The Shadow Laughs

CHAPTER VI THE SHADOW INVESTIGATES

It was late in the evening. A misty drizzle was falling, and the lights above the Philadelphia street were dim in the gloom. The front of Mrs. Johnson’s boarding house was black and shadowy.

Passing cars, sloshing through the muck, cast moving silhouettes upon the sidewalk and the wall of the house.

Black depths surrounded the steps of the building; and it was from this murky umbra that a shadow seemed to rise and blot out the door of the house.

In a moment, the blackness was gone, and no sign of it remained. Inside the rooming house, however, a singular phenomenon occurred.

The landlady, coming along the hall beside the stairs, stopped for a moment, startled by a peculiar gloom that seemed to flit toward the steps that led to the second floor. Then she realized that her imagination must be tricking her.

Quelling her alarm, she locked the front door, and went upstairs.

A new door had been placed in the entrance to the room where Frank Jarnow had been murdered. Had Mrs. Johnson come up the stairs ten seconds sooner, she would have been keenly startled. For there was a sharp click in the lock of the door, and the barrier had opened inward. But, an instant before the landlady turned at the top of the stairs, the door had closed silently.

The sight of the door made the woman pause. For a moment she listened instinctively outside the room, imagining that some one might be within. Hearing no sound, she passed on.

Within the room, a being moved. So stealthy were his steps that they were soundless, even though the carpet was thin and worn.

The invisible visitor moved here and there, from door to window. Satisfied that the shade was down, he made his presence known by the thin ray of a tiny flashlight.

First the illumination fell upon the table, which still was in its same position under the hanging lamp. The quiet investigator could not be seen; only the beam of his light indicated his presence.

He moved toward the door; then back to the table. He took a position in one chair; then in the other. His little flashlight ran along the edges of the table; then toward the hanging lamp with its green shade.

Within two short minutes, this investigator had followed the same course that Detective Harvey Griffith had taken on the previous day.

He had learned the important fact that if Henry Windsor had used a pistol from a standing position, his vision would have been obscured by the shade.

The flashlight reappeared after a moment of darkness. It was at the door, running along the woodwork of the doorway.

It stopped, and was focused on a smudge in the white paint. A long, thin finger appeared in the tiny circle of light, and scraped the paint with its nail.

The doorway had evidently been painted while Frank Jarnow had been away. The paint had barely dried at the time of his return. Some one, moving slowly through the doorway, had pressed his left shoulder against the woodwork and had made the smudge.

The tiniest bit of cloth was in the paint; the finger nail removed it. The light went to the bottom of the doorway and up again, determining the exact distance of the smudge above the floor.

Then the light swept about the room, covering every inch of the floor. It stopped at a wastebasket in the corner. The basket was empty.

An unseen hand pulled it from the corner. There, in the space behind, lay the fragments of a small green slip of paper, which had been torn to bits.

A hand gathered these and carried them to the table. There they were fitted together with amazing rapidity. It was the receipt of a Pullman ticket from Springfield, Massachusetts, to New York City.

The light went out. The hidden person paced up and down the room as though imitating the action of some person who had been there before.

One chair moved slightly; then the position of the other was disturbed. Again the invisible being went to the door; then to the table; finally to the window. The shade was carefully raised.

The light, muffled in the palm of a hand, now flashed upon the latch of the window, then went out.

The sash came up noiselessly. A figure, almost invisible, emerged through the window. The sash was lowered, from the outside, and a form dropped into the alley below.

The tiny light ran along the cement. There were no footprints there, but at one edge, where the cement ended, there was a slight mark on the ground, as though the toe of a shoe had overstepped the edge.

A hand, holding a tiny steel tape measure, spread above the spot, and made careful measurements. The single hand worked alone, handling the tape deftly.

The flashlight’s gleam was reflected by a large bluish gem that shone from the third finger. It was a girasol, or fire opal, that cast a strange, red reflection.

Then the light was gone. There was no sound; no movement in the darkness. A few seconds later, a window opened from a house in back, and the light from a room fell on the spot where the hand had been. No one was there.

The door of the city morgue was heavy, and old-fashioned. Tonight, a half hour after the episode at the rooming house, the huge portal opened noiselessly, and closed without even the slightest clang.

A shadow moved along the dim hall. The attendant in the office did not see it, although he was gazing in that direction.

The blot of darkness seemed to merge with the gloomy wall. It reached the steps that led to the room below; there it disappeared.

There were no bodies lying on the trucks to-night; the corpses of both murdered men had been removed. Yet that lighted room seemed to await some messenger of death.

Into it came a tall black figure; a form cloaked in sable, with a broad-brimmed hat that hid the features beneath. The being might have been death itself; for he walked with an ominous stride that made no noise, even on that concrete floor.

As though summoned by the spirits of the murdered men, The Shadow moved unhesitatingly to the trucks where the bodies had lain, and stood there, contemplating the empty spaces, as if visualizing the scene that had once been on exhibition.

The head of the figure turned downward. This master of the darkness was looking at a splotch of blood upon the floor.

The Shadow moved away, and with uncanny precision took the very spot that Griffith had held; then moved to the place from which the murderer had delivered the knife thrust.

Stooping, The Shadow raised the truck upon which the detective’s body had been placed — a truck that still bore marks of blood. Then the flashlight glowed from beneath, upon a black smudge which had been made by the tip of the murderer’s shoe when he had so calmly drawn the truck toward him.

The tape measure came into play. Doubled between two slender, tapering fingers, it was used to indicate the details of the smudge. The marks on the measure included the tiniest fractions of an inch; and they were noted with unerring accuracy.

The truck was replaced. The being in black moved silently across the room to a crude table in the corner. Here he sat, and made notations on a paper.

The Shadow’s left hand, with its fire opal gleaming, spread a sheet of typewritten memoranda — the report which Claude Fellows had supplied that morning.

The pencil crossed out the statement: “Conclusion. There is no possible connection between the two murders.” Then Fellows’s carefully prepared report was crumpled, and the hand thrust it beneath the cloak.

The right hand was at work, writing words that seemed to form from clear, active thoughts; words which covered some of the lost clues gathered by the late Detective Griffith; words that added new information, including items from Fellows’s condensation of the newspaper accounts.

The hand stopped its writing. Then came these words:

Then these notations were added:

Sounds came down the stairs. The outside door of the morgue clanged shut. Yet the figure at the desk still wrote.

Heavy footsteps were clanging from the stone stairs. The Shadow crumpled the paper as he rose. He moved toward a corner of the room, and his form became still. It merged with the darkness in the corner.

Any one suspecting it might have distinguished its presence; to the casual observer it could mean nothing more than natural blackness.

Two policemen entered the chamber, carrying a body on a stretcher. They were followed by the morgue attendant, who indicated one of the trucks. The body was deposited there.

“There’s another one for you, Bill,” observed one of the policemen, removing his cap, and wiping his forehead. “You and Mike get a regular collection here, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” replied the attendant.

“Does the place ever give you the creeps?” asked the officer.

“No,” answered the attendant. “Why should it? They’re all dead ones here. There ain’t no chill ever comes over me.”

The men were facing the far end of the room. The shadow in the nearer corner came suddenly to life. It moved, like a black spectre, across the room to the steps. There, hidden in the darkness of the stairs, it paused.

Then to the ears of the three men who stood beside the body came a most terrifying sound.

A deep-whispered laugh swept through that stone-walled room — a chilling laugh that echoed from the low ceiling. The men gasped, and their eyes stared at the body on the truck; it seemed that the hollow mockery had come from the lips of the dead man!

The boastful morgue keeper shook as his quavering hands sought support from his companions. Here, in this familiar place, he had felt the stroke of terror.

He had heard the laugh of The Shadow!