Page:Weird Tales volume 33 number 04.djvu/96

 result, he telephoned his apartment and got no response. Eventually, worried and almost sick with anxiety, he spent a turbulent ten minutes with his doctor and another with the superintendent. Finally he achieved his purpose and went by taxi to hrs apartment, having overruled the objection of hospital officials.

Ludwig was gone. He had vanished without a trace. Edmond considered summoning the police, but speedily dismissed the thought. He paced about the apartment nervously, seldom turning his gaze from the crystalline object that still rested in the brazier.

His diary gives little clue to what happened that night. One can conjecture that he prepared another dose of the narcotic drug, or that the toxic effects of the fumes Edmond inhaled several days before had finally worked such disintegration within his brain that he could no longer distinguish between the false and the real. An entry in the diary dated the following morning begins abruptly, "I've heard him. Just as Bob said, he spoke through the crystal thing. He's desperate, and tells me that Bob failed. He didn't get Scott to the Center, or S. could have materialized again on earth and rescued Bob. Something—I'm not sure what—caught Bob, God help him. May God help all of us Scott says I must begin where Bob left off and finish the job."

There is a soul laid bare on the last pages of that record, and it is not a pleasant sight. Somehow the most frightful of the unearthly horrors the diary describes seem not quite as dreadful as the last conflict that took place in that apartment above Hollywood, when a man wrestled with his fear and realized his weakness. It is probably just as well that the pamphlet was destroyed, for such a brain-wrecking drug as was described in it must surely have originated in some hell as terrible as any which Edmond portrays. The last pages of the diary show a mind crumbling into ruin.

"I went through. Bob has made it easier; I can begin where he left off, as Scott says. And I went up through the Cold Flame and the Whirling Vortices until I reached the place where Scott is. Where he was, rather, for I picked him up and carried him through several planes before I had to return. Bob didn't mention the suction one has to keep fighting against. But it doesn't get very strong until I've got quite a distance in."

next entry is dated a day later. It is scarcely legible.

"Couldn't stand it. Had to get out. Walked around Griffith Park for hours. Then I came back to the apartment and almost immediately Scott spoke to me. I'm afraid. I think he senses that, and is frightened too, and angry.

"He says we can't waste any more time. His vitality is almost gone, and he's got to reach the Center quick and get back to earth. I saw Bob. Just a glimpse, and I wouldn't have known it was he if Scott hadn't told me. He was all-awry, and horrible somehow. Scott said the atoms of his body had adapted themselves to another dimension when he let himself get caught. I've got to be careful. We're nearly at the Center."

The last entry.

"Once more will do it. God, I'm afraid, horribly afraid. I heard the piping. It turned my brain into ice. Scott was shouting at me, urging me on, and I think trying to drown that—other sound, but of course he couldn't do it. There was a very faint violet glow in