The rest was as bewildering as it was horrible.
The driver of the sedan had been smiling, probably at something the other man said. And then, as his front wheels whirred past the curb line and onto the intersection, he turned his face from the road ahead. He looked in my direction. Indeed, I thought for a fraction of a second that he was looking at me, before I realized that his gaze went over my head.
The smile froze on his lips. Abruptly there came to his face such a look of horror that I felt the breath freeze in my throat. I'll swear I saw his eyes glaze, like the eyes of a man newly dead.
All this was a matter of a half-second. And then I shouted aloud, as did several other people near by—screamed to the man, and pointed ahead of him in warning.
The driver of the truck was half standing in his cab as he smashed down on his brake with all his power. He was hauling at the ponderous steering-wheel. But it was useless.
The sedan's driver had jerked his wheel a little to the left, in the direction of his horrified gaze. His light car was shooting straight toward the nose of the truck.
Time seemed to stand still in that hideous second; rather, it seemed to hang suspended on a hook of horror. Then the two rapidly moving masses of metal met head on.
I heard a scream that was perhaps from one of the doomed men in the sedan and perhaps from a bystander. I saw the white, appalled face of the truck driver. Then—the end.
The sedan was a mass of junk, half under the truck. One of the truck's big front wheels had cracked off with the crash, slamming the truck to the pavement.
The driver of the sedan lay thirty feet away, as still as though already dead. The man who had ridden beside him had been thrown forward through the windshield at the moment of impact and had somehow gotten under the truck when the ten-ton bulk carried the light sedan back along its tracks for a few yards. People were trying to avert their eyes from the body under the truck. . . .
I had followed the ambulance that bore the sedan driver to the emergency ward. And I had there heard the dying man's whisper, in accents of horror, of a "face."
What face? What in God's name had he been raving about? And why had he taken his eyes off the street and rammed straight into the coal truck?
Eleven killed on Death Corner through reasonless accidents! Had all felt terror freeze their blood while they took their glazed eyes from the road just long enough for motored death to overrun them? Had all seen—a "face"?
Back at Death Corner, I found that the truck had been jacked up and the other body removed from under it. Men were working to clear the giant thing off the street. And I got to work myself.
I had one slight lead to go on; the direction in which the driver of the sedan had looked, with horror in his eyes, just before he hit the truck.
He had seemed to look right at me—but then I had got the impression that his gaze went over my head. And it was just after he looked that the glaze of terror had come to his eyes.
What in the world had he seen? And where had he seen it?
The latter question I set about trying to answer first.
I had been leaning against the corner of the building at the northeast corner of the intersection. And somewhere at that building the driver must have looked. I examined the front of it from across the street.
It was a three-story building, long past the point where it should have been torn
