that she had within her the essence of a wolf. And so, the séances.”
“She was no medium,” I said again.
“I made her think she was. I hypnotized her, and myself did weird wonders in the dark room. But she, in a trance, did not know. I needed witnesses to convince her.”
“So you invited Mr. Wills,” supplied Judge Pursuivant.
“Yes, and her father. They had been prepared to accept her as medium and me as observer. Seeing a beast-form, they would tell her afterward that it was she.”
“Zoberg,” I said between set teeth, “you’re convicted out of your own mouth of rottenness that convinces me of the existence of the Devil after whom this grove was named. I wish to heaven that I’d killed you when we were fighting.”
“Ach, Wills,” he chuckled, “you’d have missed this most entertaining autobiographical lecture.”
“He’s right,” grumbled O’Bryant; and, “Let him go on,” the judge pleaded with me.
“Once sure of this power within her,” Zoberg said deeply, “she would be prepared in heart and soul to change at touch of the ointment—the ectoplasm. Then, to me she must turn as a fellow-creature. Together, throughout the world, adventuring in a way unbelievable—”
His voice died, and we let it. He stood in the firelight, head thrown back, manacled hands folded. He might have been a martyr instead of a fiend for whom a death at the stake would be too easy.
“I can tell what spoiled the séance,” I told him after a moment. “Gird, sitting opposite, saw that it was you, not Susan, who had changed. You had to kill him to keep him from telling, there and then.”
“Yes,” agreed Zoberg. “After that, you were arrested, and, later, threatened. I was in an awkward position. Susan must believe herself, not you, guilty. That is why I have championed you throughout. I went then to look for you.”
“And attacked me,” I added.
“The beast-self was ascendant. I cannot always control it completely.” He sighed. “When Susan disappeared, I went to look for her on the second evening. When I came into this wood, the change took place, half automatically. Associations, I suppose. Constable, your brother happened upon me in an evil hour.”
“Yep,” said O’Bryant gruffly.
“And that is the end,” Zoberg said. “The end of the story and, I suppose, the end of me.”
“You bet it is,” the constable assured him. “You came with the judge to finish your rotten work. But we’re finishing it for you.”
“One moment,” interjected Judge Pursuivant, and his fire-lit face betrayed a perplexed frown. “The story fails to explain one important thing.”
“Does it so?” prompted Zoberg, inclining toward him with a show of negligent grace.
“If you were able to free yourself and kill Mr. Gird—”
“By heaven, that’s right!” I broke in. “You were chained, Zoberg, to Susan and to your chair. I’d go bail for the strength and tightness of those handcuffs.”
He grinned at each of us in turn and held out his hands with their manacles. “Is it not obvious?” he inquired.
We looked at him, a trifle blankly I suppose, for he chuckled once again.
“Another employment of the ectoplasm, that useful substance of change,” he said gently. “At will my arms and legs assume thickness, and hold the rings of the confining irons wide. Then, when I wish, they grow slender again, and—”
He gave his hands a sudden flirt, and the bracelets fell from them on the instant. He pivoted and ran like a deer.
“Shoot!” cried the judge, and O’Bryant whipped the big gun from his holster.
Zoberg was almost within a vine-laced clump of bushes when O’Bryant fired. I heard a shrill scream, and saw Zoberg falter and drop to his hands and knees.
We were all starting forward. I paused a moment to put Susan behind me, and in that moment O’Bryant and Pursuivant sprang ahead and came up on either side of Zoberg. He was still alive, for he writhed up to a kneeling position and made a frantic clutch at the judge’s coat. O’Bryant, so close that he barely raised his hand and arm, fired a second time.
Zoberg spun around somehow on his knees, stiffened and screamed. Perhaps I should say that he howled. In his voice was the inarticulate agony of a beast wounded to death. Then he collapsed.
Both men stooped above him, cautious but thorough in their examination. Finally Judge Pursuivant straightened up and faced toward us.
“Keep Miss Susan there with you,” he warned me. “He’s dead, and not a pretty sight.”
Slowly they came back to us. Pursuivant was thoughtful, while O’Bryant, Zoberg’s killer, seemed cheerful for the first time since I had met him. He even smiled at me, as Punch would smile after striking a particularly telling blow with his cudgel. Rubbing his pistol caressingly with his palm, he stowed it carefully away.
“I’m glad that’s over,” he admitted. “My brother can rest easy in his grave.”
“And we have our work cut out for us,” responded the judge. “We must decide just how much of the truth to tell when we make a report.”
O’Bryant dipped his head in sage acquiescence. “You’re right,” he rumbled. “Yes, sir, you’re right.”
“Would you believe me,” said the judge, “if I told you that I knew it was Zoberg, almost from the first?”
But Susan and I, facing each other, were beyond being surprised, even at that.
Foreword
Unlike most actors, I do not consider my memoirs worth the attention of the public. Even if I did so consider them, I have no desire to carry my innermost dear secrets to market. Often and often I have flung aside the autobiography of some famous man or woman, crying aloud: “Surely this is the very nonpareil of bad taste!”
Yet my descendants—and, after certain despairful years, again I have hope of descendants—will want to know something about me. I write this record of utterly strange
