



Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net







                         Transcriber's Note:

    This etext was produced from Weird Tales August-September 1936. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
    copyright on this publication was renewed. In the Dark


                           By RONAL KAYSER


     _It was a tale of sheer horror that old Asa Gregg poured
      into the dictaphone_

       *       *       *       *       *




The watchman's flashlight printed a white circle on the frosted-glass,
black-lettered door:

              GREGG CHEMICAL CO., MFRS. ASA GREGG, PRES. PRIVATE

The watchman's hand closed on the knob, rattled the door in its frame. Queer, but tonight the sound had seemed to come from in there.... But
that couldn't be. He knew that Mr. Gregg and Miss Carruthers carried
the only keys to the office, so any intruder would have been forced to
smash the lock. Maybe the sound came from the storage room. The watchman clumped along
the rubber-matted corridor, flung his weight against that door. It
opened hard, being of ponderous metal fitted into a cork casing. The
room was an air-tight, fire-proof vault, really. His shoes gritted on
the concrete floor as he prowled among the big porcelain vats. The
flashlight bored through bluish haze to the concrete walls. Acid fumes
escaping under the vat lids made the haze and seared the man's throat. He hurried out, coughing and wiping his eyes. It was damn funny. Every
night lately he heard the same peculiar noise somewhere in this wing
of the building.... Like a body groaning and turning in restless
sleep, it was. It scared him. He didn't mention the mystery to anyone,
though. He was an old man, and he didn't want Mr. Gregg to think he
was getting too old for the job. "Asa 'd think I was crazy, if I told him about it," he mumbled. *       *       *       *       *

Inside the office, Asa Gregg heard the muttered words plainly. He sat
very still in the big, leather-cushioned chair, hardly breathing until
the scrape of the watchman's feet had thinned away down the hall. There was no light in the room to betray him; only the cherry-colored
tip of his cigar, which couldn't be visible through the frosted glass
door. Anyway, it'd be an hour before the watchman's round brought him
past the office again. Asa Gregg had that hour, if he could screw up
his nerve to use it.... He took the frayed end of the cigar from his mouth. His hand, which
had wasted to mere skin and bone these past few months, groped through
the darkness, slid over the polished coolness of the dictaphone hood,
and snapped the switch. Machinery faintly whirred. His fingers found
the tube, lifted it. "Miss Carruthers!" he snapped. Then he hesitated. Surely, he could
trust Mary Carruthers! He'd never wondered about her before. She'd
been his secretary for a dozen years--lately, since he couldn't look
after affairs himself as he used to, she had practically run the
business. She was forty, sensible, unbeautiful, and tight-lipped. Hell, he had to trust her! His voice plunged into the darkness. "What I have to say now is intended for Mrs. Gregg's ears only. She
will take the first boat home, of course. Meet that boat and bring her
to the office. Since my wife knows nothing about a dictaphone, it will
be necessary for you to set this record running. As soon as you have
done so, leave her alone in the room. Make sure she's not interrupted
for a half-hour. That's all." He waited a decent interval. The invisible needle peeled its thread
into the revolving wax cylinder. "Jeannette," muttered Asa Gregg, and hesitated again. This wasn't
going to be easy to say. He decided to begin matter-of-factly. "As you
probably know, my will and the insurance policies are in the vault at
the First National. I believe you will find all of my papers in
excellent order. If any questions arise, consult Miss Carruthers. What
I have to say to you now is purely personal--I feel, my dear, that I
owe you an explanation--that is----"

God, it came harder than he had expected. "Jeannette," he started in afresh, "you remember three years ago when
I was in the hospital. You were in Palm Beach at the time, and I wired
that there'd been an accident here at the plant. That wasn't strictly
so. The fact is, I'd gotten mixed up with a girl----"

He paused, shivering. In the darkness a picture of Dot swam before
him. The oval face, framed by gleaming swirls of lemon-tinted hair,
had pouting scarlet lips, and eyes whose allure was intensified by
violet make-up. The full-length picture of her included a streamlined,
full-blossomed and yet delectably lithe body. A costly, enticing,
Broadway-chorus orchid! As a matter of fact, that was where he'd found
her. "I won't make any excuses for myself," Asa Gregg said harshly. "I
might point out that you were always in Florida or Bermuda or France,
and that I was a lonely man. But it wasn't just loneliness, and I
didn't seek companionship. I thought I was making a last bow to
Romance. I was successful, sixty, and silly, and I did all the damn
fool things--I even wrote letters to her. Popsy-wopsy letters." The
dictaphone couldn't record the grimace that jerked his lips. "She
saved them, of course, and by and by she put a price on them--ten
thousand dollars. Dot claimed that one of those filthy tabloids had
offered her that much for them--and what was a poor working-girl to
do? She lied. I knew that. "I told her to bring the letters to the office after business hours,
and I'd take care of her. I took care of her, all right. I shot her,
Jeannette!" He mopped his face with a handkerchief that was already damp. "Not on account of the money, you understand. It was the things she
said, after she had tucked the bills into her purse ... vile things,
about the way she had earned it ten times over by enduring my beastly
kisses. I'd really loved that girl, and I'd thought she'd cared for me
a little. It was her hate that maddened me, and I got the gun out of
my desk drawer----"

       *       *       *       *       *

Asa Gregg reached through the darkness for the switch. He fumbled for
the bottle which stood on the desk. His hand trembled, spilling some
of the liquor onto his lap. He drank from the bottle.... This part of the story he'd skip. It was too horrible, even to think
about it. He didn't want to remember how the blood pooled inside Dot's
fur coat, and how he'd managed to carry the body out of the office
without leaking any of her blood onto the floor. He tried to forget
the musky sweetness of the perfume on the dead girl, mingled with that
other evil blood-smell. Especially he didn't want to remember the
frightful time he'd had stripping the gold rings from her fingers, and
the one gold tooth in her head.... The horror of it coiled in the blackness about him. His own teeth
rattled against the bottle when he gulped the second drink.