“I know. That’s what I expected. But it hasn’t worked out that way at all. I phoned Dad this time myself, late yesterday afternoon. I was worried about Scotty. When I told him everything that had happened since Phillips had talked to him, he said, ‘We’ll take the next plane out.’ And he didn’t seem pleased. He sounded worried and upset.”
“And all this time,” I put in, “I thought he was running from me.”
“You?” Kay, startled, looked at me directly. “What do you mean?”
“I was in Miami yesterday.”
They both blinked at me. Kay started to say something more, then stopped.
Merlini scowled at us both. “There are wheels within wheels, I can see that. But let’s take them one at a time. You say you saw the ghost. When did that happen?”
“Early this morning. I went with Leonard, the chauffeur, to meet Dad and the others at the airport after I had bandaged his head. When we got back—”
“Ross,” Merlini interrupted. “Does she always skip around like this? What happened to the chauffeur’s head?”
“He was investigating the ghost. He and Phillips had decided to sit up and see what happened. I was just going up to bed when we heard a loud thumping noise on the second floor. It stopped as soon as we started up the stairs. We found nothing. I didn’t feel as sleepy then as I had. The noise seemed to have come from my bedroom. So I stood watch with them. We heard nothing more until nearly five when the thumping noise began again. Leonard sneaked up quietly in the dark. The noise stopped after a bit, but he didn’t come back. Phillips and I found him unconscious on the hall floor just outside my bedroom. He had a nasty bang on the head and there was a Louis XIV dueling pistol from the gun room lying on the floor beside him.”
“And he had discovered—”
“Nothing at all.”
“Leonard doesn’t scare easy, does he? Tracking the ghost in the dark, that way. Does he agree that it’s something supernatural?”
Kay shook her head. “Not Leonard. He wouldn’t believe in ghosts if they appeared by the dozen at high noon. But, if it isn’t a ghost, it has to go somewhere — and there’s no place for it to go. Dad, because of his valuable firearm collection, has the house wired with the very latest thing in burglar alarms — a photoelectric system. When it’s on, a mouse couldn’t get in or out without setting off an alarm bell that would wake the—” She stopped, realizing what it was she had been about to say.
“You searched the house then?” Merlini asked.
“Phillips and Leonard did.”
“And the alarm was on the whole time?”
“Yes.”
Merlini took out a cigarette and tapped it thoughtfully against the back of his hand. “And, after you had returned from the airport?”
“Phillips met us at the door. He looked a bit white about the gills and was obviously relieved to see us. The ghost had been busy again. He showed us this.”
Kay unsnapped her purse, and took out two sheets of yellowed paper, folded together. She handed them to Merlini. As he opened them out, I saw that they were pages that had been ripped from an old book.
He spread them carefully on his knees, and his eyes, as he looked at them, were round. He looked at Kay once more as if he still expected her to vanish in a puff of smoke. Then he scowled for a long moment at the exhibits without speaking. One was a title page in French.
des
sorciers, devins, magiciens, astrologues, voyants, revenants, âmes en peine, vampires, spectres, esprits malins, sorts jetés, exorcismes, etc., depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’à nos jours
par
LE RÉV. PÈRE MATHIAS DE GIRALDO
dominicain, ancien exorciste de l’Inquisition.
Revue et augmentée par Fornari, Paris, 1846
My French is rustier than the hinges on a fifteenth-century tomb, but, lacking any at all, I could still have seen quite plainly that the Reverend’s unholy treatise was admirably exhaustive — and very appropriate.
The other page, the frontispiece from the same volume, was equally germane. It bore a steel engraving depicting two rather melodramatically posed old boys who were up to no earthly good in a graveyard. The double line of a cabalistic magic circle was scratched on the ground encircling their feet. One man who held a large book and a wand was apparently intoning the necessary invocation while his awe-struck companion lifted a flaring torch high above his head. In the background, the Gothic towers of an old church rose above the trees, silhouetted by the cold rays of a moon whose full circle in the clouded sky was an awkwardly placed compositional element. A skull and one or two thigh bones lay among the leaves in the foreground, attesting, I suppose, the inefficiency of the sexton in charge.
The picture’s center of interest, however, was none of these things. A ghostly spirit, whose empty eye sockets were dark holes in a fleshless face, stood stiffly at attention before the two necromancers. It was clothed quite modestly in a quaintly designed, ruffled, and, to my taste, comic shroud. It shone like a Mazda bulb with a luminescence of its own so bright that the moon and the torch both seemed unnecessary.
My skeptical attitude was, perhaps, carping. The artist had obviously not had the slightest intention of treating the subject with any humor. And I noticed that Merlini didn’t treat it that way either. On the contrary, he scowled at the drawing, and, when he spoke to Kay, his voice was completely serious.
He pointed to a rough-edged triangular perforation in the upper center of the illustration, and to another, similarly placed, in the title page. It punctured the word “revenants.”
“What made those?” he asked.
“Phillips,” Kathryn said, “found tire pages pinned to the library wall with a revolutionary bayonet from the gun room. The book from which they were torn, and others, mostly on occult subjects, had been pulled down from the shelves and scattered on the floor.”
Merlini’s long forefinger extended and indicated the two sorcerers. “Do you know who these men are?”
“Father mentioned the names, John Dee and Edward Kelly, but I don’t know who they were.”
“I do,” Merlini said. “Doctor John Dee, the rather scared gentleman with the torch, was a sixteenth-century scholar, a boy prodigy who entered Cambridge at fifteen and was later appointed to a fellowship at Trinity by Henry VIII. He gained considerable fame as a lecturer on mathematics and might, even today, be remembered in scientific histories if his interest in astronomy hadn’t been so astrological. He was officially employed, when Elizabeth ascended the throne, to choose the most auspicious day for her coronation. She consulted him on numerous occasions, once hiring him to undo the evil charms of her royal image in wax when one was discovered in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
“In his diary, he claims that the angel Uriel appeared before him one day and presented him with a crystal whose occult properties almost made communication between this world and the next as regularly operating a service as Western Union. Particularly after he had taken on Edward Kelly as his skryer or medium.
“Kelly, although the engraver of this picture seems to have been unaware of it, was pilloried in Lancaster for forging title deeds and suffered the loss of both ears, a mutilation he tried to conceal by wearing a close-fitting black skullcap cut after the fashion of a hangman’s. It gave him a diabolic and sinister appearance which I imagine proved an asset in his line of business. He approached the learned doctor bearing excellent references, an alchemical treatise in manuscript, and a vial of white powder that had been taken by thieves from the sepulcher of Saint Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury. His Grace’s unorthodox hobby of attempting the transmutation of metals via the philosopher’s stone doubtless had something to do with his present reputation as the patron saint of goldsmiths.