Epworth strained his eyes in every direction. All was murky darkness, Cimmerian gloom. If there was anything living near, the darkness wrapped it in an envelop impossible to penetrate.
“You are certainly mistaken,” he soothed. “There is no living thing here. It couldn’t——”
He paused. There came the suspicion of a sound to his ear. It was very soft. A rat could not move with less noise; a cat in stepping would have sounded like a cannon exploding. What could it be? Noiseless crickets—a nest of young crickets expecting a mother? The cavern seemed large and the air seemed pure but that animals or things could live in such a place seemed impossible. He voiced his thoughts.
“It is strange that there is air in here,” Joan admitted, “and stranger yet that I should think that there is life here. But this is a strange world. We never saw a Thing on earth like these moon crickets. Nor is there a pigmy on earth like the pigmies that rode on the crickets; nor are there great hollows in the earth where the air has congealed and left the outside cold and airless. It is a different creation entirely. Mercy! I see—I see—eyes staring at me from out the darkness. Holy angels, protect me! There are three of them, and they are running me crazy to look at them.”
Her teeth chattered until Epworth could hear them, and she buried her head in the young man’s shirt front. Now he also saw the eyes. There were three—great red lights that flared in the darkness. Two on a level, and one in the center. The center eye was enormous and terrifying to the extreme. Brave as he was he shivered with terror. There was something so ghostly, uncanny, about the Thing that his nerves washed out.
Then it flashed by. A nasty-smelling Thing shot out of the gloom; a Thing with a lizard-like, scaly body, long legs and antennas; a Thing that carried a phosphorus glow that plainly disclosed its proportions. It went by them like a railroad train, an enormous whirling, gliding animal that chilled them unto death.
Joan screamed at the top of her voice, and fell limp. Epworth stumbled and fell forward on his face. Each second they expected the Thing to pounce on them, and mash them flat.
Then oblivion fell on both.
It seemed hours later that the two returned to consciousness. They were on the same level, rocky floor, lying side by side, and Epworth was holding his gun in his hand. It had not been discharged.
When he made this discovery he rose quickly to his feet. His first thought was of the evil-smelling Thing that had appeared out of the darkness. Where was it? Were there others back in this chamber of horrors? Was the one he saw preparing another attack on them?