The A. Merritt MEGAPACK ®. Abraham Merritt
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was in Hawaii when the cables told of Herndon’s first disappearance. There wasn’t much to tell. His man had gone to his room to awaken him one morning—and Herndon wasn’t there. All his clothes were, though, Everything was just as if Herndon ought to be somewhere in the house—only he wasn’t.
A man worth ten millions can’t step out into thin air and vanish without leaving behind him the probability of some commotion, naturally. The newspapers attend to the commotion, but the columns of type boiled down to essentials contained just two facts—that Herndon had come home the night before, and in the morning he was undiscoverable.
I was on the high seas, homeward bound to help the search, when the wireless told the story of his reappearance. They had found him on the floor of his bedroom, shreds of a silken robe on him, and his body mauled as though by a tiger. But there was no more explanation of his return than there had been of his disappearance.
The night before he hadn’t been there—and in the morning there he was. Herndon, when he was able to talk, utterly refused to confide even in his doctors. I went straight through to New York, and waited until the men of medicine decided that it was better to let him see me than have him worry any longer about not seeing me.
Herndon got up from a big invalid chair when I entered. His eyes were clear and bright, and there was no weakness in the way he greeted me, nor in the grip of his hand. A nurse slipped from the room.
“What was it, Jim?” I cried. “What on earth happened to you?”
“Not so sure it was on earth,” he said. He pointed to what looked like a tall easel hooded with a heavy piece of silk covered with embroidered Chinese characters. He hesitated for a moment and then walked over to a closet. He drew out two heavy bore guns, the very ones, I remembered, that he had used in his last elephant hunt.
“You won’t think me crazy if I ask you to keep one of these handy while I talk, will you, Ward?” he asked rather apologetically. “This looks pretty real, doesn’t it?”
He opened his dressing gown and showed me his chest swathed in bandages. He gripped my shoulder as I took without question one of the guns. He walked to the easel and drew off the hood.
“There it is,” said Herndon.
And then, for the first time, I saw the Dragon Glass!
There never has been anything like that thing! Never! At first all you saw was a cool, green, glimmering translucence, like the sea when you are swimming under water on a still summer day and look up through it. Around its edges ran flickers of scarlet and gold, flashes of emerald, shimmers of silver and ivory. At its base a disk of topaz rimmed with red fire shot up dusky little vaporous yellow flames.
Afterward you were aware that the green translucence was an oval slice of polished stone. The flashes and flickers became dragons. There were twelve of them. Their eyes were emeralds, their fangs were ivory, their claws were gold. There were scaled dragons, and each scale was so inlaid that the base, green as the primeval jungle, shaded off into vivid scarlet, and the scarlet into tip’s of gold. Their wings were of silver and vermilion, and were folded close to their bodies.
But they were alive, those dragons. There was never so much life in metal and wood since Al-Akram, the Sculptor of ancient Ad, carved the first crocodile, and the jealous Almighty breathed life into it for a punishment!
And last you saw that the topaz disk that sent up the little yellow flames was the top of a metal sphere around which coiled a thirteenth dragon, thin and red, and biting its scorpion-tipped tail.
It took your breath away, the first glimpse of the Dragon Glass. Yes, and the second and third glimpse, too—and every other time you looked at it.
“Where did you get it?” I asked, a little shakily.
Herndon said evenly: “It was in a small hidden crypt in the Imperial Palace. We broke into the crypt quite by”—he hesitated—“well, call it accident. As soon as I saw it I knew I must have it. What do you think of it?”
“Think!” I cried. “Think! Why, it’s the most marvelous thing that the hands of man ever made! What is that stone? Jade?”
“I’m not sure,” said Herndon. “But come here. Stand just in front of me.”
He switched out the lights in the room. He turned another switch, and on the glass oposite me three shaded electrics threw their rays into its mirror-like oval.
“Watch!” said Herndon. “Tell me what you see!”
I looked into the glass. At first I could see nothing but the rays shining farther, farther—back into infinite distances, it seemed. And then.
“Good God!” I cried, stiffening with horror. “Jim, what hellish thing is this?”
“Steady, old man,” came Herndon’s voice. There was relief and a curious sort of joy in it. “Steady; tell me what you see.”
I said: “I seem to see through infinite distances—and yet what I see is as close to me as though it were just on the other side of the glass. I see a cleft that cuts through two masses of darker green. I see a claw, a gigantic, hideous claw that stretches out through the cleft. The claw has seven talons that open and close—open and close. Good God, such a claw, Jim! It is like the claws that reach out from the holes in the lama’s hell to grip the blind souls as they shudder by!”
“Look, look farther, up through the cleft, above the claw. It widens. What do you see?”
I said: “I see a peak rising enormously high and cutting the sky like a pyramid. There are flashes of flame that dart from behind and outline it. I see a great globe of light like a moon that moves slowly out of the flashes; there is another moving across the breast of the peak; there is a third that swims into the flame at the farthest edge—”
“The seven moons of Rak,” whispered Herndon, as though to himself. “The seven moons that bathe in the rose flames of Rak which are the fires of life and that circle Lalil like a diadem. He upon whom the seven moons of Rak have shone is bound to Lalil for this life, and for ten thousand lives.”
He reached over and turned the switch again. The lights of the room sprang up.
“Jim,” I said, “it can’t be real! What is it? Some devilish illusion in the glass?”
He unfastened the bandages about his chest.
“The claw you saw had seven talons,” he answered quietly. “Well, look at this.”
Across the white flesh of his breast, from left shoulder to the lower ribs on the right, ran seven healing furrows. They looked as though they had been made by a gigantic steel comb that had been drawn across him. They gave one the thought they had been ploughed.
“The claw made these,” he said as quietly as before.
“Ward,” he went on, before I could speak, “I wanted you to see—what you’ve seen. I didn’t know whether you would see it. I don’t know whether you’ll believe me even now. I don’t suppose I would if I were in your place—still—”
He walked over and threw the hood upon the Dragon Glass.
“I’m going to tell you,” he said. “I’d like to go through it—uninterrupted. That’s why I cover it.
“I don’t suppose,” he began slowly—“I don’t suppose, Ward, that you’ve ever heard of Rak the WonderWorker, who lived somewhere back at the beginning of things, nor how the Greatest Wonder-Worker banished him somewhere outside the world?”
“No,” I said shortly, still shaken by the sight.
“It’s a big part of what I’ve got to tell you,” he went on. “Of course you’ll think it rot, but—I came across the legend in Tibet first. Then I ran across it again—with the names changed, of course—when I was getting away from China.
“I take it that the gods were still fussing around close to man when