with my own hands, policeman. Today, even today, the thought was in my mind, and I could not so much as lift a finger against her. But you"
Ethredge, for the first time, spoke.
"I understand more about this than you know, Gallicchio,” he said slowly. "Tell us—all that you know about Marilyn Des Lys. We will not laugh at you, Gallicchio, I promise you. And then—we will decide—what to do."
11. The Cult of the Dead Who Live
"We must kill her, Commissioner!"
Ethredge and Peters sat, alone, in Peters' small office. Gallicchio, heartsick, babbling incoherently to himself, had gone, stumbling blindly, from the room. Pitying him, Peters had let him go. . . .
Slowly, then, Ethredge nodded.
"Yes, Peters," he agreed heavily. "She is too frightful a thing to let live. But if there were any other way"
Peters turned his hands over, palms upward, and looked at them thoughtfully. Slowly his fingers flexed until his hands were upturned fists, blue-knuckled, unrelenting.
"There is no other way, Commissioner." Peters' mouth was grim. "I have watched this case from the start, and I knew, days ago, that those men who staggered from the Northrup Hotel to collapse in the streets, emaciated of body and ravaged of mind, were no dope addicts. Even then I knew that there were only two solutions—either those men had been exposed to some infection utterly unknown to medical science, or alien, occult forces were at work.
"Any germ theory I might form proved untenable. Those men ran no temperatures; their corpuscular count was normal; it was as though from every cell in their bodies had been drawn some rare life-principle which cannot be isolated or studied under the microscope, yet whose absence left them drained and depleted as empty bags.
"I knew, of course, that Marilyn Des Lys had died in that room, so recently. And I knew, too, that she had been at the head of a small, exceedingly earnest spiritualist cult, a strange, fanatic cult which claimed to be able to do more than lend the ectoplasm of its sitters to those spirits determined enough to struggle back from the shadows to the vicinity of sympathetic mediums; this cult believed that the dead could, with the proper assistance from the living, come back and resume life!
"Ectoplasm—the word fascinated me. I knew that in ectoplasm lay the key to the mystery. Ectoplasm—that mysterious substance which mediums claim exudes, during séances, from their bodies and from the bodies of their sitters; ectoplasm—that strange vital stuff with which it is said spirits ring bells, sway draperies, touch faces, write notes, appear in their own likeness!"
Ethredge was staring, haggardly, at his subordinate.
"Perhaps, if we destroy Marilyn Des Lys, we will be making a supreme mistake!"
Somberly, Peters shook his head.
"Marilyn Des Lys is not a Messiah, Commissioner. She is but a will which abhorred death, a will so strong that, with sympathetic assistance, it has conquered death! And yet, God did not intend that the dead return! Had that been His will, the dead would have returned long ago.
"It is not God's will that the dead take life from the living! It is not God's will that a dozen strong men sink into the shadows of madness that one wanton may return.
"What would happen if Marilyn Des
