The Doomsman

  VIII

  IN THE SHADOW OF DOOM

  An hour wore on, and Constans was approaching the suburbs of the ancientmunicipality. But it did not suit his purpose to make a landing here.His plan was to reach the lower end of the island upon which the citywas built, then to work his way northward on foot until he shoulddiscover the innermost citadel of the Doomsmen. To get a fair idea ofhis task, he proposed to ascend one of the immensely high buildingswhich stood crowded together in the down-town district. From such avantage-point he could surely fix upon landmarks for his future guidancein penetrating the labyrinth of streets. It would not be a pleasantexperience to lose one's way, and, perhaps, stumble by mistake on MasterQuinton Edge's front door.

  Now, as Constans travelled onward, the ruined city began to grow uponhim in ever heavier and darker mass. Here and there a half-demolishedchurch-spire raised itself above the neighboring roof-line; plainly thishad been one of the old-time residential sections and of the betterclass. Still farther down the stream and the water-front stood crowdedthickly with wharves and warehouses, the scene of the mighty commerce ofthe past. The ships themselves were there, great monsters of iron andsteel, scaled and honeycombed with red rust. But the wharf-slips hadlong since silted up, and the vessels, careening little by little withthe subsidence of the water, had finally broken away from therestraining hawsers and lay on their beam-ends in the mud, a sorrowfulspectacle.

  The moon was rising and it was time to go ashore. Accordingly, hedirected his course for a pier that extended somewhat farther than itsfellows into the stream. There was just water enough to float the canoewithin arm's-length of the girders--a fortunate circumstance, sinceConstans had not liked the idea of trusting himself upon thetreacherous-looking mud-flat left uncovered by the ebbing tide. Securingthe boat under shadow of the structure, he took his hunting-knife andbasket of provisions and climbed easily to the floor of the pier, thenpicking his way across its broken planking he reached solid ground. Atlast he stood within Doom the Forbidden.

  Now this street, which ran parallel with the river, was of unusualwidth, and Constans crossed it quickly, seeking for cover in somenarrower and darker thoroughfare. A cross-street opened directly infront of him. He plunged into it without hesitation, for the moonlightwas now in full flood and there might be sharp eyes about.

  In the open spaces along the water-front grass grew thick and tall as ina meadow, but in this narrow, crooked lane the wholesomer, sun-lovingplants found little encouragement to existence. In their stead,pale-colored creepers mantled the house walls, and everywhere were mossstains and the spore of the various fungoid growths. Constans'sfootsteps fell hollowly upon the pavement slippery with weed and theAugust damp, and as he walked along an unearthly radiance suddenlyilluminated his path; from every cornice and eaves-end hung balls of thepale St. Elmo's fire; not a house but boasted its array ofcorpse-candles that flickered with a greenish flame.

  A terrifying sight, but harmless. Far more dangerous, could he haveknown it, were the invisible but deadly gases from the century-oldcorruption that rose to meet him and were unconsciously inhaled. Then,as the fumes mounted to his brain, sober reason was ousted from herthrone and imagination rioted unchecked, peopling the void with horrorsand ineffectual phantoms. From the sashless windows grotesque facesstared down upon him, scowling malignantly, while others, with stillmore hideous smile, invited him to enter and become one of theirdreadful company. Insane laughter re-echoed in his ears, and the musicof lutes, irresistible in its languor-compelling potency. Already hadConstans stopped twice to listen, and upon each occasion he had beenobliged to exercise all his failing strength of body and mind to resumehis forward march. If he halted again it would be forever; of that hefelt perfectly assured, but neither the imminence nor the character ofthe peril in which he stood seemed sufficient to arouse him from hislethargy. Yet he kept on, walking with the shuffling stride of amechanical doll; now he wavered and hesitated, as though the propellingspring had wellnigh run down. The night reek, hot and damp, hung like apoisoned veil upon his mouth and lips; he could not breathe; he gaspedand threw up one arm as does a swimmer who looks his last upon apitiless sun and sky.

  The wind had risen with the moon; it had been growing in strength, andnow a strong gust rattled among the chimney-pots. One fell with a crash,and a tiny fragment of brick struck Constans on the check, cutting theskin. The shock and the trickle of blood brought him to with a sharpshock; he ran forward a few steps and found himself sinking. The roadwayimmediately in front of him had doubtless been undermined by the actionof water; for the space of a dozen yards or more the pavement was but ashell concealing an abyss.

  Constans had already proceeded too far for retreat; he must go on orfounder where he stood. He flung himself forward, the oblong blocks ofgranite, with which the street was paved, grinding together underneathhis feet as the mass yielded to the downward pressure. He was sucked into his knees, but instinctively he kept the upper part of his bodyextended horizontally, his out-stretched hand seeking for some chanceholdfast. Then, as he was beginning to despair, he found it, a sectionof small diameter lead piping that had been uncovered by the breakingaway of the surrounding earth. It bent under his clutch but did not giveway. With one last effort he pulled himself clear, gained the firmground beyond, and lay there trembling.

  When afterwards he came to reason soberly over the adventure, theconclusion seemed obvious that the pitfall had been a consequent uponthe breaking out of one of the ancient springs, so that the water, inendeavoring to find an outlet, had finally undermined the wholeroadway. The chasm, as he looked back upon it, extended dear across thestreet. Its depth was only conjectural, but the mass presented thetreacherous appearance of quaking sand, and Constans shuddered as hegazed. Yet he had escaped; the peril was past; let him forget what wasbehind and press forward.

  Half a block farther on and he found himself in a cul-de-sac. The streetwas filled from house-wall to house-wall with an immense mass of brokenstone, brick, and other debris. The cause was not far to seek.

  Immediately upon the left rose one of the fabulously high buildings forwhich the ancient city had been famous. It could not compare inmagnitude with the tremendous structures that he could discern stillfarther ahead, but its dozen and a half of stories loomed up imposinglywhen contrasted with the moderate sized houses adjoining it. Constanslooked up in wonder at its towering facade, then started back with anexclamation of alarm.

  It appeared that the foundations of the structure had in some way becomeweakened, for the whole building had settled and was leaning over at aterrifying divergence from the perpendicular. Being constructed of irontruss-work similar to that of a bridge, the essential framework stillheld together, but the outside walls, mere shells of stone and brick,had cracked and given way under the strain, falling piece-meal into thestreet below. Even as he looked, a stone dropped from a window pedimentand crashed into splinters on the pavement a few yards beyond where hestood. The angle of inclination seemed to grow larger as he gazed atit; the enormous mass poised itself above him, monstrous, informed,threatening to strike.

  With that uncomfortable contraction of the scalp-skin that attends uponthe sudden presence of peril, Constans backed hastily away; not forworlds would he have ventured again under that overhang of artificialcliff. Yet behind him was the stretch of sunken pavement; he could notrisk another passage of that. A single alternative remained--to enterone of the small houses that lined the street, ascend to its roof, andso escape to the nearest cross thoroughfare.

  With a sigh of relief, Constans threw open the scuttle and climbed outupon the leads. He had entered at random one of the mean-lookingedifices that hemmed him in at the right and left, and it was pleasantto escape from the close atmosphere of its long-unused staircases andcorridors. Apparently the house had been occupied as a tenement in theancient time; the marks of its degradation had survived the universaldecay, and there was even a fetid suggestion in the air of old-timesqualor and disease. Glad he was to be fr
ee of it all, and he let thescuttle fall to with a bang.

  After surveying the different routes as best he could, Constansdetermined to work his way to the southward. He took one forward stepand stood transfixed; from below then came a faint but unmistakable tap,tap upon the closed scuttle. The bare suspicion that there could be someliving thing in that hideous interior, that it was appealing to him foraid, made him physically sick. But better to meet any horror face toface than to wrestle longer with the invisible presence of Fear; hethrew aside the hatch, and a big white owl flew out, its wing grazinghis face. He could have shouted aloud, so nakedly had his nerves beenlaid bare in the last quarter of an hour; then setting his teeth hard hetook hold of himself and laughed at his own vaporing. The worst was overnow; he was sure of that, and so again took courage.

  It was an easy matter to pass from one connecting roof to another, andthereafter down a fire-escape to the side street. A few steps took himround the corner and into a wide thoroughfare leading directly to themore important business quarter.

  Constans looked about him in wonderment. The high buildings stoodshoulder to shoulder, hemming him in on every side; the street itselfwas but a fissure in a mountain-range. The moon had now risen high inthe heavens, and her beams performed odd tricks of shadow play as theydanced through these colossal halls of emptiness and silence. Nothingseemed real or substantial; these enormous masses of masonry and ironlooked almost dreamlike, the ghosts of a forgotten past, shadows thatmust surely vanish with the morning sun.

  To sober his imagination, Constans began counting the number of storiesin a sky-scraper that reared its monstrous bulk directly in front ofhim. Thirty-six in all, and so higher by half a dozen floors than any ofits neighbors. It should make an excellent observatory, and hedetermined upon exploring it.

  "CONSTANS LOOKED ABOUT HIM IN WONDERMENT"]

  The street doors stood wide open, and the entrance-way was half blockedup by piles of dust and other refuse blown in from the street by thewinter storms. On the left, as one entered, was the principal suite ofoffices; it had been occupied by a banking firm, to judge from thedesk fittings and the long array of safes and vaults. These latter wereopen and empty, the doors having been shattered by some powerfulexplosive. In all probability the vaults had been closed and locked bytheir owners, and had afterwards been looted by the criminals whothronged the doomed city and who would naturally seek their richestbooty in the financial district. The floor was literally knee-deep inpapers of all description, and in the heap were a number of bundles ofthe old-time bank-notes, neatly labelled and banded. These theplunderers had evidently discarded as beneath their notice, for all thatthey represented wealth so vast as to be wellnigh incalculable. With theGreat Change at hand these paper promises had become valueless; only theprecious metals themselves were worth the picking up, and the plunderershad accordingly made a clean sweep of the specie drawers. It was by themerest accident that Constans, in kicking aside a pile of elaboratelyengraved stock certificates, uncovered two of the smaller gold coins, afive and ten dollar piece. He put the treasure-trove carefully away, butin spite of this promising beginning he was not tempted to proceedfurther on this golden trail. He had another purpose in view, and sofound his way to the principal staircase and began the upward climb.

  Interminable it seemed, and the sense of loneliness and oppression,which lay heavy on Constans's spirits, increased steadily as he wentfrom one landing to another. Each succeeding story was so precisely likethe one he had just left; it was always the same long, marble-pavedcorridor, with every door and window exactly duplicated. How couldliving men and women have endured the appalling uniformity of thishuman beehive? Everywhere, too, were the same recurring evidences of thehaste and panic that had characterized the final moments of thatterrible hegira. Hats and garments, cash-boxes and account-books,littered the hallways, and were piled in little heaps at the entrancesto the elevators--impedimenta that must inevitably be abandoned at thelast if life itself were to be saved. And the final tragedy--an elevatorcage that had jammed in its ways and so hung fixed between two landings.Its occupants had suddenly found themselves entrapped, with no one tohear or to help. One can fancy the growing uneasiness, the wild amaze,the terror that was afraid of the sound of its own voice. Constanshurried by; he had looked but that once.

  Onward and upward, and at last he had gained the topmost floor. It washardly worth his while to ascend to the roof itself, and so he walkedinto a room that faced the north and consequently commanded a view ofthe city along its longitudinal axis. He gazed long and earnestly intothe obscurity, and far in the distance he caught the faint twinkle of asolitary light--a camp-fire, perhaps. He tried to fix its bearings inhis mind; if it were a fire it must indicate the neighborhood of theDoomsman stronghold.

  For a long time Constans stood at the window seeking to penetrate themystery of the darkness that surrounded him; then at last natureasserted her rights, he yawned vigorously, and his eyelids fell. Therewas a brown leather lounge in the room, still in tolerable condition,and he threw himself down without even troubling to remove the thickcoating of dust that covered it. He slept.