When they had washed and combed and brushed the dust from their clothes, they went out into the dark corridor.
Ellery shivered. “What do we do now — just hurl ourselves downstairs? Being the perfect guest, and considering the generally mysterious air of this household, I’d rather not blunder in on anyth—”
“God!” whispered the Inspector. He had stopped short in his tracks and gripped Ellery’s arm with convulsive fingers. He was staring with sagging jaw, naked terror in his eyes, gray little face grayer than Ellery had ever seen it, past his son’s shoulder at something down the hall.
His nerves already frayed by the harrowing experiences of the evening, Ellery whirled about. The skin of his arms was prickling, and the flesh was crawling at the base of his scalp.
But he saw nothing unusual; the corridor was dim and empty, as before. Then he heard a faint click! as of a door closing.
“What in God’s name is the matter?” he whispered nervously, searching his father’s horror-struck face.
The Inspector’s taut body relaxed. He sighed and passed a trembling hand over his mouth. “El, I... I— Did you see what I—”
They both jumped at a light footstep behind them. Something large and shapeless was stalking them from the rear, where the corridor was blackest. Two burning eyes... But it was only Dr. Xavier detaching himself from the region of intensest shadows.
“Quite ready, eh?” he said in his deep charming voice, as if he had noticed nothing amiss, although he must have heard the Queens’ tense whispers and — Ellery saw in a flash — must have seen both the Inspector’s horror and the cause of it. The surgeon’s voice was as pure, as rich, as mildly unruffled as it had been a few moments before. He linked their arms in his. “Then let’s go downstairs; shall we? I daresay you’re both ready to do justice to Mrs. Wheary’s little snack.”
And he urged them gently but firmly toward the landing.
As they descended, three abreast on the wide staircase, Ellery stole a glance at his father. Except for a certain slackness about the lips the old man betrayed no sign of his agitation of a moment before. But there was a deep furrow between his gray brows and he was holding himself stiffly erect, as if by a great effort of will.
Ellery shook his head in the half light. All desire for sleep had fled before the excitement boiling in his brain. What mess of wriggling human relationships had they innocently blundered into?
He frowned, treading the steps quietly. There were three major problems which required immediate solution if his restless brain was to relax and succumb to sleep: the cause of the Inspector’s unaccountable and unprecedented horror, the reason their host had lurked near their door in the darkness of the upper corridor, and a rational explanation for the extraordinary fact that Dr. Xavier’s big arm where it touched Ellery’s was as rigid and hard as if the man had died and his body were in the grip of rigor mortis.
Chapter III
The Queer People
In later years Ellery Queen was to remember every brilliant detail of that remarkable night in the Tepee Mountains, with an animate wind whistling about the summit of a peak on which stood a veritable house of mystery. It would not have been so bad, he would point out, had not the palpable blackness of the mountain night provided a dark breeding ground for the phantoms of their imagination. And then, too, the fire miles below worked in and out of their minds, like a plaited thread of phosphorescent wool. Beneath everything they both realized that there was no escaping from the house, that they must eventually confront whatever of evil it concealed — unless they were willing to throw themselves upon the doubtful mercies of the wilderness and the conflagration below.
To make it worse, neither father nor son was offered the opportunity to discuss their common fears in private. Their host did not leave them alone for even a moment. Engulfing the cold pork sandwiches and blackberry tarts on the trays, and the steaming coffee Mrs. Wheary silently provided when they returned to the living room on the main floor, the Queens would gladly have dispensed with the presence of Dr. Xavier. But the big man remained with them, ringing for Mrs. Wheary and ordering more sandwiches and coffee, pressing cigars upon them — in every way except the important one acting the perfect host.
Ellery, watching the man as he ate, was puzzled. Dr. Xavier was not a charlatan nor a sinister figure out of blood fiction. There was nothing of the Cagliari nor of the Cagliostro about him. He was a cultured, handsome, genial man approaching comfortable middle age, with an air of expertness in his profession — Ellery recalled that he was sometimes referred to as “the Mayo of New England” — and a quiet charm which was even more captivating on closer acquaintance. The ideal dinner guest, for example; unquestionably, from his physique, a man of athletic tendencies; a scientist and student and gentleman. But there was something else, something he was concealing... Ellery racked his brains as his jaw rose and fell, but he could think of no explanations except the Thing that had raised the Inspector’s hackles upstairs. Good lord, he thought to himself, it can’t be one of these... these scientific monstrosities! That would be too much, he conceded. The man was a famous surgeon, had performed pioneer work in unexplored surgical fields; but to visualize him as a sort of Wellsian Dr. Moreau... Nonsense!
He eyed his father. The Inspector was eating quietly. Terror had gone. But in its place lurked a sharpness, a sleepless vigilance which he strove to mask under the necessary movements of mastication.
And suddenly Ellery realized something else. The light coming in from the corridor was stronger. There were voices, too — almost normal voices — from that direction where there had been only whispering before. It was as if a veil had been lifted, as if by telepathic command the doctor had influenced the owners of those voices, who had whispered before, to make a pretense of normality.
“And now, if you’ve quite finished,” said Dr. Xavier, surveying the ruins in the two trays with a smile, “suppose we join the others?”
“The others?” echoed the Inspector innocently, as if he had not been suspected the existence of others in the household.
“Why, yes. My brother, my wife, my medical assistant — I do some research up here, you know; quite a laboratory at the rear of the house — and a...” Dr. Xavier hesitated “...a guest. I suspect it’s a little too early to retire—?”
He stopped on an ascending note, as if mutely hoping that the Queens might be willing to forgo the pleasure of meeting “the others” for the more immediate delights of sleep.
But Ellery said quickly: “Oh, we’ve quite recovered; haven’t we, dad?” The Inspector, accustomed to accepting cues, nodded. There was even a certain eagerness in his nod. “I don’t feel a bit sleepy now. And then, after all the excitement,” Ellery added, laughing, “it will be good to plunge into congenial human society again.”
“Yes, yes, naturally,” said Dr. Xavier. There was the faintest note of disappointment in his voice. “This way, gentlemen.”
He conducted them out of the living room across the corridor to a door almost directly opposite. “I suppose,” he said hesitantly, his hand on the knob. “I should explain—”
“Not at all,” said the Inspector heartily.
“But I feel... You see I don’t doubt it’s all a little — odd to you, our behavior tonight,” he hesitated again, “but it’s most uncommonly lonely up here, you know, and the ladies were slightly — ah — alarmed at the sounds of your pounding on the front door. We thought it best to send Bones—”