nd worried about business.... You were wrong. The thing that
got me was _hearing her voice_----"

He gripped the cold cigar, chewed it. "It's very strange that you
didn't notice it. No matter what station we dialed to, always that
same voice came stealing into the room! But perhaps you did notice?
You said, once or twice, that all those blues singers sounded alike!

"And she was a blues singer.... It was she, all right, somewhere out
in the ether, reminding me....

"The next thing was--well, at first when I noticed it in the office I
thought Miss Carruthers had suddenly taken up with young ideas. You
see, I kept smelling perfume."

And he smelled it now. It was like a miasma in the dark.

"It isn't anything that Carruthers wears," he grated. "It comes
from--yes, the storage room. I realized that about a month ago. Just
after you sailed--one night I stayed late at the office, and I went in
there.... It seemed to be strongest around the vat--_her_ vat--and I
lifted the lid.

"The sweet, sticky musk-smell hit me like a blow in the face.

"And that isn't all!"

* * * * *

Terror stalked in this room. Asa Gregg crouched in his chair, felt the
weight of Fear on him like a submarine pressure. His cigar pitched to
his knees, dropped to the floor.

"You won't believe this, Jeannette." He hammered the words like nails
into the darkness in front of him. "You will say that it's impossible.
I know that. It _is_ impossible. It is a physiological absurdity--it
contradicts the laws of natural science.

"_But I saw something on the bottom of that vat!_"

He groped for the bottle. His wife would hear a long gurgle, and then
a coughing gasp....

"The vat was nearly full of this transparent, oily acid," he went on.
"What I saw was a lot of sediment on the golden floor. And there
shouldn't have been any sediment! The stuff utterly dissolves animal
tissue, bone, even the common ores--keeps them in suspension.

"It didn't look like sediment, either. It looked like a heap of mold ...
grave-mold!

"I replaced the lid. I spent a week convincing myself that it was all
impossible, that I _couldn't_ have seen anything of the sort. Then I
went to the vat again----"

Silence hung in the darkness while he sucked wind into his lungs. And
the words burst--separate, yammering shrieks:

"I looked, night after night! For hours at a time I've watched the
change.... Did you ever see a body decompose? Of co