Five Fatal Words

by Edwin Balmer; Philip Wylie

  She ate some of her grapefruit and then said, "Donald's gone out, I understand."

  "Yes."

  "What does he think of your traveling?"

  "He thinks it's an excellent idea. He has offered to accompany me. He will do so."

  "Oh!" It escaped her with unconscious poignancy. Donald was going away with his uncle. She, undoubtedly, would remain or go elsewhere with Hannah Cornwall and Lydia. It was plain that Theodore and Donald were traveling alone.

  If Theodore noticed her exclamation, he did not betray it; he was completely immersed in his own fates.

  "Donald is out investigating the sign," Theodore continued, glancing out the window opposite which the electric sign, so alarming at night, stood in the sunlight a scant framework of wood and metal with its device barely legible. "Also, he has taken my meteorite with him," said Theodore. "There was considerable discussion about it here this morning. My sisters, as usual, took opposite sides."

  "Then you told them about it?"

  "After their breakfast. Donald wished them left undisturbed as long as possible. I could eat no more than I could sleep, until Miss Loring knew. Hush, here is my sister Hannah now."

  Melicent, following his eyes, looked behind her; and there was Hannah Cornwall.

  She stood straight, as always, but never since Melicent had known her was she so aged and gray. There were brown blotches on her skin and her eyes wavered from the other two. When Melicent had first met her, she had possessed the fierce resolution of a strong woman who stands on the threshold of age; now she was shaken, demoralized. She came to the table unsteadily and took refuge in a chair. The butler appeared and solicitously inquired her wants. "Nothing," she murmured absently. "Nothing; nothing at all."

  The butler asked Melicent if she would like cereal or eggs, but Melicent had no appetite, and she began to drink her cup of coffee. Miss Cornwall stared into space, drank half a glass of milk which Theodore placed before her, and said at last to Melicent, "I am sorry I was so harsh last night. I did not know what had happened. But you should not have kept it from me. I hope I haven't offended you."

  "Of course not," said Melicent.

  Hannah turned to her brother. "Have you heard yet from Donald?"

  "No; nothing."

  "I will wait word from you in my room, Theodore."

  She arose.

  Melicent arose also and Miss Cornwall said: "You need not come now, unless you prefer."

  She disappeared; Melicent remained and was with Theodore when Donald returned; and he made his report to his uncle in her presence.

  "I've looked up that sign. There is no firm called Davis, Evans and Taylor in the city. The hat manufacturers have never heard of them. The people who rented the space on the top of the building across the street did it through an agent. The agent is an individual who erects and leases electric signs as part of his business. He tells me that a few days ago an individual appeared who said that a new firm, Davis, Evans and Taylor, were to open a hat store in this neighborhood and they wanted a sign erected in a conspicuous place immediately. It was a rush order. This roof was selected, the design of the sign approved and the whole thing paid, in advance, for cash. The agent did not question the transaction, as it was all paid in advance; and he was used to all sorts of queer things being done for advertising.

  "He was beginning to get curious, however, as he heard no more from the people and he could not trace the firm. However, he had been paid so he rushed up the sign and turned it on, as we know. After my talk with him, however, the sign will not burn to-night."

  "What good will that do?" demanded Theodore.

  "No good, I suppose. However, we have found out that the presence of the sign here--and its legend--can hardly be said to be merely an accident or coincidence."

  "Hardly," agreed Theodore. "You have been able to trace only one person who could be connected with establishment of a sign of that design in that place. You spoke of him as an individual. Did you get his description?"

  "I got a description," said Donald. "But not of a 'him'; it was of a girl. She represented herself as the secretary of Mr. Davis. She was a girl about twenty-five whose description would be answered by any of a dozen girls on any floor of any big building in New York. There is absolutely no way of tracing her--or her friends."

  "However," pronounced Theodore, dismissing this. "However, it was all a matter of mere human agency. A young woman ordered and paid for it, you say; and then she disappeared. Undoubtedly she acted for others; undoubtedly. My meteorite is quite another matter. What have you done about that, Donald; what have you learned about my messenger from my stars?"

  "We will soon know about that," Donald assured him.

  "I took it up to Columbia University to the department of geology and mineralogy where the professors, who saw it, pronounced it apparently a meteorite. They can tell for certain after making tests. You know," Donald continued more directly to Melicent,

  "there are distinctive characteristics about meteoric metal which cannot be duplicated or counterfeited on earth. Iron from the sky differs minutely but definitely from any terrestrial material. We ought to know within an hour or two whether we are dealing," he hesitated a moment, "with heaven or with hell."

  Theodore made no comment on this; he arose soon after receiving this report and betook himself to his own room; and Melicent did not yet seek Miss Cornwall. She wanted to talk alone with Donald; but Lydia now prevented this by appearing, from her suite, wheeled in her chair by her faithful and assiduous Ahdi Vado. They were conversing as they came down the hall and Hannah Cornwall evidently hearing them, came from her room and followed them in.

  Lydia sat, ponderous and asthmatic, but smiling and bland; and behind her stood the inscrutable Hindu.

  "Where is your uncle?" Lydia inquired of her nephew.

  "In his room, deciding what he will take with him," said Donald.

  "When does he go away?"

  "To-day."

  "I have been concentrating on his situation. Ahdi Vado and I. Of course we also will go away. We will return to Egypt. I think it has done me good to come back to the States, although I did want you dreadfully to come to Egypt with me for the winter, Hannah. You'd enjoy it there. I would not suggest such a thing to Theodore. Ahdi agrees with me that, in his mood, it would do nothing for him. Don't you, Ahdi?"

  At the mention of his name, the Hindu bowed. She turned her large head and looked at him steadily. Then she addressed the others again. "I prefer Egypt. Ahdi Vado infinitely prefers it. He has accompanied me here only at great personal discomfort and risk. He detests cold weather."

  "My blood," said Ahdi gently, "is not suitable to it."

  "He catches cold," Lydia explained.

  "It is very regrettable."

  "What are you doing, Donald?"

  "I'm going with Uncle Theodore," Donald announced.

  Hannah swung about quickly. "What's that? No one said anything about your going, Donald."

  "Uncle Theodore has," retorted Donald. "He asked me to go with him; I agreed."

  "Why shouldn't they go together, Hannah?" Lydia inquired.

  "They shouldn't; that's all," said Hannah stubbornly.

  Her sister scrutinized her from underneath her puffy eyelids. "My dear Hannah, the world doesn't swing about at your dictum. It is a very good plan, Theodore and Donald traveling together; is it not, Ahdi?"

  "Excellent," replied the Hindu. "Completely in accord."

  "In accord with what?" demanded Hannah acidly.

  "With cosmic considerations," replied Ahdi Vado placidly. "Nothing occurs unconsidered by the cosmic consciousness. There is no accident; no caprice in the cosmos. There is only imperfect understanding on our part. A meteorite, I am told, struck in his room last night. An extremely rare occurrence; one, then, of extreme significance.

  No one could ignore it."

  "No," agreed Donald. "That's certainly right."

  "Hush!" ordered Hannah. "Hush!"

  "
Why?"

  "I heard the telephone bell a moment ago; your uncle is talking. It is probably that fool Loring woman." It was, as Theodore proclaimed a few minutes later when he joined the family council in his living-room.

  "I know exactly what I must do!" he announced. "I am to travel rapidly in this country, not abroad. I must keep on the move for ten days; and then return here. I will leave at once for the west."

  Hannah raised her voice in protest. "It isn't safe! It isn't safe for you to step into the corridor. It isn't safe for you to ride in the car. And you will take Donald with you. If both you men go, you will leave us alone, helpless--"

  Theodore's sense of responsibility for his two sisters and Melicent was slight. His stars did not order their lives, or their deaths. They had stars of their own to guide them.

  He would follow his--especially since a shred of a star had struck in his room last night.

  "It has to be that way, Hannah," he replied simply. "Moreover, I know even the details of what I ought to do."

  "A false start will be made from the doors of this apartment; but I will make the trip down in the freight elevator. Three taxicabs will carry out my baggage, and a private car, never before in my possession, will convey me away."

  "Exactly where are you going?"

  "No one will know that but myself."

  "And Priscilla Loring!" jibed Hannah.

  "That is the same thing," retorted Theodore confidently; and sister and brother confronted each other.

  There was a long silence. To Melicent's surprise, it was broken by Ahdi Vado.

  "There has been great tribulation in your family. Great danger still threatens it, but courage and right shall prevail." His voice was sweet and gentle and his luminous dark eyes regarded each one of them in turn. "It is not for me to express my private sympathies but I work for all of you."

  "You are comforting," Lydia said.

  Hannah regarded the Hindu gravely. "I have always wished I could trust to right to prevail, but I can't."

  "Perhaps you have not been willing to abandon yourself to the general goodness."

  Hannah shook her head. "You seem to make the old age of my sister happy, Mr.

  Vado. I will be grateful to you for that."

  It was another of Hannah's rare concessions to human relationships. The Hindu appeared to appreciate it and to reflect upon it. Melicent thought about him for a little while. He was never obsequious and yet never proud. She had had no feeling of any sort about him. At first his costume had been a, little absurd, but he did nothing to bother others and never trespassed upon their rights, and his occasional remarks expressed with such solemnity and such deep conviction that he made himself easy to accept and simple to tolerate. She was even occasionally able to understand Lydia's confidence in him. He was a man to whom the world of matter, the world of blood, was foreign. He lived entirely with his dreams and of their nature one could only guess.

  Hannah must have felt that there could be no further purpose in a family conflict.

  She expressed a decision briefly. "There is nothing for us to do but go to father's house.

  Although Theodore was too much involved with his own worries to invite us to stay here, I presume that is what he expected us to do. However, I will call Mr. Reese this morning and we will move up on the Hudson immediately. That is, if it suits you, Lydia."

  "Anything for the present," Lydia replied.

  "You won't be going immediately to Egypt?"

  "Not while you need me."

  The conference broke up. Ahdi Vado wheeled Lydia away; Theodore hastened to his packing in his own room; and Hannah once more sought the refuge of her own quarters. Melicent knew that she ought to follow her; but Donald delayed in the living-room.

  And Donald was going away on that wild, sudden journey of his uncle's which was ordered by Priscilla Loring.

  Melicent lingered too.

  "Do you know where you're going, Donald?"

  "Wherever he goes; that's all."

  "She might be sending him to death."

  "That's the exact reason I'm going along. But I'll tell you this for your comfort--if you're concerned about either him or me--I think any place is as safe as here."

  "Donald, who's doing these things?"

  "Come to the phone with me, and maybe I can describe him to you."

  "Somebody will tell you?"

  "Somebody will be able to tell me, by this time, one thing I want to know--that is, whether that was actually a bit of a star which struck in uncle's room or--"

  "Or what?"

  "A bit of very worldly iron which somebody heated and fired in here from the opposite roof."

  "Oh!"

  "Didn't that possibility occur to you?"

  "Yes; that occurred to me."

  "Well, let's find out." He led her to the phone and dialed a number. "Hello; this is Donald Cornwall. . . . You've made the test. . . . All right. Give it to me." Then he listened and, while listening, whistled low and softly. "All right. Thanks; thanks tremendously. You're absolutely certain. No mistake! Thanks again. That's all."

  "What was it?" whispered Melicent, almost shaking him. "What did he say?"

  "He said that metal did not originate and could not have been made in this world.

  It came, unquestionably, from the sky. It is meteoric iron which traveled into Uncle Theodore's room."

  Melicent felt a queer hollowness. "Then nobody did it. He was struck at from the stars."

  "Hold that thought," said Donald grimly. "It will help us to escape, perhaps, from the most devilish plan ever born in the brain of man."

  CHAPTER XII

  THEODORE and Donald departed in the manner' ordained; and, as promptly as possible, Mr. Reese arranged for the reopening of the original Cornwall homestead for occupancy by Hannah and Lydia.

  The lawyer was altogether too deliberate and dilatory in his preparations, Hannah thought; and she said so. But at last the refuge was ready.

  The house of Silas Cornwall was, in fact, a castle. In every external detail it had been copied from Alcazar which Henry IV of Castile built at Segovia in the fifteenth century. It rose on a peninsula of cliff over the Hudson so that on all sides except one the vertical drop of the lofty stone walls merged into the line of actual cliff. It was a huge building girt with battlements and topped with the spires of numerous round towers. The walls, battlements, windows, watch towers and other architectural features were carefully copied. The result, while architecturally impressive and very beautiful from a distance, was extremely grim on close inspection. It sat upon the cliffs, a mysterious, impregnable fortress, as fantastic in the twentieth century as a parade of knights in armor on Fifth Avenue.

  Melicent's approach to the castle with Hannah reminded her of her trip with Mr.

  Reese to Blackcroft, and even more of her journey across France to Alice's château on the Domrey River. Apparently the Cornwalls had inherited from their father a taste for massive and sinister architecture. But certainly their father had exemplified that taste more completely than either Hannah or Alice.

  The inside of the castle was always dim and shadowy, although its huge rooms and echoing corridors were amply provided with massive chandeliers. Silas' father had called the castle "Alcazar." On three sides the cliff and the walls were almost one. But on the fourth, from which one approached, there was a tongue of land that led into extensive grounds in which a wilderness, unchecked by human cultivation, had grown so thick as to make its own secrets undiscoverable to itself.

  Melicent had had a slight indication of what the Cornwall house would be, but no words could have conveyed the majesty of it or the secret potency for evil it possessed.

  Her other approaches to Cornwall residences had been under unique circumstances and she had been somewhat uneasy each time. But when the automobile emerged from the forest and her eyes fell on the stone house of "Alcazar," she could not conquer the feeling that this birthplace of the Cornwalls was destined to be their tomb. T
here was something more than medieval darkness surrounding it--a fresh and more sinister cloud belonging to the present day.

  The car rolled toward the house and Melicent felt as if she and Hananh Cornwall were being sucked into its majestic gloom, and if the driver had applied the brakes the car would still have rolled forward. They crossed a drawbridge that for decades had stretched over a dry moat. They bumped onto a flagstone courtyard. The servants, who had been supplied by Mr. Reese, were already in the house and had been instructed in their duties.

  A moment later a car in which Lydia and Ahdi Vado rode together entered the stone archway and stopped opposite them in the courtyard.

  Hannah and Lydia both accepted the castle. They had lived in it when they were children. Its mysteries were all familiar. It was home. But to Melicent it could never be anything but unnatural. The fact that one room contained a piano and a radio, the presence of a telephone, the ordinariness of the voices and the conversation of the servants that had been hired to open and operate "Alcazar," the electric lights, the huge electric refrigerator in the kitchen--none of those things could ever teach her to ignore the ancient pattern of the edifice, or to forget the black era in man's history from which it had been copied.

  They had passed ten days in Theodore's apartment, while the castle was being opened and the staff obtained. In those ten days, not a word had been received from Hannah's brother and her nephew. Each morning, with the arrival of the newspapers, Melicent had scanned the headlines with dread. The telephone seldom rang but when it did each tinkling enlivened alarm. But no message came.

  "No news is always good news," Melicent repeated to herself and occasionally ventured a discussion of the matter with Hannah. But Miss Cornwall had become even less communicative than usual; she occupied herself almost furiously with details of instructions for the preparation of her father's house. She seemed obsessed with it; and Melicent guessed that she employed this obsession to shut out other fears.