Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “That man is a menace,” said Nancy. “Do ghosts use telephones?”

  “I don’t get you. Maybe I’m a bit—”

  “Morgan Lewis is a menace to himself and to half Darjeeling at this very moment,” said Nancy. “He is riding a motorcycle, in the dark, in the rain, without a headlight.”

  Elsa wriggled with delight. “Andrew, I told you!”

  Andrew stared at Nancy Strong: “You mean Lewis isn’t dead? How do you know?”

  “He was talking to me a few minutes ago,” said Nancy. “But of course — a motorcycle, at his time of life — and belonging at that to a Lepcha pharmacist’s assistant — probably no brakes — and rotten tires — yes, he may be dead by this time—”

  “He isn’t!” said Elsa. “He’s coming! I know it! I can feel it! He is bringing good news!”

  “It will be bad news for someone,” Nancy answered. “Unless that impudent Bulah Singh has sense enough to—”

  “Listen!” said Elsa.

  The machine-gun sputter of a decrepit motorcycle, hard-ridden, slowed up the drive and coughed to a standstill.

  Elsa nodded triumphantly: “Dr. Lewis!”

  “This has me beat,” said Andrew. “The place feels like a madhouse.”

  “The whole world is a madhouse,” said Nancy Strong. “You shot Morgan Lewis. Here comes his ghost. Perhaps his ghost is a little bit sane. We’ll soon know.”

  The bell rang. The barefooted servant upset a chair in the hall in his hurry to reach the front door.

  “I’m a failure,” said Nancy. “I have had that servant for fifteen years. But I can’t train him not to fear ghosts. Someone told him Lewis is dead. I told him Lewis is coming. So a dead man’s here! And now listen to him.”

  CHAPTER 15

  The door opened. The turbaned servant, white-eyed with superstition, staring at Lewis, switched on the light. Lewis waited for the servant to close the door behind him, then switched the light off. Andrew stood up. Lewis strode through the firelit gap between the screen of bookcases straight toward Elsa and stood beside the armchair, looking down at her, with the firelight gleaming on his monocle.

  “Did you get my message?” he demanded.

  “I knew you weren’t hurt. I knew you were coming. Is that what you mean?”

  “Did she? Can anyone prove it?”

  “Yes,” said Andrew.

  “Yes,” said Nancy Strong.

  “Good girl!” said Lewis. “That settles it. You may return to Tibet with Andrew Gunning.”

  “Dr. Lewis, you’re an angel,” said Elsa. But everyone knew she resented his manner.

  “It’s the devil who lets people do as they please,” Lewis answered. He nodded to her, recognizing unspoken comments. “Yes,” he added, “you’ve been where I never had a chance to go. But all the same, I’m the purveyor of dispensations.” He stared at Andrew: “You should be on your way now, and in hiding, before daylight.”

  Andrew squared his shoulders: “That suits me — seeing it’s you, not Bulah Singh.” He took the poker and prodded the fire.

  “Gently!” Nancy warned him. “Gently! That poker once belonged to Lord Tennyson. Don’t break it.”

  “Are the shutters tight?” Lewis asked.

  “No,” said Nancy, “not particularly. The repair-man didn’t come.”

  Lewis chose the chair in the corner between bookcase and hearth.

  “What more,” he remarked, “could a man with a pistol ask for than shutters that can be opened from outside!”

  “In twenty years, bullets have ruined three of my best books,” Nancy remarked. “Weaklings have been bullet-minded ever since the World War. But an average of one in six or seven years isn’t very exciting, is it?”

  “Who got shot in my room at the hotel?” Andrew asked.

  “No one,” said Lewis. “But the top of your head is above the book-case now, so sit down.”

  Andrew chose the chair in the corner facing Lewis. “Then the whole story’s a fake?”

  “My word, no. I was shot at, if there’s such a thing as evidence. Gunning, you are circumstantially guilty of attempted murder with an unregistered Luger automatic known to belong to you. The bullet went into the bedroom wall. The Luger was tossed into a bureau drawer by whoever used it. You are now making tracks for the sky line. Now! You are on your way — now. You haven’t spoken to me. I’m a ghost. If necessary you will lie about that, blackly and without equivocation, taking all the consequences.”

  “Okay. But I can’t read thought. Do we get the lowdown?”

  “Yes — from high Olympus.” Lewis turned toward Elsa: “Tell what happened,” he said quietly, taking her wrist.

  “But, Dr. Lewis, I don’t know what happened.”

  “Not yet, perhaps. But you haven’t looked. Look now. What took place in Andrew Gunning’s room at the hotel?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If you hadn’t touched her she might have been able to read it,” said Nancy Strong. “It won’t work that way, Morgan. You have made her self- conscious. You will have to tell your own story.”

  Andrew blundered to the rescue: “Besides, she hates that stuff,” he objected. “Elsa; don’t you let him rag you.” He grinned pugnaciously at Lewis. “She’s been run ragged by Bulah Singh, on top of her own worries. You let her alone.”

  Nancy Strong spoke with authority, as if Lewis were a small boy: “Morgan, Andrew is right. Don’t be cruel. Tell all of us what you told me just now over the telephone. I want to hear it again.”

  “Since I’m in on this,” said Andrew, “you might begin where we left off, in my room at the hotel. You warned me that Bulah Singh might trace Elsa here. So he did. I heard you lock my room door when I came away. After that, what?”

  “I unlocked it again,” said Lewis.

  “So you knew what was going to happen? It was all in the bag?”

  Lewis laughed: “That’s a beautiful phrase. No, nothing’s in the bag — yet; not even Bulah Singh, although he’s so scared we can bet on his making another mistake.”

  “He seemed so cocksure here in this room, that he had me well fooled for a couple of minutes,” said Andrew.

  “Several of us may be in the bag, as you call it, unless you fool him by staying fooled,” Lewis answered. “The same man who wants you to get going toward Tibet prevented these shutters from being repaired. Nearly all hypnotists are self-hypnotized into absurdly overestimating their own craftiness. Bulah Singh is no exception. He feels he is playing a sort of occult chess against inferior opponents. He is too busy scorning his opponents’ ignorance to notice his own mistakes. He feels like an invisible influence, because hypnotism can’t be fingerprinted, or photographed or boiled in a tube for analysis. He is so cocksure of the secrecy of what he’s doing — and of the superiority of his own intelligence — that he did an almost incredibly stupid thing. He employed a down-at-heel Eurasian, suffering from catatonia — ordered him to shoot me with your pistol.”

  “What’s catatonia?” asked Andrew.

  “It’s a form of schizophrenia. That’s the up-to-date name for dementia praecox. The man also has more or less dormant syphilis, suppressed some years ago by quack treatment. He will die of it one of these days, unless they hang him. He has been hypnotized to the point where he’s simply a diseased mass of anti-social illusions. Didn’t you notice the man on your way out of your bedroom?”

  “No,” said Andrew.

  “He was there, in the corridor, waiting. Perhaps he stepped into the lavatory to avoid you.”

  “Come to think of it,” said Andrew, “Bulah Singh did mention, after you’d left us alone together in my room, that he’d posted a man at the stairhead to prevent anyone from listening in to our conversation.”

  “That was the man. Nathaniel Braganza Lemon. Not too bad-looking, but narrow between the eyes and a long, pointed chin. Degraded Virgo, in case you know what that means. Illegitimate son of an infantry corporal who was hanged for murdering the lad’s G
oanese-Japanese-Irish mother. Bad heredity. Bad environment. No character there to begin with. Plenty of hell rubbed into him as he grew up in the red-light district of Lahore and elsewhere. Persecution complex — envy, hatred, malice, greed — how he kept clear of the gallows I don’t know. We’ve his prison and hospital record.”

  “And you knew he was laying for you?” Andrew asked.

  “Yes. Fortunately! I know quite a lot about Lemon. Had him under observation for a while, in hospital, in Delhi. He was a nuisance. Had to discipline him. Wasn’t mad enough to be locked up, nor sane enough to appreciate generous treatment at public expense. I turned him out finally. Bulah Singh ran across him by chance on a visit to Delhi and brought him here for use as an informer — not a policeman, you understand — a mere spy, paid hardly enough from the secret fund to keep body and soul together. So it was actually Lemon who first drew my attention to Bulah Singh. I learned that Bulah Singh was using him for hypnotic experiments. That brought Bulah Singh automatically into my special orbit.”

  “Why?” asked Elsa, as if Lewis were the point at issue, not Lemon or Bulah Singh. The one word sounded almost like an ultimatum.

  “Trust a woman to ask that question!”

  “Won’t you answer it, Dr. Lewis?”

  “Yes.” He smiled. “It isn’t safe not to answer. You might start thought- reading and find out too much! The answer is: we keep track of counterfeiters. Hypnotism, unrestrained by moral discipline, and unsupervised by science, is counterfeit ambition. That is my phrase. Don’t you quote it or they’ll call you crazy. Ninety percent of hypnotists become so intellectually vain and amoral that they think they can get away with anything, murder included.”

  “Ninety-nine per cent of them,” said Nancy Strong.

  “You and I don’t agree there,” said Lewis. “Anyhow, one thing leading to another, we discovered that Bulah Singh was hypnotizing various criminal types and making very interesting experiments. He was also using mediums and clairvoyants. By the use of suggestion he caused criminals to commit petty crimes, of the kind for which they were temperamentally suited. Then he would hypnotize a medium or a clairvoyant and command him to detect the crime. He soon discovered that the mediums were useless; and good clairvoyants are much harder to find. I knew what he was doing, but it was practically impossible to get legal evidence.”

  Elsa interrupted again: “Why?”

  “Because a criminal hypnotist, speaking directly to the unconscious mind of the victim, commands the victim to act but to forget who ordered him to act, and also to forget the act itself.”

  “It’s that trick of forgetting,” said Nancy Strong, “that makes the whole wide world so easy to corrupt. We even forget what prime ministers and presidents said last week.”

  “We watched Bulah Singly” said Lewis, “on the general principle that the deliberate use of secret power over other people always — always, mind you — arouses appetite for more. It becomes insatiable. In that respect it’s worse than drink or drugs. The greater the appetite for power, the less the respect for truth. It’s a self-stimulating vice, especially deadly when rooted in experience of actual authority and aggravated by intellectual conceit. That’s the reason why so-called statesmen are such liars. It wasn’t long before we uncovered Bulah Singh’s little game.”

  “Why didn’t you break him right then?” Andrew objected.

  “For the same reason that we didn’t deport Tom Grayne, and you too,” Lewis answered. “Given time and opportunity Bulah Singh will break himself — beyond the slightest shadow of doubt he’ll do that. But meanwhile, if he’s carefully watched, we can learn even more from him than from you and Tom Grayne.”

  Elsa moved suddenly, startled: “Dr. Lewis! Do you mean you think Tom will — will break, as you call it?”

  “Oh, yes. You’re laboratory mice, that’s all. Probably all three of you will meet your end in Tibet. The job is too big. You haven’t a chance. But that’s your lookout. We’re none of us immortal.”

  “Oh, yes, we are,” said Nancy Strong. “We all are.”

  Lewis smiled at her: “Immortal? In spite of us medical men?”

  “Go on telling about Bulah Singly” said Nancy.

  Lewis nodded. “Yes. If the immortal Nancy gets a word in sideways, there’ll be—”

  Nancy interrupted: “Time, Morgan, time! Tell your story.”

  Lewis laughed. “Very well. — Bulah Singh hypnotized Lemon. He gave him Gunning’s Luger. He posted him in the hotel corridor and ordered him to shoot me if he could catch me alone in Gunning’s room. Circumstantial evidence would point to Gunning, who would then have to obey Bulah Singh in all particulars or else hang for murder.”

  “Holy smoke, that Sikh took a long chance!” said Andrew.

  “Longer than you guess,” said Lewis. “Hypnotism is a boomerang.”

  “And, seems to me, you took an even longer chance.”

  “Oh no. Rudimentary hypnotism is as unintelligent as money. I was prepared for Lemon. When he opened the door and stuck his head through I hit him on the back of the neck with a piece of rubber hose.”

  “Swell. But he had a Luger! You don’t call that taking a chance?”

  “Oh no. I’m an anatomist; I know just where to hit. The rest, of course, was quite simple. I fired a shot with the Luger, to make things all nice and plausible, lifted Lemon on to your bed, tied him hand and foot, tossed the Luger into an open bureau drawer, and phoned for the hotel manager. Hotel managers are valuable people if you take care to win their confidence. I operated on Mr. Nazareth, years ago, for an obscure spinal complaint. He very luckily recovered and has been absurdly grateful to me ever since for not having killed him. So we’re excellent friends. Nazareth locked the door and refused to open it for anyone less than the Chief of Police. Messengers were sent to hunt up the Chief of Police. I cleared out, by the back way, while Nazareth spread all the necessary rumors. That’s all. Except that you are on your way to Tibet.”

  Andrew laughed. “I’d give something to see Bulah Singh’s face when he finds Lemon hog-tied on my bed.”

  “No chance of that,” said Lewis. “Bulah Singh might have suicided Lemon with the Luger — perhaps with the butt end. Hypnotists whose little tricks don’t work become hysterical. So I turned in an ambulance call.”

  “But you said the door was locked,” Elsa objected. “If Mr. Nazareth wouldn’t let them open the door—”

  Lewis smiled: “Never say no to the fire brigade, the inspector of drains, or the ambulance man. Lemon is in hospital, safe, under observation.”

  “Any chance of getting Lemon to talk?” asked Andrew.

  “I doubt it,” said Lewis. “At any rate, not for a long time. He didn’t see me — doesn’t know who hit him — had been ordered to forget — I think he’ll say nothing of any importance.”

  “Take the rap for attempted robbery or some charge like that?”

  “He will probably entertain himself with secret mental pictures of me, being killed by him, in all sorts of peculiar ways. After that he will lapse into sex-dreams.”

  “And will Bulah Singh get off scot-free?” asked Elsa.

  “Well, my dear girl, what can he be charged with at the moment? If Andrew Gunning clears out, as he is about to do, who can accuse Bulah Singh of doing what?”

  Nancy Strong chuckled: “Andrew might stay,” she suggested. “Put some wood on Andrew.”

  Andrew chose cedar knots thoughtfully, placing them carefully, thinking, thinking.

  “Andrew Gunning goes before daylight,” said Lewis, “while the going is good. Bulah Singh shall be informed of it.” He glanced at Andrew: “I suppose he knows your route?”

  “Boasted he did. I guess he knows some of it.”

  “Good. He will go his limit to make sure the route is kept wide open for you.”

  “And do I go with Andrew — now?” Elsa asked. “All right, I’m ready!”

  Lewis stared at her. He looked almost shocked. “Of course not! Nancy
Strong will turn you over to Mu-ni Gam-po’s men. They will smuggle you through on their way northward. But we must always save face for the police; so Mu-ni Gam-po’s loads, that are in the monastery stable with Gunning’s name on them, will be sent in the wrong direction to give the police an excuse for a false hunt. Bulah Singh shall be correctly informed that Gunning bolted and left you behind. Is that clear?”

  “Morgan!” said Nancy Strong. “You are too fond of being clever. What you actually are, is a romantic fifty-year-old schoolboy. What is to prevent Bulah Singh from killing Elsa to stop her from talking?”

  “That’s your job,” said Lewis.

  “Nonsense! How could I protect her? You had better have Bulah Singh pounced on now. Think! You have plenty of evidence to—”

  Lewis interrupted: “No! No! All women think intuition is legal evidence and evidence is proof. Cases aren’t cured by suppressing symptoms. No. If necessary, but not otherwise, I will try to get Bulah Singh suspended from duty for having let Gunning escape across the frontier. But I don’t want to do even that. Bulah Singh may make some very informing mistake if we give him time. He’s afraid. A frightened hypnotist is a dangerous fool who is trying to ride two wild horses. Their names are Physics and Metaphysics. That man is absolutely sure to come a cropper.”

  Suddenly Andrew got out of his chair, passed quietly through the gap between the bookcases and stood listening.

  “Shutter?” asked Lewis.

  “Yes. Quiet, please, everybody.” Andrew walked to the corner window, about ten feet beyond where Lewis sat with his back to the bookcase. The closed shutter moved. The window opened about two inches. A hand appeared in the opening. Andrew grabbed at the hand but missed it.

  “Who is it?” he demanded.

  A voice answered in a hoarse whisper: “That you, Gunnigun?”

  “Oh. You? Okay. Watch the house. Watch the windows. Wait for me. I won’t be long now.”

  The shutter closed. Andrew closed the window.

  “Your man?” asked Lewis.

  “Yes. Bompo Tsering.”