face.

"Mother of Christ!" I heard him whisper. He dropped to his knees.

I saw him dimly for I could not take my eyes from Peters' face. It was the face of a grinning, triumphant

fiend-all humanity wiped from it-the face of a demon straight out of some mad medieval painter's hell.

The blue eyes, now utterly malignant, glared at Ricori.

And as I looked, the dead hands moved; slowly the arms bent up from the elbows, the fingers

contracting like claws; the dead body began to stir beneath the covers-

At that the spell of nightmare dropped from me; for the first time in hours I was on ground that I knew. It

was the rigor mortis, the stiffening of death-but setting in more quickly and proceeding at a rate I had

never known.