Page:Weird Tales volume 30 number 06.djvu/99

754 on the porch to look for his host. He did not mind the lack of courtesy, but the silence and oppression were affecting his nerves. Tropic night had fallen, the mosquitoes were vicious. Beyond the murmur of sea caverns he heard nothing, and returned to the house, to look at the specimens in wall cases, then to reach the typewriter stand where he glanced at a sheet still in the carrier. Without consciousness of reading something not intended for him, Willoughby glanced at the typing in view:

"There is now no doubt but that physical coarseness of the beast has absorbed the fine mentality of Chueng Ching. I fed him double the usual amount of chicken yesterday, and he was in a fine rage for more. His roarings are bestial. The pool was lashed to foam by his fury. And I am assured that his rage was directed toward me, his friend and companion. It is scarcely a year since he was sorrowful at the thought that I should die before he died and leave him alone. Now he is all brute and I am punished. He no longer heeds my voice "

As if the writer had been interrupted at his task, the sentence was left unfinished. Willoughby read with mingled rage and horror. Evidently Chueng Ching had gone insane and he had been hired to care for a madman. He resented it. Yet he was virtually a prisoner on the island unless he could find the boatman who brought him. He stood a moment, wondering what to do. The little house-boy lingered near him constantly without giving the impression of watching, but shook his head when Willoughby demanded to see Denham.

"No can do," he said plaintively.

Willoughby went through the curtained doorway into a room evidently belonging to Chueng Ching, to judge by the embroidered tapestries moving in the draft. Chests of carved teak stood between wall cases. A table held metal tubes, with sealed ends and addressed to the Royal College at Pekin. Willoughby heard the squawking of hens and ran outside into the pergola of vines. A lantern stood beside a bamboo coop and Professor Denham was wringing the neck of a hen and tossing it on the ground while he reached for others. He looked at Willoughby, and it seemed to him that Denham's eyes held mingled fear and madness.

Then he heard the sound of water threshed as if by storm, although there was no wind and not a leaf of the vines stirred.

"Chueng Ching," said Denham. "Hungry again. Such gluttony! I wish you'd arrived earlier, but it's difficult to see him at night. Go into the house, Willoughby, and read those notes you'll find. I'll return presently and tell you all about him."

Denham gathered the slaughtered hens and darted down the vine-covered passageway of the pergola. There was the sound of an iron door banged shut, the repeated noise of water threshed violently, and Willoughby returned to the house, where he took up the typed script, arranged the pages according to numbers and glanced over them. Fear, horror, fascination held him. He forgot where he was. He was unaware of the house-boy standing mute near his chair, seeking companionship in a fear that was sapping his life. Willoughby sat on the edge of his chair, hair slowly rising, scalp prickly, his palms moist with cold sweat.

now the evidence that ocean depths are a desert of ice-cold water with no living organism; soundless, still, dark nothingness. A ship sinking to those depths would cease to be, ground into molecules on the ocean bed. The silence must be fearful. But greatest