Page:Weird Tales Volume 27 Number 02 (1936-02).djvu/3

Utter terror was in the muffled shriek that arose from the penthouse. A man's scream. Blood-chilling. The despairing, horror-laden cry of one face to face with an appalling, frightful death.

It brought Patrolman Barry McClave bounding into action. He had been crouching, his ear at the keyhole of the door opening upon the roof from the stairway leading from the floor below—the last elevator stop.

Barry snapped erect. He spat on his hands, and his blue eyes sparkled with eagerness for battle as he whipped forth his automatic. He yanked the door open. Through the darkness he dashed across the roof of the twenty-eight story apartment building, toward the penthouse. Excitement and exertion sent the blood pounding through his veins. His florid face became beet-red. He cried:

"Man, oh man! What a break! And me little more'n a rookie! What'll Adell say when she hears——"

The blood-curdling scream cut him short. Without changing his grip on the weapon, he hammered on the penthouse door with the butt of the automatic.

"Open up, there! It's the law! Open up, you——"

The knob turned under his left hand. The door was unlocked. He kicked it open. That fearful, harrowing shriek burst upon him with piercing intensity.

He plunged forward. He failed to see the little, brown, monkey-like man behind the door, for his attention was fixed upon the figure dead ahead. A man; a man in evening clothes; a man with a pointed Vandyke beard; a short man, pot-bellied; a man wearing high, Cuban heels.

Oddly, it was the high heels that impressed Barry as he burst through the door. For the man had been facing the library on the left of the reception hall, and merely turned his head as Barry lunged in.

The young patrolman yelled:

"Where is Mr. Trehearne? Man, what are you doing to——"

And then his question was answered, not by the short man with the high heels, but by Salisbury Trehearne himself. Trehearne, the wealthy, elderly broker who lived alone in an apartment on the eighteenth floor—whose uneasy look and whose half-expressed feeling of dread had led the officer on the beat to follow him here to the penthouse apartment of Doctor Cloxton Vroom, the zoologist.

Trehearne came staggering backward through the library door. Coiled about him from knees to shoulders was a gigantic, silver serpent, an immense, thirty-foot anaconda, giant among reptiles! Its scaly hide was a leprous silver, glowing with faint phosphorescence.