Page:Weird Tales v33n05 (1939-05).djvu/100

The dying man stared at and through me in his feeble delirium.

"The face!" he gasped out. "Oh, my God—the face!"

I leaned forward urgently. The nurse made as if to stop me, then shrugged as the surgeon had done. The man would die in a few minutes anyway.

"What face?" I said. "What face? Can't you tell me?"

The dying man did not hear. He was almost in another world.

"The face," he whispered, with a look in his starting eyes that made the nurse bite her lips till the blood almost came, in a wave of horror.

He sank back then, and his eyes closed.

"Dead?" I asked the nurse in a low tone.

She nodded, and sighed, a long, shuddering sigh like a sob.

"You were at that corner when this happened, weren't you?" she said.

I nodded, staring at the mask of terror which was the dead man's face.

"How in the world could it have happened?" she asked.

I shook my head. "I can tell you what happened: this man was crossing King Street in a hurry to beat the red light, and he ran his sedan head on into a coal truck hurrying from the opposite direction. But I can't tell you how it happened—because I can’t figure that out myself."

"They ought to block that corner off, do something about it," said the nurse.

I made some absent-minded reply, and went to the hospital's registry desk. There, still absent-mindedly, I went through a newspaper reporter's routine in such cases. I got the man's name and address, as given by identifying papers in his pocket, and his occupation and business address as given by a business card. He was a Mr. Lincoln Abner, wholesaler in furniture.

I phoned the dope in to Morgan, city editor.

"Stick around that corner, Brennan," he said. "That's your assignment from now on, remember, till we make something out of this."

He didn't hint at the nature of the "something" I might possibly "make out of this," because he had no idea of what it might be, any more than I did. But I knew that he was as sure as I was that something peculiar did lie at the bottom of it.

Eleven dead within the past three weeks in traffic accidents at the comer of King and Altsheller Streets! No wonder it had suddenly come to be named Death Corner!

But what, I speculated as I went slowly back to the fatal spot, had suddenly inaugurated this reign of death? The intersection was a secondary one, with no more traffic on it than on dozens of others in the big city. Till recently it had had a modest sum of fatalities; perhaps two killed there a year, perhaps less than that.

Now, in three weeks—eleven had died!

Morgan had called me in two days ago. Before him were clippings, and a sheet of paper on which he had listed items.

"Bill," he said, "you brought in that last story of an accident at King and Altsheller, the one where the man and woman in the blue coupé were killed when they slammed into the nose of a speeding ambulance. Didn't it occur to you that there was something mighty funny about that corner lately?"

I admitted that it hadn't.

"It wouldn't occur to most of you guys to come in out of the rain, unless you had an important assignment that should take you out," Morgan growled. "Well, it occurred to me that it was queer. So I started checking facts. And the total is queerer yet."

He arranged the news clippings on his crowded desk.

"Until three weeks ago King and Alt-