Read "The Place Called Dagon" by Herbert Gorman online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The girl beat with her hands against the door, whimpering softly as the steady concussions shook the whitewashed planks. The morning sunlight caught her by the shoulders in warm hands and seemed to shake her. She did not pause to listen for any approaching footsteps, but continued to hammer at the wood as though in a half-trance, and but semiconscious of what she was doing. White clouds ballooned upward in the bright blue sky and watched her from a distance. They were snowy-plumaged hawks observing the peregrinations of a lice-like humanity upon a rolling ball of earth and sea. The girl was a faraway mote to their farseeing eyes, a speck of dust without form or meaning. She moaned to herself and shook the door. Dreeme heard her thin voice so broken by suppressed and breathless sobs as he hurried downstairs, turned the key in the rusty grating lock, and flung the door open. She stumbled into the hall, her tear-streaked face lifted like the face of a wounded animal, and lurched against him with a sudden paralysis of knees, clinging tightly to his arm. Dreeme pushed the door shut and half-carried her along the hall to the little study.
"Why Deborah! " he cried. "What is it? Sit down. Shall I get you a glass of water?"