The Monster Men | Page 3

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THE MONSTER MEN
Edgar Rice Burroughs

1
THE RIFT
As he dropped the last grisly fragment of the dismembered and
mutilated body into the small vat of nitric acid that was to devour every
trace of the horrid evidence which might easily send him to the gallows,
the man sank weakly into a chair and throwing his body forward upon
his great, teak desk buried his face in his arms, breaking into dry,
moaning sobs.
Beads of perspiration followed the seams of his high, wrinkled
forehead, replacing the tears which might have lessened the pressure
upon his overwrought nerves. His slender frame shook, as with ague,
and at times was racked by a convulsive shudder. A sudden step upon
the stairway leading to his workshop brought him trembling and wide
eyed to his feet, staring fearfully at the locked and bolted door.
Although he knew perfectly well whose the advancing footfalls were,
he was all but overcome by the madness of apprehension as they came
softly nearer and nearer to the barred door. At last they halted before it,
to be followed by a gentle knock.
"Daddy!" came the sweet tones of a girl's voice.
The man made an effort to take a firm grasp upon himself that no
tell-tale evidence of his emotion might be betrayed in his speech.

"Daddy!" called the girl again, a trace of anxiety in her voice this time.
"What IS the matter with you, and what ARE you doing? You've been
shut up in that hateful old room for three days now without a morsel to
eat, and in all likelihood without a wink of sleep. You'll kill yourself
with your stuffy old experiments."
The man's face softened.
"Don't worry about me, sweetheart," he replied in a well controlled
voice. "I'll soon be through now--soon be through--and then we'll go
away for a long vacation-- for a long vacation."
"I'll give you until noon, Daddy," said the girl in a voice which carried
a more strongly defined tone of authority than her father's soft drawl,
"and then I shall come into that room, if I have to use an axe, and bring
you out--do you understand?"
Professor Maxon smiled wanly. He knew that his daughter was equal to
her threat.
"All right, sweetheart, I'll be through by noon for sure--by noon for
sure. Run along and play now, like a good little girl."
Virginia Maxon shrugged her shapely shoulders and shook her head
hopelessly at the forbidding panels of the door.
"My dolls are all dressed for the day," she cried, "and I'm tired of
making mud pies--I want you to come out and play with me." But
Professor Maxon did not reply-- he had returned to view his grim
operations, and the hideousness of them had closed his ears to the
sweet tones of the girl's voice.
As she turned to retrace her steps to the floor below Miss Maxon still
shook her head.
"Poor old Daddy," she mused, "were I a thousand years old, wrinkled
and toothless, he would still look upon me as his baby girl."

If you chance to be an alumnus of Cornell you may recall Professor
Arthur Maxon, a quiet, slender, white-haired gentleman, who for
several years was an assistant professor in one of the departments of
natural science. Wealthy by inheritance, he had chosen the field of
education for his life work solely from a desire to be of some material
benefit to mankind since the meager salary which accompanied his
professorship was not of sufficient import to influence him in the
slightest degree.
Always keenly interested in biology, his almost unlimited means had
permitted him to undertake, in secret, a series of daring experiments
which had carried him so far in advance of the biologists of his day that
he had, while others were still groping blindly for the secret of life,
actually reproduced by chemical means the great phenomenon.
Fully alive to the gravity and responsibilities of his marvellous
discovery he had kept the results of his experimentation, and even the
experiments themselves, a profound secret not only from his colleagues,
but from his only daughter, who heretofore had shared his every hope
and aspiration.
It was the very success of his last and most pretentious effort that had
placed him in the horrifying predicament in which he now found
himself-- with the corpse of what was apparently a human being in his
workshop and no available explanation that could possibly be
acceptable to a matter-of-fact and unscientific police.
Had he told them the truth they would have laughed at him. Had he
said: "This