The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (23 page)

We set our exploring expedition for Sunday, the 30th of October, and were not sorry when we discovered the qualities of the day itself.

It was what we used to call football weather: air with just enough of an edge on it and a high, hard layer of cloud. I found Daisy all ready at noon with luncheon put in a small pack basket. As she slung it from one shoulder, scorning my indignant desire to do the man’s part of the job, I got a new picture of her. Usually she wore dresses distinctly on the peek-a-boo side, but on this occasion she wore heavy walking boots, twill breeches, and a short leather jacket. Her coppery-brown hair, moreover, had been told to shift for itself, and was most pleasantly tousled even before we set forth. Her— But if I think too much about Daisy the story will be held up indefinitely. The subject grows so much more important every hour, and the early part of this narrative had to be so restrained about it.

On the hillside road withering grass had choked even the ruts.

We ate on the edge of the cellar hole, occasionally standing up, still chewing, to survey the surrounding territory and to discuss possibilities. The bottom of the hole was now deep in dry grass, withered asters, and goldenrod. No trace remained to show where the tent had stood.

I remembered that Muriel’s letter had mentioned a tank with running water; so a brook must be somewhere near-by. We went toward opposite ends of the field to find it. Daisy called, and I ran over to join her. I went upstream, she down. Again she was first to call. “Here’s our pipe, Dave.”

“Good girl!” I applauded, and poked around nearer the cellar until I came upon the pipe-line there. It was not had to follow, having been laid flat on the ground and covered with leaf mold. When it definitely disappeared underground it was about three or four yards above the uphill side of the foundations. We followed along what we supposed was the line of its continuation, stamping to discover any hollowness below. But the pipe simply dived into the ground and disappeared.

The adjacent wall of the cellar was made of huge granite slabs, from the days when settlers built for the ages. I put my shoulder against each in turn with a faint hope of finding one that “pivoted” in the proper romantic fashion, but Wyck evidently had been a realist. Against the center of the wall stood the enormous base of the chimney—at least eight feet wide and six deep. I even speculated with the idea that the laboratory might be inside it. There was a Dutch oven, but it was only about two feet deep, with solid stone all around. The top of the chimney had fallen long ago.

“How about those stones? Hey!” Daisy shouted. “Look!”

On the right, at the base of the chimney, was a shallow pile of stones fallen from the top. Daisy was kneeling, pointing between two of them to a piece of lithographed tin which proved to be an almost unrusted sardine box. Hastily I heaved the stones up, tossing them aside. Beneath them, instead of ground, we came upon more stones, more tin cans. As I yanked a big slab loose, part of the chimney itself seemed to crumble, and a neat square hole gaped in the side—about a foot of it above ground and a foot below. The bottom of it probably showed the original level of the cellar. I crawled into it cautiously on hands and knees and looked up. There was just a glimmer of light. My flashlight then showed that it was a regular fireplace with a flue of its own, in the top of which a large flat stone had been placed, or had fallen.

When I came out, Daisy shouted with laughter. I was covered, it seems, with soot and charcoal. Evidently Ted Watson had used that fireplace for cooking. But why should he have filled it full of stones?

“I’ll bet the charcoal was just a blind,” Daisy said. “Here, let me look.” She bent down and banged at the back of the fireplace with a stick. It clanked metallically.

“Gangway!” I said, and went plunging back into the hole, prying around until I found the edge of the iron plate which, with no great difficulty, came out entire. Daisy meanwhile had been pulling more stones from in front of the chimney, making the place easier to get at. When I had hauled out the plate I turned the flashlight into the hole. It showed a dirt tunnel, shored with logs that had not been there very long.

1. This provision is true of Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and of all other states whose laws I have inspected in this connection.—Ed.
   

Once inside the tunnel, I could almost stand erect. There was a sharp right turn, and the tunnel led about six feet farther, ending surprisingly at a door frame made of granite slabs. There was a recently-made door of unpainted pine boards, hanging slightly ajar from ancient wrought-iron hinges. We pushed it open, and flashed the light into a low room, about eight by twelve feet in extent, made of the same kind of granite slabs that had been used in the foundations of the house. At one end there was another door, round-topped.

“What the devil would a place like this have been here for?” I whispered. “It’s old as the hills.”

“It’s a vegetable cellar, or else a creamery, Dave. Look! Look at that tank.”

To corroborate Muriel’s letter, there was a galvanized cattle trough. Water flowed into it from one pipe, and an overflow pipe carried the surplus away.

The floor, of loose slabs, was comparatively new. The end farthest from where we stood was littered with smashed glassware and apparatus, kicked under a bench. I had noticed a peculiar purring noise when I came in. Inspection showed it to be a water-motor in the intake pope, coupled to a small dynamo, from which broken wires dangled. Near-by was a storage battery. I looked around quickly for lighting fixtures, but saw only a little acetylene lamp on the debris.

“He must have done something about ventilation,” I observed; and Daisy said, “Try that other door.”

It opened upon an irregular dirt wall pierced by a dozen 2-inch pipes through which light glimmered faintly. We went outside and paced until we knew we were standing approximately over the buried door. The ground sloped toward the brook, massed with raspberry bushes. I crawled among them and found some of the vent pipes stick up through the ground. Originally there bust have been a cut, downward and into the bank, to reach the old door. Wyck had filled it in level with the rest of the bank, put in his vent pipes, and transplanted bushes flush with the hundreds that grew wild on either side. It was a neat job.

“That’s the way dreams of empire end up, Dave,” Daisy said moodily. “Whoever built this place, with a chimney like that, and an underground creamery of whatever it was—well, they must have thought they were founding a dynasty to till the land forever. And instead, it gets used by an old maniac, in the end. My, it’s getting dark early.”

“Only half past three,” I said. “Must be just the clouds. It won’t make any difference to us down there. Come on.”

We re-entered the dungeon and began to explore the pile of debris under the workbench. I dragged out a sizable induction coil, and then a Tesla coil, and whistled my surprise.

“Where are they, Dave?” Daisy inquired.

“I built the same kind of things when I was a kid to put on magic exhibitions. That induction coil alone would kill you, hooked to that battery. But if you hooked on the Tesla coil too, it would run the voltage up so high and the amperage down so low that you could just do harmless tricks with it. In a dark place like this if you held that brass knob your hair would stand straight on end with a ripple of blue flame playing around on top of it. Look, if I stood on this rubber mat here, and held the knob, and stretched out my hand to you, there’d be a big brush of thin blue sparks from my hand to your body. Can’t you imagine Wyck playing he was Beelzebub? You see, Mike wasn’t delirious when he talked about that.”

A minute later Daisy said, “Whew! Look here, you’re right,” and pulled out a mask with sharp brass horns on a metal band to which was attached a binding post. My next find was the business end of an old-fashioned X-ray tube, with a pitted cathode. Daisy asked, “I wonder what he wanted it for? To see how his experiments were coming out, before the monsters were born?”

“I don’t think so,” I answered. “This tube wouldn’t have been powerful enough to define internal tissues through the whole abdomen. Last year Dr. Alling had some correspondence with a doctor who had been systematically changing the forms of moths by subjecting cocoons to X-rays. Wyck used this tube in the making of his monsters, that’s what.[
1
] It’s also been done in the case of jellyfish by changing their salt content of their water.

“If that’s so, look here,” Daisy said, triumphantly, hauling from the pile a box full of round cartons of reagents—all metallic salts. “No wonder poor Dr. Alling was scared to death of an investigation. Good Lord, it’s the best reason in the world why Alling himself would have murdered Wyck, if he thought he could keep this business secret with one neat knife-cut!”

I had to nod in agreement, but then she added, “However, my suspicions are swinging back to saintly little Marjorie Wyck, these days. She had more personal reasons to be scared than Alling.”

“What about Prendergast?” I inquired. “Those blue books have never turned up, you know.”

I had never brought myself to the point of telling Daisy about the dry-cleaning machine. I decided to wait for a chance to explore Alling’s home.

“Hey, what’s here?” Daisy said, and lifted out two graduated jars with fused nipples at the top and bottom of the graduations. There were also some red elastic tubing and several hollow needles used in vein puncture.

“That’s his transfusion apparatus,” I said. “Think of the old devil, getting poor Mike up here and performing transfusions into his own arm. Gee! I can’t help admiring the guy, devil or no devil. Cancer of the skull and his innards going to pieces, and never a yip out of him. With the help of Mike’s blood, he kept going right up to the last, and then took a swallow of veronal deliberately, to polish himself off!”

We continued searching, and found many other bits of apparatus to confirm old clues. There was a large jar of what probably was paraffin oil with some heavier wax in suspension, doubtless used to paint the lower extremities of Wyck’s victims when they sat in the water tank. Muriel had referred to a “fire” before which they had sat, half immersed in the tank. There was a large charcoal brazier, and a shelf in the wall back of the tank where it may have stood when in use.

At last we came upon what I had hardly dared hope for—a locked strongbox which, after twenty minutes of prying, burst open and revealed a ledger with day-by-day reports of Wyck’s experiments. Moreover, pasted in the front cover was the missing symmelus plate! There were a dozen drawn copies of it, showing at the lower end of the fused leg a progressively wider and more developed fishlike tail.

The flashlight was becoming weaker. It was already six o’clock. We could not forbear to glance hastily through the ledger, to prove that the experiments were specifically recorded. The invariable preliminary to each was the production of hypnosis by use of a single candle flame in a dark room, after which procedures with acids, alkalis, temperature baths, and suggestion through visual image were indulged in, while the patient was for all practical purposes unconscious.

We replaced the book in the strongbox, hid it under the debris, and cast the rapidly dying beam of the flashlight around the chamber for one last inspection. I pushed the door shut over the vents.

Daisy said, “It’s funny that Wyck didn’t deliver that strongbox to Alling.”

“It’s another reason for believing my old hunch that Ted murdered him up here, and drove down with the body to some accomplice for the embalming job. That would explain why the strongbox was left. It looks as if Ted just wrecked the place deliberately and sealed it up and scrammed. Well, let’s scram too. We’re a hundred bucks richer than we were this noon, deary.”

Daisy laid a hand on my arm and whispered, “Wait. Did you hear that?”

There was a scraping sound, then a metallic bang in the passageway.  I switched off the already very faint light and reached for Daisy’s hand in the darkness. It was trembling, but so was mine.

“Davy,” she said faintly, “hold me. Oh, what’s hap—”

She went limp in my arms. I had let the flashlight fall among the rubbish as I grasped her, and now knelt in the darkness, lowering her gently to the floor. I could hear faint sounds of something creeping near in the passage and had an agonized few moments of wondering whether it could be Mike Connell, escaped, come again to look for his blood. Even worse, it might be Ted Gideon. These were the likeliest chances, and both were madmen. I felt about for the flashlight, to use its last flickers at least to find a weapon with.

Just as I touched it, I was relieved to hear a woman’s voice, mumbling, “Can’t find it in the dark. How can I ever find it now? My baby. Oh, my baby.”

Now I could hear her creeping across the floor, toward the trickle of water in the tank. She must have put her hand in the tub, for she gasped and said, “Oh, he drowned him before he was born. A fish. He tried to turn my baby into a fish. Dead babies in bottles. Baby, my baby.”

There was no means of knowing whether she was another of Wyck’s products—another homicidal maniac. As I felt Daisy stirring against my knee I flashed the light at the woman, growling, “What do you want here?”