Page:Weird Tales Volume 36 Number 12 (1943-07).djvu/61

60 "You did? Then perhaps you can tell me what caused it.”

“I—I think it came from outside,” stammered O’Rourke. "We heard it through the window.”

"Nonsense,” snapped Harlow. "How could I hear an outside noise from my side of the hall. Gentlemen, I intend to find out where that sound came from.”

He wheeled and walked put of the room. Fearfully, their hearts in their throats, O’Rourke, Cummings and Limerick followed him. "Play innocent and dumb,” cautioned Cummings.

Harlow tapped on a dozen doors up and down the corridor before he came to Freddy’s room. At Freddy’s room he tapped again and again.

"Mr. Simpson,” he called. "I wish to speak to you. Are you awake, Simpson?”

There was no reply.

"Better open it, sir,” whispered O’Rourke. He knew that Harlow intended to do that very thing, so what was the use of stalling? Harlow would step into the room and run smack into the horror.

It couldn’t be avoided now. Harlow had questioned every student on the ground floor with the exception of Freddy and Freddy didn’t answer. Harlow would get a jolt too. But he wouldn’t plunge shrieking through what was left of the screen. He’d swing around and start asking questions.

It would mean expulsion but it had to be faced. They would have to take their medicine like men.

Harlow’s face was purpling when he pushed into the room. “No student could sleep that soundly,” he muttered.

Tremulously the guilty three piled in after him.

The light was still on in Freddy’s room. It flooded over the crumpled bed and the still, white form lying there. Not sitting with a book gruesomely propped up before it, but lying with its head dangling over the foot of the bed and its arms rigidly outflung.

For an instant they thought that Simeon Hodges had simply toppled over. Passing from the darkness of the corridor into the brightly lighted room and seeing what looked like a corpse such a first impression was unavoidable.

For a merciful instant their minds envisaged simply expulsion, disgrace and the difficulty of explaining it to the home folks. Then real horror gripped them, shook them and left them as limp as rags.

Hideously the truth dawned. It wasn’t old Hodges lying there. It was Freddy Simpson and he looked—ghastly. Freddy had red hair and a fresh, boyish complexion, but now his face was corpse pale and the blood on his throat was such a bright, glaring red that his hair seemed drab by contrast.

The blood had come from two tiny cuts immediately above Freddy’s Adam’s Apple. One on each side of his throat—two tiny punctures oozing bright blood.

The reactions of O’Rourke, Limerick and Cummings were as divergent as their personalities.

Cummings said: "My God!” and turned as white as a sheet.

Limerick swore lustily.

O’Rourke said nothing at all. He didn’t even cry out. All he did was reel back against the wall and slump to the floor in a dead faint.

T WAS past midnight when they reassembled in O’Rourke’s room to talk it over in hushed whispers. Slater had rejoined them and was adding his voice to the discussions, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched.

"We ought to be thankful he’s rallying,” he muttered. “I was afraid his overtaxed