Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 76: what you’re looking at

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

78 THE METAL MONSTER still hidden within earth. It seemed to draw to itself the light, sending. it back with gleamings of the gray-blue of the star sapphire, with pel- lucid azures and lazulis like clouded jades, with glistening peacock iridescences and tender, milky greens of tropic shallows. | Little turrets globular and topaz, yellow and pierced with tiny hexag- onal openings clustered about it like baby bubbles just nestling down to rest. | Great trees shadowed it, unfamiliar trees among whose glossy leaves blossomed in wreaths flowers pink and white as apple-blossoms. From their graceful branches strange fruits, golden and scarlet and pear- shaped, hung pendulous. — } | It was an elfin palace; a goblin dwelling; such a bower as some mirthful, beauty-loving Jinn King of Jewels might have built from enchanted hoards for some well-beloved daughter of earth. All of fifty feet in height-was the blue globe, and up to a wide and ovaled entrance ran a broad and shining roadway. Along this the cubes swept and stopped. “My house,” murmured Norhala. The attraction that had held us to the surface of the blocks relaxed, angled through changed and assisting lines of force; the hosts-of minute eyes sparkling quizzically, interestedly, at us, we gently slid Ventnor’s body; lifted down the pony. “Enter,” sighed Norhala, and waved a welcoming hand. “Tell her to wait a minute,” ordered Drake. He slipped the bandage from off the pony’s head, threw off the sad- dlebags, and led it to the side of the roadway where thick, lush grass was growing, spangled with flowerets. There he hobbled it and rejoined us. em we picked up Ventnor and passed slowly through the portal. | | We stood in a shadowed chamber. The light that filled it was trans- lucent, and oddly enough with little of the bluish quality I had ex- pected. Crystalline it was; the shadows crystalline, too, rigid—like the facets of great ctystals. And as my eyes accustomed themselves I saw that what I had thought shadows actually were none. They were slices of semitransparent stone like pale moonstones, springing from the curving walls and the high dome, and bisecting and intersecting the chamber. They were pierced with oval doorways over which fell glimmering metallic curtains—silk of silver and gold. I glimpsed a pile of this silken stuff near by, and as we laid our bur- den upon it Ruth caught my arm with a little frightened cry. Through a curtained oval sidled a figure. Black and tall, its long and gnarled arms swung apelike; its shoulders were distorted, one so much longer than the other that the hand upon GOGO .S (GO)