He must see--he must know what was waiting--

The match flared to a point of brilliance in the murky gloom. It
showed, on the floor where they stood, a litter of dried
vegetation--food, doubtless placed there as an offering. It was dry
now, and dusty, and through it there shone the bleak whiteness of
bones. Beyond was the floor, and beyond that.... The whiteness that
had been but a blur grew sharply distinct.

Jerry could not have told what he expected the light to disclose.
Certainly it was not the heaping of coils, milk-white and ghastly,
that took shape before his staring eyes. Above them a head hung in
air. It was motionless--lifeless, almost--like the coiled body that
held it. But the eyes, black and staring, in the bloated, bulging
head, made its poised stillness the more deadly.

Even in the dark Jerry had sensed the hypnotic spell of unseen eyes.
Visible, they held him in a rigid, unreasoning terror. Unreal,
unthinkable, this serpentlike horror, tremendous and ghastly in its
loathsome whiteness. A dweller in the dark, used by the priests as a
symbol and a threat for the ignorant folk who trusted and believed
them. And it held him, stilled and stricken, in its evil spell.

* * * * *

The flame was scorching Jerry's hand that nervelessly opened to
release the match. The man was like a statue, frozen to mental
deadness. About his feet a light was playing, unseen. A bit of the dry
stuff sprang brightly to yellow flame. Neither seeing nor feeling, the
figure of Jerry Foster stood, held in the deadly magic of the
malignant eyes.

Dimly he sensed that the prostrate body on the floor was that of
Marahna. Vaguely he knew when the form of the priest took a halting
step forward. The fire his match had kindled was rising about his
feet. The flames seared and stabbed with a pain that reached his
dulled brain. Quivering and shaken, the body of Jerry Foster reacted
again to a conscious thought. He leaped quickly as the deadly witchery
left him, and he tore at the smoldering cloth about his legs.

And now he knew the thing before him for what it was. Shocking in its
gigantic size, more so in the concentrated venom of its gaze, it was
the flabby, scaly and crusted whiteness of the thing that filled his
being with a deadly nausea. He stared with a sickened fascination at
the flabby, drooping pouches beside the mouth, the distorted, bulging
head and the short legs, armed with long, curving t