November Night Tales

by Henry Chapman Mercer

  “This is a strange business, gentlemen,” said he. “Did you get my last message?”

  “No.”

  “He has gone.”

  “Gone, why? Where?” asked the astonished officer.

  “We don’t know. He must have dressed when we thought he was asleep. Poor fellow! I know him well; but I don’t think he recognized me. He went off without a hat.”

  “Is he bewitched?” cried Norton. “What on earth can he mean? What did the doctor say?”

  “He called it a case of attempted suicide, at first. So I thought, until we woke him up for a few minutes this morning. He must have been out of his head ever since they found him on the track.”

  “How did he get there?” asked Carrington.

  “We missed that. He had been drugged; but, strange to say, not robbed. We made out that he had jumped out of a window in one of the old quarry sheds.”

  “In the Fairfield Woods?”

  “Yes. He had been terribly frightened in some way by turkey-buzzards. But the drug would have accounted for his ravings. We thought he said the birds had been sitting on him.”

  “What!” exclaimed Carrington. “Could he explain how——”

  “That shed will explain everything,” interrupted the chief. “Have you seen it?”

  “Yes, this morning,” said the professor. “A heap of charred wood and ashes,—struck by lightning, no doubt, during the night.”

  “Deliberately set fire to, I should say,” declared the officer excitedly. “Good-bye, evidence!”

  “What are we to do?” asked Carrington.

  “Find this man,” said the chief; “and the sooner the better. We may learn something at the station.”

  The disappointed officer pulled out a time-table from his pocket and, with his dark intelligent face bent over the leaflet, slowly followed the astonished party into the scholar’s study, a cool, book-walled museum of Oriental trophies scented with sandalwood, where the disordered outlines of a large writing-table showed dimly in the artificial twilight. The professor pulled up the Venetian blinds.

  “There can’t be any doubt about the shed,” said he, when Carrington had got through his strange story. “These men you saw must have caught him sketching the place. Why didn’t they rob him? And where was he? Why didn’t you see him?”

  “Why didn’t he see us?” added Norton.

  “But the rest of it? The buzzards? Are you quite sure of that?”

  “That’s the point,” declared Carrington. “I saw a human skull, not the slightest doubt of it.”

  The professor turned to the chief, as the latter, who had been listening impatiently, rose to take leave of the party. “The thing gets more and more mysterious,” said he. “Have you no theory?”

  Stopping at the door before following his two subalterns out of the room, the officer looked back, with a last word: “You have heard of Resurrectionists.”

  The professor had walked to the open window, and for a while stood watching the men hurry down the path and out the gate.

  “Resurrectionists,” he repeated at last. “We never thought of that.”

  “But the place was not a graveyard,” objected Carrington. “And why should dealers in dead bodies allow vultures to destroy their stock in trade? The thing is incomprehensible.”

  “Must we wait here?” Norton asked impatiently.

  “Yes,” said the professor. “The chief will find him before we finish dinner.”

  But adding new danger to the situation, the final disappearance of the artist seemed to grow more and more threatening as they discussed it, until the ringing of a bell interrupted them, after which the talk, returning to the ghastly subject of the vultures, continued upstairs. The theme was wisely abandoned during dinner, but introduced soon after, while, as no news came to verify the professor’s prophecy, the three men sat anxiously smoking their cigars in the little dining-room. Looking at the affair from half a dozen different points of view, they guessed, they argued, they theorized, without reaching any reasonable conclusion. Several times the professor seemed distracted by some idea that he hesitated to express, until at last Carrington, lacking a night’s rest, grew too sleepy to think clearly, much less talk, and at his host’s suggestion, followed the latter into a matting-floored parlor, where, in the curtained shade, he lay down on a sofa and fell asleep.

  xi

  By the time he awoke it was too dark in the parlor to see anything distinctly, and for a while he failed to recognize his surroundings. He heard a distant sound of voices as he groped through the dining-room into the hall; then, following the glimmer of a light downstairs, he at length reached the half-open door of the professor’s study, where he found his host talking to Norton.

  The windows of the laboratory were open, and the mellow glow of a student’s lamp fell upon the book-littered table by which the scholar stood. He was leaning over a large portfolio, and turned at the sound of footsteps,—and Carrington’s question:

  “Has Pryor been found?”

  “What?” came the excited answer. “No! not yet; but I have just made a discovery, and I think I have explained the mystery.” Reaching over the table, he pushed an engraving from the portfolio nearer the light. “Did you ever see that?” he asked.

  The dramatist stepped forward, to stare with astonishment at the picture. It was a duplicate of the print he had shown to Norton the day before.

  Carrington picked it up, inspected its title under the lamp, and remarking the strange coincidence, held it out before Norton, who was standing behind him, but who evidently objected to examining it.

  “It accounts for the whole affair,” said the professor. “Look here!” He pulled out another picture from what looked like a collection of Oriental prints, showing a circle of robed figures kneeling around a fire, upon which a turbaned priest seemed to be throwing incense. “Fire Worshipers!” he exclaimed. “The pictures are from the first edition of Clark’s India. I have a copy with all the plates.” Holding up the lamp, he pointed to one of the high open bookcases, where, at intervals between the volumes, the sinister fronts of a row of skulls showed dimly in the shadow.

  “I should have discovered this long ago,” continued the scholar excitedly. “What happens in India may happen here.” He paused and looked triumphantly at Carrington. “The chief is wrong. The men who assaulted our friend are Parsees.”

  Carrington dropped the print: “What, Parsees in Greenmarsh!”

  “Yes. In the quarry books they are not accounted for. They never appear in their native dress.”

  “But,—how would they get here?”

  “Easily enough, with all this imported labor, mixed up with Caribbean Negroes, Gipsies, or Hungarians, by Port officers, who don’t know one language from another. So much the better for me.”

  At a sudden gust of the night draught, which blew some of the engravings off the table, he went to one of the open windows and closed it.

  “Why should I have studied these people so long without suspecting this? Are we to suppose that deaths have not occurred among them? When that happens, a vulture feast on the carcass of a dead animal would suggest exactly what you met with in the shed.”

  Carrington had stooped to pick up the vulture print.

  “You mean this?” said he.

  “Yes. A Parsee funeral.”

  “So the bundle we saw was——”

  “A coffin. The shed was supposed to be infected with smallpox, no one would go there.”

  “The fire, then, would have been a disinfectant,” suggested Carrington.

  “No. A part of the ceremony, made by flint and steel. A symbol of what our law of physics fails to explain,—combustion, so called. There!”

  The professor laughed scornfully, as he leaned forward to turn down
the smoking lamp, around which a droning swarm of summer beetles were scorching their wings. “How easy to classify it, to analyze it as an effect. But the cause,—the Sun,—who comprehends that?”

  He paused while Carrington stared at the furrowed face and grey eyes glowing with the youth of an old man’s enthusiasm.

  “You have heard of reincarnation,” he continued; “but you cannot know what I intend to demonstrate, that the Parsee shares the doctrine with the Buddhist.”

  “You would trace it in the Sanscrit books, I suppose. The Zend Avesta?”

  “No, half the books are lost. I have discovered it in facts overlooked by science, customs centuries old, which, analyzed one by one, would show what is not generally believed: that the halt,—the back turn in the upward progress,—the universal cure——”

  Norton, who had been walking nervously about the room, stopped.

  “But what has this to do with Pryor?” he asked almost indignantly. “These men are murderers.”

  “No,” said the professor; “religious fanatics. They may be priests.”

  “They attacked and drugged him.”

  “They would rather drug him than kill him. They are afraid of our laws. He might have betrayed them. How would he know that the bodies are given to vultures, not in wanton barbarity, but to avoid the results of common burial,—the passing away of the human envelope into dead atoms? Who would understand their secret?”

  “What secret? We would call it a curious conception of hygiene.”

  “Hygiene! No! Sublime theology,—suppressed by persecution; not lost. What is evil? A compromise. I expect to prove—”

  The scholar’s voice rose as Norton tried to interrupt him:

  “You misunderstood what you saw. Reincarnation begins when the lifeless human carcass is absorbed in the flesh of living birds.” He paused. “It ends when justice triumphs over the undeserved sufferings of men and animals in the Transmigration of Souls. Pythagoras explained it two thousand years ago.”

  An excited harangue followed, in which the profound ethics of the case, getting the better of details, seemed to transform the speaker. Years of research spoke in the commanding gestures and flashing eyes, as he declaimed the transcendental doctrine in a passionate attack upon the theology of the West, which, he declared, had failed to solve the chief moral problem of the universe.

  They had stepped out upon the porch where, heightening the suggestion of his words, trees, sky, and earth pulsated with the phosphorescent gleams of whirling swarms of fireflies.

  Several times Norton attempted in vain to question the professor, until, as if convinced against his will, or overwhelmed by the theme, he listened in silence while the scholar, forgetful of everything but his subject, talked on.

  It was late when they parted, the night had darkened, but the gleams seemed to brighten as, after getting through the gate in the intermittent brilliance, the two friends hurried on toward the station, for a while in silence.

  “The man is a genius,” exclaimed Carrington at length, half dazzled by the illumination.

  “Yes,” said Norton. “While you listen to him, he carries you off your feet; but who will believe him? Besides——” he stopped. . . . “The point is not the Transmigration of Souls. Where is Pryor now? The professor has forgotten all about that?”

  “So have we,” said Carrington. “But the chief is sure to find him.”

  “He ought to have found him long ago.”

  An interval of silence followed before Norton spoke again.

  “We have forgotten something else,” said he.

  “What’s that?”

  “I mean the beginning of the thing,—the Spiritualists.”

  “They warned him about his birthday,—we know that,—but what if they did?”

  “Can you trust such people? They have been imposing upon him for years past. His birthday is not over yet.”

  They had reached Greenmarsh.

  “We had better spend the night here,” Norton suggested.

  “No,” replied Carrington. “What can we do anywhere but wait?”

  While they hesitated, the train rushed into the station, and they got aboard.

  xii

  Following the late homecoming of the friends, a night had passed. Carrington, in an embroidered dressing gown, was seated near a small breakfast-table surmounted with a tray of empty dishes.

  The morning light seemed too bright. The city’s hum, wafted through the open windows of his lofty outlook, too gay for phantasms.

  But Deadlock Meadow, the professor’s harangue, and persisting suspicions,—confusing the final exit of his friend with things impossible, grotesque, frightful,—had got the better of his spirits, when, as the thought of waiting idly for news had become almost intolerable, a noise of footsteps on the landing outside was followed by the entrance of Norton.

  His friend appeared heated by the quick ascent of many flights of stairs, as he picked up a palmleaf fan from the table and sat down by one of the windows. Fixing his bright, restless eyes upon the dramatist, he began fanning himself vigorously.

  “Prepare to be astonished,” said he.

  “It’s Pryor?” interrupted his host.

  “Yes. Thank Heaven! Just back. The chief found him at the seashore.” He paused. “There’s a lot of claptrap about Spiritualism, as we all know. But still, these people warned him. No doubt about that. He disobeyed them.”

  “And repented later, tried to break the spell. Was that all?”

  “Yes. But it explains this second runaway.”

  “Is he still out of his senses?”

  “No. He looks ill, but will be better in a day or two if he manages to conceal the affair from his mother. The old lady must not be frightened, you know.”

  “Has he identified the men who assaulted him?” asked Carrington.

  “No, and I don’t think he will, but that’s not the point.—How do you suppose he got into their hands?”

  “They caught him sketching the shed, of course.”

  “Not at all. He fell over the cliff.”

  With a crash of upset chinaware, the dramatist rose suddenly from his chair. “Impossible!” he exclaimed. “It would have killed him.”

  “But it didn’t kill him. It was where you and I looked down. He went over on a landslide, and the bushes on the rock broke his fall. He was stunned, of course, and woke up in the midst of the vultures, just as he told the doctor. These men had drugged him and covered him up with the blankets that you saw. When he awoke again, he jumped out of the window onto a pile of boards, which accounts for the clatter you heard.”

  “But they must have caught him in the woods.”

  “No, he got out ahead of them. It was the drug that overcame him when he fainted on the bridge.”

  Carrington, who was walking restlessly about the floor, stopped.

  “At last it’s over,” said he. “No more mystery, thanks to the professor. What a wonderful man he is.”

  “The chief doesn’t think so.”

  The dramatist glared angrily at his friend.

  “Why not? He has explained the buzzards.”

  “The chief holds to his theory of resurrectionists, as I thought he would, and I believe he is right.”

  “But that’s ridiculous. It doesn’t account for the vultures.”

  “The chief says it does. Some of these resurrectionist villains are dealers in skeletons, and use the buzzards to save trouble in cleaning the bones. It has happened several times in the south. A terrible idea, but ingenious enough to he true. The professor never thought of that. I doubt if he would admit it if he did.”

  “He would have to admit it if it is a fact. Don’t forget that he is a great scientist. Facts are everything to him.”


  “He has gone beyond his facts. He can’t prove his Parsee theory.”

  “Pryor can prove it,” declared Carrington. “All he has to do is to go over to Greenmarsh and point out the men.”

  “So the chief thought,” returned Norton, “but he won’t do it.”

  “Did you tell him what the professor said?”

  “I tried to, but he wouldn’t listen.”

  “How utterly foolish,” said Carrington. “But it’s just like him.”

  He walked over to the table, picked up the engraving they had looked at two nights before, and held it toward his friend. “Shall I show him this?”

  “For Heaven’s sake, don’t!” protested Norton. “He has had a terrible nervous shock.”

  “What shall I do with it?”

  “If it were mine, I would destroy it.”

  THE WOLF BOOK

  i

  The once celebrated Slavic manuscript, known as the Wolf Book, lost to science soon after its discovery about the middle of the last century, has always been associated with the name of the late Professor C——. Nevertheless, the great scholar was invariably reticent on the subject. Whether from unwillingness to figure as the hero of his own anecdotes, or distaste for publicity, he for a long time declined to admit that he had discovered the treasure, much less discuss with his friends the scarcely credible experiences that had put him in its possession. These are now, at last, made public,—prematurely, perhaps, since his own posthumous notes on the facts of the case remain to be published.

  It was in the summer following the Hungarian Insurrection of 18— that the professor, putting to the test a plausible theory, undertook his long-planned search for classic manuscripts, supposedly forgotten or misplaced in the monastic archives of Hungary and Servia. His clever plan led him to descend the Danube in a houseboat, thereby curtailing land travel and book transport by easy access to libraries from his floating headquarters.