The Abandoned Room/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
A STRANGE LIGHT APPEARS AT THE DESERTED HOUSE
Graham's intention, logical as it was, impressed Bobby as quite futile. Silas Blackburn had died in this ancient, melancholy room behind locked doors. This afternoon, with a repetition of the sounds that had probably accompanied his death, they had been drawn to find that, behind locked doors again, the position of the body had changed incredibly, as if to expose to them the tiny fatal wound at the base of the brain. Now for the third time those stealthy movements had aroused Katherine, and they had found, once more behind locked doors, the determined and malicious detective, murdered precisely as old Blackburn had been.
Of course Graham was logical. By every rational argument the murderer must still be in the room. Yet Bobby foresaw that, as always, no one would be found, that nothing would be unearthed to explain the succession of tragic mysteries. While Graham commenced his search, indeed, he continued to stare at the little round hole in Howells's head, at the fresh, irregular stain on the pillow, and he became absorbed in his own predicament. Again and again he asked himself if he could be responsible for these murders which had been committed with an inhuman ingenuity. He knew only that he had wandered, unconscious, in the vicinity of the Cedars last night; that he had been asleep when his grandfather's body had altered its position; that he had gone to sleep a little while ago too profoundly, brooding over Howells's challenge to the murderer to invade the room of death and kill him if he could. Howells had been confident that he could handle a man and so solve the riddle of how the room had been entered. Certainly Howells's challenge had been accepted, and Bobby knew that he had fallen into that deep sleep hating the detective, telling himself that the man's death might save him from arrest, from conviction, from an intolerable walk to a little room with a single chair.
"Recurrent aphasia." The doctor's expression came back to him. In such a state a man could overcome locked doors, could accomplish apparent miracles and retain no recollection. And Bobby had hated and feared Howells more than he had his grandfather.
Dully he saw Katherine go out at Graham's direction. As one in a dream he moved toward the door they had had to break down on entering.
"Stand close to it," Graham said. "We'll cover everything."
"You'll find no one," Bobby answered with a perfect assurance.
He saw Graham take the candle and explore the large closets. He watched him examine the spaces behind the window curtains. He could smile a little as Graham stooped, peering beneath the bed, as he moved each piece of furniture large enough to secrete a man.
"You see, Hartley, it's no use."
Graham's lack of success, however, stimulated his anger.
"Then," he said, "there must be some hiding place in the walls. Such devices are common in houses as old as this."
Bobby indicated the silent form of the detective.
"He believed I killed my grandfather. The only reason he didn't arrest me was his failure to find out how the room had been entered and left. Don't you suppose he looked for a hiding place or a secret entrance the first thing? It's obvious."
But Graham's savage determination increased. He sounded each panel. None gave the slightest revealing response. He got a tape from Katherine and measured the dimensions of the room, the private hall, and the corridor. At last he turned to Bobby, his anger dead, his face white and tired.
"Everything checks," he admitted. "There's no secret room, no way in or out. Logically Groom's right. We're fighting the dead who resent the intrusion of your grandfather and Howells."
He laughed mirthlessly.
"After all, we can't surrender to that. There must be another answer."
"From the first Howells was satisfied with me," Bobby said.
Graham flung up his hands.
"Then tell me how you got in without disturbing those locks. I grant you, Bobby, you had sufficient motive for both murders, but I don't believe you have two personalities, one decent and lovable, the other cruel and cunning to the point of magic. I don't believe if a man had two such personalities the actions of one would be totally closed to the memory of the other."
Bobby smiled wanly.
"It isn't pleasant to confess it, Hartley, but I have read of such cases."
"Fiction!"
"Scientific fact."
"I wish to the devil I had shared your room with you to-night," Graham muttered. "I might have furnished you an alibi for this affair at least."
"Either that," Bobby answered frankly, "or you might have followed me and learned the whole secret. Honestly, isn't that what you were thinking of, Hartley? And I did go to sleep, telling myself it would help me if something of the sort happened to Howells. Now I'm not so sure that it will. I—I suppose you've got to notify the police."
Graham held up his hand.
"What's that? In the corridor!"
There were quiet footsteps in the corridor. Bobby turned quickly, Paredes strolled slowly through the passage, a cigarette held in his slender, listless fingers. Bobby stared at him, remembering his surprise a few minutes ago that the Panamanian should have sat up so late, should have been, probably, in the court when they had followed Katherine to the discovery of this new crime.
Paredes paused in the doorway. He took in the tragic picture framed by the sinister room without displaying the slightest interest. He continued to hold his cigarette until it expired. Then he crossed the threshold. Graham and Bobby watched the expressionless face. Gracefully Paredes raised his finger and pointed to the bed. When he spoke his voice was low and pleasant:
"Appalling! I feared something of the kind when I heard you come to this room."
He glanced at the broken door.
"The same unbelievable circumstance," he drawled. "I see you had to break in."
The colour flashed back to Graham's face.
"You have taken plenty of time to solve your misgivings."
"It hasn't been so long. I fancied everything was all right, and I was immersed in my solitaire. Then I heard a stirring upstairs. As I've told you, the house frightens me. It is not natural or healthy. So I came up to investigate this stirring, and there was Miss Katherine in the hall. She told me."
Graham faced him with undisguised enmity.
"Immersed in your solitaire! We were attracted by a light in the lower hall at such an hour. We looked down. You were not there. The front door was open."
Paredes glanced at his cold cigarette. He yawned.
"When Howells died precisely as Mr. Blackburn did," Graham hurried on, "you alone were awake about the house. Weren't you at that moment in the court?"
Paredes laughed tolerantly.
"It is clear, in spite of my apologies, that we are not friends, Graham; but, may I ask, are you accusing me of this strange—accident?"
"I should like to know what you were doing in the court."
"Perhaps," Paredes answered, "I was attracted there by the sounds that aroused Miss Katherine."
Graham shook his head.
"From her description I doubt if those sounds would have been audible in the hall."
"No matter," Paredes said. "I merely suggest that it's a case for Groom. His hint of a spiritual enmity may be saner than you think."
Katherine appeared in the doorway. She had evidently overheard Paredes's comment, for she nodded. The determination in her eyes suggested that she had struggled with the situation during these last moments and had reached a definite conclusions That quality was in her voice.
"At least, Hartley," she said, "you must send for Doctor Groom before you notify the police."
Graham waved his hand.
"Why?" he asked. "The man is dead."
With a movement, hidden from Paredes, she indicated Bobby.
"Last time there was a good deal of delay before the doctor came. If we get him right away he may be able to do something for this poor fellow. At least his advice would be useful."
Bobby realized that she was fighting for time for him. Any delay would be useful that would give them a chance to plan before the police with unimaginative efficiency should invade the house and limit their opportunities. Graham showed that he caught her point.
"Maybe it's better," he said. "Then, Bobby, telephone Groom to be ready for you, and take my runabout. It's in the stable. You'll get him here much faster than he could come in his carriage."
"While I'm gone," Bobby asked, "what will you do?"
"Watch this room," Graham jerked out. "See that no one enters or leaves it, or touches the body. I'll hope for some clue."
"You've plenty of courage," Paredes drawled. "I shouldn't care to watch alone in this room."
He followed Katherine into the corridor. Bobby looked at Graham.
"You'll take no chances, Hartley?"
Graham's smile wasn't pleasant.
"According to you and the dead detective there's no risk while you're out of the house. Still, I shall be nervous, but don't worry."
Bobby joined the others before they had reached the hall.
"Of course Hartley found nothing," Katherine said to him.
"Nothing," Paredes answered, "except a very bad temper."
Katherine's distaste for the man was no longer veiled.
"You don't like Mr. Graham," she said, "but he is our friend, and he is in this house to help us."
Paredes bowed.
"I regret that the amusement Mr. Graham causes me sometimes finds expression. He is so earnest, so materialistic in his relation to the world. That is why he will see nothing psychic in the situation."
Paredes's easy contempt was like a tonic for Katherine. Her fear seemed to drop from her. She turned purposefully to Bobby, ignoring the Panamanian.
"I shall watch with Hartley," she said.
He was ashamed that jealousy should creep into such a moment, but her resolve recalled his amorous discontent. The prospect of Graham and her, watching alone, drawn to each other by their fright and uncertainty, by their surroundings, by the hour, became unbearable. It placed him, to an extent, on Paredes's side. It urged him, when Paredes had gone on downstairs, to spring almost eagerly to his defence.
"As Hartley says," Katherine began, "he makes you think of a snake. He must see we dislike and resent him."
"You and Hartley, perhaps," Bobby said. "Carlos says he is here to help me. I've no reason to disbelieve him."
A little colour came into Katherine's face. She half stretched out her hand as if in an appeal. But the colour faded and her hand dropped.
"We are wasting time," she said. "You had better go."
"I am sorry we disagree about Carlos," he commenced.
She turned deliberately away from him.
"You must hurry," she said. "Hurry!"
He saw her enter the corridor to join Graham. The obscurity of the narrow place seemed to hold for him a new menace.
He walked downstairs slowly. While he telephoned, instructing a servant to tell the doctor to be dressed and ready in twenty minutes, he saw Paredes go to the closet and get his hat and coat.
"I shall keep you company," the Panamanian announced.
Bobby was glad enough to have him. He didn't want to be alone. He was aware by this time that no amount of thought would persuade useful memories to emerge from the black pit. They walked to the stable, half gone to ruin like the rest of the estate. Bobby started Graham's car. The servants' quarters, he saw, were dark. Then Jenkins and the two women hadn't been aroused, were still ignorant of the new crime. As they drove smoothly past the gloomy house they glimpsed through the court the dimly lit windows of the old room that persistently guarded its grim secret. Bobby pictured the living as well as the dead there, and his mind revolted, and he shivered. He opened the throttle wider. The car sprang forward. The divergent glare from the headlights forced back the reluctant thicket. Paredes drawled unexpectedly:
"There is nothing as lonely anywhere in the world."
He stooped behind the windshield and lighted a cigarette.
"At least. Bobby," he said between puffs, "the Cedars has taken from you the fear of Howells."
And after a time, staring at the glow of his cigarette, he went on softly:
"Have you noticed anything significant about the discovery of each mystery at the Cedars?"
"Many things," Bobby muttered.
"Think," Paredes urged him.
Bobby answered angrily:
"You've suggested that to me once to-day, Carlos. You mean that each time I have been asleep or unconscious."
"I mean something quite different," Paredes said.
He hesitated. When he continued, his drawl was more pronounced.
"Then you haven't remarked that each time it has been Miss Katherine who has made the discovery, who has aroused the rest of the house?"
The car swerved sharply. Bobby's first impulse had been to take his hands from the wheel, to force Paredes to retract his sly insinuation.
"That's the rottenest thing I've ever known you to do, Carlos. Take it back."
Paredes shrugged his shoulders.
"There is nothing to take back. I accuse no one. I merely call attention to a chain of exceptional coincidences."
"You make me wonder," Bobby said, "if Hartley isn't justified in his dislike of you. You'll kill such a ridiculous suspicion."
"Or?" Paredes drawled. "Very well. It seems my fate recently to offend those I like best. I merely thought that any theory leading away from you would be welcome."
"Any theory," Bobby answered, "involving Katherine is unthinkable."
Paredes smiled.
"I didn't understand exactly how you felt. I rather took it for granted that Graham Never mind. I take it back."
"Then drop it," Bobby answered sullenly, sorry that there was nothing else he could say.
They continued in silence through the deserted forest whose aggressive loneliness made words seem trivial. Bobby was asking himself again where he had stood last night when he had glimpsed for a moment the straining trees and the figure in a mask which he had called his conscience. If he could only prove that figure substantial! Then Graham would have some ground for his suspicion of Paredes and the dancer Maria. He glanced at Paredes. Could there have been a conspiracy against him in the New York cafe? Did Paredes, in fact, have some devious purpose in remaining at the Cedars?
The automobile took a sharp curve in the road. Bobby started, gazing ahead with an interest nearly hypnotic. The headlights had caught in their glare the deserted farmhouse in which he had awakened just before Howells had told him of his grandfather's death and practically placed him under arrest. In the white light the frame of the house from which the paint had flaked, appeared ghastly, unreal, like a structure seen in a nightmare from which one recoils with morbid horror. The light left the building. As the car tore past, Bobby could barely make out the black mass in the midst of the thicket.
Paredes had observed it, too.
"I daresay," he remarked casually, "the Cedars will become as deserted as that. It is just that it should, for the entire neighbourhood impresses one as unfriendly to life, as striving through death to drive life out."
"Have you ever seen that house before?" Bobby asked quickly.
"I have never seen it before. I do not care ever to see it again."
It was a relief when the forest thinned and fields stretched, flat and pleasant, like barriers against the stunted growth. Bobby stopped the car in front of one of a group of houses at a crossroads. He climbed the steps and rang. Doctor Groom opened the door himself. His gigantic, hairy figure was silhouetted against the light from within.
"What's the matter now?" he demanded in his gruff voice. "Fortunately I hadn't gone to bed. I was reading some books on psychic manifestations. Who's sick? Or"
Bobby's face must have told him a good deal, for he broke off.
"Get your things on," Bobby said, "and I will tell you as we drive back, for you must come. Howells has been killed precisely as my grandfather was."
For a moment Doctor Groom's bulky frame remained motionless in the doorway. Instead of the surprise and horror Bobby had foreseen, the old man expressed only a mute wonder. He got his hat and coat and entered the runabout, Paredes made room for him, sitting on the floor, his feet on the running board.
Bobby had told all he knew before they had reached the forest. The doctor grunted then:
"The wound at the back of the head was the same as in your grandfather's case?"
"Exactly."
"Then what good am I? Why am I routed out?"
"A formality," Bobby answered. "Katherine thought if we got you quickly you might do something. Anyway, she wanted your advice."
The woods closed about them. Again the lights seemed to push back a palpable barrier.
"I can't work miracles," the doctor was murmuring. "I can't bring men back to life. Such a wound leaves no ground for hope. You'd better have sent for the police at once. Hello!"
He strained forward, peering around the windshield.
"Funny!" Paredes called.
Bobby's eyes were on the road.
"What do you see?"
"The house, Bobby!" Paredes cried.
"No one, to my certain knowledge," the doctor said, "has lived in that house for ten years. You say it was empty and falling to pieces when you woke up there this morning."
Bobby knew what they meant then, and he reduced the speed of the car and looked ahead to the right. A pallid glow sifted through the trees from the direction of the deserted house.
Bobby guided the car to the side of the road, stopped it, and shut off the engine. At first no one moved. The three men stared as if in the presence of an unaccountable phenomenon. Even when Bobby had extinguished the headlights the glow failed to brighten. Its pallid quality persisted. It seemed to radiate from a point close to the ground.
"It comes from the front of the house," Bobby murmured.
He stepped from the automobile.
"What are you going to do?" Paredes wanted to know.
"Find out who is in that house."
For Bobby had experienced a quick hope. If there was a man or a woman secreted in the building the truth as to his own remarkable presence there last night might not be so far to seek after all. There was, moreover, something lawless about this light escaping from the place at such an hour. A little while ago, when Paredes and he had driven past, the house had been black. They had remarked its lonely, abandoned appearance. It had led Paredes to speak of the neighbourhood as the domain of death. Yet the strange, pallid quality of the light itself made him pause by the broken fence. It did come from the lower part of the front of the house, yet, so faint was it, it failed to outline the aperture through which it escaped. The doctor and Paredes joined him.
"When I was here," he said, "all the shutters were closed. This glow is too white, too diffused. We must see."
As he started forward Paredes grasped his arm.
"There are too many of us. We would make a noise. Suppose I creep up and investigate."
"There is one way in—at the back," Bobby told the doctor. "Let us go there. We'll have whoever's inside trapped. Meantime, Carlos, if he wishes, will steal up to the front; he'll find out where the light comes from. He'll look in if he can."
"That's the best plan," Paredes agreed.
But they had scarcely turned the corner of the house, beyond reach of the glow, when Paredes rejoined them. His feet were no longer careful in the underbrush. He came up running. For the first time in their acquaintance Bobby detected a lessening of the man's suave, unemotional habit.
"The light!" the Panamanian gasped. "It's gone! Before I could get close it faded out."
Bobby called to the doctor and ran toward the door at the rear. It was unhinged and half open as it had been when he had awakened to his painful and inexplicable predicament. He went through, fumbling in his pocket for matches. The damp chill of the hall nauseated him as it had done before, seemed to place about his throat an intangible band that made breathing difficult. Before he could get his match safe out the doctor had struck a wax vesta. Its strong flame played across the dingy, streaked walls.
"There's a flashlight, Carlos," Bobby said, "in the door flap of the automobile."
Paredes started across the yard with a haste, it seemed to Bobby, almost eager.
Striking matches as they went, the doctor and Bobby hurried to the front of the house. The rooms appeared undisturbed in their decay. The shutters were closed. The front door was barred. The broken walls from which the plaster hung in shreds leered at them.
Suddenly Bobby turned, grasping the doctor's arm.
"Did you hear anything?"
The doctor shook his head.
"Or feel anything?"
"No."
"I thought," Bobby said excitedly, "that there was some one in the hall. I—I simply got that impression, for I saw nothing myself. My back was turned."
Paredes strolled silently in.
"It may have been Mr. Paredes," the doctor said.
But Bobby wasn't convinced.
"Did you see or hear anything coming through the hall, Carlos?"
"No," Paredes said.
He had brought the light. With its help they explored the tiny cellar and the upper floor. There was no sign of a recent occupancy. Everything was as Bobby had found it on awakening. A vagrant wind sighed about the place. They looked at each other with startled eyes. They filed out with an incongruous stealth.
"Then there are ghosts here, too!" Paredes whispered.
"Who knows?" Doctor Groom mused. "It is as puzzling as anything that has happened at the Cedars unless the light we saw was some phosphorescent effect of decaying wood or vegetation."
"Then why should it go out all at once?" Bobby asked. "Is there any connection between this light and what has happened at the Cedars?"
"The house at least," Paredes put in, "is connected with what has happened at the Cedars through your experience here."
At Doctor Groom's suggestion they sat in the automobile for some time, watching the house for a repetition of the pallid light. After several minutes, when it failed to come, Bobby set his gears.
"Graham and Katherine will be worried."
They drove quickly away from the black, uncommunicative mass of the abandoned building. The woods were lonelier than before. They impressed Bobby as guarding something.
He drove straight to the stable. As they walked into the court they saw the uncertain candlelight diffused from the room of death. In the hall Bobby responded to a quick alarm. The Cedars was too quiet. What had happened since he and Paredes had left?
"Katherine! Hartley!" he called.
He heard running steps upstairs. Katherine leaned over the banister. Her quiet voice reassured him.
"Is the doctor with you?"
He nodded. Paredes yawned and lighted a cigarette. He settled himself in an easy chair. Bobby and Doctor Groom hurried up. Katherine led them down the old corridor. Two chairs had been placed in the broken doorway. Graham sat there. He arose and greeted the doctor.
"Nothing has happened since I left?" Bobby asked.
Graham shook his head.
"Katherine and I have watched every minute."
Doctor Groom walked to the bed and for a long time looked down at Howells. Once he put out his hand, quickly withdrawing it.
"It's simply a repetition," he said at last, and his voice was softer than its custom. "It may be a warning, for all we know, that no one may sleep in this room without attracting death. Yet why should that be? I miss this poor fellow's materialistic viewpoint. There's nothing I can do for him, nothing I can say, except that death must have been instantaneous. The police must seek again for a man to place in the electric chair."
Graham touched his arm with an odd reluctance.
"Sitting here for so long I've been thinking. I have always been materialistic, too. Tell me seriously, doctor, do you believe there is any psychic force capable of killing two men in this incisive fashion?"
"No one," the doctor answered, "can say what psychic force is capable of doing. Some scientists have started to explore, but it is still uncharted country. From certain places—I daresay you've noticed it—one gets an impression of peace and content; from others a depression, a sense of suffering. I think we have all experienced psychic force to that extent. Remember that this room has a history of intense and rebellious suffering. Some of it I have seen with my own eyes. Your father's fight for life, Katherine, was horrible for those of us who knew he had no chance. As I watched beside him I used to wonder if such violent agony could ever drift wholly into silence, and when we had to tell him finally that the fight was lost, it was beyond bearing."
"If these men had been found dead without marks of violence," Graham said, "I might consider such a possibility, irrational as it seems."
"Irrational," Doctor Groom answered, "must not be confused with impossible. The marks of a physical violence, far from proving that the attack was physical, strengthens the case of the supernatural. Certainly you have heard and read of pictures being dashed from walls by invisible hands, of objects moved about empty rooms, of cases where human beings have been attacked by inanimate things—heavy things—hurtling through the air. Some scientists recognize such irrational possibilities. Policemen don't."
"Very well," Graham said stubbornly. "I'll follow you that far, but you must show me in this room the sharp object with which these men were attacked, no matter what the force behind it."
The doctor spread his hands. His infused eyes nearly closed.
"That I can't do. At any rate, Robert, this isn't wholly tragic to you. I don't see how any one could accuse you of aphasia to-night."
"You've not forgotten," Bobby said slowly, "that you spoke of a recurrent aphasia."
"That's the trouble," Graham put in under his breath. "He has no more alibi now than he had when his grandfather was murdered."
Bobby told of his heavy sleep, of the delay in Katherine's arousing him.
The doctor's gruff voice was disapproving.
"You shouldn't have drunk that medicine. It had stood too long. It would only have approximated its intended effect."
"You mean," Bobby asked, "that I wasn't sleeping as soundly as I thought?"
"Probably not, but you're by no means a satisfactory victim. Men do unaccountable things in a somnambulistic state, but asleep they haven't wings any more than they have awake. You've got to show us how you entered this room without disturbing the locks. Now, Mr. Graham, we must comply with the law. Call in the police."
"There's nothing else to do," Bobby agreed.
So they went along the dingy corridor and downstairs. From the depths of the easy chair in which Paredes lounged smoke curled with a lazy indifference. The Panamanian didn't move.
While Graham and the doctor walked to the back of the hall to telephone, Katherine, an anxious figure, a secretive one, beckoned Bobby to the library. He went with her, wondering what she could want.
It was quite dark in the library. As Bobby fumbled with the lamp and prepared to strike a match he was aware of the girl's provocatively near presence. He resisted a warm impulse to reach out and touch her hand. He desired to tell her all that was in his heart of the division that had increased between them the last few months. Yet to follow that impulse would, he realized, place a portion of his burden on her shoulders; would also, in a sense, be disloyal to Graham, for he no longer questioned that the two had reached a definite sentimental understanding. So he sighed and struck the match. Even before the lamp was lighted Katherine was speaking with a feverish haste:
"Before the police come—you've a chance, Bobby—the last chance. You must do before the police arrive whatever is to be done."
He replaced the shade and glanced at her, astonished by her intensity, by the forceful gesture with which she grasped his arm. For the first time since Silas Blackburn's murder all of her vitality had come back to her.
"What do you mean?"
She pointed to the door of the private staircase.
"Just what Howells told you before he went up there to his death."
Bobby understood. He reacted excitedly to her attitude of conspirator.
"He said," she went on, "that the criminal had nothing to lose. That it would be to his advantage to have him out of the way, to destroy that evidence."
"I thought of it," Bobby answered, "just before I went to sleep."
"Don't you see?" she said. "If you had killed him you would have taken the cast and the handkerchief and destroyed them? Hartley has told me everything, and I could see his coat for myself. The cast and the handkerchief are still in Howells's pocket."
"Why should I have killed him if not to destroy those?" Bobby took her up with a quick hope.
"You didn't," she cried. "Nothing would ever make me believe that you killed him, but you will be charged with it unless the evidence—disappears. You'll have no defence."
Bobby drew back a little.
"You want me to go there—and—and take from his pocket those things?"
She nodded.
"You remember he suggested that he hadn't sent his report. That may be there, too."
Bobby shook his head. "He must have said that as a bait."
"At the worst," she urged, "a report without evidence could only turn suspicion against you. It wouldn't convict you as those other things may. You must get them. You must destroy them."
Graham slipped quietly in and closed the door.
"The district attorney is coming himself with another detective," he said. "I can guess what Katherine has been talking about. She's right. I'm a lawyer, an I know the penalty of tampering with evidence. But I don't believe you're a murderer, and I tell you as long as that evidence exists they can convict you. They can send you to the chair. They may arrest you and try you anyway on his report, but I don't believe they can convict you on it alone. You're justified in protecting yourself, Bobby, in the only way you can. No one will see you go in the room. We'll arrange it so that no one can testify against you."
Bobby felt himself at a cross roads. During the commission of those crimes he had been unconscious. If he had, in fact, had anything to do with them, his personality, his real self, had known nothing, had done no wrong. His body had merely reacted to hideous promptings whose source lurked at the bottom of the black pit. To tamper with evidence would be a conscious crime. All the more, because of his doubt of himself, he shrank from that. Katherine saw his hesitation.
"It's a matter of your life or death."
But although Katherine decided him it wasn't with that. She came closer. She looked straight at him, and her eyes were full of an affection that stirred him profoundly:
"For my sake, Bobby"
He studied the dead ashes of the fire which a little while ago had played on Howells, vital and antagonistic, by the door of the private staircase. The man had challenged him to do just the thing from which he shrank. But Howells was no longer vital or antagonistic, and it occurred to him that a little of his shrinking arose from the thought of approaching and robbing the still thing upstairs, all that was left of the man who had not been afraid of the mystery of the locked room.
"For my sake," Katherine repeated.
Bobby squared his shoulders. He fought back his momentary cowardice. The affection in Katherine's eyes was stronger than that.
"All right," he said. "Howells never gave me a chance while he was alive. He'll have to now he's dead."
Katherine relaxed. Graham's face was quite white, but he gave his instructions in a cold, even tone:
"We'll go to the hall now. Katherine will go on upstairs. She mustn't see you enter the room, but she will watch in the corridor while you are there to be sure you aren't disturbed. You and I will chat for awhile with the others, Bobby, then you will go up. You understand? Paredes mustn't even guess what you are doing. I'll keep him and Groom downstairs. If he spied, if he knew what you were at, he'd have a weapon in his hands I'd hate to think about. He may be all right, but we can't risk any more than we have to. We must go on tiptoe."
He opened the door. Katherine gave Bobby's hand a quick, encouraging pressure.
"Take the stuff to my room," Graham whispered. "The first chance, we'll destroy it so that no trace will be left."
They went to the hall. Without speaking, Katherine climbed the stairs. Graham drew a chair between Paredes and the doctor. Bobby lounged against the mantel, trying to find in the Panamanian's face some clue as to his real feelings. But Paredes's eyes were closed. His hand drooped across the chair arm. His slender, pointed fingers held, as if from mere habit, a lifeless cigarette.
"Asleep," Graham whispered.
Without opening his eyes Paredes spoke: "No; I feel curiously awake." He yawned.
Doctor Groom glanced at his watch. "The powers of prosecution," he grumbled, "ought to be here within the next fifteen or twenty minutes."
Bobby glanced at Graham. Then it wasn't safe to delay too long. More and more as he waited he shrank from the invasion of the room of death. The prospect of reaching out and touching the still, cold thing on the bed revolted him. Was there anything in that room capable of forbidding his intention? Was there, in short, a surer, more malicious force for evil than his unconscious self, at work in the house? He was about to make some formal comment to the others, to embark on his distasteful adventure, when Paredes, as if he had read Bobby's mind, opened his eyes, languidly left his chair, and walked to the foot of the stairs.
"Where you going?" Graham asked sharply.
Paredes waved his hand indifferently and walked on up. There was something of stealth in his failure to reply, in his cat-like tread on the stairs. Graham and Bobby stared after him, unable to meet this new situation audibly because of Groom. Yet five minutes had gone. There was no time to be lost. Paredes mustn't rob Bobby of his chance. With a sort of desperation he started for the stairs. Graham held out his hand as if to restrain him, then nodded. Bobby had his foot on the first step when Katherine's cry reached them, shaping the moment to their use. For there was no fright in her cry. It was, rather, angry. And Bobby and Graham ran up while Doctor Groom remained in his chair, an expression of blank amazement on his face.
A candle burned on the table in the upper hall. Katherine and Paredes stood near the entrance of the old corridor. Paredes, as usual, was quite unruffled. Katherine's attitude was defensive. She seemed to hold the corridor against him. The anger of her cry was active in her eyes. Paredes laughed lightly.
"Sorry to have given the household one more shock. Fortunately no harm done."
"What is it, Katherine?" Graham demanded.
"I don't know," she answered. "He startled me. He entered the corridor."
Paredes nodded.
"Quite right. She was there. I was on my way to my room. If your house had electricity, Bobby, this incident would have been avoided. I saw something dark in the corridor."
"You may not know," Graham said, "that ever since we found Howells, one of us has tried, more or less, to keep the entrance of that room under observation."
"Yet you were all downstairs a little while ago," Paredes yawned. "It's too bad. I might have taken my turn then. At any rate, since I was excluded from your confidence, I overcame my natural fear, and, for Bobby's sake, slipped in, and, I am afraid, startled Miss Katherine."
"Yes," she said.
His explanation was reasonable. There was nothing more to be said, but Bobby's doubt of his friend, sown by Graham and stimulated by the incidents of the last hour, was materially strengthened. He felt a sharp fear of Paredes. Such reserve, such concealment of emotion, was scarcely human.
"If," Graham was saying, "you really want to help Bobby, there is something you can do. Will you come downstairs with me for a moment? I'd like to suggest one or two things before the police arrive."
Without hesitation Paredes followed Graham down the stairs.
Katherine turned immediately to Bobby, her eyes eager, full of the tense determination that had dictated her plan in the library.
"Now, Bobby!" she whispered. "And there's no time to waste. They may be here any minute. I won't see you go, but I'll be back at once to guard you against Paredes if he slips up again."
She walked across the hall and disappeared in the newer corridor. Without witness he faced the old corridor, and with the attempt directly ahead his repugnance achieved a new power. The black entrance with its scarcely dared memories reminded him that what he was about to do was directed against more than human law, was an outrage against the dead man. He had to remind himself of the steely purpose with which Howells had marked him as the murderer; and the man's power persisted after death. In such a contest he was justified.
He took the candle from the table. Through the stair-well the murmur of Graham's voice, occasionally interrupted by Groom's heavy tones or the languid accents of Paredes, drifted encouragingly. Trying to crush his premonitions, Bobby entered the corridor. Instead of illuminating the narrow passage the candle seemed half smothered by its blackness. For the first time in his memory Bobby faced the entrance of the sinister room alone. He pushed open the broken door. He paused on the threshold. It impressed him as not unnatural that he should experience such misgivings. They sprang not alone from the fact that within twenty-four hours two men had died unaccountably within these faded walls. Nor did the evidence pointing to his own unconscious guilt wholly account for them. At the bottom of everything was the fact that from his earliest childhood he had looked upon the room as consecrated to death; had consequently feared it; had, he recalled, always hurried past the disused corridor leading in its direction.
Through its wide spaces the light of the candle scarcely penetrated. No more than an indefinite radiance thrust back the obscurity and outlined the bed. He could barely see the stark, black form outstretched there.
The dim, vast room, as he advanced, imposed upon him a sense of isolation. Katherine in the upper hall, the others downstairs, whose voices no longer reached him, seemed all at once far away. He stood in a place lonelier and more remote than the piece of woods where he had momentarily opened his eyes last night; and, instead of the straining trees and the figure in the black mask which he had called his conscience, he had for motion and companionship only the swaying of the curtains in the breeze from the open window and the dark, prostrate thing whose face as he went closer was like a white mask—a mask with a fixed and malevolent sneer.
The wind caught the flame of the candle, making it flicker. Tenuous shadows commenced to dance across the walls. He paused with a tightening throat, for the form on the bed seemed moving, too, with sly and scarcely perceptible gestures. Then he understood. It was the effect of the shaking candle, and he forced himself to go on, but a sense of a multiple companionship accompanied him—a sense of a shapeless, soundless companionship that projected an idea of a steady regard. There swept through his mind a procession of figures in quaint dress and with faces not unlike his own, remembered from portraits and family legends, men and women to whom this room had been familiar, within whose limits they had suffered, cried out a too-powerful agony, and died. It seemed to him that he waited for voices to guide him, to urge him on as Katherine had urged him, or to drive him back, because he was an intruder in a company whose habit was strange and terrifying.
He forced his glance from the shadows which seemed more active along the walls. He raised his candle and stared at the dead man. The cast was undoubtedly there. The coat, stretched tightly across the breast, outlined it. He stood at the side of the bed. He had only to bend and place his hand in the pocket which the cast filled awkwardly. The wind alone, he saw, wasn't responsible for the shaking of the candle. His hand shook as the shadows shook, as the thing on the bed shook. The sense of loneliness grew upon him until it became complete, appalling. For the first time he understood that loneliness can possess a ponderable quality. It was, he felt, potent and active in the room—a thing he couldn't understand, or challenge, or overcome.
His hand tightened. He thought of Katherine guarding the corridor; of Paredes and Doctor Groom, held downstairs by Graham; of the county authorities hurrying to seize this evidence that would convict him; and he realized that his duty and his excuse were clear. He understood that just now he had been captured by a force undefinable in terms of the world he knew. For a moment he eluded the stealthy fleshless hands of its impalpable skirmishers. He reached impulsively out to the dead man. He was about to place his fingers in the pocket, which, after all was said and done, held his life.
In the light of the candle the face seemed alive and more menacing than it had ever done in life. About the straight smile was a wider, more triumphant quality.
The candle flickered sharply. It expired. The conquering blackness took his breath.
He told himself it was the draft from the window which was strong, but the companionship of the night was closer and more numerous. The darkness wreathed itself into mocking and tortuous bodies whose faces were hidden.
In an agony of revolt against these incorporeal, these fanciful horrors, he reached in the pocket.
He sprang back with a choked, inaudible cry, for the dead thing beneath his hand was stirring. The dead, cold thing with a languid and impossible rebuke, moved beneath his touch. And the pocket he had felt was empty. The coat, a moment ago bulging and awkward, was flat. There sprang to his mind the mad thought that the detective, malevolent in life, had long after death snatched from his hand the evidence, carefully gathered, on which everything for him depended.