Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 62: what you’re looking at

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

64 THE METAL MONSTER axis of the sinking cone, the woman’s left arm holding Ruth close to her side. Drake’s hand caught my shoulder in a grip that hurt—nor did he need to point toward that which had wrung the exclamation from him. The funnel had. broken from its slow falling; it had made one swift, startling drop and had come to rest. Its recumbent side was now flat- tened into a triangular plane, widening from the narrow tip in which we stood to all of five hundred feet where its base rested against the blue wall, and falling at a full thirty-degree pitch. The misty-edged circle had become an oval, a flattened ellipse another five hundred feet high and three times that in length. And in its exact center, shining forth as though it opened into a place of pale azure in- candescence was another rectangular Cyclopean portal. | On each side of it, in the apparently solid face of the gleaming, metallic cliffs, a slit was opening. a They began as thin lines a hundred yards in height through which the intense light seemed to hiss; quickly they opened—widening like monstrous cat pupils until at last, their widening ceasing, they glared forth, the blue incandescence gushing from them like molten steel from an opened sluice. Deep within them I sensed a movement. Scores of towering shapes swam within and glided out of them, each reflecting the vivid light as though they themselves were incandescent. Around their crests spun wide and flaming coronets. | They rushed forth, wheeling, whirling, driven like leaves in a whirl- wind. Out they swirled from the cat’s eyes of the glimmering wall, these dervish obelisks crowded with spinning fires.. They vanished in the mists, Instantly with their going, the eyes contracted: were but slits: were gone. And before us within the oval was only the waiting portal. The leading block leaped forward. As abruptly, those that bore us followed. Again under that strain of projectile flight we clutched each other; the pony screamed its terror. The metal cliff rushed to meet us like a thunder cloud of steel: the portal raced upon us—a square mouth of cold blue flame. And into it we swept; were devoured by it. Light in blinding, intolerable flood beat about us, blackening the sight with agony. We pressed, the three of us, against the side of the pony, burying our faces in its shaggy coat, striving to hide our eyes from the radiance which, strain closely as we might, seemed to pierce through the body of the little beast, through our own heads, searing the sight. | a ECOMC OOO (GO)