Half rising, Phil gained the impression that he saw flowing blood, which didn’t make sense, since Yuble, the man with the knife, wasn’t managing to carve anything. Then, before Phil could gain his feet, Yuble took a heavy sprawl, rolled over and lay still.
A moment later, something stirred from beside Yuble’s body; a patch of blackness flung itself up into the light, cut off the glow and became that same, gripping monster that had just done with Yuble and was in thirst of a new victim, Phil Harley!
Out of the blackness, Phil saw tiny, demoniac eyes and caught the glitter of sharp white teeth. He heard a sound that was like a high-pitched war shriek as he fell back, flinging his arms to ward off the unknown terror.
It was then that Phil was sprawled by an arm that swung from beside him. Landing backward, looking up toward the half-blotted light, Phil saw the literally incredible.
There were two of these monsters. One was making a furious downward swoop, as if from the wing while the other was lunging upward. For the moment, both seemed fantastically human. The swooping figure blocked the glow and therefore looked all out of proportion to its size, which didn’t apply to the shape that came up to meet it.
The illusion faded with a gun blast, delivered by the form that made the upward surge. With that, there were two Shadows no longer, but only one.
In fact one was all there ever had been.
The creature that had zoomed into the window was the thing that The Shadow had blasted in mid-air, an enormous vampire bat, a killer imported from the tropics!
A killer indeed, for it had slain Dom Yuble. How near it had come to doing the same to Phil was enough to send his head swimming. Relaxing, Phil went limp and felt the sweep of total blackness which gradually disseminated when hands shook his shoulder and splashed water lightly in his face.
Instead of The Shadow, Lamont Cranston was helping Phil into a chair. Revived, Phil stared at the body of Dom Yuble, its throat gory from the vampire’s deadly work. Near Yuble lay the killer, also dead, of huge size for a bat, but lacking the mammoth proportions that it had seemed to gain when cutting off the light.