Mr. Aylmer shook himself with a sort of savage laugh. “You certainly do not,” he said.
“Mr. Aylmer,” said Father Brown frankly, “I apologize for the liberty, but some friends of mine have told me about your trouble, and asked me to see if I could do anything for you. The truth is, I have some little experience in affairs like this.”
“There are no affairs like this,” said Aylmer.
“You mean,” observed Father Brown, “that the tragedies in your unfortunate family were not normal deaths?”
“I mean they were not even normal murders,” answered the other. “The man who is hounding us all to death is a hellhound, and his power is from hell.”
“All evil has one origin,” said the priest gravely. “But how do you know they were not normal murders?”
Aylmer answered with a gesture which offered his guest a chair; then he seated himself slowly in another, frowning, with his hands on his knees; but when he looked up his expression had grown milder and more thoughtful, and his voice was quite cordial and composed.
“Sir,” he said, “I don’t want you to imagine that I’m in the least an unreasonable person. I have come to these conclusions by reason, because unfortunately reason really leads there. I have read a great deal on these subjects; for I was the only one who inherited my father’s scholarship in somewhat obscure matters, and I have since inherited his library. But what I tell you does not rest on what I have read but on what I have seen.”
Father Brown nodded, and the other proceeded, as if picking his words:
“In my elder brother’s case I was not certain at first. There were no marks or footprints where he was found shot, and the pistol was left beside him. But he had just received a threatening letter, certainly from our enemy, for it was marked with a sign like a winged dagger, which was one of his infernal cabalistic tricks. And a servant said she had seen something moving along the garden wall in the twilight that was much too large to be a cat. I leave it there; all I can say is that if the murderer came, he managed to leave no traces of his coming. But when my brother Stephen died it was different; and since then I have known. A machine was working in an open scaffolding under the factory tower; I scaled the platform a moment after he had fallen under the iron hammer that struck him; I did not see anything else strike him, but I saw what I saw.
“A great drift of factory smoke was rolling between me and the factory tower; but through a rift of it I saw on the top of it a dark human figure wrapped in what looked like a black cloak. Then the sulphurous smoke drove between us again; and when it cleared I looked up at the distant chimney—there was nobody there. I am a rational man, and I will ask all rational men how he had reached that dizzy unapproachable turret, and how he left it.”
He stared across at the priest with a sphinx-like challenge; then after a silence he said abruptly:
“My brother’s brains were knocked out, but his body was not much damaged. And in his pocket we found one of those warning messages dated the day before and stamped with the flying dagger.
“I am sure,” he went on gravely, “that the symbol of the winged dagger is not merely arbitrary or accidental. Nothing about that abominable man is accidental. He is all design; though it is indeed a most dark and intricate design. His mind is woven not only out of elaborate schemes but out of all sorts of secret languages and signs and dumb signals and wordless pictures which are the names of nameless things. He is the worst sort of man that the world knows; he is the wicked mystic. Now, I don’t pretend to penetrate all that is conveyed by this symbol; but it seems surely that it must have a relation to all that was most remarkable, or even incredible, in his movements as he had hovered round my unfortunate family. Is there no connection between the idea of a winged weapon and the mystery by which Philip was struck dead on his own lawn without the lightest touch of any footprint having disturbed the dust or grass? Is there no connection between the plumed poignard flying like a feathered arrow and that figure which hung on the far top of the toppling chimney, clad in a cloak for pinions?”
“You mean,” said Father Brown thoughtfully, “that he is in a perpetual state of levitation.”
“Simon Magus did it,” replied Aylmer, “and it was one of the commonest predictions of the Dark Ages that Antichrist would be able to fly. Anyhow, there was the flying dagger on the document; and whether or no it could fly, it could certainly strike.”
“Did you notice what sort of paper it was on?” asked Father Brown. “Common paper?”
The sphinx-like face broke abruptly into a harsh laugh.
“You can see what they’re like,” said Aylmer grimly, “for I got one myself this morning.”
He was leaning back in his chair now, with his long legs thrust out from under the green dressing-gown, which was a little short for him, and his bearded chin pillowed on his chest. Without moving otherwise, he thrust his hand deep in the dressing-gown pocket and held out a fluttering scrap of paper at the end of a rigid arm. His whole attitude was suggestive of a sort of paralysis, that was both rigidity and collapse. But the next remark of the priest had a curious effect of rousing him.
Father Brown was blinking in his shortsighted way at the paper presented to him. It was a singular sort of paper, rough without being common, as from an artist’s sketchbook; and on it was drawn boldly in
