by Otto Penzler
“Nnnnnnyuh!” The groan was a sound that startled the room.
Carpetsi leapt back from the table, white-lipped. “The guy’s comin’ around—”
“He ain’t dead yet!” Brown gasped. Ranier had a glimpse of the pudgy man’s face, popeyed. “He’s still alive!”
Kavanaugh lashed out from the corridor doorway, “Miss, if you could get whoever’s running this place down here, this man might have a chance!” and only the girl seemed to retain her presence of mind, darting from the washbowl to slip past the Irishman at the door.
“I will get Dr. Eberhardt,” she said breathlessly. “The bell, sometimes it does not work if the battery is down. One moment, please.”
Ranier, looking into the room from his station in the shrub, had a queer impression that when the girl’s white shadow slipped into the corridor and disappeared from view on a whisper of running feet, another shadow entered the room. Something intangible, not to be seen but felt. Something that crossed Kavanaugh’s face as he walked forward to gaze down on the operating table and its patient. Something that made Carpetsi stare at Brown, Brown glare at Schlitz, the professor peer about and wring his hands. Now the girl was gone they didn’t like being left together alone. There was only the nervous squeaking of the woman’s rocking chair; the pour of water from the basin taps.
Then, from deep within the house, the girl’s voice screamed.
“Oh—come, somebody! Come quickly! Something terrible has happened to my uncle the doctor!”
CHAPTER VI
DEATH OF A DEAD MAN
He could hear feet pounding through the house as he skirted the dark wing, and he raced with no thought for a broken instep to beat them to the front. He knew her scream had come from that lighted upper room.
Coolidge shouted, “Hey!” from the direction of the car when he broke through the ferns and ran plunging along the line of the verandah. John Ranier didn’t stop. Taking the verandah in two strides, he slammed through the front door, stumbled into the pale-lit reception hall. He saw the stairway, the balcony above, the girl’s stricken face looking down from the upper-hall gloom; and he was on the fourth step going up when the others came out of the back corridor and ran shouting into the hall.
Kavanaugh saw him and yelled, “What th’—where the hell did you come from?” Schlitz, Brown, Carpetsi and Daisy were banging along behind Kavanaugh; at the same time Coolidge and Marcelline charged in from the front.
Coolidge bawled. “It’s the doc from th’ ship! He just run around from behind th’ house!”
The hall filled with uproar. Ranier ignored the crash of boots coming behind him, bending every sinew to mount the staircase and be first to reach the girl. “What’s happened here? What’s wrong?”
Her frightened eyes reminded him she had never seen him before and his unexpected appearance must be alarming. He must look like a maniac. Muddied, disheveled, sea cap askew. Face oil-smoked from that spare-tire ride, abrasions on his palms and the seat half out of his pants from that jounce in the road. He caught her arm.
“It’s all right! I’m from the ship like the rest of these people! I came with them here—I’m the ship’s doctor! Where’s Dr. Eberhardt?”
She gasped, “He is not there—something terrible must have happened—” pointing down the balcony to a wide-open door. Lamplight streamed yellow from the door and some papers blew over the doorsill and scurried out on the balcony carpet.
Ranier started for the door, conscious of tumult coming up the stairs, oaths, puffs of winded breath, steps clattering like cavalry. The girl was close behind him. He heard her voice catch on a sob, appealing for quiet. “Oh—please. There are some very sick patients downstairs. We must not wake them—The laboratory—this is Dr. Eberhardt’s laboratory.”
Ranier halted on the threshold; stared into the lighted room. He was aware of the girl beside him; aware of her fear-darkened eyes and tremulous breathing. Kavanaugh was on the other side, features sharp, eyes cold steel under his downsnapped hat brim; and a coolness under his shoulder blades told him Marcelline and Coolidge were crowding up behind. He had to shake off a feeling he was surrounded; center his attention on this room.
“The doctor is not here,” the girl breathed. “Something must have happened to him. Something has happened here—”
SOMETHING HAD HAPPENED in the room, all right. There might have been an explosion in this laboratory. The window that looked out on the gallery and driveway below was open, the screen out. The breeze that rippled a gray, dissolving curtain of fog over the sill, stirred a thresh of scattered note-papers, fever charts, record blanks and loose leaves across the floor. On the left-hand wall, shelved with a drugstore array of colored bottles, a score of bottles had been uncorked and overturned, dripping glisteny cascades of acid, powders and chemicals. A case of books—Ranier recognized Lister, Semmelweis, Pinel, Thorwaldsen’s Tropical Diseases and Ringold’s Anatomy—dumped its contents to join the mess, and surgical instruments were everywhere.
Near the door at his elbow an old fashioned roll-top desk might have experienced a hurricane, inkwell upended, pigeon-holes in disorder.
Along the right-hand wall a lab table was strewn with all manner of topsy-turvy, a scramble of test tubes, mortars, rubber hose, chemical jars, microscope lying on its side, glass cannisters overturned spilling glutinous messes of bacteriological culture. At one end of the table a big glass tank filled with live frogs gave off shimmering greenish light-rays as the amphibians—there must have been two thousand of them—sped, dived and darted in crazed schools against the glass. In that corner a human skeleton dangled like a marionette; turned slowly in the breeze with a faint clinking of hinged bones, and grinned at the green maelstrom in the aquarium.
“Hell!” Ranier said.
“He was up here by himself all evening,” the girl whispered. “He was in here when I went to bed at eight o’clock because I am alone on call tonight with the patients. He was so very busy, so much to do with no one to assist—” Her voice choked. “He was experimenting—something so important he works on—a theory he could revive dead cells with adrenaline. Tonight he was to finish, to make the vital discovery. He told me not to call him unless for emergency. He said he would go out only if the case was extreme.”
“Revive dead cells?” Ranier echoed. “Experimenting with—”
She whispered, “He has worked for years. I thought he was in here when I went down to answer the door. Look! His laboratory in ruins! What has done this? Where is Dr. Eberhardt? Never does he go out without leaving a written message to tell me where he goes. Always he leaves a note for me. On that—”
She was pointing at a white enamel table in the center of the tumbled room. Pointing at a small metal standard, on one corner of the table, a lead base with a thin five-inch spike such as housewives use for pinning a stack of milk bills and notes to the ice man. There was no little note pinned to this spike. A plump green bullfrog had been impaled on the standard. The frog’s mouth was open like a purse, its eyes bulging. It worked its hind legs feebly. It was still alive.
But John Ranier wasn’t looking at the frog. He was looking at a glass bowl set in the center of the table. There was a Bunsen burner flaming under the bowl, and the clear liquid in the bowl simmered and bubbled and gave off a pungence of something cooking. The odor filled the room. A faint flavor of boiled beef. John Ranier didn’t like that center-piece. There were, in that bubbling bowl, two human hands. In the boiling water they swam and dodged about and rapped red knuckles on the glass as if they were alive.
NOBODY COULD SPEAK. Then the girl, staring at the opened window where the fog surged, whispered: “We must find Dr. Eberhardt! We must!”
John Ranier said huskily, “That bullfrog’s still alive. This couldn’t’ve happened very long ago. What time did you say he—”
Kavanaugh snarled, “It must’ve happened before we came! Otherwise we’d have heard the noise!” His fingers gripped Ranier’s arm, shook. “You were ou
tside there just now! Did you see anybody on that gallery out there? Did you see anybody around?”
“I was at the back of the house.” Ranier wrenched away. “Why?”
“We didn’t hear nothing at the front,” Coolidge put in hoarsely. “Out in the car me and Marcelline—”
Marcelline blurted, “Regard! A frog there! Sacré nom de Dieu! It is the Voodoo! That frog—”
Everybody was pushing in. “Say,” Brown’s voice aghast, “ain’t them somebody’s hands there in that bowl?”
“Hands! A skeleton!” Daisy’s scream soared soprano above mounting babble. “Ohmygod! Ohmygod! Ohmy—”
“Kavanaugh,” Coolidge implored, “I think me and Marcelline better get started while my nerves hold out. We’ll take Brown with us. It’s a long way in the dark. This Eberhardt doctor ain’t around, an’ if we’re goin’ for the cops—”
Buzzzzzzzzzzzzz!
Everybody heard it. Stood rooted. Stared.
Buzzzzzzzzzzzzz!
There it was again, drilling the baited silence. Coming from a panel in the wall above the laboratory table. A short, insistent drone that lit a tiny red light-bulb in the panel.
Buzzzzzzzzzzzzz!
The small bulb glowing again, on red, off red, like a firefly.
“Why—” the girl at Ranier’s elbow gasped convulsively. “Why—that is the call bell from the emergency room. That is the buzzer from the room where we left the wounded man!”
“Whaaat?” It was Kavanaugh who whirled, eyes glowing. Face shocked for the first time that night. “By God, who—we left Haarman down there alone!”
A sensation of cold seemed to flow under John Ranier’s scalp. Swept in the rush for the stairs, he tried to fight back fear; a seventh-sense feeling that unknown quantities had invaded the shadows around him and something diabolic and occult was loose in the fog-hung Haitian night. A man stabbed in the back and his table companions do not see it. Cryptic figures and the name Dr. Eberhardt scrawled on an envelope from the stabbed man’s pocket. A Dr. Eberhardt’s hospital near the scene of the crime, a lonely mountain villa and a beautiful girl. Dr. Eberhardt missing, his laboratory wrecked. A frog jammed on a spike.
Laïs Engles slumped to the floor.
Those three drones from the buzzer seemed the final terror. Three calls from a room where a man lay dying on an operating table, and alone. Who had pushed that bell to start them downstairs in stampede? John Ranier seemed to run in a cold wind. He could see the tuck was out of Kavanaugh, now. All the hardness was gone from the Irishman’s face and his skin was niveous, cheekbones glistening as if under the icy spray of the morgue.
The girl’s fear sickened him. Somehow—he didn’t know how—his arm was about her waist as they followed Kavanaugh down the hall to the back corridor: he could feel her tenseness as they ran. Thump, thump, thump, the others were coming.
Then they were panting in the doorway of the emergency room, Kavanaugh holding them back, glaring. John Ranier saw the room was as they had left it. Only Haarman was there, on the operating table. The man’s knees were drawn up as if in spasm, his left hand was clenched on his chest, his right arm hung limp, palm open. His face stared at the ceiling, an unseeing glassy stare. His mouth was open and his tongue showed.
“He’s dead,” Ranier said. “He must’ve just died.”
It was the girl who gave the low-pitched, breathless cry.
“No— No— No—!”
Everybody looked at the girl. All color had fled from her face. Her eyes were wide, white-circled, appalled. She stood rigid, one hand clutched in the gold-brown thicket of her hair, the other pointing at Haarman’s corpse on the operating table.
“What’s the matter?” Ranier asked.
“That man!” the girl’s voice was barely audible, a gray whisper in her convulsed throat. “His face—the scar on his right hand—I did not notice when they first brought him in tonight—I know that man! His name is Adolph Perl! Adolph Perl!” Her voice rose on the wings of terror. “He couldn’t have died just now! He died fourteen years ago in this very room! He died here in Haiti—Dr. Eberhardt buried him in the graveyard down the mountain—fourteen years ago—”
Fog creamed and curled against the window screen, opaque, wraith-like, silent. Not quite silent. Somewhere far out in the smothered night there was a low, sullen throbbing of wooden drums.
CHAPTER VII
THE GIRL’S STORY
The room had stopped breathing. In the corridor, the halls, the the stair-bannisters, upper rooms, dark passageways behind, all the normal night-sounds of a house asleep, all the nocturnal squeakings of floor-crack, of hinges straining in release, of timbers expanding after heat of the day, had stopped. Every clock, dripping faucet, mouse, might have died. The villa held its breath. Something in the air had quit. It seemed to Ranier as if the night itself was held in the grip of shock, like a great crouching beast muscle-locked in an ictus. Only its pulse was going, a low, dulled throb from the abeyant dark, no louder than the tapping of a fainted man’s heart.
Nobody moved. In the shadowless glare of the hurricane lamps, the room with its bottles and operating table was stark; the body on the operating table, the people in the doorway like dressed figures in stone. But the girl with her right hand caught in her hair, her left hand extended in that awful attitude of pointing, was shivering. An imperceptible trembling that shook her lips, quivered down the soft curve of her throat, shook the slim lines of her figure, down the brown unstockinged ankles to her white tennis shoes. In the white of her face her eyes, glowing at the body on the table, were almost black. Ranier had never seen such eyes. Wider. Wider. The room dwindled in his own vision, other faces blurring into background. It was as if only the two alone were there—the staring girl, the contorted dead man in mid-room. And the girl was shivering and shivering. He must put a stop to this. He must break that shock before it broke the girl.
He hardly knew he moved. He hardly knew he moved through that immense silence, stepped to the operating table, consulted the taffy-haired man’s lifeless pulse, pulled a blood-stained coat over the dead face. He hardly knew he walked, then, to the girl; caught her wrists to her sides, spun her rigid body in an about-face from the table, and commanded angrily, “Stop it! Stop it!”
His voice broke the spell; cut the overtaut nerves of tension; smashed the ice in the air. Figures came to life around him as if released; everybody seemed to yell at once. Kavanaugh was shouting at the girl, “What do you mean? What do you mean by saying Haarman died here in Haiti fourteen years ago?”
It was communicated to Ranier’s sensitized skin that the Irishman’s assurance had returned, and he had to admire the man’s grit. Panic reacted in the others, but the tall, self-sure man had recovered his steely personality and was pointing that domineering finger again. His tone implied, “What the devil do you mean, trying to scare Dave Kavanaugh?”
“She made a mistake,” Ranier said grimly across his shoulder. “Of course you did,” he spoke directly to the trembling girl. “This Mr. Haarman came down on the cruise ship with us from New York. Someone stabbed him in that café down in the village, and he died a few minutes ago while we were upstairs in that laboratory. He must have revived in one of those spasms of strength that come sometimes just before death; staggered over to push that call button on the wall; then pulled himself back up on the operating table. Effort that finished him. You can see he’s not been dead three minutes. You’ve mistaken him for somebody else.”
The girl’s eyes moved in dilated fascination to the lifeless shape on the table, and he could feel her wrists grow rigid in his grip.
She whispered, “I am not mistaken. It is he. Adolph Perl. He died here fourteen years ago. I saw him die.”
SOMEBODY SWORE AND somebody made a sound like a whinny, and the look on the girl’s face put an ache in the roots of John Ranier’s hair.
Kavanaugh, who had walked to the operating table, spun furiously. “Well, he’s dead, all right, all right. . .
. What is this, an insane asylum? Girl tryin’ to tell us Haarman is a guy she saw die once before!”
“She’s mistaken him for someone she once knew,” Ranier insisted.
“I am not mistaken. That scar on his palm. Shaped like the English letter Z.” Her low voice reminded Ranier of the other-worldish murmuring of a person talking out of sleep. “That scar, it was cut in his hand by an Indian in Para, Brazil. The face I would know anywhere. Thinner, older, but the face of Adolph Perl. It was the last summer of the War, I met him. He was mate on my uncle’s schooner, and then we were four years lost up the Amazon—”
Kavanaugh stared at the girl from under stretched eyelids. “The Amazon River in South America? Two seconds ago you said he died here in Haiti!”
“It was on our way back to Europe. Adolph Perl died when the schooner came ashore in Haiti. That was in 1922. And it is Adolph Perl, here now—on the very operating table where he—”
She put her face in her hands and began to cry softly; and an alto from the doorway moaned, “Zombie!” and nothing of this was real but the echo of those drums far off in the night. Even Kavanaugh became unreal, his cheekbones sultry, his eyes blue sparks, cocking his thumb like a trigger and aiming his finger at the stunned audience in the doorway, bawling suddenly:
“Well, what are you standing there for? You don’t believe this nutty girl, do you? You realize there’ll be a murder charge here, and all of us held up under one hell of an investigation? Haarman’s dead and we’ve got to get a move on. Brown!”
The fleshy man designated by Kavanaugh’s finger made a timid step forward. His spectacles looked owlish, and his lips made the sound of “Wh” twice.
“Snap out of it,” Kavanaugh told him. “When you get to the village down below, call the American consul at Port-au-Prince on the phone. Tell him what’s happened here, and to hop in a car and get here fast. Use my name, understand?”