THE DWARF
The manner in which we next heard of the whereabouts of the Prophet’s
slipper was utterly unforeseen, wildly dramatic. That the Hashishin
were aware that I, though its legal trustee, no longer had charge of
the relic nor knowledge of its resting-place, was sufficiently evident
from the immunity which I enjoyed at this time from that ceaseless
haunting by members of the uncanny organization ruled by Hassan. I had
begun to feel more secure in my chambers, and no longer worked with a
loaded revolver upon the table beside me. But the slightest unusual
noise in the night still sufficed to arouse me and set me listening
intently, to chill me with dread of what it might portend. In short, my
nerves were by no means recovered from the ceaseless strain of the
events connected with and arising out of the death of my poor friend,
Professor Deeping.
One evening as I sat at work in my chambers, with the throb of busy
Fleet Street and its thousand familiar sounds floating in to me through
the open windows, my phone bell rang.
Even as I turned to take up the receiver a foreboding possessed me that
my trusteeship was no longer to be a sinecure. It was Bristol who had
rung me up, and upon very strange business.
“A development at last!” he said; “but at present I don’t know what to
make of it. Can you come down now?”
“Where are you speaking from?”
“From the Waterloo Road—a delightful neighbourhood. I shall be glad if
you can meet me at the entrance to Wyatt’s Buildings in half an hour.”
“What is it? Have you found Dexter?”
“No, unfortunately. But it’s murder!”
I knew as I hung up the receiver that my brief period of peace was
ended; that the lists of assassination were reopened. I hurried out
through the court into Fleet Street, thinking of the key of the now
empty case at the Museum which reposed at my bankers, thinking of the
devils who pursued the slipper, thinking of the hundred and one things,
strange and terrible, which went to make up the history of that
gruesome relic.
Wyatt’s Buildings, Waterloo Road, are a gloomy and forbidding block of
dwellings which seem to frown sullenly upon the high road, from which
they are divided by a dark and dirty courtyard. Passing an iron
gateway, you enter, by way of an arch, into this sinister place of
uncleanness. Male residents in their shirt sleeves lounge against the
several entrances. Bedraggled women nurse dirty infants and sit in
groups upon the stone steps, rendering them almost impassable. But
to-night a thing had happened in Wyatt’s Buildings which had awakened
in the inhabitants, hardened to sordid crime, a sort of torpid
interest.
Faces peered from most of the windows which commanded a view of the
courtyard, looking like pallid blotches against the darkness; but a
number of police confined the loungers within their several doorways,
so that the yard itself was comparatively clear.
I had had some difficulty in forcing a way through the crowd which
thronged the entrance, but finally I found myself standing beside
Inspector Bristol and looking down upon that which had brought us both
to Wyatt’s Buildings.
There was no moon that night, and only the light of the lamp in the
archway, with some faint glimmers from the stairways surrounding the
court, reached the dirty paving. Bristol directed the light of a
pocket-lamp upon the hunched-up figure which lay in the dust, and I saw
it to be that of a dwarfish creature, yellow skinned and wearing only a
dark loin cloth. He had a malformed and disproportionate head, a head
that had been too large even for a big man. I knew after first glance
that this was one of the horrible dwarfs employed by the Hashishin in
their murderous business. It might even be the one who had killed
Deeping; but this was impossible to determine by reason of the fact
that the hideous, swollen head, together with the features, was
completely crushed. I shall not describe the creature’s appearance in
further detail.
Having given me an opportunity to examine the dead dwarf, Bristol
returned the electric lamp to his pocket and stood looking at me in the
semi-gloom. A constable stood on duty quite near to us, and others
guarded the archway and the doors to the dwellings. The murmur of
subdued voices echoed hollowly in the wells of the staircases, and a
constant excited murmur proceeded from the crowd at the entrance. No
pressmen had yet been admitted, though numbers of them were at the
gates.
“It happened less than an hour ago,” said Bristol. “The place was much
as you see it now, and from what I can gather there came the sound of a
shot and several people saw the dwarf fall through the air and drop
where he lies!”
The light was insufficient to show the expression upon the speaker’s
face, but his voice told of a great wonder.
“It is a bit like an Indian conjuring trick,” I said, looking up to the
sky above us; “who fired the shot?”
“So far,” replied Bristol, “I have failed to find out; but there’s a
bullet in the thing’s head. He was dead before he reached the
pavement.”
“Did no one see the flash of the pistol?”
“No one that I have got hold of yet. Of course this kind of evidence is
very unreliable; these people regularly go out of their way to mislead
the police.”
“You think the body may have been carried here from somewhere else?”
“Oh, no; this is where it fell, right enough. You can see where his
head struck the stones.”
“He has not been moved at all?”
“No; I shall not move him until I’ve worked out where in heaven’s name
he can have fallen from! You and I have seen some mysterious things
happen, Mr. Cavanagh, since the slipper of the Prophet came to England
and brought these people”—he nodded toward the thing at our feet—“in
its train; but this is the most inexplicable incident to date. I don’t
know what to make of it at all. Quite apart from the question of where
the dwarf fell from, who shot at him and why?”
“Have you no theory?” I asked. “The incident to my mind points directly
to one thing. We know that this uncanny creature belonged to the
organization of Hassan of Aleppo. We know that Hassan implacably
pursues one object—the slipper. In pursuit of the slipper, then, the
dwarf came here. Bristol!”—I laid my hand upon his arm, glancing about
me with a very real apprehension—“the slipper must be somewhere near!”
Bristol turned to the constable standing hard by.
“Remain here,” he ordered. Then to me: “I should like you to come up on
to the roof. From there we can survey the ground and perhaps arrive at
some explanation of how the dwarf came to fall upon that spot.”
Passing the constable on duty at one of the doorways and making our way
through the group of loiterers there, we ascended amid conflicting
odours to the topmost floor. A ladder was fixed against the wall
communicating with a trap in the ceiling. Several individuals in their
shirt sleeves and all smoking clay pipes had followed us up. Bristol
turned upon them.
“Get downstairs,” he said—“all the lot of you, and stop there!”
With muttered imprecations our audience dispersed, slowly returning by
the way they had come. Bristol mounted the ladder and opened the trap.
Through the square opening showed a velvet patch spangled with starry
points. As he passed up on to the roof and I followed him, the
comparative cleanness of the air was most refreshing after the varied
fumes of the staircase.
Side by side we leaned upon the parapet looking down into the dirty
courtyard which was the theatre of this weird mystery; looking down
upon the stage, sordidly Western, where a mystic Eastern tragedy had
been enacted.
I could see the constable standing beside the crushed thing upon the
stones.
“Now,” said Bristol, with a sort of awe in his voice, “where did he
fall from?”
And at his words, looking down at the spot where the dwarf lay, and
noting that he could not possibly have fallen there from any of the
buildings surrounding the courtyard, an eerie sensation crept over me;
for I was convinced that the happening was susceptible of no natural
explanation.
I had heard—who has not heard?—of the Indian rope trick, where a fakir
throws a rope into the air which remains magically suspended whilst a
boy climbs upward and upward until he disappears into space. I had
never credited accounts of the performance; but now I began seriously
to wonder if the arts of Hassan of Aleppo were not as great or greater
than the arts of fakir. But the crowning mystery to my mind was that of
the Hashishin’s death. It would seem that as he had hung suspended in
space he had been shot!
“You say that someone heard the sound of the shot?” I asked suddenly.
“Several people,” replied Bristol; “but no one knows, or no one will
say, from what direction it came. I shall go on with the inquiry, of
course, and cross-examine every soul in Wyatt’s Buildings. Meanwhile,
I’m open to confess that I am beaten.”
In the velvet sky countless points blazed tropically. The hum of the
traffic in Waterloo Road reached us only in a muffled way. Sordidness
lay beneath us, but up there under the heavens we seemed removed from
it as any Babylonian astronomer communing with the stars.
When, some ten minutes later, I passed out into the noise of Waterloo
Road, I left behind me an unsolved mystery and took with me a great
dread; for I knew that the quest of the sacred slipper was not ended, I
knew that another tragedy was added to its history—and I feared to
surmise what the future might hold for all of us.