Page:Weird Tales Volume 3 Number 4 (1923-04).djvu/78

Rh the locked and bolted door as vapor through the meshes of a sieve.

Such was the THING that visited me in my room on the morning of September 2.

As soon as it was gone my feet touched the floor, I unlocked the door and went into the hall. All was quiet out there. I heard no sound, smelled no burning powder. If there were guests in the other rooms they all must have been sound asleep. One could have heard a mouse creep in that gloomy hallway. I closed the door and got into bed. When I awoke again the clanging jar of the Street traffic told me it was late.

I bathed, shaved and dressed. As I walked down the hall and took the elevator to the office I scanned the faces of the late risers. There was no look of surprise, curiosity—consternation, on a single set of features. All was as commonplace as upon any other morning. Nothing unusual had happened.

And such was the effect of those passing and re-passing guests that my harrowing experience of the early morning began to seem unreal and all but passed, for the time, out of my memory. At the office I paid my bill, listened to the commonplace talk of a garrulous clerk and went away, without having mentioned a word of my experience.

On the stage, homeward bound, a chat with a seat mate and the beauty of Autumn foliage painting the borders of the highway red, brown and yellow, occupied my attention. But when I arrived at Maple Shadows I was silent no longer.

I horrified my wife and daughter until they ran away from me. Then I followed them up.

"But Arnold Mathews was killed at Chateau Thierry. You told me so," said my daughter.

"He was! I saw him killed with my own eyes. His legs, arms and head blown into bits by an exploding bomb dropped from the air. Not a shred of his clothing remained—"

"And this one—Ugh! do go away! You make me shudder. Oh, dad, how awful!"

From the sheer lack of an audience I desisted.

"Watch the papers tonight and to-morrow," I ventured again at the dinner table. "A man committed suicide this morning at the Savoy Hotel. How he did it I am not quite prepared to say, but I should think, that, owing to the character of the explosion and the appearance of the THING after"

My wife stopped me with a gesture of disgust.

"George, that is not a nice subject for the dinner table."

"Well," I reiterated, unwilling to be squelched so suddenly, "he killed himself, just the same, in a room across the hall from mine... You'll see. Watch the papers."

And this is what we read in the evening paper:

OME time since a chief in the village of the Lake of the Two Mountains, when going to bed, incautiously stuck a lighted candle against the wainscot of a garret where he and his household, amounting to eighteen persons, had retired to rest. After some time, the tallow, by which the candle adhered, melting, it fell down, unfortunately, into a basket where there was a bag containing eighty-four pounds of gunpowder. The consequence was an immediate explosion, which blew off the roof, rent away the sides, and, in a word, reduced the house to splinters. By such an accident, one would suppose that many were killed and wounded but it was quite the reverse; for not a single person, though all were blown out of an upper story to the distance of thirty yards, was injured materially.

The chief, whose name is Jacob Commandant, alighted on his feet in a canoe on the beach, through which his legs penetrated as far as the ankles, and held him fast, as it were, in the stocks. There he was found by some of the inhabitants, in inexpressible terror, imagining his situation to have proceeded from some malicious demon, whose exit and entrance had destroyed his house. A child who was sleeping with its head near the basket, suffered no other hurt than having its hair singed: and to crown all, a leathern bag, containing three pounds more of gunpowder, and lying in the same basket, was found near the house unexploded,