A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, February 1950 — page 20: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

20 A. MERRITT’S FANTASY hideous newness of the thing that length- ened the time. The best I can do is to ask you to try to conceive a noise that was a force, and a force that was also a light. For I heard a sound, and I felt a force crushing me as deep water crushes the body, and I knew that something ripped across my eyes, or the eye of my mind, like the golden-crimson lightning that had streamed over the valley and struck the face of the opposite cliff. Then wunconsctousness hit me like a hammer-stroke, and I was blind and deaf. All at once, all my senses seemed to be smothered. ... I came to with cold water being thrown on my face, and far away voices that came quickly nearer to me, saying that I couldn’t be alive, and that it was im- possible. And then another voice, grave and calm, saying that I had stood in a node of the explosion. If you know what a node of an ex- plosion is, you are wiser than I was. I heard, afterward, that sound travels in waves. And I had stood in the ebb of one of those roaring waves. Believe it if you please. I try to, but I can’t. I mean to say, I’ve seen too many explo- sions, and handled too much dynamite to understand the wave theory at all! Some theory had to be dragged in, how- ever. I realized that when I went to look at what had been Darrell’s laboratory. All that was left of it was the steel outer wall, and the steel door in the center of it. Both wall and door were in waves—good, deep waves, too. It looked like a sheet of rubber, or a putty model. As for the solid rock on which the rest of the room had been built, it was washed away. There is no other word. It was clean gone, and the raw, dripping bowels of the mountain were in plain view. It was three days after the explosion before they let me go back to the spot, and after I had seen tt, I wished that I had stayed away for three weeks—or forever. I asked how many tons of nitroglycerine must have been used to blow the shoulder and the chest off a mountain, and the wiseacres shook their heads. Nitroglyc- erine, I gathered, was child’s play com- pared with what had popped there inside the long work room of Cleveland Dar- rell. And not a one of the wise men had a grown-up thought as to what the ex- plosive force could have been. Or could guess at it. I saw Dr. Franklin, and asked him. Oh, yes, we were on speaking terms again. He looked frightened and _ sick enough when I looked him up, but I said, straight from the heart: “Franklin, whatever was in your mind earlier that night, and whatever devils got at you, I think you were through for the evening when you left me. I don’t think you had anything to do with the hell-fire that broke later on. So please tell me what you think could have happened ?” He got hold of my arm with his shaking hand and thanked me for believing in him, and he told me in a dying voice that if he could dream of who the scoundrels were who had done the thing, or what means they had used, he would be the first to go to the powers of the law and accuse them. But he told me, in a dreadful whis- per, that he thought the engines of Cleve Darrell’s own construction must have been turned against him. By his tone, I guessed that he attributed the disaster to some superhuman agency. But as for Cleveland Darrell, no one asked where he might be. Such a ques- tion seemed foolish. They simply built him a monument on top of the remainder of the mountain, and there you may see it to this day. CHAPTER 5 A Piece of Wood UT while the world was forgetting Cleve Darrell, I was remembering him. Old friends die hard in my mind, and I never could forget that I had been placed on guard, that night of nights, and that the accident had happened while I was on the job—that I hadn’t been able to keep it from happening. Not that I really thought an outside hand had turned the trick. For Darrell himself, as you remember, had plainly stated that before morning he would either be dead or else—hell, something un- finished that had to do with life was in his mind, it appeared, when he ended his sentence, So it appeared plain that his experiment could easily end, in his own GOMIIGooOo S © iin