Read Ebook: A Personal Problem by Bedford Jones H Henry

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Ebook has 98 lines and 5512 words, and 2 pages

A soft flurry of mosquito curtains, a subdued crash, and then a scuttling and tapping that once more ended abruptly. A gasp from Hobson.

"I say, the bally thing's back!" he cried. "For God's sake help me out, Cranshaw!"

"It's only a hermit crab wandered in, you fool. Wait--now take a look and give him a good fling off."

Cranshaw's arm protruded from his curtains, and he snapped the electric torch. He had no need where to look, for he had been expecting this visit from the junior partner for some time.

Hobson gripped his curtains in desperate haste and again shook off the thing that was climbing. He looked out, saw the hideous, bristly object clatter away on its spider-legs, and fell back with a subdued groan.

"Damn this place!"

Again silence and darkness fell upon the room, and again the noises of the night slowly seeped through the surf-thunder.

Outside the veranda the crabs were scuttling and clicking and rustling, scavenging with resistless vigor and great enthusiasm. A thin, far burst of song came from the government accommodation house, where the bulk of the steamer's passengers were gathered in jovial celebration.

Then through all the muffled night there again began to pierce that insistent watch-like ticking. Not as of one watch, but as of a thousand it was, steady and irregular and very thin. Occasionally a quite distinct crunch would echo through, as though some one had stepped on a beetle; only there was no one to step.

Once or twice there came a soft "flop" on the floor; whatever had fallen must have fallen from the ceiling.

The sounds were not exactly pleasant, especially to a fevered imagination. They might mean anything from ghosts to dragons.

And over all, slurring the staccato harmony of the ticking, was an almost inaudible soft scurrying--like innumerable feathers or hairy legs running about.

It was a weird symphony, a symphony of lesser noises, of louder silences, a symphony whose eldritch orchestration produced hideousness.

There was no discord. Over the crescendo and diminuendo of the ticking swept that soft horror of nearly inaudible sound, shot through by the louder crunches; there were other sounds also that could not be defined by human ears, but all blended into a terrible harmony, the more terrible because produced by darkness and rife with suggestion.

"I say, old man," Hobson's voice rose in a thick discord that ruined the symphonic whispers utterly, "what's all this bally rustling, eh?"

Cranshaw waited a little, smiling into the blackness, inscrutable.

"I say, Cranshaw! Let's have a drink, old man!"

"You 'wake again?" Cranshaw's voice bubbled out sleepily. "What's the matter?"

"I want a drink, that's all," came the half-shamed answer.

"No more whisky in the house--we finished up the last of it to-night. Go to sleep and quit your infernal nonsense."

"You're sure there're no poisonous things around?"

Cranshaw did not answer. The other repeated the question, his voice beginning insensibly to climb with the last words.

This time Cranshaw replied, but took no immediate heed of the question itself.

"Say, Hobson, I've just been thinking about something. You remember that mess I got into down at Auckland? I heard the other day that it was you who stole that money yourself. That's true, isn't it?"

The other held silence for a moment, until the ghastly symphony protruded into his brain.

"I--I wanted Agnes," came the hoarse words.

Cranshaw smiled to himself.

"Eh? What's that?"

Hobson's voice leaped from the darkness, vivid with a horrible fear, pulsating and lingering under the roof weirdly.

Cranshaw spoke after a moment; his words were cold and sharp and quite impersonal.

"Hobson, you were a fool to imagine that I would ever forget or forgive. You had me snared for your own crime; you broke me; you got the girl I wanted; you became the junior partner in my place. I became John Smith, came to Raratonga, settled here and waited. I knew you would come sooner or later."

He paused, smiling inscrutably at the darkness.

Hobson was breathing stertorously, and there was another and queerer sound--like a fat man licking his lips in fear. The darkness intensified everything.

"I was in two minds, Hobson. I had a notion to take you out to the reefs for a swim. You don't know it, but there are interesting things out there in the warm water--bubbly eels, spiny leper-fishes with every spine deadly poison, sting-rays, devil-fish, plenty, plenty snake and shark. But I decided against that, for I knew you had imagination. So I brought you here instead."

Cranshaw still smiled into the blackness above him, lying motionless as he talked. He had no need to switch on the light to guess at the shaking mosquito curtains of the other bed, the pasty-faced man who clutched at them, the horrible fascination with which Hobson followed his every word.

"Now, my dear fellow," he went on, his voice acridly smooth, "I want you to take a little look around. Then--"

"For God's sake, Cranshaw!" burst forth the frenzied tones of the other man, shrill and smitten with hysteria. "I'll give up everything--I'll sign a confession and give you Agnes--I'll make it all right if you--"

The light was blinding, merciless, leaving every inch of the room clean-cut and distinct, dislosing the whole fearful secret of the hidden orchestration.

About the floor and walls and ceiling were poised cockroaches--South Sea cockroaches, as large as mice or larger, with great waving feather-feelers. They flitted hither and thither by the hundred--moving masses of hideousness, making as they went that ticking which furnished forth the body of the night's symphony.

And here and there, flashing away from the light more quickly than the light could follow, or flopping from ceiling to floor as the light swept up, were things that looked like sausages. Only when they moved, when the fearsome hidden red legs flashed out in all their horror, could one recognize centipeds.

Yet these were not the most horrible nor the swiftest.

For heedless of the light, the occasional crunches swept up above the body of the symphony as the electric ray disclosed the hordes of cockroaches to their enemies. Great brown shapes darted here and there, back and forth, by the dozen; huge brown hairy things as large as a plate--hunting spiders--leaping on their pray, crunching once, and leaping forward anew.

The room was a wriggling horror in that moment, and when Cranshaw clicked off the light that triumphant "crunch--crunch--crunch!" was rising in a finale that drowned out the rest of the symphony--and shattered suddenly at his voice.

"Better not step out on the floor, Hobson--I saw a couple of those spiders on your curtains. I'll take my chances, but you'll stay here. If they get under your curtains you're gone, remember--any one of those things means certain death. As I say, I'll take my chances, because I'm going to leave you here."

He calmly threw aside his curtains, reached out for his slippers, dumped the wriggling things out of them, and rose. Seizing a spray at hand, he sent a shower of boracic acid over the floor and calmly went to the door.

There he paused, with a cold laugh, to listen to the frenzied cries and promises and curses and prayers of the man who dared not leave his cot--and with that Cranshaw slammed the door.

"Damned coward!" he muttered, opening the tantalus on the veranda and pouring himself a drink. "He'll be fool enough to believe me, and be afraid to try rushing from the room--the damned coward! And precisely at two o'clock apoplexy or heart-failure will take him off, and Agnes collects the insurance. Well, I'm satisfied to call quits."

And the soda shot hissing into the glass.

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