He sat on the stool next to me and looked attentively at me.
'You got troubles?' I asked rudely.
Rankin smiled. 'Yes, I’m out to find a helper.'
'Oh, yeah?' I asked, becoming interested. 'You mean you want to hire somebody?'
'Yes.'
''Well, I’m your man.'
He started to say something and then changed his mind.
'Let’s go over to a booth and talk it over, shall we?'
We walked over to a booth and I realized that I was listing slightly. Rankin pulled the curtain.
'That’s better. Now, you want a job?'
I nodded.
'Do you care what it is?'
'No. Just how much does it pay?'
'Five hundred a job.'
I lost a little bit of the rosy fog that encased me. Something was wrong here. I didn’t like the way he used the word 'job'.
'Who do I have to kill?' I asked with a humorless smile.
'You don’t’. But before I can tell you what it is, you’ll have to talk with Mister Weinbaum.'
'Who’s he?'
'A – scientist.'
More fog evaporated. I got up.
'Uh-uh. No making a human guinea pig out of yours truly. Get yourself another boy.'
'Don’t be silly,' he said, 'No harm will come to you.'
Against my better judgement, I said, 'Okay, let’s go.'
CHAPTER 3
Weinbaum approached the subject of my duties after a tour of the house, including the laboratory. He wore a white smock and there was something about him that made me crawl inside. He sat down in the living room and motioned me into a seat. Rankin had disappeared. Weinbaum stared at me with fixed eyes and once again I felt a blast of icy coldness sweep over me.
'I’ll put it to you bluntly,' he said, 'my experiments are too complicated to explain in any detail, but they concern human flesh. Dead human flesh.'
I was becoming intensely aware that his eyes burnt with flickering fires. He looked like a spider ready to engulf a fly, and this whole house was his web. The sun was striking fire to the west and deep pools of shadows were spreading across the room, hiding his face, but leaving the glittering eyes as they shifted in the creeping darkness.
He was still speaking. 'Often, people bequeath their bodies to scientific institutes for study. Unfortunately, I’m only one man, so I have to resort to other methods.'
Horror leapt grinning from the shadows and across my mind there flitted the black picture of two men digging by the light of an uncertain moon. A shovel struck wood – the noise chilled my soul. I rose quickly.
'I think I can find my own way out, Mr. Weinbaum.'
He laughed softly. 'Did Rankin tell you how much this job pays?'
'I’m not interested.'
'Too bad. I was hoping you could see it my way. It wouldn’t take a year before you would make enough money to return to college.'
I started, and got the uncanny feeling that this man was searching my soul.
'How much do you know about me? How did you find out?'
'I have my ways.' He chuckled again. 'Will you reconsider?'
I hesitated.
'Shall we put it on a trial basis?' he asked softly. 'I'm quite sure that we can both reach a mutual satisfaction.'
I got the eerie feeling that I was talking to the devil himself, that somehow I had been tricked into selling my soul.
'Be here at 8.00 sharp, the night after next,' he said.
That was how it started.
As Rankin and I laid the sheeted body of Daniel Whetherby on the lab table, lights flashed on behind sheeted oblongs that looked like glass tanks.
'Weinbaum –' I had dropped the title, Mister, without thinking, 'I think –'
'Did you say something?' he asked, his eyes boring into mine. The laboratory seemed far away. There were only the two of us, sliding through a half-world peopled with horrors beyond the imagination.
