There is No Return

by Anita Blackmon

  “It’s worse than I thought,” I muttered. “How could even Dora Canby be taken in by such charlatanism? Hypnotism indeed!”

  “Wait,” whispered Ella.

  The professor, moistening his thick lips, was saying something about Little Blue Eyes which, it seemed, was Sheila Kelly’s control.

  At least it appeared that until recently Little Blue Eyes had been the voice through which Sheila Kelly effected communication with the spirit world.

  “If that-that other will come through tonight,” said the professor, his words suddenly running together so that I had some trouble understanding them, “or if it will refuse to manifest itself, I cannot say, nobody can say.” He drew a long breath and ended in a tremulous quotation: “ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ ”

  “Every fake spiritualist on record takes refuge in that statement,” I said scornfully.

  “Only,” murmured Chet Keith, “I think for the first time in his chequered career the professor has quoted Shakespeare with conviction.”

  I nodded, noting how Professor Matthews’ liverish hand trembled as he clicked off the chandelier in the centre of the room, leaving no illumination except the parlour lamp with its red silk shade, which threw a lurid and rather ghastly shadow upon the small round table where it sat. Nothing else was needed to add to the eerie atmosphere, I thought, stirring uneasily in my place. We were all now seated in the circle which was broken at one point by the table. The professor motioned the girl to a chair directly in front of it while he took up his position before her.

  “Are you ready?” he asked in a hollow voice.

  The girl’s lips parted, but no sound came. Finally after a painful silence she nodded. There was something almost convulsive in her movement. The professor drew a long breath and then he began to wave his hands before her eyes, murmuring softly in a sonorous voice.

  “Sleep. You are going to sleep. Do not fight off sleep. Sleep,” he repeated over and over.

  I got the impression that the girl was struggling against the monotonous spell of his voice. Her hands were clenched on the arm of the chair. In the ghastly glow of the red lamp her face was all acute angles, as if she might also be clenching her teeth, but her eyes were already beginning to dull.

  “Sleep,” chanted the professor. “You must let go and sleep.”

  Sceptical as I was about the whole performance, there was something horrible about that unctuous voice beating down upon the girl’s tense figure. The wind and the hypnotic swish of the rain seemed to be in conjunction with him, as if even the elements were conspiring to rob her of her self-mastery. I found that I, too, was clenching my hands on the arms of my chair and when, almost at once, Sheila Kelly’s slim body went limp and her eyes glazed, I shuddered.

  “She’s under,” whispered Ella.

  I had not been prepared to believe that the professor possessed genuine hypnotic powers or anything else genuine. I had been convinced that he was a fake in every sense of the word, but I had not expected anything as realistic as the way that girl sagged in her chair.

  “Can you speak to us?” inquired the professor. “Is the presence here?”

  Sheila Kelly was moaning softly and wringing her hands. Presently she began to speak in a high piping voice, a child’s voice.

  “I have a message, I have a message,” she said in a shrill singsong.

  “It is Little Blue Eyes,” murmured the professor, looking relieved, or so it seemed to me.

  “Theo sends his love,” piped Sheila Kelly. “Theo says you are not to grieve. Theo does not want his Little Butterfly to be sad.”

  “Is there anyone here to whom this message means something?” inquired Professor Matthews with unmistakable complacence.

  “Yes, oh yes!” cried Fannie Parrish breathlessly. She threw me a reproachful glance. “Isn’t it marvellous? Theo always called me Little Butterfly. You can’t doubt now, Miss Adams, that the phenomenon is authentic!”

  I shrugged my shoulders. The message was precisely such as I had expected. I began to shake off the feeling of horror which had enveloped me. To be called Little Butterfly might convince Fannie Parrish that the message came from the other world, but I did not doubt that five minutes after her arrival at Lebeau Inn everybody in the place knew poor dear Theo’s favourite name for her.

  “Can Little Blue Eyes tell us anything else?” intoned the professor.

  Sheila Kelly moaned again. “Somebody named Catherine has a word for Margaret,” announced the childish voice.

  The professor again glanced around the circle. “Is there anybody named Margaret who has a loved one Catherine in the spirit world?”

  The anxious young mother leaned forward, looking very white and shaky. “I am named Margaret and Catherine, my mother, has passed on.”

  “You are not to worry, Margaret,” chanted Little Blue Eyes. “The baby will get well.”

  “Isn’t it wonderful!” breathed Fannie Parrish.

  I raised my eyebrows at Ella. “The same old stuff!” I said.

  Ella nodded. “Wait,” she said again.

  Little Blue Eyes had a message for somebody named James.

  The dyspeptic-looking old gentleman admitted that his name was James and that he had a deceased brother Peter, but did not seem impressed when warned by Little Blue Eyes that Peter advised against his taking a trip to the West Indies in his present state of health.

  “I have told several people here, including Mrs Parrish, that my brother Peter died last spring,” he said dryly, “and I suppose anybody with eyes could observe that my health is unequal to an extended trip.”

  To my relief I discovered that I had completely retrieved my cynical attitude toward the whole business. I had attended enough séances to recognize the messages for the stereotyped forms which they were. I felt sure they originated in the brain of Professor Matthews. How far the girl was involved I was not prepared to say.

  That she was actually in some sort of hypnotic trance I was reluctantly inclined to concede.

  The professor was speaking again. “Has Little Blue Eyes anything else to give us?” he asked, fumbling nervously at his tie.

  Sheila Kelly sat up suddenly in her chair. “To hell with Little Blue Eyes,” she said distinctly.

  Dora Canby uttered a stifled wail. “Gloria! Gloria!”

  Sheila Kelly looked at her. “Don’t be more of a damned fool than usual, Mother,” she said.

  The voice was brazen and defiant, with a mocking, perverse harshness that was indescribably shocking. I saw Thomas Canby whiten. I saw him shrink as Sheila Kelly turned upon him.

  “You killed me,” she said. “You think you are God because you have made a god of money and can buy and sell people’s souls. So you killed me, but I can’t rest in my grave. I never will rest in my grave while you are alive.”

  She had started to her feet. She stood there swaying as she confronted Thomas Canby, a thin slight girl in a crumpled white evening gown, clutching a large chiffon handkerchief to her breast.

  Even in that dim room, lighted only by the red lamp and the dying fire, I could see her blazing cheeks and the dreadful look in her eyes as they travelled slowly around that circle of blanched faces.

  “You all hate him,” she said, “just as you hated me. But not one of you has the guts to stand up against him. Even you, Mother, would have let him put me away. Only he couldn’t put me away far enough. Not even six feet under the ground was deep enough or wide enough.”

  She laughed horribly, and the blood in my veins crawled as something slid across my instep. I thought for one awful minute that it was a worm which she had brought with her out of the tomb. Then I saw it was merely the extension cord to the red lamp which was attached to a floor socket half the width of the room from the table upon which it sat.

  Sheila Kelly had turned again to Thomas Canby, who cowered in his seat. “You destroyed my soul!” she cried. “Doomed me to wander forever without
peace, but I will no longer wander alone!”

  Her voice had risen to a screech, the hair stirred upon my scalp.

  Behind me I heard Chet Keith smother a cry. Ella clutched my hand, and then the lights went out, followed almost at once by that horrible groan which at times still echoes in my ears. For a moment I think we were all frozen in our seats. I know I was still sitting there, petrified with horror, when Chet Keith snapped on the central chandelier. Even then I could not move. I do not think anybody moved or even breathed. The girl, Sheila Kelly, was lying in a huddle in the centre of the room, and in his chair Thomas Canby was weaving slowly from side to side with a hideous gash in his throat from which the blood gushed in a ghastly fountain.

  6

  It is difficult even now, in spite of how often it has been threshed over, for me to say exactly what happened in those dreadful ten minutes after the lights came on again and we saw Thomas Canby gasping in his death agony, unable to speak because his throat was cut from ear to ear, but with the most terrible urgency in his sunken eyes as his thin, bloodless hands clawed the air.

  I have a confused recollection of Judy Oliver burying her head against Jeff Wayne’s shoulder, of his arms tightening about her; of Dora Canby sitting there in a state of suspended animation, staring not at the dying man beside her but at that limp figure huddled on the floor at her feet; of Lila Atwood catching her husband’s sleeve and turning him away so he could not see his uncle; of Hogan Brewster for once in his life confronting something which he could not meet with flippancy; of Patrick Oliver holding onto the back of his chair and crying “Oh, God!” over and over in a thin whisper; of Professor Matthews, looking suddenly old and stricken, covering his face with an agued hand.

  At my side Fannie Parrish, being completely without inhibitions, was indulging in a fit of hysterics. Ella had gone quite rigid.

  Back of me Miss Maurine Smith was uttering a series of sharp bleating cries, not unlike a stuck sheep. The young mother was trying to tell the dyspeptic old gentleman that he must not look while he was assuring her that he had no intention of doing so, although he did not once remove his eyes from that crimson gap in Thomas Canby’s throat which widened as life went out of the body and the head fell back against the top of the chair.

  Over by the door Chet Keith still stood with his hand on the light switch. I have never seen anything sharper than his blue eyes as he looked us all over.

  “Don’t touch him!” he said sharply when Patrick Oliver took a tentative step toward the dead man.

  “But oughtn’t we to do something?” demanded Lila Atwood, only the slightest tremor marring her lovely voice. “He – maybe he isn’t dead.”

  Chet Keith’s blue eyes raked hers. “He’s dead all right,” he said. “No doubt of that.”

  I glanced at that ashen face lying back against the headrest of the chair. No, there was nothing anybody could do for Thomas Canby.

  “The authorities will want everything left exactly as it is,” Chet Keith went on. His voice grated, “After all, this is murder.”

  “Murder!” whispered Sheila Kelly.

  She had dragged herself to her feet. She stood there trembling.

  Nobody went to her assistance. Everyone stared at her with unconcealed horror. She flung up her hand as if to ward off our hostile gaze or possibly to shut out the sight of that sagging form in the chair.

  “I didn’t kill him,” she whispered. Her eyes travelled piteously around the circle. “I didn’t kill him,” she repeated in a lifeless voice and began to tear the handkerchief in her hands to pieces, as if she had to do something. It appeared to me that her gaze rested longest upon Professor Matthews, but he did not look at her. He was shivering. He could not seem to stop.

  Fannie Parrish started up from her chair. “I’m going to my room!” she wailed.

  Chet Keith shook his head. “Nobody can leave until the officers arrive.”

  “I can’t, I won’t stay in this horrible place!” cried Fannie.

  “I think so,” murmured Mr Chet Keith, standing with his back four-square against the door.

  “I’m going to be sick!” shrieked Fannie, turning quite green.

  “Nonsense!” I exclaimed crossly. “You can’t. There aren’t any facilities for your being sick in this room.”

  Fannie gulped, but she went back to her seat, and Chet Keith gave me a grateful glance. Apparently, like myself, he knew enough feminine psychology to realize that Fannie Parrish was the last woman in the world to be messy in public, and when Miss Maurine Smith attempted to throw a faint in his arms he disposed of her very neatly upon one of the hard red sofas where she immediately came to, looking remarkably chagrined.

  Somebody was pounding on the door. “What’s the trouble in here?” demanded a voice. “What’s happened?”

  Chet Keith frowned as he slid the bolt back. I thought he wished he could postpone the interruption, but there was no help for it.

  Captain Bill French was not a man who could be put off when he saw his duty and he was the manager of Mount Lebeau Inn. The fact that he was also a veteran of the war of ‘98 did not prevent his turning as green as Fannie when he saw that ghastly figure across the room.

  “For God’s sake, what’s happened?” he cried again.

  Chet Keith shrugged his shoulders. “I should think it is self-evident,” he said coolly. “One of your guests has been murdered.”

  “Murdered!” quavered Captain French, and I realized that Miss Smith was right. The dashing widower of twenty years before had become an old man with a paunch and a toupee.

  For the first time Dora Canby spoke. “It’s my scissors,” she said, looking like the etching of a woman which had blurred. “He was killed with half of my scissors.”

  I had until that moment been too rattled to identify the object, the hilt of which still protruded from Thomas Canby’s throat, but it undoubtedly was half a pair of scissors. The handle was gold-washed and represented some sort of bird, a swan probably, only half of it was missing.

  “It is Aunt Dora’s scissors,” whispered Judy Oliver. She stepped forward, but Chet Keith was too quick for her.

  “Don’t touch it,” he said sharply. “I’ve warned you, nothing must be touched.”

  Jeff Wayne glanced bitterly at Sheila Kelly’s bowed head.

  “What’s the difference?” he demanded. “The case is open and shut. She” — into the words he put almost savage hatred — “she killed him. We all saw it.”

  I frowned at him. “Are you able to see in the dark, Mr Wayne?” I inquired sharply.

  “In the dark? No, of course not, but we all heard her. We all know she killed him.”

  “I didn’t,” whispered Sheila Kelly.

  Chet Keith looked at her. “You’re on the spot,” he said curtly. “If you’ll take my advice you’ll say nothing until the authorities arrive.”

  She gave him a wondering glance as if she could not make him out, but she took his advice.

  It was Allan Atwood’s nerves, characteristically enough, which first frazzled under the strain. “You’ve no right to keep us cooped up here with a murderess!” he cried. “Wait for the sheriff if you like. I’m getting out.”

  “No,” said Chet Keith and then asked, “So you knew your uncle had sent for the sheriff?”

  Allan Atwood turned very white. “You-you said the sheriff was coming,” he stammered.

  Chet Keith shook his head. “I haven’t mentioned the sheriff.”

  “Allan means,” interposed Lila Atwood quickly, “that we all knew Uncle Thomas had sent for the sheriff.”

  Chet Keith eyed her steadily but she had a gaze as level as his own. “Did you know your uncle had summoned an officer?” he asked Judy Oliver suddenly.

  She shook her head, and with a smile Lila Atwood amended her previous statement. “I should have said that any of us could have heard him telephoning. It was just before dinner, and we were all in Aunt Dora’s sitting room.”

  “I see,” murmu
red Chet Keith.

  Captain French abruptly realized that he was cutting no sort of figure in the proceedings. “Mr Keith is right,” he said. “You must all remain here until the authorities arrive.” He twisted the ends of his moustache nervously. “Though heaven knows, the thing is clear enough.”

  Dora Canby roused herself from the apathy in which she seemed to have sunk. “He tried to put her away,” she said. “If Gloria had lived her father would have put her in an institution.” She stretched out her hands to Sheila Kelly in a gesture of passionate tenderness.

  “He ruined your life, my darling, just as he ruined mine. You had to kill him, didn’t you? Mother knows you had to kill him.”

  “Don’t! Oh, please don’t!” cried Sheila Kelly, in an agonized voice.

  Judy Oliver sobbed once. “It’s too awful! I can’t bear it!”

  She turned blindly and again would have buried her face upon Jeff Wayne’s shoulder, but he moved aside and glared at Sheila Kelly.

  “What I want to know is,” he demanded in a smothered voice, “where is the other half of those scissors?”

  Allan Atwood flung out his hands in a wild gesture. “I suppose she is saving it for the rest of us!” he cried. “She hated us all! As much as she hated him!”

  Hogan Brewster smiled. “It was you, wasn’t it, Allan, who told Thomas Canby that his daughter put arsenic in his soup?”

  “I didn’t!” cried Allan Atwood furiously. “I merely told him that I saw Gloria take some of the weed killer from the shelf in the gardener’s room.”

  “Gloria only took the weed killer to kill a mouse in the attic. It was annoying her,” murmured Dora Canby. “You told me so, didn’t you, darling?” she asked Sheila Kelly.

  The girl flung her a despairing glance. “Please, Mrs Canby,” she said brokenly.

  The professor suddenly came to life. “It’s all your fault!” he cried, shaking his fist at the girl. “You couldn’t let well enough alone. Do you realize that we’ll both go to the electric chair for this night’s work?”