by Otto Penzler
In the light of subsequent events I must confess my culpability in allowing even so absorbing an interest as this that suddenly beset my path to turn me from my engagement to meet Mr. Colton. Instinctively, however, I pursued the insect. Although this species, as is well known, exhibits a power of sustained flight possessed by none other of the lepidopterae of corresponding wing area, I hoped that, owing to the chill morning air, this specimen would be readily captured. Provokingly it alighted at short intervals, but on each occasion rose again as I was almost within reach. Thus lured on I described a half-circle and was, approximately, a third of a mile inland when finally I netted my prey on the leaves of a Quercus ilicifolia. Having deposited it in the poison jar which I carried on a shoulder-strap, I made haste, not without some quickenings of self-reproach, toward the cliff. Incentive to greater haste was furnished by a fog-bank that was approaching from the south. Heading directly for the nearest point of the cliff, I reached it before the fog arrived. The first object that caught my eyes, as it ranged for the readiest access to the beach, was the outstretched body of Colton lying upon the hard sand where Serdholm and Haynes had met their deaths.
For the moment I was stunned into inaction. Then came the sense of my own guilt and responsibility. Along the cliff I ran at full speed, dipped down into a hollow, where, for the time, the beach was shut off from view, and surmounted the hill beyond, which brought me almost above the body a little to the east of the gully. The fog, too, had been advancing swiftly, and now as I reached the cliff’s edge it spread a grey mantle over the body lying there alone. Already I had reached the head of the gully, when there moved very slowly out upon the hard sand a thing so out of all conception, an apparition so monstrous to the sight, that my net fell from my hand and a loud cry burst from me. In the grey folds of mist it wavered, assuming shapes beyond comprehension. Suddenly it doubled on itself, contracted to a compact mass, underwent a strange inversion, and before my clearing vision there arose a man, dreadful of aspect indeed, but still a human being, and, as such, not beyond human powers to cope with. Coincident with this recognition I noted a knife, inordinately long of blade and bulky of handle, on the sand almost under Colton. Toward this the man had been moving when my cry arrested him, and now he stood facing the height with strained eye and gnashing teeth.
There was no time for delay. The facile descent of the gully was out of the question. It was over the cliff or nothing; for if Colton was alive his only chance was that I should reach his assailant before the latter could come at the knife. Upon the flash of the thought I was in mid-air, a giddy terror dulling my brain as I plunged down through the fog. Fortunately for me—for the bones of sixty years are brittle—I landed upon a slope of soft sand. Forward I pitched, threw myself completely over, and, carried to my feet by the impetus, ran down the lesser slope upon the man. That he was obsessed by a mania of murder was written on his face and in his eyes. But now his expression, as he turned toward me, was that of a beast alarmed. To hold his attention I shouted. The one desideratum was to reach him before he turned again to the knife and Colton.
The maniac crouched as I ran in upon him, and I must confess to a certain savage exultation as I noted that he had little the advantage of me in size or weight. Although not a large man, I may say that I am of wiry frame, which my out-of-door life has kept in condition. So I felt no great misgivings as to the outcome. We closed. As my opponent’s muscles tightened on mine I knew, with a sudden, daunting shock, that I had met the strength of fury. For a moment we strained, I striving for a hold which would enable me to lift him from his feet. Then with a rabid scream the creature dashed his face into my shoulder and bit through shirt and flesh until the teeth grated on my shoulder blade.
Not improbably this saved my life and Colton’s. For, upon the outrage of that assault, a fury not less insane than that of my enemy fired me, and I, who have ever practised a certain scientific austerity of emotional life, became a raging beast. Power flashed through every vein; strength distended every muscle. Clutching at the throat of my assailant I tore that hideous face from my shoulder. My right hand, drawn back for a blow, twitched the cord of my heavy poison bottle. Shouting aloud I swung the formidable weapon up and brought it down upon his head with repeated blows. His grasp relaxed. I sprang back for a fuller swing and beat him to the ground. The jar was shattered, but such was my ecstasy of murderousness that I forgot the specimen of pseudoargiolus, which fell with the fragments and was trodden into the sand.
In my hand I still held the base of the jar. My head was whirling. I staggered backward, and with just sense enough left to know that the deadily fumes of the cyanide were doing their work flung it far away. A mist fell like a curtain somewhere between my eyes and my brain, befogging the processes of thought.
The next thing I knew, I was lying on my back, looking into a white face—Colton’s! I must have been saying something, for Colton replied, as if to a question:
“It’s all right, Professor. There’s no pseudoargiolus or Pteranodon, or anything. Just lie quiet.”
But it was borne in upon me that I had lost my prize. “Let me up!” I cried. “I’ve lost it—it fell when the poison jar broke.”
“There, there,” he said, soothingly, as one calms a delirious person. “Just wait——”
“I’m speaking of my specimen, the pseudoargiolus.” The mist was beginning to lift from my brain, and the mind now swung dizzily back to the great speculation. “The Pteranodon?” I gasped.
“There!” Colton laughed shakily as he pointed to the blood-besmeared form lying quiet on the sand.
“But the footprints! The fossil marks on the rock!”
“Footprints on the rock? Handprints here.”
“Handprints!” I repeated. “Tell me slowly. I must confess to a degree of bewilderment to which I am not accustomed.”
“No wonder, sir. Here it is. I saw it all just before I was hit. This man is Serdholm’s cousin, the juggler. He’s crazy, probably from Serdholm’s blow. He’s evidently been waiting for a chance to kill Serdholm. The gully’s mouth is where he waited. You’ve seen circus-jugglers throw knives—well, that’s the way he killed Serdholm. In his crazy cunning he saw that footprints would give him away, so he utilized another of his circus tricks and recovered the knife by walking on his hands. His handprints are what we mistook for the footprints of a giant, prehistoric bird!”
“But Mr. Haynes? And yourself?”
“I don’t know why he wanted to kill us, unless he feared we would discover his secret. I escaped because I was going forward as he threw, and that must have disturbed his aim so that the knife turned in the air and the handle struck me, knocking me senseless.”
Here the juggler groaned, and we busied ourselves with bringing him to.
My monograph on the Pteranodon, it is hardly needful to state, will not be published. At the same time I maintain that the survival of this formidable creature, while now lacking definite proof, is none the less strictly within the limits of scientific possibility.…
WILLIS RAVENDEN.
THE FLYING CORPSE
A MYSTERY AUTHOR who seemed at one time to have great potential to become a major figure on the literary scene, Archibald Edward Martin (1885–1955) never quite succeeded in going beyond being a much-loved cult writer. Born in South Australia, his obsession was travel (he went as far as Invercargill, the town closest to the South Pole) and meeting all kinds of people as he took on a wide variety of unconventional jobs, including managing prize fighters, freaks, and film stars, as well as touring with a vaudeville show. His novel The Bridal Bed Murders (1954; published in England as The Chinese Bed Mysteries in 1955) employed some of these colorful vocations, with a traveling freak show touring Australia as a background. While in Europe, he bought the rights to numerous documentary films and exhibited them in Australia. Martin was nearly sixty when he tried his hand at mystery writing, producing three books in 1944: Sinners Never Die, The Misplaced Corpse, and The Common People (r
etitled from its Australian publication as The Outsiders in the United States and England). The last title served as the basis for the 1955 Hammer film titled The Glass Cage (released in America as The Glass Tomb), which starred John Ireland and Honor Blackman and was directed by Montgomery Tully. These novels were followed by a short-story collection, The Shudder Show (1945), and two detective novels, Death in the Limelight (1946) and The Curious Crime (1952). His most famous short story, “The Power of the Leaf” (1948), is a story of a nineteenth-century aboriginal tribe living in the Bush in which the protagonist, Ooloo of the Narranyeri, uses observation and deduction in true Holmesian fashion to solve a mystery that has baffled the medicine man.
“The Flying Corpse” was first published in the September 1947 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
A. E. MARTIN
“THERE MUST be some little thing wrong that’s not quite right,” my wife said.
I gave her a look, but she settled back in the front seat of the car and closed her eyes. “You go right ahead, dear, and fix it,” she went on, snuggling deeper into the cushions. “After all, it’s broken down in a nice spot.”
I thought, if she were going to sleep and I, in my shirt sleeves, was to dig and delve into the disgusting entrails of the wretched bus, it didn’t matter what sort of place the thing had chosen to break down in. Nevertheless, as I looked about me, I confessed that Mona was right.
So far as the motor road knew them we were on the crest of the Hummocks, a line of low, bare hills that provided the tail to the range that stretched Northward to God knows where. We had climbed no noble height, but at least we commanded a view, even if it was only one of flat land stretching in an immense green carpet to the shores of the distant gulf. It was one of those clear, crisp mornings when we should have been able to see ships a-sailing. But there were no ships. As far as I could see, between us and the gulf, there was nothing but grass and stunted bush, with no sign of habitation. Watching closely you could discern the lazy movement of inaudible waves as they curled in to make patterns in foam along the flat, deserted beach. Except for that there was no movement. For miles around the country appeared to be holding its breath, sluggish in the welcome warmth of a perfect winter’s day. The sunshine was no more than a caress and twenty feet below the built-up highway, dew still glistened.
Lighting my pipe I scowled at the car.
Mona’s voice came drowsily: “Unless you’re going to make it work, Rodney, I think we should telephone Nell.”
“Mona, my true love,” I retorted, “there is no chance of telephoning your adorable sister.” I added, malevolently, “Let the sausages wither.”
“Oh, Nell wouldn’t have sausages,” Mona said.
I didn’t pursue the subject but peered into the innards of the ailing Retallick. I am not mechanically minded. I am a physician, not a surgeon. I felt that whatever I did to the inside of the automobile would be wrong, and I prayed fervently for the approach of a car driven by one of those cool, efficient fellows who talk off-handedly of carburetors and sparkplugs as if they were mere thromboses or polypi.
“Have you got it going?” Mona asked, after I had, by rattling the spanner against this and that, awakened the echoes with some hearty industrial noises.
“No, I haven’t,” I said, shortly. “If only I had a hairpin …” I was well aware she never used them.
“I really think, Rodney, we should telephone,” my wife said again.
“For the hundredth time, Mona,” I cried, exasperated into exaggeration, “how can we telephone from the midst of nowhere?”
“Well, it seems quite unfair to Nellie,” she retorted, as illogical as ever. “She’s probably put her best bib on. We’re hours late.”
I wanted to say, “And whose fault is that?” but asked myself, “What’s the use?” I’d wanted to start at eight. We could have been at my sister-in-law’s country home comfortably by noon and settled down to the holiday we’d planned. But by the time Mona had been ready to start, it was ten. And there had been the delay at the gipsy camp. My wife had insisted on having her fortune told. It had been a little queer the way that paunchy Romany had looked at her and said, “So you’ve come back, eh? Looking for more bad luck?” Of course she’d never been there before, as he realized when she spoke. All the rigmarole about prospective offspring and halcyon days ahead had taken up the best part of an hour and now the effete Retallick had played up.
Opening her eyes, Mona said, “For goodness’ sake, Rodney, make an effort. Hit a bolt or something.”
“Do you realize, my girl, that tinkering with the unknown may have disastrous consequences?” I asked grimly. “Hit a bolt, indeed! Suppose it was the right bolt. The car might leap suddenly forward and hurtle into the depths with you in it. How’d you like to be shot off the highway? You’d be dead in a jiffy. Worse … your new hat crushed beyond recognition.”
She patted the crazy thing affectionately and stepped out of the car, stretching her arms adorably.
“I know,” I said, feeling better for the nearness of her, “I’ll climb through the railing and hide below the level of the road. At the first sign of a car you’ll proceed to fix your stocking. I’ve heard it’s infallible. Every motorist stops dead in his tracks.”
“And when he stops?”
“I shall leap out—I mean up—and render him unconscious with this spanner. We will then leap lightly into his car, push our own over the nearest precipice, and live happily ever after.”
“It sounds enthralling,” Mona said, “but haven’t I heard crime doesn’t pay? Seriously, Rod, we can’t stay here and perish. I think we—I mean you should walk back and enquire at the hut we just passed.”
“I saw no hut,” I said.
“I suppose you had your eyes on the road and your thoughts on some other woman,” she said, and led me round the bend and pointed. Sure enough there was a mud excrescence on the side of the drab hill and, emerging from it, a tall and very thin man who waved furiously. I waved back, glad of anyone who might perhaps deal with the refractory car.
We stood leaning on the road railing, looking down on him as he approached. He was not exactly prepossessing. Hatless, his hair fell untidily over an abnormally high brow. His eyes were too small for the swollen dome above, and his face narrowed to a weak chin and simpering mouth. As he climbed the steepish slope to the highway, I noticed the scrawniness of the wrists and saw that he was barefooted. Mentally I classified him as hydrocephalic.
“Anyhow,” Mona said, sensing my thoughts, “he’s wearing his best suit—even it it wasn’t made for him.”
He was on the highway at last, towering over us, his beady eyes focused on my wife. Putting his fingers beside his absurd mouth he shuffled like a shy schoolboy.
“My!” he giggled.
Mona smiled at him brazenly, and I coughed significantly.
“Oh, let the boy have his hour,” she said, and like a mannequin, pirouetted. The stranger gazed spellbound; then said, mincingly:
“I’m going to see you tonight.”
Mona stopped abruptly in the middle of a pose.
“Yes,” he went on eagerly. “You’re in the circus, aren’t you? All night I been hearing the trucks go by.”
Mona was too surprised to speak.
“That’s what comes of wearing that hat,” I grinned.
“It’s a rare pretty hat,” the stranger said and Mona wrinkled her nose at me.
The man was grubbing into the inside pocket of his ridiculously inadequate coat. “But most I like you without clothes,” he said simply, and as Mona blinked, held out a printed paper. “Like that.”
I glanced over my wife’s shoulder. The paper had been torn from some cheap publication and the tall man pointed a crudely bandaged forefinger at a picture of a girl posing in tights. Before he carefully restored it to his pocket I had time to notice that there was certainly some resemblance to Mona. So far as the hut dweller was concerned there was no doubt at all. He said, like a ch
ild telling of promised pleasures, “I’m going to the circus tonight.” He looked pensively at the automobile.
It was a chance in a million. “If you can make it go,” I said, “we’ll take you.” I added mischievously, “You shall ride in the back with the lady.”
“You shouldn’t,” Mona whispered as he walked across to the car. “It’s not fair promising Mr. Simon …”
“Simon?”
“Sh-h.” She nodded warningly toward the gangling creature who was poking an experimental finger into the belly of the Retallick.
“But how do you know it’s Simon?”
She whispered. “Pieman … going to the fair. No money. Remember?”
I said, “If that poor devil can get the car going, I’ll eat my hat.”
And, surprisingly, at that moment the Retallick sprang to life.
“Oh-oh,” Mona said. “I hope you’re hungry.” She reached up, and removing my hat, handed it to me.
“Well,” I said, “your Mr. Simon deserves to ride beside his princess.”
He stood, wiping greasy fingers on his newly-pressed pants, gazing into the interior of the car. With one foot on the running board he suddenly looked round. There was the strangest expression in his eyes. Suspicion was there, certainly, but something of fear too.
“We better see him first,” he said.
“Him?”
“He’s down there,” he told us, pointing to the paddock below the road.
“Who?” I asked, and as he didn’t reply, shook his sleeve. “What’s he doing there?”
“I didn’t go near,” he said defensively. “I see him lying but I didn’t go near. I called, but he didn’t answer.”
“Better have a look-see,” Mona counselled and began to scramble under the railing. I helped her down the slope. When we reached the bottom Simple Simon was standing motionless, pointing at a spot some thirty feet from the roadway above. We followed his gaze and Mona caught her breath.