“Jerry,” he said, “you’ve been studying this superstition stuff. Just what is a ghoul?”
“Something in Eastern mythology, Bill. An imaginary creature that robs graves and feeds on corpses. The modern use of the word is confined to someone who robs graves, usually for jewelry that is sometimes interred with the bodies. Back in the early days of medicine, bodies were stolen and sold to the anatomists for purposes of dissection, too.”
“The modern ones don’t—uh—”
“There have been psychopathic cases, a few of them. One happened in Paris, in modern times. A man named Bertrand. Charles Fort tells about him in his book Wild Talents.”
“Wild Talents, huh?” said Bill. “What happened?”
“Graves in a Paris cemetery were being dug up by something or someone who—” there in the dark alley, I couldn’t say it plainly—’’who—uh—acted like a ghoul. They couldn’t catch him but they set up a blunderbuss trap. It got this man Bertrand, and he confessed.”
Bill Drager didn’t say anything, just stood there. Then, just as though I could read his mind, I got scared because I knew what he was thinking. If anything like that had happened here tonight, there was only one person it could possibly have been.
Me.
Bill Drager was standing there silently, staring at me, and wondering whether I—
Then I knew why the others had stopped talking when I had come up the stairs just a few minutes before, back at the morgue. No. there was not a shred of proof, unless you can call process of elimination proof. But there had been a faint unspoken suspicion that somehow seemed a thousand times worse than an accusation I could deny.
I knew, then, that unless this case was solved suspicion would follow me the rest of my life. Something too absurd for open accusation. But people would look at me and wonder, and the mere possibility would make them shudder. Every word I spoke would be weighed to see whether it might indicate an unbalanced mind.
Even Bill Drager, one of my best friends, was wondering about me now.
“Bill,” I said, “for God’s sake, you don’t think—”
“Of course not, Jerry.”
But the fact that he knew what I meant before I had finished the sentence, proved I had been right about what he had been thinking.
There was something else in his voice, too, although he had tried to keep it out. Fear. He was alone with me in a dark alley, and I realized now why he had stepped back out of the light so quickly. Bill Drager was a little afraid of me.
But this was no time or place to talk about it. The atmosphere was wrong. Anything I could say would make things worse.
So I merely said, “Well, so long, Bill,” as I turned and walked toward the street.
Half a block up the street on the other side was an all-night restaurant, and I headed for it. Not to eat, for I felt as though I would never want to eat again. The very thought of food was sickening. But a cup of coffee might take away some of the numbness in my mind.
Hank Perry was on duty behind the counter, and he was alone.
“Hi, Jerry,” he said, as I sat down on a stool at the counter. “Off early tonight?”
I nodded and let it go at that.
“Just a cup of black coffee, Hank,” I told him, and forestalled any sales talk by adding, “I’m not hungry. Just ate.”
Silly thing to say, I realized the minute I had said it. Suppose someone asked Hank later what I had said when I came in. They all knew, back there, that I had not brought a lunch to work and hadn’t eaten. Would I, from now on, have to watch every word I said to avoid slips like that?
But whatever significance Hank or others might read into my words later, there was nothing odd about them now, as long as Hank didn’t know what had happened at the morgue.
He brought my coffee. I stirred in sugar and waited for it to cool enough to drink.
“Nice night out,” Hank said.
I hadn’t noticed, but I said, “Yeah.”
To me it was one terrible night out, but I couldn’t tell him that without spilling the rest of the story.
“How was business tonight, Hank?” I asked.
“Pretty slow.”
“How many customers,” I asked, “did you have between midnight and two o’clock?”
“Hardly any. Why?”
“Hank,” I said, “something happened then. Look, I can’t tell you about it now, honestly. I don’t know whether or not it’s going to be given out to the newspapers. If it isn’t, it would lose me my job even to mention it. But will you think hard if you saw anybody or anything out of the ordinary between twelve and two?”
“Um,” said Hank, leaning against the counter thoughtfully. “That’s a couple of hours ago. Must have had several customers in here during that time. But all I can remember are regulars. People on night shifts that come in regularly.”
“When you’re standing at that grill in the window frying something, you can see out across the street,” I said. “You ought to be able to see down as far as the alley, because this is a pretty wide street.”
“Yeah, I can.”
“Did you see anyone walk or drive in there?”
“Golly,” said Hank. “Yeah, I did. I think it was around one o’clock. I happened to notice the guy on account of what he was carrying.”
I felt my heart hammering with sudden excitement. “What was he carrying? And what did he look like? “
“I didn’t notice what he looked like,” said Hank. “He was in shadow most of the time. But he was carrying a bowling ball.”
“A bowling ball?”
Hank nodded. “That’s what made me notice him. There aren’t any alleys—I mean bowling alleys—right around here. I bowl myself so I wondered where this guy had been rolling.”
“You mean he was carrying a bowling ball under his arm?”
I was still incredulous, even though Hank’s voice showed me he was not kidding.
He looked at me contemptuously.
“No. Bowlers never carry ‘em like that on the street. There’s a sort of bag that’s made for the purpose. A little bigger than the ball, some of them, so a guy can put in his bowling shoes and stuff.”
I closed my eyes a moment to try to make sense out of it. Of all the things on this mad night, it seemed the maddest that a bowling ball had been carried into the alley by the morgue —or something the shape of a bowling ball. At just the right time, too. One o’clock.
It would be a devil of a coincidence if the man Hank had seen hadn’t been the one.
“You’re sure it was a bowling ball case?”
“Positive. I got one like it myself. And the way he carried it, it was just heavy enough to have the ball in it.” He looked at me curiously. “Say, Jerry, I never thought of it before, but a case like that would be a handy thing to carry a bomb in. Did someone try to plant a bomb at the morgue?”
“No.”
“Then if it wasn’t a bowling ball—and you act like you think it wasn’t—what would it have been?”
“I wish I knew,” I told him. “I wish to high heaven I knew.”
I downed the rest of my coffee and stood up.
“Thanks a lot, Hank,” I said. “Listen, you think it over and see if you can remember anything else about that case or the man who carried it. I’ll see you later.”
Horror in a Bowling Ball
What I needed was some fresh air, so I started walking. I didn’t pay any attention to where I was going; I just walked.
My feet didn’t take me in circles, but my mind did. A bowling ball! Why would a bowling ball, or something shaped like it, be carried into the alley back of the morgue? A bowling ball would fit into that ventilator hole, all right, and a dropped bowling ball would have broken the glass of the case.
But a bowling ball wouldn’t have done—the rest of it.
I vaguely remembered some mention of bowling earlier in the evening and thought back to what it was. Oh yes. Dr. Skibbine and Mr. Paton had been going to bowl a
game instead of playing a second game of chess. But neither of them had bowling balls along. Anyway, if Dr. Skibbine had told the truth, they had both been home by midnight.
If not a bowling ball, then what? A ghoul? A spherical ghoul?
The thought was so incongruously horrible that I wanted to stop, right there in the middle of the sidewalk and laugh like a maniac. Maybe I was near hysteria.
I thought of going back to the morgue and telling them about it, and laughing. Watching Quenlin’s face and Wilson’s when I told them that our guest had been a man-eating bowling ball. A spherical—
Then I stopped walking, because all of a sudden I knew what the bowling ball had been, and I had the most important part of the answer.
Somewhere a clock was striking half-past three, and I looked around to see where I was. Oak Street, only a few doors from Grant Parkway. That meant I had come fifteen or sixteen blocks from the morgue and that I was only a block and a half from the zoo. At the zoo, I could find out if I was right.
So I started walking again. A block and a half later I was across the street from the zoo right in front of Mr. Paton’s house. Strangely, there was a light in one of the downstairs rooms.
I went up onto the porch and rang the bell. Mr. Paton came to answer it. He was wearing a dressing gown, but I could see shoes and the bottoms of his trouser legs under it.
He didn’t look surprised at all when he opened the door.
“Yes, Jerry?” he said, almost as though he had been expecting me.
“I’m glad you’re still up, Mr. Paton, ‘‘I said. “Could you walk across with me and get me past the guard at the gate? I’d like to look at one of the cages and verify—something.”
“You guessed then, Jerry?”
“Yes, Mr. Paton,” I told him. Then I had a sudden thought that scared me a little. “You were seen going into the alley,” I added quickly, “and the man who saw you knows I came here. He saw you carrying—”
He held up his hand and smiled.
“You needn’t worry, Jerry,” he said. “I know it’s over—the minute anybody is smart enough to guess. And—well, I murdered a man all right, but I’m not the type to murder another to try to cover up, because I can see where that would lead. The man I did kill deserved it, and I gambled on—Well, never mind all that.”
“Who was he?” I asked.
““His name was Mark Leedom. He was my assistant four years ago. I was foolish at that time—I’d lost money speculating and I stole some zoo funds. They were supposed to be used for the purchase of—Never mind the details. Mark Leedom found out and got proof.
“He made me turn over most of the money to him, and he—retired, and moved out of town. But he’s been coming back periodically to keep shaking me down. He was a rat, Jerry, a worse crook than I ever thought of being. This time I couldn’t pay so I killed him.”
“You were going to make it look like an accident on the Mill Road?” I said. “You killed him here and took him—”
“Yes, I was going to have the car run over his head, so he wouldn’t be identified. I missed by inches, but I couldn’t try again because another car was coming, and I had to keep on driving away.
“Luckily, Doc Skibbine didn’t know him. It was while Doc was in South America that Leedom worked for me. But there are lots of people around who did know him. Some curiosity seeker would have identified him in the week they hold an unidentified body and—well, once they knew who he was and traced things back, they’d have got to me eventually for the old business four years ago if not the fact that I killed him.”
“So that’s why you had to make him unidentifiable,” I said. “I see. He looked familiar to Bill Drager, but Bill couldn’t place him.”
He nodded. “Bill was just a patrolman then. He probably had seen Leedom only a few times, but someone else—Well, Jerry, you go back and tell them about it. Tell them I’ll be here.”
“Gee, Mr. Paton, I’m sorry I got to,” I said. “Isn’t there anything—?”
“No. Go and get them. I won’t run away, I promise you. And tell Doc he wouldn’t have beat me that chess game tonight if I hadn’t let him. With what I had to do, I wanted to get out of there early. Good night, Jerry.”
He eased me out onto the porch again before I quite realized why he had never had a chance to tell Dr. Skibbine himself. Yes, he meant for them to find him here when they came, but not alive.
I almost turned to the door again, to break my way in and stop him. Then I realized that everything would be easier for him if he did it his way.
Yes, he was dead by the time they sent men out to bring him in. Even though I had expected it, I guess I had a case of the jitters when they phoned in the news, and I must have showed it, because Bill Drager threw an arm across my shoulders.
“Jerry,” he said, “this has been the devil of a night for you. You need a drink. Come on.
The drink made me feel better and so did the frank admiration in Drager’s eyes. It was so completely different from what I had seen there back in the alley.
“Jerry,” he told me, “you ought to get on the Force. Figuring out that—of all things—he had used an armadillo.”
“But what else was possible? Look! All those ghoul legends trace back to beasts that are eaters of carrion. Like hyenas. A hyena could have done what was done back there in the morgue. But no one could have handled a hyena—pushed it through that ventilator hole with a rope on it to pull it up again.
“But an armadillo is an eater of corpses, too. It gets frightened when handled and curls up into a ball, like a bowling ball. It doesn’t make any noise, and you could carry it in a bag like the one Hank described. It has an armored shell that would break the glass of the display case if Paton lowered it to within a few feet and let it drop the rest of the way. And of course he looked down with a flashlight to see—”
Bill Drager shuddered a little.
“Learning is a great thing if you like it,” he said. “Studying origins of superstitions, I mean. But me, I want another drink. How about you?”
Out of His Head by Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907)
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, the author of The Story of a Bad Boy, wrote several books with elements of mystery and detection, including Marjory Daw, The Stillwater Tragedy, and his earliest prose work, an episodic novel called Out of His Head. Published in 1862, it was one of the first books by an American to follow Poe’s lead in featuring an amateur detective. The discerning reader may not be surprised by the solution to the locked-room problem, which owes much to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue what is surprising is the character of Paul Lynde, Aldrich’s detective, who narrates the story. Lynde is a mild lunatic who is working on a mysterious invention called the “Moon-Apparatus.” And Lynde’s motive in confronting the killer is, to say the least, out of the ordinary.
The Danseuse
THE ensuing summer I returned North, and, turning my attention to mechanism, was successful in producing several wonderful pieces of work, among which maybe mentioned a brass butterfly, made to flit so naturally in the air as to deceive the most acute observers. The motion of the toy, the soft down and gorgeous damask-stains on the pinions, were declared quite perfect. The thing is rusty and won’t work now; I tried to set it going for Dr. Pendegrast, the other day.
A manikin musician, playing a few exquisite airs on a miniature piano, likewise excited much admiration. This figure bore such an absurd, unintentional resemblance to a gentleman who has since distinguished himself as a pianist, that I presented the trifle to a lady admirer of Gottschalk.
I also became a taxidermist, and stuffed a pet bird with springs and diminutive flutes, causing it to hop and carol, in its cage, with great glee. But my masterpiece was a nimble white mouse, with pink eyes, that could scamper up the walls, and masticate bits of cheese in an extraordinary style. My chambermaid shrieked, and jumped up on a chair, whenever I let the little fellow loose in her presence. One day, unhappily, the mouse, while nosing around aft
er its favorite ailment, got snapped in a rat-trap that yawned in the closet, and I was never able to readjust the machinery.
Engaged in these useful inventions—useful, because no exercise of the human mind is ever in vain—my existence for two or three years was so placid and uneventful, I began to hope that the shadows which had followed on my path from childhood, making me unlike other men, had returned to that unknown world where they properly belong; but the Fates were only taking breath to work out more surely the problem of my destiny. I must keep nothing back. I must extenuate nothing.
I am about to lift the veil of mystery which, for nearly seven years, has shrouded the story of Mary Ware; and though I lay bare my own weakness, or folly, or what you will, I do not shrink from the unveiling.
No hand but mine can now perform the task. There was, indeed, a man who might have done this better than I. But he went his way in silence. I like a man who can hold his tongue.
On the corner of Clarke and Crandall streets, in New York, stands a dingy brown frame-house. It is a very old house, as its obsolete style of structure would tell you. It has a morose, unhappy look, though once it must have been a blithe mansion. I think that houses, like human beings, ultimately become dejected or cheerful, according to their experience. The very air of some front-doors tells their history.
This house, I repeat, has a morose, unhappy look, at present, and is tenanted by an incalculable number of Irish families, while a picturesque junk-shop is in full blast in the basement; but at the time of which I write, it was a second-rate boarding-place, of the more respectable sort, and rather largely patronized by poor, but honest, literary men, tragic-actors, members of the chorus, and such like gilt people.
My apartments on Crandall Street were opposite this building, to which my attention was directed soon after taking possession of the rooms, by the discovery of the following facts:
First, that a charming lady lodged on the second-floor front, and sang like a canary every morning.
Death Locked In Page 14
