With my right hand I got the clasp-knife out of my pocket, and pressed the catch that snapped open the blade. I poked it inside, felt about in empty air, and ran it along the sash. Nothing. Along the sill there seemed to run, as far as I could discern in the dim light, a tiny groove. I drew the blade of the knife along it.
Look out, I tell you. Don't touch that window. Don't touch —.
And then, with a crash like a guillotine, the window fell.
It seemed to leap or spring at me, because the dim light flashed on its pane as it dropped, and the crash filled the world with noise. I went back like a hinge, flapping against the wall, and only my grip on the window-frame kept me up. That window snapped off the blade of the knife as it might have snapped off something else. For I had caught a gleam of something else as it fell. There was good reason for that, groove in the sill. Into the underside of the window was fastened a whetted blade, the whole length of the window. If I had automatically reached inside and taken hold of the inner edge, the pressure of my fingers or the weight of my hand across the sill would have brought down that miniature guillotine. And four of my fingers would now be lying on the sill, shorn off just above the palm.
These thoughts go fast. I know they go fast, because the knife had fallen out of my hand when I lurched back against the wall. And the whole explanation and picture of that little guillotine went through my head before I heard the knife slap in the branches of a tree below.
I stood for a second, and shut my eyes. I would have given a thousand pounds for just two seconds to relax my legs and sit down.
If all the windows were fitted up like this, it was useless to try getting in. But I was now more afraid to go back than to go forward, since it meant letting go something to which I could hold. I shut my mind against fancies, and edged along the intervening distance to the next window; but the fancies were thick nevertheless. The next window was closed, but it was not locked. I gave it an experimental push with shaky fingers on the glass, and it raised about an inch, then an inch more. There seemed to be no groove inside. It must be tested. I caught the side of my loose coat, wrenched it round and up, and thrust it through the aperture; then yanked the window shut.
The coat was not sliced by another such neat mechanism, as I discovered when I pulled it out. I pushed the window up, risked my luck against more guillotine booby-traps, and tumbled through to safety.
Curtains were drawn over this window. It was very dark inside the room, for the dim light showed only the edge of a colourless carpet. I stood entangled in the curtains, wiping my forehead with them. The only other light was under the sill of the door leading to the hall. There seemed to be nothing sinister here. After a decent interval for the stiffening of the legs, I struck a match.
It was a study, right enough. The match showed books somewhere, and a couple of etchings on the wall. Moreover, I had got the desk first shot; it was against the wall between the two windows, and I found it when my hand moved to the left. It was a desk after the French pattern, high, narrow, and with a folding lid, made of polished rosewood and certainly not of a sort to safeguard valuables. The key was in the lock. I struck another match and opened the lid. There were pigeon-holes on either side, stuffed with papers-except the pigeon-hole on the upper left-hand side. Here, exactly according to plan, there was a solitary envelope. I touched it gingerly, but no trap showed a fang. It was only when I pulled it out (the flap was gummed down, and it was sealed with red wax) that I felt something on my fingers.
Lamp-black.
A thick coating of it had been smeared on the wood round the envelope, so that whoever touched it would take away traces. I stood staring at it, trying to find the trap.
It could have been no actual noise in the room which made me turn round, except perhaps the faint flapping of the blind. Nor was there even an impression that anyone had moved. Yet I struck a third match, and moved forward into the room..
The first thing I saw was a small round table on which stood a bottle bearing a red-and-blue label, and a single glass. Then, beyond it, a long table with a padded chair. Then a reddish smoking-cap stuck up at an angle; then eyeballs glazed with death, and a face distorted with strychnine. And, just before the match burnt my fingers and went out, I saw Paul Hogenauer sitting in the chair grinning at me.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Guillotine-Window
There are sights which do not penetrate deeply into the mind because the mind refuses to credit them. The mind says: You didn't see this. You couldn't have seen it. The thing remains stuck there as flat and shallow as a picture post-card, but as vivid. Then common sense begins to assert itself, and your five wits to tick again, and you realize that you did see it.
Paul Hogenauer, in his red fez and with his twisted grin, could not be sitting in that chair. But he was.
Even the brief light of that match, when it went out, had made images expand and contract before my eyes in the dark. I stood looking at the dark, seeing Hogenauer as plainly as I had seen him a moment ago. He had slipped down in the chair from the position he had assumed in Moreton Abbot some seventy-odd miles away. His chin was thrust up a little more, and his head turned a little more to one side, as though he were contemplating an artistic effect.
The first thing that occurred to me was the sentence H.M. had spoken that night, his first mention of Hogenauer's new theory: "There's something about being able to transfer himself through the air, unseen, like Albertus Magnus." Well, he appeared to have done it. A dead man had done it.
I backed away two steps, and bumped into a chair, and mechanically sat down. In one hand I still had the envelope, which seemed to be rather a weighty envelope; in the other I had a sliver of a burnt match. The match I dropped on the floor. The envelope, with an equally mechanical motion, I put into my pocket. Striking more matches would be no good. There had come over me a craving for light, a frightened craving which brought me up out of the chair: and I had to tell myself to go steady, or the hag and the hungry goblin would have easy prey. On the top of the rosewood desk there had been a little lamp with a dull-yellow shade. At least I could find the desk again in the dark, for it was between the two windows. I groped across to it, feeling my way gently, and pulled the chain of the lamp.
It was still there, sitting in the padded chair. I remember wondering vaguely whether the room as well would be exactly like that little suburban parlour at "The Larches." It was not. It was a big, high room, more severe and with a black-and-white taste as sharply defined as the lines of the etchings on the walls. Although there were not many books, there were a great many neat stacks of papers. The fireplace was in the right-hand wall as you stood with your back to the windows. The table faced it from some distance down the room, so that the dead man siting behind it would have the western light from the far window over his right shoulder rather than his left….
Someone tapped on the window from behind. I whirled round, and saw Evelyn outside the guillotine-window. She was trying to push it up, even as she stared through at the dead man.
To have shouted, to have made a violent gesture of any sort, might have made her lose her grip on that window; for it is not to be denied that she was very pale, and that her long-lashed eyes looked enormous, almost ghostly, behind the glass. But for her to get that window up would mean the fall of the knife across her fingers, like a paper-cutting block in a newspaper office. The devil was playing his fish on a long line tonight, and I don't doubt he enjoyed it. But it was the worst moment in the affair. I don't suppose I could have shouted even if I had wished to. I moved over slowly, blotting out the sight of the dead man and trying to hold her eye. Someone kept repeating steadily and monotonously: