“It will do no good to strive against your fate, Magistrate,” said a voice, which sounded like the rustling of fallen leaves stirred by a cold north wind. “Sentence has already been passed, and only remains to be carried out.”
This time, Monsieur Sevanter did not pause to debate matters with the Phantom. Nor did he bother to cry out to rouse his many friends and protectors. Instead, he reached under his pillow, brought out the pistol, took rapid aim and fired.
The effect of what he did was not quite what he had expected. Instead of an instant explosion there was a sinister hiss and a huge gout of white smoke, which stung his eyes horribly, blinding him. The detonation was delayed for what seemed like an eternity, although it was probably no more than half a second. The pistol’s recoil wrenched his fingers and his wrist quite painfully, causing him to drop the weapon. Monsieur Sevanter screamed for help, rubbing his eyes furiously
When the smoke had finally cleared and he had contrived to remove the tears from his eyes, the magistrate was not at all surprised to find that the visitor was no longer standing at the foot of his bed. He threw back his sheets and leapt to the floor, hoping—if not actually expecting—to find the Phantom lying full length on the floor, with a gaping hole in his breast, covered in blood.
Alas, there was no corpse on his carpet.
The door opened to admit the sword-wielding and pistol-brandishing Funeste, dressed in the same blue cap-and-gown as the previous night, followed by a veritable army of armed warriors. Monsieur Sevanter stamped his feet like a madman and howled with rage and frustration. Furalor’s voice could be heard in the attic, screeching: “The alarms! The alarms! The door is breached, and so are the chests!”
The servants made another dutiful search, but it was quite obvious that they did not expect to find anything. They did not seem at all surprised that no sign of the Phantom’s presence remained.
“But I shot him!” Monsieur Sevanter protested, feebly. “I shot him in the heart!”
“Alas,” said Jean Funeste, pointing to one of the dark-stained wooden panels in which the wall opposite the bed was clad, “The bullet is here, embedded in the wall. Had the Phantom really been standing at the foot of your bed, it would indeed have struck him in the heart—but it seems to have passed clean through him.”
“Do you doubt me, Jean?” the magistrate cried. “Are you telling me that he was not really here, and that I have been dreaming?”
“No, of course not!” the clerk hastened to reassure him. “If you say that he was here, in the flesh, then I believe with all my heart that he was here. He must have ducked as you fired, and the bullet must have passed over his head.”
“The trigger did not act immediately!” Monsieur Sevanter was quick to say. “There was a slight delay—no more than half a second, I dare say, but probably time enough to allow a man with lightning reflexes to duck!”
“I shall clean and repair the firing-mechanism with the utmost care,” the clerk promised, “and I shall make absolutely certain that there is no delay the next time the weapon is fired—but I wonder how the Phantom could possibly have made his exit after ducking, for I would swear that no more than half a second more elapsed between my hearing the shot and bursting through that door.”
“Well,” said the magistrate, “there is one way to be certain as whether he was here or not. We must examine the chests, to see whether anything has been stolen.”
“We ought to make a record first,” Jean Funeste said, “While all the details are fresh in your memory. There might be some detail therein that will permit us to get to the bottom of the mystery.”
Alas, even when the most scrupulous record of the evening’s events had been compiled, it was impossible to detect any detail therein that might offer a clue of the Phantom’s identity or modus operandi.
When the servants had all been dismissed from their presence, Jean Funeste recovered the key to the padlock from its hiding-place, and then took the key to the cupboard door from under the magistrate’s pillow. Through the rest of the night, Monsieur Sevanter and his clerk worked methodically through their inventory. By the time dawn came, they were certain that one thing—and one thing only—had been removed from each of the three chests. The most valuable of these items was a fine embroidered chemise, trimmed with the fur of a rare white hare, which the long-dead Madame Sevanter had employed as her favorite nightshirt. The other two objects had also belonged to her. Both men wore sorrowful expressions as they locked the chests again and replaced them in the cupboard, before Jean Funeste went to attend to his other duties and fulfill his other promises
Monsieur Sevanter did not trouble to swear his domestics to secrecy again, for he knew by now how futile such gesture would be. The whole town seemed to know what had happened almost before the rising sun was clear of the horizon, and by noon there was not a single detail of the night’s events that had escaped the scrupulous attention of the gossips.
VI.
When he had eaten a far-from-hearty mid-day meal the magistrate summoned Jean Funeste, Odo and Furalor to a conference. He implored all three to help him make some sense out of what had happened. In his desperation, he even begged Furalor to tell him what kind of magic might have been worked to bring the Phantom into his room despite all possible precautions, and to leave it again so cleverly.
“Well,” said the astrologer, who had been racking his brains for some time in the hope of excusing the failure of his magical alarms to wake him until after the event they were supposed to anticipate, “it seems to me that we can only conclude that the so-called Phantom is indeed a phantom, in a perfectly literal sense. He cannot be an ordinary man protected by some kind of spell or potion of invisibility, for he does not come through the door or the window. He can only be a ghost—and since his efforts appear, in the ultimate analysis, to be focused on this house, he is probably the ghost of someone who died in this house.”
“A ghost!” exclaimed Monsieur Sevanter, who had not previously given any serious thought to the possibility that the Phantom might really be a phantom, but was now sufficiently desperate to leave no potentially-comforting straw unclutched. “Whose ghost?”
Furalor hesitated, seemingly reluctant to pronounce the name he had in mind. “I am truly sorry, Monsieur, to voice what may seem to be a shocking thought,” he eventually said, “but I believe that we must consider your late wife the most likely candidate.”
“My late wife, you star-struck imbecile!” exclaimed the magistrate, causing Furalor to recoil in apparent horror. “If that’s what passes for divination in your idiot profession, then it’s even more useless than I’ve long believed. My wife has been dead for twenty years. All our children are married, and two have children of their own. If my late wife wanted to haunt me—and I certainly never did her any wrong—why has she been idle these last twenty years?”
Furalor appeared to be making a considerable effort to suppress his resentment at the brutal dismissal of his suggestion and the casual insult to his vocation. “I merely took note, sir,” he said, as mildly as he could “of that fact that the things that the Phantom has taken from you appear to be things that your wife once owned. Can you remember, perchance, whether it was your wife who gave to your other children the things that were subsequently removed from their possession?”
While the astrologer was speaking, a deep scowl had taken possession of the magistrate’s face, but Monsieur Sevanter suppressed his anger. He was a man used to weighing evidence and drawing scrupulous conclusions—and when he considered the question that Furalor had posed, he realized that all the objects removed from the houses of his son and daughters had indeed been given to them by their mother. Even the trinket stolen from his father’s house had been a birthday gift from her.
“But what possible reason could my late wife have for haunting me?” complained the magistrate. “I was as just and fair in my dealings with her as I am with the world at large. She lived and died in comfort, with all that a woman could des
ire. She had the privilege of bearing four fine children, and would have borne five had she not had the misfortune to die in the final attempt. I cannot believe that she might want to hurt me.”
“And yet,” Odo put in, apparently more sympathetic to the astrologer’s hypothesis than might have been expected, given that his master the Archbishop presumably had not wanted him to discover any need for the services of an exorcist, any more than he had wanted him to find any need for the dispatch of a witchfinder, “there is surely other evidence to incline us in the direction of an explanation of this kind. You have admitted that each time you have seen the Phantom, you have awakened momentarily from a dream in which graves seemed to open to yield up their dead, and that you have had a sense of being drawn to some fateful rendezvous. Perhaps your encounters with the Phantom were the meetings of which your dreams spoke. Perhaps you are indeed being harassed by an unquiet spirit—whether at the Devil’s instigation or with the Lord’s permission I cannot tell.”
“No doubt it was kind of the Lord to send me an illuminating vision,” said Monsieur Sevanter, with an offensive sharpness that was suggestive of tacit atheism as well as gross rudeness, “but I wish that he had taken the trouble to make it a little more explicit.”
At this, the monk shook his head, trying to pretend that the gesture was motivated by sorrow rather than resentment. “We are the servants of the Lord,” he said. “He is not ours. We should be grateful for any enlightenment He might send, not resentful that He has not told us more.”
“Very true,” said Furalor, piously. “The stars in God’s firmament undoubtedly give us information, but never clearly; we must be grateful for what we can deduce, rather than complaining that horoscopes do not speak to us with a peasant’s bluntness or a scholar’s precision.”
Monsieur Sevanter’s scowl deepened even further, and he turned to his closest friend. “This is all nonsense, Jean, is it not?” he said. “Assure me, please, that there is another way of interpreting this case, which these silly men have overlooked.”
“Well,” said Jean Funeste, smoothly, “it certainly seems to me that there are several facts that are difficult to explain within Monsieur Furalor’s theory. The Phantom has certainly not been restricted to the bounds of this house, as haunters are traditionally supposed to be. He has not confined his attentions to the houses of Monsieur Sevanter’s kin. He has carried out raids all over Teirbrun, many of them purely for profit, and he has often carried away very substantial bundles of loot. He was certainly solid enough to slice the buttons from a grocer’s nightshirt and to engage the watchman Hernand in a material clash of arms. I cannot imagine for a moment that such actions could have been those of the late Madame Sevanter, who was a rather frail woman and very gentle of temperament.”
“Quite so!” cried the magistrate. “What have you to say to that, Master Astrologer? Since the magical alarms you placed on my treasure-chests have proved so ineffective, we can hardly be sure that the others you have set were not equally defective. It is my firm belief that this Phantom is as solid as you and me, although he would not have to be much of a magician for your silly little spells to be utterly impotent to keep him at bay!”
“Well,” replied Furalor, in the offended tone that all would-be wizards tend to adopt when their competence is questioned, “you may believe that if you like, sir, but I must agree with my esteemed colleague Odo that you have too haughty an attitude to man and God alike.”
“Peace!” said Jean Funeste, in a soothing fashion. “It will not help us to become annoyed with one another. Nor will it help us to blame the Lord for what He might or might not have condescended to do by way of enlightenment. My friend is a pious man, but he is surely right to insist that we exhaust rational explanations before coming to the conclusion that there are supernatural forces at work here. Let us think about this logically, and see where rigorous reason might lead us.”
“If that is your wish,” said Odo, skeptically, “then let us do that—but let us not forget what feeble creatures we are when we are faced with the mysteries of life and death.”
“I am as accomplished in calculation as any other astrologer,” Furalor said, similarly putting on a show of wounded vanity, “and I am as respectful of evidence and the processes of deduction as any magistrate. If my magic has failed, without more powerful magic being at work, I shall be glad to admit it and pleased to know how. Go on, Master Clerk: I shall follow your logic loyally every step of the way.”
“Thank you, gentlemen,” said Jean Funeste, evenly. “I do think that there is another way to interpret what has happened here, and with your permission, Monsieur Sevanter, I will explain the logic that leads to the conclusion—although I feel obliged to warn you that you might not like it any better than what these men have said.”
“I am a magistrate,” replied his friend, stoutly, “and I am very eager to hear all evidence and argument, wherever it may lead.”
“Well then,” said Jean Funeste, “let us consider the possibility that Furalor’s precautions were not so easily evaded. We packed the chests together, you will recall, after taking our last inventory, and then locked them all carefully. Then I left the room in search of the astrologer, did I not, returning some minutes later so that the alarm spells could be set?”
“That is so,” said the magistrate. “But I did not leave the room. No one could have removed the objects from the chest before the spell was set.”
“But it is possible, so far as I can tell,” said the clerk, “that the objects we later found to be missing were not in the chests when the locks alarm was set, having been removed in that interim. Assessing the evidence purely from my own point of view, I cannot testify to the fact that the objects were still in the chests when the alarm spells were set and the cupboard was locked—and the same judgment holds true for the previous night.”
“But that is absurd!” exclaimed the magistrate. “I can assure you, Jean, that the objects were not removed while you were out of the room. Who could have done that, save for me?”
Jean Funeste spread his arms wide, and said: “There you have it, my friend, in a nutshell: the conclusion to which logic inexorably leads. Who has seen the Phantom inside this house, except yourself? No one. How could the Phantom possibly have entered the room and left it again without my seeing him, since I was very carefully blocking the door and was exceedingly quick to react to your cries for help? Impossible—unless he was a mere figment of your imagination. Who else but you, in fact, could possibly have contrived any of the mysterious things that the Phantom is supposed to have done within this house? No one—if the things were, in fact, done rather than merely imagined. Ergo, I feel compelled to ask my companions to give serious consideration to the proposition that you are the one who has done or imagined them!”
Here Jean Funeste was forced to pause, because Monsieur Sevanter appeared likely to suffer a fit of apoplexy. The clerk immediately put a reassuring hand on his friend’s shoulder, and said to him in a kindly tone: “Of course, my old friend, I do not say that you have done or imagined these things knowingly, but only that you must have done them. You could have conjured up this ghost. You could have taken these various relics of your dead wife from your father’s and your children’s houses. You could be the Phantom, and it is hard to see that anyone else can have done what the Phantom has done these last two nights. What other explanation is as probable? That you have been bewitched, accursed or otherwise deluded is very probable—indeed, I do not doubt it—but I must, in all conscience, say that, if logic is to be our guide, we cannot seriously doubt that yours are the hands which have actually carried out these actions.”
Monsieur Sevanter was of a different opinion. “This is utterly absurd!” he howled, in a rage that would have done credit to a raving lunatic. “It is monstrous! I have been your firmest friend for forty years, Jean Funeste, and now you accuse me of this! I am a victim of robbery and evil haunting, and the only conclusion that my closest friend can reach
is that I must have robbed myself and haunted myself! You serpent of ingratitude! Everything you have and everything you are, you owe to my generosity! You were a mere gardener’s boy, and I made you a clerk. Do you know how hard I had to work to persuade my parents to let you be my friend? You miserable traitor! Logic be damned! Your contention is the vilest slander I have ever heard, and I only wish that I could find a punishment to fit such a crime, for I would surely exact it on the spot. Leave my house this instant, and take your worthless spell-casters with you. Begone! I shall face this vicious Phantom alone, and I will find out who he is for myself.”
It is doubtful that Odo or Furalor would have been over-anxious to agree with the curious hypothesis that Jean Funeste had advanced had it been put to them in calm circumstances, even though it relieved both of them from any hint of responsibility for the misfortunes afflicting the house. Once Monsieur Sevanter had exploded in this remarkable manner, however, compounding his earlier intemperate insults by calling them both worthless, they were by no means so inclined to dispute it. In fact, each of them came independently to the conclusion that Monsieur Sevanter was as excessive in his ingratitude as he was in his impoliteness, and that Jean Funeste’s charges, however unlikely they might have seemed at first, must have struck a spot made sore by conscience.
Jean Funeste, on the other hand, seemed to repent his reckless words completely, and hastened to offer a thousand apologies for having hurt his friend’s feelings. Indeed, he begged to be allowed to remaining the house—in order, as he put it, to help Monsieur Sevanter defend himself against himself. This manner of representing the situation only served to rouse Monsieur Sevanter’s anger to a higher pitch, and he would not be content until his former friend was banished from his house. Jean Funeste had to leave, in order to avoid being thrown out bodily. Furalor and Odo went with him, both feeling somewhat aggrieved by the way that their sincere attempts to help had not been better appreciated.
The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies Page 7
