The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (27 page)

“What do you want here, Mike Connell?” she said in a low, hard voice.

“I want me blood,” he growled. “Give me back jest as much as yer father took from me, so I can git well.”

“Go away, you fool,” she ordered.

He stepped forward, she stepped back. Daisy and I stood tranced, watching.

“I’ll take it then,” he growled, moving forward.

Her expression changed. “Mike,” she said, in a solemn voice, “you know my father’s dead. But,” she cried loudly, “his devils aren’t. They’re mine to command now.”

A hypnotic look came into her eyes, and she began to trace diagrams in the air. “Go back, Mike Connell,” she said sternly, “or I shall call Beelzebub to take you to my father.”

Mike shrieked and pitched forward on the floor at the top of the stairs, groveling.

“Oh, for the love of God, not that one. Keep him off. I’ll go, I’ll go.”

He turned and came leaping down the stairs, brushing me aside and making for the front door. It was locked, of course. With a great tug he twisted the knob off, then turned and threw it through a window, plunged through it himself, and was gone.

We turned to see Marjorie walking down the stairs, tucking her hair in order. Her features were composed as if nothing had happened.

“I’m sorry I had to do that,” she said, “but I knew it was the only possible way to handle him.”

I must go on quickly now from where I stopped writing last night, but I hardly care whether I write any more or not. Something has happened today that makes it not seem to matter very much what happens in the future. But I guess it is better to write than to sit around with thoughts such as mine have been in the last few hours.

The story has already been brought up to within less than a month of the day when I now am writing, and practically nothing has happened since, except that I have been busy, writing ten or fifteen pages every night. Mike gave himself up, after the event I last wrote about. The realization that he could so easily have killed me is what made me decide to write down this record; and the knowledge, which came out soon afterward, that Ted Gideon was back in the vicinity, confirmed my decision. It is not likely that Mike will escape again. But Daisy saw Ted Gideon two days later, driving to the Wyck house, and though she notified Dr. Alling at once, he was not apprehended.

Daisy! Dr. Alling! Well, I must get it told as quickly as possible, and get this into the mails. Yesterday I found my chance to inspect Dr. Alling’s house on the sly. And if I am being paid for my sin of curiosity, well and good. I have at least learned what a callow fool I am. At least I know now what I am in for.

Day before yesterday Daisy went out of town, for a weekend visit (so she said) with a cousin down at Shoulder Lake. This morning, Dr. Alling drove off for Portland at about 8:30 A.M., saying he would not be back for at least twenty-four hours. So, late in the afternoon, I took my chance, walked up to the front door nonchalantly, as if expected, and found it locked. But a kitchen window proved to be unlatched. I pried it up, and got in. There was nothing surprising in any of the rooms that were open, but the garret and bathroom were locked.

I thought the latter fact somehow more suspicious than the former. As the bathroom window must open upon the roof of a kitchen porch, and as trees arched thickly near the house, I took the chance of climbing out an adjacent bedroom window. The one opening into the bathroom was locked fast, and the shade was drawn. But, by squinting through the crack between shade and casement, I could see most of the room. Over the bathtub was a curious apparatus, a rope and pulley arrangement with a little harness like a dog’s at the end of the rope. I was at a loss to account for its use.

Next, perceiving that the limb of an oak in the back yard reached very near the back garret window, I swung up to it, and crawled to a point from which I could see inside. By the rays of the low sun, striking through the window opposite, I could make out, between two trunks, the little dry-cleaning machine I had seen depicted in the scientific supply catalogue.

Even then I was loath to believe that my supposed benefactor was proved by this coincidence to be guilty of a crime. I swung down to the porch roof again, reentered the house, and spent the remaining daylight fruitlessly poking around for further clues. It seemed safer to wait for darkness before climbing out the kitchen window again.

A car suddenly paused in front of the house, and then proceeded into the garage. I knew that my change of escape by the kitchen window was now cut off. Just as I was about to risk opening one of the study windows, I heard a footfall on the porch steps, and got a glimpse of feminine apparel. There was nothing to do but retreat upstairs, and make my getaway by means of the tree. I worked the bedroom window up and waited, to make sure that Alling was inside. When he came in the back way, and walked directly toward the front door, I waited to let him admit the other person before I myself slipped out.

“Sorry,” I heard him say, “but I do like to put the car away when I’ve come in for the night. Nice drive, wasn’t it? I think spring’s here at last.”

“Gorgeous drive.” It was Daisy’s voice answering. “It was awfully nice of you to go so far out of your way to pick me up.”

Alling said, “It was a pleasure. Now, can’t we cap a beautiful afternoon by consuming a beautiful Welsh rabbit? They’re my specialty, you know.”

“Oh, I’d love it,” Daisy answered, “but I’d better be getting out before anyone sees me. David can be so suspicious.”

“You don’t think he has any inkling of—” His voice trailed away as they walked into the study. For a minute or two the incomprehensible mumble of their voices was an agony to me. Then I glimpsed them, walking back toward the front door. Alling was waving a check in his hand, to dry the wet ink.

“There you are. Well, it’s a relief to know that you feel absolutely sure at last.”

“I’m so sure,” she answered, “that I know I can confront him with a single question, and make him collapse and confess. That’s his temperament, you know. He’ll carry a bluff to the last minute and then go to pieces. It’s taken a long while to make certain-sure, but now we know.”

“Thanks to you, my dear. It must have been tedious at times. You’ve earned your money ten times over, and you’ve been ten times smarter then that Pinkerton man I hired. Well, this little bonus will show you my gratitude. It’s been a wearisome job, holding off the law. I wonder if we’ve held it off so long that it will have to be up to us now to precipitate the dénouement.”

“We can do that too,” she said.

“Well, it’s certainly been clever of you not to let him suspect anything. It takes a woman. I feel almost sorry for the chap.”

She chuckled, in a way that cut my heart in two. Thinking back, I remembered that it was she who had deliberately suggested that we pool our knowledge. And it was a fine ending after Alling’s righteous words, “Tell the exact truth, Saunders, but no more.” He must have known well how soon I would incriminate myself, by telling the exact truth, with my hopelessly bad alibi. I wondered why they had let it drag on so long, and what it was that finally had seemed to them to cinch the case.

When Daisy had left, I slipped quickly out onto the roof, and closed the window. It was dusky now, but I thought it would be wise to remain standing with my back against the outside wall, to find out what Alling was going to do, before risking discovery in a noisy quick descent. The bathroom light went on, and I heard a noise of water in the tub. An irresistible curiosity to see the naked twisted body of this sanctimonious double-dealer caused me to creep along the slightly sloping shingles, and peer again past the shade. A minute later I witnessed a curious spectacle, ending in one of the greatest shocks of my life. Manfred Alling, nude, stepped into my line of vision, holding a nude infant in one arm. He fastened the little belt around it, seized the rope of the pulley arrangement, and stepped into the tub, supporting the child by a tension on the rope.

It was only then that I saw what the amazing business was all about, and learned why this man had elected to live so secretively, and alone. Manfred Alling’s interest in abnormalities grew out of the fact that ht was himself a monster—in the exact scientific sense of the term. Out of his left thing was growing another shriveled, half-formed body, with sightless eyes and an imbecilic expression, with mouth sagging open and apt, I suppose, to get full of soapy water during the bathing process if it were not supported by the rope. The thing seemed lifeless, and I felt sure that it did no respire for itself. Otherwise he could hardly have worn it under his clothing, in the kind of corset arrangement which I presently saw him put on.

* * *

I am going to mail this now. I dare not wait any longer. It is two o’clock in the morning. I have had a stamped envelope ready all along. Let it go, and let it be read or not, as fate will have it. I don’t care what happens to it, or to me either, now.[
1
]

1. The foregoing portion of the story was received in New York as a unit, on the 6th day of May, 1933, postmarked Chicago, May 4th, at 5:00 P.M.—Ed.
   

…Telling how David Saunders lived long enough to finish his narrative, after all.

(Editor’s Note:
The anonymous author, on the next page, claims to have learned through an intermediary that arrangements to publish his manuscript had already been made before he commenced to write the final part. It is true that an agreement had been made to publish the work in some form; and that I had contracted to edit the book and make it publishable. Neither the agency in question nor the publishers, however, were interrogated by the “intermediary” of whom the author writes. It was at no time the intention of either the publishers or myself to supply a fictional ending. We originally planned to offer the book with the mystery unsolved, and to post a series of prizes for solutions submitted by its readers. The best of these was then to have been printed and mailed to all registered purchasers of the book. The author’s own conclusion arrived in time to cancel this plan.
—A. L.)

As I take up my narrative again, I wish that I had had the wit to save a copy of the part mailed some weeks ago—for I have no clear memory at all of the disordered last pages, written in the most bitterly unhappy moments of my life. A few days ago, through the inquiries of an intermediary whom I think I can trust, I learned that the agent to whom the first part was sent had already contracted for its publication and that, if an end to the story were not forthcoming from me, it would be published with the “solution” provided fictionally.

Such an ending might bring further injustice upon persons erroneously suspected of wrongdoing in the earlier pat of my narrative; so I have thought it best to continue with the true solution of the Wyck mystery, which was precipitated shortly after I had mailed, in a fit of misery and despair, the first part of this narrative.

As the truth is now known, it would be silly for me to continue to record incidents which seemed to have a possible significance, but which later proved to be false leads. I am therefore going to tell only the important dramatic events which led up to the final explanation; and I shall be able to do this by setting down portions of my shorthand diary verbatim, interspersing sections of the official record of the magistrate’s court and of the third and final coroner’s inquest. However, in order to explain my own conduct a little later one, it will be necessary to give a few excerpts that reveal my state of mind, and the effect upon my conduct of the revelations made in the last part of my story, mailed a few weeks ago.

Midnight, Monday Evening
1st May, 1933

Nothing new today. Why should there be? Enough happened yesterday to finish me off for good. I don’t suppose I’ll take Jarvis’s way out, after all. Suicide. When you get to the point of writing the word, there’s not much chance that you’ll follow through. So the psychologists say. Daisy phoned at ten o’clock and wanted to know why I hadn’t come around last night or tonight. I told her that I thought she was going to get back on the late train from Shoulder Lake. She told me Alling had driven her home. I asked her how that had happened, and she said he’d just chanced to be driving back that way, and happened to see her at the hotel. That’s a neat mixture of truth and falsehood. If I could count on just plain falsehood, I’d know more of where I am. Well, I think I kept
her
 from suspecting that I suspect anything of what she’s been up to with that little skunk.

11:30 P.M., Tuesday
2nd May, 1933

There’s a kind of abominable pleasure in acting with my erstwhile sweetheart as if I suspected nothing. I staged a deliberate little tiff tonight, to see how she would react. If things were normal between us, I’m sure she would have met it in kind. But instead, she acted a trifle upset, and then became just endearing enough. Just enough to make me feel pretty cheap. God, she’s clever. She gauged it just right, on the assumption that I really haven’t got an inkling of what she and that mucker Alling are cooking up against me. But if I pretend everything’s all hunky-dory, she may make some slip, or Alling may, before it’s too late for me to checkmate their scheme. Perhaps I should chuck medicine and be an actor. I got a kind of savage satisfaction, tonight, out of kissing the mouth off that little cheat, pretending I meant it.