Part 27

* * * * *

The exquisite torture of recollection had shriveled Henry Fayne’s mentality and left him a semi-maniac, yet here, after all the cynical, embittering years was the physical, the carnate Henry Fayne, the long-discarded plaything of feminine caprice. His suffering was fearfully recorded in the seamed and bearded mask of his altered features.

The smile did not leave Leanor’s face. The madman’s voice rose in a shrill, terrible cry. He babbled and sputtered in consuming rage, but I caught the current of his wild harangue. He had waited all the years for this opportunity; he had followed her from Bandora, had laid all his plans with infinite nicety to avenge the wreck which Leanor had made of his life.

But the woman laughed defiantly, tensely; laughed derisively, full in the bearded face.

“You have waited too long, Henry,” she said, evenly yet with a note of triumph in her tone; “I’ve worn threadbare every allurement of life. Today I came here seeking my last adventure—a sensation at once new and ultimate—_death_!”

It was here that the miracle supervened.

Chagrin, fierce and awful, distorted the hairy vagabond’s face, and, balancing himself precariously in the crazily whirling dugout, he raised a great clenched fist. I once had seen a laughing man struck by lightning. As the rending voltage shot through him the muscles of his face had relaxed slowly, queerly, as if from incredulity, just as the furious, drawn face of Henry Fayne relaxed now. The menacing fist unclinched and fell limply at his side.

Of all the examples of thwarted vengeance I had ever seen on the stage, or off, this episode from real life was the most dramatic.

The boat had circled swiftly in to the center of the vortex and now spun crazily for a moment as though on a fixed pivot, like a weather-vane. Then it capriciously resumed its first tactics, only it now raced inversely in a rapidly widening circle, running well down in the water, as though from some powerful submarine attraction.

That the spurious boatman was a victim of some hopeless form of insanity I was certain when I saw him drop to his knees and extend both his great hands in evident entreaty to the woman who had stripped him of his honor and, driven him, a driveling idio-maniac, into exile. Leanor sat impassive, but the madman continued to supplicate.

Never did my credulity undergo so mighty a strain as when, after a moment, the woman reached out and locked her slim hands in his. It was a strange picture, believe me! From my uncertain perch on the slimy ledge of slate, I stared, thrilling deep in my being at this futile truce on the brink of eternity.

Its revolutions greatly widened and its speed diminished, the tiny boat suddenly swerved from its circular course, bobbed upward as though a great weight had been detached from its keel and then drifted like some spent thing of life toward the west wall, where I crouched dumbfounded, my breath hissing in my nostrils, my lungs heaving.

Only now am I coming to the crux of this story of which the foregoing forms a necessary prelude.

Back at Batoga that same night, in an obscure corner of the wide cool porch of the palm-environed sanitarium, Henry Fayne and Leanor, after a long heart-to-heart talk alone, agreed to forgive and forget. Later in the evening Fayne went down to the contiguous village to assemble his meager belongings. They would be interesting souvenirs with which to decorate the walls of the rehabilitated home. I found Leanor sitting where he had left her on the porch, smiling enigmatically.

“Can I act, or not?” she asked me rather abruptly as I came up.

“Act?” I groped; “what do you mean?”

She sat there, smiling mysteriously in the white moonlight, until I at length prevailed upon her to pour into my incredulous ears how it had flashed upon her, in the crucial moment at the whirlpool, that she must convince Fayne that to destroy one who seeks death would give no satisfaction to a seeker after vengeance. She had made him see that the most effective way of wreaking his revenge would be to prevent her taking her own life and force her to live with him again as in the old days. What, indeed, could be greater punishment than that?

So once again the wily adventuress had tricked poor Henry Fayne. It had been a close thing, but her lightning wits had saved her to look forward enchantedly to the prospect of other adventures. Though she had, in fact, tired of life, she had weakened before death; yet the fortitude of skillful artifice underlying that physical fear bespoke such a resourcefulness as I had never before seen in any woman.

She had spoken more truth than she knew when she said that Henry Fayne was dead, for, mentally, he no longer existed.

But Leanor had one more card to play. When she had outlined her campaign, I sat aghast at the frank inhumanity of her plans for the morrow. She had already made arrangements with the native officials of the nearby village. She was to appear in court and testify, and I was to be summoned to give evidence before the committing judge. Henry Fayne was to be ruthlessly chucked into the Acorn Insane Asylum!

After Leanor had retired to her apartment I lingered a while in the fragrant night to smoke a cigar and meditate, for I was badly upset by her pitiless resolve. As I sat reviewing the strange events of the day, the dark figure of a man, half bent and retreating rapidly among the dappled shadows of the palms, startled me unpleasantly.

At my first glimpse of the skulker, some sixth sense told me that he had been eavesdropping Leanor and me from under the elevated porch on which I sat. As soon as the flitting shadow had melted into the gloom I slipped off the porch and investigated.

My half-formed suspicion was confirmed. The eavesdropper’s footprints were quite distinct. He had crouched directly under the chairs which the adventuress and I had occupied.

I did not retire until an hour later. An indescribable feeling of dread had, though for no adequate reason, begun to weigh upon my spirits and to nag my nerves.

The first faint glimmer of dawn was in the east when something touched me softly on the shoulder. I remembered that I had left my porch window open, and sprang up in a sudden flurry of alarm, but my nerves slackened quickly when the intruder, a black Jamaican, showed me his watchman’s badge.

The old negro was afraid something had happened. He had heard stealthy footfalls upstairs, and somebody’s bedroom door was wide open. On looking into the room he had seen—!

But at this point in his story he choked, overcome. He was an excitable and superstitious old black at best, but now he was fairly beside himself with a terror for which he had no explanation. The occupant of the room, I surmised, had gone out on the porch, properly enough, to smoke an early morning cigar. But the old watchman would not be reassured until I consented to accompany him up to the second floor.

I noted, as we advanced along the corridor, that a door stood ajar. I tapped tentatively. No answer. I repeated the summons, louder. Still no answer. I walked in.

The moonlight that flooded the porch outside filtered in, subdued, through the lace-curtained windows. It revealed a bed. In the center of the bed was the figure of a woman—all in snow white save a single dark-hued covering of some sort which sprawled across the full bosom.

A nameless something made me fumble rather hurriedly for the electric switch. The bright light showed what I had dreaded, almost expected. The dark-colored garment was not a garment at all. It was blood.

It dyed the white bosom repellently and, still welling from its fountain, was fast forming a ragged little pool on the bedcovering. Fair over the victim’s heart, the ornamented stag-horn handle of a heavy hunting-knife, none of the blade visible, stood up like a sinister monument, somehow increasingly familiar to my gaze; and after an instant’s reflection I could have sworn—so plainly did my eyes visualize the motive for this horror—that I beheld a single word scrawled in crimson along the mottled staghorn handle:

“_VENGEANCE!_”

Air Transportation Between Chicago and New York To Be Established

Chicagoans will soon be able to run down to New York on business early one morning and be back home in time for breakfast the next day, if the plans for dirigible service between the two cities carry through. A number of prominent Americans are members of a corporation that is building several huge, helium-filled balloons in the Schutte-Lanz Company’s plant in Germany, according to Benedict Crowell, former secretary of war, who is the president of the new corporation. The airships will carry passengers and freight, it was announced.

_It Was a Frightful, Incredible Thing, Found in the Amazon Valley_

THE GRAY DEATH

_By_ LOUAL B. SUGARMAN

Unwaveringly, my guest sustained my perplexed and angry stare. Silently, he withstood the battering words I launched at him.

He appeared quite unmoved by my reproaches, save for a dull red flush that crept up and flooded his face, as now and then I grew particularly bitter and biting in my tirade.

At length I ceased. It was like hitting into a mass of feathers—there was no resistance to my blows. He had made no attempt to justify himself. After a momentous silence, he spoke his first word since we had entered the room.

“I’m sorry, my friend; more sorry than you can imagine, but—I couldn’t help it. I simply could not touch her hand. The shock—so suddenly to come upon her—to see her as she was—I tell you, I forgot myself. Please convey to your wife my most abject apologies, will you? I am sorry, for I know I should have liked her very much. But—now I must go.”

“You can’t go out in this storm,” I answered. “It’s out of the question. I’m sorry, too; sorry that you acted as you did—and more than sorry that I spoke to you as I did, just now. But I was angry. Can you blame me? I’d been waiting for this moment ever since I heard from you that you had come back from the Amazon—the moment when you, my best friend, and my wife were to meet. And then—why, damn it, man, I can’t understand it! To pull back, to shrink away as you did; even to refuse to take her hand or acknowledge the introduction! It was unbelievably rude. It hurt her, and it hurt me.”

“I know it, and that is why I am so very sorry about it all. I can’t excuse myself, but I can tell you a story that may explain.”

I saw, however, that for some reason he was reluctant to talk.

“You need not,” I said. “Let’s drop the whole matter, and in the morning you can make your amends to Laura.”

Anthony shook his head.

“It’s not pleasant to talk about, but that was not my reason for hesitating. I was afraid you would not believe me if I did tell you. Sometimes truth strains one’s credulity too much. But I will tell you. It may do me good to talk about it, and, anyhow, it will explain why I acted as I did.

“Your wife came in just after we entered. She had not yet removed her veil or gloves. They were gray. So was her dress. Her shoes—everything was gray. And she stood there, her hand outstretched—all in that color—a body covered with gray. I can’t help shuddering. _I can’t stand gray!_ It’s the color of death. Can your nerves stand the dark?”

I rose and switched off the lights. The room was plunged into darkness, save for the flicker of the flames in the fireplace and the intermittent flashes of lightning. The rain beat through the leafless branches outside with a monotonous, slithering _swish_ and rattled like ghostly fingers against the windows.

“The light makes it hard to talk—of unbelievable things. One needs the darkness to hear of hell.”

He paused. The _swir-r-r_ of the rain crept into the stillness of the room. My companion sighed. The firelight shone on his face, which floated in the darkness—a disembodied face, grown suddenly haggard.

“A good night for this story, with the wind crying like a lost soul in the night. How I hate that sound! Ah, well!”

There was a moment of silence.

“It was not like this, though, that night when we started up the Amazon. No. Then it was warm and soft, and the stars seemed so near. The air was filled with scent of a thousand tropical blossoms. They grew rank on the shore.

“There were four of us—two natives, myself and Von Housmann. It is of him I am going to tell you. He was a German—and a good man. A great naturalist, and a true friend. He sucked the poison from my leg once, when a snake had bitten me. I thanked him and said I’d repay him some day. I did—sooner than I had thought—with a bullet! I could not bear to see him suffer.”

The man sat there, gazing into the flames—and I listened to the dripping rain fingering the bare boughs and _tap-tap-tapping_ on the roof above.

My friend looked up.

“I was seeing his face in the flames. God help him!... We had traveled for days—weeks—how long does not matter. We had camped and moved on; we had stopped to gather specimens—always deeper into that evil undergrowth. And as we moved on, Von Housmann and I grew close; one either grows to love or hate in such circumstances, and Sigmund was not the sort of man one would hate. I tell you, I loved that man!

“One day we struck into a new place. We had long before left the tracks of other expeditions. We _trekked_ along, unmindful of the exotic beauty of our surroundings, when I saw our native, who was up ahead, stop short and sniff the air.

“We stopped, too, and then I noticed what the keener, more primitive sense of our guide had detected first.”

* * * * *

“It was an odor. A strange odor, indefinable and sickening. It was filled with foreboding—evil. It smelt—_gray_! I can not describe it any other way. It smelt dead. It made me think of decay—decay, and mould and—ugly things. I shuddered. I looked at Von Housmann, and I saw that he, too, had noticed it.

“‘What is that smell?’ I asked.

“He shook his head.

“‘Ach, dot iss new. I haf not smelled it before. But—I do not lige it. It iss not goot. Smells is goot or bat—und dot is not goot. I say, I do not lige dot smell.’

“Neither did I. We went ahead, cautiously now. A curious sense pervaded the air. It puzzled me. Then it struck me: _silence_. Silence, as though the music of the spheres had suddenly been snuffed out. It was the utter cessation of the interminable chirping and chattering of the birds and monkeys and other small animals.

“We had become so accustomed to that multitudinous babel that its absence was disturbing. It was—eerie. Yes, that’s the word. It made that first impression of lifelessness more intense. Not death, you understand. Even death has in it a thought of life, an element of being. But this was just—lifelessness.

“The gray odor had become so strong it was wellnigh unbearable. Then we saw our guides running back to us. They rebelled. They refused to go beyond the line of trees ahead. They said it was _tabu_.

“That ended it. No promise, no threat, nothing would move them. Do you know what a savage’s _tabu_ is? It is stronger than death. And this place was _tabu_. So we left them there with our stuff, and Sigmund and I went on alone. We reached the farthest line of trees and stopped on the edge of a clearing.

“I can’t describe that sight to you. But I can see it—good God, how I can still see it! Sometimes I wake up in the night with that nightmarish picture in my eyes, and my nostrils filled with that ghoulish stench.

“It was a field of gray; almost, I might have said, a field of _living_ gray. And yet, it did not give the impression of life. It moved, although there was not a breath of wind; not a leaf on the trees quivered, but that mass of gray wiggled and crawled and undulated as though it were a huge gray shroud that was thrown over some monstrous jelly-like Thing.

“And that Thing was writhing and twisting. The gray mass extended as far as I could see ahead; to the right the sandy shore of the river stopped it; and to the left and in front of us it terminated at a distance of a few yards away from the trees where a belt of sand intervened.

“I don’t know how long we stood there, my friend Von Housmann and I. It fascinated us. At last he spoke.

“‘_Heilige Mütter. Was kommt da?_ Vat in der name off all dot iss holy do you call dot? Nefer haf I seen such before. Eferyvere I haf traffeled, but nefer haf I seen a sight lige dot. I tell you, it makes my flesh crawl!’

“‘It makes me sick to look at it,’ I answered. ‘It looks like—like living corruption.’

“The old German shook his head. He was baffled. We knew we were looking upon something that no living mortal had ever gazed upon before. And our flesh crawled, as we watched that Thing writhing beneath its blanket of gray.

“We walked slowly and cautiously across the strip of sand to the edge of the gray patch. As I bent over, the pungency of the odor bit into the membrane of my nostrils like an acid, and my eyes smarted.

“And then I saw something that drove all other thoughts from my mind. The mass was a mosslike growth of tiny gray fungi. They were shaped like miniature mushrooms, but out of the top of each grew a countless number of antennae that twisted and writhed around ceaselessly in the air.

“They seemed to be feeling and groping around for something, and it was this incessant movement that gave to the patch that quivering undulation which I had noticed before. I stared until my eyes ached.

“‘What do you make of it?’ I asked my friend.

“‘_Ach_, I do not know. It iss incompbrehensible. I haf nefer seen such a—a t’ing in my whole, long life. It iss, I should say, some sort off a fungoid growt’. Ya, it iss clearly dot. But der species—um, dot iss _not_ so clear. Und dose liddle feelers; on a fungus dot iss new. It iss unheard off. See, der _veddammte_ t’ings iss lige lifting fingers; dey svay und tvist lige dey vas feeling for somet’ings, not? I am egseedingly curious. Und, I am baffled—und, my frient, I do not lige dot.’

“Impatiently, he reached out a stick he was carrying: a newlycut, stout cudgel of dried wood. He stirred around with it in the growth at his feet. And then a cry broke from his lips.

“‘_Ach, du lieber Gott—gnadig Gott im Himmel! Sieh’ da!_’

“I looked where he was pointing. His hand trembled violently. And little wonder! The stick, for about twelve inches up, was a mass of gray!

“And as I watched, I saw, steadily growing before my eyes, that awful gray creep up and surround the wood. I’m not exaggerating; I tell you, in less time than it takes to tell, it had almost reached Von Housmann’s hand. He threw it from him with an exclamation of horror.

“It fell in the gray growth and instantly vanished. It seemed to melt away.”

* * * * *

“Sigmund looked at me. He was pale. At last he sighed.

“‘So-o-o! Ve learn. On vood it grows. I might haf guessed. Dot iss der reason dot no trees are here. It destroys dem. But so _schnell_; _ach_, lige fire it growed. My frendt, I lige dot stuff lesser _als_ before. It is not healt’y. But vat vill it not eat?’

“I handed him my rifle. He took it, and with the muzzle poked the growth. Man, my hair fairly stood on end! Do you know anything about fungi? No? Well, I have never known or heard of any vegetable growth that would attack blue steel. But that stuff, I tell you, that rifle barrel sprouted a crop of that gray moss as readily and as quickly as had the wood!

“I grabbed the gun and lifted it out of the patch. Already several inches of steel had been eaten—literally _eaten_—off. I held it up and watched that damnable gray crawl along the barrel. It just seemed to melt the metal. It melted like sealing wax, and great gray flakes dropped off to the ground.

“Nearer and near it came; to the rear sight, the trigger-guard, the hammer. It was uncanny—like a dream. I stood there, paralyzed. I could not believe what my eyes told me was true. I looked at Sigmund. His mouth was open and his face was white as death. I laughed at his face. That seemed to tear away the mist. He yelled and pointed, and I looked down.

“Not two inches from my hand was that mass. I could see those feelers reaching out toward my hand and I was sick. Instinctively, I threw the gun from me; aimlessly, blindly. It fell on the sand belt outside the gray mass.

“Hardly had it struck the sand before the growth had reached the butt, and then there was nothing to be seen but a tiny patch of that gray, poisonous Thing. And as we looked, it began to melt. Gradually, steadily, it was disappearing.

“‘Quick, quick,’ shouted Von Housmann, and we ran over to the spot. By bending over, we could see what was happening.

“The feelers, or antennae, which we had noticed before, had vanished, but instead, at the bases of each individual plant, were similar tendrils. But more of them—thousands and thousands of them all feeling and groping frantically about. And as they swayed and twisted and brushed the sand, one by one they shriveled up and seemed to withdraw into the parent body.

“And gradually this nucleus itself shrank and withered, until it was no more than a tiny gray speck on the sand. Soon that was all that was left; a lot of tiny whitish particles, much lighter in color than the original plant, scattered around on the sand.

“I looked at Von Housmann, and he looked at me. After a long interval, he spoke. He spoke slowly, almost as though it were a painful effort.

“‘Ant’ony, ve haf seen a—miracle. From vat, or how, or ven, dot hell-growt’ sprang, I do not know. I do not know how many, many years it has stood here; may be it has been for centuries. But I do know this: if dot sand was not here—vell, I shudder to t’ink off vat vould be today.’

“I stared.

“‘You do not understand? _Ach_, so! You haf vat happened to dot stick? Und to dot gun of steel? So! Look, now.’