beneath me. The young man slipped from my grasp and made for the door. I endeavored to follow, but I stumbled over something slippery and fell flat upon my face.
When I got up, the young man was gone, and in my hand I held something so weird that I could scarcely believe that it was real, and later I flung it from me with a cry of disgust. It was a reddish, rubbery substance about five inches long, and its under edge was lined with little golden suckers that opened and closed while I stared at them.
I was still laboring under a fearful strain when Harry Morton entered the shop. He was trembling violently, and I noticed that he gazed fearfully behind him as he approached the counter.
“What’s the best thing you have for highfalutin-acting nerves?” he asks.
“Bromides,” I says. “I can mix you some. But what’s the trouble with your nerves, Harry?”
“Hallucinations,” he groans. “Them, and other things.”
“Tell me about it,” I says.
“I was leanin’ ’gainst a lamppost,” he says, “and-1 sees a big lumbering yellowish thing walkin’ along the street like a man. It wasn’t natural, Henry. I’m not superstitious, but that there thing wasn’t natural. And then it flops into the gutter and runs like a streak of lightnin’. It made a funny noise, too. It said ‘Gulp.’ ”
I mixed the bromides and handed him the glass over the counter. “I understand, Harry,” I says. “But don’t go about blowing your head off. No one would believe you.”
I was sitting on the porch knitting when a young man with a bag stops in front of the house and looks up at me. “Good morning, madam,” he says, “have you a room with bath?”
“Look at the sign, young man,” I says to him. “I’ve a nice light room on the second floor that should just suit you.”
Up he comes and smiles at me. But as soon as I saw him close I didn’t like him. He was so terribly thin, and his hand was bandaged, and he looked as if he had been in a fight.
“How much do you want for the room?” he asks.
“Twelve dollars,” I told him. I wanted to get rid of him and I thought the.high rate would scare him off, but his hand goes suddenly into his pocket and he brings out a roll of bills, and begins counting them. I gets up very quickly and bows politely to him and takes his grip away from him, and rushes into the hall with it. I didn’t want to lose a prospect like that. Cousin Hiram has a game which he plays with shells, and I knew that the young man would be Cousin Hiram’s oyster.
I takes him upstairs and shows him the room and he; seems quite pleased with it. But when he sees the bathtub he begins jumping up and down like a schoolboy, and clapping his hands and acting so odd that I begins to suspect that he is going out of his mind. “It’s just the right size!” he shouts. “I hope you won’t mind my keeping it filled all day. I bathe quite often. But I must have some salt to put into it. I can’t bathe in fresh water!”
“He’s certainly a queer one,” I thought, “but I ain’t complaining. It isn’t often, Hiram and I land a fish as rich as this one.”
Finally he calms down and pushes me out of the room. “Everything’s all right,” he says. “But I don’t want to be disturbed. When you get the salt, put it down in the hall and knock on the door. Under no circumstances must anyone enter this room.”
He closed the door in my face and I heard the key grate in the lock. I didn’t like it, and I didn’t like the sounds that began to come from behind that door. First I heard a great sigh as if somehow he had got something disagreeable of? his chest, and then I heard a funny gulping sound that I didn’t like. He didn’t waste any time in turning on the water either. I heard a great splashing and wallowing, and then, after about fifteen minutes, everything became as quiet as death.
We didn’t hear anything more from him until that evening, when I sent Lizzie up with the salt. At first she tried the door, but it was locked, and she was obliged to put the bag down in the hall. But she didn’t go away. She squeezed up close against the wall and waited. After about ten minutes the door opened slowly and a long, thin arm shot out and took in the bag. Lizzie said that the arm was yellow and dripping wet, and the thinnest arm she had ever seen. “But he’s a thin young man, Lizzie,” I explains to her. “That may be,” she says, “but I never saw a human being with an arm like that before!”
Later, along about 10 o’clock I should say, I was sitting in the parlor sewing when I felt something wet land on my hand. I looked up and the ceiling was dripping red. I mean just what I say. The ceiling was all moist and dripping red.
I jumped up and ran out into the hall. I wanted to scream, but I bit my lips until the blood begins running down my chin and that makes me sober and determined. “That young man must go,” I says to myself. “I can’t have anything that isn’t proper going on in this house.”
I climbs the stairs looking as grim as death and pounds on the young man’s door. “I won’t stand for whatever’s going on in there!” I shouted. “Open that door.”
I heard something flopping about inside, and then the young man speaking to himself in a very low voice. “Its demands are insatiable. The vile, hungry beast! Why doesn’t it think of something besides its stomach? I didn’t want it to come then. But it doesn’t need the ray now. When its appetite is aroused it changes without the ray. God, but I had a hard time getting back! Longer and longer between!”
Suddenly he seemed to hear the pounding. 'His queer chattering stops and I hear the key turn in the lock. The door opens ever so slightly and his face looks out at me. He is horrible to look at. His cheeks are sunken and there are big horrid rings under his eyes. There is a bandage tied about his head.
“I want you to leave at once,” I tells him. “There’s queer things going on here and I can’t stand for queer things. You’ve got to leave.”
He sighed and nodded. “It’s just as well perhaps,” he says. “I was thinking of going anyway. There are rats here.”
‘Rats!’ I gasped. But I wasn’t really surprised. I knew there were rats in the house. They made life miserable for me. I was never able to get rid of them. Even the cats feared them.
“I can’t stand rats,” he continues. “I’m packing up — clearing out now.” He shuts the door in my face and I hears him throwing his things into a bag. Then the door opens again and he comes out on the landing. He is terribly pale, and he leans against the wall to catch himself, and then he starts descending the stairs.
I watches him as he goes down, and when he reaches the first landing he staggers and leans against the wall. Then he seems to grow shorter and he goes down the last flight three steps at a time. Then he makes a running leap toward the door. I never saw anyone get through a door so quick, and I begins to suspect that he’s done something that he’s ashamed of.
So I turns about and goes into the room. When I looks at the floor I nearly faints. It’s all slippery and wet, and seven dead rats are lying on their backs in the center of the room. And they are the palest-looking rats I’ve ever seen. Their noses and tails are pure white and they looks as if they didn’t have a drop of blood in them. And then I goes into the alcove and looks at the bathtub. I won’t tell you what I see there. But you remember what I says about the ceiling downstairs? I says it was dripping red, and the alcove wasn’t so very different.
I gets out of that room as quick as I can, and I shuts and locks the door; and then I goes downstairs and telephones to Cousin Hiram. “Come right over, Hiram,” I says. “Something^ terrible has been here!”
I was pretty well done up. I’d been polishing the lamps all afternoon, and there were calluses on my hands as big as hen’s eggs. I went up into the tower and shut myself in and got out a book that I’d been reading off and on for a week. It was a translation of the Arabian Nights- by a fellow named Lang. Imaginative stuff like that is a great comfort to a chap when he’s shut up by himself away off on the rim of the world, and I always enjoyed reading about Schemselnihar and Deryabar and the young King of the Black Isles.
I was reading the first part of The King of the Black Isles and had reached the sentence: “And then the youth drew away his robe and the Sultan perceived with horror that he was a man only to his waist, and from thence to his feet he had been changed into marble,” when I happened to look toward the window.
An icy south wind was driving the rain furiously against the panes, and at first I saw nothing but a translucent glitter on the wet glass and vaguely beyond that the gleaming turmoil of dark, enormous waves. Then a dazzling and indescribable shape flattened itself against the window and blotted out the black sea and sky. I gasped and jumped up.
“A monstrous squid!” I muttered. “The storm must have blown it ashore. That tentacle will smash the glass
