Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 01.djvu/26

40 in armchairs, others on divans. More, standing, had fallen in groups that even now, somehow, told of their easy, unvexed lives of conversation and travel. Penderby, glancing round, was glad that the bitterness in him had not died.

The first door he opened after he went upstairs moved only a few inches; something had fallen against it. On the floor of the next room was the body of a man. A woman and a little girl had died in another.

The fourth was empty. A door in it led to a bathroom. He turned the hot water on. It still was at boiling-point, and as he waited till it had cooled he shaved with a good sharp razor someone had left on the dressing-table.

Penderby, despite the luxury of steam and soap and water to his chin, did not linger in the bath. He had begun to hurry. For what? He did not know. But the cool sheets soothed him. The comfort of the bed was so exquisite that, to sense it as long as possible, he tried to stay awake. The sleep into which he soon fell was dreamless, and lasted till 7 p.m.

He made tea in the big kitchen, below street-level, and brought butter and cold roast chicken from a refrigerator and fine bread from a chrome-and-white cupboard. When he left the hotel, he was munching a sandwich made of remnants of the meal.

The Strand was gray and, in corners and gaping store-fronts here and there, black. Rain had made scattered pools that gave the street a shabby, defeated look. The only light they reflected was the little in the sky. All the street-lamps had failed now, and the store-lights that had outlived the day were few and ineffectual.

It was as Penderby looked round Trafalgar Square, somber and a little frightening, that he felt his first bewilderment, apart from the shocks of surprise, of the day. He sat on a balustrade outside South Africa House, and tried to plan the suddenly monstrous-appearing future.

He could not stay in the vast charnelhouse London had become. A day or two more, as he already had warned himself, and plague would ride every breath of air. But his food was in London; he could not turn farmer at short notice, and the supplies in stores and hotels would last very long.

The Continent? But he hardly could manage a boat even on the short Dover-Calais voyage, could he? Then, he had not heard nor seen aircraft since the afternoon before. If air-liners had come from France and other countries, and landed at a dead airdrome, the pilots, undoubtedly, would have flown from Croydon on to London. Had everyone in France, Germany, Spain, Italy died? Was he the only one spared? Were there French, German, Spanish, Italian Edward Penderbys?

The Square was cold, lonesome. He left his perch stiffly, and turned onto the Strand once more. He tumbled over a body now and then. Clouds that had scudded from the west broke in a short, heavy shower, and it brought a damp smell from the heaps of wet clothes on every side.

The hotel was in darkness, and he leaned against a bronze-encased pillar outside and began to smoke a cigar he had found in the bedroom. The dead he did not fear, but he was uneasy in the midst of so vast a number of them; besides, the excitement of the day had left him a little nervous. And hours of wakefulness would be the price of his evening's sleep.

began to wonder about the Thames. What had happened to the ships on the river, the men who had lived in them? A street nearby led to the water, and in five minutes he was leaning over the wall and trying to count the vessels in the dark. Two were little holiday steamers,