As Worley tells it, he had strolled half-way across the darkened park,
toward its southern sea-wall's rail, before he sensed that anything
unusual lay before him. The gleaming waters stretching out into the
darkness, the gliding lights of small craft here and there upon them,
the other far-flung blinking lights of Brooklyn and the Jersey cities,
away to left and to right--these were all that engrossed his attention
in those first moments. Then, as he drew within yards of the southern
rail, he stopped abruptly short. He had glimpsed, suddenly, a great
glistening wet mass that lay at the sea-wall's edge, ahead of him, and
that seemed to be slowly moving.
"It was," he says, "just as though someone had dumped a great mass of
glistening gelatin at the park's edge, wet and gleaming there in the
light of the few scattered bulbs about me. All along the park's edge,
along its sea-wall, that glistening mass stretched, hanging down over
the wall into the lapping sea-waters, and as the stuff seemed slowly
moving I thought it for that moment to be pouring down into the sea
beneath. Then as I stood there, gazing at that smooth-flowing movement
of the gleaming stuff, I saw something that made me rub my eyes in
amazement. The glistening masses were not flowing down into the sea at
all, I saw, but instead were flowing _up_ from it!"
For a moment of utter astonishment Worley stood still, gazing toward
the stuff. A gray, glistening mass, it was pouring slowly and smoothly
up over the wall's edge, from the sea beneath, flowing steadily up onto
the surface of the park and adding to the great, gleaming mass of the
stuff that lay already all around that park's sea-edge! The thing was
unprecedented; it was incredible, and for a moment that seemed unending
to Worley, he stared toward those shining, gathering jelly-like masses
that were flowing and flexing and writhing a few feet before him.
Then suddenly a great, thick loop of the glistening jelly--a great
_arm_--projected itself out from the gliding masses and darted straight
toward him!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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