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.