The End of the Story by Clark Ashton Smith Page A

occur to him that it would be possible to stop and ascertain what had befallen Godfrey. He had no thought, no desire, except to put the length of the hall between himself and that accursed library and its happenings.
    Avilton, dressed in pajamas, stood at the door of his room. He had been aroused by Godfrey’s scream of terror.
    “What’s the matter?” the story-writer queried, with a look of amiable surprise, which turned to a real gravity when he saw Schuler’s face. Schuler was as white as a marble headstone and his eyes were preternaturally dilated.
    “The snake!” Schuler gasped. “The snake! The snake! Something awful has happened to Godfrey—he fell with the thing just behind him.”
    “What snake? You don’t mean my stuffed rattler by any chance, do you?”
    “Stuffed rattler?” yelled Schuler. “The damned thing is alive! It came crawling after us, rattling under our very feet a moment ago. Then Godfrey stumbled and fell—and he didn’t get up.”
    “I don’t understand,” purred Avilton. “The thing is a manifest impossibility—really quite contrary to all natural laws, I assure you. I killed that
    snake four years ago, in El Dorado County, and had it stuffed by an expert taxidermist.”
    “Go and see for yourself,” challenged Schuler.
    Avilton strode immediately to the library and turned on the lights. Schuler, mastering a little his panic and his dreadful forebodings, followed at a cautious distance. He found Avilton stooping over the body of Godfrey, who lay quite still in a huddled and horribly contorted position near the door. Not far away was the abandoned fishing-creel. The stuffed rattlesnake was coiled in its customary place on top of the bookshelves.
    Avilton, with a grave and brooding mien, removed his hand from Godfrey’s heart, and observed:
    “He’s quite dead—shock and heart-failure, I should think.”
    Neither he nor Schuler could bear to look very long at Godfrey’s upturned face, on which was stamped as with some awful brand or acid an expression of fear and suffering beyond all human capacity to endure. In their mutual desire to avoid the lidless horror of his dead staring, their eyes fell at the same instant on his right hand, which was clenched in a hideous rigidity and drawn close to his side.
    Neither could utter a word when they saw the thing that protruded from between Godfrey’s fingers. It was a bunch of rattles, and on the endmost one, where it had evidently been torn from the viper’s tail, there clung several shreds of raw and bloody flesh.

T HIRTEEN P HANTASMS

    “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion.”
    John Alvington tried to raise himself a little on the pillow as he murmured in his thoughts the long-familiar refrain of Dowson’s lyric. But his head and shoulders fell back in an overflooding helplessness, and there trickled through his brain, like a thread of icy water, the realization that perhaps the doctor had been right—perhaps the end was indeed imminent. He thought briefly of embalming fluids, immortelles, coffin nails and falling sods; but such ideas were quite alien to his trend of mind, and he preferred to think of Elspeth. He dismissed his mortuary musings with an appropriate shudder.
    He often thought of Elspeth, these days. But of course he had never really forgotten her at any time. Many people called him a rake, but he knew, and had always known, that they were wrong. It was said that he had broken, or materially dented, the hearts of twelve women, including those of his two wives; and strangely enough, in view of the exaggerations commonly characteristic of gossip, the number was correct. Yet he, John Alvington, knew to a certainty that only one woman, whom no one reckoned among the twelve, had ever really mattered in his life.
    He had loved Elspeth and no one else; he had lost her through a boyish quarrel which was never made up, and she had died a year later. The other women were all mistakes, mirages: they had