Darkness and Dawn | Page 2

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.