Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 4 (1925-10).djvu/29

de Grandin muttered, "now we shall see what we shall see—perhaps."

As though his words had been a cue, there echoed from the house before us a scream of such wild, bewildered terror as few men have been unfortunate enough to hear. In the course of twenty years' active practise of medicine I had heard almost every sort of cry that physical anguish can wring from tortured flesh, but never anything like this. Fear—stark, hideous fear—played on the vocal cords of the screamer like a madman twanging a harp, bringing forth a symphony of terror that stopped the breath, hot and sulfurous, in my throat, and sent an itching tingle through my scalp.

"A-a-ah!" de Grandin exclaimed in a rising tone as he grasped his rifle and stared fixedly at the house. "Grand Dieu, grant he comes forth. Only that, and I shall be content."

Light flashed inside the house. The patter of terrified feet sounded among the babel of wondering, questioning voices, but the scream was not repeated.

"A-a-ah!" de Grandin breathed again, his voice razor-edged with excitement. "Look, my friend. Le gorille! Behold, he comes!"

Emerging from Millicent's window, horrible as a devil from lowest hell, was a great, hairy head set low upon a pair of shoulders which must have been four feet across. An arm which, somehow, reminded me of a giant snake, slipped forth, grasped the cast-iron downspout at the corner of the house, and drew a thickset, misshapen body after it. A leg, tipped with a prehensile, handlike foot, was thrown over the sill, and, like a spider from its lair, the monster leaped from the darkened window and hung a moment to the iron pipe with its sable body silhouetted against the white walls of the house.

But what was that, that white-robed form which hung pendent from the grasp of the beast's free arm? My staring eyes strained across the moonlit night and my mouth went dry with horror.

Like a beautiful, white moth inert in the grasp of the spider, her fair hair unbound and falling like a golden veil before her marble-white face, her night clothing rent into a motley of tatters, Millicent Comstock hung in the creature's grasp.

"Shoot, shoot, man; for God's sake, shoot!" I screamed, but only a whisper, inaudible ten feet away, came from my fear-thickened lips.

"Silence, fool!" de Grandin ground between his teeth, as he pressed his gunstock against his cheek and drew the muzzle in line with the descending brute's body.

Slowly, so slowly it seemed an hour was consumed in the process, the great primate descended the waterpipe, leaping the last fifteen feet of the trip and crouching on the moonlit lawn, its tiny, deepset eyes glaring malignantly, as though it challenged the world for possession of its prey.

I could hear de Grandin's breath rasping in his nostrils as he sighted his gun and drew the trigger.

A roar like a bursting shell sounded as the smokeless powder's flash burned a gash in the night and a bullet went screaming through the air.

Again de Grandin fired, throwing the magazine mechanism with feverish haste.

The monster staggered drunkenly against the house as the detonation of the first shot sounded. With the second, it dropped Millicent's body to the lawn and uttered a cry which was part roar, part snarl, and, trailing one of its hairy arms helplessly, leaped toward the woods, crossing the grass plot in great, awkward leaps which reminded me, absurdly, of the bouncing of a huge inflated ball.

"Attend Mademoiselle," de Grandin commanded sharply, throwing a fresh cartridge into his firing cham-