“Go,” he commanded; “go from me before your defiance leads to destruction.”
Aaronia Haldorn spoke from where she lay tied on the step, spoke to me:
“Shoot. Shoot now—quick. Shoot.”
I said to the man:
“I don’t care what your right name is. You’re going to the can. Now put your knife down.”
“Blasphemer,” he thundered, and took a step towards me. “Now you will die.”
That should have been funny. It wasn’t.
I yelled, “Stop,” at him. He wouldn’t stop. I was afraid. I fired. The bullet hit his cheek. I saw the hole it made. No muscle twitched in his face; not even his eyes blinked. He walked deliberately, not hurrying, towards me.
I worked the automatic’s trigger, pumping six more bullets into his face and body. I saw them go in. And he came on steadily, showing in no way that he was conscious of them. His eyes and face were stern, but not angry. When he was close to me the knife in his hand went up high above his head. That’s no way to fight with a knife; but he wasn’t fighting: he was bringing retribution to me, and he paid as little attention to my attempts to stop him as a parent does to those of a small child he’s punishing.
I was fighting. When the knife, shining over our heads, started down I went in under it, bending my right forearm against his knife-arm, driving the dagger in my left hand at his throat. I drove the heavy blade into his throat, in till the hilt’s cross stopped it. Then I was through.
I didn’t know I had closed my eyes until I found myself opening them. The first thing I saw was Eric Collinson kneeling beside Gabrielle Leggett, turning her face from the glaring light-beam, trying to rouse her. Next I saw Aaronia Haldorn, apparently unconscious on the altar step, with the boy Manuel crying on her and pulling with too nervous hands at her bonds. Then I saw that I was standing with my legs apart, and that Joseph was lying between my feet, dead, with the dagger through his neck.
“Thank God he wasn’t really God,” I mumbled to myself.
A brown body in white brushed past me, and Minnie Hershey was throwing herself down in front of Gabrielle Leggett, crying:
“Oh, Miss Gabrielle, I thought that devil had come alive and was after you again.”
I went over to the mulatto and took her by the shoulder, lifting her up, asking her: “How could he? Didn’t you kill him dead?”
“Yes, sir, but—”
“But you thought he might have come back in another shape?”
“Y‑yes, sir. I thought he was—” She stopped and worked her lips together.
“Me?” I asked.
She nodded, not looking at me.
XII
The Unholy Grail
Owen Fitzstephan and I ate another of Mrs. Schindler’s good dinners that evening, though my eating was a matter of catching bites between words. His curiosity poked at me with questions, requests to have this or that point made clear, and orders to keep talking whenever I stopped for breath or food.
“You could have got me in on it,” he had complained before our soup was in front of us. “I knew the Haldorns, you know, or, at least, had met them once or twice at Leggett’s. You could have used that as an excuse for somehow letting me in on the affair, so that I’d now have firsthand knowledge of what happened, and why; instead of having to depend on what I can get out of you and what the newspapers imagine their readers would like to think had happened.”
“I had,” I said, “enough grief with the one guy I did let in on it—Eric Collinson.”
“Whatever trouble you had with him was your own fault, for selecting the wrong assistant, when such a better one was available. But come, my boy, I’m listening. Let’s have the story, and then I can tell you where you erred.”
“Sure,” I agreed, “you’ll be able to do that. Well, the Haldorns were originally actors. Most of what I can tell you comes from her, so a lot of maybes will have to be hung on it in spots. Fink won’t talk at all; and the other help—maids, Filipino boys, Chinese cook, and the like—don’t seem to know anything that helps much. None of them seems to have been let in on the trick stuff.
“As actors, Aaronia Haldorn says, she and Joseph were just pretty good, not getting on as well as they wanted to. About a year ago she ran into an old acquaintance—a onetime trouper—who had chucked the stage for the pulpit, and had made a go of it, now riding in Packards instead of day-coaches. That gave her something to think about. Thinking in that direction meant, pretty soon, thinking about Aimee, Buchman, Jeddu what’s-his-name, and the other headliners. And in the end her thinking came to, why not us? They—or she: Joseph was a lightweight—rigged up a cult that pretended to be the revival of an old Gaelic church, dating from King Arthur’s time, or words to that effect.”
“Yes,” said Fitzstephan; “Arthur Machen’s. But go on.”
“They brought their cult to California because everybody does, and picked San Francisco because it held less competition than Los Angeles. With them they brought a little fellow named Tom Fink who had at one time or another been in charge of the mechanical end of most of the well-known stage magicians’ and illusionists’ acts; and Fink’s wife, a big village-smith of a woman.
“They didn’t want a mob of converts: they wanted them few but wealthy. The racket got away to a slow start—until they landed Mrs. Rodman. She fell plenty. They took her for one of her apartment buildings, and she also footed the remodeling bill. The stage mechanic Fink was in charge of the remodeling, and did a neat job. They didn’t need the kitchens that were dotted, one to an apartment, through the building, and Fink knew how to use part of
