Earl Peirce

“ In that little lodge there was no electricity, and the glow of the oil lamps played curious tricks with the human expression which frequently resulted in something unhuman. It may have been the dusk of night, the flickering of the lamps, but Arthur Duryea had certainly noticed how his father's eyes had sunken further into his head, and how his cheeks were tighter, and the outline of his teeth pressed into the skin about his lips. ”

“ I exclaimed. “Great heavens, Carse, there have been six horrible murders! Society demands a reckoning.”
“I have atoned enough for ten times six!” he cried. “Have you no soul in you? The crimes will stop now. The German said they would, and everything else he predicted has come true. As my lifelong friend it is your duty to see me through.”
“But those six——”
“No man can bring them back to life, but I am still a living man and you must save me. I shall divide my estate among the families of the six, and I swear to you that I shall never open a book on criminology again. You must do it—you must!” ”

“ There are six human heads buried in your cellar. There must be no more.”
“No more?” he laughed shrilly and threw up both his hands to indicate the count of ten. “No more, you say? There will be ten more before it stops. Ten more! That’s what the book says!”
“You want ten?” I demanded incredulously, struck numb by his callousness. “You want ten more to add to those six? Carse, Carse! They are not cabbages you are counting; they are human heads. Do you think I am a fiend to let this continue? No; it must end—it must end on the gallows.”
“He died on the gallows!” ”

“ With forced determination, and a ludicrous lift of his eyebrows, he said,
"Cecilia is dead, and her silly superstition is dead also. From now on, Dad, we're going to enjoy life as we should. Bygones are really bygones in this case."
Doctor Duryea closed his eyes slowly, as though an exquisite pain had gone through him.
"Then you have no indignation?" he questioned. "You have none of your aunt's hatred?"
"Indignation? Hatred?" Arthur laughed aloud. "Ever since I was twelve years old I have disbelieved Cecilia's stories. ”

“ Six crimes in six weeks! And I can only thank merciful God that it will end with only one more. Perhaps it is ended now. That German servant who loaned me the diary said it would be only six or seven."
"Do you think the police will believe all of this?" I demanded. "What you have told me has no sane explanation. It—it's demonism!"
Carse smiled pitiably. "There are more things in heaven and earth," he began; then he heaved his shoulders as if flinging off an attempt at levity. "The human mind is a strange organ, and no man can explain its mysteries. ”

“ There was no rime or reason for the crimes, and yet the diabolical precision of the murderer seemed to indicate he was a madman of uncanny intelligence. In all four cases his victims were vagabonds and people of the lowest order. In none of the murders had the victim been assaulted, but the head had disappeared, seemingly for ever. There was not a shred of evidence pointing to the solution, and, except that the police knew him to be a homicidal maniac, there was not a single person in a city of several millions whom they could call the murderer. ”

“ His voice cut into the silence like the crack of a whip. "Arthur! Will you come down here?"
"Yes, Dad." Bedraggled, his body hanging like cloth, young Duryea took five steps to the landing.
"We can't be zanies!" cried Henry Duryea. "My soul is sick with dread. Tomorrow we're going back to New York. I'm going to get the first boat to open sea. . . . Please come down here." He turned about and descended the stairs to his room.
Arthur choked back the words which had lumped in his mouth. Half dazed, he followed. . . .
In the bedroom he saw his father stretched face-up along the bed. ”

“ Try to make sense, Carse. I am your friend; trust me.”
“I am talking of Emil Drukker—the man who taught me how to do these things. He is responsible for them, not I. He is the one to hang for them. Dig him out of his grave and hang him again!”
444 I pushed him gently into a chair, for his collapse seemed imminent. Spittle was running from his mouth, and his retching continued in spasms that shook him to his teeth.
“I am your friend,” I told him again. “I want to help you, but you must get control of yourself. Why do you say you are not responsible? What drove you to commit these crimes?” ”

“ Not until he reached his father's suite on the sixth floor did he make an audible noise, and this was a mere sigh which fell from his lips like a prayer.
The man who opened the door was unusually tall, his slender frame clothed in tight-fitting black. He hardly dared to smile. His clean-shaven face was pale, an almost livid whiteness against the sparkle in his eyes. His jaw had a bluish luster.
"Arthur!" The word was scarcely a whisper. It seemed choked up quietly, as if it had been repeated time and again on his thin lips. ”

“ I must turn you over to the police."
Carse slapped me viciously, then stumbled back against the table. His face was a mask of suffused blood, his eyes wild with desperation.
"Damn you!" he cried savagely. "You are no friend; you're a cheat, a betrayer!"
Suddenly his groping fingers touched the butcher knife and he drew himself taut. His fingers wound around the hilt like slowly moving worms. For a moment there was scarcely a breath between us; then he lifted his arm and brought the knife slowly out before him. I watched, horror-stricken, unable to lift my feet from the floor. ”

“ Men and women moved furtively, airport officials and police examined every strange face with cold and scrutinizing suspicion, and even my taxi-driver, a small mousy man, kept his fear-laden dark eyes continually reverting to the mirror as he whirled me through the slight evening traffic. I was surprized, therefore, in view of this mutual distrust, to find that Jason Carse, a veteran criminalist, had discharged all of his servants and was living alone in his grim house behind a barricaded door. ”

“ Henry Duryea drew his hand away.
"I'm sorry," he said, and his eyes looked straight over Arthur's lowered head. "This thing must be thrashed out now. I believe you when you say that you discredit Cecilia's stories, but for a sake greater than sanity I must tell you the truth behind the legend—and believe me, Arthur; there is a truth!" ”

“ How many men besides Jason Carse have spent sleepless nights over the diary of Emil Drukker?
The newspapers will answer that question each time they are opened; in Paris the police discover a headless body lying along the wharves, and the murderer is still unknown; in Berlin a college professor kills himself upon the discovery of a human head lying near his bed with his own hunting-knife stuck to the hilt into its brain; in Stockholm the police discover the bodies of two women lying in an empty house—their heads have not yet been found ”

“ Those books she showed me years ago, and those folk-tales of vampires and ghouls—they burned into my infantile mind like acid. They haunted me day and night in my youth, and caused me to hate you worse than death itself. ”

“ The execution, four years ago, of Autiel Duryea does not end the Duryea controversy. Time alone can decide whether the Demon has claimed that family from its beginning to its end. . . .
Arthur read on about the trial of Autiel Duryea before Veniti, the Carcassonnean Inquisitor-General; read, with mounting horror, the evidence which had sent that far-gone Duryea to the pillar—the evidence of a bloodless corpse who had been Autiel Duryea's young brother. ”

“ I thought myself to be in the presence of a tremendous evil.
In the morning Carse was up early, and moved back and forth in the corridor with strange industry. He was crying, for his sobs came disturbingly to my ears, and once I heard him descend into the cellar and there was a faint digging sound as he performed some outlandish task. Then I heard him in the hallway and on the stairs. ”

“ An old, somewhat emaciated man lies in bed, tied by the upper arms to the headboard. A younger man in a dressing gown stands behind the bed, recoiling with one arm over his mouth. An avian or bat-like shadow is cast behind the pair. "He lay like a waxen figure tied to his bed."
A cloud came over Doctor Duryea's features. "What did you expect, Arthur?" he demanded quickly. "An evil eye? A shaven head and knotted jowls?"
"Please, Dad—no!" Arthur's words clipped short. "I don't think I ever really visualized you. I knew you would be a splendid man. ”

“ The horrible truth had been dawning upon me for hours, and when I came face to face with him in the kitchen at the head of the cellar stairs I looked squarely into his eyes with the full realization that Jason Carse was the Head-hunter. ”

“ But I thought you'd look older, more like a man who has really suffered."
"I have suffered, more than I can ever describe. But seeing you again, and the prospect of spending the rest of my life with you, has more than compensated for my sorrows. Even during the twenty years we were apart I found an ironic joy in learning of your progress in college, and in your American game of football." ”

“ I left for the city by plane on the evening of the discovery of the fifth victim, and during the trans-country flight I read Carse's own statement in the Metropolitan Gazette citing the crime as an atavistic expression of animalism. The fact that two of the five victims had been men, according to Carse's theory, belied the popular suspicion that the criminal was a homicidal sadist. Carse expressed the belief that the murderer was in the grip of some inherent savagery, and that the ghastly murders would continue until he wore himself out by the sheer expenditure of energy. ”

“ I'm a man now; do you understand that? A man, with a man's sense of logic."
"Yes, I understand." Henry Duryea threw his cigar into the fireplace, and placed a hand on his son's shoulder.
"We shall forget Cecilia," he said. "As I told you in my letter, I have rented a lodge in Maine where we can go to be alone for the rest of the summer. We'll get in some fishing and hiking and perhaps some hunting. But first, Arthur, I must be sure in my own mind that you are sure in yours. I must be sure you won't bar your door against me at night, and sleep with a loaded revolver at your elbow. ”

“ The reader may recall the international effects of the infamous “Ripper” crimes which terrified London a few decades ago and he will understand how rapidly the Head-hunter’s fame spread through crime-conscious America. Both murders were made particularly mysterious because of the disappearance of the victims’ heads. I knew the damaging influence which these doings would produce upon Carse, for he had always been interested in decapitations, and his thesis at the University of Graz had been based upon the mad career of Emil Drukker, the Head-hunter of Cologne. ”

“ I must be sure that you're not afraid of going up there alone with me, and dying——"
His voice ended abruptly, as if an age-long dread had taken hold of it. His son's face was waxen, with sweat standing out like pearls on his brow. He said nothing, but his eyes were filled with questions which his lips could not put into words. His own hand touched his father's, and tightened over it. ”

“ I am in the power of that book. I am the puppet of a horror that has outlived all natural deaths.”
A feeling of relief passed over me as I saw him settle into a state of rational observation. I hoped it would last, for not three yards away from him, lying on top of the kitchen table, was a seven-inch butcher knife. My only hope was to preserve his state by permitting him to tell his story, and in that way to persuade him to accept the inevitable consequences of his crimes. I drew up a chair beside his own, yet kept myself alert to ward off any lunge he might make for the knife. ”

“ This vampire is born into certain aged families, and naught but death can destroy it. It is not conscious of its blood-madness, and acts only in a psychic state. The medium, also, is unaware of its terrible rôle; and when these two are together, despite any lapse of years, the fusion of inheritance is so violent that no power known on earth can turn it back.
3
The lodge door slammed shut with a sudden, interrupting bang. The lode grated, and Henry Duryea's footsteps sounded on the planked floor.
Arthur shook himself from the bed. ”

“ An ugly smirk went across his face and he cast a glance at the cellar door.
“You always were too smart for your own good,” he said softly. “Knowledge can be dangerous.”
“How did you think you could get away with it?” I screamed, only too well aware of his implication. “My God, Carse! Six human heads!” ”

“ Carse’s death put a definite end to the head-hunting crimes in this city, and for the first time in over six weeks the metropolitan area has been able to breathe freely. I have lost a faithful and sincere friend; but I lost him, not on the gallows, but three months ago when he first discovered the diary of Emil Drukker. ”

“ A further significant fact, which the court ignored as irrelevant, was the ghastly identity of Carse’s supposed crimes and those confessed by Emil Drukker. It is impossible that this duality of murders could be brought about by mere coincidence, for the similarity of detail was carried too far. This fact alone presupposes the statement that there was a horrible and unnatural bondage between Emil Drukker and Jason Carse—the bondage of the diary! ”

“ The room was smeared with blood from one end to the other, and there was a gore-caked knife resting beside the head, and a crimson towel lay across my bedpost. But there wasn’t a drop of blood on my hands!
“I couldn’t even attempt to explain it. I only knew that a woman had been murdered and that her severed head was in my bedroom. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t force myself into the belief that I was the murderer, and I stood stunned with the weird horror of knowing that Emil Drukker’s Number One had been re-enacted and that I had played his own role. Where could I turn? ”