A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, October 1950 — page 53: what you’re looking at

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

52 A. MERRITT’S FANTASY pearances of human beings of all ages and races, I think perhaps the flash-lamp and the screw-driver, and I might find something of exceedingly great interest down below!” He poked the fire down for the night, extinguished the lamp, and went up to his room. A few minutes later, equipped with his tools, and leaving his room in darkness so that the Lombard, if indeed he were not long ago sleeping, should think the guest in bed, he noiselessly climbed down the trellis just as he had done the night before. Cautiously, soundlessly as a wraith, he reached the pergola on its jutting outcrop of volcanic stone. The aloes, palms, and mulberry trees seemed to offer complete protection from any spying eyes. He thanked his tutelary gods there was no moon. But save for the big-eyed wonder of those half-tropic stars above the sea, the night was black. He paused a moment to watch the far lighthouse on J_es Stes. Maries, to harken the soughing wash and crumble of the surf a full fifth of a mile below. Then, awed with the majesty of the night, yet thrilled with so keen a passion of discovery as banished any wish to dwell upon it, he took the little path leading to the clump of sumacs. Half an hour’s hard and perilous toil by the flickering light of the little elec- tric flash, half an hour’s risks and perils along that narrow, broken runway down the face of the cliff, brought him, sweating and panting for breath, to the cul-de-sac where he had found the little door earlier that day. Dark though the place was, doubly dark behind its masking screen of bushes, he recognized it. “Now for the stairs!’ gulped he, his heart beginning to leap with long-pent eagerness. Against the place where he expected to enter he threw the electric beam. Then, staring as though he had seen a ghost, he stood there speechless, shiver- ing, sick with the shock of his unspeak- able astonishment. ‘““Great Heavens!’ he cried. ‘‘The door! It’s been walled up!” CHAPTER 14 Love and Fear OR A LONG minute he stood there, peering, unable to believe the evi- dent testimony of his senses. In his supreme astonishment, his bitter disap- pointment at being thus baffled on the very first step of his investigation, he felt there must be some mistake, some self deception, in this thing. But soon the touch of stone and mor- tar, fresh-laid yet already solidified into an impregnable mass, dispelled any. such idea. And, as he swept this imcomprehensi- ble barrier with his shaft of white light, he began to take cognizance of how the thing must have been done. “This looks,” said he to himself, “as though it had been laid up from the inside. The absence of trowel-marks on the mor- tar, the way the mortar has oozed out and fallen here and here, proves that clearly enough. Yes, so it must have been. There’s no room here for a man to stand and work. It would have been impossible to transport this amount of stone down the face of the cliff. Of a certainty the mason stood inside, at the top of the stairway. The mason? Lom- bard, of course! Ah! Now I understand!’ To him recurred the memory of the man’s dirty and disordered clothing and of the peculiar spots upon it. “‘He—he did it!” exclaimed the Amer- ican bitterly. “And if so—what then? By whose order? How did he get into the labyrinth? Has he access to the laboratory? Does he know the combina- tion of that door from the study into it? Il Vecchio expressly told me that nobody knew it but himself! Then—is there some other way into that maze? Great Heavens, what a mass of riddles, complications and cross-purposes! What webs of mystery! And I—I seem caught at the center of them all!’ He did not stay there long, on the ledge above the sea, in face of that impassable barrier which for the time being cut off all his hopes of solving the great secret of the death-chamber. Dejected, angry, and not without a self-unconfessed qualm of fear as to the outcome of all this, he presently (C(O) nn) (C 6)(0)©) <S (C(O)