The Fatal Kiss Mystery

by Rufus King

  Some word or two of what Mother Bain was hissing must have filtered in through Ramier’s ear, because he put an end to the business by releasing one hand from the bowl and fishing about in his trousers’ pocket until he got out fifteen dollars. He waved the money at Mother Bain until she, too, released one hand from the bowl and managed, with a dexterity that was amazing, to count it. Then, breathing vigorously, she loosed the bowl entirely and, giving vent to one of her very best beneath-the-breath mutters, left the field.

  Ramier’s first move as victor was to dump the Cerise Supreme into a sink and thoroughly to wash out its container. This seemed an act of most criminal wastefulness to. Billy, and he made no bones about saying so.

  “Nonsense,” said Ramier pleasantly. He was feeling much more friendly and jolly now that he had his bowl. “What is the trifling matter of a quart or so of Cerise Supreme in comparison with the important experiment upon which we are about to embark?”

  “I say,” said Billy, “have you two eggs been going on like this, on the Q.T., as it were, with old Snoodgy’s course?”

  “We have,” said Ramier. “And if you care to sit in, you are welcome. Miss Duveen and I are about to reproduce the beautiful experiments of Mayer.”

  Billy sat. Regardless of whether or not the show might prove interesting, he could at least hold a wake by the sink.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE FIRST STEP TOWARD DANGER

  That the experiments of Mayer should be termed beautiful is an extravagance that none but a scientific mind could go in for. The five corks with needles stuck through them undoubtedly possessed, for Ramier, some rare loveliness obscure to the eyes of a layman. They just would have looked homeless and with no purpose in life to me.

  “You will remember,” said Ramier, seizing a cork and the manner of a lecturer at the same time, “Professor Kretjz’s statement that the atomic theory of Leucippus and his friends, as well as those of the school of Democritus, have been but as forerunners of Dalton’s theory. They specifically describe the smallest particles of matter as ‘atoms’—ἄτομος—which means, as you ought to know if you don’t, indivisible. They conceive them as rigid bodies suspended and moving about one another in empty space.”

  “Very much like the thoughts of a reformer,” said Billy.

  “We are dealing with facts,” said Ramier severely. He continued his lecture while carefully shoving an agreeable needle through a violently objecting cork. “From such early conceptions to the full flower of our present-day knowledge there is no need for us to follow each individual step. I shall merely refresh your memory by giving each one of the steps the name of its creator—Van Helmont, at the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, Lavoisier, J. R. Richter, 1792, Dalton, Berzilius, Stas, Richards, Guye, and so forth. Then we come to Avogadro with his molecular hypothesis, and Prout, who in 1815 took the atomic weight of hydrogen as unity and concluded that this element is the primitive substance of which the other elements are built up.”

  Is it any wonder, as I have previously remarked, that I am astonished at Drusilla’s having remained in love with Ramier during such cataloguings as that? I can only conclude that, like a sensible girl, she closed her ears to what he was saying and quietly amused herself by gazing upon him as a splendid specimen of young virility and manhood.

  “Coming down to the anticipation of the Periodic System,” Ramier continued with verve, “we see Dobereiner in 1817 pointing out the existence of ‘triads.’ Then we skip lightly to the tables of elements of Gmelin in 1843, based on chemical similarity; to those of Chancourtois in 1862, of Lothar Meyer, in 1864, and of Newlands—1863 to ’66—Law of Octaves.”

  With this frail and frothy introduction, Ramier then proceeded to buckle down to the work at hand—that is to say, to a reproduction of the aforementioned beautiful experiments of Mayer.

  These, as I either do or do not understand it, hinge, on the regular arrangement of particles left free to move beneath the influence of certain attractive and repulsive forces. The terms have nothing to do with the appearance of the forces, but are technical terms the meanings of which are quite apparent to anyone in the know. Mayer—and Ramier—used magnetized needles mounted in corks, with all of the needles’ positive poles uppermost, that floated on the surface of the basin of water.

  With a desire for privacy that was all but human, the magnetized needles moved speedily away from one another, owing to the mutual repulsion that persists among similar poles. Now Billy assures me that a child can understand what follows. Perhaps this is true, but no longer being a child myself, and not having one within grabbing distance at the present moment to use for a test, I cannot check the assurance up.

  The next move in the experiment was to bring the negative pole of a strong bar magnet near the positive poles of the floating magnets. It tended not only to draw them together but—and this seems to be of an importance called prime—the floating magnets took up a definite “grouping” in which this attracting force was in equilibrium with their mutual repulsion. So far as I am concerned, you can take it or leave it.

  It further seems that, by bearing in mind this picture of the corks symmetrically grouped about the central magnet, we can thereby visualize the modern conception of an atom.

  The nucleus is represented by the bar magnet, and is positively and absolutely charged. The electrons can in their turn be compared with the floating needles, which are negatively charged, and which revolve in their orbits around the nucleus in a position determined not, as you might imagine, by their own free will, but in one determined when the attracting force of the nucleus is in equilibrium with their mutual repulsion.

  Let us now page a child.

  It is easy to imagine the three earnest heads of Drusilla, of Ramier, and of Billy bent absorbedly above Mother Bain’s container for her fatal stock of Cerise Supreme, with their three sets of scientific round eyes fastened raptly upon the five corks. The spell of the moment was broken by Ramier.

  “Suppose,” he said quietly, “we were to stretch that equilibrium?”

  That was all.

  Such were his exact words.

  And yet, what tremendous achievements resulted from them!

  “Well,” asked Billy, who is an intensely conversational soul, “suppose you did?”

  Ramier answered him through the singular hush that the intent look in his eyes had evoked.

  “Even though it retained its solidity,” he said, “matter would apparently dissolve.”

  The conception was staggering.

  “You mean you could make something vanish and seem invisible, even though it was there all the time?” asked Billy nervously.

  “Yes,” said Ramier. “With the proper apparatus, I could make you dissolve into air and thus become invisible to human sight.”

  “Do!” said Drusilla huskily, with the cold light of the fanatical scientist in her eye. “You must try!”

  “I shall,” said Ramier. “From this moment on I pledge my time—my very life, if need be—to the attempt.”

  It was all very grand, very inspiring, and most lavishly applauded, except by Billy, who retained the depressing impression that somehow or other he had been let in for the role of experimentee. He planned to suggest, as soon as the first furor of enthusiasm had subsided, that the experiment take place on, say, a pig. He intended strongly to advocate that a dissolved pig would be just as valuable a sacrifice to the cause of science as would be a dissolved Billy.

  An immediate celebration was in order, and the three adventurers adjourned to the shop part of the Kitchen, where they sealed their pact—there had been, as was natural, an oath of secrecy—and fed their stomachs with a dish apiece of Mother Bain’s latest creation. This consisted of an ice subdued beneath anemic chestnuts in maple syrup, and its name, Mother Bain proudly informed them, was “Morons under Glass.”

  CHAPTER V

  IN WHICH THE STAGE IS SET FOR FORTHCOMING ANGUISH IN A THOROUGHLY DESERTED SHACK LOCATED IN THAT SECTION
OF A MOUNTAIN KNOWN AS ITS FASTNESS

  Having thus given birth to his hypothesis, Ramier at once concentrated all his energies upon the discovering of some invention that would effect an experiment to prove it. Now the theory of the propagation of wireless waves was an open book to Ramier, and in it he read the means to his end.

  His first effort was the invention and manufacture of an appliance that would trap the propagated waves as they leaped from the antenna into space. Ramier’s trap caught them, rectified them, and directed their subsequent flight. In other words—principally Billy’s—the trap permitted only their positive or their negative peaks to escape, as Ramier might wish.

  The goal was in sight.

  By attaining a state of resonance between the electronic wave lengths of atoms and the waves that were propagated by the multiple-transmitter of the stupefying wireless set that he had constructed—obtaining this said state of resonance through some obscure pact sworn to by the capacities and inductances of its various circuits, both opened and closed and oscillatory—Ramier believed that he could either place a stronger negative charge upon the electrons of an atom—and so displace them by forcing them farther apart from their nucleus—or else he could place a stronger positive charge upon the nucleus and so draw its electrons back to it again and into their original position.

  And all this could be done without seriously disturbing their symmetry or arrangement.

  I imagined, at first, that Ramier’s unwillingness to disturb the symmetry or arrangement of the atoms upon-which he proposed to experiment arose from a pleasant sense of kind-heartedness in his nature.

  I was quite wrong.

  It seems that were this much-bruited symmetry of arrangements of the atoms of a human body—for Ramier indignantly rejected Billy’s suggestion concerning a pig—to be disturbed, an explosion would take place whose force would be sufficient to shatter and totally demolish a city the size of New York.

  A further light was thrown upon Ramier’s anxiety over the point when I learned that the person he had chosen as the subject for his experiment was himself.

  My admiration for Ramier’s courage knew no bounds. There were desperate dangers that he would be called upon to face. There was the primary disagreeable possibility that he would stretch the equilibrium of the attracting force of the nucleus with the mutual repulsion of its electrons too far and reach the snapping point—whereupon the aforementioned bang would take place.

  Another danger arose from the very fact itself that it was he who would personally be the subject for the experiment. There was no uncertainty in his mind but that he could make himself invisible because, up to the instant of his doing so, his own hand would be operating the controls. But the pertinent question then faced him that, having rendered himself invisible, would he still be able to operate the controls and restore himself to a normally solid state again.

  He thought not.

  His substance would temporarily be transmuted from flesh and bone into a sort of gas, and his hands would undoubtedly drift through solid matter instead of being able to grasp it.

  Ramier was balked for quite a while over this problem, as he hadn’t the slightest desire or intention of committing suicide, but he eventually saw his way clear. He believed that, with certain improvements and new adjustments in the tuning circuits of his receiving apparatus, it would be possible not only to tune-in matter—as he intended to do when having his invisible self brought back to solidity—but that it would also be possible to tune-in the sounds of the vaporous voice of the invisible subject while that subject was still invisible.

  Granting that he could do this, it would then be feasible for him, while in his invisible and hence helpless state, to communicate directly with some solid assistant and to direct with his own words that assistant’s manipulations and hands. The maddening part of the hypothesis was that there would be no way to prove it until after he had taken the fatal leap. It was a terrible, a fearful risk, but Ramier was willing—eager even—to chance it.

  Of course, all this did not occur in the converted back parlor of Mother Bain’s Kitchen at Bramwell University, for Ramier was bound by no ties to any fixed spot on earth. He bought, after graduation, a shack that stood on a piece of property adjacent to the Duveen summer home in the Adirondacks.

  The shack was weatherproof, reasonably large, stoutly built, and thoroughly secluded. It seemed especially suitable for the experimental purposes for which Ramier proposed to use it.

  The architectural construction of the shack was curious and deserves comment. It had presumably been built by an eccentric, for its site was a naturally formed but almost geometrically squared pocket in a cliff that composed the termination of a deep-bottled gulch in the mountain.

  The pocket was a distinct freak of nature and had originally been the base of a waterfall which had dropped from a height of a hundred-odd feet or so over the lip of the perpendicular cliffs above. The stream on the summit that fed the falls had been diverted through the cementing of a stone dyke by the builder of the shack. He had switched the stream into another bed, which caused it now to spill its falls at a point about fifty yards or so farther down toward the mouth of the gulch.

  The builder had then utilized the three natural stone walls of the former base of the falls for the rear and two ends of his shack. Their joists fitted snugly against the smooth rock, and the roof, similar to ones used on lean-tos, sloped up steeply at a sharp angle from the low front of the shack to the rear wall of the pocket.

  The sole approach to the shack’s door was a narrow, bracken-impeded pathway that struggled to it alongside the stream from the mouth of the bottled gulch. I am a little hazy as to just what a bottled gulch really is, but I am certain it is the appropriate term.

  This path, or trail, was about two miles in length. The stream it bordered was quite deep in places, and its pools were well stocked with trout, making the property an ideal retreat for a hermit with a mild penchant toward sport. The steep and in most places inaccessible walls of the gulch were covered with a dense growth of underbrush and timber, and the air was ever redolent with the clarifying, pungent odor of pine.

  The place was, equally, an ideal retreat for a scientist whose métier consisted in experiments which with the accidental or injudicious passing of hairbreadths terminated in cataclysmic explosions. Furthermore, no habitation stood within many miles of the shack, so that, if the worst should occur and Ramier’s atoms should find themselves unequal to the task of bearing the strain that would be put upon them, no one but his assistant and himself would be injured.

  It was Drusilla who insisted upon being Ramier’s assistant.

  She announced this decision shortly after she and Ramier had become engaged. At the base of the new waterfall there was an exceedingly attractive grotto. It was there that they had plighted their troth.

  Nor is that plighting a matter to be breezily passed over with few or careless words. It was much too curious a performance for that.

  CHAPTER VI

  SKEWERED

  I believe that Cupid, when given a man and a girl, a sylvan retreat, and a summer’s moonlight night, has little to do beyond shooting two arrows and then trotting on about his business to other couples less fortuitously surrounded by the trappings of romance.

  And so the celestial child must have thought on the evening when Ramier and Drusilla plighted their troth; for having shot his darts at them, he at once decamped without waiting to see whether or not they had taken effect.

  One can scarcely hold Cupid to blame for this, inasmuch as the summer is admittedly his open season, and he undoubtedly has more jobs on his hands than he can manage with any sort of efficiency at all. A look—a dart—a target—whereupon he must shove off and beat it for his next victims.

  “Ah!” murmured Drusilla, as the moon, at its full, shook free from the fingers of tall pines and swam indolently up above the crest of the gulch and out upon a starry sea of mauve.

  “I beg pardon?”
said Ramier, twisting to a less uncomfortable position on the top of the large boulder from where they were watching the falling waters.

  Drusilla pointed a slim finger skyward. “The moon,” she said.

  Ramier regarded the blasé satellite with distracted eyes. He was feeling uncomfortable, more so than he had ever felt before in his whole life.

  Ramier’s discomfort had arisen from the moment—then a half hour past—when Drusilla had invited his assistance by giving him her hand as they had mounted the boulder. The action had surprised Ramier, as he knew as well as she did that her feet, when engaged in climbing, were as agile and sure-footed as are those of a chamois.

  “You feeling all right?” he had mumbled, after Drusilla had at last succeeded in tripping over a projection and tottering a bit toward him.

  With perfect courtesy he had instantly straightened her up.

  Her answer had been a trifle smothered and might well have been either a “damn,” or an “I am.” His innate politeness had chosen the latter.

  But her strange and sudden tendency toward instability had not ceased with their having found seats on the top of the boulder. More than once Drusilla’s accustomed poise had betrayed her, and had it not been for the quickness of his eye and the strength of his arms, she might very well have sustained a nasty fall of fifteen feet or so to the ground.

  Something indeed, he decided, had gone shockingly wrong with her center of balance. Furthermore, she seemed in some amazing fashion to have become electrically charged, for he received a distinct and unaccountably thrilling shock every time he caught her and set her up again.

  “I wonder,” he had finally suggested huskily, “if I hadn’t better just keep my arm where it is. It might be safer.”

  It was around her waist.

  “It might and it mightn’t,” murmured Drusilla dreamily, as she sharpened her estoque—that heavy, flat-bladed sword which has brought more than one good toreadored bull to an unseasonable end—for the estocada…