He growled under his breath and said, “I want to call my lawyer.”
Jedson looked amused. “You don’t understand the situation,” he told him. “You’re not under arrest, and we don’t give a damn about your legal rights. We might just conjure up a hole and drop you in it, then let it relax.” The guy paled a little under his swarthy skin. “Oh yes,” Jedson went on, “we are quite capable of doing that—or worse. You see, we don’t like you.
“Of course,” he added meditatively, “we might just turn you over to the police. I get a soft streak now and then.” The chap looked sour. “You don’t like that either? Your fingerprints, maybe?” Jedson jumped to his feet and in two quick strides was standing over him, just outside the circle. “All right then,” he rapped, “answer up and make ’em good! Why were you taking photographs?”
The chap muttered something, his eyes lowered. Jedson brushed it aside. “Don’t give me that stuff—we aren’t children! Who told you to do it?”
He looked utterly panic-stricken at that and shut up completely.
“Very well,” said Jedson and turned to me. “Have you some wax, or modeling clay, or anything of the sort?”
“How would putty do?” I suggested.
“Just the thing.”
I slid out to the shed where we stow glaziers’ supplies and came back with a five-pound can. Jedson pried it open and dug out a good big handful, then sat at my desk and worked the linseed oil into it until it was soft and workable. Our prisoner watched him with silent apprehension.
“There! That’s about right,” Jedson announced at and slapped the soft lump down on my blotter pad. He commenced to fashion it with his fingers, and it took shape slowly as a little doll about ten inches high. It did not look like much of anything or anybody. Jedson is no artist—but Jedson kept glancing from the figurine to the man in the circle and back again, like a sculptor making a clay sketch directly from a model. You could see the chap’s nervous terror increase by the minute.
“Now!” said Jedson, looking once more from the putty figure to his model. “It’s just as ugly as you are. Why did you take that picture?”
He did not answer, but slunk farther back in the circle, his face nastier than ever.
“Talk!” snorted Jedson, and twisted a foot of the doll between a thumb and forefinger. The corresponding foot of our prisoner jerked out from under him and twisted violently. He fell heavily to the floor with a yelp of pain.
“You were going to cast a spell on this place, weren’t you?”
He made his first coherent answer. “No, no, mister! Not me!”
“Not you? I see. You were just the errand boy. Who was to do the magic?”
“I don’t know—Ow! Oh, God!” He grabbed at his left calf and nursed it. Jedson had jabbed a pen point into the leg of the dolly. “I really don’t know. Please, please!”
“Maybe you don’t,” Jedson grudged, “but at least you know who gives you your orders, and who some of the other members of your gang are. Start talking.”
He rocked back and forth and covered his face with his hands. “I don’t dare, mister,” he groaned.
“Please don’t try to make me—” Jedson jabbed the doll with the pen again; he jumped and flinched, but this time he bore it silently with a look of gray determination.
“O.K.,” said Jedson, “if you insist—”
He took another drag from his cigarette, then brought the lighted end slowly toward the face of the doll. The man in the circle tried to shrink away from it, his hands up to protect his face, but his efforts were futile. I could actually see the skin turn red and angry and the blisters blossom under his hide. It made me sick to watch it, and, while I didn’t feel any real sympathy for the rat, I turned to Jedson and was about to ask him to stop when he took the cigarette away from the doll’s face.
“Ready to talk?” he asked. The man nodded feebly, tears pouring down his scorched cheeks. He seemed about to collapse. “Here—don’t faint,” Jedson added, and slapped the face of the doll with a fingertip. I could hear the smack land, and the chap’s head rocked to the blow, but he seemed to take a brace from it.
“All right, Archie, you take it down.” He turned back. “And you, my friend, talk—and talk lots. Tell us everything you know. If you find your memory failing you, stop to think how you would like my cigarette poked into dolly’s eyes!”
And he did talk—babbled, in fact. His spirit seemed to be completely broken, and he even seemed anxious to talk, stopping only occasionally to sniffle, or wipe at his eyes. Jedson questioned him to bring out points that were not clear.
There were five others in the gang that he knew about, and the setup was roughly as we had guessed. It was their object to levy tribute on everyone connected with magic in this end of town, magicians and their customers alike. No, they did not have any real protection to offer except from their own mischief. Who was his boss? He told us. Was his boss the top man in the racket? No, but he did not know who the top man was. He was quite sure that his boss worked for someone else, but he did not know who. Even if we burned him again he could not tell us. But it was a big organization—he was sure of that. He himself had been brought from a city in the East to help organize here.
Was he a magician? So help him, no! Was his section boss one? No—he was sure; all that sort of thing was handled from higher up. That was all he knew, and could he go now? Jedson pressed him to remember other things; he added a number of details, most of them insignificant, but I took them all down. The last thing he said was that he thought both of us had been marked down for special attention because we had been successful in overcoming our first “lesson.”
Finally, Jedson let up on him. “I’m going to let you go now,” he told him. “You’d better get out of town. Don’t let me see you hanging around again. But don’t go too far, I may want you again. See this?” He held up the doll and squeezed it gently around the middle. The poor devil immediately commenced to gasp for breath as if he were being compressed in a strait jacket. “Don’t forget that I’ve got you anytime I want you.” He let up on the pressure, and his victim panted his relief. “I’m going to put your alter ego—doll to you!—where it will be safe, behind cold iron. When I want you, you’ll feel a pain like that”—he nipped the doll’s left shoulder with his fingernails; the man yelped—“then you telephone me, no matter where you are.”
Jedson pulled a penknife from his vest pocket and cut the circle three times, then joined the cuts. “Now get out!”
I thought he would bolt as soon as he was released, but he did not. He stepped hesitantly over the pencil mark, stood still for a moment, and shivered. Then he stumbled toward the door. He turned just before he went through it and looked back at us, his eyes wide with fear. There was a look of appeal in them, too, and he seemed about to speak. Evidently he thought better of it, for he turned and went on out.
When he was gone I looked back at Jedson. He had picked up my notes and was glancing through them. “I don’t know,” he mused, “whether it would be better to turn his stuff at once over to the Better Business Bureau and let them handle it, or whether to have a go at it ourselves. It’s a temptation.”
I was not interested just then. “Joe,” I said, “I wish you hadn’t burned him!”
“Eh? How’s that?” He seemed surprised and stopped scratching his chin. “I didn’t burn him.”
“Don’t quibble,” I said, somewhat provoked. “You burned him through the doll, I mean with magic.”
“But I didn’t, Archie. Really I didn’t. He did that to himself—and it wasn’t magic. I didn’t do a thing!”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“Sympathetic magic isn’t really magic at all, Archie. It’s just an application of neuropsychology and colloidal chemistry. He did all that to himself, because he believed in it. I simply correctly judged his mentality.”
The discussion was cut short; we heard an agony-loaded scream from somewhere outside the building. It brok
e off sharply, right at the top. “What was that?” I said, and gulped.
“I don’t know,” Jedson answered, and stepped to the door. He looked up and down before continuing. “It must be some distance away. I didn’t see anything.” He came back into the room. “As I was saying, it would be a lot of fun to—”
This time it was a police siren. We heard it from far away, but it came rapidly nearer, turned a corner, and yowled down our street. We looked at each other. “Maybe we’d better go see,” we both said, right together, then laughed nervously.
It was our gangster acquaintance. We found him half a block down the street, in the middle of a little group of curious passers-by who were being crowded back by cops from the squad car at the curb.
He was quite dead.
He lay on his back, but there was no repose in the position. He had been raked from forehead to waist, laid open to the bone in three roughly parallel scratches, as if slashed by the talons of a hawk or an eagle. But the bird that made those wounds must have been the size of a five-ton truck.
There was nothing to tell from his expression. His face and throat were covered by, and his mouth choked with, a yellowish substance shot with purple. It was about the consistency of thin cottage cheese, but it had the most sickening smell I have ever run up against.
I turned to Jedson, who was not looking any too happy himself, and said, “Let’s get back to the office.”
We did.
We decided at last to do a little investigating on our own before taking up what we had learned with the Better Business Bureau or with the police. It was just as well that we did; none of the gang whose names we had obtained was any longer to be found in the haunts which we had listed. There was plenty of evidence that such persons had existed and that they had lived at the addresses which Jedson had sweated out of their pal. But all of them, without exception, had done a bunk for parts unknown the same afternoon that their accomplice had been killed.
We did not go to the police, for we had no wish to be associated with an especially unsavory sudden death. Instead, Jedson made a cautious verbal report to a friend of his at the Better Business Bureau, who passed it on secondhand to the head of the racket squad and elsewhere, as his judgment indicated.
I did not have any more trouble with my business for some time thereafter, and I was working very hard, trying to show a profit for the quarter in spite of setbacks. I had put the whole matter fairly well out of my mind, except that I dropped over to call on Mrs. Jennings occasionally and that I had used her young friend Jack Bodie once or twice in my business, when I needed commercial magic. He was a good workman—no monkey business and value received.
I was beginning to think I had the world on a leash when I ran into another series of accidents. This time they did not threaten my business; they threatened me—and I’m just as fond of my neck as the next man.
In the house where I live the water heater is installed in the kitchen. It is a storage type, with a pilot light and a thermostatically controlled main flame. Right alongside it is a range with a pilot light.
I woke up in the middle of the night and decided that I wanted a drink of water. When I stepped into the kitchen—don’t ask me why I did not look for a drink in the bathroom, because I don’t know—I was almost gagged by the smell of gas. I ran over and threw the window wide open, then ducked back out the door and ran into the living room, where I opened a big window to create a cross draft.
At that point there was a dull whoosh and a boom, and I found myself sitting on the living-room rug.
I was not hurt, and there was no damage in the kitchen except for a few broken dishes. Opening the windows had released the explosion, cushioned the effect. Natural gas is not an explosive unless it is confined. What had happened was clear enough when I looked over the scene. The pilot light on the heater had gone out; when the water in the tank cooled, the thermostat turned on the main gas jet, which continued immediately to pour gas into the room. When an explosive mixture was reached, the pilot light of the stove was waiting, ready to set it off.
Apparently I wandered in at the zero hour. I fussed at my landlord about it, and finally we made a dicker whereby he installed one of the electrical water heaters which I supplied at cost and for which I donated the labor.
No magic about the whole incident, eh? That is what I thought. Now I am not so sure.
The next thing that threw a scare into me occurred the same week with no apparent connection. I keep dry mix—sand, rock, gravel—in the usual big bins set up high on concrete stanchions so that the trucks can drive under the hoppers for loading. One evening after closing time I was walking past the bins when I noticed that someone had left a scoop shovel in the driveway pit under the hoppers.
I have had trouble with my men leaving tools out at night; I decided to put this one in my car and confront someone with it in the morning. I was about to jump down into the pit when I heard my name called.
“Archibald!” it said—and it sounded remarkably like Mrs. Jennings’ voice. Naturally I looked around. There was no one there. I turned back to the pit in time to hear a cracking sound and to see that scoop covered with twenty tons of medium gravel.
A man can live through being buried alive, but not when he has to wait overnight for someone to miss him and dig him out. A crystallized steel forging was the prima-facie cause of the mishap. I suppose that will do.
There was never anything to point to but natural causes, yet for about two weeks I stepped on banana peels both figuratively and literally. I saved my skin with a spot of fast footwork at least a dozen times. I finally broke down and told Mrs. Jennings about it.
“Don’t worry too much about it, Archie,” she reassured me. “It is not too easy to kill a man with magic unless he himself is involved with magic and sensitive to it.”
“Might as well kill a man as scare him to death!” I protested.
She smiled that incredible smile of hers and said, “I don’t think you have been really frightened, lad. At least you have not shown it.”
I caught an implication in that remark and taxed her with it. “You’ve been watching me and pulling me out of jams, haven’t you?”
She smiled more broadly and replied, “That’s my business, Archie. It is not well for the young to depend on the old for help. Now get along with you. I want to give this matter more thought.”
A couple of days later a note came in the mail addressed to me in a spidery, Spencerian script. The penmanship had the dignified flavor of the last century, and was the least bit shaky, as if the writer were unwell or very elderly. I had never seen the hand before, but guessed who it was before I opened it. It read:
My dear Archibald:
This is to introduce my esteemed friend, Dr. Royce Worthington. You will find him staying at the Belmont Hotel; he is expecting to hear from you. Dr. Worthington is exceptionally well-qualified to deal with the matters that have been troubling you these few weeks past. You may repose every confidence in his judgment, especially where unusual measures are required.
Please to include your friend, Mr. Jedson, in this introduction, if you wish.
I am, sir,
Very sincerely yours,
Amanda Todd Jennings
I rang up Joe Jedson and read the letter to him. He said that he would be over at once, and for me to telephone Worthington.
“Is Dr. Worthington there?” I asked as soon as the room clerk had put me through.
“Speaking,” answered a cultured British voice with a hint of Oxford in it.
“This is Archibald Fraser, Doctor. Mrs. Jennings has written to me, suggesting that I look you up.”
“Oh yes!” he replied, his voice warming considerably. “I shall be delighted. When will be a convenient time?”
“If you are free, I could come right over.”
“Let me see—” He paused about long enough to consult a watch. “I have occasion to go to your side of the city. Might I stop by your office in thirty minutes
, or a little later?”
“That will be fine, Doctor, if it does not discommode you—”
“Not at all. I will be there.”
Jedson arrived a little later and asked me at once about Dr. Worthington. “I haven’t seen him yet,” I said, “but he sounds like something pretty swank in the way of an English-university don. He’ll be here shortly.”
My office girl brought in his card a half-hour later. I got up to greet him and saw a tall, heavy-set man with a face of great dignity and evident intelligence. He was dressed in rather conservative, expensively tailored clothes and carried gloves, stick, and a large brief case. But he was black as draftsman’s ink!
I tried not to show surprise. I hope I did not, for I have an utter horror of showing that kind of rudeness. There was no reason why the man should not be a Negro. I simply had not been expecting it.
Jedson helped me out. I don’t believe he would show surprise if a fried egg winked at him. He took over the conversation for the first couple of minutes after I introduced him; we all found chairs, settled down, and spent a few minutes in the polite, meaningless exchanges that people make when they are sizing up strangers.
Worthington opened the matter. “Mrs. Jennings gave me to believe,” he observed, “that there was some fashion in which I might possibly be of assistance to one, or both, of you—”
I told him that there certainly was, and sketched out the background for him from the time the racketeer contact man first showed up at my shop. He asked a few questions, and Jedson helped me out with some details. I got the impression that Mrs. Jennings had already told him most of it, and that he was simply checking.
“Very well,” he said at last, his voice a deep, mellow rumble that seemed to echo in his big chest before it reached the air, “I am reasonably sure that we will find a way to cope with your problems, but first I must make a few examinations before we can complete the diagnosis.” He leaned over and commenced to unstrap his briefcase.
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