Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 43 — page 24: what you’re looking at

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

TO-MORROW IS old prints and carpeted in heavy green, to a door beyond which was visible a comfort- able room. It might have been a scholar’s study rather than a consulting room. _ Dr. Quonsett said: “Ah. Good evening, Mr. Michel,” but Michel didn’t hear him. He was gazing in horror and fascination. The doctor was a man of medium height; dark, with receding hair, and excessively white, long hands which he flexed and clasped incessantly. His skin had a curious waxen quality, like a mask, and his professional smile was exactly as Michel had seen it in his dream. Almost, in that instant, he expected the desk to writhe into a coiled serpent, and the walls to ooze and drip stinking ichor; the lights to waver into greenness like the phosphor- escence of putrid fish. He waited, entranced, while his mind tottered on the edge of unreality—an unreality in which he would have seen the doctor pull away his mask and show a lipless, laughing mouth ANOTHER DAY full of inhuman teeth, while the nurse fought to calm him and lead him away to a cell. “That’s what he wants!” said a voice inside his head, softly, insistently, urgently; and since it was not using words which exist in a vacuum but was playing on the synap- ses of his brain, there was no need to explain that the he referred to was the person that would be revealed if the psy- chiatrist were to take off his face. He released pent-up breath in a loud exhalation, shut his eyes and steadied himself. Then he shook his head and took the hand Quonsett ex- tended, forcing himself to look steadily at the face that was not—could not be—a mask. Behind him, the nurse shut the door. He sat down at the doctor’s invitation, breathing heavily. The doctor, flexing his hands, said: “What’s your trouble, Mr. Michel ?” ““T—have dreams,’’ Michel enunciated, his voice kept 23 comiclooks.corn