Reinach kept smiling. “Pshaw. Thorne hadn’t left the Black House since Sylvester’s funeral. Nor did he receive or send any mail during his self-imposed vigil last week. This morning he left me on the pier to telephone someone. You showed up shortly after. Since he was gone only a minute or two, it was obvious that he hadn’t had time to tell you much, if anything. Allow me to felicitate you, Mr. Queen, upon your conduct today. It’s been exemplary. An air of omniscience covering a profound and desperate ignorance.”

  Ellery removed his pince-nez and began to polish their lenses. “You’re a psychologist as well as a physician, I see.” Thorne said abruptly: “This is all beside the point.”

  “No, no, it’s all very much to the point,” replied the fat man in a sad bass. “Now the canker annoying your friend, Mr. Queen—since it seems a shame to keep you on tenterhooks any longer—is roughly this: My half-brother Sylvester, God rest his troubled soul, was a miser. If he’d been able to take his gold with him to the grave—with any assurance that it would remain there—I’m sure he would have done so.”

  “Gold?” asked Ellery, raising his brows.

  “You may well titter, Mr. Queen. There was something mediaeval about Sylvester; you almost expected him to go about in a long black velvet gown muttering incantations in Latin. At any rate, unable to take his gold with him to the grave, he did the next best thing. He hid it.”

  “Oh, lord,” said Ellery. “You’ll be pulling clanking ghosts out of your hat next.”

  “Hid,” beamed Dr. Reinach, “the filthy lucre in the Black House.”

  “And Miss Alice Mayhew?”

  “Poor child, a victim of circumstances. Sylvester never thought of her until recently, when she wrote from London that her last maternal relative had died. Wrote to friend Thorne, he of the lean and hungry eye, who had been recommended by some friend as a trustworthy lawyer. As he is, as he is! You see, Alice didn’t even know if her father was alive, let alone where he was. Thorne, good Samaritan, located us, gave Alice’s exhaustive letters and photographs to Sylvester, and has acted as liaison officer ever since. And a downright circumspect one, too, by thunder!”

  “This explanation is wholly unnecessary,” said the lawyer stiffly. “Mr.

  Queen knows”

  “Nothing,” smiled the fat man, “to judge by the attentiveness with which he’s been following my little tale. Let’s be intelligent about this, Thorne.” He turned to Ellery again, nodding very amiably. “Now, Mr.

  Queen, Sylvester clutched at the thought of his new-found daughter with the pertinacity of a drowning man clutching a life-preserver. I betray no secret when I say that my half-brother, in his paranoic dotage, suspected his own family—imagine!—of having evil designs on his fortune.”

  “A monstrous slander, of course.”

  “Neatly put, neatly put! Well, Sylvester told Thorne in my presence that he had long since converted his fortune into specie, that he’d hidden this gold somewhere in the house next door, and that he wouldn’t reveal the hiding-place to anyone but Alice, his daughter, who was to be his sole heir. You see?”

  “I see,” said Ellery.

  “He died before Alice’s arrival, unfortunately. Is it any wonder, Mr.

  Queen, that Thorne thinks dire things of us?”

  “This is fantastic,” snapped Thorne, coloring. “Naturally, in the interests of my client, I couldn’t leave the premises unguarded with that mass of gold lying about loose somewhere”

  “Naturally not,” nodded the doctor.

  “If I may intrude my still, small voice,” murmured Ellery, “isn’t this a battle of giants over a mouse? The possession of gold is a clear violation of the law in this country, and has been for several years. Even if you found it, wouldn’t the government confiscate it?”

  “There’s a complicated legal situation, Queen,” said Thorne; “but one which cannot come into existence before the gold is found. Therefore my efforts to”

  “And successful efforts, too,” grinned Dr. Reinach. “Do you know, Mr. Queen, your friend has slept behind locked, barred doors, with an old cutlass in his hand—one of Sylvester’s prized mementoes of a grandfather who was in the Navy? It’s terribly amusing.”

  “I don’t find it so,” said Thorne shortly. “If you insist on playing the buffoon”

  “And yet—to go back to this matter of your little suspicions, Thorne

  —have you analyzed the facts? “Whom do you suspect, my dear fellow?

  Your humble servant? I assure you that I am spiritually an ascetic”

  “An almighty fat one!” snarled Thorne. “—and that money, per se, means nothing to me,” went on the doctor imperturbably. “My half-sister Sarah? An anile wreck living in a world of illusion, quite as antediluvian as Sylvester—they were twins, you know—who isn’t very long for this world.

  Then that leaves my estimable Milly and our saturnine young friend Nick.

  Milly? Absurd; she hasn’t had an idea, good or bad, for two decades.

  Nick? Ah, an outsider—we may have struck something there. Is it Nick you suspect, Thorne?” chuckled Dr. Reinach.

  Keith got to his feet and glared down into the bland damp lunar countenance of the fat man. He seemed quite drunk. “You damned porker,” he said thickly.

  Dr. Reinach kept smiling, but his little porcine eyes were wary. “Now, now, Nick,” he said in a soothing rumble.

  It all happened very quickly. Keith lurched forward, snatched the heavy cut-glass brandy decanter, and swung it at the doctor’s head.

  Thorne cried out and took an instinctive forward step; but he might have spared himself the exertion. Dr. Reinach jerked his head back like a fat snake and the blow missed. The violent effort pivoted Keith’s body completely about; the decanter slipped from his fingers and flew into the fireplace, crashing to pieces. The fragments splattered all over the fireplace, strewing the hearth, too; the little brandy that remained in the bottle hissed into the fire, blazing with a blue flame.

  “That decanter,” said Dr. Reinach angrily, “was almost a hundred and fifty years old!”

  Keith stood still, his broad back to them. They could see his shoulders heaving.

  Ellery sighed with the queerest feeling. The room was shimmering as in a dream, and the whole incident seemed unreal, like a scene in a play on a stage. Were they acting? Had the scene been carefully planned? But, if so, why? What earthly purpose could they have hoped to achieve by pretending to quarrel and come to blows? The sole result had been the wanton destruction of a lovely old decanter. It didn’t make sense.

  “I think,” said Ellery, struggling to his feet, “that I shall go to bed before the Evil One comes down the chimney. Thank you for an alto-gether extraordinary evening, gentlemen. Coming, Thorne?” He stumbled up the stairs, followed by the lawyer, who seemed as weary as he. They separated in the cold corridor without a word to stumble to their respective bedrooms. From below came a heavy silence.

  It was only as he was throwing his trousers over the footrail of his bed that Ellery recalled hazily Thome’s whispered intention hours before to visit him that night and explain the whole fantastic business. He struggled into his dressing-gown and slippers and shuffled down the hall to Thome’s room. But the lawyer was already in bed, snoring sterterously.

  Ellery dragged himself back to his room and finished undressing. He knew he would have a head the next morning; he was a notoriously poor drinker. His brain spinning, he crawled between the blankets and fell asleep almost stertorously.

  * * *

  He opened his eyes after a tossing, tiring sleep with the uneasy conviction that something was wrong. For a moment he was aware only of the ache in his head and the fuzzy feel of his tongue; he did not remember where he was. Then, as his glance took in the faded wall-paper, the pallid patches of sunlight on the worn blue carpet, his trousers tumbled over the footrail where he had left them the night before, memory returned; and, shivering, he consulted his wrist-watch, which he had forgotten to take off on going to bed. It was five minutes to seven. He raised his head from the pillow in the frosty air of the bedroom; his nose was half-frozen. But he could detect nothing wrong; the sun looked brave if weak in his eyes; the room was quiet and exactly as he had seen it on retiring; the door was closed. He snuggled between the blankets again.

  Then he heard it. It was Thome’s voice. It was Thome’s voice raised in a thin faint cry, almost a wail, coming from somewhere outside the house.

  He was out of bed and at the window in his bare feet in one leap. But Thorne was not visible at this side of the house, upon which the dead woods encroached directly; so he scrambled back to slip shoes on his feet and his gown over his pajamas, darted toward the footrail and snatched his revolver out of the hip pocket of his trousers, and ran out into the corridor, heading for the stairs, the revolver in his hand.

  “What’s the matter?” grumbled someone, and he turned to see Dr.

  Reinach’s vast skull protruding nakedly from the room next to his.

  “Don’t know. I heard Thorne cry out,” and Ellery pounded down the stairs and flung open the front door.

  He stopped within the doorway, gaping.

  Thorne, fully dressed, was standing ten yards in front of the house, facing Ellery obliquely, staring at something outside the range of Ellery’s vision with the most acute expression of terror on his gaunt face Ellery had ever seen on a human countenance. Beside him crouched Nicholas Keith, only half-dressed; the young man’s jaws gaped foolishly and his eyes were enormous glaring discs.

  Dr. Reinach shoved Ellery roughly aside and growled: “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?” The fat man’s feet were encased in carpet slippers and he had pulled a raccoon coat over his night-shirt, so that he looked like a particularly obese bear.

  Thome’s Adam’s-apple bobbed nervously. The ground, the trees, the world were blanketed with snow of a peculiarly unreal texture; and the air was saturated with warm woolen flakes, falling softly. Deep drifts curved upwards to clamp the boles of trees.

  “Don’t move,” croaked Thorne as Ellery and the fat man stirred.

  “Don’t move, for the love of God. Stay where you are.” Ellery’s grip tightened on the revolver and he tried perversely to get past the doctor; but he might have been trying to budge a stone wall. Thorne stumbled through the snow to the porch, paler than his background, leaving two deep ruts behind him. “Look at me,” he shouted. “Look at me. Do I seem all right? Have I gone mad?”

  “Pull yourself together, Thorne,” said Ellery sharply. “What’s the matter with you? I don’t see anything wrong.”

  “Nick!” bellowed Dr. Reinach. “Have you gone crazy, too?” The young man covered his sunburnt face suddenly with his hands; then he dropped his hands and looked again.

  He said in a strangled voice: “Maybe we all have. This is the most—

  Take a look yourself.”

  Reinach moved then, and Ellery squirmed by him to land in the soft snow beside Thorne, who was trembling violently. Dr. Reinach came lurching after. They ploughed through the snow toward Keith, squinting, straining to see.

  They need not have strained. What was to be seen was plain for any seeing eye to see. Ellery felt his scalp crawl as he looked; and at the same instant he was aware of the sharp conviction that this was inevitable, this was the only possible climax to the insane events of the previous day. The world had turned topsy-turvy. Nothing in it meant anything reasonable or sane.Dr. Reinach gasped once; and then he stood blinking like a huge owl.

  A window rattled on the second floor of the White House. None of them looked up. It was Alice Mayhew in a wrapper, staring from the window of her bedroom, which was on the side of the house facing the driveway. She screamed once; and then she, too, fell silent.

  There was the house from which they had just emerged, the house Dr.

  Reinach had dubbed the White House, with its front door quietly swinging open and Alice Mayhew at an upper side window. Substantial, solid, an edifice of stone and wood and plaster and glass and the patina of age. It was everything a house should be. That much was real, a thing to be grasped.

  But beyond it, beyond the driveway and the garage, where the Black House had stood, the house in which Ellery himself had set foot only the afternoon before, the house of the filth and the stench, the house of the equally stone walls, wooden facings, glass windows, chimneys, gargoyles, porch; the house of the blackened look; the old Victorian house built during the Civil War where Sylvester Mayhew had died, where Thorne had barricaded himself with a cutlass for a week; the house which they had all seen, touched, smelled! . . . there, there stood nothing.

  No walls. No chimney. No roof. No ruins. No debris. No house.

  Nothing.

  Nothing but empty space covered smoothly and warmly with snow.

  The house had vanished during the night.

  Chapter II

  “There’s even,” thought Mr. Ellery Queen dully, “a character named Alice.”

  He looked again. The only reason he did not rub his eyes was that it would have made him feel ridiculous; besides, his sight, all his senses, had never been keener.

  He simply stood there in the snow and looked and looked and looked at the empty space where a three-story stone house seventy-five years old had stood the night before.

  “Why, it isn’t there,” said Alice feebly from the upper window. “It . . .

  isn’t . . . there.”

  “Then I’m not insane.” Thorne stumbled toward them. Ellery watched the old man’s feet sloughing through the snow, leaving long tracks. A man’s weight still counted for something in the universe, then.

  Yes, and there was his own shadow; so material objects still cast shadows.

  Absurdly, the discovery brought a certain faint relief.

  “It is gone!” said Thorne in a cracked voice.

  “Apparently.” Ellery found his own voice thick and slow; he watched the words curl out on the air and become nothing. “Apparently, Thorne.” It was all he could find to say.

  Dr. Reinach arched his fat neck, his wattles quivering like a gobbler’s.

  “Incredible. Incredible!”

  “Incredible,” said Thorne in a whisper.

  “Unscientific. It can’t be. I’m a man of sense. Of senses. My mind is clear. Things like this—damn it, they just don’t happen!”

  “As the man said who saw a giraffe for the first time,” sighed Ellery.

  “And yet . . . there it was.”

  Thorne began wandering helplessly about in a circle. Alice stared, bewitched into stone, from the upper window. And Keith cursed and began to run across the snow-covered driveway toward the invisible house, his hands outstretched before him like a blind man’s.

  “Hold on,” said Ellery. “Stop where you are.” The giant halted, scowling. “What d’ye want?” Ellery slipped his revolver back into his pocket and sloshed through the snow to pause beside the young man in the driveway. “I don’t know precisely. Something’s wrong. Something’s out of kilter either with us or with the world. It isn’t the world as we know it. It’s almost . . . almost a matter of transposed dimensions. Do you suppose the solar system has slipped out of its niche in the universe and gone stark crazy in the uncharted depths of space-time? I suppose I’m talking nonsense.”

  “You know best,” shouted Keith. “I’m not going to let this screwy business stampede me. There was a solid house on that plot last night, by God, and nobody can convince me it still isn’t there. Not even my own eyes. We’ve—we’ve been hypnotized! The hippo could do it here—he could do anything. Hypnotized. You hypnotized us, Reinach!” The doctor mumbled: “What?” and kept glaring at the empty lot.

  “I tell you it’s there!” cried Keith angrily.

  Ellery sighed and dropped to his knees in the snow; he began to brush aside the white, soft blanket with chilled palms. When he had laid the ground bare, he saw wet gravel and a rut.

  “This is the driveway, isn’t it?” he asked without looking up.

  “The driveway,” snarled Keith, “or the road to hell. You’re as mixed up as we are. Sure it’s the driveway! Can’t you see the garage? Why shouldn’t it be the driveway?”

  “I don’t know.” Ellery got to his feet, frowning. “I don’t know anything. I’m beginning to learn all over again. Maybe—maybe it’s a matter of gravitation. Maybe we’ll all fly into space any minute now.” Thorne groaned: “My God.”

  “All I can be sure of is that something very strange happened last night.”

  “I tell you,” growled Keith, “it’s an optical illusion!”

  “Something strange.” The fat man stirred. “Yes, decidedly. What an inadequate word! A house has disappeared. Something strange.” He began to chuckle in a choking, mirthless way.

  “Oh that,” said Ellery impatiently. “Certainly. Certainly, Doctor.

  That’s a fact. As for you, Keith, you don’t really believe this mass-hypnosis bilge. The house is gone, right enough . . . . It’s not the fact of its being gone that bothers me. It’s the agency, the means. It smacks of—of—” He shook his head. “I’ve never believed in . . . this sort of thing, damn it all!” Dr. Reinach threw back his vast shoulders and glared, red-eyed, at the empty snow-covered space. “It’s a trick,” he bellowed. “A rotten trick, that’s what it is. That house is right there in front of our noses. Or—or—

  They can’t fool me”

  Ellery looked at him. “Perhaps,” he said, “Keith has it in his pocket?” Alice clattered out on the porch in high-heeled shoes over bare feet, her hair streaming, a cloth coat flung over her night-clothes. Behind her crept little Mrs. Reinach. The women’s eyes were wild.

  “Talk to them,” muttered Ellery to Thorne. “Anything; but keep their minds occupied. We’ll all go balmy if we don’t preserve at least an air of sanity. Keith, get me a broom.”

  He shuffled up the driveway, skirting the invisible house very carefully and not once taking his eyes off the empty space. The fat man hesitated; then he lumbered along in Ellery’s tracks. Thorne stumbled back to the porch and Keith strode off, disappearing behind the White House.

 

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