Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
fainting across the corpse.
He awoke with a sense of horror, leaped from the body, and groped up the
stairs, calling to the guard. The watchman sat as if asleep, with the
gate swinging free. With one glance at him the messenger hurried up to
the sub-vault. In vain he called to the guards. His voice echoed and
re-echoed weirdly. Up into the great basement he rushed. Here another
guard lay prostrate on his face, cold and still. A fear arose in the
messenger's heart. He dashed up to the cellar floor, up into the bank.
The stillness of death lay everywhere and everywhere bowed, bent, and
stretched the silent forms of men. The messenger paused and glanced
about. He was not a man easily moved; but the sight was appalling!
"Robbery and murder," he whispered slowly to himself as he saw the
twisted, oozing mouth of the president where he lay half-buried on his
desk. Then a new thought seized him: If they found him here alone--with
all this money and all these dead men--what would his life be worth? He
glanced about, tiptoed cautiously to a side door, and again looked
behind. Quietly he turned the latch and stepped out into Wall Street.
How silent the street was! Not a soul was stirring, and yet it was
high-noon--Wall Street? Broadway? He glanced almost wildly up and down,
then across the street, and as he looked, a sickening horror froze in
his limbs. With a choking cry of utter fright he lunged, leaned giddily
against the cold building, and stared helplessly at the sight.
In the great stone doorway a hundred men and women and children lay
crushed and twisted and jammed, forced into that great, gaping doorway
like refuse in a can--as if in one wild, frantic rush to safety, they
had rushed and ground themselves to death. Slowly the messenger crept
along the walls, wetting his parched mouth and trying to comprehend,
stilling the tremor in his limbs and the rising terror in his heart. He
met a business man, silk-hatted and frock-coated, who had crept, too,
along that smooth wall and stood now stone dead with wonder written on
his lips. The messenger turned his eyes hastily away and sought the
curb. A woman leaned wearily against the signpost, her head bowed
motionless on her lace and silken bosom. Before her stood a street car,
silent, and within--but the messenger but glanced and hurried on. A
grimy newsboy sat in the gutter with the "last edition" in his uplifted
hand: "Danger!" screamed its black headlines. "Warnings wired around the
world. The Comet's tail sweeps past us at noon. Deadly gases expected.
Close doors and windows. Seek the cellar." The messenger read and
staggered on. Far out from a window above, a girl lay with gasping face
and sleevelets on her arms. On a store step sat a little, sweet-faced
girl looking upward toward the skies, and in the carriage by her
lay--but the messenger looked no longer. The cords gave way--the terror
burst in his veins, and with one great, gasping cry he sprang
desperately forward and ran,--ran as only the frightened run, shrieking
and fighting the air until with one last wail of pain he sank on the
grass of Madison Square and lay prone and still.
When he rose, he gave no glance at the still and silent forms on the
benches, but, going to a fountain, bathed his face; then hiding himself
in a corner away from the drama of death, he quietly gripped himself and
thought the thing through: The comet had swept the earth and this was
the end. Was everybody dead? He must search and see.
He knew that he must steady himself and keep calm, or he would go
insane. First he must go to a restaurant. He walked up Fifth Avenue to a
famous hostelry and entered its gorgeous, ghost-haunted halls. He beat
back the nausea, and, seizing a tray from dead hands, hurried into the
street and ate ravenously, hiding to keep out the sights.
"Yesterday, they would not have served me," he whispered, as he forced
the food down.
Then he started up the street,--looking, peering, telephoning, ringing
alarms; silent, silent all. Was nobody--nobody--he dared not think the
thought and hurried on.
Suddenly he stopped still. He had forgotten. My God! How could he have
forgotten? He must rush to the subway--then he almost laughed. No--a
car; if he could find a Ford. He saw one. Gently he lifted off its
burden, and took his place on the seat. He tested the throttle. There
was gas. He glided off, shivering, and drove up the street. Everywhere
stood, leaned, lounged, and lay the dead, in grim and awful silence. On
he ran past an automobile, wrecked and overturned; past another, filled
with a gay party whose smiles yet lingered on their death-struck lips;
on past crowds and groups of cars, pausing by dead policemen; at 42nd
Street he had to detour to Park Avenue to avoid the dead congestion. He
came back on Fifth Avenue at 57th and flew past the Plaza and by the
park with its hushed babies and silent throng, until as he was rushing
past 72nd Street he heard a sharp cry, and saw a living form leaning
wildly out an upper window. He gasped. The human voice sounded in his
ears like the voice of God.
"Hello--hello--help, in God's name!" wailed the woman. "There's a dead
girl in here and a man and--and see yonder dead men lying in the street
and dead horses--for the love of God go and bring the officers----" And
the words trailed off into hysterical tears.
He wheeled the car in a sudden circle, running over the still body of a
child and leaping on the curb. Then he rushed up the steps and tried the
door and rang violently. There was a long pause, but at last the heavy
door swung back. They stared a moment in silence. She had not noticed
before that he was a Negro. He had not thought of her as white. She was
a woman of perhaps twenty-five--rarely beautiful and richly gowned, with
darkly-golden hair, and jewels. Yesterday, he thought with bitterness,
she would scarcely have looked at him twice. He would have been dirt
beneath her silken feet. She stared at him. Of all the sorts of men she
had pictured as coming to her rescue she had not dreamed of one like
him. Not that he was not human, but he dwelt in a world so far from
hers, so infinitely far, that he seldom even entered her thought. Yet as
she looked at him curiously he seemed quite commonplace and usual. He
was a tall, dark workingman of the better class, with a sensitive face
trained to stolidity and a poor man's clothes and hands. His face was
soft and slow and his manner at once cold and nervous, like fires long
banked, but not out.
So a moment each paused and gauged the other; then the thought of the
dead world without rushed in and they started toward each other.
"What has happened?" she cried. "Tell me! Nothing stirs. All is silence!
I see the dead strewn before my window as winnowed by the breath of
God,--and see----" She dragged him through great, silken hangings to
where, beneath the sheen of mahogany and silver, a little French maid
lay stretched in quiet, everlasting sleep, and near her a butler lay
prone in his livery.
The tears streamed down the woman's cheeks and she clung to his arm
until the perfume of her breath swept his face and he felt the tremors
racing through her body.
"I had been shut up in my dark room developing pictures of the comet
which I took last night; when I came out--I saw the dead!
"What has happened?" she cried again.
He answered slowly:
"Something--comet or devil--swept across the earth this morning
and--many are dead!"
"Many? Very many?"
"I have searched and I have seen no other living soul but you."
She gasped and they stared at each other.
"My--father!" she whispered.
"Where is he?"
"He started for the office."
"Where is it?"
"In the Metropolitan Tower."
"Leave a note for him here and come."
Then he stopped.
"No," he said firmly--"first, we must go--to Harlem."
"Harlem!" she cried. Then she understood. She tapped her foot at first
impatiently. She looked back and shuddered. Then she came resolutely
down the steps.
"There's a swifter car in the garage in the court," she said.
"I don't know how to drive it," he said.
"I do," she answered.
In ten minutes they were flying to Harlem on the wind. The Stutz rose
and raced like an airplane. They took the turn at 110th Street on two
wheels and slipped with a shriek into 135th.
He was gone but a moment. Then he returned, and his face was gray. She
did not look, but said:
"You have lost--somebody?"
"I have lost--everybody," he said, simply--"unless----"
He ran back and was gone several minutes--hours they seemed to her.
"Everybody," he said, and he walked slowly back with something film-like
in his hand which he stuffed into his pocket.
"I'm afraid I was selfish," he said. But already the car was moving
toward the park among the dark and lined dead of Harlem--the brown,
still faces, the knotted hands, the homely garments, and the
silence--the wild and haunting silence. Out of the park, and down Fifth
Avenue they whirled. In and out among the dead they slipped and
quivered, needing no sound of bell or horn, until the great, square
Metropolitan Tower hove in sight. Gently he laid the dead elevator boy
aside; the car shot upward. The door of the office stood open. On the
threshold lay the stenographer, and, staring at her, sat the dead clerk.
The inner office was empty, but a note lay on the desk, folded and
addressed but unsent:
Dear Daughter:
I've gone for a hundred mile spin in Fred's new Mercedes. Shall not
be back before dinner. I'll bring Fred with me.
J.B.H.
"Come," she cried nervously. "We must search the city."
Up and down, over and across, back again--on went that ghostly search.
Everywhere was silence and death--death and silence! They hunted from
Madison Square to Spuyten Duyvel; they rushed across the Williamsburg
Bridge; they swept over Brooklyn; from the Battery and Morningside
Heights they scanned the river. Silence, silence everywhere, and no
human sign. Haggard and bedraggled they puffed a third time slowly down
Broadway, under the broiling sun, and at last stopped. He sniffed the
air. An odor--a smell--and with the shifting breeze a sickening stench
filled their nostrils and brought its awful warning. The girl settled
back helplessly in her seat.
"What can we do?" she cried.
It was his turn now to take the lead, and he did it quickly.
"The long distance telephone--the telegraph and the cable--night rockets
and then--flight!"
She looked at him now with strength and confidence. He did not look like
men, as she had always pictured men; but he acted like one and she was
content. In fifteen minutes they were at the central telephone exchange.
As they came to the door he stepped quickly before her and pressed her
gently back as he closed it. She heard him moving to and fro, and knew
his burdens--the poor, little burdens he bore. When she entered, he was
alone in the room. The grim switchboard flashed its metallic face in
cryptic, sphinx-like immobility. She seated herself on a stool and
donned the bright earpiece. She looked at the mouthpiece. She had never
looked at one so closely before. It was wide and black, pimpled with
usage; inert; dead; almost sarcastic in its unfeeling curves. It
looked--she beat back the thought--but it looked,--it persisted in
looking like--she turned her head and found herself alone. One moment
she was terrified; then she thanked him silently for his delicacy and
turned resolutely, with a quick intaking of breath.
"Hello!" she called in low tones. She was calling to the world. The
world _must_ answer. Would the world _answer_? Was the world----
Silence!
She had spoken too low.
"Hello!" she cried, full-voiced.
She listened. Silence! Her heart beat quickly. She cried in clear,