Avon Fantasy Reader No. 8 — page 122: what you’re looking at

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

ee EVERIL WORRELL trees hung down motionless, as though they were actually wilting on their 1 branches. : . __- With an effort, I turned my head. 7 Two hands caught me around my neck. The pale face was so near that I : felt the warm breath from its nostrils fanning my cheek. | | ' And, suddenly, all that was wholesome in my perverted nature rose upper- ; most. I longed for the touch of the red mouth, like a-dark flower opening 3 before me in the night. I longed for it—and yet more I dreaded it. I shrank . back, catching in a powerful grip the fragile wrists of the hands that strove to hold me. I must not—I must not yield to the faintness that I felt stealing over me. a I was facing down the path toward the city. A low rumble of thunder— the first—broke the torrid hush of the summer night. A glare of lightning seemed to tear the night asunder, to light up the universe. Overhead, the clouds were careering madly in fantastic shapes, driven by a wind that swept the upper heavens without causing even a trembling in the air lower down. And far down the canal, that baleful glare seemed to play around and hover. over the little row of shanties—murder-cursed, and haunted by the ghost of a dead child. My gaze was fixed on them, while I held away from me the pallid face and fought off the embrace that sought to overcome my resisting will. And so a long moment passed. The glare faded out of the sky, and a greater darkness took the world. But there was a near, more menacing glare fastened upon my face—the glare of two eyes that watched mine, that had watched me as I unthinking, stared down at the dark houses. This girl—this woman who had.come to me at my own importunate re- quests, did not love me, since I had shrunk from her. She did not love me— but it was not only that. She had watched me as I gazed down at the houses that held her dark past, and I was sure that she divined my thoughts. She knew my horror of those houses—she knew my new-born horror of Aer. And she hated me for it, hated me more malignantly than I had believed a human being could hate. | And at that point in my thoughts, I felt my skin prickle and my scalp rise again: could a human being cherish such hatred as I read, trembling more and more, in those glowing fires lit with what seemed to me more like the fires of hell than any light that ought to shine in a woman’s eyes? And through all this, not a word had passed between us! Ae So far I have written calmly. I wish that I could write on so, to the end. If I . could do that, there might be one or two of those who will regard this as the | document of a maniac, who would believe the horrors of which I am about to write. : | | But I am only flesh and blood. At this point in the happenings of the awful (Q) comliciooks con