The Plague Court Murders

Carter Dickson (John Dickson Carr)

The Plague Court Murders

(Sir Henry Merrivale 01)

OUT OF THE ORDINARY

They hired psychic Roger Darworth to exorcise the Plague Court ghost.

The ghost of Plague Court was no ordinary ghost. Hardly. Reportedly a malevolent soul on the lower plane, it was always watchful, always cunning, always waiting to possess a living body and to exchange that body's weak brain for its own just as it had done since its first appearance in 1665.

The exorcist, Roger Darworth, was no ordinary exorcist. Of course not. Actually, he was a first-rate fraud who had been under police surveillance for months.

It follows then that the exorcism of Plague Court was no ordinary exorcism. Naturally-or perhaps supernaturally-not after the exorcist was found brutally murdered in a small stone house with its door both padlocked and bolted, its windows barred, and with no secret entrances. And the murder weapon? Far, far from ordinary. It was an ancient knife which was said to be the property of the Plague Court ghost.

By now we all know that Sir Henry Merrivale is no ordinary detective. Here he is in his first recorded appearance. And THE PLAGUE COURT MURDERS is not an ordinary mystery novel. How could it be? After all, it is the first book to bear the name of Carter Dickson, a/k/a John Dickson Carr, and by either name a most extraordinary author.

"This is a genuine baffler, placed in an eerie, ghostly setting. Any reader who is able to guess the solution before Sir Henry chooses to reveal it is entitled to call himself a first-class amateur detective:'

-Isaac Anderson New York Times Book Review

June 3, 1934

"Excellent plus."

Saturday Review of Literature

"This thickly atmospheric work provides a sure and pleasant means of giving yourself the jumps... for those who wish to be scared on every page'

-Will Cuppy Books

THE PLAGUE COURT MURDERS

Copyright © 1934 by William Morrow & Company, Inc. Copyright renewed 1961 by John Dickson Carr. Published with the permission of the author's estate and Harold Ober Associates Inc.

Introduction: Copyright © 1990 by Douglas G. Greene.

Printed and manufactured in the United States of America.

First IPL edition, June 1990.

INTRODUCTION

The Plague Court Murders is a tale of a haunted house as only John Dickson Carr (aka, Carter Dickson) could tell it.

Throughout his life, Carr was fond of ghost stories. In a recently discovered article that Carr wrote when he was fifteen years old, he remarked: "To like such stories is entirely natural. We love to be scared, but unconsciously we challenge anyone to do it.... Despite science, despite common sense, still we lie awake o’ nights with a volume of Poe-of Kipling-of Marion Crawford-in our hands, while outside the circle of light thrown by the lamp at our bedside flit all the mocking phantoms of fancy, defying science, defying common sense to crush the ghost story:' Poe and Kipling are great figures in the history of the supernatural tale (and much else), but F Marion Crawford has been almost forgotten. Nonetheless, Carr praised several of Crawford's short stories, especially a small masterpiece called "The Screaming Skull," whose opening lines Carr liked to quote:

I have often heard it scream. No, I am not nervous or imaginative; and I never believed in ghosts, unless that thing is one. But it hates me as it hated Luke Pratt, and it screams at me.

Four years after the publication ofThe Plague Court Murders, Carr wrote an article called "...and Things that Go Bump in the Night" about ghosts in fact and fiction. Its discussion of important writers of supernatural fiction indicates Carr's wide reading. Among the authors whom he singled out are W. F. Harvey, M. R. James, L. P. Hartley, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, J. Sheridan LeFanu, Bram Stoker, E. F Benson, Margaret Irwin and Algernon Blackwood.

At least four of Carr's earliest stories are about ghosts. For example, "The Will-0'-The-Wisp;' written while he was still in high school, already combines two of his abiding interests, the supernatural and historical romance. When he went to preparatory school in Autumn 1922, he continued to write such tales: One is a ghost story of Christmas, another comes close to being a historical horror tale, and a third brings together in unexpected fashion ghosts, humor and drinking. In short, the young John Dickson Carr was as interested in ghost stories as he would be in fictional detection.

It was at Haverford College that John Dickson Carr began what we might call "The Carrian Synthesis," the nearly perfect integration of supernatural atmosphere, seemingly impossible events, and rational detection. In several short stories done for The Haverfordian between December 1926 and June 1928 (reprinted in The Door to Doom, 1980), Carr had M. Henri Bencolin of the Surete solve murders and vanishings that take place in locked and guarded rooms. In each of the stories, Carr hints that the answer can only be supernatural. In "The Shadow of the Goat' for example, Sir John Landervorne tells Bencolin that "I shall have to tell you a story which will not interest you, unless you believe in sorcery." "The Murder in Number Four" begins, "During the night run between Dieppe and Paris, on a haunted train called the Blue Arrow, there was murder done." At the conclusion of each tale, however, Bencolin explains that the impossibilities were devised by humans for human reasons. The ghosts disappear, the witchcraft vanishes-until the next story again opens the door to the unknown.

Carr's final story for The Haverfordian was a novella called "Grand GuignolI which also featured Henri Bencolin. Much enlarged, it became his first novel, It Walks By Night, published in February 1930. Like his short stories, the novel begins with the suggestion that the impossible murder-in this case, a grisly beheading in a room under constant observation-must have been committed by someone in league with dark powers. The suspect seems to be a "night monster" who "by night becomes a misshapen beast with blood-bedabbled claws." Carr followed It Walks By Night with three other eerie cases for Bencolin, one of which, Castle Skull (1931), was set in a seemingly haunted castle on the Rhine.

Carr tired of Bencolin but not of creeps and chills. Poison in Jest (1932) comes close to having a haunted house. The events take place in America, in a rambling estate near Carr's hometown of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. In this story, various characters see a disembodied hand, apparently once belonging to a statue of Caligula, crawling about on its own locomotive power. But nothing much is done with this, and the emphasis of the book is not on ghosts. Even closer to housely haunting is the first Dr. Gideon Fell novel, Hag's Nook (1933), with its spirit-ridden prison. The same year, The Bowstring Murders was published under the pseudonym Carr Dickson. Its detective, the elderly and "slightly drunk" Sir John Gaunt, is one of Carr's most interesting characters, but the book shows signs of hurried writing. Carr produced it at white-hot speed toward the end of 1932 to earn money for a trip to England with his new bride. As with Poison in Jest, the novel has much that might have made a good story of hauntings: the murder, which occurs in a room whose entrances are under observation, may have been committed by an ambulatory suit of armor. But Carr doesn't sustain the atmosphere, and the solution to the impossible crime is cribbed from It Walks By Night.

All of which is a lengthy way of saying that The Plague Court Murders, originally published in 1934, is not only the first Sir Henry Merrivale novel, but also Carr's first fully developed hauntedhouse story. Instead of having the ordinary spooks that might congregate around any house that has such a horrid history as Plague Court, Carr based the tale around the fashionable ideas of spiritualism. Beginning with the Fox sisters in 1848, spiritualists claimed to be mediums (or, sometimes, to use others as mediums) to allow the spirits of the dead to communicate with the living.

Carr's interest in spiritualism began with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's lecture tour of the United States in 1922. Doyle had lost a son during the First World War, and using his wife as medium, he believed that he had contacted him in the afterlife which he called, in a rather discordant note, "Summerland." Doyle was also a fervent advocate of the genuineness of spirit photography and even of photographs of fairies. At the age of fifteen, Carr wrote no fewer than five articles for his local newspaper disagreeing with Doyle's views. "Is it possible that the master mind who conceived Sherlock Holmes and gave to him the keenest intellect of any detective in fiction, has been deceived by parlor magic? Many think so." Carr then recounted various methods that fake mediums use to produce their effects.

Moreover, he objected to spiritualism on artistic as well as materialistic grounds. The great people of the past, he said, would not "return to earth to bang tamborines and maltreat furniture" People who believe that the dead can contact the living have usually suffered a recent bereavement and are therefore in a receptive frame of mind. "The hope that they may yet bring back their lost has affected them so that they imagine they feel the soft caress of hands on their cheek, or hear musical voices whispering secrets into their ears." This was probably the case with Doyle himself, and in The Plague Court Murders, with Lady Benning. A few years later, Carr read Harry Houdini's classic expose of spiritualism,A Magician Among the Spirits (1924), and he used several of the tricks described in that book as plot devices in his own stories, including the one you are about to read.

Carr created his effects by using atmospheric writing to prepare the reader for horrors, and then bringing in common sense to dispel them. The house at Plague Court is described in words reminiscent of the old writers of Gothic terror:

It had almost a senile appearance, as of a brain gone, but its heavy cornices were carved with horrible gaiety in cupids and roses and grapes: a wreath oil the head of an idiot.... In the vast fireplace burnt a very small and smoky fire. Strung along the hood of the mantelpiece were half a dozen candles burning in tall brass ` holders. They flickered in the damp, showing above the mantelpiece, decaying fragments of wallpaper that had once been purple and gold. There were two occupants of the room-both women. , It added a sort of witch-like eeriness to the place. J

Sometimes, however, Carr's language is understated. Of all ghost-story writers after Poe, he may have most admired Montague Rhodes James, whose trick of making the commonplace redolent with terror he borrowed forThe Plague Court Murders. In his article, "... and Things that Go Bump in the Night," Can wrote that James's stories contain "no sensations in crude colours. They are for the sophisticated. Dr. James never `cracks the whip or goads the adjective, but terror comes as lightly as a face poked suddenly around a corner." Probably the most terrifying image inThe Plague Court Murders, the one that seems ordinary in itself yet suggests supernatural horror, is the man glimpsed only from the back who holds his neck at an odd angle.

Into this story comes Detective-Inspector Humphrey Masters, cynical and unruffled. It may be that Carr originally planned to make Masters the sole detective in the story. He so dominates the early sections that the publishers of the first paperback edition (Avon, 1941) described the book on the front cover as "A Chief-Inspector Masters Mystery." But whatever Carr's original plans were, he decided that Masters would not solve the mystery. The reader who expects common sense to overcome all the terrors, instead finds Masters' knowledge of mediumistic tricks to be insufficient. Then enters Sir. Henry Merrivale - H.M. with his fund of bawdy stories, his constant fear that someone (perhaps Masters) is out to get him, and his earthy enjoyment of life. His biography has been given in the introduction to the IPL edition of one of his finest adventures, The Judas Window, but the point to be made here is that he is without pretensions and it is this very fact that lets him bring sanity to bear on the matter of Plague Court and so many later cases.

In the opening scene ofThe Plague Court Murders, Dean Halliday asks the narrator, Ken Blake, "to spend a night in a haunted house:' Blake "felt an anticipatory pleasure." A few years after writing these words, John Dickson Carr was asked to spend a night in a haunted house owned by his friend, the novelist J. B. Priestley. He too felt an anticipatory pleasure, and was disappointed when nothing even mildly ghostly occurred. But plenty of ghostly things will happen on the following pages, and no reader will be disappointed.

Douglas G. Greene Norfolk, Virginia December 1989

Series consultant Douglas G. Greene is busily at work on the authorized biography of John Dickson Carr. He is also putting the finishing touches to the first volume of the collected short fiction of that author which will be entitled Fell and Foul Play, and will be published in the fall of 1990 by IPL:

I

THE HOUSE IN PLAGUE COURT

OLD MERRIVALE, that astute and garrulous lump who sits with his feet on the desk at the War Office, has been growling again for somebody to write the story of the Plague Court murders; chiefly, it is believed, to glorify himself. He does not have so much glory nowadays. His department has ceased to be called the Counter Espionage Service; it has become merely the M.I.D., and its work is somewhat less dangerous than taking photographs of the Nelson Monument.

I have pointed out to him that neither of us has any connection with the police, and that, since I left his service some years ago, I have not even his excuse. Besides, our friend Masters-now Chief Inspector of the Criminal Investigation Department-might not like it. I was, therefore, inveigled into playing a cold poker-hand to determine whether I should write it, or somebody else. I forget who the other person was to be, but it was not Sir Henry Merrivale.

My own connection with the case began on the night of September 6, 1930: the rainy night when Dean Halliday walked into the smoking-room of the Noughts-and-Crosses Club and made his startling statements. And one fact must be emphasized. Had it not been for the streak of morbidity that ran through his whole family-as witness James-or possibly for Dean's fits of hard drinking during the years he was in Canada, he would never have reached a dangerous state of nerves. You saw him at the dub, wiry and vital in his movements, with his sandy mustache, his young-old face and reddish hair, his heavy forehead above sardonic eyes. Yet you invariably felt there was a shadow there-some snag out of the past. Once, in one of those casual shifting discussions, somebody was haranguing us about the newest scientific terms for madness; and Halliday said suddenly, blasting the talk with the personal, "You never know, do you? My brother James, now-" Then he laughed.

I had known him for some time before we became at all friendly. We used to fall into casual conversation in the smoking-room at the club. What I knew of Halliday -for we never talked of personal matters-was fired at me by my sister, who happened to be well acquainted with Lady Benning, Halliday's aunt.

He was, it appeared, the younger son of a tea-importer who had got so rich that he could refuse a title, and say that his firm was too old for that sort of thing. The old man, Dean's father, had side-whiskers and a turkeycock nose. He was sour enough to his associates, but fairly indulgent toward his sons. The real head of the family, however, was Lady Benning, his sister.

Dean went through a number of phases. Before the war, as an undergraduate, he was one-of the customary down from-Cambridge bloods. Then the war came along. Like a number of others, the drawler suddenly became an amazingly good soldier. He left the army with a D.S.O. and a lot of shrapnel inside, and then started raising hell in earnest. There was trouble; a dubious nymph sued for breach of promise; family portraits wriggled with horror; and, with that happy British optimism which decides that bad ways always change if they are practiced somewhere else, Dean was packed off to Canada.

Meantime, his brother had inherited Halliday and Son at the death of the old man. Brother James was Lady Benning's favorite and darling; James was this, James was that, James was a model of soft-spoken rectitude and precision.... The truth of the matter lay in the fact that James was a decayed little prig. He used to go on ostensible business-trips and lie speechlessly fuddled in bawdy houses for two-week periods, then slip back quietly to Lancaster Gate, with his hair brushed straight again, complaining resignedly of his health. I knew him slightly-a smiling man always in a mild sweat, who couldn't sit still in a chair. All this mightn't have hurt him, if it hadn't been for what he called his conscience. His conscience got him, presently. He went home one night and shot himself.

Lady Benning was distracted. She had never liked Dean - I think it probable that, in some obscure way, she held him responsible for James's death-but now it was necessary to recall him as head of the family from his nine year exile.

He had sobered down, but he still had enough of the old humorous devil to make him good (sometimes dangerous) company. He had seen men and places. He had acquired a tolerant droop of the eyelid. Also, there was about him a certain fresh vitality and frankness which must have disturbed the somnolent air round Lancaster Gate. You liked his grin. He was very fond of beer, detective stories, and poker. Anyhow, things seemed to be going well for the returned prodigal; but I think he was lonely.

Then something happened. It was more than unexpected, because I had heard from my sister, a short time before, that he was "understood" to be engaged to be married. After mentioning the girl's name as Marion Latimer, my sister had enlivened the afternoon with a rapid and Tarzan-like inspection of her family tree. When the branches were all tested, my sister had smiled grimly over her folded hands, looked in a sinister fashion at the canary, and said she hoped it would turn out all right.

But something had happened. Halliday was one of those people who carry their own atmospheres about with them. We felt it at the club, though he spoke to us as usual. Nobody said anything; Halliday would glance at us sharply, and try to be the jolly good fellow; and afterwards he would look confused. There was something wrong with his laugh. He used it too often, and spilled cards on the table when he shuffled sometimes, because he had not been looking at them. This went on for a week or two, not very pleasantly. Then, after a time, he stopped coming altogether.

One night I was sitting in the smoking-room after dinner. I had just ordered coffee, and I was in one of those thick sloughs of boredom where every face looks vapid; where you wonder why the whole rushing, solemn routine of a city doesn't get sick of its own nonsense and stop. It was a wet night, and the big, brown-leather smoking. room was deserted. I was sitting idly near the fire making nothing of a newspaper, when Dean Halliday walked in.

I sat up a little-there was something in the way he walked. He hesitated, looked around, and stopped again. He said, "Hullo, Blake," and sat down some distance away.

The silence was doubly uncomfortable. What he thought was in the air, was all about, was as palpable as the fire at which he was staring. He wanted to ask me something, and couldn't. I noticed that his shoes and the edges of his trousers were muddy, as though he had been walking far; he seemed unconscious of the damp-extinguished cigarette between his fingers. There was no humor now in the low chin, the high forehead, the high-muscled jaws.

I crackled my newspaper. Remembering it afterwards, I think it was then my eye caught a small headline towards the foot of the first page: "STRANGE THEFT AT-" but I did not read it at the time, or notice any more.

Halliday inflated his chest. Quite suddenly he looked up.

"Look here, Blake," he said in a sort of rush. "I regard you as a pretty level-headed fellow...."

"Why don't you tell me about it?" I suggested.

"Ah," he said, and sat back in his chair; and looked at me steadily. "If you won't think I'm a jabbering ass. Or an old woman. Or-" As I shook my head he interposed: "Wait, Blake. Wait a bit. Before I tell you about it, let me ask you whether you're willing to give me a hand in what you'll probably call an idiotic business. I want you to..."

"Go on”

"To spend the night in a haunted house," said Halliday.

"What's idiotic about that?" I asked, trying to conceal the fact that my boredom had begun to disappear; I felt an anticipatory pleasure, and my- companion seemed to notice it.

He laughed a little, now. "Right. I say, this is better than I'd hoped for! I didn't want you to think I was crazy, that's all. You see, I'm not interested in the blasted business; or I wasn't. They may return, or they may not. I don't know. All I do know is that, if matters keep on in the present way, then-I'm not exaggerating-two lives are going to be ruined."

He was very quiet now, staring at the fire, speaking in an absent voice.

"Six months ago, you see, the whole thing would have seemed wildly absurd. I knew Aunt Anne was going to a medium-or mediums. I knew she had persuaded Marion to go along with her. Well, damn it-I couldn't see any harm in that." He shifted. "I suppose I thought of it, if I thought about it at all, as a fad like bagatelle or jigsaw puzzles. I certainly supposed that Marion at least would keep her sense of humor... " He looked up. "I'm forgetting something. Tell me, Blake. Do you believe?"

I said I would always be prepared to accept satisfactory evidence, but that I had never come on it as yet.

"I wonder," he mused. “`Satisfactory evidence'. Ha. What the devil is it, anyhow?" His short brown hair had tumbled partly across his forehead; his eyes were full of a hot, baffled anger; and muscles tightened down, his jaws. "I think the man's a charlatan. Well and good. But I went myself to a God-forsaken house-alone-nobody else there-nobody knew I was going....

"Listen, Blake. I could tell you the whole story, if you insist on knowing. I don't want you to walk in blindfold. But I'd rather you didn't ask anything. I want you to go with me, tonight, to a certain house in London; to tell me whether you see or hear anything; and, if you do, whether you can explain it on natural grounds. There'll be no difficulty about getting into the house. It belongs to our family, as a matter of fact.... Will you go?"

"Yes. You expect a trick, then?"

Halliday shook his head. "I don't know. But I can't tell you how grateful I'd be. I don't suppose you've had any experience in these matters? Old empty house-things.... Good God, if I only knew more people! If we could get somebody to go with us who knew all about fake.... What are you laughing at?"

"You need a good stiff drink. I wasn't laughing. I was only thinking that I knew our man, provided you don't object "

"Object?"

"To a Detective-Inspector from Scotland Yard."

Halliday stiffened. "Don't talk rot. Above everything else, I don't want the police in on this. Forget it, I tell you! Marion would never forgive me.

"Oh, not in an official capacity, you understand. Masters makes rather a hobby of this." I smiled again, thinking of Masters the unruffled, Masters the ghost-breaker; the big, stout, urbane man who was as pleasant as a cardsharper and as cynical as Houdini. During the spiritualistic craze that took England after the war, he was a detective-sergeant whose chief business was the exposing of bogus mediums. Since then his interest had increased (apologetically) into a hobby In the workshop of his little house at Hampstead, surrounded by his approving children, he tinkered with ingenious devices of parlor magic; and was altogether highly pleased with himself.

I explained all this to Halliday. First he brooded, ruffling the hair at his temples. Then he turned a flushed, grim, rather eager face.

"By Jove, Blake, if you can get him-! You understand, we're not investigating mediums now: we're only going to a supposedly haunted house...."

"Who says it's haunted?"

There was a pause. You could hear tangled motor-horns shrilling and squawking outside the windows.

"I do," he said quietly. "Can you get in touch with this detective-fellow at once?"

"I'll 'phone him." I got up, stuffing the newspaperinto my

pocket. "I shall have to tell him something of where we're going, you know."

"Tell him anything. Tell him-stop a bit! If he knows anything about London ghosts," said Halliday grimly, "just tell him 'the house in Plague Court'. That'll fetch him."

The house in Plague Court! As I went out to the lobby and the telephone, some dubious memory stirred, but I could not place it.

Masters' slow, deep voice was a pleasant sanity over the telephone.

"Ah!" said he. "Ah, sir? And how are you? Haven't seen you in a dog's age. Well, and is anything on your mind?"

"A good deal," I told him, after the amenities. "I want you to go ghost-hunting. Tonight, if you can manage it."

"Hum!" remarked the unsurprised Masters, as though I had asked him to go to the theater. "You've hit my weakness, you know. Now, if I can manage it.... What's it all about, then? Where are we to go?"

"I've been instructed to tell you 'the house in Plague Court'. Whatever that means."

After a pause, there came over the phone a distinct whistle.

"Plague Court! Have you got anything?" Masters inquired, rather sharply. He sounded startlingly professional now. "Has it anything to do with that business at the London Museum?"

"I don't know what the devil you're talking about, Masters. What's the London Museum got to do with it? All I know is that a friend of mine wants me to investigate a haunted house, tonight, if possible, and bring an experienced ghost-layer along. If you'll come here as soon as you can, I'll tell you all I know. But `London Museum'-"

Another hesitation, while Masters clucked his tongue. "Have you seen today's paper, then? No? Well, have a look at it. Find the account of the London Museum business, and see what you make of it. We thought that `lean man with his back turned' might have been somebody's imagination. But maybe it wasn't.... Yes, I'll catch the tube-you're at the 'Noughts-and-Crosses', you say? - right! I'll meet you there in an hour. I don't like this business, Mr. Blake. I don't like it at all. Good-by."

My pennies clinked in the telephone, and were gone.

II

WE HEAR OF A LEAN MAN, AND GO ON AN ERRAND

AN HOUR afterwards, when the porter came in to tell us that Masters was waiting in the Visitors' Room, Halliday and I were still talking over that notice we had missed in the morning paper. It was one of a series of feature articles headed: "Today's Strange Story -No. 12."

STRANGE THEFT AT LONDON MUSEUM

Weapon Missing From "Condemned Cell"

Who Was the "Lean Man with His Back Turned"?

At the London Museum, Lancaster House, Stable Yard, St. James's, there occurred yesterday afternoon one of those thefts of relics sometimes committed by souvenir-hunters; but in this case the circumstances were unusual, puzzling, and the cause of some apprehension.

A history of blood and villainy surrounds many of the exhibits in the basement of this famous museum, where are displayed Thorp's Models of Old London.

In one large room, used mostly for the display of prison relics, is a life-size model of a condemned cell at old Newgate Prison, made of the bars and timbers from the original cell. On the wall-unticketed-hung what is described as a crudely fashioned steel dagger about eight inches long, with a clumsy hilt and a bone handle on which were cut the letters L.P. It disappeared yesterday afternoon between 3 and 4 o'clock. Nobody knows the thief.

Your correspondent visited the place, and confesses he received a start at the realism of the condemned cell. The whole room is grim enough-low and duskily lighted. There is the original grated door of Newgate, ponderous in rusty bolts, salvaged in 1903. There are manacles, leg-irons, huge, corroded keys and locks, cages, torture-instruments. Occupying one wall, in neat frames, are bills and popular broadsides of old executions from several centuries-all bordered in black, printed in smeary type, with a grisly woodcut showing the butchery, and the pious conclusion, "God Save the King."

The condemned cell, built into one corner, is not for children. I say nothing of a real "prison smell" which seems to cling to it; of the real terror and despair conveyed by this rotting hole. But I want to congratulate the artist who made that shrunken-faced wax effigy in its rags of clothes, which seems to start up off the bed as you look inside.

Still, it is all one to ex-Segt. Parker, who has served as attendant here for eleven years. And, this is what he says:

"It was about three o'clock in the afternoon. Yesterday was a `free day' and there were lots of children. I could hear a party of them going through the next rooms, making a good deal of noise.

"I was sitting near the window, some distance away from the cell, looking at a newspaper. It was a dull day, foggy, and the light bad. So far as I thought, there was nobody else in that room."

Then Sergeant Parker had what he can only describe as a "Queer feeling." He looked up. And, though he had thought there was nobody else in the room:

"There was a gentleman standing at the door of the cell over there, with his back to me, looking in.

"I can't describe him, except that he was very lean, and had darkish clothes on. He seemed to be moving his head slowly, and sort of jerkily, as though he wanted to take a good look at the cell but had trouble with his neck. I wondered how he had got there without my hearing and supposed he had come through the other door. I went back to my paper again. But I kept getting that queer feeling; so, to satisfy myself, just before all the children came in, I went over and looked into the cell.

"First I couldn't tell what was wrong, and then it struck me: that knife, hanging up over the effigy, was missing. Of course, the man was gone, and I knew he had got it, and I reported it."

Sir Richard Meade-Browne, curator of the museum, commented later:

"I trust you will broadcast, through the columns of your newspaper, an appeal for public cooperation to stop this vandalism of valuable relics."

The dagger, Sir Richard stated, was listed as the gift of J. G. Halliday, Esq., and was dug up in 1904 on the grounds of a property belonging to him. It is conjectured to have been the property of one Louis Playge, Common Hangman of the Borough of Tyburn in the years 1663-65. Being of doubtful authenticity, however, it was never exhibited as such.

No trace, of the thief has been found. Detective-Sergeant McDonnell, of Vine Street, is in charge.

Now all this was, if you will, a journalist's stunt; a penny-a-liner's way of making copy on a dull day. I read it first standing in the lobby of the club, after I had telephoned to Masters, and then I wondered whether I ought to show it to Halliday.

But I put it into his hands when I returned to the smoking-room, and watched his face while he read it.

"Steady!" I said. For the freckles began to start out against his changing face as he read it; then he got up uncertainly, looked at me for a moment, and threw the paper into the fire.

"Oh, that's all right," he said. "You needn't worry. This only relieves my mind. After all - this is human, isn't it? I was worrying about something else. This man Darworth, this medium, is behind it; and the plan, whatever it is, is at least human. The suggestion in that blasted article is absurd. What's the man trying to say?-that Louis Playge came back after his own knife?"

"Masters is coming," I said. "Don't you think it would be better if you told us something about it?"

He shut his jaws hard. "No. You made a promise, and I'll hold you to it. I won't tell you - yet. When we start out for the infernal place, I'll stop by at my flat and get you something which will explain a good deal; but I don't want you to see it now. . Tell me something. They say that a soul on the lower plane, a malevolent one, is always watchful and always cunning. That this one mass of dead evil is always waiting for the opportunity to take possession of a living body, and change the weak brain for its own, just as it infests a house. Do you think, then, that the clot could take possession .. ?"

He hesitated. I can still see him standing in the firelight, a curious deprecating smile on his face, but a fierce stare in his red-brown eyes.

"You're talking rot now," I said sharply. "And you've confused your facts. Take possession! Of what?"

"Of me," said Halliday quietly.

I said what he needed was not a ghost-breaker, but a. nerve-specialist. Then I dragged him off to the bar and saw that he swallowed a couple of whiskies. He was submissive; he even achieved a sort of satirical jollity. When we returned to the newspaper article, as we did again and again, he seemed again his old, lazy, amused self.

Still, it was a relief to see Masters. We found Masters standing in the Visitors' Room: large and rather portly, with his bland shrewd face, his sedate dark overcoat, and his bowler held against his breast as though he were watching a flag-procession go by. His grizzled hair was brushed carefully to hide the bald spot, his jaw looked heavier and his expression older since I had last seen him - but his eyes were young. Masters suggests the Force, though only slightly: something in the dump of his walk, the way his eyes go sharply from face to face, but there is none of the peering sourness we associate with. Public Protectors. I could see that Halliday immediately unbent and felt at ease before his practical solidity.

"Ah, sir," he said to Halliday, after the introductions; "and you're the one who wants a ghost laid?" This time he spoke as though he had been asked to install a radio. He smiled. "Mr. Blake'll tell you I'm interested. Always have been. Now, about this house in Plague Court."

"You know all about it, I see," said Halliday.

"We-ell," said Masters, putting his head on one side, "I know a little. Let me see. It came into possession of your family a hundred-odd years ago. Your grandfather lived there until the eighteen-seventies; then he moved out, quite suddenly, and refused to go back.... And it's been a white elephant ever since, which none of your people have ever been able to let or sell. Taxes, sir, taxes! Bad." Masters' mood seemed to change-smoothly, but with a compelling persuasion. "Now, Mr. Halliday, come! You're good enough to say I can give you a little help. So I know you won't mind returning the favor. Strictly unofficially, of course. Eh?"

"Depends. But I think I can promise that much."

"Just so, just so. I take it you've seen the paper today?"

"Ah!" murmured Halliday, grinning. "The return of Louis Playge; is that what you mean?"

Inspector Masters. returned the smile, blandly. He lowered his voice. "Well, as man to man, now, can you think of anybody - anybody you know, perhaps-any real flesh-and-blood person who might be interested in lifting that dagger? That's my question, Mr. Halliday. Eh?"

"It's an idea," Halliday admitted. Perching himself on the edge of a table, he seemed to debate something in his mind. Then he looked at Masters with shrewd inspiration. "First off, I'll give you a counter-question, Inspector. Do you know one Roger Darworth?"

Not a muscle moved in the other's face, but he seemed pleased.

"Possibly you know him, Mr. Halliday?"

"Yes. But not so well as my aunt, Lady Benning. Or Miss Marion Latimer, my fiancee, or her brother, or old Featherton. Quite a circle. Personally, I am definitely anti-Darworth. But what can I do? You can't argue; they only smile on you gently and say you don't understand."

He lit a cigarette and twitched out the match; his face looked sardonic and ugly. "I was only wondering whether Scotland Yard happened to know something of him? Or that red-headed kid of his?"

Those two exchanged a glance, and spoke without uttering a word. In words Masters only answered, carefully: "We know nothing whatever against Mr. Darworth. Nothing whatever. I have met him; a very amiable gentleman. Very amiable, nothing ostentatious. Nothing claptrap, if you know what I mean.:.."

"I know what you mean," agreed Halliday. "In fact, during her more ecstatic moments, Aunt Anne describes the old charlatan as `saint-like'."

"Just so," said Masters, nodding. "Tell me, though. Hum! Excusing delicate questions and all, should you describe either of the ladies as at all ... hurrum?"

"Gullible?" Halliday interpreted the strange, noise Masters had produced from some obscure depth in his throat. "Good Lord, no? Quite the contrary. Aunt Anne is one of those little old ladies who look soft, and actually are honey and steel-wire. And Marion - well, she is Marion, you see."

"Exactly so," agreed Masters, nodding again.

Big Ben was striking the half hour as the porter got us a taxi, and Halliday told the man to drive to an address in Park Lane; he said he wanted to get something from his flat. It was chilly, and still raining. The black streets were a-dazzle with split reflections of lights.

Presently we pulled up outside one of those new whitestone, green-and-nickel apartment houses (which look somehow like modernistic book-cases) sprouting up amid the sedateness of Park Lane. I got out and paced up and down under the brightly lit canopy while Halliday hurried inside. The rain was blowing over out of the dark Park; and - I don't know how to describe it - faces looked unreal. I was tormented by that sharp, bald image that had been described in the newspaper: a lean man with his back turned, peering into the model of the condemned cell, and moving his head slowly. It seemed all the more horrible because the attendant had referred to him as a "gentleman". When Halliday tapped my shoulder from behind, I almost jumped. He was carrying a flat package wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine, which he put into my hands.

"Don't open it now. It's some facts or fancies concerning one Louis Playge," he said. He was buttoned up in the thin waterproof he affected in all weathers, with his hat pulled over one eye. Also, he was smiling. He gave me a powerful flashlight, Masters being already provided with one; and, when he climbed into the cab beside me, I could feel the pressure of what I thought was another in his side-pocket. I was wrong: it was a revolver.

It is not difficult to talk lightly of horrors when you are in the West End, but I give you my word I was uneasy when we got out among the scattered lights. The tires were singing drowsily on wet streets; and I felt that I had to talk.

"You won't tell me," I said, "anything about Louis Playge. But I imagine it wouldn't be difficult to reconstruct his story, from the account in the newspaper."

Masters only grunted, and Halliday prompted: "Well?"

"The conventional one," I said. "Louis was the hangman, and dreaded as such. The knife, let's say, was the one he used for cutting down his guests.... How's that for a beginning?"

Halliday answered, flatly: "As it happens, you're wrong on both points. I wish it were as simple and conventional as that. What is terror, anyway? What is the thing that you come on all of a sudden, as though you'd opened a door; that turns you tipsy-cold in the stomach and makes you want to run blind somewhere, anywhere, to escape the touch of it?-but you can't, because you're limp as pulp, and. "

"Come!" Masters said gruffly, out of his corner. "You talk as though you'd seen something." "I have."

"Ah! Just so. And what was it doing, Mr. Halliday?"

"Nothing. It was just standing at the window, looking in at me.... But you were talking about Louis Playge, Blake. He wasn't a hangman. He didn't have the courage to be - although I believe he did seize their legs sometimes, at the hangman's command, when they'd been twirling too long on the rope. He was a sort of hangman's toady; and held the - the instruments when there was a drawing-and-quartering case; and washed up the refuse afterwards."

My throat felt a little dry. Halliday turned to me.

"You were wrong about the dagger. It wasn't exactly a dagger, you see; at least, it wasn't used for that purpose until the last. Louis invented it for the hangman's labors. The newspaper account didn't describe the blade: the blade is round, about the thickness of a lead pencil, and

coming to a sharp point. In short, like an awl. Well, can you imagine what he used it for?"

"No."

The cab slowed down and stopped, and Halliday laughed. Pushing back the glass slide, the driver said: "'Ere's the corner o' Newgate Street, guv'nor. Now what? "

We paid him off and stood for a moment or two looking about us. The buildings all looked lofty and distorted, as they do in dreams. Far behind us there was a hazy glow from Holborn Viaduct; we could hear only a thin piping of night-traffic, and the lonely noise of the rain. Leading the way, Halliday struck up Giltspur Street. Almost before I was aware we had left the street, I found myself going down a narrow and sticky passage between brick walls.

They call it "claustrophobia", or some such fancy name; but a man likes to be pressed down into a narrow space only when he is sure what he is shut up with. Sometimes you imagine you hear somebody talking, which is what happened then. Halliday stopped short in that high tunnel - he was ahead, I followed him, and Masters came last - and we all stopped, in our own echoes.

Then Halliday switched on his electric torch, and we moved on. The beam found only the dingy walls, the puddles in the pavement, one of which gave a sudden plop as a stray raindrop struck it from the overhanging eaves. Ahead I could see an elaborate iron gate standing wide open. We all moved softly; I don't know why. Possibly because there seemed such an absolute hush in the desolation of the house before us. Something seemed to be impelling us to move faster; to get inside those high brick walls; something drawing us on and playing with us. The house-or what I could see of it-was made of heavy, whitish blocks of stone, now blackened with the weather. It had almost a senile appearance, as of a brain gone, but its heavy cornices were carven with horrible gayety in Cupids and roses and grapes: a wreath on the head of an idiot. Some of its windows were shuttered, some patched with boards.

At the rear, the wall rose and broadened round a vast back court. It was a desolation of mud, into which refuse had been thrown. Far at the rear of the yard, the moonlight showed a detached structure: a small, oblong house of heavy stone, like a dilapidated smokehouse. The little windows were heavily grated; it stood out among the ruins of the yard, and there was a crooked tree growing near it.

Following Halliday, we went to a weedy brick path to the carven porch over the front door. The door itself was more than ten feet high, and had a corroded knocker still hanging drunkenly from one bolt. Our guide's light played over the door; it winked back the damp, the swellings in the oak, the cuts where people had hacked their initials in the senility and ruin of Plague Court....

"The door is open," said Halliday.

Inside, somebody screamed.

We met many horrors in this mad business, but none, I think, that took us so off-balance. It was a real voice, a human voice;yet. it

was as though the old house itself had screamed, like a doddering hag, at Halliday's touch.

Masters, breathing hard, started to lunge past me. But it was Halliday who flung the door open.

In the big musty hall inside, light was coming out of a door to the left. I could see Halliday's face in that light; damp and set, and absolutely steady, as he stared into that room. He did not raise his voice.

"What the devil is going on here?" he demanded.

III THE FOUR ACOLYTES

What any of us expected to see, I do not know. Something diabolic; possibly the lean man with his face turned. But that was not to occur just yet.

Masters and I came round on either side of Halliday, so that we must have seemed absurdly like a guard. We saw a large, rather lofty room; a ruin of past splendor, that smelt like a cellar. Its wall-paneling had been ripped away, exposing the stone; above it rotted what might once have been white satin, sagging in black peelings, and puffy with spiders-webs. The mantelpiece alone remained: stained and chipped, a thin height of stone scrollwork. In the vast fireplace burnt a very small and smoky fire. Strung along, the hood of the mantelpiece were half-a-dozen candles burning in tall brass holders. They flickered in the damp, showing above the mantelpiece, decaying fragments of wallpaper that had once been purple and gold.

There were two occupants of the room both women. It added a sort of witchlike eeriness to the place. One of them sat near the fire, half risen out of the chair. The other, a young woman in her middle twenties, had turned round sharply to look at us; her hand was on the sill of one of the tall shuttered windows towards the front.

Halliday said: "Good God! Marion

And then she spoke in a strained voice, very clear and pleasant, but only a note removed from hysteria. She said:

"So it's - it is you, Dean? I mean, it's really you?"

It struck me as a strange way of wording an obvious question, if that was what she really meant to imply. It meant something else to Halliday.

"Of course it is," he said, in a sort of bark. "What did you expect? I'm still me. I'm not Louis Playge. Not just yet."

He stepped into the room, and we followed him. Now, it was a curious thing, but the moment we crossed that threshold I felt the lightening of a pressing, crowding, almost suffocating, feeling which was present in the air of the entrance-hall. We all went in quickly, and looked at the girl.

Marion Latimer stayed motionless, a tense figure in the candlelight; and the shadow seemed to tremble at her feet. She had that thin, classic, rather cold type of beauty which makes face and body seem almost angular. Her hair was set in dark-gold waves close to the somewhat long head; her eyes were dark blue, glazed now with a preoccupied and somehow disturbing quality; the nose short, the mouth sensitive and determined.... She stood there crookedly, almost as though she were lame. One hand was thrust deep into the pocket of the brown tweed coat wrapped about her thin body; as she watched us, the other hand left the window-sill and pulled the collar close round her neck. They were fine, thin, wiry hands.

"Yes. Yes, of course ..." she muttered. She essayed a smile. She raised a hand to brush her forehead, and then caught her coat close again. "I-I thought I heard a noise in the yard. So I looked out through the shutter. There was a light on your face, just for a second. Absurd of me. But how did you come to be-how... ?"

Some influence was about the woman: an emotional repression, a straining after the immaterial, a baffled and baffling quality that sometimes makes spinsters and sometimes hellions. It was a quality of vividness, of the eyes or the body or the square line of the jaw. She disturbed you; that is the only word I can think of.

"But you shouldn't have come here," she said. "It is dangerous----tonight."

A voice from the fireside spoke softly, without emotion. "Yes. It is dangerous."

We turned.... She was smiling, the little old lady who sat near the dull and smoky fire. She was very modish. Bond Street had coiffed her elaborate white hair; there was a black velvet band round her. throat, where the flesh had begun to darken and sag. But the small face, which suggested wax flowers, was unwrinkled except round the eyes, and it was highly painted. The eyes were gentle and hard. Though she smiled at us, her foot was tapping the floor slowly. She had obviously been shaken at our entrance; her jeweled hands, lying limp along the arms of the chair, were twisting and upturning as though to begin a gesture; and she was trying to control her breathing. You have read, doubtless, of people who are supposed to resemble eighteenth-century French marquises by Watteau. Lady Anne Benning looked like a thoroughly modern, sharp-witted old lady got up to resemble one. Besides, her nose was too large.

Again she spoke softly, without emotion.

"Why have you come here, Dean? And who are these men with you?"

The voice was thin. It seemed to explore and probe, despite its professional sweetness, and I almost shuddered. Her black eyes never left his face, and she retained that mechanical smile. There was a sickliness about her.

Halliday straightened up. He made an effort.

"I don't know whether you are aware of it," he said, "but this is my house." (She had put him on the defensive, as, I imagined, she always had. At his remark she only smiled, dreamily). "I hardly think, Aunt Anne, that I need your permission to come here. These gentlemen are my friends."

"Present us."

He did so, first to Lady Benning and then to Miss Latimer. It was a mad business, those formal introductions in the damp-smelling vault of a room, among the candle-flames and the spiders. Both of them-the cold, lovely girl standing against the mantelpiece, the reptilian pseudo-marquise nodding against her red silk cloak-were hostile. We were intruders in more senses than one. About them both was a kind of exaltation, which some might call self-hypnosis; a repressed and waiting eagerness, as at some tremendous spiritual experience they had once undergone and hoped to undergo again. I stole a sideways glance at Masters, but his face was as bland as ever. Lady Benning opened her eyes.

"Dear, dear," she murmured to me, "of course you are Agatha Blake's brother. Dear Agatha. And her canaries." Her voice changed. "The other gentleman I fear I have not the pleasure of recognizing.... Now, dear boy, perhaps you will tell me why you are here?"

"Why?" repeated Halliday. His voice cracked. He struggled with a baffled anger, and put out his hand towards Marion Latimer. "Why? Look at you - look at both of you! I can't stand this fog. I'm a normal, sane human being, and you ask me what I want here and why I'm trying to stop this nonsense! I'll tell you why we came. We came to investigate your blasted haunted house. We came here to get hold of your blasted turnip-ghost and smash it in little bits for good and all; and, by God!"

The voice echoed and rang blatantly, and we all knew it. Marion Latimer's' face was white. Everything was very quiet again.

"Don't challenge them, Dean," she said. "Oh, my dear, don't challenge them."

But the little old lady only twitched up her fingers again, from palms flat on the chair-arm, and half shut her eyes, and nodded.

"Do you mean that something impelled you to come here, dear boy?"

. "I mean that I came here because I damned well chose."

"And you want to exorcise this thing, dear boy?"

"If you want to call it that," he said grimly; "yes. Look here, don't tell me - don't tell me that's why you're all here?"

"We love you, dear boy."

There was a silence, while the fire sputtered in small blue flames, and the rain ran soft-footed through the house; splashing and echoing in its mysterious places. Lady Benning went on in a voice of ineffable sweetness:

"You need not be afraid here, dear boy. They cannot come into this room. But elsewhere, what then? They can take possession. They took possession of your brother James. That was why he shot himself."

Halliday spoke in nothing more than a low, calm, serious voice. He said: "Aunt Anne, are you trying to drive me mad?"

"We are trying to save you, dear boy."

"Thanks," said Halliday. "That's jolly good of you."

His hoarse tones had struck the wrong note again. He looked round at stony faces.

"I loved James," said Lady Benning, and her face was suddenly pitted with wrinkles. "He was strong, but he could not stand them. So they will come for you, because you are James's brother and you are alive. James told me so, and he cannot ... you see, it is to give him peace. Not you. James. And until this thing is exorcised, not you, nor James will sleep.

"You came here tonight. Perhaps it is best. There is safety in the circle. But this is the anniversary, and there is danger. Mr. Darworth is resting now. At midnight he will go alone to the little stone house in the yard, and before daylight he will have cleansed it. Not even the boy Joseph will go with him. Joseph has great powers, but they are receptive. He has not the knowledge to exorcise. We shall wait here. Perhaps we shall form a circle, although that may only hinder him. That is all, I think."

Halliday glanced at his fiancee.

"You two," he said harshly, "came here alone with Darworth?"

She smiled faintly. His presence seemed to comfort her, though she was a little afraid of him. She came close, and took his arm.

"Dear old boy," she said - and it was the first human tone of voice we had heard in that literally damned house-"you are rather a tonic, you know. When I, hear you talking like that, in just that particular way, it seems to change everything. If we're not afraid, there's nothing to fear...."

"But this medium - "

She shook his arm. "Dean, a thousand times, I've told you Mr. Darworth is not a medium! He is a psychic, yes. But he concerns himself with causes rather than effects." She turned to Masters and me. Marion Latimer looked tired, but she was making an effort to be light and easy in an almost teasing fashion. "I suppose you know something about it, if Dean doesn't. Tell him the difference between a medium and a psychical researcher. Like Joseph and Mr. Darworth."

Masters shifted heavily from one foot to the other. He was impassive, he did not even look pleased, standing there turning his bowler round in his hands; but I, who knew him well, could detect a curious ring in the slow, patient, reflective tones.

"Why, yes, miss," he said. "I think I can tell you from my certain knowledge that I have never known Mr. Darworth to lend himself to demonstrations. Of himself, that is."

"You know Mr. Darworth?" she asked quickly.

"Ah! No, miss. Not exactly, that is. But I don't want to interrupt; you were saying-eh?"

She looked at Masters again, rather puzzled. I was uneasy; the words "police officer" were to me as patent as though he had worn a placard, and I wondered if she had spotted him. Her cool, quick eyes searched his face; but she dismissed whatever notion she had.

"But I was telling you, Dean. We're certainly not alone here with Mr. Darworth and Joseph. Not that we should have minded...." (Now what was this? Halliday had muttered something and jerked his head; while she was trying to look him out of countenance with a thin, bright imperiousness). "Not that we should have minded," she repeated, straightening her shoulders, "but, as a matter of fact, Ted and the major are here too."

"Eh? Your brother," he said, "and old Featherton? Oh, my Lord!"

"Ted believes. Be careful, my dear."

"Because you do. Oh, I don't doubt it. I went through the same phase at Cambridge, at his age. The soundest beef-eater isn't immune. Mystical-incense-swinging-love and glory of God wrapping you round. I believe they get it worse at Oxford." He stopped. "But where the devil are they, then? Not out daring the emanations?"

"As a matter of fact, they're out in the little stone house. Lighting a fire for Mr. Darworth when he goes to watch." She attempted to speak lightly. "Ted made this fire. It's not very good, is it? Oh, my dear, what is the matter with you?"

He had begun to pace to and fro, so that the candle flames swung with his passage. Now he said: "Good! That reminds me; you gentlemen will want to see over the house, and that little fountainhead of iniquity out in the yard.... "

"You're not going out there?"

The sandy eyebrows went up. "Certainly, Marion. I was out there last night."

"He will be a fool," Lady Benning said gently and sweetly, with closed eyes. "But we will protect him in spite of himself. Let him go. Mr. Darworth, dear Mr. Darworth, can protect him."

"Come along, Blake," said Halliday, and nodded curtly.

The girl made as if to stop him, with an uncertain gesture. I could hear a curious scraping, ticking sound; it was the rings on Lady Benning's fingers brushing the arm of the chair, but it sounded horribly like rats in a wall. The small dainty face was turned dreamily towards Halliday and I saw how much she hated him.

"Don't disturb Mr. Darworth," she said. "It is nearly time."

Halliday got out his flashlight and we followed him into the hall. There was a tall creaky door, which he scraped shut by putting his finger into the empty knobhole. Then we stood in the damp, heavy darkness, and there were three electric torches switched on now. Halliday flashed his light first into my face and then into Masters'.

'Anoint ye, witch,'" he said, as mockingly as he could. "Well? What do you think, now, about what I've been through for the last six months?"

Blinking in the light, Masters put on his hat again. He picked his words with care. "Why, Mr. Halliday, if you'll take us somewhere else-where we couldn't be overheard-why, maybe I can tell you. A little, at least. I'm even more grateful at being brought here, now."

I saw him smile as the light moved away. From what we could see of it, the hall was even more desolate than the room behind. Its floor was of stone flags, over which patterned wood had been at one time laid; but this was long carried away, like the paneling. It remained a bleak, square vault, with a heavy staircase at the far end, and three tall doors on either side. A rat scuttled across the light; we could hear the scrape of its feet as it vanished near the staircase. Masters went along ahead, his light probing. Halliday and I followed as quietly as we could; Halliday whispered to me, "Can you feel it again?" and I nodded. I knew what he meant. It had gathered round again, tightening and closing. If you have ever done any swimming underwater, and stayed down too long, and been suddenly terrorized that you will never get to the surface again, you will understand a very similar sensation.

"Don't," said Halliday, "don't let's get separated." For Masters was some distance ahead, prowling near the staircase. It was with a sense of shock that we saw him stop beside the paneling that enclosed its side; stop dead, and stare down. The light before him silhouetted his prim bowler hat and his big shoulders. Stooping, he went down on one knee. We heard him grunt.

There were some darkish stains on the flagstones near the side of the stair. The little space thereabouts was clean of dust. Masters reached out and touched the panel. It was a little door to a low closet under the steps; as Masters pushed it, there was a wild stirring and rushing of rats inside. A few of the creatures darted out - one of them over Masters' foot but he did not move from his kneeling position. I could see the reflection on the high gloss of one shoe as he poked the flashlight into the foul little space beyond. .

He stared; the damp, musty air turned suffocating in my lungs; then he spoke, gruffly.

"It's all right, sir," said Masters. "All right. It ain't nice, though. It's only a cat." "A cat?"

"Yes, sir. A cat. It's got its throat cut."

Halliday jerked back. I leaned over Masters' shoulder and turned my light inside. Somebody or something had thrust it in there to be out of sight. It had not been dead long, and lay on its back, so I could see that the neck had been slit through. It was a black cat, stiffened out with agony; now turning shrunken and wiry and dusty, and the half-open eyes looked like shoe-buttons. There were things moving about it.

"I'm beginning to think, Mr. Blake," said Masters, rubbing his chin, "that maybe there's a kind of devil in this house after all."

With a stolid disgust he pulled the door shut again, and got up.

"But," said Halliday, "who would-?" He peered over his shoulder.

"Ah! That's it. Who would? And why? Would you call it a piece of deliberate cruelty, now, or was there a reason? Eh, Mr. Blake?"

"I was thinking," I said, "of the enigmatic Mr. Darworth. You were going to tell us something about him, you know. By the way, where is he?"

"Steady-!" Masters struck in quietly, and raised his hand.

We could hear voices and the sound of footsteps coming through the house. They were palpably human voices; yet such was the trick of echoes in this stone labyrinth that they seemed to sheer off the wall and echo softly in your ear just behind you. First there was a gruff mumble in which we could catch scattered words:

"-don't hold with the mumbo-jumbo ... all the same ... look a damned fool ... something.”

"That's it, that's just it!" The other voice was lower, lighter, more excited. "Why do you feel like that? Look here, do I look like any namby-pamby aesthete who could be gulled and hypnotized by my own nerves? That's the ridicule you're afraid of. Trust yourself! We've accepted modern psychology...."

The steps were coming from beyond a low archway at the rear of the hall. I saw the light of a candle shielded in somebody's hand; there was a glimpse of a whitewashed passage with a brick floor; then a figure stepped into the hall, and saw us. It jerked back, bumping into another figure. Across that space you could almost feel its shock and stiffening. I saw a mouth suddenly pulled back, and the teeth, over the candle it held. It muttered, "Oh, Christ. . ." And Halliday threw back in a matter-of-fact tone, faintly edged with spite: "Don't get the wind up, Ted. It's only us."

The other peered, straightening his candle. He was very young. Over the candle-flame hung first a careful Etonian tie, then an uncertain chin, the sproutings of a fair mustache, the faint outline of a square face. His coat and hat were sodden. He said, querulously:

"You ought to have better sense than to try to scare a fellow like that, Dean! I mean, hang it all, you can't go crawling about the place, and-and-" We heard the whistle of his breath.

"Who the devil are these people?" rasped his companion, who had come out from behind him. We threw up our lights mechanically to see the newcomer; he cursed and winked, and we lowered them. Besides these two, there was a thin little red-headed figure behind them.

"Good evening, Major Featherton," Halliday greeted. "As I say, you needn't be alarmed. I seem to have the unenviable quality of making everybody I meet jump like a rabbit." His voice kept rising. "Is it my face, or what? Nobody ever used to think it was so frightful as all that, but as soon as they begin talking to Darworth---“

"Confound you, sir, who says I'm alarmed?" said the other. "I like your infernal, blasted cheek. Who says I'm alarmed, sir? Furthermore, I will repeat to you, as I will repeat to everybody I meet, that I hope I am a fair-minded man, whose motives will not be misunderstood or made a subject for ridicule because I preserve-because, in short, I am here." He coughed.

The voice in the gloom sounded like a disembodied letter to The Times. The paunchy figure tilted slightly backwards. From the brief glimpse I had had of him, of the map-veined cheeks and cadaverous eyes, I could fill out the bigness of an outworn buck and gallant of the eighties, tightened into his evening clothes like a corset.

"I shall have rheumatism for this," he protested, weakly and almost cajolingly. "Besides, Lady Benning asked my assistance, and what could a man of honor do?"

"Not at all," said Halliday, without particular relevancy. He drew a deep breath. "Well, we've seen Lady Benning too. My friends and I are going to watch and wait for the ghost-laying with you. Now we're going to have a look at the little house out there."

"You can't," said Ted Latimer.

The boy looked fanatical. A smile twitched round his lips, as though he had lost control of the facial muscles. "You can't, I tell you!" he repeated. "We've just put Mr. Darworth in there. He asked to go. He's begun his vigil. Besides, you daren't, even if you could. It's too dangerous, now. They'll be out.. And it must be” -his thin, angular eager face, very much like his sister's, bent over his wristwatch-"yes. Yes, it is five minutes past twelve."

"Damn," said Masters. It was unexpected, as though the word had been shaken out of him. He took a step forward, his footfall squeaking on the rotting boards towards the rear of the hall, where the floor had not been lifted from the flagstones. I remember thinking, with that dull focus of mind which fastens on trivial details at such moments, that the rest of the flooring had probably been fine hardwood. I remember Ted Latimer's grimy hand, with its grease-covered knuckles, thrust far out of his sleeve. I remember that colorless figure of the red-headed youngster in the background, vague by candlelight touching its hair, brushing its face, in inexplicable and rather horrible pantomime. . . .

It was to him that. Ted Latimer turned. The candle-flame swung, fluttering with thin noise. His motions abruptly stopped.

"We'd better go into the front room, hadn't we?" Ted demanded. "In the front room, where it's safe, and they can't come. Hadn't we?"

"Yes, I suppose so," replied a colorless voice. "Anyway, that's what I'm given to understand. I never see them, you know."

So this was Joseph, saving the fantastic incongruity of names, whose dull freckled countenance appeared incurious. The candle fluttered round again, and the shadows took him.

"You see?" inquired Ted.

"Monstrous!" said Major Featherton suddenly, for no reason at all.

Halliday strode forward, with Masters after him. "Come along, Blake," he said to me; "we're going to have a look at that place."

"They're out now, I tell you!" cried Ted. "They won't like it. They're gathering, and they're dangerous."

Major Featherton said that as a gentleman and a sportsman he considered it his duty to go along and give us safe conduct. Stopping short, Halliday gave him a kind of satirical salute, and laughed. But Ted Latimer touched his arm, grimly, and the major allowed himself to be led towards the front of the hall. They were all moving now, the major with a rolling stateliness, Ted hurriedly, Joseph in obedient and unperturbed slowness. Our lights followed the footsteps of that little procession, and the high darkness pushed round us like water, and I turned towards that little whitewashed passage that led out to where the rain was splashing....

"Look out, man!" said Masters, and dived to yank Halliday aside.

Something fell out of the darkness. I heard a crash; somebody's flashlight jumped and vanished; and, while the vibrations beat and whirled round my ears, I saw Ted Latimer turn round with staring eyeballs, his candle held high.

IV TERROR OF A HIGH PRIEST

FULL in the beam of my electric torch, Halliday sat on the floor, supporting himself with his hands behind him, and looking dazed. Another beam - Masters' after flickering on him momentarily, had gone straight up into the vault like a searchlight; it was playing over the staircase, the stair-rail, the landing immediately above. They were empty.

Then Masters faced round on the group of three. "Nobody is hurt," he said heavily. "You'd better go into the front room, all of you. And hurry. If they are alarmed, tell them in there - we will join them in five minutes."

They did not argue, but turned into the room and the door scraped shut.

Then Masters began to chuckle.

"That's torn it, sir. They're cool, they are. Why, sir," said the inspector, with a sort of broad tolerance, "that's one of the oldest, stalest, childishest tricks in the whole bag. Talk about whiskers. . . . Lummy! You can rest easy now, Mr. Halliday. I've got him. I always thought he was a fake. And I've got him now."

"Look here," said Halliday, pushing back his hat, "what the devil happened anyway?" His voice was under control, but a muscle jerked in his shoulder, and his eyes wandered round the floor. "I was standing there. And then something hit the flashlight out of my hand; I was holding it loose. I think" - he experimented, without rising - "I think my wrist is numb. Something hit the floor, something came flying down; bang! Ha. Ha ha. Funny, maybe, but damned if I see it. I need a drink. Ho ho."

Masters, still chuckling, turned the beam on the floor. Lying a few feet in front of Halliday were the smashed fragments of a vessel so heavy that the shards had scattered very little, and a third of it was still intact. It was of grayish stonework, now black with age: a sort of trough some three feet long and ten inches high, which must once have held flowers. Masters' chuckle died, and he stared.

"That thing-" he said, "my God, that thing would've crushed your head like an orange.. You don't know how lucky you are, sir. It wasn't meant to hit you, of course. They didn't mean it; not them! That wasn't on the cards. But a foot or two to the left.. .

"They?" repeated Halliday, starting to get up. "You don't mean-?"

"I mean Darworth and young Joseph, that's who. They only meant to show that the powers, the evil powers, were getting out of control; that they were fighting us, and firing that stone thing at you because you insisted on coming here. It was for somebody, anyhow... That's right. Look up. Higher. Yes, it came from the top of the staircase; from the landing.... Halliday's knee-muscles were not as steady as he had thought. He knelt there, absurdly, until his own rage helped him to his feet.

"Darworth? Man, are you telling me that – that swine," he pointed, "stood up there on the landing, and dropped-? -"

"Steady, Mr. Halliday. Don't raise your voice, if you please - not at all. I don't doubt Mr. Darworth is out there where they left him. Just so. There's nobody on the landing. It was that kid Joseph."

"Masters, I'll swear it wasn't," I said. "I happened to have my light on him the whole time. Besides, he couldn't have---“

The inspector nodded. He seemed possessed of an endless patience. "Ah? You see? That's part of the trick. I'm not exactly what you'd call an educated man, gentlemen," he explained, with a rather judicial air and broad gesture, "but this trick, now ... well, it's old. Giles Sharp, Woodstock Palace, sixteen forty-nine. Anne Robinson, Vauxhall, seventeen seventy-two. It's all in my files. A gentleman at the British Museum has been very helpful. I'll tell you. how they worked it in just a minute. Excuse me."

From his hip-pocket, solicitous as a steward, he whipped out a cheap gunmetal flask, which had been carefully polished. "Try some of this, Mr. Halliday. I'm not a drinking man myself, but I always take it along when I tackle matters of this kind. I find it useful-eh? For others, I mean. There was a friend of my wife, who used to go and visit a medium at Kensington.”

Halliday leaned against the stairs and grinned. He was still pale; but, somehow, a great weight seemed lifted from him.

"Go on, you swine," he said abruptly, peering up at the landing. "Go on, damn you. ' Chuck another." He shook his fist. "Now that I know the thing's a trick, I don't care what you do. That's what I was afraid of: that it wasn't. Thanks, Masters. I'm not quite so bad as your wife's friend, but that thing was a jolly close call. I will have one.... The question is, what do we do now?"

Masters motioned us to follow, and we went over the creaking boards and out into the moldy gloom of the passage beyond. Halliday's flashlight was smashed, and I offered him mine; but he refused it.

"Look sharp for more traps," the inspector growled in a whisper. "They may have the whole house flummoxed.

The point's just this. Darworth and Company are up to some game. They mean to put on a show of some sort, and for some more than ordinary reason. I want to find out why, but I don't want to crash in on Darworth," he nodded, "out there. If I could make sure he doesn't leave his post, and at the same time keep an eye on that kid……Hum. Hay-em – “

All this time his light had been taking in details. The passage was narrow, but of great length, and reenforced by heavy beams; on either side were half-a-dozen doors, set beside barred windows apparently giving on interior rooms. I tried to conceive their purpose, in the middle seventeenth century when this house had been built, and then I remembered. Merchant's warehouse rooms, of course.

Peering through one set of bars (it might have been a counting-house), I saw a tank-like desolation strewn with forgotten firewood. I had hazy remembrances of speckled porcelain, Mecca muslin, canes and snuff-bottles, which was curious, because I could not remember having read of these things. The images came suddenly, mixed with the stifling uneasy air. There were no forms or faces - if you can except the suggestion of somebody pacing up and down, up and down, endlessly, on the brick floor :but only the things of finery. I cursed myself for growing light-headed in the bad air; yet the blight of this house grew and grew in my brain. Staring at the dropsical walls, I wondered why they called it Plague Court.

"Hullo!" said Masters, and I pulled up short behind Halliday.

He had reached a door at the end of the passage, and had been peering outside. The rain fell very lightly now. On our right, a smaller passage wandered off into a black rabbit-warren of kitchens which looked like burnt-out furnaces. The other door led into the yard. Turning his light upwards, Masters pointed.

It was a bell. A rusty bell set into an iron framework, about the size of a top-hat, and it hung in the low roof just over the door to the yard. Since it seemed only a means of communication from the old days of the house, I saw nothing odd about it until Masters shifted his lamp a little, and pointed again. Down the side of the bell ran a length of fine wire, new wire; gleaming faintly.

"More tricks?" said Halliday, after a pause. "Yes. It's wire right enough. It goes . . . here, down the side, out through the boards of this window, into the yard. Is this another stunt?"

"Don't touch it!" said Masters, as the other stretched up his hand. He peered out into the dark. The cool wind brought a smell of mud, and other odors less pleasant. "Don't want to call the attention of our friend out there, but I shall have to risk a flash.... Yes. The wire comes out, down, and runs across the ground towards the little stone house. Hurrum. Well ..."

With him we stared out. The rain had died to a mutter of splashings, to stirrings along the gutters and a sullen drip-drip dose beside us, but it still made prankish noises in the yard. I could see very little, for the sky was overcast, and shapes of buildings blocked it out round the wall which enclosed the big piece of ground at the rear. The little stone house was about forty yards away from us. Its only light was a flickering gleam that showed, slyly, at the gratings of little embrasures - they were too small to be called windows - set dose under the roof. It stood lonely, with a crooked tree growing near it.

The light flickered again, curled eerily, with a sort of invitation, and shrank back. That faint spatter and stir of the rain made the muddy yard sound as though it were infested with rats.

Halliday made a movement like one who is cold.

"Excuse my ignorance," he said. "This may seem excellent fun, but it isn't sense. Cats with their throats cut. Bells with wire attached to them. Thirty-odd pounds of stone flower-box chucked at you by somebody who, isn't there. I'm like the chap at the Circumlocution Office; I want to know. Besides, there was something in that passage - I could have sworn.... "

I said: "The wire on the bell probably doesn't mean anything. It's too obvious. Darworth may have arranged it with the rest of them as a sort of alarm-bell, in case "

"Ah! Just so. In case of what?" Masters muttered. He glanced sharply to the right, as though he had heard something. "Ah, ah, but I wish I'd been prepared. They both need watching, and (excuse me) neither of you gentlemen knows enough of the dodges - Just between ourselves, and confidentially, I'd give a month's pay to lay Darworth by the heels."

"You're dead-set anti-Darworth, aren't you?" asked Halliday, looking at him curiously. Masters' tone had not been pleasant. "Why? You can't do anything to him, you know. I mean to say, you told me yourself he's no Gerrard Street fortune-teller making the tambourines rattle a guinea at a time. If a man wants to investigate psychical research, or try a seance for his friends in his own home, that's his business. Beyond exposing him- "

"H'm. That," agreed Masters, "is Mr. Darworth's own copper-bottomed cleverness. You heard what Miss Latimer said. He don't get embroiled. He's only a psychical researcher. He's careful to be only the patron of a tame medium. Then, if anything happens ... why, he was deceived by a fraud, and his honesty isn't questioned any more than the dupes he introduced his medium to. And got money from. Hecould do

it all over again. Now, as man to man, Mr. Halliday, come! - Lady Benning is a wealthy woman, isn't she?"

"Yes."

"And Miss Latimer?"

"I believe so. If that's what he wants-" Halliday snapped, and then checked himself. He went on, obviously changing what he intended to say, "If that's what he wants, I'd write him a check for five thousand any time he agreed to clear out."

"He wouldn't do business. Not him. But you can see this is a heaven-sent chance. If he tries anything himself tonight - and, you see, not knowing I'm here-why - huh!" Masters grunted expressively. "What's more, the kid don't know me. I never saw friend Joseph before. Excuse me, gentlemen. I won't be a minute; but I want to - um-reconnoiter. Stop there, and don't move till I get back."

Before we could speak he had gone down the two or three steps into the yard and disappeared. Though he was a bulky man, he made no noise. He made no noise, that is, until (about ten seconds later) his footstep squelched in the mud; as though he had stopped dead.

Far over in the right-hand corner of the yard, the beam of a flashlight had appeared. We watched it, silent in the soft-rustling rain: sharp in contrast to the ugly, suggestive reddish glow dancing in the windows of the stone house. It was directed on the ground. It held steady; then it winked off and on three times rapidly, a pause, a longer flash, and disappeared.

I nudged Halliday as he started to speak. After a brief interval, mysterious with rustlings and splashings, there was a reply. From the spot where I judged Masters to be, Masters' flashlight did the same.

Then somebody was moving over there in the dark, and Masters' bulk appeared before us on the steps again, breathing heavily.

"Signal?" I asked.

"It's one of our people. Yes. I answered him. That's the code; there couldn't be a mistake. Now what," Masters said in a flat voice, "one of our people.... "Evening, sir," somebody whispered, from the foot of the steps. "I thought it was your voice."

Masters got him up and into the passage. He was, as the light showed, a thin, wiry, nervous young man, with an intelligent face which caught you with its student-like earnestness. His soaked hat hung down grotesquely, and he wiped' his face with a soaked handkerchief.

"Hul-lo," grunted Masters, "so it's you, Bert? Ha. Gentlemen, this is Detective-Sergeant McDonnell." He became indulgent. "He does the same sort of work I used to. But Bert here's a university man; one of our new kind) and ambitious. You may have seen his name in the paper - he's looking for that lost dagger." He added sharply: "Well, Bert? What is it? You can speak out."

"Hunch of mine, sir," the other answered respectfully. Continuing to wipe his face, he regarded the inspector through narrowed eyes. "I'll tell you about it in a minute. That rain's filthy, and I've been out there for two hours. I-I suppose I don't have to tell you, sir, that your-your bete noir, Darworth, is out there?"

"Now, then," Masters said curtly. "Now, then. If you want promotion, my lad, you stick to your superior officers. Eh?" After this somewhat mysterious pronouncement he wheezed a moment, and went on: "Stepley told me you'd been sent to get a line on Darworth months ago, and, when I heard you were looking into that dagger business---"

"You put two and two together. Yes, Sir."

Masters peered of him. "Exactly. Exactly. I can use you, my lad. I've got work for you. But first I want facts, and want 'em quick. You've seen the little stone house, eh? What's the lay-out?"

"One good-sized room. Roughly oblong shape; stone walls, brick floor. Inside of the roof makes the ceiling. There are four of those little grated windows in the middle of each side, high up. The door is under the window you can see from here...."

"Any way out except the door?"

"No, sir."

"I mean, any way the man could get out secretly?"

"Not a chance, sir. That' is, I don't think.... Besides, he couldn't get out the door, either. They padlocked it. He asked them to padlock it on the outside."

"Doesn't mean anything. Yes; it means hanky-panky. I wish I could have got a look inside. What about the chimney?"

"I looked into all that," McDonnell answered. He tried to keep from giving a jerk with the cold. "There's an iron grating in the chimney just over the fireplace. The gratings in the windows are solid in the stone, and you couldn't get a lead-pencil through the openings. Also, I heard Darworth drop the bar inside the door.... Excuse me, sir. Your questions: I suppose your idea is the same as mine?"

"About Darworth trying to get out?"

"No, sir," replied McDonnell quietly. "About something or somebody trying to get in."

Instinctively we all turned in the dark, to look at the ugly little house where the light was changing and writhing and inviting. The cross-barred grating of that little window-scarcely a foot square-was silhouetted in strong outline as the firelight loomed on it inside. And, just for a moment, a head was silhouetted there too. It seemed to be peering out from behind the grating.

There was no reason for the shock of horror that struck me, and made my muscles watery. There was no reason why Darworth, if he were a tall man, should not stand on a chair and look out of the window. But the silhouetted head moved slowly, as though it had trouble with its neck....

I doubt that any of the others saw it, for the fire-glow had died away, and Masters was speaking harshly. I did not hear all of it, but he was giving McDonnell a dressing-down as a weak-kneed something'd something who had got himself impressed by the damned tomfoolery of -

"Excuse me, sir." McDonnell was still respectful, but I think the tone of his voice had some effect. "Would you like to hear my story? About why I'm here?"

"Come along," said Masters curtly. "Away from here. I'll take your word for it that he's padlocked in. That is, I'll go and see for myself in a minute. Urn, don't misunderstand, now, lad !"

He took us a little way down the passage, threw his light into a door at random, and motioned us in. It was part of an ancient kitchen. McDonnell had taken off his shapeless hat and was lighting a cigarette. His sharp greenish eyes glanced at Halliday and me over the match flame.

"They're all right," said Masters; he did not mention our names.

"It happened," McDonnell went on, rather jerkily, "just a week ago tonight, and it was the first real progress I'd made. You see, I was sent to get a line on Darworth last July; but I didn't get anything. He might be an impostor, but - "

"We know all that."

"Yes, sir." McDonnell stopped a moment. "But the business fascinated me. Especially Darworth. I think you know how it is, Inspector. I spent a good deal of time collecting Darworth information, looking over the house, and even asking for leads from people - people I used to know. But they couldn't help me. Darworth would open his mouth about psychical research only to a small, closed circle. They were all filthily rich people, by the way. And several friends of mine, who knew him and said he was a poisonous blighter, didn't even know he was interested in spiritualism. Well, you can see how it was....

"I'd almost forgotten the business when I accidentally ran into a fellow I used to know at school; quite a good friend of mine. I hadn't seen him in a long time. We went to lunch, and he immediately began babbling about spiritualism. Latimer, his name is: Ted Latimer.

"Even at school Ted had been inclined in that direction, though there was nothing much dreamy about him: he was as neat a center-forward as I ever saw. But when he was fifteen he got hold of one of the wrong kind of Conan Doyle books, and used to try to put himself into trances. My hobby was parlor magic, like yours, so maybe that's how. . . . Excuse me. When I met him last week, he pounced on me.

"He went on telling me about an amazing medium a friend of his had discovered, and Darworth was the friend. Now, I didn't tell him I was in the force. I felt pretty rotten about it afterwards; it was a dirty trick, in a way; but I wanted to see Darworth in action. So I argued with him, and asked whether I could meet this paragon. He said Darworth didn't meet people, ordinarily - didn't like them to know his interests - all that. But Darworth was going to be at a little dinner, next night, given by a friend of Ted's aunt, named Featherton. He thought he might be able to get me invited. So a week ago tonight I went.."

McDonnell's cigarette glowed and darkened. He seemed oddly hesitant. Masters said:

"Get on with it. You mean for a demonstration?"

"Oh, no. Nothing of the kind. The medium wasn't there. Which reminds me, sir. In my opinion, that idiot `Joseph' is only Darworth's - what do theycall it

? - front. The little devil gets on my nerves, but I don't believe he knows what goes on. I think his trances are drug-trances, induced by Darworth; that maybe the moron believes he is a medium. He's a sort of dummy to take any blame, while Darworth produces his own phenomena.... Masters nodded heavily. "Ah! That's good, my lad. If that's true, it's something tangible to fasten our man with. I don't believe it, except maybe about the drugs, but if so.... Good! Go on."

"Just a moment, Sergeant," I put in. "A few minutes ago, out there, anybody would have gathered from what you said that you were convinced there really was something in all this. Something supernatural. At least, the inspector assumed as much."

McDonnell's cigarette stopped in the gloom. It moved up, pulsed and darkened strongly, and then the sergeant said:

"That's what I wanted to explain, sir. I didn't say it was supernatural. But I do say that something or somebody is after Darworth. That's as definite as I'd care to make it. And also as vague.”

"Let me tell you.”

"This Major Featherton - I suppose you know he's here tonight - has a flat in Piccadilly. Certainly there's nothing ghostly about it; he prides himself on his modernism, but all the time he keeps telling anecdotes about how different, and how much better, it was in King Edward's time. There were six of us present: Darworth, Ted Latimer, Ted's sister Marion, a glucose old party named Lady Benning, the major, and myself. I got the impression-"

"See here, Bert," interrupted Masters, who seemed outraged; "what kind of reports do you make out, I'd like to know? That's not facts. We don't want your blasted impressions; don't stand there and take up our time in the cold with gibbering away-!"

"Oh, yes, we do," Halliday said suddenly. (I could hear him breathing). "That's exactly what we do want. Please go on gibbering, Mr. McDonnell."

After a. silence McDonnell bowed slightly in the gloom. I do not know why it struck me as fantastic, as fantastic as that conference with our flashlights turned on the floor. But McDonnell seemed on his guard.

"Yes Sir. I got the impression that Darworth was more than a little interested in Miss Latimer, and that everybody else, including Miss Latimer herself, was completely unconscious of it. He never did anything you could call outspoken; it was his air - and there's something about him that can convey an impression better than anyone I ever knew. But the others were too rapt to notice." Here Masters coughed, coughed with a long "Urrrr!" but the young man paid no attention. "They were all polite to me, but they conveyed definitely that I was out of the charmed circle, and Lady Benning kept looking at Ted in a funny way that was worse than merely unpleasant. Then Ted kept blurting things out, sometimes: that's how I put together a lot of hints, piecemeal, that there might be a party here tonight. They shut him up, and afterwards we all went into the drawing-room feeling pretty uncomfortable. Darworth ..."

But the memory of a silhouette on a red-lit window kept coming at me, so that I could see it all around in the dark; I could not keep it away, and I said:

"Is Darworth a tall man? What does he look like?"

"Like - like a swank psychiatrist," McDonnell replied. "Looks and talks like one. . . . God, how I disliked that man! - Excuse me, sir." He checked himself. "You see, he's a positive quantity. Either you fall under his spell, or he puts your back up so much that you want to land one on his jaw. Maybe it's his possessive air towards all the women, the way he touches their hands or leans towards them; and they tell me he's had plenty.... Yes, sir, he's tall. He's got a little brown silky beard, and a sort of aloof smile, and he's pudgy...."

"I know," said Halliday.

`But I was telling you. . We went into the other room, and tried to talk, particularly about some Godawful new-school paintings that Lady Benning had persuaded the major to buy. You could see he detested 'em, and was embarrassed; but I gather he's as completely under Lady Benning's thumb as she is under Darworth's. Well, presently they couldn't keep away from spiritualism, despite my presence, and the upshot of all the talk was that they persuaded Darworth to try automatic writing.

"Now, there's one fake you can't prove a fake; I suppose Darworth wouldn't have touched it otherwise. First he gave them a little lecture to make their minds receptive, and I am willing to admit that if I hadn't kept myself well in hand I should have been almost afraid to have the lights out. No, Sir, I'm not joking!" His head turned towards Masters. "It was all so quiet, so reasonable and persuasive, so deftly tied up in real and sham science....

"The only light in the room was the fire. We made a circle, and Darworth sat some distance away, at a little round table, with pencil and paper. Miss Latimer played the piano for a while, and then joined the circle. I don't wonder the others were shaken. Darworth had got them into that state; he seemed to take pleasure in it, and the last thing I noticed before the lights went out was his complacent little smirk.

"I had a seat so that I was facing in his direction. What with only the firelight, our shadows cut him off. All I could see was the top of his head, resting easily against the back of a tall thin chair, and the firelight rising on the wall just behind him. Above him - I could see it well-was a big painting of a nude sprawled out in ghastly sharp angles, and painted green. That was all, wavering by the firelight.

"We were nervous in the circle. The old lady was moaning, and muttering about somebody named James. Presently it seemed to get colder in the room. I had a wild impulse to get up and shout, for I have attended a good many seances, but never one that made me feel like this. Then I saw Darworth's head shaking over the top of the chair.

"His pencil began to scratch, and still his head kept shaking. Everything was very quiet; only that horrible motion of his head, and the sound of the pencil now traveling in circles on the paper.

"It was twenty minutes - thirty - I don't know how long afterwards that Ted got up and put the lights on. It had got unbearable, and somebody had cried out. We looked over at Darworth; and when my eyes had got accustomed to the light I jumped towards him....

"The little table had been knocked over. Darworth sat back stiffly against the chair, with a paper in his hand; and his face was green.

"I tell you, sir, that charlatan's face was exactly the soupy color of the damned picture hung over his head. He had himself in hand in a second; but he was shaking. Both Featherton and I had come up to him, to see if we could give any assistance. When he saw us over him he crumpled up the paper in his hand. He got up, walked over stiffly, and threw the paper in the fire. You had to admire him for the way he controlled his voice. He said, 'Absolutely nothing, I regret to say. Only some nonsense on the Louis Playge matter. We shall have to try it again some other time'

"He was lying. There were distinct words on that pa per; I saw them, and I think Featherton did too. It was only a glance, and I couldn't catch the first part; but the last line read "

"Well?" Halliday demanded harshly.

"The last line read, 'Only seven more days are allowed.' "

After a pause, McDonnell dropped his glowing cigarette on the floor and ground it under his heel. Sharp through the house behind us, rising in a kind of sob, we heard a woman's voice crying, "Dean-Dean-!"

V THE PLAGUE-JOURNAL

EVERY flashlight snapped on; Masters was alert, and seized his subordinate's arm. "That's Miss Latimer. They're all here “

"I know," said McDonnell quickly; "Ted told me all about it. I watched them tonight."

"And she mustn't find you here. Stay in this room, and keep out of sight till I call you. No, wait! Mr. Halliday!"

Halliday was already stumbling out the door in the dark, but he turned round. I heard McDonnell give a faint start and a snap of his fingers as the name was pronounced. "We promised to be back in five minutes, damn it," snarled Halliday. "And here we are still. She must be nearly dead with fright. Give me a light, somebody. . .

"Hold on a bit," urged Masters, as I handed Halliday my own electric torch; "hold on, sir, and listen. You'd better go into the front room and stay with her; for a while, anyhow. Reassure her. But tell them I want that kid Joseph sent out to us, right here, immediately. If necessary, tell them I'm a police officer. This has got too serious for fooling."

Halliday nodded and bolted down the passage.

"I'm a practical man," Masters said to me, heavily,, "but I trust my instinct. And instinct said there was something wrong. I'm glad I heard this, Bert.... You understand, don't you? That wasn't any ghost-writing. One of those people in that room worked it on Darworth just as he was going to work it on them."

"Yes, I'd thought of that too," agreed McDonnell soberly. "And yet there's one great big thundering hole in it. Can you in any realm of sanity imagine Darworth being frightened by faked ghost-writing? It's incredible, sir. And, whatever else might have been a fake, that scare of his wasn't, I'll swear."

Masters grunted. He took a few steps up and down, bumped into something, and cursed. "Some light," he growled; "we want some light-I'm bound to tell you I don't like this. And this talking in the dark

"Just a moment," said McDonnell. He was gone a few seconds, his light flickering up the passage, and returned with a cardboard box containing three or four big candles. "Darworth was sitting in one of these rooms," he went on, 'resting' before he went out there. He called out to Ted and Major Featherton when they were coming back from lighting his fire - naturally he wouldn't light a fire-and they took him out there. ." He handed me a flashlight. "This is evidently Darworth's, sir. It was in the candle-box. You'd better take it."

It was still gloomy when the candles were lighted, but at least we could see each other's faces, and -the load of darkness was less terrifying. We heard the rats then. McDonnell found a long, battered table, rather like a carpenter's work-bench, and set the candles up on it. The only seat he could find was a decrepit packing-case, which he shoved towards Masters. We stood on a gritty brick floor, blinking at each other in a dreary furnace of a kitchen whose walls had once been whitewashed. McDonnell was fully revealed as a lean, gawky young man going slightly bald. He had a long nose, and a habit of pinching out his underlip between thumb and,; forefinger. His intensely serious expression was lightened by a somewhat satirical droop of the lids over the greenish eyes. It was a face of whiplash intelligence.

I still did not like the atmosphere, and twice I looked over my shoulder. It was this damnable waiting....

Masters appeared ruffled, but he proceeded methodically. He picked up the packing-case, shook it, and crushed with his foot a spider that scuttled out. Then he sat down at the work-bench with his notebook.

"Now, then, Bert. We'll assemble, and we'll consider. Eh? We'll take the business of this faked ghost-writing."

"Very good, sir."

"Well!" said Masters, and rapped a pencil on the table as though he expected to conjure up something. "And what de we have? We have a group of four neurotic people." He seemed to relish the word, like a slight surprise. "Four neurotic people, Bert; or let's except the old major, and say three. We have young Latimer, Miss Latimer, and old Lady Benning. Queer cases, Bert. Now, the trick could have been worked in a number of ways. The paper with the writing could have been prepared beforehand, and shuffled into Dalworth's papers when they were handed him before the lights went out. Who gave him the papers?"

"As a matter of fact, it was old Featherton," McDonnell answered with great gravity. "He just ripped 'em out of a tablet and handed 'em over. Besides, sir (excuse me) Darworth would have known all about an ancient dodge like that. He'd have jolly well known he didn't write it."

"It was dark," pursued Masters. "No difficulty for one of those people to have left the circle, with a prepared paper; tipped over the little table - you said it was tipped over - shoved the writing on top, and come back."

"Ye-es," said McDonnell, pinching his under-lip and shifting; "yes, possible, sir. But the same objection holds. If Darworth is a fake, he'd know this is a fake; and why in God's name, I repeat, should it scare the living wits out of him?"

"Can you," I put in, "can you remember anything else that was on that paper besides `Only seven more days are allowed'?"

"That's what I've been trying to think for a week," McDonnell answered, a sort of spasm going over his face. "I could swear I did, and yet - no. I only saw it in a flash, and it was because the last line was rather larger than the rest, in a big sprawly sort of writing, that I caught it. All I can hazard is this: that there was a name written on the paper, because I seem to remember the capital letters. Also, somewhere, the word buried. But I couldn't swear to it. I should question Major Featherton, if I were you"

"A name," I repeated, "and the word buried." There were rather horrible ideas in my mind, because I was wondering what one of those four,- or three, neurotic devotees would do if he suddenly discovered Darworth to be an impostor and a charlatan....”

"And Darworth," I also said, without mentioning that shapeless notion, "Darworth, considerably knocked endways, said it was something to do with the Louis Playge matter. By which we assume he blurted out something that was in his mind. Is anything or anybody buried hereabouts, by the way?"

Masters' big jowls shook with quiet mirth. He glanced at me out of a bland eye. "Only Louis Playge himself, sir."

I think I was rightly exasperated, and explained in somewhat heated terms that everybody seemed to know all about what had gone on here; everybody made leering hints, but nobody had given any information.

"Why, there's a chapter about it," Masters said, "in a book at the British Museum. H'm. Didn't Mr. Halliday give you some books, or a parcel, or the like?" He saw my hand go to my pocket, where was the brown-paper package I had forgotten. "H'm. Just so. You'll have time enough to read it tonight, sir, I dare say. You'll've guessed that `Plague Court' is only a corruption of the name `Playge'; it was the popular name for it, and it stuck, after all the lad's antics. Eh, he was a spanker,, he was!" said Masters with some admiration, and no whit impressed. "But let's get to facts, Bert. What happened here tonight?"

McDonnell spoke rapidly and concisely while I drew out the brown-paper parcel and weighed it in my hand. Following out the information he had gained from Ted Latimer, McDonnell had posted himself in the yard-the gate was open - on what he guiltily thought might be the most erratic of wild goose chases. At ten-thirty the six of them: Darworth, Joseph, Lady Benning, Ted Latimer, his sister, and the major, had come in. After being some time in the house (McDonnell had not been able to get a look inside), Ted and Major Featherton opened the back door and set about preparations for making the stone house habitable.

"That bell?" suggested Masters. "The one hung in the passage?"

"Right! Sorry, sir Yes, I was a good deal puzzled when I saw them working on it. Ted attached a wire to the bell, under Darworth's directions, then unreeled it across the yard, and climbed on a box and shoved one end through the window. Darworth went back to one of the rooms along here, to rest or something; and the others fussed about in the stone house, lighting fires and candles, and moving furniture or something - I couldn't see inside -and swearing generally. I gathered that the bell is for an alarm, in case Darworth thinks he needs help." McDonnell smiled sourly. "Presently they came in again, and Darworth told them he was ready. He didn't seem nervous at all. Whatever he's afraid of, it's not that. The rest you know."

Masters considered a moment. Then he got up. "Come along. Our Halliday seems to be having a bit of trouble. I'll get that medium away from 'em. Yes. And ask a few discreet questions; eh, Bert? You come with me, but I'll keep you back out of sight. . . ." He glanced at me.

I said: "If you don't mind, Masters, I'll stay right here for a few minutes and see what's inside this parcel. Give me a call if you need me." I got out my knife and cut the string, while Masters watched curiously.

"What," he said, sharply, "what's on your mind, if I may ask? The last time you got a hunch like this, we were able to arrest ----“

I denied, not quite truthfully, that I had any idea to play with. Masters said nothing, since he didn't believe me, and jerked his head to McDonnell. When they had gone I turned up the collar of my coat, sat down on the packing-case Masters had vacated, and put the parcel before me. Instead of opening it, I lit my pipe.

There were two ideas; both obvious, and they conflicted. If Darworth had not been terrified by any faked ghostwriting, it followed that he had been terrified by some genuine, everyday, human thing, say a threat or a revelation of knowledge. This might have been supernatural (although I was not, as yet, prepared to accept it as that), or it might have been managed in some such sleight-of-hand fashion as Masters described. In any event, it was something of devastating power and import; and derived added force from having been presented in that manner. On the other hand, it probably had no connection with this house or the events that were now going on here.

This was sheer theorizing, yet it seemed to me that, if Darworth were so panic-stricken by a threat having to do with this house, he would scarcely have acted in the way he did tonight. He alone was calm and sure. He alone enjoyed working his marionettes, and sitting by himself in dark places. Had the writing on that paper really concerned Plague Court, he would in all likelihood have shown it to the others. He mentioned Plague Court because it was a bogey to the others, but not to him.

In that supposition, you perceive, lay the conflict. All the nebulous terrors of Darworth's acolytes centered round this house. They believed that here existed a deadly earthbound which must be exorcised, lest it take possession of a human soul. Now there had been so much nonsense in what Lady Benning had told us, that spiritualism seemed to violate its own rules; and presumably Darworth had only confused them with vague, Delphic hints. He could make vagueness even more terrifying. Yet, though it did not at all alarm Darworth the mystic, it had struck with ill-controlled panic Halliday the hard-headed and practical man.

I watched the pipe-smoke slide round the candle flames, and the whole room whispered with unpleasant suggestions. After glancing sharply over my shoulder, I pulled the wrapping paper off the parcel. It was a heavy cardboard letter-file opening like a book, and it rattled with papers.

Inside were three things: a large folded sheet, flimsy and brownish-mottled with age; a short newspaper-cutting; and a bundle of foolscap letter pages, as old as the first. On the last, the writing was so faded as to be indecipherable under the yellow blotches, but there was a newer copy in longhand folded and wedged under the tape.

The large sheet-which I did not entirely open because I feared to tear it was a deed. At the commencement the spidery script was so large that I could make out the parties to the sale: Thomas Frederick Halliday, Gent., had bought this house from Lionel Richard Maulden, Lord Seagrave of Seagrave, as attested on March 23, 1711.

From the newspaper-cutting, the headline leapt up: "PROMINENT CITY MAN A SUICIDE," accompanied by a pale photograph showing a rather goggle-eyed man in a high collar, who seemed afraid of the camera. In the picture of James Halliday, Esq., there was a horrible resemblance to Doctor Crippen. There were the same double-lensed spectacles, the same drooping mustaches, the same rabbit-like stare. The cutting told briefly of his connections; that he had shot himself at the home of his aunt, Lady Anne Benning; that he had been worried and depressed for some weeks, "seeming' always to search for something about the house"; that it was all very mysterious, and that Lady Benning twice broke down at the inquest.

I pushed it away, untied the tape, and drew out the other documents. The copy of those creased, faded, decaying sheets was headed: "Letters. Lord Seagrave to George Playge, the Steward and Manager o f his Estates, Together ,with Reply. Transcribed. J. G. Halliday, Nov. 7, 1878."

I began to read, under the uncertain candles in that bleak room, now and then referring to the original. There was no noise but the stirrings that are always in an old house; but on two occasions it seemed to me that someone had come in, and was reading over my shoulder:

Villa della Trebbia, Roma,

13th October, 1710.

PLAYGE:

Your master (and friend). is too ill and distracted to write as befits him, yet I would pray you and charge you, as you love your God, to tell me the truth of this horrible thing. Yesterday comes a letter from Sir J. Tollfer, that my brother Charles is dead at home, and this by his own hand. He said no more, but hinted at some foul business, and when I brought to mind all the things that are said about our House, I was driven near mad; since also my Lady L. is in worse failing health, and troubleth my mind exceedingly, and I cannot travel home; though a learned doctor of physick says she may be cured. So I charge you to tell me everything, Playge, as one who hath been in our family since a boy, and your father before, and pray God Sir J. Tollfer was mistaken.

Believe me, Playge, now more your friend than your master,

SEAGRAVE.

London,

21st November, 1710.

MY LORD:

If it had pleased GOD to avert this misfortune which is upon your Lordship, and indeed on all of us, I should never have been constrained to speak. For indeed I thought it was but a passing calamity, but now I know it was not; and it is a sore task which is laid upon me now, since GOD knows I feel the weight of my guilt. I must tell your Lordship more than you have asked, and of events during my father's stewardship during the Great Plague; but of that I shall speak hereinafter.

Of my Master Charles's death I must tell you this: your Lordship knows him to have been a boy of quiet and studious habits, sweet of disposition and beloved by all. During the month preceding his death (which took place on Thursday, the 6th September) I had indeed noticed him pale and restless, but this I laid to overstudy. G. Beaton, his bodyservant, had told me that he would break into sweats at night; and on one occasion Beaton, waked and roused from the truckle-bed by a cry, found him clutching back the bed-curtains and grasping at his neck as though in dreadful pain. But of this Master Charles remembered nothing next morning.

Nor would he wear a sword, but seemed always restless and seeking for something else at the side of his longcoat, and yet more pale and weary. Moreover, he took to sitting at the window of his bedchamber-which, as well your Lordship knows, looks over the court or yard behind our House-and this he would do especially at twilight, or when the moon was up. Once, he suddenly cried out from this window, and, pointing to a dairymaid who was returning to the house, he cried to me for Christ'ssake. to

lock this girl up, and that 'he could see great sores on her hands and body.

Now I must ask your Lordship to call to mind a certain stone house which stands in the yard, and is connected with it by a covered arbor.

This house has been vacant of use for above fifty years. 'The reason given by your Lordship's father, and his father, is this: viz., That the house was built by mischance above a cesspool, and that all things sicken there. To maintain this which is untrue, they had not perforce to pull it down, lest the cesspool should poison us all; and nothing of provisions could be stored there save straw, grain, oats, or the like.

We had then in our service a young man, Wilbert Hawks by name, an ill-faced fellow employed as porter, who got on so ill with the other servants that he would not sleep with them, and cast about him for another bed. (All this, you may be sure, I did not know then). He vowed he believed in no cesspool, since never was there an ill savor about the place; but that the ruling was of mine, to keep honest servants out of a good bed of clean straw. They told him it was forbidden. Says he, then- 'Why, I'll take the key of the padlock from Master Snoopnose Playge's ring, when he hangs it up at night, and be. up each morning and put it back before him.'

And this he did, this being the wet season and full of high winds. And when they asked him how he had slept,

and if the bed was good, `Aye,' says he, `good enough. But which of ye thinks to cozen me by trying the door at night, and knocking on it lightly, and pawing round the house, and peering in at the windows? For you'll not befool me to think 'tis Master Snoopnose, and open.'

Whereat they jeered at him., and said he lied, forasmuch as none in the house was by some feet tall enough to look in at the windows. They noticed that he seemed pale, and had no liking to go on errands after dark; but he kept his bed, lest they should taunt him.

And then began the first week of September, which was wet and windy, and it began to befall as I shall tell you: Master Charles kept to his bed, being ailing, and was attended by Dr. Hans Sloane himself.

On the night of the 3rd September, the servants complained of somebody in the house, who seemed to brush them in the dark hallways. Moreover, they said the air was hard to breathe, and sickened them; but they saw nothing.

On the night of the 5th September, one Mary Hill, a maidservant, was sent out after dark into the passage which runneth past the storerooms and counting house to water some stone boxes of geraniums which stand on the window-ledges inside the passage. So goes she out - this part of the house being now deserted - with her candle and watering-pot, though afeard to do so. And when she did not return after many minutes, they grew sore alarmed and began to shriek, whereat I myself went out after her, and found her lying in a swound there, her face a blackish color.

She did not speak until morning (it being necessary for two women to sit up with her) she finally told us that this was true: viz., that, as she was watering the geraniums a hand appeared between the bars of the window before her. That this hand was of a grayish hue, very wasted, and covered with large bursting sores. That this hand twitched weakly in the flowers, and tried to seize her candle. That there was another hand, holding something like an awl or a knife, with which it picked at the window; but this she was not sure of, because she remembered no more.

I pray that your Lordship will excuse me of writing fully what occurred the succeeding night, 6th September. I will say that towards one of the clock, in the morning, we were roused by a screaming which came from outside. And when I went out with pistol and lanthorn, and others behind me, we found that the door of the little stone house was barred on the inside. Hawks, who had been sleeping there, presently opened it, but we could not persuade him to talk in a befitting manner. But he told us, most piteously, Not to let it in - not to let it in, for God's sake. And then he said, It was hacking at the bars with its awl, seeking to get in, and he could see its face.

This was the night (or it was rather towards morning, as G. Beaton told the constables) that Master Charles expired of cutting his throat, in his bed. I will say, with obedient circumspection, and in the hope that your Lordship will understand me, that certain swellings which I observed upon his face and body were altogether disappeared by the time the laying-out women –

I found my heart beating heavily, and I was warm despite the damp air. These people lived before me: the pale lad sitting at the window, the steward painfully writing his account, the shadows of that cramped and greasy time come back upon a damned house. I began to have a hideous notion of what haunted Dean Halliday now.

Then I got up, with a muscle of fear jerking in my leg, because I could have sworn somebody had walked down the passage, and past my door. It was only a flash out of the tail of the eye; I went over to reassure myself. Stone window-boxes? They were not here now, although I could remember one, and the passage was empty.

Returning, and wiping my hands aimlessly on my overcoat, I wondered whether I ought to call Masters and show him. But the spell took me.

. And now it behooves me, though with a sick and doubtful heart, to throw what light I can upon this Visitation which GOD in his inscrutable ways hath wrought. Some part of it I observed myself, but most I learned in later time from my father; for I was bare ten years old then, which was in the year of the Great Plague, or 1665.

Doubtless your Lordship has heard men talk of this time, since there are many now alive who did not flee the city, yet survived

My father, who was a good and pious man, used to gather us his children and in his great voice he would read the text which says, 'Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness: nor for the destruction that wasteth at noon day. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee.' This was in August and September, the worst months because the hottest. Even shut into our room I can remember hearing from the upper windows of neighboring houses the shrieks of the women that broke the great silence that was on the city. Once my sister and I crept out on the roof-tiles, at a giddy height, and saw the hot murky sky, and no smoke going up from the chimneys, and such people as were abroad hurrying in the middle of the streets, and the watchmen with their red wands before houses that were marked in a red cross on the doors below the words, `Lord, have mercy upon us.' I only saw a plague-cart once, which was when I crept to a window at night: it was stopped near by, and the bellman was clanging his bell and bawling towards an upstairs window, and so was the watchman, and the linkman was holding up his light so that I saw the cart full of bodies that were covered with sores. I heard these carts every night.

However, this was later, as I shall speak of hereinafter, and the Plague (which broke out in the parish of St. Giles) took so long a time to reach us that people said it would not come at all; and it was mayhap to my father's forethought that we owed our lives. For my father took thought to GOD's signs and omens, like others less fortunate. When the great comet appeared, and burned dull and sluggish in the sky, he went to Sir Richard - as he was then, your Lordship's grandfather - and told him what it was. (This was in the month of April).

Now Sir Richard's own room of business, set apart from his counting-room and warehouses, was the stone house before mentioned. Here he entertained the great people who came to buy of him: which is to, say, inside by the fire in cool weather, and outside under the trees in fine. Sir Richard was a vasty awesome figure in his great periwig and grave fur gown, with the gold chain round his neck; but he did not take amiss what my father said to him.

My father urged on him the precaution he had heard was taken by a Dutch family in Aldersgate Street: viz., that the house should be well provisioned and shut up of itself, suffering none to go in or out until the scourge abated. Sir Richard heard him out, and pinched his chin and was mighty thoughtful. For he had a dear wife, who was soon to be brought to bed of child; likewise a beloved daughter Margaret, and a son Owen, your Lordship's own father. Whereat he said - Ay, there was reason in the plan, and if the plague showed no abatement in a fortnight, they would do it. For they dared not leave the town, because of his wife.

Your Lordship well knows that it did not abate; nay, that it breathed fiercer as the warm weather came with the flies (although all birds had gone from the town). It smote northwards to Holbourne, down the Strand and Fleet Street, and was upon us, and everywhere were people fleeing mad from the stricken town with their goods piled into carts and waggons. These stormed at the gates of the Mansion House, beseeching of my Lord Mayor passes and certificates of health, without which no other town would suffer them to enter, or no inn allow them to lie there. To some it came slowly, first the pains and vomit, then the swelling sores, and mayhap lingered a week ere dying in convulsions; to others it came in the vitals, without outward sign, until they fell in the street and died there.

Whereupon Sir Richard ordered the house to be shut up, dismissing his clerks and keeping only such servants as were of necessity. He desired his son and daughter to leave and join the Court (which had fled to Hampton), but they would not. So none were suffered to go out into the air, save only within the enclosure of our wall; and these with myrrh and zedory in their mouths. I except only my father, who manfully offered to carry abroad such messages as Sir Richard should wish: But indeed he would have thought himself fortunate, had it not been for one thing: that is to say, his half-brother, Louis Playge.

Now in truth I turn sick when I write of this man, who hath affrighted my dreams. I saw him only twice or thrice. Once was when he came boldly to the house, demanding too see the steward his brother; but the servants knew who he was, and ran from him. He caught my little sister, so that when my father came upon him he was twisting her arm horribly, and laughing, and telling her how they cut up a man at Tyburn yesterday. (For your Lordship must know he was assistant to the Hangman, a thing of horror and shame to my father, and which he strove to conceal from Sir Richard). Nor had he the courage or skill for the Hangman's office, but could only stand beside and .. .

Some things I shall not include; it is not well that I should.

. .. But my father said - That if once he could gain the stomach for all he desired to do, then, Louis Playge must be so evil that he could not die like other men. In appearance he was a short man, with a face something bloated. He wore his own lank hair, and had a greasy flopping hat pinned up at one side; and instead of a sword he wore at his side a curious dagger with a blade like a thick awl, which he was very proud of because -he had made it himself, and which he called Jenny. He used it at Tyburn for . .

But when the noisome pestilence blew upon us, we did not see him, and I know my father hoped him dead. Then one day (it was August) my father went abroad with a message, and when he returned he sat down by my mother in the kitchen - and put his head in his hands. For he had seen his brother Louis in an alley off Basinghall Street, and his brother was kneeling and stabbing at something with his weapon. Beside him there was a handcart full of small furry bodies, the which were cats. (For your Lordship must know that by an ORDER conceived by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, no hogs, dogs, cats or tame pigeons, being bearers of contagion, were suffered to be kept; but all must be made way with, and killers appointed for that purpose)....

Somehow, as my eyes fell on this sentence, I found myself nodding as though in confirmation, and saying, "Yes!" and being positive that I remembered seeing the Order - which was bordered in black, and posted outside a tavern with people muttering about it.

And, seeing this, my father would have hastened on, but that Louis called to him, and he was laughing and saying-How now, brother, but are ye afeard of me? And the cat was still writhing, so that he trod on its neck, and came stepping through the filth of the alley, all lean and bespattered, with his hat flopping against the muddy yellow sky behind. When my father asked him if he did not fear, he replied that he had a philtre, gained of a potent necromancer at Southwark, which kept him immune.

Though indeed there were many with philtres, and plague-waters, and amulets (so that quacks grew rich), yet it did not save them, and they were put into the deadcart with the amulets still round their necks. But it seemeth that his charm was of the Devil, forasmuch as through all those crazed days he had his safety, and grew crazed with what he dared do among the dead and dying. These things I will not repeat, save only to tell your Lordship that he grew to a thing shunned like the plague itself, nor would any tippling-house take him in.

Him, however, my father forgot, for on the 21st August Master Owen - your Lordship's father fell ill as he was rising from dinner.

Nor was Sir Richard behindhand with taking action. He desired Master Owen to be conveyed to the stone house, that others might not be infected. Here a bed was caused to be made of Sir Richard's finest tapestries, and he lay moaning among the lacquer cabinets, and the hard gold and silver, and Sir Richard was as one demented. It was agreed (though this against the ORDER) that no report should be made to the council; that Sir Richard and my father should attend him, and a chirurgeon sent for under oath of secrecy.

Throughout that month, I say, they watched. (It was a few days afterwards, I think, that Sir Richard's wife was delivered of a stillborn son). Dr. Hodges waited daily on Master Owen, as he lay there with his shaven head, and let blood and administered clysters; and held him up in his bed to prevent choking, an hour at a time. And it was in the most terrible time of the Visitation, the week of the 1st September, that Dr. Hodges told us the turn was past, and he would grow well.

That night Sir Richard, and his lady near death herself, and their daughter, wept for joy. We knelt and gave thanks to GOD.

On the night of the 6th September my father roused himself at midnight, and went out to take night watch at Master Owen's side. He carried a flaring link in his hand, and when he did start across the yard, then he saw a man on his knees before the house, who was pawing at the door.

And Sir Richard, who was inside, thought it to be my father, so that he came to open the door. But the man staggered up and turned round, and my father saw that it was Louis Playge. And he saw that Louis Playge was moving his neck curiously He held up the light, and perceived that this was because a great plague-sore had blossomed on his throat; and even as he watched, other sores began to swell on his face. Whereat Louis Playge began to scream and cry.

'Twas then that Sir Richard opened the door, asking what the matter was. Nor did Louis Playge speak, but only made a dart to go in at the door; but my father thrust the flaming link into his face as I have seen done with wild animals. Whereupon he tumbled down and rolled, crying - For Christ's sake, brother, will ye turn me out to die? Sir Richard stood horror-struck, not being able to shut the door. And cries my father-Get to the pesthouse, or he would set fire to his clothes and burn the plague out of him. But Louis Playge said they would not have him, that they cursed and reviled him, and no man would look on his face, and he must die in a gutter. When my father would not let him, of a sudden he gathers himself together, and drawing his dagger leaps at the door a-slashing; the which Sir Richard closed in bare time.

Then my father's brother ran about the yard, so that my father was compelled, to bespeak aid; and half-a-dozen fellows with torches pursued him to drive him out, a-jabbing the torches while he ran screaming before them. Presently they heard him no more, and came on him fallen dead under a tree.

There they buried him, seven full feet beneath the tree, because had they given him to the dead-cart, then they would have acknowledged the plague in their house and been guarded by watchmen; nor did they dare cast him into the street, because of who might see and report. Yet my father heard him say before he died, crying out in the yard, that he would come back, and find a way in, and butcher who should be in, the house as he butchered cats; and, if he were not strong enough, he would take the body of an inmate or him who owned the house....

Master Owen heard him (or his shape) even that same night, clinging to the door like a great flattened bat, and trying to force the door with his awl.

Therefore, my lord, since it hath pleased you to ask me for this account of horror and suffering....

Something drew my eyes off the page, and to this day I do not know what it was. The evil images were so entangled with this room that I felt not here, but in the seventeenth century. Yet I found myself standing up, staring about the place....

There were footsteps in the yard. There was a creak and scrape outside in the passage.

And then, harsh and sudden as though at a dying jerk, the bell in the passage began to ring.

VI DEATH OF A HIGH PRIEST

THAT introduced it. And, since the ringing of that bell began one of the most astounding and baffling murder cases of modern times, it is as well to be very careful of what I say; not to exaggerate or mislead-at least, any more than we were misled-so that you may have a fair opportunity to put your wits to work on a puzzle apparently impossible of solution.

First, then, the bell did not clang out strongly. In the stiffness of its rust and disuse, that would have been impossible even with a heavy hand pulling the wire. It creaked, and jarred down with a low reverberation; creaked again more weakly, and the dapper fell in little more than a whisper. But to me it was more horrible than though it had banged a sharp alarm through the house. I got up, with a faint sickishness in the pit of my stomach, and hurried to the door into the passage.

A light flashed in my face, and the beam of my own lamp crossed that of Masters. He was standing in the door to the yard, looking back over his shoulder at me, and he was pale. He said hoarsely:

"Follow me out, and close behind. . . . Wait!" The voice grew to a bellow as hurrying steps and the gleam of candles, plunged towards us from the throat of the passage behind. First came stalking Major Featherton, paunchy and rather wild-eyed, with Halliday and Marion Latimer behind him. McDonnell elbowed past them, holding firmly to the arm of the red-headed Joseph.

"I demand to know-" roared the major.

"Stand back," said Masters. "Stand back, all of you. Stay where you are, and don't move till I give the word. No, I don't know what's happened! Round 'em all up, Bert.... Come along," he said to me.

We slipped down the three steps into the yard and cast our lights out across it. The rain had stopped some time ago; the yard was a thick sea of mud, undulating in places, but sloping a trifle towards where we stood, so that it was almost drained of puddles.

"There isn't a footmark," snapped Masters, "going near that stone house on this side. Look at it! Besides, I've been here. Come on, and keep in my tracks...."

Slogging out across the yard, we examined the unbroken mud in front of us. Masters cried, "You in there! Darworth! Open the door, will you?" and there was no reply. The light flickered much lower against the windows. The last few steps we ran at the door. It was a low door, but immensely heavy: built of thick oak boards bound in rusty iron, with a broken handle. And it was fastened now by a new hasp and padlock.

"I'd forgotten that damned padlock," Masters breathed, wrenching it. He threw his shoulder on the door, to no effect. `Bert! Ahoy there, Bert! Get the key to this lock from whoever's got it and bring it out! ... Come on, sir. The windows.. There we are, where the bell-wire runs in: ought to be that box, or whatever it was, that young Latimer stood on when he ran the wire in. No? By God, it isn't here! Let's see ..." We had hurried round to the side of the house, keeping close in against the wall, and making sure that there were no footprints ahead of us. There was the window to which the wire ran, a foot square and about twelve feet above the ground. The roof, which was low-pitched and built of heavy rounded tiles, did not overhang the wall.

"No way to climb," snarled Masters. The man was upset, and breathing hard; also, he was dangerous. "That must have been a devil of a big box young Latimer stood on, to climb up there. Give me a leg up, will you? I'm pretty heavy, but I'll not be long. . .

It took a strain to support that weight. I braced my back against the stone wall, knitting my fingers to give him a stirrup. My shoulder-bones seemed to go out of joint as the weight pulled them; we staggered and grunted a moment, and then Masters steadied us with his fingers on the window-ledge.

There was a silence....

With that muddy boot cutting into my fingers, I bucked and braced on the wall for what seemed like five minutes. By craning my neck I could see a part of Masters' face from below; the flickering light was on it, and touched his staring eyeballs....

"All right," Masters grunted, vaguely.

I gasped and let him slide down. He stumbled in the mud; and, when he spoke, after gripping my arm and rubbing his sleeve insistently across his face, it was in a gruff, steady, unhurried voice.

"Well ... that's done it, sir. I don't think I ever saw so much blood."

"You mean he's-?"

"Oh, yes, he's dead. Stretched out in there. He looks pretty well cut and hacked. Not pretty. Louis Playge's dagger is there, too. But there's nobody else in the place; I could see all of it."

"But, man," I said, "nobody could have-"

"Ah, just so. Just so. Nobody could have." He nodded, dully. "I don't think the key to that padlock will be of much use now. I could see the inside of the door. It's bolted, and there's a big bar across it too.... It's a trick, I tell you! It's got to be a trick, somehow! Bert! Where the hell are you, Bert?"

Lights crossed again as McDonnell stumbled round the side of the house. And McDonnell was afraid: I saw that in the glaze of his greenish eyes, shutting up as the light struck them, and the twitch of his narrow face. There was a wild contrast in the rakishness of his hat, which was pulled over one eye with a sort of sodden jauntiness. He said: "Here, sir. Young Latimer had the key. Here it is. Has anything-?" He swept out his hand.

"Give it to me. We'll try.... What the devil have you got in your other hand?"

McDonnell blinked, stared, and then looked down. "Why- Nothing, sir. They're cards-playing cards, you know." He exposed a handful, in one of those movements of conscious grotesqueness suited to what he carried in that place. "It was the medium. You said to keep an eye on him when you were out. And he wanted to play Rummy "

"To play Rummy?"

"Yes, sir. I think he's dotty, sir; clean off his head. But he got out the cards, and-"

"Did you let him get out of your sight?"

"No, sir; I did not." McDonnell thrust out his jaw; his eyes were level and positive for the first time. "I'll swear I didn't."

Masters snapped something and took the key out of his hand; but it did no good to open the padlock on the door. The three of us hurled our shoulders at the door together without even shaking it.

"No good," Masters panted. "Axes: that's what we need. Only thing'll do it. Yes, yes, he's dead, Bert! - don't keep asking fool questions! I know a corpse when I see one. But we've got to get in there. Nip back to the house, and look in that room where there's some wood piled; see if you can find a fair-sized log. We'll use it for a battering-ram, and maybe the wood's rotten enough to smash. Hop it, now." Masters was sharp and practical now, though a trifle short of breath. He played his light round the yard. "No footprints anywhere near this door - no footprints anywhere. That's what sticks me. Besides, I was here, I was watching...."

"What happened?" I demanded. "I was reading that manuscript.... "Eh, ah. Just so. Do you know how long you were at it - a-mooning, sir?" He did not sound pleasant. Then he hauled out a notebook. "Reminds me. I'd better put that down. Noted the time when I heard the bell. Time: 1:15 exactly. 'Heard bell, one-fifteen.' Ha. Now, sir, you were sitting there a-mooning that long, maybe you found something out. That's near on three quarters of an hour."

"Masters," I said, "I didn't see or hear anything. Unless ... you say you were out at the back. Did you pass the door of the room where I was sitting when you went out?"

He was twisted round, his torch propped under one arm with its beam focused on the notebook. His muddy fingers stopped writing.

"Ah! Passed your door, eh? When was that?"

"I don't know. While I was reading. I had such a strong feeling of it that I got up and looked out the door, but I didn't see anybody"

"Haaa-!" said the inspector, rather ghoulishly. "Wait a bit, though. Is that facts - you know what I mean: hard, absolute, really 'appened facts, that no counsel could shake - or is it only more impressions? You'll admit you've had a lot of those impressions, you know."

I told him it was a hard, absolute, really 'appened fact, and he smeared the notebook again.

"Because, Mr. Blake, it wasn't me. I came out the front door, and round the side of the house: as you'll hear. Now, can you give any description of those steps, say Man or woman, eh? Kind of walk-fast or slow; something that'd be helpful?"

This was impossible. It was a brick floor, and the sounds had been only half-heard in the midst of cryings and shadows built up from George Playge's manuscript. That they were quick footsteps, as of one anxious to escape being seen, was all I could tell him.

"Well, sir, then here's what happened after Bert and I left you.... I'd better get it down on paper. They'll be asking . . . and I shall catch hell for all this. Down on paper.... Do you know what that crowd was doing, what they've been doing for the last half-hour?" Masters demanded bitterly. "Yes, you've guessed it. Round a circle in the dark. Exactly as they were a week ago tonight, when somebody slipped that fake message among the papers and scared Darworth. How could I prevent 'em?"

"A seance-" I said. "Yes, but what about Joseph?"

"It wasn't a seance. They were praying. And there, if you look at it, is the fishy part of the whole thing. They didn't want Joseph there. The old lady was a bit heated about it. She said Darworth had given specific instructions that Joseph was not to be present: some sort of bosh about his being a strong psychic, which would only tend to gather bad influences rather than ... I don't know. But McDonnell and I took him in hand instead. Ha. Little enough we got out of him, or them either, for that matter. They wouldn't talk."

"Did you tell them you were a police officer?"

Masters made a sound through his nostrils. "Yes. And it only made a mug of me. What right had I to do anything?" He brooded. "The old lady only opened and shut her hands, and said, 'I thought so.' I thought the young fellow – Latimer was going to come after me with a poker. Only one who tried pacifying me was the old gentleman. Ah, and they ordered me out of their prayer-meeting, too. If it hadn't been for Mr. Halliday I should have been chucked out altogether.... Here we come. Bert!" he shouted towards the house. "Get Mr. Halliday with you on that log, and keep the rest back. Make 'em get back, d'ye hear?"

There was a shrilling of protest, mingled with the sound of argument, at the back door. Trundling a heavy log, McDonnell bumped it down the steps against the uncertain gleam of candles that others were holding high. Halliday picked up the other end of the log, and they stumbled out towards us.

"Well?" Halliday demanded. "Well? McDonnell says---“

Masters interrupted: "He says nothing, sir. Catch hold here; two of us each side. Aim for the center of the door, and we'll try to split it in half. Torches in your pockets; use both hands. Ready, when I give the word ... now!"

The noise of the separate crashes blasted in that enclosed space, and seemed to make windows tingle roundabout. Four times we drove that ram at the door, slipping in the muck, drawing back, and plunging again at Masters' word. You could feel it cracking, but the old iron snapped before the wood. A fifth time, and Masters' light was playing on two halves splintered cleanly down.

Breathing hard, Masters drew on a pair of gloves, lifted one sagging flap, and slid through it on his knees. I followed him. Across the center of the door, a large iron bar was still wedged into its socket. As I ducked under it, Masters turned his light round to the back of the door. Not only was the bar still in place, but a long and rusty iron bolt, of the type common in seventeenth-century houses, was shot into place. When Masters tested it with his gloved hand, a stiff wrench of the wrist was required to draw it out. The door had no lock or keyhole: only a dummy handle of the type nailed on outside. So closely did it fit the door-frame all around that the brittle iron binding had been crushed and. ripped out.

"Take note," said Masters, gruffly; "and now stand where you are - turn round be sure there's nobody here.... '

I whirled round quickly; for I had glimpsed fragments of the sight as I crawled inside, and it was not one for a weak stomach. The air was foul, for the chimney could not have drawn well, and Darworth had evidently been burning spices in the immense fire. Then, too, there was an odor of singeing hair.

In the wall towards our left (the same narrow side of the oblong through whose window Masters had seen the body), in this wall was the fireplace. The fire had sunk lower now, but it was heaped into a red-glowing mass that threw out fierce heat. It still winked invitingly, and it looked demoniac. A man was lying in front of it, his head almost among the embers.

He was a tall man, with a sort of shattered elegance about him. He lay partly on his right side, hunched and shrunken as though with pain. His cheek was against the floor, head twisted round towards the door in what might have been a last effort to look up. But he never could have looked up, even had he been alive. Evidently in the fall forward, his eyeglasses - with a little gold chain going round to his ear-had been smashed in his eyes. From this ruin the blood had run down over his face, past the teeth of the wide-open mouth now wrenched back in agony, and into his silky brown beard. The heavy brown hair had been worn long; it had tumbled out grotesquely over his ears, and was streaked with gray. He seemed almost to be imploring us, over the limp left arm that was stretched out towards the side of the fireplace.

Except for the red-pulsing fire, there was no light in the room. It looked smaller here than from the outside: about twenty feet by fifteen, with stone walls crusted in green slime, a brick floor, and a groined ceiling of solid oak. Though there had been a recent attempt to clean it - a broom and mop were propped against one wall this had done little against-the corruption of years. And now the place was sticky and sickly with something you could smell through the damp fog of heat....

Masters' footfalls echoed on the brick floor as he walked towards the body. Insane words came back to me, and reverberated in my mind as they reverberated here when I spoke them aloud.

"`Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him ... ?' "

Masters wheeled. It may have been in the way I repeated what the Scottish thane's wife had said. He started to say something, but checked himself. The echoes still came back. "There's the weapon," said Masters, pointing.. "See it?-lying over there the other side of him? It's Louis Playge's dagger, right enough. Table and chair, knocked over. Nobody hiding here.... You know a bit about medicine. Look at him, will you? But be careful of your boots. Muddy ..."'

It was, of course, impossible to avoid the blood. The floor, the walls, the hearthstone had been splashed before that twisted figure (hacked like a dummy at bayonet practice) had writhed forward with its hair in the fire. He seemed to have run from something - wildly, blindly, banging round in circles like a bat trying to get out of the room-while it set upon him. Through the hacking of his clothes I could see that his left arm, side, and thigh had been slashed. But the worst damage was to his back. Following the direction of his outflung hand, I saw hanging beside the chimney-piece a part of a brick that had been tied as make-weight to the wire of the bell.

I stooped down over him. The fire stirred and fell a trifle. It made a changing play of expressions on the blind face, as though he were opening and shutting his mouth; and his dabbled cuff-link was fine gold. So far as I could ascertain, there were four stabs into the back. Most of them were high up and rather shallow, but the fourth was straight through the heart, driven down under the left shoulder-blade, and it had finished him. A small air-bubble, assuming blackish tints through the mess, had formed on the last wound.

"He's not been dead five minutes," I said. (This, we later learned, was a correct estimate). "Though," I wasbound to

add, "it might have been difficult for a police surgeon's diagnosis later. He's lying directly in front of a blaze that would keep the body at a much hotter temperature than blood-heat for some little time...."

The fire, in fact, was scorching, and I moved back on the slippery bricks. The man's right arm was doubled up behind him; his fingers were gripping an iron blade about eight inches long, with a crudely fashioned hilt and a bone handle on which were visible the letters L.P. - faintly visible through the stains. It was as though he had plucked it out before he died. I stared round the room.

"Masters," I said, "this thing is impossible………'

He swung round savagely. "Ah! Now we have it. I know what you're going to say. Nothing could have come through windows or door, and got out again. I tell you it did happen, and by ordinary means, and, so help me, I'm going to find out-!" His big shoulders relaxed. The bland face looked suddenly dull and old. "There must be a way, sir," he repeated doggedly. "Through the floor or ceiling or something. We'll go over every inch of it. Maybe one of the window-gratings can be removed. Maybe I don't know. But there must be. . . . Keep out, if you please!" He broke off and waved towards the door. Halliday's face had appeared in the aperture. His eyes slid momentarily to the thing on the floor; he winced with a startled spasm, as though somebody had prodded a wound; then he looked straight at Masters, his face a muddy pallor, and spoke rapidly:

"There's a copper out here, Inspector. You know, a-" he was having trouble with his words, "a policeman. We - we made a row with that log, and he heard it, and-" Suddenly he pointed. "Darworth there. He's-?"

"Yes," said Masters. "Keep out of here, sir, but don't go up to the house yet. Tell Sergeant McDonnell to bring the constable in. He'll have to make a station report. Steady, now!"

"I'm all right," said Halliday, and put his hand over his mouth. "Funny. It - it looks like bayonet practice."

That unholy image had occurred to me also. I peered round in the gloom again. The only touch of past splendor in this ruin, of a time when it had been lined with Sir Richard Seagrave's Bayeux tapestries and cabinets of Japanese lacquer, remained in the solid oak ceiling. I saw Masters carefully putting down an inventory in his notebook, and as I followed his eyes I noted also the only other things in the room: (1) a plain deal table, overturned about six feet out from the fireplace, (2) a kitchen chair, also overturned, with Darworth's overcoat across it, (3) a fountain-pen and some sheets of paper, lying in the blood behind Darworth's body, (4) an extinguished candle in a brass holder, which had rolled to the middle of the floor, (5-6) the brick attached to the bell-wire, already indicated, and the mop and broom leaning on the wall beside the door.

And, as a final touch of horror, the spice burned in the fire was a sort of wistaria incense, which clogged the air in a sickly-sweet fog.... The whole case, the whole atmosphere, the whole tangle of contradictions, cried that there was something wrong in these facts.

"-Masters," I said, as though in the middle of a conversation, "there's another thing, too. Why didn't he cry out, when he was attacked like that? Why didn't he scream or make some noise, in addition to trying to get at that bell?"

Masters looked up from the notebook.

"He did," said the inspector unsteadily. "That's just it. He did. I heard him."

VII PLAYING CARDS AND MORPHINE

YOU see," Masters went on, clearing his throat, "that's the worst part of it. It wasn't a good healthy yell or scream, that'd 'uv brought me out fast and ready for trouble. It wasn't very loud at all; but it got faster and faster-I could hear him talking-and then as though he were begging and imploring somebody, and then as though he'd begun to moan and cry. You wouldn't have heard it at all, in where you were. I only heard it because I was outside, coming round the side of the house before then...."

He stopped, stared round, and wiped his forehead with a gray cotton glove much too large for him.

"I admit it scared me. But I thought it was only a part of this man's game, whatever it was. The voice got quicker and quicker, and more shrill. I could see some shadows chasing round on the window; it looked - it looked hellish, in that red light. And I wondered what to do. Did you ever have the sure and certain instinct that something's really wrong, though you think it's only a game?-and yet you hesitate, and stand there without doing anything, and afterwards it turns you sick to think what you should have done." He opened and shut his hands: big and grizzled, a solid man in a mad world, peering round with dull blue eyes. "I shall be lucky not to be demoted for this, sir. Well, I heard that; and all I did was stand there. Then I heard the bell."

"How long afterwards?"

"Well, say a minute and a half after the noises had stopped. I've bungled," he said bitterly, "I've bungled everything."

"And how long did these noises last?"

"A little over two minutes, I should think." He remembered something, and entered it in his notebook; the furrows were deepening in his big face. "But I only stood there at the back door to the passage. Like a mug! Like-never mind, sir. As though something was holding me, eh? Ha! You see, I was exploring. I'd gone out the front door of the house.... The shattered door creaked then. McDonnell slid through, accompanied by a policeman whose helmet and great black waterproof seemed to take up the whole room. He saluted Masters, seemed unsurprised, and said in one of those crisp Force voices of indeterminate accent: "Yes, Sir? District station-house report, sir. Very necessary." His waterproof made a big surge and swish as he whipped out a notebook, and under cover of it I got out at the door.

Even the yard smelled fresh after the foul air of the little room. The sky had cleared, and there were stars out. A short distance away, Halliday stood smoking a cigarette.

"So the swine's done in," he observed in a matter-of-fact tone. I was startled to see that there was neither nervousness nor affected ease about him. The glow of his cigarette caught crinkled, rather mocking eyes. "And with Louis Playge's dagger, all according to schedule, eh? Blake, this is a great night for me. I mean it."

"Because Darworth's dead?"

"No-o. Because the whole game has been queered." He hunched his shoulders under the raincoat. "Look here, Blake. I suppose you've read the dark history? Masters said you were hard at it. Let's be rational. I never really believed in all that nonsense about 'possession', or the prowling spook either. I'll admit it upset me. But now the whole air is cleared - Lord, and how it's cleared! By three things."

"Well?"

He meditated, drawing deeply on his cigarette. Behind us we could hear Masters and McDonnell arguing, and heavy footsteps clumping about.

"The first, old boy, is that this bogus ghost has definitely destroyed his ghostliness by killing Darworth: So long as, it only prowled and rattled windows, it could alarm us. But here's the funny thing: the moment it takes an extremely ordinary lethal weapon and punches holes in somebody, we get skeptical. Maybe if it had only come in and slashed at Darworth a couple of times, then killed him with fright, it would have been effective. A stabbing ghost may be good spiritualism, but it isn't good sense. It's absurd. It's as though the ghost of Nelson had stalked up from the crypt of St. Paul's, only to bean a tourist with its telescope.... Oh, I know. It's horrible, if you like. It's inhuman murder, and somebody ought to hang. But as for the ghostliness . . . “

"I see the point. And what's the second thing?"

His head was cocked on one side, as though he were staring at the roof of the little house. He made a sound as though he had started a chuckle, and cut it off in the presence of death.

"Very simple. I know perfectly damned well, my boy, that nothing 'possessed' me. While all this was going on I was sitting in the dark, on an uncomfortably hard chair, and pretending to pray. . To pray, mind you!" He spoke with a sort of surprised pleasure, as at a discovery. "For Darworth. Then was when my sense of humor got started....

"And that brings me to my final point. I want you to talk to those people in there: Marion and Aunt Anne in particular. I want you to see what's happened to the atmosphere, and you may get a shock. How do you think they're acting?"

"Acting?"

"Yes." He turned round excitedly and flung his cigarette away before he faced me again. "How do you think they've taken Darworth's cropper? Is he a martyr? Are they prostrated? NO! - They're relieved, I tell you! Relieved! All, maybe, except Ted, who'll go on believing Darworth was done in by a spook to the end of his days. ... But it's as though some hypnotic influence had got off them at last. Blake, what's the insane, upended psychology of the whole business? What's-?"

Masters thrust his head out of the door at this juncture,. and hissed mysteriously. He looked even more worried.

He said:

"We've a lot to do. Police surgeon - photographers - reports. And now we're testing. Look here, sir, will you go back to the house and just chat with those people? Don't examine them, exactly. Let 'em talk, if they like. Hold them there until I come. And no information, beyond he's dead. None of the things we can't explain; eh? Eh?"

"How's it going, Inspector?" Halliday, inquired, somewhat genially.

Masters turned his head. The words had jarred.

"It's murder, you know," he answered heavily, and with a faint inflection that might have been suspicion. "You ever see a trial, sir? Ah, just so. I shouldn't call it funny...?'

Halliday, as though on a sudden resolution, walked up to the door and faced him. He hunched up his shoulders, in that old gesture of his, and fixed Masters with his rather bovine brown eyes.

"Inspector," he said, and hesitated-as though he were rehearsing a set speech. Then he went on with a rush: "Inspector, I hope everybody will understand everybody else before we start this thing. I know it's murder. I've thought it all over; I know the notoriety, the unpleasantness, the sticky nastiness that we'll have to go through; oh, yes, and what a lot of soft-headed dupes we shall look at a coroner's inquest. . . Can't you let us off anything? I'm not blind. I know the implication will be that somebody up there stabbed Darworth. But you know better, don't you? You know it wasn't one of his own disciples. Good God, who would kill him? Except, of course" - his finger moved up slowly and touched his own chest, and his eyes opened wide.

"Ah!" said Masters in a colorless voice.."Possibly, possibly. Why, I shall have to do, my duty, Mr. Halliday. I'm afraid I can't spare anybody. Unless - you're not meaning to give yourself up for murder, are you?"

"Not at all. All I meant ..."

"Why, then," said Masters, with a deprecating motion of his head. "Why, then-! Excuse me, sir. I've got to get back to work."

The muscles tightened down Halliday's jaws. He was smiling. Taking me by the arm, he strode off towards the house. "Yes. Yes, the inspector's got his eye on one of us, very definitely. And do I care, my son? I do not!" He threw back his head, as though he were laughing to heaven, and I could feel him shaking with that silent and rather terrible mirth. "And now I'll tell you why I don't. I told you we were sitting in the dark: the lot of us. Now if Masters can't fix the slashing on young Joseph - which is what he'll try to do, first off then he'll pitch on one of us. You see? He'll say that during twenty-odd minutes of darkness, one of us got up and went out....

'And did anybody?"

"I don't know," he answered very coolly. "There was undoubtedly somebody who got up from a chair; I heard it creak. Also, the door of the room opened and closed. But that's all I could swear to."

Apparently he did not yet know. the impossible (or difficult, if you prefer the word) circumstances surrounding Darworth's murder. But it struck me that the picture he had been presenting had elements rather worse than the supernatural.

"Well?" I demanded. "Nothing very laughable about that, you know. It's not altogether reasonable, on the face of it. Nobody but a lunatic would risk a chance like that, in a room full of people. But as for being uproariously funny-"

"Oh, yes, it is." His face was pale, almost inhuman in the starlight, and split by that fantastic jollity. But his head jerked down. He grew serious. "Because, you see, Marion and I were sitting in the dark holding hands. By God, won't it sound amusing in a coroner's court? Clapham Common on parade. I think I hear the giggles.... But it will have to be told; because that, my boy, is what is known as an alibi. You see, it doesn't seem to have occurred to the rest of them that they may be suspected of murder. I can tell you it's jolly well occurred to me. However, that doesn't matter. So long as my own light-o'-life can present a brow of radiant innocence . . . why, they may lock up old Featherton, or Aunt Anne, or anybody they like."

There was a hail from ahead of us, and Halliday hurried forward. From the old kitchen where I had read the letters, the light of the candles was still shining out into the passage. And silhouetted against it in the back door was the figure of a tall girl in a long coat. She stumbled down the steps, and Halliday had her in his arms.

I heard little dry sobs of breathing. The girl said: "He's dead, Dean. He's dead! And I ought to feel sorry, but I don't."

Her trembling shook the words. The flickers of light made dazzling her yellow hair, against the gaunt doorway and the gray time-bitten house. When Halliday began to say something, all he could do was shake her shoulders; and what he actually stammered out, gruffly, was: "Look here, you can't come down in this mud! Your shoes-"

"It's all right. I've got galoshes; I found some. I - what am I saying? Oh, my dear, come in and talk to them...." Raising her head, she saw me, and looked at me steadily. All the scenes in this puzzle had seemed fragments in half-light: a face shadowed, a gleam on teeth, a gesture indicated, as Marion Latimer was now. She pushed herself away from Halliday.

"You're a policeman, aren't you, Mr. Blake?" she asked quietly. "Or a sort of one, anyway, Dean says. Please come with us. I'd rather have you than that awful man who was here a while ago. . . ."

We went up the steps, the girl stumbling in heavy galoshes much too large for her; but at the door to the kitchen I gestured the others to stop. I was interested in that kitchen. Joseph was sitting there.

He sat on the packing-case, as I had done when I read the manuscript; his elbows on the work-bench and fingers propped under his ears. His eyes were half shut, and he breathed thinly. The light of the four candles brought his face strongly out of the gloom; his face, his thin, grimy hands and meager neck.

It was an immature face, immature and small-featured, with freckles staining the muddy skin across the flattish nose and round the large, loose mouth. The red hair - of a light shade, and cut short - was plastered against his forehead. He might have been nineteen or twenty years old, and looked thirteen. On the work-bench before him were spread out the papers I had been reading, but he was not reading them. A soiled pack of playing-cards had been spread out fanwise across them. He was peering dully at one candle, swaying a little; the loose mouth moved, slobbering, but he did not speak. His clothes, of a violent reddish check pattern, made him look even more weird.

"Joseph!" I said, not loudly. "Joseph!"

One hand fell with a flat smack on the table. He rolled his body round slowly, and peered up.... It was not that the face was witless; once upon a time it might have been highly intelligent. A film was over his eyes, whose pupils were contracted nearly to invisibility, and yellowish round the iris. When they came to focus on me, he cringed away. A smile was parodied on his big mouth. When I had seen him a few hours before, by the beam of a flashlight, he had seemed quiet and dull and incurious enough. But not like this.

I repeated his name, and went slowly towards him. "It's all right, Joseph. It's all right. I'm a doctor, Joseph....

"Don't you touch me!" he said. He did not speak at all loudly, but he gave such a jerk backwards that I thought he meant to duck down under the bench. "Don't you touch me, now...."

I got my fingers on his wrist, by dint of keeping his eye (an excellent hypnotic subject); he trembled, and kept jerking back. To judge by the pulse, whoever had given him that dose of morphine had gone a little too far. He was not in danger, however, for he was obviously accustomed to it.

"Of course. You're ill, Joseph. You're often ill, aren't you? And so you get medicine, of course...."

"Please, Sir." He shrank again, with a ducking motion, and an ingratiating look. "Please, Sir, I feel quite well now, thank you, sir. Will you let me go?" Suddenly he became voluble. It was the voice of a young schoolboy blurting out a confession to a master. "I know now! You want to find out. Please, I didn't mean any harm! I know he told me I shouldn't ought to have any medicine tonight, but I took it anyway, because I know where he keeps the case. So I took the case ... but I only took the medicine a very little while ago, sir! Only a very little while ago...."

"Medicine you put in your arm, Joseph?"

"Yes, Sir!" His hand moved towards his inside pocket, with the child's hurry to show you everything once he has confessed, and lighten the blame. "I'll show you. Here-"

"Mr. Darworth gives you this medicine, Joseph?"

"Yes, Sir. When there is to be a seance, and then I go into a trance. That's what makes the forces gather; but of course I don't know that, because I never see anything. . . ." Joseph burst out laughing. "I say, I shouldn't be telling you this. I was told never to tell. Who are you? Besides, I thought it would be better if I took twice as big a dose tonight, because I liked the medicine, and I'd like it twice as well if I took twice as big a dose. Wouldn't I?" His smeary eyes came round at me with a sort of pounce, eagerly.

I wanted to look round and see how Halliday and the girl were taking this, but-I was afraid to lose his eye. That extra grain had fuddled him into speech. It was a blunder that might bring us on the truth.

"Of course you would, Joseph" (he looked gratified), "and I don't blame you. Tell me, what's your whole name: all of it, you know?"

"You don't know that? Then you can't be a doctor-!"

He moved back a little, changed his mind, and said: "You know it. Joseph Dennis."

"Where do you live?"

"I know! You're a new doctor. That's it. I live at 401B Loughborough Road, Brixton."

"Do you have any parents, Joseph?"

"There's Mrs. Sweeney-" he said doubtfully. "Parents? I don't think so. I don't remember, except I never had enough to eat, much. All I remember is a little girl I was going to get married to, that lived in a house and had yellow hair, but I don't what happened to her, sir. There's Mrs. Sweeney. We were each of us only eight years old, though, so of course we couldn't."

"How did you come to know Mr. Darworth?"

This question took more time. I gathered that Mrs. Sweeney was a guardian of his, who had known Mr. Darworth once. It was Mrs. Sweeney who told him he had great psychic powers. She went out one day and came back with Mr. Darworth "in a coat with a fur collar on, and a shiny hat, and rode in a long car that had a stork on the bonnet." They had talked about him, and somebody had said, "He'll never blackmail." Joseph thought this was three years ago.

Again - while Joseph was giving an involved description of the parlor at 401B Loughborough Road, with special reference to the bead curtains at the door and the gilt-clasped Bible on the table-I wanted to look round at my companions. How the acolytes would take this tolerably clear evidence about Darworth was uncertain: the difficulty might be in persuading him to repeat it afterwards. Besides, I could tell that he was nearly at the limit of his volubility. A few minutes more, and he would turn sullen and fearful, possibly savage. I pressed him on gently, thus:

"No, of course you needn't worry about what Mr. Darworth says, Joseph. The doctor'll tell him you took that medicine because you had to-"

"Ah-h!"

"-and the doctor'll tell him, naturally, you couldn't be expected to do what Mr. Darworth told you to do.... Let's see, old man: what was it he told you to do, now?"

Joseph put a grubby thumb-nail in his mouth and nibbled at it. He lowered his voice portentously, almost as though he were imitating Darworth. "To listen, sir. To listen. That's what he said, please, sir." Then Joseph nodded several times, and looked triumphant.

"Listen?"

"To listen to them. The people here. He said not to stay with them at all, and if they wanted a sitting to refuse it, but to keep listening. Please, sir, that's true. He said he wasn't sure, but that somebody might want to hurt him, and come creeping out. . . ." The boy's eyes grew more hazy; evidently Darworth had described that process of "creeping out" with sharp and hideous detail. Also evidently, Darworth was no stranger to the medical use of hypnotic suggestion. "Creeping out.... And I was to see who it was...."

"What then, Joseph?"

"He told me how good he had been to me, and the money he had given Mrs. Sweeney for me; and that my mind would know it, and if anybody did I should know who it was.... But I took my medicine, you see, sir, and then all I wanted to do was play cards. I don't understand the games, much, but I like to play cards. After a while the cards with the pictures on them all seem to come alive, especially the two red queens. You hold them to the light and turn them round, and then you can see new colors on them you didn't see before

"Did he expect anybody to come creeping out, Joseph?"

"He said--" The weak mind groped obscurely within itself. He had already turned round, and was picking up the cards and sorting them over in eager haste. A thin hand plucked out the queen of diamonds. As he looked up again, his eyes wandered past me.

"Please, sir, I won't talk any more," he said in a sort of whine. He got up and backed away. "You can beat me, if you like, the way they used to, but I won't talk any more."

With a jerk he had slid past the packing case, holding the card jealously, and retreated into the shadows.

I turned round sharply. Marion Latimer and Halliday were standing close together, her hand on his arm: both of them staring at Joseph's white face writhing and retreating towards the wall. Halliday's eyes were heavy-lidded; his mouth showed either pity or contempt, and he held the girl closer. I thought that she shuddered, that relief had weakened her, that it was as though her eyes were growing accustomed to the light in here; even that her angular beauty had grown softer like the loosening in the sharp waves of her blonde hair. But, looking past them, I saw that the audience had been augmented.

There was a figure in the doorway.

"Indeed!" said Lady Benning harshly.

Her upper lip was pulled up. In contrast to the primness of the waved white hair and the black velvet band round her throat, her face was full of darkish wrinkles. The black eyes were on mine. She was leaning, incongruously, on an umbrella, and with this she abruptly made a gesture and struck the wall of the passage behind. "Come into the front room, you," she cried shrilly, "and ask which one of us killed Roger Darworth. . . . Oh, my God, James! James!" said Lady Benning, and suddenly began to cry.

VIII

WHICH ONE OF FIVE?

IN THE front room I faced five people.

For the moment the most curious study was the self-assured old lady breaking to pieces like the wax-flower placidness of her face. It was as though she had tumbled down and could not get up: and there existed a very real physical cause behind the mental. Either slightly lame, or afflicted as I judged with some slight paralytic weakness of the legs, Lady Benning remained a stately little figure (got up deftly into her Watteau marquise's role, as though to have her portrait painted) while she only sat in the chimney corner and nodded against her red cloak. But once she got up, and moved uncertainly, you saw only a decaying, spiteful, very bewildered, elderly woman, who had lost a beloved nephew. Such at least was my impression, though you sensed in her a more baffling quality than in any of the others.

She sat in the same chair as before, beside the smoky fire that had long ago gone out, under the six candles in the ruined room. Nor would she use a handkerchief; she sat with a hand pressed to her pouched and smeary eyes, her breast heaving, and would not speak. Major Featherton stood over her, glaring at me. Ted Latimer was on the other side of the fireplace, and he had a poker in his hand.

Yet to face these people down was so easy that you felt uncomfortable, for the most palpable thing in that room - standing behind each person's shoulder - was fear.

"Now, sir!" boomed Major Featherton, as though he would get down to business at once. But he stopped.

A rather imposing figure, the major, when seen at last in full light. He had that look of being tilted slightly backwards, compressed into a correct overcoat whose tailoring almost hid his paunch. His shiny, bald head (much at variance with the port-wine-colored flabby face, big nose, and jowls swelling over the collar as he spoke) was inclined on one side. One hand was oratorically bent behind his back; with the other he pulled at his white mustache. Pale blue eyes studied me from under grizzled brows that needed combing. He coughed. A curious, pacifying expression spread over his face, as though he were about to say, "Ahem!" At the back of all this hesitancy you perceived sheer bewilderment; and also something fundamentally nervous, honest, and solidly British. I expected him to burst out with: "Oh, dammit, let somebody else do the talking!"

Lady Benning drew a sobbing breath, and he put a hand gently on his shoulder.

"They tell us, sir, that Darworth's dead," he said, with an attempt at a growl. "Well, it's a bad business. A confoundedly bad business, I don't mind telling you. How did it happen?"

"He was stabbed," I said. "Out there in the stone house, as you know."

"With what?" Ted Latimer asked swiftly. "With Louis Playge's dagger?"

Ted had pulled out a chair with a quick gesture, and sat down with his legs straddling the back of it. He was trying to be very cool. His tie was disarranged, and there were smears of dirt at the edges of his carefully brushed, wiry, yellowish hair.

I nodded.

"Well, damn it, say something!" rasped the major. He brought his hand up from Lady Benning's shoulder, and put it down again more softly. "Come, now. None of us feel too pleasant about this. When the friend that Dean introduced, that fellow Masters, turned out to be nothing else than a police officer---“

Ted glared at Halliday, who was unconcernedly lighting a cigarette; but Ted met his sister's eye, and jerked his hand before his face as though he were brushing away a fly.

"-that," said the major, "was bad enough. It wasn't like you, Dean. It was rank violation. It was-"

"I should call it foresight, sir," Halliday interrupted. "Don't you think I was justified?"

Featherton opened and shut his mouth. "Oh, look here! I'm not up to all these tricks, confound it! I'm a plain man, and I like to know where I am. If the ladies will pardon me for saying so, that's the truth. I haven't approved of these goings-on, never did approve of 'em, and, by Gad, I never will!" He was considerably on edge, but he seemed to grow penitent as he glanced down at Lady Benning, and turned his tirade at me. "Now, come, sir. After all! I hope we all speak the same language here.

Lady Benning knows your sister." (He spoke with a sort of accusation). "What's more, Dean tells me you were connected with Department 3. You know, M.I.D. Why, confound it, I know your Chief there; the one you call Mycroft. Know him well. Surely you don't want us tangled up in any of the rotten mess that's bound to follow this?"

There was only one way to get these people to speak frankly. When I had finished explaining, the major cleared his throat.

"Good. Ah, good. Not bad, I mean. What you mean's this: You're not a policeman. You won't press any inquiries you think are absurd-about us. Hey? You'll try to help if that police officer, humph, gets gay ..."

I nodded. Marion Latimer was staring at me with a curious expression in her dark-blue eyes, as though she had remembered something.

She said in a clear voice: "And also you think the key to this affair lies in – in - what did you say? -some associate or association of Darworth aside from us. Say in the past ... "Rot!" said Ted, and let out a high laugh such as urchins give when they have smashed a window and run.

"That's what I meant. But before we can go on, one question must be answered by all of you, and answered frankly...."

"Ask, by all means," said the major.

I looked round the group. "Then can any of you honestly say now that he still believes Darworth was killed by a supernatural agency?"

There is, or used to be, a game called Truth. It is popular among adolescents, with an end towards drawing out all the giggling secrets; but a grown-up with a curious turn of mind will do well to encourage it sometimes among his own associates, and observe closely the result. Watch their eyes and hands, the way they form their sentences, the devious turn of their lies or else their shattering frankness; and much is to be learned of their natures.... After asking that question, I was reminded of nothing so much as a group of adolescents playing with an uneasy question in a game of Truth.

They looked at each other. Even Lady Benning had stiffened. Her jewel-gaudy hands were still pressed over her eyes, but she might have been peering out between the fingers; she began to tremble, then uttered what might have been a moan or a sob, and slid back against the gaudier red-lined cloak.

"NO!" said Major Featherton explosively.

It broke the tension. Halliday murmured, "Good man! Speak up, old girl. Banish the hobgoblins. Tell 'em all about it."

"I-I don't know," said Marion, with a dull and incredulous half-smile at the fireplace. She looked up. "I don't honestly know, but I don't think so. You see, Mr. Blake, you've got us into such a position that we shall look most awful fools if we say, `No.'- Wait! I'll put it another way. I don't know whether, or not I believe in the supernatural. I rather 'fancy I do. There's something in this house-" her eyes moved round quickly. "I-I haven't been myself, and there may be something terrible and unnatural here. But if you ask me whether I think Mr. Darworth is an impostor, the answer is YES! After hearing what that Dennis boy had to say... ." She shuddered.

"Then, my dear Miss Latimer," boomed the major, massaging his jaw, "why, in the name of heaven—“

"You see?" she said quietly, and smiled. "That's what I meant. I didn't like that man. I think I hated him. It was the way he talked, the manner he had; oh, I can't explain it, except that I've heard of people getting in the power of of doctors before. He was a kind of super-doctor who poisoned you so that " her eyes slid quickly to Halliday, and as quickly darted away, "so that: well, it's horrible to talk of, but - you could almost see maggots crawling on people you knew and loved! And the odd thing is that it's like a spell in the story-books. He's dead. And we're all free, as I wanted to be free."

Her cheeks were flushed, and her speech rapid to incoherence, Ted let out a whinny of laughter.

He said: "I say, angel, I shouldn't go on like that, you know. You're only providing motives for murder."

"Well, well," said Halliday, and took the cigarette out of his mouth. "Want your face knocked off, do you?"

Ted studied him. Ted was very much the young intellectual then, drawn back a little, supercilious, touching his sprouting mustache. He would have been ludicrous had it not been for the fighting fanaticism of his eyes.

"Oh, if it comes to that, old son, motives for all of us. With the possible exception of myself. And that's unfortunate, because I haven't much objection to being accused...." It was the very familiar aloof Chelsea strain, and I think he caught Halliday's slight grimace, for his face hardened; he went on rapidly: "Especially as they'll never be able to arrest anybody. Yes, I believed in Darworth, and I still do! It seems to me you're all doing a hell of a lot of shuffling and sliding, the moment someone says, `Coppers!' Let 'em come! I'm glad of this, in a way. It'll throw a demonstration of the truth at the whole world, and the morons who've always tried to block every bit of real scientific progress-" He swallowed hard. "All right, all right! Say I'm potty, but this will have demonstrated it to the world. Now isn't it worth a man's life and what's a man's life compared to scientific…”

"Yes," said Halliday. "You only seem to be interested in man's life after he's dead. As for the rest of it, I've heard all that poisonous nonsense before." He looked at the other sharply. "'By the way, what are you getting at, anyhow?"

Ted thrust out his neck. He tapped his finger slowly on the back of the chair. His head was wagging, and his face screwed up into a probably unintentional sneer.

"Only this, my boy. Simply this. We're not altogether without brains. We heard your policemen smashing down that door; we heard a good deal of what was said, and what's thought. . . . And until your Scotland Yard can tell us how Darworth was killed, I'll keep my own ideas."

He glanced across the hearth, as though carelessly, and his eyes narrowed. Inexplicably, we must all have experienced a sense of shock to see that Lady Benning was sitting up.

She was dry-eyed now, but so dull of face that the black-lace gown, all the elaborate deckings out of a, shell, became harsh travesty. On God knows what impulse-but I remembered it afterwards - Major Featherton bent over and settled the cape about her shoulders. With the red-lining gone, she became a somber part of the gloom. Only the bracelets on her arm glittered as she put her elbow on the arm of the chair, her flabby chin against her knuckles, and stared down as though at flames in the dead fire. She hunched her shoulders, drearily.

"Thank you, William," she said. "These courtesies-! Yes. Yes, I am better now."

Featherton said gruffly: "If anything's upset you, Anne,

"No, you won't, William." Her hand slid up as his big shoulder lifted. It was comedy, or tragedy, or whatever you like. "Ask Mr. Blake, or Dean, or Marion," she went on without lifting her eyes. "They know."

"You mean, Lady Benning," I said, "what Joseph told us?"

"In a way. Yes."

"Seriously, then: had you never suspected Darworth of being an impostor?"

We heard voices begin calling outside the house; a hail, somebody's answer, the clumping of footsteps coming nearer. A muffled voice at the front said: "Carry y'r own ruddy tripod, can'tcher? Were the 'ell? ..." Somebody replied, there was a mutter of mirth, and the footsteps clumped on round the side of the house. Lady Benning spoke.

"Suspected? We do not know Mr. Darworth was an impostor. If so, I am sure of one thing. . . . They are not impostors. They are real. He tampered with them, and they killed him."

There was a pause. She felt the atmosphere.

"I am an old woman, Mr. Blake," she said, looking up suddenly. "I had very little to make me happy. I never asked you into my life. But you came into it, with your - your great boots, and your bullyings of half-witted children like Joseph - and you trampled that little garden down. For the love of God, my friend, in the name of His mercy, do nothing more!"

She pressed her hands together, and turned away.

"Part of it, Lady Benning," I said, "would seem a very terrible gospel. Were you made happy to think, or did you really think, that your nephew could be possessed, and go amuck like a devil?"

For answer she regarded Halliday.

"You! Oh, my dear boy, I don't doubt you're happy. You're young, you're rich, you have a beautiful girl...." Lady Benning spoke with soft malevolence, turning out her wrist as she uttered each phrase, so that she sounded horribly like a burlesque Shylock. "You have health, and friends, and a quiet bed at night. Not like poor James, out there in the cold. Why shouldn't you worry and squirm a little? Why shouldn't that pretty doll, with her lips and her fine body, why shouldn't she sicken and worry her heart out? Do her good, instead of so much kissing. Why shouldn't I encourage it? . . . It wasn't you I worried about. It wasn't for you I wanted this house cleansed. It was for James. James must stay there in the cold until the foul thing is gone out of this house. Perhaps James is the foul thing---“

"Anne, my dear old friend!" said Major Featherton.

"Good God, this won't do.... "And now," Lady Benning went on, in a sharp but very

matter-of-fact tone, "Roger Darworth has cheated me. Very well. I only wish I had known it sooner."

I restrained Halliday, who was regarding his aunt with incredulous eyes, and he had started to say, "You encouraged-" I said quickly:

"Cheated you, Lady Benning?"

She hesitated, seeming to come to herself. "If he was an impostor, he cheated me. If not, he still failed to exorcise what is in this house. In either case, it slew him. He failed. And therefore he cheated me." Lady Benning lay back in her chair and commenced to laugh, in shuddering convulsions, as though she had made a hilariously witty reply. Then she wiped her eyes. "Ah, ah. I mustn't forget. Was there anything else you wanted to ask me, Mr. Blake?"

"Yes. Something I should like to ask everybody.... A week ago tonight, I am given to understand, there was an informal gathering at Major Featherton's flat. At this gathering, Mr. Darworth was persuaded to try automatic writing. Is that correct?"

The old lady turned and prodded at Featherton's coat.

"Didn't I tell you?" she demanded, in malevolent triumph. "Didn't I tell you, William? ... I knew it. When that police-officer came in here a while ago, and tried to bully us, he had a younger man with him. Another policeman, the one who took charge of Joseph. He didn't show his face to us, but I knew who it was. It was the police spy they sent to us, and we received as a friend."

Ted Latimer jumped up. "Oh, I say! That's utter rot! Bert McDonnell--oh, yes, I know!-I thought I recognized him, in the dark, when he came in after that log, and didn't answer when I spoke to him ... but, damn it, that's impossible! Bert McDonnell's no more on the police force than I am. The idea's absurd. Fantastic.... Look here, it isn't true, is it?"

I evaded as well as I could, by referring them to Masters, for I wished no more digressions. Halliday, I could see, was preventing Marion from speaking; and I kept my eyes on Major Featherton while I sketched out what we knew of the evening. The major seemed uneasy.

`And we are informed that Darworth was terrified, apparently by what he saw on that paper... " I glanced round.

"Yes, by Gad, he was!" Featherton blurted, and drove one gloved fist into his palm. "Funk. Sheer funk. Never saw it worse."

Ted said blankly: "Yes. Yes, it must have been Bert...."

"And, of course, if anybody saw what was on that paper-"

The silence held for so long a time that it appeared I had drawn a blank. Lady Benning was disinterested, but she had a contemptuous eye on Ted, who was blankly muttering something to himself.

"A pack of foolery, of course," the major announced. He cleared his throat several times. "But-aaah-for what it's worth, I think I can tell you the first line. Don't look at me like that, Anne! Confound it, I never did approve of your nonsense, and I'll tell you this besides ... those pictures I was dragooned into buying ... H'm, yes. Now that I think of it. They go into the fire tomorrow.... What was I saying? Ah!' The first line. Remember it distinctly. It said, `I know where Elsie Fenwick is buried."'

There was another silence, while the major stood back, wheezing and stroking at his mustache in a sort of swaggering defiance. You could hear no sound but his asthmatic breathing. Repeating the words aloud, I looked round the group. Either one person in that group of five was a magnificent actor, or else the words meant absolutely nothing to anybody. Only two remarks were made in the space of possibly three minutes: which can seem a very long time. Ted Latimer said, "Who's Elsie Fenwick?" in a querulous tone, as though irrelevant matters were being dragged in; and later Halliday observed thoughtfully: "Never heard of her." Then they all stood and looked at the major, whose port-wine cheeks were growing more mottled, and his puffings louder, as at some slur on his veracity.

And I was becoming morally certain that one of the five people before me was the murderer of Roger Darworth.

"Well?" Featherton demanded explosively. "Say something, one of you!"

"You didn't tell us of this before, William," said Lady Benning.

Featherton made a vague and irritated gesture. "But it was a woman's name, confound it," he protested, as though he were not certain of the issues himself. "Don't you see? It was a woman's name."

Ted looked round in a sort of wild amusement, as though he had seen a caricature he could not believe. Halliday muttered something about the Medes and the Persians; Marion's face wore a bright and interested expression, and she said, "Oh!" Only Lady Benning studied him grimly, catching her cloak about her neck....

Heavy footfalls clumped along the hall outside, and we all turned. The tension went back to chill hostility as Masters strode into the room.

Masters returned the hostility. I have never seen him look more disheveled, more worried, or more sinister. His coat was muddy, like the bowler jammed on the back of his head. He stood in the doorway, surveying the group slowly.

"Well?" asked Ted Latimer. The way he pitched his voice, in those circumstances, was less like defiance than childish impertinence. "Are we free to go home? How long do you intend keeping us here?"

Masters kept looking round. As though on an impulse, he let himself smile. He said, nodding:

"Why, I'll tell you, ladies and gentlemen." Carefully drawing off his muddy gloves, he reached inside his overcoat and drew out a watch. "It's now just twenty-five minutes past three. To be frank, we may be here until daylight. You may go as soon as I have had a statement from each of you - needn't be on oath, of course, but I should suggest frankness....

"We shall want these statements separately. My men are making one of the rooms as comfortable as possible, and we shall want you in one at a time. Meantime, I'll send a constable in here to keep you company, and see that no harm comes to anybody. We regard you all as valuable witnesses, ladies and gentlemen."

The smile grew tighter. "And now, um, excuse me. Mr. Blake! Will you step out here a moment, please? I should like a word in private."

IX

"LOCKED IN A STONE BOX"

MASTERS took me down to the kitchen before he spoke. Joseph was not there now. The work-bench had been slewed round so that it faced the door; with the candles burning in a line across it, and a chair drawn up a few feet out for witnesses, the background made it resemble pictures of the Inquisition's tribunal-room.

The yard behind was noisy and full of darting lights. Somebody was climbing up on the roof of the little stone house; the puff of a flashlight-powder glared out momentarily, so that the house, the wall, the crooked tree, looked as wild as a scene from Dore. Close at hand, a muffled voice said in an awed tone, "Lummy, but 'e got it, didn't 'e?" Another voice muttered, "Uh!" and somebody scratched a match.

Masters jabbed his finger out towards the scene of activity.

"I'm beaten, sir," he said. "Right now, at least, I'm beaten, and I don't mind admitting it. This thing can't have happened, but it did. We've got the evidence - clear evidence, plain evidence - that nobody in God's world could have got into that house or out of it. But Darworth's dead. Let me tell you how bad it is.... Wait! Have you learned anything?"

I started to sketch out what I had learned, and he stopped me when I was telling' about Joseph.

"Ah! Ah, yes. I'm glad you saw him; so did I" He was still smiling grimly. "I sent the boy home in a cab, under guard of a constable. He may not be in any danger, but on the other hand…."

"Danger?"

"Yes. Oh, the first part of it hangs together, sir. Neat; very neat. Darworth didn't fear this house because of its ghosts. He was very, very easy about the ghosts. What he did fear was physical harm from somebody-eh? Why else, d'ye think, did he bolt and bar his door out there? He wasn't trying to keep out a ghost with an iron bolt. But he thought somebody in his little spiritualist circle had designs on him, and didn't know which one. That was why he wanted to keep Joseph away from them tonight: to watch, and to find out. He knew it was one of this group, from the bogus message that'd been stuck among his automatic-writing drivel when only one of them could've done it. D'ye see, sir? There was something, or somebody, he was deadly afraid of; and this was a good time to get a line on who it might have been. He thought he was safe out there.... Then I told Masters about Major Featherton's evidence.

" `I know where Elsie Fenwick is buried-' " he repeated. His big shoulders grew rigid, and his eyes narrowed. "That name's familiar. By George, that name's familiar! And it's associated with Darworth. I could swear to it. But it's been a long time since I've seen the man's dossier, so I'm not sure.' Bert will know. Elsie Fenwick! We've got something; I'm positive of it."

He was silent a long time, biting at the joint of his thumb, muttering to himself. Then he turned.

"Now, then, let me tell you the mess we're into. Do you realize it won't do us an ounce of good even to fasten on somebody we think is the murderer, if we can't show how the murderer did it? We shouldn't dare go to court, even. Eh? Listen.

"First, the house. The walls are solid stone; not a crack or rat-hole in 'em. One of my men has been going over the ceiling inch by inch, and it's as solid and unbroken as the day it was put in. We've been over every inch of the floor also-"

"You don't," I said, "waste any time."

"Aaa-h!" grunted Masters, with a sort of battered pride, as though that were all he had left. "Yes. 'Tisn't every Force could get the police surgeon out of bed at three o'clock in the morning. Well! We've been over floor, ceiling, and walls. Any idea of hinges or trapdoors or funny entrances you can get out of your mind. Statement to that effect is signed and initialed by my men.

"Next, the windows, and they're out. Those gratings are solid in the stone; no question of that. The gratings are so small that you can't even get the blade of that dagger through 'em, for instance; we tried it. The chimney isn't big enough to admit anybody, even if you could drop down into a blazing fire; and, finally, there's a heavy iron mesh across it only a little way up. That's out. The door ..." He paused, stared out at the yard, and bellowed: "GET OFF THAT ROOF! WHO'S ON THAT ROOF? .Didn't I tell you we'd wait till morning for all that? You can't see anything----"

"Daily Express, Inspector," replied a voice out of the gloom. "The sergeant said…"

Masters charged down the steps and disappeared. There was a flurry of high-colored language, and presently he came back breathing hard.

"It don't much matter, I daresay," he said gloomily. "According to what we know. I was telling you. The door - well, you know about the door. Bolted, and barred; and not one of those bolts you could do tricks with, either. It's hard enough to pull back even when you're inside the place ...”