Bat Wing by Sax Rohmer (ereader for android .TXT) 📕

I got astride of the window ledge, and began to grope for the bamboo rungs beneath me. I had found the first of these, and, turning, had begun to descend, when:

“Knox! Knox!” came softly from the opening in the box hedge, “what the devil are you about?”

It was Paul Harley returned from his tour of the building.

“Harley!” I whispered, descending, “quick! the Colonel has just gone into the Tudor garden!”

“What!” There was a note of absolute horror in the exclamation. “You should have stopped him, Knox, you should have stopped him!” cried Harley, and with that he ran off in the same direction.

Disentangling my foot from the rungs of the ladder which lay upon the ground, I was about to follow, when it happened—that strange and ghastly thing toward which, secretly, darkly, events had been tending.

The crack of a rifle sounded sharply in the stillness, echoing and re-echoing from wing to wing of Cray’s Folly and then, more dimly, up the wooded slopes beyond! Somewhere ahead of me I heard Harley cry out:

“My God, I am too late! They have got him!”

Then, hotfoot, I was making for the entrance to the garden. Just as I came to it and raced down the steps I heard another sound the memory of which haunts me to this day.

Where it came from I had no idea. Perhaps I was too confused to judge accurately. It might have come from the house, or from the slopes beyond the house, But it was a sort of shrill, choking laugh, and it set the ultimate touch of horror upon a scène macabre which, even as I write of it, seems unreal to me.

I ran up the path to where Harley was kneeling beside the sun-dial. Analysis of my emotions at this moment were futile; I can only say that I had come to a state of stupefaction. Face downward on the grass, arms outstretched and fists clenched, lay Colonel Menendez. I think I saw him move convulsively, but as I gained his side Harley looked up at me, and beneath the tan which he never lost his face had grown pale. He spoke through clenched teeth.

“Merciful God,” he said, “he is shot through the head.”

One glance I gave at the ghastly wound in the base of the Colonel’s skull, and then swayed backward in a sort of nausea. To see a man die in the heat of battle, a man one has known and called friend, is strange and terrible. Here in this moon-bathed Tudor garden it was a horror almost beyond my powers to endure.

Paul Harley, without touching the prone figure, stood up. Indeed no examination of the victim was necessary. A rifle bullet had pierced his brain, and he lay there dead with his head toward the hills.

I clutched at Harley’s shoulder, but he stood rigidly, staring up the slope past the angle of the tower, to where a gable of the Guest House jutted out from the trees.

“Did you hear—that cry?” I whispered, “immediately after the shot?”

“I heard it.”

A moment longer he stood fixedly watching, and then:

“Not a wisp of smoke,” he said. “You note the direction in which he was facing when he fell?”

He spoke in a stern and unnatural voice.

“I do. He must have turned half right when he came to the sun-dial.”

“Where were you when the shot was fired?”

“Running in this direction.”

“You saw no flash?”

“None.”

“Neither did I,” groaned Harley; “neither did I. And short of throwing a cordon round the hills what can be done? How can I move?”

He had somewhat relaxed, but now as I continued to clutch his arm, I felt the muscles grow rigid again.

“Look, Knox!” he whispered—“look!”

I followed the direction of his fixed stare, and through the trees on the hillside a dim light shone out. Someone had lighted a lamp in the Guest House.

A faint, sibilant sound drew my glance upward, and there overhead a bat circled—circled—dipped—and flew off toward the distant woods. So still was the night that I could distinguish the babble of the little stream which ran down into the lake. Then, suddenly, came a loud flapping of wings. The swans had been awakened by the sound of the shot. Others had been awakened, too, for now distant voices became audible, and then a muffled scream from somewhere within Cray’s Folly.

“Back to the house, Knox,” said Harley, hoarsely. “For God’s sake keep the women away. Get Pedro, and send Manoel for the nearest doctor. It’s useless but usual. Let no one deface his footprints. My worst anticipations have come true. The local police must be informed.”

Throughout the time that he spoke he continued to search the moon-bathed landscape with feverish eagerness, but except for a faint movement of birds in the trees, for they, like the swans on the lake, had been alarmed by the shot, nothing stirred.

“It came from the hillside,” he muttered. “Off you go, Knox.”

And even as I started on my unpleasant errand, he had set out running toward the gate in the southern corner of the garden.

For my part I scrambled unceremoniously up the bank, and emerged where the yews stood sentinel beside the path. I ran through the gap in the box hedge just as the main doors were thrown open by Pedro.

He started back as he saw me.

“Pedro! Pedro!” I cried, “have the ladies been awakened?”

“Yes, yes! there is terrible trouble, sir. What has happened? What has happened?”

“A tragedy,” I said, shortly. “Pull yourself together. Where is Madame de Stämer?”

Pedro uttered some exclamation in Spanish and stood, pale-faced, swaying before me, a dishevelled figure in a dressing gown. And now in the background Mrs. Fisher appeared. One frightened glance she cast in my direction, and would have hurried across the hall but I intercepted her.

“Where are you going, Mrs. Fisher?” I demanded. “What has happened here?”

“To Madame, to Madame,” she sobbed, pointing toward the corridor which communicated with Madame de Stämer’s bedchamber.

I heard a frightened cry proceeding from that direction, and recognized the voice of Nita, the girl who acted as Madame’s maid. Then I heard Val Beverley.

“Go and fetch Mrs. Fisher, Nita, at once—and try to behave yourself. I have trouble enough.”

I entered the corridor and pulled up short. Val Beverley, fully dressed, was kneeling beside Madame de Stämer, who wore a kimono over her night-robe, and who lay huddled on the floor