Page:Weird Tales Volume 02 Number 2 (1937-02).djvu/54
of payment—and my God—look! Look! The Fiend has claimed his own!"
I looked, frozen with horror. Flames had enveloped the whole house with appalling swiftness, and now the great mass was etched against the shadowed sky, a crimson inferno. And above the holocaust hovered a gigantic black shadow like a monstrous bat, and from its dark clutch dangled a small white thing, like the body of a man, dangling limply. Then, even as we cried out in horror, it was gone and our dazed gaze met only the shuddering walls and blazing roof which crumpled into the flames with an earth-shaking roar.
The Vaunsburg Plague
By JULIUS LONG
Overnight it struck, that dread ray which turned vigorous young men and women into doddering, senile creatures in a few seconds—and lured a great European Dictator to the U. S. to use the ray for his own purposes
I am only a lawyer, not a scientist, and when the first news of the scourge at Vaunsburg broke upon the world, my reaction was precisely that of any layman. I was frightened. The thing which had happened in Vaunsburg might occur anywhere else. The complete inability of science to discover its origin, the wholesale failure to comprehend the nature of the disease, brought a feeling of abject helplessness to all mankind. Humanity in the face of this catastrophe could not deny that the thing men fear most is not death, nor pain, nor loss of loved ones, but simply old age.
Nothing could be more appalling than the sudden, overnight transformation of a normal city of twenty thousand into a city of the aged. When this happened in Vaunsburg, the world was stunned. It tried not to believe, to discredit the reports. But the thousands of withered and aged victims who streamed dazedly from the doomed city were horrible exhibits in proof that the thing was actually true.
Whole families of these miserable unfortunates tottered about the countryside in search of food and drink, only to be turned empty-handed from door to door. Ignorance of the nature of the disease, of course, was responsible for this inhumanity. It was not then realized that the plague was non-contagious, that it might be acquired only within the confines of the city of Vaunsburg. This fact was soon made manifest by the fate of those daring investigators of science and the press who went into the city in search of facts. One and all these men came away mutilated by age, victims of the senile sickness that claimed their minds and bodies within an hour after their inhabitation of the dread city.
Many of the foremost scientific minds of our time were sacrificed in this futile search for the genesis of the plague. Scientists found their brains enfeebled, their memories destroyed by senile de-