Page:Weird Tales Volume 45 Number 3 (1953-07).djvu/67

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Do they answer
telephones in hell?

Dread Summons

BY PAUL ERNST

Herb Meller stared at the great house on Chicago's chief boulevard with a grim and savage pride, the house that had once belonged to that bleak old financier, R. J. Hill.

The structure was six stories tall, containing nearly forty rooms. It was a palace; built thirty years before at a cost of over two million dollars; situated now on land so valuable that if it were covered with gold pieces the sum would hardly approximate its worth.

A palace! One of the costliest buildings in Chicago! Yet it was but a fraction of what Meller had wrested from the Hill estate. He had looted millions from the fortune of the ferocious old man who had taken so long in dying. This house on the boulevard faded into insignificance when compared to the total.

Yet for Herbert Meller it was a symbol, and its possession gave him more exultation than all the rest. The very citadel and personal pride of old Hill had been won when


Heading by A. V. DiGiannurio