The Last Hieroglyph (64 page)

He rose to his feet and embraced Rubalsa, who seemed overcome with astonishment and joy at the revelation that Vadarth was her father.

The almoner turned to Cushara and Zobal. “Will ye come with me to Tasuun?” he inquired. “For this night’s work, I shall make ye captains in the service of Ilorgh.”

“Thy destination is mine,” said Cushara. To this the archer added:

“There is an old saying, that parent should not be parted from child, nor lover from lover, nor comrade from comrade. I also come with thee.”

A
PPENDIX
F
IVE:
A
LTERNATE
E
NDING TO
“
I
A
M
Y
OUR
S
HADOW”

J
ones went home at the usual post-midnight hour, after getting himself systematically and completely replastered. He prided himself that he had achieved a sort of bland indifference to shadows. Whatever forms they might manifest, were alike inconsequential. He ignored the ebon monstrosity that still companioned him when he turned on the light in his bedroom.

Still, he was glad of the darkness of closely drawn blinds that blotted it from sight and, he hoped, from existence. He lay with eyes tightly shut, waiting the deeper darkness of alcoholic oblivion.

He had almost reached the indefinite verge where stupor becomes sleep. A sourceless voice, a light, thin, sibilant whisper, pierced the gulf into which he was sinking. Jones was roused into a sort of semi-awareness, without knowing whether the voice spoke in his own mind or from without.

“Who’s that?” he mumbled drowsily.

“I am your shadow.”

“What the hell do you want?” Jones began to awaken now, startled and even a little frightened.

“I shall want many things… in the end. But just at present I can offer to do something for you.”

Jones thought: “I certainly must have them now. After seeing things, I’m hearing voices.”

However, the bravado of many Martinis had only half evaporated. He said aloud: “What can you do for me, shadow?”

“More than you think,” rejoined the whisper. “You have seen the foreshadowing of the crime that your partner meditates: the crime that he will attempt tonight. If you wish I can prevent him.”

“You’re only a shadow,” protested Jones, wondering if the fantastic dialogue were part of some insidious but growing delirium. “You’re an ugly bastard: but I’m the only one that can see you. How could you prevent anything?”

“You have made me strong,” averred the whisper. “And I have power now over other shadows, both seen and unseen, and can exert myself in the world of physical causes and effects.”

“I don’t believe it,” sneered Jones, feeling even as he spoke a weird horripilation in the mid-region of his back. Something—perhaps a hand or a hoof—was pressing his chest lightly through the bed-clothes. The pressure deepened by almost imperceptible gradations till it became an incubus-like burden that seemed to flatten his ribs and breast-bone and lungs against his spine. He gasped and agonized for breath; and the dreadful weight was withdrawn with insupportable slowness.

“Do you wish further proof of my power?” resumed the whisper, close above him now in the opaque darkness.

Jones was thoroughly terrified by this time; and his terror was complicated by a feeling of nightmare impotence and muddlement.

“No, no!” he cried. “Go away, shadow. Do whatever you want, but don’t bother me.”

It seemed that a ponderable presence was gone suddenly from the room. There was no repetition of the thin, rustling whispers, no return of the crushing encumbrance. Jones listened awhile with the curious intentness of which only an alcoholic is capable. His fear lightened; his drunkenness came flooding back upon him; and he lapsed by degrees into a slumber without dreams or untoward interruptions.

He awoke only once during the remainder of the night. His mouth and throat were parched with the all-consuming thirst that ensues heavy drinking. He rose and groped his way to the bathroom where, after much fumbling, he found the switch. As he poured himself a second glass of water, he perceived with senses still drugged and sluggish, that no shadow, either natural or unnatural, was cast by his body on the basin and faucets and wall in the light that streamed directly from behind.

“Damn good riddance,” he rumbled, as he went back to bed. “Christ, what a nightmare that was!”

A reiterated buzzing, like that of a badgered rattlesnake, awakened Jones to the horrid realities of daylight. It was the telephone on the stand beside his bed.

He lifted the receiver with a none too steady hand. Immediately a feminine voice, shrill with agitation and hysteria, began to babble in his ear.

“Mr. Jones? This is Miss Lamont, in the office next to yours. Come down at once…. Something horrible has happened.”

“What? What?” stammered Jones.

“Your partner, Caleb Johnson… dead… found by the janitor… crushed to death…. No one can figure how it happened. Miss Owens… stark mad… in your office….” The babbling became wholly incoherent, till Jones could distinguish only an occasional word or syllable that conveyed nothing of further information to his bewildered mind.

The sun was nearly halfway to its meridian when he emerged on the street. Plainly he had overslept following the strange experience, whether nightmare or hallucination, that had plagued his homecoming.

Heedless, for once, of whatever shadow might ensue or proceed his steps, he reached his office, to find a state of bedlam for which the babbling voice had prepared him all too inadequately with its intimations of horror.

It seemed that all other offices in the three-story edifice had voided their tenants into the hall outside his door. The door itself stood open, with people milling in and out. They made way for Jones, and the hubbub sank to a temporary hush. He entered his office, feeling himself the cynosure of eyes in which some ghastliness beyond belief was reflected.

There were two policeman and a doctor amid the crowd that filled the room as buzz-flies fill an abattoir. Miss Lamont, typist of the real-estate firm in the office next door, detached herself from the clustered group and fluttered toward Jones, still babbling. Jones heard little, and understood less, of what she was trying to say.

Miss Owens, sitting flaccidly in a chair, was moaning and sobbing with the mindless reiteration of a phonograph record. Her eyes were vacant, her face was drawn and distorted as if by some sudden mysterious stroke. The doctor, whom Jones knew by sight as a practitioner in the same neighborhood, was standing solicitously beside her, a hypodermic still in his hand. Plainly he had given her an injection of some soporific drug: her noisy hysteria began to subside, with lengthening intervals of drowsy silence.

Jones gave her only a passing attention. The group of people before the big iron safe had drawn back, turning toward him as if with one accord. Seized and held by an abominable fascination, he gazed at the strange thing that was now revealed.

The legs and hips of a man, wearing the rakish, broad-checked suit that Caleb Johnson had affected recently, protruded at a sharp, stiff angle from the safe door, which had closed on the body like a huge trap. It seemed that the body had been cut virtually in two by this inexplicable closing: since the heavy door was now nearly plumb with its iron and concrete frame. Johnson’s coat-tails and trousers were streaked darkly with the blood that had run down and coagulated in a broad pool about his nattily shod feet. It was evident that he had been dead for several hours.

People began to talk all at once, vociferating and expostulating. Bemused with a sense of horror and unreality, Jones gathered by fragments the information they were trying to give him.

The janitor, coming late to work that morning, had heard the cries and sobbing of a woman in Jones’ office. Finding the door unlocked, he had entered, to discover Johnson caught like a trapped rat in the safe door, and Miss Owens in a state of shock or seizure that seemingly unhinged her mind. He had been unable to budge the ponderous door of the safe; unable to learn anything from the mouthings of the madwoman; and had promptly called the police and a doctor. The local coroner had also been summoned, but was delayed in coming.

Other people had appeared from the neighboring offices that began to fill at that hour. Many attempts had been made to release the dead and almost bisected body, identified beyond a doubt as that of Johnson by letters in one of his hip pockets. Crowbars had been employed; but nothing could loosen the grip of the massive metal jaws that had closed so unaccountably upon their victim. No one could conjecture what force or agency had caused their closing; certainly no human power could have been responsible. Why they should so obstinately refuse to open was an equal mystery.

As he listened, Jones recalled the eerie nocturnal dialogue in which he had seemed to take part. Could the thin, whispering voice have been more than a figment of dream or delirium? Had someone, or something, offered to prevent the crime that had been apparently foreshown by a pantomime of shadows? Had the frightfully crushing pressure in his chest been something other than a cacodemon of slumber or alcohol?

It seemed all too patent that Johnson, with the connivance of Miss Owens, had planned to rob the safe, and had opened it with the combination known only to himself and Jones. There was no legitimate reason why the pair should have visited the office during what, from all evidence, must have been the late night or early morning hours. What hellish thing had overtaken them, had slain Johnson so hideously in his act of embezzlement, and had driven his companion to madness? Jones stood aghast before the gulf that was opened by such questions and surmises.

At this moment he heard the familiar whispering voice: “You alone can open that which I have closed.”

Jones put his fingers into the inch or more of space that remained between the door’s edge and the frame. The dialled mass of metal swung outward easily and without sound, and Johnson’s body, compressed at the waist to a ghastly hour-glass attenuation, slumped forward into the safe. It lay face downward amid stacks of currency and standard bonds. A rubber-banded roll of twenty-dollar bills was still clutched in the right hand, which had already stiffened a little with premature rigor mortis.

An hour later, Jones locked the empty office in which nothing could have induced him to linger. His feelings were those of one who has just escaped from some inquisitorial ordeal, but is still dogged by more than inquisitorial terrors. The inquest had been a tedious daymare, from which nothing had emerged conclusively except the irrefutable fact that Johnson was dead. No reason, or suspicion of a reason, could be found for holding anyone in connection with his death. His car had been located in an alley back of the building. In it were valises belonging both to Johnson and Miss Owens. Indications were that the pair had planned to elope for parts unknown following the safe-robbery.

Miss Owens had been removed to a local hospital for observation. Reporters had beleaguered Jones with questions that he was, for the most part, honestly unable to answer. Apparently they, as well as the coroner and the police, were satisfied that the whole affair was no less a mystery to Jones than to others. Nevertheless, he was pursued by dark apprehensions, and his feelings of physical shock and spectral horror were tinged by something that bordered on guilt. Walking along the sunbright street with inattentive eyes, he thought that he was not alone—that a presence walked beside him, step by step.

It was the shadow. The thing had changed overnight, assuming new properties. Opaque and tri-dimensional, it paced
between Jones and the sun
like a sable quadruped, rising nearly waist-high above the pavement. It was independent both of Jones and the light: a self-existent entity, a black and bestial doppelganger.

[Typescript of “I Am Your Shadow” ends with this page.]

A
PPENDIX
S
IX:
A
LTERNATE
E
NDING TO
“
N
EMESIS OF THE
U
NFINISHED”

[This version begins following the paragraph that ends “He sat down at the typewriter, determined that he would finish the story to his satisfaction.”]

F
or a while he wrote steadily, without hesitating over variant words or divergencies of plot development. It seemed that some magic lamp illumined his brain, clarifying all that had baffled and eluded him heretofore. The sorcerer, Guillaume de la Coudraie, had procured an ancient chart of mouldy parchment, giving the location of a ghoul-guarded tomb in which were hidden the essential formulæ that he had long vainly sought. The formulæ contained the words of power, the secret names by which the dread kings of the four infernal quarters, as well as many lesser spirits, could be summoned, constrained and dismissed. The procuring of the parchment itself had entailed many obscure perils both to soul and body. The path to the designated tomb, moreover, was fraught with preternatural dangers and deadfalls.

At this point La Porte’s inspiration became once more confused and indecisive. He wrote page after page, only to discard them as unsatisfactory. The magic light, illumining the story so briefly, had dimmed and gone out like a necromancer’s lantern in smoky darkness.

The day wore on in this frustrating, brain-fettering labor; only to leave La Coudraie still conning the musty, worm-frayed parchment in his tower chamber lined with ponderous tomes of goety and demonology.

At last La Porte abandoned the fruitless task in something that bordered upon despair. It was nearly sunset; perhaps a walk to the neighboring village would refresh his jaded brain.

It was many hours later when he wandered homeward rather unsteadily by the rays of a cloud-strangled moon. Forgetting his usual strict economy, he had consumed numerous brandies at a local bar. He did not care for the people who frequented such places; but he had been reluctant to leave and face again the unsolved problems of his sorcerer, in a cabin peopled with half-written and unwritten fantasies.