Collected Short Fiction, page 224
“Robin!” He was amazed. “What are you doing here? I thought—Carter said you were staying in town tonight.”
“I was so frightened!” She clung to his arm. “I got Carter’s telegram. It made me afraid something was wrong, so I came out on the four-ten train. I wanted to be with Carter. And as there wasn’t any taxi at the station, decided to walk, following the path along the cliffs.”
“Robin, you shouldn’t have!” his slow voice protested, deep with concern. “On such a night—that trail’s dangerous!”
“I know—now!”
She shuddered. Her fingers tightened on his arm.
“I had the most dreadful fright, Mark. And I think—it may sound silly—but, Mark, something followed me!”
His voice was low with quick anxiety.
“What was it, Robin?”
“I don’t know. Once, when lightning flashed, I saw it—or thought I did. It was big and grey and slimy. Like—well, like an octopus. Somehow, too, it was like a man! I just glimpsed it. It was crawling toward me. And it had the most horrible cry. Like a baby’s, but somehow—hideous! It sounded hungry—for me!”
She had expected big Markham Dorn to laugh at her fears. His level, iron-grey eyes could look unflinchingly into the cold face of danger. A hundred times, in Carter’s robot bathysphere, he had plumbed the dark chasm of the sea, in stern contempt of peril.
But silence met her story, and a long, wondering breath.
“Part octopus?” he asked slowly. “And part man?”
The bright disk of the flashlight crept across the floor. It climbed a glass case filled with shadowy horrors, and came to rest upon a thing standing on a strong table.
It was an ivory squat image. Archaic horror oozed from every hideous convolution of its bulbous, eight-tentacled body. Above the writhing coils of the sucker-bearing tentacles rose a head.
A head which was hairless, flat-featured, singularly narrow. Thin lips snarled away from animal-like fangs. There was no nose. The eyes were cunning slits of evil. For all that, it was human—in its sinister travesty of man lay its crowning horror.
It was not large—no more than three feet high. The fine detail of its carvings inevitably proclaimed the faithful likeness of obscene reality. An accurate copy—of what unthinkable original? Before it lay a long, age-scarred knife of bronze.
ROBIN looked away from it. She tried to force its squat, twisting lechery from her mind.
“It was like that—the thing I saw!” she whispered. “But such things can’t live. God wouldn’t let them!”
“But they do,” Markham Dorn told her, his voice queerly grave. “I’ve seen them. This image,” he said briefly, “is the prize find of our expedition. I brought it up, with Carter’s diver. It came from the bottom of the South Atlantic, over a mile down. And I saw creatures there, in the depths, like it. I beat off a mob of them with the metal arms of the bathysphere, and carried this, and the knife, away from a sort of shrine. I think it’s their idol—”
Markham Dorn’s voice broke off. He turned suddenly. His light darted about the long room.
“What is it?” Robin whispered fearfully. “Do you think—”
“Somebody—or something—has been in here,” he told her swiftly. “Must have been an hour ago that your husband heard it. He called Dr. Thurman and me. When we came in, there was a window open. The intruder was gone. We all ran outside, and searched around the house. Didn’t find anybody. Carter and Thurman went on, to look further. I came back to check things over. A few specimens were gone—one of octopus punctatus—but nothing of great value. Don’t know why anybody broke in—unless he was after the image.”
“Then Carter’s outside?” cried Robin, terrified.
“Thurman is with him,” Dorn reassured her. “And both are armed.”
“Where are the others?” she asked anxiously. “Mr. Whipple? And the servants?”
“Whipple drove to the station, to meet the evening train,” Dorn told her. “He was expecting the curator of the World Museum, Wickard Kidd. Kidd’s coming down to look at the image, and the other objects I fished up. He’ll make a good offer, I understand, if we can convince him that the find is genuine. It’s a big thing, really, Robin—we’re asking a quarter of a million. If it goes through, Carter can buy that little steel house he’s always talking of.”
“I hope it does,” she whispered. Then her fears came back. “Why don’t the lights work?”
“The generator, in the basement, is out of order,” Dorn told her. “And the servants are gone. Something happened to day. Just what it was, I still have no idea. Thurman knows, though. And he’s scared. Won’t tell why. But he had Carter send that wire for you to stay in town. Said your life wouldn’t be safe here. And I wish you had stayed, Robin.”
“I didn’t want to be away from Carter,” she explained simply. “But what became of the servants?”
“Something frightened them. Village natives, you know. A closemouthed clan. They wouldn’t say much. Muttering something about devil-fish crawling up out of the sea. Anyway, they all five went across to the village—all of them except the gardener. They’re staying until the storm is over, they said. Whipple had to drive himself to the sta—”
His voice snapped off.
“What was that?”
Now Robin also heard it. First that avid, lustful wail, which had followed her up from the cliffs. And then a man’s voice, shouting something. “The thing!” whispered Robin. “Or could it be—the wind?”
“That was Carter!” muttered Dorn. “His voice! I must help him. You stay—”
THE flashlight was in his left hand. He drew an automatic.
“No!” choked Robin. “I’m going—if Carter’s in danger—”
They ran back into the dark living room. Robin unlocked the front door. Dorn led the way out, his shoulders looming massive and square against a purple sheet of lightning.
They ran across a rainswept lawn. “It sounded that way!” called Robin. “Around the left wing.”
“Thurman! Thurman!” The voice of Carter Dell rang out of the darkness. “Dr. John, where are you?” Lightning picked him out for a static instant, as he leaped a dark clump of shrubbery. He was a big man, two inches taller than Markham Dorn, mighty of shoulder, powerful. Lightning etched in Robin’s mind the steel-blue eyes, the firm mouth, the iron jaw, the rain-matted red hair.
She sighed with relief, to see him unharmed.
“Dear Carter,” she whispered. “Where’s Thurman?” Carter shouted, as the dark swallowed him again. “I heard him scream—”
“Around the house, it sounded,” said Markham Dorn.
They ran left. For weapon, Carter’s great hand carried an axe.
“We saw something, down toward the cliff,” Carter panted as he ran. “Big, grey, crawling! It was out of sight in a moment. I went to investigate. Dr. John stayed, with his gun, to watch the house. I couldn’t find what we saw. Then I heard him scream—”
They came around the end of the house. A gust of rain stung them. Pandemonium of storm and mad ocean hammered in their ears. Robin caught instinctively at Carter’s hard arm. She clung to him, trembling.
And then another flash of lightning threw a merciless glare on the horror at their feet. What used to be a human form was now only a mass of raw, red pulp. Splintered bones protruded from it. Crimson oozed out of it, mixing with the rain as it flowed down into the grass.
“Thurman!” gasped Carter Dell. “Can it be?”
“His spectacles,” Markham Dorn said hoarsely. He pointed, trembling. “His revolver. That rag—from his coat.”
“Then—they’ve come,” said Carter Dell, his voice incredulous, yet, at same time, solemn with overwhelming dread. “I still had hope. Only their tentacles could pulp a man so. Or,” catching himself, “have we all gone mad?”
Staring at the scarlet sod, Robin was drowned in a sea of grey faintness. She pitched limply forward, toward the red horror.
CHAPTER II
They Dwell in Ocean
“ROBIN, darling,” came Carter’s anxious voice. He was tenderly lifting her from the red-splashed grass. “You all right?”
“Yes,” she whispered faintly. “Yes, Carter.”
She didn’t let him see the object she was slipping into the neck of her dress. And she walled the mind-rending horror of it away from her consciousness. For it was the fatal germ of madness unthinkable.
“Where—where’s Mark?” she gasped.
“He went after a rug—for poor old Thurman.”
Carter released her. She stood swaying on her feet. Lightning came again. Carter’s blue eyes were peering keenly. His red, bare head was cocked, listening. One great hand clutched the axe. Then he stooped and picked up the dead man’s revolver.
“You’re in danger, Robin. Better take this. By the way, didn’t you get my wire?”
“Yes. It frightened me, for you. I had to come.”
He wiped off the blood-clotted gun and gave it to her.
“Don’t hesitate using it, either,” he said grimly. “Here comes Mark.”
Markham Dorn laid the rug on the grass. Into it they rolled the bleeding pulp that had been Dr. John Thurman. Carter lifted the sodden bundle in his great arms, and they hastened into the building. Dorn had cleared a table in the living room, and Carter laid his ghastly, dripping burden there.
Robin’s voice was a dry husk of dread, when she asked:
“What did this, Carter?”
He stared oddly at her, and then across at Markham Dorn. In the pallid glow of the flashlight, the two men loomed like gigantic, silent statues.
“Better tell her, Mark,” Carter said slowly.
Markham Dorn nodded. His grey eyes looked at her solemnly.
“Must you know?”
“Tell me,” she insisted.
“You saw the image,” he began soberly.
She shuddered with remembered dread.
“That horrible thing in the museum, you mean? Man—and octopus?”
The big man nodded grimly.
“I told you that we found it on the bottom of the South Atlantic. Your husband, you know, would lower me over the side of the Avalon, in his robot diver. Then the ship would steam slowly forward, with me swinging along in the steel globe, a mile below.
“Mr. Whipple, you probably know, financed the expedition, on the understanding that we were to search for the sunken ruins of Atlantis. And every day, for three weeks, I was dragged over the black, cold floor of the ocean, searching for remains of the drowned continent.”
“Well, after three weeks of it I found—structures! Ruins, first, that clearly must have been the buildings of men. Crumbling, incredibly ancient. They must have been the cities of Atlantis. They’re inhabited, though the buildings are like no buildings of men. And the inhabitants are monstrous! They are half men, half—octopus!”
Robin’s eyes widened to the whispering horror of his voice.
“They are huge things, grey, powerful, hideous. They swarmed about the diver. They worked at the door-fastenings with their tentacles. They dragged at the cables. They brought metal bars, and began striking at the glass ports.
“The Avalon kept dragging me on.
I turned the diver this way and that, to see as much as I could. Then I guided it into this shrine, where the creatures were sprawling about their idol. I wanted some proof of my discovery. So I steered the globe toward the image, and caught it, and the bronze sacrificial knife, in the robot arms.
“Then I phoned Carter to haul me up at full speed. In another minute the monsters would have broken the glass. The blade of water, stabbing through the smallest crack, would have cut me like a knife. A close call. Two ports were chipped. But the glass was heavy. I got up—with the loot.”
“I meant to go down again. But we had a week of nasty weather, and a storm that carried us a hundred miles off the discovery. Then the coal ran low, and the captain turned back toward Pernambuco.
“And,” he finished slowly, “well—it’s just a week since the Avalon docked at New York, and we found Whipple waiting for the plunder, and you waiting to marry Carter.”
HIS grey eyes flashed at Robin, disturbingly.
“How came those creatures to be?” she asked, still clutched in the fascination of horror. “Half man and half monster?”
“I don’t know,” said Markham Dorn, deliberately. “But I’ve a theory. The Atlanteans were scientists. Their ruins prove that. Perhaps they were able to survive, as their continent sank. Perhaps they changed, adapted themselves to live under the sea. It may have been by some dreadful interbreeding with monsters of the ocean!” Dread silence hung for a space in the long room. It was ripped with wild thunder. Distant windows shook. Robin started back from the sodden bundle on the table.
“You think those things have followed—here?” she whispered, fearfully. “Why?”
“The ivory image is their god,” said Markham Dorn. “I tore it out of the midst of a crawling mob of worshipers. I believe that the things have come to take it back to the depths. And it may be to avenge the desecration of their shrine.”
Robin shuddered. She turned to Carter, grasping at his great arm.
“Then they might,” she whispered—“might break in the house? We must call the police!”
“We’ll call them, of course,” said Carter Dell. “But—”
His deep voice faded doubtfully, and Markham Dorn finished:
“But probably the police can’t do much.”
“Why not?”
“The things have strange intelligence, strange powers. Otherwise they could never have followed us so far from their abode in the sea.”
“Call them, anyway,” insisted Robin, nervously.
Carter Dell crossed the room, picked up the telephone on a side table. He frowned, and shook the instrument.
“Dead,” he muttered. “Wires down in the storm, I suppose.”
“Unless,” began Markham Dorn, “they have cut—”
The clamoring doorbell cut him off.
The three hurried together to the door. Markham Dorn had picked up Carter’s axe. Robin nervously clutched the revolver. Carter Dell unlocked the door, pulled It open quickly.
A small man swayed into the room, behind a gust of rain. He shook himself like a terrier, and water flew off his black coat. He flung his head, and drops spun from his sodden hat. He stamped mud off his small feet.
Carter’s flashlight showed quick, shrewd eyes darting at the apprehensive three, at the revolver, the axe. A thin mouth twisted oddly, about long, wolfish gold teeth.
“Hello,” rasped a sharp, nasal voice. “This the Whipple estate?”
“It is,” said Carter Dell. “Who are you?”
“I’m Wickard Kidd. I was to have been met at the station.”
“Mr. Whipple himself drove to meet you,” Carter told him.
“He didn’t,” clipped Wickard Kidd. “No car there. No taxi. Agent showed me a path. Half mile, he said. Horrible walk, along frightful cliffs. I came to look at some objects in Whipple’s museum. But if he cares no more—”
“The objects are here,” Carter Dell assured him. “And Mr. Whipple is very much interested in having you inspect them. We all are. It was Mr. Dorn, here, who brought them up out of the Atlantic.”
“Dorn, eh?” Wickard Kidd nodded sharply. “You’re Dell, the inventor of the diver, eh? What’s going on, here? Why receive me in the dark—with weapons?”
“The lights aren’t working. A frightful thing has happened here tonight,” Carter Dell told him. “A man has been—murdered. We’ve all seen—and heard—a monstrous thing. And the museum has been robbed!”
“The makers of the image have followed us up from the sea,” Markham Dorn put in soberly. “They have come for their idol, and perhaps for—revenge!”
“Humph!” snorted Wickard Kidd. “Somebody knows the thing’s worth a fortune—if it’s genuine. He’s trying to steal it.”
The doorbell whirred again. Carter went to answer it. The others waited silently.
A HEAVY man surged into the flashlight’s beam. He blew explosively through his nose, and began mopping the rain from his red face with a square of pale green silk. Mild blue eyes, under shaggy white brows, blinked at the light.
“Mr. Whipple!” Carter exclaimed. “You’ve had trouble on the road?”
“Trouble?” the other’s deep voice boomed. “The damned car went off in the ditch. Mired over the fenders. I had to tramp back in this infernal storm. We’ll have to phone to the station, because Kidd—”
He lurched forward, as his mild eyes suddenly noticed the small man in black.
“Dr. Kidd!” he boomed. “So you’re already here? Sorry I failed you. Frightful weather. How did you make it out?”
“Walked!” snapped Wickard Kidd. “Wouldn’t do it again for everything in your cursed museum.”
Justin Whipple strode forward. He seized the curator’s hand in a bluff attempt at cordiality.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Kidd,” he apologized. “We shall try to make amends. But come! You must see our Atlantean finds, immediately. They are truly remarkable. The image alone is a milestone in archeology. . . . Mr. Dell, call Dr. Thurman. Send him to the museum.”
“Thurman,” Carter informed him, slowly, “is dead.”
“What?” thundered Whipple. “Dead! How did it happen? Why didn’t you tell me? Where’s his body?”
His red face went a little pale. He mopped it again, nervously. Robin saw that his thick hands were trembling.
Silently, Carter stood aside, and played the flashlight over the table with its blood-soaked burden.
“They have come,” solemnly whispered Markham Dorn. “The makers of the image! To carry it back to the shrine in the ocean. And to destroy us who desecrated it!”
“Nonsense!” snarled Wickard Kidd. “Some murderous thief, who realized the value of the image—”
Carter lifted the edge of the rug, to expose the shapeless scarlet mass within. Kidd’s voice froze in his throat. He staggered back. His long mouth hung open, and the gold teeth gleamed wolfishly.
“I was so frightened!” She clung to his arm. “I got Carter’s telegram. It made me afraid something was wrong, so I came out on the four-ten train. I wanted to be with Carter. And as there wasn’t any taxi at the station, decided to walk, following the path along the cliffs.”
“Robin, you shouldn’t have!” his slow voice protested, deep with concern. “On such a night—that trail’s dangerous!”
“I know—now!”
She shuddered. Her fingers tightened on his arm.
“I had the most dreadful fright, Mark. And I think—it may sound silly—but, Mark, something followed me!”
His voice was low with quick anxiety.
“What was it, Robin?”
“I don’t know. Once, when lightning flashed, I saw it—or thought I did. It was big and grey and slimy. Like—well, like an octopus. Somehow, too, it was like a man! I just glimpsed it. It was crawling toward me. And it had the most horrible cry. Like a baby’s, but somehow—hideous! It sounded hungry—for me!”
She had expected big Markham Dorn to laugh at her fears. His level, iron-grey eyes could look unflinchingly into the cold face of danger. A hundred times, in Carter’s robot bathysphere, he had plumbed the dark chasm of the sea, in stern contempt of peril.
But silence met her story, and a long, wondering breath.
“Part octopus?” he asked slowly. “And part man?”
The bright disk of the flashlight crept across the floor. It climbed a glass case filled with shadowy horrors, and came to rest upon a thing standing on a strong table.
It was an ivory squat image. Archaic horror oozed from every hideous convolution of its bulbous, eight-tentacled body. Above the writhing coils of the sucker-bearing tentacles rose a head.
A head which was hairless, flat-featured, singularly narrow. Thin lips snarled away from animal-like fangs. There was no nose. The eyes were cunning slits of evil. For all that, it was human—in its sinister travesty of man lay its crowning horror.
It was not large—no more than three feet high. The fine detail of its carvings inevitably proclaimed the faithful likeness of obscene reality. An accurate copy—of what unthinkable original? Before it lay a long, age-scarred knife of bronze.
ROBIN looked away from it. She tried to force its squat, twisting lechery from her mind.
“It was like that—the thing I saw!” she whispered. “But such things can’t live. God wouldn’t let them!”
“But they do,” Markham Dorn told her, his voice queerly grave. “I’ve seen them. This image,” he said briefly, “is the prize find of our expedition. I brought it up, with Carter’s diver. It came from the bottom of the South Atlantic, over a mile down. And I saw creatures there, in the depths, like it. I beat off a mob of them with the metal arms of the bathysphere, and carried this, and the knife, away from a sort of shrine. I think it’s their idol—”
Markham Dorn’s voice broke off. He turned suddenly. His light darted about the long room.
“What is it?” Robin whispered fearfully. “Do you think—”
“Somebody—or something—has been in here,” he told her swiftly. “Must have been an hour ago that your husband heard it. He called Dr. Thurman and me. When we came in, there was a window open. The intruder was gone. We all ran outside, and searched around the house. Didn’t find anybody. Carter and Thurman went on, to look further. I came back to check things over. A few specimens were gone—one of octopus punctatus—but nothing of great value. Don’t know why anybody broke in—unless he was after the image.”
“Then Carter’s outside?” cried Robin, terrified.
“Thurman is with him,” Dorn reassured her. “And both are armed.”
“Where are the others?” she asked anxiously. “Mr. Whipple? And the servants?”
“Whipple drove to the station, to meet the evening train,” Dorn told her. “He was expecting the curator of the World Museum, Wickard Kidd. Kidd’s coming down to look at the image, and the other objects I fished up. He’ll make a good offer, I understand, if we can convince him that the find is genuine. It’s a big thing, really, Robin—we’re asking a quarter of a million. If it goes through, Carter can buy that little steel house he’s always talking of.”
“I hope it does,” she whispered. Then her fears came back. “Why don’t the lights work?”
“The generator, in the basement, is out of order,” Dorn told her. “And the servants are gone. Something happened to day. Just what it was, I still have no idea. Thurman knows, though. And he’s scared. Won’t tell why. But he had Carter send that wire for you to stay in town. Said your life wouldn’t be safe here. And I wish you had stayed, Robin.”
“I didn’t want to be away from Carter,” she explained simply. “But what became of the servants?”
“Something frightened them. Village natives, you know. A closemouthed clan. They wouldn’t say much. Muttering something about devil-fish crawling up out of the sea. Anyway, they all five went across to the village—all of them except the gardener. They’re staying until the storm is over, they said. Whipple had to drive himself to the sta—”
His voice snapped off.
“What was that?”
Now Robin also heard it. First that avid, lustful wail, which had followed her up from the cliffs. And then a man’s voice, shouting something. “The thing!” whispered Robin. “Or could it be—the wind?”
“That was Carter!” muttered Dorn. “His voice! I must help him. You stay—”
THE flashlight was in his left hand. He drew an automatic.
“No!” choked Robin. “I’m going—if Carter’s in danger—”
They ran back into the dark living room. Robin unlocked the front door. Dorn led the way out, his shoulders looming massive and square against a purple sheet of lightning.
They ran across a rainswept lawn. “It sounded that way!” called Robin. “Around the left wing.”
“Thurman! Thurman!” The voice of Carter Dell rang out of the darkness. “Dr. John, where are you?” Lightning picked him out for a static instant, as he leaped a dark clump of shrubbery. He was a big man, two inches taller than Markham Dorn, mighty of shoulder, powerful. Lightning etched in Robin’s mind the steel-blue eyes, the firm mouth, the iron jaw, the rain-matted red hair.
She sighed with relief, to see him unharmed.
“Dear Carter,” she whispered. “Where’s Thurman?” Carter shouted, as the dark swallowed him again. “I heard him scream—”
“Around the house, it sounded,” said Markham Dorn.
They ran left. For weapon, Carter’s great hand carried an axe.
“We saw something, down toward the cliff,” Carter panted as he ran. “Big, grey, crawling! It was out of sight in a moment. I went to investigate. Dr. John stayed, with his gun, to watch the house. I couldn’t find what we saw. Then I heard him scream—”
They came around the end of the house. A gust of rain stung them. Pandemonium of storm and mad ocean hammered in their ears. Robin caught instinctively at Carter’s hard arm. She clung to him, trembling.
And then another flash of lightning threw a merciless glare on the horror at their feet. What used to be a human form was now only a mass of raw, red pulp. Splintered bones protruded from it. Crimson oozed out of it, mixing with the rain as it flowed down into the grass.
“Thurman!” gasped Carter Dell. “Can it be?”
“His spectacles,” Markham Dorn said hoarsely. He pointed, trembling. “His revolver. That rag—from his coat.”
“Then—they’ve come,” said Carter Dell, his voice incredulous, yet, at same time, solemn with overwhelming dread. “I still had hope. Only their tentacles could pulp a man so. Or,” catching himself, “have we all gone mad?”
Staring at the scarlet sod, Robin was drowned in a sea of grey faintness. She pitched limply forward, toward the red horror.
CHAPTER II
They Dwell in Ocean
“ROBIN, darling,” came Carter’s anxious voice. He was tenderly lifting her from the red-splashed grass. “You all right?”
“Yes,” she whispered faintly. “Yes, Carter.”
She didn’t let him see the object she was slipping into the neck of her dress. And she walled the mind-rending horror of it away from her consciousness. For it was the fatal germ of madness unthinkable.
“Where—where’s Mark?” she gasped.
“He went after a rug—for poor old Thurman.”
Carter released her. She stood swaying on her feet. Lightning came again. Carter’s blue eyes were peering keenly. His red, bare head was cocked, listening. One great hand clutched the axe. Then he stooped and picked up the dead man’s revolver.
“You’re in danger, Robin. Better take this. By the way, didn’t you get my wire?”
“Yes. It frightened me, for you. I had to come.”
He wiped off the blood-clotted gun and gave it to her.
“Don’t hesitate using it, either,” he said grimly. “Here comes Mark.”
Markham Dorn laid the rug on the grass. Into it they rolled the bleeding pulp that had been Dr. John Thurman. Carter lifted the sodden bundle in his great arms, and they hastened into the building. Dorn had cleared a table in the living room, and Carter laid his ghastly, dripping burden there.
Robin’s voice was a dry husk of dread, when she asked:
“What did this, Carter?”
He stared oddly at her, and then across at Markham Dorn. In the pallid glow of the flashlight, the two men loomed like gigantic, silent statues.
“Better tell her, Mark,” Carter said slowly.
Markham Dorn nodded. His grey eyes looked at her solemnly.
“Must you know?”
“Tell me,” she insisted.
“You saw the image,” he began soberly.
She shuddered with remembered dread.
“That horrible thing in the museum, you mean? Man—and octopus?”
The big man nodded grimly.
“I told you that we found it on the bottom of the South Atlantic. Your husband, you know, would lower me over the side of the Avalon, in his robot diver. Then the ship would steam slowly forward, with me swinging along in the steel globe, a mile below.
“Mr. Whipple, you probably know, financed the expedition, on the understanding that we were to search for the sunken ruins of Atlantis. And every day, for three weeks, I was dragged over the black, cold floor of the ocean, searching for remains of the drowned continent.”
“Well, after three weeks of it I found—structures! Ruins, first, that clearly must have been the buildings of men. Crumbling, incredibly ancient. They must have been the cities of Atlantis. They’re inhabited, though the buildings are like no buildings of men. And the inhabitants are monstrous! They are half men, half—octopus!”
Robin’s eyes widened to the whispering horror of his voice.
“They are huge things, grey, powerful, hideous. They swarmed about the diver. They worked at the door-fastenings with their tentacles. They dragged at the cables. They brought metal bars, and began striking at the glass ports.
“The Avalon kept dragging me on.
I turned the diver this way and that, to see as much as I could. Then I guided it into this shrine, where the creatures were sprawling about their idol. I wanted some proof of my discovery. So I steered the globe toward the image, and caught it, and the bronze sacrificial knife, in the robot arms.
“Then I phoned Carter to haul me up at full speed. In another minute the monsters would have broken the glass. The blade of water, stabbing through the smallest crack, would have cut me like a knife. A close call. Two ports were chipped. But the glass was heavy. I got up—with the loot.”
“I meant to go down again. But we had a week of nasty weather, and a storm that carried us a hundred miles off the discovery. Then the coal ran low, and the captain turned back toward Pernambuco.
“And,” he finished slowly, “well—it’s just a week since the Avalon docked at New York, and we found Whipple waiting for the plunder, and you waiting to marry Carter.”
HIS grey eyes flashed at Robin, disturbingly.
“How came those creatures to be?” she asked, still clutched in the fascination of horror. “Half man and half monster?”
“I don’t know,” said Markham Dorn, deliberately. “But I’ve a theory. The Atlanteans were scientists. Their ruins prove that. Perhaps they were able to survive, as their continent sank. Perhaps they changed, adapted themselves to live under the sea. It may have been by some dreadful interbreeding with monsters of the ocean!” Dread silence hung for a space in the long room. It was ripped with wild thunder. Distant windows shook. Robin started back from the sodden bundle on the table.
“You think those things have followed—here?” she whispered, fearfully. “Why?”
“The ivory image is their god,” said Markham Dorn. “I tore it out of the midst of a crawling mob of worshipers. I believe that the things have come to take it back to the depths. And it may be to avenge the desecration of their shrine.”
Robin shuddered. She turned to Carter, grasping at his great arm.
“Then they might,” she whispered—“might break in the house? We must call the police!”
“We’ll call them, of course,” said Carter Dell. “But—”
His deep voice faded doubtfully, and Markham Dorn finished:
“But probably the police can’t do much.”
“Why not?”
“The things have strange intelligence, strange powers. Otherwise they could never have followed us so far from their abode in the sea.”
“Call them, anyway,” insisted Robin, nervously.
Carter Dell crossed the room, picked up the telephone on a side table. He frowned, and shook the instrument.
“Dead,” he muttered. “Wires down in the storm, I suppose.”
“Unless,” began Markham Dorn, “they have cut—”
The clamoring doorbell cut him off.
The three hurried together to the door. Markham Dorn had picked up Carter’s axe. Robin nervously clutched the revolver. Carter Dell unlocked the door, pulled It open quickly.
A small man swayed into the room, behind a gust of rain. He shook himself like a terrier, and water flew off his black coat. He flung his head, and drops spun from his sodden hat. He stamped mud off his small feet.
Carter’s flashlight showed quick, shrewd eyes darting at the apprehensive three, at the revolver, the axe. A thin mouth twisted oddly, about long, wolfish gold teeth.
“Hello,” rasped a sharp, nasal voice. “This the Whipple estate?”
“It is,” said Carter Dell. “Who are you?”
“I’m Wickard Kidd. I was to have been met at the station.”
“Mr. Whipple himself drove to meet you,” Carter told him.
“He didn’t,” clipped Wickard Kidd. “No car there. No taxi. Agent showed me a path. Half mile, he said. Horrible walk, along frightful cliffs. I came to look at some objects in Whipple’s museum. But if he cares no more—”
“The objects are here,” Carter Dell assured him. “And Mr. Whipple is very much interested in having you inspect them. We all are. It was Mr. Dorn, here, who brought them up out of the Atlantic.”
“Dorn, eh?” Wickard Kidd nodded sharply. “You’re Dell, the inventor of the diver, eh? What’s going on, here? Why receive me in the dark—with weapons?”
“The lights aren’t working. A frightful thing has happened here tonight,” Carter Dell told him. “A man has been—murdered. We’ve all seen—and heard—a monstrous thing. And the museum has been robbed!”
“The makers of the image have followed us up from the sea,” Markham Dorn put in soberly. “They have come for their idol, and perhaps for—revenge!”
“Humph!” snorted Wickard Kidd. “Somebody knows the thing’s worth a fortune—if it’s genuine. He’s trying to steal it.”
The doorbell whirred again. Carter went to answer it. The others waited silently.
A HEAVY man surged into the flashlight’s beam. He blew explosively through his nose, and began mopping the rain from his red face with a square of pale green silk. Mild blue eyes, under shaggy white brows, blinked at the light.
“Mr. Whipple!” Carter exclaimed. “You’ve had trouble on the road?”
“Trouble?” the other’s deep voice boomed. “The damned car went off in the ditch. Mired over the fenders. I had to tramp back in this infernal storm. We’ll have to phone to the station, because Kidd—”
He lurched forward, as his mild eyes suddenly noticed the small man in black.
“Dr. Kidd!” he boomed. “So you’re already here? Sorry I failed you. Frightful weather. How did you make it out?”
“Walked!” snapped Wickard Kidd. “Wouldn’t do it again for everything in your cursed museum.”
Justin Whipple strode forward. He seized the curator’s hand in a bluff attempt at cordiality.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Kidd,” he apologized. “We shall try to make amends. But come! You must see our Atlantean finds, immediately. They are truly remarkable. The image alone is a milestone in archeology. . . . Mr. Dell, call Dr. Thurman. Send him to the museum.”
“Thurman,” Carter informed him, slowly, “is dead.”
“What?” thundered Whipple. “Dead! How did it happen? Why didn’t you tell me? Where’s his body?”
His red face went a little pale. He mopped it again, nervously. Robin saw that his thick hands were trembling.
Silently, Carter stood aside, and played the flashlight over the table with its blood-soaked burden.
“They have come,” solemnly whispered Markham Dorn. “The makers of the image! To carry it back to the shrine in the ocean. And to destroy us who desecrated it!”
“Nonsense!” snarled Wickard Kidd. “Some murderous thief, who realized the value of the image—”
Carter lifted the edge of the rug, to expose the shapeless scarlet mass within. Kidd’s voice froze in his throat. He staggered back. His long mouth hung open, and the gold teeth gleamed wolfishly.
