Short Stories
a nose, and there an arm-stump showed where a hand had
rotted off. They were men and women beyond the pale, the thir-
ty of them, for upon them had been placed the mark of the beast.
They sat, flower-garlanded, in the perfumed, luminous night,
and their lips made uncouth noises and their throats rasped ap-
proval of Koolau's speech. They were creatures who once had
been men and women. But they were men and women no long-
er. They were monsters—in face and form grotesque caricatures
of everything human. They were hideously maimed and distort-
ed, and had the seeming of creatures that had been racked in
millenniums of hell. Their hands, when they possessed them,
were like harpy claws. Their faces were the misfits and slips,
crushed and bruised by some mad god at play in the machinery
of life. Here and there were features which the mad god had
smeared half away, and one woman wept scalding tears from
twin pits of horror, where her eyes once had been. Some were in
pain and groaned from their chests. Others coughed, making
sounds like the tearing of tissue. Two were idiots, more like huge
apes marred in the making, until even an ape were an angel.
They mowed and gibbered in the moonlight, under crowns of
drooping, golden blossoms. One, whose bloated ear-lobe
flapped like a fan upon his shoulder, caught up a gorgeous flow-
er of orange and scarlet and with it decorated the monstrous ear
that flip-flapped with his every movement.
And over these things Koolau was king. And this was his
kingdom, a flower-throttled gorge, with beetling cliffs and crags,
from which floated the blattings of wild goats. On three sides the
grim walls rose, festooned in fantastic draperies of tropic vegeta-
tion and pierced by cave-entrances—the rocky lairs of Koolau's
subjects. On the fourth side the earth fell away into a treme-
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