The Fantasy Fan, Volume 1, Number 10, June 1934: The Fan's Own MagazineVarious
History
The Fantasy Fan, Volume 1, Number 10, June 1934: The Fan's Own Magazine
Various
Fan magazines; Fantasy fiction -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Fantasy fiction -- Periodicals
"You think those floundering things wiped out the servants? Fool, they
are harmless! But the servants _are_ gone, aren't they? You tried to
stop me; you discouraged me when I needed every drop of encouragement I
could get; you were afraid of the cosmic truth, you damned coward, but
now I've got you! What swept up the servants? What made them scream so
loud?... Don't know, eh! You'll know soon enough. Look at me--listen to
what I say--do you suppose there are really any such things as time
and magnitude. Do you fancy there are such things as form or matter. I
tell you, I have struck depths that your little brain can't picture.
I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down demons from
the stars.... I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to
world to sow death and madness.... Space belongs to me, do you hear?
Things are hunting me now--the things that devour and dissolve--but
I know how to elude them. It is you they will get, as they got the
servants.... Stirring, dear sir? I told you it was dangerous to move,
I have saved you so far by telling you to keep still--saved you to see
more sights and to listen to me. If you had moved, they would have been
at you long ago. Don't worry, they won't _hurt_ you. They didn't hurt
the servants--it was the _seeing_ that made the poor devils scream so.
My pets are not pretty, for they come out of places where aesthetic
standards are--_very different_. Disintegration is quite painless, I
assure you--_but I want you to see them_. I almost saw them, but I knew
how to stop. You are not curious? I always knew you were no scientist.
Trembling, eh. Trembling with anxiety to see the ultimate things I have
discovered. Why don't you move, then? Tired? Well, don't worry, my
friend, _for they are coming_.... Look, look, curse you, look ... it's
just over your left shoulder...."
What remains to be told is very brief, and may be familiar to you from
the newspaper accounts. The police heard a shot in the old Tillinghast
house and found us there--Tillinghast dead and me unconscious. They
arrested me because the revolver was in my hand, but released me in
three hours, after they found that it was apoplexy which had finished
Tillinghast and saw that my shot had been directed at the noxious
machine which now lay hopelessly shattered on the laboratory floor. I
did not tell very much of what I had seen, for I feared the coroner
would be skeptical; but from the evasive outline I did give, the doctor
told me that I had undoubtedly been hypnotised by the vindictive and
homicidal madman.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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