Avon Fantasy Reader No. 8 — page 124: what you’re looking at

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

120 ; ~-EVERIL WORRELL “am i Nal aT Ls been accused of slaying there, and at the certainty I felt that she was reading | my thoughts. — And now the horror that engulfed me darkened my brain. I know that we set our feet upon the long, wide bridge that spanned the tiver. I know the storm broke there, so that I battled for my footing, almost for my life, it seemed, against the pelting deluge. And the horror I had in- voked was in my arms, clinging to me, burying its head upon my shoulder. So increasingly dreadful had my pale-faced companion become to me, that I hardly thought of her now as a woman at all—only as a demon of the night. The tempest raged still as she leaped down out of my arms on the other shore. And again I walked with her against my will, while the trees lashed their branches around me, showing the pale under-sides of their leaves in the vivid frequent flashes that rent the heavens. - On and on we went, branches flying through the air and missing us by a miracle of ill fortune. Such as she and I are not slain by falling branches. The. river was a welter of whitecaps, flattened down into strange shapes by the pounding rain. The*clouds as we glimpsed them were like devils flying through the sky. Past dark tent after dark tent we stole, and past a few where lights burned dimly behind their canvas walls. And at last we came to an old quarry. Into its artificial ravine she led me, and up to a crevice in the rock wall. “Reach in your hand and pull out the loose stone you will feel,” she whis- pered. “It closes an opening that leads into deep caverns. A human hand must remove that stone—your hand must move it!” | | Why did I struggle so to disobey her? Why did I fail? It was as though | knew—but my failure was foreordained—I had taken oath! ; ; 4 3 { ’ If you who read have believed that I have set down the truth thus far, the little that is left you will call the ravings of a madman overtaken by his mad- ness. Yet these things happened. I stretched out my arm, driven by a compulsion I could not resist. At arm’s length in the niche in the rock, I felt something move—the loose rock, a long, narrow fragment, much larger than I had expected. Yet it moved easily, seeming to swing on a natural pivot. Outward it swung, toppling toward me—a moment more and there was a swift rush of the ponderous weight I had loosened. I leaped aside and went down, my forehead grazed by the rock. For a brief moment I must have been unconscious, but only for a moment. My head a stabbing agony of pain, unreal lights flashing before my eyes, I yet knew the reality of the storm that beat me down as I struggled to my feet. I knew the reality of the dark, loathsome shapes that passed me in the dark, crawling out of the orifice in the rock and flapping through the wild night, along the way that led to the pleasure camps. om So the caverns I had laid open to the outer world were infested with bats. I _ cComicbooks,com