Collected Short Fiction, page 225
“Their tentacles are very powerful,” Markham Dorn said pointedly.
“Dr. John!” muttered Whipple. “Merciful God, how did that happen?”
Carter replaced the rug over the body.
“We heard an intruder in the museum,” he explained quietly. “Thurman and I followed it outside. We saw something grey and monstrous crawling down over the cliffs. I tried to follow it, but lost it in the storm. When I returned, Thurman was—as you see him now.”
Whipple’s big face was grey with fear.
“They’ve come—really?” he gasped, staring from Carter to Dorn. “But it can’t be! This is all a ghastly hoax!”
He read his answer in their grim silence.
“Then we’re all in horrible danger!” he croaked, suddenly ashen with terror. “They might have caught me, on the road! We must call the police.”
“The line’s down,” Carter informed him.
“We must have help,” he said, urgently. “Well, there’s a separate phone in the gardener’s cottage. It might be working. Will you try it, Mr. Dell? And have the gardener come back with you.”
“No!” Robin cried, half hysterical. “No, Carter, don’t go out there alone—please!”
Carter patted Robin’s shoulder. With trembling fingers, she clung to him.
“Don’t worry, dear, I’ll be all right.”
He took the revolver from her shaking hand; unlocking the door, he walked deliberately out into the storm.
“Hurry!” pleaded Robin, after him.
“Watch out.”
“Mr. Dorn,” said Whipple, “in my bedroom closet you’ll find two automatics. Will you bring them down, and see to it that the windows on the second floor are all secure?”
Dorn went up the stairs, carrying the axe, and his flashlight.
WHIPPLE and Wickard Kidd stood apprehensively near Robin, until there was a quick knock on the door. She flung it open, and Carter Dell came in with his flashlight, drenched with rain.
“No use,” he told Whipple. “The gardener wasn’t in. His phone is dead, too.”
And then Markham Dorn returned down the stairs.
“All secure,” he reported briefly. He presented two automatics to Whipple. The millionaire handed one of them to Kidd. He snapped back the slide on the other, to see that the chamber was loaded. His red face warmed with reassurance. He swung to Wickard Kidd.
“Well, Dr. Kidd, let me show the image, and the other relics of old Atlantis.” His loud voice rang with forced enthusiasm. “The most remarkable find of this century. Of any century! It opens a new volume in archeology! And you’ll find the objects genuine, too. Any fraud is impossible. I assure you. They’re worth ten times the price we mentioned.”
“A quarter of a million,” Wickard Kidd said flatly, “is a large sum.”
“The price is that,” Whipple reminded him, “plus what I’ve invested financing the expedition, which amounts to an additional hundred thousand. The World Museum is a large institution; it can easily afford it.”
The millionaire opened the door to the museum. He took Markham Dorn’s flashlight, and advanced into the room. Then he recoiled suddenly, a hoarse, strangling cry bursting from his thick lips. He began stammering incoherently. The others crowded in after him.
Wind swirled into the room. Lightning flared through an open window. The walls writhed with grotesque shadows of the mounted octopus. Rigid monstrosities leered from their cases of glass.
“The image!” Whipple roared at last. “It’s—gone I Also the sacrificial knife!”
Markham Dorn ran past the empty table, to the open window. “I’d repaired that catch. It’s been forced again.”
He picked up a twisted fragment of metal. “Just putty,” he muttered, “against their tentacles.”
“Tentacles!” snorted Wickard Kidd. “Behind these crimes is a man. His motive is a quarter of a million—”
His sharp nasal tones faded away from Robin Dell. For incredible horror was thundering in her ears. She had paused by the empty table, where the monstrous image had squatted. Her blue eyes were now staring at an object on the floor—a brown button. She stooped quickly, while Whipple’s flashlight was on Wickard Kidd, picked it up, and dropped it into the neck of her dress Her wide eyes went to Carter’s coat. Yes, his buttons were brown. The upper one, upon which the strain might have come, if he had lifted the image in his arms, was gone. She gazed in mute agony at that tuft of brown thread.
Yes, Carter might have taken the image, when Whipple sent him to the gardener’s cottage. And, too, Carter had been out in the darkness alone, when old John Thurman died. And armed with the axe.
An axe can make pulp of a man!
“MERCIFUL God!” she breathed. “It can’t be Carter! I waited so long for him to come back from the sea. I love him so. It can’t be! It—mustn’t be!”
The thing she had found in the blood-stained grass beside the pulped body of Dr. John Thurman, the clue she had concealed, had been the familiar green-and-white fountain pen, stamped with the initials of Carter Dell!
CHAPTER III
Grey Tentacles Creep!
“THE police!” Justin Whipple’s fog-horn voice was roaring. “Whether a man took it, or something else, we must have the police. That image is worth a fortune. I’ll go get the police myself.”
“The things!” warned Markham Dorn. “They are lurking—”
“I walked here, safely enough,” Whipple said grimly. “I can walk out again. For a quarter of a million—”
He pulled down his hat, and stalked toward the front door.
“Should I go with you?” Carter Dell asked tersely.
“No!” thundered Whipple. “I’m going alone. And I’ll kill anybody—or anything—that comes near me. I’m returning with the police. We’ll find what killed poor Dr. John—and get back that image if it costs me every penny I own, and takes the rest of my life.”
The door slammed behind him.
“Fool!” Markham Dorn was muttering. “He doesn’t realize—If he had seen the crawling grey monsters, as we have!”
“Grey monsters!” barked the unbelieving nasal voice of Wickard Kidd. “What kind of nonsense is this. I still insist the motive of all this deviltry is the price of that image. His thin arm pointed startlingly at Carter Dell. “Tell me, how was the money to be shared?”
“Our contract stipulated,” Carter informed him swiftly, “that Mr. Whipple was to receive seventy-five per cent of any profit from the expedition. He financed it, you know. Mark, here, was to have twenty per cent. He organized and led the expedition, and was really responsible for locating the site of Atlantis. And I was to receive five per cent, above the flat fee for the use of the robot diver.”
“Only five per cent!” rapped Wickard Kidd.
His dark eyes flashed at Carter Dell. Robin’s heart came up in her throat. Five per cent was so little; he would suspect Carter of being dissatisfied. She shrank from his next words.
“Whipple’s pretty shrewd, eh?” said Wickard Kidd. “I think he did it, while he pretended to be going to the station, after me.”
“But,” Robin whispered, “I myself saw a hideous grey crawling thing. It couldn’t have been human. Nor were the sounds it made ‘human.’ And I heard it cry out, with a sound that wasn’t human.”
“The creatures are here,” Markham Dorn’s voice insisted, deep with dread. “We’ve all seen them.”
“And anyway,” Carter now put in sharply, “why should Whipple murder his secretary? And why should he steal the image? It was three-fourths his, already. And you were about to pay him—”
“Only one hundred thousand dollars,” Kidd snapped, “which would just cover the cost of his expedition. He knew that—knew I would not pay a penny more. So he engineered this weird monster story to get publicity for his image, which will conveniently turn up somewhere.” His dark eyes flamed. “And Whipple may not be alone in it!”
Carter and Dorn stared at him blankly.
“When enough newspapers have headlined the horror from Atlantis, with pictures of Dr. Thurman’s crushed cadaver, some fool will offer him a million. But that fool won’t be Wickard Kidd!”
He started toward the door, pausing to throw over his shoulder:
“Whipple said he was going for the police. What he’s really doing is hiding the image, and covering his tracks. And perhaps planting clues to lead us off the trail. I’m going to see the local police myself. He’s not getting away with this.”
HE flung the door open and hurled himself out into the wind-whipped rain. Robin nervously locked the door behind him, and wearily leaned back against it. She glanced at the open, tanned face of her husband. He was staring at the sodden bundle on the table, and haunting dread lurked in his steel-blue eyes.
Robin felt the sting of sudden tears. She ached with desire to put her arms around his big shoulders and smooth his tangled red hair, and laugh away his gnawing apprehensions.
“Merciful God!”
She started at Markham Dorn’s voiceless outcry. A muffled whisper, it was hoarse and terrible with straining dread.
“Listen!”
Blood drummed in her ears. She poised, trembling, on the balls of her feet. The crash of thunder jarred her above the ocean’s endless roar and the monstrous bellowing of the storm. And then—she heard another sound, that ripped her flesh with the jagged spikes of utter terror. It was a high, plaintive wailing, which might have been made by the dying scream of an infant on the torturer’s hooks. And it was keen with a feral lust, with an obscene and nameless avidity.
Reeling with the faintness of devouring fear, Robin stumbled across the room. She clutched at Carter’s big arm.
“The voice of the thing!” The whisper husked from her aching throat. “The thing—that followed me!”
Markham Dorn let out a slow exhalation of dread. Deliberately he picked up the axe.
“They are here again,” came his strained, hoarse rasp. “They are after Whipple and Kidd. The fools—we shouldn’t have let them go out. But I must help them now.”
He swung steadily toward the door.
Carter’s voice was low and strained when he offered:
“I’ll go with you.”
Markham Dorn turned to shake his head.
“No,” he said. “Thanks,” he said, “but your wife—”
He smiled oddly, disturbingly, at Robin, and was gone.
Carter took a step toward the door. Robin clung to his arm.
“Go along, if you want to,” she whispered. “But I’m going with you. I can’t stay here alone, Carter. I’m too dreadfully frightened.”
His big hand tenderly caressed her damp copper hair.
“Then I’ll stay, dear,” he said. “I can’t expose you to any danger. To me you’re the most precious thing on earth.”
She snuggled against his side. Then her upturned eyes saw the tuft of broken brown threads on his coat. She shivered with sudden doubt. But then again, how could it have been Carter. He and Mark had been with her when they heard the thing wail outside.
Carter was speaking again.
“That idea of Dr. Kidd’s,” she heard Carter saying—“if there’s really a man behind all this, it might be old Thurman himself.”
“But how?” demanded Robin. “When he’s—there!”
Shuddering, she pointed at the red-soaked rug.
“Somebody is,” said Carter. “But the—it couldn’t be identified. There are only the spectacles, the gun, a few bloody rags. The idea just struck me: the gardener is missing. This—thing—may be he. Thurman might have killed him, thus faking his own death, and escaped with the image!”
“But why—” gasped Robin—“why should he—”
“He’s a trained archeologist, a gifted marine biologist He knew the value of the image. And he was desperately poor, or he wouldn’t have served as Whipple’s secretary—he hated Whipple. And Thurman has been acting oddly for a couple of days. Keeping something from us. Yesterday he had some difficulty with Dorn. He seemed afraid of something. Had me send you that wire. He may have just been preparing us for this monster scare.”
“But the things are here,” Robin protested. “We’ve seen them, heard them.” She shuddered.
“I still hope,” Carter said slowly, “It may be—something else.”
There was silence for a few seconds. Robin listened to the pounding of the angry ocean, the eerie howling of the wind hovering in the night.
“It was brave of Markham,” she said impulsively, “to go out there—alone.”
“A great chap, Mark.” Carter’s voice was warm with ringing admiration. “A keen mind he has, finely trained. And he made himself, too. His father was a sort of tramp actor, he told me once. Punch and Judy show, in vaudeville. Mark had to work his own way through college—”
His voice froze. His lean face went suddenly white. His steel-blue eyes expanded with fear. His great arm, about Robin’s shoulders, went hard as iron. It drew against her with an unconscious, crushing pressure. Then he turned from her abruptly, he snatched the revolver out of his coat pocket, and started toward the door.
“WAIT, Carter!” Robin half screamed. “Don’t leave me! What is it?”
He paused in the blast of storm through the open door.
“I must go,” he said swiftly. “And now. To save a man’s life! Explain when I get back.”
The door slammed behind him.
She locked the door and ran up the stairs to her own room. With trembling fingers she also locked the bedroom door. The candle had burned out. In the dark, she sat on the foot of the bed, gripping its iron railing. The cold strength of it was obscurely comforting. And then suddenly her white fingers tightened upon it with maniacal violence. Into her ears poured the acid of consuming madness. For, near and eager, she heard the crying of the thing!
Shrill above the crescendo of the storm, it shrieked with the agony of a babe roasting on the coals of torture, and throbbed with a monstrous lust—for her!
Motionless, powerless to move, her glazed eyes stared at the dark wall. Her straining ears now caught a scraping sound, the papery rustle of deliberately gliding tentacles. Outside the window they were creeping up!
She sat bolt upright. Her eyes were still fixed on the wall. She couldn’t turn. She dared not look or she’d go mad—stark, raving mad!
Through the window gushed a violet beam of lightning. On the wall, where her eyes still rested, it burned the window’s outline. Blackly, there, it printed a horrendous shadow.
A wild scream cleft Robin’s throat. The cruel fingers of utter fear, contracting, choked it off. Her tense body was beaded with icy perspiration. She tried to stand up and run. But the bitter nausea of terror drained her strength. She could only sit rigid on the bed, staring into the darkness that had swallowed the shadow.
For the shadow had taken the shape of an octopus. The writhing web of its tentacles filled the window, like monstrous serpents. Above the dark blob of its body loomed a horrible head. The head looked flat and strange—and yet human!
Robin endured through an eternity of black silence. Weakly she dragged to her feet. Where could she take refuge? If the thing entered, it could follow anywhere. But surely . . .
Thunder fell upon her in a stunning avalanche. With it she heard the shatter of glass. Wind howled through the room. Cold rain stung her cheek. A heavy body writhed noisily on the floor. Her vanity table crashed before it. A nauseating, reptilian putrescence struck her nostrils.
Robin fled to the door. Wildly she snatched at the key. It came out of the lock and clattered on the floor. Panting with terror, she dropped to search for it.
“Carter!” she shrieked. “For God’s sake, Carter—”
The thing fell upon her.
Great, slimy tentacles wrapped her fear-stiffened body. Wet, cold, sucking-disks rasped against her ankles, her tender throat. The writhing weight of the strange invader crushed her flat against the floor.
Her hands struck vainly at its cold, horny mass. She tried to squirm free, but the crushing weight on her hips held her powerless. The slimy embrace caught one wrist. With the remaining hand she strove to keep foul, malodorous horror from her face.
Cold, leathery tentacles writhed over her helpless, pulsating flesh. The ruthless pressure increased upon her body. The cruel grip constricted on her arm. Another horny tentacle wrapped her throat. The suction disks tore her soft flesh.
Horror and pain dragged her toward black oblivion.
Dimly she knew that her clothing was being stripped away. She heard the thin shredding of cloth. She felt cold, monstrous flesh against her half-naked body.
Mercifully her consciousness was swept away, as the foul embrace tightened. Faintly she was aware of the thing’s voice. An infant’s wail of agony, keyed high with an unspeakable avidity.
CHAPTER IV
Foul is the Bed of Death!
DARKNESS was pressing heavily upon Robin’s eyes as awareness stumbled back. Was she blind? She blinked her eyes, and their blinking made no change in the darkness. Had the thing destroyed her sight?
Returning fear cleared her senses. She took stock of her surroundings. The endless thunder of the sea was near. Its salt dankness stung her nostrils. The wet breath of it chilled her naked body.
She stirred, tried to rise. Cold, wet rocks scratched her flesh. The dull, aching numbness of her legs was shot through with red, sudden pain. She fell back, gasping with agony. She couldn’t get up. A great flat stone lay crushingly across her thighs.
Sharpness of pain spurred her dull wits. The darkness, the nearness of the roaring sea, the dampness of the stones—now she understood them. She was not blind. The thing had carried her down into the labyrinth of sea-caverns that wound through the base of the cliffs.
She was helpless, far from aid, at their mercy.
A retching sickness overtook her, born of fear and pain. She lay still for a little time, trying to ignore the dull, throbbing ache of her tortured limbs, and the chill of the slimy stones against her flesh.
“Dr. John!” muttered Whipple. “Merciful God, how did that happen?”
Carter replaced the rug over the body.
“We heard an intruder in the museum,” he explained quietly. “Thurman and I followed it outside. We saw something grey and monstrous crawling down over the cliffs. I tried to follow it, but lost it in the storm. When I returned, Thurman was—as you see him now.”
Whipple’s big face was grey with fear.
“They’ve come—really?” he gasped, staring from Carter to Dorn. “But it can’t be! This is all a ghastly hoax!”
He read his answer in their grim silence.
“Then we’re all in horrible danger!” he croaked, suddenly ashen with terror. “They might have caught me, on the road! We must call the police.”
“The line’s down,” Carter informed him.
“We must have help,” he said, urgently. “Well, there’s a separate phone in the gardener’s cottage. It might be working. Will you try it, Mr. Dell? And have the gardener come back with you.”
“No!” Robin cried, half hysterical. “No, Carter, don’t go out there alone—please!”
Carter patted Robin’s shoulder. With trembling fingers, she clung to him.
“Don’t worry, dear, I’ll be all right.”
He took the revolver from her shaking hand; unlocking the door, he walked deliberately out into the storm.
“Hurry!” pleaded Robin, after him.
“Watch out.”
“Mr. Dorn,” said Whipple, “in my bedroom closet you’ll find two automatics. Will you bring them down, and see to it that the windows on the second floor are all secure?”
Dorn went up the stairs, carrying the axe, and his flashlight.
WHIPPLE and Wickard Kidd stood apprehensively near Robin, until there was a quick knock on the door. She flung it open, and Carter Dell came in with his flashlight, drenched with rain.
“No use,” he told Whipple. “The gardener wasn’t in. His phone is dead, too.”
And then Markham Dorn returned down the stairs.
“All secure,” he reported briefly. He presented two automatics to Whipple. The millionaire handed one of them to Kidd. He snapped back the slide on the other, to see that the chamber was loaded. His red face warmed with reassurance. He swung to Wickard Kidd.
“Well, Dr. Kidd, let me show the image, and the other relics of old Atlantis.” His loud voice rang with forced enthusiasm. “The most remarkable find of this century. Of any century! It opens a new volume in archeology! And you’ll find the objects genuine, too. Any fraud is impossible. I assure you. They’re worth ten times the price we mentioned.”
“A quarter of a million,” Wickard Kidd said flatly, “is a large sum.”
“The price is that,” Whipple reminded him, “plus what I’ve invested financing the expedition, which amounts to an additional hundred thousand. The World Museum is a large institution; it can easily afford it.”
The millionaire opened the door to the museum. He took Markham Dorn’s flashlight, and advanced into the room. Then he recoiled suddenly, a hoarse, strangling cry bursting from his thick lips. He began stammering incoherently. The others crowded in after him.
Wind swirled into the room. Lightning flared through an open window. The walls writhed with grotesque shadows of the mounted octopus. Rigid monstrosities leered from their cases of glass.
“The image!” Whipple roared at last. “It’s—gone I Also the sacrificial knife!”
Markham Dorn ran past the empty table, to the open window. “I’d repaired that catch. It’s been forced again.”
He picked up a twisted fragment of metal. “Just putty,” he muttered, “against their tentacles.”
“Tentacles!” snorted Wickard Kidd. “Behind these crimes is a man. His motive is a quarter of a million—”
His sharp nasal tones faded away from Robin Dell. For incredible horror was thundering in her ears. She had paused by the empty table, where the monstrous image had squatted. Her blue eyes were now staring at an object on the floor—a brown button. She stooped quickly, while Whipple’s flashlight was on Wickard Kidd, picked it up, and dropped it into the neck of her dress Her wide eyes went to Carter’s coat. Yes, his buttons were brown. The upper one, upon which the strain might have come, if he had lifted the image in his arms, was gone. She gazed in mute agony at that tuft of brown thread.
Yes, Carter might have taken the image, when Whipple sent him to the gardener’s cottage. And, too, Carter had been out in the darkness alone, when old John Thurman died. And armed with the axe.
An axe can make pulp of a man!
“MERCIFUL God!” she breathed. “It can’t be Carter! I waited so long for him to come back from the sea. I love him so. It can’t be! It—mustn’t be!”
The thing she had found in the blood-stained grass beside the pulped body of Dr. John Thurman, the clue she had concealed, had been the familiar green-and-white fountain pen, stamped with the initials of Carter Dell!
CHAPTER III
Grey Tentacles Creep!
“THE police!” Justin Whipple’s fog-horn voice was roaring. “Whether a man took it, or something else, we must have the police. That image is worth a fortune. I’ll go get the police myself.”
“The things!” warned Markham Dorn. “They are lurking—”
“I walked here, safely enough,” Whipple said grimly. “I can walk out again. For a quarter of a million—”
He pulled down his hat, and stalked toward the front door.
“Should I go with you?” Carter Dell asked tersely.
“No!” thundered Whipple. “I’m going alone. And I’ll kill anybody—or anything—that comes near me. I’m returning with the police. We’ll find what killed poor Dr. John—and get back that image if it costs me every penny I own, and takes the rest of my life.”
The door slammed behind him.
“Fool!” Markham Dorn was muttering. “He doesn’t realize—If he had seen the crawling grey monsters, as we have!”
“Grey monsters!” barked the unbelieving nasal voice of Wickard Kidd. “What kind of nonsense is this. I still insist the motive of all this deviltry is the price of that image. His thin arm pointed startlingly at Carter Dell. “Tell me, how was the money to be shared?”
“Our contract stipulated,” Carter informed him swiftly, “that Mr. Whipple was to receive seventy-five per cent of any profit from the expedition. He financed it, you know. Mark, here, was to have twenty per cent. He organized and led the expedition, and was really responsible for locating the site of Atlantis. And I was to receive five per cent, above the flat fee for the use of the robot diver.”
“Only five per cent!” rapped Wickard Kidd.
His dark eyes flashed at Carter Dell. Robin’s heart came up in her throat. Five per cent was so little; he would suspect Carter of being dissatisfied. She shrank from his next words.
“Whipple’s pretty shrewd, eh?” said Wickard Kidd. “I think he did it, while he pretended to be going to the station, after me.”
“But,” Robin whispered, “I myself saw a hideous grey crawling thing. It couldn’t have been human. Nor were the sounds it made ‘human.’ And I heard it cry out, with a sound that wasn’t human.”
“The creatures are here,” Markham Dorn’s voice insisted, deep with dread. “We’ve all seen them.”
“And anyway,” Carter now put in sharply, “why should Whipple murder his secretary? And why should he steal the image? It was three-fourths his, already. And you were about to pay him—”
“Only one hundred thousand dollars,” Kidd snapped, “which would just cover the cost of his expedition. He knew that—knew I would not pay a penny more. So he engineered this weird monster story to get publicity for his image, which will conveniently turn up somewhere.” His dark eyes flamed. “And Whipple may not be alone in it!”
Carter and Dorn stared at him blankly.
“When enough newspapers have headlined the horror from Atlantis, with pictures of Dr. Thurman’s crushed cadaver, some fool will offer him a million. But that fool won’t be Wickard Kidd!”
He started toward the door, pausing to throw over his shoulder:
“Whipple said he was going for the police. What he’s really doing is hiding the image, and covering his tracks. And perhaps planting clues to lead us off the trail. I’m going to see the local police myself. He’s not getting away with this.”
HE flung the door open and hurled himself out into the wind-whipped rain. Robin nervously locked the door behind him, and wearily leaned back against it. She glanced at the open, tanned face of her husband. He was staring at the sodden bundle on the table, and haunting dread lurked in his steel-blue eyes.
Robin felt the sting of sudden tears. She ached with desire to put her arms around his big shoulders and smooth his tangled red hair, and laugh away his gnawing apprehensions.
“Merciful God!”
She started at Markham Dorn’s voiceless outcry. A muffled whisper, it was hoarse and terrible with straining dread.
“Listen!”
Blood drummed in her ears. She poised, trembling, on the balls of her feet. The crash of thunder jarred her above the ocean’s endless roar and the monstrous bellowing of the storm. And then—she heard another sound, that ripped her flesh with the jagged spikes of utter terror. It was a high, plaintive wailing, which might have been made by the dying scream of an infant on the torturer’s hooks. And it was keen with a feral lust, with an obscene and nameless avidity.
Reeling with the faintness of devouring fear, Robin stumbled across the room. She clutched at Carter’s big arm.
“The voice of the thing!” The whisper husked from her aching throat. “The thing—that followed me!”
Markham Dorn let out a slow exhalation of dread. Deliberately he picked up the axe.
“They are here again,” came his strained, hoarse rasp. “They are after Whipple and Kidd. The fools—we shouldn’t have let them go out. But I must help them now.”
He swung steadily toward the door.
Carter’s voice was low and strained when he offered:
“I’ll go with you.”
Markham Dorn turned to shake his head.
“No,” he said. “Thanks,” he said, “but your wife—”
He smiled oddly, disturbingly, at Robin, and was gone.
Carter took a step toward the door. Robin clung to his arm.
“Go along, if you want to,” she whispered. “But I’m going with you. I can’t stay here alone, Carter. I’m too dreadfully frightened.”
His big hand tenderly caressed her damp copper hair.
“Then I’ll stay, dear,” he said. “I can’t expose you to any danger. To me you’re the most precious thing on earth.”
She snuggled against his side. Then her upturned eyes saw the tuft of broken brown threads on his coat. She shivered with sudden doubt. But then again, how could it have been Carter. He and Mark had been with her when they heard the thing wail outside.
Carter was speaking again.
“That idea of Dr. Kidd’s,” she heard Carter saying—“if there’s really a man behind all this, it might be old Thurman himself.”
“But how?” demanded Robin. “When he’s—there!”
Shuddering, she pointed at the red-soaked rug.
“Somebody is,” said Carter. “But the—it couldn’t be identified. There are only the spectacles, the gun, a few bloody rags. The idea just struck me: the gardener is missing. This—thing—may be he. Thurman might have killed him, thus faking his own death, and escaped with the image!”
“But why—” gasped Robin—“why should he—”
“He’s a trained archeologist, a gifted marine biologist He knew the value of the image. And he was desperately poor, or he wouldn’t have served as Whipple’s secretary—he hated Whipple. And Thurman has been acting oddly for a couple of days. Keeping something from us. Yesterday he had some difficulty with Dorn. He seemed afraid of something. Had me send you that wire. He may have just been preparing us for this monster scare.”
“But the things are here,” Robin protested. “We’ve seen them, heard them.” She shuddered.
“I still hope,” Carter said slowly, “It may be—something else.”
There was silence for a few seconds. Robin listened to the pounding of the angry ocean, the eerie howling of the wind hovering in the night.
“It was brave of Markham,” she said impulsively, “to go out there—alone.”
“A great chap, Mark.” Carter’s voice was warm with ringing admiration. “A keen mind he has, finely trained. And he made himself, too. His father was a sort of tramp actor, he told me once. Punch and Judy show, in vaudeville. Mark had to work his own way through college—”
His voice froze. His lean face went suddenly white. His steel-blue eyes expanded with fear. His great arm, about Robin’s shoulders, went hard as iron. It drew against her with an unconscious, crushing pressure. Then he turned from her abruptly, he snatched the revolver out of his coat pocket, and started toward the door.
“WAIT, Carter!” Robin half screamed. “Don’t leave me! What is it?”
He paused in the blast of storm through the open door.
“I must go,” he said swiftly. “And now. To save a man’s life! Explain when I get back.”
The door slammed behind him.
She locked the door and ran up the stairs to her own room. With trembling fingers she also locked the bedroom door. The candle had burned out. In the dark, she sat on the foot of the bed, gripping its iron railing. The cold strength of it was obscurely comforting. And then suddenly her white fingers tightened upon it with maniacal violence. Into her ears poured the acid of consuming madness. For, near and eager, she heard the crying of the thing!
Shrill above the crescendo of the storm, it shrieked with the agony of a babe roasting on the coals of torture, and throbbed with a monstrous lust—for her!
Motionless, powerless to move, her glazed eyes stared at the dark wall. Her straining ears now caught a scraping sound, the papery rustle of deliberately gliding tentacles. Outside the window they were creeping up!
She sat bolt upright. Her eyes were still fixed on the wall. She couldn’t turn. She dared not look or she’d go mad—stark, raving mad!
Through the window gushed a violet beam of lightning. On the wall, where her eyes still rested, it burned the window’s outline. Blackly, there, it printed a horrendous shadow.
A wild scream cleft Robin’s throat. The cruel fingers of utter fear, contracting, choked it off. Her tense body was beaded with icy perspiration. She tried to stand up and run. But the bitter nausea of terror drained her strength. She could only sit rigid on the bed, staring into the darkness that had swallowed the shadow.
For the shadow had taken the shape of an octopus. The writhing web of its tentacles filled the window, like monstrous serpents. Above the dark blob of its body loomed a horrible head. The head looked flat and strange—and yet human!
Robin endured through an eternity of black silence. Weakly she dragged to her feet. Where could she take refuge? If the thing entered, it could follow anywhere. But surely . . .
Thunder fell upon her in a stunning avalanche. With it she heard the shatter of glass. Wind howled through the room. Cold rain stung her cheek. A heavy body writhed noisily on the floor. Her vanity table crashed before it. A nauseating, reptilian putrescence struck her nostrils.
Robin fled to the door. Wildly she snatched at the key. It came out of the lock and clattered on the floor. Panting with terror, she dropped to search for it.
“Carter!” she shrieked. “For God’s sake, Carter—”
The thing fell upon her.
Great, slimy tentacles wrapped her fear-stiffened body. Wet, cold, sucking-disks rasped against her ankles, her tender throat. The writhing weight of the strange invader crushed her flat against the floor.
Her hands struck vainly at its cold, horny mass. She tried to squirm free, but the crushing weight on her hips held her powerless. The slimy embrace caught one wrist. With the remaining hand she strove to keep foul, malodorous horror from her face.
Cold, leathery tentacles writhed over her helpless, pulsating flesh. The ruthless pressure increased upon her body. The cruel grip constricted on her arm. Another horny tentacle wrapped her throat. The suction disks tore her soft flesh.
Horror and pain dragged her toward black oblivion.
Dimly she knew that her clothing was being stripped away. She heard the thin shredding of cloth. She felt cold, monstrous flesh against her half-naked body.
Mercifully her consciousness was swept away, as the foul embrace tightened. Faintly she was aware of the thing’s voice. An infant’s wail of agony, keyed high with an unspeakable avidity.
CHAPTER IV
Foul is the Bed of Death!
DARKNESS was pressing heavily upon Robin’s eyes as awareness stumbled back. Was she blind? She blinked her eyes, and their blinking made no change in the darkness. Had the thing destroyed her sight?
Returning fear cleared her senses. She took stock of her surroundings. The endless thunder of the sea was near. Its salt dankness stung her nostrils. The wet breath of it chilled her naked body.
She stirred, tried to rise. Cold, wet rocks scratched her flesh. The dull, aching numbness of her legs was shot through with red, sudden pain. She fell back, gasping with agony. She couldn’t get up. A great flat stone lay crushingly across her thighs.
Sharpness of pain spurred her dull wits. The darkness, the nearness of the roaring sea, the dampness of the stones—now she understood them. She was not blind. The thing had carried her down into the labyrinth of sea-caverns that wound through the base of the cliffs.
She was helpless, far from aid, at their mercy.
A retching sickness overtook her, born of fear and pain. She lay still for a little time, trying to ignore the dull, throbbing ache of her tortured limbs, and the chill of the slimy stones against her flesh.
