He took a time-saving detour through a narrow side street. This got him ahead of the police cruiser. Another five blocks, and he trod abruptly on his brake pedal and brought the coupé to a slithering, screeching halt. This was as far as even he could go. The street was blocked by jammed traffic and crowds of frightened human beings, milling, shouting, jostling each other.
As he leaped out of his coupé he heard snatches of conversation from the bloodless lips about him:
“The dark!”
“The terrible twilight!”
“The world — coming to an end!”
“The devil — is on earth!”
Superstitious fear showed on the faces of some. A woman was weeping hysterically, fearfully, wringing her bony hands in a paroxysm of awed fright. An old colored man who looked like a preacher was down on his knees at the edge of the curb, praying, his body swaying, his eyes rolling toward the sky above, his deep-toned voice quavering in religious fervor.
“Oh, Lord, save us! Save thy chullen from the hands of Satan! Save the blessed earth from his wiles and wickedness!”
His words seemed an echo of the stark terror that was stamped on the features of everyone in sight — terror of the unknown.
The man from the press coupé strode ahead grimly, slipping unnoticed through the milling mob, moving on toward the spot from which the nameless horror seemed to have radiated. And then he glimpsed one face upon which no fear was registered. It was the face of a white-haired, shabbily dressed beggar standing in a doorway with a tray of chewing gum tied around his middle — a blind beggar whose sightless eyes had mercifully been spared the horror of the darkness which had cast its dread spell over every one else.
The blind man leaned forward abruptly, listening to the approaching footsteps.
Suddenly he called out: “Mr. Robbins! Mr. Robbins!”
Only for an instant did the driver of the press coupé pause. He laid a friendly hand on the blind man’s shoulder, uttered a name quickly: “Thaddeus Penny.” Then he plunged on through the crowd which at this point had begun to thin.
A hundred feet from the spot where he had been forced to park his coupé, he came upon ghastly evidence that the mysterious terror which all had mentioned wasn’t imaginary.
Two big delivery trucks, coming out of side streets, had met in a fearful, head-on collision. The motors and front wheels of both were telescoped into a tangled mass of shattered junk. Water from their cracked radiators had spilled into the street, running away in rusty rivulets.
THE driver of one truck was visible. Yet he was hardly recognizable as a man. An inert, flattened figure, he lay pinned under the side of the cab — beyond the aid of ambulance or interne.
The man from the press coupé stepped jerkily around the telescoped trucks and moved forward. But the accident of the crashing trucks was only the beginning. Twenty feet farther on he paused to stare with widening eyes into the gutter. Here, too, the Grim Reaper had struck.
The bodies of four people, three women and a man, lay in distorted postures, trampled to death by the onrush of many frenzied feet, their clothing torn and soiled. Bundles they had clutched before the fear-crazed mob had wrought its horrible havoc upon them, lay scattered and broken. Then the coupé’s driver came to the most gruesome tragedy of all — a thing so horrible that it made breath hiss between his clenched teeth.
For a school bus, filled with small children, had swerved and crashed into a lamp post. It had cracked open down its whole length, and turned on its side, spilling the crushed and mangled forms of its small occupants into the street. Tousled curly heads and tiny faces lay still under a mass of broken glass and debris. Three who had succeeded in dragging themselves from the wreck had fallen, pitiful victims to the frenzied mob’s feet. Only one, a little girl with chestnut hair, had managed somehow to reach a doorway on the street’s opposite side. Huddled in a corner, she sobbed in confused terror.
The man from the press coupé walked to her, bent down and whispered quiet words of reassurance until her crying ceased. He picked her up, comforted her still further, and gave her into the temporary care of an old lady who was peering fearfully from a first floor window.
Something else attracted his attention then. Faces stared out at him from the glass front of a big store, men and women with fear shadows in their eyes, gaping like frightened, wondering animals, too dazed to move.
He strode toward them, opened the store’s door, and when he entered they backed away. But he raised his voice harshly, authoritatively, and began quick questioning. As he did so he drew a press card from his pocket and held it up for all to see. This bore the name of A. J. Martin.
The store’s proprietor was the first to find his voice and answer the queries that were flung at him. Yet what the man said seemed hardly to make sense, any more than the statements of the milling people at the edge of the mob. For he was trembling, his hand waving toward the littered street, and his speech came haltingly.
“The dark!” he croaked. “The dark — out there! Even our lights were no good. The sun must have gone out. It was — an eclipse, I guess. But I don’t understand — about our lights not shining.”
A pause followed his startling words. Then a frightened woman spoke:
“No — you’re wrong. The sun didn’t go out. It was a fog — a black fog that filled the street. The people ran screaming. I saw them — and then — It was terrible — like a night when nothing can be seen.”
The man who held the press card nodded tensely. Fog, or an eclipse, or the falling of night — these people couldn’t explain the thing that had come to pass. Yet something infinitely strange had happened, something under the influence of which nightmare tragedies had occurred — cars smashed, men trampled, small children killed.
A moment of silence passed while his sharp eyes hovered over a dozen fear-strained faces. Then he said: “Thanks,” turned and hurried back into the street.
THOSE whom he had questioned weren’t aware that no syndicate or newspaper had sent him. They weren’t aware that his plainly cast features were part of a brilliantly clever disguise, natural as living flesh. They didn’t guess that behind it lay the face of a man whose identity was hidden from all the world — the identity of Secret Agent “X.”
Strange rumors had been built up about this Man of a Thousand Faces. His name had been spoken in awed whispers throughout the underworld. There he was feared as a swift, relentless human scourge who seemed to hear all and know all. Yet the police of many cities had been ordered to investigate his activities, trace him down, trap him. For the law regarded him as a desperate criminal. Only a few on earth knew that the direct opposite was true, that this man of strange destiny and mystery was one of the most daringly ingenious criminal investigators alive. For where crime appeared in its most threateningly hideous form — there, also, Agent “X” made a habit of appearing.
Yet his arrival now seemed oddly inconsistent. Darkness had fallen. Fearful accidents had occurred. People had been trampled, killed. But Nature, not man, seemed the guilty one.
The Secret Agent left the store, strode on down the block, and a figure suddenly stepped from a doorway and accosted him.
“Mr. Martin!”
The man was tall, redheaded. There was on his face a look of strain, as there had been on those others in the store. “Mr. Martin,” he said again. “Listen — the sun’s shining now. But it wasn’t a few minutes ago when I called you. It got dark, black as hell!”