"A woman? There was no woman."
"Oh, yes, there was a woman—a very beautiful one."
The old lady dropped her hand. It was trembling.
"Oh, dear," she was saying. "This makes two. This morning it was a man and now it is a woman, that makes two."
It seemed to the man as he looked down in her eyes that he was looking into great fear; she was so slight and frail and helpless and so old; such a fragile thing to bear burden and trouble. Her voice was cracked and just above a shrill whisper, almost uncanny. She kept repeating:
"Now there are two. Now there are two. That makes two. This morning there was one. Now there are two."
Jerome could not understand. He pitied the old lady.
"Did you say that Dr. Holcomb is here?"
Again she looked up: the same blank expression, she was evidently trying to gather her wits.
"Two. A woman. Dr. Holcomb. Oh, yes. Dr. Holcomb. Won't you come in?"
She opened the door.
Jerome entered and took off his hat. Judicially he repeated the doctor's name to keep it in her mind. She closed the door carefully and touched his arm. It seemed to him that she was terribly weak and tottering; her old eyes, however expressionless, were full of pitiful pleading. She was scarcely more than a shadow.
"You are his son?"
Jerome lied; but he did it for a reason. "Yes."
"Then come."
She took him by the sleeve and led him to a room, then across it to a door in the side wall. Her step was slow and tottering; twice she stopped to sing the dirge of her wonder. "First a man and then a woman. Now there is one. You are his son." And twice she stopped and listened. "Do you hear anything? A bell? I love to hear it: and then afterward I am afraid. Did you ever notice a bell? It always makes you think of church and the things that are holy. This is a beautiful bell—first—"
Either the woman was without her reason or very nearly so: she was very weak and tottering.
"Come, mother, I know, first a bell, but Dr. Holcomb?"
The name brought her back again. For a moment she was blank trying to recall her senses. And then she remembered. She pointed to the door.
"In there—Dr. Holcomb. That's where they come. That's where they go. Dr. Holcomb. The little old man with the beautiful whiskers. This morning it was a man; now it is a woman. Now there are two. Oh, dear; perhaps we shall hear the bell."
Jerome began to scent a tragedy. Certainly the old lady was uncanny; the house was bare and hollow; the scant furniture was threadbare with age and mildew; each sound was exaggerated and fearful, even their breathing. He placed his hand on the knob and opened the door.
"Now there are two. Now there are two."
The room was empty. Not a bit of furniture; a blank, bare apartment with an old-fashioned high ceiling. Nothing else. Whatever the weirdness and adventure Jerome was getting nowhere. The old lady was still clinging to his arm and still droning:
"Now there are two. Now there are two. This morning a man; now a woman. Now there are two."
"Come, mother, come. This will not do. Perhaps—"
But just then the old lady's lean fingers clinched into his arm; her eyes grew bright; her mouth opened and she stopped in the middle of her drone. Jerome grew rigid. And no wonder. From the middle of the room not ten feet away came the tone of a bell, a great silvery voluminous sound—and music. A church bell. Just one stroke, full toned, filling all the air till the whole room was choked with music. Then as suddenly it died out and faded into nothing. At the same time he felt the fingers on his arm relax; and a heap at his feet. He reached over. The life and intelligence that was so near the line was just crossing over the border. The poor old lady! Here was a tragedy he could not understand. He stooped over to assist her. He was trembling. As he did so he heard the drone of her soul as it wafted to the shadow: "Now there are two."
4. GONE
JEROME WAS A strong man, of iron nerve, and well set against emotion; in the run of his experience he had been plumped into many startling situations; but none like this. The croon of the old lady thrummed in his ears with endless repetition. He picked her up tenderly and bore her to another room and placed her on a ragged sofa. There were still marks on her face of former beauty. He wondered who she was and what had been her life to come to such an ending.
"Now there are two," the words were withering with oppression. Subconsciously he felt the load that crushed her spirit. It was as if the burden had been shifted; he sensed the weight of an unaccountable disaster.
The place was musty and ill-lighted. He looked about him, the dank, close air was unwashed by daylight. A stray ray of sunshine filtering through the broken shutter slanted across the room and sought vainly to dispel the shadow. He thought of Dr. Holcomb. Dr. Holcomb and the old lady. "Now there are two." Was it a double tragedy? First of all he must investigate.
The place was of eleven rooms, six downstairs and five on the upper story. With the exception of one broken chair there was no furniture upstairs; four of the rooms on the lower floor were partly furnished, two not at all. A rear room had evidently been to the old lady the whole of her habitation, serving as kitchen, bedroom, and living-room combined. Except in this room there were no carpets whatever. His steps sounded hollow and ghostly; the boards creaked and each time he opened a door he was oppressed by the same gloom of dankness and stagnation. There was no trace of Dr. Holcomb.
lie remembered the bell and sought vainly on both floors for anything that would give him a clue to the sound. There was nothing. The only thing he heard was the echoing of his own creaking footsteps and the unceasing blur that thrummed in his spirit, "Now there are two."
At last he came to the door and looked out into the street. The sun was shining and the life and pulse was rising from the city. It was daylight; plain, healthy day. It was good to look at. On the threshold of the door he felt himself standing on the border of two worlds. What had become of the doctor and who was the old lady; and lastly and just as important who was the Rhamda and his beautiful companion?
Jerome telephoned to headquarters.
It is a strange case.
At the precise minute when his would-be auditors were beginning to fidget over his absence the police of San Francisco had started the search for the great doctor. Jerome had followed his intuition. It had led him into a tragedy and he was ready to swear almost on his soul that it was twofold. The prominence of the professor, together with his startling announcement of the day previous and the world-wide comment that it had aroused, elevated the case to a national interest.
Dr. Holcomb had promised to tear away the veil of the occult. He was not a man to talk idly. The world had long regarded him as one of its greatest thinkers. It was a mystery that had shrouded over the ages. Since man first blubbered out of apehood he had fought with this great riddle of infinity. And now, in the lecture on the Blind Spot, was promised the great solution; and not only the solution, but the fact, and substance to back it.
What was the Blind Spot? The world conjectured, and, like the world has been since beginning, it scoffed and derided. Some there were, however, men well up in the latest discoveries of science, who did not laugh. They counseled forbearance; they would wait for the doctor and his lecture.
There was no lecture. In the teeth of our expectation came the startling word that the doctor had disappeared. Apparently when on the very verge of announcing his discovery he had been swallowed by the very force that he had loosened. There was nothing in known science, outside of optics, that could in any way be blended with the Blind Spot. There were but two solutions; either the professor had been a victim of a clever rogue, or he had been overcome by the rashness of his own wisdom. At any rate, it was known from that minute on as "THE BLIND SPOT."
Perhaps it is just as well to take up the findings of the police. The police of course eluded from the beginning any suggestion of the occult. They are material; and were convinced from the start that the case had its origi
n in downright villainy. Man is complex; but being so, is oft overbalanced by evil. Some genius had made a fool of the doctor.
In the first place a thorough search was made for the professor. The place at No. 288 Chatterton Place was ransacked from cellar to attic. The records were gone over and it was found that the property had for some time been vacant; that the real ownership was vested in a number of heirs scattered about the country.
The old lady had apparently been living on the place simply through sufferance. No one could find out who she was. A few tradesmen in the vicinity had sold her some scant supplies and that was all. The stress that Jerome placed upon her actions and words was given due account of. There were undoubtedly two villains; but also there were two victims. That the old lady was such as well as the professor no one has doubted. The whole secret lay in the strange gentleman with the Eastern cast and complexion. Who was Rhamda Avec?
And now comes the strangest part of the story. Ever, when we recount the tale there is something to overturn the theories of the police. It has become a sort of legend in San Francisco; one to be taken with a grain of salt, to be sure, but for all that, one at which we may well wonder. Here the supporters of the professor's philosophy hold their strongest point—if it is true. Of course we can venture no private opinion, never having witnessed. It is this:
Rhamda Avec is with us and in our city. His description and drawn likeness has been published many times. There are those who aver that they have seen him in the reality of the flesh walking through the crowds of Market Street.
He is easily distinguished, tall and distinctive, refined to an ultra degree, and with the poise and alertness of a gentleman of reliance and character. Women look twice and wonder; he is neither old nor young; when he smiles it is like youth breaking in laughter. And with him often is his beautiful companion.
Men vouch for her beauty and swear that it is of the super kind that drives to distraction. She is fire and flesh and carnal—she is superbeauty. There is allurement about her body; sylphlike, sinuous; the olive tint of her complexion, the wonderful glory of her hair and the glowing night-black of her eyes. Men pause; she is of the superlative kind that robs the reason, a supreme glory of passion and life and beauty, at whose feet fools and wise men would slavishly frolic and folly. She seldom speaks, but those who have heard her say that it is like rippling water, of gentleness and softness and of the mellow flow that comes from love and passion and from beauty.
Of course there is nothing out of the ordinary in their walking down the streets. Anybody might do that. The wonder comes in the manner in which they elude the police. They come and go in the broad, bright daylight. Hundreds have seen (hem. They make no effort at concealment nor disguise. And yet no fantoms were ever more unreal than they to those who seek them. Who are they? The officers have been summoned on many occasions; but each and every time in some manner or way they have contrived to elude them. There are some who have consigned them to the limbo of illusion. But we do not entirely agree.
In a case like this it is well to take into consideration the respectability and character of those who have witnessed. Fantoms are not corporeal; these two are flesh and blood. There is mystery about them; but they are substance, the same as we are. All the secrets of the universe have not been unriddled by any means. We believe in Dr. Holcomb; and whether it was murder or mystery, we do not think we shall solve it until we have discovered the laws and the clues that led the great doctor up to the Blind Spot.
And lastly:
If you will take the Key Route ferry some foggy morning you may see something to convince you. It must be foggy and the air must be gray and drab and somber. Take the lower deck. Perhaps you shall see nothing. If not try again; for they say you shall be rewarded. Watch the forward part of the boat; but do not leave the inner deck. The great Rhamda watching the gray swirl of the water!
He stands alone, in his hands the case of reddish leather, his feet slightly apart and his face full of a great hungry wonder. Watch his features; they are strong and aglow with a great and wondrous wisdom; mark if you see evil. And, remember. Though he is like you he is something vastly different. He is flesh and blood; but perhaps the master of one of the greatest laws that man can attain to. He is the fact and the substance that was promised, but was not delivered by the professor.
A HISTORY OF
"THE SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE"
IN THE MUNSEY MAGAZINES,
1912-1920
by Sam Moskowitz
1. THE DISCOVERY OF EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS
ALL THE WORLD is familiar with the novel Tarzan of the Apes, and literally tens of millions of the world's people recognize the name of its author, Edgar Rice Burroughs. A substantial number are aware that he wrote stories other than Tarzan, most of them science fiction with locales on Mars, Venus, the Moon, Jupiter, the interior of the Earth, and planets surrounding other stars. Very few realize that he supplanted H. G. Wells as the world's front-running science-fiction writer and outdistanced another contemporary science-fiction-master, A. Conan Doyle (The Lost World, 1912; The Poison Belt, 1913), by so great a margin in both quantity and popularity that even if Doyle had wished to enter into a deliberate competition, it is doubtful that he could have overtaken him.
Following the appearance of his first published work of fiction, Under the Moons of Mars, in THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE (February-July, 1912), Burroughs turned the entire direction of science fiction from prophecy and sociology to romantic adventure, made the major market for such work the all-fiction pulp magazines, and became the major influence on the field through to 1934.
Edgar Rice Burroughs carried no illusion of rhetorical grandeur when he first evaluated seriously the potential of a literary career. Reasonably acquainted with the popular magazines of the day, he read their fiction, analyzed their policies, and determined that considering the type of thing he planned to write, a scientific romance, his best hope lay with the all-fiction pulps. These were magazines that carried little or no nonfiction; usually unrelieved by illustrations (because of their rough paper), they crammed page after page of solid type with adventure, human interest, and romance. The number of such magazines was increasing, but the group most likely to accept a highly fantastic romantic adventure was the Munsey pulps. Of that group, the magazine that ran such stories most regularly was THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, so that would be his target.
"I had good reason for thinking I could sell what I wrote," Edgar Rice Burroughs stated in a by-lined feature article for THE SUNDAY WORLD MAGAZINE, October 27, 1929. "I had gone thoroughly through some of the all-fiction magazines, and made up my mind that if people were paid for writing rot such as I read I could write stories just as rotten. ... I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines."
The motivation for writing was not the challenge, not the subconscious love of it, but sheer, utter, and driving despair. Burroughs had missed his mark in a dozen diverse occupations in scattered areas of the country. There were two children to support, and he had already pawned the wife's jewelry and his watch. His last venture, a mail-order business, had failed miserably, and he was working out of borrowed space as an agent for a pencil-sharpener company.
It has never been made clear how many back issues of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE he had read, or whether the "rotten" stories he was referring to were science fiction.
Had he read The Cave of the Glittering Lamps (October, 1910-January, 1911), a five-part novel of the tunnels of a subterranean city carved out of a Persian mountain, whose golden grandeur outdated the Bible, written by a twenty-seven-year-old, Ludwig Lewisohn, then struggling to build a literary reputation? The ancient priests bent on their sacrifices to the Sun God were deliberately calculated to provide thrills and were a far cry from the scholarship of Lewisohn's translations, later books on world literature, or novels of the Jews that later brought him attention.
Burroughs' contempt for The M
onkey Man (September, 1910-January 1911), by William Tillinghast Eldridge, a stalwart of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, would be more understandable. Eldridge had taken the potentially fascinating idea of an immensely powerful apelike man, who swung through trees, to the terror of a couple cast away on a tropical island, and reduced it to an ordinary and eminently forgettable episode. It may well be that Tarzan of the Apes owes its genesis as much to that poorly cast story as it docs to the legend of Romulus and Remus or to the Jungle Books of Rudyard Kipling, hitherto regarded as the most probable sources.
It is not as likely that his reading had extended as far back as the issues of January-June, 1909, which featured A Columbus of Space by the popular astronomer and journalist Garrett P. Serviss. Had he read it, he probably could not have treated with proper respect a novel written in 1908 in which atomic energy derived from uranium is used to power a space ship to Venus. But he was not likely to have scoffed at the fascinating space scenes, the exploration of Venus with its dark-side and light-side humanoid cultures, its strange monsters and lovable pets. The description of the great clouds parting once in a lifetime to reveal the face of a gigantic, merciless sun is not to be demeaned, particularly when the effect of the rays that pour down is to drive all inhabitants mad. A much more sophisticated use of the idea in Nightfall (ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION, September, 1941) had raised Isaac Asimov to the rank of a major figure in the field of science fiction. The idea had been suggested to him by John W. Campbell, the magazine's editor (attributed to a stanza from Ralph Waldo Emerson) who had read A Columbus of Space when it was reprinted in AMAZING STORIES, August-October, 1926. In Nightfall, a world is hypothesized where the stars appear only once in a thousand years, and each time it happens the population is rendered insane and civilization falls. The closest similarity to this concept in a Burroughs story occurs in The Pirates of Venus (ARGOSY, September 17-October 22, 1932), where occasional rifts in the clouds burn up vegetation and destroy life.
Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of the Scientific Romance in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 Page 40