Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 — page 123: what you’re looking at

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

cea = - comet Fe a ow x a > _Gulping in fright, Mr. Chambers slammed the door shut, locked it and double bolted it. Then he went to his bedroom and took sleeping powders. ‘His dreams that night were the same as on the night before. Again there was the islet in mid-ocean. Again he was alone upon it. Again the squirm- ing hydrophinnae were eating his foothold piece by piece. : He awoke, body drenched with perspiration. Vague light of early dawn filtered through the window. The clock on the bedside table showed seven- thirty. For a long time he lay there motionless. : Again the fantastic happenings of the night before came back to haunt him and, as he lay there staring at the windows, he remembered them, one by one. But his mind, still fogged by sleep and astonishment, took the happenings in its stride, mulled over.them, lost the keen edge of fantastic - terror that lurked around them. The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers slid out of bed and crossed to the window, the cold of the floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out. ; There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there might be a fog. But no fog, however thick, could hide the apple tree that grew close against the house. : 3 But the tree was there—shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with a few withered: apples still clinging to its boughs, a few shriveled leaves reluc- tant to leave the parent branch. The tree was there now. But it had not been there when he first had looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that. And now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor’s house—but those outlines were all wrong. They didn’t jibe and fit together, they were out of plumb, as if some giant hand had grasped the house and wrenched it out of true, like the house he had seen across the street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself when he thought of how it should look. Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor’s house should look, it too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too weary to think about the house. He turned from the wincow and dressed slowly. In the living room he slumped into his chair, put his feet’on the old cracked ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think. And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through him. Rigid, he ‘sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes later he crossed the room to the old mahogany bookcase that stood against the wall. There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The second shelf contained but one book around which Mr. Chambers’ entire life was centered. Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk failing to understand either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent of some ‘antirational cult, had forced his expulsion from the school. It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as merely the 121 | : Comichooks;co ae