Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 167: what you’re looking at

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

A, MERRITT 169 brandishing javelins and great maces, and shouting fiercely as they drove down upon each end of the Metal Shape. Under cover of their attack ] saw cloaked riders spurring their ponies across the plain to shelter of . the cliff walls, to the chance of hiding places within them. Women and | men of the rich, the powerful, flying for safety; after them ran and scattered through the fields of grain a multitude on foot. | The ends of the spindle drew back before the horsemen’s charge, broadening as they went—like the heads of monstrous cobras with- drawing into their hoods. Abruptly, with a lightning velocity, these roadenings expanded into immense lunettes, two tremendous curving and crablike claws. Their tips flung themselves past the racing troops; then like gigantic pincers began to contract. | Of no avail now was it for the horsemen to halt dragging their mounts on their haunches, or to turn to fly. The ends of the lunettes had met, the pincer tips had closed. The mounted men were trapped within half-mile-wide circles. And in upon man and horse their living © walls marched. Within those enclosures of the doomed began a frantic milling—I shut my eyes— | | , There was a dreadful screaming of horses, a shrieking of men. Then silence. | Shuddering, I looked. Where the mounted men had been was — nothing. . Nothing? There were two great circular spaces whose’ floors were glistening, wetly red. Fragments of man or horse—there was none. They had been crushed into—what was it Norhala had promised—had been stamped into the rock beneath the feet of her—servants. Sick, I looked away and stared at a Thing that writhed and undulated over the plain; a prodigious serpentine Shape of cubes and spheres linked and studded thick with the spikes of the pyramid. Through the fields, over the plain its coils flashed. Playfully it sped and twisted among the fugitives, crushing them, tossing them aside broken, gliding over them. Some there were who hurled themselves upon it in impotent despair, some who knelt before it, praying. On rolled the metal convolutions, inexorable: | Within my vision’s range there were no more fugitives. Around a corner of the broken battlements raced the serpent Shape. Where it had writhed was now no waving grain; no trees, no green thing. There was only smooth rock upon which here and there red smears glistened wetly. | _ Afar there was a crying, in its wake a rumbling. It was the column, it came to me, at work upon the further battlements. As though the sound. had been a sigrial the spindle trembled; up we were thrust an- ECOMC OOO (GO)