Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/51

Rh without warning, rose swiftly to a piercing, falsetto shriek, and ended like the snapping off of a radio.

"Immediately afterward the telephone let loose the most fearful uproar I have ever heard. If you have ever torn wooden packing-boxes to pieces with your hands—you know, fruit crates and the like—and if you can imagine those sharp, rending, splitting sounds magnified and multiplied a millionfold, then you have a faint idea of what I heard aver those telephone wires that night. Only it wasn't a box I heard being ripped to pieces; it was a house.

"In the midst of that uproar the phone went dead.

"How I got into my clothes and over to Fothergill's house I don't remember. I was half mad with fear—fear of the unknown, I suppose; my brain wasn't really functioning. But I got to what was left of Fothergill's house

"That house lay—flat on the ground. It had been burst wide apart, out- ward, in all directions! Great torn slabs of walls and roof lay all around. Just a moment; I've kept the newspaper clipping."

He got quickly to his feet—a tall, racehorse-slim man with prematurely white hair—walked over to his car and came back with a wallet in his hands. He opened the wallet, extracted a worn and yellowing rectangle of newsprint and handed it to me. I took it gingerly—it was brittle, almost, as a long-dried leaf—and read it aloud.

was more, but nothing pertinent to this narrative. When I had finished reading the item, Doctor Bowen carefully returned it to his wallet. He had been standing as I read; now he sat down again, and the three of us, oddly evading each other's direct gaze, stared at the triangle of green turf between our feet. Fred Winn began tapping his fingernails on the arm of his lawn-chair.

"The clipping describes it pretty accurately," Doctor Bowen said suddenly. "Fothergill was thrown three hundred feet—well over three hundred feet. His body was smashed—and