Graham tiptoed forward. He stretched out his
hand. With a motion of abhorrence he drew it
back. Bobby watched him hypnotically, thinking:
“I wanted this. I hated him. I thought
of it just before I went to sleep.”
Graham reached out again. This time he touched
Howells’s head. It rolled over on the pillow.
“Good God!” he said.
They stared at the red hole, near the base of the
brain, at a fresh crimson splotch, straying beyond
the edges of the darker one they had seen that afternoon.
Graham turned away, his hand still outstretched, as
if it had touched some poisonous thing and might retain
a contamination.
“He was prepared against it,” he whispered,
“expected it, yet it got him.”
He glanced rapidly around the room whose shadows seemed
crowding about the candle to stifle it.
“Unless we’re all mad,” he cried,
“the murderer must be hidden in this room now.
Don’t you see? He’s got to be, or
Groom’s right, and we’re fighting the
dead. Go out, Katherine. Stand by that broken
door, Bobby. I’m going to look.”
A STRANGE LIGHT APPEARS AT THE DESERTED HOUSE
Graham’s intention, logical as it was, impressed
Bobby as quite futile. Silas Blackburn had died
in this ancient, melancholy room behind locked doors.
This afternoon, with a repetition of the sounds that
had probably accompanied his death, they had been
drawn to find that, behind locked doors again, the
position of the body had changed incredibly, as if
to expose to them the tiny fatal wound at the base
of the brain. Now for the third time those stealthy
movements had aroused Katherine, and they had found,
once more behind locked doors, the determined and malicious
detective, murdered precisely as old Blackburn had
been.
Of course Graham was logical. By every rational
argument the murderer must still be in the room.
Yet Bobby foresaw that, as always, no one would be
found, that nothing would be unearthed to explain the
succession of tragic mysteries. While Graham
commenced his search, indeed, he continued to stare
at the little round hole in Howells’s head, at
the fresh, irregular stain on the pillow, and he became
absorbed in his own predicament. Again and again
he asked himself if he could be responsible for these
murders which had been committed with an inhuman ingenuity.
He knew only that he had wandered, unconscious, in
the vicinity of the Cedars last night; that he had
been asleep when his grandfather’s body had
altered its position; that he had gone to sleep a little
while ago too profoundly, brooding over Howells’s
challenge to the murderer to invade the room of death
and kill him if he could. Howells had been confident
that he could handle a man and so solve the riddle
of how the room had been entered. Certainly Howells’s
challenge had been accepted, and Bobby knew that he
had fallen into that deep sleep hating the detective,
telling himself that the man’s death might save
him from arrest, from conviction, from an intolerable
walk to a little room with a single chair.
