Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 4).djvu/669

 cover; there was only a wide road bordered by short turf; there was no hole in the earth; but John had gone, and I never saw him again.

For days I sat in my room, or paced about it, waiting for the moment when my brain should give way and leave me a muttering idiot; but I must have a strong brain, or a lethargic one, for I retained my reason. Then I determined to fathom this horrible mystery; and until that moment I had never known the real meaning of the word "determination."

I went straight to my uncle's house and let myself in; and I went straight to the laboratory and unlocked the door. Dust was upon everything, and I shuddered so as I looked round the place that I had to go away into the dining-room and sit down for a time. Then I returned to the laboratory.

I had come examine that old desk; for I felt a conviction that it contained a secret drawer, and that this secret drawer contained the clue to the mystery. I may have heard of a secret drawer in the desk in my boyhood; that is quite possible, although I did not remember the circumstance.

Anyhow, I took up that desk and moved its cover, made of a piece of my uncle's craze—the grey cloth—and I pushed and pulled at it on every side, until a faint recollection seemed to come to me, and I pulled out and forcibly depressed the sliding stamp-box in the corner of the desk; and the secret drawer flew open. There was a sheet of foolscap in it, covered with writing in my uncle's hand.

It described the composition of an explosive (many times more potent than dynamite), the rapidity of whose action caused it to be, firstly, inaudible to the human ear by reason of the number of the resultant air-waves; and, secondly, to be extremely local in its action. Another peculiarity was the centripetal direction of its lines of energy, by means of which the violence of its particles would be exerted towards a common centre. Thus, if an object should be surrounded with a layer of the explosive, the object would be wholly destroyed, while objects in actual contact with the outside of the layer would remain absolutely unaffected. Further, the violence of the inaudible explosion was so intense as to reduce the object surrounded to a gaseous state, and its action caused no visible flash. The process would, therefore, in any place sufficiently open to allow of the free expansion of the destroyed object into a gaseous state, be absolutely undetectable by the senses of a person a little distance away.

Then were jotted down some convenient methods of using the stuff; and one of these was to saturate any material partly woollen with the explosive in solution, and, having wrapped the material round the object to be destroyed, to explode the substance either by friction, or concussion, or electricity. The writing went on to say that for some weeks, or even months, after being applied to the material, the explosive might be handled, or subjected to shocks, with impunity, its explosive qualities being slowly developed by exposure to the air.

In certain cases, after a lapse of time, the composition might become so sensitive as to be exploded by an electric condition of the atmosphere, or by a touch even. The solution would in no way affect the colour of a material chemically adapted to receive it, provided that material were frequently exposed to the light; but that, if kept in the dark, the material would soon become yellowish and acquire a pungent odour.

I ran upstairs to the press where, as I knew, a stock of the "health-material" used to be kept, and threw open the door. A strong pungent odour came out; and there