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In the Dark by Rannell Kazer.
The watchman's flashlight painted a white circle on

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the frosted glass, black lettered door
Gregg Chemical Company Manufacturers, ASA, Gregg

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President Private. The watchman's hand closed
on the knob, rattling the door in

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its frame queer but to night the
sound had seemed to come from in there,

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But it couldn't be. He knew
that mister Gregg and Miss Carruthers carried

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the only keys to the office,
so any intruder would be forced to smash

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the lock. Maybe the sound came
from the storage room. The watchman clumped

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along the rubber matted corridor, flung
his weight against the door. He opened

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hard, being of ponderous metal fitted
into a cork casing. The room was

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an air tight, fire proof fault. Really, his shoes gritted on the

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concrete floor. As he prowled among
the big porcelain vats. The flashlight bore

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through the bluish haze to the concrete
walls. Acid fumes escaped under the vat

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lids, made the haze and seared
the man's throat. He hurried out,

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coughing and wiping his eyes. It
was damned funny every night he heard the

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same peculiar noise somewhere in this wing
of the building, like a body groaning

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and turning in a restless sleep.
It was. It scared him. He

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didn't mention the mystery to anyone,
though. He was an old man and

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he didn't want mister Gregg to think
he was getting too old for the job.

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HASA think I was crazy if I
told him about it, he mumbled

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Inside the office, Asa Gregg heard
the muttered words plainly. He sat very

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still in the big leather cushioned chair, hardly breathing, until the scrape of

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the watchman's feet had thinned away down
the hall. There was no light in

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the room to betray him, only
the cherry colored tip of his cigar,

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which couldn't be visible through the frosted
glass door. Anyway. It'd be an

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hour before the watchman's rounds brought him
past the office again. Asa Gregg had

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an hour, if he could screw
up his nerves to use it. He

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took the freight end of the cigar
from his mouth, his hand, which

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had wasted to mere skin and bone
these past few months, groped through the

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darkness, slid opened the polished coolness
of the dictaphone hood and snapped the switch.

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Machinery faintly whirred. His fingers found
the tube, lifted it. Miss

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Carruthers, he snapped. Then he
hesitated. Surely he could trust Mary Carruthers.

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He'd never wondered about her before.
She'd been his secretary for a dozen

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years. Lately, since he couldn't
look after affairs himself as he used to,

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she had practically run the business.
She was forty, sensible, unbeautiful,

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and tight lipped. Hell, he
had to trust her. His voice

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plunged into the darkness. What I
have to say now is intended for missus

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Gregg's ears only. She will take
the first boat home. Of course,

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meet that boat and bring her to
the office. Since my wife knows nothing

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about a dictaphone, it will be
necessary for you to set this recording running

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as soon as you have done so, leave her alone in the room.

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Make sure she is not interrupted for
a half hour, That's all. He

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waited a decent interval. The invisible
needle peeled its thread into the revolving wax

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cylinder. Jeannette muttered Asa Gregg and
hesitated again. This wasn't going to be

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easy to say. He decided to
begin. Matter of fact, as you

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probably know, my will and the
insurance policies are in the vault at the

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First National I believe you will find
all my papers in excellent order. If

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any questions arise, consult Miss Carruthers. What I have to say to you

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now is purely personal. I feel, my dear, that I owe you

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an explanation. That is God,
it was harder than he had expected,

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Jeannette, he started afresh. You
remember three years ago when I was in

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the hospital. You were in Palm
Beach. At the time, I wired

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that there had been an accident here
at the plant That wasn't strictly so.

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The fact is I'd gotten mixed up
with a girl. He paused, shivering

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in the darkness. A picture of
Dot swam before him. The oval face,

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framed with gleaming swirls of lemon tinted
hair, had poutings, garlet lips,

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and eyes whose allure was intensified by
a violent make up. The full

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length picture of her included a streamlined, full, blossomed, and yet delectably

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lithe body, a costly enticing Broadway
chorus orchid. As a matter of fact,

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that is where he'd found her.
I won't make any excuses for myself,

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Asa Gregg said harshly. I might
point out that you were always in

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Florida or Bermuda or France, and
that I was a lonely man, but

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it wasn't just loneliness, and I
didn't seek companionship. I thought I was

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making a last bow to romance.
I was successful, sixty and silly,

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and I did all the damn fool
things. I even wrote letters to her,

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popsy wopsy letters. The dictaphone couldn't
record the grimace that jerked his lips.

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She saved them, of course,
and by and by she put a

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price on them. Ten thousand dollars. Dot claimed that one of those filthy

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tabloids had offered her that much for
them. And what was a poor working

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girl to do, she lied,
I knew that. I told her to

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bring the letters to the office after
business hours and I'd take care of her.

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I took care of her, all
right. I shot her, Jeanette.

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He mopped his face with a handkerchief
that was already damp. Not on

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account of the money, you understand, It was the thing, she said,

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after she had tucked the bills into
her purse vile things about the way

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she had earned it ten times over
by enduring my beastly kisses. I really

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loved that girl, and I'd thought
she'd cared for me a little. It

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was her hate that maddened me,
and I got a gun out of my

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desk. Drower Aesa Gregg reached through
the darkness for the switch. He fumbled

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for the bottle, which stood on
the desk. His hands trembled, spilling

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some of the liquor onto his lap. He drank from the bottle. This

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part of the story he'd skip.
It was too horrible even to think about.

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He didn't want to remember how the
blood pooled inside dots fur coat,

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and how he'd managed to carry the
body out of the office without leaking any

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of her blood onto the floor.
He tried to forget the musky sweetness of

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the perfume on the dead girl mingled
with the other evil blood smell. Especially,

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he didn't want to remember the frightful
time he'd had stripping the gold rings

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from her fingers and the one gold
tooth in her head. The horror of

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it coiled in the blackness about him. His own teeth rattled against the bottle

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when he gulped the second drink.
He snapped the switch savagely, but when

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he spoke, his voice cringed into
the tube. I carried her into the

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storage room. I got the lid
off one of the acid tanks. The

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VAT contained an acid powerful enough to
destroy anything except gold. In fact,

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the vat itself had to be lined
with gold leaf. I knew that in

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twenty four hours there wouldn't be a
recognizable body left, and in a week

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there wouldn't be anything at all.
No matter what the police suspected, they

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couldn't prove a murder charge without a
corpus DELECTI I had committed the perfect crime,

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except for one thing. I didn't
realize there'd be a splash when she

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went into the vat. Gregg laughed, not pleasantly. His wife might think

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it had been a sob when she
heard this record. Now you understand why

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I went to the hospital, he
jerked. Possibly you'd call that poetic justice.

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Oh God, hiss broke again.
He thumbed off the switch and mopped

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his face with the damp linen.
The rest How could he explain the rest

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of it? He spent a long
minute arranging his thoughts. You haven't any

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idea, he resumed, No one
has any idea of how I've been punished

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for the thing I did. I
don't mean the sheer physical agony, but

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the fear that I'd talked coming out
of the ether at the hospital, the

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fear that she'd been traced to my
office. I'd simply hidden her rings away,

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expecting to drop them into the river, or that she might have confided

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in her lover, yes she had
one, or suppose A whopping big order

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came through and the tank was emptied
the very next day, and I couldn't

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ask any questions. I didn't even
know what was in the papers. However,

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that part of it was gradually cleared
up. I quizzed Miss Carruthers and

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learned that an unidentified female body had
been fished out of the East River a

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few days after Dot disappeared. That's
how the police solved the crime. I

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got rid of her rings. I
ordered the vat left alone. The other

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thing began about six months ago.
A spasm contorted his face, his fingers

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ached their grip into the dictaphone tube. Jeanette, you remember how I began

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to object to the radio, how
I'd shout at you to turn it off

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in the middle of the program.
You thought I was ill and worried about

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business. You were wrong. The
thing that got me was hearing her voice.

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He gripped the cold cigar. Shoot
it. It's very strange that you

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didn't notice it. No matter what
station we dialed to, always the same

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voice came stealing into the room.
But perhaps you did notice. You said

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once or twice that all those blue
singers sound alike, and she was a

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blue singer. It was she all
right somewhere out there in the ether,

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reminding me. The next thing was
well. At first, when I noticed

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it in the office, I thought
Miss Carruthers had suddenly taken up with young

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ideas. You see, I kept
smelling perfume, and he smelled it.

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Now. It was like a miasma
in the dark. It isn't anything that

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Carruthers wears, he grated. It
comes from, yes, the storage room.

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I realized that about a month ago, just after you sailed. One

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night, I stayed late at the
office and I went in there. It

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seemed to be strongest around the vat, her vat, and I lifted the

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lid. The sweet, sticky,
musty smell hit me. Like a blow

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in the face. And that isn't
all terror stalked in this room. Asa

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Gregg, crouched in his chair,
felt the weight of fear on him like

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a submarine pressure. His cigar pitched
on his knees dropped to the floor.

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You wouldn't believe this, Jeanette.
He hammered the words like nails into the

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darkness in front of him. You
will say that it's impossible. I know

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that it is impossible, and it
is physiologically absurd. It contradicts the laws

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of natural science. But I saw
something on the bottom of that vat.

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He groped for the bottle. His
wife would hear a low gurgle and then

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a coughing gasp. The vat was
nearly full of this transparent, oily acid.

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He went on. What I saw
was a lot of sediment on the

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golden floor, and there shouldn't have
been any sediment. The stuff utterly dissolves

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animal tissue, bone, even the
common ores keeps them in suspension. It

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didn't look like sediment either. It
looked like a heap of mold, grave

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mold. I replaced the lid.
I spent a week convincing myself that it

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was all impossible that I couldn't have
seen anything of the sort. Then I

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went to the vet again. Silence
hung in the darkness while he sucked air

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into his lungs, and the words
burst separate, yammering shrieks. I looked

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night after night, for hours at
a time. I watched the change.

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Did you ever see a body decomposed? Of course not neither have I.

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But you must know in a general
way what the process is. Well,

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this has been the exact opposite.
First I stared at the heap of grave

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mold as it shaped itself into bones, a skeleton. I watched the coming

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of hair, a yellow tangle of
it, sprouting from the bare round skull,

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until, oh God, the flesh
began to make itself before my eyes.

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I couldn't bear anymore. I stayed
away, didn't come to the office

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for five days. The tube slipped
from his sweating, slick fingers, Panting,

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Asa Gregg fumbled in the dark until
he found it. Exhaustion, not

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self control, flattened his voice to
a dead monotone. I tried to think

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of a way out, if I
could fish the corpse out of the tank,

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but I couldn't smuggle it out of
the plant alone. You know that,

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and so do I. Besides,
what would be the use If the

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acid can't kill her, nothing can. That's why I can't have the lid

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cemented on. It wouldn't do any
good either. Until three days ago,

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she hadn't the least color, looking
as white as a ghost in the vat,

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a naked ghost. Because there's been
no resurrection for her clothing. I've

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watched her limbs grow rosy, her
lips are scarlet, her eyes are bright.

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They opened yesterday, and her breasts
were rising and falling, almost imperceptibly.

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But that was last night, and
tonight, I swear it. Her

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lips moved, she muttered my name. She turned, she'd been lying on

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her side over onto her back.
The record would be badly blurred. His

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hand shook violently, bobbling the tube
against his lips. Greg braced his elbow

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against the desk. She isn't dead, he choked. She's only asleep,

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not very soundly asleep. She's waking
up. The invisible needle quivered as it

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traced several noises. There was his
tortured breathing and the clawing of his fingernails,

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rattling over the desk. The drawer
clicked as it opened. A loud

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click was the cocking of the revolver. Soon, she's going to get out

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of that vat, bleeded Jeannette.
Forgive me, God, forgive me,

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for I will not, I cannot. I dare not stay here and see

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her. Then the sound of the
shot brought the watchman stumbling along the corridor.

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He crashed against the office door.
It banged open in a shower of

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falling frosted glass. The watchman's flashlight
severed the darkness and printed its white circle

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on the face of Asa Gregg.
He had fallen back into the chair,

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a blackish gout of blood running from
the hole in his temple. He stared

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sightlessly into the light with his eyes
that were two gnarls of shrunken brown flesh,

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like nuts in a pine board.
Asa Gregg was blind, had been

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since that night. Three years passed
when the acid splashed. The end of

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In the Dark by Ronald Caser