across the pond at the lights gleaming cheerfully from the lodge.
Floating out over the water came soft music. A woman was singing a haunting, minor melody. Her voice had a strange, fascinating quality, yet its huskiness was not altogether pleasant. Larry listened. There was another sound, that of heavy feet plodding through sticky mud. Tall grasses waved. A splash, and again the night belonged to a woman’s singing.
The black surface of the pool tippled gently in the wake of a punt moving slowly twenty feet from the shore. In the prow stood a long, thin man, poling. In the stern, wrapped in white, was the lovely form of the singing woman—Dean Wile’s young wife, perhaps.
The singing stopped. “You know, Frank,” the woman said, “you may well wonder how I put up with him day after day. I don’t love him. I never could love a man whose mind is completely wrapped up in his work.”
The man in the stern of the punt dropped his pole, crouched in the bottom of the drifting boat, and crawled toward the woman. “Bernice!” The name barely audible from his lips throbbed with passion.
It was the last word he ever spoke. Directly behind the little boat, something marred the black surface. From where Larry stood, it looked like a little watersnake, swimming with head erect. It was rapidly overhauling the craft. Suddenly, the water behind the boat was cleaved by a great, round, reptilian head. A black, three-taloned member fully twelve inches across slashed up through the water, fastened to the edge of the boat, and gave it a sudden lurch.
The man in the boat uttered a strange, terrorful cry and pitched over the side. For a moment, Larry saw his face raised in frantic appeal. Then huge talons struck down in a blow of tremendous power that caught the man full in the face, obliterating his features, turning his face into a gory pulp that uttered shriek after shriek until it was dragged burbling beneath the water.
Larry Corrin shook himself from a paroxysm of horror that had rooted him to the spot. The woman—what had become of her? He raced down the hill, plowed through long grasses and plunged into the water. The woman was swimming toward him, her breath coming in tortured gasps. Larry’s flashlight sought her face. She was very beautiful. His arm went beneath her bare, wet arm, encircled her back. He lifted her bodily and carried her to the shore.
She clung closely to him, murmuring over and over, “Frank…Frank” in her dreamy, caressing voice.
Larry stood the woman somewhat roughly upon her feet. Her wide blue eyes sought his face inquiringly. “You saw it? You saw the monster. You’ll believe?”
Larry scowled. “I—I don’t know what to believe, Mrs. Wile.”
Perhaps she read a second meaning into his words. A frown of displeasure flitted across her face. “You—you’re Larry Corrin?”
He nodded.
“Bernice! Bernice!” A man’s voice was shouting from the other side of the pool. A yellow lantern bobbed along the shore. “Bernice, are you all right?”
“Call out to him. Tell him you’re all right,” Larry commanded.
The girl raised her quivering voice and called back. Then holding to Larry’s arm she ran toward the man with the light.
The man who met them was short, sturdily built, and bearded. He gave the woman’s arm a quick pinch as if to assure himself that she was flesh and blood, then extended his hand to Larry.
“Remember me, Corrin? You’ve arrived a day ahead of schedule, haven’t you?”
* * * *
Larry Corrin clasped Ivan Stern’s hand. He remembered Stern, one of the oldest of Dean Wile’s associates in the Jordan Scientific Institute Larry said, “If I had come tomorrow, I would have been too late then, too.”
“Too?” Ivan echoed. Then his keen, questioning eyes searched the woman’s face. His voice dropped to an apprehensive whisper. “Where’s Frank Mayer?”
Bernice clutched Larry Corrin’s arm. “Tell him,” she implored.
“They were in a boat together, Mayer and—this is Mrs. Wile, I presume?”
Stern nodded. “I heard a shriek coming from the pool. I ran here. And Frank…?”
“Any conjecture you can draw will be as good as mine,” said Larry.
“Then—then the pool sucked him under?” Stem persisted.
“Not the pool. Something else. But we can’t stand here imagining things! Mrs. Wile is wet, and—and nervous.” He remembered the brief scrap of conversation he had heard between Frank Mayer and Bernice Wile. Bernice did not love her husband. Perhaps she had loved Frank Mayer.
He shrugged away the thought and half supporting Bernice Wile hurried along the shore toward the house. Behind them came Ivan Stern growling in his beard. “Why did you go out on that damned pond after all the warnings you’ve had?” Ivan asked.
“Frank wanted to go,” Bernice panted. “He said it was all nonsense, fearing a little body of water because it was black and too treacherous for bathing.”
Stern drew a long, deep breath. “I don’t suppose Dean told you in his letter about Jimmy Droon, one of the members of the group, did he, Corrin?”
The reporter shook his head. “What’s the matter with Jimmy? Nice chap as I remember him.”
“He’s dead. Today is the eighth day!”
Fifteen minutes later, Larry Corrin was seated on the comfortable veranda of Black Pool Lodge. Sitting about him, eagerly waiting for his story of Frank Mayer’s death, were all that remained of perhaps the greatest single group of men devoted to scientific learning. Dean Wile, holding the pale hand of his wife who reclined in a deck chair, leaned forward. His high dome of a head was bald as an egg. His black brows, contrasting with the white of his skin, beetled over piercing, black-bean eyes. “My brother Perry saw the monster,” he said, addressing Larry, “or rather he saw the fore-feet of the thing. That was when Jim Droon said he was going to break the jinx of Black Pool and go for a swim. That was eight days ago. Does that mean anything to you, Larry?”
Corrin reflectively examined the tip of his cigarette. “You mean that if Jim Droon had been drowned, he would have risen to the surface today.”
“Of course he was drowned.” The speaker was Mathew Ince, a fiery haired little man, the only one in the group who was not a scientist. Mathew Ince was the manager of the huge estate that Dr. Jordan had left to the institute bearing his name. A keen business man was Ince, careful and calculating. “I’m inclined to think we’re all a bunch of marbleheads. We got ourselves all worked up because some drunken ass around here said he saw a dragon or something in Black Pool. Nothing would do but what the whole crowd must sneak up here and watch for the damned beast. And have we seen it? Science be damned. Dinosaurs are dead! None of us but Perry have seen it, and we’ve no proof that he wasn’t drunk, too.”
Perry Wile, his brother’s junior by ten years, but already making a name for himself in anthropology, had just entered the room. “You can’t argue around the eight days, Ince. A body rises to the surface of water after that time just as the body of Jim Droon would have risen had it not been for the fact—well, to put it brutally, the fact that he was devoured.”
“Exactly!”
