The Alien MEGAPACK®

by Talmage Powell

  It was stiff in death, as stiff as the rabbit had been, bone stiff, stone stiff.

  There is terror in unnatural death. There is horror in unnatural death. The fear of unnatural death is one of the fundamental human fears. Death from a known cause is bad; death from an unknown cause is infinitely worse.

  Unnatural death had come to the dog in the box.

  Graham turned it over. The man in the blue suit seemed to find a horrible fascination in the bare spot on its back.

  Using nail scissors, he had snipped the hair from that spot.

  “What do you make of it?” he said to Graham.

  “I wish I were a life insurance salesman,” Graham answered.

  “What?” the man gasped.

  “I bet I could sell a hell of a lot of life insurance right here in this room,” Graham answered.

  He turned from the box, walked over to Featherstone.

  “What have you got, Swami?” he asked.

  Featherstone took another drink of brandy. Graham picked up the bottle and took a drink for himself.

  “What have you got, Swami?” he repeated.

  “What do you think?” Featherstone answered.

  “I’m not thinking right now.”

  “Um, did you examine that box?”

  “No.”

  “You should. It’s made of steel.”

  “I’ll take your word for that, for the time being. What was that thing?”

  “I don’t know,” Featherstone answered.

  “You don’t know?”

  “No. You can call it a devil, but you are only using a word without saying anything. You can call it an elemental, but again you are only using a word.”

  “It obeyed you,” Graham interrupted.

  Featherstone smiled up at him. “Yes, I believe it did,” he answered. “I believe it did.”

  He rose to his feet. “That’s all,” he said. “That’s all for tonight. If any of you want to come back next Thursday night, I will be glad to see you.”

  He walked out of the room.

  Graham let him go. Louie was urging the guests to the door.

  “Mr. Featherstone is very tired,” Louie was saying. “He can’t talk to anyone and he can’t answer questions.”

  Louie looked longingly toward the half empty bottle of brandy. He had the appearance of a man who could use a drink himself.

  * * * *

  The woman who had fainted had been revived. Graham joined Whitman Chambers and his daughter. They walked in silence to the car. When they were in the car, the girl spoke.

  “Father, that thing that came into the room—”

  “Yes, my dear—”

  There was inexplicable fright on her face.

  “A few nights ago—I don’t remember exactly which night it was—that thing was—was in my bedroom. I awakened and heard it buzzing—”

  “I know it was,” Whitman Chambers answered.

  “You knew it was there!” the startled girl gasped.

  “Yes. Otherwise why would I have spent a hundred thousand dollars?”

  “What? You spent that money to protect me?”

  “Of course!” Whitman Chambers answered. “I had attended two of Featherstone’s séances. I had seen that thing come through the window and kill one time a cat in that box, the second time a rabbit. Suspecting trickery, I had asked for the body of the rabbit. I was going to have it examined by the best doctors that money could buy. But before I got that done, the thing was in my room at night. I heard it, I heard it disappear. It went to Featherstone. One hundred thousand dollars was the price he asked to control it. He hinted that it had been in your room, and said that a donation would be acceptable. I paid his price without question. I would pay it again without question, my dear—”

  “But the police—” the girl protested. “Surely they could have offered some kind of protection.”

  Chambers sighed. “I have several times one hundred thousand dollars. I have only one daughter. Should I take chances with the police when—when my daughter’s life is at stake? No, my dear, this is not something for the police. Do you agree, Mr. Graham?”

  “I agree,” Graham growled. He could imagine how Chambers’ story would have been received in the average police station. The best he could expect would be a gruff, “Brother, you’re nuts!” from some desk sergeant. The worst he could expect would be an examination by a psychiatrist. Presuming Chambers was wealthy and influential enough to forestall an examination for mental disturbance—what odd words they used to describe insanity?—he could still get himself a reputation for being cracked, but he would not get protection, not from the police, not in a case like this.

  * * * *

  This was something you fought yourself, this was a battle in which neither civilization nor law and order could help you. This was a case of individual survival, of one man and one woman, or of a few men and a few women, against the dark forces of the universe, against the night.

  “What do you think, Mr. Graham?” the girl asked.

  “I think it’s extortion,” Graham answered. “Extortion—and something else!”

  “Do you really believe it is only extortion?” Whitman Chambers asked. He seemed a little relieved by that thought. If it was just extortion, just a method of prying money out of a wealthy man—

  “And something else,” Graham repeated. “I know the Swami. He has been a lot of things, and all of them have been crooked. This is crooked too, but the force he is using to extort money out of you is real. And he is scared of it himself. It obeys him, but it also scares the living daylights out of him. That is the most damnable part of the whole case. Featherstone is scared. If he wasn’t scared, then there might be some things we could do, but as long as he is scared, we have to walk mighty softly. Because the Swami, whatever else you can say about him, doesn’t scare easily.”

  “What do you think that thing is?” Chambers asked. “The thing that came into the room.”

  “I haven’t any idea whatsoever,” Graham answered. “I am fairly familiar with the literature of the occult and there is nothing remotely like it in the maddest dope dreams of the craziest occultist who ever lived. That thing is unique.”

  He looked out of the car window. The advertising signs of New York glowed in the sky of night. Normally there was solid comfort in all that glittering electricity but there was no comfort in it now. Something else was in that sky, somewhere in that sky.

  Graham had visions of a gigantic bee darting and dashing through the sky, twisting and turning in the night, buzzing as it moved. He visualized it leaping out toward the moon, maybe out toward the stars.

  “What do you think we ought to do?” Mildred Chambers asked.

  “How about taking a quick trip to Europe and forgetting to come back for a couple of years?” Graham suggested. “That ought to solve your problem for you. Featherstone will scarcely follow you to Europe.”

  There was silence.

  “What about you?” Chambers asked.

  “I’ll stay here and see what can be done,” Graham answered.

  The silence fell again.

  “We run while you stay and fight,” the girl said.

  “Well—”

  “No, thanks,” she answered. “We don’t run off and let somebody else fight our battles for us.”

  “Good girl,” her father said.

  Graham was glad he had already decided he liked this violet-eyed girl.

  “Actually I don’t see where you are in much danger now,” he said. “You have already paid off. Featherstone should let you alone now.”

  Their silence told him that they knew as well as he did that he was lying. In dealing with an extortionist the pay-off is no protection. There were two good reasons why all three of them were in danger. One, they knew too much. Two, Feathers
tone was scared.

  * * * *

  Graham left Mildred Chambers and her father at their apartment. He didn’t even go up with them. They would want to talk and he had nothing to talk about, as yet. He wanted to think. He had the definite foreknowledge that his thoughts were not going to make him happy, but he had to think them anyhow. He decided to walk back to his own modest bachelor apartment. It was almost midnight. Featherstone’s séance—Graham used that word in the absence of a better word to describe what had taken place in Featherstone’s studio—had not taken much time. The Swami had not attempted to put on a show. He had gone directly to the point and if the audience didn’t like the shortness of the demonstration or the abrupt way they had been booted out when the performance was over, they could lump it.

  Graham caught himself watching the sky as he walked down the almost deserted streets. The night was pleasantly cool for August in New York. The moon was over Manhattan. The old town looked quiet, peaceful, and serene. It was hard to realize there were places like Featherstone’s studio in a town that looked so comfortable and placid.

  “What in the name of heaven is that thing?” Graham thought. “It came through the window and the glass blurred but did not break. It went into that steel box and killed the dog—”

  He was cold, cold, cold! It had killed the dog. Of course he hadn’t examined the box. He only had Featherstone’s word that it was made of steel. But Featherstone had invited him to examine it and he was willing to bet that if he had looked it over, he would have found it was actually made of steel. Of course, there might be a trick of some kind. An X-ray machine might be hidden in the room under the box, its radiations focused to pass through the floor and through the box, but he knew of no X-ray, nor any other kind of ray, that would turn a frightened dog into bone.

  There wasn’t any ray like that. Or if there was, it was the product of some obscure inventor who had never let his discovery become known.

  There might be an inventor who had done exactly that. And Featherstone might have gotten control of his invention.

  “Maybe I better pay a quiet visit to Featherstone’s studio and see what I can find out,” Graham thought. “I might discover something. I also might get my tail full of lead. I sure as hell don’t know where else to start.”

  The absence of a starting point was giving him more trouble than anything else.

  * * * *

  He bought a paper, went into a restaurant for a cup of coffee and a ham sandwich. Graham was a confirmed believer in combining reading and eating. When he reached the third page of the paper, he stopped eating.

  A feature story on page three gave him a starting point. The story had originated in the town of Elm Point which Graham remembered as being a small town about two hundred miles from Manhattan. It had been written by some special correspondent and was dated the preceding day. The headline read:

  FARMER’S COW TURNS INTO BONE

  Elm Point, N. Y. Aug. 21 (Special) Sam Wakely, prominent farmer living near here, went out into his barn lot yesterday morning and discovered that one of his cows had mysteriously turned into bone over night. According to Wakely, he found the animal, a fine Jersey, standing stiff and cold in the corner of the barn lot when he went out to do his morning feeding. Although dead, the cow was still on her feet, but toppled over when Wakely pushed against her side.

  James Watkins, Elm Point veterinarian summoned by Wakely, says that he has never encountered a similar case in his extensive experience as an animal doctor. He professes himself completely baffled as to the cause of the condition.

  A rabbit and a dog in New York. In Elm Point, two hundred miles away, a Jersey cow.

  Graham found a telephone. After some argument with a sleepy central in Elm Point, he finally got Watkins out of bed.

  “Most amazing thing I ever saw!” the veterinarian said. “Most amazing thing I ever saw. You with a New York paper, you say? Well, that cow was dead and I don’t have the slightest idea what killed her. Fine Jersey too.”

  “Huh?

  “City man, you say? Name of Featherstone? Let me think—”

  Graham hung on to the wire while the sleepy veterinarian shuffled through his mind.

  “I believe there is a man by the name living around here. Come to think of it, I believe his place joins Wakely’s farm on the north. You looking for him to add something to your story, maybe?”

  “Thank you,” Graham said, and hung up.

  Featherstone had a place in Elm Point. There was a dead cow in Elm Point.

  * * * *

  Graham headed directly for his apartment. He intended to dump some clothes into a suitcase, pick up his car at the garage, and take off for Elm Point. The elevator operator in his building recognized Graham. The operator was colored. He was also a little scared.

  “Evenin’, Mr. Graham. Been somethin’ buzzin’ around in this here lobby.”

  “What?” Graham said.

  “Somethin’ like a big bee. I heard it and I heard and I heard it, but I ain’t never seen it a-tall. What’s the matter, Mr. Graham? Ain’t you all goin’ up to your apartment after all?”

  “I forgot something,” Graham answered. “I got to go back and take care of it.”

  He went through the lobby and out of the building in one hell of a hurry.

  He wondered what he would have found waiting for him if he had gone on up to his apartment.

  If anything followed him, he did not see it.

  * * * *

  Graham saw Wakely’s cow. It was the middle of the afternoon when he reached the farmer’s place. He had driven all night and had registered in a hotel in a town about twenty miles from Elm Point. For obvious reasons, he did not want to be seen around the latter place.

  Wakely was a middle-aged farmer. He was a little scared but not too scared to have his business eye wide open. He charged Graham a dollar to see his cow.

  Graham needed only a minute to determine that the cow, the dog, and the rabbit had died from the same cause.

  “She was standin’ right where she is now when I came out of the house in the morning,” Wakely said. “All the other animals was herded together up in the corner of the lot. I thought maybe a wolf had scared them during the night. There’s still a few wolves around here. It’s mostly cut-over timber land from here to Canada and now and then a few wolves come down from up north. But it wasn’t no wolf that killed her.”

  “I can see that,” Graham answered.

  “I called Doc Watkins and he come out and looked her over. He charged me two dollars, which was plumb wasted, for there wasn’t anything he could do.”

  “You have any idea what killed your cow?” Graham asked.

  “I haven’t an idea in the world,” the farmer answered.

  “Well, thanks,” Graham said. “Incidentally, doesn’t a man by the name of Featherstone own the adjoining farm?”

  “Yeah. City feller. From the next bend in the road you can see his house.”

  Graham caught a glimpse of Featherstone’s house as he drove past. He didn’t stop. He saw a gang of workmen busy cleaning up the debris left over after the construction of a large barn-like structure next to the garage. A new power line had been strung from some distant source of electric current to this building. Heavy transformers on the last pole of the high line fed current into Featherstone’s new construction.

  Graham frowned. Featherstone was building something. It was out of character for the Swami to make extensive additions to his property, especially expensive additions. The price of high lines and big transformers was more than hay. What was Featherstone building?

  It was a passing question. Graham had other and more important questions to think about. One question was why Wakely’s Jersey cow had been killed. Extortion could not be involved. The farmer didn’t have enough money to interest Featherstone. Probably even the threat of
death would not jar him loose from his hard-earned dollars. Farmers were likely to be independent as the devil. No, the Swami was not trying to extort money from Wakely. Then why had the cow been killed?

  One possibility was that the farmer knew too much and was being warned to keep his mouth shut.

  “That doesn’t make sense either,” Graham grumbled.

  * * * *

  Obviously Wakely hadn’t kept his mouth shut. He had called a veterinarian, had talked to the newspapers. If the death of his jersey had been intended as a warning, Wakely would have known enough not to talk about what had happened.

  No matter how he looked at it, the death of the cow had all the appearance of an accident.

  “I wonder if Featherstone knows that cow is dead!” he thought.

  The thought scared him. He was scaring easily these days and this thought scared him again. Didn’t Featherstone have full control of the thing that had come through the window and killed the dog in the steel box? Had it slipped away from him and gone on a killing spree of its own, its victim being Wakely’s cow?

  Graham clearly remembered the fear that Featherstone had shown during his séance, the suggestion of strain visible on his lean face as he called his devil not from the vasty deep but from the infinitely more vast sky. Was that fear rising from the knowledge that he could not guarantee control of the monstrosity he could evoke?

  “I wish I lived on an island in the South Seas!” Graham thought. “I wish I was a beachcomber and had nothing bigger to worry about than when the next coconut would fall from a tree.”

  He drove back to the town where he was staying but he didn’t go near the hotel where he was registered. Maybe he was shying from shadows but he intensely disliked visiting the same place twice. Something might be waiting for him if he went back the second time.

  For a hard-boiled detective, who had spent most of his life exposing fakes, who believed nothing that he read and little that he saw, Graham was developing a set of nerves.

  He went to a clothing store and bought a pair of overalls, a pair of tennis shoes, and a dark cap. He went to a hardware store and bought a light crowbar and half a dozen plain corks, which he placed in his car. He bought a paper to read while he was eating dinner.