A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, April 1950 — page 44: what you’re looking at

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

A. MERRITT’S FANTASY He shook his head, as if to protest. “Your place is already laid,” she per- sisted. “Not courtesy, but my wish.” He looked full into her eyes, night- dark, now. He said: “Then I thank you, and accept.” -“Kefra,” she reminded him. “T thank you, and accept—Kefra.” She laughed, very softly. ‘“Wasn’t it a mad story I told you?” He answered: “I am not sure that it was—Ketira.”’ ‘CHAPTER 8 Time Stands Moveless (S= followed the silent little man up the wide staircase, and into a lighted room of which the half- open door faced him as he gained the first- floor level. An ordinary bedroom, he saw, furnished as the drawing room with a heavy Victorian type suite: it might have been a bedroom in an old-fashioned hotel, by the look of it. On a stand at the foot of the bed he saw the suitcase he had left in the back of his car. He turned to face Saleh, angered by the obsequious service for which he had given no authorization. . But, for nearly a minute, perhaps, he did not speak, and Saleh, facing him, stood in the anticipatory silence of the well-trained serving man. A little man, Gees saw, no darker in complexion than a southern Italian, with close-cropped, griz- zled hair, and as many wrinkles in the. skin of his: face and neck, apparently, as there were hairs on his head. A very old man, until he looked Gees straight in the face, when his blue eyes appeared amaz- ingly youthful: yet his face and hands and body were those of an old man; those blue eyes-did not fit with the rest of him, and their incongruity made Gees forget his annoyance in curiosity. “Did Miss Kefra tell you to bring this stuff up?” Gees demanded. “There was no need, Sir,” Saleh an- swered calmly, “‘since you are dining with ~her. The case is locked, or I would have laid out the clothes. Shall I now, sir?” “T can manage, thank you.’ Saleh inclined his head, turned, and went out, closing the door silently. | Gees frowned at the case, and then opened it, to take out his dinner jacket. A quarter of an hour later he found Saleh waiting to conduct him to a small room lighted only by shaded candles on the small, circular table laid for two. On a side table he saw a cocktail shaker and two small, stemless glasses of a curious opalescence. Saleh said: “Madam will join you here, sir,” and went out. There was a big coal fire in an old- fashioned grate, and on the mantel over _ it a black marble clock, stopped at a quar- ter to six. With a thought that, since he had to change back into day clothes be- fore taking to the road again, he would not be in London till the small hours, Gees looked at his wrist watch, and saw that it, too, oddly enough, registered the time as a quarter to six. Very:odd, that; the watch had never let him down before, but, putting it to his ear, he found it had stopped. He took it off, shook it, and put it to his ear again, to hear half a dozen faint ticks, and then no more. He had just finished strapping it back on his wrist when his hostess entered the room, slen- der in a closely fitting dinner frock of shining gray, with the moonstone on her breast as her only ornament. “My watch has stopped,” he said. “I wonder—we must have talked a long while before I left you—do you know what the time actually is?” She shook her head and_ smiled. “Time?” she echoed. “No. Need we think: of it? I hope I have not kept you waiting.” He took up the shaker and, giving it a twist, heard the tinkle of ice. Then, be- side him, she took up one of the two glasses on the tray, held it between her- self and the light, and stooped to lay it on’ its side on the carpet. She put her foot on the rim, and as Gees said, “Why break we" pressed the edge of the glass. He saw it go flat, and then spring back to its normal shape as she released the pressure and took up the glass undam- aged. “More magic?” he asked ironically. Again she shook her head. “There were four,” she answered. “One was lost, one I gave away, and these two I have kept in all my wanderings.” Again, tak- ing up the glass, she inverted it, and cS comicbooks.co _~