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Roy Glashan's Library
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Dime Mystery Magazine, March 1934, with "Black Laughter"
Jean Armstrong, alone and terrified in the big house, where she had once known happiness and love, fights for sanity—as the echo of black, inhuman laughter dins through dark passage-ways of deserted rooms.
JEAN ARMSTRONG woke with a start. There was no sound in the darkness of her bedchamber, nothing moved against the moon-painted rectangle of her window. But Jean was in a cold sweat of fear, and terror pounded in her temples.
"Again!" she whispered with icy lips. "Please God. Not again." She lay still, rigid in the paralysis of nightmare. The silence of the old house weighed on her like a pall, but within it, within her tightened brain, she could still hear the dying reverberations of the dream-heard gong that twice before had swept her out of sleep.
Last night, and the night before, that deep-toned bell had sounded in her dreams—a welling vibration just above the lower threshold of hearing—a bass note somehow infinitely menacing. And each morning had brought... Jean whimpered, way back in her throat.
Far off, the long-drawn, melancholy wail of a locomotive whistle sounded. Jean forced her attention to it.
"That's the midnight freight at Hopeton Junction. Bill Sims is the engineer on it, he lives down in the village and his father is the postmaster there." The homely thought gave her a hold on reality, broke the spell binding her to immobility. Her slim hand moved along the blanket, slid under her pillow, felt the coldness of the little pearl-handled .22 hidden there. Her last night's resolution came back, her braggart boast to Rand Lane. She would not wait till morning this time.
Gripping the gun, she pushed back the covers, swung silk-pajamaed legs from the bed and slipped tiny feet into frivolous feather-trimmed mules. She shivered a little in the crisp cold and pulled a quilted robe around her. Then she was moving across the carpeted floor.
With her hand on the door knob she hesitated. Should she call for help? She shrugged. The servants sleeping above; Elmer Thomas, toothless and decrepit; his wife Prudence, sour-faced and hysterical; they would be a hindrance in any emergency, not a help. Why hadn't she let Rand send out a guard from the village, as he had proposed? Too late now. The knob rattled, hinges creaked, and she was out in the hall.
The musty, warm odor of the ancient house folded around her, comforting for a moment. But shadows lay in pools on the staircase she must descend, shadows that might hide—almost anything. Jean turned to go back, time enough when daylight came to see if the bell's prophecy had been fulfilled. A vision of Rand's face rose before her, smiling that taunting, thin-lipped smile of his.
"Just as I thought," he would say slowly. "You haven't the courage. You are afraid."
She was afraid, deathly afraid of what she might find. But she dare not let Lane know it. For five years now, since her father's death, he had tried to break her spirit, to dominate her. Trustee under the will, he had control of her estate and managed it to suit himself. But he had never succeeded in controlling her, in managing her. He had wanted her to go to New York, to go abroad, had insisted on it. Because he had insisted she had refused, as she had refused everything he had ever asked. Instinctively she knew that if she once yielded to him he would gain an ascendency she could never again throw off. It had been hard, fighting alone. But it was almost over now—in three months she would reach her twenty-third birthday and after that she need never see Rand Lane again.
There was nothing, Jean told herself, on the stairs, in the foyer below, that could harm her. She knew every inch of the way, every last inch of this house as only one can know a house who has been born within its walls. She turned again and went down the steps, her slippers making little slapping noises on each tread.
The girl reached the big entrance door at last. Nothing had happened, nothing had struck at her from the midnight dimness that was somehow unfamiliar to her taut nerves. She was at the door and all that was left to do was to turn the key in the lock and draw the two strong bolts. All? How many thousands of times had she done those simple, mechanical things? But now—Jean scraped the very bottom of her reservoir of courage before she could force her hand to perform them.
It was done. Clutching the pearl-handled revolver Jean brought her ear to the panel and listened. Silence. She opened the inside door, pushed against the heavy storm door. A soft pressure resisted her thrust. Jean whimpered again, color drained from her small-featured face and an electric tingling rippled under the clinging, short-cap of brown curls that made her so like a pert boy. It was there, the thing she feared.
But was it? Snow had fallen during the evening. Only an hour's light fall, but perhaps it had drifted against the door. Perhaps it was that which held it with that light, yielding resistance. Perhaps—she had to know, had to see! She thrust again, and something slithered aside as the door-edge scraped past it. A shapeless bundle, humped and motionless. Not drifted snow! The bell in her dream had fulfilled its threat once again.
JEAN'S terror-widened eyes flicked quickly away from the
dark, still heap, swept across the expanse of snowy lawn,
glimmering bluely under the moon, probed into the black band of
tall pine woods thirty feet beyond. The edging of white on the
upper branches of the giant evergreens emphasized their brooding
gloom. There was no movement there—not even a swaying of
the dark foliage in a nonexistent breeze. Standing motionless in
the doorway, the girl's glance came back across the unmarred,
soft sheet. Unmarred! There was not the faintest footprint on the
thin powdering of fragile crystals, not the least sign that
anyone had passed across it since the snowfall had stopped. Yet
there was no snow on the thing that lay so still, so dreadfully
still, here before her. No snow on the tiling that had not been
there when last she had looked across the whitened lawn.
Jean dared to look more closely at it. The moon's tender luminance softened the lines of the dead face that gazed at her with sightless eyes, made it less horrible than the others had been in the bright morning glare. But there was the same look of startled fear on it, there were the same blackened, congested lips with the tip of red tongue protruding between them. And on the bared throat, there were the same dark bruises left by strangling fingers, bruises that were too far apart to have been made by her small digits, by Elmer's or his sour-faced wife. If it had not been for that circumstance...
A metallic flash streaked through midair. Spang! A knife, deep-driven, quivered in the doorpost right beside Jean's head. Spang! Another knife trembled in the other post. From the woods cackling, eerie laughter shuddered. Spang! A third blade shivered in the sill, just at her feet. Jean's mouth opened in a soundless scream—and she twisted to a noise behind her, to a bony clutch on her arm!
"Miss Jean! Miss Jean! What are you doing here?" Elmer Thomas's querulous, high-pitched voice—Elmer's skull-like, cadaverous face.
"Look out! Someone...."
Wheee, chunk! A fourth knife whizzed past Jean's ear, thudded into Elmer's throat. Blood gushed. The old man's face was reproachful as he slid down out of her sight.
Jean got control of her limbs, slammed shut the storm door. Thud! A knife-point snicked through the center panel. Frantically Jean pushed shut the inside door. Wood-muffled, crazy laughter sounded once more.
Jean looked down at the contorted, gory visage of the old man who had served her father, had known the mother she did not remember. A special provision in Dad's will had kept Elmer and his wife here when Lane's cut in her allowance had sent away the other servants, had kept Elmer here—for this! No use to bend to him, no one could have survived that awful gash.
Hysteria tore at the girl's throat—grimaced her lips. A laugh started inside her, a mad laugh she fought to stifle. Her head went back, uncontrollably, and her gaze focussed on a framed picture high on the wall, a picture lit by the moon's rays coming through the fanlight over the door. Her father's face looked calmly down at her, strong-lined, indomitable. His eyes challenged her. His firm mouth, under the grizzled mustache that always flavored his kisses with tobacco smell, seemed to move, seemed to say: "Steady, Jean-girl. Steady." She gulped the laugh down.
"Elmer! Elmer!" A tenuous voice quavered from the third floor. "Where are you? Is anything wrong? I heard ..." Bare feet thudded. Prudence was coming down. She must not—must not see this, unprepared.
"Wait!" Jean forced steadiness into her voice. "Wait. Don't come down here. I'm coming up to you." She fumbled the bolts back into their sockets, got to the stairs, started up them. Her limbs dragged as if through a heavy, viscous fluid. She had to pull herself up by the bannister, dark-polished by decades of use. She had to pull herself up, hand over hand. "Wait, Prudence. It's Jean. I'm coming."
PALE, shaken, Jean tried to shut her ears to the old woman's moaning as she twirled the magneto handle of the phone. Through the parlor door lamplight folded over the kneeling woman, scrawny in her drab flannel nightgown, as she swayed from the waist in a litany of mourning and her withered hands fluttered above the lifeless husband, whose scrawny neck had received the knife meant for his mistress.
Jean frowned. Had the knife really been meant for her? Those flashing blades had come with too much dexterity, too much skill, for the thrower to have missed the target she had made. Only Elmer's neck and head could have showed beyond her, yet the dagger that had done for him had gone unswervingly to the vital point, clearing her own ear by a hair's breadth.
A sleepy voice in the receiver said; "Number, please." The operator at Hopeton. Tommy Slade.
"Get me Sheriff Jenkins. Quickly!"
Jean could hear the boy jerk awake. "Right, Miss Armstrong." Clickings and a burr. "Somethin'—somethin' wrong again, Miss?"
"Yes, Tommy." Strange that her voice could be so steady, so calm, when all inside her was boiling, maddening fright. "Oh hurry, hurry!"
"I'm ring—Here he is."
"Hello." She could visualize the sheriff's gaunt, weathered face, deep-sunk eyes blinking drowsily. "Whut is it?"
"Jean Armstrong, Sheriff...."
"Godfrey mighty, thar ain't—"
"Another. Yes! And Elmer's been killed. Come quickly, please. But be careful. Someone's in the pines—a knife-thrower. He murdered Elmer. Oh, be careful!"
"Be there in twenty minutes." Something reassuring in the crisp, purposeful phrase. "Keep away from the windows an' keep yer doors locked. I'll toot twice."
"No fear..." But a tinkle told her that the sheriff had hung up.
Keep away from the windows, he had said. But Jean could not. She had to look, had to make sure she did not know the dead man. The other two had been strangers, unknown to her, unknown to any in the countryside. Tramps, apparently, unshaven, unwashed. But this one—?
JEAN picked up a round-globed lamp from the parlor table,
carried it out into the hall. "Prudence, hadn't you better go up
and rest till the sheriff comes?" she asked gently. But the
bereaved woman paid not the slightest attention to her as she
swayed and moaned endlessly. The girl set the lamp down under the
antlered hat-rack, went back into the parlor, pulling velour
portières across between her and the light. Now she would
not be silhouetted against the pane, it would take keen eyes to
see her there at all. From the bay window she would be able to
see the patch of ground where—it—lay. Safely, she
hoped.
The snow was still unmarked. Jean craned to get the body within view. Light enough—why—it—it wasn't there!
Nothing was there, except a dark, irregular oval where the body had been. The girl gasped, and fear laid its frigid fingers on her once again. The body had vanished—and there was nothing to show how it had gone. She reeled, grasped the sill with shaking fingers, stared out again, quivering. It wasn't...
A shriek knifed through the curtains from the foyer! Another! It twisted the girl around, pulled her through the heavy curtains. Prudence was on her feet, backed against the door. Her jaw chattered—yammering—and her bleared eyes started from their sunken sockets. One pipe-stem arm was upraised—one wrinkled finger pointed at the wall above the stairs.
"What is it? Oh what is it, Prudence?"
The woman's mouth worked, rasped sound. "Look. The picture. Look."
Jean whirled. Her father's picture—a knife handle stuck out from it, still trembling, its point buried in the portrait's breast. "Oh-h-h!" Indignation swept through her for an instant—blotted other emotion. Then the full impact of the happening smashed her. He was in the house—the killer was in the house! Through locked doors—locked windows—he had gotten in! As if in confirmation, cackling, mad laughter floated down to her from where the stairs lifted into darkness.
And in answer—in terrible answer—cackling, mad laughter came from behind her. From—she whirled to it, whitening—from Prudence, from a gibbering, red-eyed Prudence who stared at her insanely and laughed, and laughed, and laughed. "Oh God!" The exclamation wrenched from Jean was a prayer. "Oh God help me." She was alone now, alone with a corpse, alone with an insane woman and a killer. A mad killer who threw knives with unerring aim, who choked men to death and wafted them through the air to lie across her door, who spirited them away without trace and who had come through solid walls, locked doors, to drive her insane too.
The floor rocked under her feet and the walls danced dizzily as nausea retched her. She raised hands to throbbing temples and felt coldness of metal against her forehead. Through all the terror of the night she had unconsciously kept the little pistol clutched tightly in her small fist, the pistol Dad had given her before he—went away. Again she heard his deep, calm voice; "Steady, Jean-girl. Steady," just as it used to sound when, on their trips in the woods, something untoward occurred and she felt control slipping, woman-like. Just as he had whispered it when, tear-eyed, she had watched death's pallor stealing over his dear face. It drove back the gray reaching fingers of madness from her brain, brought sanity back to her. Sanity and red hot fury—unreasoning anger. She leaped for the stairs, reckless of danger, reckless of anything save the desire, the clamor, to kill!
She reached the first landing, crouched, and glared down the unlit hall. In the blackness something blacker moved, something scraped, fumbling along the wall. Her pearl-handled weapon spat flame, spat again. She fanned lead across the narrowness of the corridor, could miss nothing that lurked down there.
Could not miss? A door opened and shut, making sharp noise. The door of her father's room, locked since his death! And through the momentary phosphorescent rectangle of its opening, a hunched black figure had flitted. Uncanny, mocking laughter drifted to her.
The berserk lust to kill was still on Jean. In the pocket of her robe were extra cartridges. How she blessed her foresight now! Swiftly, she broke and reloaded her gun. Then she was at the door that had opened, was flinging it wide, gun cocked and ready. Moonlight flooded the chamber, searched out every corner of it, painted with its bluish silver the great four-poster bed, the Morris chair, the brick, book-shelf bordered fireplace. And no one was there! Jean's eyes flicked to the window—it was nailed shut as it had been for almost five years. She dropped to her knees and looked under the bed. Nothing! There was no other hiding place—
Midnight terror closed about the girl again, dark, unpenetrable. The very light bathing this well-loved room seemed the sourceless cold luminescence of nightmare horror...
Arrrnk! An auto horn sounded from outside. Arrrnk! A flivver horn. Sheriff Jenkins had arrived. A sob tore through the constricted muscles of Jean's throat. Warmth crept back into her limbs and she pulled herself slowly erect. Pounding came to her from the door below, and muffled shouting. "Open up! Open up!"
THE gaunt peace-officer scratched the gray stubble of his
chin. "Ill be switched," he drawled. "Ef I kin make it out. Are
ycr sure it happened thet away?"
"Does all this look as if I have been dreaming?" Jean Armstrong gestured wearily.
Prudence Thomas was no longer laughing. She hunched in a chair, a gray bundle of misery, and there was no light of reason in her old eyes that stared vacantly into space. Elmer's age-shrunk form lay on the floor, stiffening now to a waxen mummy, the life-blood that had poured from his gashed throat a drying pool. From John Armstrong's portrait on the wall the black handle of a knife projected, casting a long shadow across the determined face so like her own. "Or do you think I did it myself?"
Jenkins looked at her speculatively from under his bushy eyebrows. "Wall, I mought think even thet ef it warn't fer two things."
"What are they?"
"Yer wouldn't stick a knife in ycr old man's pitcher. All Hopeton county knows as how yer loved him ter much fer thet, keepin' his room jest like it was an' all. An' my depities did find tracks in the pines. Ter be sure they was scuffed up an' might er been made by anyone, but yer couldn't hev gotten out thar an' back without leavin' tracks in the snow."
The girl argued perversely, "Someone did—why not I? Someone brought that body here and took it away without leaving tracks, and that somebody got into the house. He's here now, I'm sure he is." Her voice rose on that, broke on a shrill note of panic.
"Now, now, don't yer go gettin' all worked up again. Ef thar's anybody here Silas an' Pete'll find him."
Jean became conscious of the thump of boots overhead, saw a short, dark figure pass across the stair-head, pause for a moment to look down. "We war out thar fer ten minutes 'fore I honked, sarchin' the woods," the sheriff continued. "Yer saw him durin' thet time, yer say, an' he couldn't hev got away without my spottin' him. We'll find him."
"I couldn't find him in father's room and I saw him go into it." The girl's hands twisted, one within the other. "There's something unreal about him, something—diabolical!" Her eyes were dark pools of terror. "He isn't here—and he is here. I can feel him now, staring at me!"
The sheriff laid a gnarled hand on her shoulder, its touch light for all its hugeness. "Now, don't yer go off on thet track. Them knives is real enough, an' so is the one thet threw them. We'll git him. Don't yer be afraid, we'll git him."
"Oh, I hope so. I hope you get him before anything more happens." She shuddered. "Before anyone else is killed."
The man of the law touched the forty-eight in his belt, and smiled grimly. "Thar won't be any more killin' hereabouts, less'n I do it." He eyed the flickering kerosene lamp. "One thing puzzles me, Miss Armstrong, I know yer Dad had a Delco system here, how come yer ain't usin' the 'lectric lights 'stead o' them lamps?"
Palpably, Jean thought, he was trying to change the subject, trying to talk normalcy back to her. She answered him, speaking low: "My allowance is just enough for my food and absolutely necessary clothing. These things were bought before Dad passed away. The electric generator went out of order and I didn't have enough money to get it repaired."
"Everyone thought Jack Armstrong left yer well fixed."
"Oh, he did. There must be at least two hundred thousand in bonds and investments, beside this house and the land. But although father and I were pals, he had a queer idea that a girl could not manage money properly. Something mother did before I was born had to do with that. So he left the estate in trust and I do not get control until my twenty-third birthday. My trustee has the right to give me as much or as little as he chooses till then."
"Hmmm. President Rand Lane o' the Hopeton National Bank's yer trustee, ain't he?"
"Yes."
"Knew Lane was a tight-fisted note-shaver but I'll be durned ef I kin see why he's so miserly with yer. Arter all, it's yer money."
"He wanted me to leave here, I refused, and he cannot brook opposition."
JENKINS' eyes were suddenly bleak, and a little muscle
twitched in his weathered cheek. "Wanted yer to go away, eh," he
said slowly, and there was a rumble deep in his chest.
"Yes. All these years he's tried to..." She stopped as two tight-faced young men appeared at the head of the stairs, silver stars glittering on their leather mackinaws and blued automatics in their capable hands.
"Ain't ary one up here, Hen," the taller twanged nasally. "We've done sarched every inch o' the two floors."
That was Peter Lanning. His loose-fitting clothing made his six feet gawky, but there was strength in the set of his jaw, dependability in the level gaze of his eyes. The other, Silas Paynton, squat, long-armed, swarthy-faced, contrasted with him oddly, disquietingly.
"Haow 'bout the attic," Jenkins called.
"Ain't none. Thar..."
"The roof is flat," Jean explained. "Except for gables along the front. The third floor ceiling is right under it, and there isn't room for a cat between."
"Did yer take a look at the roof?"
"No way o' gettin' up there, 'cept from outside. No way o' someone gettin' in, neither."
Jenkins turned to the girl. "Thet right?"
"I—I think so. They always put a ladder up against the side of the house when there was anything to be done up there. I am sure nobody has been up for years."
"Hmmmm. The boys hev gone through the upstairs, me an' you hev sarched down here an' the cellar. Thar ain't no one in the house 'cept us. Thar ain't no one got away. Yet there was someone here. Et's got me stomped."
Jean's mouth twisted. "I tell you the—the killer is here. You can't find him but he's here. He'll stay here until he—he gets a chance to do something terrible to me. Not kill me—he's had chance enough to do that. Something else—something worse. That's what scares me—that I can't imagine what he is after, yet I know it's something—something hellish."
"No one's doin' nothin' ter yer. I'll see ter thet." The sheriff's tone lacked conviction and his eyes shifted to the dark corners where the lamplight did not reach. "I'm here an'..."
They whirled to an exclamation from Prudence. The mindless old woman was mumbling something but her words were unintelligible. Her head, framed in straggly gray strings of hair, lifted in an attitude of listening, and little lights crawled in her empty eyes.
"It's acomin'," she yammered, her false teeth clicking. "It's acomin', Satan's wrath's acomin'. I hear them buzzin', buzzin', the hordes o' little imps in his retinoo." Her cracked voice squeaked louder, shriller, but above it they could hear a burring hum from somewhere without. "The servant o' Beelzebub is acomin', the steward of Lucifer is here!"
The mad woman shrieked the last against a thunderous roar, just outside, shrieked it and fell writhing from her seat. And as she sprawled across her husband's body the roar stopped. There was a momentary silence, then a thunderous clap on the door.
"God Almighty!" Jenkins squeezed out and twisted to the door, his gun leaping into his fingers. Again the summons boomed.
"Get back. Miss Armstrong, get inter the parlor! I'm goin' ter open it."
The deputies, pale but game, hurtled down the stairs. The sheriff shot the bolts back, got his hand on the knob, slammed open the inside door, flung wide the storm door. An appallingly tall figure stood there, black against the moonlight. From the floor Prudence squealed, "Get thee behind me, Satan! Get thee behind me!" The officer fell back, slowly, and the lanky figure came as slowly in.
"WHAT'S going on here?" A thin, inflectionless, almost feminine voice came from the newcomer, and his black eyes glittered under a round cap of black fur. "Point that gun away from me before it goes off."
Jenkins' arm dropped to his side. "Beg pardon, Mr. Lane. We thought—we thought..."
"That I was the devil, I suppose, as I heard someone scream. What's it all about, Jean?" He looked sardonically down at the old woman grovelling at his feet, at the blood-smeared corpse. "Tom Stevens 'phoned me from the exchange the old fool had been killed and I drove out here as quickly as I could manage."
He unwound a heavy woolen scarf from around his neck, pulled off the fur cap with its attached ear-muffs. "But why the heavy artillery and the pale faces?" He smiled thinly and passed a gloved hand over his hairless scalp. His was a ferret's face, sharp-featured and predatory. "Are you expecting an attack in force?" Threadlike lines from pointed nose to lip-corners showed cruelty, ageless shrewdness, but otherwise the saturnine countenance was that of a young man.
"Rand, terrible things have been happening." There was no welcome in Jean's face as she stood backed against the side-wall, arms outstretched and palms pressed against it. "There is a madman loose in the house and we can't find him." She watched the sheriff send Pete Lanning outside, motion Silas to the stair-landing above. Lane wriggled out of his fur-lined coat, hung it carefully on the antlered rack, and came toward her, his long-fingered hands dry-washing each other in the immemorial gesture of the banker.
"A madman? It seems to me there is quite enough insanity already here that can be more easily found."
"It's been enough to drive anyone crazy," Jean flung at him. "Let alone that poor old woman." Even now she felt the antagonism with which he always inspired her. "You asked what happened and I am trying to tell you if you will let me. But I shan't if you keep interrupting."
Lane bowed. "Proceed. I shall be silent as the grave."
"I heard that bell in my dreams again, and it woke me up. I told you yesterday I would trace it down if it came again. I came downstairs to do so, and...."
She relived the terrors just passed and reawakened horror squeezed her throat, made utterance difficult. But she won through the narrative. "Can you explain it, Rand?" she finished. For the first time Jean asked something from the man—perhaps his financier's mind, coldly analytical, could solve the mystery. "Can you understand what is happening?"
Lane shrugged. "It seems clear there is a homicidal maniac somewhere about. But I see nothing mysterious, remembering of course the hysterical makeup of the female mind."
"Oh how can you say..."
Jean's outburst was stayed by the other's raised hand. "My dear, you requested my silence while you had your say. Please accord me the same courtesy."
The girl bit her lips. "All right. But I am no more hysterical than you are."
"Others can better judge that. But we shall not discuss it at present. Do you wish me to go on?"
"Please."
"Very well. As I started to say, it is evident there is a murderous lunatic at large, someone who is dexterous at knife-throwing. A foreigner perhaps, a Sicilian or East Indian. I believe many individuals of both races are skilled in that art. For some reason he has picked on this house for his ministrations. Perhaps for no reason a sane being could comprehend. Having killed two tramps, probably in the vicinity of the hobo 'jungle' we know to exist near the railroad crossing at Hopeton, he carried and deposited them here as a way of disposing of them that appealed to his twisted brain. Tonight he was probably lurking in the pine grove when you so foolishly exposed yourself as a target. He threw four knives at you, unsuccessfully, then another that found a billet in Thomas' throat. You got behind the door and he could not reach you any longer." Lane spread his hands wide. "That is all there is to it."
"But the third corpse that was out there and disappeared. The knife that was thrown into Dad's picture from inside the house. The figure I shot at that dived into father's room and vanished. You have not explained those at all."
The corners of Lane's narrow-slitted mouth lifted a trifle. "I said four knives were thrown before the one that killed Thomas, you remember. One of these passed over your head and struck the portrait. As for the rest—" again the banker's lip-joinings quirked in his humorless smile—"they arc figments of your hysterical imagination. You expected to see a corpse outside the door and saw one in a drift of snow. Not having noticed the dagger in the picture before Prudence glimpsed it and finally lost a mind that has long been tottering, you jumped to the conclusion that the killer was in the house.
"In the same way your hysterical, overwrought eyes changed a flickering shadow to a running human form at which you fired. The reflected flash of your gun made you think a door had opened down the hall. The final laugh—well, that may have been Mrs. Thomas, or it may have been the other lunatic, still outside." He paused.
"You see, Jean, there is no such thing as the supernatural outside of a few unbalanced minds. In the real world any event that cannot be naturally explained simply did not happen."
"By jingo!" the listening sheriff exclaimed. "He's right! Ye've hit the nail on the head, Mr. Lane! Thar warn't no tracks in the snow so thar warn't no corpse. Thar ain't no one in the house, so thar never war. Ef'n yer don't know how somethin' happened it never did happen. Thet's what eddication does fer yer!"
Lane glanced at Jenkins suspiciously, but turned back to Jean. "This is no place for you my dear. Suppose you go upstairs, dress, and pack a few things. I have a room reserved for you in the Hopeton House, and tomorrow afternoon you can be in New York, in a fine hotel. You can go to theaters, concerts, and forget all this. I'll let you have enough money..."
"No! Never! I shall not leave this house until I am a free agent." For a moment the girl had been swayed by the specious theory, but now she knew he was wrong, all wrong. She had seen the things he stigmatized as products of her imagining, she had seen them!
Over and over Jean said it to herself. Otherwise, the thought froze her. For if she had not seen them, if they had not really been there, the name for what was wrong with her was not hysteria, was not overwrought nerves. It was... insanity!
"You have been trying to force me to go away for years, and you won't succeed now. I shall never give in to you." She flung the words at Lane.
The banker stepped back, and something baleful crept into the narrowing eyes with which he regarded Jean fixedly. "You refuse to leave here," the words came icily from his thin lips that seemed not to move at all. "Even now you refuse to leave?"
"I do." Jean's chin thrust forward and she felt her face set in frozen defiance. "Since you want me to go—I stay."
And Rand Lane's answer was, "Very well. Stay. I see no reason for my losing any more sleep...."
He got his coat from the rack, shrugged into it "I shall leave you to the sheriff, since you prefer his protection to mine." The black cap covered his gleaming baldness. "I hope, I sincerely hope, you will not regret your choice." It sounded like a threat, a challenge. A grisly suspicion crept into the turmoil of Jean's mind. "Good-night. Pleasant dreams. Good luck, Jenkins, and good hunting."
The door slammed behind him. Jean heard his feet crunch away through the snow, heard his motor throb into life, roar briefly, and hum away into the night. And still she stared stonily at the door that had shut behind him. Was it possible that... No. Incredible. What could he gain by her death, what could he possibly gain?
"FAUGH. Good riddance!" Jenkins made no secret of his relief
at the banker's departure. "They ain't ary place in Hopeton
county that don't smell sweeter when he's gone."
The girl turned slowly to him. "If Dad only knew what he was doing to me when he put me in that man's power!"
"Your Dad war so upright he never would believe some men air skunks. An' Lane knows the most about handlin' money of anyone aroun'. But naow, girlie. There ain't ary use o' your stay-in' up an' frettin'. Why don't yer go to your room an' try ter git some sleep? Come mornin', what with the cor'ner an' the reporters thar won't be no rest fer yer."
Jean knew she would not sleep, but she had no more strength to fight. "All right. But what about..." She glanced at Prudence who had apparently fallen asleep on the floor.
"She's best off as she is. Tomorrer we'll take her away—an' him too. Come. I'll take yer fur's yer room."
"No. You stay here. Silas Paynton is up there, and I am not afraid. Good night, Mr. Jenkins, and thank you."
"Goodnight, girlie. Rest easy."
Not afraid? Perhaps not. Afraid wasn't quite the word. Jean was moving—what was the expression in that volume of Bunyan on the table in the parlor—she was traveling through the Valley of the Shadow. The shadow—not of death, of something far worse than mere annihilation. As she climbed wearily up the worn carpet of the stairs the answer came to her, the answer to the riddle of how Rand Lane could gain by the events of this terrible midnight. Not by her death—that would end his trusteeship and take the estate from his control. Nor was it her life that was being attacked. She saw it clearly now. Death had struck all about her and left her unscathed, physically untouched. But her mind, her reason, had been rocked to its very foundations.
THERE was the crux. If she were insane, if he could prove her
insane, drive her insane, she would be committed to an
institution and someone must be appointed to administer her
property. Someone—who better than the very man her own
father had chosen as her trustee? Rand Lane. Rand Lane, who must
account for his stewardship in three short months. Rand Lane, who
for five years had made every effort to send her away where she
could have not even nominal watch over his management of Dad's
estate. Rand Lane, who had looked without pity at the poor,
mindless creature below and coined a jest at her expense.
"What cannot be naturally explained simply did not happen," he had said. "Those things were figments of your hysterical imagination, my dear." You are crazy, my dear. Your mind is gone. Oh, the monster, the inhuman, vile monster!
But he couldn't do it. She'd fool him. She'd trick him. A crafty look crept into the girl's eyes. How surprised he would be tomorrow when she walked into his office and said: "See. Here I am, and I am just as sane as I was last night." How funny he would look! Jean's head jerked back and peal after peal of laughter came from her white lips. Threadlike laughter, laughter that would not stop. How funny—Then suddenly the laugh did stop. My God! To laugh in such a place, at such a time. Icy fingers tightened about her heart. Was she—was she really—was it too late, had he succeeded?
Jean stood stock still, she had reached the upper landing, and probed herself. No—not yet. But she must be wary, careful. She must keep tight hold on herself. No matter what happened she must keep herself under absolute control.
But what could happen with three armed men guarding her?
Strange that Silas Paynton was not up here. The lamp they had lighted threw its yellow illumination all down the hall and there was no sign of the squat, dark deputy. She had heard the sheriff tell him to stay just here. Maybe he had gone up to the servant's floor, thinking he could watch better from there. He was a strange, dour-looking, habitually silent fellow. Every winter she saw him wandering alone and aimlessly over the countryside. In the summer he was never around. Jean wondered where he went then. Not that it mattered, except that it helped to think about something else.
Although the moonlight wasn't in her room any longer, the illumination from the hall came dimly into it. Jean caught her breath as she moved across the threshold, but there was nothing to fear. She closed the door, took off her dressing gown, her mules, slid into the soft welcome of her bed. The high-piled down took her aching body. She stared at the ceiling, vaguely lit by light reflected from the snow, and wondered how much longer it was till morning. She would not think about Lane, about... Her tired eyelids drooped—snapped open again.
The deep-toned, dying reverberations of an ominous gong echoed in her ears.
ACROSS the luminescence of the ceiling a shadow sprawled, its outline changing slowly, forming, taking on the contours of—a man! Jean stared at it, lay rigid and stared up at the huge blot in the pale truncated triangle above—while icy waves pulsed over her. It wasn't there, it couldn't be there! "Steady, Jean-girl. Steady." She was dreaming and the shadow was not there. Or it was the shadow of a tree, a bush, distorted.
Something bumped softly, nearby, thudded stealthily. It came from her left, where her window was. Was it—was it something—someone;—coming in? There was a ledge just outside, and a drainpipe down which she used to shin, long ago when things like this never happened.
There was the soft bumping sound again! Her legs, her arms, were wooden, lifeless. She scarcely breathed. But she could turn her head. She could turn it and see what was at her window, who it was. Dared she? She must, she couldn't lie there and wait for it to come in. Her head moved, slowly, slowly, on her pillow, turned till she could see the opening.
A face stared in at her, stared straight at her. A twisted face, pallid, grotesque. A face she knew. Peter Lanning's face, but horribly changed. It leered in at her, bobbed and leered in at her. He must be standing on the ledge, but how was he holding on? His arms were straight down, and his wide shoulders away from the sill. No, he couldn't be standing there, he couldn't sway like that if he were standing on the ledge. He was turning slowly, his head, his shoulders were turning. He wasn't standing on anything! He was hanging there, in mid-air—he was dead and hanging there! He was swaying pendulum-like and rotating at the end of something she could not see—
Through the glass, muffled but unmistakable, came the eerie, cackling laugh of the mad killer.
It galvanized the girl, hurled her from her bed with no conscious volition of her own, snapped her to the window without thought. She stared out and saw—
Almighty God! She was mad, stark, gibbering mad! For what she saw, or thought she saw, was flatly impossible.
High over the white-clad lawn, high as the roof, supported by nothing at all, a hunched black figure danced against the pale glare of the sky! Capered in mid-air! Jigged on nothingness and laughed its uncanny, triumphant laugh!
"In the real world any event that cannot be naturally explained simply did not happen." But this was happening. She was seeing it, was hearing it. It was happening and it couldn't be explained. It couldn't be explained and so it was not happening.
"Twice two make four. My name is Jean Armstrong and I am in my room in the house where I was born. Steady, Jean Armstrong, steady. That man out there is real, and something is holding him up that you cannot see."
She flogged her brain into logical thought, willed it to reason. "Rand Lane is trying to drive me crazy, and I won't let him. Keep steady now and he will not succeed. If that man is real he is alive and I can kill him. I am a good shot and he is an easy target. My pistol is in the pocket of my robe and I can get it by reaching behind me." Slowly, painfully, step by step, she worked it out.
And outside the killer danced and laughed, laughed and danced, and the dead man bobbed and swayed before her window.
The little revolver was in her hand, cocked. Now to raise the sash. Would it be better to do it slowly, or in one quick jerk? The latter. Her left hand gripped the handhold.
Now! In one motion she threw the frame up, leaned out, aimed and fired. Fired again as the capering figure jerked to the impact of her first bullet.
The crazy laughter cut off in a shrill scream, and a black form dropped, plummet-like, to the snow.
Jean reeled away from the open window. "Thank God! Oh, thank God! He is real. He was alive and I have killed him. I am not mad. I am sane... sane!"
Knuckles thudded against her door. "Miss Armstrong! Miss Armstrong! What is it? Are yer—"
SOMEHOW Jean got to the door, and flung it open. Sheriff
Jenkins had his gun in his hand. "I thought I heard a shot."
"You did!" Strange that she should be so proud of having slain a man. "I just shot down the mad killer."
Startlingly, his face flushed dull red and contorted with what was certainly anger, fury. His eyes blazed wrath. "Shot him down! Yer...." Then the inexplicable anger was gone from his expression, his voice. "Yer killed him. Great work! Wonderful! Yer a marvellous girl. But Jack Armstrong's daughter couldn't be anythin' else. What happened? How did yer do it?"
Jean's brain raced, but her tone was calm and her countenance inscrutable as she explained. "Look," she ended. "There's poor Pete's body hanging right outside here, but the one who did for him is out on the lawn. He won't throw any more knives or hang any more people."
Steady, Jean, steady. She must not show she had noticed anything, must pretend she still trusted him. There was a way out. There must be a way.
"Godfrey mighty, I'm sorry 'bout Lanning. He war a good, steady goin' lad. Got ter leave him like thet till the cor'ner gets here, but yer kin go sleep in another room."
"No. I will stay here. After all I have gone through I shall not mind him at all."
Did a glimmer of suspicion flicker over the officer's gaunt countenance? It vanished before she could be sure. "Just as yer say. It won't make much difference. I'll camp right outside here. Somethin' might happen yet." He said it grimly. "I wouldn't be at all surprised."
"Oh, I hope you arc wrong. But do what you think best. I am going to try to sleep."
The door closed and Jean leaned against it. Sleep! No sleep for her tonight, perhaps never any more. She knew now the source of all that had beset her. The second's dropping of Jenkins' mask had betrayed him. Did he realize her knowledge? He must know she could not have missed the murderlust that had glared at her.
Just as she thought she had won through, terror closed in on her once again. He, whom she had called the mad-killer, was a mere tool in the hands of a man outside her door, the man whose sworn duty it was to protect her, the man whose safety now lay only in her death. He was working with Lane and the two hounds were baying her down.
Why had he not shot her off-hand? Only because he was scheming a shrewder, safer way. She heard him plodding up and down the hall outside, knew that each thudding step was also a step nearer her death. He must move soon, the false light before the dawn was already silhouetting the pines. Others, the coroner, state police perhaps, would be here in an hour or two. She must be silenced before they came.
What was it Rand Lane had said in his silky voice as he bowed himself out. "Good luck, Jenkins. Good hunting." Good hunting indeed! She was the quarry they hunted and she was nearly run to earth.
Nearly, but not quite. They didn't have her yet. She had fought them, baffled them till now and she would go down fighting if go down she must. Jean swung to her closet door, ripping off dressing gown, pajamas, not feeling the freezing cold at all. She tore clothes from hooks, hangers, jerked them on. In seconds she was fully clad, sweater, riding-breeches, moccasins.
THE girl flitted across to the window, sat on the sill and swung her feet out. They struck Peter Lanning's body and she gasped, but did not pause. Nothing to fear in a dead man, nothing he could do to her. She had to push the corpse aside to reach the pipe that was her path to escape. And did it without a qualm.
The gelid drain stung her fingers, but she gripped it, clamped it with her knees. The suspended corpse, released, swung at the end of its tether and thumped against the window-pane. Glass smashed! Nothing to fear from a dead man—except betrayal!
The door slammed open inside the room. Jean thrust away from the wall and dropped. She thudded to the ground, leaped to her feet. Above, a hoarse voice shouted. "Stop! Stop yer she-devil or I'll shoot!" She sprang into a run, a zigzagging run across the open ground. If he shot he might bring her down, but the bullet would tell the tale of his crime. She was half across the lawn and there was no gun-crash from behind. She glanced back, saw Jenkins leaping to the ground, glimpsed a flashing knife in his hand. That was his scheme then! Had she waited she would have been another victim of the knife-thrower.
"Stop! Damn you!" His hoarse shout flung after her as he heaved erect and plunged into pursuit, his long legs carrying him over the snow at a rate she could not match. But the pines were just ahead—if she could reach them ... A dark mound, a white face, flitted past her. The body of the man—Silas! Behind her Jenkins pounded, just behind. "Got yer!" he grunted. She swerved, light-footed, and he plunged past her, slithering clumsily on the icy ground, unable to turn in time. Dark tree trunks were about her, and undergrowth whipped against her legs.
He threshed after her, cursing. She darted deviously, the boles were thick in here and the darkness almost absolute. But she could not go silently and he kept on after her, guided by the rustle of her passage.
"You can't get away. You can't!" Her breath was going, her chest heaved, and blood pounded in her throat. She couldn't—run—much longer. The highway beyond! If she could reach it—if some late motorist were passing—
She burst out of the trees on to cleared macadam and white light of headlights engulfed her. A horn blared raucously. Somehow she found voice to scream.
Brakes squealed. A bellow of rage drowned their complaint, and Jenkins lumbered into the road. But he was twenty yards away, and the car had stopped only feet from her. She stumbled toward it, the blaze of its lights blinding her. They dimmed, and she could make out the vague form of the driver springing into the road, could see the gun in his hand.
He was armed! Luck! What Luck! Then her eyes traveled up to his face. It was Rand Lane!
IT was Rand Lane and his gun was sweeping up, was snouting at
her. Behind Jenkins' heavy feet pounded as he came after her with
his knife. Good hunting! Good hunting indeed! Gun or
knife—which would take her?
The gun! It flashed, point-blank at her, crashed thunderously. Funny. She felt nothing. Had he—had he missed? Missed at this distance? The knife, then! In her back! No! She whirled to take it. And saw Jenkins falling, collapsing like a pricked balloon, his knees buckling under him and the blade dropping from his flaccid hand. He sprawled on the road, writhed, flopped over on his back, and was still.
"Jean! Are you—did he—are you all right?" Rand's voice, in back of her, but Rand's voice as she had never heard it. Quivering. Choked. "Jean!"
His usually masklike, expressionless face was contorted with emotion. "All right—Rand. Whole in body—and in mind."
"God be praised!" His gaze jerked past her, went to the body in the road. Fear flared in his eyes, faded out. "Done for! Lord, if I only had the guts to do that long ago."
She scarcely heard him. "Rand—I thought you—were the one—behind it all."
He looked at her again, smiled his thin smile, bitter now. "No. He was—behind it. But I helped him. God forgive me, I helped him."
She stepped back from him, loathing, horror in her face. "You helped him. You knew what was going on and you helped him?"
Certainly this was a new Lane. The hard-faced, brass-souled banker was gone. He stood before her in the drab gray of an overcast dawn, head bowed, mouth working, abject. "He forced me to. But at the last I could not stand the thought of what he was doing to you and I came back to stop it. Thank God I was in time."
"You—you—In time! Yes—to save me. But what about Elmer, and Prudence? What about the others—the three tramps—Peter Lanning?"
Something of the old hardness crept back. "Two senile, doddering fools with only months left to drag out lives that were a burden to them. Three derelicts—spewed out by society. They do not matter. But you—oh my dear—the world would be empty if you were gone." He clawed a hand toward her in an angular, awkward gesture of appeal.
Jean shuddered with disgust. She turned away, started toward the trees. "Jean, where are you going? Jean!"
"Back to the house to pack and get away. Anywhere where I shall never have to see you again." It was all she could do. Her story, his confession, would never be credited. He had not done the killings with his own hands.
"Jean!" Agony edged his cry. "Can't you forgive me?"
Laughter vibrated in her throat, dark laughter. Every nerve in her body was raw, quivering because of him and he asked for forgiveness! "Forgive you!" And the laugh rang out, humorless, scorching, whipping him with a lash of scorn. "Go ask Prudence Thomas to forgive you. She has lost her mind!"
He plodded after her, stumbling, caroming into tree trunks, arms extended to her and red eyes pleading.
"I did try to save you. I tried to get you to go away. I fought him off for years while I tried to get you beyond his reach. Even at the very last, when it had already begun, I asked you to go back to Hopeton to stay with me. You refused. Always you refused. I had to let him go ahead."
She stopped and turned on him. "I don't believe you. You were the one who engineered the whole thing. He was your tool, not you his."
"I swear it! By all He made me."
Youth was gone from his face. It was sallow, old. Strength was gone from it. It was the face of a broken man. The lips trembled with weakness. "I came here ten years ago, unknown. He found out who I was—why I had come to Hopeton. My superior in a 'Frisco bank embezzled funds and framed me. I escaped from jail—the law hounds lost my trail. I went into the rattletrap bank here and made it an institution. I was respected, admired. Then he struck. He showed me my face, my fingerprints on a yellowed circular he had kept for five years. Five years he had waited till he saw a way to use his knowledge. Then I became your trustee!
"Oh, he was shrewd, cunning. The scheme he broached was fool-proof. He had a tool to his hand, Silas Paynton. A circus man, slack-wire walker and knife-thrower. Paynton had thrown his knives too unerringly once and killed a girl. Jenkins found that out, too, and used it to enslave him. Jenkins was a devil, a fiend from the lowermost reaches of hell!"
A light dawned on Jean. "Paynton was a knife-thrower and wire-walker. Then that was how..." They were through the woods and out on the lawn. Sunrise painted the snow with rose, but Paynton was a black blotch in the clearing and Peter Lanning's lax body hung swaying before her window. "That was how it was done!"
"Yes. Look up there." The girl followed the direction of his pointing finger. She saw a fine wire arcing from the top of a tall pine to a chimney just above her father's room. She saw that Lanning's corpse hung from another wire that was also fastened to the roof.
"It was an ingenious scheme and it worked," Rand said. "You would never have seen that wire if you did not know just where to look. Nor would any others until there was opportunity to remove it."
"The bodies of the tramps...."
"Were trolleyed across the lawn suspended from another wire, adjusted so that a jerk would free it. The gong-sound you heard in your sleep was the twang of that wire when it was released. Paynton fished the third body back up to the roof with a hook on the end of the same wire. The chimney from the fireplace in your father's room was cleaned thoroughly when you locked it after his death, and it made a convenient passage for Silas to the interior of the house, and out of it when you saw and chased him."
It was all so simple, so diabolically simple! Jean shuddered as she pushed the house-door open and passed Elmer's stiffened body. Prudence lay across it, sound asleep. Jean went up the stairs and Lane kept at her elbow, still talking. The sound of his voice was a murmur in her ears. She was so tired, so terribly tired. She shut him out of her room and fell across her bed. She had to rest....
A CONFUSED roar woke Jean—shouting voices, coarse,
threatening. She skidded to the window. Who were those men,
brutish-faced, in tattered nondescript clothing, pouring across
the lawn? Twenty of them, more, waving clubs, knives. They were
streaming into the house! She twisted and ran out into the
hall.
Lane was at the head of the stairs, his gun in his hand. "Stop there!" he was yelling. "Stop there or I shall shoot." She got to his side. "What do you men want?"
The foyer below was filled with them, a milling throng of humanity's dregs. One, a hulking fellow with simian arms and scarred, lowering face, bellowed back. "We want you! An' we'll damn well get yuh, too." A growling murmur ran through the mob, ominous.
Lane's voice was tight, controlled. "You want me! What do you mean?"
"Yer one o' the guys what croaked Boston Red an' a couple other bindle stiffs. The Dayton Kid piked yer car las' night, wid two guys biggin' a stiff inter it. He spotted the boat out there on the road and follied yer tracks here. We want yuh an' the dame too. Yer goin' ter be strung up, like yer pal outside, an' the skirt's goin' ter wish she were 'fore we get through with her."
"You are mistaken. But even if you were right in your accusation you cannot take the law into your own hands." Lane had won back to his old hauteur, his old superiority. "If you have any charges against me turn me over to the police."
The word was like red meat thrown to a pack of starving wolves. It brought a howl, vociferous, rabid.
"Shut up, youse guys," their leader shouted them down. "Lemme handle this." Then to Lane: "There ain't goin' ter be no perlice in this. The Dayton Kid is wanted fer crackin' a crib an' half the rest of us are on the lam. Nossir. Well tend ter yuh ourselves...."
Jean watched, listened, as if she were at a play. She no longer had capacity for emotion, was numbed to that which threatened her. But Lane was an erect, pale statue and the black revolver never trembled in his rock-steady hand. "There are six bullets in this revolver, and I cannot miss. Six of you will die the moment one foot touches that bottom step. Who wants to be the first?"
"Be damned to yuh. You may get six, but the rest of us'll get yuh. An' it'll be just too bad when we do. It won't be hangin' then. What d'yuh say, men?"
They said it in a feral roar. "Let's get him."—"Burn him!—Rip his guts out!"
"Okay! Come on!" The mob surged forward, baited at a ringing shout from Rand. "Wait!"
They halted and listened.
"I will surrender. On one condition. You may do with me as you please, but you must leave the girl alone."
They milled again, undecided. Lustful eyes peered up at Jean, then shifted to Lane's steady gaze. From the outer fringes of the crowd a husky voice croaked, "The hell with him. We want the dame!"
The banker's icy voice dropped again into their midst. "Remember—six of you die if you do not take my terms. And I will not fire at the front men alone. Any of you may be the ones to die."
The big leader grinned suddenly, a crafty light on his face. "Okay. T'row yer heat down an' we'll let the termaty go."
Lane's thin smile flickered for a moment, but his eyes were marble. "Not so easy. She gets the gun, and she is as good a shot as I. What do you say?"
The other gestured defeat. "All right, wise guy. Give her the roscoe an' snap down here."
Jean felt the gun-grip in her cold hand, heard a whispered, "Do you forgive me?" She nodded, unable to speak. Then she watched him walk steadily down the stairs, walk unflinching into that drooling, red-eyed pack. Rough hands seized him—and the door slammed open.
"Scram, guys!" an undersized runt shrilled from the doorway. "The bulls! Tree cars, comin' fast!"
Jean saw them melt away. In seconds the hall was clear. Only the dead old man and the sleeping, white-haired woman remained. And from outside came the approaching hum of speeding cars.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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