The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  “Or are we?” Her voice scraped so cuttingly that Buffler might have lost his temper. But instead he had continued to fall at her feet, smoothing her ugly manners with promises and kisses born of his foolish infatuation.

  “Promise me you’ll forget about Drizzlepuss until I get back,” he begged. “As soon as my plan works out, there’ll be the sweetest little honeymoon you ever dreamed of. But you’ve got to sit tight until I get back to my office. Promise!”

  Those were Buffler’s parting words, and Jewel repeated her promise as she left.

  The houseman and I helped Buffler back to bed, and for the remainder of the day he was a very sick man. But back of moanings and groanings I could detect a glow of fervor. Jewel had warmed his spirit and set his scheming mind upright. I guessed that he would go through with his dastardly plan as swiftly as passible, and I guessed rightly.

  I was now determined to break out of my inertia and blow the lid off this thing. Being followed about the house by the houseman and his gun, being denied the use of the telephone, being confined to the house by force—these things had become galling to the limit of my endurance. Moreover, the open break over my letter had brought my danger out into the open. It was high time for me to act.

  “Tomorrow noon,” I said to myself as I sat alone in my room.

  My slow wits turned over every bit of evidence that had fallen into my hands.

  “Tomorrow noon Gertrude Becker will die if I don’t do something to prevent it,” I told myself.

  I was sure of the time Buffler would choose. For Gertrude Becker had an old-maidish habit of eating her lunch in her office every noon and allowing no intruders during that hour. Buffler had rechecked this point with Jewel in their recent visit, and I was sure he had done so for a purpose.

  “When the motors begin to hum tomorrow noon,” I said to myself, “where will I be? Buffler knows that I know. He let the cat out of the bag himself when he said ‘ray gun’. He won’t try to cover that up now. His only alternative is to get me out of the way—but how? It won’t look good for him to have two mysterious deaths on his hands at once.”

  There was little comfort in that thought. I didn’t eat my food for fear there was poison in it. I didn’t sleep for fear I would be murdered in my bed. Whenever I had a wild inspiration to dash for a door or a window or scribble off a note to throw to a passing newsboy, I would turn to see the houseman’s pistol dangling from his careless hand.

  The new day came. The hours crept toward noon. Every strike of the clock struck terror through me. I was pitifully tired and exhausted from loss of sleep and nerve strain and hunger.

  Now I sat languidly on the drawing room divan, almost in a stupor, my eyes resting on the gleaming pistol. The houseman seemed to be reading; he held a book of science in his hand. But if I so much as glanced at the pearl-handled extension telephone at the side of the room, his alert eyes were on me and his quick fingers twitched at the gun.

  “I’ll wait until eleven-thirty,” I kept telling myself. “On the stroke of eleven-thirty I’ll rush that telephone, gun or no gun.”

  My muscles grew tense. With every glance at the clock my heart quickened.

  “At eleven-thirty I’ll make a rush . . . Or will I?”

  The demon fear must have had a deadly grip on me. I tried to close my eyes and relax, but the cold-faced houseman across the room from me had only to turn a page of his book to bring me up with a start.

  The clock struck ten-thirty. On the floor above, Jonathan Buffler was stirring. The clock struck eleven. Buffler waddled down the stairs weakly. He was in his bathrobe, his blindfold was pushed high on his forehead, his flabby face was gray. He paused to look at me. His fat fingers twitched nervously.

  He went to the basement door, unlocked it and disappeared down the stairs. I could hear the swish of his bedroom slippers as he toddled through the basement.

  The clock struck eleven-thirty. I sat paralyzed. The houseman looked at me sharply. He must have heard my heart pounding. My heart was a fireball beating back and forth, and my chest and throat were on fire from it. From the basement came faint clicking sounds—sounds that could only be the checking of instruments. The houseman’s eyes turned toward the basement door, and in that instant I moved like a fool.

  I caught the telephone, jerked it off the hook, dropped it. The houseman was coming at me. I flopped a huge overstuffed chair over myself. In my craze to get a call through, I would have dodged behind anything, even a sieve. It was folly, of course. As my hand reached for the fallen phone, a bullet went through my forearm. The low crack! of the pistol echoed through the house.

  The houseman was upon me like a cat. I tried to kick the chair against him. He sidestepped and hovered, and the butt of his pistol swung up to strike me. I wanted to lash out with my fist. More than anything in the world I wanted to feel the crash of my knuckles against his jaw.

  But nausea swept down upon me and my right hand only clamped over my wounded forearm to catch the spurting blood. Then the rap of the pistol butt caught me on the side of my skull, and spirals of blackness whirled away my consciousness.

  CHAPTER VI

  Spray of Death

  I awoke to the hum of motors and the thunder of sparks. I imagined I could even smell the hot coils and see the purple streams of power. The death ray was at work!

  In utter horror I tried to spring from my bed, but the most I could do was roll. In my grogginess I tumbled onto the floor. My hands and feet were bound. My wounded arm was bandaged clumsily, and it was shooting with pains.

  I lay on the floor listening. The electrical roar dwindled and died away. For long minutes there were no sounds. I waited. The clock struck one. Soon, I thought, there would be a telephone call from the office to bring the tragic news that Gertrude Becker had suddenly “died.” But the telephone didn’t ring, and an hour or more later I learned it had been disconnected.

  That hour or more of waiting was uneventful, but it was by far the most excruciating uneventfulness I have ever endured. The two men came up from the basement, and Jonathan Buffler lapsed into his terrific illness. He went to bed and said he would stay there indefinitely. Under no conditions was he to be disturbed by anything or anybody.

  “What about Olin?” I heard the houseman ask.

  “He’ll wait,” Buffler grunted.

  Then the doorbell rang, and to my agony of waiting was added the shattering news that I knew was coming.

  “The telephone girl,” began the messenger boy at the front door in a high-pitched voice, “says that Mr. Buffler don’t answer—”

  “The phone’s cut off,” said the houseman. “Buffler’s awful sick. He ain’t to be disturbed. What’d you want?”

  “She sent me with a message,” said the boy. “I’m to get word to Buffler that his Number One secretary just died. It happened this noon, so sudden that everybody’s pretty much shocked, and they thought Mr. Buffler had better be told about it.”

  “I’ll give him the message,” said the houseman. “I know he’ll be deeply grieved. Come back in a couple of hours and maybe he’ll have a message to send back to the office.”

  The boy left. The houseman came up to Buffler’s bedroom to report the conversation.

  “I heard it,” Buffler grunted, and it was a grunt of satisfaction.

  “Okay,” said the houseman. “There you are. The big deal’s over.”

  “It won’t take long to cover our tracks,” said Buffler. “But I’d better dope out a statement about Drizzlepuss Becker. The newspapers may want something. She’s been with me a long time, and she’s pretty well known. The employees will expect a statement from me. Get me a pen and some paper, and I’ll dope out some deepest regrets.” Two hours later the doorbell rang again. The houseman had taken the trouble to gag me in the meantime. If he hadn’t, I’d have shouted to the caller at the top of my voice, for it was Dr. Ramsell. I’d have known his voice anywhere.

  “No, you can’t see him!” the houseman barked. “He
wants rest and quiet and no interviews. But here, I’ll give you his statement about Gertrude Becker’s death.”

  “Oh,” said the doctor, in a curiously surprised tone.

  “Well, do you want to take it or don’t you?” the houseman snapped.

  “I’ll take it—with pleasure,” came the doctor’s crisp answer. “By the way, where’s Olin?”

  “Olin?” asked the houseman innocently. “You mean Buffler’s nephew that was here a few days back? He beat it for home soon after the old man took sick. Took the train or bus, I suppose. Damfino. Maybe he flew.”

  Ramsell said, “Tell Buffler I want to see him as soon as he’s able. I’m stalling off the reporters and the police as well as I can, but these two sudden deaths—the scrubwoman and Gertrude Becker—both in the same roomful of pink mirrors, have naturally raised a lot of idle speculations—and some that maybe aren’t so idle.”

  “What the hell! Ain’t Buffler’s lawyer on the job?”

  “Yes, but the lawyer can’t answer all the questions that have come up about Buffler’s mirror mania. The investigators come to me about that.”

  “Tell them Buffler’s rich enough to have things like he wants ’em,” said the houseman. “Maybe he’s a bit cracked, but to hell with ’em. What have mirrors got to do with a secretary’s dying?”

  “I hope to answer that question sooner or later,” said the doctor, and with that he left.

  The long evening wore on, and for a time it promised nothing but waiting.

  But I knew now that the only thing that would bring my waiting to an end was death.

  I must have been a problem to Buffler, for I am sure that he and the houseman spent a long and earnest hour discussing how best to handle my case. Occasionally the houseman came in to look at me, and each time I felt sure that he had come for me; but each time he only inspected the bonds that held my hands and feet, and then went away.

  Never did he pay any attention to my bullet wound, for I would soon be dead.

  Now I observed that Jonathan Buffler’s spirits were rising. That was another sure sign that my fate was completely sealed. Now and then a chuckle of laughter sounded from his room. I heard him get up from bed and dress. Again his illness had conveniently vanished. He went downstairs and called to the houseman to reconnect the telephone. He tried to call Jewel, but her apartment did not answer.

  As a drowning man will snatch at straws, I seized at every wisp of an idea for escape that came to my mind. I even debated rolling out onto the roof. But at last I stumbled upon something—dim chance that it was—which absorbed my struggles for half the night. That something was—a heliograph message!

  But not a real heliograph. My signaling instrument would have to be the little pocket mirror which I habitually kept in the breast pocket of my suit coat. And my signaling light would be the wall lamp of my bedroom.

  Squirming, I drew my rib bones up inside my jacket coat, swelled my chest with air and fought to catch the edge of the mirror against a rib. It was sweating work, desperate work, and I was sure I would never make it. But at last I felt the mirror sliding through the pocket opening.

  My straining body threshed about, finally shook the mirror free. I crawled forward then, inch by inch. At last my sweaty hands felt glass! My fingers clutched at the mirror, and I maneuvered myself until the glass caught the round gleam of the lamp bulb.

  Then, jerking my head up as far as possible from the cold floor, I trained the mirror so that the lamp bulb reflection on it would stream through the window opposite me and reach out in the black night to Buffler Tower.

  It was almost fantastic that I should hope my “heliographed” message would attract any attention, considering what a welter of city lights filled the blackness. But the later the hour, the fewer the lights, I reasoned; and also the greater my skill.

  With infinite pains to flash my dots and dashes at an angle that would catch the mirrors of Buffler Tower, I spelled out the words.

  DR RAMSELL DR RAMSELL DR RAMSELL

  On the first floor Buffler continued his efforts to telephone to Jewel. Every time the clock struck another half hour, I would hear him mutter the number of her apartment, then after a long wait put down the telephone with a splutter of impatience.

  “One more job,” I could hear the houseman say. “Let’s get it over with. As long as he’s alive we’re not safe.”

  “I want to get Jewel first,” Buffler would retort, and he would try the telephone again.

  But between calls I could catch snatches of their conversation, enough to assure me that the houseman was impatient to take care of that “one more job” so he could unmount the ray gun. He was no mere houseman. Unimpressive as he was, he was the scientific brain that had set up this death ray apparatus. Probably he had stolen plans and equipment both. At any rate, he was scheduled to take his leave of Jonathan Buffler as soon as this job was rounded up.

  All the while I listened to them, my bound wrists continued to flash dots and dashes from the wall light of my room, reflecting off the perilously fingered mirror. The process was routine by this time—a hopeless routine at that—but it was something with which to work off some of the death-cell tenseness that gripped me.

  Shortly after one o’clock—and I remember that the lights were still ablaze in the top floor of the Buffler Tower—my heliographic routine came to an end. I heard the houseman coming up to get me. Quickly I tossed the little mirror under the bed.

  The houseman paused in the doorway. Buffler’s voice sounded from below, muttering another telephone number. This time, for some reason. Buffler called the offices of Buffler Tower. Perhaps he thought the excitement of Gertrude Becker’s death had caused some of the staff to remain at the Tower discussing the strange affair, and he would find Jewel there.

  “Give me the office of Secretary Number Two . . .” His voice was tense. “Hello . . . Hello! Is Jewel—Who the devil is this? . . . What? . . . Oh, my God!”

  The telephone crashed down and I could hear Buffler’s hoarse breathing. I didn’t know what to make of it.

  The houseman, thoroughly impatient with his master’s continual telephoning, went on about his business. He came into the room, and then he cursed.

  “Fell out of bed, huh? What the hell you up to, Olin? Trying to escape?”

  I looked him coolly in the eyes. My mouth was gagged, so I couldn’t say anything, which was just as well.

  He grunted sourly, picked me up in his arms, bonds, gag, bandages and all, and carried me down the two flights of stairs to the basement.

  He placed me in a corner of the room on the floor. I could see the ray gun diagonally across from me, polished and gleaming under the dim light. It was a beautiful array of equipment for such an ugly purpose. But it murdered clean, without leaving a mark that any coroner or doctor would ever find. That was its beauty. I wondered what they would do with my body.

  Slowly, weakly, Jonathan Buffler tottered down to the basement level. His blindfold was over his eyes again. He lifted it long enough to glance at me, then replaced it. I never saw his face so white.

  “One more job,” the houseman observed in his characteristically impersonal manner. “It won’t take but a minute. I’ll have these instruments disassembled and packed away before dawn, and our fears will be over . . . What’s the matter, Buffler?”

  “You won’t disassemble it,” said Buffler in a voice that was like dry ice. “I’ve changed the plan.”

  “What the hell! What’s the matter, Buffler? You sick?”

  “Do you think I’m sick?” Buffler cracked coldly. He raised his blindfold and moved toward the instruments.

  “I never knew you to be sick down here” said the houseman dubiously. “I thought your sickness was something that you got when things didn’t go right. Did something in that telephone call upset you? Something about Jewel?”

  Buffler snarled, “Maybe I’m going blind.” He bit his words with an icy fury that was on the ragged edge of breaking. “Maybe I c
an’t tell pink from green. Maybe I can’t count windows straight. But by heaven, I can’t do any worse than the experts I hire!”

  “What the devil?” the houseman barked. “You’re dizzy. You’re sick as a horse. Get upstairs. I’ve got one more job here—”

  “I’ve got one more job!” Buffler roared.

  He snatched the color filters out of a slot and started the big barrel of the ray gun rotating on the turntable. He ripped a command at the houseman.

  “Stand back, damn you! I’m doing this one, to make sure it won’t miss.” The big barrel swung around in my general direction, and the spin of a wheel from Buffler’s shaking white fingers brought the elevation down. The puzzled houseman backed away to the corner, as if to humor the old man to the last, but he studied Buffler’s operations with the eye of a critical machinist.

  Buffler continued to snarl enigmatically. “A little bonus on my pay sheet. for someone who didn’t come through with the goods.”

  Then one of his white hands shot to the switch, and the other suddenly rotated the gun past me toward the next corner.

  “Look out!” the houseman screamed. “I’ll do this one, you damned bone-head!” Buffler shrieked.

  Then both the mad voices were drowned by the hum of motors and the thunder of purple sparks. The houseman’s hands beat at the air in protest, but the invisible line of death turned full on him—

  The houseman simply jell, lifeless. “You’re next!” Buffler’s murderous bulbous eyes turned on me, and I could read the words of his snarling lips, submerged by the thunder of the machine.

  Half blinded by the dazzle of sparks, I saw the gleaming barrel start to swing back. I closed my eyes, waited.

  The waiting dragged out to full seconds. The sensation—whatever it would be—must be almost upon me. It would be quick, I thought. Perhaps there would be no sensation. Perhaps I wouldn’t even know. Why didn’t it come? Or had it happened? Or would I faint before it struck? I forced my eyes open.