was going to happen to her; and they put me with her so she would
tell me and so, while I waited, I would have the benefit of my own
anticipations of the “glass room.”
Suggestive sort of name, wasn’t it?
I stood in that closet, or sat on the floor, for three hours. It turned
out to be not yet nine when the normals removed me. Of course it seemed
several times longer; many more than three hours’ thoughts went through
my head.
“Ready for the ‘glass room’ now?” one of the normals said to me.
I said something in the manner of “Go ahead.”
“Come along then,” he said; and prodded me as before. But this time,
as they were taking me out, they did a little more. They tied my hands
and stuffed my mouth full of cotton and bound it in. After they had
prodded me into their car, they threw a rope around my feet and pulled
it tight.
I did not see Doris at all, then. I had no idea whether they already
had attended to her, or whether she was next or whether they were
leaving her behind.
In the car, the curtains were down; I couldn’t see out, yet I had
some idea of where we were going. First we headed east, running with
the long blocks, then we swung to the right and went with the short
squares, crossing many streets and stopping many times at traffic
signals.
That was one of the queerest features of the ride, to feel that the
car, carrying me bound and gagged to the glass room, was halting, with
the most punctilious, to obey the street regulations.
The three normals said little to me and not much more to each other.
Altogether it was a quiet ride and, in itself, uneventful. We turned
east again after our run south and I knew that we were in that bulge of
the city below the numbered streets.
We went on to a bridge,--the Williamsburg bridge, I thought; and when
we were off it, and had taken a couple of turns, I lost all reckoning.
I wasn’t particularly up on Long Island City and Brooklyn.
When we reached our terminus, they threw the noose from my feet
and prodded me to precede them from the car. Others were there
waiting,--other normals, I mean. I saw nobody else in my fix. We were
between two large, dark buildings which seemed to compose a factory of
some sort. I saw corrugated, sheet-steel shutters covering the windows,
not only next to the ground but upon the upper floors. The factory unit
to the right communicated with the one to the left by a bridge-of-sighs
effect about twenty feet from the ground. The whole place had a shut
and deserted look which was intensified by the distance of the nearest
night lamps.
There was a dark, overcast sky. I remember glancing up to get a glimpse
of a star or so, if I could; but nothing like one was showing. So I
took a long deep breath of the outside air, as the next best thing to
do, before following some of the normals, and preceding others, into an
aperture which developed a door somewhat farther along.
We were in a large, wide space of a character familiar to me; it was
bare of furniture, except for many long, low tables, several chairs
and stools and, here and there, a desk. Chutes slanted down upon the
tables. These were for the delivery of goods in the days when the
factory was working; here the shipments had been made up and dispatched.
I saw all this in the yellow glow from a couple of old electric bulbs
in fixtures on the sides of the great supporting columns which stood
in rows through the room. Although these lights proved that current
was coming into the building, the state of this shipping floor was
conclusive that the factory was shut down. It was an easy trick, I
knew, for one of the normals to “cut in” the current which had been
turned off by the company.
Several empty boxes, ready for goods which never slid down the chutes,
were piled up on one side and I passed near enough to read the
stencilling on their ends.
“Stamby-Temke Chemical Company,” they said.
I had a dim notion of the name. It seemed to me that this was one
of the plants which had boomed during the war and afterwards had
continued, with the idea that German dyes and chemicals would not
again compete in the American market. They had quoted us coloring
matter and synthetic fruit flavors; but we weren’t interested.
The normals walked me upon the broad platform of a freight elevator. I
saw by the city license framed on its side that this was operated by
electric power. A normal moved a lever and we slowly rose past one dark
floor, two, three, four. Upon the fifth, we stepped out. Several lights
were burning here and better ones than below,--bright Mazdas, these
were. We were in another wide room but this had rows of desks and work
benches; big bottles and carboys gleamed from shelves. The glass in the
windows reflected the lights like mirrors, for they were black behind,
with steel shutters tight screening them. None of this light escaped.
One of the normals jerked the binder from before my mouth and I coughed
out the cotton without hindrance. From this floor, no shout could
escape; nor could a shot be heard outside.
They watched me but let me alone. I sat on the edge of a desk and
looked about at them. Just now, they were doing nothing.
It was plain, of course, that they had complete control of this empty
plant. Probably Stamby-Temke had a watchman but the normals either
overpowered him, terrorized him or bought him over. Perhaps he was one
of them, who had applied for the job for the purpose of obtaining these
buildings for their use. Evidently they were quite at home here.
They were so at ease, indeed, that they must be sure that no one would
disturb them. I attempted a pose “at ease” but with my hands tied back
of me, and more particularly with the feeling I had, I certainly made a
poor pretense at it.
Something was going to happen to me here, I knew; and I was going to
have nothing to say about it. The occurrence would be of that sort
which precedes the finding of a body in a deserted building.
You’ve read in the papers, as I had, how the vice-president of the
John Doe Company, making an inspection of a disused building prior to
reopening it, was shocked to come upon the body of a man, evidently
dead for some time. His clothing and so on; marks of identification and
so on. The police state that the man undoubtedly met a violent end and
prior to his death and so on. It is evident that the man was brought
there by several others who used the building for--well, here I was to
find out for what these normals used this building.
The elevator, which had descended after depositing us, reappeared with
another group of normals and with a girl. Doris! Yes; there she was! If
they had tied and gagged her while bringing her here, they had loosed
her again; she stepped off the elevator and moved a little away from
the normals. Not even her hands were tied; but she was in the same fix
I was; that was clear.
They were letting her go to see what she would try to do, as they had
let me. I got up from my seat on the desk; she came toward me. “Hello,”
I said; and she said the same and sat in a chair near me. I slumped
down again on the edge of the desk.
There was an average of eight of the normals about us in that big
office; some kept sifting in and out, from and to a farther room, where
there appeared to be somebody or something particularly important.
Doris glanced that way several times and they watched her; I watched
her, too. She appeared alert and on edge with eyes bright and with
lips thin and tight; but she didn’t show fright.
I’m not sure what I showed but I know what I felt. I was dull, not
alert like her. One sort of nature seems to dull itself when in for
what it can’t prevent; that was mine. I guessed that the “glass room”
was over in that farther end of this floor.
During those three hours alone in that closet, I had spent a good deal
of thought on the “glass room”; and, knowing that the scheme at the
Sencort Trust had employed gas, naturally I set to fitting gas in the
arrangements of the “glass room.” So now that I had seen this was a
chemical factory, I was sure I was right. They had some ritual with gas
for Doris and me. A rather elaborate ritual, if one were to judge by
the time it took them to make ready. Or perhaps they were waiting for
somebody.
A telephone instrument stood on the desk beside me. The last time I’d
sat down, I had placed myself next it. Now I didn’t take it up; I
merely moved my hand and lifted the receiver from the hook.
One of the normals saw me and made no move. He had no reason for worry;
there was no response in the wire; the circuit was dead.
“Know anything to do?” I asked Doris in a whisper.
“Not now,” she replied.
The normals did not care; they did not even come closer to hear what we
said.
“This is the place, I suppose,” I continued.
She nodded.
“What’s your idea for later?” I asked her.
“I’ll have it--later,” she said.
So that was it. She had no better plan than I who had none at all.
Just then Jerry came in. That is, I thought at first he was Jerry.
My heart leaped at the sight of him; physically it leaped; I felt it
pounding in me. I thought he was Jerry, you see. I thought he had come
here as Keeban; I believed he was playing the part of Keeban but that
really he was Jerry who had come to try to save me.
XXI
DORIS ENTERS THE GLASS ROOM.
You see, I had remained sure up to this time that there were two of
them. Now and then, for short periods, I had questioned myself about
it; but always my certainty of Jerry, as somebody distinct from Keeban,
won over my doubt. I would never grant that Jerry, my brother, could be
guilty of what Keeban had done.
Then, if they were only one, why would Jerry warn me and send me to
prevent the plan of Keeban, as he had sent me to the Sencort Trust?
“Here’s Jerry!” I said to myself, and that jump of my heart encouraged
me. “He’s playing Keeban. He’s come for me.”
The normals nodded or gazed at him; he gave hardly a glance at them. He
looked to Doris and came over to me.
My pulse had stopped jumping then, when I saw him closer. “He’s not
Jerry!” I warned myself. “He’s Keeban!” And then my senses did another
roundabout. “He’s Keeban and Jerry, too!” For here was a body which
I was sure was Jerry’s and some one else possessed it. That some one
must be the soul we’d called Keeban--Jerry and I. Here was Keeban who’d
robbed Dorothy Crewe and thrown her in the street; here was Keeban
who had shot Win Scofield for his insurance and had knocked me on the
head when I called at Cheron Street; here was Keeban who had tried to
kill, by poison gas, Strathon, Géroud and Teverson and the Sencort
directors in their room. And here--in the sense, at least, that I felt
him physically present--was Jerry, who had been brother of mine for
twenty-five years. And his present purpose was to finish me.
“Well, Steve,” he said, “You did a good job.”
“All right, I guess,” I replied.
“Damn good,” he granted to me. “You got any idea of what you beat me
out of?”
“No,” I said, doing my best to stand up to him; and while I talked to
him, I thought, “He warned me. He told me to do it. That wasn’t Keeban,
of course. Jerry had the body then. Jerry must come into him at times.
Then Jerry knows and goes horrified at what Keeban does. Jerry himself
sent me that warning to try to stop him. He did the same in the
killing of Win Scofield.”
He went on talking, “You beat me out of more than you’d make in the
bean business if you lived as many more years as you’re going to live
minutes. You like that girl over there?”
I didn’t reply to that; but he went on as if I had.
“Good you do. She’s traveling right along with you. Plenty of space for
two in the old glass room. Now Stenewisc, he was simply a fool.”
“Stenewisc, who made the gas?” I asked him. I was trying to keep him
talking for the general reason that every minute gained was another
minute lived; and besides, below everything else in my mind, was the
idea that something might turn this body back from Keeban to Jerry
again. I got to figuring like this:
“Years ago, when we were at college, he started being Keeban for a
couple of short periods which confused him afterwards. He was Jerry
nearly all the time. Then he stopped turning into Keeban until that
night of the Sparlings’ dance. He became Keeban for a time, then he
was Jerry again when he came home to talk to me, after which he went
back to being Keeban. He has stayed Keeban most of the time since,
especially through that Scofield business; but once or twice he became
Jerry. But now, except when he sent those two notes to me, he’s been
Keeban all the time.”
“Stenewisc, he never had any sense,” he went on to me. “He had the gas
during the war. But would he sell it to the army or to the English or
the French or, if he didn’t like that side, would he sell to the other?
He would not. He wouldn’t help any government anywhere; he wouldn’t
help a government even to wipe out the rest. He was set to do the
wiping himself, personally. He had his big idea.”
I kept quiet; and he stood close. This was like Jerry himself, this
impulse to talk on.
“He figured he could croak everybody--give him a little more time and
plenty of gas. Everybody in New York, anyway.” Keeban laughed. “Lot of
good that would do. Get up!” he told me.
I got up.
“Get up!” he said to Doris; and she arose.
The normals formed before us and behind; and so we started to march to
the glass room.
There was an ordinary wood and plaster partition first which set off
another large room at the end of this floor. The usual employment
of this place was plain enough, even to me with only college
course knowledge of chemical matters. Here were the laboratories
for experimentation and research where a commercial firm, such as
Stamby-Temke, would keep a covey of chemists testing their products,
analyzing the goods of competitors and making experiments to improve
their own formulæ for colors, caustics, preservatives, antiseptics,
poisons, solvents, reagents and what not.
Most of these tests would be simple enough and involve no danger to any
one; but some would generate gases, poisonous or otherwise noxious,
which should not be allowed in an open room; therefore the firm had
installed, at the end of this laboratory, a special compartment which
was, beyond any doubt, “the glass room.”
Its outer wall was not of glass; rather, it was not all glass, though
there were two windows in it. No blinds were drawn before them but they
were black from the steel shutters outside. The other three walls were
of glass from floor to ceiling and, as the normals brought us nearer, I
could see that the glass was heavy, clear plate such as is used in show
windows and that it was carefully and evenly joined in steel framing.
Where the glass met the frame, and about the single, glass door,
the joints were caulked and sealed, making the place air-tight and
gas-tight, undoubtedly. There was a way of ventilating it without using
the windows, I saw; for cords communicated with ceiling traps. The
traps were open now; the blackness above was the darkness of the sky.
One set of cords hung inside the room, another hung just outside the
glass.
I guessed that, when Stamby-Temke had the building, the chemists who
worked in the glass room used the inner set when they wished to clear
the air of their cabinet; the outer cords must be for emergencies, in
case the chemists in the outer laboratory saw the experimenters in the
cabinet overcome; then the rescuers could open the ceiling before going
into the glass room.
The fact that the traps now were up suggested that the cabinet recently
had been used. For whom? I wondered. I was sure of the purpose of the
cabinet. Here was the place of punishment and of discipline.
Keeban strode into the glass room and pulled the cords. The ceiling
closed and he came out. His normals stood about him, grinning. They
took on an additional detachment of manner which I didn’t like at all;
it was detachment from us--from Doris and me--that I mean.
She was keeping her nerve and she was standing steady. She was gazing
into the glass room with a look which made me think that, though she’d
known about this cabinet, she had never actually seen it before.
I haven’t mentioned its furnishings. The room had a bench with nothing
on it; there was a table in the middle of the cabinet. Nothing was on
that either, but from its position, and from the way that Doris and the
normals looked at that, it had a much more menacing suggestion.
It was a narrow table, no wider than a couch; it was about the length
of a couch. And somehow, though it was perfectly flat and hard, it
suggested a couch. At least, I imagined myself spread out upon it. The
reason I fancied this was simple. I was sure that they meant to put
me into that cabinet; and the only place they could put me and tie me
safely would be to bind me to that table.
Then they would pump in Stenewisc’s gas--his KX, which so competently
had accounted for Costrelman and his butler and for the four guinea
pigs which, but for me, might have been Lord Strathon and M. Géroud and
Sencort and Teverson. But for Doris and me, I mean; for I knew--and
Keeban and his normals knew--that if I had failed to warn Teverson,
Doris was there to do it. Consequently, we were to get the gas now; and
we were not to get it simply, but impressively as a part of a ceremony
of punishment and discipline.
For Doris had done the double cross; she had “speiled” and “spouted”;
and not only had she spoiled the biggest job this crowd ever had “on”
but by her squeal or her willingness to squeal had made every man here
a candidate for the electric chair. That was their judgment and their
sentence against her.
It was not a fair judgment, nor a fair sentence, even from their own
point of view, I thought. It was strange that, standing there and
staring into the glass room, I angered at this more than anything else,
that their sentence of her wasn’t fair. She never could have agreed to
mix in murder; she had mixed with them only for counterfeiting, for her
shoving of “the queer”; and through that contact, she had learned of
the plot to kill which she could not stand for.
Other flashes of comprehension came to me there, too. Keeban was fast
developing, I understood. He’d started, so far as I knew, only with
robbery; then he’d run to shooting of old Win Scofield and, from that,
to his attempt at the simultaneous gassing of the group appointed to
gather in the Sencort directors’ room. Keeban had tried to carry Doris
with him from counterfeiting into killing; he had failed. He must have
been carrying some, or most, of these normals with him from smaller
offenses into those which threatened “the chair.”
He could not simply have happened upon a group of normals going the
exact gait he was going; he had to speed up some of them and keep them
with him and impress them with the certainty of something worse than
“the chair”, if any failed him. So he was giving “the glass room” to
Doris and me, not merely for our punishment, but for an example to the
others. And more of the others were arriving now. I heard footsteps
and voices, a girl’s voice among them and her laugh. I turned about.
Shirley, Win Scofield’s widow, had come with two young men beside her.
The sight of her brought me images of recollection. How I had seen
her sing in her house that night before the shooting! How, like a
cabaret Récamier, she had received me after her husband was dead! How I
witnessed her dance at the Flamingo Feather that night she had stabbed
at her partner, Keeban!
Sometimes, since, I had doubted the authenticity of my own witnessing
that night; I wondered if, actually, she had tried, in that sudden,
swift dart of the dagger, to kill Keeban, her partner. Now I wondered
that no longer.
She came in smiling; but her smile was too like Doris’s when she now
smiled at me. For a moment I thought that Shirley was with us; she,
also, was to be a guest of the glass room. Then I realized that this
was not so. She had come only to see us entertained within the glass. I
realized that it was for her we had been waiting. She had come but not
of her own will. She had been brought to see this entertainment which
was planned for her.
I got a glimpse of Keeban’s face; and there I saw a leer which seemed
to say:
“You stabbed at me. I let you get away with it. But watch your step.
Now see what I can do.”
She kept on smiling. She looked at Doris but didn’t speak. She didn’t
even nod at Doris, indeed; and Doris took no heed of her. She gazed
at me, did Shirley Scofield,--Christina. And she smiled at me as she
had at Keeban, and she smiled at the normals, too. That smile meant
nothing; no more than their grins in reply to her.
Keeban spoke aloud. “Everybody’s here.” It seemed to be a prearranged
signal. Two of the normals came up to me and took my arms; two more
placed themselves in position similarly to escort Doris.
“What’s the big rush, boys?” said Keeban then. “Didn’t they show us
something new down on Wall Street? Don’t we show it back to them?”
He laughed; and how he looked like Jerry when he laughed! But he didn’t
sound like Jerry. Not at all. That other person possessed the body.
“Where are they?” he asked the nearest of his normals.
“Oh!” said the normal, remembering. “In there.”
“Get them,” said Keeban.
The fellow stepped to a locker at the side of the room; he stooped,
and, reaching in, he brought out a pair of white rabbits in one hand,
another pair hung by their ears from his other fist.
“Rabbits,” said Keeban, with a sort of play at apology to Doris and me.
“I know you got guinea pigs; but rabbits do just as well and they show
better.”
He took them from the man who held them and he stepped again into the
glass room and tossed the four white rabbits upon the table. Carefully
he closed the door when he came out.
He went to the end of the cabinet where now I noticed, when he touched
it, a thin pipe with a cock right against the glass. He twisted the
cock and he returned to us.
The end of the pipe pierced the glass, I saw; but now that the cock was
turned, nothing visible came from it. Stenewisc’s gas was colorless and
odorless, I remembered. I did not expect to smell it through the glass
of the cabinet; but I could not help expecting the rabbits, on the
table there, to show some alarm. They discerned nothing threatening,
however.
Timidly they tried this end of the table and now that. They hopped
about, nosing each other, naturally enough. Nothing at all seemed to
be happening. Then a lethargy crept over them. They did not sleep;
they remained awake but became slower and slower in their motions.
Yet nothing alarmed them; they seemed to sense nothing at all but
the difficulty of motion. They nosed up, seeming to search for this
intangible thing which was restraining them. They drooped, as though
pressed down; but they remained awake and gave not a squeal nor a
quiver of pain.
Surely it was painless, as well as invisible and intangible, too,--this
amazing death from Stenewisc’s gas.
“No trouble at all, you see,” said Keeban to me. “You never know it.”
He knew how horrible that gradual, invisible death was; a shot or a
knife, or anything sudden, would have been ten times more merciful.
It’s a strange thing to say, but I’m sure that pain--some pain, at
least--would have made it less terrible. It was uncanny, you see.
“They’d never have suspected it,” he spoke again to me. “They’d each
thought the rest were getting thick in the head and nobody would’ve
tried to get up from the table--till they couldn’t.”
He was speaking of the four, who would have been in the Sencort
directors’ room, if I hadn’t interfered; and his words, and this sight
of the rabbits before me, made me see how the Englishman and the
Frenchman and Teverson and Sencort would have gone, without feeling,
without knowing, with nothing really to alarm them till too late.
“Great stuff,” said Keeban again and not to me but to the normals.
“We’ll make it worth millions yet--millions! We’ll get the next bunch
and then sell Wall Street the gas--at our own price! Boys, the curtain
raiser’s over.”
For the rabbits had drooped into death. There was not a mark nor a
twist on them to show it. Keeban shut off the gas, where he had turned
it on; he pulled the cords to open the ceiling.
“Perfectly safe in two minutes,” he assured Doris and me. “It’s light;
the stuff rises.”
Doris and I looked at each other. What had been done had been planned
of course to break our nerve. I can’t say what cracks showed in mine,
nor how much satisfaction I was giving them. I can say that what she
was supplying them was mighty small.