Free Day of Doom: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 2 by J. Allan Dunn Page A

them.
    “We had been sleeping in separate rooms lately,” he went on. “At her request. She—Evelyn—had changed greatly. She used to like society, sports, the theater. She gave them up. She seemed to retire into herself entirely. I have seen her at times when she almost seemed to be in a trance. She disliked to have me even touch her.
    “She shrank from me—as if some influence walled her off from me. I’ve got plenty of weaknesses, but I’m not a rotter. I’ve tried to patch things up, to bring them back to where we started. But she looked at me now and then as if she hated me.
    “Last night, this morning rather, somewhere around four, I came home. I had been to a card club. I had been thinking things over. I wanted a showdown, either to make up with Evelyn, or call it all off. I was willing to make promises, even confessions, to try to win her back. You see, I still loved her.
    “I knew she didn’t sleep very much, never very heavily. I didn’t want to put off the attempt. I was despondent. I have lost a great deal of money, my own and a lot of Evelyn’s, the same as a great many other people have. Gambling, in Wall Street. Not losses at cards. And I thought, if Evelyn refused, that the only thing for me to do was to make away with myself. When we married, we each took out a policy for two hundred thousand dollars in the other’s favor.”
    Manning stroked his lean jaw. Power did not see that he was establishing motive for his killing his wife. Two hundred thousand dollars meant a lot to a man who was practically ruined.
    “The premiums were fully paid,” Power went on. “My contract winnings paid them. It seemed the only honorable thing to do. A bit morbid, perhaps, to you, but here was a total loss ahead, all ways, if I couldn’t get through to Evelyn, get her back.”
    “I can understand it,” said Manning. “Go on.”
    “I let myself in,” said Power. “The door of her room—formerly a guest room—was not locked. It was the first time I had intruded on her privacy, but I had to get it over with, one way or the other.
    “It was dark. She never used a night light. The window was wide open. I saw the stars shining back of the buildings across the road. I saw the curtains waving in a little wind and then—my God—I saw….
    “God or the devil knows what I saw, Manning. It was a shape, and it seemed to be crouching. It was furry and spotted, like a leopard in its mottling. Like nothing I knew of in shape. And it stank. It stank horribly, acrid, foul! It was on Evelyn’s breast. It had clawed aside the coverings. It was quiet, hideously intent. I thought she had swooned at sight of the horror.
    “Then it heard me. It rose, hideous, dreadful. It turned its head toward me. Manning, I saw eyes, not two, but many eyes, there might have been six, perhaps a dozen. I could not tell. I was gripped with some sort of paralysis. The thing reared, the eyes glared crimson and the stench was terrible, ammoniac, blinding, choking. And those eyes! They shifted from crimson to purple, to green, and then I snapped out of it and groped for the switch. I found it. The lamps in her room were all shaded, but I saw the monster leap as if the light scared it. It sprang for the window, through it, without a sound, like some enormous bullet.”
    Manning had already noticed a persistence of the stench Power had mentioned, when he had looked at the body. It had been vaguely familiar to him at the time. He had hastily connected it with disinfectants Henley might have used. Now he knew it had been something else. Weird as it sounded, he believed much, at least, of Power’s story. Power lacked the imagination and the dramatic quality to have evolved and acted out a fantasy of that amazing type.
    “I let the thing go—how could I stop it? My first thought then was for Evelyn. I saw it against the sky, blurred, furry, blotched, and then it was gone.
    “And Evelyn was dead. Manning, you’ve been in Paris? You’ve seen