The Doomsday Men

by J. B. Priestley

  “I don’t blame you,” said Malcolm. “But where does this other brother, John—Father John or whatever he is—come in?”

  “He doesn’t, so far as I know. I don’t care about him. Probably he’s crazy. These families nearly always produce at least one crazy one, and I doubt if the other two are strictly sane.”

  “That might possibly explain Andrea—the girl, y’know.”

  Hooker struggled with a yawn. “Don’t ask me. Nothing explains girls to me. I gave that up years ago, when I stopped dating ’em. What time is it? Must be late.”

  Malcolm looked at his watch. “Nearly eleven. Look here, this is absurd. Do you realise, Hooker, how long that chap’s been gone for his whisky? Why, it couldn’t have been much after nine when he went, and he said he’d be back in half a minute.”

  The other did not reflect the alarm in Malcolm’s tone. “Decided to finish the Scotch himself, I guess. I’ll bet he’s snoring now.”

  But Malcolm was still uneasy. “He seemed to me too keen on this mad business—with his talk about murder and God knows what—just to do that. We’d better go and see if he’s all right, Hooker. Number Twenty-two, he said. It’s on this floor somewhere. Come on.”

  Hooker yawned again, pointing out afterwards that he had been driving since early morning, but agreed to go along. They went down the corridor, and, turning a corner, came to Twenty-two. The door was open, and the lights were on inside the room. An elderly chambermaid was in there, tidying up. A half-empty bottle of Scotch stood on the table, and by its side was a pipe, the one that Edlin had been smoking when he left them. There was also a decided reek of whisky. But there was no sign of Edlin, no sign even of his baggage. After peering in for a moment or two, Malcolm and Hooker stared at one another. The chambermaid went on grumpily with her work, taking no notice of them.

  “Could you please tell us where the gentleman is who had this room?” asked Malcolm.

  “No, I couldn’t.” The chambermaid sounded as cross as she looked. “He’s gone, that’s all I know.”

  “Gone where?”

  “I wasn’t told that. All I was told was to come up and do the room out. You’d better ask at the desk.”

  “Mr. Edlin was in this room, wasn’t he?”

  “Don’t know the name,” she snapped, as if she strongly disapproved of everything connected with this business. “You’ll have to ask at the desk. Whoever he was, he seems to have been powerful fond of liquor. Place stinks of liquor.”

  They withdrew slowly, feeling somewhat defeated as well as mystified. On their way downstairs, Hooker gave it as his opinion that Edlin, a little shaky after his escape, must have taken a few enormous swigs of whisky, and then, suddenly drunk, must have forgotten all about returning to their room and have gone reeling out of the hotel. Malcolm felt that there was more in it than that, though he was not prepared even to guess at what had happened.

  The reception clerk was more communicative than the chambermaid, though he spoke with a certain reserve. Yes, Mr. Edlin of Twenty-two had left about an hour ago.

  “But did he say why he was going?” asked Malcolm.

  No, he hadn’t said anything.

  Malcolm looked questioningly at Hooker, who was frowning now. Then they both looked again at the young clerk, who showed some faint signs of embarrassment.

  “We can’t make this out,” Hooker told him. “Mr. Edlin was talking to us, about two hours ago, went to his room, saying he’d be back in a minute, and we haven’t seen him since.”

  The clerk leaned forward a little and became confidential. “He oughtn’t to have been out, you see. And the doctor and an attendant came for him. Good job they did too, because he’d got himself pretty bad even in that short time. Practically passed out. But they got him away all right.”

  It was left to Hooker to ask the questions. Malcolm felt that everything had now escaped any kind of control. His own lunacy had brought him here, and he had wandered into an ever-enlarging and more spectacular lunacy.

  “One of these sanatoriums for fellows who can’t quit the liquor,” the clerk explained. “The doctor didn’t say much, but I knew that was it. They came for him from Riverside or somewhere down there. Pretty bad case, I reckon. He’d only just checked in, but when they carried him out, I could smell the whisky from here. He’d had plenty, believe me. And I don’t mind telling you gentlemen I wasn’t sorry to see him go.”

  After a struggle, Malcolm now found his voice. “Did you know this doctor?”

  “No, sir. Stranger to me. From Riverside—or Pasadena, I forget which. Johnson, the name was. A tall dark man with a terrible squint.”

  Malcolm seemed to have heard just recently of a tall dark man with a terrible squint, but could not remember in what connection it was. At the moment he felt all at sea. No sense in any of this.

  “Thanks,” said Hooker, rather dryly.

  “You bet!” replied the clerk, beaming, and turned away.

  Without a word, Malcolm and Hooker moved across the little lobby and went outside, where a locomotive, which looked to Malcolm of an incredible size, was ringing its warning bell. Another train, away in the distance, was giving that long mournful hoot that seems to make the night spaces of America even vaster than they actually are. Away across the gleaming railroad tracks the coloured lights of Barstow’s main street shone bravely, very small in the immensity of the night. Malcolm felt a long way from home; not only bewildered but lost.

  “Well,” he asked, at length, “what do you make of it?”

  “You’ve got to take one line or the other,” replied Hooker, slowly. “Either he’s one of these crazy drunks, and he never had a brother who was murdered and there isn’t a Brotherhood of the Judgment and a Father John and all the rest of it—or——”

  “He was telling the truth, and those fellows came back and somehow took him out of the hotel, eh?”

  “That’s it. Either one or the other. Take your choice.”

  Malcolm thought a moment. “He seemed all right to me.”

  “They often do, those drunks, when they’ve just had enough and not too much,” said Hooker, almost as if he enjoyed making it all more difficult. “But I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.”

  “What?” Malcolm had nothing to suggest himself.

  “I’m going,” said Hooker firmly, “to bed.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BEING THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF MR. EDLIN

  “Back in half a minute,” said Jimmy Edlin, over his shoulder, as he opened the door. When he came out into the corridor, he had a feeling that somebody had just gone round the corner, towards the stairs, but he did not attach any importance to this fact. After all, they hadn’t the whole hotel to themselves. He went along to his room in a pleasantly excited state of mind. The last thing he had expected was to find here a couple of fine young fellows who seemed to be as curious about this MacMichael business as he was, and who appeared to have seen it so far from an entirely different point of view. In a minute or two he would know what that point of view was, and might learn something valuable, over a drink or two of that excellent Scotch he had had the sense to put in his bag. This was going to be great. Nice fellows, and the three of them all after the same queer crowd. Jimmy liked company, and so far he had not been a big success working by himself on this job, which he was convinced now was a very rum job indeed. The little widow, Mrs. Atwood—and there was an attractive little piece of womanhood for a lonely man—had been very much interested, very sympathetic, almost excited it seemed when he told her over the telephone where he was going—but you couldn’t land a woman into this nasty mess, as he had been careful to tell her. (She hadn’t liked that either, he remembered, and had even been a bit short and sharp with him, saying Good-bye abruptly and cutting him off. A pity! Though he was no hand at saying things that might please
a woman over the telephone; something too inhuman about that lump of vulcanite.) But now it looked as if he had two very useful allies in these fine alert young chaps. Yes, he’d been lucky.

  In this pleasantly excited state of mind, then, Jimmy hurried along to his room, and, not bothering to close the door behind him, he rummaged in his bag, which he had not unpacked yet, for the Scotch. He took the lead foil wrapping off the top of the bottle, to make sure that he would not need a corkscrew. Then he looked up, remembering the two glasses he had promised to take along, to discover that he was facing the barrel of a large revolver. The man who held it, now standing with his back to the door, was the very man, a youngish fellow with queer light eyes and almost bleached hair, who had answered the Brotherhood password and taken him out to the car.

  “Get back and raise your hands, mister,” came the command.

  Jimmy did as he was told, breaking out into a sweat. This was going to be tough.

  “I can tell you exactly what our orders are, mister,” continued the unpleasant bleached young man. “We’re to take you along. But if you won’t come along, if you give any trouble, then we’re to make good an’ sure you don’t do any more interferin’.”

  Jimmy knew only too well that this was the truth. These people were capable of killing him there and then, and to hell with the consequences. Whatever it was they were planning, it obviously made them both relentless and reckless.

  “All right,” he muttered, with a mouth that was drier than ever. “I haven’t got a gun. Better put that one down.”

  “No, sir. We let you off too easy last time,” said the other, now coming forward. He moved until he was near the telephone, but kept Jimmy steadily covered.

  “I don’t know what you think you can do,” said Jimmy uneasily. “But this happens to be an hotel, don’t forget.”

  “Sure! I hadn’t forgotten.” And the young man, without taking his eyes or his large revolver off Jimmy, reached down with his left hand and took up the receiver. Jimmy stared in amazement. What did the fellow think he could do? But the fellow seemed to know. “I want to speak to Doctor Johnson,” he remarked, coolly, down the telephone. “That’s right. Oh—doc—I’ve got him. Yes—twenty-two. Sure I can hold him. Okay.”

  The young man put down the telephone, still watching Jimmy, then slowly backed towards the door.

  “You might give me some idea what you’re doing,” said Jimmy. “Where does the doctor come in? Are you sick—or am I?”

  “I reckon you are, mister,” was the reply, delivered without the ghost of a smile.

  Jimmy felt more puzzled than alarmed. So long as he kept quiet and gave them no trouble, as the young man admitted, they had no intention of using that gun on him, which, anyhow, would be a very desperate move on their part, here in the hotel. On the other hand, how could they “take him along”? Was there some back way out that they knew about? And what was this doctor business? While Jimmy asked himself these questions, the young man kept silent, but very watchful, obviously not intending that Jimmy should escape a second time that night.

  A knock and a voice outside. The young man had the door open and shut again before Jimmy could even think of making a move. But now Dr. Johnson, complete with a black bag, was in the room. And there could be no possible doubt as to who it was. Brother Kaydick had now taken charge.

  Brother Kaydick muttered something Jimmy could not catch to his assistant, then stood looking hard at Jimmy and rubbing his long chin. At least, Jimmy felt that Brother Kaydick was looking hard in his direction, but, so powerful was that squint of Brother Kaydick’s that he might have also been looking at the bottle of whisky on the table. This silence seemed to Jimmy unmannerly.

  “Good evening, Brother Kaydick,” he remarked. “When did you turn into Dr. Johnson? And what have you got in that bag?”

  “Quiet!” commanded Brother Kaydick harshly. He muttered again to the bleached young man, then, to Jimmy’s surprise, stalked into the bathroom, taking the bag with him.

  “Keep your hands up,” said the owner of the revolver, sharply.

  “You don’t mind me being in this room, do you?” Jimmy enquired. He was tired of this, and so were his arms, which now ached to be anywhere but up in the air. “I couldn’t rent you fellows another room here, could I? I’d like the use of this myself. I don’t want to be unreasonable——”

  But Brother Kaydick had reappeared. “Turn round.”

  “Why should I?” But he did. He also heard Brother Kaydick and his assistant coming closer, and smelt something sickly, something that might easily have a place in Dr. Johnson’s black bag. Then he found his arms seized and pulled down behind him; a sickly-smelling cloth enveloped his nose and mouth; he was suffocating, and he struggled hard to free himself; they were choking him, the devils; but now, though he was still struggling, he was half-floating about too, and there seemed to be rockets whizzing and exploding all over the room. And, oddly enough, the last thing he remembered was the appearance from nowhere of a sudden fountain of Scotch whisky. . . .

  He was back in China, in the native quarter of Shanghai perhaps, and they were celebrating some festival, and never had he heard so much beating of gongs, so many fire-crackers; and though he kept telling them to stop, they only grinned at him, and brought out bigger gongs and more strings of firecrackers; and then there was a procession, with everybody making the most devilish racket, and at the end of the procession was an enormous gilded car, with dragons carved all over it, and seated high in this car, dressed like a mandarin in full regalia, was Brother Kaydick; and though Jimmy tried to hide himself in the crowd, it was no use, because always the Chinese in front of him mysteriously melted away, leaving him open to the view of the figure in the car; and though he ran and ran, that was no use either, because the car was always just coming round the corner; and at last Brother Kaydick saw him and cried in a terrible voice, “There’s the man,” pointing a long talon of a finger, and a big Chink soldier, with a club, rushed at him and hit him—bang!—on the head. . . .

  He could still feel the bang on the head. His head seemed to be enormous and every bit of it ached like the devil. He was cold too, stiff and cold. Slowly he opened his eyes, but made no sense out of what they saw, so closed them again. This happened several times. Then he really began to take notice. It was hard work at first, with such a head on him, but he persevered. He was lying among some packing cases in the corner of a small dim room that had unpainted deal plank walls. He was cold because he had had no covering over him, and was not even wearing his coat. Bright sunlight was coming in, through a few cracks in the walls and between the edge of a small window and the rough curtaining tacked over it. He thought about all this for a long time. Cold and stiff though he was, somehow he did not want to move yet. There were sounds outside, but he did not feel like bothering about them. The thing to do was to keep quiet, just to think a little, not too much, and try to forget that his head was far too big and apparently split open in several places. He felt as if he was just recovering from a three days’ crazy binge-and-blind, yet he knew that he had been up to nothing like that. This would have to be carefully worked out before he began to move. What exactly had he been doing? He began to work it out, very cautiously. He wasn’t still in China; that had been a dream. Honolulu? No, he left Honolulu for Los Angeles.

  His half-opened eyes were pained to behold an ever-widening bar of brilliant light, so they closed again. Might that be a door opening? He lay quite still. Then a voice remarked: “No, he’s still out.” It was a voice he had heard before and had disliked. There came the sound of the door closing, then being locked.

  Within five minutes, Jimmy was thoroughly awake, though feeling groggy. He remembered all the events of the previous night, up to his having a struggle with Kaydick and the other fellow in the hotel room. They had doped him somehow—he could still smell chloroform or whatever
it was they had on the cloth—and there was also a puzzling smell of whisky, though he could not remember having had any the night before. Very carefully and quietly, he moved and then rubbed his stiff and cold arms and legs. Evidently they had dumped him in here, last night, after taking away his coat. But where was he? And how had they smuggled him out of the hotel at Barstow? And what in the name of thunder was he going to do now? Beneath his surface bewilderment, however, there was a growing anger. Doping him, then dumping him in here like a parcel!

  Now that he could feel his arms and legs again, he began to take careful stock of the place he was in, which seemed to be the back store room of a not very large, rough wooden structure. There were a good many packing cases of all sizes about, along with various wooden boxes and tins. The floor, which like the walls was made of rough deal planking, was littered with packing straw, paper, bits of rope and twine. The window was high up and very small. Very cautiously, for it would be easy to make a noise that would give him away, he rose and tip-toed to the nearest point of light, where a knot in the wood had fallen out. He put an eye to this hole, but all he could see through it was a yellow bit of desert, brilliant in the sunlight. There were, however, some narrow lighted streaks in the wall where the door was, and through which he could just hear voices, so now, moving more cautiously than ever, he went on tip-toe across, and tried two of these. They were better for hearing than seeing, but he was able to catch a glimpse of Kaydick and the bleached young man, and he came to the conclusion that the third fellow there was the other man, who had driven the car from which he had escaped near Barstow the night before. He saw too, on the table, a package about three foot long and one foot high, very securely tied and sealed, and looking as if it had come a long way, for there were various labels and stamps on it. This was all he could see. What he heard was more important.