There was an agony in her eyes that forbade the truth, so I lied to her.
"I can comfort you as to that, at least. Your husband died of entirely natural causes—from a blood clot in the brain. My examination satisfied me thoroughly as to that. You had nothing to do with it. As for the doll—you had an unusually vivid dream, that is all."
She looked at me as one who would give her soul to believe. She said:
"But I heard him die!"
"It is quite possible—" I plunged into a somewhat technical explanation which I knew she would not quite understand, but would, perhaps, be therefore convincing—"You may have been half–awake—on what we term the borderline of waking consciousness. In all probability the entire dream was suggested by what you heard. Your subconsciousness tried to explain the sounds, and conceived the whole fantastic drama you have recited to me. What seemed, in your dream, to take up many minutes actually passed through your mind in a split second—the subconsciousness makes its own time. It is a common experience. A door slams, or there is some other abrupt and violent sound. It awakens the sleeper. When he is fully awake he has recollection of some singularly vivid dream which ended with a loud noise. In reality, his dream began with the noise. The dream may have seemed to him to have taken hours. It was, in fact, almost instantaneous, taking place in the brief moment between noise and awakening."
She drew a deep breath; her eyes lost some of their agony. I pressed my advantage.
"And there is another thing you must remember—your condition. It makes many women peculiarly subject to realistic dreams, usually of an unpleasant character. Sometimes even to hallucinations."
She whispered: "That is true. When little Mollie was coming I had the most dreadful dreams—"
She hesitated; I saw doubt again cloud her face.
"But the doll—the doll is gone!" she said.
I cursed to myself at that, caught unawares and with no ready answer. But McCann had one. He said, easily:
"Sure it's gone, Mollie. I dropped it down the chute into the waste. After what you told me I thought you'd better not see it any more."
She asked, sharply:
"Where did you find it? I looked for it."
"Guess you weren't in shape to do much looking," he answered. "I found it down at the foot of the kid's crib, all messed up in the covers. It was busted. Looked like the kid had been dancing on it in her sleep."
She said hesitantly: "It might have slipped down. I don't think I looked there—"
I said, severely, so she might not suspect collusion between McCann and myself:
"You ought not to have done that, McCann. If you had shown the doll to her, Mrs. Gilmore would have known at once that she had been dreaming and she would have been spared much pain."
"Well, I ain't a doctor." His voice was sullen. "I done what I thought best."
"Go down and see if you can find it," I ordered, tartly. He glanced at me sharply. I nodded—and hoped he understood. In a few minutes he returned.
"They cleaned out the waste only fifteen minutes ago," he reported, lugubriously. "The doll went with it. I found this, though."
He held up a little strap from which dangled a half–dozen miniature books. He asked:
"Was them what you dreamed the doll dropped on the dressing table, Mollie?"
She stared, and shrank away.
"Yes," she whispered. "Please put it away, Dan. I don't want to see it."
He looked at me, triumphantly.
"I guess maybe I was right at that when I threw the doll away, Doc."
I said: "At any rate, now that Mrs. Gilmore is satisfied it was all a dream, there's no harm done."
"And now," I took her cold hands in mine. "I'm going to prescribe for you. I don't want you to stay in this place a moment longer than you can help. I want you to pack a bag with whatever you and little Mollie may need for a week or so, and leave at once. I am thinking of your condition—and a little life that is on its way. I will attend to all the necessary formalities. You can instruct McCann as to the other details. But I want you to go. Will you do this?"
To my relief, she assented readily. There was a somewhat harrowing moment when she and the child bade farewell to the body. But before many minutes she was on her way with McCann to relations. The child had wanted to take "the boy and girl dolls." I had refused to allow this, even at the risk of again arousing the mother's suspicions. I wanted nothing of Madame Mandilip to accompany them to their refuge. McCann supported me, and the dolls were left behind.
I called an undertaker whom I knew. I made a last examination of the body. The minute puncture would not be noticed, I was sure. There was no danger of an autopsy, since my certification of the cause of death would not be questioned. When the undertaker arrived I explained the absence of the wife—imminent maternity and departure at my order. I set down the cause of death as thrombosis—rather grimly as I recalled the similar diagnosis of the banker's physician, and what I had thought of it.
After the body had been taken away, and as I sat waiting for McCann to return, I tried to orient myself to this phantasmagoria through which, it seemed to me, I had been moving for endless time. I tried to divest my mind of all prejudice, all preconceived ideas of what could and could not be. I began by conceding that this Madame Mandilip might possess some wisdom of which modern science is ignorant. I refused to call it witchcraft or sorcery. The words mean nothing, since they have been applied through the ages to entirely natural phenomena whose causes were not understood by the laity. Not so long ago, for example, the lighting of a match was "witchcraft" to many savage tribes.
No, Madame Mandilip was no "witch," as Ricori thought her. She was mistress of some unknown science—that was all.
And being a science, it must be governed by fixed laws—unknown though those laws might be to me. If the doll–maker's activities defied cause and effect, as I conceived them, still they must conform to laws of cause and effect of their own. There was nothing supernatural about them—it was only that, like the savages, I did not know what made the match burn. Something of these laws, something of the woman's technique—using the word as signifying the details, collectively considered, of mechanical performance in any art—I thought I perceived. The knotted cord, "the witch's ladder," apparently was an essential in the animation of the dolls. One had been slipped into Ricori's pocket before the first attack upon him. I had found another beside his bed after the disturbing occurrences of the night. I had gone to sleep holding one of the cords—and had tried to murder my patient! A third cord had accompanied the doll that had killed John Gilmore.
Clearly, then, the cord was a part of the formula for the direction of control of the dolls.
Against this was the fact that the intoxicated stroller could not have been carrying one of the "ladders" when attacked by the Peters doll.
It might be, however, that the cord had only to do with the initial activity of the puppets; that once activated, their action might continue for an indefinite period.
There was evidence of a fixed formula in the making of the dolls. First, it seemed, the prospective victim's free consent to serve as model must be obtained; second, a wound which gave the opportunity to apply the salve which caused the unknown death; third, the doll must be a faithful replica of the victim. That the agency of death was the same in each case was proven by the similar symptoms.
But did those deaths actually have anything to do with the motility of the dolls? Were they actually a necessary part of the operation?
The doll–maker might believe so; indeed, undoubtedly did believe so.
I did not.
That the doll which had stabbed Ricori had been made in the semblance of Peters; that the "nurse doll" which the guards had seen poised on my window–ledge might have been the one for which Walters had posed; that the doll which had thrust the pin into Gilmore's brain was, perhaps, the replica of little Anita, the eleven–year–old schoolgirl—all this I admitted.