Five Fatal Words

by Edwin Balmer; Philip Wylie

  Nothing more occurred to threaten or menace her. The sign on the opposite roof, having served its purpose, was removed; and no one raised an objection. Nothing more was discovered about the person who paid for it.

  Lydia and Ahdi Vado continued their devoted contemplations. The Hindu argued, even, that tranquility was restored; that peace might have been made successfully with those influences in the macrocosm which men call fate; but he interposed no argument against the move to the castle.

  The arrival was accomplished in mid-afternoon, when a winter's sun afforded a cold, lumar illumination to the mighty pile of "Alcazar." Hannah's first step was to take Melicent to the rooms she had retained for herself. Two vast rooms, side by side, the narrow windows of which overlooked a sweeping stretch of the river. In one corner of Hannah's room was a round tower with a wider window from which one could look back toward a profile of New York City, dim and blue in the distance. The ceilings were enormously high and cobwebbed with beams which appeared to be fragile only because they were so far from the eyes of one on the floor below. When they reached those rooms, Hannah seemed satisfied.

  "Those oak doors," she said, "are four inches thick. They have huge iron locks on them and if you look out of the windows you will see that nobody on earth could reach us from the outside!'

  When Melicent looked, she saw that it was true. The walls were one with the cliff and the drop was sheer for three hundred feet to the river. She drew her head back into the room after a moment of alarmed inspection. The place was indeed a fortress; yet, in Melicent's mind, was the fog which killed Alice and the meteoric iron which had come into Theodore's room.

  Hannah Cornwall read her thoughts. "You are saying to yourself that walls twice as thick could not have saved Alice; and that Theodore could have been killed from the sky. Something different may be prepared for me; but I will cheat it. You see, if anything happens to Theodore, I'll just stay here in these rooms. Now I've thought, during these days, of everything--everything that can possibly happen to me here; and I will forestall it. I will not follow my brothers and sisters. . . . I used to love this place when I was a child."

  Melicent shivered slightly. There was only one place in the entire building in which she could be at home. In what must have been designed for a closet, a gigantic closet, had been made a modern bathroom with tiled walls, and a relatively low ceiling.

  When she was in that room with the electric lights turned on and no barred windows to cast suggestive shadows on the floor, she could almost imagine that she was, living in a normal world. But she had very little time in which to contemplate the future of her mental peace of mind at "Alcazar."

  Lydia and Ahdi Vado had rooms lost somewhere in the vast interior of the castle.

  The afternoon was spent in unpacking. The whole routine of flight and fresh settling for a little while in a new place, soon to be made untenantable, was so familiar to Melicent that it was almost a habit. At six o'clock a ship's gong boomed and they walked on stone flag corridors through the baronial rooms of the first floor to the dining salon. They were joined by Lydia, and there, in a chamber suitable for organizing a crusade, or the last banquet before a search for the Holy Grail, they had their supper. It was no fit place for two old women and a girl.

  After supper Miss Cornwall asked Melicent to come up to her room at nine and excused herself. A little later Lydia withdrew. Except for the servants moving vaguely in various portions of the house, Melicent was left alone and to her own devices, as she had been at Blackcroft. For a little while she checked her sense of oppression sufficiently to take an intelligent interest in the house. She inspected the front hall and the rooms on both sides. Silas Cornwall had evidently been something of a collector and among his medieval trophies were several possessions not calculated to reassure their observer.

  Melicent came upon one which she particularly disliked--a helmet, no longer bright and in some places rusty, its unused vizor pulled down with a sword thrust through the metal on both sides. She wondered, if she had the courage to lift that vizor, what still more literal relic of forgotten combat she might find behind it. It was impossible for her to divide the house into living rooms, libraries, and music rooms. There were many chambers, all lofty, some sixty or seventy feet long, and all of them were furnished with huge chairs of carved wood and leather, gigantic tables, chests, cases, bookshelves, and in all of them were fireplaces.

  The farther she carried her investigation, the less comfortable she became, and at last in self-defense she went to the circular room in which she had noticed a radio and switched it on. The light over the dial reassured her. Presently the long dead past represented by "Alcazar" was disturbed and driven a little back by the voice of an announcer. The voice became jazz. Jazz reminded Melicent that she could look out of windows that had been designed for archers and see the lights of Manhattan and Hoboken and Jersey City and the Bronx and Staten Island. By and by the jazz stopped, the broadcast station played its chimes and a new program was announced. Melicent realized how early their dinner had been, how early in the evening it still was, for the new program was Lawrence Bartlett reciting the news of the day. She settled beside the instrument and listened with concentration. It was her only hold on civilization and almost her only hold on sanity.

  "Hello, everybody!" the big, rapid voice of Lawrence Bartlett boomed cheerfully.

  "The news bag is full of presents to-night and I'm going to distribute as many of them as I can in the fifteen minutes allowed. They're having a big time in Paris to-night. An American aviator recently broke all the European records between the largest cities, but to-night a Frenchman, Gaspard Vormeil, has put the American in his place and as much as said to him, 'You better go home, Uncle Sam, because we can do things on our own grounds.' He flew a mystery ship that has been in the making for the last twelve months.

  He had his breakfast in Paris at eight o'clock this morning. A little later he dropped in on London for gasoline, but he didn't stay in London for lunch. Not Gaspard! He had his lunch in Berlin and he had his lunch right on time, too. One o'clock. Well, he must have said, 'The food in Berlin is not too good and I better go somewhere else for tea.' He went down to Rome. He had tea in Rome a little bit early and then he must have thought of his friends waiting for him back there in Paris, because no sooner had he finished his cup of tea--at least we will assume that it was tea he drank--when he started back for Le Bourget. He got there at nine-fifteen and found his friends still waiting dinner for him.

  The mystery ship is certainly a wow! Experts are trying to figure out just how fast it flew, but nobody seems to have seen it long enough to be sure. Not all the news is good news, but a good deal of the news is aviation news. Here's some bad news. Early this afternoon two men, who were in a hurry to get from Chicago to New York, chartered a passenger plane. The plane was a big one and a fast one and carried two pilots. But the two men apparently were nervous about flying, or else they believed in taking no chances, because they carried parachutes with them, which is about like a passenger on a steamship liner bringing his own life preserver. They left Chicago at half-past one. When they got over Pennsylvania they ran into a little fog. A little fog doesn't mean anything to you and to me and all the rest of us aeronauts, but it did to those two men. They got frightened. Then one of the motors began to kick up and their fright increased. The extra pilot went out on the cat-walk to see what he could do about that motor and meanwhile the two passengers became more and more alarmed. Neither of the pilots paid much attention to them. They were too busy. When they looked around both their passengers were about to get off--to get off with their parachutes. They did. Both of them were pretty cool. The pilots saw them jump. But their altitude was considerable and the fog was pretty dense. They didn't see what happened to the two parachute jumpers after they were swallowed by the murk below and nobody else had seen them since. The pilots got their plane down all right and made a forced landing on an emergency field twenty miles from the place where t
heir passengers had leaped. It is assumed that both men were killed. Searching parties have found no traces of them up to the present moment and a dispatch says that the country below was full of many lakes and ponds, into which they may have fallen. It is possible, too, that since they were inexperienced in handling their parachutes, they did not get them open and dropped to the earth like plummets. The two men who probably lost their lives by taking a foolhardy chance, when commercial flying offered greater safety, were Theodore and Donald Cornwall, members of that famous old Yankee family which is one of the richest in America.

  "Theodore Cornwall is one of the joint heirs to an income from an estate valued at two or three hundred million dollars and that estate goes to the last Cornwall brother or sister surviving. Donald was his nephew. I have an Associated Press Dispatch here which tells me that Theodore Cornwall, if he has lost his life in his reckless parachute jump, will be the fourth member of the family to die within the last three months, and that he will be survived by two sisters. That means that one of those sisters will inherit one of the greatest fortunes, in the country. But I haven't only tragedy to bring you. Here's a story about a cuckoo clock--"

  Melicent did not hear the story about the cuckoo clock; the voice went on, relating it; but Melicent Waring stood in front of the radio, her hands clenched tight together, and spoke back at it.

  "He isn't dead," she denied in a low, vibrant voice. "He can't be dead." She referred to Donald.

  Theodore Cornwall might be dead. A seizure of horror passed over her, thinking of that; but nothing in her rose to refuse the whole idea of it. On the contrary, it was only reasonable that he would die. Was he not T in the frightful series of fate; had he not been the next doomed to die; had not he, indeed, read his fatal message? No; she could not deny the death of Theodore Cornwall. She could not, in fact, think about him. He became a figure in the background--a figure she could not have expected to survive. But for Donald to die! Donald to be swept away, never to hear his voice once more!

  So Melicent, standing there speaking back at the radio, discovered the secret within her which had underlain all she had done in the last frightful weeks. It was Donald. Her mind numbly traced the whole history of her relations in the Cornwall family. By instinct and without words she knew she had decided to stay with them because at the very beginning when the stark tragedies stalked the family a young man with red hair and blue eyes had come through the front door and asked her if she had a name.

  She knew that while he had been friendly with her, and often shared his confidence with her, he still remained enigmatic. His past was more or less a mystery.

  She was not fully informed about his education, where he had traveled, for whom he had cared, what sort of things he liked, what he disliked--the innumerable details of habit, choice, and behavior, which combine to make up a personality. Her glimpses of his human likeableness had been brief at the best.

  But now, from the ether had come word that he was almost surely dead. She did not rush upstairs to tell Hannah Cornwall of the accident. She sat in front of the radio without even the relief of tears and said, "It can't be. It mustn't be." Until at last she said,

  "I love him," and after that she wept.

  A few minutes passed while her shoulders shook and her head was held in her hands. The radio announcer vanished from the air and in his place came two world-famous comedians. She did not hear them. She was thinking that she had stayed with the Cornwalls, not because she was bold or brave, not because she was a steadfast person, but because she was in love. And now they said that the man she loved was gone forever.

  There would be no opportunity to participate in that period of human ecstasy during which two people find themselves drawn rapidly and willingly closer and closer together.

  She did not doubt but that if he had not already been in love with her she could make him love her. He had been all his life a wanderer, a forlorn man, a hungry man, a man to whom had come many splendid things but not love. She knew, in fact, that he had tried to interest her in a way so casual that that very quality would have revealed its desperation if she had been careful to notice it. Now it was too late.

  She remembered her duty. She appreciated what the news would mean to Hannah Cornwall. Daniel. Everett. Alice. Theodore. But one letter--H--remained to complete the word "Death" upon the Cornwall tombstones. H for Hannah. Melicent thrust aside the agony of that moment and went upstairs.

  On the door of every bedroom in the castle of Silas Cornwall was a huge cast-iron ring, which served as a knocker and also turned back the latch. Melicent stood in front of Hannah's door. She felt weak and lost and hopeless. The Cornwall tragedy had suddenly become a tragedy of her own. She knocked, and Hannah, who asked a question from the room behind the door, let her in quickly, because every syllable Melicent spoke was freighted with disaster.

  Hannah Cornwall did not say "What's happened?" or "What's the matter?" Any such inquiry would have been superfluous. She merely let the girl into her room, relocked the door and waited like a prisoner preparing for his own execution.

  Melicent's voice was low and very soft. "I was listening to Lawrence Bartlett on the radio just now. In the middle of his broadcast about the day's news he said that your brother Theodore and Donald had been going from Chicago to New York in an aeroplane and that something had gone wrong and that they had jumped in parachutes and probably fallen into a lake or something, because they haven't been found."

  Hannah sat down in a chair and looked steadily at her secretary. In spite of her shrewdness and the quick perception of her mind, she did not quite understand. She belonged to a generation which had not known the radio, and probably under the shock of impending knowledge her mind acted as it had when she was younger. She could not quite understand the source of what Melicent had said or acclimatize her thoughts to the shocking fact that this new Cornwall tragedy had been thrust almost physically over hundreds of miles of space through the walls of "Alcazar."

  "I don't understand," she said.

  "I was listening to the radio--" Melicent repeated tremulously. "Yes, the radio. Go on, Miss Waring."

  "--to a man who broadcasts the news every night. He just gives little snatches of a few things that have happened during the day, but no details. That's the trouble. He doesn't really know what did happen. All he knows was that Donald and your brother had jumped out of an aeroplane and that they were lost."

  "This came over the radio?"

  "Yes, Miss Cornwall, over the radio."

  "It couldn't be a trick to disturb us?"

  "No, Miss Cornwall. It was no trick."

  "And it is said both of them were dead?"

  "No. It just said that probably both of them were dead."

  The obtuseness of Hannah Cornwall was more than Melicent could bear. She repeated in a very low voice, "Maybe he's dead. Maybe Donald's dead," and she threw herself face down on a sofa and began to cry again.

  When their distress is very real and very strong, people cry only in short snatches.

  Comforting attention will sometimes prolong those periods of tears, but no one comforted Melicent. She soon realized that she was surrounded by frigid silence and after a while she remembered that for the second time her inadvertent behavior was reflecting an interest in Miss Cornwall's nephew to the old lady. She sat up.

  Hannah was in a chair a few feet from her. Hannah's arms were on the arms of the chair. Her hands hung down at rigid right angles. Her back was steel stiff and her face was engraved with fear. She did not blink her black eyes and even her mouth did not twitch. The iciness of realization had crept through her while Melicent wept. She was frozen to death with terror.

  Melicent made a miserable attempt to project solace to the stiff statue. "Maybe they'll be all right. Maybe I could call up the newspapers and find out about them. Maybe it's just a rumor."

  Hannah said nothing.

  "I'll go now." She stumbled across the room and took up the receiver of the telephone. Then
she remembered she would have to look up a number and she did so.

  The pages slithered under her shaking fingers. It was with difficulty that she concentrated her eyes on the letters. She found the number of the newspaper office and she called it.

  "I'd like to speak to someone who knows about the aeroplane disaster over the Allegheny Mountains this afternoon. I'm speaking for Hannah Cornwall, a sister of one of the men on that plane." Her voice quivered and halted. She waited for a long time and then repeated her question.

  A man at a desk in New York City answered it with terse courtesy. "A report has just come in from Bellmede, Pennsylvania, saying that one of the men landed safely in his parachute. The 'chute the other one jumped in didn't open and he was killed."

  Melicent asked, "Which one landed safely?" and it took all the strength she had.

  But there was no comfort for her.

  The man at the other end of the wire merely said, "Don't know yet. Call up in half an hour," and hung up.

  She set the telephone back on the stand and turned her attention toward Hannah with renewed hope. One of the men had landed safely. Donald was young. Donald was strong. And Donald was certainly that one.

  "One landed safely. They don't know which one. Oh--"

  Miss Cornwall ignored the exclamation wrung from the girl and for the first time in several minutes she spoke. Her voice was at a dead level and seemed to be activated by a portion of her mind wholly beyond human feeling. "Now begins the day which I have dreaded all my life. Now it's here. I'm next. There's no one between me and death." As she continued she made wide gestures of pointing with her hands; slow, sweeping mechanical gestures. "Try all the doors, Miss Waring, and be sure they are locked and bolted." Melicent began mechanically to obey. "Now look out each window and see if there was anything or anyone on the walls."

  Melicent leaned out into the icy air, opening the windows each in turn and looking down.