THE HAUNTED ROOM
In which an apoplectic scientist explodes—In which invisible footsteps
sound in a dark corridor—In which Julien De Medici opens a letter—The
woman of the hidden eyes—Floria, the lady of the dagger, appears—In
which underworlds collide—The staircase to Hell and a strange
passion—A voice that spoke over the telephone.
Tall, wine-colored velvets fell in monotonous parallels from the ceiling
to the floor. There were no windows to be seen. A somber and luxurious
emptiness like the inside of a jewel box stamped the curious chamber.
Four black candlesticks ending in little pyramids of flame stood on the
long table in the center. The four little flames glistened like
suspended medallions. The towering drapes that enclosed the room broke
the darkness into thin and motionless waves. The shadows reaching toward
the burning candles seemed to beat with an invisible and inaudible
rhythm.
Julien De Medici, his narrow eyes half shut, sat watching the dungeon
lights that flitted over the face of Dr. Lytton. The doctor’s bald head
loomed ghostlike above the table. His black eyes were peering wrathfully
at his half visible host. He was talking in a voice alive with
indignation.
“Bring some lights into this confounded place. This sort of thing is at
the bottom of your trouble, Julien.”
He waved his short hand in the air and a great shadow lifted itself to
the ceiling.
“You’re deliberately submitting yourself to a dangerous hypnosis. The
wraiths of past De Medicis! Inherited phantoms. Bosh!”
The scientist snorted and brought a fist down on the table.
“Hypnosis, I tell you. A cleverly induced mania as artificial as this
damned room. Wake up, man. There’s nothing wrong with you except a
stupid,—yes, sir, a damnably deliberate effort to make a fool out of
yourself. You’re as sound mentally as I am.”
“Thanks.”
The soft voice of De Medici came out of the shadows. His choler growing,
the doctor continued:
“Why don’t you try crystal-gazing? Sitting in a room like this,
candlesticks, darkness, drapes, and bombarding yourself with the fancy
that you’re someone else! What do you expect? Something is bound to
happen if you keep it up long enough.”
“I am satisfied.”
The soft calm of De Medici’s voice seemed to infuriate his friend.
“And you claim to be in love with Florence,” he cried. “Yet you haven’t
made a move to help her. They’ll close in on her any day now. We’ve got
to do something. Come now, I want to talk to you. Do you think her
innocent?”
“I prefer her guilty,” De Medici whispered.
“Hm,” the scientist grunted. He sat stroking his heavy face.
“Monomania,” he muttered as if to himself. He raised his voice. “What
form do these idiotic delusions of yours take?”
Glaring into the shadows he waited for De Medici’s words. They came
languidly out of the darkness—
“Neither delusion nor idiocy, Hugo. She unquestionably murdered her
father. And I find the situation to my liking.”
Dr. Lytton was on his feet. He walked swiftly to the side of De Medici
and seized his shoulder.
“I came here to talk to you chiefly about her,” he said. “Ballau was my
dear friend.”
De Medici’s eyes remained intently on the shadowed curtains.
“I know, I know,” he whispered. “You’ve been working hard. And you’ve
found out what I know. You’ve found it was Florence.”
“Can you drag yourself out of your delusions long enough to think
sanely?” the doctor cried.
“My mind is perfectly clear,” De Medici answered. He lighted a cigarette
in the half dark, his eyes watching the glow of the tobacco. “You have
discovered that someone telephoned her at the theater, that she was in
the apartment more than a half hour before giving the alarm. And other
details.”
“Yes, other details,” Dr. Lytton repeated warily. De Medici sighed.
“You’ve interrupted a charming dream,” he said, rising from the chair.
His hand passed tiredly over his forehead. The scientist regarded him
closely. He saw the lean face of his host shudder and the gleaming eyes
close for a moment.
“Ah,” continued De Medici in a murmur, “it comes over me like that. A
dream obliterates me. I sit and watch myself from a distance.” He smiled
wearily at his friend. “Are you interested in my symptoms, Hugo?”
“Go on,” the doctor answered.
“From a distance,” repeated De Medici, “my gestures seem to change. They
become slower. And my jaw shifts curiously to a side. My eyes droop and
I keep staring out of their corners. The fears leave me, however. There
is nothing to fear in this dream. Last night I sat there staring at the
curtains and waiting. But there was no fear. And finally the
hallucination came. As it did once before on the night of the murder. I
was in the apartment and she appeared for an instant in the doorway. The
Francesca one ... her hair down and a band circling her forehead. I knew
last night she would come again. And she did. I sat looking at
Florence—a Florence you don’t know.... Cold, cruel with a wild gleam to
her.... A long robe and a dagger in her hand. She smiles at me and I
feel my heart dissolve with rapture. The dream is horrible and
beautiful. An exultation comes into me.”
“And are you aware of its unreality at the moment?” Dr. Lytton asked
quietly.
“Alas, yes! I watch from a distance. I repeat to myself—‘a
hallucination.’ But even then there is something truthful about her.
Even though I know I dream the image, it appears to me as
psychologically true. The woman with the dagger is Florence....”
De Medici moved slowly down the room. As he stood against the darkened
curtains, his face glowed uncertainly toward the doctor.
“We must save her,” he whispered.
Dr. Lytton grunted.
“Yes,” he agreed, “if you can keep your head clear of these obsessions
of yours. Yet——” He paused and stared at De Medici. “Curious,” he
resumed. “It fits in. That vision of yours. Yes, an odd psychological
phenomenon. I have had a similar image in my mind for a week.”
De Medici’s voice had undergone a change when he spoke again. It was
crisp and with a precision in its sound.
“Now tell me, Hugo,” he asked, “what you’ve found.”
“First,” countered the doctor, “what are you hiding? Your consciousness
of her guilt is not as pathologic as you would make out. The telephone
call and all the rest are good enough. But you were there that night.
The first to see her. You saw something ... found something.”
De Medici nodded as the doctor’s eyes glittered at him. Moving to the
table he opened a drawer and removed the purse he had picked up in the
Ballau library.
“In the chair near the body,” he explained. “It has her initials in the
corner. And inside a theater program for a performance of ‘Iris’ in a
London theater in 1899.”
Dr. Lytton reached for the object with an exclamation. His hands seized
it and, thrusting it into the light of the candles, he remained lost in
an ecstatic contemplation of it.
“Good God!” he muttered abruptly. “I knew it. Yes, I was right.”
De Medici smiled slowly at the scientist’s elation.
“A brain,” he thought. “It plays with a delightful puzzle. He knows
something.” There flitted through his mind the memory of Dr. Lytton’s
accomplishments.... An exuberant modernist among the pathologists of the
country.... “He came here to corroborate something,” he continued
musing: “He suspects that I and not Florence did the murder. Yes, an
obvious and romantic theory. Even Norton played with it at the inquest.
I turned De Medici for a moment and killed a man.... Inherited homicidal
mania ... hm.”
“An odd thing about Ballau,” Dr. Lytton was saying. He had seated
himself and was copying something from the program. He talked cheerfully
as he wrote. “A man like Ballau without a breath of scandal about his
name. Rather strange, don’t you think? A lover of beautiful things.
Unmarried, with no restrictions. And yet not the sign of a woman or of
an affair in his life. I’ve talked to a dozen people who knew him as
well as I did. All collaborate on a halo for the man. And thereby hangs
an idea. Virtue, no less than vice, has its pathologic mainsprings, eh?”
His eyes beamed excitedly over the program.
“Twelve names in the cast,” he continued. “I’m taking them down. Names
are always something. A name is a beginning. Did you tell Florence of
this?”
“Yes.”
“And she grew excited,” pursued Dr. Lytton as he finished his writing.
“Did you mention the Goldsmith Theater to her?”
“No.”
“She wanted the thing back, eh? Come, what did she say? How did she
look?”
“As you said,” De Medici answered. “Excited. Disturbed.”
“This was before she left town?” pursued Dr. Lytton. “Of course.... You
saw her after the inquest. She left that night.”
“I didn’t know,” De Medici murmured.
“Yes,” Dr. Lytton continued, “she went to a place called Rollo, in
Maine. A curious out-of-the-way little village. I found this out the
next day. She had had her trunks shipped there. The grief and
excitement, I suppose. And a desire to get away.”
“I didn’t know,” repeated De Medici uncomfortably. So she had gone away!
A bewilderment came into his thought. He recalled her rage that had
ended their talk in the theater. The blow she had struck and her
anguish. Remorse and tenderness overwhelmed him, and a feeling of
self-revulsion. What a scoundrel! Playing with evil dreams while her
heart was breaking. “No one ... no one,” she had wailed. Yes, he had
abandoned her. Become a useless and fantastic actor in the hour she
needed him. And she had fled....
The tragedy suddenly changed in his inner mind. The image of the evil
Francesca which had confused itself with his memories of Florence seemed
to evaporate from the recesses of his thought. He saw, in retrospect
suddenly, the laughing-eyed, vivid young woman whom he had loved. Guilty
of the murder of her father! Incredible! He had been playing viciously
with a dangerous make-believe. Yes, there was something else. A mystery
beckoned behind the inexplicable conduct of the girl. He had succumbed
to a few obvious leads. Now, with his mind cleared of the phantoms that
had seduced him, he remembered the dead man. Victor Ballau ... there had
been something about him. Trembling fingers and averted eyes.... A
secret pantomiming behind the fastidious exterior.
Dr. Lytton was talking. De Medici’s ears again picked up the man’s
excited ramblings.
“In part the mystery lies with Ballau. A London theater program. You
know he lived in London before he came here. I found out something about
him. He was married in London. Have you ever talked to Florence about
her mother, Julien? Never mind, we’ll come to that later. This purse
fits in. I wanted only a peg to hang the thing on. Here it is....”
Dr. Lytton waved the paper on which he had copied the names.
“Names are mysteries in themselves....”
He paused and glanced quickly around the room.
“Someone’s knocking, Julien,” he exclaimed.
A muffled sound was repeated.
“It’s the door,” De Medici smiled at the doctor’s unexpected nerves.
“Come in, Harding.”
Harding, his bland-faced valet, entered.
“A special-delivery letter,” he said.
“Thanks.” De Medici took the proffered envelope. The valet stepped
through the curtains.
“Look out,” Dr. Lytton cried as De Medici’s fingers began to tear open
the letter. “Postmarks are important.”
He watched De Medici’s eyes grow narrow and an expression of horror
slowly consume his shadowed face. He had removed a sheet of paper from
the envelope. The thing lay in his fingers and cast a distorted shadow
across the table. There followed a moment of silence.
“Dear God!” the voice of De Medici came softly. He had become rigid. His
face had grown into a somber and elongated mask. For the moment he stood
motionless, his eyes staring. Terror, blank and wordless, gleamed in the
look of his eyes.
Dr. Lytton sprang to his side. De Medici had wavered and stumbled
against the table edge. His hand shot out, fingers spread, in a gesture
of horror toward the fluttering shadows on the curtains.
“She ... she!” he cried. “From the thing with the dagger....”
The doctor stooped and picked up the paper that had dropped from his
hands. Holding it quickly under the rays of the candles he read:
Prince Julien De Medici,
I write to let you know that your meddlesome interest in my affairs is
distasteful. You will allow the matter to drop or incur the anger of
one who knows how to deal with a De Medici. I am,
Your humble servant,
Floria.
Underneath the signature was a crude drawing in ink of a dagger.
“Floria,” muttered Dr. Lytton.
De Medici’s face, gray in the candle-light, was regarding him.
“What was the postmark?” the doctor asked quietly.
“Rollo, Maine,” De Medici answered. Dr. Lytton examined the torn
envelope.
“Rollo, Maine,” he repeated; “mailed yesterday morning. Come now, pull
yourself together, Julien.”
“Yes.”
“The thing is complete. It fits in. Hm, what a curious handwriting. You
recognize it?”
“Hers,” he answered.
“Almost,” the scientist murmured. “Come, the mystery draws to an end. I
would like to make comparisons. Have you a letter of hers?”
“Yes.”
Mechanically, De Medici opened the table drawer. Dr. Lytton brought a
candle close to its contents.
“Here!” he exclaimed. His eyes studied the envelope. “Written two months
ago. Fine. Excellent.”
He removed a letter sheet and spread it under the light. De Medici
watched him. His calm had returned.
“Floria and not Francesca,” he mused. “Floria of the dagger. Then the
hallucination was not entirely unreal. He said something ... what was
it? A similar image in his brain.”
His heart sickened as the realization grew. Guilty! Yet a few moments
ago a conviction had overpowered him—a certainty that he was toying with
chimeras, that no truth or substance lay in his evil obsessions. But now
the letter ... and the postmark....
“A similarity,” Dr. Lytton finally announced. “The letter from Rollo,
Maine, could have been written by the same hand that wrote this letter
to you. Yet they are not identical. There are several vital differences,
although a layman, on cursory examination, would call them of no
consequence. Yes, the difference is a difference of tempo. Floria, the
lady of the dagger, writes with a certain jerky stiffiness. The
characters show high nervous tension, excitement, hysteria. An
exaggeration of her natural chirography. Look, the lines are uneven. The
letters jumble in spots. The thing resembles the slow, painful scrawl of
a child. Yet it was written in fierce haste.... Hysteria.”
De Medici nodded. His eyes avoided the thing under the doctor’s hands.
“I perceived it from the beginning,” the scientist continued.
“Everything pointed to it. A dual personality....”
“Florence and Floria,” murmured De Medici.
Dr. Lytton’s manner had become elate. A professional singsong was in his
voice. He was off on a favorite topic once more. His heavy face
glistened with enthusiasm. The underworlds of the soul ... the absorbing
novelties of manias ... these were his scientific specialties.
“I expected one of two things out of my visit,” he announced. “I knew
what sort of creature had killed Ballau.... It had left its marks in
every detail. An amazing murder.... A slow, painful, and yet fiercely
executed crime. Like the handwriting on this letter paper. The eerie
footprints of hysteria. They were all over the deed. A soul writhing in
the depths of a crazed sleep.”
“He is quoting from his paper on somnambulism,” mused De Medici. His
eyes remained on the doctor’s face. Lytton had settled back in his
chair. His wrathful and nervous manner had given way to a pedagogic air.
Yet as he talked his eyes peered through the lowered lashes at the
immobile figure of De Medici.
“The dual personality was obvious, Julien. But, ah, whose? And the
obvious answer was—yours. The dagger—a relic of De Medici evil. The
blood-stained hands. I learned this from Norton. Florence’s confusion.
Her concealed evidence. To protect you, of course. I talked to her after
you had taken her to the theater. You remember, the inquest morning?”
“What did she say?” De Medici whispered.
“Mad. You were mad. But I needed no diagnosis from her. Mad you seemed.
And very clever, too clever at the inquest. A curious balance of
sincerity and evasion. And the two hours between eight o’clock and ten
o’clock that night he was killed. Where had you spent them? Yes, a walk
in Broadway. But you never walk, my dear Julien. Do I remember
correctly? The purse gave me my first definite conviction, however.”
“And now your theory is?” De Medici prompted him quietly.
“The letter has ended it,” Dr. Lytton replied. “Florence Ballau and not
Julien De Medici.”
“But I may have written it myself,” De Medici murmured; “written it,
sent it from Rollo, Maine ... to myself ... evidence to exonerate me.”
“I thought of that,” smiled Dr. Lytton. “Except that you couldn’t have
known I would be here tonight. The letter is authentic. And the rest
unravels itself.”
He beamed at the masked eyes of his host.
“Dual personality, as we know it,” he continued, “is a dramatic disease.
Yes, the phenomenon of disassociation.... People are seldom born with
dual personalities except in the most neurotic of cases. Ordinarily they
acquire them. In pathology, dual personality cases belong to the
ill-defined border-land between sanity and insanity. It is for that
reason that I have been inclined to ridicule your own obsessions,
Julien. Dual personalities are not inherited. Bad blood may breed
disorders. But the charming Jekyll and Hyde pose you have been trying to
wish on yourself is, scientifically, absurd. Are you interested,
Julien?”
“Yes.”
The two men sat facing each other out of the shadows of the velvet-hung
room. The candles burned motionlessly.
“I remember a case of a woman named Jenny,” Dr. Lytton mused aloud. “Do
you mind sitting closer so I can see you, Julien? It’s rather difficult
talking to an apparition. Thanks.... Now we’ll discuss the strange case
of Florence Ballau. I’ll give you the groundwork. We’ll be able to
operate in the open, then. And I shall need your help. Yes, you can help
me, Julien.”
“Go on,” De Medici muttered.
“About Jenny,” Dr. Lytton resumed. “Well, she was the mother of a
three-year-old boy who, while playing, slipped out of the window of
their flat. As she came walking back from the grocery store, Jenny
looked up. She saw her child hanging by his fingers from the window four
stories above the ground. She stood powerless and transfixed while his
little fingers slowly gave way. She watched him slip ... slip, and then
his body shot to the ground and was smashed to a pulp before her eyes.
And here we have a logical cause for dual personality.
“The shock was terrific for the mother. It split her mind. And an
abnormal condition developed. Her little son fell to his death eight
years ago and Jenny is now in an asylum. I’ve studied her carefully. She
is the ideal dual personality case. You see, Julien, nothing inherited,
no phantoms, no mysterious impulses. Merely a shock that split the mind
into two compartments. She presents the following symptoms. She will be
engaged, for instance, in sewing or in conversation. Suddenly she ceases
her work. She stands up. Her eyes lift. And for the minutes that follow
she lives over again the awful scene of her little son’s death, carrying
out in every detail the tragedy of the thing. And during the minutes the
hallucination endures she goes through the scene with all the power of
an accomplished emotional actress.
“Yes, I’ve watched her. While this drama is in progress she is perfectly
unconscious of the actual things happening around her. She hears nothing
that is said and sees nothing but the imaginary scene which she is
reliving. This phenomenon, which is technically called somnambulism,
will end as suddenly as it begins, and Jenny will return to her former
occupation, absolutely unaware of the fact that it has been interrupted.
You see how different your alleged and artificial case of fancied
obsession is, Julien. You remember too much. The vision of Francesca is
in your mind now—the thing you fancied you saw. Therefore you are not a
victim of disassociation. If you’re a man of evil at all, it is you who
sit here and not a hidden, unknown you that walks in the dark places of
your subconscious.”
Dr. Lytton leaned forward and placed his hand on De Medici’s knee.
“If Jenny is questioned during her apparently normal intervals,” he
said, “it will be found that she has not only entirely forgotten
everything that happened during her somnambulism, but that the whole
tragedy of her boy’s death has completely disappeared from her conscious
mind. She remembers nothing of the minutes she stood watching her son
slipping from the window ledge. And if you press her she’ll discuss his
death vaguely and indifferently as if it were the death of someone
else’s child. She’ll say, ‘Oh, he just died, that’s all.’ And reveal no
interest or emotion whatsoever. Yet concerning all other things of her
past life she has a rather keen memory.
“This curious localized loss of memory or amnesia is found in some
cases. In other dual personality cases we have a complete loss of memory
of all events preceding the shock that produced the disassociation. So
you see, science absolves you, Julien.”
De Medici nodded.
“Now we come to Florence Ballau. A high-strung, vivid temperament,”
continued Dr. Lytton. “The letter signed Floria and decorated with the
dagger reveals one thing. Its writer is suffering from delusions of
persecution. Persecutory delusions are a common form of mental disorder.
We all have them more or less. Floria is the terrified and persecuted
thing that dwells in the soul of Florence Ballau. At times this
terrified thing usurps the body of Miss Ballau and lives its own
mysterious life. As in the case of Jenny it is not an inherited
phenomenon. It was induced by shock of some sort. Florence may be dimly
aware of the change after she returns to herself. More likely, however,
she is merely distracted, depressed, and suffers from a sense of
bewilderment.”
De Medici nodded again.
“I remember something,” he said slowly.
“I thought you would,” smiled Dr. Lytton.
“I had called at her apartment unexpectedly. It was last year. I rang
the bell a half dozen times before anyone answered. Finally the door was
opened by Florence. I hardly recognized her. She stood before me
white-faced and eyes staring. I had a feeling for the moment that
something terrible had happened, was happening. I tried to pass it
over—such things always confuse me violently—by inviting myself in for a
cup of tea. She stood looking at me almost as if she failed to recognize
me. Then she said, ‘Father isn’t home,’ and closed the door in my face.”
“Excellent,” murmured the doctor. “The perfect corroboration. And did
you ever ask her what had been wrong?”
“She called me up,” De Medici answered, “the next morning, and
apologized for the incident. She said she suffered from periodic
headaches the pain of which almost drove her beside herself. I had come
on her during one of the spells.”
“Did she use the word ‘spells’?” Dr. Lytton asked.
“I think she did,” De Medici answered.
The two men became silent. The candles had burned down. One of them
sputtered excitedly for a moment and then faded out. De Medici’s eyes
watched the growing flicker of the three lights. Darkness would come....
His heart chilled. Florence, crazed and standing dagger in hand before
her father.... Victor Ballau staring aghast at the horrible-eyed woman
who wore the body of his daughter but in whose soul leaped the awful
desires of a demoniacal stranger ... the lady of the dagger.
“Nothing is explained,” he mused as the second candle drifted away. The
darkness stepped closer to the two men. “The beard ... the thing he
clutched....”
“I follow your thoughts,” murmured Dr. Lytton from behind his hand. “The
false Vandyke....”
“Yes,” De Medici said. The two remaining candles were dying. A terror
swept him. Darkness ... it would grow black. There were candles in the
table drawer. His hands crept slowly forward and stopped. An inanition
held them. He sat riveted, unable to stir. Terror exploded a Roman
candle in his head....
“Ah,” he breathed, a sweat covering him. Darkness! A black room. His
throat framed a cry.... “Ah,” he moaned.
Hands were pressing him down, holding him against the chair. Something
was at his throat. No, inside his throat, crawling into his mouth.
Suddenly his arms flung themselves against the air. He plunged to his
feet, beating at the blackness.
“Lights ... lights!” came in a scream from his throat. The doctor’s
voice roared a command.
“Stand still!”
The figure of De Medici spun crazily in the darkness and crashed into
the velvet-covered wall. It sank without sound to the floor. The doctor
groped toward the table.
“Julien!” he cried. His thick fingers were fumbling with a match box. He
held a quickly lighted candle aloft. The curtained room swayed and
danced in the shadows.... A figure lay, face down, arms outstretched and
fingers spread against the gigantic-seeming drape.
The telephone was ringing. Its bell tinkled eerily in the dark. Dr.
Lytton stood listening. A voice was waiting for him. He stepped forward
and lifted the receiver from its hook.
“Is this Mr. De Medici?” a voice asked.
“Yes,” the doctor answered.
“This is Lieutenant Norton on the wire, Mr. De Medici. Can you come over
to my office at once?”
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
“What is it?”
“I haven’t time to go into any detail over the phone,” the voice
answered. “But I would like to see you as soon as possible. We’ve found
the murderer of Mr. Ballau.”