Page:Strange Tales Volume 02 Number 03 (1932-10).djvu/129

 glass, there reposed in loathsome disarray a hideous collection of white human bones.

HE ensuing journey was a nightmare and a madness. Not one, but dozens of auxiliary chambers jutted off from the main cavern, and in each there rested human remains—gleaming, fleshless skullcaps, tibias, limb and jaw fragments. Harvey was frozen with terror. He lay rigid as a corpse. From far behind there came a man's shriek, prolonged, agonized, horrible. Harvey recognized the timbre of the voice, and a tremor passed over him. It was Taylor crying out in fright at what he saw, Taylor who was less stoical than his companion, less able to endure in silence the threat implicit in the fleshless bones.

But Harvey remained through it all keenly observant. He noticed that to a few of the bones adhered clothes, which invariably were of a dark texture, coarse garments bearing unmistakable evidences of prolonged wear. Brass buttons gleamed from several of these fragmentary garments, while on others were insignias in rusted gold and scarlet, insignias which Harvey recognized and shuddered at. On the floor of one cavern there reposed a circular cap, upturned, with peaked visor. The visor was corrugated and eaten away at the edges, but its maritime derivation was unmistakable.

There was little doubt in Harvey's mind as to the profession which the skeletons had pursued in the world of men. Though inured to the sea, they, too, had succumbed to the Pacific's dark treachery, had fallen through a vent in the bed of the ocean. For hundreds of years, perhaps, they had been descending in ships into an alien world through a vent at the bottom of the ocean, which yawned to receive the living and the dead. No other explanation was tenable. The living and the dead. Or only the dead, perhaps. Drowned men, corpses. Harvey was a novelty in that world; the octopus-men regarded him with wonder, with awe. Perhaps he and Taylor alone, of all men

IS captor had come to a sudden halt, standing very still in the blue light before an empty chamber. Harvey's gaze swept the enclosure in vague apprehension, which mounted to a shrill fright when the creature lowered its tentacles and deposited him in the center of the burnished floor. For an instant he relinquished hope. In the course of the journey past the dark chambers he had correlated his impressions and reduced them to some sort of meaning, and he was convinced that the creature intended to devour him.

But his captor had other plans. It simply deposited him in the center of the floor and retreated precipitously, with shrill ululations. Harvey was left alone in the vacant enclosure. For a moment he lay there prone, too stunned and frightened to move or cry out. His mind was in a turmoil; momentarily he expected that a claw would fasten on his throat, would dash out his brains. If the side chambers, with their gruesome relics, were not slaughter stations, what were they? Harvey was not vouchsafed an immediate reply. He was simply left lying in the center of the chamber, whilst the octopus creature busied itself elsewhere. Even when he rose to a sitting posture and stared frantically about, no one interfered with him. It was only when he gained his feet and staggered, shakily, toward the central cavern that the octopus creatures reappeared. His original captor reappeared, and also several others.