The Stone Image | Page 8

I swung the door wide.
"Who's there?" I called, feeling quite sure that my challenge would go unanswered.
A moment later I regretted my rashness. Just within the door, dimly outlined against the gray darkness of the outer night, crouched an ungainly, squat figure. Its staring eyes glared with a hellish phosphorescence; its ivory tusks gleamed from writhing, blood-red lips; its hideous painted face twisted in a grimace of deadly hatred.
"Why, it--it--it's the image!" I gibbered fatuously.
It was the image. The same image that had slain poor little Chang; the same stone monster that had forced Betty to worship it; yet it was not the same. Its loathsome, bloated face changed expression; it moved; it was alive!
Shaken in a very palsy of fear, I shrank back into the hall.
Swift as my retreat was, it was not quick enough. With a swaying, ungainly bound, the thing was upon me. Great hands, cruel and relentless as the coils of a serpent, closed round my neck, choking the breath from me; huge, fiery eyes glared vengefully into mine; long, gleaming tusks were gnashing at my throat, seeking the living blood in my veins.
With arms and legs and stiffened back I strained against the monster, striving to unclasp the cruel hands throttling me, pushing vainly against the terrible embrace which drew me nearer, ever nearer, the champing white teeth which flashed from the misshapen face so near mine.
As I fought against the accursed thing crushing me in its relentless grip, I thought wildly, "This is how poor Chang died," and I braced my knee against its swollen belly.
Cold, acid sweat stood out upon my forehead and rolled down into my eyes; my lungs were bursting with the air imprisoned within them; great, sonorous gongs seemed booming in my ears; lights flashed before my eyes, and the walls of the vestibule seemed toppling in upon me.
The image and I swayed back and forth in a death grapple, went down; there was a crash, a blinding flash of light, my hands relaxed their grip on the stone shoulders, I was deathly sick at my stomach--
"Bring me another cold rag; he'll be all right in a minute," Doctor Towbridge's voice sounded close beside me, and his firm, capable hands replaced a cold-water pack on my forehead.
I sat up and stared about me. I was lying on the couch in the living room. Doctor Towbridge was bending over me, and a very frightened Betty stood behind him, a cloth saturated with cold water in her hand.
"Young man," Doctor Towbridge bent his sternest professional look upon me, "next time you feel inclined to cheat an honest physician out of his honest fee don't risk a case of alcoholic poisoning trying to drink up all the rock and rye in town."
"But I wasn't drunk," I expostulated; "that cursed image--"
"Yes, yes, we know all about that, too. We found it broken to pieces in the vestibule, and you've done nothing but rave about it for the past half-hour. The neighbors' boys evidently carried out their design of putting the thing against your front door, and when you went to the vestibule it fell through the door and was broken. Too bad, too; it was a valuable piece of bric-a-brac, wasn't it?"
I looked at them out of the corner of my eye.
"Yes," I answered meekly. If they already thought me drunk, what would they think if I were to tell them how the image really came to be broken?
"Yes," I agreed, "it cost us a lot of money; but I think we can worry along without it."
Doctor Towbridge may have been right. Perhaps I did take too much rock and rye that night; maybe the neighbors' boys did put the stone image in the doorway. Possibly my fight with the grisly thing was all the figment of an alcohol-inspired dream.
But there is one thing I'd like the doctor to explain--if he can. For a week after that horrible night there were great purple bruises on my throat, where I had believed the monster's terrible hands had been.

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