Avon Fantasy Reader No. 7 — page 108: what you’re looking at

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

— 104. FRANK BELKNAP LONG, JR. Li Twice I nearly stumbled, and a sharp stone pricked enour) the thin soles of my moccasins. The ground was littered with incredibly ancient rocks; and the sand was soft and wet, and it gave beneath me. For a moment I ‘mame that from somewhere beyond the narrow gray confines of the temple there came a current of sickly, evil-smelling air blowing noiselessly in the dark. I felt the unwholesome warmth upon my cheeks and throat. But worst of all was a sense of evil that enveloped me like a putrid shroud. I resolved to anticipate the embrace of Ishtar, and I deliberately stared into the eyes before me. They blazed with unconcealed fury. My body sought to rebel and the palms of my hands grew damp with the fear of Ishtar; but my will kept me from the brink of the pit. I thought: “It is very queer that Ishtar does not challenge me. It is very strange that she does nothing but stare with her large soulless eyes.” Then I became dumb. I saw that the eyes before me were divided into tiny sections, and the idea came to me that Ishtar’s eyes were complex, like the eyes of a fly, and consisted of a million million blazing orbs. The eyes before me were not human! I retreated until my back, was against a high, jutting wall I ran my hands rapidly back and forth across the stone to assure myself that the wall was high and firm. The wall was a protection against the evil changeling of the night. It was a buttress of the visibly strong and real against the shadowy and amorphous. I quietly drew my revolver from its holster and leveled it at the glaring, unblinking green eyes. My revolver could wreck the darkness, cleave it in two, tear it to shreds. My revolver was a symbol of power brought to bear upon evil that sulked, that stabbed in the back. S I sought to orient myself to the unaccustomed weapon. The thought of the sudden, brutal bark of a revolver in that shrouded place seemed a desecration, and my fingers trembled upon the breech. A queer paralysis held me; for a moment | felt like a corpse standing in a shroud. I was tortured by the tear of noise. and action, of anything that would unsettle the darkness and make the situation drastic. For a moment I wavered, and turned over in my mind the advisibility of going on my knees to Ishtar and asking her pardon; and then suddenly courage swelled within me like a wave. I dared to press upon the trigger; and the loathsome blackness disappeared in a plethoric glare which swallowed the earth. Nothing existed but an eva- nescent and transcendent whiteness; and the darkness quivered like jelly and fell away and writhed on the knees of the night. And then from the matrix - comichooks.com