Page:Weird Tales Volume 12 Issue 05 (1928-11).djvu/144

that mound and crouched in the shadow of one at the very edge, but a few yards from its sloping side. Crouching there they heard the sounds from its summit clearly, now, and saw beneath the mighty brilliance above scores of the dark, hideous shapes of the toad-men, clustered on the summit, moving to and fro. McQuirk had paused, now, and his eyes held Warren's.

"It's death for us if we show ourselves on that summit," he said, in a whisper, "but up there is our last chance."

Warren gazed up toward the mound's thronged top, and something seemed to tighten across his chest. Then, without speaking, his hand went forth to the other, who gripped it once, then crawled slowly out of the protecting shadow, across the narrow, illuminated belt that separated them from the mound's sloping side. And Warren followed.

Once again they paused, glancing up toward the summit; then crawled on, up its side toward the mound's top, up, up, toward death, until they were within a few yards of that top, a few feet, a few——

Boom!

A tremendous, powerful note, deep and low and muffled strangely, it sounded from the air around them, from over all the island, it seemed, thundering out with cosmic, deliberate grandeur.

McQuirk gripped the airman's arm. "The domes!" he whispered. "They're opening; they're——"

Boom!

Again the vast, deep note had pealed out, a mighty note whose source was the myriad synchronized individual notes from the myriad domes around them. And the toad-men above had heard, too, and were rushing down the mound's side, only a score of yards from where the two crouched, down toward the domes from which arose that mighty warning note.

Boom!

With the last note there was a faint, sighing sound, a sudden increasing babel of whispering speech-sounds, and in the sides of the massed dark domes Warren glimpsed expanding circles opening, figures emerging. . . .

David, beside him, crawled suddenly upward, to the edge of the mound's summit, turned to whisper rapidly: "It's a chance! They're all off the summit, all gone down among the opening domes. And now——"

Without finishing he crawled up onto the flat summit itself, followed instantly by the airman; then they sprang to their feet, glanced for a moment over the broad, ruin-littered summit, and then were racing across it. For on it was no sign of the toad-men, for the moment, and a hundred yards away loomed the great cylinder from which the light-shaft soared—the great cylinder, and the switches on its side.

Speeding across the mound's summit toward the cylinder, Warren heard a mighty wave of clicking, whispering speech from all around, knew it to be the speech of the newly released thousands from the forest of acred domes around the mound. They were within a hundred feet of the cylinder, of the switches, were staggering on, on—and then both stopped dead in their tracks.

Ahead of them a dark figure had suddenly sprung from behind the cylinder itself, a human figure, the figure of a tall, black-browed man who raised a hand toward them in warning gesture, holding them with his mad, burning eyes. Warren heard, issuing from his lips, a clicking, sibilant cry, and then heard it answered by scores of cries from those below the mound, heard the sudden scramble of their feet as they raced up toward the summit in answer to that cry. Then David, beside him, had flung an arm out toward the man ahead in a gesture of infinite entreaty.

"Angus!" he cried, his voice ago-