Page:Weird Tales volume 38 number 03 CAN.djvu/100

 For a time he lay there, too stunned to do other than look weakly around him on the ghost-like bridge. Then he got to his feet. He forced himself to the side of the structure and looked over. The water below was running silently, covering its loot without trace. Trembling violently Jack stumbled on across the bridge and found his way home, still clutching a bulky weight in his hand. This horror—something lie was too dazed to look at and appraise, afraid that it was what he most feared, no more incredible than anything else his evening—Nevers' hand!

Y NOW, sirens were sounding in the streets below and Larue knew that rescue squads were on the way to the piers. Sc much had happened that evening that the foundry worker's mind was numb. Still hypnotized with horror, he dropped the something he had sneaked home with him from the bridge in a corner and hurriedly covered it with newspapers. Then he went down into the street again, down to a waterfront excited and packed now with eager, watching people In addition to the apparatus at the wharves, there were police launches and small craft of all types cruising around in the river directly beneath the bridge. On the span itself he could see figures moving. Searchlights were shining down onto the water. Larue watched for hours as people around him came and went, and as dawn finally streaked the sky to the east. The boats drifted and crossed in eccentric lines around the center of the river, their white wakes criss-crossing over the grave of the el train.

Full morning came and Larue reluctantly left to have breakfast in a little restaurant and then headed for work. Somehow he got through the day. He bought all the evening papers. "A mentally deranged employee of the el line," it is stated, "stole a train last evening after fatally beating his roommatae [sic] and a guard, both employees of the el, and ran the train of three cars off the West River Bridge where demolition of the tracks had already started. Police stated that they expected Nevers' body would be recovered when wreckage of the el could be raised."

Larue worked his time at the foundry in a daze. For him, the river had a morbid, fateful fascination. He was on hand when the smashed cars of the el train began to come up, caught and drawn up laboriously with grappling hooks. But Never? was not found. Still the police trawled the river, for, as was pointed out in the newspapers, the engines were supplied with an automatic device that caused the train to stop of itself if the motorman left the controls. Somehow, the press speculated, Nevers' body might have wedged itself through a window and was even now somewhere at the bottom of the river.

Larue knew at last, and he lived with his terrible secret, not wishing to confirm it, clinging to the doubt, slim though it was, that he was crazy, that his memory of that night was wrong. A nightmare delusion, although the livid bruises still apparent on his body testified otherwise. Days passed, and the foundry worker shunned the corner of his room. After several weeks, the police and press admitted grudgingly that possibly Nevers had escaped on the bridge just before the train went off. Police nets were spread for the deranged murderer and Larue watched the papers closely. More time passed and nothing new was uncovered.

Finally, very desperately, the foundry-worker went to the corner of bis- room one night and dug out the object which had rested there for so many weeks under an increasing pile of newspapers. He took what he found there in trembling hands, horror-stricken, and headed out through the foggy darkness for the wharves, the bundle under his arm. He got to the water's edge and stood for a moment looking around to see if he was observed. Satisfied, he took the paper covering off and held Nevers' arm in his hands. Something the dead Philpot had said came back to him poignantly. No. the motorman hadn't been human.

And Larue dropped the metal throttle lever he'd been holding into the water to join the rest of Pete Nevers of the el.