The Flying Death

by Samuel Hopkins Adams

Fog was drifting in from the ocean, giving added incentive to haste. Wisest it would be, the professor judged, to make for the near point of the cliff, so that he might have a line to follow should mist blot the landscape. The beach below was just dimming with the advance of the first folds of grey when Professor Ravenden reached the brink. The nearer sands were cut off from his vision by a rise between himself and the rendezvous. As his eye ranged to the west for the readiest access to the level, it was caught and held by the outstretched body of Dick Colton lying upon the hard sand out from the mouth of the ravine where Serdholm and Haynes had met their death.

For the moment the scientist was stunned into inaction. Suddenly the body twitched, and there swept over the unhappy entomologist a dreadful sense of his own negligence and responsibility. Along the heights paralleling the beach-line he ran at utmost speed, dipped down into a hollow where, for the time, the prospect was shut off, and surmounted the slope beyond, which brought him almost above the body, and a little to the east of the gully. Meantime the fog had been closing down, and now, as the professor reached the spot, it spread a grey and wavering mantle between him and what lay below.

Already he had attained the gully’s edge, when there moved out upon the hard sand a thing so out of all conception, an apparition so monstrous, that the professor’s net fell from his hand, and a loud cry burst from him. Through the enveloping medium of the mist, the figure swayed vaguely, and assumed shapes beyond comprehension. Suddenly it doubled on itself, contracted to a compact blur, underwent a swift inversion, and before the scientist’s straining vision there arose a man, dreadful of aspect indeed, but still a human being, and as such, not beyond human powers to cope with. The man had been moving toward the body of Colton when the professor’s shout arrested him. Now he whirled about and stood facing the height with squinted eyes and bestially gnashing teeth.

To delay him was the one chance for Colton’s life, if Colton indeed were not already beyond help.

“If I only could get down the gully!” thought the professor, and dismissed the thought instantly. Time for any course except the direct one now was lacking. The one way lay over the cliff.

“Stand where you are!” he shouted in a voice of command, and before the words were fairly done he was in mid-air, a giddy terror dulling his brain as he plunged down through the fog. Fortunately—for the bones of fifty-odd years are brittle—he landed upon a slope of soft sand. Pitching forward, he threw himself completely over, and carried to his feet by the impetus, charged down the slope upon the man.

It was the juggler. So much the professor realised as he sped forward. Mania of murder was written unmistakably on the seamed and malignant face and in the eyes, as the man turned them on the professor. His posture was that of a startled beast, alert and alarmed. Beyond him, near the sprawled body of Colton, a huge knife with an inordinately broad blade stuck, half upright, in the sand. Toward this the maniac had started, but turned swiftly with a snarl, and crouched, as the intrepid scientist ran in upon him.

Exultation, savage and keen, a most unscientific emotion, blazed up in Professor Ravenden as he noted that his opponent had little the advantage of him in size and weight. What little there was would be offset by his own natural wiriness of frame which a rigid habit of life and out-of-door exercise had kept from the deterioration of age. The scientist came in, stooping low, and, stooping low, the murderer met the onset. The two closed. With a sudden, daunting shock the entomologist realised, as Whalley’s muscles tightened on his, that he had met the strength of fury. For a moment they strained, Professor Ravenden striving for a grip which should enable him to break the other’s foothold. Then with a rabid scream the creature dashed his face into the professor’s shoulder. Through cloth and flesh sheared the ravening teeth, until they grated on the shoulder-blade.

Instantly the aspect of the duel changed. For, upon the outrage of that assault, a fury not less insane than the maniac’s fired the professor, and he who always had prided himself upon a considered austerity of the emotions, was roused to the world-old, baresark thirst of murder which lies somewhere, black and terrible, in the soul of every courageous man, and, sends him, at the last, straight to the throat of his enemy.

Power flushed through his veins; his muscles distended with the strength of steel. Driving his fingers deep under the chin, he tore the hideous, distorted face from his shoulder. His right hand, drawn back for a blow, twitched upon the cord from which depended his heavy poison-bottle. Shouting aloud, he swung up the formidable weapon and brought it down upon the juggler’s head with repeated blows. The man’s grasp relaxed. Back for a fuller swing Professor Ravenden leaped, and crushed him to the ground. The thick glass was shattered, and on the blood-stained sands a little spot of heaven’s blue fluttered in the breeze, instantly to be trampled under foot.