Five Fatal Words (22 page)

Melicent opened the door carefully and saw Miss Cornwall standing on the other side.

"Do you mind if I come in?"

"Not a bit," Melicent replied. "Do come in."

Miss Cornwall hugged a silk wrapper around herself and shivered. "That sign is driving me mad. . . . We're eighteen floors above the street, so I don't think anybody can molest us directly from the windows and all the doors are locked; yet--yet--" She paused and found a chair. "I could not stand being alone another instant. Do you realize what may happen to Theodore to-night?"

"Of course," said Melicent. "I've been thinking of that."

"What, do you suppose, will they do to him?"

"I've been imagining," confessed Melicent, "all sorts of things."

"Yet we could never hit it--neither you nor I. There was poison for Daniel; electrocution in the bath for Everitt--who would ever have dreamed of that?; and for Alice, the fog which no one could have foreseen. What--what do you suppose it will be for Theodore?"

Melicent shook her head.

"Or for me?" whispered Miss Cornwall. "Suppose now it is for me? It--that--that," she stared once toward the flashing sign but refrained from mentioning it as one avoids naming a terror, "that is nearly as opposite to my windows as it is to Theodore's; suppose now the five words are for me."

"Oh," cried Melicent, "I don't think so. They might as well be for your sister, Lydia."

"No; Lydia's windows are on the other side; and Ahdi Vado reassures her. Sometimes I think it must be worth while to be a fool and believe what any sane mind must refuse. Lydia says it is merely an electric sign incapable of harm in itself unless we, in our minds, create the causes of our own confusion. She and Ahdi Vado are attempting, with their own minds, to counteract the terror in ours. . . . That sign is driving me mad; where is Theodore now, do you know?"

"I think he's still talking with Donald," Melicent said. "If you listen very closely, you can just barely catch the sound of voices. I expect that Donald will spend the night in his room."

"He should; he must. It is awful to wait for something which you cannot possibly be prepared for, anyway. Poison, which no one at first suspected; electrocution; fog. I was wondering if maybe I have been wrong about the police. Perhaps to-morrow we should call them; yet I can't bear to do it. I won't do it."

She gazed at her companion with a mingling of almost childish terror and unearthly resolution. "All the others died a few hours after they received their messages, half a day at most--that is, assuming Alice got her message the day she talked to you. You think it was that day, don't you?"

"Yes, " said Melicent.

"So do I. That's why she suddenly had to talk to you. I wish they'd put that sign out; yet what good would that do? Alice burnt up her message; but she died that night. What, do you suppose, can be coming to Theodore?"

"Then you do think it is coming to him and not to you?"

Hannah Cornwall wet her thin lips. "I think that more likely; yes; more likely Theodore--before me. I would call upon the police to-night, immediately, if I could believe they could do any good. But would all the police in New York have saved Everitt from dying in the bath or saved Alice from the fog?" She arose, quivering, and fought for resolution. "I did not mean to further disturb you but my nerves have been shrieking for hours. I will return to my room--your room--but how can I sleep to-night?"

"Yet you must try to," urged Melicent.

"The sign does not come on again. Do you see? It stays dark."

"Yes," said Melicent. "They've put it out."

"They--they--they," whispered Miss Cornwall. "But what good does putting it out now do? Remember that Alice burned her message; but she died. Good night, child."

"Good night, Miss Cornwall."

She went through the doorway again; she closed the door firmly and Melicent heard the key turned on the other side.

Melicent switched out her light; and the sign on the opposite roof remained dark.

Melicent could see it vaguely as a bit of shadowy framework in the faint diffusion of the city glow over the roof. She sat looking out and, collecting her thoughts, she considered the strangely inert manner of the Cornwalls in meeting their collective doom. It was almost as if they had been trained from childhood to expect some such form of extinction, and as if that early breeding was now showing itself in a resignation that gave way only under the utmost stress. To be sure, there was Theodore at last determined to be bold--to live rashly.

Miss Cornwall's room became utterly silent; and the low resonance of men's voices from the other side had ceased. Melicent lay for an hour--for hours--wide awake, listening in a vigil which surpassed, in its tenseness, even that of her first night when she and Miss Cornwall had exchanged rooms.

She could lie still no longer. She arose and went to the window and looked out.

The sign across the street remained dark; and all over the city, the evening illumination was lessened; but the lights of night were sustained. And over all stood the stars.

Strange to look up at the stars over the city and see them the same stars as those which stood over the sea; but there they were--the Big Dipper and the Little Bear, Cassiopeia and the Chair. Stars and constellations so immense and far away that the mind could not encompass their distances but which-so Theodore Cornwall firmly believed--concerned themselves with petty, individual, human fates and affairs. What vanity!

High overhead, there was a flash in the sky--a brilliant blue line of light which vanished as swiftly as it had appeared. Now, near the eastern horizon, another. Meteors; shooting stars; for the world, in its wanderings, was encountering bits of cosmic débris.

Last night and to-night, the papers said, we would be sweeping through the path of a comet which had been dissipated long ago but which left behind its scattered fragments.

Melicent forgot the stars. Footsteps approached her door; just outside, they stopped for a moment and then went on. A minute passed. The sound had disappeared.

Already her mind was playing tricks upon her and she was not positive that the sound she had heard had been footsteps, not sure that she had heard any connected series of sounds at all. A moment later she knew why she was doubting the footsteps; she was afraid to do what she thought she would do if she heard anything at all. Heretofore she had always entered into the Cornwalls' affairs after the alarm had been raised. Now she was determined to make a more intelligent effort. Every member of the family was in danger and every member gave the others some appearance of protection, but she knew that, in so far as Hannah Cornwall's generation was concerned, each person now living was primarily interested in himself. The sequence of deaths and the terror of the warnings had made Melicent desperate. They roused her to an unnatural courage.

She decided that she had heard footsteps and she rose from her bed. She took off Hannah Cornwall's nightcap and donned her own kimona. She crept across the room, took up the key of the hall door, which Miss Cornwall had placed on top of the bureau, and slowly turned the lock. The hall was pitch dark. With every sense vividly alert, she began to move through it, though she had neither weapon nor plan.

When she reached the middle of the hall, she began to be able to see faintly. The hall ended at the portière on the other side of which was the living room. She could hear the faint sounds of traffic in the street eighteen stories down; but now there was no sound within the walls of the apartment. The glow from the street made the room dimly visible.

There was no one in it; at least, nothing moved. Melicent's eyes ransacked every corner.

Now, though nothing moved, something clicked. A trigger cocked? The latch of a door? Melicent started; she jerked back behind the portieres and clutched them. She wanted to scream; but she stifled even the gasp of her breathing and stood tense, listening. No sound succeeded the click; when she separated away the noise from outside, within the walls was absolute silence.

She realized, after a minute or two, that the elevator shaft lay in the direction from which the click had sounded. The elevator communicated almost directly into the living room. Theodore Cornwall's apartment occupied the entire top floor and there was no other reason for the elevator rising to this floor except to serve his apartment. There was, accordingly, only a very small space between the door from the living room and the elevator door.

Was there some one standing in that space now? Someone who had just come up in the elevator and who, after leaving the car, stood there without ringing or rapping?

The door was almost directly across the room from Melicent; and the longer she listened, hearing nothing, the more firmly the idea fastened itself in her mind. Some one had come up in the elevator and stepped out; the car, undoubtedly, had descended, leaving him there; but he neither rang nor rapped.

What was he waiting for? What was he doing? Working on the door? She strained her eyes for sign of the door opening and her ears for sound of a key in the lock. She saw and heard nothing. No one was there, boldly she told herself. To prove it, she'd cross the room and throw open the door. Or, would she? What madness would that be!

At least, she'd cross the room; but she found she could not even do that. She could creep around by way of the wall; for she began to do that, edging along, her back to the wall, her eyes jumping from object to object in the room, her hand beside her and pressed back against the wall for the strange and senseless reassurance of the feeling of something solid with her fingers.

She came to a table against the wall and she had to leave the wall to work her way round that. And as she was doing it, the door she was watching seemed to open. Was it opening? Was it an illusion? She could not see surely; and her foot caught on something.

She kicked to free it and a lamp beside her swayed. She had caught the cord on it; and the lamp toppled and crashed on the floor. It took all her attention for a second--three seconds--five seconds--who could say? For she had tried to catch it, but her hands missed it; and then she stared at it on the floor.

The door! No doubt now that it was partly open. No light came through it; the entry was absolutely black, but the door was not closed. But no one appeared; nobody seemed to be at it; there was not the slightest response, at the door, to the crash of the lamp. It was as if the thud on the floor had jarred the door open.

But Melicent knew that could not be.

Behind her, now, was a definite sound; behind her a door opened. It was Theodore Cornwall's door; and for an instant light from beyond his door shone down the hallway. Then the light was extinguished.

"Come back!" she heard the loud whisper in Donald's voice; but Theodore Cornwall did not heed him. Act boldly, his horoscope had warned him; and Melicent had seen how he was hypnotized by his stars.

"Stay back!" she cried out to halt him.

"Who's that?" he jerked out; and she knew that she had stopped him; but some one else passed him and approached her. Donald, she was sure, even before he spoke, demanding: "Where are you?"

"Don't turn on the light!" she cried. "There's some one here."

He found her, then, and seizing her, he thrust her behind him. With his left hand, he kept hold of her wrist; with his right, he presented a pistol to the room, while he whispered: "What did you see?"

"That door opening--I think."

"It doesn't seem open now."

"No. . . . Yes, it does, a little."

"I see," he agreed; and for a breathless second together they watched it. Then he asked: "What else was there?"

"Steps, I thought."

"Where?"

"Passing my door. I waited a minute--then I came out. Then there was a click--a distinct click over there; and the door opened."

"But that crash."

"That was me. I knocked the lamp off the table."

"Donald!" called Theodore Cornwall's voice from the hallway.

"Stay there, uncle, a minute," Donald replied, and of Melicent he begged: "Please go back to your room."

"What will you do?"

"I'll only turn on the light."

For answer, she reached along the wall and touched a switch and light flooded the room. No one else was in the room; except for the lamp which Melicent had overturned, there was no disorder. The door to the elevator entry was closed; and the entry was empty with the door to the shaft, on the other side, properly shut.

Theodore Cornwall, pistol in hand, assisted his nephew and Melicent in the examination which made all this certain.

"Nerves," he reassured Melicent. "Just nerves; that's all. Natural enough under the circumstances."

The three of them looked at one another--the two men in dressing gowns over pajamas, the girl in kimona.

"Just nerves," repeated Theodore. "We'd all best go back to bed."

Melicent went to her room, of which the door was still standing open while the others watched her down the lighted hall. The room was, of course, that which was assigned to Miss Cornwall and her return to it in sight of the others betrayed the fact that Miss Cornwall and she exchanged rooms; but Melicent never thought of this, as she went in and shut the door. She was thinking that, having left open the door, she had exposed Miss Cornwall to intrusion through her room; but she found that the door between the rooms was as she had left it. Nothing had disturbed Hannah Cornwall.

She returned to bed and sought again to summon sleep. She was lying with eyes closed but facing the window when a queer, sudden flash aroused her.

At least she was later aware of the flash; but probably it was the immediately ensuing shattering of glass and clang of metal which startled her up. The sounds came from Theodore Cornwall's room; and she heard cries--Donald's and Theodore's voices.

She ran into the hall and to Theodore's door. She could hear them in the room--both of them; and through the door was a smell of scorching. Theodore was shouting orders to Donald and he was crying: "You stay away, uncle, leave it to me!"

Then there was the hissing of steam; the splash of water and more hissing, which finally ceased. At last, after Melicent had been calling and pounding for minutes it seemed, Donald opened the door to her.