Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 130: what you’re looking at

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

132 THE METAL MONSTER them other scores not until then visible to us, joining pair by pair from hidden arcs. Into the secret shadows they flowed, two by two, each bearing over it the slim shaft holding the serene flame. Grotesquely were they like a column of monks marching with dimmed flambeau of their worship. Angled metal monks of some god of metal, carrying tapers of electric fire, withdrawing slowly from a Holy of Holies whose metallically divine Occupant knew nothing of man— nor cared to know. Grotesque—yes. But would that I had the power to crystallize in words the underlying, alien terror every movement of the Metal Mon- ster when disintegrate, its every manifestation when combined, evoked; the incredulous, amazed lurking always.close behind the threshold of the mind; the never lifting, thin-shuddering shadow. Smaller, dimmer waned the lights—they were gone. We crouched, motionless. Nothing stirred; there was no sound. Without speaking we arose; crept together over the smooth floor toward the cones. ~ | _As we crossed I saw that the pave, like the. walls, was built of the bodies of the Metal People; and, like the walls, they were dormant, filmed eyes oblivious to our passing. Closer we crept—were only a scant score of rods from that colossal mechanism. I noted that the crystal foundation was set low; was not more than four feet above the floor. The sturdy, dwarfed pilasters supporting it thrust up in crowded copses, merging through distance into apparent solidity. Now, too, I realized, as I had not when looking down from above, how stupendous the structure rising from the crystal foundation was. I began to wonder how so thin a support could bear the mount bristling above it—then remembered what it was that at first had flown from them, shrinking them, and at last had fed and swelled them. Light! Weightless magnetic ions; swarms of electric ions; the misty breath of the infinite energy breathing upon, condensing upon, them. Could it be that the Cones for all their apparent mass had little, if any, weight? Like ringed Saturn, thousands of times Earth’s bulk, flaunting itself in the Heavens—yet if transported to our world so light that rings and all it would float like a bubble upon our oceans. The Cones towered above me—close, so close. GOGO .S (GO)