“You have them, my dear Quarrier; keep them--safe.”
Quarrier had never liked Marston; the man was elusive, like an eel; you never saw his hand: it was impossible to guess what moved behind the mask-like marble of his face, expressionless always, cold, contained.
But Quarrier had the “documents,” or, rather, they were there, in that wall safe, in itself a small fort of chrome-nickel steel and manganese against which no mere “can-opener” could have prevailed--no torch, even.
Now, as he operated the combination, he was abruptly sensible of a curious sensation of strain; a shock; the short hairs at the back of his neck prickled suddenly as if at the touch of an invisible, icy finger. And for a moment he could have sworn to a Presence just behind him--a something in ambush grinning at his back--a danger, a real and daunting peril, the greater that it was unmeasured and unknown.
But with his fingers upon that dial, Quarrier half turned as if to depart. He was getting jumpy, his nerves out of hand--too much coffee and too many strong cigars, perhaps. That was it. That kidnapping; it might, after all, have had nothing to do with Marston. The documents were safe--they simply had to be. Unless Marston had been there, and gone; but he would scarcely have had time.
Perhaps, too, Quarrier might have obeyed the impulsion of that turning movement, and in that case, also, this story would never have been written. Quarrier might have done this, but for the moment, practical and sanely balanced as he was, for a split second he had the fancy that if he turned his head he would see--something that was not good, that was not--well--normal.
It was instinctive, elemental, rather than rational, and, getting himself in hand, he would, doubtless, have turned abruptly, leaving the room, if, at that moment, out of the tail of his eye, he had not seen the inescapable evidence of a presence other than his own.
_IV._
The Silent Witness.
Quarrier was a large man, and hard-muscled, a dangerous adversary in a rough-and-tumble, a “good man with his hands,” as we have seen; young, and a quick thinker.
In the half of a second it came to him that Marston might have delegated his authority (at second- or third-hand, certainly) to some peterman, some yegg, say, to obtain possession of those documents. But the fellow would have to be a boxman par excellence; that strong-box was the last word in safes, and, Quarrier was certain, the _final_ one.
No ordinary houseman could hope to break into it, and the marauder would have to depend upon a finger sandpapered to the quick, hearing microscopically sensitive, to catch, through that barrier of steel and bronze, the whispering fall of those super-tumblers.
And abruptly following this suggestion, a second and a more daunting thought obtruded: Suppose--just suppose, that their design held no intention of an assault upon the safe; suppose that their plan, the purpose of that nameless, invisible Presence, had included, in the first place, him--Quarrier? In case, after all, he had managed to escape the trap back there in the cellar? Why--they would use him; that was it! They would force him to open the safe. The thing was simple; there was about it, even, a suggestion of sardonic humor, but it was a humor that did not appeal to Quarrier.
Upon the instant he swung round, crouching, his hand reaching for his pocket in a lightning stab, and coming up, level, holding the short-barrelled automatic.
Then his mouth twisted in a mirthless grin as his straining gaze beheld the square room empty under the lights.
A moment he stood, his keen, strong, thoughtful face etched deep with new lines of worry, ears strained against the singing silence, eyes turning from door to door, and from wall to window, a pulse in his temple throbbing jerkily to his hard-held breath. He began the circuit of the room. Walking on tiptoe, he approached the door by which he had entered, thrust into its socket the great bolt. The bolt seemed really unnecessary; the lock in itself, a spring-latch affair, was devised so that it held the stronger for pressure from without.
The _snick_ of steel against steel rang startlingly loud in the speaking stillness; for a moment Quarrier had a curious fancy, a premonition almost, that it was a wasted precaution--that, in effect, he was locking and double locking that door upon an empty room--an empty strong-box. Pistol in hand, however, and starting from the door, he began his round.
The book-case he passed with a cursory examination; nothing there. Next the painting; a portrait of his great-uncle; it held him for a moment; those eyes had always held him; they were “following” eyes; and now for a moment it seemed to Quarrier that they held a warning, a message, a command. But he passed on....
A heavy leather settle was next in order. With a sheepish grimace he stooped, peering under it, straightened, going on to the double windows. That settle had been innocent of guile, but as to the windows--he paused an interval while he thumbed the patent steel catches. These were shut tight, the windows black, glimmering squares against the windy night without.
Throwing off the locks, one after the other, he pushed up the first window, released the steel outer apron, and then, in the very act of leaning outward into the black well beneath, he drew back, with a quick, darting glance over his shoulder as his spine prickled at a sudden, daunting thought.
_What was that?_
For a heartbeat at his back he thought to hear a rustle, a movement, like the shuffle of a swift, stealthy footfall, on the heavy pile of the Kermanshah rug.
But once more there was nothing--no one.
It was thirty stories to the street beneath, and as he leaned there in the window his imagination upon the instant had swayed out down to the dreadful peril of the sheer, sickening fall.
How simple it would have been for someone behind him--how easy....
He shivered, the sweat beading his forehead in a fine mist of fear. A hand on his ankle--a quick heave--and then a formless blur against the night--the plunge--into nothingness....
Turning to the right, he surveyed the heavy door leading to the lumber-room. He tried the great key, rattling the knob. The door was locked; it was heavy, solid, substantial. A quick frown wrinkled his forehead.
“Absurd!” he muttered, but there was an odd lack of conviction in the word. “Impossible!” he said again. “There’s nobody in the room except myself; there _couldn’t_ be.”
But even as he spoke he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that someone or something _had_ occupied that room but a matter of seconds prior to his entry, and if he, or whatever it was, was not there now, where was this invisible presence?
The presence in the room of another than himself was a physical impossibility unless, indeed, there was, after all, a fourth dimension, into which as a man passes from sunlight into shadow, the intruder had stepped, perhaps now regarding him sardonically from that invisible plane: A living ghost!
Absurd! And yet, there was that other fact--he had seen it: _the silent, the voiceless, yet moving witness--the positive and irrefutable proof of a presence other than his own_.
* * * * *
There, in a locked, bolted, impregnable chamber, unmarked by the least sign of entry--a main door which did not have a key, responding only to a combination known only to himself--a secondary door most obviously locked, and from the inside; windows of thick glass, triple locked with the latest in patent catches--someone or something had entered, passing, as it seemed, through bolts and bars, through walls, through steel and stone and concrete, like a djinn, or a wraith--_through the keyhole_?
Matter-of-fact as he was, hard-headed and practical, Quarrier was aware for an instant of a flicker of almost superstitious fear. But--rot! In all the space confined by those four walls and ceiling and floor there was not room for concealment even for a--cat, for instance--for nothing human, at any rate. It was beyond him, even as the Thing that had entered was _beyond him, though at hand_.
Quarrier did not believe in the supernatural with his mind; but, brave as he was by nature and training, in that moment he knew fear. But he preferred, with his intelligence, to credit Marston with it; Marston, so far as morals were considered, might have been almost anything: you saw it in his curious eyes, with their pale irises, the flat, dead color of his skin, like the belly of a snake; in the grim, traplike mouth. Quarrier had never deceived himself as to the President of Intervale Steel. The thing was fantastic, unreal--and yet. It might easily be a trap, and worse. Peril, the more subtile because unknown, was all about him; he felt it, like an emanation. What was it that the psychological sharps would call it? An aura, as of some invisible and deadly presence, seeing, although unseen.
_V._
Through The Keyhole.