The dream detective
surprise that he had made arrangements to spend the following week
beneath the hospitable roof of Friars House.
I have nothing to record of interest up to the time I left; but often
during the ensuing six days the problem of the haunting of Grange, and
the mystery of Moris Klaw’s protracted visit to Friars House came
between me and my work. Then on the Saturday morning arrived a
telegram:
“Can you join us for week-end--car will meet 2:30. Wire reply. Best
wishes.--Leyland.”
I determined to accept the invitation; for respecting the nature of
Moris Klaw’s business at Friars House--and that he had some other
motive than ordinary in sojourning there I was persuaded--my curiosity
knew no bounds. Accordingly, I packed my grip, and at about five
o’clock on a delightful afternoon found myself taking tea in a
cloister-like apartment of the former Friary.
“Grange,” said Sir James, in answer to a question of mine, “is shut
up.”
“It is shut, yes,” rumbled Moris Klaw. “What a pity! What a pity!”
In the course of the day occurred incidents which I have since
perceived to have been significant. I will pass over them, however,
and hasten to what I may term the catastrophe of this very singular
case.
Four of us sat down to dinner in an apartment which clearly had been
the ancient refectory of the monks. Clement Leyland, who had arrived
barely in time to dress, looked haggard and worried. I determined that
he had some private troubles of his own, and beneath his quiet
geniality I thought I could detect a sort of brooding gloom. His pale,
clean-shaven face, so like yet so unlike that of his cousin, was a
mask that ill repaid study; yet I knew that the real Clement Leyland
was a stranger to me, perhaps to all of us.
I was most anxious to learn if Moris Klaw had divulged the secret of
the hidden chamber at Grange to Sir James; and I was unspeakably
curious concerning the box of which I had had but a glimpse--the box
that he had found there. But he baffled my curiosity at every point.
Have you experienced that sense of impending calamity which sometimes
heralds tragic things? It was with me that night, throughout dinner;
and afterward, when we entered the library and sat over our cigars, it
grew portentously. I felt that I stood upon the brink of a precipice.
And literally I was not in great error. Moris Klaw, to the evident
discomfort of Sir James, brought the conversation around to the
subject of the haunting. I observed him to glance at his watch, with a
rather odd expression upon his vellum-hued face.
“Is it not singular,” he said, “how poor spectres are confined, like
linnets, to their cages? They seem, these spooks, never to roam. That
laughing demon of Grange--look at him. He remains in that empty,
desolate house; he----”
There was a dreadful interruption.
Commencing with a sort of guttural rattle, out upon the cloisteresque
stillness burst a peal of wicked laughter.
It rang throughout the room; it poured fear into my every fibre. It
died away--and was gone.
Sir James, clutching the leather-covered chair-arms, looked like a man
of stone. I was frankly terrorized. Moris Klaw stood behind me, by a
bookcase, him I could not see. But Clement Leyland’s face I can never
forget. It was positively deathlike. His eyes seemed starting from
their sockets, and his teeth chattered horribly.
“God in Heaven!” he whispered, brokenly. “What is it? O God! What is
it! Take it away--take it away!”
Then Moris Klaw spoke, slowly:
“It is for _you_ to take it away, Mr. Leyland!”
Clement Leyland rose from his seat; he swayed like a drunken man, and
there was madness in the glaring eyes that he turned in Klaw’s
direction.
“You--you----” he gasped.
“I--I----” rumbled Moris Klaw, sternly, and took a step forward; “I
have entered the Jacobite hiding place at Grange, and there I found a
box! Ah! you glare! glare on, my friend! I returned that box to where
I found it; but first I examined its contents! What! that demon
laughter frightens you! Then descend, Mr. Leyland, descend and bring
him out--the one who laughs!”
Rigidly, Sir James sat in his chair; I, too, seemed to be palsied. But
at sight of the next happening we both stood up. Moris Klaw stamped
heavily upon the oaken floor in a deep recess; then applied his weight
to a section of the seemingly solid stone wall.
It turned, as on a pivot, revealing a dark cavity.
He stood there, a bizarre figure, pointing down into the blackness.
“Descend, my friend!” he cried. “The one who laughs is upon the
seventh step!”
“_The seventh step!_”
In a whisper the words came from Clement Leyland. A draft of damp,
cavernous air blew into the library out of the opening.
“Descend, my friend!”
Remorselessly, Moris Klaw repeated the words. In the centre of the
room, Clement Leyland, a pitiable sight, stood staring--and
hesitating. Suddenly his cousin spoke.
“Don’t go, Clement!” he whispered.
The other turned to him, dazedly.
“Don’t go--down that place. But--O God! I understand at last, or
partly.… _Quit!_ I give you half an hour!”
Sir James sank back into his chair and buried his face in his hands;
Moris Klaw never moved from where he stood by the cavity. But Clement
Leyland, with bowed head, walked from the room.
In the silence that followed his going--
“Await me, gentlemen,” rumbled Klaw; “I descend for the laughter!”
He stepped into the opening.
“One,” he counted, “two--three--four--five--” his voice came up to us
from the depths--“_six!_”
We heard him ascending. Walking into the library he placed upon the
table beside Sir James a very large and up-to-date gramophone!
“The laughter!” he explained, simply. “That night, my friends, when
first I slept at Grange, I secured, among a host of other dreadful
negatives, the negative of one who lurked in a secret hiding place. I
saw him come creeping from the chimney corner, bearing a great mace
which I recognized for one that had hung in the hall! Almost, the
Science of the Mind betrayed me; for I mistook him for a thought-form!
But the mind of Isis is _en rapport_ with the mind of her poor old
father. In her dreams she saw my peril, and she it was who, screaming,
saved me!--saved me from the murderer with the mace!”
Sir James made no sign. Moris Klaw continued:
“I gathered, then, that the one who sometimes lurked in the Jacobite
hiding place and who, somehow, made the demon laughter, and the other
phenomena, sought _one_ end. It was to cause you to leave Grange and
to live in Friars House! Beyond so far, my science could not show me.
I assisted, therefore, the project of the lurker; and came myself,
too, in order to watch, my friend, to guard and to spy!
“His gramophone I found, examined, and replaced. It had a clockwork
attachment, very ingenious, which both started and stopped it; there
was little or no scraping. To-night, from his room, unknown to him, I
removed the instrument from its case, which lay hidden at the bottom
of his trunk. Yes! I stole his key! I am the old fox! Why did he bring
it here? I cannot reply. Perhaps he meant again to use it; his future
projects are dark to me, but their object is all too light.”
Sir James groaned.
“Old Clem!” he whispered, “and how I trusted him!”
“He did not quite believe in my science,” resumed Moris Klaw, “but he
did not know that, hidden, I slept almost beside him as he sat,
planning, in this very room! From his own bad mind I secured my second
negative; and it showed me the death trap of some bad old son of
Mother Church! At Grange there was but the Jacobite hiding place, but
here was the devilry of feudal times! I returned to London. Why? To
learn if my suspicions were well founded. Yes! You may or may not be
aware; but if you die childless, the wicked Clement inherits Grange!”
“I knew that,” whispered Sir James.
“Ah! you knew? _So._ I returned to here, for, even at that time, I
suspected that your _accidental_ death was the object of removal! Then
I secured it, my second negative. Biding my time, I explored that
death-smelling place. Its wicked machinery had been _freshly oiled!_
Ah! he knew its secrets well, the old house that he hoped to inherit!
“One night, all innocent, as you sat here, with other guests, he would
have blundered upon that doorway! And _you_, the host, would have led
the search party! But I saw that he feared to move whilst I remained,
and so I played the ghost upon him with his own spook!”
Sir James Leyland looked up. His bronzed face was transformed with
emotion.
“Mr. Klaw,” he said, huskily, “why did you lay so much emphasis upon
the words, ‘the seventh step’?”
Moris Klaw shrugged, replying simply:
“Because _there is no seventh step--only the mouth of a well!_”
TENTH EPISODE.
CASE OF THE VEIL OF ISIS
I
I have made no attempt, in these chronicles, to arrange the cases of
my remarkable friend, Moris Klaw, in sections. Yet, as has recently
been pointed out to me, they seem naturally to fall into two orders.
There were those in which he appeared in the rôle of criminal
investigator, and in which he was usually associated with Inspector
Grimsby. There was another class of inquiry in which the criminal
element was lacking: mysteries which never came under the notice of
New Scotland Yard.
Since Moris Klaw’s methods were, if not supernatural, at any rate
supernormal, I have been asked if he ever, to my knowledge, inquired
into a case which proved insusceptible of a natural explanation--which
fell strictly within the province of the occult.
To that I answer that I am aware of several; but I have refrained from
including them because readers of these papers would be unlikely to
appreciate the nature of Klaw’s investigations outside the sphere of
ordinary natural laws. Those who are curious upon the point cannot do
better than consult the remarkable work by Moris Klaw entitled,
“Psychic Angles.”
But there was one case with which I found myself concerned that I am
disposed to include, for it fell between the provinces of the natural
and supernatural in such a way that it might, with equal legitimacy,
be included under either head. On the whole, I am disposed to bracket
it with the case of the headless mummies.
I will take leave to introduce you, then, to the company which met at
Otter Brearley’s house one night in August.
“This is most truly amazing,” Moris Klaw was saying; “and I am
indebted to my good friend Searles”--he inclined his sparsely covered
head in my direction--“for the opportunity to be one of you. It is a
séance? Yes and no. But there is a mummy in it--and those mummies are
so instructive!”
He extracted the scent spray from his pocket and refreshed his yellow
brow with verbena.
“How to be regretted that my daughter is in Paris,” he continued, his
rumbling voice echoing queerly about the room. “She loves them like a
mother--those mummies! Ah, Mr. Brearley, this will cement your great
reputation!”
Otter Brearley shook his head.
“I am not yet prepared to make it public property,” he declared,
slowly. “No one, outside the present circle, knows of my discovery. I
do not wish it to go farther--at present.”
He glanced around the table, his prominent blue eyes passing from
myself to Moris Klaw and from Klaw to the clean-cut dark face of
Doctor Fairbank. The latter, scarce heeding his host’s last words, sat
watching how the shaded light played, tenderly, amid the soft billows
of Ailsa Brearley’s wonderful hair.
“Shall you make it the subject of a paper?” he asked suddenly.
“My dear Doctor Fairbank!” rumbled Moris Klaw, solemnly, “if you had
been paying attention to our good friend you would have heard him say
that he was not prepared, at present, to make public his wonderful
discovery.”