“No, I’m with Ellery Queen,” Howard was saying. “You remember, Father—that wonderful guy I met in Paris before the war…Yes, Queen…Yes, the same one.” And, grimly: “I decided to look him up.”

  During that Parisian idyl, Howard had struck Ellery as rather pitifully provincial. He came from New England—Ellery never did learn from just where in New England; but it was not far, he had gathered, from New York. Apparently the Van Horns lived in one of the town’s great houses: Howard, his father, and his father’s brother; no women were mentioned, and Ellery supposed that Howard’s mother had been dead for many years. His boyhood had been surrounded by a high wall of tutors and governesses; he learned a great deal of the world through the eyes of paid adults, which is to say, he learned nothing. His only contact with reality was the town he lived in. It was not wonderful, then, that in Paris Howard should have been uneasy, bewildered, and resentful. He was too far from Main Street…and, Ellery suspected, from papa.

  Ellery remembered thinking that Howard would have interested a psychiatrist. He was structurally the big-boned, muscular, rugged, bony-headed, square-jawed, thick-skinned man of action—bold, adventurous, and masterful, the typical hero of popular fiction. Yet, caught up in the ferment of Europe at the most tempestuous moment in its history, he kept stealing wistful glances, as it were, over his big shoulder at fireside and father an ocean away. The father creates the son in his own image, Ellery had thought, but not always with the expected result.

  Ellery had got the feeling that Howard was in Europe not because he wanted to be but because Diedrich Van Horn expected him to be. Howard would have been far happier, Ellery knew, in a Boston fine arts class or, as the town’s sole authority in such matters, acting as consultant to the Mayor’s Planning Committee on the propriety of allowing that foreign sculptor to go ahead with those undraped females planned for the pediment of the proposed Civic Recreation Center. Ellery had thought with a grin that Howard would have made the perfect adviser in such a situation, for he invariably blushed when they passed the clandestin at the corner of the Rue de la Huchette and the Rue Zacharie, and he had once summarized his feelings about Europe by pointing earnestly to the Poste de Police across the street from it and bursting out: “I’m no prude, Ellery, but by God that’s going too far, that’s pure decadence!” Ellery recalled thinking at the time that Howard could not have been too familiar with the sociological facts of life as it was lived in his own home town. He had often thought since of Howard hacking soberly away at his father’s image in that splendid Left Bank studio, an overgrown and troubled young soul. He had been very fond of Howard.

  “But that’s silly, Father. You tell Sally she’s not to worry about me. At all.”

  But all this had been ten years ago. Another Sculptor had been at work on Howard’s physiognomy in the intervening decade, and Ellery was not thinking of the unknown artist who had given it such an expert going-over with his fists. There were secretive corners to Howard’s mouth now and an older, warier glint in his undamaged eye. Things had happened to young Van Horn since their last meeting. He would not be abashed by a bordel now; and there was a note in his voice as he spoke to his father which Ellery had not heard ten years before.

  Ellery experienced a sudden very odd feeling.

  But before he could examine it, Howard came out of the study.

  “Father had all the cops in the East out looking for me,” grinned Howard. “Doesn’t speak very well for Inspector Queen’s profession.”

  “The East is a big place, Howard.”

  Howard sat down and began to examine his bandaged hands.

  “What was it?” asked Ellery. “The war?”

  “War?” Howard looked up, really surprised.

  “You’re so obviously suffering from a painful—and I should think a chronic—experience. It wasn’t the war?”

  “I wasn’t even in it.”

  Ellery smiled. “Well, I’ve given you your opening.”

  “Oh. Yes.” Howard scowled, jiggled his right foot. “I don’t know why I should think you’d be interested in my troubles.”

  “Let’s assume I am.”

  Ellery watched him struggle with himself.

  “Come on,” he said. “Get it off your chest.”

  Howard blurted: “Ellery, two and a half hours ago I was going to jump out of a window.”

  “I see,” said Ellery, “you changed your mind.”

  Howard went slowly red. “I’m not lying!”

  “And I’m not the least bit interested in dramatics.” Ellery knocked out his pipe.

  Everything in Howard’s battered face tightened and blued.

  “Howard,” said Ellery, “I don’t know of anyone who hasn’t toyed with the notion of committing suicide at one time or other. But you’ll notice that most of us are still around.” Howard glared at him. “You think I’m one hell of a confidant. But Howard, you started the wrong way. Suicide isn’t your problem. Don’t try to impress me.” Howard’s glance wavered, and Ellery chuckled. “I like you, you ape. I liked you ten years ago when I thought you were a fine kid who’d been thoroughly screwed up by a dominating and overindulgent father—and stop making with the jaw, Howard, I’m not talking your father down; what I just said is true of most American fathers—what differences exist are only in degree, varying according to the individual.

  “I say I liked you then, when you were a damp-muzzled pup, and I like you now, when you’re obviously a full-grown dog. You’re in trouble, you’ve come to me, and I’ll help all I can. But I can’t do a thing if you strike attitudes. Heroics are going to get in the way. Now have I wounded you to the soul?”

  “Damn you.”

  They both laughed, and Ellery said briskly, “Wait till I reload my pipe.”

  Early on the morning of September 1, 1939, Nazi warplanes roared over Warsaw. Before the day was out the Republic of France had decreed general mobilization and martial law. Before the week was out Howard was homeward bound.

  “I was glad of the excuse,” Howard confessed. “I’d had a bellyful of France, refugees, Hitler, Mussolini, the Café St. Michel, and myself. I wanted to crawl under the comforter in my own little bed and sleep for twenty years. I was even sick of sculpture; when I got home I chucked my chisel away.

  “Father came through, as usual. He didn’t ask any questions, and he didn’t throw anything up to me. He let me work it out alone.”

  But Howard had not worked it out. His bed was not the slumberous womb he had looked forward to; Main Street unaccountably seemed more foreign than the Rue du Chat Qui Pêche; he found himself reading newspapers and news magazines and listening to the radio report Europe’s agony; he began to avoid mirrors. And he discovered that he resented violently some of his uncle’s isolationist observations. There were quarrels at the Van Horn dinner table, with Howard’s father the rather troubled mediator.

  “Uncle?” said Ellery.

  “My Uncle Wolfert. Father’s brother. He’s something of a character,” said Howard, and he let it go at that.

  And then Howard sailed on his first cruise on the black sea.

  “It happened the night father married,” said Howard. “It was a surprise to all of us—I mean the marriage; I remember Uncle Wolf making a typical snide remark about old fools in their second childhood. But father wasn’t so old, and he’d fallen in love with somebody pretty wonderful—he hadn’t made any mistake.

  “Anyway, he married Sally and they left for their honeymoon and that same night I was standing in front of my bureau mirror ripping off my tie—undressing to hit the hay—when the next thing I knew I was choking over a piece of fly-specked blueberry pie in a truckmen’s diner four-hundred-odd miles away.”

  Ellery very carefully put a match to his pipe again. “Teleportation?” he grinned.

  “I’m not kidding you. It was the next thing I knew.”

  “How long a time had elapsed?”

  “Five and a half days.”

  Ellery puffed. “Damn this pipe.”

  “Ellery, I had no recollection of a thing. One minute I was taking off my tie in my own bedroom, the next minute I was sitting on a stool in a diner over four hundred miles away. How I’d got there, what I’d done for almost six days, what I’d eaten, where I’d slept, whom I talked to, what I said—nothing. A blank. I had no sensation of the passage of time. I might just as well have died, been buried, and been resurrected.”

  “That’s better,” said Ellery to his pipe. “Oh, yes. Unsettling, Howard, but not uncommon. Amnesia.”

  “Sure,” said Howard with a grin. “Amnesia. Just a word. Did you ever have it?”

  “Go on.”

  Three weeks later it happened again.

  “The first time nobody knew about it. Uncle Wolfert didn’t give a damn where I was or how long I stayed away, and father was off on his honeymoon. But the second time father and Sally were back home. I was gone twenty-six hours before they found me, and I didn’t snap out of it for another eight. They had to tell me what happened. I came to thinking I’d just stepped out of my shower. But it was a full day and a half later.”

  “And the doctors?”

  “Naturally father had every doctor he could lay his hands on. They couldn’t find a thing wrong with me. Brother Queen, I was scared, and no fooling.”

  “Of course you were.”

  Howard lit a cigaret, slowly. “Thanks. But I mean scared.” He frowned as he blew out the match. “I can’t describe…”

  “You felt as if all the normal rules were suspended. But only for you.”

  “That’s it. All of a sudden I felt absolutely alone. Sort of—sort of fourth-dimensional stuff.”

  Ellery smiled. “Let’s get off the auto-analysis. The attacks kept recurring?”

  “Right up to and through the war. When Pearl Harbor was blasted, I was almost relieved. To get into uniform, get going, do things…I don’t know, it looked like a possible answer. Only…they wouldn’t take me.”

  “Oh?”

  “Turned down, Ellery. By the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marine Corps, and the Merchant Marine—in that order. I guess they didn’t have much use for a guy who staged his own private blackouts at the most unpredictable times.” Howard’s puffed lip curled. “I was one of Uncle Sam’s pet four-effs.”

  “So you had to stay home.”

  “And it was rugged. People in town gave me an awful lot of queer looks. And the boys home on leave sort of avoided me. I guess they all thought because I was the son of…Anyway, I fought the war working on the night shift at a big aircraft plant up home. Half-days I messed around with clay and stone in my studio at the house. I didn’t show myself much. It was too tough trying to shrink up so I wouldn’t be noticed.”

  Ellery glanced over the powerful body sprawled in the armchair, and he nodded.

  “All right,” he said crisply. “Now let’s have some details. Tell me everything you know about these amnesia attacks.”

  “They’re periodic and sporadic. Never any warning, although one doctor claimed that they seemed to occur when I’ve been unusually excited, or upset. Sometimes the blackout lasts only a couple of hours, sometimes three or four weeks. I snap out of them in all sorts of places—at home, in Boston, in New York, once in Providence. Other times on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Or any old place. I never have the faintest recollection of where I’ve been or what I’ve done.”

  “Howard.” Ellery’s tone was casual. “Did you ever come to on a bridge?”

  “On a bridge?”

  “Yes.”

  It seemed to Ellery that Howard’s tone was as deliberately casual as his own.

  “I did once, at that. Why?”

  “What were you doing when you became conscious of yourself? I mean on the bridge.”

  “What was I,” Howard hesitated, “doing?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why…”

  “You were about to jump off, weren’t you?”

  Howard stared at him. “How the hell did you know that? I never even told that to the doctors!”

  “The suicide pattern suggests itself strongly. Any other such episodes? I mean waking up to find yourself about to take your own life?”

  “Two other times,” said Howard tightly. “Once I was in a canoe on a lake; I came to as I hit the water. The other time I was just about to step off a chair in a hotel room. There was a rope around my neck.”

  “And this going-to-jump-out-of-a-window business this morning?”

  “No, that was conscious.” Howard jumped up. “Ellery—”

  “No. Wait. Sit down.” Howard sat down. “What do the doctors say?”

  “Well, I’m perfectly sound organically. There’s no medical history that would account for the attacks—epilepsy, or anything like that.”

  “Have they put you under?”

  “Hypnosis? I think they have. You know, Ellery, they’ve got a cute trick of hypnotizing you and then, before they bring you out of it, they’ll order you not to remember having been put under—to wake up thinking you’d simply fallen asleep.” Howard grinned grimly. “I have an idea I’m not a very easy hypnotic subject. I’m sure it hasn’t happened more than once or twice, and then unsatisfactorily. I don’t co-operate.”

  “They haven’t offered anything constructive?”

  “There’s been a lot of learned talk, and I suppose some of it means something, but they certainly haven’t been able to stop the attacks. The last psychiatrist father sicked onto me suggested that I may be suffering from hyperinsulinism.”

  “Hyper-what?”

  “Hyperinsulinism.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  Howard shrugged. “The way it was explained to me, it’s the exact opposite of the condition that causes diabetes. When the pancreas or whatever it is doesn’t manufacture—the M.D. used the word ‘elaborate’—enough insulin, you have diabetes. When it elaborates too much insulin, you have the big fancy word and it can cause, among other things, amnesia.

  “Well, maybe that’s it and maybe it isn’t. They’re not sure.”

  “You must have been given sugar-tolerance tests?”

  “Inconclusive. Sometimes I reacted normally, sometimes I didn’t. The truth is, Ellery, they just don’t know. They say they could find out all right if I’d really co-operate, but what do they expect? A piece of my soul?”

  Howard glared at the rug.

  And Ellery was silent.

  “They admit it’s perfectly possible for me to have periodic, temporary attacks of amnesia and still be organically and functionally okay. Helps, doesn’t it?” Howard squirmed in the armchair, rubbing the back of his neck. I don’t give a damn any more what the doctors say, Ellery. All I know is, if I don’t stop walking into these black holes, I’ll…” He sprang to his feet. Then he walked over to the window and stared out at Eighty-seventh Street. “Can you help me?” he said, without turning around.

  “I don’t know.”

  Howard whirled. He was very pale. “Somebody’s got to help me!”

  “What makes you think I can help?”

  “What?”

  “Howard, I’m not a doctor.”

  “I’m fed up with doctors!”

  “They’ll locate the cause eventually.”

  “And what am I supposed to do in the meantime? Go off my trolley? I tell you I’m close to it right now!”

  “Sit down, Howard, sit down.”

  “Ellery, you’ve got to help me. I’m desperate. Come home with me!”

  “Come home with you?”

  “Yes!”

  “Why?”

  “I want you near me when the next one comes. I want you to watch me, Ellery. See what I do. Where I go. Maybe I’m leading a…”

  “Double life?”

  “Yes!”

  Ellery rose and went to the fireplace to knock out his pipe again.

  And he said: “Howard, come clean.”

  “What?”

  “I said come clean.”

  “What do you mean!”

  Ellery glanced at him sidewise. “You’re holding something out on me.

  “Why, I’m doing nothing of the sort.”

  “Yes. You won’t co-operate with the only people who can really help you find a cause—and consequently a cure—for this condition, the doctors. You’re not an ‘easy’ subject for diagnosis or treatment. You admit you’ve told me things you haven’t told any of the medical men. Why me, Howard? We met ten years ago—for three weeks. Why me?”

  Howard did not answer.

  “I’ll tell you why. Because,” said Ellery, straightening, “I’m an amateur snoop, Howard, and you think you’ve committed a crime during one of your blackouts. Perhaps more than one crime. Perhaps one in each episode.”

  “No, I—”

  “That’s why you won’t help the doctors, Howard. You’re afraid of what they might find out.”

  “No!”

  “Yes,” said Ellery.

  Howard’s shoulders drooped. He turned around and put his bandaged hands in the pockets of the jacket Ellery had given him and he said, in a hopeless sort of way, “All right. I suppose that’s what’s behind it.”

  “Good! Now we have a basis for discussion. Any concrete reason for your suspicion?”

  “No.”

  “I think you have.”

  Howard suddenly laughed. He withdrew his hands and held them up. “You saw them when I got here. That’s the way they were when I came to in that flophouse this morning. You saw my coat, my shirt.”

  “Oh, is that it? Why, Howard, you were in a fight.”

  “Yes, but what happened?” Howard’s voice rose. “It’s not being sure that’s getting me down, Ellery. Not knowing. I’ve got to know! That’s why I wish you’d come home with me.”

  Ellery took a little walk around the room, sucking on his empty pipe.

  Howard watched him, uneasily.

  “Are you considering it?” Howard asked.

  “I’m considering,” said Ellery, stopping to lean against the mantelpiece, “the possibility that you’re still holding something back.”