by Earl
Lockhart stopped the violent rocking. It was useless and besides he was constantly in danger of tipping over on his back or side, and that would make things still more horrible in either of those constrained positions. Better to sit and face his doom.
Now a sound arose in the room: it was the faint singing of the heated mixture in the beaker, heralding the approach of the boiling point of the liquid. From the bottom of the beaker, the little specks of oxalic acid shot upward to the surface, carried by the strong convection currents of the sulfuric acid. It didn’t look white, it looked red in the glow of the coils! Red . . . . red blood! His blood! It was going to eat into his blood! The poisonous gas would arise and search him out! And he could do nothing!
George Lockhart moaned in mental anguish at the blindness of a fate that had thus allowed him to be trapped in a vicious web of slow, soul-torturing death. Why did this have to be visited upon him? What great sin had he done to deserve tins? Surely it was no sin of his when he had testified against Raymond Wickersham fourteen years ago?
Wickersham had become overly ambitious. He was high in favor of the chief who hadn’t yet seen his treacherous nature. Lockhart had hated Wickersham from the moment he had laid eyes on him. Then Wickersham had pulled his poison act, had doped a sandwich with mercury chloride. Clever, because Chief Seltzer had been working with mercury salts at that time. Lockhart had seen him furtively sneak out of the locker room. Undecided what to do, and suspicious of his actions, he delayed saying anything till after lunch. When the chief mentioned a funny taste in his lunch, it all flashed on Lockhart. Together he and the chief quickly analyzed a crust of the doped sandwich which the chief had thrown in the garbage pail, and finding mercuric chloride, used antidotes in time to save the latter’s life. Then Wickersham had been called in, accused and arrested after a confession which revealed his cowardly nature. But he had remained stubborn for three days. They told him Seltzer was dead, that he would be convicted of murder in the first degree, that a confession would save his own life. Confronted with Lockhart’s statement of detection, he broke down like a baby. Before he signed the confession, he managed to get a private interview with Lockhart, begged him to retract his statement, saving him; promised him a high position. But with loathing Lockhart had declined to enter into the nefarious scheme.
Wickersham had been convicted on his evidence.
These events of the past flooded Lockhart’s mind like ghosts from a grave. He must suffer for having done his duty; must suffer for the mad scheming of a conscienceless fanatic. The bitterness of an undeserved fate overwhelmed him to make still more maddening this, his last hour of life.
Then Lockhart went over Wickersham’s plans, tried to see a possible loophole for himself. But there was none! He was as good as dead, and they would never find a clue to connect up this affair with the true murderer. It would be an unsolved mystery to the police. His death was inevitable; Lockhart could see that now. Oh! if only a kind fate would somehow punish the murderer, somehow point him out to the law, so that he, Lockhart, would not die in vain!
He had tried to avoid looking at the beaker, but with the fatal attraction of the mystery of death, his eyes fixed themselves on the bubbling fluid. He could see dimly the beginning of reaction between the oxalic acid and sulfuric acid. Bubbles arose which he knew were messengers of strangling death . . . . carbon monoxide . . . . the robber of hemoglobin! Lockhart staved off insane fits to yield to the pressing influence of hopeless madness. His strong mind bore up under the terrific strain of waiting for inevitable extinction. There was no hope, but the scientist, so used to submerging the personal element in the interests of science, was able to look almost calmly at the last chemical reaction it would be his privilege to witness. He began to review his life with a feeling of satisfaction that at least he had done his part; had harmed no one; had tried to help his fellow-men in his own way.
The mixture began to froth and fume violently. The gas of death must be coming out of it in large volumes now. Lockhart thought he could detect an acrid odor in the air, but how could that be? Carbon monoxide is an odorless gas! He became panicky. His mind was slipping! His imagination was running riot! Delirium was coming upon him with icy fingers of insanity! His lungs began to heave. Already the air was becoming unfit to breathe.
Sweat poured from the tortured man, his throat became dry, parched. The gag felt like a rope about his neck that was gradually drawing tighter. At times he madly bunched his muscles and strained at the bonds that held him from freedom and life. And ever and anon his eyes would encounter the beaker of fuming death, a brew-pot of devilish death, to further throw his shaken mentality closer to madness.
With a last mighty, futile shudder, his body fell limp. His eyes closed slowly, and his head drooped forward. George Lockhart had lost!
CHAPTER III
DEATH
RAYMOND WICKERSHAM held the colorless liquid up to the light and smiled in satisfaction. The parent substance of the light-sensitive bodies of the eye! He had made it in this last month that he had been here in Salem. It had taken him a while to get into the swing of the synthesis. Fourteen years is a long time and he found himself very rusty in the delicate methods by which these complicated and touchy compounds were made. Numerous failures to get results had worn his patience to the breaking point at times, but finally he had won through a complete synthesis and produced a few c.c. of the precious solution. As he went step by step through the complicated reactions recorded in the black notebook, he wondered how one man could have ever developed them. For instance, that oxidation reaction whereby the triple cyanine was produced: it was the work of genius! Reluctantly, day by day, Wickersham was forced to admit that he had killed a man fan superior to himself in ability; far more worthy to live. At such times he would bolster up his ego and pacify his conscience with the contention that he had been wronged. Lockhart, had he had the least spark of humanity in him, would have saved him from the disgrace of a fourteen-year imprisonment. That was what he said out loud to himself as he worked alone in his laboratory in a secluded section of the town, but down deep within him a voice reproached him, saying he had killed a great man for a petty thing like vengeance for a misnamed wrong! At times Wickersham looked fearfully around at little creaks and taps, fearful of he knew not what. Then he would laugh at himself. Get him? Never! There wasn’t a thing he had forgotten to take into account. It was a perfect fool-proof plan from beginning to end. George Lockhart was dead by unknown means and an unknown assailant. He had been somewhat disturbed on failing to find any reference to the murder in the papers, but breathed in relief as he remembered that George Lockhart had been a decided recluse, so that his death was nothing for the papers to play up. Perhaps there had been a few lines about it that had escaped his notice somewhere in their columns. Anyway, it was nothing to worry about, he told himself.
Wickersham had received from his brother enough money for him to buy this laboratory. It had been in disuse for many years, and when he first entered it, rats had scurried around, dust had risen in clouds, and cobwebs glistened in every corner and crevice. There had been a good stock of chemicals in the place and he had supplemented it with more chemicals bought with the money he had left. He had no fear of spending all he had, for he knew that the substance in that flask was worth vast sums to him when he should be ready to announce its discovery. Eagerly he had set to work on the formulae in the notebook. Tonight would be the final test to see if he had succeeded in producing the right compound. Wickersham had plenty of time. There was no hurry. He was the only one on earth with those formulae. If he had failed with this flask full, his first try to reproduce Lockhart’s delicate work, he would try again, and again, till he succeeded. He must be able to run through it to put the mark of authenticity to his claim on it. Then he would go out in the world of big money and industry, and claim the vast rewards that would be his. This discovery would revolutionize the photographic industry, would reach prying fingers into cinema, astronomy, pu
blishing, pictorial art, and would open vast new fields of research to chemists and biologists.
It was late at night. Wickersham fastened the shutters tight with a sigh of relief. He was still trembling from that vision of a face in the window . . . . Lockhart’s face! . . . to make it worse yet. Of course, it had been purely hallucination, occasioned by the strenuous work that he had been plugging away at for a month; of that Wickersham was sure. To prove that he wasn’t afraid, he had left the shutters open till now. He was closing them now because he had to exclude all light for the important tests of the compound. He set up the violet lamp and began the important and final reaction which produced the various light-sensitive bodies. The violet light dimly lighted up the table, giving the characteristic shimmering, dancing effect to everything.
Suddenly Wickersham gasped and dropped the pipette in his hand. He hardly noticed that it fell to the floor and splintered into a thousand pieces. He had seen the face . . . . Lockhart’s face! . . . . in the mirror-like surface of the liquid! Strange it hadn’t been a pain-distorted face as he had last seen it, but a quiet, determined-looking face. With eyes closed, Wickersham fought off the craven fear of superstition that had gripped him, and tried to calm his wildly-beating heart. It was his imagination, of course . . . . silly imagination . . . . and the strain of the work. But his eyes darted again to the liquid as he reached for another pipette. It was there again!
His dark skin grew several shades lighter. Sudden fear grasped him with a grip of steel. That face was real! He slowly, fearfully lifted his eyes to the dimness of the other side of the table where the violet beams hardly were able to pierce the darkness. Then he screamed.
“Good God! . . . . it’s his ghost. . . . come to haunt me!” In abject, spineless fear, he sunk his head in his arms and sobbed in mortal terror.
“Raymond Wickersham! Look up!”
The stricken man convulsed spasmodically but lacked the nerve to face the apparition.
“Wickersham . . . . I have returned from the dead as far as you’re concerned. You left me to certain death.” Lockhart’s tone was sepulchral and hollow. He coughed weakly as if his chest were very sore, and his words came slowly.
“The perfect crime, Wickersham, yes . . . . the perfect crime . . . . except for two things! . . . . one was a mistake on your part, the other was something you could not foresee.”
Wickersham had gained enough control over his cowardly emotions to look up. In the pale, violet light, the figure of the man he had sent to death seemed unreal, almost like a spirit from beyond. His voice, too, sounded like a voice from the grave.
In uncontrollable fear and terror Wickersham screamed at the vision, “My God! Please tell me . . . . are you dead or are you alive? Oh! I can’t stand this!”
“Yes, you will stand this!” returned Lockhart fiercely. “I’m alive, Wickersham, and I’ve got a gun here in my hand, pointed at your rotten heart! Now listen to me, you white-livered coward . . . .”
Wickersham, somewhat heartened by the release of superstitious fears of a visitor from the world of spirits, ceased his violent trembling and looked up with a touch of bravado. After all, Lockhart had nothing on him that he could prove in court, and he doubted if he had the necessary courage in his heart to do murder. Probably he could talk him out of anything rash. He broke off his thoughts to listen to Lockhart.
“The cards were stacked against you, Wickersham, even before you attempted my life. That was the first thing wrong with your perfect crime, and, as I said before, you could do nothing about it.
“The morning of the day before you revealed your presence to me . . . .
the day, by the way, on which I first succeeded with my syntheses . . . . Mary cleaned up in my laboratory. There were two reagent bottles on my shelf with loose labels. One was OXALIC ACID and the other was AMMONIUM CHLORIDE! Her duster flicked off those loose labels and she picked up and pasted them back on the bottles, thinking she knew which came from which. Well, she was wrong and you can figure out for yourself why I didn’t strangle from carbon monoxide.”
Lockhart paused a moment to watch his enemy. The latter seemed to have lost his powers of movement; remained standing with a look of stupidity on his face. Lockhart went on:
“As it was, I breathed hydrochloric acid fumes all night long until Mary opened the door in the morning, and my lungs have been seared badly. The second flaw in your perfect plan was of your own doing. You told me where you were going after the crime, so confident that I would never leave that room alive!”
THE shock, these revelations brought to Wickersham, was even greater than the shock of Lockhart’s presence. To think that even before he had entered the laboratory to do away with his victim, fate had already made his plans worthless, by that little incident of two loose labels! And fool . . . . unutterable fool . . . . that he had been to tell Lockhart where he was going! If he hadn’t, Lockhart would not have had so easy a task to find him!
“And now, Wickersham,” went on Lockhart as the other merely stared dazedly at him, totally lacking initiative now that the tables were turned, “I’ve come here to KILL YOU!”
“Oh, no . . . . for the mercy of heaven . . . . Lockhart. . . . have pity on me! I’ll do anything . . . . your notebook isn’t harmed in the least . . . . there it is . . . . please . . . . oh! God!” Wickersham blubbered out the incoherent words as he ran out from behind the table and fell on his knees before the man he had wronged.
With a curl of scorn on his lips, Lockhart looked down at the groveling worm that had been a man. He remained silent as the coward continued his plea in more uncertain words and sobbing. Lockhart let him plead till he felt that the man was ready to collapse from fear. Then he touched him with his toe.
“Listen, Wickersham. You’ve got to act more like a human being . . . . get into that chair!”
With the alacrity of a slave, Wickersham crouched in the chair. Lockhart slipped a noose of rope around his middle and deftly tied him securely before the fear-blinded man knew what was happening. Only one arm was left free. Then he stepped in front of him.
“Wickersham, look at me. Notice anything different? Yes, I see you do . . . . I’m a changed man. That hour of torture, facing sure death, tied helpless in a chair, has snapped something in me. A few weeks ago I could not have murdered to save my soul. To-day, after that hell of waiting for death . . . . I feel a joy, an intense happiness that I can kill you! Now . . . . no more of that blubbering. You’ve got to face death as I did and I hope to heaven you suffer like I did! God . . . . that was awful!”
Lockhart hung his head for a moment as thoughts of that similar scene came to him when he had watched with anguished eyes the beaker that was to loose death upon him. Wickersham, in the last extremity of terror, fixed his eyes on his captor with a horrible intentness, looking in his face for some sign of hope. He noticed again how that formerly kind face had changed, how lined and seamed it was. Truly, it was a different George Lockhart.
Lockhart spoke again, slowly, as if it were an effort. He coughed at times as his acid-seared lungs bothered him: “Wickersham, this is what happened after you left me tied to a chair in my laboratory, face to face with death: I had given up all hope; I watched the mixture in the beaker bubble furiously. Then, as the air became filled with fumes, I became unconscious. The few times that I regained consciousness during the night, I wondered why death was so slow in coming; why I had to suffer so long. Revived by Mary, I came to full sanity in the morning and gradually realized that I hadn’t died after all. From her description of the acid fumes that nearly choked her as she opened the door, it came to me dimly that somehow carbon monoxide had not been produced. I told Mary not to mention the matter to anyone, especially not the police; that I would take care of the situation myself. Then I fell into delirium and the doctor had all he could do to keep me alive. As it is, my lungs will never be healthy again. When I was able to get out of bed three weeks later, I took a look at the bottle labeled ‘Oxalic Acid’ and
found it to contain ammonium chloride. Conversely, the bottle labeled ‘Ammonium Chloride’ had in it the oxalic acid. Calling Mary, I got her to remember after some prompting that she had two days before our meeting pasted those two labels on after they had fallen to the floor. She had put them on the wrong bottles. Satisfied as to that, my next task was to locate you. I realized that to punish you fully for your vicious crime, I would have to get to you myself; the law probably would have let you go with a light sentence, or freed you for lack of evidence against you. It may sound unreasonable, but it took me two days before I could think of the place you had mentioned you were going to. You see, Wickersham, those long minutes of waiting for death had driven almost all sane thought from my mind, and it was only by continued effort, and a mighty desire for revenge . . . . perhaps you’ve heard that word before, Wickersham . . . . that I finally dug it out of the chaotic impressions of that horrible night.
“Then it was a simple matter. In absolute secrecy I left my home and came here. There is only one person in this town knows I’m here, and that is a person I met on Main Street here in Salem. I stopped him and asked him, where there was a laboratory in town. He gave me the directions and asked me if I knew you. I said, ‘Yes,’ I was your new assistant. It is dark to-night, so he couldn’t see me well. He doesn’t know where I’m from or who I am, so, you see, Wickersham, this plan of mine is just as perfect as yours, and I’m going to make it still more perfect. But to go on with the story: I arrived here at the laboratory about two hours ago. I looked in your window and saw you alone. Then I waited till a few minutes ago so that if I had to shoot you if you resisted, no one would be up to hear the shot. The nearest house is far enough away so that the sound will not carry to the occupants. I crept in through the storeroom window, knowing the front door would be locked, picked up this rope I’ve tied you with, and waited till you turned out the lights and worked with the violet lamp. I presume you’ve finally managed to follow through my syntheses. Well, Wickersham, at least you have the distinction of being the second man in the world to produce the compound that I’ve given five years of my life to, even if you had the bad luck to miss the chance of being credited with its discovery.
