"Where's that open into?" Quenlin asked.
"Goes right through the wall," Dr. Skibbine told him. "Opens on the alley, just a foot or two above the ground. There's another wheel just like that one on the outside. A little electric motor turns them."
"Could the thing be dismantled from the outside?"
Dr. Skibbine shrugged. "Easiest way to find that out is to go out in the alley and try it. But nobody could get through there, even if you got the thing off. It's too narrow."
"A thin man might--"
"No, even a thin man is wider than twelve inches across the shoulders, and that's my guess on the width of that hole."
Quenlin shrugged.
"Got a flashlight, Drager?" he asked. "Go on out in the alley and take a look.
Although if somebody did get that thing off, I don't see how the devil they could have--"
Then he looked down at the case and winced. "If everybody's through looking at this for the moment," he said, "for crying out loud put a sheet over it. It's giving me the willies. I'll dream about ghouls tonight."
The word hit me like a ton of bricks. Because it was then I remembered that we had talked about ghouls early that very evening. About--how had Mr. Paton put it?--"ghosts, ghouls, vampires, werewolves," and about a morgue being a good place for ghouls to hang around; and about--
Some of the others were looking at me, and I knew that Dr. Skibbine, at least, was remembering that conversation. Had he mentioned it to any of the others?
Sergeant Wilson was standing behind the other men and prob-ably didn't know I could see him from where I stood, for he surreptitiously crossed himself.
"Ghouls, nuts!" he said in a voice a bit louder than necessary. "There ain't any such thing. Or is there?"
It was a weak but dramatic ending. Nobody answered him.
Me, I had had enough of that morgue for the moment. Nobody had put a sheet over the case because there was not one available downstairs.
"I'll get a sheet," I said and started up for the office. I stumbled on the bottom step.
"What's eating--" I heard Quenlin say, and then as though he regretted his choice of words, he started over again. "Some-thing's wrong with the kid. Maybe you better send him home, Doc."
He probably didn't realize I could hear him. But by that time I was most of the way up, so I didn't hear the coroner's answer.
Wildest Talent
From the cabinet I got a sheet, and the others were coming up the steps when I got back with it. Quenlin handed it to Wilson.
"You put it on, Sarge," he said.
Wilson took it, and hesitated. I had seen his gesture downstairs and I knew he was scared stiff to go back down there alone. I was scared, too, but I did my Boy Scout act for the day and said:
"I'll go down with you, Sergeant. I want to take a look at that ventilator."
While he put the sheet over the broken case, I stared up at the ventilator and saw the bent vane. As I watched, a hand reached through the slit between that vane and the next and bent it some more.
Then the hand, Bill Drager's hand, reached through the widened slit and groped for the nut on the center of the shaft on which the ventilator wheel revolved.
Yes, the ventilator could be removed and replaced from the outside. The bent vane made it look as though that had been done.
But why? After the ventilator had been taken off, what then? The opening was too small for a man to get through and besides it was twelve feet above the glass display case.
Sergeant Wilson went past me up the stairs, and I followed him up. The conversation died abruptly as I went through the door, and I suspected that I had been the subject of the talk.
Dr. Skibbine was looking at me.
"The cap's right, Jerry," he said. "You don't look so well. We're going to be around here from now on, so you take the rest of the night off. Get some sleep."
Sleep, I thought. What's that? How could I sleep now? I felt dopy, I'll admit, from lack of it. But the mere thought of turning out a light and lying down alone in a dark room--huh-uh! I must have been a little lightheaded just then, for a goofy parody was running through my brain:
A ghoul hath murdered sleep, the innocent sleep, sleep that knits . . .
"Thanks, Dr. Skibbine," I said. "I--I guess it will do me good, at that."
It would get me out of here, somewhere where I could think without a lot of people talking. If I could get the unicorns and rhinoceros out of my mind, maybe I had the key. Maybe, but it didn't make sense yet.
I put on my hat and went outside and walked around the building into the dark alley.
Bill Drager's face was a dim patch in the light that came through the circular hole in the wall where the ventilator had been.
He saw me coming and called out sharply, "Who's that?" and stood up. When he stood, he seemed to vanish, because it put him back in the darkness.
"It's me--Jerry Grant," I said. "Find out anything, Bill?"
"Just what you see. The ventilator comes out, from the outside. But it isn't a big enough hole for a man." He laughed a little off-key. "A ghoul, I don't know. How big is a ghoul, Jerry?"
"Can it, Bill," I said. "Did you do that in the dark? Didn't you bring a flashlight?"
"No. Look, whoever did it earlier in the night, if somebody did, wouldn't have dared use a light. They'd be too easy to see from either end of the alley. I wanted to see if it could be done in the dark."
"Yes," I said thoughtfully. "But the light from the inside shows."
"Was it on between midnight and two?"
"Um--no. I hadn't thought of that."
I stared at the hole in the wall. It was just about a foot in diameter. Large enough for a man to stick his head into, but not to crawl through.
Bill Drager was still standing back in the dark, but now that my eyes were used to the alley, I could make out the shadowy outline of his body.
"Jerry," he said, "you've been studying this superstition stuff. Just what is a ghoul?"
"Something in Eastern mythology, Bill. An imaginary creature that robs graves and feeds on corpses. The modern use of the word is confined to someone who robs graves, usually for jewelry that is sometimes interred with the bodies. Back in the early days of medicine, bodies were stolen and sold to the anatomists for purposes of dissection, too."
"The modern ones don't--uh--"
"There have been psychopathic cases, a few of them. One happened in Paris, in modern times. A man named Bertrand. Charles Fort tells about him in his book Wild Talents."
"Wild Talents, huh?" said Bill. "What happened?"
"Graves in a Paris cemetery were being dug up by something or someone who--" there in the dark alley, I couldn't say it plainly--"who--uh--acted like a ghoul.
They couldn't catch him but they set a blunderbuss trap. It got this man Bertrand, and he confessed."
Bill Drager didn't say anything, just stood there. Then, just as though I could read his mind, I got scared because I knew what he was thinking. If anything like that had happened here tonight, there was only one person it could possibly have been.
Me.
Bill Drager was standing there silently, staring at me, and wondering whether I--
Then I knew why the others had stopped talking when I had come up the stairs just a few minutes before, back at the morgue. No, there was not a shred of proof, unless you can call process of elimination proof. But there had been a faint unspoken suspicion that somehow seemed a thousand times worse than an accusation I could deny.
I knew, then, that unless this case was solved suspicion would follow me the rest of my life. Something too absurd for open accusation. But people would look at me and wonder, and the mere possibility would make them shudder. Every word I spoke would be weighed to see whether it might indicate an unbalanced mind.