Science Fiction by Gaslight: A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines, 1891-1911

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  He broke off with a sudden start and gripping my wrist, leaned over the rail, pointing down to the water. Down in the gloomy city-built gully through which the river flows I caught the disappearing dive of some black waving object, then there was a quiet eddy of the water, and further on a series of V-shaped ripples came to the surface and shot toward the South Side wharves; again a long, dark, indefinite thing lifted from the river and waved glistening wet one instant under an arc-lamp and then disappeared, as though it plunged under the stone-walled embankment of the street.

  “Merciful heaven!” I cried, “the submerged outlet of a sewer must be there!”

  “Yes,” said Hood. “It is nearly wide enough to drive through. Now,” he said solemnly, “we shall solve this hideous mystery of the sewers and shall do away with it as sure as there is a God in Heaven!”

  His tone of suppressed exultation changed to one of solicitude as he saw that horror was again crawling over my back—for neither of us dared compare the hideous surmises that had taken shape in our minds.

  “We would better go,” he said; “your nerves have had all they should stand. Ten or twelve hours in bed will make you over.”

  “Did you notice the length and peculiar motion of that arm?” I whispered.

  “I did,” he answered, laying his hand upon my shoulder; “perhaps before this time to-morrow morning we shall know.”

  The clock on the old Inter-Ocean Building had just tolled midnight when I turned into a cross-town street and rang the night bell of the undertaking establishment that Hood had given me as his address.

  A handsome, ruddy-cheeked youth admitted me with subdued professional concern that changed to a cheery welcome upon his learning my business was a matter of personal friendship with Mr. Hood. Behind a reception room, I was led through a heavily carpeted and dimly lighted hall; into another room at the foot of which was a huge bronze sarcophagus in a plate-glass case; from behind this Hood came forward to greet and conduct me on through a big, barren workroom, where beneath their sheets lay two rigid and indistinct forms, so awfully withdrawn from life yet so pathetically helpless against intrusion.

  Into one of three or four stall-like compartments, partitioned but half-way to the ceiling off this work-room, Hood ushered me, explaining that they were the bedrooms of the employees who must be in constant attendance at the establishment.

  “I shall not offer you my one chair,” said he, as we both glanced with a smile at the odd and meager furnishings of the room; “it is high time we were down to business. You may open your hunting case here on the cot—that’s good: a sweater, a duck coat, hip boots and two 44-caliber sixes—better for our purpose than rifles—a practical lot of stuff. Now I,” he went on, “am going to be rather unsportsman-like, if I am driven to it. The vampire has put himself beyond mercy; so, like Puckle, who invented a double-barreled gun, one side firing balls ‘for shootinge ye Christians,’ and the other square bullets for shootinge ye Turks,’ I have a special charge that I shall fire at the fiend—there is enough acid in this big syringe to bring an elephant to his knees.”

  Hood was also armed with a long, keen knife, which, he said, since his packing-house experience, he trusted more than firearms. For our light he had provided two new electric clubs, like the morocco-covered section of a telescope, which on pressing a button emitted a powerful beam of light through the big lens set in the end.

  “Are you ready now?” asked Hood, laying his hand upon my shoulder. “The affair that we are undertaking cannot be long in any case; but on the other hand, are you prepared to risk it should our return be—”

  “Indefinitely extended?” I concluded. “Yes, I am ready. The thought that at this moment some one, happy and full of life, may be snatched down to that foul death makes my very soul yearn to hunt this mystery to the end. The papers gave no report of last night’s disappearance, and as you said, God alone knows how many have gone that way for us to avenge.”

  Hood led the way through the rear ware-room to the alley, and we cautiously crept between iron-shuttered walls of business houses to the middle of the next block without encountering a watchman. Here he knelt on the paving, and after some groping lifted the lid of a manhole, thrusting his electric truncheon down into the black opening. A glare of white light showed a narrow shaft of masonry eight feet deep, connecting with a conduit scarcely large enough to crawl through. A warm, white, malodorous vapor arose from the glowing opening on the keen outer air. The place looked ratty and so confined that I dreaded sticking fast in it; but Hood motioned me to go in, and I filled my lungs with pure air and dropped down into total darkness.

  At the bottom my light showed a drain so narrow that I found it better to back in feet first. I had at once the feeling of crushing suffocation, but I crawled away from the manhole to make room for Hood, and I heard his scuffling descent and the iron cover drop into its place. Lying almost upon my face I had little room for movement, but the fury with which I wormed my way through twenty yards of that drain was marvelous. I think Hood himself found the passage irksome, and when we dropped into a feeder of the trunk sewer we were glad enough to stand ankle-deep in a dark tunnel of sewage and breathe in the freedom of space, if not of purity.

  We had gained the underground system that drained the city. A noisome sweat, the dank contamination of humanity, covered the walls; the arch of masonry was mottled with dark stains and straggling patches of a soot-like growth, through which a snow-white vermicular fungus wriggled, fed by the peculiar properties of the seepage above; over the sloping floor the foul flow from the many stories of life in the upper world sneaked away in the darkness with a loathsome gurgle, as though it would invite us that way to seek the murderer of the sewer.

  Following the course of the brown streams for a block or two we entered what proved to be the main artery of the sewers, as spacious as a railway tunnel and as well-built as an ancient wine-cellar. We did not expect to find the outlaw in this thoroughfare, for even in the solitudes of the city’s vaults he would find some blind passage more to his purpose; but the trunk sewer was the natural base of our operations, the beginning and termination of each long excursion to the right or left with which we traced every feeder and cross tunnel in the hunt that followed—traced them of necessity in silence, and as much as possible in darkness, which encouraged the imagination to shrink all the more from fetid moistures and smells and the touch of vermin that we heard scurrying and gliding away from our footsteps.

  Hood read the gush of every drain as an archeologist reads the layers of earth that cover a buried city: here was a hotel; there a wholesale chemist’s; this sickening spout of offal, he declared, came from the night cleansing of a dissecting-room; this was a livery stable, and that the emptying vats of a dye-house, and there the drain of a milk depot spouting a river of sour milk. Yet Hood never forgot the hunt; each flash of the light was first used to search for traces of the murderer, and at a single glance he saw things that might have escaped my prolonged quest. I fear I was of little use save as a companion in the black, lonely labyrinth, and while I kept myself alert my imagination heard a startled exclamation in every drip, retreating footfalls as our own echoed along the dark vaulting, and a disturbed snarl in the gurgle of the moving offal.

  Without acknowledging it to each other, we had purposely avoided the fatal locality under Michigan Avenue, each feeling that it was best to become used to the strange conditions of the hunt before we risked the attempt on the murderer’s most probable lurking place. We must have been in the neighborhood of the Masonic Temple; I was about to flash my light into a branch sewer, my body bent against the angle of the wall, my finger ready upon the electric buttom, when there was a sudden snarl almost in my face and a hoarse voice whispered:

  “Whist! Is it the murderin’ devil ye’re after at last?”

  I leaped back, jostling Hood, and our electric clubs shot unsteady beams of white glare into the eyes of an enormous figure, that with a guttural curse cowered and buried h
is face in his arm.

  “Take the light aff me! Take it aff, dom it!”

  We poured the intense rays over the man and needed no other weapon to cover him, for he staggered against the wall and turned his back to the light.

  “Shut it aff, men, shut it aff!” he wailed; “d’ye want to blind me? I’m Officer Kindelon, on duty, by—, on since Wednesday night, from Harrison Station.”

  The lights showed a burly shape in brass buttons, the twisted wrack of a mighty man, who leaned forward and sideways in spite of painful effort to straighten up. His face, it seemed, had been florid, but black rings under his eyes made its unnatural pallor all the more noticeable. He was hatless, one arm was bare to the shoulder and bruised black and blue; the remnant of a white glove encircled his wrist in a dirty rag; his coat was ripped up the back, and what had been a smart uniform hung on him in tatters, befouled by the splash of the sewage.

  Hood tucked his light under his arm and produced his flask; the big policeman brightened eagerly, but controlled himself like an abused simpleton.

  “By the growth on me face it would be three days since I tasted food,” grumbled the poor fellow, and gulped the dram Hood poured for him; “three days since I saw the impudent devil himself reach up out of hell, as cool as you please, and drag a poor creature from aff his bones, without by yer leave—bad luck to the size of the sewer-trap that let me follow him, and the devil’s own mommickin’ up he give me!”

  We had half guessed this, but we looked at each other in amazement. Here, then, was a man, who had not only seen, but had even dared the death-trap in its hiding-place, and by reason of superhuman strength had brought himself off to tell it.

  “Officer Kindelon,” said I, with a kindly force that seemed necessary to stir his clouded understanding, “you were a powerful man and you must have met something of tremendous strength to have given you this terrible punishment. We are here to find this demon—where is he and what is he like?”

  The man leaped up, and wrestling grotesquely with himself imitated the manner of his defense in the clutch of the death-trap.

  “The Old One himself, none less, I tell ye,” he answered, drawing us both toward him and looking fearfully down the dark vaulting of the sewer. “He had no science; but he was hell for reach and for strength. D’ye think Kindelon was whipped?—what good is the science of the ring when ye fight the devil in the dark? Come, since ye have lights. I have listened to him wanderin’ about and never askin’ what’s the time of day. I’m dommed if I don’t shoy ye the fight of yer life.”

  The man beckoned us down the passage, and limping, humped and askew, went ahead in the gloom, turning now and then to grimace us to be cautious. He led us into the trunk sewer and for a block or more down its wide vaulting; then turning to the right we knew, without his pantomime, we were nearing the lair of the murderer of the sewers.

  At the next turn Kindelon stopped and motioned us to come on without lights. In total darkness we stood grouped and breathless listening to sounds so suggestive of the devil that they did not need the denunciation of Kindelon. They did not seem human, and yet they were, too; as though some human work was being lazily done, a long-drawn, gliding movement ending in a fleshy thud, then a deep breath of satisfaction followed by a sound as of something bone-like moving on the stone floor.

  “Och, ye hellion!” muttered the big policeman, and spat in disgust.

  I found that inaction and the presence of that awful mystery in the darkness was more than I could stand. I must have it out, even if it had to come to the repellent thing I had dreaded, a hand-to-hand contest with that foul fiend in the filth of the sewer floor. I whispered to Hood that I would try to cut off the retreat of the monster by slipping by him in the dark. He would have detained me, but Kindelon was working himself into a fury, and I glided away in the darkness while he was trying to control the policeman’s fever for revenge.

  Foot by foot, nearer and nearer, I drew to the death-trap, feeling my way, no longer daintily, but low down and nearly upon all fours, along the wall, that seemed to draw out like elastic as I crept on. The vaulting became a whispering gallery of those hideous sounds, and they hummed in my ears with the blood that was rushing to my brain. As I came opposite them my lungs seemed to fail and then fill to bursting with the fetid breath of the place, and my heart rebelled with furious pounding at every thought I made to quiet it. I was in the midst of my peril when I stumbled over what I took to be a log; but it instantly arose and I leaped on, though not quickly enough, for a glancing blow across the shoulders sent me staggering down the sewer.

  I shot my light and Hood’s followed on the instant. For a moment we all stood paralyzed by what we saw. Never since man began to kill has he brought to bay such a monster.

  Gigantic it was, but its horror partook of no one of the familiar forms of this latter world’s creatures; it was not of earth, air or water, though it hideously combined the beast, the reptile and the bird; and yet I felt it was not misbegotten, but was perhaps the last survival of some species from the mesozoic era, a disinherited offspring of Mother Earth that had been overlooked in the ruthless management of her family affairs, bred down through the ages in some deep retreat in the receding lake. The thing reared itself at bay, dazzled by the bright shafts of light we poured over it; and still we gazed, fascinated by its hideous loathsomeness.

  Then I noticed that the beam of Hood’s light was wavering, and out of the tail of my eye I saw Kindelon creeping toward the monster. Hood tried to restrain him, and at the same time manage his light, while he aimed his charge of acid. The stream of liquid fire shot toward the great creature and for an instant played upon its head. Then the stone vaulting of the sewer was full of the writhing of those agile, squid-like arms and their multiplying shadows. I fired in quick succession three shots and then saw the policeman straighten up to his full height and with a roar charge like a bull upon the writhing knot of tentacles. Hood clutched at him; he might as well have tried to stop a rhinoceros. Kindelon threw himself into the midst of the snaky turmoil, and unmindful of the burning fluid that dripped from it throttled the death-trap. Any other than a man of his gigantic strength would have been instantly wrung to death in that vortex; but the policeman fastened his great hands on the wartly leathern throat and clung to it while the huge beast tore at him cruelly.

  Hood and I hovered about the fight, retreating as we were forced to, closing in as we saw opportunity. Twice Hood flashed his long keen knife and buried it in the monster with an accurate thrust. I shot a dozen times, but I doubt if more than three of the bullets were effective. Suddenly the fury of the fight slackened and Hood, seeing his chance, swung the knife. The death-trap reared and tearing Kindelon from his hold threshed the great body of the policeman like a rag between the walls of the sewer—then it began to waver, and sinking, sinking, sinking, it dropped lifeless, with the dead officer still in its grasp, upon the hideous debris of its lair.

  The Red Book Magazine

  April, 1911

  THE AIR SERPENT

  by Will A. Page

  WILLIAM ADINO PAGE’s work is best remembered today as a forerunner of the “confidential” books about famous theatrical, movie, and political figures, before such material helped to establish the reputations of columnists like Walter Winchell, Jack Lait, Lee Mortimer, and, in a more remote sense, Drew Pearson. Page’s book, Behind the Curtain of the Broadway Beauty Trust, published by Edward A. Miller (1927), gave an inside view of the theatrical business. There were several letters by George Bernard Shaw tacked on to the book for effect, and the introduction was by none other than Jack Lait.

  In his youth, Will Page had edited The Bauble (1895-1897), a little journal of destructive criticism. Later on he wrote fiction; The Air Serpent (The Red Book Magazine, April 1911) is of special interest on several counts. First, it is an early speculation on the possibility of unknown dangers and life forms existing in the upper atmosphere, which was a natural result of the advent of air flight
and which remained a basic theme of science fiction even as recently as Robert A. Heinlein, who under the name of Anson MacDonald wrote for the March 1942 Astounding Science-Fiction, Goldfish Bowl, a well-handled novelette of a highly intelligent life form that exists in the stratosphere.

  The flying saucer business has briefly revived that concept, but basically space travel has just about destroyed any vestigal possibility of sustaining the notion.

  Secondly, it is possible that A. Conan Doyle secured his basic idea for The Horror of the Heights (published in Everybody’s, November 1913), about a year and a half later, from this source. Doyle never minded borrowing, though he often improved on his model. The similarity of the two stories is sinking.

  GENTLEMEN: The report which I now have the honor to submit to your honorable body is so extraordinary, and deals with facts so difficult to prove—beyond my own mere word and the records of my barograph which indicate the approximate height reached by my machine—that it is with much trepidation that I now appear before you. In presenting to you the results of my recent exploration of the upper ether, and the mysterious disappearance of my late mechanic, John Aid, of which cognizance has already been taken by the police, I realize that I am taxing the limit of credulity; yet before passing final judgment upon the extraordinary narrative I am about to place before you, let me call your attention to the fact that my record hitherto in the annals of aviation has been a story of unquestioned achievements, of daring which has often been characterized as reckless, and of an earnest and constant effort to discover new truths in that wonderful air world which has been opened up to exploration through the recent development of the aeroplane.

  I cannot refrain, also, from reminding your learned body that pioneers in all fields of endeavor suffer martyrdom from the unthinking and the unbelieving. Half a century ago, a ribald rhymster mocked at Darius Green and his flying machine; yet within the brief space of half-a-dozen years, the perfect aeroplane expresses of to-day have been evolved before our very eyes. Even last year, when a new world’s altitude record of 16,374 feet was established by the lamented Renegal, your sub-committee on altitude adopted a resolution that the limit of attainment in the upper ether had been reached; yet less than two months after, Santuza, the daring Spanish aviator, flying his 200-horse-power Mercadio tri-plane with the improved ailerons, reached the incredible height of 23,760 feet, when the ink in his barograph ran out and refused to register a greater height, although Santuza is of the belief that he climbed almost 1,000 feet higher.