Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 02.djvu/31

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Black and white illustration of a large hand emerging upwards out of a lake.
Black and white illustration of a large hand emerging upwards out of a lake.

"Great Gitche Manitou... punish—punish—punish!"


"A Witch's Tale" logo: image of a man speaking into a microphone with the title "A Witch's Tale" in a speech baloon.

From The Witch's Tale—that highly popular radio broadcast which thrilled you so often over the air—comes a story specially adapted for the magazine by that famous program's author and director, Alonzo Deen Cole.


The
Spirits of the Lake


By Alonzo Deen Cole


Was it at the bidding of the "Old Ones" that slime—loathsome, hideously green—rose from the lake's dreadful depths to exact monstrous vengeance...?


Roger Benton slammed the bungalow door behind him and stamped down the path to the shore. Another month in this wilderness and Bernice would be going about dressed in a blanket and beads, he angrily told himself—for she acted and thought more like a damned Indian every day. He'd been a fool to let her buy this island a stone's throw from the reservation on the advice of these dumb doctors. Her lungs hadn't shown any improvement here; her condition was worse, if anything—and as for the effects of this "Back to Nature" stuff on him—! He cursed aloud, bitterly.

From across the placid lake a monotonous Indian chant beat at his eardrums, and weak tears of self pity welled into his eyes.