The Dream Detective 43Part 9 · The voice was that of Isis Klaw!
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Literature · Short Stories
The Dream Detective 43
Part 9 · The voice was that of Isis Klaw!
RohmerEnglish
Whenever I accompanied her father upon any of his inquiries I came armed, and now, with a magazine pistol held in my hand, I leapt out into the corridor and turned toward the stair. A door slammed open in front of me and Sir James Leyland also came running out, pulling on his dressing gown as he ran. One quick glance he gave me; his face was very pale; and together we went racing down the stairs into the hall patched with ghostly moonlight.
“You heard it?” he breathed, hoarsely. “It was Miss Klaw! What in God’s name has happened? Where is she?”
But even as he asked the question, and as we pressed on into the billiard room, it was answered. For Isis Klaw, with a dressing gown thrown over her night apparel, was kneeling beside the settee upon which her father lay.
“What has happened? What has happened?” groaned Sir James. Then, as we approached together: “Mr. Klaw! Mr. Klaw!” he cried.
“All right, my friend!” came the rumbling voice, and to my inestimable relief Moris Klaw sat up and looked around upon us, adjusting his pince-nez to the bridge of his massive nose: “I live! It has saved me, the Science of the Mind!”
Isis Klaw bowed her head upon the red cushion, and I saw that she was trembling violently. It was the first time I had known her to lose her regal composure, and, utterly mystified, I wondered what awful danger had threatened Moris Klaw.
“Thank Heaven for that!” said the baronet, earnestly.
Approaching footsteps sounded now, and a group of frightened servants, headed by the butler, appeared at the door of the billiard room. Through them came pressing Mr. Clement Leyland. His face was ghastly, showing a startling white against the dull red of the dressing gown he wore.
“James!” he said, huskily. “James! that awful screaming! What was it? What has occurred?”
I knew that he slept in the west wing and that he must have been unable to distinguish the words which Isis had cried. Thus heard, the shrill scream must have sounded even more terrifying.
Moris Klaw raised his hand protestingly.
“No fuss, dear friends,” he implored, in rumbling accents, “no wonderings and botherings. They so disturb the nerves. Let us be calm, let us be peaceful.” He laid his hand upon the head of the girl who knelt beside him. “Isis, my child, what a delicate instrument is the psychic perception! You knew it, the danger to your poor old father, to the poor old fool who lies here waiting to be slaughtered! Almost you knew it before I knew it myself!”
“For God’s sake, Mr. Klaw,” said Clement Leyland, shakily, “what has happened? Who, or what, came to you here? What occasioned Miss Klaw’s terror?”
“My friend,” replied Klaw, “you ask me conundrum-riddles. Some dreadful thing haunts this Grange, some deadly thing. The man has not lived who has not tasted fear, and I, the old foolish, have lived indeed to-night! I fail, my friend. There is some evil intelligence ruling this Grange, which I cannot capture upon my negative”--he tapped his brow characteristically--“to attempt it would be to die. It is too powerful for me. Grange is unclean, Sir James. You will leave Grange without delay; it is I, the old experienced who knows, that warns you. Fly from Grange. Take up your residence to-morrow at Friars House!”
No further explanation would he vouchsafe.
“I am defeated, my friends!” he declared, shrugging, resignedly.
Accordingly, Isis, her beautiful face deathly pale and her great eyes feverishly bright, returned to her room. She covered her face with her hands as she passed to the door. Moris Klaw accepted the use of an apartment next to mine, and we all sought our couches again in states of varying perturbation.
That there was some profound mystery underlying these happenings of the night was evident to me. Moris Klaw and Isis Klaw were keeping something back. They shared some dark secret and guarded it jealously; but with what motive they acted in this fashion was a problem that defied my efforts at solution.
The morning came and brought a haggard company to the breakfast table. Few, if any, beneath the roof of Grange, had known sleep that night, although, so far as I could gather, there had been no manifestations of any kind.
Moris Klaw talked incessantly about the fauna of the Sahara Desert, and so monopolized the conversation with his queer anecdotes of snakes and scorpions that no other topic found entrance.
After breakfast the whole party, in Sir James’s car, drove over to Friars House; and despite the up-to-date furniture and upholstery, I found it a very gloomy residence. Stripped of its ghostly atmosphere, Grange had been quite a charming seat for any man; but this dungeonesque place, with its lichened tower that had dominated the valley when John signed Magna Charta, with its massive walls and arrow-slit windows, its eccentrically designed apartments and crypt-like smell, was altogether too archaic to be comfortable.
Moris Klaw, standing in the room which had been fitted up as a library, removed his flat-topped brown bowler and fumbled for his scent spray.
“This place,” he said, “smells abominably of dead abbots!”
He squirted verbena upon himself and upon Isis. He replaced the scent spray in the lining of the hat, and was about to replace the hat on his head, when he paused, staring straight up at the ceiling reflectively.
“My notes!” he said, abruptly; “I have left those notes in my valise. I must have them. Curse me, for an old foolish! Sir James, you will show Isis this charming old tower in my absence? Do I intrude? But I would borrow the car and return to Grange for my notes!”
“Not a bit!” replied the baronet, readily. “Clement can go with you!”
“No, no! Certainly no! I could not think of it! My old friend, Mr. Searles, may come if he so likes; if not, I go alone.”
Naturally, I agreed to accompany him; and, leaving the others at the ancient gateway, we set off in Sir James’s car back to Grange. Down into the valley we swept and up the slope to Grange, Moris Klaw sitting muttering in his beard, but offering no remark and patently desirous to avoid conversation.
“Come, my friend,” he said, as the car drew up before the house, “and I will show you what my mental negative recorded to me last night, just before the great danger came.”
He led the way into the billiard room, curtly directing the butler to leave us. When we were alone--
“You will note something,” he rumbled, swinging his arm vaguely around in the direction of the banqueting hall. “What you will note is this: the laughter--where is it heard? It is heard here, in the gun room on my right, in the banquet room before me. Great is the Science of the Mind! I will now test my negative.”
I followed him with wondering gaze as he stepped into the deep old-fashioned fireplace which formed one of the quaintest features of the room. He bent his tall figure to avoid striking his head upon the stonework, and placed the historic brown bowler upon one of the settles.
“Perhaps I cannot find it,” came his rumbling voice; “my negative was fogged by assassinations, murderous sieges, candle-light duels, and other thought-forms of the troubled past; but I may triumph--I may triumph!”
He was standing on a settle with his head far up the chimney, and presently a faint grating sound proceeded from that sooty darkness.
“I have it!” he rumbled, triumphantly. “And in my pocket reposes the electric lamp. I ascend; you, my good friend, will follow.”
True enough he scrambled upward and, to my unspeakable amazement, disappeared in the chimney. Filled with great wonder I followed and saw him standing in a recess high above my head, a recess which he must have opened in some way unknown to me. He extended a long arm and grasped my hand in his.
“Up!” he cried, exerted his surprising strength, and jerked me up beside him with as little effort as though I had been a child.
He pressed the button of a torch which he held and I saw that we stood upon an exceedingly steep and narrow wooden stair.
“It is in the thickness of the wall between the panellings,” he whispered, solemnly; “a Jacobite hiding place. Sir James knows nothing of it, for has he not spent his life in the Bush?”
He mounted the stair.
“On the right,” his voice came back to me, “the gun room, the billiard room! On the left, the banquet room. From here comes the laughter--from here comes the danger.”
Still he ascended and I followed. The narrow stair terminated in a dusty box-like apartment no more than six feet high by six feet square. Moris Klaw, ducking his head grotesquely, stood there shining the light about him. From the floor he took up a square wooden case and waved to me to descend again.
“No exit,” he said; “no exit. Sir James’s bedroom is upon the farther side, but, as I had anticipated, there is no exit.”
We returned the way we had come; clearly there was no other. Beneath his caped coat Moris Klaw jealously concealed the case which he had discovered in the secret chamber. I was filled with intense curiosity; but Moris Klaw, having gone to his room, asking me to await him outside in the drive, returned, ultimately, without the case, but carrying a huge notebook, and intimated that he was prepared to reënter the waiting car.
Behind the pebbles of his pince-nez his strange eyes gleamed triumphantly.
“We triumph,” he said. “The haunting of Grange succumbs to the Science of the Mind!”
