by Rufus King
There was a morbid relief in the flashing thought that the bodies never could be found no matter how minute the search, and a confused impression gleaned from inaccurate readings of several murder trials that no corpse was complete without its delicti, or vice versa.
But the evidence of the parked cars was indisputably damaging.
Beyond a blanket denial of the whole affair, there was no story he could tell but the true one, and if he did tell the true one, and even if Ramier were to regain consciousness and back him up, they would both be locked in a madhouse for life.
He picked up a monkey wrench and clutched it as a possible reserve should no neater way out occur.
There was Drusilla’s red hat.
It lay where Duveen had tossed it upon a table. Billy took it and, going to one of the supply lockers, hid it beneath some blankets.
There was another knock upon the door.
There was still no impatience in the knock, but it was somehow disagreeably inexorable. It was the sort of a knock, Billy felt, that would be repeated again and again—and again, until he had opened the door. He slowly turned the knob and pulled the door toward him.
A woman stood facing him on the threshold.
“Hot,” she said, “isn’t it?”
She was a plump elderly woman, quietly dressed in dark cloth, and with a bonnet on her head.
“I had a time getting here,” the woman continued, brushing politely past Billy and entering the room. “Quite a time. A hard and a hot time. Where, please, will I find Miss. Drusilla?”
Billy shut the door and leaned against it, both for moral courage, and support.
“I am Anna, her maid,” the woman went on quietly. “And I suppose you are one of the two young gentlemen she has told me about?”
Billy nodded dumbly. He was only too indeed one of the two young gentlemen whom Drusilla had told her about.
“Well,” continued Anna, “she said I was to meet her here this evening if she didn’t come home by eight or nine o’clock. I drove myself over—I have a little car of my own, you know, sir—and was glad enough to find her own car standing with another at the start of the path. My lights are not very good, and I am afraid I damaged the other car some, but as I could not disconnect my own car from its gasoline tank, I could not tell how much.”
A forceful impact of air seemed to press about her. It was confined to the general region of her neck, and was very strange, as there was no wind, and no draught of any nature.
“Now where shall I find her, please?” concluded Anna.
Anna looked around. Her eyes, which possessed the prettiness one sometimes finds in those of certain superior cows, came in line with Ramier stretched out flat on his cot. She gave a slight start and quickly stilled a request that heaven, in the shock which the sight of the motionless body gave her, should help her.
Billy’s mind continued to spin. Foremost in it stood a picture of an ever-increasing line of parked automobiles. The group at the entrance to the valley now numbered three. He wondered how many more would be added before the string was complete. Their presence was a menace and, he decided, he must get rid of them.
But first he must get rid of Anna.
His head became spinnier and spinnier. If he had felt quite sure of his ground, he would have led her gallantly to the fatal spot from which he had witnessed Duveen disappear, and then, having pressed the required keys, would have dissolved her, too.
Explain the situation to her, he could not. Let her go away, he could not. Kill her, no matter how suggestively the monkey wrench itched as it lay still clenched in the palm of his hand, he would not. There was nothing left for him to do except to keep her as a prisoner until Ramier recovered and straightened out the snarl.
He tossed the monkey wrench on to a bench, locked the door, and put the key in his pocket.
This ominous act, in conjunction with the silence and strangeness of the whole place, struck Anna in a most unfavorable light. Thanks to Hollywood, and her local Bijou Palace of Mobile Art, she was not unversed in the things that happen to the Claudettes and the Dorine-von-Fichus of this wicked old world when they get trapped by villains in lonely cabins in the mountains and have the door locked on them. It never made any appreciable difference how personable or smooth the villain might be—in fact, the smoother the villainer. Dynamite, thoughtfully approached by a fuse stuck through a lighted candle with inches marked off on it to designate the passing hours, was generally the least of their worries. She nervously began to wonder whether such dirty doings also happened to Annas.
Anna was a stolid soul and had to travel a considerable distance before she was able to overtake her mind, whenever she wanted to make it up. Dimly, at the end of her present pursuit of it, awaited a scream; a rousing, full-blooded, curdling scream. It was going to be a beauty when she reached it.
Her steady eye continued its detailed passage around the dim-lit room, and her mind, having docketed the corpselike figure of Ramier stretched motionless on his cot, and the locking of the door with the subsequent significant placing of the key in the smooth villain’s pocket, next proceeded to docket the suitcase which Drusilla had brought with her that morning, and which rested on the floor by the door just beneath a small square table. The sight of the suitcase hastened Anna’s deliberate journey toward the scream. It was alarmingly evident that foul play—which encompassed for her a high diversity of exciting and sinister things, ranging anywhere from buzz saws to railroad tracks and the better quality cyanides—had already been done, and that she would have to scream for two.
Billy was quite naturally unaware of what was going on so slowly but so surely in their latest guest’s head. He was much too busy with the problem of what he was going to do with her to worry about what she was busy doing to herself.
He hoped that it wouldn’t be necessary to bind her, for, viewed impartially, she didn’t present a particularly favorable subject for binding. Her stolidity was one of dormant strength rather than of fattish inertia, and ordinary cord, of which there was a modest supply, seemed hopelessly futile. Now some rope or some good honest bale wire… On the other hand, she did seem a quiet and reasonable enough sort of body. How had he best approach the subject and inform her that she was a prisoner?
Her silence and sudden cessation from any further questioning as to the whereabouts of Drusilla pointed toward a refreshing and bovine sort of either dumbness or resignation. Perhaps if he simply told her in a kindly fashion to sit down in a chair and stay put until he advised her that she could get up again, the issue would be solved.
It was at this point that Anna arrived at her scream. “Good God!” said Billy, after she had passed it.
“I will do it again,” said Anna calmly, “if you do not produce my Miss Drusilla on the spot. Neither you, nor your dynamite, nor your fuses can compel me to keep quiet.”
“My—what?” said Billy, still very much shaken.
“I say, young man, that neither your dynamite, nor your fuses, nor”—she went the whole hog for his better comprehension—“your candle marked off in inches can compel me to keep quiet, let the buzz saw come as may.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Billy, pouncing upon the situation and getting it in hand, “but if you make another noise like that last one, I shall have to gag you.”
Nothing daunted, Anna immediately gathered her resources to put his threat to the test. Billy caught her neatly before she had time to get comfortably into full swing, or cry, as it were, and wrapped a towel around her head.
That, of course, accounted for Anna’s head, which one can presume weighed several pounds. But it did not account by any manner of means for the pounds and pounds that composed the rest of her. Each one of these leftovers got into instant and violent action.
From the point when the towel pressed about her face, the situation lost, for Anna, its semblance to any drama of the silver screen. Even to her own credulous eyes the struggles she had so fr
equently witnessed on the part of the heroine to prevent the villain from binding her up had always seemed a bit academic in nature.
She had more than once caused considerable annoyance to neighboring, as well as to not-so-neighboring patrons by offering advice to the struggling heroine in a piercingly hissing voice. And the tactics she had thus been accustomed to propose were the ones which she now, with Billy as an objective for them, put into effect.
“Ouch!” yelled Billy, as a clutching hand, with nails attached, earnestly attempted to separate several muscles and a ligament or two from the calf of his leg. “Let go!”
“Wook!” said Anna, from within the towel.
It proved a battle cry for serious action.
Billy had managed, somehow, to get the towel knotted in back of her neck at a sacrifice of one lock of his hair and several distressing bruises. This placed Anna at a fatal disadvantage, for while her hands were raised to loosen the knot, Billy slipped the heavy cord from his dressing gown and bound them tight. Setting her into a chair and binding her legs with the cord from Ramier’s bathrobe was then, in view of what had just passed, a comparatively simple little thing to do.
Then Billy turned hopefully to Ramier. If anything could have wakened the sleeper, it certainly should have been Anna’s scream and the brief rumpus which followed it. But Ramier’s eyes were closed.
Nor did he open them for seven hours.
CHAPTER XIII
OUR HERO RECOVERS HIS SANITY JUST IN TIME ALMOST TO LOSE IT AGAIN
As Billy expresses it, that was some night.
It is an everlasting monument to his powers of persuasiveness that before the first few hours were over he had removed the bonds from Anna and had won her completely over to his side.
He had told her in plain unvarnished language exactly what had happened, not only to Drusilla, but to Duveen. To his profound astonishment, she had believed him.
One cannot tell whether this facile aptitude for belief was due to that schooling of Anna’s at the great university of the silver screen, or whether it was due to an innate readiness in her blood—her people came originally from Lithuania—for believing anything that verged on the mystical and strange. But whatever it was due to, the agreeable fact remained that she thoroughly believed in ghosts and had been easily persuaded that in some occult rather than in any scientific fashion her beloved Miss Duveen and her not-so-beloved but nevertheless-respected Mr. Duveen had been changed into phantoms, and that phantoms they would remain until the half-dead gentleman on the cot could be made well again and set upright upon his feet.
The wretched, weary hours of the long-drawn night produced no further interruptions or visitors from the outside world.
Billy started for the mouth of the valley during the first early hours of the dawn. He wanted to get rid of the parked cars. The peculiar oppressiveness of the close air, the copper haziness that persisted in the feverish, dawning sky, and the continued silence (on the part of the insects struck him afresh. Was it, though, silence so much as it was—absence? But he was much too occupied with worrying about Ramier and Drusilla and Duveen to spend any time in puzzling over mysteries arranged for his bedevilment by nature. That it was hot, he knew—desperately hot. Even after a night of murky shade, the dirt beneath his feet was parched and dry, and seemed to burn him through the soles of his light tennis shoes.
He found the three cars huddled up together in the first muffled rays from the hidden sun.
The front bumper of Duveen’s car was locked with the rear bumper of Drusilla’s roadster. Duveen’s car had no rear bumper and the spare disk and tire which normally would have been there had been left with the man at the filling station of the small mountain hamlet for the insertion of a new tube.
This had offered the forward bumper of Anna’s car a clear field in which to do whatever it deemed fit to Duveen’s gas tank. A large hole ripped in the bottom of it convinced Billy that it was empty.
He started the motor of Anna’s car and put the gears into low. The rear wheels churned placidly in sand. He released the emergency brake and found that that helped the wheels to churn both faster and deeper.
Drusilla and Duveen had taken the keys to their transmission, locks with them; wherever it was, Billy thought savagely, that that was. Sweat poured down him in streams as he pulled and lifted and pushed.
Not a budge could he get out of any of the three.
He concentrated on Anna’s car and finally managed, by using a sapling as a lever and a few loose rocks for a bed, to back it up.
He then succeeded, by going in for a series of private miracles, in loosing the other two cars from their determined embrace and in heading them toward the roadside brush. He eventually, using Anna’s car as a battering ram, pushed them deeply into it and decided that they were competently concealed. He then backed the battering ram itself into the brush and left it headed toward the road for any eventuality which might require its future use.
He took a plunge in one of the stream’s deeper pools and, donning his worries again with his clothes, headed back for the shack.
It was undoubtedly due to Anna’s care and sensible ministrations that Ramier pulled through. When he finally did open his eyes, he was still very weak, and in that dubious condition known as being far from well.
Billy had returned before Ramier came to, and the first thing that Ramier asked for, when he stared in bewilderment upon the hot dawn, was Drusilla.
Billy told him.
The seven hours of unconsciousness had given Ramier a sorely needed physical and mental rest. He was able, in consequence, to endure, without suffering a relapse, the blow which reawakened memory gave to his heart. It was a memory as poignant and as full of heartache as if it were for a loved one just dead.
He insisted upon getting up at once. He drank a large bowl of broth that Anna made from a mysterious combination of canned goods, and declared that he felt as well and as strong as ever. Naturally this was not true, but so important did they consider immediate activity on his part to be, that they pretended to believe it and to agree with him.
A sickening fear of what might have happened to Drusilla and to Duveen during the past hours oppressed him, and an even more sickening fear of what might be happening to them now.
He went to the wireless and inspected each part of it thoroughly. The presence of Anna had been explained to him and, after a brief word of thanks for her care, Ramier ignored her completely. Nor did he pay any further attention to Billy, who stood near by, with Anna, and gravely watched him.
Ramier intended at once to make a strong effort to tune-in Drusilla’s voice. The reason for doing so was that she could then constantly warn and advise him during the delicate and most dangerous operation of tuning-in her own and her father’s substance.
He switched on the batteries of the receiving set and plugged in the headphones. Then his fingers moved decisively for the dials.
The eyes of both Billy and Anna grew increasingly tenser and rounder as he twisted the knobs this way and that. As for Ramier, his face remained as expressionless as a mask. His lips were drawn in a tight, straight line, and a hard crease slashed downward between his eyebrows.
For three hours Ramier sat motionless, except for a ceaseless, delicate turning of the dials.
The sun swept upward and across the sky, beating down upon earth with its pitiless heat. Only once did Ramier speak, and that was to ask briefly for a glass of water. Billy filled one and gave it to him. Ramier drank it in great hurried gulps, and turned back at once to his dials.
The sun rode torridly into the zenith, and the stifle of high noon filled the laboratory until it became an all but intolerable furnace.
One o’clock came and passed.
At twenty-seven minutes past one, Ramier gave a convulsive start and the blood rushed swiftly into his face.
Billy could not repress an exclamation, which caused Ramier to raise a compelling hand for silence.
With infinite caution
his fingers moved the dials—so slightly—so imperceptibly—that the motion could scarcely be noted with the eye.
An immeasurable stillness muffled the room, and out of this stillness came Ramier’s voice, speaking not to Anna or to Billy, but to someone whom they could not see!
“Not clear,” said Ramier. “I cannot hear you well. Your voice is still not clear.”
For six minutes more not a thing was said.
For six interminable minutes Ramier did nothing beyond moving, by means of an ultra-vernier attachment, the dial of the primary condenser of the receiver one one-hundredth millimeter to the left.
“Now,” he said, almost with a sob, “the voice is plain.” The relief felt by Ramier was almost more than he could bear. He gripped the edge of the table with tight fingers in order to steady himself.
It was evident to Billy that the “voice” continued to talk, for a bewildered, peculiar look crept over Ramier’s face, and he suddenly made the following astonishing remark:
“If you are Duveen who is talking to me, why don’t you speak in English?”
Billy could stand the suspense no longer. He implored Ramier to explain instantly what was going on.
“I hear a voice talking,” Ramier told him. “It is a man’s voice. It must be Duveen. Must be!” The bewildered, harassed look deepened on Ramier’s face as he added in a whisper, “but he isn’t talking English. He is talking archaic Greek!”
CHAPTER XIV
THE WEIRDEST, WILDEST VOICE MAN EVER HEARD
I think there is no greater proof of the keenness and true control that Ramier had over his mind than the fact that he was so instantly able to recognize the language being employed by the “voice” as being archaic Greek.
Even if he had been fairly sure that it was mere modern Greek, I should have marveled but to have spotted it at once with such absolute precision for the archaic variety, everlastingly dumfounds me.
Ramier had spent considerable time while at Bramwell University in acquiring a thorough foundation in and familiarity with the classics. This is quite understandable, as he naturally felt a keen interest in the different conceptions of science that were held by the early philosophers. Democritus was one who particularly interested him, owing to Democritus’s views upon atoms and cosmology, which were—at least in part—adopted from the doctrines of Leucippus.