Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 75: what you’re looking at

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

CHAPTER XII ‘T Will Give You Peace’ . N OUR concentration upon Ventnor none of us had given thought to the passing of. time, nor where we were going. We stripped him to the. waist, and while Ruth massaged head and neck, Drake’s strong fingers kneaded chest and abdomen. I had used to the utmost my some- what limited medical knowledge. We had found no mark nor burn upon him, not even upon his hands over which had run the licking flame: The slightly purplish, cyanotic tinge of his skin had given away to a clear pallor; the skin was itself disquietingly cold, the blood-pressure only slightly subnormal. The pulse was more rapid, stronger; the breathing faint but regular, and with no laboring. The pupils of his eyes were contracted almost to the point of invisibility. _ I could get no nervous reactions whatever. I am familiar with the ef- fects of electric shock and know what to do in such cases, but Ventnor’s symptoms, while similar in part, presented other features unknown to me and-most puzzling. There was a passive automatism, a perplexing muscular rigidity which caused arms and legs, hands and head to re- | main, doll-like, in any position placed. “Several times during my labors I had been aware of Norhala gazing down upon us; but she made no effort to help, nor did she speak. Now, my strained attention relaxing, I began to receive and note impressions from without. There was a different feeling in the air, a diminution of the magnetic tension; I smelled the blessed breath of trees and water. | | The light about us. was clear and pearly, about the intensity of the moon at full. Looking back along the way we had been traveling, I saw a half mile away vertical, knife-sharp edges of two facing cliffs, the gap between them a mile or more wide. Through them we must have passed, for beyond them were the radiant mists of the pit of the city, and through this precipitous gate- way filtered the enveloping luminosity. On each side of us uprose grad- ually converging and perpendicular scarps along whose base huddled a sparse. foliage. | | There came a low whistle of astonishment from-Drake; I turned. We were slowly gliding toward something that looked like nothing so much as a huge and shimmering bubble of mingled sapphire’ and turquoise, swimming up from and two-thirds above and the balance 77 GOGO .S (GO)