'We must visit him at his quarters,' said Raffles. He put his hand on my shoulder to warn me, but there was no need. I too had seen the three men come around the corner of the wall. One took a position at the angle of the wall; the other two started toward our woods. We retreated as quietly as possible. Since there was no train available at this late hour, we walked to Maida Vale and took a hansom from there to home. Raffles went to his rooms at the Albany and I to mine on Mount Street
.
Chapter3
* * *
When we saw the evening papers, we knew that the affair had taken on even more bizarre aspects. But we still had no inkling of the horrifying metamorphosis yet to come.
I doubt if there is a literate person in the West – or in the Orient, for that matter – who has not read about the strange case of Mr James Phillimore. At eight in the morning, a hansom cab from Maida Vale pulled up before the gates of his estate. The housekeeper and the cook and Mr Phillimore were the only occupants of the house. The area outside the walls was being surveilled by eight men from the Metropolitan Police Department. The cab driver rang the electrically operated bell at the gate. Mr Phillimore walked out of the house and down the gravel path to the gate. Here he was observed by the cab driver, a policeman near the gate, and another in a tree. The latter could see clearly the entire front yard and house, and another man in a tree could clearly see the entire back yard and the back of the house.
Mr Phillimore opened the gate but did not step through it. Commenting to the cabbie that it looked like rain, he added that he would return to the house to get his umbrella. The cabbie, the policemen, and the housekeeper saw him re-enter the house. The housekeeper was at that moment in the room which occupied the front part of the ground floor of the house. She went into the kitchen as Mr Phillimore entered the house. She did, however, hear his footsteps on the stairs from the hallway which led up to the first floor.
She was the last one to see Mr Phillimore. He did not come back out of the house. After half an hour Mr Mackenzie, the Scotland Yard inspector in charge, decided that Mr Phillimore had somehow become aware that he was under surveillance. Mackenzie gave the signal, and he with three men entered the gate, another four retaining their positions outside. At no time was any part of the area outside the walls unobserved. Nor was the area inside the walls un-scrutinised at any time.
The warrant duly shown to the housekeeper, the policemen entered the house and made a thorough search. To their astonishment, they could find no trace of Mr Phillimore. The six-foot-six, twenty-stone (Two hundred and eighty pounds) gentleman had utterly disappeared.
For the next two days, the house – and the yard around it – was the subject of the most intense investigation. This established that the house contained no secret tunnels or hideaways. Every cubic inch was accounted for. It was impossible for him not to have left the house; yet he clearly had not done so.
'Another minute's delay, and we would have been cornered,' Raffles said, taking another Sullivan from his silver cigarette case. 'But, Lord, what's going on there, what mysterious forces are working there? Notice that no jewels were found in the house. At least, the police reported none. Now, did Phillimore actually go back to get his umbrella? Of course not. The umbrella was in the stand by the entrance; yet he went right by it and on upstairs. So, he observed the foxes outside the gate and bolted into his briar bush like the good little rabbit he was.'
'And where is the briar bush?' I said,
'Ah! That's the question,' Raffles breathed. 'What kind of a rabbit is it which pulls the briar bush in after it? That is the sort of mystery which has attracted even the Great Detective himself. He was condescended to look into it.'
'Then let us stay away from the whole affair!' I cried. 'We have been singularly fortunate that none of our victims have called in your relative!'
Raffles was a third or fourth cousin to Holmes, though neither had, to my knowledge, even seen the other. I doubt that the sleuth had even gone to Lord's, or anywhere else, to see a cricket match.
'I wouldn't mind matching wits with him,' Raffles said. 'Perhaps he might then change his mind about who's the most dangerous man in London.'
'We have more than enough money,' I said. 'Let's drop the whole business.'
'It was only yesterday that you were complaining of boredom, Bunny,' he said. 'No, I think we should pay a visit to our journalist. He may know something that we, and possibly the police, don't know. However, if you prefer,' he added contemptuously, 'you may stay home.'
That stung me, of course, and I insisted that I accompany him. A few minutes later, we got into a hansom, and Raffles told the driver to take us to Praed Street
.
Chapter 4
* * *
Persano's apartment was at the end of two flights of Carrara marble steps and a carved mahogany banister. The porter conducted us to 10-C but left when Raffles tipped him handsomely. Raffles knocked on the door. After receiving no answer within a minute, he picked the lock. A moment later, we were inside a suite of extravagantly furnished rooms. A heavy odour of incense hung in the air.
I entered the bedroom and halted aghast. Persano, clad only in underwear, lay on the floor. The underwear, I regret to say, was the sheer black lace of the demimondaine. I suppose that if brassieres had existed at that time he would have been wearing one. I did not pay his dress much attention, however, because of his horrible expression. His face was cast into a mask of unutterable terror.
Near the tips of his outstretched fingers lay the large matchbox. It was open, and in it writhed something.
I drew back, but Raffles, after one soughing of intaken breath, felt the man's forehead and pulse and looked into the rigid eyes.
'Stark staring mad,' he said. 'Frozen with the horror that comes from the deepest of abysses.'
Emboldened by his example, I drew near the box. Its contents looked somewhat like a worm, a thick tubular worm, with a dozen slim tentacles projecting from one end. This could be presumed to be its head, since the area just above the roots of the tentacles was ringed with small pale-blue eyes. These had pupils like a cat's. There was no nose or nasal openings or mouth.
'God!' I said shuddering. 'What is it?'
'Only God knows,' Raffles said. He lifted Persano's right hand and looked at the tips of the fingers. 'Note the fleck of blood on each,' he said. 'They look as if pins have been stuck into them.'
He bent over closer to the thing in the box and said, 'The tips of the tentacles bear needlelike points, Bunny. Perhaps Persano is not so much paralysed from horror as from venom.'
'Don't get any closer, for Heaven's sake!' I said.
'Look, Bunny!' he said. 'Doesn't that thing have a tiny shining object in one of its tentacles?'
Despite my nausea, I got down by him and looked straight at the monster. 'It seems to be a very thin and slightly curving piece of glass,' I said. 'What of it?'
Even as I spoke, the end of the tentacle which held the object opened, and the object disappeared within it.
'That glass,' Raffles said, 'is what's left of the sapphire. It's eaten it. That piece seems to have been the last of it.'
'Eaten a sapphire?' I said, stunned. 'Hard metal, blue corundum?'
'I think, Bunny,' he said slowly, 'the sapphire may only have looked like a sapphire. Perhaps it was not aluminium oxide but something hard enough to fool an expert. The interior may have been filled with something softer than the shell. Perhaps the shell held an embryo.'
'What?' I said.
'I mean. Bunny, is it inconceivable, but nevertheless true, that that thing might have hatched from the jewel?'
Chapter 5
* * *
We left hurriedly a moment later. Raffles had decided against taking the monster – for which I was very grateful – because he wanted the police to have all the clues available.
'There's something very wrong here, Bunny,' he said. 'Very sinister.' He lit a Sullivan and added in a drawl, 'Very alien!'
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'You mean un-British?' I said.
'I mean... un-Earthly.'
A little later, we got out of the cab at St James' Park and walked across it to the Albany. In Raffles' room, smoking cigars and drinking Scotch whiskey and soda, we discussed the significance of all we had seen but could come to no explanation, reasonable or otherwise. The next morning, reading the Times, the Pall Mall Gazette, and the Daily Telegraph, we learned how narrowly we had escaped. According to the papers, Inspectors Hopkins and Mackenzie and the private detective Holmes had entered Persano's rooms two minutes after we had left. Persano had died while on the way to the hospital.
'Not a word about the worm in the box," Raffles said. 'The police are keeping it a secret. No doubt, they fear to alarm the public.'
There would be, in fact, no official reference to the creature. Nor was it until 1922 that Dr Watson made a passing reference to it in a published adventure of his colleague. I do not know what happened to the thing, but I suppose that it must have been placed in a jar of alcohol. There it must have quickly perished. No doubt the jar is collecting dust on some shelf in the backroom of some police museum. Whatever happened to it, it must have been disposed of Otherwise, the world would not be what it is today.
'Strike me, there's only one thing to do, Bunny!' Raffles said, after he'd put the last paper down. 'We must get into Phillimore's house and look for ourselves!'
I did not protest. I was more afraid of his scorn than of the police. However, we did not launch our little expedition that evening. Raffles went out to do some reconnoitring on his own, both among the East End fences and around the house in Kensal Rise. The evening of the second day, he appeared at my rooms. I had not been idle, however. I had gathered a supply of more corks for the gatetop spikes by drinking a number of bottles of champagne.
'The police guard has been withdrawn from the estate itself,' he said. 'I didn't see any men in the woods nearby. So, we break into the late Mr Phillimore's house tonight. If he is late, that is,' he added enigmatically.
As the midnight chimes struck, we went over the gate once more. A minute later, Raffles was taking out the pane from the glass door. This he did with his diamond, a pot of treacle, and a sheet of brown paper, as he had done the night we broke in and found our would-be blackmailer dead with his head crushed by a poker.
He inserted his hand through the opening, turned the key in the lock, and drew the bolt at the bottom of the door open. This had been shot by a policeman who had then left by the kitchen door, or so we presumed. We went through the door, closed it behind us, and made sure that all the drapes of the front room were pulled tight. Then Raffles, as he did that evil night long ago, lit a match and with it a gas light. The flaring illumination showed us a room little changed. Apparently, Mr Phillimore had not been interested in redecorating. We went out into the hallway and upstairs, where three doors opened onto the first floor hallway.
The first door led to the bedroom. It contained a huge canopied bed, a mid-century monster Baird had bought secondhand in some East End shop, a cheap maple tallboy, a rocking chair, a thunder mug, and two large overstuffed leather armchairs.
'There was only one armchair the last time we were here,' Raffles said.
The second room was unchanged, being as empty as the first time we'd seen it. The room at the rear was the bathroom, also unchanged.
We went downstairs and through the hallway to the kitchen, and then we descended into the coal cellar. This also contained a small wine pantry. As I expected, we had found nothing. After all, the men from the Yard were thorough, and what they might have missed, Holmes would have found. I was about to suggest to Raffles that we should admit failure and leave before somebody saw the lights in the house. But a sound from upstairs stopped me.
Raffles had heard it, too. Those ears missed little. He held up a hand for silence, though none was needed. He said, a moment later, 'Softly, Bunny! It may be a policeman. But I think it is probably our quarry!'
We stole up the wooden steps, which insisted on creaking under our weight. Thence we crept into the kitchen and from there into the hallway and then into the front room. Seeing nobody, we went up the steps to the first floor once more and gingerly opened the door of each room and looked within.
While we were poking our heads into the bathroom, we heard a noise again. It came from somewhere in the front of the house, though whether it was upstairs or down we could not tell.
Raffles beckoned to me, and I followed, also on tiptoe, down the hall. He stopped at the door of the middle room, looked within, then led me to the door of the bedroom. On looking in (remember, we had not turned out the gaslights yet), he started. And he said, 'Lord! One of the armchairs! It's gone!'
'But – but... who'd want to take a chair?' I said.
'Who, indeed!' he said, and ran down the steps with no attempt to keep quiet. I gathered my wits enough to order my feet to get moving. Just as I reached the door, I heard Raffles outside shouting, 'There he goes!' I ran out onto the little tiled veranda. Raffles was halfway down the gravel path, and a dim figure was plunging through the open gate. Whoever he was, he had had a key to the gate.
I remember thinking, irrelevantly, how cool the air had become in the short time we'd been in the house. Actually, it was not such an irrelevant thought since the advent of the cold air had caused a heavy mist. It hung over the road and coiled through the woods. And, of course, it helped the man we were chasing.
Raffles was as keen as a bill-collector chasing a debtor, and he kept his eyes on the vague figure until it plunged into a grove. When I came out its other side, breathing hard, I found Raffles standing on the edge of a narrow but rather deeply sunk brook. Nearby, half shrouded by the mist, was a short and narrow footbridge. Down the path that started from its other end was another of the half-built houses.
'He didn't cross that bridge,' Raffles said. 'I'd have heard him. If he went through the brook, he'd have done some splashing, and I'd have heard it. But he didn't have time to double back. Let's cross the bridge and see if he's left any footprints in the mud.'
We walked Indian file across the very narrow bridge. It bent a little under our weight, giving us an uneasy feeling. Raffles said, 'The contractor must be using as cheap materials as he can get away with. I hope he's putting better stuff into the houses. Otherwise, the first strong wind will blow them away.'
'It does seem rather fragile,' I said. 'The builder must be a fly-by-night. But nobody builds anything as they used to do.'
Raffles crouched down at the other end of the bridge, lit a match, and examined the ground on both sides of the path. 'There are any number of prints,' he said disgustedly. 'They undoubtedly are those of the workmen, though the prints of the man we want could be among them. But I doubt it. They're all made by heavy workingmen's boots.'
He sent me down the steep muddy bank to look for prints on the south side of the bridge. He went along the bank north of the bridge. Our matches flared and died while we called out the results of our inspections to each other. The only tracks we saw were ours. We scrambled back up the bank and walked a little way onto the bridge. Side by side, we leaned over the excessively thin railing to stare down into the brook. Raffles lit a Sullivan, and the pleasant odour drove me to light one up too.
'There's something uncanny here, Bunny. Don't you feel it?'
I was about to reply when he put his hand on my shoulder. Softly, he said, 'Did you hear a groan?'
'No,' I replied, the hairs on the back of my neck rising like the dead from the grave.
Suddenly, he stamped the heel of his boot hard upon the plank. And then I heard a very low moan.
Before I could say anything to him, he was over the railing. He landed with a squish of mud on the bank. A match flared under the bridge, and for the first time I comprehended how thin the wood of the bridge was. I could see the flame through the planks.
Raffles yelled with horror. The match" went out. I shouted, 'What is it?' Suddenly, I was falling
. I grabbed at the railing, felt it dwindle out of my grip, struck the cold water of the brook, felt the planks beneath me, felt them sliding away, and shouted once more. Raffles, who had been knocked down and buried for a minute by the collapsed bridge, rose unsteadily. Another match flared, and he cursed. I said, somewhat stupidly, 'Where's the bridge?'
'Taken flight,' he groaned. 'Like the chair!'
He leaped past me and scrambled up the bank. At its top he stood for a minute, staring into the moonlight and the darkness beyond. I crawled shivering out of the brook, rose even more unsteadily, and clawed up the greasy cold mud of the steep bank. A minute later, breathing harshly, and feeling dizzy with unreality, I was standing by Raffles. He was breathing almost as hard as I.
'What is it?' I said.
'What is it, Bunny?' he said slowly. 'It's something that can change its shape to resemble almost anything. As of now, however, it is not what it is but where it is that we must determine. We must find it and kill it, even if it should take the shape of a beautiful woman or a child.'
'What are you talking about?' I cried.
'Bunny, as God is my witness, when I lit that match under the bridge, I saw one brown eye staring at me. It was embedded in a part of the planking that was thicker than the rest. And it was not far from what looked like a pair of lips and one malformed ear. Apparently, it had not had time to complete its transformation. Or, more likely, it retained organs of sight and hearing so that it would know what was happening in its neighbourhood. If it sealed off all its organs of detection, it would not have the slightest idea when it would be safe to change shape again.'
'Are you insane?' I said.
'Not unless you share my insanity, since you saw the same things I did. Bunny, that thing can somehow alter its flesh and bones. It has such control over its cells, its organs, its bones – which somehow can switch from rigidity to extreme flexibility – that it can look like other human beings. It can also metamorphose to look like objects. Such as the armchair in the bedroom, which looked exactly like the original. No wonder that Hopkins and Mackenzie and even the redoubtable Holmes failed to find Mr James Phillimore. Perhaps they may even have sat on him while resting from the search. It's too bad that they did not rip into the chair with a knife in their quest for the jewels. I think that they would have been more than surprised.