Footprints on the Ceiling Read online

  One of the catches, when I pushed at it, flipped open. The bag was unlocked. I laid it on its side and heard an inner, heavy metallic rattle. I snapped the other catch free and raised the lid, six inches perhaps, before I dropped it. My surprise couldn’t have been more complete if I had discovered a full-grown Gila monster or a collection of human heads. The veiled lady and the Coast Defense plans weren’t in the same class!

  I stood there in prosaic, everyday Grand Central Station, and clutched a strange suitcase that was filled with coins. Funny-looking old coins, worn and wobbly about the edges, all about the size of a quarter and of a dull, dirty yellow color. Brass slugs? I quickly extracted one and closed the lid. In spite of the appearance of age, I fully expected a close look to reveal some such inscription as New York World’s Fair Souvenir or This token with two box tops is good for—But that wasn’t it.

  I saw instead the likeness of a plump, sharp-nosed, and vaguely familiar face, that of a man wearing long curly hair surmounted by a laurel wreath. The inscription in worn letters that circled him read: GEORGIUS III—DEL GRATIA. The reverse side bore on a floriated shield a complicated and impressive coat of arms—the English lions, a harp, fleur-de-lis, and a date, 1779. Coins right enough. English. Revolutionary period. Denomination, as far as I was concerned, unknown. I only knew that there were a thousand or two in that suitcase and that their yellow color—if the coins were bona-fide—could only mean one thing: gold.

  I glanced quickly around the station again. Everything normal—except the cockeyed contents of that case and the dizzy whirl under my hat. I opened the lid once more for just an instant, and took out the small cardboard box I had glimpsed lying there half buried in the yellow metal. I pulled away the rubber band that encircled it and removed the cover. There might be something here to explain—but there wasn’t. Only more coins, a half-dozen of them.

  My sneak-thief theory collapsed. I didn’t get it at all. Only that something had slipped a cog. That seemed as obvious as the nose on George III’s chubby face. Could anyone be so preoccupied as not to be instantly aware of the difference in weight between the two suitcases and, at the same time, harmless enough to be at large? I doubted it strongly. Yet, if the exchange had been deliberate—Had someone burgled the collection of the Numismatic Society? I doubted that too. They wouldn’t have that many coins all alike.

  The idiotic irrationality of it all annoyed me. The loss of my camera annoyed me. The problem in ethics, a problem unprovided for by my ordinary rules of conduct, annoyed me. I should, I supposed, trot around to the nearest police station crying, Look what I found! If I wasn’t immediately locked up on suspicion, I would at least have to spend an hour or two tangled in explanations—explanations I didn’t have. They might search me and find the gun—and I’d no explanation and no permit. I’d miss Merlini and his haunted house. If I didn’t step on it, I’d miss him as it was.

  I decided that if any eccentric dealer in old coins was unhinged enough to leave his stock around loose like this, he could wait a day or two to get it back. Teach him a lesson. I think I fully expected that somehow, somewhere there was a rational, probably quite commonplace, answer, and that someone would turn up in due course to claim the coins. But I was certainly not going to hang around waiting for him; I had things to do and places to go.

  I dropped the cardboard box with its six coins into my pocket—Merlini, I thought, might know what they were—took the suitcase around the corner and shoved it into the nearest dime-in-the-slot locker. I went back to the Walgreen’s on the corner and bought flashlights, paper cups, and sandwiches. Then I stopped at the Ship’s Bar half a block over on 43d, picked up a quick one and a quart of Scotch to go.

  The mid-portion of the block between Lexington and Third Avenue is none too brightly lit. I was 20 feet from the door of the bar on the way out when I heard the quick footsteps behind me. I started to turn—way too late. Something that might easily have been the Chrysler building hit me on the top of the head, and was followed immediately by an elegant display of shooting stars in full Technicolor. They whirled through a fast, eccentric, Walt Disney dance routine and then, as the film began to flicker badly, something hard and flat, strangely like a cement sidewalk, pushed gently against my face. It was very comfortable and I went to sleep.

  When I woke after awhile I was conscious, first, that my head seemed to be very loosely attached and on the verge of floating off. I was lying ten feet or so back from the sidewalk in the shadow of an areaway. I rolled over slowly, with some vague intention of rising, and felt a hard, square shape bump against my ribs. My hand fumbled over the object, feeling the hard fiber and the metal catches. The fog behind my eyes lifted a bit further. I sat up. Brain cells clicked and started turning over again. Suitcase, I thought. Damn thing followed me. Haunted, that’s what. I swung up on to my feet, balanced there none too steadily, and put my complete profane vocabulary into one blistering and very satisfying paragraph. I tacked a neat row of exclamation points on the end and stopped short.

  My hand, acting apparently of its own volition, was groping in my pocket, hunting for—and not finding—that locker key. Then I knew—this suitcase was my own.

  My other packages lay near by, having been kicked in off the sidewalk out of sight. The one that contained the bottle was still intact. I opened it and administered enough first aid to shock me fully awake. Then I stepped out to the sidewalk. Half a block away a taxi came toward me. I waited, took another drink, and flagged him. I gathered up the suitcase and packages, got into the cab and said:

  “Grand Central. Let’s see how fast you can do it.”

  It was only half a block and he did all right, but we hadn’t started soon enough. He waited while I looked at the locker. I saw the key and knew, before I opened the door, that the locker was quite empty.

  We pulled up at the river end of 44th Street a good 20 minutes after nine. But Merlini wasn’t much before me. We stopped behind another taxi just as his long, lank frame got out and unfolded. I was not close enough to see the impish twinkle in his black eyes or the enigmatic half-smile that touched his lips, though I knew they were there, as they always are when he makes that familiar and graceful necromantic gesture that produces the coins—his cab fare in this instance—from thin air. Merlini wears no theatrical opera cape, curling mustachios, or pointed van-dyke, but somehow you feel that those hallmarks of the conjurer are there in spirit. It may be the utterly confident way he carries himself or the sure, smoothly co-ordinated movements of his hands or, perhaps, the resonant, almost hypnotic, voice that with deft, unnoticed misdirection propels you along an apparently sound but quite illogical path of thought, and then, with no warning, springs a trap door that leaves you standing on the sheer edge of an impossibility.

  He left the cab driver blinking and came toward me as I disembarked.

  “Late again,” he said, grinning.

  But I was in an ill humor by now. I pointed to my driver. “That trick you just did,” I said wearily. “This man wants to see it too. Sixty cents worth, plus tip.”

  I walked off abruptly, down toward the dock and the long, low speedboat moored there beneath a landing light. A small man wearing a yachting cap approached me.

  “Mr. Merlini?” he asked.

  “No. He’s coming. Back there. I’m with him.”

  He took my packages and the suitcase and stowed them in the boat. Merlini climbed down and sat beside me a moment later. He took a brightly jacketed circus program from his pocket tore the margin from one of its pages, quickly sketched something on it, and passed it over:

  “Got a new puzzle for you, Ross,” he said. “Turned it up in an old book the other day. So old it’s new again. Two glasses, water in one, wine in the other, same amount of liquid in each. You take one teaspoonful from the wine glass and put it in the water. Stir well and take one teaspoonful of the resulting mixture and put it back in the wine. Do you now have more wine in the water glass than water in the wine glass, or vice versa,
or—”

  “Puzzles!” I groaned. “My God! I’ll give you puzzles.”

  Merlini looked at me closely.

  “Oh. A bit pale around the gills and grouchier than usual. Anything wrong?”

  “Wrong?” I rubbed the back of my head, feeling for possible compound fractures. “Oh, no. Unless you count being blackjacked and losing a fortune in gold pieces. Here. Puzzles is it? What do you make of that?”

  The boat kicked up a roar and moved out on the dark river. As Merlini took the little box, I got a flashlight from the suitcase and held it for him. He lifted the cardboard cover and regarded the box’s contents with interest. Then he picked out one of the coins and, casually, with what seemed only a simple twist of the wrist, made it vanish. His empty hand reached for another.

  “Hey!” I protested, grabbing at the box.

  Merlini said, “Sorry,” and the coin reappeared with prompt inexplicability at his fingertips. “They look nice, but they’re a bit small and heavier than I like for easy manipulation. When did you begin collecting old and rare coins?”

  “Tonight. But they aren’t so rare. What sort of coin is it and what’s it worth? Do you know?”

  “For a coin collector, you’re not too well informed, are you? English guineas—a guinea’s twenty-one shillings—about five dollars. What—here, are you going to be seasick?”

  “No,” I said weakly, “I—I don’t think so. I was just multiplying.”

  He scowled at me and indicated my packages. “What are all these? More coin collection?”

  “Scotch, two more flashlights, sandwiches …” My voice trailed off. I was remembering the weight of that suitcase.

  “Flashlights, sandwiches, odd behavior of ignorant coin collector, blackjack, Scotch …You’ve been burgling a museum. Irate curator lets fly and catches you one. Serves you right. Or else—the Scotch. Any left?”

  For once in my life I had the great mysterioso, the high panjandrum of hocus-pocus, right where I wanted him—mystified. I proceeded to take full advantage of it.

  “Classified ads,” I said. “Haunted houses. Skelton Island, Colonel Watrous, Miss Verrill, deadly weapon. I’ll trade even. But I want your story first.”

  “Deadly weapon?” he asked. “I don’t follow.”

  “This one.” I produced the gun Burt had given me. “And don’t hold out. I want the whole story.”

  He eyed me with what appeared to be a genuinely puzzled air. “Looks like further burglary to me. It’s the one I keep at the shop. What are you doing with it?”

  “I’m asking you. Burt said you told him to have me bring it.”

  “I did not.”

  We tangled over that, but finally, when I’d explained something of the circumstances, Merlini laughed. “Burt knows you, Ross. Trading on your romantic nature. He wanted to make sure you’d say yes and come along.”

  I said, glumly, “What about that classified ad gag?”

  “Oh, that. It’s not a gag. It’s a radio broadcast. NBC is starting a series called The Ghost Hour and they want to send some of the programs from haunted houses, graveyards, and such. I’m emceeing the show.”

  “You get the ghost to step up to the mike and say a few words. Something like that?”

  “Sure, and if the ghost is bashful, there’s always the sound effects department.”

  “I’m disappointed. Commercialism rears its sordid head. Probably to introduce a new breakfast cereal called Ghost-Toasties, with testimonials from famous haunts.”

  “Sorry if I’ve let you down,” he said. “About these coins—”

  “No you don’t. Not yet. What about the Colonel’s mysterious visit this morning, why have you been keeping Miss Verrill from me, and what goes on at Skelton Island that has them all wigwagging for help? Radio sketch, my hat!”

  “There’s more to it than that, I’ll admit. There’s a haunted house out there, one I’ve been meaning to get a look at. It was double-starred on the list Watrous made up. But—”

  “Oh!” My tone was heavily sarcastic. “NBC hired him too, I suppose, as a technical expert on spooks?”

  The red beacon at the upper tip of Welfare Island dropped astern. We swung in a wide curve around through Hellgate toward the great arches of the Triborough Bridge, whose moving flow of lights connected Ward’s Island and Astoria.

  “Yes. As a matter of fact they did. Because of his preeminent reputation as a psychical researcher, author, and authority on anything occult, they naturally thought of him first. But they wanted their ghosts treated with a light touch. That upset matters. Not having read any of his books, they didn’t realize that the Colonel’s sense of humor doesn’t operate on that subject. He said if that’s what they wanted they’d better get me. They did.”

  “And he invites you out here and shows off a haunted house so you can poke fun at his pet spooks on a nationwide hookup? I don’t believe it.”

  “No, it isn’t that. It seems that Skelton Island has other psychic attractions. Madame Rappourt.”

  “Oh. The Colonel’s prize medium. But he didn’t invite you out to see her.”

  “Yes, he did.” Merlini nodded. “Exactly that. Did you read that newest book of his, Modern Mediums?”

  “The one that kicked up all the Sunday supplement discussion? No.”

  “You should. It’s an unintentionally revealing psychological study—of its author. He tries so hard to be coldly scientific, but his desire to get a positive result just manages to trip him up. The book is largely a brief for Rappourt. The Colonel says that, finally, after years of investigation, he’s turned up in her a real, first-class genuine psychic. He even goes so far as to say that psychical research can rest its whole case on her phenomena. Which rather puts him out on a limb, because if she ever should prove phony—well, he’s put all his eggs in one basket.”

  “And he invites you out to pass on her? He must be awfully sure she’s the real McCoy.”

  “No, just the opposite. All of a sudden he has doubts. She’s up to something even stranger than usual. He wants an outside opinion.”

  It still didn’t make good sense to me. “If Eva Rappourt has agreed to put on her act before a professional magician, she must have something so close to genuine that—”

  “She hasn’t agreed. She won’t know we’re there—at least I hope not—until it’s too late. Just before the séance Watrous is going to beg off with a headache, and as soon as it has started he’ll let us into the house via a sun deck on the second floor. We enter through his room and station ourselves on the stairway that goes down directly into the living-room where the séance will be in progress. Whenever I dig you in the ribs, you snap a picture. The Colonel said you should focus at about twenty feet, minus the usual quarter-inch turn correction for infra-red, whatever that means.”

  “It means he wants his evidence pretty badly. Not being an owl, I’ll have to aim my camera by guess and by God. The setup needs a wide-angle lens, but I can’t use that with this trick lighting short of a time exposure. I’m certainly not going to guarantee any results, and if Rappourt catches wise before we get positive evidence on film, there’ll be a lovely row. What about friend Sigrid? She sitting in on this?”

  “Yes. She’s staying on the island at present. Her mother was a Skelton and she spends her summers here with Aunt Linda and studies in town at the American School of the Ballet while her father is on the road. You must have heard me mention him. Tim Verrill, the best advance man in show business. He’s with Baker’s Colossal-Combined Outfit this year.”

  “She had things on her mind when I saw her. She find you at the Garden?”

  “Yes. She’s not sold on Rappourt either. The old girl doesn’t seem to be as convincing as usual, somehow. Sigrid rather suspects her of trying to annex a big helping of the Skelton fortune.”

  “Sounds reasonable. Aunt Linda’s wealthy, then?”

  “A million or two. And apparently a pushover for the occult. Sigrid says Rappourt has her jumping through
hoops. Sigrid hasn’t been able to spot the gimmick but she’s a hard-headed young lady and skeptical.”

  “What is it this time? Ectoplasm, spirit lights, slates—?”

  For answer, Merlini’s hand gripped mine suddenly and one long arm pointed. “Did you see that, Ross?”

  Skelton Island moved past on our starboard side. It lies with its near-by neighbors, North Brother and South Brother Islands, in midchannel where Hell Gate widens out into Long Island Sound. Half a mile beyond I could just make out the faint, dotted-line pattern of lights from the windows of the city prison on the larger Riker’s Island.

  The lighthouse on North Brother winked brightly at us, but Skelton Island was dark, except for one small gleam low on the water.

  A projecting arm of the island moved between us and the light as I watched, blotting it out. “Houseboat, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, I think so. But that’s not what I meant. Up at the top of the island. Watch it.”

  At its northern end, the island sloped upward to a high point on which a dark boxlike shape loomed above the trees, its heavy silhouette reminiscent of Nantucket and New Bedford. An ornamental balustrade encircled the flat roof, set back slightly from its projecting, topheavy eaves. There were gaps in the rows of flamboyantly carved balusters and in the array of squat wooden urns spaced out along the top rail. Two massive brick chimneys, one partly fallen in, rose within this enclosure on either side of a square pillbox of a penthouse that was the “Captain’s room.” This in turn was surmounted by a somewhat simpler balustrade that leaned in a rickety tired way enclosing the “widow’s walk.” The whole had a foreboding air of distinctly down-at-the-heel dignity.