The Life-Masters by Edmond Hamilton — Read

Just before midnight on that same night it was, less than a dozen hours after the Association's announcement, that the horror broke upon the world. Had the thing come gradually upon us, place by place and event after event, it would be possible to give some consecutive account of it, now. But, crashing down upon almost all the astounded world at the same moment as it did, the very scope of it makes futile any efforts to describe completely the terror of that world when it awoke to doom. It is enough, indeed, if we can give some impression of its action at such a city as New York, for there, of all places, its horror was the most intensified.

The accounts of the thing's coming to New York are almost numberless, and it is from one of these, that of Edward Worley, that we find what is perhaps our most vivid picture of the thing. Worley's account, to which he has given the somewhat banal title of _My Experiences in the Life Horror_, not only gives us a description of the first coming of the horror at New York, but summarizes in fact the action of the thing over all the world. For as it was in New York that night, so it was in a thousand seaside cities in that same hour, and what Worley saw in its streets was seen by millions of horror-stricken men in that same night. The magnitude of the thing was greater at New York, but the horror was the same, as Worley indeed points out.