“Then he stole a diamond, I don’t know where, and vanished. One presumes he wanted to have that Paradise that the rabbis told of for his very own. Since then he has been trying to destroy me, sending out messages, dominating other minds on the Earthly plane—if you will excuse the jargon —to that end. He reached you, Fitzgerald, through a letter he got someone else to write and post, then when you were located and itemized he could work on you directly.
“You failed him, and he, fearing I would use you, tried to destroy you by heightening your sense of hearing and sending you visions nightly of this plane. It would destroy any common man; we are very fortunate that you are extraordinarily tough in your psychological fibre.
“Since then I have been dodging Runi Sarif, trying to get a diamond big enough to send me here through all the barriers he has prepared against my coming, You helped me very greatly.” Again Kazam cast an apprehensive look at the horizon.
The detective looked around slowly. “Is this a paradise?” he asked. “If so I’ve been seriously misled by my Sunday School teachers.” He tried weakly to smile.
“That is one of the things I don’t understand—yet,” said the Persian. “And this, is another unpleasantness which approaches.”
Fitzgerald stared hi horror at the little spills of fog which were upending themselves from the sand. He had the ghastly, futile dream sensation again.
“Don’t try to get away from them,” snapped Kazam. “Walk at the things.” He strode directly and pugnaciously at one of the little puffs, and it gave way before him and they were out of the circle.
“That was easy,” said the detective weakly.
Suddenly before them loomed the stone tower. The winged skulls were nowhere to be seen.
Sheer into the sky reared the shaft, solid and horribly hewn from grey granite, rough-finished on the outside. The top was shingled to a shallow cone, and embrasures were black dots hi the wall.
Then, Fitzgerald never knew how, they were inside the tower, in the great round room at its top. The winged skulls were perched on little straggling legs along a golden rail. Aside from the fiat blackness of their wings all was crimson and gold in that room. There was a sickly feeling of decay
and corruption about it, a thing that sickened the detective.
Hectic blotches of purple marked the tapestries that bung that circular wall, blotches that seemed like the high spots in rotten meat. The tapestries themselves the detective could not look at again after one glance. The thing he saw, sprawling over a horde of men and women, drooling flame on them, a naked figure still between its jaws, colossal, slimy paws on a little heap of human beings, was not a pretty sight.
Light came from flambeaux in the wall, and the torches cast a sickly, reddish-orange light over the scene. Thin curls of smoke from the sockets indicated an incense.
And lastly there was to be seen a sort of divan, heaped with cushions in fantastic shapes. Reclining easily on them was the most grotesque, abominable figure Fitzgerald had ever .seen. It was a man, had been once. But incredible incontinence had made the creature gross and bloated with what must have been four hundred pounds of fat. Fat swelled out the cummerbund that spanned the enormous belly, fat welted out the cheeks so that the ears of the creature could not be seen beneath the embroidered turban, gouts of fat rolled in a blubbery mass about the neck like the wattles of a dead cockerel.
“Ah,” hissed Joseph Kazam. “Runi Sarif …” He drew from his shirt a little sword or big knife from whose triangular blade glinted the light of the flambeaux.
The suety monster quivered as though maggots were beneath bis skin. In a voice that was like the sound a butcher makes when he tears the fat belly from a hog’s carcass, Runi Sarif said: “Go—go back. Go back—where you came from—” There was no beginning or ending to the speech. It came out between short, grunting gasps for breath.
Kazam advanced, running a thumb down the knife-blade. The monster on the divan lifted a hand that was like a bunch of sausages. The nails were a full half-inch below the level of the skin. Afterwards Fitzgerald assured himself that the hand was the most repellent aspect of the entire affair.