s shattered features. When his hand
came away again, his whole face came away with it!

Gordon had one horror-stricken glimpse of a featureless blob of
rubbery bluish-gray flesh in which fiendish eyes of blue-green fire
blazed in malignant fury.

Then the stranger fumbled at his collar, ripping the linen swiftly
away. Something lashed out from beneath his throat--a loathsome
snake-like object, slender and forked at the end. For one ghastly
moment, as the writhing tentacle swung into line with him, Gordon saw
its forked ends glow strange fire--one a vivid blue, the other a
sparkling green.

Then the world was abruptly blotted out for Blair Gordon.

* * * * *

Consciousness returned to Gordon as swiftly and painlessly as it had
left him. For a moment he blinked stupidly in a dazed effort to
comprehend the incredible scene before him.

He was seated in a chair over near the wall of a large room that was
flooded with livid red light from a single globe overhead. Beside him
sat Leah Keith, also staring with dazed eyes in an effort to
comprehend her surroundings. Directly in front of them stood a figure
of stark nightmare horror.

The weirdly glowing eyes identified the figure as that of the stranger
at the Maori Hut, but there every point of resemblance ceased. Only
the cleverest of facial masques and body padding could ever have
enabled this monstrosity to pass unnoticed in a world of normal human
beings.

Now that his disguise was completely stripped away, his slight frame
was revealed as a grotesque parody of that of a human being, with arms
and legs like pipe-stems, a bald oval head that merged with neckless
rigidity directly into a heavy-shouldered body that tapered into an
almost wasp-like slenderness at the waist. He was naked save for a
loin cloth of some metallic fabric. His bluish-gray skin had a dull
oily sheen strangely suggestive of fine grained flexible metal.

The creature's face was hideously unlike anything human. Beneath the
glowing eyes was a small circular mouth orifice with a cluster of
gill-like appendages on either side of it. Patches of lighter-colored
skin on either side of the head seemed to serve as ears. From a point
just under the head, where the throat of a human being would have
been, dangled the foot-and-a-half long tentacle whose forked tip had
sent Gordon into oblivion.

Behind the creature Gordon was dimly aware of a maze of complicated
and utter