Sleuths (10 page)

"Mr. Quinn, you have angered Angkar." The medium's voice was sharply reproachful. "He finds your question inappropriate, frivolous, even mocking. He may deny us further communication and return to the Afterworld."

Mrs. Buckley cried, "Oh no, please, he mustn't go!"

Cobb said angrily, "Damn your eyes, Quinn —"

"Silence!" Vargas, in a sibilant whisper. "We must do nothing more to disturb the spirits or the consequences may be dire. Do not move or speak. Do not break the circle."

The stuffy blackness closed down again. It was an effort for Quincannon to hold still. He regretted his question, though not because of any effect on Angkar and his discarnate legion; he was sure that the table-tipping and levitation would have taken place in any event. His regret was that he had allowed Sabina to glimpse the depth of his frustration, and into the bargain added weight to her already erroneous idea of the nature of his passion. Seduction wasn't his game; his affection for her was genuine, abiding. Hell and damn! Now it might take him days, even weeks, to undo the damage done by
his profligate tongue
—
A sound burst the heavy stillness, a jingling that was not of the silver bell in the jar. The tambourine that had been on the sideboard. Its jingling continued, steady, almost musical in an eerily discordant way.

Vargas's whisper was fervent. "Angkar is still present. He has forgiven Mr. Quinn, permitted us one more chance to communicate with the spirits he has brought with him."

Mrs. Buckley: "Praise Angkar! Praise the spirits!"

The shaking of the tambourine ended. And all at once a ghostly light, pale and vaporous, appeared at a distance overhead, hovered, and then commenced a swirling motion that created faint luminous streaks on the wall of dead black. One of the sitters made an ecstatic throat noise. The swirls slowed, the light stilled again for a moment; then it began to rise until it seemed to hover just below the ceiling, and at last it faded away entirely. Other lights, mere pinpricks, flicked on and off, moving this way and that as if a handful of fireflies had been released in the room.

A thin, moaning wail erupted.

The pinpricks of light vanished.

Quincannon, listening intently, heard a faint ratchety noise followed by a strumming chord. The vaporous light reappeared, now in a different location closer to the floor; at the edge of its glow the guitar could be seen to leap into the air, to gyrate this way and that with no hand upon it. The strumming chord replayed and was joined by other strange music that sounded and yet did not sound as though it were being made by the strings.

For three, four, five seconds the guitar continued its levitating dance, seemingly playing a tune upon itself. Then the glow once more faded, and when it was gone the music ceased and the guitar twanged to rest on the carpet. Nearly a minute passed in electric silence.

Grace Cobb shrieked, "A hand! I felt a hand brush against my cheek!"

Vargas warned, "Do not move, do not break the circle." Something touched Quincannon's neck, a velvety caress that lifted the short hairs there and bristled them like a cat's fur. If the fingers—they felt exactly like cold, lifeless fingers—had lingered he would have ignored the professor's remonstration and made an attempt to grab and hold onto them. But the hand or whatever it was slid away almost immediately.

Moments later it materialized long enough for it to be identifiable as just that—a disembodied hand. Then it was gone as if it had never been there at all.

Another period of silence.

The unearthly moan again.

And a glowing face appeared, as disembodied as the hand, above where Dr. Cobb sat.

The face was a man's, shrouded as if in a kind of whitish drapery that ran right around it and was cut off at a straight line on the lower part. The eyes were enormous black-rimmed holes. The mouth moved, formed words in a deep-throated rumble.

"Oliver? It's Philip, Oliver."

"Philip! I'm so glad you've come at long last." Cobb's words were choked with feeling. "Are you well?"

"I am well. But I cannot stay long. The Auras have allowed me to make contact but now I must return."

"Yes . . . yes, I understand."

"I will come again. For a longer visit next time, Oliver. Next time . . ."

The face was swallowed by darkness.

More minutes crept away. Quincannon couldn't tell how many; he had lost all sense of time and space in the suffocating dark.

A second phantomlike countenance materialized, this one high above Margaret Buckley's chair. It was shimmery, indistinct behind a hazy substance like a luminous veil. The words that issued from it were an otherworldly, childlike quaver—the voice of a little girl.

"Mommy? Is that you Mommy?"

"Oh, thank God! Bernice!" Margaret Buckley's cry was rapturous. "Cyrus, it's our darling Bernice!"

Her husband made no response.

"I love you, Mommy. Do you love me?"

"Oh yes! Bernice, dearest, I prayed and prayed you'd come. Are you happy in the Afterworld? Tell Mommy."

"Yes, I'm very happy. But I must go back now."

"No, not so soon! Bernice, wait —"

"Will you come again, Mommy? Promise me you'll come again. Then the Auras will let me come too."

"I'll come, darling, I promise!"

The radiant image vanished.

Mrs. Buckley began to weep softly.

Quincannon was fed up with this hokum. Good and angry, too. It was despicable enough for fake mediums to dupe the gullible, but when they resorted to the exploitation of a middle-aged woman's yearning for her long-dead child the game became intolerable. The sooner he and Sabina put a finish to it, the better for all concerned. If there was even one more materialization . . .

There wasn't. He heard scratchings, the unmistakable sound of the slate pencil writing on a slate. This was followed by yet another protracted silence, broken only by the faintest of scraping and clicking sounds that Quincannon couldn't identify.

Vargas said abruptly, "The spirits have grown restless. All except Angkar are returning now to the land beyond the Border. Angkar will leave too, but first he will free me from my bonds, just as one day we will all be freed from our mortal ties —"

The last word was chopped off in a meaty smacking noise and an explosive grunt of pain. Another smack, a gurgling moan. Sabina called out in alarm, "John! Something's happened to Vargas!" Other voices rose in frightened confusion. Quincannon pushed up from the table, fumbling in his pocket for a Lucifer. His thumbnail scratched it alight.

In the smoky flare he saw the others scrambling to their feet around the table, all except Professor Vargas. The medium, still roped to his chair, was slumped forward with his chin on his chest, unmoving. Quincannon kicked his own chair out of the way, carried the Lucifer across to the nearest wall sconce. The gas was off; he turned it, and applied the flame. Flickery light burst forth, chasing shadows back into the room's corners.

Outside in the hallway, hands began to beat on the door panel. Annabelle's voice rose shrilly: "Let me in! I heard a cry . . . let me in!"

"Dear Lord, he's been stabbed!"

The exclamation came from Cyrus Buckley. There were other cries overridden by a shriek from Mrs. Buckley; Quincannon turned in time to see her swoon in her husband's arms. He ran to where Sabina stood staring down at the medium's slumped body.

Stabbed, for a fact. The weapon, a dagger whose ornate hilt bore a series of hieroglyphics, jutted from the back of his neck. Another wound, the first one struck for it still oozed blood, showed through a rent in Vargas's robe lower down, between the shoulder blades.

Ashen-faced, Dr. Cobb bent to feel for a pulse in the professor's neck. He shook his head and said, "Expired," a few moments later.

"It isn't possible," his wife whispered. "How could he have been stabbed?"

Buckley had lowered his wife onto one of the chairs and was fanning her flushed face with his hand. He said shakily, "How—and by whom?"

Quincannon caught Sabina's eye. She wagged her head to tell him, she didn't know, or couldn't be sure, what had happened in those last few seconds of darkness.

The psychic assistant, Annabelle, was still beating on the door, clamoring for admittance. Quincannon went to the sideboard. The brass key lay where Vargas had set it down before the séance began; he used it to unlock the door. Annabelle rushed in from the dark hallway, her eyes wide and fearful. She gave a little moan when she saw Vargas and ran to his side, knelt to peer into his dead face.

When she straightened again her own face was as white as milk. She said tremulously, "One of you did this?"

"No," Dr. Cobb told her. "It couldn't have been one of us. No one broke the circle until after the professor was stabbed."

"Then . . . it was the spirits."

"He did perceive antagonistic waves tonight. But why would a malevolent spirit —"

"He made all the Auras angry. I warned him but he didn't listen."

Sabina said, "How did he make the Auras angry, Annabelle?"

The woman shuddered and shook her head. Then her eyes shifted into a long stare across the room. "The slates," she said.

"What about the slates?"

"Did the spirits leave a message? Have you looked?"

Quincannon swung around to the sideboard; the others, except for Margaret Buckley, crowded close behind him. The tied slates were in the center of the stack where Vargas had placed them. He pulled those two out, undid the knot in his handkerchief, parted them for his eyes and the eyes of the others.

Murmurs and a mildly blasphemous exclamation from Buckley.

In a ghostlike hand beneath the "John Quinn" signatures on each, one message upside down and backwards as if it were a mirror image of the other, was written
: I Angkar destroyed the evil one.

"Angkar!" Dr. Cobb said. "Why would the professor's guide and guardian turn on him that way?"

"The spirits are not mocked," Annabelle said. "They know evil when it is done in their name and guardian becomes avenger."

"Madam, what are you saying?"

"I warned him," she said again. "He would not listen and now he has paid the price. His torment will continue on the Other Side, until his essence has been cleansed of wickedness."

Quincannon said, "Enough talk and speculation," in authoritarian tones that swiveled all heads in his direction. "There'll be time for that later. Now there's work to be done."

"Quite right," Cobb agreed. "The police —"

"Not the police, Doctor. Not yet."

"Here Quinn, who are you to take charge?"

"The name isn't Quinn, it's Quincannon. John Quincannon. Of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services."

Cobb gaped at him. "A detective? You?"

"Two detectives." He gestured to Sabina. "My partner, Mrs. Carpenter."

"A woman?" Grace Cobb said. She sounded as shocked as if Sabina had been revealed as a soiled dove.

Sabina, testily: "And why not, pray tell?"

Dr. Cobb: "Who hired you? Who brought you here under false pretenses?"

Quincannon and Sabina both looked at Buckley. To his credit, the financier wasted no time in admitting he was their client.

"You, Cyrus?" Margaret Buckley had revived and was regarding them dazedly. "I don't understand. Why would you engage detectives?"

Before her husband could reply, Quincannon said, "Mr. Buckley will explain in the parlor. Be so good, all of you, as to go there and wait."

"For what?" Cobb demanded.

"For Mrs. Carpenter and me to do what no other detective, police officer, or private citizen can do half so well." False modesty was not one of Quincannon's character flaws, despite Sabina's occasional attempts to convince him otherwise. "Solve a baffling crime."

No one protested, although Dr. Cobb wore an expression of disapproval and Annabelle said, "What good are earthly detectives when it is the spirits who have taken vengeance?" as they left the room. Within a minute Quincannon and Sabina were alone with the dead man.

Quincannon turned the key in the lock to ensure their privacy. He said then, "Well, my dear, a pretty puzzle, eh?"

Instead of answering, Sabina fetched him a stinging slap that rattled his eyelids. "That," she said, "is for the rude remark about sharing your bed."

For once, he was speechless. He might have argued that she had precipitated the remark with her own sly comments, but this was neither the time nor the place. Besides, he could not recall ever having won an argument with Sabina over anything of consequence. There had been numerous draws, yes, but never a clear-cut victory. At times he felt downright impotent in her presence. Impotent in the figurative sense of the word, of course.

"Now then," she said briskly, "shall we see if we can make good on your boast?"

They proceeded first to extinguish the incense burner and to open a window so that cold night air could refresh the room, and then with an examination of the walls, fireplace, and floor. All were solid; there were no secret openings, crawlspaces, hidey holes, or trapdoors. Quincannon then went to inspect the corpse, while Sabina examined the jar-encased bell on the table.