“To the Dee-Kelly partnership, the latter also brought a vivid imagination, and their hermetical researches were interspersed with long sessions of crystal gazing during which Kelly reported some remarkable visions. On one occasion he stated that he saw a nude female spirit who insisted that he and the doctor should exchange wives. Kelly, at the moment, was on bad terms with his own. He got away with it, too. And, if you think I’m making this up as I go along, the manuscript outlining this curious communal arrangement still exists in Dee’s own handwriting.”
“Good God!” I protested weakly. “Footnotes too!”
Merlini ignored my critical snort and went merrily ahead with his biographical essay. “On a later trip to the continent, Kelly so impressed even the German Emperor, Maximilian II, with a prospectus of his alchemical prowess that he was made a marshal of Bohemia. He was, however, a bit tardy in turning out gold by mass-production methods and the impatient emperor imprisoned him with orders to put up or else. Kelly, on the spot, tried to escape via the traditional bed-sheet method, took a tumble, and died of injuries received. Doctor Dee, having returned to his home at Mortlake, eventually—”
“Class,” I broke in impatiently, “is dismissed.”
Merlini, once started on a history of magic, either white or black, was all too likely to deliver an oration that carried it in extensive detail right on up to the present day, with an added appendix of predictions as to its future.
“Dee and Kelly are an interesting pair,” I protested, “but there’s a contemporary ghost under discussion, have you forgotten?”
He shook his head. “No, hardly. I was just wondering why he took the trouble to hunt through those books for this particular picture and title page. I thought that possibly the background might suggest what he had in mind.” He looked at Kathryn again. “Or is it a female haunt?”
Kay smiled, but it was a pale ghost of a smile and her gloved fingers played nervously with the purse in her lap. “No. It’s a man. We were all standing there, by the library door, looking at that picture and listening to Phillips when something made me glance up toward the head of the stairs.”
Kay’s fingers tightened on the purse, their nervous motion gone. Her voice was a low half whisper. “It stood there looking clown at us, watching very quietly as if it had been there for a long time. I cried out, I think, and Father, who had been examining the torn pages, dropped them. He stood in front of me and I saw his face as he turned. It was as if something had struck him a violent physical blow. Dunning stared upward too, apparently almost as shocked as Father. Something struck me heavily in the back so that I stumbled forward and almost fell. Anne had fallen in a faint.
“And then, quickly, the figure moved. The upper hall, even in the daytime, is shadowy and dark. It seemed to melt back into it. And, just as it vanished, the doorbell rang.
“Phillips had started uncertainly toward the stairs. Now he stopped, came back and threw open the door, thankful, I think, for the excuse. Francis Galt stood outside the door. Father had phoned him from the airport.
“‘Well,’ he said, ‘where’s your ghost? I’ve come to—’
“He saw Anne’s body on the floor, and he stopped. Dunning, pointing, said, ‘It’s up there. We saw it just now!’ It was the first time I’ve ever seen Dunning upset.
“Galt didn’t ask any questions. He went up the steps three at a time. Phillips followed him, though not quite so fast. And that’s all.”
“All?” Merlini said. “Then Galt found nothing?”
“Nothing. He searched the house. And yet the alarm system was still operating.”
“The front door,” Merlini asked. “Isn’t that hooked in with the system? You and the others and then Galt had just come through it.”
“It can be opened without disturbing the alarm as long as it’s done from the inside. There’s a switch there that frees that door. But that was the only way out and we all stood in front of it.”
“The only way out,” Merlini said slowly, “for anyone but a ghost. You haven’t told us the most important thing, you know.”
Kathryn looked puzzled.
“The ghost. You haven’t told us what he looked like.”
Kay glanced again at the engraving in Merlini’s hand. “I’m afraid he wasn’t as orthodox as Doctor Dee’s ghost. He wasn’t luminous and his clothes were ordinary enough, except that they seemed to be very dirty, as if he had been lying on the round. They were streaked with dried mud. He wore a black hat that was crumpled and out of shape, and a dark overcoat. His face was thin and sharp with deep black eyes — and as white as paper. He had a thin mustache that curved down around his mouth and a black short-cropped beard.
“And — oh yes, Galt did find one thing, a small piece of dried clay where the figure had stood watching us. There were two pine needles embedded in it.”
Chapter Seven:
Haunted House
Kathryn’s description of the ghost was, to me, just a bit anticlimactic. Its effect on Wolff, Dunning, and Anne had led me to expect something a bit more in the Gothic manner, a pale, gibbering, wraithlike phantom, or some monstrous evil shadow of impalpable terror out of Bulwer-Lytton, James, or Machen. Later, when I found out what had been in Wolff’s mind, and in Anne’s and Dunning’s, I realized that the ghost was all anyone could desire — and then some.
I didn’t know what Merlini thought of the apparition as described, but I knew he wasn’t going to be able to resist it. Kay had given him so much else besides — a strange disappearance, poltergeist phenomena in carload lots, and a problem that paralleled the underwater coffin escape. If Francis Galt’s search of the house had been thorough — and he’d had plenty of experience along those lines — and if the ghost was anything other than the ectoplasmic shade it pretended to be, then it had somehow escaped a house guarded as securely as though it too, like the coffin, had been bolted and submerged under water.
Merlini frowned up at the empty stage, then glanced again at Kay. I didn’t need to be a mind reader to know what he was thinking. The show, on the dizzy edge of financial disaster, needed his undivided attention. And yet, the story she told was every bit as tempting as any that Scheherazade had ever left unfinished.
“And still,” he asked, “there’s no sign of the missing boatkeeper?”
Kay shook her head, scowling. “No. None. And Dad flatly refuses to report it. He won’t, or pretends he won’t, believe that anything can have happened to Scotty. But he protests a little too much. I think he knows more than he’ll admit about what’s going on out there. And whatever it is, he’s scared to death of it. I’m afraid that—” Her voice trailed off as if she wasn’t quite sure what it was she feared.
“I do wish,” Merlini said slowly, “that this ghost had picked some other house to haunt. I put the skids under one of Dudley Wolff’s ghosts once, and he didn’t like it at all. He wouldn’t let me touch any haunt of his with a ten-foot pole. And he certainly wouldn’t be caught dead with any of his folding money invested in a show that I—”
“But,” Kay objected, “don’t you see? It’s different this time. He’s not afraid you might expose the ghost as a fake; he’s scared that no one can. And he’s so sure it’s the real thing he’ll jump at the chance to show you up, to make you admit that ghosts can be made of something besides cheesecloth.”
“Maybe so, but your father is a solid mass of sales resistance. If he’s as sold on this ghost as you say, there’s only one way to change his mind. I’d have to catch the spook and deliver it up, tied securely hand and foot, with a doctor’s affidavit swearing that it was thoroughly alive and kicking and not the least little bit dead. Not only that, but I’d have to come up with neatly dovetailed, watertight, ironclad solutions to the half-dozen secondary puzzles you’ve served up. Even then I’d get an argument. I did last time. Proving Dudley Wolff wrong is no way to induce him to invest money in—”