CHAPTER XVIII
THE SUPREME QUESTION
Now that his course lay clear before him, the man felt aninstant and a huge relief. Whatever the risks, the dangers, thisadventuring was better than a mere inaction, besieged there in thetower by that ugly, misshapen horde.
First of all, as he had done on the first morning of the awakening,when he had left the girl asleep, he wrote a brief communication toforestall any possible alarm on her part. This, scrawled with charcoalon a piece of smooth hide, ran:
"Have had to go down to get water and lay of the land. Absolutelynecessary. Don't be afraid. Am between you and them, well armed. Willleave you both the rifle and the shotgun. Stay here, and have no fear.Will come back as soon as possible. ALLAN."
He laid this primitive letter where, on awakening, she could not failto see it. Then, making sure again that all the arms were fullycharged, he put the rifle and the gun close beside his "note," and sawto it that his revolvers lay loosely and conveniently in the holstersshe had made for him.
One more reconnaissance he made at the front window. This done, hetook the water-pail and set off quietly down the stairs. His feet werenoiseless as a cat's.
At every landing he stopped, listening intently. Down, ever down,story by story he crept.
To his chagrin--though he had half expected worse--he found that theboiler-explosion of the previous night had really made the wayimpassible, from the third story downward. These lowest flights ofsteps had been so badly broken, that now they gave no access to thearcade.
All that remained of them was a jumbled mass of wreckage, below thegaping hole in the third-floor hallway.
"_That_ means," said Stern to himself, "I've got to find another waydown. And quick, too!"
He set about the task with a will. Exploration of several lateralcorridors resulted in nothing; but at last good fortune led him tostairs that had remained comparatively uninjured. And down these hestole, pail in one hand, revolver ready in the other, listening,creeping, every sense alert.
He found himself, at length, in the shattered and dismembered wreckageof the once-famed "Marble Court." Fallen now were the carved andgilded pillars; gone, save here or there for a fragment, the wondrousbalustrade. One of the huge newel-posts at the bottom lay on thecracked floor of marble squares; the other, its metal chandelier stillclinging to it, lolled drunkenly askew.
But Stern had neither time nor inclination to observe these wofulchanges. Instead, he pressed still forward, and, after a certain timeof effort, found himself in the arcade once more.
Here the effects of the explosion were very marked. A ghastly holeopened into the subcellar below; masses of fallen ceiling blocked theway; and every pane of glass in the shop-fronts had shattered down.Smoke had blackened everything. Ashes and dirt, ad infinitum,completed the dreary picture, seen there by the still insufficientlight of morning.
But Stern cared nothing for all this. It even cheered him a trifle.
"In case of a mix-up," thought he, "there couldn't be a better placefor ambushing these infernal cannibals--for mowing them down,wholesale--for sending them skyhooting to Tophet, in bunches!"
And with a grim smile, he worked his way cautiously toward MadisonForest and the pine-tree gate.
As he drew near, his care redoubled. His grip on the revolver-butttightened.
"They mustn't see me--_first!_" said he to himself.
Into a littered wreck of an office at the right of the exit hesilently crept. Here, he knew, the outer wall of the building wasdeeply fissured. He hoped he might be able to find some peep-holewhere, unseen, he could peer out on the bestial mob.
He set his water-pail down, and on hands and knees, hardly breathing,taking infinite pains not to stir the loose rubbish on the floor, noteven to crunch the fallen lumps of mortar, forward he crawled.
Yes, there _was_ a glimmer of light through the crack in the wall.Stern silently wormed in between a corroded steel I-beam and a crackedgranite block, about the edges of which the small green tendrils of avine had laid their hold.
This way, then that, he craned his neck. And all at once, with a sharpbreath, he grew rigid in horrified, eager attention.
"Great Lord!" he whispered. "_What?_"
Though, from the upper stories and by torch-light, he had alreadyformed some notion of the Horde, he had in no wise been prepared forwhat he now was actually beholding through a screen of sumacs thatgrew along the wall outside.
"Why--why, this can't be real!" thought he. "It--must be some damnedhallucination. Eh? Am I awake? What the deuce!"
Paling a little, his eyes staring, mouth agape, the engineer stayedthere for a long minute unable to credit his own senses. For now he,he, the only white man living in the twenty-eighth century, waswitnessing the strangest sight that ever a civilized being had lookedupon in the whole history of the world.
No vision of DeQuincey, no drug-born dream of Poe could equal it forgrisly fascination. Frankenstein, de Maupassant's "Horla," all thefantastic literary monsters of the past faded to tawdry, childishbogeys beside the actual observations of Stern, the engineer, the manof science and cold fact.
"Why--what _are_ these?" he asked himself, shuddering despite himselfat the mere sight of what lay outside there in the forest. "What? Men?Animals? Neither! God help me, what--_what are these things?_"