At the door, Finch turned off the lantern and put it down. He opened the heavy vault door an inch and peered out. A full moon cast an eerie silver glow over the cemetery. Finch listened for a moment, hearing nothing. Quietly he opened the door just far enough to reach out and slowly lower the locking handle until it was in its closed position. That done, he reached out with the key, slipped it into the lock and turned the holding tumblers into place. There now, he thought, if the door will crypt’ll be sealed tight again.
Finch leaned his weight against the door. It snapped solidly into place and held firmly.
And that, Finch thought, takes care of any evidence. With the key inside, the crypt of Sheel will never again be opened.
Picking up his lantern, Finch switched it on again and started back for his tunnel. He could not help thinking about Tyron Murfee’s eyes. Were they open or closed? As he passed the coffin, he deliberately flashed the beam of light on it, then tried to steady it.
Finch froze in terror, his blood turning icy, his palms and the bottoms of his feet and the inside of his mouth drawing up in tight, cold panic. The coffin of Tyron Murfee, the last Earl of Sheel, was empty!
“No,” Finch muttered in a quivering whisper, “no, no, no—”
The lantern slipped from his hand; its beam of light flashed and whirled about the crypt as it bounced and tumbled from coffin edge to ier to the ground, finally landing upright between Finch and the tunnel. When it was still, the lantern cast its light straight again, shining brightly on the tunnel hole — now the only way out of the crypt.
And in the hole, twisting and writhing, his face contorted in epileptic madness, was Tyron Murfee, his huge bulk hopelessly stuck in the hole.
Finch, still holding the useless key in one hand, screamed.
Outside the crypt, silence reigned over the cemetery and all in its domain were of the dead.
The China Cottage
by August Derleth
While the ordinary intellect may accept the pattern of coincidence without question, one of superior acumen is apt to prove it a happenstance which beclouds the view.
“My esteemed brother,” said Solar Pons as I walked into our quarters one autumn morning for breakfast, “has a mind several times more perceptive than my own, but he has little patience with the processes of ratiocination. Though there is nothing to indicate it, it was certainly he who sent this packet of papers by special messenger well before you were awake.”
He had pushed the breakfast dishes back, having barely touched the food Mrs. Johnson had prepared, and sat studying several pages of manuscript, beside which lay an ordinary calling card bearing the name Randolph Curwen, through which someone had scrawled an imperative question mark in red ink.
Observing the direction of my gaze, Pons went on. “The card was clipped to the papers. Curwen is, or perhaps I had better say ‘was’, an expert on Foreign affairs, and was known to be a consultant of the Foreign Office in cryptology. He was sixty-nine, a widower, and lived alone in Cadogan Place, Belgravia, little given to social affairs since the death of his wife nine years ago. There were no children, but he had the reputation of possessing a considerable estate.”
“Is he dead, then?” I asked.
“I should not be surprised to learn that he is,” said Pons. “I have had a look at the morning papers, but there is no word of him there. Some important discovery about Curwen has been made. These papers are photographs of some confidential correspondence between members of the German Foreign Office and that of Russia. They would appear to be singuarly innocuous, and were probably sent to Curwen so he might examine them for any code.”
“I assumed,” said an icy voice from the threshold behind me, “that you would have come to the proper conclusion about this data. I came as soon as I could.”
Bancroft Pons had come noiselessly into the room, which was no mean feat in view of his weight. His keen eyes were fixed unswervingly upon Pons, his austere face frozen into an impassive mask, which added to the impressiveness of his appearance.
“Sir Randolph?” asked Pons.
“Dead,” said Bancroft. “We do not yet know how.”
“The papers?”
“We have some reason to believe that a rapprochement between Germany and Russia is in the wind. We are naturally anxious to know what impends. We had recourse to Curwen, as one of the most skilled of our cryptologists. He was sent the papers by messenger at noon yesterday.”
“I take it he was given the originals.”
Bancroft nodded curtly. “Curwen always liked to work with the originals. You’ve had a chance to look them over.”
“They do not seem to be in code,” said Pons. “They appear to be only friendly correspondence between the foreign secretaries, though it is evident that some increase in trade is being contemplated.”
“Curwen was to have telephoned me early this morning. When seven o’clock passed without a call from him, I put in a call. I could not get a reply. So we sent Danvers out. The house and the study were locked. Of course, Danvers had skeleton keys which enabled him to get in. He found Curwen dead in his chair at the table, the papers before him. The windows were all locked, though one was open to a locked screen. Danvers thought he detected a chemical odour of some kind: it suggested that someone might have photographed the papers. But you shall see Curwen. Nothing has been touched. I have a car below. It isn’t far to Cadogan Place.”
The house in Cadogan Place was austere in its appointments. It was now under heavy police guard; a constable stood on the street before the house, another at the door, and yet another at the door of the study, which was situated at one corner of the front of the house, one pair of windows looking out toward the street, the other into shrubbery-grown grounds to a low stone wall which separated the building from the adjacent property. The house was Georgian in architecture, and likewise in its furniture.
When the study door was unlocked. it revealed book-lined walls, the shelving broken only by windows and a fireplace. The walls framed what we had come to see — the great table in the centre of the room, the still-lit lamp, the motionless form of Sir Randolph Curwen, collapsed in his armchair arms dangling floor-ward, his head thrown back, his ace twisted into an expression of agony. Beside him stood, as if also on guard, a man whom Bancroft Pons introduced as Hilary Danvers.
“Nothing has been disturbed, sir.”
Bancroft nodded curtly and waved one arm toward the body. “Sir Randolph, Parker. Your division.”
I went around immediately to examine the body. Sir Randolph had been a thin, almost gangling man, A grey moustache decorated his upper lip, and thin grey hair barely concealed his scalp, Pince-nez, one eyeglass broken, dangled from a black silk cord around his neck He appeared to have died in convulsive agony, but there was certainly no visible wound on his body.
“Heart?” asked Pons.
When I shook my head, he left me to my examination and walked catlike around the room. He examined the windows, one after the other, tested the screen on the hall-opened window to the grounds, and came to a pause at the fireplace, where he dropped to one knee.
“Something has been burned here,” he said. “Part of the original material?”