He held up a gnarled hand. "One moment, my boy. Let me finish."
So he finished. And the rest of the story was even nuttier.
He was a throwback, he said with quiet pride. The perfection which had taken his people countless years to attain was wiped out the moment he came into being. They'd tried to reform him, but there was something fundamental about his evil—as if it were an essence.
As a last resort, they'd put him into one of their wonderful machines and thrown the switch. At that agonizing instant, he'd imagined himself to be water scraping over the edge of a sharp rock. Then he'd come to, drifting through space. And, much later, he'd touched Earth. Once landed, he'd taken on many shapes, through the years—mainly, however, of people who'd died.
EVEN AS HE talked, I was carefully sliding my chair back. If I could reach the phone in the hallway without being noticed, it would be fairly simple to get help. But he saw what I was doing and laughed.
"Edward," he said, "I know you don't believe me, but stick around until I prove it."
What happened next almost made me sick to my stomach. His face, which had been as wrinkled as a fielder's mitt, all of a sudden took on the appearance of a disturbed reflection in a pool of water. His flesh began to writhe like a tangled mass of earthworms. Thirty seconds after it began, he'd sloughed off thirty years. Even his beard, which had been as white as shower-room tiling, became a fierce, dead black.
I heard Tommy pipe, "Gollee!" and Nan sigh—only it sounded more like a groan. I shook away the dazed feeling and it was immediately replaced by a great excitement.
"Listen here," I said hoarsely, "this story will set the whole country on its ear. With my by-line on it!"