fast beating of his own heart, the labored breath between his lips. Crouching, at first, then down on hands and knees, he crept into the vault. Before him and all about him he felt cautiously. No aperture. The floor seemed smooth and uniform, covered here and there by little drifts of an unusually heavy and co- hesive dust. “How big?” asked Dennison aloud. “How big aroom? And is there any other opening out of it?” an) (C 6)(0)©) (C(O)