Murder by Reflection

by H. F. Heard

  “Look here.” There was as much detachment in his tone—more, indeed, for he was now detached from his own disgust. “Perhaps I can help you—at least to help yourself. Look at it from this standpoint. You’ve always lived feeling that this life is a dream. Well, now’s the time to have the courage of your convictions.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You thought everything is shadow, and therefore to do away with the life-dream or dream-life of a dreamer wasn’t really doing any irreparable harm. Well, in a way all the material world is a play of motions. Your body is simply a ‘dust-devil’ of whirling atoms, themselves only small eddies of force, the whole spinning in a certain way and shape caused by a certain vortex of desire, which we don’t understand. But we do know that our bodies are no more than sand-grains swept up by a passing wind.”

  “Oh, I know we remake our bodies every seven years.”

  “Not at all; now that radioactive atoms can be put into the body we can, with the Geiger Counter, track them moving about in the body and, at any moment, drifting out of that column of living dust.”

  “Do you mean to say …?”

  “I only want you to realize that your body is a shadow cast by something else.”

  “You think I could think …?”

  Arnoldo was again looking at his hand. He flexed the fingers. They felt firm; they felt healthy. Yet they were only streaks of a shadowy force, and in those streaks, those quiet ordered rays of radiation, already a deadly disturbance had begun. He had thrust these wisps of mist, these quiet columns of living smoke, rising like vapor in still evening air, into the tearing wind of radioactivity—and they were literally being blown away by the blast. But was it proved? “Seeing is believing, but feeling is knowing”—the old adage came into his mind. He didn’t see, far less feel, anything wrong. Kermit’s voice confirmed his thought.

  “You can say, nothing has as yet happened and so nothing will. Of course there is no absolute certainty in life—only probability. I have shown you the probability. Now I’ll try and go further and tell you how you might prepare for it. But one thing more I ought to add; perhaps it’ll help you to make up your mind to face your body. I’ll put it in a question. You didn’t by any chance, ask Miss Gayton to help you with your work?”

  Arnoldo seemed to rouse out of his lethargy. Fear again showed on his face.

  “Why?”

  “It is medically interesting. I understand that she came here because she had had old T.B. trouble ’way back East. She seemed to be all right here for a while. Then about the time that Mrs. Heron’s trouble began she seems to have become unwell again. Of course it looked like a recurrence of the old T.B. But I understand that they are now sure that she is dying, if not already dead, of a disease which is often mistaken for T.B. and which may attack a T.B.-damaged lung—if the person should be exposed to conditions which are favorable for cancer. She has cancer of the lung, I have lately been informed.”

  Arnoldo made no defense.

  “We were friends and I did ask her to try-out for me one of the X-ray tubes.”

  Kermit only added, “Now that the fate you started has engulfed two of the people closest to you, perhaps you will have the courage to stand up to your test, now that it is reaching out and touching you. Will you?”

  Gradually Arnoldo listened. When Kermit had finished speaking some time had passed. Another considerable period was spent in silence.

  Then Arnoldo remarked, more to himself than to the other, “It’s a chance … and then, if the full penalty is after all exacted, I shall be prepared to pay for it. There’s nothing else to do, to live for, I guess.”

  In consequence, Kermit was not surprised to receive a month later a visit from Doc. Nor was he surprised that Doc was in good spirits.

  “See, by taking a little care not only have we fended off any town scandal, but the city’s gained a first-rate feature. I always said that might happen as the happiest way out, and I believe if you choose what you think to be the very best possible thing that can befall, it will befall. And I’ve gotten the very man for the place, too. He’ll be happy keeping it up and showing people around.”

  “Yes,” said Kermit. “I think that was the best solution. God only knows how long that house might remain unhealthy to anyone living in it.”

  Kermit did not often go into town. It was perhaps as much as a year after that he was up at the end toward Plantation House. He had yet an hour to wait for some express parcels that he had come for. He strolled into the cool grounds where the caretaker was working. His “May I show you over?” was so obviously an offer meant to be accepted that Kermit fell in behind him.

  “Few cities like this have such a feature! I assure you it draws visitors. Sure, the town itself has plenty of present attractiveness. But then so have a dozen other planned cities, like this, about here. But this gives us—as some visitors said to me only yesterday—background. And background gives the finishing touch, doesn’t it?”

  Kermit give the “assent of courtesy” which authorities on casuistry say need not necessarily be a “contractual consent.”

  “Background gives, I always say,” said the guide, swinging back the tall leaf of the double front door, and waving him to enter, “atmosphere.”

  The great hall was silent, the sun still throwing long, searching beams across its emptiness. Like, Kermit thought, the way a blind man will search with fringed extended fingers, seeking for some fine object that eludes him—the blind sun, like the blinded Polyphemus groping for his enemy. Yes, there was certainly atmosphere about the vacant place, but, surely, less of quiet reflection than of expectancy. They walked slowly along until the guide paused.

  “Many visitors say to me, ‘You have Williamsburg beat.’ I don’t know about that, but I do know that just here you do have a kind of feeling as though you had gotten right back into the past and left the present as though it hadn’t yet been born.” They had reached the middle of the hall. “I put the visitors just here and say to them, ‘Now, don’t look at yourselves, but look over your shoulders; just sort of miss your faces and look right along your background!’ And they see, just as we see now, right down those long corridors of repeated, reflected rooms!”

  Kermit and he looked into the reflecting mirrors in silence for a while.

  “It does seem, doesn’t it,” said the guide, anxious to collect yet another visitor’s impression, “as though there were a passage right down there, and often I’ve felt as though it would lead one right back into the past itself, if one could really slip into it.”

  “Yes,” Kermit felt that a remark was required of him, “yes, people often say in old places, ‘If only these old walls could speak, could give an echo of the impressions that fell on them!’”

  “That’s just what a lady visitor said to me the other day. And then she said a clever thing which only a lady would think of. She said, ‘I suspect why we can’t actually get back into that past’—we were standing just here—‘is because we are tied to the present by our appearance; our clothes are all that hold us back, are the only thing making us of this date and not that!’ But though I’m proud of the place, they’re not going to get me into fancy dress—as they do at Williamsburg. That’d be going too far.”

  They walked on toward the grand staircase. The guide seemed to be wondering whether he should make a confidence, as they were alone.

  “Tell the truth, I’m not so sure that if one did actually dress the part and live in the place one mightn’t become a sort of living ghost!”

  Then, seeing that he was not laughed at, he eyed Kermit, wondering whether he might share with this silent man all his impressions.

  “Believe me, that’s the honest impression I sometimes do get in the place. I go around, when I’ve locked the gates, and take a last look over. It’s then still and quiet as though none of us busy moderns were born or thought of. And, really, I often stand here at the foot of this stair in a sort of brown study wondering whether it’s rea
l, all this—” He waved his hand to the perfect period setting which surrounded them. “—Or just my intruding self. I could fancy, then, that down these stairs, as real as life, came the real people who’d be at home here and who’d pass through me as though I were a shabby shadow.”

  He was evidently more than a little pleased with his prose-period and, no doubt, future visitors would hear his fear of the past gaining in polish and patina. But on Kermit’s ear it struck with an uncanny personal conviction. For wasn’t it true that this house was demonstrably charged with energies which, though our senses could not record them, could affect us fatally? Was not this a clear proof that the “dead hand of the past” could be something far more than a phrase-with-a-creep-in-it? Hadn’t resentment—the silent struggle between the wish to escape into the past and the fear of that living burial—actually caused these walls, was causing them still, to echo with death? A soundless echo but far more blood-curdling than any cry of agony.

  He thought, “Invisible, intangible rays leave such a powerful impression; dig in and hit back in this way—why shouldn’t the passions which set the rays in train, themselves leave traces, imprints, echoes? We’re only now learning the full properties of X-rays and the invisible radiations which are quite close to the visible spectrum. The sensible, intelligent men, who designed the style of this house, they would have laughed at X-rays as medieval magic, necromancers’ nonsense.”

  So strong indeed was the impression of truth given by the old guide’s eloquence that, when after a silent moment—which he felt was a fitting tribute to his evocation of the past—he suggested going upstairs, Kermit declined.

  “No, thank you; perhaps another time. You have given me a wonderful impression of the place—quite brought it to life.”

  Satisfied with the testimonial, the caretaker let him go.

  Increasingly in the months that followed he absorbed himself in the study of radiation. He took up again the mitogenetic radiation—the powerful rays which a number of Russian researchers had for long been maintaining were given out by growing seeds, which could affect the growth rate of other seeds near them and so greatly increase reproduction. As is not uncommon in pure research work, it became unexpectedly practical. Living as he did on the borders of a national forest, he found he was soon able to give some useful information and advice to the rangers in the planting of seedlings.

  One ranger he found to have much the same cast of mind as his own. They came to work together partly because in that particular of forestry research they could interact, but, equally, because they shared the same general approach to life and its problems. Their uniting interest was the new ecology, the study of the invisible balance and constant interaction of the whole of the forest life, how vegetable and animal, carnivore and ruminant, the organic and the inorganic, the visible and the invisible were in incessant reciprocation.

  “We rangers,” said the forester one evening, when after some work in the laboratory they were sitting out on the little patio-plateau watching the light fade, “we’re going through a revolution in our job. Few years ago we all knew what to do—how to thin, prune, clear; stamp out that plant or animal, protect these. But now, with the present shift and at the present pace, we’ll soon be nothing but observers, watching old ecology manage its own elaborate accounts. Talk of double entry! Nature keeps account-books that are so elaborate, you have to watch for years before you tumble to the fact that she is an accountant. But, by gum and resin, she is. Though when she’ll actually strike a balance …”

  “God only knows,” concluded Kermit.

  “I guess that’s it,” responded the other. “As long as there’s time, nature will be carrying on and ‘carrying forward.’”

  “And that’s only another way of saying, ‘While there’s life there’s hope.’”

  “Yes, you’d be surprised how that works out. Time and again I’ve seen an animal that’s lost a foot or an eye and I’ve thought ‘Better put it out; it’s not got a chance now.’ But as often as not it’s adapted and gone on with a sort of roused vitality.

  “But the oddest case I’ve seen about the forest in that respect wasn’t an animal, it was human, it was a man. I sighted him some time back, living on a small patch which touches the forest boundary, on the other side. But when I’d pass actually near the place he’d always be out of sight. But he kept a fine small garden around his one-room shack. There’s a real recluse for you. I’d never sighted a real hermit before, though some of the other boys tell me that they’ve heard of such becoming not uncommon these days—men who just wouldn’t stand any longer for what we are still calling civilization. But this was the first I’d ever found the track of.

  “Then one day I actually had a close-up of him. I suppose we rangers can move pretty quietly when we want and I wanted to get a good view of him. It was obvious that he was a shy bird, and that always lures a naturalist. He was working his land and as he worked he came across to the side where I was seated in a bush Then I saw why I’d thought he looked a little skewed, when I’d seen him in the distance. He was bare to the waist and as tough as an old tree-root, and as twisted, too. Would you believe it, that man was working that soil in a way that’d shame most lumber jacks, and yet he was doing it all with one arm, his left arm. His right looked all withered and I couldn’t see even a hand on it.”

  “Pruning,” remarked Kermit.

  “That’s what I say,” remarked the ranger. “Pruning doesn’t apply merely to plants. It’s just as true of animals, just as true of us.”

  About the Author

  Henry FitzGerald “Gerald” Heard (1889–1971) was an English philosopher, lecturer, and author. The BBC’s first science commentator, he pioneered the study of the evolution of consciousness, which he explored in his definitive philosophical work The Ascent of Humanity (1929). A prolific writer, Heard was also the author of a number of fiction titles, including mysteries and dystopian novels. He is best known for his beloved Mycroft Holmes mystery series.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1942 by The Vanguard Press, Inc.

  Cover design by Andrea Worthington

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-3782-2

  This edition published in 2016 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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