Page:Weird Tales v15n01 1930-01.djvu/59

shudder and hung limply below the hellish monster, while Billy in a daze of horror lay just below it, so close that he could almost touch the damnable thing.

A spider! It couldn't be—but it was—a spider greater than any that the world had ever seen! And it stood there on its net above him sucking out the juices from that lifeless body that a moment before had been a man! He heard Chota Lal sobbing and screaming in terror where he had left him.

In a curious, detached sort of way Billy slowly and carefully drew his automatic, moving almost imperceptibly. To his dazed faculties it seemed as though his mind stood apart from his body and watched those actions which were his own as though they were those of a stranger. The gun flashed —once—twice—thrice—as Billy shot pointblank into that terrible thing just above him. The acrid fumes choked and blinded him, and when he could open his eyes again the Thing was gone, but Sikhandar Khan's body still sagged limply above him. The man was dead! Billy knew that from the drawn, pinched features. That hideous Thing had sucked every drop of blood from out the body. But the Thing was gone!

It seemed ages before Billy retraced his slow, crawling way back to the shrinking, hysterical lad, and he himself was shaking as with nervous ague.

"Whence came the—the Shaitan?" Billy whispered. "And whither went it, oh my son?"

Chota Lal clung wildly to him and pressed his shaking little body tightly against him. Billy could feel the furious, frightened beating of his heart in the little breast that pressed so close against his own.

"Oh my master, let us fly. Quickly, ere it follow and leap upon us as it did upon that—that———"

"There, there, lad," Billy soothed, forcing himself to speak English. "It's only a spider—but the biggest thing I ever saw or heard of. It's no devil, though it looks like one. Come, lad, where did it go?" He repeated the question in Urdu.

Chota Lal's only answer was to clutch him the tighter.

"No! No! Billee Sahib! Let us go! Do not seek the djinn! It will but take thee as it took that other," he wailed.

Gently Billy disengaged the lad's arms from about his neck and picked up his Mannlicher. "Fear not for me, little one. I shall slay this Thing. Tell me but whither it went."

Slowly he paced the wide circumference of the net, seeking the vanished monster. On the opposite side he paused. Was that not one of the Thing's legs projecting between those boulders?

"Heave thou a stone, my son, he whispered to Chota Lal, who kept tight by his side. The lad demurred. Billy insisted. At last Chota tossed a stone the size of a baseball in that direction.

There was no movement, but Billy was more convinced than ever that it was one of the creature's legs that he saw. He inched nearer and nearer until he had a glimpse of that brilliantly colored horrible body. Slowly the rifle raised, flashed, and the hills thundered to its sharp report. Still no movement.

"Seest thou? It is as I said. The Thing is dead."

He drew nearer until he could see the horrid Thing in its entirety. It was surely dead. When he had satisfied himself on that point he crawled under the net once more and succeeded in hacking down Sikhandar Khan's body and then in dragging it out.

"First we bury this," he said as Chota Lal begged him to leave.

A shallow grave was dug at last and stones heaped above the miserable wretch before Billy Singleton with a sigh set his face back along the way he had come.

He had won through, but at what