Four Weird Tales | Page 4

hold himself perfectly well in hand when it was carried into effect
and he was formally introduced as private secretary to the General Manager.
Now the Manager was a large, fat man, with a very red face and bags beneath his eyes.

Being short-sighted, he wore glasses that seemed to magnify his eyes, which were always
a little bloodshot. In hot weather a sort of thin slime covered his cheeks, for he perspired
easily. His head was almost entirely bald, and over his turn-down collar his great neck
folded in two distinct reddish collops of flesh. His hands were big and his fingers almost
massive in thickness.
He was an excellent business man, of sane judgment and firm will, without enough
imagination to confuse his course of action by showing him possible alternatives; and his
integrity and ability caused him to be held in universal respect by the world of business
and finance. In the important regions of a man's character, however, and at heart, he was
coarse, brutal almost to savagery, without consideration for others, and as a result often
cruelly unjust to his helpless subordinates.
In moments of temper, which were not infrequent, his face turned a dull purple, while the
top of his bald head shone by contrast like white marble, and the bags under his eyes
swelled till it seemed they would presently explode with a pop. And at these times he
presented a distinctly repulsive appearance.
But to a private secretary like Jones, who did his duty regardless of whether his employer
was beast or angel, and whose mainspring was principle and not emotion, this made little
difference. Within the narrow limits in which any one could satisfy such a man, he
pleased the General Manager; and more than once his piercing intuitive faculty,
amounting almost to clairvoyance, assisted the chief in a fashion that served to bring the
two closer together than might otherwise have been the case, and caused the man to
respect in his assistant a power of which he possessed not even the germ himself. It was a
curious relationship that grew up between the two, and the cashier, who enjoyed the
credit of having made the selection, profited by it indirectly as much as any one else.
So for some time the work of the office continued normally and very prosperously. John
Enderby Jones received a good salary, and in the outward appearance of the two chief
characters in this history there was little change noticeable, except that the Manager grew
fatter and redder, and the secretary observed that his own hair was beginning to show
rather greyish at the temples.
There were, however, two changes in progress, and they both had to do with Jones, and
are important to mention.
One was that he began to dream evilly. In the region of deep sleep, where the possibility
of significant dreaming first develops itself, he was tormented more and more with vivid
scenes and pictures in which a tall thin man, dark and sinister of countenance, and with
bad eyes, was closely associated with himself. Only the setting was that of a past age,
with costumes of centuries gone by, and the scenes had to do with dreadful cruelties that
could not belong to modern life as he knew it.
The other change was also significant, but is not so easy to describe, for he had in fact
become aware that some new portion of himself, hitherto unawakened, had stirred slowly
into life out of the very depths of his consciousness. This new part of himself amounted

almost to another personality, and he never observed its least manifestation without a
strange thrill at his heart.
For he understood that it had begun to watch the Manager!

II
It was the habit of Jones, since he was compelled to work among conditions that were
utterly distasteful, to withdraw his mind wholly from business once the day was over.
During office hours he kept the strictest possible watch upon himself, and turned the key
on all inner dreams, lest any sudden uprush from the deeps should interfere with his duty.
But, once the working day was over, the gates flew open, and he began to enjoy himself.
He read no modern books on the subjects that interested him, and, as already said, he
followed no course of training, nor belonged to any society that dabbled with half-told
mysteries; but, once released from the office desk in the Manager's room, he simply and
naturally entered the other region, because he was an old inhabitant, a rightful denizen,
and because he belonged there. It was, in fact, really a case of dual personality; and a
carefully drawn agreement existed between Jones-of-the-fire-insurance-office and
Jones-of-the-mysteries, by the terms of which, under heavy penalties, neither region
claimed him