"THE THING THAT NEVER WAS"
Stunned by the realization that the man who worked around the airport
seemed to have betrayed those who trusted him, clinging to the roll of
tracing paper that was his evidence of that betrayal, Chick faced Doc
Morgan in the dark hovel until the next flash of celestial fire showed
him a lantern standing on the small, rickety table at one side.
Hastening over to the table Chick fumbled on it, and in the drawer
which remained partially open.
He found a card of paper matches.
Quickly lifting the lantern slide and turning up the wick, Chick
ignited a match, applied it to the burner and adjusted his light.
"Listen here--" Doe Morgan, in his corner, struggled up to a sitting
posture, groaned again and then took up his own refutation of Chick's
accusation. "Listen, Chick! I ain't a traitor, no such thing I ain't!"
Turning, in the feeble glow of the lantern as its wick burned with a
queer, fitful light, Chick's face showed his antagonism and unbelief.
"No, sir," the man contended, "Doc Morgan, he may be 'queer' but he
ain't no such a thing as a traitor, not him!"
"Look at this!"
Chick waved the rolled tracing.
"----And this!" He indicated the overturned bottle that reeked of
alcohol of the cheapest kind, lying on its side at the edge of the
table.
"You thought you'd celebrate getting away with the plans of the new
all-metal ship, and nobody would know about it, off here in the marsh!"
Chick accused Morgan fiercely. Treachery was hateful to Chick. The man
had been allowed to stay around the aircraft building plant and the new
airport because he was a harmless sort of scatter-brain, able to do
simple chores, willing enough, and always "doctoring" people with his
herb remedies, coming to the swamps for the peculiar forms of sea
grasses and weed that he contended had medicinal value. He had been
trusted.
"How can you say you aren't a traitor?" Chick challenged, motioning
with the paper he clutched, keeping the table between himself and the
man he no longer trusted, watchful, alert, angry.
"What's that, you got there?" asked Doc, making an effort to get to his
feet. He fell back, groaning, and Chick, in some surprise, noted that
there was a handkerchief made into a rude bandage about his head.
"You know, well enough!" Chick spoke through the rumble and thud of
thunder whose echoes reminded him of heavy cannon balls rolling along
on cleats fastened to an inclined trough, as thunder was simulated in
the local motion picture house for one of its "sound effects."
"I never saw that, what you got, no I never!" declared Doc. "Here I
come in the swamp, I do, for salt water weed to mix my herbs, and I see
a storm coming fast, I do, and shelter here."
"That's good!" scoffed Chick.
"It's truth, it is so! I come here, I do, and--" his face, in the
spectral yellow gleams from the lantern, and the contrasting glare of
intermittent lightning showing through the door, looked pale and weird,
"--and I see--something I never thought I'd see outside of a nightmare,
so I do----"
Chick's attention was arrested.
"What do you mean," he demanded. "'See what you wouldn't see outside of
a nightmare!' What is that!"
"I can't tell you, that I can't! It was--too awful!"
Quickly Chick recovered from his momentary dismay. The man was trying
to divert him from his accusation, he decided.
He made a gesture toward the emptied bottle.
"That's what made you see whatever you think you saw!" he declared.
"No!" Doc got slowly and unsteadily to his feet. Chick watched. "No,"
Doc reiterated, "I never touched that till after I saw--It! I come in
here, I did, I declare--to shelter. Then I saw--It. It was in the
corner, and I saw it, I did so! Terrible, it was! Green in the hair,
and green in the face! And greenish hands! And all slimy and terrible,
like it had come up out of the ooze, it was so!"
Chick crushed back his tendency to believe, and to be startled.
"After--you'd emptied that!" he insisted, gesturing toward the old
bottle.
"No! No such thing. I knocked that over. It set there, it did, and I
hit it, I jumped so. I hit the table, and I must either of got upset
stumbling over my own feet or--It--hit me! That's when I took
that--what was left in the bottle, to steady me, I did so!"
Chick, disgusted, unwilling to be hoodwinked, realizing that he had
more important things to consider, refused to listen any longer.
The Dragonfly lay tied to the wharf piling: the wind was rising. His
chums were off in the dark waters of the swamp on a rescue errand.
"I can't bother with you," he snapped. "Tell it to Don's uncle, when we
get out of this."
Doc remained silent, steadying himself by resting a hand on the wall,
holding his seemingly aching head with the other.
Keeping the table between them, and braced against the ruse of a push
against it to upset him, Chick opened an end of the tracing and
verified his earlier guess.
The tracing certainly looked like the rough sketch for an airplane,
with most of the bracing and internal structure of the fuselage inked
in heavily, with the wide-spanning, thin, speedy "slotted" wings
sketched in more lightly, with the tail assembly marked on, and with
innumerable sets of figures, in ink, underneath the drawing.
Swiftly he rolled it up and put it back into his upper coat pocket,
being sure that it could neither shake nor be dropped out by folding it
over, jamming it down as far as he could, and snapping a safety pin he
saw in the drawer across the pocket top. Doe watched him with a
woebegone look, as Chick judged it to be.
"I don't know what you're hiding, I don't that! Nor why you say I'm
what I declare I ain't no such a thing--a traitor. But I'm going on
home, and doctor me up myself some."
"Go on!" Chick braced for a rush, a surprise.
None came.
Moodily, with head bent, Doc walked to the doorway and out. Following
him, Chick saw him, picked out by the flashes, cross the planks and
disappear in the winding path.
"Who was that?"
Scott, coming around the side of the hovel from the wharf, made his
presence known, asking the question sharply.
"Doc Morgan," Chick responded. "I found him here. He had finished off a
bottle, and he had some tracings. I guess I forgot and left them out on
the designing room table when we were talking about our plan for
tonight."
"Tracings! You don't say? Let's see them!"
"In the morning!" said Chick, eagerly. "You ought to go and help Don
and Garry. Where's the Dart?"
"Over in the shelter of the grass, across the water, there. What are
the other two doing?"
Quickly Chick told him where Don and Garry had started for in the dory.
They scanned the water. The dory, invisible, hidden and held by the
wind among the weeds, told them no story of its abandonment.
"I guess they're at the crack-up," surmised Scott. "Light two red flare
signals, Chick. Get those two back here. If I don't get back to the
Dart she'll never get above the storm in time. The same for the
Dragonfly. Get those boys back here! If Don hurries he can get up aloft
in time." Moving away he added, "After the storm we'll search."
Chick climbed to the struts over a rocking, tossing wing of the
tethered Dragonfly, secured signals from the fuselage, and as he saw
them set and ignited Scott hurried off to get his own lighter ship out
of the danger area. Chick refused to go along, preferring to risk Don's
less experienced piloting. He would not desert his chums.
"By gracious!" he exclaimed to himself, "I wonder if there are any more
of those plans in the drawer of that table? Doc might have tried to
hide them, stopped to celebrate, got too 'tight' to know what he was
doing, and struck his head when he staggered and fell. That would
account for the drawer being open so the paper could blow out--I'll go
and have another look!"
He hastened back into the hovel, investigating by the flicker of the
lantern, wind-blown, but staunchly holding its own.
"Funny!" commented the youthful searcher. "Why did he have only the
least important plan--the sketch? Maybe he has the others on his
person! I ought not to have let him go. But I was so----"
He paused, his words choked back into his throat by a strange sound.
Had something struck the hovel? A blown limb, crashing against the
side, could have made that heavy, but dull thud, hard to locate.
To his horror, before he could locate the source of the crash, a low,
sepulchral voice spoke!
"Go!--Go!--I am the Thing That Never Was--the Man Who Never Lived!
Go--or I take you with me--down--down--down-n-n-n!"
Chick whirled to face about. In a corner, behind him, half out of the
floor, as it seemed, was the shape of the Thing--terrifying, and yet
surprising. Green, dull and glistening, as if of plastered seaweed or
wet rubber was its head. Heavy, glistening, ooze-covered was the
covering upon its partially disclosed torso. Green, glistening, but
dripping with slimy weed were its waving, beckoning hands.
Transfixed, rooted to his tracks, Chick gasping, stared.
Seen in the unearthly, fitful flashes of lightning, the yellow lantern
flicker and the dull refracted red from the burning flares outside, the
apparition was horrifying enough.
But Chick felt his muscles unchained as the figure grew in height and
advanced toward him, its long, glistening, weed-spattered arms
outstretched. Like a streak of fleeing terror Chick raced out of the
door.
There he paused, uncertain. It was safer in the open than in the room:
the signals and the brighter light outside the cabin would enable him
to see better that Thing of Fear if it came forth.
Out it came, speaking no word. Terrified, Chick ran. But for all its
flapping encumbrance of weird draperies, it was swift. It caught the
youth. Terror chilled his blood but he struggled. Then his courage came
welling to him. If those hands could grip they must be human, and if
shins kicked in desperation could evoke human growls of dismay, he
faced no spectre, but a flesh-and-blood creature.
The man, in his horrid garments, was searching with exploring fingers
while he tried to hold the squirming, kicking Chick who strove to be
free, to escape.
There were shouts from the other side of the hovel; suddenly Chick felt
his inner pocket ripped open, and the Thing--or man--was away over the
planking, running fleetly and with sure steps. He knew that way!
After him went Chick, into the twisting, swamp-bound paths.
Nor did he return until long after that!