Page:Weird Tales Volume 12 Issue 06 (1928-12).djvu/52

north as soon as the small boat had been picked up. The Bemis immediately radioed the facts to the United States naval authorities, and three destroyers were dispatched in pursuit. Ten days later, two of the flotilla, consisting of the Preble and the Ordway, sighted the Narcissus steaming at full speed in the general direction of Bakelief Island, one of the last of the rocky protuberances which make up the Aleutian Islands. At this moment the Narcissus made the third point of a triangle consisting of herself and the two destroyers. These last immediately closed in, forcing the yacht to shift her course straight for Bakelief. Escape seemed impossible. The Preble ordered the yacht to heave to, and on her failure to do so, hurled a three-inch shell across her bows. At this moment one of the dense fogs so characteristic of these latitudes blanketed the Narcissus from view. When it lifted a few moments later, the yacht had disappeared.

The flotilla combed that section of the North Pacific for three succeeding weeks. Although their search was so thorough that scarcely a floating chip could have escaped, the Narcissus had vanished.

Eighty-six years later, on an afternoon in May in the year 2014, the coast guard cutter Sitka was steaming eastward just south of Bakelief Island. There were fogs as usual. Suddenly out of the murk to leeward in the pan of gray sea which lay between the Sitka and Bakelief Island a ship appeared. So near was she and so sudden her appearance that the startled lookout in the cutter's crow's-nest was too paralyzed with apprehension to shout a warning. The quartermaster, however, saw the ship almost as soon as did the lookout and jammed the wheel hard down. The Sitka swerved sharply to port, hoping to avoid the blow, but the distance between the two vessels was too short and the sharp prow of the cutter tore into the stranger.

And yet, instead of the ripping crash of rending plates and splintering timbers, there came no sound save the pulsing throb of the Sitka's engines! The ship which should have been rammed and sinking by that time steamed on, the officers on her bridge apparently paying not the least attention.

The Sitka, according to all the known laws of distance, should have rammed her just abaft the funnels. And yet, somehow, in a way those on the deck of the Sitka could never explain, the stranger pushed on and a moment later was lost in the fog.

The incident was put down in naval annals as a trick of the atmosphere, visibility in those latitudes often playing queer pranks on the mariners. And so it remained. But the man in the crow's-nest and the quartermaster at the wheel of the Sitka swore until their dying day that as the phantom ship steamed out of their path they read in plain gold letters across her stern the name: Narcissus. And they maintained, too, that looking back at the time they saw no wrake behind her. But the Narcissus was never seen again.

In the year 2014, exactly three days before the incident of the Sitka and the phantom ship, a man in his late twenties, going by the name of Ralph Hearne, was riding in the Lexington Avenue subway in New York City. The car was not so crowded at the time but that he was able to hold his newspaper unfolded before him as he read, and so in this manner his left hand had come within the vision of the traveler beside him. This was a heavily built man of middle age with a long, narrow face made longer by a pointed gray imperial which in its turn seemed to enhance the thin, aquiline nose and the curiously shaped ears, lobeless at the bottom and running to a point at the top. At