The Last Hieroglyph (39 page)

Jones had lunched with more semblance of appetite than he had believed possible. The day drew on toward five o’clock. The lowering sun filled a westward window with its yellow blaze. Johnson stood up to trim and light a cigar. His strong black shadow was flung on the gold-lit door of the company’s big iron safe in the corner beyond.

The shadow, Jones noted, was not engaged in the same action as its owner. There was nothing like the shadow of a cigar in its outthrust hand. The black fingers seemed trying to manipulate the dial on the safe’s door. They moved deftly, spelling out the combination that opened the safe. Then they made the movement of fingers that draw back a heavy hinged object. The shadow moved forward, stooping and partly disappearing. It returned and stood erect. Its fingers carried something. The shadow of the other hand became visible. Jones realized, with a sort of startlement, that Johnson’s shadow was counting a roll of shadowy bills. The roll was apparently thrust into its pocket, and the shadow went through the pantomime of closing the safe.

All this had set Jones to thinking again. He had heard, vaguely, that Johnson gambled—either on stocks or horses, he couldn’t remember which. And Johnson was the firm’s bookkeeper. Jones had never paid much attention to the bookkeeping, apart from noting cursorily that the accounts always seemed to balance.

Was it possible that Johnson had been using, or meant to use, the firm’s money for irregular purposes? Large sums were often kept in the safe. Offhand, Jones thought that there must be more than a thousand dollars on hand at present.

Oh, well, maybe it was preferable to think that excess cocktails had endowed him with a new brand of heeby-jeebies. It would be better than believing that Johnson was a possible embezzler.

That evening he visited a doctor instead of making the usual round of barrooms.

The doctor frowned very learnedly as Jones described his strange affliction. He took Jones’ pulse and temperature, tested his knee-jerk and other reflexes, flashed a light into his eyes, looked at his tongue.

“You haven’t any fever, and there’s no sign of d.t.,” he reassured finally. “Your nerves seem to be sound though jumpy. I don’t think you’re likely to go insane—at least not for some time. Probably it’s your eyes. You’d better see a good oculist tomorrow. In the meanwhile I’ll prescribe a sedative for your nervousness. Of course you ought to ease up on liquor—maybe the alcohol is affecting your eyesight.”

Jones hardly heard the doctor’s advice. He had been studying the doctor’s shadow, flung across an expensive rug by a tall and powerful floor-lamp. It was the least human and most unpleasant of all the shadows he had yet seen. It had the contours and the posture of a ghoul stooping over a ripe carrion.

After leaving the doctor’s office, Jones remembered that he had a fiancée. He had not seen her for a week. She did not approve of Martinis—at least not in such quantities as Jones had been collecting nightly for the past month. Luckily—unless he collected them in her company—she was unable to tell whether he had had two drinks or a dozen. He was very fond of Marcia. Her quaint ideas about temperance weren’t too much of a drawback. And anyway he was going to be temperate himself till he got rid of the shadows. It
would
be something to tell Marcia.

On second thought he decided to leave out the shadow part. She would think he had the heeby-jeebies.

Marcia Dorer was a tall blonde, slender almost to thinness. She gave Jones a brief kiss. Sometimes her kisses made him feel slightly refrigerated. This was one of the times.

“Well, where have you been keeping yourself?” she asked. There was a sub-acid undertone in her soprano. “In front of all the bars in town, I suppose?”

“Not today,” said Jones gravely. “I haven’t had a drink since last night. In fact, I have decided to quit drinking.”

“Oh, I’m glad,” she cooed, “if you really mean it. I know liquor can’t be good for you—at least, not so much of it. They say it does things to your insides.”

She pecked him again, lightly, between cheek and lips. Just at that moment Jones thought to look at their shadows on the parlor wall. What would Marcia’s shadow be like?

In spite of the queer phenomena he had already seen, Jones was unpleasantly surprised, even shocked. He hardly knew what he had expected, but certainly it wasn’t anything like this.

To begin with, there were three shadows on the wall. One was Jones’, porcine, satyr-like as usual. In spite of his physical proximity to Marcia, it stood far apart from hers.

Marcia’s shadow he could not clearly distinguish from the third one, since, with its back turned to Jones’, it was united with the other in a close embrace. It resembled Marcia only in being a shadow of a female. The other shadow was plainly male. It lifted a grossly swollen, bearded profile above the head of its companion. It was not a refined-looking shadow. Neither was Marcia’s.

Marcia had never embraced him like that, thought Jones. He felt disgusted; but after all, he couldn’t be jealous of an unidentified shadow.

Somehow, it was not a very successful evening. Jones turned his eyes away from the wall and refrained from looking at it again. But he could not forget the shadows. Marcia chattered without seeming to notice his preoccupation; but there was something perfunctory in her chatter, as if she too were preoccupied.

“I guess you’d better go, darling,” she said at last. “Do you mind? I didn’t sleep well, and I’m tired tonight.”

Jones looked at his wrist-watch. It was only twenty minutes past nine.

“Oh, all right,” he assented, feeling a vague relief. He kissed her and went out, seeing with the tail of his eye that the third shadow was still in the room. It was still on the parlor wall, with Marcia’s shadow in its arms.

Halfway down the block, beside a lamp-post, Jones passed Bertie Filmore. The two nodded. They knew and liked each other very slightly. Jones peered down at Filmore’s shadow on the sidewalk as he went by. Filmore was a floorwalker in a department store—a slim, sleek youth who neither drank, smoked nor indulged in any known vice. He attended the Methodist church every Sunday morning and Wednesday evening. Jones felt a profane and cynical curiosity as to what his shadow would look like.

The adumbration that he saw was shortened by the nearby lamp. But its profile was unmistakably the gross, bearded profile of the third shadow on Marcia’s wall! It bore no resemblance to Filmore.

“What the hell!” thought Jones, very disagreeably startled. “Is there something in this?”

He slackened his pace and glanced back at Filmore’s receding figure. Filmore sauntered on as if out for an airing, without special objective, and did not turn to look back at Jones. He went in at the entrance of Marcia’s home.

“So that’s why she wanted me to leave early,” Jones mused. It was all plain to him now… plain as the clinching shadows. Marcia had expected Filmore. The shadows weren’t all katzen-jammer, not by a jugful.

His pride was hurt. He had known that Marcia was acquainted with the fellow. But it was a shock to think that Filmore had displaced him in her affections. In Jones’ estimation, the fellow was a cross between a Sunday school teacher and a tailor’s dummy. No color or character to him.

Chewing the cud of his bitterness, Jones hesitated at several barroom doors. Perhaps he would see worse shadows if he killed another row of Martinis. Or… maybe he wouldn’t. What the hell….

He went into the next bar without hesitating.

The morning brought him a headache worthy of the bender to which twenty—or was it twenty-one—more or less expert mixologists had contributed.

He reached his office an hour behind time. Surprisingly, Miss Owens, who had always been punctual, was not in evidence. Less surprisingly, Johnson was not there either. He often came late.

Jones was in no mood for work. He felt as if all the town clocks were striking twelve in his head. Moreover, he had a heart which, if not broken, was deeply cracked. And there was still the nerve-wracking problem of those strangely distorted and often misplaced shadows.

He kept seeing in his mind the shadows on Marcia’s wall. They nauseated him… or perhaps his stomach was slightly upset from more than the due quota of Martinis. Then, as many minutes went by and neither Miss Owens nor Johnson appeared, he recalled the queer shadow-play in his office of the previous afternoon. Why in hell hadn’t he thought of that before? Perhaps—

His unsteady fingers spun the combination of the safe, drew back the door. Cash, negotiable bonds, a few checks that had come in too late for banking—all were gone. Johnson must have returned to the office that night. Or perhaps he had cleared out the safe before leaving in the late afternoon. Both he and Miss Owens had stayed after Jones’ departure. They often did that, and Jones hadn’t thought much about it since both were busy with unfinished work.

Jones felt paralyzed. One thing was clear, however: Johnson’s shadow had forewarned him with its pantomime of opening the safe, removing and counting money. It had betrayed its owner’s intention beforehand. If he had watched and waited, Jones could no doubt have caught his partner in the act. But he had felt so doubtful about the meaning of the shadows, and his main thought when he left the office had been to see a doctor. Later, the discovery of Marcia’s deceit had upset him, made him forget all else.

The telephone broke into his reflections with its jangling. A shrill female voice questioned him hysterically. It was Mrs. Johnson. “Is Caleb there? Have you seen Caleb?”

“No. I haven’t seen him since yesterday.”

“Oh, I’m so worried, Mr. Jones. Caleb didn’t come home last night but phoned that he was working very late at the office. Said he might not get in till after midnight. He hadn’t come in when I fell asleep; and he wasn’t here this morning. I’ve been trying to get the office for the past hour.”

“I was late myself,” said Jones. “I’ll tell Johnson to call you when he comes. Maybe he had to go out of town suddenly.” He did not like the task of telling Mrs. Johnson that her husband had embezzled the firm’s cash and had probably eloped with the typist.

“I’m going to call the police,” shrilled Mrs. Johnson. “Something dreadful must have happened to Caleb.”

Jones kept remembering that other shadow-scene in his office which had made him almost blush. More as a matter of form than anything else, he rang up the apartment house at which Miss Owens roomed. She had returned there as usual the previous evening but had left immediately with a valise, saying that she was called away by the sudden death of an aunt and would not be back for several days.

Well, that was that. Jones had lost a good typist, together with more cash than he could afford to lose. As to Johnson—well, the fellow had been no great asset as a partner. Jones, who had no head for figures, had been glad to delegate the bookkeeping to him. But he could have hired a good accountant at far less expense.

There was nothing to do but put the matter in the hands of the police. Jones had reached again for the receiver, when the mailman entered, bringing several letters and a tiny registered package.

The package was addressed to Jones in Marcia’s neat and somewhat prim handwriting. One of the letters bore the same hand. Jones signed for the package and broke the letter open as soon as the mailman had gone. It read:

Dear Gaylord,

I am returning your ring. I have felt for some time past that I am not the right girl to make you happy. Another man, of whom I am very fond, wishes to marry me. I hope you will find someone better suited to you than I should be.

Always yours,

Marcia

Jones put the little package aside without opening it. His thoughts were bitter. Marcia must have written to him and mailed the package early that morning. Filmore, of course, was the other man. Probably he had proposed to her the night before, after Jones had passed him on the street.

Jones could definitely add a sweetheart to his other losses. And he had gained, it seemed, a peculiar gift for seeing shadows that did not correspond to their owners’ physical outlines… which did not always duplicate their movements… shadows that were sometimes revelatory of hidden intentions, prophetic of future actions.

It seemed, then, that he possessed a sort of clairvoyance. But he had never believed in such things. What good was it doing him anyway?

After he phoned the police about Johnson, he would call it a day and gather enough drinks to dissolve the very substance of reality into a shadow.

T
HE
E
NCHANTRESS OF
S
YLAIRE

“W
hy, you big ninny! I could never marry you,” declared the demoiselle Dorothée, only daughter of the Sieur des Flêches. Her lips pouted at Anselme like two ripe berries. Her voice was honey—but honey filled with bee-stings.

“You are not so ill-looking. And your manners are fair. But I wish I had a mirror that could show you to yourself for the fool that you really are.”

“Why?” queried Anselme, hurt and puzzled.

“Because you are just an addle-headed dreamer, poring over books like a monk. You care for nothing but silly old romances and legends. People say that you even write verses. It is lucky that you are at least the second son of the Comte du Framboisier—for you will never be anything more than that.”

“But you loved me a little yesterday,” said Anselme, bitterly. “A woman finds nothing good in the man she has ceased to love.”

“Dolt! Donkey!” cried Dorothée, tossing her blonde ringlets in pettish arrogance. “If you were not all that I have said, you would never remind me of yesterday. Go, idiot—and do not return.”

Anselme, the hermit, had slept little, tossing distractedly on his hard, narrow pallet. His blood, it seemed, had been fevered by the sultriness of the summer night.

Then, too, the natural heat of youth had contributed to his unease. He had not wanted to think of women—a certain woman in particular. But, after thirteen months of solitude, in the heart of the wild woodland of Averoigne, he was still far from forgetting. Crueler even than her taunts was the remembered beauty of Dorothée des Flêches: the full-ripened mouth, the round arms and slender waist, the breast and hips that had not yet acquired their amplest curves.