Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 01.djvu/42

56 tonight, but I do say it gives us something to think about"

"I'm afraid you're goin' off the deep end. Alvin." I told him. "Amberson's laid up with a smashed clavicle. That lets him out. A man in that condition can't wash his own face, let alone go tearing men to pieces. apKern's a fairly husky lad, but not qnite up to wringing Pennsylvania miners' necks. As for Miss Watrous—poor kid, she's got a bad break coming when I tell her about him."

"About him? Who?"

"Young Tom Ten Eyck. I didn't realize they'd brought her into hospital that day. She must have been checked in before he died."

"Who in the name of Caesar's nightshirt was this Tom Ten Eyck?"

I told him how the lad died, then how I'd seen him and Fedocia years before in Fairmount Park. "Funny, isn't it?" I ended.

"Not very," he replied somberly. "Maybe medicine has been too cock-sure about what can and what can't happen all these years."

"How d'ye mean?"

He shrugged into his sheep-lined mackinaw and held his hand out. "Thanks for the drink. Pat. If I should tell you what I'm thinking you'd say I'm crazy as a coot. Maybe I am, at that. Good-night."

some inexplicable reason a wave of intestinal disorders swept across our section of the Army of Occupation, and the incidence of appendicitis mounted steadily. I'd performed three appendectomies that evening, two cases had reached paraappendicitic stages, and I was thoroughly depressed, dispirited and exhausted by the time the cold and dismal twilight darkened into colder night. The courtyard was filled with sad muddy puddles, relics of the melting snow, a fine mist, half sleet blew against my cheeks, everywhere was humid cold as I walked back and forth and drew great gulps of frosty air into my lungs. It seemed to me l'd never get the taint of ether out of my nostrils and throat.

"Bad night, sir, ain't it?" asked the sentry chatily as I paused to do a right about at the end of the quadrangle. "'Minds me o' th' waterfront down by th' Brooklyn Bridge. 'Member how th' mists comes up from th' Bay when th' wind is changin'— my Gawd, sir, what's that?"

He was looking toward the high brick wall that loomed against the drizzle-darkened night across the courtyard, dark and sinister as the wall of some old haunted castle, and his face was set in a stiff, frozen mask of terror. His eyes were fixed, intense, it seemed as if the very substance of his soul was pouring from them as he looked. "Mater purissima, renuglum pecsatorum—" I heard him mumble between chattering teeth, searching memory for the half-forgotten prayers learned at parochial school—"Mater salvatoris—"

My eyes caught the object of his fascinated gaze, and I felt my throat close with a quick fear-while something terrible and numbing-cold seemed clutching at my stomach.

Against the blackness of the fog-soaked wall a form—a human form—was moving, not grip by slow and painful grip as it clung to irregularities worn in the masonry by stress of years and weather, but with an almost effortless progress, head-downward, like a monstrous lizard!

"Good Lord, it can't be—" I began, but his voice, high-pithed, honed sharp by hysteria, drowned my words out.

"I'll get it, Captain; ghost or devil, I'll get it—"

"Don't shoot! Don't shoot!" I heard Weinberg's frantic cry as he dashed out into the courtyard. "Don't fire, I tell you—it's—"

The clatter of the sentry's automatic cut across and blotted out his frenzied