Page:Weird Tales Volume 36 Number 06 (1942-07).djvu/25

dark face of my adversary. Suddenly all weight and grip was gone from me.

I set up. The diagram was no more than knife-edges in the moonlight. The hole—there was no hole any more, only hard earth. Of the Flying Horned One was nothing to be seen.

Jaeger, then had been right. Power to resist evil magic kept me safe. Endeavoring to carry me away, the Flying Horned One had fallen alone into the hole and had, so to speak, pulled the hole in after him.

Rising, I wondered if I should consider myself the victor.

The morning sun was warm, invigoratingly so. Jaeger and I strove, with grubbing hoe and shovel, at earth that was no longer frozen to stony hardness.

"Make the grave wide, but not too shallow," he directed as he toiled. "Seven must go into it. I wonder if I can spare blankets enough to wrap them all."

"Will nobody ask questions?" I demanded. "Have they no friends or families?"

"Their friends and families will know that fate overtook them, but not in what form," replied Jaeger. "If no corpse shows above earth, I will not be required to explain anything. That is the way of the law hereabouts, and it is well. Wrestlings with demons do not court publicity."

I reflected that, after all, here was a wild and unwatched country. It was no more than four or five years since many more persons had been killed in Kansas by the Bender family, and the detection had come only by the slimmest of chances. Jaeger seemed confident that the matter was as good as closed."

"I shall read a prayer for them all," he took up the subject again. "God knows that few men have needed prayers more, but I do not despair of their souls. They were only misled, not wicked of their own wish."

I wiped my face on my sleeve. "Didn't they flog Peter Dole to death?" I reminded. “Didn’t they come to kill us?" Didn't—"

"All at the bidding of the Flying Horned One. He had bound them in a spell. But he is gone, and I doubt if he ever comes again to Welcome Rock." Jaeger was speaking triumphantly. "His reception was calculated to daunt even a demon."

"Demon," I repeated. "Mr. Jaeger, tell me now, simply and shortly, what sort of a person a demon is?"

"No sort of person. For a demon is not born on Earth, nor does it die there. It comes from another place."

"From hell, yes."

"Perhaps from the place we think of as hell. What that place is like I cannot tell you, nor could any other man—not even if the Flying Horned One's betrayed servants returned to life. For we live and behave in but one sphere, with no conception of others. Yet, if another sphere could touch ours by accident or purpose, and beings come from it to us—"

He paused, and let the rest of the explanation grow in my own mind.

I considered the bizarre possibility. We of this life are two-legged things with blood in our veins, appetites to satisfy, hopes and duties to impel our actions. Basic concepts of nature as we know her make us all brothers. This is what we call the universe, this tiny handful of objects experienced through our few senses and imaginations.

But another universe, wherein not only beings and viewpoints and constructions are different, but the very elements of them—had that spawned the Flying Horned One?

Perhaps his very appearance, strange