by Philip Wylie
“Where you going, buddy?”
“Newark.”
“Good. How long will it take?”
“Less ’n an hour.”
“Fine.”
Baxter was waving airily at a man behind the moving car. The man had emerged from the roadside and was watching the departure. The driver of the truck grinned.
“Walking home?”
“Yes. We were on a party. Had a row. They kicked us out.”
The youth glanced appreciatively at the blonde girl. “Must of been some row.”
“Yes. It was.”
“Tough. I’ll step on it. You’ll want to get back.”
“Thanks, buddy.”
He let them out at the corner of Broad Street and Bloomfield Avenue. People stared at them curiously. A taxi-cab cruised past the spot and Baxter hailed it.
“New York,” Baxter said.
The driver looked twice to make sure that his fare could pay. “What address?”
“Clariena Hotel. Fifth Avenue and Forty-fifth.”
“Right.”
Baxter shut the window. Daryl leaned into the hollow of his arm.
“That terrible man!”
“He was faintly unpleasant.”
“I could have screamed. I wanted to scream. I’ve been wanting to scream for hours.”
“Go ahead.”
“It would scare the driver. Besides, I think I’ll just lie here. I’m tired.”
He looked down at her. “Tired? Darling, you’re damn near dead.”
“I know it.”
They rode in silence. He thought that she was sleeping when she next spoke to him.
“You know, these are all the clothes I have in the world.”
“I thought of that. We’ll fix it this afternoon.”
“And all the money I have—two month’s salary is in the savings bank in Sinkak. I won’t dare go there for it.”
“No. It wouldn’t be advisable.”
“What am I going to do?”
He chuckled. “Are you worried?”
“No. I’m shameless.”
“All right. That’s fine. Go to sleep.”
A short interval of time. The taxi speeded out on the Jersey marshes.
“Do you believe what they said?”
“What who said?”
“That man—about the skeleton?”
Baxter’s mouth tightened. “Yes. Exactly.”
“It must have been awful.”
“Don’t think about it.”
“I can’t help it. What was the reason?”
“Why—the stuff he took must have acted on his flesh first. I think that is what he was laughing at when I heard him in the laboratory.”
“Laughing?”
“It wasn’t the funny kind of laughter.”
“Oh.”
“And—remember what we were told?—two or three people saw him in the bony state. That started a riot. In a town like Sinkak—it would. In New York, some one would see a thing like that and call up the museum of Natural History to send a man for it.”
She laughed gently. “You like New York, don’t you?”
“Love it.”
“Me too. Well, go on.”
“There isn’t any more.”
“Yes, there is.” She turned her eyes up to his. “Just keep that giant brain functioning long enough to remove the clouds from our Daryl’s stupid mind. What did they mean about the rest of the story?”
“It’s not very nice.”
“Thinking about it without understanding is worse.”
He pursed his lips with a benevolent amusement. “Well—they caught him. Remember? Dumb idiots. See how dumb they are! This morning they even imagine they caught rashes from touching him.”
“Maybe they did.”
“Nonsense. Otherwise—what I would have caught from the aquarium——”
Daryl stiffened. “I’d forgotten about that. Gee! That’s mean.”
“I’d forgotten about it, too. Doesn’t hurt—so it must be better.” He pushed up his sleeve and lifted the edge of the bandage on his arm. The abrasions were healing. There was no redness or no great soreness in them. “See.”
She sighed. “So many things came all at once——”
“Exactly. Although while I was standing in that jail I thought nothing would ever happen.”
“That must have been terrible.”
Baxter laughed. “You speak as if you hadn’t had a similar experience.”
“Me? I didn’t. I had a light and I was digging and I was mad through and through all the time.”
His laughter was renewed. “Funny girl.”
“Go on.”
“About Carpenter?”
“Certainly.”
“Well—I presume he was in a jam like that of the hero tied to the railroad tracks. Rescued in the nick of time. For hours the stuff stopped working. He was left stranded at a very inconvenient point.”
“Inconvenient!”
“Let’s not go into too much detail. Just as they were ready to chuck him on the fire—his medicine—heaven forbid it ever becomes a patent medicine—hit him, you might say, like a shot of hooch. He probably saw it beginning to work. And he used his knowledge, evidently, to perform a miracle. The Sinkakians weren’t in any too calm a frame of mind by then and when he stood—there wasn’t much nervous strength left in the crowd. They let him walk away. Getting sleazier all the time, getting farther from the light, too.
“We may imagine that Carpenter reached a point where the unreliable light and his growing unseeableness combined to put him beyond reach of the human eye.”
“And then?”
“Then? Well, Carpenter is a placid beggar. He might have run a few steps until the process was completed. After that he might have returned to the circle and stood around the useless fire listening to what the burghers had to say about him. In which case, within arm’s reach of any of them he could have walked out of the gate. On the other hand—if it had been me, for example—the natural thing would be to beat it like the devil which he was alleged to have resembled. Not my idea of His Satanic Majesty, by the way. One would lie down in a calm spot until the nerves were quieter and the brain soothed.”
“And after that?” she persisted.
“After that—we have only an explosion to guess from.”
“And we guess——?”
“That the worthy avuncular relative ambled tranquilly down the road, being quite beyond sight although possibly giving a few dogs a moment of puzzlement, and so passed to his own domain which he blew skyward.”
“Why?”
“Why? So that no one, by any possible fluke, could investigate his lares and penates. In other words, he destroyed every tangible evidence of the William Carpenter known to Sinkak. Perhaps. On the other hand, he might have decided that his great scheme was not so happy, and sent himself along with the blast.”
Daryl nodded. “I almost wish he had.”
“Almost wish he had? That’s generosity. Myself—I pray he did.”
The taxi rushed over a bridge and circled into the maze of covered roadway that leads to the Holland Tunnel. It flashed over the light-checkered pavement. Daryl’s head fell forward and she slept. Baxter stared with unseeing eyes at the concrete walls and he did not notice when they plunged into the artificial illumination of the tunnel itself.
Sometime later he roused her and she was surprised to find that they were parked at the curb on Forty-fifth Street in New York. She remembered afterward the jumble of small performances—signing the ledger in the hotel, riding rapidly to a small suite, bathing her weary body, drawing the dark shades over the window, falling asleep. Baxter had left her in the lobby, saying something about meeting her for dinner.
A fire engine dashed to the Mortland place immediately after the explosion. It was followed by several carloads of armed men. The scene that met their arrival was startling. What had been a house was a shambles. The very foundation stones had
been hurled into the meadow that surrounded the building. In their place was a huge crater blazing madly. The fire was hotter and stronger than could be produced by an ordinary house. An occasional bottle of chemicals which had escaped the original blast would flare for an instant in the greater flame or burst with a muffled thud.
The men turned hoses on the blaze—hoses they knew were entirely ineffectual.
Martin made the sanest explanation for the fire. “Bet he came back and did this.”
“Burns like hell itself anyway,” some one said.
There was no wind. An acute observer might have noticed that the bushes at the edge of the field moved occasionally—as if some one stood there shifting his position from time to time the better to watch the spectacle. Any one who saw that slight motion in the greenery, however, would certainly have attributed it to a breeze, no matter how calm the day.
On the North Shore of Long Island Sound, not far from a small town, a railroad, and a dock, in the center of an estate which had been deserted for years by its heirs, stood a tatterdemalion house with boarded windows and a barred door. Any one who trespassed on the uninviting property surrounding it, and any trespasser who was so bold as to fasten his eye to the cracks in the weather-beaten window covers would have seen in the gloom that the floors down stairs were bare of carpets and that the faded paper was peeling from the walls.
Such a trespasser would have stood looking at the yellow clapboard walls and the numerous white-trimmed gables, at the seedy lawn and ragged shrubbery with a feeling of discomfort and would have hastened back to the traffic-laden highway. Even the telephone wire which had once hung between the pole and the house had fallen to the earth and its end lay on the rotting cellar doors. Wasps built nests under the eaves of the house and bees circled over the ancient lawn.
Its agents had rented it six months previously to a person who appeared only by proxy. The rent had been paid, but no effort had been made to occupy Chrome Gables—or even to repair it.
It had certain points in common with a place a hundred miles distant which had once been the residence of a family named Mortland. Those points were seclusion, quiet, surrounding fields, accessibility of a sort.
On George Street, at Number 95, in the heart of Manhattan, stood a second long deserted residence. Its brick façade was also boarded up. Its small rear garden had been reclaimed by the lush and unhealthy weeds which sprout and flourish in cities. The subway roared under the earth a block from Number 95. The elevated thundered overhead at a distance of two blocks. It was within easy walking distance of the motion picture house at Sheridan Square, of the Washington Square Arch and Park, of the green buses that crawl like huge snails along Fifth Avenue.
The oldest inhabitants of the locale reported that in 1905 a young woman had been conducted to the house by her new husband. Some terrible misunderstanding had occurred. The day after he had gaily carried her across the threshold, she had been seen leaving by the front door—and never again had mortal eyes fallen upon her to identify her by the lofty name she possessed. The heart-broken husband had loitered pallidly in the brick house, hoping for her return. A winter passed, a second spring—and then he was seen to leave his domicile. His servant carried his trunk from the house. They drove West toward the water front, the hoofs of fleet horses playing a farewell tattoo all the way. He had embarked that very day for distant lands and the city had never heard of him again.
A duly authorized agent had boarded up the house. For years it had been on the market. Finally it was bought by some one for some one else. Six months had passed; the transaction was forgotten—and no sign of ownership other than the removal of the “For Sale” placard had marked the change of hands.
It was long after midnight. A single man walked along George Street and as he walked he staggered slightly. The man was young. He wore no hat. His hair was long. His head was turned toward the earth.
When he came opposite to Number 95 he sat down abruptly on the steps of a brownstone house. He put his head in his hands. He thought for a little while about the painting on which he had been working for many days. Then he thought about the party from which he was returning. It had been the last drink which had caused this uncertainty. One should never mingle Scotch whiskey and absinthe—not even in Bohemia, not even in Greenwich Village.
A shrill sound attracted his attention. He looked up. The front door of the house across the street had opened creakily. He focussed his eyes and waited for some one to come out. No one did. The door closed of its own accord. The lock clicked.
“I must be very drunk,” he muttered.
The thought disturbed him. Certainly doors did not open of their own accord. As a matter of fact, the house was closed up for the summer. Mystery somewhere. He rose unsteadily and staggered across the street. He tried the handle of the door. Locked. Odd. He went carefully down the steps and reeled off in the night.
William Carpenter, who had been watching him through the window, grunted with relief and walked up the dark stairs. The house was four stories high. Its roof was level with the other roofs on the street, and separated from the nearest one by a narrow canyon through which an alley ran to the back garden. One could also go from the back door through the dilapidated garden, over a fence, around a garage and into the street above.
Carpenter walked to the top story, his steps guided by the rail, and unlocked the hall door of a front room. Once inside, he lighted a kerosene lamp. Its glow revealed a fairly large room. Black material covered the windows. On the floor was a thick carpet. A comfortable bed stood near one wall, a dressing table with a huge oval mirror against the opposite wall. A huge chest of drawers and a closet, both locked, were the other chief pieces of furniture.
Any one else in the room would have seen the door open—and nothing more—unless that person had noticed the faint depressions in the nap of the carpet where Carpenter’s feet were placed.
Carpenter unlocked the chest of drawers and took out a steel box of cosmetics. He sat down before the dressing table. It was the provision of those cosmetics which had caused him to powder his face at the height of a previous dilemma. A cream was spread on the empty air and it remained spread there. Then a white powder. A face, a neck, ears took form. They remained suspended moving to meet the daubs of powder that sailed up from the box. After the powder, rouge was applied to the bodiless, eyeless face. Finally the colored pencils floated through the air, touched the face, replaced themselves.
Then the face regarded itself attentively in the mirror. The lips smiled. Except for the eyes, it was a human face. It was wafted again to the drawers of the closet where hands—represented by fugitive daubs of color that had been laid upon the fingers from the process of make-up—selected hair and made a beard and moustache.
The moustache covered the mouth, nevertheless a precaution was taken to insure the blank interior of that cavern against the peril of a casual yawn: the front teeth were whitened. Glasses were donned and afterward a pair of dark tinted goggles, and a wig. The effect was that of a hairy, rather ruddy, somewhat venerable head which belonged to a gentleman of feeble eyesight. A head that lacked a body and moved independently through space.
Carpenter now dressed himself and in doing so he became a person once more. He donned gloves, took a cane from his armoire, put on a hat. Afterward he surveyed himself and was satisfied. No one would doubt his authenticity either in the glare of artificial light or the gloom of the streets.
Again he walked down the dark staircases. This time, however, he let himself out the back door, rounded the house through the side alley, peered through the gate that blocked it, and presently went into the street. It was very late. He walked along slowly.
At Seventh Avenue he was passed by a group of late home-comers who watched him with curious eyes—his height and his goggles would have attracted attention at any place and at any hour—but their curiosity was complicated with no other emotion. That was the first test.
He performed the second
in an all-night coffee spot whither he made his way. One clerk was behind the counter. There were two customers—a young man with a pale face and a panhandler who was taking a recess from his business during the slack hours of early morning and who hunched his rags around his soup.
Carpenter entered, hung his cane on a coat hook, sat at a table and peered near-sightedly at the greasy menu. Presently the clerk came to his side and he ordered. He listened to a desultory conversation about prize fighting until his meal was served. He devoured it ravenously.
The panhandler went out. “Night, grandpop,” he said.
Carpenter nodded. “Night.”
Then the young man. “Egan’ll win. Bet on him.”
Carpenter glanced up at the pale face. It jerked in his direction. The man behind the counter changed the bags of coffee in the silver boilers. Carpenter rose, finally, and paid his check.
“Nice evening.”
The impenetrable goggles looked at the waiter-cook. “Yes, indeed.”
“Come again.”
“I shall. Often.”
The tall figure moved along George Street and at a moment when it was unpopulated, he turned in at Number 95. This was all according to his plan. Everything had been successful. He could eat, he could move to and from his domicile without giving it the appearance of occupancy. He had a base from which to carry on the matters that were destined for his attention.
When Daryl woke, the high sun of the third successive bright May morning was dotting the wall and the floor wherever its long fingers were able to reach through the drawn blinds. She remembered where she was with a quick, startled effort. Hastily she rose and lifted one of the shades. She looked down from the high window of the hotel to the figures of ant-like people and miniature automobiles that crawled along the street.
Baxter had promised to take her to dinner, but he had either been unable to call for her or had allowed her to sleep through the afternoon and night. She called the desk on the telephone and asked if there were any messages for her.
“Yes, madam,” the clerk said.
“Send them up. And I’d like to order breakfast.” She was duly connected with the room service.