by Sax Rohmer
“Let’s review the facts,” said he, “and figure out our chances. You claimed there awhile back, Max, that we weren’t constantly watched. I say what happened in the Felsenweir woods showed for sure you were wrong. That outer barrage, whatever it is, was put down after Woodville and I went through.
If it had been there when we started we’d have struck it.”
“I cannot agree, my friend. In my opinion the gate is insulated—so is the path. You were lucky enough not to stray from this path.”
“We were covered!”
“From the time you approached Felsenweir, possibly.”
“What about the Voice?”
“Presently,” Max replied, “I shall ask you a question and also Woodville. If your replies are what I expect, I shall offer an explanation, fantastic perhaps, but possible, of this Voice.”
Lonergan and I stared hard at the speaker, and:
“If there’s an acceptable explanation of the Voice,” I said, “there may be one covering the bats, in which event we can rule out the supernatural element.”
“I wish I could think that way,” Lonergan growled. “But we’ve got to find some kind of answer to the question: Why did that poor devil die?”
“He died,” I replied, “because he knew things which the Voice does not intend we shall learn.”
“True enough!” cried Gaston Max. “But how did he die?”
“Let’s just log it,” Lonergan proposed, “that we haven’t the mistiest notion how he died, and then let’s get down to sawdust. He hadn’t a thing on him to prove his identity or connect him with Felsenweir."
“I cannot agree,” Max interrupted. “He wore a steel bracelet with a kind of medal attached to it. On one face of this medal was a number, on the other an Egyptian figure. A strange ornament for a man of his class.”
Strange indeed. I, too, had seen that queer bracelet. Having driven our dead captive to a lonely spot and laid him under the trees, Max—Lonergan acting as torch bearer—had skillfully examined his possessions. It was a scene I could never forget.
“Possibly worn for sentimental reasons,” I suggested. “The man may have been a sailor at some time.”
“There’s nothing sentimental about a number,” Lonergan objected harshly. “4,396 is about as romantic as a taxicab.”
“Congratulations!” Max murmured. “This was indeed the number on the disk.”
“But if, as we have reason to believe,” I went on, “he was killed by the Voice (we know our enemy by no other name), isn’t this evidence that we were watched—even after we left Felsenweir?”
“My point exactly!” said Lonergan. “Let’s agree we were. Next—have we covered our tracks? When the poor devil’s found in the morning are we going to be arrested for murdering him?”
“If so, I was clumsy,” said Max. “But I think —no!”
“I hope you’re right,” Lonergan declared. “Let’s go ahead. We know Felsenweir is inhabited. If it isn’t, why was that poor devil climbing up there? No normal citizen of these parts would go within a mile of it at night. We know: (a)”—he ticked off the points on his fingers—“it’s haunted, or (b) guarded by men in armour—God knows what for! ...
“We know it’s protected by death zones of a kind unheard of by any of us. Argument: it is, as we’re already agreed, the headquarters of somebody who doesn’t encourage interviewers and photographers. We were plainly warned to beat it. We’re still here! If you feel happy—I don’t. I’ll say that poor kite didn’t die a natural death. And if the Voice can strike down that way . . .”
He paused, looking from Max to myself. The latter shrugged and smiled.
“I am willing to bet,” he declared, “that the Voice cannot strike us down so easily. Otherwise he would most certainly have done so.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean that this Voice is not infallible. He failed to foresee the arrival of the poor fellow by whose misfortune you escaped death in those woods! For all his strange powers, he is not yet a god. Fate plays with him as it plays with others. He is, I think, the cleverest, the most dangerous man the world has ever known. He has a wonderful brain; obedient accomplices. Let me test one of my theories about him. Let me ask these questions I spoke of.”
He turned to me.
“Have you recently lost or mislaid any object which you usually carry about with you?”
I stared, scarcely comprehending; but:
“/ have,” Lonergan broke in. “I lost my cigar lighter for a whole day: posted it as missing. Then a waiter brought it back—told me he found it in the garden.”
A gleam of triumph lighted up the eyes of Gaston Max.
“If it’s any answer to your question,” I said, “my wrist watch stopped a few days after I arrived here, and I had to send it to be mended.”
Max bowed as though I had paid him a compliment. He drew out his ornate gold cigarette case; and:
“The hinge of this case became mysteriously broken,” he explained, “on the day I entered Baden-Baden. I also sent it to be mended. I was opening it, my friends, after its return, at the very moment the Voice spoke to me outside the cemetery gate!
“There are employees in this hotel w~ho could tell us much we should like to know! There is a mysterious jeweller in the town who cleverly repairs watches, lighters, and cigarette cases!”
Lonergan had his cigar lighter in his hand and I was staring at my wrist watch as though I had never seen it before. . . .
“I have examined my cigarette case with the utmost care,” Max went on, “and although I do not understand its construction, I have found that a tiny, delicate mechanism—so tiny as to be almost impossible to detect—has been attached inside it!” “Suffering Moses!”
“It is, I think, through this mechanism that the Voice speaks!” . . .
2
“Our only course,” said I, “is to apply to the German authorities and have Felsenweir raided. If possible, tonight—certainly before tomorrow morning.”
“Is that so?”
Lonergan regretfully examined an empty beer bottle.
“It is difficult,” Max murmured. “And as for my own position, the French were never really popular in Germany.”
“What’s more,” said Lonergan, “that’s where we failed back home. When the raiding party got in the ‘cupboard was bare.’ I’d be willing to lay a hundred to one that a raid of Castle Felsenweir would draw blank. It’s supposed to be empty. It’s supposed to be haunted. If we could ginger the German police to take the matter up, we’d maybe find it wasn’t haunted, but we’d surely find it was empty.”
I looked from one speaker to the other. Dimly to my apartment penetrated strains from the dance band still playing almost continuously in the ball room. Laughing voices were audible—footsteps on gravel paths. On the return journey, having dropped our gruesome passenger, we had passed more than one lighted car crammed with fancifully clad figures.
“Imagine,” Max resumed, “that we present ourselves before the chief of police. We identify ourselves. We say: ‘We want a large party of men to go and surround the grounds of Felsenweir. We want the ruins of the castle raided tonight.” He is polite, and: ‘Gentlemen/ he says, ‘what evidence have you upon which I may take this action?’”
Max shrugged, looking from me to Lonergan. “What do we reply? We tell a story, my friends, which no chief of police in Europe would believe. Consider what we know. I put it to you, Woodville, would any editor publish what you have to tell?” “Frankly, I shouldn’t care to put my name to it at the moment-”
“We can prove nothing,” Lonergan broke in. “But there’s one thing we can do.”
“What?”
“We can log it! We can put the record in a safe place. We can tell London, Paris, and New York where the evidence lies. Then—if the Voice acts— we sha’n’t have died for nothing.”
“Good!” said Gaston Max. “With this I am in accord. Woodville—you shall be the scribe.” .
. .
I wrote an account of the night’s strange work, prompted first by one, then by another. It was significantly like the act of a man who feverishly executes his last will and testament, knowing his hours to be numbered.
From moment to moment we were expecting an intrusion . . . the Voice.
Max’s theory had yet to be proved. Even if correct, it pointed to knowledge on the part of our opponent passing the achievements of any scientist of Europe or America.
But except for the intrusion of a waiter summoned by Lonergan to bring more beer, distant strains of dance music, voices, and vague footsteps on garden paths, my task was uninterrupted. The account completed:
“Pin these pages to your earlier notes,” Max directed. “We will all sign it.”
This done and the signatures being blotted:
“What now?” I asked.
“Now,” said Lonergan, “we put it in a large envelope—I see you’ve got some—and we have it locked in the manager’s safe.”
The manuscript was sealed in an envelope which we all three initialled. Max and I set out for the office.
“It would be kind of better,” Lonergan explained, “if I didn’t associate myself with this matter, as I’m now Rev. Josiah Higgins. I might easily have made your acquaintance but I don’t have to be mixed up in your affairs. The Voice has got me taped but the gang mayn’t know where I am.” . . .
The manager was discovered. He agreed to lock the document in his safe. Gaston Max despatched a code wire to Paris, adding that it was to be transmitted immediately to Scotland Yard and cabled to New York Police Headquarters. This done: “To-morrow,” he said, “or, rather, later today, in France, in England, in America it will be known that important information is lodged in the safe of this hotel. It is a precaution which may be unnecessary or may be useless, but, name of a good little man, we can do no more!,,
We went back to my apartment where Lonergan was waiting.
As I turned the key and opened my door, I heard —or thought I heard—a voice. I stopped dead. It was not Lonergan’s voice! The words reached me confusedly, but they seemed to be:
“Wait—and forget!”
I turned to Max.
“You heard it?”
He shook his head.
“I heard nothing.”
I hurried into the apartment, Max close behind me. The first thing which caught my notice was the attitude of Lonergan. He was sitting in an armchair by the writing table, staring around him in a dazed way. In other circumstances I should have supposed that he had fallen asleep and had been awakened by the sounds of our return. But with the menace which hung over us such an idea was ridiculous. Nevertheless, his manner was oddly vague. He stared dreamily. But already my attention had wandered.
The shutters were raised fully six feet! Framed in that square opening was such a nocturne as genius never painted. I saw a moon-bathed nightscape. Max spoke.
“My dear friend, why in heaven’s name did you raise those shutters?”
Lonergan stood up, staring almost angrily at the speaker.
“I thought there was somebody outside.” He spoke in an oddly mechanical way. Max stared at him very hard, crossed, and lowered the shutters.
I was mystified, irritated. But the truth was far from my mind. Would that we had realized what had occurred since Max and I had left the room! Fate ordained otherwise.
Those haggard hands which hovered, eaglesque, over the world, met with no check.
3
Our final conference outlasted the band. All sounds of music and of laughing voices had ceased when at last we parted. Memory of that odd expression of Lonergan’s as I had found him seated with the shutter raised haunted me from time to time. More than once I caught Max glancing shrewdly at him.
His behaviour was normal and his contributions to the conversation were characterized by all his old pungency. Nevertheless, I was uneasy. Admittedly, since the windows were open, the voice might have been that of someone in the gardens. Lonergan’s story was definite enough. Suspicion had prompted him to raise the shutter, but there had been no one on the balcony. Yet it was oddly unsatisfactory.
“This is a case,” said Gaston Max at last, “where there is no strength in numbers. If you take my advice, Woodville, you will not go to bed wearing your wrist watch! It may be useless—one cannot shoot the invisible—but it is reassuring to have a pistol under one’s pillow. And if the Voice decides to treat us as he treated that poor fellow whom we captured—well! . . .” He shrugged. “We have left a record of all we know.”
“You are to survive for a thousand years,” I reminded him mirthlessly. “And Lonergan is to taste of the Waters of Oblivion. . .
He shrugged again.
“What does it matter?”
And so presently I found myself alone.
Whilst I undressed I listened to that merry music of the little stream, rippling on its way so near to my window. I made a very elaborate business of brushing my teeth in the bathroom and even then lighted another cigarette and mixed myself a final whisky and soda. My wrist watch I placed on the writing table.
Since hearing Max’s ingenious theory I had had no opportunity of examining its mechanism and now I had no disposition to do so.
I was oddly reluctant to extinguish the light.
Lifting my telephone, I called up the night porter and gave orders that I should be awakened at seven o’clock. I was sorry when he wished me good-night. I found myself listening for footsteps in the gardens and calculating how long must elapse before the Prussian sergeant’s patrol led him to my windows.
The Rev. Josiah Higgins had registered, and deposited his baggage, at a modest hotel near the Trinkhalle. To-night, however, he was occupying the spare bed in that large double room on the first floor above me in which Gaston Max resided.
I carefully locked both my outer and inner door and tested the fastenings of the shutters, with which the ingenious Max had found a means of tampering. They were safe enough tonight.
Yet when at last I scrambled into bed, leaving only one lamp alight beside me, the idea of darkness had become definitely terrible.
“But, you, Woodville, are to decide . .
In short, I’m not ashamed to confess that, while nothing palpable threatened me, I was as frightened as I had ever been in my life. I had merely to close my eyes to see again the still, white, masklike face of that unknown man who had died in the car, propped up between Lonergan and myself; stricken silently.
Nor could I forget those words heard in this very room as Max and I had returned.
“Wait—and forget.” ... I recalled the intonation, the muted strangeness of the tone; I tried to construe a sentence of which these three words might have formed a part.
I lingered over my whisky and soda and lighted yet another cigarette, resting on my elbow and looking toward the shuttered windows. Revellers had long since dispersed. There were no pedestrians in Lichtenthaler Allee. Faintly from the woods came the call of a night-hawk above musical chattering of the stream.
My glance was persistently drawn in the direction of the shutters. Owing to the position of the moon, bars of light shone through the slats on to the left-hand wall of the outer room. I found this pattern morbidly fascinating.
All the time I was turning over in my mind those strange words. Now, suddenly, like an inspiration, I grasped the clue. The voice had not said, “Wait— and forget,” but, “Wake—and forget!”
This I realized, dropped my cigarette in the tray beside me, and sat bolt upright. . . staring.
A shadow had moved across that moon-cast pattern—the magnified shape of what might have been an upraised arm!
I had my pistol out in a trice. Stripping off the sheets, I stepped silently on to the floor.
Tap, tap, tap!
Someone, or something, was rapping on the shutters !
I forced myself to advance. Barefooted, I began to cross the carpet in the direction of the windows. Tap, tap, tap!
I was now no more than five feet away, and: “Who’s there?” I cried.
“Mr. Woodville! Quick! Lift the shutters! Let me in!”
My heart seemed to miss a beat.
Running, a silver thread through the nightmare of my life in the Black Forest, a dream had persisted—a hope; and a prayer that it might be realized.
This was my dream come true!
Putting the pistol on the settee, I sprang to the cords. I raised the heavy shutters.
A muffled figure stood on the balcony. . . . “Marusa!”
CHAPTER XIV - THE CASTLE GUARDS
1
I reclosed the shutters, glanced at my disordered bed and then at Marusa who was standing by the writing table watching me.
Her fur wrap in which she had been muffled she had cast upon a chair, and I saw that she still wore her Arab costume, except that the veil was discarded. I thought of the gleaming figure with outstretched wings which had arisen from the Felsenweir tomb. Dark mediaeval memories from works consulted prior to my visit to the Black Forest gave up ghostly reflections.
But, looking into those frank blue eyes, the past was forgotten. I leaped back into an eager present. My heart sang.
Whatever she was, whoever she was, Marusa in some part returned my interest. She was not indifferent. She had found it worth while to seek me out in the small hours of the night and to come to my room.
A sense of possession at once delicious and dangerous claimed me; then:
“I can't possibly stay long," she began, and her English schoolgirl accent added another note to the chord, the insoluble chord, struck by her unexpected arrival. “I wouldn't have come—I wouldn't have dared . . . but—" she hesitated—“I was told tonight . .
She ceased, bit her lip in agitation, and glanced aside.
“Yes!" I urged. “What were you told?"
“I was told you were in danger, and I thought that if I could save you—I ought to come."
She leaned back against the table, resting her sun-browned hands upon its edge.
