Avon Fantasy Reader No. 9 — page 127: what you’re looking at

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

g corridor caused the child, the girl, the doll to keep its eyes shut with ar? Nicholas watched the image for hours, marveling at the illusion of three- _ under focus. : _ He found himself unable to banish the picture from his mind. It stayed _ with him when he left. It preoccupied him during his waking hours. It _ persisted in his dreams, vividly, hauntingly alive. : Not without trepidation, he tugged at the screens upon his next ascent. The phantoms of sleep had lingered on, and deep within him quaked a bell at tolled unease. | | But the marvelous mirror beckoned stronger, and Nicholas knew why when it lay exposed. | er The eyes of the distant doll were wide open and fixed compellingly upon him! 3 _ A strange giddiness swept over him, like a wind that wafted all famil- iar things away. Knowledge smote him with its evil curse, knowledge that e had half guessed, half feared, and entirely denied—the knowledge that e mirror did not reflect a scene from some far corner of the world, but contained within itself a world of its own. And the light, so pale, so unearthly, continued to glimmer from the elfin features of the doll, light originating in whatever sun or moon coursed the sky of that internal world above and beyond the frame of the mirror. Under e glow, the opened eyes of the figurine possessed a hypnotic brilliance, issued a silent message across all those intervening leagues. “A message—what message? Nicholas stared at the boundless, silent world —the vast plain, the cavern tunneling into distance beyond sight, the girl doll emerging and fleeing from whatever terror lurked behind her. The _ Vestiges of that terror dwelt on her face, in the pallor of her cheeks, and her _ fleeing still, as she opened her eyes and saw Nicholas. Electrical tingles fired him, turned him hot and cold. He could only watch, unable to help, forced to wait, because of the barrier that separated their two worlds, a veil that neither of them could tear asunder. But there was a hope, if time would favor them. In all the days that he had labored, the distant doll had advanced only by a step, to open its eyes. The other world moved far more slowly than the world of Nicholas. She was safe a little while longer, because of the slow, almost imperceptible life of the land of the miurror. ‘ _ She was a lovely thing, a golden toy, invested with perilous beauty. She he saw that the shadows of evening had crept into the attic. The day had passed, and she had moved without his awareness. He wondered about the a 125 | imensional depth in the mirror; the glass acted like a telescope seen through | € wrong end, and multiplied by many times the distance to the object _ lips parted to gasp for breath. But hope, all but fled, had returned to ber, 4 had emerged fully from the cavern, Nicholas noted with a start. Turning, Comicbookscom