by Rufus King
And she was gone.
There was a bare possibility that she might have concealed herself in the shrubbery that lined the path as he had approached. A momentary vision of wildcats was peremptorily dismissed. And if she had concealed herself as he had passed, she might even then be speeding home in her roadster, providing—his mental attitude toward his daughter became a bit less tender—she could first sufficiently disentangle it from his own car to make it a separate unit again, could turn it around in a space precisely wide enough to permit of passage in a straight line, and could then push his car out of the way to clear the road, or else leap over it.
The percentage of probability that he granted any one of these herculean possibilities was slender indeed, for there was again, her hat. It remained as a mute witness to her continued presence. Why should she have left it? She wasn’t in the habit of leaving her hats.
And as a definitely conclusive argument there were the suspicious refusals on the part of Billy to let him in. They unshakably confirmed his opinion that Drusilla was concealed somewhere in the shack.
He decided that there must be some very obscure part that he had overlooked—a small cellar, say, with a trapdoor, that joined so closely with the floor boards that it would pass unnoticed. He had read of such architectural arrangements frequently; in fact, the type of novels he did read were rarely without one. Sometimes the trapdoor would be under a rug. At others, it would be beneath a table or a cot. He left no remembrance unplumbed and included the walls and the ceiling, too. If it were the ceiling, there would be red drops. It was innocent, he examined it hastily with his eye, of red drops.
He would begin with the floor. There was nothing to do but to move each piece of furniture and all of the crazy mechanical contraptions that littered it until he had found the trap.
He took the key from his pocket and contemptuously unlocked the door. He threw it wide open in the hope that the breeze, hot as it was, would cool off some fraction of the stifling heat.
“Going?” asked Ramier, with relief.
Duveen eyed him coldly. “No,” he said, “I am not. I tell you flat, young man, that I don’t put a foot outside of this shack until I have moved every stick of the fiddle-de-riddles you’ve got lumbering it up and have found the trapdoor to the cellar where you’ve hidden my daughter.”
“You can’t!” said Ramier, shocked. “You must touch nothing at all.”
The thought of having Duveen’s clumsy hands pawing over his delicate apparatus gave Ramier a sharp stab of fear. Even under normal conditions, such a mauling would be detrimental, but in the immediate tense situation, when Drusilla’s safety, when the lives of all of them were hanging upon the slenderest threads of adjustment, any milling about among his apparatus, a breakage of the least of its delicate parts, might prove fatal.
Duveen laughed unpleasantly. “Oh, can’t I?” he muttered, opening his fingers and heading at once for the first battery of transmitters with the full intention of brushing them vigorously from his path.
Ramier jumped for him and pinned him firmly by the lapels of his coat. Duveen, who had never before experienced such treatment, was momentarily shaken and thoroughly astonished by the attack. Any attacks, in the past, had invariably been launched by him, and his objectives had always stood bowed and trembling before their blasts like the proverbial reeds. But this… He stared at Ramier with genuine alarm in his important-looking eyes.
“Touch nothing!” Ramier was saying fiercely. “Touch nothing at all! Go away—go away!”
Duveen decided that Ramier was indubitably mad. He wondered whether he would have to use force to subdue him. Honesty made him change the question to “could” he use force if he had to subdue him. He thought for a fleeting second of physical training camps for elderly gentlemen, and wondered why he had never taken any interest in them. He promised himself an absorbing one in the future. Should there be any future…
The pains in Ramier’s head clawed maddeningly, and the stifle of the hot close air seemed to interfere with his breathing. He looked almost savagely at Duveen, whose brief plunge at rampage had carried him into the midst of the battery of transmitters—to the precise spot where Drusilla had been standing when she had disappeared…had disappeared…disappeared…
Another plunge on the part of Duveen, in any direction, would ruin the apparatus. If he could only be made to stand still—for one moment…
“Have a cigar,” said Ramier, pulling one from his pocket.
Duveen took the cigar mechanically and, before he knew just what he was doing, had bitten off its end. Then he began to gather himself for a prompt attack upon Ramier. He felt that Ramier must be immediately subdued and then strapped in a strait-jacket. He did not know just what the mechanics of a strait-jacket were, nor did he bother about where he might, so instantly, procure one. Being strapped in a strait-jacket was the universally accepted solution for situations similar to the one on hand, and Duveen’s entire success in life had been built on the simple plan of never sidestepping accepted solutions.
But, Duveen reflected, Ramier was strong. He automatically struck a match to light his cigar, and eyed the maniac covertly. He noted that Ramier was fiddling with something or other that looked like a switch.
Ramier was. He had switched on the generator of the transmitters. Billy bleached still further as his ears caught the thin, sweet hum of the generator’s tune, and as an inkling of just what Ramier proposed to do to Duveen came home to him. He became transfixed and incapable of speech or motion. He stared at Duveen as if Duveen were a rabbit and Ramier had become an intelligent snake with strange hypnotic powers.
Duveen started to raise the lighted match slowly toward the cigar.
Ramier’s hand, with sinisterly extended fingers, moved imperceptibly toward the keyboard of the transmitters.
Duveen’s hand, holding the lighted match, moved very slowly nearer and nearer to his mouth.
Ramier’s hand all but touched the keys of the control board.
Duveen’s hand all but touched the flame to the tip of the cigar.
And Ramier’s hand pressed down.
Duveen’s body began to shimmer with a weird, strange translucence. The black, straight lines of the supports for the battery of transmitters appeared through him. He lingered infinitesimally as a frail mist. The lighted tip of the match and the important-looking Duveen eyes melted last.
Duveen was gone.
CHAPTER XII
OUR HERO, IN KEEPING WITH THE MODERN TREND, GOES MAD
Billy tells me that the hours immediately following Duveen’s melting are the worst ones that he has ever spent in his life. I can well believe it, for it isn’t every day that one is afforded the shock of beholding a corpulent and energetic human being dissolve before one’s eyes into a mist, or whatever substance it was that Ramier had dissolved Drusilla and her father into.
In strict reality, up to the exit of Duveen, Billy had only half believed that Drusilla had been made invisible. In fact, until this visual proof was offered him, he hadn’t really believed in Ramier’s hypothesis and invention at all.
Billy felt none of the exalted satisfaction and sense of honor that one eminent scientist might be supposed to feel when present at the successful culmination of a still more eminent colleague’s opus of a lifetime—if scientists class their ultimate achievements as opuses. On the other hand, he did feel a good deal like a small boy who has been monkeying about with his father’s pet shotgun and has managed, by pulling the trigger, to knock the parlor what-not for a goal.
“Let’s quit,” he said to Ramier, as articulately as the curious activity of his teeth and the quaking in the bottom of his stomach would permit. “Call it a day, old s-s-scout, and get them back.”
“Endless—endless,” Ramier was muttering loosely. “There are endless things to think of. My problem is doubled. There is now not only my little Drusilla to bring back, but her big father as well.”
As it not infrequently happens wit
h people who are ashamed of their own nervousness, Billy began to lose his temper. “I’m sure it’s your own fault,” he said, “about Duveen. What in the fair name of reason, if there’s such a thing left, made you do it? It’s a cinch he never could have found Drusilla, and that’s all we wanted. What if he did yell his head off about her little red hat—her poor red little hat—”
They were both of them as near to the verge of tears as two healthily strong young men might comfortably be supposed to approach.
“I wish you’d go to hell,” said Ramier absently. “You saw the way Duveen was plunging around here like a mad bull. If he had knocked even so much as one of those transmitters down it would have taken months to reproduce it, even if we ever could do so exactly. Months—and Drusilla—if ever—”
Billy read in Ramier’s eyes an insufferable pain and a great regret. Billy knew then, without a doubt, that Ramier loved Drusilla and, what was of greater importance, that Ramier himself knew that he loved Drusilla. His temper evaporated as swiftly as, so it seemed, did a Duveen.
“In that case,” he said, “when you do bring them back, you’d better arrange to solidify Drusilla first. You saw the temper her father was in even before you started monkeying around with his atoms, and heaven alone knows what he’ll be like when he comes out. He probably won’t be responsible for his actions and will want to smash everything in sight. Is there any way you can fix it?”
“We will simply tell her,” said Ramier.
“Tell her? How?”
“By talking to her,” said Ramier peevishly. He was already beginning to get mentally involved among the higher and, fortunately, rarer branches of mathematics while constructing a tentative outline of his plan for restoring the two wraiths.
“Do you mean to tell me,” said Billy, “that she can hear what we’re saying now?”
“If my theory is correct—and it has been so far—she can.”
“And Duveen, too?”
“Naturally.”
Billy quickly swallowed a “God help us.”
“Is there any way,” he whispered; “when you do bring Duveen back, of putting him together again inside of a cage? We could fix the lock so that he could pick it, say, in ten minutes or so, and by then we would—”
“This is not a time,” said Ramier heatedly, and with a manner in keeping with the curious glitter in his eye, “for nonsense. And don’t whisper like that. They can overhear whispering just as well as they can when you speak in a clear voice.”
“But I’ve never been more serious in my life,” insisted Billy. “If you don’t like the idea of putting your future father-in-law in a cage, we can at least arrange some obstructions—something like a hurdle race—tables and things he’ll have to jump over before he can start running after us.”
“I do wish you would stop talking and go away. Every sound that I hear increases this damnable pain.”
“Pain?”
“Nothing serious—just a normal reaction from my excited nerves.”
“Don’t you think if you were to rest for a little while it would help you?” Billy suggested. “Lie down for about ten minutes and absolutely relax. I’ll promise to wake you up, and then you can tackle this business with a clear head.”
Ramier smiled. “You don’t really think I could rest, do you?”
“No,” admitted Billy, “I don’t.”
“There can be no sleep until I have brought them back.”
“For either of us.”
“No sleep—no peace—no rest…”
Ramier walked quite steadily over to a wash basin and filled it with water that was ice cold from the falls. The shock that the chilled water gave him was the final straw, or rather drop, that his nervous system needed to make it go on a strike.
Billy has never been able to describe very accurately the feeling of downright horror that gripped him when Ramier turned from the basin and, his face and hands still glistening with water, walked stiltedly toward him. Ramier took six or seven mechanical steps in silence, and then began to laugh. It was a rusty, unaccustomed laugh that gathered in power and swung shortly into what Billy describes as the most awful laughing shrieks that he had ever heard in his life.
Then Ramier collapsed.
It is a good thing that he did, too, for Billy would never have been strong enough to manage him if he had grown violent. He just slumped to the floor in a heap and lay still. The scene became a tableau without any vivant in it at all. Nothing moved but the indolent hands of the clock. Nothing stirred beyond some sultry puffs of the torrid breeze. All life hung limply in abeyance.
Then Billy half lifted and half dragged Ramier to a cot and tumbled him into it.
Following the first miserable moment of utter hopelessness, Billy managed to find his head and keep it during the bleak hours that trailed like successive nightmares on the heels of Ramier’s collapse.
There was a well-stocked medicine chest in the laboratory. It contained, as well as medicines, a simply written and judicious pamphlet to be used as a guide in selecting proper remedies for such emergencies as might occur.
I will not attempt to describe the various concoctions that Billy prepared and administered to Ramier. Whether his hand was in the right place when he chose the bottle, I do not know, but I do know that his heart was. And if there is anything in the saying that one finds efficacy in love and faith, then there was benefit and not harm in the potions of Billy’s choice.
His dilemma was an all but inconceivable one, for even if it were possible to find a doctor within reach of a good many miles, which it was not, the situation was far too involved to permit of bringing in any help from outside.
A doctor, were one found, might order Ramier to stay in bed for months, might decide that he had caught some contagious disease and insist upon isolating him, might—Billy was feeling miserable enough to believe anything about doctors—kill him.
Then what would happen to Drusilla and Duveen?
Would they stay in their invisible state for millions of years? Forever? Or would they slowly dissolve still further; suffer tortures—hunger—thirst—
Billy tried not to think very earnestly along such lines.
No, no matter how sick Ramier was, the primary responsibility was too great. Billy dared not risk calling in any help from outside. He would do his best, his very best, and Ramier would have to take whatever chance that best might offer him.
The long weary day passed hotly to its close. A smothered sun ended its tiresome journey beneath the lip of the copper sky. And still Ramier did not open his eyes.
Often, throughout the futile hours, Billy had debated the advisability of himself going to work on the wireless set and attempting to achieve some results. And they would very probably turn out to be, he thought wisely, quite some results. Beyond shutting off the generator of the transmitters, he did nothing. He dreaded any promiscuous handling of the controls. Ramier’s hand, and Ramier’s hand alone could do the trick. So dose after dose of this and of that he fed to Ramier, but without effect.
The breeze died completely with sunset.
Everything in nature seemed dead. For a long while Billy had the uncomfortable knowledge that he missed something, some sound, some noise to which his ears—through the months of their stay in the mountains—had grown attuned. Then he knew: the insects were still. That endless, brilliant whirring of the summer’s insect life had stopped, and he wondered why. For some reason the thought terrified him more than all else that had occurred.
Why were the insects still?
What was it they knew that he did not know?
Danger?
As he mixed a concoction for himself as well as one for Ramier, he began to wish someone would have the goodness to ask him another.
A hot, torrid night drifted in at the dead day’s heels, and still no breeze cooled the air. Billy lighted a single lamp and shaded its direct brightness from Ramier’s cot. Ramier’s breathing was quiet and more natural, but he had no
t opened his yes. Nor could Billy make him open his eyes. He seemed sunk in a lethargy from which he could not be aroused.
Billy was, naturally enough, as nervous as a cat. He sat motionless in a chair placed as near to Ramier’s cot as he could get it. The room was cluttered with shadows; with shadows that did not move.
Somewhere in that room were Drusilla and her father, watching him, perhaps touching him. And he could not see them or feel them. He had a pretty definite idea that a night spent in such meditations was going to drive him insane.
At half-past nine there came an interruption. It was a single, quiet, passionless knock upon the door. It would be, he imagined, a servant from Duveen’s home who had traced Duveen’s car and had found it standing at the entrance to the valley. What would he tell the man? What could he tell the man?
Nothing.
There was nothing he could tell. There was nothing he could do but to open the door, permit the man to satisfy his curiosity that Duveen was not inside, and then tell him to go away. He could explain that Ramier was asleep and not to be disturbed. As for an explanation of why Duveen’s and Drusilla’s cars were parked at the entrance to the valley, the man would have to supply one for himself.
But suppose the man should—and undoubtedly would—report the facts in the case to the state troopers? It was the reasonable thing for the man to do, and could be attended to quickly by telephone. The result would be an exhaustive questioning on the part of the troopers, and an equally exhaustive search. And he would be the butt of it all, for heaven knew when Ramier might be able to talk again. They might even consider Ramier as a ready example of what he had done to Drusilla and Duveen—before he had disposed of the bodies. It went without saying that each bit of the delicate apparatus would be irreparably ruined while they diligently searched for the aforementioned bodies.