Beneath Strange Stars: A Collection of Tales

by Ralph E. Vaughan

  “You have no proof of any of this!” Grosvernor shouted.

  “The bruise across Vale’s throat is very thin, no wider than the width of your cane,” Reyes said. “You put your cane across his throat and bore down with all your weight.”

  “Clyde,” Stillwell breathed. “Why?”

  “To protect you!” Grosvernor cried. “With the Ponape dagger proven not a forgery, as you have frequently and loudly proclaimed, you would have been ruined. I did it for you!”

  Stillwell pushed Grosvernor away. “Monster!”

  “Professor Grosvernor, you are under arrest for the murder of Thomas Elliott Vale,” Reyes said, taking the man’s arm.

  Grosvernor struck out with his cane. Reyes staggered. Grosvernor moved surprisingly fast. Reynard tripped over a chair shoved into his path. Reyes gripped the revolver in his shoulder holster, then released it and watched Grosvernor run out the hotel.

  “You let him get away, Inspector!” Reynard accused.

  “The airfield is denied him,” Reyes replied. “Where can he go? This is Easter Island.”

  Professor Clyde Grosvernor was discovered the next morning. He had lost his footing in the dark and plunged a hundred meters to his death at the base of Birdman Cliff.

  The island’s magistrate approved Inspector Reyes’ request and dismissed charges against Margaret (or Marguerite) Atwater for theft and corpse mutilation, remanding her into Professor Stillwell’s custody on the proviso she receive psychiatric therapy.

  At the airport, Reyes handed Stillwell a padded manila envelope containing the Ponape dagger and the ancient parchment Vale had brought to the island.

  “With Professor Grosvernor dead, the knife no longer has any evidentiary value,” Reyes explained. “If you do not want the parchment, I will give it to the Cultural Museum in Santiago.”

  “I still don’t believe in its validity, but I promise to study it,” Stillwell said. “If I had not been so obstinate, Vale might be alive today. If this comes to anything I’ll ensure he gets due credit.”

  Reyes watched as the airplane lifted from the tarmac and vanished eastward, toward Chile and the illusion of civilization’s veneer. He cast his gaze over the island, past the shops and homes and hotels to the island’s rising interior, where, perhaps, the lords of a vanished land once trod. For a moment, he seemed to hear a low, undulating noise, like the horn of a distant hunter, but the sound soon surrendered to the whispering wind, as if it never were.

  Note to the Reader

  Thank you for purchasing this copy of Upon Unknown Seas, Beneath Strange Stars. I hope you enjoyed it. Please consider leaving a review on Amazon, Good Reads and other sites where you may have an account. Also, if you want to be updated about future publications please click ‘like’ on my Facebook pages.

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  Thanks to my wife, Patricia, who has been married to me almost as long as I have been writing, for her assistance in making this book possible. She tirelessly retyped stories from magazines and from carbon copies, more than 100,000 words of print. People who know me claim she is a saint, and her contribution to this collection will only solidify that estimation in their minds. Well, it is true that she has the patience of a saint…though we’ll see what happens when I tell her this was just the first volume.