The Gray Mask by Charles Wadsworth Camp (best reads txt) 📖

SHADOWS advanced through the shadowy fog, and Garth could define them as no more than shadows. In one place the mist thinned momentarily, and he glimpsed, apparently floating forward, the trunk of a man’s figure. Pallid tatters, such as might survive in a mortuary, flapped about bare shoulders, and from a little distance beyond came a sickly gleam—the doubtful response uncertain moonlight might draw from a bayonet or a musket barrel.

The fog closed in. There were no more shadows. Garth, eager to follow, forced himself to wait. He told himself that the march of phantoms possessed a meaning which would give direction to his task. The unveiling of its impulse, he was confident, would unveil the mystery at the house. Against so many only caution was useful at present.

He was glad Nora was not with him. He knew how profoundly she would have been stirred, how ready she would have been to discard a rational explanation for the occult. He could smile a little. In this one respect of vulnerability to superstition he felt himself immeasurably her superior. He was glad she had not involved herself in such a case.

Finally, phantom-like himself, he proceeded through the fog in the direction the silent shadows had taken. He walked for some distance.

Without warning he stumbled and pitched forward to his knees. Reaching out to save himself, his fingers touched something wet, cold, and possessed of a revealing quality which in one breathless moment drove into his brain the excuse for those at the house, and focussed for him their terror of the unexplored world of whose adjacence their solitude must have convinced them.

He snatched his hand back, rendered for the moment without purpose by this silent and singular tryst to which chance had led him in the evil forest. It was necessary, however, to strip the mask of night from the face of the one who lay, defeated and beyond resistance, in the path of the shadowy army.

He took his pocket lamp from his coat and pressed the control. The light fought through the fog to the face of the old servant who a few hours ago had begged him to get Mrs. Alden away, whose lips had been incomprehensibly sealed.

Quickly he searched for the manner of death, for there could be no coincidence about two such catastrophes in the same spot. In spite of the coroner’s verdict, murder was the only sensible deduction. Yet he found no slightest souvenir of violence. The face alone held a record of an attack—the features were twisted as if from its vehemence, and the eyes appeared to secrete some shocking vision.

Garth sprang to his feet. Alden’s sick fear and his wife’s hysterical misgivings were placed on a basis far sounder than imagination. A danger, un-cenformable, but none the less real, skirted their isolated house, had at last, according to the woman, forced an entrance.

Garth knew his limitations. He must have help, and now Alden must be made to talk.

He ran back to the house and stepped through the window. The lamp had been lighted. It shone on Mrs. Alden who bent over the writing-table, her gaze directed hypnotically towards the huddled man in the chair. Garth, since he came from the rear, could not see Alden’s face at first.

“Mrs. Alden,” he said, “I found your man, out there—”

Her hands left the table. She straightened. With a perceptible effort she raised her eyes from the chair to meet Garth’s.

“Not de—”

She put her hand to her mouth and crushed back the word.

Garth nodded.

“I must have help. Where’s the telephone?” he asked.

He started for the hall.

“Lock that window,” lie said. “I’ve left it open.”

Suddenly he paused and turned. A sound, scarcely human, had come from the chair—a hollow, a meaningless vocal attempt, as though therewere no palate behind it, no tongue to shape its intention.

From where he stood Garth could see Alden distinctly enough. His head was sunk forward on his chest. His fingers clutched powerlessly at the chair arms. His eyes appeared to have hoarded and just now released all the strength of which his meager body had been stripped. They flashed with a passionate purpose which drew Garth magnetically until he was close and had stooped and was staring into them with a curiosity almost as pronounced as their eagerness.

“What is it, Mr. Alden?” he asked.

The other’s fingers continued to stray about the chair arms.

“You’ve got to tell me what you know—all you suspect,” Garth urged “We’ve murder on our hands. What do you know?”

Alden’s head rose and fell affirmatively.

“Out with it.”

But Alden did not answer, although his eyes burned brighter; and Garth guessed.

“Speak, Mr. Alden,” he begged.

Alden’s lips moved. His throat worked. His face set in a grotesque grimace.

“There’s danger for all of us,” Garth cried. “The time for silence has passed.”

Then Alden answered, but it was only with that helpless, futile sound—such a whimper as escapes unintelligibly from the fancied fatality of a nightmare.

Garth drew back. Now when it was too late Alden wanted to talk. Now when he had been robbed of the power he craved the abandonment of words.

“Mrs. Alden,” Garth whispered. “You know your husband can’t speak! Look at him!”

About her advance there was that hypnotic quality Garth had noticed before. He read in her face, moreover, a sympathy and a love that made it as difficult of unmoved contemplation as the helpless suffering in Alden’s.

Alden smiled sorrowfully as his wife came close and stooped to him. His hands ceased their straying about the chair arms. They rose with a quick motion, an unsuspected strength, and closed about her white and beautiful throat.

She did not cry out. Perhaps there was no time. Her eyes closed. Her lips were wistful.

Garth tore at the man’s fingers. It took all his force to break their hold. And as he fought the answer to a great deal came to him. Alden was clearly insane, and his wife’s fear and John’s doubt of her safety were accounted for. Yet it didn’t answer all. What was the share of the shrouded army in the forest? What was the connection of the death that had struck there twice?

Alden’s vise-like grip was broken. Mrs. Alden swayed against the writing-table, gasping. Alden’s whimpering had recommenced.

Garth looked from one to the other.

“Good God! “he said.

She turned on him.

“Why did you come? It is your fault.”

Garth pointed at the cabinet where the medicine was kept. The nightmare whimpering did not cease.

“Get him something,” Garth directed. “The doctor must have left you a narcotic.”

She walked with a pronounced lurch to the cabinet where Garth heard her fumbling among the bottles, but he did not turn away from Alden. The imbecile sounds stopped, but the lips worked ineffectively again. One of the hands moved slowly with an apparent sanity of purpose. Garth realized that it was motioning him back. Alden started to rise. Garth saw his veins swell and the emaciated muscles, strain as he literally dragged himself out of the chair and braced his elbows against the writing-table. He grasped a pencil and wrote rapidly on a piece of paper. Garth understood, and he reached out for the sheet on which Alden had written the words—perhaps a warning, perhaps the truth — which his tongue had been unable to form.

“Don’t touch that paper.”

There was a new quality about the voice Garth could not deny. There was no more tinkling of glass at the cabinet. He found it difficult to credit Mrs. Alden with that clear, authoritative command. He turned warily and looked into the muzzle of his own revolver. Mrs. Alden’s outstretched hand, he noticed, did not waver.

“What does this mean?” he cried.

“It means,” she answered in a tired voice, “that if you read what is on that paper you’ll leave me no choice. I shall have to shoot.”

Alden whimpered again. The paper fluttered to the floor and rested, white and uncommunicative, beneath the table. His face set. He pointed accusingly towards the rear window.

The gesture was clear to Garth. He knew what it meant before his eyes followed its direction. Before he had seen, he appreciated almost palpably the new presence in the room. At the moment it seemed inevitable to him that the tense group should be joined by a stronger force, the inspiration, probably, of the mysteries that had posed it, and that worked ahead, he could not doubt, to a graver issue for Alden and himself

The newcomer glided from the shadows by the window and moved to Mrs. Alden’s side—huge, powerful. The cap, drawn low over his eyes, and the thick growth about the mouth, robbed his face of expression and gave to his actions a mechanical precision not lightly to be disturbed. He took the revolver