"There, it's gone," I said soothingly. "All right, now?"
His answer was a scream.
"But that--that--_that_!" he choked. "That thing without legs, or eyes,
or mouth. There--there! See it! Take it away!" He was looking at the
fire extinguisher.
It was a cylindrical tube about two feet long and six inches in
diameter. I looked at it, and suddenly there came to my mind the
physical resemblance to the weird and uncanny _thing_ that had
tormented me in my dreams. Not knowing that I was right, yet obeying a
sympathetic impulse, born of my own dream terrors, I took the innocent
cylinder off its hook, and said: "I will throw it overboard, and drown
it. It will never come back."
Then I went on deck, and tossed it over. It must have filled before
long through its rubber tube, and gone to the bottom. Going back, with
a faint hope that I had solved Fred's problem and my own, I found him a
raving maniac, screaming and shouting for whiskey.
By this time, the skipper and his niece were aroused, and they appeared
in the passage between the rooms. Ignoring them for the moment, I
endeavored to soothe the demented creature in his berth. To no avail.
Springing out, with twitching features and convulsive movements of
arms and legs, he upbraided me for throwing overboard the whiskey. I
told him that it was all gone, and that I had simply thrown away the
_thing_. He would not accept. Shrieking his maledictions upon me, he
bounded through the door, reached the deck, and led us in pursuit up
the poop steps to the alley. Along this he raced, gained the taffrail,
and before the surprised man at the wheel could make a move to stop
him, he had sprung overboard.
We backed the mainyards, lowered a boat, and searched for two hours
before giving him up. He had gone to find the demon that had cursed
him--the cylindrical thing of two-feet-and-six-inch dimensions.
* * * * *
I am an old man now, old and content in the love and companionship of
a sweet-faced little woman, who, thanks to the testimony of the German
steward, came to me before the end of the passage.
Since the death of Fred, I have never dreamed of monsters and
cylindrical _things_. But in later years I have studied deeply of
psychology and the occult. And these problems remain unsolved. Did I,
who dreamed of monsters before Fred was born, obsess him and drive him
to the drink that killed him?
Or did Fred, after he had begun drinking, obsess me with the dream
vision of the _thing_, which found physical manifestation in an
innocent fire extinguisher in which he kept the whiskey?