A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Chapter I

A slick-looking roadster stopped in front of Headquarters at about nine that night, and its lone occupant sat there in it for a moment before cutting the ignition, as if trying to make up her mind what to do. The car had money written all over it, money without flash. The number was so low it was almost zero. The girl in it took a cigarette out of the box fitted to the door, pulled a patented lighter out of the dash, inhaled deeply as if to brace herself. Then she got out and went up the steps between the two dark-green lights.

She was tall and slim and young. She wore a little leopard-skin jacket that didn’t come below her elbows. The price of it probably ran into three figures. Her face was pale, paler than powder could have made it. At the top of the steps she took a second and final drag. Then she dropped the cigarette, stepped on it, and went in. She asked to see the lieutenant in charge.

His name was McManus and he brought a chair forward with his own hands for her in the back room. She was that kind of a girl.

She said, “My name is Ann Bridges,” then she looked down at the floor. You could see her wrists were trembling, where she held them folded over one knee. Diamond-splinters flashed around her wrist-watch from the slight vibration.

“Any relative of John T. Bridges?” McManus said.

Ann Bridges looked up again. “I’m his niece,” she said. “In fact, his only relative.” She took it in her stride, said it almost off-handedly. To McManus it was a stunning piece of information; it was like finding yourself in the same room with the heir-apparent to a throne.

He never thought of doubting her. There was something 14-karat about her that couldn’t have been faked.

She said, “It isn’t the pleasantest thing in the world to come to the police like this—” she broke off abruptly. Then she went ahead: “I don’t even know what there is you people can do about it. But something’s got to be done—”

McManus’ voice was kind. “You tell me what it is.”

“That’s the worst part of it. It doesn’t sound like anything when you tell it. Anything at all. But it is something!” Her voice rose almost to the point of hysteria. “I can’t just stand by and watch him — sink into the grave before my eyes! I had to tell somebody — had to get it off my chest! I’ve waited too long as it is!” Her eyes misted. “I’ve driven down here four nights in a row — and the first three times I lost my nerve and drove on around the block without stopping. I said to myself, ‘Ann, they’ll think you’re crazy.’ ”

McManus went over to her and rested a fatherly hand on her shoulder. “We don’t laugh at people,” he said gently. “We run across anything and everything, in our line — but we don’t laugh at people who are in trouble.” It wasn’t because she was Ann Bridges; it was because she was so young and lovely and there was such distress written on her face.

“Something has hold of us,” she said. “Something that started in by being nothing at all, by being just a joke over the luncheon-table; something that’s grown and grown, until now it’s like an octopus throttling us. I can’t name it to you, because I don’t know what to call it, don’t know what it is. It threatens him, not me, but I love him, and so the threat is to the two of us.”

She gave a little sob in her throat.

“Call it a prophecy, call it fate — call it what you will. I fought against it hard enough, God knows. But the evidence of my own eyes, my own ears, my own senses, is too much for me. And the time’s too short now. I’m afraid to take a chance. I haven’t got the nerve to bluff it out. You don’t gamble with a human life. Today’s the 13th, isn’t it? It’s too close to the 14th; there isn’t time-margin enough left now to be skeptical. Day by day, I’ve watched him cross off the date on his desk-calendar, drawing nearer to death. There are only two leaves left now, and I want help! Because on the 14th — at the exact stroke of midnight, just as the 15th is beginning—”

She covered her face with both arms and shook silently.

“Yes?” urged McManus. “Yes?”

“He’s become convinced — oh, and almost I have too — that at exactly midnight on the 14th he’s to die. Not just an ordinary death, but a death rushing down to him from the stars he was born under — rushing down even before he existed. A death inexorable, inescapable. A death horrid and violent, inconceivable here in this part of the world where we live.”

She took a deep, shuddering breath, whispered the rest of it. “Death at the jaws of a lion.”

McManus didn’t answer for an awfully long time. When he spoke, it wasn’t to her at all. He opened the door, called to someone, said “I’m not to be disturbed — until further orders, hear?”

When he came back to her she said limply. “Thanks — for not laughing, for not smelling my breath, for not hinting that I should see a doctor. Oh, thanks, anyway!”

He took a package of cigarettes out of the desk-drawer, passed them to her. “I like you modern kids,” he said paternally. “Smoke up. Pull yourself together. Tell it in your own way. Begin at the beginning — and tell it right straight through—”

Chapter II

It all started (Ann Bridges said) about an airplane ride. My Uncle John was going to ’Frisco on business, and he’d bought his ticket. He showed it to me at lunch, and I saw that the take-off was dated Friday the 13th. Half kiddingly, I suggested he put off leaving until the day after. There’d been a bad crack-up a week before, but lord! we were both joking, not serious about it!

My maid must have overheard us. She came to me later and said, “Beg your pardon, miss, but if that were I, I’d never let him do a thing like that.”

I said, “Be your age.”

She said, “I know of someone who could warn you, if there is to be any trouble. A man who’s gifted with second sight. Why don’t you let me take you to him?”

I gave her a cold look and I said, “Just what do I look like to you? Are you seriously suggesting that I go to some flea-bitten fortuneteller with a dirty cloth wrapped around his head and—”

“He’s not a fortune-teller,” she defended. “He’d resent being called that. He doesn’t make a profession of it, and he doesn’t take money for it.”

“I bet he doesn’t refuse it, either,” I said cynically.

“He’s a good man,” she said stoutly, “not a sharper of any kind. He happens to be born with this gift, he can’t help that. He doesn’t trade on it in any way; in fact, he doesn’t like to use it. My family and I have known him for years—”

I smiled to myself, as anyone would have. “He’s certainly sold himself to you, Elaine.”

“We won’t talk any more about it, miss,” she said stiffly. “Only, you remember that time I was in trouble—” She’d gotten mixed up with some man, and I’d straightened it out for her; it wouldn’t, be fair for me to give you the details. “You were the only one knew about that, Miss Bridges, I didn’t say a word at home, I didn’t dare. He took me aside one night and told me the whole thing. He told me how it was going to end up, too. He said the man was going to meet death, and I’d be rid of him once and for all. I fainted dead away on the floor. You remember how we heard two months later he’d been run over on the street?”

I did, but my skepticism wouldn’t dent much. “You didn’t say a word to me at the time, how was that?”

“He made me promise not to. I’ve broken my word to him today. He doesn’t want it to become known. He hates his gift himself, says it caused him nothing but misery—

All of which sounded reasonable enough, but I was definitely not impressed. I’ve had very good commonsense all my life, and you have to watch your step — when you’re the heir to twenty millions.

My uncle took off from Newark early the next morning, and when I got back to the house the maid blurted out: “There’s nothing to worry about, Miss Bridges. I–I asked him about this trip, and he said it was safe to make it.”

“Oh you did, did you?” I said severely. “And who told you to?”

“I didn’t tell him who it was or anything about it. Just asked him about this morning’s plane,” she defended. But Mr. Bridges needn’t have gone at all, could have saved himself the trouble. He told me that whoever this party is that’s going out there, he or she is doomed to disappointment; nothing wall come of it, he’ll just have wasted his time.”

My uncle’s in the import and export business, he’d gone to see about an important consignment of silk from Japan, but the maid couldn’t have known that, much less this seer of hers. I’m afraid I snickered rudely.

Nothing daunted, she rushed on: “But don’t let Mr. John come back by air, Miss Bridges, whatever you do! Wire him to take the train instead. The eastbound-plane is going to run into trouble — he saw it clearly. Not a crack-up but it’s going to be grounded somewhere in the Rockies and half of them are going to die of exposure before they’re located. He saw snow piled all around it and people with frozen hands and feet having to have them amputated later—”

I blew up. I said, “One more word out of you, and I’ll give you your week’s notice!”

She didn’t open her mouth from then on, just went around looking sorry for me.

Uncle John had told me he was starting back the following Saturday. Take-off was at seven Pacific Coast Time, ten back here. I’ll admit I got a little worried Friday night, wondered whether or not I oughtn’t to send that wire after all. I was afraid he’d laugh at me. More than that even, I hated to give in to her after the way I’d talked. I went to bed without sending the wire. It was too late when I woke up in the morning, he would have started already.

He should have gotten in about noon Sunday. I drove to the airport to meet him, and he wasn’t on the plane. That gave me a nasty turn. I asked at the airport-office, and they told me he had booked a seat from Chicago east, along with several other people, on this one, and none of them had shown up to make the connection; the ’Frisco plane had been overdue when they left Chicago.

I went home plenty worried. It was in the papers and on the radio already, reported missing somewhere over the Rockies with fourteen people in it!

The maid saw how I was taking it, so finally she came out with: “I suppose I’m discharged, but I knew better than you — I took the liberty of sending Mr. John a wire over your name last night, begging him to come by train instead—”

Discharged? I could have kissed her! But then anxiety raised its head again. “He’s stubborn, he’d never listen to a message like that—”

“I–I told him that one of his associates wanted to consult him about a very important matter, and mentioned a place where the planes don’t stop, so he’d have to take the train. He says,” she went on, “that it won’t be found for three days, the plane. It wouldn’t have meant death, it isn’t Mr. John’s time yet, but he would have lost both feet and been a helpless cripple for the rest of his—”

All of which evoked a pretty creepy feeling in me. It wasn’t any help when my uncle got off the train three days later, safe and sound. The first words out of his mouth were that he’d made the trip for nothing; a maritime strike had broken out on the Coast and his silk-shipment was tied up indefinitely at Honolulu; he hadn’t been able to accomplish a thing.

The snow-bound plane was sighted from the air later that same day, and when the rescue parties got to it, seven of the fourteen were dead from exposure, and several of the survivors had to have their hands or feet amputated as soon as they got to a hospital. Just as he’d foretold — rescue-date, circumstances, number of casualties, and all. It was uncanny. I didn’t want to believe, I fought like anything against believing — and yet there it was.

I told my uncle the whole story of course — who wouldn’t have? — and he was as impressed as I was. What we did next was what anyone else would have done after what happened. We asked the maid to take the two of us to this man, we wanted to see him for ourselves. She wasn’t to tell him who we were, just two friends of hers. I even put on an old coat and hat of hers, to look properly working-class, and we left the car home, went there on foot.

It was a big let down, at first. This fortune teller was merely a middle-aged man sitting in a furnished room with his suspenders hanging down! His name was Jeremiah Tompkins, about as unimpressive a name as they come. And worst of all, he was just a bookkeeper. Had been, rather, for he wasn’t working just then. If I remember correctly, he was reading the want ads in a newspaper when we came in.

I could see my uncle was more disappointed; he was almost resentful. After all, Uncle John was a level-headed intelligent businessman. That a figure like this should be able to spout prophecies, should know more than he did himself about what was going to happen to him, was too much for him to swallow.

“Watch,” he said to me out of the corner of his mouth, “I’ll show you. I’ll show you he’s just a phony, that all this was just a coincidence. I’ve got something here that’s the best little miracle-eraser in the world!”

And he took out five-hundred dollars in cold cash and pressed it into Tompkins’ hand. Tompkins had been reading the want ads, remember, and Elaine told me later her people were having him in for meals out of sheer pity.

“You’ve done something for me that I can never repay,” my uncle said as a come-on. “This is just a token of my gratitude. Call on me at any time and I’ll be more than glad to—”

Tompkins didn’t let him finish. He threw the money down at my uncle’s feet. “I don’t like being insulted,” he said quietly. There was a sort of dignity about the way he said it, at that. I didn’t do this for money, and I won’t take money for it. This girl here—” he pointed at Elaine — “is a friend of mine. She asked me some questions about a plane and I answered them for her, that’s all. Please go. I don’t like being made a show of.”

“But you don’t know who I am,” my uncle began protestingly.

Tompkins gave a bleak smile and put his hand up to his head, as though he had a headache. Not in that theatrical way clairvoyants do when they’re about to “go into their trance,” but as though something were hurting him.

He answered as though he were speaking against his will. “You’re John Bridges,” he said. “Your mother died when you were fourteen years old, and it was the sight of the beautiful silk kimonos and wrappers she wore that really made you go into the export and import business later on...”

Elaine could have told him all that, was the unspoken thought in my mind.

He turned to me and answered it as though it had been said aloud. I went white and nearly fell through the floor! “But here’s something she couldn’t have,” he said. “About you. You took off your dance-slippers under a restaurant-table one night last week and a waiter accidentally kicked one halfway across the room. Rather than admit it was yours, you left in your stocking-feet. And you’ve got a diamond and ruby necklace with twenty stones in it in Safety Box No. 1805 at the National Security Bank. Also a bundle of letters you bought back from a gigolo in Paris for fifty thousand francs.”

My own uncle didn’t know about that!

“I don’t ask you to believe in me, I don’t care whether you do or not,” this Tompkins went on sombrely. “I didn’t ask you to come here in the first place. You’re going to the police about me some day, anyway, and get me in a lot of trouble.”

My hands strayed up and down the blank wall trying to find the door where there wasn’t any door. My eyes were blurred. I moaned, “Get me out of here!” The whole world was turning upside-down. I felt like a fly walking on the ceiling.

My uncle took me home. The five hundred stayed there on Tompkins’ floor. Elaine brought it back with her when she returned, after we did.

“Wouldn’t touch it,” she murmured. “What do you think he did, though? Borrowed five dollars from me, to tide himself over.”

That business of the $500 sold the fortune-teller to my uncle more than any number of bull’s-eye predictions could have. He was convinced now that Jeremiah Tompkins wasn’t a fake. That he was a phenomenon; and ordinary, in fact sub-ordinary, human being with this frightful, gift — or blight — of prognostication. In other words, the ground work of credulity had been laid. The rest followed in due course.

To begin with Uncle John tried to make the man a gift of money again — no longer to show him up, but in all sincerity and respect. He mailed him his personal check, for $1,000 this time. It came back inside a readdressed envelope, almost by return mail, torn into eight neat pieces. That failing, my uncle got Tompkins a job — and made sure he accept it by keeping his own name out of it. He had a friend advertise for a bookkeeper. The friend, without knowing the details, agreed to bar all except one of the applicants who might answer it — Jeremiah Tompkins. In other words, it was a one-man ad. Elaine was posted to call the man’s attention to it in the paper, in case it should escape his eye. It all worked out according to plan; he took the job.

“But,” I insisted stubbornly to the two of them, “if he’s the actual mindreader he showed himself to be, how is it he didn’t know at once who was in back of this paid ad you showed him? Why couldn’t he see that the job came through Uncle John?”

“He doesn’t go around all day reading what’s in people’s minds — he’d kill himself doing that.” Elaine protested, as though I had disparaged the man. “It seems to come to him in flashes, only when he’ll let it — and he doesn’t like to. It’s there in his unconscious self the whole time.” She meant subconscious. “And he lets it flicker out once in awhile, or else it gets out in spite of him — I don’t know.”

Anyway, Tompkins took the job, and if he was a firstclass mystic, he wasn’t any great shakes as a bookkeeper. My uncle’s friend had to let him go in about six weeks. The friend didn’t, of course, know the inside story; he claimed the man was too moony and moody — in plain English, shiftless.

Meanwhile Tompkins kept getting under my uncle’s skin deeper and deeper. The strike on the Pacific Coast gave signs of going on all the rest of the summer. The silk shipment, which was worth thousands, was stuck there in Honolulu, rotting away. My uncle got an offer from a Japanese dealer in the islands, considerably below its intrinsic value, let alone any profit. It looked like a case of take what he could get or lose the whole thing. It wasn’t a question of the money so much, with him, but he hated to come out second best in any transaction, hated to admit himself licked.

He’d already drafted the cable accepting the Jap offer, then at the last minute held it without filing. He went and looked up Tompkins by himself, without confiding in anyone.

I don’t know what passed between them. All I know is that Uncle John came home that night and told me he’d cabled the Japs to go to hell; the shipping strike was going to be over in forty-eight hours, right when the deadlock seemed at its worst.

I don’t have to remind you what happened. You’ve read how the Chief Executive himself intervened unexpectedly two days later and the strike was arbitrated and called off between sun-up and sundown. The president’s own advisers hadn’t known he was going to do it, so it was said. My uncle’s consignment beat every other cargo into ’Frisco; and by getting into port first — well, it was quite a windfall. Uncle John got exactly double the usual price for the shipment.

A man in a shabby furnished-room, without a job of his own, had saved his firm exactly $200,000 all told!

I kept out of it from then on. I wanted to hang onto my peace of mind; more than that even, my sanity.

But then the thing finally clamped down on my uncle, as anyone might have known it would eventually. Three months ago, I saw the change come over him and asked him what it was. He suddenly retired from business, sold out — or rather gave away his interest for next to nothing. He lost concern in everything and anything. He got haggard. I could see the mortal terror standing out in his eyes, day by day.

He’d gone to Tompkins again about some enormous venture he was contemplating. He was gambling more and more on these “inside tips,” growing more reckless all the time. But this time there was a different answer, a catastrophic answer.

The thing under discussion was a long-term transaction, that would have taken about six months to pay off. “It doesn’t matter one way or the other,” Tompkins told him indifferently, “unless of course it’s the firm itself you’re thinking about, and not yourself personally.” And then very indifferently, as though he’d known it all along; “Because you’ll be dead by that time. Your life’s coming to an end at midnight on the 14th-to-15th of next March.”

I don’t know whether Tompkins told it to him all at once, or doled it out piece-meal. I don’t know how many times my uncle had to seek him out — pleaded with him maybe, or grovel on bended knees. I don’t know anything at all. Uncle John wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t asked the man how he would die, in what manner, and what could be done to prevent it.

“Nothing,” was the merciless answer. “You can’t stop it from happening. Though you fly to the far ends of the world, though you hide yourself in the depths of the earth, though you gather a thousand men about you to shield you, it will still find you out. It’s there — written down for you — death by the jaws of a lion.”

And then Uncle John started going slowly to pieces. Oh, it’s not the money, Lieutenant McManus! It’s not that he’s endowed Tompkins with hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time, that he’s dissipating my inheritance, trying to buy minutes and seconds of life back from a man who admits, himself, that he has no control over it and can do nothing about it. I don’t mind that.

It’s that he’s dying by inches, before my eyes, day by day. It’s that the Spanish Inquisition never devised tortures to compare to what he’s going through now. It’s that it’s become communicated to me; I’m terrified and sick with horror. It’s that the sun has gone out and we’re trapped. It’s that there’s only tomorrow left now. I want help! I want help!

Chapter III

She was so overwrought that she fell forward across his desk, burying her face against it, pounding it helplessly with her clenched fist. McManus had to send out for a sedative. When she had drunk the spirits of ammonia, she lay down on a cot in another room and rested. McManus covered her up to the chin with his own overcoat, with his own hands.

When he went back again alone to his office, he spat out: “Gad, what things you run into. Twenty-million dollars, eighteen years old, and her very soul taken from her.”

He sat down at his desk; stayed there staring blankly before him as though he’d forgotten the whole incident.

After about five minutes, he picked up the phone very slowly: “Send Tom Shane in here to me. And Schafer. And Sokolsky. And Dominguez. Send out a short-wave if you have to, I want ’em here right away. Tell ’em to drop whatever they’re on, no matter what it is...”

Tom Shane was just a pleasant-looking fellow in a thirty-dollar herringbone suit. He didn’t look dumb and he didn’t look bright either. Just a guy you wouldn’t mind having a glass of beer with. He lined himself up to the left of the other three.

“Shane,” said McManus, “are you afraid of lions?”

“I wouldn’t go to bed with one,” admitted Shane frankly.

“Shane,” said McManus, “do you think you can keep a millionaire from being mangled by a lion at exactly twelve o’clock tomorrow midnight?”

It wasn’t really a question. McManus seemed to be talking absent-mindedly while he did a lot of thinking behind the smoke-screen of words. “I may as well tell you now that the ‘lion’ might take almost any kind of a shape. It might be a bullet. It might be a poisoned cup of coffee. Then again it just might be an honest-to-goodness lion. I could fill that house with fellows like you, have ’em hanging from the chandeliers like mistletoe, but I don’t want to do that. The ‘lion’ would only defer its visit, and come around some other time when it was least expected. I don’t want that to happen; I want it to come when it’s due to come, so I can make sure it’ll never come again. So there’s only one man going up there to that house with those two people, and I don’t want him to fall down on the job. It’s a double-header, too. If this is what I think it is, that girl’s as doomed as her uncle. That would mop up the twenty-millions nicely, otherwise she could always bring suit to recover what’s already been given away of it.

“So, Tom Shane, you go in there in the next room and sit by Ann Bridges, and go home with her when she’s feeling fit enough. You’re not a detective — you’re her boy-friend on a week-end visit as her house-guest, or her new butler, or a traveling-salesman trying to sell her vacuum-cleaners, I don’t care. But keep those two people alive. Midnight tomorrow’s the deadline.”

Tom Shane wheeled around and went out without a word. He still didn’t look bright, but he didn’t look dumb either. Just a well-built guy in a herringbone suit.

McManus said, “Schafer, you’re on a girl named Elaine O’Brien — and all her family, too. I want to know more about ’em than they know about themselves. And be ready to pinch.

“Sokolsky, you’re on a guy named Jeremiah Tompkins. And don’t kid yourself by the way he looks that he’s no great shakes of a guy. He’s the kingpin in this, whatever it is. Don’t let him out of your sight. Dictaphones and every trick of the trade. And try not to think while you’re at it; the guy’s supposed to be a mind-reader. Take somebody else on it with you, it’s not going to be any pushover. And be even readier to pinch than Shafer. Tompkins has got to be in custody long before midnight — whether you get anything on him or not.”

There was just a guy left that looked a little like Valentino, only better looking.

“Dominguez,” MaManus said, “I’ve gotta lotta little odd-jobs for you. But they’re just as important as the other guys’ assignments, don’t bluff yourself they’re not. Find out what zoos there are within a 500-mile radius of here. Check with every one of them and find out if they keep lions. Find out if any have escaped or been swiped.”

“Swipe a lion?” breathed the detective.

“Warn the keeper at all of ’em to keep extra watch over their lion cages tonight and all day tomorrow. Report to me. Got that? Then, find out at what night club Miss Ann Bridges had a slipper kicked across the dance floor two years ago. And what became of it. Also, the mate to it. Use your Latin looks, apply for a job there or something. Find out what waiter picked ’em up after she’d gone, and what he did with them. If you can get hold of him, bring him in. Report to me. Then, buttonhole one of the big shots at the National Security Bank, ask his cooperation, see if you can trace the leak by which the number of Miss Bridges’ safe-deposit box — 1805 — and what it had in it, came into the possession of a third party. There’s nothing criminal in that, in itself, but it would give us a swell lead.

“Y’got less than twenty-four hours to do all this! Y’ain’t eating and y’ain’t sleeping and y’ain’t even taking time off to talk from now on! Get going!”

When he was all by himself once more, McManus picked up the phone and asked for long distance. “Gimme Paris, France,” he said matter-of-factly, “the Chief of the Surete.”

Many blackmailing gigolos have had telephone love calls, but few have ever been the cause of a transatlantic long distance from police official to police official!

Chapter IV

The University Club Building has two entrances, one on the side street, the other on the avenue. An L-shaped lobby connects them. It’s just for men, of course — college men — and women aren’t allowed above the mezzanine floor, but the lobby’s usually full of them, calling for pinch-hitters to fill in at dances, theatre parties, and house parties.

Ann Bridges and Tom Shane arrived there simultaneously, she in her car at the main entrance, he in a taxi at the side entrance. He had a cowhide overnight bag with him and had changed in the cab itself. He had Princeton written all over him, and — no offense — was now veering dangerously toward the dumb side of the not-dumb, not-bright equation. He had a polo coat hanging down his back below the elbows, orange-and-black tie (very narrow diagonals, not loud), the usual thick brogues. If you’d unbuttoned his jacket, you would see a fraternity pin on the lower tab of his vest. He looked about twenty-three. He jelled perfectly.

The girl was just coming in one side of the lobby as Shane showed up from the other, bag in hand. They were collegiately informal — and loud. He didn’t raise his hat; she punched him on the shoulder. “Hi, toots.”

“ ’Lo ducky!” He grabbed her arm and they went sailing outside to her car, two young things without a care in the world.

Heads turned after them. Somebody mentioned her name. Everybody wondered who he was. All this to baffle watchful eyes that otherwise might have seen her drive away from Headquarters with Shane and would have known him to be a detective. A ticket for a traffic violation she had actually received two days previously was screen enough for her visit there tonight. McManus had had the desk sergeant enter a dummy complaint against her in his records, and a Headquarters reporter had fallen for it, phoned in a couple of lines about it to his paper.

In the car she took the wheel. Shane pitched his bag into the back seat, lay back on the base of his skull. But as they shot off, he suddenly grew up again.

“Feel well enough to drive?” he asked.

“It’ll keep my mind busy till we get there. College men usually let the other fellow do their driving for them anyway. If you’re not one to the life—! How did you do it so quickly?”

“Borrowed the outfit from a friend who really went to one — changed in the cab... Who’s out there with him?” he asked abruptly.

“We have a cook, and a door-opener; then there’s Elaine, and Uncle John’s secretary. My uncle will be all right — I know what you’re thinking — but he’ll be all right until tomorrow night. He wants to live too badly to do anything to himself. It’s tomorrow night we’ve got to worry about.” She drew in her breath fearfully and repeated it a second time: “Tomorrow night.”

“Step it up a little,” Shane said quietly. “Ninety wont hurt any.”

The clock on the dashboard said midnight. The midnight before the midnight.

It was a palatial place, lost in its own grounds. Couldn’t see it from the main road, it was so far back, but a private driveway led to it. Lighted by its private road lights.

Two granite lions couchant, like a sort of omen, were the first things that met Shane’s eye as he got out at the entrance. A little like the lions in front of the Public Library in New York, but smaller. They went up the steps between them.

“J bet it hasn’t helped any to have those things staring him in the face every time he went in or out the last few weeks,” Shane muttered grimly.

“He’s spoken several times of having them removed and replaced by something else,” the girl said, “but this terrible lethargy, this fatalism, that’s come over him, has prevented his doing even that.”

The butler let them in. Shane, taking a snapshot of the man through his mask of collegiate vacuity, decided this wasn’t one of those crime-story butlers to be suspected at sight. He was an old man — sixty or more — had loyalty written all over him, and looked plenty worried.

“How is he, Weeks?” the girl asked in a whisper.

The butler shook his head. “I can’t stand much more of it myself, Miss Ann. He’s sat in one place ever since you left, staring at a clock on the wall.” The old man looked sort of hopefully toward Shane; then, nothing the get-up, his hopes seemed to fade a little.

“Yes, he knows about it, Weeks,” the girl said. “That’s why he’s here. Take his bag up — put him in the room next to my uncle.”

On each side of the long entrance hall a ceiling-high stained-glass panel was set into the blank wall, with electric lights hidden behind them to throw them into relief. They gleamed out in beautiful medieval tones of ruby, emerald, sapphire and mauve. Each leaded sub-division bore the head of some mythological or heraldic animal — a unicorn, a wild boar, a lion rampant, a phoenix...

She saw Shane looking at the windows as they went by. “They came from England,” she said dully. “Some royal abbey or other. Time of the Plantagenets.”

Shane didn’t know who the Plantagenets were. He wasn’t supposed to, anyway. “Pretty old, I guess, eh?” he hazarded. It occurred to him that, judging by the number of decorative animals around, the prophecy might very well have originated right here in the house, in someone’s evil, fertile mind.

“He ever been here, to your knowledge?” he asked.

“Who, Tompkins? Never.”

She took the detective in to see the doomed John Bridges.

Bridges sat in the middle of a big room, and he had gathered three time-pieces around him. A big clock on the wall, a medium-sized one on the table before him, an expensive white-gold watch on his wrist. All three were ticking remorselessly away in the silence, like the mechanism of a time bomb. There was a minute’s difference, Shane noted, between the wall and table clocks. Bridges turned two feverish eyes in hollow sockets toward them.

“Which is right?” he pleaded. “What does yours say?”

“It’s twenty-nine past twelve, not half-past,” the girl said.

His face lit up joyously. “Oh, Ann!” he cried. “Oh, Ann! that gives me a minute more! Just think, a minute more!”

Tom Shane thought, “For what he’s done to this guy already, Tompkins deserves the chair, whether he intends to do anything more or not.”

Aloud he said, cheerfully, “You and I, old timer, are going to have a good stiff highball together — then we’re going up to bed!”

“Yes, yes,” Bridges agreed pathetically. “My next-to-the-last night on earth! I must celebrate, I must—” His voice broke dismally. “Oh, help me forget for just five minutes! Just five minutes, that’s all I ask!” He opened a drawer, pulled out a checkbook, scribbled hastily in it. “If you can take my mind off it for just five minutes, write your own figure in here over my name! Five thousand, ten thousand, I don’t care!”

Shane thought: “I wonder how many times friend Tompkins has cashed in like this?” He went out to mix the highballs himself, and gave Bridges a shot of Scotch that would have lifted a horse off its shoes. McManus’ words came back to him: “It may be a poisoned cup of coffee.” He sampled the drink himself first, rinsing his mouth with it carefully. The taste was so good he hated to waste it, so he swallowed it. “Pleasant way of dying, anyway,” he consoled himself.

He took the drink inside. “You go to bed,” he told the girl. “Lock your door. It’s my job from now on.”

She said, “You’re swell. Keep us alive,” with a funny little catch in her voice as she sidled by him and went up the stairs.

The wall clock chimed one, with a horrid, shuddery, brazen sound. “Twenty-three hours to go,” John Bridges said.

Shane clicked their glasses together with almost enough force to shatter them. “Here’s to crime!” he said huskily. He winked one eye deliberately at the doomed man.

Chapter V

3 a.m. — Shafer, lieutenant. Sorry to wake you up, but I’ve lost this Elaine O’Brien twist, Miss Bridges’ maid—”

You’ve lost her? Well, find her again! Whaddye mean by—

It ain’t that. I know where she is, but she’s no good to us any more. She’s dead.

Dead? What happened to her?

She did the Dutch. Took a run up to the bathroom just before I closed in on her, and swallowed something. I called an ambulance right away, but it was too late.

So then she was implicated. She knew something and was afraid we’d get it out of her!

She didn’t know I was on her trail. I had just about located her house, when I heard the screaming start up inside. Time I busted in, it was all over. I’m holding the rest of them. They claim it was the prophecy preying on her mind. She came home tonight and told them she couldn’t stand the gaff, waiting around out there for it to happen. I checked on the drugstores where she got the stuff, and she bought it a full three days ago, long before Miss Bridges came to us. What’ll I do with the rest of ’em?

10 a.m. — Dominguez, lieutenant. I took a dish-washing job at the Club Cuckoo, where Miss Bridges lost her shoes. Say, my hands are red as lobsters!”

Never mind your hands, I’m no palm-reader. What’d you get?

They knew who she was, so they knew whose shoes they were. First the manager was going to send ’em out to her house next day-after all, they cost about fifty bucks a pair — but some kind of a foreigner sitting there at one of the tables buttonholes him. This guy gives the manager a lotta malarkey about how he’s an old friend of Miss Bridges, knew her in Paris, and he’ll see she gets ’em back. I got all this from a waiter, who I gave a tip on the horses to while I was massaging the crockery—

Well, you got something, Don. I was just asking about that very guy at the rate of twenty bucks a syllable. The shakedown racket made Paris too hot for him so he came over here about two years ago. You gotta descriptch, I suppose?

Yeah. Misplaced eyebrow on his lip. When he’s doing the hot spots he wears one eyeglass in his right lamp. Very good-looking. A short little devil, about five—

That’s enough. One of his names is Raoul Berger, but he’s got twenty others. So he got the shoes?

No. The pay-off is the manager wanted all the credit for himself and hung onto them. But this Frog didn’t seem to mind—

Sure he didn’t. All he cared about was knowing what had taken place, so he could tip off Tompkins and get under her skin. I’m sending out a general alarm for Berger right away. They’re probably working hand-in-glove together, and intend splitting the Bridges millions between ’em at the windup. Probably the idea was originally Berger’s, since he’d already shaken her down once in Europe.

Now, about the safe-deposit box, chief. I been conferring with Cullinan — he’s the manager of that branch of the National Security — and we questioned the vault-keeper. I think I’ve cleared up pretty definitely about how the number of Miss B’s box, 1805, was known — but not its contents. The vault custodian seems straight enough; he’s been with them for years. He recalls definitely that one day about a year and a half ago, Miss B. took her box into one of the little private cubbyholes that are provided for that purpose down in the vault room. The custodian recalls it, because she came out and absent-mindedly left her key behind her. Now, two of these keys are used at a time, see. The custodian has one, and the owner of the box has the other. The number of the box it opens is engraved on the shaft of each key. Well, Miss B. stepped right back inside, that day she mislaid her key, and the custodian went with her to help her look. The key wasn’t there. They came out again — she went through her purse and everything — no sign of it. Fie stepped in again a second time, and there it was, right on the slab! The custodian’s pretty certain that the adjoining booth was occupied at the time, but he is hazy about who was in there. That doesn’t matter. The partitions don’t run all the way up to the ceiling. Obviously, it was our friend Berger, and obviously he’d been in there every time she was, waiting for just such a thing to happen. When it did, he probably used a fish hook or a magnet on the end of a string to draw the key up, memorize its number, then replace it again. All to add to Tompkin’s build-up with her as a wizard. But about what the contents of the box was, I don’t know, unless he used some kind of a mirror as a periscope—

More likely she bought that necklace in Paris. Berger’d seen it on her over there, and he figured it would be in the box. Also the letters she’d written to him. Took a guess at it and scored a bull’s-eye. To get into the vaults all he’d have to do was rent a box under a phony name for five, six bucks, stuff it with old newspapers, and keep showing up each time she did. Still, it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Berger had to stay out of sight — she knew what he looked like — and he had to get in right next door to her each time, not further down the line.

For twenty million bucks I’d go to that much trouble myself.

Get busy on them zoos, or you won’t even be earning forty-eight hundred.

Zoos! That’s gratitude for ya!

5 p.m. — Sokolsky, lieutenant—

It’s about time I was hearing from you! Where’ve you been all this time. What’ve you got?

A pretty bad case of the jitters, for one thing. And Dobbs — I took him on this detail with me — is about ready to crack wide open. I don’t think he’ll be any good for the rest of this case.

I ain’t asking for a health report, I wanna know—

It’s uncanny about that guy — Tompkins, I mean. He — he can see through walls and things—

Less words and more facts!

Yes sir. We took a room in the same house he lives in. We got a lucky break and got the one right over his.Tompkins was out at the time, so we fixed up a dictaphone and led it up through the ceiling behind the steam-pipe. The landlady don’t like him, on accounta he read what was in her mind when she insured her third husband so heavily, after losing two in a year, and also ’cause he’s hep that the color of the hair she goes around wearing ain’t her own. She didn’t tell me this; I put two and two together from the remarks she let drop. Anyway, I got around her and found some French cake-eaters been calling on Tompkins off and on for the past year or so.

Your voice makes sweet music! We’re getting places fast now!

The landlady thinks this Frenchy is the nuts, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is, he’s the only person at all — outside of the O’Brien girl and the old man Bridges himself — who has been near Tompkins since he’s living in the house...

Well, the O’Brien girl’s out of it now. I don’t think she was in on it, anyway. Just a stooge they used to pump facts out of about the Bridges family. I think maybe she found out there was something phony up, after it was too late, and realizing what she’d done to her benefactors, committed the old harry. Go ahead, Sock, what else?

I gave Tompkins’ room a good going-over while I was in there, and came across any number of checks made out by Bridges. Way up in the high brackets, too, telephone numbers! The only thing that don’t jell right was some of ’em were dated six months or more back. He hauls ’em in all right, but don’t seem to bother cashing ’em! Maybe he’s just cagey, afraid to go too heavy yet while Bridges is still alive. Maybe he’s saving them all up until B. and the girl have been done away with!

Will those checks build us a case against him and his French shill! What you do with them?

I was afraid he’d miss them if I impounded them this soon. Dobbs and I rushed a few of the biggest ones out, had ’em photostated, and then replaced ’em again.

Good work!

Tompkins came in about midnight, just as we were getting through, so we beat it upstairs to listen in. About two in the morning this French pal of his pays him a visit. Dobbs took down everything in shorthand, until he went haywire, and I’ll read it to you.

Tompkins says, “You again? What do you want now?”

“Endorse me another one of them checks — I’m running short.”

T. refused at first, says he don’t want Bridges’ money, and Frenchy has no right to it either. Frenchy pulls a gun on him or something, and makes him do it. Then Frenchy says, “Now you get hold of Bridges tomorrow and have him change his will, while there’s still time. I’ll supply the lawyer, a friend of mine. He’s to turn over everything to you, see? Kid him that you’ll call off the prophecy if he does it.”

Tompkins says, “But I can’t. It’s not in my power. It’s there. It’s going to happen.”

The French guy does a slow burn. “You think I believe that stuff? Save that for him! You do what I tell you, or—”

Tompkins answers quietly, “You’re not going to get hold of his money, Berger. You’re not going to live long enough to. Why, you’re going to die even sooner than he is! His time is tomorrow night, but yours is right tonight! You’re never even going to get out of this house alive. There are two dicks in the room over us right now, listening to every word we say — their names are Sokolsky and Dobbs—”

The notes break off there, loot, because Dobbs keeled over right at the mike and pulled a dead faint on the floor. Yeah, honest! It gave me a pretty stiff jolt myself. Just seeing the leadwire of the dictaphone which I’m sure he didn’t, wouldn’t have given this Tompkins our names — nor how many of us were up there.

I’ll have to quote the rest from memory: “Death,” says Tompkins, “is rushing at you right now; I hear the beat of his swift wings. I feel it, I see it, it’s on its way. You have only minutes left. And for me there is imprisonment waiting, and lingering death in a little stone room—”

I heard the Frenchman yell out, “So you framed me, you dirty double-crossing lug! Well, see if you saw this in your crystal ball!”

With that the gun goes off, and nearly busts my eardrum. The Frog has shot him.

I didn’t wait to hear any more. I unlimbered my own gun and lit out and down the stairs hell-bent for leather. The Frog had beaten me out to the stairs; he was already a flight below.

I yelled, “Stay where you are!” Instead, he turned and fired at me, and I fired at the same time he did. He fell all the rest of the way down to the ground floor, and when I got to him he was dead.

Tompkins came out of his room unhurt, but with a powder burn across his forehead. The Frog must have fired at point-blank range, and still didn’t hit him! He started coming down slowly to where I was, with nothing in his hands. Dobbs had come to, and came downstairs behind him, looking like he’d seen a ghost.

Well, this is the hardest part to believe. You can suspend me if you want to, but it’s the God’s honest truth. This man Tompkins came all the way down to where I was bending over the body at the foot of the stairs. I straightened up and covered him with my gun. It didn’t faze him in the least. He kept moving right on past me toward the street door. Not quickly, either, but slowly as if he was just going out for a walk. He said, “It isn’t my time yet. You can’t do anything to me with that.”

I said, “I can’t, eh? You take one step away from me, and it’ll not only be your time, but you’ll be a minute late!”

Dobbs was practically useless; he almost seemed to be afraid of the guy.

Tompkins turned his back on me and took that one step more. I fired a warning shot over his head. He put his hand on the doorknob. So I lowered the gun and fired at the back of his knee, to bring him down. The bullet must have gone right through between his legs. I heard it hit wood along the door frame. Tompkins opened the door and stepped into the opening, and I got mad. I reared after him and fired pointblank at the back of his head. He wasn’t five yards away from me. It was brutal — would have been murder and I’m willing to admit it myself, even though technically he was resisting arrest! I’m telling you, he didn’t even stagger; it never even got him. He went on through and the darkness swallowed him up.

I leaned there against that door for a minute seeing ghosts, then I ran out after him. He was clean gone, not a sign of him up or down the block.

Loot, I’m in a frame of mind where I don’t care what you do to me. My job is to get flesh-and-blood guys that know a bullet when they feel one, not protoplasms that don’t even know enough to lie down when they’re hit...

Awright, Sokolsky, pull yourself together. Bring in the stiff and rinse yourself out with a jolt of rye; maybe it’ll help you carry out instructions better next time! All I know is you let Tompkins slip right through your fingers, and we’re right back where we were. We got to start all over again. We’ve stopped the crook, but the maniac or screwball or whatever you want to call him, the more dangerous of the two, is at large. And every minute he stays that way, Bridges and his niece are in danger of their lives! Tompkins wasn’t bluffing when he walked out that door. He believes in that hooey himself; and if the prophecy don’t work, he’ll help it work! We’ve got seven hours to pick him up again, out of seven million people! Nice going, Sokolsky. Look in a mirror and get good and red in the face!

Chapter VI

“Don’t!” Shane yelled at the man roughly. “Take your eyes off that clock! You’re starting to get me, myself, doing that! I’m only human!” He took a quick step over to the table and turned the instrument face down.

John Bridges gave a skull-like grin, all teeth and no mirth. “You’re only human — that’s right. That’s the truest thing you ever said, son. You’re a detective, too, aren’t you, son? That’s why you’ve been hanging around here all day. Don’t try to tell me, I know. This poor child here thinks you can save me. You think you can save me, too. You poor fools! Nothing can — nothing! He said I’m to die and I’ve got to die.”

“He’s lying through his teeth!” Shane yelled hotly. “That Tompkins is a faker and a crook and a skunk. He’ll fry in hell before anything gets near you. I’ll live to see it, and so will she — and so will you!”

Bridges’ head fell forward, over his lap. “Will it hurt much?” he whined. “I guess it must. Those terrible fangs in their mouths! Those sharp, cruel claws, tearing your skin. But it won’t be the claws — it’s the jaws that will mangle me. By the jaws of a lion, he said — by the jaws of a lion!”

Ann Bridges put her hands over her ears. “Don’t,” she murmured quietly. She gave Shane a look. “I’m trying so hard to — to stay all in one piece.”

Shane poured a dynamic drink, all Scotch with a needle of seltzer. He handed it to Bridges. “Give yourself a little Bravemaker,” he suggested in an undertone.

The millionaire deliberately thrust the glass away from him. Liquor spilled all over the carpet; the glass bounded and rocked on its side without breaking. “Alcohol! Trying to ward off death with bottled slops!”

Shane took out his gun, pointed it butt-first at the old millionaire. “Don’t this mean anything to you? Don’t it mean anything to you that every window and door of this house is locked fast, that there’s an electric alarm on them? That there’s dozens of armed men within call, hidden all around this estate, ready to jump in and grab anyone or anything the minute it shows? That we’re sealed up tight, just the five of us?”

The secretary had lit out in panic sometime during the previous night. Just as Elaine O’Brien had fled. Shane had found a note from him that morning, saying he couldn’t stand it, resigning the job.

Bridges cackled horribly, like a chicken about to have its neck wrung. “Five against Fate. Five against the stars. And what a five! A slip of a girl, a loud-mouthed boy with a gun, and I—!”

“Fate, hell! Stars, hell!” Shane smashed the butt of his gun fiercely at the face of the clock on the wall. Thick glass dribbled off it. “That for Fate, and that for the stars!”

Something happened to the clock. The damaged mechanism started whirring violently, the hands began to move — the hour-hand slowly, the minute-hand more rapidly. They telescoped, jammed together in a straight line pointing at the top of the dial, stayed that way. The whirring sound stopped, the apparatus went dead.

Bridges pointed a bloodless finger at the omen; he didn’t have to say anything.

In the silence the old butler came to the door, stood looking in at them a minute. “Dinner is served,” he said hollowly.

“The Last Supper,” Bridges shuddered. He got up, swayed, tottered toward the dining room. “Eat, drink, let us be merry, for — tonight we die!”

Ann Bridges ran to the detective and clung to him. What difference did it make, at a time like this, that Shane was still a stranger to her, that she hadn’t even known him twenty-four hours before?

“And I still say it was just a coincidence,” he muttered pugnaciously. “You say it, too! Look at me and say it! It was just a coincidence. That happened to be the nearest place on the dial where they both met exactly, those two hands. My blows dented them. They got stuck there, just as the works died, that was all. Stay sane whatever you do. Say it over and over. It was just a coincidence!”

Outside the tall French windows, in the velvety nightsky, the stars in all their glory twinkled derisively.

10:45 p.m. — Dominguez, Mac. I’ve been trying to get through to you for fifteen minutes. Must be some trouble along the line somewhere. I’m way the hell out at a little crossroads called Sterling Junction — yeah, it’s only about ten miles from the Bridges place, in the other direction. Very bad grief. Checking the zoos like you told me, I dig up a traveling road show — a carnival or whatever you want to call it — making a one-night stand here.

Now they had two lions — yes, I said had, that’s the grief. Two monsters, a male and a female, both in one cage. My check-up was a post-mortem. They’d both busted out not twenty minutes before — don’t know if the cage was left open through the keeper’s carelessness, or deliberately tampered with. I beat it right up here to find out what I could. The female was shot dead just outside the carnival grounds but the male got away clean. A posse is out after it with everything from shotguns to fire extinguishers, hoping to rub it out before it gets anyone... They think it’s heading toward the Bridges estate. Someone in a Ford reported sighting what he mistook to be an enormous tawny dog with green eyes in the underbrush as he went by.

Earlier in the evening, the keeper tells me, there was a peculiarlooking duck mooning around the lion cage. Kept staring at them like he was trying to hypnotize the two brutes. The keeper caught this guy teasing them with a bit of goods torn from a woman’s dress, flitting it at them through the bars. Fie sent him about his business without having sense enough to try and find out what the idea was. It may have been our friend Tompkins, then again it may not. Plenty of village half-wits can’t resist riling caged animals like that.

D’you suppose brutes like that can be mesmerized or hypnotized in some way, loot? D’you suppose they can be given the scent of one particular person, through a bit of clothing, like bloodhounds? Yeah, I know him, but then this whole affair is so screwy from first to last, nothing would surprise me any more. You better contact Shane right away and let him know he’s up against the real thing, not a metaphor any more. There’s a lot of difference between a man-eater like that and a little runt like Tompkins, when it comes to a showdown!

Chapter VII

John Bridges was slumped in a big overstuffed chair by now, staring wild-eyed at nothing. Shane was perched on the chair arm, his gun resting on his thigh, finger around the trigger, safety off. Ann Bridges was standing behind the chair, leaning over it, pressing soothing hands to her uncle’s forehead.

The portieres were drawn across the French windows, veiling the stars outside — which were there nevertheless. In addition, a ponderous bookcase blocked one window, a massive desk the other. The double-doors were locked on the inside, and the key to them was in Shane’s vest pocket. The butler and the Finnish cook were, at their own request, locked in the scullery.

It was the awful silence that was hardest to bear. They couldn’t get the old millionaire to say anything. Their own voices — Shane’s and Ann’s — were a mockery in their ears, so they quit trying to talk after a while. Bridges wouldn’t drink either, and even if he had, he was past all sensation now; it wouldn’t have affected him.

The girl’s face was the color of talcum. Her uncle’s was a death mask, bone structure overlaid by parchment. Shane’s was granite, with a glistening line of sweat just below his hair line. He’d never forget this night, no matter what else happened for the rest of his life. They were all getting scars on their souls, the sort of scars people got in the Dark Ages, when they believed in devils and black magic.

The travesty of food and drink that Shane had swallowed at that shadowy supper table a while before was sticking in his craw. How can wine warm you when the toast is death at midnight? He’d tried to urge the girl to leave while there was time, to get out and leave the two of them to face it alone. He hadn’t been surprised at her staunch refusal; he admired her all the more for it. Tie would nevertheless have overridden her by physical force if necessary — the atmosphere had grown so deadly — but for one fact.

When he’d tried to contact McManus, to have a special bodyguard sent out to take Ann away, the phone was dead. The house was cut off. Ann couldn’t go alone, of course; that would have been worse than staying.

They had one clock with them in the room again. Bridges had begged and pleaded so hard for one, that Shane reversed his edict. The mental agony of Bridges, and the strain on Ann and himself were much worse without a clock than with one. It was better to know just how much time was left. Shane had got a large one with a pendulum, from the entrance hall. It said fourteen minutes to twelve.

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick — and it was thirteen minutes to twelve. The pendulum, like a harried gold planet, kept flashing back and forth behind the glass pane that cased it. Ann manipulated her two solacing hands over the doomed man’s temples.

“It goes so fast, so fast,” John Bridges groaned, eyes on the clock. The minute hand, shaped like a gold spearhead, had notched forward again — eleven to twelve.

“Damn!” Shane said with a throaty growl, “Damn!” He began to switch the muzzle of his gun restlessly up and down on his thigh. Something to shoot at, he thought; gimme something to shoot at! A drop of sweat ran vertically down his forehead as far as the bridge of his nose, then off into one of the tear ducts beside it.

Tick, tick, tick — whish, whish, whish — ten to twelve.

Bridges said suddenly, without taking eyes off the clock: “Son — Shane, or whatever your name is — call Warren 2424 in the city for me. Ask him once more — oh, I’ve asked him so many times — for the last time, if there isn’t any hope for me? Ask him if I’ve got to go, if he still sees it?”

Shane said, “Who?” But he knew. Bridges wasn’t aware yet that Tompkins would be in custody, that McManus had seen to that item right after Ann’s visit.

“Tompkins,” the ill man answered. “I haven’t — haven’t heard from him in two days. And if there isn’t any hope, say goodbye for me.”

Shane said curiously, sparring for time because he knew the phone was dead, “You want me to unlock those doors, go out there into the other room where the phone is?”

“Yes, yes,” Bridges said. “It’s still safe, we have — yes, there’s ten minutes yet. You can be back in here in a minute. His landlady will answer. Tell her to hurry and bring him down to the phone—”

Shane snapped his fingers. “Maybe I can bring this baby back to life,” he thought. He gave the girl a look. “Stay right by him, Miss Ann. I’ll just be outside the door.”

He took the doorkey from his pocket, opened the two tall doors, and stepped quickly to the phone in the room beyond. The lights were on all over the house, and everything was quiet.

The phone was still dead, of course. He spoke loudly into the silent mouthpiece, “Give me Warren 2424, hurry it up!” He feigned a pause, then, “Bring Jeremiah Tompkins to the phone, quickly! This call is from John Bridges.”

He faked another wait, slightly longer. The clock in the next room ticked remorselessly away before Ann Bridges and her uncle. He held his gun in his right hand. The phone was a hand-set. A gust of wind or something scuffed and snuffed at one of the French windows over on the other side of the house; instantly his weapon pointed in that direction. The sound was almost animal-like. Phoof! like that. A snuffle.

It wasn’t repeated. Shane remembered his charade, and said, “Tompkins? Hello! I’m talking on behalf of Mr. Bridges. Does that still hold good, for tonight at twelve? It’s nearly that now, you know.”

There was a long mirror-panel in the wall over him. In it he could see the room he had left. The girl and her uncle were bending forward, drinking in every word.

“Fight fire with fire,” he thought. “I don’t know why McManus didn’t sweat Tompkins down to the bone, then make him eat his prophecy to Bridges’ face. That would have undone the damage quicker than anything else!”

He raised his voice, “That’s more like it!” he said. “When did you find this out? Re-checked, eh? You should have let him know first thing — he’s been worried sick! I’ll tell him right away!” He hung up, wondering just how good an actor he was going to be.

He went briskly in again, gave them the bridgework. He could tell by the girl’s face that she saw through the bluff; maybe she had found out already that the phone was n.g. But if he could only sell the death-candidate himself—

“It’s all off!” he announced cheerfully. “Tompkins just told me so himself. There’s been a change in — in, uh, the stars. He’s not getting the death-vibrations any more. Can’t possibly be midnight tonight. He’ll tell you all about it himself when he—” Something in the old man’s face stopped him. “What’s the matter, what’re you looking at me like that for? Didn’t you hear what I just said?”

John Bridges’ head was thrown back, mouth open. He began to roll it slowly from side to side. “Don’t mock me,” he said. “Death’s too serious to be mocked like that. I just remembered — after I sent you out there — his landlady had that phone taken out a month ago. Too much trouble calling roomers to it all the time, she said. There is no phone at all now in the house where Tompkins lives.”

Shane took it like a man. He turned away without a word, closed! the doors again behind him, leaned his back against them. Tossing the key up and down in the hollow of his hand, he smiled mirthlessly out i of the corner of his mouth.

The figure in the chair was holding out a hand toward him, a trembling hand. “It’s five-to,” he quavered. “I’m going to say goodbye now. Thank you for sticking by me, anyway, son. Ann, my dear, come around in front of me. Kiss me goodbye.”

Shane said in a hoarse, offensive voice: “What’ll you have for breakfast?” He ignored the outstretched hand.

Bridges didn’t answer. The girl crouched down before him and he kissed her on the forehead. “Goodbye, dear. Try to be happy. Try to forget — whatever horror you’re about to witness in this room in the next few minutes.”

Shane said belligerently, trying to rally him: “Not to want to die is one thing. Not to lift a finger to keep from dying is another! Were you always like this, all your life?”

The doomed man said, “It’s easy to be brave with forty years ahead of you. Not so easy with only four minutes—”

The tick of the clock, the hiss of its pendulum, seemed louder than all their voice. Three minutes to twelve... two minutes. John Bridges’ eyes were like tiny billiardballs in his head, so rounded, so hard, so white. Shane’s trigger-finger kept twitching nervously, aching to pull, but in which direction, he didn’t know.

One minute to go. The space between the two clock hands was a sliver of white, a paring, a thread. Three pairs of eyes were on it. Dying calf-eyes; frightened woman’s eyes; skeptical policeman’s eyes!

Then, the space was gone. The two hands had blended into one.

A bell, a pair of them, rang out jarringly. The phone that Shane had thought dead, that had been dead until now, was pealing on the other side of the door. The shock lifted him off his heels. The girl jumped too. Bridges alone gave no sign.

Bong! the clock struck mellowly, majestically repeatedly.

Before the first vibration had died away Shane was already outside at the signaling instrument, gun-hand watchfully fanning the empty air around him. A trick? A trap to draw him away? He’d thought of that. But Bridges and the girl were in full sight of him; to get to them anything would have to pass him first. And he had to answer this weird call.

McManus’ distant voice said: “Hello! Shane— Shane? Line was down, couldn’t get through to you till now. Been trying for an hour... Everything’s under control, Shane. We’ve beaten the rap, the guy’s saved! No time to tell you now. I’ll be out there the quickest I can—”

Bong! cut across the voice, third stroke of the hour.

“Hurry, chief,” said Shane. “The poor guy is sweating his very life away with terror. I want you to tell him it’s all O.K.”

“General alarm was out for Tompkins. At half-past ten tonight he walks in here of his own accord, gives himself up! Yeah, Headquarters! Said he knew he’d be arrested anyway. He’s still spouting Bridges has to die. Also that he’s going to conk out himself, in jail waiting for his trial to come up. The latter he Iras my best wishes on. Here’s something for you, kid, after what you must have gone through out there tonight; according to Tompkins, you’re marrying twenty million bucks inside a year. Yeah, Ann Bridges, before the year is out!”

Bong!

“Oh, one thing, I just got word they shot a lion that was heading your way, cornered it on the outskirts of the estate. A real one that broke out of its cage earlier tonight. We thought at first Tompkins had something to do with it, but he’s been able to prove he wasn’t anywhere near there when it happened. Just a spooky coincidence. Tell Bridges everything’s jake. I’ll be there myself in three-quarters of an hour—”

The gild’s frenzied scream seared through Shane like cauterization. He dropped the phone like a bar of red-hot iron, whirled. Old man Bridges dashed by before he could stop him and sprinted down the entrance-hall like something bereft of its senses.

“Stop him! He’s out of his mind!” Ann Bridges screamed.

Bong!

Shane took up the chase. Bridges had vanished but the chatter of broken glass sounded far away. The detective turned into the hallway — and slid to a stop. Walking warily, apprehensively, he approached the distant figure of the millionaire. Bridges stood at the far end of the hall, leaning against the wall, which held two stained-glass panels.

As Shane approached, the other man’s knees buckled wearily but he didn’t fall. A chill swept through Shane’s flesh. He stopped, unable to breath. For John Bridges was headless or seemed to be. His head had been thrust directly through one of those leaded panes, rammed straight out the other side.

Jagged teeth of thick, splintered glass which held his neck in a vise had pierced his jugular. You could see a dark shadow running down the inside of the lighted pane that was the millionaire’s life-blood.

It was midnight and the square of glass he had chosen in his blind, headlong flight, out of all the many squares, was that one of the lion rampant!

Bong!

The mane and eyes and feline nostrils of the beast still showed above John Bridges’ gashed throat, as though the painted image were swallowing the man bodily. And for fangs, instead of painted ones there were jagged spears of glass, thrusting into Bridges’ flesh from all sides of the orifice he himself had created.

Death by the jaws of a lion!

Bong! the clock struck for the twelfth time, and then all was silence.

McManus raised worried eyes above the report he was making out, “What’ll I put in here? Would you call it murder by mental suggestion?”

“I’m not so sure,” Shane answered.

“Are you starting to go superstitious on me, too?” the lieutenant snapped. But his eyes went uneasily toward the window, beyond which the stars were paling into dawn.

They both looked long at those distant inscrutable pin-points of brilliance that no man can defy or alter.