Footprints on the Ceiling

Chapter Nine: SORCERER’S APPRENTICES

The doctor’s cottage was a small summer affair close by the shore, perhaps 100 yards from the larger house. The lighted window, as we drew near, still blinked monotonously, sending its cryptic message out across the water. During the lighted intervals, now, we could see Dr. Gail. Wearing a dark blue dressing gown and slippers, he stood by the light switch with his right hand on the button. His left held a sheet of note paper that he watched carefully.

Merlini’s knuckles rapped sharply against the door. The dots and dashes stopped abruptly, leaving the room in darkness.

After a short silence, the Doctor’s voice called out: “Who is it?”

“Man from the light company,” answered Merlini. “Noticed you were having trouble.”

The light came on, footsteps crossed the room, and the Doctor smiled at us from the open door. “Come in. You gave me a start for a moment. Thought perhaps it might be the murderer.”

Merlini marched in, past him.

“Maybe it is,” he replied.

Dr. Gail blinked a bit at that. “I’ll take a chance. You’re company at any rate. I rent this place from Miss Skelton and come out here week-ends mainly for solitude. Somehow that doesn’t seem to be what I want tonight.”

Merlini indicated the paper the Doctor still held in his hand. “May I see that, please?”

“What? Oh, of course.” He handed it over, looked at us both for a moment through narrowed eyes, and then grinned widely. “Mysterious signals in the night arouse suspicion because no one admitted knowing Morse code. Investigators investigate.” He nodded at the paper. “I hope that clears me?”

I looked over Merlini’s shoulder. On the paper, printed in pencil and widely spaced were the letters: SOS SEND POLICE SKELTON ISLAND HURRY. Each letter had beneath it a combination of dots and dashes, the first few like this:

“I don’t know the code,” Gail continued, “but after I’d returned here it suddenly occurred to me that the encyclopedia should have it. It does.” He pointed at a volume of the Britannica that lay open on the table. “And since the visibility has cleared somewhat in the last hour — you can make out the lights on shore now — I thought it was just possible someone might catch on. And we could do with the police, you know.”

“I see,” Merlini said pleasantly. “Sure this is what you were sending?”

“Yes, at least, that’s what I hope I was sending. Though God knows what a professional telegrapher would think of it. And I was getting awfully bored. Perhaps one of you would like to have a go at it?”

“It won’t be necessary,” Merlini explained casually. “We managed to phone in.”

“Phone? How?” He seemed genuinely surprised.

“The person who cut the line kindly repaired it for us. Is that coffee I smell?”

“The person — Who was it?”

“He didn’t wait for us to thank him.” Merlini turned his back, dismissing the subject, and glanced interestedly about at the books which overflowed the room.

“Oh.” Gail sent a sharp look at his back. “I see. Yes, it’s coffee. It’ll be right out.” He disappeared into the kitchen.

The living-room was a pleasant, cheerful place with an open fireplace, deep, comfortable armchairs, and a sufficient number of ash trays scattered about. Two bookcases were filled to capacity and beyond. There were books on the tables, in the chairs, and stacked in crooked towers in the corners. The larger share of them were technical works on psychology and related subjects, though here and there I glimpsed others that indicated a wide and catholic taste. One lower bookcase shelf held a whole row of brightly jacketed detective stories.

Merlini removed a stack of psychology journals from one of the chairs and sat down. As he lighted a cigarette, his eyes, above the match flame, slid sideways and looked down at something on a small end table beside his chair. Dropping his match into an ash tray, he glanced up thoughtfully at the kitchen door, his slightly tilted smile showing across his mouth.

The Doctor entered carrying a tray that held coffee, cups, cream, and sugar. As he placed them on the center table, I came forward from the bookshelves and circled Merlini’s chair, a surreptitious eye cast downward. Two letters lay there bearing similar inscriptions, both addressed to Mr. Gordon Williams, c/o G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2 West 45th Street, New York City. In each case the name and address had been crossed out and a new one written in ink alongside: Dr. William Gail, 56 East 65th Street, New York City.

I took my coffee black. Merlini lay in his chair, his long legs protruding an unheard-of distance. Dr. Gail poured silently and with a slightly grim air.

Merlini took his cup and held it cradled in his hands, warming them. “There’s one point that must be settled at once. You, Doctor, said tonight that Miss Skelton would never have gone up to that house alive and under her own power. You sounded pretty positive. Are we to understand that there could have been no exceptions at all?”

Gail struck a match with his thumbnail, applied it to his cigarette, and then pitched it into the fireplace. “Know much about agoraphobia?”

Merlini shook his head. “Never heard of it until tonight.”

“All right. We’ll start from scratch. The word means ‘fear of assembly.’ A more exact term, in Linda’s instance, would be topophobia, fear of place. It’s an anxiety hysteria that springs from some childhood experience which gave her a terrific, disruptive emotional shock, and has played merry hell with her neural patterns almost ever since. For the patient, the fear is a mysterious thing with no apparent reason. The causative experience, long forgotten, remains buried in the subconscious mind while its emotional effect, seizures of uncontrollable terror, bursts from time to time into the consciousness.”

Dr. Gail leaned back in his chair and fished a book from the shelves behind him. “Leonard, its most articulate victim, described it in The Locomotive God far better than I can.” He thumbed quickly through the pages, found a passage, and read, “ ‘At times this emotional effect remains merely a diffused state of terror, in intensity running the whole scale from vague anxiety to intensest feeling of impending death; and the agonized mind stands balked of any explanation whatever.… my phobic seizures at their worst approach any limits of terror that the human mind is capable of in the actual presence of death in its most horrible forms.’ ” Gail looked up. “That gives you a rough idea.”

“Yes, quite,” Merlini said seriously. “What would have happened had Miss Skelton been taken forcibly beyond her given limit?”

“A number of things. The outward symptoms might be one or more of the following: palpitation of the heart, shivering, vomiting, exaggerated flushing of the face, dry mouth, cold and clammy sweating, accelerated intestinal and urinary action, hysterical fainting, unconsciousness, and even catalepsy. In Linda’s case I should fully expect a collapse from nervous exhaustion, quite possibly resulting in complete insanity or simple death from pure fright.”

“That,” I interposed with a sudden technical interest, “sounds like a novel murder method for a detective story. Murderer, forcing agoraphobe out of bounds, frightens her to death. Then moves body back again. Medical examiner diagnoses heart failure, It’s neat and simple, and the cops would have a pretty time trying to prove murder.”

Gail smiled, “Yes. That’s all right — for fiction, There’s an even better agoraphobe plot though. Use the phobia as a motive. The murderer has it. Within his prescribed area he has a job. Someone who dislikes him tries to get him fired. See the situation? His livelihood depends on the position; if he loses it he can’t hop on a train like anyone else and go look for one somewhere else. He’s irrevocably sunk. He kills his enemy as a simple matter of self-preservation. And if you can devise a long-distance murder, so that the victim meets death out beyond the boundary which the murderer cannot cross — you’ve given him a neat alibi.”

“And the other agoraphobe variation,” Merlini said slowly, “is the one we’ve got. Any ideas about that, Doctor?”

The latter carefully ground out his cigarette in an ash tray. Then, seeing my cup empty, he indicated the coffee pot and said, “Help yourself, Harte.” He lighted another cigarette before he replied in a careful voice, “Yes, I have.”

Merlini said nothing, waiting. The Doctor went on.

“I can’t tell you who poisoned Linda, but — well, if I were you I wouldn’t eliminate everyone who knew she was an agoraphobe, just because her body was in the wrong place. Not right off the bat, anyhow.”

“You suspect that’s what the murderer wants us to do?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been thinking about that. The murderer kills her, fakes the appearance of suicide, and then puts the body in the wrong place. The position of the body not only explodes the false suicide, but at the same time indicates that the murderer was someone who knew no better than to fake a suicide in the wrong place. The obvious explanation, and, being simpler, the one the police would prefer. The agoraphobia is then neither means nor motive, but alibi. That the general idea?”

“Yes. It explains the appearance of suicide.”

Merlini frowned at him. “Doctor, I hope you didn’t kill her. Because if you did I can see it’s going to be difficult.”

Gail said coolly, “As a matter of fact, I didn’t, but I shouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be difficult just the same.”

“You suspect someone?”

The Doctor hesitated. “Perhaps. But it’s only that. I couldn’t suggest a name at this point.”

“But you might — later?”

“I might.” Gail didn’t seem too positive. He scowled at the floor; then, studying Merlini’s face, asked, “Do you believe there are any justifiable instances of murder?”

Merlini shook his head. “That’s a leading question. I beg to be excused on the grounds that I might incriminate myself. I take it you do?”

“Your reason for not answering—”the Doctor smiled—“is as good as any.”

“You shouldn’t have mentioned it. Let’s get back to Miss Skelton, shall we? Had you any hope of effecting a cure?”

“No. Frankly, I did not. No harm in trying though. You see, she was beginning to develop phobophobia, a fear of the fear itself. I was trying to prevent that, but phobias in the acute form of Linda’s are far out on the frontiers of abnormal psychology. There’s such a lot we don’t know yet. About all we can do is to try to drag the initial causative experience up out of the subconscious depths and put it where the patient can see and understand it. Linda’s acute condition dates from the opening night of her first Broadway appearance as an actress. She collapsed completely. Her most powerful emotional urge has been the desire to be a great actress. Instead of being an exhibitionist, she’s an agoraphobe, and her complete frustration merely makes matters worse. The acting scare was not the original one; only that which unleashed the phobia. Somewhere far back in her childhood — she may have been only two or three years old — some emotional fright occurred that burned itself deep into her brain.”

“But how can you get at something that has happened so far back and is so completely forgotten?”

The Doctor smiled broadly. “That, in a way, is right up your alley. The answer is: detective work and black magic. Detective work of a high order, too, if I do say so. You have to probe about through the human mind in a jungle of deviously intertangled and snarled complexities. You have to follow an old trail, using clues — a fifteen-year-old dream, for example — that may prove to be only a symbol for another clue. The labyrinth of false trails and blind alleys makes child’s play out of criminal detection. A study may last several years and provide an index of fifteen or twenty thousand recall items that have to be properly classified, co-ordinated, analyzed, and jigsawed together.”

“And the black magic?”

“Insanity used to be explained on the demoniac-possession theory. It’s a good theory, too, except that the demon is imaginary rather than real. Strangely enough, the technique that has been evolved for exorcising that demon is made up of some things most people think of as magical. It is necessary somehow to induce the subconscious or marginal mind to express itself freely and the methods of doing that—”

Merlini grunted. “Uh-huh. Methods which concern inverted drinking glasses hanging in mid-air. I see now. A dim light just behind the head, half-raised eyes, attention focused on the glass — in short, crystal gazing! Ross, Inspector Gavigan isn’t going to like this at all.”

“Neither do I,” I said doubtfully. “Do you have a turban, Doctor, and a robe with the zodiacal signs on it?”

“You see, Merlini?” He spread his hands helplessly. “No, Harte, sorry, nor any stuffed alligators. The phony sciences have been almost too thoroughly debunked. With all that smoke you don’t realize there is a little fire. You can look into a crystal and see visions, visions you’d swear were really there. I can prove that to you. Actually, of course the vision is not in the crystal, but in your head. It’s a self-induced, visual hallucination. The crystal gazer who thinks the vision is an external reality is only a magician playing tricks on himself.”

“I still don’t see where the psychoanalysis comes in,” I complained.

“Hallucinations are of subconscious origin. And that makes crystal gazing a method of tapping the subconscious memory, a method of getting at the long-past things the conscious mind has forgotten, but which the subconscious mind still holds.”

Merlini, somewhat fearfully I thought, asked, “And the other methods, Doctor?”

“Your Inspector won’t like those either. The complete list is: automatic writing, automatic speech, shell hearing — like crystal gazing, except that the hallucination is auditory rather than visual — twilight sleep, hypnosis, trances, and catalepsy. Since Linda Skelton paid me for services rendered, I fully expect that the Inspector will jug me for obtaining money through fraudulent mediumistic practices.”

Merlini almost shouted at him. “Did you say hypnosis?”

“Yes, but you don’t need to jump to the conclusion that Linda was hypnotized into going out of bounds. That’s out. She had a phobic resistance to any unconscious form of trance state. My clinical notes will prove that. We tried it. And she tried hard to co-operate, but with no success. There might be several reasons for that. She was operated on at one time as a child; it may be a persisting fear of anesthesia or it might be her peculiarly assertive personality or even the phobia’s own self-protective blockage.”

“But what did you use?”

“Crystal gazing and automatic writing were the most successful.”

Merlini frowned. “What effect has Madame Rappourt had on Linda?”

“Bad. That woman should be—” The Doctor stopped, shrugged his shoulders, and went on. “Linda wouldn’t believe the hallucinations were not real. She persisted in assigning spiritualistic causes. Pleased because she thought she had mediumistic powers. Rappourt and I have been at loggerheads, naturally.”

“And yet you let Linda take part in these séances?”

“Let her?” Gail grinned. “You didn’t know Linda. I’ve just mentioned her assertive personality. That was my innate politeness. Linda did what she damned well pleased, and if her doctor didn’t like it he could go climb a tree. Handling her was a problem, and mostly she didn’t handle. I continued with her case only because the phobia is rare and offered study possibilities.”

“What effect did the séances have?”

“They were definitely harmful. She had been hyper-excited and her interest had been so absorbed that my treatments had for the moment practically ceased. That happened once before. Last year she had a Hindu mystic on the place. He spouted reincarnation, Yogi breath control, mystic world cycles, and all the rest of it. His engagement terminated when the silverware in the house began to dematerialize.”

“Silverware.” Merlini sat up in his chair. “I knew I’d forgotten something. Ross, show him those coins of yours.”

I took the little box out and rolled the six gold guineas across the table. I saw the Doctor’s eyes grow round, and he looked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time.

“Where did you get those?”

“You might spin that story now, Ross,” Merlini said. “I’ve waited long enough.”

I settled back and gave it to them, from the phone booth to the crack on the head. I’ve never had a more attentive audience. Merlini lay back with his eyes closed, but I knew that his ears were wide open. Doctor Gail examined the coins, one at a time, his calm professional confidence fading as he listened, to be replaced by a frankly bewildered air.

When I had finished, Merlini sat up, and, without commenting on my yarn, produced the slates he had taken from the safe. Our previous examination, after seeing the Doctor’s light, had been hasty. He looked at them again, now, and passed them across one at a time to Gail.

“You’ve seen those guineas and heard Harte’s story,” he said. “I want you to look at these and tell me something.”

The Doctor raised an eyebrow but said nothing. He looked at the slates. I moved around where I could see. On the first, the one bearing the map, I now noticed something I had missed before, an X-mark on the water just within the projecting arm of the island and about equally distant from either shore.

The complete message on the second slate read: Bow at 108 beam 112-four-feet silt two tar, superstructure projects slightly astern position lies 20 points off north by northeast. Pole. The handwriting had an odd, uneven, hesitant quality about it, and in several places some of the words overlapped each other. It looked very much as if it had been written by a disembodied spirit, or — by someone writing in the dark.

But the third message was the honey. Doctor Gail read it slowly aloud: “September 13, 1780, £380,000 transferred from H. M. S. Mercury and 14 cartloads specie from paymaster’s office in Cherry Street. This added to the large sum shipped at Dover made total in my care £960,000. Capt. Charles M. Pole.”

What hit me between the eyes was that date!

Dr. Gail’s voice attempted calmness, but it missed fire. “Where did you get these?” he asked Merlini.

“Found them kicking about down there.” Merlini nodded in the direction of the other house. I hadn’t known that articles locked in a safe could be described as kicking about but I let it pass.

“And you want to know?” Gail inquired slowly.

Merlini pulled himself up out of his chair and stood before the fireplace. “I want to know what it’s all about.”