by Sax Rohmer
“My God!” he cried, turning a pale face toward me. “It’s Ottley gone! Did you see anything?”
“No! Did you?”
“Curse it! No! I had just slipped away from the window to get my repeater! You heard the voice?”
“Clearly!”
The door was thrown open and we ran out into the drive.
There was no sign of Ottley, and we stood for a moment, undecided how we should act. Then, just inside the shadow belt we found the detective lying.
Thinking him dead, we raised and dragged him back to the house. Having re-fastened the door, we laid him on a sofa in the morning-room. His face was deathly and blood flowed from a terrible wound on his skull. Strangest of all, though, he had a gaping hole just above the right wrist. The skin about it was discoloured as if with burning. Neither of us could detect any sign of life, and we stood, two frankly frightened men, looking at one another over the body.
“It’s got to be done!” said Haufmann slowly. “One of us has to stay here and do what he can for him, and one has to go for a doctor! There’s no telephone!”
“Where’s the nearest doctor?” I asked.
“There’s one at the corner of the first road on the right.”
“I’ll go!” I said.
Without shame I confess that from the moment the door closed behind me, I ran my hardest down the poplar avenue until I had passed the gate! And it was not anxiety that spurred me, for I did not doubt that Ottley was dead, but stark fear!
III
Moris Klaw deposited a large grip and a travelling-rug upon the verandah.
“Good-day, Mr. Haufmann! Good-day, Mr. Searles!” At an open window the white-aproned figure of a nurse appeared. “Good-day, Nurse! I am direct from Paris. This is a case which cannot be dealt with under the head of the Cycle of Crime, and I do not think it has any relation with the history of The Park. But thoughts are things, Mr. Haufmann. How helpful that is!”
Forty-eight hours had elapsed since Haufmann and I had picked up Ottley for dead in the poplar avenue. Now he lay in a bed made up in the billiard-room, hovering between this world and another. I had a shrewd suspicion that the doctor who attended him was mystified by some of the patient’s symptoms.
Haufmann stared oddly at Moris Klaw, not altogether comprehending the drift of his words.
“If only Ottley could tell us!” he muttered.
“He will tell us nothing for many a day,” I said; “if, indeed, he ever speaks again.”
“Ah,” interrupted Moris Klaw, “to me he will speak! How? With the mind! Something — we have yet to learn what — struck him down that night. The blow, if it was a blow, made so acute an impression upon his brain that no other has secured admittance yet! Good! That blow, it still resides within his mind. To-night, I shall sleep beside his bed. I shall be unable odically to sterilise myself, but we must hope. From amid the phantasms which that sick brain will throw out upon the astral film — upon the surrounding ether — I must trust that I find the thought, the last thought before delirium came!”
Haufmann looked amazed. I had prepared him, to some extent, for Klaw’s theories, but nevertheless he was tremendously surprised. Klaw, however, paid no attention to this. He looked around at the trees.
“I am glad,” he rumbled impressively, “that you managed to hush up. Distinctly, we have now a chance.”
“A chance of what?” I cried. “The thing seems susceptible of no ordinary explanation! How can you account for what happened to Ottley and for his condition? What incredible thing came out from the poplars?”
“No thing!” answered Moris Klaw. “No thing, my good friend!”
“Then what did he fire at?”
“At the coach-house!”
I met the gaze of his peculiar eyes, fixed upon me through the pince-nez.
“If you will look at the coach-house chimney,” he continued, “you will see it — the hole made by his bullet!”
I turned quickly, and even from that considerable distance the hole was visible; a triangular break on the red-tiled rim.
“What on earth does it mean?” I asked, more hopelessly mystified than ever.
“It means that Ottley is a clever man, who knows his business; and it means, Mr. Searles, that we must take up this so extraordinary affair where the poor Ottley dropped it!”
“What do you propose?”
“I propose that you invite yourself to a few days’ holiday, as I have done. You stay here. Do not allow even the doctor to know that you are in the house. The nurse you will have to confide in, I suppose. Mr. Haufmann” — he turned to the latter— “you will occupy your old room. Do not, I beg of you, go outside after dusk upon any consideration. If either of you shall hear it again — the evil whispering — come out by the front door, and keep in the shadow. Carry no light. Above all, do not come out upon the balcony!”
“Then you,” I said, “will be unable to stay?”
“I shall be so unable,” was the reply; “for I go to Brighton to secure the interview with Miss Greta which the poor Ottley so much required!”
“You don’t suggest that she knows—”
“She knows no more than we do, Mr. Searles! But I think she holds a clue and does not know that she holds a clue! For an hour I shall slumber — I, who, like the tortoise, know that to sleep is to live — I shall slumber beside the sick man’s bed. Then, we shall see!”
IV
It was a quarter to seven when Moris Klaw entered the sickroom. Ottley lay in a trance-like condition, and the eccentric investigator, of whose proceedings the nurse strongly disapproved, settled himself in a split-cane armchair by the bedside and waving his hand in dismissal to Haufmann and myself, placed a large silk handkerchief over his sparsely covered skull and composed himself for slumber.
We left him, and tiptoed from the room.
“If you hadn’t told me what he’s done in the past,” whispered Haufmann, “I should say our old friend was mad a lot!”
The great empty house was eerily silent, and during the time that we sat smoking and awaiting the end of Moris Klaw’s singular telepathic experiment, neither of us talked very much. At eight o’clock the man whose proceedings savoured so much of charlatanry, but whom I knew for one of the foremost criminologists of the world, emerged, spraying his face with verbena.
“Ah, gentlemen,” he said, coming in to us, “I have recovered some slight impression” — he tapped his moist forehead— “of that agonising thought which preceded the unconsciousness of Ottley. I depart. Some time to-night will come Sir Bartram Vane from Half-Moon Street, the specialist, to confer with the physician who is attending here. Mr. Searles, remain concealed. Not even he must know of your being here; no one outside the house must know. Remember my warnings. I depart.”
Behind the thick pebbles his eyes gleamed with some excitement repressed. By singular means, he would seem to have come upon a clue.
“Good-night, Mr. Haufmann,” he said. “Good-night, Mr. Searles. To the nurse I have said good-night and she only glared. She thinks I am the mad old fool!”
He departed, curtly declining company, and carrying his huge plaid rug and heavy grip. As his slouching footsteps died away along the avenue, Haufmann and I looked grimly at one another.
“Seems we’re left!” said my friend. “You won’t desert me, Searles?”
“Most certainly I shall not! You are tied here by the presence of poor Ottley, in any event, and you can rely upon me to keep you company.”
At about ten o’clock Sir Bartram Vane drove up bringing with him the local physician who was attending upon Ottley. I kept well out of sight, but learnt, when the medical men had left, that the course of treatment had been entirely changed.
Thus commenced our strange ordeal; how it terminated you presently shall learn.
Moris Klaw, in pursuit of whatever plan he had formed never appeared on the scene, but evidence of his active interest reached us in the form of telegraphic instructions. Once it was a
wire telling Haufmann to detain the American servants in London should they arrive and to go on living as we were. Again it was a warning not to go out on the balcony after dusk, and, again, that we should not desert our posts for one single evening. On the fourth day the doctor pronounced a slight improvement in Ottley’s condition, and Haufmann determined to run down to Brighton on the following morning, returning in the afternoon.
That night we again heard the voice.
The house was very still, and Haufmann and I had retired to our rooms, when I discerned above the subdued rustling whisper of the leaves, that other sound that no leaf ever made. In an instant I was crouching by the open window. A lull followed. Then, again, I heard the soft voice calling. I could not detect the words, but in obedience to the instructions of Klaw, I picked up the pistol which I had brought for the purpose, and ran to the door. The idea that the whispering menace was something that could be successfully shot at, robbed it of much of its eerie horror, and I relished the prospect of action after the dreary secret sojourn in the upper rooms of the house.
I groped my way down to the hall. As we had carefully oiled the bolts, I experienced no difficulty in silently opening the door. Inch by inch I opened it, listening intently.
Again I heard the queer call.
Now, by craning my neck, I could see the moon-bright front of the house; and looking upward, I was horrified to see Shan Haufmann, a conspicuous figure in his light pyjama suit, crouching on the balcony! The moonlight played vividly on the nickelled barrel of the pistol he carried, as he rose slowly to his feet.
Though I did not know what danger threatened, nor from whence it would proceed, I knew well that Klaw’s was no idle warning. I could not imagine what madness had prompted Haufmann to neglect it, and was about to throw wide the door and call to him, when a series of strange things happened in bewildering succession.
An odd, strumming sound came from somewhere in the outer darkness. Haufmann dropped to his knees (I learnt, afterwards, that the loose slippers he wore had tripped him). The glass of the window behind him was shattered with a great deal of noise.
A shot!... a spurt of flame in the black darkness of the poplar avenue!... a shriek from somewhere on the west front... and I ran out on to the drive.
With a tremendous crash a bulky form rolled down the sloping roof of the coach-house, to fall with a sickening thud to the ground!
Then, out into the moonlight, Moris Klaw came running, his yet smoking pistol in his hand!
“Haufmann!” he cried, and again: “Haufmann!”
The big American peered down from the balcony hauling in something which seemed to be a line, but which I was unable to distinguish in the darkness.
“Good boy!” he panted. “I was a fool to do it! But I saw him lying behind the chimney and thought I could drop him!”
Moris Klaw ran, ungainly, across to the coach-house, and I followed him. The figure of a tall, lithe man, wearing a blue serge suit, lay face downwards on the gravel. As we turned him over, Haufmann, breathing heavily, joined us. The moonlight fell on a dark saturnine face.
“Gee!” came the cry. “It’s Corpus Chris!”
“Where did I get hold upon the clue?” asked Moris Klaw, when he, Haufmann, and I sat, in the grey dawn, waiting for the police to come and take away the body of Costa. “It was from the brain of Ottley! His poor mind” (he waved long hands circularly in the air) “goes round and round about the thing that happened to him on the balcony.”
“And what was that?” demanded Haufmann, eagerly. “Same as happened to me?”
“It was something — something that his knowledge of strange things tells him is venomous — which struck his wrist as he raised his revolver! What did he do? I can tell you; because he is doing it over and over again in his poor feverish mind. He clapped to the injured wrist the barrel of his revolver, and fired! Then, swooning, he toppled over and fell among the bushes. The wound that so had puzzled all becomes explained. It was self-inflicted — a precaution — a cauterising; and it saved his life. For I saw Sir Bartram Vane to-day and he had spoken with the other doctor on the telephone. The new treatment succeeds.”
“I am still in the dark!” confessed Haufmann.
“Yes?” rumbled Moris Klaw. “So? Why do I go to Brighton?
I go to ask Miss Greta what Ottley would have asked her.”
“And that is?”
“What she feared, that made her so very anxious to get you away from your home. To me she admitted that she had received from the man Costa impassioned appeals, such as, foolish girl, she had been afraid to show to you — her father!”
“Good Heavens! the scamp!”
“The canaille! But no matter, he is dead canaille! After you got the brother hanged, this Corpus Chris (it was Fate that named him!) sent to your daughter a mad letter, swearing that if she does not fly with him, he will kill you if he has to follow you around the world! Yes, he was insane, I fancy; I think so. But he was a man of very great culture. He held a Cambridge degree! You did not know? I thought not. He tracked you to Europe and right to this house. Its history he learned in some way and used for his own ends. Probably, too, he had no opportunity of getting at you otherwise, without leaving behind a clue or being seen and pursued.”
Moris Klaw picked up an Indian bow which lay upon the floor beside him.
“A bow of the Sioux pattern,” he rumbled impressively.
He stooped again, picking up a small arrow to which a length of thin, black twine was attached.
“One standing on the balcony in the moonlight,” he continued, “what a certain mark if the wind be not too high! And you will remember that on gently blowing nights the whispering came!”
He raised the point of the arrow. It was encrusted in some black, shining substance. Moris Klaw lowered his voice.
“Curari!” he said, hoarsely, “the ancient arrow-poison of the South American tribes! This small arrow would make only a tiny wound, and it could be drawn back again by means of the twine attached. Costa, of course, mistook Ottley for you, Mr. Haufmann. Ah, a clever fellow! I spent three evenings up the second tree in the avenue waiting for him. I need not have shot him if you had followed my instructions and not come out on the balcony. We could have captured him alive!”
“I’m not crying about it!” said Haufmann.
“Neither do I weep,” rumbled Moris Klaw, and bathed his face with perfume. “But I loathe it, this curari — it smells of death. Ah! the canaille!”
Seventh Episode. CASE OF THE HEADLESS MUMMIES
I
The mysteries which my eccentric friend, Moris Klaw, was most successful in handling undoubtedly were those which had their origin in kinks of the human brain or in the mysterious history of some relic of ancient times.
I have seen his theory of the Cycle of Crime proven triumphantly time and time again; I have known him successfully to demonstrate how the history of a valuable gem or curio automatically repeats itself, subject, it would seem, to that obscure law of chance into which he had made particular inquiry. Then his peculiar power — assiduously cultivated by a course of obscure study — of recovering from the atmosphere, the ether, call it what you will, the thought forms — the ideas thrown out by the scheming mind of the criminal he sought for — enabled him to succeed where any ordinary investigator must inevitably have failed.
“They destroy,” he would say in his odd, rumbling voice, “the clumsy tools of their crime; they hide away the knife, the bludgeon; they sop up the blood, they throw it, the jemmy, the dead man, the suffocated poor infant, into the ditch, the pool — and they leave intact the odic negative, the photograph of their sin, the thought-thing in the air!” He would tap his high yellow brow significantly. “Here upon this sensitive plate I reproduce it, the hanging evidence! The headless child is buried in the garden, but the thought of the beheader is left to lie about. I pick it up. Poof! he swings — that child-slayer! I triumph. He is a dead man. What an art is the art of the odic phot
ograph.”
But I propose to relate here an instance of Moris Klaw’s amazing knowledge in matters of archaeology — of the history of relics. In his singular emporium at Wapping, where dwelt the white rats, the singing canary, the cursing parrot, and the other stock-in-trade of this supposed dealer in oddities, was furthermore a library probably unique. It contained obscure works on criminology; it contained catalogues of every relic known to European collectors with elaborate histories of the same. What else it contained I am unable to say, for the dazzling Isis Klaw was a jealous librarian.
You who have followed these records will have made the acquaintance of Coram, the curator of the Menzies Museum; and it was through Coram that I first came to hear of the inexplicable beheading of mummies, which, commencing with that of Mr. Pettigrew’s valuable mummy of the priestess Hor-ankhu, developed into a perfect epidemic. No more useless outrage could well be imagined, than the decapitation of an ancient Egyptian corpse; and if I was surprised when I heard of the first case, my surprise became stark amazement when yet other mummies began mysteriously to lose their heads. But I deal with the first instance, now, as it was brought under my notice by Coram.
He rang me up early one morning.
“I say, Searles,” he said; “a very odd thing has happened. You’ve heard me speak of Pettigrew the collector; he lives out Wandsworth way; he’s one of our trustees. Well, some demented burglar broke into his house last night, took nothing, but cut off the head of a valuable mummy!”
“Good Heavens!” I cried. “What an original idea!”
“Highly so,” agreed Coram. “The police are hopelessly mystified, and as I know you are keen on this class of copy I thought you might like to run down and have a chat with Pettigrew. Shall I tell him you are coming?”
“By all means,” I said, and made an arrangement forthwith.
Accordingly, about eleven o’clock I presented myself at a gloomy Georgian house standing well back from the high road, and screened by an unkempt shrubbery. Mr. Mark Pettigrew, a familiar figure at Sotheby auctions, was a little shrivelled man, clean shaven and with the complexion of a dried apricot. His big spectacles seemed to occupy a great proportion of his face, but his eyes twinkled merrily and his humour was as dry as his appearance.