Mr. Ellery Queen’s frown was a thing of beauty when he put down the last personal possession of the six prisoners. He had picked them apart to the accompaniment of a chorus of protests, chiefly from the artist Adams and Miss Reis. But he had not found what should have been there. He rose from his squatting position on the floor and silently indicated that the articles might be returned to their owners.

  “Parbleu!” cried Monsieur Duval suddenly. “I do not know what is it for which you seek, my friend; but it is possible that it has been secretly placed upon the person of one of us, n’est-ce pas? If it is of a nature damaging, that would be—”

  Ellery looked up with a faint interest. “Good for you, Duval. I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “We shall see,” said Monsieur Duval excitedly, beginning to turn out his pockets, “if the brain of Dieudonné Duval is not capable … Voici! Will you please examine, Mr. Queen?”

  Ellery looked over the collection of odds and ends briefly. “No dice. That was generous, Duval.” He began to poke about in his own pockets.

  Djuna announced proudly: “I’ve got everything I ought to.”

  “Well, Mr. Queen?” asked Ziegler impatiently.

  Ellery waved an absent hand. “I’m through, Captain.… Wait!” He stood still, eyes lost in space. “Wait here. It’s still possible—” Without explanation he plunged through the doorway marked with the green arrow, found himself in a narrow passageway as black as the rooms leading off from it, and flashed his light about. Then he ran back to the extreme end of the corridor and began a worm’s progress, scrutinizing each inch of the corridor floor as if his life depended upon his thoroughness. Twice he turned corners, and at last he found himself at a dead end confronted by a door marked EXIT: ASSEMBLY ROOM. He pushed the door in and blinked at the lights of the cellar. A policeman touched his cap to him; the attendant skeleton looked scared.

  “Not even a bit of wax, or a few crumbs of broken glass, or a burned matchstick,” he muttered. A thought struck him. “Here, officer, open this door in the grating for me, will you?”

  The policeman unlocked a small door in the grating and Ellery stepped through to the larger division of the room. He made at once for the rack on the wall, in the compartments of which were the things the prisoners—and he himself—had checked before plunging into the main body of the House. He inspected these minutely. When he came to the artist’s box he opened it, glanced at the paints and brushes and palette and three small daubs—a landscape and two seascapes—which were quite orthodox and uninspired, closed it.…

  He paced up and down under the dusty light of the bulbs, frowning fiercely. Minutes passed. The House of Darkness was silent, as if in tribute to its unexpected dead. The policeman gaped.

  Suddenly Ellery halted and the frown faded, to be replaced by a grim smile. “Yes, yes, that’s it,” he muttered. “Why didn’t I think of it before? Officer! Take all this truck back to the scene of the crime. I’ll carry this small table back with me. We’ve all the paraphernalia, and in the darkness we should be able to conduct a very thrilling séance!”

  When he knocked on the door of the octagonal room from the corridor, it was opened by Captain Ziegler himself.

  “You back?” growled the detective. “We’re just ready to scram. Stiff’s crated—”

  “Not for a few moments yet, I trust,” said Ellery smoothly, motioning the burdened policeman to precede him. “I’ve a little speech to make.”

  “Speech!”

  “A speech fraught with subtleties and cleverness, my dear Captain. Duval, this will delight your Gallic soul. Ladies and gentlemen, you will please remain in your places. That’s right, officer; on the table. Now, gentlemen, if you will kindly focus the rays of your flashes upon me and the table, we can begin our demonstration.”

  The room was very still. The body of Dr. Anselm Hardy lay in a wickerwork basket, brown-covered, invisible. Ellery presided like a swami in the center of the room, the nucleus of thin beams. Only the glitter of eyes was reflected back to him from the walls.

  He rested one hand on the small table, cluttered with the belongings of the prisoners. “Alors, mesdames et messieurs, we begin. We begin with the extraordinary fact that the scene of this crime is significant for one thing above all: its darkness. Now, that’s a little out of the usual run. It suggests certain disturbing nuances before you think it out. This is literally a house of darkness. A man has been murdered in one of its unholy chambers. In the house itself—excluding, of course, the victim, myself, and my panting young charge—we find six persons presumably devoting themselves to enjoyment of Monsieur Duval’s satanic creation. No one during the period of the crime was observed to emerge from the only possible exit, if we are to take the word of the structure’s own architect, Monsieur Duval. It is inevitable, then, that one of these six is the killer of Dr. Hardy.”

  There was a mass rustle, a rising sigh, which died almost as soon as it was born.

  “Now observe,” continued Ellery dreamily, “what pranks fate plays. In this tragedy of darkness, the cast includes at least three characters associated with darkness. I refer to Mr. Reis, who is blind; and to Mr. Juju Jones and his escort, who are Negroes. Isn’t that significant? Doesn’t it mean something to you?”

  Juju Jones groaned: “Ah di’n’t do it, Mistuh Queen.”

  Ellery said: “Moreover, Mr. Reis has a possible motive; the victim treated his eyes, and in the course of this treatment Mr. Reis became blind. And Mrs. Clarke offered us a jealous husband. Two motives, then. So far, so good.… But all this tells us nothing vital about the crime itself.”

  “Well,” demanded Ziegler harshly, “what does?”

  “The darkness, Captain, the darkness,” replied Ellery in gentle accents. “I seem to have been the only one who was disturbed by that darkness.” A brisk note sprang into his voice. “This room is totally black. There is no electricity, no lamp, no lantern, no gas, no candle, no window, in its equipment. Its three doors open onto places as dark as itself. The green and red lights above the doors are nonluminous, radiate no light visible to the human eye beyond the arrows themselves.… And yet, in this blackest of black rooms, someone was able at a distance of at least twelve feet to place four bullets within an area of inches in this invisible victim’s back!”

  Someone gasped. Captain Ziegler muttered: “By damn …”

  “How?” asked Ellery softly. “Those shots were accurate. They couldn’t have been accidents—not four of them. I had assumed in the beginning that there must be powder burns on the dead man’s coat, that the killer must have stood directly behind Dr. Hardy, touching him, even holding him steady, jamming the muzzle of the revolver into his back and firing. But the coroner said no! It seemed impossible. In a totally dark room? At twelve feet? The killer couldn’t have hit Hardy by ear alone, listening to movements, footsteps; the shots were too accurately placed for that theory. Besides, the target must have been moving, however slowly. I couldn’t understand it. The only possible answer was that the murderer had light to see by. And yet there was no light.”

  Matthew Reis said musically: “Very clever, sir.”

  “Elementary, rather, Mr. Reis. There was no light in the room itself.… Now, thanks to Monsieur Duval’s vacuum-suction system, there is never any débris in this place. That meant that if we found something it might belong to one of the suspects. But the police had searched minutely and found literally nothing. I myself fine-combed this room looking for a flashlight, a burned match, a wax taper—anything that might have indicated the light by which the murderer shot Dr. Hardy. Since I had analyzed the facts, I knew what to look for, as would anyone who had analyzed them. When I found nothing in the nature of a light-giver, I was flabbergasted.

  “I examined the contents of the pockets of our six suspects; still no clue to the source of the light. A single matchstick would have helped, although I realized that that would hardly have been the means employed; for this had been a trap laid in advance. The murderer had apparently enticed his victim to The House of Darkness. He had planned the murder to take place here. Undoubtedly he had visited it before, seen its complete lack of lighting facilities. He therefore would have planned in advance to provide means of illumination. He scarcely would have relied on matches; certainly he would have preferred a flashlight. But there was nothing, nothing, not even the improbable burned match. If it was not on his person, had he thrown it away? But where? It has not been found. Nowhere in the rooms or corridor.”

  Ellery paused over a cigarette. “And so I came to the conclusion,” he drawled, puffing smoke, “that the light must have emanated from the victim himself.”

  “But no!” gasped Monsieur Duval. “No man would so foolish be—”

  “Not consciously, of course. But he might have provided light unconsciously. I looked over the very dead Dr. Hardy. He wore dark clothing. There was no watch which might possess radial hands. He had no smoking implements on his person; a nonsmoker, obviously. No matches or lighter, then. And no flashlight. Nothing of a luminous nature which might explain how the killer saw where to aim. That is,” he murmured, “nothing but one last possibility.”

  “What—”

  “Will you gentlemen please put the lantern and your flashes out?”

  For a moment there was uncomprehending inaction; and then lights began to snap off, until finally the room was steeped in the same thick palpable darkness that had existed when Ellery had stumbled into it. “Keep your places, please,” said Ellery curtly. “Don’t move, anyone.”

  There was no sound at first except the quick breaths of rigid people. The glow of Ellery’s cigarette died, snuffed out. Then there was a slight rustling and a sharp click. And before their astonished eyes a roughly rectangular blob of light no larger than a domino, misty and nacreous, began to move across the room. It sailed in a straight line, like a homing pigeon, and then another blob detached itself from the first and touched something, and lo! there was still a third blob of light.

  “Demonstrating,” came Ellery’s cool voice, “the miracle of how Nature provides for her most wayward children. Phosphorus, of course. Phosphorus in the form of paint. If, for example, the murderer had contrived to daub the back of the victim’s coat before the victim entered The House of Darkness—perhaps in the press of a crowd—he insured himself sufficient light for his crime. In a totally black place he had only to search for the phosphorescent patch. Then four shots in the thick of it from a distance of twelve feet—no great shakes to a good marksman—the bullet holes obliterate most of the light patch, any bit that remains is doused in gushing blood … and the murderer’s safe all around.… Yes, yes, very clever. No, you don’t!”

  The third blob of light jerked into violent motion, lunging forward, disappearing, appearing, making progress toward the green-arrowed door.… There was a crash and a clatter, the sounds of a furious struggle. Lights flicked madly on, whipping across one another. They illuminated an area on the floor in which Ellery lay entwined with a man who fought in desperate silence. Beside them lay the paint box, open.

  Captain Ziegler jumped in and rapped the man over the head with his billy. He dropped back with a groan, unconscious. It was the artist, Adams.

  “But how did you know it was Adams?” demanded Ziegler a few moments later, when some semblance of order had been restored. Adams lay on the floor, manacled; the others crowded around, relief on some faces, fright on others.

  “By a curious fact,” panted Ellery, brushing himself off. “Djuna, stop pawing me! I’m quite all right.… You yourself told me, Captain, that when you found Adams blundering around in the dark he was complaining that he wanted to get out but couldn’t find the exit. (Naturally he would!) He said that he knew he should follow the green lights, but when he did he only got deeper into the labyrinth of rooms. But how could that have been if he had followed the green lights? Any one of them would have taken him directly into the straight, monkeyshineless corridor leading to the exit. Then he hadn’t followed the green lights. Since he could have no reason to lie about it, it must simply have meant, I reasoned, that he thought he had been following the green lights but had been following the red lights instead, since he continued to blunder from room to room.”

  “But how—”

  “Very simple. Color blindness. He’s afflicted with the common type of color blindness in which the subject confuses red and green. Unquestionably he didn’t know that he had such an affliction; many color-blind persons don’t. He had expected to make his escape quickly, before the body was found, depending on the green light he had previously heard the barker mention to insure his getaway.

  “But that’s not the important point. The important point is that he claimed to be an artist. Now, it’s almost impossible for an artist to work in color and still be color blind. The fact that he had found himself trapped, misled by the red lights, proved that he was not conscious of his red-green affliction. But I examined his landscape and seascapes in the paint box and found them quite orthodox. I knew, then, that they weren’t his; that he was masquerading, that he was not an artist at all. But if he was masquerading, he became a vital suspect!

  “Then, when I put that together with the final deduction about the source of light, I had the whole answer in a flash. Phosphorus paint—paint box. And he had directly preceded Hardy into the House.… The rest was pure theatre. He felt that he wasn’t running any risk with the phosphorus, for whoever would examine the paint box would naturally open it in the light, where the luminous quality of the chemical would be invisible. And there you are.”

  “Then my husband—” began Mrs. Clarke in a strangled voice, staring down at the unconscious murderer.

  “But the motive, my friend,” protested Monsieur Duval, wiping his forehead. “The motive! A man does not kill for nothing. Why—”

  “The motive?” Ellery shrugged. “You already know the motive, Duval. In fact, you know—” He stopped and knelt suddenly by the bearded man. His hand flashed out and came away—with the beard. Mrs. Clarke screamed and staggered back. “He even changed his voice. This, I’m afraid, is your vanishing Mr. Clarke!”

  The Adventure of the Bleeding Portrait

  Natchitauk is the sort of place where the Gramatons and Eameses and Angerses of this world may be found when the barns are freshly red and the rambler roses begin to sprinkle the winding roadside fences. In summer its careless hills seethe with large children who paint vistas and rattle typewriters under trees and mumble unperfected lines to the rafters of a naked backstage. These colonials prefer rum to rye, and applejack to rum; and most of them are famous and charming and great talkers.

  Mr. Ellery Queen, who was visiting Natchitauk at Pearl Angers’ invitation to taste her scones and witness her Candida, had hardly more than shucked his coat and seated himself on the porch with an applejack highball when the great lady told him the story of how Mark Gramaton met his Mimi.

  It seems that Gramaton had been splashing away at a watercolor of the East River from a point high above Manhattan when a dark young woman appeared on a roof below him, spread a Navajo blanket, removed her clothes, and lay down to sun herself.

  The East River fluttered fifteen stories to the street.

  And after a while Gramaton bellowed down: “You! You woman, there!”

  Mimi sat up, scared. There was Gramaton straining over the parapet, his thick blond hair in tufts and his ugly face the color of an infuriated persimmon.

  “Turn over!” roared Gramaton in a terrible voice. “I’m finished with that side!”

  Ellery laughed. “He sounds amusing.”

  “But that’s not the point of the story,” protested the Angers. “For when Mimi spied the paintbrush in his hand she did meekly turn over. And when Gramaton saw her dark back under the sun—well, he divorced his wife, who was a sensible woman, and married the girl.”

  “Ah, impulsive, too.”

  “You don’t know Mark! He’s a frustrated Botticelli. To him Mimi is beauty incarnate.” It appeared, too, that no Collatinus had a more faithful Lucrece. At least four unsuccessful Tarquins of the Natchitauk aristocracy were—if not publicly prepared—at least privately in a position to attest Mimi’s probity. “Besides, they’re essentially gentlemen,” said the actress, “and Gramaton is such a large and muscular man.”

  “Gramaton,” said Ellery. “That’s an odd name.”

  “English. His father was a yachtsman who clung barnaclelike to the tail of a long line of lords, and his mother’s epidermis was so incrusted with tradition that she considered Queen Anne’s death without surviving issue a major calamity to the realm, inasmuch as it ended the Stuart succession. At least, that’s what Mark says!” The Angers sighed emotionally.

  “Wasn’t he a little hard on his first wife?” asked Ellery, who was inclined to be strait-laced.

  “Oh, not really! She knew she couldn’t hold him, and besides she had her own career to think of. They’re still friends.”

  The next evening, taking his seat in the Natchitauk Playhouse, Ellery found himself staring at the loveliest female back within his critical memory. No silkworm spun, nor oyster strained, that dared aspire to that perfect flesh. The nude dark glowing skin quite obliterated the stage and Miss Angers and Mr. Shaw’s aged dialogue.

  When the lights came on Ellery awoke from his rhapsodizing to find that the seat in front of him had been vacated; and he rose with a purpose. Shoulders like that enter a man’s life only once.

  On the sidewalk he spied Emilie Eames, the novelist.

  “Look,” said Ellery. “I was introduced to you once at a party. How are you, and all that. Miss Eames, you know everybody in America, don’t you?”

  “All except a family named Radewicz,” replied Miss Eames.

  “I didn’t see her face, curse it. But she has hazel shoulders, a tawny, toasty, nutty sort of back that … You must know her!”

  “That,” said Miss Eames reflectively, “would be Mimi.”