Part 4

"You'd reckon those things would strike the jury, wouldn't you? But they're so dam' simple down here that they're content to come up against facts like that, and they say: Well, here's a man got killed and we don't know what hit him. Guess we'll let it go at misadventure and go get a drink!' That's their mental attitude, and there isn't anything going to shake them out of it."

"What's your theory?" I asked.

He revolved the toothpick meditatively.

"If I knew, I guess I'd be up against a story that would make every newspaper in the country sit up. There's something queer there, and I'll tell you why, and you'll see just how enterprising these country juries are. Last April"--he raised his voice again, giving the toothpick an extra twirl in emphasis--"precisely the same thing happened to another man, not twelve miles from where this was. He was killed under much about the same circumstances, and the jury then returned the same old verdict, with a caution about the dangers of scorching. I happen to know, because I was down there on some story the time the thing occurred. I saw the man." He paused, and without knowing why I felt my pulses quicken suddenly in anticipation. "He had marks on his body that a wild-cat couldn't have made! He was picked up at the side of the path, among some stiff under-brush, so of course they said the fall did it. I tell you he was ripped, like I've seen a dog's face ripped by a badger. I've seen murder cases and I've seen accidents, but I've never seen the precise accident that would leave that kind of marks."

"You think it was murder?"

"The man wasn't murdered. He hit his head against a stone and died of concussion that time, right enough. But it was near enough to murder, if you assume an assailant who'd strap two-inch steel claws on to his hands." He laughed. "It's an original outfit! But that's what I'm asking _you_? What's the animal that goes round in these woods that's strong enough to wreck the steel tubing of a bicycle, that attacks with its claws and not with its teeth, and that's quick enough to knock a man down without the chance of a struggle?"

"There were no traces?"

"None. Not a single footprint."

All the while he spoke there had been before my mind the picture of Lessing--Lessing with those inexplicable scratches on his chest. Whatever had attacked these two had attacked Lessing also; that I would swear to. I was conscious that the young man was watching me rather closely.

"Heard something of this before, have you?"

"No. It interests me. But I think you're on a wrong tack."

"How?"

"Man alive, you don't suppose there could conceivably be any animal of that kind loose in the country without people knowing it! Someone would have seen it."

"I guess two people did see it," he suggested.

"If anything escaped from a menagerie there'd be a hue and cry raised. The woods around here couldn't give cover to any animal of that size and ferocity for three months without some track of it being found."

He said: "How about the murders in the Rue Morgue?"

"Those scratches weren't made by a monkey!"

I was unguarded. He looked up sharply.

"You didn't see them."

"You have described them," I reminded him. "Besides, an ape's instinct is to strangle."

"Not necessarily."

"Put the first down as a murder. The second might not have had any connection. There is nearly three months between. The medical officer suggested himself that the injuries might have been caused by falling on the broken bicycle framework."

"Medical officers aren't infallible. They've got to say something."

I laughed. "Well, stick to your escaped simian theory! If a third case turns up we'll see who's right."

I rose, paid my bill and went out, leaving him, I have no doubt, with the impression that I was a particularly hidebound idiot. But I had my own reasons for making no further contribution to his data. I would see this thing through without any assistance from a too enterprising press.

VI

A BOYCOTTED HOUSEHOLD

Thursday evening found me at the Lessing's bungalow. Mrs. Lessing was in evidence this time, in a soft black gown that accentuated the pallor of her face. The evening did not correct my first impressions of her. She shook hands limply, contributed a few remarks about the weather, and then subsided on the couch in silence. Dinner was laid on a small round table near the window, and Mary Lessing came in from the kitchen with uprolled sleeves and a big apron tied about her.

"We do our own chores here, Doctor Haverill," she said. "Do you want to make yourself useful?"

I rose promptly. Lessing had not yet appeared and my _tête-à-tête_ with his wife was not exhilarating. I followed her out into the kitchen, where she gave me a can-opener and a box of sardines.

"Turn those out for me, please. And if you have any hygienic aversion to canned goods, smother it. We live on them here."

"You find it far from the village?"

She smiled, quizzically. "A good way. Besides, the tradespeople here aren't exactly genial. So we subsist on boxes from the city. It gives you all the real pleasure of a desert island without the risks. Put them on that plate, will you? You see, by the time the box arrives and gets hauled up from the station we've generally forgotten what we ordered, so there's all the excitement of discovery as well. This time it was olives. Do you realize the joy of unexpected olives in the wilderness?"

"I'm going to."

"That's the right spirit! Living in the country teaches one a becoming humility. There are more things to open. Perhaps it was a mistake to ask you out here, but in any case I could hardly have palmed off these peaches as grown in our own garden, because we haven't got one."

She was standing at the table, drying crisp salad on a white cloth. The position showed me only her profile, with a little wave of bronze hair escaping near one ear. "Do you think gardening is worth the trouble?"

"When things like this grow in every department store? Perhaps not. Good heavens, Doctor Haverhill, but you must _wash_ that can-opener! Give it to me!"

I gazed at the jagged gash already achieved in the peach-can.

"Don't tell anyone and they won't taste it!"

"I thought bachelors knew how to do everything."

"Sardines and peaches go excellently together," I maintained. "They call it _salade de fruits poissonnés_."

Lessing lounged in.

"I admire the way Mary sets you to work," he said. "She has a talent for being industrious by proxy. Here----" He pulled a parcel out of his pocket "I've brought your cheese, but I won't answer for the state of it."

Miss Lessing cast a quick glance at me. "Where----?"

"_Not_ at Johnson's. I don't know if my sister has explained to you, Doctor Haverhill, that we are a boycotted household? We find it quite amusing. It leads to a practice of expedience which is excellent training for the young. Mary has learned to make quite creditable bread already."

"Out of the sawdust they pack the canned goods in," put in his sister promptly. "Carry that dish in without spilling it, Dick, and don't talk nonsense!"

We sat down to one of the most cheerful meals four young people have ever enjoyed. I would except Mrs. Lessing, but that even her limp and monosyllabic presence failed to dampen our spirits. Afterwards Lessing made Turkish coffee over a spirit lamp while the two girls cleared the table, refusing my assistance high-handedly.

I moved about the room in the familiarity which our informal meal had fostered, looking at the knick-knacks, the row of books on the shelves. They were a pretty varied collection, poetry, some modern French scientific books and novels, and one of the most complete collections of detective literature I have ever encountered, side by side with a few text-books on chemistry and some volumes on occultism and black magic, some familiar to me by title, others unknown. There was a monthly magazine lying near which I recognized as occupying itself largely with the subject of psychic phenomena, and turning it over I noticed Lessing's name in the index.

"You write?" I asked.

"Once in a blue moon!" He looked up from a critical stage in his coffee-making. "Does that sort of thing interest you?"

"Indifferently--if it happens to be genuine."

"There's so little genuine." He withdrew the coffee deftly, blowing out the lamp, and stood the little copper pot aside. "That's the worst of it. One endures hours of boredom for no result."

"You belong to the P.R.S.?"

"A most respectable and unexciting body." He smiled. "I would give in my demission, only they afford me a patient hearing from time to time. Besides, it gives me the opportunity of wrangling with someone, and contention is the spice of life, as I was saying. It was with that truism that I strove to console Lennox, when I bored him to extinction."

Involuntarily my ears pricked.

"Was that often?"

"No, I can't say the boredom predominated, in the long run." He surveyed his coffee with the air of an artist, his boyish head on one side.

"Where are those cups, Mary?"

"Your system of boredom seemed to have a remarkable effect on Lennox, anyway," slipped from me involuntarily.

Lessing laughed. "Oh, that was when the boredom ended! He stood it nobly to a point." He turned toward me. "Would you like to see what frightened Lennox, sometime?"

Before I could answer Mary Lessing came in with the coffee-cups, and the subject was dropped.

It was ten o'clock when I rose to leave, my departure hastened by a suspicion that Mrs. Lessing had glanced several times of purpose at the clock. They all came out on the porch to say good night, and at the last moment Lessing added: "I'll walk down the hill with you."

"I've got my bicycle," I said quickly, as Miss Lessing looked up. "There's no need to bring you out."

"Oh, it'll do me good!"

It was a still, sultry night, with a humidity in the air that had arisen since nightfall. We walked leisurely, smoking, as far as the crossroad at the top of Dutchman's Hill. The hollow below was alive with fireflies, gleaming and vanishing alternately in the soft dusk. There should be a moon, but within the past hour premonitory rainclouds had gathered, blotting it out. Lessing glanced at the sky.

"How long will it take you to get back?"

"Ten minutes, more or less. It won't rain till I get there."

I scratched a match, stooping toward my bicycle lantern.

"Is it necessary to light that?" he asked.

"Why not? There's a bad bit of road at the bottom there."

"I find the glare of a lamp like that always makes it worse. What is it, acetylene?"

He bent over the lantern to examine it, and in the pause the match burned down and went out. I felt for the box again in my pocket, and as I did so Lessing let go his hold on the bicycle. The machine slipped by its weight, and reaching quickly to catch it I heard the unmistakable sound of escaping air.

"Now you've done it!" cried Lessing boyishly.

"Damn!" I groped for the rear tire. It was flat. "Here's a cheerful business. How the dickens----"

Lessing laughed. "We'll have to walk it now! Never mind. I know the road."

"I'm not going to bring you all that way," I said. "I shall be all right."

"Nonsense! I like a walk before I turn in."

He took hold of the bicycle on one side, I on the other, and together we set off to walk down the hill. There is an exhilaration in walking through woods at night, even tempered by the necessity of pushing a heavy motor-cycle before you, and my brief annoyance at the accident rapidly vanished. Lessing was boyishly high-spirited; between us we made a fairly rowdy trip of it. We had just finished the ascent of the other side of the hollow when he laid a sudden hand on my arm.

"Did you hear anything?"

"No. Why?"

I thought he was still joking, but his cloak of nonsense had dropped from him abruptly. He pulled me to the side of the road.

"Listen!"

There seemed nothing to listen for. I waited, rather impatiently. Lessing threw back his head, scanning the line of the trees that shut us in. "There!"

It was still in my mind that he was trying to play some game on me.

"It's nothing but a bird," I said.

"Bird? You heard nothing else?"

"No."

"Come on," Lessing said. He seemed abruptly sobered, and I fancied he was at pains to quicken our pace over the remaining stretch of road. When we sighted the glimmer of the orchard palings I pulled up.

"Come on into the house and have a drink," I said.

"No, thanks. I must get back. By the way, do you carry a revolver?"

"What on earth for?"

"I only wondered. I should advise you to, around here." His hand slipped down to his pocket, and I heard a soft click.

"What are you going to do?"

"Have a pot at the birds, going back." He smiled. "Good night. Look in sometime during the week."

And he went off without further delay, whistling softly.

VII

WHAT HAPPENED IN THE LABORATORY

Instead, it was Lessing who came a day or two later to see me. He lounged in one evening when I was sitting smoking on the porch, after supper, and my first advice of his presence was the clatter of a zinc pail which Pete let fall promptly in the side yard. When Lessing rounded the corner of the porch he was grinning.

"Your nigger must have a bad conscience," he said. "I never saw anyone so afraid of the devil in all my life!"

I made a sound of annoyance. Evidently I had not finished with Pete yet. "He's a born idiot!" I said.

"I'm not so sure," Lessing returned. "He has a very practical regard for his own skin. I appreciate that."

"You ought to."

He gave me one of those habitual quick looks, his head on one side.

"Thanks! Do you find the mosquitoes bad around here? I got all bitten up coming past Dutchman's Hollow."

I took the hint.

"We'll sit indoors," I said. "It's pretty cool in the surgery."

He followed me into the room, glancing curiously about him.

"So this is where old Lennox hung out ... the place has a look of him. What's that, butterflies? He always had a weakness for things he could stick a pin into and label nicely!"

"Have you never been here before?"

"Never. He used to come to my place. I have an idea you know, that Lennox still thinks I'm not right in the head."

I lit the student lamp on the table and set out whisky and a couple of glasses. Lessing settled himself in the shabby armchair opposite me, and for a little while we smoked in silence. In the half-shadow beyond the ring of lamplight I could see his face, fine and clear cut against the shabby morocco of the chair back, the dark hair tumbled over his forehead. He was staring up at the smoke wreaths in a curious intensity of abstraction.

"I suppose," he began at last, "that I owe you some sort of an explanation, as things go."

I made a little gesture of indifference. I was beginning to know my man. If it pleased him to work upon my curiosity I was prepared to give him the least possible satisfaction.

"You offered me one," I corrected him. "I believe we decided to let it go at that."

He turned his gaze upon me, with a rather charming impertinence.

"That was when I took you for a fool. As I admit the error you ought to forgive my expression of it. The truth is..." He paused so long that I reached for a fresh cigarette to break the interval. "I'll be damned if I know what the truth is myself!" He finished almost violently. "I can give you facts--all you want. When it comes to putting things together.... Do you know how maddening it is to have your hand on a thing--actually on it--and feel it all the while slipping through your fingers?"

He threw his cigarette away. "Let's drop all this nonsense, anyway. I came over here tonight to have a talk with you. I tell you frankly, because you're about the only sane man I'm likely to cross down here. I tried Lennox once, and Lennox thought I was batty, and there the matter ended. But I've got to a point now where it's absolutely necessary, for the sake of my own mental balance, that I should have someone else's opinion about things. I'm going to put certain facts before you, and you'll say what you think about them."

I nodded.

"About eighteen months ago," Lessing began, "my wife was in rather bad health. It was some sort of nervous trouble, which I need not enter into here, but the doctor said she needed complete change, and that she must positively live in the country for some time, a year or two at least. We came down here. I bought the piece of ground up the hill there and built the little bungalow we are living in, with the idea of using it later on, when her health is restored, simply as a summer cottage. I have a fondness for dabbling in chemistry, as I think I told you, and shortly after we moved down here I built that sort of outdoor study you have seen, so that I could have a place, perfectly quiet, that I could work in without being disturbed, and without messing the house up with my things. I am not a good sleeper. I sit up pretty late at night as a rule, and it worries me to know I'm disturbing other people in the house or that the women are liable to drop in in their dressing-gowns at half-past one or so, to ask whether I'm going to bed or not.

"My laboratory has a top light for day use, and I have rigged up an acetylene lamp just over my table, with a pretty strong light. One night last fall I happened to be working rather late. As a rule I have no difficulty whatever about keeping awake--it's the other way about, in fact--but along about one o'clock I began to get rather drowsy. It might have been the fumes of the chemicals I was using, but I'm used to that, and anyway I don't think they could have affected me. My interest in what I was doing was still awake, but the other side of my mind seemed to get drowsy at the same time. I fought against it a long while, and then gradually I seemed to get the consciousness of something--some presence--in or near the room. I don't know if you have ever attended a séance, Haverill?"

"Never--of any account."

My cigarette had burned down to my fingers, and I threw it away. I was beginning to get keenly interested in his story.

"Well, if you had, you would know that one sometimes gets the sense of a materialization some minutes before it actually takes place. I suppose the subconscious part of one's mind acts more quickly than the senses in receiving an impression. Anyway that was what seemed to happen with me. I waited. I was awake; I want you to understand that clearly. I was as awake as I am now. I saw everything about me, but I seemed to see it in a quite impersonal sort of way.

"The top light is arranged to open in sections, the top as well as the four sides. The side glasses were my idea for bad weather, so that I could always have ventilation on one side or the other without rain driving in, as it will with an ordinary skylight. I had the middle section raised, and one side open as well. Presently I was conscious that something was trying to enter at the glass. There were no sound on the roof itself, which is galvanized, but I could hear plainly a sort of scraping at the window. The inside light was so strong that I could see nothing, but something was gradually obscuring the opening. I had a conviction that the thing, whatever it was, was attracted by my light, and I made an effort, with the strange drowsiness gaining on me, to reach the lamp and turn it out.

"I was on my feet, reaching across the table, with the glare of the lamp full in my eyes, when something--I don't know what--struck me and threw me to the ground. My hand was already on the lamp, and I must have managed to turn it out actually in the moment of falling. I have a recollection of struggling for a moment there in the darkness, of trying, with some sort of hazy instinct, to drag myself under cover of the table, and then I suppose I became unconscious.

"When I came to it was broad daylight. I was lying on the floor, near the table. There was broken glass near me, and I seemed to remember the crash of it before I lost consciousness. My clothes were torn, my arms and chest were badly scratched--I must have somehow defended my face without knowing it--and I was stiff all over when I moved. When I got into the open I was seized with an intense nausea, which lasted for several minutes. My wife and sister are used to my being up till all hours, so that my absence had caused no uneasiness. I went into the house, washed myself as well as I could, and went to sleep. It was then five o'clock, so that I must have been nearly four hours unconscious."

"Did you notice any other symptoms besides the nausea?" I interrupted.

"Yes; an intense fatigue. It was not sleepiness. I was tired out, as if I had been through some great exertion."

"Well?" I said, for I knew he had not finished.

"That was last October, the twenty-fourth, to be exact. Since then the thing has happened twice again. On each occasion I have had the same premonitory drowsiness. I have struggled against it, and it has mastered me at just the critical moment. The second time when I came to I was more badly hurt than before. My sister happened to be up early that morning, and there was no disguising my condition from her. She went off for Lennox. When he came he fixed me up and gave me a sleeping draught--which I didn't need--and I slept nearly the whole day. He held the opinion, which I wrested from him later, that I had had some sort of seizure, the result of overwork, and that I had inflicted the injuries on myself during unconsciousness. The rest he put down to hallucination. He was a fool, and I told him so. Whatever the thing was, it was no hallucination."

"How wide was the skylight open?"

"About eighteen inches."

"Did you find any traces in the morning?"

"Not a mark. The building is high, as you know, and the sides are of perfectly plain boarding. There is nothing that could give foothold, except to a monkey, and the nearest tree is eight feet off. Oh, I went over the whole ground carefully! Whatever it was that came, it did not reach me from the ground."

I moved impatiently. "But what other way could it have reached you?"

"That's what I ask myself," said Lessing grimly. "Do I look like a man subject to brain trouble?"

"No," I said. "I gave that theory up almost immediately."

"Then what do you make of it?" he asked quietly.

"Make of it!" I cried. "Good heavens, man, do you realize that you're asking me to believe a thing that's outside the range of all human possibility!"

"Human possibility! What is human possibility? I tell you the thing as it happened, simply." He rose and began to pace to and fro in the room. "I'm a sane man. I'm not given to imaginary things. And besides--you saw yourself----"

"Wait a moment," I said. "About this light. Have you used the same lamp right along?"

Lessing gave a quick look. I wondered if he had divined my visit to the laboratory that first morning.

"No. I altered it after the second time. There was an interval of over four months when nothing happened at all. I tried to reason it all out, and I concluded that in some way the lamp had had to do with it. From the position of the building, and the woods about it, the light I was at first using could be visible only from one certain direction. I wanted to investigate the whole thing systematically, and with that idea I raised the lamp and fitted a strong reflector that would throw the light outside the building at will, and in any direction."

His description corresponded with the light I had seen above the tree-tops, the night of Pete's adventure with the turkey-buzzard.

"You were using this the last time?"

"Yes. I had been experimenting with it, off and on, for several weeks."

"Have you any idea of the shape of the thing?" I asked him.