Part 12

The last step on their ladder of reason was not difficult for my mind to ascend. I had spoiled their great scheme at the Sencort Trust; therefore now I was to be punished. Perhaps, in contemplation of the certainty of this, I should have been satisfied; but I had to go about the gathering up of earlier starts and sequences.

I felt myself caught in a continuity, frequently suggested but not finally convincing, until suddenly that gat at my stomach summed up everything for me. “Here you are!” it spoke. “You’ve gone this way and that; but now you’ve come to it!”

I got to thinking what Jerry told me of “his friend”--Keeban, his strange, sinister twin--“sitting in with destiny” by knowing, in advance, what he was going to do to others. I’d thought of him sitting in with destiny on Dorothy Crewe and old Win Scofield and on Jerry himself; but I hadn’t thought of him sitting in with destiny on me. Stupid, now that I came to see it; for of course I was in his calculations all along; he’d used me, as long as I proved profitable and now that I’d failed him, he’d finish me.

For I knew than that Keeban had me. He had not shown himself in that circle of reception in the alley. No; every face there had been unknown to me, unless one was the dyke-keeper of Klangenberg’s delicatessen. They were normal-appearing, good-looking youths who made the majority in that circle.

I’d often noticed--haven’t you--how indistinguishable our felons are from the philanthropists of the day. Mix up the captions--as the best of newspapers sometimes do--accompanying the illustrated page pictures of the gentry who last night did “Fanny’s First Play” for the Presbyterian Home and the guests and ladies who last night failed to start their Fiat promptly after they had it all filled from the ring and wrist-watch trays in Caldon’s windows, and who could be sure which words went with which faces?

Admit the truth; you’d hire most murderers on sight. Others do; why not you? They look normal.

Nero was normal, H. G. Wells says; he had a little peculiarity, to be sure, but that was merely incidental to his position, not to his nature. He was so placed, you see, that the ideas, which remain mere passing black thoughts and impulses with the rest of us, could without any trouble or personal effort at all become actual deeds with him. That was the secret of Nero. Before a man condemns Nero as being of a separate species from himself, he should examine very carefully his own secret thoughts. This is Wells’s own advice and monition.

It occurred to me there in the dark in reference to the normals on the other side of the door. They looked all right; but they showed signs of an education decidedly deficient on inhibitions, and altogether too prodigal at translating dark thoughts and impulses into action.

I wondered about Jerry and how much he might be knowing of my present position; twice, recently, you remember, I’d had word from him. I did the drowning-man acts,--both of them; I caught at the straw that somehow he might save me, and I reviewed, if not my entire life, yet several significant epochs of it; and I got to thinking about Doris.

She was in with the worst, I was now sure; she not only had had me hit on the head, when I came to see her, but she’d worked in that scheme to gas Sencort and his guests. I kept thinking about her and the dances we’d had together at the Flamingo Feather and our dinner on the train when I’d had the best time ever in my life.

Meanwhile I was listening and I began to realize that there was a soft, regular sound separate from and nearer than those which reached me through the door. It was the zephyr of breath. Some one was in the closet with me.

“Hello,” I whispered. “Who’s here?”

A hand touched my side and I seized it,--a small, firm hand mighty like Doris’s.

“Hello; who’re you?” I asked.

“Hello, Steve,” she said. “Doris! By Christopher, Doris!”

“Anybody else in here?” I asked. That sounds stupider now than at the time; for after this, I was ready for anything.

“No,” she said.

“What’re you doing here?” I asked her; and she said, “What d’you suppose?”

That was it; what did I suppose? Here she was with me. I was there because I’d run down and showed Teverson those slotted pipes and spoiled the best of Keeban’s schemes. Now why should she be here except for the same reason?

“They saw you down on Wall Street,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I see,” I whispered.

“Do you?” she asked me.

I bent at the same time that my hands, which had been holding hers, felt up her arms, over her shoulders and located her cheeks. I held her between my hands and, bending, kissed her. On the lips, it was; I found them fair. She helped, perhaps, a little.

“How long you been here,” I asked her, my lips burning like flame; and how I liked it!

“What time is it?” she asked.

“’Bout five when they shoved me in.”

“I came at three.”

I kissed her again at that; I was still bending and had her cheeks between my hands.

“How’d they get you? You take a cab?”

“That’s how they got you?”

“Me,” I said. “But you--you weren’t so easy, were you?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she temporized.

Queer--wasn’t that--how she wanted to show consideration for me? “I should have told you,” she blamed herself, “that they’d be watching the Sencort building, and when they bumped off just guinea pigs, they’d lay for who fooled ’em.”

“I had a tip to skip out,” I said. “But I didn’t start in time. Where did they get you?”

Now she told me, “They took me out of my room by the back way.”

I held to her but differently--oh, entirely differently--from my hold of her in that Sencort room. For I knew not only that she’d not been in that scheme, not only that she’d gone there to warn Teverson, as she said, but also I knew she’d nothing to do with that blow on my _medulla oblongata_ at Cheron Street.

“Vine’s doing this, I suppose,” I whispered.

“Yes.”

“He sent me both those telegrams?”

“No; only the second; I came on, as I wired you. He grabbed me when I arrived and threw you the second wire. I didn’t see the street till he was through with you.”

“What’d he do to you?”

“Me? Oh, he was all right about me, then.”

“He didn’t hurt you at all?”

She knew what I meant and replied, “He did not! Christina saw to that.”

“Oh, she’s back with him?”

“Umhm. That’s why she saw to it.”

“All right,” I said; and kept hold of her. My property, she was; mine.

“You’re forgiving me?” I said.

“For what?”

“Down on Wall Street; and what I did after I’d been hit.”

“Oh, that was you, Steve, just you.”

Pretty soon, then, I asked her, “What’s Vine’s idea for us now?”

You’d have thought I would have asked that the first thing. But question any doctor; inquire how patients act when they know there’s no hope for them. Do they say right away, “What is it, doctor?” They do not; they say, “Lovely weather; and what a view from this window!”

Doris was like a doctor in that, when I got around to asking her, she did her stalling, too; but finally she told me, “Well, I guess for us it’s the ‘glass room’.”

XX

DORIS AND I ARE TAKEN TO IT.

When she said “for us,” I got another thrill there in the dark, and right away I got quite the opposite when she said “the glass room.”

I had not heard of it before. No; that was the première for the phrase with me; but it was one of those phrases which carry their own connotation; and this was decidedly an uncomfortable one.

“What’s the ‘glass room’?” I asked her.

“Never mind,” she said, and it was like a mother to a child. You’ve heard something of the sort when a visitor let slip, before the children, a remark about the feature atrocity in the morning paper. “Never mind,” Doris said again to me.

“Well, I’m grown,” I said. “And since I’m apparently a candidate for it, why not tell me--unless you prefer to have it come as a complete surprise to me?”

“Don’t!” she asked me; and we stood in silence in the dark.

“You’ve explored the cavern, I suppose between three and five,” I said, starting up the small talk again.

“Yes.”

“It runs to solid walls, I take it?”

“Very solid.”

“Nothing like a trap door in the floor, by any chance?”

“Not by any.”

“Now a noise would probably be one of the worst advised projects possible, don’t you think?”

“It wouldn’t change the end at all,” Doris said, “and would only put us worse off now. They’d tie and gag us--or else let us yell for their amusement.”

“Of course some one’s just outside.”

“Of course.”

We were silent again and I listened. “Yet we don’t know. I hear nobody now.”

I threw my weight against the panels, bracing my feet as firmly as I could. The wood creaked but did not break. Hearing some one at the other side, I relaxed and the door opened.

“Who’s so crazy to come out?” one of the normals said to me. “Come along.” He punched me with his pistol. I came.

He slammed the door on Doris and threw over the bolt. Without another word to me, but guiding me by punches of his automatic against my side, he herded me into another closet, equipped with a heavy door. Here I was alone.

Standing alone in the dark, I wondered why they put me in with Doris, first; and I wondered now that it was too late to ask her again, exactly what “the glass room” was. Then my two perplexities partly answered each other.

She, having been caught doing a “double cross” on her crowd, knew what was going to happen to her; and they put me with her so she would tell me and so, while I waited, I would have the benefit of my own anticipations of the “glass room.”

Suggestive sort of name, wasn’t it?

I stood in that closet, or sat on the floor, for three hours. It turned out to be not yet nine when the normals removed me. Of course it seemed several times longer; many more than three hours’ thoughts went through my head.

“Ready for the ‘glass room’ now?” one of the normals said to me.

I said something in the manner of “Go ahead.”

“Come along then,” he said; and prodded me as before. But this time, as they were taking me out, they did a little more. They tied my hands and stuffed my mouth full of cotton and bound it in. After they had prodded me into their car, they threw a rope around my feet and pulled it tight.

I did not see Doris at all, then. I had no idea whether they already had attended to her, or whether she was next or whether they were leaving her behind.

In the car, the curtains were down; I couldn’t see out, yet I had some idea of where we were going. First we headed east, running with the long blocks, then we swung to the right and went with the short squares, crossing many streets and stopping many times at traffic signals.

That was one of the queerest features of the ride, to feel that the car, carrying me bound and gagged to the glass room, was halting, with the most punctilious, to obey the street regulations.

The three normals said little to me and not much more to each other. Altogether it was a quiet ride and, in itself, uneventful. We turned east again after our run south and I knew that we were in that bulge of the city below the numbered streets.

We went on to a bridge,--the Williamsburg bridge, I thought; and when we were off it, and had taken a couple of turns, I lost all reckoning. I wasn’t particularly up on Long Island City and Brooklyn.

When we reached our terminus, they threw the noose from my feet and prodded me to precede them from the car. Others were there waiting,--other normals, I mean. I saw nobody else in my fix. We were between two large, dark buildings which seemed to compose a factory of some sort. I saw corrugated, sheet-steel shutters covering the windows, not only next to the ground but upon the upper floors. The factory unit to the right communicated with the one to the left by a bridge-of-sighs effect about twenty feet from the ground. The whole place had a shut and deserted look which was intensified by the distance of the nearest night lamps.

There was a dark, overcast sky. I remember glancing up to get a glimpse of a star or so, if I could; but nothing like one was showing. So I took a long deep breath of the outside air, as the next best thing to do, before following some of the normals, and preceding others, into an aperture which developed a door somewhat farther along.

We were in a large, wide space of a character familiar to me; it was bare of furniture, except for many long, low tables, several chairs and stools and, here and there, a desk. Chutes slanted down upon the tables. These were for the delivery of goods in the days when the factory was working; here the shipments had been made up and dispatched.

I saw all this in the yellow glow from a couple of old electric bulbs in fixtures on the sides of the great supporting columns which stood in rows through the room. Although these lights proved that current was coming into the building, the state of this shipping floor was conclusive that the factory was shut down. It was an easy trick, I knew, for one of the normals to “cut in” the current which had been turned off by the company.

Several empty boxes, ready for goods which never slid down the chutes, were piled up on one side and I passed near enough to read the stencilling on their ends.

“Stamby-Temke Chemical Company,” they said.

I had a dim notion of the name. It seemed to me that this was one of the plants which had boomed during the war and afterwards had continued, with the idea that German dyes and chemicals would not again compete in the American market. They had quoted us coloring matter and synthetic fruit flavors; but we weren’t interested.

The normals walked me upon the broad platform of a freight elevator. I saw by the city license framed on its side that this was operated by electric power. A normal moved a lever and we slowly rose past one dark floor, two, three, four. Upon the fifth, we stepped out. Several lights were burning here and better ones than below,--bright Mazdas, these were. We were in another wide room but this had rows of desks and work benches; big bottles and carboys gleamed from shelves. The glass in the windows reflected the lights like mirrors, for they were black behind, with steel shutters tight screening them. None of this light escaped.

One of the normals jerked the binder from before my mouth and I coughed out the cotton without hindrance. From this floor, no shout could escape; nor could a shot be heard outside.

They watched me but let me alone. I sat on the edge of a desk and looked about at them. Just now, they were doing nothing.

It was plain, of course, that they had complete control of this empty plant. Probably Stamby-Temke had a watchman but the normals either overpowered him, terrorized him or bought him over. Perhaps he was one of them, who had applied for the job for the purpose of obtaining these buildings for their use. Evidently they were quite at home here.

They were so at ease, indeed, that they must be sure that no one would disturb them. I attempted a pose “at ease” but with my hands tied back of me, and more particularly with the feeling I had, I certainly made a poor pretense at it.

Something was going to happen to me here, I knew; and I was going to have nothing to say about it. The occurrence would be of that sort which precedes the finding of a body in a deserted building.

You’ve read in the papers, as I had, how the vice-president of the John Doe Company, making an inspection of a disused building prior to reopening it, was shocked to come upon the body of a man, evidently dead for some time. His clothing and so on; marks of identification and so on. The police state that the man undoubtedly met a violent end and prior to his death and so on. It is evident that the man was brought there by several others who used the building for--well, here I was to find out for what these normals used this building.

The elevator, which had descended after depositing us, reappeared with another group of normals and with a girl. Doris! Yes; there she was! If they had tied and gagged her while bringing her here, they had loosed her again; she stepped off the elevator and moved a little away from the normals. Not even her hands were tied; but she was in the same fix I was; that was clear.

They were letting her go to see what she would try to do, as they had let me. I got up from my seat on the desk; she came toward me. “Hello,” I said; and she said the same and sat in a chair near me. I slumped down again on the edge of the desk.

There was an average of eight of the normals about us in that big office; some kept sifting in and out, from and to a farther room, where there appeared to be somebody or something particularly important.

Doris glanced that way several times and they watched her; I watched her, too. She appeared alert and on edge with eyes bright and with lips thin and tight; but she didn’t show fright.

I’m not sure what I showed but I know what I felt. I was dull, not alert like her. One sort of nature seems to dull itself when in for what it can’t prevent; that was mine. I guessed that the “glass room” was over in that farther end of this floor.

During those three hours alone in that closet, I had spent a good deal of thought on the “glass room”; and, knowing that the scheme at the Sencort Trust had employed gas, naturally I set to fitting gas in the arrangements of the “glass room.” So now that I had seen this was a chemical factory, I was sure I was right. They had some ritual with gas for Doris and me. A rather elaborate ritual, if one were to judge by the time it took them to make ready. Or perhaps they were waiting for somebody.

A telephone instrument stood on the desk beside me. The last time I’d sat down, I had placed myself next it. Now I didn’t take it up; I merely moved my hand and lifted the receiver from the hook.

One of the normals saw me and made no move. He had no reason for worry; there was no response in the wire; the circuit was dead.

“Know anything to do?” I asked Doris in a whisper.

“Not now,” she replied.

The normals did not care; they did not even come closer to hear what we said.

“This is the place, I suppose,” I continued.

She nodded.

“What’s your idea for later?” I asked her.

“I’ll have it--later,” she said.

So that was it. She had no better plan than I who had none at all.

Just then Jerry came in. That is, I thought at first he was Jerry. My heart leaped at the sight of him; physically it leaped; I felt it pounding in me. I thought he was Jerry, you see. I thought he had come here as Keeban; I believed he was playing the part of Keeban but that really he was Jerry who had come to try to save me.

XXI

DORIS ENTERS THE GLASS ROOM.

You see, I had remained sure up to this time that there were two of them. Now and then, for short periods, I had questioned myself about it; but always my certainty of Jerry, as somebody distinct from Keeban, won over my doubt. I would never grant that Jerry, my brother, could be guilty of what Keeban had done.

Then, if they were only one, why would Jerry warn me and send me to prevent the plan of Keeban, as he had sent me to the Sencort Trust?

“Here’s Jerry!” I said to myself, and that jump of my heart encouraged me. “He’s playing Keeban. He’s come for me.”

The normals nodded or gazed at him; he gave hardly a glance at them. He looked to Doris and came over to me.

My pulse had stopped jumping then, when I saw him closer. “He’s not Jerry!” I warned myself. “He’s Keeban!” And then my senses did another roundabout. “He’s Keeban and Jerry, too!” For here was a body which I was sure was Jerry’s and some one else possessed it. That some one must be the soul we’d called Keeban--Jerry and I. Here was Keeban who’d robbed Dorothy Crewe and thrown her in the street; here was Keeban who had shot Win Scofield for his insurance and had knocked me on the head when I called at Cheron Street; here was Keeban who had tried to kill, by poison gas, Strathon, Géroud and Teverson and the Sencort directors in their room. And here--in the sense, at least, that I felt him physically present--was Jerry, who had been brother of mine for twenty-five years. And his present purpose was to finish me.

“Well, Steve,” he said, “You did a good job.”

“All right, I guess,” I replied.

“Damn good,” he granted to me. “You got any idea of what you beat me out of?”

“No,” I said, doing my best to stand up to him; and while I talked to him, I thought, “He warned me. He told me to do it. That wasn’t Keeban, of course. Jerry had the body then. Jerry must come into him at times. Then Jerry knows and goes horrified at what Keeban does. Jerry himself sent me that warning to try to stop him. He did the same in the killing of Win Scofield.”

He went on talking, “You beat me out of more than you’d make in the bean business if you lived as many more years as you’re going to live minutes. You like that girl over there?”

I didn’t reply to that; but he went on as if I had.

“Good you do. She’s traveling right along with you. Plenty of space for two in the old glass room. Now Stenewisc, he was simply a fool.”

“Stenewisc, who made the gas?” I asked him. I was trying to keep him talking for the general reason that every minute gained was another minute lived; and besides, below everything else in my mind, was the idea that something might turn this body back from Keeban to Jerry again. I got to figuring like this:

“Years ago, when we were at college, he started being Keeban for a couple of short periods which confused him afterwards. He was Jerry nearly all the time. Then he stopped turning into Keeban until that night of the Sparlings’ dance. He became Keeban for a time, then he was Jerry again when he came home to talk to me, after which he went back to being Keeban. He has stayed Keeban most of the time since, especially through that Scofield business; but once or twice he became Jerry. But now, except when he sent those two notes to me, he’s been Keeban all the time.”

“Stenewisc, he never had any sense,” he went on to me. “He had the gas during the war. But would he sell it to the army or to the English or the French or, if he didn’t like that side, would he sell to the other? He would not. He wouldn’t help any government anywhere; he wouldn’t help a government even to wipe out the rest. He was set to do the wiping himself, personally. He had his big idea.”

I kept quiet; and he stood close. This was like Jerry himself, this impulse to talk on.

“He figured he could croak everybody--give him a little more time and plenty of gas. Everybody in New York, anyway.” Keeban laughed. “Lot of good that would do. Get up!” he told me.

I got up.

“Get up!” he said to Doris; and she arose.

The normals formed before us and behind; and so we started to march to the glass room.

There was an ordinary wood and plaster partition first which set off another large room at the end of this floor. The usual employment of this place was plain enough, even to me with only college course knowledge of chemical matters. Here were the laboratories for experimentation and research where a commercial firm, such as Stamby-Temke, would keep a covey of chemists testing their products, analyzing the goods of competitors and making experiments to improve their own formulæ for colors, caustics, preservatives, antiseptics, poisons, solvents, reagents and what not.

Most of these tests would be simple enough and involve no danger to any one; but some would generate gases, poisonous or otherwise noxious, which should not be allowed in an open room; therefore the firm had installed, at the end of this laboratory, a special compartment which was, beyond any doubt, “the glass room.”