Page:Weird Tales v02 n01 (1923-07-08).djvu/78

Rh the sheet covering the corpse at his right. He stopped petrified with amazement, and stared at the thing on the cold, gray slab, while a strange prickly feeling coursed the length of his dorsal vertebrae.

With forced bravado he stepped up beside the still figure and turned back the sheet. The corpse, which lay on the third slab from the end, was that of a middle aged man, gray haired, slightly bald, and dressed in the garb of a laborer. No doubt the face had not been unpleasant to look at in life but in death it was hardly a thing of beauty, with its glassy, staring eyes, sagging lower jaw, and protruding, blue-white tongue.

Ryan replaced the sheet with a shudder and hurried to his chair: The place certainly got on his nerves. He had known that it would when Chief Howell assigned him to it and, in observation of the old proverb, "Forewarned is forearmed," had made due preparation for the exigency. The preparation was very simple. He had poured some pale amber liquid from a large round bottle into a small, flat bottle. The flat bottle reposed snugly in his hip pocket.

The large, round bottle, a gallon of "moon," had been a present from a bootlegger friend.

"Don't be afraid to drink it like water, Ed," his friend had told him. "I know it’s all right 'cause I made it myself. You won't find no slivers in that hooch."

Despite the admonition of his friend, the bottle had reposed in the Ryan basement for six months, untouched. Ryan was not an habitual drinker, but he believed in "kapin' a nip in the house for emergency."

He glanced slyly toward the office door, then extracted the bottle from his hip pocket, pulled the cork, and held it up to the light to admire its color and lucidity as a connoisseur admires rare old wine. With some dismay, he noticed that it was nearly two thirds empty, whereas the night was scarcely more than half gone, He must cut down the size of his drinks, or go without during the wee, small hours. He would cut down, too, after this one. Just this once he must have a man's size shot.

He needed it sorely. The staring eyes and lolling tongue of that corpse on the third slab had set his nerves on edge. Placing the bottle to his lips, he drank deeply, corked it, and returned it to his hip pocket with a sigh.

"Sure, and that man knows how to build booze," he muttered. "Goes down as smooth as oil, and it has a flavor like ten year old bottled in bond."

He sat, in silence until his watch told him that it was time to make the rounds again, then rose reluctantly to perform his distasteful duty.

When he, arrived opposite the third slab he resolutely looked straight ahead. Thus, he reasoned, if the thing should move he would not see it, and there would be no harm done. Ryan had overlooked the fact that he had a pair of perfectly good ears, and that they were in excellent working order. A slipping, sliding, soul-sickening sound from the direction of the third slab, acted as a forcible reminder.

With a gasp of horror, he fairly flew to the chair. He sat down weakly, mopped the cold perspiration from his forehead, and finished the contents of his bottle at one gurgling gulp.

Ryan had made up his mind not to look in the direction of that slab again, and when he made up his mind he was a hard man to change. With stubborn determination to carry out his plan, come what might, he pivoted his swivel chair a half turn and settled down to await the dreary passage of another twenty-five minutes.

"Now let the damn' thing turn over all it wants to, or do a toe dance, for all of me. Oi'll not give it the satisfaction of watchin its devilish capers," he resolved, half aloud.

That last drink had been a stiff one. In fact, it would have made four good husky drinks for as many hearty lumberjacks or longshoremen.

Ryan grew drowsy. Decorators had been at work in the morgue that day, white enameling the walls, and he told himself that the smell of the turpentine made him sleepy—that and the cursed dank, musty odor of the place itself. His head nodded until his chin rested on one of the gold buttons that adorned the front of his uniform.

Some time later he awoke with a start and looked at his watch. He looked again, rubbing his eyes to make sure that he was awake. Surely he had not slept more than ten minutes, yet the hands told him it was four-thirty.

He wondered what had-awakened him. There had been a noise of some sort. He dimly, remembered that much, but, try as he would, he could not recall the nature of the sound.

Suddenly, and with startling distinctness, the noise was repeated. It was the sharp click of a heavy shoe on the hard, concrete floor. Scarce had the hollow echoes died when he heard it again.

Someone was walking toward him with slow, dragging footsteps from the direction of the third slab!

YAN was no coward. On the contrary, he had shown marked bravery in many encounters with desperate bandits and thugs of the underworld. Neither was he superstitious. He believed that when a man was dead he was gone; and that was that. His soul might go to purgatory, and thence to heaven or hell, but never return to earth. Yet, despite his inherent bravery and his firm theological convictions, he could not bring himself to swing his chair about and face the thing that was approaching,

In fact, he discovered, to his utter horror, that he was unable to move. He could not so much as lift his nerveless hands from the arms of the chair. Even breathing was difficult, as though great chains had been wound about his body, pinning hit against the chair back.

Deliberately, painfully, those weird, echoing footfalls approached. The thing was almost upon him, yet he could not move nor utter a sound. An odd, misshapen shadow appeared on the floor in front of him. Slowly it crawled up the side of the wall, its grotesque outline gradually assuming human form.

Then the thing itself appeared. The invisible chains about Ryan's chest tightened, and icy fingers laid hold of his wildly beating heart and squeezed it until it pounded eccentrically, like an engine with cracked spark plugs, for he recognized the gaunt figure and grisly features of the corpse from the third slab!

It stood there before him, swaying slightly, then extended its gnarled left hand and steadied itself against the wall. As those glassy eyes stared into his, Ryan's palate seemed to shrivel and dry up. It rattled like a dead leaf in a gale with each intake of his breath.

Evidently the corpse was trying to converse with him, for its blue-white tongue and lips moved slightly. Presently it obtained some measure of control over them and spoke in a hoarse, husky whisper:

"G-good evening."

Ryan was too petrified with horror to reply.

The corpse looked at him curiously for a moment. Evidently it reached the decision that it had said the wrong thing. It tried again:

"G'morning, oshifer."

The policeman’s tongue seemed glued to the roof of his mouth.

"Sha matter? Ya deaf and dumb?"

To his amazement, Ryan heard himself speaking. Anger at the other's insulting insinuation had loosed his tongue.