The Quests of Simon Ark

And Other Stories

Edward D. Hoch

FOR BILL PRONZINI

Contents

Introduction

Village of the Dead

The Man from Nowhere

The Vicar of Hell

II

III

IV

The Judges of Hades

II

III

IV

V

Sword For a Sinner

The Treasure of Jack the Ripper

The Mummy from the Sea

The Unicorn’s Daughter

The Witch of Park Avenue

INTRODUCTION

“VILLAGE OF THE DEAD” was the first story i ever published. It appeared on September 26, 1955, in the December 1955 issue of Famous Detective Stories, one of the last of the old pulp magazines. I was 25 years old at the time.

The origin of the plot for “Village of the Dead” is still fresh in my memory, though it took shape more than thirty years ago. During the summer of 1953, I was at a beach in Rye, New York with a girl I was dating at the time. The beach was at a large amusement park called Playland, and excursion boats came across Long Island Sound from nearby ports to deposit visitors for the day. As we rested on the sand in the late afternoon, I noticed that hundreds of people were making their way onto a long pier that stretched into the Sound. There was no boat in sight, and it seemed for a few moments that they were marching lemming-like to their deaths. The boat soon came, of course, and no one jumped off the pier, but the idea stuck in my mind. The pier became a cliff when research uncovered the North African cult of the Circumcellions, whose followers sometimes cast themselves off cliffs.

For a plot like this I knew at once that I needed an unusual—almost mystical—protagonist. I chose Simon Ark, whom I’d used a year earlier in one of my scores of unpublished stories. But this time I gave him a nameless narrator to serve as a Boswell/Watson figure. The story made the rounds of mystery magazines without immediate success. In those days, long before Jonestown, the idea of a modern cult leader forcing his followers to commit mass suicide struck most editors as unbelievably bizarre. Happily, the story finally reached the desk of Robert A. W. Lowndes, then editing Famous Detective Stories and several other magazines for Columbia Publications. Lowndes was a long-time admirer of psychic detectives such as William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin, and Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence, and perhaps he saw something in Simon Ark that reminded him of these earlier sleuths. In any event, the story was featured on the magazine’s cover and Lowndes indicated he wanted more Simon Ark adventures. My career as a mystery writer was launched.

The earlier, unpublished Ark story became the second one to appear in Famous Detective Stories. I’ve omitted it from this collection because its third-person narration from Simon Ark’s viewpoint seems not in keeping with the series as it evolved. Other early stories in which the character was squeezed into the mold of a private detective are likewise omitted. But several more of Ark’s early adventures are here, and I hope the reader will be properly indulgent about these samples of my writing apprenticeship.

When Columbia’s mystery magazines ceased publication, Simon Ark found a home with Hans Stefan Santesson at The Saint Mystery Magazine and The Saint Mystery Library. But by the mid-1960s the series was dormant as I turned my attention to other types of plots and series characters. Strangely enough, the memory of Simon Ark lived on with readers, and I found mention of him in fan publications—including even a letter speculating upon the meaning of the name Gidaz, the location of Simon’s first adventure. (I had just discovered Voltaire’s Zadig, and spelt the title backwards.)

In 1971 came two paperback collections of Ark stories, and a television option. I revived the character briefly for two stories and then dropped him once again. By that time I was appearing regularly in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Ark had never been one of Fred Dannay’s favorite characters. Finally, in 1978, I came up with a plot idea that called out for Simon’s return. This time Fred Dannay agreed, and “The Treasure of Jack the Ripper” became the first Ark to appear in the pages of EQMM. The series was reborn and over the next several years appeared regularly in EQMM and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

In this collection I have included what seem to me to be the best of the 39 Simon Ark stories published to date, dividing them between the early and later adventures. If there is a single theme that runs through them all, it is that of a quest. Sometimes it is a quest for a missing book or manuscript, or a lost treasure. Always, in the mind of Simon Ark, it is a quest for Satan and his works. The stories are not fantasies, however, and the solution to the mystery is always rational. In my mind, at least, Simon Ark owes a far greater debt to Father Brown than to Carnacki and the other occult sleuths.

Is Simon Ark really close to 2,000 years old, as he claims? Certainly his name has a Biblical sound to it, but I make no speculations about the matter. I hope readers can enjoy the stories equally well as pure detection or as semi-fantasy. I have often felt that perhaps was one of my favorite words in the language. It is the perfect word for summing up the fiction writer’s technique, and I was overjoyed some years ago when I discovered that perhaps was the opening word in the first story I ever published.

Is Simon Ark really 2,000 years old?

Perhaps.

—Edward D. Hoch

VILLAGE OF THE DEAD

PERHAPS, IF YOU’RE OLD enough, you remember the Gidaz Horror. At least that was the name the newspapers gave it during those early days when the story shocked the world.

I was near Gidaz when the thing happened, and I suppose I was one of the first to reach the village. I went without sleep for forty-eight hours to get the story and then I never could use it. All these years I’ve thought about it, and I guess sooner or later I just had to tell someone.

So this is the way it happened, that day in Gidaz …

I was at the state capitol, covering a political story, when the flash came in. We crowded around the teletype in the press room and watched the words as they formed on the yellow paper: … THE TINY VILLAGE OF GIDAZ, IN THE SOUTHERN PART OF THE STATE, WAS THE SCENE TODAY OF AN APPARENT MASS SUICIDE. A MAIL TRUCK, ARRIVING IN THE VILLAGE THIS MORNING, FOUND THE HOUSES DESERTED, AND, AT THE BASE OF A HUNDRED-FOOT CLIFF NEARBY, SCORES OF BODIES WERE FOUND AMONG THE ROCKS …

That was all. There was more to follow, but none of us wanted to see it. Ten minutes later we were in a car heading south, toward the village of Gidaz, eighty miles away.

It was almost evening when we arrived, but there were no lights in the village. The streets and the few dozen houses that clustered around them were dark and silent. It was as if the entire population had suddenly vanished.

And in a way it had.

We found people and cars at the edge of the village, but the people were not toiling silently, as at the scene of a train wreck or a fire. They only stood at the edge of the cliff and looked down at the rocks below.

We joined them at the edge, and I saw it, too. In the reflected glare of a dozen headlights and in the dying glow of the setting sun, I saw the bodies on the rocks below. There must have been nearly a hundred of them, men, women, and children. I could almost imagine a giant hand sweeping them over the edge to their death.

Presently we made our way down the steep path to the bottom, and men began to set up floodlights for the long job ahead. They were piled on top of each other, among the pointed rocks that stretched upward toward the sky.

“Think any of them could be alive?” I heard myself asking.

“Not a chance. A hundred feet is a long way to fall, especially with rocks like these at the bottom.”

“Yeah …”

And they began moving the bodies. An old man with his skull shattered by the fall, a girl with her neck broken …

They carried them from the rocks and laid the bodies in neat rows on the ground. Soon there were only the red-stained rocks remaining. And I counted the bodies, along with the others. “Seventy-three.”

“Seventy-three …”

A state trooper joined the group at the foot of the cliff. “We’ve gone through every house in the village; there’s not a living thing up there …”

“The entire village walked over the edge of that cliff sometime last night …”

After that the deserted village of Gidaz was alive with reporters and photographers from all over the country. They wrote a million words about the Gidaz Horror. Seventy-three people, the entire population of the village of Gidaz, had committed suicide by walking off the edge of a cliff. Why? What had driven them to it? That was the question we all wanted to answer.

But there was no answer.

A New York paper compared it to an incident during the Napoleonic Wars, when a charging cavalry had ridden over the edge of a cliff before they realized their error. A national magazine brought up the legend of the Pied Piper, and suggested that some supernatural force had lured them to their death.

But still there was no answer.

The houses were searched for clues, but yielded nothing. In some places, food was still on the table. In others, people had been preparing for bed. It must have been around eight o’clock when something brought them from their houses. There were no notes or messages remaining. Apparently they had planned to return when they left their houses for the last time.

But they had not returned …

I was the first one to think of digging into the background of the town, and I spent most of the first night in the deserted building that had once held town meetings. There were records here—records and memories of days past, when Gidaz had been founded, by a group of settlers pushing westward. It had been named after one of them, and had grown rapidly after the discovery of gold nearby.

I studied one of the old maps I found, and decided that the gold mines must have been almost at the spot where those seventy-three persons had plunged over the cliff to their deaths.

It was while I was looking at the map that I suddenly became aware that I was not alone in the old building. I turned and pointed my flashlight at a dark corner, and a tall man stepped out of the shadows. “Good evening,” he said quietly.

“Who are you?”

“My name is not important, but you may call me Simon Ark if you wish.”

“Simon Ark?”

“That is correct,” the stranger replied. “And now may I ask who you are?”

“I’m a reporter, a newspaper reporter. I came down from the state capitol to cover the story.”

“Ah, and you thought you might find something in the old records of the village? I also had a similar thought.”

The man called Simon Ark had advanced closer now, and I could make out his features clearly in the light from my flash. He was not old, and yet his face had tiny lines of age to be seen if one looked closely enough. In a way he was perhaps a very handsome man, and yet I somehow could not imagine women ever being attracted to him.

“Are you a writer or something?” I asked him.

“No, I am simply an investigator; I make a hobby of investigating any strange or unexplained happenings in the world.”

“How did you manage to get here so quickly?”

“I was in the area, just across the state line, on another mission. I would have been here sooner, but it is very difficult to reach Gidaz by road.”

“It certainly is. The village is almost completely cut off from the rest of the town. Ever since the gold mines died out, the place has been almost a ghost town.”

“And yet,” Simon Ark said quietly, “there were seventy-three people remaining here. Why did they remain, I wonder. Why didn’t they leave this dying village?”

“They’ve left it now,” I said; “they left it last night when they walked over that cliff.”

“Yes …” And the man called Simon Ark left the ancient building. I followed him outside, to see where he would go.

He was a strange man, strange in many ways. He seemed almost to be from another world or another time as he walked slowly along the dirt road that led through the center of the dead village.

The reporters and the police had already searched the houses, but he seemed to be looking for something more …

Soon, he had almost disappeared in the darkness, and I hurried after him. When I finally reached him, he was bending over a dark spot on the ground. I could see only by the light of the moon overhead, but he seemed excited by what he had found.

“There has been a fire here recently,” he said, almost to himself. He pulled something from the ashes and attempted to brush it off. It looked as if it had once been a book, but in the dim light it was impossible to tell more.

I had not realized the utter silence of the night around us until that moment, when it was suddenly shattered by the distant sound of an approaching car.

“Someone’s coming,” I said.

“Odd …” And a strange expression passed quickly over the face of Simon Ark.

He pushed the remains of the charred book into his topcoat pocket and walked back toward the dirt road.

Somewhere above, a cloud passed over the moon, and for the moment all was darkness. Then the night was broken by the gleam of two headlights moving slowly along the road.

Simon Ark stepped in front of the car and held up both hands, like some ancient high priest calling upon the gods above. A chill ran down my spine as I watched him.

The car, a light green convertible, came to an abrupt halt, and a girl climbed out from behind the wheel. “Are you the police?” she asked him.

“No, only an investigator. This other gentleman is a reporter.” She noticed me then for the first time, and the tense look on her face softened.

“I’m Shelly Constance,” she said. “I … I used to live here.”

Simon Ark introduced himself. “You had a family still living here in Gidaz?” he asked quietly.

“Yes … My father and brother … I …I heard on the radio what happened last night. I came as soon as I could …”

“It would have been wiser to stay away,” Simon Ark told her. “Your father and brother are beyond all worldly aid now, and the evil of Gidaz still fills the air, mingled now with the odor of death.”

“I …I must see them,” she said. “Where did it happen?”

Simon Ark motioned toward the distant cliff and led the way through the darkness. “The bodies have been covered with canvas for the night,” he told her. “I believe the plans are to bury them tomorrow in a mass grave at the bottom of the cliff. Most of them, of course, have no living relatives.”

We reached the edge, and I played my flashlight down on the rocks below, but nothing could be seen from that far up. In the light of the flash, however, I got my first good look at the girl by my side. She was young and tall and pretty in a casual sort of way. Her blonde hair hung to her shoulders, and helped to set off the lines of her face.

“Tell me,” I asked, as we walked back to her car, “why did you ever leave Gidaz?”

“That is a long story,” she said, “but perhaps it has something to do with this horrible thing. Come, come into my …house over here for a few minutes, and I’ll try to tell you about it.”

Simon Ark and I followed her in silence to one of the houses just off the main road. It seemed strange entering this house that no longer belonged to the living. There were things, dishes and books and clothing and cigarettes and food, that were reminders of the people who had lived here. On the wall was a map of the gold mining area, where some of these people had continued to work until yesterday, in the futile hope of recovering the village’s lost greatness.

It was then, as the girl entered this dead house that had once been home, that she seemed to go to pieces. She began sobbing, and threw herself into a big armchair to cover her face. I remained where I was and let her cry. There was no way to comfort this girl who was almost a stranger to me.

I noticed that Simon Ark also left her to her sorrow and moved over to inspect the small bookcase in the dining room. After a moment’s hesitation I joined him and glanced at the titles on the shelves. They were mostly children’s books, with a few others that had probably served as college textbooks. One, an ancient history book, was stamped State University.

This seemed to remind Simon Ark of the charred remains of the book he had found earlier. He removed it from his pocket and carefully examined it. A few charred pieces drifted to the floor.

“It seems to be …” Simon Ark began, and then fell silent.

“What?”

“Ah, yes, The Confessions of Saint Augustine. A truly remarkable book. Did you ever read it?”

“No, I’m not a Catholic,” I replied.

“Augustine wrote for all men,” Simon Ark said slowly; “this is a very interesting discovery.”

“Why should anyone want to burn it?”

“I am beginning to fear that I know the answer to that,” he told me, and there was something in his voice that scared even me.

He returned the remains of the book to his pocket as the girl joined us again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Please forgive me.”

“Certainly,” I told her; “we understand.”

“I’ll see if I can fix us coffee or something,” and she disappeared into the kitchen.

Presently she returned, with three steaming cups, and as we drank she told us of her early life in Gidaz …

“… I suppose it was about five years ago when I left to attend college. Of course, I was home for the summers, but for the first two years things seemed the same as they had always been in Gidaz. Then, in the summer following my third year at the University, I returned home to find things had changed slightly.”

“In what way?”

“Well, I suppose it would be hard for you to understand, because it was really nothing I could put my finger on. It seemed to be just a change in attitude at first. They talked of a man who had come to Gidaz—a man named Axidus, who seemed to have a great influence on their lives from then on. Of course, you must realize that Gidaz is so remote from other cities that these seventy-three people were forced to live entirely among themselves. My father and brother usually got into town about once every month or two. To them, the village was everything, even though it was slowly dying. A few of the men kept working in the mines, finding just enough gold to keep them alive. Others worked small farms in the valley. But they were happy here, probably because they had never known anything better.”

“But you were not satisfied with it?”

“I wasn’t the only one. Many of the young people like me left Gidaz, especially after the coming of this man Axidus.”

Simon Ark’s face had grown dark while she talked. “You say his name was Axidus?”

“Yes, do you know him?”

“I may have met him once, long ago …”

“Well, he was the cause of all the trouble, and I saw that right away. When I came home for Christmas that year, it was as if a madness had seized the people. They talked of nothing but Axidus, and how he was going to help them save themselves. He seemed to have some kind of new religion …”

I glanced at him, but his face was like stone. Once again I seemed to feel a shiver run down my spine.

“It really scared me, the way they all believed in him so completely,” she continued. “Once each week he held a meeting in the old town hall, and everyone would go to hear him—even the children. It was uncanny, the way he seemed to know everything that happened in the village. He would tell people secret facts that no one else could possibly have known. When I was away at school, he would tell my father everything I was doing. Of course, people like this have always been attracted by fortunetellers and the like, and a person like this knew exactly how to get them in his power. I went to see him just once, and I must admit I found something strangely haunting about this man Axidus.”

“What did he look like?” I asked.

“He was fairly tall, with a white beard that hung to his chest. His hair was long and white, too, and he wore a white robe. He would come out on the small platform at one end of the hall and begin talking without any introduction. Afterward, he just seemed to disappear. Sometimes people would see him around the village during the week, too, but always in this white robe. No one knew where or how he lived.”

“It’s fantastic,” I said; “it sounds like something out of the dark past.”

Simon Ark frowned. “It is dark, and it is certainly from the past. My only wish is that I had heard all this before it was too late …”

There was a wind coming up outside, and from somewhere up in the hills came the cry of a lonesome timber wolf. I glanced at my watch and was surprised to see it was already past midnight.

“What do you mean …?” the girl started to ask, but she never completed the sentence.

Suddenly, Simon Ark was out of his chair, and he was pulling open the front door of the house. I ran to his side, and then I saw it, too …

A figure, or a thing, all in white, running with the wind toward the cliff where Death slept in the darkness …

We followed, through the night, with the gathering breeze whistling through the trees around us. The girl started to follow, but I waved her back inside. Whatever was out here, it was not for her to see …

In the distance, a sudden streak and rumble of thunder followed. It would be raining back in the hills, but with luck the storm would miss us.

The wind was picking up, though, and by the time we reached the edge of the cliff it was close to being a gale. I wondered briefly if a strong wind could have blown these people to their death, but that of course, was fantastic … But perhaps the real reason for their death would be even more fantastic …

“There!” He pointed down the cliff, to the very center of where the seventy-three bodies rested under canvas on the rocks.

And I saw it again.

The moon that had given us light before was hidden now by the threatening clouds of rain, but I could see the blot of white against the blackness of the rocks.

“Axidus?” I breathed.

“Or Satan himself,” Simon Ark answered; “perhaps this is the moment I have waited for.” He started down the rocks, and I followed.

But the white form seemed to sense our approach. Suddenly, before our very eyes, it seemed to fade away.

“He must be hiding in the rocks somewhere,” I said.

The odor of the corpses was all around us then, and my head swam sickeningly.

“I must find him,” Simon Ark said, and he shouted something in a strange language that might have been Greek, but wasn’t.

We searched the rocks until the odor was overpowering and forced us to retreat. We found nothing …

On the way back up the cliff, I asked Simon Ark what he’d shouted before.

“It was in Coptic,” he said, “which is very much like Egyptian. It was a type of prayer …”

With the coming of daylight, the horror that hung thick in the air over Gidaz seemed to lift a little. The girl had slept through the remainder of the night, and I had sat alone in the front room of the house while Simon Ark prowled the night on some further mysterious investigations.

Since I knew sleep was impossible, I spent the time attempting to set down in words just what had happened to me that day, ever since the moment in the early evening when I’d first arrived in Gidaz. But I couldn’t do it; I was still living the thing, and the terror that clung to the village was still a very real part of the air I breathed. Maybe later …

Simon Ark returned to the house soon after daybreak, and the sound of our talking awakened the girl. She made breakfast for us from among the remains we found around the house, and by nine o’clock we were ready to leave.

The lack of sleep was beginning to get me then, but the sunlight helped revive me. Simon Ark looked the same as he had the evening before, and seemed anxious to leave the village. “I have things that must be done,” he said. “In the meantime, if you would desire to help me, there are one or two things you could find out.”

“Sure. Anything for a story.”

They were interrupted then by the sound of an approaching truck. Down the single road that led to civilization, an ancient mail truck was coming toward them.

“This must be the man who found the bodies yesterday,” Simon Ark said.

And it was. A fairly tall, middle-aged man named Joe Harris. “They haven’t buried them yet, huh?” he asked us.

“No,” I answered. “The bodies are under canvas at the bottom of the cliff, a short distance from the rocks. The funeral is to take place today. I understand they’ve decided to bury them here in a mass grave rather than try to remove all the bodies to another town.”

“Gee,” he said, “I near died of shock yesterday morning when I drove up and found them all down there. Why do you think they jumped?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It would make a great story if I did.”

There were other trucks and cars coming now, with a gleaming State Police car in the lead. There were workers with shovels, who would soon bury the remains of the Gidaz Horror. And there were more photographers and reporters, from all over the country, coming to record forever the strange happening in this forgotten village.

They took pictures of Joe Harris and his battered mail truck; they took pictures of Shelly Constance, and questioned her about her life in the village. She talked to them at length, but she did not mention the strange man, Axidus, again; I suspected that Simon Ark had suggested she keep silent about this part of it.

Simon Ark himself kept in the background during most of the morning, and went unnoticed in the crowd of curiosity seekers who poured over the scene in growing numbers throughout the early hours of the day.

It was nearly noon before Simon Ark and I could make our escape in my car. I wondered briefly how this strange man had arrived the previous night when he had no car, but the thought passed from my mind as we watched them lowering the last of the seventy-three into the long grave at the base of the cliff.

For a moment, there was silence over the scene, as the last rites of various religions were spoken over the grave. Then, once again, a murmur of voices arose, as I turned my car away from the village.

Simon Ark was in the seat next to me, and I was glad I had managed to avoid the other reporters who’d ridden out to the village with me the previous day. For I had a feeling that the answer to this riddle rested somehow with Simon Ark, and with the white figure we’d seen on the cliff.

I turned into the highway that led north, toward the state capitol. “What did you want me to do?” I asked.

“Do? Oh, I would like you to look up some information in the old newspaper files. I would like you to find out if any priests or ministers have been killed in the Gidaz area within the past few years …”

I thought about that for a while. “All right, I’ll get the information for you on one condition. That you tell me just who you are, and just who this Axidus is.”

“I am just a man,” he answered slowly. “A man from another age. You would not be interested in where I came from, or in what my mission is. I need only tell you that I am searching for the ultimate evil—for Satan himself. And perhaps, in Gidaz, I have found him at last.”

I sighed softly. “What about Axidus?”

“Axidus is also from the past. I knew him long ago, in North Africa, as St. Augustine did …”

“Are you crazy? Are you trying to tell me we’re dealing with people who’ve been dead over fifteen hundred years?”

“I do not know,” Simon Ark replied. “But I intend to find out tonight when we return to the village of the dead—”

I left the strange man near the capitol building an hour later, having agreed to meet him there again at five o’clock. It did not take me long to gather the information Simon Ark had requested, and I was surprised to learn that six months earlier, a Catholic priest had been found beaten to death only a few miles from Gidaz. The crime had never been solved, although police were still investigating …

I could make nothing of the information, but I was certain it would mean something to Simon Ark.

I went next to the public library, to do some investigating on my own. I was determined to solve the mystery of Axidus and the seventy-three deaths, and I felt certain that the answer was hidden somewhere in the ancient pages of history.

I looked first in the Encyclopedia Britannica, but there was nothing under AXIDUS. I read the article on St. Augustine, but it contained no clue. A thick history book likewise offered no leads. A biographical dictionary listed no one named Axidus, and I was beginning to believe such a person had never existed.

I glanced out the library window, at the gleaming golden dome of the state capitol. Somewhere, there must be a clue … Axidus, St. Augustine … Augustine was a great Catholic saint, and a Catholic priest had been murdered near Gidaz six months ago …

I walked back to the endless bookshelves that lined the walls and took down the index to the Catholic Encyclopedia …

A-X-I-D-U-S … Yes, there it was …

“AXIDUS, leader of Circumcellions” … Quickly my fingers found the fifth volume and turned to the indicated page.

And I began to read: The Circumcellions were a branch of the Donatist schism, which had split away from the Catholic Church in the Fourth Century. They seemed to be an insane band of outlaws who roamed about North Africa, killing and robbing Catholic priests and others. St. Augustine had spent much of his life fighting them, and their leader, Axidus.

The whole fantastic thing was beginning to take shape in my mind now … Axidus … the burned book … the murdered priest …

And then a sentence leaped out at me from the page: “They frequently sought death, counting suicide as martyrdom. They were especially fond of flinging themselves from precipices … Even women caught the infection, and those who had sinned would cast themselves from the cliffs, to atone for their fault …”

And further down the page was more: “When in controversy with Catholics, the Donatist bishops were proud of their supporters. They declared that self-precipitation from a cliff had been forbidden in their councils. Yet the bodies of these suicides were sacrilegiously honoured, and crowds celebrated their anniversaries …”

So this was it …

Something reaching out from fifteen hundred years ago to bring death to an entire village …

Was it possible?

Was it possible that this man Axidus had convinced seventy-three persons to leap to their deaths?

I left the library and stopped in a bar and fought off the gathering clouds of exhaustion and horror with a couple of stiff drinks. Then I went to meet Simon Ark …

As we drove south once more, toward the dead village and the darkening night, I told Simon Ark what I had found. I told him about the murdered priest and about the Circumcellions.

“I feared that I was right,” he said quietly. “The death of that priest proves that there actually existed in that village the ancient cult of the Circumcellions …”

“But … but the whole thing’s fantastic. It couldn’t happen in the twentieth century.”

“Consider the circumstances, though. Here is a village almost completely cut off from the outside world. It is eighty miles from the nearest city, and almost that far from a town of any size. Its people are living completely within themselves, leaving Gidaz only about once a month. Except for the daily mail truck, they see no one else. The road leading to it is a dead end, so there are not even any other cars to pass by. The people, nearly all of them, are living in the past, in a time when the town was great and famous.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m beginning to see …”

“And into this town comes a man, a man who is completely evil, who sees the opportunity that the village and its people offer. This man, Axidus, plays on their ignorance and their superstition to get up a new religion. It is an area, I discovered this afternoon, largely neglected by the established churches because of its inaccessibility. A priest will come by every six months or so, but the rest of the time the village is alone.”

“And so they listened to Axidus.”

“Yes … I imagine he had almost a hypnotic quality in his speech, a quality that, over a period of the last two years, convinced even the most hostile that he was their savior. A few, like Shelly Constance, who were young and intelligent enough to know the truth, simply left the village, rather than stay and fight this demon who had taken control. The priest who visited the place had to die, because he realized the truth. Perhaps others who opposed Axidus died, too. Because he was playing for big stakes and could not afford to lose.”

“But … just how did he work the mass suicide?”

“In the same way that he, or his namesake, did fifteen hundred years ago. He convinced the people that suicide was a form of martyrdom, and that they should throw themselves from the cliff to repent for their sins. He had probably been leading up to it for a long, long time. But two nights ago, when he called them suddenly from their houses, he told them the time had come. They had no time to think, to consider the fantastic thing they were doing. They actually believed, I am certain, that it was good. And they walked off the cliff in the night, probably thinking that Axidus would join them. But of course he did not.”

“You’ve built up a pretty strong case,” I admitted. “I’ll agree that over a period of years, a fanatic like that might talk most of those isolated people into killing themselves, especially since they seem to have had nothing to live for anyway. But there must have been at least one or two who would have resisted. What about the children?”

“I imagine,” Simon Ark said quietly, “that the children were carried over the cliff in their mothers’ arms. Or led over by their fathers.”

I fell silent as the horror of the scene formed a terrifying picture in my mind.

“And,” he continued, “Axidus could easily have killed any adults who might have resisted the idea of suicide. He could have killed them and thrown their bodies down with the rest.”

“Still, such a thing seems so … impossible.”

“It seems so impossible and fantastic only because of its setting in time and space. In the twentieth century, in the western United States, it is fantastic. But in the fourth century, in North Africa, it was common. And who is to say that people have changed since then? Times have changed, and places have changed, but the people have remained the same, and they suffer today from exactly the same faults and weaknesses they had fifteen hundred years ago …”

I turned the car into the dirt road that led to the village of the dead. “But why are we coming back here tonight?”

“Because Axidus will return this evening, and this time he must not escape us.”

“How do you know he’ll return?”

“Because from the beginning Axidus had to be one of two things: either a clever killer whose insane mind had devised this fantastic scheme, or else he really was the long-dead Axidus of St. Augustine’s time. If he is the former, then there’s something in Gidaz he wants, possibly the gold, and he’ll come for it because we scared him away last night. And,” he paused for a moment, “if it’s to be the latter explanation, then according to legend and history, he’d return to worship at the grave, just as he did fifteen hundred years ago …”

I turned on my headlights against the thickening night and tried to shake the gathering sleep from my eyes. “Which do you think it is?”

“In a way, I hope it is the latter, because then possibly my long search will be over. But there is still one thing that puzzles me.”

“What’s that?”

“I am wondering why a mail truck was delivering mail this morning, to a village full of dead people …”

After that we waited.

We waited in the rocks of the cliff itself, overlooking the grave in the moonlight. We waited as Augustine might have waited those many years before.

The evening slipped slowly by and nothing happened. Once there came the distant call of a timber wolf, and again the hooting of a nearby owl, but otherwise the night was silent.

The grave below us had been marked with a large temporary cross, until some sort of plaque could list the names of the seventy-three.

For a moment the moon slipped behind a cloud, but then it appeared again, and the edge of the cliff glowed in its light.

Then I saw it.

High above us, on the very edge of the cliff, the girl, stood …

“Damn!” I whispered. “I forgot about the girl; she’s still here.”

But before we could move, we realized she was not alone on the cliff’s edge. A tall, bearded man, all in white, had come up behind her.

Simon Ark leaped from his hiding place and shouted one word:” Axidus!”

The figure on the cliff paused, startled, and the girl, seeing him behind her, screamed …

After that, it was a nightmare.

The figure in white was clutching the girl, like a scene from some third-rate movie, as I scrambled up the rocks toward them. But already Simon Ark was ahead of me, shouting something in the language he’d used before.

Axidus released his grip on the girl, and I caught her as she fell.

And then, there on the very edge of the cliff, Simon Ark challenged this creature from another time. He held in his hand an oddly shaped cross, with a loop at the top, and he said, in a voice like thunder, “Back, Axidus, go back to the caverns of the damned from which you came.” He raised the cross high above his head. “I command it, in the name of Augustine!”

And suddenly the figure in white seemed to lose his footing on the rocks, and he slipped down over the edge of the cliff, with a scream that echoed through the night …

We found him later, at the base of the cliff, which had now claimed its seventy-fourth life. And of course, under the blood and the false white beard, we found Joe Harris, the mail truck driver …

And one can argue, I suppose, that it all had a perfectly sane explanation. As driver of the mail truck, the insane Joe Harris would have known enough about the people to scare them into believing he was a man of supernatural powers. He had been after the remains of the gold in the old mines, and had carefully planned for two years to drive the entire town to suicide.

But of course this did not explain how a man like Joe Harris had ever heard the odd story of Axidus in the first place, nor did it explain why he found it necessary to burn the books of Saint Augustine.

That was why I never published my story. There were too many things that could never be explained. Simon Ark and I worked the rest of the night, burying Joe Harris in the big grave with the other seventy-three. His disappearance caused some further excitement, but in a few weeks it was forgotten.

And likewise the Gidaz Horror itself has been forgotten with the passage of time, except for an occasional feature article in the Sunday newspapers.

Perhaps it is better that way …

As for the others who shared my adventure, the girl, Shelly Constance, and I were married six months later, but that is another story, and a much happier one.

And Simon Ark … Well, I never saw him again after that night, but I have a feeling that he’s still around somewhere …

THE MAN FROM NOWHERE

THE INTERESTED READER MAY find the tale of Kaspar Hauser’s strange life and stranger death related at some length in volume eleven of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And perhaps the story of Douglas Zadig’s life and death will be there someday, too.

For Douglas Zadig was also a man from nowhere, a man who came out of the mists and died in the snow—just as Kaspar Hauser had over one hundred years ago.

This is the story of Douglas Zadig’s last day on earth, and of the people who were with him when he died …

It was a cold, bleak Friday afternoon in early November when Simon Ark called me at my office. I was in the midst of checking some final galley proofs for our January books, but I tossed them aside when I recognized his voice on the line. “Simon! How’ve you been?”

“Busy,” he replied. “How would you like to go up to Maine for the weekend?”

“Maine? In November? Nobody goes up there except hunters this time of year.”

“Hunters and publishers,” Simon Ark corrected; “I want to see a man, and since he’s a writer of sorts, I thought it might be good to take you along. That is, if you’re free …”

I’d learned long ago that an invitation from Simon Ark was never as casual as it sounded. If he was going up to Maine for the weekend, there was a reason for it, and I wanted to be with him. “I’m free,” I said. “When should I meet you?”

“Can you be at Grand Central at six? We’ll take the New Haven part of the way.”

“I’ll be there. At the information booth …”

I called my wife after that, explaining the reason for my sudden trip. She knew Simon Ark almost as well as I did, and she was one of the few people in this world who understood. She said goodbye to me with that little catch in her breath that told me she’d be waiting for whatever adventures I had to relate upon my return.

And then I was off, on a weekend I was never to forget …

I’d first met Simon Ark years before, when I was still a newspaper reporter; and though I’d lost track of him for several years, he’d turned up again recently to renew our friendship. He was an odd man by any standards, a tall, heavy-set figure with an expression that was at times saintly.

My experiences with him in the past, together with the tales he’d related to me over a beer or a glass of wine, told me that he was someone not really of our world at all. He belonged to the world of the past—to the world of the supernatural, perhaps, but certainly not to the world of twentieth century America.

He was a man who was searching, searching for what he called the Ultimate Evil, the devil himself. I’d laughed at first, or thought possibly that he was a little crazy; but I didn’t laugh any more, and I knew that if anything he was the sanest man in the world. He found evil everywhere, because there was evil everywhere, and I knew that someday he would have his wish; someday he would confront Satan himself.

That was why I always went with him when he asked. He’d been searching for a long time, and the meeting might never take place in my lifetime; but if it did I wanted to be there, too.

So that was why I was with him as the train rumbled north toward New England that night. “What’s it all about this time, Simon?” I asked finally, when no information was forthcoming.

He gazed out the train window, almost as if he could see something in the darkness besides the irregular patterns of light from buildings and roads.

Presently he asked, “Did you ever hear of a man called Douglas Zadig?”

The name seemed somehow familiar, but I had to shake my head. “Who is he?”

“He is a man from nowhere, a man without family or country, a man without a past. You may have read about him some ten years ago, when he walked out of an English mist one night to become an overnight sensation.”

“I remember now,” I said. “He was a youth of about twenty at the time, and he claimed to have no memory of his past life. He spoke English very poorly, and his clothes were almost rags. The only thing he remembered was that his first name was Douglas. When they found him, he was carrying a worn French copy of Voltaire’s novel, Zadig, so the newspapers named him Douglas Zadig.”

“You have a good memory for details,” Simon Ark said. “As you probably remember, this Douglas Zadig has remained a complete mystery. His fingerprints were not on file anywhere in the world; his picture has never been identified by anyone. He is simply a man without a past.”

“I lost track of him a few years back, though,” I told Simon. “What’s he been doing recently?”

“I ran into him a few years ago in London,” Simon Ark continued. “I was in England to investigate an odd happening in Devonshire, and I happened to hear him speaking at a sort of rally. He’s become quite a writer and speaker in some circles—a sort of prophet, I suppose you’d call him.”

“Is this the man we’re going up to Maine to see?”

“Quite correct. He came to this country with an American doctor two years ago. The doctor—a man named Adam Hager—has actually adopted him as a son, and the two of them are living in Maine.”

“Odd, but hardly in your field of investigation, is it, Simon?”

The train rumbled on through the small New England towns, along the dark waiting waters of Long Island Sound. Around us, people were drifting into sleep, and the seat lights were being dimmed.

Simon Ark took a slim volume from his pocket and held it out for my examination. I glanced at the cover and saw that the unlikely title was, On the Eternal War Between the Forces of Good and the Forces of Evil. The author was Douglas Zadig.

“So?” I questioned.

Simon Ark returned the book to his pocket. “The odd thing about this book—as with all of Douglas Zadig’s writings and speeches—is that his apparently new philosophy is actually lifted almost word for word from the teachings of a religious leader named Zoroaster, who lived seven centuries before Christ …”

It took us until Saturday noon to reach our destination, a small town called Katahdin in the northern part of the state. It was cold up here, and a fresh layer of snow already covered the ground. All around us were mountains and lakes and forests, and it seemed impossible that such a place could be only a single night’s journey from New York.

There was a small hotel of sorts, where we left what few belongings we’d brought along. It was all but empty now, but in another week I imagined it would be full of sportsmen up from Bangor and Boston.

“You fellows hunters?” the room clerk asked us. “Little early in the season for good hunting.”

“We’re hunters of a very special type of game,” Simon Ark replied. “Can you direct us to the house of Doctor Hager?”

“Sure; it’s right at the edge of town, where the road turns. Big white place. You can’t miss it.”

“Thank you.”

The house of Doctor Hager was indeed easy to find; and from the look of the barren white fields that surrounded it, I guessed that someone had once tried farming the land.

Doctor Hager himself was average in almost every respect. He might have been a typical country doctor, but he might just as well have been a big city businessman. There was a look of shrewdness about his eyes that contrasted with the weak smile that seemed always on his lips.

Simon Ark explained that we were from a New York publishing company, and had come up to speak with Douglas Zadig about the possibility of doing one of his books.

“Come in, by all means,” Doctor Hager urged us. “I’m sure Douglas will be happy to speak with you. There are so many people interested in his work …”

The house was even larger than it had seemed from outside, and we saw at once that we were not the only visitors. A handsome young woman of perhaps thirty, and an older man with thin, drawn features were sitting in the-living room.

Doctor Hager took charge of the introductions, and I learned that the woman was a Mrs. Eve Brent, from Chicago. The older man was Charles Kingsley, and I recognized him as a retired manufacturer, whose name was prominent in financial circles.

“These are some New York publishers,” Doctor Hager announced proudly, “who have come all the way up here to talk with Douglas.” Then, turning to us, he explained, “Our house here is always open to visitors. Mrs. Brent and Mr. Kingsley are staying with us for a few weeks to try and find themselves spiritually.”

I had taken the chair next to Mrs. Brent, and I asked her where Douglas Zadig was, just to get the conversation started.

“He’s upstairs in his room; I think he’ll be down shortly.”

“You’re a long way from Chicago, aren’t you?” I asked.

“My … my husband died a few years back. Since then, I’ve just been at loose ends, traveling to Europe and South America; it wasn’t until I read one of Douglas Zadig’s books that I found myself again.”

I saw that Simon was busy talking with Hager and Mr. Kingsley. But all conversation stopped with the sudden entrance of a thin young man whom I knew to be Douglas Zadig.

He was taller than I’d supposed, with gaunt, pointed features of the type that stayed in your memory. There was a slight limp to his walk, and I remembered reading now that he’d had the limp when he first appeared, more than ten years ago in England.

“I’m sorry to be late,” he apologized, in a rich full voice, with barely a trace of English accent. “But it happened again.”

Whatever it was that had “happened” was enough to bring gasps from the Doctor and the two guests. Hager rushed to Douglas Zadig’s side and quickly examined his head.

“The same side as before, Adam,” the young man said. “I was shaving, when suddenly I felt this blow on the temple; there’s not much blood this time, though.”

“The skin is broken, though,” Doctor Hager said. “Just like the other time.”

Simon Ark arose from his chair and went forward to examine the young man. “Just what is the trouble here?” he asked, addressing the question to the four of them.

It was Mrs. Brent at my side who answered. “Douglas has been the victim of two mysterious attacks, both while he was alone in his room. We … we think it might be the … the devil…”

I saw Simon Ark’s quiet eyes come alive at the word, and I knew that in some mysterious way he’d come into conflict again with the Evil he eternally sought. From outside, a slight wind stirred the barren trees; and through the window I could see a brief gust of snow eddy up into the air.

Charles Kingsley snorted and took out a cigar. “This whole business is nonsense. We’re not living in the Middle Ages anymore; the devil doesn’t come around attacking people.”

“I fear you’re quite wrong.” Simon Ark spoke quietly. “Satan is just as real today as he was a thousand years ago; and there’s no reason to suppose that his tactics have changed any in that time. If I were more certain he was among us, in fact, I’d suggest a rite of exorcism.”

“We’d need a priest for that,” Mrs. Brent said; “there isn’t one within miles of here.”

Simon Ark shook his head. “In the early days of Christianity, it was quite common for lay persons to exorcise the devil. But I would not want to attempt it under the present circumstances.”

Douglas Zadig spoke from the doorway, where he’d remained during Simon Ark’s brief examination. “Just what do you mean by that, sir? You talk oddly for a book publisher.”

“I have other professions. I refer to the peculiar doctrine you preach as to the eternal war between the two great forces of good and evil. It reminds one somewhat of the teachings of Zoroaster.”

The young man seemed to pale slightly at the name “I … I have read about his doctrines, of course. But if you’d completed your study of my teachings and published works, I think you’d find that my theory of evil holds that, as a force, it is a part of God, and is willed by Him—not that it is a separate and distinct power.”

“Oh, come now, Mr. Zadig,” Simon Ark said with almost a chuckle, “Thomas Aquinas disproved that idea seven hundred years ago. In case you’re not familiar with it, I refer you to chapters 39 and 95 in Book One of his Summa Contra Gentiles. For a preacher of a new religion, you seem to be quite confused as to your own doctrine.”

Douglas Zadig turned on him with blazing eyes. “I need not listen to these insults in my own house,” he said, and turned from the room. Doctor Hager ran after him and followed him onto the front porch.

Kingsley and Mrs. Brent seemed shocked at Simon Ark’s tactics; I walked over close enough to speak to him without their hearing us. “Perhaps you were a little hard on the fellow, Simon; I’m sure he means no harm.”

“Whether he means harm or not, the fact remains that false teachings like that can always cause harm.”

Doctor Hager returned to us then, and through the window we could see Douglas Zadig walking off across a snow-covered field, his open jacket flapping in the breeze. “He’s gone for a walk,” the doctor informed us; “he wants to be alone with his thoughts.”

Simon Ark walked to the window and watched him until he was out of sight over a hill of snow.

“Really,” Mrs. Brent said, “I think you owe him an apology when he returns. In his own way, he’s a great man.”

Simon Ark turned from the window and faced the four of us. “Have any of you ever heard the story of Kaspar Hauser?” he asked quietly. And when he saw our blank expressions, he went on, “Kaspar Hauser was a German youth of about sixteen, who appeared suddenly in Nuremberg in May of 1828. He was dressed as a peasant, and seemed to remember nothing of his past life. In his possession were found two letters, supposedly written by the boy’s mother and his guardian. A professor in Nuremberg undertook his education, and he remained there and in Ansbach until his death in 1833. Twice before his death, while he was living with the professor, he suffered mysterious wounds; and his death from a stab wound while he was walking in a park during the winter has never been explained.”

Doctor Hager spoke from between tightened lips. “Just what are you driving at?”

“I am suggesting that Douglas Zadig’s life, his appearance out of nowhere in England ten years ago, his friendship with you, Doctor, and even the two odd wounds he has recently suffered, follow very closely the life of Kaspar Hauser.”

Mrs. Brent was still beside me, and her fingers dug unconsciously into my arm. “Perhaps you’re right. What does that prove?”

“Don’t any of you see it?” Simon Ark asked. “This man we all know as Douglas Zadig has no life of his own. Everything he has done and said has been done and said before in this world. He bears the name of a fictional character from French literature; he teaches a doctrine of a man dead nearly three thousand years, and he lives the life of a man from the nineteenth century. I don’t propose to explain it—I am only stating the facts …”

There was silence when he finished speaking, and the four of us who were with him in the room looked at each other with questioning glances. There was something here which was beyond our understanding. Something …

Doctor Hager broke the silence. “How …how did this man … this Kaspar Hauser die?”

“He was stabbed to death while walking alone in a park. There were no other footprints in the snow, and yet the wound could not have been self-inflicted. The mystery has never been solved.”

As if with one body our eyes went toward the window where last we’d seen Douglas Zadig walking. And I knew there was but a single thought in our minds.

Doctor Hager pulled a coat from the closet and threw it over his shoulders. “No, not that way,” he said, giving voice to the fear that was in all our minds. “He’ll come back the other way, at the rear of the house.”

We ran out, Hager and Simon Ark in the lead, closely followed by Kingsley, Mrs. Brent and myself. We gave only a passing glance to the single set of footprints leading off over the hill, and then we ran around the back of the big white house.

It was cold, but somehow we didn’t notice the cold. We saw only the snow—clear and white and unmarked ahead of us—and far away in the distance across the field, the lone figure of Douglas Zadig walking back toward us.

He walked quickly, with the steady gait of a young, vigorous man. The thin layer of snow did not impede his feet, and his short jacket flapped in the breeze as if it were a summer’s day. When he saw us he waved a greeting, and seemed to walk a little faster toward us.

He was perhaps a hundred yards away when it happened. He stopped short, as if struck by a blow, and his hands flew to his left side. And even at this distance we could see the look of shock and surprise on his face.

He staggered, almost fell, and then continued staggering toward us, his hands clutching at his side. “I’ve been stabbed,” he shouted, “I’ve been stabbed.” And already we could see the bloody trail he was leaving in the snow …

Doctor Hager was the first to break the spell, and he dashed forward to meet the wounded man, with the rest of us in close pursuit. When Hager was still some twenty yards from him, Douglas Zadig fell to his knees in the snow; and now the blood was reddening his shirt and gushing out between his fingers. He looked at us once more, with that same surprised expression on his face, and then he toppled over in the snow.

Hager was the first to reach him, and he bent over and quickly turned the body back to examine the wound. Then he let it fall again and looked up at us.

“He’s dead …” he said simply …

We knew it was impossible, and we stood there and looked down at the impossible and perhaps we prayed.

“He must have been shot,” Eve Brent said; but then Doctor Hager showed us the wound, and it was clearly that of a knife.

“He stabbed himself,” Charles Kingsley said, but I knew that Kingsley didn’t even believe it himself. There was no knife in the wound, no knife back there in the snow; and Hager settled it by pointing out that such a wound would be difficult to self-inflict, and impossible while the five of us watched him.

We went back to where the bloodstains started, and searched in the snow for something, anything—even the footprints of an invisible man. But there was nothing. The snow was unmarked, except for the bloodstains and the single line of footprints.

And then we stood there and looked at the body and looked at each other and waited for somebody else to say something.

“I suggest we call the local police, or the state troopers,” Simon Ark said finally.

And so we left the body of Douglas Zadig where it lay in the snow and went back into the house. And waited for the police.

And when they came—a bent old man, who was the local barber and also at times the constable, and a wiser one, who was the town doctor and also its coroner, we knew no more.

Could the wound have been inflicted by someone on the other side of the hill, before he came into view? That was my question, but the half-formed theory in my mind died even before it was born. The blood had only started at the point where we’d seen him grip his side; and besides that both doctors agreed that such a wound would cause almost instantaneous death. It was a wonder he’d even managed to walk as far as he did.

And presently the barber, who was the constable, and the doctor who was the coroner, left, taking the body of Douglas Zadig with them.

Simon Ark continued to gaze out the window at the occasional snowflakes that were drifting down from above. Mrs. Brent and I managed somehow to make coffee for the others, but for a long time no one spoke.

Presently I heard Simon Ark mumble, “The man from nowhere … Nowhere …” And seeing me watching him, he continued, “Dear, beauteous death, the jewel of the just! Shining nowhere but in the dark; what mysteries do lie beyond thy dust, could man outlook that mark!”

When he saw my puzzled expression, he explained, “The lines are not original with me. They were written back in the seventeenth century by Henry Vaughan.”

“Does that tell you what killed Douglas Zadig out there in the snow?”

He smiled at me, something he rarely did. “The answer to our mystery might better be found in Shakespeare than in Vaughan.”

“Then you do know!”

“Perhaps …”

“I read a story once, about a fellow who was murdered with a dagger made of ice.”

“That melted and left no trace? Well, you’d hardly expect a dagger of ice to melt when the outside temperature is below freezing, would you?”

“I guess not,” I admitted. “But if it wasn’t done in any of the ways we’ve mentioned, then it must have been supernatural. Do you really mean that Douglas Zadig was possessed of the devil?”

But Simon Ark only repeated his favorite word. “Perhaps …”

“I don’t care,” Charles Kingsley was saying, in the loud voice I’d come to expect from him. “I’m not a suspect, and I don’t intend to stay here any longer. I came because I believed in the teachings and writings of Douglas Zadig; now that he’s dead there’s no reason for me to remain any longer.”

Doctor Hager shrugged and gave up the argument. “You’re certainly free to leave any time you want to, Mister Kingsley. Believe me, this awful tragedy strikes me a much greater blow than anyone else.”

Mrs. Brent had taken out a checkbook and her pen. “Well, I’ll still give you the money as I promised, Dr. Hager. If nothing else perhaps you can erect a memorial of some sort.”

I could see that she was serious. I had known Douglas Zadig for only a short time on the final day of his life, but I could see that he’d had a profound effect on the lives of these people and others like them. To me he had been only a name half-remembered from the news stories of ten years ago, but to some he had become apparently the preacher of a new belief.

And then Simon Ark spoke again. “I would like you people to remain for another hour if you would. I think I will be able to show you the manner in which Douglas Zadig died.”

“If you can do that,” Kingsley said, “it’s worth waiting for. But if there really is some sort of devil around here, I sure don’t want to stay.”

“I promise you that I’ll protect you all from the force that struck down Douglas Zadig,” Simon Ark said. “I have one question, though: Dr. Hager, do you keep any chickens here?”

“Chickens?” Hager repeated with a puzzled frown. “Why, no; there’s a place down the road that raises them, though. Why?”

“I wondered,” he replied, and then he would say no more. After that, he disappeared into a remote section of the house and the four of us were left alone. We knew that the state police would be arriving before long, to continue the investigation; and I could understand why Kingsley and Mrs. Brent were anxious to get away.

They were beginning to grow restless again when Simon Ark reappeared, this time holding in his hands the small ansated cross he always carried. “If you people will accompany me outside, I believe I will be able to show you how Douglas Zadig met his death.”

“You mean you know who killed him.”

“In a way I suppose I was responsible for his death,” Simon Ark answered. “The least I can do is to avenge it …”

We followed him outside, to the snow-covered field very near the spot where Douglas Zadig had died just an hour earlier. The four of us paused at the edge of the snow, but Simon Ark walked on, until he was some fifty feet away from us.

Then he stood there, looking up at the bleak November sky and at the distant trees and mountains. And he seemed to be very much alone …

He held the strange ansated cross above his head, and chanted a few words in the Coptic language I’d come to know so well.

From somewhere a large bird swooped in a giant circle overhead. It might have been an eagle, or a vulture, lured north into the cold weather by some unknown quirk of nature. We watched it until it disappeared into a low brooding cloud bank, and then our eyes returned to Simon Ark.

He stood there, chanting in the strange tongue, as if calling upon some demons from the dark past. He stood there for what seemed an eternity, and what must have been the longest five minutes of my life.

And then it happened.

Again.

He dropped his hands suddenly to his side, and when they came away we could see the blood. He took a single step forward and then collapsed on his face in the snow, one outstretched hand still clutching the ansated cross.

We rushed forward behind Adam Hager, and I could feel my knees growing weak at the sight before us. Simon Ark, whom I’d come to think of as almost an invincible man, had been struck down by the same force that had killed Douglas Zadig …

Dr. Hager reached him first, and felt for his heart. And then …

… In a moment I’ll never forget, Simon Ark suddenly came alive, and rolled over in the snow, pinning Hager beneath him.

And we all saw, in Hager’s outstretched helpless hand, the gleaming blade of a thin steel dagger …

“They were just a couple of small-time swindlers who came close to hitting the big money,” Simon Ark said later, when the state police had taken away the cursing, struggling, figure of Dr. Hager.

We were back inside—Kingsley, Mrs. Brent, several police officers, and myself—and listening to Simon Ark’s explanation. Somehow the tension of the past few hours was gone, and we were a friendly group of people who might have been discussing the results of the day’s football games.

“It’s always difficult to imagine yourself as the victim of a swindler,” he was saying, “but I saw at once that Zadig and Hager had invited you two here for the purpose of getting money from you. We might never know how many dozens were here before you, people who’d read Zadig’s book and written to him. If you’ll check further, I think you’ll find that the book’s publication was paid for by Zadig and Hager, and that most of his speaking engagements were phony, too—like his occasional limping.”

“He did ask us for money to carry out various projects,” Kingsley admitted.

“As I’ve already told you,” Simon Ark continued, “the very fact that his name, his life, and his so-called doctrine were copied from the past made me suspect a swindle of some sort. There was just nothing original about the man; his was a life copied out of an encyclopedia. I suppose after he met Hager in London, the two of them thought up the scheme. I imagine you’ll find that Hager has tried this sort of thing before under various names.”

“But what about the murder?” Mrs. Brent wanted to know. “Why should Hager kill his partner in crime?”

“I fear it was because of my arrival. My detailed questions about Zadig’s teachings caught them both off guard; and Hager, especially, knew that I might uncover their whole phony plot. When I mentioned the parallels between the attacks on Zadig and Kaspar Hauser, as well as those between the doctrines of Zadig and Zoroaster, Hager knew I was getting too close. When he and Zadig went out on the porch together before, I imagine they set up the final act of the Hauser drama, in which Zadig was to be wounded by a devil that had taken possession of him. I suppose this was the final try for the money, and perhaps they’d done the whole performance before.”

“Only this time it was real,” I said; “this time Hager really killed him …”

“Correct. You’ll remember it was Hager who asked how Hauser had been killed—and Hager who got us out of the house, so we could have front row seats for the final act. The actual mechanics of the murder are simple, once you know they were both swindlers. There’s an old trick among confidence men—I believe it’s called a ‘cackle-bladder’—a small membranous bag filled with chicken blood or the like, which the swindler crushes to his body in order to appear wounded, after his confederate has fired a blank pistol at him. Douglas Zadig, walking toward us across the field, simply burst the bladder on his side and did a good job of acting. Hager, who naturally was expecting it all, easily managed to move fastest and reach the ‘body’ first. At this point, to make it look as realistic as possible, Hager was to wound Zadig slightly with a spring-knife hidden up his sleeve …”

He paused, and we remembered the scene in the snow; and the horror of what was coming dawned on us all.

“And then, while Douglas Zadig braced himself so as to remain motionless when the knife cut into him, his partner released the spring knife up his sleeve, and sent the steel blade deep into Zadig’s side, straight for the heart …”

Charles Kingsley stirred slightly, and Mrs. Brent was beginning to look sick. But there wasn’t much more, and Simon Ark continued. “Both doctors told us such a wound would have caused almost instantaneous death, and that made me wonder about the wounded man walking as far as he did. Anything’s possible, of course, but it seemed far more likely that Hager had killed him as he bent over the body.”

“But,” I objected, “why did he have the nerve to try to kill you in the same way? When you pulled the trick with the chicken blood he must have realized you knew.”

“It wasn’t chicken blood,” Simon Ark corrected with a slight smile. “I was forced to use ordinary ketchup, but I knew Hager would try to kill me, even though he realized I was only waiting to grab the knife from his sleeve. He had no choice, really. Once I was on to his trick, I had only to explain it; and an analysis of the various blood stains on Zadig’s shirt would have proved me correct. His only chance was to be faster with his spring-knife that I was with my hands. Luckily, he wasn’t, or you might have had a second impossible death on your hands.”

He said it as if he meant it; but somehow I had the feeling that his life had never really been in danger. I had the feeling that it would be awfully difficult to kill Simon Ark …

And so we departed from the little town in Maine, and journeyed back toward the slightly warmer wilds of Manhattan. A search of the house had turned up nearly a hundred thousand dollars in contributions from Zadig’s swindled followers, and we began to think that Hager had possibly been thinking of that, too, when he plunged the knife into his partner’s side.

“One thing, though, Simon,” I said as the train thundered through the New England night. “Just where did Douglas Zadig ever come from? What happened in that London mist ten years ago?”

“There are things that are never explained,” he answered simply. “But several explanations present themselves. The copy of the novel in French suggests—now that we know the man’s true character—that even at this early age he was trying to fool the public into thinking him French instead of English. I don’t know the real answer, and probably never will; but if a young man had avoided military service during England’s darkest hours, he might well have had to think up a scheme to protect himself in a postwar world full of returning veterans.”

“Of course!” I agreed. “He was a draft-dodger; that would explain why his fingerprints weren’t on file with the army, or elsewhere!”

But Simon Ark was gazing out the window, into the night, and he replied in a quiet voice. “There are other possible explanations, of course, but I prefer not to dwell on them. Douglas Zadig is dead, like Kasper Hauser before him, and there are some things better left unexplained, at least in this world.”

And after that he said no more about it …

THE VICAR OF HELL

CONSIDERING THE FACT THAT Sir Francis Bryan was, during his lifetime, one of the most notorious men in the British Isles, it is unusual that he should have become one of the forgotten men of history, overlooked by virtually every modern encyclopedia and textbook.

Since my business is publishing, it was this fact, more than any other, that took me to England that winter on a strange quest. And before my long search was ended I was to find my very life threatened by a murder that took place over four hundred years ago …

The first thing I heard, as I left the big four-motored plane at London airport, was a small portable radio playing one of Gershwin’s old tunes, “A Foggy Day.” It was indeed a foggy day in London town, and for a time there’d been some doubt about our ability to land the plane. They told me such fog was common in London during the winter months, and I guess that was supposed to settle any complaints I might have voiced.

Actually, it had just turned December by the calendar; but in a city like London, where the annual mean temperature was only around 51 degrees, anything past the middle of November could be considered winter.

Had I been planning a sight-seeing visit to the tightly sprawling city on the Thames, I’m sure I’d have picked a better month than December. But this was a business trip; and though the whole thing had been my idea in the first place, I hadn’t much choice over the time of the year.

And so there I was, in London in the middle of a mild fog, bound for a meeting with a girl bearing the unusual name of Rain Richards.

I’d first seen the name at the bottom of a letter sent to our London office, and forwarded to me in New York. Since I was a married man approaching the age of forty, I had not even considered the fact that Miss Rain Richards might be young and beautiful and intelligent. But she was all three of these—and much more besides—as I realized the moment she’d opened the thick oak door of her house in the London suburbs.

She was tall and slim, with the stature of a fashion model, and yet there was something about her that hinted at a darkness beneath the surface. “I’ve been expecting you,” she said after I’d introduced myself. “Please come in.

She led me down a narrow, dusky hall into a large room that might have been a study. Three walls were hung with a variety of small arms—guns, revolvers and automatics of all types. I judged there to be close to a hundred of them in the collection.

“Yours?” I motioned toward the walls, never dreaming that they were.

“Yes,” she surprised me by saying. “Shooting is a hobby with me.”

“Interesting. Now, about this matter, Miss Richards …”

“You can call me Rain.”

“That really is your name? I could hardly believe it when I saw the letter.”

“I was born in India during the monsoon,” she said, by way of explanation. “I guess my folks had a sense of humor or something.”

From the looks of her, I would have guessed her age to be about twenty-seven, but it was hard to tell. I might have been five years off in either direction. She lit a cigarette as she talked, and casually blew smoke out her nostrils. “But you don’t want to hear about me, of course. You’ve come about my letter.”

“That’s correct. You were quite right in saying that we’d be interested in this book you mention. Suppose you tell me a little more about it.”

She relaxed deep into the chair and began to talk, with a soft toneless voice that flowed through the room like a glistening stream.

“You’ve heard of Sir Francis Bryan? Good! Very few people have, you know. I myself first became interested in Bryan while I was at your Columbia University. One day I came across a line in Milton which refers to him as the ‘Vicar of Hell,’ and that started me searching. It was a hard, long job, because most modern historians seem to have completely forgotten Bryan. But I finally found a few facts.”

She paused long enough to take another draw on her cigarette, and then continued. “Bryan lived during the first half of the sixteenth century, and he was a friend and advisor to Henry VIII. He was also a cousin of the ill-fated Anne Boleyn, and when she was put on trial, which resulted in her execution death in 1536, he deserted her in order to remain in Henry’s good graces. This deed caused Thomas Cromwell to refer to him in a letter as ‘the Vicar of Hell,’ a name that stuck with him until his death—though some historians credit Henry with first calling him that.”

“But what about this unsolved murder you mentioned in your letter?” I asked her.

“Oh yes. Well, in 1548, James Butler—an Irishman and the Ninth Earl of Ormonde—was poisoned while visiting here in London. Because they feared that his widow might marry an enemy of the crown, and thus strengthen his land-holdings, certain highly placed persons persuaded Francis Bryan, himself a widower, to woo and marry her—for the good of the country. Bryan succeeded in this last duty for his country, and he moved to Ireland to take over his new lands. However, he lived only two years, and died mysteriously in 1550.”

“So you have two mysterious deaths on your hands—James Butler and Bryan himself.”

“Yes,” she continued, in an earnest voice that he was beginning to like. “Now my researches have turned up further information, unknown thus far to any of the historians. Sometime during the seventeenth century, about a hundred years after these deaths, there was published a large volume which claimed to give a somewhat shocking solution to these deaths. The book was immediately suppressed by the government, and all copies were seized and destroyed.”

“Then what makes you think you can turn up a copy, three hundred years later?”

She rose from the chair and began striding back and forth across the room, her long legs moving quickly beneath the tight folds of her skirt. “Two weeks ago I received a letter from a man who’d heard of my quest. He offered to obtain a copy of the suppressed book for ten thousand pounds.”

I relaxed and felt for my own American cigarettes. “So that’s why you contacted a book publisher. You expect us to put up … what? Around $30,000? Put up around $30,000 for a book that might not even exist!”

“No; I simply want you to go with me to see this man. He refused even to see me unless I brought someone along who could offer that kind of money. Actually, ten thousand pounds isn’t very much for a book that may have been written by another Boswell.”

I sighed, and puffed on the cigarette. “I suppose not,” I admitted. “At least it’s worth talking to this fellow.” Actually, since I’d crossed the ocean on this mission already, I had no intention of going back empty-handed. But there was no reason for letting Rain Richards know that—at least not yet.

“Good,” she said; “let me call him.”

She placed a call to a number in the Kensington Gardens section of London, “At least that’s where he told me he was located,” and waited until a man’s voice answered. “Hello? Mister Hugo Carrier? This is Rain Richards. I have an interested party over from the States. Can we get together sometime tonight? Oh …well, how about first thing in the morning? Fine…Let me jot down the address…Good, we’ll see you around ten in the morning.”

She hung up and turned back to me. “He can’t see us until ten in the morning; will that be all right with you?”

“Guess it’ll have to be. I’ll stop by here for you around nine-thirty.”

“Fine,” she replied, the hint of a smile lingering on her face. “Till then…”

I left her in the doorway and walked back toward my hotel. With the coming of night, the fog seemed even thicker, but I found Waterloo Bridge after nearly an hour of walking and hailed a cab for the remaining distance.

Back in my hotel room, I found myself preoccupied with the memory of the girl named Rain. I took out a book and started to read, but it didn’t help. I found myself comparing her with my wife, Shelly, and presently I took out my wallet and gazed at the photo of Shelly—the one I’d taken at the beach some three years ago.

Finally, unable to settle the troubled thoughts of my own mind, I climbed into bed and dropped off into a sound sleep…

The morning dawned, bright and sunny, with only a slight mist to remind me of the fog of the night before. It was almost like a morning in New York, when the canyons of Manhattan seem like valleys for the flowering river of mist.

Now that I realized just how far Rain lived from the center of London, I took a cab the entire distance. She met me at the door, looking as young and cool as I remembered her. “Come in,” she greeted me. “I’m just doing a little shooting downstairs. You may watch, if you like.”

I followed her to the basement, where I found a sandbagged area, with targets on the far wall, that apparently served as her shooting gallery. On a shelf in front of her were a number of hand guns, and I recognized a U.S. Army .45 and .25 pocket automatic, and several foreign pistols.

“This is my favorite,” she said, choosing a tiny weapon from the shelf. “A .41 caliber Derringer. Watch!”

She brought the gun up to eye level with a single sweeping motion that my eye could hardly follow. There was a deafening roar as both of its twin barrels spouted flame, and I could see the bull’s eye of one of the targets fly away at the bullets’ impact.

“You’re quite a shot.”

“I had to be. I was in Burma when the Japanese invaded; they killed my folks.”

“I’m sorry…”

“I’m over it now,” she said. “I’m back in jolly old England, where everybody’s respectable; and the war seems a long ways back. I suppose I’m lucky that my family had money back here, so I can devote myself to foolish projects like searching for lost manuscripts, and such.”

As she spoke, she traded the Derringer for a tiny Colt .25 automatic and let go with five quick shots at another target. We walked over to examine it together. Four of the bullets had circled the bull’s eye; the fifth was off to one side.

“That should have been in the center,” she complained. “Well, what say we go to see Mister Carrier? It’s nearly ten now.”

I agreed and she put away the guns. “Have to clean them later—that’s one part of it I don’t like. Here, I’ll take the Derringer with me; never can tell when it’ll come in handy.”

She dropped it into her purse and I raised my eyebrows lightly. “Do you have a permit for that?”

“The bobbies don’t carry guns around here. Somebody has to have one, or there’s no telling what would happen.”

I shrugged and followed her out. The trip to Hugo Carrier’s tiny flat on the other side of London was made in a swift little MG with Rain at the wheel. It was my first ride in one of them, but it seemed to handle well under her command.

Presently we came to a halt before a run-down block of apartments off Bayswater Road. “This is the address he gave me; he’s on the second floor.”

We climbed the shadowy stairs to the first landing, and in the dim light of a single naked bulb read the names on the doors. “Here it is,” I said. “Hugo Carrier.”

I knocked at the door and waited, but no one came. I knocked again.

“It’s only five minutes after ten,” Rain said. “He must be here.”

“Maybe he’s still asleep.” I tried the knob of the door, more as a reflex action than for any other reason. It swung open at my touch, and in that instant I already knew what we would find inside.

But I was unprepared for the horror that met our eyes. For there, pinned to the opposite wall of the room, was the body of a man. His arms were spread in a cross, and the hands pinned to the wall with long arrows through each palm. A third arrow protruded from the man’s chest.

Behind me, Rain Richards screamed…

II

The room seemed filled with the quiet men from Scotland Yard, popping their flashbulbs and dusting for fingerprints. We told our story for the tenth time to the inspector, who seemed to be in charge.

“You hadn’t previously met this man, Miss Richards?” he wanted to know.

“No,” she shook her head. “I’d only talked to him on the phone.”

“And have you any knowledge of this mark on the floor?” He was pointing to something that Rain and I had missed in the first shock of our discovery. It was a sort of pentagram, in a circle, drawn in red on the floor in front of Carrier’s body. There was no doubt that the design had been drawn with the dead man’s blood…

They took us down to the Yard for further questioning, but they seemed to be getting nowhere. Presently we were introduced to still another questioner, an Inspector Ashly.

As soon as I heard the name, something clicked in my mind, like the tumblers of a safe. “Ashly! Inspector Ashly!” I exclaimed. “Simon Ark told me about you once.”

Ashly’s face became alert at the mention of that name. “You know Simon Ark?”

“Very well; I met him years ago back in the States. He told me of the odd happening at Devonshire a few years back.”

Ashly was interested now. “I sometimes thought it was all a bad dream; I doubted, somehow, that the man ever really existed. It’s certainly a relief to talk to someone else who knows him.”

Ashly was a short man with a deep, booming voice, and I well remembered Simon Ark’s tale of their adventures together in the snows of Devonshire. He was much as Simon had described him, and in that moment I knew that the odd murder of Hugo Carrier was another case that called for Simon’s special talents.

“But did you know that Simon Ark was in England?” I asked him.

“No! Where is he?”

“I have no idea, but he left New York over a month ago. If we could find him, I’m sure he could help us on this case.”

Inspector Ashly frowned. “He’s not a detective, though. And there hardly seem to be any supernatural elements in this case…”

“I wouldn’t be too sure,” I replied. “You’ve probably heard that a pentagram was drawn in blood on the floor of the room. Isn’t that an old symbol of witchcraft and satanism?”

Ashly struck the table with his fist. “I believe you’re right. And if so, we can build up a newspaper story that’s sure to attract Simon Ark if he’s anywhere around.”

After that, we left the buildings of New Scotland Yard, and walked through the chill December air toward Westminster Abbey. Whitehall was buzzing with midday activity, and before we’d gone two blocks there was already a newsboy shouting about the “weird murder in Kensington.”

We walked on, aimlessly, until at last Rain asked, “Who is this Simon Ark you both seemed to know, anyway? Is he a detective?”

“No,” I replied, searching for the right words to explain the fantastic story. “He’s perhaps the wisest man in the world, a man with a past that may date back to the beginning of the Christian era. He’s been searching the world for a long time, perhaps for centuries, in hopes of meeting the devil in combat.”

“But…are you trying to kid me? Is he some sort of crazy man, or what?”

A double-decked bus rumbled by us, and we turned west on Victoria Street. Behind us, Big Ben was just tolling the hour of one o’clock.

“Whatever he is, he’s not crazy,” I told her. “Actually, the Comte de Saint-Germain claimed to have lived for four thousand years, and it’s possible that he did. And the German physician, Paracelsus, is once supposed to have fought bodily with Satan. Certainly Simon Ark’s story is no more fantastic than theirs.”

“But who is he? Where did he come from?”

“That’s something nobody knows. My own guess is that he was once a Coptic priest, back in the early centuries after Christ; but he never says much about it. He told me once, though, that he knew Saint Augustine, personally—which would make him well over 1,500 years old.”

Rain laughed at that and gripped my arm with hers. “I was beginning to think you were serious, but you’re just having some fun with me.”

“Believe me, I am serious.”

“Well, then you’ll have to show me this man and let me judge for myself. I saw many unusual things in India, but never a man who claimed to be over 1,500 years old.”

A breeze somewhat cooler than the rest hit us then, and she pushed closer to me. “Let’s get inside somewhere, out of this confounded cold air.”

“What we should be doing is trying to find that book Carrier had for us,” I told her. “If the book was the cause of his murder, it must be certainly worth having.”

She was excited now, with the hint of intrigue in the air. “You mean that you really think there might be a connection between the book and his murder?”

“It’s certainly possible; we should have searched the place for it.”

“Oh, the police would have found it if it were there,” she replied. “It’s a folio, you know. Hardly the thing you hide behind a picture or anything.”

“It does seem odd, though, that if all the copies were destroyed three hundred years ago, Carrier should come up with one now. Maybe the whole thing was a swindle of some sort.”

“I doubt that,” she said. “He seemed only interested in receiving payment for the book.”

We’d reached Victoria Station by this time, and we decided to hail a cab for the long trip back to Rain’s place, rather than return for the MG. Even the taxi trip across London was slow at this time of day, and it was nearly two when we reached her house.

“Let me bring in the mail,” she said. “Not that there’s ever…” She paused and ripped open an envelope that had been addressed in a quick, almost illegible scrawl.

“Look!” she exclaimed, “It’s from Carrier.”

“What? Let me see that!” I took it away from her shaking hands and read: I may not be alive tomorrow when you come. If they get me first, I will at least have cheated them of their secret. The book you seek is titled The Worship of Satan, and together with accounts of diverse crimes of the 16th and 17th centuries, it also includes the forbidden rituals of devil worship. The only copy still in existence in London is in an ancient dwelling at 65 Crashaw Place, behind the Blue Pig Pub. You will find a room there which was once a priest’s hole, during the Elizabethan persecution of the Catholics. The book is in this room, though to insure payment of the agreed sum, I cannot tell you more as to its location. I sincerely hope that my fears will prove groundless. Hugo Carrier.”

She had been reading it over my shoulder, and she said, “What’s all this about devil worship? What has that got to do with Sir Francis Bryan?”

“I don’t know, Rain; I don’t know. I just hope that we succeed in contacting Simon Ark.”

“Maybe you were right about this all being some sort of gigantic swindle.”

I frowned and shook my head. “He sounds like an educated man, which doesn’t mean he might not have been planning a swindle—but the fact of his murder seems to bear out his honesty. In fact, he’s one of those men I sort of wish I’d met during his life.”

She lit a cigarette and dropped the letter on a table. “Are you sorta glad you met me?”

I raised my eyebrows to look at her, but she’d already gone into the kitchen in search of drinks for us. I ignored the question and said, “We should probably go to this place he mentions and look around. We might be able to turn up the book.”

She returned with two tall frosted glasses. “I’m beginning to think it’s not worth all the trouble. After all, we might end up with arrows in us, too.”

“It’s certainly a weird business,” I agreed as I sipped my drink. “Say, these are pretty good. What’s in them?”

“A secret love potion,” she murmured with a grin; “let’s have a little music.”

“I’m a married man, you know,” I told her, trying unsuccessfully to keep it sounding light.

She came to me then, with the radio behind her playing something soft by Mantovani, and the clatter of passing traffic drifting in from the street. And it was as I’d feared it would be since I first met her.

I tried to think about Shelly, and our little house in Westchester; but gradually the memories faded from my brain, and I was just a man of flesh and desire…

Later, too long later, as night drifted slowly in from the east, we left the house and started out for the address in Crashaw Place. In the night’s already deepening shadows, an occasional bird glided down from above, and it might have been a bat or a gull. I only knew it was a moving, living creature up there in the dark, and maybe I wished I was up there too.

“It’s not too far,” Rain told me, in a voice that made even a casual remark into a hint of intimacy. “We can follow the river all the way.”

The Thames was winding on its never-ending journey to the sea, and we followed along its banks, the whole of London seemed to sleep, even at this early hour. It was as if we were alone in the city, alone without the cluster of crowds and the rumble of civilization.

I paused a moment to light a cigarette, and it was then I saw two men moving in on us. “Rain!” I shouted. “Look out!”

She whirled quickly and a blow from the first man’s blackjack caught her on the shoulder. I hurled myself at him, and we went down in a heap. I tried to see where our second attacker was, but the first one was keeping me busy.

Finally I broke free and grabbed up Rain’s hand. “Come on,” I managed to shout, dragging her with me down a flight of stone steps that led to the water’s edge.

I could feel them behind us as we hurtled down the stairs, and at the bottom step I felt strong fingers of steel tear at my throat. I lost my grip on Rain and went tumbling backwards, the hulking attacker on top of me. I struggled to free myself from those murderous fingers, but already I saw one hand leave my throat and come up with a glistening knife.

“Die, damn you,” the raspy voice squeaked, and in that instant I thought I had reached the end of everything. But suddenly a roar split the air and his face seemed to fly apart before me. His dying grip relaxed on my neck, and I saw the little smoking Derringer in Rain’s steady hand.

“I didn’t want to kill him,” she sobbed; “but there was no time for a good shot.”

“Don’t worry. Where’s the other one now?”

“Up there!” She pointed to the top of the steps, where the second assassin stood outlined against the dark sky.

“Duck! He’s got a gun!” I pulled her down just as the man fired.

“It’s a .45,” she told me between gasps. “And my gun is empty.”

I glanced fearfully at the dim river a few feet away. Can you swim?

“A little, but we’d never make it to the water.”

“We’ll have to try. Come on.” He saw us the instant we made our move, and I saw his gun hand move around for a second shot at us.

Then suddenly he seemed to falter, and for the first time I saw the dim figure in the darkness behind him. The .45 slipped from his hand and clattered to the concrete below; then he followed it, diving over in a graceful arc that thudded his body against the very edge of the bank and then hurled it into the black river.

We stood rooted to the spot, looking up at the dim figure who moved down the steps toward us. And then I recognized the tall, heavy-set features of Simon Ark…

III

“Simon! You certainly arrived just in time. How did you ever find us?”

He smiled slightly, as he always did, and replied, “There are ways. I see you already disposed of one of them.”

We looked down at the bloody face of the man Rain’s bullets had killed. “Luckily for me,” I said. “This is Rain Richards, a most unusual girl, and a crack shot with a pistol.”

Simon Ark grunted a greeting and bent to examine the body. “Do you think this is connected in any way with the death of Hugo Carrier last night?” he asked us.

“I don’t know,” I replied, “but Rain received a letter from Carrier this noon. He told us of a pub where something was hidden, and we were on our way there now.”

“Hidden,” he repeated, suddenly interested. “What is it you seek?”

“A book,” I told him. “A book called The Worship of Satan, written during the seventeenth century, but banned by the government, which destroyed all copies. The book supposedly gives the solution to the 1548 murder of Sir James Butler and the mysterious death two years later of Sir Francis Bryan.”

“Sir Francis Bryan,” Simon Ark muttered. “The Vicar of Hell…”

“You’ve heard of him,” Rain said, sounding surprised.

“I’ve heard of him…”

Simon Ark was the same as when I’d last seen him, back in the States a few months earlier. He still had the mysterious quality about him that sometimes made you wonder at the things he said. In that moment, I felt certain he’d known Francis Bryan personally, somehow in the dark past.

“Your old friend Inspector Ashly is working on the case,” I told him.

“I saw his name in the papers; he’s a brilliant man. I’ll call him now and tell him what happened here. Then we can be on our way to this pub you mentioned.”

“You’re coming with us?” Rain asked.

“Certainly. The Worship of Satan is a most unusual book. If there is a copy still remaining, I would like to see it.”

We had climbed the steps from the river now, and in the distance I could see a police car, apparently called by some alert neighbor, bearing down upon us.

“Simon, do you really think this devil worship business is tied in with Carrier’s murder?”

He gazed out across the river, as if looking at something far away which only he could see, and then he answered. “In the year 1100, King William II was slain by an arrow in the New Forest. His death was part of a human sacrifice of a cult of devil worshipers. Today they still worship, and kill, in much the same way.”

His words sent a chill through me, and I put my arm around Rain’s slim shoulders. Then the police joined us, and Simon spoke quickly to them, in that old manner of his which could somehow convince anyone of anything. He wrote a brief message to Chief Inspector Ashly and then we departed.

“I believe this pub should be our first stop,” he said. “Do you know the way?”

Rain nodded and led us down a dark alley, away from the river. “I feel better now with you two strong men to protect me,” she said.

“I doubt if they’ll bother us further,” Simon Ark comforted her. “They must have learned from Hugo Carrier that he’d sent you the letter.”

A slight mist was beginning to gather in the streets, and I suspected we were in for more fog. “Doesn’t the fog ever lift around here?” I mumbled.

“This is the season for it,” Simon Ark said. “London has been foggy in December for as long as I can remember. The Fall is the worst time for it.”

Presently, we reached Crashaw Place and ahead of us we could make out the weather-beaten sign of the Blue Pig, “By Appointment To His Majesty King George V.” It was a rundown place that might have looked better thirty years earlier, under George’s reign. Now it was badly in need of a paint job, and I couldn’t help thinking that a bit of good old American neon would have pepped up the swaying sign.

Inside, a few obviously regular customers lined the bar, and turned as we entered, in mild expectation of seeing some of their nightly drinking companions. Rain was the only girl in the place, but none of them seemed to mind. We ordered three beers because that seemed to be the thing everyone was drinking, and carried them to a table.

Presently, when Simon Ark was certain he’d identified a stout, balding gentleman as the owner, he rose and walked over to him. “Pardon me, sir, but I’m a visitor in your country…”

“Oh,” the stout man said. “Well, we’re always happy to entertain foreigners at the Blue Pig, sir. My name is George Kerrigan. I’m the owner of this here place.”

“Very pleased to meet you, Mr. Kerrigan. I’m Simon Ark, and these are my friends. We’ve been told that the rear of this building dates back to the seventeenth century, and we’re very anxious to examine it further.”

“Glad to be of service,” Kerrigan smiled at us. “Yes, sir, this here’s just about the only old building like it still standing. You know, there was that God-awful fire back in 1666, and it just about burned down the whole damned town.” He spoke as if he’d witnessed it personally, with just the right degree of awe.

“We understand,” Simon Ark continued, “that you even have a room where Catholic priests hid during the persecutions.”

“That we have, sir—or at least them’s the stories what goes with the old place. Come on back this way and I’ll show you.”

We followed him down a musty corridor which led into the rear of the pub. Here, in a house that was obviously much older than the front, he paused to unlock a door and throw it open before us. “Haven’t been in here myself in a good many months,” he told us. “Wait a minute while I get some candles.”

“No electricity?” Rain asked, somewhat startled.

“Not in this room, miss; we never use it, so we never bothered to wire it.”

He returned in a moment with a multi-branched candlestick held high, and led us into the room. It was no more, really, than an enclosed space some twenty feet square, without windows, and with only the one door through which we’d entered. An ancient, musty smell hung over the place, suggesting that even the air we were now breathing might have been several hundred years old. The walls were covered with a fantastic blaze of colored wallpaper, which even now was just beginning to fade. The only bit of furniture in the room was a huge old carved table, some ten feet long, which stood against the opposite wall. Its top had been covered with newspapers, apparently to preserve the finish.

Kerrigan was busy telling us the history of the room, from its priesthole days through the reigns of various kings and queens, but I noticed that Simon Ark was far more concerned with the ancient table. He brushed aside the dusty newspapers, which I noticed were some four weeks old, and smiled slightly when he came upon a shallow drawer in the table’s side. But the smile faded when he found the drawer empty.

I, meanwhile, had strolled over to one of the walls and was trying to decipher some patterns from the faded rainbows of color. But the paper seemed to be designed without any purpose, a weird reminder of seventeenth-century England.

Simon Ark was on his knees, examining the bottom of the long table now; but if Kerrigan thought this odd, he made no comment. He had trapped Rain in a corner and was continuing his brief history of England. “You know, miss, George III himself once visited this very pub, near the end of his reign. Of course there are those who say he was crazy at the time, but he was certainly a friendly one. My great-grandfather used to tell me about those days when I was very small…”

“Pardon me,” Simon Ark interrupted, resuming an upright position. “But if this room was once a hiding place for priests, I’m sure it has more than one exit. Suppose you show us the secret way out.”

Kerrigan never blinked an eye, but simply led us to one of the room’s corners as if he’d intended to show it to us all along. “Here it is,” he said, and gave a yank to an almost-invisible metal ring set flush with the floor. A well-oiled trap door rose out of the floor and we peered down into the darkness below.

“It simply leads to the cellar,” Kerrigan explained. “I don’t even store anything down there anymore. Too many rats.” He lowered the candles a bit so we could see that the cellar was truly empty.

“Well, thank you very much for the tour,” Simon told him. “I think that’s about all we wanted to see.”

He relocked the room behind us and led the way back to the pub’s main room. “Have a beer on me before you go,” he told us. “And stop by again sometime.”

“Thanks,” Rain replied. “We will.”

Soon afterwards, we departed and headed back through the gathering fog to Rain’s house. When we were a safe distance away from the Blue Pig, I asked Simon, “What do you think about it? Any idea where the book might be hidden?”

“I have ideas about many things,” he told us; “I even have ideas about the odd-looking stains on that tabletop.”

“Stains?” I wondered. “I didn’t notice any.”

Simon Ark grunted. “In any event, we have much more here than simply the mystery of the Vicar of Hell. Although certainly the death of Carrier suggests that the missing book is involved.”

By the time we reached Rain’s place, the fog had closed in completely, and visibility was down to some fifty yards. We followed her in, on her invitation to make some coffee, and settled down around the fireplace.

I tossed a couple of logs on, and before long the room was alive with the glow of leaping flames. Simon Ark settled back in his chair, closed his eyes, and began to talk.

“Although most history books merely imply that the one-eyed Sir Francis Bryan earned the title of ‘Vicar of Hell’ by deserting his cousin, Anne Boleyn, when she needed him most, it seems probable there were further reasons. And in a period when witch cults and black magic were running wild throughout England, perhaps it is not too fantastic to suspect that Bryan himself was involved in one of these cults. Certainly that, more than anything else, would have earned him the odd title.”

Rain arrived with the steaming coffee and passed it to us. “But what about the murder of James Butler in 1548? And Bryan’s own mysterious death two years later?”

“There are two possible solutions which immediately present themselves. Bryan himself could have poisoned James Butler in order to marry his wife, Joan. Then, when Joan discovered this, she herself killed her husband’s murderer.”

Rain sipped her coffee and lit a cigarette. “And I suppose you’ll say the other possibility is that Joan killed both of her husbands.”

Simon Ark smiled and nodded. “I admit that was my thought.” And then, half to himself, he added, “I only regret that I never had the honor of meeting the Vicar of Hell…”

Rain shot me a glance at that, but I was used to such remarks from Simon’s lips. I ignored it and asked instead, “Do you really think this book, The Worship of Satan, has something in it about Bryan?”

“Very possible, or else there would have been no reason for the government to ban it at the time; books on devil worship and the like were quite common. From the size of it, I would say it must also have included several large illustrations.”

We talked further on the subject, but presently, as midnight drew near, Simon Ark departed, promising to call us in the morning. “It might be a good idea to get some sleep,” he cautioned me. “Tomorrow might be a long day.”

“Why?”

“Because there will be a full moon tomorrow night,” he said, and then he was gone, into the fog.

I came back into Rain’s living room, puzzling over these words. I looked at a calendar and saw that there would indeed be a full moon on the following night. “What do you suppose he meant by that?” Rain asked me.

“I don’t know. But let’s forget about all that for now”. I walked over and sat next to her on the couch.

“Should we forget about your wife back in New York, too?”

I didn’t answer her.

Instead, my hand went out and found hers, and I drew her close to me in the flickering light from the fireplace.

IV

Simon Ark was at my hotel room before noon on the following morning, and I was surprised to see that Inspector Ashly was with him. “Good morning,” I greeted them. “What’s up?”

“Everything, from what Simon’s been telling me,” Ashley said. “You fellows must have had a pretty busy night, shooting up would-be killers and such.”

“We’re lucky we’re even alive,” I said; “Simon arrived just in time last night.”

“He told me. He also had me check on the two dead men, and I find they both frequented the Blue Pig pub.”

“That figures,” I said, lighting a before-breakfast cigarette. “There’s something funny about that place.”

Simon Ark chuckled. “The understatement of the year, certainly. If you had been a little more observant, I’m sure you would have come to the same conclusions that I did about the Blue Pig, and its mysterious back room.”

“And just what are your conclusions?” I asked, aware that he’d already outlined his ideas to Inspector Ashly.

“I’m convinced that a Black Mass, and various other ceremonies of Satanism, are being carried on at the Blue Pig, in that very room. And I’m further convinced that there’s another meeting of the group being held this evening.”

“I’ll admit that I suspected something funny, but I think now you’re going a little over board, aren’t you, Simon?”

“He’s got me convinced,” Ashly boomed out in that deep voice which still amazed me. “Wait until you’ve heard the whole thing.”

I settled back and sighed. “O.K., Simon. Go ahead and convince me.”

“Well,” he began, “the arrow murder of Hugo Carrier hinted at some sort of ritual crime; and, as I already told you, this type of slaying has been used before by devil worshipers. The attack on you and Rain proved that Carrier’s murder was caused by his knowledge of the book, The Worship of Satan. The people who killed him did so because they feared he would reveal the location of the book. Therefore the book itself, or its location, or both, are dangerous to them.”

“All right so far,” I admitted. “But why does that make it the Blue Pig?”

“First, the men who attacked you were from the Blue Pig. Second, Carrier gave that as the location of the book. Third, George Kerrigan lied to us when we visited him last night.”

“Lied? About what?”

“He said he never stored things in the cellar, yet the secret trap door was well-oiled. And he said he hadn’t been in the room in months, yet the newspapers covering the table were four weeks old.”

“So I’ll agree he lied. But why does it have to be devil worship? Maybe he just runs a card game in that room.”

Simon Ark closed his eyes once more. “Those were bloodstains on the table top,” he said very quietly. “It was used as an altar, for animal—or perhaps human-sacrifices…”

The three of us were silent for a moment. It was hard for me to believe that such a thing could happen in twentieth-century London. And yet I knew, from past experiences with Simon Ark, that there were things happening every day beyond human knowledge. It was sometimes as if a vast alternate world of evil were operating all the time, giving us an occasional glimpse into its horrible scenes.

“But why?” I asked. “Why, of all places, should they choose an ancient pub like the Blue Pig?”

“Because it was once a hiding place for priests, a place where actual Mass was celebrated, the next best thing to a church. And because it later became the resting place of the only existing copy of The Worship of Satan.”

“Horrible…” Inspector Ashly muttered. “Now tell us how you’re so certain they’ll meet again tonight.”

“Many strange things happen when the moon is full. Cults of devil worshipers do not necessarily, or always, meet at the time of the full moon; but when I noticed that the newspapers covering the table were just four weeks old—dated on the first day of last month’s full moon—I guessed this was the time of their previous meeting. Thus, since there is another full moon beginning tonight, I believe we’ll find them there again.”

Ashly rose to his feet. “My men will be ready to close in whenever you give the word, Simon. I know from the last time we met that your theories are usually correct.”

I lit another cigarette and began to think about the breakfast I was missing. “Since when is it against the law to carry on religious rites in a private dwelling?” I asked.

Ashly bristled slightly at my question. “This isn’t a religion; and you seem to have forgotten the poor devil they left pinned to the wall with three arrows in him.”

“I guess I did for a moment,” I admitted, feeling slightly subdued. “So—what’s our plan of action?”

“The Inspector and his men will surround the place, early in the evening, and await my signal to move in,” Simon Ark explained. “I will be in the basement, under that trap door, and you can join me if you wish.”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” I told him. “If you’re going to find Satan himself in that room, I want to be along, too.”

Ashly sighed. “I believe you two are crazy to risk discovery like that, but I know better than to try arguing with Simon here.”

“It might be best,” Simon said, “if you could get a gun from somewhere, though. Could you borrow one from Rain?”

“Sure could.”

“Don’t let me hear anything about this,” Ashly muttered. “In London, even the police have a difficult time getting permission to carry guns.”

“Well, you’d better have them tonight,” Simon Ark told him. “These people are very close to insanity, all of them; when cornered, they might do anything.”

After that, they left me, and then I was alone with my thoughts of the night to come. And my thoughts of Rain and of my own house in Westchester, and of Shelly who waited there for me. For the first time I wondered if I would ever go back to her…

The cab carried me through Piccadilly Circus, past the neon signs now darkened in the light of day where Gordon’s Gin and Wrigley’s Gum fought each other for the customers’ attention. And presently I was back at Rain’s place in the suburbs. “Hello, again,” she greeted me at the door. “Have a good night’s sleep?”

“Fine.” I quickly outlined the details of Simon Ark’s revelations. “How’s chances of borrowing a gun till tomorrow?”

“Sure,” she said, leading me to a cabinet. “Which one do you want?”

“I used a .45 in the Military Police. That’s the only one I’m sure of, so I’d better take one of those.”

She handed me the heavy automatic, together with an empty clip and a box of bullets. I shoved seven of them into the clip and then rammed it into the butt. “Thanks a lot, Rain. I’ll have it back in the morning.”

“Let me come with you,” she said then. “I’ll go crazy sitting home here, thinking about it.”

“Sorry; that’s out of the question. Ashly’s even worried with Simon and I on the scene. But I’ll call you as soon as it’s over.”

“Is that a promise?”

“That’s a promise.” I kissed her lightly on the lips and then went out into the street, the automatic hanging heavy in my topcoat pocket.

I took time out to cable the New York office that I expected to obtain the missing book that evening, and close the deal. Then I went to a middle-class bar in downtown London and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to think about nothing at all.

When I got back to the hotel I found an air mail letter from Shelly awaiting me. I tossed it on the bed without opening it.

I wondered, for just a second, if possibly I was going to the Blue Pig that night in some subconscious hope that death would solve my problem for me.

Because now I was convinced that I loved Rain Richards…

The basement of the Blue Pig Pub was a surprisingly easy place to enter, and it took Simon and me only a few moments to locate the door to the old cellar and place ourselves beneath the trap door.

I took the .45 from my pocket, and jacked a bullet into the chamber; after that we waited.

And waited…

Presently, when my wristwatch glowed 11:30, and I had just about given up hope, we heard some movement in the room above. At almost the same instant we caught the sound of people entering through the basement, as we had come.

We took shelter behind some musty packing cases, and watched several men and a few women entering the room through the trap door. Finally, when the sounds from above told us the ceremony had begun, we resumed our post beneath the door.

Simon Ark edged it up a fraction of an inch, and through the opening I saw a scene I’ll never forget. There, behind the long table, stood the white-robed figure of George Kerrigan, his arms outstretched toward the ceiling. On either end of the table burned dozens of long black candles, sending their dancing flames over the kneeling figures of some twenty men and women who nearly filled the small room.

The brightly colored wallpaper had been covered in spots by hanging pictures of basilisks and other mythical monsters, and behind Kerrigan I saw a statue of Jupiter, the ancient god. “Like the one the pagans erected on Calvary, after Christ’s death,” Simon Ark whispered. “We are in the midst of evil here.”

“What are we waiting for, then?” I asked; “let’s go!”

“Be patient. There is still more to be seen.”

The kneeling figures above were swaying back and forth now, as if under the influence of some narcotic. And a low murmuring chant was slowly building up among them.

“It’s horrible,” I said, half to myself.

Simon Ark let the trap door fall into place and he said, very quietly, “Perhaps, though, the evil up there is no greater than the evil in your own heart.”

“What?” I muttered. “What do you mean?”

“Who is to say that the sin of adultery is any less serious than the sin of devil worship?” he asked, quietly. “Certainly they are both works of Satan.”

“Are you crazy, Simon? Why pick a time like this to give me a lecture on morality?”

“It is as good a time as any, my friend. I came here searching for the devil, and perhaps I have found him in the least likely of all places—inside of you!”

The chanting from above had grown louder, and it pounded at my eardrums as I listened to Simon’s words. “No…” I mumbled. “No…”

“Leave this woman, and go home to Shelly, before it is too late.”

“I…”

Suddenly, the chanting above turned to shouting, and there was a rush of movement. I lifted the trap door again and saw a startling sight. “It’s Rain! They’ve got Rain!”

Simon Ark was at my side; and he, too, saw the struggling girl in the grip of two strong men. “She must have sneaked in, and Kerrigan recognized her. The little fool!”

And I saw that the white-robed Kerrigan had already produced his deadly bow and arrows. His right hand was drawing back on the bow string and the trembling arrow was pointing through the flickering stillness at Rain’s struggling body.

I waited no longer. While my left hand slammed up on the trap door, my right hand was already bringing the heavy .45 into firing position.

George Kerrigan half-turned toward me, and the look of utter surprise was spreading over his face when my bullet tore into his shoulder.

After that, it was chaos…

I came out of it with a bloody nose and a torn sleeve, thanks mostly to the prompt arrival of Inspector Ashly and his men. My bullet had completely shattered Kerrigan’s shoulder, and he was unconscious by the time the ambulance arrived. His followers were quickly rounded up and led away, and soon only Simon and Ashly and Rain and I remained in the room.

“That bow and arrow should be enough to convict them of Carrier’s murder,” Ashly said. “I only hope the newspapers don’t get hold of this devil worship angle, or I fear they’ll have you stripped nude and about to be sacrificed on the altar, Miss Richards. These reporters are great at building up a sensational story.”

“I’m just happy to be alive,” Rain answered. “Right now I don’t care what they say about me. When I saw that arrow pointing at my chest, all I could remember was poor Carrier pinned to the wall.”

“You owe your life to your friends here,” Ashly told her.

“I know. Now I just wish Simon would tell us where the book is hidden so we could all go home.”

“That’s right, Simon,” I agreed. “Where is this elusive copy of The Worship of Satan?”

He sighed, and motioned around the room, now brightly lit by several portable police spotlights. “Right where it’s always been, my friends; it should have been obvious to you from the beginning. After all, why was it necessary to kill Carrier to keep him from telling its location? Why didn’t they simply move it to a new hiding place?”

“That’s right,” I agreed. “Why didn’t they move it?”

“Because they couldn’t; because it was the one part of this room that could not easily be disposed of or transported to another place.”

We looked around at the long table, and at the pictures, and at the statue, but we saw nothing.

“Where?” Rain asked simply.

Simon Ark closed his eyes. “During the seventeenth century, when a book was banned by a government censor, it was not always burned. If the book was a large one, like a folio, the pages were damasked into wallpaper…”

“Wallpaper!”

“Certainly. The text was blotted out by overprinting with a heavy design in bright colors, and it was used for wallpaper. Here,” he motioned around the room at the multi-colored walls, “here is the last remaining copy of The Worship of Satan, and with it is the final secret of the Vicar of Hell…”

After that, much later, I walked with Rain Richards through the mist of a cold London morning…

“I’ll get the University Laboratory to work on that wallpaper right away,” she said, “but it’ll still be months before the original printing is readable.”

“I know,” I said, “but somehow it isn’t as important as it was a few days ago. Whether Bryan was a murderer himself, or whether he was merely the second victim of his murderous wife, is something that need not concern us, really. The punishment for the crimes has been meted out long ago by a much higher court than ours.”

“I suppose so,” she agreed reluctantly. “It’s only too bad that it had to cause so much trouble and death.”

We walked further in silence, and then I said, “You know, it’s all over between us…”

“Yes, I know…”

“Simon Ark talked to me tonight, while we waited in that basement.”

“He’s quite a man, isn’t he?”

“Yes, I suppose he is.”

“Remember me to your wife.”

“Yes,” I said, but we both knew that I never would.

“Goodbye…”

“Goodbye, Rain…”

I watched her as she walked away into the morning mist. I watched her until she was out of sight and then I went back to my hotel room.

The air mail letter from Shelly was still on the bed; I tore it open, and settled down in a chair to read it…

THE JUDGES OF HADES

THE NIGHTMARE BEGAN WITH eleven words in a telegram: Your sister and father killed in auto accident. Come at once.

That was all.

I stared at it for a full five minutes, reading it over and over, hoping that the words would somehow magically change before my eyes.

Then finally I looked away from the telegram on my desk and gazed out the window at the snowy February canyons of Manhattan. At that moment Maple Shades, Indiana, seemed a lifetime away, and even my sister and my father were merely vague figures in my memory.

But now they were dead. I would have to return to Maple Shades, Indiana, now, and stand beside the graves as their bodies were lowered into the ground, and perhaps shed a tear for what might have been.

I picked up the telephone and dialed the Westchester number where my wife would be, just starting to prepare the evening meal. “Hello, dear,” I said into the mouthpiece. “I just received a telegram from Uncle Philip. My sister and father were both killed in an auto accident…”

“Oh, no…” Shelly gasped on the other end of the line. “How awful!”

“Look… I guess we’re going to have to fly out there for the funeral and things. Can you be ready to go tonight?”

“Of course.”

“Good. I’ll call the airline now and see about reservations. I think there’s a plane around seven…”

And so it began.

I stuffed the telegram into my pocket.

Luckily the major Spring book promotions were already under way at Neptune Books, so I had no thoughts of business to trouble me that night as our plane winged its way over Pennsylvania’s ragged mountains. And with Shelly in the seat next to me, I felt that I could face anything the people of Maple Shades had to offer.

It was an odd town, Maple Shades, lying as it did on the banks of the not-so-beautiful Ohio at a point where three states almost touched. For though it was actually located in the state of Indiana, its business and social life was influenced more by the fact that it was somewhat a suburb of Cincinnati, across the Ohio line. And its thinking more than once had reflected that of the South, as represented by Kentucky, the third state which bounded that odd bend in the Ohio River.

It was a combination of cultures which had made me flee from Maple Shades as soon as I was able, leaving behind the smug suburban aristocracy into which I had been born. I’d left nearly twenty years ago, to become a newspaper reporter out West; to go off to the wars; to meet and marry Shelly Constance; and finally to rise to the vice-presidency of a leading New York publishing house before the age of forty.

In all those years I’d never been back to Maple Shades, except for occasional Christmas visits—and once right after I’d married Shelly, when I knew my dying mother would want to see the girl I’d chosen.

But now it was time to return. My sister, whom I loved, and my father, who maybe wasn’t so bad after all, were dead—dead together in an automobile somewhere along the banks of the Ohio, or perhaps against one of the tall, stately maples that gave the town its name. They were gone, and when I thought about the people they’d left behind—Uncle Philip and his wife, my sister’s husband, and the rest—I wondered why it had to be those two who died.

“We’re coming into the Cincinnati airport,” Shelly said quietly, a voice at my side cutting sharply through the fog of my thoughts.

“So soon?”

“So soon,” she repeated. “Is it going to be that hard for you to go back, to face them after all these years?”

“I don’t know. I just have a feeling…”

The plane bumped to a rocky landing and slowed suddenly as the twin propellers reversed their pitch. We were there. We were in Cincinnati, and home was only a few miles away, across the state line.

We drove through the city to Bridgetown, and then out route 264 till we picked up the modern divided highway at Cleves. It was a familiar route, and the cab driver hurried along through the gently falling snow with the air of one retracing a familiar but boring journey.

Then we were across the state line, into Indiana. And soon I saw the familiar billboard standing to the right of the road: WELCOME TO MAPLE SHADES, THE HOTTEST LITTLE TOWN IN AMERICA. POPULATION: 32,590. KIWANIS CLUB MEETS EVERY WEDNESDAY NOON.

I laughed a little to myself when I saw it, remembering a favorite high school trick of my youth. Someone was forever slipping out at night to paint over the part of the sign reading MAPLES, and drivers in the morning were often quite startled to be confronted with a sign reading: WELCOME TO HADES, THE HOTTEST LITTLE TOWN IN AMERICA.

In spite of this, the town fathers had never changed their slogan, and I imagined the high school boys were still at it, when the spirit moved them.

But the cab had slowed now, and I was startled to find that we’d already arrived at my uncle’s rambling white house near the edge of town. Maple Shades was the county seat, and both my father and uncle served as judges, a position which called for rambling white houses in a town like this.

We paid the driver and started up the steps with our bags. I didn’t know whether Uncle Philip intended to put us up at his house during our stay; but he had plenty of room and I decided to give him the opportunity, anyway.

He opened the door at our ring, and at once he was the Uncle Philip of old, calm, dignified, sardonic. “Well,” he began in his best courtroom voice, “I’m glad to see you two could make it.” He always included Shelly in his attacks on me, as if by marrying me she had taken on the burden of my imagined guilt.

“We came as soon as I received your telegram, Philip,” I replied. “You remember Shelly, of course.”

“Of course … Well, come on in out of the cold. The others are all here, too.”

By “the others” I soon saw that he meant his wife, Rita; my sister’s husband, Frank Broderick; and the local District Attorney, Hallison James. Hallison had been the family’s closest friend for years, and at the moment he was the only one of the four I was happy to see.

Rita’s eyes were red-rimmed, though I couldn’t imagine why she would ever shed tears for my father and sister. Frank was in bad shape, I saw at once, and I felt suddenly a little more kindly toward him. My sister, Stella, had been a wonderful girl, and the loss of her would be great after five years of married life.

“How did it happen?” I asked.

“We don’t know exactly,” James stated quietly. “It was down on the River Road …”

“Who was driving?”

“They were in two separate cars,” Uncle Philip mumbled, in a voice that was hardly his. “Richard was driving his car north, and Stella was traveling south on the same road. The … the cars crashed head-on, a tremendous impact. Both of them were killed almost instantly.”

“But,” I began, “but how could such a thing have happened? There are no curves in the River Road, and it’s well-lighted. Was it icy?”

“Dry as a bone.” Uncle Philip muttered. “The snow didn’t start until later.”

My mind was in a fog, struggling to break free from the haze of half-formed horrors that lurked there. “Then how?”

Hallison James spoke with a sorrowful voice. “We don’t think it was an accident,” he said, speaking very much like the District Attorney. “We think it was a case of murder and suicide …”

After that, everyone talked. And talked.

I listened, and after a time Shelly came over to my side and slipped her warm hand into mine. And I clung to it because it was the only real thing in a world suddenly full of shattered images and toppling towers. I was surprised myself at how much the news affected me. I was surprised at how much feeling I still had left for a father I didn’t love, and a sister I hadn’t seen in two years.

“Oh, such coincidences happen, of course,” Hallison was saying. “There was a case like it in Ohio a year or two ago. And another out West, where a woman killed her own child while she was out driving several blocks from her house. But the situation is different here. Stella couldn’t have helped recognizing her father’s black-and-white Buick, just as he must have seen her station wagon coming down the road toward him. They saw each other, because it was after eight o’clock, with plenty of daylight to see by.”

He paused to light a fresh cigar, and I took a firmer grip on Shelly’s warm hand. Frank Broderick still sat in silence, his head bowed low. And Rita and Philip stood together in somber silence across the room.

“No,” Hallison James continued, “it couldn’t have been an accident. They saw each other, and one of them pointed the automobile at the other; and they hit …”

I thought about Stella, with her fiery temper inherited from our father. Yes, either one of them might have done it, in a moment of blind rage.

“What side of the road were the cars on?” I asked.

“They were in the middle. Apparently the intended victim tried to swerve out of the way, but didn’t quite make it.”

“Did anyone see the accident?”

“Not really. A farmer out in his field had his head turned the other way. He turned as soon as he heard the crash, then ran to his house to call the highway patrol. He reached the wreck itself within three minutes, but by that time they were both dead.”

Uncle Philip added the exacting details of the accident with a voice that was almost relish. “Stella was thrown through the windshield. She received a broken neck that killed her instantly. Her father must have died seconds later, of multiple internal injuries and a fractured skull.”

“All right, Philip,” Frank Broderick shouted, rising to his feet, “you don’t have to gloat about it. I know you hated them both, but she was my wife, you know.”

Uncle Philip produced a silk handkerchief to wipe his sweated brow. “You’re upset, my boy,” he said after a moment. “No one regrets this tragedy more than I do.”

“I’ll bet,” was Frank’s comment.

I sighed quietly to myself and wished I was back in New York. The good life in Maple Shades was the same as always—the only element seemed to be the introduction of Frank Broderick, a young man who seemed to belong with the rest of them.

I hadn’t known Frank before my sister married him; even now I knew only that he had been a nebulous sportsman, sailing the inland waterway between the cocktail parties of Washington and the steaming sands of Florida. Stella had met him six years earlier, on a trip to the West Indies with our father. They’d still loved each other then, but many things had happened in six years.

She’d fallen in love with Frank, and they’d married a year later. And it was because of Frank that the final breakup had come, a few years back. It was then, over a complicated legal matter, that my father, the judge, had ruled against his own son-in-law in a decidedly unfair decision. From that day on, Stella and her father had never spoken to each other.

But could the memory of this unfairness have made Stella smash her car into his? I don’t know, but it was something I had to find out.

“Of course,” James was saying, “you’ll want to keep this quiet. I can see that nothing gets in the papers about it.”

Uncle Philip’s wife, Rita, agreed. “Certainly, Hallison. But won’t people talk anyway? There’s another election this Fall and I don’t want to go through another thing like the Judges of Hades campaign.”

“What was that?” I asked. There was so much about their ordinary conversation that I didn’t understand. I was beginning to realize how much I’d really lost contact with these people who were my relatives.

“Somebody in the opposition party started calling Philip and Richard the Judges of Hades. Apparently it was a name given to a group of Greek vase paintings that someone came across.” Rita explained. “It was a clever name, especially since the boys are always painting over the sign. Of course, what they were driving at was that Philip and Richard were too strict in their verdicts.” She said it as a school teacher might; and then I remembered that she’d once been a school teacher, before she married my uncle.

Uncle Philip smiled slightly. “My brother and I were what used to be referred to as Hanging Judges. It’s a matter of degree, of course. Both Richard and I have always felt that the punishment should more than fit the crime, as a warning to future criminals.”

“Well,” Hallison interrupted, “we won’t get anywhere this way. We’re agreed to keep any hint of murder out of the papers, but there’s a further problem to be resolved.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Your uncle here feels that we should hire a private detective to make discreet inquiries about the accident.”

“What?” I almost shouted. “I thought you just said you wanted to hush the whole thing up!”

For a second everybody was talking at once; but finally they quieted down, and Uncle Philip’s voice emerged from the babble. “As I said before, I’m up for re-election this November. I don’t want somebody springing this story the week before the election unless I have the answers ready for them.”

Though I certainly didn’t go along with his motives, I was beginning to think that I, too, would like to know more about the accident on the River Road that morning. “All right,” I agreed finally. “Are you planning to get someone from Cincinnati?”

“And have the word all over town in a day?” Uncle Philip moaned. “Impossible! What we need is a total stranger. We were thinking you might know someone in New York, who could …”

The fact that I was a book publisher somehow had connected itself with private detectives in these people’s minds. I could see it was no use explaining that the only private eye I’d ever seen had been one from Kansas City, whom I’d met at a writers’ conference.

And then I thought of Simon Ark …

“Yes,” I replied slowly. “I know a man; perhaps I could call him.”

“Certainly.” Uncle Philip motioned toward the phone. “The sooner the better.”

II

I took the phone into the next room and partly closed the door. It wouldn’t do for them to hear my conversation with Simon Ark. I asked for long distance, and within a minute I was connected with the night operator at the College of the Hudson.

“Professor Dark, please.”

“Who?”

“This is a long distance call from Indiana. I wish to speak to Professor Dark; he’s doing basic research in Satanism with your Ancient History department.”

“Oh! Certainly. Just a moment, please.”

The moment stretched to five, and I was beginning to think I should have called person-to-person when finally I heard the familiar voice on the other end of the line.

“Professor Dark here.”

I hadn’t quite figured out why Simon Ark was hiding his identity during his stay at the College of the Hudson; but since he was producing a definitive work on Satanism in ancient times for Neptune Books to publish, I wasn’t really concerned what name he used. For certainly no one knew more about Satan than Simon Ark, a man who’d devoted his life and work to seeking out the devil’s deeds.

“This is your publisher talking,” I told him.

“Who …?” And then he recognized my voice. “Oh, how are you this evening?”

“Pretty good, Simon. Look, I’m calling from Indiana. My father and my sister were killed this morning in an auto accident …”

“I’m awfully sorry to hear that.”

“Thank you. The reason I’m calling is that there’s an element of mystery in the thing. I don’t want to discuss it over the phone, but I’d like you to fly out here if you could.”

“Well …” he paused, undecided by my unexpected request. “I’m not a detective, you know,” he said finally.

“We just need someone to investigate the facts, to maybe come up with something we’re all too close to see.”

“Is it …” I heard his intake of breath at the other end of the line as he spoke the words, “… is it anything …in my line of work?”

“No,” I told him. “This would be a personal favor to me.”

I knew he couldn’t refuse when I put it on a friendship basis. “All right,” he said; “I’ll be out there tomorrow. Just where are you?”

“It’s a town called Maple Shades. It’s in Indiana, but you’ll have to take a plane to Cincinnati and get a cab to take you out. It’s only about thirty-five miles outside the city.” I made a snap decision and added, “Shelly and I will be staying at the Shades Hotel. Ask for us there.”

“All right. I’ll see you around noon tomorrow.”

I hung up and returned to the others.

“Is he coming?” Uncle Philip asked.

“Yes. He’ll be here around noon.”

“Can we trust him?” Rita wanted to know.

“As much as you can trust me.”

They were silent at that, and I figured it was probably the wrong thing to say. But right then I didn’t particularly care. I looked around at them all, at Uncle Philip and Rita, at Frank Broderick, and even at Hallison James; and I felt more than ever that these people were somehow responsible for the morning’s tragedy on the River Road.

“Shelly and I will be staying at the Shades,” I told them, and nobody protested. “My man will be here around noon and we can continue things then. I suppose you’ll all be at the funeral parlor tomorrow?”

They all nodded and Frank Broderick said, “The funeral is Monday morning. We decided that two days was long enough to keep them.”

I nodded and picked up my coat. “We’ll see you in the morning, then. Come on, Shelly.”

She followed me out of the big white house and into the streets of Maple Shades, where the snow had settled down to a light but steady fall.

“They’re the same, aren’t they?” she said from my side.

“They’ll always be the same; that’s why I left twenty years ago.”

“Was it Simon Ark you called?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“Not much. He’s coming.”

“What do you think he’ll find?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you want him to find?”

“I don’t know …”

The morning was Saturday; it was clear and cool, and very much like Indiana. The night’s snowfall had totaled possibly two inches, and here and there I could see a shopkeeper sweeping off his sidewalk.

For a long time I lay there in bed, gazing out the window at the town that had once been mine. There was no school for the children today, and I could see them running and playing much as I had myself not too many years before. It had been a good life then. It was still a good life now, but in a different way. I had Shelly, and I had my job, and I didn’t need Maple Shades any more.

I reached out my arm until I could feel Shelly’s sleeping body at my side. She awakened at my touch and rolled over with a yawn. “What time is it?”

“Let’s see … Almost ten-thirty. We should probably be getting up. It’s going to be a busy day.”

She stretched and yawned again and rolled out of the bed. “It’ll be good to see Simon again; it’s been a long time—for me at least.”

We had breakfast in the room and were just finishing when the desk clerk rang to announce Simon Ark. In another few moments I opened the door to admit him.

Simon Ark was tall and heavy-set; yet he carried himself with an ease and dignity that often made people forget his physical features and remember only the overpowering persuasion of his manner. I’d first met him nearly twenty years earlier, at the time of my meeting with Shelly, and we’d recently renewed our friendship after a lapse of many years.

He was an odd man, without home or family, who seemed content to roam the world in search of the devil’s works. Once he’d told me he was over 1,500 years old; and sometimes, after a few hours in his company, I almost believed him. His great knowledge of Satanism—especially in early times—had spurred me to talk Neptune Books into commissioning a book based on his studies. It was for this purpose that he was currently at the College of the Hudson, living there under the name of Dark while he completed his book.

“How are you, Simon?”

“Good, good. First, let me extend my sympathies to you and Shelly on your loss.”

“Thank you, Simon. How’s the book coming?” He smiled the old sure smile he seemed to reserve for people like Shelly and me, and said, “It’s coming. The college atmosphere seems to help my thinking, if nothing else.”

“Think we’ll be ready to publish next Fall?”

“I hope so. If my … duties don’t call me away.”

Shelly poured some coffee that was left over from breakfast, and the three of us sat down. “Well, Simon,” I began, “I hated to call you away on a personal matter like this, but you don’t know my uncle. He insisted on getting some New York private detective to work on the case; I figured you’d be better all around.”

Simon Ark smiled slightly. “As I’ve constantly reminded you, my boy, I’m not in any way a detective …”

“I know; but they don’t, and you’re one as far as they’re concerned.”

“All right,” Simon sighed. “I know when I’m beaten. Tell me about it.”

Shelly put down her coffee cup and pointed to Simon’s pocket. “From the looks of that newspaper you already know more about it than we do.”

Simon Ark unfolded the paper and passed it over to me. I looked at the two battered cars and the usual blurred half-column pictures of the victims. I looked at the round smiling face of my sister and suddenly I felt very empty deep down inside.

I remembered the picture very well, even though they’d cropped away everything but her head. It had been taken at a beach party once, and come out so well she’d had it enlarged and framed. The photo of dad was one of his campaign pictures. I folded up the paper and tossed it on the table.

“What do they say about it?” I asked Simon.

“Well, of course your father was living alone, and nobody knows just what brought him out that early in the morning. He was headed away from the courthouse, so he wasn’t on his way to work. Your brother-in-law, Frank Broderick, says that Stella awakened him quite early and said she had to go out. She didn’t say where she was going, but he has a vague impression that he heard a telephone ring shortly before she woke him. That’s about all the newspaper account covers. Of course there’s no hint of anything suspicious; but no reader can fail to see the odd coincidence of the whole matter.”

“Do you have any ideas about it, Simon?” I asked him.

“Hardly! I don’t even yet know what you want me to find out. Just why did you and your uncle want to hire a private investigator?”

“Uncle Philip tells me the cars met head-on in the center of the road. Both cars were distinctive enough to be recognized by the other driver, and there were no external conditions like darkness or ice on the road to explain the crash. In short, Simon, one of them—either my father or my sister—deliberately crashed into the other car.”

“And you want to know which one?”

“Yes. I want to know.”

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why? Why do you want to know? What difference does it make, now, whether your father killed your sister or your sister killed your father? They’re both dead, and the guilty one is being punished by a higher court.”

“I don’t know why; I just want to know. If they were your family, you’d want to know, too, Simon. Besides, my uncle is afraid if he doesn’t dig out the facts, someone will spring the whole story at election time.”

Simon Ark sighed. “All right. What would you like me to do?”

“Talk to people; see what you can dig up about the background. I’ve been away so long myself that I don’t really know too much of what’s been going on. All I can tell you is that Stella and my father were on bad terms ever since he ruled unfavorably against Frank in a court decision.”

“We’d better be getting over to the funeral parlor,” Shelly interrupted. “It’s nearly noon.”

Before I could agree, the telephone rang again and I picked it up. “Hello?”

“I’m glad I could get you, boy.” I recognized the dignified tones of District Attorney Hallison James. “Could you come right out to your sister’s house? Your brother-in-law has been attacked and badly injured.”

“What? What happened?”

“We’re not sure yet. Apparently someone was waiting for him when he returned home last night; he was pretty badly beaten.”

“We’ll be right out,” I said, and hung up.

I told Shelly and Simon about it while we gathered up our coats. Then we were downstairs and in a taxi bound for Stella and Frank’s house. And once, when I glanced sideways at Simon Ark, I noticed that the casual expression was gone from his eyes.

Now they were hard and bleak, and very dangerous; and I knew that he’d already seen something we’d missed

III

The house was Stella, and to me it always would be. Everything, every little vase and picture and chair, bore her mark. And even now, in the midst of death, Stella seemed still to be there, greeting me as I walked through the door.

The first thing I saw was Hallison James coming out of the kitchen with a uniformed policeman. “How is he, Hallison?” I asked.

“Oh, he’ll live; but he’s got a couple of cracked ribs and a bad bump on the head.” I saw him looking at Simon, so I introduced them. Then we all followed Hallison into the bedroom, where a doctor was leaning over Frank Broderick.

“I’d like to take him to the hospital for X-rays,” the doctor was saying. “I don’t think it’s too serious, but those cracked ribs might be dangerous.”

“Can you talk yet, Frank?” James asked him.

“Sure,” the man on the bed mumbled. To me he looked much the same as he had the night before, except for a bandaged head and a bruised cheek. “I don’t know who it was, though. He jumped me just as I came in the door; punched me in the face and then hit me over the head with something.”

“He must have kicked you a few times, too, judging from those ribs,” the doctor added.

“Any idea what he was after?” I asked.

“None at all,” Frank Broderick replied. “The place is pretty well messed up, especially here in the bedroom. Maybe he was just a sneak thief I surprised. If he was trying to kill me or something, I should think he’d have finished the job; I was in no shape to offer much resistance.”

“Well, go along to the hospital,” Hallison said. “This is Simon Ark, a … gentleman from New York, who’s going to look into the accident. Maybe he’ll turn up something on your assailant as well.”

“Good,” Frank Broderick said. “As soon as they take the X-rays and get me taped up, I’ll try to come over to the funeral parlor.”

An ambulance had arrived to take him to the hospital, but as we left I saw Simon Ark call the doctor aside. I moved in close and heard him ask, “Doctor, is there any chance this man’s injuries were self-inflicted?”

The doctor looked up in surprise. “Two cracked ribs? Not a chance in the world. As near as I can tell without X-rays, it’s a wonder they didn’t cut his lung open. No, people don’t go around cracking their own ribs, or kicking themselves in the chest.”

“Thank you, doctor,” Simon said, and moved back to join Shelly and me.

“What kind of idea are you playing around with?” I asked him.

“None; I simply don’t want to overlook any possibilities. The attack on your brother-in-law is most significant, and must be fully investigated.”

“Your interest seems to have increased considerably, Simon.”

“It has. Shall we leave for the funeral parlor now? I’m quite anxious to meet the rest of your family.”

Hallison James drove us back to town, to the squat marble slab of a building that served as Maple Shades’ principal funeral parlor. Uncle Philip and his wife were already there, and while Hallison handled the introductions, I went in to look at the twin coffins that held the bodies of my father and sister.

Both tops were closed, and I asked Uncle Philip about it.

“Stella’s face was pretty much cut up when she went through the windshield,” he explained, “so we decided it would be best to keep Richard’s coffin closed as well.”

I knelt and said a silent prayer for them both, and then returned to the outer room, where Simon Ark was talking with Hallison and Uncle Philip. Shelly and Aunt Rita had disappeared somewhere into the further depths of the place.

“I just can’t understand this attack on Frank,” my uncle was saying. “There’s no possible reason for it, unless the thing was simply a robbery attempt.”

“The police are dusting the place for fingerprints,” Hallison told us, reverting to his role of District Attorney. “We hope to get a lead on whoever it was.”

“All this would have to happen in an election year,” Uncle Philip mumbled.

“At least they can’t use the old Judges of Hades tag,” Hallison said; “you’re the only one left now, Philip.”

I saw Simon Ark’s face come alive at the mention of the Judges of Hades. “What’s this?”

“Just something somebody thought up for a political campaign,” Hallison explained. “It was a painting on an old Greek vase that somebody came across in a book; and, of course, the fact that the boys are always changing the sign …”

Simon Ark interrupted to ask about this, and we explained the ritual with the Maple Shades sign. “So this is really Hades,” he said, with a slight smile on his face. “You should have told me this over the telephone last night; I’d have been more eager to come.”

“Anyway,” James continued, “the point was that their court decisions were so lacking in human mercy that they were like the Judges of Hades. And I suppose, if Philip here will forgive me saying it, that there was something to it. The case of Frank Broderick is a perfect example.”

“I’d be interested in knowing more about that myself,” I said.

“Well, it seems that Frank Broderick owned some land that was to be used for a large shopping center. He’d bought the land for that express purpose, sinking most of his money into the deal. Just as he was about to close a deal with the backers of the shopping center, the local government re-zoned that particular piece of property into a residential area. Of course Frank fought it, claiming the town government had known of the plans for the shopping center, and had originally approved them. He took the case to court on the grounds that the re-zoning should not be allowed to interfere with the already-approved shopping center.”

He paused a moment to light a cigar, the continued. “Well, Frank’s father-in-law drew the case. Of course he should have disqualified himself at once, on the grounds of personal relationship with the plaintiff. He must have known, as everyone else did, that whatever decision he reached would immediately be thrown out by a higher court. But he sat on the case anyway, and he ruled against his son-in-law on the zoning battle. And while the high court was busy reprimanding him, and tossing out the decision, the shopping center backers got tired of waiting and bought another location.”

“With the result,” Uncle Philip interjected, “that Frank was forced to sell the property at a loss of around fifteen thousand dollars. I suppose at times I can’t blame him for his hatred of Richard and myself.”

“And this is the reason for the enmity between my father and Stella?” I asked.

“That was the main cause,” Uncle Philip agreed, “though of course there were others. After this shopping center deal fell through, your father blamed Frank for the Judges of Hades tag. It could never be proven, but I suspect myself that it was Frank’s way of getting back at us.”

Some people were arriving to pay their last respects to the dead, and Uncle Philip and his wife hurried off. Shelly, Simon Ark, Hallison and I remained in the outer room. After a moment Simon rose and strode to the window. I followed him and we stood together looking out at the drifting snowflakes.

“What is it, Simon?” I asked at last, because I knew there was something bothering him.

“I don’t quite know,” he answered. “Is your local library open on Saturdays?”

“It always used to be. Why?”

“If you can get away from here for a while and accompany me, we might possibly learn some facts of mild interest.”

That was enough for me. I left Shelly in Hallison’s care, made my excuses to the others, and we were off.

“Now what’s all this about?” I asked Simon as we walked briskly through the snow toward the library.

“Well … it probably means nothing; but since my arrival here, all of these people have been most silent on one point.”

“Which point is that, Simon?” I asked him.

“No one has even mentioned the third judge.”

“The third judge?”

“Certainly! Your knowledge of Greek vase paintings is most limited, my friend. There were always three Judges of Hades …”

The low, sprawling building that housed the meager collection of the Maple Shades Public Library was all but deserted when we entered. Here and there a high school student was busily pondering over thick volumes, but otherwise we seemed to be the only customers. Simon Ark went immediately to the librarian and asked to see the file of local newspapers covering the last election of judges.

She gave him a curious look and then disappeared into the rear. Presently she returned, bearing a large bound volume that was already beginning to show signs of wear.

Simon turned quickly to the October issues of Maple Shades’ single daily newspaper and ran over the columns of political news he found there. Finally we found what we sought, buried halfway down a column reporting on a speech of the previous night: “In an obvious reference to the three men running on the rival ticket, he said further that he does not want to see our courts presided over by the ‘Judges of Hades.’ This apparently was a reiteration of the charges that some recent court decisions have been unfair, and that jail sentences have been extremely harsh.”

“Well, said Simon, “there it is! There were three Judges of Hades, in Maple Shades as well as in ancient Greece. Now if we can only find something about the third man …”

“But what good will that do?” I wanted to know. “It still won’t tell us about the accident; or about who attacked Frank Broderick last night.”

“You never know. Sometimes the truth lurks in unlikely places … Here!” He pointed to the picture of a political rally on the front page of one of the papers. The photo showed a vast crowd of people, gathered before a platform on which three men stood, their hands linked above their heads in a symbol of victory. I recognized my father and Uncle Philip as two of the men. The third was a well-built man who appeared to be quite a bit younger. That was about all we could tell from the screened newspaper photo.

“Here’s his name,” I pointed out to Simon. “Conrad Mara. He apparently was running for his second term as county judge.”

Simon Ark grunted. “Conrad Mara … A most significant name.”

“Significant? What’s significant about it? It’s not too uncommon a name.”

“It is significant nevertheless. Let us look further and see what happened to Conrad Mara.”

We looked and read; we followed the day-by-day activities of Maple Shades all through the month of October, through the fires and births and deaths, and all the common little things that happened in any small town.

Finally we came to Election Day, and the day after.

There was my father’s picture, smiling out at me from the printed page, and there was Uncle Philip smiling next to him. They had won; they had been re-elected to another term in office.

But there was no picture of Conrad Mara.

There was no mention of Conrad Mara.

We looked at the tabulations and found his name, but he had run far behind his opponent; there was no mention of him elsewhere in the paper.

Simon closed the heavy volume and returned it to the librarian. “Maybe you can be of some assistance,” he told her. “We’re seeking information about Conrad Mara. He used to be a county judge here …”

“No,” she replied, “I’m afraid I can’t help you. I know nothing of Conrad Mara.” She turned away from us and walked quickly to the rear.

Simon Ark sighed and I followed him out into the street. “Where to now?”

“Back to the funeral parlor, to see if we can find anyone who wants to tell us about Mara.”

“But why is he so important, Simon?”

“My friend,” he answered slowly, “as you know, I have pursued Satan and his works for many centuries, and I have seen him in a variety of guises. I have seen him as a desert chieftain and a crusading knight, and even as a baldheaded monk. He comes, and he lives among people for a time, and then he goes.”

I was used to hearing Simon talk like this, and I knew that it was not just talk. Whether he was a mortal man like the rest of us, or something more, I’d probably never know. But when he talked like this I listened.

“Are you trying to say that this Conrad Mara was the devil in disguise?”

“I don’t yet know for certain. But something brought the evil to Maple Shades, something brought the evil that struck down your father and sister. Because evil comes like a wet summer wind, clutching at a town, seeping into every crevice until no one is safe from it.”

“But why Conrad Mara more than anyone else?”

“Because he is no longer here. Because he has moved on, as Satan always must, after his work is done.”

“But why Mara?”

“My friend,” he answered, “do you know who Mara was?”

“Who he was?”

“Not this Mara, but the original one—many centuries ago.”

“Mara? No, I’m not familiar with the name in history.”

“‘Mara’ was the name given to the devil in writings of Buddha …”

“Oh, come on now, Simon! Mara is a fairly common Italian name; you’ll find it in almost any phone book.”

“And perhaps, my friend, Conrad Mara is just a simple Italian judge. But then again, perhaps he is more. We must wait and see.”

He was excited now, in that quiet way I knew so well. He was on the trail, on the trail of something big and very evil. The memory of his original purpose in visiting Maple Shades was now buried deep in his mind, and he was the man I’d first known, so many years ago.

IV

We reached the funeral parlor and while I spoke briefly to the few visitors I still remembered, I noticed Simon motioning my uncle into the next room. When I could break free I joined them in time to hear Uncle Philip saying, “I have nothing to say, Mister Ark. Judge Mara is gone and that is all you need to know. He left town well over a year ago, and could have no possible connection with the accident.”

Simon Ark sighed. “Is that all you have to say?”

“That’s all,” said my uncle, and hurried back to join his wife and the other mourners.

“Now what?” I asked Simon.

“We must find out,” he answered. “I’m convinced that Conrad Mara was the cause of the evil here.”

“It does seem strange that no one will talk about him. Look, there’s Hallison James. Let’s ask him.”

Hallison joined us, glad to relax from the tiring chore of greeting visitors. “Where have you fellows been?”

“At the library, Hallison,” I said. “Trying to find out something about the third Judge of Hades, Conrad Mara.”

Hallison’s smile faded. “We’d rather forget about Mara.”

“Why?”

“It’s not something we discuss here in Maple Shades,” he said, and there was a note of finality in the words.

“Well, can you tell us where he went when he left here?” Simon asked.

“To hell, I imagine,” James replied.

“You mean he’s dead?”

“No, no, he still lives; I think he’s in Cincinnati somewhere.”

“And where did he come from?” Simon asked, his face tense as he waited for the reply.

“Well, that’s a long story. Philip could probably tell you more about it than I could.”

“Philip won’t talk,” I told him.

“Then I’ll tell you as much as I know. Philip and your father met Conrad Mara in Havana, back in 1937. You were still in your late teens then, but you’ll remember that they went down to Havana for the first Daiquiri Bowl football game on that New Years’ Day. Rita went along, too, but your mother was too sick to go; she stayed home with you and Stella.”

I remembered. It was nearly twenty years, but I remembered. The details of those last few years at home still stood out clearly in my mind.

“Well,” Hallison continued, “as you probably remember, there was a huge sports carnival in Cuba that month, just after Battista took over the government. Villanova and Auburn, I think, were the teams who played in that one and only Daiquiri Bowl game. Anyway, somewhere during the festivities the two judges met this Conrad Mara, a widower living in Havana with his ten-year-old son. He had a small law practice, but apparently he was interested in coming back to the States. After Philip and Richard returned, they kept corresponding with Mara, and pretty soon he did come up here, to Maple Shades. He’d found some people to take care of his son, and he came up here to set up a law practice. And before long he was a judge, along with the other two …”

“Then what happened?”

“I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you. He was defeated in the last election and he moved to Cincinnati. That’s all I know …”

I sighed reluctantly and turned to Simon. “That answer your questions?”

Hallison James left us, and Simon stood for some minutes watching the visitors entering and leaving the house of the dead. I took a minute to call the hospital and ask about Frank Broderick’s condition. He was in fair shape, and they were just keeping him overnight for observation. He’d be released in the morning.

Next I found Shelly in the undertaker’s office with Rita.

“Hello, dear. Sorry to be away so long.”

“I’m used to it by this time,” she smiled. “What did Simon find out?”

“Not too much, I’m afraid.” I thought of asking Rita about Mara, but decided she’d tell me no more than my uncle had. She was in one of her unfriendly moods, and left the room when she saw I was going to remain with my wife for a while.

“How’s your brother-in-law?” Shelly asked.

“He’ll live, I guess. They’re letting him out of the hospital in the morning.”

Simon Ark joined us and I could see a new thought had crossed his mind. “Could we go out to your father’s house? I’d like to look around.”

“Well … I suppose so. Wait a minute, and I’ll get the key from my uncle.”

I returned with the key and we were off again—this time with Shelly too, because she couldn’t take any more of facing my aunt and uncle without my support.

A cab dropped us at the big house that was so familiar to my childhood. I tried to look at it objectively, not thinking about all the good times. And all the bad times. But it was still my house, and I couldn’t get away from that simple fact.

The inside was much as I’d remembered it, with the long, wide staircase and the lighted portrait of my mother over the fireplace.

“You mean he lived in this big house all by himself?” Shelly asked me.

“He was that kind of a man,” I answered simply.

“I wish I’d known him better.”

“No you don’t; nobody who really knew him ever did,” I told her.

Simon Ark paused in his reconnaissance of the house to face us by the broad silent stairs. “My friend, before we proceed any further in this investigation, I think it would be well for you to tell me just why you hate your father so much …”

It was out in the open now, and somehow I was glad he’d put it into words. And yet I retreated, still subconsciously fighting the thought. “Where did you get that idea?”

“It’s been quite obvious from the first. You want it to be your father who was responsible for that auto crash; you don’t want it to be your sister because you loved her.”

Shelly came to my side and the three of us stood there in silence, alone in the big house that had once been home to me. I realized that they were both waiting for me to speak, and I asked through dry lips, “Do you know which of them caused the crash?”

Simon Ark hesitated and then replied. “I’ve known that for several hours now, but the question that remains unanswered is why. Why, after all these months—and even years—of hatred between your father and your sister, did it suddenly boil to the surface?”

“Do you think you know why?”

“I believe the answer lies with the third judge, Conrad Mara.”

I didn’t understand his constant talk of this third judge, who was no longer even living in Maple Shades; but I knew from the past that Simon Ark was a wise man.

We searched briefly through my father’s study, looking for something, yet not really knowing what we’d find. Simon seemed to disregard my father’s legal papers, and even the stack of correspondence got only a brief glance from him. But finally he found what he apparently sought, and he showed it to us.

“What is it?” I asked. “A business card?”

“It’s in Spanish,” Simon replied. “It’s the card of a firm of private investigators in Havana.”

“What does that tell us?”

“Perhaps that your father was investigating the past life of Conrad Mara …”

We looked further, and soon Shelly came upon some dusty campaign posters. “Look!” she exclaimed, holding one up. “Here’s your father, and Philip … and here’s a picture of Mara, too!”

Simon and I were at her side in an instant, looking down at the smiling face before us.

“He looks so young,” Shelly commented.

“He can’t be much under fifty if he had a ten-year-old son back in 1937,” I said.

“His face looks vaguely familiar in some way,” Shelly said, frowning at the campaign photo.

“The face of evil is always familiar,” Simon Ark spoke quietly. “It is the face of Judas at the Last Supper; of Genghis Khan charging across the Asian plains; of John Wilkes Booth as he shot Lincoln. It is the face of the serpent in Paradise, of the ultimate evil, the devil himself.”

“Perhaps,” I said, borrowing Simon’s favorite word. “If you’re right, and Mara did bring this evil to Maple Shades, then he must be found and destroyed.”

Simon Ark nodded in agreement. “Let us search further. If your father was interested enough to dig into Mara’s past, it’s quite possible he knew where he went after leaving here.”

And so we searched.

But there was nothing. Whatever reports my father might have received from the private detectives in Havana, there were no traces of them now. And even his address book contained no hints as to Judge Mara’s destination, after leaving Maple Shades.

Finally, almost in desperation, Simon picked up a Cincinnati telephone book and glanced through it. We all stared as the phone book fell open to a page with a folded corner. There, halfway down the column, one name and number had been circled, the Southern Gateway Hotel. And next to the number, in my father’s familiar scrawl, was the single word “Mara” …

We were going back, back along the broad pavement of U.S. Highway 50, back to the sprawling confines of Cincinnati. We were crowded into the back seat of a taxi, and not one of the three of us spoke. Shelly’s face was white and drawn and I was beginning to be sorry we’d brought her along. On the other side of me Simon sat tense and expectant. I had a feeling that the end was near, but the end of what?

“I never even looked inside the coffins,” I mumbled, half to myself. “I don’t even know for sure that it’s them inside.”

“It’s them,” Simon Ark said. “I already considered and rejected the possibility that the whole accident was faked for some reason.”

“Then what’s the answer?” I wanted to know. “Which one of them was it? Which one of them caused the accident?” The questions had been becoming more important as the hours drifted past, and now they were the most important thing in my life—more important than my job, or Simon, or even Shelly. Because if it was Stella whose mind had been warped by this evil thing, then somehow I had failed. I had run away and left Stella at the mercy of the family, at the mercy of my father and Uncle Philip and Aunt Rita.

It had to be my father. It had to be …

We came in Seventh Street, past the New Telephone Building, and Shillito’s, and all the other familiar and unfamiliar landmarks of a city that was no longer mine. The cab turned right, glided two blocks south into Fountain Square and Government Square, then into Main Street and south toward the river.

The Southern Gateway Hotel, when we finally reached it, was a run-down three-story structure almost at the river’s edge. Already the night shadows were slipping in around us, and from the hotel’s lounge came the mighty wail of a jazz trumpet, splitting the evening air with a mournful note. We passed through the lounge, noting the young kids and their girls, getting an early start on a Saturday night, because perhaps the Southern Gateway was not the type of place you came to later in the evening.

And I remembered them, because I’d been one of them twenty years earlier. I’d been one of the kids with pimples on their faces, escorting the girls with the jutting jaws or the pushed-in faces, and kidding themselves that they were out with the most beautiful girl in Cincinnati.

I’d listened to the blues played on a black man’s horn, and I’d watched the lithe movements of the girl singer’s hips as she went through the motions of a song in the night.

It was the same now, with these kids. It would always be the same. This, I guess, was life. At least it was life in the fifth decade of the twentieth century.

Beyond the trumpet and the piano and the bass and the girl singer the hotel’s desk clerk lounged in the doorway, enjoying the music while waiting for the customers who wouldn’t come until the night grew a little darker.

Simon Ark moved among the swaying couples on the dance floor until he reached the man’s side, and then he asked, “Is there a man named Mara staying here?”

The room clerk looked him up and down, trying to judge whether or not we were detectives. Then he saw Shelly and decided we weren’t. “Upstairs. Third floor. Room 316.”

Simon started up the dimly lit stairs, and I turned to Shelly. “You’d better wait down here, dear. If any of these creeps try to pick you up, just give a yell.”

I smiled at her and followed Simon up the stairs. The place reminded me of one I’d often stayed in while I was in the army.

And finally we were at the door of Room 316. I wondered if Satan was always this easy to find, for those who looked.

At my side, Simon said, very quietly, “Libera nos a malo …”

“Is that another of your Coptic prayers?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “This one’s Latin,” he answered simply, and then knocked on the door of Conrad Mara’s room.

We waited …

From the inside, very softly, came the sound of music, as if from a radio. Simon Ark knocked again. “Judge Mara,” he called out; “we know you’re in there. We want to talk to you.”

And now an odor reached our nostrils, the heavy odor of a perfume, perhaps mingled with the scent of incense. Simon Ark tried the door, but it was locked.

He knocked again, and we listened. Now, in addition to the faint music, we could hear something bumping at regular intervals.

“Should I get the room clerk?” I asked.

“There’s no time; it might be too late already. Help me break down this door.”

We hit the thin wooden door together, and the lock sprang open. And then we were in the room. And we saw it …

Conrad Mara, the third Judge of Hades, was hanging from the light fixture in the center of the small room, a thin chain wrapped tightly around his neck. He was dressed in a woman’s black bathing suit and his body was doused with perfume.

“God!” I gasped, “what is this?”

Simon Ark stared at the swollen, dead face, and at the incense burner, and at the scattered newspapers on the floor. “We’re too late,” he said simply. “We’ve come too late to save Conrad Mara, but not too late to trap the devil of Maple Shades …”

V

Finally I asked, “Who killed him?” when I’d had time to recover from the shock of the scene before me.

“Perhaps his past,” Simon Ark replied. “Perhaps our modern civilization. Perhaps a force beyond our knowledge.” He paused a moment and then added, “Conrad Mara took his own life …”

“Suicide? Like this? Why, that’s impossible, Simon. Who’d ever dress up in an outfit like that, with perfume and everything, to hang themselves?”

“A masochist,” Simon answered simply. “People talk quite openly these days about rapists and homosexuals, but there are other areas of aberration less well known to the general public. Conrad Mara received sexual pleasure from the experience of physical pain; and in hanging himself with that chain he experienced the supreme masochistic thrill. There’ve been a number of similar cases on the West Coast in recent years.”

“But …” I began, still not wholly convinced, “how can you be so certain?”

“It’s been obvious to me for several hours that Mara was being shunned by the people of Maple Shades because of some act. It wasn’t criminal, or they’d have talked about it—rather, it was some sort of sexual act, something that was discovered and ruined his career as a judge.”

“Then you never really believed he was the devil?”

“Sometimes, my friend, Satan enters the bodies of those he would destroy. Who is to say he was not inside of this body until a few hours ago?”

Simon stepped to the house phone and called downstairs. “There’s been a suicide,” he said simply. “I suggest you call the local police. And you might tell the young lady who’s been waiting in the lobby that we’re all right and we’ll be down presently.” Then he hung up and turned back to me, averting the hanging corpse as much as possible.

“But why did he pick today to kill himself? Surely he must have had this … aberration for many years.”

Simon Ark pointed to the scattered newspapers on the floor. “But it was just today that he read about the accident in Maple Shades; and he realized the truth of it.”

“You mean he was in some way connected with the deaths of my father and sister?”

Simon nodded. “In a way. You might say that his existence was the cause of the deaths on the River Road yesterday morning.”

“Is it all over, then?”

“Just about, my friend. As soon as the police get here, we’ll start back to Maple Shades. There’s only one Judge of Hades left now. He will, perhaps, be interested to learn of these developments.”

And then the police were on the stairs, and all around us; one man was asking us questions while another was taking pictures, and two others were gently lowering the body of Conrad Mara to the floor …

And so we went back, for the last time, to the town of Maple Shades, across the state line, and along the highway lined with the maple trees that gave the place its name, at some time in the forgotten past when pioneers in wagons and explorers in boats had first made their way into this wilderness.

I thought about it, and I thought about my own early days in Maple Shades, and about my father. And Stella.

The cab deposited the three of us in front of the funeral parlor, and we stood watching the twinkling lights of the town by night. And suddenly I knew that this was no longer my home and these were no longer my people. My home was back in New York, among the glistening towers and the narrow streets, as I always thought it had been.

“Simon,” I said, “we’re not going back in there. Shelly and I aren’t waiting around for the funeral; we’re going back to New York tonight.”

They both looked at me as if I was crazy, but I knew it was perhaps the only sane thing I’d said in the last twenty-four hours.

“Let us walk together for a ways,” Simon said quietly. “Shelly, you wait for us inside.”

And we walked, down the main street of the town that was no longer mine, passing the people I no longer knew, and the unfamiliar stores and all the glistening tributes to suburban living.

“I don’t want to know,” I told him finally, as we walked. “I thought it was the most important thing in the world to me, to know which of them it was. But I don’t want to know any more. I don’t want it to be my sister, and I don’t want it to be my father. I don’t want you to tell me which one it was.”

“I’m sorry,” Simon Ark said, “but the truth will always come out. If I don’t tell you now, some day—some night—next week or next year, you’ll want to know. You’ll be warm and happy, but suddenly you’ll be sorry you didn’t know.”

We’d passed through the main part of town now, and we faced the million-dollar county hospital rising silently in the night before us. “Come,” Simon said. “We will pay a visit to Frank Broderick and clear up the attack on him last night. It is a good starting place for my story.”

I said nothing, and followed him into the hospital. A nurse informed us it was after visiting hours, but in his usual mysterious manner Simon talked his way past her. And upstairs, on the top floor of the building, we found Frank Broderick’s room at the end of a long white hall.

“How are you getting along, Frank?” I asked as we entered. He gave a start and then relaxed when he saw who it was. “Can’t complain,” he replied. “I’ll be out of this place in the morning.” He was sitting up in a chair, reading a book, and we could see his taped ribs through the open front of his pajamas.

“We’ve come to clear up the attack on you,” Simon said.

“Oh? Did they catch the guy who did it?”

“Not exactly,” Simon replied slowly.

“Well …?” Frank Broderick looked at me with a puzzled glance that I transferred to Simon.

“Judge Mara killed himself in Cincinnati this afternoon,” Simon stated.

And then, before our eyes, Frank Broderick’s face and composure seemed to crumble. He sank deeper into the chair and watched us through thin terrified slits of eyes.

Simon Ark stepped to the room telephone and asked the operator for the number of the funeral home. After he got it he called the number and requested to speak to Hallison James.

“Mr. James? This is Simon Ark. I’d like you to come over to the hospital right away. Frank Broderick would like to make an official statement about the auto accident.”

Then he hung up, and the three of us faced each other, and Frank Broderick said through clenched teeth, “Damn you, how did you find out …?”

It was very quiet in that room, and we might have been the only three people in the universe just then. But we weren’t. District Attorney Hallison James was on his way, and Simon Ark and Frank Broderick knew what that meant, even if I didn’t.

“How did you know?” Frank Broderick repeated.

“Stella’s body was thrown through the windshield when the two cars hit,” Simon explained, in a voice that hardly rose above a whisper. “Did you ever hear of the driver of a car being thrown through the windshield in an accident? No, you never did, because the steering wheel is in the way.”

The words were a roar in my brain, and I tried to cling to the wall for support. What was he saying? What did Simon mean?

“Stella went through the windshield because she wasn’t driving, because she was sitting next to the driver at the time. And once I knew that, I asked myself who had been driving. I asked myself who would have been driving your car if Stella wasn’t, and of course there was only one possible answer. You, Frank Broderick! It was you who saw Richard’s car coming down the River Road in the morning’s dawn. It was you who aimed your car at his, disregarding your wife’s frantic screams, and then leaped to safety just before the two cars hit!”

Frank Broderick mumbled something deep in his throat, and I faced him as a stranger. It had not been my father who caused the accident; it had not been Stella. It had been this man before me.

“Perhaps,” Simon continued, “it was necessary to knock your wife out, to stop her struggles. Perhaps it was necessary to bash in your father-in-law’s head after the accident to make sure he was dead. But in any event, you still had time to pull yourself into a ditch or a field before the farmer reached the scene. And then you made your way back to your house so you could be there when the sad news came to you. But of course your leap from the death car hadn’t been completely without injury. You landed badly, and cracked a couple of ribs. You couldn’t very well just show up at a doctor’s office or the hospital with them—not right after the accident. So you waited until last night and then made up the story of the attack to account for them.

“Cracked ribs are an odd thing to get from an attacker. I’m surprised I was the only one who fitted them in with the accident. Of course I already suspected you, and was looking for some confirming injury. It would have been truly amazing if you had made that last minute jump without suffering some sort of injury.”

Frank Broderick was beginning to get back his composure. “That’s a good theory for a detective story, but you’d never convict me in court on that evidence. What was my motive?”

“You’ve hated Richard for years,” Simon replied. “And as for your wife, her death was simply necessary to your plan.”

“Exactly! I hated Richard for years! So why should I hate him any more on yesterday morning?”

Simon Ark sighed. “I have no time to play games with you. We both know the truth, and it will do you no good to deny it. You killed the judge yesterday morning because he had just discovered that Conrad Mara was your father …”

And of course I knew it all then. The pieces all fell into place, and I saw all of Simon’s reasoning as clearly as if he’d spoken it. Conrad Mara had left a ten-year-old son in Havana, back in 1937, and Stella had first met Frank in the West Indies. And even my wife had remarked how familiar Mara’s face looked on that campaign poster.

I could picture Frank Broderick, or Frank Mara, meeting my sister in Havana—perhaps even seeking her out—and taking another name because he knew of his father’s aberration. And then he married Stella, and came to Maple Shades himself, still keeping his real identity a secret against the day when scandal would certainly ruin his father. My own father became his hated enemy; and then—as he’d feared—the ruin came down upon Conrad Mara’s head, somehow, just before the last election.

And so he was a son alone, his father an outcast who fled the town perhaps on some dark night. And he lived with his secret; he lived with it until my father received word from the private detectives in Cuba of the father-son relationship.

I knew what my father would have done then. I knew what he’d said over the telephone yesterday morning when he’d called Frank. He wouldn’t have a daughter of his married to such a man’s son!

And as he’d raced through the morning toward their house, Frank set out to meet him, on the River Road. My sister would have tried to stop him, but she would have been powerless. And then, with his car speeding along the River Road at sixty miles an hour, he would have seen my father’s car, coming the other way. He would have headed right toward it, hunting it down like an animal, and jumped free at the last second, leaving his wife and father-in-law to die in the crash, to silence those accusing lips forever.

And Conrad Mara, reading the newspaper account, had realized the truth, and hanged himself …

The door opened, and Hallison James was in the room with us. “What is it?”

Frank Broderick, who was really Frank Mara, rose from his chair. “No,” he screamed silently. “No …”

Before Simon or Hallison or I could stop him, he turned in a single motion and threw himself against the window. It shattered under his weight and he was gone, into the night.

And the three of us were at the window, looking down …

It was only three floors to the ground, and he was still alive down there, pulling himself along the ground, injured, perhaps dying, but still alive.

An ambulance turned into the hospital drive, its siren cutting through the night as it returned from its errand of mercy.

He saw it.

He saw it, and with a last desperate burst of energy he hurled himself in front of it.

There was a screech of brakes and a scream that quickly died in the night, and then a babble of voices from below.

District Attorney Hallison James turned away from the window and said, to no one in particular, “There was a fellow who really wanted to die …”

And that was the end of it.

Simon and Shelly and I stayed for the funerals on Monday after all, and then we went back to New York, leaving Maple Shades to the domain of District Attorney James and Uncle Philip.

It’s still hard for me to believe, of course, that anyone would so despise his father that he’d kill two people to keep the relationship a secret. But then, whenever I start to doubt it, I remember my own hatred, and my own desire that my father be revealed a murderer. And I think that perhaps, under different circumstances, I might have been like Frank Broderick.

SWORD FOR A SINNER

THE HIGHLY DELICATE MISSION that brought Simon Ark and me to the tiny village of Santa Marta is a story in itself, and since it was to play such an important part in what followed I must start with it. Perhaps by starting with Father Hadden’s story I can at least delay for a time the setting down on paper of the horror that was to await us in the mountains. Perhaps I can wash it from my memory with a beautiful scene of Santa Marta as I first saw it, nestled on the valley floor in a sea of sunshine, a jewel unclaimed among the mountains.

Santa Marta is a village of some fifty or sixty people, located almost on the state line between Colorado and New Mexico. It lies somewhat north of Questa, and east of Antonito—in the rugged foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. The journey from New York had taken us two full days by plane, train, and bus, but finally we arrived. It was early morning when the bus dropped us at our destination, with only a quizzical glance from the driver in farewell.

“So this is Santa Marta,” I said, breathing in the warm, dry desert air. “Where is this priest we came to see?”

Simon Ark frowned into the sun. “I see a church down there, a relic of happier days here. I imagine once this was a booming oasis in the desert. Perhaps Father Hadden can be found in his church.”

The church, in stone architecture distinctly Spanish, was the last building on the street, a final resting place before the long climb into the mountains. As we approached, a few of the village people were drifting out, bound for their day of work after morning Mass. This far north I was surprised to see so many Mexicans, and I was equally surprised to see Father Hadden, a rosy-cheeked man who might have been more at home in a big, sparkling church in Chicago.

“Father Hadden? I’m Simon Ark …”

“I’m so glad you’ve come,” he said, and I could see he meant it. He had the type of personality that made him immediately an old and trusted friend.

“This is a friend of mine,” Simon explained, gesturing toward me. “A New York publisher who sometimes assists me in my wanderings. He wants to write my biography someday—but that day is surely far off.”

A hint of uncertainty crossed the priest’s face at these words. “I hope I can trust my story in your hands,” he said quietly. “It would not be the type of story that should appear in print.”

“You can trust me,” I said. “If I ever write it at all, I’d change the names and the location.”

“I admire your church,” Simon said. “It is large and fine for such a small village.”

“Thank you,” Father Hadden said with a slight smile of gratitude. “I try to keep it well, even for such a small congregation as mine. The fine old church from a better day is one of the reasons why the bishop believes it necessary to keep a priest here in Santa Marta.”

“Oh?” Simon said. “And what are the other reasons?”

“One involves a place you might have passed on the way in—a den of sin or such called the Oasis. It’s been open only a year, but it already attracts people from a hundred miles around. The other reason … has to do with something up in the hills which need not concern us now.”

“Your letter said you’d heard of my work,” Simon began, anxious to get to the matter at hand.

The priest leaned back in his chair, brushing a suntanned hand through thick black hair. “I have a brother at the monastery of St. John of the Cross, in West Virginia. He told me that some two years ago you rendered them a great service.”

“Oh, yes,” Simon nodded. “A case of diabolic possession. Both interesting and tragic, in a way.”

Father Hadden nodded. “My brother spoke very highly of you, and when my own … problem came up I felt you were the man to help me. I went to my bishop and received his permission to consult you about it.”

“I’m indeed gratified that your bishop ever heard of me.”

“You’re much too modest, Mr. Ark. How many men are there in the world today doing actual, physical battle with the devil himself? And I understand that you yourself were once a priest?”

It was a phase of Simon’s past he never spoke of. Now he simply brushed it aside with an impatient gesture. “In Egypt, long ago, I practiced in the Coptic rite. But let us get to your problem, Father …”

“My problem is simpler stated than solved, I fear. It seems I find myself equipped with the power of communication with the dead. In short, Mr. Ark, I am a medium …”

His face never changed expression as he made the statement. He might have been giving us a baseball score, or asking for an extra-large Sunday collection. He was still the friendly, smiling priest, but I thought I detected a slight chill in the warm spring air.

“A medium?” Simon Ark repeated very slowly. “Of course, the term is only a bare hundred years old. It’s odd to hear the word spoken by a priest—one who certainly holds nothing in common with the Fox sisters and other American spiritualists.”

“I use only the popular term for a somewhat unpopular gift, Mr. Ark. I believe even Margaret Fox finally admitted the presence of fraud in her little act. Still, I understand there’s a monument to her back in Rochester where much of it started.”

Simon nodded. “But tell me of your strange power, whatever its name. This is most interesting.”

The ringing of a telephone interrupted the conversation, and Father Hadden rose to answer it. “Hello? Father Hadden here …” As he listened, his expression changed, ever so slightly. The smile faded and was replaced by a troubled, gray look. “I’ll come at once, of course.”

“What is it, Father, trouble?” Simon asked as he hung up the phone.

“I fear so. The very worst kind of trouble. A murder at the morada of Sangre de Cristo. In the mountains. I must go there at once.”

“Could I be of service?” Simon asked. “I have had some slight experience in such matters. Perhaps on the way we could discuss your own problem further.”

But the priest waved this aside. “You are welcome to come certainly, Mr. Ark, but this is far more important than any problem I might have. This is a tragedy that could be very bad for the Church.”

“Then all the more reason for my assistance.” Simon motioned to me and we followed the priest outside to his car, a station wagon brown with dust from the plains.

Father Hadden paused at the door and turned to me. “I must ask one promise from both of you. What you are to see up here is … well, it is a sight few men have witnessed. You must promise me never to speak of this to the outside world.”

We gave him our promises, and I for one was wondering what strange world we were about to enter, what sights awaited us in these distant mountains. Before long we were bouncing over black roads, climbing ever north into the hills and valleys of the Rockies. It was beautiful country, but strange and silent too—almost menacing in the quiet calm of its mountains, in the yucca and cactus that were the only vegetation.

“These mountains,” Simon began, breaking the silence which had hung over the car, “are called the Sangre de Cristo range? Blood of Christ?”

The priest nodded. “An ironically tragic name in view of the circumstances. Have you ever heard of the Brotherhood of Penitentes, Mr. Ark?”

Surprisingly Simon nodded his head. “Is that what this is?” he asked somberly.

“I’m afraid so. They have nearly a hundred and fifty chapter houses in the Southwest. They’re a group more powerful and more important than most people

“Would someone mind telling me what this is all about?” I asked.

“You will know soon enough, my friend,” Simon said, as a great stone villa came into view ahead. It stood on a flat bluff between two mountains, a relic of the Spanish conquerors forgotten by later men.

But the thing that riveted my eyes was on a hill just beyond the house. It was a great wooden cross, much too large to be simply the marker for a grave. There seemed to be some sort of banner or scarf attached to it, drifting gently in the breeze. “What’s that?” I asked.

Father Hadden didn’t even lift his eyes to it. He must have seen it many times before. “The cross,” he said simply. “You’ll see more of them inside.”

We parked in a worn brick driveway in front of the place, and I wondered about the absence of other cars. Certainly the people here must arrive somehow. Did they fly in on broomsticks or something?

There was a little cross over the door, too—a plain wooden one—and I suddenly supposed that this must be a monastery of some sort. I was about to put my thought into words when the great glass-and-metal door swung silently open in answer to our ring. The man who stood there wore a black hood over his head, a hood with only two eyeholes staring out at us. He was naked to the waist, and there were a number of great bloody scratches across his chest. In that moment I thought I’d stepped into a madhouse, but there was worse to come.

The hooded doorkeeper led us in without a word, down a dim, dank hallway lit only by stained glass windows high on each side. Father Hadden hurried along with him and I could see they were speaking in low tones about the tragedy we had come to witness.

“What in hell is this anyway?” I whispered to Simon. But already we were starting down a flight of stone steps, and in a moment we found ourselves in a low, dark basement lit here and there by flickering candlelight. My first impression was that we were in a great storeroom full of life-size crucifixes. But then I realized with a chilling start that the figures on the crosses were alive, horribly, fantastically alive!

There were perhaps twenty of the crosses in the room, reaching from floor almost to ceiling. And on each a nearly naked man was tied, his arms outstretched in the familiar attitude of Christ. Most of them wore only the black hoods and white loincloths, though some had compromised by wearing bathing trunks. All had their arms and legs tied to the crosses with thick horsehair cords, and some showed the red marks of scourging on their bare chests and thighs. It was a scene from hell.

“What is this?” I gasped out. “A lodge initiation?”

“If it were only that simple,” Simon mused. And then Father Hadden shone his light on the cross at the far end of the room—and we saw there the greatest horror of all.

The last cross in the line had a man tied to it like all the others—a man wearing a black hood—but this one was different. From the left side of his body, slanting upward into his chest, protruded the slim steel shaft of a Spanish sword …

“What is it, Simon? What is this madness?” I asked him later as we sat with Father Hadden in one of the upstairs rooms.

And Simon Ark closed his eyes and stared off into an unseeing world of his own mind. “The Brotherhood of Penitentes,” he began, very softly, “is an old, old society. Some trace its origin back to the Franciscan missionaries or even before. In a virgin country without priests or churches, perhaps it was only natural that some of the more passionate Spanish men should turn to self-torture as an act of devotion. A hundred years ago the practices of the Penitentes were so widespread and so brutal in the Southwest that the Catholic Church was forced to ban such groups. But of course it didn’t stop them. They continued their rites of self-scourging and crucifixion in secret, wearing hoods to conceal their identity from the public, and sometimes from each other.”

“But if the group is banned by the Church, why does Father Hadden here deal with them?”

The priest himself answered my question. “A few years ago it was decided that the practices of the Penitentes had softened considerably, consisting now only of processions and mild scourging during Holy Week. They have again been recognized by the Church—or at least most of the chapters have been. Unfortunately, this morada is one that was not received back into the fold. Its practices continue as staggeringly brutal as they were fifty or a hundred years ago. You saw the basement—some say there have been times when the crucifixions were performed with nails rather than merely ropes …”

“There have been deaths before?” Simon asked.

“There have been deaths,” the priest agreed. “Hushed up, but I hear of them sometimes. Never anything like this, though. I ask myself how it is possible that one of these men, in the midst of a religious fervor so great that it drove him to emulate the sufferings of Christ, could possibly commit murder.”

“Who was the man?” Simon asked. “I noticed your start of surprise downstairs when you removed the hood.”

“That is the thing that makes this all the more frightening,” Father Hadden answered. “The man is the owner of the Oasis.”

“The bar you mentioned earlier?”

The priest nodded. “The Oasis is all things to all men—drink, sex, sin, gambling. And Glen Summer is, or was, its owner and manager. His was the greatest sin of all.”

Simon frowned and was silent for a moment. Somewhere outside a cloud lifted from the sun and a single ray of light shot through one of the stained glass windows, bathing his face in a purple hue. “You believe a man like Summer would come to a place like this to atone for his sins in secret?”

“I believe it, Mr. Ark, because these others tell me it is true. But imagine what the people and the public will think! They will never believe it—they will never believe that good and evil can live side by side in the same man. They already circulate fantastic rumors about this place, and now they will claim Summer was kidnapped and murdered in some sort of religious ritual.”

I could see that Simon agreed with him. “It would be a fairly logical assumption, Father. But we have no choice except to call the local police. The murderer might not be so difficult to discover, after all. It must be one of those men downstairs.”

“But which of them, Mr. Ark? Which of them?”

Simon rose slowly from the chair and began to pace the floor, frowning. “If we sit in on the police questioning, we might learn something. How many are there downstairs?”

“Eighteen men, plus the one who let us in.”

“Who was he?”

“Their leader, in a way. His name is Juan Cruz. He’s Mexican, studied for the priesthood for a time, but was dropped because of practices like these. He drifted into the States about ten years ago and joined the Penitentes. I fear Cruz is the one who keeps this little group banded together. Without him they’d surely listen to me and funnel their passionate piety into more normal outlets.”

“You think this Cruz may have killed Summer?”

“Normally I’d answer yes to that. He was the only one not tied to a cross when we arrived, and certainly such a deed wouldn’t be beyond him if he thought it would bring some good. I have had many long talks with Juan Cruz and have yet to convince him that the end does not justify the means.” The priest paused and then continued after a moment. “And yet … I do not think he would endanger his group of Penitentes here by committing a murder during one of their rites of penance. He would kill Summer under certain conditions, but he would pick another time and another place.”

As if on cue the basement door opened and Juan Cruz appeared, fully dressed now and carrying the black hood he’d removed earlier. He was a bulky man, distinctly Spanish in appearance, with glistening black hair and tiny eyes to match. I disliked him immediately, but not for any action or word. Rather it was the dislike one often feels for a person of obvious superiority.

“They are all untied and dressed now,” he said quietly.

“Then we must call the police,” Father Hadden said. “There is no other way, Juan.”

“I suppose not,” the bulky man answered.

Simon Ark stepped once more into the purple spot of light that filtered down from above. “Do you know of any of these men who might have had a special reason for killing Glen Summer?”

“Certainly not,” Cruz answered. “He was a sinful man, but he was seeking the way back to God. I doubt if anyone else was even aware of his identity. That’s the purpose of the hoods, you know.”

“Who are the other eighteen?” Simon asked.

“For the most part they are simply poor Mexican laborers who have lived in sin for many years. A few are Americans, like Summer.”

“With the hoods to conceal identity it would be possible for an outsider to gain admittance, would it not?”

“Possible but most difficult,” Cruz replied. “I am careful.”

“The body has not been disturbed?”

“No.”

“Then I suggest we call the police immediately,” Simon said. “Too much time has already elapsed since the killing. Father Hadden and I will remain here while they question you and the others.”

Cruz nodded reluctantly and went off to the telephone.

I noticed Simon motioning to me and I walked over to where he stood. “My friend, you can serve no purpose here, but you might serve a very useful one elsewhere.

Perhaps you could take Father Hadden’s station wagon and drive to this place called the Oasis. You could be there when the word came in about Glen Summer, and you could see what reaction there was. It might be most interesting.”

It was agreeable with me, if only to get me away from the atmosphere of that place. Simon told Father Hadden of our plan and the priest nodded in agreement. “Take my car and see what you can learn,” he said. “You might especially observe the reaction of Summer’s wife, since I doubt very much if she knew he came to this place.”

I left them and headed the dusty station wagon back down the road to Santa Marta. About halfway into town I passed the sheriff’s car, filled with grim-faced men, and a moment later the town’s ambulance-hearse followed.

It took me a little time to locate the Oasis, a few miles outside of town. It sat back from the road a ways, a long low building with a parking lot and a few trees around it. Now, in the afternoon sunlight, there were only two cars parked there, and the business seemed slow for a den of sin. I parked the station wagon and went inside.

The place was not unlike a thousand other bars back east. It was a neighborhood sort of joint, even out here in the middle of nowhere. Booths along one wall, the damp and glistening bar along the other. And curtains over an entrance to a back room. A bald bartender with a gray mustache was polishing glasses casually behind the bar, and the only customer appeared to be a good-looking blonde girl propped up on one of the bar stools. She was wearing a loose white blouse and blue shorts that were much too short. I guessed her age at twenty-five or younger, and the way she eyed me when I came in told me she wasn’t presently attached.

“What’ll you have?” the bartender asked without putting down the glass he was polishing.

“Beer,” I mumbled. “Too hot for anything else.” I picked out the stool just two away from the girl and lifted myself onto it. After a moment I asked, “Glen Summer around?”

The bartender placed a bottle of beer and a glass in front of me. He took his time about answering, as if trying to determine the reason for my question. Finally, he said, “Nope. Gone away today. Back tonight.”

“How about Mrs. Summer?”

“She’s in the back. Want I should get her?”

“No. Maybe I’ll wait for Glen.”

The girl in the blue shorts slid off her stool, her shapely thighs bulging a bit under the tight fabric. She picked up her glass, moved it over a bit, and sat down next to me. “Mind?” she asked in reply to my look.

“Why should I?”

“I need somebody to talk to. This town is dead dead dead.”

“So I’ve been noticing.”

“Nothing to do with your afternoons but drink them away. The Oasis is the only civilized place for fifty miles.”

She’d had a few drinks but she was far from drunk. Just unhappy, I decided. “You live in Santa Marta?”

“Nobody lives in Santa Marta. They only exist. A month ago I was working up in Denver. I lost my job and decided to travel south, and this is as far as I got.”

“What keeps you here if you don’t like it?”

She waved an arm in a vague gesture. “Oh, things. You know.”

I didn’t know, and I could see I wasn’t going to find out. “You know Glen Summer?”

“Sure do! He’s a swell fellow.”

“And his wife?”

“She’s a bitch, but that’s the way it usually turns out.”

I took a swallow of beer. “I came down through the mountains, past a big old house with a cross nearby on a hill. What is it, a convent or something?”

She peered at me from under half-closed lids. “A bunch of crazy religious nuts. They go up there and beat each other with whips and stuff. Supposed to be good for their souls.” She gave a little chuckle. “If they did it in New York they’d be locked up in ten minutes.”

“You from New York?”

“I’m from everywhere. You’re just full of questions, aren’t you?” She signaled the bartender to pour her another drink.

The only thing I’d decided about her was that she didn’t know about Summer and the Penitentes, and that wasn’t much. “What’s your name?” I asked, figuring there was nothing suspicious in the direct approach.

“Vicky Nelson,” she answered. “Twenty-four and unmarried.”

I told her my name, said I was from New York, but skipped the rest of the vital statistics. Before we could get in any more conversation I noticed a distant funnel of dust through the window. It was a car, traveling fast in our direction. A good guess told me it was the sheriff and I was right.

He was short and fat—why are sheriffs always fat?—and he wore a holstered revolver low on his hip like some leftover cowboy. He’d come alone to break the news to Mrs. Summer, and I figured that made her a pretty important person in his opinion.

“Delia around?” he asked the bartender.

“She’s in back, working on the books, Sheriff.”

“Get her for me. It’s important.”

The bartender muttered something under his breath and put down the damp cloth. As he went through the back curtains I caught a glimpse of multicolored metal monsters lining the wall. The place was a little Las Vegas, complete with slot machines, and I was sure gambling wasn’t legal in this state.

After a moment the curtains parted once more and a tall middle-aged woman appeared. She might have been pretty once, but that day was long past. I discovered later she was only thirty-five, but just then I would have guessed her for over forty. “Hello, Sheriff. What’s the trouble?” she asked.

“I’ve got some bad news, Delia,” he said, ignoring the audience of Vicky and me. “It’s about Glen.”

“God—what happened to him?”

“Somebody killed him, Delia. Up at the morada …”

“Killed him!” she gasped, her voice cracking. “At the morada?” I don’t know which surprised her more—the fact of her husband’s death or its place of occurrence. “What was he doing there?”

“He was … with them, Delia. He was taking part in their … rites, and somebody stabbed him with a sword.”

“I don’t believe it,” she screamed out. “You’re lying!”

The bartender came around the row of stools and took her arm. “Steady, Delia. Let me take you in back.”

The sheriff finally noticed us sitting there and nodded in agreement. “Let’s all go in back,” he decided. And the three of them disappeared through the curtains.

“Glen Summer—dead!” Vicky Nelson said when we were alone. “I just can’t believe it.”

“He was a good friend, eh?”

“He was a good guy. I’d only known him these few weeks but he was a good guy. Say, how come you were asking about that place where Glen got killed, mister?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Just coincidence. What have you heard about it?”

“Like I said, they’re nuts. I sure didn’t figure Glen Summer for one of them.”

The sheriff came out of the back with Delia Summer and they got in his car. Her eyes were red but she was holding up well. The bartender returned, too, stepping behind his polished counter and picking up the damp cloth as if nothing had happened.

“Summer’s dead?” I asked him.

“Yeah.” He picked up another glass.

“How’d it happen?”

“Don’t know a thing, mister. You’ll have to ask the sheriff about it.”

“Thanks,” I said, and slid off the stool. I could see I wasn’t going to learn anything more here. “You want a ride anywhere?” I asked Vicky.

“Guess not, thanks. I need a few more of these.” She held up her glass. “See you around.”

“Yeah.” I went out and climbed back into Father Hadden’s station wagon. I didn’t want to go back to the villa in the mountains so I drove to the church where we’d first met the strange priest. It was only then, sitting there in the street before the great stone towers that I remembered the thing that had brought Simon and me to this place.

Father Hadden believed that he was a medium. That was an interesting thing to think about, at least. I didn’t remember ever hearing before about a priest who could communicate with the dead, though it did seem logical that if such things were at all possible a priest would be the person to do it.

I lit a cigarette and tried to conjure up a phantom in the smoke. If Father Hadden could talk to the dead, why couldn’t he talk to the departed Glen Summer and find out who shoved the sword into him? I filed away that thought for further conversation with Simon.

Ten minutes later, halfway through my third cigarette, the familiar sheriff’s car turned into the street before the church. I saw Simon and Father Hadden climb out, followed by the stout shape of the sheriff himself. While I was still debating whether to reveal myself, the sheriff strode quickly to my door and yanked it open. “O.K., mister, climb out. I want to talk to you.”

“What?” I mumbled something, startled by this sudden turn of events. “What did I do?”

The big sheriff rumbled on. “Never mind the wise talk. Come on inside while I get to the bottom of this.”

I slid out of the driver’s seat and followed him into Father Hadden’s rectory, because at this point there was nothing else to do. Simon and the priest were already there, sitting at a big oak table in silence.

“I got your buddy here,” the sheriff said triumphantly. “Nobody puts anything over on Ben Partell. You two were up there without any car, and then I see this joker at the Oasis drivin’ the church’s car. I just put two and three together, and I come up with all of you at the morada and this bird leavin’ for some reason. Why?”

Father Hadden cleared his throat. “Really, Sheriff Partell, there’s no excuse for this type of questioning …”

“And you be quiet, too,” the sheriff stormed. “I ain’t runnin’ for another three years. I don’t have to worry about the Catholic vote this season.”

It was amazing to me how the calm, semi-dignified man who’d brought Delia Summer the news of her husband’s death could have given way in a brief half-hour to this growling, bullying person who now faced us.

“You think we killed the man?” Simon asked mildly.

“No, I don’t think you killed the man, but I’m sure as hell goin’ to find out, if I have to run in that whole collection of creeps. They were all hangin’ there on their damned crosses, all in the same room, and not a damned one of them saw a thing! You think I believe that?”

“The room was quite dark,” Simon said. “And the dead man was at the end of it. Since I understand the Penitences were in the habit of entering the room one at a time at irregular intervals, any one of them could have plunged the sword into Summer and left him hanging there in the dimness.”

“But Juan Cruz tied each of them to the cross. If he didn’t do it himself, he sure as hell must know who did.” The sheriff lowered his bulk into one of the chairs and took out a fat cigar. Now that he’d shown us he was the boss, he seemed content to pursue the investigation on a somewhat more subdued level. “Cruz was constantly in and out of that cellar room. You mean to tell me that one of those eighteen guys, stripped down to the shorts or a loincloth, could have taken the sword off the wall upstairs, carried it down to the cellar in plain sight, and stabbed Summer without anyone seeing him?”

“It is possible,” Simon said.

“Nuts! I’m taking that guy Cruz down to my office, and if he won’t talk I’ll beat the truth out of him. I’ll lock up that whole place if I have to. I’m no hick-town sheriff, you know!”

Father Hadden rose and rested a gentle hand on the sheriff’s shoulder. “I have faith that the sinner will see his way to confess before very long,” he said. “Whatever the world may think of groups like the Penitentes, there is no doubt they are deeply religious men. The very fact of murder in such a place is unthinkable—the continued concealment of the crime by the killer is fantastic. He will come forward to confess, never fear.”

But Sheriff Partell was far from satisfied. “Well, you start praying for his soul, Father. I’m going out and drag that Cruz in for questioning.” And with that he rose from the chair and went outside to his car.

For a moment we sat simply in silence, as people do when some sort of vague disaster has passed them by. Finally, I broke the silence. “He may be a slob, but he’s no dope.”

But Simon Ark only sat in continued silence, as if deep in thought. “Tell me, my friend,” he asked at last, “what adventures befell you at the Oasis?”

“Well …” I told him everything that had happened, as close as I could remember it. Neither he nor Father Hadden interrupted, but when I finished I could see they weren’t impressed.

“Delia Summer must still be up there,” Father Hadden observed. “The sheriff brought her to officially identify the body and then he took us back here.”

Simon stirred in his seat. “My friend, would you like to do a bit more traveling this day?”

“I suppose so, but let me tell you my idea first.”

“And what is that?”

I turned to the priest. “Father, you told us before that you had been in communication with the dead.”

“That is correct …”

“Then why can’t you talk to the spirit of Glen Summer—talk to him and find out who killed him?”

The priest’s face paled at my suggestion. “I fear you do not understand my problem, not at all.”

Apparently I’d said the wrong thing, for Simon interrupted quickly. “My friend, would you take the car again and journey to the villa in the mountains? Perhaps you can somehow get a chance to speak to Juan Cruz before Partell takes him over.”

“And what should I say to him if I do? Should I ask him if he killed Summer?”

Simon ignored the sarcasm in my remark. “No, my friend. You should ask him if any member of the Penitentes was absent this morning …”

“Absent?”

“Perhaps there was an extra man in the room. It hardly seems likely that the murderer would allow himself to be tied to a cross in the same room as his victim. But if there was a missing Brother—perhaps that is your answer.”

It sounded reasonable, if a bit far-fetched, and I agreed to go.

The unearthly quiet of the villa on my previous visit had not prepared me for the bedlam which had broken out in the few hours since I’d left. Now there were cars parked everywhere, in a crazy unpatterned manner that reminded me of harbored boats after a hurricane. The sheriff’s car was back, as I’d expected, and now it had been joined by a state police car and a number of unidentified vehicles. At least two of them had press cards in the windows.

A deputy sheriff met me at the door and asked what I wanted. I thought fast and flashed my membership card in the Overseas Press Club. Apparently that was good enough for him, because he stepped aside without a word. Inside the place was alive with reporters and photographers, popping their flash bulbs at every possible corner. A cluster of them had gathered in the big main room, where the stout Partell was standing on a chair examining a rack of antique Spanish swords. Beyond, in a sort of sitting room, I could see Delia Summer, deep in an old straight-backed chair, staring out the window in a state bordering shock. Juan Cruz was with her, speaking softly, but she seemed not to hear his words. I walked in and stood quietly behind them, listening.

“Mrs. Summer, I know it is a difficult thing to grasp,” he was saying, “but your husband came to me a month ago. He was shocked by the sin and vice the Oasis had caused in its brief existence. He wanted to repent. He wanted to join the Brothers of the Blood of Christ and suffer for the sins of his life. Just a few days ago he told me he planned to sell the Oasis and give the money to the Church. He was a man repentant, Mrs. Summer, and you can be thankful he died that way.”

I cleared my throat and he turned toward me. “Ah, you are the friend of Father Hadden and that man Ark. What can I do for you?”

“Could I talk to you alone?” I said. Delia Summer turned tired eyes in my direction but seemed not to really see me at all.

“I’m afraid the good sheriff will never let me completely out of his sight, but perhaps over in the corner …” He motioned me to the far end of the room, under a great red-draped painting of some Franciscan missionary whose name I didn’t know.

“Simon Ark wanted me to ask you a question,” I began.

“Yes?”

“Were there any members of your Penitentes who were not present this morning?”

A cloud of something—fear?—passed over his eyes before he answered. “There was one,” he said slowly. “The man who first introduced Summer to me. Yates Ambrose, the bartender at the Oasis …”

“You think this bartender, Ambrose, might have sneaked in here while the others were tied to those crosses? The man was his boss—he might have had a reason for killing him.”

The Mexican never had a chance to answer, because I saw Sheriff Partell bearing down on us with fire in his eyes. “Joe, show this bird to the door, and make sure he doesn’t get back in.” His orders were crisp and to the point, and the deputy he’d spoken to acted at once.

Before I had a chance to say anything else to Cruz I found myself being propelled toward the door and out down the steps to the car. “Sheriff means what he says,” the guy told me. “Stay away or we lock you up.”

I turned quickly at the bottom of the steps and only succeeded in sliding into the dust. I got up slowly like a fool. Whatever Simon and Father Hadden wanted me to find out, I surely hadn’t done it. Unless there was something about that bartender …

I passed a careful eye over the scattered parking of cars and remembered the complete absence of them when we’d driven up this morning. But there were nineteen men—twenty, counting Summer—in that place and they must have come somehow. They sure didn’t walk.

I started the station wagon and drove slowly around to the rear of the big mansion. As I’d suspected, there was another parking lot there, with some ten or twelve cars nestled under the roofs tiled overhang. Well, all of the Penitentes weren’t poor Mexicans.

On second thought I took back that last part. Some of them might live at the villa—it was certainly large enough. But there was something in the sand that caught my eye and I swung the car to a quick stop. It was an odd type of tire track, a double tread mark made by a tire only recently put on the market. The rows of double treads ran over the other tracks, showing that it had been the last car in. And there was another set of them on the left, coming out of the driveway. I left my car where it was and walked the fifty feet to the line of vehicles. None of them had the double-tread tires. Somebody had come and gone after they arrived. I took a quick look for footprints, but that was hopeless. With a bit of hope I headed back to the car …

The Oasis was picking up business as the afternoon dragged along, filling its parking lot with a variety of new and old cars. The one I was seeking was at the end of the line, one of the two that had been there earlier in the day. I jotted down the license number and went inside.

The place was more like a morgue than a palace of pleasure, and I guessed that the word had gotten around. The same bartender, who must have been Yates Ambrose, was serving an occasional drink to the somber crew. But what really stopped me was the girl, Vicky Nelson. She was still there, in the same tight shorts, sitting on the same stool smoking her cigarette.

Beyond the curtained partition waited a solid row of one-armed slot machines. There were a couple of green felt poker tables, too, and a cloth-covered bulge that might have been a roulette wheel. But these were quiet today, out of respect for a dead sinner. There were only the slots to greedily accept our quarters.

Vicky and I played a while and then I asked her, “Ever hear any talk about Yates Ambrose and Mrs. Summer?”

“You kidding? Not a chance! He couldn’t have gotten her with a fish net. Besides, he’s one of those religious nuts.”

“A Penitente?”

“Could be, for all I know.”

“How come he works in a place like this?”

“Who knows? Trying to convert Summer, I suppose.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re full of questions, aren’t you?”

I handed her a couple of quarters. “Play for me. I’ll be right back.”

Out in front the murmurers were still in force, holding their private wake for the late owner of the Oasis. I leaned on the end of the bar until I attracted Ambrose’s attention and I motioned him toward me.

“Got a minute, Yates?”

“Who told you my name?” He was still clutching the bar rag.

“I’m a friend of Juan Cruz.”

“Who?”

“Cut the act. I know you’re one of them. Why weren’t you up there today?”

“You must be crazy.”

“Or maybe you were up there, huh?”

“Look, mister, I don’t know anything about it. I belonged to the thing for a while, went up there a few times. I even told the boss about it and introduced him to Cruz. But I quit a couple of weeks back. That nut!”

“Was the crucifixion bit a usual thing?”

Ambrose nodded. “Every week or so. He had twenty wooden crosses in the basement room, and he’d tie us to them with horsehair cords. Sometimes he’d let himself be tied there too.”

“Did each of you have your own cross?”

Ambrose shook his head. “It wasn’t quite that organized. But Cruz never let us forget we were sinners.”

“And you weren’t out there this morning?”

“No sir! I didn’t go near the place.”

I was pretty sure he was lying, but I’d never get anywhere with him. I thanked him and went back to Vicky Nelson.

“Hi, girl. How’s things been in my absence?”

She gave me a big smile. “I beat the thing out of five dollars with one of your quarters. Put it nearly all back in, though.”

There was a stir of activity in the front and we poked our heads through the curtain. Delia Summer had returned and she was telling Ambrose to close the place up. “We’ll be open again after the funeral,” she told the crowd. “Go home now, and mourn my husband’s murder.”

They murmured and moved, slowly filing toward the door. Mrs. Summer had regained much of her composure now, but I could see she was still a shaken woman. “We have to leave,” I told Vicky. “Come on.”

“Leave? Where will I go?”

“You must have a home somewhere. Where’ve you been staying?”

She thought about that, the drink gradually beginning to cloud her vision. “A motel someplace. I don’t remember quite where. Can’t I come along with you?”

“Girl, there’s fifteen years and a wife between us.”

But by this time Delia Summer had appeared. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before today?” she asked me, frowning in concentration.

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, we’re closing anyway, till after my husband’s funeral. You’ll have to leave.”

I shrugged and helped Vicky gather up her quarters. As soon as we were out the door Delia Summer and Yates Ambrose began closing the place up, getting ready for the period of mourning. I wondered if anyone else worked at the place and I asked Vicky.

“At night a few dealers and stick men come in,” she said. “Glen Summer hired them in Vegas.”

“And Sheriff Partell winks at all this?”

“He sure does, near as I can see. Maybe Summer was paying him off.”

One of the remaining cars in the lot apparently belonged to Vicky, but in her condition I could hardly let her drive it. She was beginning to sober up a bit, and I figured I could drive her around in the afternoon air for a while. “Climb in,” I said, holding open the station wagon door. “You can stay with me a little while and then I’ll bring you back here to your car.”

“You’re nice,” she said, climbing in.

I headed back toward Father Hadden’s church, because I was anxious to report my progress—or lack of it—to Simon. It wasn’t until I pulled up in front of the place again that I remembered Vicky’s costume. I couldn’t very well produce her in Father Hadden’s rectory in those shorts.

“Stay in the car,” I told her. “I’ll be back.”

“You’re going into church?”

“There are worse places, believe me. I’ll be back.”

Inside, Simon Ark and Father Hadden were still sitting at the table, just as I’d left them. Empty coffee cups told me the hours had been talkative and thirsty.

“I’m back. You two get everything solved?”

Simon peered at me through the lengthening afternoon shadows that were quietly stealing into the room. “We have had an interesting talk. Did you learn anything?”

I started at the beginning and told them everything that had happened, especially about the tire tracks that appeared to be from Yates Ambrose’s car. “Simon, I think he went out there this morning, took off his clothes and put on his black hood and killed Summer with the sword. It’s the only solution as I see it.”

Simon smiled a bit, as he often did when I was becoming positive about some theory of mine. “It is hardly the only solution, my friend. But perhaps we may learn something tonight. Perhaps your idea of Father Hadden communicating with the dead was not so bad after all.”

I shot a glance at the priest, but his face did not change expression. “You mean …?”

Simon nodded slightly. “Father Hadden has explained his problem—the problem that originally brought us to Santa Marta. It does indeed appear that he is able to form some sort of communication with the dead of this parish. In fact, the good Father believes he can reach anyone whose confession he ever heard during life.”

“Fantastic! Do you believe this, Simon?”

“There may be some truth to it. At times God moves in strange ways.”

I turned to the priest. “You’ll actually do it? Hold a seance or whatever they call them? Tonight?”

Father Hadden nodded reluctantly. “Mr. Ark is most persuasive. I will do as he wishes.”

“Who’s going to be here for this, Simon? Just the three of us?”

“On the contrary, my friend. I hope to have a great many people present—as many as possible. We will start by inviting the good Sheriff Partell.”

That even brought a laugh from me. “You’ll never get him down here. And if you did, he’d never sit still for anything as crazy as this.”

“Perhaps he would,” Simon mused. “Perhaps he would. In any event, I will go out now like the servant in the Gospels and assemble some guests for our gathering. I shall return by nightfall.”

“Oh—say, there’s this girl in Father’s car, the one I told you about …”

Simon nodded. “She may want to join us, too.”

I couldn’t quite picture Vicky Nelson sitting at any table that didn’t have drinks on it, but I supposed there was always a first time. “You’d better get her some clothes first,” I warned him. “She hasn’t got many on now.”

And when Simon had left I sat for a time in silence with Father Hadden, as the sun finally began to vanish behind the meager line of shrubs and cactus in the distance. “Mr. Ark is truly a strange man,” he said at last.

“You’re right there, Father,” I agreed. “I’ve known him for twenty years, off and on, and still I don’t really know him.”

“Do you believe what he says about his past? About back there—in Egypt?”

I spread my palms flat on the table. “Frankly, he’s never told me too much about it. Just that he’s lived a long, long time. Occasionally, when the dark winds of night are passing over the moon, I even find myself thinking that perhaps he actually is over fifteen hundred years old …”

The priest nodded. “One could believe it, very easily. He spoke of other things this afternoon, of a strange Coptic priest in the first century after Christ, who wrote a gospel glorifying the Lord. The words were devout but hardly divinely inspired. The Fathers of the Church denounced it as a fraud, and the Coptic priest lost everything. He was in a unique if impossible situation—his writings had been holy praises to God, worthy of a place in Heaven, but the deceit he’d used in circulating them as a fifth gospel made such a reward impossible. It was a situation even baffling for the Almighty, and this man could be sent neither to Heaven nor Hell. He was doomed to walk the earth forever, until such time as God would decide his fate.”

It was the first time I’d ever heard the story, and I wondered if this really was the strange secret of Simon Ark. “Did he tell you the name of this work?”

“It has come down to us, in a greatly altered form, as The Shepherd of Hernias. There is such a book. I am familiar with it.”

“And why would he tell you these things?” I asked.

“Perhaps,” said the priest slowly, “perhaps even a man as powerful as Simon Ark needs help sometimes. Perhaps he did not come solely to help me.”

“But why does he seek Satan, Father?” I asked. “Will the finding of the devil somehow break the spell of this curse that haunts him?”

But the priest only shook his head. “That I do not know, I do not even know if these words he spoke were true words. He was perhaps only telling me that the ways of God are often strange and unbelievable. He was only telling me that the fantastic, the supernatural, is possible on this earth—if it is God’s will.”

“And?”

“And he told me to accept this strange power of mine-accept it and turn it to God’s uses. He told me that tonight I must attempt to contact the spirit of Glen Summer …”

“But aren’t such things as seances against religion?”

“He says that some good can come even out of the bad. Though the end may never justify the means, surely at times circumstances must dictate the wiseness of fools and the foolishness of wise men.”

“And so Simon thinks the killer will give himself away at the seance?”

The priest shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows? I assure you I have never done anything like this before. My … spirits have always come in private before.”

“Well, I’ve seen a few of these things in the movies. Everyone sits in a circle and holds hands, or something like that.”

Father Hadden nodded. “I suppose we must duplicate the expected conditions.”

“Could I have a cup of that coffee while we’re waiting?” I asked him. “I suddenly remembered I’ve had mighty little to eat today.”

“Surely. I think I even have enough food for us.”

And that’s what happened. I ate there with the priest while Simon Ark roamed the streets of Santa Marta, seeking out those we needed for the final act of the little drama.

And presently, as the night shadows slipped slowly across the plain, Simon returned with Sheriff Partell in tow. “I must be crazy to even come here,” he was protesting. “Am I supposed to believe this big-deal priest is goin’ to conjure up a murderer for me? I’ve already got the killer locked up, and it’s that guy Juan Cruz, believe me!”

But Simon took the renewed attack with a slight smile. “I have not yet been able to convince the good sheriff that we will need the presence of Mr. Cruz as well.”

“The hell you will!”

“Consider, Sheriff Partell, if you do not arrive at a quick and satisfactory solution to this case, the state police will move in very soon. There are already some of them around. They will move in, and ask questions, and soon they will begin to wonder about your connection with the Oasis …”

“Damn it, I have no connection with the Oasis!”

“When a wide-open place like that operates in a town as small as this, the sheriff must have a connection with it.”

“I looked the other way, that’s all I did! Are you going to crucify—” He stopped as soon as the word was out of his mouth. “Are you going to hang me just because I let people do what they wanted to do? It’s a free country!”

I could see that Simon had him on the defensive, and he pressed his advantage. “Freedom to violate the law is not found in any constitution,” he pointed out. “It would be to your advantage to cooperate with us.”

“I’m here, ain’t I?” the sheriff growled. “How the hell much else cooperation do you want?”

“We want Juan Cruz,” Simon answered simply.

“Nuts! He stays in his cell.”

“You haven’t actually charged him with anything yet, you know. You can only hold him a few more hours.”

Partell sighed and flung up his hands, a beaten man. “O.K., O.K.—you can have him. Where is this crazy thing goin’ to take place. Here?”

Simon glanced at Father Hadden, saw the troubled frown of uncertainty on his face, and answered for him. “No, I think not. I think we should return to the villa in the mountains—to the scene of the crime, as they say …

And so we went back, up the hill now darkened by desert night, up and over dusty mountain roads leading nowhere, till finally the moonlight caused the image of the great wooden cross on the rise near the morada. Other cars were arriving, too, and I could see that Simon had done his work well in gathering these people together.

The great house itself was dark now, guarded only by a single deputy sheriff who snapped a quick and sloppy half-salute at Partell. The eighteen, whoever they were, had long since headed for their homes, their moment of dim suffering gone now. And if I wondered why Simon had not summoned them back, I was soon to learn the reason.

The great central room of the place seemed crowded with familiar faces, but a quick count showed only eight of us—Simon and myself, Father Hadden and Sheriff Partell, Juan Cruz, a bare-legged and puzzled Vicky Nelson, and—surprisingly—Delia Summer and Yates Ambrose. Simon’s travels had apparently carried him to the Oasis.

“If you’ll all be seated around this table,” Simon began, “I hope we can get this over with quite quickly.”

“Do you really think you can contact my husband?” Mrs. Summer wanted to know.

“We are certainly going to try, madame. But first let me say a few words of introduction.” As he spoke, we were seating ourselves around the big table. I took a chair to the left of Simon, right next to Vicky Nelson, who was still looking mildly bewildered at this whole business.

“You all know,” Simon began, “what has been happening here, in this place. A practice of medieval times, that of extreme physical penances for sins, has been revived. It has been revived and carried to extremes by a group of devout but misguided men. Perhaps Juan Cruz here was the most misguided of them all, since he was their leader.”

The eyes of us all went to Cruz, who sat opposite Simon, between the sheriff and Yates Ambrose. “Today,” Simon continued, “one of this group died, killed with a Spanish sword as he hung on a cross in the dim basement below us. As you know, he was Glen Summer, owner of the Oasis.”

Beside me, Vicky moved restlessly in her chair. Beyond the leaded glass windows I could hear a wind rising in the mountains. Perhaps there was a storm on the way. “As a few of you also know, Father Hadden here has been deeply troubled of late by a strange power that has thrust itself unwanted upon him. It is the power to communicate, under certain circumstances, with the spirits of those who have departed the earth. I’ll turn you over to Father Hadden now.”

The priest, looking uncomfortable, cleared his throat and began. “It is a generally accepted belief that the soul of a dead person does not leave the body for some hours after death. I believe that this fact is the basis of my strange power. I believe that by coming to the place of death within twelve to fifteen hours I can sometimes make contact with the soul of the departed. This is what I will try now. Please join hands to complete the circle.”

We did so, and the lights of the room dimmed, apparently on a signal to one of the waiting deputies outside. Soon the place was almost black, with only a distant glow through the windows to show us the faint outlines of each other’s faces.

“Now,” Father Hadden’s voice droned on, “silence, please … concentrate and hold hands tightly … do not break the circle … do not break the circle … I am calling upon the departed spirit of Glen Summer … Glen Summer … can you hear me? … are you still among us, Glen Summer …?”

He kept it up like that, talking to himself in the darkness, for perhaps ten minutes—until my palm began to sweat in Vicky’s grip. Then, without warning, there came a moaning sound from very close. It might have been at the center of the great round table. The moaning increased in volume until it formed words, and Vicky’s fingernails dug into my hand.

“I have come,” the voice boomed.

“That’s not my husband,” Delia Summer gasped. “That’s not his voice!”

But whoever it was, the voice continued. “Hello, Delia … hello, Juan …

I heard Cruz utter a startled gasp, and then Father Hadden’s voice cut in. “Who killed you, Glen? Who?”

“I … I don’t know … Felt the sword go in …”

“It’s some sort of trickery,” Yates Ambrose muttered across the table. “That’s not Glen.”

But Father Hadden pressed on. “Can you tell us anything at all, Glen?”

“No … except … except …”

“What? Except what?”

“Except how did the killer know which one of them was me?”

As soon as the words had been uttered I realized the truth of them, the single fantastic truth that none of us had noticed or questioned. With nineteen nearly naked men hanging on crosses in a dim cellar, their heads completely hooded, how could anyone know which one of them was Glen Summer?

And as soon as the thought entered my head I knew the answer. Only one man could have known which of those hanging figures was Summer. One man, the man who tied him to the cross—Juan Cruz.

“No!” Cruz shouted in the same instant, and leaped free of the human ring. Before I knew what was happening the lights were flooding down on us, and Juan Cruz’s terrified figure was leaping over a low sofa by the leaded windows.

“I knew it was him all the time,” Partell snorted, reaching for his gun. But, somehow, Simon was there beside him, clutching the gun hand.

And in a moment it was all over, with three deputies bearing down on top of Cruz’s struggling body. Partell shook free from Simon’s grip and finally got the revolver out. “Why didn’t you let me shoot him?” he muttered. “It would have saved the expense of a trial.”

“Because,” Simon said quietly, “he isn’t guilty.”

“What? Who the hell could have done it if he didn’t?”

And Simon Ark turned toward the others. “Suppose you answer that, Mrs. Summer. Suppose you tell him how you killed your husband …”

We just stood there, waiting for the screams of denial that never came. I think in that first moment even I must have thought that at last Simon had made a mistake, that certainly Delia Summer could not possibly have plunged the sword into her husband’s chest. But no denial came.

“Are you crazy, Ark?” Sheriff Partell snorted, breaking the shocked silence.

“Not at all.”

“But that voice …”

Simon smiled. “Forgive me, it was my voice, slightly disguised and removed from its usual position. Father Hadden and I really had little hope that the spirit of Glen Summer would really present itself before so many people. We hoped to scare a confession out of Mrs. Summer, but unfortunately we only succeeded in scaring the innocent Senor Cruz.”

“And why couldn’t Cruz be the killer?” Partell wanted to know.

“The reason for that goes deeply into the character of the man and the whole practice of the Penitentes. It has already been pointed out that neither Cruz nor any of the others would be a party to a simple murder in such a place as this, while in the grip of a religious fervor. Such good and evil just could not exist side by side in the same man. Besides, none of the eighteen would know which cross was occupied by Summer this day. Only Cruz would know that, and he was the most fervent of all—the one person least likely to murder within the walls of his sacred palace. There remained one possibility, however. Suppose—suppose Cruz committed the murder in a fit of religious zeal, somehow believing Summer to be evil? Suppose he had some insane quirk that dictated the very ritual murder we all feared so much.”

Sheriff Partell nodded. “I still think that’s what happened.”

But Simon Ark had not finished speaking. “Consider the man, though. Consider Juan Cruz, deciding he must murder the hanging figure on the cross. Either insane or in an uncontrollable fit of religious passion, he seizes a weapon from the wall there and heads for the basement.” He paused only a moment. “And what weapon does he seize?”

The sheriff gestured toward the wall. “All there are are swords and spears. He didn’t have much choice.”

“But he did! He had the ultimate choice. He had the choice between stabbing Glen Summer in the left side with a sword—or a spear like the Roman soldier used on Christ as He hung dying on Calvary …”

We were silent then, all of us, because, somehow, we knew he was right. But then Sheriff Partell spoke again. “O.K., but why does that make it his wife?”

“We have already shown that the killer had to be able to recognize Glen Summer hanging nearly naked in a dimly lit basement, with his entire head covered. Who could have recognized him, for his body alone? Ambrose the bartender? Possible but doubtful. Only one person could enter that basement with the certainty of recognizing the naked chest and legs of Glen Summer. Only one person—the wife who shared his bed.”

And now Vicky Nelson spoke up beside me. “I don’t know too much about this whole crazy thing, but from what I have heard I’d like you to explain how Mrs. Summer or any other woman could walk past eighteen men without being noticed. After all, they were all supposed to be naked to the waist, weren’t they?”

Simon cleared his throat. “What nearly everyone tends to forget in dealing with real-life crime is that it is not at all like crime in books. In a mystery novel a killer must have a foolproof, or seeming foolproof, method of murder before he strikes. But in real life a murderer might be impelled to strike with only a fifty-fifty chance of escape, if the motive was great enough. Delia Summer’s motive was great enough, and her chances of escape were better than fifty’ fifty.”

“But how?”

“She knew about the basement room; she knew about the rite that would be going on this morning. She knew it all because her husband had told her. She entered the villa, took down the sword—perhaps she knew about that, too, or perhaps she had brought some other weapon which she discarded in favor of the sword—and then made her way down the steps to the basement. And then she walked past those hanging men, studying them in the dimness until she recognized her husband.”

“And they never saw her?”

“They never saw her, my friend, because—simply—their eyes were closed. You must remember that these men were religious mystics, in the grip of a highly emotional experience. Each man, as he hung there with the ropes cutting into his wrists, was in a sense another Christ. Each man, deep in his own prayerful thoughts, would naturally have closed his eyes—especially since there was nothing to see in the dim basement. Delia Summer guessed this, and she was right. Moving silently on the stone floor she had perfect safety—until the very moment she plunged the sword into her husband’s chest. And even then the odds were with her. Already in pain from the ropes, there was a good chance he would not cry out in the split second before death. He didn’t, and she won her only gamble.”

Through it all, Delia Summer had been silent. Now she spoke. “Why did I kill him?” she asked, not making it a denial but rather only a question. A question to which she already knew the answer.

“Because, dear lady, your husband told you he planned to sell the Oasis and donate the money to the Church. You couldn’t stand the thought of a future of poverty chained to a religious fanatic. So you had to kill him before he carried out his plan. You had to kill so you would inherit control of the Oasis. And you risked killing him here because this was the last place on earth a woman would be suspected.”

I could tell by the faces around us that he’d convinced us all, but I still had a final question. “Simon, what about Ambrose’s tire tracks outside?”

“Simple, my friend. She borrowed his car. I considered the possibility that Ambrose was guilty, but quickly rejected it. He had no obvious motive, and as I’ve explained, it was doubtful if he could have been certain of recognizing Summer’s masked body. In any event, there was a final clue pointing to Mrs. Summer. Sheriff Partell told me that when she arrived here with him, she broke away and ran sobbing to the basement. How did she know the way to the basement, or that her husband had died there? She knew because she’d been here before today—to search him out and kill him.”

“While she was prowling around she might have run into Cruz,” I objected.

“She knew he’d be at prayer. It was no more of a chance than any of the rest of it. When her husband told her of this place, he no doubt went into great detail.”

Sheriff Partell’s expression was somber. “Delia,” he said quietly, “I’m afraid I’ll have to …”

“I know,” she said. “It was the chance I took.”

“You’re confessing?”

But there was still a spark of fire in her eyes. “Not on’ your life! I’ll fight it out with a jury.”

Vicky Nelson turned to me with a low snort. “Didn’t I tell you she was a real bitch? Let’s get out of here …”

Simon and I dropped Vicky back at her car, and that was the last I saw of her—though the memory of those legs stayed with me for many days. We spent the night with Father Hadden, and I know that he and Simon talked far into it, of the strange happenings and the strange things that did not happen. And when we left the next morning the priest was busy telephoning—talking to the eighteen men who were all that remained of the case’s loose ends.

A month or so later I received a letter at my New York office. It was sent to Simon Ark, in my care, and it was from Father Hadden. It had been a busy month for him, but it was a happy letter. He had succeeded in organizing the Penitentes into a group to help him with parish activities, and he had great hopes that their overwhelming piety was being channeled into more normal activities. Juan Cruz, unfortunately, had suffered a mild nervous breakdown—but Father Hadden even held out hope for him. And surprisingly enough he added a P.S. to the effect that Vicky Nelson and Yates Ambrose were planning to be married.

“He doesn’t say a word about the spirits,” I pointed out to Simon.

“It is a happy letter, my friend. Full of the joy of young love and older faith. There will be no more spirits for Father Hadden.”

And one day—it must have been a year later—the priest himself visited us, happy in the midst of a job well done. “I’m here only for a few days,” he said. “I couldn’t pass through without seeing my old friends.”

“How are Vicky and Yates?” I asked.

“Happy,” he said, and that after all was a complete answer.

And Simon smiled down on the man of God. “No more spirits?”

But the priest hesitated before answering. “Only one, Mr. Ark. Only one.”

“One?”

He nodded. “Delia Summer died in the gas chamber last month.” And that was all he would say …

THE TREASURE OF JACK THE RIPPER

BEFORE RECOUNTING THE REMARKABLE events surrounding the search for the lost treasure of Jack the Ripper, it might be well to say a few words about my friend and occasional companion Simon Ark. It was Simon who brought the affair to a satisfying conclusion, as he has so many other times in the 22 years I’ve known him.

I was a young newspaper reporter when I first met Simon Ark back in the mid-fifties. I’d been sent to a remote western town to report on an apparent mass suicide. Simon was there too, looking tall and imposing and very old. He told me later that he was nearly 2,000 years old, that he’d been a Coptic priest in Egypt, and now was doomed to roam the world like some Flying Dutchman or Wandering Jew, undying, seeking a final confrontation with Satan and all that was evil on this earth.

Did I believe any of that?

Frankly, no. Not at first, anyway. I married a wonderful girl named Shelly Constance and moved from a career in journalism to one in publishing. When Simon Ark reappeared in my life, as he kept doing at irregular intervals, I was an editor at Neptune Books. Whether I believed his story or not, I realized his vast knowledge of the occult and the mystic arts could be put to good use. He wrote a book and I published it. This was, after all, the era when every mystic had a book to publish.

In recent years Simon and I drifted apart. I was a middle-aged editor no longer quite up to the sudden journeys to Egypt or Poland or London that used to fascinate me in the old days. And for all I knew, Simon himself might have died of old age. Because I never really believed all that business about Simon being 2,000 years old, did I?

It had been fully five years since our last adventure together when suddenly he was back, on the other end of the telephone, acting as if he’d seen me not ten minutes earlier.

“Hello, my friend:”

“Simon! Is that really you?”

“Are you free for lunch?”

“Of course! But what—?”

“I could not pass through New York without telephoning my publisher now, could I?” I knew his face would have that familiar sly smile as he said it.

I arranged to meet him at one o’clock at a steak house near my office. It had a small back room where customers could talk or drink away the afternoon without interruption, and I often took my authors there to iron out some sticky point in their plots or in our contracts.

“You look the same,” I told Simon, meaning every word of it. His large body and worn but vigorous face reminded me of our first meeting 22 years earlier.

“You are looking good too, my friend. Putting on a little weight, though. How is Shelly?”

“She’s fine. Away visiting her mother in Florida at the moment.”

“Ah, then you’re alone?”

“Yes,” I admitted reluctantly.

“Come to England with me,” he said suddenly.

It was the sort of spur-of-the-moment suggestion I would have relished in the old days. “I can’t, Simon. I have my work.”

“We shall have some high old times, as we did in the old days.”

“Still chasing the Devil?”

“Yes. It is an eternal quest.” His face had gone solemn at my question. “Satanism has become a new fad among many young people.”

“I’ve been reading about the resurgence of witch cults in England. Is that what you’re after?”

He shook his head. “Something far more evil, my friend.” The old eyes flashed with a familiar fire. “The treasure of the late Jack the Ripper.”

“At least you admit that he’s dead. Every once in a while someone tries to prove he’s still alive. But I never heard of any treasure.”

“I have a communication from a man in London named Ceritus Vats. A collector of esoterica. He feels my presence is needed to forestall a murder. And to find a treasure.”

I thought about it. I still had a week’s vacation coming, and June was a slow time in publishing. The autumn books were already in various stages of production, the concern of other people, and I wouldn’t have to finalize our spring list for months yet. Shelly would be at her mother’s place another week. There was no real reason why I couldn’t go, except common sense.

And I’d never let that stop me before. If Simon Ark was going to find a treasure belonging to Jack the Ripper, I wanted to be along for the show.

I phoned Shelly in Florida to tell her what was up. She’d always had mixed feelings about Simon Ark, and I knew she was far from delighted to have him back in our lives. But she didn’t argue about the trip. She only said, “Be careful,” and then, “I’ll see you next week.”

At ten o’clock the following night Simon and I were airborne over the Atlantic. It had been a bumpy takeoff from Kennedy, in the midst of an early summer rainstorm, but the flight quickly settled down to a smooth uneventful crossing. “What have you been doing with yourself these past five years?” I asked Simon.

He smiled. “Five years is merely a weekend to me, my friend. A pause, a rest from the search. As a matter of fact, I was studying at an Irish abbey for part of the time. I had only just returned to America when Ceritus Vats got in touch with me.”

“What sort of man is Vats? And how did he know where to reach you? I’ve never known your address in all these years, except for the brief times you stayed with Shelly and me.”

“Ceritus Vats is a bookseller among other things. He operates from a little shop off Hammersmith Road in London. He knows my wants in certain fields, and he knows an address where I may be reached.”

“You mentioned esoterica. The mystic arts, I suppose.”

“In this case, yes, though he deals in a wide range of books and maps. Anything old or rare.”

I was prepared to meet a man who went with his name, but Ceritus Vats was a surprise. Our first afternoon in London was misty with a damp June rain, but the shop of Ceritus Vats was warm and brightly lit. He was a short handsome gentleman with white hair, who moved between the stacks of old books with a nimbleness born of long experience. Though the shop had the traditional hodge-podge look of a good second-hand book store, I never doubted that he could lay his hand on any title in the place at a moment’s notice.

“So good to see you again, Simon,” he said with a smile. “And it’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.”

I shook his hand and sat down. “I noticed a few of our Neptune Books have drifted across the sea to England.”

“Quite a few, actually. Neptune is a fine American house.”

Simon cleared his throat, anxious to get down to business. “You can speak freely in front of my friend here. He’s shared many adventures with me.”

Vats glanced at me a bit uncertainly, then replied. “Very well. Of course you’re familiar with Jack the Ripper and his crimes.”

“I am,” Simon said. “Unfortunately I was not in London at the time, or I might have brought the criminal to justice.”

I was used to this sort of talk from Simon, and apparently Vats was too. He hurried on. “Nowadays the killing of five prostitutes on the streets of London would hardly attract all that fuss.”

“Perhaps it would,” Simon said. “If done in the manner of the Ripper’s killings.”

“You mean the mutilations?”

“And the letters to the newspapers. He was nothing if not a showman.”

Ceritus Vats leaned back in his chair. “Suppose I told you I have evidence that the Ripper was neither a madman nor a sex fiend, but only a coldly calculating killer whose motive was financial gain!”

“I’d find that difficult to believe,” Simon said.

“And suppose I could name the Ripper?”

“Do so, by all means!”

“Recently a remarkable document—a handwritten journal—was offered to dealers in rare books and esoterica, like myself. Its author purports to be none other than Jack the Ripper himself. In this journal he explains the motive for his crimes, and reveals his identity. I must say that the handwriting compares favorably with that in reproductions of the Ripper’s newspaper letters.”

“Who is offering this journal?”

“A great-granddaughter of the man who wrote it. Her name is Glenda Coxe. His was Raymond Slackly.”

“I’ve never heard of Slackly,” Simon admitted. “Nor the woman either, for that matter.”

“According to the journal, Raymond Slackly was a small-time thief. He’d once knifed a man in a brawl, but he admits to no other prior violence. Sometime in the mid-1880s he teamed up with another thief named Hogarth, a smarter criminal who expanded both their horizons. After a number of profitable robberies they heard about the heist of a lifetime.

“It seems that 1887 was Queen Victoria’s Jubilee year, the fiftieth anniversary of her coronation. To celebrate the event a merchant named Felix Rhineman collected contributions for the crafting of a solid gold lion encrusted with fifty diamonds. It was to be a surprise gift to Victoria from London’s merchants, presented during the summer Jubilee week. Only a few people knew of it in advance, but unfortunately one of them let something slip in a pub. Hogarth and Slackly learned of the golden lion and managed to steal it on the eve of the presentation. The matter was hushed up to avoid embarrassment and Queen Victoria never knew of it.”

“Do you believe all this?” I asked with an editor’s natural skepticism. “That sort of thing went out with the Maltese Falcon!”

Ceritus Vats merely smiled. “It’s possible your Mr. Hammett got his idea from legends about the golden lion. Certainly I demand proof for such a story—but the map is a proof of a sort.”

“What about Jack the Ripper?” Simon pressed on. The lines of his face were deep and his eyes were veiled.

“Hogarth and Slackly were afraid to offer the lion for sale once they’d stolen it. And they possessed neither the knowledge nor equipment to melt it down. They decided Hogarth would bury the treasure in a safe place for five years, at which time they would then take the lion abroad and sell it.”

“Where was it buried?”

Vats shook his head. “Hogarth never told Slackly. He claimed that Slackly drank too much and had a loose tongue. But Slackly insisted he draw a map of the location, in the event he was arrested for some other crime. Hogarth agreed to draw a map in five parts, and to leave one part with each of five London streetwalkers. They were paid to keep it, with more money promised in five years’ time. Only Hogarth and Slackly had lists of the prostitutes’ names.”

“An unlikely story,” Simon remarked.

“But is it? For the money, and the promise of more money, these women could be depended on. The parts of the map would remain safe. Hogarth seemed certain they wouldn’t be lost or misplaced. And even if one of the women died or disappeared, Hogarth himself still knew the location of the treasure. The trouble is, Hogarth died—he was killed in a pub brawl the following year. Slackly was left with five names and nothing more. According to the journal, he tracked the women down over a period of months but each one refused to give him her portion of the map—he hadn’t the money that was promised. So he was forced to kill them, all five, using the mutilations and his letters to the press to hide the true motive.”

“Is there any evidence besides the handwriting?” Simon asked.

“The journal is curiously reticent about the specific details of the killings—almost as if Slackly himself could no longer face the memory of them. But he does say he strangled the women before using his knife. Donald Rumbelow’s recent book on the Ripper confirms that at least four of the victims were probably strangled first.”

“Could I examine this journal?”

Vats shook his head. “I was allowed to read portions in the presence of Glenda Coxe, but she would not let me keep it.”

“And the map?”

“That’s the strangest part of all. Once Slackly retrieved it and put the pieces together, he found he couldn’t read it. That’s why he wrote the journal, leaving the map for his heirs.”

“I assume Miss Coxe can’t read it either, or she’d hardly offer it for sale.”

“Correct. She feels the journal and the map themselves are of great value, even if the treasure is never located.”

“And certainly they are valuable, if the story is true.”

“Can you help me, Simon?” Vats asked.

“Just what sort of help do you need? You asked me to forestall a murder.”

Vats nodded sadly. “My own. It is depressing to reach this stage in one’s life and realize that a colleague would actually kill you for financial gain.”

“And this colleague is—?”

“Martin Rood, an antiquarian bookseller and dealer in esoterica like myself. We’ve been friendly rivals for years.”

“Miss Cox showed him the journal too?”

“Yes, indeed. She wanted us to bid against each other and she has succeeded admirably.”

“Has Rood actually threatened your life?”

“Yes. Last week we held a joint meeting with Miss Coxe. When I topped his bid he stormed out, saying if I cheated him out of the journal and map he’d see me in Hades. He was not jesting.”

“But perhaps he’s cooled down by now.”

“No. On the morning I cabled you I received a package at my shop here. It was an old leather-bound book with no indication of who’d sent it. When I opened the cover I saw the book had been hollowed out—to make room for a live black widow spider.”

“My God!” I breathed.

But Simon did not take it so seriously. “Hardly a serious attempt to kill you, Ceritus, or the book would have contained a bomb rather than a spider. Still, it’s a bit unpleasant. You think Rood sent it?”

“Who else? The book was an old regimental history of little value. I almost think I’d seen it on his shelves.”

“Have you spoken to him since then?”

“I tried to phone him but he’s always out.”

“Perhaps a visit to Mr. Rood is in order,” Simon decided. “Meanwhile, is it possible that Miss Glenda Coxe has shown this journal to other dealers?”

“I doubt it. Both Rood and I made strong bids for it.”

“And the map? Did she allow you to inspect that as well?”

“No. Only the buyer gets to see the map, though she’s described it to us as a circle of dots with a horseshoe of dots inside.”

Simon Ark lifted his head. “Is that so? And she was unable to identify it?”

“So she says. Do you know—”

“Just a thought. I’ll withhold comment for the present.”

“Can you speak to Rood, Simon? Somehow get him off my back so I can close this deal for the journal?”

“I can speak to him. But the police could have spoken to him too. Why didn’t you simply call them and tell them about the spider?”

“If the police got wind of this Ripper connection they’d surely confiscate the journal and the map. The newspapers would get the story and no one would make a penny out of it!”

“I suppose the monetary factor is important to you.”

“Of course it’s important. I’m not in this business for my health, Simon! And neither is Rood. This is my chance to acquire the find of a lifetime!”

“Have you and Rood considered sharing it?”

“Share? With him? Never!”

There seemed little more to be said. Simon and I left Vats with a promise to do what we could. But I detected in my friend a depression that our long journey had come to this. “I have known Ceritus for years,” he said finally, breaking the gloomy silence, “but I never realized the full extent of his greed. Rood resorts to spiders in hollowed-out books, and Ceritus resorts to me. I am to be the weapon to gain his ends.”

“Do you really believe this business about Jack the Ripper’s buried treasure?”

“Perhaps this solution is no more fantastic than the original crimes were. However it leaves one fact unaccounted for: if the Ripper was a sane and rational man bent only on finding that buried lion, why did he find it necessary to mutilate his victims after strangling them?”

“He was crazy and this whole business is crazy, if you ask me. Let’s forget it and catch the next plane back to New York.”

“I think first a few words with Martin Rood are called for. Then perhaps we will leave.”

Rood’s Rare Books occupied a shop on Bayswater Road, opposite Kensington Gardens. In its cluttered shelves and haphazard piles of books it was much like Vats’s shop, but the lighting was dimmer and the odor a bit mustier. And Martin Rood, when he appeared, looked very much like the sort of person who would send black widow spiders in hollowed-out books. He was as tall as Simon, but much thinner, with sunken cheeks and a pale skin that gave him something of a cadaverous appearance.

“What may I help you with today?” he asked. “We have some fine leather-bound volumes of Sir Walter Scott, just purchased from an estate.”

“I’m more in the market for regimental histories,” Simon remarked. “Perhaps something on the Black Widows.”

“Black Widows?” Rood seemed puzzled. “I don’t believe I know that regiment.”

“Strange. Ceritus Vats thought you could help me.”

At the mention of Vats’s name, the bookdealer’s whole manner changed. I could see the veins in his temples beginning to throb as he said, “I have no dealings with Vats! I know nothing of the lies he may have told you!”

“They concern a certain Miss Glenda Coxe and a handwritten journal dating from the last century.”

“Miss Coxe has contacted me, yes. I believe the entire matter to be a hoax. If Vats wishes to spend his money on it, so be it!”

“You didn’t mail him a spider in a book?”

“A spider? In a book? What a quaint idea!”

Simon and I exchanged glances. Either Vats or Rood was a consummate liar. And maybe it didn’t much matter which one. But then Simon said something which surprised me. “I’m quite interested in Miss Coxe’s journal myself. I’d like to make a purchase offer on it.”

“You? Who’d you say you were?”

“The name is Simon Ark.”

“American?”

“Most recently.”

“You don’t exactly sound American.”

“I’m a mixture,” Simon answered with a smile. “Now about this journal—”

“You can’t really believe in it? Jack the Ripper and all that?”

“But if it’s true, the journal could be worth a fortune.”

Rood considered. “How to prove it?”

“Dig up the golden lion. That should prove it.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

Simon turned to me. “Come along, my friend.”

“Where are you going?” Rood asked.

“To see Miss Coxe, of course. To put in my bid on Jack the Ripper’s map.”

Simon’s performance may have galvanized Rood into some sort of action. We were only a block away from the shop when I turned to see him lowering the sunshade on his front window and putting out the lights. “Looks as if he’s decided to close early,” I remarked. “Maybe he wants to beat you to Miss Coxe’s place.”

“Or else he’s planning another little surprise for Ceritus. In any event, I think it’s time we called on Miss Coxe. She obviously holds the key to this entire matter.”

Glenda Coxe was a psychologist doing basic research in animal behavior at a university laboratory located in London’s East End. We found it without much difficulty, and after being announced we were greeted by a cool young woman wearing a white lab coat. Her dark hair was pulled up in a knot at the back of her head, and I had the impression that she might be far prettier if she allowed her hair to hang free. It took me a moment to remember that this was, supposedly, the great-granddaughter of Jack the Ripper.

“Gentlemen, I hope it won’t take too long. I’m timing an experiment with some rats.” Her voice was cool and dispassionate, like the rest of her.

“In a maze, no doubt,” Simon said.

“What?”

“The rats are in a maze.”

“Yes, they are. But I’m sure you didn’t want to talk about rats.”

“As a matter of fact, we came to talk about this journal which has suddenly come to light. And a map, I believe.”

“That’s correct. Do you wish to purchase them?”

“Could we sit down?” Simon asked, indicating some chairs in one corner. When we were seated he continued, “You realize that this journal of yours could be immensely valuable if it’s what you say it is.”

“My dear man, I don’t say it’s anything at all! Perhaps it was a novel my great-grandfather was attempting to compose. I am simply offering it for sale.”

“I see. Then you don’t believe you’re a descendant of Jack the Ripper?”

“I ceased speculating on it long ago. My uncle—” she stopped.

“Your uncle?”

“I was going to say that my uncle does enough speculating for both of us. But that needn’t concern you.”

“Your uncle believes the journal to be authentic?”

“He does. It’s become an obsession with him.”

“I’d like to meet him,” Simon said.

“That would accomplish nothing.”

“Something puzzles me about this whole business, Miss Coxe. When you found this journal, why didn’t you take it to the newspapers—or even to a book publisher? Why offer it surreptitiously to a couple of old booksellers?”

“Frankly, I wanted to get rid of the thing. And I didn’t want to be plastered across the papers as the great-granddaughter of Jack the Ripper. You must understand that.”

“I’d still like to meet your uncle.”

“Meet him if you wish, Mr. Ark. But I repeat, it will accomplish nothing.”

She gave us his address and then retreated into her laboratory. I decided she wasn’t sorry to see us go. Perhaps to her we represented the stigma of publicity she’d tried so hard to avoid.

Or was she trying to avoid it? “Simon, the thought occurs to me that this whole charade might be nothing more than a giant publicity stunt for a new book about jack the Ripper.”

He smiled at me. “British publishers go about things a bit differently from you New Yorkers. I hardly think she’s after publicity. At this point we must accept what she tells us at face value.”

“And later?”

“After we’ve met her uncle we might draw other conclusions.”

As we drove away we noticed Glenda Coxe leaving through a rear door of the lab. Like Martin Rood, she too was closing early.

Meeting her uncle involved driving to Greenwich, where the Coxe home was located within sight of the Observatory. “Virtually at longitude zero,” Simon remarked as we pulled up in front of a red stone house that had obviously seen better days.

His name was Nesbett Coxe and like the house he had seen better days. Somehow he reminded me of a cross between the two bookdealers, Rood and Vats. He moved slowly, with glasses worn low on his nose so he could peer over them. His hair was thin and he looked unwell, though he couldn’t have been more than fifty years old. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Simon Ark. My niece warned me you were on your way. It’s about the Ripper business, what?”

Simon nodded as we followed him through the downstairs rooms. A woman’s touch was obvious here and there, but it did little to alleviate the general gloom. “Do you and your niece live here alone?” Simon asked.

“That’s right. Wife left me ten years ago. I’m Glenda’s guardian for another three years, till she reaches thirty. Her granddad didn’t think women matured till thirty.” He thought about it and remarked glumly, “I suppose then she’ll toss me out and sell the house. That’ll be all the thanks I get for bringing her up and putting her through the university.”

“Then her grandfather had money? He would have been the son of this man Slackly?”

Nesbett Coxe allowed an evil grin to form on his lips. “I know what you’re thinking. But the money didn’t come from Slackly’s criminal activities—and especially not from Queen Victoria’s golden lion. Slackly didn’t have a son, but a daughter—and she married Herbert Coxe, my father. He was something of a department-store tycoon, with a chain of shops in Liverpool and Bristol and York. Finally opened one in London, but that was his ruin. He couldn’t compete with the big boys. Still, there was enough left for me to take care of Glenda when her folks died in a fire.”

“Your brother?”

He nodded. “House burned down one night when Glenda was twelve. She lost everything, including her parents. Came to live with me after that. My father was still alive and he left all his money in trust for her till she reached thirty. He felt it would make up for the loss of her parents.”

“And this journal?”

“I never knew about it till Glenda showed it to me a few months ago. The map was with it—five little pieces of parchment stitched together, and marked with red dots in a strange sort of ink.”

“I’d be most interested in seeing that map,” Simon told him.

“That would be impossible unless Glenda approved. This is all hers—the journal and the map, you understand. If it was mine I’d be out selling it to the News of the World for a fancy figure.”

I was thinking that was why she’d said it would do us no good to see her uncle. Glenda was in complete charge.

He puttered around the house, offered us tea, and finally announced that he had work to do upstairs. That was as close as we came to seeing the mysterious map.

On the way back to London I asked Simon what he thought about it. “Are we in the midst of a hoax, or a feud, or a swindle, or a great historical discovery, or what?”

“I’m not quite sure, my friend. There are several ways of looking at it, and none of them is satisfactory.”

Things grew even more puzzling the following morning. Ceritus Vats phoned our hotel quite early to announce that he was being questioned by the police. Glenda Coxe’s uncle Nesbett had been murdered the previous night, apparently during an attempted robbery at his home.

The officer investigating the case was Inspector Flaver, a bustling middle-aged man who came right to the point. “So your name is Simon Ark and you’re a friend of Mr. Vats. Is that any reason why I should talk to you?”

Simon’s last encounter with Scotland Yard had been much too long ago to be meaningful to this man. Nevertheless, Simon told him, “I once helped Inspector Ashly in the matter of some Satanists and an arrow murder. I expect it was before your time.”

“Yes, I remember Ashly.” He relaxed a bit. “What do you know about this killing?”

“Far less than you at the moment. How did it happen?”

“The niece, Miss Glenda Coxe, who lives with the deceased, was working late at a research laboratory. She returned home around midnight and found him shot to death on the steps going down to the side door. The door itself had been forced open. It looks as if a burglar tried the place, not knowing anyone was home, and Coxe surprised him.”

“It looks a great deal like that,” Simon agreed. “Does Miss Coxe have an alibi—witnesses who saw her at work?”

“Oh, certainly. You can’t suspect her of killing her own uncle, can you?”

“It happens,” Simon said. “About what time did the crime occur?”

“About nine, we figure.”

“Just getting dark then, this time of year.”

Inspector Flaver nodded. “We figure there were no lights on yet. That’s why the burglar thought the house was empty. There’s a tall hedge on that side which screens the door from the neighbors.”

“They heard no shot?”

“Not a thing. But, you know, they had the telly going.”

“I’d like to see Miss Coxe,” Simon said.

“She’s just finishing her statement. Wait here.”

Glenda Coxe appeared about ten minutes later, looking tired and a bit bedraggled. When Simon Ark attempted to speak to her she held up a hand in protest. “I’ve been up all night. I’ve told the police everything I know. Please let me pass.”

“Ceritus Vats is being questioned. Did you give the police his name?”

“They asked why anyone would try to burgle our house. I had to mention the journal I’d offered both Vats and Rood.”

“Is Rood being questioned too?”

“I assume so. Now please let me pass.”

“Miss Coxe, you must have checked to see if the journal and map were stolen. Were they?”

She hesitated a moment and then answered. “They’re both safe. I believe the thief was frightened away after shooting my uncle.”

“Miss Coxe, I must see that map at once,” Simon insisted.

“That’s impossible.”

“You don’t seem to understand your position at present. If the journal and the map are shown to be frauds, this whole business could be viewed as a plot to kill your uncle from the very beginning. You present the journal to two rival bookdealers known for their interest in esoterica. One of them is sent a black widow spider, apparently by the other—though I’m sure such creatures are easy to come by in your research labs. When you have the rivalry and tension between the dealers at a fever pitch, someone breaks into your house and kills your uncle. The dealers are suspected, while you seem to have an alibi. And with your uncle dead you don’t have to wait three more years to come into your inheritance.”

Her eyes flashed with a cold fury. “Who could concoct such a fantastic plot?”

“A psychologist, Miss Coxe. A psychologist who spends her working days sending rats through mazes.”

That stopped her. She gnawed at her bottom lip and asked quietly, “What good would it do you to see the map?”

“The description given me, of a circle of dots with a horseshoe of dots within, reminded me of something. I might know the place where the treasure is buried.”

“You might know it, when my great-grandfather didn’t? When neither my uncle nor I could make anything out of it?”

“This man Hogarth would hardly leave a neatly labeled map in the hands of streetwalkers who were virtual strangers to him. Still, I repeat that I may know the place. You must decide quickly, Miss Coxe. Murder has made this a very serious business.”

She hesitated only a moment. “Very well, come with me.

As we followed her in our rented car, I said, “Simon, even if the map and the journal are genuine, that doesn’t prove she didn’t kill her uncle.”

“I know, my friend. But it gives us an opportunity to see this fabled map.”

There was no arguing with his logic, so I didn’t try. When we reached the house in Greenwich once more, I parked behind her little red car and we followed her inside.

She went at once to a small wall safe and extracted a metal box. Opening it, she took out a faded notebook. “There, gentlemen—the journal of Jack the Ripper. Just as I found it in a trunk in my father’s attic.”

“At the moment I’m more interested in the map.”

She unrolled a small piece of parchment and placed it on the table before us. As described, it consisted of five separate pieces which had been stitched together. The whole thing had a diameter of perhaps eight inches. On it, marked in red ink, was a circle of thirty dots, with an inner horseshoe of five more pairs of dots, and a larger dot near the center. At the top of the map, directly opposite the open end of the horseshoe, was an X.

“Just as I suspected!” Simon announced triumphantly.

“What is it?”

“A simplified diagram of the rocks at Stonehenge. That’s where you’ll find Jack the Ripper’s lost treasure—if there is a treasure.”

Simon telephoned Inspector Flaver and told him we planned to dig at Stonehenge for buried treasure. He suggested the Inspector meet us there, accompanied by the two bookdealers, Vats and Rood. Then he hung up before the questions started coming.

“How can you be so sure it’s Stonehenge?” I asked.

“Around 1887 it wouldn’t have been uncommon for people to be digging in the area, searching for artifacts of the past. It’s only in more recent times that the government has taken steps to preserve and protect these ancient monuments. For Hogarth it would have been the perfect hiding place for his stolen lion.”

“But his partner Slackly couldn’t read the map even after he recovered its five parts.”

“Exactly. He wasn’t familiar with Stonehenge and the dots would have meant nothing to him.”

The drive to the Salisbury Plain took nearly two hours from London, but when we arrived I spotted the Inspector and the two bookdealers at once. Stonehenge seemed alive with police that day, guarding against possible trouble from a nearby rock concert.

“All right,” Flaver said, “we came. This had better be worthwhile.”

“It will be,” Simon assured him.

We took the tunnel from the parking area, beneath the highway to Stonehenge. The place was filled with summer tourists and a group of youths from the rock concert who were carrying on a sort of chanting ceremony. “They imagine they’re Druids,” Inspector Flaver explained, “though of course these stones were here long before the Druids came.”

We passed through the great stone archways, which somehow seemed smaller with all the people about. Then Simon consulted the stitched-together parchment once more and paced off a distance to the point that seemed to correspond roughly with the spot on the map where the X was drawn.

“It’s far enough beyond the actual monument, so we can dig here,” Simon said. “I trust you brought a shovel, Inspector.”

“We have one in the car,” he admitted.

Finally it was Martin Rood who insisted on starting the digging. “If it’s there I want to find it,” he said.

Vats tried to pull the shovel from him, but Inspector Flaver intervened. “If you find anything at all, I’m taking it. If there’s any truth to Miss Coxe’s story, it’s the property of the British government.”

But after twenty minutes Rood threw down the shovel. “Nothing here,” he said, obviously disappointed.

“Perhaps a bit to the left,” Simon suggested, consulting the map again. Ceritus Vats took over the digging for a time while the rest of us watched. Some tourists had drifted over, but Flaver’s orders to the police on guard kept them away.

After another half-hour’s digging Vats gave up too. “If it was ever here, it’s gone.”

“He would have buried it deeper,” Simon speculated, “because of all the digging in the area. He wouldn’t have wanted it uncovered by accident.”

I jumped into the hole and took up the shovel. We were only down about four feet and Simon’s reasoning seemed sound to me. If the treasure was here at all, it would be deeper.

As I plunged the shovel into the earth for the third time I hit something solid. “It could be just a rock,” I cautioned, stooping to scoop the dirt away by hand.

But it wasn’t a rock. It was something hard and heavy, wrapped in burlap sacking that had partly disintegrated with the passage of time. I unwrapped it and held it high, brushing the clinging dirt from its glistening surface.

“The treasure of jack the Ripper!” Ceritus Vats said in a voice touched with awe. And indeed it seemed a treasure—a striding lion all in gold, with fifty glistening diamonds set into the body at regular intervals.

Only Simon seemed unimpressed. He took the lion in both hands and hefted it. “The journal said solid gold. I could tell by the ease with which you lifted it that this isn’t solid gold. A gold statue of this size would weigh nearly a hundred pounds. And those diamonds are fakes as well.”

Vats could not believe it. “But—but something like that could never be presented to the Queen!”

“Exactly—which leads us to believe it was never meant for Queen Victoria. That merchant, Felix Rhineman, collected the money, had a cheap statue gold-plated and encrusted with imitation diamonds, then dropped word at a place where thieves like Hogarth and Slackly would hear of it. There was no danger from his standpoint. Even if they discovered after the robbery that the statue was a fake they could hardly report it to the police.”

“And Rhineman kept the money he collected,” I said. “He made a handsome profit and Queen Victoria never really lost anything.”

Simon Ark nodded. “The only losers were those five women who carried parts of Hogarth’s map.”

“Why did Slackly have to kill them, Simon? Especially the way he did?”

Simon Ark took out the parchment map and held it to the light, “This is not the usual parchment, my friend, made from the skin of a sheep or goat. Slackly mutilated their bodies after strangling them so the missing pieces of flesh would go unnoticed. You see, Hogarth paid those poor women to let him tattoo the five parts of his map on their skin.”

After that Simon walked for a long time with Inspector Flaver. Then Simon and I departed, leaving Ceritus and his rival Rood with Glenda Coxe and the Inspector. “But who killed Nesbett Coxe?” I asked on the drive back. “You never solved it, Simon!”

“My friend, I am not a detective, much as you would like to make me one. I am merely a wanderer, searching the world for evil. At times I find it in unlikely places. At times I find it in the eyes of a twelve-year-old child grown to adulthood.”

“You mean—?”

“The story of the Ripper’s treasure was either true or false. On the basis of what we found here, we concluded it was true, to the best of Raymond Slackly’s knowledge when he wrote the journal. But if the journal is true we must believe that Glenda Coxe found it where she said—in her father’s attic trunk. Now her uncle told us yesterday that her house burned down when she was twelve. She lost everything, including her parents. Therefore her discovery of Slackly’s journal and the map must have come before that fire!”

“Perhaps,” I was willing to grant.

“Not perhaps, but certainly! And can you imagine the effect this discovery would have on a child of that impressionable age? Her great-grandfather—the most terrible murderer in London’s history! We know it had an effect on her, because she kept it a secret all these years till now.

But I shook my head. “There’s a flaw in your reasoning, Simon. Suppose she found the journal sometime before the fire as you say. It would still have burned up, unless she deliberately removed it from the house before the fire.”

“Exactly, my friend.”

“You mean she burned down her own house? Killed her own—?”

“And now resurrected the journal to kill again, in such a way that Vats or Rood would be blamed for it. She needed two suspects, in case one of them could prove an alibi for last night. Remember that back door to her laboratory? An easy way out, and back in, while her coworkers thought she never left the building.”

“And you told all this to Inspector Flaver?”

“I did. The proof is up to him. I believe he’ll start with the fire fifteen years ago.”

“And the map, Simon?”

“I think it will go into Scotland Yard’s files, along with the journal. Someday, perhaps, when there is not already enough horror in the world, it can be revealed.”

We drove on toward London, and that was the last I ever heard of the treasure of Jack the Ripper.

THE MUMMY FROM THE SEA

IT WAS SEVERAL DAYS after Christmas when I arrived in Rio de Janeiro with Simon Ark, but the season was summer there and the wave of heat that hit us at the airport was a pleasant change from the wet snow we’d left behind in New York.

Simon had phoned and asked me to make the journey with him. “I need you, my friend,” he’d said. “You are one of the few stabilizing influences in a world gone increasingly mad.”

“Does the Devil wait for you in Rio, Simon?” I asked. After knowing him for twenty-five years I was too well aware of his interest in the diabolic and mystical.

“Perhaps,” he replied. “A lawyer I know there telephoned me this morning to report on an extraordinary crime. A mummy has been found washed up on Copacabana Beach.”

“A mummy! Wrapped up and everything? Like in Egypt?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe it fell overboard from a ship. Is it very old?”

“It is surprisingly new. It is the mummy of the lawyer’s client, who disappeared from his home the day before Christmas.”

I knew then that I’d be going to Rio with Simon Ark.

My wife Shelly was upset at my missing New Year’s Eve at home, but she understood as well as anyone my strange relationship with Simon Ark. It is a relationship that has brought us together sometimes after years apart, and carried us to distant places while Simon pursued his investigations of the strange and Satanic. I once edited a book of Simon’s on witchcraft, and my firm published it. Although I didn’t really believe his claim that he’d been searching out evil for nearly two thousand years, I had to admit he knew a great deal about it. And there were times, looking at his weathered face and tired eyes, when I’d have believed him to be just about any age he said.

So we were in Rio.

The lawyer who’d summoned us was an American named Felix Brighter, a portly man in his forties whom Simon had known in New York. When I asked what he was doing in Brazil, Simon only smiled wisely and said, “I believe there was some trouble with money. And of course Brazil has no extradition treaty with the United States.”

Whatever brought him there, Felix Brighter had made the best of it. His office in one of the big new buildings facing the ocean commanded a sweeping view of the Avenida Atlantica and the hundred-yard-wide expanse of Copacabana Beach beyond.

I stared out the window at the wavy mosaic pattern of Copacabana’s promenade far below. “It was almost opposite my building that the body was found,” Felix Brighter said, directing our gaze a bit to the south. “In fact, I saw the police cars and the crowd around the spot when I came to work that morning.”

“It’s a very wide beach,” Simon observed, “yet the body was by the water rather than here near the street?”

“Exactly. As if it had been cast up by the ocean.”

Simon and I resumed our seats opposite the lawyer’s desk. “Tell me everything you know about the victim,” Simon said.

“I’m afraid that’s very little. His name was Sergio Costa, and he operated a tourist shop just down the street with his brother Luiz. They sold native pottery and artifacts, and I did some legal work for them when it was needed. Sergio was divorced from his wife and living with his unmarried brother in a small house in the Canoa section. He disappeared on Christmas Eve, but Luiz didn’t think much of it at first. His brother had been depressed about the breakup of his marriage, and Luiz thought he was off getting drunk somewhere.”

“And the body?”

“Washed up on the beach two days ago. It was completely embalmed and wrapped in burial windings like an Egyptian mummy, as if it had been plucked from a tomb.”

Simon Ark nodded. “It seems like a terrorist act—something to throw fear into people. Have you been troubled with urban guerrillas here in Brazil?”

“Of course, and that is what the police think. But Sergio and Luiz were not wealthy men, and no ransom was demanded.”

“That may come later.” Simon pondered. “Perhaps this death was meant as an example, so that other merchants will pay up out of fear.”

The lawyer scowled. “Perhaps. But there is another possibility, and that’s the reason I contacted you, Simon. I remembered your interest in the bizarre, especially regarding religion and the worship of strange gods.”

“Some gods are so strange it is difficult to distinguish them from devils,” Simon remarked. “The spirit cults of Rio have both gods and devils to worship.”

“You know of their devil Exu?”

“Yes.”

“And the she-demon Pomba Gira?”

Simon nodded.

“Then you must know of the sea goddess Yemanja. She is portrayed as a beautiful black-haired woman in a long blue gown coming out of the ocean. Soon, on New Year’s Eve to be exact, that beach down there will be alive with her worshipers. They will cast offerings of flowers and jewelry and even sacrificial animals into the surf for their goddess. If the offering is carried out to sea, Yemanja’s aid and protection are assured. If it is washed back to the beach, it is a sign of her rebuff.”

“And you believe—”

“That Sergio Costa was killed and his mummy cast into the ocean as an offering to Yemanja, who rejected it.”

I was beginning to think that Felix Brighter had been living in Rio too long, but surprisingly enough Simon seemed to accept the theory in dead earnest. “That’s a possibility worth looking into,” he agreed. “But tell me, exactly what is your interest in this affair?”

“He was my client. I drew up his will and I’ll be probating his estate. I feel someone should try to find his killer. For the police it’ll be a routine investigation, quickly forgotten.”

“What about Sergio’s estate? Does his brother inherit?”

“Only Sergio’s half interest in the shop, which isn’t worth much. His house went to his ex-wife in the divorce settlement, along with much of his cash. He was still supporting her and their two children.”

“I should speak with the police,” Simon decided.

“The local police are working with a government detective named Marcos Orleans. I will arrange an appointment.”

Brighter dialed a number and spoke briefly in Portuguese, listened, and then spoke again. When he hung up he said, “Orleans can see you in an hour. He suggests you meet at the city morgue. If you learn anything, I’d appreciate your letting me know at once. Orleans says he will help in any way possible.”

“That needn’t include showing us the remains,” I grumbled.

But of course I went along with Simon to the morgue.

Marcos Orleans had curly black hair and a pencil-thin mustache. He was younger than I’d expected and there was a gleam in his eyes that hinted at a zest for more pleasant pursuits than the grim business at hand. He introduced himself as a member of the federal police and led us to one of the sheet-covered morgue tables.

“A terrible crime. Terrible!”

“How was he killed?” Simon asked.

“We suspect poison, and we’ll remove certain tissues for examination. Of course with the body already embalmed it’s impossible to state just when he died.”

Simon bent to examine the corpse’s skin, perhaps searching for needle marks. “Do you have any leads on who embalmed him?”

“None,” the detective admitted. “Our federal industry is not as well regulated as it might be. We have the poor living in those shacks on the hillsides, and often they are dead and buried without anyone even knowing. Naturally we are checking all undertakers for any embalming they did on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, but if the killer passed off Sergio as a poor slum-dweller there might be no record of it.”

Simon straightened up. “Do you believe the embalming was done as part of an offering to the sea goddess Yemanja?”

“I am not a superstitious man, Mr. Ark. There is no place for superstition in police work.”

“I think the lawyer, Felix Brighter, summoned me because he is a superstitious man.”

Marcos Orleans smiled for the first time. “He has an office high above Copacabana Beach. I have been there. From his window, looking down at the tiny specks of humanity moving on the sand below, one might easily imagine himself to be something of a god. And, after all, gods are superstitious, are they not?”

Simon merely smiled. I could see he admired the detective without necessarily agreeing with him. Perhaps they had both seen something of Felix Brighter’s character that I’d missed.

“Then you have no leads?” Simon asked as we were departing.

The detective shrugged. “Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve and the great night of Yemanja’s festival. The candles will burn on the beach, and the sea itself might give us an answer. I will be there.”

“I thought you weren’t superstitious.”

“I’m not, Mr. Ark, but maybe the killer is.”

Simon paused at the door. “One more thing. Is there anyone in Rio who could tell me more about Yemanja and the spirit cults?”

The detective considered his question. “Go see Father Rudolph at the Church of Santa Catarina. He is an American who has labored long among our people.” He glanced at the wall clock. “Now he will be among the poor on the hillsides, but go in the morning when he says Mass.”

“Thank you,” Simon said.

We went out into the sunlit street and I was thankful for the fresh air after the closeness of the morgue. Feeling the warmth on my face it was hard to believe it was winter back home. “Now what?” I asked Simon.

“Now we visit the surviving brother, Luiz Costa.”

The Costa brothers had known how to choose a good location. Their shop fronted on the six-lane Avenida Atlantica, next to a sidewalk cafe where tables with blue-and-white umbrellas offered a respite from the tropic sun. I followed Simon Ark through the front door, past display counters loaded with carved animals and woven baskets.

“We’ll be closing soon,” the man behind the counter informed us. “A death in the family.”

He was short and clean-shaven, with black hair that half covered his ears. With the addition of a mustache he might have passed for the man I’d just seen in the morgue. “You are Luiz Costa?” Simon asked.

“Yes.”

“I have come from New York to investigate the strange death of your brother.”

“Who would care about my brother as far away as New York?”

“Your lawyer, Felix Brighter, asked me to come. I have had some experience in this sort of thing.”

“You, an old man? How will you find Sergio’s killers?”

“First by discovering the motive,” Simon told him. “Who wanted your brother dead?”

“No one.” But immediately he corrected himself. “Except maybe that ex-wife of his, Rosetta. That woman would stop at nothing.”

“This hardly seems a crime of passion,” Simon pointed out.

“She bled him of every penny. In the end he was living with me, having only his interest in this shop to keep him going.”

“Could you tell us something of his disappearance?”

“He left the shop early on Christmas Eve. Generally only one of us worked here at a time, but during the Christmas season we had a part-time clerk as well. He had planned to do some last-minute shopping for his children. Naturally, I expected he would be home when I arrived there a bit past six o’clock. But his absence did not worry me at first. I assumed he had gone early to visit his children. In fact, it was not until Christmas morning when Rosetta telephoned me that I realized something was wrong.”

“He didn’t go there?”

“No, she never saw him—or so she claimed. I telephoned some of his friends but no one had seen him. When he did not return home that evening I reported him missing to the police.”

“And they found him two days ago?”

“Yes. On the twenty-eighth, early in the morning. The waves had rolled his wrapped body onto the beach.”

“The body is still at the morgue.”

Luiz nodded. “They are trying to determine the cause of death. It will be released later today, which is why I am closing early. The funeral must be tomorrow because of the New Year’s holiday.”

“Brighter said you thought he might have been off drinking because he was depressed at the breakup of his marriage.”

“The thought occurred to me. I despised that woman, but we are a Catholic country, after all, and divorce is a very serious matter. It was a terrible blow to my brother.”

“So he drank.”

“Yes.”

I paused at a counter to pick up a small stone carving of a llama. “This looks very old. Is it valuable?”

“Ones like it from pre-Columbian days are national treasures in Peru. But that is only a copy.”

I set it gently on the counter. Simon seemed to have finished with his questioning. He paused only to study a framed photograph of the two brothers that hung on the wall behind the shop’s cash register. Then he said goodbye and followed me outside.

“What do you think about him, Simon?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I was struck mainly by the resemblance between him and his dead brother. With the addition of a mustache he could be the twin of the man in the morgue.”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

“Embalming a body removes one very specific means of identification—a person’s blood type. The blood is drained and replaced by embalming fluid.”

“So it could be Luiz in the morgue instead of Sergio?”

“We’ll see.”

Back at our hotel Simon telephoned the detective, Marcos Orleans, and asked him how the body was identified. He listened and finally hung up, somewhat disappointed. “Sergio’s ex-wife identified him. And his fingerprints checked out too. There’s no doubt about the identification.”

“It was a good idea, Simon.”

We spent the evening strolling the streets of Rio near our hotel. Once we came upon a newsstand where large prints of religious scenes were sold along with the magazines. There was an agonized Christ, and the Last Supper, and St. Stephen pierced by arrows, and in the midst of them a portrait of a beautiful lady in a blue gown rising from the flower-strewn ocean waves.

“That would be Yemanja,” Simon pointed out.

“They certainly mix their religious icons.”

“The pagan and the Christian have always been very close in Latin countries. In the morning we will visit Father Rudolph, and perhaps he can help us.”

I had been to Catholic Mass before with Simon, but nothing prepared me for the Mass we attended at the little Church of Santa Catarina. The entire front row of the church was filled with a row of native women, their heads shaved and their bodies and faces dabbed with spots of white paint. Colorful scarves were wound around their bodies and their necklaces and bracelets jingled when they moved. They seemed under the direction of a robed woman who wore a dozen or more crosses and strands of beads around her neck. As the Mass came to an end, she unbelievably lit a cigar and smoked it as she shepherded her charges out.

Father Rudolph, a tall smiling priest with a Midwestern accent, had been told to expect us. He shook hands and led us into the sacristy while he removed his vestments.

“Who were those people, Father?” I asked. “It seemed almost part of some initiation rite.”

“That’s exactly what it was. They are initiates into the Candomble spirit cult. The initiation ceremony lasts for several weeks and this is the final ritual. They are brought to attend Catholic Mass.”

“I can’t believe it!” I said. “That woman with the cigar—”

The priest merely shrugged. “The cigar is part of the ritual, and she is the Mother of Saint, the head priestess of their closed community. They are mediums, you see, or think they are.”

“But you allow them here?”

“Candomble is the oldest of the spirit cults, with roots in West Africa. Those white dots and lines painted on the initiates’ bodies are meant to represent the scars cut into the flesh by African tribes. Theirs is a mixture of Christian and pagan ceremony, and in many ways they are an approximation of the Church. Though we deplore spiritism, we will not drive them away from our churches.”

“Do these people worship Yemanja?” Simon asked.

Father Rudolph carefully folded his vestments. “No. She is a deity of the Umbanda cult, which is Rio’s largest. And its most dangerous, I might add, since it fosters a subsidiary cult that practices black magic.”

“The Devil.”

The priest studied Simon. “You say it like the name of an old friend.”

“Hardly a friend, but surely an acquaintance. He is never far away, is he?”

“Not here. Not where poverty drives the people down and superstition lifts them up. If the Church and the spirit cults cannot help them, they will turn to an older religion.”

“I am interested in the death of Sergio Costa.”

“Yes.” The priest nodded. “The one wrapped like a mummy.”

“A sacrifice to the sea goddess?”

“Perhaps. Tonight is New Year’s Eve, and sacrifices will be made on Rio’s beaches.”

“Who would I talk to about the sacrifices?” Simon asked.

“Bamba Yin, perhaps. She’s a fat ugly old woman who knows more about such matters than any human being should.”

“Where will I find her?”

“You won’t, today. She’ll be meditating for tonight’s celebration. Look for her before midnight on Copacabana Beach.”

“Will you be there, Father?” Simon asked.

“I do not worship Yemanja. They may bring their gods to me, but I do not take my God to them.”

When we left the little church, Simon suggested we call on the dead man’s former wife. “A wife, present or former, is always a suspect in a murder case,” he pointed out.

“We’re not even certain it is murder, Simon. Unless Orleans has been able to establish the cause of death was poison,”

“I think we can assume, my friend, that Sergio Costa had some unwanted help in departing this life. Let us visit the widow.”

We arrived at the Costa home just as the family was returning from the cemetery. I’d forgotten this was the morning of the funeral. The children were taken inside by an older woman dressed in black while Rosetta Costa, also in black, greeted us on an enclosed patio. She was a lovely woman with long black hair, not at all what I’d expected, and it took me a moment to realize why her face seemed so familiar. It was because she bore an uncanny resemblance to the painting of the goddess Yemanja that we’d seen for sale.

I glanced at Simon and saw that his eyes were on her face. “Who would want to murder your husband, Mrs. Costa?”

“He hadn’t been my husband for two years. I saw him only when he came to see the children. And this year he did not even send them his usual cards before Christmas. If he involved himself with the spirit cults he deserves what he got.”

“Do you know for a fact he was involved with them?”

“I told you his life no longer concerned me. But years ago he was involved with them. I do some modeling, and an artist used a photograph of me to paint a picture of one of their goddesses.”

“Yemanja,” Simon said.

“Yes. How did you know?”

“The resemblance is still quite striking.”

“They ask me to take part in their ceremony each year, on the beach. This year, because of the funeral, I should not go.” She considered a moment and added, “But perhaps I will. Sergio was dead for me two years ago.”

“It might be wiser to stay away,” Simon cautioned. “But what about your brother-in-law, Luiz? Are you on friendly terms with him?”

“Why do you ask?”

“He did not come back here after the funeral.”

“How observant you are. No, we’re not on particularly friendly terms. He took in Sergio after I’d thrown him out. He was on Sergio’s side through the entire divorce.”

“Isn’t that natural for a brother?”

“I suppose so,” she said with a sigh, “but that doesn’t mean I have to like him.”

“Did you ever stop into their shop?”

“Never, since the divorce.”

“One last question, Mrs. Costa—if I may still call you that. Was Sergio involved in any criminal activity?”

“Do you mean the cults? They are not criminal, except for the black magic perhaps.”

“Not the cults. Something else.”

“No, no—there was nothing else while we were married. Since then, who knows?”

We left her on the patio and walked back to my rented car. “Why did you ask that last question, Simon? Do you know something?”

“No more than you do, my friend.”

I thought about that as we drove back to our hotel.

There was a message for us to call Marcos Orleans. When I reached him he said, “You and Simon might want to come down here to police headquarters. We’ve solved the Costa murder.”

When we got there Orleans greeted us with a smile. “We have filed charges against a Peruvian citizen named Juan Mira.”

“Murder charges?” Simon asked.

“Yes, along with certain customs violations and other offenses.”

“I thought it odd that a member of the federal police would be investigating a local killing unless there were other crimes involved.”

I remembered Orleans’ introduction to us at the morgue. Simon had caught the fact I’d missed—that he was a federal investigator rather than a local one.

“Mira has confessed to everything except the actual killing,” Orleans said. “But we’re certain he’ll admit to that soon too.”

“What did the customs violations involve?” Simon asked.

“Traffic in pre-Columbian art treasures. But I’ll let you hear it directly from the man himself. He’s more than willing to talk. We’ve been on his trail for some time.”

He issued some rapid instructions in Portuguese over the intercom, and presently a slender man with sharp features was brought into the room. It was obvious at once why he’d been so willing to talk. There was a large purple bruise beneath one eye and he walked with a stiff painful gait that hinted at other unseen injuries.

“Ah!” Orleans greeted him, helping him to a chair. “These gentlemen would like to hear your story just as you told it to me.”

Juan Mira shifted in his chair as if seeking a less painful position. I was reminded of the news stories of the Brazilian brand of justice, with torture of prisoners and the infamous death squads of off-duty policemen who sought out and executed known criminals without the formality of a trial. For an instant I even wondered if Sergio Costa might have been the victim of a police death squad. But then Mira began to tell his story.

“The government of Peru has very strict laws against the exporting of pre-Columbian works of art, whether jewelry or sculpture. Sergio hit on a method of moving the art objects across the border by using tour boats that operate on the upper Amazon River. The source of the Amazon is in the Peruvian Andes, not far from some of the famed Inca ruins. Tourists often visit the ruins and then take a boat trip partway down the river to visit some native villages. It is not difficult for the boats to wander across the border at this point long enough for a skilled skin diver like myself to remove certain packages secured below the waterline. Once the art pieces are inside Brazil I transport them to Sergio’s shop here in Rio. They are sold as imitations for Customs purposes, with the buyer paying extra under the counter.”

“Tell them about last week,” Orleans urged.

“A few days before Christmas I met with Sergio to conclude our largest deal yet. We avoided seeing each other as much as possible, of course, only meeting two or three times a year when there was a shipment to be delivered. This time I phoned him as usual and he met me at the Rio Yacht Club near Sugar Loaf. I gave him the packages of smuggled art work—sixteen small pieces in all—but then he said he couldn’t pay me till the following day. I was upset because he’d never done that before, but he pleaded that his brother was getting suspicious and he hadn’t been able to take the money out of the store account. He promised to meet me at the Yacht Club the next day, but he never showed up. I went to the store but only Luiz was there.”

“Exactly when was this?”

“Two days before Christmas. I kept searching for him all day and night, and the next day I even confronted Luiz in the shop. He told me his brother was missing.”

Marcus Orleans nodded and turned to Simon. “It seems obvious now that Juan here tracked down Sergio and murdered him for welching on the deal. He hasn’t confessed that yet, but he will.”

Juan Mira lifted his head, and there was a fleeting look of fright in his eyes. “I did not find him. I did not kill him.”

Orleans signaled to a guard and the prisoner was led away. Simon leaned back in his chair and asked, “You’re convinced this man is the murderer?”

“It seems more than likely, doesn’t it?”

“Sergio had the smuggled artwork. Someone might have killed him for it.

“Or Juan Mira might be lying about not receiving the money,” the detective pointed out. “He might have received payment and then killed Sergio himself, to take back the art treasures.”

“But we come back to one unanswerable question,” Simon said. “Why was the body embalmed and wrapped as a mummy? If Mira killed him—or even if one of your infamous police death squads carried out his execution—the body would have been left in a ditch somewhere. A great deal of trouble and risk went into having it embalmed.”

But Orleans seemed unconcerned. “Mira will talk, and when he does we will have the answers.”

Simon Ark nodded, but I could see he was unconvinced.

As we walked along the streets of Rio, Simon asked, “What do you think about it, my friend?”

“About as you do, I guess. A simple falling out between criminals, complicated only by the circumstances under which the body was found. Has Orleans determined the cause of death yet?”

“He told me it was poison, but they’re running further tests on some tissues they removed from the body.”

Ahead of us we could see office workers dumping old files and computer printout sheets from the windows of buildings, joining them with an occasional roll of toilet paper. It was what one might have expected on Wall Street during the era of the ticker-tape parades, only here there was no parade. It was merely New Year’s Eve, and the workers were following some old Rio tradition.

Simon watched the papers floating down around us and seemed to remember that other New Year’s Eve tradition about which we’d heard. “We will go to the beach tonight,” he decided, “and search for Bamba Yin.”

“You think Sergio’s death may have been a sacrificial killing after all?”

“We will see.”

When night came the wide beach at Copacabana was already crowded with spiritists come to worship. They’d erected colorful cabalistic banners and strung lines of fluttering pennants back and forth above the sands. “It looks a bit like a gas station back home,” I remarked to Simon as we lingered at the edge of the crowd.

“It is a religion to them,” he said. “Their homage to Yemanja, the sea goddess.”

As darkness fell, thousands of candles were lit all along the beach. Each little grouping was in a particular shape—a cross, or a circle surrounding some gifts to Yemanja, or a magical sign of African origins. As we moved carefully past the groups it seemed as if all the religions of the world might be mingling and merging here on the sands of a Rio beach.

“Be careful not to disturb them,” Simon warned as we moved past a particularly colorful display with candlelight reflecting off an array of champagne and beer bottles.

“Do they come here to drink this?” I wondered.

“Those are gifts too. Yemanja must be lured, from the sea.”

We came upon a large group of worshipers circling a statue of Yemanja, once again in her flowing blue gown. And I remembered Rosetta Costa’s remarkable resemblance to the portraits.

“Here!” Simon said, gripping my arm. Ahead, in the darkness lit only by the glow of a thousand candles stuck into the sand, I saw a familiar figure. It was the lawyer who had summoned us, Felix Brighter, deep in conversation with an elderly cigar-smoking woman. As soon as he saw us, Brighter broke off and came over to greet us.

“Quite a spectacle, isn’t it?” he said. “There must be a thousand people in this section of the beach.”

“I didn’t expect to find you here,” Simon told him.

“Why not? My client’s body was found nearby. Like yourself, I feel these cult members may know something.”

“And the one to whom you were speaking?”

“Bamba Yin, a legend among these people.”

Simon nodded. “And the one I seek as well.” He took a few steps across the sand to reach her before she could move away. As she turned her hugeness toward us I saw her face clearly for the first time. It was as ugly as the face of Yemanja was beautiful.

“Do you wish a reading, stranger?” she asked Simon.

“I wish what my friend Felix Brighter wishes—information regarding the death of Sergio Costa.”

The old woman cackled, and the flickering candlelight danced around us. “Why should I tell you anything?” she asked.

“Father Rudolph told me you could help.”

“The priest?” She fell back a step as if we had struck her.

“Was Sergio’s death meant as a sacrifice to Yemanja?”

“That is for Yemanja to say. I know nothing.”

“Then why was Brighter speaking with you just now?”

“He desires knowledge of the future, as does everyone else. He pays me to tell him of his future.”

“He came to you as a fortune teller?” Simon asked.

I could see what she wanted even if Simon couldn’t. I slipped a folded bill into her hand. “Tell us of the past, old lady. Tell us of Sergio Costa’s death.”

She accepted the money readily enough, but before she could speak there was a commotion down the beach. I turned to see what was going on but there was only a tide of worshipers running toward the water, leaving their candles flickering in the sand.

Felix Brighter appeared again at our side. “They are preparing for midnight when they will surge into the surf with their gifts for the goddess.”

“No,” Simon said. “It is something more.”

Behind us a native boy was beating on drums. There was chanting and wild dancing and a feeling of madness all around us.

“Yemanja! Yemanja.”

And then we saw her, caught by the glow of a thousand candles, coming out of the surf like the goddess she was.

Yemanja, ruler of the sea.

“No!” Simon shouted, rushing forward before I could stop him. “No! Go back! You’re in great danger!”

But his words did not carry above the chanting of her worshipers. Yemanja came on, through the surf, gowned in flowing blue and crowned with stars. It was a portrait come to life, and even as I realized it must be Rosetta Costa I heard the sound of a single shot cut through the chanting and the screaming. The goddess staggered, and a blossom of blood seemed to burst from her. She sank to her knees in the water, spreading her arms in supplication.

“There’s your murderer!” Simon Ark shouted. “Stop him!”

Then I was splashing through the waves after the running figure, aware of movement all around me, intent only on closing the gap between us.

I was almost upon him when at the last moment he turned, and I was staring again into the dead face of Sergio Costa at the morgue. I faltered at that vision, and his pistol came up again and I saw death as clearly as I ever had.

And then the detective Orleans was on him, tackling him in the surf. The gun went off, sending its bullet toward the moon, and I hurried to help Orleans hold him down.

“Simon!” I shouted. “It’s Sergio Costa! He’s not dead after all!”

But Simon Ark merely bent up and stripped the mustache from the killer’s upper lip. “Sergio is dead. This is Luiz who, like Cain, has slain his brother.”

“She may live,” Marcos Orleans told us later at his office in the federal building. “The doctors give her a better-than-even chance.”

“That’s what I can’t figure out,” I said, turning to Simon. “Why would he risk everything to take that shot at her?”

“Because, my friend, he had made one mistake that Rosetta of all people could discover. But I should start at the beginning.”

“With the embalming? Why did he do that? To shift suspicion to the spiritists?”

“Not primarily, though that became a secondary factor. No, he had the most practical of reasons for having his brother’s body embalmed—to hide the time of death. You see, I believe Sergio was murdered up to a week before he disappeared.”

“But that’s impossible!” I protested. “He was seen at the shop! That man Mira met him at the yacht club!”

“Exactly. And we’ve already established that the mustache is the main difference in the appearance of Sergio and Luiz. Don’t you see? Luiz poisoned his brother some time during the week before Christmas and took his place wearing a false mustache as he did tonight. We know they were never together in the shop so it was easy to work the substitution there. He found some undertaker who didn’t ask questions about embalming the body, and then hid it at his home until after Christmas.”

“But why?” I asked. “What was his motive?”

“He wanted the shipment of pre-Columbian art that Mira was smuggling in. I suppose somehow Luiz learned of his brother’s illegal activities. He decided to kill him, and in such a way that Luiz himself could profit from the crime. Mira would be cheated out of payment for his smuggled goods, and the already dead Sergio would be blamed.”

“Mira didn’t realize the man he met was Luiz and not Sergio?”

“They kept away from each other, remember, and met only two or three times a year. It was probably the phone call from Mira that triggered the whole crime. Luiz answered it, pretending to be his brother, and learned about the meeting. That’s when he decided to kill Sergio and take his place. He put Mira off for a day on payment and then announced his brother’s sudden disappearance. You see, Sergio had to disappear before Christmas because he always visited the children on Christmas and either they or his former wife would have surely seen through Luiz’s disguise.”

“And the mummy?”

“Luiz couldn’t have the police find Sergio’s body and announce he’d been dead a week because then Mira would have realized what really happened. But once Luiz had his brother’s embalmed body he decided to wrap it as a mummy and throw it in the ocean. That way it might seem a sacrifice to the gods, and the fact of the embalming would be only one more bizarre part of it.”

Marcos Orleans stirred in his chair. “Why did he try to kill Rosetta tonight?”

“He remembered his one mistake. Sergio always sent the children Christmas cards a few days before the holiday. Rosetta had already commented on their absence this year, and he feared she might realize that her former husband died earlier than everyone thought. He put on the false mustache to disguise himself tonight and tried to kill her when she came out of the sea as Yemanja, hoping her death would be linked to the spiritists too.”

Orleans nodded. “You are a wise man, Simon Ark. How did you know all this?”

“The missing Christmas cards, the strong resemblance between the brothers, the fact that poison could be most easily administered by someone living in the same house as the victim, and, lastly, a small oversight that Luiz made. He told Juan Mira that Sergio was missing on Christmas Eve, but he told us it was Christmas morning before he realized something was wrong.”

When we left, Simon suggested we stroll along the beach. The litter was still there from the night before—candle stubs peeking from the sand, champagne bottles unclaimed by the goddess but emptied by others, cigar butts discarded by ugly old women.

“There’s Felix Brighter,” I said, pointing toward a lone figure by the water.

“Yes,” Simon said.

Brighter turned in the sand as we approached. “You solved it, didn’t you?” he said, almost bitterly.

“Yes.”

“But for the federal police, not for me.”

Simon nodded. “You brought me down here to find the artworks, didn’t you? As Sergio’s lawyer, you knew about his involvement with Mira. And when he was killed you wanted those smuggled art treasures for yourself.”

“You knew that?”

“Not until last night,” Simon said. “I found Bamba Yin after the shooting and strolled with her here on the beach. That was the future you wanted to buy—the location of that final shipment.”

“She didn’t know.”

“Of course not. Her spirit world is made up of other truths. You wasted your money asking her.”

“But you knew, Simon?”

“I could guess. Those pre-Columbian items are no doubt in Luiz’s display cases right now, marked with price tags like his regular stock, waiting for the right buyer from America.”

Felix Brighter sighed. “And the police will be there first. There’s nothing more for me.”

“It is a new year, my friend. A time for resolutions and new beginnings. Put aside your dark thoughts and walk back to the hotel with us. I believe there is just time for a farewell drink before we catch the plane back to New York.”

THE UNICORN’S DAUGHTER

THE MAN’S NAME WAS Harvey Cross and he sat across the desk from me much as hundreds of other authors and would-be authors had in the years I’d been a senior editor at Neptune Books. In those first minutes of our meeting he wasn’t especially different from those others. Slim and just a bit boyish, with a trace of a stutter, he clutched the thick manuscript to his chest and said, “I wanted to try Neptune with it first because you published Simon Ark’s book.”

“That was more than ten years ago,” I reminded him. “If it’s something occult we wouldn’t really be interested at the present time.” I was beginning to regret having agreed to see him. He could just as well have left his manuscript with my secretary, the practice followed with most other unsolicited submissions. But there’d been something in his voice on the phone that interested me. Seeing him now, I couldn’t remember what it had been.

“Oh, it’s not an occult book. Not in the true sense of the word. It’s—I suppose you’d call it an adult fairy tale, about a strange place in the forest and a strange girl who lives there.”

“I don’t really think—”

“At least give it a reading!”

“All right, Mr. Cross. Why don’t you leave it with my secretary? She’ll—”

I was interrupted by the flashing of the intercom. I flipped a switch and heard Martha Scane, our publicity director, say, “This is Martha. Could I see you for a few moments when you’re free?”

Harvey Cross had gotten out of his chair and was walking to the window. “Right, Martha,” I acknowledged and flipped the switch.

I started to turn toward my visitor when I heard the shattering of glass and saw him going through the window. “Cross!” I shouted, but it was too late.

I sat stunned for a second, then ran to the big broken window and peered out at the street twenty-eight stories below. I could see cars stopping and people gathering.

My secretary ran in. “What was that crash?”

“Put me through to the police, Irene! A man just jumped through the window!”

“Was it that Cross fellow?”

“I’m afraid so.” I saw his manuscript in a corner of my desk and I glanced at the title page. The Unicorn’s Daughter by Harvey Cross. It was all that was left of him now. I noticed the return address in the upper left-hand corner. It was a box number in Catskill, New York.

Others crowded into my office as word of the tragedy spread. “Terrible,” Ash Gregory from the Art Department said, patting my shoulder. “Who was he, some nut?”

“I don’t really know,” I admitted. “Just an author trying to sell his book.”

Martha Scane came in, her blonde hair flying. “My God! Did he jump while I was talking to you?”

“Just about. I didn’t really see it happen. He walked over to the window and when I looked around he was going through the glass.”

I told the police the same thing. They shook their heads and I got the impression they thought Harvey Cross had been less than rational. By the time they left and everyone else cleared out of my office I was still a bit unnerved. The building’s maintenance people placed a sheet of plywood over the window until it could be replaced in the morning and the lack of a familiar angle of illumination further depressed me. I told Irene I’d work the rest of the day at home.

I was halfway out the door when I remembered the dead man’s manuscript. I went back to my office for it but it wasn’t on the desk. I wondered if the police had taken it without telling me, or if someone else had picked it up while my office was crowded.

On the way out I stopped at my secretary’s desk. “Irene, send a memo around—ask if anyone inadvertently took a manuscript from my office today. The title is The Unicorn’s Daughter and the author is Harvey Cross.”

“The man who jumped?”

“That’s right. The man who jumped.”

When the manuscript didn’t reappear by Friday afternoon my curiosity got the better of me. The newspaper accounts of Cross’s spectacular leap from my office window had given his address as a furnished apartment in Brooklyn, and had listed no family. But he’d given me that box number in Catskill. Suddenly I was curious enough to pursue it.

That afternoon I phoned Simon Ark at the Institute for Medieval Studies where he’d been pursuing some esoteric research project for several months. He seemed pleased to hear from me. “Ah, my friend, I read about the bizarre event at your office.”

“Bizarre is right. That’s not the half of it, Simon.” I told him about the vanished manuscript.

“Could one of your employees plan to sell it to another publisher, perhaps as his own?”

“That would presuppose it had some value. As near as I can tell, Harvey Cross never published a thing. I can’t believe the manuscript has any value at all, except perhaps as the final ravings of a troubled mind.”

“But you didn’t read it.”

“No,” I admitted.

“What do you plan to do about it?”

“He mentioned you, Simon. Before he jumped he said he came to Neptune Books because we’d published Simon Ark.”

“Hardly a recommendation, my friend. The book wasn’t one of your better sellers.”

“He implied his book might have the same mystic quality that led us to publish it—though he denied it was an occult book.”

“I repeat my question. What do you plan to do about it?”

“Well, the address on the manuscript was a box number in Catskill. That’s a two-hour drive up the Hudson. I thought I might go up there tomorrow morning, arriving before the post office closes at noon. Do you want to come along?”

“A drive in the country is tempting,” he admitted. “The dust of old books is thick in my throat these days.”

At home that night I invited my wife Shelly to join us. But with the passing years she’s taken an increasing dislike to Simon and, as I expected, she refused. “One of these days he’s going to get you killed on one of these foolish expeditions,” she predicted.

“This one was my idea,” I pointed out.

“It’s about that man who jumped from your window, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “I can’t just let it rest, Shelly.”

She sighed and said simply, “Try to be careful.” After living with me for twenty-six years she knew there was nothing more she could say.

It was a fine warm Saturday in early June, a perfect day for our journey up the Hudson. Simon had shed his traditional black garb for grey slacks and a dark-blue jacket. It wasn’t much of an improvement but it helped. Though he often claimed to be two thousand years old, on that day he would have passed for a reasonably vigorous seventy-five.

“What do you expect to find here?” he asked as we pulled up in front of the post office.

“Cross didn’t drive all this way to pick up his mail. If he had a box here it means he lived near here at least part of the time. The police might be willing to dismiss this whole business, but I’m not. After all, he jumped out of my window.”

Luckily I’d remembered the box number correctly. The postal clerk checked his records and informed me, “We have notice that Harvey Cross is recently deceased.”

“That’s correct. What’s being done with his mail?”

“His sister discontinued the box and instructed us to forward the mail directly to her. I guess he used to live with her.”

“Here in Catskill?” The newspaper had mentioned no sister, anywhere.

“Not far from here. A town called Olympus. It’s over toward the mountains about fifteen miles. I suppose that’s how it got its name, though there’s no Mount Olympus there.”

I showed him my business card. “Look, it’s important I contact Cross’s sister about a manuscript he submitted to us. I need her address.”

He thought it over and replied, “I suppose I could give you that. It’s Hazel Phoenix, Hillside Road, Olympus.”

I wrote it down and thanked him. Back in the car I told Simon what I’d learned. “It’s not far. Let’s drive over and see the sister. Maybe she can tell us something about the dead man.”

“By all means,” he agreed, and for the first time I detected a glimmer of interest in his eyes.

“I’m afraid there won’t be any devils for you to chase,” I said.

“Don’t be too sure, my friend. At Olympus we may find gods, and where there are gods there could be devils as well.”

It took us some time to find the home of Hazel Phoenix. As its name implied, Hillside Road ran along the side of a hill. The area was on the northeastern rim of the Catskills, and although the hills weren’t as steep as those we could see in the distance they were still formidable.

The house sat back some distance from the road, almost hidden among the trees. It might have been the forest Harvey Cross said he’d written about. I wondered if he’d written the book while living in this house.

We parked at the end of the long driveway and had a closer look at the place. It was a small house that had been added onto in a seemingly haphazard manner. The overall impression was as if the original structure had sprouted wings—or tentacles—to spread itself over the surrounding landscape. “The gingerbread house gone wild,” Simon commented.

At first no one answered the big brass knocker, but as we were about to turn away we heard the sound of a power saw from somewhere behind the house. We walked around back, past a cinder-block garage, and found a slim young woman cutting through some small logs.

“That’s hard work for a woman,” I said, regretting the chauvinistic greeting almost at once.

She turned off the saw and eyed us uncertainly. “What can I do for you?”

“We’re looking for Hazel Phoenix.”

“You’ve found her.” She set down the saw and wiped her hands on the legs of her jeans. I introduced Simon and myself and she shook hands, though I thought her eyes hardened at the mention of my name.

“Mrs. Phoenix, we came about your brother, Harvey Cross.”

“Yes?”

“You may have recognized my name. It was my office he jumped from.”

“Yes, I know.” Her expression didn’t change. She was a fairly attractive woman, around thirty, with the sort of face I wanted to see break out in a smile. But I wasn’t giving her anything to smile about.

“Before he died, Harvey brought me the manuscript of a novel he’d written. It was called The Unicorn’s Daughter. Unfortunately, the manuscript was mislaid during the confusion following his death. I’m sure it’ll turn up, but in the meantime I wonder if you might have a carbon copy of it I could read. I feel I owe it to your brother.”

She rolled the sleeves of her shirt higher on her slim arms and squinted at me in the sunlight. “It seems to me you own him a lot more than that, mister. It seems to me you’re responsible for his suicide.”

“No, I assure you I’m not. We’d only just begun to talk. Nothing much had been said, and certainly nothing to cause his sudden decision to jump out the window.”

“Well, I know nothing about his manuscript.”

“Did he work on it while he was living here?”

“Who told you he lived here?” she asked sharply.

“The man at the post office mentioned it. He gave me your address.”

“Well, he misunderstood. My brother lived in New York. He came here only occasionally for a visit.”

“I see. Do you live here with your husband?”

“I’m not married.”

“Oh. I thought, since your name was different from your brother’s—”

“I’m not married,” she repeated, offering no further explanation, and bent to pick up the power saw.

“Thank you for your help, Miss Phoenix,” I muttered, and we turned away.

“Odd sort,” Simon commented as we walked back to the car.

“That’s for sure.”

“Did you notice the names on the mailbox out by the road?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Take a look.”

I did and saw there were two names printed on a small piece of paper which had been taped to the box. A. GRIFFIN and H. PHOENIX. “So she’s living here with some guy,” I said as we got in the car.

“Perhaps.”

“Or some girl.”

“Are you in a hurry to get back, my friend?”

“Not especially.”

“This case, if we could call it that, interests me. I’d like to drive around the neighborhood and ask a few questions.”

“About Harvey Cross?”

“No, about A. Griffin and Hazel Phoenix.”

There were no close neighbors along Hillside Road, and when we finally stopped at a house nearly a mile away an elderly couple there professed to know nothing about their distant neighbors. We had better luck at a small grocery store at the next crossroads. It was called Buraq’s Country Store and the owner, Sam Buraq, a stocky man in his thirties, with a short beard, talked to us.

“Hazel Phoenix? Sure, she shops here. Lives there alone most of the time, but this fellow Griffin comes up and spends the weekends. I guess he works in New York and doesn’t want to make that two-hour drive every night.”

“What’s he like?” I asked.

“About her age, I guess. Early thirties. Quiet fellow. Some sort of artist, I think.”

“If he comes up on weekends he should be here today,” I pointed out.

“He is. I seen him drive past not ten minutes ago. Had somebody with him in the car, but I didn’t see who it was.”

“What kind of car?”

“A blue Ford, the one he always drives. He was headin’ up toward the house. If you came that way you must have passed him.”

I thanked him and we went back to my car. “What do you think, Simon? Should we try Hazel Phoenix one more time?”

“It might prove interesting,” he agreed. “This is interesting country.”

We were about halfway back along the road when I spotted the blue Ford parked on the shoulder. It was empty. I pulled up just ahead of it and we got out. “Where could they have gone from here?” I said. “There’s nothing but woods.”

“Let’s take a look,” Simon suggested.

We walked a few feet into the woods and were enveloped by twilight. It was an eerie, silent place and I wanted to turn back at once. “Maybe he’s in here with some girl,” I said.

“Quiet,” Simon cautioned, raising his hand. “Do you hear something?”

There was a breaking of the underbrush somewhere nearby, as if someone was running through the woods. We paused, frozen in our tracks, as the sound grew nearer. Then suddenly we saw a man crash into view ahead of us. His face and chest were covered with blood, and for an instant I didn’t recognize him, but he seemed to know me. “God, Simon!”

“Quickly! He needs help!”

The man had collapsed on the ground. He reached out a trembling hand and spoke my name.

Then I saw it was Ash Gregory, the artist from my office.

“Ash, what happened? What are you doing here?”

He was trying to speak, but there was blood in his mouth. “Took—took manuscript from your office. Had to know—”

“Cross’s manuscript? You took it?”

He nodded. “They—all—wanted it.”

I could see now he’d been stabbed several times about the face and chest. “Who did this to you?”

“I—she—unicorn’s daughter—help her.”

“Why did Cross kill himself?”

“Because she—”

But that was all he said before he died there in the forest, a long way from Manhattan.

Simon and I looked quickly through his car before going for the police. There was no sign of Cross’s manuscript. The killer might have taken it. But there was also a good chance it was back in New York. If so, we had to find it.

When the police arrived we told them as little as possible. I didn’t want to be held up there all day and we didn’t know very much anyway. They seemed to attribute the killing to some hitchhiker Gregory had picked up and put out an alarm to watch for hitchhikers in the area. But one of the local police, a sheriff’s deputy named Toby Chimera, thought it an odd coincidence that I’d traveled all this distance to find the body of a man I worked with in Manhattan.

I thought it an odd coincidence too, and I tried to explain it away with a lie. “I recognized his car,” I said. “He’d told me he sometimes drove up this way on weekends, so when I saw the car pulled off the road I thought he might be in some sort of trouble and I pulled off too.”

“Still seems to be quite a coincidence,” Chimera said, scratching his cheek. “We’ll probably want to talk with you again. And you too, Mr. Ark.”

“I’m available,” Simon informed him. And then he said an odd thing. “Mr. Chimera, you know this part of the state. Are there many goats in the area? And snakes?”

“Well, sure—some of the farmers raise goats. And the Catskills are full of snakes.”

“But no lions, I imagine.”

The deputy’s face hardened suddenly. “No, no lions.” He left us and walked back to his car.

“What was that all about?” I asked Simon.

“This is a strange area. I was only trying to establish exactly how strange.”

“Strange enough to have goats and snakes, but not lions?”

“I’ll explain later.”

When we got back to Manhattan I discovered I didn’t know Ash Gregory’s address, and there were too many A. Gregory listings in the phone book. I wasn’t even sure he lived in Manhattan. I tried phoning my secretary Irene but it was already Saturday evening and when she didn’t answer I figured she was out with her boyfriend and I tried Martha Scane from publicity.

She was surprised to hear my voice and I told her as quickly as possible the tragic news about Ash Gregory. “I can’t believe it!” she said, her voice breaking. “Not Ash!”

“I’m sorry I had to tell you like this, Martha. I know you were a friend of his and that’s why I called. I need to know his address.”

“He lived down in Greenwich Village,” she replied, and gave me the address on Christopher Street. “Do the police have any idea who killed him?”

“They think it might have been a hitchhiker. If I hear anything more I’ll let you know.”

“He lived in the Village,” I told Simon. “Let’s get going.”

“Do you plan on breaking and entering?” he asked with a slight smile.

“I plan on finding that manuscript, if it’s there to be found.”

We parked on the street about a block away from the address Martha had given me. It was eight o’clock, but not yet dark, as we mounted the steps and I rang the bell under A. Gregory’s name. When no one answered we entered the vestibule through the unlocked door and moved down the dim hallway to his apartment at the rear of the first floor. I don’t know how I intended to get in but that problem was solved when we saw that the lock had been forced and the wood around it splintered.

“Hardly the sort of thing the police would do,” Simon whispered.

I pushed the door open cautiously and at once we heard the muffled sounds of a search in progress. Drawers were being pulled open and papers were being rifled. We must have made some slight noise because suddenly the sounds ceased and a figure in black appeared in a doorway across the living room from us.

As the figure moved, so did I, springing forward to grab one leg as it darted toward a window. We went down together with a thud and then I saw that my captive was a woman.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded.

She sat up, rubbing her shoulder where she’d hit the floor, and I had my first real look at her. She appeared to be in her thirties, and she had long black hair and brown eyes. The black slacks and sweater gave her the appearance of a sneak thief, but her face seemed open and almost innocent. “I might ask you the same thing,” she countered, shifting her gaze to Simon in the doorway. “Are you police?”

“No. I worked with Ash. We found him today just before he died.”

That didn’t surprise her. She’d known he was dead. “I came here to collect some things of mine,” she said. “My name’s Kate Talos. Ash was a friend.”

“How’d you know he was dead?”

“I heard it on the news.”

It was possible, but I couldn’t immediately check it. While I questioned her, Simon peered at the paintings on the walls. “He had a great interest in mythology,” he observed.

“He painted those himself,” Kate Talos said, getting to her feet and brushing herself off. I switched on the light in order to see them better.

There were seven paintings in all, and I recognized Ash’s distinctive style from the jacket illustrations he’d done for some of our books. One showed a man of brass guarding an island, another a unicorn with a small naked girl at its side. There was a great bird, its wings spread wide, rising from smoldering ashes, and another winged creature with a lion’s body. One painting showed a beast that seemed to have a fire-breathing lion’s head, the body of a sheep or goat, and a serpent’s tail. There was a dragon too. And the final painting showed a winged horse with the face of a woman and a peacock’s tail. Studying them, I began to wonder how well I’d really known Ash Gregory.

“We may not need Harvey Cross’s manuscript,” Simon said. “These may tell us what we want to know. What do you think, Miss Talos?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know anything about a manuscript.”

“Where is the child, Miss Talos?”

“What child?”

“The unicorn’s daughter. The one in that painting.”

“The painting was just his imagination.”

“I don’t think so.” Simon took a step toward her. “Two of the seven are already dead, aren’t they? Do you want more to die? Do you want the child to die?”

“No one would harm her,” she blurted out, and then tried to backtrack. “If this child you speak of even exists.”

“You’re playing a dangerous game, Miss Talos. Who sent you here to search for the manuscript?”

“No one.” She was defiant once more. “I’m leaving now. Don’t try to stop me.”

“Only your conscience will stop you, and I pray that it does. Otherwise, the death of that child could be on your head.”

She hurried out the door, running from Simon and me, and maybe from herself.

“What was that all about?” I asked him.

“Only she can tell us. I hope she will.”

“And the manuscript?”

“Is here in this apartment, most likely. If the killer had removed it from Gregory’s body Kate Talos wouldn’t have been here searching for it.”

We took up the search where she had abandoned it, but found nothing. Two hours later I was about to give it up. “Simon, it’s only a matter of time before the Olympus police contact the New York police and ask them to check this place. If we’re here when they arrive they’ll think we broke in the door.”

“Yes, it’s odd the police haven’t turned up before this.” He had that knowing look on his face that often infuriates me. “It’s almost as if they were being kept away until the apartment could be searched.”

“Well, she searched it and we’ve searched it. There’s no manuscript here,” I said.

“Don’t be too sure.”

“It was about an inch and a half thick, Simon—a good three hundred and fifty pages. There’s nowhere it could be hidden we haven’t looked.”

He stood in the center of the room, gazing around. “Your mistake, my friend, is in regarding it as a complete unit, like a book. Think of it as three hundred fifty separate pages.”

“What?”

He strode to the closest of the seven paintings and lifted it from the wall. There, taped to the back of the painting, was a thickness of typewritten sheets. “You see? Divide it into seven parts, tape it to the backs of these paintings, and each part becomes less than a quarter-inch thick—hardly noticeable with the thickness of these frames.”

“How did you know?”

“Because the paintings are the key to everything. They became the logical hiding place when the rest of the apartment turned up nothing.”

We quickly assembled the manuscript and Simon sat down at the kitchen table to read it. “What about the police?” I asked.

“They won’t be coming. We’re safe here.”

“How do you know?”

But he didn’t answer. He was already engrossed in the book. I joined him and tried reading some of it, but my eyelids soon grew heavy. Harvey Cross had not been a great prose stylist, and the world of literature, at least, had lost nothing by his untimely death.

Simon read through the night while I dozed on the couch. When he roused me it was near dawn, but he seemed as fresh as if he’d just awakened. “How was it, Simon?” I asked. “As bad as the first twenty pages?”

“It had a story to tell.”

“The girl living in the forest has already been done,” I reminded him, “in Green Mansions.”

“But this girl is only a child of seven, and a flashback later in the manuscript tells how she came to be there.”

“I know. She’s the unicorn’s daughter.”

He started to speak, but a noise at the door distracted him. Moving quickly across the room, he yanked it open and Kate Talos all but fell in. She took a deep breath and said, “I came back.”

“At five in the morning?” Simon said. “For another look for the manuscript?”

“No. I was hoping you might still be here. I want to take you to her.”

“The child?”

She nodded. “If it’s not too late.”

“Do you think it might be?”

“As you pointed out, two people have died already. I’ve been awake all night thinking about that.”

I had to interrupt. “Will one of you please tell me what’s going on?”

“There will be time for that on the road,” Simon said. “We’re driving back to Olympus.”

The Sunday-morning traffic along the Hudson seemed surprisingly light until I remembered it was not yet seven o’clock. As I drove, Simon and Kate Talos talked.

“How did you know there were seven?” she asked Simon.

“Because Gregory had done seven paintings. I recognized several of the names, of course, and it was not difficult to connect each name with its painting. It was reasonable to assume there were seven of you in all.”

“And the child?”

“It was painted realistically in the portrait of the unicorn, not symbolized as the rest of you were. That told me there was a real child, and it also told me the subject of Harvey Cross’s manuscript was more truth than fiction.”

I saw her nod in the rearview mirror. “Ash loved the child. He had to portray her as she really was.”

“Would somebody please tell me what this is all about?” I asked.

“The story begins a long time ago,” Simon replied, “More than ten years ago, in that era of war protests and alternate lifestyles and the heavy use of drugs by the counterculture. Harvey Cross’s manuscript tells all about it. Seven people—four men and three women—went to live in a commune in the Catskills. They adopted the names of mythical creatures, perhaps because the commune was located near the village of Olympus and somehow they imagined themselves to be like those ancient Greek gods. But over the years there was a falling-out. One man left the commune completely and was cursed by some who remained. A woman bore a child by one of the other men and decided it should run wild in the woods and grow up as a free creature. The commune members fed the little girl, but there was no thought of sending her to school or allowing her to mingle with other children.”

“The unicorn’s daughter,” I said.

“Exactly. Harvey Cross was the one who left the commune, but he kept his ties with at least one member. You, Miss Talos?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “I did see Harvey after he left. We all did, really, except for Unicorn. Occasionally Harvey even went back and stayed at the house with Phoenix, but never when Griffin was there on weekends. He was afraid of Griffin, because of the child.”

“Griffin was the child’s father?”

“Yes. Isn’t that in the manuscript?”

“Not in so many words, but it seemed likely.”

“Would you mind telling me who this Griffin is?” I asked.

“That should be obvious, my friend. The name on the mailbox in Olympus was A. Griffin, just as the name on that apartment was A. Gregory. And the portrait of the little girl was so lovingly detailed it seemed more likely to be the painter’s daughter than someone else’s daughter. Griffin and Gregory were the same person. That’s why he appeared in Olympus only on weekends—because he was employed at Neptune Books during the week. The identification shouldn’t surprise you, since Mr. Buraq at the store told us Griffin had passed by in his blue Ford—the car Gregory was driving.”

The girl seemed surprised. “So you know Buraq too.”

“Oh, yes. We know almost all of them.” And he said to me, “Some of the seven adopted their mythical names for permanent use. Others, like Unicorn and Griffin and Dragon, found the names more suitable within the confines of the commune. Back in the city they kept their own names.”

“What are the names?” I’d been so interested in the conversation that I hadn’t realized we’d almost reached our destination. It was not yet eight o’clock.

“The seven creatures portrayed in Gregory’s paintings. The bird rising from the ashes signified Hazel Phoenix. The man of brass guarding the island of Crete was Miss Talos here. Ash Gregory was Griffin, the winged creature with the lion’s body. Sam Buraq, at the store where we stopped, was an Islamic beast, the winged horse with the face of a woman and a peacock’s tail. I think by process of elimination we can conclude that Harvey Cross was Dragon before he deserted the commune and started writing his book. As for the remaining two—”

“There are cars at the house,” Kate Talos said, pointing ahead of us.

“That is good,” Simon Ark decided. “The commune is assembled for the last act.”

“They won’t let you take the child,” Kate warned.

“We’ll see.”

Simon led the way to the door of the gingerbread house while Kate Talos and I trailed along. They must have seen our approach, because Hazel Phoenix greeted us and said, “Well, Kate—another traitor in our midst?”

“He found the manuscript, Hazel. He knows all about it. I didn’t have to tell him a thing.”

We stepped into the living room and I saw Sam Buraq sitting in a chair. The curtains blocking the adjoining room stirred and another man stepped in, holding a revolver in his hand. I recognized Toby Chimera, the sheriff’s deputy we’d met the previous day.

“Thank God, you’re here, Sheriff,” I began. “These people are—”

“My friend,” said Simon, “Mr. Chimera knows who these people are. Mr. Chimera is one of them.”

“What?”

“Chimera—the fire-breathing monster with a lion’s head, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent. Don’t you remember my asking him about those creatures yesterday? The New York police never came to Gregory’s apartment last night because Chimera delayed notifying them of the murder until Miss Talos had time to search for the manuscript.”

“You know a great deal,” Chimera said. “Too much.”

“We came for the child,” Simon told him. “You can’t leave her to grow up in the woods like some sort of animal.”

“That’s none of your business,” Hazel Phoenix told him.

“It’s everyone’s business. It’s the law’s business when two people are killed.”

“Cross committed suicide,” Sam Buraq reminded us.

“But Ash Gregory didn’t. He was murdered because he’d finally seen the light and decided to rescue his daughter.”

I was standing near the window looking out on the backyard that ran down to the woods and thought I saw a movement at their edge. “The law will deal with Gregory’s murder,” Chimera was saying.

“As a man of the law you must make a choice, Mr. Chimera,” Simon told him. “You must serve your friends or uphold the law—you cannot do both. You can no longer cover up what goes on here. None of you are gods and you never were. Perhaps in truth you are more like the beasts whose names you bear.” He turned to Phoenix. “The war is over now and the revolution never happened. It’s time to come home with the rest of us.”

Her face hardened as she stared at Simon. “Shoot him, Toby,” she said.

“Simon! There’s a child in the woods!” My shout brought them running to the window in time to see a little girl in raggedy clothing vanish into the underbrush.

“We must hurry,” Simon Ark urged, “before she gets away.”

I didn’t know if a bullet might stop us, but they let us go.

Simon didn’t move fast and by the time we reached the edge of the woods the child was gone from sight. We went further in, searching for her. “We’ll never find her,” I said after a few minutes.

“Yes, we will. She’s not afraid of people. Cross’s manuscript said she liked strangers.”

We hurried on into the deepest part of the forest until at last we came to a little clearing by a brook. And then we saw her, playing down by the water. The unicorn’s daughter.

“Six of them, Simon. The four in the house and the two that are dead. We never got to the seventh. We never got to Unicorn.”

The little girl turned at the sound of my voice and smiled up at us. “Who are you?” she asked. “Are you the wise Wufniks from the desert lands?”

“We are your new friends,” Simon told her, kneeling in the grass by her side. “We have come to take you away with us.”

“No, you won’t!” a voice behind us said.

We turned and I saw the woman who stood at the edge of the woods, clad in jeans and a shirt. Though I’d never seen her in anything but her office dresses, I recognized Martha Scane at once.

Her head was down, sighting along the barrel of the shotgun pointed at us. At that angle it might almost have been a unicorn’s horn protruding from her forehead.

“Get away from them, Lilith!” she shouted to the child, and the little girl obeyed instantly, running for cover in the woods.

“Martha—” I started to say.

She fired once, and the blast from the shotgun thudded into the ground near Simon. I saw little specks of blood appear on his hand.

Her second shot came like an echo of the first, almost drowning out the simultaneous crack of a revolver. But this shot was wide to the left, and then I saw the blood on Martha Scane’s shirt.

She fell on her face in the soft grass, still clutching the shotgun.

Toby Chimera came out of the woods holding his service revolver. I saw that he was crying as he walked to her body, but I knew he had made his choice at last.

It was much later that day when Simon and I finally drove back to New York. The little girl, Lilith, would find foster parents to care for her and the four we’d left at the house would go their own ways when the investigation was completed.

“She did it all for the child,” Simon explained as we drove. “In some misguided way she thought she was protecting Lilith from the world. She’d threatened to destroy Harvey Cross many times before, and when he heard her voice come over that intercom in your office he must have thought she was a true demon. He’d never known where she or Ash worked, you see, and he’d unwittingly brought his manuscript to the very publisher who employed her. It must have been an overwhelming rush of sheer despair that made him leap through your window to his death.”

“And his death brought matters to a head.” Simon nodded. “Ash Gregory began to realize that his daughter had to be removed from the commune. She wasn’t a goddess—only a child. He and Martha must have argued about it driving up yesterday. She got him to stop the car—perhaps by pretending to see Lilith in the woods—and then stabbed him to death. She had to keep the child at all costs, to raise her as a daughter of nature.”

“And you knew it was Martha all along?”

“The way you described the event to me, only her voice on the intercom could have affected Harvey Cross so quickly. And doesn’t it seem reasonable that if Gregory was the child’s father, then the mother—and Gregory’s killer—who was driving up with him from New York might be someone who worked with him during the week?”

“I can’t believe the coincidence that brought Cross to the same publisher where they worked,” I said. It was early evening now, and the lights of Manhattan were coming into view across the Hudson.

“Oh, it was no coincidence, my friend. Harvey Cross was lured to your office by the same conscious urge that brought Martha Scane and Ash Gregory there as employees in the first place. Don’t you see it yet? These seven people believed in the old Roman and Greek gods. They established their commune in a place called Olympus and took the names of mythical creatures. It was not coincidence but a logical choice that brought them to a publisher named Neptune Books.”

THE WITCH OF PARK AVENUE

IT WAS A JUNIOR PARTNER at the law firm of Nevins & Scott who first contacted Simon Ark regarding the unlikely affair of Maud Slumber, the millionaire witch. Simon was speaking on “Religion and the Decline of Magic” at a workshop on the Middle Ages being conducted at a university in The Bronx, and this had brought him more than the accustomed amount of notice in the press.

“What am I to do, my friend?” he asked me over lunch at a Bavarian cafe on the, west side of Manhattan. “I give a simple, straightforward interview to the afternoon paper and now I have requests like this one.”

“What do they want you to do with this millionaire witch?” I asked. “Marry her?”

“Heaven forbid! Will you come with me to the lawyer’s office?”

“I suppose I could.” There were things to be done back at the office, but nothing that others couldn’t handle for a few hours. And my curiosity was aroused.

So after lunch we took a taxi down to the Wall Street suite of Nevins & Scott and were ushered promptly into the office of Greg Hopkins, the junior partner who’d contacted Simon. “It’s a pleasure,” he said, rising to shake hands. I guessed his age to be around thirty, though a bushy mustache the same shade of red as his hair made it difficult to estimate exactly. His blue eyes were clear and honest, and I imagined him to be quite effective in a courtroom.

“You must understand,” Simon told him, “that I’m not a private-inquiry agent. I can answer your questions about witchcraft but that is all. If you have a problem with this woman—”

“Oh, we have a problem with her all right. At least I do. Maud Slumber is seventy-eight years old and her estate is the largest one I handle. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to offend her—it wouldn’t be good for me or for the firm.”

“You said on the telephone she’s a millionaire.”

“That’s not violating any confidences. She donated a new wing to a New England medical school last year and she’s talked publicly about establishing a foundation to handle the estate after she dies. About the only thing she doesn’t mention in public is the fact that she’s been a practicing witch for most of her life.”

“How do you know that?” Simon Ark asked.

“Because she told me, in this very office. We got into a discussion about a year ago on how she managed to acquire her wealth. It seems it came mainly through large bequests from distant relatives and friends. That’s when she told me she’d hexed them, that she was a witch.”

“You couldn’t have believed her,” I said.

“Not at first, certainly. But Maud Slumber is an enigmatic woman. I came to realize that whether or not she really is a witch, she believes herself to be one.”

“Sometimes believing is all that’s necessary,” Simon murmured. He was staring hard at the young lawyer. “Tell me, Mr. Hopkins—other than her persuasive conversation, has this woman demonstrated any evidence of witchcraft?”

“Well,” he said slowly, choosing his words carefully, “there was the matter of her husband.”

“You hadn’t mentioned she was married.”

“And I didn’t believe her to be when I first acquired her as a client. She’d been with one of the older members of the firm who passed away and his clients were divided among several junior partners. The file listed her as unmarried and I never questioned her about it, but some months back she telephoned me one afternoon, quite agitated. It seems her former husband was back in town, demanding money from her. I learned they’d been divorced about twenty years earlier, before she came into most of her money. He was a few years younger than Maud, still in his early seventies, and quite spry.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Lyle Caser, but I’m afraid he’s no longer with us.” Hopkins hesitated, as if wishing he didn’t have to tell us the rest of it. “She put a hex on him and he died.” He showed us a photo of a bald man with glasses.

Simon leaned forward in his chair. “How did he die?”

“He fell through a plate-glass window in a department store. Apparently he had a seizure of some sort, but it was the glass that killed him. A sliver of it cut his throat.”

“And Maud Slumber took credit for this?”

The young lawyer nodded. “She claims—But it’s all nonsense, of course. It’s not even worth repeating.”

“And yet you’re troubled enough to have summoned me.”

Hopkins took a deep breath. “Attorneys have a certain responsibility for their clients—at least the responsibility to see that they don’t break the law or harm anyone. Lyle Caser is dead, but he has a brother named Eric who’s still very much alive. I’m afraid Maud Slumber might—might harm him next.”

“Is this a matter for the police?”

“It’s not a matter for the police or private detectives or anyone like that, Mr. Ark. Frankly, I was at my wits’ end when I saw the notice of your appearance at the university. Maybe, just maybe, you could talk to her before anything else happens.”

Because I knew Simon would never ask it, I interrupted with a practical question. “Is your firm offering to hire Mr. Ark as a consultant in this matter?”

“You must realize this isn’t the sort of service that can be rebilled to the client. But the firm is willing to pay for any reasonable expenses, and for your time, of course. Could you call on Maud Slumber and persuade her to drop this foolishness?”

“By foolishness you mean her threat to put a hex on Eric Caser?”

“Yes,” he answered quietly. “She’s convinced the brother’s reappeared to get her money. I suggested she simply disinherit them, but instead she’s doing this.”

“Threatening to kill Eric like she killed her ex-husband?”

“Yes.”

Simon Ark stood up. “I’ll be happy to talk with her. Please arrange for an appointment as soon as possible.”

The appointment was for the following afternoon and I arranged to accompany Simon. The idea of meeting a millionaire witch who lived in a luxury Park Avenue condominium attracted me as much as it did Simon, and as we arrived by taxi I asked, “Do you think she’s really a witch?”

“Greg Hopkins thinks she is—he thinks she can kill people by hexing them. When one is dealing with witchcraft appearances can often become reality.”

“You mean that a person can fall through a plate-glass window simply because he believes his ex-wife has willed his death?”

“Something like that. In the Australian bush, where witchcraft of a sort is still practiced among the aborigines, the practice of pointing a bone at one’s enemies has been known to cause their illness and death. But it only happens if the victim knows the bone has been pointed, if his imagination can be set to work to such an extent as to bring about a physical illness.”

We passed through the revolving door of the building into a stark chrome-and-glass lobby where a security guard waited to ask our business. “And you think something like that has happened here?” I asked.

“We shall see, my friend,” Simon replied. He gave the man the name of Maud Slumber and we waited to be announced.

Her door on the twenty-second floor was opened by a uniformed maid who greeted us with a French accent. She left us in a plush living room where gold-flecked wallpaper matched the golden threads of the furniture, momentarily distracting me from the breathtaking view of the Manhattan skyline to the south.

Then we were joined by Maud Slumber herself. She was a large woman, who moved to her chair with a sort of rolling motion. White-haired, wrinkled, showing the obvious signs of her seventy-eight years, her eyes were still alert and calculating as she faced us. “My lawyer sent you,” she said, not bothering with introductions. “For what purpose?”

Simon cleared his throat. “My name is Simon Ark. I am a researcher into matters—”

“I know who you are. The Satan-hunter. The scourge of necromancy. The undying detective. What do you want of me?”

“Merely a conversation. I do not come to burn you at the stake or to test you with torture. You have said you are a witch and I accept that.”

She bowed slightly, regaining something of her lost composure. “I have no caldron and no broomstick, Mr. Ark. I am not a threat to anyone.”

“Young Greg Hopkins seems to think you may have been responsible in some manner for the death of your former husband.”

She turned in her chair and issued orders to the maid. “Marie, bring us some tea.” Then she returned to the conversation with Simon. “I trust tea is satisfactory. Now, Mr. Ark, in the matter of Lyle Caser, his death was tragic—but not unexpected by me.”

“You had placed a hex or spell on him?”

She acknowledged that. “Not to kill him, but to drive him away. He and his brother had come back after all these years simply to see what they could get out of me. I sent someone to talk to them, but it did no good.”

“So you killed your former husband.”

“That’s a harsh word, don’t you think? I created an atmosphere in which he would be uncomfortable. If it caused his death I am sorry.”

“And now Eric?” Simon asked with a slight smile.

“They were always very close. They’re French, raised in Paris by a French father and an American mother. They moved here before the war and Lyle and I were married for about twenty years. I was not as wealthy then, but I was generous to them both. After the divorce they went away, and now they’re back. Since Lyle’s death a few weeks ago Eric has taken an apartment in Greenwich Village.”

“How did you acquire your wealth?” Simon asked her. “If you have no objection to my curiosity.”

“Not at all. I imagine Hopkins has told you already anyway. I have had a great many friends over the years and as they died their money has come to me.”

“Through your powers as a witch?”

“If you will.” Before she could say more, Marie entered with the tea on a silver tray. The old woman fell silent while we were served, and I took the opportunity to study Marie herself. She was a classic dark-haired beauty, with pale skin that made a vivid contrast to the blood-red lipstick she wore. “That will be all,” Maud Slumber told her when tea had been served, and our conversation did not resume until the maid had retreated to the kitchen.

“Is she French too?” Simon asked.

“Marie? Yes. I watch my words around her. Lyle recommended her to me when my former maid left last year and I’ve always had a nagging suspicion she was sent to spy for him.”

“But Lyle is dead now,” Simon reminded her.

“His brother Eric is alive. Sometimes I think they’re more alike than twins.”

“Which is why you’ve put a hex on him as well?”

“I’m an old lady and witchcraft is a hobby to me. Perhaps Lyle would have died anyway. His time had come.”

“Then you’re not threatening Eric?”

“What gave you that idea?”

“Your attorney.”

“He talks too—” The lobby buzzer interrupted her. “Marie, see who that is!” she called.

The maid reappeared to answer the buzzer and listened to the crackling intercom. “It’s Doctor Langstrom, madam.”

“Oh, have him come up,” she said. Then, to Simon: “I’m sorry, but my doctor is here. Perhaps we can talk again sometime—about a mutual acquaintance.”

Simon lifted himself to his feet. “And who might that be?”

“Why, Satan, of course.”

From the kitchen came the sound of shattering glass. I made a move toward the closed door through which Marie had just disappeared. She came back through it, her chalk-white face without expression. “I’m deeply sorry, madam,” she said. “I broke one of the water glasses.”

Doctor Langstrom arrived before Maud Slumber could vent whatever anger she might have about the broken glass. Once the doctor was admitted she dismissed the maid and introduced us. Langstrom, a tall slender man with grey hair and a mustache, extended a bony hand. “Simon Ark. I’ve heard your name—aren’t you lecturing up at my alma mater this week?”

They fell into a brief, friendly conversation while I edged toward the door. Presently Simon lumbered along after me.

“Interesting,” he said when we were in the elevator.

“Who—Maud Slumber or the doctor?”

“Neither one,” he replied enigmatically. “The maid.”

“You mean she broke the glass when Satan was mentioned.”

“It would seem she’d be accustomed to her mistress’s behavior.”

We were leaving the building by way of the revolving door, having passed the uniformed security man, when Simon’s attention was attracted by a bald man with thick glasses who was approaching the building with a purposeful stride.

“Pardon me, sir,” Simon said, intercepting him on the sidewalk. “Would you happen to be Mr. Eric Caser?”

“Yes,” the man replied. “Do we know one another?” He spoke with a decided French accent.

“We have never met,” Simon replied, “but I came here because of you—and your brother.”

“My brother is dead.”

“I know that. An attorney, Gregory Hopkins, believes your life may be in danger too.”

“From that witch’s hex?” Caser snorted. “I have my own amulet against hexes.” He started to push past us.

“Don’t try to see her now,” Simon warned.

Eric Caser turned to stare at him. “The thing which killed my brother will not harm me,” he said. He entered the revolving door and started through.

“How did you know that was Eric Caser?” I asked Simon, but before he could answer something strange happened.

Caser, pushing through the revolving door, had somehow become stuck.

We heard him cry, or mutter in anger, and try to force the glass door inward. But something had jammed it, and even as we went to help from outside the security guard was walking toward it from the lobby.

Something seemed to frighten Caser and he turned away from the guard toward us, trying to push his way out again. When he saw it was useless he pounded on the glass, sheer panic washing over his face.

“Don’t break the glass!” Simon shouted, perhaps remembering how Caser’s brother had died. “Don’t panic! We’ll have you free in a minute!”

But then a shudder seemed to run through the imprisoned man’s body. He clawed at his breast pocket and pulled out a black marking pen.

And as we watched, helpless, he printed a single jagged word on the glass in front of his face.

Then, his mouth working soundlessly, he dropped the pen and slid into a heap inside the jammed revolving door. The word he had printed on the glass was MARIE.

“He’s dead,” Simon said when the security guard had finally freed the jammed door. Then he told the man, “Phone upstairs to the Slumber apartment and get Dr. Langstrom down here.”

“What killed him?” I asked.

“I don’t know. It could have been his heart. He’s no youngster.”

I was staring at the glass of the revolving door and the word Caser had left there. “He didn’t think it was his heart, Simon. He thought he was being murdered. He left us a dying message naming his killer.”

But Simon ignored that for the moment. Dr. Langstrom had come down in answer to the summons and was kneeling beside the body. He tore open Caser’s shirt and listened to his heart. “This man is dead,” he confirmed.

“Do you know him, Doctor?” Simon asked.

“I’ve never seen him before, at least to my knowledge. Who is he?”

“Eric Caser, the brother of Maud Slumber’s former husband.”

“He was coming to see her?”

“I assume so.”

Langstrom loosened more of Caser’s clothes and tried to pump a spark of life into him but without success. An ambulance and police car arrived on the scene. As the body was being taken away I noticed the security guard fussing with the revolving door and polishing the glass. “What happened to the word that was written there?” I asked him.

He looked blank. “What word? I didn’t notice any word—just some dirty smudges.” He was a dark-haired man in his thirties who looked as if he might have been a boxer once.

“What’s your name?”

“Vic Tannet. What’s it to you?”

“Are you employed by the building management?”

“Of course. Do you think I do this for my health?”

“What seems to be the trouble?” Simon asked, coming over to join us.

“He wiped off the word Caser wrote,” I said.

“No matter. We saw what it said.”

“But—”

“The police are treating it as a natural death. There’s no reason yet for us to treat it any differently.” He took my arm and led me away.

“You mean you believe this business of a witch’s hex?” I said. “You believe those glass doors imprisoned and killed him somehow?”

“I believe he died before our eyes, trapped in the door with no living thing anywhere near him. He couldn’t have been murdered, therefore his death must have been from natural causes.”

And that’s what we told Greg Hopkins later that afternoon, seated in his office overlooking Wall Street. At first he couldn’t believe our words, but then he asked for a detailed account of our meeting with Maud Slumber and our later encounter with Eric Caser.

“How did you know it was Caser?” he asked Simon.

“You showed me a picture of his brother Lyle. And Maud Slumber made the remark that they were more alike than twins. When I saw a man so closely resembling the photograph approaching the building I made the simple deduction it was Eric.”

“Eric dead! I still can’t believe they could both go like that. Maybe the old woman is a witch after all.”

“There are other possibilities,” Simon remarked. “Coincidence, for one. But what can you tell me about Dr. Langstrom?”

The attorney shrugged. “He’s an old friend of Maud’s. A widower, getting along in years himself but still active. In addition to his own small practice he does a bit of research for the government. Some business with electric eels.”

“And Marie, Miss Slumber’s French maid?” Simon asked.

“I don’t know anything about her. Maud mentioned her once recently, said she was seeing some man Maud didn’t approve of, but that’s all I know. I’ve only seen her once or twice when I called at the apartment.”

Simon nodded, almost as if this was the answer he’d expected. “I’m sorry we couldn’t have been of more help to you. We simply arrived too late.”

“Too late?” Hopkins repeated, not understanding. “But I thought you were there when he died.”

“Perhaps Eric Caser started to die a long time ago, when Maud Slumber first put her hex on him.”

“Then you believe in witchcraft?”

“I believe in Maud Slumber. It may not be the same thing.”

The following morning I was visited by Detective Sergeant Anthony Banto. He entered casually after my secretary announced him and glanced around at the framed cover art from some of our bestselling paperbacks. “First time I’ve ever been in a publishing company. Neptune Books, eh? My son reads a lot of them. You print ’em here in the building?”

“No, over in New Jersey. This is just the editorial and sales office.”

“Interesting business, I suppose.”

“You’ve come about the death I witnessed yesterday?”

“Yeah.” He took out his notebook and thumbed through the pages. “Eric Caser. That the fellow?”

“That’s him.”

“Tell me what happened. You were there with another man. Simon Ark?”

“That’s right.” I went over the previous day’s events once more, leaving out the part about Maud Slumber’s hex. “Do you have the autopsy report yet?”

He scratched his ear and nodded. “That’s why I’m here.”

“Was it a heart attack?”

“No. He was poisoned.”

“Poisoned!” I almost came out of my chair. “A slow-acting poison that just happened to kill him while he was stuck in the revolving door?”

Sergeant Banto shook his head, ignoring my sarcasm. “No, actually the medical examiner says it was a form of cyanide that would have caused death within less than a minute. It was apparently injected by a hypodermic needle into the victim’s left arm.”

“That’s impossible,” I insisted. “Simon Ark and I witnessed the whole thing. No one came near the man. He was trapped in this revolving door and no one was near him.”

“What about after he was freed?”

“He was already dead then.” I remembered the doctor and the security guard. “Even if he wasn’t, Simon and I were there all the time. No one could have injected him without our seeing it.”

The detective shook his head. “Well, he sure didn’t commit suicide. No hypo was found on the body.”

“His hands were in plain view all the time,” I agreed. “He was writing on the glass with a marking pen.”

“Writing?”

“I mentioned it earlier. He wrote the word Marie.”

“As he was dying?”

“Yes. He seemed unable to speak and his strength was fading fast—he died in less than a minute.”

“Was anyone named Marie on the scene?”

“No,” I said. I told him about Maud Slumber’s maid.

“But you have no reason to believe this was the Marie he meant, or even that he was trying to indicate the name of his killer?”

“No, but in detective stories a dying message is usually—”

“This isn’t a detective story, sir. There was a movie when I was a kid—before your time, I guess—about a man who died saying the word Rosebud. Turned out at the end it wasn’t the name of a person at all—just a sled he’d had as a kid. See what I mean about dying messages?”

“Citizen Kane,” I remarked. “It wasn’t before my time.”

“But you get my point?”

“Yes.”

“So think about it. Who could have injected this man Caser with the poison?”

I thought about it. “No one.”

“You’re sure?”

“No one,” I repeated. “He couldn’t have died that way.”

“But he did. Unless you’re willing to believe in the supernatural.”

“Who said anything about the supernatural?” I asked.

“I should have told you I interviewed Simon Ark just before coming here. He seems to believe a supernatural explanation is possible. He said something about witchcraft.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll be getting back to you,” Banto said, rising.

As he was going out the door I asked, “Do you believe in witchcraft, Sergeant?”

He looked back and smiled. “Oh, no. Not me.”

I telephoned Simon as soon as Banto had left and described my conversation with him. “My talk with him was quite similar,” he said.

“How could Caser have been injected with poison in front of our eyes?” I asked.

“It’s an interesting problem,” Simon admitted. “Are you coming up to hear me speak tonight?”

“Of course.” The evening session was a public portion of the university’s workshop and Simon would be delivering a brief, popularized version of his student lectures.

“I’m leading off the program at eight.”

“I’ll be there.”

I’d heard him speak many times before, but this evening Simon delivered his concept of magic in the Middle Ages with a new verve that seemed to hypnotize the young audience. Watching his gestures, listening to his words, I could almost believe his occasional claim that he’d been there when the Inquisition burned its witches, when Gilles de Rais rode with Joan and the horned god danced beneath the winter moon.

Afterward I sought him out at the rear of the podium. “You really outdid yourself tonight, Simon,” I said.

But he wanted nothing of my compliments. “Come here, my friend. A most unusual visitor is waiting for me backstage.”

I followed him down a dimly lit corridor to a tiny office that had been given over to him for the evening. To my surprise a young woman sat patiently waiting for him—Marie, the maid.

She stood, startled, as I entered behind Simon, but he immediately calmed her. “You may speak freely in front of my friend. You have nothing to fear from either of us.”

She nodded, and I noticed that she was clutching a wrinkled brown paper bag. “I had to see you, Mr. Ark,” she said. “I heard you speaking with Miss Slumber yesterday, before—the death.” She lifted her dark eyes to his. “It was the second death, you know.”

“I know.”

“Both brothers. Madam’s former husband and now his. brother.”

“What have you brought me?” Simon asked.

“I found this in Madam’s bedroom drawer.” She thrust the bag into Simon’s hands and sat back as if glad to be rid of it. “I thought of telling the police but decided to bring it to you instead.”

He opened it carefully and extracted two identical stuffed manikins. The faces had been given crude male features and bits of hair. The clothing seemed fashioned from authentic pieces. They were named—one carried a slip of paper on its back with LYLE printed on it. ERIC was pinned to the back of the other. The Lyle puppet had a tiny sliver of glass embedded in its throat. The Eric puppet had a small pin sticking out of its left arm.

“My God, Simon!” I gasped. “Does such voodoo nonsense still go on?”

“It appears so,” Simon murmured, examining the dolls with care. “Witches have always used puppets, for love charms and for harming enemies.”

“Then this proves it—Maud Slumber is a witch!”

“Do not jump to hasty conclusions, my friend.” He turned back to the French girl, asking, “When did you find these, Marie?”

“Earlier today, when I was cleaning.”

“In a drawer, you said?”

“Yes.”

“A drawer Miss Slumber often uses?”

She hesitated. “No. More likely one she would hide something in.”

“Does she know you have taken these?”

“No—unless she looked for them while I was gone.”

Simon nodded. “Tell me one thing. Did you know Eric Caser?”

Marie shook her head. “I never met him. I knew Lyle. He got me the job with Miss Slumber before he died. But I never knew his brother.”

“Does Miss Slumber have a great many visitors to her apartment?”

“No. She hasn’t got any friends. She told me they are all dead.”

Simon returned the dolls to the paper bag. “I want you to return these,” he instructed. “Put them back exactly as you found them.”

“But—Aren’t you going to tell the police?”

“Not quite yet.”

She took the bag somewhat reluctantly and we saw her to the door.

Simon stared after her in the darkness, watching as she walked across the parking lot toward a waiting car. When she was almost up to it, the car’s headlights went on. “Come,” he said suddenly, “she’s not alone.”

“What if she isn’t?”

“Remember Greg Hopkins telling us, Maud didn’t approve of a man she was seeing? I want to know who he is.”

We reached the car just as it was pulling away. The glow from an overhead streetlight fell across the windshield and I could see Marie’s startled face staring at us from the passenger seat. Behind the wheel sat Vic Tannet, the security guard.

We followed them back downtown in my car.

“It might not mean anything,” I argued.

“Perhaps not,” Simon agreed.

“So why are we following them back to Maud Slumber’s apartment?”

“Because I want to make certain the dolls are returned intact.”

We let ourselves be announced once more and accompanied Marie up to the apartment. Vic Tannet vanished with his car without speaking to us. “Don’t you trust me?” Marie asked in the elevator. “Didn’t you think I’d bring them back?”

“We can create a diversion,” Simon explained, “while you return them to the drawer in which you found them.”

But the diversion was not to be of our making. We walked in upon a scene of Maud Slumber, along with her attorney Greg Hopkins and Dr. Langstrom, sipping champagne from fluted Swedish glasses. “You’re just in time to join the celebration,” she said. “The more the merrier.”

“What are we celebrating?” Simon asked, accepting a glass of champagne as Marie doffed her coat and disappeared into the bedroom.

“My wedding! Dr. Langstrom and I were married a week ago. I wanted to keep it secret but he’s convinced me it’s time to make it public.”

We offered our somewhat startled congratulations while Dr. Langstrom beamed and shook hands. “You gentlemen work with Greg here?” he asked, obviously uncertain as to our function.

“They’re advisers,” Hopkins answered quickly.

“This has been the greatest week of my life,” Langstrom said. “Dear Maud is the woman I need beside me. I’m glad she’s agreed not to keep it a secret any longer.”

Marie reappeared from the bedroom and Maud instructed her to open another bottle of champagne. “Mr. Hopkins has an empty glass, dear.”

“No, no,” the lawyer insisted. “I really must be going.”

Simon and I decided to depart at the same time and Maud walked us to the door. “Dear Greg, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner but you understand, don’t you? We can take care of any legal technicalities next week.”

“There shouldn’t be any, unless you wish to change your will.”

“We’ll talk about it,” she said, patting his shoulder. “Oh, and can you be here tomorrow morning? That detective, Banto, is coming at eleven and I’d feel better about seeing him if you were present.”

“Sure,” he answered agreeably. “I’ll be glad to.” He marked the time down in his date book.

She turned to Simon and said, “At my age, if only a woman could marry her doctor and lawyer life would be so much easier.”

Simon laughed, then paused at the door with a question. “Did anyone know about your marriage? Marie, for instance?”

She shook her head. “No one. No one at all.”

“I’ll see you in the morning,” Hopkins told her.

In the elevator I remarked, “There was certainly no talk of witchcraft tonight.”

Simon Ark smiled slightly. “Perhaps she used a love charm on Dr. Langstrom. Witches sometimes tie two puppets together with red ribbon to cast a spell over a desired love object.”

“Puppets?” Hopkins asked.

“She had two hidden in her bedroom drawer,” I told him. “Marie found them and brought them to Simon. They were labeled with the names of Lyle and Eric and pierced with glass and a pin.”

“My God!”

“God was not the intended recipient of her prayers in this case,” Simon said drily.

“But—if that’s true, you’re saying she caused the death of the Caser brothers. You’re saying you have proof her hexes really work.”

“Not at all.” We’d reached the lobby and walked out past the security guard. It wasn’t Vic Tannet. He was nowhere in sight. “What I’m saying is only that someone made those dolls, and that that same someone caused Eric Caser’s death in this revolving door.”

“Who else could it be but Maud?”

“Who else?” Simon repeated. “Marie, for one. Have you ever considered the possibility that Marie might be the real witch of Park Avenue?”

We talked far into the night, seated in a conveniently isolated booth at a bar near Grand Central Station. We’d walked there from Maud Slumber’s and had felt the need to continue the conversation for a time.

“What do you mean,” Greg Hopkins asked, “when you say that the person who made those puppets caused Eric Caser’s death? What about Lyle Caser?”

“Lyle’s death could have been an accident,” Simon explained. “But Eric was certainly murdered. He was injected with poison in his left arm, the same arm that was pierced with a pin on the doll meant to represent him. Since the autopsy results have not been made public, there are only two possibilities to explain this. Either we believe in witchcraft or we believe that Eric’s murderer made those dolls. Because a third person would not have known how Eric died.”

“How could anyone have killed Eric with both of you watching?” the lawyer wanted to know.

Simon Ark, drinking an unaccustomed glass of imported beer, leaned back. “Let us examine a purely hypothetical possibility. Maud Slumber imagines herself to be a witch, but in truth she has no powers. Lyle Caser, anxious to spy on his former wife, and possibly her relationship with Dr. Langstrom, plants Marie in the apartment as a maid. Marie in time takes up with the daytime security guard and they develop a scheme to fleece the old woman out of her money.”

“That would be unlikely,” Hopkins protested. “I keep a very careful eye on her finances.”

“Let me finish, please. I told you this was hypothetical.

“Lyle is killed in an accident, but his brother Eric comes along and somehow learns of Marie and Vic’s scheme. He threatens to tell the old lady and they have to kill him—but in such a way that it’ll be linked to Lyle’s death and Maud’s claims of witchcraft. They make the dolls and Marie plants them in the apartment. She told us Maud never has visitors, so who would have done it? Then Vic lies in wait for Eric in the building lobby. He jams the revolving door with a small metal wedge and somehow manages to inject the poison into him as he struggles to free him. Eric doesn’t know Vic, but in his dying moment he realizes who must be behind the plot and he scrawls Marie’s name on the glass. Vic wipes it off as soon as he has the chance.”

“But how could he inject Eric?” I wanted to know. “The door was always between them. You implied before that Eric wasn’t killed until later.”

“No,” Simon admitted. “He was dead before we freed him from the door.”

“Then how was Eric poisoned?”

“We can work that out later,” Greg Hopkins said. “I like most of it—it makes sense. And when no one found the dolls where Marie had planted them, she pretended to find them herself and bring them to you, Simon. It all hangs together.”

“All you have to do is prove it,” I commented.

We fell silent for a bit, thinking about that.

It was late when we finished talking and I phoned my wife Shelly to tell her I’d be staying in town overnight, taking the spare bed in Simon’s temporary room at the university.

Which was how I happened to be with him at breakfast in the morning when Sergeant Banto showed up. “You fellows live together or something?” he asked, settling down at our table in the dining hall.

“I missed the last train to Westchester,” I explained. “Simon put me up overnight.”

“What’s on your mind?” Simon asked Banto. “I thought you were seeing Maud Slumber this morning.”

“I am, at eleven. But I thought I’d see you first.” He reached into his pocket and took out a small plastic device of a sort I’d never seen before. “Any idea what this thing is?”

Simon took it and turned it over in his hands. It was round and flat, a couple of inches in diameter, with a hollow channel running along one side. There was a small spring in the channel and I could see a little lever that latched the spring and held it in place. “Look,” I showed him, “when the spring is latched a certain amount of pressure on the side plate will release it. Whatever’s put in this channel would be propelled forward about an inch.”

“Where did you find this?” Simon asked Banto.

“In Eric Caser’s room. He had an apartment in Greenwich Village. There was nothing else of interest, but this intrigued me because I don’t know what it is.”

“I saw one once before, years ago,” Simon said. “Remember, my friend, when we investigated the killings at the army base in the desert back in the 1950s? They were still doing research into nerve gas then and working on possible defensive measures. That was always the problem—how do you protect yourself against a gas that kills within seconds, before you have time to put on a protective mask?”

“This thing protects against gas?” Banto asked, unbelieving.

Simon nodded. “It was tested but never issued to the troops. The threat of nerve gas simply faded away. The idea was that an antidote had been developed. Work on it was begun during World War II. All that was needed was an instant manner of injection during possible exposure. A tiny hypodermic needle was fitted into this channel and loaded with one shot of the nerve-gas antidote. The disc was worn taped to the arm or leg. Pressure on this side-simply by squeezing the arm against the body—was enough to release the spring and inject the needle into the skin. It took only a second and that was fast enough to counteract the nerve gas.”

“Eric Caser wasn’t killed with nerve gas,” Banto said.

“No, but this little device has solved the case for us.”

“How’s that?”

“Do you want proof of the killer’s identity, Sergeant? Do you want to make a capture red-handed?”

Banto laughed. “Why not?”

“Then tell Maud Slumber you’re going down to search Caser’s apartment later this afternoon. Make up some excuse why you haven’t been there before this. Tell her you’re looking for some clue as to how he died.”

“All right. I can do that.”

“Say nothing else. Just tell her you’re going down after lunch. Meanwhile, give us the address and we’ll watch the place till you get there.”

“I’ve got detectives who can do that.”

“What’s the address?”

Banto told us. “All right,” he said, “here’s the key. Put this gadget back in one of the drawers for me and then get out. My men will cover it from there. If you’re right, she’ll try to get to it before I do my search, is that right?”

“Something like that,” Simon admitted.

“Go to it.”

We took a taxi down to the Village, arriving at the apartment on Bleecker Street just a few minutes after eleven. “I’m surprised he trusted us,” I remarked to Simon.

“He didn’t. He radioed ahead. There’s a detective in that doorway watching us. He had nothing to lose by going along with my idea, but that doesn’t mean he trusts us.”

I unlocked the apartment door and we entered the silent, plainly furnished room. There was a desk and a few books, mainly in French, with a sofa that converted to a bed at night. It was the apartment of someone on the move, a rest stop along a journey. Simon slipped the plastic device into a dresser drawer, making no attempt to hide it.

“Let’s go,” I said.

He touched my shoulder. “No, my friend. We stay.”

“But the police—”

“We stay. Our killer is a very slippery individual who may expect a trap.”

“What if Marie isn’t there to hear Banto say he’s going to search the apartment?”

“She’ll be there.”

“And she’ll tip off Vic Tannet, right?”

“We shall see.”

So we waited, standing behind a curtain that hid a small walk-in kitchen from the rest of the studio apartment. We waited for an hour and nothing happened. The noontime street noises drifted up, but no intruder came.

“It’s hopeless, Simon,” I said. “A good idea but—”

“Quiet!” he whispered.

There was a scratching at the lock and suddenly the door popped open. A figure moved across the room, searching quickly in the likely places. I could see it was a man.

And then I remembered that Maud Slumber hadn’t been alone at her meeting with Sergeant Banto. She’d asked Greg Hopkins to be present too.

I heard a drawer slide open. He’d found the thing he sought.

“Don’t try to escape,” Simon said, stepping through the curtains.

He turned then, his face twisted with fury, and his hand went to his pocket. I saw the hypodermic needle held high, beginning its swing toward Simon, and then Banto was there, crashing in from the fire escape.

There was an instant’s struggle as Banto flung himself on the man and toppled him to the floor. “Get that needle!” Simon warned Banto. “It’ll be full of cyanide!”

Then the struggle went out of Banto’s captive and I got my first clear look at his face.

It wasn’t Greg Hopkins.

It was Doctor Langstrom.

“I wasn’t surprised,” Simon Ark said later. “From the minute Banto showed us that device I knew it had to be Langstrom. He did government research with electric eels, remember? During the Second World War the antidote for nerve gas was developed through continuing research with electric eels. Langstrom had these gadgets and it was a simple enough task to persuade Eric Caser to wear one.”

“How simple?”

“Eric’s brother had already been killed, possibly as a result of Maud Slumber’s hex. Langstrom convinced Eric she’d used some sort of nerve poison on her ex-husband and that she planned to kill him the same way. After all, Langstrom was a respected physician and Eric believed him in medical matters. What’s more, Langstrom told him he and Maud had just been married, giving him an inside track on her plans—he didn’t want Eric to die like his brother, he said, so he had to be prepared with this poison antidote.”

“But there was no poison,” Sergeant Banto said.

“Exactly. Langstrom couldn’t have known Eric would get stuck in the revolving door, of course—that was just happenstance. He’d probably warned him to beware of the elevator or some other part of the building. Beware of closed spaces, he might have said. He knew that sooner or later Eric—very nervous by now—would squeeze the disc to his side and inject himself with the antidote that was really poison. It didn’t really matter if the disc was found still taped to the dead man’s arm—there was nothing to connect it to Langstrom.

“But as luck would have it he was in the building, at Maud’s apartment, when Eric died and he was the first to examine the body. So when he ripped open Eric’s shirt to try to ‘revive’ him it was a simple matter to pull the disc and tape from his arm and pocket them. Naturally he’d call Maud for a rundown on her talk with Banto, so he learned of Banto’s plan to search this apartment later. I supposed he’d given Eric a duplicate disc in the event the first one malfunctioned. Remember, when we met Eric in front of the apartment house he told us he had his own amulet against hexes? This was it, only it killed him.”

“Then Lyle’s death and Eric being stuck in the revolving door were only coincidences?”

“Yes,” Simon said, “if such things can ever be coincidence. Langstrom made up the two dolls after the deaths, of course, using a bit of glass to indicate the method of Lyle’s death. He planted them in Maud’s bedroom himself, knowing they’d be found. I imagine it was the first part of a long-range plan to have her declared insane. Marie said no one ever came to the apartment. But of course Dr. Langstrom did.”

“But why did he kill Eric?” I asked.

“Maud had left Lyle and Eric money in her will—a sum which had grown to a great deal of money, I believe. When she threatened to put a hex on them, Hopkins suggested she simply disinherit them instead. But even after Langstrom talked her into marriage she was still reluctant to change her will. So with Lyle already gone by accident, Langstrom decided to kill Eric and have all the money for himself. Maud told us she sent someone to talk to the brothers when they came back into her life. I’m sure that was Langstrom. That’s how he struck up the acquaintance with Eric.”

“He must have been very persuasive to convince Eric to inject something into his body.”

“Oh, he was,” Simon agreed. “The perfect bedside manner. After all, he persuaded Maud to marry him. But even Eric must have realized the truth at the moment he was dying. That’s why he managed to print that word on the glass. And that’s how I knew the doctor had confided his wedding news to Eric.”

“But he printed Marie! What did she have to do with any of it?”

“Nothing. You’ll remember she told us she never met Eric. Lyle knew her, but not Eric. He wasn’t trying to tell us her name. He was trying to indicate the man who had tricked him into poisoning himself. And as he died he reverted to his native French tongue. Langstrom was too long a name to print, so he managed marie instead—the French word for bridegroom.”

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Village of the Dead © 1955 by Columbia Publications, Inc.

© Renewed 1983 by Edward D. Hoch

The Man from Nowhere © 1956 by Columbia Publications, Inc.

© Renewed 1984 by Edward D. Hoch

The Vicar of Hell © by Columbia Publications, Inc.

© Renewed 1984 by Edward D. Hoch

Sword For a Sinner © 1959 by Great American Publications, Inc.

The Treasure of Jack the Ripper © 1978 by Edward D. Hoch

The Mummy from the Sea © 1981 by Davis Publications, Inc.

The Unicorn’s Daughter © 1981 by Davis Publications, Inc.

The Witch of Park Avenue © 1982 by Edward D. Hoch

Copyright © 1984, by Edward D. Hoch.

Cover design by Jason Gabbert

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