A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, October 1950 — page 75: what you’re looking at

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

74 A. MERRITT’S FANTASY is it?” she cried, in dread astonishment. Harshly he laughed, unable to control the delirium any longer—the madness of intoxication in his dazed and riven brain. Toward her he took a step. But she, terror in her eyes, shrank back. “No, no!” she gasped. “Oh, mon Dieu! What is it ? What—what has happened ?” “‘Stasia!”’ mumbled Dennison, madly fighting for self-mastery, for coherence, even though his subjectivity realized how futile was that fight, how pitiable, how mean a figure he was making. ‘‘Stasia— listen! He—he has given me—he—uncle 99 = a “You see,” interrupted the calm, dis- passionate voice of the old man. “You understand, my dear. Now at last you know the reason of our guest’s sudden disappearance and his—”’ “Lies! All, all lies!” wailed the miser- able wretch, staggering in his tracks. His speech was thick, all but incomprehensible. ‘*Stasia—listen to—me! He—gave—”’ But the girl, with a cry of utter dis- illusionment, of pain and anguish that pierced even the numbing senses of the tortured Dennison. repulsed him. “No! No! Keep away—away from mel” she cried. ‘What is it? Uncle, tell me!” Until this moment Dennison had thought his tortures as acute as any man could bear, and live. Right up to and past the crisis of attempted suicide they had driven him. But now, dazed and stunned as he was by the hellish rack of the cyanid pulsing through his fever- drunken brain, he felt a deeper anguish, sharp as the fabled pangs of Hades it- self. Swimming in a dark haze, with crim- son and purple blotches that ever burst and faded and reformed again, he seemed to catch intermittent glimpses of the girl. And as he saw those wonderful dark eyes widen with fear, then with horror and repugnance and unspeakable scorn, he knew—through all his drunkenness— that not yet had he drained the bitter cup of Il Vecchio’s vengeance to its lowest dregs. The agony of seeing another human being, an innocent and helpless victim— the woman among all women whom he loved !—indissolubly bound up with his ] fate, inevitably forced to suffer for his treason, drove him mad. For the first time he knew the torture of dealing death to the soul. Frenzied with the effort to bring his numb tongue and his palsied body under some control, to tell her what had hap- pened, to explain, he reeled right toward her, babbling like a maniac. He had a vision of her hair, her warm and lovely throat, her bare arms, the slender hands, wherewith she now repelled him. “Stasia! Lis—listen to—me!” he panted, fighting as a man fights in the last stage of drowning. But she, loosed now from the dumb- ness caused by this awful and, to her, utterly incomprehensible change, screamed something—what he knew not—some wild, passionate terrible thing whereof the echoes rang like tocsins in his hum- ming ears. Then, outflinging both hands in an abandon of horror, she turned and fled. Like a white bird she vanished into the night. “*Stasia !”’ laughter. No answer—she was gone! Dennison laughed again, a weakly fool- ish laugh, the laugh of a man far gone in liquor. Nodding to himself, shaking, blearing, he turned to the grim patriarch. | be VECCHIO was still sitting there, in the same chair, whence he had never moved since Denniscn’s return a half-hour before. Still comfortably smoking that lon pipe, still observing all this wreck arid ruin of human lives, as though seated in a box at the opera. he smiled as he sagely shook his head. And, at the dim-glimmering sight of him, with his last feeble sparks of reason Dennison felt the birth of a hate so bitter, so violent and ghastly, that for a second it cleared the intoxication from his brain. “You, you die anyway!’’ he shrieked. “Not for—what you have done to me, you viper! Not—for all your scores of murders! But—for—her!”’ On the reading-table lay a Chinese paper-cutter, a long steel blade set in a haft of dragon-carved ivory. The dragon he screamed with maniac (C(O) nn) (C 6)(0)©) Ss (C(O)