“Pasty!” Crow exclaimed, “Powers of observation, indeed! I was just thinking, before hearing your name, what a thin, pasty creature you look—Pasty.” Crow grinned, got out of bed and put on his flame-red dressing-gown. Joe looked him up and down appraisingly. Crow was tall and broad-shouldered and it was plain to see that in his younger days he had been a handsome man. Even now there was a certain tawniness about him, and his eyes were still very bright and more than intelligent. Overall his aspect conveyed an impression of hidden power, which Joe did not particularly care much for. He decided it would be best to show his authority at the earliest opportunity. And Crow obligingly supplied him with that opportunity in the next few seconds.
The jibe the occultist had aimed at Pasty had meanwhile found its way home. Pasty’s retaliation was a threat: “Lovely colour, that dressing-gown,” he said, “it’ll match up nicely if you bleed when I rap you on your head.” He laughed harshly, slapping a metal cosh into his open palm. “But before that, you will tell us where it is, won’t you?”
“Surely,” Crow answered immediately, “it’s third on the left, down the passage … ugh!” Joe’s pistol smacked into Crow’s cheek, knocking him sprawling. He carefully got up, gingerly fingering the red welt on his face.
“Now that’s just to show you that we don’t want any more funnies, see?” Joe said.
“Yes, I see,” Crow’s voice trembled with suppressed rage. “Just what do you want?”
“Now is that so difficult to figure out?” Pasty asked, crossing the room. “Money … we want your money! A fine fellow like you, with a place like this—” the lean man glanced appraisingly about the room, noting the silk curtains, the boukhara rugs, the original erotic illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley in their rosewood frames “—ought to have a good bit of ready cash lying about … we want it!”
“Then I’m sorry to have to disappoint you,” Crow told him happily, seating himself on his bed. “I keep my money in a bank—what little I’ve got.”
“Up!” ordered Joe briefly. “Off the bed.” He pulled Crow to one side, nodding to Pasty, indicating some sort of action involving the bed. Crow stepped forward as Pasty yanked back the covers from the mattress and took out a sharp knife.
“Now wait …” he began, thoroughly alarmed.
“Hold it, guv, or I might just let Pasty use his blade on you!” Joe waved his gun in Crow’s face, ordering him back. “You see, you’d be far better off to tell us where the money is without all this trouble. This way you’re just going to see your little nest wrecked around you.” He waited, giving Crow the opportunity to speak up, then indicated to Pasty that he should go ahead.
Pasty went ahead!
He ripped open the mattress along both sides and one end, tearing back the soft outer covering to expose the stuffing and springs beneath, then pulling out the interior in great handfuls, flinging them down on the floor in total disregard of Crow’s utter astonishment and concern.
“See, guv, you’re a recluse—in our books, anyway—and retiring sorts like you hide their pennies in the funniest places. Like in mattresses … or behind wall-pictures!” Joe gave Pasty a nod, waving his pistol at the Beardsleys.
“Well for God’s sake, just look behind them,” Crow snarled, again starting forward, “there’s no need to rip them off the walls.”
“Here!” Pasty exclaimed, turning an enquiring eye on the outraged householder, “these pictures worth anything then?”
“Only to a collector—you’d never find a fence for stuff like that,” Crow replied.
“Hah! Not so stupid, our recluse!” Joe grinned, “But being clever won’t get you anywhere, guv, except hospital maybe. Okay, Pasty, leave the man’s dirty pictures alone. You—” he turned to Crow “—your study; we’ve been in there, but only passing through. Let’s go, guv, you can give us a hand to, er, shift things about.” He pushed Crow in the direction of the door.
Pasty was last to enter the study. He did so shivering, an odd look crossing his face. Pasty did not know it but he was a singularly rare person, one of the world’s few truly “psychic” men. Crow was another—one who had the talent to a high degree—and he sensed Pasty’s sudden feeling of apprehension.
“Snug little room, isn’t it?” he asked, grinning cheerfully at the uneasy thug.
“Never mind how pretty the place is—try the panelling, Pasty,” Joe directed.
“Eh?” Pasty’s mind obviously was not on the job. “The panelling?” His eyes shifted nervously round the room.
“Yes, the panelling!” Joe studied his partner curiously. “What’s wrong with you, then?” His look of puzzlement turned to one of anger. “Now come on, Pasty boy, get a grip! At this rate we’ll be here all bleeding night!”
Now it happened that Titus Crow’s study was the pride of his life, and the thought of the utter havoc his unwelcome visitors could wreak in there was a terrifying thing to him. He determined to help them in their abortive search as much as he could; they would not find anything—there was nothing to find!—but this way he could at least ensure as little damage as possible before they realized there was no money in the house and left. They were certainly unwilling to believe anything he said about the absence of substantive funds! But then again, to anyone not knowing him reasonably well—and few did—Crow’s home and certain of its appointments might certainly point to a man of considerable means. Yet he was merely comfortable, not wealthy, and, as he had said, what money he did have was safe in a bank. The more he helped them get through with their search the quicker they would leave! He had just made up his mind to this effect when Pasty found the hidden recess by the fireside.
“Here!” The nervous look left Pasty’s face as he turned to Joe. “Listen to this.” He rapped on a square panel. The sound was dull, hollow. Pasty swung his cosh back purposefully
“No, wait—I’ll open it for you.” Crow held up his hands in protest.
“Go on then, get it open,” Joe ordered. Crow moved over to the wall and expertly slid back the panel to reveal a dim shelf behind. On the shelf was a single book. Pasty pushed Crow aside, lifted out the book and read off its title:
“The … what? … Cthaat Aquadingen! Huh!” Then his expression quickly turned to one of pure disgust and loathing. “Ughhh!” He flung the book away from him across the room, hastily wiping his hands down his jacket. Titus Crow received a momentary but quite vivid mental message from the mind of the startled thug. It was a picture of things rotting in vaults of crawling darkness, and he could well understand why Pasty was suddenly trembling.
“That … that damn book’s wet!” the shaken crook exclaimed nervously.
“No, just sweating!” Crow informed. “The binding is, er, human skin, you see. Somehow it still retains the ability to sweat—a sure sign that it’s going to rain.”
“Claptrap!” Joe snapped, “And you get a grip of yourself.” He snarled at Pasty. “There’s something about this place I don’t like either, but I’m not letting it get me down.” He turned to Crow, his mouth strained and twisting in anger: “And from now on you speak when you’re spoken to.” Then carefully, practicedly, he turned his head and slowly scanned the room, taking in the tall bookshelves with their many volumes, some ancient, others relatively modern, and he glanced at Pasty and grinned knowingly. “Pasty,” Joe ordered, “get them books off the shelves—I want to see what’s behind them. How about it, recluse, you got anything behind there?”
“Nothing, nothing at all,” Crow quickly answered, “for goodness sake don’t go pulling them down; some of them are coming to pieces as it is. No!”
His last cry was one of pure protestation; horror at the defilement of his collection. The two thugs ignored him. Pasty, seemingly over his nervousness, happily went to work, scattering the books left, right and centre. Down came the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe, the first rare editions of Machen’s and Lovecraft’s fiction; then the more ancient works, of Josephus, Magnus, Lévi, Borellus, Erdschluss and Wittingb
y; closely followed by a connected set on oceanic evil: Gaston Le Fe’s Dwellers in the Depths, Oswald’s Legends of Liqualia, Gantley’s Hydrophinnae, the German UnterZee Kulten and Hartrack’s In Pressured Places …
Crow could merely stand and watch it all, a black rage growing in his heart, and Joe, not entirely insensitive to the occultist’s mood, gripped his pistol a little tighter and unsmilingly cautioned him: “Just take it easy, hermit. There’s still time to speak up—just tell us where you hide your money and it’s all over. No? Okay, what’s next?” His eyes swept the now littered room again, coming to rest in a dimly lighted corner where stood a great clock.
In front of the clock—an instrument apparently of the “grandfather” class; at least, from a distance of that appearance—stood a small occasional table bearing an adjustable reading-lamp, one or two books and a few scattered sheets of notepaper. Seeing the direction in which Joe’s actions were leading him, Crow smiled inwardly and wished his criminal visitor all the best. If Joe could make anything of that timepiece, then he was a cleverer man than Titus Crow; and if he could actually open it, as is possible and perfectly normal with more orthodox clocks, then Crow would be eternally grateful to him. For the sarcophagus-like thing in the dim corner was that same instrument with which Crow had busied himself all the previous day and on many, many other days since first he purchased it more than ten years earlier. And none of his studies had done him a bit of good! He was still as unenlightened with regard to the clock’s purpose as he had been a decade ago.
Allegedly the thing had belonged to one Etienne-Laurent de Marigny, once a distinguished student of occult and oriental mysteries and antiquities, but where de Marigny had come by the coffin-shaped clock was yet another mystery. Crow had purchased it on the assurance of its auctioneer that it was, indeed, that same timepiece mentioned in certain of de Marigny’s papers as being “a door on all space and time; one which only certain adepts—not all of this world—could use to its intended purpose!” There were, too, rumours that a certain Eastern mystic, the Swami Chandraputra, had vanished forever from the face of the Earth after squeezing himself into a cavity hidden beneath the panel of the lower part of the clock’s coffin shape. Also, de Marigny had supposedly had the ability to open at will that door into which the Swami vanished—but that was a secret he had taken with him to the grave. Titus Crow had never been able to find even a keyhole; and while the clock weighed what it should for its size, yet when one rapped on the lower panel the sound such rappings produced were not hollow as might be expected. A curious fact—a curious history altogether—but the clock itself was even more curious to gaze upon or listen to.
Even now Joe was doing just those things: looking at and listening to the clock. He had switched on and adjusted the reading-lamp so that its light fell upon the face of the peculiar mechanism. At first sight of that clock-face Pasty had gone an even paler shade of grey, with all his nervousness of a few minutes earlier instantly returned. Crow sensed his perturbation; he had had similar feelings while working on the great clock, but he had also had the advantage of understanding where such fears originated. Pasty was experiencing the same sensations he himself had known when first he saw the clock in the auction rooms. Again he gazed at it as he had then; his eyes following the flow of the weird hieroglyphs carved about the dial and the odd movements of the four hands, movements coinciding with no chronological system of earthly origin; and for a moment there reigned an awful silence in the study of Titus Crow. Only the strange clock’s enigmatic and oddly paced ticking disturbed a quiet which otherwise might have been that of the tomb.
“That’s no clock like any I’ve ever seen before!” exclaimed an awed Joe. “What do you make of that, Pasty?”
Pasty gulped, his Adam’s apple visibly bobbing. “I … I don’t like it! It … it’s shaped like a damned coffin! And why has it four hands, and how come they move like that?” He stopped to compose himself a little, and with the cessation of his voice came a soft whispering from beyond the curtained windows. Pasty’s eyes widened and his face went white as death. “What’s that?” His whisper was as soft as the sounds prompting it.
“For God’s sake get a grip, will you?” Joe roared, shattering the quiet. He was completely oblivious to Pasty’s psychic abilities. “It’s rain, that’s what it is—what did you bleeding think it was, spooks? I don’t know what’s come over you, Pasty, damned if I do. You act as if the place was haunted or something.”
“Oh, but it is!” Crow spoke up. “At least, the garden is. A very unusual story, if you’d care to hear it.”
“We don’t care to hear it,” Joe snarled. “And I warned you before—speak when you’re spoken to. Now, this … clock! Get it open, quick.”
Crow had to hold himself to stop the ironic laughter he felt welling inside. “I can’t,” he answered, barely concealing a chuckle. “I don’t know how!”
“You what?” Joe shouted incredulously. “You don’t know how? What the hell d’you mean?”
“I mean what I say,” Crow answered, “so far as I know that clock’s not been opened for well over thirty years!”
“Yes? S … so where does it p … plug in?” Pasty enquired, stuttering over the words.
“Should it plug in?” Crow answered with his own question. Joe, however, saw just what Pasty was getting at; as, of course, had the “innocent” Titus Crow.
“Should it plug in, he asks!” Joe mimed sarcastically. He turned to Pasty. “Good point, Pasty boy—now,” he turned back to Crow, menacingly, “tell us something, recluse. If your little toy here isn’t electric, and if you can’t get it open—then just how do you wind it up?”
“I don’t wind it up—I know nothing whatsoever of the mechanical principles governing it,” Crow answered. “You see that book there on the occasional table? Well, that’s Walmsley’s Notes on Deciphering Codes, Cryptograms and Ancient Inscriptions; I’ve been trying for years merely to understand the hieroglyphs on the dial, let alone open the thing. And several notable gentlemen students of matters concerning things not usually apparent or open to the man in the street have opinionated to the effect that yonder device is not a clock at all! I refer to Etienne-Laurent de Marigny, the occultist Ward Phillips of Rhode Island in America, and Professor Gordon Walmsley of Goole in Yorkshire; all of them believe it to be a space-time machine—believed in the case of the first two mentioned, both those gentlemen now being dead—and I don’t know enough about it yet to decide whether or not I agree with them! There’s no money in it, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Well, I warned you, guv,” Joe snarled, “space-time machine!—My God!—H. G. bloody Wells, he thinks he is! Pasty, tie him up and gag him. I’m sick of his bleeding claptrap. He’s got us nervous as a couple of cats, he has!’
“I’ll say no more,” Crow quickly promised, “you carry on. If you can get it open I’ll be obliged to you; I’d like to know what’s inside myself.”
“Come off it, guv,” Joe grated, then: “Okay, but one more word—you end up immobile, right?” Crow nodded his acquiescence and sat on the edge of his great desk to watch the performance. He really did not expect the thugs to do much more than make fools of themselves. He had not taken into account the possibility—the probability—of violence in the solution of the problem. Joe, as a child, had never had much time for the two-penny wire puzzles sold in the novelty shops. He tried them once or twice, to be sure, but if they would not go first time—well, you could usually make them go with a hammer! As it happened such violence was not necessary.
Pasty had backed up to the door. He was still slapping his cosh into his palm, but it was purely a reflex action now; a nervous reflex action. Crow got the impression that if Pasty dropped his cosh he would probably faint.
“The panels, Pasty,” Joe ordered. “The panels in the clock.”
“You do it,” Pasty answered rebelliously, “that’s no clock and I’m not touching it. There’s something wrong here.”
Joe turned to him in exasperation. “Are you crazy or something? It’s a clock and nothing more! And this joker just doesn’t want us to see inside. Now what does that suggest to you?”
“Okay, okay—but you do it this time. I’ll stay out of the way and watch funnyman here. I’ve got a feeling about that thing, that’s all.” He moved over to stand near Crow who had not moved from his desk. Joe took his gun by the barrel and rapped gently on the panel below the dial of the clock at about waist height. The sound was sharp, solid. Joe turned and grinned at Titus Crow. There certainly seemed to be something in there. His grin rapidly faded when he saw Crow grinning back. He turned again to the object of his scrutiny and examined its sides, looking for hinges or other signs pointing to the thing being a hollow container of sorts. Crow could see from the crook’s puzzled expression that he was immediately at a loss. He could have told Joe before he began that there was not even evidence of jointing; it was as if the body of the instrument was carved from a solid block of timber—timber as hard as iron.
But Crow had underestimated the determined thug. Whatever Joe’s shortcomings as a human being, as a safecracker he knew no peer. Not that de Marigny’s clock was in any way a safe, but apparently the same principles applied! For as Joe’s hands moved expertly up the sides of the panelling there came a loud click and the mad ticking of the instrument’s mechanism went totally out of kilter. The four hands on the carven dial stood still for an instant of time before commencing fresh movements in alien and completely inexplicable sequences. Joe stepped nimbly back as the large panel swung silently open. He stepped just a few inches too far back, jolting the occasional table. The reading-lamp went over with a crash, momentarily breaking the spell of the wildly oscillating hands and crazy ticking of de Marigny’s clock. The corner was once more thrown in shadow and for a moment Joe stood there undecided, put off stroke by his early success. Then he gave a grunt of triumph, stepped forward and thrust his empty left hand into the darkness behind the open panel.
Dark Detectives Page 28
