The Fatal Kiss Mystery

by Rufus King

  Anna was Drusilla’s maid, having graduated to the position from the earlier job of nurse.

  Ramier, perhaps because he would so shortly be invisible, seemed purposely to be left out of the discussion.

  “But what will your father say?” demanded Billy.

  “I would rather not tell you,” said Drusilla coldly. “I have no doubt but that he will begin to worry at the end of five or six days or so, but he’ll know that Anna has also disappeared from the house, and he’ll just put it down to some fiendish impulse or other on my part. It won’t be the first time I’ve gone off. He’ll decide it’s just another one of those silly efforts to lead my own life, and he knows that I always get bored with them in about a week and come home. Are those eggs?”

  “They were,” said Billy, “and very good ones, too. Let me cook you some more.”

  “Do,” said Drusilla, removing a daring red hat from her equally daring red hair and setting it on a chair.

  As Billy pointed out to me, there had been a total lack of conversation between Drusilla and Ramier, beyond the most perfunctory sort of morning greetings, since she had gone with the breeze in through the door. Billy could not fathom the significance of it. He was totally unable to decide whether the emotions which each felt were too great and too deeply rooted for such mere things as words, or whether there truly existed, as Ramier claimed, a genuine indifference between them so far as matters of the heart went. It appears that their attitudes resembled nothing so much as two colleagues who meet in the operating theater and stand about in a perfunctory sort of abeyance while waiting for the wheeling-in of the patient and not a bit like that of two lovers, one of whom is about to embark upon an adventure whose termination might be the grave.

  With an air of almost too excessive efficiency Ramier occupied himself in testing the state of charge in the storage cells with an hydrometer; an act that Billy claims was quite unnecessary as Ramier had carefully done so not later than an hour before. Upon an indifferently worded question from Drusilla, Ramier assured her brusquely that all was in order, and that there was nothing left to be done but to wait in patience for the appointed hour.

  Just why there should be an appointed hour for such occasions, I have never been able to understand. But there always is. By Ramier’s own admission, his apparatus was in the perfect pink, and all that remained to be done was the simple motion of switching on his wireless set, taking up the proper position for his body, and pressing the essential keys on the control board.

  The time was quarter past eight, and the fact that they had previously determined upon nine o’clock as the hour for the experiment seemed to bind them irrevocably to a containing-of-themselves in patience for the ensuing forty-five minutes.

  How different all might have been—what anguish—what anxiety might have been averted had they but performed the experiment at once without delay, no one can tell!

  Billy went in for an elaborate arrangement in eggs, with the assistance of a frying pan and some strips of bacon, and offered the results to Drusilla, who stared at them for a blankish moment or so and succeeded in eating nothing. She, too, confined herself to coffee. She drank four cups, very strong, very black, and very hot. And undoubtedly very bad for her indeed.

  There were many silences, each successive one more oppressive than the last. Finally, the interruptions became so negligible that the hush was almost continual.

  “I have been wondering, Ramier,” said Drusilla breaking it, “of just what practical value this invention is going to be to the world.”

  Ramier thought impressively for a minute; at least, insomuch as a narrative of this highly scientific nature must be accurate down to its slenderest detail, he looked impressive, whether he were actually thinking impressively or not. “None,” he said. “With the world in its present state, none at all. It is a condition of affairs similar to that which every scientist has had to face. There are innumerable instances in the history of our calling where the precisely correct application of some great discovery was obscure at the moment when the discovery was made. But in the hands of the men who followed the discoverer, his achievement inevitably found its proper use and took a rational place in the needs of civilization.”

  “Or else,” Billy pointed out not ungiddily, “a need is acquired like, having been given olives, a taste for them.”

  “My intention with the experiment on hand,” said Ramier, ignoring olives as if they were just so many more eggs, “is simply to prove that it can be done. After the test, I shall complete my notes and data and hold them in reserve. Perhaps I may publish a general paper on the subject—of course withholding all the essential mechanical details—and then wait until some feasible and serviceable plan is advanced for the discovery’s use. This may not come for years. There is an excellent chance that it may not come at all in our time. We shall see.”

  Billy admits that, as the hands of the clock crept nearer and nearer to the hour of nine, he felt a most annoying nervousness. The clock was a large one hanging on the wall and its minute hand moved in a series of spasmodic jerks rather than gliding in a calm and unbroken fashion around the dial. Each jerk represented a minute, and he sat there staring up at it and trying to count sixty at a speed that would synchronize with its leaps. He only succeeded in doing so once out of eight trials, and the shock that the unique success gave to his nervous system was worse than the shocks that it got when he failed. He tried turning his back, but found that doing so made him more fidgety than when he faced the clock. It finally obliged by striking the half hour.

  And thirty crucial minutes were left.

  Ramier was utterly unable to stand the suspense of inactive waiting. As a safety vent for his poorly concealed nervousness, he went to his apparatus and deliberately adjusted it all over again. He took a lay figure, stuffed to the same size as himself, and placed it in the position he would occupy during the test; then, passing from one boxed transmitter to another, he carefully inspected and checked their focusing.

  The hands of the clock jerked indifferently on.

  He started the set’s small generator, whose frequency was higher than any previously attained or dreamed possible by designers, and to the hot sigh of the breeze coming in through the windows was added the thin sweet hum of the generator’s steady tune. It was a sound all but imperceptible except to trained and expectant ears; a sound more like the echo of some half-forgotten melody that creeps from the mind’s subconscious lair than like reality. It was a sound, Billy tells me, that for many months to come was to haunt his waking and his sleeping hours like a sinister lament that is played as an overture for some mystic drama of the stage.

  There were, inasmuch as the clock had not stopped, ten little minutes left.

  The stifling breeze increased, and the dull haze that floated between the sun and the earth grew thicker until it deadened the day. The faces of the three adventurers were all but a chalky white. Billy frankly admits that he was not only nervous but was on the verge of being downright afraid.

  Six single, and littler, minutes alone were left.

  Ramier cleared the space for the experiment by removing the lay figure. All that the space now needed to fill it was his body. He did not stop the generator.

  Billy got to his feet and faced Ramier and Drusilla.

  “See here, you two,” he said much more loudly than was necessary and quite as if he were addressing a large convention rather than two people whose ears were within reach of his hands, “what’s the sense in beating about the bush like this? If that d’damned minute hand will only get it off its chest and jerk, there will be just five minutes left before Ramier shoots the works. Now I guess you two birds want to say a few things to each other, and I’m only in the way. If you don’t want to,” he said severely, “you should. Th-there she goes!” He gave a slight start as the minute hand of the clock pounced upon the five-minute-to-the-hour mark.

  “I am going to take a little turn outside for the next four minutes and—we
ll, and then I’ll be back.”

  Looked at from the most complimentary angle it was not a good speech—in fact, it was no sort of a speech at all—but it served its purpose. Billy grabbed a cap and left the laboratory, pulling the door shut after him and stopping a second as the full puffs of the hot breeze burned against his face.

  As for Ramier, the significance of the step he was about to take came thoroughly home to him for the first time. It is interesting to note that even then, when he grasped the stark truth plainly, his grand manner never deserted him, and instead of feeling a harrowing grief that perhaps his eyes and his heart would be attuned to Drusilla’s for the final time until death and resurrection would join them again, his mind was chiefly busied with the problem of his “last words.”

  He knew that every important man spoke last words just before death, and last words as he understood them were invariably impressive and not lightly to be uttered. They must be simple, yet pertinent and easy to remember, in order that they might accurately be reported to the world at large after said utterer’s demise. It was a short order, and Ramier had a sinking sensation that he was going to make a mess of it.

  Neither he nor Drusilla had opened their mouths since Billy had gone outside. Both had arisen and were facing each other stiltedly. As I have previously mentioned, Drusilla is a very clever girl as well as being a beautiful one, and she was able to follow the trend of Ramier’s thoughts as easily as if he had put them into just so many words. She looked up at him very tenderly, and smiled a little at his heavy scowl.

  “Does it matter so very much what you say,” she asked slowly, “in comparison with what you do?”

  CHAPTER IX

  THAT KISS

  It took a full jerk on the part of the minute hand of the clock before the sense of Drusilla’s remark became clear to Ramier.

  His first reaction to it was one of profound astonishment. He advanced a step as if to inspect her more closely, much as one would inspect a friendly leopard who had achieved the impossible and changed its spots. She smiled a little and, for some utterly feminine reason, retreated.

  “Look out,” Ramier said in a muffled sort of voice, “or you will knock one of those stands over.”

  Owing to her retreat, which had taken place backward, Drusilla was on the point of becoming seriously entangled with the stands that supported Ramier’s battery of transmitters. She found herself in the midst of them and stood stock still, at his warning, and waited for his next move.

  He felt an annoying indecision as to what to do. He knew very well what Drusilla wanted. She wanted a kiss; a kiss of good-bye, and Ramier, as we have seen, was a very poor hand at kissing. He had done but little of it in his life and had held but the most perfunctory sort of interest in the little he had done. He had both hoped and expected that in Drusilla he had found a mate whose crystal mind would rise untrammeled and superior to her heart; and certainly a mate who would accompany him comfortably through the years without expecting too great an abundance of kissings. Could he trust her, if he gave her a kiss this time, not to take any below-the-belt advantages of the fact in the future?

  Last words were by then, of course, quite out of the question. A glance at the clock, showed him that but two minutes were left. And at the end of one of them, Billy would return to the laboratory. The thought was a spur to Ramier. If he did have to kiss Drusilla good-bye, he would much prefer doing so without an audience, and especially without an audience whom he knew to be inherently and hopelessly sentimental.

  “We might as well say good-bye,” he muttered in an abashed voice.

  “Yes, dear,” agreed Drusilla, and gave him the needed moral push by swaying an inch or so toward him.

  He caught her.

  For a blinding, revealing moment he held her tight. A most unscientific feeling as of liquid fire coursed through him and left him trembling and unnerved. His keen, precise, impartial indifference—the whole elaborate structure of his calm, well-ordered life—begged him frantically to quit before it was too late. He separated himself almost roughly from her, and his hand groped blindly about for support.

  It found it on the keyboard of the transmitters.

  “I love you,” he was muttering thickly, incredibly, while his brain struggled madly to focus itself upon the exigencies of the moment, struggled to collect his whirling thoughts into the quiet, chill order that the strokes of the clock were even at that instant telling him they would require. “Drusilla, I love you…”

  His eyes roved like those of a trapped animal from Drusilla, where she stood in the center of the battery of transmitters looking dazed, unbelievably beautiful and lovely, with surprise and a most smug and unholy satisfaction resting on her unholier lashes—roved from her to the clock, which was striking with callous deliberation the fatal hour—roved to the keyboard of the transmitters where his hand pressed lightly…

  Never, no, never before had Ramier wanted so keenly, so desperately to live. Should he give it up—throw over the whole business—forego—?

  He felt his splendid resolution slipping; felt what must have been the ambition of a lifetime dropping from his shoulders like a cloak that has suddenly become threadbare and devoid of purpose. He attempted one last desperate grip upon concentration.

  The clock had marked its seventh stroke. There were but two more. Like a cold stab to his heart came the truth:

  It must be now or never!

  With a precision that was the result of habit rather than of any coolness of the moment, his fingers arranged themselves properly over the keys of the control board. With a swift movement, he placed his body where it should receive the full flux of the propagated waves. He hurled a last look at Drusilla, who stood with her rare loveliness not more than a foot away from him, gave a hoarse mutter that was almost a whisper of “Good-bye, my love, good-bye!”—and pressed the keys.

  And Drusilla vanished from before his eyes!

  Gone.

  Drusilla was gone.

  Dumfounded—aghast—Ramier ripped his hand from the control board and plunged the intervening step to where Drusilla had been standing. For an instant of madness his arms encircled the empty air. “Drusilla!” he kept calling, while his breath came in short startled gasps. “Drusilla!”

  But no answer came.

  It was beyond belief—impossible—what could have happened? Ramier’s thoughts chased themselves in a confused race about his severely aching head. And as if from a tremendous distance, he heard the final stroke of the clock striking the hour of nine.

  Curiously enough, his first lucid thought was about Billy.

  Why hadn’t Billy come back into the laboratory in time for the experiment?

  He found himself on the very point of running to the door and looking for Billy when the staggering truth that Drusilla had vanished came to him clearly and in full.

  He stared stonily at the daring little red hat that she had worn and which now rested, like a lost child, upon the chair where she had placed it.

  He looked at the spot where she had stood.

  Could it be he who was invisible, and who had lost the power to see Drusilla?

  He felt a great surge of relief. Of course that was it! The experiment was a success—a complete success. Exultation began to claim him, to sweep refreshingly over him. He wanted to yell it aloud—that his hypothesis was no longer an hypothesis but a proven fact. He had made himself invisible.

  But had he?

  Cold logic tumbled his house of cards about him, for if he was unable to see Drusilla because he was invisible why was he able to see all other objects clearly? Why should not they also be as invisible to him as she? No, there was no evading the issue. Something had slipped, and instead of himself it was Drusilla who had disappeared.

  It was Drusilla who even now was resting in the transmuted state; who even now was facing the perilous chances of the Unknown that he himself had planned to meet.

  It was Drusilla, whose precious being—how precious nothi
ng but that kiss had made him realize!—was a nebulous mist, in which condition she must stay until his hand, which in its unbelievable carelessness had sent her there, could bring her back again—could restore her to sunlight again—to flesh and blood again—to love again.

  The danger of it overwhelmed him.

  And the terrifying question arose: how closely to the snapping point had he stretched the equilibrium of her now-so-dearly-beloved atoms when he had hurled her into invisibility?

  What terrible disaster might hang upon the addition of the slightest fraction of a milliampere of power?

  A chill sweat broke out all over him as he jumped for the control board and stopped the generator of the transmitters.

  The thin, sweet hum of its steady tune drifted into silence like a sigh.

  During an irrational moment, Ramier steeled himself for the cataclysmic explosion that might come. I believe he would almost have welcomed it as a solution to the terrible dilemma into which some still unaccountable act of carelessness on his part had involved them. An instant catastrophe would solve all, would hurl both Drusilla and himself from the suspense of their present doubtful situation into the irrevocable mysteries of eternity.

  But there was no explosion.

  There was, instead, an imperative knock upon the door.

  CHAPTER X

  PURSUIT

  It is said by an eminent authority on the subject that a writer, when reporting a narrative in the first person singular, must confine himself strictly to such details as he either observed with his own eyes or else had related to him by some competent witness.

  That, of course, is nonsense.

  Anyone who has sufficient crust to get away with it can perfectly well project himself into the life and thoughts of some person whom he knows and strike closely enough to the truth still to remain a step or two this side of libel.