Page:Weird Tales v01n01 (1923-03).djvu/86

Rh, unless, indeed, there was, after all, a fourth dimension, into which as a man passes from sunlight into shadow, the intruder had stepped perhaps now regarding him sardonically from that invisible plan: A living ghost!

Absurd! And yet, there was that other fact—he had seen it: the silent, the voiceless, yet moving witness—the positive and irrefutable proof of a presence other than his own.

HERE, in a locked, bolted, impregnable chamber, unmarked by the least sign of entry—a main door which did not have a key, responding only to a combination known only to himself—a secondary door most obviously locked, and from the inside; windows of thick glass, triple locked with the latest patent catches—someone or something had entered, passing, as it seemed through bolts and bars, through walls, through steel and stone and concrete, like a djinn, or a wraith—through the keyhole?

Matter-of-fact as he was, hard-headed and practical, Quarrier was aware for an instant of a flicker of almost superstitious fear. But—rot! In all the space confined by those four walls and ceiling and floor there was not room for concealment even for a—cat, for instance—for nothing human, at any rate. It was beyond him, even as the Thing that had entered was beyond him, though at hand.

Quarrier did not believe in the supernatural with his mind; but, brave as he was by nature and training, in that moment he knew fear. But he preferred, with his intelligence, to credit Marston with it; Marston, so far as morals were considered, might have been almost anything: you saw it in his curious eyes, with their pale irises, the flat, dead color of his skin, like the belly of a snake; in the grim, traplike mouth. Quarrier had never deceived himself as to the President of Intervale Steel. The thing was fantastic, unreal—and yet. It might easily be a trap, and worse. Peril, the more subtile because unknown, was all about him; he felt it, like an emanation. What was it that the psychological sharps would call it? An aura, as of some invisible and deadly presence, seeing, although unseen.

HE ROOM, or office, as has been written, was impregnable to any but an assault in force, the doors invincible save by the shattering crash of a high explosive, the windows almost equally so.

Quarrier's man, Harrison, even, would be unable to enter the room in his employer's absence; so that, knowing the combination of the safe, he could take nothing from it, or bring anything into it. He left, in the rare intervals that Quarrier suffered his ministrations, always with his master, returning likewise, if he returned at all, in Quarrier's company.

The recluse had hedged himself about with care. Marston, with his keen, devising brain, would face a pretty problem in the recovery of those documents.

But it was when, on an abrupt inspiration, Quarrier removed the telephone receiver from its hook, that he became certain that it was a trap.

"Give me Schuyler 9000," he had whispered, his voice hoarse in the blanketing silence. But even with the words he knew that the line was dead, yet it was characteristic of Quarrier that, once satisfied that this was so, he resumed his inventory of the office where he had left off.

He had completed the circuit of the chamber with the exception of the wall safe and the small, flat-topped writing-desk by the door. From his position he could see the desk quite easily; there was nothing and nobody either on or under it. And now, before he twirled the combination, he laid his hand upon the doors, pulling at the handles in a perfunctory testing. And then—

He recoiled, stumbling backward, as the doors swung wide with a jarring clang. Finger trembling, he jerked forward a drawer—put in his hand. He