Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 01.djvu/41

Rh way around—just as if something had wrung his neck like a chicken's.'

"There it was, so help me, Carmichael, point for point and line for line, the same bruise-pattern as the one you saw on the train from Paris, and I'd seen once before at Bellevue Mortuary."

"What's the history?" I demanded as I helped myself to cognac. Somehow I, too, was beginning to feel chilly, despite the fierce heat from the porcelain stove.

"Here it is—" He spread his fingers fanwise and checked the items off. "There's a crowd of nurses—five or six of 'em—laid up with the flu in N-18. Next door, in a semi-private which happens to be private now because the other inmate died this afternoon, is Miss Watrous. Just down the corridor, in M-40, is Amberson, in drydock with a smashed collar-bone, and next to him, in 41, is apKern with the flu. Notice anything?"

"Three of the five people who were in the compartment when the German spy was throttled were within a hundred feet or so of the spot where, presumably, this man was killed—again presumably—in the same way."

"Right. Right as a rabbit. This fellow was a Polack from Pennsylvania, miner or something; big as a horse and strong as a bull. Influenza convalescent who'd gone raving-wild on some whiskey someone smuggled into the first floor wards. Crazy as a chinch-bug, and with a killing streak on him.

He'd knocked an orderly out cold and gone wandering through the hospital. While they were looking for him on the ground floor he was running up and down the second-story corridors, peeking into rooms and wards and scaring all he patients senseless. Finally he reached the nurses' ward."

"And—" I prompted as he fell silent.

"'And' is right," he answered finally. "He came barging into the ward, snatched the blankets off the first bed and lay down in it. When the patient in it tried to get out he grabbed her.

"No," he answered the unspoken question in my eyes, "he might have thought about that later; right then he was intent on murder and destruction. He took her by the hair with one hand and clutched her throat in the other, and was about to break her neck when something—get this, they're all agreed on it—something rushed in from the corridor, snatched him by the neck and dragged him out."

"Something? What was it?" I asked fatuously.

"That's just what nobody knows. The only light in N-18 was a candle, no electric bulbs in there, for it used to be a storeroom and was never wired. When the big Bohunk fanned the bedclothes back he blew the candle out, so all the light they had was what came through the window from the courtyard. The girls were all too weak to fight him, but not too weak to yell, and they were setting up an awful clamor when It rushed in.

"Keep your blouse on, can't you?" he demanded irritably as I leaned forward with another question. "I'm telling you everything I know. When I say 'It' I'm as near to being specific as anybody. Something—and no two of 'em are agreed on what it was—came crashing in from the hall way and grabbed the murdering drunkard by the neck, hustled him out and killed him, just as something we don't know about did in that Jerry secret agent on the train from Paris."

"Some of the girls declare it looked like a great white ape, one thinks it was a spider bigger than a man, but all agree it handled that six-footer as if he'd been a baby.

"Now—" he tapped me on the knee in sober emphasis—"I'm not saying there's any connection between the fact that some of those who were with us on the Paris train were within striking distance of N-18