The Fatal Kiss Mystery

by Rufus King

  It was at this point that she had murmured her “Ah,” and “the moon.”

  “To think,” said Ramier with a quickening note of interest in his voice, “that we should somehow feel the moon’s influence even—”

  Drusilla held her breath during the infinitesimal pause. Would the man—would the man, she wondered, wake up now.

  “Even,” continued Ramier with more fervor, “though it is two hundred and thirty-eight thousand and eight hundred miles away.”

  Drusilla expelled her breath. In one less charming it might possibly have been said that she snorted.

  “Bother!” she said sharply. “Oh, bother—bother—bother!”

  “You aren’t well,” Ramier announced with alarm, as he squeezed her tighter.

  She tested the squeeze and subsided. Why was he so dear and so dumb? She knew that he loved her, but how, within fairish bounds, was she ever going to make him know it himself?

  “You have still to comment on the moonlight on the “pool,” she said in a small frigid voice. “It is beautiful—beautiful—and has a mean, if not positively wicked velocity of one hundred and eighty-five thousand miles per second.”

  “One hundred and eighty-six thousand,” corrected Ramier gently.

  And she burst into tears.

  Ramier was inexpressibly shocked and at a complete loss as to what to do. There was no formula that he knew of for spiking a downpour of tears. He started to release her, but her tears seemed to flow in inverse ratio with the pressure of his arm around her waist. The tighter he squeezed, the less, as he explained it, her tears flew—or flewed—he was really very much mixed up—whereas the slightest letting down of any even recently added pressure shot their volume up distressingly.

  “Stop it!” he said. “For heaven’s sake, Drusilla, stop it!”

  The use of her given name—it was the first time he had essayed it—rewarded him with a momentary check in the flow.

  “Very well, Ramier,” she said, once more settling her head firmly against his shoulder.

  He looked at her hair; at the brief expanse of forehead showing beneath it. A not uncomfortable luxuriance giddied about inside of him. He wondered what on earth he was doing.

  He did it again.

  “Do you realize that you are kissing my forehead?” murmured Drusilla.

  “What of it?” he growled stiffly.

  “Just as you say, Ramier.”

  “Why shouldn’t—Drusilla, why should we not get married?”

  “For the sake of science?”

  “If you care to look at it in that sensible way, yes. We have the same tastes—the same training—we could go on through life together devoting our combined intellects and ideals to great researches.”

  Drusilla took the suggestion and gave it a careful onceover. This combining-of-intellects part of it sounded not so good, but the proposition was at any rate a step in the right direction.

  “Well, at least we could consider ourselves engaged,” she said.

  And there the engagement rested.

  It was a clandestine and quite passionless affair; a union, as Ramier explained it, of kindred minds.

  Upon Drusilla’s advice, they decided to keep it a secret until after the great experiment should have taken place, lest her father get wind of their work and put a forceful and speedy end to it.

  Duveen was not only a man with good homely old-fashioned ideas about women and their place in the household, but he was proud of it. He took it for granted that his daughter was likewise. In fact, his confidence in Drusilla’s ability to take care of herself was almost too great to be flattering. Where it was she went gadding to in her car every day was no concern of his, providing she showed up promptly on time for eight o’clock dinner or produced some vigorous excuse for being late. However, if so much as an inkling were to come to him that his offspring was not alone dabbling but up to her neck in newfangled contraptions of science, an explosion would take place in comparison with which Ramier’s best efforts would seem languishing and faint. It appears that his opinion of Bramwell University, thanks to the impression imbedded in him by Drusilla, had been a cross between a young ladies’ cloistered seminary and a finishing school for the very finest arts.

  Drusilla was only too well aware of this mental kink in her father’s head and arrived at the workable decision that it would be better not to announce their engagement to her sire at all until after she and Ramier were married.

  Which brings us back again to the stand taken by Drusilla that she and none other be Ramier’s assistant for the great affair.

  Billy had originally been elected to the post, and had promised to fulfill his part, but Drusilla overruled him. I believe that tears again played an important role in her attack. She further pointed out, quite correctly too, that both her training and her natural aptitude were keener than Billy’s and that the experiment was much more likely to be a success if she, rather than he, were at the helm. Ramier murmured something quite magnificently grandiloquent about an “immolation of themselves upon the altar of science,” and capitulated.

  The hour for the experiment was set for nine o’clock of an August morning.

  There was nothing wrong with the hour, but the month—as the fatal sequence of events so shortly proved—was the most desperately unfortunate one that could have been chosen from the entire year.

  CHAPTER VII

  WHICH, AMONG OTHER CHORES, USHERS IN THE FATAL DAY

  The weather on the morning of the fatal day conformed perfectly to all the requirements one expects of nature at the birth of an event of world import.

  A dry hot wind puffed out of the north and drifted fitfully down the silent valley, searing still further with its heavy breath the leaves, shriveled by long drought, that drooped lifelessly from the trees. A film of haze misted the sky, and light from the risen sun filtered yellowly to earth as through a translucent, copper-colored bowl.

  In company with the dreary despair that lay like a blight upon nature were the words that kept tugging at Ramier’s heartstrings. “Is the price that I may have to pay too great for the problematic value of the result I may achieve?”

  To that, Ramier told himself firmly, there could be but one answer—no! Nothing is achieved without sacrifice, and even when Drusilla should come to take her stand at his side and do the part that was assigned to her—even if the curious, enigmatic look that had played of late in her eyes should grow stronger and more compelling—the answer must still be—no.

  With the moment for the experimenting but a few hours off, I must bring myself to recall and to record with exactitude each detail that occurred on that strange, terrifying morning as it was revealed to me by the participants in the affair.

  Both Ramier and Billy were much too excited to eat any breakfast. They went through the mechanics of preparing a good substantial one consisting of bacon, numerous eggs, fried potatoes, and coffee, but with the exception of coffee, the food remained untouched. They could not even bring themselves to make a pretense of eating, nor could they find much of anything to talk about. Plain technical discussions were unessential as their plans were completed and Ramier’s apparatus was in order.

  It is better for a proper understanding of the dreadful events that follow to have a fair mental picture of the interior arrangement of the laboratory.

  Ramier’s wireless set differed widely from the ordinary run of commercial or experimental types that one sees, so ubiquitously, upon the market. This can readily be understood when you take into consideration the size of atoms and molecules.

  Billy has supplied me with a few figures which he assures me are correct, and which he insists upon having introduced in order to give a more scientific flavor to this report—as a counter irritant, presumably, to the flavor already prevalent of fried potatoes and eggs.

  A man named Bertelot found that a hundred-thousand-billionth part of a grain of musk could be detected by its odor. And from that single sniff Mr. Bertelot came to the pr
ofound conclusion that a molecule of musk could not therefore, have a greater weight than that part.

  A second astounding example is offered by a lad called Zsigmondy—the calling is presumably done in the sign language—who examined a solution of colloidal gold in which the particles were too small to be seen even with the ultramicroscope. He succeeded in counting the number in a given volume by means of developing them with a solution of gold salt until they grew large enough to be detected. From this number, and from the known gold content of the original solution, he calculated the mean weight and diameter of the particles of colloidal gold and, for the diameter, obtained the figure 0.8 (i.e., 0.8 millionths of a millimeter). One direct result of his examination was that throughout his entire generation the violet completely lost its championship belt.

  With such shrinkingly modest and infinitesimal things to deal with, it can clearly be understood that Ramier’s path was far from being a smooth one.

  Having built up his elaborate table of resonances, Ramier constructed his wireless transmitter and receiver with a care so delicate that the finest instruments of precision are, he claims, clodhoppers in comparison.

  Billy especially urges me to bear in mind, while dazing the scientific world with these statistics, that the question was not one of power so much as it was one of resonance. Power, when appropriately applied to the human system, kills; whereas the power used by Ramier was so slight that it can scarcely be measured and can give no sensation at all when one is under its influence. On the other hand, the perfect state of resonance between-his transmitted waves and the various atoms that go to make up the human body permitted the waves to act upon either the nuclei or the electrons of those very atoms as Ramier saw fit.

  In appearance, Ramier’s apparatus resembled a battery of boxes fastened on adjustable stands. Each box contained a transmitter, whose antenna was a small, umbrella-shaped group of wires over which was held the appliance he used for rectifying and directing the propagated waves.

  The boxes could be focused, much in the same manner as if they were so many searchlights, upon the person who was to be the subject for the experiment, until his entire body came under the influence of their flux.

  As for the controls, both for wave-length adjustment and for intensity, they were all brought to a keyboard that was similar to the type used on a piano.

  The receiver that Ramier constructed, both for tuning-in matter and for tuning-in the voice of the subject while the subject was still invisible, formed a separate appliance entirely. It resembled more closely the conventional form of a modern wireless receiving unit.

  The laboratory was not large—about twenty by thirty feet—and what with the modest sleeping and living arrangements in use by Ramier and Billy, there was not much space left, after the apparatus had been accounted for, in which one could turn around. Certainly, one had to move about with a degree of care in order to prevent one’s self from knocking up against something or other and spoiling its adjustment.

  Inasmuch as so slight an amount of energy was required for the propagated waves, there was no necessity for any powerful source of supply. A bank of storage cells which he charged with a small generator run by a gasoline motor was all that Ramier used for his power.

  “I think, old man,” said Billy earnestly, “that you had better put yourself on the outside of a couple of those eggs. This may—I hate to say it, or think it—but this may be your last meal for some time to come, and there is no telling whether you’ll need food or not when you’re invisible.”

  This remark seemed to open up a whole vista of profound conjecture for Ramier. He relegated the eggs into their appropriate insignificance in the scheme of his affairs with a very superior gesture of his hand, and stared prophetically at hot trees through the windows.

  “There are so many things,” he said, “that are impossible to foretell; so many questions, the solutions of which might save me needless pain and menace could they be arrived at before they must actually be faced. There are really no preparations that I can make. It will be a plunge into a strange, unfathomed sea whose depths and whose intricate currents have never before been sounded or charted by man.”

  As you may have noticed, Ramier had quite a grand manner of speaking in those days. It seemed to come naturally to him and hence was almost unobjectionable, as it certainly would not have been had it been put on or forced.

  He continued with his outspoken meditations. “Perhaps I shall need food, perhaps not. The emotions, the senses, may no longer function within my invisible self. If they are composed of atomic matter, they may be distorted and rendered hideously abnormal with my physical self. If, on the other hand, and as I believe, they are composed of an ephemeral substance that is as ageless as life is brief and is not circumscribed by the common terminals we know as birth and death, then they may remain in a state of abeyance until I resume my natural form. I do not know.”

  “I do wish you wouldn’t talk like this. Here, eat an egg—it’s a swell egg.”

  “Egg?” Ramier’s inflection inferred the question—what is an egg?

  “Yes; it can’t do you any harm, and you might need it before you come back.” Billy paused for a frightened instant before adding, “You’re pretty certain that you will come back, aren’t you?”

  Ramier answered in a quiet voice. The words fell like slow raindrops pattering upon dead leaves. “If I find that the power of speech or of sight has gone from me, then I am lost forever. Only my eyes and my voice can direct Drusilla along the path she must follow to restore me to solidity. Whether I shall ever retain the power of movement—feel pain, or fear, or exaltation at the success of my experiment—”

  “If you’d quit this brooding and eat, even if it’s only a bite or two—one bite—one teeny weeny—”

  “Whether my transmuted body will be able to move about in obedience to my will, if I retain a will, or just hang suspended in its nebulous state in atmosphere, I do not know.”

  “I wish for your own sake you’d quit this. It’s the very worst thing possible for your nerves. And if the rest of your feelings go with you, your nerves are bound to go, too. Then there’s our nerves to be considered, if Drusilla and I are to follow your instructions about bringing you back again along the lines you have indicated and written out.”

  Ramier smiled. It was a badly bent smile and not worth very much. “The directions I have written out for you are purely problematic,” he said. “I may find, when in a state of invisibility, that my calculations are all wrong. If so, both you and Drusilla might fumble around for hours—days—for years without hitting upon the precise points of resonance required to restore me.”

  “We’d spend our whole lives at it if we had to.”

  “Well, if it should happen that I am unable to send you my voice, then you must go ahead along the route I have tentatively indicated. If that fails, then make efforts of your own accord—but carefully!” The bend in Ramier’s smile was straightened out by gloom. “For you are well conversant with the fact that the passing of a certain line no greater than the breadth of the finest hair will disrupt the equilibrium of my atoms, and you and Drusilla, as well as myself, will be shattered into—nothingness.”

  Of course, even Billy saw that there could be no eating of eggs after such a statement.

  “This is none of my business,” Billy said, in the manner of a person meaning just the opposite, “but I know how absent-minded you are about everything that doesn’t touch directly on the problem you are interested in at the moment. Have you done all that is necessary in order to take care of any eventualities if—if the experiment is a failure?”

  “You mean if it were to kill me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have,” said Ramier. “My affairs are in order, and my papers are in the hands of my attorneys—Jones, Wilkins & Miner, of New York. In fact, they have a document that they are to open this evening if they don’t hear from me by wire. It will advise them what to do.”

&
nbsp; “But couldn’t Drusilla or I advise them?”

  “You couldn’t be here, either, to do so.”

  Billy frankly shuddered. “I keep forgetting that,” he said. “Well, I have done much the same thing, too. There wasn’t so much that really required attention—just a few odds and ends. I wonder about Drusilla. I hope she hasn’t gone and gotten herself worked up into a state about last wills and testaments and that sort of thing. She’s taking this whole business pretty well, don’t you think?”

  “She has the true nerve and the dispassionate lack of emotion of a scientist.”

  Billy looked at Ramier curiously. “Has it ever occurred to you,” he asked, “that all of that might be just a pose; that beneath it she is just a girl—like all other girls?”

  “Not for a minute. You do not understand Drusilla at all. Our engagement is one of the mind, one of mutual tastes and habits, rather than one of emotion. That is all. Our life together shall be as ordered, as unruffled as one of our own experiments. There will be none of the humdrum annoyances that spring from so-called ‘love matches’ to worry us.”

  “Oh,” said Billy, with reservations.

  They sank into silence, staring moodily at nothing across the cooling platter of bacon and fried eggs. Warm puffs of the sultry wind came to them through the opened windows. A clock struck the hour of eight.

  “Well,” said Drusilla, placing a small suitcase on the floor, and pressing back against the door through which she had just drifted with a portion of the hot breeze, “we seem to have exactly one hour left.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  WHEREUPON THE CLOCK, AS A PRELUDE TO TERROR, STRIKES NINE

  “Just what is that suitcase for?” asked Billy, suspecting the worst.

  “I may have to stay here,” answered Drusilla calmly.

  “But you can’t do that,” insisted Billy, who owns an intensely conventional soul.

  “Why not? I left instructions with Anna to look me up here if I’m not home by nine o’clock tonight. I can trust her to say nothing to anyone. She has been with me since I was born. Why for all we know, I may have to stay here a week.”