The Last Night

Six days later, a little after nine in the evening, Manny Reyes came to Vane's apartment.

He had been with Kessler for twenty-eight years. He was a careful, cheerful, churchgoing man of about sixty who ran a house of five employees and had never once, in Vane's hearing, raised his voice. He came in and stood in the doorway with his coat still on and Vane did not recognize him.

“Mr. Vane,” he said. “There is something very wrong.”

“Sit down. Let me get you a drink.”

“You know how he shuts himself up,” said Reyes, not sitting down. “He's shut up again, in the cabinet, and I don't like it. I'm afraid.”

“Afraid of what? Be specific, Manny.”

“I've been afraid about a week,” said Reyes, “and I can't carry it any more.”

He sat, finally, and left the glass on his knee and looked at the floor. “I think there has been foul play.”

“Foul play?”

“I won't say it. Come with me and see for yourself.”

Vane got his coat. Reyes's relief was so enormous, so disproportionate, that Vane was frightened before he was out of the building.

They walked to Cambridge on a wild, cold March night, with a low moon and clouds going across it fast and the wind coming down the avenues hard enough to make conversation work. The streets were empty — emptier, Vane was sure, than he had ever seen them. He found that he wanted, with a physical craving, to see other people, to be among strangers, to be anywhere there were twenty human beings. They reached the house, and Reyes let them in with a chain on the door, and in the hall they found the entire staff: the cook, the two housekeepers, the driver, all of them standing together in the bright light of a fire built up high, as close as a flock of sheep.

The cook saw Vane and burst out, “Thank God, thank God, it's Mr. Vane,” and started toward him with her arms out. The younger housekeeper had begun to cry.

“What is this?” said Vane. “All of you? This is very unseemly. Your employer would be extremely displeased.”

“They're frightened,” said Reyes.

Nobody contradicted him. The young woman cried harder, and Reyes turned on her with a ferocity that Vane had not known he had, and she stopped, and everyone in the room looked at once toward the inner door, and then looked away.

“Get me a candle,” said Reyes to the driver. “We'll get this done with now.”

He asked Vane to come with him, and led him out through the back garden.

“Now, sir, walk quietly. I want you to hear what I hear, and I don't want him to hear you. And if he asks you in—” He stopped. “Don't go in.”

They crossed the wet yard and went in through the laboratory, past the racks and the crates, to the foot of the narrow stair. Here Reyes set the candle down on a table and turned to him.

“Wait here,” he said, and went up. He knocked on the red felt door with a hand he could not keep steady.

“Mr. Vane is asking to see you, sir.”

A voice answered from inside. It said, complainingly: “Tell him I can't see anyone.”

Reyes thanked him — actually thanked him — and came back down and picked up the candle and led Vane back across the yard, in silence, to the big kitchen, where the fire had gone out and the beetles were crossing the tiles.

“Sir,” he said, and looked Vane full in the face for the first time that night. “Was that my master's voice?”

“It seemed changed,” said Vane. He was very pale.

“Changed.” Reyes nodded slowly. “I've been twenty-eight years in this man's house. Do you think I don't know his voice? No, sir. He was made away with eight days ago, when we heard him cry out. And whoever is in that room instead of him, and whatever it's doing in there, is a thing that cries out to Heaven.”

“That is a wild story, Manny.”

“Then come and prove it's wild. All this week that — that thing in there has been crying for a chemical, night and day, and it can't be got. It's been his way to write orders and push them under the door. That's all we've had — paper, and a locked door, and his meals left on the stair to be sneaked in when nobody's looking. Every day, twice a day, three times a day, orders and complaints, and I've been running all over Boston to wholesale suppliers. And every time I bring something back, there's another note telling me to take it back and try somebody else. It's not pure enough for him. He wants it bad, sir. Desperate bad.”

“Do you have the notes?”

Reyes took a crumpled sheet out of his pocket. It was Kessler's handwriting; Vane knew it the way he knew his own. It said that the last sample was impure and quite useless for his present purpose; that in the year 2016 he had bought a considerable quantity of the salt from this supplier; that they were to search their own stores with the greatest possible care and send him whatever remained of that batch; that expense was no consideration; and that the importance of this to the writer could hardly be exaggerated.

Then the pen had come down through the paper. And across the bottom of it, in a hand that was no longer a physician's hand at all:

For the love of God, find me some of the old.

“How did you come by this open?”

“The man at the supplier got angry and threw it back at me like it was garbage.”

“This is his handwriting, you understand that.”

“I thought it looked like it.” Reyes was quiet a moment. Then he said, “But what does handwriting matter? I've seen him.”

“Go on.”

“It was this way. I came into the lab suddenly from the garden. The cabinet door was open and he was at the far end, digging in the crates — I suppose looking for this stuff himself. He looked up when I came in, gave a kind of a cry, and ran up the stairs. It was one second, one second, but my hair stood up. Sir, if that was my master — why did he have a mask on? If that was my master, why did he cry out like an animal and run from me?”

Vane stood there in the cold kitchen and did the thing he did better than any man in Boston: he tried to make a story that would hold.

“There may be an explanation,” he said slowly. “Your master has a condition — I don't know which one, but a disease that torments a man and disfigures him. That accounts for the voice. It accounts for the mask, and for hiding from his friends, and for wanting this drug so badly, because it is the one hope he has left. It's sad, Manny. It's appalling. But it holds together.”

“Sir,” said Reyes, and his color went strange. “That thing was not my master. My master is a tall man. That was a small one. Do you think I don't know where my master's head comes to on that doorframe? I have seen it every morning of my life. That was not him. I believe there was murder done in this house, and I want you to come up with me and see.”

Vane was silent for a moment. Then he said: “If you say that, then it's my duty to find out. And I'm going to break that door.”

“Now you're talking, sir.”

“Who's going to do it?”

“You and me,” said Reyes.

“Very well. And whatever comes of it, I'll see you're not the loser by it.”

“There's an axe in the lab,” said Reyes, “and you could take the kitchen poker.”

Vane picked the poker up and weighed it in his hand.

“Manny,” he said. “You know that you and I are about to put ourselves in a certain amount of danger.”

“I'd say so, sir, yes.”

“Then let's be frank with each other. This masked figure you saw. Did you know it?”

“It went so quick, and it was so doubled up.” Reyes's hands were working at his sides. “But if you're asking, was it Mr. Voss — yes. I think it was Mr. Voss. It was the same smallness. It was the same quick light way with it. And who else could have come in through the lab door? You haven't forgotten, sir, he still had the key. And there's more. Did you ever meet Mr. Voss?”

“Once.”

“Then you know what the rest of us know. There was something about that man that gave you a turn in your stomach and cold in your spine.” Reyes wiped his face. “When that little masked thing came out from behind the chemicals and went up those stairs, it went down my back like ice water. I know it's not evidence. I'm not a fool. But I'd swear on my mother's grave it was him.”

“I believe you,” said Vane. It was true. He had believed it since October. “I believe my friend is dead, and I believe the man who killed him is still in that room, and I would rather see that with my own eyes than explain it to a judge. Call the driver in.”

He gave the driver his instructions — to take his post by the lab door with a stick, in case anything came out that way — and gave him ten minutes. Then he and Reyes went out into the yard, and it was fully dark now.

They sat in the lab and waited. Somewhere out over the city, the low undifferentiated hum of a hundred thousand people went on. Close at hand there was only one sound: footsteps, going up and down, up and down, along the floor of the cabinet above them.

“It walks like that all day, sir,” whispered Reyes. “And most of the night. Only when a sample comes from the supplier does it stop for a while. That's an ill conscience that can't sit still. There's blood in every step of it.” He was quiet, listening. “Hark. Closer. Put your heart in your ears, Mr. Vane, and tell me: is that the doctor's step?”

It was light, and fast, and somehow swinging, for all that it was slow. It was not the heavy tread of Adrian Kessler.

“Is there never anything else?” asked Vane.

“Once,” said Reyes. “Once I heard it crying.”

“Crying?”

“Crying like a woman, or like somebody lost,” said Reyes. “I came away with that on my heart, and I could have cried myself.”

The ten minutes ended. Reyes took the axe out from under the packing straw. They went up the stairs together, with the candle set behind them on the table to light them, and the footsteps still going up and down, up and down on the other side of the door.

Vane put his mouth near the felt and said, loudly: “Adrian. I'm coming in.”

Nothing.

“I'm giving you fair warning. We have our suspicions and I am going to see you; if not with your consent, then without it.”

Then, through the door, in a voice soaked in terror: “Howard — for God's sake, have mercy.”

Vane straightened up. “That is not Kessler,” he said. “That is Voss. Take the door, Manny.”

Reyes swung the axe. The first blow shook the whole building and the door jumped in its frame. Something inside screamed — an animal scream, without words. He swung again. Three times, four times; the door was old and the work was good. On the fifth blow the lock burst and the wreck of it fell in onto the carpet, and the two men stood back, appalled by their own noise and by the silence that came down after it, and looked in.

The room was the quietest room in the world. The fire was burning, chattering to itself; the kettle was singing on the hob; two drawers were open; papers were laid out in their neat bundles on the desk; and near the fire, the things were set out for tea — cup, saucer, sugar already in the cup, waiting for someone.

In the middle of the floor lay a man's body, badly contorted, still twitching.

They went in on tiptoe and turned it over. It was Calvin Voss.

He was dressed in clothes enormously too large for him — Kessler's clothes, bought for a much taller man — and the cords of his face were still moving with a horrible semblance of life. Between his fingers was a plastic capsule, crushed by the weight of the dying hand, and the room smelled of bitter almonds, and Howard Vane had been in enough sudden deaths to know that he was looking at a suicide.

“We've come too late,” he said, “whether to save him or to punish him. Voss has answered for Voss. Now we have to find your master.”

They searched the building and found nothing — no room, no closet, no cellar that had not been shut for years, and no trace of Adrian Kessler anywhere, living or dead.

Reyes stamped on the floor of the corridor, listening. “He must be under here,” he said.

“Or he's gone,” said Vane, and went to the street door. It was locked from the inside. On the floor beside it lay a key — a small one, the kind that fits a back door — broken in half, and both pieces were rusted.

Vane turned it over with the toe of his shoe.

“This hasn't been used in a long time,” he said.

“Used!” said Reyes. “Sir, look at it — it's broken. Like somebody put his heel on it.”

“And the break is rusty, too,” said Vane. “Which means it was broken and left here a long time ago.”

The two men looked at each other.

Vane would work at this for a long time afterwards, with the two halves of the key on a sheet of paper in front of him, and get nowhere. In the autumn a man he trusted had told him, on a Sunday walk, that Voss had used this key within the fortnight. Either Ray had been wrong about what he saw across a dark street, or somebody had been opening that door with a key that had no business in it.

They went back up. On the desk in the cabinet were the traces of an interrupted experiment: measured heaps of a white crystalline salt laid out on glass saucers, the way a man lays out a dose he intends to take.

“That's the same stuff I've been running all over the city for,” said Reyes. And as he spoke, the kettle behind them boiled over with a startling hiss.

That brought them to the fire, where the armchair had been pulled up close, opposite the coffee table and the waiting tea. There were books on a shelf beside it. One lay open on the arm of the chair, and Vane, looking at it out of nothing but habit, was astonished to find that it was a devotional book — the kind of thing a man keeps on a shelf for thirty years and never opens — covered in annotations in Kessler's own hand, and the annotations were not devotional. They had gone past blasphemy into something that had no name, and they were written in a hand that shook.

Then they came to the tall mirror.

It was a dressing mirror on a wooden stand, in the middle of a room that had no reason to own one: full-length, silvered at the edges, angled to catch whatever stood in the middle of the floor. Vane looked into it and saw the fire reflected, and the glass fronts of the cabinets, and his own pale face and Reyes's behind him.

“This glass has seen some things,” said Reyes quietly.

“Not stranger than itself,” said Vane. And then, because he was tired and frightened, he said, “What did Adrian”— he caught his breath, and corrected himself— “what would a man want with a thing like this in here?”

They turned, at last, to the desk.

On top of the neat stacks of paper lay a large envelope with his own name on it in Kessler's writing. Vane opened it, and several documents slid out onto the table.

The first was a will — a new one, drawn in the same terms as the old, death and disappearance, with the same three-month clause, everything to the same single beneficiary.

He read the beneficiary's name twice, and then a third time, and then sat down.

It was Howard Vane.

He looked at Reyes, and then at the papers, and then at the small dead man on the carpet.

“He has been in possession of this room all week,” said Vane. “He had no reason to like me. He must have been enraged to find himself replaced on a piece of paper by an attorney. And he did not destroy it.”

He picked up the second sheet. It was a note from Kessler, in Kessler's hand, dated that same day.

“He was alive today,” said Vane, and his voice came out wrong. He put the sheet down and picked it up again. “He was alive and in this house today. Which means this is not what it looks like, because a man who was writing at noon is not a man who has been a week dead, and that note is in his hand — I have read that hand for thirty years, and it is steady, and a dead man's hand is not steady.” He looked at the body on the carpet. “So either the man on this floor is not my friend, or the hand that wrote at noon is not the hand that died. Manny, I am not going to be able to stand in front of an officer and call this a suicide.”

“Read it, sir,” said Reyes.

“I'm afraid to,” said Vane.

He read it.

My dear Howard, — When this comes into your hands I will have disappeared. Under what circumstances I cannot foresee, but everything in my situation tells me the end is certain and close. Go first to what Nora Aldiss left you. And if you want the rest of the answer, go on to my own statement, which is with it.

Your unworthy and unhappy friend, A. K.

There was a third enclosure, a thick sealed packet. Vane put it in his inside pocket.

“We'll say nothing about any of this yet,” he said. “If he has fled, or if he is dead, we can at least save his name. Go back to the others and keep them calm. I'll be back before midnight.”

He was at the door when he turned around. “One more thing, Manny. Whoever is on that floor is to be buried properly, under whatever name the police give him, and paid for out of my own account. I promised your master I would see that he got what was his, and this is what is left of it.”

He was back before midnight, and they sent for the police, and the police did everything Ruiz had promised in October: the flyers, the reward, the bank watched for eight weeks at both ends of the day. Nothing came of any of it. In April the file on Calvin Voss was closed. The two documents from the cabinet were where Vane had put them, in the safe behind the wall in his office, and he never gave them up, and he never once explained to anybody why. In October he had believed in the machinery — the flyers, the reward, a file that fills up until it arrives somewhere. The file closed in April. What Vane learned from that year was that the machinery does not arrive anywhere; that a man who wants an ending has to make one himself, out of the materials in the room.

He walked home the long way, along the river, and at a few minutes before eleven he sat down at his own desk, broke Nora Aldiss's seal, and read the last thing she ever wrote.