Fantastic Stories Presents the Weird Tales Super Pack #2. Уильям Хоуп Ходжсон

his neck—he must have worn a sixteen collar—and even if it were, there isn’t any thumb mark here.”

      He nodded gloomily, almost sullenly. “You said it. Know what it reminds me of?”

      “I’ll bite.”

      “Something I saw when I was hoppin’ ambulances at Bellevue. Circus was playin’ the Garden, and a roustabout got in a tangle with one of the big apes. It throttled him.”

      “So?” I raised my brows. “Where’s the connection?”

      “Right here. These livid patches on this feller and the ones on that poor cuss we took down to the morgue are just alike. Charlie Norris had us all down to the mortuary when he performed the autopsy on that circus man and showed us the characteristic marks of an ape’s hand contrasted with a man’s. He was particular to point out how a man grasps something using his thumb as a fulcrum, while the great apes, with the exception of the chimpanzee, make no use of the thumb, but use the fingers only in their grasp. Look here—” he pointed to the large square livid mark—“this would be the bruise left by the heel of the hand, and these—” he indicated the long, circling lines about the dead man’s neck—“would be the finger-marks. That’s just the way the bruises showed on that man at the Bellevue Morgue.”

      “Snap out of it!” I almost shook him in my irritation. “Here’s one time when observed phenomena don’t amount to proof. It seemed fantastic enough to find a cylinder of concentrated carbon monoxide in the car, with you chaps and Miss Watrous almost dead of CO poisoning, but to lug in a gorilla or orangutan to throttle our would-be murderer before he had a chance to slip his gas mask on—Poe never thought up anything as wild as that.”