Rivvin put up his hand.
The lights went out.
In the black dark we stood, stood until I could almost see the outlines
of the windows; less black against the intenser blackness.
Soon I heard another click, and the grate of an opened door.
Then a kind of snarl, a thump like a blow, a sort of strangling gasp,
and the cushiony sounds of a struggle.
Thwaite turned on the lights.
Rivvin was in the act of staggering up from his knees. I saw a pair
of small, pink hands, the fingers intertwined, locked behind Rivvin’s
neck. They slipped apart as I caught sight of them.
I had a vision of small feet in little patent leather silver-buckled
low-shoes, of green socks, of diminutive legs in white trousers
flashing right and left in front of Rivvin, as if he held by the throat
a struggling child.
Next I saw that his arms were thrown up, wide apart.
He collapsed and fell back his full length with a dull crash.
Then I saw the snout!
Saw the wolf-jaws vised on his throat!
Saw the blood welling round the dazzling white fangs, and recognized
the reality of the sinister head I had seen over and over in his
pictures.
Rivvin made the fish-out-of-water contortions of a man being killed.
Thwaite brought his slung-shot down on the beast-head skull.
The blow was enough to crush in a steel cylinder.
The beast wrinkled its snout and shook its head from side to side,
worrying like a bull-dog at Rivvin’s throat.
Again Thwaite struck and again and again. At each blow the portentous
head oscillated viciously. The awful thing about it to me was the two
blue bosses on each side of the muzzle, like enamel, shiny and hard
looking; and the hideous welt of red, like fresh sealing-wax, down
between them and along the snout.
Rivvin’s struggles grew weaker as the great teeth tore at his throat.
He was dead before Thwaite’s repeated blows drove in the splintered
skull and the clenched jaws relaxed, the snout crinkling and
contracting as the dog-teeth slid from their hold.
Thwaite gave the monster two or three more blows, touched Rivvin and
fairly dashed out of the room, shouting.
“You stay here!”
I heard the sound of prying and sawing. There alone I looked but once
at the dead cracksman.
The thing that had killed him was the size of a four to six year old
child, but more stockily built, looked entirely human up to the neck,
and was dressed in a coat of bright dark blue, a vest of crimson
velvet, and white duck trousers. As I looked the muzzle wriggled for
the last time, the jaws fell apart and the carcass rolled sideways. It
was the very duplicate in miniature of the figure in the big picture on
the staircase landing.
Thwaite came dashing back. Without any sign of any qualm he searched
Rivvin and tossed me two or three bundles of greenbacks:
He stood up.
He laughed.
“Curiosity,” he said, “will be the death of me.”
Then he stripped the clothing from the dead monster, kneeling by it.
The beast-hair stopped at the shirt collar. Below that the skin was
human, as was the shape, the shape of a forty-year-old man, strong and
vigorous and well-made, only dwarfed to the smallness of a child.
Across the hairy breast was tattooed in blue,
“HENGIST EVERSLEIGH.”
“Hell,” said Thwaite.
He stood up and went to the fatal door. Inside he found the electric
button.
The room was small and lined with cases of little drawers, tier on
tier, rows of brass knobs on mahogany.
Thwaite opened one.
It was velvet lined and grooved like a jeweler’s tray and contained
rings, the settings apparently emeralds.
Thwaite dumped them into one of the empty bags he had taken from
Rivvin’s corpse.
The next case was of similar drawers of rings set with rubies. The
first of these Thwaite dumped in with the emeralds.
But then he flew round the room pulling out drawers and slamming them
shut, until he came upon trays of unset diamonds. These he emptied
into his sack to the last of them, then diamond rings on them, other
jewelry set with diamonds, then rubies and emeralds till the sack was
full.
He tied its neck, had me open a second sack and was dumping drawer
after drawer into that when suddenly he stopped.
His nose worked, worked horridly like that of the dead monster.
I thought he was going crazy and was beginning to laugh nervously, was
on the verge of hysterics when he said:
“Smell! Try what you smell.”