In The Shadow Of Doom

: The Doomsman

An hour wore on, and Constans was approaching the suburbs of the ancient

municipality. 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 city

was built, then to work his way northward on foot until he should

discover the innermost citadel of the Doomsmen. To get a fair idea of

his task, he proposed to ascend one of the immensely high buildings

which
stood crowded together in the down-town district. From such a

vantage-point he could surely fix upon landmarks for his future guidance

in penetrating the labyrinth of streets. It would not be a pleasant

experience to lose one's way, and, perhaps, stumble by mistake on Master

Quinton Edge's front door.



Now, as Constans travelled onward, the ruined city began to grow upon

him in ever heavier and darker mass. Here and there a half-demolished

church-spire raised itself above the neighboring roof-line; plainly this

had been one of the old-time residential sections and of the better

class. Still farther down the stream and the water-front stood crowded

thickly with wharves and warehouses, the scene of the mighty commerce of

the past. The ships themselves were there, great monsters of iron and

steel, scaled and honeycombed with red rust. But the wharf-slips had

long since silted up, and the vessels, careening little by little with

the subsidence of the water, had finally broken away from the

restraining hawsers and lay on their beam-ends in the mud, a sorrowful

spectacle.



The moon was rising and it was time to go ashore. Accordingly, he

directed his course for a pier that extended somewhat farther than its

fellows into the stream. There was just water enough to float the canoe

within arm's-length of the girders--a fortunate circumstance, since

Constans had not liked the idea of trusting himself upon the

treacherous-looking mud-flat left uncovered by the ebbing tide. Securing

the boat under shadow of the structure, he took his hunting-knife and

basket of provisions and climbed easily to the floor of the pier, then

picking his way across its broken planking he reached solid ground. At

last he stood within Doom the Forbidden.



Now this street, which ran parallel with the river, was of unusual

width, and Constans crossed it quickly, seeking for cover in some

narrower and darker thoroughfare. A cross-street opened directly in

front of him. He plunged into it without hesitation, for the moonlight

was 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 in

a meadow, but in this narrow, crooked lane the wholesomer, sun-loving

plants found little encouragement to existence. In their stead,

pale-colored creepers mantled the house walls, and everywhere were moss

stains and the spore of the various fungoid growths. Constans's

footsteps fell hollowly upon the pavement slippery with weed and the

August damp, and as he walked along an unearthly radiance suddenly

illuminated his path; from every cornice and eaves-end hung balls of the

pale St. Elmo's fire; not a house but boasted its array of

corpse-candles that flickered with a greenish flame.



A terrifying sight, but harmless. Far more dangerous, could he have

known it, were the invisible but deadly gases from the century-old

corruption that rose to meet him and were unconsciously inhaled. Then,

as the fumes mounted to his brain, sober reason was ousted from her

throne and imagination rioted unchecked, peopling the void with horrors

and ineffectual phantoms. From the sashless windows grotesque faces

stared down upon him, scowling malignantly, while others, with still

more hideous smile, invited him to enter and become one of their

dreadful company. Insane laughter re-echoed in his ears, and the music

of lutes, irresistible in its languor-compelling potency. Already had

Constans stopped twice to listen, and upon each occasion he had been

obliged to exercise all his failing strength of body and mind to resume

his forward march. If he halted again it would be forever; of that he

felt perfectly assured, but neither the imminence nor the character of

the peril in which he stood seemed sufficient to arouse him from his

lethargy. Yet he kept on, walking with the shuffling stride of a

mechanical doll; now he wavered and hesitated, as though the propelling

spring had wellnigh run down. The night reek, hot and damp, hung like a

poisoned veil upon his mouth and lips; he could not breathe; he gasped

and threw up one arm as does a swimmer who looks his last upon a

pitiless sun and sky.



The wind had risen with the moon; it had been growing in strength, and

now 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 the

skin. The shock and the trickle of blood brought him to with a sharp

shock; he ran forward a few steps and found himself sinking. The roadway

immediately in front of him had doubtless been undermined by the action

of water; for the space of a dozen yards or more the pavement was but a

shell concealing an abyss.



Constans had already proceeded too far for retreat; he must go on or

founder where he stood. He flung himself forward, the oblong blocks of

granite, with which the street was paved, grinding together underneath

his feet as the mass yielded to the downward pressure. He was sucked in

to his knees, but instinctively he kept the upper part of his body

extended horizontally, his out-stretched hand seeking for some chance

holdfast. Then, as he was beginning to despair, he found it, a section

of small diameter lead piping that had been uncovered by the breaking

away of the surrounding earth. It bent under his clutch but did not give

way. With one last effort he pulled himself clear, gained the firm

ground beyond, and lay there trembling.



When afterwards he came to reason soberly over the adventure, the

conclusion seemed obvious that the pitfall had been a consequent upon

the breaking out of one of the ancient springs, so that the water, in

endeavoring to find an outlet, had finally undermined the whole

roadway. The chasm, as he looked back upon it, extended dear across the

street. Its depth was only conjectural, but the mass presented the

treacherous appearance of quaking sand, and Constans shuddered as he

gazed. Yet he had escaped; the peril was past; let him forget what was

behind and press forward.



Half a block farther on and he found himself in a cul-de-sac. The street

was filled from house-wall to house-wall with an immense mass of broken

stone, brick, and other debris. The cause was not far to seek.



Immediately upon the left rose one of the fabulously high buildings for

which the ancient city had been famous. It could not compare in

magnitude with the tremendous structures that he could discern still

farther ahead, but its dozen and a half of stories loomed up imposingly

when contrasted with the moderate sized houses adjoining it. Constans

looked up in wonder at its towering facade, then started back with an

exclamation of alarm.



It appeared that the foundations of the structure had in some way become

weakened, for the whole building had settled and was leaning over at a

terrifying divergence from the perpendicular. Being constructed of iron

truss-work similar to that of a bridge, the essential framework still

held together, but the outside walls, mere shells of stone and brick,

had cracked and given way under the strain, falling piece-meal into the

street below. Even as he looked, a stone dropped from a window pediment

and crashed into splinters on the pavement a few yards beyond where he

stood. The angle of inclination seemed to grow larger as he gazed at

it; the enormous mass poised itself above him, monstrous, informed,

threatening to strike.



With that uncomfortable contraction of the scalp-skin that attends upon

the sudden presence of peril, Constans backed hastily away; not for

worlds would he have ventured again under that overhang of artificial

cliff. Yet behind him was the stretch of sunken pavement; he could not

risk another passage of that. A single alternative remained--to enter

one of the small houses that lined the street, ascend to its roof, and

so escape to the nearest cross thoroughfare.



With a sigh of relief, Constans threw open the scuttle and climbed out

upon the leads. He had entered at random one of the mean-looking

edifices that hemmed him in at the right and left, and it was pleasant

to escape from the close atmosphere of its long-unused staircases and

corridors. Apparently the house had been occupied as a tenement in the

ancient time; the marks of its degradation had survived the universal

decay, and there was even a fetid suggestion in the air of old-time

squalor and disease. Glad he was to be free of it all, and he let the

scuttle fall to with a bang.



After surveying the different routes as best he could, Constans

determined to work his way to the southward. He took one forward step

and stood transfixed; from below then came a faint but unmistakable tap,

tap upon the closed scuttle. The bare suspicion that there could be some

living thing in that hideous interior, that it was appealing to him for

aid, made him physically sick. But better to meet any horror face to

face than to wrestle longer with the invisible presence of Fear; he

threw aside the hatch, and a big white owl flew out, its wing grazing

his face. He could have shouted aloud, so nakedly had his nerves been

laid bare in the last quarter of an hour; then setting his teeth hard he

took hold of himself and laughed at his own vaporing. The worst was over

now; he was sure of that, and so again took courage.



It was an easy matter to pass from one connecting roof to another, and

thereafter down a fire-escape to the side street. A few steps took him

round the corner and into a wide thoroughfare leading directly to the

more important business quarter.



Constans looked about him in wonderment. The high buildings stood

shoulder to shoulder, hemming him in on every side; the street itself

was but a fissure in a mountain-range. The moon had now risen high in

the heavens, and her beams performed odd tricks of shadow play as they

danced through these colossal halls of emptiness and silence. Nothing

seemed real or substantial; these enormous masses of masonry and iron

looked almost dreamlike, the ghosts of a forgotten past, shadows that

must surely vanish with the morning sun.



To sober his imagination, Constans began counting the number of stories

in a sky-scraper that reared its monstrous bulk directly in front of

him. Thirty-six in all, and so higher by half a dozen floors than any of

its neighbors. It should make an excellent observatory, and he

determined upon exploring it.






The street doors stood wide open, and the entrance-way was half blocked

up by piles of dust and other refuse blown in from the street by the

winter storms. On the left, as one entered, was the principal suite of

offices; it had been occupied by a banking firm, to judge from the

desk fittings and the long array of safes and vaults. These latter were

open and empty, the doors having been shattered by some powerful

explosive. In all probability the vaults had been closed and locked by

their owners, and had afterwards been looted by the criminals who

thronged the doomed city and who would naturally seek their richest

booty in the financial district. The floor was literally knee-deep in

papers of all description, and in the heap were a number of bundles of

the old-time bank-notes, neatly labelled and banded. These the

plunderers had evidently discarded as beneath their notice, for all that

they represented wealth so vast as to be wellnigh incalculable. With the

Great Change at hand these paper promises had become valueless; only the

precious metals themselves were worth the picking up, and the plunderers

had accordingly made a clean sweep of the specie drawers. It was by the

merest accident that Constans, in kicking aside a pile of elaborately

engraved stock certificates, uncovered two of the smaller gold coins, a

five and ten dollar piece. He put the treasure-trove carefully away, but

in spite of this promising beginning he was not tempted to proceed

further on this golden trail. He had another purpose in view, and so

found 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 went

from one landing to another. Each succeeding story was so precisely like

the one he had just left; it was always the same long, marble-paved

corridor, with every door and window exactly duplicated. How could

living men and women have endured the appalling uniformity of this

human beehive? Everywhere, too, were the same recurring evidences of the

haste and panic that had characterized the final moments of that

terrible hegira. Hats and garments, cash-boxes and account-books,

littered the hallways, and were piled in little heaps at the entrances

to the elevators--impedimenta that must inevitably be abandoned at the

last if life itself were to be saved. And the final tragedy--an elevator

cage that had jammed in its ways and so hung fixed between two landings.

Its occupants had suddenly found themselves entrapped, with no one to

hear or to help. One can fancy the growing uneasiness, the wild amaze,

the terror that was afraid of the sound of its own voice. Constans

hurried by; he had looked but that once.



Onward and upward, and at last he had gained the topmost floor. It was

hardly worth his while to ascend to the roof itself, and so he walked

into a room that faced the north and consequently commanded a view of

the city along its longitudinal axis. He gazed long and earnestly into

the obscurity, and far in the distance he caught the faint twinkle of a

solitary light--a camp-fire, perhaps. He tried to fix its bearings in

his mind; if it were a fire it must indicate the neighborhood of the

Doomsman stronghold.



For a long time Constans stood at the window seeking to penetrate the

mystery of the darkness that surrounded him; then at last nature

asserted her rights, he yawned vigorously, and his eyelids fell. There

was a brown leather lounge in the room, still in tolerable condition,

and he threw himself down without even troubling to remove the thick

coating of dust that covered it. He slept.



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