Page:Weird Tales v33n05 (1939-05).djvu/20

had come—away from Earth to her bleak satellite? There was nothing to do, then; wait—and see how bad things were. . . .

So I went with Valerie, who cried over Gibbs and Lisa—not over us. We were seeking a Grail—escape there is none—so call it that! We dare to seek escape where there is none, a victory that cannot be.

The crater's sides were steep and almost dark; there was a dim phosphorescence, however; and we found that the sides of the crater were honeycombed with tunnels like the one Le Noir had disappeared in. We did not follow him, but followed the sound Valerie had spoken of; and it was indeed like the rushing of water or a mightier wind than any I had ever heard. . . .

The rocky structure of the moon is different from that of Earth; composed, as we know, of the same elements, they are somehow differently textured, for there is a transparence about the moon; incredible as it seems, at one place in the tunnel where the ceiling must have been very thin (I had felt that we were ascending) I saw dimly but clearly the glowing orb of the sun, and even tinier glittering points of light that were the far stars.

And there was a place where the rock floor beneath our feet was thin, too; and we looked with unspeakable horror into what must have been a part of Le Noir's Hell.

Imagine murderers, degenerates, such dregs of humanity as we call "human fiends"—imagine them hurtling on their downward path of disintegration until they are in truth inhuman—until nature conforms their bodies to their black minds, and sneering features and monstrous deformities portray the spirits that inform them!

Imagine the cast-off species of the long, winding trail of evolution—monsters in the animal kingdom dating back to the age of the behemoths, back to the reptilian forms of old Earth, back farther to jelly-like amorphous monstrosities unnamed and undreamed of—imagine these freaks, too horrid to survive on Earth, having established themselves within our near neighbor the moon—and bred and changed strangely there, crossing themselves with the cast-off spawn of humanity that inhabits here with them—a world of men and monsters and demons mixed together—having one thing in common: a constant reiteration of the serpent and bat types; however grotesquely altered—always that.

Limned against a dim phosphorescence from below, through the dark clear glass-like ledge beneath our feet we looked down upon this, and shuddered and clung together; nearly fainting—I as well as Valerie—when a huge winged reptile that was yet man and monster both, swooped upward toward us in wild gyrations, bearing gripped in its slavering jaws a dangling corpse—and one we recognized, newly borne (unknown to us) to this place by Le Noir—Galen, brought here from the rock where last we saw his mutilated body—Galen making a feast for the winged dark thing that tittered. Even the sound came to our ears, echoing in the silence.

It was Valerie who partly recovered first, and drew me on. The rushing sound came to us, close ahead in the darkness. Down a second tunnel we darted; and felt a current of air drawing us on—growing into a wind; into a steady, strong gale. . . .

I said that this was the end of the journal. Now, at last, it is. The very end.

We are going on with the rushing wind. We are going to hurl ourselves into the crater-shaft ahead, up which (we can see and we believe understand) it roars.

The crater shaft ahead is visible to us now, in wonder and horror visible. Its sides are smooth as glass, and as reflectant. They are so worn by the upward rush of air, which at this point escapes under pres-