COMING NEXT MONTH
THE girl faced the ikon and we saw her bosom heave beneath its sheath of gleaming fur. Her breath came rasping, grindingly, almost like the labored breathing of a patient in extremis with nephritis. A little skirl of laughter stung her scarlet mouth, not loud, but terribly intense. I thought that never had I heard a cry more blasphemous than that light cachinnation.
Her eyes were straining toward the ikon which she had thrown open so its triple picture caught the full force of the ever-shifting beams which slanted downward from the swinging lamps. They were fixed, intense, half closed, as though the violence of her gaze was too annihilating to be loosed direct; it seemed as though the very substance of her soul and body would pour out of those set, staring eyes.
"Master," came her thin-edged whisper, mordant as a storm-blast in December, "lord, possessor, ever-living conqueror of flesh and soul and spirit—I am here!"
Strangely mystic she stood there; more mysterious, the odd thought came to me, in the starkness of her nudity than when hidden in the swathe of clinging garments.
Statue-still she stood, only her left hand moving a little as it fluttered upward toward her breast, then forward, like a tower toppling when its cornerstone is wrenched away, like a silver-birch tree crashing when the axman's final stroke cuts through its roots, she fell face-downward on the floor and lay there motionless.
The lamplight glimmered on the whiteness of her body and the bright gold of her hair, flecking, flowing shadows interchanging quickly with bright spots of light as she clasped her hands behind her neck and beat her forehead softly on the floor before the ikon.
"The pictures—mort d'un rat!—see the pictures, good Friend Trowbridge; do you see them now?" de Grandin whispered in my ear.
I saw, and a wave of retching nausea swept across me as I looked. . . .
You cannot afford to miss even a word of this fascinating thrill-tale about Jules de Grandin, ghost-breaker extraordinary; for weird-was the doom and evil was the influence that emanated from the mosaic picture on the wall. This powerful novelette will be published complete in the September issue of Weird Tales:
SATAN'S PALIMPSEST
By Seabury Quinn
Also
THE DEATH OF ILALOTHA
By Clark Ashton Smith
What horrible fate awaited Thulos as he went to keep his love-tryst with Ilalotha in the tomb?
THE LAKE OF LIFE
By Edmond Hamilton
A weird-scientific thrill-tale replete with adventure, mystery and romance—an exciting story of the waters of immortality, of the Red and Black cities, and the dread Guardians that watched eternally over that terribly glowing lake.
PSYCHOPOMPOS
By H. P. Lovecraft
A posthumous tale of horror written in rime by one of the supreme masters of weird fiction.
THE HO-HO-KAM HORROR
By Bruce Bryan
It was a very real and tangible horror that closed in on the archeologist on Superstition Mountain, as described in the fascinating pages of this thrilling goose-flesh story. Here is a story you will not easily forget.
September Issue Weird Tales . . Out August 1
