To be brief, Gray’s story supplied the police with a theory that a baby had been killed; that Ormond had been the father of it; that Agnes had been the mother; that Ormond’s father had been privy to the crime; that the older man had wanted to warn his son of the danger he ran in continuing his intrigue with Agnes; that the mysterious wording “before I go whence I shall not return” had probably meant simply “before I die, as any man may, at any time, die”; and that we—Gray, Muriel and myself—having found the note among Ormond’s papers, were perfectly justified in supposing it to have referred to bonds, and in having attempted to find such valuable securities. They mulled this over for several weeks, but in the end accepted it and granted permission for the tiny bones of the infant to be cremated.
It is true that there had been some talk of sending an investigator to England for the purpose of looking into the records there of the deaths of the elder Ormeses. But nothing came of this. Such documents and letters as Gray could show seemed conclusive enough. Ormond Ormes, insane though he may have been, even at that time, had been cunning enough to have done his work well. And eventually the matter was dropped.
We were left in peace, indeed, but it was a peace of the body only, not of the spirit. Surely we had enough to disturb our sleep at night, we who could not obliterate from memory a single horror that we had seen and known. But this was by no means all. For now, when any of us showed a face outside the Ormesby grounds (and there were many reasons why we must, occasionally, go beyond them) we were the subjects of hostile stares. The people had formerly looked upon us with pitying eyes. Now they were definitely against us. We were undesirables. They wanted us out of those hills. Tragedy stalked at our heels, evidently, and that quiet community was afraid of us. Nor could we much blame the people for this attitude. If we could not be positively connected with the causes of death in the cases of so many of the Ormeses, we had stood, at least, too close to those mysterious doings. It was as if we were ourselves bewitched. It was as if we might, at any moment, bring down calamity upon the heads of the innocent. The time had arrived for the three of us to leave Ormesby. We knew this and set about making plans to go.
Gray renewed her resolve to leave America. She would repair to England, perhaps to France, buy a little cottage somewhere in the country, and seek among flowers and books the rest she had been denied in her native land and in the home of her fathers. As for Muriel and myself, we had no plans, save only that we were determined to put Ormesby far behind us. And save only that we intended to become again legally man and wife. We dared not do that at present. We had posed as married; it would have brought down again upon us an investigation by the representatives of law if it had become known that we had lied in this matter, as it might very well have become known had news of our application for a license to marry been made public.
Gray wanted to divide her little fortune with us, but we could not consent to that. We did allow her to give us the coupé which I had once driven and in which Agnes Ormes had met her death. I did not think that the car, at any rate, was haunted. Also, we accepted from her, as a loan, a few hundred dollars to enable us to live until I should have found something to do.
For the madness of the Ormeses had at last put out of my heart all desire I had once had to make Gray my wife. Gray had been dear to my dreams, once, and I had come very close to asking her to share my future life. But I had not done it, and now I no longer wanted to do it. It was too late for that, forever. Moreover, I do not think that Gray herself, though she had loved me, would have consented to marry me. Gray has never married any man. She knows what taint she carries in her blood. Gray Ormes, whatever the rest of her tribe may have been, is not the woman to transmit that taint to her posterity.
Naturally, I had turned back to Muriel. She had returned to me. Whatever had taken place in New York, I could not deny that she had risked liberty and disgrace to stand beside me at Ormesby. Moreover, I knew that my love for Muriel had never quite died, though it had been hurt and had slept. Divorce or no divorce, I had never entirely ceased to think of her as my wife. And she, as she had told me that evening on the lawn, could find no safety in the arms of a man she could not love.
Into the little car we loaded our few belongings. Gray, who had not yet been able to sell anything, either Ormesby itself or the furnishings, put all her affairs into the hands of a trustworthy agent with instructions to get what he could. I imagine that a good many hunters of antique beds and chairs secured bargains to tickle their collectors’ hearts; and I wonder sometimes whether they would enjoy possession of those articles if they knew their histories.
“Good-bye,” said Gray as we were on the point of leaving. “You have both been better friends to me than I have deserved. I hope everything good comes to both of you. But there’s one thing you ought to know. I’ve put it into a letter to you, Selden. Don’t read it now. Don’t read it before you stop for the night. Promise me that?”
Of course I promised. I knew that if the secret in the letter were anything I ought to know at once, Gray would have told me in words. So I slipped the letter into an inside pocket of my coat and did not open it until we had ceased driving for that day and were comfortably settled in a tourist’s cabin. Then I read it. It bore no superscription.
“The truth of it is, I do not know anything about a baby belonging to Ormond and Agnes. I said what I said because it seemed necessary. But the child really belonged to Barbara. And it really belonged to her brother, that is, to my father. You who know so much of the secrets of Ormesby, should know that last shameful thing also. But how could I have told that to the investigators?
“I was never told this, but a woman knows some things without words. Barbara bore the child in that little room where you found Alice Hobbs. The blankets had never been removed. She would never permit anyone to enter that chamber. No one attended her, except Alice and the man. And whether the child was born dead, I do not know. I heard a baby’s cry, for I was listening. It may, of course, have died soon after that. But . . .
“You will destroy this, of course. This secret belongs, with so many others, in the grave. But you now know, at last, why Barbara insisted on opening that safe. Something must have snapped in her brain. She knew that her baby’s bones were in that place. But she wanted to join . . . well, all of them. There is no knowing the human heart. As there is no limit to the height of it, so also there is no bottom.
“And now, good-bye again, and forever. I shall keep no single scrap of paper which can, in any way, implicate you, or either of you, in anything which has happened. For I live over a mine. It may be that I shall be allowed to die peaceably. I cannot know, naturally. But if not, then with me shall have ended the family of Ormes as well as the curse upon it.”
So Alice Hobbs had been privy to a secret more shameful and more carefully concealed than almost any of the others? It may well have been, then, that the final “A” of that old wolf’s letter referred to Alice and not to Agnes. What should Agnes have had to do with Barbara’s baby? Why should Agnes have been the dangerous woman of whom Ormond was being warned? But this secret of Alice Hobbs and of her relations with Ormond’s father—there was now no way of solving those mysteries satisfactorily. Nor did I wish to solve them. Whether Agnes had been the mistress of the father before becoming the mistress and later the wife of the son, I could not see how the determination of that could in any manner be of the slightest benefit to either Gray or ourselves. Let the dead past bury its dead. None the less, it seemed plausible that Alice’s statement that “she cheated me and hid them from me” might have had reference to something, perhaps securities, which Agnes, by becoming Ormond’s wife, had obtained, and which Alice, as the price of her silence with regard to Barbara’s baby, might have considered belonged rightfully to herself. Indeed she may have been promised a sum of money, or its equivalent, by either Ormond or his father. With Alice “cheated,” with her tongue silenced
by time and the removal of evidence, it might have been that Barbara had only then begun to persecute the woman, hence the “and now she won’t let me alone.” So, egged on by her own hatred and by Barbara’s diabolical cunning, she had at last murdered Agnes Ormes. For that is what Barbara must have meant in saying that she had been the slayer. She had confirmed such an hypothesis by adding that it was she who had done away with poor Hobbs. In brief, she had meant that the actual slayers had been her agents.
I shall not reveal the name of the state in which we finally settled. I do not see that it concerns anyone. Suffice it that we came, after devious wanderings, to a thriving little town in a smiling valley nestled between tremendous hills. And there we halted and went forth in search of some means of livelihood. Almost at once I made the acquaintance of a hustling young fellow who wanted an older man as partner to assist him in his filling station business. I seized the opportunity presented, invested such few dollars as remained to us, and today, if any of the fellows from the M—— Club should motor out our way, it isn’t at all unlikely that I may fill their tanks with fuel and speed them on their journey. But as for myself, I would not return to the city and the ways of cities for all those fellows’ collective wealth. And Muriel wholeheartedly agrees with me in that.
I do not think I am given to superstitious fancies more than another man; certainly I am not more dastardly before the grisly fingers of fear than another man who has done what I have done and seen what I have seen. And certainly, also, I have not been haunted by Barbara Ormes’s undead body, for all her prediction that I should be. Whether the fire did for her what the stake did for the larvae in older times, I do not know. But if she meant that I should never be able to put from mind the horror of her deeds, or efface from my soul the scars her gleaming teeth have left there, then she spoke the truth.
As for this matter of superstition, naturalistic hypotheses are not lacking to account for a good many of the happenings at Ormesby. None the less, I cannot find reason to accept any of them as fitting all the facts. Say, if you will, that I dreamed or imagined the figure of the man I saw in the hallway just before I entered Alice Hobbs’s room to find the woman unconscious and with her bandages disarranged. Upon coming to her senses, she had spoken of a woman of whom she was afraid. In my ignorance I had then supposed she raved of some spectre of her dream. Yet Barbara had actually been with her a few moments, previously. This I now know from my memory of having seen Barbara’s look while she stood at the foot of the back stairs and gloated on Alice’s dying form.
And if I had been the victim of hallucination in the front hallway, what of the policeman who stood behind me and saw the same thing? Not very long before that happened, Grayce had flung herself upon poor Hobbs. And did not Barbara confess that people died at Ormesby because her agents killed them?
For where Barbara Ormes went, there went also that apparition of the brother who had loved her and who directed his human agents through her!
Barbara spoke truly when she said that her brother and herself were one and indivisible. Too much has been substantiated in the realm of dual personality to permit of being dogmatic when denying the reality of many mysterious events. Too much has been dredged out of the mud at the bottom of the human soul to allow anyone to toss away with shrugs the legends which have come down to us and which, discount them as much as you will, must yet have had some basis in actual human experience. If the Tiltown policeman and I saw exactly the same thing, at exactly the same time, and if the thing we saw acted for both of us in the same way, then there is no alternative but to accept the appearance as an appearance of reality. We can test reality in no other manner.
And what of the manner in which Barbara, apparently so delicate and frail, plunged into the great pipe and slid down it? No sane woman would have done that. No sane woman probably could have done it. Yet Barbara did it. She might well have killed herself, had she misjudged distance and dropped into the well. But she checked her descent at the right moment. She removed the loose piece of pipe and then replaced it. She must have done all that many times, in the past, to have acquired proficiency at the doing of it. Why? For mere amusement? Did she know that I had but just left the crypt? I do not know. But I do not see how her feat could have been accomplished at all were she not either herself some kind of larva or under the guidance and instruction of that monstrous brother of hers.
Then there was the typewriter which wrote quite of itself. It is true that I saw this happen but once, and then with but half an eye. It is true that only one key was moved. Moreover, that movement might have been caused by some peculiar vibration in the building, or in the floor, consequent upon my treading upon a loose board of it. And yet . . . try making one key, and no more, move from any such cause! It cannot, in my opinion, be accomplished.
Again, it will be remembered that I took that portrait from the wall and stood it on the floor against that wall opposite the one window in the room. I well recall setting it down as carefully as one usually handles a work of art. In brief, I did not drop it. I recall, also, that I so placed it as to leave the face of the picture toward the wall; I did not want those baleful eyes staring at me as I worked.
Then came Barbara’s horrid revelations. Then came that swift wrenching open of the door to the safe. Then came the explosion, and then the shock and bustle following the vampire’s collapse and death. And then the dismay caused by that infernal yell.
I am quite certain that none of us touched that portrait after I stood it against the wall. How, then, is one to account for what happened to it within the next very few minutes?
Yet there it was. When I led Muriel and Gray through the door, so that nothing within the little room should be disturbed before the police arrived, I chanced to glance down at the picture and I saw then that the canvas had fallen out of its frame. A few moments later, when I returned to the room for the express purpose of investigating this, the canvas was nothing but a small heap of dust. And that dust was entirely white, like ashes. And it was as hard and brittle to the touch as though it had been composed of lime slaked years before.
And then, too, there was that horrible triumphant shout! Sometimes I wake in my bed at night, and always Muriel wakes beside me, waiting for that shouting to be repeated. . . .
THE END
Fingers of Fear Page 25