He woke up in what seemed a few minutes. And now there was no doubt at all about there being something wrong with him. It was dark; so he couldn’t see himself. And that was just as well for had he looked at his body, he might have lost his reason.
John Braun could hardly breathe. He felt as if he were choking to death. And so he was, if he had only known it. Besides, there was an indescribable, blanketed feeling to all his body. When he’d been a kid, the small school he’d attended had given a play. A foolish teacher had gilded the upper half of his body for the part he had to play. There had been a lot of trouble till the local doctor could get the stuff off so that his skin could breathe again.
He felt now, all over his body, as he had felt then, from the waist up.
The phone was on a stand beside his bed. He reached for it, in darkness. He didn’t know if he would be able to get up and walk to the light.
He called a doctor and gasped out his plea for help. He was too weak, by then, to hang up the receiver. The phone dropped from his lax hand, as he sagged back in bed.
The doctor came in a hurry. And after one look, he called the police in even more of a hurry.
It was the investigating detective who, glancing at the unconscious man in bed, had gotten in touch with The Avenger.
John Braun, lying naked on the bed with the covers turned back for medical examination, looked as if someone had sifted powdered sugar all over him. The stuff was dust-fine, and glittered softly with an almost crystalline appearance.
“Gosh!” whispered the detective. “The guy looks like a snow man!”
The comparison was apt. Braun lay in the bed like a figure of fine, dazzling white snow. Only he didn’t melt as a snow man would have in the warm room.
CHAPTER III
The Snow Man
The fact that Braun’s bedroom was so small and dark and bare brought out the terror of the thing all the more sharply.
Braun’s body seemed to concentrate the dim light from the simple bulb within itself, and to glow as if with an inner fire. It was like a snow figure with a small searchlight on it. You felt dazzled when you looked at it.
The doctor was feeling around with a puzzled hand. He scraped some of the whitish, powdery stuff from a bit of Braun’s dead arm. The skin was exposed for only a few seconds. Then it filmed over again. The skin seemed to cloud, as a mirror does when you breathe on it; then it soon presented that powdered-sugar look again.
“It’s a kind of growth!” the doctor said, shocked. “A sort of fungus, I’d say, almost microscopically fine. Though it looks almost like an inert mineral substance.”
“You mean the guy is moldy?” asked the detective, with no intention whatever of being funny.
“Yes. In a way, the stuff is like mold. Only I have never seen anything spread so fast. It reproduces itself, literally, while you watch it.”
The detective shivered, and drew a sheet over the dead face. The eyes were open, and the powdered-sugar substance had reached them by now. The eyeballs looked like snow-covered ice.
“Is it some new kind of disease, or what?” asked the detective.
“I don’t know,” the doctor replied. “I suppose that’s as close as we can name it, right now.”
“Then it isn’t a case for the homicide squad,” the detective said, relieved.
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that.” The doctor absently scratched at his hand. “This may have been caused, not by nature, but some human brain, somehow. I wonder where the fungi originated, and how?”
In the place where the powdery, glittering stuff had originated, the Sangaman-Veshnir laboratory, Veshnir stood near the lab door with his head bent in a strained, listening attitude. He was listening for sounds in the adjoining chamber — Sangaman’s office.
At Veshnir’s feet was a figure already beginning to stiffen a little. It was Targill’s body! The whole top of the chief chemist’s head was knocked in. The weapon that had done it lay next to the corpse. It was the oblong lead case in which was the radium needle.
While Veshnir listened in the direction of Sangaman’s office, he stared at the corpse near his feet. And in his eyes was a horrible fear.
“I had to do it!” he muttered, staring at the body. “The fool would have told the police all about it. It was his fault, not mine. I had to do it!”
But having to commit a murder, and getting away with it, are two different things.
There were on the top floor of the building, and had been ever since ten o’clock that night, only three people. Those three, only souls in the place save for the building watchman and the assistant engineer in the basement, were on record as being present. When you went into the building after hours, no matter who you were, you were required to sign a register in the lobby. Then the watchman ran you up to whatever floor you called.
So it was a matter of inescapable record that only Targill, Veshnir and Sangaman were up there. No one else had come in.
Now Targill was dead! And automatically it became iron-clad fact that only one of the remaining two could be the murderer.
Either Veshnir or Sangaman was going to face the chair.
“But I had to do it,” Veshnir whispered again. “There are millions, scores of millions, in it if it can be kept secret. But there isn’t a cent in it if it gets publicity — as it would have if Targill phoned the cops.”
So Targill had had to die. But now—
There was a sound from Sangaman’s office. A curiously unsteady step, then a thump, and after that the solid thud of a body as Sangaman fell near the door in his curious dizzy spell.
Veshnir drew a great sigh of pure relief.
“It’s all right, now,” he said aloud. “Everything’s all right now.”
Sangaman slowly swam back to consciousness. His senses cleared so that he began to be aware of things around him. But one of the first things of which he was aware was a queer feeling — more of a hunch than anything else — that he had been half conscious for quite a few minutes. He had faint recollections of moving around, of having something in his hand. Some metal. It was as if his conscious brain had been cut off, but his body seemed to have been able to roam around and do — Heaven knew what.
He looked around. He was in the laboratory. He remembered he had started to come out here when the odd seizure downed him. He had intended to confront Veshnir—
Veshnir was here, standing right in front of him — and looking down at him with an accusing expression that was most perplexing.
“Why,” asked Veshnir, voice incredulous, “did you do it?”
“Do what?” said Sangaman. It seemed to him that his voice came from a distance.
“Kill him?”
“Kill who?” said Sangaman, blinking.
He tried to get to his knees, but he couldn’t make it, yet. He sat there, body swaying. He must have been working too hard over those books.
“You know who! I got to the hall door just in time to see you strike him down.”
Sangaman discovered that one reason why he wasn’t able to get up was that there was something in his right hand that slid along the floor when he tried to brace himself. He looked down stupidly at it. It was the lead case containing the radium needle. There was blood on the sharp corner of the heavy little casket.
Then Sangaman looked farther — and gasped. There was a hand and arm trailing along the floor like dead seaweed. The arm was in a white laboratory coat sleeve. He looked on past the shoulder.