The Siamese Twin Mystery (3 page)

“We escaped dropping into Hell,” he muttered to himself, “and now, by George, we seem headed straight for Valhalla!” How high was the mountain, anyway?

He felt his lids droop and shook his head angrily to keep himself awake. It was unwise to doze on this journey; the dirt road twisted and pirouetted like a Siamese dancer. He set his jaw and began concentrating upon the turmoil in his empty belly. A cup of steaming consommé, now, he thought; then a smoking rare cut of thick sirloin, with gravy and browned potatoes; two cups of hot coffee. …

He peered ahead, alert. It seemed to him that the road was widening. And the trees—they seemed to be receding. Lord, it was time! There was something doing ahead; probably they had reached the crest of this confounded mountain and would soon be slipping down the road on the other side, bound for the next valley, a town, a hot supper, and bed. Then tomorrow a swift trip south, refreshed, and the day following New York and home. He laughed aloud in his relief.

Then he stopped laughing. The road had widened for excellent reason. The Duesenberg had pushed into a clearing of some sort. The trees receded left and right into the darkness. Overhead there was hot, thick sky speckled with millions of brilliants. A wilder wind fluttered the loose crown of his cap. To the sides of the expanded road lay tumbled rocks, from shards to boulders, out of the crevices and interstices of which sprouted an ugly, dried-up vegetation. And directly ahead …

He swore softly and got out of the car, wincing at the ache in his cold joints. Fifteen feet in front of the Duesenberg, boldly revealed in the headlights’ glare, stood two tall iron gates. To both sides ran a low fence built out of stones unquestionably indigenous to this forbidding soil. The fence stretched away divergently into the darkness. Beyond the gates for the short distance illuminated by the headlights ran the road. What lay still farther ahead was cloaked in the same palpable blackness that covered everything.

This was the end of the road!

He cursed himself for a fool. He might have known. The winding of the road below had not
circled
the mountain. It had merely seesawed erratically from side to side, following, now that he thought of it, the line of least resistance. This being the case, there must be a reason for the failure of the path to spiral completely about Arrow Mountain in its ascent to the summit. The reason could only be that the other side of the mountain was impassable. Probably a precipice.

In other words, there was only one way down the mountain—and that was by the road they had just climbed. They had run headlong into a blind alley.

Angry with the world, the night, the wind, the trees, the fire, himself and all living things, he strode forward to the gates. A bronze plaque was attached to the iron grille of one of them. It said simply:
Arrow Head.

“What’s the matter now?” croaked the Inspector sleepily from the depths of the Duesenberg. “Where are we?”

Ellery’s voice was gloomy. “At an impasse. We’ve reached the end of our journey, dad. Pleasant prospect, isn’t it?”

“For cripes’ sake!” exploded the Inspector, crawling down into the road. “Mean to say this God-forsaken road doesn’t lead anywhere?”

“Apparently not.” Then Ellery slapped his thigh. “Oh, God,” he groaned, “flay me for an idiot! What are we standing here for? Help me with these gates.” He began to tug at the heavy grilles. The Inspector lent a shoulder, and the gates gave balkily, squealing in protest.

“Damned rusty,” growled the Inspector, examining his palms.

“Come on,” cried Ellery, running back to the car. The Inspector trotted wearily after. “What’s the matter with me? Gates and a fence mean human beings and a house. Of course! Why this road at all? Someone lives up here. That means food, a bath, shelter—”

“Maybe,” said the Inspector disagreeably as they began to move and swung in between the gates, “maybe there’s nobody living here.”

“Nonsense. That would be an intolerable trick of fate. And besides,” said Ellery, quite gay now, “our fat-faced friend in the Buick came from somewhere, didn’t he? And yes—there are the tracks of tires. … Where the deuce are these people’s lights?”

The house was so near it partook of the nature of the darkness about it. A wide gloomy pile which blotted out the stars in an irregular pattern. The Duesenberg’s headlights focused upon a flight of stone steps leading to a wooden porch. The sidelamp under the Inspector’s guidance swept to right and left and disclosed a long terrace running the entire length of the house, occupied only by empty rockers and chairs. Beyond the sides lay the rocky brush-covered terrain; only a few yards separated the house from the woods.

“That’s not polite,” muttered the Inspector, switching the lamps off. “That is,
if
anyone lives here. I have my doubts. Those French windows off the terrace are all closed and it looks as if they’ve got blinds drawn right to the floor. See any lights in the upper story?”

There were two stories and an attic floor beneath the slate shingles covering the gabled roof. But all the windows were black. Dry bedraggled vines half covered the wooden walls.

“No,” said Ellery, a note of misgiving creeping into his voice, “but then it’s—it’s
impossible
that the house is untenanted. That would be a blow from which I should never recover; not after our fantastic adventure tonight.”

“Yes,” grunted the Inspector, “but if anybody lives here why the devil hasn’t some one heard us? Lord knows this rattletrap of yours made enough racket coming up here. Lean on that horn.”

Ellery leaned. The klaxon on the Duesenberg possessed a singularly disagreeable voice; a voice, one would have said, capable of rousing the dead. The voice ceased and with pathetic eagerness both men bent forward and strained their ears. There was no response from the lifeless pile before them.

“I think,” said Ellery doubtfully, and stopped. “Didn’t you hear some—”

“I heard a blasted cricket calling to his mate,” growled the old gentleman, “that’s what I heard. Well, what the devil are we going to do now? You’re the brains of this family. Let’s see how good you are getting us
out
of this mess.”

“Don’t rub it in,” groaned Ellery. “I’ll admit I haven’t displayed precisely genius today. God, I’m so hungry I could eat a whole family of
Gryllidae,
let alone one!”

“Hey?”

“Salatorial orthopters,” explained Ellery stiffly. “Crickets to you. It’s the only scientific term I remember from my Entomology. Not that it does me any good at the moment. I always said higher education was perfectly useless against the ordinary emergencies of life.”

The Inspector snorted and wrapped his coat more closely about him, shivering. There was an eerie quality about their surroundings which made his usually impervious scalp prickle. He strove to drive away the unaccustomed phantoms of his roused imagination by thoughts of food and sleep. He closed his eyes and sighed.

Ellery rummaged in a car pocket, found an electric torch, and scrunched across the gravel to the house. He mounted the stone steps, tramped across the wooden flooring of the porch, and searched the front door in the light of his torch. It was a very solid and uninviting door. Even the knocker, a chunk of chipped stone fashioned in the shape of an Indian arrowhead, was darkly forbidding. Nevertheless Ellery lifted it and began to pound the oak panels. He pounded with vigor.

“This,” he said grimly between assaults on the door, “is beginning to resemble a nightmare. It is utterly unreasonable that we should go—” rap! rap! “through the ordeal by fire—”
rap! rap!
“and emerge without the customary rewards of penitence. Besides—”
RAP! RAP!
“I would welcome even a Dracula after what we’ve gone through. Lord, this
does
remind me of that vampire’s roost in the mountains of Hungary!”

And he pounded until his arm ached without evoking the faintest response from the house.

“Oh, come on,” groaned the Inspector. “What’s the use of knocking your arm off like a fool? Let’s get out of here.”

Ellery’s arm dropped wearily. He flicked the torch’s beam over the porch.
“Bleak House. …
Get out? And where shall we go?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Back to get our hides scorched, I guess. At least it’s
warm
down there.”

“Not me,” snapped Ellery. “I’m going to get that lap rug out of the luggage and camp right here. And if you’re sensible, dad, you’ll join me.”

His voice carried far through the mountain air. For an instant only the hind legs of the amorous cricket answered him. Then without warning the door of the house opened and a parallelogram of light leaped out onto the porch.

Black against the light, framed by the rectangle of the door, stood the figure of a man.

S
O SUDDENLY HAD THE
apparition appeared that Ellery instinctively retreated a step, tightening his grip on the electric torch. From below he could hear the Inspector groaning with a sort of pleasant pain at the miraculous appearance of a Good Samaritan at a time when the last hope had fled. The old man’s heavy step crunched on the gravel.

The man stood in the foreground of a dazzlingly illuminated entrance hall which, from Ellery’s position, disclosed only an overhead lamp, a rug, a large etching, the corner of a refectory table and an open doorway at the right.

“Good evening,” said Ellery, clearing his throat.

“What d’ye want?”

The apparition’s voice was startling—an old man’s voice, querulously crackling in its upper tones and heavily hostile in its undertones. Ellery blinked. With the strong light shining in his eyes all he could see of the man was a silhouette, revealed by a steady glow of golden light pouring on him from behind. The outline, which made the man look like a shape created by the luminous tubes of a neon sign, was that of a shambling, loose-jointed figure, long arms dangling, sparse hair sticking up at the top like singed feathers.

“Evening,” came the Inspector’s voice from behind Ellery. “Sorry to be bothering you at this time of night, but we’ve sort of—” his eyes yearned hungrily at the furniture in the entrance hall—“we’ve sort of got ourselves into a jam, you see, and—”

“Well, well?” snarled the man.

The Queens regarded each other with dismay. Not an auspicious reception!

“Fact of the matter is,” said Ellery, smiling feebly, “that we’ve been forced up here—I suppose this is your road—by circumstances beyond our control. We thought we might get—”

They began to make out details. The man was even older than they had thought. His face was marble-gray parchment, multitudinously wrinkled, and hard as stone. His eyes were small, black, and burning. He was dressed in coarse homespun that hung from his emaciated figure in ugly vertical folds.

“This isn’t a hotel,” he said savagely and, stepping back, began to close the door.

Ellery gritted his teeth; he heard his father begin to snarl. “But good lord, man!” he cried. “You don’t understand. We’re stuck. There’s no place for us to go!”

The rectangle had squeezed together, and at its foot there was a thin wedge of light now; it made Ellery, licking his chops, think of a slab of mince pie.

“You’re only about ten-fifteen miles from Osquewa,” said the man in the doorway in a surly voice. “Can’t go wrong. Only one road down the Arrow. You hit a wider road several miles below, turn right and keep on it until you get to Osquewa. There’s an inn there.”

“Thanks,” barked the Inspector. “Come on, El; this is one hell of a country. God, what swine!”

“Now, now,” said Ellery with desperate rapidity. “You still don’t understand, sir. We
can’t
take that road. It’s on fire!”

There was a little silence; the door opened wider again. “On fire, d’ye say?” said the man suspiciously.

“Miles of it!” cried Ellery, waving his arms. He warmed to his subject. “The whole shooting match! Foothills one mass of flame! A—a monstrous conflagration! The burning of Rome was simply a piddling little campfire compared with it! Why, man, it’s as much as your life is worth just to get within a half mile of it! Burn you crisper than a cinder before you could say antidisestablishmentarianism!” He drew a deep breath, surveying the man anxiously; made a face, swallowed his pride, smiled with childlike faith (thinking of succulent food and already hearing the blessed sound of running water), and said: “Now can we come in?” plaintively.

“Well …” The man scratched his chin. The Queens held their breaths. The issue hung quivering in the balance. Ellery began, as the seconds flew by, to feel that perhaps he had not stated the case strongly enough. He should have spun a veritable saga of tragedy to soften the granite lump occupying this creature’s breast.

Then the man said sullenly: “Wait a minute,” slammed the door in their faces—thus vanishing as miraculously as he had appeared—and left them once more in darkness.

“Why, the gosh-blamed son of a so-and-so!” exploded the Inspector wrathfully. “Did you ever
hear
of such a thing! All this confounded bunk about the hospitality of—”

“Sssh!” whispered Ellery fiercely. “You’ll break the spell. Try to screw that writhing face of yours into a smile! Look pretty, now! I think I hear our friend returning.”

But when the door swept open it was another man who confronted them—a man, one would have said, from a different world. He was impressively tall and generously shouldered, and his smile was slow and warming. “Come in,” he said in a deep pleasant voice. “I’m afraid I must apologize abjectly for the rotten bad manners of my man Bones. Up here we’re a little cautious about night visitors. Really, I’m sorry. What’s all this about a fire down on the mountain road? … Come in, come in!”

Overwhelmed by this excess of hospitality after the tempestuous reception of the surly man, the Queens blinked and gaped and rather dazedly obeyed. The tall, pleasant man in tweeds closed the door softly behind them, still smiling.

They stood in a foyer, warm and comforting and delightful. Ellery, with his habitual and irrelevant restlessness, noted that the etching on the wall which he had glimpsed from the terrace was remarkably fine, etched after the grisly Rembrandt painting,
The Anatomy Lesson.
He had time, as their host closed the door, to wonder at the nature of a man who compelled his guests to be greeted with a realistic revelation of a Dutch cadaver’s viscera. For an instant he felt a chill, looked sidewise at the distinguished features and pleasant expression of the tall man, and ascribed the chill to his depressed physical condition. The Queen imagination, he ruminated, was overwrought; if the man were surgically inclined. … Surgically inclined! Of course. He suppressed a grin. No doubt this gentleman was of the scalpel-wielding profession. Ellery felt better at once. He glanced at his father, but the subtleties of wall ornamentation had apparently escaped the old gentleman. The Inspector was licking his lips and sniffing furtively. Yes, there was the unmistakable odor of roast pork in the air.