When Lee Cranmer and his wife came south to visit, John Corliss Cranmer showed his son an amœba--normally an organism visible under low-power microscope--which he had absolved from natural growth inhibitions. This amœba, a rubbery, amorphous mass of protoplasm, was of the size then of a large beef liver. It could have been held in two cupped hands, placed side by side.
“How large could it grow?” asked Lee, wide-eyed and interested.
“So far as I know,” answered the father, “there is _no_ limit--now! It might, if it got food enough, grow to be as big as the Masonic Temple!
“But take it out and kill it. Destroy the organism utterly--burning the fragment--else there is no telling what might happen. The amœba, as I have explained, reproduces by simple division. Any fragment remaining might be dangerous.”
Lee took the rubbery, translucent giant cell--but he did not obey orders. Instead of destroying it as his father had directed, Lee thought out a plan. Suppose he should grow this organism to tremendous size? Suppose, when the tale of his father’s accomplishment were spread, an amœba of many tons weight could be shown in evidence? Lee, of somewhat sensational cast of mind, determined instantly to keep secret the fact that he was not destroying the organism, but encouraging its further growth. Thought of possible peril never crossed his mind.
He arranged to have the thing fed--allowing for normal increase of size in an abnormal thing. It fooled him only in growing much more rapidly. When he came back from Cuba the amœba practically filled the whole of the mud sink hollow. He had to give it much greater supplies....
The giant cell came to absorb as much as two hogs in a single day. During daylight, while hunger still was appeased, it never emerged, however. That remained for the time that it could secure no more food near at hand to satisfy its ravenous and increasing appetite.
Only instinct for the sensational kept Lee from telling Peggy, his wife, all about the matter. Lee hoped to spring a _coup_ which would immortalize his father, and surprise his wife terrifically. Therefore, he kept his own counsel--and made bargains with the Cajan, Rori, who supplied food daily for the shapeless monster of the pool.
The tragedy itself came suddenly and unexpectedly. Peggy, feeding the two Gordon setters that Lee and she used for quail hunting, was in the Lodge yard before sunset. She romped alone, as Lee himself was dressing.
Of a sudden her screams cut the still air! Without her knowledge, ten-foot _pseudopods_--those flowing tentacles of protoplasm sent forth by the sinister occupant of the pool--slid out and around her putteed ankles.
For a moment she did not understand. Then, at first suspicion of the horrid truth, her cries rent the air. Lee, at that time struggling to lace a pair of high shoes, straightened, paled, and grabbed a revolver as he dashed out.
In another room a scientist, absorbed in his note-taking, glanced up, frowned, and then--recognizing the voice--shed his white gown and came out. He was too late to do aught but gasp with horror.
In the yard Peggy was half engulfed in a squamous, rubbery something which at first glance he could not analyze.
Lee, his boy, was fighting with the sticky folds, and slowly, surely, losing his own grip upon the earth!
_IX._
John Corliss Cranmer was by no means a coward. He stared, cried aloud, then ran indoors, seizing the first two weapons which came to hand--a shotgun and hunting knife which lay in sheath in a cartridged belt across a hook of the hall-tree. The knife was ten inches in length and razor keen.
Cranmer rushed out again. He saw an indecent fluid something--which as yet he had not had time to classify--lumping itself into a six-foot-high center before his very eyes! It looked like one of the micro-organisms he had studied! One grown to frightful dimensions. An amœba!
There, some minutes suffocated in the rubbery folds--yet still apparent beneath the glistening ooze of this monster--were two bodies.
They were dead. He knew it. Nevertheless he attacked the flowing, senseless monster with his knife. Shot would do no good. And he found that even the deep, terrific slashes made by his knife closed together in a moment and healed. The monster was invulnerable to ordinary attack!
A pair of _pseudopods_ sought out his ankles, attempting to bring him low. Both of these he severed--and escaped. Why did he try? He did not know. The two whom he had sought to rescue were dead, buried under folds of this horrid thing he knew to be his own discovery and fabrication.
Then it was that revulsion and insanity came upon him.
There ended the story of John Corliss Cranmer, save for one hastily scribbled paragraph--evidently written at the time Rori had seen him atop the wall.
May we not supply with assurance the intervening steps?
Cranmer was known to have purchased a whole pen of hogs a day or two following the tragedy. These animals never were seen again. During the time the wall was being constructed is it not reasonable to assume that he fed the giant organism within--to keep it quiet? His scientist brain must have visualized clearly the havoc and horror which could be wrought by the loathsome thing if it ever were driven by hunger to flow away from the Lodge and prey upon the countryside!
With the wall once in place, he evidently figured that starvation or some other means which he could supply would kill the thing. One of the means had been made by setting fire to several piles of the disgorged timbers; probably this had no effect whatever.
The amœba was to accomplish still more destruction. In the throes of hunger it threw its gigantic, formless strength against the house walls _from the inside_; then every edible morsel within was assimilated, the logs, rafters and other fragments being worked out through the contractile _vacuole_.
During some of its last struggles, undoubtedly, the side wall of brick was weakened--not to collapse, however, until the giant amœba no longer could take advantage of the breach.
In final death lassitude, the amœba stretched itself out in a thin layer over the ground. There it succumbed, though there is no means of estimating how long a time intervened.
The last paragraph in Cranmer’s notebook, scrawled so badly that it is possible some words I have not deciphered correctly, read as follows:
“_In my work I have found the means of creating a monster. The unnatural thing, in turn, has destroyed my work and those whom I held dear. It is in vain that I assure myself of innocence of spirit. Mine is the crime of presumption. Now, as expiation--worthless though that may be--I give myself...._”
It is better not to think of that last leap, and the struggle of an insane man in the grip of the dying monster.
[Illustration]
_Extraordinary, Unearthly Things Will Thrill and Amaze You In This Strange Story_
_The_ Thing _of a_ Thousand Shapes
_By_ OTIS ADELBERT KLINE
Uncle Jim was dead.
I could scarcely believe it, but the little yellow missive, which had just been handed to me by the Western Union messenger boy, left no room for doubt. It was short and convincing:
“_Come to Peoria at once. James Braddock dead of heart failure._
_Corbin & His. Attorneys._”
I should explain here that Uncle Jim, my mother’s brother, was my only living near relative. Having lost both father and mother in the Iroquois Theatre Fire at the age of twelve years, I should have been forced to abandon my plans for a high school and commercial education but for his noble generosity. In his home town he was believed to be comfortably well off, but I had learned not long since that it had meant a considerable sacrifice for him to furnish the fifteen hundred dollars a year to put me through high school and business college, and I was glad when the time came for me to find employment, and thus become independent of his bounty.
My position as bookkeeper for a commission firm in South Water Street, while not particularly remunerative, at least provided a comfortable living, and I was happy in it--until the message of his death came.
I took the telegram to my employer, obtained a week’s leave-of-absence, and was soon on the way to the Union Depot.
All the way to Peoria I thought about Uncle Jim. He was not old--only forty-five--and when I had last seen him he had seemed particularly hale and hearty. This sudden loss of my nearest and dearest friend was, therefore, almost unbelievable. I carried a leaden weight in my heart, and it seemed that the lump in my throat would choke me.
Uncle Jim had lived on a three-hundred-and-twenty acre farm near Peoria. Being a bachelor, he had employed a housekeeper. The farm work was looked after by a family named Severs--man, wife and two sons--who lived in the tenant house, perhaps a thousand feet to the rear of the owner’s residence, in convenient proximity to the barn, silos and other farm buildings.