A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, October 1950 — page 90: what you’re looking at

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

THE BLUIXIR OF HATE 89 hand; the time to settle all accounts, to pay your all too inadequate total of pos- session for the horrors you have pee Ye Into my hands you are delivered. y body you transformed into a child’s; but my brain, my intellect you could not change, you could not conquer. Have I not acted my part well? Say, have I not duped you richly, dear old Uncle Vec- chio ?” The aged man struggled vainly to bring words to utterance. Only a croaking gasp escaped him. Dennison only laughed out- right. “Well spoken!” cried he. “How elo- quent you have become! Admirable, in- deed! I would that all your murdered victims could hear and see you—as you are now! “Listen ; I am soon at an end of speech. Nothing has ever counted with you, save your infernal research and your damnable records. Nothing has ever restrained you, nothing been sacred. For your elixir and for the sake of observing its effects on me, you offered up the life and love and hap- piness of a good, pure, unsullied girl. You wrecked and tortured your own niece— Stasia—the woman I adored. You gave her love, only to snatch it from her; and why? Experiments! “You played with life, with all the in- most sacred passions of two human be- ings. Itxperiments! Of that girl you = ON THE NEWSSTANDS. NOW ; | POLARIS AND THE GODDESS GLORIAR By Charles B. Stilson made a plaything, a mere trifling toy. Of me, the same. Experiments ! “Nothing was holy, to you. All things were toys, even the immutable laws of nature and the universe. So now, I do experiment with you, Vecchio; so now by my hand you perish and are damned, through the mediumship of a mere child- ish toy.” Back he stepped; the last arrow, a plunking shot, pierced II Vecchio’s lag- ging heart. With one final look at the white, blood- dappled face, one scornful, curious glance at the filmed eyes that—their lids still open—stared up sightlessly into the depths of summer sky and fleecy cloud above the mountain. Dennison turned away. He patted the ashen bow and kissed it fondly. “Well done,” he said, and dropped it and the remaining arrows in the grass. Laughing, he unbuckled the belt and let the quiver fall noiselessly into the deep grass. “Almost finished now,” he added. “‘The end—and peace—they are almost with me now.” Then, with no further look at the strange object lying there so grim and quiet in that sunlit woodland place, he turned and made his way back to the house. Not yet in the stars of Polaris was there charted a homeward voyage, a3 he had thought when the cruiser Minnetonka sailed away from mystic Sardanes. For there beckoned from the waves a weird Golden Man, calling the intrepid son of the snows from his first chosen course, to an and into the strange thralldom of a = woman—or was she goddess?—Glor- | ian of Ruthar.... This great novel by the author of : *‘Polaris—of the Snows” and “Minos incredibly ancient country, Re VI 1 \ \ of Sardanes”’ is now on the newsstands | Z& in the September issue. 6)(0)©) S (C(O)