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Read Ebook: India Impressions With some notes of Ceylon during a winter tour 1906-7. by Crane Walter
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Ebook has 47 lines and 2583 words, and 1 pages
Transcriber's Note:
In the Dark
The watchman's flashlight printed a white circle on the frosted-glass, black-lettered door:
GREGG CHEMICAL CO., MFRS. ASA GREGG, PRES. PRIVATE
The watchman's hand closed on the knob, rattled the door in its frame. Queer, but tonight the sound had seemed to come from in there.... But that couldn't be. He knew that Mr. Gregg and Miss Carruthers carried the only keys to the office, so any intruder would have been forced to smash the lock.
Maybe the sound came from the storage room. The watchman clumped along the rubber-matted corridor, flung his weight against that door. It opened hard, being of ponderous metal fitted into a cork casing. The room was an air-tight, fire-proof vault, really. His shoes gritted on the concrete floor as he prowled among the big porcelain vats. The flashlight bored through bluish haze to the concrete walls. Acid fumes escaping under the vat lids made the haze and seared the man's throat.
He hurried out, coughing and wiping his eyes. It was damn funny. Every night lately he heard the same peculiar noise somewhere in this wing of the building.... Like a body groaning and turning in restless sleep, it was. It scared him. He didn't mention the mystery to anyone, though. He was an old man, and he didn't want Mr. Gregg to think he was getting too old for the job.
"Asa 'd think I was crazy, if I told him about it," he mumbled.
Inside the office, Asa Gregg heard the muttered words plainly. He sat very still in the big, leather-cushioned chair, hardly breathing until the scrape of the watchman's feet had thinned away down the hall. There was no light in the room to betray him; only the cherry-colored tip of his cigar, which couldn't be visible through the frosted glass door. Anyway, it'd be an hour before the watchman's round brought him past the office again. Asa Gregg had that hour, if he could screw up his nerve to use it....
He took the frayed end of the cigar from his mouth. His hand, which had wasted to mere skin and bone these past few months, groped through the darkness, slid over the polished coolness of the dictaphone hood, and snapped the switch. Machinery faintly whirred. His fingers found the tube, lifted it.
"Miss Carruthers!" he snapped. Then he hesitated. Surely, he could trust Mary Carruthers! He'd never wondered about her before. She'd been his secretary for a dozen years--lately, since he couldn't look after affairs himself as he used to, she had practically run the business. She was forty, sensible, unbeautiful, and tight-lipped. Hell, he had to trust her!
His voice plunged into the darkness.
"What I have to say now is intended for Mrs. Gregg's ears only. She will take the first boat home, of course. Meet that boat and bring her to the office. Since my wife knows nothing about a dictaphone, it will be necessary for you to set this record running. As soon as you have done so, leave her alone in the room. Make sure she's not interrupted for a half-hour. That's all."
He waited a decent interval. The invisible needle peeled its thread into the revolving wax cylinder.
God, it came harder than he had expected.
He paused, shivering. In the darkness a picture of Dot swam before him. The oval face, framed by gleaming swirls of lemon-tinted hair, had pouting scarlet lips, and eyes whose allure was intensified by violet make-up. The full-length picture of her included a streamlined, full-blossomed and yet delectably lithe body. A costly, enticing, Broadway-chorus orchid! As a matter of fact, that was where he'd found her.
"I won't make any excuses for myself," Asa Gregg said harshly. "I might point out that you were always in Florida or Bermuda or France, and that I was a lonely man. But it wasn't just loneliness, and I didn't seek companionship. I thought I was making a last bow to Romance. I was successful, sixty, and silly, and I did all the damn fool things--I even wrote letters to her. Popsy-wopsy letters." The dictaphone couldn't record the grimace that jerked his lips. "She saved them, of course, and by and by she put a price on them--ten thousand dollars. Dot claimed that one of those filthy tabloids had offered her that much for them--and what was a poor working-girl to do? She lied. I knew that.
"I told her to bring the letters to the office after business hours, and I'd take care of her. I took care of her, all right. I shot her, Jeannette!"
He mopped his face with a handkerchief that was already damp.
Asa Gregg reached through the darkness for the switch. He fumbled for the bottle which stood on the desk. His hand trembled, spilling some of the liquor onto his lap. He drank from the bottle....
This part of the story he'd skip. It was too horrible, even to think about it. He didn't want to remember how the blood pooled inside Dot's fur coat, and how he'd managed to carry the body out of the office without leaking any of her blood onto the floor. He tried to forget the musky sweetness of the perfume on the dead girl, mingled with that other evil blood-smell. Especially he didn't want to remember the frightful time he'd had stripping the gold rings from her fingers, and the one gold tooth in her head....
The horror of it coiled in the blackness about him. His own teeth rattled against the bottle when he gulped the second drink. He snapped the switch savagely, but when he spoke his voice cringed into the tube:
Gregg laughed, not pleasantly. His wife might think it'd been a sob, when she heard this record. "Now you understand why I went to the hospital," he jerked. "Possibly you'd call that poetic justice. Oh, God!"
His voice broke. Again he thumbed off the switch, and mopped his face with the damp linen.
The rest--how could he explain the rest of it?
He spent a long minute arranging his thoughts.
"You haven't any idea," he resumed, "no one has any idea, of how I've been punished for the thing I did. I don't mean the sheer physical agony--but the fear that I'd talk coming out of the ether at the hospital. The fear that she'd been traced to my office--I'd simply hidden her rings away, expecting to drop them into the river--or that she might have confided in her lover ... yes, she had one. Or, suppose a whopping big order came through and that tank was emptied the very next day. And I couldn't ask any questions--I didn't even know what was in the papers.
"However, that part of it gradually cleared up. I quizzed Miss Carruthers, and learned that an unidentified female body had been fished out of the East River a few days after Dot disappeared. That's how the police 'solved' the case. I got rid of her rings. I ordered that vat left alone.
"The other thing began about six months ago."
A spasm contorted his face. His fingers ached their grip into the dictaphone tube.
He gripped the cold cigar, chewed it. "It's very strange that you didn't notice it. No matter what station we dialed to, always that same voice came stealing into the room! But perhaps you did notice? You said, once or twice, that all those blues singers sounded alike!
"And she was a blues singer.... It was she, all right, somewhere out in the ether, reminding me....
"The next thing was--well, at first when I noticed it in the office I thought Miss Carruthers had suddenly taken up with young ideas. You see, I kept smelling perfume."
And he smelled it now. It was like a miasma in the dark.
"The sweet, sticky musk-smell hit me like a blow in the face.
"And that isn't all!"
Terror stalked in this room. Asa Gregg crouched in his chair, felt the weight of Fear on him like a submarine pressure. His cigar pitched to his knees, dropped to the floor.
He groped for the bottle. His wife would hear a long gurgle, and then a coughing gasp....
"The vat was nearly full of this transparent, oily acid," he went on. "What I saw was a lot of sediment on the golden floor. And there shouldn't have been any sediment! The stuff utterly dissolves animal tissue, bone, even the common ores--keeps them in suspension.
"It didn't look like sediment, either. It looked like a heap of mold ... grave-mold!
Silence hung in the darkness while he sucked wind into his lungs. And the words burst--separate, yammering shrieks:
"I watched the coming of hair, a yellow tangle of it sprouting from the bare round skull, until--oh, God!--the flesh began making itself before my eyes! I couldn't bear any more. I stayed away--didn't come to the office for five days."
The tube slipped from his sweating, slick fingers. Panting, Asa Gregg fumbled in the dark until he found it.
"That's why I can't have the lid cemented on. It wouldn't do any good, either! Until three days ago, she hadn't the least color, looked as white as a ghost in the vat. A naked ghost, because there's been no resurrection for her clothing....
"I've watched her limbs grow rosy! Her lips are scarlet! Her eyes are bright--they opened yesterday--and her breasts were rising and falling--oh, almost imperceptibly--but that was last night.
"And tonight--I swear it--her lips moved! She muttered my name! She turned--she'd been lying on her side--over onto her back!"
The record would be badly blurred. His hand shook violently, bobb
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