RGL e-Book Cover©
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.
RGL e-Book Cover©
Dime Mystery Magazine, January 1939, with "The Spider's Parlor"
"My God!" screamed the small, piping voice. "It's Jim—it's Jim!"
Grotesque, horrible, that inhuman apparition hung there—its staring eyes and bulging body mute testimony of how strangely it had died. But Dr. Bain, who was himself a specialist in horror, knew that this was not the end. Somewhere in the shadows was the grisly master of crime—lying in wait for his next victim!
IN the stained and grimy fronts of the tenements on Wayne Avenue the windows are more often than not glassless and ragstuffed against the cold and rain. The people who shuffle dully along the broken sidewalks outside are ill-clothed, unwashed, unshaved, and in their eyes is never hope but always fear—fear of hunger and homelessness and a pauper's grave.
Fear broods always in this dreary slum street, but on a certain fall evening it was almost as tangible as the musty reek of rotted food and rotting bodies. And this fear was different. It was terror, icy and omnipresent, of strange, pallid creatures who soon would prowl the black and greasy shadows; of these and of that which they would do.
This sense of threat was everywhere in the slum. It was a cloud of dread in the bare, uncarpeted room within the street-level basement of the brownstone house at Two-forty. It held to silence those who sat on the stools that were the chamber's only furnishing, so that the only sounds were the cough racking a scrawny chest, the wail of a fever-seared babe in its shawled mother's arms, the low moan of an old woman in whose breast a hard lump of pain gnawed eternally....
There was the creak, from the high stoop's newel post outside, of a narrow, hanging sign whose tarnished legend, when it swung into a street lamp's pale glow, read: John Bain, M. D.
A door in the wall opposite the room's deeply embrasured windows opened. A man came out through it. He was stalwart, powerfully built, but his face was a still grey mask, his lips white and tight-pressed to hold back a torrent of profane protest against the sentence that had just been passed upon him.
He stumbled unseeingly across the floor and out. In the doorway, through which he had come, another figure stood; short, bowed-legs aspraddle; the loose-hung arms at his sides so long that their back-curled hands were even with his knees; his head, capped by hair completely colorless, thrust forward and canted to one side with a queer ungainliness.
His palely pink and lashless eyes passed utterly without expression over the countenances of those in John Bain's waiting-room. The cough, the old woman's moan, even the baby's wail, hushed. For an endless minute there was absolute silence save for the creak, creak of the physician's shingle.
That sound, shrilly rasping, seemed the very voice of the fear that throttled Wayne Avenue, the fear all knew terribly but of which none dared to speak.
In the doughlike blob that was the face of Henry—(Bain's factotum is known by no other name)—a thin slit of a mouth opened. His right hand lifted, jabbed a thumb at one of the sitters. "You," he said without intonation. "You're next."
There was vibrant eagerness in the way he whom Henry indicated darted toward the door. His short stature, his ragged blouse and tattered knickers showed him to be a lad of about twelve, but his sharp-featured visage was pinched and bleached as an old man's and in his deep-sunk eyes there was the glitter of a small animal's keen cunning—an ageless shrewdness.
Something feral there was, too, in the pad, pad of his shoeless feet as he reached the doorway and scuttled past Henry into John Bain's office. The door closed behind him, and suddenly the boy was motionless, his half-defiant grin vanishing, his small body quivering, his glance flicking about the shadowed room like that of a trapped woods creature.
"Come on," a stern voice commanded. "Come on."
The gamin shuddered and was moving again, almost reluctantly now, toward the aura of yellow light out of which the voice had come.
THE glow came from a shaded lamp on a battered desk that was
cluttered with instruments. Behind the desk was an immense,
brooding bulk of a man; gaunt frame, massive head, knobbed and
beardless face alike grey and hard as granite and as devoid of
human emotion, to all outward appearance, as if he were actually
hewn from rock. Beyond Dr. John Bain's motionless figure there
was the vague paleness of a screen, the glitter of shelved
bottles, the dark oblong of an unshaded window that looked out
upon the brownstone house's debris-strewn backyard.
Nearing a decrepit chair placed before the desk, the boy's grimy fingers fished in his trouser pocket and came out clenched. The hand opened on the desktop.
Where it had rested briefly there was a small heap of coins; pennies, nickels, one or two dimes. "What's that?" Bain demanded harshly. "What's that mess?"
"Your dollar," the lad gasped, still standing. "They say you won't talk to nobody without he pays you first; so there it is!"
Henry was at the corner of the desk, noiseless as if he had magically materialized there. He counted the coins, deftly and without sound, nodded. Bain's hand, long and slim and tapering in odd contrast to his body's hugeness, reached for the tidy pile the albino had made, dropped it into a drawer his other hand had opened.
"What's your name?" he queried then.
"Bob. Bob Dipton."
"And what's the matter with you?"
"Nothin'."
Under the grizzled eaves of the physician's brows, his eyes narrowed. "What did you come here for?" There was a low growl in his tone, and the almost invisible knotting of a small muscle at the corner of his rocky jaw might have been anger ... or something else. "Why are you wasting my time?"
Bob struggled with a lump in his throat, swallowed it. "I—I mean there ain't nothin' the matter with me health," he gulped. "But—but I'm scared."
Abruptly, he was whispering, for all his self-sufficiency a small and very frightened child. "I'm awful scared—for Jim."
"Jim?"
"My big brother. He didn't show up at the paper-stand he tends—one of Big Dick Tolan's. He ain't nowheres aroun'. I'm scared they've got him."
"They?"
"The Goofers." In the way he uttered that name there was chilling terror. "This mornin' he said he had a hunch who they was, an' that he'd know for certain today. I tol' him he'd better lay off them, an' he said maybe he would, but now I can't find him." The lad's voice was rising now, becoming shrill-edged with hysteria. "They've got him! I know they've got him, an' they'll.... you got to save him, Doc. You got to."
"I?" The physician grated. "Why come to me? I'm a doctor, not a detective. Why don't you go to the police?"
The shrewdness was back in Bob's color-drained face. "Listen," he said, "I know you're a doc. But I know you're a hell of a lot more. I know 'bout what you done for Mary Madden when Frank was in trouble. An' I know 'bout lots of the other things you done. You're a better dick than all the cops in the city put together, an' it's for us poor slobs that the cops don't give a hoot in hell for that you do your stuff .... Geez, Doc, have a heart."
The words may have been impertinent, but the plea in the lad's blue eyes was not, nor the way his wan lips trembled.
"A heart?" There was bitterness in Bain's somber tone. His surgeon's fingers curled into the palm of his hand, and it was a sledge-hammer fist that lay on the desk.
Unobserved in the shadows, Henry stiffened, his ape's head jerking to the gloom-veiled window, his knees bending so that his legs were springs ready for instant action.
"Jim's all I got in the world, Doc," Bob sobbed. "There's just us...."
"All right," the physician shrugged. "I'll do what I can. I...."
Henry leaped to the window, his hands snatching its sash, flinging it up. Bain was out of his seat, whirling toward him....
"What....?"
The albino was rigid, peering out into the fetid darkness, his hackles almost visibly bristling.
"I dunno," he responded, low toned. "Maybe nothing. But I swear I saw a face pressed...."
Sound cut him off, a gurgling well of sound out of the blackness, a scream of infinite agony. And then it stopped.....
Henry's form, vaulting the low sill, was blotted from Bob's sight by the doctor's bulk. Then Bain, too, was through the window and out in the black and terrible mystery beyond. The boy, shuddering within the sheath of ice to which his skin had turned, was staring after them.
CITY glow was a vague radiance in the sky, but below it was
thick, heavy darkness. Somewhere within that dense and dreadful
sightlessness was the pound of ponderous footfalls.
A sharp exclamation.... Bain's mass was abruptly silhouetted against a beam which jabbed the darkness from a flashlight Henry held. The beam's end was a white disk drifting across shattered, refuse-slimed flagstones. It folded against some vertical surface, lifted.... then pinned horror to the paintless and broken boards of a backyard fence!
The thing was huge and grotesquely man-shaped. It was the grey of a nightmare ghoul. Faceless and bloated, it was fastened erect to the fence by tendrils of the fleecy stuff of which it was composed. It might have been a more than life-sized mannikin, crudely fashioned from unwashed wool—save that it heaved, sluggishly, with a macabre sort of life. The great soft lump, that was its head, muffled a moan audible only because of the stunned silence stifling the three who stared at it.
In almost that same instant, the apparition became still and soundless.
Words broke through the clamp on Bob's throat. "The Goofers. Another....."
Another! This was not the first such grisly monstrosity Wayne Avenue had seen. This was the terror that stalked the slum, that one by one was emptying its tenements. "They've done it again!"
"Again!" John Bain's hand lashed out, dug powerful fingers into the wooly mass enveloping the thing's head, ripped it open. He ripped the fleece from a blue, contorted face, from bulging, blood-shot eyes, from a gaping mouth crammed full of the dingy mass.....
A scream shrilled through the night once more. It was Bob Dipton's scream. "Jim!" A small figure leaped through the window, flung headlong across the yard. "Jim!" Frenzied small fingers tore insanely at the grey mass of filaments that encased a naked man, while the piping voice yammered, "It's Jim. My God; It's Jim!"
The matted threads clung to the gamin's hands, queerly sticky. They clung to John Bain's fingers as they probed that gaping mouth and extracted wisp after wisp of the stuff. They danced in the light Henry held.
"It's all the way back in his throat," the physician grunted. "It's in his lungs. He's—"
"Dead? No!" Bob was whimpering now, tears streaking the dirt on his wizened face. "No Doc. He can't be. Not Jim. Not my Jim. Save him. You're a doctor. Save him."
Bain's huge arm dropped across the lad's shoulder. Oddly light, oddly tender, it stilled somewhat the shudders that shook the small frame. "I am a doctor, son, not God." The voice, too, was strangely gentle. "Your brother is beyond my help." In the flashlight's eerie illumination, his craggy countenance was graven flint. "But I promise you that....."
A STONE arced into the light beam.
Not a stone, it thudded on the flagstone too softly for that. Henry bent, snatched it up. It was a wad of the wool that had enveloped Jim Dipton's cadaver—naked now and fallen to the ground on a bed of the stuff that had choked the life from it.
"There's something in it," the albino exclaimed, thumbing that which he had picked up.
He tore it open. "A paper, and it's got writing on it." A crisp rustle. "Geez, listen to this! 'You've found your Jim. Lay off us, Doctor Bain, or you'll get worse than him. The Goofers.'"
He twisted, his light flashing along the crumpled top of the fence, darting over it to impinge on fluttering clotheslines of tattered garments, on a tenement wall down which a rusted fire-escape crawled. "They're somewheres around."
"They were," Bain grated. "But we can't find them. There are a dozen cellars around to hide them." And then, as Henry groaned with helplessness, he turned back to Bob. "I promise you," he took up his sentence as though there had been no interruption, "that those who did this will be punished if it's the last thing I accomplish in this world."
His only answer was a sob from Bob. The lad was on his knees, his pipe-stem arms about the maltreated body.
"Come, son," the physician stooped to lay a tender hand on the boy's shaking shoulder. "That will do neither Jim nor you any good. I want you to tell me...." He stiffened, bent closer, peering at the dead man's flaccid arm, at a blue-tinged fist clenched in its final agony. He reached to that hand, forced it open ....
"Don't touch him," Bob shrieked, batting at the physician, vicious as a hurt pup snapping at the one who would aid it, "It's your fault. You did it! You did it—"
A rush of sound drowned that scream, a surge of pounding feet, of hardly human yowls. Bain straightened, whirling to it.
"What...?" Henry grunted, his flash beam slashing the darkness, finding the source of the tumult.
Men, the bedraggled men of the slum, gushed out of the black maw of an alley between the brownstone house and the garage next door. It was from these that the shouts came, from mouths gaping in pallid countenances wherein terror and rage were curiously commingled.
They surged out of the alley, ravening, gaunt arms upraised fists clenched on sticks, clubs. Their shadows, huge, black, ominous, danced on the whitewashed garage wall. They caught sight of the little group and milled, abruptly timorous, frozen by terror.
"There they are!" a shout came from somewhere among them. "The Goofers. Let's get them. There's nothing to be scared of. Get them!"
The mob started forward, was halted again by the blast of John Bain's voice.
"Stop, you fools!" Massive he was in the dimness, his arm upflung, his eyes blazing. "What madness is this?"
"You know damn well what it is," the same shout responded, raucous through the growling, bestial murmur of the throng and the whimpers of an almost animal fear. "You can't fool us no more." The owner of the voice thrust through the milling mass, flinging aside those who formed it as if they had no weight nor strength. "We got you red-handed."
He was shorter than any, but in girth he would have made three of them, and there was not an ounce of fat on his pillared legs, columnar arms, squat, barreled torso.
He was monstrous in the light Henry held upon him, his huge head completely bald, his eyes masked by round, dark goggles.
"Tolan," the albino breathed. "Big Dick Tolan."
"Yeah," the man snarled. "Big Dick Tolan. You picked the wrong guy to tangle with this time. I had an idea all along it was you was working this thing but it wasn't none of my affairs till you picked one of my boys. We was watching your place, thinking you wouldn't do nothing till your office hours was over, but we heard the hollering in back here and knew you wasn't waiting. Jim's the last guy you're going to bump, and we ain't leaving you to the cops for some smart mouthpiece to get off. Come on, fellows, we ain't taking any more of his guff. Come on."
With that, Tolan was lunging across the space between, enormous hands clawed to rend and tear and after him, emboldened by their leader's example, poured the rabid, ravening pack. With the insensate venom of the oppressed, they had always hated Bain, because they had to go to him in their illness, because he took their last dollars from them, and this was their chance to relieve that hatred.
There was no escape, no chance of escape from the terror-maddened, lynch-lusting mob.
In another second....
"No," a high, boyish treble shrilled. "No!" and from Bain's very feet a tiny, wizened form launched itself straight at that ravening rush. "Doc ain't...." The boy's outstretched arms circled Tolan's knees, clamped them. The big man's fist flailed down, smashed at the youngster, but the onrush behind shoved him off balance so that the suddenly flaccid form tripped him.
He went down, the crowd piled on him. The light went out and pitchy blackness blotted out the tossing, heaving, cursing mass.
IT was moments before that jumble of humanity disentangled
itself, moments before the flame of a scratched match flowered in
the Stygian murk. Bob Dipton lay, a still pathetic figure on the
ground, stunned by Tolan's blow but otherwise unhurt. On its
lethal mattress was crumpled his brother's corpse. But John Bain
and his faithful acolyte were nowhere to be seen.....
"Never mind," Big Dick Tolan grunted. "They got to show somewheres, sometime, and we'll get them then."
He might have been certain of that, but his followers were not. There had been something magical about the vanishment of the two they hated, something almost supernatural. And there, horrible on the grey, woolen mass against the fence, was an example of the vengeance that surely now would overtake them.
They slunk furtively away, not daring to look at one another, or speak, each hoping that in the darkness and confusion he had not been seen or recognized. And now, along the sleazy slum street, there was a vast stirring, and a running about as of disturbed ants.
The news of the Goofers' latest exploit ran like wildfire through the slum, and because of the spine-chilling mystery of its perpetrators' escape it broke at last Wayne Avenue's dumb acceptance of whatever fate might be in store for it. Soon, all along the sleazy thoroughfare carts rumbled, piled high with the paltry furnishings of the very poor. Not vans, but pushcarts, shoved by bent, gaunt men, by shawled women, by sleepy children. Wayne Avenue was fleeing from terror—and terror went with them, painting their faces with the grey quiver of fear, bluing their lips, dilating their pupils.
The exodus went eastward toward where, along the riverfront, row upon row of decrepit wooden shacks had mouldered for years; untenanted, vermin-infested hovels too foul till now for even the poorest to seek shelter.
The reason for this curious unanimity in the direction of that flight was unguessable, except that from mouth to mouth spread whispers of that refuge, started no one knew where or by whom.
Meantime, through the stench filled gloom of Wayne Avenue's backyards, a shapeless shadow flitted under the brooding sky-glow. Curiously enough, though it also was in flight, and from a threat more imminent than that which overhung the others, there seemed to be a definite purpose in its furtive progress, a final goal at which it aimed.
AT the corner of Wayne Avenue and Foster Street a brick block
of a building stands. Its windows are tiny, and crusted with
dirt, but across its front a great door opens through which
trucks may pass in and out. There is no sign on this stark
structure, but everyone knows that it is the headquarters of Big
Dick Tolan, the center of his far-flung net of newsstands and
open-fronted, fly-filled little stationery stores.
There is no business so small, or whose gains are so paltry that with its units assembled in numbers it cannot yield wealth to the enterprising—and ruthless.
Only between the hours of ten and two is Tolan's building unoccupied, between the time when the last evening newspaper has been distributed and the first morning edition appears. Now, somewhere near twelve of Wayne Avenue's night of terror and flight, it was cloaked in darkness and silence. Within its thick walls there was the crisp smell of paper, the pungently-sweet aroma of fresh ink.
And also there was a tenuous, acrid odor that was neither paper nor ink.
Toward the front of the high-ceilinged, lightless vault there was empty space where shortly Tolan's trucks would maneuver. At the rear great piles of returned newspapers, of magazines waiting their set date of release, loomed to make the darkness more dense, and oddly foreboding. There was nothing living here....
There should have been nothing living. But there was movement somewhere among those towering piles, a faint disturbance of the thick air, the hiss of a leather sole on the concrete flooring, a whisper of carefully guarded breath.... and a shadow drifting, blacker than black itself, along the close aisles.
A slender pencil of light was suddenly apparent. It touched a heap of magazines. A hand appeared in the luminous spot, its fingers long and slim and tapering. Those fingers thrust into the pile, lifted the periodicals apart to reveal a multi-colored corner of one of the covers, vanished. There was a soft sigh, and movement again, and again the stealthy inspection of a magazine pile.
At the fifth heap the light paused. This was smaller than the others, and more jagged, as though the pile had been tumbled and had been hastily set up again. The almost inaudible breathing quivered, and the probing fingers went to the top of the heap, meticulously raised one after another of the magazines, inspecting each one.
Halfway down the pile they stopped, pulled out a magazine. The cover of this one was torn, a jagged piece jerked from it, and the rest crumpled. Once more the sigh sounded, but there was satisfaction in it now.
Now the light dropped to the floor between the aisles, and against its vague radiance a massive black bulk might have been visible had there been any one to see, crouched and huge as some primeval monster. The beam flitted back and forth across the floor's grey and dusty concrete, back and forth in an advancing track that covered it inch by inch.
Abruptly the scanning pencil held still, fingering a crack in the flooring, a hairbreadth break in its surface that was too ruler-straight to be accidental. The prowler's dim mass crouched lower. The hand appeared again, stroking the concrete, searching.....
A click, abruptly, rewarded that search. Oddly, the crack was widening, was a Nubian slit across the floor, became an oblong, then a square black pit quite large enough to admit a man. And out of it there came the acid reek, pungent, now, nose-prickling.
"Got it," Doctor Bain muttered. "It's down there, all right."
He manipulated the shutter of his flashlight, widened the beam it emitted. The light, thrusting downward, was jagged by the iron rungs of a vertical, descending ladder.
An instant more of tense waiting, and Bain was going down into the pit he had discovered. He dropped from the lowermost rung. His flashlight darted about the cavity.
VAULTED stone arches supported the floor above, green-slimed
and fetid with moisture. Shelving encircled one of the pillars,
serrated with gallon bottles. Centering the chamber was a huge
vat, filled, as Bain's light revealed, by a grey, and bubbling
liquid so dense as to appear on the verge of solidifying.
It was from this vat that the acid stench rose. On the floor beside it were a number of small brass tanks from each of which hung short lengths of red rubber tubing, brass-nozzled—fire-extinguishers of a very common type.
There was something else on the floor. A heap of clothing, trousers, a torn shirt. A cap. The physician's lips twisted with what might have been a smile save that there was no humor in his brooding eyes. He crossed to this, bent and picked up the trousers. His hand went into one of the pockets, came out with a tattered wallet.
A grimed card was visible under a bit of scratched isinglass let into one side of the wallet—an identification card—the name crudely hand-printed on that card was—James Dipton!
John Bain shoved the wallet into his pocket, turned to the vat..... Something grated, pulled his startled look, his flash beam, overhead, to the sliding trapdoor by which he had entered. It was closing! Bain whirled, leaped for the ladder.....
Something tripped him. He hit the ground hard. The flash bounced from his hand, crashed, smashed darkness down on him. He rolled—into something wet, thick, clinging. It clogged his legs, his arms, for all his great strength he could not get free of it. The molasses-like mass was stiffening, was a fleecy warm envelope soft as wool and as impossible to fight free of as chains of the finest steel. Bain could move no longer. He could only lie, panting, shaken on the floor....
A HOLLOW laugh sounded, and light flashed on, blindingly. Out
of the dazzle appeared a round huge face, goggle-eyed, completely
bald. Big Dick Tolan's face. Big Dick Tolan was bending over him.
One of the extinguishers was in his hands, a grey fluff dripping
from the nozzle of its tube, and he was laughing at Bain.
"A wisie," he spluttered, at length. "Came straight to the right place. But not wisie enough to figure I'd be waiting for you."
"No," the physician responded. "Not wise enough." By lifting his head he could see his body, his legs—where his body and limbs ought to be. They were bloated now, with the same grey wool that had enveloped Jim Dipton. They were imprisoned by the same soft and fleecy covering of death. "You've outsmarted me."
"Sure," the other's grin was a dreadful grimace. "I've outsmarted better men than you in my time. But what gets me is how you found the trapdoor so quick."
"Very simply. Dipton's dead hand clutched a corner of a certain magazine cover that isn't on the stands yet—it won't be for a week now. It was evident that he'd torn it off in his struggle when he was captured, and there was only one place where that could have happened. Here. Coupled with Bob's assertion that Jim suspected the identity of the Goofers that gave me the whole story. You lured him here, jumped on him. The place where he had been hidden must be near the pile of these magazines stored until the delivery date."
"I said you were a wisie." By exalting the cleverness of the opponent, Tolan was extolling by so much more his own cleverness. "Maybe you can tell me what this stuff is, since you're so smart."
Bain shrugged, as best he could. "Of course. It's a cellulose-acetate compound, like the stuff artificial silk is spun from. You probably make it in that vat from discarded magazines and old newspapers, and glacial acetic acid. You put it in those extinguishers and squirt it over your victims, into their lungs." He shuddered. "The air hardens it.
"Right," Tolan grinned, licking his lips.
"But I'm puzzled as to why you are doing it. Of course it might be for the sheer sadistic pleasure of inflicting pain, but you don't look abnormal, insane...."
"Insane!" Tolan rocked with mirthless laughter. "Sure I'm crazy—like a fox. Listen...."
He cut off, and for a moment there was a silence into which, very faintly, came the rumble of many carts, the shuffle of many frightened feet.
"That's why I done it," the squat, huge man spoke once more. "They're moving tonight, all of them, moving down to the shacks along the river I been picking up for a song. They smell, and they ain't hardly got cold water let alone hot, and the toilets are in the yards, but I'll be getting rent from them from now on, plenty of rent. Nor will anybody be moving back to Wayne Avenue, 'cause if they do the Goofers are going to start it again.
"Hell! That's enough of this jabber. You know what you want to now, but it ain't going to do no good. 'Cause, Doctor Wisenheimer, I'm going to finish the job on you now, and then I'm getting out—through that tunnel I got in here from." He jerked a hand to the black maw of an aperture behind the vat where his satanic brew stewed. "In an hour, I'll be upstairs counting the morning papers, but you'll be out somewheres on Wayne Avenue, just to show that the Goofers are still busy."
He bent to Bain's recumbent figure, jabbed the nozzle of the tank he held between the helpless physician's teeth. He started to open the brass cylinder....
Something burst from the mouth of the tunnel, a cyclone of flailing legs, of jolting arms. It crashed into Tolan, dashed the death tank from his grip, swarmed all over the startled killer.
WARNED, he might have made a fight of it, but taken unawares
he went down under that fierce onslaught. There was an instant's
maelstrom of snarling, bestial combat, the thump of brass
knuckles against a hairless scalp.... and astride him, grinning
triumphantly, sat the bleached, simian figure of.... Henry.
"Gee Doc," the albino grunted. "It sure was a good hunch of yours for me to tail this guy, but it was tough on me having to squat quiet in the stinking tunnel while you pumped him dry. Damn if you didn't have him diagnosed right."
"Yes," John Bain said quietly. "Yes, my diagnoses are usually correct. Pour some of that stuff over him to keep him quiet, and then cut me loose."
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.