A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, October 1950 — page 52: what you’re looking at

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

THE ELIXIR OF HATE 51 he got positively no enlightening results. “Curse the thing!”’ he cried at last in a sudden rage, and flung it down upon the table. The back cover flapped open with the impact. There, under the end-paper, he percetved a kind of slit. “What's this?” he exclaimed, poking with an inquisitive finger. To his surprise he found a pocket in the cover, masked with a flap which, had not the shock of throwing the book uncovered it, would in all probability have escaped his attention. A moment later he had drawn out a wide, thin envelope. His hand trembling now with a strangely prescient sense of important discovery about to be made, he opened this envelope. But, having spread the contents on the table before him, his face fell with disap- pointment. “What? Only a packet of newspaper clippings, after all?” said he in deep dis- gust. And he was about to replace them, when the idea occurred to him that he ought, perhaps, to read a few of them. feces HE began at once to do. They were cut from a large variety of papers. Some were in Spanish, others in Italian, French, and German. Two even seemed to be in Swedish, though of this the American could not be certain; they might have been Norwegian or Danish, for all that he could tell. There was one cutting from the Hong Kong Herald, one from the Hellas of Athens, and a scatter- ing of most peculiar items from places as far apart as Liberia and Hawaii, Mos- cow and Cape Town, San Francisco and Petropavlosk. Utterly astounded, Dennison sat there staring at the bizarre collection. He looked them slowly over. “Yes,” said he, “they’re all arranged according to dates. They run from—let’s see— from 1867 to—well, this last one from Raivaaja of Helsingfors, is dated November 7, 1911. And—what? They’re all about—what the deuce ?—as I live, they’re every one disappearances of per- sons !”’ Quickly he ran over the headings, his eyes widening with astonishment. “Yes, yes!” he added. “Every one! Unaccounted-for disappearances! Men— wom ftdren—gone, vanished, never heard of again! What in heaven’s name does it mean?” And, half-starting from his chair, both hands clenched, he stared about him, wild- eyed, as though expecting that some Bor- gain executioner, ax in hand, stood sum- moning him at the stairway door that led to the main hall above. But no, there was nothing. On the man- tel the old-fashioned bronze-gilt clock ticked evenly, peacefully. The fire snapped and sputtered, sending its sweet-perfumed warmth through the cheerful room. Calmly burned the student-lamp. In the dim regions outside the yellow circle of light it threw upon the clippings and the book, he saw the ranged rows of scholarly treatises, tomes, and pamphlets. “Am I crazy, or what?” ped Den- nison, shaking and trembling. ‘What short of a fool web of suspicion and hor- ror am I weaving? Great Heavens !— am I mad?” He left the clippings for a while, lighted another cigar with a wisp of paper which he ignited at the grate, and some few min- utes paced the tiling of the study. Hands clasped behind him, head bowed, he thought. Then, the puzzled, hunted look still in his eyes, but with a calmer pulse, he came back to the table. Down he sat, and for over an hour busily employed himself in making shorthand notes of all the clip- pings. This done, he carefully stowed his notes away in his pocketbook, along with the metal tags. He replaced the clippings in their proper order, put them into the envelope, and shoved that into the secret pocket at the end of the mysterious rec- ord book. This he put back onto the shelf, just as he had found it. He felt certain, now, that he had left no indication anywhere of his indiscreet investigation. Ten strokes from the clock recalled him to the fact that the hour was grow- ing late. “Now,” said he—“now that I’ve estab- lished—now that I seem to have estab- lished the fact—that Il Vecchio has for a number of years been taking the most vital interest in unaccounted-for disap- (C(O) nn) (C 6)(0)©) Ss (C(O)