“Of course,” he added, “if we should happen to discover any positive piece of additional information, it is proper and even necessary to bring it to their attention.”
In the weeds then, a dozen steps farther, as he went down it with his flash, he found the blue mutilated hat.
I went down to join him where he was crouching, looking at it. He hadn’t touched it. He was just squatting, working his toothless gums together, staring down at it in the flashlight’s beam where it lay in the damp soil, among the weeds at the bottom of the ditch.
It had startled and even terrified him. It was such a damned-looking thing, little wonder. He lifted his eyes, fixed and pale among their wrinkles, staring at me all over again. I could almost feel him putting a tape measure around my head.
“I’d like to know how it got there,” he said, as I squatted down beside him. “I’d like damned well to know.”
“I threw it here,” I said.
“You threw it here?” he said.
“I found it on the road,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “You found it on the road?”
“Yes,” I said. “I noticed it and picked it up. It used to be a hat of mine.”
His lips worked together without opening, without a sound. But I knew what he was saying, anyway. He was saying, “Oh, it used to be a hat of yours?”
“Yes,” I said, picking it up and opening it to the sweatband. “Haxler’s on Fifth Avenue. It used to have my initials on it, too, you can see. It’s my own old hat, no question of it. My maid must have given it to the Salvation Army, or maybe put it out with the trash. I suppose it’s going to be pretty hard to trace.”
The flashlight lay upon his knees. If I had shrunk in that moment to five feet three, and had grown a beard and long matted auburn hair, small red eyes and pointed teeth, I don’t think it would have surprised him.
He got up with his knees a little wobbly under him.
“Let’s go,” he said. “We might as well see about that ear of yours, before I call the police.”
Four or five hundred yards farther on—along that narrow high-crowned ditch-bordered road, with the old unbroken stone fences on either side that were overgrown with their great vine ropes and warty leaves, and woods beyond—we came to the bend. And around it, a hundred feet ahead, there was the old Draco coupe standing where I had left it, at the road fork.
We walked toward it. MacComerou had still been flashing his light in circles on the road for those Sigourney tread tracks that I hadn’t seen. But when he saw the car standing there, he lost interest in trying to pick them up again. Perhaps he hadn’t seen them any more now, either.
The battered old coupe was there. It was just there. In the middle of the narrow road, and right across the entrance to the Swamp Road, beside that three-armed sign. No car could have gone by. It just could not have gone by, without going down into the ditch and leaving a swath through the weeds, and maybe knocking down a section of stone wall, and a lot of other things. It couldn’t have gone on past me toward Stony Falls, and it couldn’t have turned off down the Swamp Road. MacComerou could see that.
He didn’t say anything for a good minute, trying to think it out. I didn’t say anything, either. I didn’t want to rub it in. I opened the coupe door, turned on the headlights, and got out my flashlight. I lifted up the hood.
“Perhaps you were mistaken about the time you were here, Doctor?” he said.
But he didn’t say it with any great conviction. He knew that I had been here, as I had said.
“From sunset,” I told him, “till I came and spoke to you in your garden. You remember?”
“Yes,” he said. “I remember.”
I loosened the feed-line nut with the little monkey wrench he had lent me, and unscrewed it the rest of the way with my fingers. It had just needed a start. I bent up the end of the copper tube, put my mouth to it, and sucked on it. Some dirt or lint came out, and then a mouthful of raw gasoline. That was all there was to it. I spat the gasoline out, with the taste still in my teeth. I took out the little filter screen and blew through it, put it back in, and connected the line again, tightening the nut with my fingers and the wrench. I closed down the hood again, while insects sang, and MacComerou stood watching me.
“You aren’t a very imaginative man, are you, Dr. Riddle?” he said.
“What is there to imagine?”
“Most men have some imagination,” he said. “A little anyway.”
“Maybe it’s my hard luck,” I told him “A screw missing. But maybe there’s enough imagination in the world already without what I might contribute. That ought to have done the trick, Professor. Here’s your wrench, before I forget it. And thanks.”
“Maybe I had better give it to you,” he said.
He stood looking at me, holding it.
“No, thanks,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to take it. I don’t expect to run into any more trouble.”
Insects hummed in the darkness, and there was an owl howling in the woods down there on Swamp Road. I stepped down along the road with my flash to find the crank that I had heaved at that yellow rattler. It was lying across the ruts where it had bounced. I picked it up. In one of the ruts my flashlight showed the snake, lying straight as a ribbon, with its head smashed down on a stone, with its long hooked fangs extruding from its pulped jaws, and its hard eyes cold.
My quick, hard throw had nailed it, though I hadn’t realized it. It hadn’t slipped away, too quick to see. That is a hard thing to do, even for a snake. It had slid down beneath grass, trying to cover up, but that was all it could do. The mortal blow had hit it, and it was finished. And so it had lain there, hard-eyed and dying, with what thoughts in its reptile brain, hell knew. It would certainly have liked to bite me, but it hadn’t had the chance.
I turned, with the crank in my hand. MacComerou was standing there behind me. He had a twelve-pound rock in his hand, which he had picked up.
“That’s all right,” I said. “It’s dead.”
His toothless gums were working a little. His bat ears seemed to quiver. He tossed the rock off into the weeds, and took a breath.
In the woods the owl howled again.
I got in behind the wheel and snapped on the switch. I had worked up a little battery juice with all the cranking I had done before; and when I stepped on the starter now the engine turned over, caught, and held its tone.
I laid the crank across my knees so that MacComerou could sit beside me. But it was only a short distance back, and he didn’t bother to get in. He stood on the running board, holding to the windshield post and breathing in the refreshing night air, while we rode back, past the eyeless house and the place where John Flail’s body lay in the weeds, and on down to where the stone fences ended in the privet of his place, to his drive.
He would have to notify the state police at their nearest barracks, at Readsfield twenty miles over beyond Stony Falls, in regard to having found John Flail killed by that hit-and-run, and have them send out an alarm for Dexter's car and the driver. But it might be a couple of hours before they got down themselves. In the mean time there was no particular use of my waiting, if I wanted to get back to New York tonight, he thought I could give him my address, in case they wanted a deposition from me. But they might not need any statement from me at all, since it would be merely corroborative of his that we had found Flail there.
I agreed with him. I'm not a man to dodge issues. But I hadn't been a witness to the event itself, any more than he had, and I had not even seen the car go by nor seen that red-eyed man. It would be just a waste of time for me to wait around.
I gave him my address at St. John's, where I should more likely to be found than at 511 West, when I had dropped him at the mailbox beside his drive. The phoebes which were nesting in the paper box stirred, I thought, but they did not come fluttering out against my face this time as when I had first appeared. Perhaps they can't see at night.
For a moment old Adam stood watching me
as I started on, not quite believing yet that I was real, somehow, I think. Then he turned and went striding up the driveway along which that gaunt hoarse twanging cat had fled from me in the twilight, as if he wanted to dismiss me from his mind.
Three or four miles down the road there was a low flat-roofed California-style bungalow standing in among fields at my left. It had wide plate glass windows that were all lit up inside, with red shades half pulled down; and I could hear a jukebox or a loud victrola playing some crazy tune inside.
There was a wide circular driveway that went in, around in front of it. It looked as if it might be a teahouse or something. I swung in, with a squeal of tires, between two low cobblestone gateposts that were placed wide apart, to see if I could get a cup of coffee and a sandwich, for my head was still splitting.
There was some splintered kindling under wheel as I came around the circle. The figure of something—animal or human—swung into my headlights on the driveway in front of the porch steps, crouching on all fours among the debris. It wore a leopard skin and a pale purple gown, and had a feather duster fastened to its stern like a rooster's tail. It leaped up with a rabbit scream and away from in front of my lights as I came around at it, and went rushing up the steps like something in a surrealist's dream, and in through the front door, leaving the door open behind it.
I went on around the drive, and out again. Fast. It was still a damned nightmare road. I was out through the cobbled gateposts and on it again when that incredible figure appeared in the lighted doorway of the bungalow, with something in its hands that looked like a shotgun. It was, for I saw a flash and heard a roar, and saw another flash and heard a roar, as I went on down the road, away.
A mile and a half or two farther, I saw four or five small gnomelike figures looming in the road in front of me. They rushed, fleeing to the roadside, before my headlights, and from the roadside I heard a man shout.
I slowed as I came abreast. There was a shingled old house in at my right, with a small light in it, beyond a hedge, standing among low broad trees that had the shape of apple trees. The figure of a man stood pressed back against the hedge beside the road, with four or five children clustered about him, those figures that I had seen. He seemed to be trying to embrace the shoulders of all of them, drawing them in to him, with his staring face upon me.
Just the picture of a poor father, frightened, trying to protect his children from something intangible in the night. Fathers have been doing it since the days of the saber-tooth tiger, or the race would not be here.
“Route 7?” I called to him.
“Keep on, mister!” he cried quaveringly.
But it wasn’t so much a direction, it seemed like, as an adjuration and supplication to me to go on. To remove my image out of his life and his quiet orchard peace.
Two miles farther on, down that dark winding nightmare way, a lamp shone from the curtainless windows of a rickety shack house at my left, close beside the road. The front door opened as my car approached, throwing light out onto the tumbledown porch. A thick-set bow-legged man in an undershirt and a pair of overalls, with a broken nose and a shock of hair, stood behind the screen door in the rectangle of light, holding a big yellowish airedale-collie mongrel by the collar. He pushed the screen door open and loosed the dog with a gruff laconic grunt as I came by, and the beast shot out with a deep-throated growl, in a slavering rush at my wheels.
For a quarter mile or more it kept beside me down the stony winding road, snarling and foaming and snapping at my tires, savage and murderous, hating me with its life. It’s often said that dogs, children, and lunatics have an infallible instinct for character. If that big, savage brute had anything to say about it, I was Jack the Ripper.
Yet I had been through blood, and perhaps that was what kept him at it. There had been Flail’s blood on the road, and the blood of Wiggins’ St. Bernard in front of his place that I had passed. And perhaps there had been St. Erme’s blood all along the road, though I didn’t know about that yet. But that dog knew, or else he just hated me.
A nightmare road. I might have dreamed it, from the time that I had turned off onto it at sunset, with a splitting head. Phantasms and eyeless houses and a red-eyed rattlesnake and a crazy hat of mine; and old Adam MacComerou staring at me through the garden dusk as I appeared, as if he couldn’t believe that I was real; and then a dead man in the ditch whose last breath I had heard. And skittering surrealistic lunatics and a terrified father clutching his children as if I might eat them, and now this damned slavering dog that would tear my throat out if he could.
All down the nightmare road. But the road was real. I didn’t dream it. And I knew that I was real. I’ll stick to that....
The big snarling rushing mongrel left off finally. The road was empty again. I only wanted to come to the end of it. I wanted to meet nothing more till I got out onto the wide smooth concrete of Route 7, and was headed down fast for home.
Yet it had been all merely something amorphous and intangible—to me, and to everyone else—so far. There had been only a weird horn, and a gray car, and an ugly little demon at the wheel driving it and laughing, and a stricken man beside him who had looked like death. A big tail-wagging dog that had been run down, and some splintered easel frames on a surrealist’s drive. Just the body of John Flail, smashed on the road, which old MacComerou and I had found. MacComerou hadn’t even been sure that St. Erme had been hurt, when that car had gone by—it had been the sight, more, of that horrible little man with him which had worried him. He hadn’t even been sure that it had been St. Erme, until he had called up Dexter, after I got there.
All ugly, and a little frightening. Sinister was the word for it. The women in their kitchens were discussing it over their phones. The party wire that ran along the road above me had been humming all the way as I drove down. Thev had all heard MacComerou phoning the state police by this time, telling about the finding of John Flail’s body, and giving the number of the car which he had learned.
All a little frightening. But not yet deliberate murder. Not the terror yet. The first man killed with the sawtooth knife had not yet been found.
He had to be found to make it real. They didn’t know, in those houses I had passed, that before they had put out their lights, if they were late stayers-up, or before they had been asleep very long, even if they got to bed early, all of them—all the men of them, and all the whole countryside for ten miles around—would be aroused and getting out their lanterns and flashlights, their cars and guns, and going down to the Swamp Road to hunt along it, and through the woods on either side, and around the old sawmill where the road petered out to corduroy and muckland, looking for red-eyed little Corkscrew, the man with the matted auburn hair, the man with the dog teeth and the pointed ear, who had killed Inis St. Erme and used surgical instruments on his body, and killed old Professor MacComerou and hidden him away in the tons of damp rotted sawdust down below the sawmill. The man who has struck down Unistaire and perhaps Trooper Stone and Quelch and Rosenblatt himself by now. And how many others out in the darkness where they are hunting him there is no saying yet.
He needed to be found, that first one of them, to make it real. St. Erme needed to be found....
A quarter mile down the road from where that slavering dog had left off, I saw the white-coated form of the girl, pressed back against the roadside rock wall, in my headlights, scratched and burr-covered from her hiding and her running, white-faced and panicky, with her great dark eyes, signaling to me imploringly to stop. Her car had been stolen and her fiancé kidnaped.
She turned and fled from me when I told her to get in. But I jumped out and caught her, and got her into the car. And when she had quieted down a little, she told it. She and Inis St. Erme had been on their way to be married. They had picked up a tramp on the road. The tramp had attacked St. Erme, and had stalked her through the woods while she hid, and had then gone on up the road that I had come down. Had I seen him?
No, I hadn’t seen him. B
ut I would get her to the police.
I drove on down the road with her to the parking place overlooking Dead Bridegroom’s Pond, and got out and felt the grass and weeds there. And it was murder I had put my hand in.
I brought her back here to MacComerou’s.
There was a police car on the road in front already when I arrived with her. I drove halfway up the graveled drive to the kitchen door, and pocketed my keys this time when I got out. MacComerou’s station wagon, out in front of the big white barn at the end of the drive, was out of commission with its flat tire; so I wasn’t blocking it for him. I don’t like to block people.
A kerosene lamp had been lit in the kitchen and there was a whiter light in the living room beyond. A state trooper was inside, a sandy-haired man with a broad, smiling face. He was just finishing a phone call in the kitchen when we entered, and he nodded to us as he put up the receiver, with his meaningless professional smile.
“Trooper Stone,” he introduced himself. “What can I do for you people?”
He led us into the living room, old-fashioned and a little dusty, but where the green-shaded gasoline lamp on the table gave a better light, and there were places to sit down. Sitting straight-backed on the horsehair sofa, gazing at him with anxious intentness, she told him her story, as if she were reciting her Latin lesson again in a high-school class.
Adding a few details, which she had forgotten, to what she had already told me. But I have included them. Trooper Stone’s smile did not change.
“Your car’s been found,” he said. “Mr. St. Erme wasn’t in it. That’s really a good indication. If he had been badly hurt or—well, dead—this man Doc would have just left him. It looks more as if he had forced Mr. St. Erme to go along with him at the point of a knife, in a crazy kidnaping attempt. But he can’t have gone far with him, and when he realizes he is cornered he will probably give up. Lieutenant Rosenblatt and Professor MacComerou are down there now, with Mr. Unistaire from the next house below. The lieutenant sent me back to phone for more troopers. It won’t be long.”
The Red Right Hand Page 12