“Lord!” he gasped. “It’s... it’s colossal! Make the fortune of a Coney Island freak-show impresario. Dad! Look at this.”
The light roused them. Ellery’s last word was drowned in a torrent of animal voices: squeaks and tiny barks and the raucous screeching of fowl. The Inspector, faintly alarmed, pushed into the small compartment and his eyes widened even as his nose wrinkled in disgust.
“Pfui! Smells like the Zoo. Well, I’ll be bedeviled!”
“More,” corrected Ellery dryly, “like the Ark. All we need now is an old gentleman with a flowing beard and patriarchal robes. In pairs! I wonder if they’re consistently male and female!”
Each cage housed two creatures of the same species. There were two queer-looking rabbits, a pair of ruffle-feathered hens, two pinkish members of the guinea-pig tribe, two solemn-faced marmosets... The shelves were full, and upon them were cages inhabited by the weirdest collection of creatures outside an animal trainer’s nightmare, many of which they failed to recognize.
But the miscellaneous nature of the collection was not what startled them. It was the fact that, as far as they could see, each pair of creatures was composed of twins — Siamese twins of the animal kingdom.
And some of the cages were empty.
They quit the laboratory rather in haste, and when the Inspector closed the corridor door behind them he heaved a sigh of relief. “What a place! Let’s get away from here.” Ellery did not reply.
When they reached the juncture of the two corridors, however, he said quickly: “Just a second. I think I’m going to gabble a little with friend Bones. There’s something...” He hurried toward the open kitchen door, the Inspector trotting wearily behind.
Mrs. Wheary whirled at the sound of Ellery’s step. “Oh!... Oh, it’s you, sir. Gave me a turn.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Ellery cheerfully. “Ah, there, Bones. I’m panting to ask you a question.”
The emaciated old man glowered. “Go ahead and ask,” he said sullenly. “I can’t stop your asking.”
“Indeed you can’t. Bones,” said Ellery, leaning against the jamb, “are you by chance a horticulturist?”
The man stared. “A what?”
“A devotee of Mother Nature, with special reference to the old lady’s flowers. I mean to say, are you trying to cultivate a garden in that stony soil outside?”
“Garden? Hell, no.”
“Ah,” said Ellery thoughtfully, “I judged not, despite what Miss Forrest said. And yet this morning you appeared from the side of the house carrying a pickax and spade. I have since investigated that side of the house and there is no sign of the simple aster, the exalted orchid, or the lowly pansy. What the devil were you burying this morning, Bones?”
The Inspector gave voice to an astonished grunt.
“Burying?” The old man did not seem perturbed: rather more surly than before, that was all. “Why, those animals.”
“Bull’s eye,” murmured Ellery over his shoulder. “Empty cages are empty cages, eh?... And why did you have to bury animals, my good Bones? — Ah, that name! I’ve solved it! You were Dr. Xavier’s keeper of the ossuary, as it were. Eh? Well, why did you have to bury animals? Come, come, speak up.”
The yellow snags of teeth showed in a grin. “There’s a smart question. They were dead, that’s why!”
“Quite right. Stupid question. Yet one never knows, Bones... They were the twin animals, weren’t they?”
For the first time something frightened twitched across the man’s wrinkled face. “The twin — the twin animals?”
“I’m sorry if I speak indistinctly,” said Ellery gravely. “The twin animals — t-w-i-n, twin. Eh?”
“Yes.” Bones glared at the floor.
“You buried yesterday’s quota today?”
“Yes.”
“But no longer Siamese, eh, Bones?”
“Don’t know what you mean.”
“Ah, but I’m afraid you do,” said Ellery sadly. “I mean this: Dr. Xavier has for some time been experimenting upon Siamese-twin creatures of the lower species — where in the name of heaven did he get them all? — in an earnest, quite unfiendish, and very scientific attempt to sever them surgically without loss of life to either. Is that right?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” muttered the old man. “You’ll have to ask Dr. Holmes about all that.”
“Scarcely necessary. Some — most — perhaps all of these experiments have been unsuccessful. Whereupon we find you in the unique role of animal undertaker. How much of a graveyard have you out there, Bones?”
“Not much. They don’t take up much space,” said Bones sullenly. “Only once, though, there was a big pair — cows. But mostly little ones. It’s been going on, on and off for over a year. The doctor did do some good ones, I know that.”
“Ah, some were successful? That was to have been expected from a man of Dr. Xavier’s reputed skill. And yet— Well, thank you, old-timer. Good night, Mrs. Wheary.”
“Wait a minute,” growled the Inspector. “If he’s been burying things out there... How do you know it isn’t something—?”
“Something else? Nonsense.” Ellery pulled his father gently out of the kitchen. “Take my word for it, Bones is telling the truth. No, it isn’t that that interests me. It’s the appalling possibility...” He fell silent and walked on.
“How’s that for a shot, Jule?” came the ringing voice of Francis Carreau from the game-room. Ellery stopped, shook his head, and went on. The Inspector followed, biting his mustache.
“It does look queer,” he muttered.
They heard the heavy tread of Smith on the terrace.
Chapter XII
Beauty and the Beast
It was the most stifling night either man had ever experienced. They tossed side by side for three hours in a hell compounded of sticky darkness and acrid air, and then by mutual consent gave up the effort to woo sleep. Ellery crawled out of bed, groaning, and snapped the light on. He groped for a cigarette, pulled a chair to one of the rear windows, and smoked without savor. The Inspector lay flat on his back, cropped mustache moving up and down in a champing mutter, staring at the ceiling. The bed, their nightclothes, were soaked in perspiration.
At five o’clock, with the black sky lightening, they took turns under the shower. Then they dressed listlessly.
Morning dawned brazenly. Even the first faint streaks were dipped in molten heat. Ellery, at the window, blinked out over the valley.
“It’s worse,” he said gloomily.
“What’s worse?”
“The fire.”
The old gentleman put his snuffbox away and went quietly to the other window. From the perpendicular edges of the back of Arrow Mountain thick streamers, mile-long lengths of fluttering gray flannel, curved and lifted to the sun. But the smoke was no longer at the base of the Arrow; it had advanced with silent menace so much farther upward that it seemed to both men to be tickling the summit. The valley was almost invisible. They were floating in air — the summit, the house, themselves.
“It’s like Swift’s island in the sky,” muttered Ellery. “Looks bad, eh?”
“Bad enough, son.”
Without another word they went downstairs.
The house was dipped in silence; no one was about. The crisp chill of a mountain morning strove vainly to get at their damp cheeks as they stood on the terrace and gazed moodily at the sky. Ash and cinders rained steadily now; and although from their vantage point they could see nothing of the world below, the whirling debris of the fire brought up by the winds that incessantly spiraled the mountain told them that the blaze had made alarming progress.