It was then he cried out, “Oh, God! God! Again! You meant it, then, God! You meant it.”
It was nearly midnight when Tommy and his friend Dobson returned to the hotel. “Your paper's been trying to get you for an hour, Mr. Hawkins,” said the night clerk when they came in. “Story right in the next room to yours. Old party in there hanged himself.”
“So?” said Tommy. “Ungrateful old guy, he is! I put in the afternoon trying to cheer him up a little.”
“Did you know him?” asked the clerk.
“Nope,” said Tommy, moving toward the elevator.
But a few moments later, confronted with the grotesque spectacle in the room upstairs, he said, “Yes—I—I know him. Jack! Jack! Get me out of here, Jack! It's Uncle Ezra, Jack! He's—he's come for me!”
As has been remarked before, sometimes even a bubble may be a mordant weapon.