The room was round and perhaps twenty feet in diameter. It was roofed by the observatory dome, an inverted bowl with a great slot cut out of it where the slide was open. I remember that stars were sharply visible through the opening. The walls and the inside of the dome were painted gray, or some light-absorbing color, and the floor was bare. The telescope was mounted on a concrete base in the middle of the room, and its long barrel was aimed up and through the slide in the dome, trained on some star a thousand light years away, I suppose. In the silence of the room there was a single sound, the ticking of the clockwork motor that revolved the dome above us, moving it with the same tremendous precision as the earth itself, spinning on its axis.
Between us and the telescope was LeNormand’s plain deal worktable, with a single hooded, gooseneck student’s lamp spilling a little circle of light out on its top. Back to us stood a wooden chair, varnished oak, of the sort that universities must buy in carload lots. LeNormand was sitting in that chair, looking at us. His arms hung straight from his shoulders, and his head was so far bent over the top of the chairback that it was completely upside down. His eyes were open, looking right at us, but there was no expression on his face at all. It was like the face of a man asleep. Of course, he must have been dead, even then, but it still seems to me that the eyes moved once, just as we appeared in the doorway.
Fire was growing up his back and around his head like a great vine. Tentacles of it licked the back of the chair and wavered to and fro over his body; there was a great blossom of flame around his head. His face looked out at us between petals of live fire. It was not the kind of fire that a burning log gives. A yellow, lambent glow. It was not like anything I ever saw before. Clear, white, silent, flickering as fast as a snake’s tongue, writhing like streamers of kelp in a tide race, it twined over and around and into the body of LeNormand as he sat there. It was a parasite on him, possessing and consuming him, apparently endued with a life of its own and nourished by its host, LeNormand. In the instant we stood, fixed with horror and amazement, in the doorway we began to smell what the fire was doing: the choking fume of burning hair and another smell that was still worse.
Lots of things happened in the next ten seconds. I ordered my legs to take me down the stairs and out of that appalling room; instead, they seemed to be carrying me straight toward LeNormand. As I went, I remember vaguely that I struggled out of my overcoat. Jerry had leaped to the wall near the stair well, and out of the corner of my eye I saw him snatch down the fire extinguisher there. The blast of heat and the stench, as I got nearer, were terrific. With the coat in front of me I flung myself at that incandescent figure on the chair. It and I went over together with a crash.
As we struck the floor, a tongue of flame went across my face.
Then I was kicking the chair away from me and wrapping LeNormand in the folds of my coat. Something cold and wet bit the back of my head, and I began to choke.
“Roll clear,” I heard Jerry tell me. His voice was cool and urgent. I flung myself to the side and scrambled to my feet. With the fire blanketed by my coat, the room was almost dark. Jerry was standing with spraddled legs, the fire extinguisher in one hand and the nozzle of its short hose in the other. A jet of hissing liquid probed something black and huddled on the floor; tendrils of smoke were rising. Jerry kicked back a corner of the coat and turned the stream of chemical on whatever was underneath.
That was all I saw. I went down the stairs as fast as I could. My knees were weak as hell. I just about got outside in time. When I was too exhausted to gag any more I went back up. My mouth tasted of bile and Scotch, and yet I could still smell that acrid, sweetish smoke of burning flesh.
When I got back all the lights in the instrument room were on. The place looked impersonal. Jerry had supplemented my coat with his own, but except for that one long, dark blotch on the floor, the overturned chair, and a puddle of stuff from the extinguisher there was no change. I pulled myself up the last two steps by the hand rail and went into the room.
Jerry looked at me. His face was white. He licked his lips, started to say something, and stopped. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Most of my mind was busy telling my stomach to stay in the usual place. Finally the silence got to me; I felt that unless I said something I should be sick again.
“Well?” I managed to get out.
“Are you all right?”
I wasn’t entirely sure. “Yeah. If I didn’t lose any essential part of me down there.”
“Jesus, I’m sorry.”
“I’m okay now,” I told him. “Is he . . . ? Have you . . . ?” I didn’t know how to put the question.
Jerry nodded. “I looked at him. He’s dead, all right.”
“I see you used your overcoat too.”
He looked away and said, “His feet were sticking out.”
I saw him swallow.
Neither of us said anything for a minute after that. I got to thinking. “What do we do now?”
Jerry took a couple of steps toward the overcoats, and then stopped. “I’ve been wondering about that myself.”
“We ought to tell somebody.”
He almost smiled. “Sure. But just who?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there’s the Dean. And there’s Prexy. And we might get a doctor from the infirmary. And the undertaker. And the police, of course.”
This last was a new idea to me, but it made sense. There’d have to be some sort of investigation into how LeNormand had come to die. That fire . . .
“I guess we ought to call the police.”
Jerry admitted that. But it was a University matter, any way you looked at it. As he pointed out, this would be front-page news tomorrow, and it was important that we do the whole thing carefully. We talked it over and agreed the safest thing to do would be to call Prexy and leave it up to him. He could handle it any way he wanted.
“Listen,” said Jerry, when we’d agreed on that. “Suppose you phone him. There’s a couple of things here I want to look at.”
Probably he saw I was still pretty shaky. “There’s nothing here I ever want to see again,” I said, and went down the stairs.
At the bottom of the spiral there was a telephone, one of the old-fashioned kind with the brown oak box, fastened to the wall. The University had its own on-campus system. I picked up the receiver. After quite some time a kid’s bored voice said in my ear, “University.”
“Get me President Murray.”
“He’s not to be disturbed. There’s a trustees’ dinner tonight.”
I was annoyed. This guy was probably a green kid with a scholarship. “Listen, freshman,” I told him. “This is an eccentric old millionaire who wants to leave the U a million dollars. And I want to talk to Murray. Get him.”
“Yes, sir.” Bells rang, clicks occurred, and eventually Prexy’s smooth, careful voice was there in the receiver.
“This is President Murray.”
In four years at the University I’d never spoken to Prexy before. I was suddenly nervous. “President Murray, I’m Bark Jones, class of ’thirty-two.”
“I’m very sorry, Mr. Jones. I’m extremely busy at the moment. If there is anything I can do for you—”
I cut him short. “This is serious, sir. I’m not drunk or playing a practical joke. I’m at the observatory, and there’s been a serious accident. Jerry Lister, a classmate of mine, and I think you had best come up here right away.”
His voice changed its quality. Some of the smoothness went out of it. It became alert, suspicious. A trifle peremptory. “What sort of accident?”
I told him Professor LeNormand was dead. He didn’t believe me. I told him again.
“Mr. Jones, if this is not absolutely—”
“Absolutely and positively,” I affirmed.
“Have you notified anyone else?”
“No,” I said. “We considered that this was a University matter. We want you to come at once and take the thing off our hands. Better come al
one. It’s a nasty business.”
His voice still sounded incredulous, but he told me, “Very well. I shall be there in ten minutes.”
I hung up and sat down on the bottom step; my legs felt like boiled macaroni, and my mouth still tasted abominably. There was a high, continuous, ringing sound in my ears.
“Hey, Bark!” It was Jerry’s voice from the top of the stairs.
“Coming,” I told him, and decided on the way up to keep count of the number of times I had to climb those damn stairs. This was the third trip.
Jerry had turned out the lights again and found a couple of chairs some place. He made me sit down, first producing, to my pleased surprise, a flask.
“If you think you can hold this down now, you better have some.”
I held it down, all right. It was fine stuff, Irish, and must have come out of the family cellar. Our drinking and our talk, as I reproduce it, sounds callous. Perhaps it was. But after a shock like the one we had just experienced, your emotions retreat to some quiet corner of your brain and you set up, in self-protection, a superficial toughness of mind to keep from going crazy. I was glad to get a drink, and because I could not tolerate too much silence in that room, I accused him of holding out on me.
“Always prepared,” he replied. “I used to be a Boy Scout once.” His manner changed, and he stared at the floor for some moments without speaking, as though he were trying to decide about something difficult. “I suppose Prexy’s on his way?”
“Said he’d be here in ten minutes.”
Jerry nodded. “There’s a couple of things we better talk over before he comes, Bark.”
“My God,” I said. “This thing is foul enough already. I don’t want to talk about it. Let Prexy shoulder the grief.”
He cut me short. “That’s all very well. I don’t like this any better than you do. Besides, LeNormand was my friend.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Forget it. We’re going to be asked a whole lot of questions, Bark. Prexy first, and then the police, and then, I suppose, the newspapers. Just what are we going to tell them?”
“Why . . . that we came in here—I suppose it was about six o’clock —and found LeNormand here, burning up in his chair, and . . .”
Jerry looked hard at me. “Yeah. We came in here and LeNormand was in his chair with his head hanging down over the back of it, and he was burning. Burning like a torch. Suppose somebody told you that story?”
It did sound unconvincing when he put it as baldly as that. The questions I’d been fighting to keep out of my mind began to stampede into it. How did the fire start? How could LeNormand have just sat there while it burned him alive? Had he carelessly jammed a lighted pipe into his pocket and set fire to his clothes that way? Then he must have died soon after, because no man would sit calmly in his chair and be burned to death. Heart failure? Perhaps that was it.
Jerry cut in on my thoughts. “While you were telephoning, I looked round this place. It’s going to be pretty hard to explain how it happened, Bark. You saw him just as we came in. Did you think he was dead then?”
“He must have been.”
“Did you think he was?” “No,” I had to admit. “I thought I saw his eyes move. I thought he was looking at us.”
He nodded. “So did I. Maybe it was the flicker of the fire.” He paused. “Take a look at that chair, but don’t touch it. There may be fingerprints.”
I got up slowly and crossed the room to the overturned chair. I had to force one foot deliberately and consciously ahead of the other to get there, and it took every ounce of will power to do it. Leaning over carefully, so as to include nothing else in the room in my field of vision, I looked at the chair. Of course, at the time it was dark in the room, but even the light from one gooseneck lamp was enough to show that the chair was not the way I’d expected it to be. Instead of being blackened with fire and charred clear up the back, it was almost unmarked. There were a few varnish blisters toward the top of the back, but that was all. I thought of that flick of fire that had gone across my face when I tackled LeNormand and couldn’t decide whether it had felt hot or not. It must have; all fires are hot, so I must have felt the heat, but I couldn’t remember that I had. And apparently the chair hadn’t. It simply was not burned. I turned toward Jerry.
“This is the damnedest thing.”
He nodded and said carefully, “I looked at him too. His back is burned clear through.”
My stomach began to turn on its foundations. “I’ll take your word for that.”
“You know,” he observed calmly, “this thing is going to look like a crime. In fact, murder. A torch murder.”
I left the chair and went back to him. “And we’ll be the principal witnesses?”
“Witnesses,” said Jerry, “or else . . .”
“Or else what?”
“Suspects.”
“Nuts,” I said. “They won’t suspect us.”
“The only way out of this place is the front door. We had it in view for five minutes before we got here. Did you see anyone come out?”
“It was dark.”
Jerry looked at me sadly. “Yes, it was dark, but we’d have seen the motion, at least, if someone had slipped out. Unless the police find some other goat, it looks to me as if we’d be unanimously elected. Somebody did it.”
I could see the point. We might be in for a nasty time. “How about saying that we did see somebody—just a shadow—go out the door?”
He didn’t think much of that idea. In fact, his opinion was that it wouldn’t pay to lie to the police. I thought privately that it might be accident or suicide, or lots of things besides murder, but I could see that Jerry was right about one thing. We were going to be in the limelight for a couple of days. Our final decision was that each of us would tell his own story and stick by it.
All the time we were talking Jerry was wandering round the room, looking at everything. There were some scattered papers and a pencil on top of the worktable, and he spent some time staring at them. As far as I could tell, the papers had equations of some sort on them, and Jerry finally decided to copy them into his notebook, though he kept muttering that they didn’t make sense and he couldn’t understand them at all. The paper was the sort they sell by the tablet at the University co-op, and the edges of the leaves looked faintly yellow as if the sheets were old.
I began to feel completely shot. My legs ached, my head ached. I felt dirty all over, and tired to death. There was a nasty taste in my mouth.
“What the hell’s keeping Prexy?” I said fretfully. “I want to get a shower and some sleep. I feel like the latter end of a misspent life.”
Jerry grinned. “You ain’t seen nothing yet. Forget about the shower and the sleep. Just impress this place, and the way every thing is in it, on your mind. We’ll be questioned till we’re liable to forget our own names.”
He was obviously right, and I tried to follow his advice. But there were so few things to look at and the whole affair was so conspicuously a nightmare that it all began to seem unreal to me. I wondered if I had d.t.’s. Maybe this was the way they took you. Perhaps if I could get hold of some sleep and a competent doctor I’d be cured of the whole illusion. Just then there was a swish of tires on the gravel.
“Prexy’s here,” said Jerry. “And now the fun begins.”
We crossed to the head of the spiral stairs; there was the slam of a car door, and the brisk click of the latch at the entrance.
“Mr. Jones?” his big voice boomed out in the hall below. “Right up here, sir,” I called down.
He came up the stairs, irritation and purpose in every stamp of his feet on the treads. “Mr. Jones, I trust the extraordinary story you told me over the telephone a few minutes ago—”
And he was in the room, his words abruptly silenced by its quiet austerity. Before he had perfect control of himself, I heard him give a single sniff, as the impact of the smell still lingering in the air took him by surprise. Even though he did not se
e LeNormand at once, he said nothing, asked no questions, but looked swiftly about him. He had no doubt in the world after that first breath.
Prexy is a fine-looking man, big as a house and built like an athlete, with a granite face and hair as gray as stone. His manner is heavy rather than pompous, and he never appears to be at a loss. My own idea is that his worst enemy has been a terrible temper, and that he has learned to keep it chained up so tight that he gives an impression of being almost devoid of feeling. I always think of him more as a major in the marines than as an educator; sometimes I suspect he does himself. There’s no doubt, though, that his iron purpose and executive force have put life into the whole University. That evening he was dressed for a formal dinner—tails and white tie.
Jerry broke the momentary silence. “Over there,” he said, with a flash of his eye toward the long, dark bundle on the floor.
“Thank you,” said Prexy. “You’re Mr. Lister?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll talk to you both about this in a moment.” He went across the room evenly, steadily. Then he was kneeling beside our overcoats. I saw one hand reach out to draw them back, and looked quickly away. The clockwork of the dome ticked steadily on, the pinprick stars burned in the black sky beyond the opening, and I could see my breath, faintly frosty in the cold air of the room. When I looked again, Prexy was just standing up. He came back to us, glancing from Jerry to me without the slightest expression of any sort on his face. But I’d swear it was whiter than it had been, and the lips more firmly pressed together.
“You gentlemen did exactly the right thing in calling me,” he said. “It’s LeNormand, and he’s dead.”
Jerry said, “I think you’d better hear our story before doing anything further.” And he told the whole thing, quickly and concisely.
When he had finished, Prexy asked: “Have you anything to add to that, Mr. Jones?”
“No, sir.”
“Mr. Lister, Mr. Jones, you must surely be aware that your story is almost impossible to believe. Your account of the discovery of Professor LeNormand’s body is absolutely incompatible with the nature and extent of the burns.” His voice was not quite so decisive. “I have never seen a human body so—” he paused for a word, “so nearly incinerated.”
The Rim of Morning Page 5