Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 01.djvu/45

 floor when he died. She stroked his hair, and she dropped a kiss on his hair and she whispered that she was sorry that he was going to do what he was going to do because they might have been happy if things had been different, and now he should listen to her little heels tap-tap-tapping out of the room and out of his life because he was going to take the dagger and kill himself and he could not keep from doing it if he kept looking at the candles and thinking of Lilith Lamereaux and the past years when he might have been happy if he had been different.

And then tap-tap-tap and she was gone. And he was alone.

Across the table the woman dead a hundred years looked at him, and it seemed that she smiled and urged him to be a man at last and not be afraid, because it was not such a hard thing to be dead, if there was love, even a dead love in your life. And the more he looked at her and at the two candles the more he knew that he had to kill himself, and the more sure he was that he would kill himself. The woman across the table seemed to change to Lilith, and there was the tappity-tap-tappity-tap of his heart and the tap-tap-tap of her heels on the floor—or was she tapping on the table with her polished finger nails? He could hear the blood pounding in his ears and everything was beating rhythmically to the tune of the tap-tap-tap, and words came and kept time with the music in his ears, and he heard her say again and again, "You have to kill yourself—you have to kill yourself—tap-tap-tappity-tap-tap—you have to kill yourself." Little white drops of sweat came out on his face, and slowly, very slowly, he reached for the dagger and with clenched hand did the thing he had to do.

weeks later the old lawyer sat alone in his office. Now and then he reached in his pocket, took out his little bottle and placed a tablet of nitroglycerin carefully under his tongue. He was trying to think, and his thoughts did not make any sense. His stenographer brought in a card. He glanced at it, took another tablet and simply said,

"Have her come in."

In came a little lady, beautifully dressed in black. Her little heels tap-tapped on the bare floor.

"Please do not say a word till I am through," urged the lawyer. "Where have you been, and why did you fail to answer our advertisements? Don't you know it cost you nearly two million? If you know me now, you knew me then and knew about the will. And where were you that night? Let me tell you something. I took your cousin to that house and left him there. There were two bodies there, tied to chairs around the center table, and I left him there in the third chair. The room was spotless; there was no dust. I was afraid; so the next morning I brought a witness with me, the very best detective I could find, and when we entered that dining-room there was only one dried body there, that of the woman. The other body was gone. And your cousin was dead. He had been killed with the dagger that I found in the room, and the detective took finger prints of the dead man and the dagger and he says that the man killed himself. And it does not make sense; and where is the other body, and where were you that night? I will tell you in confidence that the dead man was afraid of you. He said that you had tried three times to kill him, and now everything points to the fact that he got drunk and killed himself. But why was the room so clean?

"Of course there is nothing I can do