Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 14: what you’re looking at

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

16 THE METAL MONSTER broke as though a gigantic, unseen hand had reached up and snapped them! An jnstant the severed ends ribboned aimlessly, then bent, turned down and darted earthward into the welter of clustered summits at the north and swiftly were gone, while down upon the valley fell night. “Good God!” whispered Drake. “It was as though something reached up, broke those rays and drew them down—like threads.” “T saw it.” I struggled with bewilderment. “I saw it. But I never saw anything like it before,” I ended, most inadequately. “It was purposeful,” he whispered. “It was deliberate. As though something reached up, juggled with the rays, broke them, and drew them down like willow withes.” “The devils that dwell here!” quavered Chiu-Ming. “Some magnetic phenomenon.” I was half angry at myself for my own touch of panic. “Light-can be deflected by passage through a mag- netic field. Of course that’s it. Certainly.” | “T don’t know.” Drake’s tone was doubtful indeed. “It would take a whale of a magnetic field to have done z4at—it’s inconceivable.” He harked back to his first idea. “It was so—so damned deliberate,” he repeated. | “Devils—” muttered the frightened Chinese. “What’s that?” Drake gripped my arm and pointed to the north. A deeper blackness had grown there while we had been talking, a pool of darkness against which the mountain summits stood out, blade-sharp edges faintly luminous. A gigantic lance of misty green fire darted from the blackness and thrust its point into the heart of the zenith; following it, leaped into the sky a host of the sparkling spears of light, and now the blackness was like an ebon hand, brandishing a thousand javelins of tinseled flame. “The aurora,” I said. “Tt ought to be a good one,” mused Drake, gaze intent upon it. “Did you notice the big sun spot?” I shook my head. “The biggest I ever saw. Noticed it first at dawn this morning. Some little aurora lighter*that spot. I told you—look at that!” he cried. The green lances had fallen back. The blackness gathered itself to- gether—then from it began to pulse billows of radiance, spangled with infinite darting swarms of flashing corpuscles like uncounted hosts of dancing fireflies. | Higher the waves rolled—phosphorescent green and iridescent violet, weird copperous yellows and metallic saffrons and a shimmer of glit- tering ash of rose—then wavered, split and formed into gigantic, sparkling, marching curtains of splendor. ECOMC OOO (GO)