A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, October 1950 — page 79: what you’re looking at

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

78 A. MBERRITT’S FANTASY hempen cord, Lombard proceeded to trice up the victim. Again the American fought, cursed, writhed and foamed with insane wildness. Methodically, slowly, surely, Lombard dominated him. Presently, securely bound hand and foot, the Italian bore him off to the study. Dennison, his pride now again reassert- ing itself, refrained from further speech or supplication, threats or invectives. Only, wide-eyed, panting and undone, he watched what might befall him now. “Let him only kill me—that is all I hope for now,” he thought, with worm- wood bitterness cankering his inmost heart. “Death! Can I not find it, soon?” To his surprise, he saw that the inner door, leading into the laboratory, stood open, and that the vacuum-lights within were flooding the hateful place with radi- ance. Acting as though under orders, and knowing just what to do, Lombard carried the American into this place. At the fur- ther end, almost opposite the tall cabinet which masked the secret entrance to the caverns, a cage of steel had been con- structed—of steel with thickly padded bars. Some twelve feet long this was, by eight wide and seven high. The floor of it, resting directly on the tiles, seemed to be of thick oak planking strewn with rushes. The door, armed with a formid- able padlock, was ajar. Dennison, divining the purpose of this horrible thing, went white with loathing and a helpless rage so bitter that it sick- ened him. But never any word escaped him. To struggle now, he understood, meant only further humiliation and added pain. Unresisting, he closed his eyes and let the inevitable run its course. Even after Lombard had laid him on the rushes, cut his bonds, and, going out, securely locked the door of this degrading, frightful pris- on, the American made no sound, no mo- tion. Inert he lay there, his breath choking him, his heart all but bursting with this incredible affront. And so, in stlent agony, a certain time dragged by. Then came a voice: “You see, my friend? See what you have forced me to? What I have had to do in order to pre- serve you from your own mad suicidal impulses? From your own self?” Dennison, shuddering with revulsion, opened his eyes. There stood II Vecchio, slippered and comfortable, with fountain pen and note- book and that ever-mocking smile. The American, burying his face among the coarse reeds, stopped both ears with his palms. Only the convulsive twitching of his body showed the agony that racked him. I! Vecchio, smiling no more, but with a bestial glitter in his eye, wrote for a little while; then turning away, left the laboratory. Behind him the heavy door clanged shut. The combination-lock clicked twice or thrice. Dennison was left in silence and in darkness there—in darkness to the eye, in utter darkness of the soul. CHAPTER 23 Totor’s Birthday Present INTER, the short Elysian win- ter of the Riviera, blent almost imperceptibly into spring. Life in the close-walled estate on Mount St. Clair had changed very little—except for a new figure in that very singular of house- holds. No longer did a tall, vigorous your man labor among the orchard trees wit Ii Vecchio and the Lombard. Nor did he with Stasia, now grown strangely wan and pallid, walk among the rose-paths, or sit and muse with book, and pipe in the moving shadows and the wavering blots of gold that wimpled through the vine- leaves of the pergola. Nay, quite gone was this man; vanished utterly ; no longer anywhere existent. Not dead, however. Not in existence, dead or living. This was the strangest happening ever witnessed since time began, or since man first emerged from the brute, and destiny rang up the curtain on the long, passionate, suffering drama that through all the ages has been playing on the world- stage |! Not living and not dead, was Dennison now; Dennison as a man among other (C(O) nn) (C 6)(0)©) Ss (C(O)