It was like a cave, a great vaulted cave which echoed back my first hesitant movements on the slab and tossed them from wall to wall until the darkness about me was all one vast rustling. I felt my skin prickle into gooseflesh. In that moment of waking I was oddly frightened. I had no memory of location. I might have been in a subterranean grotto, with enormous stalagmites of supergrotesque shape rising all about me in the thick gloom. I sat up. The slab was cold beneath me. Directly in front of

For a long while I walked alone with my cold rage. It was, well, most curious is a mild way to describe it. I had never been a man of violence and fury. Only in my adventure yarns had I spread gore and destruction abroad. I thought back over my twenty-eight years of life. I didn't believe I had ever even hit anyone before tonight. Yet I had taken enormous pleasure in the wanton brutality. Even after my anger had died, I felt no regret whatever for the murder of the guard. He had been a stupid ma

I could hear no sounds of pursuit as yet. I thought back over the past half hour. I still experienced no shred of remorse. The man had deserved to die. He had laid hands on me without provocation. He had been stupid. He had been a man . Again that odd emphasis stirred a wonder in my mind, which vanished before I could grip it. I looked about me at what I could discern of the artificial cavern. I felt at home here. Then my memory played me a trick. I thought I had been in this place before, with

As I stuffed things into my big battered Gladstone I found myself changing. A cryptic statement, that, and one which requires explanation; yet how can I say just what it was like, this metamorphosis? At first I was the same creature that had crouched behind the false stalagmite and slain the guard, then had leaped from the second-story window to flee into the night. This was a—I was about to say a wholly physical being. That isn't true. There was brainwork of a sort behind its actions, but an al

I caught the five A.M. train for another big city—never mind which. I had about two hundred dollars in my wallet, a fair selection of clothes and essentials in my Gladstone, and the portable typewriter in its beat-up case. For a while I was well enough provided for. I settled back in the reclining chair, watched the dawn come up beyond the windows of the train, and listened with half an ear to the whispering voice that was calling to me from the unknown. An hour passed. I was drowsing, comfortab

It was some two hours before sunrise. I was dressing, packing leisurely. There was a knock at the door. My light was on. I could not pretend to be asleep. "What is it?" "Police sir. We're checking for a wanted man. Will you open up, please?" I threw the last of my stuff into the Gladstone and shoved it under the bed. Putting my ear to the panel of the door, I listened for their breathing. There were two of them, and probably more within call, checking other rooms where a single man was registere

I pulled my Gladstone from below the bed, strapped and locked it. Then for a moment I stared at my typewriter. It was doubtful that I would ever use her again, and she'd make an extra burden which I could scarcely afford to carry with me. I hated the thought of someone else's fingers on her keys. I had loved that cranky, faithful old mill. I opened her case and raising the machine above my head brought her face down onto a bedpost. Two crashes were plenty. They'd never repair my old girl now. I

I stopped on the crest of a knoll and got out of the car. Off to the right lay the beginnings of a vast swampy tract of wilderness, green and steaming in the early morning air. I had never known of it before, had no idea of its name or nature, and yet I knew I had been heading for it ever since I left the museum. Somewhere in its somber depths I would find the voice that was calling to me. I looked back the way I had come. I could see for miles. There was nothing moving on the road but I had the

The hounds bayed on my trail, and the voice in my head called me forward. I picked up the Gladstone and hastened on, following an invisible path between oozing stretches of swamp under great creeper-festooned oaks, never putting my feet on anything but firm ground. I seemed closer to the earth than I had ever been. It spoke to me, mystically, silently, and I knew where was footing and where was treacherous bog. Even so a fox traverses new territory and never makes a misstep. I don't know how lon

They came along the pathway, holding in the leashed dogs, for evidently they did not trust to their own powers to keep up with free-running beasts. There were eight or ten men, with as many hounds. These were making a fearful racket. They nosed us and before they got abreast of us were poking wildly aside from the safety of the tussocked path of solid earth. The men yelled at each other and made the usual human amount of unnecessary uproar. How I scorned and despised them! One carried a grotesqu

The house was old but well-kept, upreared in the heart of the great green swampland. It was such a house as a troll might have built—a troll with a Gothic imagination. Rambling, with a ramshackle look despite its sturdiness, wood-turreted.... "One of our more exotic head-quarters," said yellow-hair, whose name was Skagarach. "Don't know what madman built it. We have them, HQs that is, all over the world; but not many in so congenial a setting." "Are we truly all over the world, then?" "Most of i

Now you who read this: I declare war on you and all your kind. I tell you plain that we will rise and slay you, that there will be no quarter in this war which is to come to you. Forget your hostilities between nation and nation—they have no importance compared with our crusade. Put by your silly fears of invasion from other worlds—your foe is here, has always been here, and is an enemy you cannot even recognize. For we are banding against you and we can do that which will be the all-important f