LITMIR.BIZ

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sudden spring of alarm he saw—the kit bag.

      Odd! he thought. That’s not where I left it! A few moments before it had surely been on his right, between the bed and the bathtub; he did not remember having moved it. It was very curious. What in the world was the matter with everything? Had all of his senses gone queer? A terrific gust of wind tore at the windows, dashing the sleet against the glass with the force of a small gunshot, and then fled away, howling dismally over the waste of Bloomsbury roofs. A sudden vision of the English Channel the next day rose in his mind and recalled him sharply to realities.

      “There’s no one here at any rate; that’s quite clear!” he exclaimed aloud. Yet at the time he uttered them he knew perfectly well that his words were not true and that he did not believe them himself. He felt exactly as though someone was hiding close to him, watching all of his movements, trying to hinder his packing in some way. “And two of my senses,” he added, keeping up the pretense, “have played me the most absurd tricks: the steps I heard and the figure I saw were both entirely imaginary.”

      He went back to the front room, poked the fire into a blaze, and sat down before it to think. What impressed him more than anything else was the fact that the kit bag was no longer where he had left it. It had been dragged closer to the door.

      What happened afterward that night happened, of course, to a man already excited by fear and was perceived by a mind that had not the full and proper control, therefore, of the senses. Outwardly, Johnson remained calm and a master of himself to the end, pretending to the very last that everything he witnessed had a natural explanation or was merely delusions of his tired nerves. But inwardly, in his very heart, he knew all along that someone had been hiding downstairs in the empty suite when he came in, that this person had watched for his opportunity and then stealthily made his way up to the bedroom, and that all he saw and heard afterward, from the moving of the kit bag to—well, to the other things that this story has to tell—were caused directly by the presence of this invisible person.

      And it was here, just when he most desired to keep his mind and thoughts controlled, that the vivid pictures received day after day upon the mental plates exposed in the courtroom of the Old Bailey came strongly to light and developed themselves in the darkroom of his inner vision. Unpleasant, haunting memories have a way of coming to life again just when the mind least desires them—in the silent watches of the night, on sleepless pillows, during the lonely hours spent by sick and dying beds. And so now, in the same way, Johnson saw nothing but the dreadful face of John Turk, the murderer, lowering at him from every corner of his mental field of vision: the white skin, the evil eyes, and the fringe of black hair low over the forehead. All of the pictures of those ten days in court crowded back into his mind unbidden and very vivid.

      “This is all rubbish and nerves,” he exclaimed at length, springing with sudden energy from his chair. “I shall finish my packing and go to bed. I’m overwrought, overtired. No doubt, at this rate I shall hear steps and things all night!”

      But his face was deadly white all the same. He snatched up his field glasses and walked across to the bedroom, humming a music-hall song as he went—

      a trifle too loud to be natural; and the instant he crossed the threshold and stood within the room something turned cold around his heart, and he felt that every hair on his head stood up.

      The kit bag lay close in front of him, several feet closer to the door than he had left it, and just over its crumpled top he saw a head and face slowly sinking down out of sight as though someone was crouching behind it to hide, and at the same moment a sound like a long-drawn sigh was distinctly audible in the still air around him between the gusts of the storm outside.

      Johnson had more courage and willpower than the girlish indecision of his face indicated; but at first such a wave of terror came over him that for some seconds he could do nothing but stand and stare. A violent trembling ran down his back and legs, and he was conscious of a foolish, almost an hysterical, impulse to scream aloud. That sigh seemed in his very ear, and the air still quivered with it. It was unmistakably a human sigh.

      “Who’s there?” he said at length, finding his voice; but though he meant to speak with loud decision, the tones came out instead in a faint whisper, for he had partly lost the control of his tongue and lips.

      He stepped forward so that he could see all around and over the kit bag. of course there was nothing there, nothing but the faded carpet and the bulging canvas sides. He put out his hands and threw open the mouth of the sack where it had fallen over, being only three parts full, and then he saw for the first time that around the inside, some six inches from the top, there ran a broad smear of dull crimson. It was an old and faded bloodstain. He uttered a scream and drew back his hands as if they had been burned. At the same moment the kit bag gave a faint, but unmistakable, lurch forward toward the door.

      Johnson collapsed backward, searching with his hands for the support of something solid, and the door, being farther behind him than he realized, received his weight just in time to prevent his falling and shut with a resounding bang. At the same moment the swinging of his left arm accidentally touched the electric switch, and the light in the room went out.

      It was an awkward and disagreeable predicament, and if Johnson had not been possessed of real pluck, he might have done all manner of foolish things. As it was, however, he pulled himself together and groped furiously for the little brass knob to turn the light on again. But the rapid closing of the door had set the coats hanging on it swinging, and his fingers became entangled in a confusion of sleeves and pockets so that it was some moments before he found the switch. And in those few moments of bewilderment and terror two things happened that sent him beyond recall over the boundary into the region of genuine horror: he distinctly heard the kit bag shuffling heavily across the floor in jerks, and close in front of his face sounded once again the sigh of a human being.

      In his anguished efforts to find the brass button on the wall, he almost scraped the nails from his fingers, but even then, in those frenzied moments of alarm—so swift and alert are the impressions of a mind keyed up by a vivid emotion—he had time to realize that he dreaded the return of the light and that it might be better for him to stay hidden in the merciful screen of darkness. It was but the impulse of a moment, however, and before he had time to act upon it, he had yielded automatically to the original desire, and the room was flooded again with light.

      But the second instinct had been right. It would have been better for him to have stayed in the shelter of the kind darkness. For there, close before him, bending over the half-packed kit bag, as clear as life in the merciless glare of the electric light, stood the figure of John Turk, the murderer. Not three feet from him the man stood, the fringe of black hair marked plainly against the pallor of the forehead, the whole horrible presentment of the scoundrel, as vivid as he had seen him day after day in the Old Bailey, when he stood there in the dock, cynical and callous, under the very shadow of the gallows.

      In a flash Johnson realized what it all meant: the dirty and much-used bag; the smear of crimson within the top; the dreadful stretched condition of the bulging sides. He remembered how the victim’s body had been stuffed inside a canvas bag for burial, the ghastly, dismembered fragments forced with lime into this very bag, and the bag itself produced as evidence—it all came back to him as clear as day…

      Very softly and stealthily his hand groped behind him for the handle of the door, but before he could actually turn it, the very thing that he most of all dreaded came about, and John Turk lifted his devil’s face and looked at him. At the same moment that heavy sigh passed through the air of the room, formulated somehow into words: “It’s my bag. And I want it.”

      Johnson just remembered clawing open the door and then falling in a heap upon the floor of the landing as he tried frantically to make his way into the front room.

      He remained unconscious for a long time, and it was still dark when he opened his eyes and realized that he was lying, stiff and bruised, on the cold boards. Then the memory of what he had seen rushed back into his mind, and he promptly fainted again. When he woke the second time, the wintry dawn was just beginning to peep in at the windows, painting the stairs a cheerless, dismal gray, and he managed to crawl into the front room and cover himself with an overcoat

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