Page:Weird Tales Volume 29 Number 1 (1937-01).djvu/36

dulling. You can't hypnotize a normal person against his will, but regular hypnotic subjects get so they aren't normal. They get so they slip into the trance almost at a look from the master.

"Honey——"

It was a dreamy, dopy whimper. And then Cele stood swaying, silent, under Welch's thumb as completely as if she hadn't a brain of her own.

"All right, Dorothy," Welch said softly. "I'll hypnotize you as I did before. Like you were dead."

He came still closer. His eyes made several people in the front row shift uneasily. But they thought of course it was all an act. So, for one more instant, did I. Then the meaning of his calling Cele "'Dorothy" cracked home to me.

"You'll sleep, Dorothy," Welch crooned. "How you'll sleep! I can put you into a trance like catalepsy, now, if I want to. Now, after all these trances. . . . And I will. You hear? I will."

The watching crowd were beginning to mill a little. "Hey, what goes on?" I heard a big guy mutter near me. But I didn't have wit enough to stop the show. I was stopped myself, right in my tracks.

"Raise a fuss because I see Cele Wallace once in a while, will you?" Welch went on, still in that dreadful soft voice. "I'll show you, you dull little fool! I'll fix it so you'll never get under my feet again. Sleep, Dorothy. Sleep. Sound enough for the doctor to pronounce you dead."

My God! Oh, my God! my brain was whimpering. He did kill her! He did send her, living still, to be burned to ashes in a metal coffin! And now he's going through the thing he did last spring here!

"Suspended animation, the big shots call it," crooned Welch, chuckling horribly. "But we don't care what they call it, do we, darling? Not as long as I can put you in a trance deep enough to fool a coroner. Deep enough to fool them at the crematory. Sleep. Deep enough not to feel the first fire. . . ."

Somewhere a woman screamed. I think the crowd had known for ten seconds, then, that this thing was not a show any more. The woman's scream expressed it. And after it came men's shouts and a horrified confusion that couldn't have been deeper had the tent burst into flames.

"He's mad—mad——" I heard a man shriek.

"He's a murderer," I heard a deeper, hoarser voice. And with that I saw a detective, detailed to watch the crowd for dips this time as he had been last, plow through the milling crowd toward the platform.

Welch turned toward the mob. He put his emaciated finger to his blanched lips.

"Ssh," he said, with his jaws still set in that skull-grin and with the light of permanent madness in his eyes. "Ssh, You'll wake her. You'll wake Dorothy. And she must sleep sound. Sleep like death. Till the draft screams and moans up the chimney with the thick, black smoke. . . ."

I saw the pay-off later. I was walking around the tent, not seeing where I was going, thinking of the thing that had been in the metal coffin when the fires began to burn, when I saw it.

Bu-Jo was giving Tim, the midget, a roll of bills.

I turned without a word, and wandered into the dressing tent where Celia Wallace lay.

Two doctors and a nurse were still trying, without having much luck at it, to get her out of the last trance Welch had put her in before the dick led him away. {{nop}