Page:Weird Tales Volume 26 Number 03 (1935-09).djvu/108

my hand had clutched nothing more than empty air!

I laughed. Even in my own ears, the sound possessed a startling quality. The thing had been a carven stone toad upon my desk, and had become alive. And now, to my touch, there was no toad!

"Hallucination," I muttered; "I am seeing things that do not exist."

The implications of that conclusion were far from comforting, however. And whatever I might think—or whatever else than a stone idol it might be—there it sat upon the floor, its sardonic eyes unswerving from my face, blinking . . . waiting. . . .

I sat down at the desk, stared back, baffled—and afraid—into those cold, glittering eyes. Gradually, sullen rage possessed me. I sprang up, furiously, and stamped upon the small monster. I fell upon my knees, sought to seize it with my hands, to tear and rend it into nothingness. Each time I lifted my grinding heel, each time I drew back my clawing fingers, the thing was there: gloating up at me with its cold, demon's eyes.

Finally, I staggered again to my chair, and fell forward across the desk, burying my head in my arms. I awoke in that position, in the chill, gray dawn that succeeded. My first coherent thought moved me to rouse, groaning with misery, and look toward that corner where the accursed toad had huddled the night before. Even in abjection, I found heart to rejoice, for the living creature that had been upon the floor was gone with the night; and the small idol rested in its accustomed place atop my desk—clearly, a carved, lifeless piece of obsidian.

But chill dread awoke with the sudden thought that life might return with another night. All through that day, the apprehension lay like a somber shadow upon my mind. I left the house, returning after nightfall. When I came to the door of my workroom, I hesitated for long minutes before entering.

Groping through the darkness, I switched on the lights. After one fearful, revealing glance, I sank into my chair, utterly abject with terror and despair. For, settled in the same corner it had occupied the night before, the toad regarded me with bright, malevolent eyes.

If I am mad, I have every reason to be. Night after night, for so many nights that it wearies me to number them, I have been stared out of countenance by a fiend in the shape of a malformed toad. Hoping that its manifestations were confined to this room, I have fled the house more than once at night. But wherever I seek to hide, my familiar demon appears with darkness. Seemingly, it has been ages since I have known sleep that was not induced either by drunkenness or soporific drugs; more often than not, neither of these suffices to bring merciful oblivion.

Tomorrow, I shall leave this country for ever; I have already completed my arrangements. Perhaps if, as I intend, the end of my flight places half the world between us, I shall elude my tormenter.

That I am not mad, I have established to my satisfaction, by writing this account. Obviously, the effort and orderly thought required for a coherent narrative of this length is outside the scope of a deranged mind. And in the course of this exercise, there remains but one further item to be set down.

This has to do with the pebbles that have accompanied the idol's latter nightly transformations. I noticed the first of them, a little longer than a fortnight ago. Upon each succeeding night, there has been one more pebble, each about the size of a small walnut, added to the growing pile beside the creature. These appear only at night, like the living reptile that squats beside them; they are not on the