METROPOLIS
"Which do you think," contined the voice. "to be more painful: to smash in the skull. or to tear the heart out of the body?" Job Fredersen was silent. "Are your wits frozen. that you don't answer, Joh Fredersen?" "A brain like yours should be able to forget," said the man standing at the door. staring,at S.olomon's seal. The soft, far-off voice laughed. "Forget? I have twice in my life forgotten something..•• Once that Aetra-oil and quick-silver have an idiosyncracy as regards each other; that cost me my arm. Secondly that Hel was a woman and you a man; that cost me my heart. The third time, I am afraid, it will cost me my head. I shall never again forget anything. Job Fredersen." Joh Fredersen was silent. The far-off voice was silent, too. Joh Fredersen turned round and walked to the table. He piled books and parchments on top of each other, sat down and took a piece of paper from his pocket. He laid it before him and looked at it. It was no larger than a man's hand, bearing neither print nor script, being covered over and over with the tracing of a strange' symbol and an apparently half-destroyed plan. Ways seemed to be indicated, seeming to be false ways, but they all led one way; to a place that was filled with crosses. Suddenly he felt, from the. back, a certain coldness approaching him. Involuntarily he held his breath. A hand grasped along, by his head, a graceful, skeleton hand. Transparent skin was· stretched over the slender joints, which gleamed beneath it like dull silver. Fingers, snow-white and Beshless, closed over the plan which lay on the table, and, lifting it up, took it away with it, Joh Fredersen swung around. He stared at the being which stood before him with eyes which grew glassy. The being was, indubitably, a woman. In the soft garment which it wore stood a body, like the body of a young birch tree, swaying on feet set fast together. But, although it was a woman, it was not human. The body seemed as though
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