The Last Night

Pike was at his own fire one night in the last week of March, after dinner, when the bell rang. He was not expecting anyone. The woman who kept the house went to the door, and there were two voices in the hall, and then she came in and said the name.

He met him in the hall. Diaz had no coat worth the name, and snow had gone to water on his shoulders, and he was breathing hard. He had walked from Kirkland Street, three miles, in the cold.

"Diaz. What brings you here." And then, taking a second look at him: "What is the matter with you. Is the doctor ill."

"Mister Pike," Diaz said. "There is something wrong."

Pike opened the door of the little front room. "Sit down. There is wine on the sideboard, and I want you to take your time and tell me plainly what you have come to say."

Diaz sat and did not take the wine. He put his hands on his knees and looked at a corner of the floor, and he had not once, since the door opened, looked Pike in the face.

"You know the doctor's ways, sir," he said. "How he shuts himself up. Well, he has shut himself up in the room over the laboratory, and I do not like it. I am afraid."

"Be exact with me. What are you afraid of."

Diaz did not answer that. "I have been afraid about a week," he said, doggedly, as if Pike had not spoken, "and I can bear it no more." Then, hoarser: "I think there has been foul play."

Pike stood up and took his coat and his hat. He had been half waiting for this bell for a year.

It was a wild night, cold and raw, with a thin moon on her back and fast cloud going over it. The streets were empty, and the whole way up he carried a weight he could not have explained.

Diaz walked a step or two ahead the whole way and never once looked back.

They came to the house. Diaz went up the steps and knocked three times, careful, and the door opened the width of a chain, and a voice asked out of the dark inside, "Is that you, Oscar."

"It is all right," Diaz said. "Open it."

The hall was lit like a room kept up all night. The fire was built high and every lamp was burning, and all the people of the house stood about the hearth, the cook and the two women and the gardener and the boy, huddled together like a flock. One of the women began to whimper.

"What is this. Are you all here. This is very irregular, and your master would not be pleased with the look of it."

"They are all afraid," Diaz said.

Nobody contradicted him. Then the woman cried out, and Diaz silenced her, and every face turned toward the inner door and listened, and there was nothing to hear.

"Now," Diaz said to the boy, "get me a candle, and we will have this through with at once." He lit it and led Pike out by the back way and across the yard, where the snow lay in a gray crust.

"Come as gently as you can. I want you to hear and I do not want you to be heard. And if by any chance he asks you in, do not go."

They went into the laboratory building through the cold theatre with its crates and bottles and straw, and stopped at the foot of the wooden stair. Diaz set the candle on a crate and put a hand on Pike's arm, and then went up the steps and knocked on the felt-covered door.

"Mister Pike is here, sir, asking to see you." He turned at once and signed to Pike to listen.

A voice came back through the door. "Tell him I cannot see anyone." It said the words like an effort and a grievance at once, and then nothing more.

"Thank you, sir," Diaz said, with something very close to triumph in his voice. He took up the candle and led Pike back across the yard into the big kitchen, where the fire was out, and shut the door.

"Sir," he said, and now he did look Pike in the face. "Was that my master's voice."

"It seems much changed."

"Changed. Yes, I think so." Diaz nodded slowly. "Have I been nineteen years in this man's house, to be wrong about his voice. No, sir. My master is gone. He was got rid of last week, the night I heard him cry out. Who is in there now, and why it stays, I cannot tell you."

"That is a strange story, Oscar, and a wild one to bring a man at night. Suppose the doctor had been killed. What would keep the killer in that room. He has the lane door and the key to it."

"You are a hard man to satisfy," Diaz said, "but I will satisfy you. All this week, whatever lives in that room has been crying for a medicine and cannot get it to its mind. It was the master's way to write his orders on a sheet and throw it down the stair. Twice and three times a day I have been sent to every chemist in the city, and every time I brought the stuff back there was another paper telling me to take it away, that it was not the same."

"Do you have any of these papers."

Diaz brought out a folded and much-handled sheet. Pike bent to the candle and read. It began formally: the doctor's compliments, and the assurance that the last sample was not right and was useless for his present purpose. Some years before he had bought from them a quantity of one particular lot, and he begged them to search with care and send any of that same material that remained. Expense was no consideration.

And then, at the bottom, the neat hand had given way. The pen had come down hard and the line had run off the page, and it said: For God's sake, find me some of the old.

"This is a strange note," Pike said. And then, sharply: "How do you come to have it open."

"The man at the counter was angry, sir, and he threw it back at me like so much dirt."

"This is the doctor's hand. This is his writing."

"I thought it looked like it." Diaz put the paper away. "But what does the hand matter." He looked up. "I have seen him."

"Seen him. Well."

"That is it, sir. I came into the theatre from the yard. The door of the room was open, and there he was at the far end, down among the crates. He looked up, gave a kind of cry, and went up the stair and shut himself in. It was a moment only that I saw him. But the hair stood up on my head like pins. If that was my master, why did he have a thing pulled down over his face. Why did he cry out and run from me."

"Your master is a doctor," Pike said, "and plainly in the grip of an illness that tortures a man and deforms him. Hence the change in the voice, hence the covering of the face, hence the sending away of his friends."

"Sir," Diaz said, and his face went a mottled color, "that thing was not my master. My master is a tall man of a fine build, and that was nearer a dwarf. Do you think I do not know where his head comes to in that door. No, sir. And it is the belief of my heart that there was murder done."

Pike was quiet a moment. Then he said, "Oscar, if you tell me that, it becomes my duty to be certain. I shall break that door."

"Ah, Mister Pike," Diaz said, "that is talking."

"Then here is the second question. Who is going to do it."

"Why, you and me, sir."

"That is well said. And whatever comes of it, I will see that you are not the loser by it."

"There is an axe in the theatre," Diaz said. "And you might take the poker out of the kitchen for yourself."

Pike went and got it. It was a heavy iron thing with a blackened end, and he weighed it in his hand and set it against his shoulder.

"Do you know, Oscar, that you and I are about to put ourselves in a position of some danger."

"You may say so, sir, indeed."

"Then it is as well we are frank. That figure you saw among the crates. Did you know it."

"It went so quick, and the thing was so doubled up, that I could hardly swear to it." Diaz looked at the dead fire. "But if you mean, was it Cal Voss, then yes, I think it was. Much the same bigness. The same quick light way with it. And who else had a key to the back door. When it came up out of the crates and went up the stair, it went down my spine like ice. I know that is not evidence, sir. But a man has his feelings."

"I believe you," Pike said. "I believe your master has been killed, and I believe the man who killed him is still in that room. So let us put an end to it tonight. Call the gardener and the boy."

They came, white faced and quick. Pike sent them round the corner to the door in the service lane, with two good sticks. He gave them ten minutes, and then looked at his watch and said, "And now, Oscar, let us get to ours."

They went out into the yard and sat down on two crates in the theatre, out of the wind, with the candle between them, and waited for the ten minutes to run. The two men came back inside eight of them, breathing hard, with nothing to report: the lane door was shut, and the lane was empty, and the thin snow in front of the door had not been walked on by anybody.

The city hummed somewhere off beyond the buildings, and nearer at hand the only sound was a footfall going up and down, up and down, on the floor of the room above.

"So it will walk all day," Diaz whispered, "and the better part of the night. Only when a new sample comes from the chemist is there a break in it. It is an ill conscience that cannot lie down." He was quiet a moment. "Put your heart in your ears and tell me. Is that the doctor's foot."

The steps came down to them light and quick, with a kind of swing to them, and slow, and nothing at all like the heavy tread Pike had heard on that stair a hundred times. Pike listened and did not answer.

"Is there never anything else," he said at last.

Diaz nodded once. "Once I heard it weeping. Like a woman, or like a thing that has lost its way. I went out with that in my ears, and I could have wept myself."

The ten minutes ran out. Diaz took the axe from under the packing straw and set the candle on the near table, and they went out through the side door into the lane and along the wall to the narrow door.

Pike put his mouth to the seam of it. "Adrian," he called, in a loud voice. "I demand to see you."

Nothing.

"I give you fair warning. Our suspicions are raised, and I must see you, and I shall. If not by fair means, then by force."

Then a voice came through the door. "Warren," it said. "For God's sake have mercy."

Pike stood back. He knew that voice as well as he knew his own, and it was not the voice of the man he had known for twenty-six years. He said one word to the man beside him.

"Break it."

Diaz swung the axe over his shoulder and brought it down, and the door jumped in its frame. Behind it a screech went up, thin and animal, all terror and no words. Four times the blow came down, and it was not until the fifth that the lock gave and the wreck of the door fell inward.

They stood back a little, shaken by their own noise and by the silence that came after it, and looked in.

The room was as quiet as a room can be. The fire was glowing to itself, and a kettle sang on the hob, and the papers were squared on the long table, and near the fire the tea things were laid out for one, with the sugar already in the cup.

In the middle of the floor, on the carpet, lay the body of a man, drawn up and twisted, and still moving.

They went to it on their toes and turned it onto its back, and the face that came up into the lamplight was the face of Cal Voss.

The clothes on him were far too big, the collar standing away from the neck and the sleeves hanging past the hands, as if a small thing had been put into a bigger man's suit. In one hand was a small bottle, crushed. Above him hung a smell, sharp and sweet at once, that Pike had met once before in a laboratory and had never wanted to meet again, and he knew without asking what he was looking at.

"We have come too late," he said. "Whether to save or to punish."

He got up and looked round the room and knew there was one more thing to be done, and did not want to say it.

"It remains," he said, "to find the body of your master."

They went over the whole of it: the theatre, the corridor, a few closets, and a cellar under everything. Every closet was empty, and the dust on the doors had been lying there for years; the cellar was full of lumber from the surgeon who had had the house before Hale, and a mat of cobweb came away across the opening like a curtain. Nowhere in the building, dead or alive, was there any trace of Adrian Hale.

Diaz went to the lane door and looked at the flags. "He must be buried in here," he said, and struck the floor with his heel and listened.

"Or he has gone out," Pike said, and looked at the door they had just broken. It stood open where the frame had given, and a key lay on the flags beside it, snapped in two and stained with rust.

"That does not look like use," Pike said.

"Use," Diaz said. "Do you not see, sir, that it is broken. As if a man had stamped on it."

"And the breaks in it are rusty too." They looked at each other. "This is beyond me, Oscar. Let us go back up."

They went back into the room and went over it again. On one table stood heaps of a white salt on glass saucers. "That is the same stuff I was always fetching him," Diaz said, and the kettle boiled over with a hiss. At the fireside the chair was drawn up close and the tea stood ready. A book of devotions lay open, written over between the lines in Hale's hand.

He put it down. In the corner stood a tall glass, turned so that it showed them nothing but the firelight on the ceiling and their own two pale faces. "That glass," Diaz whispered. "He used to sit and look into it by the hour." Pike said nothing. He had been about to say a name, and stopped.

They turned at last to the long table. Above the ordered papers lay a large envelope addressed to Pike in Hale's hand. Inside was a will, in the same odd terms as the one he had made years ago, giving everything, in the event of death or of disappearance for three months, to a single named person. The name in it was no longer Cal Voss. It was Warren Pike.

Pike looked at the paper and then at the body on the floor and then at the paper again.

"My head is going round," he said. "He has had this house all these days. He had no reason to be fond of me. And Adrian did not destroy this. He left it on the top of the pile, where I would find it."

Then a short note, dated, in the same hand. When this came into Pike's hands the writer would have disappeared, under circumstances he could not foresee; the end was certain and would not be long. It asked Pike to read first the account Paul Acker had left in his hands, and then, if he wanted more, the confession of Adrian Hale.

"There is a third thing," Pike said.

"Here, sir." Two envelopes had fallen to the floor. The thicker was sealed in several places and had no name on it. The smaller was in Acker's hand and carried Acker's seal, marked exactly as the one in Pike's own safe, so that it was plain the dying man had written his account twice and left one copy here in trust.

Pike put them both in his inside pocket, with the note and the will.

"I would say nothing of this to anyone," he said. "If your master has fled, or is dead, we can at least save his name. Whatever the will turns out to say, Oscar, this house will not turn you out of it. It is late. I am going home to read these in quiet."

They locked the theatre behind them and went out past the servants, and Pike walked home with the two envelopes flat against his chest inside his coat. He let himself in and sat down at the table where the fire was nearly out, and lit the lamp.

Then he took out the two envelopes and laid them side by side on the cloth, the thick one and the sealed one, and sat for a moment with his hand flat on them, the way another man had once put his hand flat on an envelope and would not take it back.

Acker's was the one to be opened first. That was the order he had been given, twice over, by two men who were both now beyond giving orders. He turned it so the seal came under his thumb, and put the lamp a little nearer, and began.