Hastening downwards he found his worst fears were true. The entrance door had been locked. A kind of reasonless panic threatened to engulf him—his theories about Gothic art were the blame—but by mimicking the verger's pedantic cynicism, he kept a surface calm. Possibly he could find a broken pane somewheres where he could shout out until someone came. Penhryn had barely made up his mind when it happened. Hitherto all was a canvas of dead silence but now a sound was brushed across it. From the transept of the Reliquary it had come; and as he turned in that direction he sensed, then saw, a stirring in the almost impenetrable dark. Fear had called up that presence.
Memory was fragmentary after that. Some shock drove him to seek the upper regions where a blur of light remained. A priceless stained glass window was smashed. And he plunged to the ground outside. No questions were asked him when days later he came out of a state of delirium. None were needed; he had babbled disjointedly while in that state, enough to cause the cathedral to be closed. An examination was made, discreetly, of certain relics. Later the gardener was observed by some to cast a small paper parcel into the river. And shortly afterwards several high ranking clergymen held a private church service in the cathedral to which no one was admitted. Though the more noisy spoke of hearing a hand bell ring and ponderous Latin phrases uttered.
Penhryn's experience had blanks in it which was well for him. One thing, not fully erased, was of a "face eaten away by darkness." There was one final thing that, when he learned of it, sent him into a paroxysm of horror. The investigators, taking much of his delirium babbling into serious consideration, had medical examinations made of the relics. One osseous remain—that which the drugged monks had blasphemously reverenced—had been non-human and unhallowed; a spurious relic passed off as genuine. The substitution was made obviously by a hidden Satanist, mocking the Church, as the Gothic carvers had, and the witch covens.
The End
DIFFERENT
A Voice of the Atomic Age
resumes publication at 79-14 266 St. Glen Oaks, Floral Park, Long Island, N. Y. Poetry and Science Fiction. $2.00 per year, fifty cents per copy. Lilith Lorraine, Editor.
AT TAKEOFF TIME
by Raymond L. Clancy