Chapter 1: The "Vanishing Place"

“Look at that plane! That fellow’s crazy! Took off with the wind behind him! He’ll nose dive before he clears the clubhouse! He’ll crash into those trees along the edge of the golf course!”

The group on the field at Westbury, Long Island, held their breaths as they watched James Dent take off in the wildest, most erratic flight that they had ever seen. Under lowering storm clouds, with the wind roaring half a hurricane behind him, Dent spiraled upward as if unconscious of the laws of Earthly gravity.

“I told you so! You ought to have stopped him, even if it is his private plane! A feller’s got no business trying to break his neck! Look there! He’s cleared those trees after all!”

James Dent had cleared them, and the clubhouse too, and was already disappearing across the Hempstead Plains, looking like a leaf whirling up in a winter storm. At a height of five hundred feet he sped eastward.

“Didn’t tell you where he was going?”

“Nope, acted like a crazy man. Something on his mind sure. Wherever he’s bound for, he’ll never get there!”

But James Dent was already out of sight, and the little group dispersed. And Dent, winging his way due east, over the oak barrens of central Long Island, was conscious neither of the storm that howled about him nor of the excitement that his rash take-off had occasioned.

The rain lashed him in the open cockpit, the ground fog swirled about him, and, though it was still afternoon, there brooded a somber twilight over the wastes. But in his mind Dent was already anticipating his descent at the “Vanishing Place,” as the natives called it near Peconic Bay.

The “Vanishing Place” was so called because of the terrible and inexplicable catastrophe that had occurred there five years previously. In the two-century-old farmhouse, Miles Parrish, the world’s greatest authority on physical chemistry, had been conducting investigations into the structure of the atom.

James Dent and Lucius Tode had been associated with old Parrish in this work, which, carried to a successful issue, would revolutionize the social organization of the world. The energy locked up in the atom is so stupendous that, as Eddington indicated, a thimbleful of coal, disintegrated, would carry the Mauretania from England to America and back again. To unlock this energy would be to set man free from bondage, to restore the pristine leisure and happiness of Eden.

And because the three men were playing with deadly forces, of incalculable power, this deserted spot had been selected for the carrying on of the investigations. The old farmhouse had been converted into a laboratory. For days together the three had bent over their tubes and laboratory apparatus, hardly eating or sleeping. And the day had come when success had seemed almost within their grasp.

Dent had received six months’ leave of absence from his duties at Columbia University in order to prosecute the experiments. As the weeks went by, and the blind track that the three were following opened into a clear road, a sort of madness settled upon every one of them.

The Planck-Bohr quantum theory that the energy of a body cannot vary continuously, but only by a certain finite amount, or exact multiples of this amount, had been the key that unlocked the door. But always it had been Lucius Tode who led the way. Tode was a graduate of the University of Virginia, and accounted one of the most brilliant minds of his generation. At thirty, he stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries.

Dark, handsome, fearless, with a will power that nothing seemed able to subdue, he had taken the leadership away from old Miles Parrish, who eagerly and without thought of his own reputation followed in his assistant’s footsteps.

There were the three men--and there was the girl, Lucille Parrish, the child of Miles’s old age. Seventeen, when the catastrophe occurred, she had come out to the deserted spot sometimes of a Sunday from her boarding school at Garden City.

And Tode had found time to make love to her when he rushed her back to her school in his high-powered foreign car!

Jim Dent had known nothing of that until after the catastrophe. Lucille had been afraid of him, afraid to open her mouth upon the subject even to her father. And she had been fascinated too, as a young girl may well be, when a fascinating man of thirty uses his arts to win her.

It was only by chance that Jim had failed to be involved in the hideous catastrophe that had stamped the old farmhouse with the name of “Vanishing Place” whenever the natives spoke of it.

“Two Killed in Laboratory Explosion!” was the heading in the next morning’s paper which gave Jim his first intimation of the accident. He had been to Columbia overnight to look up a new publication that contained an article on the hydrogen spectrum.

It was only a long paragraph, and the names of Parrish and Tode meant nothing to the man who had written it. But Jim had taken train to Hempstead, taxied to the flying fields, and essayed his first plane ride to Peconic Bay, in the charge of a pilot.

A group of natives, three newspaper men and a Suffolk County policeman were near the spot where the farmhouse had been--near the spot, not on it.

For where the farmhouse had been was a great pool of stagnant water, black as ink, covering an expanse of perhaps three-quarters of an acre.

“No, sir, there was no explosion,” said the officer. “At least, none of these fellows heard anything. Just a--you tell the Professor, Mr. Lumm.”

“It was about half-past eight last night, Mr. Dent,” said Andrew Lumm, who kept the village store a mile away. “Ground seemed to rock. Earthquake, I says to myself, holdin’ on to the door. But it wasn’t no earthquake. Too gentle for that. Nothin’ broke, not even a plate. Then I says to Mrs. Lumm, ‘They’re gone, poor fellers, and I allus knowed it would be that way. It’s lucky young Mr. Dent went out last night on the 7.15.’

“We hurried here, but there wasn’t no sign of the place, jest a hole on the ground with a sort of sticky mud in it. Water’s been fillin’ in since then, but I guess it’s reached its level now. They jest blowed themselves to bits, Mr. Dent.”

“Tell him about the vi’let light, Andy,” put in one of the bystanders.

“Yeah, like a pillar of vi’let fire that were, Mr. Dent. We seed it through the trees, but by the time we got here it was ‘most gone. Gosh, that throwed a scare into some of us!”

“It was Mr. Tode’s soul a-burnin’,” squeaked Granpop Dawes. “I allus said that feller’d come to no good end.”

The group shook their heads and remained silent. It was clear that, if they did not share Granpop Dawes’s opinion, at least they considered it not without the bounds of plausibility. Lucius Tode had created a bad impression among the natives.

Jim Dent stooped and picked up something lying imbedded in the mud at the edge of the black pool, and slipped it into his pocket. He had been present at the inquest and had gone back to Columbia. That had been five years before.

Professor McDowd, the palaeontologist, had identified the object Jim had found as the milk molar of merychippus insignis, the miocene representative of the modern horse. And that had made Jim Dent think furiously.

The catastrophe must have been a gigantic one to have flung up that fossil tooth from strata far beneath the level of the earth’s surface. More, there were even traces of archaean deposits around the borders of the pool, whose depth, in the center, was ascertained to be 164 feet.

Black, silent, uninhabited, unstirred save by a passing breeze, the pool had remained those five years past. The spot was shunned as haunted or accursed by the superstitious country folks. Dense underbrush had grown up around it.

Periodically, Jim had gone out to visit it. That was how he had come to invest in a private plane. It was only an hour to the flying-fields, and less than an hour from there to Peconic Bay. What he expected to achieve he did not know. In the back of his mind was the belief that some day he would light upon some clue that would tell something of the unusual catastrophe.

And then that afternoon he had been shaken to the depths when a message came to him in Lucille’s voice over the telephone:

“I’ve heard from dad!”

Winging his way eastward through the storm, Jim Dent was mentally reconstructing all that had led up to the present moment.