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Comet, v. 1, issue 3, May-June 1940
Page 12
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PAGE 12 THE COMET --HORROR'S CELLAR-- night like some haunted thing, and gotten it. Either in the darkness he took a hevier mace than he thought, or the door was more frail than he believed. At any rate, he had crashed into the door, with the log like a battering ram, with every ounce of his strenght. It had given way---and he had plunged headlong down the steps and broken on the bottom of the hard cellar floor. A guilty conscience. But it does not explain why I burned the house to the ground. Down there in the cellar there was dust--dust, lying like a smooth brown carpet on the ground. Dust that hadn't been disturbed, save in a few places, for years. Dust that lay thick except where Morton lay in it; except on the steps, and except in a few other places--where the log had struck the ground, and here and there. But there was no refuting the evidence that dust mutely gave. The places it was disturbed brought forth their testimony. The tale became known to me in full. In the last look with the searchlight I saw something else down there, too. Or rather, it wasn't down there at all---it was at the top of the stairs. As I have said, there is not the slightest chance of refuting the evidence the dust gave out. The marks on the steps, quite distinct from the bare spots where Morton's tumbling body had bounced; the bareness of the ground at certain places near the bottom of the stairs. It all spoke of the truth. For Morton, you see, hadn't broken his neck from losing his balance because the log was sturdier than he'd supposed, or because the door was weaker than he thought. He had broken it by tripping--tripping and falling. And what he had tripped over was what made me rush out to my car, drain all but a little of the gasoline out of the tank, and pour it carefully over the kitchen floor. The thing he had tripped over made me drop a match in the pile of papers under the sink; stand there until it was a blazing inferno no man could stay near and live, and then go home, somehow quite calmly and collectedly. The place burned to the ground that night from an undetermined source, the papers said. The police were puzzled at the finding of two charred skeletons in the place of one. One they knew to be Morton. Never did they learn the identity of the second's--to whom the frame-work of the body had belonged in life. And I was thankful for that. Thankful because of that last thing I had seen back there---that ultimate. And I said, Morton did not die in any manner other than tripping. The thing over which he had tripped was the awful, grinning, putre- Cont on pg. 19
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PAGE 12 THE COMET --HORROR'S CELLAR-- night like some haunted thing, and gotten it. Either in the darkness he took a hevier mace than he thought, or the door was more frail than he believed. At any rate, he had crashed into the door, with the log like a battering ram, with every ounce of his strenght. It had given way---and he had plunged headlong down the steps and broken on the bottom of the hard cellar floor. A guilty conscience. But it does not explain why I burned the house to the ground. Down there in the cellar there was dust--dust, lying like a smooth brown carpet on the ground. Dust that hadn't been disturbed, save in a few places, for years. Dust that lay thick except where Morton lay in it; except on the steps, and except in a few other places--where the log had struck the ground, and here and there. But there was no refuting the evidence that dust mutely gave. The places it was disturbed brought forth their testimony. The tale became known to me in full. In the last look with the searchlight I saw something else down there, too. Or rather, it wasn't down there at all---it was at the top of the stairs. As I have said, there is not the slightest chance of refuting the evidence the dust gave out. The marks on the steps, quite distinct from the bare spots where Morton's tumbling body had bounced; the bareness of the ground at certain places near the bottom of the stairs. It all spoke of the truth. For Morton, you see, hadn't broken his neck from losing his balance because the log was sturdier than he'd supposed, or because the door was weaker than he thought. He had broken it by tripping--tripping and falling. And what he had tripped over was what made me rush out to my car, drain all but a little of the gasoline out of the tank, and pour it carefully over the kitchen floor. The thing he had tripped over made me drop a match in the pile of papers under the sink; stand there until it was a blazing inferno no man could stay near and live, and then go home, somehow quite calmly and collectedly. The place burned to the ground that night from an undetermined source, the papers said. The police were puzzled at the finding of two charred skeletons in the place of one. One they knew to be Morton. Never did they learn the identity of the second's--to whom the frame-work of the body had belonged in life. And I was thankful for that. Thankful because of that last thing I had seen back there---that ultimate. And I said, Morton did not die in any manner other than tripping. The thing over which he had tripped was the awful, grinning, putre- Cont on pg. 19
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