Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 — page 21: what you’re looking at

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

and stars, and the ink-black blots made against them by one thing and an- other. And the great black thing that wasn’t a boulder, and wasn’t an ele- phant, went lurching and lumbering, smashing through Orion, wiping Scorpio off the sky, putting out the Pointers where the Cross was waiting to come up; it seemed to swing all over the universe. “It's chasing something,” I thought. It was. One could see it tack and turn with incredible swiftness, swinging behind it something that might have been legs and rnight have been a tail. Clearly, it was hunting, like the rats and the iguanas, and now I could see— or thought I could see—the thing it hunted: Something very small, com- pared with the enormous bulk of the beast; something that dodged in and out of the stones, running for its life. A little, upright thing with a round head, that scuttled madly, squeaked as it ran. : Or had I fancied the squeak? The whole amazing drama was so silent that I could not be sure. It seemed to me that if there had been a cry, a queer thin cry, I had heard it inside my head, not outside. I can’t explain more clearly, but there are those who will understand. At any rate, I was sure the thing had cried, and that it had cause. The end was approaching. : There was another frantic doubling, another swing around of the im- mense hobbling beast, and then the little creature simply was not—and the enormous shadow had swept to the edge of the cliff and over, and was gone, | I felt my forehead wet. My breath was coming as quickly as if it had been I who had squeaked and doubled there, out among the night-black grasses and the stones. . . . The shadow! They who died had seen shadows. “But,” I found myself saying argumentatively, to the silent stars, “I am real, and that wasn’t. It’s like things in a dream, when you know the rail- way engine can’t run over you, because it isn’t really there.” Something obscuredly answered: “Rafferty is dead, and Wilder is dead. Death is real.” : I got out of the pill-box. “I shall say the multiplication table all the wat home,” I told myself. And I did. But when I had got home to the bungalow, I said something else—I said a prayer. “Perhaps they didn’t,” I thought. Then I went in, and cooked my supper. It was quite a good supper, and I slept very well. : Next morning nothing seemed more impossible than the things that, I was assured, had not happened last night. All the same, I decided to go and have another look at the cave, with plenty of dynamite, and the shotgun, for what that might be worth. I could not forget that Beth, who would give her head away—and who had given her heart—was waiting for that brick house, and that little car, and those Sunday mornings on the surf beaches. And I was resolved that she should not miss them. It was now about ten days since I landed, and I began, for the first time, to count the days that remained. France would have to reach London, find ~ a simpleton who would finance his venture (I knew he’d do it—he could have squeezed money out of a concrete pillar), return to Australia, and make his way to the island. Six weeks; three weeks: six weeks ; three or four weeks. Nineteen in all. And I had put one week and a half behind me. There 19 Com (a) lNO@LK