His voice died out in a choking gurgle and he staggered wildly around the room, pulling desperately at his throat as if trying to unloosen the clutch of hands. Grimstead took hold of the struggling figure.
"You are mad!" he cried. "There is no one here!"
The stranger did not seem to hear.
His eyes were rolling in his head and his face was turning a mottled purple. Up and down the room he threshed in agony, trying vainly to break the deadly hold that was apparently fastened upon his windpipe with the grip of a maddened bulldog. It was a horrible sight and Grimstead could do nothing but follow the agonized man, who seemed destitute of all reason.
The end came quickly! Suddenly there was a rattling sound in the man's throat and then he sank slowly to his knees and toppled forward on his face. Once more the sound of invisible footsteps and Grimstead looked up from the dead body in time to see the door of the dressing-room open quickly and close.
Then he. lost all control over his twitching nerves and ran shrieking out of the room, down the stairs and out into the fresh sweetness of the September night, staggering like a drunken man, his brain reeling from the horrors of that fetid bedroom.
III
The sight of the familiar street and the feel of the wind blowing in his face partially restored his faculties to normal, but he was trembling like a drug fiend as he entered Dr. Stoughton's office and his speech was so incoherent that the amazed physician was convinced that he was either intoxicated or insane. But as the spell of the horror wore away and Grimstead began to talk more rationally Dr. Stoughton realized that this was no ordinary case and that Grimstead was neither intoxicated nor insane. He was that most pathetic of all objects — a strong man suffering from overwhelming fright.
Dr. Stoughton had been the Carey physician and was for many years Weldon Carey's closest friend. So it was with a very grave face that he went back to the house with Grimstead, accompanied by "Mort" Farley, an official who facetiously called himself Sedley's "chief of police."
It was with a strong shudder that Grimstead entered the house that had shattered his skepticism to bits, and followed the two men upstairs. Everything in the bedroom was just as he had left it. His candles were still burning and his automatic lay where it had fallen from his nerveless hand. In the center of the room was a huddled heap that had once been a man.
"Hm! This looks bad!" ejaculated Dr. Stoughton as he bent above the prostrate figure. He turned the body over and the face peered up at him, distorted and black as a charred log.
"My God. it's Weldon Carey!" he shouted, drawing back from the corpse in sudden horror.
"How do you know?" asked Farley in awestruck tones. "It has been twenty years — and this man wears a beard."
Dr. Stoughton lifted the man's limp left hand.
"I can tell by this amethyst ring on the little finger," he explained. "It was given to him by his mother and he has always worn it on that finger, as it was too small to fit on any of the others."
"What do you think caused his death, Doctor?" asked Grimstead.
"It" was a sudden rush of blood to his head," said Dr. Stoughton, "caused by a tremendous shock of some sort." Then, after a pause: "It couldn't have been anything else. There are no marks on his throat," and he looked challengingly at the newspaperman.
"I only know what I know," replied Grimstead, and he told the whole story again for Farley's benefit, not omitting the slightest detail. When he had finished, the police official looked doubtfully at Dr. Stoughton. This sort of a case was outside of his own ken.
"Frankly, I am puzzled over all this," began the physician, looking more closely at the face of the dead man. "It is very evident that — Hello!" he broke off abruptly. "This is devilish queer, I must say!"
Taking a small magnifying glass from his bag, he bent over the body and examined the throat carefully.
"This is the most extraordinary thing that has ever come within my medical knowledge," he said gravely.
"What is it?" asked his companion curiously.
"When I first looked at Carey," explained the physician, "there were no marks whatever upon his throat. It was strangely white in contrast with his blackened face. But now look!"
He handed the glass to Grimstead. The newspaperman looked, started, and then looked again. Without a word, he handed the glass to Farley, who looked through it long and hard. Then he whistled softly.
"Finger prints!" he said laconically.
"Exactly," agreed Dr. Stoughton. "They have come out on the skin like a rash. Carey's throat looked like an undeveloped negative when I first looked at it. But now, through some queer phenomenon, it has been 'developed.' "
A little silence followed his words.
"Did you, perhaps, notice anything else when you looked through the glass?" continued Dr. Stoughton.
"What, for instance?" asked Grimstead.
"Those finger prints on his throat were those of a woman," said Dr. Stoughton. "They are much too small to have been inflicted by a man."
"Good Lord!" said Farley.
"But they couldn't have been inflicted by a woman," observed Grimstead satirically, "because you said my story was an hallucination. Beings that figure in hallucinations cannot commit real murders, can they?"
"Humph!" grunted Dr. Stoughton. Then, with a puzzled frown: "What do you think of all this, Grimstead?"
"There is only one way to think." replied the newspaperman. "Carey undoubtedly murdered his wife and came back to visit the scene of his crime, as murderers from time immemorial have done. His wife's ghost was in this room. I am as certain of that as I am that my name is Grimstead. It was Selma Carey's fingers that reached from the grave and strangled her husband."
"Bosh!" ejaculated the physician. "Such things are impossible!"
Grimstead shrugged his shoulders.
"Nothing is impossible nowadays. Doctor," he said.
The deviltry of Dr. Waugh
by Christopher B. Booth
I
The leaky radiator of a flivver was responsible for the discovery. Judson Wheaton, a farmer living in the lower end of the county, was driving to the city when he shut off his overheated engine and climbed down into the dusty roadway. Some distance from the highway stood the Thatcher farmhouse, bleak, ugly and deserted, its pitiful shabbiness charitably hidden by the thick foilage of many maple trees.
Wheaton cursed again that people should build their houses so far from the thoroughfare.
"Now I've got to tramp all th' way up that hill for water," he lamented. A stranger in the neighborhood, he did not know that the place was deserted until he reached the top of the knoll and saw the windows staring vacantly down upon him.
"Just my luck!" he mourned; "probably not a bucket on the place."
The hapless driver made his way along the weed-choked path around the side of the building. Suddenly, rooted in his tracks by horror, he let forth a yell of surprised terror.
Underneath one of the large trees was the body of a man, face turned to the sky. The eyes bulged wide and the muscles of the face were frozen into an expression of wild and livid fright.
A few feet from the body stood a smart limousine, an automobile of expensive make; on the doors were the neatly stenciled initials "K. A. W."
Wheaton raced down the hill, stood in the centre of the roadway as he flapped his long arms up and down in a frantic signal to the motorist who was, at that moment, approaching from the north.
"Dead man up at that house!" he shrieked. "Dead man — think he's murdered!"