The Reader Is Warned - John Carr

CHAPTER XII

His first sensation, as he remembered afterwards, was one of freedom and almost of cheerfulness.

He could settle down to read, or to consider his own personal problems, in the luxuriance of being alone. Maybe he ought not to leave all these lights blazing in somebody else's house, but they suited his mood and he did not feel of an economical turn. Remarkable, though, how wiry and receptive your nerves and ears and even eyes seemed to become under the mere weight of silence. Everything looked just a little larger and sharper than life. Everything, from the fall of your shoe on unglazed tiles to the brushing of your sleeve across the leaves of a potted palm, seemed to have a clarity of sound which shook like a note in music.

He went into the drawing-room, where the polished oak floor was even more noisy. It was growing definitely cold here, so he closed the long window. As an afterthought he went back and locked it. All the windows on this floor stretched to the ground, it occurred to him: were they all locked? When you came to consider it, such houses were nothing more than a series of open arches.

Wandering into the dining-room, he considered the great dark pictures and the massive plate on the sideboard. There was a half-finished flagon of beer in the sideboard, he remembered. He brought it out, put it down on the table with what seemed a very loud bump, and went to fetch a glass from a deep china-closet which showed him, unexpectedly, his own reflection in a mirror inside. He also brought a china ash-tray from the sideboard, an ash-tray which rattled and clattered and perversely bumped up against something whenever you put ash in it.

The beer, warmish, frothed a good deal. With patient effort he filled the glass, lighted a cigarette, and sat down beside the big round table to consider.

It might be interesting one day to write a monograph on the medical aspects of the emotion called fear. It had been treated before, of course; but not until he sorted out facts for his little report to Masters had he realized the depths and mists in that field called nervous shock. It was a new territory, almost a new quicksand. Several persons here "had suffered from it, including Hilary. And - come to think of it - he had not yet learned what Hilary saw. Taking a more concrete example, let us suppose that Sam Constable had died of nervous shock as the result of something seen or heard or prepared for that purpose.

Behind him, the swing-door to the kitchen creaked' and cracked sharply.

He did not jump up, as-his impulse was. He waited for the fraction of a second, and then glanced back casually over his shoulder.

He saw nothing, knowing that he should see nothing. That jump, for which he felt annoyed, had been caused by the mere sudden movement of an inanimate thing. Draughts or contraction of wood or whatever the cause, it is the small stir of the inanimate which brushes nerves the wrong way. He noticed that the kitchen was dark; also dark was the conservatory, which he could see through a closed glass door.

But it was not the best time, probably, for analysing the nature of nerves. Better be up and doing something. Better go up and see how Mina Constable was getting on.

Extinguishing his cigarette, he finished the beer and went upstairs. When he knocked at the door of her room he received no answer, nor did he expect one; the morphia would have done its work by that time. He opened the door very softly and looked in.

Mina's bed was empty.

The bedclothes were thrown back in some disarray, showing a sort of throat of crisp white sheets which shone in the light of the bedside lamp. Pillows were punched into confusion; and a dressing-gown and slippers, which he remembered having seen when Mina went docilely to bed at nine o'clock, had now gone. Yet the bathroom was empty. And this room and her husband's were blank dark blurs where no person could care to sit or lurk for pleasure.

'Mrs Constable!' he called.

She ought to answer that.

'Mrs Constable!'

There is no more disturbing realization than that a person, who is confined with you within the four walls of a house, must hear you but for some reason chooses not to reply. It is too much like an unpleasant game. Yet Mina continued to hide.

He made a search of the room, half expecting to find her in the wardrobe and wondering what he should say if he did find her there. A real seizure this time? But the slippers and dressing-gown did not fit in with that. He hurried through the bathroom, barking his shins on the bronze-painted metal of the heater and tipping over a drinking-glass, which fell with a hellish ringing clatter into the wash-basin. That noise sobered him. Quietly he set about looking into every room on that floor, including his own. Then he went downstairs, to find a slight alteration in die look of the lower hall. The tall folding doors to the drawing-room, which he was certain he had left open, were now closed.

The telephone began to ring as he pulled the doors open; it almost muddled his errand, for he never realized that die thing had such a tongue. It continued to ring while he looked round the room, and angered him. Better answer it. When he picked up the receiver he found it was still warm from recent contact with a hand.

'Hello,' said a persuasive voice. 'Is this Grovetop three-one?'

'No. Yes,' said Sanders, clearing his throat and looking at the dial. 'What is it?'

'This is the Daily Non-Stop. May I speak to Miss Shields, please?'

'To whom? Oh! Sorry, Miss Shields is indisposed and regrets that she cannot make -'

"That's quite all right, Doctor,' interposed Mina's voice, speaking at his ear. Mina's face appeared at his shoulder.

Mina's arm, thin and brown and rather freckled out of the loose sleeve of the dressing-gown, moved past his own; and she took the receiver. 'Hello? Yes, speaking. Well, now you've rung me back, are you convinced it wasn't a hoax? ... Yes, yes, I quite understand you have to be careful... Yes, print it, or as much as you dare ... No, that's quite all right; but I can't talk to you any longer, really I can't; I'm not well; yes, thank you very much. Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.'

She clattered the receiver down on its hook and stood back.

'I'm so sorry to have to deceive you,' said Mina, looking up at him after a pause. 'But I told them they couldn't keep me away from the telephone for ever. As soon as they'd. gone, I came down here. I was waiting. They'd have stopped me.'

Sanders also stood back.

'That's quite all right, Mrs Constable.'

'Now you're annoyed.'

(Of course I'm annoyed. Who the hell wouldn't be annoyed?)

'That's quite all right, Mrs Constable. If I want to make a fool of myself, that's my affair.' He remembered himself shouting all over the house, betraying his state of mind with every word. 'But will you tell me how you manage to be so spry after that dose of morphia ?'

'I didn't take it,' retorted Mina, with the desperate and triumphant cunning of a genuinely ill woman. He saw that hysterical cunning, and relented. 'I only pretended to take it, you see. And now I've got back at Pennik; I've got back at him. They wouldn't print all I told them, because they said it was slander or libel or something; but there's enough, there's enough, there's enough. He'll look a proper fool, M. Vaudois will. Did you know? A professor aboard our ship used to call Pennik M. Vaudois; I don't know why; but it made him look like fire. And now I've done it. I'm going upstairs now and take my medicine, then I shall be all right,'

‘You certainly are. Off you go, now!'

‘But you'll come up with me, won't you? I'm alone, and it seems worse to be alone now than it did during the day. All the rats have left the ship. Except you.'

'It's all right, Mrs Constable. Come along.'

On the landing above them the great clock rang with fluid chimes, echoing, and began to strike ten. It was twenty minutes past ten before he had got her to bed again, had seen to it that this time she swallowed the tablet, had tucked the dressing-gown round her, and heard the dull mutter of exhaustion as the drug took effect. With her head under a pillow, she crumpled up and slept.

Without dreams, he hoped. He took her pulse, studied her for a time with his watch in his hand, and turned out the light. Yet this apparently sincere woman, he reflected as he went downstairs, had lied up-hill-down-dale over every place where she could possibly have lied.

One thing, however, the sharp edge of that disappearance scare had done for him. It had cured him (or he thought it had cured him) of nervous disturbances without foundation. Once was enough. It only left him restless and strung up beyond any hope of sleep. He knew that he ought to turn in, for he had work to do to-morrow, but he also knew that it would be useless. He prowled or sat, always coming back to the dining-room. One interval he filled up by going round and locking every door or window on the ground floor, another by glancing over a rather dull collection of books in the library. Ten-thirty rang from, the clock on the stairs; then a quarter to eleven, then the hour itself.

It was close to eleven-thirty when he thought he saw Herman Pennik's face looking at him through the glass door to the conservatory.

Sanders afterwards remembered that the tumbler, from which he had been drinking the last of the beer in the flagon, slipped through his fingers and smashed in a star of brown froth on the dining-room table. He had simply looked round, and there it was.

For some time he had been conscious of a faint noise: a noise, in fact, so dim as to be rather a vibration, a pressure on the ears, than a sound. He vaguely associated it with water, and then realized that it must be the miniature fountain in the conservatory, soberly falling after Sam Constable's death as before it. Turning round in his chair to see, he looked at the glass door of the conservatory - and Pennik looked back at him.

He was across the room so quickly that he did not remember leaving his chair. For a second he thought it might have been his own reflexion, in gleams of light against a door to a dark room, until he saw Pennik's nose and fingers pressed against and flattened out in greyish-white blobs on the glass. Then Pennik bolted. Sanders threw open the door, to meet a rush of hot over-scented air from the plants - and silence.

He stood in the doorway. No light, no noise, no movement of any kind, until he blundered forward and set moving a jungle-brush of sound by walking into plants. He could not remember the position of the light-switch. Groping through the aisles, he knew that to search here was useless; and for another reason. One of the long stained-glass windows, which he had locked a while ago, was now open: a way of escape.

Mina Constable?

Mina Constable, upstairs and half-drugged?

He tried not to run when he went upstairs and hurried into the dark room, only to find another false alarm. She was no more dead or hurt than he was: breathing quietly and regularly in sleep. Yet this time he took no chances. He locked the door to the bathroom, saw that the windows were locked, and, when he went out into the hall again, locked the door on the outside and kept the key.

These continued false alarms were worse than a real happening. Yet he had seen Pennik - or hadn't he? Suddenly he knew that he was not sure. It had been no more than a flash across the tail of the eye, an image conjured out of his own imagination, or (he boggled at the thought) a projected image. But the open window? He might have left that open himself; now that he reflected, he was almost sure he had.

That was a little better. However, he did not go far away from Mina's bedroom; he sat down on the top step of the stairs. His breathing quietened; his thoughts revolved round the ease with which phantoms could be evoked; he lighted another cigarette and watched the smoke. The clock chimed the quarter to midnight. Feeling easy again, he wandered downstairs.. .

The telephone was ringing again.

Better answer it.

'Hello?' said a pleasant voice. 'Grovetop three-one? This is the Daily Trumpeter -

Sanders wearily started to lower the receiver. 'I'm sorry,' he said, 'very-sorry-no-statement-to-make-this -'

'Hold on!' said the voice, with such urgency that he stopped in spite of himself. 'Don't ring off, will you? I don't want any story. I want to give you one.'

'What?'

'Is Miss Mina Shields all right? You know what I mean.' 'No, I don't know what you mean. Of course she's all right. Why?' 'Who is this speaking, please?'

'My name is Sanders. I'm a friend of the family. Why did you ask whether she is all right?'

'Dr Sanders ?' asked the voice, quickly. 'Doctor, you ought to know this. Mr Herman Pennik has just rung up this office.'

'Yes?' said Sanders - knowing what was coming.

'He said that Miss Shields would probably die before midnight to-night. He wants us to make clear that he doesn't promise it, or say that it's certain, but he thinks he'll have succeeded in killing her by then. Naturally, we don't pay much attention to his claims, but we thought we'd better give you the opportunity to contra . ..'

'Wait! Where was he phoning from, do you know?'

Slight pause. 'Place called the Black Swan Hotel, about four miles away from you.'

'You're sure of that ?' 'Yes..I checked back.' 'How long ago did he ring?'

'About ten minutes. We're considering what's best to be done about it, Doctor, and if you would care to assist us by making a state ...'

'There is no truth in it. Mrs Constable is comfortably asleep with her door locked, and nobody can get near her. She is absolutely all right. Please accept that from me.'

He put down the receiver with jingling finality; he stared at the bay windows, and fingered the key in his pocket.

Was she all right?

Shatteringly, at his elbow, the telephone rang again.

'Grovetop three-one? This is the News-Record. Sorry to trouble you, but some remarkable claims were made to us this morning by a man named Herman Pennik. Now he has just rung up this office to say ...'

'I know. He proposes to kill Mrs Constable by what he calls Teleforce. He is very modest about it, and doesn't entirely promise he can do this trick ...'

'Not exactly,' said the voice. 'That's what he said fifteen minutes ago. Now he says she's dead.'

For a time Sanders looked at the number on the white dial before him. Without listening to what the person at the other end of the wire was saying, he replaced the phone.

He would not be gulled again. It had been all imagination that he thought he saw Herman Pennik in this house, for at that time Herman Pennik had been at the Black Swan Hotel four miles away. Everything was imagination. Yet the fact that it had been such vivid imagination, the fact that Pennik's image had been stamped on that glass as clearly as the prkjis of his nose and fingers, was what made Sanders's scalp stir with the remembrance of that hard sandy head as a reality.

He had seen it. By the Lord, he had.

Again the telephone clattered out.

'Grovetop three-one? This is the Daily Wireless -