Page:Weird Tales v15n01 1930-01.djvu/65
ror was the same, as Worley indeed points out.
This Edward Worley figures unconsciously in his own narrative as a somewhat commonplace individual, a middle-aged person, the greater part of whose days had been spent in the adding and subtracting of figures in a Broad Street broker's office. To avoid crowded subways, as he tells us, Worley had taken rooms in one of the narrow lodging-houses jammed in here and there east of the financial section, at Manhattan's lower extremity. It was this fact that conspired with circumstances to project Worley into the very heart of the terror's first coming. For, a half-hour before midnight on that fateful night of the 27th, he had decided that a short stroll through the warm spring air would be a pleasant one, and his steps had led him southward toward the Battery's little open park.
It was an hour, that just before midnight, when the southern end of that great island-mass of structures that is New York lies beneath a silence and a loneliness supernatural, almost. So it seemed to Worley, at least, strolling southward in the warm spring night through the silent streets, from one pool of corner lamplight to another, between the towering, vast buildings that loomed into the darkness on either side. Those buildings, the center of unparalleled activity in the hours of day, lay as silent beneath the white spring stars as though they were the still unbroken ruins of some mighty, deserted city. Northward, from the midtown section, a glow of light against the sky told of the life that still surged through the crowded streets there, but Worley, strolling on, met none save an occasional policeman who eyed him keenly beneath the corner lights. Then within moments more puffs of fresh salt air came to his nostrils, and he was passing out between the last of the great buildings, out beneath the looming tracks of the elevated and into the silent little park.
As Worley tells it, he had strolled half-way across the darkened park, toward its southern sea-wall's rail, before he sensed that anything unusual lay before him. The gleaming waters stretching out into the darkness, the gliding lights of small craft here and there upon them, the other far-flung blinking lights of Brooklyn and the Jersey cities, away to left and to right—these were all that engrossed his attention in those first moments. Then, as he drew within yards of the southern rail, he stopped abruptly short. He had glimpsed, suddenly, a great glistening wet mass that lay at the sea-wall's edge, ahead of him, and that seemed to be slowly moving.
"It was," he says, "just as though someone had dumped a great mass of glistening gelatin at the park's edge, wet and gleaming there in the light of the few scattered bulbs about me. All along the park's edge, along its sea-wall, that glistening mass stretched, hanging down over the wall into the lapping sea-waters, and as the stuff seemed slowly moving I thought it for that moment to be pouring down into the sea beneath. Then as I stood there, gazing at that smooth-flowing movement of the gleaming stuff, I saw something that made me rub my eyes in amazement. The glistening masses were not flowing down into the sea at all, I saw, but instead were flowing up from it!"
For a moment of utter astonishment Worley stood still, gazing toward the stuff. A gray, glistening mass, it was pouring slowly and smoothly up over the wall's edge, from the sea beneath, flowing steadily up onto the surface of the park and adding to the great, gleaming mass of the stuff that lay already all around that park's sea-edge! The thing was unprecedented; it was incredible, and for a moment that seemed unending to Worley, he stared toward those shining, gath-