No Coffin for the Corpse

by Clayton Rawson

  “The switch-box lock was all right?” Galt asked.

  “Wolff nodded, then pointed to a round hole in the window frame. “An ultraviolet light in there sends a beam of black light diagonally across the window opening. It is reflected by a small countersunk mirror on the opposite side and recrosses to center on a photoelectric cell.” He indicated another, lower hole in the frame near the sill. “Even an intruder who knew where the beam was wouldn’t be able to edge in past it. There’s not enough free space. And the moment his body interrupts the beam—”

  He put out his hand and brought it down within the window opening like a conjurer commanding a miracle. The loud strident clamor of an alarm bell came instantly. Then, as a door slammed and footsteps raced toward us from the rear of the hall outside, Dunning threw a switch and the ringing stopped. We heard his voice reassuring Phillips.

  Wolff called, “Dunning, Phillips. Both of you come in here.”

  Merlini said, “I still don’t see that the alarm proves those guns are still in the house. It may keep outsiders out, but it won’t keep insiders in. Since the front door has a separate, easily accessible switch of its own, anyone could have taken the guns out and left the door ajar so as to get back.”

  Wolff shook his head. “After what happened here this morning, I told Phillips to keep the door locked.” He turned to the butler who waited in the doorway. “Have you let anyone in or out of this house since nine o’clock?”

  Phillips indicated Merlini and myself. “These two gentlemen came in. That’s all.”

  “You’re quite sure? What about Leonard?”

  “Not since nine o’clock. He came in just before dinner when you sent for him, but went out again immediately. There hasn’t been anyone else.”

  “All right. Until further notice, no one goes in or out under any circumstances until you ask me. There are two guns missing from this room. If no one has left in the last hour the guns are still in the house somewhere. The cook is new today. I want you to search her room. At once.”

  Phillips blinked. “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s all. Report to me.”

  The butler turned and went out.

  Wolff waited a moment, then said, “And Dunning, while he’s doing that, you search his room!”

  Dunning’s blink was even more pronounced, but he too merely nodded and went quickly out. If Wolff had told him to go jump in the lake I believe he would have done it just as promptly.

  Francis Galt seemed amused. There was a twinkle in his eyes behind the thick-lensed glasses. “This looks like a game of musical chairs. Who searches Dunning’s room?”

  Wolff had that answer ready. “You do. And don’t argue. Get going. You’ll have to get clear before he comes back.”

  “But—” Galt started to protest. “I’m no—”

  Wolff glared at him. “I said don’t argue.”

  I thought for a moment that Galt was going to refuse flatly, but then he shrugged, turned, and started out. He stopped for a moment in the doorway.

  “My bag of photographic equipment is here in the hall by the camera,” he said. “It’s unlocked and open for inspection.”

  Wolff didn’t beat around the bush. I doubt if he knew how. “Thanks,” he said flatly. “I’ll look at it.”

  Galt was not amused now. He said stiffly, “I’d prefer that you did. I’d rather not have this elimination process leave me out on a limb. But don’t move that camera. It’s all set and carefully focused on the stairs.”

  “In hopes,” Merlini put in, trying to case the tension, “that Old Nick will soon be here?”

  Galt nodded. “Yes. But you may not joke about it afterward. If you think you can prove that this ghost is made of cheesecloth, I warn you, you’ve got a job on your hands.”

  “Galt,” Wolff commanded. “Get on with it and stop—”

  Galt turned on his heel and vanished into the hall.

  Wolff closed and locked the window, then crossed to the hall door and took a key ring from his pocket.

  “I’m locking this room up,” he said.

  As we filed out past him, Merlini asked, “Does Dunning have a key?”

  Wolff nodded. “Yes. But I’ll collect it.”

  “Any others?”

  “No.” Wolff quickly locked the door and crossed to where the suitcase Galt had mentioned lay on the floor beside the camera tripod. He knelt, pulled it open, and began examining its contents.

  I took a look at the camera. It was a Speed Graphic with synchronized flash. It was tilted back, set at f.4.5 and focused at twenty feet. Above the stair’s top step the second-floor hallway was dark.

  I saw Merlini point at a row of light switches on the wall beside the gun-room door. “Will one of these give us some light in the hall up there?”

  Kay nodded. “The one on the right. But Galt thinks that if it’s left dark, there’s a better chance—”

  Merlini flipped the switch. Nothing happened. The darkness beyond the stairs remained as black as ever.

  “Did he unscrew the bulb just to make sure?” Merlini asked.

  Wolff looked up, surprised. “No. On the contrary, he put in a photoflood bulb so that he’d have plenty of light when we wanted it. It worked all right before. Someone—” Wolff started to get to his feet nervously. “Someone, Merlini finished, doesn’t like light. It looks promising. It may mean that the ghost’s appearance is guaranteed.” He turned to me. “Ross, check that camera. See if it’s ready for business. It would be too bad if, when our astral visitor appears—”

  I saw the package of photographic film drop from Dudley Wolff’s fingers toward the floor, heard the quick intake of his breath, and, for a brief split second, glimpsed the terror that was on his face. My gaze jerked upward.

  If speaking of the devil makes him appear, Merlini had done it. The ghost was there on the second floor beyond the balcony rail—a white blur of face and two hands floating in the dark. It was the same face Kathryn had described, thin, sharp-featured, its full lips surrounded by the thin mustache and close-cropped beard. Black eyes, like the cutout holes in a mask, stared down, fixed on Wolff. And, slowly, one hand moved, its forefinger pointing.

  For a brief moment we stared soundlessly and without motion. Then, as though some invisible dam had burst, both sound and motion spilled over, rushing down upon us.

  Merlini’s voice struck out at me, a thin knife-edged whisper.

  “Camera, Ross! Quick!”

  I brought my eyes down long enough to locate the cable release. I grabbed for it, pressed it, and then jumped. The sharp brilliant flare of the flash bulb was accompanied by a completely unexpected reverberating roar!

  Then I saw the gun in Wolff’s hand kick back and saw him steady it to fire again. But, in the same instant, his target, the phantom whatever-it-was, moved, swiftly sideways to the right and vanished.

  I suddenly found myself going up the stairs three steps at a time. Mr. Ghost didn’t appear to be such a healthy specimen, and my ghost-laying strategy, what I had of one, was based on the principle of the direct frontal attack.

  But, when I reached the top, my next move wasn’t so obvious. The hallway to the right down which the ghost had gone was as dark as the Black Hole of Calcutta. I hesitated, remembering those missing guns.

  I looked back over my shoulder and saw Merlini straighten up from above Galt’s suitcase, a large electric torch in his hand. Then, as he started up the stairs toward me, from somewhere beyond the darkness that filled the second-floor corridor my ears caught the faint sound of a door closing.

  A second later all hell broke loose.

  It sounded as though a major power had declared war. The first shot was followed by a woman’s high shrill scream. A second report cut across that, and then after a short interval three more followed in rapid smashing succession.

  I ducked instinctively, not at all sure who was being fired at and feeling very much like a clay pigeon. Merlini, at my side now, leveled his light. There was a small cl
ick as he pushed the button.

  But no answering beam of light shot forth. The flash was dead.

  “Somebody,” I heard him growl, “has thought of every th—”

  Somewhere in the darkness ahead a doorknob rattled, a door slammed, and a faint ghostly glimmer of white moved. The crash of the gun came once again, louder this time, streaking the dark with flame.

  And then at last we got light. Behind us, from the opposite end of the corridor, footsteps pounded up the back stairs and then rushed toward us behind the round bobbing eye of a pocket flash.

  Galt’s voice cried, “What the hell—”

  But we had no attention for him. Merlini and I were racing in the direction the ghost had gone toward the white night-robed figure that faced an open bedroom door at the hall’s end.

  It was Mrs. Wolff, and the gun in her hand pointed in at the open door and spurted noise and name once again as we plunged toward her.

  I grabbed her arm, twisted the gun from her grasp, and faced the doorway.

  Galt’s flash sent a hesitant beam of light in through the dark.

  Chapter Nine:

  Portrait of a Phantom

  THE WHITE CONE OF LIGHT moved swiftly, its circle slanting across the walls. Distorted shadows sprang up in its path behind bed, dressing-table, and chairs, shifted crazily and were swallowed again by the larger darkness that filled the room.

  But we saw no trace of what we hunted.

  Then my light moved across the two doors in the wall at my left. I moved in through the thick, acrid smell of cordite, my hand tense on the butt of my gun. I pulled the first door open and found a closetful of dresses on hangers. Behind me someone clicked the wall switch and the room filled with a soft-rose glow from shaded lamps. I stepped into the closet and pushed the dresses aside. There was no one there.

  Merlini reached the second door, turned the knob and pulled. The door was locked and the key was in the keyhole on this side. I turned to face the windows. There were two, both closed. One was directly opposite me beyond the bed, the other in the side wall at my left. Three of the latter’s leaded panes had been pierced by neat round holes that were centered in spidery webs of radiating cracks. Two more bullets had bored their way into the cream-colored plaster of the wall a yard or so to the left, and a sixth had smashed through a framed Laurencin water color. Fragments of glass and plaster littered the floor beneath.

  The bed was a low modern affair set so close to the floor that nothing more than a ghost, and a thin one at that, could possibly have crawled beneath. But I stepped forward, dropped to my hands and knees and looked just the same. I found nothing. There was no other possible hiding place within the room.

  “Dead-end street,” I announced, glancing up at Merlini. “Where do we go from here?”

  He looked at Galt. “The alarm guards those windows too?”

  Galt nodded. “Yes.”

  Merlini indicated the locked door. “And this goes where?”

  “Connecting bath through into Wolffs’ room and that opens out into the hall again. All the rooms this side of the main stairs do that. There’s no other exit. You won’t find a damned thing. This is exactly what happened this morning.”

  “And we got here within seconds,” Merlini said, making it still worse. “There was no time for anyone to go through into the bathroom and lock the door after them from the wrong side with any key-and-string hocus-pocus. But we’ll play safe and look just the same.” He tossed the useless flash he carried onto the bed, took Galt’s, and went back out into the hall. The sound of voices and running feet came from the stairway.

  Merlini turned his light in that direction. “Phillips,” he ordered, “stay there and watch those stairs. Dunning, do something about some light. Wolff—”

  But I didn’t hear the rest. I was staring at the dark square of the window that held the bullet holes. In the lowest pane just above the sill a dim shape had materialized in the darkness outside—the white blur of a man’s face.

  I had seen it and stopped halfway in the act of rising to my feet. Now my right arm moved upward under some automatic compulsion of its own, the gun it held aiming at the window. My finger began to squeeze the trigger.

  The face jerked swiftly down out of sight.

  “Got him!” I shouted. “In here. Hurry!”

  I threw myself forward across the room.

  The window was unlocked. I pulled it open and leaned forward across the sill, gun ready.

  Then everything happened at once. The alarm bell burst into life, and a hand shot up, clamped around my wrist and twisted it with a sudden jerk that started me out in a nose dive over the edge.

  I dropped quickly, doubling hingelike and grabbing frantically for a hold with my left hand. The impact of the window ledge against my middle left me gasping. I tried to dig holes in the carpet with my toes.

  The man who held my wrist was standing on the upper latticework of a rose trellis that ascended the side of the house almost to the window.

  His voice, close beside my ear, ordered, “Drop that gun!”

  Pain stabbed up along my arm as he twisted it again violently. The gun fell from my fingers and I started slipping forward again. The marines arrived in the nick of time. Someone threw himself against my legs from behind and hung on grimly. A flashlight beam shot down into my opponent’s face.

  It was the chauffeur, Leonard.

  “Somebody haul him up,” he growled, “before this damned trellis pulls loose and we both—” Then he saw Merlini. “Say, who the hell—”

  Galt’s voice cut in. “Leonard! What are you doing outside this window?”

  “I was on guard. Wolff’s orders. And when this guy starts shooting the joint up—”

  “Just where were you,” Merlini demanded, “when you first heard the shots?”

  “Right here at the corner of the house. I—”

  “Hey, for the luvva Mike,” I protested weakly. “Can’t we hold the inquisition somewhere else? I’m coming apart in the middle.”

  Leonard recognized my voice. “Oh,” he growled, “so you’re the guy who does the ghost imitations—the guy who conked me this morning!”

  He sounded as if he wanted to even the score then and there. But Merlini explained quickly. “He didn’t do the shooting you heard. Unhand him so we can haul him up. And you come along, too.”

  Merlini and Galt pulled me up. Leonard, still eyeing me doubtfully, threw a leg over the sill and came in.

  Merlini said, “Galt, go shut off that bell and reset the alarm. Quickly!” He turned to the chauffeur. “Let’s have it. What happened out there?”

  Leonard scowled, looking around at the damage the bullets had caused. An electric torch projected from the side pocket of his uniform coat and there was a long strip of adhesive on his head just behind his right ear. He looked doubtfully at Merlini.

  “And just who are you?”

  Wolff’s voice came from the hall. “It’s all right, Leonard. Answer him. What happened outside?”

  “Nothing, sir. I was just coming around the corner of the house when somebody started to lay down a barrage. I jumped for the trellis and started up. Then the shots began smacking into the window just above my head and I stood pat. After the shooting stopped, a light came on in here and I eased up for a look. I see this guy crouching on the floor by the bed with a gun in his hand. And, when he starts to aim at me, I—”

  Merlini crossed to the other window, examined its latch and said, “Locked. And if Leonard insists that no one could have shinnied down that trellis past him—”

  “They certainly couldn’t.” Leonard scowled. “Besides, with that burglar alarm working, how could anyone—”

  “It doesn’t look very practical, does it?” Merlini said somewhat glumly. “One door, locked on the inside. Burglar alarm on the windows and a witness just outside the single unlocked one. It’s not bad.”

  “And,” I growled, massaging my sore arm, “it’s not good either.”

 
Dudley Wolff, in the doorway, turned nervously as light flooded the dark hallway behind him at last. Downstairs Galt turned off the alarm bell.

  I followed Merlini to the door and saw Dunning climb down from the chair on which he had been standing. In the ceiling socket above, a photoflood bulb shone brightly.

  “Loose in the socket?” Merlini asked.

  Dunning nodded.

  Standing in the doorway, I surveyed the hall. The door to Wolff’s room was directly opposite. There was another in the same wall a few feet to the left. Mrs. Wolff stood backed against it rigidly, Kathryn at her side. There was a third door beyond and across from this, near the head of the stairs where Phillips stood, one hand on the balcony rail. Galt joined him in a moment from below.

  Anne stared at her husband as he crossed to her and took her arm.

  “What was it? What did you see?” Wolff’s voice didn’t roar now. It was thin and shaky. It almost sounded as though he didn’t really want the answer to the question he asked.

  Anne’s voice was a flat dull monotone, little more than a whisper. “I had just gone to bed when I heard the shot outside. I reached for the reading lamp above the bed, and then, before I could find it, I heard something in the hall outside my door. And the doorknob turned.” Her voice faltered. She stared at the door. “I heard the door open—”

  “Yes?” Wolff prompted. His fingers were tight on her arm.

  “Then the footsteps ran in through the dark, and—and I saw—”

  Wolff cut in. “What we saw this morning on the stairs?”

  She nodded. “Yes. It moved toward the window. I can’t remember picking up the gun from the bedside table, but I suddenly had it in my hand. I fired. I—I think I cried out. I fired again and again. The figure moved as though the shots made no difference. It reached the window. I fired again, and then—then I was running for the hall. Dudley, I’m afraid. I don’t want to stay in this house any longer. What I saw is—”

  Wolff shook her arm, tightening his grasp. “That’s enough, Anne,” he said quickly.

  And then, as he spoke, the rigid tension of her body relaxed. She swayed unsteadily; her eyes closed. Wolff put his arm around her.