That laughter seemed to shake Melicent from her stupor. She suddenly came to life. "Don't, Miss Cornwall. Please don't," she implored.
Hannah laughed again and gazed out the window.
DAVIS
EVANS
AND
TAYLOR
HATS.
with the initial letter of each word in red, flashed across the sky of Manhattan. It threw an eerie light on the roof of the building upon which the sign had been constructed. Hannah began to laugh again. "It's for you, Theodore."
Melicent cried, "Don't."
Miss Cornwall ceased to laugh and shuddered almost uncontrollably; she seized Melicent's hand. "What can I do--what can anyone--anyone do--do ?"
Almost any reaction might have been expected from Theodore Cornwall. He was old. He had fainted when he had found that his horoscope was wrong. Everyone was subconsciously prepared to defend him against this new and diabolical blow, but he astonished them.
When he turned away from the window he had drawn back his shoulders and lifted his head. He was smiling. "This is what you have told me about. This is the kind of death-writing obituaries for the Cornwall family. You know"--and he sat down in a chair with almost youthful indolence--"you know, I have always been an adventurer at heart. I had tied myself down all my life and lived circumspectly. This is the first real thing that has ever happened to me. My new horoscope has told me to be bold, to be audacious. I think I am going to have some fun, some fun at last."
Melicent looked at him with wide incredulity; but when she turned her attention from Theodore to Donald, she saw that Donald, in spite of the paleness of his face, was grinning at his uncle.
"That's the old fight."
Theodore Cornwall leaped to his feet. "You don't know how much it means to me to throwaway this endless caution of mine. How I have hated the doctors and the diets and the electrical treatments. How I've hated myself. I've never had an enemy. Never experienced a danger, and now perhaps death itself is at my heels. Yesterday the very thought would have killed me. To-day it makes me almost gay."
"Theodore!" Hannah exclaimed with dismay.
He stood in front of his sister. "I'm through with it all. You, with your locks and keys and special servants. Lydia with her Hindu fakir. My new stars tell me to be daring.
I will dare--anything." He walked across to the window and shook his fist at the electric sign.
"He's mad," Hannah said.
"No, he isn't." Donald came to the side of his aunt. "He's not mad. He's waking up. I say, good for him. I say there's something of the old Cornwall spunk in him yet."
Theodore addressed the people in the room again. His voice was almost rapturous.
"We'll fight but we'll fight intelligently. In the first place, we'll find out if this sign is a coincidence. As soon as it's morning, we'll investigate it. They've been building it all day.
We'll find out who owns it and who is advertising those hats. If it's coincidence, then I'll still have the laugh on you, Hannah--"
"It isn't coincidence."
"--and if it isn't, then we'll fight. If Daniel and Everitt and Alice were murdered, I'll see their murderer in Hell myself. And always I will be bold; bold. I will fear nothing."
Hannah stood. She spoke with quiet severity. "Theodore, I believe you have lost your senses. Come, Miss Waring. We'll leave him in Donald's care. I have no wish to participate in this raving." She looked searchingly at her brother and said, "I hope that by morning you will be more self-possessed, if morning ever dawns for you."
With that closing sentence she left the room. Melicent glanced uncertainly at Donald, who nodded at her to follow, and then she, too, departed.
An hour later Melicent lay in the darkened bedroom which had been assigned to Miss Cornwall. She stared blindly into the night without either the hope or the thought of capturing sleep, although she knew that some time before dawn awoke the dull grumbling of the city she would sleep. In the Cornwall household one became able successfully to court slumber even under incredibly adverse conditions.
Theodore Cornwall had received his death sentence; and death, as she very well knew, did not delay after the delivery of the five-word message.
She tried to argue it away and to say that the sign which was still flashing outside the windows was an advertisement merely--simply a sign advertising hats; but each darkening and flashing of the sign only increased her nervous tension.
The partitions of the apartment were thin and she could hear the ceaseless confusion of small sounds made by Hannah Cornwall. She heard Miss Cornwall rise, move across the room and there was a knock on her door.
In spite of the fact that Melicent was reasonably sure that it was Miss Cornwall who had knocked, she sat up in bed and turned on the light with trembling fingers.
Melicent opened the door carefully and saw Miss Cornwall standing on the other side.
"Do you mind if I come in?"
"Not a bit," Melicent replied. "Do come in."
Miss Cornwall hugged a silk wrapper around herself and shivered. "That sign is driving me mad. . . . We're eighteen floors above the street, so I don't think anybody can molest us directly from the windows and all the doors are locked; yet--yet--" She paused and found a chair. "I could not stand being alone another instant. Do you realize what may happen to Theodore to-night?"
"Of course," said Melicent. "I've been thinking of that."
"What, do you suppose, will they do to him?"
"I've been imagining," confessed Melicent, "all sorts of things."
"Yet we could never hit it--neither you nor I. There was poison for Daniel; electrocution in the bath for Everitt--who would ever have dreamed of that?; and for Alice, the fog which no one could have foreseen. What--what do you suppose it will be for Theodore?"
Melicent shook her head.
"Or for me?" whispered Miss Cornwall. "Suppose now it is for me? It--that--that,"
she stared once toward the flashing sign but refrained from mentioning it as one avoids naming a terror, "that is nearly as opposite to my windows as it is to Theodore's; suppose now the five words are for me."
"Oh," cried Melicent, "I don't think so. They might as well be for your sister, Lydia."
"No; Lydia's windows are on the other side; and Ahdi Vado reassures her.
Sometimes I think it must be worth while to be a fool and believe what any sane mind must refuse. Lydia says it is merely an electric sign incapable of harm in itself unless we, in our minds, create the causes of our own confusion. She and Ahdi Vado are attempting, with their own minds, to counteract the terror in ours. . . . That sign is driving me mad; where is Theodore now, do you know?"
"I think he's still talking with Donald," Melicent said. "If you listen very closely, you can just barely catch the sound of voices. I expect that Donald will spend the night in his room."
"He should; he must. It is awful to wait for something which you cannot possibly be prepared for, anyway. Poison, which no one at first suspected; electrocution; fog. I was wondering if maybe I have been wrong about the police. Perhaps to-morrow we should call them; yet I can't bear to do it. I won't do it."
She gazed at her companion with a mingling of almost childish terror and unearthly resolution. "All the others died a few hours after they received their messages, half a day at most--that is, assuming Alice got her message the day she talked to you.
You think it was that day, don't you?"
"Yes, " said Melicent.
"So do I. That's why she suddenly had to talk to you. I wish they'd put that sign out; yet what good would that do? Alice burnt up her message; but she died that night.
What, do you suppose, can be coming to Theodore?"
"Then you do think it is coming to him and not to you?"
Hannah Cornwall wet her thin lips. "I think that more likely; yes; more likely Theodore--before me. I would call upon the police to-night, immediately, if I could believe they could do any good. But would all the police in New Yor
k have saved Everitt from dying in the bath or saved Alice from the fog?" She arose, quivering, and fought for resolution. "I did not mean to further disturb you but my nerves have been shrieking for hours. I will return to my room--your room--but how can I sleep to-night ?"
"Yet you must try to," urged Melicent.
"The sign does not come on again. Do you see? It stays dark."
"Yes," said Melicent. "They've put it out."
"They--they--they," whispered Miss Cornwall. "But what good does putting it out now do? Remember that Alice burned her message; but she died. Good night, child."
"Good night, Miss Cornwall."
She went through the doorway again; she closed the door firmly and Melicent heard the key turned on the other side.
Melicent switched out her light; and the sign on the opposite roof remained dark.
Melicent could see it vaguely as a bit of shadowy framework in the faint diffusion of the city glow over the roof. She sat looking out and, collecting her thoughts, she considered the strangely inert manner of the Cornwalls in meeting their collective doom. It was almost as if they had been trained from childhood to expect some such form of extinction, and as if that early breeding was now showing itself in a resignation that gave way only under the utmost stress. To be sure, there was Theodore at last determined to be bold--to live rashly.
Miss Cornwall's room became utterly silent; and the low resonance of men's voices from the other side had ceased. Melicent lay for an hour--for hours--wide awake, listening in a vigil which surpassed, in its tenseness, even that of her first night when she and Miss Cornwall had exchanged rooms.
She could lie still no longer. She arose and went to the window and looked out.
The sign across the street remained dark; and all over the city, the evening illumination was lessened; but the lights of night were sustained. And over all stood the stars.
Strange to look up at the stars over the city and see them the same stars as those which stood over the sea; but there they were--the Big Dipper and the Little Bear, Cassiopeia and the Chair. Stars and constellations so immense and far away that the mind could not encompass their distances but which-so Theodore Cornwall firmly believed--
concerned themselves with petty, individual, human fates and affairs. What vanity!
High overhead, there was a flash in the sky--a brilliant blue line of light which vanished as swiftly as it had appeared. Now, near the eastern horizon, another. Meteors; shooting stars; for the world, in its wanderings, was encountering bits of cosmic débris.
Last night and to-night, the papers said, we would be sweeping through the path of a comet which had been dissipated long ago but which left behind its scattered fragments.
Melicent forgot the stars. Footsteps approached her door; just outside, they stopped for a moment and then went on. A minute passed. The sound had disappeared.
Already her mind was playing tricks upon her and she was not positive that the sound she had heard had been footsteps, not sure that she had heard any connected series of sounds at all. A moment later she knew why she was doubting the footsteps; she was afraid to do what she thought she would do if she heard anything at all. Heretofore she had always entered into the Cornwalls' affairs after the alarm had been raised. Now she was determined to make a more intelligent effort. Every member of the family was in danger and every member gave the others some appearance of protection, but she knew that, in so far as Hannah Cornwall's generation was concerned, each person now living was primarily interested in himself. The sequence of deaths and the terror of the warnings had made Melicent desperate. They roused her to an unnatural courage.
She decided that she had heard footsteps and she rose from her bed. She took off Hannah Cornwall's nightcap and donned her own kimona. She crept across the room, took up the key of the hall door, which Miss Cornwall had placed on top of the bureau, and slowly turned the lock. The hall was pitch dark. With every sense vividly alert, she began to move through it, though she had neither weapon nor plan.
When she reached the middle of the hall, she began to be able to see faintly. The hall ended at the portière on the other side of which was the living room. She could hear the faint sounds of traffic in the street eighteen stories down; but now there was no sound within the walls of the apartment. The glow from the street made the room dimly visible.
There was no one in it; at least, nothing moved. Melicent's eyes ransacked every corner.
Now, though nothing moved, something clicked. A trigger cocked? The latch of a door? Melicent started; she jerked back behind the portieres and clutched them. She wanted to scream; but she stifled even the gasp of her breathing and stood tense, listening. No sound succeeded the click; when she separated away the noise from outside.
within the walls was absolute silence.
She realized, after a minute or two, that the elevator shaft lay in the direction from which the click had sounded. The elevator communicated almost directly into the living room. Theodore Cornwall's apartment occupied the entire top floor and there was no other reason for the elevator rising to this floor except to serve his apartment. There was, accordingly, only a very small space between the door from the living room and the elevator door.
Was there some one standing in that space now? Someone who had just come up in the elevator and who, after leaving the car, stood there without ringing or rapping?
The door was almost directly across the room from Melicent; and the longer she listened, hearing nothing, the more firmly the idea fastened itself in her mind. Some one had come up in the elevator and stepped out; the car, undoubtedly, had descended, leaving him there; but he neither rang nor rapped.
What was he waiting for? What was he doing? Working on the door? She strained her eyes for sign of the door opening and her ears for sound of a key in the lock. She saw and heard nothing. No one was there, boldly she told herself. To prove it, she'd cross the room and throw open the door. Or, would she? What madness would that be!
At least, she'd cross the room; but she found she could not even do that. She could creep around by way of the wall; for she began to do that, edging along, her back to the wall, her eyes jumping from object to object in the room, her hand beside her and pressed back against the wall for the strange and senseless reassurance of the feeling of something solid with her fingers.
She came to a table against the wall and she had to leave the wall to work her way round that. And as she was doing it, the door she was watching seemed to open. Was it opening? Was it an illusion? She could not see surely; and her foot caught on something.
She kicked to free it and a lamp beside her swayed. She had caught the cord on it; and the lamp toppled and crashed on the floor. It took all her attention for a second--three seconds--five seconds--who could say? For she had tried to catch it, but her hands missed it; and then she stared at it on the floor.
The door! No doubt now that it was partly open. No light came through it; the entry was absolutely black, but the door was not closed. But no one appeared; nobody seemed to be at it; there was not the slightest response, at the door, to the crash of the lamp. It was as if the thud on the floor had jarred the door open.
But Melicent knew that could not be.
Behind her, now, was a definite sound; behind her a door opened. It was Theodore Cornwall's door; and for an instant light from beyond his door shone down the hallway. Then the light was extinguished.
"Come back!" she heard the loud whisper in Donald's voice; but Theodore Cornwall did not heed him. Act boldly, his horoscope had warned him; and Melicent had seen how he was hypnotized by his stars.
"Stay back!" she cried out to halt him.
"Who's that?" he jerked out; and she knew that she had stopped him; but some one else passed him and approached her. Donald, she was sure, even before he spoke, demanding: "Where are you?"
"Don't turn on the light!" she cried. "There's some one here."
He found her, then, and seizing her, he thrust her behind him.
With his left hand, he kept hold of her wrist; with his right, he presented a pistol to the room, while he whispered: "What did you see?"
"That door opening--I think."
"It doesn't seem open now."
"No. . . . Yes, it does, a little."
"I see," he agreed; and for a breathless second together they watched it. Then he asked: "What else was there?"
"Steps, I thought."
"Where?"
"Passing my door. I waited a minute--then I came out. Then there was a click--a distinct click over there; and the door opened."
"But that crash."
"That was me. I knocked the lamp off the table."
"Donald!" called Theodore Cornwall's voice from the hallway.
"Stay there, uncle, a minute," Donald replied, and of Melicent he begged: "Please go back to your room."
"What will you do?"
"I'll only turn on the light."
For answer, she reached along the wall and touched a switch and light flooded the room. No one else was in the room; except for the lamp which Melicent had overturned, there was no disorder. The door to the elevator entry was closed; and the entry was empty with the door to the shaft, on the other side, properly shut.
Theodore Cornwall, pistol in hand, assisted his nephew and Melicent in the examination which made all this certain.
"Nerves," he reassured Melicent. "Just nerves; that's all. Natural enough under the circumstances."
The three of them looked at one another--the two men in dressing gowns over pajamas, the girl in kimona.
"Just nerves," repeated Theodore. "We'd all best go back to bed."
Five Fatal Words Page 17
