Monty Price's Nightmare Read Free Page B

opaque, dim, mustering clouds. Hot puffs shot into his face. His eyes smarted and stung. His ears hurt, and were being stopped up. The deafening roar was the roar of avalanches, of maelstroms, of rushing seas, of the wreck and ruin and end of the world. It grew to be so great a roar that he no longer heard. There was only si­lence. His horse stretched low on a dead run; the tips of the pines were bending in the wind; and wildfire was blowing through the forest, but there was no sound.
    Ahead of him, down the road, low under the spreading trees, floated swiftly some kind of a medium, like a transparent veil. It was neither smoke nor air. It carried faint pin points of light, sparks, that resembled atoms of dust floating in sunlight. It was a wave of heat propelled before the storm of fire. Monty did not feel pain, but he seemed to be drying up, parching. All was so strange and unreal—the swift flight between the pines, now growing ghostly in the dimming light—the sense of rushing, overpowering force—and yet absolute silence. But that light bur­den against his breast—the child—was not unreal.
    He fought the desire to look back, but he could not resist it. Some hor­rible fascination compelled him to look. All behind had changed. A hot wind, like a blast from a furnace, blew light, stinging particles into his face. The fire was racing in the treetops, while below all was yet clear. A lashing, leaping, streaming flame engulfed the canopy of pines. It seemed white, seething, in­conceivably swift, with a thousand flash­ing tongues. It traveled ahead of smoke. It was so thin he could see the branches through it, and the dirty, fiery clouds behind. It swept onward a sublime and an appalling spectacle. Monty could not think of what it looked like. It was fire, liberated, freed from the bowels of the earth, tremendous, de­vouring. This, then, was the meaning of fire. This, then, was the burning of the world.
    He must have been insane, he thought, not to be overcome in spirit. But he was not. He felt loss of some­thing, some kind of sensation he ought to have had. But he rode that race keener and better than any race he had ever before ridden. He had but to keep his saddle—to dodge the snags of the trees—to guide the maddened horse. No horse ever in the world had run so magnificent a race. He was outracing wind and fire. But he was run­ning in terror. For miles he held that long, swift, tremendous stride without a break. He was running to his death whether he distanced the fire or not. For nothing could stop him now except a bursting heart. Already he was blind, Monty thought.
    And then, it appeared to Monty, al­though his steed kept fleeting on faster and faster, that the wind of flame was gaining. The air was too thick to breathe. It seemed ponderous—not from above, but from behind. It had irresistible weight. It pushed Monty and his horse onward in their flight—straws on the crest of a cyclone.
    Again he looked back and again the spectacle was different. There was a white and golden fury of flame above, beautiful and blinding; and below, far­ther back, a hellishly dark and glowing fire, black-streaked, with tumbling puffs and streams of yellow smoke, The aisles between the burning pines were smoky, murky caverns, moving, coalesc­ing, weird, and mutable. Monty saw fire shoot from the treetops down the trunks, as if they were trains of pow­der; and he saw fire shoot up the trunks. They went off like huge rock­ets. And along the ground leaped the little flames, like oncoming waves in the surf. He gazed till his eyes burned and blurred, till all merged into a wide, pursuing storm too awful for the gaze of man.
    Ahead there was light through the forest. He made out a white, open space of grass. A park! And the horse, like a demon, hurtled onward, with his smoothness of action gone, be­ginning to break.
    A wave of wind, blasting in its heat, like a blanket