Speaker 1: In the dark by Runnell Kazer. The watchman's flashlight painted
a white circle on the frosted glass, black lettered door
Greg Chemical Company Manufacturers a SA Gregg President Private. The
watchman's hand closed on the knob, rattling the door in
its frame queer but to night the sound had seemed
to come from in there, But it couldn't be. He
knew that mister Gregg and Miss Carruthers carried the only
keys to the office, so any intruder would be forced
to smash the lock. Maybe the sound came from the
storage room. The watchman clumped along the rubber matted corridor,
flung his weight against the door he had opened hard,
being of ponderous metal fitted into a cork casing. The
room was an air tight, fire proof fault. Really, his
shoes gritted on the concrete floor. As he prowled among
the big porcelain vats. The flashlight bore through the bluish
haze to the concrete walls. Acid fumes escaped under the
vat lids, made the haze and seared the man's throat.
He hurried out, coughing and wiping his eyes. It was
damn funny every night he heard the same peculiar noise
somewhere in this wing of the building, like a body
groaning and turning in a restless sleep. It was. It
scared him. He didn't mention the mystery to anyone, though.
He was an old man, and he didn't want mister
Gregg to think he was getting too old for the job. Hey,
sud think I was crazy if I told him about it,
he mumbled. Inside the office, Aesa Gregg heard the muttered
words plainly. He sat very still in a big leather
cushioned chair, hardly breathing, until the scrape of the watchman's
feet had thinned away down the hall. There was no
light in the room to betray him, only the cherry
colored tip of his cigar, which couldn't be visible through
the frosted glass door. Anyway. It'd be an hour before
the watchman's rounds brought him past the office again. Ayesa
Gregg had an hour if he could screw up his
nerves to use it. He took the frayed and of
the cigar from his mouth, his hand, which had wasted
to mere skin and bone these past few months, groped
through the darkness, slid opened the polished coolness of the
dictaphone hood and snapped the switch machinery faintly whorred. His
fingers found the tube, lifted it. Miss Carruthers, he snapped.
Then he hesitated. Surely he could trust Mary Carruthers. He'd
never wondered about her before. She'd been his secretary for
a dozen years. Lately, since he couldn't look after affairs
himself as he used to, she had practically run the business.
She was forty, sensible, unbeautiful, and tight lipped. Hell, he
had to trust her. His voice plunged into the darkness.
What I have to say now is intended for missus
Gregg's ears only. She will take the first boat home.
Of course, meet that boat and bring her to the office.
Since my wife knows nothing about a dictaphone, it will
be necessary for you to set this recording running as
soon as you have done so, leave her alone in
the room. Make sure she is not interrupted for a
half hour, That's all. He waited a decent interval. The
invisible needle peeled its thread into the revolving wax cylinder.
Jeannette muttered, Asa Gregg and hesitated again. This wasn't going
to be easy to say. He decided to begin matter
of factly. As you probably know, my will and the
insurance policies are in the vault at the First National
I believe you will find all my papers in excellent order.
If any questions arise, consult Miss Carruthers. What I have
to say to you now is purely personal. I feel,
my dear, that I owe you an explanation. That is God.
It was harder than he had expected, Jeannette, he started afresh.
You remember three years ago when I was in the hospital.
You were in Palm Beach at the time. I wired
that there had been an accident here at the plant.
That wasn't strictly so. The fact is I'd gotten mixed
up with a girl. He paused, shivering in the darkness.
A picture of Dot swam before him. The oval face,
framed with gleaming shirls of lemon tinted hair, had poutings,
garlet lips, and eyes whose allure was intensified by a
violent make up. The full length picture of her included
a streamlined, full, blossomed, and yet delectably life body, a
costly enticing Broadway chorus orchid. As a matter of fact,
that is where he'd found her. I won't make any
excuses for myself, Aesa Gregg said harshly. I might point
out that you were always in Florida or Bermuda or France,
and that I was a lonely man, but it wasn't
just loneliness, and I didn't seek companionship. I thought I
was making a last bow to romance. I was successful,
sixty and silly, and I did all the damn fool things.
I even wrote letters to her, popsy wopsy letters. The
dictaphone couldn't record the grimace that jerked his lips. She
saved them, of course, and by and by she put
a price on them ten thousand dollars. Dot claimed that
one of those filthy tabloids had offered her that much
for them. And what was a poor working girl to do,
she lied, I knew that. I told her to bring
the letters to the office after business hours and I'd
take care of her. I took care of her, all right.
I shot her, Jeannette. He mopped his face with a
handkerchief that was already damp. Not on account of the money,
you understand, It was the thing, she said, after she
had tucked the bills into her purse, vile things about
the way she had earned it ten times over by
enduring my beastly kisses. I really loved that girl, and
I'd thought she'd cared for me a little. It was
her hate that maddened me, and I got a gun
out of my desk drawer. Aesa Gregg reached through the
darkness for the switch. He fummed for the bottle, which
stood on the desk. His hands trembled, spilling some of
the liquor onto his lap. He drank from the bottle.
This part of the story he'd skip. It was too
horrible even to think about. He didn't want to remember
how the blood pooled inside Dot's fur coat, and how
he'd managed to carry the body out of the office
without leaking any of her blood onto the floor. He
tried to forget the musky sweetness of the perfume on
the dead girl mingled with the other evil blood smell. Especially,
he didn't want to remember the frightful time he'd had
stripping the gold rings from her fingers and the one
gold tooth in her head. The horror of it coiled
in the blackness about him. His own teeth rattled against
the bottle. When he gulped the second drink, he snapped
the switch savagely, but when he spoke, his voice cringed
into the tube. I carried her into the storage room.
I got the lid off one of the acid tanks.
The VAT contained an acid powerful enough to destroy anything
except gold. In fact, the vat itself had to be
lined with gold leaf. I knew that in twenty four
hours there wouldn't be a recognizable body left, and in
a week there wouldn't be anything at all. No matter
what the police suspected, they couldn't prove a murder charge
without a corpus delectie. I had committed the perfect crime,
except for one thing. I didn't realize there'd be a
splash when she went into the vat. Gregg laughed, not pleasantly.
His wife might think it had been a sob when
she heard this record. Now you understand why I went
to the hospital, he jerked. Possibly you'd call that poetic justice.
Oh God always broke again. He thumbed off the switch
and mopped his face with the damp linen. The rest,
how could he explain the rest of it? He spent
a long minute arranging his thoughts. You haven't any idea,
he resumed, No one has any idea of how I've
been punished for the thing I did. I don't mean
the sheer physical agony, but the fear that i'd talk
coming out of the ether at the hospital, the fear
that she'd been traced to my office. I'd simply hidden
her rings away, expecting to drop them into the river,
or that she might have confided in her lover, yes
she had one, or suppose A whopping big order came
through and the tank was emptied the very next day,
and I couldn't ask any questions. I didn't even know
what was in the papers. However, that part of it
was gradually cleared up. I quizzed Miss Carruther's and learned
that an unidentified female body had been fished out of
the East River a few days after Dot disappeared. That's
how the police solved the crime. I got rid of
her rings. I ordered the vat left alone. The other
thing began about six months ago. A spasm contorted his face,
his fingers ached their grip into the dictaphone tube. Jeannette,
you remember how I began to object to the radio,
how I'd shouted you to turn it off in the
middle of the program. You thought I was ill and
worried about business. You were wrong. The thing that got
me was hearing her voice. He gripped the cold cigar
chewed it. It's very strange that you didn't notice it.
No matter what station we dialed to, always the same
voice came stealing into the room. But perhaps you did notice.
You said once or twice that all those blues singers
sound alike, and she was a blue singer. It was she, oh,
all right, somewhere out there in the ether, reminding me.
The next thing was well. At first, when I noticed
it in the office, I thought Miss Carruthers had suddenly
taken up with young ideas. You see, I kept smelling perfume,
and he smelled it. Now. It was like a miasma
in the dark. It isn't anything that Carruthers wears, he grated.
It comes from, yes, the storage room. I realized that
about a month ago, just after you sailed. One night,
I stayed late at the office and I went in there.
It seemed to be strongest around the vat, her vat,
and I lifted the lid. The sweet sticky musty smell
hit me like a blow in the face. And that
isn't all terror stocked in this room. Aesa Gregg, crouched
in his chair, felt the weight of fear on him
like a submarine pressure. His cigar pitched on his knees
dropped to the floor. You wouldn't believe this, Jeannette. He
hammered the words like nails into the darkness in front
of him. You will say that it's impossible. I know
that it is impossible, and it is physiologically absurd. It
contradicts the laws of natural science. But I saw something
on the bottom of that vat. He groped for the bottle.
His wife would hear a low gurgle and then a
coughing gasp. The vat was nearly full of this transparent,
oily acid. He went on. What I saw was a
lot of sediment on the golden floor, And there shouldn't
have been any sediment. The stuff utterly dissolves animal tissue, bone,
even the common ores keeps them in suspension. It didn't
look like sediment either. It looked like a heap of mold,
grave mold. I replaced the lid. I spent a whek
convincing myself that it was all impossible, that I couldn't
have seen anything of the sort. Then I went to
the vet again. Silence hung in the darkness while he
sucked air into his lungs, and the words burst separate,
yammering shrieks. I looked night after night, for hours at
a time. I watched the change. Did you ever see
a body decomposed? Of course not neither have I. But
you must know in a general way what the process is. Well,
this has been the exact opposite. First, I stared at
the heap of grave mold as it shaped itself into bones,
a skeleton. I watched the coming of hair, a yellow
tangle of it, sprouting from the bare round skull, until,
oh God, the flesh began to make itself before my eyes.
I couldn't bear anymore. I stayed away, didn't come to
the office for five days. The tube slipped from his sweating,
slick fingers, panting aesa, Gregg fumbled in the dark until
he found it. Exhaustion, not self control, flattened his voice
to a dead monotone. I tried to think of a
way out, if I could fish the corpse out of
the tank, but I couldn't smuggle it out of the
plant alone. You know that, and so do I. Besides,
what would be the use If the acid can't kill her,
nothing can. That's why I can't have the lid cemented on.
It wouldn't do any good either. Until three days ago,
she hadn't the least color, looking as white as a
ghost in the vat, a naked ghost, because there's been
no resurrection for her clothing. I've watched her limbs grow rosy,
her lips are scarlet, her eyes are bright. They opened yesterday,
and her breast were rising and falling, oh, almost imperceptibly.
But that was last night, and tonight, I swear it.
Her lips moved, she muttered my name. She turned, she'd
been lying on her side over onto her back. The
record would be badly blurred. His hand shook violently, bobbling
the tube against his lips. Gregg braced his elbow against
the desk. She isn't dead, he choked. She's only asleep,
not very soundly asleep. She's waking up. The invisible needle
quivered as it traced several noises. There was his tortured breathing,
and the clawing of his fingernails rattling over the desk.
The drawer clicked as it opened. A loud click was
the cocking of the revolver. Soon, she's going to get
out of that vat, Greg bleeded, Jeannette, forgive me, God,
forgive me, for I will not, I cannot, I dare
not stay here and see her. Then the sound of
the shot brought the watchman stumbling along the corridor. He
crashed against the office door. It banged open in a
shower of falling frosted glass. The watchman's flashlight severed the
darkness and printed its white circle on the face of
Asa Gregg. He had fallen back into the chair, a
blackish gout of blood running from the hole in his temple.
He stared sightlessly into the light with his eyes that
were two gnarls of shrunken brown flesh, like knots in
a pine board. Asa greg was blind, had been since
that night. Three years passed when the acid splashed. The
end of in the Dark by Ronald Caser