Mr Splitfoot (Dr Basil Willing)

by Helen McCloy

  “I might have known it!” Ginevra sighed ecstatically. “The Three Graces didn’t have names, did they? But the Three Fates did, and we even have an idea what they looked like, if we can trust Michelangelo. Did these three play a fateful role in the Crowe family history?”

  David Crowe looked at her thoughtfully across the table. “You’re careful to say fateful, not fatal. How odd that so many words derived from the word fate should imply death.”

  “Not odd at all,” protested Folly. “Fate is the inescapable, love and death. When the Victorians said ‘his fate,’ they meant either ‘his love’ or ‘his death.’ Were these three girls concerned with love or death?”

  “Both.” Crowe paused to relish a sip of wine. “Atropos alone lived to a great old age. She held tight to her property and hoarded her money. Her heirs, who had expected to be men of means while they were still young, soon realized that they would have to scratch for a living all through middle age.”

  “And what happened to Clotho and Lachesis?” It was as near to a show of interest as Alcott had come all evening.

  “There was a young man.”

  “There always is.”

  “He had studied medicine at the University of Paris, so he must have represented all that was cosmopolitan and romantic in their eyes. I remember hearing that he taught them to play the waltz from the new opera, Traviata. There’s a portrait of him around somewhere. He was handsome in a swarthy, saturnine way, with a high forehead and proud eyes. Just the kind of face repressed young ladies fall in love with in any era. What a pity the human sexual instinct is so dependent on visual impressions, but then some biologists say that sight was originally a male secondary sexual trait.”

  “Which one fell in love with him?”

  Crowe laughed. “Which would you expect?”

  “The youngest,” said Lucinda.

  “The oldest,” said Folly. “She had been waiting longest.”

  “They say middle children are the loneliest,” put in Gisela.

  “All three of them had been living alone with their father ten miles from the nearest town for a number of years,” mused Basil. “And there were no cars. Just horses.”

  “You win,” said Crowe. “They all fell in love with him, of course. Enter Conflict, laughing.”

  “Did he choose one?”

  “The youngest, Lachesis.”

  “Why didn’t she marry him?”

  “He died. He was the first to be found dead in the room we’re talking about.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was about a week before the wedding. His family lived in town. By ‘town’ I mean what was then the drowsy little Hudson River village of Pratt’s Landing and what is now the thriving little Hudson River town of Prattsville. He rode over to spend the day and, I suppose, make plans for the wedding.”

  “Imagine riding over that mountain road!” said Basil.

  “People did, just as they used to drive through the Swiss Alps by diligence when my mother was a child.”

  “Diligence?”

  “An open carriage and a pair of horses in summer. There was a great deal of summer travel in these mountains in those days. After all, we’re in the same line of country as Saratoga and the old Catskill Mountain House.”

  “Did it happen in summer?”

  “No, October. That may or may not mean snow up here, but that time it did snow. Like the Willings, he hadn’t expected to spend the night here, but the roads were becoming impassable, as they are tonight, so Jonathan Crowe showed him to the only vacant room—a little room at the head of the stairs. There was only a couch there because the Crowes had always used it as a sewing room. Of course there was no gas or electricity then, so Jonathan Crowe lighted his guest’s way with an oil lamp and left it on a little round table beside the couch.

  “Next morning, when the sun didn’t rouse the young guest for breakfast, a servant was sent to his room. He was still lying on the couch, apparently asleep. Only when the maidservant approached him did she see that he was dead.”

  “Didn’t they make any attempt to find out how he died?”

  “This was 1870, about five years after the Civil War. Medical jurisprudence was in its infancy, especially in country districts where police procedure is still more easygoing than in the big cities. He hadn’t been ill. There were no wounds or other marks of violence on his body. His heart had just stopped. So the verdict was: Death from shock, cause unknown.”

  “Did they lock up the room after that?”

  “No. In those days, when families lived in houses for several generations, a room where a death had occurred was just another room. Clotho, the eldest, had always had a room of her own. Atropos and Lachesis had always shared a room. But, within a few weeks of the young man’s death, Lachesis asked her father if she could move into the room where the death had occurred, the room that had always been a sewing room until then.”

  “Wasn’t that rather odd?”

  “There was no other empty room. Sharing a room with a sister who had also been in love with the dead man may have had its drawbacks for the one he had chosen, the one who had really lost him. Or she may simply have wanted privacy. We know now that even animals become abnormal in overcrowded living quarters. Among civilized human beings privacy is a necessity. If you haven’t one room where you can be alone at will, you are living in prison.”

  “Was there talk of a ghost then?”

  “Apparently not . . . unless you count Lachesis’ own words as they have come down to us by oral tradition. She is said to have said to someone: ‘I am not afraid. How could I be afraid of Laurence?’ Anyway, whatever her reason, she did move her few belongings into the sewing room.”

  “And she was found dead in the morning?”

  “Of course. The whole shape of the story as we know it from later developments makes that inevitable.”

  Crowe had the full attention of his audience now. There was a whiff of brimstone about that second death. They all felt it. Even Bradford Alcott turned his lack-luster gaze on Crowe with something like interest.

  “And that’s when the ghost talk started?”

  “Well . . . if the heart just stops beating and there’s no apparent physical cause, you naturally begin to think in terms of other causes.

  “All we actually know is that after a few weeks Atropos asked if she could share Clotho’s room. She explained the request by saying that the room she had shared with Lachesis was becoming distasteful to her. She said that she was always expecting to see Lachesis there. She didn’t say that she saw Lachesis, or even that she felt the invisible presence of Lachesis. She just said that she expected to see Lachesis. Lovely word in that context—expected.”

  “And this is the first hint of anything like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like . . . well . . . overwrought nerves? Things left unsaid?”

  “Oh, yes. Even then on the surface Atropos simply wanted to leave the room she had shared with Lachesis because of its tragic associations.”

  “And below the surface?”

  “Isn’t it significant that there was never any question of Atropos’ occupying any of the other empty rooms in the house? There were two guest rooms and, after her father died, his room was vacant, but there was never any question of her occupying any of those rooms. She asked specifically to share Clotho’s room with Clotho, as if she were afraid to be alone, and she must have been quite insistent for Clotho to give up the privilege of having a room of her own for what she must have regarded as a sick fancy of her younger sister’s.”

  “Perhaps Clotho was afraid to be alone, too.”

  “Perhaps. Whatever the reason, Clotho and Atropos shared a bedroom for thirty years while all the other bedrooms in the house remained empty except when there were guests. The room where Lachesis and her young man had died was never shown to guests. Its door was never unlocked, and the myth grew.”

  “Naturally,” said Swayne. “The myth-making p
art of the mind abhors coincidence. There has to be an intelligible pattern of cause and effect or we lose the illusion that we can control our environment. When no rational pattern is discernible, we automatically invent an irrational pattern.”

  “The genesis of this one is pretty obvious then,” said Crowe. “Was it just coincidence that the only two people who ever slept in that room were both found dead the next morning? There must be something in the room that makes people die if they sleep there. Since there is no apparent natural cause, there must be a supernatural cause.”

  “Exactly.” Swayne grimaced. “Myths, like scandals, grow rapidly as if they had a life of their own borrowed from the living minds that entertain them so hospitably.”

  “This particular myth grew fast as a weed,” continued Crowe. “By the time Clotho and Atropos were old women it had become a Gothic romance. All three sisters loved the young man. One of them had stolen into his room the night before he died, one of the two he didn’t love. She had killed him by threatening to kill herself. She knew his heart was weak. She knew or at least hoped the stress of such a scene would be too much for him.”

  “And who killed Lachesis, then?”

  “The jealous sister who had killed the young man also killed Lachesis later and by the same method, frightening her to death.”

  “Don’t tell us she had a weak heart, too!” exclaimed Folly.

  “Oh, no, those were the days when women fainted or went into a decline and died of a broken heart at the drop of a hat. You didn’t have to prove that a woman’s heart was physically weak in order to make people believe she had been frightened to death.”

  “Which was the killer, according to the myth?” asked Basil. “Clotho or Atropos?”

  “It had to be Atropos. She is the one of the Three Fates who cuts the thread of life. Clotho and Lachesis merely spin and draw out the thread as it grows. Michelangelo painted Atropos shears in hand with a face that makes the Mona Lisa’s smile look as naive as a baby’s first grin. Why else did Atropos fear to go on sleeping in the room she had shared with Lachesis? Why else did she ‘expect’ to ‘see’ Lachesis at any moment? Isn’t the murderer’s fear of the ghost of the murdered the most ancient of all fears? Why else was Atropos afraid even to sleep alone?”

  “Did Clotho suspect?”

  “Who can say? She did take Atropos into her own room to live. Would anyone voluntarily share a room with a murderer? The myth-makers say ‘yes.’ They say Clotho must have suspected but she didn’t probe because she had loved the young man, too, and been as jealous of Lachesis as Atropos. Whatever the truth, both surviving sisters lived under a cloud for many years with no company but one another, sharing one small bedroom in a house where there were four other bedrooms and several maids’ rooms.”

  “Intimate hostility.” Ginevra shuddered. “Too grim to think about.”

  “And it lasted a long time. They were both old women when Clotho was found dead one morning.”

  “Not in the room at the head of the stairs!”

  “Of course. The symmetry of the myth demands that. There were two stories. First, Atropos killed Clotho because Clotho finally discovered proof that Atropos was guilty. Second, Atropos betrayed herself to Clotho involuntarily and she was afraid to let Clotho go on living once Clotho knew. The wicked flee when no man pursueth.”

  “But how and why did Clotho get into a room that had been locked up for a whole generation?” demanded Basil.

  “No one knows, really. Again there were stories.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “There’s never been much traffic on the road that passes this house, but a man did drive along that road the night that Clotho died, a farmer on his way to the farmhouse where Vanya and his mother now live. It was after midnight, but he saw lights in the house here and he heard pounding and someone crying: ‘Let me out! Oh, God, let me out!’ ”

  “And he didn’t stop?”

  “Most people hate being involved in family quarrels. The farmer had been drinking, he was barely literate and he believed every word he had ever heard about a ghost at Crow’s Flight. He was human. He hurried home as fast as he could.”

  “But he talked the next morning?”

  “Oh, yes. That’s human, too. He talked after Clotho’s body was found and people whispered that Atropos had forced Clotho into the haunted room and locked the door from the outside, leaving her alone all night with the terror that had been accumulating for thirty years. Clotho was an old woman by that time. It was too much for her.”

  “And Atropos escaped justice?”

  “Yes—if there was justice to escape. This whole story may be a tissue of lies concocted to explain a few coincidences and three natural deaths. Atropos is in her nineties now, paralyzed and speechless in a sanitarium. When she finally dies, the house will come to me. I’ll be free to sell it then. All my interests are in New York. A place like this is too large and too far out for me.”

  “It’s just what we’ve been looking for,” said Folly. “A comfortable country house with plenty of land and privacy where we can live all year round. A writer doesn’t have to live in town. When we do go in for a few days, we can always stop at a hotel.”

  Basil looked at Swayne. “And the ghost doesn’t bother you?”

  “Not me.”

  “But you keep the room locked?”

  “David insisted on that when he let us have the house, so I agreed. There are plenty of other rooms.”

  “Only sensible thing to do.” Folly’s hands fluttered over the silverware beside her plate as if she couldn’t keep them still and yet had to rationalize their fluttering by pretending the knives and forks needed aligning more precisely. “If there’s any possibility at all that people die in that room for some reason we cannot understand, how frightful to take a chance on such a possibility! I’d much rather be called superstitious than find a guest of mine dead there some morning. Let’s have our coffee in the living room, shall we?”

  The fire on the great stone hearth had died down to what Gisela called a “ruby mine,” a mound of incandescent red embers with almost invisible blue flames playing on their surface.

  Swayne heaved a birch log across the embers, took down a bellows from the wall and added its breath to the chimney draught.

  Basil was watching Lucinda. Why did the child keep stealing glances at her wrist watch guardedly as if she hoped no one would notice what she was doing? Was she expecting a telephone call? She couldn’t be expecting a visitor so late on a night like this . . .

  He was putting his coffee cup down on a table when the motion was arrested by a sudden sound.

  The birch log? He glanced at the grate, expecting to see a shower of sparks, but there was none. He looked at Lucinda again. She had dropped her eyelids. One hand lay in her lap, palm up, relaxed, but the other hand, half hidden in a fold of her skirt, was clenched in a tight fist.

  The noise came again. This time it was different. Or did it merely sound different to him because he could no longer associate it with the fire? It was no longer a knock or a rap. It was sharper, more like the snap of castanets.

  Serena was smiling. “These old houses with their wooden beams! If they warm up during the day, the wood will contract when they cool off after sunset and then it’s pop, snap, crackle!”

  “It wasn’t really warm today,” said Crowe.

  “And that doesn’t sound like wood contracting,” added Alcott. “More like a steam radiator. How old is the heating system?”

  “Pretty old. As I said, it was the first in the county. But it’s hot air, not steam. Registers, not radiators. Funny how fashion comes full circle. Now we’re back again to fitted carpets and hot-air furnaces. When I was a child, they were hopelessly old-hat and everybody was ripping them out.”

  The next noises were louder. Lucinda spoke suddenly in a high taut voice. “Why . . . those raps are coming in groups of three!”

  “There must be someone tapping at the door,” Gisel
a’s voice was calm as if she were trying to set Lucinda an example.

  “I doubt it,” said Swayne. “But I’ll make sure.”

  He switched on floodlights before he opened the wide front door. Falling snow guttered a silent shower of diamond dust in the light. Beyond, the newly fallen snow lay unmarked and immaculate.

  “Nobody there.” He shut the door and switched off the outdoor lights.

  “Did you think there would be?” Lucinda’s voice climbed higher. “Did you?”

  She had risen. Her face was fever-pink. Her pale eyes glittered like the snowflakes. Her high voice rang out crystal-hard, eldritch, compelling:

  “Do as I do, Mr. Splitfoot!”

  She clapped her hands three times.

  Promptly the answer came: Rap . . . rap . . . rap . . .

  Folly gasped aloud.

  Swayne spoke sharply “Lucinda, do you know what’s happening?”

  Basil thought he saw a flash of malice in Lucinda’s glance, but the glance was for Folly, not for Swayne.

  Before she could answer him, the telephone rang.

  Swayne picked it up. “Yes? . . . Oh, too bad. . . . She’s here. . . . You want to speak to her?” His eyes were troubled as he looked at his daughter. “For you.”

  “For . . . me?” Lucinda was short of breath.

  “Your friend Vanya.”

  “Vanya . . . but . . . where is he?”

  “At home, of course. Where else would he be? He’s calling to tell you that he can’t come out tonight and—God!”

  Lucinda had crumpled to the floor. Basil had trouble finding her pulse. When he did, it was thin and irregular. She wasn’t shamming. She had fainted.

  Chapter Six

  THE CLOCK ON THE chimney shelf was close to eleven. Fresh logs on the fire had not yet caught and the living room seemed cold. Basil Willing crossed its wide floor to the front door. At his touch floodlights sprang into being outside and he saw through windows on either side of the door that the snow had stopped falling. Now there was only an arctic stillness in the white world beyond the door. He should have no trouble getting Gisela to the hospital tomorrow.