descended it was necessary to make sure that the ladder would be in the same compartment with him, set firmly against the wall, directly under the aperture. If he were prevented from leaving the compartment by the corridor door, he might find himself needing the ladder. Without it he might be descending into a trap that could close with a clang and abruptly imprison him.

Getting down into the compartment was the worst part, just putting the ladder into place and not knowing how badly hurt she was.

What if she's dead? he thought. What if he killed her with a single blow? He looked strong enough. He could have killed her. God, don't let me think of that. I mustn't think it.

His feet touched the floor. He let out his breath slowly, turned and crossed the floor to where she was lying. He went down on his knees and lifted her into his arms. She lay relaxed in his arms, face up, quiet, her lips slightly parted.

He looked down into her face, and for a moment his mind went numb, became still, so that there was no longer a whirling inside his head—only a chilling horror.

She seemed to have two faces. One was shrunken and almost torn away, a shredded fragment of a face. But enough of it remained for him to see the shriveled flesh of the cheeks, the puckered mouth, the white hair clinging to the temples. It was the face of an old woman but so fragmentary that it could not even have been called a half-face. And even though it had been almost ripped away, it seemed still to adhere firmly to the face to which it had been attached, and to blend with it, so that the features of both faces intermingled in a quite unnatural way.

Not quite, though; Helen Ramsey's face was sharper, more distinct—all of the features stood out more clearly. And when Corriston's stunned mind began to function normally again, he realized that the old woman's face was—had to be—a plastic mask.

It took him only an instant to remove the ghastly thing from features which he could not bear to see defaced.

He had to pry it loose, but he did so very gently, exactly as a sculptor might have pried loose a life mask from the face of a recumbent model.

He held it in his hand and looked at it, and a little of the horror crept back into his mind.

It was the merest fragment, as he had thought. Thin, flexible, a tissue-structure of 

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