no longer perspiration on his face. It was dry, feverishly dry; and the skin was cracking on his taut, puffed cheeks.
"Burning!" he gasped. "Burning up!"
The girl secretary screamed, then. And the man who had put his hand on Varley's arm jerked at the operator's shoulder.
"For heaven's sake get this cage down! Mr. Varley's ill!"
"I—I can't," gasped the boy. "Something's the matter—it never acted like this before"
He jerked at the controls, and the elevator did not respond. Slowly, monotonously, it continued its deliberate descent.
And abruptly a scream tore from Varley's cracking lips.
"Burning! Help me, somebody"
The slowly dropping cage became a thing of horror, a six-foot square of hell from which there was no escape because there were no doors opening onto the shaft at the upper levels, and which could not be speeded up because it did not respond to the controls.
Screaming with every breath he drew, Varley sank to the floor. And those who might otherwise have tried to help him cowered away from him as far as they could get. For from his body now was radiating heat that made a tiny inferno of the elevator.
"God!" whispered one of the men. "Look at him—he really is burning up!"
The heat from Varley's body had become so intense that the others in the cage could hardly stand it. But far worse than their bodily torment was the mental agony of watching the thing that for a week had New York City in a chaos.
Varley had stopped screaming now. He lay staring up at the gilded roof of the elevator with frightful, glazing eyes. His chest heaved with efforts to draw breath. Heaved, then was still.
"He's dead!" shrieked one of the secretaries. “Dead"
Her body fell to the floor of the cage near Varley's. The elderly woman quietly sagged to her knees, then in a huddled heap in the corner as her senses fled under the impact of a shock too great to be endured.
But the horror that had gripped Varley went on.
"Look! Look! Look!" panted the office manager.
But he had no need to pant out the word. The rest were looking all right. They'd have turned their eyes away if they could, but there is a fascination to extremes of horror that makes the will powerless. In every detail they were forced to see the thing that happened.
Varley's dead body was beginning to disappear.
The corpulent form of the man who a moment ago had been one of the biggest figures in the nation seemed to have been turned to wax, which was melting and vaporizing.
His face was a shapeless mass now; and the flesh of his body seemed to be melting and running together. As it did so, his limbs writhed and twitched as if still imbued with life. Writhed, and shriveled.
"Burning up!" whispered the office manager, his eyes bulging with horror behind their thick lenses. "Melting away . . . burning up. . . ."
It was so incredible, so unreal that it was dream-like.
The cage descended slowly, slowly, like the march of time itself which no man could hasten. The operator stood like a wooden image at the controls, staring with starting eyes at the heap on the floor which had been Varley. The two business men shrank together, hands to their mouths, gnawing the backs of their hands. The office manager was panting,
