by Fritz Leiber
CHAPTER II.
WARNING.
With me the influence of a personality, however strong, ended where its line of direction crossed the course of my own wishes. Nils’s opposition to my further acquaintance with the Moores had struck me as decidedly officious.
Once outside the restaurant, he turned on me almost savagely.
“Clay,” he said, “you are not going up there tonight!”
“No?” I asked coldly. “And why not?”
“You don’t know what you might be let in for. That is why not.”
“You have an odd way of talking about your friends.”
“Oh, Moore knows what I think.”
“All right,” I grinned, not really wishing a quarrel if one could be avoided. “But your friends are good enough for me, too, Nils. Who was the lady in the purple veil?”
“His wife. A physical medium—God help her!”
“Spirit rapping, clairvoyant and all that, eh? I supposed it was something of the sort. Well, if I wish to go out to their place and spend a dollar or so to watch some conjuring tricks, why do you object so strenuously? That’s one thing I’ve never done—”
“Spend a dollar or so!” snapped Berquist. “Those people are not professionals, Clay. Mrs. Moore is one of the few genuine mediums in this country.”
“Oh, come! Surely you’re not a believer in table-tipping and messages from Marcus Aurelius and Shakespeare?”
Berquist squinted at me disgustedly. “Heaven help me to save this infant!” he muttered, taking no pains, however, that I shouldn’t hear him. “Clay, you go home and stay among your own people. Jimmy Moore is a moderately good fellow, but in one certain line he’s as voracious as a wolf and unscrupulous as a Corsican bandit. He told you that he didn’t extend these invitations to every one. That is strictly true. The fact that he extended one to you is proof sufficient that you should not accept. He saw in you something he’s continually on the watch for. He would use you and wreck you without a scruple.”
“How? What do you mean?”
“If I should tell you in what way, you would laugh and call it impossible. But let me say something you can understand. Except casually, Moore is not a pleasant man to know. He would like people to believe that he was dropped from the administrative board of the Association because his investigations and inferences were too daring for even the extraordinary open types of mind which compose it. The real reason was that he proved so violently, overbearingly quarrelsome that even they couldn’t tolerate him.”
Recalling Moore’s impregnable good humor under Nils’s own attacks, I began to wonder exactly what was the latter’s object in all this.
“I’m not going there to quarrel with him,” I said.
“No; you’re going to be used by him. Look at that unfortunate little wife of his, if you want a horrible example.”
“D’ you mean he’d obscure my classic features with a purple veil? There’ll be a fight to the finish first, believe me!”
“Oh, that veil-vibration-seaweed business—that’s all rot. Just freak results of freak theorizing. Froth and bubbles. It’s the dark brew underneath that’s dangerous.”
“Witch’s scene in Macbeth,” I chuckled. “Fire burn and caldron bubble! We now see Mr. Jimmy Moore in his famous impersonation of Beelzebub—costume, one Palm Beach suit and a cheerful grin. Don’t worry, Nils! I’ll bolt through the window at the first whiff of brimstone.”
“My child,” said Berquist, very gently and slowly, “you have the joyous courage of ignorance. Alicia Moore is that rare freak, a real materializing medium—a producer of supernormal physical phenomena, as they are called. In other words, she is an open channel for forces which are neither understood nor recognized by the average civilized man. Jimmy Moore is that muck more common freak, a fool who doesn’t care whose fingers get burnt. The responsibility for having introduced you to those people is mine. As a personal favor, I now ask you to have nothing more to do with either of them.”
“Nils, you’re back in the dark ages, as Moore claimed. I never thought you’d fall for this spiritualistic bunk.”
“Leave that. You are determined to keep the appointment?”
“Come with me, if you think I need a chaperon.”
“No,” he said soberly.
“Why not?”
“He wouldn’t have me. Not when a séance is planned, and that is what he meant by an ‘interesting evening.’ I’m persona non grata on such an occasion, because Alicia says her spirit guides don’t like me—save the mark! If I tried to wedge in tonight there would be another row, and Heaven alone knows where the thing would end. I wish you’d stay away from there, Clay!”
“Do you mean,” I asked slowly, and beginning to see new light on Nils’s attitude, “that you have quarreled with Moore in the past?”
“My dear fellow, get this through your head if you can. It is impossible to know Moore very long and not quarrel with him—or be subjugated. You keep away.”
I was growing a little sick of Nils’s persistence.
“Sorry. Fear I haven’t your faith in the bodiless powers of evil, and I can’t say Moore seemed such an appalling person. I’m going!”
Abruptly, without a word of answer or farewell, Berquist turned his back on me and swung off down street. Several times I had seen him end a conversation in that manner, and I knew why. By rights, he should have been the last man to criticize another man’s temper.
But I knew, too, that Nils’s wrath was generally as evanescent as sudden. He would be friendly as ever next time we met, and even if he were not, I couldn’t see why his anger or disapproval should afflict me greatly. Friends were too easily acquired for me to miss one.
I forgot him promptly, and began wondering how my desertion for the evening would be accepted by Roberta Whitingfield.
CHAPTER III.
THE DEAD-ALIVE HOUSE.
That afternoon I reached home to find Roberta herself on the veranda with my sister Catherine. Rather to my consternation, on hearing of the restaurant encounter, Bert promptly dubbed it, “The Adventure of the Awful Veiled One,” and announced her intent to solve the mystery in my company. Catherine seconded the motion, calmly including herself in the party, but there I rebelled.
Roberta and I were to be married one of these days. She was mine to command me, and besides, she had been very good-natured about giving up the concert we had planned attending. But I had the vaguest idea of what Moore’s invitation portended, and I knew what would happen if I took both those girls and anything unusual occurred. They would giggle.
We kept Roberta with us for dinner, and when she had gone home to dress, Cathy and I had our argument in earnest. My mother was confined to her room with one of her frequent headaches, and for a while dad hid himself in his paper. Then a grizzled head appeared over the top of it, with a flash of indignant spectacles.
“Cathy,” he drawled, “I haven’t a notion what this is all about, but wherever Clay is off to, I’m sure they don’t want you both. Not together! Clay, my son, I don’t wish to be rude, but if you are going, won’t you please depart at once? Run upstairs, Catherine, and see if all this loud talking has disturbed your mother.”
Cathy went. Generally dad sided with her, but she knew better than to oppose him when he used that tone. It meant stoppage of allowance money.
She had been arguing that Roberta’s mother, who was from Charleston, South Carolina, and a “St. Cecilian”—whatever that is—wouldn’t allow her daughter to go with me un-chaperoned, engaged or not engaged. The concert? Didn’t I know that Bert had come over expressly to find out if she, Cathy, would consent to accompany us?”
I had already discovered that St. Cecilians—whatever they are—have rigorous ideas of chaperonage. Consequently I was relieved when on bringing my car to a st
op before the Whitingfield place, Roberta came down the steps alone in response to my honking siren.
“Mother says,” she explained demurely, “that since we have changed our plans and are to call on a nice married couple like the Moores, we may go alone—this once. Isn’t that lovely?”
I grinned. “Mother is not omniscient, after all!”
“I told her everything but the purple veil and—and fortune-reading part. And of course, she doesn’t know you only met them today.”
“Girl,” I retorted sternly, “you are a deceiver—but I like you. Climb in.”
Well, after nine o’clock we arrived at the address written across Moore’s card. It turned out to be half of a detached double dwelling, standing on a corner beyond a block of quiet, respectable red-stone fronts, with a deep lawn between it and the street.
“Ridiculous house,” Bert named it on first sight, and ridiculous house it was in a certain sense. It reminded one of that king in the old fairy tale who “laughed with one side of his face and smiled with the other.”
The half that bore Moore’s number was neat, shining and of unimpeachable exterior. Its yellow brick front was clean, with freshly painted white woodwork; its half of the lawn, close-clipped and green, was set with little, thriving, round flower beds. The other half had the look of a regular old beggar among houses. The paint, weather-beaten, blistered and brown, was no dingier than the dirt-freckled bricks. Two or three windows were boarded up. Not one of the rest but mourned a broken pane or so. From the dilapidated porch, wooden steps all askew led to a weed-grown walk. On that side the lawn was a straggling waste of weeds.
Roberta had hopped out of the car without waiting for assistance. I joined her and we stood staring at the queer-looking combination.
“Roberta,” I said solemnly after a moment, “there is a grim, grisly secret which I hadn’t meant to alarm you with, but perhaps it is better you should be warned now.”
“Clay! What do you mean?”
“That house!” My voice was a sinister whisper. “Don’t you see? Life and death, or chained to the corpse of his victim! Moore murdered one of twin houses, and now he must live in the other forever as a penance.”
To my surprise, instead of laughing at my nonsense, she took my arm with a shiver. “Don’t!” she protested. “When you speak so, the house isn’t funny any more. It’s—horrid. A—a dead-alive house! Let’s not go in, Clay. We can still attend the concert instead.”
“Arriving in time to exit with the audience.” I felt annoyed, for this last-moment retreat was not like her. “No, thank you. Come along, Berty, and don’t be silly. I suppose one half belongs to Moore and the other to somebody else, and he can’t make the other owner keep his half in repair.”
After some further discussion, we entered the gate at last. I remember that as we went up Moore’s walk, I threw back my head and glanced upward. The moonlight was so white on the slanting house roofs that for just a moment I had an illusion of their being thick with snow.
With snow. Yes, I remembered that illusion afterward.
Moore had expected me alone, of course, but he needn’t have made that fact quite so obvious. He met us in his library on the second floor, whither a neat, commonplace maid had ushered us after a glance at my card.
It was a long, rather heavily furnished room, lined with books to the ceiling. Our first view of it noted nothing bizarre or out of the ordinary. Moore was seated reading, but as we were announced he rose quickly. It was when he perceived Roberta and realized that I had brought a companion that I had my first real doubt that Nils had not exaggerated about the man’s temper.
His good-humored, full-lipped mouth seemed to draw inward and straighten to a disagreeably gash-like effect. The skin over his cheek-bones tightened. A pronounced narrowness between the eyes forced itself suddenly upon the attention. For one instant we faced a man disagreeably different from the one who had parried all Berquist’s thrusts with unshakable good nature.
As he rose and came toward us, however, the ominous look melted again to geniality. “Began to think old Nils had scared you off in earnest, Barbour,” he greeted. “Witch burnings would still be in order if our wild anarchist had his way, eh? I had quite given you up.”
“I believe you did mention seven o’clock,” I retorted stiffly. A host to whom Roberta’s presence, invited or not, was so obviously unwelcome! Rather reluctantly I performed the necessary introduction.
“I had no right to come with him,” she apologized. “We meant to attend the Russian Symphony, but when Clayton told me of your invitation, I—we thought—”
“That you might find better amusement here?” Moore finished for her. “That’s all right, Miss Whitingfield, though the work I am engaged in is a bit serious to be amusing, I fear. Hope you’re not the nervous, screaming sort?” he added, with blunt anxiety.
She flushed a trifle, then laughed. “I’m not—really!” she protested. “But I’ll go away if you wish.”
That was too much for me. “We’ll both leave,” I said very haughtily. “Sorry to have put you out, Mr. Moore.”
To my astonishment, for I was really angry, he burst out laughing. It was such a genial, inoffensive merriment as caught me unawares. I found myself laughing with him, though at what I hadn’t the faintest notion.
“Why, Barbour,” he chuckled, “you mustn’t take an offense at a lack of conventional mannerisms on my part. I’m a worker—first, last and all the time. Miss Whitingfield, you’re welcome as the flowers in May, but I can no more forget my work nor what is likely to affect it than I can forget my own name. You aren’t angry with me, are you?”
“N-no—” she began rather hesitatingly, but just then the door opened behind us and we heard someone enter.
“I am here!”
The words were uttered in a dry, toneless voice. We both turned, and I realized that the “Mystery of the Awful Veiled One” was a mystery no more, or at least had been shorn of its purple drapery.
Of course, I had expected to meet Alicia here, but I think I should have recognized those eyes in any surroundings. They were fully as bright, dark, and almost incredibly large and attentive as they had seemed behind the veil. For the rest, Mrs. Moore’s slender figure was draped in filmy, voluminous folds of black, between which, and a piled mass of black hair, her face gleamed, a peaked white patch—and with those eyes in it.
“Medium” or not, Mrs. Moore herself was more like the creature of another world than any human being I had ever seen.
“Be seated, Alicia.”
Without troubling to present Roberta, Moore gestured toward a peculiar-looking chair at one side of the room. The slender creature in black swept toward it obediently. Long and filmy, the train of her somber costume slid past us like a low, twisting trail of dark smoke over the carpet.
Having reached the chair, she turned, faced us for a moment, still expressionless save for those terribly attentive eyes, then sank into the chair’s depths. As she did so the filmy folds circled, floating about her. It was as though she sank into the depths of a black smoke cloud.
Roberta was frankly staring, and so was I, but my stare had a newly startled quality. Alicia had passed me very closely indeed. My hand still tingled where another hand—a bony, fierce little hand—had closed on it in a swift, pinching clasp. And though I was sure that her colorless lips had not moved, four low words had reached my ears distinctly.
“Go away—you! Go.”
I glanced at Berty, but decided that she had missed the rude little message. Moore certainly hadn’t heard, for he had gone over to the chair and was standing behind it when Alicia reached there.
With a slight shrug I determined that where so much oddity prevailed, this additional eccentricity of Mrs. Moore had better be ignored. To think of her as a real person—my hostess—was made diffi
cult by the atmosphere of utter strangeness which her appearance and Moore’s treatment of her had already created.
“You and Miss Whitingfield sit over there,” commanded Moore briskly.
“I’ll explain what we’re about in a minute. You’ll be interested. Can’t avoid it. A little farther off, Miss Whitingfield—d’you mind? Alicia is more easily affected than other sensitives—more—easily—affected. Right! Now just a moment and I can talk to you.”
We had seated ourselves as he directed, I some half dozen feet from the enthroned Alicia, Roberta much farther away, well over by the heavily curtained windows.
To the savage and to the young, “strange” is generally synonymous with “funny.” We exchanged one quick look, then kept our eyes resolutely apart. A wave of incipient mirth had fairly leaped between us. It was well, I thought, that Cathy had been suppressed.
Then we saw what Moore was doing at the chair, and forgot laughter in amazement. It must be remembered that Roberta and I were innocent of the least previous experience in this line. Save for some hazy knowledge of “spiritualistic fakes” and “mind-reading” of the vaudeville type, we were blankly ignorant, and by consequence as unconsciously receptive as a couple of innocent young sponges. But at first we were merely shocked by the brutal fact of Moore’s preparations.
I have said that the chair taken by Alicia was a peculiar one. It stood before a pair of black curtains, which concealed what in spiritualistic circles is called a cabinet. The chair itself was large, heavy, with a high back and uncommonly broad arm-rests. More, it had about it that look of “apparatus” which one associates with dentists’ and surgeons’ fixtures. Alicia leaned back in it, her hands resting limp on the armrests.
Then up over each fragile wrist Moore clamped a kind of steel handcuff, attached to the chair arm. Another pair of similar fetters, extended on short rods from the back, were clasped round her upper arms, and, as if this were not enough, he locked together the two halves of a wide steel band about her waist.