The Jacques Futrelle Megapack. Jacques Futrelle
compelled to meet them. But the effort was a desperate one, and that night late, when a city slept around him, the bell sounded twice.
When he reached his downtown office next day an enormous amount of detail work lay before him, and he attacked it with a feverish exaltation which followed upon days and nights of restlessness. He had been at his desk only a few minutes when his private telephone clattered. With an exclamation he arose; comprehending, he sat down again.
Half-a-dozen times within the hour the bell rang, and each time he was startled. Finally he arose in a passion, tore the desk-telephone from its connecting wires and flung it into the waste-basket. Deliberately he walked around to the side of his desk and, with a well-directed kick, smashed the battery-box. His secretary regarded him in amazement.
“Mr. Camp,” directed the financier sharply, “please instruct the office operator not to ring another telephone-bell in this office—ever.”
The secretary went out and he sat down to work again. Late that afternoon he called on his family physician, Doctor Perdue, a robust individual of whom it was said that his laugh cured more patients than his medicine. Be that as it may, he was a successful man, high in his profession. Doctor Perdue looked up with frank interest as he entered.
“Hello, Phillips!” was his greeting. “What can I do for you?”
“Nerves,” was the laconic answer.
“I thought it would come to that,” remarked the physician, and he shook his head sagely. “Too much work, too much worry and too many cigars; and besides, you’re not so young as you once were.”
“It isn’t work or cigars,” Phillips replied impatiently. “It’s worry—worry because of some peculiar circumstances which—which—”
He paused with a certain childish feeling of shame, of cowardice. Doctor Perdue regarded him keenly and felt of his pulse.
“What peculiar circumstances?” he demanded.
“Well, I—I can hardly explain it myself,” replied Mr. Phillips, between tightly-clenched teeth. “It’s intangible, unreal, ghostly—what you will. Perhaps I can best make you understand it by saying that I’m always—I always seem to be waiting for something.”
Doctor Perdue laughed heartily; Mr. Phillips glared at him.
“Most of us are always waiting for something,” said the physician. “If we got it there wouldn’t be any particular object in life. Just what sort of thing is it you’re always waiting for?”
Mr. Phillips arose suddenly and paced the length of the room twice. His under jaw was thrust out a little, his teeth crushed together, but in his eyes lay a haunting, furtive fear.
“I’m always waiting for a—for a bell,” he blurted fiercely, and his face became scarlet. “I know it’s absurd, but I awake in the night trembling, and lie for hours waiting, waiting, yet dreading the sound as no man ever dreaded anything in this world. At my desk I find myself straining every nerve, waiting, listening. When I talk to any one I’m always waiting, waiting, waiting! Now, right this minute, I’m waiting, waiting for it. The thing is driving me mad, man, mad! Don’t you understand?”
Doctor Perdue arose with grave face and led the financier back to his seat.
“You are behaving like a child, Phillips!” he said sharply. “Sit down and tell me about it.”
“Now, look here, Perdue,” and Mr. Phillips brought his fist down on the desk with a crash, “you must believe it—you’ve got to believe it! If you don’t, I shall know I am mad.”
“Tell me about it,” urged the physician quietly.
Then haltingly, hesitatingly, the financier related the incidents as they had happened. Incipient madness, fear, terror, blazed in his eyes, and at times his pale lips quivered as a child’s might. The physician listened attentively and nodded several times.
“The bell must be—must be haunted!” Mr. Phillips burst out in conclusion. “There’s no reasonable way to account for it. My common-sense tells me that it doesn’t sound at all, and yet I know it does.”
Doctor Perdue was silent for several minutes.
“You know, of course, that your wife did buy the bell of the old German?” he asked after a while.
“Why, certainly, I know it. It’s proved absolutely by the letters he writes trying to get it back.”
“And your fear doesn’t come from anything the Japanese said?”
“It isn’t the denial of the German; it isn’t the childish things Mr. Matsumi said and did; it’s the actual sound of the bell that’s driving me insane—it’s the hopeless, everlasting, eternal groping for a reason. It’s an inanimate thing and it acts as if—it acts as if it were alive!”
The physician had been sitting with his fingers on Mr. Phillips’ wrist. Now he arose and mixed a quieting potion which the other swallowed at a gulp. Soon after his patient went home somewhat more self-possessed, and with rigid instructions as to the regularity of his life and habits.
“You need about six months in Europe more than anything else,” Doctor Perdue declared. “Take three weeks, shape up your business and go. Meanwhile, if you won’t sell the gong or throw it away, keep out of its reach.”
Next morning a man—a stranger—was found dead in the small room where the gong hung. A bullet through the heart showed the manner of death. The door leading from the room into the hall was locked on the outside; an open window facing east indicated how he had entered and suggested a possible avenue of escape for his slayer.
Attracted by the excitement which followed the discovery of the body, Mr. and Mrs. Phillips went to investigate, and thus saw the dead man. The wife entered the room first, and for an instant stood speechless, staring into the white, upturned face. Then came an exclamation.
“Why, it’s the man from whom I bought the gong!” She turned to find her husband peering over her shoulder. His face was ashen to the lips, his eyes wide and staring.
“Johann Wagner!” he exclaimed.
Then, as if frenzied, he flung her aside and rushed to where the gong hung silent and motionless. He seemed bent on destruction as he reached for it with gripping fingers. Suddenly he staggered as if from a heavy blow in the face, and covered both eyes with his hands.
“Look!” he screamed.
There was a smudge of fresh, red blood on the fifth bell. Mrs. Phillips glanced from the bell to him inquiringly.
He stood for a moment with hands pressed to his eyes, then laughed mirthlessly, demoniacally.
II
Here a small brazier spouting a blue flame, there a retort partially filled with some purplish, foul-smelling liquid, yonder a sinuous copper coil winding off into the shadows, and moving about like an alchemist of old, the slender, childlike figure of Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, Ph. D., LL. D., F. R. S., M. D., etc., etc. A ray of light shot down blindingly from a reflector above and brilliantly illuminated the laboratory table. The worker leaned forward to peer at some minute particle under the microscope, and for an instant his head and face were thrown out against the darkness of the room like some grotesque, disembodied thing.
It was a singular head and face—a head out of all proportion to body, domelike, enormous, with a wilderness of straw-yellow hair. The face was small, wizened, petulant even; the watery blue eyes, narrow almost to the disappearing point, squinted everlastingly through thick spectacles; the mouth drooped at the corners. The small, white hands which twisted and turned the object-glass into focus were possessed of extraordinarily long, slender fingers.
This man of the large head and small body was the undisputed leader in contemporaneous science. His was the sanest, coldest, clearest brain in scientific achievement. His word was the final one. Once upon a time a newspaperman, Hutchinson Hatch, had dubbed him The Thinking