After a moment he appeared to have been struck by a thought. Unexpectedly, he cut the record off in its prime, and, stealing a side glance at the youth and maid, now busily engaged in whispered conversation, he left the room.
Exactly twenty minutes later his apartment bell rang. Of which, also, Fleming Knibbs and Lola were blissfully unaware.
Then Dreer’s green spectacles poked their way through the door. Fleming had his half-asleep girl in his arms — no longer half asleep, however, for her lips were pressed to his in passionate surrender. The little man said later he never saw, and never expected to see again, so beautiful, so colorful a picture.
He coughed.
“Come in,” said Knibbs, without looking up.
“It’s Hjalmar Yensen below,” explained Simeon. “He says ‘Red’ Belden and the man called Jim confessed to making off with your personal property and named the ‘fence’ they had employed. He has recovered everything, young Knibbs, and wants to see you.”
“Can’t,” replied Fleming, briefly, giving the chair a hitch so that its back was now to the door. “I’m busy. Tell him to leave the Ingersoll and scarf pin in your care. As for the wallet—let him keep it.”
“And its contents?”
“Of course.”
“Whew!”
“And Dreer—”
“Yes?”
“Invite him to the wedding. We can have him watch the gifts, you know.”
by
I
Chicken-Foot Darragh, with a skinful of cheap Italian red wine, lurched, stiff-armed, against the basement grille. The warped treads of the ancient staircase creaked under the pressure of a careful footfall—then, at what he saw, outlined in the red circle of the single gas-jet, Darragh’s loose lips sagged open—stark, elemental fear strangled the outcry in his throat—his blunt finger-nails met like talons, hooked into the basement gate.
A moment he stood thus, while above him, like a face without a body, there floated against a black pool of darkness, the dreadful head, like, in its semblance, to nothing animal or human save in the broad, porcine snout.
For a moment it held against the red glimmer of the gas which, in a debased aureole, seemed to pale to a flat, toneless shading of unholy fire. Then it passed, like the brief smoke of a windblown torch.
Darragh knew nothing of hippogrifs, of leprechauns; he might have called it a gargoyle, a djinn, had he known them by their names. Nor was he familiar with Anubis, the dog-faced deity of the Egyptians—but the head which he had beheld was kin to none of these...
Now, spread-eagled against the grating, he fell suddenly sick, the fumes of the cheap liquor he had drunk mounting in a swift, dizzying surge against his brain. Stumbling, reeling, clawing desperately outward, behind him the memory of the Thing which he had seen, he gained the street, and, after a headlong flight of several blocks, a park bench.
But his last conscious impression, ere he sank into the stupor which would last until well into the next day’s noon, was of a face which seemed to float, head-high, at the height of a tall man, like a face without a body—a face unspeakable, inhuman, and yet—real—in its terrifying semblance, half-dog, half-pig—whole horror. And with it, too, ere he sank like a stone into the sea-green silence of oblivion, there persisted in his nostrils a savor, a stench, an acrid, faint tang, as though the very air itself had been tainted by the passage of that nameless terror.
II
Detective Sergeant Sinsabaugh, off duty at two A. M., went up the steps of the Varick Street tenement wherein he kept bachelor quarters. No. 32 was a malodorous building in a neighborhood grim and chancy enough of its kind. On one side there loomed the squat bulk of a stable; on the other the towering outline of a chemical plant.
Sinsabaugh, however, was thinking that it was his last night as a bachelor, and, consequently, his last night in No. 32. For tomorrow he would be married... his last night...
But tonight, despite the joyance of his mood, there was something in the air—he felt it as a heaviness, a deadness, a breathless, weighty hush like the tension before storm. But the August evening was close and sultry.
And yet, as he mounted the worn steps, into his mind’s eye, unbidden, there came a face: writhen, snarling, bestial, vengeful—the face of Duster Joe Masterman, gang leader and all-round crook, as he had last seen it on the day that Masterman had gone “up the river” to begin his ten-year term for loft burglary.
It had been Sinsabaugh’s testimony which had convicted the gangster, and Masterman had sworn to “get” him. “You damn double-crossing dick,” Masterman had promised, “I’ll get you—and it’ll take me just ten years and a day — and then—”
But others had threatened Sinsabaugh—there was nothing novel in it — it was just a part of the day’s work — the vicious hatred of an underworld for all that typified the Law—an hereditary and accustomed hatred accepted and understood.
Today, however, Duster Joe was out; no doubt he was even now showing himself in the haunts he had aforetime favored; Gaspipe Looie’s, doubtless, for one. It may have been habit that caused the policeman to feel for his service pistol as he paused in the entrance of the hallway. But as he reached behind him his groping fingers suddenly became rigid—a faint, hissing breath sounded from his lips as he felt his arm caught and held abruptly from behind.
Sinsabaugh pivoted as a boxer ducks under his adversary’s lead, whirling sidewise to face—the empty street. Then he grinned foolishly, clucked with his tongue, and released his coat-sleeve where it had caught in the ornamental ironwork of the banister.
But he hesitated on the threshold, glancing upward where, above the black well of the stairway, there hung a faint pinpoint of gas.
Sinsabaugh was not imaginative, but — it was his last night as a bachelor — almost it seemed as if that touch upon his coat-sleeve had been a warning, a message, a summons laid upon him by the urgence of invisible fingers... nonsense!
But the murky air continued heavy, lifeless—the unwinking eye of the gaslight somehow sinister, malevolent. As has been said, Sinsabaugh was not imaginative, but now, like a swimmer breasting a tide of impenetrable and soundless flood, he mounted with slow steps the narrow stair. And about him as he went forward the darkness closed in like a wall, sinister, threatening, above and beyond him that pinpoint of gas, like an evil star now curiously bluish, flat, unreal as a flickering, painted flame.
Sinsabaugh loosened his pistol in its arm-holster, searching the thick-piled shadows massed beyond the fell circle of that brooding beacon. He drew his Colt. If Masterman awaited him somewhere upon that stair or upon the landing above, he would be ready for him. Hugging the wall, for the more silent footing there afforded, the policeman, one hand before him, feeling along the plaster, the other holding his gun, went upward steadily in the whispering gloom, eyes strained against the blackness, ears attuned to the throbbing silence, like the beating of a heart.
The gas offered no illumination beyond its flat nimbus of pale flame, but it seemed to Sinsabaugh that if he could see nothing, there yet lingered in that atmosphere an aura, a something felt yet unperceived. Something or someone had been before him on that stairway, if he or It had passed like the passing of a candle’s breath in the malodorous dark.
At the stairhead he crouched, swung up his arm, and the bright lance of his pocket flash clove the darkness in a dazzling arc to right and left. But there was nothing.