Avon Fantasy Reader No. 8 — page 113: what you’re looking at

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

THE CANAL | 109 able people lived seemed to march with me, and then fell behind. They looked like places in which murders might be committed, every one of them. The bridge I had crossed was near the end of the city going north, as the canal marked its western extremity. Ten minutes of walking, and the dismal shacks were quite a distance behind, the river was farther away and the strip of waste land much wider and more wooded, and tall trees across the canal marched with me as the evil-looking houses had done before. Far and faint, the sound of a bell in the city reached my ears. It was midnight. - I stopped, enjoying the desolation around me. It had the savor I had ex- pected and hoped for. I stood for some time looking up at the sky, watching the low drift of heavy clouds, which were visible in the dull reflected glow from distant lights in the heart of the city, so that they appeared to have a lurid phosphorescence of their own. The ground under my feet, on the con- trary, was utterly devoid of light. I had felt my way carefully, knowing the edge of the canal partly by instinct, partly by the even more perfect blackness of the water in it, and even holding fairly well to the path, because it was perceptibly sunken below the ground beside it. Now as I stood motionless in this spot, my eyes upcast, my mind adrift with strange fancies, suddenly my feelings of satisfaction and well-being gave way to something different. Fear was an emotion unknown to me—for those things which make men fear, I had always loved. A graveyard at night was to me a charming place for a stroll and meditation. But now the roots of my hair seemed to move upright on my head, and along all the length of my spine I was conscious of a prickling, tingling sensation—such as my forefathers may have felt in the jungle when the hair on their backs stood up as the hair of my head was doing now. Also, I was afraid to move; and I knew that there were eyes upon me, and that that was why I was afraid to move. I was afraid of — those eyes—afraid to see them, to look into them. | All this while, I stood perfectly still, my face uptilted toward the sky. But after a terrible mental effort, I mastered myself. Slowly, slowly, with an attempt to propitiate the owner of the unseen eyes by my casual manner, I lowered my own. I looked straight ahead—at the softly swaying silhouette of thé tree-tops across the canal as they moved gently in the cool night wind; at the mass of blackness that was those trees, and the opposite shore* at the shiny blackness where the reflections of the clouds glinted vaguely and disappeared, that was the canal. And again I raised my eyes a little, for just across the canal where the shadows massed most heavily, there was that at which I must look more closely. And now, as I grew accus- tomed to the greater blackness and my pupils expanded, I dimly discerned the contours of an old boat or barge, half sunken in the water. An old aban- doned canal-boat. But was I dreaming, or was there a white-clad figure seated _ on the roof of the low cabin aft, a pale, heart-shaped face gleaming strangely Comlicloooks.cComn