  To Roger, the presence of Doctor Ryder showed that Grover suspected him. Of the whole staff only he had been told, included in this vigil. The headset was shifted slightly away from his ears; Roger listened, as midnight approached, to his cousin’s chat with the experimenting medical man. “Of course I know that I am under suspicion,” Dr. Ryder said. “The culture was hidden in my section. Other things look bad——” “Of the whole staff you are the only man I need not suspect,” Grover saw deeper into things than had Roger. “It is an old trick, to turn suspicion toward an innocent man by ‘planting’ something.” That, Roger decided, was sounder sense than he had used. He had forgotten to dig past appearances to the heart of truth! “What do you expect will happen here?” asked the doctor. “The miscreant will come, with his menagerie, for the priceless camphor secret.” “Pretty smart stuff,” broke in Potts, “coagulating camphor with kangaroos.” Coagulating was the wrong word, Roger knew; and the others saw through the meaning. “Claws on glass implied something tall enough to reach up that high on top of the cage,” Grover explained. “The ‘snake’ trail and an animal with a dragging tail ‘coagulated.’” “But why did the man take the white rats?” Potts was beaming, in the faint glow from the bulbs in the shadow box; tickled that his word had been so good; not dreaming that Grover was inwardly amused. “With the same motive that makes a magician do meaningless movements with his left hand while he really palms cards in his other hand,” Dr. Ryder explained, “to make you look away from the real motive.” “And he brought the kangaroo and the ape to confusicate us,” Potts was being clever, he felt. “I’d say the ape came so he could be used to climb down a rope, and go and open the cellar trap that had no beam-alarm,” Roger spoke up. “I looked up notices in the theatre columns and there is an act that has a boxing kangaroo, and the critic called it ‘she.’ In the act, she ‘brings down the house’ when a fire is supposed to trap the trained rats on the roof of a little house, and ‘she’ makes everybody laugh by taking the rats and putting them in the pouch they have to carry their young in.” “Oh, yes, that coagulates,” Potts agreed. Although all the others realized that the word meant to clot or curdle, and wanted to smile when it was used to mean “connects up,” Potts, had they known it, was precisely correct—for they were to find that many deductions certainly coagulated, in a broad way of speaking, the real truth, instead of solving the mystery. If clotting and curdling means to thicken and make lumpy, then as Potts said, Roger’s explanation did exactly that to their deductive cleverness. Roger, as the slow minutes dragged along, picked up with his headset whispers of the policemen outside a window, exchanging ideas about their tedious watch; and even the slip and rattle of shifting coal in the cellar bin. No invading menagerie, though, brought news to his intent ears. A tiny, but sharp click broke a long silence. The oil-burner relays of heating plants in adjoining buildings made such “static” on his home radio, he knew, but the heat would not be used in the hour after midnight. None of the apparatus or light was on the laboratory. The interpretation Roger gave was that in moving he had jarred some poor connection that made loose contact in his circuits; and he began testing his wires at soldered points, seating tubes, and shaking headset binding posts. He did not succeed in locating the source of the single sound, because things began to happen. From the darkness, and apparently from the upper floor, in a hollow, grave-yard sort of tone, an unexpected voice spoke. Roger, with power full-on, got a roar, and dashed aside the set to save his ear-drums, for a microphone had caught and had brought him what the others heard naturally. The voice spoke in English, low, deep, mournful and yet, somehow, menacing, as it said: “Hear me. I am the Voice of Doom!” Roger felt his blood “coagulate” in very truth. Grover, never more calm, although the unforeseen and uncanny call galvanized and terrified Potts and made the Doctor’s face look absolutely horrified, leaped up, and vanished out of the small pool of dull light from the shadow-boxed panel. With the ease of familiarity, he got past their great transformers, and the storage batteries from which direct current was drawn for certain types of experimentation. He avoided, in the gloom, the new high-intensity-spark mechanism, and took the stairs two at a bound. Roger, impulsively starting to follow, remembered his duty, and in spite of his shuddering nerves and the cold fear always coming from any uncanny and unexplained happening, he stuck to his post. Doctor Ryder, attempting to follow, ran into the recording equipment and stopped, hesitating, as Grover, from above, threw on the lights. Roger got the switch-snap, but it differed from his other “click.” “Nothing here,” Grover called down. “Strange!” “Potts,” Doctor Ryder turned his head, half accusingly, “are you a ventriloquist?” “A——” “Ventriloquist! Able to throw your voice so that it sounds as if it came from somewhere else than where you are.” “Are you?” asked Roger suddenly. The other laughed. Grover, leaving the lights going, came down, switching on illumination all over the building; while several policemen came from concealment, blinking and staring around uncertainly, the experimenter in the bright light walked over and sat beside Roger. “Watch me closely,” he half-smiled, but kept his eyes glancing around half fearfully. “I did not dream—it would happen—again—and here!” He spoke as if to himself. “No, that is not ventriloquism,” he muttered. “It is some art of the Far East, known to the Lamas of Tibet——” Again, and in the same hoarse, menacing, hollow way, the sound was repeated: “Hear me! I am the Voice of Doom.” Potts was shaking with fright. Uncanny and weird, the sound woke in the rather poorly educated man all the primitive fears and superstitions of his ancestors. Grover, listening with his head on one side, his eyes on the Doctor, spoke: “He isn’t a ventriloquist, Roger. The changes in muscular and other throat parts developed by constant ventriloquial practice, do not show. We took a film, remember, of just such throat development in connection with our research for the clue to our case when the deaf man ‘heard things.’” Roger, recalling that in that case a tiny click had also come, when he had listened on a headset, jumped to the conclusion that he had before found correct. “Somebody is using Mr. Ellison’s little radio test-sender,” he declared, confidently. Grover nodded. “Possibly. Go and see.” “His private locker needs a key that is in the safe.” “Never mind, then. I think you have the explanation, Roger.” Grover sat down again, relieved, as was Potts. Dr. Ryder, though, seemed unconvinced. “Sorry, but I must dispute your deduction,” he asserted. “I have heard that voice before, and it is sent by some Asiatic, wise in use of the hidden forces of Nature. It is a manifestation that is directly intended for me.” Roger stared at him. “‘Manifestation’? You mean—like thought transference or the ‘ghosts’ that spirit-mediums pretend to call on?” “Only this is more sinister and terrible, because it is the way that the Far East makes known to some intended victim the fact that he is to be punished.” He rose, and began to pace. Roger, suddenly intent, caught at a passing “hunch.” “Appearances” could be falsified. It appeared to be fact that something uncanny was happening. Might it not be the same sort of misleading use of one hand to distract attention while the other did some trick, as with the white rats that “appeared” to have been inoculated, were apparently “stolen” and so on? Quickly the headset was put on. He cut the output strength to avoid having his ears blasted if the microphone upstairs picked up that booming, hollow voice again. Grover, intently considering the Doctor’s last words, spoke: “What do you mean by saying that you are being warned by some occult means that you are marked to be a victim?” The man addressed held up a hand. “It will tell you!” His face was set; he was listening. Again Roger heard the inexplicable sound. This time, no voice! Beginning in a low moan, faint and very much like the whine of a puppy that is hungry, it grew in volume, and its tone changed from a high falsetto, running down the scale and then up again, in cycles, constantly growing louder, while Grover, again rushing to the upper floor, stood looking around as, with a great grinding and rumble, following the last piercing roar of the sound, there fell silence. Doctor Ryder, rising, walked around the recording machinery and Mr. Ellison’s newest camera, that worked with a stroboscopic lamp and ran its film so fast that no shutter was needed, as daylight did not act on it long enough in any spot to fog it. “That,” he called upward, “was the real Voice of Doom.” Grover, bidding Roger turn over the monitoring work to Potts, summoned his younger cousin. “Roger,” as the hurrying figure came into the room with the vacant glass experiment-cage, “are you afraid to stay up here?” “Not much—but if I am, I will stay, just the same.” “Then set up that sound camera, with film, so you can take in every foot of this partitioned room. Be ready, and if the voice comes again, switch on, for continuous takes.” “You think—anybody is hiding?” “No. But a voice means something vibrating. I could not locate anything. The camera might do so.” He went down, to give Potts some instructions and took over the monitor’s post while the handy man executed his order, which was to mix fresh developers and fixing baths, and to be ready for whatever Roger caught. Doctor Ryder, helpful and desiring, as he made plain, to take away Roger’s sense of fear by explaining how the Far East made so uncanny a manifestation by mental powers, handed him the can of non-flam negative so that Roger lost no time in “threading up” and getting all ready for his duty. Alert and steady, in spite of his chill of nervous uncertainty as to what might come next, Roger heard, seemingly from a corner of the small room, a thump. “Start it!” gasped the man beside him. But when two minutes of time had run out the film in his magazine and nothing more had come, Roger disappointedly took the film into the dark room and changed the magazines, hurrying back. Half an hour later, with nothing to break the tedium, the next amazing development came. Potts, in the dark-room, shouted, and tore out into the light, waving a damp strip of film. He had developed the film on the chance that the thump had caused some change. Instead, developing that film, he had brought, to wave before Roger’s startled eyes, an impossible thing. On that film, in a different position on each Frame, or individual picture, a spectral monkey and an equally indistinct kangaroo hopped, bounced, and skipped, finally vanishing into thin air! |
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