Part 16

The Cuban shook his head. “No, _senor_, I hear no one talk but you since I come in.”

His master swore helplessly. “Are you trying to make a fool of me, Manuel? Do you dare stand there and tell me no one spoke to me?”

“I don’t know, _senor_. I only know I hear no one speak--”

Again the Voice intruded:

“It may be that Manuel thinks you are trying to make a fool of him,” it suggested.

“Do you?” Defoe asked the Cuban.

“Do I what, _senor_?” the valet asked, placidly.

“Do you think I’m trying to make a fool of you?”

“I do not say so, do I, _senor_?” the servant replied, deprecatingly.

“No, but you heard--or _did_ you hear?--this visitor say it!”

The Cuban, almost tearfully, denied it, becoming verbose in his protestation.

Defoe flapped his arms on the wings of his easy chair and bade his valet hush.

“Get out of here, you brown-skinned dumbbell! One of us has gone crazy tonight!”

The Cuban moved off, keeping a suspicious eye upon his master. His retreating footstep presently was heard dying away in the hall outside.

“Well, what do you think of that damned little Cuban?” Defoe asked the Voice. “I wonder what made him lie so brazenly?”

There was no response. Defoe repeated his second question.

Still silence answered him.

“Have you gone, my friend?” Defoe asked, turning part way in his chair to test the other’s watchfulness. This time no automatic punched his head and no command wilted him into the depths of his chair again.

Still doubtful of his good luck, Defoe called out once more:

“I say, stranger, have you gone?”

The only sound that greeted his ears was the faint creaking of a window in the adjoining dining-room. Defoe rose and darted to the connecting door, snapping on the electric light at the entrance to the dining-room.

The room was vacant of any soul but himself.

All he could see was the slight movement of the lace curtain at the dining-room window--and when he examined the window he found it latched.

_III._

The next day Defoe went to his doctor. He wished to take stock of himself; perhaps he had been applying himself too closely to his business.

“You are badly run down, Allen,” the physician said, almost before he had sat down with his patient. “You look mentally distressed.”

“I am,” admitted Defoe. “Working too hard, I guess.”

The doctor eyed him keenly.

“Anything else troubling you?” he asked.

Defoe insisted there really was nothing at all beside his work that was affecting him. So the doctor gave the usual diagnosis: Too much nerve tension, not enough sleep, not the proper kinds of food. He ended by advising more rest and quiet.

“And avoid excitement, too,” he warned. “That old heart palpitation might crop up again, you know.”

It was all very well for the doctor to advise more rest and more sleep, but how was a man to sleep beneath a Damocles sword of mystery, of weird forebodings?

It was three weeks before Defoe felt that he was succeeding in obeying the doctor’s instructions, partly, at least. Then--.

It happened late one night. Defoe lay in bed, his back to the lighted electric lamp on the table: he had fallen asleep, reading. Suddenly he stirred at a touch on his shoulder.

“That you, Manuel?” he asked, drowsily. “All right, put out the li--”

“No, it is not Manuel--and don’t bother to turn around, Defoe!” this last sharply, as Defoe made a movement to arise in bed.

“You again!” Defoe exclaimed. “What--how did you get in?”

“That’s my problem, not yours,” said the Voice. “I merely dropped in again to inquire if you had thought any more of doing what I suggested.”

Defoe checked an insane desire to leap out of bed and make a break for the door--anything, to escape this tormentor at his back! But he remembered the automatic....

He got himself under a semblance of control before he answered:

“Your suggestions were ridiculous. Why should I have anything to confess about the Bland trial, or why should I commit suicide over it?” He even essayed a laugh meant to be derisive.

But the intruder chose to ignore Defoe’s evasions. His next remark was as startling as it was illuminating:

“Did you know,” said the Voice, “that of the other eleven jurors who convicted Bland, only seven are living--still?”

“No; I haven’t kept track of the other eleven men,” replied Defoe, annoyed subconsciously by the detachment that the Voice gave to the word “still.”

“Well, I have,” said the Voice. “Two of the surviving seven are in insane asylums; two of the four dead committed sui--.”

Defoe could brook it no longer. He wrenched around in bed to grapple with his antagonist, forgetful, in his madness, of the automatic. But before he could free himself from the bedclothes the lamp was snapped out, and Defoe was left ignominiously tumbled in the darkness on the floor.

A chuckle from the vicinity of the bedroom door told him of his guest’s departure....

When morning came, after the nerve-racking night, Defoe found it hard to realize that his two experiences with the Voice really had taken place. None the less, he knew they were preying on his vitality, on his brain-functions.

Repeatedly the thought came to him that it was all a dream like his recollection of the murder trial out of which he had awakened the night of the Voice’s first visit. But always against the theory of the dream he placed his remembrance of the feel of the automatic revolver; and, too, the fact that he had talked with Manuel and with the Voice at the same time argued against the dream explanation.

Left, then, was conscience--that is, if the visits of the Voice were simply hallucinations of a distracted mind. But why should conscience wait for twelve years to haunt and harass him?

The more he pondered it all, the greater became the dread of another visit from the Voice. The greater grew his fear, too, of losing his reason, as he sought to analyze the situation from every conceivable standpoint. With every new bit of theorizing, Defoe felt himself giving way more and more to melancholia such as he knew is frequently but the prelude to insanity. Was it possible, he wondered, for a man’s conscience to drive him to imbecility?

Defoe finally accepted the inevitable.

“Manuel,” he ordered, the second morning after the bedroom encounter with the Voice, “pack my things. We’re going away.”

“Away, _senor_? Where?”

Defoe’s brain groped vainly for an instant, then seized upon the only chance.

“The sea--a sea voyage. My nerves....”

Manuel busied himself among Defoe’s clothes. “Do you need many things, _senor_? Do you go far away--Europe, perhaps?”

“No, no. Just down the coast--Old Point Comfort, I guess. Yes, that’s it. A week or so of rest. Just my steamer trunk and a suitcase will do.”

The day of the trip down the coast was as perfect as he could have wanted for his own satisfaction. All during the forenoon the Old Dominion steamer skirted the Jersey shore line, and Defoe sat out on deck basking in the sun and already feeling better for the salt-laden air that he breathed in deeply. In the afternoon he napped most of the time and when nightfall chilled the deck promenaders he descended with the rest to the dining-saloon.

It was while sitting in the smoking-saloon, after dinner, that Defoe first had the impression that he was being watched. A poker game was going on, lackadaisically, in one corner of the saloon; scattered in chairs and cushioned seats along the windows were perhaps a dozen or fifteen men. But, for the life of him, Defoe could not pick out any one in the room who might be watching him, now he gave his fleeting impression indulgence long enough to look about him.

Finishing a cigar, Defoe decided on a deck stroll before retiring. It was too cold and damp, with a fog beginning to gather, to permit of sitting on deck, so he paced to and fro briskly up near the fore deck beneath the pilot’s tower. The nervousness of the few moments in the smoking-saloon, when he imagined himself being watched, transmuted itself into a shiver as the foggy dampness penetrated to his marrow. He lit a fresh cigar and puffed at it jerkily as if to generate bodily warmth. Presently the shiver developed into a veritable shudder such as precedes chills or certain forms of ague.

Defoe, thoroughly miserable and alarmed now at the fear of sickness on board ship, chafed his cheeks with his hands and, on his way to the entrance to the stateroom, he flailed his arms about himself to stem the onrush of the chill. Once inside the passageway of the staterooms, however, he felt warmer, and by the time he reached his stateroom door the chill had subsided almost completely.

He was still uncomfortably cold, though, as he opened the door. With one hand he unbuttoned his overcoat and with the other he reached gropingly for the electric light button on the wall. He fumbled around for it a few seconds, then swore softly in vexation because he had not noticed by daylight just where it was located.

Groping with both hands, now, he stumbled around the none-too-commodious room, feeling for the push button on the wall. He paused once and took inventory of his pockets and cursed his luck for lack of another match.

Then he went to hunting in the dark again--until his hand came full against a living body....

_IV._

The body stirred, eluding Defoe’s contact.

Defoe fell to quaking once more, but it was not the trembling of the chill this time. He opened his mouth to challenge the intruder, and all he could do was swallow and gag at the words that stuck in his throat.

A pressure against the pit of his stomach--a firm shove of hand upon his shoulder--and Defoe found himself stepping backward until it seemed he must have walked the length of the ship. But of course he hadn’t--he hadn’t even left the stateroom--and suddenly he was tumbled on to the edge of the berth, the pressure against his abdomen increasing.

A vague nausea gripped him. He clutched at his abdomen and his fingers wrapped themselves around the barrel of an automatic pistol. The pressure against his body became unbearable, piercing.... Defoe crumpled back into the berth and the convulsive effort restored his speech.

“What the hell are you doing?” he exploded. “Get out of here! What are you trying to do--stab me with a pistol?”

The incongruity of his question aroused a titter of amusement from the invisible presence.

“No, I only wished to make sure you weren’t trying to get away.”

That Voice again!--_here_! Defoe cringed in a sort of abject fear.

“What are you--_who are you_?” Defoe struggled to keep his voice steady, struggled, indeed, to keep his reason from flying out of balance and shattering into a thousand pieces of driveling idiocy.

“Call me anything you care to,” replied the Voice in the dark.

“I don’t believe you are--_anything_ at all! I think you are all a dream, a nightmare, a damnable hallucination that I can’t get rid of! To hell with you! I’m going to go down to the smoking-room and--smoke you out of my mind! I’m going to stay in the light from now on, day and night, until I get over this morbid dreaming!”

Defoe really thought he meant it all, until the pressure against his stomach made him doubt his courage and defiance.

Perhaps it was the nausea--maybe seasickness; he never had thought of that!--that was griping at his vitals like the insistent pressure of a steel-barreled weapon.

“Sit down, Mr. Defoe!” commanded the Voice. “I’ve got something to say to you.”

“To hell with you!” Defoe repeated, almost hysterically now. His hands clutched at the pressure again--and once more the pistol barrel sent him squirming back into the recesses of the berth.

“I want to talk to you some more about the Bland case,” went on the Voice, unperturbed by the other’s outburst. “When are you going to confess?”

“Confess?” Defoe parried. “Confess what?”

“Confess that you knew Bland was innocent when you convicted him,” said the Voice.

“But I didn’t.” It was like wrestling with one’s conscience, Defoe thought, this interminable denying of Bland’s innocence. He was wearying of it all; his mind was revolting at the repeated “third degree” of this mysterious Voice. Soon, he feared, his brain would refuse to function.

“But you’ve said you did,” the Voice insisted.

“When? It’s a lie!” exclaimed Defoe.

The Voice chuckled, sending a shudder through the man crouching in the corner of the berth.

“You probably don’t know, Mr. Defoe, that for a number of years you have had the treacherous habit of talking in your sleep--talking volubly, excitedly, sometimes almost reconstructing entire incidents in your talk for the benefit of anyone who might happen to be listening.”

“Well?” asked Defoe.

“Simply this: Manuel has overheard enough to--”

“Manuel?” broke in Defoe. “What’s he got to do with it!”

“I forgot to tell you,” the Voice apologized. “The Cuban is my confederate--former member of the Secret Police of Havana, you know. I saved his life during the Spanish war and--well, he’s paying back an old debt, as he calls it. He let me in and out of your house, and tipped me off about this trip. You see, Manuel had overheard you say, in your sleep, that you convicted an innocent man of murder. So I knew your conscience--”

“Are you trying to be my conscience? Are you trying to plague me into confessing? Are you--”

“No,” answered the Voice, “unless you choose to call me your conscience. I’m willing. You seem to be in need of one. Do you know, Mr. Defoe,” and the Voice took on a more affable tone, “you have been fearfully distracted the last few weeks or months. You need a rest--a _long_ rest!”

Defoe was silent, hunched in the retreat of the berth. He had no fight left in him. Presently he fell to whimpering quietly, as a child does when it is punished beyond endurance and is too frightened to cry. The Voice, it seemed, missed the old combativeness, gone so quickly after Defoe’s late outburst, so it prodded the hunted man with its chief weapon--not its pistol, but its chuckle. This time it chuckled devilishly, aggravatingly, and it rasped against the tender sensibilities of the sniveling Defoe like salt in an open wound.

Then something broke what little bonds of restraint remained in Defoe. He sprang, catlike, to the outer edge of the berth and lunged for the arm that held the pistol. In the darkness his head struck the cross-support of the berth above and he slumped forward, half dazed by the blow.

Again the chuckle sounded in his ears, now ringing with the stunning impact; and again Defoe lurched forward, only to fall dizzily to the floor. He clambered clumsily to his feet, gripping the berth for a momentary prop.

Soon his head began to clear. He was assembling out of the maze of ache and buzzing in his ears and brain some sort of coherent idea of where he was and what had been happening.

“Now I know what it all means!” he burst forth presently. “You--you sneaking, cackling little conscience, get out of here! I’m going to cheat you if I have to become a drunkard or a dope fiend the rest of my life! I’m not going to let a conscience, or a voice or a chuckle, drive me to insanity--or to confessing--or to suicide!”

Defoe was steady enough now, supporting himself against the upper berth. His voice grew more strident.

“No, I’m not going to let my conscience get the best of me! You thought you could keep after me endlessly, but I’ll get rid of you. I’m never going to be bothered with you or your voice again! Never! Now get out of here! Get out of here, I say!”

The chuckle--a croaking, sepulchral chuckle it was now--answered him out of the darkness.

“You might tell me, before I go, if you know who really did kill the man Bland was convicted of murdering,” said the Voice. “I’m curious enough to wish to know his name.” And the Voice chuckled once more.

“Damn that cackle! I’ll tell you, if you choke off that infernal cackling! I’ll tell you--_yes_! _I_ can tell you, because _I did it_! _I_ committed that murder, you understand? _I_ did it! Now cackle all you want to! And I convicted Bland of it! Cackle, you damned little shriveled conscience! _Ho, ho, ho-ho-ho!_ I think it’s my turn--to--cackle--now!”

The words of the hysterical man rose to a maudlin scream that reverberated piercingly in the little stateroom.

“Now get out of here for good!” the raving Defoe shouted, recovering coherence of speech after a time. “Get out--before--I--”

A blinding glare of light came as Defoe reached for the door. The intruder had found the push button.

Defoe stared--then toppled to the floor.

“Bland! _Bland! You! It’s you...._”

And before the stranger that was Bland passed from the room he felt again of the heart of the craven hulk at his feet. The doctor had been right: The tumult in the breast of the twelfth juror had been too much.

If only Defoe had known that the Governor had pardoned Bland, his secret might have been safe forever.

_Walter Scott Story offers a new conclusion to Edgar Allen Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado”_

_The_ Sequel

Sobered on the instant--the padlock had clicked when Montresor passed the chain about my waist and thus fastened me to the wall--I stood upright in the little dungeon, the blood running cold in my veins.

With maniacal laughter, he withdrew from the niche, whipped a trowel from under his robe and began to wall up the narrow opening. I knew it was not a joke, a drunken jest. I saw that his drunkenness had fallen from him. The dying flambeau fell from my nerveless hand and cast a fitful bloody glow upon the whitened, dripping walls. I shook the chain frenziedly.

“For God’s sake, Montresor!” I cried.

He replied with a horrible, mocking laugh, and, like a devil from hell, lifted his voice with mine to show that it was idle to call for help.

I had always distrusted Montresor. I knew him to be a serpent. He feared me and was jealous of my person and attainments. In spite of all his fawning and his smiles, I knew he hated me deeply for the injuries I had heaped upon him and for the open insults I had added to them. And yet I swear he had never in the slightest suspected that it was not Giovanna, the tenor, who was successful with his wife, but _I_!

“Fortunato!” he called, and his hoarse tone echoed in a ghastly way through the gloomy catacombs of his ancestors and re-echoed along the winding crypt.

I made no reply. Cold beads of fear started from my brow as I strained against the chain and listened to the soft thud of the stones he was building into the opening to make my tomb and the accompanying tinkle of his trowel. Even then, I admired, perforce, the cleverness with which he had secured his revenge.

It was the night of the carnival. He had found me in the streets, dazed with wine, and, pretending that he wanted my judgment on a cask of sherry, had lured my staggering feet into the gloomy passages under his _palazzo_. And he had brought me into this narrow niche in the castle walls to entomb me alive where no one would ever find me. It was _clever_!

My memory fails me now, but I doubt not I cried out many times for pity and mercy; and I take no shame in thinking this may have been so. I recall his words and his horrible mouthings as he worked with more haste and zeal than skill.

But I was a brave man always. I did not yield myself to fate. It was unthinkable. I, _Fortunato_, to die walled in by Montresor! I cursed him and his line. I wrenched at the chain with ferocious strength, more eager to have him by the throat than to be free to live. I called upon all the saints and particularly to my patron saint. You shall see that I was not unheard.

The wall grew high--to his breast--and in the light of his flambeau set somewhere in the wall outside I could see Montresor’s sweating face as he labored with the stones.

Suddenly he thrust his torch through the opening, now no larger than his head--and to deceive him I prostrated myself upon the floor and laughed the laugh of a dying man.

I heard the _thud_ of another stone, and looked up quickly. My flambeau had died out: Montresor’s had disappeared. And there was no opening! I was in a tomb of stone!

Absolute darkness surrounded me, and the walls seemed to press in upon me like icy blankets. And silence as absolute as the darkness reigned.

I leaped to my feet. Silence! Silence, absolute silence, save for my own labored breathing. Maria! Suppose the mortar hardened ere I could throw my weight against the poor wall he had built. Then I were lost!

I called out aloud to my holy saint. Lucky it was that I had the bodily strength of two. I strained upon the chain wildly; I seized it in my hands and tore at it with savage determination. I would not die thus! In desperation, frantic with rage and fear, I made one last violent, prodigious effort to free myself, with strength enough to make the palazzo tremble, and in that last great effort the staples of the chain tore loose from the half-rotten stone in which they were fastened.

Hot tears of joy welled in my eyes. I vowed a hundred candles to the Virgin: but I could not then take time to give thanks.

Throwing myself upon the wall Montresor had just reared, my feet desperately braced on the rough floor, I fought for liberty like a tiger. Heavens! It _gave_!--the wall gave!

It yielded like a stiff canvas against the push of a hand, gave slowly, but surely--bulged outward, then went rumbling down! I thrust myself through the jagged opening into the catacombs. I was free!

What joy if Montresor had been there, even though he wore his rapier and I had but my poinard!

It was very dark, and yet I could see a gleam of light in the direction from which we had come, Montresor crazed with the thought of sweet revenge, I drunk with wine. I paused and thought. Should I find him in the streets in this gay time and slay him. No! I laughed insanely, yet clearly. No! There was a better thing to do.

With haste and no mean skill, I built up the wall anew, closing the opening of what might have been my tomb--had I been a weak man--and against this new wall erected a rampart of old bones; then, thrusting the dangling ends of the chain within my doublet, began to retrace my feet toward freedom.

I struck my foot against some small, soft object, and halted with a start. I leaned over. I had kicked against Montresor’s mask, and I put it over my face.

I knew that all of his servants were away to enjoy the carnival, but it would do no harm to wear this mask--and it served my purpose. I passed through the crypt and walked back swiftly and steadily through the range of low arches through which I had come staggering to an awful doom.

Soon I was above in my false friend’s rich suites in the cheerful glow of many lights. But all was quiet. No one stirred. I was alone--safe!

I went light-footed through the deserted house--I could hear the shouts and laughter of the merry people in the street--until I came to the passage leading to the plaza.

There I stopped, with the blood jumping through my veins like wildfire. In this hall, in the corner upon a low settee, lay Montresor, sprawling in a heavy stupor, as drunk with wine as I had been when I had trustfully entered within his doors. I paused over his body. Within my bosom was the dagger with which I never part. And yet I let him lie there unharmed.

When I elbowed my way, masked, through the square, it was twelve o’clock. I was in time to keep my appointment with his wife! I laughed. What a jest!

And Montresor’s wife was awaiting me in the usual place. Such a beautiful woman! I really loved her--and I hoped _he_ did.

I was as clever as I was brave--I was, indeed, an exceedingly clever man. I had seen my creditors pressing and all things turning toward ruin, and that was why I had converted everything possible into gold and precious stones.

That night I crept unseen into my own house, from which my servants, like Montresor’s, had stolen away to enjoy the carnival, and, securing all the wealth I had secreted, was up and away, my chain stricken off by an obscure armorer. I have no doubt that my body-servant was executed for the theft of my fortune--as indeed he should have been for watching my belongings so poorly. But I know not.

Then we left the city while the streets were still crowded and gay--Montresor’s wife and I--and went to England, where we have lived a long life very happily.

Years ago I heard a vague rumor that Montresor believed his beautiful wife had gone away with Giovanna, the tenor, who disappeared at about that time. But it was not so. As for Lady Fortunato--she may have guessed the truth.

And Montresor will believe until he dies that my bones lie crumbling in the little walled-in dungeon below his palazzo.

The Weaving Shadows

_By_ W. H. HOLMES

Chet Burke was lazily reclining in his favorite easy chair, absorbed in a rare book on alchemy and black magic, when his sister answered a summons at the door.

In addition to managing the household affairs of the apartment in which she and Burke lived alone, her duties also consisted in scrutinizing the many visitors. Most of them could be persuaded to call at the book stall, which Burke conducted when not devoted to some criminal mystery that held him until it was solved. Others, whose cases were urgent, were admitted to the apartment, thus infringing on Burke’s only recreation, reading and study.

The visitors were Chief Rhyne, a friend of Burke’s, of the Rhyne Detective Agency, and a stranger.