Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 192: what you’re looking at

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

194 THE METAL MONSTER Hordes; no, the bellowing of the levins of our own earth. And the wind was cold; it bathed the burning skin; laved the fevered lungs. | 7 “Again the sky was split by the lightnings. And roaring down from it in solid sheets came the rain, | From the Pit arose a hissing as though within it raged Babylonian Tiamat, Mother of Chaos, serpent dweller in the void; Midgard-snake of the ancient Norse holding in her coils the world. Buffeted by wind, beaten down by rain, clinging to each other like drowning men, Ventnor and I pushed on to the elfin globe. The light was dying fast. By it we saw Drake pass within the portal with his burden. The light became embers; it went out; blackness clasped us. Guided by the ‘lightnings, we beat our way to the door; passed through it. In the electric glare we saw Drake bending over Ruth. In it I saw a slide draw over the open portal through which shrieked the wind, streamed the rain. As though its crystal panel was moved by unseen, gentle hands, the portal closed; the tempest shut out. — We dropped beside Ruth upon a pile of silken stuffs—awed, marvel- ing, trembling with pity and—thanksgiving. For we knew—each of us knew with an absolute definiteness as we crouched there among the racing, dancing black and silver shadows with which the lightnings filled the blue globe—that the Metal Monster was dead. | | Slain by itself! CHAPTER XXX Burned Out UTH SIGHED and stirred. By the glare of the lightnings, now almost continuous, we-saw that her rigidity, and in fact all the puzzling cataleptic symptoms, had disappeared. Her limbs relaxed, her skin faintly flushed, she lay in deepest but natural slumber undisturbed by the incessant cannonading of. the thunder under which the walls of the blue globe shuddered. Ventnor passed through the curtains of the cen- tral hall; he returned with one of Norhala’s cloaks; covered the girl with it. | - | _ An overwhelming sleepiness took possession of me, a weariness inef- GOGO .S (GO)