Page:Weird Tales Volume 12 Issue 05 (1928-11).djvu/109

One shrinks appalled at the thought of their size, their powers and their immunity from detection.

"This new science of aviation? Why, one of those brutes could overwhelm a Zeppelin, and in a moment cast it a flaming heap of junk to destruction; and a dozen could clear the skies of every flying-machine the world could gather together, and make of aviation just another term for certain suicide. For how can one combat a creature that with the speed of a falling stone comes out of nothingness invisible until the darkness of death is smothering you?

"What this creature is I have no notion, whether a single survival of our planet's early abortions, or a type evolved in comparatively recent times, along a line and in an environment we, from inability to explore, have never thought of; these are enigmas that only research and further evidence can elucidate. All I know to a certainty is that my sense of peace and security has vanished for ever; the nature I have been wedded to, the lonely loveliness I have loved, now all is profitless—it is abhorrent! For what I have seen will dog my memory to my last day."

Such, deleting a few repetitions, was the narrative of Richard Messinger, and in the main is the extent of our knowledge today of the creature that popular misconception has christened "The Flying Death." For as yet no fresh witness has arisen to affirm or deny the particulars he has given.

Speculations, learned treatises, and discursive theories exist by the dozen, proving that the monster is mentioned allegorically in the Bible, or was known to the Chinese before Confucius, or has no existence—are there not persons who affirm that the world is flat and ignore the certain evidence to the contrary?

But the world has no doubt that this thing exists—a nightmare that can prey on humanity with the ease and impunity of a cat catching mice. For, immersed in alcohol in a glass jar in the great Metropolitan Museum, there lies one item of incontrovertible evidence of the creature's unique and terrorizing ability to destroy as it will and when it lists. And marveling crowds daily read the inscription beneath it.

Thus preserved for perpetuity lies a fragment, a mere strip—though originally somewhat larger, the vandals of science having wrought on it—the size of one’s middle finger, that Messinger’s pick had torn from the monster. In this liquid it looks exactly like a greasy, saturated sponge, of the coarse, dark-hued variety used in garages and for window cleaning. It was salvaged by a farmhand, who early on the spot the following morning had disturbed a horde of gulls which were screaming and squabbling on the sands above high water. Just in the nick of time he arrived to secure this morsel, the last of a banquet the feasters had been enjoying; consumed with the glory of his discovery he had straightway sought the authorities and turned it over, and finding his name mispelt in the papers had felt amply rewarded.

Lengthy and exhaustive examination of this fragment has resulted in some startling conclusions about the interior economy of its former owner, and its marvelous adaptation to altitudes so vast that the most daring aviator has never more than touched their fringe. We know for a certainty that its substance is as light and strong as a feather, elastic, and permeated by innumerable tiny cells, miniature bladders void of contents, connecting one with another by a network of small channels.

Primarily it was conceived that as with some species of fish these empty containers might be used for the storage of air to render the brute