Page:Weird Tales v02 n01 (1923-07-08).djvu/80

 The Author of ‘Beyond the Door” Spins Another Eerie Tale in His Masterful Style



UGRAND and Marvin agree that Craddock acted very strangely that night.

After growing sleepy and confused, staring into the fire in the lounging-room of the club house, he rose from his chair, passed through the double glass doors into the next room, and reclined beside Doctor Wilford Sawyer. Doctor Sawyer lay in his coffin.

Against the wall, paralleling the coffin, was a leather couch. It was on this couch that Craddock stretched himself out and went to sleep.

These three—Craddock, Marvin, and Jugrand—had been Wilford Sawyer's closest friends. In the course of years they had penetrated, though but slightly, behind the veil of his odd, aloof personality; witnessing gladly his rise to fame; standing by him now in death.

One of them—Craddock, the surgeon—had brought him back from the faraway spot where he had been found, dead; that spot to which he had fled madly, yet perhaps with a wisdom beyond sanity. Through the offices of all, he had been laid in state in the club house, rather than in his own formal bachelor apartments. They were paying final homage to him as Guard of Honor, through that long night before the funeral.

Some time in the course of that night, ere his astounding exit into the other room, Craddock began to talk. Before that, nothing much beyond gloomy monosyllables had entered into the conversation.

Marvin, the artist, had been pacing up and down the room, or sitting, bowed, in a Morris chair. Jugrand, professor of psychology for unreckoned years in the university, was crumpled inelegantly in a Turkish rocker. When he opened his half-shut eyes, the firelight glistened from their faded blue, bristled his white moustache to the point of grotesqueness, made his red cheeks seem frightfully puffy. All three of them were uneasy.

Something extraordinary hovered above their heads; a sense, it seemed, of some tremendous event hesitating on the threshold. Whatever they said took on significance and authority in proportion as it bore upon the breathless presence on the farther side of the glass doors. So it was that they listened intently—painfully—when Craddock started to tell of an informal party which he and Doctor Wilford Sawyer had attended together.

"In this room—a year ago. There must have been a dozen of us, more or less. Someone suggested that each of us tell something he did as a boy—some adventure—something out of the ordinary."

"As a boy—yes?" Marvin prompted, nervously.

He untwisted his lean legs from the Morris chair where he happened to be coiled, just then. He was suddenly on the alert.

"Someone suggested it; I don’t remember who. And, without a word of explanation, Sawyer took his hat and coat and left the house."

Craddock paused and peered into the fire, as if the scene were reenacting and clarifying itself there.

"I followed," he went on. "We walked together back to his apartment. Rh