Again he thumbed off the switch, and mopped his face with the damp linen.

The rest—how could he explain the rest of it?

He spent a long minute arranging his thoughts.

"You haven't any idea," he resumed, "no one has any idea, of how I've been punished for the thing I did. I don't mean the sheer physical agony—but the fear that I'd talk coming out of the ether at the hospital. The fear that she'd been traced to my office—I'd simply hidden her rings away, expecting to drop them into the river—or that she might have confided in her lover ... yes, she had one. Or, suppose a whopping big order came through and that tank was emptied the very next day. And I couldn't ask any questions—I didn't even know what was in the papers.

"However, that part of it gradually cleared up. I quizzed Miss Carruthers, and learned that an unidentified female body had been fished out of the East River a few days after Dot disappeared. That's how the police 'solved' the case. I got rid of her rings. I ordered that vat left alone.

"The other thing began about six months ago."

A spasm contorted his face. His fingers ached their grip into the dictaphone tube.

"Jeannette, you remember when I began to object to the radio, how I'd shout at you to turn it off in the middle of a program? You thought I was ill, and worried about business.... You were wrong. The thing that got me was hearing her voice——"

He gripped the cold cigar, chewed it. "It's very strange that you didn't notice it. No matter what station we dialed to, always that same voice came stealing into the room! But perhaps you did notice? You said, once or twice, that all those blues singers sounded alike!

"And she was a blues singer.... It was she, all right, somewhere out in the ether, reminding me....

"The next thing was—well, at first when I noticed it in the office I thought Miss Carruthers had suddenly taken up with young ideas. You see, I kept smelling perfume."

And he smelled it now. It was like a miasma in the dark.

"It isn't anything that Carruthers wears," he grated. "It comes from—yes, the storage room. I realized that about a month ago. Just after you sailed—one night I stayed late at the office, and I went in there.... It seemed to be strongest around the vat—her vat—and I lifted the lid.

"The sweet, sticky musk-smell hit me like a blow in the face.

"And that isn't all!"

error stalked in this room. Asa Gregg crouched in his chair, felt the weight of Fear on him like a submarine pressure. His cigar pitched to his knees, dropped to the floor.

"You won't believe this, Jeannette." He hammered the words like nails into the darkness in front of him. "You will say that it's impossible. I know that. It is impossible. It is a physiological absurdity—it contradicts the laws of natural science.

"But I saw something on the bottom of that vat!"

He groped for the bottle. His wife would hear a long gurgle, and then a coughing gasp....

"The vat was nearly full of this transparent, oily acid," he went on. "What I saw was a lot of sediment on the golden floor. And there shouldn't have been any sediment! The stuff utterly dissolves animal tissue, bone, even the common ores—keeps them in suspension.

"It didn't look like sediment, either. It looked like a heap of mold ... grave-mold!

"I replaced the lid. I spent a week convincing myself that it was all impossible, that I couldn't have seen anything of the sort. Then I went to the vat again——"

Silence hung in the darkness while he sucked wind into his lungs. And the words burst—separate, yammering shrieks:

"I looked, night after night! For hours at a time I've watched the change.... Did you ever see a body decompose? Of course not! Neither have I. But you