Chapter 7

“Because I think you are right,” he said. “He wouldn’t have been likely to shoot himself in a hall, and because the very moving of the body would be in itself suspicious. Then I want to look at the curtains. ‘The curtains would have been safer.’ Safer for what? For the bag with the letters, probably, for she followed that with the talk about Hawkins. He’d got them, and somebody was afraid he had.”

“Just where does Hawkins come in, Sperry?” I asked.

“I’m damned if I know,” he reflected. “We may learn tonight.”

The Wells house was dark and forbidding. We walked past it once, as an officer was making his rounds in leisurely fashion, swinging his night-stick in circles. But on our return the street was empty, and we turned in at the side entry.

I led the way with comparative familiarity. It was, you will remember, my third similar excursion. With Sperry behind me I felt confident.

“In case the door is locked, I have a few skeleton keys,” said Sperry.

We had reached the end of the narrow passage, and emerged into the square of brick and grass that lay behind the house. While the night was clear, the place lay in comparative darkness. Sperry stumbled over something, and muttered to himself.

The rear porch lay in deep shadow. We went up the steps together. Then Sperry stopped, and I advanced to the doorway. It was locked.

With my hand on the door-knob, I turned to Sperry. He was struggling violently with a dark figure, and even as I turned they went over with a crash and rolled together down the steps. Only one of them rose.

I was terrified. I confess it. It was impossible to see whether it was Sperry or his assailant. If it was Sperry who lay in a heap on the ground, I felt that I was lost. I could not escape. The way was blocked, and behind me the door, to which I now turned frantically, was a barrier I could not move.

Then, out of the darkness behind me, came Sperry’s familiar, booming bass. “I’ve knocked him out, I’m afraid. Got a match, Horace?”

Much shaken, I went down the steps and gave Sperry a wooden toothpick, under the impression that it was a match. That rectified, we bent over the figure on the bricks.

“Knocked out, for sure,” said Sperry, “but I think it’s not serious. A watchman, I suppose. Poor devil, we’ll have to get him into the house.”

The lock gave way to manipulation at last, and the door swung open. There came to us the heavy odor of all closed houses, a combination of carpets, cooked food, and floor wax. My nerves, now taxed to their utmost, fairly shrank from it, but Sperry was cool.

He bore the brunt of the weight as we carried the watchman in, holding him with his arms dangling, helpless and rather pathetic. Sperry glanced around.

“Into the kitchen,” he said. “We can lock him in.”

We had hardly laid him on the floor when I heard the slow stride of the officer of the beat. He had turned into the paved alley-way, and was advancing with measured, ponderous steps. Fortunately I am an agile man, and thus I was able to get to the outer door, reverse the key and turn it from the inside, before I heard him hailing the watchman.

“Hello there!” he called. “George, I say! George!”

He listened for a moment, then came up and tried the door. I crouched inside, as guilty as the veriest house-breaker in the business. But he had no suspicion, clearly, for he turned and went away, whistling as he went.

Not until we heard him going down the street again, absently running his night-stick along the fence palings, did Sperry or I move.

“A narrow squeak, that,” I said, mopping my face.

“A miss is as good as a mile,” he observed, and there was a sort of exultation in his voice. He is a born adventurer.

He came out into the passage and quickly locked the door behind him.

“Now, friend Horace,” he said, “if you have anything but toothpicks for matches, we will look for the overcoat, and then we will go upstairs.”

“Suppose he wakens and raises an alarm?”

“We’ll be out of luck. That’s all.”

As we had anticipated, there was no overcoat in the library, and after listening a moment at the kitchen door, we ascended a rear staircase to the upper floor. I had, it will be remembered, fallen from a chair on a table in the dressing room, and had left them thus overturned when I charged the third floor. The room, however, was now in perfect order, and when I held my candle to the ceiling, I perceived that the bullet hole had again been repaired, and this time with such skill that I could not even locate it.

“We are up against some one cleverer than we are, Sperry,” I acknowledged.

“And who has more to lose than we have to gain,” he added cheerfully. “Don’t worry about that, Horace. You’re a married man and I’m not. If a woman wanted to hide some letters from her husband, and chose a curtain for a receptacle, what room would hide them in. Not in his dressing-room, eh?”

He took the candle and led the way to Elinor Wells’s bedroom. Here, however, the draperies were down, and we would have been at a loss, had I not remembered my wife’s custom of folding draperies when we close the house, and placing them under the dusting sheets which cover the various beds.

Our inspection of the curtains was hurried, and broken by various excursions on my part to listen for the watchman. But he remained quiet below, and finally we found what we were looking for. In the lining of one of the curtains, near the bottom, a long, ragged cut had been made.

“Cut in a hurry, with curved scissors,” was Sperry’s comment. “Probably manicure scissors.”

The result was a sort of pocket in the curtain, concealed on the chintz side, which was the side which would hang toward the room.

“Probably,” he said, “the curtain would have been better. It would have stayed anyhow. Whereas the bag--” He was flushed with triumph. “How in the world would Hawkins know that?” he demanded. “You can talk all you like. She’s told us things that no one ever told her.”

Before examining the floor in the hall I went downstairs and listened outside the kitchen door. The watchman was stirring inside the room, and groaning occasionally. Sperry, however, when I told him, remained cool and in his exultant mood, and I saw that he meant to vindicate Miss Jeremy if he flung me into jail and the newspapers while doing it.

“We’ll have a go at the floors under the carpets now,” he said. “If he gets noisy, you can go down with the fire-tongs. I understand you are an expert with them.”

The dressing-room had a large rug, like the nursery above it, and turning back the carpet was a simple matter. There had been a stain beneath where the dead man’s head had lain, but it had been scrubbed and scraped away. The boards were white for an area of a square foot or so.

Sperry eyed the spot with indifference. “Not essential,” he said. “Shows good housekeeping. That’s all. The point is, are there other spots?”

And, after a time, we found what we were after. The upper hall was carpeted, and my penknife came into requisition to lift the tacks. They came up rather easily, as if but recently put in. That, indeed, proved to be the case.

Just outside the dressing-room door the boards for an area of two square feet or more beneath the carpet had been scraped and scrubbed. With the lifting of the carpet came, too, a strong odor, as of ammonia. But the stain of blood had absolutely disappeared.

Sperry, kneeling on the floor with the candle held close, examined the wood. “Not only scrubbed,” he said, “but scraped down, probably with a floor-scraper. It’s pretty clear, Horace. The poor devil fell here. There was a struggle, and he went down. He lay there for a while, too, until some plan was thought out. A man does not usually kill himself in a hallway. It’s a sort of solitary deed. He fell here, and was dragged into the room. The angle of the bullet in the ceiling would probably show it came from here, too, and went through the doorway.”

We were startled at that moment by a loud banging below. Sperry leaped to his feet and caught up his hat.

“The watchman,” he said. “We’d better get out. He’ll have all the neighbors in at that rate.”

He was still hammering on the door as we went down the rear stairs, and Sperry stood outside the door and to one side.

“Keep out of range, Horace,” he cautioned me. And to the watchman:

“Now, George, we will put the key under the door, and in ten minutes you may come out. Don’t come sooner. I’ve warned you.”

By the faint light from outside I could see him stooping, not in front of the door, but behind it. And it was well he did, for the moment the key was on the other side, a shot zipped through one of the lower panels. I had not expected it and it set me to shivering.

“No more of that, George,” said Sperry calmly and cheerfully. “This is a quiet neighborhood, and we don’t like shooting. What is more, my friend here is very expert with his own particular weapon, and at any moment he may go to the fire-place in the library and--”

I have no idea why Sperry chose to be facetious at that time, and my resentment rises as I record it. For when we reached the yard we heard the officer running along the alley-way, calling as he ran.

“The fence, quick,” Sperry said.

I am not very good at fences, as a rule, but I leaped that one like a cat, and came down in a barrel of waste-paper on the other side. Getting me out was a breathless matter, finally accomplished by turning the barrel over so that I could crawl out. We could hear the excited voices of the two men beyond the fence, and we ran. I was better than Sperry at that. I ran like a rabbit. I never even felt my legs. And Sperry pounded on behind me.

We heard, behind us, one of the men climbing the fence. But in jumping down he seemed to have struck the side of the overturned barrel. Probably it rolled and threw him, for that part of my mind which was not intent on flight heard him fall, and curse loudly.

“Go to it,” Sperry panted behind me. “Roll over and break your neck.”

This, I need hardly explain, was meant for our pursuer.

We turned a corner and were out on one of the main thoroughfares. Instantly, so innate is cunning to the human brain, we fell to walking sedately.

It was as well that we did, for we had not gone a half block before we saw our policeman again, lumbering toward us and blowing a whistle as he ran.

“Stop and get this street-car,” Sperry directed me. “And don’t breathe so hard.”

The policeman stared at us fixedly, stopping to do so, but all he saw was two well-dressed and professional-looking men, one of them rather elderly who was hailing a street-car. I had the presence of mind to draw my watch and consult it.

“Just in good time,” I said distinctly, and we mounted the car step. Sperry remained on the platform and lighted a cigar. This gave him a chance to look back.

“Rather narrow squeak, that,” he observed, as he came in and sat down beside me. “Your gray hairs probably saved us.”

I was quite numb from the waist down, from my tumble and from running, and it was some time before I could breathe quietly. Suddenly Sperry fell to laughing.

“I wish you could have seen yourself in that barrel, and crawling out,” he said.

We reached Mrs. Dane’s, to find that Miss Jeremy had already arrived, looking rather pale, as I had noticed she always did before a seance. Her color had faded, and her eyes seemed sunken in her head.

“Not ill, are you?” Sperry asked her, as he took her hand.

“Not at all. But I am anxious. I always am. These things do not come for the calling.”

“This is the last time. You have promised.”

“Yes. The last time.”

X

It appeared that Herbert Robinson had been reading, during his convalescence, a considerable amount of psychic literature, and that we were to hold this third and final sitting under test conditions. As before, the room had been stripped of furniture, and the cloth and rod which formed the low screen behind Miss Jeremy’s chair were not of her own providing, but Herbert’s.

He had also provided, for some reason or other, eight small glass cups, into which he placed the legs of the two tables, and in a business-like manner he set out on the large stand a piece of white paper, a pencil, and a spool of black thread. It is characteristic of Miss Jeremy, and of her own ignorance of the methods employed in professional seances, that she was as much interested and puzzled as we were.

When he had completed his preparations, Herbert made a brief speech.

“Members of the Neighborhood Club,” he said impressively, “we have agreed among ourselves that this is to be our last meeting for the purpose that is before us. I have felt, therefore, that in justice to the medium this final seance should leave us with every conviction of its genuineness. Whatever phenomena occur, the medium must be, as she has been, above suspicion. For the replies of her ‘control,’ no particular precaution seems necessary, or possible. But the first seance divided itself into two parts: an early period when, so far as we could observe, the medium was at least partly conscious, possibly fully so, when physical demonstrations occurred. And a second, or trance period, during which we received replies to questions. It is for the physical phenomena that I am about to take certain precautions.”

“Are you going to tie me?” Miss Jeremy asked.

“Do you object?”

“Not at all. But with what?”

“With silk thread,” Herbert said, smilingly.

She held out her wrists at once, but Herbert placed her in her chair, and proceeded to wrap her, chair and all, in a strong network of fine threads, drawn sufficiently taut to snap with any movement.

He finished by placing her feet on the sheet of paper, and outlining their position there with a pencil line.

The proceedings were saved from absurdity by what we all felt was the extreme gravity of the situation. There were present in the room Mrs. Dane, the Robinsons, Sperry, my wife and myself. Clara, Mrs. Dane’s secretary, had begged off on the plea of nervousness from the earlier and physical portion of the seance, and was to remain outside in the hall until the trance commenced.

Sperry objected to this, as movement in the circle during the trance had, in the first seance, induced fretful uneasiness in the medium. But Clara, appealed to, begged to be allowed to remain outside until she was required, and showed such unmistakable nervousness that we finally agreed.

“Would a slight noise disturb her?” Mrs. Dane asked.

Miss Jeremy thought not, if the circle remained unbroken, and Mrs. Dane considered.

“Bring me my stick from the hall, Horace,” she said. “And tell Clara I’ll rap on the floor with it when I want her.”

I found a stick in the rack outside and brought it in. The lights were still on in the chandelier overhead, and as I gave the stick to Mrs. Dane I heard Sperry speaking sharply behind me.

“Where did you get that stick?” he demanded.

“In the hall. I--”

“I never saw it before,” said Mrs. Dane. “Perhaps it is Herbert’s.”

But I caught Sperry’s eye. We had both recognized it. It was Arthur Wells’s, the one which Sperry had taken from his room, and which, in turn, had been taken from Sperry’s library.

Sperry was watching me with a sort of cynical amusement.

“You’re an absent-minded beggar, Horace,” he said.

“You didn’t, by any chance, stop here on your way back from my place the other night, did you?”

“I did. But I didn’t bring that thing.”

“Look here, Horace,” he said, more gently, “you come in and see me some day soon. You’re not as fit as you ought to be.”

I confess to a sort of helpless indignation that was far from the composure the occasion required. But the others, I believe, were fully convinced that no human agency had operated to bring the stick into Mrs. Dane’s house, a belief that prepared them for anything that might occur.

A number of things occurred almost as soon as the lights were out, interrupting a train of thought in which I saw myself in the first stages of mental decay, and carrying about the streets not only fire-tongs and walking-sticks, but other portable property belonging to my friends.

Perhaps my excitement had a bad effect on the medium. She was uneasy and complained that the threads that bound her arms were tight. She was distinctly fretful. But after a time she settled down in her chair. Her figure, a deeper shadow in the semi-darkness of the room, seemed sagged--seemed, in some indefinable way, smaller. But there was none of the stertorous breathing that preceded trance.

Then, suddenly, a bell that Sperry had placed on the stand beyond the black curtain commenced to ring. It rang at first gently, then violently. It made a hideous clamor. I had a curious sense that it was ringing up in the air, near the top of the curtain. It was a relief to have it thrown to the ground, its racket silenced.

Quite without warning, immediately after, my chair twisted under me. “I am being turned around,” I said, in a low tone. “It as if something has taken hold of the back of the chair, and is twisting it. It has stopped now.” I had been turned fully a quarter round.

For five minutes, by the luminous dial of my watch on the table before me, nothing further occurred, except that the black curtain appeared to swell, as in a wind.

“There is something behind it,” Alice Robinson said, in a terrorized tone. “Something behind it, moving.”

“It is not possible,” Herbert assured her. “Nothing, that is--there is only one door, and it is closed. I have examined the walls and floor carefully.”

At the end of five minutes something soft and fragrant fell on to the table near me. I had not noticed Herbert when he placed the flowers from Mrs. Dane’s table on the stand, and I was more startled than the others. Then the glass prisms in the chandelier over our heads clinked together, as if they had been swept by a finger. More of the flowers came. We were pelted with them. And into the quiet that followed there came a light, fine but steady tattoo on the table in our midst. Then at last silence, and the medium in deep trance, and Mrs. Dane rapping on the floor for Clara.

When Clara came in, Mrs. Dane told her to switch on the lights. Miss Jeremy had dropped in her chair until the silk across her chest was held taut. But investigation showed that none of the threads were broken and that her evening slippers still fitted into the outline on the paper beneath them. Without getting up, Sperry reached to the stand behind Miss Jeremy, and brought into view a piece of sculptor’s clay he had placed there. The handle of the bell was now jammed into the mass. He had only time to show it to us when the medium began to speak.

I find, on re-reading the earlier part of this record, that I have omitted mention of Miss Jeremy’s “control.” So suddenly had we jumped, that first evening, into the trail that led us to the Wells case, that beyond the rather raucous “good-evening,” and possibly the extraneous matter referring to Mother Goose and so on, we had been saved the usual preliminary patter of the average control.

On this night, however, we were obliged to sit impatiently through a rambling discourse, given in a half-belligerent manner, on the deterioration of moral standards. Re-reading Clara’s notes, I find that the subject matter is without originality and the diction inferior. But the lecture ceased abruptly, and the time for questions had come.

“Now,” Herbert said, “we want you to go back to the house where you saw the dead man on the floor. You know his name, don’t you?”

There was a pause. “Yes. Of course I do. A. L. Wells.”

Arthur had been known to most of us by his Christian name, but the initials were correct.

“How do you know it is an L.?”

“On letters,” was the laconic answer. Then: “Letters, letters, who has the letters?”

“Do you know whose cane this is?”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell us?”

Up to that time the replies had come easily and quickly. But beginning with the cane question, the medium was in difficulties. She moved uneasily, and spoke irritably. The replies were slow and grudging. Foreign subjects were introduced, as now.

“Horace’s wife certainly bullies him,” said the voice. “He’s afraid of her. And the fire-tongs--the fire-tongs--the fire-tongs!”

“Whose cane is this?” Herbert repeated.

“Mr. Ellingham’s.”

This created a profound sensation.

“How do you know that?”

“He carried it at the seashore. He wrote in the sand with it.”

“What did he write?”

“Ten o’clock.”

“He wrote ‘ten o’clock’ in the sand, and the waves came and washed it away?”

“Yes.”

“Horace,” said my wife, leaning forward, “why not ask her about that stock of mine? If it is going down, I ought to sell, oughtn’t I?”

Herbert eyed her with some exasperation.

“We are here to make a serious investigation,” he said. “If the members of the club will keep their attention on what we are doing, we may get somewhere. Now,” to the medium, “the man is dead, and the revolver is beside him. Did he kill himself?”

“No. He attacked her when he found the letters.”

“And she shot him?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Try very hard. It is important.”

“I don’t know,” was the fretful reply. “She may have. She hated him. I don’t know. She says she did.”

“She says she killed him?”

But there was no reply to this, although Herbert repeated it several times.

Instead, the voice of the “control” began to recite a verse of poetry--a cheap, sentimental bit of trash. It was maddening, under the circumstances.

“Do you know where the letters are?”

“Hawkins has them.”

“They were not hidden in the curtain?” This was Sperry.

“No. The police might have searched the room.”

“Where were these letters?”

There was no direct reply to this, but instead:

“He found them when he was looking for his razorstrop. They were in the top of a closet. His revolver was there, too. He went back and got it. It was terrible.”

There was a profound silence, followed by a slight exclamation from Sperry as he leaped to his feet. The screen at the end of the room, which cut off the light from Clara’s candle, was toppling. The next instant it fell, and we saw Clara sprawled over her table, in a dead faint.

XI

In this, the final chapter of the record of these seances, I shall give, as briefly as possible, the events of the day following the third sitting. I shall explain the mystery of Arthur Wells’s death, and I shall give the solution arrived at by the Neighborhood Club as to the strange communications from the medium, Miss Jeremy, now Sperry’s wife.

But there are some things I cannot explain. Do our spirits live on, on this earth plane, now and then obedient to the wills of those yet living? Is death, then, only a gateway into higher space, from which, through the open door of a “sensitive” mind, we may be brought back on occasion to commit the inadequate absurdities of the physical seance?

Or is Sperry right, and do certain individuals manifest powers of a purely physical nature, but powers which Sperry characterizes as the survival of some long-lost development by which at one time we knew how to liberate a forgotten form of energy?

Who can say? We do not know. We have had to accept these things as they have been accepted through the ages, and give them either a spiritual or a purely natural explanation, as our minds happen to be adventurous or analytic in type.

But outside of the purely physical phenomena of those seances, we are provided with an explanation which satisfies the Neighborhood Club, even if it fails to satisfy the convinced spiritist. We have been accused merely of substituting one mystery for another, but I reply by saying that the mystery we substitute is not a mystery, but an acknowledged fact.