RGL e-Book Cover©
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.
RGL e-Book Cover©
Cosmopolitan, December 1913, with "The Ghouls"
Again Kennedy is called upon to unravel a mystery which baffles the highest detective skill. Weird knowledge gathered in the Orient has prepared the scene. The situation is unlike any with which he has heretofore been confronted. But he is equal to it with the latest development of the moving-picture art. And yet, strange to say, his efforts to shed light on mysterious happenings bring about a real tragedy.
"KENNEDY, I have a startling case for you. Can you help me out with it?"
It was our old friend Andrews, head of the Great Eastern Life Insurance Company's secret service.
As he sat down heavily, he pulled from his immense black wallet some scraps of paper and newspaper cuttings.
"You recall, I suppose," he went on, unfolding the papers without waiting for an answer, "the recent death of young Montague Phelps, at Woodbine, just outside the city?"
Kennedy nodded. The death of Phelps, about ten days before, had attracted nation-wide attention because of the heroic fight for life he had made against what the doctors admitted had puzzled them—a new and baffling manifestation of coma. They had labored hard to keep him awake, but had not succeeded, and after several days of lying in a comatose state he had finally succumbed. It was one of those strange but rather frequent cases of long sleeps reported in the newspapers, although it was by no means one which might be classed as record-breaking.
The interest in Phelps lay, a great deal, in the fact that the young man had married the popular dancer, Anginette Petrovska, a few months previously. His honeymoon trip around the world had suddenly been interrupted, while the couple were crossing Siberia, by news of the failure of the Phelps banking-house in Wall Street and the practical wiping-out of his fortune. He had returned, only to fall a victim to a greater misfortune.
"A few days before his death," continued Andrews, measuring his words carefully, "I, or rather the Great Eastern, which had been secretly investigating the case, received this letter. What do you think of it?"
He spread out on the table a crumpled note in a palpably disguised handwriting:
To Whom it May Concern:
You would do well to look into the death of Montague Phelps, Jr. I accuse no one, assert nothing. But when a young man, apparently in the best of health, drops off so mysteriously and even the physician in the case can give no very convincing information, that case warrants attention. I know what I know.
An Outsider.
"H-m," mused Kennedy, weighing the contents of the note carefully, "one of the family, I'll be bound—unless the whole thing is a hoax. By the way, who else is there in the immediate family?"
"Only a brother, Dana Phelps, younger and somewhat inclined to wildness, I believe. At least, his father did not trust him with a large inheritance, but left most of his money in trust. But before we go any further, read that."
Andrews pulled from the papers a newspaper cutting on which he had drawn a circle about the following item. As we read, he eyed us sharply.
PHELPS TOMB DESECRATED
Last night, John Shaughnessy, a night watchman employed by the town of Woodbine, while on his rounds, was attracted by noises as of a violent struggle near the back road in the Woodbine Cemetery, on the outskirts of the town. He had varied his regular rounds because of the recent depredations of motor-car yeggmen who had timed him in pulling off several jobs lately.
As he hurried toward the large mausoleum of the Phelps family, he saw two figures slink away in opposite directions in the darkness. One of them, he asserts positively, seemed to be a woman in black, the other a man whom he could not see clearly. They readily eluded pursuit in the shadows, and a moment later he heard the whir of a high-powered car, apparently bearing them away.
At the tomb there was every evidence of a struggle. Things had been thrown about; the casket had been broken open, but the body of Montague Phelps, Jr., which had been interred there about ten days ago, was not touched or mutilated.
It was a shocking and extraordinary violation. Shaughnessy believes that some personal jewels may have been buried with Phelps and that the thieves were after them, that they fought over the loot, and in the midst of the fight were scared away.
The vault is of peculiar construction, a costly tomb in which repose the bodies of the late Montague Phelps, Sr., of his wife, and now of his eldest son. The raid had evidently been carefully planned to coincide with a time when Shaughnessy would ordinarily have been on the other side of the town. The entrance to the tomb had been barred, but during the commotion the ghouls were surprised and managed to escape without accomplishing their object and leaving no trace.
Mrs. Phelps, when informed of the vandalism, was shocked, and has been in a very nervous state since the tomb was forced open. The local authorities seem extremely anxious that every precaution should be taken to prevent a repetition of the ghoulish visit to the tomb, but as yet the Phelps family has taken no steps.
"Are you aware of any scandal, any skeleton in the closet in the family?" asked Craig, looking up.
"No—not yet," considered Andrews. "As soon as I heard of the vandalism, I began to wonder what could have happened in the Phelps tomb, as far as our company's interests were concerned. You see, that was yesterday. To-day this letter came along," he added, laying down a second very dirty and wrinkled note beside the first. It was quite patently written by a different person from the first; its purport was different, indeed quite the opposite of the other. "It was sent to Mrs. Phelps," explained Andrews, "and she gave it out herself to the police."
Do not show this to the police. Unless you leave $5000 in gold in the old stump in the swamp across from the cemetery, you will have reason to regret it. If you respect the memory of the dead, do this, and do it quietly.
Black Hand.
"Well," I ejaculated, "that's cool. What threat could be used to back this demand on the Phelpses?"
"Here's the situation," resumed Andrews, puffing violently on his inevitable cigar and toying with the letters and clippings. "We have already held up payment of the half-million dollars of insurance to the widow as long as we can consistently do so. But we must pay soon, scandal or not, unless we can get something more than mere conjecture."
"Here's the situation," resumed Andrews.
"You are already holding it up?" queried Craig.
"Yes. You see, we investigate thoroughly every suspicious death. In most cases, no body is found. This case is different in that respect. There is a body, and it is the body of the insured, apparently. But a death like this, involving the least mystery, receives careful examination, especially if, as in this case, it has recently been covered by heavy policies. My work has often served to reverse the decision of doctors and coroners' juries.
"An insurance detective, as you can readily appreciate, Kennedy, soon comes to recognize the characteristics in the crimes with which he deals. For example, writing of the insurance plotted for rarely precedes the conspiracy to defraud. That is, I know of few cases in which a policy originally taken out in good faith has subsequently become the means of a swindle.
"In outright murder cases, the assassin induces the victim to take out insurance in his favor. In suicide cases, the insured does so himself. Just after his return home, young Phelps, who carried fifty thousand dollars already, applied for and was granted one of the largest policies we have ever written—half a million."
"Was it incontestable without the suicide clause?" asked Kennedy.
"Yes," replied Andrews, "and suicide is the first and easiest theory. Why, you have no idea how common the crime of suicide for the sake of the life insurance is becoming. Nowadays, we insurance men almost believe that everyone who contemplates ending his existence takes out a policy so as to make his life, which is useless to him, a benefit, at least, to some one—and a nightmare to the insurance detective."
"I know," I cut in, for I recalled having been rather interested in the Phelps case at the time, "but I thought the doctors said finally that death was due to heart failure."
"Doctor Forden who signed the papers said so," corrected Andrews. "Heart failure—what does that mean? As well say breath failure, or nerve failure. I'll tell you what kind of failure I think it was. It was money failure. Hard times and poor investments struck Phelps before he really knew how to handle his small fortune. It called him home and—pouf!—he is off—to leave to his family a cool half-million by his death. But did he do it himself or did some one else do it? That's the question."
"What is your theory," inquired Kennedy absently, "assuming there is no scandal hidden in the life of Phelps before or after he married the Russian dancer?"
"I don't know, Kennedy," confessed Andrews. "I have had so many theories and have changed them so rapidly that all I lay claim to believing, outside of the bald facts that I have stated, is that there must have been some poison. I rather sense it, feel that there is no doubt of it, in fact. That is why I have come to you. I want you to clear it up, one way or another. The company has no interest except in getting at the truth."
"The body is really there?" asked Kennedy. "You saw it?"
"It was there no later than this afternoon, and in an almost perfect state of preservation, too."
Kennedy seemed to be looking at and through Andrews as if he would hypnotize the truth out of him. "Let me see," he said quickly. "It is not very late now. Can we visit the mausoleum to-night?"
"Easily. My car is down-stairs. Woodbine is not far, and you'll find it a very attractive suburb, aside from this mystery."
ANDREWS lost no time in getting us out to Woodbine, and on the
fringe of the little town, one of the wealthiest around the city,
he deposited us at the least likely place of all, the cemetery. A
visit to a cemetery is none too enjoyable even on a bright day.
In the early night it is positively uncanny. What was gruesome in
the daylight became doubly so under the shroud of darkness.
We made our way into the grounds through a gate, and I, at least, even with all the enlightenment of modern science, could not restrain a weird and creepy sensation.
"Here is the Phelps tomb," directed Andrews, pausing beside a marble structure of Grecian lines and pulling out a duplicate key of a new lock which had been placed on the heavy door of grated iron. As we entered, it was with a shudder at the damp odor of decay. Kennedy had brought his little electric bull's-eye, and, as he flashed it about, we could see at a glance that the reports had not been exaggerated. Everything showed marks of a struggle. Some of the ornaments had been broken, and the coffin itself had been forced open.
"I have had things kept just as we found them," explained Andrews. Kennedy peered into the broken coffin long and attentively. With a little effort I, too, followed the course of the circle of light. The body was, as Andrews had said, in an excellent, indeed a perfect, state of preservation. There were, strange to say, no marks of decay.
"Strange, very strange," muttered Kennedy to himself.
"Could it have been some medical students, body-snatchers?" I asked musingly. "Or was it simply a piece of vandalism? I wonder if there could have been any jewels buried with him, as Shaughnessy said? That would make the motive plain robbery."
"There were no jewels," said Andrews, his mind not on the first part of my question, but watching Kennedy intently.
Craig had dropped on his knees on the damp, mildewed floor, and bringing his bull's-eye close to the stones, was examining some spots here and there.
"There could not have been any substitution?" I whispered, with my mind still on the broken coffin. "That would cover up the evidence of a poisoning, you know."
"No," replied Andrews positively, "although bodies can be obtained cheaply enough from a morgue, ostensibly for medical purposes. No, that is Phelps, all right."
"Well, then," I persisted, "body-snatchers, medical students?"
"Not likely for the same reason," he rejected.
We bent over closer to watch Kennedy. Apparently he had found a number of round, flat spots with little spatters beside them. He was carefully trying to scrape them up with as little of the surrounding mold as possible.
SUDDENLY, without warning, there was a noise outside, as if a
person were moving through the underbrush. It was fearsome in its
suddenness. Was it human or wraith? Kennedy darted to the door in
time to see a shadow glide silently away, lost in the darkness of
the fine old willows. Some one had approached the mausoleum for a
second time, not knowing we were there, and had escaped. Down the
road we could hear the purr of an almost silent motor.
"Somebody is trying to get in to conceal something here," muttered Kennedy, stifling his disappointment at not getting a closer view of the intruder.
"Then it was not a suicide," I exclaimed. "It was a murder!"
Craig shook his head sententiously. Evidently he was not prepared yet to talk.
With another look at the body in the broken casket he remarked: "To-morrow I want to call on Mrs. Phelps and Doctor Forden, and, if it is possible to find him, Dana Phelps. Meanwhile, Andrews, if you and Walter will stand guard here, there is an apparatus which I should like to get from my laboratory and set up here before it is too late."
It was far past the witching hour of midnight, when graveyards proverbially yawn, before Craig returned in the car. Nothing had happened in the meantime except those usual eery noises that one may hear in the country at night anywhere. Our visitor of the early evening seemed to have been scared away for good.
Inside the mausoleum, Kennedy set up a peculiar machine which he attached to the electric-light circuit in the street by a long wire which he ran loosely over the ground. Part of the apparatus consisted of an elongated box lined with lead, to which were several other attachments, the nature of which I did not understand, and a crank-handle.
"What's that?" asked Andrews curiously, as Craig set up a screen between the apparatus and the body.
"This is a calcium-tungsten screen," remarked Kennedy, adjusting now what I know to be a Crookes' tube on the other side of the body itself, so that the order was: the tube, the body, the screen, and the oblong box. Without a further word we continued to watch him.
At last, the apparatus adjusted apparently to his satisfaction, he brought out a jar of thick white liquid and a bottle of powder.
"Buttermilk and a couple of ounces of bismuth subcarbonate," he remarked, as he mixed some in a glass, and with a pump forced it down the throat of the body, now lying so that the abdomen was almost flat against the screen.
He turned a switch and the peculiar bluish effulgence, which always appears when a Crookes' tube is being used, burst forth, accompanied by the droning of his induction-coil and the welcome smell of ozone produced by the electrical discharge in the almost fetid air of the tomb. Meanwhile, he was gradually turning the handle of the crank attached to the oblong box. He seemed so engrossed in the delicateness of the operation that we did not question him, in fact did not move. For Andrews, at least, it was enough to know that he had succeeded in enlisting Kennedy's services.
Well along toward morning it was before Kennedy had concluded his tests, whatever they were, and had packed away his paraphernalia.
"I'm afraid it will take me two or three days to get at this evidence, even now," he remarked, impatient at even the limitations science put on his activity. We had started back for a quick run to the city and rest. "But, anyhow, it will give us a chance to do some investigating along other lines."
EARLY the next day, in spite of the late session of the night
before, Kennedy started me with him on a second visit to
Woodbine. This time he was armed with a letter of introduction
from Andrews to Mrs. Phelps.
She proved to be a young woman of most extraordinary grace and beauty, with a superb carriage such as only years of closest training under the best dancers of the world could give. There was a peculiar velvety softness about her flesh and skin, a witching stoop to her shoulders that was decidedly continental, and in her deep, soulful eyes a half-wistful look that was most alluring. In fact, she was as attractive a widow as the best Fifth Avenue dealers in mourning goods could have produced.
I knew that 'Ginette Phelps had been, both as dancer and wife, always the center of a group of actors, artists, and men of letters as well as of the world and affairs. The Phelpses had lived well, although they were not extremely wealthy, as fortunes go. When the blow fell, I could well fancy that the loss of his money had been most serious to young Montague, who had showered everything as lavishly as he was able upon his captivating bride.
Mrs. Phelps did not seem to be overjoyed at receiving us, yet made no open effort to refuse.
"How long ago did the coma first show itself?" asked Kennedy, after our introductions were completed. "Was your husband a man of neurotic tendency, as far as you could judge?"
"Oh, I couldn't say when it began," she answered, in a voice that was soft and musical and under perfect control. "The doctor would know that better. No, he was not neurotic, I think."
"Did you ever see Mr. Phelps take any drugs—not habitually, but just before this sleep came on?"
Kennedy was seeking his information in a manner and tone that would cause as little offense as possible. "Oh, no," she hastened. "No, never—absolutely."
"You called in Doctor Forden the last night?"
"Yes, he had been Montague's physician many years ago, you know."
"I see," remarked Kennedy, who was thrusting about aimlessly to get her off her guard. "By the way, you know there is a great deal of gossip about the almost perfect state of preservation of the body, Mrs. Phelps. I see it was not embalmed."
She bit her lip and looked at Kennedy sharply.
"Why, why do you and Mr. Andrews worry me? Can't you see Doctor Forden?"
"Why, why do you and Mr. Andrews worry
me? Can't you see Doctor Forden?"
In her annoyance I fancied that there was a surprising lack of
sorrow. She seemed preoccupied. I could not escape the feeling
that she was putting some obstacle in our way, or that from the
day of the discovery of the vandalism, some one had been making
an effort to keep the real facts concealed. Was she shielding
some one? It flashed over me that perhaps, after all, she had
submitted to the blackmail and had buried the money at the
appointed place. There seemed to be little use in pursuing the
inquiry, so we excused ourselves, much, I thought, to her
relief.
WE found Doctor Forden, who lived on the same street as the
Phelpses several squares away, most fortunately at home. Forden
was an extremely interesting man, as is, indeed, the rule with
physicians. I could not but fancy, however, that his hearty
assurance that he would be glad to talk freely on the case was
somewhat forced.
"You were sent for by Mrs. Phelps, that last night, I believe, while Phelps was still alive?" asked Kennedy.
"Yes. During the day it had been impossible to arouse him, and that night, when Mrs. Phelps and the nurse found him sinking even deeper into the comatose state, I was summoned again. He was beyond hope then. I did everything I could, but he died a few moments after I arrived."
"Did you try artificial respiration?" asked Kennedy.
"N-no," replied Forden. "I telephoned here for my respirator, but by the time it arrived at the house it was too late. Nothing had been omitted while he was still struggling with the spark of life. When that went out, what was the use?"
"You were his personal physician?"
"Yes."
"Had you ever noticed that he took any drug?"
Doctor Forden shot a quick glance at Kennedy. "Of course not. He was not a drug fiend."
Doctor Forden shot a quick glance at Kennedy.
"Of course not. He was not a drug fiend."
"I didn't mean that he was addicted to any drug. But had he taken anything lately, either of his own volition or with the advice or knowledge of anyone else?"
"Of course not."
"There's another strange thing I wish to ask your opinion about," pursued Kennedy, not to be rebuffed. "I have seen his body. It is in an excellent state of preservation, almost lifelike. And yet I understand, or at least it seems, that it was not embalmed."
"You'll have to ask the undertaker about that," answered the doctor brusquely.
It was evident that he was getting more and more constrained in his answers. Kennedy did not seem to mind it, but to me it seemed that he must be hiding something. Was there some secret which medical ethics kept locked in his breast? Kennedy had risen and excused himself.
The interviews had not resulted in much, I felt, yet Kennedy did not seem to care. Back in the city again, he buried himself in his laboratory for the rest of the day, most of the time in his dark room, where he was developing photographic plates or films, I did not know which.
DURING the afternoon Andrews dropped in for a few moments to
report that he had nothing to add to what had already developed.
He was not much impressed by the interviews.
"There's just one thing I want to speak about, though," he said at length, unburdening his mind. "That tomb and the swamp, too, ought to be watched. Last night showed me that there seems to be a regular nocturnal visitor and that we cannot depend on that town night watchman to scare him off. Yet if we watch up there, he will be warned and will lie low. How can we watch both places at once and yet remain hidden?"
Kennedy nodded approval of the suggestion. "I'll fix that," he replied, anxious to return to his photographic labors. "Meet me, both of you, on the road from the station at Woodbine, just as it is getting dusk." Without another word he disappeared into the dark room.
WE met him that night as he had requested. He had come up to
Woodbine in the baggage-car of the train with a powerful dog, for
all the world like a huge, gray wolf.
"Down, Schaef," he ordered, as the dog began to show an uncanny interest in me. "Let me introduce my new dog-detective," he chuckled. "She has a wonderful record as a police-dog."
We were making our way now through the thickening shadows of the town to the outskirts. "She's a German sheep-dog, a Schäferhund," he explained. "For my part, it is the English bloodhound in the open country and the sheep-dog in the city and the suburbs."
Schaef seemed to have many of the characteristics of the wild, prehistoric animal, among them the full, upright ears of the wild dog which are such a great help to it. She was a fine, alert, upstanding dog, hardy, fierce, and literally untiring, of a tawny light brown like a lioness, about the same size and somewhat of the type of the smooth-coated collie, broad of chest and with a full brush of tail.
Untamed though she seemed, she was perfectly under Kennedy's control, and rendered him absolute and unreasoning obedience.
At the cemetery we established a strict watch about the Phelps mausoleum and the swamp which lay across the road, not a difficult thing to do as far as concealment went, owing to the foliage. Still, for the same reason, it was hard to cover the whole ground. In the shadow of a thicket we waited. Now and then we could hear Schaef scouting about in the underbrush, crouching and hiding, watching and guarding.
As the hours of waiting in the heavily laden night air wore on, I wondered whether our vigil in this weird place would be rewarded. The soughing of the night wind in the evergreens, mournful at the best, was doubly so now. Hour after hour we waited patiently.
AT last there was a slight noise from the direction opposite
the mausoleum and toward the swamp next to the cemetery.
Kennedy reached out and drew us back into the shadow deeper. "Some one is prowling about, approaching the mausoleum on that side, I think," he whispered.
Instantly there recurred to me the thought I had had earlier in the day that perhaps, after all, the five thousand dollars of hush money, for whatever purpose it might be extorted, had been buried in the swamp by Mrs. Phelps in her anxiety. Had that been what she was concealing? Perhaps the blackmailer had come to reconnoiter, and, if the money was there, to take it away.
Schaef, who had been near us, was sniffing eagerly. From our hiding-place we could just see her. She had heard the sounds, too, even before we had, and for an instant stood with every muscle tense.
Then, like an arrow, she darted into the underbrush. An instant later, the sharp crack of a revolver rang out. Schaef kept right on, never stopping a second, except, perhaps, for surprise.
"Crack!" almost in her face came a second spit of fire in the darkness, and a bullet crashed through the leaves and buried itself in a tree with a ping. The intruder's marksmanship was poor, but the dog paid no attention to it.
"One of the few animals that show no fear of gun-fire," muttered Kennedy, in undisguised admiration.
"Gr-r-r-r," we heard from the police-dog.
"She has made a leap at the hand that holds the gun," cried Kennedy, now rising and moving rapidly in the same direction. "She has been taught that a man once badly bitten in the hand is nearly out of the fight."
We followed, too. As we approached we were just in time to see Schaef running in and out between the legs of a man who had heard us approach and was hastily making tracks for the road. As he tripped, she lunged for his back.
Kennedy blew shrilly on a police whistle. Reluctantly, Schaef let go. One could see that with all her canine instinct she wanted to "get" that man. Her jaws were open, as, with longing eyes, she stood over the prostrate form in the grass. The whistle was a signal, and she had been taught to obey unquestioningly.
"Don't move until we get to you, or you are a dead man," shouted Kennedy, pulling an automatic as he ran. "Are you hurt?"
There was no answer, but as we approached, the man moved, ever so little, through curiosity to see his pursuers.
Schaef shot forward. Again the whistle sounded and she dropped back. We bent over to seize him as Kennedy secured the dog.
"She's a devil," ground out the prone figure on the grass.
"Dana Phelps!" exclaimed Andrews, as the man turned his face toward us. "What are you doing, mixed up in this?"
SUDDENLY there was a movement in the rear, toward the
mausoleum itself. We turned, but it was too late. Two dark
figures slunk through the gloom, bearing something between them.
Kennedy slipped the leash off Schaef and she shot out like an
unchained bolt of lightning.
There was the whir of a high-powered machine which must have sneaked up with the muffler on during the excitement. They had taken a desperate chance and had succeeded. They were gone!
Still holding Dana Phelps between us, we hurried toward the tomb and entered. While our attention had been diverted in the direction of the swamp, the body of Montague Phelps had been stolen.
Dana Phelps was still deliberately brushing off his clothes. Had he been in league with them, executing a flank movement to divert our attention? Or had it all been pure chance?
"Well?" demanded Andrews.
"Well?" replied Dana.
Kennedy said nothing, and I felt that, with our capture, the mystery seemed to have deepened rather than cleared.
As Andrews and Phelps faced each other, I noticed that the latter was now and then endeavoring to cover his wrist, where the dog had torn his coat sleeve.
"Are you hurt badly?" inquired Kennedy.
Dana said nothing, but backed away. Kennedy advanced, insisting on looking at the wounds. As he looked he disclosed a semicircle of marks.
"Not a dog bite," he whispered, turning to me and fumbling in his pocket. "Besides, those marks are a couple of days old. They have scabs on them."
He had pulled out a pencil and a piece of paper, and, unknown to Phelps, was writing in the darkness. I leaned over. Near the point, in the tube through which the point for writing was, protruded a small accumulator and tiny electric lamp which threw a little disk of light, so small that it could be hidden by the hand, yet quite sufficient to guide Craig in moving the point of his pencil for the proper formation of whatever he was recording on the surface of the paper.
"An electric-light pencil," he remarked laconically, in an undertone.
"Who were the others?" demanded Andrews of Dana.
There was a pause as though he were debating whether or not to answer at all. "I don't know," he said at length. "I wish I did."
"You don't know?" queried Andrews, with incredulity.
"No. I say I wish I did know. You and your dog interrupted me just as I was about to find out, too."
We looked at each other in amazement. Andrews was frankly skeptical of the coolness of the young man. Kennedy said nothing for some moments.
"I see you don't want to talk," he put in shortly.
"Nothing to talk about," grunted Dana, in disgust.
"Then why are you here?"
"Nothing but conjecture. No facts, only suspicions," said Dana, half to himself.
"You expect us to believe that?" insinuated Andrews.
"I can't help what you believe. That is the fact."
"And you were not with them?"
"No."
"You'll be within call, if we let you go now, any time that we want you?" interrupted Kennedy, much to the surprise of Andrews.
"I shall stay in Woodbine as long as there is any hope of clearing up this case. If you want me, I suppose I shall have to stay anyhow, even if there is a clue somewhere else."
"I'll take your word for it," offered Kennedy. "I'll give it."
I must say that I rather liked the young chap, although I could make nothing out of him.
AS Dana Phelps disappeared down the road, Andrews turned to
Kennedy. "What did you do that for?" he asked, half
critically.
"Because we can watch him, anyway," answered Craig, with a significant glance at the now empty casket. "Have him shadowed, Andrews. It may lead to something and it may not. But in any case don't let him get out of reach."
"Here we are in a worse mystery than ever," grumbled Andrews. "We have caught a prisoner, but the body is gone, and we can't even show that he was an accomplice."
"What were you writing?" I asked Craig, endeavoring to change the subject to one more promising.
"Just copying the peculiar shape of those marks on Phelps' arm. Perhaps we can improve on the finger-print method of identification. Those were the marks of human teeth."
He was glancing casually at his sketch as he displayed it to us. I wondered whether he really expected to obtain proof of the identity of at least one of the ghouls by the tooth-marks.
"It shows eight teeth, one of them decayed," he remarked. "By the way, there's no use watching here any longer. I have some more work to do in the laboratory which will keep me another day. Tomorrow night I shall be ready. Andrews, in the mean time I leave the shadowing of Dana to you, and with the help of Jameson I want you to arrange to have all those connected with the case at my laboratory tomorrow night without fail."
ANDREWS and I had to do some clever scheming to bring pressure
to bear on the various persons interested to insure their
attendance, now that Craig was ready to act. Of course there was
no difficulty in getting Dana Phelps. Andrews's shadows reported
nothing in his actions of the following day that indicated
anything. Mrs. Phelps came down to town by train and Doctor
Forden motored in. Andrews even took the precaution to secure
Shaughnessy and the trained nurse, Miss Tracy, who had been with
Montague Phelps during his illness but had not contributed
anything toward untangling the case. Andrews and myself completed
the little audience.
We found Kennedy heating a large mass of some composition of rubber, such as dentists use in taking impressions of the teeth.
"I shall be ready in a moment," he excused himself, still bending over his Bunsen flame. "By the way, Mr. Phelps, if you will permit me."
He had detached a wad of the softened rubber. Phelps, taken by surprise, allowed him to make an impression of his teeth, almost before he realized what Kennedy was doing. The precedent set, so to speak, Kennedy approached Doctor Forden. He demurred but finally consented. Mrs. Phelps followed, then the nurse, and even Shaughnessy.
With a quick glance at each impression, Kennedy laid them aside to harden.
"I am ready to begin," he remarked at length, turning to a peculiar looking instrument, something like three telescopes pointing at a center in which was a series of glass prisms.
"These five senses of ours are pretty dull detectives sometimes," Kennedy began. "But I find that when we are able to call in outside aid we usually find that there are no more mysteries."
He placed something in a test-tube in line before one of the barrels of the telescopes, near a brilliant electric light.
"What do you see, Walter?" he asked, indicating an eyepiece.
I looked. "A series of lines," I replied. "What is it?"
"That," he explained, "is a spectroscope, and those are the lines of the absorption spectrum. Each of those lines, by its presence, denotes a different substance. Now, on the pavement of the Phelps mausoleum I found, you will recall, some roundish spots. I have made a very diluted solution of them which is placed in this tube.
"The applicability of the spectroscope to the differentiation of various substances is too well known to need explanation. Its value lies in the exact nature of the evidence furnished. Even the very dilute solution which I have been able to make of the material scraped from those spots gives characteristic absorption bands between the D and E lines, as they are called. Their wavelengths are between 5774 and 5390. It is such a distinct absorption spectrum that it is possible to determine with certainty that the fluid actually contains a certain substance, even though the microscope might fail to give sure proof. Blood —human blood—that was what those stains were."
He paused. "The spectra of the blood pigments," he added, "of the extremely minute quantities of blood and the decomposition products of hemoglobin in the blood are here infallibly shown, varying very distinctly with the chemical changes which the pigments may undergo."
Whose blood was it? I asked myself. Was it of some one who had visited the tomb, who was surprised there or surprised some one else there? I was hardly ready for Kennedy's quick remark.
"There were two kinds of blood there. One was contained in the spots on the floor all about the mausoleum. There are marks on the arm of Dana Phelps which he probably might say were made by the teeth of my police-dog, Schaef. They are human tooth-marks, however. He was bitten by some one in a struggle. It was his blood on the floor of the mausoleum. Whose were the teeth?"
Kennedy fingered the now set rubber impressions, then resumed: "Before I answer that question, what else does the spectroscope show? I found some spots near the coffin, which has been broken open by a heavy object. It had slipped and had injured the body of Montague Phelps. From the injury some drops had oozed. My spectroscope tells me that that, too, is blood. The blood and other muscular and nervous fluids of the body had remained in an aqueous condition instead of becoming pectous. That is a remarkable circumstance."
It flashed over me what Kennedy had been driving at in his inquiry regarding embalming. If the poisons of the embalming fluid had not been injected, he had now clear proof regarding anything his spectroscope discovered.
"I had expected to find a poison, perhaps an alkaloid," he continued slowly, as he outlined his discoveries by the use of one of the most fascinating branches of modern science, spectroscopy. "In cases of poisoning by these substances, the spectroscope often has obvious advantages over chemical methods, for minute amounts will produce a well-defined spectrum. The spectroscope 'spots' the substance, to use a police idiom, the moment the case is turned over to it. There was no poison there." He had raised his voice to emphasize the startling revelation. "Instead, I found an extraordinary amount of the substance and products of glycogen. The liver, where this substance is stored, is literally surcharged in the body of Phelps."
He had started his moving-picture machine.
"Here I have one of the latest developments in the moving-picture art," he resumed, "an X-ray moving picture, a feat which was until recently visionary, a science now in its infancy, bearing the formidable names of bioroentgenography, or kinematoradiography."
Kennedy was holding his little audience breathless as he proceeded. I fancied I could see Anginette Phelps give a little shudder at the prospect of looking into the very interior of a human body. But she was pale with the fascination of it. Neither Forden nor the nurse looked to the right or to the left. Dana Phelps was open-eyed with wonder.
"In one X-ray photograph, or even in several," continued Kennedy, "it is difficult to discover slight motions. Not so in a moving picture. For instance, here I have a picture which will show you a living body in all its moving details."
On the screen before us was projected a huge shadowgraph of a chest and abdomen. We could see the vertebrae of the spinal column, the ribs, and the various organs.
"It is difficult to get a series of photographs directly from a fluorescent screen," Kennedy went on. "I overcome the difficulty by having lenses of sufficient rapidity to photograph even faint images on that screen. It is better than the so-called serial method, by which a number of separate X-ray pictures are taken and then pieced together and re-photographed to make the film. I can focus the X-rays first on the screen by means of a special quartz objective which I have devised. Then I take the pictures.
"Here, you see, are the lungs in slow or rapid respiration. There is the rhythmically beating heart, distinctly pulsating in perfect outline. There is the liver, moving up and down with the diaphragm, the intestines, and the stomach. You can see the bones moving with the limbs, as well as the inner visceral life. All that is hidden to the eye by the flesh is now made visible in striking manner."
NEVER have I seen an audience at the "movies" so thrilled as
we were now, as Kennedy swayed our interest at his will. I had
been dividing my attention between Kennedy and the extraordinary
beauty of the famous Russian dancer. I forgot Anginette Phelps
entirely.
Kennedy placed another film in the holder.
"You are now looking into the body of Montague Phelps," he announced suddenly.
We leaned forward eagerly. Mrs. Phelps gave a half-suppressed gasp. What was the secret hidden in it?
There was the stomach, a curved sack something like a bagpipe or a badly made boot, with a tiny canal at the toe connecting it with the small intestine. There were the heart and lungs.
"I have rendered the stomach visible," resumed Kennedy, "made it 'metallic,' so to speak, by injecting a solution of bismuth in buttermilk, the usual method, by which it becomes more impervious to the X-rays and hence darker in the skiagraph. I took these pictures not at the rate of fourteen or so a second, like the others, but at intervals of a few seconds. I did that so that, when I run them off, I get a sort of compressed moving picture. What you see in a short space of time actually took much longer to occur. I could have either kind of picture, but I prefer the latter.
"For, you will notice that there is movement here—of the heart, of the lungs, of the stomach—faint, imperceptible under ordinary circumstances, but nevertheless, movement."
He was pointing at the lungs. "A single peristaltic contraction takes place normally in a very few seconds. Here it takes minutes. And the stomach. Notice what the bismuth mixture shows. There is a very slow series of regular wave-contractions from the fundus to the pylorus. Ordinarily one wave takes ten seconds to traverse it; here it is so slow as almost to be unnoticed."
What was the implication of his startling, almost gruesome, discovery? I saw it clearly, yet hung on his words, afraid to admit even to myself the logical interpretation of what I saw.
"Reconstruct the case," continued Craig excitedly. "Mr. Phelps, always a bon vivant and now so situated by marriage that he must be so, comes back to America to find his personal fortune—gone.
"What was left? He did as many have done. He took out a new large policy on his life. How was he to profit by it? Others have committed suicide, have died to win. Cases are common now where men have ended their lives under such circumstances by swallowing bichloride-of-mercury tablets, a favorite method, it seems, lately.
"But Phelps did not want to die to win. Life was too sweet to him. He had another scheme." Kennedy dropped his voice.
"One of the most fascinating problems in speculation as to the future of the race under the influence of science is that of suspended animation. The usual attitude is one of reserve or skepticism. There is no necessity for it. Records exist of cases where vital functions have been practically suspended, with no food and little air. Every day science is getting closer to the control of metabolism. In the trance the body functions are so slowed as to simulate death. You have heard of the Indian fakirs who bury themselves alive and are dug up days later? You have doubted it. But there is nothing improbable in it.
"Experiments have been made with toads which have been imprisoned in porous rock where they could get the necessary air. They have lived for months in a stupor. In impervious rock they have died. Frozen fish can revive; bears and other animals hibernate. There are all gradations from ordinary sleep to the torpor of death. Science can slow down almost to a standstill the vital processes so that excretions disappear and respiration and heart-beat are almost nil.
"What the Indian fakir does in a cataleptic condition may be duplicated. It is not incredible that they may possess some vegetable extract by which they perform their as yet unexplained feats of prolonged living burial. For, if an animal free from disease is subjected to the action of some chemical and physical agencies which have the property of reducing to the extreme limit the motor forces and nervous stimulus, the body of even a warm-blooded animal may be brought down to a condition so closely resembling death that the most careful examination may fail to detect any signs of life. The heart will continue working regularly at low tension, supplying muscles and other parts with sufficient blood to sustain molecular life, and the stomach would naturally react to artificial stimulus. At any time before decomposition of tissue has set in, the heart might be made to resume its work and life come back.
"Phelps had traveled extensively. In Siberia he must undoubtedly have heard of the Buriats, a tribe of natives who hibernate, almost like the animals, during the winters, succumbing to a long sleep known as the 'leshka.' He must have heard of the experiments of Professor Bakhmetieff, who studied the Buriats and found that they subsisted on foods rich in glycogen, a substance in the liver which science has discovered makes possible life during suspended animation. He must have heard of 'anabiose,' as the famous Russian calls it, by which consciousness can be totally removed and respiration and digestion cease almost completely."
"But—the body—is gone!" some one interrupted. I turned. It was Dana Phelps, now leaning forward in wide-eyed excitement.
"Yes," exclaimed Craig. "Time was passing rapidly. The insurance had not been paid. He had expected to be revived and to disappear with Anginette Phelps long before this. Should the confederates of Phelps wait? They did not dare. To wait longer might be to sacrifice him, if indeed they had not taken a long chance already. Besides, you yourself had your suspicions and had written the insurance company hinting at murder."
Dana nodded, involuntarily confessing.
"You were watching them, as well as the insurance investigator, Mr. Andrews. It was an awful dilemma. What was to be done? He must be resuscitated at any risk.
"Ah—an idea! Rifle the grave—that was the way to solve it. That would still leave it possible to collect the insurance, too. The blackmail letter about the five thousand dollars was only a blind, to lay on the mythical Black Hand the blame for the desecration. Brought into light, humidity, and warmth, the body would recover consciousness and the life-functions resume their normal state after the anabiotic coma into which Phelps had drugged himself.
"But the very first night the supposed ghouls were discovered. Dana Phelps, already suspicious regarding the death of his brother, wondering at the lack of sentiment which Mrs. Phelps showed, since she felt that her husband was not really dead—Dana was there. His suspicions were confirmed, he thought. Montague had been, in reality, murdered, and his murderers were now making away with the evidence. He fought with the ghouls, yet apparently, in the darkness, he did not discover their identity. The struggle was bitter, but they were two to one. Dana was bitten by one of them. Here are the marks of teeth—teeth—of a woman."
Anginette Phelps was sobbing convulsively. She had risen and was facing Doctor Forden with outstretched hands.
"Tell them!" she cried wildly.
Forden seemed to have maintained his composure only by a superhuman effort.
"The—body is—at my office," he said, as we faced him with deathlike stillness. "Phelps had told us to get him within ten days. We did get him, finally. Gentlemen, you, who were seeking murderers, are, in effect, murderers. You kept us away two days too long. It was too late. We could not revive him. Phelps is really dead!"
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.