The Fatal Kiss Mystery Read online

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1924 by Rufus King.

  Copyright renewed in 1952.

  All rights reserved.

  *

  Published by Wildside Press LLC.

  www.wildsidepress.com

  CHAPTER I

  WHAT WAS FOUND IN THE TRUNK, AND A BACKHANDED APOLOGY TO ANY SCIENTIST WHO MAY BE TRAPPED, THROUGH SOME CURIOUS MALEVOLENCE ON THE PART OF FATE, INTO READING THIS NARRATIVE OF HORROR—OR THIS HORRIBLE NARRATIVE, WHICHEVER THE VICTIM MAY WISH

  Hunches, premonitions, second sight, and all that sort of thing, have always appeared to me to belong by right to the province of the weak-minded.

  That was before I bought the trunk.

  If I hadn’t bought the trunk, I would never have come across the amazing document, nor would I have met Billy. To have missed the first would have been a serious loss, not alone to the world, but, I am sure, to its owner’s peace of mind. It is not the sort of document that ought to be left lying about where it might fall into the hands of some unscrupulous person, because the terrible possibilities for evil it contains shock one from their very limitlessness.

  As to not having met Billy, I do not know.

  It is all very well for people to say that contact with youth is good for age. I haven’t the least doubt but that it is. If one looks at it from the point of view that the bulk of things which are good for one are either uncomfortable or unpleasant, then the statement is true. I do not want to give the impression by this that Billy is unpleasant, for he is quite the reverse, and is one of the most attractive young fellows imaginable. But he is decidedly uncomfortable.

  In common with most people who have been intimately connected with some astounding experience, everyday life seems tame in comparison, and Billy is always hoping either that the same experience will be repeated, or else that a more exciting one will take its place. I have spent a good deal of valuable time—I say valuable inasmuch as the commodity is invariably reputed to be so—in trying to argue Billy into settling down and into giving up his expectations of imminent and perilous emotional kicks.

  Just because he happened to have been on hand when the experiment occurred and was closely concerned with its thrilling and almost fatal outcome is no reason, as I have futilely pointed out to him again and again, for expecting anything remotely like it to occur in either a blue or any other peculiarly tinted sort of a moon.

  I have found that another uncomfortable condition of such a state of mind is an insatiable insistence that others be excited, too. There is nothing that youth likes to share quite so much as astonishment. I am personally only too willing to share any amount of it, but I do not like to have to dispense it; and I could tell from the determined manner with which Billy all but unhinged the door to my flat last Sunday morning that I was about to be let in for something or other especially astonishing, and that there would be no escape.

  “Look here, sir,” he said intently, only pausing briefly enough to inspect the popovers on the breakfast tray and to decide that he wanted one, “you’ve got to put this affair into writing. It’s not the sort of thing that should be kept mum. I had a long argument with myself last night, and decided that we should—we must—give an account of it to the world.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t stand up while eating,” I told him. “I haven’t the slightest interest in what it will do to your own stomach, but I have about mine. There is such a thing as sympathetic indigestion, and I don’t want to get it. I once knew a man—”

  “If you would listen for one minute without—”

  “I once knew a man named Zachary Adolphus Beems, through no fault of my own, who caught a very severe attack of the sympathetic brand from his wife. It was just after the good woman herself had had indigestion one morning as a direct punishment for a startling habit she had indulged herself in for years of bouncing spasmodically up from the breakfast table at frequent intervals in order to run to the kitchen and get something. She never gave the poor man the slightest warning as a buffer for the shock of the bounce, but would—”

  “I wish—in fact, I—”

  “Now, my watching you stand up there while you eat that popover, which I suggest you butter, is enough to disrupt the abomasum of a gazelle. The abomasum is the fourth stomach of a ruminant. I’m doubtless wasting my breath in giving you the information, as you probably are well acquainted with the fact already.”

  “I certainly am not, and I don’t believe a word you’ve been saying. You’re making the whole thing up out of your head just to stall me off. Well, it won’t do you any good, because I won’t listen. I’d write the account of this ghastly business myself, if I had the time, but I haven’t and you have. You ought to be glad of the opportunity, instead of flying off the handle like this the minute I open my mouth about it. It will give you something to do. No, I thank you, I do not want any butter.”

  This was deliberately implied slander. I have plenty of things to do—so many that I scarcely know from day to day whether or not I can get them done. I couldn’t say offhand just what they are, but they keep popping up every instant or so and demand attention. The fact that they never get any has nothing to do with it; the things are there to be done, and if I wanted to I would do them.

  “Granting,” I said cautiously—one has to go cautiously when talking with Billy, as he has an extravagant aptitude for seizing an inch and making it an ell—“that I were temporarily to become bereft of my senses and write an account of the affair as you suggest, and which I tell you flatly I won’t, have you paused at all to consider the effect on our semi-barbaric civilization were such a discovery to be loosed upon the world?”

  “Yes,” said Billy, with a disturbing wholeheartedness, “and that is exactly why you must write it.”

  I failed to see his point and told him so. I even went so far, in my folly, as to ask for enlightenment.

  “It is this way, sir: the terrible thing that happened to Ramier and Drusilla and me is just as important historically as, well, the Flood, or any other great news even in the earth’s history. Now this is the point I want to make—just as there was an historian for the Flood, there ought to be one for this. I wonder—”

  “But look here—”

  “I wonder if you would mind ringing for more popovers? You might suggest some broiled kidneys and another pot of coffee while you’re about it. I’ve already had my breakfast, but I can’t stand up here like this and watch you eat with out feeling hungry.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” I said hopefully. “If you will only sit down, I’ll order up anything you like. And I yet don’t see that one word of all you’ve been talking about goes to prove that I am peculiarly fit for writing up your adventure.”

  “You will. You just said yourself that it would be a dangerous thing for Ramier’s discovery to be loosed upon the world. Well, I agree with you.”

  “I am very glad that you do, as it closes the whole question, and we need say nothing more about it.”

  I hastened to change the subject and fle
d to the opening up of what I hoped would grow into a heated discussion on baseball—a theme that I have found will hold Billy enthralled for hours and hours at a time. “Now, my personal opinion of the Babe is that—”

  “It closed nothing. And I haven’t the time now to discuss baseball players. To go back to the Flood—”

  “Look here, young man, I have read numerous outlines of history. If you think for a single minute I’ll not only be browbeaten into having such shreds of digestive apparatus as—”

  “I do wish you wouldn’t interrupt me. You know very well what I mean. The man who wrote up the Flood covered it exclusively from its pictorial angle. In fact, I shouldn’t wonder but that he could get a job today as a star reporter on the tabs. Anyone can see it didn’t interest him a bit as a problem in physics in their relation to the elements, and he was evidently just as unable to explain scientifically the cause for such a whale of a bunch of water as is the Man in the Moon. Just the same, he made a good story out of it, and an important one, too, in the world’s history.”

  “I still don’t see—”

  “Well, it will be the same way with you. Your handling of this adventure will be exclusively dramatic, and whatever scientific data you may have to bring in will be quite unintelligible and probably wrong. I doubt whether the smartest and most acute scientist in the country will be able to follow your account and then reproduce Ramier’s experiment. Really, sir, you are the ideal man for the job.”

  “If you think,” I said indignantly, “that I am going to sit here and supply you with broiled kidneys and popovers while you stand up there and spend your time, between swallows, in insulting me to my face—”

  “I do wish you would stop flying off on a tangent like this, sir. You know as well as I do that I wouldn’t dream of insulting you either to your face or behind it. Besides, I haven’t all morning to waste. I am due in an hour, or less, to take Jennie to church, and if I don’t see you properly started at your desk before I go, I’m pretty certain you will fritter away the whole afternoon without doing a lick, and this affair has been kept from the public long enough.”

  “How would it be if we were to hire some perfectly good writer to do it?” I suggested weakly. “I’m sure there are any number of them who would jump at the chance. If one can believe half the things that are said about authors, and I more than suspect that one can, they are always in a state of being desperate about something or other, generally about food. I imagine we could find a good, honest, capable one with an authentic wife and a few starving children who would look upon the commission as a blessing conferred directly by Providence. My own viewpoint of the matter is a perfect antithesis. We could then put out a very private edition of four copies and everybody would die happy.”

  “Nobody would be happy at all,” said Billy, with confident belligerence, inasmuch as he had just caught sight from the tail of his eye of Hopkins coming into the room with a tray, on which were the broiled kidneys and popovers. “This story has got to be scattered to all parts of the land so that everyone may know what happened.”

  “If you multiplied Rockefeller’s fortune by four and then added the combined wealth of the Shah of Persia and Henry Ford, you would begin to approach the cost of scattering any story to all parts of any land. As for my own modest millions—”

  It won t cost you a cent, and I don’t believe you have millions, anyhow, because, after you have finished writing it, you can persuade one of the editors you know to print it.”

  “There you go too far. I might write it,” I said, “but I am certain that no power on earth could budge any self-respecting editor—and Heaven knows they’re all that—into publishing it.”

  Billy caught the inch on the bound and at once proceeded to ell it.

  “Well, so long as you have decided to write it—I have your word for that—we needn’t worry about getting it published until you are through.”

  “You haven’t my word at all. I’ve nothing but my words, and there’s a big difference between the two.”

  “That is a quibble. I can’t tell you how greatly you have relieved my mind. I should have worried about it all during church if you hadn’t agreed, and if there is one thing Jennie doesn’t like me to do it’s to look abstracted during the service. I’ll just polish off these kidneys and then run along. If you’ve no objections, I’ll stop in this evening and check up on how far you’ve gone. I’ll stop in anyway. You ought to have a couple of chapters done, at the least.”

  As I say, if I hadn’t bought the trunk and so chanced upon the document, I would have been spared not alone this interview with its dangerous potential toward sympathetic indigestion, but would not now be involved with writing this account at all.

  To begin with, I bought the trunk because of an irresistible passion I have had since childhood for examining the contents of anything that is unknown and locked. It was offered for sale during an auction of unclaimed goods held by the Warden Warehouse Company, where I had gone to bid on a peculiarly interesting Daghestan carpet. The sale of the trunk immediately preceded that of the carpet. It was going for the ridiculous price of fifty cents. It seemed little enough to satisfy my overmastering curiosity as to what it might contain, so I impulsively raised a catalogue, and the trunk was knocked down to me for seventy-five.

  It held, among other things, the fatal document.

  The value of the document struck me at once, for the facts that it dealt with were so stupendous that I knew it would be a constant source of menace to have the papers left lying around; nor did I feel that I had a right to destroy them, or I should have done so. I immediately made every effort to get in touch with the document’s owner by means of inserting advertisements in all the leading newspapers throughout the country. It was an expensive and fairly lengthy business, but my tireless quest was eventually rewarded

  From a certain little place in the West, the name of which I shall not disclose—as Ramier has emphatically stated that he positively will not be bothered with interviewing reporters or turning his sitting room into a salon for scientists—came an answer in the form of a letter that was personally delivered to me by an attractive young stranger named Billy Preston. It developed that another young man, called Ramier Bellmy, who had written the letter, was the owner of the document and had sent Billy East to get it.

  Like most geniuses, Ramier is very absent-minded and had been racking his brains for upwards of a year in trying to remember just what he had done with his important data.

  I could well understand this after I had met him, and had come to know him better, as well as from many pertinent sidelights that Drusilla and Billy shed upon his character during the exhaustive accounts they gave me of the complete adventure.

  There is no doubt but that Billy’s insistence alone would never have been enough to persuade me to tackle the job of writing this report, and I believe he suspected as much, for when he returned that Sunday evening he brought Jennie with him.

  Jennie is Billy’s wife and, in common with Drusilla, is one of the most charming and lovely girls I know. They have been married a year, and when she saw that reason or entreaties had failed to move me from my determination not to put pen to paper, she took me aside and, running a finger over my hair, which is beginning to turn gray, whispered the secret that the reason she really wanted me to write the story was not because of its value or interest to the world at large, but that she might have a record to keep for Billy Junior or Jennie Junior—as the case might be.

  I kissed, her for the second time in my life—the first was at her wedding—and promised that Billy Junior or Jennie Junior would have the account in print if I had to threaten with letters of introduction every editor in the city whom I knew.

  All of which explains how this narrative came into being. And now to our muttons.

  CHAPTER II

  DEALING WITH CERTAIN CASUAL EXPLOSIONS BOTH WITHIN THE FIELDS OF CHEMISTRY AND WITHIN THE OBSCURER PASTURAGES OF THE HUMAN HEART

  T
hat the idea should have originated in five corks with needles stuck through them, and a bar magnet, has never failed to strike me as being absurd, even though the fact is in harmony with the origin of most great discoveries.

  Witness, if you wish, Newton and his apple. Surely nothing could have been more absurd, or annoying, than that little commedia dell’ arte and yet from it sprang, with great éclat, the laws of gravitation.

  It is perfectly true that gravitation was doing a rushing business for many millions of years before Newton had his impromptu rendezvous with the Early Greening, and that people were no more able to hang suspended in air than they are today, but the point is this: until Newton came along, nobody had told them why it was they couldn’t hang suspended in air, nor had anyone made a lot of laws about it.

  I cannot see that Newton’s act has done any harm, or any good either, to nature or to mankind. On the other hand, if he had gone a step further and had told people how they could overcome the laws that he had originated, I could see an inestimable amount of gain.

  There are any number of situations in life when it would be pleasant to possess the ability to hang suspended in air. For instance, if the woman sitting in front of you at the theater insisted upon keeping a hat with feathers sticking out from it on her head, one could then just push up from the seat and remain in a state of suspension at a level where one’s eyes just surmounted the peak of the obstacle and so see the play. You can imagine for yourself what a crimp it would put in the pastime of lynching.

  Now, Ramier Bellmy went Newton one better, as we shall see.

  Bramwell, the university that Ramier attended, is coeducational, and the fact is directly responsible for his having met Drusilla Duveen. Knowing Drusilla as I now do, I cannot blame Ramier for having fallen in love with her on sight—even though he did fail to tabulate the confused state of his feelings for some time to come.

  On the other hand, I do wonder very much at Drusilla’s having fallen in love with Ramier. If one ignores, as no woman will, his obvious physical attractiveness—I can confidently state that I have never beheld such an engagingly built and well-modeled young animal as himself, no, not even in the physical culture ads, where junior Herculeses rather impudently ask one if one is a man and what one proposes to do about it—there must have been at the least a ten-months’ stretch of impossibleness on his part that led up to the moment of his staggering experiment.