Page:Weird Tales Volume 12 Issue 05 (1928-11).djvu/101
ness of the extravasation was an anomaly to science, the tissues being disrupted in the selfsame violent manner, and every exposed surface of epidermis betraying a like eruptive disfigurement. Though the body was otherwise not mutilated, the examination was unhindered by the shocking maceration that Symington’s corpse had suffered. In spite of this the verdict was identical: "Murder! but no evidence of how, or by whom committed."
Again the great presses roared in their pangs of conceiving columns that dripped with adjectives and horror; and staider prints admitted frankly that the tragedy had really happened, and in them learned men penned articles that meandered through the dictionary, and seemed very wise and conclusive, but left the reader wondering what it was all about, yet oddly comforted that such men lived to deal with these ghastly enigmas as coolly and confidently as though the solution were concealed in tomes of algebra or differential calculus.
But the great public, whose emotions feed on simpler diet, just wondered, and thrilled with the horror of that strange, pitiless slaying, and throbbed with pity for an old, broken-hearted man mourning his only child; yet, lacking fuel to keep alight the gracious fire of sympathy, it shortly expired, just as reports of vast calamities in foreign lands flame dazzlingly for a moment in our mental firmament, then flicker and vanish as another star leaps above the horizon and outlives its predecessor.
Probably sooner or later there would have been other victims, and by chance some terror-stricken witness to afford humanity the first inkling of the gravest peril that has ever beset it. But it so happened that Philip Daimler, the talented painter, and his friend Richard Messinger, the well known curator of the geological section of the Jackson Institute, were the first to solve the mystery of the two terrible slayings, and in detail render an account of the fearful assailant—a relation that left humanity gasping and bewildered as we realized our impotence to combat the menace that now must be reckoned with. In a twinkling it had thrust our species back a hundred thousand years, to days when the survival of our hirsute ancestors trembled in the balance and only by a miracle escaped from the chaos of ravening monsters to become the dominant masters of their destiny. But now as well, or better, might we plan to clear the black depths of the oceans of the monstrous octopi that lurk a hundred fathoms below the surface invincible in their murky kingdom and calmly awaiting the diving leviathans or foundered floating palaces to appease their gargantuan appetites.
It might have been better had we never learnt the truth, never awakened to the fact that after all our thousands of years of striving, ceaseless war with ruthless creatures, pride of victory and attainment, after all we are not the lords of creation, and though in no danger of a world-wide catastrophe, yet neither science, police, nor politics can guarantee protection in the future to the individual. Now the serene cerulean dome has lost its divinity, for we know that merciless malignancy is hidden in its profundity; and the seductive peace of the green country, the charm of solitude, must forever be haunted by the dread of impending tragedy. Only surrounded by our fellows or with walls enclosing us can we know the security that once we lightly deemed our heritage.
The relation of their terrible experience is perhaps more vitally descriptive in the simple words of Messinger rather than the later careful summaries by the learned of the mere facts shorn of their emotional