Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 5 (1925-11).djvu/24

her sleep. From mere curiosity, I lay back, trying to catch her disconnected words. Altogether, it was perhaps five minutes before I again sat upright, feeling moved—by what force, I cannot say—to look out of the window.

As my gaze turned toward the corner of the yard, the blood in my veins seemed suddenly transformed into ice, while my heart, for a second or two, apparently stopped beating.

The moonlight had suddenly and most strangely taken on almost the brilliancy of early morning sunlight; every object in the grounds was distinctly visible; and, horror unutterable, the door of "The House of the Dead" was flung wide open, and from the doorway there ran a single track, made by a pair of naked feet, the prints pointing, as the track ran, toward the hospital!

Five minutes before, I had seen the door closed, the snow in the yard smooth and undisturbed. Then I recalled the noise as of the rattling lock or bolt, which sound, apparently, had awakened me.

A thought flashed into my mind that caused me to reach out for the bell-cord; but my arm fell as if paralyzed. I tried to call out, to scream; but no sound came from my dry, contracted throat.

Martha had come back—but—as what?

The silence in the hospital was as of the grave itself; I lay like one already dead. The brain alone remained living and conscious of the awful horror of the situation. God! This was maddening! Surely, helplessness in the presence of such terror is the climax of human agony!

Then an added dread made itself manifest; horripilation swept over me.

Distinctly I heard the patter of naked feet, steadily approaching. Up the main stairway, across the short hallway, then into and across the ward, toward the open door of my room!

I could not cry out, could not even pray. Thought itself was almost impossible. I closed my eyes—and waited.

A board in the floor squeaked faintly; I had heard it do so often, when stepped upon. Against my will, yet compelled by a power I could in no way control, I again opened my eyes.

In the doorway, plainly seen in the moonlight, stood the dead child. Dead, did I say? This being was alive; or, rather, horrible as the realization was to me, it was undead!

The long, yellow hair hung straight down over the drooping, bony shoulders. The night-gown, in which the child had been carried into the dead-house, clung to her damply, as though death had been a matter of only a few minutes ago, and as though the fever-sweat had been unaffected by the chill of the winter night. And yet, it gave out a noxious, musty effluvium, as of the tomb itself. The parchmentlike skin of the face was more tightly drawn than ever; its pallor contrasted sharply with the scarlet lips, thin and cruel-looking, that now seemed drawn back in a sort of venomous smile, exposing the irregular and, in life, badly-cared-for teeth. Only the canines appeared to have escaped decay, or to have been replaced since death had occurred. I noticed that they were unusually long and sharply pointed.

But the eyes! Can I ever forget those terrible eyes!

Sunken in the head until they appeared almost like empty sockets, they yet burned with a fearsome, red glow, baleful and horrifying.

But, in another way, the face upon which I gazed was changed. Not alone was it the awful pallor of it that showed the work of the hand of Death. There was in it something