The flashing, terrible realization of the truth struck at Kent in that last instant, as the old man stepped timidly, almost blindly, toward the nailed door.
“Wait!” he shrilled. “Wait!”
His piercing voice died. Where the old man had been was – nothingness.
A thin wind howled with brief mournfulness around the house, rattling the eaves.
He stood alone on that faded, long-unused veranda. Alone with the comprehension that had, in one dreadful kaleidoscope of mind picture, suddenly cleared up – everything.
And, dominating everything else, was the dreadful fear that he would be too late.
He was running, his breath coming in great gulps. A tiny wind caught the dust that his shoes kicked up from the soft road-bed, and whipped it in little, unpleasant gusts around his nostrils.
The vague thought came that it was lucky he had done so much walking the past month; for the exercise had added just enough strength to bring the long, long mile and a half to the hotel within his powers—
A tangy, unpleasant taste of salt was in his mouth as he staggered up the steps. Inside, he was blurrily aware of the man, Tom, staring at him across the counter. Kent gasped:
“I’ll give you five dollars if you can pack my things and get me to Kempster in time to catch the twelve-o’clock train. And tell me how to get to the insane asylum at Peerton. For Heaven’s sake, make it fast.”
The man goggled. “I had the maid pack your things right after breakfast, Mr Kent. Don’t you remember, this is 17 August.”
Kent glared at him with a blank horror. That prophecy come true. Then what about the other, more awful one—
On the way to Kempster he was vaguely aware of the driver speaking, something about Peerton being a large town, and he’d be able to get a taxi at the station—
From the taxi the asylum showed as a series of long, white buildings, a green, tree-filled inclosure, surrounded by a high iron fence. He was led through an endless, quiet corridor; his mind kept straining past the sedate, white-clothed woman ahead of him. Couldn’t she realize this was life and death?
The doctor sat in a little, bright cozy room. He stood up politely as Kent entered, but Kent waited only for the woman to close the door as she went out.
“Sir, you have a woman here named Mrs Carmody.” He paused a fraction of a second to let the name sink in, then rushed on: “Never mind if you can’t remember her name. It’s true.”
The fine, strong face of the white-haired doctor cleared. “I remember the case.”
“Look!” said Kent desperately. “I’ve just found out the truth about that whole affair; and this is what you’ve got to do – at once:
“Take me to the woman, and I’ll assure her, and you assure her, that she has been found innocent, and will be freed. Do you understand?”
“I think,” said the doctor quietly, “that you had better begin at the beginning.”
Kent had a frantic sense of walls rising up between him and his purpose. “For Heaven’s sake, sir, believe me, there’s no time. I don’t know just how it is supposed to happen, but the prediction that she would be hanged can only come true in—”
“Now, Mr Kent, I would appreciate—”
“Don’t you understand?” Kent yelled. “If that prophecy is not to be fulfilled, you must act. I tell you I have information that will release this woman. And, therefore, the next few minutes are the vital ones.”
He stopped because the man was frowning at him. The doctor said: “Really, Mr Kent, you will have to calm down. I am sure everything will be all right.”
The strained wonder came to Kent, if all sane, be-calm people seemed as maddening as this quiet-spoken doctor.
He thought shakily: “He’d better be careful or they’d be keeping him in here with the rest of the lunatics.”
He began to speak, to tell what he’d heard and seen and done. The man kept interrupting him with incisive questions; and, after a while, it came to Kent, that he would actually have to begin at the beginning to fill in the gaps of this fellow’s knowledge.
He stopped, sat shaky for a moment, struggling to clear his brain, and then with a tense quietness, began again.
He found himself, as the minutes dragged, listening to his own voice. Every time his words speeded up, or rose in crescendo, he would deliberately slow down and articulate every syllable. He reached the point where the Dunne books came into the story, and—
His mind paused in a wild dismay: Good heavens, would he have to explain the Dunne theory of time with its emphasis on time as a state of mind. The rest was unimportant, but that part—
He grew aware that the doctor was speaking, saying: “I’ve read several volumes by Mr Dunne. I’m afraid I cannot accept his theory of multi-dimensional time. I—”
“Listen,” said Kent in a tight voice, “picture an old man in his dotage. It’s a queer, incoherent mind-world he lives in; strange, frequently unassociated ideas are the normal condition; memory, particularly memory, is unutterably mixed up. And it is in that confused environment that somehow once a variation of the Dunne phenomena operated.
“An old man whose time sense has been distorted by the ravages of senility, an old man who walks as easily into the future as you and I walk into the next room.”
“What!”
The doctor was on his feet, pacing the rugged floor. He stared at Kent finally.
“Mr Kent, this a most extraordinary idea. But still I fail to see why Mrs Carmody—”
Kent groaned, then with a terrible effort pulled himself together. “Do you remember the murder scene?”
“Vaguely. A domestic tragedy, I believe.”
“Listen. Mrs Carmody woke up the morning after she thought she’d made everything right for herself and her family, and found a note on her dressing table. It had been lying there all night, and it was from her son, Bill.
“In it, he said he couldn’t go through with her plan. Besides, he didn’t like the farm, so he was going immediately to the city – and in fact he walked to Kempster and caught the train while she was in the theater.
“Among other things, he said in his note that a few days before the old man had acted surprised at seeing him, Bill, still around. The old man talked as if he thought Bill had gone to the city—”
That was what kept stabbing into the woman’s mind. The old man, the interfering old man—
He had, in effect, told Bill that he, Bill, had gone to the city, and so in a crisis Bill had gone.
Gone, gone, gone – and all hope with him. Phyllis would marry Charlie Couzens; and what then? What would become of a poor, miserable woman of forty-five?
The old man, she thought, as she went down the stairs from her room, the old man planned it all. Fiendish old man! First, telling Bill about the city, then suggesting who Phyllis was to marry, then trying to scare her with that hanging—
Hanging—
The woman stopped short in the downstairs hallway, her blue eyes stark, a strange, burning sensation in her brain. Why—
If all the rest came true, then—hanging!
Her mind whirled madly. She crouched for a moment like an animal at bay, cunning in her eyes. They couldn’t hang you unless you murdered someone, and—
She’d see that she didn’t pull anything so stupid.
She couldn’t remember eating breakfast. But there was a memory of her voice asking monotonously:
“Where’s Mr Wainwright?”
“He’s gone for a walk, ma. Hey, ma, are you ill?”
Ill! Who asked a silly question like that. It was the old man who’d be ill when she got through with him.
There was a memory, too, of washing the dishes, but after that a strange, dark gap, a living, evil night flooding her mind . . . gone . . . hope . . . Bill . . . damned old man—