“Not much. The parcel of clothing seems to have been left on one of the public desks in the main post office after closing hours on the evening of the ninth. The clerk remarked it because the person who left it, to make sure of the postage, had put about twice as many stamps on it as were needed. There were three speakeasy cards in his wallet, and we went to all of the places with the police. They hadn’t seen him in nearly a year. Or so they said.”
I stiffened when he continued, “What I wanted to talk to you about is something that happened the night Dr. Wyck disappeared.”
The blood began to buzz in my ears. “At faculty meeting, that evening, Dr. Wyck had two blue books—examinations by Prendergast and Jarvis. What became of them?”
My mind cleared enough to permit me to say, “Why, it was my impression that they were passed around to a few of the doctors, then back to you. Yes, and the you read parallel passages for me to take down in the minutes, and handed the books back to Dr. Wyck.”
“Precisely, and he put them in his pocket. Well, everything else that was in his pockets seems to have been returned in that bundle—everything but those blue books.” He paused impressively. “I’m telling you this, Saunders, because the matter has got to be cleared up for the good name of the college. I’ll need help, and the sheriff’s a blundering fool. Do you want to work with me?”
“Why, certainly,” I said, thoroughly perplexed by this failure to ask the obvious expected question.
“Good,” he answered. “Now, you know all that’s been published?” I nodded. “Very well then, after faculty meeting Dr. Wyck went to his office. Dr. Kent saw him. I stayed, talking to Mr. Tolland, Prendergast’s uncle. When I left the building, Wyck’s study window was dark. He must have gone straight home, because his daughter says he came in a little after half past nine. He told her he was going for a walk, and she tried to dissuade him because he seemed ill. He made his usual boast that he had never been ill in his life, although at the meeting I remember thinking that he looked very pale.”
“I noticed it too,” I agreed.
“Well, Marjorie couldn’t dissuade him, but it was some while after he went out that she heard the sound of someone descending the steps. At the time, she had no thought of its being anyone other than her father. What’s your idea on that?”
He spoke the last sentence crisply. I hesitated, more wary of this little man’s cordial manner. He had failed to ask an absolutely obvious question, which I had come expecting to have to answer. Instead, he asked me about footsteps on the Wyck’s porch, heard at a time when I myself had actually been by the barberry hedge, a few yards from the spot. Did he think the footsteps on the porch had been mine? To justify my pause, I said slowly, “Why, I’ve tried to think of another possibility, but I haven’t anything to go on.”
He merely nodded. “Very well then, those descending footsteps are our last positive knowledge of the whereabouts of Gideon Wyck. That is, I assume anyone would report to us who saw him after that time, don’t you?”
I got a better grip on myself, and answered, “I can’t see why anyone should withhold information—that is, unless he was afraid it might implicate him in something he really had nothing to do with.”
“Of course. To continue: I’ve inquired at the bank. On March 26th he made the abnormal withdrawal of five hundred dollars in cash. He pays bills by check, and that sum is unaccountably gone. What are we to conclude from that?”
“It seems to me, sir, that everything points to his deliberate disappearance. Did he know that he was going to be retired?”
“He had good reason to suspect it, certainly.”
“Well, then, he may have known he was going insane, and so drew enough money to go far away somewhere—perhaps to fight it, away from old influences. Who knows?”
I was almost prepared again to make a clean breast of the facts I knew, since they seemed to corroborate this theory. Then I remembered that a perhaps trivial incident had occurred to make me wonder whether Dr. Alling really trusted me. It was the occasion of discovering that the
symélien
plate was missing from Geoffroy Atlas. I had wondered at the time whether he suspected me of taking it, and he said nothing about the coincidence that a symmelus had been born that very day.
Here, again, he was definitely avoiding an even more obvious coincidence in asking nothing by way of explanation of my bloodstained appearance on the crucial night. I decided to keep my secret until convinced of his sincerity.
A kind of tense calm settled upon Altonville—an aspect of everything going scrupulously right on the surface, the better to hide some brooding catastrophe below. When we lacked even a hint of what had happened to the old doctor, there had been nothing definite to think about; but the mailing of his clothes was an act of mystery, provoking all sorts of conjectural solutions.
In my case it had the effect of making me wonder whether the doctor might still be near at hand, playing dead in order to gain some new advantage. There no longer seemed any question but that he had been demented toward the last. A madman was an unpredictable element. Whatever deviltry he had been up to, of nights, on the hillside north of town might still be going on.
There had been a consequent temptation to o more exploring by daylight; but several things stood in the way. I was (and still am) working my way through medical school—a routing which leaves one with little enough time for sleep, let alone exploring. I hoped, moreover, to have a talk with Muriel, who obviously knew the secret of the hill. And, finally, I still suspected Dr. Alling’s motives. He might have his own reasons for assuming that Wyck’s machinations had been conducted somewhere up that lonely road. If so, it was a good place for me to avoid. Prexy had taken over some of Wyck’s work in the school, and also had been called out of town several times to consult with legislative committees and with the county prosecutor. One morning he told me that he did no see any prospects of taking up his historical work for some time to come and asked whether I would care to take a position, at an increased salary, as nurse and “keeper” to Mike.
The hospital authorities were still uncertain whether it would be necessary to commit him to an asylum. They had voted to let him go home for the time being, under observation. After the long sleep which followed his period of violent mania he had been docile; there had been no repetition of the baffling seizures, all of which had occurred within twenty-four hours. I had been allowed to see him, under guard, and he ha shown no tendency to repeat his rough treatment of me. He was, however, definitely deranged—receptive, but uncommunicative.
Biddy’s agonized appeal, “Just to give him a chance to get well, Mr. David,” had won me over. It was agreed that one or the other of us must be with him constantly. A special phone was installed in my garret, to summon help if he became violent below, and a couple of lengths of two-by-four were arranged in such a fashion that they could instantly be slipped into place to block the top of the stairwell.
During Mike’s first few days at home, once or twice he acted as if listening intently to some inaudible voice. That frightened me, I confess. I could not help imagining Gideon Wyck, or his ghost, speaking words audible to Mike alone. The rest of the time, when awake, he either sat staring out the window or read the newspaper. I noticed that he was not bothered, however, when stories were continued on another page. He read right on to the bottom of the column, and started at the top of the next one, willy-nilly. He made no progress whatever in accustoming himself to the loss of an arm. When he wanted to turn a page of the paper, it always fell to the floor, because of his automatic attempt to hold it in nonexistent fingers.
On the 18th of April, Dr. Alling asked me to accompany him and Sheriff Palmer as a witness in a complete search through Dr. Wyck’s effects. No one as yet had gone carefully through his papers. I was on my guard; but nothing happened to increase my suspicions. The sheriff spent a lot of time blowing white lead on various articles of furniture, but his painstaking investigation only served to clinch the finding that the thumbprint was indubitably Dr. Wyck’s own.
When I learned this, the conviction that the doctor had mailed the bundle himself became inescapable. The investigation of Wyck’s papers developed no other clue. Of the missing blue books there was no trace; but I could see nothing remarkable in their disappearance. The essential passages, so far as the testimony against Dick Prendergast was concerned, had been read into the minutes of the faculty meeting by Prexy himself.
When I returned to the Connell’s, I found Mike staring into the corner of his room with an attentive expression, nodding as if to acknowledge phrases no one else could hear. Immediately I remembered the fingerprint in the watchcase, and its inference that Wyck was still alive. The possibility that he had retained a kind of psychic control over Mike was something I could not get out of my imagination. A horde of possibilities, which the normal mind would never think of, were accessible to me in recent memory, owing to the subject material of the
Short Sketch for a History of Concomitant Variations, etc.,
which was concerned exclusively with abnormalities of body and of mind. Once section, for example, had dealt with an appalling series of case histories involving the authentic production, in normal society, of cannibals, rippers, blood drinkers, and ghouls who dug up newly buried bodes for purposes which you can learn, if you care to, when the
Short Sketch
is published.
Wyck himself, as an authority on witchcraft and demonology, had had a chance to become infected from contact with similar material. It was dreadful to think what the effect might be, upon a mind lapsing into insanity, of so much knowledge concerning the darkest phrases of the human character. Perhaps you have read descriptions of the Black Mass with a thrill of purely vicarious horror, since it supposedly has passed forever out of the world. But, if enough insane perverts happened to be swayed by a knowledge of its traditions, what was to prevent its celebration on a Main hillside, in degenerate farming country?
I had been instructed by the alienist to follow Mike without molesting him if he showed a desire to leave the house while I was on guard. It was thought that he was still too weak to go far. If he did seem to be overdoing it, I was to telephone for aid from some convenient house, or to send a message by a passing automobile.
On the afternoon of the 19th of April, some two weeks after the events with which my narrative opens, I was seated on the little kitchen porch, studying. Biddy was shopping, and Mike could be seen through the bedroom window. Once, when I looked, he seemed to be listening intently, for perhaps a minute. Then he decisively nodded his head, as if in obedient approval of an order. I watched carefully for some minutes, but he lapsed once more into the dull lethargy that characterized him during most of the day. The next thing I knew Mike was walking slowly down the road toward the hospital.
Thinking a stroll might be good for him, I let him get a start, and then followed. He turned north at the gates. When abreast of the Wycks’ house, he paused, listened, nodded, and walked slowly down the Bottom Road. With woods so near, on each side, I thought it would be best to keep an eye on him, and to send back news by a passing car if necessary. It seemed unlikely that he would go far; but he continued his slow walk all the way to the second little bridge, turned over it, and commenced to climb. I was vexed with myself for not having phoned from the Wyck house, and scanned the road nervously for a car. I waited as long as I dared, and then followed, full of wild imaginings. Without hesitation, he took the left-hand fork, as I had at night, and emerged presently into the upland meadow.
I was able to proceed in the shadow of the trees, four or five hundred feet behind Mike. Something more than a sense of duty urged me onward toward the mystery that was calling the madman: I was appallingly afraid of my own fears, and decided that it was high time to accept any means whatever the promised to substitute facts for imaginings.
Considering turns of the road, I guessed that the pasture along the edge of which I was following Mike was two miles north of Tom Hobb’s farm. The nearest farm out Center way must be four miles off, beyond Lonesome Hill. One could hardly have found a wilder place anywhere, so near a railroad. At the corner of the pasture, Mike climbed through a barbed wire fence, the strands of which, I noticed, were hooked around the nearest post, removable to let a car drive through. Little bushes also had been barked, betraying the passing of some vehicle; and grease had stained the dry grass in the middle of the old vestigial road.
Presently, beyond a thicket, I glimpsed the old Ford with a tarpaulin thrown over it. Mike had gone past it and through another fence. Small trees grew in the middle of the way, thereafter, which dwindled to a pair of parallel paths through the thickets. Mike stepped out into a smaller upland pasture, with nothing remarkable in it but two huge lilac bushes, gone wild, standing against a mound that indicated another burned farmhouse. I crouched at the edge of the woods, watching, as he walked slowly toward the bushes, a hundred yards away. Then my hair tingled as a voice bade him halt, and asked what he wanted. It was even more frightening to hear him say, “I want me blood back. I ain’t been right without me blood.”
These were, I think, the first words he had spoken since his madness.
The voice said, “He isn’t here now. Go away.”
Mike proceeded, nevertheless, till a figure rose up, rifle in hand, between the lilac bushes. For a moment it looked like Wyck. Then I saw that it was the same boy who had come to inquire at the hospital about Sarah Mullin. I crouched lower, my heart thumping painfully.
“How’d you know how to get here?” the boy asked. “You were always blindfolded, before.”
“I want me blood back. I gave it to the old divil. He can give it back the same way, with the hose and the needles.”
“He’s not here,” the boy screamed. “He’s never coming back. It’s all done with. There’s nobody here now but me.” He poked at Mike with the gun barrel, until the poor mad cripple turned and walked slowly toward the path, muttering, “I ain’t right, any more, without me blood.”