From Beginning to End
"The first was young Harkness, the teller at the Vance National. He had
been speculating in stocks, had lost thousands of the bank's money,
and was desperate, with discovery near. All around him people were
talking of the Invisible Master and of what he could do, and Harkness
saw in that an idea, grasped at it as at a last straw. He arranged his
accounts to show right when it was over, then on that afternoon simply
cried out and gave the alarm, stammering that the money had been taken
by someone invisible who had snatched it from before him. All believed
quite naturally that the Invisible Master had done it! Their thoughts
had been full of him for two days, and what else could they, could we,
believe?
"Thus the Invisible Master was established still farther as a reality,
a criminal who walked unseen. Hardly any in New York doubted his
existence after that first amazing robbery, and it was probably that
robbery that gave Taylor, the pay-clerk at the Etna Construction
Company, his idea for his robbery and murder that night. For it was
Taylor who took the money and who killed his fellow-clerk, Barsoff, on
that night. He believed like everyone else that the bank-robbery that
afternoon had been committed by the Invisible Master, and saw a chance
to commit a crime that would inevitably be blamed upon the same unseen
criminal.
"He and Barsoff were in the pay-office building, both armed. Taylor had
the packages of money ready, and at the moment selected he flung the
door open from inside without showing himself to the guards outside. In
the next instant he drew his gun and shot Barsoff through the heart,
then stuck the gun and money alike into his pockets and was staggering
against the wall a moment later when the guards burst in. They never
thought of questioning or searching him, so strong was their own belief
in the Invisible Master, and that it was he who had rushed unseen into
the little office and committed the murder and theft!
"By the next morning all New York was cold with fear of the Invisible
Master, and hardly a living soul doubted by then his existence. The
evidence was too strong! And seeing this, Allen saw his chance to
commit the triple murder of his partners which was the third crime to
be laid to the Invisible Master's credit. There had been bad blood
between the four partners--they were meeting on that day, you remember,
to dissolve their partnership because of their enmity, and Allen had
resolved to revenge himself on the other three.
"He wrote a letter purporting to be a threat from the Invisible
Master, a demand for a hundred thousand dollars, and mailed it at a
time calculated to bring it to their office before noon on the next
day. They were settling their accounts, the letter was opened and
brought by their excited secretary, and Allen led them in laughing
it down. When the hour of eleven came, though, the hour specified in
the threat, Allen rose and walked behind his three partners, who were
bent over the accounts. Three shots sent quick bullets crashing into
their skulls, from behind, and another shot a bullet into the opposite
wall. Allen leaped back to that wall, pocketing the gun, and when the
others who had heard rushed into the room they found him standing by
the bullet-pierced wall, apparently overcome with horror. There was the
threatening letter lying on the table, and none doubted for a moment
but that the Invisible Master had carried out his threat and had slain
three of the partners but had been forced to flee before he could kill
the fourth or snatch any of the securities on the table.
The Three Crimes
"Thus three crimes had been committed that every soul in the city
believed implicitly had been committed by the Invisible Master! For
the obsession of his presence had been spread so that all believed
him roaming its ways, and no suspicion fell on Harkness or Taylor or
Allen because in the ordinary course of things they would never have
committed crimes which would be blamed so swiftly and inevitably upon
them. What all forgot was that the ordinary course of things had been
changed, and that the three had in each case counted, and counted
correctly, upon the Invisible Master obsession turning away all
suspicion from themselves toward the unseen criminal. As it happened,
I ordered the usual routine investigation of Harkness in the first
crime, though not for a moment believing him guilty, so strong was my
own belief in the Invisible Master. But it was that bit of routine that
shattered the whole great scheme in the end.
"As it was, though, Grantham had achieved his third great step, and
all New York was in panic from the crimes which it believed the
Invisible Master had committed. And Grantham himself had not needed
to be concerned with a single one of those crimes! He had needed only
to sit back, knowing that as surely as human nature was human nature,
crime after crime would be committed by those who would blame it on
the Invisible Master, and that those crimes would as surely raise up a
greater and greater terror for the Invisible Master's name! If it had
not been Harkness and Taylor and Allen, it would have been others!
"Thus the fear of the Invisible Master, as Grantham had foreseen, was
now convulsing all the great city, and that was what he had waited for.
He sent in instantly that letter demanding the payment of five million
dollars as the price of the Invisible Master's departure from the city.
It was sheer, colossal bluff, and it succeeded! For with the peoples of
New York mad with fear of the Invisible Master, with its ordinary life
falling into chaos under that fear, the money was swiftly raised by
the city's leaders who were losing far more than that in this storm of
panic. Kingston was appointed to place the money at the requested spot,
and since the letter had mockingly given the police liberty to attempt
the capture of the Invisible Master, Grantham was able to suggest a
scheme by which he might be captured, using his warning bell.
"That scheme, of course, was devised only to the end that Grantham
might accompany Kingston in to place the money. For Grantham, before he
had written the letter specifying the spot where the money was to be
placed, had been to that spot and had arranged a clever hiding-place
near the boulder, a niche in the earth covered by an earth-masked
trap-door. He and Kingston went in, they placed the steel box on the
boulder, after stretching their wire around, and then waited with drawn
guns, no doubt, while we all waited around them in a great circle.
"Then when Grantham judged the wait long enough, he himself rang the
bell beside him by making contact with its batteries, and as Kingston
naturally cried out in astonishment he cried out with him, then gave
an exclamation in a feigned deeper voice and at the same moment shot
Kingston dead, and sent another bullet through his own left shoulder,
the last touch of verisimilitude needed to remove any trace of
suspicion from him. It was but the work of an instant to grasp the box
and stow it in the niche beside him, all prepared, and slam down the
masked door of it and then crouch beside Kingston. None of us doubted
for a moment his story that the Invisible Master had shot Kingston and
himself and escaped with the money. We came back to town believing that
the whole thing was over.
Over the Trail
"But when I got back to headquarters I found awaiting me the report of
the man I had given the routine job of looking up young Harkness. The
report stated that Harkness was a young man without any known income
but his salary, but stated also that he had in the last few weeks lost
nearly fifty thousand dollars through a certain broker on stocks.
I was amazed. Where had he gotten the money? I recalled that it had
been almost exactly that amount the Invisible Master had been blamed
with taking from the bank, and for the first time I was suspicious of
Harkness.
"I had them bring him to headquarters at once, and we hadn't sweated
him fifteen minutes before he confessed that he'd seen the chance to
cover his embezzlement by blaming a theft on the Invisible Master. I
didn't know what to think. Could it be that the other crimes were the
same in nature? I had them round up Taylor and Allen at once. Taylor
was found on the point of sailing for Europe, having resigned his
position on the ostensible account of shattered nerves. He proved a
harder case than Harkness, but an hour of grilling brought from him the
admission that he too had blamed his theft of the money and killing of
Barsoff on the Invisible Master, and had only planned the crime because
he saw a chance to do it thus free of all suspicion. I don't think he'd
ever have come clean if we hadn't found most of the money involved
there in his grips.
"Allen, though, went to pieces at our first question and confessed
volubly that his crazy hatred of his three partners had made him plan a
killing of them that all would think the Invisible Master's work. The
funny thing, was, too, that each one of the three believed that the
other two crimes had been really the Invisible Master's work!
"I was amazed, stupefied. If the Invisible Master had not committed
those crimes, then his demand for the five millions was simply a
gigantic bluff. Was there, then, any Invisible Master at all? Was
there, the thought flashed over me for the first time, any such power
of invisibility as Grantham claimed to have discovered? I boiled it
all down and found that the only real evidence of the invisibility
part of it was the demonstration Grantham had given. I grabbed all
the books on optics I could find in an effort to learn whether such a
demonstration could be faked, and soon found out about the tourmaline
crystals and their remarkable property. It all fitted in exactly with
the demonstration as it had been described to me. Grantham had made
no demonstrations at all since that first one, nor had we dreamed of
asking him for them, so utter was our belief in his word and in the
Invisible Master's existence.
"I made some swift inquiries and the whole thing burst clear on me.
There had never been any invisibility or any Invisible Master at
all. Grantham had planned the great bluff that was to wring five
millions out of the city, had built it up from the trick of that
first demonstration and from the circumstantial evidence he was able
to gather to support the thing, had used the crimes that inevitably
resulted from the city's belief in the Invisible Master to make that
belief even stronger. I drove out to the place where we were last night
and it took but minutes of searching to find the concealed niche beside
the stone where the money still lay.
"Undoubtedly Grantham meant to retrieve it later on, and undoubtedly
he would have refused ever to give out any information or any
demonstrations of his invisibility-method, by saying that he would take
no chances on loosing another invisible criminal on the world. Gray
would never have been found, and would then have been believed always
the unseen criminal. Almost Grantham won, and would have won had not
that one routine and unthinking step of mine defeated him. Yet he must
have known, too, that there was always a chance of losing, for when I
came out this morning after telling him over the phone to be waiting
here for some new information I was bringing, he had the cyanide with
him. And the rest--you saw how he took his one way out."
When Wade had finished Carton and Ellsworth gazed at him across the
sunlit laboratory, spellbound. It was Carton who at last found his
voice.
"And we never guessed--we never dreamed--that there was never any
Invisible Master!"
Wade was looking thoughtfully out of the window. "Did I say there
wasn't? I think I was wrong in that, after all--I think there was
an Invisible Master whose hand has lain heavy on New York for these
last days. Fear!--the fear that Grantham loosed on the city for his
own ends, the fear that stalked its ways and was by day and night its
unseen lord! It was that that was the true Invisible Master!"
THE END