The Search for Rook

That evening Corbin came home to his house in Clarksville in sombre spirits and sat down to dinner without relish. It was his custom of a Sunday, when the meal was over, to sit close by the fire with a volume of some dry legal commentary until midnight, when he would go soberly and gratefully to bed. On this night, as soon as the table was cleared, he took a key from his pocket and went into his study. He opened the safe behind the bookshelf, took from the most private part of it a document endorsed in his own hand with the words "Vane Trust, current," and sat down with a clouded brow to study its contents.

The document was not the one he had refused to draw. That one had been holographic, written out by Vane himself on his own machine and witnessed by two employees of the research institute, and Corbin had taken it apart clause by clause until Vane had told him, gently, to stop. "You are my lawyer, Elias, not my conscience," Vane had said. "I know which of you I can spare."

The document in Corbin's safe was the trust instrument that had replaced the will, because Vane had wanted his affairs arranged so that in the event of his death, or of his disappearance or unexplained absence for any period exceeding three calendar months, everything he owned would pass without delay to his friend and beneficiary, Silas Rook. The instrument provided for the payment of a few small sums to members of Vane's household, and for the rest it was all Rook. Corbin had told him it was an invitation to a kidnapper. Vane had laughed.

Corbin had never seen Rook. That was what had swelled his indignation; now, by a sudden turn, it was his knowledge. It was already bad enough when the name was but a name of which he could learn no more. It was worse when it began to be clothed upon with detestable attributes; and out of the shifting, insubstantial mists that had so long baffled his eye, there leaped up the sudden, definite presentment of a fiend.

"I thought it was madness," he said, as he replaced the obnoxious paper in the safe, "and now I begin to fear it is disgrace."

He put on his coat and walked across town to the house of Dr. Emilio Salazar. Salazar was an old school friend, a hearty, dapper man of fifty-eight with a shock of hair prematurely white, who ran the internal medicine wing at the university hospital. If anyone knew anything, it would be Salazar.

The housekeeper knew Corbin and welcomed him. Salazar was sitting alone over his wine and sprang up at the sight of his visitor, welcoming him with both hands. They were old friends, old mates both at school and college, and men who thoroughly enjoyed each other's company. After a little rambling talk, Corbin led up to the subject that so disagreeably preoccupied his mind.

"I suppose, Emilio," he said, "you and I must be the two oldest friends that Roland Vane has?"

"I wish the friends were younger," chuckled Salazar. "But I suppose we are. And what of that? I see little of him now."

"Indeed," said Corbin. "I thought you had a bond of common interest."

"We had," was the reply. "But it is more than ten years since Roland became too fanciful for me. He began to go wrong, wrong in mind; and though of course I continue to take an interest in him for old sake's sake, I see devilish little of the man. Such unscientific balderdash," added the doctor, flushing suddenly purple, "would have estranged Damon and Pythias."

"They have only differed on some point of science," Corbin thought, and being a man of no scientific passions, he even added, "It is nothing worse than that."

"Did you ever come across a protégé of his," he asked, "one Rook?"

"Rook?" repeated Salazar. "No. Never heard of him. Since my time."

That was the amount of information Corbin carried home with him, and he carried it badly. He lay awake for hours, and when he slept he dreamed. He dreamed of a nocturnal city, and of the figure of a man walking swiftly, and of a child running, and then these met, and the man trod the child down and passed on regardless of her screams. Or else he saw a room in a rich house, where his friend lay asleep, dreaming and smiling at his dreams, and the door of that room was opened and the sleeper recalled, and there stood by his side a figure to whom power was given, and even at that dead hour he must rise and do its bidding. The figure in these two phases haunted the lawyer all night, and still it had no face by which he might know it. And thus there sprang up in his mind a singularly strong, almost an inordinate, curiosity to behold the features of the real Silas Rook. If he could but once set eyes on him, he thought, the mystery would lighten and perhaps roll altogether away. At least it would be a face worth seeing: the face of a man who was without bowels of mercy.

From that time forward, Corbin began to haunt the door on Cherry Lane. In the morning before office hours, at noon when business was plenty and time scarce, at night under the face of the city's red sky, the lawyer was to be found on his chosen post. "If he be Rook," he had thought, "I shall be Mr. Seek."

His patience was rewarded on a fine dry night in December. It was about ten o'clock, the lane was empty and still, and small sounds carried far. Corbin had been some minutes at his post when he became aware of an odd light footstep drawing near, a footfall that sprang out distinct from the distant hum of the city. He withdrew into the entry of a loading dock.

The steps drew swiftly nearer. The lawyer, looking forth, could soon see what manner of man he had to deal with. He was small and very plainly dressed, and the look of him, even at that distance, went somehow strongly against the watcher's inclination. He made straight for the door, crossing the roadway to save time, and as he came he raised his hand to the keypad like one approaching home.

Corbin stepped out and touched him on the shoulder as he passed. "Mr. Rook, I think?"

The man shrank back with a hissing intake of the breath. But his fear was only momentary; and though he did not look the lawyer in the face, he answered coolly enough. "That is my name. What do you want?"

"I see you are going in," said Corbin. "I am an old friend of Dr. Vane's, Elias Corbin of Congress Avenue. You must have heard of my name; and meeting you so conveniently, I thought you might admit me."

"You will not find Dr. Vane; he is from home," replied Rook. And then suddenly, but still without looking up, "How did you know me?"

"On your side," said Corbin, "will you do me a favor?"

"With pleasure," replied the other. "What shall it be?"

"Will you let me see your face?"

Rook appeared to hesitate, and then, as if upon some sudden reflection, fronted about with an air of defiance; and the pair stared at each other pretty fixedly for a few seconds. "Now I shall know you again," said Corbin. "It may be useful."

"Yes," returned Rook, "it is as well we have met; and, by the way, you should have my address." And he gave a number on a street in the old industrial flats east of the river, easily, the way a man gives an address he does not expect to be followed to.

"Good God," thought Corbin, "can he, too, have been thinking of the trust?" But he kept his feelings to himself and only grunted in acknowledgment of the address.

"And now," said the other, "how did you know me?"

"By description," was the reply.

"Whose description?"

"We have common friends," said Corbin.

"Common friends," echoed Rook, a little hoarsely. "Who are they?"

"Vane, for instance," said the lawyer.

"He never told you," cried Rook, with a flush of anger. "I did not think you would have lied."

"Come," said Corbin, "that is not fitting language."

The other snarled aloud into a savage laugh; and the next moment, with extraordinary quickness, he had keyed the code and disappeared through the door.

The lawyer stood a while when Rook had left him, the picture of disquietude. The man was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice. All these were points against him, but not all of these together could explain the disgust, loathing and fear with which Corbin regarded him. "There must be something else," said the perplexed gentleman. "There is something more, if I could find a name for it. The man seems hardly human. Something troglodytic, shall we say? Or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through and transfigures its clay continent? The last, I think; for, O my poor old Roly Vane, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend."

Around the corner from the lane, on the street that fronted the warehouse, was Vane's house, a large modern house that had been built into the shell of the old warehouse's front offices. It was a strange arrangement, the research floor and the living floor sharing one roof, but Vane had always been proud of it. The front door was opened by Marcus Dodd, Vane's lab manager and factotum, a thin, gray man of fifty-five who had worked for Vane for twenty years.

"Is Dr. Vane at home, Dodd?" asked Corbin.

"I will see, Mr. Corbin," said Dodd, admitting the visitor into a large, comfortable hall with a bright gas fire and costly cabinets of oak. "Will you wait here by the fire, sir? Or shall I give you a light in the dining room?"

"Here, thank you," said the lawyer, and he drew near and leaned on the tall fender. This hall was a pet fancy of his friend's, and Corbin himself was wont to speak of it as the pleasantest room in town. But tonight there was a shudder in his blood; the face of Rook sat heavy on his memory; he felt, what was rare with him, a nausea and distaste of life; and in the gloom of his spirits he seemed to read a menace in the flickering of the firelight on the polished cabinets and the uneasy starting of the shadow on the roof. He was ashamed of his relief when Dodd presently returned to announce that Dr. Vane was gone out.

"I saw Mr. Rook go in by the lane door, Dodd," he said. "Is that right, when Dr. Vane is from home?"

"Quite right, Mr. Corbin," replied the man. "Mr. Rook has the code."

"Your master seems to repose a great deal of trust in that young man, Dodd."

"Yes, sir, he does indeed," said Dodd. "We have all orders to obey him."

"I do not think I ever met Mr. Rook?" asked Corbin.

"O, dear no, sir. He never dines here," replied Dodd. "Indeed we see very little of him on this side of the house; he mostly comes and goes by the laboratory."

"Well, good-night, Dodd."

"Good-night, Mr. Corbin."

And the lawyer set out homeward with a very heavy heart. "Poor Roly Vane," he thought, "my mind misgives me he is in deep waters. He was wild when he was young, a long while ago to be sure; but in the law of God there is no statute of limitations. Ah, it must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace: punishment coming years after memory has forgotten and self-love condoned the fault."

And the lawyer, scared by the thought, brooded awhile on his own past, groping in all the corners of memory, lest by chance some Jack-in-the-Box of an old iniquity should leap to light there. His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into a sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing yet avoided. And then, by a return on his former subject, he conceived a spark of hope. "This Master Rook, if he were studied," thought he, "must have secrets of his own; black secrets, by the look of him; secrets compared to which poor Vane's worst would be like sunshine. Things cannot continue as they are. It turns me cold to think of this creature stealing like a thief to Roly's bedside. Poor Roly, what a wakening! And the danger of it; for if this Rook suspects the existence of the trust, he may grow impatient to inherit. Ah, I must put my shoulder to the wheel, if Vane will but let me." For once more he saw before his mind's eye, as clear as transparency, the strange clauses of the instrument.