Page:Weird tales v36n07 1942-09.djvu/38

44 WEIRD TALES

Close thunder, like thick metal ripping, drowned out the rest.

"It’s gotten beyond a question of your or my personal taste in heights,” I argued, squinting for a sight of the road between mud splashes. "Sure Malcolm Orne’s a midget, but you don’t know how slippery the road is ahead or how deep those Jersey salt marshes are on either side of it. And no garages or even houses for miles. Too risky, in this storm. Anyway, we figured all along we might visit him on the way. That’s why we took this road.”

"Yes, this lonely, god-forsaken road.” Helen’s voice was as strained and uneasy as her face, pallidly revealed by another lightning flash. "Oh, I know it's silly of me, but I still feel that—”

Again cracking thunder blanketed her words. Our coupé was progressing by heaves, as if through a gelatinous sea. I spotted the high white posts a little ahead, and swung out for the turn-in.

"Still really want to go on?” I asked. Maybe it was the third blast of thunder, loudest of the lot, that decided her against further argument. She gave me a "You win” look, and even grinned a little, being a much better sport than I probably deserve for a wife. The coupé slithered between the posts, lurched around squishily on a sharp slippery rise, made it on the last gasp, and lunged toward the house through a flail of lasting, untrimmed branches.

The windows in front were dark and those to the right were tightly shuttered, but light flickered faintly through the antique white fanlight above the six-paneled Colonial door. Helen hugged my arm tight as we ducked through the drenching rain up onto the huge porch, with its two-story pillars. I reached for the knocker.

Just at that moment there came one of those brief hushes in the storm. The lightning held off, and the wind stopped.

I felt Helen jump at the ugly rustling, scraping sound of a branch which, released from the wind’s pressure, brushed against a pillar as it swung back into place. I remember noting that the paint was half-peeled away from the pillar.

Then things happened fast. Groping for the knocker, I felt the door give inward. There was a deafening blast from inside the house. A ragged semi-circle of wood disappeared from the jamb about a foot from the ground. Splinters flew from a point in the floor eight inches from my shoe. The door continued to swing slowly open from the first push I had given it, revealing a Negro with grizzled hair and fear-wide eyes, clad in the threadbare black of an outdated servant's costume. Despite his slouching posture he still topped six feet. Smoke wreathed from the muzzle of the shotgun held loosely in his huge pink-palmed hands. "Oh, Lordy,” he breathed in quaking tones. "Dat rustlin’ soun’—I t'ought it was—”

SOMETHING, then, checked my angry retort and the lunge I was about to make forward for the weapon. It was the appearance of another face—a white man’s—over the Negro’s shoulder. A saturnine face with aristocratic features and bulging forehead. Judging from the way he towered over the gigantic Negro, the second man could hardly be more than a few inches short of seven feet. But that wasn’t what froze me dead in my tracks. It was that the face was unmistakably that of Malcom Orne, the midget.

The Negro was grasped and swung aside as if he were a piece of furniture. The gun was lifted from his nerveless fingers as if it were a child’s toy. Then the giant bowed low and said, "A thousand pardons! Welcome to Orne House!”

Helen’s scream, long delayed, turned to hysterical laughter. Then the storm, re-