The Flame Breathers

CHAPTER I Dreadful Night

In Paris they thought of him as a very queer duck, indeed.

Usually people came to Paris to have a good time, even when they come from Poland, as this man had come. Particularly when they come via the United States, which is a splendid place to make money, but where men tend to work too hard.

But this man, who had landed in Paris after a stay in America, had obviously not come to have a good time. It would seem that he had come to hunt a hole, crawl into it, and then pull it in after him.

He had been in the hotel for nearly three weeks, and only three or four times had he been out of his room at all. On those rare occasions, had he participated in the night life of the gay city? He had not. The concierge — the doorman-superintendent — of the hotel knew. He knew because he had been curious enough to follow this Polish guest.

The man had walked, just before dawn, along the Seine breathing in great gulps of fresh air. That was all. And as he walked he looked over his shoulder. So the concierge got a hint of it.

The man was a little afraid of something.

Had the man himself been able to read that conjecture in the mind of the concierge, he would have laughed like a soul in purgatory.

A little afraid! Is that what you say about a horror that rode your shoulders day and night? Is that what you would say about a terror that robbed you of all the pleasures of life — for fear they would end in the gurgle of death?

The man’s name was Wencilau. He had the air of being “somebody.” He walked and acted, in spite of the terror that warped his hours, like a man who had accomplished great things.

He was about forty, slightly bald, rather small, and wore thick glasses.

On that dreadful night, at a little after twelve, he was peering through those glasses at a newspaper clipping. He had studied it so often, with bated breath, that he knew it by heart, syllable for syllable.

The item was from a Berlin paper, dated nearly a month ago.

Wencilau put the item away in his wallet with trembling fingers. In his brain burned part of the item:

“There was more than a suspicion of poison. However, no trace of poisoning appeared in exhaustive analyses.”

Wencilau was very thirsty. And if his emaciated appearance indicated anything, he was also famished. But he was afraid to eat — and afraid to drink.

“There was more than a suspicion of poison.”

At seven o’clock that evening, Wencilau had had his dinner. He had eaten it in his room, where he took all his meals since crawling into this obscure hotel to hide. But the food was cold because it had been delivered at four thirty and he didn’t eat till seven o’clock. Wencilau had spent the two and a half hours examining the four simple items of the dinner for poison. All the resources of a brilliant chemist had been exerted to ascertain that there was no known poison in the stuff. After that, to make doubly sure, Wencilau had fed a morsel of each course to a canary, now singing blithely in the artificial daylight of the unshaded electric bulb. And the canary was still all right.

No poison in the food. And now Wencilau was thirsty. So he prepared to take a drink of water.

The preparations showed, once more, how fearful the Pole was.

There was water on tap at the washstand in the corner. There was half a bottle of mineral water on the table. He went for neither.

He took a new, sealed bottle of water from a case, and examined it carefully. The foil around neck and crown was untampered with, he could swear. When he opened the bottle there was the little sigh of inrushing air showing that the stopper had not been removed before.

A new, sealed bottle of pure, distilled water. He lifted it to his lips and drank.

For about twenty seconds Wencilau stood erect, staring at the innocent bottle of water with eyes that widened in growing horror till they seemed about to engulf the rest of his thin, sensitive face.

Then he caved in in the middle as if a large hinge had suddenly been substituted for his abdominal muscles. He fell slowly to the floor, writhed for a few more seconds and then lay still.

In the cage, the canary sang and sang, as if to the memory of the man who had fed him those morsels from his dinner, hours ago. Then the canary hopped to a tiny cup affixed to the bars and dipped his bill in water.

There was no more singing.

The canary fluttered a little and was still. Bird and man in stark death. Though neither had had any food not rigidly tested, and though both had drunk from a tightly sealed, foolproof water bottle.

It was the concierge who called the gendarmes.

The man had been waiting for Wencilau to take his late-night walk for a bit of fresh air. He had intended to follow him again, for he was very curious, indeed, and he expected, one of these nights, to trail the man to whatever it was that made him act so queerly.

When Wencilau didn’t appear, he finally opened the door with his passkey.

The French gendarmerie is one of the best police organizations in the world. An inspector looked at the body convulsed on the floor and said instantly, “Poison!”

Then the laboratories went to work.

They analyzed the stomach contents. They analyzed the bottled water and crumbs from the man’s dinner plate. They analyzed a sample of the room’s air. They inspected the water in the tap.

Since the bird was also dead along with its owner, they even repeated the same drawn out performance with the canary.

And they came to one absolute conclusion.

There was no trace of poison.

Monsieur Wencilau had died as if in the agonies of deadly poisoning, but there had been no poison in anything he ate, breathed or drank.

Next morning, an excerpt from a Paris newspaper read:

Two days dater, in Montreal, Canada, a man paced the living room floor of a hotel suite and chewed feverishly on a long, black cigar.

The man was big, florid-faced, heavy-set. He had graying, shaggy eyebrows and looked like a swashbuckling fellow who feared neither man nor devil.

That is, normally he might have exhibited some such fearlessness. Right now he apparently suffered from hell’s own terror. His florid face was pale. The cigar bobbled and jerked between trembling jaws. He clenched and unclenched his hands as he paced. A big, burly man not even remotely like the dead Wencilau in appearance.

But he was like him in one respect. He, too, was from Poland.

And he acted similarly to Wencilau: he, too, was quite obviously hag-ridden by the terrible fear of death. In his movements could be read the whole thing. He knew he was going to die; yet he couldn’t quite accept the fact as truth and spent all his hours trying to shove the fatal moment further into the future.

There was a discreet tap at the door. The big man stopped his pacing as if he had been shot. He stood rigid, eyes flaming.

The tap was repeated, a little louder. He moistened his lips.

“Well?” he called, in a foreigner’s English.

“Package for you, Mr. Veck,” came the voice of the night man.

“Leave it at the door, please,” Veck said.

He stood there rigid, sweat streaming down his full, heavy face. He heard steps go down the hall, heard the clang of an elevator door. So he went to his own door — but not to open it.

He took from his pocket a little device like a stethoscope. This he applied to the panels. With it, he could have heard any sound in the hall — even one so faint as a person’s repressed breathing. He heard no such sound. The clerk had gone to the elevator and down, as his steps had indicated.

Veck relit his cigar. Then he opened the door, whisked the package in and shut the door again as swiftly as possible. He drew a long breath as he shot the bolt.

The package was bottle shaped. When he opened it, he saw a bottle of fine rye. There was a card in the wrappings.

“From a friend,” the card said simply. There was no name signed to it.

Veck laughed harshly. Of all the stupid moves! Did the person who had sent this package to a man in fear of his life actually expect the whiskey to be drunk?

He went with it to the bathroom, broke the bottle over the tub and watched the liquor drain away. He would take no such perilous chances as drinking from a bottle left at his door!

The liquor odor, however, suggested a drink of safer stuff to him. He went toward his bureau for the Scotch he kept in the top drawer.

For days Veck had literally lived on whiskey, trying to drink himself out of that awful fear and finding that the alcohol had no more effect than water on his over-stimulated brain.

He poured out half a tumbler of the stuff and gulped it. Then he clamped the cigar in his mouth again.

The time of Wencilau’s death was two days from that of Veck’s. The places were thousands of miles apart. The men were physically as different as two men can be.

But their invitation to the tomb was identical!

Veck stood stone-still for about thirty seconds after drinking the whiskey. His eyes widened with utter horror.

Then, as if suddenly hinged in the middle, he bent slowly over and fell to the floor. But there was more here than had occurred in the shabby little Paris hotel room.

Veck’s breathing did not stop for a moment or two after his fall.

And Veck breathed — fire!

From the man’s mouth and nostrils came pure, white flame in streamers a yard long. The flame seared the nap of the carpet, scorched the leg of a nearby chair. It came and went, as Veck’s breath came and went. It was like the legendary exhalations of a dragon.

The flame, gruesome, ghastly, streamed a last time and died. It made an audible hissing as it licked at the remnants of moisture on the man’s splitting lips. But it stopped when Veck’s breathing stopped.

Out of nowhere, it seemed, had come this flame of death; and Veck had breathed it and died!