Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 169: what you’re looking at

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

A. MERRITT 171 gardens— the voice of its agony was that of the soulsin Dis. __ The row of destroying shapes lengthened, each huge warrior of metal drawing far apart from its mates. They flexed their manifold arms, shadow boxed—grotesquely, dreadfully. - Down struck the flails, the sledges. Beneath the blows the buildings burst like eggshells, their fragments burying the throngs fighting for —_ in the thoroughfares that threaded them. Over their ruins we moved. Down and ever down crashed the awful sledges. And ever under them the city crumbled. | There was a spider Shape that crawled up the wide stairway ham- mering into the stone those who tried to. flee before it. Stride by stride the Destroying Things ate up the city. I felt neither wrath nor pity. Through me beat a jubilant roaring pulse—as though I were a shouting corpuscle of the rushing hurricane, as though I were one of the hosts of smiting spirits of the bellowing typhoon. | | a Through this stole another thought—vague, unfamiliar, yet seem- ingly of truth’s own essence. Why, I wondered, had I never recognized this before? Why had I never known that these green forms called trees were but ugly, unsymmetrical excrescences?. That these high projections of towers, these buildings were deformities? - That these four-pronged, moving little shapes that screamed and ran were—hideous? | _ They must be wiped out! All this misshapen, jumbled, inharmonious ugliness must be wiped out! It must be ground down to smooth un- broken planes, harmonious curvings, shapeliness—harmonies of arc and line and angle! | - Something deep within me fought to speak—tfought to tell me that this thought was not human thought, not my thought—that it was the reflected thought of the Metal ‘Things! | / It told me—and fiercely it struggled to make me realize what it was that it told. Its insistence was borne upon little despairing, rhythmic beatings—throbbings that were like the muffled sobbings of the drums of grief. Louder, closer came the throbbing; clearer with it my percep- tion of the inhumanness of my thought. . : The drum beat tapped at my humanity, became a dolorous knockin at my heart. , It was the sobbing of Cherkis! | The gross face was shrunken, the cheeks sagging in folds of woe; cruelty and wickedness were wiped from it; the evil in the eyes had been washed out by tears. Eyes streaming, bull throat and barrel chest GOGO .S (GO)