Barker guffawed. “G’on! You’re kidding, Cap’n!”

  “Ain’t doin’ no sech thing. You tell ’em, Jenny.”

  “I—I tried it one night myself,” said Jenny in a low voice. “I think I’m reasonably intelligent, Mr. Queen. They’re two-room cabins, and the complaints had said the sounds came from the—the living room while they were trying to sleep in the bedroom. The night I stayed in that cabin I—well, I heard it, too.”

  “Sounds?” frowned Ellery. “What kind of sounds?”

  “Oh,” she hesitated, shrugging helplessly, “cries. Moans, mutters, whimpers, slithery noises, patters, scrapings—I can’t really describe them, but they,” she shivered, “they didn’t sound—human. There was such a variety of them! As—as if it was a congress of ghosts.” She smiled at Ellery’s cynical eyebrows. “I suppose you think I’m a fool. But I tell you—hearing those muffled, stealthy, inhuman sounds…well, they get you, Mr. Queen.”

  “Did you investigate the—ah—scene of the visitation while these sounds were being produced?” asked Ellery dryly.

  She gulped. “I took one peek. It was dark, though, and I couldn’t see a thing. The sounds stopped the minute I opened the door.”

  “And did they continue afterward?”

  “I didn’t wait to see, Mr. Queen,” she said with a tremulous grin. “I ducked out of the bedroom window and ran for dear life.”

  “Hmm,” said Barker, narrowing his shrewd eyes. “I always did say this part of the country produced more imagination to the square inch than a trunkful of fiction. Well, no goldarned sounds are going to keep me up. And if they happen I’ll find out what made ’em or know the reason why!”

  “I’ll exchange cabins with you, Mr. Barker,” murmured Ellery. “I’ve always felt the most poignant fear of—and the most insatiable curiosity about—ghosts. Never met one, I suppose. What say? Shall we trade?”

  “Hell, no,” chuckled Barker, rising. “You see, I’m prob’ly the world’s greatest disbeliever in spirits, Mr. Queen. I’ve got a sweet little .32 Colt”—he grinned in a mirthless way—“I’m in hardware, you see—and I never heard of a spook yet that liked the taste of bullets. I’m goin’ to bed.”

  “Well,” sighed Ellery, “if you insist. Too bad. I’d love to have met a wraith—all clanky with chains and dripping foul seaweed….Think I’ll turn in myself. By the way, this cabin which had been occupied by Gillette is the only one in which your ghost has walked, Cap’n Hosey?”

  “Only one, yep,” said the innkeeper gloomily.

  “And have sounds been heard while the cabin’s been unoccupied?”

  “Nope. We watched a couple o’ nights, too, but nothin’ happened.”

  “Curious.” Ellery sucked a fingernail thoughtfully for a moment. “Well! If Miss Jenny and these gentlemen will excuse me?”

  “Here,” said Heiman hurriedly, bouncing out of the chair. “I’m not goin’ to cross that backyard alone….W-wait for baby!”

  The rear of the inn was a desolate place. As they emerged from the backstairs leading from the taproom its cold desolation struck them like a physical blow. Ellery could hear Heiman breathing hoarsely, as if he had run far and fast. There was a livid moon, and it lit up his companions’ faces: Heiman’s was drawn, fearful; Barker’s amused and a trifle wary. The cabins were for the most part black and silent; it was late.

  They walked shoulder to shoulder across the sandy terrain, instinctively keeping together. The wind kept up an incessant angry hissing through the dark trees beyond the cabins.

  “’Night,” muttered Heiman suddenly and darted across to one of the cabins. They heard him scuttle inside and lock the door. Then the rattles of windows came to their ears as the chubby salesman closed them hastily; and a square of yellow brilliance sprang up as he flooded his quarters with ghost-dispelling light.

  “I guess it’s got Heiman, all right,” laughed Barker, shrugging his bony shoulders. “Well, Mr. Queen, here’s where the spook hangs out. D’y’ever hear anything so nutty? These old sailors are all the same—superstitious as hell. I’m surprised at Jenny, though; she’s an educated girl.”

  “Are you sure you shouldn’t like me to—” began Ellery.

  “Naw. I’ll be all right. I’ve got a quart of rye in one of my sample trunks that’s the best little ghostchaser y’ever saw.” Barker chuckled deep in his throat. “Well, nighty-night, “Mr. Queen. Sleep tight and don’t let the spooks bite!” He sauntered to his cabin, squared his shoulders, whistled a rather dreary tune, and disappeared. A moment later the light flashed on and his thin long figure appeared at the front window and pulled down the shade.

  “Whistling,” thought Ellery grimly, “in the dark. At that, the man has intestines.” He shrugged and flicked his cigaret away. It was no concern of his; some natural phenomenon, no doubt—wind sobbing down a chimney shaft, the scratchings of a mouse, the rattle of a loose window-pane; and there was a ghost. Tomorrow he would be well out of it, headed for Newport and the home of his friend….He flattened against the door of his cabin.

  Someone was standing in the shadow of the inn’s back door, watching.

  Ellery crouched and slipped along the walls of the cabins toward the inn—crept like a cat upon the motionless watcher before he realized how ridiculous his stealth was. When he caught himself up, swearing, it was too late. The watcher had spied him. It was Isaac, the man-of-all work.

  “Out for a breath of air?” asked Ellery lightly, fumbling for another cigaret. The man did not reply. Ellery said: “Uh—by the way, Isaac, if I may use the familiar—when a cabin is unoccupied are the windows closed?”

  The broad bowed shoulders twitched contemptuously. “Yep.”

  “Locked?”

  “Nope.” The man answered in a heavy rumble, like aged thunder. He stepped out of the shadow and gripped Ellery’s arm so tightly that the cigaret fell out of his hand. “I harkened to yer scoffin’ an’ sneerin’ in th’ taproom. An’ I says to ye: Scoff not an’ sin not. There’re more things in heav’n ’n’ earth, Horaysheeo, th’n ’re drempt of in yer philos’phy. Amen!” And Isaac turned and vanished.

  Ellery stared at the empty shadows with puzzled, angry eyes. An innkeeper’s daughter who had studied Greek; a shambling countryman who quoted Shakespeare! What the deuce was going on here, anyway? Then he cursed himself for a meddling, imaginative fool and strode back to his cabin. And yet, despite himself, he shivered at the slash of the wind; and his scalp prickled at a perfectly natural night-sound from the silent woods.

  Something cried out in the distance—faintly, desperately, a lost soul. It cried again. And again. And again.

  Mr. Ellery Queen found himself sitting up in bed, covered with perspiration, listening with all the power of his ears. The cabin bedroom, the black world outside, were profoundly quiet. Had it been a dream?

  He sat listening for minutes that were hours. Then, in the dark, he fumbled for his watch. The luminous dials glowed at 1:25.

  Something in the very silence made him get out of bed, slip into his clothes, and go to the door of the cabin. The clearing was a pit of darkness; the moon had long since set. The wind had died somewhere in the lost hours and the air, while cold, was still. Cries…A conviction grew within him that they had come from Barker’s cabin.

  His shoes crunched loudly on the stiff earth as he went to Barker’s front door and knocked. There was no answer. He knocked again.

  A man’s deep, curiously strained voice said behind him: “So ye heard it, too, Mr. Queen?” He whirled to find old Cap’n Hosey, in pants and slippers and a huge sweater, at his shoulder.

  “Then it wasn’t my imagination,” muttered Ellery. He knocked again, and there was still no answer. Trying the door, he found it locked. He looked at Cap’n Hosey, and Cap’n Hosey looked at him. Then, without speaking, the old man led the way around the cabin to the back, facing the woods. The rear window to Barker’s living room stood open, although the shade was down. Cap’n Hosey poked it aside and directed a flashlight into the thick blackness of the room. They caught their breaths, sharply.

  The lank figure of Barker, dressed in pajamas and bathrobe, slippers on his skinny naked feet, lay on the rug in the center of the room—contorted like an open jacknife in the ghastly, unmistakable attitude of violent death.

  How the others knew no one thought of asking. Death wings its way swiftly into human consciousness. When Ellery rose from his knees beside the dead man he found Jenny, Isaac, and Heiman crowded in the doorway; Cap’n Hosey had opened the door. Behind them peered the vulturous face of Captain Rye. They were all in various stages of undress.

  “Dead only a few minutes,” murmured Ellery, looking down at the sprawled body. “Those cries we heard must have been his death-cries.” He lit a cigaret and went to the window and leaned against the sill and stood there, drooping and watchful as he smoked. No one said anything, and no one moved. Barker was dead. A matter of hours before he had been alive, laughing and breathing and joking. And now he was dead. It was a curious thing.

  It was a curious thing, too, that except for a very small area on the rug with the dead man as its nucleus, nothing in the room had been disturbed. In one corner stood two big trunks, both open, with various heavy drawers; they contained samples of Barker’s wares. The furniture stood neatly and sedately about. Only the rug around Barker’s body was scuffed and wrinkled, as if there had been a struggle at precisely that spot. One bit of wreckage not native to the room lay a few feet away: a flashlight, its glass and bulb shattered.

  The dead man lay partly on his back. His eyes were wide open and staring with an unearthly intensity of horror and fear. His fingers clutched the loose collar of his pajama-coat, quite as if some one had been strangling him. But he had not been strangled; he had bled to death. For his throat, fully revealed by the painful backward stretching of his head, had been ripped and slashed raggedly, grotesquely, at the jugular vein, and his hands and coat and the rug were smeared with his still liquid blood.

  “Good God,” choked Heiman; he covered his face with his hands and began to sob. Captain Rye pulled him roughly outside, growling something at him; they heard the chubby man stumble off to his cabin.

  Ellery flipped his cigaret out the window past the shade, which they had raised on climbing into the room, and went to Barker’s sample trunks. He pulled out all the drawers. But nothing was there that should not have been there, and the hammers and saws and chisels and electrical supplies and samples of cement and lime and plaster were ranged in neat unviolated rows. Finding no evidence of disturbance in either trunk, he went quietly into the bedroom. He returned soon enough, looking thoughtful.

  “What—what d’ye do in a case like this?” croaked Cap’n Hosey. His weatherbeaten face was the color of wet ashes.

  “And what do you think about your ghost now, Mr. Queen?” giggled Jenny; her face was convulsed with horror. “G-ghosts…Oh, my God!”

  “Now, now, pull yourself together,” murmured Ellery. “Why, notify the local authorities, naturally, Captain. In fact, I advise very prompt action. The murder occurred only a matter of minutes ago. The murderer must still be in the vicinity—”

  “Oh, he is, is he?” growled Captain Rye, stepping crookedly into the room on his pegleg. “Well, Hosey, what in time ye waitin’ fer?”

  “I—” The old man shook his head in a daze.

  “The murderer got out through the back window,” said Ellery softly. “Probably hard on my first knock at the front door. He took the weapon with him, dripping blood. There are a few bloodstains on the sill here pointing to that.” There was the most curious note in his voice: a compound of mockery and uncertainty.

  Cap’n Hosey departed, heavily. Captain Rye hesitated and then stumped off after his friend. Isaac stood dumbly staring at the corpse. But there was a freshet of color in Jenny’s young cheeks and her eyes reflected a returning sanity.

  “What sort of weapon, Mr. Queen,” she demanded in a small but steady voice, “do you think capable of inflicting such a frightful wound?”

  Ellery started. “Eh?” Then he smiled. “There,” he said dryly, “is a question indeed. Sharp and yet jagged. A vicious, lethal instrument. It suggests certain outré possibilities.” Her eyes went wide, and he shrugged. “This is a curious case. I’m half-disposed to believe—”

  “But you know nothing whatever about Mr. Barker!”

  “Knowledge, my dear,” he remarked gravely, “is the antidote to fear, as Emerson has pointed out. Moreover, it needs no catalyst.” He paused. “Miss Jenny. This isn’t going to be pleasant. Why don’t you return to your own quarters? Isaac can stay and help me.”

  “You’re going to—?” Terror glittered in her eyes again.

  “There’s something I must see. Please go.” She sighed rather strangely and turned and went away. Isaac, a motionless hulk, still stared at the corpse. “Now, Isaac,” said Ellery briskly, “stop gaping and help me with him. I want him moved out of the way.”

  The man stirred. “I told ye—” he began harshly, and then clamped his lips shut. He looked almost surly as he shambled forward. They raised the fast-chilling body without words and carried it into the bedroom. When they returned Isaac pulled out a lump of stiff brown stuff and bit off a piece. He chewed slowly, without enjoyment.

  “Nothing missing, nothing stolen, so far as I can tell,” muttered Ellery, half to himself. “That’s a good sign. A very good sign indeed.” Isaac stared at him without expression. Ellery shook his head and went to the middle of the room. He got to his knees and examined the rug in the area on which Barker’s body had rested. There was a fairly smooth piece where the body had lain, surrounded like an island by the ripples of the disturbed rug. His eyes narrowed. Was it possible…He bent forward in some excitement, studying the rug fiercely. By God, it was!

  “Isaac!” The countryman lumbered over. “What the devil caused this?” Ellery pointed. The nap of the rug where the corpse had sprawled was quite worn away. On examination it had a curiously scratched appearance, as if it had been subjected to a long and persistent scraping process. It was the only part of the rug, as he could see plainly enough, which was rubbed in that manner.

  “Dunno,” said Isaac phlegmatically.

  “Who cleans these cabins?” snapped Ellery.

  “Me.”

  “Have you ever noticed that spot before—that worn spot?”

  “Cal’late.”

  “When, man, when? When’d you first begin to notice it?”

  “Wall—round ’bout th’ middle o’ summer, I guess.”

  Ellery sprang to his feet. “Banzai! Better than my fondest hopes. That clinches it!” Isaac stared at him as if Ellery had suddenly gone mad. “The others,” mumbled Ellery, “were mere speculations, stabs in the dark. This—” He smacked his lips together. “Look here, man. Is there a weapon on the premises somewhere? Revolver? Shotgun? Anything?”

  Isaac grunted: “Wall, Cap’n Hosey’s got an ol’ shooter some’eres.”

  “Get it. See that it’s oiled, loaded, ready for business. For God’s sake, man, hurry! And—oh, yes, Isaac. Tell everybody to keep away from here. Keep away! No noise. No disturbance. Except the police. Do you understand?”

  “I cal’late,” muttered Isaac, and was gone.

  For the first time something like fear leaped into Ellery’s eyes. He twisted toward the window, took a step, stopped, shook his head, and hurried to the fireplace. There he found a heavy iron poker. Gripping it nervously, he ran into the bedroom and half-closed the door. He remained completely quiet until he heard Isaac’s heavy step outside. Then he dashed through the living-room, snatched a big old-fashioned revolver from the man’s hand, sent him packing, made sure the weapon was loaded and cocked, and returned to the living room. But now he acted with more assurance. He knelt by the telltale spot on the rug, placed the revolver near his foot, and swiftly hauled up the rug until the bare wooden floor was revealed. He scanned this closely for some time. Then he replaced the rug and took up the revolver again.

  He met them at the door fifteen minutes later with his finger at his lips. They were three husky, hatchet-faced New Englanders with drawn revolvers. Curious heads were poking out of lighted cabins all about.

  “Oh, the idiots!” groaned Ellery. “Reassure those people, blast ’em. You’re the law here?” he whispered to the leading stranger.

  “Yep. Benson’s my name,” growled the man. “I met your daddy once—”

  “Never mind that now. Make those people put out their lights and keep absolutely quiet; d’ye understand?” One of the officers darted away. “Now come inside, and for the love of heaven don’t make any noise.”

  “But where’s the body of this drummer?” demanded the New Bedford man.

  “In the bedroom. He’ll keep,” rasped Ellery. “Come on, man, for God’s sake.” He herded them into the living room, shut the door with caution, got them into an alcove, snapped off the light….The room blinked out, vanished.

  “Have your weapons ready,” whispered Ellery. “How much do you know about this business?”

  “Well, Cap’n Hosey told me over the ’phone about Barker, and those damn funny noises—” muttered Benson.

  “Good.” Ellery crouched a little, his eyes fixed on the exact center of the room, although he could see nothing. “In a few moments, if my deductions are correct, you’ll meet—the murderer of Barker.”

  The two men drew in their breaths. “By God,” breathed Benson, “I don’t see—How—”

  “Quiet, man!”

  They waited for an eternity. There were no sounds whatever. Then Ellery felt one of the officers behind him stir uneasily and mutter something beneath his breath. After that the silence was ear-splitting. He realized suddenly that the palm of his hand around the butt of the big revolver was wet; he wiped it off noiselessly against his thigh. His eyes did not waver from the invisible center of the black room.