A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, October 1950 — page 81: what you’re looking at

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

&0 A. MBRRITT’S FANTASY that be the end? Will the Horla really catch me; must I finish in the darkness of insanity ?” Strangely irrelevant thoughts crowded in upon his feverish brain—that horrible anomaly of a brain, a man’s brain in the skull of a mere boy. He recalled his of- fices in New York, his assistant whom he had so unceremoniously deserted, and all his patients left in the lurch by his mad flight. Then his mother’s face, long dead (he envied her!) flashed on the screen of his inental vision. Quite absurdly the next picture was an inconsequential wrangle he had once had with a French railway porter at Lyons, over an excess piece of baggage. Then came the thought of Stasia —but this he banished with a cry of a wounded animal. “No, no!” he whispered. “I mustn’t dwell on that! For that spells madness— and I need my reason, clear and unim- peded, for the thing I yet must do. To be called back from old age to the prime of life, to love again, to find love turn to dust and ashes on my lips—” Fused in a glow of gold, the overarch- ing sky flooded that summer land with wonder; but Dennison, the lad, beheld it not. No longer now could the groves, the rose-trees, the gorgeous-hued par- terres, hold any charm for him. A mere mockery had become the warmth and perfume of that delicious spot, the scent of the big purple violets along the crumbling cdge of the cliff, the cuckoo-calls among the shrubbery, the bird-songs, and the wonder of the inverted howl of sky which blended, on the far ho- rizon, with the still deeper hues of the great inland sea. This, the paradise of the whole world, with its unending delights for every sense and faculty, now wrought in his fear-sick- ened mind and in his perishing soul only revulsions, nauseating by their very in- tensity. “Oh—could I only die!” he moaned. “Did I only dare to end it! The noose, the bullet, the ax, the burning stake, to a being dowered with determination and the courage I have lost—how infinitely prefer- able! But Vecchio, that fiend incarnate, Il Vecchio has robbed me of my fortitude. Strength he has taken. Courage he has sapped. Life he will yet exact. Will he take my mind, as well?” The wretch twisted his hands in a spasm of agony. He had spoken the truth. Un- der the aged scientist’s long treatment, under the torment of having seen him- self periodically lessen and dwindle and grow physically weaker, his stamina had given way. He moved and lived under Il Vecchio’s domination. A VICIOUS circle held him. So long It Vecchio lived, and willed that he should live, the wretch no longer dared attempt to take his own life’; and he lacked courage, as a house-dog even when abused utterly lacks it, to try to compass I! Vecch- io's death. So, wrung with constant agony, which he labored to conceal, he waited. His speculations as to the future, these con- stituted his supreme torture. What would the end be? That which, for the aged Italian, constituted the climax of a long series of intensely interesting observa- tions, filled the boy with shuddering abom- ination. Imagine a guinea pig in a pathological laboratory endowed with human reason. Imagine the sensations of this creature as, dumb and inhibited from resistance, it sees and feels the daily inoculation with tetanus bacillus or the virus of hydro- phobia. In such a way the maddening hor- ror of Dennison’'s life continued during those wecks and months of captivity on Mount St. Clair. That he, alone of all the fifteen hundred million human-beings on earth, should have been ordained for such a fate, filled him with savage rage. The thought of shrinking into a little child and thence passing to the state of helpless infancy, borne in a nurse’s arms, drove him half mad. Worst of all was the thought which constantly recurred: “Must my mind, too, eventually give way, and shrink and weaken with my body: Or shall I, as a crawling baby, still possess all the acumen, knowledge, and intellectual power of a full-grown man?” The horror of this situation preyed upon him night and day. Robust in body, fatally healthy through the workings of the damnable Alkahest, yet his face—boy- COMICLOC|S (C(O)