The Malignant Entity (4 page)

“Now try to get away, you devil!” I cried, shaking the jar exultantly.

I almost dropped it a moment later as a muffled explosion jarred the building. Then I remembered Chief McGraw’s safe-cracker, and hurried upstairs.

When I reached the living-room, Dr. Dorp was emerging from the study in a cloud of plaster dust. In his hand was a thick, loose-leaf book.

“I have the professor’s diary,” he called excitedly.

“Don’t get fussed over such trifles,” I replied. “Look what I’ve got. Caught it alive, too.”

I put the jar on the table and he squinted at it for a moment. The blood-bloated monstrosity had separated its shapeless hulk from the whitened bones of its victim and was sluggishly crawling up the side of the glass.

“You caught it, sure enough,” he said. “I only hope it hasn’t any little sons or daughters about.”

“I’ll keep the house under guard for a couple of days,” said Chief McGraw, who had come down to learn the result of the cracksman’s labors. “If there are any more of these things around they ought to show themselves by that time.”

The doctor drew a chair up to the table and eagerly scanned the pages of the diary while we watched the antics of the thing in the jar. It kept getting lighter colored all the time, and more lively. By the time the cytoplasm had become transparent it was racing around, contorting its body into all kinds of shapes—flat, oval, and round. At times it put forth pseudopods, sometimes elongating them until it resembled a small cuttle fish.

“September twenty-third was the night Immune Benny died wasn’t it, Chief?” asked the doctor.

“Right. Why?”

“Then this diary tallies with Miss Townsend’s testimony. Here is the professor’s entry.

“
‘September
23,
Nearly Midnight.

“ ‘Eureka! I have succeeded. I placed a tiny drop of syntheplasm on the slide tonight as 1 have done a thousand times before, and covered it with a weak, sterile solution of gelatine.

“
'I
watched it steadily for a half hour but nothing happened until, suddenly, I noticed a tiny black spot forming in its center. I am positive there were no animalcules either in the syntheplasm or the solution, yet no sooner had the black spot become readily distinguishable than my speck of syntheplasm began moving about as if searching for food. Evidently it cannot subsist on gelatine.

“
'I
next introduced a rhizopod into the solution. -My animal slightly resembles it, but is larger and gets about much faster. I wanted to compare the two but the rhizopod was quickly devoured
;
Now I know what to feed it.’ ”

“It is growing late so I will not read all the details to you,” continued the doctor. “Suffice to say that the professor discovered his synthetically created creature would feed on nothing but living creatures. He fed it so many microscopic animals the second day that it grew to a size visible to the naked eye. Then he fed it gnats, mosquitos, flies, beetles, and finally mice, when it became so large he was forced to transfer it from the small porcelain dish in which he kept it, to a much larger one.

“The thing grew at a prodigious rate of speed. Its growth seemed only limited by the amount of living creatures it was permitted to devour-. At length he was compelled to keep it in the glass-lined tank which he had been using for the culture of infusoria. Its victims were thrown into the tank alive and were quickly killed by the monster. He noticed that it was sluggish while assimilating its food, but moved with cat-like quickness when hungry. Though it had no eyes it seemed to sense the approach of food in some way and, toward the last, stretched forth pseudopods and snatched the animals from his hands.

“Yesterday the professor led two mastiffs into the room. Hardly had he closed the door of the laboratory before the monster was out of the tank.

It killed and devoured the two big dogs in less than a half hour—then crawled back sluggishly into the tank to digest its meal. Thus ends the written record of the professor’s adventures with the Malignant Entity. His whitened bones on the floor of the laboratory are mute testimony of what occurred.”

There was a moment of awed silence when the doctor finished his narrative. His eyes fell on the struggling thing in the glass jar.

“What are you going to do with it?” I asked.

“Come,” he said, taking up the jar and starting for the basement. “I will show you.”

The chief and I followed him down the basement stairs and into the furnace room. He opened the fire-door and tossed the jar on the glowing coals.

The thing raced about spasmodically for a moment in the intense heat, then fell huddled in the bottom of the jar. Suddenly, as if inflated from beneath, it puffed upward and outward, almost filling the receptacle in a shape that resembled a human head. I thought this only a figment of my imagination at first — blinked — and yet a second time. The face of a man stared back at me from behind the curved glass, eyes glowing with malevolent hatred, and lips drawn back in a snarl that revealed crooked, yellow fangs. For a moment only the vision held. The next instant the jar was empty of all save a tiny pile of white, flaky ash and the bones of the mouse.

Dr. Dorp shut the door suddenly and noisily.

“That face,” I exclaimed. “Did you see it also?”

“A queer distortion of the gas-inflated protoplasm,” he replied.

Chief McGraw seemed greatly perturbed. He drew a long black cigar from his pocket, lighted it and puffed nervously for a moment.

“Distortion, hell,” he muttered. "
It-was a perfect double for the face of Ammune Benny!”

The End