Claimed (Sci-Fi Classic). Francis Stevens
the top, or cover, underneath. Across the surface now brought to light was a brief inscription done in blood-red enamel.
“What do those characters mean?” demanded Miss Robinson, and now the strained tension in her voice was unmistakable.
It struck Vanaman that this first nightcall of his had brought him into touch with some situation which he did not understand, and which had some possibly very queer angles.
“I don’t know what they mean,” he said gently, almost soothingly. “I have seen an inscription in hieratic Egyptian which somewhat resembled this. But I am no palaeographist, Miss Robinson. If you wish the inscription translated, I’d suggest that you take the box to some expert in these things.”
The young woman seemed actually to shudder.
“I don’t wish to take it anywhere!” she said hastily. “I don’t wish even to touch it. Not ever again!”
Before Vanaman had time to reply or question further, a sudden sound from the lounge made them both turn. Old Robinson was sitting up. From under knotted, hawklike brows his eyes stared fiercely and he was stretching toward them two yellow claws that opened and closed with grasping motion.
“Give it!” he croaked hoarsely. “Give it — quick.”
The doctor, who had not expected his patient to rouse for some hours at least, was considerably startled. Miss Robinson, however, displayed a comprehension of her uncle’s meaning so instant as to be almost uncanny. Snatching up the box which she had just expressed her disinclination to touch, she ran and fairly thrust it into his hands. They closed on it greedily. Then he sank back, clasping the thing tight to his breast.
“I got it!” he croaked. “What I want I get, and — what I get I keep! They can’t take it away from-old Jesse Robinson! Nobody — can take it! You — hear me?” His voice rose to a kind of discordant shriek, hoarse and dreadful with effort. “Nobody can take it! Nobody! Not even — him!”
Chapter III.
The Green Invasion
Two A. M. that morning found Dr. John Vanaman in a place where yesterday he would have least expected to spend half the night. That is, he was ensconced in a large comfortable chair in the richly furnished bedchamber of old Jesse Robinson, the wealthiest — also some said the meanest — man in Tremont.
But if Robinson were mean, the meanness did not apply to expenditures on himself or his house. The mellow light of a shaded night lamp showed his lean, yellow, sleeping face pillowed in a bed, the cost of which would have paid Vanaman’s house rent and all other expenses for some years. The elaborate brocaded silk of the curtains, the bizarre splendor of the Chinese robe flung over a chair by the bedside, were like all else in the room: very beautiful and in almost distressing contrast with the lean, ravenous hawkishness of their owner.
Dr. Vanaman sighed and stirred uneasily.
He was not altogether pleased with his position. He had suggested that a nurse be sent for; and had immediately begun to learn why Miss Robinson had not called in the police without her uncle’s authorization, and also a possible reason for that slightly bored weariness which seemed to be her habitual manner.
Mr. Robinson, in fact, was “difficult.” Very soon after recovering consciousness he had demanded the reason for Vanaman’s presence, been surprisingly disagreeable over his niece’s act in sending for a doctor at all, and then abruptly reversed his faultfinding to all but literally hurl curses at Vanaman because the young man proposed to leave him and go home.
A nurse? Never! No she-cat, whisky-guzzling nurse was going to watch over him. His niece? No, indeed! Leilah must go straight to bed; just a little night-watching made any woman as ugly as an owl. He hated ugly people, and he would not have them around when he was sick. As for the servants, they were a stupid, addleheaded lot whom no man with the brains of a mouse would rely on.
He wanted Vanaman with him the rest of the night, and Vanaman he would have. A doctor was supposed to have some sense. Vanaman probably hadn’t much, but at least he was better than the others. And there were reasons — yes, there were very good reasons indeed why he wanted somebody with sense beside him the rest of that night.
Vanaman had yielded finally, and stayed, although it was not for the amiable Jesse J. Robinson’s sake. Rather, it was for Leilah’s.
“You will stay, won’t you?” she had pleaded, in her drawling, sweet voice. “I— I can’t tell you exactly why, but I’m afraid!”
The man who could resist that, thought Vanaman, must be less than human. Sitting there, his eyes on that really terrible old countenance on the pillow, he remembered the amazing loveliness of Leilah’s face beneath its delicate crown of moonbeam hair, and wondered. How might it be that in her veins flowed even a trace of the blood of that — that hawk-thing? The silken coverlid stirred, and he knew that the old man was even in his sleep making sure that his precious box was safe. Like a child with a treasured toy, he had insisted on taking it to bed with him, What was the mystery of that box? Was there any real mystery?
Robinson had firmly declined to tell what had happened after the butler left him alone in his study with the strange tramplike visitor. Questioned tentatively by Leilah, he had grown instantly secretive in a queer, half-frightened, half-defiant way; told them that his business with the stranger was his own, not theirs, and that if they knew what was good for them they would cease to try to pry into it.
Vanaman remembered the peculiar optical effect of infinite green depths into which his vision had sickeningly plunged — till Leilah’s touch on his arm had recalled him. Leilah! A beautiful name — very, very — beautiful —
It must have been some time after this last reflection that Dr. Vanaman became aware that he had slept. Moreover, he opened his eyes with an unpleasant, though still heavily drowsy consciousness that all was not well in the room about him.
Without moving his head — he was sitting in such an ideally comfortable attitude, that he hated to move — he could see his patient well enough. The hawk-faced one slept quietly. The movement of his long, easy respiration stirred the coverlid reassuringly. Nothing wrong there, but — Vanaman wondered dreamily if the weather had changed, and it was raining outside. Not that he heard any sounds of rain, but the air in the room breathed damp, as if fairly saturated with water vapor. There was a strange, chill, fresh tang to it, too, that dimly puzzled him. The very feel of the air was reminiscent of — of something familiar, but what? He was too drowsy for clear thinking.
This wouldn’t do. He must rouse himself. In one way or another a very wrong condition — was present about him. He fought his own inertia in the helpless, utterly futile manner peculiar to nightmare.
Without turning his head — and now he knew to his own dismay that he could not turn it, try as he would — not only the bed but the closed door leading into the outer passage was visible. And from somewhere beyond that door a sound gradually invaded his trance-like misery.
At first it seemed to come faintly, as from a very long way off, and it approached by rhythmic stages of progression and retrogression. That is, there would be a long, even rush of oncoming; then a failing and subsiding and running back of the noise till it was again almost inaudible. But Vanaman felt assured that in each time of the sound’s swelling what approached came nearer than in the preceding time.
The sound had a seething, hissing quality that seemed somehow congruous with the fresh, damp tang in the air, though the doctor’s numbed mind could not quite make the association and learn what either of them meant. He was not really thinking at all. He was feeling merely, and even to struggle for thought was mental agony.
The seething hiss of what approached had come very near on its last onrush — appallingly near, and Vanaman was afraid as he had never feared in his life before. But this was no normal terror. This was the frightful, will-paralyzing