Avon Fantasy Reader No. 7 — page 113: what you’re looking at

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

| THE WERE-SNAKE = | 109 exists there is no longer any reason for living—if it exists we are all hopeless, helpless, wretched creatures living in an hallucination, living on the edge of an abyss, living in a dream from which it is death to awake. We live surrounded by a Walpurgis night of obscene shapes; flaffing harpies that would tear out our brains and glut upon our bodies in sleep; ghoulish, black-lipped incubi: serpents of nightmare from Acheron; Calibans from Tartarus; we live sur- rounded by famine and pestilence and death—if such as this can exist under Se the stars!” I gnawed at the ends of my fingers to keep from shrieking. Miss Beardsley lay in a pool of ooze, the muscles of her face relaxed; and an awful, indescrib- able agony shone in her eyes. Her arms hung limp at her sides, but the fingers of her right hand opened and closed convulsively. Above her in the dim light, its face in profile against the dark, ageless, boulder, crouched the thing that | had followed through the darkness, the shadowy, lethal thing of unutterable evil that had left a dark, noisome trail of slime behind it. — ; Its doglike head was covered with scales, and a long, reptilian tongue pro- truded from between its black, bulbous lips. Its eye in profile seemed large and gray; but the tunnel-light had glazed it, and it no longer glittered. It was quite hopeless from a sane or human point of view, and when I raised my arm in a gesture of despair and fury it hissed, and spat at me. I knew that I should shiver and grow frigid at its touch. For a moment I did not think that I could ever move again; and I wondered if Miss Beardsley suffered pain. I longed to ‘soothe and console her, to assure her that I understood. “T shall attend to this!’ I said, but I had no intention of attending to any- thing. My mind ran in one narrow channel, to the exclusion of everything that should have concerned me. “If it does not move, I am safe,” | thought. I stood very still, fearing that if I moved an inch | should bring it down upon me. In fancy I felt its cold nostril nuzzling my face. I knew that it would nuzzle me and nuzzle me until | perished of horror and loathing. I was more upset than I cared to acknowledge. I suppose I thought of Miss Beardsley; but ane thing comes back now, and shames me—my vile, shocking cowardice. But something destroyed my shivering inhibition of muscle and will, and sent me forward like a released spring. I saw its body! The head had held me back, and tied my muscles into knots and filled me with shameless fright; but the body called for quick, decisive action. ] went forward instantly, and did what I had to do. But before I joined with it in that foggy earth-crypt I bent with amazing agility, and picked from the ground a thin, sharp stone. ’ I remember severing with one stroke the great, doglike head, and I remem. ber how the black arterial blood ‘ran out of the neck and spattered over my =— Qa SCOMIIGIOOKSHEO in