Karl Wagner - Why Not You and I?

“John Chance.” Raw whiskey wafted along with his hoarse whisper. “John Chance — is that you?”

“Are you Mr. Cullin Shelton?” demanded the other man smoothly.

“Oh, God!” the drunken man moaned. “Let’s get away from here!” He staggered across the walk for the car.

“Now see here, old fellow!” protested the driver, as the girl shrank away from the door. “Can’t we talk right here?”

“No!” A bony hand fumbled for the door latch. “Let’s get away!”

The night mists flickered with a sudden, eerie glare — like heat lightning behind distant clouds.

Shelton screamed and fell back from the running board. “Too late!” he bawled in terror. “Get away!”

The light flickered again — closer, more intense — dazzling their eyes like a magnesium flare. Its sudden brilliance made the fog opaque, blinding them. And with the white glare, a sudden hiss like escaping steam.

Shelton had started to run. Now he recoiled, screaming hideously. “No, Dread! No!” He fell back against the car.

The girl screamed as the man’s flailing arms hooked over her door, his face turned toward them — sagging below the level of the sill as he crumpled.

His hands were shriveled stumps, the flesh of his face seared and shrunken to his skull — charring and peeling even as they watched. Cullin Shelton was being burned to a crisp in the passage of seconds, before their horrified gaze — but his clothing was untouched, nor could they feel a trace of the intolerable heat that was burning flesh to cinder in a matter of seconds.

The scream rasped silent as vocal cords seared and cracked. The nightmare face and blackened arms fell away from the sill, trailing a sooty smear down the cream finish of the door. Then the Packard was tearing away from the curb, and Shelton’s corpse was flung aside like a smouldering scarecrow.

The Packard roared headlong down the steep slope of Laurel Mountain, and the town and its horror vanished into the mist. Tires moaned as the heavy roadster skidded dangerously on the sharp curves. The driver’s tanned face was set in a pallid grimace of unreasoning fear.

“John! For God’s sake, slow down! We’ll be killed!”

The girl’s sharp exclamation broke through his panic, and he braked the car’s suicidal speed. “God! Sorry, Kirsten!” he murmured shakily. “That — that thing back there — God! That’s the worst scare I’ve had in my life! Didn’t stop to think what I was doing!”

He slowed the car to a near crawl, searched the fog-hidden shoulder of the road.

“What are you doing?” she asked uneasily. “Help me find a place to turn around,” he told her, his voice steadier. “We’ve got to go back.”

“Why?” she demanded in a note of panic. “There’s nothing we can do for that man.”

“Of course not, poor devil. But we were witnesses — and we’ve got to warn the rest before someone else dies like that.”

“But what happened?”

His self-assurance was returning. “Electrocuted, of course. Had to be. Maybe a freak lightning discharge — St. Elmo’s fire or something like that. But probably there’s a high-power line come down there or something of the sort. Poor drunken fool blundered into it trying to run from his pink elephants, and we were in too great a funk by it all to realize what was happening.” He pulled the Packard onto a turnout.

“I don’t want to go back there,” the girl said resolutely.

“Well, I’m not relishing it myself,” he muttered, starting to back the car.

“No! There’s danger there you don’t understand!”

“Rot, Kirsten. Stop acting like a frightened child.”

The mist shimmered with a blue-white glow. Kirsten screamed.

“More lightning!” he growled, hitting the accelerator. The roadster slung gravel and lurched back onto the roadway.

Lambent flame in the mist ahead of them — harsh incandescence that burned through the fog. Floating on the white-opaque mist — a pair of eyes, glowing like white-hot steel. Materializing in front of them — an obscene phantom of flame — a fantastic lizard-shape. Its jaws gape wide — a sudden shrill hiss…

The driver howled in death-agony, throwing stumps of hands in front of seared and blackened face.

The Packard hurtled from the road — snapping the guardrail. The cacophony of splintered trees, smashing boulders, and tearing metal drowned out all else and seemed to go on forever.

In a rundown stucco cottage in Vestal, Compton Moore sat with a glass of absinthe in one hand and a Luger in the other. He considered the tall glass with its opalescent liqueur, then the cold black automatic with its walnut grips. It was fitting, he thought, with that somber and poetic introspection that comes upon a man late at night and deep in drink.

Yes, it was all entirely fitting. Vestal, unwanted stepchild of Knoxville, half-caste bastard community the city would not annex, instead grew around and ignored. This tawdry house, part of a cheap suburban development project that went bust in the Depression along with everyone else. Half the houses remained unfinished in their gullied and weedgrown lots, shunned even by vagrants. This one had been finished — a shabby stucco eyesore of what the developers had called variously Roman or Moorish architecture, and named the rutted dirt lanes things like “Via Roma” or “Castille Lane.” The shoddy structure was already falling apart, going the way of all bright and glittering dreams.

And here he sat in a broken-springed chair, in a dirty room with crumbling plaster and threadbare fake-oriental carpet. His blond hair turned prematurely thin, a stained lounging jacket covering an athletically slim frame that had gone softly to seed. Only these two objects had substance and reality: Absinthe, that slow, insidious poison, a taste for which he had cultivated in the old days of wealth and refined decadence. The Luger, sleek and deadly, all that remained of his days of courage and glory, a winged knight fighting the Hun dragon in the skies of France to win the war that would end all wars.

God, but wasn’t it fitting! “Dulce et decorum est…” he quoted to himself, taking another long sip of absinthe. A witchery of distilled dream in the bitter, heavy sweetness of anise perfume. With practiced ease he pressed the magazine release catch of the Luger, examined the clip with its eight 9 mm. cartridges, replaced the magazine. One would be enough; he wouldn’t miss.

His shadowed blue eyes again stared at the evening News-Sentinel, lying crumpled on the dirty carpet beside his chair. At this distance his vision was no longer keen enough to read beyond the headlines, but he had long since committed every word to memory.

FIERY CRASH CLAIMS NOTED

OCCULTIST AND FIANCÉE

Dillon, N.C. The brilliant career of noted occultist, John Chance, ended tragically yesterday in a late night auto crash not far from this small mountain community. The tragedy also claimed the life of Miss Kirsten von Brocken, Dr. Chance’s fiancée and research assistant.

There were no witnesses to the crash, which local authorities estimate to have occurred shortly before midnight. Apparently Chance, who was driving Miss von Brocken’s late model Packard, lost control on a curve and plunged down the steep mountain slope. While thick fog delayed discovery of the accident for several hours, local authorities state that the couple was killed instantly. Their automobile was totally demolished and the bodies burned beyond recognition. Identification was made from personal effects.

Chance, 37, was a native of Knoxville who spent much of his life abroad. Prior to America’s active entry in the World War, he flew for the R.F.C. and was credited with 18 victories before crashing behind lines. Reported dead, he survived German prison hospitals to escape shortly before Armistice. In 1920, sole heir to the Chance estate, he liquidated his family’s extensive holdings in the munitions industry with the avowed intention to devote his life and fortune in the study of the underlying causes that drive men to make war. In the years of globetrotting that followed, he earned doctorate degrees in Anthropology and Psychology, and studied in numerous prestigious universities and institutes. He was considered one of the world’s foremost authorities in the esoteric realms of parapsychology and legitimate occult phenomena, as well as a scholar of folk myths and superstitions. He was the author of several books, among them Supernatural or Paranormal? and The Veil of Superstition.