The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

  “He screamed out: ‘For God’s sake, Fenton, take it off me!’

  “And for the last time the thing jumped.

  “They were over near the curtains of that bay window, which were drawn as they are now. Miss Twigelow, who was nearest, says that Mr. Wilkes could not have seen anything, because the white bag was still drawn over the woman’s head. The only thing she noticed was that at the lower part of the bag, where the face must have been, there was a curious kind of discoloration, a stain of some sort which had not been there before: something seemed to be seeping through. Mr. Wilkes fell back between the curtains, with the hooded person after him, and screamed again. There was a kind of thrashing noise in or behind the curtains; then they fell straight again, and everything grew quiet.

  “Now, our Kentish cider is very strong, and for a moment Mr. Fenton did not know what to think. He tried to laugh at it, but the laugh did not sound well. Then he went over to the curtains, calling out gruffly to them to come out of there and not play the fool. But, after he had looked inside the curtains, he turned round very sharply and asked the rector to get the ladies out of the room. This was done, but Miss Abbott often said that she had one quick peep inside. Though the bay windows were locked on the inside, Mr. Wilkes was now alone on the window seat. She could see his beard sticking up, and the blood. He was dead, of course. But, since he had murdered Jane Waycross, I sincerely think that he deserved to die.”

  For several seconds the two listeners did not move. She had all too successfully conjured up this room in the late ’seventies, whose stuffiness still seemed to pervade it now.

  “But look here!” protested Hunter, when he could fight down an inclination to get out of the room quickly. “You say he killed her after all? And yet you told us he had an absolute alibi. You said he never went closer to the house than the windows.…”

  “No more he did, my dear,” said the other.

  “He was courting the Linshaw heiress at the time,” she resumed; “and Miss Linshaw was a very proper young lady who would have been horrified if she had heard about him and Jane Waycross. She would have broken off the match, naturally. But poor Jane Waycross meant her to hear. She was much in love with Mr. Wilkes, and she was going to tell the whole matter publicly: Mr. Wilkes had been trying to persuade her not to do so.”

  “But——”

  “Oh, don’t you see what happened?” cried the other in a pettish tone. “It is so dreadfully simple. I am not clever at these things, but I should have seen it in a moment: even if I did not already know. I told you everything so that you should be able to guess.

  “When Mr. Wilkes and Dr. Sutton and Mr. Pawley drove past here in the gig that night, they saw a bright light burning in the windows of this room. I told you that. But the police never wondered, as anyone should, what caused that light. Jane Waycross never came into this room, as you know; she was out in the hall, carrying either a lamp or a candle. But that lamp in the thick blue-silk shade, held out there in the hall, would not have caused a bright light to shine through this room and illuminate it. Neither would a tiny candle; it is absurd. And I told you there were no other lamps in the house except some empty ones waiting to be filled in the back kitchen. There is only one thing they could have seen. They saw the great blaze of the paraffin oil round Jane Waycross’s body.

  “Didn’t I tell you it was dreadfully simple? Poor Jane was upstairs waiting for her lover. From the upstairs window she saw Mr. Wilkes’s gig drive along the road in the moonlight, and she did not know there were other men in it; she thought he was alone. She came downstairs——

  “It is an awful thing that the police did not think more about that broken medicine-bottle lying in the hall, the large bottle that was broken in just two long pieces. She must have had a use for it; and, of course, she had. You knew that the oil in the lamp was almost exhausted, although there was a great blaze round the body. When poor Jane came downstairs, she was carrying the unlighted lamp in one hand; in the other hand she was carrying a lighted candle, and an old medicine-bottle containing paraffin oil. When she got downstairs, she meant to fill the lamp from the medicine-bottle, and then light it with the candle.

  “But she was too eager to get downstairs, I am afraid. When she was more than half-way down, hurrying, that long nightgown tripped her. She pitched forward down the stairs on her face. The medicine-bottle broke on the tiles under her, and poured a lake of paraffin round her body. Of course, the lighted candle set the paraffin blazing when it fell; but that was not all. One intact side of that broken bottle, long and sharp and cleaner than any blade, cut into her throat when she fell on the smashed bottle. She was not quite stunned by the fall. When she felt herself burning, and the blood almost as hot, she tried to save herself. She tried to crawl forward on her hands, forward into the hall, away from the blood and oil and fire.

  “That was what Mr. Wilkes really saw when he looked in through the window.

  “You see, he had been unable to get rid of the two fuddled friends, who insisted on clinging to him and drinking with him. He had been obliged to drive them home. If he could not go to ‘Clearlawns’ now, he wondered how at least he could leave a message; and the light in the window gave him an excuse.

  “He saw pretty Jane propped up on her hands in the hall, looking out at him beseechingly while the blue flame ran up and turned yellow. You might have thought he would have pitied, for she loved him very much. Her wound was not really a deep wound. If he had broken into the house at that moment, he might have saved her life. But he preferred to let her die: because now she would make no public scandal and spoil his chances with the rich Miss Linshaw. That was why he returned to his friends and told a lie about a murderer in a tall hat. It is why, in heaven’s truth, he murdered her himself. But when he returned to his friends, I do not wonder that they saw him mopping his forehead. You know now how Jane Waycross came back for him, presently.”

  There was another heavy silence.

  The girl got to her feet, with a sort of bouncing motion which was as suggestive as it was vaguely familiar. It was as though she were about to run. She stood there, a trifle crouched, in her prim brown dress, so oddly narrow at the waist after an old-fashioned pattern; and in the play of light on her face Rodney Hunter fancied that its prettiness was only a shell.

  “The same thing happened afterwards, on some Christmas Eves,” she explained. “They played Blind Man’s Bluff over again. That is why people who live here do not care to risk it nowadays. It happens at a quarter-past seven——”

  Hunter stared at the curtains. “But it was a quarter-past seven when we got here!” he said. “It must now be——”

  “Oh, yes,” said the girl, and her eyes brimmed over. “You see, I told you you had nothing to fear; it was all over then. But that is not why I thank you. I begged you to stay, and you did. You have listened to me, as no one else would. And now I have told it at last, and now I think both of us can sleep.”

  Not a fold stirred or altered in the dark curtains that closed the window bay; yet, as though a blurred lens had come into focus, they now seemed innocent and devoid of harm. You could have put a Christmas-tree there. Rodney Hunter, with Muriel following his gaze, walked across and threw back the curtains. He saw a quiet window-seat covered with chintz, and the rising moon beyond the window. When he turned round, the girl in the old-fashioned dress was not there. But the front doors were open again, for he could feel a current of air blowing through the house.

  With his arm round Muriel, who was white-faced, he went out into the hall. They did not look long at the scorched and beaded stains at the foot of the panelling, for even the scars of fire seemed gentle now. Instead, they stood in the doorway looking out, while the house threw its great blaze of light across the frosty Weald. It was a welcoming light. Over the rise of a hill, black dots trudging in the frost showed that Jack Bannister’s party was returning; and they could hear the sound of voices carrying far. They heard one of the party carelessly singing a Ch
ristmas carol for glory and joy, and the laughter of children coming home.

  THE MAN FROM NOWHERE

  OVER THE COURSE of the last half century or more, it has been virtually impossible for an author to earn a living as a short-story writer, but Edward Dentinger Hoch (1930–2008) was that rare exception. He produced about nine hundred stories in his career, approximately half of them published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, beginning in 1962. In May of 1973, Hoch started a remarkable run of publishing at least one story in every issue of EQMM until his death—and beyond, as he had already delivered additional stories.

  Readers have never been able to decide which is their favorite of Hoch’s series characters, but there can be little argument that his most unusual is Simon Ark, who was the protagonist of his first published story, “Village of the Dead,” which ran in the December 1955 issue of Famous Detective Stories, one of the last pulp magazines. Ark looks to be an ordinary man in his sixties but claims to be a two-thousand-year-old Coptic priest who has spent the past two millennia touring the globe in search of Satan in order to do battle with him. Is he really what he claims to be? The author has never answered the question, preferring to leave the decision to readers. The stories always present a fantastic situation (the disappearance of all the people in a village, the murder of one member of a cult in a dark cellar while all the other members are hanging from crucifixes) but are resolved in the classic detective manner of observation and deduction, without any supernatural elements playing a role. Ark stories have been collected in several volumes: The Judges of Hades and Other Simon Ark Stories (1971), City of Brass and Other Simon Ark Stories (1971), and The Quests of Simon Ark (1984).

  “The Man from Nowhere” was first published in the June 1956 issue of Famous Detective Stories; it was first collected in The Quests of Simon Ark (New York, Mysterious Press, 1984).

  EDWARD D. HOCH

  THE INTERESTED READER may find the tale of Kaspar Hauser’s strange life and stranger death related at some length in volume eleven of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And perhaps the story of Douglas Zadig’s life and death will be there some day, too.

  For Douglas Zadig was also a man from nowhere, a man who came out of the mists and died in the snow—just as Kaspar Hauser had over one hundred years ago.

  This is the story of Douglas Zadig’s last day on earth, and of the people who were with him when he died.…

  It was a cold, bleak Friday afternoon in early November when Simon Ark called me at my office. I was in the midst of checking some final galley proofs for our January books, but I tossed them aside when I recognized his voice on the line. “Simon! How’ve you been?”

  “Busy,” he replied. “How would you like to go up to Maine for the weekend?”

  “Maine? In November? Nobody goes up there except hunters this time of year.”

  “Hunters and publishers,” Simon Ark corrected; “I want to see a man, and since he’s a writer of sorts, I thought it might be good to take you along. That is, if you’re free.…”

  I’d learned long ago that an invitation from Simon Ark was never as casual as it sounded. If he was going up to Maine for the weekend, there was a reason for it, and I wanted to be with him. “I’m free,” I said. “When should I meet you?”

  “Can you be at Grand Central at six? We’ll take the New Haven part of the way.”

  “I’ll be there. At the information booth.…”

  I called my wife after that, explaining the reason for my sudden trip. She knew Simon Ark almost as well as I did, and she was one of the few people in this world who understood. She said goodbye to me with that little catch in her breath that told me she’d be waiting for whatever adventures I had to relate upon my return.

  And then I was off, on a weekend I was never to forget.…

  I’d first met Simon Ark years before, when I was still a newspaper reporter; and though I’d lost track of him for several years, he’d turned up again recently to renew our friendship. He was an odd man by any standards, a tall, heavy-set figure with an expression that was at times saintly.

  My experiences with him in the past, together with the tales he’d related to me over a beer or a glass of wine, told me that he was someone not really of our world at all. He belonged to the world of the past—to the world of the supernatural, perhaps, but certainly not to the world of twentieth century America.

  He was a man who was searching, searching for what he called the Ultimate Evil, the devil himself. I’d laughed at first, or thought possibly that he was a little crazy; but I didn’t laugh any more, and I knew that if anything he was the sanest man in the world. He found evil everywhere, because there was evil everywhere, and I knew that someday he would have his wish; someday he would confront Satan himself.

  That was why I always went with him when he asked. He’d been searching for a long time, and the meeting might never take place in my lifetime; but if it did I wanted to be there, too.

  So that was why I was with him as the train rumbled north toward New England that night. “What’s it all about this time, Simon?” I asked finally, when no information was forthcoming.

  He gazed out the train window, almost as if he could see something in the darkness besides the irregular patterns of light from buildings and roads.

  Presently he asked, “Did you ever hear of a man called Douglas Zadig?”

  The name seemed somehow familiar, but I had to shake my head. “Who is he?”

  “He is a man from nowhere, a man without family or country, a man without a past. You may have read about him some ten years ago, when he walked out of an English mist one night to become an overnight sensation.”

  “I remember now,” I said. “He was a youth of about twenty at the time, and he claimed to have no memory of his past life. He spoke English very poorly, and his clothes were almost rags. The only thing he remembered was that his first name was Douglas. When they found him, he was carrying a worn French copy of Voltaire’s novel, Zadig, so the newspapers named him Douglas Zadig.”

  “You have a good memory for details,” Simon Ark said. “As you probably remember, this Douglas Zadig has remained a complete mystery. His fingerprints were not on file anywhere in the world; his picture has never been identified by anyone. He is simply a man without a past.”

  “I lost track of him a few years back, though,” I told Simon. “What’s he been doing recently?”

  “I ran into him a few years ago in London,” Simon Ark continued. “I was in England to investigate an odd happening in Devonshire, and I happened to hear him speaking at a sort of rally. He’s become quite a writer and speaker in some circles—a sort of prophet, I suppose you’d call him.”

  “Is this the man we’re going up to Maine to see?”

  “Quite correct. He came to this country with an American doctor two years ago. The doctor—a man named Adam Hager—has actually adopted him as a son, and the two of them are living in Maine.”

  “Odd, but hardly in your field of investigation, is it, Simon?”

  The train rumbled on through the small New England towns, along the dark waiting waters of Long Island Sound. Around us, people were drifting into sleep, and the seat lights were being dimmed.

  Simon Ark took a slim volume from his pocket and held it out for my examination. I glanced at the cover and saw that the unlikely title was On the Eternal War Between the Forces of Good and the Forces of Evil. The author was Douglas Zadig.

  “So?” I questioned.

  Simon Ark returned the book to his pocket. “The odd thing about this book—as with all of Douglas Zadig’s writings and speeches—is that his apparently new philosophy is actually lifted almost word for word from the teachings of a religious leader named Zoroaster, who lived seven centuries before Christ.…”

  It took us until Saturday noon to reach our destination, a small town called Katahdin in the northern part of the state. It was cold up here, and a fresh layer of snow already covered the ground. All around us were mountains
and lakes and forests, and it seemed impossible that such a place could be only a single night’s journey from New York.

  There was a small hotel of sorts, where we left what few belongings we’d brought along. It was all but empty now, but in another week I imagined it would be full of sportsmen up from Bangor and Boston.

  “You fellows hunters?” the room clerk asked us. “Little early in the season for good hunting.”

  “We’re hunters of a very special type of game,” Simon Ark replied. “Can you direct us to the house of Doctor Hager?”

  “Sure; it’s right at the edge of town, where the road turns. Big white place. You can’t miss it.”

  “Thank you.”

  The house of Doctor Hager was indeed easy to find; and from the look of the barren white fields that surrounded it, I guessed that someone had once tried farming the land.

  Doctor Hager himself was average in almost every respect. He might have been a typical country doctor, but he might just as well have been a big-city businessman. There was a look of shrewdness about his eyes that contrasted with the weak smile that seemed always on his lips.

  Simon Ark explained that we were from a New York publishing company, and had come up to speak with Douglas Zadig about the possibility of doing one of his books.

  “Come in, by all means,” Doctor Hager urged us. “I’m sure Douglas will be happy to speak with you. There are so many people interested in his work.…”

  The house was even larger than it had seemed from outside, and we saw at once that we were not the only visitors. A handsome young woman of perhaps thirty, and an older man with thin, drawn features were sitting in the living room.