The Lamp of God

Chapter I The Black House

If a story began: “Once upon a time in a house cowering in wilderness there lived an old and eremitical creature named Mayhew, a crazy man who had buried two wives and lived a life of death; and this house was known as The Black House” — if a story began in this fashion, it would strike no one as especially remarkable. There are people like that who live in houses like that, and very often mysteries materialize like ectoplasm about their wild-eyed heads.

Now however disorderly Mr. Ellery Queen may be by habit, mentally he is an orderly person. His neckties and shoes might be strewn about his bedroom helter-skelter, but inside his skull hums a perfectly oiled machine, functioning as neatly and inexorably as the planetary system. So if there was a mystery about one Sylvester Mayhew, deceased, and his buried wives and gloomy dwelling, you may be sure the Queen brain would seize upon it and worry it and pick it apart and get it all laid out in neat and shiny rows. Rationality, that was it. No esoteric mumbo-jumbo could fool that fellow. Lord, no! His two feet were planted solidly on God’s good earth, and one and one made two — always — and that’s all there was to that.

Of course, Macbeth had said that stones have been known to move and trees to speak; but, pshaw! for these literary fancies. In this day and age, with its Cominterns, its wars of peace, its fasces and its rocketry experiments? Nonsense! The truth is, Mr. Queen would have said, there is something about the harsh, cruel world we live in that’s very rough on miracles. Miracles just don’t happen any more, unless they are miracles of stupidity or miracles of national avarice. Everyone with a grain of intelligence knows that.

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Queen would have said; “there are yogis, voodoos, fakirs, shamans, and other tricksters from the effete East and primitive Africa, but nobody pays any attention to such pitiful monkeyshines — I mean, nobody with sense. This is a reasonable world and everything that happens in it must have a reasonable explanation.”

You couldn’t expect a sane person to believe, for example, that a three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood, veritable human being could suddenly stoop, grab his shoelaces, and fly away. Or that a water-buffalo could change into a golden-haired little boy before your eyes. Or that a man dead one hundred and thirty-seven years could push aside his tombstone, step out of his grave, yawn, and then sing three verses of Mademoiselle from Armentieres. Or even, for that matter, that a stone could move or a tree speak — yea, though it were in the language of Atlantis or Mu.

Or... could you?

The tale of Sylvester Mayhew’s house is a strange tale. When what happened happened, proper minds tottered on their foundations and porcelain beliefs threatened to shiver into shards. Before the whole fantastic and incomprehensible business was done, God Himself came into it. Yes, God came into the story of Sylvester Mayhew’s house, and that is what makes it quite the most remarkable adventure in which Mr. Ellery Queen, that lean and indefatigable agnostic, has ever become involved.

The early mysteries in the Mayhew case were trivial — mysteries merely because certain pertinent facts were lacking; pleasantly provocative mysteries, but scarcely savorous of the supernatural.

Ellery was sprawled on the hearthrug before the hissing fire that raw January morning, debating with himself whether it was more desirable to brave the slippery streets and biting wind on a trip to Centre Street in quest of amusement, or to remain where he was in idleness but comfort, when the telephone rang.

It was Thorne on the wire. Ellery, who never thought of Thorne without perforce visualizing a human monolith — a long-limbed, gray-thatched male figure with marbled cheeks and agate eyes, the whole man coated with a veneer of ebony, was rather startled. Thorne was excited; every crack and blur in his voice spoke eloquently of emotion. It was the first time, to Ellery’s recollection, that Thorne had betrayed the least evidence of human feeling.

“What’s the matter?” Ellery demanded. “Nothing’s wrong with Ann, I hope?” Ann was Thome’s wife.

“No, no.” Thorne spoke hoarsely and rapidly, as if he had been running.

“Where the deuce have you been? I saw Ann only yesterday and she said she hadn’t heard from you for almost a week. Of course, your wife’s used to your preoccupation with those interminable legal affairs, but an absence of six days—”

“Listen to me, Queen, and don’t hold me up. I must have your help. Can you meet me at Pier 54 in half an hour? That’s North River.”

“Of course.”

Thorne mumbled something that sounded absurdly like: “Thank God!” and hurried on: “Pack a bag. For a couple of days. And a revolver. Especially a revolver, Queen.”

“I see,” said Ellery, not seeing at all.

“I’m meeting the Cunarder Coronia. Docking this morning. I’m with a man by the name of Reinach, Dr. Reinach. You’re my colleague; get that? Act stern and omnipotent. Don’t be friendly. Don’t ask him — or me — questions. And don’t allow yourself to be pumped. Understood?”

“Understood,” said Ellery, “but not exactly clear. Anything else?”

“Call Ann for me. Give her my love and tell her I shan’t be home for days yet, but that you’re with me and that I’m all right. And ask her to telephone my office and explain matters to Crawford.”

“Do you mean to say that not even your partner knows what you’ve been doing?”

But Thorne had hung up.

Ellery replaced the receiver, frowning. It was stranger than strange. Thorne had always been a solid citizen, a successful attorney who led an impeccable private life and whose legal practice was dry and unexciting. To find old Thorne entangled in a web of mystery...

Ellery drew a happy breath, telephoned Mrs. Thorne, tried to sound reassuring, yelled for Djuna, hurled some clothes into a bag, loaded his.38 police revolver with a grimace, scribbled a note for Inspector Queen, dashed downstairs and jumped into the cab Djuna had summoned, and landed on Pier 54 with thirty seconds to spare.

There was something terribly wrong with Thorne, Ellery saw at once, even before he turned his attention to the vast fat man by the lawyer’s side. Thorne was shrunken within his Scotch-plaid greatcoat like a pupa which has died prematurely in its cocoon. He had aged years in the few weeks since Ellery had last seen him. His ordinarily sleek cobalt cheeks were covered with a straggly stubble. Even his clothing looked tired and uncared-for. And there was a glitter of furtive relief in his bloodshot eyes as he pressed Ellery’s hand that was, to one who knew Throne’s self-sufficiency and aplomb, almost pathetic.

But he merely remarked: “Oh, hello, there, Queen. We’ve a longer wait than we anticipated, I’m afraid. Want you to shake hands with Dr. Herbert Reinach. Doctor, this is Ellery Queen.”

“ ‘D’you do,” said Ellery curtly, touching the man’s im mense gloved hand. If he was to be omnipotent, he thought, he might as well be rude, too.“Surprise, Mr. Thorne?” said Dr. Reinach in the deepest voice Ellery had ever heard; it rumbled up from the caverns of his chest like the echo of thunder. His little purplish eyes were very, very cold.

“A pleasant one, I hope,” said Thorne.

Ellery snatched a glance at his friend’s face as he cupped his hands about a cigarette, and he read approval there. If he had struck the right tone, he knew how to act thenceforth. He flipped the match away and turned abruptly to Thorne. Dr. Reinach was studying him in a half-puzzled, half-amused way.

“Where’s the Coronia?”

“Held up in quarantine,” said Thorne. “Somebody’s seriously ill aboard with some disease or other and there’s been difficulty in clearing her passengers. It will take hours, I understand. Suppose we settle down in the waiting-room for a bit.”

They found places in the crowded room, and Ellery set his bag between his feet and disposed himself so that he was in a position to catch every expression on his companions’ faces. There was something in Thome’s repressed excitement, an even more piquing aura enveloping the fat doctor, that violently whipped his curiosity.

“Alice,” said Thorne in a casual tone, as if Ellery knew who Alice was, “is probably becoming impatient. But that’s a family trait with the Mayhews, from the little I saw of old Sylvester. Eh, Doctor? It’s trying, though, to come all the way from England only to be held up on the threshold.”

So they were to meet an Alice Mayhew, thought Ellery, arriving from England on the Coronia. Good old Thorne! He almost chuckled aloud. “Sylvester” was obviously a senior Mayhew, some relative of Alice’s.

Dr. Reinach fixed his little eyes on Ellery’s bag and rumbled politely. “Are you going away somewhere, Mr. Queen?”

Then Reinach did not know Ellery was to accompany them — wherever they were bound for.

Thorne stirred in the depths of his greatcoat, rustling like a sack of desiccated bones. “Queen’s coming back with me, Dr. Reinach.” There was something brittle and hostile in his voice.

The fat man blinked, his eyes buried beneath half-moons of damp flesh. “Really?” he said, and by contrast his bass voice was tender.

“Perhaps I should have explained,” said Thorne abruptly. “Queen is a colleague of mine, Doctor. This case has interested him.”

“Case?” said the fat man.

“Legally speaking. I really hadn’t the heart to deny him the pleasure of helping me — ah — protect Alice Mayhew’s interests. I trust you won’t mind?”

This was a deadly game, Ellery became certain. Something important was at stake, and Thorne in his stubborn way was determined to defend it by force or guile.

Reinach’s puffy lids dropped over his eyes as he folded his paws on his stomach. “Naturally, naturally not,” he said in a hearty tone. “Only too happy to have you, Mr. Queen. A little unexpected, perhaps, but delightful surprises are as essential to life as to poetry. Eh?” And he chuckled.

Samuel Johnson, thought Ellery, recognizing the source of the doctor’s remark. The physical analogy «truck him. There was iron beneath those layers of fat and a good brain under that dolichocephalic skull. The man sat there on the waiting-room bench like an octopus, lazy and inert and peculiarly indifferent to his surroundings. Indifference — that was it, thought Ellery; the man was a colossal remoteness, as vague and darkling as a storm cloud on an empty horizon.

Thorne said in a weary voice: “Suppose we have lunch. I’m famished.”

By three in the afternoon Ellery felt old and worn. Several hours of nervous, cautious silence, threading his way smiling among treacherous shoals, had told him just enough to put him on guard. He often felt knotted tip and ti^ht inside when a crisis loomed or danger threatened from an unknown quarter. Something extraordinary was going on.

As they stood on the pier watching the Coronia’s bulk being nudged alongside, he chewed on the scraps he had managed to glean during the long, heavy, pregnant hours. He knew definitely now that the man called Sylvester Mayhew was dead, that he had been a pronounced paranoic, that his house was buried in an almost inaccessible wilderness on Long Island. Alice Mayhew, somewhere on the decks of the Coronia doubtless straining her eyes pierward, was the dead man’s daughter, parted from her father since childhood.

And he had placed the remarkable figure of Dr. Reinach in the puzzle. The fat man was Sylvester Mayhew’s half-brother. He had also acted as Mayhew’s physician during the old man’s last illness. This illness and death seemed to have been very recent, for there had been some talk of “the funeral” in terms of fresh if detached sorrow. There was also a Mrs. Reinach glimmering unsubstantially in the background, and a queer old lady who was the dead man’s sister. But what the mystery was, or why Thorne was so perturbed, Ellery could not figure out.

The liner tied up to the pier at last. Officials scampered about, whistles blew, gang-planks appeared, passengers disembarked in droves to the accompaniment of the usual howls and embraces. Interest crept into Dr. Reinach’s little eyes, and Thorne was shaking.

“There she is!” croaked the lawyer. “I’d know her anywhere from her photographs. That slender girl in the brown turban!”

As Thorne hurried away Ellery studied the girl eagerly. She was anxiously scanning the crowd, a tall charming creature with an elasticity of movement more esthetic than athletic and a harmony of delicate feature that approached beauty. She was dressed so simply and inexpensively that he narrowed his eyes.

Thorne came back with her, patting her gloved hand and speaking quietly to her. Her face was alight and alive, and there was a natural gaiety in it which convinced Ellery that whatever mystery or tragedy lay before her, it was still unknown to her. At the same time there were certain signs about her eyes and mouth — fatigue, strain, worry, he could not put his finger on the exact cause — which puzzled him.

“I’m so glad,” she murmured in a cultured voice, strongly British in accent. Then her face grew grave and she looked from Ellery to Dr. Reinach.

“This is your uncle, Miss Mayhew,” said Thorne. “Dr. Reinach. This other gentleman is not, I regret to say, a relative. Mr. Ellery Queen, a colleague of mine.”

“Oh,” said the girl; and she turned to the fat man and said tremulously: “Uncle Herbert. How terribly odd. I mean — I’ve felt so all alone. You’ve been just a legend to me, Uncle Herbert, you and Aunt Sarah and the rest, and now...” She choked a little as she put her arms about the fat man and kissed his pendulous cheek.

“My dear,” said Dr. Reinach solemnly; and Ellery could have struck him for the Judas quality of his solemnity.

“But you must tell me everything! Father — how is father? It seems so strange to be... to be saying that.”

“Don’t you think, Miss Mayhew,” said the lawyer quickly, “that we had better see you through the Customs? It’s growing late and we have a long trip before us. Long Island, you know.”

“Island?” Her candid eyes widened. “That sounds so exciting!”

“Well, it’s not what you might think—”

“Forgive me. I’m acting the perfect gawk.” She smiled. “I’m entirely in your hands, Mr. Thorne. Your letter was more than kind.” As they made their way toward the Customs, Ellery dropped a little behind and devoted himself to watching Dr. Reinach. But that vast lunar countenance was as inscrutable as a gargoyle.

Dr. Reinach drove. It was not Thome’s car; Thorne had a regal new Lincoln limousine and this was a battered if serviceable old Buick sedan.

The girl’s luggage was strapped to the back and sides; Ellery was puzzled by the scantness of it — three small suitcases and a tiny steam-er-trunk. Did these four pitiful containers hold all of her worldly possessions?

Sitting beside the fat man, Ellery strained his ears. He paid little attention to the road Reinach was taking.

The two behind were silent for a long time. Then Thorne cleared his throat with an oddly ominous finality. Ellery saw what was coming; he had often heard that throat-clearing sound emanate from the mouths of judges pronouncing sentence of doom.

“We have something sad to tell you, Miss Mayhew. You may as well learn it now.”

“Sad?” murmured the girl after a moment. “Sad? Oh, it’s not—”

“Your father,” said Thorne inaudibly. “He’s dead.”

She cried: “Oh!” in a small helpless voice; and then she grew quiet.

“I’m dreadfully sorry to have to greet you with such news,” said Thorne in the silence. “We’d anticipated... And I realize how awkward it must be for you. After all, it’s quite as if you had never known him at all.

Love for a parent, I’m afraid, lies in direct ratio to the degree of childhood association. Without any association at all...”

“It’s a shock, of course,” Alice said in a muffled voice. “And yet, as you say, he was a stranger to me, a mere name. As I wrote you, I was only a toddler when mother got her divorce and took me off to England. I don’t remember father at all. And I’ve not seen him since, or heard from him.”

“Yes,” muttered the attorney.

“I might have learned more about father if mother hadn’t died when I was six; but she did, and my people — her people — in England... Uncle John died last fall. He was the last one. And then I was left all alone. When your letter came I was — I was so glad, Mr. Thorne. I didn’t feel lonely any more. I was really happy for the first time in years. And now—” She broke off to stare out the window.

Dr. Reinach swiveled his massive head and smiled benignly. “But you’re not alone, my dear. There’s my unworthy self, and your Aunt Sarah, and Milly — Milly’s my wife, Alice; naturally you wouldn’t know anything about her — and there’s even a husky young fellow named Keith who works about the place — bright lad who’s come down in the world.” He chuckled. “So you see there won’t be a dearth of companionship for you.”

“Thank you, Uncle Herbert,” she murmured. “I’m sure you’re all terribly kind. Mr. Thorne, how did father... When you replied to my letter you wrote me he was ill, but—”

“He fell into a coma unexpectedly nine days ago. You hadn’t left England yet and I cabled you at your antique-shop address. But somehow it missed you.”

“I’d sold the shop by that time and was flying about patching up things. When did he... die?”

“A week ago Thursday. The funeral... Well, we couldn’t wait, you see. I might have caught you by cable or telephone on the Coronia, but I didn’t have the heart to spoil your voyage.”

“I don’t know how to thank you for all the trouble you’ve taken.” Without looking at her Ellery knew there were tears in her eyes. “It’s good to know that someone—”

“It’s been hard for all of us,” rumbled Dr. Reinach.

“Of course, Uncle Herbert. I’m sorry.” She fell silent. When she spoke again, it was as if there were a compulsion expelling the words.

“When Uncle John died, I didn’t know where to reach father. The only American address I had was yours, Mr. Thorne, which some patron or other had given me. It was the only thing I could think of. I was sure a solicitor could find father for me. That’s why I wrote to you in such detail, with photographs and all.”

“Naturally we did what we could.” Thorne seemed to be having difficulty with his voice. “When I found your father and went out to see him the first time and showed him your letter and photographs, he... I’m sure this will please you, Miss Mayhew. He wanted you badly. He’d apparently been having a hard time of late years — ah, mentally, emotionally. And so I wrote you at his request. On my second visit, the last time I saw him alive, when the question of the estate came up—”

Ellery thought that Dr. Reinach’s paws tightened on the wheel. But the fat man’s face bore the same bland, remote smile.

“Please,” said Alice wearily. “Do you greatly mind, Mr. Thorne? I–I don’t feel up to discussing such matters now.”

The car was fleeing along the deserted road as if it were trying to run away from the weather. The sky was gray lead; a frowning, gloomy sky under which the countryside lay cowering. It was growing colder, too, in the dark and draughty tonneau; the cold seeped in through the cracks and their overclothes.

Ellery stamped his feet a little and twisted about to glance at Alice Mayhew. Her oval face was a glimmer in the murk; she was sitting stiffly, her hands clenched into tight little fists in her lap. Thorne was slumped miserably by her side, staring out the window.

“By George, it’s going to snow,” announced Dr. Reinach with a cheerful puff of his cheeks.

No one answered.

The drive was interminable. There was a dreary sameness about the landscape that matched the weather’s mood. They had long since left the main highway to turn into a frightful byroad, along which they jolted in an unsteady eastward curve between ranks of leafless woods. The road was pitted and frozen hard; the woods were tangles of dead trees and under-brush densely packed but looking as if they had been repeatedly seared by fire. The whole effect was one of widespread and oppressive desolation.

“Looks like No Man’s Land,” said Ellery at last from his bouncing seat beside Dr. Reinach. “And feels like it, too.”

Dr. Reinach’s cetaceous back heaved in a silent mirth. “Matter of fact, that’s exactly what it’s called by the natives. Land-God-forgot, eh? But then Sylvester always swore by the Greek unities.”

The man seemed to live in a dark and silent cavern, out of which he maliciously emerged at intervals to poison the atmosphere.

“It isn’t very inviting-looking, is it?” remarked Alice in a low voice. It was clear she was brooding over the strange old man who had lived in this wasteland, and of her mother who had fled from it so many years before.

“It wasn’t always this way,” said Dr. Reinach, swelling his cheeks like a bullfrog. “Once it was pleasant enough; I remember it as a boy. Then it seemed as if it might become the nucleus of a populous community. But progress has passed it by, and a couple of uncontrollable forest fires did the rest.”

“It’s horrible,” murmured Alice, “simply horrible.”

“My dear Alice, it’s your innocence that speaks there. All life is a frantic struggle to paint a rosy veneer over the ugly realities. Why not be honest with yourself? Everything in this world is stinking rotten; worse than that, a bore. Hardly worth living, in any impartial analysis. But if you have to live, you may as well live in surroundings consistent with the rottenness of everything.”

The old attorney stirred beside Alice, where he was buried in his greatcoat. “You’re quite a philosopher, Doctor,” he snarled.

“I’m an honest man.”

“Do you know, Doctor,” murmured Ellery, despite himself, “you’re beginning to annoy me.”

The fat man glanced at him. Then he said: “And do you agree with this mysterious friend of yours, Thorne?”

“I believe,” snapped Thorne, “that there is a platitude extant which says that actions speak with considerably more volume than words. I haven’t shaved for six days, and today has been the first time I left Sylvester Mayhew’s house since his funeral.”

“Mr. Thorne!” cried Alice, turning to him. “Why?”

The lawyer muttered: “I’m sorry, Miss Mayhew. All in good time, in good time.”

“You wrong us all,” smiled Dr. Reinach, deftly skirting a deep rut in the road. “And I’m afraid you’re giving my niece quite the most erroneous impression of her family. We’re odd, no doubt, and our blood is presumably turning sour after so many generations of cold storage; but then don’t the finest vintages come from the deepest cellars? You’ve only to glance at Alice to see my point. Such vital loveliness could only have been produced by an old family.”

“My mother,” said Alice, with a faint loathing in her glance, “had something to do with that, Uncle Herbert.”

“Your mother, my dear,” replied the fat man, “was merely a contributory factor. You have the typical Mayhew features.”

Alice did not reply. Her uncle, whom until today she had not seen, was an obscene enigma; the others, waiting for them at their destination, she had never seen at all, and she had no great hope that they would prove better. A livid streak ran through her father’s family; he had been a paranoic with delusions of persecution. The Aunt Sarah in the dark distance, her father’s surviving sister, was apparently something of a character. As for Aunt Milly, Dr. Reinach’s wife, whatever she might have been in the past, one had only to glance at Dr. Reinach to see what she undoubtedly was in the present.

Ellery felt prickles at the nape of his neck. The farther they penetrated this wilderness the less he liked the whole adventure. It smacked vaguely of a fore-ordained theatricalism, as if some hand of monstrous power were setting the stage for the first act of a colossal tragedy... He shrugged this sophomoric foolishness off, settling deeper into his coat. It was queer enough, though. Even the lifelines of the most indigent community were missing; there were no telephone poles and, so far as he could detect, no electric cables. That meant candles. He detested candles.

The sun was behind them, leaving them. It was a feeble sun, shivering in the pallid cold. Feeble as it was, Ellery wished it would stay.

They crashed on and on, endlessly, shaken like dolls. The road kept lurching toward the east in a stubborn curve. The sky grew more and more leaden. The cold seeped deeper and deeper into their bones.

When Dr. Reinach finally rumbled: “Here we are,” and steered the jolting car leftward off the road into a narrow, wretchedly gravelled driveway, Ellery came to with a start of surprise and relief. So their journey was really over, lie thought. Behind him he heard Thorne and Alice stirring; they must be thinking the same thing.

He roused himself, stamping his icy feet, looking about. The same desolate tangle of woods to either side of the byroad. He recalled now that they had not once left the main road nor crossed another road since turning off the highway. No chance, he thought grimly, to stray off this path to perdition.

Dr. Reinach twisted his fat neck and said: “Welcome home, Alice.”

Alice murmured something incomprehensible; her face was buried to the eyes in the moth-eaten lap robe Reinach had flung over her. Ellery glanced sharply at the fat man; there had been a note of mockery, of derision, in that heavy rasping voice. But the face was smooth and damp and bland, as before.

Dr. Reinach ran the car up the driveway and brought it to rest a little before, and between, two houses. These structures flanked the drive, standing side by side, separated by only the width of the drive, which led straight ahead to a ramshackle garage. Ellery caught a glimpse of Thome’s glittering Lincoln within its crumbling walls. The three buildings huddled in a ragged clearing, surrounded by the tangle of woods, like three desert islands in an empty sea.

“That,” said Dr. Reinach heartily, “is the ancestral mansion, Alice. To the left.”

The house to the left was of stone; once gray, but now so tarnished by the elements and perhaps the ravages of fire that it was almost black. Its face was blotched and streaky, as if it had succumbed to an insensate leprosy. Rising three stories, elaborately ornamented with stone flora and gargoyles, it was unmistakably Victorian in its architecture. The façade had a neglected, granular look that only the art of great age could have etched. The whole structure appeared to have thrust its roots immovably into the forsaken landscape.

Ellery saw Alice Mayhew staring at it with a sort of speechless horror; it had nothing of the pleasant hoariness of old English mansions. It was simply old, old with the dreadful age of this seared and blasted countryside. He cursed Thorne beneath his breath for subjecting the girl to such a shocking experience.

“Sylvester called it The Black House,” said Dr. Reinach cheerfully as he turned off the ignition. “Not pretty, I admit, but as solid as the day it was built, seventy-five years ago.”

“Black House,” grunted Thorne. “Rubbish.”

“Do you mean to say,” whispered Alice, “that father... mother lived here?”

“Yes, my dear. Quaint name, eh, Thorne? Another illustration of Sylvester’s preoccupation with the morbidly colorful. Built by your grandfather, Alice. The old gentleman built this one, too, later; I believe you’ll find it considerably more habitable. “Where the devil is everyone?”

He descended heavily and held the rear door open for his niece. Mr. Ellery Queen slipped down to the driveway on the other side and glanced about with the sharp, uneasy sniff of a wild animal. The old mansion’s companion-house was a much smaller and less pretentious dwelling, two stories high and built of an originally white stone which had turned gray. The front door was shut and the curtains at the lower windows were drawn. But there was a fire burning somewhere inside; he caught the tremulous glimmers. In the next moment they were blotted out by the head of an old woman, who pressed her face to one of the panes for a single instant and then vanished. But the door remained shut.

“You’ll stop with us, of course,” he heard the doctor say genially; and Ellery circled the car. His three companions were standing in the driveway, Alice pressed close to old Thorne as if for protection. “You won’t want to sleep in the Black House, Alice. No one’s there, it’s in rather a mess; and a house of death, y’know...”

“Stop it,” growled Thorne. “Can’t you see the poor child is half-dead from fright as it is? Are you trying to scare her away?”

“Scare me away?” repeated Alice, dazedly.

“Tut, tut,” smiled the fat man. “Melodrama doesn’t become you at all, Thorne. I’m a blunt old codger, Alice, but I mean well. It will really be more comfortable in the White House.” He chuckled suddenly again. “White House. That’s what I named it to preserve a sort of atmospheric balance.”

“There’s something frightfully wrong here,” said Alice in a tight voice. “Mr. Thorne, what is it? There’s been nothing but innuendo and concealed hostility since we met at the pier. And just why did you spend six days in father’s house after the funeral? I think I’ve a right to know.”

Thorne licked his lips. “I shouldn’t—”

“Come, come, my dear,” said the fat man. “Are we to freeze here all day?”

Alice drew her thin coat more closely about her. “You’re all being beastly. Would you mind, Uncle Herbert? I should like to see the inside — where father and mother—”

“I don’t think so, Miss Mayhew,” said Thorne hastily.

“Why not?” said Dr. Reinach tenderly, and he glanced once over his shoulder at the building he had called the White House. “She may as well do it now and get it over with. There’s still light enough to see by. Then we’ll go over, wash up, have a hot dinner, and you’ll feel worlds better.” He seized the girl’s arm and marched her toward the dark building, across the dead, twig-strewn ground. “I believe,” continued the doctor blandly, as they mounted the steps of the stone porch, “that Mr. Thorne has the keys.”

The girl stood quietly waiting, her dark eyes studying the faces of the three men. The attorney was pale, but his lips were set in a stubborn line. He did not reply. Taking a bunch of large rusty keys out of a pocket, he fitted one into the lock of the front door. It turned over with a creak.

Then Thorne pushed open the door and they stepped into the house.

It was a tomb. It smelled of must and damp. The furniture, ponderous pieces which once no doubt had been regal, was uniformly dilapidated and dusty. The walls were peeling, showing broken, discolored laths beneath. There was dirt and debris everywhere. It was inconceivable that a human being could once have inhabited this grubby den.

The girl stumbled about, her eyes a blank horror, Dr. Reinach steering her calmly. How long the tour of inspection lasted Ellery did not know; even to him, a stranger, the effect was so oppressive as to be almost unendurable. They wandered about, silent, stepping over trash from room to room, impelled by something stronger than themselves.

Once Alice said in a strangled voice: “Uncle Herbert, didn’t anyone... take care of father? Didn’t anyone ever clean up this horrible place?”

The fat man shrugged. “Your father had notions in his old age, my dear. There wasn’t much anyone could do with him. Perhaps we had better not go into that.”

The sour stench filled their nostrils. They blundered on, Thorne in the rear, watchful as an old cobra. His eyes never left Dr. Reinach’s face.

On the middle floor they came upon a bedroom in which, according to the fat man, Sylvester Mayhew had died. The bed was unmade; indeed, the impress of the dead man’s body on the mattress and tumbled sheets could still be discerned. It was a bare and mean room, not as filthy as the others, but infinitely more depressing. Alice began to cough.

She coughed and coughed, hopelessly, standing still in the center of the room and staring at the dirty bed in which she had been born. Then suddenly she stopped coughing and ran over to a lopsided bureau with one foot missing. A large, faded chromo was propped on its top against the yellowed wall. She looked at it for a long time without touching it. Then she took it down.

“It’s mother,” she said slowly. “It’s really mother. I’m glad now I came. He did love her, after all. He’s kept it all these years.”

“Yes, Miss Mayhew,” muttered Thorne. “I thought you’d like to have it.” “I’ve only one portrait of mother, and that’s a poor one. This — why, she was beautiful, wasn’t she?”

She held the chromo up proudly, almost laughing in her hysteria. The time-dulled colors revealed a stately young woman with hair worn high. The features were piquant and regular. There was little resemblance between Alice and the woman in the picture.

“Your father,” said Dr. Reinach with a sigh, “often spoke of your mother toward the last, and of her beauty.”

“If he had left me nothing but this, it would have been worth the trip from England.” Alice trembled a little. Then she hurried back to them, the chromo pressed to her breast. “Let’s get out of here,” she said in a shriller voice. “I–I don’t like it here. It’s ghastly. I’m... afraid.”

They left the house with half-running steps, as if someone were after them. The old lawyer turned the key in the lock of the front door with great care, glaring at Dr. Reinach’s back as he did so. But the fat man had seized his niece’s arm and was leading her across the driveway to the White House, whose windows were now flickeringly bright with light and whose front door stood wide open.

As they crunched along behind, Ellery said sharply to Thorne:

“Thorne. Give me a clue. A hint. Anything. I’m completely in the dark.” Thome’s unshaven face was haggard in the setting sun. “Can’t talk now,” he muttered. “Suspect everything, everybody. I’ll see you tonight, in your room. Or wherever they put you, if you’re alone... Queen, for God’s sake, be careful!”

“Careful?” frowned Ellery.

“As if your life depended on it.” Thome’s lips made a thin, grim line. “For all I know, it does.”

Then they were crossing the threshold of the White House...

Ellery’s impressions were curiously vague. Perhaps it was the effect of the sudden smothering heat after the hours of cramping cold outdoors; perhaps he thawed out too suddenly, and the heat went to his brain.

He stood about for a while in a state almost of semi-consciousness, basking in the waves of warmth that eddied from a roaring fire in a fireplace black with age. He was only dimly aware of the two people who greeted them, and of the interior of the house. The room was old, like everything else he had seen, and its furniture might have come from an antique shop. They were standing in a large living-room, comfortable enough; strange to his senses only because it was so old-fashioned in its appointments. There were actually antimacassars on the overstuffed chairs! A wide staircase with worn brass treads wound from one corner to the sleeping quarters above.

One of the two persons awaiting them was Mrs. Reinach, the doctor’s wife. The moment Ellery saw her, even as she embraced Alice, he knew that this was inevitably the sort of woman the fat man would choose for a mate. She was a pale and weazened midge, almost fragile in her delicacy of bone and skin; and she was plainly in a silent convulsion of fear. She wore a hunted look on her dry and bluish face; and over Alice’s shoulder she glanced timidly, with the fascinated obedience of a whipped bitch, at her husband.

“So you’re Aunt Milly,” sighed Alice, pushing away. “You’ll forgive me if I... It’s all so very new to me.”

“You must be exhausted, poor darling,” said Mrs. Reinach in the chirping twitter of a bird; and Alice smiled wanly and looked grateful. “And I quite understand. After all, we’re no more than strangers to you. Oh!” she said, and stopped. Her faded eyes were fixed on the chromo in the girl’s hands. “Oh,” she said again. “I see you’ve been over to the other house already.”

“Of course she has,” said the fat man; and his wife grew even paler at the sound of his bass voice. “Now, Alice, why don’t you let Milly take you upstairs and get you comfortable?”

“I am rather done in,” confessed Alice; and then she looked at her mother’s picture and smiled again. “I suppose you think I’m very silly, dashing in this way with just—” She did not finish; instead, she went to the fireplace. There was a broad flame-darkened mantel above it, crowded with gewgaws of a vanished era. She set the chromo of the handsome Victorian-garbed woman among them. “There! Now I feel ever so much better.”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” said Dr. Reinach. “Please don’t stand on ceremony. Nick! Make yourself useful. Miss Mayhew’s bags are strapped to the car.”

A gigantic young man, who had been leaning against the wall, nodded in a surly way. He was studying Alice Mayhew’s face with a dark absorption. He went out.

“Who,” murmured Alice, flushing, “is that?”

“Nick Keith.” The fat man slipped off his coat and went to the fire to warm his flabby hands. “My morose protégé. You’ll find him pleasant company, my dear, if you can pierce that thick defensive armor he wears. Does odd jobs about the place, as I believe I mentioned, but don’t let that hold you back. This is a democratic country.”

“I’m sure he’s very nice. Would you excuse me? Aunt Milly, if you’d be kind enough to—”

The young man reappeared under a load of baggage, clumped across the living-room, and plodded up the stairs. And suddenly, as if at a signal, Mrs. Reinach broke out into a noisy twittering and took Alice’s arm and led her to the staircase. They disappeared after Keith.

“As a medical man,” chuckled the fat man, taking their wraps and depositing them in a hall-closet, “I prescribe a large dose of... this, gentlemen.” He went to a sideboard and brought out a decanter of brandy. “Very good for chilled bellies.” He tossed off his own glass with an amazing facility, and in the light of the fire the finely etched capillaries in his bulbous nose stood out clearly. “Ah-h! One of life’s major compensations. Warming, eh? And now I suppose you feel the need of a little sprucing up yourselves.; Come along, and I’ll show you to your rooms.”

Ellery shook his head in a dogged way, trying to clear it. “There’s something about your house, Doctor, that’s unusually soporific. Thank you, I think both Thorne and I would appreciate a brisk wash.”

“You’ll find it brisk enough,” said the fat man, shaking with silent laughter. “This is the forest primeval, you know. Not only haven’t we any electric light or gas or telephone, but we’ve no running water, either. Well behind the house keeps us supplied. The simple life, eh? Better for you than the pampering influences of modern civilization. Our ancestors may have died more easily of bacterial infections, but I’ll wager they had a greater body immunity to coryza!... Well, well, enough of this prattle. Up you go.”

The chilly corridor upstairs made them shiver, but the very shiver revived them; Ellery felt better at once. Dr. Reinach, carrying candles and matches, showed Thorne into a room overlooking the front of the house, and Ellery into one on the side. A fire burned crisply in the large fireplace in one corner, and the basin on the old-fashioned washstand was filled with icy-looking water.

“Hope you find it comfortable,” drawled the fat man, lounging in the doorway. “We were expecting only Thorne and my niece, but one more can always be accommodated. Ah — colleague of Thome’s, I believe he said?”

“Twice,” replied Ellery. “If you don’t mind—”

“Not at all.” Reinach lingered, eying Ellery with a smile. Ellery shrugged, stripped off his coat, and made his ablutions. The water was cold; it nipped his fingers like the mouths of little fishes. He scrubbed his face vigorously.

“That’s better,” he said, drying himself. “Much. I wonder why I felt so peaked downstairs.”

“Sudden contrast of heat after cold, no doubt.” Dr. Reinach made no move to go.

Ellery shrugged again. He opened his bag with pointed nonchalance. There, plainly revealed on his haberdashery, lay the.38 police revolver. He tossed it aside.

“Do you always carry a gun, Mr. Queen?” murmured Dr. Reinach.

“Always.” Ellery picked up the revolver and slipped it into his hip pocket.

“Charming!” The fat man stroked his triple chin. “Charming. Well, Mr. Queen, if you’ll excuse me I’ll see how Thorne is getting on. Stubborn fellow, Thorne. He could have taken pot luck with us this past week, but he insisted on isolating himself in that filthy den next door.”

“I wonder,” murmured Ellery, “why.”

Dr. Reinach eyed him. Then he said: “Come downstairs when you’re ready. Mrs. Reinach has an excellent dinner prepared and if you’re as hungry as I am, you’ll appreciate it.” Still smiling, the fat man vanished.

Ellery stood still for a moment, listening. He heard the fat man pause at the end of the corridor; a moment later the heavy tread was audible again, this time descending the stairs. Ellery went swiftly to the door on tiptoe. He had noticed that the instant he had come into the room.

There was no lock. Where a lock had been there was a splintery hole, and the splinters had a newish look about them. Frowning, he placed a rickety chair against the door-knob and began to prowl.

He raised the mattress from the heavy wooden bedstead and poked beneath it, searching for he knew not what. He opened closets and drawers; he felt the worn carpet for wires. But after ten minutes, angry with himself, he gave up and went to the window. The prospect was so dismal that he scowled in sheer misery. Just brown stripped woods and (lie leaden sky; the old mansion picturesquely known as the Black House was on the other side, invisible from this window.

A veiled sun was setting; a bank of storm clouds slipped aside for an instant and the brilliant rim of the sun shone directly into his eyes, making him see colored, dancing balls. Then other clouds, fat with snow, moved up and the sun slipped below the horizon. The room darkened rapidly.

Lock taken out, eh? Someone had worked fast. They could not have known he was coming, of course. Then someone must have seen him through the window as the car stopped in the drive. The old woman who had peered out for a moment? Ellery wondered where she was. At any rate, a few minutes’ work by a skilled hand at the door... He wondered, too, if Thome’s door had been similarly mutilated. And Alice Mayhew’s.

Thorne and Dr. Reinach were already seated before the fire when Ellery came down, and the fat man was rumbling: “Just as well. Give the poor girl a chance to return to normal. With the shock she’s had today, it might be the finisher. I’ve told Mrs. Reinach to break it to Sarah gently... Ah, Queen. Come over here and join us. We’ll have dinner as soon as Alice comes down.”

“Dr. Reinach was just apologizing,” said Thorne casually, “for this Aunt Sarah of Miss Mayhew’s — Mrs. Fell, Sylvester Mayhew’s sister. The excitement of anticipating her niece’s arrival seems to have been a bit too much for her.”

“Indeed,” said Ellery, sitting down and planting his feet on the nearest firedog.

“Fact is,” said the fat man, “my poor half-sister is cracked. The family paranoia. She’s off-balance; not violent, you know, but it’s wise to humor her. She isn’t normal, and for Alice to see her—”

“Paranoia,” said Ellery. “An unfortunate family, it seems. Your half-brother Sylvester’s weakness seems to have expressed itself in rubbish and solitude. What’s Mrs. Fell’s delusion?”

“Common enough — she thinks her daughter is still alive. As a matter of fact, poor Olivia was killed in an automobile accident three years ago. It shocked Sarah’s maternal instinct out of plumb. Sarah’s been looking forward to seeing Alice, her brother’s daughter, and it may prove awkward. Never can tell how a diseased mind will react to an unusual situation.”

“For that matter,” drawled Ellery, “I should have said the same remark might be made about any mind, diseased or not.”

Dr. Reinach laughed silently. Thorne, hunched by the fire, said: “This Keith boy.”

The fat man set his glass down slowly. “Drink, Queen?”

“No, thank you.”

“This Keith boy,” said Thorne again.

“Eh? Oh, Nick. Yes, Thorne? What about him?”

The lawyer shrugged. Dr. Reinach picked up his glass again. “Am I imagining things, or is there the vaguest hint of hostility in the circumambient ether?”

“Reinach—” began Thorne harshly.

“Don’t worry about Keith, Thorne. We let him pretty much alone. He’s sour on the world, which demonstrates his good sense; but I’m afraid he’s unlike me in that he hasn’t the emotional buoyancy to rise above his wisdom. You’ll probably find him anti-social... Ah, there you are, my dear! Lovely, lovely.”

Alice was wearing a different gown, a simple unfrilled frock, and she had freshened up. There was color in her cheeks and her eyes were spark-ling with a light and tinge they had not had before. Seeing her for the first time without her hat and coat, Ellery thought she looked different, as all women contrive to look different divested of their outer clothing and refurbished by the mysterious activities which go on behind the closed doors of feminine dressing-rooms. Apparently the ministrations of another woman, too, had cheered her; there were still rings under her eyes, but her smile was more cheerful.

“Thank you, Uncle Herbert.” Her voice was slightly husky. “But I do think I’ve caught a nasty cold.”

“Whisky and hot lemonade,” said the fat man promptly. “Eat lightly and go to bed early.”

“To tell the truth, I’m famished.”

“Then eat as much as you like. I’m one hell of a physician, as no doubt you’ve already detected. Shall we go in to dinner?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Reinach in a frightened voice. “We shan’t wait for Sarah, or Nicholas.”

Alice’s eyes dulled a little. Then she sighed and took the fat man’s arm and they all trooped into the dining-room.

Dinner was a failure. Dr. Reinach divided his energies between gargantuan inroads on the viands and copious drinking. Mrs. Reinach donned an apron and served, scarcely touching her own food in her haste to prepare the next course and clear the plates; apparently the household employed no domestic. Alice gradually lost her color, the old strained look reappearing on her face; occasionally she cleared her throat. The oil lamp on the table flickered badly, and every mouthful Ellery swallowed was flavored with the taste of oil. Besides, the piece de résistance was curried lamb: if there was one dish he detested, it was lamb; and if there was one culinary style that sickened him, it was curry. Thorne ate stolidly, not raising his eyes from his plate.

As they returned to the living-room the old lawyer managed to drop behind. He whispered to Alice: “Is everything all right? Are you?”

“I’m a little scarish, I think,” she said quietly. “Mr. Thorne, please don’t think me a child, but there’s something so strange about— everything... I wish now I hadn’t come.”

“I know,” muttered Thorne. “And yet it was necessary, quite necessary. If there was any way to spare you this, I should have taken it. But you obviously couldn’t stay in that horrible hole next door—”

“Oh, no,” she shuddered.

“And there isn’t a hotel for miles and miles. Miss Mayhew, has any of these people—”

“No, no. It’s just that they’re so strange to me. I suppose it’s my imagination and this cold. Would you greatly mind if I went to bed? Tomorrow will be time enough to talk.”

Thorne patted her hand. She smiled gratefully, murmured an apology, kissed Dr. Reinach’s cheek, and went upstairs with Mrs. Reinach again.

They had just settled themselves before the fire again and were lighting cigarettes when feet stamped somewhere at the rear of the house.

“Must be Nick,” wheezed the doctor. “Now where’s he been?”

The gigantic young man appeared in the living-room archway, glowering. His boots were soggy with wet. He growled: “Hello,” in his surly manner and went to the fire to toast his big reddened hands. He paid no attention whatever to Thorne, although he glanced once, swiftly, at Ellery in passing.

“Where’ve you been, Nick? Go in and have your dinner.”

“I ate before you came.”

“What’s been keeping you?”

“I’ve been hauling in firewood. Something you didn’t think of doing.” Keith’s tone was truculent, but Ellery noticed that his hands were shaking. Damnably odd! His manner was noticeably not that of a servant, and yet he was apparently employed in a menial capacity. “It’s snowing.”

“Snowing?” They crowded to the front windows. The night was moonless and palpable, and big fat snowflakes were sliding down the panes.

“Ah, snow,” sighed Dr. Reinach; and for all the sigh there was something in his tone that made the nape of Ellery’s neck prickle. “ ‘The whited air hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, and veils the farmhouse at the garden’s end.’ ”

“You’re quite the countryman, Doctor,” said Ellery.

“I like Nature in her more turbulent moods. Spring is for milksops. Winter brings out the fundamental iron.” The doctor slipped his arm about Keith’s broad shoulders. “Smile, Nick. Isn’t God in His heaven?”

Keith flung the arm off without replying.

“Oh, you haven’t met Mr. Queen. Queen, this is Nick Keith. You know Mr. Thorne already.” Keith nodded shortly. “Come, come, my boy, buck up. You’re too emotional, that’s the trouble with you. Let’s all have a drink. The disease of nervousness is infectious.”

Nerves! thought Ellery grimly. His nostrils were pinched, sniffing the little mysteries in the air. They tantalized him. Thorne was tied up in knots, as if he had cramps; the veins at his temples were pale blue swollen cords and there was sweat on his forehead. Above their heads the house was soundless.

Dr. Reinach went to the sideboard and began hauling out bottles — gin, bitters, rye, vermouth. He busied himself mixing drinks, talking incessantly. There was a purr in his hoarse undertones, a vibration of pure excitement. What in Satan’s name, thought Ellery in a sort of agony, was going on here?

Keith passed the cocktails around, and Ellery’s eyes warned Thorne. Thorne nodded slightly; they had two drinks apiece and refused more. Keith drank doggedly, as if he were anxious to forget something.

“Now that’s better,” said Dr. Reinach, settling his bulk into an easy-chair. “With the women out of the way and a fire and liquor, life becomes almost endurable.”

“I’m afraid,” said Thorne, “that I shall prove an unpleasant influence, Doctor. I’m going to make it unendurable.”

Dr. Reinach blinked. “Well, now,” he said. “Well, now.” He pushed the brandy decanter carefully out of the way of his elbow and folded his pudgy paws on his stomach. His purple little eyes shone.

Thorne went to the fire and stood looking down at the flames, his back to them. “I’m here in Miss Mayhew’s interests, Dr. Reinach,” he said, without turning. “In her interests alone. Sylvester Mayhew died last week very suddenly. Died while waiting to see the daughter whom he hadn’t seen since his divorce from her mother almost twenty years ago.”

“Factually exact,” rumbled the doctor, without stirring.

Thorne spun about. “Dr. Reinach, you acted as Mayhew’s physician for over a year before his death. What was the matter with him?”

“A variety of things. Nothing extraordinary. He died of cerebral hemorrhage.”

“So your certificate claimed.” The lawyer leaned forward. “I’m not entirely convinced,” he said slowly, “that your certificate told the truth.”

The doctor stared at him for an instant, then he slapped his bulging thigh. “Splendid!” he roared. “Splendid! A man after my own heart. Thorne, for all your desiccated exterior you have juicy potentialities.” He turned on Ellery, beaming. “You heard that, Mr. Queen? Your friend openly accuses me of murder. This is becoming quite exhilarating. So! Old Reinach’s a fratricide. What do you think of that, Nick? Your patron accused of cold-blooded murder. Dear, dear.”

“That’s ridiculous, Mr. Thorne,” growled Nick Keith. “You don’t believe it yourself.”

The lawyer’s gaunt cheeks sucked in. “Whether I believe it or not is immaterial. The possibility exists. But I’m more concerned with Alice Mayhew’s interests at the moment than with a possible homicide. Sylvester Mayhew is dead, no matter by what agency — divine or human; but Alice Mayhew is very much alive.”

“And so?” asked Reinach softly.

“And so I say,” muttered Thorne, “it’s damnably queer her father should have died when he did. Damnably.”

For a long moment there was silence. Keith put his elbows on his knees and stared into the flames, his shaggy boyish hair over his eyes. Dr. Reinach sipped a glass of brandy with enjoyment.

Then he set his glass down and said with a sigh: “Life is too short, gentlemen, to waste in cautious skirmishings. Let us proceed without feinting movements to the major engagement. Nick Keith is in my confidence and we may speak freely before him.” The young man did not move. “Mr. Queen, you’re very much in the dark, aren’t you?” went on the fat man with a bland smile.

Ellery did not move, either. “And how,” he murmured, “did you know that?”

Reinach kept smiling. “Pshaw. Thorne hadn’t left the Black House since Sylvester’s funeral. Nor did he receive or send any mail during his self-imposed vigil last week. This morning he left me on the pier to telephone someone. You showed up shortly after. Since he was gone only a minute or two, it was obvious that he hadn’t had time to tell you much, if anything. Allow me to felicitate you, Mr. Queen, upon your conduct today. It’s been exemplary. An air of omniscience covering a profound and desperate ignorance.”

Ellery removed his pince-nez and began to polish their lenses. “You’re a psychologist as well as a physician, I see.”

Thorne said abruptly: “This is all beside the point.”

“No, no, it’s all very much to the point,” replied the fat man in a sad bass. “Now the canker annoying your friend, Mr. Queen — since it seems a shame to keep you on tenterhooks any longer — is roughly this: My half-brother Sylvester, God rest his troubled soul, was a miser. If he’d been able to take his gold with him to the grave — with any assurance that it would remain there — I’m sure he would have done so.”

“Gold?” asked Ellery, raising his brows.

“You may well titter, Mr. Queen. There was something mediaeval about Sylvester; you almost expected him to go about in a long black velvet gown muttering incantations in Latin. At any rate, unable to take his gold with him to the grave, he did the next best thing. He hid it.”

“Oh, lord,” said Ellery. “You’ll be pulling clanking ghosts out of your hat next.”

“Hid,” beamed Dr. Reinach, “the filthy lucre in the Black House.”

“And Miss Alice Mayhew?”

“Poor child, a victim of circumstances. Sylvester never thought of her until recently, when she wrote from London that her last maternal relative had died. Wrote to friend Thorne, he of the lean and hungry eye, who had been recommended by some friend as a trustworthy lawyer. As he is, as he is! You see, Alice didn’t even know if her father was alive, let alone where he was. Thorne, good Samaritan, located us, gave Alice’s exhaustive letters and photographs to Sylvester, and has acted as liaison officer ever since. And a downright circumspect one, too, by thunder!”

“This explanation is wholly unnecessary,” said the lawyer stiffly. “Mr. Queen knows—”

“Nothing,” smiled the fat man, “to judge by the attentiveness with which he’s been following my little tale. Let’s be intelligent about this, Thorne.” He turned to Ellery again, nodding very amiably. “Now, Mr. Queen, Sylvester clutched at the thought of his new-found daughter with the pertinacity of a drowning man clutching a life-preserver. I betray no secret when I say that my half-brother, in his paranoic dotage, suspected his own family — imagine! — of having evil designs on his fortune.”

“A monstrous slander, of course.”

“Neatly put, neatly put! Well, Sylvester told Thorne in my presence that he had long since converted his fortune into specie, that he’d hidden this gold somewhere in the house next door, and that he wouldn’t reveal the hiding-place to anyone but Alice, his daughter, who was to be his sole heir. You see?”

“I see,” said Ellery.

“He died before Alice’s arrival, unfortunately. Is it any wonder, Mr. Queen, that Thorne thinks dire things of us?”

“This is fantastic,” snapped Thorne, coloring. “Naturally, in the interests of my client, I couldn’t leave the premises unguarded with that mass of gold lying about loose somewhere—”

“Naturally not,” nodded the doctor.

“If I may intrude my still, small voice,” murmured Ellery, “isn’t this a battle of giants over a mouse? The possession of gold is a clear violation of the law in this country, and has been for several years. Even if you found it, wouldn’t the government confiscate it?”

“There’s a complicated legal situation, Queen,” said Thorne; “but one which cannot come into existence before the gold is found. Therefore my efforts to—”

“And successful efforts, too,” grinned Dr. Reinach. “Do you know, Mr. Queen, your friend has slept behind locked, barred doors, with an old cutlass in his hand — one of Sylvester’s prized mementoes of a grandfather who was in the Navy? It’s terribly amusing.”

“I don’t find it so,” said Thorne shortly. “If you insist on playing the buffoon—”

“And yet — to go back to this matter of your little suspicions, Thorne — have you analyzed the facts? “Whom do you suspect, my dear fellow? Your humble servant? I assure you that I am spiritually an ascetic—”

“An almighty fat one!” snarled Thorne.

“—and that money, per se, means nothing to me,” went on the doctor imperturbably. “My half-sister Sarah? An anile wreck living in a world of illusion, quite as antediluvian as Sylvester — they were twins, you know — who isn’t very long for this world. Then that leaves my estimable Milly and our saturnine young friend Nick. Milly? Absurd; she hasn’t had an idea, good or bad, for two decades. Nick? Ah, an outsider — we may have struck something there. Is it Nick you suspect, Thorne?” chuckled Dr. Reinach.

Keith got to his feet and glared down into the bland damp lunar countenance of the fat man. He seemed quite drunk. “You damned porker,” he said thickly.

Dr. Reinach kept smiling, but his little porcine eyes were wary. “Now, now, Nick,” he said in a soothing rumble.

It all happened very quickly. Keith lurched forward, snatched the heavy cut-glass brandy decanter, and swung it at the doctor’s head. Thorne cried out and took an instinctive forward step; but he might have spared himself the exertion. Dr. Reinach jerked his head back like a fat snake and the blow missed. The violent effort pivoted Keith’s body completely about; the decanter slipped from his fingers and flew into the fireplace, crashing to pieces. The fragments splattered all over the fireplace, strewing the hearth, too; the little brandy that remained in the bottle hissed into the fire, blazing with a blue flame.

“That decanter,” said Dr. Reinach angrily, “was almost a hundred and fifty years old!”

Keith stood still, his broad back to them. They could see his shoulders heaving.

Ellery sighed with the queerest feeling. The room was shimmering as in a dream, and the whole incident seemed unreal, like a scene in a play on a stage. Were they acting? Had the scene been carefully planned? But, if so, why? What earthly purpose could they have hoped to achieve by pretending to quarrel and come to blows? The sole result had been the wanton destruction of a lovely old decanter. It didn’t make sense.

“I think,” said Ellery, struggling to his feet, “that I shall go to bed before the Evil One comes down the chimney. Thank you for an altogether extraordinary evening, gentlemen. Coming, Thorne?”

He stumbled up the stairs, followed by the lawyer, who seemed as weary as he. They separated in the cold corridor without a word to stumble to their respective bedrooms. From below came a heavy silence.

It was only as he was throwing his trousers over the footrail of his bed that Ellery recalled hazily Thome’s whispered intention hours before to visit him that night and explain the whole fantastic business. He struggled into his dressing-gown and slippers and shuffled down the hall to Thome’s room. But the lawyer was already in bed, snoring stertorously. Ellery dragged himself back to his room and finished undressing. He knew he would have a head the next morning; he was a notoriously poor drinker. His brain spinning, he crawled between the blankets and fell asleep almost stertorously.

He opened his eyes after a tossing, tiring sleep with the uneasy conviction that something was wrong. For a moment he was aware only of the ache in his head and the fuzzy feel of his tongue; he did not remember where he was. Then, as his glance took in the faded wall-paper, the pallid patches of sunlight on the worn blue carpet, his trousers tumbled over the footrail where he had left them the night before, memory returned; and, shivering, he consulted his wrist-watch, which he had forgotten to take off on going to bed. It was five minutes to seven. He raised his head from the pillow in the frosty air of the bedroom; his nose was half-frozen. But he could detect nothing wrong; the sun looked brave if weak in his eyes; the room was quiet and exactly as he had seen it on retiring; the door was closed. He snuggled between the blankets again.

Then he heard it. It was Thome’s voice. It was Thome’s voice raised in a thin faint cry, almost a wail, coming from somewhere outside the house.

He was out of bed and at the window in his bare feet in one leap. But Thorne was not visible at this side of the house, upon which the dead woods encroached directly; so he scrambled back to slip shoes on his feet and his gown over his pajamas, darted toward the footrail and snatched his revolver out of the hip pocket of his trousers, and ran out into the corridor, heading for the stairs, the revolver in his hand.

“What’s the matter?” grumbled someone, and he turned to see Dr. Reinach’s vast skull protruding nakedly from the room next to his.

“Don’t know. I heard Thorne cry out,” and Ellery pounded down the stairs and flung open the front door.

He stopped within the doorway, gaping.

Thorne, fully dressed, was standing ten yards in front of the house, facing Ellery obliquely, staring at something outside the range of Ellery’s vision with the most acute expression of terror on his gaunt face Ellery had ever seen on a human countenance. Beside him crouched Nicholas Keith, only half-dressed; the young man’s jaws gaped foolishly and his eyes were enormous glaring discs.

Dr. Reinach shoved Ellery roughly aside and growled: “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?” The fat man’s feet were encased in carpet slippers and he had pulled a raccoon coat over his night-shirt, so that he looked like a particularly obese bear.

Thome’s Adam’s-apple bobbed nervously. The ground, the trees, the world were blanketed with snow of a peculiarly unreal texture; and the air was saturated with warm woolen flakes, falling softly. Deep drifts curved upwards to clamp the boles of trees.

“Don’t move,” croaked Thorne as Ellery and the fat man stirred. “Don’t move, for the love of God. Stay where you are.” Ellery’s grip tightened on the revolver and he tried perversely to get past the doctor; but he might have been trying to budge a stone wall. Thorne stumbled through the snow to the porch, paler than his background, leaving two deep ruts behind him. “Look at me,” he shouted. “Look at me. Do I seem all right? Have I gone mad?”

“Pull yourself together, Thorne,” said Ellery sharply. “What’s the matter with you? I don’t see anything wrong.”

“Nick!” bellowed Dr. Reinach. “Have you gone crazy, too?”

The young man covered his sunburnt face suddenly with his hands; then he dropped his hands and looked again.

He said in a strangled voice: “Maybe we all have. This is the most— Take a look yourself.”

Reinach moved then, and Ellery squirmed by him to land in the soft snow beside Thorne, who was trembling violently. Dr. Reinach came lurching after. They ploughed through the snow toward Keith, squinting, straining to see.

They need not have strained. What was to be seen was plain for any seeing eye to see. Ellery felt his scalp crawl as he looked; and at the same instant he was aware of the sharp conviction that this was inevitable, this was the only possible climax to the insane events of the previous day. The world had turned topsy-turvy. Nothing in it meant anything reasonable or sane.

Dr. Reinach gasped once; and then he stood blinking like a huge owl. A window rattled on the second floor of the White House. None of them looked up. It was Alice Mayhew in a wrapper, staring from the window of her bedroom, which was on the side of the house facing the driveway. She screamed once; and then she, too, fell silent.

There was the house from which they had just emerged, the house Dr. Reinach had dubbed the White House, with its front door quietly swinging open and Alice Mayhew at an upper side window. Substantial, solid, an edifice of stone and wood and plaster and glass and the patina of age. It was everything a house should be. That much was real, a thing to be grasped.

But beyond it, beyond the driveway and the garage, where the Black House had stood, the house in which Ellery himself had set foot only the afternoon before, the house of the filth and the stench, the house of the equally stone walls, wooden facings, glass windows, chimneys, gargoyles, porch; the house of the blackened look; the old Victorian house built during the Civil War where Sylvester Mayhew had died, where Thorne had barricaded himself with a cutlass for a week; the house which they had all seen, touched, smelled... there, there stood nothing.

No walls. No chimney. No roof. No ruins. No debris. No house. Nothing. Nothing but empty space covered smoothly and warmly with snow.

The house had vanished during the night.