Behind him, one of the men in the grave gave an exclamation and stooped down. When he stood again, he was tugging at a gray-flannel blanket that was streaked with dirt. He looked up into our staring faces.
“D.t.’s?” he said. “Maybe, but there’s no body here now!”
Chapter Fourteen:
Dormice and Fakirs
“MAGICIANS!” FLINT EXPLODED disgustedly. “Ghosts! And now zombies! Oh hell!”
I think we all felt the same way, all, that is, except Doctor Haggard. His professional aplomb had taken a severe beating in the last hour or so, but this development, oddly, seemed to restore some of it.
“That,” he said, half to himself, “lets me out.”
Flint heard him. “Oh yeah? And how do you figure that?”
The doctor looked as if he wished he hadn’t spoken. “Well, you can hardly—well, hold me as a material witness unless you have a body, can you?”
“If that,” Flint threatened, “is the reason someone moved the body, he’s got another think coming. It just happens, in spite of the rental-library fiction you read, that a corpus delicti is not a body. All I have to do is prove the fact of death. I don’t need a body, not when I’ve got the signed statements of Douglass, Mrs. Wolff, and an M.D. who happens to be an authority on death and its causes!”
Merlini had his half dollar out again. It flickered back and forth in his fingers wavering between visibility and nothingness. His eye held an enthusiastic gleam and his voice, for the first time in hours, was almost cheerful.
“Lieutenant,” he said, “Scotty’s story is the first lone ray of light to come poking through the thick damp fog of medieval darkness that covers this whole case. Don’t you see that it offers us the first halfway decent explanation of our ghost? We can skip all those dead-end, false-whisker speculations as to who could be impersonating the dead man. Scotty’s story may very well mean that the ghost is the dead man himself! No wonder Dudley Wolff had the wind up! Could anyone want a more authentic haunt?”
“I don’t want any kind,” Flint said bleakly. He eyed the magician like a psychiatrist discovering some new species of lunatic. “Doctor Haggard has certified the man was dead. He’s got no reason to lie about that. I had to drag it out of him.”
“No,” Merlini said. “Perhaps not. But the fingerprints on the files. They match—”
Flint shook his head. “So what? It hasn’t been proved they were made by the man Haggard saw dead and helped bury. They could have been made any time this last week. Are you forgetting that Douglass also said he didn’t come back and dig into this grave until an hour after the burial? He’s admitted he likes his liquor. Just because he thinks that maybe he saw the body move—”
“But I did!” Scotty insisted. “It sat up, and clawed the blanket away from its face! I dinna wait to see wha’ happened then!”
“I wouldn’t let the hour interment bother you too much, Lieutenant,” Merlini said. “Or Doctor Haggard’s diagnosis of death either. Much stranger things have happened. Take the intriguing case of the Thieving Sexton and the Corpse of the Countess of Edgcumbe. She was certified dead, and entombed in the family vault. A sexton who was no better than he should be, if that, returned later and attempted to steal a valuable ring from her ladyship’s finger. As he tried to remove it, the corpse suddenly sat bolt upright in the coffin. The thief, as Scotty here did, as anyone might do, made tracks. Lady Edgcumbe then got out of her coffin and walked, clad in her shroud, to the house where she fainted in her husband’s arms.
“Or take General Robert E. Lee’s mother who was likewise once buried prematurely and saved from an Edgar Allan Poe fate in time’s nick when she recovered consciousness, knocked on her coffin lid, and attracted the attention of the men who were filling in the grave. There have been many similar cases, and I suspect that they may, in part at least, account for the vampire legend.”
“We’re going places fast,” Flint muttered. “Now it’s vampires! Are you trying to tell me that those people were pronounced dead by qualified physicians when they weren’t?”
“Yes,” Merlini nodded. “I was hinting at just that. Illness or hysteria sometimes induces a cataleptic coma in which the pulse and respiration are so feeble they escape detection. In one case the victim, still half-conscious but exhibiting cataleptic symptoms, heard himself pronounced dead and had the dubious privilege of listening to his own funeral service without being able to call out or make any movement. Luckily, he did succeed in doing so before the coffin lid was screwed down. There have been many other instances in which the ending was less happy. In this day and age, however, we needn’t fear burial alive. If the Grim Reaper doesn’t really get us, the embalming process will!”
“That’s ducky,” Flint growled. “And how the hell do you know about the ones who were buried alive if they didn’t live to report? Mind reading? Spirit messages? Or ghostly emanations from the Beyond?” He was being heavily sarcastic.
“Not emanations,” Merlini replied. “Exhumations. The bodies were found to have changed position in ways that indicated movement after burial. And post-mortems disclosed that death was due not to the certified cause, but to asphyxia.”
The lieutenant turned to Doctor Haggard. “Well, what about it? He’s saying that the medical profession doesn’t know for sure when a man’s dead.”
Haggard, who had been frowning intently at the empty grave, looked up, first at Merlini and then at Flint. Slowly he said, “I’m afraid he’s right about premature burial. He seems to have been reading Hartmann and Tebb.1 Another authority on the subject, LeGuern, collected evidence of over twenty-three hundred cases and came to the conclusion that as many as three in every thousand interments might—this was before embalming became general practice of course—be premature ones.
“Death can be a very difficult thing to determine. There is only one absolutely certain sign—decomposition. But unless the man I saw was a schizophrenic—cataleptic coma occurs commonly in that disease—or unless he was otherwise ill or suffering from acute hysteria, I don’t see—”
Haggard glanced again at the grave. “The empty grave proves nothing. I’m inclined to agree that Douglass’s taste for stimulants—”
Merlini interrupted. “You keep forgetting that there are other witnesses as well. You, yourself, identified the image in Galt’s photograph as being that of the dead man.” He looked at Flint. “And Mrs. Wolff did the same, didn’t she?”
Flint nodded. “Yeah, but—”
“And, if they are the same,” Merlini went on, “lots of witnesses beside Scotty here have seen the corpse in motion. Mrs. Wolff, Miss Wolff, Phillips, Dunning, Galt, Harte, myself—”
“Dammit,” Flint burst out, “even if I should admit catalepsy—” he used the word gingerly as if afraid it might bite—“and I’m not saying I do, you aren’t going to make me believe that anyone could stay in that hole in the ground, under four feet of sand and earth, for one solid hour unless—” Flint gave Merlini a sudden suspicious scowl—“unless he’s a magician!”
Merlini grinned. “I think you may have something there. Only, just because I’m so handy, don’t start barking up the wrong magician. The one that climbed up out of this grave was a conjurer of another color. Do you know anything about the magic of Egypt, Algiers, and India?”
Flint looked anything but interested. “No. I don’t. I’ve got along so far without it.”
“Then perhaps this is where you change cars. The prize item in the Eastern fakirs’ bag of tricks is voluntary burial alive for varying periods in an apparent state of suspended animation. I think I’ll go back to the house. It’s chilly out here.” He moved as if to start off.
Flint snapped, “You stay where you are!” He looked as if he felt the course of the investigation slipping out of control, and as if he didn’t at all like the direction in which it was going. I had qualms myself.
Merlini turned.
Flint went on, “You said tricks. The stunts they do are all m
onkey business with trap doors, secret exits, air tubes. That’s why they’re called fakirs. Garner, if I’m to believe anything I’ve been told, had an impromptu burial in a spot he couldn’t possibly have predicted. That grave doesn’t show the slightest sign of hocus-pocus. It’s four feet deep. There wasn’t any coffin. He was in it for an hour. No Egyptian, Algerian, or Hindu—”
“Now,” Merlini put in, “you’re trespassing on my department. The world’s all-time record for lying still is held by Marguerite Bozenval, ‘The Dormouse of Menelles.’ Her sad case would give any practical joker pause. She had an illegitimate child when she was twenty-one and a girl friend told her, as a joke, that the gendarmes were coming to arrest her. Hysterical, she became unconscious and stayed that way, fed through a tube, for twenty years. She regained consciousness in 1903 a few hours before she died.
“And the probable world’s champion emulator of Lazarus was the Fakeer of Lahore who, in 1837, at the court of Runjeet Singh, was triply encased in a linen bag, a padlocked box, and a stone vault that was sealed and guarded day and night by a squad of British soldiers supplied by the then Governor General of India, Sir Claude Wade. The Fakeer, still alive, though somewhat shriveled and stiff, came out of his trance little the worse for wear after six weeks!”
Flint was unconvinced.
“Believe-It-or-Not Ripley lives down the road a piece. Remind me to introduce you sometime. The two of you would get along swell. You can believe that was the longdistance trance and non-eating record if you want but it looks to me like the corporal of the guard collected some fix money. Besides, that guy wasn’t filed away underground. A padlocked box and a stone vault, probably with barred windows, wouldn’t be so airtight. Can’t you skip the Sunday-supplement yarns that have nothing to do with the case?”
“All right,” Merlini grinned. “I’ll stick to underground burials. Another Hindu is reported by Sir James Braid to have been buried five feet down, his grave guarded, and corn planted in the earth above it which sprouted and grew to a height of several inches before he was exhumed. There are other recorded cases of burials lasting from three to thirty days, the best authenticated of which is probably that reported from Tunis by Harry Price, secretary of the University of London Council for Psychic Research, who was present when an Algerian fakir was exhumed after a ten-day burial. He states that the grave had been guarded throughout, that he personally examined it and found no slightest evidence of trickery—and he’s an experienced investigator who knows all the tricks. The linen bag that shrouded the performer was almost entirely covered with a green mildew, the symptoms of a rigid trance were present—bloodless face, teeth set so tightly they had to be pried apart with a knife, body as cold as ice, no discernible heart action detectible by an attending physician.2
“Price thinks that the man may have used some narcotic or alkaloid to help induce the trance, although I suppose it might be argued that anyone who would let himself be buried for ten days where no help could possibly reach him in time, if anything went wrong, is so mad that his catalepsy is undoubtedly due to schizophrenia or some such mental derangement. But, except for the cataleptic coma, which they apparently induce at will, they show no other signs of that disease. Human hibernation—”
Flint stopped him. “For God’s sake! Human hibernation! If this is the beginning of a cheery and exhaustive treatise with lantern slides on Why People Are Bears, or the Economic and Social Aspects of Life in a Coffin, I’m going out to the box office now and demand a refund. Those cases are all ancient history, and, witnesses or not, at this distance we’ve no way of knowing how reputable they are. They sound like screwballs. Stop riding your hobby and get down to—”
“Well,” Merlini said, “that corn growing over the grave does sound a bit as if someone exaggerated some. But history isn’t as dead a subject as the police appear to think—especially not the history of premature burial and voluntary interment. Quickly, before my audience walks out entirely, I’m going to mention Rahman Bey. He’s what I was leading up to all along anyway. And the date, 1926, isn’t so ancient. You’ll find armloads of newspaper clippings documenting the case at the public library. It made headlines from here to the coast and back.
“Egyptian, Algerian, and a good bit of Hindu magic consists in the display of apparently supernormal physical feats—demonstrations of the fakir’s ability to withstand, or not to feel, pain when swords and knives are plunged into his body or when the flesh is exposed to flame, and demonstrations of voluntary control over such usually involuntary biological actions as the pulse rate and the circulatory system. The Mavlevee whirling dervishes, the Algerian sect of Aissauas, the Hindu fakirs, commonly practice such feats both in connection with religious rituals and among the street performers as entertainment.
“Rahman Bey was an Egyptian who came to this country and started a tour of Loew’s vaudeville circuit in 1926. He supported large rocks on his chest while they were smashed to bits with sledge hammers. He stuck hatpins and daggers through his cheeks and arms with nonchalant impunity. And he performed an abridged version of the burial-alive feat by having himself covered for eight minutes with a mound of sand.
“He opened in Boston, then came here to Loew’s State. The press department, deciding that a little publicity would be a welcome thing, called in the reporters for a special performance. Rahman popped into his trance, then into a watertight coffin which medical men admitted could not contain enough air to sustain life for more than two or three minutes after being hermetically sealed. But Rahman stayed in for twenty-one minutes while it was submerged in a swimming pool. He surprised the doctor in attendance by coming out alive, smiling, and without showing any signs of the carbon dioxide poisoning that is the first stage of asphyxia. He claimed that his cataleptic trance obviated the necessity for any breathing at all. This, naturally, got him the desired free newspaper space in gratifying quantities, and also that press agent’s dream—a controversy. One, at that, with a man whose name insured the story page-one position.
“Harry Houdini, because Rahman claimed supernatural rather than merely extra-normal powers, stated flatly that none of Rahman’s stunts were the least bit unusual. He called attention to the fact that they were old and quite standard side-show acts, feats that almost anyone could duplicate after a little practice—and without any trance. The side-show performers who did the same things never seemed to require one as Rahman did, but depended on the use of little-known but quite ordinary scientific principles.
“Houdini made no especial mention of the burial stunt, and, since this wasn’t exactly a run-of-the-mine side-show exhibit, Rahman challenged him to duplicate it. Just to make it harder, he promptly repeated the underwater burial, in the Dalton Hotel pool on West 59th Street, this time staying down for a full hour and getting bigger and blacker headlines than ever. When anyone challenged Houdini in his own bailiwick, that was news. What’s more, the physician in attendance declared that the self-induced cataleptic trance was genuine.
“Houdini had to put up or shut up. He put up. Two weeks later, August 5, he was sealed in a galvanized iron casket and lowered beneath the surface of the Hotel Shelton pool. If he used any trance, it was a conscious one because his assistant, James Collins, was in constant telephonic communication with him, checking every few minutes on his state of health. He smashed Rahman’s record into smithereens, bettering it by a full half-hour for a total time of one hour and thirty-one minutes.
“He announced then that he had used nothing any more occult than a technique he termed ‘shallow breathing.’ This consisted in lying perfectly still, using a minimum amount of energy, a great deal of will power, determination, and nerve, breathing as slowly and infrequently as possible so that the air in the coffin lasted many times longer than any of the theoretical experts had thought possible. Houdini Bey, the papers headlined, Puts Fakir on Ice.
“The reporters naturally went after Rahman, caught up with him out in Wilkes-Barre where his tour had taken him by now,
and asked him what about it. His claim that he could exist for an hour without breathing at all had been pretty thoroughly deflated and his cataleptic trance, in spite of the doctor’s seal of approval, looked like excess baggage. Rahman promptly countered by offering to stay thirty minutes in a coffin which was not airtight, but something worse—one that would have an intake attached to a motor-car exhaust supplying a steady inflow of carbon monoxide! Provided, of course, that Houdini would do the same. It sounds like something Rahman’s press agent thought up. In any event I’ve not heard that he’s ever tried such a stunt. Collins and Hardeen, Houdini’s brother, say that Houdini never received this challenge, but that his answer would have been, ‘Okay Rahman, but you do it first.’
“And there, just as the death-defying game of follow the leader began to get really interesting, it stopped. Rahman had no reason to carry it further—and probably good reason not to. The publicity he’d received prior to Houdini’s burial had secured him a $1500-a-week contract.”
Merlini showed no sign of stopping now that he’d got well under way, and Flint cut in. “So what?” He pointed to the grave. “This guy wasn’t in any coffin at all, and he was four feet underground. There’s one hell of a lot of difference.”
“Yes,” Merlini said. “But not the sort you think. I’m coming to that. Two months later Houdini died. The following January, the demand for fakirs on the Loew circuit apparently exceeding the immediate supply, another was shipped in from Egypt. A twenty-four-year-old young man named Hamid Bey—no relation; Bey is a title. He was introduced as Rahman’s tutor and the master fakir of them all. He was booked into the State and, the day before he opened, he went over to Englewood, New Jersey, popped off into the much debated trance, and was buried, without coffin, five feet down before a crowd of two hundred witnesses, including a full quota of reporters. And, if you think I’m still spinning old wives’ yarns, all you need to do is look in the New York papers for January 21, 1927. It’s all there, complete with pictures that include cheesecake shots of a Spanish dancer, courtesy of Loew’s booking office, who relieved the tedium of the wait and gave the cameramen something to do by dancing a tango on the grave.”3
No Coffin for the Corpse Page 17
