Page:Weird Tales Volume 10 Number 2 (1927-08).djvu/103

 we can find some way out of this terrible disaster that seems to have descended upon us. There may be some wild mistake. There may be some shred of hope yet. God does not desert his own!" She tugged at his arm and started down the hill. "I am going to your mother."

in the town the alarmists had raced from house to house, with shouts and angry cries, broadcasting the thing they had heard, gathering new recruits as they surged on. Over the streets from tongue to tongue flashed the report, gathering ugly significance and rousing flaming fury as it spread. Women stayed behind, trailing the skirts of the mob, shouting to each other the infamy that must be avenged, their outraged sense of fanatical anger rising.

Saul Blauvette had come tearing through the night, calling that Kinkaid girl who worked in Whittly's office, crying that the man Arn was dead and that he had killed his mother! They had been right all along! Hideous things went on in that mystery-shrouded laboratory! No wonder those fiends had kept their work an utter secret! They were experimenting on human beings!

As they gathered and rushed on toward the end of the town, the enraged minds of the people composing that wild mob envisioned unspeakable things. They saw people shut in that grim-walled building, cut into pieces and tortured to satisfy the gloating curiosity of merciless monsters. They saw bodies and bones and hideous bestial rites. They saw all the horrible things that lie in the purlieus of subconscious thought, ready to be roused into ghoulish life by inflamed brains. They poured down the street wildly, shrieking their indignation, picking up sticks and stones and any destructive missiles that came within reach of their hands.

On to the laboratory! Batter it, wreck it, tear it to splinters! Burn it to the ground! If Saul Blauvette burned with it, little matter! The ghastly, mystery-shrouded, ghost-ridden building must go!

Down through the streets and out of the little town they surged, half running in their spirit of destructive rage, jostling each other, trampling each other, cursing the great barnlike structure that few of them had ever seen. And five of the men in that crazed throng carried waste and cans of inflammable oil. And three of them carried, knowing it, cancers that ate into their living flesh, drove them sick with terror, and rushed them to the yawning grave from which none had been able to save their ravaged bodies.

and Cloud walked with slow, solemn steps into the lighted laboratory, carrying reverently between them the sheeted body of Henry Arn. Mrs. Blauvette stood in the doorway and watched as they paused by a bottle-littered table.

"Mrs. Blauvette, will you clear away some of this rubbish so that we can lay Henry here?" Whittly knew the value of busy hands, when the brain is harassed by things beyond control.

Mrs. Blauvette hurried forward, brushed the bottles aside and made clear a space large enough to accommodate the body. Gently Whittly and Cloud laid down the man who had come, as he said, to give his life for science in this place. As they turned to leave the laboratory, Cloud paused and gestured at a shelf and another table covered with numberless bottles.

"Doe, that's 511. There are gallons of it there. Saul and I were so sure of what we had found at last that we made up enough to inject a hundred thousand people. And that big jug contains unadulterated