“Wouldn’t you drop dead?” Fergus concluded simply.
My throat felt dry as I asked, “What did you tell the insurance company?”
“Much like Norm’s theory. Man was an artist, had an anatomical model, gave out he was a doctor to keep the natives from conniption fits. Collected expenses, but no bonus: the prints they sent me fitted what I found in his home, and they had to pay the sister.”
Norman cleared his throat. “I’m beginning to hope they don’t send me back to the island.”
“Afraid you might get too tempted by a tualala?’
“No. But on the island we really do have pink caterpillars. I’m not sure I could face them.”
“There’s one thing I still wonder,” Fergus said reflectively. “Where was Humbert Targ while his skeleton hung at Miller’s side? Or should I say, when was he? He said, ‘It took a little time to get here.’ From where? From when? And what kind of time?”
There are some questions you don’t even try to answer.
The Chronokinesis of Jonathan Hull
This isn’t, properly speaking, Fergus O’Breen’s story, though it starts with him. Fergus is a private detective, but he didn’t function as a detective in the Jonathan Hull episode. It was no fault of his Irish ingenuity that he provided the answer to the mystery; he simply found it, all neatly typed out for him. Typed, in fact, before there ever was any mystery.
In a way, though, it’s a typical O’Breen anecdote. “I’m a private eye,” Fergus used to say, “and what happens to me shouldn’t happen to a Seeing Eye. I’m a catalyst for the unbelievable.” As in the case of Mr. Harrison Partridge, who found that the only practical use for a short-range time machine was to provide the perfect alibi for murder. But the Partridge case was simplicity itself compared to the Hull business.
It began—at least according to one means of reckoning a time sequence—on the morning after Fergus had trapped the murderer in the Dubrovsky case—a relatively simple affair involving only such prosaic matters as an unbreakable alibi and a hermetically sealed room.
Nonetheless it was a triumph that deserved, and received, wholehearted celebration, and it was three o’clock before Fergus wound up in bed. It was eight when he unwound upon hearing a thud in the corner of the room. He sat up and stared into the gloom and saw a tall thin figure rising from the floor. The figure moved over to his typewriter and switched on the light. He saw a man of about sixty, clean-shaven, but with long, untrimmed gray hair. An odd face—not unkindly, but slightly inhuman, as though he had gone through some experience so unspeakable as to set him a little apart from the rest of his race.
Fergus watched curiously as the old man took an envelope out of a drawer in the desk, opened it, unfolded the papers it contained, set them in a pile beside the typewriter, took the topmost sheet, inserted it in the machine, and began typing furiously.
It seemed a curious procedure, but Fergus’ mind was none too clear and the outlines of the room and of the typist still tended to waver. Oh well, Fergus thought, long-haired old men at typewriters is pretty mild in view of those boilermakers. And he rolled over and back to sleep.
It was about an hour later that he opened his eyes again, much surprised to find Curly Locks still there. He was typing with his right hand, while his left rested on a pile of paper beside him. As Fergus watched, the old man pulled a sheet from the typewriter and added it to the pile at his left. Then he put the pile in the side section of the desk which housed unused paper, rose from the machine, switched off the light, and walked out the door with a curious awkward walk, as though he had been paralyzed for years and had had to learn the technique all over again.
The dominant O’Breen trait, the one that has solved more cases than any amount of ingenuity and persistence, is curiosity. A phantasm that stays right there while you sleep is worth investigating. So Fergus was instantly out of bed, without even bothering to pull on a robe, and examining the unused paper compartment.
He sighed with disgust. All the sheets were virginally white. It must have been a delusion after all, though of a singular sort. He turned back to bed. But as he did so, his eye glanced at the corner where he had heard that first thud. He executed a fabulous double take and looked again. There was no doubt about it.
In that corner lay the body of a tall thin man of about sixty, clean-shaven, but with long untrimmed gray hair.
The average man might find some difficulty in explaining to the police how an unidentified corpse happened to turn up in his bedroom. But Detective Lieutenant A. Jackson had reached the point where he was surprised at nothing that involved O’Breen.
He heard the story through and then said judiciously, “I think we’ll leave your typewriter out of the report, Fergus. If your Irish blood wants to go fey on you, it’s O.K. with me; but I think the Psychical Research Society would be more interested in a report on it than the L.A. Police Department. He died when you heard that thud, so his actions thereafter are pretty irrelevant.”
“Cyanide?” Fergus asked.
“Smell it from here, can’t you? And the vial still clenched in his hand, so there’s no doubt of a verdict of suicide. To try a little reconstruction: Say he came to see you professionally about whatever was preying on him. Found you asleep and decided to
