It's undeniable that the authors of sci-fi and fantasy in the thirties through the sixties were a breed of a different kind and also easy to see why that was called the Golden Age of Fiction, because the output and the quality of the works during that time were tremendous.

Here is a class story which should raise a few goosebumps if you have a habit of not picking your partners carefully.

Enjoy.

John
"Why must you always hurry away, my little one?"

The voice of Mere Antoinette, the witch, was an amorous croaking. She ogled Pierre, the apothecary's young apprentice, with eyes full-orbed and unblinking as those of a toad. The folds beneath her chin swelled like the throat of some great batrachian. Her huge breasts, pale as frog-bellies, bulged from her torn gown as she leaned toward him.

He gave no answer; and she came closer, till he saw in the hollow of those breasts a moisture glistening like the dew of marshes... like the slime of some amphibian... a moisture that seemed always to linger there.
Her voice, raucously coaxing, persisted. "Stay awhile tonight, my pretty orphan. No one will miss you in the village. And your master will not mind." She pressed against him with shuddering folds of fat. With her short flat fingers, which gave almost the appearance of being webbed, she seized his hand and drew it to her bosom.

Pierre wrenched the hand away and drew back discreetly. Repelled, rather than abashed, he averted his eyes. The witch was more than twice his age, and her charms were too uncouth and unsavory to tempt him for an instant. Also, her repute was such as to have nullified the attractions of a younger and fairer sorceress. Her witchcraft had made her feared among the peasantry of that remote province, where belief in spells and philters was still common. The people of Averoigne called her La Mere des Crapauds, Mother of Toads, a name given for more than one reason. Toads swarmed innumerably about her hut; they were said to be her familiars, and dark tales were told concerning their relationship to the sorceress, and the duties they performed at her bidding. Such tales were all the more readily believed because of those batrachian features that had always been remarked in her aspect.

The youth disliked her, even as he disliked the sluggish, abnormally large toads on which he had sometimes trodden in the dusk, upon the path between her hut and the village of Les Hiboux. He could hear some of these creatures croaking now; and it seemed, weirdly, that they uttered half-articulate echoes of the witch's words.

It would be dark soon, he reflected. The path along the marshes was not pleasant by night, and he felt doubly anxious to depart. Still without replying to Mere Antionette's invitation, he reached for the black triangular vial she had set before him on her greasy table. The vial contained a philter of curious potency which his master, Alain le Dindon, had sent him to procure. Le Dindon,the village apothecary, was wont to deal surreptitiously in certain dubious medicaments supplied by the witch; and Pierre had often gone on such errands to her osier-hidden hut.

The old apothecary, whose humor was rough and ribald, had sometimes rallied Pierre concerning Mere Antoinette's preference for him. "Some night, my lad, you will remain with her," he had said. "Be careful, or the big toad will crush you." Remembering this gibe, the boy flushed angrily as he turned to go.

"Stay," insisted Mere Antoinette. "The fog is cold on the marshes; and it thickens apace. I knew that you were coming, and I have mulled for you a goodly measure of the red wine of Ximes."

She removed the lid from an earthen pitcher and poured its steaming contents into a large cup. The purplish-red wine creamed delectably, and an odor of hot, delicious spices filled the hut, overpowering the less agreeable odors from the simmering cauldron, the half-dried newts, vipers, bat-wings and evil, nauseous herbs hanging on the walls, and the reek of the black candles of pitch and corpse-tallow that burned always, by noon or night, in that murky interior.

"I'll drink it," said Pierre, a little grudgingly. "That is, if it contains nothing of your own concoction."
"'Tis naught but sound wine, four seasons old, with spices of Arabia," the sorceress croaked ingratiatingly. "'Twill warm your stomach... and..." She added something inaudible as Pierre accepted the cup.

Before drinking, he inhaled the fumes of the beverage with some caution but was reassured by its pleasant smell. Surely it was innocent of any drug, any philter brewed by the witch: for, to his knowledge, her preparations were all evil-smelling.

Still, as if warned by some premonition, he hesitated. Then he remembered that the sunset air was indeed chill; that mists had gathered furtively behind him as he came to Mere Antoinette's dwelling. The wine would fortify him for the dismal return walk to Les Hiboux. He quaffed it quickly and. set down the cup. "Truly, it is good wine," he declared. "But I must go now."

Even as he spoke, he felt in his stomach and veins the spreading warmth of the alcohol, of the spices... of something more ardent than these. It seemed that his voice was unreal and strange, falling as if from a height above him. the warmth grew, mounting within him like a golden flame fed by magic oils. His blood, a seething torrent,poured tumultuously and more tumultuously through his members.

There was a deep soft thundering in his ears, a rosy dazzlement in his eyes. Somehow the hut appeared to expand, to change luminously about him. He hardly recognized its squalid furnishings, its litter of baleful oddments, on which a torrid splendor was shed by the black candles, tipped with ruddy fire, that towered and swelled gigantically into the softgloom His blood burned as with the throbbing flame of the candles.
It came to him, for an instant, that all this was a questionable enchantment, a glamor wrought by the witch's wine. Fear was upon him and he wished to flee. Then, close beside him, he saw Mere Antoinette.

Briefly he marvelled at the change that had befallen her. Then fear and wonder were alike forgotten, together with his old repulsion. He knew why the magic warmth mounted ever higher and hotter within him; why his flesh glowed like the ruddy tapers.

The soiled skirt she had worn lay at her feet, and she stood naked as Lilith, the first witch. The lumpish limbs and body had grown voluptuous; the pale, thick-lipped mouth enticed him with a promise of ampler kisses than other mouths couldyield. The pits of her short round arms, the concave of her ponderously drooping breasts, the heavy creases and swollen rondures of flanks and thighs, all were fraught with luxurious allurement.

"Do you like me now, my little one?" she questioned.

This time he did not draw away but met her with hot, questing hands when she pressed heavily against him. Her limbs were cool and moist; her breasts yielded like the turf-mounds above a bog. Her body was white and wholly hairless; but here and there he found curious roughnesses... like those on the skin of a toad... that somehow sharpened his desire instead of repelling it.

She was so huge that his fingers barely joined behind her, His two hands, together, were equal only to the cupping of a single breast. But the wine had filled his blood with a philterous ardor.

She led him to her couch beside the hearth where a great cauldron boiled mysteriously, sending up its fumes in strange-twining coils that suggested vague and obscene figures. The couch was rude and bare. But the flesh of the sorceress was like deep, luxurious cushions...

PIERRE AWOKE in the ashy dawn, when the tall black tapers had dwindled down and had melted limply in their sockets. Sick and confused, he sought vainly to remember where he was or what he had done. Then, turning a little, he saw beside him on the couch a thing that was like some impossible monster of ill dreams; a toadlike form, large as a fat woman. Its limbs were somehow like a woman's arms and legs. Its pale, warty body pressed and bulged against him, and he felt the rounded softness of something that resembled a breast.
Nausea rose within him as memory of that delirious night returned; Most foully he had been beguiled by the witch, and had succumbed to her evil enchantments.

It seemed that an incubus smothered him, weighing upon all his limbs and body. He shut his eyes, that he might no longer behold the loathsome thing that was Mere Antoinette in her true semblance. Slowly, with prodigious effort, he drew himself away from the crushing nightmare shape. It did not stir or appear to waken; and he slid quickly from the couch.

Again, compelled by a noisome fascination, he peered at the thing on the couch — and saw only the gross form of Mere Antoinette. Perhaps his impression of a great toad beside him had been but an illusion, a half-dream that lingered after slumber. He lost something of his nightmarish horror; but his gorge still rose in a sick disgust, remembering the lewdness to which he had yielded.

Fearing that the witch might awaken at any moment and seek to detain him, he stole noiselessly from the hut. It was broad daylight, but a cold, hueless mist lay everywhere, shrouding the reedy marshes, and hanging like a ghostly curtain on the path he must follow to Les Hiboux. Moving and seething always, the mist seemed to reach toward him with intercepting fingers as he started homeward. He shivered at its touch, he bowed his head and drew his cloak closer around him.
Thicker and thicker the mist swirled, coiling, writhing endlessly, as if to bar Pierre's progress. He could discern the twisting, narrow path for only a few paces in advance. It was hard to find the familiar landmarks, hard to recognize the osiers and willows that loomed suddenly before him like gray phantoms and faded again into the white nothingness as he went onward. Never had he seen such fog: it was like the blinding, stifling fumes of a thousand witch-stirred cauldrons.

Though he was not altogether sure of his surroundings, Pierre thought that he had covered half the distance to the village. Then, all at once, he began to meet the toads. They were hidden by the mist till he came close upon them. Misshapen, unnaturally big and bloated, they squatted in his way on the little footpath or hopped sluggishly before him from the pallid gloom on either hand.

Several struck against his feet with a horrible and heavy flopping. He stepped unaware upon one of them, and slipped in the squashy noisomeness it had made, barely saving himself from a headlong fall on the bog's rim. Black, miry water gloomed close beside him as he staggered there.

Turning to regain his path, he crushed others of the toads to an abhorrent pulp under his feet. The marshy soil was alive with them. They flopped against him from the mist, striking his legs, his bosom, his very face with their clammy bodies. They rose up by scores like a devil-driven legion. It seemed that there was a malignance, an evil purpose in their movements, in the buffeting of their violent impact. He could make no progress on the swarming path, but lurched to and fro, slipping blindly, and shielding his face with lifted hands. He felt an eery consternation, an eldrich horror. It was as if the nightmare of his awakening in the witch's hut had somehow returned upon him.

The toads came always from the direction of Les Hiboux, as if to drive him back toward Mere Antoinette's dwelling. They bounded against him like a monstrous hail, like missiles flung by unseen demons. The ground was covered by them, the air was filled with their hurtling bodies. Once, he nearly went down beneath them.
Their number seemed to increase, they pelted him in a noxious storm. He gave way before them, his courage broke, and he started to run at random, without knowing that he had left the safe path. Losing.all thought of direction, in his frantic desire to escape from those impossible myriads, he plunged on amid the dim reeds and sedges, over ground that quivered gelatinously beneath him. Always at his heels he heard the soft, heavy flopping of the toads; and sometimes they rose up like a sudden wall to bar his way and turn him aside. More than once, they drove him back from the verge of hidden quagmires into which he would otherwise have gallen. It was as if they were herding him deliberately and concertedly to a destined goal.

Now, like the lifting of a dense curtain, the mist rolled away, and Pierre saw before him in a golden dazzle of morning sunshine the green, thick-growing osiers that surrounded Mere Antoinette's hut. The toads had all disappeared, though he could have sworn that hundreds of them were hopping close about him an instant previously. With a feeling of helpless fright and panic, he knew that he was still within the witch's toils; that the toads were indeed her familiars, as so many people believed them to be. They had prevented his escape, and had broughthimback to the foul creature... whether woman, batrachian, or both... who was known as The Mother of Toads.

Pierre's sensations were those of one who sinks momently deeper into some black and bottomless quicksand. He saw the witch emerge from the hut and come toward him. Her thick fingers, with pale folds of skin between them like the beginnings of a web, were stretched and flattened on the steaming cup that she carried. A sudden gust of wind arose as if from nowhere, lifting the scanty skirts of Mere Antoinette about her fat thighs, and bearing to Pierre's nostrils the hot, familiar spices of the drugged wine.

"Why did you leave so hastily, my little one~" There was an amorous wheedling in the very tone of the witch's question. "I should not have let you go without another cup of the good red wine, mulled and spiced for the warming of your stomach... See, I have prepared it for you... knowing that you would return."
She came very close to him as she spoke, leering and sidling, and held the cup toward his lips. Pierre grew dizzy with the strange fumes and turned his head away. It seemed that a paralyzing spell had seized his muscles, for the simple movement required an immense effort.

His mind, however, was still clear, and the sick revulsion of that nightmare dawn returned upon him. He saw again the great toad that had lain at his side when he awakened.

"I will not drink your wine," he said firmly. "You are a foul witch, and I loathe you. Let me go.

"Why do you loathe me?" croaked Mere Antoinette. "You loved me yesternight. I can give you all that other women give ... and more."

"You are not a woman," said Pierre. "You are a big toad. I saw you in your true shape this morning. I'd rather drown in the marsh-waters than sleep with you again."

An indescribable change came upon the sorceress before Pierre had finished speaking. The leer slid from her thick and pallid features, leaving them blankly inhuman for an instant. Then her eyes bulged and goggled horribly, and her whole body appeared to swell as if inflated with venom.

"Go, then!" she spat with a guttural virulence. "But you will soon wish that you had stayed..."

The queer paralysis had lifted from Pierre's muscles. It was as if the injunction of the angry witch had served to revoke an insidious, half-woven spell. With no parting glance or word, Pierre turned from her and fled with long, hasty steps, almost running, on the path to Les Hiboux.

He had gone little more than a hundred paces when the fog began to return. It coiled shoreward in vast volumes from the marshes, it poured like smoke from the very ground at his feet. Almost instantly, the sun dimmed to a wan silver disk and disappeared. The blue heavens were lost in the pale and seething voidness overhead. The path before Pierre was blotted out till he seemed to walk on the sheer rim of a white abyss, that moved with him as he went.

Like the clammy arms of specters, with death-chill fingers that clutched and caressed, the weird mists drew closer still about Pierre. They thickened in his nostrils and throat, they dripped in a heavy dew from his garments. They choked him with the fetor of rank waters and putrescent ooze ... and a stench as of liquefying corpses that had risen somewhere to the surface amid the fen.

Then, from the blank whiteness, the toads assailed Pierre in a surging, solid wave that towered above his head and swept him from the dim path with the force of falling seas as it descended. He went down, splashing and floundering, into water that swarmed with the numberless batrachians. Thick slime was in his mouth and nose as he struggled to regain his footing. The water, however, was only knee-deep, and the bottom, though slippery and oozy, supported him with little yielding when he stood erect.

He discerned indistinctly through the mist the nearby margin from which he had fallen. But his steps were weirdly and horribly hampered by the toad-seething waters when he strove to reach it. Inch by inch, with a hopeless panic deepening upon him, he fought toward the solid shore. The toads leaped and tumbled about him with a dizzying eddylike motion. They swirled like a viscid undertow around his feet and shins. They swept and swelled in great loathsome undulations against his retarded knees.

However, he made slow and painful progress, till his outstretched fingers could almost grasp the wiry sedges that trailed from the low bank lhen, from that mist-bound shore, there fell and broke upon him a second deluge of those demoniac toads; and Pierre was bome helplessly backward into the filthy waters.
​
Held down by the piling and crawling masses, and drowning in nauseous darkness at the thick-oozed bottom, he clawed feebly at his assailants. For a moment, ere oblivion came, his fingers found among them the outlines of a monstrous form that was somehow toadlike... but large and heavy as a fat woman. At the last, it seemed to him that two enormous breasts were crushed closely down upon his face.

When the air is gliding

Like soft fingers across your cheeks.

When the stars are falling

And begging you to peek.

 

There are the minders

Of the good that fill our souls

With Windmills of the Heart

To make us once more whole!

--- From Lovelight's Journal ---

***

"Make me!"

"No, you make me!"

"You're not big enough to make me!"

"And you're too short to make me!"

"Will you two grow up!" Lovelight hollered at the two jocks that were in each other's faces.

They both turned on her.

Like clones they hollered. "Make me!"

Lovelight, who was holding a bucket of ice water for the football heroes to douse themselves with, flung its contents over both of them.

The jocks sputtered and made faces, then like the silly kids they were, they both broke into laughter, then put arms around each other's shoulders and marched off the field back into the locker room, where Lovelight later learned they had beat up on one another when  one of them snapped the other with a wet towel.

"Jerks!" She muttered to herself.

"Pardon?" Her English teacher, Mrs. Towers asked, looking up from the book she had been reading to the class.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Towers, I was just thinking about those two jocks who fought last night in the locker room with wet towels."

The classroom burst into laughter.

"Keep your thoughts elevated, Lovelight and the rest will follow." Her teacher had spoken.

Lovelight was struck by the profundity of the words for the rest of her classes, even through the horrid Biology class where she was supposed to dissect a frog, but secretly let it go, claiming it escaped. No one told on her, because as soon as she let hers go, a lot of the others did too, except for Chalmers and Spoke, who didn't give a rat's butt for anything that was alive.

She didn't give them as much thought as usual. She was too preoccupied with what Mrs. Towers had taught her earlier. "Keep your thoughts elevated." Never once thinking that perhaps she was being teased by the teacher and not taught at all!

***

She stood before the huge, deformed wooded door that opened into a flight of stairs that wound through endless corridors beneath the ancient structure. Her thoughts of childhood fled her as she opened that horrid door, the musty smell of the underworld rising, and the terror of what might lay in the dark awakened again.

Her best friend had vanished down there. She had seen him enter the door, and then shut it behind him. He had told her to wait. He was an agent for the government. A secret agent. His department dealt with supernatural phenomena and alien visitations...or encounters of the third kind as they were called by UFOlogists.

"Ben!" She whispered, hoping her voice would reach him, but knowing it probably wouldn't. The descending stairs were wide, the overhead ceiling high and the opposing walls narrow. Sound was trapped here and didn't travel far, muffled by the raw stone that had so many cuts to it that it deflected and muffled any sounds. She could barely hear her own footsteps as she descended.

Her vision opened up as she did and a soft radiance of gold and white light lit the path ahead, else she might never have seen the huge gap in the descent before her. She saw it, and then leaped across, hoping that Ben had seen it as well. He usually carried a maglite in his pocket for such ventures, but she couldn't know that for sure. Why had she let him go ahead of her? The Nine were not nice cookies to deal with.

And yes, they had tried to kill her. And yes, she had miraculously survived the encounters, but she had a different kind of protection than Ben. He had courage, and honesty. She had something hard to put a name or finger on. Her mother used to always be amazed when Lovelight would tumble from their backyard apple tree and never hurt herself. "You're like one of those damned cats, Lovelight. You always land on your feet. Unhurt!"

Her Mom and she would sometimes sit outside under the old crabapple tree, breathing in its sweet fragrance while honey bees meandered about the small garden, buzzing happily from one flower to the next, gathering pollen, then maybe stopping a moment to rub legs together and then flitting off again for a new flower to extract pollen from.

The soft breezes of the autumn skies would whisk past them, flinging strands of hair into their faces. They would laugh. Her mom's worry lines smoothing out so much that she looked like a young teenager. Her Mom never looked old to Lovelight, just older.

One day they were seated beneath the crabapple tree and Lovelight was very upset. One of her classmates had been run down by a drunken driver while they were biking home. The driver had lost control and driven up onto the sidewalk and killed her friend.

"It's unfair!" Lovelight cried angrily, slamming a fist into the grassy knoll she sat upon.

Her mother had smoothed her hair from her forehead, and then said. "We only see this side of the coin of life. The other side has a much broader vision than ours."

Lovelight had been reading through the Baghvad Gita in her history class, and eyed her Mom sternly. "Reincarnation?"

Her Mom hadn't confirmed or denied it. "What do you think?"

Lovelight had looked away. Something in her mother's eyes told her she was being tested in some way. She just wasn't sure on what. "I don't know what to believe or think. Most of the kids seem to be pretty much neutral towards any kind of religion at all, or if they do practice, they seem to be very sloppy about it."

Mom laughed. "It's easier to walk the path to hell, than redemption, sweetheart, that's why it's so well lit. The path to truth is a hard fought battle, and one that we must constantly wage war to win."

Lovelight hadn't grasped the imponderability of those words at the time, but as she descended after Ben, she cringed at the memories. She knew it was real. People did die. They did go on. But not always where they thought they would. Some clung to the Earth, fearing to let go. Fearing to make a move to free them from the grasp of mortality. Fearing to lose the touch of a loved one, the taste of a grape, the kiss of a friend, the grasp of power!

And it was the last one that had brought her and Ben into the cavernous space beneath the ground.

"This way!" She heard ahead of her, and she scrambled to catch up.

He stood framed in a new doorway, this one open already, and the source of a bright light that was creating a noir affect with Ben, who turned to smile at her. "Enjoying our cub scout exploration?"

She noted the weapon in his right fist. "You seem to be."

He shrugged. Which he usually did as a way of apologizing for his weapons, but he never stopped using them. "It's all nice to be spiritual and all like you Lovelight, but when a bullet's zinging for your heart, you better be wearing armor!"

She'd always laugh when he would go zing with his mouth, and then tap her on her heart, a huge grin on his face, like some of the puppies she saw at the pet stores.

"No one here."

He shook his head. "But they left traces."

He turned and descended into a larger room than the one above, which had also been stripped bare. This one had huge shelving and there were still some books on the shelves. Many had been torn and tossed to the floor; some burnt, smoke still lingering in the corners of the room, but most were gone. She could see the tracks of dust where they had been pulled down or away from the shelving.

She drew a finger across one shelf. The dust had to be at least an inch thick. "They must have taken the old ones."

"They wouldn't have it any other way." He said in a wry twist of a commercial.

She laughed, and then took his left hand. "Now what?"

"Now I call in the big boys and they come out with all the forensics tools."

"Will this still be here if we wait?"

He gave her a side-glance. She was right.

He shook his wavy blonde hair, causing his deep emerald eyes to sparkle with humor. It was his way of telling her "God only knows! They've managed to beat us every time before this." He snapped in irritation.

She nodded. She didn't blame him for his anger. The Nine were a powerful force of evil on the planet. While everyone was out politicizing about the rich one percent, the Nine were the masters who held the strings to the puppets everyone thought of as the richest people, when in fact they were only part of a vast network of expanding control that the Nine had created.

"Let's check anyway. Maybe we can find a clue."

They began probing the walls of the large chamber, working their way to the far wall, and then back again towards the stair well, where they had started from. They acted as checkers on each other; in case one missed something the other would surely catch it.

The door above them suddenly slammed shut.

Ben snapped on his maglite and shot its beam at the doorway above. Nothing. No one there, but they heard the sound of footsteps swiftly ascending.

"Not good." He remarked.

Then smoke began to filter into the room. Lots of smoke. Green smoke.

"Not good at all." He swore.

Lovelight and Ben searched stairwell walls on both sides, and were about to give up. The green smoke was almost to their level as it spilled thickly down the stairwell stairs, cascading like a liquid smoke to the floor and curling about their shoes.

A wisp caught in Lovelight's throat and she made gagging sounds. She hurriedly spit out what had gotten into her mouth, grabbing her throat protectively. Ben gave her a worried look, and bumped into the shelf nearest the stairwell. A grinding sound.

They both turned to see a new doorway appear.

Above them green smoke began to pour from the ceiling as well as the doorway.

"Well, Princess. Any mad ideas?"

"Reincarnate as a bird?" She quipped.

He grinned. "Great idea. How about we put it under our Christmas tree."

Then he dashed into the new opening, spearing ahead with his maglite, while she followed. They'd gone maybe ten yards along a narrow corridor about six feet high, causing Ben to have to duck his head constantly, so he didn't see the object ahead. She hadn't seen it either, but her intuition was burning hot as a flame.

"STOP!" She hollered.

He stopped. Looked up. Banged his head. "Damnit!" He cursed, and then he saw what she had seen. It had been flattened against the wall. So narrow and undefined that it would have been easy to pass it by. Exposed by Lovelight, the creature slid away from the wall, its semi-translucent body glowing now with a kind of crude dark green color.

"What in the hell is that?" Ben swore.

"Exactly." Lovelight answered.

It charged them, baring a mouthful of slimy fangs that extruded forth like giant syringe needles.

"Stop or I'll shoot!" Ben warned, and shot at the same time.

The creature gave him a stunned look, and then looked upwards, where a hole had appeared magically in the center of its forehead. It let out a wet sigh, and then collapsed to the floor.

"I said stop!" Ben told Lovelight as she looked at him.

She shook her head, then bent down and pressed a palm to the body of the creature. "It's not from here."

"Meaning California or..."

"Or." She answered.

Then behind them they heard an explosion.

"Run!" Ben yelled.

He grabbed her hand and they ran forwards as green smoke and searing flames blasted into view behind them.

***

A huge Doberman Pincer was digging into an overturned garbage can in a deserted alleyway. The throb of traffic on the street that fronted the alley was noisy, but nothing would disturb its hunger. It nosed through the trash, and then huffed in despair. Nothing.

Then the bricks to its left exploded outwards.

It spun around and snarled angrily, baring its teeth as Ben and Lovelight hurtled into view, then ran its way, as searing flames and green smoke burst into the alley.

"Wrooff!" Warned the dog!

Lovelight and Ben froze. Ben kept his weapon ahead of him.

Lovelight caught his hand. "Don't."

He didn't move.

She came around him, and then dropped to a knee. The huge dog growled, warning her.

"Hi fellow! You look hungry. Are you hungry?"

The dog eyed her uncertainly. It didn't feel an ounce of fear radiating from her. It felt something warm and soothing. It lowered its ears, and then raised them.

"You have such pretty eyes. I bet everyone tells you that." She told the dog.

He made a slight whining sound, and then lowered his tail between his legs.

"I won't hurt you." She promised, slowly extending a hand.

"Lovelight, those fingers don't come with a warranty, money back guarantee!"

"He's just scared..." She told him, not taking her eyes of the dog's eyes. "...Aren't you, honey?"

She sat down on the pavement and the dog growled again. It turned its head, but the alley was a dead-end. It looked back at her, baring its teeth again.

Ben raised his weapon, but held fire.

Lovelight patted her lap. "Come on, boy. Come on!"

The dog remained frozen in place, its teeth bared.

"Ben, you still got that jerky in your rear right pocket?"

"Lunch."

"Not today."

He sighed, and handed it over. She unwrapped the jerky slowly and carefully, making sure the dog wasn't startled by any sudden movements. It didn't growl, but it tensed, and then its nostrils caught the scent of the beef jerky. It sears shot up. Its tail shot out like a flag unfurling in the wind.

"Come here, boy. Nice jerky for you!"

The dog slowly relaxed, its nose working overtime at the scent of the jerky. It licked its lips, its hunger getting the better of it. Lovelight tore off a tiny chunk and very carefully tossed it several yards in the dog's direction. It gave her a startled look, then saw the jerky and leaped upon it, eating it as if hadn't had anything to eat in weeks.

"More, baby?" She said.

It turned around, licking its lips, trying to get more of the jerky into its throat that was now gone. Its eyes saw the huge piece in her hands. She gently laid it down in front of her. The dog looked up into her eyes, and then it slowly came forward, its eyes locked on hers. When it was close enough to snag the food it did, but it didn't move away. It just stood there.

"That's a good boy!" She said, then slowly reached her hand out and touched its head.

The dog looked up at her a moment, as if weighing her life in that moment, but as she continued to touch it and then gently rub it, its eyes softened, and its tail began to wag.

"You're such a good boy!" She told the dog.

It wagged its tail faster, then let out a tiny whine and dropped to its belly and rolled over, exposing its stomach to her. She looked over at Ben, who couldn't believe his eyes, and then she gently began rubbing its belly. The dog made tiny whining sounds of pleasure as she did so. Then it snapped around, and leaped at her.

Ben raised his gun to fire, but the dog wasn't attacking Lovelight; it was licking her face all over. She put her arms around it and hugged it as its body shook and shimmered with delight. She could feel tears coming to her eyes. Yes, there was evil in the world, but there was also goodness. Good things. Good creatures.

"Good boy!" She told the dog. "Good boy!"

Sherlock Holmes as you've never seen before!

The Case of the Yellow Hand

Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson discover a trail of frozen bodies that leads them to an ancient cult that has mystical powers and the ability to summon demons. Will they be able to discover who the leader is and bring him to justice before Victorian London is shattered by the violence of the cult?

A Baker Street Universe tale, this story brings in the help of Nicolas Tesla, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Jules Verne, and H.G.Wells. Even with this Fellowship of Baker Street, will the famous detective and Watson be able to rein in the terror of death that is spreading throughout Victorian London?

The Master Detective Tale is now at Amazon.Com and Smashwords.Com for 99cents

Purchase it now at Amazon.Com and Smashwords for 99cents to read it right away!

Raging Against the Darkness at Amazon. Tons of out of this world excitement and adventure!

Raging Against the Darkness! at Smashwords. The action never stops!

Also you can buy it directly at from my bookstore here!

Sherlock Holmes as you've never seen him before!