over me like an infinitely intoxicating liquid, invisible but potent. A liquid that contained some subtle, all-powerful drug that paralyzed the will with the promise of everything the imagination could conjure of joy in a woman's giving.
This whole scene was the opposite of what the girl's words had given me to expect. Her words disillusioned me more, but awakened instead a vast anger and a curiosity as big in my breast.
THE woman by the guarded couch spoke first, with strange words. English with that queer accent I could not place. Something archaic and Eastern about it. Mentally I decided never to agree with a nudist again. For the transparent film of gown she wore was infinitely more revealing and satisfying than any nudity could be. Every curve, every delicious sinuosity of a dancer's developed body shone behind the glistening fabric with a luminosity as of a pale flame of vitality leaping within her soft flesh. Her voice carried a husky, man-conscious inflection to me, as well as her eyes, boldly upon me.
"Did you get them, Kyra?"
As she used that name, my echoing dream-memory struck me again with the vast mystery here opening before me. How could this girl be Kyra who existed only in dreams? Kyra, my witch-maid—her name, her face, what else of hers might this girl have? Her wisdom, her occult power, perhaps?
"I brought something worth a lot more to us. I brought the inventor himself. He came to save me from a terrible witch!" Kyra's laughter was gently mocking, and as the strange woman joined in, I grew too angry to stand still, with the two women laughing at me. . . .
I flushed, said:
"I don't know what is funny. If you people have brought me here to make fun of me, I may as well go now!" Even as I spoke, my mind wondered, what in hell is Kyra wearing whip marks for if this place is not evil?
The woman, still laughing, took my hand between her own and pressed it.
"Don't be angry. Kyra had to use the first idea that came into her head, probably. We had a great need of your invention, a need that is greater than any scruples we might have about stealing it. Now that you are here we will take you into our confidence. Kyra, get the man some wine, while I introduce myself to him. Our best blue wine, Kyra."
She turned now to me, and as women can, turned on all the lure of her so that the flame of her body within that transparent gown did its work with me. My anger was gone; my curiosity, as well as a desire for her in its place. It was desire that made staying there the one thing I wanted to do. Something in her voice when she had asked Kyra to bring wine had warned me, but I was powerless to heed any warnings just then. Who could have? I was helpless. This woman was a witch of another kind that I had come prepared to meet. Yet my fear was not gone; it was only overlaid with another thing, an attraction more powerful.
This lovely "witch" took my hand again and pulled me to a seat on the low lounge on which she had been reclining when I entered. Her husky, vaguely alien voice began to weave a spell about me, the spell of charm and of well-told adventurous promise, a spell of woman-charm and of culture, and another that has grown stronger . . . maybe it was evil, maybe it is more than evil now! Judge for yourself.
"My name," she began, "is Tanil. I come from a far country . . . a country you have never heard of. I have been here quite a long time. There is a great deal I must tell you, so that you can understand why we need you. So keep your mind open and unprejudiced against us until you have heard me out. Then you will decide whether you wish to help us or not."
Kyra entered with three goblets of wine. She had changed into a simple clinging drape of the same kind of translucent material of which Tanil's revealing gown was made. Her own slim beauty sang through the filmy stuff like a song from the past. It was a lurid passionate past of midnight revels in the groves of Pan; or perhaps the more passionate revels held in the groves of deeper antiquity of a still longer dead time, to the worship of some more wilful desiring God than ever Pan had been.
The clothing of the two women struck this same strange note of archaic music, a luringly familiar note in my male breast. Something of the glory of ancient times lived here in this room, hidden under the squalor of the modern city. The question of what this strangeness might be, made me listen with an avid curiosity. The wine
