Richard Connell

“ The gesture said as plainly as words could that I had better go to my own home and avoid the vicinity of The Grim House. But although the old man seemed to have a real concern for my safety, I stood rooted to the spot, for with the trained eye of a physician I had followed the finger of the man when he had pointed to his open mouth, and I had seen a shocking thing. The man had no tongue!
Before I could answer his wordless warning, the old man turned and skurried away toward the house like a venerable frightened rabbit. ”

“ It was Doctor Raffin's custom to keep the men and women—“his material”—in the iron cages in the dining room. He silenced them by paralyzing their tongues. At night he never permitted me in the laboratory; he made me go up to my little room in the attic, and then he took the ladder away. The screams and pleadings I have heard from those poor devils before Doctor Raffin silenced them were awful, awful. But I was too weak, too weak to do anything. Yesterday I saw that the cage contained a handsome man, just turned thirty, a man with red hair and the physique of an athlete. ”

“ I did not go up to The Grim House, as a braver man might have done; I quieted my conscience by telling myself that the tall man with the black beard could take care of himself. As for the old servant, it could not have been he who cried out. ”

“ A little later he said to me: “Gryce, the quality of my material is too poor.” “Material” was what he called the poor human devils he lured into his laboratory. “It takes life to make life,” he continued “Now, these tramps are inferior beings; I need a man of good intellectual development—a man like my neighbor, Doctor Wain, eh?” And he rubbed his hands and chuckled. So, at the risk of torture, I wrote a note warning Doctor Wain of his peril. Lucky man that he never kept his dinner engagement with Doctor Raffin! ”

“ I had always taken an interest in The Grim House since the time, some years ago, when I bought the house nearest it—a little place, separated from the privet hedge by a small field and a road. In the daytime I never passed the old place without thinking of a broken-down aristocrat, aloof and sullen, clinging to the husk of a former grandeur. ”

“ Once, as they were carrying what I thought at first to be an enormous vase, as tall as a man, the moon, for just a second, came from behind a cloud, and its rays were reflected by the shiny surface of the strange object. ”

“ A man is dead, his skull shattered and a deep stab wound in his heart. Two persons firmly believe that they have killed him, and yet there is every reason to believe that neither of them did! And if Roger Farrier or the Corsican woman had not killed him, who had?
I decided, while waiting for the arrival of the coroner, to poke around The Grim House. ”

“ Years before, I had given it as a birthday present to my brother-in-law, Roger Farrier, who lived about a mile from The Grim House.
Roger Farrier a murderer? A settled, family man, a respectable lawyer. I remembered his sudden flares of violent temper, which so soon cooled for which he more than made up by long periods of perfect good nature, and I thought of his powerful physique, souvenir of his college rowing days. I held the broken stick in my hands; that there was not another like it I felt sure, for I had hunted all over Ireland for just such a stick. Roger always carried it ”

“ As I passed along the hedge a wrinkled, bony hand was thrust through the hedge, and I started back, fearing, in a sudden panic, a knife thrust, but the hand of the tongueless old man contained nothing more deadly than a scrap of paper, which I took. ”

“ Then the moon came out, and I made out, vaguely, several black shapes roving through the tall grass of The Grim House lawn. Animals as big as small ponies! I had heard the baying of the giant dogs that my neighbor said would tear the throat out of any nocturnal visitor.
When I passed The Grim House next day, I took good care to keep clear of the hedge, for I had small wish to encounter the savage brutes. ”

“ I confess freely, and without fear of the consequences and without remorse, that I killed Doctor Karl Raffin on the night of November 12th. If there was ever a monster created in the shape of a man, it was he. I met Doctor Raffin about three years ago. ”

“ Then we'll see some sport. I'm a magician, Gryce, and with the touch of my wand I can turn a man into a gibbering parrot.” And he waved a surgical knife over his head. Last night Doctor Wain was expected, but he didn't come. It would have been his last visit on this earth, if he had. At nine or thereabouts, I saw the big man with the black stick visit the doctor, heard their quarrel, and saw the man strike the doctor twice. They were only glancing blows, and inflicted slight cuts on the doctor's head. ”

“ I started at once for The Grim House to demand an explanation, for I was loath to have a man arrested until I had heard both sides of the story I knocked at the front door of The Grim House, and a tall man with a black beard, who was dressed all in white, like a baker or a surgeon, came to the door and asked what I wanted. ”

“ The nocturnal visitors of my bearded neighbor increased in number. Sometimes for a whole week, he brought home some one with him every night, usually around midnight, and always—of this I felt certain—a different person. Most of his visitors appeared to be young. Several times there were women. This continued for nearly a month. The visitors were quiet enough; once the door of The Grim House closed behind them, I had no cause to complain, for I never heard a sound after that. ”

“ But here was a new question that had to be answered before the whole story of the killing of Doctor Raffin could be told. Who had poisoned the dogs?
After my gruesome find in the cellar, I felt that I must ransack the entire house. The upper rooms were quite empty and had not been used. The servants' quarters on the third floor were similarly covered with thick layers of dust. But in a little hallway I found a ladder leading to an attic, and the absence of dust on its rungs told me plainly that some one had gone up it within the past twenty-four hours. ”

“ I jumped into my roaster and burned up the road to the hospital.
I was shown to the bedside of a dark woman of perhaps thirty, in whose deep, black eyes were signs of a great sorrow. Her limbs and body were swathed in bandages, and she was suffering from lacerations and shock, but the interne told me that her condition was not serious. When she heard I had come from The Grim House she said in a tired voice with a slight foreign accent, Italian, I judged:
“Is he dead?” ”

“ Just before dark he passed the property known as The Grim House. He was tossing a ball with his brother Vernon, aged thirteen, and the ball lodged in the hedge. Robert thrust his arm in to get the ball. As he did so, his arm was seized by some man on the other side of the hedge, and the man attempted to drag my son's body through the hedge. Robert screamed and his brother came to his aid. Vernon says that he saw the man, and that he was a tall man with a black beard and a wild, savage face. ”

“ Her confession supplied an incontestable alibi, it seemed to me, for Roger Farrier, for had she not sworn that she had seen Doctor Raffin alive after Roger Farrier, “the big man,” left the house? And yet how could one account for the shattered skull of the dead man?
As I drew near The Grim House, I passed that part of the hedge where the mysterious note of warning had been handed to me, and a new problem presented itself to my mind. What had become of the tongueless man? And where were the dogs?
The coroner had not reached the scene when I returned to The Grim House from the hospital ”