STRANGE SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY OMNIBUS by Benson Grayson Read Free Book Online Page B

bodies, alerted that something might be amiss by his father’s paper, which reported that he had not turned up at the office for several days and that the phone had apparently been left off the hook.. The victims were not only murdered.
    The story referred to the bodies of the victims being torn apart and mangled as though by some wild beast. It added that the police had been forced to break into the mansion as all doors and windows had been securely fastened from the inside. There were no signs of any attempt at forced entrance and no indication that the murders had resulted from a botched robbery attempt.
    So sensational were the murders that follow-up stories about it appeared on succeeding days. .Many of the facts from the original story were repeated, along with statements from the police that no motive for the crimes could be uncovered. The story on the third day told Jimmy something he had no seen before. The paper had uncovered the fact that a very similar still unsolved crime had taken place in the mansion some six years before, An entire family including three small children had been brutally murdered, with the victims’ bodies torn apart and mangled beyond description. Following the earlier crime, the house had been boarded up and left uninhabited. Prospective purchasers, it added had been discouraged by the violent crime that occurred in it and because of the gossip in the neighborhood that it “was haunted.”
    After work, Jimmy on a whim hired a taxi to take him to see the mansion. It was fortunate that he had copied down the address. When he arrived at the site, he found it completely changed. The mansion had been razed and all of the tall trees cut down. Where his parent’s home once stood, he saw eight very modern town houses occupying the lot.
    When his assignment to the Washington Bureau was over, Jimmy carefully warded off suggestions by the Bureau Chief that he might wish to become a permanent member of its staff. He departed Washington by train as rapidly as he could, heading for the shore to spend the weekend with his wife and children at his in law’s beach cottage. Jimmy never returned to Washington again. He was always very grateful he had not learned whether had been his imagination or if he had really glimpsed something horrible in the mansion cellar. It was something it was better not to know. But of one thing he was absolutely certain. He was very glad he had refused to let his parents convince him he had not seen anything there and that one of the most fortunate days of his life was the day he left with his grandfather to return to Ohio.

THE MAN ON THE MOON
    Herman Hawthorne was unique in two distinct areas. He was the third richest individual in North America, thanks to his late father’s early investment in the shale oil industry. Secondly, he was the world’s worst curmudgeon. Hawthorne cared not one iota for the opinions of other people. Everyone except him, he said often and loudly, was either a fool or a charlatan, or both. Naturally, he could hardly be said to be well liked.
    None of Hawthorne’s views were widely accepted and most were almost universally discredited. His claims that the germ theory had no basis of fact but was actually invented by the Pinnacle Pharmaceutical Company in 1904, in what was a highly successful campaign to increase the sales of its drugs was universally scoffed at, despite Hawthorne’s proof that a high percentage of all pharmaceutical products are today actually purchased by individuals responding to widespread television advertising. Similarly, his assertions that earthworms actually do fall from the sky when it rains, rather than simply fleeing their flooded homes was flatly denied by all reputable scientific bodies, notwithstanding Hawthorne’s clear evidence that no widespread scientific research had ever been conducted to objectively look into his theory.
    Hawthorne was born and raised in northern Florida, far from the family’s holdings of