The Thrill Book Sampler

by Seabury Quinn

  What a gift was that! What must have been the reflections of the pair who had gained their happiness over the broken heart and the violated hearthstone of another human being, as they shared that strange gift—thinking, as they surely could not resist, of the donor of the gift. William Tolliver must have been amply revenged upon the despoiler of his home and happiness night after night. The two young people became more and more reserved with each other as the days and nights, equally wretched, passed. Orville began haunting his clubs again, returning at night as though drawn by a subtly powerful magnet to toss and reflect, to grind his teeth, to toss again. Clara grew melancholy, and her maid often found her dissolved in tears and told about it in the servants’ quarters.

  “After the inquest there will be more to discuss,” the coroner hinted darkly. He was quite right; the inquest brought out the final act of the tragedy and painted, strangely enough, to the interposition of Tolliver, who had been dead several days before young Rodman’s death.

  The maid testified that Mrs. Rodman had received a letter which the girl had not scrupled to read when she had discovered it in her mistress’ bureau drawer. It was from William Tolliver, and was in a lofty but terrible strain. It warned her to prepare her soul for sudden death; it bade her tell her husband that he had but a short time left to enjoy that which he had deliberately stolen from another man; it told her to watch for the announcement of his death, as it would be an omen to her that her own would follow shortly.

  Within a week a newspaper announced the ex-husband’s tragic death at his own hands.

  The maid declared that after the receipt of this news the pair acted like people from whose shoulders a great weight had been lifted. They toasted each other at dinner, laughing. She heard them discussing the discardal of the dead man’s unwelcome gift. Orville then asked his wife if she did not consider herself absolved of her promise, now that “he” was dead. She replied that she feared him more dead than alive. Then she had burst out sobbing, crying: “Orville, Orville, swear that you do not regret your love for me! Tell me that it has compensated for everything!”

  Mr. Rodman, said the girl, had soothed his wife with caresses. It was nearly eleven that night before she—the maid—had been dismissed, and she slept soundly until wakened by Mr. Benham after the tragedy.

  It was impossible to question Mrs. Rodman; the unhappy young widow was in such a hysterical condition that her personal physician refused point-blank to answer for the consequences if she were questioned by the coroner at that time.

  Benham discussed the subject thoughtfully with the coroner that afternoon in his own apartment. The man declared that in his opinion all the suspicion pointed at the first husband, although of course the verdict must be “Death by accident.”

  “I wonder if we cannot take a look at that bed?” inquired the bachelor musingly. “Mrs. Rodman is in a private hospital, and the maid is in charge of the apartment. I have a theory that I’d like to subject to proof.”

  The two men acted on Benham’s proposition, and ten minutes later had entered the dread chamber of the tragedy, shutting out the maid with her curious eyes. Benham felt strangely averse to any more witnesses than were strictly necessary. Together he and the coroner went over the bed inch by inch, letting it down cautiously. It was a curious and beautiful piece of work, ingeniously conceived, and handsomely executed. It appeared, when closed, to be a wardrobe, in the door of which was set a large full-length mirror. Perhaps it was, as a whole, a bit too heavy for a lady’s boudoir, and to Benham—after the horrible accident—there seemed something almost sinister in the thing.

  He exchanged a mutually distrustful look with the coroner, and the two men pulled the bedding aside, exposing the springs, as with a single impulse. The hinges on which the bed turned were concealed in cunningly contrived metal boxes; Benham discovered that there were two at the foot of the bed from which ran long rods that connected with those at the top.

  “What on earth are these for?” he said aloud. “The hinges of the bed must be at the top, where it folds up. I believe there is something diabolical about this bed!” He called to the maid for a hammer. Then he beat and battered at the round, well-oiled mechanisms until the head of the boxes screwed off, disclosing springs—some kind of clockwork arrangement inside.

  Suddenly he began to see light. He backed off as though his hands had inadvertently come in contact with something horrible. He looked at the coroner, who stared back in dawning comprehension of something unutterably unbelievable. Mutually impelled by the same thought, they destroyed the mechanism and replaced the metal cap, laid the bedding in place, and pushed the terrible instrument of a dead man’s vengeance up into place again.

  And then the bachelor gave a sharp exclamation. “Come here! Stand where I am standing,” he directed.

  The coroner took his place before the mirror, started back with an echo of Benham’s cry. At the angle from which he looked, with the light striking the mirror from the side, he saw the distinct life-sized features of a man peering at him from over his shoulder. Intuitively, although he had never seen a likeness of him, he knew that it was the face of William Tolliver, who, with compressed lips, looked at him malevolently from deep-set eyes under shaggy eyebrows, from out the depths of the mirror.

  How it had been accomplished, by what trick of the glazier’s art or the artisan’s skill, the thing had been done; staring with implacable hate from the mirror was the face of the man who had been so deeply wronged, the man who had so horribly revenged himself. No wonder the bed remained always with the mirror concealed! No wonder that the Rodmans nightly tossed and muttered, turning almost with loathing from arms that had formerly been so eager to embrace! No wonder they had discharged one girl who had put the bed down in spite of prohibitive orders, in the mistaken attempt to improve the appearance of the room!

  The dead man had avenged himself horribly; he had kept his memory fresh before the miserable pair day and night in the very privacy of their nuptial chamber, with a refinement of torture that only a bitter and passionate nature could have devised. To this day Benham cannot decide whether or not the angry spirit of the wronged and embittered husband had not gone that night to gloat over the doom of those whom he had warned, with sarcastic prophecy, of their near-impending death? Had it been he who, unseen, had left the scene of his final triumph so hastily, leaving open to Benham as he went the door of that desolated home? The bachelor shudders at his own uncertainty.

  But he was not surprised at hearing that Mrs. Rodman had entered a nursing sisterhood, which she had endowed with the vast properties left her by her husband’s death.

  IT was a strange series of events that brought us together in that Godforsaken hole. Men drift around through the tropics like lost souls in hell. It isn’t considered good ethics to question them closely, either. A lot of them went out there to escape justice; some joined the army, and when their enlistments were out decided to remain; others had been disappointed in love and professed to be woman-haters. But, as a general rule, they were good fellows. Now and then we would run across a scoundrel. It did not take us long to find it out. A few nights at the club, a stretch of work, some tense moment; then, if the poor dog failed, it ended the affair. A few days later a tramp schooner would melt into the distance carrying a dejected being to another port. It was not always so easy to rid the place of their presences. There was Braxton, for instance; but that’s another story.

  Kennedy has always possessed a flair for the mysterious, the unseen. In addition, he was a good talker. When you dwell on the fact that we had been marooned in Mindanao over six months, with no possible hope of returning, and had been hard put to find something which might amuse us, you will realize what Kennedy stood for. Not that he was such a jovial fellow; no one was less so. The charm of his personality lay rather in his comfortableness, his manner of repose. We watched each other closely, we four, and I am sure if one of us had proven a coward it would have been instantly discovered.

&nbs
p; It wasn’t an easy matter to try and sleep when a thousand Moros or so beat their fiendish drums in religious ecstasy through the long, hot hours of darkness. Nor was it a simple matter to greet a column from the interior bearing the remains of some American slashed and shot to pieces. When these and a few other trifling matters are taken into consideration it will be seen how comparatively easy it might have been for us to drift into a laxity of spirit and will.

  Kennedy kept us interested from the very first day. As it happened, he was the head of an engineering party that had built some sort of a plant the year before. He was waiting for orders from Manila. He expected to have another proposition on his hands by the end of that summer. We didn’t know much about his past life. From his conversation I gathered that he had been educated decently, no more, and was a reader of wide range, with a tremendous store of experiences. He had delved into Eastern thought and European philosophy, holding to his original opinions in spite of argument and despising dogmatic conceptions of any kind. It is a bit dangerous to be an original thinker when you are banished to a distant part of the world. I have seen them crumple like burned paper in the silence, those thinkers. But Kennedy had a level head.

  “You’ve got to watch yourself,” he would say. “Out here it’s blamed easy to concentrate on what you’ve lost. I tried it for a while. The chief looked me over, and said that if I didn’t let the booze alone and stop getting off into a corner by myself he’d send me home as a failure. That set my thoughts in motion. I didn’t repeat. A man’s philosophy out here has got to be objective, not subjective. What he needs is plenty to do and little to think about. Don’t you remember Carson? He came here when I did. There wasn’t a finer fellow in the world. He once told me that he expected to make a fortune and return to the States. He didn’t say anything more, but we learned later that he was engaged. I found her picture in his room afterward. Then we had to wait for some machinery. That came all O.K., but it proved the usual dead stuff. We had to order again. By that time Carson began to worry. We didn’t like to say anything. We kept a close watch. Months passed. We realized that unless something happened the game was up. It did. Fred Birney found him sitting in front of his mirror with a kind of silly smile on his face, dead! The poor fellow had shot himself. We buried him quietly, but it made us all do too much thinking.

  “There are three things you have to do in the Islands: forget that women ever lived, leave drink alone, and never worry.”

  Kennedy lit a comfortable cigar and tipped his chair back against the railing, putting one leg over the arm and the other on a chair. He loved to sprawl. It was a particularly hot night. We could hear the continuous racket of the drums far off along the bay and now and then the odd yell of a native engaged in some peculiar work. There wasn’t another white man in the district. We were too busy listening to Kennedy to think much of this, however.

  “I often wonder,” he continued, “why fear doesn’t get the best of us in the end. I haven’t met many fellows out here who experienced the emotion and got away alive. That was what was the matter with Carson. He was afraid. You couldn’t have put your hand on the exact cause of it all, yet he killed himself because of fear. The fact is, a white man never was intended for such a beastly life. It isn’t human. The slightest thing will set your nerves on edge if you are not careful. Now take the case of Carson, for instance. I’ll bet that none of you ever imagined that he shot himself because of something that happened in Manila months before he came here. You remember how we used to wonder at his dread of the tarantula. I poked fun at him until I learned the reason; then I kept still. But in a civilized community I am sure he would never have allowed the thing to prey upon him. It was in the night that he suffered most. He had his bed surrounded by three thicknesses of netting, and when he retired he would tuck the whole business carefully under a mattress so that there wasn’t a chance for a mosquito, as he claimed, to enter. I knew better. He lived in terror of the tarantula. He had heard of how they crawled into houses sometimes and walked over one in the darkness. I’ll admit it is enough to make one’s flesh creep. Well, it made him tremble. Near the end he hardly dared to sleep at all. I could have killed Birney when he put that dead one in his bed as a practical joke. Birney was sorry enough later on, but it didn’t do Carson any good.

  “It was funny how I happened to be the one who learned the truth from Carson’s own lips before he died. One night—it must have been around twelve or one—I heard someone rap on my door. I was reading, and when I answered it there stood Carson, in the yellow light streaming over my shoulders, looking for all the world like a ghost. He was wearing a peculiar sort of kimono that he affected, and I was struck by the fact that he had only one slipper on. I begged him to come in. He took a cigarette, but it was some time before he spoke. ‘I suppose you think I’m a fool,’ he remarked after a while. I hastened to disagree with him. ‘Oh, don’t do that; my nerves are on edge and I can’t sleep.’ And before he left me I had listened to one of the strangest stories I have ever heard. I didn’t say anything to you fellows. He didn’t ask to have the thing kept secret, but I thought it best. Fellows like Birney never understand.

  “It seems that when he first came to the Islands he was stationed for a time in Manila. He had taken rather a fancy to the old city and loved to ramble around the Luneta and through the Tondo. The sight of the natives in their ridiculous costumes amused him. It wasn’t long, however, before he began to grow a little tired of the life. It was this that led him into strange portions of the city and on long walks through the country when he ought to have been at work. He was a curiously imaginative chap, building dreams out of a mere desire. I guess that was why he thought he could get rich by coming down here. He did manage to keep away from the women, and he didn’t carouse much. Finally he got keenly interested in an old monastery that faced on the Calle Palacio in the Intramuros. You know where it is. The place is about three hundred years old and the walls look as though they were built to withstand a ten-month siege. Carson said that he heard of a book they kept there, an old hand-painted Bible which had been brought over by Magellan. It was kept chained to a table. It was already centuries old when it first came over, so the story went. The room where they kept the thing was locked all the time. Carson said that a strange tale had grown up around it. Anyone who dared to spend a night studying it never came out alive. Many students had died in this way, and it was deemed best by the prior to lock the doors and make it impossible for anyone else to run the risk.

  “Carson, once his interest was fully aroused, refused to listen to any objections. In the end he convinced the authorities that they could let him examine the book without danger. The prior decided not to let him go alone, and when Carson called as per agreement he gave the keys to a trusty monk and ordered him to stay in the room during the time Carson was there. On the way down through the musty corridors they ran over the history of the book. The peculiar part about it all was that when someone read the faded print for a few hours alone they were found dead, their eyes popped out as though in abject fear, the mouth open and the hands gripping the table like vises. About fifty years previous to Carson’s visit some stranger had obtained permission to spend a night in the room, and had astounded the monks by walking out of the place the next morning as quiet and contained as when he entered it. He showed them the book lying wide open on the stand with a soft, furred thing that he had crushed. He said that while he was reading, a thin thread, alive, had curled around over the cover clasps, followed by two eyes that peeped over the great back of the book. At first he could not stir, but watched it, fascinated. His very heart seemed to stop beating. When the blurred eyes neared his own he had sprung to his feet from a sudden overflowing of courage and had closed the heavy volume with a slam. A colorless liquid had forced its way out through the leaves, and for a few moments his excited senses realized that a single tendon waved tremulously forward and backward and then stopped. An odor as of almonds hung upon the suffocating atmosphere, and
he rushed for the little door in order to let in some fresh air. When the morning dawned he smilingly told the monks that there was no more danger. After eating a hearty breakfast he left them. He had not been seen again.

  “The monk who accompanied Carson told the story for perhaps the thousandth time as they opened doors and tramped through seemingly endless corridors on their way to the cell where the book was kept. Carson distinctly remembered the monk telling him that he didn’t believe there was the least bit of danger. In fact, he confessed that he based his conclusions on the death of the animal or specter that had haunted those ominous pages. He smiled in a superior sort of way when Carson warned him not to place any faith in that ancient tale. ‘If people died then,’ he said, as they neared the top of a narrow staircase that led into the very bowels of the earth, ‘they can die now.’ Carson laughed as he drove this warning home. Somehow the echo of his laugh seemed to collect more echoes as it sung back of him down an empty, dark corridor. He turned his head over his shoulder after hesitating, then cursed himself for giving in to his vivid imagination. It was at this moment that the monk pulled a large key from his pocket and inserted it within a small doorway that faced directly upon the base of the spiral staircase down which they had come. After some trouble it yielded to his efforts, and he entered, followed by Carson. One match spluttered and went out in the darkness. It had been years since the place was opened, and for some time it was difficult to coax a candle into lighting. The shadows formed weird arabesques on the wall, and, as the monk moved across the floor, his shape loomed high above them and seemed to bend strangely at the juncture of the wall and ceiling. Huge cobwebs dangled in their eyes. Carson felt a thin piece of gossamer float before him, and jumped as a tiny spider ran hurriedly over his lips. He brushed it off.