Instantly maddened thoughts began to flock and flutter wildly inside her brain.
'Who was it? Was it Hubert Poke? Would history be repeated? Was she doomed also to be strangled inside the alcove? Had Fate led her there?'
She waited, but nothing happened. Again she had the sensation of being played with by a master mind—dangled at the end of his invisible string.
Presently she was emboldened to steal from the alcove, to seek another shelter. But though she held on to the last flicker of her will, she had reached the limit of endurance. Worn out with the violence of her emotions and physically spent from the strain of long periods of standing, she staggered as she walked.
She blundered round the Gallery, without any sense of direction, colliding blindly with the groups of waxwork figures. When she reached the window her knees shook under her and she sank to the ground—dropping immediately into a sleep of utter exhaustion.
She awoke with a start as the first grey gleam of dawn was stealing into the Gallery. It fell on the row of waxworks, imparting a sickly hue to their features, as though they were creatures stricken with plague.
It seemed to Sonia that they were waiting for her to wake. Their peaked faces were intelligent and their eyes held interest, as though they were keeping some secret.
She pushed back her hair, her brain still thick with clouded memories. Disconnected thoughts began to stir, to slide about. . . Then suddenly her mind cleared, and she sprang up—staring at a figure wearing a familiar black cape.
Hubert Poke was also waiting for her to wake.
He sat in the same chair, and in the same posture, as when she had first seen him, in the flash of lightning. He looked as though he had never moved from his place—as though he could not move. His face had not the appearance of flesh.
As Sonia stared at him, with the feeling of a bird hypnotised by a snake, a doubt began to gather in her mind. Growing bolder, she crept closer to the figure.
It was a waxwork—a libellous representation of the actor—Kean.
Her laugh rang joyously through the Gallery as she realized that she had passed a night of baseless terrors, cheated by the power of imagination. In her relief she turned impulsively to the waxworks.
'My congratulations,' she said. 'You are my masters.'
They did not seem entirely satisfied by her homage, for they continued to watch her with an expression half-benevolent and half-sinister.
'Wait!' they seemed to say.
Sonia turned from them and opened her bag to get out her mirror and comb. There, among a jumble of notes, letters, lipsticks and powder-compresses, she saw the electric torch.
'Of course!' she cried. 'I remember now, I put it there. I was too windy to think properly. . .Well, I have my story. I'd better get my coat.'
The Gallery seemed smaller in the returning light. As she approached Charles Stuart, who looked like an umpire in her white coat, she glanced down the far end of the room, where she had groped in its shadows before the pursuit of imaginary footsteps.
A waxwork was lying prone on the floor. For the second time she stood and gazed down upon a familiar black cape—a broad—brimmed conspirator's hat. Then she nerved herself to turn the Figure so that its face was visible.
She gave a scream. There was no mistaking the glazed eyes and ghastly grin. She was looking down on the face of a dead man.
It was Hubert Poke.
The shock was too much for Sonia. She heard a singing in her ears, while a black mist gathered before her eyes. For the First time in her life she fainted.
When she recovered consciousness she forced herself to kneel beside the body and cover it with its black cape. The pallid face resembled a death-mask, which revealed only too plainly the lines of egotism and cruelty in which it had been moulded by a gross spirit.
Yet Sonia felt no repulsion—only pity. It was Christmas morning, and he was dead, while her own portion was life triumphant. Closing her eyes, she whispered a prayer of supplication for his warped soul.
Presently, as she grew calmer, her mind began to work on the problem of his presence. His motive seemed obvious. Not knowing that she had changed her plan, he had concealed himself in the Gallery, in order to poach her story.
'He was in the Hall of Horrors at First,' she thought, remembering the opened door. 'When he came out he hid at this end. We never saw each other, because of the waxworks between us; but we heard each other.'
She realized that the sounds which had terrified her had not all been due to imagination, while it was her agency which had converted the room into a whispering gallery of strange murmurs and voices. The clue to the cause of death was revealed by his wrist-watch, which had smashed when he fell. Its hands had stopped at three minutes to three, proving that the flash and explosion of the thunderbolt had been too much for his diseased heart—already overstrained by superstitious fears.
Sonia shuddered at a mental vision of his face, distraught with terror and pulped by raw primal impulses, after a night spent in a madman's world of phantasy.
She turned to look at the waxworks. At last she understood what they seemed to say.
'But for Us, you should have met—at dawn.'
'Your share shall be acknowledged, I promise you,' she said, as she opened her notebook.
Eight o'clock. The Christmas bells are ringing and it is wonderful just to be alive. I'm through the night, and none the worse for the experience, although I cracked badly after three o'clock. A colleague who, unknown to me, was also concealed in the Gallery has met with a tragic fate, caused, I am sure, by the force of suggestion. Although his death is due to heart-failure, the superstitious will certainly claim it is another victory for the Waxworks.
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8 - Serenade to a Killer by JOSEPH COMMINGS
JOSEPH COMMINGS (b. 1913) is the forgotten man of detective fiction. Thirty-odd years ago he toiled mightily in the field, tapping out story after story about one of the most colourful characters in the genre—that grizzled old Washington bison in the dusty frock-coat and saggy, baggy britches held up by bourbon-bottle-width scarlet suspenders, US Senator Brooks U. Banner, whose awesome girth gave birth to the Foggy Bottom canard that his shirts must all have been run up by Omar the Tentmaker.
Banner is a wonderfully rambunctious creation, who rumbles cracker-barrel frontiersman philosophy round the disgusting Pittsburgh stogies he continually chaws, usually unlit, clears his throat with a tremendous 'Haak-haak.' (sometimes in the direction of an adjacent spittoon, sometimes not), galumphs his rain-tub-sized figure around with all the grace of a bull elephant on the rampage, and dispenses his own unique brand of lumberingly coy gallantry to gals pretty, not so pretty, and downright back-end-of-a-bus.
He also solves baffling Impossible Crimes—for the very simple reason that it was the sub-genre that Commings, heavily influenced by John Dickson Carr (although Banner himself is not at all a cardboard copy of Dr Fell or Sir Henry Merrivale), delighted in and was, moreover, extremely ingenious at.
Commings, as a boy, attended first grade at High School but thereafter educated himself. He jobbed around variously before the War, wrote bits and pieces for the newspapers, began writing detective fiction in a pup-tent in Sardinia within the sound of battle and for the amusement of his comrades. After the War he began to crack the pulp market, his first published story, 'Murder Under Glass', appearing in 10-Story Detective in 1947. That featured Banner, as did most of his published output (and unpublished—there's a Banner novel in typescript still floating around somewhere). He wrote for 10-Story, Ten Detective Aces, Hollywood Detective; he even wrote Impossible Crimes with a blazing-six guns background for Western Trails.
But the majority of Joe Commings's stories were written for one of the most bizarre magazines of the 1950s, Mystery Digest, run by the decidedly eccentric Rolfe Passer (whose good right arm, at one stage, was a young tyro, just out of the USAF, called Donald E. Westlake). Passer never quite seemed able to make up his m
ind whether Mystery Digest should run mystery stories, or sex stories, or pieces about UFOs, 'mind-power', and the activities of the more lunatic-fringe cultists. The Contents page was invariably a strange stew of oddball items, written by people whose names positively scream 'pseudonym' at you (even Commings became 'Monte Craven' for a while). Passer didn't mind wasting space, either: whole pages of Mystery Digest would be devoted to single gnomic utterances such as 'The best doctor is the one you run for and can't find.'
When, with the inevitability of the sun going down, Mystery Digest folded, Joe took to knocking out paperback smut with titles like All The Men She Had, Sailors' Nympho, Man-Eater, and Lesbian Heaven. Well, some writers have done worse, and at least it kept the wolf from the door. Eighteen years ago Joe Commings was felled by a massive stroke, and hasn't written since. It's certainly time someone collected the Banner stories into volume form.
Some of them are masterpieces of the plotter's craft. Time and again Joe would come up with an outrageous (no other word for it) plot-premise—and then proceed, deftly and gleefully, to show you how the Impossible gimmick was actually as easy as winking. Surely his best was 'The X-Street Murders', in which the victim is shot in a closed room and the still-smoking gun is produced only seconds later, from a sealed envelope next-door.
Unfortunately, 'The X-Street Murders' didn't take place at Christmas time. But this one does. . .
MURDER and Christmas are usually poles apart. But this Yuletide Senator Brooks U. Banner had the crazy killing at Falconridge dumped into his over-sized elastic stocking.
At the Cobleskill Orphanage, he stood among the re-painted toys like a clean-shaven Kris Kringle. He was telling the kids how he'd begun his career as a parentless tyke—just as they—with a loaf of Bohemian rye under one arm and six bits in his patched jeans. He followed that revelation with a fruity true crime story about a lonely hearts blonde who killed six mail-order husbands and how he'd helped the police to catch her. The two old maids who ran the orphanage paused to listen and were scandalized, but the kids loved him. He was six feet three inches tall and weighed 280 pounds, and he looked so quaint in his greasy black string tie, dusty frock-coat, baggy grey britches, and the huge storm rubbers with the red ridged soles.
Presenting the toys, he made little comic speeches and ruffled up the kids' hair. While this was going on a young man came in and stood in the bare, draughty dining hall with its shrivelled brown holly wreaths. He was sallow-skinned and slight, with a faint moustache and large lustrous eyes.
He waited impatiently until Banner was done, then he approached.
'Senator, my name is Verl Griffon. I'm a reporter for my father who owns the local paper, The Griffon.'
Banner beamed. 'And you wanna interview me!' He stabbed a fresh corona cigar in his mouth. 'Yass, yass! Wal, my lad, if you'd come in a li'l earlier, you'd've heard me telling the young-timers that—'
'No, this isn't merely an interview, Senator.' Verl's luminous eyes zigzagged nervously. 'Where can I see you privately?'
Frowning, Banner led the way into a gloomy office that had a cold radiator and a two-dimensional red-cardboard Christmas bell on the window. They looked dubiously at the rickety ladder-backed chairs and remained standing.
Verl chewed his knuckles. 'Senator, I've read a lot about the way you handle things. Things like murders. And I was at the trial of Jack Horner in New York.'
Banner grunted from his top pants-button. 'Izzat so? Then you saw how I made that poisoner holler uncle.'
'Indeed I did. Now I need your help. You've heard of Caspar Woolfolk, the famous pianist, haven't you?'
Banner grinned. 'Lad, when it comes to music, I lissen to a jook-box every Saturday night.'
Verl plunged on regardless. 'Early this morning Woolfolk was murdered!'
'No!'
'And a woman I know very well says she killed him—but the facts are all against it!' His eyes, peering into the middle distance, were stunned with bewilderment.
Banner shifted ponderously. 'Tell it to me from A to Izzard. Pin the donkey on the tail.'
Verl talked rapidly, gravely. 'Woolfolk owned Falconridge, a manor outside town. On the grounds is a little octagonal house he called the Music Box. He kept his piano and music library there. This morning I found him in there dead. He was killed and no one knows how the murderer could have done it. . .You see, I went to the manor after breakfast to wish everybody a happy holiday. Ora met me at the door. She had the jitters.'
'Who's Ora?'
'Ora Spires. That's the woman I referred to. She's governess to little Beryl, Woolfolk's ten-year-old daughter. Woolfolk was a widower. Ora, as I said, greeted me with a look of panic. All she could tell me was that something terrible must have happened to Woolfolk inside the Music Box. She hadn't dared go look for herself . . . It snowed during the night. There's over an inch of it on the ground. The snow on the lawns hadn't been disturbed, save where Woolfolk had walked out in it toward the Music Box. I could see by the single line of clear-cut footprints that Woolfolk hadn't come back. I walked alongside his tracks. The door opened to my touch. This morning was so gloomy that I switched on the light. Woolfolk was at the grand piano, sitting on the bench, the upper part of his body lying across the music. He was stone cold dead—shot through the centre of the forehead.'
Cold as the room was, Banner could see a sheen of sweat on Verl's puckered forehead.
'Remembering that I'd seen only Woolfolk's tracks,' continued Verl, 'the First thought that struck me was: If he's been murdered, the murderer is still here! I searched the place. There was no one else there. Even the weapon that'd killed Woolfolk was missing—proving beyond a doubt that it wasn't suicide. How can a thing like that be. It stopped snowing around midnight. Wool-folk walked out there after that time. Then somebody killed him. And whoever it was got away without leaving a trace anywhere in the snow!'
'How far from the main house is the Music Box?'
'A good hundred yards.'
'A sharpshooter might've plugged Woolfolk through an open window while standing a hundred yards or more away.'
'No,' said Verl. 'The doors and windows were closed. Woolfolk was shot at close range. The murderer stood on the other side of the piano.'
Ruminating, Banner finally said: 'Wal, sir. You can take your pick of three possible answers.'
'Three! said Verl with a bounce of surprise.
Banner held up a thick blunt thumb. 'One. The murderer went out there before it'd stopped snowing. The snow that fell after he walked through it covered up his tracks. When Woolfolk came later, he killed Woolfolk and managed to conceal himself so cleverly in the Music Box that you failed to see him.'
Verl looked annoyed—and disappointed. 'That's out of the question. No one was there, I tell you.'
Banner, undismayed, stuck up his forefinger. 'Two. Both the murderer and Woolfolk went out there before it'd stopped snowing. Both their tracks were covered up by the falling snow. After killing Woolfolk, the murderer put on Woolfolk's shoes and walked backwards toward the main house.'
Verl shook his head sourly. 'Woolfolk was wearing his own shoes when I found him. The police, who came later, went over all that. There's absolutely no trickery about the footprints. They were made by a man walking forward. Made by Woolfolk. That's certain!'
Banner lifted his middle finger. He stared at it thoughtfully and with hesitation. 'Three. Again, the murderer got out there before Woolfolk did—'
He paused so long that Verl said: 'And how did he get back?'
'He knows a way of crossing a hundred yards of snow without leaving a mark on it!'
Verl's mouth dropped open. He snapped it shut again. 'Ora Spires,' he said, jittery, 'has part of an answer. She thinks she killed Woolfolk. She keeps saying that.' He paused. 'But she doesn't know how she got out there and back.'
Quizzically Banner raised his black furry eyebrows. 'Right now,' he said, reaching for the doorknob, 'I'm so fulla curiosity that Ora has more lure for me than a sarong g
al.'
Verl took a step toward the held-open door and then he said: 'Something else, Senator. She walks in her sleep.'
The great Spanish shawl that covered the whole top of the grand piano in the Music Box was clotted with blood. Woolfolk's body had been removed. Banner walked behind the piano bench. On the piano-rack was the sheet music for Bellini's La Somnambula.
'Was this electric lamp tipped over when you found him?' asked Banner.
Verl nodded.
Ten paces beyond the piano stood a grandfather's clock. The wall shelves were stuffed with music albums.
Verl said: 'Doesn't that music on the piano strike you as being particularly significant, Senator? La Somnambula. The Sleep Walker!'
'Uh-huh.' Banner bobbed his grizzled mop of hair.
Verl rattled on as if he couldn't restrain himself. 'Woolfolk was a funny one. Peculiar. His talk wasn't all music. He was full of weird theories about the power of suggestion, mind over matter, that sort of thing. He sometimes mentioned a lot of grotesque characters and objects, like: Abbé Faria, Carl Saxtus's zinc button, Baron du Potet's magic mirror, and Father Hell's magnet. He thought all that esoteric knowledge would help him to rule women. But I don't think it helped very much. Women,' he added regretfully, 'know intuitively how to get the best of men.'
Banner didn't answer. He lumbered to both windows. He opened each. Thirty feet to the east of the small house stood a pole with insulated cross-arms. Nowhere was the snow on the ground disturbed. There was no snow on either of the window-sills. The over-hanging eaves had sheltered them. He looked up at the eaves.
Verl said in a tired voice: 'The snow on the roof hasn't been disturbed either.
Banner closed the windows and they both trudged across the white lawn to the manor house.
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