The Killer

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BILLOWS of heavy fog were swirling from the North River. The low-hanging clouds that had swept Manhattan with an early evening drizzle were dipping to meet the waters of the harbor.

Trapped smoke which could not rise amid the moisture-charged atmosphere, added a smudgy tone to the thick mist. The fog seemed a living monster. From its depths came the hoarse, raucous blasts of steamship whistles, accompanied by the high-pitched, staccato blares of tugboats. These penetrating sounds, their sources invisible, gave the fog a weird existence that might well have been its own.

Moreover, the fog possessed a motion. The piers along the Manhattan river front broke its creeping mass; from the rifts thus caused came little swirls of dense mist that resembled the clutching tentacles of a mammoth octopus.

This illusion was most apparent upon the lighted stretch of the Central American Shipping Pier. Powerful incandescents, set at regular intervals, seemed feeble as they battled against the blotting inroads of the fog. One gust of thick cloudiness stretched its enveloping folds completely along the pier; it cleared reluctantly, and left spots of misty blackness that dispelled themselves like vanishing ghosts.

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