Darkness and Dawn

To
Robert H. Davis
Unique inspirer of plots
Do I dedicate
This my trilogy
G.A.E.

Dimly, like the daybreak glimmer of a sky long wrapped in fogs,
a sign of consciousness began to dawn in the face of the tranced girl.

Once more the breath of life began to stir in that full bosom, to
which again a vital warmth had on this day of days crept slowly back.

And as she lay there, prone upon the dusty floor, her beautiful face
buried and shielded in the hollow of her arm, a sigh welled from her
lips.

Life—life was flowing back again! The miracle of miracles was growing
to reality.

Faintly now she breathed; vaguely her heart began to throb once more.
She stirred. She moaned, still for the moment powerless to cast off
wholly the enshrouding incubus of that tremendous, dreamless sleep.

Then her hands closed. The finely tapered fingers tangled themselves
in the masses of thick, luxuriant hair which lay outspread all over
and about her. The eyelids trembled.

And, a moment later, Beatrice Kendrick was sitting up, dazed and
utterly uncomprehending, peering about her at the strangest vision
which since the world began had ever been the lot of any human
creature to behold—the vision of a place transformed beyond all power
of the intellect to understand.

For of the room which she remembered, which had been her last sight
when (so long, so very long, ago) her eyes had closed with that sudden
and unconquerable drowsiness, of that room, I say, remained only
walls, ceiling, floor of rust-red steel and crumbling cement.

Quite gone was all the plaster, as by magic. Here or there a heap of
whitish dust betrayed where some of its detritus still lay.

Gone was every picture, chart, and map—which—but an hour since, it
seemed to her—had decked this office of Allan Stern, consulting
engineer, this aerie up in the forty-eighth story of the Metropolitan
Tower.

Furniture, there now was none. Over the still-intact glass of the
windows cobwebs were draped so thickly as almost to exclude the light
of day—a strange, fly-infested curtain where once neat green
shade-rollers had hung.

Even as the bewildered girl sat there, lips parted, eyes wide with
amaze, a spider seized his buzzing prey and scampered back into a hole
in the wall.

A huge, leathery bat, suspended upside down in the far corner, cheeped
with dry, crepitant sounds of irritation.

Beatrice rubbed her eyes.

"What?" she said, quite slowly. "Dreaming? How singular! I only wish I
could remember this when I wake up. Of all the dreams I've ever had,
this one's certainly the strangest. So real, so vivid! Why, I could
swear I was awake—and yet—"

All at once a sudden doubt flashed into her mind. An uneasy expression
dawned across her face. Her eyes grew wild with a great fear; the fear
of utter and absolute incomprehension.

Something about this room, this weird awakening, bore upon her
consciousness the dread tidings this was not a dream.

Something drove home to her the fact that it was real, objective,
positive! And with a gasp of fright she struggled up amid the litter
and the rubbish of that uncanny room.

"Oh!" she cried in terror, as a huge scorpion, malevolent, and with
its tail raised to strike, scuttled away and vanished through a gaping
void where once the corridor-door had swung. "Oh, oh! Where
am
I?
What—
what has—happened?
"

Horrified beyond all words, pale and staring, both hands clutched to
her breast, whereon her very clothing now had torn and crumbled, she
faced about.

To her it seemed as though some monstrous, evil thing were lurking in
the dim corner at her back. She tried to scream, but could utter no
sound, save a choked gasp.

Then she started toward the doorway. Even as she took the first few
steps her gown—a mere tattered mockery of garment—fell away from
her.

And, confronted by a new problem, she stopped short. About her she
peered in vain for something to protect her disarray. There was
nothing.

"Why—where's—where's my chair? My desk?" she exclaimed thickly,
starting toward the place by the window where they should have been,
and were not. Her shapely feet fell soundlessly in that strange and
impalpable dust which thickly coated everything.

"My typewriter? Is—can
that
be my typewriter? Great Heavens! What's
the matter here, with everything? Am I mad?"

There before her lay a somewhat larger pile of dust mixed with soft
and punky splinters of rotten wood. Amid all this decay she saw some
bits of rust, a corroded type-bar or two—even a few rubber key-caps,
still recognizable, though with the letters quite obliterated.

All about her, veiling her completely in a mantle of wondrous gloss
and beauty, her lustrous hair fell, as she stooped to see this
strange, incomprehensible phenomenon. She tried to pick up one of the
rubber caps. At her merest touch it crumbled to an impalpable white
powder.

Back with a shuddering cry the girl sprang, terrified.

"Merciful Heavens!" she supplicated. "What—what does all this mean?"

For a moment she stood there, her every power of thought, of motion,
numbed. Breathing not, she only stared in a wild kind of cringing
amazement, as perhaps you might do if you should see a dead man move.

Then to the door she ran. Out into the hall she peered, this way and
that, down the dismantled corridor, up the wreckage of the stairs all
cumbered, like the office itself, with dust and webs and vermin.

Aloud she hailed: "Oh! Help, help,
help!
" No answer. Even the echoes
flung back only dull, vacuous sounds that deepened her sense of awful
and incredible isolation.

What? No noise of human life anywhere to be heard? None! No familiar
hum of the metropolis now rose from what, when she had fallen asleep,
had been swarming streets and miles on miles of habitations.

Instead, a blank, unbroken leaden silence, that seemed part of the
musty, choking atmosphere—a silence that weighed down on Beatrice
like funeral-palls.