Page:Weird Tales v41n04 (1949-05).djvu/6

Experience with madmen seem commonplace, judging by the daily press, but an individual case among one's own acquaintance is less easy to come upon. The "mad experimentalists" dear both to the hearts of Hollywood Grade-B movie producers and the writers of thrill-fiction are, happily for the general populace, something of a rarity.

George Pelgrim of the Gazette and one of that newspaper's ablest and most discerning reporters, was well aware that, in this instance, he had a sensational and bona fide case of the kind that would abash even some of the most colorful writers of lurid make-believe. The adventures that Pelgrim had just had with the Damp Man, that fabulous, beyond-normal, "unhuman," the living testimony of an experiment which should never have been undertaken, had stimulated the young reporter’s mind to a degree that made the "taboo” attitude on the story from his City Desk hard to take.

The Damp Man, Lother Remsdorf, Jr., now no more, Pelgrim mused as he sat in the huge old house at View Cliffs overlooking the sea, was an explosive subject. The man himself, even if not that in the true sense biologically, had borne a name that meant both wealth and power. Enough wealth and power to squash not only a relatively insignificant reporter like Pelgrim, but also any paper, however large and influential, that stood behind him.

A sample of this that still loomed large in George's mind was the memory of the fact, incredible but true, that Remsdorf, to suit his purposes at the end of their recent duel, had even bought Pelgrim's paper, the Gazette. A man who would go to such extremes to further some small phase of his outlandish plans was, of course, not sane.

Remsdorf had not been sane any more than he'd been normal. A man of strange, peculiar content, his body filled with an outlandish physiological proportion of water; immune to many of the menaces from which the average flesh cringes, for a well-aimed bullet or knife-thrust—an open door for the letting of the life's blood of any other individual—was merely as a gnat's bite to Remsdorf. The man had no blood in the medical man's sense of the word, but merely a watery, colorless substance. His vital organs, despite the immense size of him, were compressed arid hidden away within the fluid-fat monstrousness of the creature.

There was a brain that could guide the senses, the sight and hearing and speech, and it could think with a cunning that far exceeded the average. Lother Remsdorf, Jr.'s obsession was the obsession that is often peculiarly the part of the abnormal. In his awful abnormality,, with its connotations of inferiority, he will develop a philosophy that finally accepts the certitude that the inferiority, the "difference" is, in reality, a vast superiority.

It was Lother Remsdorf's undying obsession, his destiny, that he would found a new race that drove him along strange paths and by-ways, into actions of both criminal and murderous intent. The fact that he chanced upon Linda Mallory, the blonde swimmer of statuesque beauty, was undoubtedly coincidence, but with this aquatic star, Remsdorf's dream of a new racial empire flourished. The girl's feelings concerning his sinister advances mattered not one whit, and