Page:Weird Tales v01n03 (1923-05).djvu/83

82 attacked me—" with one of his chilling laughs—"I can only say that I think you are a poor damned fool."

"There are times that I think the same thing," replied Peret, seriously; "but this is not one of them. I not only think that the Thing was a bat—I know it. And to prove to you how futile it is for you to pretend ignorance of the Thing, and of your own identity, let me reenact in words the tragedy that ended in the death of two good and innocent men."

"Do so," gritted Deweese, his cold blue eyes glittering. "But if you think you can convince me that the Thing that attacked me was a bat—"

"As I have already stated," said Peret, fixing his gaze on the unwavering eyes of the artist, "the murder of M. Berjet was conceived after you learned that Adolphe had been killed. You deemed it necessary to your own safety. Having completed your diabolical plans, therefore, you lost no time in calling at the scientist's home. Upon reaching your destination, you entered the house by way of the front door, which you found unlocked. The door of the library or sitting-room, on the other hand, was secured.

"You therefore placed a chair in front of the door to stand on and opened the transom over the door. After tying a handkerchief over your mouth and nostrils, you raised the cover of a little box you had brought with you and released a bat in the room. Then you closed the transom and departed from the house as silently as you had entered it.

"The bat proved to be a faithful ally, Monsieur. On little rubber pads that you had glued on the upper side of its wings was a preparation used by the Dyaks to poison the tips of their arrows and spears. The preparation, which you used in powdered form, with a few added ingredients of your own, as employed by the Dyaks, consists of a paste made from the milky sap of the upas tree; dissolved in a juice extracted from the tuba root. With one possible exception, it is the most deadly poison known, a minute quantity, breathed in through the nostrils or absorbed into the system through an abrasion on the skin, causing almost instant death.

"When you released the bat in the library, it began to circle around the room and its fluttering wings scattered the powder and poisoned the air to such an extent that poor Berjet had only time, before he died, to realize the significance of the bat’s presence in the room and to leap through the window in a vain effort to save himself.

"You, in the meantime, had walked slowly down the street, and when the scientist catapulted himself through the window-sash, you were calmly lighting a cigarette under the corner lamp post half a block away. The complication was one you doubtless had not anticipated; you had thoughthought [sic] that Berjet would die an instant death when he got a whiff of the powder.

"Nevertheless, you had nothing to fear, you thought; you had laid your plans too carefully. Like any innocent pedestrian would be expected to do, therefore, you ran back down the street, determined to be in at the finish, to see your work well done.

"All this time the bat—whose mouth and nostrils, by the way, you had protected with a tiny gauze mask from which the creature could eventually free itself—was no doubt flying around and around, trying to find egress from the room. It was while you were standing on the pavement in front of the house, talking with Sprague and Greenleigh, that the bat discovered the broken window-sash and escaped into the open air.

"As it winged its way aimlessly over the sidewalk, it flew close enough to Sprague to scatter some of the powder in his face, and an instant later, continuing its flight, it passed in front of you.

"Dr. Sprague inhaled a fatal amount of the powder, but you breathed in only enough to throw you into a kind of convulsion. The struggles of both you and the physician to get your breath and otherwise to overcome the seizure made it appear that you were grappling with an invisible antagonist. Sprague succumbed almost instantly; but you, after a brief struggle, recovered, and in order to throw me off the track, as you believed, cleverly conceived the 'invisible monster.'

"Nor did you have to draw much upon your imagination for the 'whispering sound' and the 'icy breathing' of the unholy creature of your mind. The whir of the bat's wings as it flew past you made a sound not unlike that of a sibilant whisper, while the whiffs of air that the animal's wings fanned against your cheek, suggested the 'cold and clammy breathing' of the mythical monster.

"Ma foi! well do I know whereof I speak, Monsieur, for I heard the 'whisper' and felt the 'breath' of the Thing myself. The bat that was loosed in my room last night gave me the fright of my life. When its wings brushed against the wall it sounded like a whisper of the devil himself, and when its wings fanned the air against my face, I thought a corpse was breathing death into my soul. No coward am I, monsieur, but the 'whispering' and 'breathing' were so terribly real—which only goes to show what suggestion will do to a vivid imagination. You had talked so earnestly and so picturesquely about the 'whisper' and the 'breath' of the Thing, that when I first heard the whir of the little animal’s wings in the inky-dark room—Dame! It makes me shiver yet!

"Fortunately, however, the bat had been in my room long enough before I entered it to shake all the deadly powder from its wings. The powder had settled and the air was pure before I crossed the threshold of that room, else I would have died a quick and horrible death.

"The same thing is true of the bat that sprinkled death in the face of Berjet. When you and I, in company with the police, entered the scientist’s house, the bat had been gone for several minutes, and the stray particles of pulverized death had settled. You realized this, of course, or you would not have entered the room. If Strange and I had entered the house five minutes earlier, you would have let us enter it alone.”

Peret took a lavender handkerchief from the breast pocket of his coat and wiped from his brow some beads of perspiration. A slight moisture was also noticeable on the forehead of the artist, but it was due to another cause. Although he must have known that each worldword [sic] of the detective's was a strand in the rope that was being woven around his neck, he gave no signs of emotion. Inwardly, the strain had begun to tell on him, but outwardly he was calm, confident, almost indifferent.

Restoring the handkerchief to his pocket, Peret resumed: 'I confess that at first the case baffled me. Through a mistake of my own, soon to be explained, I got started on the wrong track. Your story of the Whispering Thing did not impress me, although I did not at first suspect you of deliberately trying to deceive me. I laid the Thing to your imagination and wrought-up condition. My skepticism vanished, however, when I reached my rooms, as I have explained.

" [sic]At first I scarcely knew what to believe. The asphyxiation theory of Sprague and, later on, of Coroner Rane set my mind in motion, but led me nowhere, because it did not fit in with my interpretation of Berjet's last words. As a matter of fact, nothing else seemed to fit in with anything. Clues ran counter to each other and the facts themselves clashed.

"I got my first inspiration when you declared that the breathing of the Thing was cold and clammy, for this made it seem likely that poison fumes had been