Page:Weird Tales Volume 4 Number 2 (1924-05-07).djvu/28

 of the cracksman's labors. "If there are any more of those things around they ought to show themselves by that time."

The doctor drew a chair up to the table and eagerly scanned the pages of the diary while we watched the antics of the thing in the jar. It kept getting lighter colored all the time, and more lively. By the time the cytoplasm had become transparent it was racing around, contorting its body into all manner of shapes. Sometimes it was flat, sometimes oval, and sometimes round. At times it put forth pseudopods, sometimes elongating them until it resembled a small cuttle fish.

"September twenty-third was the night Immune Benny died wasn't it, Chief?" asked the doctor.

"Right. Why?"

"Then, this diary tallies with Miss Townsend's testimony. Here is the professor's entry made under that date.

"It is growing late so I will not read all the details to you," continued the doctor. "Suffice to say that the professor discovered his synthetically created creature would feed on nothing but living creatures. He fed it so many microscopic animals the second day that it grew to a size visible to the naked eye. Then he fed it gnats, mosquitos, flies, beetles, and finally mice, when it became so large he was forced to transfer it from the small porcelain dish in which he kept it, to a much larger one.

"The thing grew at a prodigious rate of speed. Its growth seemed only limited by the amount of living creatures it was permitted to devour. At length he was compelled to keep it in the glass-lined tank which he had been using for the culture of infusoria. Its victims were thrown into the tank alive and were quickly killed by the monster. He noticed that it was sluggish while assimilating its food, but moved with cat-like quickness when hungry. Though it had no eyes it seemed to sense the approach of food in some way and, toward the last, stretched forth pseudopods and snatched the animals from his hands.

"Yesterday the professor led two mastiffs into the room. Hardly had he closed the door of the laboratory before the monster was out of the tank. It killed and devoured the two big dogs in less than a half hour—then crawled back sluggishly into the tank to digest its meal. Thus ends the written record of the professor's adventures with the Malignant Entity. His whitened bones on the floor of the laboratory are mute testimony of what occurred this morning."

There was a moment of awed silence when the doctor finished his narrative. His eyes fell on the struggling thing in the glass jar.

"What are you going to do with it?" I asked.

"Come," he said, taking up the jar and starting for the basement. "I will show you."

The chief and I followed him down the basement stairs and into the furnace room. He opened the fire-door and tossed the jar on the glowing coals.

The thing raced about spasmodically for a moment in the intense heat, then fell huddled in the bottom of the jar. Suddenly, as if inflated from beneath, it puffed upward and outward, almost filling the receptacle in a shape that resembled a human head. I thought this only a figment of my imagination at first—blinked—and looked a second time. The face of a man stared back at me from, behind the curved glass, eyes glowing with malevolent hatred and lips drawn back in a snarl that revealed crooked, yellow fangs. For a moment only the vision held. The next instant the jar was empty of all save a tiny pile of white, flaky ash and the bones of the mouse.

Dr. Dorp shut the door suddenly and noisily.

"That face," I exclaimed. "Did you see it also?"

"A queer distortion of the gas-inflated protoplasm," he replied.

Chief McGraw seemed greatly perturbed. He drew a long black cigar from his pocket, lighted it and puffed nervously for a moment.

"Distortion, hell." he muttered. ""

 

HE King of Prussia, in his correspondence with Voltaire, relates an anecdote of the Czar Peter, which is worth extracting, as illustrative of Russian Despotism: "I knew Printz, the marshal of the court of Prussia, who had been ambassador to the Czar Peter in the reign of the late king. The commission with which he was charged proving very acceptable, the prince was desirous of giving him conspicuous marks of his satisfaction, and for this purpose a sumptuous banquet was prepared, to which Printz was invited. They drank brandy, as is customary with the Russians, and they drank it to a brutal excess. The Czar who wished to give a particular grace to the entertainment, sent for twenty of the Strelitz guards, who were confined in the prisons of Peters burgh, and to every large bumper which they drank, this hideous monster struck off the head of one of these wretches. As a particular mark of respect, the unnatural prince was desirous of procuring the ambassador the pleasure, as he called it, of trying his skill upon these miserable creatures. The Czar was disposed to be angry at his refusal, and could not help betraying signs of his displeasure. This is not an invented tale; it is to be found in the narratives of M. de Printz, which are preserved in the archives. I have also mentioned it to many persons who were at Petersburgh at the time, and they all attested its truth."