When Dead Lips Speak

HE young man who had been waiting with constant, nervous glances at the door sprang up with relieved alacrity to answer the bell. He was a fair, sensitive-looking youth, not more than twenty-three or four, and hardly looking his age. He was carefully, even a trifle foppishly dressed, with a fresh band of black on the sleeve of his gray coat.

"Awfully good of you to come!" he said, uttering the meaningless formality in a pleasant but rather characterless voice. "Queer sort of arrangement."

"Very!" tersely agreed the man he had just greeted, entering and removing his shabby hat and coat. He was a marked contrast to his host, being close to forty, unusually dark of skin and hair, with a heavily lined, stern face and curiously light-colored eyes which he kept half closed. He did not look amiable, and the young man who had admitted him seemed to shrink from his grim and unresponsive demeanor.

"I suppose," said the older man, "that our letters are, in effect, about the same. We might compare them, though."

He took an envelope from his pocket, and after a moment of nervous hesitation the young fellow did the same.

They first compared the envelopes, which were both addressed in the same old-fashioned, spidery handwriting one to "Cyril Norton," the other to "Ashton Ware."

"Your uncle was such an up-to-date man," said Ashton Ware, the visitor, "that his writing always surprised me. It is of the old school."

"But surely he was of the old school!" exclaimed Cyril. "I never saw him without imagining what he would look like in the clothes of another day and generation!"

"He? Of the old school?" Ashton Ware laughed harshly. "My dear Mr. Norton, get that idea out of your head! His was the most modern, progressive personality I have known in years. He led the extremists when it came to daring theories and problems—scientific or metaphysical, or—as is so often the case—both. Surely you never thought of your late uncle as old-fashioned?"

"I—I never thought of him in any other way particularly," said Cyril, looking perplexed. "He never did anything particularly modern that I know of except buy an automobile and a phonograph. He was fond of the phonograph. Always kept it in his bedroom." Ware smiled a grim, mirthless smile.

"And you never heard of his research and experimental work in psychology?"

"Psychology? Uncle Adam? Impossible!"

Cyril appeared to grow slightly paler, and drew back a step.

"It seems incredible!" he exclaimed in his colorless voice. "My uncle always seemed a quiet, rather moody old man given over to his love for books. I didn't know that he had any interest in life keener than what he felt for a genuine first edition."

There was the faintest note of bitterness in his voice, and Ashton Ware flashed him a quick glance out of those odd, penetrating light eyes of his.

"You and the late Mr. Adam Norton—your uncle—were not altogether congenial, I believe?"

Cyril colored as he answered hastily: "Malicious persons have circulated that rumor"

"But doesn't it happen to be a true rumor?" persisted the other, seeming to take a malignant satisfaction in the young man's obvious annoyance and embarrassment. "You wanted to be an actor, I think?"

Cyril Norton shrugged his shoulders. "We got along together as well as most uncles and nephews, I fancy," he said, speaking as composedly and naturally as he could. "He did not care about the stage, and—well, it couldn't be expected that we should have the same tastes with a difference of half a century between us, but we seldom quarreled."

"And yet," said Ashton Ware, tapping the letter he held, "he expected you to murder him!"

"He seemed to think it quite as likely that you would!" responded Cyril quickly with a certain veiled intonation that suggested he didn't think that proposition altogether improbable himself. Ware could hardly fail to read the significance of the tone, and a flicker of resentment showed in his pale eyes for a moment, then passed under what was evidently a superbly developed power of self-control.

"You have a comfortable place here," he said abruptly, looking about him at the rich heavy furniture and old oil paintings. The Nortons lived in one of the largest apartments in the city, and, though the house was modern, the flat itself was as like a piece taken whole out of an older and less garish day as any flat could be. But Cyril was staring at the two envelopes and did not answer, so the older man said bluntly, almost brutally:

"Let's get done with it! Read yours first aloud—or, stay, we will read each other's aloud."

Cyril agreed, they exchanged envelopes, and Ware read from the letter addressed to the young man:

Cyril looked at him blankly. "The Vocamorta!" he repeated. "What did he mean?"

"One of his inventions, doubtless," said Ware. "During the far too brief period when I went to school I think I learned that Voca meant voice and Morta death. Therefore, this means literally the voice of death, or voice of the dead. Am I right about that? Your uncle sent you through college, I believe, and you should know."

Cyril recoiled, and spoke with a visible effort: "Yes—yes, of course. Vocamorta—the voice of the dead! What a horrible thought! Shall I read aloud his letter to you? It is practically the same as mine, only a good deal longer and more detailed.

Cyril had read the last part of the letter with a frown of increasing bewilderment. But he seemed to brush it aside with a little, characteristic, half-affected gesture he had, and added: "There are some directions below, like the other. It all seems quite mad to me!"

Ashton Ware shrugged his shoulders. "When did your uncle die, Mr. Norton?" he brusquely demanded as if tired of wasting time.

"As I told you over the telephone," said young Norton, "I went into his room not five hours ago—that is, about four this afternoon—to find him cold and lifeless. I sent for the doctor immediately, and heard my fears only too sadly confirmed. Then, as Judson, his old valet, gave me his letter, I telephoned you without delay."

The caller smiled bitterly. He and Judson had had more than one interview, and he did not like him. Indeed, he detested that type of old, senile family servant, slavishly devoted to their masters' interests, regarding all strangers askance! Even as he thought thus resentfully a timid knock sounded on one of the inner doors of the apartment, and Judson himself stood before them—a little, bent old man with a scanty fringe of white hair and the perennially anxious yet self-effacing look of one to whom life has been all and only service.

"I beg pardon, Mr. Cyril," he said in a thin voice, "but you said I was to be a witness or something. Me and the maids, sir."

"Quite so, Judson," Cyril Norton answered kindly. "I particularly want you to be present when I open my uncle's will, which his lawyer sent to me, sealed, an hour ago."

"I know all about the will, sir," Judson said in his melancholy, diffident way. "I witnessed it—me and cook."

"Really!" Cyril knitted his brows. "That's odd, isn't it?" He appealed to Ware. "Beneficiaries can't witness wills, yet I'd have sworn Uncle Adam had made some provision for Judson here."

"Oh, sir" deprecated Judson.

Ware broke in harshly: "Men confronted with death are often apt to forget the smaller considerations of life, and to remember only one great obligation—or one great revenge" He broke off, oddly disconcerted, for Cyril was looking at him with a more inscrutable expression than he would have expected in that shallow and transparent young person.

"You are taking it for granted," the latter said quietly, "that Uncle Adam really knew he was confronted by death?"

"His letter sounds like it, doesn't it?" responded Ware with an insolent inflection.

Judson put in his piping voice, not exactly eagerly, but as though impelled by something utterly irrepressible. "And there was his heart, too, you know, Mr. Cyril! You know as well as I, sir, that the doctor told him a year ago he might go off at any moment, and must on no account get excited"

"That will do!" said Cyril quickly with a heightened color. "Call in the maids and we will read the will at once."

They were just outside the door, the stout cook and the two maids, and were inside it in a second, very much awed and enormously interested.

Then Cyril broke the seal of the long legal envelope and read the document it contained.

The will, which was as brief as legal formality would permit, left his worldly goods to be divided equally between Cyril Norton and Ashton Ware.

Cyril cried out, astounded, as he glanced over it; then, steadying his voice, read it aloud to murmurs of surprise from the servants. Just at the end he came upon a clause in which old Mr. Norton stipulated that "if suspicion of a criminal character were in any manner thrown upon either of the legatees, the other was to inherit the whole fortune outright."

Ashton Ware smiled cynically. He knew a lot about that will. What a weak, spineless fool the boy was anyhow! The plan would be sure to work with him; he seemed almost like a woman, ready for hysterics and any sort of absurdity.

"Well," said the young man, steadying his voice, "the first thing to do of course is to follow those very strange directions of my uncle's. I—I simply can't understand them. I think he must have been not quite right in his head. I knew he had a laboratory, but really I hardly knew of his going into it for years. Did you, Judson?"

"Oh, yes, sir," said the old fellow, promptly but mournfully. "He used to work there at night with wires and batteries and things"

"And did you ever know of this—this Vocamorta?" exclaimed Cyril.

"I know there was such a thing, sir. Yes, the Vockymotta; that's what it was. He said the dead could speak through it, but I never heard it working, Mr. Cyril."

The young man shuddered. "God forbid!" he muttered. "What a ghastly invention—even in theory! For, of course, it is entirely impossible."

"Why?" suddenly and rather unexpectedly demanded Ashton Ware. "There has been spirit photography very difficult indeed to explain."

"You believe in this—Vocamorta?" ejaculated Cyril incredulously.

Ware again shrugged his shoulders.

"I believe in giving it a trial—in the presence of these witnesses," was all he said.

"I believe in carrying out my great-uncle's wishes to the letter," Cyril Norton rejoined rather curtly. "Come with me to my uncle's room, if you please—all of you."

He entered first, and paused a moment on the threshold, his head bowed reverently. Old Judson wiped his eyes on his respectable black sleeve, and one of the maids shivered.

"Please come in," said young Norton quietly. "All of you," he repeated.

The bedroom was a fairly large one for an apartment, and furnished in the somewhat heavy, somber taste of an old-fashioned old man. There were two incongruous notes, one the phonograph, modern and shining and cold of look in a corner, the other the glimpse, through another open door, of a small laboratory.

"You have been here before?" Cyril asked Ware. "I have not seen you."

"Often," he replied laconically. "While you were off with your actor friends!"

Ashton Ware and Judson entered the death chamber, but the three women stayed by the door. Not that they minded a corpse, you understand, but all this talk of the dead speaking, which they had heard through the library door, had made them more than a little uneasy. They huddled together, ready for flight, but determined to stay.

The figure on the bed lay very straight and stiff, covered, face and all, with a sheet.

"The directions," said Ashton Ware, speaking in his naturally unpleasant voice, with no pretense at lowering it, "are to bring in the Vocamorta from the laboratory and place it in position, its electric battery turned on, the small silver disk hanging half an inch above the lips of—of"

Even he faltered a bit just there. Cyril winced outright.

"Shall—shall I bring it, Mr. Cyril?" asked Judson in a small and nervous voice.

"You know which it is?"

"Oh, yes, sir. I—I'm sort of afraid of it, sir, begging your pardon."

He really was afraid, poor little old man! Like many very gentle, diffident, subservient souls, Judson was at heart far from being a coward. But he had a deep and abiding fear of the Vocamorta. His dread of it amounted almost to an obsession.

Nevertheless, he carried the instrument, a delicately complicated mechanism, with two long wires supporting a tiny gleaming circle of metal which hung like a miniature silver lily pad and trembled at the slightest touch.

Very gently Cyril turned the edge of the sheet back from the still face. It was fragile and finely cut, crowned with hair like snow. It looked peaceful, as though Adam Norton were indeed not dead but sleeping.

Cyril consulted his own letter.

"Our directions seem to be the same," he said in a low, grave tone. "The disk" He lowered the wires so that the little circle of silver gleamed above the pale face. "And now—the electric lights out for—somebody count, please, I—I'm too nervous—for two minutes."

Old Judson, still a little shaky, pulled himself together. "I'll count, sir," he said. "It's the last thing I can do for my old master."

Ware turned the electric switch which flung the room into complete darkness, and immediately Cyril turned on the small battery beside the deathbed and the air was full of the whine and whir of imprisoned electricity trying to break free. The women murmured "Hail Marys" and were more than ever inclined to flee when a tiny blue gleam, the merest pinpoint of light, appeared playing about the disk, a delicate, mysterious spirit thing, dancing almost on the very face of death.

Judson was counting slowly and regularly, though in a very weak and tremulous voice. The room was in utter darkness, save for that pricking, glinting speck of light. But there were sounds. Sounds other than that of the tiny dynamo—strange, scarcely audible sounds—footfalls, and then a queer, harsh voice—the voice of Adam Norton, who lay dead—crying, "Cyril!"

Almost immediately it stopped, and then it came again, and now they_could actually see the pale lips, just lighted by the blue flame, moving as Adam Norton unmistakably said: "Cyril this man, this Ware—is a blackmailer—a scoundrel"

Ware uttered a hoarse cry and checked it. Judson had reached ninety-eight in his counting. The voice went on: "You have murdered me, finally"

"One hundred and seven," said Judson, with chattering teeth. One of the girls began to cry.

"The ginger—you poisoned—I Oh, Heaven help me—my heart—I am dying! I can't go on—I"

The voice broke off, and Cyril quickly turned up the lights as Judson reached the hundred and twenty that made up the two minutes specified in the dead man's directions. Then he disconnected the battery.

The room was intolerably still. Judson wiped the cold sweat from his forehead. Cyril carefully covered the still face, removing the electric apparatus to make room for the sheet, then he turned to the man the voice of the dead had accused.

"Well?" he asked simply.

Ware suddenly gasped wildly, and flung out his hands in a queer, convulsive way, like a man drowning or suffocating.

"That was not the record!" were the words he uttered, in a sort of hoarse, almost voiceless scream. "That was not the rec" The strident, tortured tones died away. He stood staring, a man of stone yet somehow giving the impression of overwhelming horror.

"Not the record you put in the phonograph?" said Cyril coolly. "I'm quite aware of it. I turned off your record as soon as you started it. It wasn't a bad scheme, though, Ware, especially after you had given him the poisoned Chinese ginger which you knew he was fond of. I had no way of proving I hadn't bought it for him myself—I often did. And with your phonograph record smuggled into the machine while the lights were down while that wouldn't have much actual legal value—well, witnesses and all, it would have put me in a pretty pickle. I congratulate you on your imagination!"

He looked surprisingly energetic and capable all at once. The other man cursed himself for having so underrated his adversary. He was still very cold from shock and terror.

"Then you got him to make a record for you, too!" he said in an ugly voice. "I might have known he'd double cross me at the last. It would have been his idea of a joke!"

"Quite so—a screaming jest! Almost as funny as your giving him the ginger."

"You can't prove there was anything wrong with the ginger!"

"Really? Oh, I think so, you know—I really think so. You are counting Don't go, any of you!" he added to the servants who, divided between terror and curiosity, were now edging away. "There'll be more for you to testify to." He went to a carved old-fashioned cabinet, and took down a blue jar of Canton ginger from its shelves. "You are counting," he proceeded calmly, "on his having eaten the few pieces of ginger at the top of the jar. Naturally you would not have poisoned it all, in case of an investigation. He would have been supposed to have died of heart trouble. Entirely simple."

"Then how"

"As you see," Cyril went on calmly, "the jar has not even been unsealed. I intend to have it analyzed to-morrow."

Ware, his face ashen and convulsed, started toward him, but the effeminate-looking man with the black band on his sleeve had already exchanged the ginger jar for a revolver. All three maids shrieked in unison, but young Norton's steady tone brought instant quiet. "I wouldn't kick up a fuss, Ware, I really wouldn't," he advised, almost gently. "Things are complicated enough without our getting into a free fight, you know. We don't want the police butting in, do we?"

Suddenly a horrible, gruesome thought seemed to break in upon Ashton Ware's consciousness. His strange eyes dilated, and he took a few slow, stiff steps backward.

"Of course your murdered him yourself," he said, "but how did you make him talk into that phonograph?"

"How did you?" demanded Cyril. "Really, it seems an odd thing for a man to arrange all the practical details of having himself murdered, even for the sake of getting a relative into trouble!"

"It was" The words seemed to choke him.

"I know what it was! I've heard that precious record. It's a beauty!"

"Just the same as—as"

"As what we heard to-night? Very much the same! With the substitution for yours. But, however down on me my great-uncle may have been, I still think he wouldn't have gone to the trouble of dying in order to convict me for his murder. Come now! How did you arrange it between you No, no, my friend! Nothing like that!" For Ware had involuntarily started toward the door. "Don't forget I have you covered, and I'm rather good at target shooting—at short range like this! Speak up, man, or I'll have you arrested within five minutes!"

But Ware was not yet utterly cowed. "Ill repeat my question, if you please," he retorted. "How did you get him to get that record?" He shrank a little as he realized to what the emphasis had committed him.

Cyril turned to the servants, Judson, the cook and the two maids. "You all heard that, I think, and can repeat it—as he said it?"

"Yes, sir," "Yes," "Oh, yes, Mr. Cyril!" "Oh, the sneaking creature!" Such were a few of the immediate if somewhat shaky responses. But Ware would not give in yet. "I don't understand—I don't understand!" he muttered repeatedly. Then his pale eyes grew suddenly wide.

"If there was no other record in the phonograph," he said in a sharp, strangled tone, "what was it I heard?"

"The voice of the dead," said Cyril solemnly. "You knew of his investigations in psychic matters, and of his invention of the Vocamorta."

Old Judson faintly put in from the doorway: "There was a Vockymotta, sir—I know he used to work on it in secret. But I never knew it to work before"

"Then he is really—dead?" gasped Ware, in choked, incredulous tones.

It must have been clear, even to the most ignorant or the most casual observer, that he was like a man distraught; his brain had been so unexpectedly and strangely shocked that his normal reactions of caution and self-control, of reason and quickness of wit alike, had been set awry. "You are sure?"

"Here is the doctor's certificate of death," said the young man simply, producing a paper and half extending it. Ware waved it aside. Like one in a trance he took a step toward the sheeted figure, and still as though acting without his own volition, put his hand Cyril's fingers, surprisingly strong for all their slenderness, closed viselike on his wrist and thrust him back. "Take care!" he exclaimed sternly. "I would not touch him if I were you! Have you never heard of a corpse shedding blood at the touch of the murderer? Ah! That got to you, didn't it?" he added, as the dark man recoiled instinctively, with terror in his pale eyes.

"But," Ware muttered, passing his hand over his wet forehead, "I don't understand—I swear I didn't kill him! What did the doctor say he died of?"

"He said he was puzzled, and wants an autopsy, but I think it won't be necessary. We've got you very nearly where we want you, Mr. Ware!"

"But," gasped the wretched man, now completely unstrung, "you say he didn't touch the—I mean" He floundered, trying to gather up the shreds of his self-control. Cyril laughed mercilessly.

"And that about settles you!" he declared calmly—but he still held the automatic. "Gone all to pieces, haven't you? We thought you would!"

"We!" echoed Ware, reeling a trifle as he stood.

"Uncle Adam and I," went on Cyril inexorably. "And now since I really know more about it on the whole than you do—suppose I tell you in a few short, sweet words what you did, before I telephone for the police."

"The police! You're mad! What for"

"To arrest you for plotting to kill my great-uncle, Adam Norton. No! Stand just where you are and hear it all. You knew Uncle Adam years ago, and made capital out of the only crooked episode in his honest life—that smuggling business in the West Indies."

"He told you!"

"He told me a lot of things, Mr. Ashton Ware, a whole lot of things. He didn't want to go to the police if he could help it, and he and I planned to trick you. You know I like acting, and for once he was willing. He plotted with you in order to get you to commit yourself, and all things taken together, I think you pretty well have! Want to stay and fight for your rights? I wouldn't—not after your ginger-jar break! That was my living uncle who spoke to you—for the last time, I trust, you scoundrel!"

But even before he had finished speaking, Ashton Ware had dashed away past the startled maids, his swarthy face twisted with rage and terror alike.

"He's gone, sir," commented Judson meekly. "I—I'm troubled about your uncle, sir, if you'll excuse me"

He drew the sheet from Adam Norton's face and looked down at it anxiously.

But Cyril was in a gale of boyish triumph.

"It hasn't hurt you, uncle, has it, my little comedy-melodrama?" he cried. "He's all right, isn't he, Judson?"

"He's breathing, sir, but, oh, sir, I warned you it would be too much for him. His poor heart"

Still Cyril rattled on unheeding. "I guess his fangs are pretty well drawn, uncle," he cried, turning to the delicate old face above the white sheet, which still made the maids shiver, it was that deathly, as you might say, "He won't trouble you again. But say. It was lucky we sent his jar of ginger to the laboratory and found it was poisoned, wasn't it?" He chuckled. "Good old ginger jars, they all look pretty much the same, and this had him scared stiff!" His voice deepened with a sudden emotion as he came closer. "Of course, it was a crazy, theatrical way of doing it, for any good lawyer could have disposed of him. But you really didn't mind, did you, Uncle Adam? I think we played our scene very well. Thank God it was only playing a scene!"

"Mr. Cyril, sir" Judson tried to interrupt.

"Uncle Adam, now that we're rid of the brute, let's turn on that beastly record I coaxed you to make for him." He sprang, laughing, to the phonograph, and started it. Then, laughing still, he faced his uncle again.

"Doesn't it just make the final touch for the scene?" he cried gayly as the instrument began its ghostly "Cyril—Cyril." Then he started back, himself as white as death.

"Uncle Adam! Uncle Adam!" he cried wildly. "What's the matter? Has my little melodrama really harmed you? Speak to me, uncle!"

But even as he uttered the words, he knew that his uncle would never speak to him again. The strain and excitement had proved too much for that aged, lightly beating heart. Adam Norton was stone dead.

"It's over, Mr. Cyril," said Judson in a very low voice.

Cyril covered his face with his hands, appalled, remorseful, but the phantom voice of his uncle still vibrated on the air of the death chamber, a spectral, almost a supernatural thing from the cold wooden box in the corner, weirdly accompanying the moment:

"Cyril—it is you who have killed me—you whom I loaded with benefits all the days of your life—it is only you, Cyril, who are responsible for this—you, Cyril—Cyril"

Judson came softly up to Cyril's side, and laid a shaking, timid hand upon his arm. The maids had gone silently away at last.

"Mr. Cyril"

The old man's eyes peered into his, dreadful, accusing eyes, the more accusing because they begged for reassurance. "Mr. Cyril, sir," he went on tremulously, "you didn't wish for your uncle's death, did you, sir?"

The terrible, ghostly voice from the phonograph went on and on, and the hoy broke out into strangling sobs.

"Stop it!" he implored. "Stop that ghastly thing!"

And Judson, immediately if tremulously obedient even in that tragic moment, stopped it.

After a moment of anguished silence, Cyril made his way unsteadily to the door.

"I'll never touch a cent of his money, never!" he vowed, with all youth's passion and pain. "And I—I'll go off somewhere and try to grow up. My fooling has cost Uncle Adam his life, and—and—God forgive me—I—maybe I wasn't as careful of it as I should have been! Good-by, Judson."

"Good-by, Mr. Cyril." The old eyes blinked at him anxiously. "You're not coming back, sir?"

"No! Never—never!"

"If it isn't making too free, sir, is it a play actor you're going to be after all?"

"A play actor? After this—horror? I've played my last part! It's life, now, and learning how to be a man! Good-by!"

Scarcely conscious of what he said or did, Cyril Norton fled from the room and the house. And Judson was left alone with his dead. He approached near to the sheeted body of Adam Norton, and uncovering the fragile face, strangely stern now, nodded slowly, as one who bows before the will of God.

Then in that still room, beside the deathbed of his master, the old valet drew a long folded document from his waistcoat pocket and opened it carefully, for it was extremely precious.

Again he nodded. This, too, was the will of God—oh, decidedly the will of God! It was another of Adam Norton's wills, duly signed and attested, and there were a few lines that interested Judson as no words had ever interested him before.

A third time Judson slowly nodded.

He was pretty sure neither of them would put in a claim. As for the lawyers, well, he would just tell them how it was, just tell them how it was. All but

"Murderer!"

He heard. The one word rang through the room with a strange silver cadence that he had never heard before. He looked about him wildly, in terror unspeakable. He was alone in the chamber of death; he had shut off the phonograph. Yet the voice continued:

"I did not suspect you in life; in death I know you for what you are, Judson. For months you have been slowly poisoning me, weakening my heart, accomplishing your end by the most fiendish and patient means. You have succeeded"

Judson had collapsed in a cringing, shuddering heap, but the awful Accuser did not cease. It went on relentlessly with the clarity of a silver bell.

"What is it?" moaned the wretched little old man, beside himself. "What is it? Oh, what is it, what is it?"

But he knew. It was the Vocamorta, the Vocamorta which he had always feared, and it was really working at last; it was the voice of the dead, and that voice was speaking to—him!

In fact, Judson had gone quite mad.