Annihilation

“‘The breath of death!’” Dennis repeated, awestruck. “God save us, what’s that? Are you trying to say that the French girl is in Orbit’s house, dead?”

“We’ll soon see!” Shaking off the Chinese butler’s grip McCarty dashed up the steps and in at the door, with Dennis just behind and Ching Lee bringing up the rear, chanting a weird refrain of lamentation.

The door of the huge conservatory also stood wide and its humid breath, heavy with fragrance, stole out to meet them, the silent organ with slender pipes gleaming softly like silver birches in moonlight looming up in the semi-gloom, but a group at the marble bench facing it stood out against the background of leafy palms and thorny cacti, holding their eyes irresistibly in dread fascination.

Orbit’s tall figure, the Bellamy baby clasped tightly in his arms, stood before it. Beside him Jean, the houseman, was bending forward while little Fu Moy knelt at its foot. On the bench itself a slender form lay relaxed as though in sleep, the head with its bright hair rippling from beneath the trim little bonnet resting against the high, white stone back, the small gloved hands limply extended at either side.

McCarty halted for an instant and Dennis crossed himself but Ching Lee darted forward and seizing Fu Moy dragged him away as though from the mouth of some unnameable peril. Then Orbit turned, his face white and set, and McCarty advanced to meet him.

“Thank Heaven, it is you!” The resonant, well-modulated voice was hoarse and shaken. “Ching Lee thought he caught a glimpse of you passing and I told him to rush after you! McCarty, look—look at this girl! What is this horror that has come to my house!”

“Is it—dead, she is?” McCarty’s own tones were reverently low. “How did it happen? What was she doing here?”

“Listening to the organ! She was to all appearances as bright and well as this little child but when I finished playing and turned, she was as you see her now! I feel as though I were going mad, as though I couldn’t credit the evidence of my own eyes! What can this fearful thing mean!”

“We’d better be finding out, Mr. Orbit!” McCarty was rapidly recovering from the first shock and his quick mind leaped to meet the exigencies of the tragic situation. “Denny, run next door to Goddard’s and get the inspector but not a word to anybody else!—Jean, take the little one home to the other house and tell Mrs. Bellamy that her nursemaid’s took sick here but will be over it in a little while and she’s not to bother; understand? Think you can put it so’s she won’t come tearing in here to make a scene?”

Jean straightened and nodded, not trusting himself to speak. His sensitive face was working but he controlled his emotions by a valiant effort and took the baby whom his employer held mechanically out to him. Little Maude broke into a low wail of dismay at the abrupt transition and stretched out wavering, dimpled arms to the familiar but strangely inattentive figure on the bench. Her sobs echoed back to them as she was borne quickly from the room.

“Now, Mr. Orbit, what did you do when you turned from the organ and saw Lucette stretched out like this on the bench?” McCarty began. “Where was the baby? How did Ching Lee and Jean know that something was wrong,—did you call them? Have you sent for anybody else?”

Orbit passed his hand across his forehead as if dazed and the other noticed that it came away glistening with moisture.

“For the doctor, of course!” He replied to the last question first. “Allonby, around on the next block. I haven’t had a physician for years myself, but some of my neighbors swear by him. I told Ching Lee to telephone to him as soon as I could make myself realize that—that she was gone!”

A slight shudder ran through him and he averted his gaze from the rounded, childish face, relaxed as though in sleep, save that the bright blue eyes were dull and staring widely at the lofty ceiling.

“She wasn’t dead, then, the first glimpse you had of her after you stopped playing?” McCarty himself did not find it easy to continue, with that silent, dominant presence before them.

“I don’t know—but she must have been, of course! She didn’t move and there was no sign of her breath! I can’t understand it! What frightful thing can have stricken her?”

“Suppose you tell me from the beginning.” McCarty restrained his impatience. “How did she and the child come here?”

“I was seated here alone at the organ, improvising as I do when I am disturbed in mind, for this misfortune to little Horace affected me deeply.” He paused as though to collect himself, glanced again with a shudder at the body of the young French girl and turned away. “The room seemed overpoweringly warm and I went to the window there and opened it wider to see Lucette and the baby just outside, listening. The child is entranced with music and once or twice before Lucette has brought her in at my invitation; Mrs. Bellamy is much amused at little Maude’s devotion to me. When I saw them standing there I suggested that they come in and myself opened the door for them. Lucette seated herself there where you see her now and took the baby up on her lap. I returned to the organ, really forgetting their presence the moment I was seated again before it. Handel’s ‘Largo’ came into my thoughts, although it is scarcely the sort of thing to appeal to a child and I played it through to the end. In the silence, as the last notes died away, the patter of little feet running across the marble floor recalled my guests to my mind and I turned. Little Maude was playing about that palm over there, trying to reach the lowest of its broad leaves but Lucette was—as you see her. I don’t know—I can’t recall what I thought for the moment—possibly that she had fallen asleep or was still relaxed under the spell of the music, but almost instantly it came to me that something was wrong. I called her name sharply, I remember, and hurried to her side but before I touched her I seemed to know the truth—that she was dead!”

“You didn’t move her, Mr. Orbit? The position of the body is just the same?”

“I raised one of her hands to feel her pulse but there was no slightest beat beneath my fingers and I lowered it to the bench and drew her head forward. One look was enough and I let it roll back once more, calling for Ching Lee. The baby had trotted over to me and I took her up in my arms to keep her from approaching Lucette. I think it was Jean who appeared first, but Ching Lee came immediately after and I told him to send for the doctor; when he came back from the telephone he said you were passing and I had him stop you.” Orbit passed a shaking hand once more across his forehead. “What could have brought death to that girl, McCarty? I’m not ignorantly superstitious but it seems as if some horrible, malign thing were settling down over us here in the Mall and the horror deepens! First Hughes, then Horace’s disappearance and now this inexplicable tragedy right under my roof, in my very presence! It is enough to shake a man’s reason!”

“You’re sure you were alone in the house, with just the servants, I mean?” McCarty had advanced to the body again and was scrutinizing it carefully without touching it. “Those front windows are flush with the sidewalk but nobody could have climbed in very well in broad daylight with the watchman patrolling the block. How about that glass wall where it bulges out? The lower panes open as well as the upper ones, don’t they?”

He pointed to the farther side of the room built out like a huge bay-window and Orbit nodded.

“Of course, but they are never touched, except for an hour on the hottest of summer days; the tropical orchids banked there would die instantly if a cool breeze blew over them and the sections of glass can only be reached with a long pole. No one could force a way through the plants without leaving some trace or making their presence known. There is a French window in the card-room which is probably open and a person might enter unseen from the court between this house and Goddard’s, and the kitchen or tradesmen’s door may have been left ajar.” He spoke slowly as if to himself. “The cook is out and Jean, Ching Lee and Fu Moy are the only others in the house besides myself. Great heavens, Sir Philip arrives this evening! I had a wire from him!”

“That’s the English gentleman who’s on his way from the West? Sir Philip Dever—something?” McCarty recalled their conversation of the previous day.

“Sir Philip Devereux. He comes at a most inopportune moment!” Orbit groaned. “This poor girl—McCarty, there must be some rational explanation!”

“What did Ching Lee mean?” McCarty asked suddenly. “When he grabbed me outside in the street there he said Lucette had ‘breathed the breath of death.’ It didn’t seem only a Chinese way of expressing himself. Have you an idea what he could have been getting at?”

“Is that what he said?” Orbit walked quickly over to the nearest orchid and indicated the great distended purple bloom shot with angry streaks of livid orange-yellow. “There is what he meant, one of the rarest of my specimens and a hybrid, a cross between two of the least-known varieties of orchid in Central America. The natives down there regard it as poison and believe that to inhale its odor, which is rank and nauseous, means death. There is an old superstition among them that it is part vegetable and part animal life and that the curious vibration of its petals—so like pulsation, do you see it?—is the act of breathing; to smell it is to take its breath, to die. Ching Lee heard me telling this to some guests one evening and nothing could ever induce him to approach it since. There is nothing in the idea, however; the plant isn’t poisonous in any way, but I suppose that was the first thought that occurred to his mind when he saw Lucette lying dead.”

McCarty edged cautiously over toward it but footsteps sounded in the hall and Jean presented himself at the door.

“Madame Bellamy is not at home, but Snape took the little Maude to place in the care of one of the maids,” he reported. “He say that he will explain to Madame.—The docteur is not come?”

Before Orbit or McCarty could reply the doorbell rang and he hurried away to admit Dennis and the inspector. The latter had evidently been prepared by his companion, for he glanced hastily at the body and then turned to Orbit.

“How long has she been dead?” he asked.

“I don’t know; about twenty minutes I should say, inspector. It occurred while I was playing rather a lengthy movement on the organ and I wasn’t aware of it until I had finished.” Orbit started as the bell pealed again and added in relief: “That must be Doctor Allonby now!”

Jean ushered in a slender, dapper man who greeted Orbit by name, nodded with suddenly alert interest when the inspector and his deputies were introduced and then advanced to the body.

While he examined it the four grouped themselves about him, but Jean crept to the door and joined Ching Lee who was hovering just outside. They whispered together but the others waited in tense silence.

Finally the doctor straightened.

“This woman has been killed by the inhalation of some gas, some poisonous fumes, but of what nature I am unable to determine,” he announced, gazing from Orbit to the inspector with keen incisiveness. “I have never encountered a similar case but the symptoms admit of no other diagnosis. They are like and yet unlike some of those I noted on the battlefields of France a few years ago, but undoubtedly death was induced by asphyxiation of an exceedingly uncommon form; the autopsy will reveal its nature.”

The inhalation of poisonous fumes! McCarty heard a faint but high-pitched ejaculation in the hall, in Ching Lee’s chattering tones. Involuntarily his eyes strayed to the distorted, bulbous, luridly glowing orchid, which seemed in the shadows to be moving, reaching out toward them! Could it have been the “breath of death” indeed? He felt the nerves crawl beneath his skin and his scalp tingled, but the matter-of-fact voice of the inspector recalled him to stern facts.

“How long would you say she’d been dead, Doctor?”

“Not much more than half an hour; the body is still warm. You have taken charge here?”

The inspector nodded.

“Then I may suggest that you notify your medical examiner without delay. I understand that this death is—er—a mystery, Mr. Orbit?”

“An unaccountable one, Doctor Allonby. I was here in the room at the time it occurred, playing the organ over there and Lucette and the baby—this young girl was the nurse for Mrs. Bellamy’s child next door—were seated on this bench.”

The doctor started and asked quickly:

“The child! What has become of it?”

“The houseman took it home after you were summoned,” Orbit replied.

“But it was unharmed? The child was seated here beside the nurse?”

“Oh, no!” Orbit interrupted. “While I played it had climbed down and was amusing itself over by that palm.”

“A miraculous escape!” the doctor exclaimed. “Had it remained here it would undoubtedly have met with the same death which overcame the nurse. Was that window open just as it is now, the one directly behind those plants back of the bench?”

The doctor had never taken his eyes from Orbit’s face and it seemed to McCarty that his tones had quickened.

“Just as you see it now,” affirmed Orbit. “Nothing has been disturbed or changed in any way. But, Doctor, are you positive of your diagnosis? I am not questioning your knowledge but this terrible affair is utterly inexplicable to me! I heard nothing, saw no one! When I seated myself before the organ Lucette was to all casual appearances a perfectly normal young woman glowing with health; when I turned from it a few minutes later she was stretched there dead! The child was absolutely unconcerned and I am sure she had noticed nothing; she is a shy little creature, uneasy in the presence of strangers, and if any one had stolen in and approached the nurse it seems incredible that she would not have cried out or run to me. Thank heaven she is old enough to talk, we may be able to learn something from her later.”

“That is an important point,” conceded the doctor. “When you approached the body did you notice any peculiar odor on the air? It would have been pungent, irritating, almost choking.—Think, Mr. Orbit! You must have been conscious of some foreign, highly chemicalized odor, even if it were almost instantly dissipated.”

There was a pause and then Orbit slowly shook his head.

“I was conscious of no such odor,” he replied. “It is odd, for I am peculiarly sensitive to things of that sort but then I was overwhelmed with the shock of what had taken place. As soon as I realized the girl was dead I called the servants—they might have detected this odor you speak of.—Jean! Ching Lee!”

The two advanced reluctantly from the hall, but in answer to the physician’s queries supplemented by more brusk ones from the inspector, they could reply only in the negative. Jean had been polishing some brasses in a nearby room and heard Mr. Orbit call Ching Lee; he had thought it strange that he did not ring as usual, and when he called again there was something in his voice that made Jean think he needed help. He rushed in and saw the girl stretched upon the bench and Mr. Orbit standing there with little Maude in his arms. Ching Lee had entered just behind him and their stammered stories corroborated that of their employer in every detail. They had noticed no odor but that of the plants all about and they were quite certain they had seen no stranger lurking in the immediate vicinity, to say nothing of getting into the house itself. They had both been on the lower floor all the afternoon.

“I live on the next street and I shall be glad to render any assistance possible to your medical examiner,” Doctor Allonby turned to the inspector and there was an oddly repressed note in his tones. “I will look up this case among my notes and try to ascertain the nature of the chemicals used to generate the gas or vapor which caused this young woman’s death, meanwhile holding myself at your disposal.—Mr. Orbit, I regret that I arrived too late to be of real service, but in any event the end must have come almost instantaneously.”

He bowed, still with that guarded air of repression, and left the room, Ching Lee accompanying him to the door. Orbit shrugged, throwing out his hands in a hopeless gesture.

“You saw? I believe the man actually thinks I am withholding some facts from him!—But who wouldn’t? I can’t bring myself to believe it either, even with that poor girl’s body here before us! It is awful—awful!”

He sank down upon a low stone seat, resting his head upon his hands and the inspector observed:

“Poison gas! That’s a new one on me, except for the carbon monoxide generated from motor cars standing in enclosed spaces. I never was connected with the Bomb Squad but I thought most of that stuff had to be exploded. You didn’t hear anything, did you, while you were playing?”

“Not a sound. The ‘Largo’ is not necessarily thunderous in volume but it has swelling chords which would have effectually smothered any slight noise. What are we to do now, inspector? I am in your hands.”

“Where’s your telephone? I’ve got to notify headquarters and get the medical examiner. That’s the first step, as the doctor said.... Of course I want no one to leave this house!”

“Assuredly not!” Orbit lifted his head. “Ching Lee, show Inspector Druet to the telephone and then see that Fu Moy remains quietly upstairs until he is sent for.”

Ching Lee bowed and followed the official from the room. Dennis, who had been fearfully regarding the body of the dead girl, moved toward McCarty.

“By all that’s unholy, what’s doing around here!” he whispered audibly. “Are the powers of darkness let loose, entirely? Poison gas, my eye! Mac, how would anybody be reaching her except with a squirt-gun or a grenade through that window?”

“Who gave Hughes that poison that not one in a thousand has ever heard of, and how was the Goddard kid snatched from off the face of the earth?” McCarty retorted but in a cautiously lowered tone. He had approached the bench once more and was gazing down at the still figure. “You remember what Ching Lee said? Lucette was the ‘next.’ He don’t think this devilment is goin’ to stop even here and no more do I, unless our luck turns and we can stamp it out! This girl, now—”

He paused, staring down seemingly at the small feet encased in their neat shoes which peeped out from beneath a fold of her skirt, and Dennis drew back with a shiver.

“It turns me fair sick to look at her! To think we was only talking to her this morning!—It seems to me there is a kind of a funny smell on the air! Don’t you get it, Mac? Maybe it’s something that creeps over you gradual, and before we know it we could be corpses ourselves! I’d like well to be out of this room!”

“’Tis your imagination and not that nose you brag of that’s working now!” McCarty thrust his foot forward in a pushing motion until his knee struck smartly against the edge of the stone seat on which Lucette’s body lay. “There’s no smell whatever, barring the scent of the flowers! Himself has been here through it all, remember.”

He indicated with a jerk of his head the seat where the bowed figure rested, and at that moment the inspector reëntered the conservatory.

“Mr. Orbit, is there any other entrance to this room besides that door?”

Orbit looked up and then rose slowly, shaking his head.

“None, but the windows are open as you see—”

“We’ll close and fasten them and then lock this door behind us. I want everything in here left undisturbed until the medical examiner comes. Take us somewhere private where we can talk; I’ll have to get every detail connected with this straight for my report.”

“My study, upstairs?” Orbit suggested.

“All right. Riordan, close the windows, will you, and fix the catches?” The inspector turned and fumbled with the key in the lock as Dennis started for the windows and Orbit, after a last horror-stricken glance at the dead girl, preceded the others from the room.

McCarty eyed his superior’s back for a moment then stooped quickly and drew out from under the bench the object he had carefully kicked there a minute or two before; it was a slender stick with a wad of shrivelled, limp blue rubber dependent from one end. Snapping the stick he thrust it back beneath the bench again and placed the fragment with the clinging, clammily resilient pouch in his pocket. Then he, too, glanced once more at Lucette’s dead face as though ratifying some agreement between them and turned to follow his superior.