“I have traced every fact in the lives of these men. I know what they habitually ate for breakfast, how they spent their Sundays, and which of them preferred snuff to tobacco. There is only one factor which they all possess in common: Each of them recently purchased a record of the Pergolesi Pater Noster sung by . . . Carina. And those records have vanished as thoroughly as the naked men themselves.”
I bestowed upon him an amicable smile. Family affection must temper the ungentlemanly emotion of triumph. Still smiling, I left him with the uniform and the leg while I betook myself to the nearest gramophone merchant.
The solution was by then obvious to me. I had observed that Captain Clutsam’s gramophone was of the sapphire-needled type designed to play those recordings known as hill-and-dale, the vertical recordings produced by Pathe and other companies as distinguished from the lateral recordings of Columbia and Gramophoneand-Typewriter. And I had recalled that many hill-and-dale recordings were at that time designed (as I believe some wireless transcriptions are now) for an inside start, that is, so that the needle began near the label and traveled outward to the rim of the disc. An unthinking listener might easily begin to play an inside-start record in the more normal manner. The result, in almost all instances, would be gibberish; but in this particular case . . .
I purchased the Carina record with no difficulty. I hastened to my Kensing-ton home, where the room over the dispensary contained a gramophone con-vertible to either lateral or vertical recordings. I placed the record on the turntable. It was, to be sure, labeled INSIDE START; but how easily one might overlook such a notice! I overlooked it deliberately. I started the turntable and lowered the needle . . .
The cadenzas of coloratura are strange things in reverse. As I heard it, the record naturally began with the startling final note which so disheartened Miss Borigian, then went on to those dazzling fioriture which so strengthen the dresser’s charge of time-magic. But in reverse, these seemed like the music of some undiscovered planet, coherent to themselves, following a logic unknown to us and shaping a beauty which only our ignorance prevents us from worshipping.
And there were words to these flourishes; for almost unique among sopranos, Carina possessed a diction of diabolical clarity. And the words were at first simply Nema . . . nema . . . nema . . .
It was while the voice was brilliantly repeating this reversed Amen that I became literally beside myself.
I was standing, naked and chill in the London evening, beside a meticulously composed agglomeration of clothing which parodied the body of Dr. Horace Verner.
This fragment of clarity lasted only an instant. Then the voice reached the significant words: olam a son arebil des men . . .
This was the Lord’s Prayer which she was singing. It is common knowledge that there is in all necromancy no charm more potent than that prayer (and most especially in Latin) said backwards. As the last act of her magical malefactions, Carina had left behind her this record, knowing that one of its purchasers would occasionally, by inadvertence, play it backwards, and that then the spell would take effect. It had taken effect now.
I was in space . . . a space of infinite darkness and moist warmth. The music had departed elsewhere. I was alone in this space and the space itself was alive and by its very moist warm dark life this space was draining from me all that which was my own life. And then there was with me a voice in that space, a voice that cried ever Eem vull! Eem vull! and for all the moaning gasping urgency in that voice I knew it for the voice of Carina.
I was a young man then. The Bishop’s end must have been swift and merciful. But even I, young and strong, knew that this space desired the final sapping of my life, that my life should be drawn from my body even as my body had been drawn from its shell. So I prayed.
I was not a man given to prayer in those days. But I knew words which the Church has taught us are pleasing to God, and I prayed with all the fervor of my being for deliverance from this Nightmare Life-in-Death.
And I stood again naked beside my clothes. I looked at the turntable of the gramophone. The disc was not there. Still naked, I walked to the dispensary and mixed myself a sedative before I dared trust my fingers to button my garments. Then I dressed and went out again to the shop of the gramophone merchant. There I bought every copy in his stock of that devil’s Pater Noster and smashed them all before his eyes.
Ill though I could afford it, even in my relative affluence, I spent the next few weeks in combing London for copies of that recording. One copy, and one only, I preserved; you heard it just now. I had hoped that no more existed . . .
“. . . but obviously,” Dr. Verner concluded, “your Mr. Stambaugh managed to acquire one, God rest his soul . . . and body.”
I drained my second Drambuie and said, “I’m a great admirer of your cousin.” Dr. Verner looked at me with polite blue inquiry. “You find what satisfies you as the truth.”
“Occam’s Razor, dear boy,” Dr. Verner murmured, associatively stroking his smooth cheeks. “The solution accounts economically for every integral fact in the problem.”
“But look,” I said suddenly. “It doesn’t! For once I’ve got you cold. There’s one ‘integral fact’ completely omitted.”
“Which is . . . ?” Dr. Verner cooed.
“You can’t have been the first man that thought of praying in that . . . that space. Certainly the Bishop must
