Drug addicts -- Fiction; Fantasy fiction; Magicians -- Fiction
"Hide this, quick!" came her urgent whisper. "Don't come back but go
away and hide. This is full of elixir--I will try to get you some more
before that is all gone. You must find a way of communicating with me."
"Yes, but how did you get this?" I asked amazedly.
"I stole it from the Master! Now please, I must go before he misses me."
And she sprang back into the doorway and vanished. I stood undecided. I
was sure that she had risked nothing less than her life in doing this
and I was torn by the fear of what Kathulos might do to her, were the
theft discovered. But to return to the house of mystery would certainly
invite suspicion, and I might carry out my plan and strike back before
the Skull-faced One learned of his slave's duplicity.
So I crossed the street to the waiting automobile. The driver was a
negro whom I had never seen before, a lanky man of medium height. I
stared hard at him, wondering how much he had seen. He gave no evidence
of having seen anything, and I decided that even if he had noticed me
step back into the shadows he could not have seen what passed there nor
have been able to recognize the girl.
He merely nodded as I climbed in the back seat, and a moment later we
were speeding away down the deserted and fog-haunted streets. A bundle
beside me I concluded to be the disguise mentioned by the Egyptian.
To recapture the sensations I experienced as I rode through the rainy,
misty night would be impossible. I felt as if I were already dead and
the bare and dreary streets about me were the roads of death over which
my ghost had been doomed to roam forever. A torturing joy was in my
heart, and bleak despair--the despair of a doomed man. Not that death
itself was so repellent--a dope victim dies too many deaths to shrink
from the last--but it was hard to go out just as love had entered my
barren life. And I was still young.
A sardonic smile crossed my lips--they were young, too, the men who
died beside me in No Man's Land. I drew back my sleeve and clenched my
fists, tensing my muscles. There was no surplus weight on my frame,
and much of the firm flesh had wasted away, but the cords of the great
biceps still stood out like knots of iron, seeming to indicate massive
strength. But I knew my might was false, that in reality I was a broken
husk of a man, animated only by the artificial fire of the elixir,
without which a frail girl might topple me over.
The automobile came to a halt among some trees. We were on the
outskirts of an exclusive suburb and the hour was past midnight.
Through the trees I saw a large house looming darkly against the
distant flares of night-time London.
"This is where I wait," said the negro. "No one can see the automobile
from the road or from the house."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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