The Return of the Master
by H. Warner Munn
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"The dead man clutched the wolf by the loins,
although the creature snapped fiercely at his
arms.”
Hark! In a trice they are hushed and flown,
For morn is at hand, and the cock has crown!
’Twas a gala night for the souls set free:
Then hail Death and Equality!
1. A Voice from the Dead
Many years had passed since last I had seen my old innkeeper friend, Pierre Garnier, in far-away France.
Disinclination, perhaps born of fear, perhaps mere laziness and sloth, had kept me long near home. Travel ceased to beckon, for as one grows older he is ready to sit quietly by the fire and think, dwelling more in the past than either the present or the future.
Once I was cursed with itching feet which had carried me into strange places, but now they seemed content to rest easily in soft warm slippers, the while my fancy rebuilt old scenes and faces in the glowing embers.
Since the news of Pierre’s death in far-away France, which had arrived simultaneously with the curious Latin work, written on human skin, which I have described in the translation that was made public some months ago, I had lapsed into apathy.
Pierre had been the last of my friends. Some correspondence had passed between us lately, but never a word in regard to his amazing ancestor, Wladislaw Brenryk of Ponkert, the werewolf whose diluted blood coursed in Garnier’s veins.
That was one reason why I had never returned to the inn. Where lives the man who can converse calmly with son of warlock or vampire? Surely I am not the man who finds it possible, and so I closed the chapter, as I thought, and went away. But still I handled with a fearful de- 6
