John Carr - The Reader Is Warned

The heavy rep curtains belled out on the farther of the open windows. Someone seemed to be fighting them. The tiny table tilted up beside them; bumping, the china lamp slid on that smooth surface, whirled, and went to the floor with a crash that must have been audible downstairs. From under the curtains appeared first a black satin slipper; then flesh-coloured stockings; then an arm and a dark blue gown; and then Hilary Keen, breathing hard, tumbled into the room. She was so frightened that the colour seemed to have been drained from her eyes, and she was as near a faint as she had ever been in her life.

But even now she tried not to admit it.

'I'm s-sorry to break in like this,' she said. 'But I couldn't help it. There's somebody in my room.'

'Somebody in your room? Who?'

'I came by the window,' she explained, with the painstaking carefulness of the distraught. "There's a balcony. Please let me sit down for a minute; I don't want to disgrace . myself.'

For some time he had been trying to think of the quality which most distinguished her. And he saw it now, when she was upset. It was the quality of fastidiousness. About her smooth shoulders and arms, about her eyes and forehead, there was an almost shrinking fastidiousness which went with the cool look of her skin. One of the shoulder-straps of her dress had fallen down or come loose, and she pulled it up quickly. There was grime on her hands and arms from having come by way of the balcony,’ and, when she saw it, he thought her nerves were going to break down in tears. She sat down on the edge of the bed.

'Now, steady!' he insisted. 'What is it? Just tell me what's wrong.'

There was no time for a reply, for somebody knocked thunderously at Sanders's door. Hilary sprang up.

'Don't open it!' she said. 'Let it alone 1 Whatever you do, don't open - But she broke off, with a breath of relief, when the door was opened without anybody's permission; and they saw that it was only Sam Constable, wearing slippers and with a dressing-gown hastily pulled round him.

'What's the row?' he demanded. 'Sounded like the house falling. Can't a fellow finish dressing in peace?'

'Sorry,' said Sanders. 'It's all right; the lamp fell over.'

But their host was not concerned with the lamp. He had got a good look at them; his eyes opened; and he drew his own conclusions.

'Look here -' he began, raising his eyebrows.

Hilary was frozen into composure.

'No, Mr Constable. Don't jump to conclusions. It really isn't what you're thinking.'

'And may I ask, Miss Keen,' said the other, becoming a complete stuffed-shirt again, 'what conclusions I am presumed to be drawing? Have I asked for any explanation?' He was quivering with outraged dignity; he lifted a hand and ran it through his heavy, silky grey hair. 'I come to investigate a noise. I find a valuable heirloom smashed (look at it) and two of my guests in a position which in my day would have been called sufficiently curious. But have I asked any questions?'

'Miss Keen has been telling me -' Sanders began.

She cut him off.

'There was something in my room, and it frightened me. I ran in here by way of the balcony. Take a look at my hands, if you don't believe it. I'm awfully sorry about the lamp; I knocked it over when I climbed through the window.'

'It is of no consequence,' said Sam Constable, looking sly. 'Only I regret that something in your room frightened you. Mice, perhaps?'

'I -I don't know.'

'Not mice. If you remember, please tell me and I will have it seen to. Excuse me, then: I shall not intrude on you any longer.'

Sanders, realizing that if he joined in the explanations it would only give their host the opportunity to look more sly, did not comment. Constable was evidently beginning to realize the possibilities of triumph in the situation.

'By the way, Mr Constable,' he said, 'nobody has tried to murder you so far, I imagine?'

'Not as yet, Doctor. Not as yet, I am glad to say. The scrap-book remains on its shelf. Until dinner, then!'

Sanders stared at the closing door.

'Now just what did he mean by that?'

'By what?'

"The scrap-book remains on its shelf." '

'I haven't the remotest idea,' said Hilary. 'And at the moment I don't know whether to laugh or cry. It does seem as though the whole affair, so far, has been to put you into one embarrassing position after another.'

'Oh, that's all right - but the point is, what particular embarrassing position were you in a little while ago?'

She was quiet again, though the shock had left its aftermath and Sanders did not like the look of her. At times she would tremble, for no apparent reason.

'It's nothing. May I use your bathroom to wash in? I don't want to go back to my own room for a while.'

He gestured towards it, picking up the cigarette he had put down at her entrance. That sudden entrance, the look of her, had disturbed him in more ways than one. She was gone only a moment; and when she returned he noticed the strength of resolution about her chin. 'I really wanted time to think,' she explained. 'And I'm sorry, Dr Sanders, but I can't tell you anything about it. Believe me, things are heading for a smash here; and I'm not going to add my unimportant mite to the total. It was nothing -'

'It was definitely something. In plain' language, did somebody go for you?' 'I don't understand.' 'Don't you?'

'Well, not in the way you mean. It was something else.' She shivered. 'I suppose, as they say, that I simply can't take it. Looks shouldn't break any bones, should they? May I have a cigarette ?' She sat down in a padded chair; he gave her a cigarette and lighted it for her. For a time she blew smoke-rings. 'Shall I tell you what's wrong with all of us here, and why it's going to end in a way we won't like?'

'Well?'

'When I was a little girl, I had a book of stories I was very fond of; though some of them were rather frightening. They showed you a world where you could have everything you wanted, provided only some witch or wizard took a fancy to you. One of them was about a magic carpet, the usual kind of magic carpet. The sorcerer said to the boy who had it that it would carry him anywhere - with one proviso. While he was travelling on the carpet, he must never think of a cow. If he thought of a cow, the carpet would go to earth again.

'Now, there was no earthly reason why he should think of a cow. But, once he had been told he mustn't, all he could think about was that cow. Once he got it into his head, it never left him when he saw the carpet. No, I haven't taken leave of my senses. I didn't understand the psychology of that story then; I disliked the story, rather. But it's true. Because somebody says, "Here is a person who can read your thoughts," all you can think about is what you don't want anybody to know. We're all concentrating on what we don't want known; it won't leave our minds however we try.'

'But what of that?'

'Oh, don't be so - so virtuous!' Sanders considered this.

'I'm not trying to be virtuous, Lord knows,' he said. 'And I still don't understand. Aren't you making too much of this? I'm inclined to agree with Larry Chase: it would be damned uncomfortable to have all our thoughts known, but, after all, we're not a bunch of criminals.' ,

'Aren't we? Potentially ? I have a stepmother. I hate her. I wish she'd die. What do you say to that?'

'Only that it's not a very terrible secret.'

‘I want her money,' said Hilary relentlessly. 'Or, rather, my father's money that she has a life interest in. It's a real life interest in it; she married him when he was about Mr Constable's age. She isn't much older than I am, and hard as scrap-iron. I'm learning how to be hard too... Tell me: what do you think of our mind-reader, Mr Pennik?'

'I think he's a fake,' answered Sanders. Hilary, who had been staring hard at the cigarette, glanced up with surprise and something like alarm. There was relief in it, too, and a jumble of emotions he could not read. Yet he knew that in some superstitious corner of her soul she was being impelled into belief in the powers of Herman Pennik.

'Why do you say that? He read your thoughts.'

'Apparently. I've been thinking about that. I haven't worked it out, but it's just possible that a good part of the answer may lie with Larry Chase.'

'With Larry Chase ?' cried Hilary. 'How ?'

‘You know how he talks. He's interested in people. He will give you somebody's life history and afterwards tell you and quite sincerely believe himself that he hasn't said a word. I remember, now I come to think of it, that he knew or suspected something about - well, Marcia Blystone and things I'd rather not discuss. He mentioned it in a letter he wrote to me. If Pennik is an expert in pumping people and later making them forget they've been pumped ..

'But that wouldn't explain how Pennik would know when you might be thinking about something.'

'I'm not so sure. We'll grant that he is an expert psychologist. All successful fortune-tellers have to be.'

'What about that statue of Lister, or whoever it was? And -' Hilary hesitated. She did not look up. 'Excuse me for mentioning this, but what about the other thing he said? The last thing?'

'Lister I admit I don't understand. What you call the last thing may be merely because I haven't got as good a poker-face as I should like to have.'

Literally for minutes Hilary did not speak. Throwing her cigarette into the empty fireplace, she got up and measured out steps on the carpet.

'There's his prophecy about Mr Constable.'

'Mr Constable,' said Sanders politely, 'is not dead yet, you know. And even if Pennik can read minds, I'm hanged if I'll believe he can read the future.'

'But if the whole thing is a huge fraud -'

'I don't say it is. A certain degree of telepathic power may be quite possible. Pennik may merely be bolstering it up, as certain honest men have done in other things, by a little conscious fraud and a remarkable deductive ability.'

'Then you don't believe in thought as a physical weapon ?'

'I will go to my grave denying it.'

From two rooms away, Mina Constable began to scream when the hands of Sanders's watch stood at one minute to eight.

" There was an animal quality about those screams, one of almost physical pain rather than fright. Mina Constable seemed to be trying to scream and speak at the same time, so that all they could hear was the endless repetition of her husband's name. Hilary, her hand on the mantelpiece, turned round with a face of pure superstitious terror. But she could not stand the sound of those screams; and Sanders was afraid she would begin to cry out as well.

He had the door to the hall open while the noise was still going on. And he saw the scene he was so many times afterwards to describe.

Sam Constable, fully dressed for dinner, was leaning against the hand-rail round the well of the stairs - within one step of the descent. He was sagging forward across the hand-rail, one hand partly supporting him on the newel-post. He raised the other hand spasmodically, the fingers twitching; he heaved his back, and for a second Sanders thought he would pitch forward over the rail on to the stairs below. But he was already too inert. He slid down beside the banisters, his body curving against them, and one hand struck with a flat thud on the carpet. His face had been turned away, so that Sanders could not see it until he rolled over on his back. The screams stopped.

Mina Constable, her teeth biting on a handkerchief, stood in the half-open door of one of the two rooms facing the head of the stairs. She did not move. With that piercing din gone; it was possible to think. Sanders ran over and knelt beside him. There was a faint flutter of pulse, which stopped as Sanders found it; and the man was dead.

Sanders, still kneeling, looked round. Three doors were open on that hall: the door of Mina Constable's room, his own room, and Hilary's room. From his position he could see across obliquely into Hilary's room. He could see under the chairs, under the bed, even under the dressing-table against the far wall. And his eye was caught by the outlines of an object which had rolled unnoticed or uncared-for under the dressing-table, but which he was to remember afterwards.

It was a tall white chef's cap, with a muffin top.

Ringing with fluid chimes, and then breaking off in dignity for official pronouncement, the grandfather clock on the landing struck eight.

CHAPTER V

And now, he noticed out of the corner of his eye, there were three persons looking out into the hall besides himself. Mina Constable still stood by the half-open door, her jaws shaking. Hilary had taken two steps out towards them, and stopped. Across the hall Lawrence Chase had just opened another door, leading to his bedroom. None of them moved.

A dim little cluster of bulbs burned at a corner of the landing by the grandfather clock, which seemed to rustle rather than tick. That light threw shadows of the hand-rail's banisters across Sam Constable's face and body. Methodically, shutting his mind to everything else, Sanders made an examination of the body. What he found caused him no alarm, but a shattering sense of relief. And yet - He felt rather than saw Chase tiptoeing over to his side, and making several ineffectual attempts to look past, his shoulder. But he did not turn round until Chase, with a kind of pounce, seized his arm. Chase was coatless and collarless, his stiff shirt bulging out between striped braces, and his long neck looking even longer. He had his collar in the other hand.

'Look here,' Chase began with hoarse thinness. 'He's not dead, is he? You're not going to tell me he's dead?' 'Yes.'

'Sam is dead?' 'See for yourself.'

'But it can't be,' said Chase, holding Sanders with one hand and shaking the collar in his face with the other. He crowded still closer. 'It's not true. He didn't mean any of it; He couldn't have.'

'Who couldn't have what?'

'Never mind. How did he die? Just tell me that. What was it?'

.'Steady! You'll have me over this rail in a minute. Get away, damn it! - Rupture of the heart, I should think.'

'Rupture?'

'Yes. Or it may be plain heart failure, where the heart is weak and just conks out by itself. Get away, will you?' said Sanders, brushing the collar away from his face with a feeling that a hundred collars were being shaken at him. ‘You heard him talk about a seizure. How was his heart, do you know?'

'His heart?' repeated Chase, with a powerful gleam of hope or relief. 'Idon't know. Probably very bad. Must have been. Poor old Sam. Ask Mina; that's it; ask Mina!'

Hilary had come out quietly and joined them. Sanders touched an arm of each of them.

'Listen to me,' he said, 'and please do as I tell you. Stay here with him; don't touch him, either of you, and don't let anyone else touch him. I'll be back in just one moment.'

And he went over to the half-open door where Mina Constable was waiting. Pushing her gently back before him, he went into the room and closed the door.

She did resist him, but her knees began to sag with an effect less like' that of a fall than of a collapsing paper lantern. He put his hands under her arms and put her gently down in a chair. She had not finished dressing; she was wearing a large padded pink dressing-gown, which muffled her except for the wiry hands and the muddled face from which the black hair was brushed back. It was an untidy dressing-gown, spotted on the sleeve with what looked like spots of wax. All Mina Constable's vivacity had gone. The lips were white, the pulse very rapid. But it was only when she seemed to realize he was keeping her away from her husband, was holding her back gently in the chair, that she began to fight.