“Okay,” the lieutenant growled. “I’ll bite. How long did this groundhog stay under?”
After the build-up he’d given it, Merlini wasn’t going to miss this chance for a nicely timed dramatic pause. He flipped his shiny half dollar into the air once, caught it, and smiled quizzically at his hand as it slowly opened to show that the fifty-cent piece had melted in its customary mysterious manner into the very thinnest of air.
“Two hours and forty-five minutes!”4
Flint didn’t say anything audible, but he seemed to be muttering under his breath. The impression I got was one of profanity. Merlini continued.
“According to some of the papers, when Hamid had been disinterred and while he was still coming out of his trance, he smiled faintly and in a satisfied whisper said something that sounded like ‘Houdini.’ The controversy was wide open again, and, though some of the papers, more cautious than at first, had fun with picture captions like Hamid’s in de Cold Cold Groun’, they weren’t noticeably ready with explanations. The doctors present offered none either, and Houdini, who had been appearing nightly at half the spirit séances in the country (sometimes in two or more at once), was so strangely silent that even some of the spiritualists began to suspect it might be two other guys.”
The lieutenant shook his head stubbornly. “No,” he said. “It’s no sale. If you’re going to try to get me to believe that Hamid’s catalepsy was the real McCoy because Houdini’s hour-and-a-half record is the limit for shallow breathing—” Flint’s voice trailed off and he turned to Doctor Haggard as if just remembering his presence. He looked at him for a moment, then said slowly, “Self-induced catalepsy. Well, let’s have it.” There was a note of warning in his voice as he added, “And I don’t think I need to tell you that your opinion had better check with the others I’m going to collect.”
“And just what,” Haggard asked, “does that ominous remark mean?”
“Nothing, maybe.” Flint wasn’t very convincing.
“The word ‘catalepsy,’” Haggard began a bit uncertainly, “is a clinical description of a morbid state in which the patient lies motionless, unresponsive to stimuli, his pulse and respiration slowed, his skin pale. There is a waxy rigidity of the limbs which retain the various positions into which they may be put for a time. The cataleptic state is ordinarily involuntary, occurring in mental derangements—schizophrenia and hysteria. But it is closely allied—the exact distinction, if there is one, is vague—to autohypnosis. The hypnotist can produce cataleptic-trance symptoms in a good subject and the latter, with practice, could induce them in himself. There are a few cases on record. It’s not medically impossible, only rare.
“I suspect, though, that the fakirs, the reporters, and those doctors Merlini mentioned have been misusing the word. All the descriptions mention a very stiff rigid muscular state much more pronounced than the waxy flexibility that is usually indicative of catalepsy. It sounds much more like autohypnosis, although I don’t know that the distinction means a lot, since differentiating between them is largely a matter of definition. Due to the fact that it’s an unfamiliar thing which the layman, and a lot of M.D.’s for that matter, know little about, the fakirs pretend, and some of them may really believe, that it is something supernatural. Actually it is only abnormal. I might add that in crymotherapy, the new ‘frozensleep’ technique now being used in the treatment of cancer and schizophrenia, the patient remains in an insensible, cold-induced coma not very different from catalepsy sometimes as long as eight days.”
“All right, suppose I’m in a cataleptic coma,” Flint said, looking just a bit as if he wished he were. “How would that keep me from suffocating when I’m buried underground?”
“The lowered respiration rate,” Haggard answered. “Since it is reduced to an often indetectible minimum, a sort of super shallow breathing beyond anything that could be attained consciously, the subject would require an astonishingly small amount of air. But I doubt very much that either Rahman or Hamid Bey or any other fakir induced catalepsy in themselves to order several times a day every day on their vaudeville tours. You can’t play around with catalepsy or even autohypnosis quite as nonchalantly as all that.”
“And you don’t,” Merlini added, “when it’s quite unnecessary.”
“Unnecessary!” Flint exploded violently. “What the blazing blue hinges of hell are we talking about it for then?”
“I don’t know,” Merlini said. “You asked Haggard about it. I didn’t. Hamid’s three-hour burial doesn’t prove he used it. It was longer and more spectacular than Houdini’s hour-and-a-half underwater shallow-breathing record, but Hamid wasn’t by any means hermetically sealed. There would be considerable air in, and some seepage of air through, the loose dirt that was shoveled in above him. Voluntary, rather than trance-induced, shallow breathing could have turned the trick. If Houdini had been on deck, I suspect he’d have come forward, or rather gone down, to prove it.”
“But you said that the doctors present at Hamid’s burial admitted he was in a cataleptic trance,” Flint objected.
Merlini nodded. “I know, but most of these fakirs do seem to have one uncanny ability—they somehow always manage to pick out medical men who make sweeping assertions after only the sketchiest sort of examinations. The ballyhoo bug bites them—or something. Houdini had his examining physician take temperature, pulse, respiration, and blood-pressure readings before and after his burial. But all that the doctors examining Rahman and Hamid ever did was to note that rigidity was present, that the respiration was ‘low,’ and take the pulse rate.
“The rigidity, of course, proves nothing. Anyone can hold himself rigid during an examination. The stooges a stage hypnotist carries with his act do it all the time. Head on one chair, heels on another, they’ll let you stand on them. I’ll do that one for you myself, no hypnosis or catalepsy required. Actually Rahman’s and Hamid’s rigidity is even suspicious since the true cataleptic coma is not a rigid one at all.
“A low respiration rate is likewise meaningless. Anyone can breathe slowly, or even hold his breath and cease breathing altogether, during the few moments he is being examined. As for the pulse rate, Rahman’s, like Houdini’s, went up, which is not what you’d expect if the trance was bona fide. Hamid’s went down, from a normal 72 to 58. That effect could be produced either by autohypnosis or by purely mechanical means—pressure applied to the large artery of the arm shutting off the flow of blood. A hard object concealed under the armpit or a tight band of adhesive tape around the upper arm are the methods usually used.”
“But,” Haggard put in, “what if the reading were taken at the heart rather than the wrist? You can’t fake a low rate there.”
“No,” Merlini said. “That would tear it, unless the performer happened to be one of those abnormal and rare persons whose hearts fluctuate erratically. Or unless autosuggestion really was used. But Rahman and Hamid didn’t have to clear that hurdle. The medical examinations were so slipshod that faking was quite possible.”
“I wish to hell,” Flint said exasperatedly, “that you’d make up your mind. Did they fake it or didn’t they?”
“I suspect they did. If not, then they missed out on a swell chance to make the stunt really convincing. If they were using autosuggestion as claimed, they should have asked the doctors to roll up their sleeves and really go to town on the tests. They should have asked that the heart action be checked with an electrocardiograph, respiration with a basal-metabolism mask, and temperature with a clinical thermometer. That’s what I’d do if I wanted to impress the American Medical Association as well as the newspapermen. But I wouldn’t stay unconscious a bit longer than was necessary to cover the examination period. I’d come out of it but play possum, and go into the grave conscious so that I’d have some chance of sending out an SOS if anything went wrong. Once underground, I’d use the shallow-breathing method. The medicos couldn’t catch me at that unless they were buried alive with me.”
“That,” F
lint said, eyeing both Merlini and Haggard with a disgusted look, “wouldn’t be a bad idea at all. So you want me to think that Garner is an Algerian whirling dervish who played dead, fooled Haggard, let himself be buried, stayed underground for an hour—”
“Yes. Hamid Bey’s three-hour burial makes Mr. Garner’s one-hour emulation of the hedgehog class as small potatoes. And Doctor Haggard not only had no reason to suspect monkey business in the form of self-hypnosis, but his examination was no more thorough than the ones Hamid and Rahman, underwent. Any doctor might have made the same mistake. I’m afraid it’s quite possible that Scotty may have seen just what he says he did, and that Garner may still be very much alive at this moment.”
Flint didn’t want to buy it at all. “You’ll certainly be way out on a limb it we find him dead. If he’s alive, I may have to admit he’s a shallow-breathing, human dormouse but I’ll bet I can explain Haggard’s diagnosis of death without any hypnotic cataleptic hocus-pocus. If Garner was just playing dead, then Haggard and I are going to the station for a nice little heart-to-heart talk.”
The doctor froze as if at the onset of one of the more rigid forms of trance. “Are you accusing me,” he asked coldly, “of perjury—of diagnosing death when I knew—”
“No, not yet. But I may. You gave me a signed statement certifying death, and if we find him alive—”
“But why would I insist that he was dead when it leaves me open to a charge of accessory after the fact to murder, assisting at an illegal burial, and God knows what else?”
“That’s easy.” Flint watched the doctor narrowly. “Maybe you knew the body had been taken from the grave and figured that we couldn’t make a charge stick without it. You said as much a while back. Remember?”
Haggard didn’t answer. We all turned to listen as we heard someone running through the woods, running toward us as it a horde of ghostly specters was close behind. It was the police officer who had earlier tried to stop the fleeing car.
“Lieutenant,” he reported with what can by no means be described as shallow breathing, “we found Dunning! In the garage. He didn’t take it on the lam in that car, but the guy who did gave him a nasty crack on the head and shoved him in one of the other cars out of sight.”
“Can he talk?”
“He did—some. But he passed out again. Tucker says Doctor Haggard better have a look at him right away.”
Flint turned to one of the men who had been digging in the grave. “Newman, take Haggard in. And don’t let him out of your sight. We’ll be along in a minute or two.”
As they started off the lieutenant faced the patrolman again. “What happened, Ryan?”
“Well, he says he ran out of cigarettes and went downstairs to bum one from the chauffeur. His room’s next to the garage in the basement. Leonard wasn’t there but Dunning finds a pack and then, just as he’s leaving, he thinks he hears somebody in the garage. He figures it’s Leonard and he goes in. There’s nobody there, but the garage doors are wide open and that looks fishy. He wonders if maybe somebody is getting ready to take a run-out powder and he looks in the cars to see if they’ve loaded any luggage. When he opens the door of Miss Wolff’s car and sticks his head in, there’s a guy inside who reaches up, grabs his throat, and bangs his head against the dashboard. That’s all he remembers.”
“Who was it? Didn’t he get a look at the man?”
Ryan shook his head. “I don’t know. Tucker’s just asking him that when he passes out on us again.”
Flint looked back at Merlini and myself. “Come on. We’re going in. Ryan, you—”
He stopped. Another man was running toward us from the woods, Tucker this time.
He started reporting before he had come to a full stop. “Lovejoy just phoned. He’s got the guy in the car! It smashed up on the Parkway.”
As he paused to catch his breath, Flint demanded, “Who—”
“The ghost,” Tucker answered, “and this time he really is dead!”
I had expected that, but I wasn’t quite prepared for what followed.
“Just what,” Merlini asked quietly, “makes the sergeant so sure his captive is dead?”
Tucker blinked. “What makes—Well, he said he’d shipped him in to the morgue, so I suppose—”
The lieutenant emitted smoke and flame like an incendiary bomb. “Ryan, bring this crowd in. And don’t lose any of ’em!” He started running toward the house.
Merlini said, “I hope that body’s still in the wagon when it arrives. If it can escape from a grave—”
Then he started running too.
1. Burial Alive. — Dr. Franz Hartmann, Boston, 1895; Premature Burial and How It May Be Prevented, with special reference to trance, catalepsy, and other forms of suspended animation. — William Tebb, F.R.G.S., and Colonel Edward Perry Vollurn, M.D., Swan Sonnennschein & Co., Ltd., London, 1905.
2. Leaves from a Psychist’s Case-Book, Victor Gollanz, Ltd. . London, 1933.
3. For accounts of Rahmar’s one-hour burial see New York papers for July 28, 1926. For Houdini’s Shelton pool experiment see August 6 papers.
4. The “contest or record-breaking” type of burial in which the customers paid so much a head for a look down a glass-covered shaft at the buried man was something else again, and always, since they ran up from weeks to a month or more depending on the ticket sale, phony. In some cases the performer knocked off work each night, made a surreptitious exit, and returned just before the first showing the next day. In others he remained underground the full time, receiving food and water through the observation shaft. Sometimes he pretended to be in a trance. The visitors, looking down, saw half the man’s face and a closed eye; the other out of sight was engaged in reading the latest edition of the daily paper!
Chapter Fifteen:
A Dead Man Dies
MERLINI’S DASH after the lieutenant was short-lived. Ryan roared a command to halt. Merlini paid no attention. The policeman drew his gun and fired once in the air.
That got results. Merlini stopped and looked back. “Are you a good shot?” he asked.
“You just keep running,” Ryan promised. “You’ll find out.”
Merlini shook his head. “I’ll take your word for it.”
Hastily Ryan herded us back toward the house. I fell into step beside Merlini. “Got any more rabbits in your hat like that last one?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to look. We still need a few.”
I agreed to that heartily. “We certainly do. Your appealing theory that the haunt is the dead man himself doing a return engagement cancels out quite a few stickers. We don’t need to hunt for a lightning-change impersonator any longer, and it gives an explanation for Scotty’s story, the matching fingerprints, and most of the poltergeist tomfoolery—the smashed china, the transposed pictures, the spilled ink, the library books, the frightened servants. But just look at the ragged fringe of loose ends all around the edges.
“How, if he’s flesh and blood and not a bona fide wraith, did he smash that flower vase? There were witnesses that time and he wasn’t exactly visible. He may use a flashlight to outwit the burglar alarm, but it wouldn’t help him wriggle through locked doors the way he does. How did he vanish from Mrs. Wolff’s room quicker than you can say ‘Scat!’ or was Leonard lying when he insisted no one shinnied out the window? He could have gotten into the study with the key Wolff missed, but how’d he exit again after the shooting when I was watching the window and you guarded the door?
“For that matter, why’d he toss me into the drink? Unless he’s a homicidal maniac, it doesn’t make sense. If he wanted to liquidate a witness to the fact that he was hiding in the study, then why is he so careless with his fingerprints? Why does he leave so many of them everywhere anyway? It almost looks as if—”
“Go on,” Merlini said. “You’re doing fine. As if what?”
“As if he left them on purpose.” But I sounded doubtful.
“Well,” Merlini said matter-of-factly, “
why not? Before we knew that the grave was empty, the prints seemed to offer the final proof that the ghost was the real thing. He might have planned that for Wolff’s benefit.”
I objected. “No, you’re slipping. Why would he leave them for Wolff’s benefit when the next thing he does is shoot Wolff? And how come, in that blamed photo, does he show up as transparent as a guppy? Or are you going to tell me that Lady Edgcumbe and General Lee’s mother could do that sort of thing too? Because if you are—”
“I’m not. Those are added wrinkles. But you’re being coy about the photo. You’re the boy who used to wear his Leica to bed. You can explain that one.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “It’s just a common garden variety of double exposure, the kind all beginners make when they forget to wind their film between shots. Galt had set up the camera and left it loaded, aimed, focused, and unguarded. Mr. Ghost floats in, clicks the shutter, and puts a shot of the background on the film. The light from the photoflood bulb in the upper hall would have served nicely. He goes upstairs, unscrews the bulb in the corridor, and waits for his cue. Then, when he makes his little bow, I click the shutter again, and the shot of him that I get overlays the background that’s already on the film, giving us a phantom view. He certainly took pains to give Wolff a scare. And why? More blackmail?”
Merlini nodded. “Looks that way. Wolff was shying frantically from unfavorable publicity. He thought he’d killed a man, and he’d tried to cover up by burying the body. Can you think of any better blackmail material?”
“No,” I said. “Don’t think I can. But, if he goes to all that trouble to blackmail Wolff, why does he shoot him? There’s no point in that. And, even if he hadn’t, he couldn’t leave Wolff a spirit message demanding that he put the money in unmarked bills of small denomination on the gravel. Spooks aren’t troubled by the rising cost of living; it’s a contradiction in terms. Wolff would have smelled rats. If he should suspect that the ‘dead man’ is alive it upsets the whole scheme. And if the dead man stays dead, how does he collect?”
No Coffin for the Corpse Page 18
