“I was still hovering near the desk, in a state of near-panic, not knowing what to do, when as in a nightmare I heard a brisk knock on the door to the hall, and the voice of my beloved Richard. A moment later, before I could say anything at all, the hall door opened and Richard came in. From the look on his face, I knew immediately that he was aware, at least, that something was gravely wrong.
“My fiance evidently already knew much more about Hayden than I had ever suspected. Perhaps the duke, Richard’s father, had employed investigators — to this day I do not know what had made my dear one suspicious of me. But he was full of suspicion on that day, and with cause — though not with as great cause as he feared.
“Richard confronted me. ‘He was seen coming in here, the man Hayden. Do you tell me that he is not here now?’”
“I do not remember what I said in reply. I must, however, have looked the very picture of guilt.
“Richard looked quickly round the study, even peering behind pieces of furniture where a man might possibly have had room to lie concealed. It took him only a moment to do so; the furniture was then very much as it is now, and offered, as you can see, little in the way of hiding places.
“He tried the door of the lumber-room then, and I was sure for a moment that my heart had stopped.
“‘This door is locked. Do you know, Louise, where the key is kept?’”
“I understood perfectly that he would force the door at once if no key were available. Silently I went to the desk, and got the key from the upper drawer, where, in my confusion I had just replaced it; I handed it to Richard, still without a word. At that moment I knew with certainty that final ruin was upon me, and I could not bear another instant the horror of waiting for the blow to fall. I thought that after Richard had seen what I had done, then, in that moment of his greatest shock, I might appeal to him. I could only hope that he loved me as truly and deeply as I did him.
“But his gaze was black and forbidding as he took the key from my hand and turned away. He was in the lumber-room for only a few moments, but I need not tell you what an eternity they seemed to me. When he reappeared, his face was altered; yet even as I gazed at him in despair, a sudden new hope was born within my breast. For his new expression was not so much one of horror or shock, as one expressing a great relief, even though mingled with shame and bewilderment.
“For a moment he could not speak. Then ‘Darling’, he said at last, and his voice cracked, even as mine had moments earlier. ‘Can you ever forgive me for having doubted you?’”
“Without answering, I pushed past Richard to the door of the lumber-room.
Everything inside, with one great exception, was just as I had seen it a few minutes earlier before I had locked the door. There were the dusty crates and cartons untouched, certainly, by any human hand in the intervening time. There on the floor, in lighter dust and hardly noticeable, were the tracks left by my own feet on my first entrance, and by the horrible burden that I had dragged in with such difficulty. There was the stone with which I had struck the fateful blow — but the piece of stone lay now in the middle of the otherwise empty patch of bare floor. Of the body of the man I had struck down there was not the smallest trace.”
My friend the detective emitted a faint sigh, expressing what, in the circumstances, seemed a rather inhuman degree of intellectual satisfaction. ‘Most interesting indeed,” he murmured soothingly. “And then?”
“There is very little more that I can tell you. I murmured something to Richard; he, assuming that my state of near-collapse was all his fault for behaving, as he said, brutally, made amends to the best of his ability. To make the story short, we were married as planned. Hayden’s name has never since been mentioned between us. Our life together has been largely uneventful, and in all outward aspects happy. But I tell you, gentlemen — since that day I have lived in inward terror … either I am mad, and therefore doomed, and imagined the whole ghastly scene in which I murdered Hayden; or I did not imagine it. Then he was only stunned. He somehow extricated himself from that lumber-room. He is lying in wait for me. Somewhere, sometime … neither of you know him, what he can be like … he still has the letters, yet he has in mind some revenge that would be even more horrible … I tell you I can bear it no longer…” The lady sank into a chair, struggling to control herself.
The detective turned to me. “Dr. Corday, it is essential that we ascertain the — nature of this man Hayden.” A meaningful glance assured me what sort of variations in nature he had in mind.
I nodded, and addressed myself to the lady, who had now somewhat recovered.
“At what time of day, madam, did these events occur? Can we be absolutely sure that they took place after dawn and before sunset?”
The lady looked for a moment as if she suspected that madness was my problem instead of hers. “In broad daylight, surely,” she replied at last. “Though what possible difference…”
I signed to my friend that I must speak to him in confidence. After a hurried apology to our client we withdrew to a far corner of the study. “The man she knocked down”, I informed the detective there, “could not possibly have been a vampire, because the force of the blow that felled him was borne in stone, to which we are immune. Nor could he, even supposing him to be a vampire, have shifted form in broad daylight, and escaped as a mist from that closet under the conditions we have heard described. Nor could he in daylight have taken on the form of a small animal and hidden himself somewhere among those crates and boxes.”
“You are quite sure of all that?”
“Quite.”
“Very good.” My friend received my expert opinion with evident satisfaction, which surprised me.
For my own part, it seemed to me that we were getting nowhere. “My life has been very long,” I added, “and active, if not always well spent. I have seen madness … much madness. And I tell you that the lady here, if I am any judge, is neither mad nor subject to hallucinations.”
“In that opinion I concur.” Still my friend did not appear nearly as disconcerted as it seemed to me he should. There was, in fact, something almost like a twinkle in his eye.
“Then what are we to make of this?” I demanded.
“I deduce…”
“Yes?”
Again the twinkle. “That one of her father’s trips abroad, before the wedding, took him to Arizona. But of course I must make sure.” And with that; leaving me in a state that I confess approached speechlessness, my friend went back across the room.
He approached our client, who still sat wearily in her chair, and extended both his hands. When she took them, wonderingly, he raised her to her feet. “One more question,” he urged her solemnly. “The stone with which you struck down Hayden — where is it now? Surely it is not one of those still on the desk?”
“No,” the lady marveled. “I could not bear to leave it there.” Going back to the door of the lumber-room, she reached inside, and from a shelf took down a pinkish stone of irregular, angular shape, a little larger than a man’s fist. This she presented to my friend.
He turned it over once in his hands, and set it back upon the desk. A confident smile now transformed his face. “It is my happy duty to inform you,” he said at once, “that the man you knew as Hayden will never bother you again; you may depend upon it.”
Dracula paused here in his narration. “In a moment I was able to add my own assurances, for what they were worth, to those of the famed detective. That was after I had walked over to the desk and looked at the weapon for myself.
I knew then that the man struck down with it could indeed have been a vampire; nay, that he must have been. For when he died of the effects of the blow, there on the floor of the lumber-room, his body, as is commonly the case with us, had at once undergone a dissolution to dust, and less than dust. His clothing, including the letters in his pocket, had, as would be expected, disappeared as well. No humanly detectable trace was left when the fiance opened the door a few moments later.”
“A vampire?” I protested. “But, he was struck down with a stone…”
“I was looking,” said Dracula softly, “at a choice Arizona specimen of petrified wood.”
* * * * *
FRED SABERHAGAN is the author of many popular science fiction and fantasy books including the
