BURN, WITCH, BURN! (1933) [Part 1]

FOREWORD

I am a medical man specializing in neurology and diseases of the brain. My peculiar field is abnormal psychology, and in it I am recognized as an expert. I am closely connected with two of the foremost hospitals in New York, and have received many honors in this country and abroad. I set this down, risking identification, not through egotism but because I desire to show that I was competent to observe, and competent to bring practiced scientific judgment upon, the singular events I am about to relate.

I say that I risk identification, because Lowell is not my name. It is a pseudonym, as are the names of all the other characters in this narrative. The reasons for this evasion will become increasingly apparent.

Yet I have the strongest feeling that the facts and observations which in my case-books are grouped under the heading of “The Dolls of Mme. Mandilip” should be clarified, set down in orderly sequence and be made known. Obviously, I could do this in the form of a report to one of my medical societies, but I am too well aware of the way my colleagues would receive such a paper, and with what suspicion, pity or even abhorrence, they would henceforth regard me so counter to accepted notions of cause and effect do many of these facts and observations run.

But now, orthodox man of medicine that I am, I ask myself whether there may not be causes other than those we admit. Forces and energies which we stubbornly disavow because we can find no explanation for them within the narrow confines of our present knowledge. Energies whose reality is recognized in folk-lore, the ancient traditions, of all peoples, and which, to justify our ignorance, we label myth and superstition.

A wisdom, a science, immeasurably old. Born before history, but never dying nor ever wholly lost. A secret wisdom, but always with its priests and priestesses guarding its dark flame, passing it on from century to century. Dark flame of forbidden knowledge…burning in Egypt before even the Pyramids were raised; and in temples crumbling now beneath the Gobi’s sands; known to the sons of Ad whom Allah, so say the Arabs, turned to stone for their sorceries ten thousand years before Abraham trod the streets of Ur of the Chaldees; known in China—and known to the Tibetan lama, the Buryat shaman of the steppes and to the warlock of the South Seas alike.

Dark flame of evil wisdom…deepening the shadows of Stonehenge’s brooding menhirs; fed later by hands of Roman legionaries; gathering strength, none knows why, in medieval Europe…and still burning, still alive, still strong.

Enough of preamble. I begin where the dark wisdom, if that it were, first cast its shadow upon me.

CHAPTER I

THE UNKNOWN DEATH

I heard the clock strike one as I walked up the hospital steps. Ordinarily I would have been in bed and asleep, but there was a case in which I was much interested, and Braile, my assistant, had telephoned me of certain developments which I wished to observe. It was a night in early November. I paused for a moment at the top of the steps to look at the brilliancy of the stars. As I did so an automobile drew up at the entrance to the hospital.

As I stood, wondering what its arrival at that hour meant, a man slipped out of it. He looked sharply up and down the deserted street, then threw the door wide open. Another man emerged. The two of them stooped and seemed to be fumbling around inside. They straightened and then I saw that they had locked their arms around the shoulders of a third. They moved forward, not supporting but carrying this other man. His head hung upon his breast and his body swung limply.

A fourth man stepped from the automobile.

I recognized him. He was Julian Ricori, a notorious underworld chieftain, one of the finished products of the Prohibition Law. He had been pointed out to me several times. Even if he had not been, the newspapers would have made me familiar with his features and figure. Lean and long, with silvery white hair, always immaculately dressed, a leisured type from outward seeming, rather than leader of such activities as those of which he was accused.

I had been standing in the shadow, unnoticed. I stepped out of the shadow. Instantly the burdened pair halted, swiftly as hunting hounds. Their free hands dropped into the pockets of their coats. Menace was in that movement.

“I am Dr. Lowell,” I said, hastily. “Connected with the hospital. Come right along.”

They did not answer me. Nor did their gaze waver from me; nor did they move. Ricori stepped in front of them. His hands were also in his pockets. He looked me over, then nodded to the others; I felt the tension relax.

“I know you, Doctor,” he said pleasantly, in oddly precise English. “But that was quite a chance you took. If I might advise you, it is not well to move so quickly when those come whom you do not know, and at night—not in this town.”

“But,” I said, “I do know you, Mr. Ricori.”

“Then,” he smiled, faintly, “your judgment was doubly at fault. And my advice doubly pertinent.”

There was an awkward moment of silence. He broke it.

“And being who I am, I shall feel much better inside your doors than outside.”

I opened the doors. The two men passed through with their burden, and after them Ricori and I. Once within, I gave way to my professional instincts and stepped up to the man the two were carrying. They shot a quick glance at Ricori. He nodded. I raised the man’s head.

A little shock went through me. The man’s eyes were wide open. He was neither dead nor unconscious. But upon his face was the most extraordinary expression of terror I had ever seen in a long experience with sane, insane and borderland cases. It was not undiluted fear. It was mixed with an equally disturbing horror. The eyes, blue and with distended pupils, were like exclamation points to the emotions printed upon that face. They stared up at me, through me and beyond me. And still they seemed to be looking inward—as though whatever nightmare vision they were seeing was both behind and in front of them.

“Exactly!” Ricori had been watching me closely. “Exactly, Dr. Lowell, what could it be that my friend has seen—or has been given—that could make him appear so? I am most anxious to learn. I am willing to spend much money to learn. I wish him cured, yes—but I shall be frank with you, Dr. Lowell. I would give my last penny for the certainty that those who did this to him could not do the same thing to me—could not make me as he is, could not make me see what he is seeing, could not make feel what he is feeling.”

At my signal, orderlies had come up. They took the patient and laid him on a stretcher. By this time the resident physician had appeared. Ricori touched my elbow.

“I know a great deal about you, Dr. Lowell,” he said. “I would like you to take full charge of this case.”

I hesitated.

He continued, earnestly: “Could you drop everything else? Spend all your time upon it? Bring in any others you wish to consult—don’t think of expense—”

“A moment, Mr. Ricori,” I broke in. “I have patients who cannot be neglected. I will give all the time I can spare, and so will my assistant, Dr. Braile. Your friend will be constantly under observation here by people who have my complete confidence. Do you wish me to take the case under those conditions?”

He acquiesced, though I could see he was not entirely satisfied. I had the patient taken to an isolated private room, and went through the necessary hospital formalities. Ricori gave the man’s name as Thomas Peters, asserted that he knew of no close relations, had himself recorded at Peters’ nearest friend, assumed all responsibility, and taking out a roll of currency, skimmed a thousand dollar bill from it, passing it to the desk as “preliminary costs.”

I asked Ricori if he would like to be present at my examination. He said that he would. He spoke to his two men, and they took positions at each side of the hospital doors—on guard. Ricori and I went to the room assigned to the patient. The orderlies had stripped him, and he lay upon the adjustable cot, covered by a sheet. Braile, for whom I had sent, was bending over Peters, intent upon his face, and plainly puzzled. I saw with satisfaction that Nurse Walters, an unusually capable and conscientious young woman, had been assigned to the case. Braile looked up at me. He said: “Obviously some drug.”

“Maybe,” I answered. “But if so then a drug I have never encountered. Look at his eyes—”

I closed Peters’ lids. As soon as I had lifted my fingers they began to rise, slowly, until they were again wide open. Several times I tried to shut them. Always they opened: the terror, the horror in them, undiminished.

I began my examination. The entire body was limp, muscles and joints. It was as flaccid, the simile came to me, as a doll. It was as though every motor nerve had gone out of business. Yet there was none of the familiar symptoms of paralysis. Nor did the body respond to any sensory stimulus, although I struck down into the nerve trunks. The only reaction I could obtain was a slight contraction of the dilated pupils under strongest light.

Hoskins, the pathologist, came in to take his samples for blood tests. When he had drawn what he wanted, I went over the body minutely. I could find not a single puncture, wound, bruise or abrasion. Peters was hairy. With Ricori’s permission, I had him shaved clean—chest, shoulders, legs, even the head. I found nothing to indicate that a drug might have been given him by hypodermic. I had the stomach emptied and took specimens from the excretory organs, including the skin. I examined the membranes of nose and throat: they seemed healthy and normal; nevertheless, I had smears taken from them. The blood pressure was low, the temperature slightly subnormal; but that might mean nothing. I gave an injection of adrenaline. There was absolutely no reaction from it. That might mean much.

“Poor devil,” I said to myself. “I’m going to try to kill that nightmare for you, at any rate.”

I gave him a minimum hypo of morphine. It might have been water for all the good it did. Then I gave him all I dared. His eyes remained open, terror and horror undiminished. And pulse and respiration unchanged.

Ricori had watched all these operations with intense interest. I had done all I could for the time, and told him so.

“I can do no more,” I said, “until I receive the reports of the specimens. Frankly, I am all at sea. I know of no disease nor drug which would produce these conditions.”

“But Dr. Braile,” he said, “mentioned a drug—”

“A suggestion only,” interposed Braile hastily. “Like Dr. Lowell, I know of no drug which would cause such symptoms.”

Ricori glanced at Peters’ face and shivered.

“Now,” I said, “I must ask you some questions. Has this man been ill? If so, has he been under medical care? If he has not actually been ill, has he spoken of any discomfort? Or have you noticed anything unusual in his manner or behavior?”

“No, to all questions,” he answered. “Peters has been in closest touch with me for the past week. He has not been ailing in the least. Tonight we were talking in my apartments, eating a late and light dinner. He was in high spirits. In the middle of a word, he stopped, half-turned his head as though listening; then slipped from his chair to the floor. When I bent over him he was as you see him now. That was precisely half after midnight. I brought him here at once.”

“Well,” I said, “that at least gives us the exact time of the seizure. There is no use of your remaining, Mr. Ricori, unless you wish.”

He studied his hands a few moments, rubbing the carefully manicured nails.

“Dr. Lowell,” he said at last, “if this man dies without your discovering what killed him, I will pay you the customary fees and the hospital the customary charges and no more. If he dies and you make this discovery after his death, I will give a hundred thousand dollars to any charity you name. But if you make the discovery before he dies, and restore him to health—I will give you the same sum.”

We stared at him, and then as the significance of this remarkable offer sank in, I found it hard to curb my anger.

“Ricori,” I said, “you and I live in different worlds, therefore I answer you politely, although I find it difficult. I will do all in my power to find out what is the matter with your friend and to cure him. I would do that if he and you were paupers. I am interested in him only as a problem which challenges me as a physician. But I am not interested in you in the slightest. Nor in your money. Nor in your offer. Consider it definitely rejected. Do you thoroughly understand that?”

He betrayed no resentment.

“So much so that more than ever do I wish you to take full charge,” he said.

“Very well. Now where can I get you if I want to bring you here quickly?”

“With your permission,” he answered, “I should like to have—well, representatives—in this room at all times. There will be two of them. If you want me, tell them—and I will soon be here.”

I smiled at that, but he did not.

“You have reminded me,” he said, “that we live in different worlds. You take your precautions to go safely in your world—and I order my life to minimize the perils of mine. Not for a moment would I presume to advise you how to walk among the dangers of your laboratory, Dr. Lowell. I have the counterparts of those dangers. Bene—I guard against them as best I can.”

It was a most irregular request, of course. But I found myself close to liking Ricori just then, and saw clearly his point of view. He knew that and pressed the advantage.

“My men will be no bother,” he said. “They will not interfere in any way with you. If what I suspect to be true is true they will be a protection for you and your aids as well. But they, and those who relieve them, must stay in the room night and day. If Peters is taken from the room, they must accompany him—no matter where it is that he is taken.”

“I can arrange it,” I said. Then, at his request, I sent an orderly down to the doors. He returned with one of the men Ricori had left on guard. Ricori whispered to him, and he went out. In a little while two other men came up. In the meantime I had explained the peculiar situation to the resident and the superintendent and secured the necessary permission for their stay.

The two men were well-dressed, polite, of a singularly tight-lipped and cold-eyed alertness. One of them shot a glance at Peters.

“Christ!” he muttered.

The room was a corner one with two windows, one opening out on the Drive, the other on the side street. Besides these, there were no outer openings except the door to the hall; the private bathroom being enclosed and having no windows. Ricori and the two inspected the room minutely, keeping away, I noticed, from the windows. He asked me then if the room could be darkened. Much interested, I nodded. The lights were turned off, the three went to the windows, opened them and carefully scrutinized the six-story sheer drop to both streets. On the side of the Drive there is nothing but the open space above the park. Opposite the other side is a church.

“It is at this side you must watch,” I heard Ricori say; he pointed to the church. “You can turn the lights on now, Doctor.”

He started toward the door, then turned.

“I have many enemies, Dr. Lowell. Peters was my right hand. If it was one of these enemies who struck him, he did it to weaken me. Or, perhaps, because he had not the opportunity to strike at me. I look at Peters, and for the first time in my life I, Ricori—am afraid. I have no wish to be the next, I have no wish to look into hell!”

I grunted at that! He had put so aptly what I had felt and had not formulated into words.

He started to open the door. He hesitated.

“One thing more. If there should be any telephone calls inquiring as to Peters’ condition let one of these men, or their reliefs, answer. If any should come in person making inquiry, allow them to come up—but if they are more than one, let only one come at a time. If any should appear, asserting that they are relations, again let these men meet and question them.”

He gripped my hand, then opened the door of the room. Another pair of the efficient-appearing retainers were awaiting him at the threshold. They swung in before and behind him. As he walked away, I saw that he was crossing himself vigorously.

I closed the door and went back into the room. I looked down on Peters.

If I had been religious, I too would have been doing some crossing. The expression on Peters’ face had changed. The terror and horror were gone. He still seemed to be looking both beyond me and into himself, but it was a look of evil expectancy—so evil that involuntarily I shot a glance over my shoulder to see what ugly thing might be creeping upon me.

There was nothing. One of Ricori’s gunmen sat in the corner of the window, in the shadow, watching the parapet of the church roof opposite; the other sat stolidly at the door.

Braile and Nurse Walters were at the other side of the bed. Their eyes were fixed with horrified fascination on Peters’ face. And then I saw Braile turn his head and stare about the room as I had.

Suddenly Peters’ eyes seemed to focus, to become aware of the three of us, to become aware of the entire room. They flashed with an unholy glee. That glee was not maniacal—it was diabolical. It was the look of a devil long exiled from his well-beloved hell, and suddenly summoned to return.

Or was it like the glee of some devil sent hurtling out of his hell to work his will upon whom he might?

Very well do I know how fantastic, how utterly unscientific, are such comparisons. Yet not otherwise can I describe that strange change.

Then, abruptly as the closing of a camera shutter, that expression fled and the old terror and horror came back. I gave an involuntary gasp of relief, for it was precisely as though some evil presence had withdrawn. The nurse was trembling; Braile asked, in a strained voice: “How about another hypodermic?”

“No,” I said. “I want you to watch the progress of this—whatever it is—without drugs. I’m going down to the laboratory. Watch him closely until I return.”

I went down to the laboratory. Hoskins looked up at me.

“Nothing wrong, so far. Remarkable health, I’d say. Of course all I’ve results on are the simpler tests.”

I nodded. I had an uncomfortable feeling that the other tests also would show nothing. And I had been more shaken than I would have cared to confess by those alternations of hellish fear, hellish expectancy and hellish glee in Peters’ face and eyes. The whole case troubled me, gave me a nightmarish feeling of standing outside some door which it was vitally important to open, and to which not only did I have no key but couldn’t find the keyhole. I have found that concentration upon microscopic work often permits me to think more freely upon problems. So I took a few smears of Peters’ blood and began to study them, not with any expectation of finding anything, but to slip the brakes from another part of my brain.

I was on my fourth slide when I suddenly realized that I was looking at the incredible. As I had perfunctorily moved the slide, a white corpuscle had slid into the field of vision. Only a simple white corpuscle—but within it was a spark of phosphorescence, shining out like a tiny lamp!

I thought at first that it was some effect of the light, but no manipulation of the illumination changed that spark. I rubbed my eyes and looked again. I called Hoskins.

“Tell me if you see something peculiar in there.”

He peered into the microscope. He started, then shifted the light as I had.

“What do you see, Hoskins?”

He said, still staring through the lens:

“A leucocyte inside of which is a globe of phosphorescence. Its glow is neither dimmed when I turn on the full illumination, nor is it increased when I lessen it. In all except the ingested globe the corpuscle seems normal.”

“And all of which,” I said, “is quite impossible.”

“Quite,” he agreed, straightening. “Yet there it is!”

I transferred the slide to the micro-manipulator, hoping to isolate the corpuscle, and touched it with the tip of the manipulating needle. At the instant of contact the corpuscle seemed to burst. The globe of phosphorescence appeared to flatten, and something like a miniature flash of heat-lightning ran over the visible portion of the slide.

And that was all—the phosphorescence was gone.

We prepared and examined slide after slide. Twice more we found a tiny shining globe, and each time with the same result, the bursting corpuscle, the strange flicker of faint luminosity—then nothing.

The laboratory ’phone rang. Hoskins answered.

“It’s Braile. He wants you—quick.”

“Keep after it, Hoskins,” I said, and hastened to Peters’ room. Entering, I saw Nurse Walters, face chalk white, eyes closed, standing with her back turned to the bed. Braile was leaning over the patient, stethoscope to his heart. I looked at Peters; and stood stock still, something like a touch of unreasoning panic at my own heart. Upon his face was that look of devilish expectancy, but intensified. As I looked, it gave way to the diabolic joy, and that, too, was intensified. The face held it for not many seconds. Back came the expectancy then on its heels the unholy glee. The two expressions alternated, rapidly. They flickered over Peters’ face like—like the flickers of the tiny lights within the corpuscles of his blood. Braile spoke to me through stiff lips:

“His heart stopped three minutes ago! He ought to be dead—yet listen—”

The body of Peters stretched and stiffened. A sound came from his lips—a chuckling sound; low yet singularly penetrating, inhuman, the chattering laughter of a devil. The gunman at the window leaped to his feet, his chair going over with a crash. The laughter choked and died away, and the body of Peters lay limp.

I heard the door open, and Ricori’s voice: “How is he, Dr. Lowell? I could not sleep—” He saw Peters’ face.

“Mother of Christ!” I heard him whisper. He dropped to his knees.

I saw him dimly for I could not take my eyes from Peters’ face. It was the face of a grinning, triumphant fiend—all humanity wiped from it—the face of a demon straight out of some mad medieval painter’s hell. The blue eyes, now utterly malignant, glared at Ricori.

And as I looked, the dead hands moved; slowly the arms bent up from the elbows, the fingers contracting like claws; the dead body began to stir beneath the covers—

At that the spell of nightmare dropped from me; for the first time in hours I was on ground that I knew. It was the rigor mortis, the stiffening of death—but setting in more quickly and proceeding at a rate I had never known.

I stepped forward and drew the lids down over the glaring eyes. I covered the dreadful face.

I looked at Ricori. He was still on his knees, crossing himself and praying. And kneeling beside him, arm around his shoulders, was Nurse Walters, and she, too, was praying.

Somewhere a clock struck five.

CHAPTER II

THE QUESTIONNAIRE

I offered to go home with Ricori, and somewhat to my surprise he accepted with alacrity. The man was pitiably shaken. We rode silently, the tight-lipped gunmen alert. Peters’ face kept floating before me.

I gave Ricori a strong sedative, and left him sleeping, his men on guard. I had told him that I meant to make a complete autopsy.

Returning to the hospital in his car, I found the body of Peters had been taken to the mortuary. Rigor mortis, Braile told me, had been complete in less than an hour—an astonishingly short time. I made the necessary arrangements for the autopsy, and took Braile home with me to snatch a few hours’ sleep. It is difficult to convey by words the peculiarly unpleasant impression the whole occurrence had made upon me. I can only say that I was as grateful for Braile’s company as he seemed to be for mine.

When I awoke, the nightmarish oppression still lingered, though not so strongly. It was about two when we began the autopsy. I lifted the sheet from Peters’ body with noticeable hesitation. I stared at his face with amazement. All diabolism had been wiped away. It was serene, unlined—the face of a man who had died peacefully, with no agony either of body or mind. I lifted his hand, it was limp, the whole body flaccid, the rigor gone.

It was then, I think, that I first felt full conviction I was dealing with an entirely new, or at least unknown, agency of death, whether microbic or otherwise. As a rule, rigor does not set in for sixteen to twenty-four hours, depending upon the condition of the patient before death, temperature and a dozen other things. Normally, it does not disappear for forty-eight to seventy-two hours. Usually a rapid setting-in of the stiffening means as rapid a disappearance, and vice versa. Diabetics stiffen quicker than others. A sudden brain injury, like shooting, is even swifter. In this case, the rigor had begun instantaneously with death, and must have completed its cycle in the astonishingly short time of less than five hours—for the attendant told me that he had examined the body about ten o’clock and he had thought that stiffening had not yet set in. As a matter of fact, it had come and gone.

The results of the autopsy can be told in two sentences. There was no ascertainable reason why Peters should not be alive. And he was dead!

Later, when Hoskins made his reports, both of these utterly conflicting statements continued to be true. There was no reason why Peters should be dead. Yet dead he was. If the enigmatic lights we had observed had anything to do with his death, they left no traces. His organs were perfect, all else as it should have been; he was, indeed, an extraordinarily healthy specimen. Nor had Hoskins been able to capture any more of the light-carrying corpuscles after I had left him.

That night I framed a short letter describing briefly the symptoms observed in Peters’ case, not dwelling upon the changes in expression but referring cautiously to “unusual grimaces” and a “look of intense fear.” Braile and I had this manifold and mailed to every physician in Greater New York. I personally attended to a quiet inquiry to the same effect among the hospitals. The letters asked if the physicians had treated any patients with similar symptoms, and if so to give particulars, names, addresses, occupations and any characteristic interest under seal, of course, of professional confidence. I flattered myself that my reputation was such that none of those who received the questionnaires would think the request actuated either by idle curiosity or slightest unethical motive.

I received in response seven letters and a personal visit from the writer of one of them. Each letter, except one, gave me in various degrees of medical conservatism, the information I had asked. After reading them, there was no question that within six months seven persons of oddly dissimilar characteristics and stations in life had died as had Peters.

Chronologically, the cases were as follows:

May 25: Ruth Bailey, spinster; fifty years old; moderately wealthy; Social Registerite and best of reputation; charitable and devoted to children. June 20: Patrick McIlraine; bricklayer; wife and two children. August 1: Anita Green; child of eleven; parents in moderate circumstances and well educated. August 15: Steve Standish; acrobat; thirty; wife and three children. August 30: John J. Marshall; banker; sixty interested in child welfare. September 10: Phineas Dimott; thirty-five; trapeze performer; wife and small child. October 12: Hortense Darnley; about thirty; no occupation.

Their addresses, except two, were widely scattered throughout the city.

Each of the letters noted the sudden onset of rigor mortis and its rapid passing. Each of them gave the time of death following the initial seizure as approximately five hours. Five of them referred to the changing expressions which had so troubled me; in the guarded way they did it I read the bewilderment of the writers.

“Patient’s eyes remained open,” recorded the physician in charge of the spinster Bailey. “Staring, but gave no sign of recognition of surroundings and failed to focus upon or present any evidence of seeing objects held before them. Expression one of intense terror, giving away toward death to others peculiarly disquieting to observer. The latter intensified after death ensued. Rigor mortis complete and dissipated within five hours.”

The physician in charge of McIlraine, the bricklayer, had nothing to say about the ante-mortem phenomena, but wrote at some length about the expression of his patient’s face after death.

“It had,” he reported, “nothing in common with the muscular contraction of the so-called ‘Hippocratic countenance,’ nor was it in any way the staring eyes and contorted mouth familiarly known as the death grin. There was no suggestion of agony, after the death—rather the opposite. I would term the expression one of unusual malice.”

The report of the physician who had attended Standish, the acrobat, was perfunctory, but it mentioned that “after patient had apparently died, singularly disagreeable sounds emanated from his throat.” I wondered whether these had been the same demonic machinations that had come from Peters, and, if so, I could not wonder at all at my correspondent’s reticence concerning them.

I knew the physician who had attended the banker—opinionated, pompous, a perfect doctor of the very rich.

“There can be no mystery as to the cause of death,” he wrote. “It was certainly thrombosis, a clot somewhere in the brain. I attach no importance whatever to the facial grimaces, nor to the time element involved in the rigor. You know, my dear Lowell,” he added, patronizingly, “it is an axiom in forensic medicine that one can prove anything by rigor mortis.”

I would have liked to have replied that when in doubt thrombosis as a diagnosis is equally as useful in covering the ignorance of practitioners, but it would not have punctured his complacency.

The Dimott report was a simple record with no comment whatever upon grimaces or sounds.

But the doctor who had attended little Anita had not been so reticent.

“The child,” he wrote, “had been beautiful. She seemed to suffer no pain, but at the onset of the illness I was shocked by the intensity of terror in her fixed gaze. It was like a waking nightmare—for unquestionably she was conscious until death. Morphine in almost lethal dosage produced no change in this symptom, nor did it seem to have any effect upon heart or respiration. Later the terror disappeared, giving way to other emotions which I hesitate to describe in this report, but will do so in person if you so desire. The aspect of the child after death was peculiarly disturbing, but again I would rather speak than write of that.”

There was a hastily scrawled postscript; I could see him hesitating, then giving way at last to the necessity of unburdening his mind, dashing off that postscript and rushing the letter away before he could reconsider—

“I have written that the child was conscious until death. What haunts me is the conviction that she was conscious after physical death! Let me talk to you.”

I nodded with satisfaction. I had not dared to put that observation down in my questionnaire. And if it has been true of the other cases, as I now believed it must have been, all the doctors except Standish’s had shared my conservatism—or timidity. I called little Anita’s physician upon the ’phone at once. He was strongly perturbed. In every detail his case had paralleled that of Peters. He kept repeating over and over:

“The child was sweet and good as an angel, and she changed into a devil!”

I promised to keep him apprised of any discoveries I might make, and shortly after our conversation I was visited by the young physician who had attended Hortense Darnley. Doctor Y, as I shall call him, had nothing to add to the medical aspect other than what I already knew, but his talk suggested the first practical line of approach toward the problem.

His office, he said, was in the apartment house which had been Hortense Darnley’s home. He had been working late, and had been summoned to her apartment about ten o’clock by the woman’s maid, a colored girl. He had found the patient lying upon her bed, and had at once been struck by the expression of terror on her face and the extraordinary limpness of her body. He described her as blonde, blue-eyed—“the doll type.”

A man was in the apartment. He had at first evaded giving his name, saying that he was merely a friend. At first glance, Dr. Y had thought the woman had been subjected to some violence, but examination revealed no bruises or other injuries. The “friend” had told him they had been eating dinner when “Miss Darnley flopped right down on the floor as though all her bones had gone soft, and we couldn’t get anything out of her.” The maid confirmed this. There was a half-eaten dinner on the table, and both man and servant declared Hortense had been in the best of spirits. There had been no quarrel. Reluctantly, the “friend” had admitted that the seizure had occurred three hours before, and that they had tried to “bring her about” themselves, calling upon him only when the alternating expressions which I have referred to in the case of Peters began to appear.

As the seizure progressed, the maid had become hysterical with fright and fled. The man was of tougher timber and had remained until the end. He had been much shaken, as had Dr. Y, by the after-death phenomena. Upon the physician declaring that the case was one for the coroner, he had lost his reticence, volunteering his name as James Martin, and expressing himself as eager for a complete autopsy. He was quite frank as to his reasons. The Darnley woman had been his mistress, and he “had enough trouble without her death pinned to me.”

There had been a thorough autopsy. No trace of disease or poison had been found. Beyond a slight valvular trouble of the heart, Hortense Darnley had been perfectly healthy. The verdict had been death by heart disease. But Dr. Y was perfectly convinced the heart had nothing to do with it.

It was, of course, quite obvious that Hortense Darnley had died from the same cause or agency as had all the others. But to me the outstanding fact was that her apartment had been within a stone’s throw of the address Ricori had given me as that of Peters. Furthermore, Martin was of the same world, if Dr. Y’s impressions were correct. Here was conceivably a link between two of the cases—missing in the others. I determined to call in Ricori, to lay all the cards before him, and enlist his aid if possible.

My investigation had consumed about two weeks. During that time I had become well acquainted with Ricori. For one thing he interested me immensely as a product of present-day conditions; for another I liked him, despite his reputation. He was remarkably well read, of a high grade of totally unmoral intelligence, subtle and superstitious—in olden time he would probably have been a Captain of Condottieri, his wits and sword for hire. I wondered what were his antecedents. He had paid me several visits since the death of Peters, and quite plainly my liking was reciprocated. On these visits he was guarded by the tight-lipped man who had watched by the hospital window. This man’s name, I learned, was McCann. He was Ricori’s most trusted bodyguard, apparently wholly devoted to his white-haired chief. He was an interesting character too, and quite approved of me. He was a drawling Southerner who had been, as he put it, “a cow-nurse down Arizona way, and then got too popular on the Border.”

“I’m for you, Doc,” he told me. “You’re sure good for the boss. Sort of take his mind off business. An’ when I come here I can keep my hands outa my pockets. Any time anybody’s cutting in on your cattle, let me know. I’ll ask for a day off.”

Then he remarked casually that he “could ring a quarter with six holes at a hundred-foot range.”

I did not know whether this was meant humorously or seriously. At any rate, Ricori never went anywhere without him; and it showed me how much he had thought of Peters that he had left McCann to guard him.

I got in touch with Ricori and asked him to take dinner with Braile and me that night at my house. At seven he arrived, telling his chauffeur to return at ten. We sat at the table with McCann, as usual, on watch in my hall, thrilling, I knew, my two night nurses—I have a small private hospital adjunct—by playing the part of a gunman as conceived by the motion pictures.

Dinner over, I dismissed the butler and came to the point. I told Ricori of my questionnaire, remarking that by it I had unearthed seven cases similar to that of Peters.

“You can dismiss from your mind any idea that Peters’ death was due to his connection with you, including the tiny globes of radiance in the blood of Peters.”

At that his face grew white. He crossed himself.

“La strega!” he muttered. “The Witch! The Witch-fire!”

“Nonsense, man!” I said. “Forget your damned superstitions. I want help.”

“You are scientifically ignorant! There are some things, Dr. Lowell—” he began, hotly; then controlled himself.

“What is it you want me to do?”

“First,” I said, “let’s go over these eight cases, analyze them. Braile, have you come to any conclusions?”

“Yes,” Braile answered. “I think all eight were murdered!”

CHAPTER III

THE DEATH AND NURSE WALTERS

That Braile had voiced the thought lurking behind my own mind—and without a shred of evidence so far as I could see to support it—irritated me.

“You’re a better man than I am, Sherlock Holmes,” I said sarcastically. He flushed, but repeated stubbornly:

“They were murdered.”

“La strega!” whispered Ricori. I glared at him.

“Quit beating around the bush, Braile. What’s your evidence?”

“You were away from Peters almost two hours; I was with him practically from start to finish. As I studied him, I had the feeling that the whole trouble was in the mind—that it was not his body, his nerves, his brain, that refused to function, but his will. Not quite that, either. Put it that his will had ceased to care about the functions of the body—and was centered upon killing it!”

“What you’re outlining now is not murder but suicide. Well, it has been done. I’ve watched a few die because they had lost the will to live—”

“I don’t mean that,” he interrupted. “That’s passive. This was active—”

“Good God, Braile!” I was honestly shocked. “Don’t tell me you’re suggesting all eight passed from the picture by willing themselves out of it—and one of them only an eleven-year-old child!”

“I didn’t say that,” he replied. “What I felt was that it was not primarily Peters’ own will doing it, but another’s will, which had gripped his, had wound itself around, threaded itself through his will. Another’s will which he could not, or did not want to resist—at least toward the end.”

“La maledetta strega!” muttered Ricori again.

I curbed my irritation and sat considering; after all, I had a wholesome respect for Braile. He was too good a man, too sound, for one to ride roughshod over any idea he might voice.

“Have you any idea as to how these murders, if murders they are, were carried out?” I asked politely.

“Not the slightest,” said Braile.

“Let’s consider the murder theory. Ricori, you have had more experience in this line than we, so listen carefully and forget your witch,” I said, brutally enough. “There are three essential factors to any murder—method, opportunity, motive. Take them in order. First—the method.

“There are three ways a person can be killed by poison or by infection: through the nose—and this includes by gases—through the mouth and through the skin. There are two or three other avenues. Hamlet’s father, for example, was poisoned, we read, through the ears, although I’ve always had my doubts about that. I think, pursuing the hypothesis of murder, we can bar out all approaches except mouth, nose, skin—and, by the last, entrance to the blood can be accomplished by absorption as well as by penetration. Was there any evidence whatever on the skin, in the membranes of the respiratory channels, in the throat, in the viscera, stomach, blood, nerves, brain—of anything of the sort?”

“You know there wasn’t,” he answered.

“Quite so. Then except for the problematical lighted corpuscle, there is absolutely no evidence of method. Therefore we have absolutely nothing in essential number one upon which to base a theory of murder. Let’s take number two—opportunity.

“We have a tarnished lady, a racketeer, a respectable spinster, a bricklayer, an eleven-year-old schoolgirl, a banker, an acrobat and a trapeze performer. There, I submit, is about as incongruous a congregation as is possible. So far as we can tell, none of them except conceivably the circus men—and Peters and the Darnley woman—had anything in common. How could anyone, who had opportunity to come in close enough contact to Peters the racketeer to kill him, have equal opportunity to come in similar close contact with Ruth Bailey, the Social Registerite maiden lady? How could one who had found a way to make contact with banker Marshall come equally close to acrobat Standish? And so on—you perceive the difficulty? To administer whatever it was that caused the deaths—if they were murder—could have been no casual matter. It implies a certain degree of intimacy. You agree?”

“Partly,” he conceded.

“Had all lived in the same neighborhood, we might assume that they might normally have come within range of the hypothetical killer. But they did not—”

“Pardon me, Dr. Lowell,” Ricori interrupted, “but suppose they had some common interest which brought them within that range.”

“What possible common interest could so divergent a group have had?”

“One common interest is very plainly indicated in these reports and in what McCann has told us.”

“What do you mean, Ricori?”

“Babies,” he answered. “Or at least—children.”

Braile nodded: “I noticed that.”

“Consider the reports,” Ricori went on. “Miss Bailey is described as charitable and devoted to children. Her charities, presumably, took the form of helping them. Marshall, the banker, was interested in child-welfare. The bricklayer, the acrobat and the trapeze performer had children. Anita was a child. Peters and the Darnley woman were, to use McCann’s expression, ‘daffy’ over a baby.”

“But,” I objected, “if they are murders, they are the work of one hand. It is beyond range of possibility that all of the eight were interested in one baby, one child, or one group of children.”

“Very true,” said Braile. “But all could have been interested in one especial, peculiar thing which they believed would be of benefit to or would delight the child or children to whom each was devoted. And that peculiar article might be obtainable in only one place. If we could find that this is the fact, then certainly that place would bear investigation.”

“It is,” I said, “undeniably worth looking into. Yet it seems to me that the common-interest idea works two ways. The homes of those who died might have had something of common interest to an individual. The murderer, for example, might be a radio adjuster. Or a plumber. Or a collector. An electrician, and so and so on.”

Braile shrugged a shoulder. Ricori did not answer; he sat deep in thought, as though he had not heard me.

“Please listen, Ricori,” I said. “We’ve gotten this far. Method of murder—if it is murder—unknown. Opportunity for killing—find some person whose business, profession or what not was a matter of interest to each of the eight, and whom they visited or who visited them; said business being concerned, possibly, in some way with babies or older children. Now for motive. Revenge, gain, love, hate, jealousy, self-protection? None of these seems to fit, for again we come to that barrier of dissimilar stations in life.”

“How about the satisfaction of an appetite for death—wouldn’t you call that a motive?” asked Braile, oddly. Ricori half rose from his chair, stared at him with a curious intentness; then sank back, but I noticed he was now all alert.

“I was about to discuss the possibility of a homicidal maniac,” I said, somewhat testily.

“That’s not exactly what I mean. You remember Longfellow’s lines:

‘I shot an arrow into the air.

It fell to earth I know not where.’

“I’ve never acquiesced in the idea that that was an inspired bit of verse meaning the sending of an argosy to some unknown port and getting it back with a surprise cargo of ivory and peacocks, apes and precious stones. There are some people who can’t stand at a window high above a busy street, or on top of a skyscraper, without wanting to throw something down. They get a thrill in wondering who or what will be hit. The feeling of power. It’s a bit like being God and unloosing the pestilence upon the just and the unjust alike. Longfellow must have been one of those people. In his heart, he wanted to shoot a real arrow and then mull over in his imagination whether it had dropped in somebody’s eye, hit a heart, or just missed someone and skewered a stray dog. Carry this on a little further. Give one of these people power and opportunity to loose death at random, death whose cause he is sure cannot be detected. He sits in his obscurity, in safety, a god of death. With no special malice against anyone, perhaps—impersonal, just shooting his arrows in the air, like Longfellow’s archer, for the fun of it.”

“And you wouldn’t call such a person a homicidal maniac?” I asked, dryly.

“Not necessarily. Merely free of inhibitions against killing. He might have no consciousness of wrongdoing whatever. Everybody comes into this world under sentence of death—time and method of execution unknown. Well, this killer might consider himself as natural as death itself. No one who believes that things on earth are run by an all-wise, all-powerful God thinks of Him as a homicidal maniac. Yet He looses wars, pestilences, misery, disease, floods, earthquakes—on believers and unbelievers alike. If you believe things are in the hands of what is vaguely termed Fate—would you call Fate a homicidal maniac?”

“Your hypothetical archer,” I said, “looses a singularly unpleasant arrow, Braile. Also, the discussion is growing far too metaphysical for a simple scientist like me. Ricori, I can’t lay this matter before the police. They would listen politely and laugh heartily after I had gone. If I told all that is in my mind to the medical authorities, they would deplore the decadence of a hitherto honored intellect. And I would rather not call in any private detective agency to pursue inquiries.”

“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“You have unusual resources,” I answered. “I want you to sift every movement of Peters and Hortense Darnley for the past two months. I want you to do all that is possible in the same way with the others—”

I hesitated.

“I want you to find that one place to which, because of their love for children, each of these unfortunates was drawn. For though my reason tells me you and Braile have not the slightest real evidence upon which to base your suspicions, I grudgingly admit to you that I have a feeling you may be right.”

“You progress, Dr. Lowell,” Ricori said, formally. “I predict that it will not be long before you will as grudgingly admit the possibility of my witch.”

“I am sufficiently abased,” I replied, “by my present credulity not to deny even that.”

Ricori laughed, and busied himself copying the essential information from the reports. Ten o’clock struck. McCann came up to say that the car was waiting and we accompanied Ricori to the door. The gunman had stepped out and was on the steps when a thought came to me.

“Where do you begin, Ricori?”

“With Peters’ sister.”

“Does she know Peters is dead?”

“No,” he answered, reluctantly. “She thinks him away. He is often away for long, and for reasons which she understands he is not able to communicate with her directly. At such times I keep her informed. And the reason I have not told her of Peters’ death is because she dearly loved him and would be in much sorrow—and in a month, perhaps, there is to be another baby.”

“Does she know the Darnley woman is dead, I wonder?”

“I do not know. Probably. Although McCann evidently does not.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t see how you’re going to keep Peters’ death from her now. But that’s your business.”

“Exactly,” he answered, and followed McCann to the car.

Braile and I had hardly gotten back to my library when the telephone rang. Braile answered it. I heard him curse, and saw that the hand that held the transmitter was shaking. He said: “We will come at once.”

He set the transmitter down slowly, then turned to me with twitching face.

“Nurse Walters has it!”

I felt a distinct shock. As I have written, Walters was a perfect nurse, and besides that a thoroughly good and attractive young person. A pure Gaelic type—blue black hair, blue eyes with astonishingly long lashes, milk-white skin—yes, singularly attractive. After a moment or two of silence I said:

“Well, Braile, there goes all your fine-spun reasoning. Also your murder theory. From the Darnley woman to Peters to Walters. No doubt now that we’re dealing with some infectious disease.”

“Isn’t there?” he asked, grimly. “I’m not prepared to admit it. I happen to know Walters spends most of her money on a little invalid niece who lives with her—a child of eight. Ricori’s thread of common interest moves into her case.”

“Nevertheless,” I said as grimly, “I intend to see that every precaution is taken against an infectious malady.”

By the time we had put on our hats and coats, my car was waiting. The hospital was only two blocks away, but I did not wish to waste a moment. I ordered Nurse Walters removed to an isolated ward used for observation of suspicious diseases. Examining her, I found the same flaccidity as I had noted in the case of Peters. But I observed that, unlike him, her eyes and face showed little of terror. Horror there was, and a great loathing. Nothing of panic. She gave me the same impression of seeing both within and without. As I studied her I distinctly saw a flash of recognition come into her eyes, and with it appeal. I looked at Braile—he nodded; he, too, had seen it.

I went over her body inch by inch. It was unmarked except for a pinkish patch upon her right instep. Closer examination made me think this had been some superficial injury, such as a chafing, or a light burn or scald. If so, it had completely healed; the skin was healthy.

In all other ways her case paralleled that of Peters—and the others. She had collapsed, the nurse told me, without warning while getting dressed to go home. My inquiry was interrupted by an exclamation from Braile. I turned to the bed and saw that Walters’ hand was slowly lifting, trembling as though its raising was by some terrific strain of will. The index finger was half-pointing. I followed its direction to the disclosed patch upon the foot. And then I saw her eyes, by that same tremendous effort, focus there.

The strain was too great; the hand dropped, the eyes again were pools of horror. Yet clearly she had tried to convey to us some message, something that had to do with that healed wound.

I questioned the nurse as to whether Walters had said anything to anyone about any injury to her foot. She replied that she had said nothing to her, nor had any of the other nurses spoken of it. Nurse Robbins, however, shared the apartment with Harriet and Diana. I asked who Diana was, and she told me that was the name of Walters’ little niece. This was Robbins’ night off, I found, and gave instructions to have her get in touch with me the moment she returned to the apartment.

By now Hoskins was taking his samples for the blood tests. I asked him to concentrate upon the microscopic smears and to notify me immediately if he discovered one of the luminous corpuscles. Bartano, an outstanding expert upon tropical diseases, happened to be in the hospital, as well as Somers, a brain specialist in whom I had strong confidence. I called them in for observation, saying nothing of the previous cases. While they were examining Walters, Hoskins called up to say he had isolated one of the shining corpuscles. I asked the pair to go to Hoskins and give me their opinion upon what he had to show them. In a little while they returned, somewhat annoyed and mystified. Hoskins, they said, had spoken of a “leucocyte containing a phosphorescent nucleus.” They had looked at the slide but had been unable to find it. Somers very seriously advised me to insist upon Hoskins having his eyes examined. Bartano said caustically that he would have been quite as surprised to have seen such a thing as he would have been to have observed a miniature mermaid swimming around in an artery. By these remarks, I realized afresh the wisdom in my silence.

Nor did the expected changes in expression occur. The horror and loathing persisted, and were commented upon by both Bartano and Somers as “unusual.” They agreed that the condition must be caused by a brain lesion of some kind. They did not think there was any evidence either of microbic infection or of drugs or poison. Agreeing that it was a most interesting case, and asking me to let them know its progress and outcome, they departed.

At the beginning of the fourth hour, there was a change of expression, but not what I had been expecting. In Walters’ eyes, on her face, was only loathing. Once I thought I saw a flicker of the devilish anticipation flash over her face. If so, it was quickly mastered. About the middle of the fourth hour, we saw recognition again return to her eyes. Also, there was a perceptible rally of the slowing heart. I sensed an intense gathering of nervous force.

And then her eyelids began to rise and fall, slowly, as though by tremendous effort, in measured time and purposefully. Four times they raised and lowered; there was a pause; then nine times they lifted and fell; again the pause, then they closed and opened once. Twice she did this—

“She’s trying to signal,” whispered Braile. “But what?”

Again the long-lashed lids dropped and rose—four times…pause…nine times…pause…once…

“She’s going,” whispered Braile.

I knelt, stethoscope at ears…slower…slower beat the heart…and slower…and stopped.

“She’s gone!” I said, and arose. We bent over her, waiting for that last hideous spasm, convulsion—whatever it might be.

It did not come. Stamped upon her dead face was the loathing, and that only. Nothing of the devilish glee. Nor was there sound from her dead lips. Beneath my hand I felt the flesh of her white arm begin to stiffen.

The unknown death had destroyed Nurse Walters—there was no doubt of that. Yet in some obscure, vague way I felt that it had not conquered her.

Her body, yes. But not her will!

CHAPTER IV

THE THING IN RICORI’S CAR

I returned home with Braile, profoundly depressed. It is difficult to describe the effect the sequence of events I am relating had upon my mind from beginning to end—and beyond the end. It was as though I walked almost constantly under the shadow of an alien world, nerves prickling as if under surveillance of invisible things not of our life…the subconsciousness forcing itself to the threshold of the conscious battering at the door between and calling out to be on guard…every moment to be on guard. Strange phrases for an orthodox man of medicine? Let them stand.

Braile was pitiably shaken. So much so that I wondered whether there had been more than professional interest between him and the dead girl. If there had been, he did not confide in me.

It was close to four o’clock when we reached my house. I insisted that he remain with me. I called the hospital before retiring, but they had heard nothing of Nurse Robbins. I slept a few hours, very badly. Shortly after nine, Robbins called me on the telephone. She was half hysterical with grief. I bade her come to my office, and when she had done so Braile and I questioned her.

“About three weeks ago,” she said, “Harriet brought home to Diana a very pretty doll. The child was enraptured. I asked Harriet where she had gotten it, and she said in a queer little store way downtown.

“‘Job,’ she said—my name is Jobina—‘There’s the queerest woman down there. I’m sort of afraid of her, Job.’

“I didn’t pay much attention. Besides, Harriet wasn’t ever very communicative. I had the idea she was a bit sorry she had said what she had.

“Now I think of it though, Harriet acted rather funny after that. She’d be gay and then she’d be—well, sort of thoughtful. About ten days ago she came home with a bandage around her foot. The right foot? Yes. She said she’d been having tea with the woman she’d gotten Diana’s doll from. The teapot upset and the hot tea had poured down on her foot. The woman had put some salve on it right away, and now it didn’t hurt a bit.

“‘But I think I’ll put something on it I know something about,’ she told me. Then she slipped off her stocking and began to strip the bandage. I’d gone into the kitchen and she called to me to come and look at her foot.

“‘It’s queer,’ she said. ‘That was a bad scald, Job. Yet it’s practically healed. And that salve hasn’t been on more than an hour.’

“I looked at her foot. There was a big red patch on the instep. But it wasn’t sore, and I told her the tea couldn’t have been very hot.

“‘But it was really scalded, Job,’ she said. ‘I mean it was blistered.’

“She sat looking at the bandage and at her foot for quite a while. The salve was bluish and had a queer shine to it. I never saw anything like it before. No, I couldn’t detect any odor to it. Harriet reached down and took the bandage and said:

“‘Job, throw it in the fire.’

“I threw the bandage in the fire. I remember that it gave a queer sort of flicker. It didn’t seem to burn. It just flickered and then it wasn’t there. Harriet watched it, and turned sort of white. Then she looked at her foot again.

“‘Job,’ she said. ‘I never saw anything heal as quick as that. She, must be a witch.’

“‘What on earth are you talking about, Harriet?’ I asked her.

“‘Oh, nothing,’ she said. ‘Only I wish I had the courage to rip that place on my foot wide open and rub in an antidote for snake-bite!’

“Then she laughed, and I thought she was fooling. But she painted it with iodine and bandaged it with an antiseptic besides. The next morning she woke me up and said:

“‘Look at that foot now. Yesterday a whole pot of scalding tea poured over it. And now it isn’t even tender. And the skin ought to be just smeared off. Job, I wish to the Lord it was!’

“That’s all, Dr. Lowell. She didn’t say any more about it and neither did I. And she just seemed to forget all about it. Yes. I did ask her where the shop was and who the woman was, but she wouldn’t tell me. I don’t know why.

“And after that I never knew her so gay and carefree. Happy, careless…Oh, I don’t know why she should have died…I don’t…I don’t!”

Braile asked:

“Do the numbers 491 mean anything to you, Robbins? Do you associate them with any address Harriet knew?”

She thought, then shook her head. I told her of the measured closing and opening of Walters’ eyes.

“She was clearly attempting to convey some message in which those numbers figured. Think again.”

Suddenly she straightened, and began counting upon her fingers. She nodded.

“Could she have been trying to spell out something? If they were letters they would read d, i and a. They’re the first three letters of Diana’s name.”

“Well, of course that seemed the simple explanation. She might have been trying to ask us to take care of the child.” I suggested this to Braile. He shook his head.

“She knew I’d do that,” he said. “No, it was something else.”

A little after Robbins had gone, Ricori called up. I told him of Walters’ death. He was greatly moved. And after that came the melancholy business of the autopsy. The results were precisely the same as in that of Peters. There was nothing whatever to show why the girl had died.

At about four o’clock the next day Ricori again called me on the telephone.

“Will you be at home between six and nine, Dr. Lowell?” There was suppressed eagerness in his voice.

“Certainly, if it is important,” I answered, after consulting my appointment book. “Have you found out anything, Ricori?”

He hesitated.

“I do not know. I think perhaps—yes.”

“You mean,” I did not even try to hide my own eagerness. “You mean—the hypothetical place we discussed?”

“Perhaps. I will know later. I go now, to where it may be.”

“Tell me this, Ricori—what do you expect to find?”

“Dolls!” he answered.

And as though to avoid further questions he hung up before I could speak.

Dolls!

I sat thinking. Walters had bought a doll. And in that same unknown place where she had bought it, she had sustained the injury which had so worried her—or rather, whose unorthodox behavior had so worried her. Nor was there doubt in my mind, after hearing Robbins’ story, that it was to that injury she had attributed her seizure, and had tried to tell us so. We had not been mistaken in our interpretation of that first desperate effort of will I have described. She might, of course, have been in error. The scald or, rather, the salve had had nothing whatever to do with her condition. Yet Walters had been strongly interested in a child. Children were the common interest of all who had died as she had. And certainly the one great common interest of children is dolls. What was it that Ricori had discovered?

I called Braile, but could not get him. I called up Robbins and told her to bring the doll to me immediately, which she did.

The doll was a peculiarly beautiful thing. It had been cut from wood, then covered with gesso. It was curiously life-like. A baby doll, with an elfin little face. Its dress was exquisitely embroidered, a folk-dress of some country I could not place. It was, I thought, almost a museum piece, and one whose price Nurse Walters could hardly have afforded. It bore no mark by which either maker or seller could be identified. After I had examined it minutely, I laid it away in a drawer. I waited impatiently to hear from Ricori.

At seven o’clock there was a sustained, peremptory ringing of the doorbell. Opening my study door, I heard McCann’s voice in the hall, and called to him to come up. At first glance I knew something was very wrong. His tight-mouthed tanned face was a sallow yellow, his eyes held a dazed look. He spoke from stiff lips:

“Come down to the car. I think the boss is dead.”

“Dead!” I exclaimed, and was down the stairs and out beside the car in a breath. The chauffeur was standing beside the door. He opened it, and I saw Ricori huddled in a corner of the rear seat. I could feel no pulse, and when I raised the lids of his eyes they stared at me sightlessly. Yet he was not cold.

“Bring him in,” I ordered.

McCann and the chauffeur carried him into the house and placed him on the examination table in my office. I bared his breast and applied the stethoscope. I could detect no sign of the heart functioning. Nor was there, apparently, any respiration. I made a few other rapid tests. To all appearances, Ricori was quite dead. And yet I was not satisfied. I did the things customary in doubtful cases, but without result.

McCann and the chauffeur had been standing close beside me. They read my verdict in my face. I saw a strange glance pass between them; and obviously each of them had a touch of panic, the chauffeur more markedly than McCann. The latter asked in a level, monotonous voice:

“Could it have been poison?”

“Yes, it could—” I stopped.

Poison! And that mysterious errand about which he had telephoned me! And the possibility of poison in the other cases! But this death—and again I felt the doubt—had not been like those others.

“McCann,” I said, “when and where did you first notice anything wrong?”

He answered, still in that monotonous voice:

“About six blocks down the street. The boss was sitting close to me. All at once he says ‘Jesu!’ Like he’s scared. He shoves his hands up to his chest. He gives a kind of groan an’ stiffens out. I says to him: ‘What’s the matter, boss, you got a pain?’ He don’t answer me, an’ then he sort of falls against me an’ I see his eyes is wide open. He looks dead to me. So I yelps to Paul to stop the car and we both look him over. Then we beat it here like hell.”

I went to a cabinet and poured them stiff drinks of brandy. They needed it. I threw a sheet over Ricori.

“Sit down,” I said, “and you, McCann, tell me exactly what occurred from the time you started out with Mr. Ricori to wherever it was he went. Don’t skip a single detail.”

He said:

“About two o’clock the boss goes to Mollie’s—that’s Peters’ sister—stays an hour, comes out, goes home and tells Paul to be back at four-thirty. But he’s doing a lot of ’phoning so we don’t start till five. He tells Paul where he wants to go, a place over in a little street down off Battery Park. He says to Paul not to go through the street, just park the car over by the Battery. And he says to me, ‘McCann, I’m going in this place myself. I don’t want ’em to know I ain’t by myself.’ He says, ‘I got reasons. You hang around an’ look in now an’ then, but don’t come in unless I call you.’ I says, ‘Boss, do you think it’s wise?’ An’ he says, ‘I know what I’m doing an’ you do what I tell you.’ So there ain’t any argument to that.

“We get down to this place an’ Paul does like he’s told, an’ the boss walks up the street an’ he stops at a little joint that’s got a lot of dolls in the window. I looks in the place as I go past. There ain’t much light but I see a lot of other dolls inside an’ a thin gal at a counter. She looks white as a fish’s belly to me, an’ after the boss has stood at the window a minute or two he goes in, an’ I go by slow to look at the gal again because she sure looks whiter than I ever saw a gal look who’s on her two feet. The boss is talkin’ to the gal who’s showing him some dolls. The next time I go by there’s a woman in the place. She’s so big, I stand at the window a minute to look at her because I never seen anybody that looks like her. She’s got a brown face an’ it looks sort of like a horse, an’ a little mustache an’ moles, an’ she’s as funny a looking brand as the fish-white gal. Big an’ fat. But I get a peep at her eyes—Geeze, what eyes! Big an’ black an’ bright, an’ somehow I don’t like them any more than the rest of her. The next time I go by, the boss is over in a corner with the big dame. He’s got a wad of bills in his hand and I see the gal watching sort of frightened like. The next time I do my beat, I don’t see either the boss or the woman.

“So I stand looking through the window because I don’t like the boss out of my sight in this joint. An’ the next thing I see is the boss coming out of a door at the back of the shop. He’s madder than hell an’ carrying something an’ the woman is behind him an’ her eyes spitting fire. The boss is jabbering but I can’t hear what he’s saying, an’ the dame is jabbering too an’ making funny passes at him. Funny passes? Why, funny motions with her hands. But the boss heads for the door an’ when he gets to it I see him stick what he’s carrying inside his overcoat an’ button it up round it.

“It’s a doll. I see its legs dangling down before he gets it under his coat. A big one, too, for it makes quite a bulge—”

He paused, began mechanically to roll a cigarette, than glanced at the covered body and threw the cigarette away. He went on:

“I never see the boss so mad before. He’s muttering to himself in Italian an’ saying something over an’ over that sounds like ‘strayga.’ I see it ain’t no time to talk so I just walk along with him. Once he says to me, more as if he’s talking to himself than me, if you get what I mean—he says, ‘The Bible says you shall not suffer a witch to live.’ Then he goes on muttering an’ holding one arm fast over this doll inside his coat.

“We get to the car an’ he tells Paul to beat it straight to you an’ to hell with traffic—that’s right, ain’t it, Paul? Yes. When we get in the car he stops muttering an’ just sits there quiet, not saying anything to me until I hear him say Jesu!’ like I told you. And that’s all, ain’t it, Paul?”

The chauffeur did not answer. He sat staring at McCann with something of entreaty in his gaze. I distinctly saw McCann shake his head. The chauffeur said, in a strongly marked Italian accent, hesitatingly:

“I do not see the shop, but everything else McCann say is truth.”

I got up and walked over to Ricori’s body. I was about to lift the sheet when something caught my eye. A red spot about as big as a dime—a blood stain. Holding it in place with one finger, I carefully lifted the edge of the sheet. The blood spot was directly over Ricori’s heart.

I took one of my strongest glasses and one of my finest probes. Under the glass, I could see on Ricori’s breast a minute puncture, no larger than that made by a hypodermic needle. Carefully I inserted the probe. It slipped easily in and in until it touched the wall of the heart. I went no further.

Some needle-pointed, exceedingly fine instrument had been thrust through Ricori’s breast straight into his heart!

I looked at him, doubtfully; there was no reason why such a minute puncture should cause death. Unless, of course, the weapon which had made it had been poisoned; or there had been some other violent shock which had contributed to that of the wound itself. But such shock or shocks might very well bring about in a person of Ricori’s peculiar temperament some curious mental condition, producing an almost perfect counterfeit of death. I had heard of such cases.

No, despite my tests, I was not sure Ricori was dead. But I did not tell McCann that. Alive or dead, there was one sinister fact that McCann must explain. I turned to the pair, who had been watching me closely.

“You say there were only the three of you in the car?”

Again I saw a glance pass between them.

“There was the doll,” McCann answered, half-defiantly. I brushed the answer aside, impatiently.

“I repeat: there were only the three of you in the car?”

“Three men, yes.”

“Then,” I said grimly, “you two have a lot to explain. Ricori was stabbed. I’ll have to call the police.”

McCann arose and walked over to the body. He picked up the glass and peered through it at the tiny puncture. He looked at the chauffeur. He said:

“I told you the doll done it, Paul!”

CHAPTER V

THE THING IN RICORI’S CAR (CONTINUED)

I said, incredulously, “McCann, you surely don’t expect me to believe that?”

He did not answer, rolling another cigarette which this time he did not throw away. The chauffeur staggered over to Ricori’s body; he threw himself on his knees and began mingled prayers and implorations. McCann, curiously enough, was now completely himself. It was as though the removal of uncertainty as to the cause of Ricori’s death had restored all his old cold confidence. He lighted the cigarette; he said, almost cheerfully:

“I’m aiming to make you believe.”

I walked over to the telephone. McCann jumped in front of me and stood with his back against the instrument.

“Wait a minute, Doc. If I’m the kind of a rat that’ll stick a knife in the heart of the man who hired me to protect him—ain’t it occurred to you the spot you’re on ain’t so healthy? What’s to keep me an’ Paul from giving you the works an’ making our getaway?”

Frankly, that had not occurred to me. Now I realized in what a truly dangerous position I was placed. I looked at the chauffeur. He had risen from his knees and was standing, regarding McCann intently.

“I see you get it.” McCann smiled, mirthlessly. He walked to the Italian. “Pass your rods, Paul.”

Without a word the chauffeur dipped into his pockets and handed him a pair of automatics. McCann laid them on my table. He reached under his left arm and placed another pistol beside them; reached into his pocket and added a second.

“Sit there, Doc,” he said, and indicated my chair at the table. “That’s all our artillery. Keep the guns right under your hands. If we make any breaks, shoot. All I ask is you don’t do any calling up till you’ve listened.”

I sat down, drawing the automatics to me, examining them to see that they were loaded. They were.

“Doc,” McCann said, “there’s three things I want you to consider. First, if I’d had anything to do with smearing the boss, would I be giving you a break like this? Second, I was sitting at his right side. He had on a thick overcoat. How could I reach over an’ run anything as thin as whatever killed him must have been all through his coat, an’ through the doll, through his clothes, an’ through him without him putting up some kind of a fight. Hell, Ricori was a strong man. Paul would have seen us—”

“What difference would that have made,” I interrupted, “if Paul were an accomplice?”

“Right,” he acquiesced, “that’s so. Paul’s as deep in the mud as I am. Ain’t that so, Paul?” He looked sharply at the chauffeur, who nodded. “All right, we’ll leave that with a question mark after it. Take the third point—if I’d killed the boss that way, an’ Paul was in it with me, would we have took him to the one man who’d be expected to know how he was killed? An’ then when you’d found out as expected, hand you an alibi like this? Christ, Doc, I ain’t loco enough for that!”

His face twitched.

“Why would I want to kill him? I’d a-gone through hell an’ back for him an’ he knew it. So would’ve Paul.”

I felt the force of all this. Deep within me I was conscious of a stubborn conviction that McCann was telling the truth—or at least the truth as he saw it. He had not stabbed Ricori. Yet to attribute the act, to a doll was too fantastic. And there had been only the three men in the car. McCann had been reading my thoughts with an uncanny precision.

“It might’ve been one of them mechanical dolls,” he said. “Geared up to stick.”

“McCann, go down and bring it up to me,” I said sharply—he had voiced a rational explanation.

“It ain’t there,” he said, and grinned at me again mirthlessly. “It out!”

“Preposterous—” I began. The chauffeur broke in:

“It’s true. Something out. When I open the door. I think it cat, dog, maybe. I say, ‘What the hell—’ Then I see it. It run like hell. It stoop. It duck in shadow. I see it just as flash an’ then no more. I say to McCann—‘What the hell!’ McCann, he’s feeling around bottom of car. He say—‘It’s the doll. It done for the boss!’ I say: ‘Doll! What you mean doll?’ He tell me. I know nothing of any doll before. I see the boss carry something in his coat, si. But I don’t know what. But I see one goddam thing that don’t look like cat, dog. It jump out of car, through my legs, si!”

I said ironically: “Is it your idea, McCann, that this mechanical doll was geared to run away as well as to stab?”

He flushed, but answered quietly:

“I ain’t saying it was a mechanical doll. But anything else would be—well, pretty crazy, wouldn’t it?”

“McCann,” I asked abruptly, “what do you want me to do?”

“Doc, when I was down Arizona way, there was a ranchero died. Died sudden. There was a feller looked as if he had a lot to do with it. The marshal said: ‘Hombre, I don’t think you done it—but I’m the lone one on the jury. What say?’ The hombre say, ‘Marshal, give me two weeks, an’ if I don’t bring in the feller that done it, you hang me.’ The marshal says, ‘Fair enough. The temporary verdict is deceased died by shock.’ It was shock all right. Bullet shock. All right, before the two weeks was up, along comes this feller with the murderer hog-tied to his saddle.”

“I get your point, McCann. But this isn’t Arizona.”

“I know it ain’t. But couldn’t you certify it was heart disease? Temporarily? An’ give me a week? Then if I don’t come through, shoot the works. I won’t run away. It’s this way, Doc. If you tell the bulls, you might just as well pick up one of them guns an’ shoot me an’ Paul dead right now. If we tell the bulls about the doll, they’ll laugh themselves sick an’ fry us at Sing Sing. If we don’t, we fry anyway. If by a miracle the bulls drop us—there’s them in the boss’s crowd that’ll soon remedy that. I’m telling you, Doc, you’ll be killing two innocent men. An’ worse, you’ll never find out who did kill the boss, because they’ll never look any further than us. Why should they?”

A cloud of suspicion gathered around my conviction of the pair’s innocence. The proposal, naive as it seemed, was subtle. If I assented, the gunman and the chauffeur would have a whole week to get away, if that was the plan. If McCann did not come back, and I told the truth of the matter, I would be an accessory after the fact—in effect, co-murderer. If I pretended that my suspicions had only just been aroused, I stood, at the best, convicted of ignorance. If they were captured, and recited the agreement, again I could be charged as an accessory. It occurred to me that McCann’s surrender of the pistols was extraordinarily clever. I could not say that my assent had been constrained by threats. Also, it might have been only a cunningly conceived gesture to enlist my confidence, weaken my resistance to his appeal. How did I know that the pair did not have still other weapons, ready to use if I refused?

Striving to find a way out of the trap, I walked over to Ricori. I took the precaution of dropping the automatics into my pockets as I went. I bent over Ricori. His flesh was cold, but not with the peculiar chill of death. I examined him once more, minutely. And now I could detect the faintest of pulsation in the heart a bubble began to form at the corner of his lips—Ricori lived!

I continued to bend over him, thinking faster than ever I had before. Ricori lived, yes. But it did not lift my peril. Rather it increased it. For if McCann had stabbed him, if the pair had been in collusion, and learned that they had been unsuccessful, would they not finish what they had thought ended? With Ricori alive, Ricori able to speak and to accuse them—a death more certain than the processes of law confronted them. Death at Ricori’s command at the hands of his henchmen. And in finishing Ricori they would at the same time be compelled to kill me.

Still bending, I slipped a hand into my pocket, clenched an automatic, and then whirled upon them with the gun leveled.

“Hands up! Both of you!” I said.

Amazement flashed over McCann’s face, consternation over the chauffeur’s. But their hands went up.

I said, “There’s no need of that clever little agreement, McCann. Ricori is not dead. When he’s able to talk he’ll tell what happened to him.”

I was not prepared for the effect of this announcement. If McCann was not sincere, he was an extraordinary actor. His lanky body stiffened, I had seldom seen such glad relief as was stamped upon his face. Tears rolled down his tanned cheeks. The chauffeur dropped to his knees, sobbing and praying. My suspicions were swept away. I did not believe this could be acting. In some measure I was ashamed of myself.

“You can drop your hands, McCann,” I said, and slipped the automatic back in my pocket.

He said, hoarsely: “Will he live?”

I answered: “I think he has every chance. If there’s no infection, I’m sure of it.”

“Thank God!” whispered McCann, and over and over, “Thank God!”

And just then Braile entered, and stood staring in amazement at us.

“Ricori has been stabbed. I’ll explain the whole matter later,” I told him. “Small puncture over the heart and probably penetrating it. He’s suffering mainly from shock. He’s coming out of it. Get him up to the Annex and take care of him until I come.”

Briefly I reviewed what I had done and suggested the immediate further treatment. And when Ricori had been removed, I turned to the gunmen.

“McCann,” I said, “I’m not going to explain. Not now. But here are your pistols, and Paul’s. I’m giving you your chance.”

He took the automatics, looking at me with a curious gleam in his eyes.

“I ain’t saying I wouldn’t like to know what touched you off, Doc,” he said. “But whatever you do is all right by me—if only you can bring the boss around.”

“Undoubtedly there are some who will have to be notified of his condition,” I replied. “I’ll leave that all to you. All I know is that he was on his way to me. He had a heart attack in the car. You brought him to me. I am now treating him—for heart attack. If he should die, McCann—well, that will be another matter.”

“I’ll do the notifying,” he answered. “There’s only a couple that you’ll have to see. Then I’m going down to that doll joint an’ get the truth outa that hag.”

His eyes were slits, his mouth a slit, too.

“No,” I said, firmly. “Not yet. Put a watch on the place. If the woman goes out, discover where she goes. Watch the girl as closely. If it appears as though either of them or both of them are moving away—running off—let them. But follow them. I don’t want them molested or even alarmed until Ricori can tell what happened there.”

“All right,” he said, but reluctantly.

“Your doll story,” I reminded him, sardonically, “would not be so convincing to the police as to my somewhat credulous mind. Take no chance of them being injected into the matter. As long as Ricori is alive, there is no need of them being so injected.”

I took him aside.

“Can you trust the chauffeur to do no talking?”

“Paul’s all right,” he said.

“Well, for both your sakes, he would better be,” I warned.

They took their departure. I went up to Ricori’s room. His heart was stronger, his respiration weak but encouraging. His temperature, although still dangerously subnormal, had improved. If, as I had told McCann, there was no infection, and if there had been no poison nor drug upon the weapon with which he had been stabbed, Ricori should live.

Later that night two thoroughly polite gentlemen called upon me, heard my explanation of Ricori’s condition, asked if they might see him, did see him, and departed. They assured me that “win or lose” I need have no fear about my fees, nor have any hesitancy in bringing in the most expensive consultants. In exchange, I assured them that I believed Ricori had an excellent chance to recover. They asked me to allow no one to see him except themselves, and McCann. They thought it might save me trouble to have a couple of men whom they would send to me, to sit at the door of the room—outside, of course, in the hall. I answered that I would be delighted.

In an exceedingly short time two quietly watchful men were on guard at Ricori’s door, just as they had been over Peters’.

In my dreams that night dolls danced around me, pursued me, threatened me. My sleep was not pleasant.

CHAPTER VI

STRANGE EXPERIENCE OF OFFICER SHEVLIN

Morning brought a marked improvement in Ricori’s condition. The deep coma was unchanged, but his temperature was nearly normal; respiration and heart action quite satisfactory. Braile and I divided duties so that one of us could be constantly within call of the nurses. The guards were relieved after breakfast by two others. One of my quiet visitors of the night before made his appearance, looked at Ricori and received with unfeigned gratification my reassuring reports.

After I had gone to bed the obvious idea had occurred to me that Ricori might have made some memorandum concerning his quest; I had felt reluctance about going through his pockets, however. Now seemed to be the opportunity to ascertain whether he had or had not. I suggested to my visitor that he might wish to examine any papers Ricori had been carrying, adding that we had been interested together in a certain matter, that he had been on his way to discuss this with me when he had undergone his seizure; and that he might have carried some notes of interest to me. My visitor agreed; I sent for Ricori’s overcoat and suit and we went through them. There were a few papers, but nothing relating to our investigation.

In the breast pocket of his overcoat, however, was a curious object—a piece of thin cord about eight inches long in which had been tied nine knots, spaced at irregular intervals. They were curious knots too, not quite like any I could recollect having observed. I studied the cord with an unaccountable but distinct feeling of uneasiness. I glanced at my visitor and saw a puzzled look in his eyes. And then I remembered Ricori’s superstition, and reflected that the knotted cord was probably a talisman or charm of some sort. I put it back in the pocket.

When again alone, I took it out and examined it more minutely. The cord was of human hair, tightly braided—the hair a peculiarly pale ash and unquestionably a woman’s. Each knot, I now saw, was tied differently. Their structure was complex. The difference between them, and their irregular spacing, gave a vague impression of forming a word or sentence. And, studying the knots, I had the same sensation of standing before a blank door, vitally important for me to open, that I had felt while watching Peters die. Obeying some obscure impulse, I did not return the cord to the pocket but threw it into the drawer with the doll which Nurse Robbins had brought me.

Shortly after three, McCann telephoned me. I was more than glad to hear from him. In the broad light of day his story of the occurrence in Ricori’s car had become incredibly fantastic, all my doubts returning.

I had even begun again to review my unenviable position if he disappeared. Some of this must have shown in the cordiality of my greeting, for he laughed.

“Thought I’d rode off the range, did you, Doc? You couldn’t drive me away. Wait till you see what I got.”

I awaited his arrival with impatience. When he appeared he had with him a sturdy, red-faced man who carried a large paper clothing-bag. I recognized him as a policeman I had encountered now and then on the Drive, although I had never before seen him out of uniform. I bade the two be seated, and the officer sat on the edge of a chair, holding the clothes-bag gingerly across his knees. I looked at McCann inquiringly.

“Shevlin,” he waved his hand at the officer, “said he knew you, Doc. But I’d have brought him along, anyway.”

“If I didn’t know Dr. Lowell, it’s not me that’d be here, McCann me lad,” said Shevlin, glumly. “But it’s brains the Doc has got in his head, an’ not a cold boiled potato like that damned lootenant.”

“Well,” said McCann, maliciously, “the Doc’ll prescribe for you anyway, Tim.”

“’Tis no prescribin’ I want, I tell you,” Shevlin bellowed, “I seen it wit’ me own eyes, I’m tellin’ you! An’ if Dr. Lowell tells me I was drunk or crazy I’ll tell him t’hell wit’ him, like I told the lootenant. An’ I’m tellin’ you, too, McCann.”

I listened to this with growing amazement.

“Now, Tim, now, Tim,” soothed McCann, “I believe you. You don’t know how much I want to believe you—or why, either.”

He gave me a quick glance, and I gathered that whatever the reason he had brought the policeman to see me, he had not spoken to him of Ricori.

“You see, Doc, when I told you about that doll getting up an’ jumping out of the car you thought I was loco. All right, I says to me, maybe it didn’t get far. Maybe it was one of them improved mechanical dolls, but even if it was it has to run down sometime. So I goes hunting for somebody else that might have seen it. An’ this morning I runs into Shevlin here. An’ he tells me. Go on, Tim, give the Doc what you gave me.”

Shevlin blinked, shifted the bag cautiously and began. He had the dogged air of repeating a story that he had told over and over. And to unsympathetic audiences; for as he went on he would look at me defiantly, or raise his voice belligerently.

“It was one o’clock this mornin’. I am on me beat when I hear somebody yellin’ desperate like. ‘Help!’ he yells. ‘Murder! Take it away!’ he yells. I go runnin’, an’ there standin’ on a bench is a guy in his soup-an’-nuts an’ high hat jammed over his ears, an’ a-hittin’ this way an’ that wit’ his cane, an’ a-dancin’ up an’ down an’ it’s him that’s doin’ the yellin’.

“I reach over an’ tap him on the shins wit’ me night-club, an’ he looks down an’ then flops right in me arms. I get a whiff of his breath an’ I think I see what’s the matter wit’ him all right. I get him on his feet, an’ I says: ‘Come on now, the pink’ll soon run off the elephants,’ I says. ‘It’s this Prohibition hooch that makes it look so thick,’ I says. ‘Tell me where you live an’ I’ll put you in a taxi, or do you want t’go to a hospital?’ I says.

“He stands there a-holdin’ unto me an’ a-shakin’, an’ he says: ‘D’ye think I’m drunk?’ An’ I begins t’tell him. ‘An’ how—’ when I looks at him, an’ he ain’t drunk. He might’ve been drunk, but he ain’t drunk now. An’ all t’once he flops down on the bench an’ pulls up his pants an’ down his socks, an’ I sees blood runnin’ from a dozen little holes, an’ he says, ‘Maybe you’ll be tellin’ me it’s pink elephants done that?’

“I looks at ’em an’ feels ’em, an’ it’s blood all right, as if somebody’s been jabbin’ a hat-pin in him—”

Involuntarily I stared at McCann. He did not meet my eyes. Imperturbably he was rolling a cigarette.

“An’ I says: ‘What the hell done it?’ An’ he says ‘The doll done it!’”

A little shiver ran down my back, and I looked again at the gunman. This time he gave me a warning glance. Shevlin glared up at me.

“‘The doll done it!’ he tells me,” Shevlin shouted. “He tells me the doll done it!”

McCann chuckled and Shevlin turned his glare from me to him. I said hastily:

“I understand, Officer. He told you it was the doll made the wounds. An astonishing assertion, certainly.”

“Y’don’t believe it, y’mean?” demanded Shevlin, furiously.

“I believe he told you that, yes,” I answered. “But go on.”

“All right, would y’be sayin’ I was drunk too, t’believe it? Fer it’s what that potato-brained lootenant did.”

“No, no,” I assured him hastily. Shevlin settled back, and went on:

“I asks the drunk, ‘What’s her name?’ ‘What’s whose name?’ says he. ‘The doll’s,’ I says. ‘I’ll bet you she was a blonde doll,’ I says, ‘an’ wants her picture in the tabloids. The brunettes don’t use hat-pins,’ I says. ‘They’re all fer the knife.’

“‘Officer,’ he says, solemn, ‘it was a doll. A little man doll. An’ when I say doll I mean a doll. I was walkin along,’ he says, ‘gettin’ the air. I won’t deny I’d had some drinks,’ he says, ‘but nothin’ I couldn’t carry. I’m swishin’ along wit’ me cane, when I drops it by that bush there,’ he says, pointin’. ‘I reach down to pick it up,’ he says, ‘an’ there I see a doll. It’s a big doll an’ it’s all huddled up crouchin’, as if somebody dropped it that way. I reaches over t’ pick it up. As I touch it, the doll jumps as if I hit a spring. It jumps right over me head,’ he says. ‘I’m surprised,’ he says, ‘an’ considerably startled, an’ I’m crouchin’ there lookin’ where the doll was when I feel a hell of a pain in the calf of me leg,’ he says, ‘like I been stabbed. I jump up, an’ there’s this doll wit’ a big pin in its hand just ready t’ jab me again.’

“‘Maybe,’ says I to the drunk, ‘maybe ’twas a midget you seen?’ ‘Midget hell!’ says he, ‘it was a doll! An’ it was jabbin’ me wit’ a hat-pin. It was about two feet high,’ he says, ‘wit’ blue eyes. It was grinnin’ at me in a way that made me blood run cold. An’ while I stood there paralyzed, it jabbed me again. I jumped on the bench,’ he says, ‘an’ it danced around an’ around, an’ it jumped up an’ jabbed me. An’ it jumped down an’ up again an’ jabbed me. I thought it meant to kill me, an’ I yelled like hell,’ says the drunk. ‘An’ who wouldn’t?’ he asks me. ‘An’ then you come,’ he says, ‘an’ the doll ducked into the bushes there. Fer God’s sake, officer, come wit’ me till I can get a taxi an’ go home,’ he says, ‘fer I make no bones tellin’ you I’m scared right down to me gizzard!’ says he.

“So I take the drunk by the arm,” went on Shevlin, “thinkin’, poor lad, what this bootleg booze’ll make you see, but still puzzled about how he got them holes in his legs. We come out to the Drive. The drunk is still a-shakin’ an’ I’m a-waitin’ to hail a taxi, when all of a sudden he lets out a squeal. ‘There it goes! Look, there it goes!’

“I follow his finger, an’ sure enough I see somethin’ scuttlin’ over the sidewalk an’ out on the Drive. The light’s none too good, an’ I think it’s a cat or maybe a dog. Then I see there’s a little coupe drawn up opposite at the curb. The cat or dog, whatever it is, seems to be makin’ fer it. The drunk’s still yellin’ an’ I’m tryin’ to see what it is, when down the Drive hell-fer-leather comes a big car. It hits this thing kersmack an’ never stops. He’s out of sight before I can raise me whistle. I think I see the thing wriggle an’ I think, still thinkin’ it’s a cat or dog, ‘I’ll put you out of your misery,’ an’ I run over to it wit’ me gun. As I do so the coupe that’s been waitin’ shoots off hell-fer-leather too. I get over to what the other car hit, an’ I look at it—”

He slipped the bag off his knees, set it down beside him and untied the top.

“An’ this is what it was.”

Out of the bag he drew a doll, or what remained of it. The automobile had gone across its middle, crushing it. One leg was missing; the other hung by a thread. Its clothing was torn and begrimed with the dirt of the roadway. It was a doll—but uncannily did it give the impression of a mutilated pygmy. Its neck hung limply over its breast.

McCann stepped over and lifted the doll’s head, I stared, and stared…with a prickling of the scalp…with a slowing of the heart beat…

For the face that looked up at me, blue eyes glaring, was the face of Peters!

And on it, like the thinnest of veils, was the shadow of that demonic exultance I had watched spread over the face of Peters after death had stilled the pulse of his heart!

CHAPTER VII

THE PETERS DOLL

Shevlin watched me as I stared at the doll. He was satisfied by its effect upon me.

“A hell of a lookin’ thing, ain’t it?” he asked. “The doctor sees it, McCann. I told you he had brains!” He jounced the doll down upon his knee, and sat there like a red-faced ventriloquist with a peculiarly malevolent dummy—certainly it would not have surprised me to have heard the diabolic laughter issue from its faintly grinning mouth.

“Now, I’ll tell you, Dr. Lowell,” Shevlin went on. “I stands there lookin’ at this doll, an’ I picks it up. ‘There’s more in this than meets the eye, Tim Shevlin,’ I says to myself. An’ I looks to see what’s become of the drunk. He’s standin’ where I left him, an’ I walk over to him an’ he says: ‘Was it a doll like I told you? Hah! I told you it was a doll! Hah! That’s him!’ he says, gettin’ a peck at what I’m carryin’. So I says to him, ‘Young fellow, me lad, there’s somethin’ wrong here. You’re goin’ to the station wit’ me an’ tell the lootenant what you told me an’ show him your legs an’ all,’ I says. An’ the drunk says, ‘Fair enough, but keep that thing on the other side of me.’ So we go to the station.

“The lootenant’s there an’ the sergeant an’ a coupla flatties. I marches up an’ sticks the doll on the top of the desk in front of the lootenant.

“‘What’s this?’ he says, grinnin’. ‘Another kidnapin’?’

“Show him your legs,” I tells the drunk. ‘Not unless they’re better than the Follies,’ grins this potato-brained ape. But the drunk’s rolled up his pants an’ down his socks an’ shows ’em.

“‘What t’hell done that?’ says the lootenant, standin’ up.

“‘The doll,’ says the drunk. The lootenant looks at him, and sits back blinkin’. An’ I tells him about answerin’ the drunk’s yells, an’ what he tells me, an’ what I see. The sergeant laughs an’ the flatties laugh but the lootenant gets red in the face an’ says, ‘Are you tryin’ to kid me, Shevlin?’ An’ I says, ‘I’m tellin’ you what he tells me an’ what I seen, an’ there’s the doll.’ An’ he says, ‘This bootleg is fierce but I never knew it was catchin’.’ An’ he crooks his finger at me an’ says, ‘Come up here, I want t’ smell your breath.’ An’ then I knows it’s all up, because t’ tell the truth the drunk had a flask an’ I’d took one wit’ him. Only one an’ the only one I’d had. But there it was on me breath. An’ the lootenant says, ‘I thought so. Get down.’

“An’ then he starts bellerin’ an’ hollerin’ at the drunk, ‘You wit’ your soup-an’-nuts an’ your silk hat, you ought to be a credit to your city an’ what t’ hell you think you can do, corrupt a good officer an’ kid me? You done the first but you ain’t doin’ the second,’ he yelps. ‘Put him in the cooler,’ he yelps. ‘An’ throw his damned doll in wit’ him t’ keep him company!’ An’ at that the drunk lets out a screech an’ drops t’ the floor. He’ out good an’ plenty. An’ the lootenant says, ‘The poor damned fool by God he believes his own lie! Bring him around an’ let him go.’ An’ he says t’ me, ‘If you weren’t such a good man, Tim, I’d have you up for this. Take your degen’ret doll an’ go home,’ he says, ‘I’ll send a relief t’ your beat. An’ take tomorrow off an’ sober up,’ says he. An’ I says t’ him, ‘All right, but I seen what I seen. An’ t’ hell wit’ you all,’ I says t’ the flatties. An’ everybody’s laughin’ fit t’ split. An’ I says t’ the lootenant, ‘If you break me for it or not, t’ hell wit’ you too.’ But they keep on laughin’, so I take the doll an’ walk out.”

He paused.

“I take the doll home,” he resumed. “I tell it all t’ Maggie, me wife. An’ what does she tell me? ‘T’ think you’ve been off the hard stuff or near off so long,’ she says, ‘an’ now look at you!’ she says, ‘wit’ this talk of stabbin’ dolls, an’ insultin’ the lootenant, an’ maybe gettin’ sent t’ Staten Island,’ she says. ‘An’ Jenny just gettin’ in high school! Go t’ bed,’ she says, ‘an’ sleep it off, an’ throw the doll in the garbage,’ she says. But by now I am gettin’ good an’ mad, an’ I do not throw it in the garbage but I take it with me. An’ awhile ago I meet McCann, an’ somehow he knows somethin’, I tell him an’ he brings me here. An’ just fer what, I don’t know.”

“Do you want me to speak to the lieutenant?” I asked.

“What could you say?” he replied, reasonably enough. “If you tell him the drunk was right, an’ that I’m right an’ I did see the doll run, what’ll he think? He’ll think you’re as crazy as I must be. An’ if you explain maybe I was a little off me nut just for the minute, it’s to the hospital they’ll be sendin’ me. No, Doctor. I’m much obliged, but all I can do is say nothin’ more an’ be dignified an’ maybe hand out a shiner or two if they get too rough. It’s grateful I am fer the kindly way you’ve listened. It makes me feel better.”

Shevlin got to his feet, sighing heavily.

“An’ what do you think? I mean about what the drunk said he seen, an’ what I seen?” he asked somewhat nervously.

“I cannot speak for the inebriate,” I answered cautiously. “As for yourself—well, it might be that the doll had been lying out there in the street, and that a cat or dog ran across just as the automobile went by. Dog or cat escaped, but the action directed your attention to the doll and you thought—”

He interrupted me with a wave of his hand.

“All right. All right. ’Tis enough. I’ll just leave the doll wit’ you to pay for the diagnoses, sir.”

With considerable dignity and perceptibly heightened color Shevlin stalked from the room. McCann was shaking with silent laughter. I picked up the doll and laid it on my table. I looked at the subtly malignant little face and I did not feel much like laughing.

For some obscure reason I took the Walters doll out of the drawer and placed it beside the other, took out the strangely knotted cord and set it between them. McCann was standing at my side, watching. I heard him give a low whistle.

“Where did you get that, Doc?” he pointed to the cord. I told him. He whistled again.

“The boss never knew he had it, that’s sure,” he said. “Wonder who slipped it over on him? The hag, of course. But how?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Why, the witch’s ladder,” he pointed again to the cord. “That’s what they call it down Mexico way. It’s bad medicine. The witch slips it to you and then she has power over you.” He bent over the cord… “Yep, it’s the witch’s ladder—the nine knots an’ woman’s hair…an’ in the boss’s pocket!”

He stood staring at the cord. I noticed he made no attempt to pick it up.

“Take it up and look at it closer, McCann,” I said.

“Not me!” He stepped back. “I’m telling you it’s bad medicine, Doc.”

I had been steadily growing more and more irritated against the fog of superstition gathering ever heavier around me, and now I lost my patience.

“See here, McCann,” I said, hotly, “are you, to use Shevlin’s expression, trying to kid me? Every time I see you I am brought face to face with some fresh outrage against credibility. First it is your doll in the car. Then Shevlin. And now your witch’s ladder. What’s your idea?”

He looked at me with narrowed eyes, a faint flush reddening the high check-bones.

“The only idea I got,” he drawled more slowly than usual, “is to see the boss on his feet. An’ to get whoever got him. As for Shevlin—you don’t think he was faking, do you?”

“I do not,” I answered. “But I am reminded that you were beside Ricori in the car when he was stabbed. And I cannot help wondering how it was that you discovered Shevlin so quickly today.”

“Meaning by that?” he asked.

“Meaning,” I answered, “that your drunken man has disappeared. Meaning that it would be entirely possible for him to have been your confederate. Meaning that the episode which so impressed the worthy Shevlin could very well have been merely a clever bit of acting, and the doll in the street and the opportunely speeding automobile a carefully planned maneuver to bring about the exact result it had accomplished. After all, I have only your word and the chauffeur’s word that the doll was not down in the car the whole time you were here last night. Meaning that—”

I stopped, realizing that, essentially, I was only venting upon him the bad temper aroused by my perplexity.

“I’ll finish for you,” he said. “Meaning that I’m the one behind the whole thing.”

His face was white, and his muscles tense.

“It’s a good thing for you that I like you, Doc,” he continued. “It’s a better thing for you that I know you’re on the level with the boss. Best of all, maybe that you’re the only one who can help him, if he can be helped. That’s all.”

“McCann,” I said, “I’m sorry, deeply sorry. Not for what I said, but for having to say it. After all, the doubt is there. And it is a reasonable doubt. You must admit that. Better to spread it before you than keep it hidden.”

“What might be my motive?”

“Ricori has powerful enemies. He also has powerful friends. How convenient to his enemies if he could be wiped out without suspicion, and a physician of highest repute and unquestionable integrity be inveigled into giving the death a clean bill of health. It is my professional pride, not personal egotism, that I am that kind of a physician, McCann.”

He nodded. His face softened and I saw the dangerous tenseness relax.

“I’ve no argument, Doc. Not on that or nothing else you’ve said. But I’m thanking you for your high opinion of my brains. It’d certainly take a pretty clever man to work all this out this-a-way. Sort of like one of them cartoons that shows seventy-five gimcracks set up to drop a brick on a man’s head at exactly twenty minutes, sixteen seconds after two in the afternoon. Yeah, I must be clever!”

I winced at this broad sarcasm, but did not answer. McCann took up the Peters doll and began to examine it. I went to the ’phone to ask Ricori’s condition. I was halted by an exclamation from the gunman. He beckoned me, and handing me the doll, pointed to the collar of its coat. I felt about it. My fingers touched what seemed to be the round head of a large pin. I pulled out as though from a dagger sheath a slender piece of metal nine inches long. It was thinner than an average hat-pin, rigid and needle-pointed.

Instantly I knew that I was looking upon the instrument that had pierced Ricori’s heart!

“Another outrage!” McCann drawled. “Maybe I put it there, Doc!”

“You could have, McCann.”

He laughed. I studied the queer blade—for blade it surely was. It appeared to be of finest steel, although I was not sure it was that metal. Its rigidity was like none I knew. The little knob at the head was half an inch in diameter and less like a pinhead than the haft of a poniard. Under the magnifying glass it showed small grooves upon it…as though to make sure the grip of a hand…a doll’s hand a doll’s dagger! There were stains upon it.

I shook my head impatiently, and put the thing aside, determining to test those stains later. They were bloodstains, I knew that, but I must make sure. And yet, if they were, it would not be certain proof of the incredible—that a doll’s hand had used this deadly thing.

I picked up the Peters doll and began to study it minutely. I could not determine of what it was made. It was not of wood, like the other doll. More than anything else, the material resembled a fusion of gum and wax. I knew of no such composition. I stripped it of the clothing. The undamaged part of the doll was anatomically perfect. The hair was human hair, carefully planted in the scalp. The eyes were blue crystals of some kind. The clothing showed the same extraordinary skill in the making as the clothes of Diana’s doll.

I saw now that the dangling leg was not held by a thread. It was held by a wire. Evidently the doll had been molded upon a wire frame-work. I walked over to my instrument cabinet, and selected a surgical saw and knives.

“Wait a minute, Doc.” McCann had been following my movements. “You going to cut this thing apart?”

I nodded. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a heavy hunting knife. Before I could stop him, he had brought its blade down like an ax across the neck of the Peters doll. It cut through it cleanly. He took the head and twisted it. A wire snapped. He dropped the head on the table, and tossed the body to me. The head rolled. It came to rest against the cord he had called the witch’s ladder.

The head seemed to twist and to look up at us. I thought for an instant the eyes flared redly, the features to contort, the malignancy intensify—as I had seen it intensify upon Peters’ living face…I caught myself up, angrily a trick of the light, of course.

I turned to McCann and swore.

“Why did you do that?”

“You’re worth more to the boss than I am,” he said, cryptically.

I did not answer. I cut open the decapitated body of the doll. As I had suspected, it had been built upon a wire framework. As I cut away the encasing material, I found this framework was a single wire, or a single metal strand, and that as cunningly as the doll’s body had been shaped, just as cunningly had this wire been twisted into an outline of the human skeleton!

Not, of course, with minute fidelity, but still with amazing accuracy…there were no joints nor articulations…the substance of which the doll was made was astonishingly pliant…the little hands flexible…it was more like dissecting some living mannikin than a doll…And it was rather dreadful…

I glanced toward the severed head.

McCann was bending over it, staring down into its eyes, his own not more than a few inches away from the glinting blue crystals. His hands clutched the table edge and I saw that they were strained and tense as though he were making a violent effort to push himself away. When he had tossed the head upon the table it had come to rest against the knotted cord—but now that cord was twisted around the doll’s severed neck and around its forehead as though it were a small serpent!

And distinctly I saw that McCann’s face was moving closer…slowly closer…to that tiny one…as though it were being drawn to it…and that in the little face a living evil was concentrated and that McCann’s face was a mask of horror.

“McCann!” I cried, and thrust an arm under his chin, jerking back his head. And as I did this I could have sworn the doll’s eyes turned to me, and that its lips writhed.

McCann staggered back. He stared at me for a moment, and then leaped to the table. He picked up the doll’s head, dashed it to the floor and brought his heel down upon it again and again, like one stamping out the life of a venomous spider. Before he ceased, the head was a shapeless blotch, all semblance of humanity or anything else crushed out of it—but within it the two blue crystals that had been its eyes still glinted, and the knotted cord of the witch’s ladder still wound through it.

“God! It was…was drawing me down to it…”

McCann lighted a cigarette with shaking hand, tossed the match away. The match fell upon what had been the doll’s head.

There followed, simultaneously, a brilliant flash, a disconcerting sobbing sound and a wave of intense heat. Where the crushed head had been there was now only an irregularly charred spot upon the polished wood. Within it lay the blue crystals that had been the eyes of the doll—lusterless and blackened. The knotted cord had vanished.

And the body of the doll had disappeared. Upon the table was a nauseous puddle of black waxy liquid out of which lifted the ribs of the wire skeleton!

The Annex ’phone rang; mechanically I answered it.

“Yes,” I said. “What is it?”

“Mr. Ricori, sir. He’s out of the coma. He’s awake!”

I turned to McCann.

“Ricori’s come through!”

He gripped my shoulders—then drew a step away, a touch of awe on his face.

“Yeah?” whispered McCann. “Yeah—he came through when the knots burned! It freed him! It’s you an’ me that’s got to watch our step now!”

CHAPTER VIII

NURSE WALTERS’ DIARY

I took McCann up with me to Ricori’s bedside. Confrontation with his chief would be the supreme test, I felt, resolving one way or another all my doubts as to his sincerity. For I realized, almost immediately, that bizarre as had been the occurrences I have just narrated, each and all of them could have been a part of the elaborate hocus-pocus with which I had tentatively charged the gunman. The cutting off of the doll’s head could have been a dramatic gesture designed to impress my imagination. It was he who had called my attention to the sinister reputation of the knotted cord. It was McCann who had found the pin. His fascination by the severed head might have been assumed. And the tossing of the match a calculated action designed to destroy evidence. I did not feel that I could trust my own peculiar reactions as valid.

And yet it was difficult to credit McCann with being so consummate an actor, so subtle a plotter. Ah, but he could be following the instructions of another mind capable of such subtleties. I wanted to trust McCann. I hoped that he would pass the test. Very earnestly I hoped it.

The test was ordained to failure. Ricori was fully conscious, wide awake, his mind probably as alert and sane as ever. But the lines of communication were still down. His mind had been freed, but not his body. The paralysis persisted, forbidding any muscular movements except the deep-seated unconscious reflexes essential to the continuance of life. He could not speak. His eyes looked up at me, bright and intelligent, but from an expressionless face…looked up at McCann with the same unchanging stare.

McCann whispered: “Can he hear?”

“I think so, but he has no way of telling us.”

The gunman knelt beside the bed and took Ricori’s hands in his. He said, clearly: “Everything’s all right, boss. We’re all on the job.”

Not the utterance nor the behavior of a guilty man—but then I had told him Ricori could not answer. I said to Ricori:

“You’re coming through splendidly. You’ve had a severe shock, and I know the cause. I’d rather you were this way for a day or so than able to move about. I have a perfectly good medical reason for this. Don’t worry, don’t fret, try not to think of anything unpleasant. Let your mind relax. I’m going to give you a mild hypo. Don’t fight it. Let yourself sleep.”

I gave him the hypodermic, and watched with satisfaction its quick effect. It convinced me that he had heard.

I returned to my study with McCann. I was doing some hard thinking. There was no knowing how long Ricori would remain in the grip of the paralysis. He might awaken in an hour fully restored, or it might hold him for days. In the meantime there were three things I felt it necessary to ascertain. The first that a thorough watch was being kept upon the place where Ricori had gotten the doll; second, that everything possible be found out about the two women McCann had described; third, what it was that had made Ricori go there. I had determined to take the gunman’s story of the happenings at the store at their face value—for the moment at least. At the same time, I did not want to admit him into my confidence any more than was necessary.

“McCann,” I began, “have you arranged to keep the doll store under constant surveillance, as we agreed last night?”

“You bet. A flea couldn’t hop in or out without being spotted.”

“Any reports?”

“The boys ringed the joint close to midnight. The front’s all dark. There’s a building in the back an’ a space between it an’ the rear of the joint. There’s a window with a heavy shutter, but a line of light shows under it. About two o’clock this fish-white gal comes slipping up the street and lets in. The boys at the back hear a hell of a squalling, an’ then the light goes out. This morning the gal opens the shop. After a while the hag shows up, too. They’re covered, all right.”

“What have you found out about them?”

“The hag calls herself Madame Mandilip. The gal’s her niece. Or so she says. They rode in about eight months since. Nobody knows where from. Pay their bills regular. Seem to have plenty of money. Niece does all the marketing. The old woman never goes out. Keep to themselves like a pair of clams. Have strictly nothing to do with the neighbors. The hag has a bunch of special customers—rich-looking people many of them. Does two kinds of trade, it looks—regular dolls, an’ what goes with ’em, an’ special dolls which they say the old woman’s a wonder at. Neighbors ain’t a bit fond of ’em. Some of ’em think she’s handling dope. That’s all yet.”

Special dolls? Rich people?

Rich people like the spinster Bailey, the banker Marshall?

Regular dolls—for people like the acrobat, the bricklayer? But these might have been “special” too, in ways McCann could not know.

“There’s the store,” he continued. “Back of it two or three rooms. Upstairs a big room like a storeroom. They rent the whole place. The hag an’ the wench, they live in the rooms behind the store.”

“Good work!” I applauded, and hesitated—“McCann, did the doll remind you of somebody?”

He studied me with narrowed eyes.

“You tell me,” he said at last, dryly.

“Well—I thought it resembled Peters.”

“Thought it resembled!” he exploded. “Resembled—hell! It was the lick-an’-spit of Peters!”

“Yet you said nothing to me of that. Why?” I asked, suspiciously.

“Well I’m damned—” he began, then caught himself. “I knowed you seen it. I thought you kept quiet account of Shevlin, an’ followed your lead. Afterwards you were so busy putting me through the jumps there wasn’t a chance.”

“Whoever made that doll must have known Peters quite well.” I passed over this dig. “Peters must have sat for the doll as one sits for an artist or a sculptor. Why did he do it? When did he do it? Why did anyone desire to make a doll like him?”

“Let me work on the hag for an hour an’ I’ll tell you,” he answered, grimly.

“No,” I shook my head. “Nothing of that sort until Ricori can talk. But maybe we can get some light in another way. Ricori had a purpose in going to that store. I know what it was. But I do not know what directed his attention to the store. I have reason to believe it was information he gained from Peters’ sister. Do you know her well enough to visit her and to draw from her what it was she told Ricori yesterday? Casually—tactfully—without telling her of Ricori’s illness?”

He said, bluntly: “Not without you give me more of a lead—Mollie’s no fool.”

“Very well. I am not aware whether Ricori told you, but the Darnley woman is dead. We think there is a connection between her death and Peters’ death. We think that it has something to do with the love of both of them for Mollie’s baby. The Darnley woman died precisely as Peters did—”

He whispered—“You mean with the same—trimmings?”

“Yes. We had reason to think that both might have picked up the—the disease—in the same place. Ricori thought that perhaps Mollie might know something which would identify that place. A place where both of them might have gone, not necessarily at the same time, and have been exposed to—the infection. Maybe even a deliberate infection by some ill-disposed person. Quite evidently what Ricori learned from Mollie sent him to the Mandilips. There is one awkward thing, however—unless Ricori told her yesterday, she does not know her brother is dead.”

“That’s right,” he nodded. “He gave orders about that.”

“If he did not tell her, you must not.”

“You’re holding back quite a lot, ain’t you, Doc?” He drew himself up to go.

“Yes,” I said, frankly. “But I’ve told you enough.”

“Yeah? Well, maybe.” He regarded me, somberly. “Anyway, I’ll soon know if the boss broke the news to Mollie. If he did, it opens up the talk natural. If he didn’t—well, I’ll call you up after I’ve talked to her. Hasta luego.”

With this half-mocking adieu he took his departure. I went over to the remains of the doll upon the table. The nauseous puddle had hardened. In hardening it had roughly assumed the aspect of a flattened human body. It had a peculiarly unpleasant appearance, with the miniature ribs and the snapped wire of the spine glinting above it. I was overcoming my reluctance to collect the mess for analysis when Braile came in. I was so full of Ricori’s awakening, and of what had occurred, that it was some time before I noticed his pallor and gravity. I stopped short in the recital of my doubts regarding McCann to ask him what was the matter.

“I woke up this morning thinking of Harriet,” he said. “I knew the 4-9-1 code, if it was a code, could not have meant Diana. Suddenly it struck me that it might mean Diary. The idea kept haunting me. When I had a chance I took Robbins and went to the apartment. We searched, and found Harriet’s diary. Here it is.”

He handed me a little red-bound book. He said: “I’ve gone through it.”

I opened the book. I set down the parts of it pertinent to the matter under review.

Nov. 3. Had a queer sort of experience today. Dropped down to Battery Park to look at the new fishes in the Aquarium. Had an hour or so afterwards and went poking around some of the old streets, looking for something to take home to Diana. Found the oddest little shop. Quaint and old looking with some of the loveliest dolls and dolls’ clothes in the window I’ve ever seen. I stood looking at them and peeping into the shop through the window. There was a girl in the shop. Her back was turned to me. She turned suddenly and looked at me. She gave me the queerest kind of shock. Her face was white, without any color whatever and her eyes were wide and sort of staring and frightened. She had a lot of hair, all ashen blonde and piled up on her head. She was the strangest looking girl I think I’ve ever seen. She stared at me for a full minute and I at her. Then she shook her head violently and made motions with her hands for me to go away. I was so astonished I could hardly believe my eyes. I was about to go in and ask her what on earth was the matter with her when I looked at my watch and found I had just time to get back to the hospital. I looked into the shop again and saw a door at the back beginning slowly to open. The girl made one last and it seemed almost despairing gesture. There was something about it that suddenly made me want to run. But I didn’t. I did walk away though. I’ve puzzled about the thing all day. Also, besides being curious I’m a bit angry. The dolls and clothes are beautiful. What’s wrong with me as a customer? I’m going to find out.

Nov. 5. I went back to the doll shop this afternoon. The mystery deepens. Only I don’t think it’s much of a mystery. I think the poor thing is a bit crazy. I didn’t stop to look in the window but went right in the door. The white girl was at a little counter at the back. When she saw me her eyes looked more frightened than ever and I could see her tremble. I went up to her and she whispered, “Oh, why did you come back? I told you to go away!” I laughed, I couldn’t help it, and I said: “You’re the queerest shopkeeper I ever met. Don’t you want people to buy your things?” She said low and very quickly: “It’s too late! You can’t go now! But don’t touch anything. Don’t touch anything she gives you. Don’t touch anything she points out to you.” And then in the most everyday way she said quite clearly: “Is there anything I can show you? We have everything for dolls.” The transition was so abrupt that it was startling. Then I saw that a door had opened in the back of the shop, the same door I had seen opening before, and that a woman was standing in it looking at me.

I gaped at her I don’t know how long. She was so truly extraordinary. She must be almost six feet and heavy, with enormous breasts. Not fat. Powerful. She has a long face and her skin is brown. She has a distinct mustache and a mop of iron-gray hair.

It was her eyes that held me spellbound. They are simply enormous black and so full of life! She must have a tremendous vitality. Or maybe it is the contrast with the white girl who seems to be drained of life. No, I’m sure she has a most unusual vitality. I had the queerest thrill when she was looking at me. I thought, nonsensically—“What big eyes you have, grandma!” “The better to see you with, my dear!” “What big teeth you have, grandma!” “The better to eat you with, my dear!” (I’m not so sure though that it was all nonsense.) And she really has big teeth, strong and yellow. I said, quite stupidly: “How do you do?” She smiled and touched me with her hand and I felt another queer thrill. Her hands are the most beautiful I ever saw. So beautiful, they are uncanny. Long with tapering fingers and so white. Like the hands El Greco or Botticelli put on their women. I suppose that is what gave me the odd shock. They don’t seem to belong to her immense coarse body at all. But neither do the eyes. The hands and the eyes go together. Yes, that’s it.

She smiled and said: “You love beautiful things.” Her voice belongs to hands and eyes. A deep rich glowing contralto. I could feel it go through me like an organ chord. I nodded. She said: “Then you shall see them, my dear. Come.” She paid no attention to the girl. She turned to the door and I followed her. As I went through the door I looked back at the girl. She appeared more frightened than ever and distinctly I saw her lips form the word—“Remember.”

The room she led me into was—well, I can’t describe it. It was like her eyes and hands and voice.

When I went into it I had the strange feeling that I was no longer in New York. Nor in America. Nor anywhere on earth, for that matter. I had the feeling that the only real place that existed was the room. It was frightening. The room was larger than it seemed possible it could be, judging from the size of the store. Perhaps it was the light that made it seem so. A soft mellow, dusky light. It is exquisitely paneled, even the ceiling. On one side there is nothing but these beautiful old dark panelings with carvings in very low relief covering them. There is a fireplace and a fire was burning in it. It was unusually warm but the warmth was not oppressive. There was a faint fragrant odor, probably from the burning wood. The furniture is old and exquisite too, but unfamiliar. There are some tapestries, clearly ancient. It is curious, but I find it difficult to recall clearly just what is in that room. All that is clear is its unfamiliar beauty. I do remember clearly an immense table, and I recall thinking of it as a “baronial board.” And I remember intensely the round mirror, and I don’t like to think of that.

I found myself telling her all about myself and about Diana, and how she loved beautiful things. She listened, and said in that deep, sweet voice, “She shall have one beautiful thing, my dear.” She went to a cabinet and came to me with the loveliest doll I have ever seen. It made me gasp when I thought how Di would love it. A little baby doll, and so life-like and exquisite. “Would she like that?” she asked. I said: “But I could never afford such a treasure. I’m poor.” And she laughed, and said: “But I am not poor. This shall be yours when I have finished dressing it.”

It was rude, but I could not help saying: “You must be very, very rich to have all these lovely things. I wonder why you keep a doll store.” And she laughed again and said, “Just to meet nice people like you, my dear.”

It was then I had the peculiar experience, with the mirror. It was round and I had looked and looked at it because it was like, I thought, the half of an immense globule of clearest water. Its frame was brown wood elaborately carved, and now and then the reflection of the carvings seemed to dance in the mirror like vegetation on the edge of a woodland pool when a breeze ruffles it. I had been wanting to look into it, and all at once the desire became irresistible. I walked to the mirror. I could see the whole room reflected in it. Just as though I were looking not at its image or my own image but into another similar room with a similar me peering out. And then there was a wavering and the reflection of the room became misty, although the reflection of myself was perfectly clear. Then I could see only myself, and I seemed to be getting smaller and smaller until I was no bigger than a large doll. I brought my face closer and the little face thrust itself forward. I shook my head and smiled, and it did the same. It was my reflection—but so small! And suddenly I felt frightened and shut my eyes tight. And when I looked in the mirror again everything was as it had been before.

I looked at my watch and was appalled at the time I had spent. I arose to go, still with the panicky feeling at my heart. She said: “Visit me again tomorrow, my dear. I will have the doll ready for you.” I thanked her and said I would. She went with me to the door of the shop. The girl did not look at me as I passed through.

Her name is Madame Mandilip. I am not going to her tomorrow nor ever again. She fascinates me but she makes me afraid. I don’t like the way I felt before the round mirror. And when I first looked into it and saw the whole room reflected, why didn’t I see her image in it? I did not! And although the room was lighted, I can’t remember seeing any windows or lamps. And that girl! And yet—Di would love the doll so!

Nov. 7. Queer how difficult it is to keep to my resolution not to return to Madame Mandilip. It makes me so restless! Last night I had a terrifying dream. I thought I was back in that room. I could see it distinctly. And suddenly I realized I was looking out into it. And that I was inside the mirror. I knew I was little. Like a doll. I was frightened and I beat against it, and fluttered against it like a moth against a windowpane. Then I saw two beautiful long white hands stretching out to me. They opened the mirror and caught me and I struggled and fought and tried to get away. I woke with my heart beating so hard it nigh smothered me. Di says I was crying out: “No! No! I won’t! No, I won’t!” over and over. She threw a pillow at me and I suppose that’s what awakened me.

Today I left the hospital at four, intending to go right home. I don’t know what I could have been thinking about, but whatever it was I must have been mighty preoccupied. I woke up to find myself in the Subway Station just getting on a Bowling Green train. That would have taken me to the Battery. I suppose absentmindedly I had set out for Madame Mandilip’s. It gave me such a start that I almost ran out of the station and up to the street. I think I’m acting very stupidly. I always have prided myself on my common sense. I think I must consult Dr. Braile and see whether I’m becoming neurotic. There’s no earthly reason why I shouldn’t go to see Madame Mandilip. She is most interesting and certainly showed she liked me. It was so gracious of her to offer me that lovely doll. She must think me ungrateful and rude. And it would please Di so. When I think of how I’ve been feeling about the mirror it makes me feel as childish as Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass, rather. Mirrors or any other reflecting surfaces make you see queer things sometimes. Probably the heat and the fragrance had a lot to do with it. I really don’t know that Madame Mandilip wasn’t reflected. I was too intent upon looking at myself. It’s too absurd to run away and hide like a child from a witch. Yet that’s precisely what I’m doing. If it weren’t for that girl—but she certainly is a neurotic! I want to go, and I just don’t see why I’m behaving so.

Nov. 10. Well, I’m glad I didn’t persist in that ridiculous idea. Madame Mandilip is wonderful. Of course, there are some queer things I don’t understand, but that’s because she is so different from any one I’ve ever met and because when I get inside her room life becomes so different. When I leave, it’s like going out of some enchanted castle into the prosiest kind of world. Yesterday afternoon I determined I’d go to see her straight from the hospital. The moment I made up my mind I felt as though a cloud had lifted from it. Gayer and happier than I’ve been for a week. When I went in the store the white girl—her name is Laschna—stared at me as though she was going to cry. She said, in the oddest choked voice, “Remember that I tried to save you!”

It seemed so funny that I laughed and laughed. Then Madame Mandilip opened the door, and when I looked at her eyes and heard her voice I knew why I was so light-hearted—it was like coming home after the most awful siege of home-sickness. The lovely room welcomed me. It really did. It’s the only way I can describe it. I have the queer feeling that the room is as alive as Madame Mandilip. That it is a part of her—or rather, a part of the part of her that are her eyes and hands and voice. She didn’t ask me why I had stayed away. She brought out the doll. It is more wonderful than ever. She has still some work to do on it. We sat and talked, and then she said: “I’d like to make a doll of you, my dear.” Those were her exact words, and for just an instant I had a frightened feeling because I remembered my dream and saw myself fluttering inside the mirror and trying to get out. And then I realized it was just her way of speaking, and that she meant she would like to make a doll that looked like me. So I laughed and said, “Of course you can make a doll of me, Madame Mandilip.” I wonder what nationality she is.

She laughed with me, her big eyes bigger than ever and very bright. She brought out some wax and began to model my head. Those beautiful long fingers worked rapidly as though each of them was a little artist in itself. I watched them, fascinated. I began to get sleepy, and sleepier and sleepier. She said, “My dear, I do wish you’d take off your clothes and let me model your whole body. Don’t be shocked. I’m just an old woman.” I didn’t mind at all, and I said sleepily, “Why, of course you can.” And I stood on a little stool and watched the wax taking shape under those white fingers until it had become a small and most perfect copy of me. I knew it was perfect, although I was so sleepy I could hardly see it. I was so sleepy Madame Mandilip had to help me dress, and then I must have gone sound asleep, because I woke up with quite a start to find her patting my hands and saying, “I’m sorry I tired you, child. Stay if you wish. But if you must go, it is growing late.” I looked at my watch and I was still so sleepy I could hardly see it, but I knew it was dreadfully late. Then Madame Mandilip pressed her hands over my eyes and suddenly I was wide awake. She said, “Come tomorrow and take the doll.” I said, “I must pay you what I can afford.” She said, “You’ve paid me in full, my dear, by letting me make a doll of you.” Then we both laughed and I hurried out. The white girl was busy with someone, but I called “au ’voir” to her. Probably she didn’t hear me, for she didn’t answer.

Nov. 11. I have the doll and Diana is crazy about it! How glad I am I didn’t surrender to that silly morbid feeling. Di has never had anything that has given her such happiness. She adores it! Sat again for Madame Mandilip this afternoon for the finishing touches on my own doll. She is a genius. Truly a genius! I wonder more than ever why she is content to run a little shop. She surely could take her place among the greatest of artists. The doll literally is me. She asked if she could cut some of my hair for its head and of course I let her. She tells me this doll is not the real doll she is going to make of me. That will be much larger. This is just the model from which she will work. I told her I thought this was perfect but she said the other would be of less perishable material. Maybe she will give me this one after she is finished with it. I was so anxious to take the baby doll home to Di that I didn’t stay long. I smiled and spoke to Laschna as I went out, and she nodded to me although not very cordially. I wonder if she can be jealous.

Nov. 13. This is the first time I have felt like writing since that dreadful case of Mr. Peters on the morning of the 10th. I had just finished writing about Di’s doll when the hospital called to say they wanted me on duty that night. Of course, I said I would come. Oh, but I wish I hadn’t. I’ll never forget that dreadful death. Never! I don’t want to write or think about it. When I came home that morning I could not sleep, and I tossed and tossed trying to get his face out of my mind. I thought I had schooled myself too well to be affected by any patient. But there was something—Then I thought that if there was anyone who could help me to forget, it would be Madame Mandilip. So about two o’clock I went down to see her. Madame was in the store with Laschna and seemed surprised to see me so early. And not so pleased as usual, or so I thought but perhaps it was my nervousness. The moment I entered the lovely room I began to feel better. Madame had been doing something with wire on the table but I couldn’t see what because she made me sit in a big comfortable chair, saying, “You look tired, child. Sit here and rest until I’m finished and here’s an old picture book that will keep you interested.” She gave me a queer old book, long and narrow and it must have been very old because it was on vellum or something and the pictures and their colorings were like some of those books that have come down from the Middle Ages, the kind the old monks used to paint. They were all scenes in forests or gardens and the flowers and trees were the queerest! There were no people or anything in them but you had the strangest feeling that if you had just a little better eyes you could see people or something behind them. I mean it was as though they were hiding behind the trees and flowers or among them and looking out at you. I don’t know how long I studied the pictures, trying and trying to see those hidden folk, but at last Madame called me. I went to the table with the book still in my hand. She said, “That’s for the doll I am making of you. Take it up and see how cleverly it is done.” And she pointed to something made of wire on the table. I reached out to pick it up and then suddenly I saw that it was a skeleton. It was little, like a child’s skeleton and all at once the face of Mr. Peters flashed in my mind and I screamed in a moment of perfectly crazy panic and threw out my hands. The book flew out of my hand and dropped on the little wire skeleton and there was a sharp twang and the skeleton seemed to jump. I recovered myself immediately and I saw that the end of the wire had come loose and had cut the binding of the book and was still stuck in it. For a moment Madame was dreadfully angry. She caught my arm and squeezed it so it hurt and her eyes were furious and she said in the strangest voice, “Why did you do that? Answer me. Why?” And she actually shook me. I don’t blame her now, although then she really did frighten me, because she must have thought I did it deliberately. Then she saw how I was trembling and her eyes and voice became gentle and she said, “Something is troubling you, my dear. Tell me and perhaps I can help you.” She made me lie down upon a divan and sat beside me and stroked my hair and forehead and though I never discuss our cases to others I found myself pouring out the whole story of the Peters case. She asked who was the man who had brought him to the hospital and I said Dr. Lowell called him Ricori and I supposed he was the notorious gangster. Her hands made me feel quiet and nice and sleepy and I told her about Dr. Lowell and how great a doctor he is and how terrible I am in love in secret with Dr. B-. I’m sorry I told her about the case. Never have I done such a thing. But I was so shaken and once I had begun I seemed to have to tell her everything. Everything in my mind was so distorted that once when I had lifted my head to look at her I actually thought she was gloating. That shows how little I was like myself! After I had finished she told me to lie there and sleep and she would waken me when I wished. So I said I must go at four. I went right to sleep and woke up feeling rested and fine. When I went out the little skeleton and book were still on the table, and I said I was so sorry about the book. She said, “Better the book than your hand, my dear. The wire might have snapped loose while you were handling it and given you a nasty cut.” She wants me to bring down my nurse’s dress so she can make a little one like it for the new doll.

Nov. 14. I wish I’d never gone to Madame Mandilip’s. I wouldn’t have had my foot scalded. But that’s not the real reason I’m sorry. I couldn’t put it in words if I tried. But I do wish I hadn’t. I took the nurse’s costume down to her this afternoon. She made a little model of it very quickly. She was gay and sang me some of the most haunting little songs. I couldn’t understand the words. She laughed when I asked her what the language was and said, “The language of the people who peeped at you from the pictures of the book, my dear.” That was a strange thing to say. How did she know I thought there were people hidden in the pictures? I do wish I’d never gone there. She brewed some tea and poured cups for us. And then just as she was handing me mine her elbow struck the teapot and overturned it and the scalding tea poured right down over my right foot. It pained atrociously. She took off the shoe and stripped off the stocking and spread salve of some sort over the scald. She said it would take out the pain and heal it immediately. It did stop the pain, and when I came home I could hardly believe my eyes. Job wouldn’t believe it had really been scalded. Madame Mandilip was terribly distressed about it. At least she seemed to be. I wonder why she didn’t go to the door with me as usual. She didn’t. She stayed in the room. The white girl, Laschna, was close to the door when I went out into the store. She looked at the bandage on my foot and I told her it had been scalded but Madame had dressed it. She didn’t even say she was sorry. As I went out I looked at her and said a bit angrily, “Goodbye.” Her eyes filled with tears and she looked at me in the strangest way and shook her head and said “Au ’voir!” I looked at her again as I shut the door and the tears were rolling down her cheeks. I wonder—why? (I wish I had never gone to Madame Mandilip!!!!)

Nov. 15. Foot all healed. I haven’t the slightest desire to return to Madame Mandilip’s. I shall never go there again. I wish I could destroy that doll she gave me for Di. But it would break the child’s heart.

Nov. 20. Still no desire to see her. I find I’m forgetting all about her. The only time I think of her is when I see Di’s doll. I’m glad! So glad I want to dance and sing. I’ll never see her again.

But dear God how I wish I never had seen her! And still I don’t know why.

This was the last reference to Madame Mandilip in Nurse Walters’ diary. She died on the morning of November 25.

CHAPTER IX

END OF THE PETERS DOLL

Braile had been watching me closely. I met his questioning gaze, and tried to conceal the perturbation which the diary had aroused. I said:

“I never knew Walters had so imaginative a mind.”

He flushed and asked angrily: “You think she was fictionizing?”

“Not fictionizing, exactly. Observing a series of ordinary occurrences through the glamour of an active imagination would be a better way of putting it.”

He said, incredulously, “You don’t realize that what she has written is an authentic, even though unconscious, description of an amazing piece of hypnotism?”

“The possibility did occur to me,” I answered tartly. “But I find no actual evidence to support it. I do perceive, however, that Walters was not so well balanced as I had supposed her. I do find evidence that she was surprisingly emotional; that in at least one of her visits to this Madame Mandilip she was plainly overwrought and in an extreme state of nervous instability. I refer to her most indiscreet discussion of the Peters case, after she had been warned by me, you will remember, to say nothing of it to anyone whatsoever.”

“I remember it so well,” he said, “that when I came to that part of the diary I had no further doubt of the hypnotism. Nevertheless, go on.”

“In considering two possible causes for any action, it is desirable to accept the more reasonable,” I said, dryly. “Consider the actual facts, Braile. Walters lays stress upon the odd conduct and warnings of the girl. She admits the girl is a neurotic. Well, the conduct she describes is exactly what we would expect from a neurotic. Walters is attracted by the dolls and goes in to price them, as anyone would. She is acting under no compulsion. She meets a woman whose physical characteristics stimulate her imagination—and arouse her emotionalism. She confides in her. This woman, evidently also of the emotional type, likes her and makes her a present of a doll. The woman is an artist; she sees in Walters a desirable model. She asks her to pose—still no compulsion and a natural request—and Walters does pose for her. The woman has her technique, like all artists, and part of it is to make skeletons for the framework of her dolls. A natural and intelligent procedure. The sight of the skeleton suggests death to Walters, and the suggestion of death brings up the image of Peters which has been powerfully impressed upon her imagination. She becomes momentarily hysterical—again evidence of her overwrought condition. She takes tea with the doll-maker and is accidentally scalded. Naturally this arouses the solicitude of her hostess and she dresses the scald with some unguent in whose efficacy she believes. And that is all. Where in this entirely commonplace sequence of events is there evidence that Walters was hypnotized? Finally, assuming that she was hypnotized, what evidence is there of motive?”

“She herself gave it,” he said, “‘to make a doll of you, my dear!’”

I had almost convinced myself by my argument, and this remark exasperated me.

“I suppose,” I said, “you want me to believe that once lured into the shop, Walters was impelled by occult arts to return until this Madame Mandilip’s devilish purpose was accomplished. That the compassionate shop-girl tried to save her from what the old melodramas called a fate worse than death—although not precisely the fate they meant. That the doll she was to be given for her niece was the bait on the hook of a sorceress. That it was necessary she be wounded so the witch’s salve could be applied. That it was the salve which carried the unknown death. That the first trap failing, the accident of the tea-kettle was contrived and was successful. And that now Walters’ soul is fluttering inside the witch’s mirror, just as she had dreamed. And all this, my dear Braile, is the most outrageous superstition!”

“Ah!” he said obliquely. “So those possibilities did occur to you after all? Your mind is not so fossilized as a few moments ago I supposed.”

I became still more exasperated.

“It is your theory that from the moment Walters entered the store, every occurrence she has narrated was designed to give this Madame Mandilip possession of her soul, a design that was consummated by Walters’ death?”

He hesitated, and then said: “In essence—yes.”

“A soul!” I mused, sardonically. “But I have never seen a soul. I know of no one whose evidence I would credit who has seen a soul. What is a soul—if it exists? It is ponderable? Material? If your theory is correct it must be. How could one gain possession of something which is both imponderables and nonmaterial? How would one know one had it if it could not be seen nor weighed, felt nor measured, nor heard? If not material, how could it be constrained, directed, confined? As you suggest has been done with Walters’ soul by this doll-maker. If material, then where does it reside in the body? Within the brain? I have operated upon hundreds and never yet have I opened any secret chamber housing this mysterious occupant. Little cells, far more complicated in their workings than any machinery ever devised, changing their possessor’s mentality, moods, reason, emotion, personality—according to whether the little cells are functioning well or ill. These I have found, Braile—but never a soul. Surgeons have thoroughly explored the balance of the body. They, too, have found no secret temple within it. Show me a soul, Braile, and I’ll believe in Madame Mandilip.”

He studied me in silence for a little, then nodded.

“Now I understand. It’s hit you pretty hard, too, hasn’t it? You’re doing a little beating of your own against the mirror, aren’t you? Well, I’ve had a struggle to thrust aside what I’ve been taught is reality and to admit there may be something else just as real. This matter, Lowell, is extra-medical, outside the science we know. Until we admit that, we’ll get nowhere. There are still two points I’d like to take up. Peters and the Darnley woman died the same kind of death. Ricori finds that they both had dealings with a Madame Mandilip—or so we can assume. He visits her and narrowly escapes death. Harriet visits her, and dies as Darnley and Peters did. Reasonably, therefore, doesn’t all this point to Madame Mandilip as a possible source of the evil that overtook all four?”

“Certainly,” I answered.

“Then it must follow that there could have been real cause for the fear and forebodings of Harriet. That there could exist a cause other than emotionalism and too much imagination—even though Harriet were unaware of these circumstances.”

Too late I realized the dilemma into which my admission had put me, but I could answer only in the affirmative.

“The second point is her loss of all desire to return to the doll-maker after the teapot incident. Did that strike you as curious?”

“No. If she were emotionally unstable, the shock would automatically set itself up as an inhibition, a subconscious barrier. Unless they are masochists, such types do not like to return to the scene of an unpleasant experience.”

“Did you notice her remark that after the scalding, the woman did not accompany her to the door of the store? And that it was the first time she had neglected to do so?”

“Not particularly. Why?”

“This. If the application of the salve constituted the final act, and thereafter death became inevitable, it might be highly embarrassing to Madame Mandilip to have her victim going in and out of her shop during the time it took the poison to kill. The seizure might even take place there, and lead to dangerous questions. The clever thing, therefore, would be to cause the unsuspecting sacrifice to lose all interest in her; indeed, feel a repulsion against her, or even perhaps forget her. This could be easily accomplished by post-hypnotic suggestion. And Madame Mandilip had every opportunity for it. Would this not explain Harriet’s distaste as logically as imagination—or emotionalism?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“And so,” he said, “we have the woman’s failure to go to the door with Harriet that day explained. Her plot has succeeded. It is all over. And she has planted her suggestion. No need now for any further contact with Harriet. She lets her go, unaccompanied. Significant symbolism of finality!”

He sat thinking.

“No need to meet Harriet again,” he half-whispered, “till after death!”

I said, startled: “What do you mean by that?”

“Never mind,” he answered.

He crossed to the charred spot upon the floor and picked up the heat-blasted crystals. They were about twice the size of olive pits and apparently of some composite. He walked to the table and looked down upon the grotesque figure with its skeleton ribs.

“Suppose the heat melted it?” he asked, and reached over to lift the skeleton. It held fast, and he gave it a sharp tug. There was a shrill twanging sound, and he dropped it with a startled oath. The thing fell to the floor. It writhed, the single wire of which it was made uncoiling.

Uncoiling, it glided over the floor like a serpent and came to rest, quivering.

We looked from it to the table.

The substance that had resembled a sprawling, flattened, headless body was gone. In its place was a film of fine gray dust which swirled and eddied for a moment in some unfelt draft—and then, too, was gone.

CHAPTER X

NURSE’S CAP AND WITCH’S LADDER

“She knows how to get rid of the evidence!”

Braile laughed—but there was no mirth in his laughter. I said nothing. It was the same thought I had held of McCann when the doll’s head had vanished. But McCann could not be suspected of this. Evading any further discussion of the matter, we went to the Annex to see Ricori.

There were two new guards on watch at his door. They arose politely and spoke to us pleasantly. We entered softly. Ricori had slipped out of the drug into a natural sleep. He was breathing easily, peacefully, in deep and healing slumber.

His room was a quiet one at the rear, overlooking a little enclosed garden. Both my houses are old-fashioned, dating back to a more peaceful New York; sturdy vines of Virginia creepers climb up them both at front and back. I cautioned the nurse to maintain utmost quiet, arranging her light so that it would cast only the slightest gleam upon Ricori. Going out, I similarly cautioned the guards, telling them that their chief’s speedy recovery might depend upon silence.

It was now after six. I asked Braile to stay for dinner, and afterward to drop in on my patients at the hospital and to call me up if he thought it worthwhile. I wanted to stay at home and await Ricori’s awakening, should it occur.

We had almost finished dinner when the telephone rang. Braile answered.

“McCann,” he said. I went to the instrument.

“Hello, McCann. This is Dr. Lowell.”

“How’s the boss?”

“Better, I’m expecting him to awaken any moment and to be able to talk,” I answered, and listened intently to catch whatever reaction he might betray to this news.

“That’s great, Doc!” I could detect nothing but deepest satisfaction in his tones. “Listen, Doc, I seen Mollie an’ I got some news. Dropped round on her right after I left you. Found Gilmore—that’s her husband—home, an’ that gave me a break. Said I’d come in to ask her how she’d like a little ride. She was tickled an’ we left Gil home with the kid—”

“Does she know of Peters’ death?” I interrupted.

“Nope. An’ I didn’t tell her. Now listen. I told you Horty—What? Why Missus Darnley, Jim Wilson’s gal. Yeah. Let me talk, will you? I told you Horty was nuts on Mollie’s kid. Early last month Horty comes in with a swell doll for the kid. Also she’s nursing a sore hand she says she gets at the same place she got the doll. The woman she gets the doll from gave it to her, she tells Mollie—What? No, gave her the doll, not the hand. Say, Doc, ain’t I speaking clear? Yeah, she gets her hand hurt where she got the doll. That’s what I said. The woman fixes it up for her. She gives her the doll for nothing, Horty tells Mollie, because she thought Horty was so pretty an’ for posing for her. Yeah, posing for her, making a statue of her or something. That makes a hit with Horty because she don’t hate herself an’ she thinks this doll woman a lallapaloozer. Yeah, a lallapaloozer, a corker! Yeah.

“About a week later Tom—that’s Peters—shows up while Horty’s there an’ sees the doll. Tom’s a mite jealous of Horty with the kid an’ asks her where she got it. She tells him a Madame Mandilip, an’ where, an’ Tom he says as this is a gal-doll she needs company, so he’ll go an’ get a boy-doll. About a week after this Tom turns up with a boy-doll the lick-an’-split of Horty’s. Mollie asks him if he pays as much for it as Horty. They ain’t told him about Horty not paying nothing for it or posing. Mollie says Tom looks sort of sheepish but all he says is, well, he ain’t gone broke on it. She’s going to kid him by asking if the doll woman thinks he’s so pretty she wants him to pose, but the kid sets up a whoop about the boy-doll an’ she forgets it. Tom don’t show up again till about the first of this month. He’s got a bandage on his hand an’ Mollie, kidding, asks him if he got it where he got the doll. He looks surprised an’ says ‘yes, but how the hell did you know that?’ Yeah-yeah, that’s what she says he told her. What’s that? Did the Mandilip woman bandage it for him? How the hell—I don’t know. I guess so, maybe. Mollie didn’t say an’ I didn’t ask. Listen, Doc, I told you Mollie’s no dummy. What I’m telling you took me two hours to get. Talking ’bout this, talking ’bout that an’ coming back casual like to what I’m trying to find out. I’m afraid to ask too many questions. What? Oh, that’s all right, Doc. No offense. Yeah, I think it pretty funny myself. But like I’m telling you I’m afraid to go too far. Mollie’s too wise.

“Well, when Ricori comes up yesterday he uses the same tactics as me, I guess. Anyway, he admires the dolls an’ asks her where she gets ’em an’ how much they cost an’ so on. Remember, I told you I stay out in the car while he’s there. It’s after that he goes home an’ does the telephoning an’ then beats it to the Mandilip hag. Yeah, that’s all. Does it mean anything? Yeah? All right then.”

He was silent for a moment or two, but I had not heard the click of the receiver. I asked:

“Are you there, McCann?”

“Yeah. I was just thinking.” His voice held a wistful note. “I’d sure like to be with you when the boss comes to. But I’d best go down an’ see how the hands are getting along with them two Mandilip cows. Maybe I’ll call you up if it ain’t too late. G’by.”

I walked slowly back to Braile, trying to marshal my disjointed thoughts. I repeated McCann’s end of the conversation to him exactly. He did not interrupt me. When I had finished he said quietly:

“Hortense Darnley goes to the Mandilip woman, is given a doll, is asked to pose, is wounded there, is treated there. And dies. Peters goes to the Mandilip woman, gets a doll, is wounded there, is presumably treated there. And dies like Hortense. You see a doll for which, apparently, he has posed. Harriet goes through the same routine. And dies like Hortense and Peters. Now what?”

Suddenly I felt rather old and tired. It is not precisely stimulating to see crumbling what one has long believed to be a fairly well ordered world of recognized cause and effect. I said wearily:

“I don’t know.”

He arose, and patted my shoulder.

“Get some sleep. The nurse will call you if Ricori wakes. We’ll get to the bottom of this thing.”

“Even if we fall to it,” I said, and smiled.

“Even if we have to fall to it,” he repeated, and did not smile.

After Braile had gone I sat for long, thinking. Then, determined to dismiss my thoughts, I tried to read. I was too restless, and soon gave it up. Like the room in which Ricori lay, my study is at the rear, looking down upon the little garden. I walked to the window and stared out, unseeingly. More vivid than ever was that feeling of standing before a blank door which it was vitally important to open. I turned back into the study and was surprised to find it was close to ten o’clock. I dimmed my light and lay down upon the comfortable couch. Almost immediately I fell asleep.

I awoke from that sleep with a start, as though someone had spoken in my ear. I sat up, listening. There was utter silence around me. And suddenly I was aware that it was a strange silence, unfamiliar and oppressive. A thick, dead silence that filled the study and through which no sound from outside could penetrate. I jumped to my feet and turned on the lights, full. The silence retreated, seemed to pour out of the room like something tangible. But slowly. Now I could hear the ticking of my clock—ticking out abruptly, as though a silencing cover had been whisked from it. I shook my head impatiently, and walked to the window. I leaned out to breathe the cool night air. I leaned out still more, so that I could see the window of Ricori’s room, resting my hand on the trunk of the vine. I felt a tremor along it as though someone were gently shaking it—or as though some small animal were climbing it—

The window of Ricori’s room broke into a square of light. Behind me I heard the shrilling of the Annex alarm bell which meant the urgent need of haste. I raced out of the study, and up the stairs and over.

As I ran into the corridor I saw that the guards were not at the door. The door was open. I stood stock-still on its threshold, incredulous—

One guard crouched beside the window, automatic in hand. The other knelt beside a body on the floor, his pistol pointed toward me. At her table sat the nurse, head bent upon her breast—unconscious or asleep. The bed was empty. The body on the floor was Ricori!

The guard lowered his gun. I dropped at Ricori’s side. He was lying face down, stretched out a few feet from the bed. I turned him over. His face had the pallor of death, but his heart was beating.

“Help me lift him to the bed,” I said to the guard. “Then shut that door.”

He did so, silently. The man at the window asked from the side of his mouth, never relaxing his watch outward:

“Boss dead?”

“Not quite,” I answered, then swore as I seldom do—“What the hell kind of guards are you?”

The man who had shut the door gave a mirthless chuckle.

“There’s more’n you goin’ to ask that, Doc.”

I gave a glance at the nurse. She still sat huddled in the limp attitude of unconsciousness or deep sleep. I stripped Ricori of his pajamas and went over his body. There was no mark upon him. I sent for adrenalin, gave him an injection and went over to the nurse, and shook her. She did not awaken. I raised her eyelids. The pupils of her eyes were contracted. I flashed a light in them, without response. Her pulse and respiration were slow, but not dangerously so. I let her be for a moment and turned to the guards.

“What happened?”

They looked at each other uneasily. The guard at the window waved his hand as though bidding the other do the talking. This guard said:

“We’re sitting out there. All at once the house gets damned still. I says to Jack there, ‘Sounds like they put a silencer on the dump.’ He says, ‘Yeah.’ We sit listening. Then all at once we hear a thump inside here. Like somebody falling out of bed. We crash the door. There’s the boss like you seen him on the floor. There’s the nurse asleep like you see her. We glim the alarm and pull it. Then we wait for somebody to come. That’s all, ain’t it, Jack?”

“Yeah,” answered the guard at the window, tonelessly. “Yeah, I guess that’s all.”

I looked at him, suspiciously.

“You guess that’s all? What do you mean—you guess?”

Again they looked at each other.

“Better come clean, Bill,” said the guard at the window.

“Hell, he won’t believe it,” said the other.

“And nobody else. Anyway, tell him.”

The guard Bill said:

“When we crash the door we seen something like a couple of cats fighting there beside the window. The boss is lying on the floor. We had our guns out but was afraid to shoot for what you told us. Then we heard a funny noise outside like somebody blowing a flute. The two things broke loose and jumped up on the window sill, and out. We jumped to the window. And we didn’t see nothing.”

“You saw the things at the window. What did they look like then?” I asked.

“You tell him, Jack.”

“Dolls!”

A shiver went down my back. It was the answer I had expected—and dreaded. Out the window! I recalled the tremor of the vine when I gripped it! The guard who had closed the door looked at me, and I saw his jaw drop.

“Jesus, Jack!” he gasped. “He believes it!”

I forced myself to speak.

“What kind of dolls?”

The guard at the window answered, more confidently.

“One we couldn’t see well. The other looked like one of your nurses if she’d shrunk to about two feet!”

One of my nurses…Walters…I felt a wave of weakness and sank down on the edge of Ricori’s bed.

Something white on the floor at the head of it caught my eye. I stared at it stupidly, then leaned and picked it up.

It was a nurse’s cap, a little copy of those my nurses wear. It was about large enough to fit the head of a two-foot doll…

There was something else where it had been. I picked that up.

It was a knotted cord of hair pale ashen hair with nine curious knots spaced at irregular intervals along it…

The guard named Bill stood looking down at me anxiously. He asked:

“Want me to call any of your people, Doc?”

“Try to get hold of McCann,” I bade him; then spoke to the other guard: “Close the windows and fasten them and pull down the curtains. Then lock the door.”

Bill began to telephone. Stuffing the cap and knotted cord in my pocket, I walked over to the nurse. She was rapidly recovering and in a minute or two I had her awake. At first her eyes dwelt on me, puzzled; took in the lighted room and the two men, and the puzzlement changed to alarm. She sprang to her feet.

“I didn’t see you come in! Did I fall asleep…what’s happened?…” Her hand went to her throat.

“I’m hoping you can tell us,” I said, gently.

She stared at me uncomprehendingly. She said, confusedly:

“I don’t know…it became terribly still…I…thought I saw something moving at the window…then there was a queer fragrance and then I looked up to see you bending over me.”

I asked: “Can you remember anything of what you saw at the window? The least detail—the least impression. Please try.”

She answered, hesitantly: “There was something white…I thought someone…something…was watching me…then came the fragrance, like flowers…that’s all.”

Bill hung up the telephone: “All right, Doc. They’re after McCann. Now what?”

“Miss Butler,” I turned to the nurse. “I’m going to relieve you for the balance of the night. Go to bed. And I want you to sleep. I prescribe—” I told her what.

“You’re not angry—you don’t think I’ve been careless—”

“No, to both.” I smiled and patted her shoulder. “The case has taken an unexpected turn, that’s all. Now don’t ask any more questions.”

I walked with her to the door, opened it.

“Do exactly as I say.”

I closed and locked the door behind her.

I sat beside Ricori. The shock that he had experienced—whatever it might have been—should either cure or kill, I thought grimly. As I watched him, a tremor went through his body. Slowly an arm began to lift, fist clenched. His lips moved. He spoke, in Italian and so swiftly that I could get no word. His arm fell back. I stood up from the bed. The paralysis had gone. He could move and speak. But would he be able to do so when consciousness assumed sway? I left this for the next few hours to decide I could do nothing else.

“Now listen to me carefully,” I said to the two guards. “No matter how strange what I am going to say will seem, you must obey me in every detail! Ricori’s life depends upon your doing so. I want one of you to sit close beside me at the table here. I want the other to sit beside Ricori, at the head or the bed and between him and me. If I am asleep and he should awaken, arouse me. If you see any change in his condition, immediately awaken me. Is that clear?”

They said: “Okay.”

“Very well. Now here is the most important thing of all. You must watch me even more closely. Whichever of you sits beside me must not take his eyes off me. If I should go to your chief it would be to do one of three things only—listen to his heart and breathing—lift his eyelids—take his temperature. I mean, of course, if he should be as he now is. If I seem to awaken and attempt to do anything other than these three—stop me. If I resist, make me helpless—tie me up and gag me—no, don’t gag me—listen to me and remember what I say. Then telephone to Dr. Braile—here is his number.”

I wrote, and passed it to them.

“Don’t damage me any more than you can help,” I said, and laughed.

They stared at each other, plainly disconcerted. “If you say so, Doc—” began the guard Bill, doubtfully.

“I do say so. Do not hesitate. If you should be wrong, I’ll not hold it against you.”

“The Doc knows what he’s about, Bill,” said the guard Jack.

“Okay then,” said Bill.

I turned out all the lights except that beside the nurse’s table. I stretched myself in her chair and adjusted the lamp so my face could be plainly seen. That little white cap I had picked from the floor had shaken me—damnably! I drew it out and placed it in a drawer. The guard Jack took his station beside Ricori. Bill drew up a chair, and sat facing me. I thrust my hand into my pocket and clutched the knotted cord, closed my eyes, emptied my mind of all thought, and relaxed. In abandoning, at least temporarily, my conception of a sane universe I had determined to give that of Madame Mandilip’s every chance to operate.

Faintly, I heard a clock strike one. I slept.

Somewhere a vast wind was roaring. It circled and swept down upon me. It bore me away. I knew that I had no body, that indeed I had no form. Yet I was. A formless sentience whirling in that vast wind. It carried me into infinite distance. Bodiless, intangible as I knew myself to be, yet it poured into me an unearthly vitality. I roared with the wind in unhuman jubilance. The vast wind circled and raced me back from immeasurable space…

I seemed to awaken, that pulse of strange jubilance still surging through me… Ah! There was what I must destroy…there on the bed…must kill so that this pulse of jubilance would not cease…must kill so that the vast wind would sweep me up again and away and feed me with its life…but careful…careful…there—there in the throat just under the ear…there is where I must plunge it…then off with the wind again…there where the pulse beats…what is holding me back?…caution…caution, “I am going to take his temperature”…that’s it, careful, “I am going to take his temperature.”…Now—one quick spring, then into his throat where the pulse beats… “Not with that you don’t!” … Who said that?…still holding me…rage, consuming and ruthless blackness and the sound of a vast wind roaring away and away…

I heard a voice: “Slap him again, Bill, but not so hard. He’s coming around.” I felt a stinging blow on my face. The dancing mists cleared from before my eyes. I was standing halfway between the nurse’s table and Ricori’s bed. The guard Jack held my arms pinioned to my sides. The guard Bill’s hand was still raised. There was something clenched tightly in my own hand. I looked down. It was a strong scalpel, razor-edged!

I dropped the scalpel. I said, quietly: “It’s all right now, you can release me.”

The guard Bill said nothing. His comrade did not loose his grip. I twisted my head and I saw that both their faces were sallow white. I said:

“It was what I had expected. It was why I instructed you. It is over. You can keep your guns on me if you like.”

The guard who held me freed my arms. I touched my cheek gingerly. I said mildly:

“You must have hit me rather hard, Bill.”

He said: “If you could a seen your face, Doc, you’d wonder I didn’t smash it.”

I nodded, clearly sensible now of the demonic quality of that rage, I asked:

“What did I do?”

The guard Bill said: “You wake up and set there for a minute staring at the chief. Then you take something out of that drawer and get up. You say you’re going to take his temperature. You’re half to him before we see what you got. I shout, ‘Not with that you don’t!’ Jack grabs you. Then you went crazy. And I had to slam you. That’s all.”

I nodded again. I took out of my pocket the knotcord of woman’s pale hair, held it over a dish and touched a match to it. It began to burn, writhing like a tiny snake as it did so, the complex knots untying as the flame touched them. I dropped the last inch of it upon the plate and watched it turn to ash.

“I think there’ll be no more trouble tonight,” I said. “But keep up your watch just as before.”

I dropped back into the chair and closed my eyes…

Well, Braile had not shown me a soul, but—I believed in Madame Mandilip.

CHAPTER XI

A DOLL KILLS

The balance of the night I slept soundly and dreamlessly. I awakened at my usual hour of seven. The guards were alert. I asked if anything had been heard from McCann, and they answered no. I wondered a little at that, but they did not seem to think it out of the ordinary. Their reliefs were soon due, and I cautioned them to speak to no one but McCann about the occurrences of the night, reminding them that no one would be likely to believe them if they did. They assured me, earnestly, that they would be silent. I told them that I wanted the guards to remain within the room thereafter, as long as they were necessary.

Examining Ricori, I found him sleeping deeply and naturally. In all ways his condition was most satisfactory. I concluded that the second shock, as sometimes happens, had counteracted the lingering effects of the initial one. When he awakened, he would be able to speak and move. I gave this reassuring news to the guards. I could see that they were bursting with questions. I gave them no encouragement to ask them.

At eight, my day nurse for Ricori appeared, plainly much surprised to have found Butler sleeping and to find me taking her place. I made no explanation, simply telling her that the guards would now be stationed within the room instead of outside the door.

At eight-thirty, Braile dropped in on me for breakfast, and to report. I let him finish before I apprised him of what had happened. I said nothing, however, of the nurse’s little cap, nor of my own experience.

I assumed this reticence for well-considered reasons. One, Braile would accept in its entirety the appalling deduction from the cap’s presence. I strongly suspected that he had been in love with Walters, and that I would be unable to restrain him from visiting the doll-maker. Usually hard-headed, he was in this matter far too suggestible. It would be dangerous for him, and his observations would be worthless to me. Second, if he knew of my own experience, he would without doubt refuse to let me out of his sight. Third, either of these contingencies would defeat my own purpose, which was to interview Madame Mandilip entirely alone—with the exception of McCann to keep watch outside the shop.

What would come of that meeting I could not forecast. But, obviously, it was the only way to retain my self-respect. To admit that what had occurred was witchcraft, sorcery, supernatural—was to surrender to superstition. Nothing can be supernatural. If anything exists, it must exist in obedience to natural laws. Material bodies must obey material laws. We may not know those laws—but they exist nevertheless. If Madame Mandilip possessed knowledge of an unknown science, it behooved me as an exemplar of known science, to find out what I could about the other. Especially as I had recently responded so thoroughly to it. That I had been able to outguess her in her technique—if it had been that, and not a self-induced illusion—gave me a pleasant feeling of confidence. At any rate, meet her I must.

It happened to be one of my days for consultation, so I could not get away until after two. I asked Braile to take charge of matters after that, for a few hours.

Close to ten the nurse telephoned that Ricori was awake, that he was able to speak and had been asking for me.

He smiled at me as I entered the room. As I leaned over and took his wrist he said:

“I think you have saved more than my life, Dr. Lowell! Ricori thanks you. He will never forget!”

A bit florid, but thoroughly in character. It showed that his mind was functioning normally. I was relieved.

“We’ll have you up in a jiffy.” I patted his hand.

He whispered: “Have there been any more deaths?”

I had been wondering whether he had retained any recollection of the affair of the night. I answered:

“No. But you have lost much strength since McCann brought you here. I don’t want you to do much talking today.” I added, casually: “No, nothing has happened. Oh, yes—you fell out of bed this morning. Do you remember?”

He glanced at the guards and then back at me. He said:

“I am weak. Very weak. You must make me strong quickly.”

“We’ll have you sitting up in two days, Ricori.”

“In less than two days I must be up and out. There is a thing I must do. It cannot wait.”

I did not want him to become excited. I abandoned any intention of asking what had happened in the car. I said, incisively:

“That will depend entirely upon you. You must not excite yourself. You must do as I tell you. I am going to leave you now, to give orders for your nutrition. Also, I want your guards to remain in this room.”

He said: “And still you tell me—nothing has happened.”

“I don’t intend to have anything happen.” I leaned over him and whispered: “McCann has guards around the Mandilip woman. She cannot run away.”

He said: “But her servitors are more efficient than mine, Dr. Lowell!”

I looked at him sharply. His eyes were inscrutable. I went back to my office, deep in thought. What did Ricori know?

At eleven o’clock McCann called me on the telephone. I was so glad to hear from him that I was angry.

“Where on earth have you been—” I began.

“Listen, Doc. I’m at Mollie’s—Peters’ sister,” he interrupted. “Come here quick.”

The peremptory demand added to my irritation. “Not now,” I answered. “These are my office hours. I will not be free until two.”

“Can’t you break away? Something’s happened. I don’t know what to do!” There was desperation in his voice.

“What has happened?” I asked.

“I can’t tell you over—” His voice steadied, grew gentle; I heard him say, “Be quiet, Mollie. It can’t do no good!” Then to me—“Well, come as soon as you can, Doc. I’ll wait. Take the address.” Then when he had given it to me, I heard him again speaking to another—“Quit it, Mollie! I ain’t going to leave you.”

He hung up, abruptly. I went back to my chair, troubled. He had not asked me about Ricori. That in itself was disquieting. Mollie? Peters’ sister, of course! Was it that she had learned of her brother’s death, and suffered collapse? I recalled that Ricori had said she was soon to be a mother. No, I felt that McCann’s panic had been due to something more than that. I became more and more uneasy. I looked over my appointments. There were no important ones. Coming to sudden determination, I told my secretary to call up and postpone them. I ordered my car, and set out for the address McCann had given me.

McCann met me at the door of the apartment. His face was drawn and his eyes haunted. He drew me within without a word, and led me through the hall. I passed an open door and glimpsed a woman with a sobbing child in her arms. He took me into a bedroom and pointed to the bed.

There was a man lying on it, covers pulled up to his chin. I went over to him, looked down upon him, touched him. The man was dead. He had been dead for hours. McCann said:

“Mollie’s husband. Look him over like you done the boss.”

I had a curiously unpleasant sense of being turned on a potter’s wheel by some inexorable hand—from Peters, to Walters, to Ricori, to the body before me. Would the wheel stop there?

I stripped the dead man. I took from my bag a magnifying glass and probes. I went over the body inch by inch, beginning at the region of the heart. Nothing there nothing anywhere…I turned the body over…

At once, at the base of the skull, I saw a minute puncture.

I took a fine probe and inserted it. The probe—and again I had that feeling of infinite repetition—slipped into the puncture. I manipulated it, gently.

Something like a long thin needle had been thrust into that vital spot just where the spinal cord connects with the brain. By accident, or perhaps because the needle had been twisted savagely to tear the nerve paths, there had been paralysis of respiration and almost instant death.

I withdrew the probe and turned to McCann.

“This man has been murdered,” I said. “Killed by the same kind of weapon with which Ricori was attacked. But whoever did it made a better job. He’ll never come to life again as Ricori did.”

“Yeah?” said McCann, quietly. “An’ me an’ Paul was the only ones with Ricori when it happened. An’ the only ones here with this man, Doc, was his wife an’ baby! Now what’re you going to do about that? Say those two put him on the spot—like you thought we done the boss?”

I said: “What do you know about this, McCann? And how did you come to be here so—opportunely?”

He answered, patiently: “I wasn’t here when he was killed—if that’s what you’re getting at. If you want to know the time, it was two o’clock. Mollie got me on the ’phone about an hour ago an’ I come straight up.”

“She had better luck than I had,” I said, dryly. “Ricori’s people have been trying to get hold of you since one o’clock last night.”

“I know. But I didn’t know it till just before Mollie called me. I was on my way to see you. An’ if you want to know what I was doing all night, I’ll tell you. I was out on the boss’s business, an’ yours. For one thing trying to find out where that hell-cat niece keeps her coupe. I found out—too late.”

“But the men who were supposed to be watching—”

“Listen, Doc, won’t you talk to Mollie now?” he interrupted me, “I’m afraid for her. It’s only what I told her about you an’ that you was coming that’s kept her up.”

“Take me to her,” I said, abruptly.

We went into the room where I had seen the woman and the sobbing child. The woman was not more than twenty-seven or -eight, I judged, and in ordinary circumstances would have been unusually attractive. Now her face was drawn and bloodless, in her eyes horror, and a fear on the very borderline of madness. She stared at me, vacantly; she kept rubbing her lips with the tips of her forefingers, staring at me with those eyes out of which looked a mind emptied of everything but fear and grief. The child, a girl of no more than four, kept up her incessant sobbing. McCann shook the woman by the shoulder.

“Snap out of it, Mollie,” he said, roughly, but pityingly, too. “Here’s the Doc.”

The woman became aware of me, abruptly. She looked at me steadily for slow moments, then asked, less like one questioning than one relinquishing a last thin thread of hope:

“He is dead?”

She read the answer in my face. She cried:

“Oh, Johnnie—Johnnie Boy! Dead!”

She took the child up in her arms. She said to it, almost tranquilly: “Johnnie Boy has gone away, darling. Daddy has had to go away. Don’t cry, darling, we’ll soon see him!”

I wished she would break down, weep; but that deep fear which never left her eyes was too strong; it blocked all normal outlets of sorrow. Not much longer, I realized, could her mind stand up under that tension.

“McCann,” I whispered, “say something, do something to her that will arouse her. Make her violently angry, or make her cry. I don’t care which.”

He nodded. He snatched the child from her arms and thrust it behind him. He leaned, his face close to the woman’s. He said, brutally:

“Come clean, Mollie! Why did you kill John?”

For a moment the woman stood, uncomprehending. Then a tremor shook her. The fear vanished from her eyes and fury took its place. She threw herself upon McCann, fists beating at his face. He caught her, pinioned her arms. The child screamed.

The woman’s body relaxed, her arms fell to her sides. She crumpled to the floor, her head bent over her knees. And tears came. McCann would have lifted, comforted her. I stopped him.

“Let her cry. It’s the best thing for her.”

And after a little while she looked up at McCann and said, shakily:

“You didn’t mean that, Dan?”

He said: “No, I know you didn’t do it, Mollie. But now you’ve got to talk to the Doc. There’s a lot to be done.”

She asked, normally enough now: “Do you want to question me, Doctor? Or shall I just go on and tell you what happened?”

McCann said: “Tell him the way you told me. Begin with the doll.”

I said: “That’s right. You tell me your story. If I’ve any questions, I’ll ask them when you are done.”

She began:

“Yesterday afternoon Dan, here, came and took me out for a ride. Usually John does not…did not get home until about six. But yesterday he was worried about me and came home early, around three. He likes…he liked…Dan, and urged me to go. It was a little after six when I returned.

“‘A present came for the kid while you were out, Mollie,’ he said. ‘It’s another doll. I’ll bet Tom sent it.’ Tom is my brother.

“There was a big box on the table, and I lifted the lid. In it was the most life-like doll imaginable. A perfect thing. A little girl-doll. Not a baby-doll, but a doll like a child about ten or twelve years old. Dressed like a schoolgirl, with her books strapped, and over her shoulder—only about a foot high, but perfect. The sweetest face—a face like a little angel. John said: ‘It was addressed to you, Mollie, but I thought it was flowers and opened it. Looks as though it could talk, doesn’t it? I’ll bet it’s what they call a portrait-doll. Some kid posed for that, all right.’ At that, I was sure Tom had sent it, because he had given little Mollie one doll before, and a friend of mine who’s…whose dead…gave her one from the same place, and she told me the woman who made the dolls had gotten her to pose for one. So putting this together, I knew Tom had gone and gotten little Mollie another. But I asked John: ‘Wasn’t there a note or a card or anything in it?’ He said, ‘No—oh, yes, there was one funny thing. Where is it? I must have stuck it in my pocket.’

“He hunted around in his pockets and brought out a cord. It had knots in it, and it looked as if it was made of hair. I said, ‘Wonder what Tom’s idea was in that?’ John put it back in his pocket, and I thought nothing more about it.

“Little Mollie was asleep. We put the doll beside her where she could see it when she woke up. When she did, she was in raptures over it. We had dinner, and Mollie played with the doll. After we put her to bed I wanted to take it away from her, but she cried so we let her go to sleep with it. We played cards until eleven, and then made ready for bed.

“Mollie is apt to be restless, and she still sleeps in a low crib so she can’t fall out. The crib is in our bedroom, in the corner beside one of the two windows. Between the two windows is my dressing table, and our bed is set with its head against the wall opposite the windows. We both stopped and looked at Mollie, as we always do…did. She was sound asleep with the doll clasped in one arm, its head on her shoulder.

“John said: ‘Lord, Mollie—that doll looks as alive as the baby! You wouldn’t be surprised to see it get up and walk. Whoever posed for it was some sweet kid.’

“And that was true. It had the sweetest, gentlest little face…and oh, Dr. Lowell…that’s what helps make it so dreadful…so utterly dreadful…”

I saw the fear begin to creep back into her eyes.

McCann said: “Buck up, Mollie!”

“I tried to take the doll. It was so lovely I was afraid the baby might roll on it or damage it some way,” she went on again quietly, “but she held it fast, and I did not want to awaken her. So I let it be. While we were undressing, John took the knotted cord out of his pocket.

“‘That’s a funny looking bunch of knots,’ he said. ‘When you hear from Tom ask him what it’s for.’ He tossed the cord on the little table at his side of the bed. It wasn’t long before he was asleep. And then I went asleep too.

“And then I woke up…or thought I did…for if I was awake or dreaming I don’t know. I must have been a dream—and yet…Oh, God, John is dead…I heard him die…”

Again, for a little time, the tears flowed. Then:

“If I was awake, it must have been the stillness that awakened me. And yet—it is what makes me feel I must have been dreaming. There couldn’t such silence…except in a dream. We are on the second floor, and always there is some sound from the street. There wasn’t the least sound now…it was as though…as though the whole world had suddenly been stricken dumb. I thought I sat up, listening…listening thirstily for the tiniest of noises. I could not even hear John breathing. I was frightened, for there was something dreadful in that stillness. Something living! Something wicked! I tried to lean over to John, tried to touch him, to awaken him.

“I could not move! I could not stir a finger! I tried to speak, to cry out. I could not!

“The window curtains were partly drawn. A faint light showed beneath and around them from the street. Suddenly this was blotted out. The room was dark—utterly dark.

“And then the green glow began—

“At first it was the dimmest gleam. It did not come from outside. It was in the room itself. It would flicker and dim, flicker and dim. But always after each dimming it was brighter. It was green like the light of the firefly. Or like looking at moonlight through clear green water. At last the green glow became steady. It was like light, and still it wasn’t light. It wasn’t brilliant. It was just glowing. And it was everywhere—under the dressing table, under the chairs…I mean it cast no shadows. I could see everything in the bedroom. I could see the baby asleep in her crib, the doll’s head on her shoulder…

“The doll moved!

“It turned its head, and seemed to listen to the baby’s breathing. It put its little hands upon the baby’s arm. The arm dropped away from it.

“The doll sat up!

“And now I was sure that I must be dreaming the strange silence the strange green glow…and this…

“The doll clambered over the side of the crib, and dropped to the floor. It came skipping over the floor toward the bed like a child, swinging its school books by their strap. It turned its head from side to side as it came, looking around the room like a curious child. It caught sight of the dressing table, and stopped, looking up at the mirror. It climbed up the chair in front of the dressing table. It jumped from the chair seat to the table, tossed its books aside and began to admire itself in the mirror.

“It preened itself. It turned and looked at itself, first over this shoulder and then over that. I thought: ‘What a queer fantastic dream!’ It thrust its face close to the mirror and rearranged and patted its hair. I thought: ‘What a vain little doll!’ And then I thought: ‘I’m dreaming all this because John said the doll was so life-like he wouldn’t be surprised to see it walk.’ And then I thought: ‘But I can’t be dreaming, or I wouldn’t be trying to account for what I’m dreaming!’ And then it all seemed so absurd that I laughed. I knew I had made no sound. I knew I couldn’t…that the laugh was inside me. But it was as though the doll had heard me. It turned and looked straight at me—

“My heart seemed to die within me. I’ve had nightmares, Dr. Lowell—but never in the worst of them did I feel as I did when the doll’s eyes met mine…

“They were the eyes of a devil! They shone red. I mean they were—were—luminous…like some animal’s eyes in the dark. But it was the—the—hellishness in them that made me feel as though a hand had gripped my heart! Those eyes from hell in that face like one of God’s own angels…

“I don’t know how long it stood there, glaring at me. But at last it swung itself down and sat on the edge of the dressing table, legs swinging like a child’s and still with its eyes on mine. Then slowly, deliberately, it lifted its little arm and reached behind its neck. Just as slowly it brought its arm back. In its hand was a long pin…like a dagger…

“It dropped from the dressing table to the floor. It skipped toward me and was hidden by the bottom of the bed. An instant and it had clambered up the bed and stood, still looking at me with those red eyes, at John’s feet.

“I tried to cry out, tried to move, tried to arouse John. I prayed—‘Oh, God, wake him up! Dear God—wake him!’

“The doll looked away from me. It stood there, looking at John. It began to creep along his body, up toward his head. I tried to move my hand, to follow it. I could not. The doll passed out of my sight…

“I heard a dreadful, sobbing groan. I felt John shudder, then stretch and twist…I heard him sigh…

“Deep deep down…I knew John was dying…and I could do nothing…in the silence in the green glow…

“I heard something like the note of a flute, from the street, beyond the windows. There was a tiny scurrying. I saw the doll skip across the floor and spring up to the windowsill. It knelt there for a moment, looking out into the street. It held something in its hand. And then I saw that what it held was the knotted cord John had thrown on his table.

“I heard the flute note again…the doll swung itself out of the window…I had a glimpse of its red eyes…I saw its little hands clutching the sill…and it was gone…

“The green glow…blinked and…went out. The light from the street returned around the curtains. The silence seemed…seemed…to be sucked away.

“And then something like a wave of darkness swept over me. I went down under it. Before it swept over me I heard the clock strike two.

“When I awakened again…or came out of my faint…or, if it was just a dream, when I awakened…I turned to John. He lay there…so still! I touched him…he was cold…so cold! I knew he was dead!

“Dr. Lowell…tell me what was dream and what was real? I know that no doll could have killed John!

“Did he reach out to me when he was dying, and did the dream come from that? Or did I…dreaming…kill him?”

CHAPTER XII

TECHNIQUE OF MADAME MANDILIP

There was an agony in her eyes that forbade the truth, so I lied to her.

“I can comfort you as to that, at least. Your husband died of entirely natural causes—from a blood clot in the brain. My examination satisfied me thoroughly as to that. You had nothing to do with it. As for the doll—you had an unusually vivid dream, that is all.”

She looked at me as one who would give her soul to believe. She said:

“But I heard him die!”

“It is quite possible—” I plunged into a somewhat technical explanation which I knew she would not quite understand, but would, perhaps, be therefore convincing—“You may have been half-awake—on what we term the borderline of waking consciousness. In all probability the entire dream was suggested by what you heard. Your subconsciousness tried to explain the sounds, and conceived the whole fantastic drama you have recited to me. What seemed, in your dream, to take up many minutes actually passed through your mind in a split second—the subconsciousness makes its own time. It is a common experience. A door slams, or there is some other abrupt and violent sound. It awakens the sleeper. When he is fully awake he has recollection of some singularly vivid dream which ended with a loud noise. In reality, his dream began with the noise. The dream may have seemed to him to have taken hours. It was, in fact, almost instantaneous, taking place in the brief moment between noise and awakening.”

She drew a deep breath; her eyes lost some of their agony. I pressed my advantage.

“And there is another thing you must remember—your condition. It makes many women peculiarly subject to realistic dreams, usually of an unpleasant character. Sometimes even to hallucinations.”

She whispered: “That is true. When little Mollie was coming I had the most dreadful dreams—”

She hesitated; I saw doubt again cloud her face.

“But the doll—the doll is gone!” she said.

I cursed to myself at that, caught unawares and with no ready answer. But McCann had one. He said, easily:

“Sure it’s gone, Mollie. I dropped it down the chute into the waste. After what you told me I thought you’d better not see it any more.”

She asked, sharply:

“Where did you find it? I looked for it.”

“Guess you weren’t in shape to do much looking,” he answered. “I found it down at the foot of the kid’s crib, all messed up in the covers. It was busted. Looked like the kid had been dancing on it in her sleep.”

She said hesitantly: “It might have slipped down. I don’t think I looked there—”

I said, severely, so she might not suspect collusion between McCann and myself:

“You ought not to have done that, McCann. If you had shown the doll to her, Mrs. Gilmore would have known at once that she had been dreaming and she would have been spared much pain.”

“Well, I ain’t a doctor.” His voice was sullen. “I done what I thought best.”

“Go down and see if you can find it,” I ordered, tartly. He glanced at me sharply. I nodded—and hoped he understood. In a few minutes he returned.

“They cleaned out the waste only fifteen minutes ago,” he reported, lugubriously. “The doll went with it. I found this, though.”

He held up a little strap from which dangled a half-dozen miniature books. He asked:

“Was them what you dreamed the doll dropped on the dressing table, Mollie?”

She stared, and shrank away.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Please put it away, Dan. I don’t want to see it.”

He looked at me, triumphantly.

“I guess maybe I was right at that when I threw the doll away, Doc.”

I said: “At any rate, now that Mrs. Gilmore is satisfied it was all a dream, there’s no harm done.”

“And now,” I took her cold hands in mine. “I’m going to prescribe for you. I don’t want you to stay in this place a moment longer than you can help. I want you to pack a bag with whatever you and little Mollie may need for a week or so, and leave at once. I am thinking of your condition—and a little life that is on its way. I will attend to all the necessary formalities. You can instruct McCann as to the other details. But I want you to go. Will you do this?”

To my relief, she assented readily. There was a somewhat harrowing moment when she and the child bade farewell to the body. But before many minutes she was on her way with McCann to relations. The child had wanted to take “the boy and girl dolls.” I had refused to allow this, even at the risk of again arousing the mother’s suspicions. I wanted nothing of Madame Mandilip to accompany them to their refuge. McCann supported me, and the dolls were left behind.

I called an undertaker whom I knew. I made a last examination of the body. The minute puncture would not be noticed, I was sure. There was no danger of an autopsy, since my certification of the cause of death would not be questioned. When the undertaker arrived I explained the absence of the wife—imminent maternity and departure at my order. I set down the cause of death as thrombosis—rather grimly as I recalled the similar diagnosis of the banker’s physician, and what I had thought of it.

After the body had been taken away, and as I sat waiting for McCann to return, I tried to orient myself to this phantasmagoria through which, it seemed to me, I had been moving for endless time. I tried to divest my mind of all prejudice, all preconceived ideas of what could and could not be. I began by conceding that this Madame Mandilip might possess some wisdom of which modern science is ignorant. I refused to call it witchcraft or sorcery. The words mean nothing, since they have been applied through the ages to entirely natural phenomena whose causes were not understood by the laity. Not so long ago, for example, the lighting of a match was “witchcraft” to many savage tribes.

No, Madame Mandilip was no “witch,” as Ricori thought her. She was mistress of some unknown science—that was all.

And being a science, it must be governed by fixed laws—unknown though those laws might be to me. If the doll-maker’s activities defied cause and effect, as I conceived them, still they must conform to laws of cause and effect of their own. There was nothing supernatural about them—it was only that, like the savages, I did not know what made the match burn. Something of these laws, something of the woman’s technique—using the word as signifying the details, collectively considered, of mechanical performance in any art—I thought I perceived. The knotted cord, “the witch’s ladder,” apparently was an essential in the animation of the dolls. One had been slipped into Ricori’s pocket before the first attack upon him. I had found another beside his bed after the disturbing occurrences of the night. I had gone to sleep holding one of the cords—and had tried to murder my patient! A third cord had accompanied the doll that had killed John Gilmore.

Clearly, then, the cord was a part of the formula for the direction of control of the dolls.

Against this was the fact that the intoxicated stroller could not have been carrying one of the “ladders” when attacked by the Peters doll.

It might be, however, that the cord had only to do with the initial activity of the puppets; that once activated, their action might continue for an indefinite period.

There was evidence of a fixed formula in the making of the dolls. First, it seemed, the prospective victim’s free consent to serve as model must be obtained; second, a wound which gave the opportunity to apply the salve which caused the unknown death; third, the doll must be a faithful replica of the victim. That the agency of death was the same in each case was proven by the similar symptoms.

But did those deaths actually have anything to do with the motility of the dolls? Were they actually a necessary part of the operation?

The doll-maker might believe so; indeed, undoubtedly did believe so.

I did not.

That the doll which had stabbed Ricori had been made in the semblance of Peters; that the “nurse doll” which the guards had seen poised on my window-ledge might have been the one for which Walters had posed; that the doll which had thrust the pin into Gilmore’s brain was, perhaps, the replica of little Anita, the eleven-year-old schoolgirl—all this I admitted.

But that anything of Peters, anything of Walters, anything of Anita had animated these dolls…that dying, something of their vitality, their minds, their “souls” had been drawn from them, had been transmuted into an essence of evil, and imprisoned in these wire-skeletoned puppets…against this all my reason revolted. I could not force my mind to accept even the possibility.

My analysis was interrupted by the return of McCann.

He said, laconically: “Well, we put it over.”

I asked. “McCann—you weren’t by any chance telling the truth when you said you found the doll?”

“No, Doc. The doll was gone all right.”

“But where did you get the little books?”

“Just where Mollie said the doll tossed ’em—on her dressing table. I snaked ’em after she’d told me her story. She hadn’t noticed ’em. I had a hunch. It was a good one, wasn’t it?”

“You had me wondering,” I replied. “I don’t know what we could have said if she had asked for the knotted cord.”

“The cord didn’t seem to make much of a dent on her—” He hesitated. “But I think it means a hell of a lot, Doc. I think if I hadn’t took her out, and John hadn’t happened home, and Mollie had opened the box instead of him—I think it’s Mollie he’d have found lying dead beside him.”

“You mean—”

“I mean the dolls go for whichever gets the cords,” he said somberly.

Well, it was much the same thought I had in my own mind.

I asked: “But why should anybody want to kill Mollie?”

“Maybe somebody thinks she knows too much. And that brings me to what I’ve been wanting to tell you. The Mandilip hag knows she’s being watched!”

“Well, her watchers are better than ours.” I echoed Ricori; and I told McCann then of the second attack in the night; and why I had sought him.

“An’ that,” he said when I had ended, “Proves the Mandilip hag knows who’s who behind the watch on her. She tried to wipe out both the boss and Mollie. She’s on to us, Doc.”

“The dolls are accompanied,” I said. “The musical note is a summons. They do not disappear into thin air. They answer the note and make their way…somehow to whoever sounds the note. The dolls must be taken from the shop. Therefore one of the two women must take them. How did they evade your watchers?”

“I don’t know.” The lean face was worried. “The fish-white gal does it. Let me tell you what I found out, Doc. After I left you last night I go down to see what the boys have to say. I hear plenty. They say about four o’clock the gal goes in the back an’ the old woman takes a chair in the store. They don’t think nothing of that. But about seven who do they see walking down the street and into the doll joint but the gal. They give the boys in the back hell. But they ain’t seen her go, an’ they pass the buck to the boys in front.

“Then about eleven o’clock one of the relief lads comes in with worse news. He says he’s down at the foot of Broadway when a coupe turns the corner an’ driving it is the gal. He can’t be mistaken because he’s seen her in the doll joint. She goes up Broadway at a clip. He sees there ain’t nobody trailing her, an’ he looks around for a taxi. Course there’s nothing in sight—not even a parked car he can lift. So he comes down to the gang to ask what the hell they mean by it. An’ again nobody’s seen the gal go.”

“I take a couple of the boys an’ we start out to comb the neighborhood to find out where she stables the coupe. We don’t have no luck at all until about four o’clock when one of the tails—one of the lads who’s been looking—meets up with me. He says that about three he sees the gal—at least he thinks it’s the gal—walking along the street around the corner from the joint. She’s got a coupla big suitcases but they don’t seem to trouble her none. She’s walking quick. But away from the doll joint. He eases over to get a better look, when all of a sudden she ain’t there. He sniffs around the place he’s seen her. There ain’t hide nor hair of her. It’s pretty dark, an’ he tries the doors an’ the areaways, but the doors are locked an’ there ain’t nobody in the areaways. So he gives it up an’ hunts me.

“I look over the place. It’s about a third down the block around the corner from the doll joint. The doll joint is eight numbers from the corner. They’re mostly shops an’ I guess storage up above. Not many people living there. The houses all old ones. Still, I don’t see how the gal can get to the doll joint. I think maybe the tail’s mistaken. He’s seen somebody else, or just thinks he’s seen somebody. But we scout close around, an’ after a while we see a place that looks like it might stable a car. It don’t take us long to open the doors. An’ sure enough, there’s a coupe with its engine still hot. It ain’t been in long. Also it’s the same kind of coupe the lad who’s seen the gal says she was driving.

“I lock the place up again, an’ go back to the boys. I watch with ’em the rest of the night. Not a light in the doll joint. But nigh eight o’clock, the gal shows up inside the shop and opens up!”

“Still,” I said at this point, “you have no real evidence she had been out. The girl your man thought he saw might not have been she at all.”

He looked at me pityingly.

“She got out in the afternoon without ’em seeing her, didn’t she? What’s to keep her from doing the same thing at night? The lad saw her driving a coupe, didn’t he? An’ we find a coupe like it close where the wench dropped out of sight.”

I sat thinking. There was no reason to disbelieve McCann. And there was a sinister coincidence in the hours the girl had been seen. I said, half-aloud:

“The time she was out in the afternoon coincides with the time the doll was left at the Gilmores’. The time she was out at night coincides with the time of the attack upon Ricori, and the death of John Gilmore.”

“You hit it plumb in the eye!” said McCann. “She goes an’ leaves the doll at Mollie’s, an’ comes back. She goes an’ sets the dolls on the boss. She waits for ’em to pop out. Then she goes an’ collects the one she’s left at Mollie’s. Then she beats it back home. They’re in the suitcases she’s carrying.”

I could not hold back the irritation of helpless mystification that swept me.

“And I suppose you think she got out of the house by riding a broomstick up the chimney,” I said, sarcastically.

“No,” he answered, seriously. “No, I don’t, Doc. But them houses are old, and I think maybe there’s a rat hole of a passage or something she gets through. Anyway, the hands are watching the street an’ the coupe stable now, an’ she can’t pull that again.”

He added, morosely:

“At that, I ain’t saying she couldn’t bridle a broomstick if she had to.”

I said, abruptly: “McCann, I’m going down to talk to this Madame Mandilip. I want you to come with me.”

He said: “I’ll be right beside you, Doc. With my fingers on my guns.”

I said: “No, I’m going to see her alone. But I want you to keep close watch outside.”

He did not like that; argued; at last reluctantly assented.

I called up my office. I talked to Braile and learned that Ricori was recovering with astonishing rapidity. I asked Braile to look after things the balance of the day, inventing a consultation to account for the request. I had myself switched to Ricori’s room. I had the nurse tell him that McCann was with me, that we were making an investigation along a certain line, the results of which I would inform him on my return, and that, unless Ricori objected, I wanted McCann to stay with me the balance of the afternoon.

Ricori sent back word that McCann should follow my orders as though they were his own. He wanted to speak to me, but that I did not want. Pleading urgent haste, I rang off.

I ate an excellent and hearty lunch. I felt that it would help me hold tighter to the realities—or what I thought were the realities—when I met this apparent mistress of illusions. McCann was oddly silent and preoccupied.

The clock was striking three when I set off to meet Madame Mandilip.