Avon Fantasy Reader No. 8 — page 123: what you’re looking at

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

é THE CANAL : ee 119 night, my calmness deserted me—at this point I felt that I had been drawn into the midst of a horrible nightmare from which there was no escape, no waking! As I write, this feeling again overwhelms me, until I can hardly write at all—until, were it not for the thing which I must do, I would rush out into the street and run, screaming, until I was caught and dragged away, to be put behind strong iron bars. Perhaps I would feel safe there—perhaps! I know that, terrified at the hate I saw confronting me in those redly gleam- ing eyes, I would have slunk away. The two thin hands that caught my arm again were strong enough to prevent that, however. I had been spared her kiss, but I was not to escape from the oath I had taken to serve her. “You promised, you swore, ” she hissed in my ear. “And tonight you are tc keep your oath.” I felt my senses reel. My = I had an oath to keep. I had lifted my hand toward the dark heavens, and sworn to serve her in any way she chose. Freely, and of my own volition, I had sworn. I sought to evade her. “Let me help you back to your boat,” I begged. “You have no kindly feel- ing for me, and—you have seen it—I love you no longer. I will go back to the city—you can go back to your father, and forget that I broke your peace.” The laughter that greeted my speech I shall never forget—not in the depths under the scummy surface of the canal—not in the empty places between the worlds, where my tortured soul may wander. “So you do not love me, and I hate you! Fool! Have I waited these weary months for the water to stop, only to go back now? After my father and I re- turned here and found the old boat rotting in the drained canal, and took refuge in it; when the water was turned into the canal while I slept, so that I could never escape until its fow should cease, because of the thing that I am —even then I dreamed of tonight. “When the imprisonment we still shared ceased to matter to my father— come on board the deserted boat tomorrow, and see why, if you dare!—still | dreamed on, of tonight! “T have — lonely, desolate, starving—now the whole world shall be mine! And by your help!” I asked her, somehow, what she wanted of me, and a madness overcame | me so that I hardly heard her reply. Yet somehow, I knew that there was that on the opposite shore of the great river where the pleasure ‘camps were, that she wanted to find. In the madness of my terror, she made me understand and obey her. I must carry her in my arms across the long bridge over the river, deserted in the small hours of the night. .The way back to the city was long tonight—long. She eae behind me, and I turned my eyes neither to right nor left. Only as I passed the ean down houses, I saw their reflection in the canal and trembled so that I could have fallen to the ground, at the thoughts of the little child this woman had