Page:Stirring Science Stories, March 1942.djvu/54

 staring at my right foot. I long ago passed the point where I allowed people to indulge their curiosity at the cost of much personal anguish to me. I decided that I might as well.

I threw some clothes on and went down to the corner where a tubercular young clerk was dispensing a few early-morning cokes. "Hi," he said. "Nice day." Avoiding his conversational spray I got change and slid into the booth.

A woman's voice answered the phone in their room at a nearby hotel.

"Mrs. Leonard?" I asked. "I got a telegram from Mac—he wanted me to call him."

"He must have gone out," she said. "He wasn't here when I woke up. Must have gone for breakfast—wouldn't wait for me, the barbarian!"

I mumbled some inanity or other, wondering what I ought to do.

"Listen," she said, suddenly urgent. "This is the first chance I've had to talk to you, really. I'm just a dumb woman, so they tell me, but there are some things I want to know. That foot of yours—what's wrong with it?"

"I don't want to talk about It," I snarled. "Since you began it, it was run over sidewise by a car when I was about twenty. Is there anything else?"

"Yes. What do you do for a living?"

The damnable impudence of the woman! I didn't answer; just slammed the receiver down on the hook and stormed out.

Mac was waiting for me in my apartment. The landlady had let him in, she told me as I was going up.

"Now what's this?" I asked, as I found him nervously smoking on the edge of my bed.

"Sorry I broke in," he said. Damn him! His eyes were on my twisted foot again!

"What do you want? I was just talking with your wife."

"You might want to know why I did a damned foolish thing like trying to make a student. It was because my wife wouldn't treat me like a husband. I was nearly crazy. I loved her so." His voice was thin and colorless.

"I don't care about your personal affairs, Mac. Get out of here."

He rose slowly and dangerously, and as he moved towards me I began to realize how big he was and how small I was. He grabbed me by the coat lapels; as he twisted them into a tight knot and lifted me so that my dragging foot cleared the ground he snarled: "You tell me what's wrong with your foot or I'll break your neck!"

"Car ran over it!" I gasped. I was shocked to find out that I was a physical coward; never before had I been subjected to an asault like this. I feared that man with the lunatic gleam in his eyes as I had never feared anything before.

"Car," he growled. "Now how do you make a living? Don't give me that 'retired capitalist' bull you tried in your letters. I've been looking you up and you haven't got a single bank-account anywhere. Where do you get your money from?"

A voice from my door sounded. "Put him down," it said. "He's no friend of mine. Maybe of yours." I fell in a heap and turned to see Leonard's wife. "The Whelmers," she said, "disavowed him."

Mac turned away. "You know that I know!" he gasped, his face quite dead, dirty white. It was absolutely bloodless.

"I saw two of the Whelmers in the street. They know nothing of this." She gestured contemptuously at me. "That foot of his is no mark. Now, Mr. Leonard—" She advanced slowly on him, step by step.

He backed away, to before a window. "Only a few days ago," he gasped, "only a few days ago I put it all together. . And last night I—we—my God!" His eyes were dilated with terror.

"Last night," said the woman, "you were my husband and I was your wife."

With the beginning of a musical laugh she slumped and bloated strangely, quietly, a bluish glare shining from her skin.

With the glare came a momentary paralysis of my limbs. I would have run rather than have seen what I had to see. I would have died rather than have seen that Presence that had horns and a tail and great, shining teeth and lustful, shining eyes.

Leonard took his dry dive through the window just a second before I fainted. When I awoke there was nobody at all in the room except myself and the friendly, curious police. 

— Emil Petaja 