by Anthology
And the next day came Harry. It was really a shock, though I had been warned by the girl. He was not Harry at all, but another. His eyes were dim and they had lost their lustre; when they did show light at all, it was a kind that was a bit fearful. He was wan, worn, and shrunk to a shadow, as if he had gone through a long illness.
He said he had not been sick. He maintained that he was quite well physically. And on his finger was the ring of which the girl had spoken. Its value must have been incalculable. Wherever he moved his hand its blue flame cut a path through the darkness. But he said nothing about it. I waited and wondered and was afraid. It was not until our walk under the elm trees that it was mentioned.
It was a full moon; a wonderful, mellow moon of summer. He stopped suddenly and gazed up at the orb above us. It seemed to me that his mind was wandering, he held me closely—tenderly. He was not at all like Harry. There was a missing of self, of individuality; he spoke in abstractions.
"The maiden of the moonbeams?" he said. "What can it mean?"
And then I asked him. He has already told of our conversation. It was the ring of which the Nervina had told me. It had to do with the Blind Spot—the great secret that had taken Dr. Holcomb. He would not give it to me. I worked hard, for even then I was not afraid of it. Something told me—I must do it to save him. It was weird, and something I could not understand—but I must do it for Harry.
I failed. Though he was broken in every visible way there was one thing as strong as ever—his honour. He was not afraid; he had been the same in his boyhood. When we parted that night he kissed me. I shall never forget how long he looked into my eyes, nor his sadness. That is all. The next morning he left for San Francisco.
And then came the end. A message; abrupt and sudden. It was some time after and put a period to my increasing stress and worry. It read:
CITY OF PERU DOCKS TONIGHT AT EIGHT. MEET ME AT THE PIER. HOBART COMING,—HARRY.
It was a short message and a bit twisted. In ordinary circumstances he would have motored down and brought me back to greet Hobart. It was a bit strange that I should meet him at the pier. However, I had barely time to get to the city if I hurried.
I shall never forget that night.
It was dark when I reached San Francisco. I was a full twenty minutes early at the pier. A few people were waiting. I looked about for Harry. He was to meet me and I was certain that I would find him. But he was not there. Of course there was still time. He was sure to be on hand to greet Hobart.
Nevertheless, I had a vague mistrust. Since that strange visit I had not been sure. Harry wasn't well. There was something to this mystery that he had not told me. Why had he asked me to meet him at the pier? Why didn't he come? When the boat docked and he was still missing I was doubly worried.
Hobart came down the gangplank. He was great, strong, healthy, and it seemed to me in a terrible hurry. He scanned the faces hurriedly and ran over to me.
"Where's Harry?" He kissed me and in the same breath repeated, "Where's Harry?"
"Oh, Hobart!" I exclaimed. "What's the matter with Harry? Tell me. It's something terrible!"
He was afraid. Plainly I could see that! There were lines of anxiety about his eyes. He clutched me by the arm and drew me away.
"He was to meet me here," I said. "He didn't come. He was to meet me here! Oh, Hobart, I saw him some time ago. He was—it was not Harry at all! Do you know anything about it?"
For a minute he stood still, looking at me. I had never seen Hobart frightened; but at that moment there was that in his eyes which I could not understand. He caught me by the arm and started out almost at a run. There were many people and we dodged in and out among them. Hobart carried a suitcase. He hailed a taxi.
I don't know how I got into the car. It was a blur. I was frightened. Some terrible thing had occurred, and Hobart knew it. I remember a few words spoken to the driver. "Speed, speed, no limit; never mind the law—and Chatterton Place!" After that the convulsive jerking over the cobbled streets, a climbing over hills and twisted corners. And Hobart at my side. "Faster—faster," he was saying; "faster! My lord, was there ever a car so slow! Harry! Harry!" I could hear him breathing a prayer. Another hill; the car turned and came suddenly to a stop! Hobart leaped out.
A sombre two-storey house; a light burning in one of the windows, a dim light, almost subdued and uncanny. I had never seen anything so lonely as that light; it was grey, uncertain, scarcely a flicker. Perhaps it was my nerves. I had scarcely strength to climb the steps. Hobart grasped the knob and thrust open the door; I can never forget it.
It is hard to write. The whole thing! The room; the walls lined with books; the dim, pale light, the faded green carpet, and the man. Pale, worn, almost a shadow of his former self. Was it Harry Wendel? He had aged forty years. He was stooped, withered, exhausted. A bottle of brandy on the desk before him. In his weak, thin hand an empty wineglass. The gem upon his finger glowed with a flame that was almost wicked; it was blue, burning, giving out sparkles of light—like a colour out of hell. The path of its light was unholy—it was too much alive.
We both sprang forward. Hobart seized him by the shoulders.
"Harry, old boy; Harry! Don't you know us? It's Hobart and Charlotte."
It was terrible. He didn't seem to know. He looked right at us. But he spoke in abstractions.
"Two," he said. And he listened. "Two! Don't you hear it?" He caught Hobart by the arm. "Now, listen. Two! No, it's three. Did I say three? Can't you hear? It's the old lady. She speaks out of the shadows. There! There! Now, listen. She has been counting to me. Always she says three! Soon it will be four."
What did he mean? What was it about? Who was the old lady? I looked round. I saw no one. Hobart stooped over. Harry began slowly to recognise us. It was as if his mind had wandered and was coming back from a far place. He spoke slowly; his words were incoherent and rambling.
"Hobart," he said; "you know her. She is the maiden out of the moonbeams. The Rhamda, he is our enemy. Hobart, Charlotte. I know so much. I cannot tell you. You are two hours late. It's a strange thing. I have found it and I think I know. It came suddenly. The discovery of the great professor. Why didn't you come two hours earlier? We might have conquered."
He dropped his head upon his arms; then as suddenly he looked up. He drew the ring from his finger.
"Give it to Charlotte," he said. "It won't hurt her. Don't touch it yourself. Had I only known. Watson didn't know—"
He straightened; he was tense, rigid, listening.
"Do you hear anything? Listen! Can you hear? It's the old lady. There—"
But there was not a sound; only the rumble of the streets, the ticking of the clock, and our heart-beats. Again he went through the counting.
"Hobart!"
"Yes, Harry."
"And Charlotte! The ring—ah, yet it was there, Keep it. Give it to no one. Two hours ago we might have conquered. But I had to keep the ring. It was too much, too powerful; a man may not wear it. Charlotte"—he took my hand and ran the ring upon my finger. "Poor Charlotte. Here is the ring. The most wonderful—"
Again he dropped over. He was weak—there was something going from him minute by minute.
"Water," he asked. "Hobart, some water."
It was too pitiful. Harry, our Harry—come to a strait like this! Hobart rushed to another room with the tumbler. I could hear him fumbling. I stooped over Harry. But he held up his hand.
"No, Charlotte, no. You must not. If—"
He stopped. Again the strange attention, as if he was listening to something far off in the distance; the pupils of his hollow, worn, lustreless eyes were pin-points. He stood on his feet rigid, quivering; then he held up his hand. "Listen!"
But there was nothing. It was just as before; merely the murmuring of the city night, and the clock ticking.
"It's the dog! D'you hear her? And the old lady. Now listen, 'Two! Now there are two! Three! Three! Now there are three!' There— now." He turned to me. "Can you hea
r it, Charlotte? No? How strange. Perhaps—" He pointed to the corner of the room. "That paper. Will you—"
I shall always go over that moment. I have thought over it many times and have wondered at the sequence. Had I not stepped across the library, what would have happened?
What was it.
I had stooped to pick up the piece of paper. There came a queer, cracking, snapping sound, almost audible, I have a strange recollection of Harry standing up by the side of the desk—a flitting vision. An intuition of some terrible force. It was out of nothing—nowhere—approaching. I turned about. And I saw it— the dot of blue.
Blue! That is what it was at first. Blue and burning, like the flame of a million jewels centred into a needlepoint. On the ceiling directly above Harry's head. It was scintillating, coruscating, opalescent; but it was blue most of all. It was the colour of life and of death; it was burning, throbbing, concentrated. I tried to scream. But I was frozen with horror. The dot changed colour and went to a dead-blue. It seemed to grow larger and to open. Then it turned to white and dropped like a string of incandescence, touching Harry on the head.
What was it? It was all so sudden. A door flung open and a swish of rushing silk. A woman! A beautiful girl! The Nervina! It was she!
Never have I seen anyone like her. She was so beautiful. In her face all the compassion a woman is heir to. For scarcely a second she stopped.
"Charlotte," she called. "Charlotte—oh, why didn't you save him! He loves you!" Then she turned to Harry. "It shall not be. He shall not go alone. I shall save him, even beyond—"
With that she rushed upon Harry. It was all done in an instant. Her arms were outstretched to the dimming form of Harry and the incandescence. The splendid impassioned girl. Their forms intermingled. A blur of her beautiful body and Harry's wan, weary face. A flash of light, a thread of incandescence, a quiver—and they were gone.
The next I knew was the strong arms of my brother Hobart. He gave me the water he had fetched for Harry. He was terribly upset, but very calm. He held the glass up to my lips. He was speaking.
"Don't worry. Don't worry. I know now. I think I know. I was just in time to see them go. I heard the bell. Harry is safe. It is the Nervina. I shall get Harry. We'll solve the Blind Spot."
XIX
HOBART FENTON TAKES UP THE TALE
Right here at the outset, I had better make a clean breast of something which the reader will very soon suspect, anyhow: I am a plain, unpoetic, blunt-speaking man, trained as a civil engineer, and in most respects totally dissimilar from the man who wrote the first account of the Blind Spot.
Harry had already touched upon this. He came of an artistic family. I think he must have taken up law in the hope that the old saying would prove true: "The only certain thing about law is its uncertainty." For he dearly loved the mysterious, the unknowable; he liked uncertainty for its excitement: and it is a mighty good thing that he was honest, for he would have made a highly dangerous crook.
Observe that I use the past tense in referring to my old friend. I do this in the interests of strict, scientific accuracy, to satisfy those who would contend that, having utterly vanished from sight and sound of man, Harry Wendel is no more.
But in my own heart is the firm conviction that he is still very much alive.
Within an hour of his astounding disappearance, my sister, Charlotte, and I made our way to an hotel; and despite the terrible nature of what had happened, we managed to get a few hours rest. The following morning Charlotte declared herself quite strong enough to discuss the situation. We lost no time.
It will be remembered that I had spent nearly the whole of the preceding year in South America, putting through an irrigation scheme. Thus, I knew little of what had occurred in that interval. On the other hand, Harry and I had never seen fit to take Charlotte into our confidence as, I now see, we should have done.
So we fairly pounced upon the manuscript which Harry had left behind. And by the time we had finished reading it, I for one, had reached one solid conclusion.
"I'm convinced," I said, "that the stranger—Rhamda Avec—is an out-and-out villain. Despite his agreeable ways, I think he was solely and deliberately to blame for Professor Holcomb's disappearance. Consequently, this Rhamda is, in himself, a very valuable clue as to Harry's present predicament."
Referring to Harry's notes, I pointed out the fact that, although Avec had often been seen on the streets of San Francisco, yet the police had never been able to lay hands on him. This seemed to indicate that the man might possess the power of actually making himself visible or invisible, at will.
"Only"—I was careful to add—"understand, I don't rank him as a magician, or sorcerer; nothing like that. I'd rather think that he's merely in possession of a scientific secret, no more wonderful in itself than, say, wireless. He's merely got hold of it in advance of the others; that's all."
"Then you think that the woman, too, is human?"
"The Nervina?" I hesitated. "Perhaps you know more of this part of the thing than I do."
"I only know"—slowly—"that she came and told me that Harry was soon to call. And somehow, I never felt jealous of her, Hobart." Then she added: "At the same time, I can understand that Harry might—might have fallen in love with her. She—she was very beautiful."
Charlotte is a brave girl. She kept her voice as steady as my own.
We next discussed the disappearance of Chick Watson. These details are already familiar to the reader of Harry's story; likewise what happened to Queen, his Australian shepherd. Like the other vanishings, it was followed by a single stroke on that prodigious, invisible bell—what Harry calls "The Bell of the Blind Spot." And he has already mentioned my opinion, that this phenomenon signifies the closing of the portal of the unknown—the end of the special conditions which produce the bluish spot on the ceiling, the incandescent streak of light, and the vanishing of whoever falls into the affected region. The mere fact that no trace of the bell ever was found has not shaken my opinion.
And thus we reached the final disappearance, that which took away Harry. Charlotte contrived to keep her voice as resolute as before, as she said:
"He and the Nervina vanished together. I turned round just as she rushed in, crying out, 'I can't let you go alone! I'll save you, even beyond.' That's all she said, before—it happened."
"You saw nothing of the Rhamda then?"
"No."
And we had neither seen nor heard of him since. Until we got in touch with him, one important clue as to Harry's fate was out of our reach. There remained to us just one thread of hope—the ring, which Charlotte was now wearing on her finger.
I lit a match and held it to the face of the gem. As happened many times before, the stone exhibited its most astounding quality. As soon as faintly heated, the surface at first clouded, then cleared in a curious fashion, revealing a startling distinct, miniature likeness of the four who had vanished into the Blind Spot.
I make no attempt to explain this. Somehow or other, that stone possesses a telescopic quality which brings to a focus, right in front of the beholder's eyes, a tiny "close-up" of our vanished friends. Also, the gem magnifies what it reveals, so that there is not the slightest doubt that Dr. Holcomb, Chick Watson, Queen and Harry Wendel are actually reproduced—I shall not say, contained— in that gem. Neither shall I say that they are reflected; they are simply reproduced there.
Also, it should be understood that their images are living. Only the heads and shoulders of the men are to be seen; but there is animation of the features, such as cannot be mistaken. Granted that these four vanished in the Blind Spot—whatever that is—and granted that this ring is some inexplicable window or vestibule between that locality and this commonplace world of ours, then, manifestly, it would seem that all four are still alive.
"I am sure of it!" declared Charlotte, managing to smile, wistfully, at the living reproduction of her sweetheart. "And I think Harry did perfectly right, in handing it to me to keep."
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"Why?"
"Well, if for no other reason than because it behaves so differently with me, than it did with him.
"Hobart, I am inclined to think that this fact is very significant. If Chick had only known of it, he wouldn't have insisted that Harry should wear it; and then—"
"Can't be helped," I interrupted quickly. "Chick didn't know; he was only certain that someone—SOMEONE—must wear the ring; that it mustn't pass out of the possession of humans. Moreover, much as Rhamda Avec may desire it—and the Nervina, too—neither can secure it through the use of force. Nobody knows why."
Charlotte shivered. "I'm afraid there's something spooky about it, after all."
"Nothing of the sort," with a conviction that has never left me. "This ring is a perfectly sound fact, as indisputable as the submarine. There's nothing supernatural about it; for that matter, I personally doubt if there's ANYTHING supernatural. Every phenomenon which seems, at first, so wonderful, becomes commonplace enough as soon as explained. Isn't it true that you yourself are already getting used to that ring?"
"Ye—es," reluctantly. "That is, partly. If only it were someone other than Harry!"
"Of course," I hurried to say, "I only wanted to make it clear that we haven't any witchcraft to deal with. This whole mystery will become plain as day, and that damned soon!"
"You've got a theory?"—hopefully.
"Several; that's the trouble!" I had to admit. "I don't know which is best to follow out.—It may be a spiritualistic thing after all. Or it may fall under the head of 'abnormal psychology'. Nothing but hallucinations, in other words."
"Oh, that won't do!"—evidently distressed. "I know what I saw! I'd doubt my reason if I thought I'd only fancied it!"
"So would I. Well, laying aside the spiritualistic theory, there remains the possibility of some hitherto undiscovered scientific secret. And if the Rhamda is in possession of it, then the matter simmers down to a plain case of villainy."