Other Worlds, page 9
One rule of police theory is that in cases of domestic murder the primary suspect is always the husband or wife. So I started my mental investigation with Mrs. Bell. But I admit I was dumbfounded when I realized that every single bit of evidence pointed straight to her. She is not only the principal suspect, she is the only person who could have committed the crime.
John Bell was gravely ill but still conscious on December eighteenth. On the morning of the nineteenth his son found him in a deep coma from which he never awoke. Clearly the murderous potion was administered to him on the night of the eighteenth. And who was with him the whole night? Why, Mrs. Bell. Did you note that revealing sentence in her son’s narrative—“Mother slipped away from the bedside where she had sat all night long”? Even without that I would have assumed Mrs. Bell had been with her husband; where else would a devoted wife be when her husband lay mortally ill?
This fact in itself is almost enough to condemn Mrs. Bell. There is one other suspect. By his own statement, John Junior was in charge of his father’s medicine. He could have given Mr. Bell the fatal dose without comment or suspicion from his mother. But John Junior could not have committed the other acts that led up to the murder.
Mrs. Bell must have been poisoning her husband for several years. The numbness and swelling of his tongue suggest some kind of vegetable poison, administered by mouth. Mrs. Bell isn’t the only person who could have slipped a pinch of poison into his hot toddy or his glass of whiskey, but the individual who had constant access to what he ate and drank was his wife, the supervisor of the kitchen.
So much for opportunity. Let us now consider the means by which Mrs. Bell might have obtained poison.
The fields and forests of our beautiful country contain enough poisonous substances to wipe out half the population. The pretty foxglove, the common pokeberry—the berries of a dozen different shrubs—why, gentlemen, nature is a poisoner! In that pioneer society the lady of the house had to be an amateur doctor; she took care of her family and servants in cases of minor illness. If her medicine chest didn’t hold what she needed to kill her husband, she could gather a few leaves and brew up gallons of noxious liquids without anyone asking what she was doing. Finding that the old gentleman was too tough to succumb to the first concoction, she got impatient and tried something else. John Bell’s deep coma could have resulted from an overdose of a narcotic, such as opium. Laudanum—a mixture of opium and alcohol—was part of every housewife’s pharmacopoeia in the nineteenth century. The cat’s reaction to the mysterious liquid is susceptible to several explanations. Maybe the bottle John found wasn’t the laudanum, but one of Mrs. Bell’s other brews. The cat’s convulsions sound like the same tetanic seizures John Bell suffered in the last few months of his life. His wife may have tried a dozen different substances before one finally finished him.
Why would a good, virtuous lady like that want to kill her good, virtuous husband? I ask you, gentlemen—who knows the hidden angers and secret resentments felt by married people? But I know one thing—if Mrs. Bell wanted to be free of Mr. Bell, murder was the only way out for a woman of her temperament and station in life. And it was beginning to look as if the old man would live forever. I can’t talk about motive, it is buried in the grave. I don’t need to. The other facts are damning enough. Mrs. Bell had the best opportunity to kill her husband, and she is the only one who could have created the Spirit.
Take almost every one of the weird tricks it performed, including some of those you’ve eliminated as too preposterous to be true, and you’ll find that Mrs. Bell could have done them. The voice of the Spirit, for instance. You talk about misdirection—it never occurred to anyone to suspect the pious housewife. She could howl like a banshee and the audience wouldn’t even look in her direction. The believers would exclaim in wonder and the skeptics would be watching Betsy.
Mrs. Bell could be out of her bed all night long, and if anybody caught her wandering around she had a dozen excuses. She forgot to put the milk away, or she thought she heard one of the kiddies crying…Her hard-working husband probably slept like the dead—even assuming he hadn’t been drugged by his loving spouse. As soon as he was snoring off went Lucy, tiptoeing into the children’s rooms to scratch and slap, visiting the neighbors to eavesdrop on their private conversations. When Mrs. Bell was sick, the Spirit shut its mouth while she was sleeping. It started to talk when she woke up.
Remember the sermons that were quoted so accurately? That was a cute trick, and I’m surprised Mr. Houdini hasn’t spotted how it could have been worked. Mrs. Bell had undoubtedly heard one of the sermons. She was a regular churchgoer. She had heard the other preacher, too, dozens of times, she was acquainted with his style of talking, and one of her friends might have mentioned the subject of his sermon that Sunday—even given her a synopsis of the talk. Why, that was what they discussed at those Sunday night prayer meetings, wasn’t it? She wouldn’t have had to repeat the sermons word for word; a reasonably accurate imitation would have been accepted as miraculous by her superstitious audience.
And take the decision to send for the witch doctor, a decision known only to Mr. Bell and the two messengers. At first the “all-knowing” Spirit was baffled by this, but by evening it had learned the truth. Now, gentlemen, wouldn’t Mr. Bell finally yield to the pleas of his wife and confide in her? Ladies have a lot of little tricks for wheedling information out of their husbands. The “phantom” hand held for an instant by Calvin Johnson was a woman’s hand. The voices were all female, even those of the four members of the witch family.
Mrs. Bell created the Spirit, but it wasn’t long before other people took a hand. Miss Betsy, and perhaps some of the others, played tricks on their own account. There’s your naughty little girl, Mr. Podmore. She became the center of attention—the sweet child martyr. Few kiddies could resist that role. Besides, it must have been useful for getting her out of chores she didn’t want to do. You can’t ask a girl who has been beaten by a witch to wash the dishes.
From the start the Spirit doted on Mrs. Bell. “Luce, poor Luce—the best woman alive.” That’s a dead giveaway right there. As for the way the others were treated, the only one who really suffered was the husband. The children didn’t get anything worse than the tweaks and smacks any exasperated parent may be moved to bestow on them. It isn’t unusual for a mother to prefer her sons—or one particular son—to her daughters, and fathers often spoil their little girls. I don’t buy your notion that Mr. Bell molested his daughter, Doctor—not because it shocks me, the Good Lord knows I’ve encountered too many such cases—but because there’s no evidence to support it. Mr. Bell could have been innocently fond of his pretty golden-haired daughter, and his wife could have been jealous. But I think it’s more likely that Betsy pulled her own hair and fell into fake fits to get attention.
Dr. Fodor, I don’t hold with your idea that sex is at the bottom of everything, but your talk about split personalities gave me some new insights. I’ve heard about such cases, but don’t you see that the things you said about little Betsy apply even more neatly to her mother? Here’s a lady at a certain time of life, a lady known for her piety and kindness. By George, she must have had a good-sized bundle of repressions built up. I guess Dr. Fodor would say Mrs. Bell’s repressed hostility and frustration split off into a separate personality—a Mrs. Hyde, so to speak. That would explain why the Spirit’s first remarks were so pious and mealy-mouthed. It was testing, making sure its little game was going to work. Once it was accepted as an outside agent, it could let itself go and say all the nasty things Mrs. Bell had never allowed herself to say. I’m told that some of the most delicate, refined ladies cut loose with language that would make a muleskinner blush when they are under anaesthesia. They know the words. Mrs. Bell knew them too, just as she knew a lot of neighborhood gossip she wouldn’t repeat when she was herself.
The conclusive piece of evidence is the second visit of the Spirit. Betsy is cleared by that, if by nothing else; she wasn’t even living at home in 1828. Neither was John Junior. But his house wasn’t far away; did his mother take long walks on those spring evenings, or were the conversations about future wars and the martyrdom of our Saviour the product of John Junior’s restless imagination? It doesn’t matter. Mrs. Bell was living in the old homestead when the rappings returned for the second time. By 1935, when the Spirit was due to return for its third visit, she had been in her grave for almost a century. Poor woman! Once I might have called her something else, but I’ve learned a thing or two tonight. I believe it was not Mrs. Bell but Mrs. Hyde—Lucy II, as Dr. Fodor would call her—who committed the murder. God knows what drove her to it. May she rest in peace.
Houdini struck his hands together. His gray eyes shone.
“I like it. I like it! Inspector, you put us to shame. I think you’ve got it.”
Fodor stroked his chin. “A most convincing argument.”
“Horrible,” Doyle cried. “Unjust and unfair. I don’t believe it for a moment.”
“Neither do I,” Podmore said. “Your arguments are ingenious, Inspector. But my explanation also covers all the facts, and child poltergeists are the common rule. Miss Betsy fits the pattern too well.”
“Your child poltergeist is only one of the possible patterns,” Fodor objected. “Of all the theories put forth this evening—”
NINETEEN
SUMMERS: PLAYING WITH HELL FIRE
“ALL ARE most damnably in error.”
The deep sepulchral voice seemed to issue from the empty air. Even the imperturbable Podmore started. Doyle glared wildly around the room, as if he feared that the Bell Spirit had returned to make its comment on the proceedings.
A high-backed leather chair stood slightly to one side of the circle in which the friends were sitting. With unnerving abruptness a face rose into view over the back of the chair—a round, rosy, smiling face whose generous chin was supported by a clerical collar. This apparition went on, its tone and its language quite at variance with its benevolent appearance.
“Your ignoble fatuities and monstrous extravagances, gentlemen, indicate that you are totally ignorant of the subject. The true nature of the Bell Witch is hideously apparent to anyone with an open mind. This suffering child, this unhappy maiden, was doomed to suffer because of the ignoble heresies of Calvin and Knox. The misguided ministers had neither the spiritual nor the practical knowledge to deal with so dark and difficult a task. The only thing that could have saved Betsy Bell was an exorcist—spiritualis imperator—specifically ordained to cast out demons by the grace of the Holy Ghost.
“Yes! This was a clear and dreadful case of diabolic possession. Have we not the authority of God’s holy word as to its reality? ‘Behold, they brought him a dumb man possessed with a devil, and after the devil was cast out, the dumb man spoke.’ (Matthew nine, gentlemen—verses thirty-two and thirty-three.)
“History records innumerable examples of obsession and diabolic possession. That unhappy home in Tennessee saw another. At first the demon attacked the Bell family from without, by knocks and rappings and physical attacks. This is technically known as obsession. It is often the prelude to actual possession, in which the demon assumes control of an individual’s body from within. Betsy Bell’s seizures, or fainting fits, were unmistakable signs of possession. The filthy obscenities voiced by the creature, its knowledge of all languages, the foul stench noted by one witness—all are signs of the presence of an unclean spirit. Or, in this case, spirits. Scripture tells us that a demonic presence admitted its name was Legion—innumerable, countless. With what typical frivolity did you dismiss one of the most important clues in the narrative—the witch family, and the devilishly significant name of its leader. A black dog was one of the commonest manifestations of that oldest and most vile of fallen angels.
“Sir Arthur, you appear flushed. No wonder! Don’t you realize you are playing with fire—Hell fire—when you summon the dead? The voices you hear at your séances are not dear ones who have passed from this life, they are demonic actors of diabolic skill. The New Religion of Spiritualism is but the Old Witchcraft, and the Bell Witch was indeed a witch—a vile, perverse, and perverting spirit like the ones that led the Salem witches to death and damnation. Spiritualism is most foul, most loathly, most—”
Doyle surged to his feet. “By Heaven, Summers, you go too far! This was a private conversation which—”
“Which was on the verge of concluding,” Houdini interrupted, taking his irate friend firmly by the arm. “Shall we go, gentlemen?”
“We may as well.” Podmore shot a glance of cold dislike at the disembodied head, which grinned back at him. “There is no hope of intelligent discussion now. Good night, Mr. Summers.”
“Reverend Summers, sir! And let me warn you, Sir Arthur—”
Doyle’s friends surrounded him and led him out. In the hall, while they waited for the servant to fetch their coats, the Inspector asked incredulously, “Who the devil is that madman?”
“He is no priest, whatever he pretends,” Doyle sputtered.
“His name is Montague Summers,” Fodor explained. “He is the author of a number of learned books on magic and witchcraft which are distinguished by the astonishing fact that the man believes in each and all of these superstitions. He deplores the fact that the witch finders were not thorough enough, and considers burning to death too light a punishment for persons who have embraced Satanism.”
“You’re kidding,” Ryan said. “Or is he?”
“No, he is quite in earnest. Strangely enough,” Fodor said thoughtfully, “he has done quite a nice job of editing the major Restoration dramatists.”
“Oh, what does it matter?” Houdini slipped into his overcoat and took his hat from the cloakroom attendant. “The fellow is a bad joke. If Sir Arthur hadn’t been on the verge of losing his temper, I’d have encouraged Summers to rave on. He is funnier than a vaudeville show.”
The front door opened; a gray tendril of fog slid in, like a ghostly arm. Podmore turned up his collar. Fodor contemplated the spectral glow of a street lamp, eerily swathed in mist.
“We part here, gentlemen,” he said. “A strange conclusion to our evening. We had dispelled the ghosts and demons, only to have them raised again by Summers.”
“Perhaps it was a fitting conclusion after all,” Houdini said musingly. “Our theories offer satisfying explanations, but in spite of all our logic we will never know the true answer—unless in some other universe we are privileged to meet Mrs. Betsy Bell Powell face-to-face, and hear the story from her own lips. We might not care for that, you know. It would be a dull world if all doubts were resolved and all questions answered—a world without wonder or scope for imagination…”
The five men part. Their forms melt into the fog and disappear.
The Second Evening
TWENTY
“THE FOG THICKENS,” said Conan Doyle in solemn tones.
He stood at the tall window, which was framed by heavy red plush draperies. Outside, the wrought-iron railings glistened with condensed moisture. All objects beyond them were wrapped in a veil of fog; the forms of passersby moved like shrouded spectres, and the gas lamps shone with a ghostly glow.
His companion laughed. “An appropriate setting, isn’t it? Like the start of one of your famous stories. Come and sit down, Arthur, and let the servant draw the curtains.”
With the dreary night shut out the room felt cozy and comfortable. A fire crackled on the hearth and handsome oriental rugs muffled the footsteps of the servants moving about the room. Several overstuffed chairs had been drawn up in a semicircle facing the fire. Instead of taking one of them, Doyle turned, courteously awaiting the arrival of the others. They were not long in following: thin-faced, intense Frank Podmore, who had been called the skeptic-in-chief of the Society for Psychical Research; the suave Viennese psychiatrist, Nandor Fodor; and, preceding them, the sole American member of their informal society, gallantly excorting a lady whose hand rested lightly on his arm. Harry Houdini was not a tall man, but the lady’s crown of thick auburn hair barely reached his ear. Like the men, she wore formal evening attire; the skirts of her satin gown trailed behind her and the bodice glittered with jet and crystal beads. She was not in her first youth, but Doyle, a gentleman of the old school, had privately decided she was still a fine figure of a woman. He was too much of a gentleman to wonder whether the color of her hair was entirely natural.
The lady examined the pleasant room and its elegant furnishings with interest. “Well, this is a privilege,” she remarked, her deep contralto voice marked (not unpleasingly, Doyle thought) by an unmistakable American accent. “I never expected to be admitted to such a bastion of masculine privacy. How did you get me in?”
Houdini chuckled, and led her to a chair in the center of the circle. “The rules of that other world—I won’t call it the real world, since this one suits me just fine—are suspended here, ma’am. If this were a traditional gentleman’s club, I probably wouldn’t have been admitted either!”
Andrew Lang, who had already seated himself, rose politely, and the others waited until she had taken a chair before selecting their own. Brandy and coffee were ordered. Houdini lit a cigar, and Fodor took out his pipe. The lady fumbled in her unfashionably large evening bag and produced a packet of cigarettes. She was still rummaging around in it, presumably for a means of lighting her cigarette, when Harry Price, on her right, struck a match for her.
