Page:Weird Tales v01n01 (1923-03).djvu/185

184

great hands grasped the bars and his two-hundred-and-fifty-pound bulk, clad in only a regulation undershirt, twitched, started and trembled from head to foot. A horrible fear distended his eyes, his teeth clicked together and the muscles of his face worked spasmodically.

"Sick, Hulsey?" the guard demanded, hardened, to such nerve-shattering outburst in a building full of tortured souls.

"I saw—I saw—" Hulsey began, his teeth chattering and rendering speech well-nigh impossible. "I saw—Oh Mr. Hill, please give me a cellmate—now, tonight! I—I'm a sick man, Mr. Hill. Nerves all shot to pieces. I guess. Can't I have a cellmate to talk to, Mr. Hill?"

"What did you see?" the guard asked.

"He was standing right where you are now," Hulsey whispered hoarsely. "Pointing his fingers at me, he was, when I opened my eyes and saw him. Smiling, too. I—I"—a violent shudder—"I could see through him, Mr. Hill; could see the bars on that window beyond him I—"

"Who? See who?" the guard interrupted.

Hulsey seemed to realize, then, that he was talking totoo [sic] much; that he was not conducting himself as the hardest convict in the prison should.

"Why," he stammered. "I saw—I thought I saw—an old pal o' mine. He's been dead a long time. Nerves, I guess. Thinking too much about my old pal and the good old days. Nightmare. I guess."

"Yeah-nightmare is right!" the unsympathic guard growled. "But don't let another blat like that out of you or we'll throw you into the padded cell. Got the whole wing stirred up. Get to bed now and forget that good old pal of yours."

"If I only could!" Hulsey whispered huskily to himself, as he got back into the bunk.

WO WEEKS passed.

There were no more outbusts from cell twenty-one. The "ghost tower" on the wall was silent, cold.

Then, at two o'clock one morning, Captain Dunlap saw the indicator move. It sickened him, made him wish ardently that he was a thousand miles from Granite River Prison.

The indicator moved slowly, hesitantly, to the left and the bell tinkled weakly. The captain placed the receiver to his ear, but no sound came: the line was dead. The indicator fell back to its original position as the captain replaced the deceiverreceiver [sic] on the crotch.

A few minutes later the yard guard entered the look out. Bill Wilton, the regular yard guard on the graveyard shift, was away on leave and the substitute guard was new at the prison.

"Didn't I understand you to say, Mr. Dunlap," the new guard said, "that there was no one on Old Tower Number Three?"

"You sure did," Dunlap answered.

The guard pulled his left ear and looked puzzled.

"Funny," he finally remarked. "Was sure I heard somebody in that tower, singing soft and low like, when I passed under it a few minutes ago."

"What was he singing?" the captain asked, bending forward and fixing a penetrating gaze on the recent arrival at the prison.

"Let me see now," said the guard meditatively. "Couldn't make out much of the song. Something about 'when I die in the ocean deep,'—No, that wasn't it. 'When I die and am buried deep'—that's it. Then there was something in it about this dead guy coming back to ha'nt people, and a lot of bunk like that."

"I see," said Dunlap, as he eased himself out of the chair. "I'm going up and have a look around in the tower. You stay in here until I return."

Dunlap went outside the walls and up through New Tower Number Three, 