Wings Of Flight: Short Stories by Sean McDevitt by Sean McDevitt

Author:Sean McDevitt [McDevitt, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-25T06:00:00+00:00

April 1— April Fool’s Day—

…And this is where Dr. Corentz’s notes abruptly end. I do not think any pages of his report were lost in the fire— his words simply stop right there, leaving a big gap on the rest of the page. None of these documents would have survived had Corentz not left them in a small metal file cabinet; while it had been blackened and buckled by the heat of the fire, the pages of Dr. Corentz’s journal survived— singed on the edges, but otherwise intact.

Strangely, the university with which he was affiliated showed little to no interest in determining what exactly had happened to Dr. Corentz; while they freely admitted I had in fact located the remains of the small building in the woods where the doctor had done his work, in the course of my investigation I came to the conclusion that the administration was of the opinion he had set the cabin ablaze himself, and had run away because his experiments had failed (the same biological, time-altering experiments they had supported him pursuing). None of my offers to university officials to allow them to examine the partially burned documents that I’d uncovered were ever seriously considered. Indeed, some said he’d conveniently left those documents behind in an attempt to throw the authorities off the trail; the university said there was no way of verifying that any of the wild claims Dr. Corentz made in his diary were true. Sadly, any proof that might have been found in the rats that Corentz claimed to have successfully experimented on had vanished— totally destroyed, along with all of the other animals— in the fire; at the most what I was able to locate appeared to be a few blackened husks in the charred remnants of a cage. So far as the synthesis, if it had in fact been there, it had certainly been destroyed; all I found were a few totally melted syringes, bits of broken glass, and the remains of a Bunsen burner.

I disagreed with the university’s assumption that the doctor had somehow manufactured his disappearance by deliberately burning down his lab in the woods; while I make no claim to be an authority on arson fires, the photos of the scene I showed to an expert seemed to point in an entirely different direction— one I hadn’t even noticed myself while actually at the scene or taking the photographs. John McMullen has spent thirty years examining the scenes of deliberately set fires, and within moments of examining the photos that I presented him with, he pointed out an extremely interesting detail I’d completely missed: the evidence of a jagged scar in the bark of a Ponderosa pine that overlooked the small cabin. The trunk had splintered bark and exploded wood on each side, all of it on the side of the tree that seemed to gently droop over the property. Most likely, McMullen told me, was a scenario in which a lightning strike led to strips

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.