Part 12

Quarrier had never liked Marston; the man was elusive, like an eel; you never saw his hand: it was impossible to guess what moved behind the mask-like marble of his face, expressionless always, cold, contained.

But Quarrier had the “documents,” or, rather, they were there, in that wall safe, in itself a small fort of chrome-nickel steel and manganese against which no mere “can-opener” could have prevailed--no torch, even.

Now, as he operated the combination, he was abruptly sensible of a curious sensation of strain; a shock; the short hairs at the back of his neck prickled suddenly as if at the touch of an invisible, icy finger. And for a moment he could have sworn to a Presence just behind him--a something in ambush grinning at his back--a danger, a real and daunting peril, the greater that it was unmeasured and unknown.

But with his fingers upon that dial, Quarrier half turned as if to depart. He was getting jumpy, his nerves out of hand--too much coffee and too many strong cigars, perhaps. That was it. That kidnapping; it might, after all, have had nothing to do with Marston. The documents were safe--they simply had to be. Unless Marston had been there, and gone; but he would scarcely have had time.

Perhaps, too, Quarrier might have obeyed the impulsion of that turning movement, and in that case, also, this story would never have been written. Quarrier might have done this, but for the moment, practical and sanely balanced as he was, for a split second he had the fancy that if he turned his head he would see--something that was not good, that was not--well--normal.

It was instinctive, elemental, rather than rational, and, getting himself in hand, he would, doubtless, have turned abruptly, leaving the room, if, at that moment, out of the tail of his eye, he had not seen the inescapable evidence of a presence other than his own.

_IV._

The Silent Witness.

Quarrier was a large man, and hard-muscled, a dangerous adversary in a rough-and-tumble, a “good man with his hands,” as we have seen; young, and a quick thinker.

In the half of a second it came to him that Marston might have delegated his authority (at second- or third-hand, certainly) to some peterman, some yegg, say, to obtain possession of those documents. But the fellow would have to be a boxman par excellence; that strong-box was the last word in safes, and, Quarrier was certain, the _final_ one.

No ordinary houseman could hope to break into it, and the marauder would have to depend upon a finger sandpapered to the quick, hearing microscopically sensitive, to catch, through that barrier of steel and bronze, the whispering fall of those super-tumblers.

And abruptly following this suggestion, a second and a more daunting thought obtruded: Suppose--just suppose, that their design held no intention of an assault upon the safe; suppose that their plan, the purpose of that nameless, invisible Presence, had included, in the first place, him--Quarrier? In case, after all, he had managed to escape the trap back there in the cellar? Why--they would use him; that was it! They would force him to open the safe. The thing was simple; there was about it, even, a suggestion of sardonic humor, but it was a humor that did not appeal to Quarrier.

Upon the instant he swung round, crouching, his hand reaching for his pocket in a lightning stab, and coming up, level, holding the short-barrelled automatic.

Then his mouth twisted in a mirthless grin as his straining gaze beheld the square room empty under the lights.

A moment he stood, his keen, strong, thoughtful face etched deep with new lines of worry, ears strained against the singing silence, eyes turning from door to door, and from wall to window, a pulse in his temple throbbing jerkily to his hard-held breath. He began the circuit of the room. Walking on tiptoe, he approached the door by which he had entered, thrust into its socket the great bolt. The bolt seemed really unnecessary; the lock in itself, a spring-latch affair, was devised so that it held the stronger for pressure from without.

The _snick_ of steel against steel rang startlingly loud in the speaking stillness; for a moment Quarrier had a curious fancy, a premonition almost, that it was a wasted precaution--that, in effect, he was locking and double locking that door upon an empty room--an empty strong-box. Pistol in hand, however, and starting from the door, he began his round.

The book-case he passed with a cursory examination; nothing there. Next the painting; a portrait of his great-uncle; it held him for a moment; those eyes had always held him; they were “following” eyes; and now for a moment it seemed to Quarrier that they held a warning, a message, a command. But he passed on....

A heavy leather settle was next in order. With a sheepish grimace he stooped, peering under it, straightened, going on to the double windows. That settle had been innocent of guile, but as to the windows--he paused an interval while he thumbed the patent steel catches. These were shut tight, the windows black, glimmering squares against the windy night without.

Throwing off the locks, one after the other, he pushed up the first window, released the steel outer apron, and then, in the very act of leaning outward into the black well beneath, he drew back, with a quick, darting glance over his shoulder as his spine prickled at a sudden, daunting thought.

_What was that?_

For a heartbeat at his back he thought to hear a rustle, a movement, like the shuffle of a swift, stealthy footfall, on the heavy pile of the Kermanshah rug.

But once more there was nothing--no one.

It was thirty stories to the street beneath, and as he leaned there in the window his imagination upon the instant had swayed out down to the dreadful peril of the sheer, sickening fall.

How simple it would have been for someone behind him--how easy....

He shivered, the sweat beading his forehead in a fine mist of fear. A hand on his ankle--a quick heave--and then a formless blur against the night--the plunge--into nothingness....

Turning to the right, he surveyed the heavy door leading to the lumber-room. He tried the great key, rattling the knob. The door was locked; it was heavy, solid, substantial. A quick frown wrinkled his forehead.

“Absurd!” he muttered, but there was an odd lack of conviction in the word. “Impossible!” he said again. “There’s nobody in the room except myself; there _couldn’t_ be.”

But even as he spoke he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that someone or something _had_ occupied that room but a matter of seconds prior to his entry, and if he, or whatever it was, was not there now, where was this invisible presence?

The presence in the room of another than himself was a physical impossibility unless, indeed, there was, after all, a fourth dimension, into which as a man passes from sunlight into shadow, the intruder had stepped, perhaps now regarding him sardonically from that invisible plane: A living ghost!

Absurd! And yet, there was that other fact--he had seen it: _the silent, the voiceless, yet moving witness--the positive and irrefutable proof of a presence other than his own_.

* * * * *

There, in a locked, bolted, impregnable chamber, unmarked by the least sign of entry--a main door which did not have a key, responding only to a combination known only to himself--a secondary door most obviously locked, and from the inside; windows of thick glass, triple locked with the latest in patent catches--someone or something had entered, passing, as it seemed, through bolts and bars, through walls, through steel and stone and concrete, like a djinn, or a wraith--_through the keyhole_?

Matter-of-fact as he was, hard-headed and practical, Quarrier was aware for an instant of a flicker of almost superstitious fear. But--rot! In all the space confined by those four walls and ceiling and floor there was not room for concealment even for a--cat, for instance--for nothing human, at any rate. It was beyond him, even as the Thing that had entered was _beyond him, though at hand_.

Quarrier did not believe in the supernatural with his mind; but, brave as he was by nature and training, in that moment he knew fear. But he preferred, with his intelligence, to credit Marston with it; Marston, so far as morals were considered, might have been almost anything: you saw it in his curious eyes, with their pale irises, the flat, dead color of his skin, like the belly of a snake; in the grim, traplike mouth. Quarrier had never deceived himself as to the President of Intervale Steel. The thing was fantastic, unreal--and yet. It might easily be a trap, and worse. Peril, the more subtile because unknown, was all about him; he felt it, like an emanation. What was it that the psychological sharps would call it? An aura, as of some invisible and deadly presence, seeing, although unseen.

_V._

Through The Keyhole.

The room, or office, as has been written, was impregnable to any but an assault in force, the doors invincible save by the shattering crash of high explosive, the windows almost equally so.

Quarrier’s man, Harrison, even, would be unable to enter the room in his employer’s absence; so that, knowing the combination of the safe, he could take nothing from it, or bring anything into it. He left, in the rare intervals that Quarrier suffered his ministrations, always with his master, returning likewise, if he returned at all, in Quarrier’s company.

The recluse had hedged himself about with care. Marston, with his keen, devising brain, would face a pretty problem in the recovery of those documents.

But it was when, on an abrupt inspiration, Quarrier removed the telephone receiver from its hook, that he became certain that it was a trap.

“Give me Schuyler 9000,” he had whispered, his voice hoarse in the blanketing silence. But even with the words he knew that the line was dead, yet it was characteristic of Quarrier that, once satisfied that this was so, he resumed his inventory of the office where he had left off.

He had completed the circuit of the chamber with the exception of the wall safe and the small, flat-topped writing-desk by the door. From his position he could see the desk quite easily; there was nothing and nobody either on or under it. And now, before he twirled the combination, he laid his hand upon the doors, pulling at the handles in a perfunctory testing. And then--

He recoiled, stumbling backward, as the doors swung wide with a jarring _clang_. Fingers trembling, he jerked forward a drawer--put in his hand. He withdrew it--empty. Confronted with the incredible truth--the thing which he had feared and yet had not believed--he stood, stunned. _For the documents had vanished!_

Even in the midst of his excitement and dismay, Quarrier permitted himself the ghost of a faint, wintry grin. But a few hours before he had himself bestowed those papers in their particular resting-place, and, observing a precaution to make assurance doubly sure, he had stationed a guard at the street level, men whom he could trust. For, in the morning he had meant to transfer those documents to that repository in the West Eighties from which Marston would never be able to retrieve them, for with their receipt would come the final quietus of the President of Intervale Steel. And that was why Quarrier had called that number, which had not answered.

Now the documents were gone and Marston was safe. But there remained a final thin thread of hope, and it was this:

The building, a new one, stood alone; Quarrier owned it; his enemies had in some obscure fashion obtained that which they sought. And--this being so--they were in the building.

Quarrier’s orders to that guard had not included the stoppage or detention of any seeking ingress. On entering, he had been informed merely that perhaps half a dozen, all told, had possibly preceded him. They had trapped him--perhaps they might even succeed in expunging him from the record together with the evidence, but they--Marston and the rest--some or all of them were in the building; they _had_ to be.

He grinned again, a swift, tigerish grin, as he considered the trifling clue which had betrayed them. But for that he would never have discovered the looting of the safe.

And it was then, as he stood, turned a little from the safe and facing the heavy door giving on the lumber-room, that he straightened, tense, bending to the keyhole.

The door was sound-proof, as were the walls, but abruptly, as a sound heard in dreams, he had heard it: At the keyhole, a sound, or the shadow of a sound, faint and thin, but unmistakable, like the beating of a heart.

And that sound had gone on, faint and thin, as though muffled through layers of cotton wool, persistent, regular--the faint, scarce-audible ticking of a watch.

For a moment, even while he considered and dismissed the thought that they might have planted a time-bomb against that door, Quarrier hesitated. And then, abruptly, he knew: They were in the lumber-room; he had surprised them; doubtless they waited, hidden, for his exit. He had been too quick for them; they had not counted on his escape from that cellar, and if that were so, he, Quarrier, would have something to say as to their getaway.

Silent, his automatic ready, he had opened the door into the corridor with a slow, stealthy caution. Then he was in the corridor, searching the thick-piled shadows, where, at the far end, a light hung between floor and ceiling like a star. A silence held, thick, heavy, mournful, daunting, as he began his advance--a silence burdened with a tide of threat, sinister, whispering, alive.

Just ahead of him was the first of the great batteries of elevators. A pressure upon the call-bell, and in a moment he would have with him men upon whom he could rely, men who would execute his least order without question. And then, remembering, he desisted.

For he found it easy to believe that the same agency which had silenced his telephone might have cut him off here also from communication, but his finger, reaching for the signal, jerked backward, as, out of the corner of his eye, he beheld a lance of light spring suddenly from the crusted transom of the lumber-room door.

Were they coming out?

“Ha!” he breathed, deep in his throat.

He did not pause to consider how many of them there might be, or that his faithful guardians of the gate, thirty stories below, were probably silenced by the same sinister hand.

Silently, his gun held rigid as a rock, he approached the lumber-room door; then, a step away, he paused, with a sharp intake of his breath.

Here, six paces at his left, a narrow corridor led to a fire-alarm box and a window directly overlooking the main entrance and the street. Quarrier, back to the wall, thrust up a groping hand to where, just above his head, a light cluster hung. Three of the bulbs he unscrewed; then, going to the window, opened it, leaned outward, and, with intervals between, dropped them downward into the dark.

Then, pistol in hand, his feet silent upon the concrete flooring of the corridor, he approached the lumber-room door.

On hands and knees, he listened a moment at the keyhole; then, still on his knees, his fingers, reaching, turned the knob, slowly, with an infinite caution, in his face new creases, grim lines. His face bitter, bleak, mouth hard, he straightened, got to his feet, thrust inward the heavy door with one lightning movement; stepped into the lumber-room, his gun, swung in a short arc, covering the two who faced him across the intervening space.

“Those documents, Marston,” he commanded bruskly, “I can--use them.”

His gaze, for a fleeting instant, turned to the other man, who, hands clenched at his sides, his eyes wide with sudden terror and unbelief, stared dumbly at the apparition in the doorway.

But Marston, his face gray, his hand hidden in his pocket, shrugged, sneered wryly, his hand thrust out and upward with the speed of light.

But, for the difference between time and eternity, he was not quick enough. There came a double report, roaring almost as one: Marston’s sneer blurred to a stiff, frozen grimace; he swayed, leaning forward, his face abruptly blank; then, in a slumping fall, he crashed downward to the floor.

Quarrier stooped, swept up the papers where they had fallen from the dead man’s pocket; then he turned curtly upon his body-servant.

“You may go, Harrison,” he said, as if dismissing the man casually at the end of his day’s service.

But if Harrison felt any gratitude for the implied reprieve, he turned now to Quarrier with an eager gesture, his speech broken, agonized:

“He--you must listen, sir--Mr. Quarrier,” he begged. “He--Mr. Marston--he knew me when--he knew about....”

His voice broke, faltered.

“Well--?” asked Quarrier, coldly, his face expressionless.

“Mr. Marston,” continued the man--“he knew--my record--I was afraid to tell you, sir. He--he found out, somehow, that I’d--been--done time, sir.... He scared me, I’ll admit--he threatened me--threatened to tell you.... You didn’t know, of course....”

“Yes--I _knew_,” explained Quarrier, simply, and at the expression in his master’s face the valet’s own glowed suddenly as if lighted from within.

“You--_knew_--” he murmured.

_VI._

Chain of Circumstance.

“But there is one thing you can tell me,” Quarrier was saying. “You had the combination of the safe, of course; we’ll say nothing more about that--but--how did you get in?”

Harrison bent his head.

“Well, sir,” he explained, after a moment, “it was simple, but I’d never have thought of it but for--him.” He pointed to the silent figure on the floor.

“Well--there are just three doors, sir, as you know,” he resumed. “The entrance door of your office, with the combination lock; the entrance door of the lumber-room here, both giving on the corridor; and the inside door between the lumber-room and your office. We couldn’t get into the office by the entrance door from the hall on account of the combination lock, but we could and did get into the lumber-room easily enough from the corridor--the door’s not even locked, as you know, sir. And that’s how we got into the private office--from the lumber-room, here, through the door between.”

“But how--?” began Quarrier. “That door is a steel one; it was locked--I’ll swear to that. You didn’t jimmy it; you didn’t have a Fourth Dimension handy, did you, Harrison? But--go on; it’s beyond me, I’ll confess.”

Harrison permitted himself the ghost of a grin.

“Why--just a newspaper, and a bit of wire, sir--that was how it was done. I didn’t dare unlock the connecting door--beforehand, sir--from the office side; I never had the chance. I was never alone in the office, sir, even for a second, as you know; but there’s a clearance of nearly half an inch, sir, beneath that connecting door--just enough for the newspaper. From the lumber-room here I pushed the paper under the door, into the office, and then, with the wire, it wasn’t so difficult to push the key out of the lock; the door was locked from the office side, of course.

“The key fell on the paper; we pulled the paper with the key on it back under the door, sir, into the lumber-room here, and--we just _unlocked_ the connecting door there, and walked into the office. Afterwards I locked the door again, from the office side, and I just did make it out the front door of the office, when I heard your step on the stair. _He_ was waiting for me in the lumber-room; he said it was safer. Anyway, I just did make it along the hall and into the lumber-room by the hall entrance before you came.”

He paused, a queer expression in his face.

“But I don’t understand how you _knew_, if you’ll excuse me, sir--how you suspected. Afterward, from the corridor, you saw our light when we were ready to come out; we thought you’d gone for good, of course.... But nothing was touched, sir, except--that is--of course--” He stumbled.

Quarrier silenced him with upraised hand.

“I didn’t _suspect_, Harrison--I _knew_,” he said. “And I heard, through the keyhole of that connecting door, the ticking of that watch of yours; it’s big enough. That helped, of course. But that was afterward. There was one little thing you overlooked, and, for the matter of that, so did I--nearly.”

There came the sound of heavy footsteps on the concrete flooring of the corridor, voices: His guards, summoned by Quarrier’s “light-bombs.”

Quarrier continued, as if he had not heard:

“Well--it was right under my eyes, but I almost missed it, at that. I saw it moving, and I knew that something must have made it move.”

He paused, with a faint grimace of recollection.

“You see--you had your hat on in the office, didn’t you?... Yes, I thought so. You’re a bit deaf, too.... Well, you should have been--to Marston. But that’s past. And you have a good, thick crop of hair--_so far_.”

Quarrier smiled frostily. “Well, you struck against it and set it moving--that was all. You never noticed it. Because it was--_the chain from the electrolier_, Harrison, and that was how--”

“You caught us, sir! I--I’m glad. You might call it a--”

“--Chain of circumstance,” finished Quarrier, his eyes outward, gazing into the new dawn.

_The_ Place of Madness

_By_ Merlin Moore Taylor

“Nonsense. A penitentiary is not intended to be a place for coddling and pampering those who have broken the law.”

Stevenson, chairman of the Prison Commission, waved a fat hand in the direction of the convict standing at the foot of the table.

“This man,” he went on, “has learned in some way that the newspapers are ‘gunning’ for the warden and he is seizing the opportunity to make a play for sympathy in his own behalf. I’ll admit that these tales he tells of brutality toward the prisoners are well told, but I believe that he is stretching the facts. They can’t be true. Discipline must be maintained in a place like this even if it requires harsh measures to do it at times.”

“There is no call for brutality, however,” exclaimed the convict, breaking the rule that prisoners must not speak unless they are spoken to.

Then, ignoring the chairman’s upraised hand, he went on: “We are treated like beasts here! If a man so much as opens his mouth to ask a civil and necessary question, the reply is a blow. Dropping a knife or a fork or a spoon at the table is punished by going without the next meal. Men too ill to work are driven to the shops with the butts of guns. Petty infractions of the most trivial rules mean the dark cell and a diet of bread and water.

“Do you know what the dark cell is? ‘Solitary’ they call it here. ‘Hell’ would be a better name. Steel all around you, steel walls, steel door, steel ceiling, steel floor. Not a cot to lie upon, not even a stool to sit upon. Nothing but the bare floor. And darkness! Not a ray of light ever penetrates the dark cell once the door is closed upon you. No air comes to you except through a small ventilator in the roof. And even that has an elbow to keep the light away from you.

“Is it any wonder that even the most refractory prisoner comes out of there broken--broken in mind, in body, in spirit? And some of them go insane--stark, staring mad--after only a few hours of it. And for what? I spent two days in ‘solitary’ because I collapsed from weakness at my bench in the shoe factory.

“See this scar?” He pointed to a livid mark over one eye. “A guard did that with the barrel of his rifle because I was unable to get up and go back to work when he told me. He knocked me senseless, and when I came to I was in ‘solitary.’ Insubordination, they called it. Two days they kept me in there when I ought to have been in a hospital. Two days of hell and torture because I was ill. People prate of reforming men in prison. It’s the other way around. It makes confirmed criminals of them--if they don’t go mad first.”

The chairman wriggled in his seat and cleared his throat impatiently.

“We have listened to you for quite a while, my man,” he said pompously, “but I, for one, have enough. A dozen or more prisoners have testified here today, and none of them has made a statement to back up the charges you have made.”

“And why?” demanded the prisoner. “Because they are afraid to tell the truth. They know that they would be beaten and starved and deprived of their ‘good time’ on one excuse or another if they even hinted at what they know. You wouldn’t believe them, anyhow. You don’t believe me, yet I probably shall suffer for what I have said here. But that doesn’t matter. They can’t take any ‘good time’ away from me. I’m in for life.”

His voice grew bitter.

“And that is one reason I have gone into this thing in detail--for my sake and the sake of others who cannot look forward to ever leaving this place. The law has decreed that we shall live and die here, but the law said nothing about torturing us.”

“This board guaranteed its protection to all who were called upon to testify here,” answered the chairman. “It has no desire to whitewash any person in connection with the investigation which is being made, and in order that there might be no reflection upon the manner in which this hearing is conducted neither the warden, his deputies nor guards have been permitted to attend. Unless you have tangible evidence to offer us and can give the names of those who can back up your charges, you may go.”

“Just a minute.” It was the board member nearest the prisoner who interrupted. Then, to the convict, “You said, I believe, that only a few hours in the dark cell often will drive a man insane. Yet you spent two days there. You are not insane, are you?”

“No, sir.” The convict spoke respectfully. “My conscience was clear and I was able to serve my time there without breaking. But another day or so would have finished me. You testified against me at my trial, didn’t you? I hold no grudge against you for that, sir. I give you credit for doing only what you thought was your duty. Your testimony clinched the case against me. Yet I am innocent--”