Five Fatal Words (13 page)

"It's just like a poison gas."

"We'll go outside. I am going to get mother. I have sent Pierre for the servants.

They've had terrible mists on the Domrey River before, but I've never heard of anything like this and you can hardly breathe. Better go downstairs and put your coat on. This damned stuff may suffocate us if we don't get away from it."

On the floor below the mist was thicker. It was like a great wall, always ahead of one and never quite enveloping one. She had heard of London fogs that actually made the inside of houses misty, but she had never seen one before. The agonizing choking which had awakened her and which had continued since she opened her eyes was now almost unendurable. The mist itself seemed to have the capacity for irritating her throat. Her chest felt as if it had been compressed by heavy weights. Her eyes ran. She found her coat.

Pierre came down the stairs and spoke to her in his accented English. "The servants are leaving in two automobiles. Mrs. Wilbur's chauffeur will bring the car to the door at once. Mr. Lester Wilbur believes that we must get out of the river valley. In my whole life I have seen nothing like this."

"Where is Mr. Cornwall?" Melicent demanded of him.

"He is not here; he is gone away."

"You are sure?"

"Mr. Cornwall and Miss Cornwall and Granger; none of them are here," repeated Pierre positively. "They have gone away."

Melicent could not argue; she heard a car draw up outside and the front door opened. A mist still thicker than that inside the house poured through the vertical oblong made by the door. It was cold and clinging and when it struck her face she found it almost impossible to breathe in it. The ringing she had noticed in her ears when she awoke became louder. Her chest rose and fell at a rapid rate and she noticed drowsily that their voices were hoarse. She thought she was going to faint.

The chauffeur spoke from some invisible place nearby. "Mrs. Wilbur's limousine is outside."

Melicent made no move toward the car. Was Pierre right in his certainty that Miss Cornwall, Donald, and Granger had all gone away? If so, what did that fact mean? At this moment of her indecision, Lester leaped downstairs.

"My mother has fainted. We must have a doctor here. She was choking terribly."

He began to cough so that he could not speak for a long time and then only by the greatest effort managed to say, "Could you telephone?"

"I'll try."

She switched on the lights in the big front room and went to the telephone. She lifted up the receiver and sat for a considerable time repressing her desire to choke, but there was no answer, no sound. She concluded abruptly that the wire was dead. Probably the operators in the town had been driven away from their switchboards by the same fog. Finally she hung up.

She could dimly see the chauffeur still standing in the hall. He had a handkerchief over his nose and mouth.

There was nobody else downstairs. She went up to Mrs. Wilbur's room. Lester was kneeling beside his mother's bed, frantically chafing her hands.

"How soon did the doctor say he'd be here? She's cold as ice."

"I couldn't get the doctor."

"Take the car then. Wait. You can't speak French. You stay here with mother. I'll go for the doctor." He rushed from the room. Melicent sat down on the bed beside Mrs. Wilbur and commenced to rub her hands as Lester had. They were cold. The arms were cold. She felt the face of the woman who lay on the bed and it, too, seemed unnaturally chilly. Her mind was working badly and she was coughing so much now that it made any steady activity impossible. Some one had shut the windows, but the mist in the room did not settle. Mrs. Wilbur opened her eyes and Melicent bent over her.

"Oh!" Mrs. Wilbur managed to convey recognition. "You; it's you."

"Yes," said Melicent. "Don't try to speak. I will stay with you. Your son has gone for a doctor."

The woman choked, shut her eyes, but opened them again and signaled Melicent closer. "I must speak," she gasped. "Listen to me. The message--it came to me--I lied to you"--she was whispering with the greatest difficulty, but she was determined to proceed.

She seemed, indeed, to muster all her strength to speak as if willing to spend her last powers for what she had to say. "The message--came to me--I burned it--but wrote it down--"

Her breath trailed away and her eyes closed. Melicent clasped her close as if with the breath of her own body she could revive her; but Alice Wilbur did not stir. Melicent sat beside her and bent, herself choking: "What shall I do? What shall I do?" she asked herself in a hoarse, pitiful voice.

She pulled herself to her feet in one last effort to do something, to get aid. She ran through the house calling, "Help me, somebody," but before she had finished a complete circuit of the ancient building it dawned on her that she was entirely alone with the dead or dying mistress of the place. The servants had left. Hannah Cornwall had vanished. Granger and Donald were nowhere to be found, and Lester had gone away with the chauffeur.

She went back to Mrs. Wilbur's bedside. Melicent's exertions had exhausted her last resources. She sat down in a chair beside the bed and coughed incessantly. The mist seemed to tear her throat and burn her lungs. She was sure now that in a little while she would lose consciousness. She was fighting to make that period as long as possible. The room began to spin. It was so heavily laden with the poisonous murk that Melicent could scarcely see across it. Her head pounded and she realized dully that her nose was bleeding.

No mist of which she had ever heard held these terrible potentialities. It was more like poison gas than it was like a mist. That thought passed through her mind and its passing stirred her into a last faint flicker of mental activity. Not mist--or at least not wholly mist--but poison gas. Alice Wilbur was another of the Cornwall heirs. She was A in the series which had started with D--next E--now A. When that thought presented itself to her disorganized mind, Melicent screamed feebly, pressed her hand against her mouth, and tried to run from this chamber where she now realized the third murder was taking place.

There was something, too, about a message. Mrs. Wilbur had said something about a message she had lied about. What was that about the message? Melicent fell forward on the floor before she could cross the threshold.

When Melicent opened her eyes she looked into the face of a perfectly strange woman who wore a nurse's costume.

"Ca va mieux, mademoiselle? "

Before Melicent could answer she heard a man's voice. It was a voice speaking in French. She looked around herself quickly and saw that she was lying in a bed in a small white room. A man entered. He was carrying the black satchel which all over the world identifies a doctor. He spoke to her in reasonably good English.

"You are not sleeping any longer, now, mademoiselle? That's good. You have been suffering a great distress. Many people have died of that same distress, but you are young. Your heart is strong. You live! Good! It is right!"

He twirled his small black mustache and sat down on a chair beside her. He took her hand and felt her pulse. "Very much better. It was going too fast, your heart, a little while ago. Much too fast. You were so pale as a white flower when they brought you here this morning. I have many others the same. Some not so lucky as yourself. It is horrible, this--what is the word ?--this cloud."

Melicent's mind was functioning. She remembered the mist. She remembered the terrible night. She remembered falling into an unfathomable oblivion in the bedroom of Mrs. Wilbur. She was about to ask questions when she heard a cheery voice outside her door. It seemed to her that the cheerfulness was slightly forced, but she recognized Donald Cornwall.

"Don't tell me I ne pouvez pas entrer! Don't tell me le medicin est la!" The door was pushed open. "Melicent! Thank God you came through this all right. If I had had the faintest idea of what was happening down here, I believe I'd have gone crazy."

She turned so that she could see him. The doctor glanced at her and then at Donald Cornwall. He patted the girl's hand, rose, and left the room, after promising to return in a little while.

Melicent had been taking stock of herself. She was very weak. Her throat and chest burned and she found that some sort of poultice had been put upon them, but her senses had cleared rapidly and except for a dull headache she was fairly comfortable.

Donald Cornwall crossed the room and took the chair the doctor had vacated. He stared at the girl with an expression she could not understand. He did not speak for so long that she said, "Where were you last night?"

He seemed to summon his mind from distant places. "Funny," he said. He crossed his long legs, took out a cigaret and then returned it to his pocket in respect for her condition. "Funny. About ten-thirty last night Aunt Hannah came down the hall and told me that she had promised her bankers to be in Brussels at nine o'clock to-morrow morning. It is quite a ways to Brussels and there aren't any trains. She said it was very important, because her entire quarterly income depended upon her being there and she asked if I would be good enough to rout out Granger, get the Rolls, and go up with her.

She said she would be safer if it were not known to others that she was making this trip; she said that she had made an arrangement with you so it would seem that she was in her room."

"She did," said Melicent. "But she did not tell me she was leaving."

"She wanted no one else to know. She had figured that we would get to Brussels by two o'clock and that she'd telephone some place along the way for rooms at a hotel.

Said she'd rather start before we'd all gone to bed than try to get up at three o'clock in the morning and drive. We got going and when we stopped on the way to telephone, I sent back a telegram to Aunt Alice, which was to be delivered at nine o'clock this morning, telling her where we were. Granger drove fast and we got up there and went to bed."

Melicent nodded. "I see."

"The first thing this morning we were up and the newsboys were bawling extras. I heard them say something about 'Death Mist in Domrey Valley' and I ran out in my pajamas to get a copy. You must know all about it. You went through it."

"I don't know anything. I just know the mist--"

Donald clinched his jaw. "Poor kid. Well, that fog settled along the river valley here for twelve miles. It took in half a dozen towns and it killed a lot of people."

She asked a question which had been burning in her mind ever since she had become conscious, and which every minute she had expected he would answer. "Did Mrs. Wilbur--"

He shook his head. "She didn't get through. She, and heaven only knows how many other people. Forty or fifty. The civil and medical authorities here are wild. Some of them say it was just a very dense fog and that old people with weak respiratory systems couldn't stand it. Others say that escaping gases from the mills around here were held close to the earth by the fog. These mills are always letting out a lot of poisonous gas, but usually it is dissipated. Anyhow, some people think that the poison from the mills did it."

He combed his fingers through his curly red hair. "I saw one of the early editions that carried the news in Brussels and I dressed like a shot. Didn't even wait for my aunt.

Hopped into the limousine myself and got back here in three hours fiat. I drove up to the house and I found that Lester had come back with a doctor for his mother. It was the doctor who was just in here. He found it was too late to do any good for Aunt Alice, but you were lying there and still breathing, thank God! They brought you down here to the hospital and gave you oxygen."

"Where's Lester?"

"He's next door. He hasn't come around yet. He didn't pass out, I guess, until after they got you here and he had to wait a while for his oxygen. The nurse tells me that he insisted on it." Donald was silent for a long moment. "Funny. I got that bird all wrong. If anybody had asked me who the wettest wet smack on earth was, I would have said my Cousin Lester, but he sure crashed through last night. That lad's entire interior is just one big bunch of spunk when the old bee lands on him. It's pretty bad, you know. Most of the nurses are in bed; one of the doctors died--I guess this town lost about thirty people and as many more in the countryside. Apparently, if you come out of it, you are all right, although they're not even sure of that. I suppose I shouldn't tell you all this because you're pretty sick."

"It would be worse to lie here and wonder what had happened." Melicent stared at the ceiling for a time. "What time is it?"

He looked at his wrist watch. "Half-past one."

"Then I've been unconscious for a long while?"

"Yes, ten hours anyway."

"I feel all right."

"That's good, but you mustn't get up. You must stay in bed a couple of days."

"I suppose so. Has Miss Cornwall come back yet?"

He shook his head negatively. "I don't know what she's done. Probably nothing; probably she hasn't stirred from her room. She sent for me, I suppose, and then for Granger. He will be near her, I hope, when she gets the news about Aunt Alice. I told Granger when I took the Rolls not to let my aunt know about anything until she had to hear it. I hoped I could get back with good news or maybe telegraph her that everything was all right before she got excited about the death mist. But I haven't been able to send her anything pleasant yet."

Melicent looked at him. His face was lined and behind it lurked a ghastly expression which never quite appeared on his features. His eyes were frightened; his skin was pale; and yet usually he was a pleasant, reassuring individual.

She knew the reason for his secret dread. He could not realize how completely she shared his thoughts-thoughts about the Cornwall family and the sudden disastrous doom which had stricken three of its members. She knew that he was worrying, wondering, calculating, whether or not the dreadful fog that had descended upon the Domrey valley could possibly have any connection with the electric light which had killed Everitt Cornwall, and the traces of the rare poison which an autopsy had revealed in his own father.