Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 184: what you’re looking at

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

186 THE METAL MONSTER oppressed with a nightmare weight, the consciousness. — ; ‘Rectangular, esa their outlines no spike of pyramid, no curve or globe showing, uncompromisingly ponderous, they upthrust. riser C tops of the first rank were enormous: masses, sledge shaped—li e those metal fists that had battered down the walls of Cherkis’s city but to them as the human hand is to the paw of the dinosaur. | | Conceive this—conceive these Shapes as animate and flexible; beating down with the prodigious mallets, smashing from side to side as though the ‘tremendous pillars that held them were thousand jointed upright pistohs; that as closely as I can present it in images of things we know is the picture of the Hammering Things. Behind them stood a second row, high as they and as angular. From them extended scores of girdered ayms. These were thickly studded with the flaming cruciform shapes, the opened cubes gleaming with their angry flares of reds and smoky yellows. From the tentacles of many. swung immense shields like those which ringed the hall of the great cones, — And as the sledges beat, ever over their bent heads poured from the crosses a flood of crimson lightnings. Out of the concave depths of the shields whipped lashes of blinding flame. With ropes of fire they knouted the Things the sledges struck, the sullen crimson levins blasted. Now I could see the Shapes that attacked. Grotesque; spined and tusked, spiked and antlered, wenned and breasted; as chimerically angled, cusped and cornute as though they were the superangled, super- cornute gods of the cusped and angled gods of the Javanese, they strove against the sledge-leaded and smiting, the multiarmed and blasting square towers. | High as them, as huge as they, incomparably fantastic, in dozens of shifting forms they battled. More than a mile from the stumbling City stood ranged. like sharp- shooters a host of solid, bristling-legged towers. Upon their tops spun gigantic wheels. Out of the centers of these wheels shot the radiant lances, hosts of spears of intensest violet light. The radiance they vol- leyed was not continuous; it was broken, so that the javelin rays shot out in rhythmic flights, each flying fast upon the shafts of the others, It was their impact that sent forth the thunderous drumming. They struck and splintered against the walls, dropping from them in great gouts of molten flame. It was as though before they broke they pierced the wall, the Monster’s side, ‘bled fire. | | With the crashing of broadsides of massed batteries the sledges smashed down upon the bristling attackers. Under the awful impact globes and pyramids were shattered into hundreds of fragments, rocket GOGO .S (GO)