Such precautions seemed so elaborate as to be absurd. Under ordinary circumstances they would have been. But these were not ordinary.
Six of the richest men in the city had received letters on a single day. Those letters had been uniform in their terms. The men were to signify their willingness to pay a certain sum of money, which sum varied in each instance, or they were to die.
None of the men paid the slightest attention to those letters, save to turn them over to the police.
Then I. W. Steen, the millionaire head of a publishing company which included several magazines and two newspapers, one of which was the sensational Clarion, received a second letter.
That letter announced the day and the hour of his death in the event he did not comply with the request. Steen turned that letter over to the police and took precautions against attack.
The precautions were in vain.
Seated in his private office, in conference with the heads of his various publications, a sickening sweet odor became noticeable in the room. Ten seconds later Steen was dead. No other occupant of the room suffered the slightest inconvenience, the slightest sensation of discomfort, although all of them noticed the peculiar odor.
Two days later C. G. Haymes received a summons through the mail. It was in the nature of an ultimatum. He was to signify his willingness to comply with the terms of the man who signed himself “Zin Zandor,” or he, too, was to die.
The hour of his death was not given. But the day of the death was announced.
C. G. Haymes had been frankly worried. He had placed himself in the hands of the police. They had isolated him in his home, surrounded the place with guards. He, too, had become good “copy,” and the newspaper reporters who enjoyed the confidence of the administration had been permitted to cover the case. They had done it with an air of boredom. Steen’s death had been due to fright, they felt; the autopsy disclosed no organic lesion. There was no chance that coincidence would repeat itself.
Yet, while the reporters were lounging about at ease, while the police cordon surrounded the place, while even the servants had been excluded, C. G. Haymes died, and the manner of his death was as the other’s. A sickening sweet odor that had been noticed by the other occupants of the room, yet had not seemed to affect them in the least, a cry of anguish from the millionaire, a sudden spasm, and death.
Three of the remaining millionaires had capitulated.
They had followed the routine indicated in the letter for showing their willingness to pay. And they were paying, transmitting the money to the dreaded Zin Zandor by means which they refused to divulge. For Zin Zandor had made it apparent that any information given to the police would result in death.
Tolliver Hemingway alone of the remaining men who had been threatened refused to be cowed. He hurled forth his defiance, and the mail had brought him the information that he would meet his death on the twenty-fourth day of June.
Now midnight had struck on the twenty-third of June, and the clocks clacked off the seconds of the fatal twenty-fourth.
“Well, we might as well have a drink,” said Inspector Hunter, pouring himself a stiff jolt from some of the prewar whisky the millionaire’s cellars had furnished.
“None for me,” said Hemingway. “I think I’ll go easy on the drink. One can’t tell...”
The inspector snorted.
“Don’t be foolish. You’re absolutely safe here. Every bit of food and drink in this room has been checked by two police chemists. I wouldn’t even waste the time to sit here with you, only the public are in a panic over this Zandor fellow, and we’ve got to show them how powerless he is in the face of adequate precautions. In the meantime our paper and handwriting experts are at work on those letters. They were all written on a Remington typewriter, and all on the same machine. The stationery has been traced to a job lot that went to one of the big stationery firms. It’s a cinch.”
He drained the whisky.
Carl Ramsay scribbled a sentence in a notebook, and, as he wrote, read aloud the words he jotted down for future reference.
“The Man Who Dares Not Eat,” he intoned. “We’ll run a picture over that.”
Nick Searle snorted.
“You’ve got a cinch with that yellow journal of yours, Ramsay. Wish I had things as easy.”
Arthur Swift stirred in his chair uneasily.
“You both have a snap compared to me. What am I supposed to do?”
Searle laughed.
“Look wise and feel foolish. Along about nine o’clock we’ll cook up a column or two for you to write about the scientific angle of the thing. I’ll dope out what I want, you can stick in a couple of high-sounding scientific terms, something about metabolism and the oxidation of tissue. We’ll run your picture at the head of the column. There’ll be a catchy headline, ‘Noted Professor Explains Hysteria,’ or something of the sort. The idea will be that there was something akin to hypnotic suggestion in the minds of the men who died.”
Carl Ramsay lit a cigarette.
“Better headline than that,” he said: “ ‘Scientist Pits Skill Against Death.’ ”
Searle stretched, yawned.
“You ought to have the city editor I’ve got to go up against,” he said gloomily.
And Arthur Swift, watching Ramsay, suddenly saw a peculiar thing. The right hand of the reporter seemed to vanish. He rubbed his eyes. The hand was back in place.
But, for a split fraction of a second, the right hand of the tabloid reporter had simply vanished. It had not only dissolved into space, but the right arm, almost to the shoulder, had ceased to exist.
It could hardly have been a mere freak of the imagination. Neither could it have been an optical illusion. For Arthur Swift had been able to see everything else within that room clearly and with normal vision.
Tolliver Hemingway, the millionaire, was taking a cigarette from a gold case. Searle was biting the end from a cigar. Ramsay was smoking. His left hand was conveying the cigarette from his lips. Inspector Hunter was finishing the last of the generous drink he had poured.
Everything was entirely normal, save and except for that sudden disappearance of Carl Ramsay’s right hand. It had happened that Arthur Swift was watching that right hand. He had seen it suddenly become nothing. He had blinked his eyes, and the hand was back, reaching for a notebook. It could not have been more than a tenth of a second that the hand was gone, perhaps not half that long. Yet it most certainly had disappeared.
“Look here,” said Swift, “did you fellows notice anything just then?”
They looked at him, and as their eyes saw the expression on his face, they snapped to rigid attention.
“What?” asked Searle.
“Shoot,” said Inspector Hunter.
“Your hand,” said Swift, addressing himself to Ramsay, “it seemed sort of... er... well, sort of funny.”
And then a strange thing happened.
Ramsay opened his lips to make some reply, and the sounds that came forth were not words. They seemed a peculiar rattle of gurgling noise that beat with consonant harshness upon the eardrums, rattled against the intelligence with such terrific rapidity that they were like static on a radio receiver.
“What?” asked Swift.
Ramsay drawled slightly, in his normal irritating tone of voice, as he reached for the pencil and scrawled a line across the notebook.
“Guard Goes Goofy,” he scribbled, and said: “That’d look fine under your picture. It shows what hysteria will do. Sort of fits in with a general theory. Get a man to believe that a sickening sweet odor will produce death upon him alone, and then fill the room with such an odor, and the man who believed it would be fatal would kick off. Good thought that. I’ll write it up with a by-line by Professor Somebody-or-other: Scientist Suggests Solution.”