Avon Fantasy Reader No. 14 — page 50: what you’re looking at

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

know. Perhaps I was excited. The air was that air that had fingers which tickled the back of my neck and rubbed my scalp. “The Russian did not know what was going to happen. I do not think the girl knew. It was just the business of the old man. He was not /atah now. He was alive. His black eyes were sparkling, and at times I thought there was a grin of delight on his face. “We had walked about twenty paces when the noise started. Ja, the noise. It started at the far end of the vault, some hundred feet from where we were standing; and it came creeping toward us, eating up the silence. Eating up the silence like a great invisible mouth. It was funny. At first it was not a great noise. It was soft and rather soothing, but as it crept nearer and nearer, it became louder. Much louder. “Now and then it would stop for a few seconds—stop as if it had been throttled. And all our eyes were turned to the spot where it had halted. Do you understand? We knew, although we could see nothing, that it had reached a certain point. It was near this or that carved pillar that supported the roof. A noise made by something that we could not see. Moving and stop- ping, moving and stopping. “It grew louder. Much louder. New noises joined up with it. Noises that 1 could not place, noises that had been lost to the world when that temple went out of business. There was a devilish rumble that seemed to be the backbone of the clamor. It came at intervals. It seemed to shake the temple. And it carried a poisonous fear with it. Drums of hell was that noise. /a, drums of hell! “When that big queer noise came, J thought the veins in my head would burst. It led the others to a sort of crescendo; then it snapped off quick so that it hurt your head. And you could see nothing. Nothing at all. In that vast underground vault there was only the old man, Ilyin, the girl and myself. ]a, and the toads. Those toads were banked now inches high around the walls and around the pillars. They were afraid—those toads. Possibly they saw things that we did not see. That bufo-serboa is clever. Very clever. “Closer and closer came that racket. Bulging its way toward us! I leaned forward, pop-eyed and sweating, in an effort to see something. I have heard all the noises of the jungle, but | have never heard noises like those. They were devilish. They were beyond the intelligence of man. They woke memories of things that were snaky and slimy, things of the past when the bull-roarer struck fear into the hearts of those who heard it. “In the bones of our ears are echoes that have been asleep for hundreds of years. Frightening echoes. They are in the cells of our brains, They are part of us. We collected them in our climb out of the dark womb of the world. This civilization of ours is a small thing. It is of yesterday. It is the thin scum of conceit that we have placed upon the terrors of other days. And when we are frightened, that scum that is civilization, that is modernity, that is law and order and smugness and silly pomp and humbug, is broken by those memories that are mostly hooked up with sounds. “They come out of the depths. The beat of the tom-toms, the clang of the devil-gongs, the hiss of big serpents, the whirring of the wings of vampires 48 comiclsooks.com