The Black Mask — page 79: what you’re looking at

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

The Tell-Tale Band of Yellow By Hamilton Craigie HICKEN-FOOT Darragh, with a skinful of cheap Italian red wine, lurched, stiff-armed, against the basement grille. The warped treads of the ancient staircase creaked under the pressure of a careful footfall—then, at what he saw, outlined in the red circle of the single gas-jet, Darragh’s loose lips sagged open—stark, elemental fear strangled the outcry in his throat—his blunt finger-nails met like talons, hooked into the basement gate. A moment he stood thus, while sas him, like a face without a body, there floated against a black pool of darkness, the dreadful head, like, in its semblance, to nothing animal or human save in the broad, porcine snout. For a moment it held against the red glimmer of the gas which, in a debased aureole, seemed to pale to a flat, tone- less shading of unholy fire. Then it passed, like the brief smoke of a wind- blown torch. — Darragh knew nothing of hippogrifs, of leprechauns; he might have called it a gargoyle, a djinn, had he known them by their names. Nor was he familiar with Anubis, the dog-faced deity of the Egyptians—but the head which he had beheld was kin to none of these.... _ Now, spread-eagled against the grat- ing, he fell suddenly sick, the fumes of the cheap liquor he had drunk mounting in a swift, dizzying surge against his brain. Stumbling, reeling, clawing des- _ perately outward, behind him the mem- ‘oe of the Thing which he had seen, he tine street, and, tauleh a: headlong 3 ae But his last conscious impression, ere he sank into the stupor which would last until well into the next day’s noon, was of a face which seemed to float, head-high, at the height of a tall man, like a face without a body—a face un- speakable, inhuman, and yet—real—in its terrifying semblance, half-dog, half- pig—whole horror. And with it, too, ere he sank like a stone into the sea- green silence of oblivion, there persisted in his nostrils a savor, a stench, an acrid, faint tang, as though the very air itself had been tainted by the passage of that nameless terror. "a Il DETECTIVE SERGEANT SINSABAUGH, off duty at two A. M., went up the steps of the Varick Street tenement wherein he kept bachelor quarters. No. 32 was a malodorous building in a neighbor- hood grim and chancy enough of its kind. On one side there loomed the squat bulk of a stable; on the other the towering outline of a chemical plant. Sinsabaugh, however, was thinking that it was his last night as a bachelor, and, consequently, his last night in No. 32. For tomorrow he would be mar- ried ... his last night. . But. tonight, despite the joyance of his mood, there was something in the _ air—he felt it as a heaviness, a dead- ness, a breathless, weighty hush like the tension before storm. But the August. evening was close and sultry. And yet, as he mounted the worn into his | ound ‘eye , te |