“You’d better get that lantern, Henderson. Anyone here know Morse code?”
No one replied.
“Well, do the best you can with it. And is there a cot or something of the sort down there, Arnold?”
“A cot? Yes, I think so. Why?”
“We’ll take the body down. With this storm we won’t connect with mainland before daylight. We can’t leave it here very well, unless someone stays with it — too many rats.”
“Taking a lot of responsibility, aren’t you?” Dr. Gail asked with a surprised lift to his eyebrows. “Moving the body before the medical examiner sees it?”
“Yes. That’s why I asked you to look at it. Ross, you get that camera of yours and start using it. You’ve seen the homicide squad in action. You know what they’ll want. Front, top, all sides, full shots of the room from each corner. Get going, Henderson. Lantern, cot, and a tarpaulin of some sort to cover the body. Some slickers too if you have them. The storm’s slacking a bit, but there’s still lots of water.”
Henderson and I went down together. I got the suitcase from the living-room where I’d left it and hurried back. Merlini stood on the upper landing shooing the others down the stairs. He came back with me into the room. I changed my film, substituting the Super-XX for the Infra-D, and got busy. I didn’t fuss with any trick lighting or fancy angles on those shots, either. I stopped down to keep them sharp and let fly.
As the third flash exploded in a white burst of light, I heard Merlini give a small, surprised grunt and saw him hurry over to the window seat, climb up and examine the top of the window frame. I finished off my pictures.
“I think that does it,’” I said then. “Anything else?”
“Yes,” he said watching me with that familiar impish twinkle in his eyes. “I think you’d better do a shot of the ceiling.”
“The ceiling?”
He held his flashlight with the nonchalant air of the conjurer who is about to exhibit the girl in two parts. Its light made a circle on the wall behind and to one side of the table before which the body sat. There, a good five feet from the floor, on eye level, I saw two faint, darkish smudges, a rounded smudge and, just above, a larger oval one. I didn’t realize what it was until his light moved higher and picked out a similar discoloration on the grayed plaster three feet above the first and slightly to the left. I still wasn’t sure I believed it. Their shape was that of the prints a man’s shoes make in walking.
Steadily the light climbed the wall and moved across the ceiling, finding one uncanny, inexplicable footprint after another — an upside-down procession of surrealist impossibilities. The prints stopped directly above the open window and the sheer 40-foot drop outside.
“The top edge of that window sash, Ross, shows definite traces in the grime. Traces that someone — or something — has crawled out. You’d better get a shot of that too.”
Chapter Six:
COUNCIL OF WAR
Ira Brooke stood on the stairs, one hand on the curving chromium rail, and blinked nervously down at us as we filed in out of the wet and left muddy tracks across the beige carpet. He cast a shrewd, appraising glance at Merlini and a quick, apprehensive one at the grotesque shape the body’s bended knees made beneath their canvas covering. Then, all at once, he bustled into action, coming forward to help Lamb and the Doctor carry the cot upstairs.
Arnold called after him, “Where’s Rappourt?”
“Bed,” he said over his shoulder, his voice still smooth and oiled in spite of his worried manner. “Gail better look at her. She collapsed after you left. I had my hands full.”
Merlini went straight to the phone, picked up the receiver, listened, and dialed tentatively once or twice, his keen eyes moving about the room with swift scrutiny. I noticed their quickened interest as they caught sight of Rappourt’s oddly fitted chair. Then he replaced the receiver, examined the wire between phone and wall, and came out toward the stair. As he passed me he said quietly: “Give the phone line a look, Ross. Outside.” Arnold moved hastily, close on Merlini’s heels, up the steps. He, like Lamb and the Doctor, was soaked from his coatless run through the furious, initial downpour of the rain. Without turning, he said, “You might light the fire, Colonel. I’m going to change.”
I stared after him, wondering at the odd, lowered posture of his head, the evasive, tucked-in way he carried it between hunched-up shoulders, and at the fleeting glimpse I had had of one cheek where the too-white complexion now seemed splotchy and streaked with dirt, as if charcoal-covered fingers had been drawn down across his face.
Watrous knelt and held a match under the ready-laid fire. Sigrid, who, without removing her raincoat, had dropped into a chair before the fireplace, watched him with a mechanical, disinterested gaze. I walked to the door and stepped out once more into the wet.
Circling the house, I soon found the wire where it came out from the trees and disappeared up above the edge of the sun deck. I went up the stairs and stopped outside a wide, lighted window. Through it I saw Lamb and Dr. Gail bending over the body on the cot. Brooke stood near by holding the tarpaulin. They lifted the body, still in its sitting position, limbs stiffly bent, arms extended, and moved with it sideways toward the low bed. Merlini, watching, stopped them. I saw his lips move and his arm gesture at a near-by chair. They pivoted toward it, gently lowered the body, and left it sitting in the chair. Merlini gave a slow nod of satisfaction.
A white-enameled phone stood just within the window on a small stand, and beyond Merlini, against the wall, I saw a streamlined dressing table covered with small jars and bottles. The shining mirror above it was surrounded on all four sides by long tubular lights.
Dr. Gail covered the body with a sheet and hurriedly left the room. Brooke and Lamb, standing in the doorway, watched Merlini as he leaned in absorbed examination above a writing pad lying on an end table drawn close beside the right arm of the chair. Then he stepped back, eyes searching the floor, and suddenly stooped to pick up two small objects from the carpet — the broken complementary halves of a lead pencil. He stood with one in each hand and fitted them together, scowling. After a moment, he knelt, replaced them carefully on the floor, and, rising, made as if to turn toward the door. The action was interrupted halfway as he stopped abruptly to glare at something beyond the chair.
I moved closer, peering in through the panes. In the corner of the room some four feet above the floor and well away from the walls, an ordinary drinking glass rested upside down and altogether too nonchalantly on nothing at all — completely suspended in mid-air! Merlini approached it quickly, passed his hand gently above the glass, and destroyed the illusion. The glass jerked slightly and began swaying from side to side. Its motion indicated that it must be hanging at the end of a long dark thread, unseen in the half-light of the corner, and attached above to the ceiling.
Merlini frowned at it thoughtfully, threw a speculative glance at the sheeted body, and turned to walk to the door. He pushed the light switch and went out with the others, closing the door after him.
I looked around for the phone wire and saw the difficulty. Instead of entering the house, the wire was looped about the metal railing of the balcony and tied in a loose half hitch. Its copper core protruded from a ragged end that had obviously been cut with some instrument that was none too sharp. Just above my head, near the window, I found a porcelain insulator from which a short end of wire hung loosely. I unfastened the line from the rail, hauled the slack in toward, me, and discovered that it failed to reach. Someone had cut and removed a six-foot length.