Ellery Queen

House of Haunts

Chapter I

The Black House

If a story began: “Once upon a time in a house cowering in wilderness there lived an old and eremitical creature named Mayhew, a crazy man who had buried two wives and lived a life of death; and this house was known as The Black House” — if a story began in this fashion, it would strike no one as especially remarkable. There are people like that who live in houses like that, and very often mysteries materialize like ectoplasm about their wild-eyed heads.

Now however disorderly Mr. Ellery Queen may be by habit, mentally he is an orderly person. His neckties and shoes might be strewn about his bedroom helter-skelter, but inside his skull hums a perfectly oiled machine, functioning as neatly and inexorably as the planetary system. So if there was a mystery about one Sylvester Mayhew, deceased, and his buried wives and gloomy dwelling, you may be sure the Queen brain would seize upon it and worry it and pick it apart and get it all laid out in neat and shiny rows. Rationality, that was it. No esoteric mumbo-jumbo could fool that fellow. Lord, no! His two feet were planted solidly on God’s good earth, and one and one made two — always — and that’s all there was to that.

Of course, Macbeth had said that stones have been known to move and trees to speak; but, pshaw! for these literary fancies. In this day and age, with its Cominterns, its wars of peace, its fasces and its rocketry experiments? Nonsense! The truth is, Mr. Queen would have said, there is something about the harsh, cruel world we live in that’s very rough on miracles. Miracles just don’t happen any more, unless they are miracles of stupidity or miracles of national avarice. Everyone with a grain of intelligence knows that.

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Queen would have said; “there are yogis, voodoos, fakirs, shamans, and other tricksters from the effete East and primitive Africa, but nobody pays any attention to such pitiful monkeyshines — I mean, nobody with sense. This is a reasonable world and everything that happens in it must have a reasonable explanation.”

You couldn’t expect a sane person to believe, for example, that a three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood, veritable human being could suddenly stoop, grab his shoelaces, and fly away. Or that a water-buffalo could change into a golden-haired little boy before your eyes. Or that a man dead one hundred and thirty-seven years could push aside his tombstone, step out of his grave, yawn, and then sing three verses of Mademoiselle from Armentieres. Or even, for that matter, that a stone could move or a tree speak — yea, though it were in the language of Atlantis or Mu.

Or... could you?

The tale of Sylvester Mayhew’s house is a strange tale. When what happened happened, proper minds tottered on their foundations and porcelain beliefs threatened to shiver into shards. Before the whole fantastic and incomprehensible business was done, God Himself came into it. Yes, God came into the story of Sylvester Mayhew’s house, and that is what makes it quite the most remarkable adventure in which Mr. Ellery Queen, that lean and indefatigable agnostic, has ever become involved.

The early mysteries in the Mayhew case were trivial — mysteries merely because certain pertinent facts were lacking; pleasantly provocative mysteries, but scarcely savorous of the supernatural.

Ellery was sprawled on the hearthrug before the hissing fire that raw January morning, debating with himself whether it was more desirable to brave the slippery streets and biting wind on a trip to Centre Street in quest of amusement, or to remain where he was in idleness but comfort, when the telephone rang.

It was Thorne on the wire. Ellery, who never thought of Thorne without perforce visualizing a human monolith — a long-limbed, gray-thatched male figure with marbled cheeks and agate eyes, the whole man coated with a veneer of ebony, was rather startled. Thorne was excited; every crack and blur in his voice spoke eloquently of emotion. It was the first time, to Ellery’s recollection, that Thorne had betrayed the least evidence of human feeling.

“What’s the matter?” Ellery demanded. “Nothing’s wrong with Ann, I hope?” Ann was Thome’s wife.

“No, no.” Thorne spoke hoarsely and rapidly, as if he had been running.

“Where the deuce have you been? I saw Ann only yesterday and she said she hadn’t heard from you for almost a week. Of course, your wife’s used to your preoccupation with those interminable legal affairs, but an absence of six days—”

“Listen to me, Queen, and don’t hold me up. I must have your help. Can you meet me at Pier 54 in half an hour? That’s North River.”

“Of course.”

Thorne mumbled something that sounded absurdly like: “Thank God!” and hurried on: “Pack a bag. For a couple of days. And a revolver. Especially a revolver, Queen.”

“I see,” said Ellery, not seeing at all.

“I’m meeting the Cunarder Coronia. Docking this morning. I’m with a man by the name of Reinach, Dr. Reinach. You’re my colleague; get that? Act stern and omnipotent. Don’t be friendly. Don’t ask him — or me — questions. And don’t allow yourself to be pumped. Understood?”

“Understood,” said Ellery, “but not exactly clear. Anything else?”

“Call Ann for me. Give her my love and tell her I shan’t be home for days yet, but that you’re with me and that I’m all right. And ask her to telephone my office and explain matters to Crawford.”

“Do you mean to say that not even your partner knows what you’ve been doing?”

But Thorne had hung up.

Ellery replaced the receiver, frowning. It was stranger than strange. Thorne had always been a solid citizen, a successful attorney who led an impeccable private life and whose legal practice was dry and unexciting. To find old Thorne entangled in a web of mystery...

Ellery drew a happy breath, telephoned Mrs. Thorne, tried to sound reassuring, yelled for Djuna, hurled some clothes into a bag, loaded his.38 police revolver with a grimace, scribbled a note for Inspector Queen, dashed downstairs and jumped into the cab Djuna had summoned, and landed on Pier 54 with thirty seconds to spare.

There was something terribly wrong with Thorne, Ellery saw at once, even before he turned his attention to the vast fat man by the lawyer’s side. Thorne was shrunken within his Scotch-plaid greatcoat like a pupa which has died prematurely in its cocoon. He had aged years in the few weeks since Ellery had last seen him. His ordinarily sleek cobalt cheeks were covered with a straggly stubble. Even his clothing looked tired and uncared-for. And there was a glitter of furtive relief in his bloodshot eyes as he pressed Ellery’s hand that was, to one who knew Throne’s self-sufficiency and aplomb, almost pathetic.

But he merely remarked: “Oh, hello, there, Queen. We’ve a longer wait than we anticipated, I’m afraid. Want you to shake hands with Dr. Herbert Reinach. Doctor, this is Ellery Queen.”

“ ‘D’you do,” said Ellery curtly, touching the man’s im mense gloved hand. If he was to be omnipotent, he thought, he might as well be rude, too.“Surprise, Mr. Thorne?” said Dr. Reinach in the deepest voice Ellery had ever heard; it rumbled up from the caverns of his chest like the echo of thunder. His little purplish eyes were very, very cold.

“A pleasant one, I hope,” said Thorne.

Ellery snatched a glance at his friend’s face as he cupped his hands about a cigarette, and he read approval there. If he had struck the right tone, he knew how to act thenceforth. He flipped the match away and turned abruptly to Thorne. Dr. Reinach was studying him in a half-puzzled, half-amused way.

“Where’s the Coronia?”

“Held up in quarantine,” said Thorne. “Somebody’s seriously ill aboard with some disease or other and there’s been difficulty in clearing her passengers. It will take hours, I understand. Suppose we settle down in the waiting-room for a bit.”

They found places in the crowded room, and Ellery set his bag between his feet and disposed himself so that he was in a position to catch every expression on his companions’ faces. There was something in Thome’s repressed excitement, an even more piquing aura enveloping the fat doctor, that violently whipped his curiosity.

“Alice,” said Thorne in a casual tone, as if Ellery knew who Alice was, “is probably becoming impatient. But that’s a family trait with the Mayhews, from the little I saw of old Sylvester. Eh, Doctor? It’s trying, though, to come all the way from England only to be held up on the threshold.”

So they were to meet an Alice Mayhew, thought Ellery, arriving from England on the Coronia. Good old Thorne! He almost chuckled aloud. “Sylvester” was obviously a senior Mayhew, some relative of Alice’s.

Dr. Reinach fixed his little eyes on Ellery’s bag and rumbled politely. “Are you going away somewhere, Mr. Queen?”

Then Reinach did not know Ellery was to accompany them — wherever they were bound for.

Thorne stirred in the depths of his greatcoat, rustling like a sack of desiccated bones. “Queen’s coming back with me, Dr. Reinach.” There was something brittle and hostile in his voice.

The fat man blinked, his eyes buried beneath half-moons of damp flesh. “Really?” he said, and by contrast his bass voice was tender.

“Perhaps I should have explained,” said Thorne abruptly. “Queen is a colleague of mine, Doctor. This case has interested him.”

“Case?” said the fat man.

“Legally speaking. I really hadn’t the heart to deny him the pleasure of helping me — ah — protect Alice Mayhew’s interests. I trust you won’t mind?”

This was a deadly game, Ellery became certain. Something important was at stake, and Thorne in his stubborn way was determined to defend it by force or guile.

Reinach’s puffy lids dropped over his eyes as he folded his paws on his stomach. “Naturally, naturally not,” he said in a hearty tone. “Only too happy to have you, Mr. Queen. A little unexpected, perhaps, but delightful surprises are as essential to life as to poetry. Eh?” And he chuckled.

Samuel Johnson, thought Ellery, recognizing the source of the doctor’s remark. The physical analogy «truck him. There was iron beneath those layers of fat and a good brain under that dolichocephalic skull. The man sat there on the waiting-room bench like an octopus, lazy and inert and peculiarly indifferent to his surroundings. Indifference — that was it, thought Ellery; the man was a colossal remoteness, as vague and darkling as a storm cloud on an empty horizon.

Thorne said in a weary voice: “Suppose we have lunch. I’m famished.”

By three in the afternoon Ellery felt old and worn. Several hours of nervous, cautious silence, threading his way smiling among treacherous shoals, had told him just enough to put him on guard. He often felt knotted tip and ti^ht inside when a crisis loomed or danger threatened from an unknown quarter. Something extraordinary was going on.

As they stood on the pier watching the Coronia’s bulk being nudged alongside, he chewed on the scraps he had managed to glean during the long, heavy, pregnant hours. He knew definitely now that the man called Sylvester Mayhew was dead, that he had been a pronounced paranoic, that his house was buried in an almost inaccessible wilderness on Long Island. Alice Mayhew, somewhere on the decks of the Coronia doubtless straining her eyes pierward, was the dead man’s daughter, parted from her father since childhood.

And he had placed the remarkable figure of Dr. Reinach in the puzzle. The fat man was Sylvester Mayhew’s half-brother. He had also acted as Mayhew’s physician during the old man’s last illness. This illness and death seemed to have been very recent, for there had been some talk of “the funeral” in terms of fresh if detached sorrow. There was also a Mrs. Reinach glimmering unsubstantially in the background, and a queer old lady who was the dead man’s sister. But what the mystery was, or why Thorne was so perturbed, Ellery could not figure out.

The liner tied up to the pier at last. Officials scampered about, whistles blew, gang-planks appeared, passengers disembarked in droves to the accompaniment of the usual howls and embraces. Interest crept into Dr. Reinach’s little eyes, and Thorne was shaking.

“There she is!” croaked the lawyer. “I’d know her anywhere from her photographs. That slender girl in the brown turban!”

As Thorne hurried away Ellery studied the girl eagerly. She was anxiously scanning the crowd, a tall charming creature with an elasticity of movement more esthetic than athletic and a harmony of delicate feature that approached beauty. She was dressed so simply and inexpensively that he narrowed his eyes.

Thorne came back with her, patting her gloved hand and speaking quietly to her. Her face was alight and alive, and there was a natural gaiety in it which convinced Ellery that whatever mystery or tragedy lay before her, it was still unknown to her. At the same time there were certain signs about her eyes and mouth — fatigue, strain, worry, he could not put his finger on the exact cause — which puzzled him.

“I’m so glad,” she murmured in a cultured voice, strongly British in accent. Then her face grew grave and she looked from Ellery to Dr. Reinach.

“This is your uncle, Miss Mayhew,” said Thorne. “Dr. Reinach. This other gentleman is not, I regret to say, a relative. Mr. Ellery Queen, a colleague of mine.”

“Oh,” said the girl; and she turned to the fat man and said tremulously: “Uncle Herbert. How terribly odd. I mean — I’ve felt so all alone. You’ve been just a legend to me, Uncle Herbert, you and Aunt Sarah and the rest, and now...” She choked a little as she put her arms about the fat man and kissed his pendulous cheek.

“My dear,” said Dr. Reinach solemnly; and Ellery could have struck him for the Judas quality of his solemnity.

“But you must tell me everything! Father — how is father? It seems so strange to be... to be saying that.”

“Don’t you think, Miss Mayhew,” said the lawyer quickly, “that we had better see you through the Customs? It’s growing late and we have a long trip before us. Long Island, you know.”

“Island?” Her candid eyes widened. “That sounds so exciting!”

“Well, it’s not what you might think—”

“Forgive me. I’m acting the perfect gawk.” She smiled. “I’m entirely in your hands, Mr. Thorne. Your letter was more than kind.” As they made their way toward the Customs, Ellery dropped a little behind and devoted himself to watching Dr. Reinach. But that vast lunar countenance was as inscrutable as a gargoyle.

Dr. Reinach drove. It was not Thome’s car; Thorne had a regal new Lincoln limousine and this was a battered if serviceable old Buick sedan.

The girl’s luggage was strapped to the back and sides; Ellery was puzzled by the scantness of it — three small suitcases and a tiny steam-er-trunk. Did these four pitiful containers hold all of her worldly possessions?

Sitting beside the fat man, Ellery strained his ears. He paid little attention to the road Reinach was taking.

The two behind were silent for a long time. Then Thorne cleared his throat with an oddly ominous finality. Ellery saw what was coming; he had often heard that throat-clearing sound emanate from the mouths of judges pronouncing sentence of doom.

“We have something sad to tell you, Miss Mayhew. You may as well learn it now.”

“Sad?” murmured the girl after a moment. “Sad? Oh, it’s not—”

“Your father,” said Thorne inaudibly. “He’s dead.”

She cried: “Oh!” in a small helpless voice; and then she grew quiet.

“I’m dreadfully sorry to have to greet you with such news,” said Thorne in the silence. “We’d anticipated... And I realize how awkward it must be for you. After all, it’s quite as if you had never known him at all.

Love for a parent, I’m afraid, lies in direct ratio to the degree of childhood association. Without any association at all...”

“It’s a shock, of course,” Alice said in a muffled voice. “And yet, as you say, he was a stranger to me, a mere name. As I wrote you, I was only a toddler when mother got her divorce and took me off to England. I don’t remember father at all. And I’ve not seen him since, or heard from him.”

“Yes,” muttered the attorney.

“I might have learned more about father if mother hadn’t died when I was six; but she did, and my people — her people — in England... Uncle John died last fall. He was the last one. And then I was left all alone. When your letter came I was — I was so glad, Mr. Thorne. I didn’t feel lonely any more. I was really happy for the first time in years. And now—” She broke off to stare out the window.

Dr. Reinach swiveled his massive head and smiled benignly. “But you’re not alone, my dear. There’s my unworthy self, and your Aunt Sarah, and Milly — Milly’s my wife, Alice; naturally you wouldn’t know anything about her — and there’s even a husky young fellow named Keith who works about the place — bright lad who’s come down in the world.” He chuckled. “So you see there won’t be a dearth of companionship for you.”

“Thank you, Uncle Herbert,” she murmured. “I’m sure you’re all terribly kind. Mr. Thorne, how did father... When you replied to my letter you wrote me he was ill, but—”

“He fell into a coma unexpectedly nine days ago. You hadn’t left England yet and I cabled you at your antique-shop address. But somehow it missed you.”

“I’d sold the shop by that time and was flying about patching up things. When did he... die?”

“A week ago Thursday. The funeral... Well, we couldn’t wait, you see. I might have caught you by cable or telephone on the Coronia, but I didn’t have the heart to spoil your voyage.”

“I don’t know how to thank you for all the trouble you’ve taken.” Without looking at her Ellery knew there were tears in her eyes. “It’s good to know that someone—”

“It’s been hard for all of us,” rumbled Dr. Reinach.

“Of course, Uncle Herbert. I’m sorry.” She fell silent. When she spoke again, it was as if there were a compulsion expelling the words.

“When Uncle John died, I didn’t know where to reach father. The only American address I had was yours, Mr. Thorne, which some patron or other had given me. It was the only thing I could think of. I was sure a solicitor could find father for me. That’s why I wrote to you in such detail, with photographs and all.”

“Naturally we did what we could.” Thorne seemed to be having difficulty with his voice. “When I found your father and went out to see him the first time and showed him your letter and photographs, he... I’m sure this will please you, Miss Mayhew. He wanted you badly. He’d apparently been having a hard time of late years — ah, mentally, emotionally. And so I wrote you at his request. On my second visit, the last time I saw him alive, when the question of the estate came up—”

Ellery thought that Dr. Reinach’s paws tightened on the wheel. But the fat man’s face bore the same bland, remote smile.

“Please,” said Alice wearily. “Do you greatly mind, Mr. Thorne? I–I don’t feel up to discussing such matters now.”

The car was fleeing along the deserted road as if it were trying to run away from the weather. The sky was gray lead; a frowning, gloomy sky under which the countryside lay cowering. It was growing colder, too, in the dark and draughty tonneau; the cold seeped in through the cracks and their overclothes.

Ellery stamped his feet a little and twisted about to glance at Alice Mayhew. Her oval face was a glimmer in the murk; she was sitting stiffly, her hands clenched into tight little fists in her lap. Thorne was slumped miserably by her side, staring out the window.

“By George, it’s going to snow,” announced Dr. Reinach with a cheerful puff of his cheeks.

No one answered.

The drive was interminable. There was a dreary sameness about the landscape that matched the weather’s mood. They had long since left the main highway to turn into a frightful byroad, along which they jolted in an unsteady eastward curve between ranks of leafless woods. The road was pitted and frozen hard; the woods were tangles of dead trees and under-brush densely packed but looking as if they had been repeatedly seared by fire. The whole effect was one of widespread and oppressive desolation.

“Looks like No Man’s Land,” said Ellery at last from his bouncing seat beside Dr. Reinach. “And feels like it, too.”

Dr. Reinach’s cetaceous back heaved in a silent mirth. “Matter of fact, that’s exactly what it’s called by the natives. Land-God-forgot, eh? But then Sylvester always swore by the Greek unities.”

The man seemed to live in a dark and silent cavern, out of which he maliciously emerged at intervals to poison the atmosphere.

“It isn’t very inviting-looking, is it?” remarked Alice in a low voice. It was clear she was brooding over the strange old man who had lived in this wasteland, and of her mother who had fled from it so many years before.

“It wasn’t always this way,” said Dr. Reinach, swelling his cheeks like a bullfrog. “Once it was pleasant enough; I remember it as a boy. Then it seemed as if it might become the nucleus of a populous community. But progress has passed it by, and a couple of uncontrollable forest fires did the rest.”

“It’s horrible,” murmured Alice, “simply horrible.”

“My dear Alice, it’s your innocence that speaks there. All life is a frantic struggle to paint a rosy veneer over the ugly realities. Why not be honest with yourself? Everything in this world is stinking rotten; worse than that, a bore. Hardly worth living, in any impartial analysis. But if you have to live, you may as well live in surroundings consistent with the rottenness of everything.”

The old attorney stirred beside Alice, where he was buried in his greatcoat. “You’re quite a philosopher, Doctor,” he snarled.

“I’m an honest man.”

“Do you know, Doctor,” murmured Ellery, despite himself, “you’re beginning to annoy me.”

The fat man glanced at him. Then he said: “And do you agree with this mysterious friend of yours, Thorne?”

“I believe,” snapped Thorne, “that there is a platitude extant which says that actions speak with considerably more volume than words. I haven’t shaved for six days, and today has been the first time I left Sylvester Mayhew’s house since his funeral.”

“Mr. Thorne!” cried Alice, turning to him. “Why?”

The lawyer muttered: “I’m sorry, Miss Mayhew. All in good time, in good time.”

“You wrong us all,” smiled Dr. Reinach, deftly skirting a deep rut in the road. “And I’m afraid you’re giving my niece quite the most erroneous impression of her family. We’re odd, no doubt, and our blood is presumably turning sour after so many generations of cold storage; but then don’t the finest vintages come from the deepest cellars? You’ve only to glance at Alice to see my point. Such vital loveliness could only have been produced by an old family.”

“My mother,” said Alice, with a faint loathing in her glance, “had something to do with that, Uncle Herbert.”

“Your mother, my dear,” replied the fat man, “was merely a contributory factor. You have the typical Mayhew features.”

Alice did not reply. Her uncle, whom until today she had not seen, was an obscene enigma; the others, waiting for them at their destination, she had never seen at all, and she had no great hope that they would prove better. A livid streak ran through her father’s family; he had been a paranoic with delusions of persecution. The Aunt Sarah in the dark distance, her father’s surviving sister, was apparently something of a character. As for Aunt Milly, Dr. Reinach’s wife, whatever she might have been in the past, one had only to glance at Dr. Reinach to see what she undoubtedly was in the present.

Ellery felt prickles at the nape of his neck. The farther they penetrated this wilderness the less he liked the whole adventure. It smacked vaguely of a fore-ordained theatricalism, as if some hand of monstrous power were setting the stage for the first act of a colossal tragedy... He shrugged this sophomoric foolishness off, settling deeper into his coat. It was queer enough, though. Even the lifelines of the most indigent community were missing; there were no telephone poles and, so far as he could detect, no electric cables. That meant candles. He detested candles.

The sun was behind them, leaving them. It was a feeble sun, shivering in the pallid cold. Feeble as it was, Ellery wished it would stay.

They crashed on and on, endlessly, shaken like dolls. The road kept lurching toward the east in a stubborn curve. The sky grew more and more leaden. The cold seeped deeper and deeper into their bones.

When Dr. Reinach finally rumbled: “Here we are,” and steered the jolting car leftward off the road into a narrow, wretchedly gravelled driveway, Ellery came to with a start of surprise and relief. So their journey was really over, lie thought. Behind him he heard Thorne and Alice stirring; they must be thinking the same thing.

He roused himself, stamping his icy feet, looking about. The same desolate tangle of woods to either side of the byroad. He recalled now that they had not once left the main road nor crossed another road since turning off the highway. No chance, he thought grimly, to stray off this path to perdition.

Dr. Reinach twisted his fat neck and said: “Welcome home, Alice.”

Alice murmured something incomprehensible; her face was buried to the eyes in the moth-eaten lap robe Reinach had flung over her. Ellery glanced sharply at the fat man; there had been a note of mockery, of derision, in that heavy rasping voice. But the face was smooth and damp and bland, as before.

Dr. Reinach ran the car up the driveway and brought it to rest a little before, and between, two houses. These structures flanked the drive, standing side by side, separated by only the width of the drive, which led straight ahead to a ramshackle garage. Ellery caught a glimpse of Thome’s glittering Lincoln within its crumbling walls. The three buildings huddled in a ragged clearing, surrounded by the tangle of woods, like three desert islands in an empty sea.

“That,” said Dr. Reinach heartily, “is the ancestral mansion, Alice. To the left.”

The house to the left was of stone; once gray, but now so tarnished by the elements and perhaps the ravages of fire that it was almost black. Its face was blotched and streaky, as if it had succumbed to an insensate leprosy. Rising three stories, elaborately ornamented with stone flora and gargoyles, it was unmistakably Victorian in its architecture. The façade had a neglected, granular look that only the art of great age could have etched. The whole structure appeared to have thrust its roots immovably into the forsaken landscape.

Ellery saw Alice Mayhew staring at it with a sort of speechless horror; it had nothing of the pleasant hoariness of old English mansions. It was simply old, old with the dreadful age of this seared and blasted countryside. He cursed Thorne beneath his breath for subjecting the girl to such a shocking experience.

“Sylvester called it The Black House,” said Dr. Reinach cheerfully as he turned off the ignition. “Not pretty, I admit, but as solid as the day it was built, seventy-five years ago.”

“Black House,” grunted Thorne. “Rubbish.”

“Do you mean to say,” whispered Alice, “that father... mother lived here?”

“Yes, my dear. Quaint name, eh, Thorne? Another illustration of Sylvester’s preoccupation with the morbidly colorful. Built by your grandfather, Alice. The old gentleman built this one, too, later; I believe you’ll find it considerably more habitable. “Where the devil is everyone?”

He descended heavily and held the rear door open for his niece. Mr. Ellery Queen slipped down to the driveway on the other side and glanced about with the sharp, uneasy sniff of a wild animal. The old mansion’s companion-house was a much smaller and less pretentious dwelling, two stories high and built of an originally white stone which had turned gray. The front door was shut and the curtains at the lower windows were drawn. But there was a fire burning somewhere inside; he caught the tremulous glimmers. In the next moment they were blotted out by the head of an old woman, who pressed her face to one of the panes for a single instant and then vanished. But the door remained shut.

“You’ll stop with us, of course,” he heard the doctor say genially; and Ellery circled the car. His three companions were standing in the driveway, Alice pressed close to old Thorne as if for protection. “You won’t want to sleep in the Black House, Alice. No one’s there, it’s in rather a mess; and a house of death, y’know...”

“Stop it,” growled Thorne. “Can’t you see the poor child is half-dead from fright as it is? Are you trying to scare her away?”

“Scare me away?” repeated Alice, dazedly.

“Tut, tut,” smiled the fat man. “Melodrama doesn’t become you at all, Thorne. I’m a blunt old codger, Alice, but I mean well. It will really be more comfortable in the White House.” He chuckled suddenly again. “White House. That’s what I named it to preserve a sort of atmospheric balance.”

“There’s something frightfully wrong here,” said Alice in a tight voice. “Mr. Thorne, what is it? There’s been nothing but innuendo and concealed hostility since we met at the pier. And just why did you spend six days in father’s house after the funeral? I think I’ve a right to know.”

Thorne licked his lips. “I shouldn’t—”

“Come, come, my dear,” said the fat man. “Are we to freeze here all day?”

Alice drew her thin coat more closely about her. “You’re all being beastly. Would you mind, Uncle Herbert? I should like to see the inside — where father and mother—”

“I don’t think so, Miss Mayhew,” said Thorne hastily.

“Why not?” said Dr. Reinach tenderly, and he glanced once over his shoulder at the building he had called the White House. “She may as well do it now and get it over with. There’s still light enough to see by. Then we’ll go over, wash up, have a hot dinner, and you’ll feel worlds better.” He seized the girl’s arm and marched her toward the dark building, across the dead, twig-strewn ground. “I believe,” continued the doctor blandly, as they mounted the steps of the stone porch, “that Mr. Thorne has the keys.”

The girl stood quietly waiting, her dark eyes studying the faces of the three men. The attorney was pale, but his lips were set in a stubborn line. He did not reply. Taking a bunch of large rusty keys out of a pocket, he fitted one into the lock of the front door. It turned over with a creak.

Then Thorne pushed open the door and they stepped into the house.

It was a tomb. It smelled of must and damp. The furniture, ponderous pieces which once no doubt had been regal, was uniformly dilapidated and dusty. The walls were peeling, showing broken, discolored laths beneath. There was dirt and debris everywhere. It was inconceivable that a human being could once have inhabited this grubby den.

The girl stumbled about, her eyes a blank horror, Dr. Reinach steering her calmly. How long the tour of inspection lasted Ellery did not know; even to him, a stranger, the effect was so oppressive as to be almost unendurable. They wandered about, silent, stepping over trash from room to room, impelled by something stronger than themselves.

Once Alice said in a strangled voice: “Uncle Herbert, didn’t anyone... take care of father? Didn’t anyone ever clean up this horrible place?”

The fat man shrugged. “Your father had notions in his old age, my dear. There wasn’t much anyone could do with him. Perhaps we had better not go into that.”

The sour stench filled their nostrils. They blundered on, Thorne in the rear, watchful as an old cobra. His eyes never left Dr. Reinach’s face.

On the middle floor they came upon a bedroom in which, according to the fat man, Sylvester Mayhew had died. The bed was unmade; indeed, the impress of the dead man’s body on the mattress and tumbled sheets could still be discerned. It was a bare and mean room, not as filthy as the others, but infinitely more depressing. Alice began to cough.

She coughed and coughed, hopelessly, standing still in the center of the room and staring at the dirty bed in which she had been born. Then suddenly she stopped coughing and ran over to a lopsided bureau with one foot missing. A large, faded chromo was propped on its top against the yellowed wall. She looked at it for a long time without touching it. Then she took it down.

“It’s mother,” she said slowly. “It’s really mother. I’m glad now I came. He did love her, after all. He’s kept it all these years.”

“Yes, Miss Mayhew,” muttered Thorne. “I thought you’d like to have it.” “I’ve only one portrait of mother, and that’s a poor one. This — why, she was beautiful, wasn’t she?”

She held the chromo up proudly, almost laughing in her hysteria. The time-dulled colors revealed a stately young woman with hair worn high. The features were piquant and regular. There was little resemblance between Alice and the woman in the picture.

“Your father,” said Dr. Reinach with a sigh, “often spoke of your mother toward the last, and of her beauty.”

“If he had left me nothing but this, it would have been worth the trip from England.” Alice trembled a little. Then she hurried back to them, the chromo pressed to her breast. “Let’s get out of here,” she said in a shriller voice. “I–I don’t like it here. It’s ghastly. I’m... afraid.”

They left the house with half-running steps, as if someone were after them. The old lawyer turned the key in the lock of the front door with great care, glaring at Dr. Reinach’s back as he did so. But the fat man had seized his niece’s arm and was leading her across the driveway to the White House, whose windows were now flickeringly bright with light and whose front door stood wide open.

As they crunched along behind, Ellery said sharply to Thorne:

“Thorne. Give me a clue. A hint. Anything. I’m completely in the dark.” Thome’s unshaven face was haggard in the setting sun. “Can’t talk now,” he muttered. “Suspect everything, everybody. I’ll see you tonight, in your room. Or wherever they put you, if you’re alone... Queen, for God’s sake, be careful!”

“Careful?” frowned Ellery.

“As if your life depended on it.” Thome’s lips made a thin, grim line. “For all I know, it does.”

Then they were crossing the threshold of the White House...

Ellery’s impressions were curiously vague. Perhaps it was the effect of the sudden smothering heat after the hours of cramping cold outdoors; perhaps he thawed out too suddenly, and the heat went to his brain.

He stood about for a while in a state almost of semi-consciousness, basking in the waves of warmth that eddied from a roaring fire in a fireplace black with age. He was only dimly aware of the two people who greeted them, and of the interior of the house. The room was old, like everything else he had seen, and its furniture might have come from an antique shop. They were standing in a large living-room, comfortable enough; strange to his senses only because it was so old-fashioned in its appointments. There were actually antimacassars on the overstuffed chairs! A wide staircase with worn brass treads wound from one corner to the sleeping quarters above.

One of the two persons awaiting them was Mrs. Reinach, the doctor’s wife. The moment Ellery saw her, even as she embraced Alice, he knew that this was inevitably the sort of woman the fat man would choose for a mate. She was a pale and weazened midge, almost fragile in her delicacy of bone and skin; and she was plainly in a silent convulsion of fear. She wore a hunted look on her dry and bluish face; and over Alice’s shoulder she glanced timidly, with the fascinated obedience of a whipped bitch, at her husband.

“So you’re Aunt Milly,” sighed Alice, pushing away. “You’ll forgive me if I... It’s all so very new to me.”

“You must be exhausted, poor darling,” said Mrs. Reinach in the chirping twitter of a bird; and Alice smiled wanly and looked grateful. “And I quite understand. After all, we’re no more than strangers to you. Oh!” she said, and stopped. Her faded eyes were fixed on the chromo in the girl’s hands. “Oh,” she said again. “I see you’ve been over to the other house already.”

“Of course she has,” said the fat man; and his wife grew even paler at the sound of his bass voice. “Now, Alice, why don’t you let Milly take you upstairs and get you comfortable?”

“I am rather done in,” confessed Alice; and then she looked at her mother’s picture and smiled again. “I suppose you think I’m very silly, dashing in this way with just—” She did not finish; instead, she went to the fireplace. There was a broad flame-darkened mantel above it, crowded with gewgaws of a vanished era. She set the chromo of the handsome Victorian-garbed woman among them. “There! Now I feel ever so much better.”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” said Dr. Reinach. “Please don’t stand on ceremony. Nick! Make yourself useful. Miss Mayhew’s bags are strapped to the car.”

A gigantic young man, who had been leaning against the wall, nodded in a surly way. He was studying Alice Mayhew’s face with a dark absorption. He went out.

“Who,” murmured Alice, flushing, “is that?”

“Nick Keith.” The fat man slipped off his coat and went to the fire to warm his flabby hands. “My morose protégé. You’ll find him pleasant company, my dear, if you can pierce that thick defensive armor he wears. Does odd jobs about the place, as I believe I mentioned, but don’t let that hold you back. This is a democratic country.”

“I’m sure he’s very nice. Would you excuse me? Aunt Milly, if you’d be kind enough to—”

The young man reappeared under a load of baggage, clumped across the living-room, and plodded up the stairs. And suddenly, as if at a signal, Mrs. Reinach broke out into a noisy twittering and took Alice’s arm and led her to the staircase. They disappeared after Keith.

“As a medical man,” chuckled the fat man, taking their wraps and depositing them in a hall-closet, “I prescribe a large dose of... this, gentlemen.” He went to a sideboard and brought out a decanter of brandy. “Very good for chilled bellies.” He tossed off his own glass with an amazing facility, and in the light of the fire the finely etched capillaries in his bulbous nose stood out clearly. “Ah-h! One of life’s major compensations. Warming, eh? And now I suppose you feel the need of a little sprucing up yourselves.; Come along, and I’ll show you to your rooms.”

Ellery shook his head in a dogged way, trying to clear it. “There’s something about your house, Doctor, that’s unusually soporific. Thank you, I think both Thorne and I would appreciate a brisk wash.”

“You’ll find it brisk enough,” said the fat man, shaking with silent laughter. “This is the forest primeval, you know. Not only haven’t we any electric light or gas or telephone, but we’ve no running water, either. Well behind the house keeps us supplied. The simple life, eh? Better for you than the pampering influences of modern civilization. Our ancestors may have died more easily of bacterial infections, but I’ll wager they had a greater body immunity to coryza!... Well, well, enough of this prattle. Up you go.”

The chilly corridor upstairs made them shiver, but the very shiver revived them; Ellery felt better at once. Dr. Reinach, carrying candles and matches, showed Thorne into a room overlooking the front of the house, and Ellery into one on the side. A fire burned crisply in the large fireplace in one corner, and the basin on the old-fashioned washstand was filled with icy-looking water.

“Hope you find it comfortable,” drawled the fat man, lounging in the doorway. “We were expecting only Thorne and my niece, but one more can always be accommodated. Ah — colleague of Thome’s, I believe he said?”

“Twice,” replied Ellery. “If you don’t mind—”

“Not at all.” Reinach lingered, eying Ellery with a smile. Ellery shrugged, stripped off his coat, and made his ablutions. The water was cold; it nipped his fingers like the mouths of little fishes. He scrubbed his face vigorously.

“That’s better,” he said, drying himself. “Much. I wonder why I felt so peaked downstairs.”

“Sudden contrast of heat after cold, no doubt.” Dr. Reinach made no move to go.

Ellery shrugged again. He opened his bag with pointed nonchalance. There, plainly revealed on his haberdashery, lay the.38 police revolver. He tossed it aside.

“Do you always carry a gun, Mr. Queen?” murmured Dr. Reinach.

“Always.” Ellery picked up the revolver and slipped it into his hip pocket.

“Charming!” The fat man stroked his triple chin. “Charming. Well, Mr. Queen, if you’ll excuse me I’ll see how Thorne is getting on. Stubborn fellow, Thorne. He could have taken pot luck with us this past week, but he insisted on isolating himself in that filthy den next door.”

“I wonder,” murmured Ellery, “why.”

Dr. Reinach eyed him. Then he said: “Come downstairs when you’re ready. Mrs. Reinach has an excellent dinner prepared and if you’re as hungry as I am, you’ll appreciate it.” Still smiling, the fat man vanished.

Ellery stood still for a moment, listening. He heard the fat man pause at the end of the corridor; a moment later the heavy tread was audible again, this time descending the stairs. Ellery went swiftly to the door on tiptoe. He had noticed that the instant he had come into the room.

There was no lock. Where a lock had been there was a splintery hole, and the splinters had a newish look about them. Frowning, he placed a rickety chair against the door-knob and began to prowl.

He raised the mattress from the heavy wooden bedstead and poked beneath it, searching for he knew not what. He opened closets and drawers; he felt the worn carpet for wires. But after ten minutes, angry with himself, he gave up and went to the window. The prospect was so dismal that he scowled in sheer misery. Just brown stripped woods and (lie leaden sky; the old mansion picturesquely known as the Black House was on the other side, invisible from this window.

A veiled sun was setting; a bank of storm clouds slipped aside for an instant and the brilliant rim of the sun shone directly into his eyes, making him see colored, dancing balls. Then other clouds, fat with snow, moved up and the sun slipped below the horizon. The room darkened rapidly.

Lock taken out, eh? Someone had worked fast. They could not have known he was coming, of course. Then someone must have seen him through the window as the car stopped in the drive. The old woman who had peered out for a moment? Ellery wondered where she was. At any rate, a few minutes’ work by a skilled hand at the door... He wondered, too, if Thome’s door had been similarly mutilated. And Alice Mayhew’s.

Thorne and Dr. Reinach were already seated before the fire when Ellery came down, and the fat man was rumbling: “Just as well. Give the poor girl a chance to return to normal. With the shock she’s had today, it might be the finisher. I’ve told Mrs. Reinach to break it to Sarah gently... Ah, Queen. Come over here and join us. We’ll have dinner as soon as Alice comes down.”

“Dr. Reinach was just apologizing,” said Thorne casually, “for this Aunt Sarah of Miss Mayhew’s — Mrs. Fell, Sylvester Mayhew’s sister. The excitement of anticipating her niece’s arrival seems to have been a bit too much for her.”

“Indeed,” said Ellery, sitting down and planting his feet on the nearest firedog.

“Fact is,” said the fat man, “my poor half-sister is cracked. The family paranoia. She’s off-balance; not violent, you know, but it’s wise to humor her. She isn’t normal, and for Alice to see her—”

“Paranoia,” said Ellery. “An unfortunate family, it seems. Your half-brother Sylvester’s weakness seems to have expressed itself in rubbish and solitude. What’s Mrs. Fell’s delusion?”

“Common enough — she thinks her daughter is still alive. As a matter of fact, poor Olivia was killed in an automobile accident three years ago. It shocked Sarah’s maternal instinct out of plumb. Sarah’s been looking forward to seeing Alice, her brother’s daughter, and it may prove awkward. Never can tell how a diseased mind will react to an unusual situation.”

“For that matter,” drawled Ellery, “I should have said the same remark might be made about any mind, diseased or not.”

Dr. Reinach laughed silently. Thorne, hunched by the fire, said: “This Keith boy.”

The fat man set his glass down slowly. “Drink, Queen?”

“No, thank you.”

“This Keith boy,” said Thorne again.

“Eh? Oh, Nick. Yes, Thorne? What about him?”

The lawyer shrugged. Dr. Reinach picked up his glass again. “Am I imagining things, or is there the vaguest hint of hostility in the circumambient ether?”

“Reinach—” began Thorne harshly.

“Don’t worry about Keith, Thorne. We let him pretty much alone. He’s sour on the world, which demonstrates his good sense; but I’m afraid he’s unlike me in that he hasn’t the emotional buoyancy to rise above his wisdom. You’ll probably find him anti-social... Ah, there you are, my dear! Lovely, lovely.”

Alice was wearing a different gown, a simple unfrilled frock, and she had freshened up. There was color in her cheeks and her eyes were spark-ling with a light and tinge they had not had before. Seeing her for the first time without her hat and coat, Ellery thought she looked different, as all women contrive to look different divested of their outer clothing and refurbished by the mysterious activities which go on behind the closed doors of feminine dressing-rooms. Apparently the ministrations of another woman, too, had cheered her; there were still rings under her eyes, but her smile was more cheerful.

“Thank you, Uncle Herbert.” Her voice was slightly husky. “But I do think I’ve caught a nasty cold.”

“Whisky and hot lemonade,” said the fat man promptly. “Eat lightly and go to bed early.”

“To tell the truth, I’m famished.”

“Then eat as much as you like. I’m one hell of a physician, as no doubt you’ve already detected. Shall we go in to dinner?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Reinach in a frightened voice. “We shan’t wait for Sarah, or Nicholas.”

Alice’s eyes dulled a little. Then she sighed and took the fat man’s arm and they all trooped into the dining-room.

Dinner was a failure. Dr. Reinach divided his energies between gargantuan inroads on the viands and copious drinking. Mrs. Reinach donned an apron and served, scarcely touching her own food in her haste to prepare the next course and clear the plates; apparently the household employed no domestic. Alice gradually lost her color, the old strained look reappearing on her face; occasionally she cleared her throat. The oil lamp on the table flickered badly, and every mouthful Ellery swallowed was flavored with the taste of oil. Besides, the piece de résistance was curried lamb: if there was one dish he detested, it was lamb; and if there was one culinary style that sickened him, it was curry. Thorne ate stolidly, not raising his eyes from his plate.

As they returned to the living-room the old lawyer managed to drop behind. He whispered to Alice: “Is everything all right? Are you?”

“I’m a little scarish, I think,” she said quietly. “Mr. Thorne, please don’t think me a child, but there’s something so strange about— everything... I wish now I hadn’t come.”

“I know,” muttered Thorne. “And yet it was necessary, quite necessary. If there was any way to spare you this, I should have taken it. But you obviously couldn’t stay in that horrible hole next door—”

“Oh, no,” she shuddered.

“And there isn’t a hotel for miles and miles. Miss Mayhew, has any of these people—”

“No, no. It’s just that they’re so strange to me. I suppose it’s my imagination and this cold. Would you greatly mind if I went to bed? Tomorrow will be time enough to talk.”

Thorne patted her hand. She smiled gratefully, murmured an apology, kissed Dr. Reinach’s cheek, and went upstairs with Mrs. Reinach again.

They had just settled themselves before the fire again and were lighting cigarettes when feet stamped somewhere at the rear of the house.

“Must be Nick,” wheezed the doctor. “Now where’s he been?”

The gigantic young man appeared in the living-room archway, glowering. His boots were soggy with wet. He growled: “Hello,” in his surly manner and went to the fire to toast his big reddened hands. He paid no attention whatever to Thorne, although he glanced once, swiftly, at Ellery in passing.

“Where’ve you been, Nick? Go in and have your dinner.”

“I ate before you came.”

“What’s been keeping you?”

“I’ve been hauling in firewood. Something you didn’t think of doing.” Keith’s tone was truculent, but Ellery noticed that his hands were shaking. Damnably odd! His manner was noticeably not that of a servant, and yet he was apparently employed in a menial capacity. “It’s snowing.”

“Snowing?” They crowded to the front windows. The night was moonless and palpable, and big fat snowflakes were sliding down the panes.

“Ah, snow,” sighed Dr. Reinach; and for all the sigh there was something in his tone that made the nape of Ellery’s neck prickle. “ ‘The whited air hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, and veils the farmhouse at the garden’s end.’ ”

“You’re quite the countryman, Doctor,” said Ellery.

“I like Nature in her more turbulent moods. Spring is for milksops. Winter brings out the fundamental iron.” The doctor slipped his arm about Keith’s broad shoulders. “Smile, Nick. Isn’t God in His heaven?”

Keith flung the arm off without replying.

“Oh, you haven’t met Mr. Queen. Queen, this is Nick Keith. You know Mr. Thorne already.” Keith nodded shortly. “Come, come, my boy, buck up. You’re too emotional, that’s the trouble with you. Let’s all have a drink. The disease of nervousness is infectious.”

Nerves! thought Ellery grimly. His nostrils were pinched, sniffing the little mysteries in the air. They tantalized him. Thorne was tied up in knots, as if he had cramps; the veins at his temples were pale blue swollen cords and there was sweat on his forehead. Above their heads the house was soundless.

Dr. Reinach went to the sideboard and began hauling out bottles — gin, bitters, rye, vermouth. He busied himself mixing drinks, talking incessantly. There was a purr in his hoarse undertones, a vibration of pure excitement. What in Satan’s name, thought Ellery in a sort of agony, was going on here?

Keith passed the cocktails around, and Ellery’s eyes warned Thorne. Thorne nodded slightly; they had two drinks apiece and refused more. Keith drank doggedly, as if he were anxious to forget something.

“Now that’s better,” said Dr. Reinach, settling his bulk into an easy-chair. “With the women out of the way and a fire and liquor, life becomes almost endurable.”

“I’m afraid,” said Thorne, “that I shall prove an unpleasant influence, Doctor. I’m going to make it unendurable.”

Dr. Reinach blinked. “Well, now,” he said. “Well, now.” He pushed the brandy decanter carefully out of the way of his elbow and folded his pudgy paws on his stomach. His purple little eyes shone.

Thorne went to the fire and stood looking down at the flames, his back to them. “I’m here in Miss Mayhew’s interests, Dr. Reinach,” he said, without turning. “In her interests alone. Sylvester Mayhew died last week very suddenly. Died while waiting to see the daughter whom he hadn’t seen since his divorce from her mother almost twenty years ago.”

“Factually exact,” rumbled the doctor, without stirring.

Thorne spun about. “Dr. Reinach, you acted as Mayhew’s physician for over a year before his death. What was the matter with him?”

“A variety of things. Nothing extraordinary. He died of cerebral hemorrhage.”

“So your certificate claimed.” The lawyer leaned forward. “I’m not entirely convinced,” he said slowly, “that your certificate told the truth.”

The doctor stared at him for an instant, then he slapped his bulging thigh. “Splendid!” he roared. “Splendid! A man after my own heart. Thorne, for all your desiccated exterior you have juicy potentialities.” He turned on Ellery, beaming. “You heard that, Mr. Queen? Your friend openly accuses me of murder. This is becoming quite exhilarating. So! Old Reinach’s a fratricide. What do you think of that, Nick? Your patron accused of cold-blooded murder. Dear, dear.”

“That’s ridiculous, Mr. Thorne,” growled Nick Keith. “You don’t believe it yourself.”

The lawyer’s gaunt cheeks sucked in. “Whether I believe it or not is immaterial. The possibility exists. But I’m more concerned with Alice Mayhew’s interests at the moment than with a possible homicide. Sylvester Mayhew is dead, no matter by what agency — divine or human; but Alice Mayhew is very much alive.”

“And so?” asked Reinach softly.

“And so I say,” muttered Thorne, “it’s damnably queer her father should have died when he did. Damnably.”

For a long moment there was silence. Keith put his elbows on his knees and stared into the flames, his shaggy boyish hair over his eyes. Dr. Reinach sipped a glass of brandy with enjoyment.

Then he set his glass down and said with a sigh: “Life is too short, gentlemen, to waste in cautious skirmishings. Let us proceed without feinting movements to the major engagement. Nick Keith is in my confidence and we may speak freely before him.” The young man did not move. “Mr. Queen, you’re very much in the dark, aren’t you?” went on the fat man with a bland smile.

Ellery did not move, either. “And how,” he murmured, “did you know that?”

Reinach kept smiling. “Pshaw. Thorne hadn’t left the Black House since Sylvester’s funeral. Nor did he receive or send any mail during his self-imposed vigil last week. This morning he left me on the pier to telephone someone. You showed up shortly after. Since he was gone only a minute or two, it was obvious that he hadn’t had time to tell you much, if anything. Allow me to felicitate you, Mr. Queen, upon your conduct today. It’s been exemplary. An air of omniscience covering a profound and desperate ignorance.”

Ellery removed his pince-nez and began to polish their lenses. “You’re a psychologist as well as a physician, I see.”

Thorne said abruptly: “This is all beside the point.”

“No, no, it’s all very much to the point,” replied the fat man in a sad bass. “Now the canker annoying your friend, Mr. Queen — since it seems a shame to keep you on tenterhooks any longer — is roughly this: My half-brother Sylvester, God rest his troubled soul, was a miser. If he’d been able to take his gold with him to the grave — with any assurance that it would remain there — I’m sure he would have done so.”

“Gold?” asked Ellery, raising his brows.

“You may well titter, Mr. Queen. There was something mediaeval about Sylvester; you almost expected him to go about in a long black velvet gown muttering incantations in Latin. At any rate, unable to take his gold with him to the grave, he did the next best thing. He hid it.”

“Oh, lord,” said Ellery. “You’ll be pulling clanking ghosts out of your hat next.”

“Hid,” beamed Dr. Reinach, “the filthy lucre in the Black House.”

“And Miss Alice Mayhew?”

“Poor child, a victim of circumstances. Sylvester never thought of her until recently, when she wrote from London that her last maternal relative had died. Wrote to friend Thorne, he of the lean and hungry eye, who had been recommended by some friend as a trustworthy lawyer. As he is, as he is! You see, Alice didn’t even know if her father was alive, let alone where he was. Thorne, good Samaritan, located us, gave Alice’s exhaustive letters and photographs to Sylvester, and has acted as liaison officer ever since. And a downright circumspect one, too, by thunder!”

“This explanation is wholly unnecessary,” said the lawyer stiffly. “Mr. Queen knows—”

“Nothing,” smiled the fat man, “to judge by the attentiveness with which he’s been following my little tale. Let’s be intelligent about this, Thorne.” He turned to Ellery again, nodding very amiably. “Now, Mr. Queen, Sylvester clutched at the thought of his new-found daughter with the pertinacity of a drowning man clutching a life-preserver. I betray no secret when I say that my half-brother, in his paranoic dotage, suspected his own family — imagine! — of having evil designs on his fortune.”

“A monstrous slander, of course.”

“Neatly put, neatly put! Well, Sylvester told Thorne in my presence that he had long since converted his fortune into specie, that he’d hidden this gold somewhere in the house next door, and that he wouldn’t reveal the hiding-place to anyone but Alice, his daughter, who was to be his sole heir. You see?”

“I see,” said Ellery.

“He died before Alice’s arrival, unfortunately. Is it any wonder, Mr. Queen, that Thorne thinks dire things of us?”

“This is fantastic,” snapped Thorne, coloring. “Naturally, in the interests of my client, I couldn’t leave the premises unguarded with that mass of gold lying about loose somewhere—”

“Naturally not,” nodded the doctor.

“If I may intrude my still, small voice,” murmured Ellery, “isn’t this a battle of giants over a mouse? The possession of gold is a clear violation of the law in this country, and has been for several years. Even if you found it, wouldn’t the government confiscate it?”

“There’s a complicated legal situation, Queen,” said Thorne; “but one which cannot come into existence before the gold is found. Therefore my efforts to—”

“And successful efforts, too,” grinned Dr. Reinach. “Do you know, Mr. Queen, your friend has slept behind locked, barred doors, with an old cutlass in his hand — one of Sylvester’s prized mementoes of a grandfather who was in the Navy? It’s terribly amusing.”

“I don’t find it so,” said Thorne shortly. “If you insist on playing the buffoon—”

“And yet — to go back to this matter of your little suspicions, Thorne — have you analyzed the facts? “Whom do you suspect, my dear fellow? Your humble servant? I assure you that I am spiritually an ascetic—”

“An almighty fat one!” snarled Thorne.

“—and that money, per se, means nothing to me,” went on the doctor imperturbably. “My half-sister Sarah? An anile wreck living in a world of illusion, quite as antediluvian as Sylvester — they were twins, you know — who isn’t very long for this world. Then that leaves my estimable Milly and our saturnine young friend Nick. Milly? Absurd; she hasn’t had an idea, good or bad, for two decades. Nick? Ah, an outsider — we may have struck something there. Is it Nick you suspect, Thorne?” chuckled Dr. Reinach.

Keith got to his feet and glared down into the bland damp lunar countenance of the fat man. He seemed quite drunk. “You damned porker,” he said thickly.

Dr. Reinach kept smiling, but his little porcine eyes were wary. “Now, now, Nick,” he said in a soothing rumble.

It all happened very quickly. Keith lurched forward, snatched the heavy cut-glass brandy decanter, and swung it at the doctor’s head. Thorne cried out and took an instinctive forward step; but he might have spared himself the exertion. Dr. Reinach jerked his head back like a fat snake and the blow missed. The violent effort pivoted Keith’s body completely about; the decanter slipped from his fingers and flew into the fireplace, crashing to pieces. The fragments splattered all over the fireplace, strewing the hearth, too; the little brandy that remained in the bottle hissed into the fire, blazing with a blue flame.

“That decanter,” said Dr. Reinach angrily, “was almost a hundred and fifty years old!”

Keith stood still, his broad back to them. They could see his shoulders heaving.

Ellery sighed with the queerest feeling. The room was shimmering as in a dream, and the whole incident seemed unreal, like a scene in a play on a stage. Were they acting? Had the scene been carefully planned? But, if so, why? What earthly purpose could they have hoped to achieve by pretending to quarrel and come to blows? The sole result had been the wanton destruction of a lovely old decanter. It didn’t make sense.

“I think,” said Ellery, struggling to his feet, “that I shall go to bed before the Evil One comes down the chimney. Thank you for an altogether extraordinary evening, gentlemen. Coming, Thorne?”

He stumbled up the stairs, followed by the lawyer, who seemed as weary as he. They separated in the cold corridor without a word to stumble to their respective bedrooms. From below came a heavy silence.

It was only as he was throwing his trousers over the footrail of his bed that Ellery recalled hazily Thome’s whispered intention hours before to visit him that night and explain the whole fantastic business. He struggled into his dressing-gown and slippers and shuffled down the hall to Thome’s room. But the lawyer was already in bed, snoring stertorously. Ellery dragged himself back to his room and finished undressing. He knew he would have a head the next morning; he was a notoriously poor drinker. His brain spinning, he crawled between the blankets and fell asleep almost stertorously.

He opened his eyes after a tossing, tiring sleep with the uneasy conviction that something was wrong. For a moment he was aware only of the ache in his head and the fuzzy feel of his tongue; he did not remember where he was. Then, as his glance took in the faded wall-paper, the pallid patches of sunlight on the worn blue carpet, his trousers tumbled over the footrail where he had left them the night before, memory returned; and, shivering, he consulted his wrist-watch, which he had forgotten to take off on going to bed. It was five minutes to seven. He raised his head from the pillow in the frosty air of the bedroom; his nose was half-frozen. But he could detect nothing wrong; the sun looked brave if weak in his eyes; the room was quiet and exactly as he had seen it on retiring; the door was closed. He snuggled between the blankets again.

Then he heard it. It was Thome’s voice. It was Thome’s voice raised in a thin faint cry, almost a wail, coming from somewhere outside the house.

He was out of bed and at the window in his bare feet in one leap. But Thorne was not visible at this side of the house, upon which the dead woods encroached directly; so he scrambled back to slip shoes on his feet and his gown over his pajamas, darted toward the footrail and snatched his revolver out of the hip pocket of his trousers, and ran out into the corridor, heading for the stairs, the revolver in his hand.

“What’s the matter?” grumbled someone, and he turned to see Dr. Reinach’s vast skull protruding nakedly from the room next to his.

“Don’t know. I heard Thorne cry out,” and Ellery pounded down the stairs and flung open the front door.

He stopped within the doorway, gaping.

Thorne, fully dressed, was standing ten yards in front of the house, facing Ellery obliquely, staring at something outside the range of Ellery’s vision with the most acute expression of terror on his gaunt face Ellery had ever seen on a human countenance. Beside him crouched Nicholas Keith, only half-dressed; the young man’s jaws gaped foolishly and his eyes were enormous glaring discs.

Dr. Reinach shoved Ellery roughly aside and growled: “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?” The fat man’s feet were encased in carpet slippers and he had pulled a raccoon coat over his night-shirt, so that he looked like a particularly obese bear.

Thome’s Adam’s-apple bobbed nervously. The ground, the trees, the world were blanketed with snow of a peculiarly unreal texture; and the air was saturated with warm woolen flakes, falling softly. Deep drifts curved upwards to clamp the boles of trees.

“Don’t move,” croaked Thorne as Ellery and the fat man stirred. “Don’t move, for the love of God. Stay where you are.” Ellery’s grip tightened on the revolver and he tried perversely to get past the doctor; but he might have been trying to budge a stone wall. Thorne stumbled through the snow to the porch, paler than his background, leaving two deep ruts behind him. “Look at me,” he shouted. “Look at me. Do I seem all right? Have I gone mad?”

“Pull yourself together, Thorne,” said Ellery sharply. “What’s the matter with you? I don’t see anything wrong.”

“Nick!” bellowed Dr. Reinach. “Have you gone crazy, too?”

The young man covered his sunburnt face suddenly with his hands; then he dropped his hands and looked again.

He said in a strangled voice: “Maybe we all have. This is the most— Take a look yourself.”

Reinach moved then, and Ellery squirmed by him to land in the soft snow beside Thorne, who was trembling violently. Dr. Reinach came lurching after. They ploughed through the snow toward Keith, squinting, straining to see.

They need not have strained. What was to be seen was plain for any seeing eye to see. Ellery felt his scalp crawl as he looked; and at the same instant he was aware of the sharp conviction that this was inevitable, this was the only possible climax to the insane events of the previous day. The world had turned topsy-turvy. Nothing in it meant anything reasonable or sane.

Dr. Reinach gasped once; and then he stood blinking like a huge owl. A window rattled on the second floor of the White House. None of them looked up. It was Alice Mayhew in a wrapper, staring from the window of her bedroom, which was on the side of the house facing the driveway. She screamed once; and then she, too, fell silent.

There was the house from which they had just emerged, the house Dr. Reinach had dubbed the White House, with its front door quietly swinging open and Alice Mayhew at an upper side window. Substantial, solid, an edifice of stone and wood and plaster and glass and the patina of age. It was everything a house should be. That much was real, a thing to be grasped.

But beyond it, beyond the driveway and the garage, where the Black House had stood, the house in which Ellery himself had set foot only the afternoon before, the house of the filth and the stench, the house of the equally stone walls, wooden facings, glass windows, chimneys, gargoyles, porch; the house of the blackened look; the old Victorian house built during the Civil War where Sylvester Mayhew had died, where Thorne had barricaded himself with a cutlass for a week; the house which they had all seen, touched, smelled... there, there stood nothing.

No walls. No chimney. No roof. No ruins. No debris. No house. Nothing. Nothing but empty space covered smoothly and warmly with snow.

The house had vanished during the night.

Chapter II

Magic or miracle?

“There’s even,” thought Mr. Ellery Queen dully, “a character named Alice.”

He looked again. The only reason he did not rub his eyes was that it would have made him feel ridiculous; besides, his sight, all his senses, had never been keener.

He simply stood there in the snow and looked and looked and looked at the empty space where a three-story stone house seventy-five years old had stood the night before.

“Why, it isn’t there,” said Alice feebly from the upper window. “It... isn’t... there.”

“Then I’m not insane.” Thorne stumbled toward them. Ellery watched the old man’s feet sloughing through the snow, leaving long tracks. A man’s weight still counted for something in the universe, then. Yes, and there was his own shadow; so material objects still cast shadows. Absurdly, the discovery brought a certain faint relief.

“It is gone!” said Thorne in a cracked voice.

“Apparently.” Ellery found his own voice thick and slow; he watched the words curl out on the air and become nothing. “Apparently, Thorne.” It was all he could find to say.

Dr. Reinach arched his fat neck, his wattles quivering like a gobbler’s. “Incredible. Incredible!”

“Incredible,” said Thorne in a whisper.

“Unscientific. It can’t be. I’m a man of sense. Of senses. My mind is clear. Things like this — damn it, they just don’t happen!”

“As the man said who saw a giraffe for the first time,” sighed Ellery. “And yet... there it was.”

Thorne began wandering helplessly about in a circle. Alice stared, bewitched into stone, from the upper window. And Keith cursed and began to run across the snow-covered driveway toward the invisible house, his hands outstretched before him like a blind man’s.

“Hold on,” said Ellery. “Stop where you are.”

The giant halted, scowling. “What d’ye want?”

Ellery slipped his revolver back into his pocket and sloshed through the snow to pause beside the young man in the driveway. “I don’t know precisely. Something’s wrong. Something’s out of kilter either with us or with the world. It isn’t the world as we know it. It’s almost... almost a matter of transposed dimensions. Do you suppose the solar system has slipped out of its niche in the universe and gone stark crazy in the uncharted depths of space-time? I suppose I’m talking nonsense.”

“You know best,” shouted Keith. “I’m not going to let this screwy business stampede me. There was a solid house on that plot last night, by God, and nobody can convince me it still isn’t there. Not even my own eyes. We’ve — we’ve been hypnotized! The hippo could do it here — he could do anything. Hypnotized. You hypnotized us, Reinach!”

The doctor mumbled: “What?” and kept glaring at the empty lot.

“I tell you it’s there!” cried Keith angrily.

Ellery sighed and dropped to his knees in the snow; he began to brush aside the white, soft blanket with chilled palms. When he had laid the ground bare, he saw wet gravel and a rut. “This is the driveway, isn’t it?” he asked without looking up.

“The driveway,” snarled Keith, “or the road to hell. You’re as mixed up as we are. Sure it’s the driveway! Can’t you see the garage? Why shouldn’t it be the driveway?”

“I don’t know.” Ellery got to his feet, frowning. “I don’t know anything. I’m beginning to learn all over again. Maybe — maybe it’s a matter of gravitation. Maybe we’ll all fly into space any minute now.”

Thorne groaned: “My God.”

“All I can be sure of is that something very strange happened last night.”

“I tell you,” growled Keith, “it’s an optical illusion!”

“Something strange.” The fat man stirred. “Yes, decidedly. What an inadequate word! A house has disappeared. Something strange.” He began to chuckle in a choking, mirthless way.

“Oh that,” said Ellery impatiently. “Certainly. Certainly, Doctor. That’s a fact. As for you, Keith, you don’t really believe this mass-hypnosis bilge. The house is gone, right enough... It’s not the fact of its being gone that bothers me. It’s the agency, the means. It smacks of— of—” He shook his head. “I’ve never believed in... this sort of thing, damn it all!”

Dr. Reinach threw back his vast shoulders and glared, red-eyed, at the empty snow-covered space. “It’s a trick,” he bellowed. “A rotten trick, that’s what it is. That house is right there in front of our noses. Or— or— They can’t fool me!”

Ellery looked at him. “Perhaps,” he said, “Keith has it in his pocket?”

Alice clattered out on the porch in high-heeled shoes over bare feet, her hair streaming, a cloth coat flung over her night-clothes. Behind her crept little Mrs. Reinach. The women’s eyes were wild.

“Talk to them,” muttered Ellery to Thorne. “Anything; but keep their minds occupied. We’ll all go balmy if we don’t preserve at least an air of sanity. Keith, get me a broom.”

He shuffled up the driveway, skirting the invisible house very carefully and not once taking his eyes off the empty space. The fat man hesitated; then he lumbered along in Ellery’s tracks. Thorne stumbled back to the porch and Keith strode off, disappearing behind the White House.

There was no sun now. A pale and eerie light filtered down through the cold clouds. The snow continued its soft, thick fall.

They looked like dots, small and helpless, on a sheet of blank paper.

Ellery pulled open the folding doors of the garage and peered. A healthy odor of raw gasoline and rubber assailed his nostrils. Thome’s car stood within, exactly as Ellery had seen it the afternoon before, a black monster with glittering chrome-work. Beside it, apparently parked by Keith after their arrival, stood the battered Buick in which Dr. Reinach had driven them from the city. Both cars were perfectly dry.

He shut the doors and turned back to the driveway. Aside from the catenated links of their footprints in the snow, made a moment before, the white covering on the driveway was virgin.

“Here’s your broom,” said the giant. “What are you going to do — ride it?”

“Hold your tongue, Nick,” growled Dr. Reinach.

Ellery laughed. “Let him alone, Doctor. His angry sanity is infectious. Come along, you two. This may be the Judgment Day, but we may as well go through the motions.”

“What do you want with a broom, Queen?”

“It’s hard to decide whether the snow was an accident or part of the plan,” murmured Ellery. “Anything may be true today. Literally anything.”

“Rubbish,” snorted the fat man. “Abracadabra. Om viani jfadme hum. How could a man have planned a snowfall? You’re talking gibberish.”

“I didn’t say a human plan, Doctor.”

“Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish!”

“You may as well save your breath. You’re a badly scared little boy whistling in the dark — for all your bulk, Doctor.”

Ellery gripped the broom tightly and stamped out across the driveway. He felt his own foot shrinking as he tried to make it step upon the white rectangle. His muscles were gathered in, as if in truth he expected to encounter the adamantine bulk of a house which was still there but unaccountably impalpable. When he felt nothing but cold air, he laughed a little self-consciously and began to wield the broom on the snow in a peculiar manner. He used the most delicate of sweeping motions, barely brushing the surface crystals away; so that layer by layer he reduced the depth of the snow. He scanned each layer with anxiety as it was uncovered. And he continued to do this until the ground itself lay revealed; and at no depth did he come across the minutest trace of a human imprint.

“Elves,” he complained. “Nothing less than elves. I confess it’s beyond me.”

“Even the foundation—” began Dr. Reinach heavily.

Ellery poked the tip of the broom at the earth. It was hard as corundum.

The front door slammed as Thorne and the two women crept into the White House. The three men outside stood still, doing nothing.

“Well,” said Ellery at last, “this is either a bad dream or the end of the world.” He made off diagonally across the plot, dragging the broom behind him like a tired charwoman, until he reached the snow-covered drive; and then he trudged down the drive towards the invisible road, disappearing around a bend under the stripped white-dripping trees.

It was a short walk to the road. Ellery remembered it well. It had curved steadily in a long arc all the way from the turn-off at the main highway. There had been no crossroad in all the jolting journey.

He went out into the middle of the road, snow-covered now but plainly distinguishable between the powdered tangles of woods as a gleaming, empty strip. There was the long curve exactly as he remembered it. Mechanically he used the broom again, sweeping a small area clear. And there were the pits and ruts of the old Buick’s journeys.

“What are you looking for,” said Nick Keith quietly, “gold?”

Ellery straightened up by degrees, turning about slowly until he was face to face with the giant. “So you thought it was necessary to follow me?

Or— no, I beg your pardon. Undoubtedly it was Dr. Reinach’s idea.”

The sun-charred features did not change expression. “You’re crazy as a bat. Follow you? I’ve got all I can do to follow myself.”

“Of course,” said Ellery. “But did I understand you to ask me if I was looking for gold, my dear young Prometheus?”

“You’re a queer one,” said Keith as they made their way back toward the house.

“Gold,” repeated Ellery. “Hmm. There was gold in that house, and now the house is gone. In the shock of the discovery that houses fly away like birds, I’d quite forgotten that little item. Thank you, Mr. Keith,” said Ellery grimly, “for reminding me.”

“Mr. Queen,” said Alice. She was crouched in a chair by the fire, white to the lips. “What’s happened to us? What are we to do? Have we... Was yesterday a dream? Didn’t we walk into that house, go through it, touch things?... I’m frightened.”

“If yesterday was a dream,” smiled Ellery, “then we may expect that tomorrow will bring a vision; for that’s what holy Sanskrit says, and we may as well believe in parables as in miracles.” He sat down, rubbing his hands briskly. “How about a fire, Keith? it’s arctic in here.”

“Sorry,” said Keith with surprising amiability, and he went away.

“We could use a vision,” shivered Thorne. “My brain is— sick. It just isn’t possible. It’s horrible.” His hand slapped his side and something jangled in his pocket.

“Keys,” said Ellery, “and no house. It is staggering.”

Keith came back under a mountain of firewood. He grimaced at the litter in the fireplace, dropped the wood, and began sweeping together the fragments of glass, the remains of the brandy decanter he had smashed against the brick wall the night before. Alice glanced from his broad back to the chromo of her mother on the mantel. As for Mrs. Reinach, she was as silent as a scared bird; she stood in a corner like a weazened little gnome, her wrapper drawn about her, her stringy sparrow-colored hair hanging down her back, and her glassy eyes fixed on the face of her husband.

“Milly,” said the fat man.

“Yes, Herbert, I’m going,” said Mrs. Reinach instantly, and she crept up the stairs and out of sight.

“Well, Mr. Queen, what’s the answer? Or is this riddle too esoteric for your taste?”

“No riddle is esoteric,” muttered Ellery, “unless it’s the riddle of God; and that’s no riddle — it’s a vast blackness. Doctor, is there any way of reaching assistance?”

“Not unless you can fly.”

“No phone,” said Keith without turning, “and you saw the condition of the road for yourself. You’d never get a car through those drifts.”

“If you had a car,” chuckled Dr. Reinach. Then he seemed to remember the disappearing house, and his chuckle died.

“What do you mean?” demanded Ellery. “In the garage are—”

“Two useless products of the machine age. Both cars are out of fuel.”

“And mine,” said old Thorne suddenly, with a resurrection of grim personal interest, “mine has something wrong with it besides. I left my chauffeur in the city, you know, Queen, when I drove down last time. Now I can’t get the engine running on the little gasoline that’s left in the tank.”

Ellery’s fingers drummed on the arm of his chair. “Bother! Now we can’t even call on other eyes to test whether we’ve been bewitched or not. By the way, Doctor, how far is the nearest community? I’m afraid I didn’t pay attention on the drive down.”

“Over fifteen miles by road. If you’re thinking of footing it, Mr. Queen, you’re welcome to the thought.”

“You’d never get through the drifts,” muttered Keith. The drifts appeared to trouble him.

“And so we find ourselves snowbound,” said Ellery, “in the middle of the fourth dimension — or perhaps it’s the fifth. A pretty kettle! Ah there, Keith, that feels considerably better.”

“You don’t seem bowled over by what’s happened,” said Dr. Reinach, eying him curiously. “I’ll confess it’s given even me a shock.”

Ellery was silent for a moment. Then he said lightly: “There wouldn’t be any point to losing our heads, would there?”

“I fully expect dragons to come flying over the house,” groaned Thorne. He eyed Ellery a bit bashfully. “Queen... perhaps we had better... try to get out of here.”

“You heard Keith, Thorne.”

Thorne bit his lip. “I’m frozen,” said Alice, drawing nearer the fire.

“That was well done, Mr. Keith. It— it— a fire like this makes me think of home, somehow.” The young man got to his feet and turned around. Their eyes met for an instant.

“It’s nothing,” he said shortly. “Nothing at all.”

“You seem to be the only one who— Oh!”

An enormous old woman with a black shawl over her shoulders was coming downstairs. She might have been years dead, she was so yellow and emaciated and mummified. And yet she gave the impression of being very much alive, with a sort of ancient, ageless life; her black eyes were young and bright and cunning, and her face was extraordinarily mobile. She was sidling down stiffly, feeling her way with one foot and clutching the banister with two dried claws, while her lively eyes remained fixed on Alice’s face. There was a curious hunger in her expression, the flaring of a long-dead hope suddenly, against all reason.

“Who— who—” began Alice, shrinking back.

“Don’t be alarmed,” said Dr. Reinach quickly. “It’s unfortunate that she got away from Milly... Sarah!” In a twinkling he was at the foot of the staircase, barring the old woman’s way. “What are you doing up at this hour? You should take better care of yourself, Sarah.”

She ignored him, continuing her snail’s pace down the stairs until she reached his pachyderm bulk. “Olivia,” she mumbled, with a vital eagerness. “It’s Olivia come back to me. Oh, my sweet, sweet darling...”

“No, Sarah,” said the fat man, taking her hand gently. “Don’t excite yourself. This isn’t Olivia, Sarah. It’s Alice — Alice Mayhew, Sylvester’s girl, come from England. You remember Alice, little Alice? Not Olivia, Sarah.”

“Not Olivia?” The old woman peered across the banister, her wrinkled lips moving. “Not Olivia?”

The girl jumped up. “I’m Alice, Aunt Sarah. Alice—”

Sarah Fell darted suddenly past the fat man and scurried across the room to seize the girl’s hand and glare into her face. As she studied those shrinking features her expression changed to one of despair. “Not Olivia. Olivia’s beautiful black hair... Not Olivia’s voice. Alice? Alice?” She dropped into Alice’s vacated chair, her skinny broad shoulders sagging, and began to weep. They could see the yellow skin of her scalp through the sparse gray hair.

Dr. Reinach roared: “Milly!” in an enraged voice. Mrs. Reinach popped into sight like Jack-in-the-box. “Why did you let her leave her room?”

“B-but I thought she was—” began Mrs. Reinach, stammering.

“Take her upstairs at once!”

“Yes, Herbert,” whispered the sparrow, and Mrs. Reinach hurried downstairs in her wrapper and took the old woman’s hand and, unopposed, led her away. Mrs. Fell kept repeating, between sobs: “Why doesn’t Olivia come back? Why did they take her away from her mother?” until she was out of sight.

“Sorry,” panted the fat man, mopping himself. “One of her spells. I knew it was coming on from the curiosity she exhibited the moment she heard you were coming, Alice. There is a resemblance; you can scarcely blame her.”

“She’s— she’s horrible,” said Alice faintly. “Mr. Queen— Mr. Thorne, must we stay here? I’d feel so much easier in the city. And then my cold, these frigid rooms—”

“By heaven,” burst out Thorne, “I feel like chancing it on foot!”

“And leave Sylvester’s gold to our tender mercies?” smiled Dr. Reinach. Then he scowled.

“I don’t want father’s legacy,” said Alice desperately. “At this moment I don’t want anything but to get away. I–I can manage to get along all right. I’ll find work to do— I can do so many things. I want to go away. Mr. Keith, couldn’t you possibly—”

“I’m not a magician,” said Keith rudely; and he buttoned his mackinaw and strode out of the house. They could see his tall figure stalking off behind a veil of snowflakes.

Alice flushed, turning back to the fire.

“Nor are any of us,” said Ellery. “Miss Mayhew, you’ll simply have to be a brave girl and stick it out until we can find a means of getting out of here.”

“Yes,” murmured Alice, shivering; and stared into the flames.

“Meanwhile, Thorne, tell me everything you know about this case, especially as it concerns Sylvester Mayhew’s house. There may be a clue in your father’s history, Miss Mayhew. If the house has vanished, so has the gold in the house; and whether you want it or not, it belongs to you. Consequently we must make an effort to find it.”

“I suggest,” muttered Dr. Reinach, “that you find the house first. House!” he exploded, waving his furred arms. And he made for the sideboard.

Alice nodded listlessly. Thorne mumbled: “Perhaps, Queen, you and I had better talk privately.”

“We made a frank beginning last night; I see no reason why we shouldn’t continue in the same candid vein. You needn’t be reluctant to speak before Dr. Reinach. Our host is obviously a man of parts — unorthodox parts.”

Dr. Reinach did not reply. His globular face was dark as he tossed off a water-goblet full of gin.

Through air metallic with defiance, Thorne talked in a hardening voice; not once did he take his eyes from Dr. Reinach.

His first suspicion that something was wrong had been germinated by Sylvester Mayhew himself.

Hearing by post from Alice, Thorne had investigated and located Mayhew. He had explained to the old invalid his daughter’s desire to find her father, if he still lived. Old Mayhew, with a strange excitement, had acquiesced; he was eager to be reunited with his daughter; and he seemed to be living, explained Thorne defiantly, in mortal fear of his relatives in the neighboring house.

“Fear, Thorne?” The fat man sat down, raising his brows. “You know he was afraid, not of us, but of poverty. He was a miser.”

Thorne ignored him. Mayhew had instructed Thorne to write Alice and bid her come to America at once; he meant to leave her his entire estate and wanted her to have it before he died. The repository of the gold he had cunningly refused to divulge, even to Thorne; it was “in the house,” lie had said, but he would not reveal its hiding-place to anyone but Alice herself. The “others,” he had snarled, had been looking for it ever since their “arrival.”

“By the way,” drawled Ellery, “how long have you good people been living in this house, Dr. Reinach?”

“A year or so. You certainly don’t put any credence in the paranoic ravings of a dying man? There’s no mystery about our living here. I looked Sylvester up over a year ago after a long separation and found him still in the old homestead, and this house boarded up and empty. The White House, this house, incidentally, was built by my stepfather — Sylvester’s father — on Sylvester’s marriage to Alice’s mother; Sylvester lived in it until my stepfather died, and then moved back to the Black House. I found Sylvester, a degenerated hulk of what he’d once been, living on crusts, absolutely alone and badly in need of medical attention.”

“Alone — here, in this wilderness?” said Ellery incredulously.

“Yes. As a matter of fact, the only way I could get his permission to move back to this house, which belonged to him, was by dangling the bait of free medical treatment before his eyes. I’m sorry, Alice; he was quite unbalanced... And so Milly and Sarah and I — Sarah had been living with us ever since Olivia’s death — moved in here.”

“Decent of you,” remarked Ellery. “I suppose you had to give up your medical practice to do it, Doctor?”

Dr. Reinach grimaced. “I didn’t have much of a practice to give up, Mr. Queen.”

“But it was an almost pure brotherly impulse, eh?”

“Oh, I don’t deny that the possibility of falling heir to some of Sylvester’s fortune had crossed our minds. It was rightfully ours, we believed, not knowing anything about Alice. As it’s turned out—” he shrugged his fat shoulders. “I’m a philosopher.”

“And don’t deny, either,” shouted Thorne, “that when I came back here at the time Mayhew sank into that fatal coma you people watched me like a — like a band of spies! I was in your way!”

“Mr. Thorne,” whispered Alice, paling.

“I’m sorry, Miss Mayhew, but you may as well know the truth. Oh, you didn’t fool me, Reinach! You wanted that gold, Alice or no Alice. I shut myself up in that house just to keep you from getting your hands on it!”

Dr. Reinach shrugged again; his rubbery lips compressed.

“You want candor; here it is!” rasped Thorne. “I was in that house, Queen, for six days after Mayhew’s funeral and before Miss Mayhew’s arrival, looking for the gold. I turned that house upside down. And I didn’t find the slightest trace of it. I tell you it isn’t there.” He glared at the fat man. “I tell you it was stolen before Mayhew died!”

“Now, now,” sighed Ellery. “That makes less sense than the other. Why then has somebody intoned an incantation over the house and caused it to disappear?”

“I don’t know,” said the old lawyer fiercely. “1 know only that the most dastardly thing’s happened here, that everything is unnatural, veiled in that — that false creature’s smile! Miss Mayhew, I’m sorry I must speak this way about your own family. But I feel it my duty to warn you that you’ve fallen among human wolves. Wolves!”

“I’m afraid,” said Reinach sourly, “that I shouldn’t come to you, my dear Thorne, for a reference.”

“I wish,” said Alice in a very low tone, “I truly wish I were dead.”

But the lawyer was past control. “That man Keith,” he cried. “Who is he? What’s he doing here? He looks like a gangster. I suspect him, Queen—”

“Apparently,” smiled Ellery, “you suspect everybody.”

“Mr. Keith?” murmured Alice. “Oh, I’m sure not. I–I don’t think he’s that sort at all, Mr. Thorne. He looks as if he’s had a hard life. As if he’s suffered terribly from something.” Thorne threw up his hands, turning to the fire.

“Let us,” said Ellery amiably, “confine ourselves to the problem at hand. We were, I believe, considering the problem of a disappearing house. Do any architect’s plans of the so-called Black House exist?”

“Lord, no,” said Dr. Reinach.

“Who has lived in it since your stepfather’s death besides Sylvester Mayhew and his wife?”

“Wives,” corrected the doctor, pouring himself another glassful of gin. “Sylvester married twice; I suppose you didn’t know that, my dear.” Alice shivered by the fire. “I dislike raking over old ashes, but since we’re at confessional... Sylvester treated Alice’s mother abominably.”

“I— guessed that,” whispered Alice.

“She was a woman of spirit and she rebelled; but when she’d got her final decree and returned to England, the reaction set in and she died very shortly afterward, I understand. Her death was recorded in the New York papers.”

“When I was a baby,” whispered Alice.

“Sylvester, already unbalanced, although not so anchoretic in those days as he became later, then wooed and won a wealthy widow and brought her out here to live. She had a son, a child by her first husband, with her. Father’d died by this time, and Sylvester and his second wife lived in the Black House. It was soon evident that Sylvester had married the widow for her money; he persuaded her to sign it over to him — a considerable fortune for those days — and promptly proceeded to devil the life out of her. Result: the woman vanished one day, taking her child with her.”

“Perhaps,” said Ellery, seeing Alice’s face, “we’d better abandon the subject, Doctor.”

“We never did find out what actually happened — whether Sylvester drove her out or whether, unable to stand his brutal treatment any longer, she left voluntarily. At any rate, I discovered by accident, a few years later, through an obituary notice, that she died in the worst sort of poverty.”

Alice was staring at him with a wrinkle-nosed nausea. “Father... did that?”

“Oh, stop it,” growled Thorne. “You’ll have the poor child gibbering in another moment. What has all this to do with the house?”

“Mr. Queen asked,” said the fat man mildly. Ellery was studying the flames as if they fascinated him.

“The real point,” snapped the lawyer, “is that you’ve watched me from the instant I set foot here, Reinach. Afraid to leave me alone for a moment. Why, you even had Keith meet me in your car on both my visits — to ‘escort’ me here! And I didn’t have five minutes alone with the old gentleman — you saw to that. And then he lapsed into the coma and was unable to speak again before he died. Why? Why all this surveillance? God knows I’m a forbearing man; but you’ve given me every ground for suspecting your motives.”

“Apparently,” chuckled Dr. Reinach, “you don’t agree with Caesar.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“ ‘Would,’ ” quoted the fat man, “ ‘he were fatter.’ Well, good people, the end of the world may come, but that’s no reason why we shouldn’t have breakfast. Milly!” he bellowed.

Thorne awoke sluggishly, like a drowsing old hound dimly aware of danger. His bedroom was cold; a pale morning light was struggling in through the window. He groped under his pillow.

“Stop where you are!” he said harshly.

“So you have a revolver, too?” murmured Ellery. He was dressed and looked as if he had slept badly. “It’s only I, Thorne, stealing in for a conference. It’s not so hard to steal in here, by the way.”

“What do you mean?” grumbled Thorne, sitting up and putting his old-fashioned revolver away.

“I see your lock has gone the way of mine, Alice’s, the Black House, and Sylvester Mayhew’s elusive gold.”

Thorne drew the patchwork comforter about him, his old lips blue. “Well, Queen?”

Ellery lit a cigarette and for a moment stared out Thome’s window at the streamers of crepy snow still dropping from the sky. The snow had fallen without a moment’s let-up the entire previous day. “This is a curious business all round, Thorne. The queerest medley of spirit and matter. I’ve just reconnoitered. You’ll be interested to learn that our young friend the Colossus is gone.”

“Keith gone?”

“His bed hasn’t been slept in at all. I looked.”

“And he was away most of yesterday, too!”

“Precisely. Our surly Crichton, who seems afflicted by a particularly acute case of Weltschmerz, periodically vanishes. Where does he go? I’d give a good deal to know the answer to that question.”

“He won’t get far in those nasty drifts,” mumbled the lawyer.

“It gives one, as the French say, to think. Comrade Reinach is gone, too.” Thorne stiffened. “Oh, yes; his bed’s been slept in, but briefly, I judge. Have they eloped together? Separately? Thorne,” said Ellery thoughtfully, “this becomes an increasingly subtle devilment.”

“It’s beyond me,” said Thorne with another shiver. “I’m just about ready to give up. I don’t see that we’re accomplishing a thing here. And then there’s always that annoying, incredible fact... the house — vanished.”

Ellery sighed and looked at his wristwatch. It was a minute past seven.

Thorne threw back the comforter and groped under the bed for his slippers. “Let’s go downstairs,” he snapped.

“Excellent bacon, Mrs. Reinach,” said Ellery. “I suppose it must be a trial carting supplies up here.”

“We’ve the blood of pioneers,” said Dr. Reinach cheerfully, before his wife could reply. He was engulfing mounds of scrambled eggs and bacon. “Luckily, we’ve enough in the larder to last out a considerable siege. The winters are severe out here — we learned that last year.”

Keith was not at the breakfast table. Old Mrs. Fell was. She ate voraciously, with the unconcealed greed of the very old, to whom nothing is left of the sensual satisfactions of life but the filling of the belly. Nevertheless, although she did not speak, she contrived as she ate to keep her eyes on Alice, who wore a haunted look.

“I didn’t sleep very well,” said Alice, toying with her coffee-cup. Her voice was huskier. “This abominable snow! Can’t we manage somehow to get away today?”

“Not so long as the snow keeps up, I’m afraid,” said Ellery gently. “And you, Doctor? Did you sleep badly, too? Or hasn’t the whisking away of a whole house from under your nose affected your nerves at all?”

The fat man’s eyes were red-rimmed and his lids sagged. Nevertheless, he chuckled and said: “I? I always sleep well. Nothing on my conscience. Why?”

“Oh, no special reason. Where’s friend Keith this morning? He’s a seclusive sort of chap, isn’t he?”

Mrs. Reinach swallowed a muffin whole. Her husband glanced at her and she rose and fled to the kitchen. “Lord knows,” said the fat man. “He’s as unpredictable as the ghost of Banquo. Don’t bother yourself about the boy; he’s harmless.”

Ellery sighed and pushed back from the table. “The passage of twenty-four hours hasn’t softened the wonder of the event. May I be excused? I’m going to have another peep at the house that isn’t there any more.” Thorne started to rise. “No, no, Thorne; I’d rather go alone.”

He put on his warmest clothes and went outdoors. The drifts reached the lower windows now; and the trees had almost disappeared under the snow. A crude path had been hacked by someone from the front door for a few feet; already it was half-refilled with snow.

Ellery stood still in the path, breathing deeply of the raw air and staring off to the right at the empty rectangle where the Black House had once stood. Leading across that expanse to the edge of the woods beyond were barely discernible tracks. He turned up his coat-collar against the cutting wind and plunged into the snow waist-deep.

It was difficult going, but not unpleasant. After a while he began to feel quite warm. The world was white and silent — a new, strange world.

When he had left the open area and struggled into the woods, it was with a sensation that he was leaving even that new world behind. Everything was so still and white and beautiful, with a pure beauty not of the earth; the snow draping the trees gave them a fresh look, making queer patterns out of old forms.

Occasionally a clump of snow fell from a low branch, pelting him.

Here, where there was a roof between ground and sky, the snow had not filtered into the mysterious tracks so quickly. They were purposeful tracks, unwandering, striking straight as a dotted line for some distant goal. Ellery pushed on more rapidly, excited by a presentiment of discovery.

Then the world went black. It was a curious thing. The snow grew gray, and grayer, and finally very dark gray, becoming jet black at the last instant, as if flooded from underneath by ink. And with some surprise he felt the cold wet kiss of the drift on his cheek.

He opened his eyes to find himself flat on his back in the snow and Thorne in the great-coat stooped over him, nose jutting from blued face like a winter thorn.

“Queen!” cried the old man, shaking him. “Are you all right?”

Ellery sat up, licking his lips. “As well as might be expected,” he groaned. “What hit me? It felt like one of God’s angrier thunderbolts.” He caressed the back of his head, and staggered to his feet. “Well, Thorne, we seem to have reached the border of the enchanted land.”

“You’re not delirious?” asked the lawyer anxiously.

Ellery looked about for the tracks which should have been there. But except for the double line at the head of which Thorne stood, there were none. Apparently he had lain unconscious in the snow for a long time.

“Farther than this,” he said with a grimace, “we may not go. Hands off. Nose out. Mind your own business. Beyond this invisible boundary-line lie Sheol and Domdaniel and Abaddon. Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate... Forgive me, Thorne. Did you save my life?”

Thorne jerked about, searching the silent woods. “I don’t know. I think not. At least I found you lying here, alone. Gave me quite a start — thought you were dead.”

“As well,” said Ellery with a shiver, “I might have been.”

“When you left the house Alice went upstairs, Reinach said something about a cat-nap, and I wandered out of the house. I waded through the drifts on the road for a spell, and then I thought of you and made my way back. Your tracks were almost obliterated; but they were visible enough to take me across the clearing to the edge of the woods, and I finally blundered upon you. By now the tracks are gone.”

“I don’t like this at all,” said Ellery, “and yet in another sense I like it very much.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t imagine,” said Ellery, “a divine agency stooping to such a mean assault.”

“Yes, it’s open war now,” muttered Thorne. “Whoever it is — he’ll stop at nothing.”

“A benevolent war, at any rate. I was quite at his mercy, and he might have killed me as easily as—”

He stopped. A sharp report, like a pine-knot snapping in a fire or an ice-stiffened twig breaking in two, but greatly magnified, had come to his ears. Then the echo came to them, softer but unmistakable.

It was the report of a gun.

“From the house!” yelled Ellery. “Come on!”

Thorne was pale as they scrambled through the drifts. “Gun... I forgot. I left my revolver under the pillow in my bedroom. Do you think—?”

Ellery scrabbled at his own pocket. “Mine’s still here... No, by George, I’ve been scotched!” His cold fingers fumbled with the cylinder. “Bullets taken out. And I’ve no spare ammunition.” He fell silent, his mouth hardening.

They found the women and Reinach running about like startled animals, searching for they knew not what.

“Did you hear it, too?” cried the fat

###

man as they burst into the house.

He seemed extraordinarily excited. “Someone fired a shot!”

“Where?” asked Ellery, his eyes on the rove. “Keith?”

“Don’t know where he is. Milly says it might have come from behind the house. I was napping and couldn’t tell. Revolvers! At least he’s come out in the open.”

“Who has?” asked Ellery.

The fat man shrugged. Ellery went through to the kitchen and opened the back door. The snow outside was smooth, untrodden. When he returned to the living-room Alice was adjusting a scarf about her neck with fingers that shook.

“I don’t know how long you people intend to stay in this ghastly place,” she said in a passionate voice. “But I’ve had quite enough, thank you. Mr. Thorne, I insist you take me away at once. At once! I shan’t stay another instant.”

“Now, now, Miss Mayhew,” said Thorne in a distressed way, taking her hands. “I should like nothing better. But can’t you see” Ellery, on his way upstairs three steps at a time, heard no more. He made for Thome’s room and kicked the door open, sniffing. Then, with rather a grim smile, he went to the tumbled bed and pulled the pillow away. A long-barreled, old-fashioned revolver lay there. He examined the cylinder; it was empty. Then he put the muzzle to his nose.

“Well?” said Thorne from the doorway. The English girl was clinging to him.

“Well,” said Ellery, tossing the gun aside, “we’re facing fact now, not fancy. It’s war, Thorne, as you said. The shot was fired from your revolver. Barrel’s still warm, muzzle still reeks, and you can smell the burnt gunpowder if you sniff this cold air hard enough. And the bullets are gone.”

“But what does it mean?” moaned Alice.

“It means that somebody’s being terribly cute. It was a harmless trick to get Thorne and me back to the house. Probably the shot was a warning as well as a decoy.”

Alice sank onto Thome’s bed. “You mean we—”

“Yes,” said Ellery, “from now on we’re prisoners, Miss Mayhew. Prisoners who may not stray beyond the confines of the jail. I wonder,” he added with a frown, “precisely why.”

* * *

The day passed in a timeless haze. The world of outdoors became more and more choked in the folds of the snow. The air was a solid white sheet. It seemed as if the very heavens had opened to admit all the snow that ever was, or ever would be.

Young Keith appeared suddenly at noon, taciturn and leaden-eyed, gulped down some hot food, and without explanation retired to his bedroom. Dr. Reinach shambled about quietly for some time; then he disappeared, only to show up, wet, grimy, and silent, before dinner. As the day wore on, less and less was said. Thorne in desperation took to a bottle of whisky. Keith came down at eight o’clock, made himself some coffee, drank three cups, and went upstairs again. Dr. Reinach appeared to have lost his good nature; he was morose, almost sullen, opening his mouth only to snarl at his wife.

And the snow continued to fall.

They all retired early, without conversation.

At midnight the strain was more than even Ellery’s iron nerves could bear. He had prowled about his bedroom for hours, poking at the brisk fire in the grate, his mind leaping from improbability to fantasy until his head throbbed with one great ache. Sleep was impossible.

Moved by an impulse which he did not attempt to analyze, he slipped into his coat and went out into the frosty corridor.

Thome’s door was closed; Ellery heard the old man’s bed creaking and groaning. It was pitch-dark in the hall as he groped his way about.

Suddenly Ellery’s toe caught in a rent in the carpet and he staggered to regain his balance, coming up against the wall with a thud, his heels clattering on the bare planking at the bottom of the baseboard.

He had no sooner straightened up than he heard the stifled exclamation of a woman. It came from across the corridor; if he guessed right, from Alice Mayhew’s bedroom. It was such a weak, terrified exclamation that he sprang across the hall, fumbling in his pockets for a match as he did so. He found match and door in the same instant; he struck one and opened the door and stood still, the tiny light flaring up before him.

Alice was sitting up in bed, quilt drawn about her shoulders, her eyes gleaming in the quarter-light. Before an open drawer of a tallboy across the room, one hand arrested in the act of scattering its contents about, loomed Dr. Reinach, fully dressed. His shoes were wet; his expression was blank; and his eyes were slits.

###

“Please stand still, Doctor,” said Ellery softly as the match sputtered out. “My revolver is useless as a percussion weapon, but it still can inflict damage as a blunt instrument.” He moved to a nearby table, where he had seen an oil-lamp before the match went out, struck another match, lighted the lamp, and stepped back again to stand against the door.

“Thank you,” whispered Alice.

“What happened, Miss Mayhew?”

“I... don’t know. I slept badly. I came awake a moment ago when I heard the floor creak. And then you dashed in.” She cried suddenly: “Bless you!”

“You cried out.”

“Did I?” She sighed like a tired child. “I... Uncle Herbert!” she said suddenly, fiercely. “What’s the meaning of this? What are you doing in my room?”

The fat man’s eyes came open, innocent and beaming; his hand with-drew from the drawer and closed it; and he shifted his elephantine bulk until he was standing erect. “Doing, my dear?” he rumbled. “Why, I came in to see if you were all right.” His eyes were fixed on a patch of her white shoulders visible above the quilt. “You were so overwrought today. Purely an avuncular impulse, my child. Forgive me if I startled you.”

“I think,” sighed Ellery, “that I’ve misjudged you, Doctor. That’s not clever of you at all. Downright clumsy, in fact; I can only attribute it to a certain understandable confusion of the moment. Miss Mayhew isn’t normally to be found in the top drawer of a tallboy, no matter how capacious it may be.” He said sharply to Alice: “Did this fellow touch you?”

“Touch me?” Her shoulders twitched with repugnance. “No. If he had, in the dark, I–I think I should have died.”

“What a charming compliment,” said Dr. Reinach ruefully.

“Then what,” demanded Ellery, “were you looking for, Dr. Reinach?”

The fat man turned until his right side was toward the door. “I’m notoriously hard of hearing,” he chuckled, “in my right ear. Good night, Alice; pleasant dreams. May I pass, Sir Launcelot?”

Ellery kept his gaze on the fat man’s bland face until the door closed. For some time after the last echo of Dr. Reinach’s chuckle died away they were silent.

Then Alice slid down in the bed and clutched the edge of the quilt. “Mr. Queen, please! Take me away tomorrow. I mean it. I truly do. I — can’t tell you how frightened I am of... all this. Every time I think of that — that... How can such things be? We’re not in a place of sanity, Mr. Queen. We’ll all go mad if we remain here much longer. Won’t you take me away?”

Ellery sat down on the edge of her bed. “Are you really so upset, Miss Mayhew?” he asked gently.

“I’m simply terrified,” she whispered.

“Then Thorne and I will do what we can tomorrow.” He patted her arm through the quilt. “I’ll have a look at his car and see if something can’t be done with it. He said there’s some gas left in the tank. We’ll go as far as it will take us and walk the rest of the way.”

“But with so little petrol... Oh, I don’t care!” She stared up at him wide-eyed. “Do you think... he’ll let us?”

“He?”

“Whoever it is that...”

Ellery rose with a smile. “We’ll cross that bridge when it gets to us. Meanwhile, get some sleep; you’ll have a strenuous day tomorrow.”

“Do you think I’m— he’ll—”

“Leave the lamp burning and set a chair under the doorknob when I leave.” He took a quick look about. “By the way, Miss Mayhew, is there anything in your possession which Dr. Reinach might want to appropriate?”

“That’s puzzled me, too. I can’t imagine what I’ve got he could possibly want. I’m so poor, Mr. Queen — quite the Cinderella. There’s nothing; just my clothes, the things I came with.”

“No old letters, records, mementoes?”

“Just one very old photograph of mother.”

“Hmm, Dr. Reinach doesn’t strike me as that sentimental. Well, good night. Don’t forget the chair. You’ll be quite safe, I assure you.”

He waited in the frigid darkness of the corridor until he heard her creep out of bed and set a chair against the door. Then he went into his own room.

And there was Thorne in a shabby dressing-gown, looking like an ancient and dishevelled spectre of gloom.

“What ho! The ghost walks. Can’t you sleep, either?”

“Sleep!” The old man shuddered. “How can an honest man sleep in this God-forsaken place? I notice you seem rather cheerful.”

“Not cheerful. Alive.” Ellery sat down and lit a cigarette. “I heard you tossing about your bed a few minutes ago. Anything happen to pull you out into this cold?”

“No. Just nerves.” Thorne jumped up and began to pace the floor. “Where have you been?”

Ellery told him. “Remarkable chap, Reinach,” he concluded. “But we mustn’t allow our admiration to overpower us. We’ll really have to give this thing up, Thorne, at least temporarily. I had been hoping... But there! I’ve promised the poor girl. We’re leaving tomorrow as best we can.”

“And be found frozen stiff next March by a rescue party,” said Thorne miserably. “Pleasant prospect! And yet even death by freezing is prefer-able to this abominable place.” He looked curiously at Ellery. “I must say I’m a trifle disappointed in you, Queen. From what I’d heard about your professional cunning...”

“I never claimed,” shrugged Ellery, “to be a magician. Or even a theo-logian. What’s happened here is either the blackest magic or palpable proof that miracles can happen.”

“It would seem so,” muttered Thorne. “And yet, when you put your mind to it... It goes against reason, by thunder!”

“I see,” said Ellery dryly, “the man of law is recovering from the initial shock. Well, it’s a shame to have to leave here now, in a way. I detest the thought of giving up — especially at the present time.”

“At the present time? What do you mean?”

“I dare say, Thorne, you haven’t emerged far enough from your condition of shock to have properly analyzed this little problem. I gave it a lot of thought today. The goal eludes me — but I’m near it,” he said softly, “very near it.”

“You mean,” gasped the lawyer, “you mean you actually—”

“Remarkable case,” said Ellery. “Oh, extraordinary — there isn’t a word in the English language or any other, for that matter, that properly describes it. If I were religiously inclined...” He puffed away thoughtfully. “It gets down to very simple elements, as all truly great problems do. A fortune in gold exists. It is hidden in a house. The house disappears. To find the gold, then, you must first find the house. I believe...”

“Aside from that mumbo-jumbo with Keith’s broom the other day,” cried Thorne, “I can’t recall that you’ve made a single effort in that direction. Find the house! — why, you’ve done nothing but sit around and wait.”

“Exactly,” murmured Ellery.

“What?”

“Wait. That’s the prescription, my lean and angry friend. That’s the sigil that will exorcise the spirit of the Black House.”

“Sigil?” Thorne stared. “Spirit?”

“Wait. Precisely. Lord, how I’m waiting!”

Thorne looked puzzled and suspicious, as if he suspected Ellery of a contrary midnight humor. But Ellery sat soberly smoking. “Wait! For what, man? You’re more exasperating than that fat monstrosity! What are you waiting for?”

Ellery looked at him. Then he rose and flung his butt into the dying fire and placed his hand on the old man’s arm. “Go to bed, Thorne. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Queen, you must. I’ll go mad if I don’t see daylight on this thing soon!”

Ellery looked shocked, for no reason that Thorne could see. And then, just as inexplicably, he slapped Thome’s shoulder and began to chuckle. “Go to bed,” he said, still chuckling.

“But you must tell me!”

Ellery sighed, losing his smile. “I can’t. You’d laugh.”

“I’m not in a laughing mood!”

“Nor is it a laughing matter. Thorne, I began to say a moment ago that if I, poor sinner that I am, possessed religious susceptibilities, I should have become permanently devout in the past three days. I suppose I’m a hopeless case. But even I see a power not of earth in this.”

“Play-actor,” growled the old lawyer. “Professing to see the hand of God in... Don’t be sacrilegious, man. We’re not all heathen.”

Ellery looked out his window at the moonless night and the glimmering grayness of the snow-swathed world.

“Hand of God?” he murmured. “No, not hand, Thorne. If this case is ever solved, it will be by... a lamp.”

“Lamp?” said Thorne faintly. “Lamp?”

“In a manner of speaking. The lamp of God.”

Chapter III

A question of murder

The next day dawned sullenly, as ashen and hopeless a morning as ever was. Incredibly, it still snowed in the same thick fashion, as if the whole sky were crumbling bit by bit.

Ellery spent the better part of the day in the garage, tinkering at the big black car’s vitals. He left the doors wide open, so that anyone who wished might see what he was about. He knew little enough of automotive mechanics, and he felt from the start that he was engaged in a futile business.

But in the late afternoon, after hours of vain experimentation, he suddenly came upon a tiny wire which seemed to him to be out of joint with its environment. It simply hung, a useless thing. Logic demanded a connection. He experimented. He found one.

As he stepped on the starter and heard the cold motor sputter into life, a shape darkened the entrance of the garage. He turned off the ignition quickly and looked up.

It was Keith, a black mass against the background of snow, standing with widespread legs, a large can hanging from each big hand.

“Hello, there,” murmured Ellery. “You’ve assumed human shape again, I see. Back on one of your infrequent jaunts to the world of men, Keith?”

Keith said quietly: “Going somewhere, Mr. Queen?”

“Certainly. Why — do you intend to stop me?”

“Depends on where you’re going.”

“Ah, a threat. Well, suppose I tell you where to go?”

“Tell all you want. You don’t get off these grounds until I know where you’re bound for.”

Ellery grinned. “There’s a naive directness about you, Keith, that draws me in spite of myself. Well, I’ll relieve your mind. Thorne and I are taking Miss Mayhew back to the city.”

“In that case it’s all right.” Ellery studied his face; it was worn deep with ruts of fatigue and worry. Keith dropped the cans to the cement floor of the garage. “You can use these, then. Gas.”

“Gas! Where on earth did you get it?”

“Let’s say,” said Keith grimly, “I dug it up out of an old Indian tomb.”

“Very well.”

“You’ve fixed Thome’s car, I see. Needn’t have. I could have done it.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“Because nobody asked me to.” The giant swung on his heel and vanished.

Ellery sat still, frowning. Then he got out of the car, picked up the cans, and poured their contents into the tank. He reached into the car again, got the engine running, and leaving it to purr away like a great cat he went back to the house.

He found Alice in her room, a coat over her shoulders, staring out her window. She sprang up at his knock.

“Mr. Queen, you’ve got Mr. Thome’s car going!”

“Success at last,” smiled Ellery. “Are you ready?”

“Oh, yes! I feel so much better, now that we’re actually to leave. Do you think we’ll have a hard time? I saw Mr. Keith bring those cans in. Petrol, weren’t they? Nice of him. I never did believe such a nice young man—” She flushed. There were hectic spots in her checks and her eyes were brighter than they had been for days. Her voice seemed less husky, too.

“It may be hard going through the drifts, but the car is equipped with chains. With luck we should make it. It’s a powerful—”

Ellery stopped very suddenly indeed, his eyes fixed on the worn carpet at his feet, stony yet startled.

“Whatever is the matter, Mr. Queen?”

“Matter?” Ellery raised his eyes and drew a deep, deep breath. “Nothing at all. God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world.” She looked down at the carpet. “Oh... the sun!” With a little squeal of delight she turned to the window. “Why, Mr. Queen, it’s stopped snowing. There’s the sun setting — at last!”

“And high time, too,” said Ellery briskly. “Will you please get your things on? We leave at once.” He picked up her bags and left her, walking with a springy vigor that shook the old boards. He crossed the corridor to his room opposite hers and began, whistling, to pack his bag.

The living-room was noisy-with a babble of adieux. One would have said that this was a normal household, with normal people in a normal human situation. Alice was positively gay, quite as if she were not leaving a fortune in gold for what might turn out to be all time.

She set her purse down on the mantel next to her mother’s chromo, fixed her hat, flung her arms about Mrs. Reinach, pecked gingerly at Mrs. Fell’s withered cheek, and even smiled forgivingly at Dr. Reinach. Then she dashed back to the mantel, snatched up her purse, threw one long enigmatic glance at Keith’s drawn face, and hurried outdoors as if the devil himself were after her.

Thorne was already in the car, his old face alight with incredible happiness, as if he had been reprieved at the very moment he was to set his foot beyond the little green door. He beamed at the dying sun.

Ellery followed Alice more slowly. The bags were in Thome’s car; there was nothing more to do. He climbed in, raced the motor, and then released the brake.

The fat man filled the doorway, shouting: “You know the road, now, don’t you? Turn to the right at the end of this drive. Then keep going in a straight line. You can’t miss. You’ll hit the main highway in about...”

His last words were drowned in the roar of the engine. Ellery waved his hand. Alice, in the tonneau beside Thorne, twisted about and laughed a little hysterically. Thorne sat beaming at the back of Ellery’s head.

The car, under Ellery’s guidance, trundled unsteadily out of the drive and made a right turn into the road.

It grew dark rapidly. They made slow progress. The big machine inched its way through the drifts, slipping and lurching despite its chains. As night fell, Ellery turned the powerful headlights on.

He drove with unswerving concentration.

None of them spoke.

It seemed hours before they reached the main highway. But when they did the car leaped to life on the road, which had been partly cleared by snowplows, and it was not long before they were entering the nearby town.

At the sight of the friendly electric lights, the paved streets, the solid blocks of houses, Alice gave a cry of sheer delight. Ellery stopped at a gasoline station and had the tank filled.

“It’s not far from here, Miss Mayhew,” said Thorne reassuringly. “We’ll be in the city in no time. The Triborough Bridge...”

“Oh, it’s wonderful to be alive!”

“Of course you’ll stay at my house. My wife will be delighted to have you. After that...”

“You’re so kind, Mr. Thorne. I don’t know how I shall ever be able to thank you enough.” She paused, startled. “Why, what’s the matter, Mr. Queen?”

For Ellery had done a strange thing. Fie had stopped the car at a traffic intersection and asked the officer on duty something in a low tone. The officer stared at him and replied with gestures. Ellery swung the car off into another street. He drove slowly.

“What’s the matter?” asked Alice again, leaning forward.

Thorne said, frowning: “You can’t have lost your way. There’s a sign which distinctly says...”

“No, it’s not that,” said Ellery in a preoccupied way. “I’ve just thought of something.”

The girl and the old man looked at each other, puzzled. Ellery stopped the car at a large stone building with green lights outside and went in, remaining there for fifteen minutes. He came out whistling.

“Queen!” said Thorne abruptly, eyes on the green lights. “What’s up?”

“Something that must be brought down.” Ellery swung the car about and headed it for the traffic intersection. When he reached it he turned left.

“Why, you’ve taken the wrong turn,” said Alice nervously. “This is the direction from which we’ve just come. I’m sure of that.”

“And you’re quite right, Miss Mayhew. It is.” She sank back, pale, as if the very thought of returning terrified her. “We’re going back, you see,” said Ellery.

“Back!” exploded Thorne, sitting up straight.

“Oh, can’t we just forget all those horrible people?” moaned Alice.

“I’ve a viciously stubborn memory. Besides, we have reinforcements. If you’ll look back you’ll see a car following us. It’s a police car, and in it are the local Chief of Police and a squad of picked men.”

“But why, Mr. Queen?” cried Alice.

Thorne said nothing; his happiness had quite vanished, and he sat gloomily staring at the back of Ellery’s neck.

“Because,” said Ellery grimly, “I have my own professional pride. Because I’ve been on the receiving end of a damnably cute magician’s trick.”

“Trick?” she repeated dazedly.

“Now I shall turn magician myself. You saw a house disappear.” He laughed softly. “I shall make it appear again!”

They could only stare at him, too bewildered to speak.

“And then,” said Ellery, his voice hardening, “even if we chose to overlook such trivia as dematerialized houses, in all conscience we can’t overlook... murder.”

Chapter IV

The White House

And there was the Black House again. Not a wraith. A solid house, a strong dirty time-encrusted house, looking as if it would never dream of taking wing and flying off into space. It stood on the other side of the driveway, where it had always stood.

They saw it even as they turned into the drive from the drift-covered road, its bulk looming black against the brilliant moon, as substantial a house as could be found in the world of sane things.

Thorne and the girl were incapable of speech; they could only gape, dumb witnesses of a miracle even greater than the disappearance of the house in the first place.

As for Ellery, he stopped the car, sprang to the ground, signaled to the car snuffling up behind, and darted across the snowy clearing to the White House, whose windows were bright with lamp-and fire-light. Out of the police car swarmed men, and they ran after Ellery like hounds. Thorne and Alice followed in a daze.

Ellery kicked open the White House door. There was a revolver in his hand and there was no doubt, from the way he gripped it, that its cylinder had been replenished.

“Hello again,” he said, stalking into the living-room. “Not a ghost; Inspector Queen’s little boy in the too, too solid flesh. Nemesis, perhaps. I bid you good evening. What — no welcoming smile, Dr. Reinach?”

The fat man had paused in the act of lifting a glass of Scotch to his lips. It was wonderful how the color seeped out of his pouchy cheeks, leaving them gray. Mrs. Reinach whimpered in a corner, and Mrs. Fell stared stupidly. Only Nick Keith showed no great astonishment. He was standing by a window, muffled to the ears; and on his face there was bitterness and admiration and, strangely, a sort of relief.

“Shut the door.” The detectives behind Ellery spread out silently. Alice stumbled to a chair, her eyes wild, studying Dr. Reinach with a fierce intensity... There was a sighing little sound and one of the detectives lunged toward the window at which Keith had been standing. But Keith was no longer there. He was bounding through the snow toward the woods like a huge deer.

“Don’t let him get away!” cried Ellery. Three men dived through the window after the giant, their guns out. Shots began to sputter. The night outside was streaked with orange lightning.

Ellery went to the fire and warmed his hands. Dr. Reinach slowly, very slowly, sat down in the armchair. Thorne sank into a chair, too, putting his hands to his head.

Ellery turned around and said: “I’ve told you, Captain, enough of what’s happened since our arrival to allow you an intelligent understanding of what I’m about to say.” A stocky man in uniform nodded curtly.

“Thorne, last night for the first time in my career,” continued Ellery whimsically, “I acknowledged the assistance of... Well, I tell you, who are implicated in this extraordinary crime, that had it not been for the good God above you would have succeeded in your plot against Alice Mayhew’s inheritance.”

“I’m disappointed in you,” said the fat man from the depths of the chair.

“A loss I keenly feel.” Ellery looked at him, smiling. “Let me show you, skeptic. When Mr. Thorne, Miss Mayhew and I arrived the other day, it was late afternoon. Upstairs, in the room you so thoughtfully provided, I looked out the window and saw the sun setting. This was nothing and meant nothing, surely: sunset. Mere sunset. A trivial thing, interesting only to poets, meteorologists, and astronomers. But this was one time when the sun was vital to a man seeking truth... a veritable lamp of God shining in the darkness.

“For, see. Miss Mayhew’s bedroom that first day was on the opposite side of the house from mine. If the sun set in my window, then I faced west and she faced east. So far, so good. We talked, we retired. The next morning I awoke at seven — shortly after sunrise in this winter month — and what did I see? I saw the sun streaming into my window.”

A knot hissed in the fire behind him. The stocky man in the blue uniform stirred uneasily.

“Don’t you understand?” cried Ellery. “The sun had set in my window, and now it was rising in my window!”

Dr. Reinach was regarding him with a mild ruefulness. The color had come back to his fat cheeks. He raised the glass he was holding in a gesture curiously like a salute. Then he drank, deeply.

And Ellery said: “The significance of this unearthly reminder did not strike me at once. But much later it came back to me; and I dimly saw that chance, cosmos, God, whatever you may choose to call it, had given me the instrument for understanding the colossal, the mind-staggering phenomenon of a house which vanished overnight from the face of the earth.”

“Good lord,” muttered Thorne.

“But I was not sure; I did not trust my memory. I needed another demonstration from heaven, a bulwark to bolster my own suspicions. And so, as it snowed and snowed and snowed, the snow drawing a blanket across the face of the sun through which it could not shine, I waited. I waited for the snow to stop, and for the sun to shine again.”

He sighed. “When it shone again, there could no longer be any doubt. It appeared first to me in Miss Mayhew’s room, which had faced east the afternoon of our arrival. But what was it I saw in Miss Mayhew’s room late this afternoon? I saw the sun set.”

“Good lord,” said Thorne again; he seemed incapable of saying anything else.

“Then her room faced west today. How could her room face west today when it had faced east the day of our arrival? How could my room face west the day of our arrival and face east today? Had the sun stood still? Had the world gone mad? Or was there another explanation — one so extraordinarily simple that it staggered the imagination?”

Thorne muttered: “Queen, this is the most—”

“Please,” said Ellery, “let me finish. The only logical conclusion, the only conclusion that did not fly in the face of natural law, of science itself, was that while the house we were in today, the rooms we occupied, seemed to be identical with the house and the rooms we had occupied on the day of our arrival, they were not. Unless this solid structure had been turned about on its foundation like a toy on a stick, which was palpably absurd, then it was not the same house. It looked the same inside and out, it had identical furniture, identical carpeting, identical decorations... but it was not the same house. It was another house. It was another house exactly like the first in every detail except one: and that was its terrestrial position in relation to the sun.”

A detective outside shouted a message of failure, a shout carried away by the wind under the bright cold moon.

“See,” said Ellery softly, “how everything fell into place. If this White House we were in was not the same White House in which we had slept that first night, but was a twin house in a different position in relation to the sun, then the Black House, which apparently had vanished, had not vanished at all. It was where it had always been. It was not the Black House which had vanished, but we who had vanished. It was not the Black House which had moved away, but we who had moved away. We had been transferred during that first night to a new location, where the surrounding woods looked similar, where there was a similar driveway with a similar garage at its terminus, where the road outside was similarly old and pitted, where everything was similar except that there was no Black House, only an empty clearing.

“So we must have been moved, body and baggage, to this twin White House during the time we retired the first night and the time we awoke the next morning. We, Miss Mayhew’s chromo on the mantel, the holes in our doors where locks had been, even the fragments of a brandy decanter which had been shattered the night before in a cleverly staged scene against the brick wall of the fireplace at the original house... all, all transferred to the twin house to further the illusion that we were still in the original house the next morning.”

“Drivel,” said Dr. Reinach, smiling. “Such pure drivel that it smacks of fantasmagoria.”

“It was beautiful,” said Ellery. “A beautiful plan. It had symmetry, the polish of great art. And it made a beautiful chain of reasoning, too, once I was set properly at the right link. For what followed? Since we had been transferred without our knowledge during the night, it must have been while we were unconscious. I recalled the two drinks Thorne and I had had, and the fuzzy tongue and head that resulted the next morning. Mildly drugged, then; and the drinks had been mixed the night before by Dr. Reinach’s own hand. Doctor — drugs; very simple.” The fat man shrugged with amusement, glancing sidewise at the stocky man in blue. But the stocky man in blue wore a hard, unchanging mask.

“But Dr. Reinach alone?” murmured Ellery. “Oh, no, impossible. One man could never have accomplished all that was necessary in the scant few hours available... fix Thome’s car, carry us and our clothes and bags from the one White House to its duplicate — by machine — put Thome’s car out of commission again, put us to bed again, arrange our clothing identically, transfer the chromo, the fragments of the cut-glass decanter in the fireplace, perhaps even a few knickknacks and ornaments not duplicated in the second White House, and so on. A prodigious job, even if most of the preparatory work had been done before our arrival. Obviously the work of a whole group. Of accomplices. Who but everyone in the house? With the possible exception of Mrs. Fell, who in her condition could be swayed easily enough, with no clear perception of what was occurring.”

Ellery’s eyes gleamed. “And so I accuse you all — including young Mr. Keith, who has wisely taken himself off — of having aided in the plot whereby you would prevent the rightful heiress of Sylvester Mayhew’s fortune from taking possession of the house in which it was hidden.”

Dr. Reinach coughed politely, flapping his paws together like a great seal. “Terribly interesting, Queen, terribly. I don’t know when I’ve been more captivated by sheer fiction. On the other hand, there are certain personal allusions in your story which, much as I admire their ingenuity, cannot fail to provoke me.” He turned to the stocky man in blue.

“Certainly, Captain,” he chuckled, “you don’t credit this incredible story? I believe Mr. Queen has gone a little mad from sheer shock.”

“Unworthy of you, Doctor,” sighed Ellery. “The proof of what I say lies in the very fact that we are here, at this moment.”

“You’ll have to explain that,” said the police chief, who seemed out of his depth.

“I mean that we are now in the original White House. I led you back here, didn’t I? And I can lead you back to the twin White House, for now I know the basis of the illusion. After our departure this evening, incidentally, all these people returned to this house. The other White House had served its purpose and they no longer needed it.

“As for the geographical trick involved, it struck me that this side-road we’re on makes a steady curve for miles. Both driveways lead off this same road, one some six miles farther up the road; although, because of the curve, which is like a number 9, the road makes a wide sweep and virtually doubles back on itself, so that as the crow flies the two settlements are only a mile or so apart, although by the curving road they are six miles apart.

“When Dr. Reinach drove Thorne and Miss Mayhew and me out here the day the Coronia docked, he deliberately passed the almost imperceptible drive leading to the substitute house and went on until he reached this one, the original. We didn’t notice the first driveway.

“Thome’s car was put out of commission deliberately to prevent his driving. The driver of a car will observe landmarks when his passengers notice little or nothing. Keith even met Thorne on both Thome’s previous visits to Mayhew — ostensibly ‘to lead the way,’ actually to prevent Thorne from familiarizing himself with the road. And it was Dr. Reinach who drove the three of us here that first day. They permitted me to drive away tonight for what they hoped was a one-way trip because we started from the substitute house — of the two, the one on the road nearer to town. We couldn’t possibly, then, pass the tell-tale second drive and become suspicious. And they knew the relatively shorter drive would not impress our consciousness.”

“But even granting all that, Mr. Queen,” said the policeman, “I don’t see what these people expected to accomplish. They couldn’t hope to keep you folks fooled forever.”

“True,” cried Ellery, “but don’t forget that by the time we caught on to the various tricks involved they hoped to have laid hands on Mayhew’s fortune and disappeared with it. Don’t you see that the whole illusion was planned to give them time? Time to dismantle the Black House without interference, raze it to the ground if necessary, to find that hidden hoard of gold? I don’t doubt that if you examine the house next door you’ll find it a shambles and a hollow shell. That’s why Reinach and Keith kept disappearing. They were taking turns at the Black House, picking it apart, stone by stone, in a frantic search for the cache, while we were occupied in the duplicate White House with an apparently supernatural phenomenon. That’s why someone — probably the worthy doctor here — slipped out of the house behind your back, Thorne, and struck me over the head when I rashly attempted to follow Keith’s tracks in the snow. I could not be permitted to reach the original settlement, for if I did the whole preposterous illusion would be revealed.”

“How about that gold?” growled Thorne.

“For all I know,” said Ellery with a shrug, “they’ve found it and salted it away again.”

“Oh, but we didn’t,” whimpered Mrs. Reinach, squirming in her chair. “Herbert, I told you not to—”

“Idiot,” said the fat man. “Stupid swine.” She jerked as if he had struck her.

“If you hadn’t found the loot,” said the police chief to Dr. Reinach brusquely, “why did you let these people go tonight?”

Dr. Reinach compressed his blubbery lips; he raised his glass and drank quickly.

“I think I can answer that,” said Ellery in a gloomy tone. “In many ways it’s the most remarkable element of the whole puzzle. Certainly it’s the grimmest and least excusable. The other illusion was child’s play compared to it. For it involves two apparently irreconcilable elements — Alice Mayhew and a murder.”

“A murder!” exclaimed the policeman, stiffening.

“Me?” said Alice in bewilderment.

Ellery lit a cigarette and flourished it at the policeman. “When Alice Mayhew came here that first afternoon, she went into the Black House with us. In her father’s bedroom she ran across an old chromo — I see it’s not here, so it’s still in the other White House — portraying her long-dead mother as a girl. Alice Mayhew fell on the chromo like a Chinese refugee on a bowl of rice. She had only one picture of her mother, she explained, and that a poor one. She treasured this unexpected discovery so much that she took it with her, then and there, to the White House — this house. And she placed it on the mantel over the fireplace here in a prominent position.”

The stocky man frowned; Alice sat very still; Thorne looked puzzled. And Ellery put the cigarette back to his lips and said: “Yet when Alice Mayhew fled from the White House in our company tonight for what seemed to be the last time, she completely ignored her mother’s chromo, that treasured memento over which she had gone into such raptures the first day! She could not have failed to overlook it in, let us say, the excitement of the moment. She had placed her purse on the mantel, a moment before, next to the chromo. She returned to the mantel for her purse. And yet she passed the chromo up without a glance. Since its sentimental value to her was overwhelming, by her own admission, it’s the one thing in all this property she would not have left. If she had taken it in the beginning, she would have taken it on leaving.”

Thorne cried: “What in the name of heaven are you saying, Queen?” His eyes glared at the girl, who sat glued to her chair, scarcely breathing.

“I am saying,” said Ellery curtly, “that we were blind. I am saying that not only was a house impersonated, but a woman as well. I am saying that this woman is not Alice Mayhew.”

The girl raised her eyes after an infinite interval in which no one, not even the policemen present, so much as stirred a foot.

“I thought of everything,” she said with the queerest sigh, and quite without the husky tone, “but that. And it was going off so beautifully.”

“Oh, you fooled me very neatly,” drawled Ellery. “That pretty little bedroom scene last night... I know now what happened. This precious Dr. Reinach of yours had stolen into your room at midnight to report to you on the progress of the search at the Black House, perhaps to urge you to persuade Thorne and me to leave today — at any cost. I happened to pass along the hall outside your room, stumbled, and fell against the wall with a clatter; not knowing who it might be or what the intruder’s purpose, you both fell instantly into that cunning deception... Actors! Both of you missed a career on the stage.”

The fat man closed his eyes; he seemed asleep. And the girl murmured, with a sort of tired defiance: “Not missed, Mr. Queen. I spent several years in the theatre.”

“You were devils, you two. Psychologically this plot has been the conception of evil genius. You knew that Alice Mayhew was unknown to anyone in this country except by her photographs. Moreover, there was a startling resemblance between the two of you, as Miss Mayhew’s photographs showed. And you knew Miss Mayhew would be in the company of Thorne and me for only a few hours, and then chiefly in the murky light of a sedan.”

“Good lord,” groaned Thorne, staring at the girl in horror.

“Alice Mayhew,” said Ellery grimly, “walked into this house and was whisked upstairs by Mrs. Reinach. And Alice Mayhew, the English girl, never appeared before us again. It was you who came downstairs; you, who had been secreted from Thome’s eyes during the past six days deliberately, so that he would not even suspect your existence; you who probably conceived the entire plot when Thorne brought the photographs of Alice Mayhew here, and her gossipy, informative letters; you, who looked enough like the real Alice Mayhew to get by with an impersonation in the eyes of two men to whom Alice Mayhew was a total stranger. I did think you looked different, somehow, when you appeared for dinner that first night; but I put it down to the fact that I was seeing you for the first time refreshed, brushed up, and without your hat and coat. Naturally, after that, the more I saw of you the less I remembered the details of the real Alice Mayhew’s appearance and so became more and more convinced, unconsciously, that you were Alice Mayhew. As for the husky voice and the excuse of having caught cold on the long automobile ride from the pier, that was a clever ruse to disguise the inevitable difference between your voices. The only danger that existed lay in Mrs. Fell, who gave us the answer to the whole riddle the first time we met her. She thought you were her own daughter Olivia. Of course. Because that’s who you are!”

Dr. Reinach was sipping brandy now with a steady indifference to his surroundings. His little eyes were fixed on a point miles away. Old Mrs. Fell sat gaping stupidly at the girl.

“You even covered that danger by getting Dr. Reinach to tell us beforehand that trumped-up story of Mrs. Fell’s ‘delusion’ and Olivia Fell’s ‘death’ in an automobile accident several years ago. Oh, admirable! Yet even this poor creature, in the frailty of her anile faculties, was fooled by a difference in voice and hair — two of the most easily distinguishable features. I suppose you fixed up your hair at the time Mrs. Reinach brought the real Alice Mayhew upstairs and you had a living model to go by... I could find myself moved to admiration if it were not for one thing.”

“You’re so clever,” said Olivia Fell coolly. “Really a fascinating monster. What do you mean?”

Ellery went to her and put his hand on her shoulder. “Alice Mayhew vanished and you took her place. Why did you take her place? For two possible reasons. One — to get Thorne and me away from the danger zone as quickly as possible, and to keep us away by ‘abandoning’ the fortune or dismissing us, which as Alice Mayhew would be your privilege: in proof, your vociferous insistence that we take you away. Two — of infinitely greater importance to the scheme: if your confederates did not find the gold at once, you were still Alice Mayhew in our eyes. You could then dispose of the house when and as you saw fit. Whenever the gold was found, it would be yours and your accomplices’. “But the real Alice Mayhew vanished. For you, her impersonator, to be in a position to go through the long process of taking over Alice Mayhew’s inheritance, it was necessary that Alice Mayhew remain permanently inirisible. For you to get possession of her rightful inheritance and live to enjoy its fruits, it was necessary that Alice Mayhew die. And that, Thorne,” snapped Ellery, gripping the girl’s shoulder hard, “is why I said that there was something besides a disappearing house to cope with tonight. Alice Mayhew was murdered.”

There were three shouts from outside which rang with tones of great excitement. And then they ceased, abruptly.

“Murdered,” went on Ellery, “by the only occupant of the house who was not in the house when this impostor came downstairs that first evening — Nicholas Keith. A hired killer. Although these people are all accessories to that murder.”

A voice said from the window: “Not a hired killer.”

They wheeled sharply, and fell silent. The three detectives who had sprung out of the window were there in the background, quietly watchful. Before them were two people.

“Not a killer,” said one of them, a woman. “That’s what he was supposed to be. Instead, and without their knowledge, he saved my life... dear Nick.”

And now the pall of grayness settled over the faces of Mrs. Fell, and of Olivia Fell, and of Mrs. Reinach, and of the burly doctor. For by Keith’s side stood Alice Mayhew. She was the same woman who sat near the fire only in general similitude of feature. Now that both women could be compared in proximity, there were obvious points of difference. She looked worn and grim, but happy withal; and she was holding to the arm of bitter-mouthed Nick Keith with a grip that was quite possessive.

Addendum

Afterwards, when it was possible to look back on the whole amazing fabric of plot and event, Mr. Ellery Queen said: “The scheme would have been utterly impossible except for two things: the character of Olivia Fell and the — in itself — fantastic existence of that duplicate house in the woods.”

He might have added that both of these would in turn have been impossible except for the aberrant strain in the Mayhew blood. The father of Sylvester Mayhew — Dr. Reinach’s stepfather — had always been erratic, and he had communicated his unbalance to his children. Sylvester and Sarah, who became Mrs. Fell, were twins, and they had always been insanely jealous of each other’s prerogatives. When they married in the same month, their father avoided trouble by presenting each of them with a specially-built house, the houses being identical in every detail. One he had erected next to his own house and presented to Mrs. Fell as a wedding gift; the other he built on a piece of property he owned some miles away and gave to Sylvester.

Mrs. Fell’s husband died early in her married life; and she moved away to live with her half-brother Herbert. When old Mayhew died, Sylvester boarded up his own house and moved into the ancestral mansion. And there the twin houses stood for many years, separated by only a few miles by road, completely and identically furnished inside — fantastic monuments to the Mayhew eccentricity.

The duplicate White House lay boarded up, waiting, idle, requiring only the evil genius of an Olivia Fell to be put to use. Olivia was beautiful, intelligent, accomplished, and as unscrupulous as Lady Macbeth. It was she who had influenced the others to move back to the abandoned house next to the Black House for the sole purpose of coercing or robbing Sylvester Mayhew. When Thorne appeared with the news of Sylvester’s long-lost daughter, she recognized the peril to their scheme and, grasping her own resemblance to her English cousin from the photographs Thorne brought, conceived the whole extraordinary plot.

Then obviously the first step was to put Sylvester out of the way. With perfect logic, she bent Dr. Reinach to her will and caused him to murder his patient before the arrival of Sylvester’s daughter. (A later exhumation and autopsy revealed traces of poison in the corpse.) Meanwhile, Olivia perfected the plans of the impersonation and illusion.

The house illusion was planned for the benefit of Thorne, to keep him sequestered and bewildered while the Black House was being torn down in the search for the gold. The illusion would perhaps not have been necessary had Olivia felt certain that her impersonation would succeed perfectly.

The illusion was simpler, of course, than appeared on the surface. The house was there, completely furnished, ready for use. All that was necessary was to take the boards down, air the place out, clean up, put fresh linen in. There was plenty of time before Alice’s arrival for this preparatory work.

The one weakness of Olivia Fell’s plot was objective, not personal. That woman would have succeeded in anything. But she made the mistake of selecting Nick Keith for the job of murdering Alice Mayhew. Keith had originally insinuated himself into the circle of plotters, posing as a desperado prepared to do anything for sufficient pay. Actually, he was the son of Sylvester Mayhew’s second wife, who had been so brutally treated by Mayhew and driven off to die in poverty.

Before his mother expired she instilled in Keith’s mind a hatred for Mayhew that waxed, rather than waned, with the ensuing years. Keith’s sole motive in joining the conspirators was to find his stepfather’s fortune and take that part of it which Mayhew had stolen from his mother. He had never intended to murder Alice — his ostensible role. When he carried her from the house that first evening under the noses of Ellery and Thorne, it was not to strangle and bury her, as Olivia had directed, but to secrete her in an ancient shack in the nearby woods known only to himself.

He had managed to smuggle provisions to her while he was ransacking the Black House. At first he had held her frankly prisoner, intending to keep her so until he found the money, took his share, and escaped. But as he came to know her he came to love her, and he soon confessed the whole story to her in the privacy of the shack. Her sympathy gave him new courage; concerned now with her safety above everything else, he prevailed upon her to remain in hiding until he could find the money and outwit his fellow-conspirators. Then they both intended to unmask Olivia.

The ironical part of the whole affair, as Mr. Ellery Queen was to point out, was that the goal of all this plotting and counterplotting — Sylvester Mayhew’s gold — remained as invisible as the Black House apparently had been. Despite the most thorough search of the building and grounds no trace of it had been found.

“I’ve asked you to visit my poor diggings,” smiled Ellery a few weeks later, “because something occurred to me that simply cried out for investigation.”

Keith and Alice glanced at each other blankly; and Thorne, looking clean, rested, and complacent for the first time in weeks, sat up straighter in Ellery’s most comfortable chair.

“I’m glad something occurred to somebody,” said Nick Keith with a grin. “I’m a pauper; and Alice is only one jump ahead of me.”

“You haven’t the philosophic attitude towards wealth,” said Ellery dryly, “that’s so charming a part of Dr. Reinach’s personality. Poor Colossus! I wonder how he likes our jails...” He poked a log into the fire. “By this time, Miss Mayhew, our common friend Thorne has had your father’s house virtually annihilated. No gold. Eh, Thorne?”

“Nothing but dirt,” said the lawyer sadly. “Why, we’ve taken that house apart stone by stone.”

“Exactly. Now there are two possibilities, since I am incorrigibly categorical: either your father’s fortune exists, Miss Mayhew, or it does not. If it does not and he was lying, there’s an end to the business, of course, and you and your precious Keith will have to put your heads together and agree to live either in noble, ruggedly individualistic poverty or by the grace of the Relief Administration. But suppose there was a fortune, as your father claimed, and suppose he did secrete it somewhere in that house. What then?”

“Then,” sighed Alice, “it’s flown away.”

Ellery laughed. “Not quite; I’ve had enough of vanishments for the present, anyway. Let’s tackle the problem differently. Is there anything which was in Sylvester Mayhew’s house before he died which is not there now?”

Thorne stared. “If you mean the— er— the body...”

“Don’t be gruesome, Literal Lyman. Besides, there’s been an exhumation. No, guess again.”

Alice looked slowly down at the package in her lap. “So that’s why you asked me to fetch this with me today!”

“You mean,” cried Keith, “the old fellow was deliberately putting everyone off the track when he said his fortune was gold?”

Ellery chuckled and took the package from the girl. He unwrapped it and for a moment gazed appreciatively at the large old chromo of Alice’s mother.

And then, with the self-assurance of the complete logician, he stripped away the back of the frame.

Gold-and-green documents cascaded into his lap.

“Converted into bonds,” grinned Ellery. “Who said your father was cracked, Miss Mayhew? A very clever gentleman! Come, come, Thorne, stop rubber-necking and let’s leave these children of fortune alone!”

Content

Ellery Queen
House of Haunts

Chapter I The Black House

Chapter II Magic or miracle?

Chapter III A question of murder

Chapter IV The White House

Addendum