by H. F. Heard
“You mean it’s getting to be a confounded nuisance!”
“Oh, this isn’t heat,” he smiled. “We’d have to go on if it were only that. There’s not enough oblique shadow to show the tracks in the shingle now.”
He looked round him and then, very much like an old but lively goat, began to scramble up a huge boulder which lay in the shingle, thrown there, I suppose, by some earthquake. He saw handholds and footings in it as shrewdly as he had seen in the shingle the faint blurred traces of the ten footsteps which we were pursuing. Gently and without strain, he worked his way up until he stood on the top, some twenty feet above my head. Taking small binoculars from his pocket, he swept the desolation ahead. In a couple of minutes more he was beside me again.
“You sometimes can find a lost track again if you can get a little above it. Fifty feet above water you’ll see much deeper and clearer than when looking down immediately above the surface. I think I can see how the trail goes over the further shingle and I’m pretty certain that on beyond, on another sand stretch, I can see marks going forward as before.”
Another panting, stumbling advance and we were at the sand. Sure enough, the trail went on clearly once more. It was only a short spell, however, and this time it ended not in shingle but in hard ground on which not a shadow of a trace remained.
I must say that it was with relief I remarked, “Now we shall have to stop.”
“Well, you wait behind this rock out of the sun while I scout around.” I lay down and watched the indefatigable old figure turning and dipping just like some great stork looking for small frogs under stones. After some ten minutes of this he paused for a little at one spot, bent down, then turned and called me. Unwillingly I got up on my feet and went over.
“You see”—that familiar opening, but I was quicker now.
“Yes, a small bush of desert holly,” I answered, “and it’s been pulled about quite lately.”
“Right; one of the burros took a bite at it. Hardly a refreshing leaf, that ghostly prickle. But look, he took it in his mouth and it acted as a kind of chewing gum. He turned it over and then”—all the while we were again scudding along in the intense heat—“bit by bit he let the chewed fiber fall from his lips.”
That desert holly trail took us much farther than I had feared, but at last it, too, gave out.
We had reached a sort of low saddle. Behind us we could look back, for the ground I now noticed had been gently rising all the while, along the whole chain of dried lakes. In the next wide and shallow depression, I suppose, once had gathered the streams, torrents, and headwaters whose overflows filled the areas below. The opening in our forward view gave us a welcome pause, for Mr. Mycroft again swept the area with his glasses. He had climbed another boulder and, at last convinced that there was nothing ahead, was taking a last sweep of the landscape well away from our direction, far out to the right. I was watching him with some impatience, for I felt that he was just refusing to give up, trying to find excuses for not going back and so looking in directions where there could be nothing, just to waste time.
I was, indeed, about to call to him that obviously nothing could be expected in that direction, the rocks sloped right up and ended in a mountain wall, when as I rose to catch his attention I saw that his sweeping gaze had become fixed. He was, through his glasses, attentively studying something. A breeze quite strong, but anything but refreshing—rather like a draught from an oven—was now blowing up from behind us. Through it he called down to me, “From here I can see, I’m sure, something fluttering.” He took his bearings carefully. Then he scrambled down and set off in the direction he had sighted.
Of course it was farther than I had imagined. I’d thought, I’d hoped he’d seen some clue comparatively close. In the end, though, after dips in which we lost sight of the place where he said it lay and rises in which the rocks to which he pointed looked no nearer, we saw clearly across a small canyon. It couldn’t be, now I caught a clear look of it, withered leaves on an old branch—but it was that color. It dipped and wavered in the wind, which now was unpleasantly strong. Mr. Mycroft stopped and looked. He didn’t raise his binoculars.
“Careless,” was his only description of what he made out. He then looked carefully onto the ground from where we stood toward the waving branch. “No clues here” he remarked. “Walk carefully and notice anything on the ground that might be a trace.”
As I was trying to do this and following him, I did not notice that we had reached the foot of the canyon and had come some distance up the other side. Mr. Mycroft had stopped, we had evidently reached our objective. Even now, looking down on it, I couldn’t for a moment see exactly what it was. It wasn’t a branch. It stuck out from under some stones. A second look and I glanced up to see Mr. Mycroft watching me.
“I said ‘careless,’ didn’t I?”
It didn’t seem to me the time to draw attention to one’s “dicta.”
“That,” I said, drawing back as I said it, “That’s—that has been a human hand and arm!”
He was already kneeling down. I gingerly approached again.
“It was said of a desolate land, ‘In that place there is not water to drown a man, a tree to hang him on, or earth to bury him in,’” he remarked over his shoulder. “Well, it’s even harder here to dispose of your dead. And here, you see, death is an embalmer.”
He took the poor withered limb. After the first shock of recognizing what it was, I saw that there was nothing really repugnant in it. It was beautiful almost, this bone, wound about with shrunken sinew and perfectly desiccated flesh. To and fro it waved in the wind, a gesture attractive in a growing tree. It was as flexible as a spring. Mr. Mycroft had already removed the greater part of what, it was now clear, was a hastily made low cairn. I helped, and as we uncovered what it had almost hidden, I felt strongly the need to be friendly with the only living man in this desert of death, which here, for us, centered in a dead man, a man turned into a desert thing—more desiccated than the desert holly, his flesh drier than well-cured parchment.
“Why did you say ‘careless?’” I asked, conciliatingly.
“Well,” he replied, not looking up from his final task of taking the last stones off the dead man’s feet, “it is careless not to bury more carefully when you have murdered.”
“You’re sure?” I asked.
“Look at the skin. It’s perfectly unbroken anywhere else. But there is a tear in the chest and I think that darker color on the piece of shirt is pretty certainly blood.”
It was hard to deny the unpleasant deduction. But still, this was not at all my notion of a murdered man. I’d never seen such an object and now it lay before me. The skin was stretched to the tautness of a drum over the sinews and bones. The whole creature was the barest outline of a man. I had never imagined anything could be so withered, desiccated. But save for that hole in the chest, the skin was unbroken.
“It’s horrible and unbelievable,” I said.
“Yes,” he replied. “Whoever killed that man who once filled out this shell at our feet didn’t know enough about the desert. It’s life that abolishes history and records and traces. Death is the preserver—the Keeper of the Records. This man was killed. We’ll go into the how and the why later. Let’s now try and understand why he was let signal to us searchers. He’s shot,” went on Mr. Mycroft, evidently reconstructing the conditions in his mind and so working back from what was present to what had happened, “he’s shot probably by someone who followed him, by someone who perhaps relieved him of his burros and of other things and then a considerable time after, when what has been taken off him has been studied (for even the desert takes some time to do as fine a piece of tanning and curing as this), the burros with their new master pass again near by, seeking their old master’s trail and goal. But here we are only at the day of the murder. The dead must be buried. Well, as we are agreed, burial here is a difficulty: cover him, then, with stones. But desiccation here is quite unusual. A body, our bodie
s are some 68 per cent water. If you can dehydrate such a sponge—well, it goes as hard and springy as a well-cured sponge. That is what this desert did. It put the evidence immediately into its perfect preservative—air, super-thirsty for any drop of damp. Our killer goes off, having packed his limp victim, with arms huddled across the breast, under the heap of small stones. Then the desert got to work and, as it carried out its embalming, limp and soggy muscles coiled and shrank like wet rope; lax sinews twisted like spring wire. The arm on the upper side curled itself round—the pebbles rolled off—the springy limb waved its macabre au revoir to its enemy, its summons to us.”
“You know who killed this man!” I interrupted.
“No, I don’t, for certain.”
“Why, it must be—”
“Mr. Silchester, you know now as well as I that it is just as important never to run ahead of one’s actual evidence, never to make a leap, as it is never to miss a single signpost that it offers us. I have said it is certain that this man was not killed by the last man who passed this way.”
“All right,” I said, vexed that he should still be the old master when, after all, I had now graduated. “If guessing is out, what does your detective deduction give us?”
“This man, we agree, has been shot; murder probably, manslaughter certainly. The next thing we can settle before we attempt the why and ‘by whom,’ is the fairly simple question of ‘when.’ The desert works quickly hereabouts, but, as I’ve said, it needs a certain time. I’ve used dehydration several times for preserving specimens, severed limbs, and the like,” he said casually. “I know the rate. The air here is peculiarly favorable”—that detachment, as arid as this forbidding wilderness, calling this fatal desolation “peculiarly favorable”!—“a steady hot wind all the daylight hours and practically zero humidity. And there is a final and peculiar feature in the air of this place. If we had approached from the other side, I should have been puzzled. But those dried lakes gave me the clue, as we came along, though I did not know that we should be needing it. Those sand beds are so well caked because they are dense with natron salts, so common in these desert lakes. When at night there is a slight humidity and this salt-laden air rises and is borne over this ridge, then this drying body would take up these salts and so become, as it is, literally pickled—a natural tanning process. The same sort of thing can take place under a number of circumstances, wherever the same balance, though in different proportions, is preserved. In the vaults of the old church of St. Michan’s in Dublin, there the bodies exposed simply to the right mixture of air impregnated with the gases from an old, marsh-engulfed oak forest are just like this, pickled, tanned, quite cured and flexible. Yes, the process would be quick here, quicker than there, quicker perhaps in this one spot than anywhere. Therefore a most unwise place to commit homicide and hope that nature would clear up your traces.
“Yet even here,” he bent down and touched the springy limb which wheezed gently as it swung, “even here, I feel sure, there must be quite a considerable time before the weather-curing required for this extreme of dehydration could be attained. So this man met his end by shooting some months, perhaps half a year ago. Now, who is he? Well, he is someone that someone wanted to murder or at least to rob. I suspect what clothes he had, beyond this shirt and trousers, were taken and, after searching, burnt. You see, a search, a hasty one, was made. The trouser pockets have been pulled out, so as not to miss an inner pocket, and not put back.” Mr. Mycroft was kneeling close beside the shriveled cadaver. “Um,” he said, “hurried but not unthorough. That nip out of the shirt was to remove the sales tag, I suspect.”
“Well,” I put in at that point, “we can’t find out anything more. Hadn’t we better get back and notify a sheriff or someone?”
The whole thing was rather too gruesome for my liking, and the longer we hung over this really horrible twist of what had been a man, the more Mr. Mycroft seemed to become absorbed by it. He positively brooded over it like some huge bat. The situation had become positively eerie for me and I was just trying to raise my spirits by reflecting that, after all, a vampire could not have chosen a less productive victim than this sorry bundle of sinews and shriveled skin, when, looking down, I was—well, horrified and disgusted. For Mr. Mycroft had taken hold of the object. He had raised it so that his lean, hard, white face looked into its face, dun-colored and chapfallen. But that was not the shock. It was what he did with it as it lay on his knee. He had slipped his left hand round the back of its scrawny neck until I could see his long fingers squeezing its jaws. He was manipulating it like a hideous ventriloquist’s dummy. And, sure enough, to my alarmed disgust, the mouth did open. I saw the withered tongue come forward as the muscles at its base were squeezed in the neck.
“What are you doing?” I cried.
He made no reply, so absorbed was he in his beastly task, whatever its purpose. For a moment my fear made me think he might have gone mad—too much heat and exertion and, no doubt, shock—all that coolness was only cover and pretense—and here was I alone in the desert with the corpse of a murdered man and a lunatic playing with it. I couldn’t take my eyes off that terrible pair. But the next thing which the living did to the dead, reassured me. It was only my panic which had made me believe that he was trying to make the cadaver speak. No, he was examining not the play of the tongue but the line of the teeth. With relief, I felt sure he was looking for any dental work whereby, maybe, an identification could be made.
“But why not look at the finger marks?” I suggested, anxious to show myself that we were still the right side of sanity and, gruesome though our actual occupation was, it was really only part and parcel of a routine inspection any policeman would be expected to make.
“The skin has stretched away all its natural markings,” he said without turning round. “No, it’s here we’ll find a reference, if anywhere.”
Curiosity overcame my disgust. I bent over his shoulder and peered into the dead man’s mouth, opened now just the way a strangled rat’s will gape. No, there was no dental plate or bridgework or indeed anything but a few noncommittal fillings and a gap or two where a few of the middle teeth had been lost.
“Nothing to report,” I said, glad to have joined in the inspection and not to have winced. Now, at last, we could go.
But a last and worst shock was in store for me. Just as I thought we could leave this wretched shred of mortality under its rearranged pebbles, for some official to take or leave, I saw Mr. Mycroft, instead of putting it down, shift his hold. His left hand forced the mouth to open still wider until the horrid thing seemed laughing at us. Then quickly his right hand darted into the mouth. There was a sort of tussle which was one of the most nauseatingly ludicrous things I have ever seen—a ghastly sort of Punch and Judy act—as the thing wobbled and struggled and Mr. Mycroft wrestled and hung on. At last there was a tearing sound which really nearly made me sick. Mr. Mycroft let the corpse fall on the ground and slipped something into his pocket.
I was so upset that when he said, “That is all we can do now. Help me, while I cover this over again with the pebbles,” that I hastily joined in scattering shingle over the withered thing (the waving arm, I’m glad to say, Mr. Mycroft made rest by putting the body face down) and followed him dumbly as we turned back toward our base.
I think Mr. Mycroft knew I was shocked, but perhaps he was just indifferent to what I felt. Perhaps he was completely absorbed in his puzzle, treating that horrid object with the detachment I should treat such a word as cadaverine, for instance, if I knew that it was really a code-concealer. I should be quite indifferent to the fact that that word stands for one of the most terrible of stenches, and so I suppose Mr. Mycroft regarded what we had found as just so much evidential material. I was tired and really exhausted by the time we reached our base. He, with his easy reserve of energy, poured out cold coffee from the flask and offered me cigarettes though, I noticed, he did not smoke.
“Kerson won’t be here for another couple of hours.
I didn’t expect we’d net such a fish in our first cast. It made going farther not worth while, at present.” He sat back and now was evidently enjoying the austere scenery with complete appreciation. There was nothing else to do and, with his usual power of attention, he did it.
At last, as the pools of blue shadow began to fill up the shallow fawn-colored cups of the lake-beds, we heard the motor’s purr in the distance. Before night fell we were back in the cave camp.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Henry FitzGerald “Gerald” Heard (1889–1971) was an English philosopher, lecturer, and author. The BBC’s first science commentator, he pioneered the study of the evolution of consciousness, which he explored in his definitive philosophical work The Ascent of Humanity (1929). A prolific writer, Heard was also the author of a number of fiction titles, including mysteries and dystopian novels. He is best known for his beloved Mycroft Holmes mystery series.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1941 by The Vanguard Press
Rights reverted to H. F. Heard
Copyright renewed 1969 by H. F. Heard
Copyright transferred to The Barrie Family Trust
Foreword Copyright © 2009 by Stacy Gillis, Ph.D.
Afterward Copyright © 2009 John Roger Barrie
Cover design by Andrea Worthington
