Fantastic Stories Presents the Weird Tales Super Pack #1. Pearl Norton Swet

fiercely determined face of the young man a long look, and then his own colorless countenance seemed to soften a little.

      “All right,” he said quietly. “I can disguise you so you’ll not be recognized. But you’ll have to follow my orders exactly, or death will result for both of us.”

      That strange, hooded dread flickered again in his eyes, as though he saw through shrouding mists the outline of dim horror.

      “It may be,” he added slowly, “that something worse even than death awaits those who try to oppose the Brotherhood of the Door—something that would explain the unearthly, superhuman dread that enwraps the secret mysteries of the order. We’re taking more than our lives in our hands, I think, in trying to unveil those mysteries, to regain your wife. But we’ve got to act quickly, at all costs. We’ve got to find her before the great gathering of the Brotherhood takes place, or we’ll never find her.”

      *

      Two hours before midnight found Campbell and Ennis passing along a cobble-paved waterfront street north of the great East India Docks. Big warehouses towered black and silent in the darkness on one side, and on the other were old, rotting docks beyond which Ennis glimpsed the black water and gliding lights of the river.

      As they straggled beneath the infrequent lights of the ill-lit street, they were utterly changed in appearance. Inspector Campbell, dressed in a shabby suit and rusty bowler, his dirty white shirt innocent of tie, had acquired a new face, a bright red, oily, eager one, and a high, squeaky voice. Ennis wore a rough blue seaman’s jacket and a vizored cap pulled down over his head. His unshaven-looking face and subtly altered features made him seem a half-intoxicated seaman off his ship, as he stumbled unsteadily along. Campbell clung to him in true land-shark fashion, plucking his arm and talking wheedlingly to him.

      They came into a more populous section of the evil old waterfront street, and passed fried-fish shops giving off the strong smell of hot fat, and the dirty, lighted windows of a half-dozen waterfront saloons, loud with sordid argument or merriment.

      Campbell led past them until they reached one built upon an abandoned, moldering pier, a ramshackle frame structure extending some distance back out on the pier. Its window was curtained, but dull red light glowed through the glass window of the door.

      A few shabby men were lounging in front of the place but Campbell paid them no attention, tugging Ennis inside by the arm.

      “Carm on in!” he wheedled shrilly. “The night ain’t ‘alf over yet—we’ll ‘ave just one more.”