The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

Ellery grinned. “There’s a naïve directness about you, Keith, that draws me in spite of myself. Well, I’ll relieve your mind. Thorne and I are taking Miss Mayhew back to the city.”

  “In that case it’s all right.” Ellery studied his face; it was worn deep with ruts of fatigue and worry. Keith dropped the cans to the cement floor of the garage. “You can use these, then. Gas.”

  “Gas! Where on earth did you get it?”

  “Let’s say,” said Keith grimly, “I dug it up out of an old Indian tomb.”

  “Very well.”

  “You’ve fixed Thorne’s car, I see. Needn’t have. I could have done it.”

  “Then why didn’t you?”

  “Because nobody asked me to.” The giant swung on his heel and vanished.

  Ellery sat still, frowning. Then he got out of the car, picked up the cans, and poured their contents into the tank. He reached into the car again, got the engine running, and leaving it to purr away like a great cat he went back to the house. He found Alice in her room, a coat over her shoulders, staring out her window. She sprang up at his knocks.

  “Mr. Queen, you’ve got Mr. Thorne’s car going!”

  “Success at last.” Ellery smiled. “Are you ready?”

  “Oh, yes! I feel so much better, now that we’re actually to leave. Do you think we’ll have a hard time? I saw Mr. Keith bring those cans in. Petrol, weren’t they? Nice of him. I never did believe such a nice young man—” She flushed. There were hectic spots in her cheeks and her eyes were brighter than they had been for days. Her voice seemed less husky, too.

  “It may be hard going through the drifts, but the car is equipped with chains. With luck we should make it. It’s a powerful—” Ellery stopped very suddenly indeed, his eyes fixed on the worn carpet at his feet, stony yet startled.

  “What is the matter, Mr. Queen?”

  “Matter?” Ellery raised his eyes and drew a deep, deep breath. “Nothing at all. God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world.”

  She looked down at the carpet. “Oh—the sun!” With a little squeal of delight she turned to the window. “Why, Mr. Queen, it’s stopped snowing. There’s the sun setting—at last!”

  “And high time, too,” said Ellery briskly. “Will you please get your things on? We leave at once.” He picked up her bags and left her, walking with a springy vigor that shook the old boards. He crossed the corridor to his room opposite hers and began, whistling, to pack his bag.…

  The living-room was noisy with a babble of adieus. One would have said that this was a normal household, with normal people in a normal human situation. Alice was positively gay, quite as if she were not leaving a fortune in gold for what might turn out to be all time.

  She set her purse down on the mantel next to her mother’s chromo, fixed her hat, flung her arms about Mrs. Reinach, pecked gingerly at Mrs. Fell’s withered cheek, and even smiled forgivingly at Dr. Reinach. Then she dashed back to the mantel, snatched up her purse, threw one long enigmatic glance at Keith’s drawn face, and hurried outdoors as if the devil himself were after her.

  Thorne was already in the car, his old face alight with incredible happiness, as if he had been reprieved at the very moment he was to set his foot beyond the little green door. He beamed at the dying sun.

  Ellery followed Alice more slowly. The bags were in Thorne’s car; there was nothing more to do. He climbed in, raced the motor, and then released the brake.

  The fat man filled the doorway, shouting, “You know the road, now, don’t you? Turn to the right at the end of this drive. Then keep going in a straight line. You can’t miss. You’ll hit the main highway in about …”

  His last words were drowned in the roar of the engine. Ellery waved his hand. Alice, in the tonneau beside Thorne, twisted about and laughed a little hysterically. Thorne sat beaming at the back of Ellery’s head.

  The car, under Ellery’s guidance, trundled unsteadily out of the drive and made a right turn into the road.

  It grew dark rapidly. They made slow progress. The big machine inched its way through the drifts, slipping and lurching despite its chains. As night fell, Ellery turned the powerful headlights on. He drove with unswerving concentration. None of them spoke.

  It seemed hours before they reached the main highway. But when they did the car leaped to life on the road, which had been partly cleared by snowplows, and it was not long before they were entering the nearby town.

  At the sight of the friendly electric lights, the paved streets, the solid blocks of houses, Alice gave a cry of sheer delight. Ellery stopped at a gasoline station and had the tank filled.

  “It’s not far from here, Miss Mayhew,” said Thorne reassuringly. “We’ll be in the city in no time. The Triborough Bridge—”

  “Oh, it’s wonderful to be alive!”

  “Of course you’ll stay at my house. My wife will be delighted to have you. After that—”

  “You’re so kind, Mr. Thorne. I don’t know how I shall ever be able to thank you enough.” She paused, startled. “Why, what’s the matter, Mr. Queen?”

  For Ellery had done a strange thing. He had stopped the car at a traffic intersection and asked the officer on duty something in a low tone. The officer stared at him and replied with gestures. Ellery swung the car off into another street. He drove slowly.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Alice again, leaning forward.

  Thorne said, frowning, “You can’t have lost your way. There’s a sign which distinctly says—”

  “No, it’s not that. I’ve just thought of something.”

  The girl and the old man looked at each other, puzzled. Ellery stopped the car at a large stone building with green lights outside and went in, remaining there for fifteen minutes. He came out whistling.

  “Queen!” said Thorne abruptly, eyes on the green lights. “What’s up?”

  “Something that must be brought down.” Ellery swung the car about and headed it for the traffic intersection. When he reached it he turned left.

  “Why, you’ve taken the wrong turn,” said Alice nervously. “This is the direction from which we’ve just come. I’m sure of that.”

  “And you’re quite right, Miss Mayhew. It is.” She sank back, pale, as if the very thought of returning terrified her. “We’re going back, you see,” said Ellery.

  “Back!” exploded Thorne, sitting up straight.

  “Oh, can’t we just forget all those horrible people!” moaned Alice.

  “I’ve a viciously stubborn memory. Besides, we have reinforcements. If you’ll look back you’ll see a car following us. It’s a police car, and in it are the local Chief of Police and a squad of picked men.”

  “But why, Mr. Queen?” cried Alice.

  “Because,” said Ellery grimly, “I have my own professional pride. Because I’ve been on the receiving end of a damnably cute magician’s trick.”

  “Trick?” she repeated dazedly.

  “Now I shall turn magician myself. You saw a house disappear.” He laughed softly. “I shall make it appear again!”

  They could only stare at him, too bewildered to speak.

  “And then,” said Ellery, his voice hardening, “even if we chose to overlook such trivia as dematerialized houses, in all conscience we can’t overlook—murder.”

  The White House

  And there was the Black House again. Not a wraith. A solid house, a strong, dirty, time-encrusted house, looking as if it would never dream of taking wings and flying off into space. It stood on the other side of the driveway, where it had always stood.

  They saw it even as they turned into the drive from the drift-covered road, its bulk looming black against the brilliant moon, as substantial a house as could be found in the world of sane things.

  Thorne and the girl were incapable of speech; they could only gape, dumb witnesses of a miracle even greater than the disappearance of the house in the first place.

  As for Ellery, he stopped the car, sprang to the ground, signaled to the
car snuffling up behind, and darted across the snowy clearing to the White House, whose windows were bright with lamp- and fire-light. Out of the police car swarmed men, and they ran after Ellery like hounds. Thorne and Alice followed in a daze.

  Ellery kicked open the White House door. There was a revolver in his hand and there was no doubt, from the way he gripped it, that its cylinder had been replenished.

  “Hello again,” he said, stalking into the living-room. “Not a ghost; Inspector Queen’s little boy in the too, too solid flesh. Nemesis, perhaps. I bid you good evening. What—no welcoming smile, Dr. Reinach?”

  The fat man had paused in the act of lifting a glass of Scotch to his lips. It was wonderful how the color seeped out of his pouchy cheeks, leaving them gray. Mrs. Reinach whimpered in a corner, and Mrs. Fell stared stupidly. Only Nick Keith showed no great astonishment. He was standing by a window, muffled to the ears; and on his face there was bitterness and admiration and, strangely, a sort of relief.

  “Shut the door.” The detectives behind Ellery spread out silently. Alice stumbled to a chair, her eyes wild, studying Dr. Reinach with a fierce intensity.… There was a sighing little sound and one of the detectives lunged toward the window at which Keith had been standing. But Keith was no longer there. He was bounding toward the woods like a huge deer.

  “Don’t let him get away!” cried Ellery. Three men dived through the window after the giant, their guns out. Shots began to sputter. The night was streaked with orange lightning.

  Ellery went to the fire and warmed his hands. Dr. Reinach slowly, very slowly, sat down in the armchair. Thorne sank into a chair, too, putting his hands to his head.

  Ellery turned around and said, “I’ve told you, Captain, enough of what’s happened since our arrival to allow you an intelligent understanding of what I’m about to say.” A stocky man in uniform nodded curtly.

  “Thorne, last night for the first time in my career,” continued Ellery whimsically, “I acknowledged the assistance of— Well, I tell you, who are implicated in this extraordinary crime, that had it not been for the good God above you would have succeeded in your plot against Alice Mayhew’s inheritance.”

  “I’m disappointed in you,” said the fat man.

  “A loss I keenly feel.” Ellery looked at him, smiling. “Let me show you, skeptic. When Mr. Thorne, Miss Mayhew, and I arrived the other day, it was late afternoon. Upstairs, in the room you so thoughtfully provided, I looked out the window and saw the sun setting. This was nothing and meant nothing, surely: sunset. Mere sunset. A trivial thing, interesting only to poets, meteorologists, and astronomers. But this was one time when the sun was vital to a man seeking truth—a veritable lamp of God shining in the darkness.

  “For, see. Miss Mayhew’s bedroom that first day was on the opposite side of the house from mine. If the sun set in my window, then I faced west and she faced east. So far, so good. We talked, we retired. The next morning I awoke at seven—shortly after sunrise in this winter month—and what did I see? I saw the sun streaming into my window.”

  A knot hissed in the fire behind him. The stocky man in the blue uniform stirred uneasily.

  “Don’t you understand?” cried Ellery. “The sun had set in my window, and now it was rising in my window!”

  Dr. Reinach was regarding him with a mild ruefulness. The color had come back to his fat cheeks. He raised the glass he was holding in a gesture curiously like a salute. Then he drank, deeply.

  And Ellery said, “The significance of this unearthly reminder did not strike me at once. But much later it came back to me; and I dimly saw that chance, cosmos, God, whatever you may choose to call it, had given me the instrument for understanding the colossal, the mind-staggering phenomenon of a house which vanished overnight from the face of the earth.”

  “Good Lord,” muttered Thorne.

  “But I was not sure; I did not trust my memory. I needed another demonstration from heaven, a bulwark to bolster my own suspicions. And so, as it snowed and snowed and snowed, the snow drawing a blanket across the face of the sun through which it could not shine, I waited. I waited for the snow to stop, and for the sun to shine again.”

  He sighed. “When it shone again, there could no longer be any doubt. It appeared first to me in Miss Mayhew’s room, which had faced the east the afternoon of our arrival. But what as it I saw in Miss Mayhew’s room late this afternoon? I saw the sun set.”

  “Good Lord,” said Thorne again; he seemed incapable of saying anything else.

  “Then her room faced west today. How could her room face west today when it had faced east the day of our arrival? How could my room face west the day of our arrival and face east today? Had the sun stood still? Had the world gone mad? Or was there another explanation—one so extraordinary simple that it staggered the imagination?”

  Thorne muttered, “Queen, this is the most—”

  “Please,” said Ellery, “let me finish. The only logical conclusion, the only conclusion that did not fly in the face of natural law, of science itself, was that while the house we were in today, the rooms we occupied, seemed to be identical with the house and the rooms we had occupied on the day of our arrival, they were not. Unless this solid structure had been turned about on its foundation like a toy on a stick, which was palpably absurd, then it was not the same house. It looked the same inside and out, it had identical furniture, identical carpeting, identical decorations—but it was not the same house. It was another house. It was another house exactly like the first in every detail except one: and that was its terrestrial position in relation to the sun.”

  A detective outside shouted a message of failure, a shout carried away by the wind under the bright cold moon.

  “See,” said Ellery softly, “how everything fell into place. If this White House we were in was not the same White House in which we had slept that first night, but was a twin house in a different position in relation to the sun, then the Black House, which apparently had vanished, had not vanished at all. It was where it had always been. It was not the Black House which had vanished, but we who had vanished. It was not the Black House which had moved away, but we who had moved away. We had been transferred during that first night to a new location, where the surrounding woods looked similar, where there was a similar driveway with a similar garage at its terminus, where the road outside was similarly old and pitted, where everything was similar except that there was no Black House, only an empty clearing.

  “So we must have been moved, body and baggage, to this twin White House during the time we retired the first night and the time we awoke the next morning. We, Miss Mayhew’s chromo on the mantel, the holes in our doors where locks had been, even the fragments of a brandy decanter which had been shattered the night before in a cleverly staged scene against the brick wall of the fireplace at the original house—all, all transferred to the twin house to further the illusion that we were still in the original house the next morning.”

  “Drivel,” said Dr. Reinach, smiling. “Such pure drivel that it smacks of fantasmagoria.”

  “It was beautiful,” said Ellery. “A beautiful plan. It had symmetry, the polish of great art. And it made a beautiful chain of reasoning, too, once I was set properly at the right link. For what followed? Since we had been transferred without our knowledge during the night, it must have been while we were unconscious. I recalled the two drinks Thorne and I had had, and the fuzzy tongue and head that resulted the next morning. Mildly drugged, then; and the drinks had been mixed the night before by Dr. Reinach’s own hand. Doctor—drugs; very simple.” The fat man shrugged with amusement, glancing sidewise at the stocky man in blue. But the stocky man in blue wore a hard, unchanging mask.

  “But Dr. Reinach alone?” murmured Ellery. “Oh, no, impossible. One man could never have accomplished all that was necessary in the scant few hours available—fix Thorne’s car, carry us and our clothes and bags from the one White House to its duplicate—by machine—put Thorne’s car out of commission ag
ain, put us to bed again, arrange our clothing identically, transfer the chromo, the fragments of the cut-glass decanter in the fireplace, perhaps even a few knickknacks and ornaments not duplicated in the second White House, and so on. A prodigious job, even if most of the preparatory work had been done before our arrival. Obviously the work of a whole group. Of accomplices. Who but everyone in the house? With the possible exception of Mrs. Fell, who in her condition could be swayed easily enough, with no clear perception of what was occurring.”

  Ellery’s eyes gleamed. “And so I accuse you all—including young Mr. Keith who has wisely taken himself off—of having aided in the plot whereby you would prevent the rightful heiress of Sylvester Mayhew’s fortune from taking possession of the house in which it was hidden.”

  Dr. Reinach coughed politely, flapping his paws together like a great seal. “Terribly interesting, Queen, terribly. I don’t know when I’ve been more captivated by sheer fiction. On the other hand, there are certain personal allusions in your story which, much as I admire their ingenuity, cannot fail to provoke me.” He turned to the stock man in blue. “Certainly, Captain,” he chuckled, “you don’t credit this incredible story? I believe Mr. Queen has gone a little mad from sheer shock.”

  “Unworthy of you, Doctor,” sighed Ellery. “The proof of what I say lies in the fact that we are here, at this moment.”

  “You’ll have to explain that,” said the police chief, who seemed out of his depth.

  “I mean that we are now in the original White House. I led you back here, didn’t I? And I can lead you back to the twin White House, for now I know the basis of the illusion. After our departure this evening, incidentally, all these people returned to this house. The other White House had served its purpose and they no longer needed it

  “As for the geographical trick involved, it struck me that this side-road we’re on makes a steady curve for miles. Both driveways lead off this same road, one some six miles farther up the road; although, because of the curve, which is like a number nine, the road makes a wide sweep and virtually doubles back on itself, so that as the crow flies the two settlements are only a mile or so apart, although by the curving road they are six miles apart.