Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Weird Tales August-September 1936. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
In the Dark
By RONAL KAYSER
_It was a tale of sheer horror that old Asa Gregg poured into the dictaphone_
* * * * *
The watchman's flashlight printed a white circle on the frosted-glass,black-lettered door:
GREGG CHEMICAL CO., MFRS. ASA GREGG, PRES. PRIVATE
The watchman's hand closed on the knob, rattled the door in its frame.Queer, but tonight the sound had seemed to come from in there.... Butthat couldn't be. He knew that Mr. Gregg and Miss Carruthers carriedthe only keys to the office, so any intruder would have been forced tosmash the lock.
Maybe the sound came from the storage room. The watchman clumped alongthe rubber-matted corridor, flung his weight against that door. Itopened hard, being of ponderous metal fitted into a cork casing. Theroom was an air-tight, fire-proof vault, really. His shoes gritted onthe concrete floor as he prowled among the big porcelain vats. Theflashlight bored through bluish haze to the concrete walls. Acid fumesescaping under the vat lids made the haze and seared the man's throat.
He hurried out, coughing and wiping his eyes. It was damn funny. Everynight lately he heard the same peculiar noise somewhere in this wingof the building.... Like a body groaning and turning in restlesssleep, it was. It scared him. He didn't mention the mystery to anyone,though. He was an old man, and he didn't want Mr. Gregg to think hewas getting too old for the job.
"Asa 'd think I was crazy, if I told him about it," he mumbled.
* * * * *
Inside the office, Asa Gregg heard the muttered words plainly. He satvery still in the big, leather-cushioned chair, hardly breathing untilthe scrape of the watchman's feet had thinned away down the hall.There was no light in the room to betray him; only the cherry-coloredtip of his cigar, which couldn't be visible through the frosted glassdoor. Anyway, it'd be an hour before the watchman's round brought himpast the office again. Asa Gregg had that hour, if he could screw uphis nerve to use it....
He took the frayed end of the cigar from his mouth. His hand, whichhad wasted to mere skin and bone these past few months, groped throughthe darkness, slid over the polished coolness of the dictaphone hood,and snapped the switch. Machinery faintly whirred. His fingers foundthe tube, lifted it.
"Miss Carruthers!" he snapped. Then he hesitated. Surely, he couldtrust Mary Carruthers! He'd never wondered about her before. She'dbeen his secretary for a dozen years--lately, since he couldn't lookafter affairs himself as he used to, she had practically run thebusiness. She was forty, sensible, unbeautiful, and tight-lipped.Hell, he had to trust her!
His voice plunged into the darkness.
"What I have to say now is intended for Mrs. Gregg's ears only. Shewill take the first boat home, of course. Meet that boat and bring herto the office. Since my wife knows nothing about a dictaphone, it willbe necessary for you to set this record running. As soon as you havedone so, leave her alone in the room. Make sure she's not interruptedfor a half-hour. That's all."
He waited a decent interval. The invisible needle peeled its threadinto the revolving wax cylinder.
"Jeannette," muttered Asa Gregg, and hesitated again. This wasn'tgoing to be easy to say. He decided to begin matter-of-factly. "As youprobably know, my will and the insurance policies are in the vault atthe First National. I believe you will find all of my papers inexcellent order. If any questions arise, consult Miss Carruthers. WhatI have to say to you now is purely personal--I feel, my dear, that Iowe you an explanation--that is----"
God, it came harder than he had expected.
"Jeannette," he started in afresh, "you remember three years ago whenI was in the hospital. You were in Palm Beach at the time, and I wiredthat there'd been an accident here at the plant. That wasn't strictlyso. The fact is, I'd gotten mixed up with a girl----"
He paused, shivering. In the darkness a picture of Dot swam beforehim. The oval face, framed by gleaming swirls of lemon-tinted hair,had pouting scarlet lips, and eyes whose allure was intensified byviolet make-up. The full-length picture of her included a streamlined,full-blossomed and yet delectably lithe body. A costly, enticing,Broadway-chorus orchid! As a matter of fact, that was where he'd foundher.
"I won't make any excuses for myself," Asa Gregg said harshly. "Imight point out that you were always in Florida or Bermuda or France,and that I was a lonely man. But it wasn't just loneliness, and Ididn't seek companionship. I thought I was making a last bow toRomance. I was successful, sixty, and silly, and I did all the damnfool things--I even wrote letters to her. Popsy-wopsy letters." Thedictaphone couldn't record the grimace that jerked his lips. "Shesaved them, of course, and by and by she put a price on them--tenthousand dollars. Dot claimed that one of those filthy tabloids hadoffered her that much for them--and what was a poor working-girl todo? She lied. I knew that.
"I told her to bring the letters to the office after business hours,and I'd take care of her. I took care of her, all right. I shot her,Jeannette!"
He mopped his face with a handkerchief that was already damp.
"Not on account of the money, you understand. It was the things shesaid, after she had tucked the bills into her purse ... vile things,about the way she had earned it ten times over by enduring my beastlykisses. I'd really loved that girl, and I'd thought she'd cared for mea little. It was her hate that maddened me, and I got the gun out ofmy desk drawer----"
* * * * *
Asa Gregg reached through the darkness for the switch. He fumbled forthe bottle which stood on the desk. His hand trembled, spilling someof the liquor onto his lap. He drank from the bottle....
This part of the story he'd skip. It was too horrible, even to thinkabout it. He didn't want to remember how the blood pooled inside Dot'sfur coat, and how he'd managed to carry the body out of the officewithout leaking any of her blood onto the floor. He tried to forgetthe musky sweetness of the perfume on the dead girl, mingled with thatother evil blood-smell. Especially he didn't want to remember thefrightful time he'd had stripping the gold rings from her fingers, andthe one gold tooth in her head....
The horror of it coiled in the blackness about him. His own teethrattled against the bottle when he gulped the second drink. Hesnapped the switch savagely, but when he spoke his voice cringed intothe tube:
"I carried her into the storage room. I got the lid off one of theacid tanks. The vat contained an acid powerful enough to destroyanything--except gold. In fact, the vat itself had to be lined withgold-leaf. I knew that in twenty-four hours there wouldn't be arecognizable body left, and in a week there wouldn't be anything atall. No matter what the police suspected, they couldn't prove a murdercharge without a _corpus delicti_. I had committed the perfectcrime--except for one thing. I didn't realize that there'd be a_splash_ when she went into the vat."
Gregg laughed, not pleasantly. His wife might think it'd been a sob,when she heard this record. "Now you understand why I went to thehospital," he jerked. "Possibly you'd call that poetic justice. Oh,God!"
His voice broke. Again he thumbed off the switch, and mopped his facewith 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'vebeen punished for the thing I did. I don't mean the sheer physicalagony--but the fear that I'd talk coming out of the ether at thehospital. The fear that she'd been traced to my office--I'd simplyhidden her rings away, expecting to drop them into the river--or thatshe might have confided in her lover ... yes, she had one. Or, supposea whopping big order came through and that tank was emptied the verynext day. And I couldn't ask any questions--I didn't even know whatwas in the papers.
"However, that part of it gradually cleared up. I quizzed MissCarruthers, and learned that an unidentified female body had beenfished out of the East River a few days after Dot disappeared. That'show the police 'solved' the case. I got rid of her rings. I orderedthat vat left alone.
"The