Page:Weird Tales Volume 12 Issue 05 (1928-11).djvu/96

from way up, anyway, whatever it is," he added with conviction.

"How about a flying-machine, then?" observed his friend hopefully.

"This wasn't all that size," countered Bill, still slightly nettled by the summary rejection of his thunderbolt. "But say! it might be a guy—a birdman—dropped out of his machine. Gee! maybe come down miles and miles! Gosh!" and he ceased as the profundity of that presumed descent gripped him.

"Flying-men don't fall out—they're strapped in, ain't they?" said Joe diffidently, his temperamental skepticism more than a little shaken by the nerve-racking phenomenon. "But—Lord! if it is a guy come down, he’ll be a sight!" he added in an awestruck mutter.

The two men stared at each other in sudden fear. They realized that the terrible final thud had been sickeningly suggestive of something limp, inert, and compressible; imagination completed the picture and speculation abruptly ceased.

"Say, Bill!" said the tall man hoarsely. "We got to go in there." He nodded toward the fringing bush.

"Yep, I guess so; I ain't stuck on it, though," replied Bill with a catch in his voice. "Come on!" he added with querulous impatience.

Now that the matter had assumed such a significant aspect, their course, distasteful though it might be, was quite clear. And it augurs well for the future of our race that two very ordinary individuals such as these, whose lives from boyhood had been devoted to a pursuit of the slippery dollar rolling between the purchase and disposal of second-hand furniture and personal effects, should so instantly and simply obey the dictates of our common humanity. Naturally their vocation carried them far afield, and to this fact—and a lately deceased farmer—they owed their introduction to the little fishing-village of Lytham, Maine, and the after-supper stroll that had been interrupted so rudely.

At once the two men entered the scrub, and for a little they cast about like a couple of sedate retrievers in search of their objective. Then they came upon it, resting in a little open space tunneled by the shattering of stems and the stripping of limbs from a stouter and taller growth that chanced here to rear a spearlike crest as though to mark the horror at its base.

"My God, Joe! What's this? Reckon he's dead—don't you?" exclaimed Bill in an awed whisper.

"Yep, it's awful! I ain't going no closer," said Joe hastily, then paused and admitted reluctantly, "though I guess we should make certain."

Assuredly death had come in no gracious mood to the poor broken thing they gazed upon. For the man's body was smashed and twisted most horribly and lay in a huddled heap amid the splintered boughs of the tall tree and the crushed shrubbery. Limbs were hinged strangely and repulsively at places where joints are normally absent, and the face was merely a mass of shapeless pulp through which the jagged end of a shattered bough projected. Apart from total disintegration it was hard to conceive of a human frame more completely devastated; it was only too visibly obvious that every bone in the dead man's body was broken and the flesh either gashed, or stripped, or perforated in a score of places.

For a moment the two men stood staring in awed and commiserating silence at the terrible thing, and no further word was uttered concerning a closer investigation. Then the taller man shivered a little and said harshly, "Say, we'd better beat it back and tell the folks in the village."

And at once, stepping softly as though they would conceal their