The Thrill Book Sampler

by Seabury Quinn

  “It was deathly still. For the first time he saw through the half light an oaken table and on it the heavy book chained, as was the custom in older days. The links had rusted, and he snapped one of them between his nimble fingers. He looked closely at the yellow pages, marveling at the wondrous artwork of the master who had illuminated them. Great capital letters stretched down the margins in faded greens, yellows, and reds. It was well-nigh impossible to read the sentences. He had brought a huge magnifying glass with him. He applied it, and was surprised to see how the words leaped at him as though greedy to be deciphered after a half century of retirement. In spite of the age Carson saw that the strong lines plainly held their shape. With the aid of his glass he might easily read what he desired. Raising his head, he spoke to the monk. His eye happened to catch sight of an ancient cupboard in one end of the cell. Leaving the monk to examine the Bible, he stepped over the musty floor and turned the knob. He found nothing within except a very strange odor. It might have been that of almonds. He wasn’t sure. Just then he heard a cry which he admitted to me had clung to him ever since. It wasn’t so much a cry as a sort of long-drawn-out sob that filled every crook and cranny of the tiny room. He swung about on his heels, and saw the monk falling to the floor, dragging the table over on his head. The candle went out as it followed the book in the downward crash. Carson was left in absolute, impenetrable darkness.

  “As he said, it took him about a minute to collect his senses. That, as you know, is a mighty long time under such circumstances. He didn’t hear another sound, but his nostrils began to fill with that nasty odor. It seemed to madden him. He wasted twenty matches trying to light one of them. When he had found the candle and raised it above his head so as to obtain a better view of the cell he saw that the monk lay perfectly still. A corner of the table had crashed through his skull. A moving thread curled back into the leaves of the book lying at his feet. Carson saw this with startled eyes. Letting out a silly shriek, he rushed out of the door and up the winding stairs, down the long corridors, and out into the sunlight. There is something about the sun which is friendly and warm, and in a little while he was feeling better. The prior came running out into the garden, followed by the other monks. They heard the story with absolute silence. Carson spoke, as he described it to me, through chattering lips. His voice sounded far off. He waved his hands foolishly, and then collapsed.

  “That was all there was to the adventure. He kept still about it because the good old prior begged him to. It would have been disbelieved anyhow. The story was given out that a heavy table killed the monk. Indeed, Carson was sure that this was what really had killed him. He was taken into a quiet room and nursed back to reason in a very short while. He really possessed a fairly level head. It isn’t surprising that he attributed the whole thing later on to some queer delusion. His fear of the tarantula, however, grew out of this. He couldn’t have sworn that that was the thing which had haunted the book. It was too large, anyhow. It was very much like one. This much he knew absolutely.”

  Kennedy lit another cigar and made himself a bit more comfortable. I was conscious of not having moved during the whole recital of the story. My cramped muscles ached, and I moved a sleeping leg with some difficulty. The noise of the ceaseless drums beat on my ears more aggravatingly than ever. We waited silently. He went on:

  “Well, there isn’t much more to tell. Birney came to me the following morning with white lips and begged me to go to Carson’s room. I had parted from him the night before feeling that I had effectually quieted his aroused nerves. Birney’s frightened countenance left me cold. I opened Carson’s door, and found him sitting before the mirror, clasping in one hand a large revolver. I saw what happened in a moment. While Birney ran for the servants I looked down at the smile which had frozen itself into the tight lips of the dead man. I have always been a close observer. At this time I was especially so. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why Carson had killed himself so suddenly. Then, as I heard the steps of the servants down the hallway, my eye caught the end of a red tie protruding from a book lying on the table. I glanced back at Carson’s body, and then in the mirror for some unknown reason. I saw the book clearly. The glass was cheap and the red tie seemed to waver and fade in the distance. After they took him away I sat down in the chair myself. Turning my head slightly to the left, I could catch just a glimpse of the tie. I was startled by it. To my muddled mind it seemed to be a monstrous spider. In a flash the whole thing came over my mind. Poor Carson had returned to his room thinking that he would get a good night’s sleep. He lit the light; this was still burning, by the way, and sat down before his dresser for a second. Perhaps he was looking for something in one of the drawers. He found it, I have no doubt. When the cold steel touched his sensitive fingers he must have started back and gained his first glimpse of the tie resting in the book. I tried the same trick. I knew which drawer the revolver was kept in, as I had often seen him take it out before we went beyond the compound on a business trip. That was when the order first went into effect that no white man could go out without a revolver or rifle.

  “Still sitting in the chair, I lifted my hand, as though I were holding the weapon, and pointed it over my shoulder. The reflection in the glass was so indistinct and blurred that it was difficult to aim at the book. It was clear enough to me then. He had meant to shoot what he thought was a tarantula and had by mistake killed himself. In fact the bullet had passed through the back part of his head. I have never said anything about this before because of Birney. He was sorry enough afterward, as it was, without my adding the true story of how Carson died. I have never felt that I had a right to until I learned of Birney’s death the other day.”

  ONLY once in my life did I experience contact with the supernatural, and the incident is still inexplicable, looked at from the materialistic standpoint. It happened in connection with the death of a close friend of mine, Jack Lindsay, the artist.

  Jack was possessed of a stubbornly determined nature; he never gave up anything once begun, no matter how difficult the circumstances in connection with it. He was especially determined in regard to his painting; he often remarked, with a touch of quite natural melancholy in character with the observation, that death alone would stop him from reaching the highest point in his artistic career before he was thirty. He was about twenty-seven when he said that.

  In discussing Jack’s dogged grit with a common friend, Doctor Wilmott, the latter said: “If Jack lives to be forty he will already have become famous.” When I replied that Jack had declared it his intention to make a name for himself by the time he was thirty, our friend assented thoughtfully. “I believe he will make the attempt,” he granted; “but he has no time to lose.”

  The last time I saw Jack was just before he went away on one of his frequent sketching trips. When he mentioned his itinerary, I found he was passing within a few miles of a city where a cousin of mine was living, and I penciled a few words of informal introduction on the reverse of one of my cards, which, however, as afterward transpired, he never presented. He left me, apparently in high spirits, and although I heard nothing from him for a couple of months, I thought nothing of it because he was a notoriously poor correspondent.

  Then I received a notice that shocked me to the soul. The police of a certain small town had found a dead body, presumably his, in the woods, where it had lain for weeks. Their supposition was that the young artist had taken his own life, as there were no marks of violence upon the body, and apparently nothing had been removed from the pockets. My card had served to identify him. His sketching paraphernalia in its entirety had been located at the home of a farmer of the neighborhood, Pete Grimstead, one of those “poor but honest” countrymen in which America abounds.

  The farmer declared that several weeks back the artist had stopped at the house for something to eat; that after lunch he asked permission to leave his sketching outfit, as he wished to take a stroll through the woods without it. Grimstead had put the things i
nto the “front room,” which, as anyone who is at all acquainted with country people knows, is rarely used by them. Naturally they had forgotten all about the things until the hue and cry was made upon the discovery of the artist’s body,

  when they had immediately notified the police and given up the dead man’s effects.

  Both the farmer and his wife had declared that they were glad to get rid of the things. Asked why, they said they didn’t know, but they felt there was something queer about them. And they did seem relieved to have the last vestige of the unfortunate man’s visit removed from their house.

  I did not like the idea of Jack’s having committed suicide on the verge of a promising career; it was quite out of character with what I knew of him. But Grimstead and his wife were well regarded in their vicinity, and there seemed no reason to suspect that anything other than suicide or an accident of some kind had happened to poor Jack. However, the thought clung to me and persisted in obtruding itself the rest of the day when I was back at the country hotel, that there was much more back of the affair than appeared on the surface. The coroner persisted in his belief that it was a case of suicide, although I begged him to let it go down on the records as death by accident.

  You know how it is when you suddenly feel an antipathy to a person without the slightest foundation for your feelings. Well, I simply “felt” that Grimstead and his wife knew more about Jack’s tragic death than they had related, and the more I thought it over the more strongly was I convinced in my intuition. There was something I didn’t like about the hanging head of the farmer; something shifty in the wife’s eyes and unpleasant in the constant restless rubbing and twisting of her thin, gnarled hands. I determined to ferret out the secret hidden back of their apparently simple story.

  Jack’s effects were turned over to me, in lieu of relatives, and I put them in my room at the hotel. That night I set up the easel and put the landscape on it; I wanted to look at my friend’s last piece of work while I strove to untangle the threads of thought which threatened to become hopelessly knotted. I lit my pipe and sat back comfortably, reflecting sadly on poor Jack’s sudden and tragic death, the while my eyes took in the salient features of the landscape before me.

  It was a carelessly executed bit of work, quite unfinished as yet on the right-hand side. The left side showed a bit of country with woods beyond and plowed fields toward the center. At the right appeared the roughly sketched-in outlines of a house. And it was upon this house that my attention became fixed as I smoked and reflected. Perhaps I grew drowsy; perhaps it was a case of auto-suggestion; perhaps it was the powerful will of my friend projected no one knows how. Whatever it was, the longer I looked at that house the clearer the outlines grew. Such is the magic of the imagination that it seemed to me that an invisible brush was working over the house, dashing in a bit of color here, a touch there, until the whole house stood out clearly before my eyes.

  I realized that I was hardly normal; that my long reflection on my friend’s death had resulted in my becoming half drowsy, half languid; but I dreamily contemplated the picture, watching it come up, as it were, under my intent gaze, from a mere sketch into a finished piece of work. All that I saw I attributed to the vivid working of an overstimulated imagination, but at last something happened in that picture which by no means could have been attributed to imagination. A light sprang up within the house and shone through one of the windows!

  II.

  IRUBBED my eyes, leaned forward, taking mypipe from my lips, and looked intently, incredulously. There was no mistake about it; there was an actual flicker of light from behind one of the half-closed shutters of a window toward the rear of the house. I pinched myself vigorously and felt the pain with waking nerves, but the light did not fade away; it shone steadily on.

  I whipped the picture from the easel and turned it over. It was an ordinary canvas, such as Jack had always used. A cold chill began to play down my spinal column as I returned the picture to the easel. I realized that there was in truth something unearthly about my friend’s landscape; the farmer and his wife had been correct in their assertions that there was something supernatural and queer about it. I did not blame them for wishing to be rid of such a strange and unusual painting.

  As for myself, I felt certain that there was something more than appeared upon the surface of this supernatural manifestation. I held myself rigidly alert, watching that strange and weird lighting of a painted landscape. I was aware that there was a Presence in the room with me and that there was something, some message, which it desired to impart; but while I held myself open for the intuitional reception of such a message, I could not restrain the cold shiver that went over me at the realization of the propinquity of the discarnate, although I realized that my old friend could mean no harm to me.

  I kept my eyes upon that mysteriously lighted window. As I watched, suddenly the door of the house seemed to open, and the light from within streamed out along the path before it. Simultaneously a shadow fell across the shaft of light, projected by moving figures within, and there appeared in the doorway a dark mass that, as it issued, could be distinguished as three figures. I strained my eyes to see the better. Good heavens, it was the figures of a man and a woman, carrying between them the limp body of another human being! As the significance of this flashed through my mind, they stopped on the threshold to close the door, shutting out the stream of light from the path. But as they passed the lighted window, where the path wound past it to the front gate, I saw, outlined against it in a broken but unmistakably familiar silhouette, the face of the honest farmer who had last seen my poor friend alive!

  In my excitement I cried aloud. “You shall have justice, Jack!” I exclaimed.

  The light in the window faded slowly away, but the outlines of the house remained, as did all the color work invisible hands had brushed in before my startled eyes. And the painting remained as it is today, a finished picture, the last gift of my dead friend to me.

  I sat back, filled with unutterable awe at what I had witnessed. I knew that my friend had not died by his own hand; nor had he fallen and injured himself mortally in the woods. I knew that he had been foully done to death by hands which I could, and would, identify. I cannot say that I was afraid during the period of that marvelous manifestation; no, it was fury I felt that my friend must lie under the accusation of suicide when he had in reality been the victim of a sordid crime. I knew that he had come back to me to justify himself and to point out his murderers. I determined that they should be brought to justice. But how?

  III.

  THE rest of the night I sat smoking pipe afterpipe, going over all the circumstances of Jack’s death as they had been presented to me by the police and by Grimstead and his wife. There was no flaw in the story of the latter couple; it was probable enough for the country constables to credit it readily. They had known Pete Grimstead and his wife for years, and had never seen anything to their discredit, save that they were poor and had a hard struggle for existence.

  But—poverty is frequently the motive for crime. Yet what could have tempted them to kill a poor artist, who certainly had not carried on his person more than a few dollars? And the small amount found upon his body might have been all in his possession at that time. What else could he have shown them that they might have envied? His watch? It was a dollar watch, the fob a knotted black silk cord. Nothing tempting about that. Moreover, it had been found upon his body. His cuff links? Plain white buttons.

  The body had been fully clothed when found. Stop! I did not remember having seen his hat. There had been no hat, and Jack had always worn—it was his only extravagance—a superfine Panama. His hat! Perhaps here was the clew to the mystery. It was not until dawn that I finally retired to sleep brokenly, sure in my heart that I had found a clew that would eventually unfold the motive and the mystery of the crime. It could not be that my poor friend had been murdered, at the threshold of a promising career, for the sake of a Panama hat! But that the hat was closely
connected with the real story of his death I was fully persuaded. I was filled with impotent fury, but I determined to get a good sleep and then to make a visit to Pete Grimstead’s farm. I did not wish to present myself there with my brain stupid after a sleepless night.

  It was late that afternoon when I walked up the path to the house I had seen pictured so strangely in poor friend’s last painting. I had asked the local constable to drive me out, and I recognized it immediately as the scene of the crime. He sat waiting outside in the wagon until I should have completed my questioning. I felt as though I were in a dream as I stood upon the threshold from which I had seen, the night before, that guilty pair issuing. I knocked strongly.

  It was the woman who answered. She opened the door slowly, and, as it appeared to me, cautiously. When she saw who it was she uttered a single choked exclamation, and shut the door sharply in my face. I heard her hurried footsteps retreating in the hall, and then the sound of her voice calling her husband from the back door.

  I kept up an occasional sharp knocking. The constable, who had not seen the door opened, called out that I’d better go to the back door, so I stepped down to the path. As I turned the corner I saw the woman on the doorstep, her face absolutely gray in the soft afternoon light, her eyes straining anxiously toward the barn, from whence came the gruff call of her husband. When she heard my footsteps she turned abruptly, threw out her hands as if to ward off something, made as though to reenter the house, and crumpled up in a heap on the door stone.