Avon Fantasy Reader No. 14 — page 62: what you’re looking at

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

strange night sound of soundlessness. How long Jeffry sat there before he began to nod he did not guess or try to guess. He drifted out of nothingness to awareness for no immediately appreciable reason, The room took a vague, unreal form before him. The window was a quartered square of faint lightness to bis left. The curtains moved sluggishly in the night air—but there was something else! There was some other move- ment in the room. Jeffry’s hands felt numb in his lap. The white there was his open notebook. Was Ronald astir? No, he could see—yes, that must be Ronald’s head there on the pillow. Suddenly Wilburts felt his eyes drawn inexorably to something moving on the floor near him. He looked—he could move his eyes but the rest of him was seemingly paralyzed. That movement was—a soldier, soldiers! The toy soldiers were moving! All the while Wilburts clearly registered these thoughts, his mind was anesthetized with a numbness of shock or sleep—or death. It was quite impossible. All around in the dark corners small things were deploying— small lead figures, running and crouching, holding their tiny guns in readi- ness! But the mind-shocking fantasy was not over—this hallucination, for that it must be, reasoned one small hindmost part of Jeffry Wilburts’ brain, was not passing, What had awakened him, he realized now, was the Breathing. Not from the bed, not from little Ronald, but from somewhere—someone else, A breathing that was like the exhalations from the lungs of a dozen dying men, like the mournful wash of sea on an open coast, like a thousand things, all unpleasant—all inhuman or soon to be! Then the breathing was a shadow. A shadow that was dark and made the rest of the room seem hght in comparison. A blotch of preposterously shaped blackness that had no reason and no reality, except that it wes. Slowly it was coming. From the window and the door and the ceiling and the walls... all at once! Wilburts could barely move. His fingers twitched in his lap, on the sides of the notebook that lay in his lap. For the paralysis of his body, his eyes tried to make up. For they were darting everywhere. Jeffry looked at the bed and there was Ronald sitting up, his eyes white discs of blank, stark fear. Great activity was taking place on the floor around the bed. Suddenly a tiny flash, followed by others in rapid succession, from different sections of the room, attracted the tutor’s eye. The soldiers were fighting back! But whatever it was they were fighting was still coming. A breathing, panting noise of a thing. Nameless, descriptionless except for the grotesque shadow it threw. The soldiers were scattering as the shadow darkened and grew in intensity around the bed. Jeffry saw that one after another the toy guards were going down. The flashes of firing were growing less frequent. Sull the noises in the room were the distant, indistinct but recognizable noises of battle heard from afar—and all the time the heavy, slobbery breathing grew in volume until its wheezing inhalations were like a giant bellows half- full of unhealthy water. 60 comicloooks.com