The rope began to fritter. A little severed outer strand came twining loosely down the main column of it toward him like a snake. Those hands, back and forth, like a demon fiddler drawing his bow across a single tautened violin-string in hurried, frenzied funeral-march that spelled Striker’s doom!

“Help!” he shouted in a choked voice, and the empty night sky around seemed to give it mockingly back to him.

A face appeared above the hands and knife, a grinning derisive face peering down into the gloom. Vast mane of snow-white hair and long white beard. It was Peter the Hermit.

So now he knew at last—too late. Too late.

The face vanished again, but the hands, the knife, were busier than ever. There was a microscopic dip, a give, as another strand parted, forerunner of the hurtling, whistling drop to come, the hurtling drop that meant the painful, bone-crushing end of him.

He burst into a flurry of helpless, agonized motion, flailing out with arms and legs—at what, toward what? Like a tortured fly caught on a pin, from which he could never hope to escape.

Glass shattered somewhere around him; one foot seemed to puncture the solid stone wall, go all the way through it. A red-hot wire stroked across his instep and he jerked convulsively.

There was a second preliminary dip, and a wolf-howl of joy from above. He was conscious of more yellow light, this time from below, not above. A horrified voice that was trying not to lose its selfcontrol sounded just beneath him somewhere. “Grab this! Don’t lose your head now! Grab hold of this and don’t let go whatever happens!”

Wood, the wood of a chair back, nudged into him, held out into the open by its legs. He caught at it spasmodically with both hands, riveted them to it in a grip like rigor mortis. At the same time somebody seemed to be trying to pull his shoe off his foot, that one foot that had gone in through the wall and seemed to be cut off from the rest of him.

There was a nauseating plunging sensation that stopped as soon as it began. His back went over until he felt like he was breaking in two, then the chair back held, steadied, reversed, started slowly to draw him with it. The severed rope came hissing down on top of him. From above there was a shrill cackle, from closer at hand a woman’s scream of pity and terror. Yellow closed around him, swallowed him completely, took him in to itself.