Flint replaced the paper. “Tucker, get your stuff and make a cast. Compare it with Wolff’s, Dunning’s, and Haggard’s shoes, every pair you can find.”
As Tucker nodded and hurried off Merlini said, “Lieutenant, take a look at friend Douglass. The subject of footprints and shoes seems to bother him. He’s positively white about the gills. I wonder—”
He didn’t have to wonder long. The sudden spotlight of our attention increased Scotty’s perturbation tenfold. If I ever saw a man who looked as if he wanted to run like hell, Scotty was it.
“Okay,” Flint snapped. “Step over here, Douglass.”
The man shuffled over and lifted a foot for the lieutenant’s inspection reluctantly. I didn’t need to see what Flint saw to know that Merlini’s shot had put a hole right smack through the center of the target. Scotty’s expression was as eloquent as the markings on his rubber heels.
“I guess this time you talk, don’t you, Scotty?” Flint stood up. He aimed his forefinger at the grave. “What do you know about what’s buried in there?”
Scotty wouldn’t look where Flint pointed, nor would he look at Flint. His eyes cast quick nervous glances about him as though he hoped for some chance of escape, or as if afraid that he might see something he did not want to see.
He spoke haltingly. “I–I saw Mr. Wolff, Dunning, and the doctor carry something out of the house — a big heavy bundle it was, wrapped in a blanket. I—”
Flint cut in. “When was this?”
“A week ago, Saturday night. They carried spades and they came up here.”
“You followed them?”
The boatkeeper nodded. “I stayed back under the trees and watched. I saw them digging. Then they buried what it was they had, and covered it up.”
Haggard, beside me, said, “I’ll be damned.”
There was fire in Flint’s eyes, and in his voice. “And then what did you do?”
“I–I went back too. But then I was thinkin’ it o’er, an’ it did look verra fishy.” The emotional tension that pulled at Scotty brought his burr back again. “An’ the more I thought, the more I dinna like it at a’. So then I got a spade—”
“How much time did you spend at this thinking, Scotty?” Merlini asked.
“’Twas an hour before I went back. I had to make rounds first. An’ I dug in where they hae been diggin’. And—” he looked accusingly at Haggard—“it was a body I found.” Scotty grew incoherent. “A dead body — it hae to be dead — it was lyin’ there a’ that time, and then— then—”
“Then what, Scotty?” Flint sounded apprehensive.
“You’ll na believe me, but it began to climb up out of that grave after me!”
He was right. The lieutenant didn’t believe him. In an awed voice, he said, “D.t.’s!”
Behind him, one of the men in the grave gave an exclamation and stooped down. When he stood again, he was tugging at a gray-flannel blanket that was streaked with dirt. He looked up into our staring faces.
“D.t.’s?” he said. “Maybe, but there’s no body here now!”
Chapter Fourteen:
Dormice and Fakirs
“Magicians!” Flint exploded disgustedly. “Ghosts! And now zombies! Oh hell!”
I think we all felt the same way, all, that is, except Doctor Haggard. His professional aplomb had taken a severe beating in the last hour or so, but this development, oddly, seemed to restore some of it.
“That,” he said, half to himself, “lets me out.”
Flint heard him. “Oh yeah? And how do you figure that?”
The doctor looked as if he wished he hadn’t spoken. “Well, you can hardly — well, hold me as a material witness unless you have a body, can you?”
“If that,” Flint threatened, “is the reason someone moved the body, he’s got another think coming. It just happens, in spite of the rental-library fiction you read, that a corpus delicti is not a body. All I have to do is prove the fact of death. I don’t need a body, not when I’ve got the signed statements of Douglass, Mrs. Wolff, and an M.D. who happens to be an authority on death and its causes!”
Merlini had his half dollar out again. It flickered back and forth in his fingers wavering between visibility and nothingness. His eye held an enthusiastic gleam and his voice, for the first time in hours, was almost cheerful.
“Lieutenant,” he said, “Scotty’s story is the first lone ray of light to come poking through the thick damp fog of medieval darkness that covers this whole case. Don’t you see that it offers us the first halfway decent explanation of our ghost? We can skip all those dead-end, false-whisker speculations as to who could be impersonating the dead man. Scotty’s story may very well mean that the ghost is the dead man himself! No wonder Dudley Wolff had the wind up! Could anyone want a more authentic haunt?”
“I don’t want any kind,” Flint said bleakly. He eyed the magician like a psychiatrist discovering some new species of lunatic. “Doctor Haggard has certified the man was dead. He’s got no reason to lie about that. I had to drag it out of him.”
“No,” Merlini said. “Perhaps not. But the fingerprints on the files. They match—”
Flint shook his head. “So what? It hasn’t been proved they were made by the man Haggard saw dead and helped bury. They could have been made any time this last week. Are you forgetting that Douglass also said he didn’t come back and dig into this grave until an hour after the burial? He’s admitted he likes his liquor. Just because he thinks that maybe he saw the body move—”
“But I did!” Scotty insisted. “It sat up, and clawed the blanket away from its face! I dinna wait to see wha’ happened then!”
“I wouldn’t let the hour interment bother you too much, Lieutenant,” Merlini said. “Or Doctor Haggard’s diagnosis of death either. Much stranger things have happened. Take the intriguing case of the Thieving Sexton and the Corpse of the Countess of Edgcumbe. She was certified dead, and entombed in the family vault. A sexton who was no better than he should be, if that, returned later and attempted to steal a valuable ring from her ladyship’s finger. As he tried to remove it, the corpse suddenly sat bolt upright in the coffin. The thief, as Scotty here did, as anyone might do, made tracks. Lady Edgcumbe then got out of her coffin and walked, clad in her shroud, to the house where she fainted in her husband’s arms.
“Or take General Robert E. Lee’s mother who was likewise once buried prematurely and saved from an Edgar Allan Poe fate in time’s nick when she recovered consciousness, knocked on her coffin lid, and attracted the attention of the men who were filling in the grave. There have been many similar cases, and I suspect that they may, in part at least, account for the vampire legend.”
“We’re going places fast,” Flint muttered. “Now it’s vampires! Are you trying to tell me that those people were pronounced dead by qualified physicians when they weren’t?”
“Yes,” Merlini nodded. “I was hinting at just that. Illness or hysteria sometimes induces a cataleptic coma in which the pulse and respiration are so feeble they escape detection. In one case the victim, still half-conscious but exhibiting cataleptic symptoms, heard himself pronounced dead and had the dubious privilege of listening to his own funeral service without being able to call out or make any movement. Luckily, he did succeed in doing so before the coffin lid was screwed down. There have been many other instances in which the ending was less happy. In this day and age, however, we needn’t fear burial alive. If the Grim Reaper doesn’t really get us, the embalming process will!”
“That’s ducky,” Flint growled. “And how the hell do you know about the ones who were buried alive if they didn’t live to report? Mind reading? Spirit messages? Or ghostly emanations from the Beyond?” He was being heavily sarcastic.