No Coffin for the Corpse

Chapter Six: The Curious History

For a week now my most strenuous efforts had all been futile. I had chased clear to Florida and back, more than two thousand miles. Fines, phone calls, train and plane fares had reduced my bank account to the status of an exploded theory. And now, just as soon as I sat down and relaxed, she appeared out of nowhere like a jinni from a bottle.

I sat there for a moment, afraid to turn and look for fear that it might be only another of Merlini’s conjuring illusions. Then, getting up, he spoke. “You think you can supply—”

His voice tumbled suddenly headlong over a precipice and fell down out of sight. A weak astonished echo floated back. “What have you done to your hair?”

I took a chance and looked, expecting anything. If what I saw was a hallucination, it was visual as well as auditory. And worth, in my estimation, the full price of admission.

Though Kay wore no hat, I could see nothing wrong with her hair. It seemed to be just as usual, framing her face with gold and dropping down to break in a bright curling foam around her neck. Her clothes — the deep-blue dress that matched the color of her eyes, the short fur jacket thrown carelessly across her shoulders, the big, fire-engine red purse — were all out of Vogue by Bonwit Teller, but worn, as she always wore them, with a careless nonchalance.

She gave me a nod and half a smile, and said, “Hello, Ross.”

I had just zoomed up to the dizzy top of an emotional roller coaster. The completely impersonal tone of her voice, as cool and distant as the dark nebula in Orion, sent me dropping again, straight down.

She answered Merlini before I could speak, “Don’t you like my hair this way?”

“I do,” he said, still sounding a bit off balance. “I think I like it even better, especially that shade of blond. But I didn’t cast you as a lightning-change artist. Will it stay that way? I can’t order new costumes and scenery to match each time you change your mind.”

It was Greek to me — the whole conversation. That, or some lost Sanskrit dialect. “What goes on here?” I asked. “What color did you think her hair was? It’s always been blond.”

“Not last week it wasn’t,” Merlini said, eyeing me with some suspicion. “It was a dark shade of brunette. Apparently you two know each other?”

I nodded. “We did. But something slipped. Look, Kay, were you here in town rehearsing with Merlini all week?”

Merlini answered, “She’s on the pay roll, such as it is. She gets sawed in half in the first act, burned alive in the second, and is magically patched up again in time to go to town on the ‘Sleight of Heart’ song. And, as press agent, I want you to see that Miss Lamb gets—”

“Miss who?” I blurted.

“Lamb.” Merlini scowled at me. “L-a-m-b. Who did you think she was?”

“I know who she is. She’s a Wolff in—”

“In sheep’s clothing,” Kay cut in, addressing Merlini and still pretending that I wasn’t there. “I was wearing a wig on account of the detectives.”

“Oh, I see,” Merlini said, blinking a bit and not seeing any more than I did. “Detectives. You’re a fugitive from something?”

“From home. Dad and I disagreed, and I decided not to darken his door again, at least not until he calmed down. Last time that happened he ordered squads of private detectives. I was afraid they’d be watching all the theaters and booking agencies.”

Slowly, as if to see how it sounded, Merlini said, “Wolff. Kathryn Wolff.” Then he looked curiously at me. “If that’s who she is, why is it that you haven’t been around before now, Ross?”

Merlini knew I had been dating Kathryn Wolff with more regularity than I displayed toward the average blonde, but he hadn’t met her, at least not under that name.

“I’ve been vacationing,” I said. “A seven-day cruise around Robin Hood’s barn. Kay, there are one or two things I want to—”

But she wasn’t having any. “Merlini,” she cut in quickly, “don’t you want to hear about the angel I found?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do.” He looked a bit baffled by my cryptic remarks and Kay’s attitude. “Sit down.” He waved his hand at the thousand or so empty seats that surrounded us, offering her all of them.

I was baffled too. I knew now that if she had been here in New York all week, she hadn’t been responsible for that telegram. And yet she was acting just as if she felt the way the wire had sounded. I didn’t get it at all. It didn’t even look as if I was going to get a chance to discuss it.

Merlini balanced himself on the back edge of row two, put his feet on the seat in row three, facing Kathryn. “Wolff,” he said again somewhat suspiciously. “That isn’t the angel’s name too, by any chance?”

Kay nodded. “Yes. It’s Dad. He’s in a jam. You’re the only person I know who can help, and if you do—”

Merlini seemed incredulous. “Wait,” he interrupted. “Did he actually tell you that he’d put money of his in a show of mine?”

“Well, no. He didn’t. But—’’

“I was afraid of that,” Merlini said disappointedly, seeing the promised financial backing fade. Dudley T. Wolff explodes violently like a shipment of his own blasting powder every time he hears my name mentioned. I’ve seen people run for cover thinking it was a thunderstorm. And yet you—”

Merlini halted. He didn’t seem, somehow, to be operating with his usual efficiency. “Jam?” he asked then, backtracking a bit. “What kind of a jam?”

Kay hesitated, lit a cigarette, took a nervous puff or two, and then forgot she had it. The gay, lighthearted smile which was so much her own that she could have patented it wasn’t there any longer.

“It’s — It’s—” She stopped as if facing a cold shower. Then suddenly, holding her breath, she plunged in. “Well, it’s a ghost.”

If the silence that followed that had been set aside to cool, it would have jelled.

“Ghost,” Merlini repeated uncertainly. “Lamb. Wolves. Angels. Detectives. Jam. And now ghost. You know I’m not quite sure I follow this, but go on.”

“I know how it sounds,” Kay said. “But I’m quite serious. Father and Francis Galt have at last got what they’ve always wanted — and it’s too much for them.” Kathryn spoke rapidly now, almost breathlessly. “Merlini, you’ve got to help. You’re chairman of the American Scientist’s psychic-investigating committee. You say you can duplicate any occult phenomena by ordinary magician’s means. The only other person who knows nearly as much about such things is Francis Galt, and he—”

She stopped uncertainly, frowning.

“Has approved the ghost?” Merlini asked.

“No,” she said slowly. “Not yet. He’s still investigating. But I’m afraid he will. Dad’s got his wind up badly, and if Galt—” Once again her voice trailed off. Her hands played nervously with her purse.

“That doesn’t sound like Dudley Wolff,” Merlini commented.

“I know. That’s why I’m so sure that there’s something deep down behind it all that I don’t understand. Something that Dad knows and fears, and won’t admit. Something I don’t understand at all. I think it’s that mainly that has him scared — that and what he’s afraid is going to happen.”

“What is going to happen?” Merlini repeated. “Do you know?”

“No. But I think Father does, and he’s afraid — deathly afraid. I’ve never seen him like this before. I — we’ve got to do something quickly.” Her voice was strained now, and tense. She threw me a brief glance. “Dad can be a holy terror sometimes. But — Mother died when I was born. I have no one else, and — well I can’t simply stand by and see him go to pieces as he’s doing. He’s always been so completely confident, so sure of himself. And he still tries — but it’s not the same. He’s jumpy. His nerves are shot. I’ve asked him to see Doctor Haggard. He refuses. He’s tried so hard to prove that things like this are possible, and now, when he seems to have done it, it’s apparently more than he bargained for.”

Merlini regarded her thoughtfully. “What does Mrs. Wolff think? Does she agree that he has done it?”

Kay didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, “You know who she was when Dad married her?”

Merlini nodded. “That’s why I asked.”

“Then she would agree, I suppose, wouldn’t she?”

“She might. But don’t you know? What has she said?”

Kay frowned. “Anne and I aren’t exactly bosom pals. She—”

“Pardon me, Kay,” I said, “but I’m way behind. Who was she before she married your father?”

“She was a medium,” Merlini answered. “She made a bit of a stir in psychic circles back in ’35. Her particular phenomena were the production of cold breezes of apparent astral origin and spirit lights. A favorable report concerning her appeared over Galt’s name in the Journal of Psychic Research which he edits and which Wolff backs. A year or so later Dudley Wolff married her.” Merlini looked at Kay. “Galt told me once that some months later the phenomena grew weaker and finally ceased altogether as sometimes happens. Is that right?”

“Yes. She hasn’t done anything of the sort in a long time.”

“But you think she might have something to do with what is happening now?”

“I don’t know what to think. You see, she’s as scared as Dad is. When we saw the ghost this morning she fainted.”

“Oh, you’ve seen it too?”

Kathryn looked up at the deserted stage and at the single electric light that shone there, hanging down on a long cord from the flies. Her face in the pale light that reached us looked white and tired. And, as she talked, the shadows of the empty auditorium crowded close around us.

“Yes. This morning — in the upper hall. We were all there, Dad, Anne, Dunning—”

Merlini stopped her. “Wait. Where did all this happen? What house is it that’s haunted?”

“Ours, in Mamaroneck. Father and the others took the plane back from Miami last night after I’d phoned long distance and told him about the flower vase that fell and smashed in the hall when Phillips and I were there less than ten feet away. I was actually looking at it when it tipped over. And it seemed exactly as if someone — someone we couldn’t see had pushed it. And then—”

“Miss Wolff,” Merlini broke in. “Please. We’re not going at this right at all. I don’t even know who Phillips is. Let’s go way back to the beginning and then sneak up on the ghost slow and easy and in a straight line. When was it that you disagreed with your father and left home?”

“Sunday morning, a week ago. With no warning at all, Dad suddenly decided that we were all going to Miami. He didn’t discuss it; he merely issued orders. When I woke I found that the maid had already packed my bags. I protested. I didn’t want to go anywhere just then. I knew you had issued a casting call for Monday morning. Dad insisted. They could have heard him across on Long Island. I can handle him sometimes, but this wasn’t one of them. I pretended finally to give in and went with them to the airport. But just before the plane took off, I ducked out.”

“Did he explain this sudden yearning for Miami?”

“I—” Kay gave me a sidewise glance, then looked at the floor. “No. He didn’t.”

“I know that answer,” I said. “He was avoiding me. The twenty-five miles between Mamaroneck and New York is too close for comfort for either of us. And he didn’t want me to see Kay. He even managed it so that I thought she was in Miami when she wasn’t. If I had known he was so afraid of ghosts, I’d have dressed up in a sheet and—”

“You,” Merlini said. “I thought you’d come into this, somewhere. The more I hear the less I understand. But go on, Miss Wolff. Then what?”

I started once more to try to talk to Kay, but she got there first.

“I took an apartment in the Village,” she said. “I rehearsed here all week. Then, on Sunday, I took a chance on going out to the house to pick up some clothes I needed. I didn’t think Phillips — he’s the butler — would dare to hold me forcibly. He wasn’t even surprised when I walked in. He was too upset. That was when the vase fell and smashed — just after I’d come in. There was no one in the house, and it wasn’t done with wires or threads. I looked.”

“No one else in the house?” Merlini asked. “Aren’t there other servants?”

“Not Sunday. Phillips was hiring more. The maids and the cook left on Friday without giving notice, the day after Scotty Douglass disappeared.”

“The day after—” Merlini shook his head in a baffled way. “You’re hopping, skipping, and jumping again. Who is Scotty?”

“Our boatkeeper and general handy man of all work. No one has seen him since last Wednesday night. None of his clothes or the other things in his rooms over the boathouse are missing. Kay looked up at the stage, frowning. “He has simply vanished into thin air like one of your tricks. I–I don’t like it. I’m afraid—”

“Were the police notified?”

“No. Phillips phoned Father Friday after the other servants quit. He suggested that. But Dad vetoed it. Phillips isn’t exactly a cheerful soul. There was a murder once at a place where he worked — an unsolved one — and I’ve always felt that he rather looked forward to the next one. He reads too many detective stories and true-crime magazines. Dad knows him and discounts his viewing with alarm. He told Phillips Scotty had probably gone off, as he’s done once or twice before, on a drinking spree. ‘When he returns,’ Dad said, ‘dock him and warn him that next time he’s fired.’ Dad’s very lenient with Scotty. He saved Dad’s life two years ago when the Seahawk burned off Montauk Point.

“But it’s been four days and more now. And not a sign of Scotty. He’s never stayed away this long before. And he couldn’t have quit like the others. He’d have taken his clothes. I like Scotty. He taught me to sail when I was knee-high to a duck. I’m afraid something has happened to him. If Dad doesn’t report to the police, I’m going to.”

“I think I agree,” Merlini said. “Scotty vanishes on Wednesday night or sometime shortly after. The maids and the cook light out on Friday. Sunday a flower vase acts oddly. What else? Did the maids see the ghost?”

“I don’t know. I think it was the midnight noises and the broken china. There are rappings all through the house, and footsteps. Dishes have a habit of getting out of the china closet in the night and breaking themselves. The last few nights pictures have begun to change places on the walls, statuary moves about, ink bottles tip over.”

Merlini’s interest waxed rapidly. “Poltergeist phenomena,” he said. “Best grade. Your father and Galt should be tickled pink at such a made-to-order chance to investigate.”

“I know. That’s what I expected. But it hasn’t worked out that way at all. I phoned Dad this time myself, late yesterday afternoon. I was worried about Scotty. When I told him everything that had happened since Phillips had talked to him, he said, ‘We’ll take the next plane out.’ And he didn’t seem pleased. He sounded worried and upset.”

“And all this time,” I put in, “I thought he was running from me.”

“You?” Kay, startled, looked at me directly. “What do you mean?”

“I was in Miami yesterday.”

They both blinked at me. Kay started to say something more, then stopped.

Merlini scowled at us both. “There are wheels within wheels, I can see that. But let’s take them one at a time. You say you saw the ghost. When did that happen?”

“Early this morning. I went with Leonard, the chauffeur, to meet Dad and the others at the airport after I had bandaged his head. When we got back—”

“Ross,” Merlini interrupted. “Does she always skip around like this? What happened to the chauffeur’s head?”

“He was investigating the ghost. He and Phillips had decided to sit up and see what happened. I was just going up to bed when we heard a loud thumping noise on the second floor. It stopped as soon as we started up the stairs. We found nothing. I didn’t feel as sleepy then as I had. The noise seemed to have come from my bedroom. So I stood watch with them. We heard nothing more until nearly five when the thumping noise began again. Leonard sneaked up quietly in the dark. The noise stopped after a bit, but he didn’t come back. Phillips and I found him unconscious on the hall floor just outside my bedroom. He had a nasty bang on the head and there was a Louis XIV dueling pistol from the gun room lying on the floor beside him.”

“And he had discovered—”

“Nothing at all.”

“Leonard doesn’t scare easy, does he? Tracking the ghost in the dark, that way. Does he agree that it’s something supernatural?”

Kay shook her head. “Not Leonard. He wouldn’t believe in ghosts if they appeared by the dozen at high noon. But, if it isn’t a ghost, it has to go somewhere — and there’s no place for it to go. Dad, because of his valuable firearm collection, has the house wired with the very latest thing in burglar alarms — a photoelectric system. When it’s on, a mouse couldn’t get in or out without setting off an alarm bell that would wake the—” She stopped, realizing what it was she had been about to say.

“You searched the house then?” Merlini asked.

“Phillips and Leonard did.”

“And the alarm was on the whole time?”

“Yes.”

Merlini took out a cigarette and tapped it thoughtfully against the back of his hand. “And, after you had returned from the airport?”

“Phillips met us at the door. He looked a bit white about the gills and was obviously relieved to see us. The ghost had been busy again. He showed us this.”

Kay unsnapped her purse, and took out two sheets of yellowed paper, folded together. She handed them to Merlini. As he opened them out, I saw that they were pages that had been ripped from an old book.

He spread them carefully on his knees, and his eyes, as he looked at them, were round. He looked at Kay once more as if he still expected her to vanish in a puff of smoke. Then he scowled for a long moment at the exhibits without speaking. One was a title page in French.

My French is rustier than the hinges on a fifteenth-century tomb, but, lacking any at all, I could still have seen quite plainly that the Reverend’s unholy treatise was admirably exhaustive — and very appropriate.

The other page, the frontispiece from the same volume, was equally germane. It bore a steel engraving depicting two rather melodramatically posed old boys who were up to no earthly good in a graveyard. The double line of a cabalistic magic circle was scratched on the ground encircling their feet. One man who held a large book and a wand was apparently intoning the necessary invocation while his awe-struck companion lifted a flaring torch high above his head. In the background, the Gothic towers of an old church rose above the trees, silhouetted by the cold rays of a moon whose full circle in the clouded sky was an awkwardly placed compositional element. A skull and one or two thigh bones lay among the leaves in the foreground, attesting, I suppose, the inefficiency of the sexton in charge.

The picture’s center of interest, however, was none of these things. A ghostly spirit, whose empty eye sockets were dark holes in a fleshless face, stood stiffly at attention before the two necromancers. It was clothed quite modestly in a quaintly designed, ruffled, and, to my taste, comic shroud. It shone like a Mazda bulb with a luminescence of its own so bright that the moon and the torch both seemed unnecessary.

My skeptical attitude was, perhaps, carping. The artist had obviously not had the slightest intention of treating the subject with any humor. And I noticed that Merlini didn’t treat it that way either. On the contrary, he scowled at the drawing, and, when he spoke to Kay, his voice was completely serious.

He pointed to a rough-edged triangular perforation in the upper center of the illustration, and to another, similarly placed, in the title page. It punctured the word “revenants.”

“What made those?” he asked.

“Phillips,” Kathryn said, “found tire pages pinned to the library wall with a revolutionary bayonet from the gun room. The book from which they were torn, and others, mostly on occult subjects, had been pulled down from the shelves and scattered on the floor.”

Merlini’s long forefinger extended and indicated the two sorcerers. “Do you know who these men are?”

“Father mentioned the names, John Dee and Edward Kelly, but I don’t know who they were.”

“I do,” Merlini said. “Doctor John Dee, the rather scared gentleman with the torch, was a sixteenth-century scholar, a boy prodigy who entered Cambridge at fifteen and was later appointed to a fellowship at Trinity by Henry VIII. He gained considerable fame as a lecturer on mathematics and might, even today, be remembered in scientific histories if his interest in astronomy hadn’t been so astrological. He was officially employed, when Elizabeth ascended the throne, to choose the most auspicious day for her coronation. She consulted him on numerous occasions, once hiring him to undo the evil charms of her royal image in wax when one was discovered in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

“In his diary, he claims that the angel Uriel appeared before him one day and presented him with a crystal whose occult properties almost made communication between this world and the next as regularly operating a service as Western Union. Particularly after he had taken on Edward Kelly as his skryer or medium.

“Kelly, although the engraver of this picture seems to have been unaware of it, was pilloried in Lancaster for forging title deeds and suffered the loss of both ears, a mutilation he tried to conceal by wearing a close-fitting black skullcap cut after the fashion of a hangman’s. It gave him a diabolic and sinister appearance which I imagine proved an asset in his line of business. He approached the learned doctor bearing excellent references, an alchemical treatise in manuscript, and a vial of white powder that had been taken by thieves from the sepulcher of Saint Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury. His Grace’s unorthodox hobby of attempting the transmutation of metals via the philosopher’s stone doubtless had something to do with his present reputation as the patron saint of goldsmiths.

“To the Dee-Kelly partnership, the latter also brought a vivid imagination, and their hermetical researches were interspersed with long sessions of crystal gazing during which Kelly reported some remarkable visions. On one occasion he stated that he saw a nude female spirit who insisted that he and the doctor should exchange wives. Kelly, at the moment, was on bad terms with his own. He got away with it, too. And, if you think I’m making this up as I go along, the manuscript outlining this curious communal arrangement still exists in Dee’s own handwriting.”

“Good God!” I protested weakly. “Footnotes too!”

Merlini ignored my critical snort and went merrily ahead with his biographical essay. “On a later trip to the continent, Kelly so impressed even the German Emperor, Maximilian II, with a prospectus of his alchemical prowess that he was made a marshal of Bohemia. He was, however, a bit tardy in turning out gold by mass-production methods and the impatient emperor imprisoned him with orders to put up or else. Kelly, on the spot, tried to escape via the traditional bed-sheet method, took a tumble, and died of injuries received. Doctor Dee, having returned to his home at Mortlake, eventually—”

“Class,” I broke in impatiently, “is dismissed.”

Merlini, once started on a history of magic, either white or black, was all too likely to deliver an oration that carried it in extensive detail right on up to the present day, with an added appendix of predictions as to its future.

“Dee and Kelly are an interesting pair,” I protested, “but there’s a contemporary ghost under discussion, have you forgotten?”

He shook his head. “No, hardly. I was just wondering why he took the trouble to hunt through those books for this particular picture and title page. I thought that possibly the background might suggest what he had in mind.” He looked at Kathryn again. “Or is it a female haunt?”

Kay smiled, but it was a pale ghost of a smile and her gloved fingers played nervously with the purse in her lap. “No. It’s a man. We were all standing there, by the library door, looking at that picture and listening to Phillips when something made me glance up toward the head of the stairs.”

Kay’s fingers tightened on the purse, their nervous motion gone. Her voice was a low half whisper. “It stood there looking clown at us, watching very quietly as if it had been there for a long time. I cried out, I think, and Father, who had been examining the torn pages, dropped them. He stood in front of me and I saw his face as he turned. It was as if something had struck him a violent physical blow. Dunning stared upward too, apparently almost as shocked as Father. Something struck me heavily in the back so that I stumbled forward and almost fell. Anne had fallen in a faint.

“And then, quickly, the figure moved. The upper hall, even in the daytime, is shadowy and dark. It seemed to melt back into it. And, just as it vanished, the doorbell rang.

“Phillips had started uncertainly toward the stairs. Now he stopped, came back and threw open the door, thankful, I think, for the excuse. Francis Galt stood outside the door. Father had phoned him from the airport.

“‘Well,’ he said, ‘where’s your ghost? I’ve come to—’

“He saw Anne’s body on the floor, and he stopped. Dunning, pointing, said, ‘It’s up there. We saw it just now!’ It was the first time I’ve ever seen Dunning upset.

“Galt didn’t ask any questions. He went up the steps three at a time. Phillips followed him, though not quite so fast. And that’s all.”

“All?” Merlini said. “Then Galt found nothing?”

“Nothing. He searched the house. And yet the alarm system was still operating.”

“The front door,” Merlini asked. “Isn’t that hooked in with the system? You and the others and then Galt had just come through it.”

“It can be opened without disturbing the alarm as long as it’s done from the inside. There’s a switch there that frees that door. But that was the only way out and we all stood in front of it.”

“The only way out,” Merlini said slowly, “for anyone but a ghost. You haven’t told us the most important thing, you know.”

Kathryn looked puzzled.

“The ghost. You haven’t told us what he looked like.”

Kay glanced again at the engraving in Merlini’s hand. “I’m afraid he wasn’t as orthodox as Doctor Dee’s ghost. He wasn’t luminous and his clothes were ordinary enough, except that they seemed to be very dirty, as if he had been lying on the round. They were streaked with dried mud. He wore a black hat that was crumpled and out of shape, and a dark overcoat. His face was thin and sharp with deep black eyes — and as white as paper. He had a thin mustache that curved down around his mouth and a black short-cropped beard.

“And — oh yes, Galt did find one thing, a small piece of dried clay where the figure had stood watching us. There were two pine needles embedded in it.”