Page:Weird Tales Volume 13 Number 1 (1929-01).djvu/74

 just a week ago I bought a rare Japanese print from him."

"He had rather a peculiar end."

"You saw him die?"

"No. No one saw him die. He lay dead in his shop when I came there last night. In his hand he held this." Clavering pulled the wooden image from his pocket and extended it to his friend. "Examine the thing, will you, Herrick? See anything queer about it?"

"Well, it's an odd subject to carve, I should say, but beyond that there's nothing wrong. Had I the say, I should have had the cutlas in the body of the sailor; it would maintain a better proportion in the carving."

"True. It's being just touching the sailor makes it rather awkward."

"You say Morrison was holding this?"

"Yes. Odd, eh? But wait until you hear all the story. He found the image in his shop one day, hadn't the least idea where it came from, so he says, and was confident that he had never seen it before. At once he told me that he had an uncanny feeling of fright when he looked at the thing. The next night he insisted that the point of the cutlas had entered the body of the sailor, and that the expressions of the faces had changed. He hinted that the thing suggested something; I gathered that it brought to mind something in his past life that was very similar. And he dreaded the movement of the weapon into the sailor's body, going so far as to state that something would happen when the cutlas passed through the body."

"By the way, Clavering, have you ever noticed the peculiar resemblance that the face of the sailor has to Morrison?"

"I have, Herrick; I've wondered about it. I'm told that Morrison was once a seaman, perhaps even a pirate of some sort."

"Who knows?"

"No one. Nobody seems to know-much of Morrison."

"Go on with the story."

"Well, Morrison insisted that, night after night, the cutlas was being surely plunged into the sailor's body, and I was fully as insistent in my ridicule of his strange obsession. Last night when I came to see him I found him dead, with the image in his hand, as I told you. As far as I know, the cause of death is unknown, with heart trouble of an obscure sort plausible. But there was a queer burnt mark on Morrison's breast; I'll be damned if it didn't call to mind some queer stories I've heard about witchcraft. Imagine that, in this enlightened age! I took the image from him. It was just the way it is now, but in a moment I'll show you something."

"Perhaps Morrison was the victim of some subconscious obsession; perhaps at some time in his life he killed a sailor under similar conditions and his conscience conjured his past up before him?"

"It's just plausible. As I said, no one seems to know much about Morrison. At any rate, this morning I got to examining the figure. In the first place it isn't antique. It resembles a great deal of the work done by a group of old sailors down along the Thames, in Limehouse district.

"In the second place—bend closer, Herrick—four-fifths of this cutlas is entirely free of dust, from the point toward the hilt, and if you look closely at the point where the cutlas would naturally have entered the sailor's breast, you will see a faint oval line of compressed dust!"