Page:Weird Tales volume 30 number 04.djvu/67

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
THE LONG ARM
451

dark, low-ceilinged place except the obsequious proprietor who had served me my cigar and coffee. Now I realized that a man who sat in the corner diagonally across from me was studying me curiously from over his newspaper. His face was one that I had seen before. Suddenly, across all the years, I remembered him. And in that same moment he rose and came toward me with his hand held out.

A disembodied flaming arm floating above a woman sleeping in bed.
A disembodied flaming arm floating above a woman sleeping in bed.

"And she went, too. like the other."

We had been in school together, in the Gymnasium. He had been a strange fellow with few friends, but had enjoyed the reputation of being the best student in his class. But in his last year in the Gymnasium he had, for what reason I never knew, excited the animosity of a cantankerous old professor who had publicly declared that Gustav was not the kind of boy who should have a Gymnasium diploma and that he, the professor, was determined never to give him a passing