Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 120: what you’re looking at

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

122 THE METAL MONSTER pulse of—eagerness? “Hungry!” whispered Drake. “They’re hungry! Closer was the wailing; again that faint tremor quivered over the place. And now I caught it—a quick and avid pulsing. | _ “Hungry,” whispered Drake again. “Like a lot of lions with the keeper coming along with meat.” | The wailing was below us. I felt, not a quiver this time, but an un- mistakable shock pass through the Horde. It throbbed—and passed. Into the field of our vision, up to the flaming Disk rushed an im- mense cube. Thrice the height of a tall man—as I think I have noted before— when it unfolded its radiance was that shape of mingled beauty and power | call the Metal Emperor. : Yet this Thing eclipsed it. Black, uncompromising, in some inde- finable way Jrutal, its square bulk blotted out the Disk’s effulgence; shrouded it. And a shadow seemed to fall upon the crater, ‘The violet fires of the flanking stars pulsed out—watchfully, threateningly. For only an instant the darkening block loomed against the Disk; blackened it. | There came another meteor burst of light. Where the cube had been was now a tremendous, fiery cross—a cross inverted. Its upper arm arose to twice the length either of its horizontals or the square that was its foot. In its opening it must have turned, for its—face —was toward us and away from the Cones, its body hid the Disk, and almost all the surfaces of the two watchful Stars. Eighty feet at least in height,’ this cruciform shape stood. It flamed and flickered with angry, smoky crimsons and scarlets; with sullen orange glowings and glitterings of suphurous yellows. Within its fires were none of those leaping, multicolored glories that were the Metal Emperor’s; no trace of the pulsing, mystic rose; no shadow of jubilant sapphire; no purple royal; no tender, merciful greens nor gracious opalescences. Nothing even of the blasting violet of the Stars. Ail angry, smoky reds and ochres the cross blazed forth—and in its lurid glowings was something sinister, something real, something cruel, something—nearer to earth, closer to man. “The Keeper of the Cones and the Metal Emperor!” muttered Drake. “I begin to get it—yes—I begin to get—Ventnor!” Once more the pulse, the avid throbbing shook the crater. And as swiftly in its wake rushed back the stillness, the silence. : The Keeper turned—J saw its palely lustrous blue metallic back. 1 drew out my little field-glasses, focussed them. The Cross slipped sidewise past the Disc, its courtiers, its stellated GOGO .S (GO)