by Fritz Leiber
The audience hoped much of Alicia, and its keen humor was not entirely disappointed. No sooner had she appeared than an argument began about her preposterously-brilliant veil. The court insisted that it should be raised. Alicia firmly declined to oblige. She had to give in finally, of course, and when that peaked, white face with its strange eyes was exposed, the hydra beyond the rail doubtless felt further rewarded.
The hydra believed her a fraud. They had reason. I, with greater reason, understood and pitied her!
I thought she might break down on the stand. Alicia’s character, however, was a complicated affair that set her outside the common run of behavior to Clemens’s questions with sphinx-like impassivity and the precision of a machine.
Her answers only confirmed Nil’s story and mine to a certain point, and stopped there. There was not a word of “spirits” nor “guides;” not a hint of any influence more evil than common human passions; not a suggestion, even, that she had formed an opinion as to which man, slayer or slain, was the first aggressor. I am sure that a more reserved and non-committal widow than Alicia never took the stand at the trial of her husband’s supposed murderer.
“James,” she said, “wished Mr. Barbour to remain. Mr. Berquist wished him to leave. They argued—No, I should not have called the argument a quarrel—I did not see Mr. Berquist strike James. While they were still talking, I lost consciousness of material surroundings—yes, my loss of consciousness could be called a faint—the argument was not violent enough to frighten me into fainting—yes, there was a reason for my losing consciousness—I lost consciousness because I felt faint. I was tired—I do that sometimes—Yes, I warned them that something bad was coming. I couldn’t say why. I just had that impression. I did not see either James or Mr. Berquist assume a threatening attitude—”
Released at last, she readjusted her purple screen with cold self-possession, and returned to her seat.
It was Sabina Cassel’s next turn. Save in appearance, Alicia had not after all come up to public anticipations. In Sabina, however, the hydra was sure of a real treat in store.
Judge Ballington rapped for order. Sabina took her oath with a scowl. Every line of her face expressed resentment.
But she was intelligent. To Clemens’s questions, she gave grim, bald replies that offered as little grip as possible to public imagination.
Yes, on the evening in question she had been standing concealed behind the black curtains of “Miss ’Licia’s” cabinet, or “box,” as Sabina called it. No, “Marse James” did not know she was there. Miss ’Licia and she had “fixed it up” so that one could enter the box from the back. Marse James had the box built with a solid wooden back, like a wardrobe. It stayed that way—for a while.
“Then Marse James he got unsatisfied!—Yes, the sperits did work in the box an’ come out of it, too; but Marse James, he ain’t suited yet. He want them sperits should work all the time! He never give my poor child no rest!”
And so Alicia, who, according to Sabina, could sometimes but not always command her “sperits,” devised a means to satiate Moore’s scientific craving for results.
While he was absent in another city, the two conspirators brought in a carpenter. They had the cabinet removed and a doorway cut through the plastered wall into a large closet in the next room. By taking off the cabinet’s solid back and hinging it on again, it would just open neatly into the aperture cut to fit it. Alicia kept plenty of gowns hung over the opening in the closet beyond.
Returning, Moore found his solid-backed cabinet apparently as before. From that time, however, the “sperits” were more willing to oblige than formerly.
“Ab uno disce omnes,” is invariably applied to the medium or clairvoyant caught in fraud, though translated: “From all fraud, infer all deceit.”
The world laughed over the “spiritualistic fake again exposed!” I did not laugh.
Let it be that the hand which Roberta and I had seen was Sabina’s gnarled black paw, and that my impression of its insubstantiality was a self-delusion. Let those strange little twirling flames that had arisen pass as the peculiar “fireworks” I had tried to believe them. Let even the incident of the broken lamp have been a feat of Sabina’s—though how her large, clumsy figure could have stolen out past the table and into the room unheard was a puzzle—and the masculine voice of “Horace,” a wonderful ventriloquism.
Grant all these as deceptions. There had come that to me through Alicia’s unwilling agency, which had given me a terrible faith in her that no proof of occasional fraud could dispel.
Clemens’s interrogations touched lightly on the object of the door in the cabinet’s supposedly solid back, only serving to establish the fact that it was impossible for his witness to have been practically in the library unknown to all the room’s other occupants save, probably, Alicia.
Then he asked Sabina’s story of that night in her own words. She began it grimly:
“Well, I was in behind the curtains that hangs in front of Miss ’Licia’s box. Them curtains is moderate thin. I couldn’t see all of them in the room, but I certainly could see all that pass in front of the lamp—Yes, that’s what you got in your hand is one of them curtains.”
Here Clemens checked her, while the curtain, Exhibit B in the prosecution’s evidence, was passed from hand to hand through the jury-box. Each juryman momentarily draped himself in mourning while he assured himself that it was thin enough to be seen through. Then with solemn nods Exhibit B was restored to the district attorney. Sabina continued.
“These here gentlemen, Mister Berquist and Mister Barbour, they come in, and right away the arguin’ started. I can’t tell all they said. They uses high-falutin, educated language what is not familiar to me, though Lord knows I hear enough of it since Miss ’Licia come north with Marse James Moore.
“They argued an’ argued. Mister Barbour, he didn’t say nothing much. But Mister Berquist, he specified they should both up’n leave. Miss ’Licia she sais maybe something bad was gonna happen pretty quick. Marse James, he say: ‘Mister Barbour, you go; come back another time.’ Mister Barbour, he say no, he don’t want to go, cause Miss ’Licia can maybe help him some way. Mister Berquist, he goes right up in the air. He specify some harm will come on his friend stayin’ round there any longer.
“Mister Berquist, he’s standin’ right alongside the big table with the lamp on it. The lamp was behind him. I saw every move he made.
“He muttered something low. I don’ rightly know what he said, but it had a right spiteful, arguing tone to it.
“Marse James, he hollered out: ‘I’ll fix you now for that!’—No, those aren’t maybe the exact words he used, but you asked me to tell this in my own words, an’ that’s what he meant—Yes, sir, I will continue.
“He hollers, ‘I’ll fix you now for that!’ and he rush over to Mister Berquist an’ lays hands on his arm—No, sir; he didn’t go to do Mister Berquist no harm. Marse James he has a way of talkin’ loud an’ big, but I never saw him do harm to nobody.
“He grabbed Mister Berquist’s left arm. Mister Berquist, he reached out his other hand an’ grabbed something off the table. Marse James didn’t do nothing. Mister Berquist, he threw back his hand and hit out with it real smart. Marse James let go of his arm, clap his hand over his face, an’ sorta lets go all over. He jest crumbled down like.
“I knew that the bad happened.
“I couldn’t get out of that box easily into the room, cause there’s a table in it that reach pretty much across, an’ I ain’t spry to climb over it—No, sir; I didn’t think to shove the table out the way. I didn’t think of nothin’ but Miss ’Licia. I turned round an’ got out the back, cause I want to get to my Miss ’Licia. I comes round to the hall door and goes in the library. There is Mister Berquist standin’ over Marse James, his hands all droppin’ blood.
“I say
: ‘You killed him, ain’t you?’ He looks all round kinda pitiful like, and then he said:
“‘Yes, Sabina, I killed him! Now go fetch the doctor an’ some police!’
“Mister Berquist, he’s like lots of other high-spirited gentlemen. He didn’t go for to kill Marse James, but when Marse James touch him in anger, he’s just obliged to do it. That’s all right! I got a right to have my opinion, same as everyone. Well, don’ put it in the written record, then. I don’ care what you do. That’s just my opinion!
“Yes, sir. I’m sure that it was Mister Berquist grabbed the file and not Marse James. Well, Marse James, he was standin’ with his left side to the table. Yes, sir; I could sure enough tell which was which. Marse James, he ain’t so tall, pretty much a foot shorter than Mister Berquist. It was the tall man who stood with their right side against the table, who took the file off it. No; Marse James didn’t try to do nothing hurtful to Mister Berquist. No; they didn’t struggle around none at all. They just stood there. It’s the Lord’s truth, that was the most unexciting killin’ I have ever seen!”
And then Clemens let her go, to the deep disgust of the hydra, outside the rail. He had not asked what she was doing in the cabinet, nor many other of the questions which gave an amusing double interest to the Moore murder. All that, however, was bound to come out in the cross-examination, and, meantime, Sabina had peeved “Clemens’s witness” to an extent which made the case premise well of interest on its tragic side.
CHAPTER XVII
BOUND BY THE DEAD
I was not called before the jury until alter the noon recess, which gave me time to think things over a bit mere.
At the inquest, I had not actually heard Sabina’s testimony. Though Marx, who interviewed her as well as her mistress, had warned me that she would prove a difficult antagonist, I had not fully believed him. Negroes in the average run are diffuse in their statements and easily muddled into self-contradiction.
Sabina might prove so under cross-examination, but I doubted it now. She had wasted hardly a word that morning, and there was only one point on which I was sure that she could be shaken.
The difference in height between slayer and slain was a strong point for the prosecution. Even through thin, black curtains it would indeed have been hard to confuse a tail silhouette with a short one. But no one had thought to question the identity of the tall silhouette.
Though Sabina may have known better during the minutes that she stood staring through the curtains, her after and more vivid sight of Berquist, with hands “droppin’ blood,” and his almost instant claim of the crime as his own, had served to make the tall man Berquist in all her memories.
Berquist, the self-confessed!
I had no faith in Orlow. Had Marx not dropped out, I should have been content to let the trial take its course, sure that his genius would somehow save the day and free my friend. But under Orlow’s handling, with that craggy, sullen, assured black woman to swear that Moore was not and could not have been the aggressor—since he stood with his left side to the table, grasping the tall silhouette with his right hand, and a man under impulse of passion is not likely to reach for a weapon with his left—I was morally certain that Berquist would lose out.
But what if, rising on the stand, instead of a second perjury I told the simple truth?
Not that portion of it which included the superhuman, but just the fact that I, and not Berquist, had been swept by one of those sudden fits of red anger that have made murderers of many before me?
Why, Sabina herself would support my words, once spoken! There was a little, unnoticed twist in her testimony—a point where the voice of Berquist, coming from beyond the table, became the voice of the tall man standing on her side of the lamp.
The instant that I spoke she would know. Her memories, unconsciously readjusted to fit facts as she had afterward learned them, would be straight again. Berquist’s hidden heroism would stand revealed, and I, though I died, I would at least die clean.
Resolve crystallized suddenly within me. When Clemens called me to the stand I would go, not to testify, but to confess.
I walked to the little raised platform, with the chair where the others had sat, below the double tier of jurymen. I mounted it. Somebody put a rusty black book under my hand and mumbled through a slurred rigmarole, to which my low acquiescence was a prelude to ruin for me. I sat down in the chair.
Beyond the rail was a packed level of faces. They were all pale and dreary-looking, it seemed to me, though that may have been an effect of light, for the day was gray and dreary. I had returned to court through falling snow. It was a wet, late spring fall of clinging flakes, and all the way I had been haunted by a memory of the “dead-alive” house as I had seen it that night.
Not the interior—not even the library, with its master, a grim gray and scarlet horror on the floor. But the house itself, desolate under its white burden, with the great flakes swirling down, hiding deeper and more deep the line of division between the living half and the dead.
Berquist was sitting by a table with Orlow beside him. I had visited him in prison, of course, and talked with him a few moments just before the trial opened. His determination and courage had never swerved, nor his conviction that we had only to keep steady—and win.
Now I saw his eyes as a dark and valiant glory fixed on me. Their message only hardened my resolve.
That man to play the martyr for my sake? Never!
Orlow left Nils, and took his stand conveniently near. He was there to protect me from irrelevant questions, but he looked quite out of place. Clearly, the mantle of Helidore Marx did not rest easily on his shoulders.
The district attorney, a thin, scholarly person whom I instinctively disliked, began his inquisition.
“Your name, please? Age and occupation?”
“Barbour—Clayton S. Barbour,” I corrected myself. “I am—”
“Just a moment. Your full name for the record, please, Mr. Barbour.”
Clemens, who would reserve any attempt to “rattle” me for my appearance in the rebuttal, was politeness itself.
“Clayton—Serapion Barbour!” I forced out. Then I cursed myself for not having substituted “Samuel,” or left out the initial.
“There’s power in a name.” Once I would have laughed at that statement, but not now. Not with my recent memories.
And as God is my witness, I sat there and saw the district attorney’s hatchet-face change, blend, grow smooth and loathsomely pleasant.
Clemens continued his interrogations, but I spoke to another than he when I answered them.
The living bound by the dead!
CHAPTER XVIII
A LETTER FROM ALICIA
May 15.
Mr. C. S. Barbour.
Sir: I am writing to you because my guides advise it. Otherwise I should not do so. I have returned to my old home in Virginia. The newspapers were very cruel to me, as you know, and every one unkind and harsh and disbelieving.
James understood me. If he had found out about the cabinet, he would have been annoyed, but he would only have taken more pains after that to see that all the phenomena were genuine. I can’t help doing such things. It is a part of my nature. James said I was very complex.
In a measure, it is your fault that he left me. I am not vengeful, however, and I do not hold it against you, because I can well guess at what you had to contend with. For some cause that has not been revealed to me—some cause within yourself, I fear—you were and still are peculiarly open to the attack of one we know of.
Were yours an ordinary case of obsession, I might have helped. As it is, I can only offer warning. Whatever there is in you that answers to him, choke it—crush it back—give it no headway. Above all, do not obey him. If, as I suspect, you have obeyed in the past, cease now. It is not yet too late. But if
June 9 finds you under his domination you will never be free again.
You may wonder why I was silent at the trial. You may have thought that I was ignorant of the truth. This is not so, though I did not tell even Sabina. To bring the greater criminal to justice was impossible. For the rest, it was between you and your friend.
Understand, I will not interfere between you and your friend.
My guides say that this is not for me to do. That I must not. That if one of you wills to sacrifice and the other to accept, not even God will interfere between you.
But I write particularly to give you the message.
Mortal life is cheap, and mortal death an illusion. Beyond and deeper are Life and Death Eternal. Be careful which you choose.
Alicia Moon.
CHAPTER XIX.
A CONVERSATION.
“Plain life and death are the only realities. Life eternal—death eternal! For you and me, those are words, my boy—just words!”
It was dusk in my room. I sat on the edge of the bed, chin in hands, staring at the inevitable companion of my solitude. At my feet lay the scattered sheets of Alicia’s letter, scrawled over in a large, childish hand. The outside world was bright with an afterglow of the departed sun. But gray dusk was in my room.
“Just words,” repeated the face.
“Just words,” I said after him dully. Then, at a thought, I roused a trifle. “He won’t go through with it. Even Nils Berquist can’t be willing to die without a protest—and for such a crawling puppy as would let him do it!”
“He will die, but not entirely for your sake,” the presence retorted.