by Otto Penzler
“I don’t know—owow! My shoulder. If I only had my teef—!”
“Never mind,” Ranier yanked his companion’s lapel, “the teeth. Try to remember!”
He released his hold just in time to grab the wheel for a precarious grade crossing. Railway metals swimming up off the road; rumpety-bump!; an alarm bell affixed to the warning, Chemin-de-Fer, whizzing by the window with a vaguely-heard dinging that was snuffed out astern before it was there, a tocsin as futile in this fog-swamped, drum-periled night as a banged dishpan in a hurricane at sea. Would a train be coming across Purgatory? As if locomotives were the danger in this chaos!
“Who’d Kavanaugh mean by he?”
But the professor, addled by pain and fright, didn’t know. “Thash all Misher Kavanaugh shaid. And Misher Coolidge shaid, ‘Didn’t I tell you, Dave? Don’t that prove I’m on the level?’ Then Misher Kavanaugh shaid Misher Coolidge better be on the level and so had everybody else, or he’d soon put them sixsh feet under it. He waved his gun at Misher Coolidge while he shaid it, and then he shtarted running for the car. ‘We got to catch up, and catch up quick!’ he yelled. They all ran to the car and jumped in, and Misher Kavanaugh drove away like mad, leaving me there alone. For a while I was too shcared to move. Then I crept out into the shemetery, and thash when I thought I heard a horsh, and you came. Where,” the thin man appealed, “is thish awful thing going to end? Murderers! Corpshes! Stabs—!”
HAILSTONES SHOWERING UP under the fenders drowned out the professor’s concluding jeremiad. Ranier swore at an oily curve; banking through mist like an airplane. Trees swished by and, surprisingly, a steamroller somebody had brought from America and left to rust of loneliness in roadside weeds. He strained his throat above the crackle of newly-tarred highway, twisting his mouth sidewise to shout.
“What’d you say it was the blonde found in the grave that touched off Kavanaugh?”
The insectologist, who’d been crooning moans and petting his bandaged shoulder, stiffened violently upright, flung hand to mouth, palming a startled gasp. “Why—I didn’t shay! Why—of coursh! Thash the important thing—the very thing I wash going to tell you just as I wash shtabbed! Mish May, in that grave back there—she found a hat!”
Rainer’s attempt to take an S-curve with one hand and catch his companion’s throat with the other almost capsized the car. Wheels and chassis screeched; Ranier was yelling, “A hat? What kind of a hat?” and Professor Schlitz’s eyes were round gas globes in the dusk under his sun helmet, his mouth yammering between blown cheeks:
“A man’sh hat! All squashed and shtepped on, too! A Panama!”
Ranier cried across the steering wheel, “He’s the one Kavanaugh meant, you fool! He must’ve been at Colonel Otto’s grave before you got there. I knew all along that smooth Haitian never went for the police! That Panama belongs to Marcelline!”
“Yesh!” the professor wailed. “Marshelline—!” His mouth collapsed on a howl. Tarred gravel slashing the underside of the fenders made a hailstorm rataplan as Ranier, barking oaths, jammed on the brakes. Smoke poured from the emergency, gagging the air with a pungence of calcined grease. The Model T slid, vibrating; jerked convulsively; stopped in mid-career and choked silent, as if appalled.
Directly in the path of the headlamp, a man’s legs were outsprawled, shoes carelessly exposed on the road. The body, doubled as if broken, was almost concealed in the rushes of a shallow ditch that drained the road’s edge, and a great yellow tree, its vast girth protruding from the forest’s wall, towered like a shade from Erebus summoned to stand sentinel over the dead man.
Ranier knew the body to be lifeless by the pigeon-toed posture of the shoes, even before his own pigeon-toed shoes reached the road. He limped past the headlamp for a better look. There was no use walking quietly. Two miles over the mountain they must have heard those tires eating up the tar, and now his footfalls made a peanut-brittle crunching loud enough to wake the dead. But the body in the weeds didn’t waken. When Ranier halted, regretting his curiosity, there was only that other world hint of man, the noiseless smoulder of the fog, and the presence of the tree. The body had been skewered. Skewered by the splintered end of a bamboo pole, a sliver of which had gone through the ribs and punched out under the shoulder blades. Blue fists had a death-grip on the pike where it entered the chest, and the force which had driven that jab had broken the long pole at a dozen of its joints; shivered the light stiff wood so that it looked as if it had been struck by lightning.
Then, backing inadvertently from this grim-reaped harvest, Ranier walked against the tree, grazed his scalp on iron, whirled to direct his flashlight up the column of bark. At the height of a tall man’s head, driven to the hilt, a knife had been stabbed into the tree. White cord fluttered from the iron handle. As if a frog or some other trademark had been dangled there to sign the job. Ranier’s flashlight, hunting some token in the roadside weeds, found nothing but tracks. On the shoulder of the road, close to the mud-splashed body, a trail of horseshoes hoof-stamped in warm tar!
There was a gargled exclamation from Professor Schlitz.
“Shpeared! Shpeared like a bug! He was shtanding by the road, and shomebody went by like one of those horshmen in the Lives of the Bengal Lancers. Shpeared him on the pike; then left the knife in the tree as a warn—why, heavensh! Itch—”
Ranier steadied the flashlight’s occult circle on the dead man’s face. Speaking of the Devil!
“—Itch Marshelline!”
Ranier nodded. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here.”
“Whuh-where are we going?”
“Captain Friederich’s mausoleum! Last stop! To lay a ghost!”
CHAPTER XXI
UNHOLY GROUND
The mausoleum looked naked through the creamy scud.
HIER RUHET IN GOTT
HAUPTMANN VICTOR FRIEDERICH
GEST. 3 JANUAR 1922
ICH HATTE EINST
EIN SCHONES VATERLAND
Approaching that black-lettered legend cut in stolid German capitals on the marble door, it came to Ranier that this might be his last stop, for a fact. The little white house was still. Too still. With the fog-drift smoking around its base, moonlight slanting across the peaked roof and falling in mile-long shafts down the cliff at its back, the little house gave the impression of a tomb afloat in space. On that lonely corner of the mountain it had come detached from its lugubrious surroundings, been set adrift. Ankle-deep in mist, Ranier wondered if he were on solid ground.
His shoes made no sound on the turf. Around him the graveyard, its one side fenced by the monolithic boles of Caribbean pine, its terrain littered by tumbled memorials, faded plaques and a flock of angels brooding over mounds, slept as a graveyard should. Or as a graveyard shouldn’t, on a night in Haiti when all rules were reversed, the towns playing dead and the cemeteries playing Going to Jerusalem.
Skin twitching, acutely conscious that some-something had gone wrong in a place where nothing should be right, Ranier halted, listened. Had that bullet-scratch on the ear made him deaf? In this silence, the turn of a leaf would have made a report. It couldn’t be possible this half acre on a summit under the moon had been left out of the game. Nervously, he eyed the mausoleum. If the little white house saw him coming it gave no sign.
He was sorry, now, he’d left Professor Schlitz in the car parked at the entranceway urns; he could have welcomed even that companionship. Something should be here that wasn’t. This grave-yard was dead. All at once Ranier knew why.
Those drum-beats which had followed him for the past six hours had stopped. Weren’t coming. As if the pulse of Haiti had quit. Nerved to that ceaseless repetend, Ranier’s senses had become adjusted to the tension, and now, released from strain, his nerves went to pieces as if too suddenly deprived of drugs.
He ran. Charged at the little white house with bursting lungs and fists clenched, forcing climax by assault. The silent door was waiting three inches ajar, a gouge in the marble where a crowba
r might have pried the casement. Any minute now and something would come out of that door. Green hands. A knife-blade. Bullets. Ranier laughed as he strove to widen the breach, swing the massive barrier. There was a gush of stale air mixed from mould, old earth and mortar. A screech from hinges atrophied by disuse.
Then he was standing in the damp solitude of a tomb, jelled in a twilight that might have been left there since the third of January, 1922, eyes riveted at what lay on the floor.
What lay on the floor were an overturned coffin, an axe-split coffin lid, and about two hundred dry, disjointed human bones. There were, too, on the floor a mess of footprints and about a million beetles and something Ranier didn’t notice until later. Right then he saw nothing but those two hundred odd human bones.
They weren’t bones to Ranier, but fragments. Two hundred jumbled fragments of a puzzle he wanted more than anything in his life to solve.
• • •
HUMERUS. TIBIA . PELVIS. Clavicle. Clavicle. Long afterwards he was to wonder how he did it. Long afterwards—the memory sending a draught down his neck—he was to wonder how, in that cold-walled vault in a seance of blue-windowed moonshine, a thousand creeps in the silence close around him, graveyard at his back, mice-feet in his hair, his mind harried by the ghosts of mass-murder and unknown killers and vanished dead—how he could pit himself against that jigsaw of bones and beetles to reconstruct a man.
“Radius. Femur. Ulna. Scapula—” Naming the pieces as they came to hand. On his knees; panting; fingers flying over that scrap heap of human kindling in necrologic dexterity, sorting, collecting, fitting, matching. Rummaging for an elusive metacarpus. Picking the heap for a handy patella. Wishbone here. Shins there. Now the cuboid—
The great Vesalius, himself, would not have worked faster. Ranier’s fingers ached and his eyes burned. Knuckles. Vertebrae. Now he needed the seventh cervicle. Harder to find than Adam’s missing rib. The bones, straw-colored, marrow-less, made a faint dry rattling as he sorted them in the gloom, and their problem was further involved with particles of cloth that turned to dust at the touch, snarls of faded wool yarn that might have been a sweater, scraps of leather, in the macaroni heap of the ribs a few tarnished brass buttons. Like a box of dominoes mixed with an old lady’s sewing basket, then scattered across the floor.
Some of the bones had been snapped underheel; stepped on and splintered like that bamboo jousting pole through Monsieur Marcelline. It was a job to repair a fractured fibula with that picture in mind. Marcelline, dead on the Portau-Prince road—what had his Panama been doing in that grave at Bois Legone? How came Marcelline to these backwoods when, presumably, he’d gone with Mr. Brown for police help down the coast? Where did that leave Brown? Had the dumpling-faced tourist in plus fours met with some crimson come-uppance, too?
Faces, bodies, incidents, scenes raced in merry-go-round circles through Ranier’s head while dried bones raced through his fingers. The merry-go-round whirled in fog through Nowhere, and its riders were living and dead. Some rode in half-seen secondhand Fords and one, headless, unidentified, on a horse. Some dropped by the wayside, and others disappeared in the murk, and the brass ring was an answer you snatched at, thought you had, and missed.
On this cloudy carousel a web-footed man named Haarman was stabbed (why?) and his body vanished. A Haitian gendarme appeared, shot through the head. A dance-hall Italian had his jugular hacked on a pair of glasses which belonged to a pundit of insectology, himself the victim of a knife. Murder, an unknown killer drunk with blood and success, impaled a fourth victim on a bamboo pole. You got on the merry-go-round; that was one way of getting off. Faster and faster went the ride. Graveyards flew by. You hung on, leering at emptied coffins, bodies propped on headstones they didn’t own. Hanging on with you was an Irishman, diamond-eyed, snarly, socking his blond woman friend, pistolling a listener with a pointed finger, accusing you over a gun. (That killer, firing from an automobile, had had a gun!) Near by was a googoo-eyed Daisy, romping about in terror, assuring her Irish escort the fault was his. A man named Coolidge of mighty muscles and mangled nerves stood on the merry-go-round with muddied feet, grimacing, somehow in the show. They got on and off, like the man named Brown, and for a while you couldn’t see them, but they might be there.
The ride started in a waterfront café run by a Negro who mixed Voodoo cocktails, and went off into unmapped spaces. In an outer circle of night nameless shadows moved; shapes cadaverous as the undernourished and grinning Holbein figures of Plague and Death pictured in old medical book wood-cuts. The shadowy presence of Resurrection Men tip-toeing on the outskirts with barrow and shovel. A faceless physician wearing pink rubber gloves and an invisible cloak, hiding behind a fogbank, a possible Knox in cahoots with Burkes and Hares.
Centered in the merry-go-round was a hospital where a frightened girl waited between closed doors with secrets in her eyes. You didn’t trust her any more than you trusted any woman, but you feared for her safety. Her companions were dead leftovers from the War, and her uncle, a ship’s captain dead fourteen years, had evacuated his mausoleum in a land where corpses learned to walk, and the walls around her were closing in. The walls closed in as the speed of the merry-go-round shrank its dimensions. The night with its outer band, its shadowy perils closed in. The people on the carousel, all that were left, Coolidge, Brown, the blonde, Kavanaugh (their whereabouts uncertain) closed in. A mob of black men silenced their drums to advance. The faceless doctor was there. A grave-worm expert called frantically for help but made no sound through bare gums; and a strange body, compost of German sailor, zombie and murdered tourist menaced the girl, muttering, “Adolph Perl! I am Adolph Perl!”; and the only way you could save her was by solving a jigsaw puzzle made of human joints, but the joints were scattered, scattered—
RANIER JERKED HIS chin from his chest in panic. Lord, what a dream! Whole nightmare in forty winks. He couldn’t pass out now from that aguardiente. Scared out of exhaustion, he went at the bone pile in redoubled fury, cursing a seventeen-second nap where every watch-tick counted. On the edge of breakdown it was hard to know where hallucination ended and reality began. When the night, itself, was a fog. Reality a tomb in moonlight on the corner of a cemetery.
“Now the twelfth thoracic. First lumbar. Coccyx—”
Talking aloud to concentrate. Grabbing, joining, arranging with feverish haste that sepulchral design. Putting two and two together for an answer that wouldn’t make four. Piece by piece he assembled the human spine. Tacked on the ribs. Joined shoulder blades, arms, fingers; then pelvis, thighs, thin white legs, bony feet.
It was almost done. A place for everything and everything in its place. Marionette ready for its strings. Or, in that moony tomb-light, a beheaded spectre drawn by swift chalk-strokes there on the floor, wanting only one final touch for identification. The head.
Queerly, in haste to accomplish the more difficult pattern, leaving the easy for the last, Ranier had ignored the skull. Come to think of it now, with the scrap heap straightened, the corners left to the beetles—he wheeled and glared in dismay—it wasn’t there. All that fearsome artistry for nothing? Cursing, he went to his knees, clawed through splinters of coffin lid for that last jigsaw-fragment. It wasn’t in the corners or under the chopped wood. A horrifying thought assailed him as his hands ransacked and couldn’t find. Had the corpse, once gracing that framework, been minus a head when entombed? Sweat came through his collar.
“That would mean Dr. Eberhardt—uh!”
He found the skull gratefully. Behind the upsided coffin, wedged against the wall. Returned the stare it gave him with its cavernous eyes looking up at his flashlight. Then, staring, Ranier experienced a numbness of the face. That skull had been cracked, at some long-past date, like an Easter egg. The occipital bone fractured at a time when it wasn’t a death’s-head. Blunt instrument, fall, heavy blow from behind—it was written as if by a fine black pen in shaky hand across the base of the hollow gray globe; but it wasn’t that. Nor was i
t the fact that this death’shead occupied an address registered for another.
It was something about that grin. Something freezy and unsociable in that white-jawed skull-smile that sent what his Scotch ancestors would have termed a “cauld grue” through Ranier’s being. His downreaching hand started back as if those bony jaws had snapped. But they didn’t snap. He looked in spite of himself. That skull was holding something between its teeth.
Locked in that merry grimace was a piece of faded broadcloth, as if it might be biting a handkerchief to stifle uncontrollable laughter from within. Jutting tongue-like from a corner of those jaws, a rag of shiny yellow material, such as a bulldog might tear from an oilskin raincoat. And chewed between the white teeth, looped out through the molars, lustrous, iridescent, unbelievable even in the Aladdin’s lamp of his flashlight—a string of pearls!
Pearly teeth in that skull! Ranier’s hand shook so in the act of picking the thing up that its lower jaw dropped loose. Bites of cloth fell to the floor. Pearls scattered, rolled like marbles around his shoes, as if a jewel box had spilled.
“Pearls!”
IT WASN’T AN oyster! It was a skull! A skull dropping chewed white pearls from its teeth! Petrified, confounded, Ranier glared at the skull in his hand; could not have been more thunderstruck had it opened its jaws and delivered Hamlet’s soliloquy. His reflexes strained for release, as if he were standing with a live bomb. He must rid his fingers of the laughing thing, drop it, throw it. Then he saw, although it had been waiting before him all this time, his unfinished diagram on the floor. Summoning a final effort of will, he went to one knee; set the skull to its owner’s bony shoulders, and reeled back, panting. The skeleton was restored.