Disowned.

by Victor Endersby.

The sky sagged downward, bellying blackly with a sudden summer rain, giving me a vision of catching my train in sodden clothing after the short-cut across the fields, which I was taking in company with my brother Tristan and his fiancee.

The sullen atmosphere ripped apart with an electric glare; our ears quivered to the throbbing sky, while huge drops, jarred loose from the air by the thunder-impact, splattered sluggishly, heavily, about us.

Little breezes swept out from the storm center, lifting the undersides of the long gra.s.s leaves to view in waves of lighter green. I complained peevishly.

"Ah, mop up!" said Tristan. "You've plenty of time, and there's the big oak! It's as dry under there as a cave!"

"I think that'll be fun!" twittered Alice. "To wait out a thunder-storm under a tree!"

"Under a tree?" I said. "Hardly! I'm not hankering to furnish myself as an exhibit on the physiological effects of a lightning stroke--no, sir!"

"Rats!" said Tristan. "All that's a fairy-tale--trees being dangerous in a thunder-storm!"

The rain now beat through our thin summer clothing, as Tristan seized Alice's hand and towed her toward the spreading shelter. I followed them at first, then began to lag with an odd unwillingness. I had been only half serious in my objection, but all at once that tree exercised an odd repulsion on me; an imaginary picture of the electric fluid coursing through my shriveling nerve-channels grew unpleasantly vivid.

Suddenly I knew I was not going under that tree. I stopped dead, pulling my hat brim down behind to divert the rivulet coursing down the back of my neck, calling to the others in a voice rather cracked from embarra.s.sment. They looked back at me curiously, and Alice began to twit me, standing in the rain, while Tristan desired to know whether we thought we were a pair of goldfish; in his estimation, we might belong to the piscine tribe all right, but not to that decorative branch thereof. To be frank, he used the term "suckers."

Feeling exceptionally foolish, I planted myself doggedly in the soaking gra.s.s as Alice turned to dash for the tree.

Then the thing happened; the thing which to this hour makes the fabric of s.p.a.ce with its unknown forces seem an insecure and eery garment for the body of man. Over the slight rise beyond the tree, as the air crackled, roared and shook under the thunder-blasts, there appeared an object moving in long, leisurely bounds, drifting before the wind, and touching the ground lightly each time. It was about eighteen inches in diameter, globular, glowing with coruscating fires, red, green, and yellow; a thing of unearthly and wholly sinister beauty.

Alice poised with one foot half raised, and shrieked at Tristan, half terrified, half elated at the sight. He wheeled quickly, there under the tree, and slowly backed away as the thing drifted in to keep him company in his shelter. We could not see his face, but there was a stiffness to his figure indicating something like fear. Suddenly things I had read rose into my memory. This was one of those objects variously called "fire-b.a.l.l.s," "globe-lightning," "meteors," and the like.

I also recalled the deadly explosive potencies said to be sometimes possessed by such ent.i.ties, and called out frantically:

"Tristan! Don't touch it! Get away quickly, but don't disturb the air!"

He heard me and, as the object wavered about in the comparative calm under the tree, drifting closer to him, started to obey. But it suddenly approached his face, and seized with a reckless terror, he s.n.a.t.c.hed off his hat and batted at it as one would at a pestilent bee.

Instantly there was a blinding glare, a stunning detonation, and a violent air-wave which threw me clear off my feet and to the ground. I sat up blindly with my vision full of opalescent lights and my ears ringing, unable to hear, see, or think.

Slowly my senses came back; I saw Alice struggling upright in the gra.s.s before me. She cast a quick glance toward the tree, then, still on her knees, covered her face and shuddered. For a long time, it seemed, I gazed toward the tree without sight conveying any mental effect whatever. Quite aside from my dazed state, the thing was too bizarre; it gave no foothold to experience for the erection of understanding.

My brother's body lay, or hung, or rested--what term could describe it?--with his stomach across the _under_ side of a large limb a few feet above where he had stood. He was doubled up like a hairpin, his abdomen pressed tightly up against this bough, and his arms, legs and head extended stiffly, straightly, skyward.

Getting my scattered faculties and discoordinate limbs together, I made my way to the tree, the gruesome thought entering my mind that Tristan's body had been transfixed by some downward-pointing snag as it was blown up against the limb, and that the strange stiffness of his limbs was due to some ghastly sudden rigor mortis brought on by electric shock. Dazed with horror and grief, I reached up to his clothing and pulled gently, braced for the shock of the falling body.

It remained immovable against the bough. A harder tug brought no results either. Gathering up all my courage against the vision of the supposed snag tearing its rough length out of the poor flesh, I leaped up, grasping the body about chest and hips, and hung. It came loose at once, without any tearing resistance such as I had expected, but manifesting a strong elastic pull upward, as though some one were pulling it with a rope; as I dropped back to the ground with it, the upward resistance remained unchanged. Nearly disorganized entirely by this phenomenon, it occurred to me that his belt or some of his clothing was still caught, and I jerked sidewise to pull it loose. It did not loosen, but I found myself suddenly out from under the tree, my brother dragging upward from my arms until my toes almost left the ground. And there was obviously no connection between him and the tree--or between him and anything else but myself, for that matter. At this I went weak; my arms relaxed despite my will, and an incredible fact happened: I found the body sliding skyward through my futile grasp. Desperately I got my hands clasped together about his wrist, this last grip almost lifting me from the earth; his legs and remaining arm streamed fantastically skyward. Through the haze which seemed to be finally drowning my amazed and tortured soul, I knew that my fingers were slipping through one another, and that in another instant my brother would be gone. Gone--where? Why and how?

There was a sudden shriek, and the impact of a frantic body against mine, as Alice, whom I had quite forgotten, made a skyward running jump and clasped the arm frantically to her bosom with both her own.

With vast relief, I loosed my cramped fingers--only to feel her silken garments begin to slide skyward against my cheek. It was more instinct than sense which made me clutch at her legs. G.o.d, had I not done that!

As it was, I held both forms anch.o.r.ed with only a slight pull, waiting dumbly for the next move--quite _non compos_ by this time, I think.

"Quick, Jim!" she shrieked. "Quick, under the tree! I can't hold him long!"

Very glad indeed to be told what to do, I obeyed. Under her direction we got the body under a low limb and wedged up against it, where with our feet both now on the ground, we balanced it with little effort.

Feverishly, once more at her initiative, we took off our belts and strapped it firmly; whereupon we collapsed in one another's arms, shuddering, beneath it.

The blase reader may consider that we here manifested the characters of sensitive weaklings. But let him undergo the like! The supernatural, or seemingly so, has always had power to chill the hottest blood. And here was an invisible horror reaching out of the sky for its prey, without any of the ameliorating trite features which would temper an encounter with the alleged phenomena of ghostland.

For a time we sat under that fatal tree listening to the dreary drench of rain pouring off the leaves, quivering nerve-shaken to the thunderclaps. Lacking one another, we had gone mad; it was the beginning of a mutual dependence in the face of the unprecedented, which was to grow to something greater during the bizarre days to follow.

There was no need of words for each of us to know that the other was struggling frantically for a little rational light on the _outre_ catastrophe in which we were entangled.

It never once occurred to us that my brother might still be alive--until a long shuddering groan sounded above us. In combined horror and joy we sprang up. He was twisting weakly in the belts, muttering deliriously. We unfastened him and pulled him to the ground, where I sat on his knees while she pressed down on his shoulders, and so kept him rec.u.mbent, both horrified at the insistent lift of his body under us.

She kissed him frantically and stroked his cheeks, I feeling utterly without resource. He grew stronger, muttered wildly, and his eyes opened, staring upward through the tree limbs. He became silent, and stiffened, gazing fixedly upward with a horror in his wild blue gaze which chilled our blood. What did he see there--what dire other-world thing dragging him into the depths of s.p.a.ce? Shortly his eyes closed, and he ceased to mutter.

I took his legs under my arms--the storm was clearing now--and we set out for home with gruesomely buoyant steps, the insistent pull remaining steady. Would it increase? We gazed upward with terrified eyes, becoming calmer by degree as conditions remained unchanged.

When the country house loomed near across the last field, Alice faltered:

"Jim, we can't take him right in like this!"

I stopped.

"Why not?"

"Oh, because--because--it's too ridiculously awful. I don't know just how to say it--oh, can't you see it yourself?"

In a dim way, I saw it. No cultured person cares to be made a center of public interest, unless on grounds of respect. To come walking in in this fashion, buoyed balloon-like by the body of this loved one, and before the members of a frivolous, gaping house party--ah, even I could imagine the mingled horror and derision, the hysterics among the women, perhaps. Nor would it stop there. Rumors--and heaven only knows what distortions such rumors might undergo, having their source in the incredible--would range our social circle like wildfire. And the newspapers, for our families are established and known--no, it wouldn't go.

I tied Tristan to a stile and called up Jack Briggs, our host, from a neighboring house, explained briefly that Tristan had met with an accident, asked him to say nothing, and explained where to bring the machine. In ten minutes he had maneuvered the heavy sedan across the rough wet fields. And then we had another problem on our hands: to let Jack into what had happened without shocking him into uselessness. It was not until we got him to test Tristan's eery buoyancy with his own hands that we were able to make him understand the real nature of our problem. And after that, his comments remained largely gibberish for some time. However, he was even quicker than we were to see the need for secrecy--he had vivid visions of the political capital which opposing newspapers would make of any such occurrence at his party--and so we arranged a plan. According to which we drove to the back of the house, explained to the curious who rushed out that Tristan had been injured by a stroke of lightning, and rushed the closely wrapped form up to his room, feeling a great relief at having something solid between us and the sky. While Jack went downstairs to dismiss the party as courteously as possible, Alice and I tied my brother to the bed with trunk straps. Whereupon the bed and patient plumped lightly but decisively against the ceiling as soon as we removed our weight. While we gazed upward open mouthed, Jack returned.

His faculties were recovering better than ours, probably because his affections were not so involved, and he gave the answer at once.

"Ah, h.e.l.l!" said he. "Pull the d.a.m.n bed down and spike it to the floor!" This we did. Then we held a short but intense consultation.

Whatever else might be the matter, obviously Tristan was suffering severely from shock and, for all we knew, maybe from partial electrocution. So we called up Dr. Grosnoff in the nearest town.

Grosnoff after our brief but disingenuous explanation, threw off the bed covers in a business-like way, then straightened up grimly.

"And may I ask," he said with sarcastic politeness, "since when a strait-jacket has become first-aid for a case of lightning stroke?"

"He was delirious," I stammered.

"Delirious my eye! He's as quiet as a lamb. And you've tied him down so tightly that the straps are cutting right into him! Of all the--the--" He stopped, evidently feeling words futile, and before we could make an effective attempt to stop him, whipped out a knife and cut the straps. Tristan's unfortunate body instantly crashed against the ceiling, smashing the lathing and plaster, and remaining half embedded in the ruins. A low cry of pain rose from Alice. Dr. Grosnoff staggered to a chair and sat down, his eyes fixed on the ceiling with a steady stare--the odd caricature of a man coolly studying an interesting phenomenon.

My brother appeared to be aroused by the shock, struggling about in his embedment, and finally sat up. Up? _Down_, I mean. Then he _stood_, _on the ceiling_, and began to walk! His nose had been bruised by the impact, and I noticed with uncomprehending wonder that the blood moved slowly _upward_ over his lip. He saw the window, and walked across the ceiling to it upside down. There he pushed the top of the window down and leaned out, gazing up into the sky with some sort of fascination. Instantly he crouched on the ceiling, hiding his eyes, while the house rang with shriek after shriek of mortal terror, speeding the packing of the parting guests. Alice seized my arm, her fingers cutting painfully into the flesh.