Owen Fitzstephan and I ate another of Mrs. Schindler’s good dinners that evening, though my eating was a matter of catching bites between words. His curiosity poked at me with questions, requests to have this or that point made clear, and orders to keep talking whenever I stopped for breath or food.

“You could have got me in on it,” he had complained before our soup was in front of us. “I knew the Haldorns, you know, or, at least, had met them once or twice at Leggett’s. You could have used that as an excuse for somehow letting me in on the affair, so that I’d now have first-hand knowledge of what happened, and why; instead of having to depend on what I can get out of you and what the newspapers imagine their readers would like to think had happened.”

“I had,” I said, “enough grief with the one guy I did let in on it—Eric Collinson.”

“Whatever trouble you had with him was your own fault, for selecting the wrong assistant, when such a better one was available. But come, my boy, I’m listening. Let’s have the story, and then I can tell you where you erred.”

“Sure,” I agreed, “you’ll be able to do that. Well, the Haldorns were originally actors. Most of what I can tell you comes from her, so a lot of maybes will have to be hung on it in spots. Fink won’t talk at all; and the other help—maids, Filipino boys, Chinese cook, and the like—don’t seem to know anything that helps much. None of them seems to have been let in on the trick stuff.

“As actors, Aaronia Haldorn says, she and Joseph were just pretty good, not getting on as well as they wanted to. About a year ago she ran into an old acquaintance—a one-time trouper—who had chucked the stage for the pulpit, and had made a go of it, now riding in Packards instead of day-coaches. That gave her something to think about. Thinking in that direction meant, pretty soon, thinking about Aimee, Buchman, Jeddu what’s-his-name, and the other headliners. And in the end her thinking came to, why not us? They—or she: Joseph was a lightweight—rigged up a cult that pretended to be the revival of an old Gaelic church, dating from King Arthur’s time, or words to that effect.”

“Yes,” said Fitzstephan; “Arthur Machen’s. But go on.”

“They brought their cult to California because everybody does, and picked San Francisco because it held less competition than Los Angeles. With them they brought a little fellow named Tom Fink who had at one time or another been in charge of the mechanical end of most of the well-known stage magicians’ and illusionists’ acts; and Fink’s wife, a big village-smith of a woman.

“They didn’t want a mob of converts: they wanted them few but wealthy. The racket got away to a slow start—until they landed Mrs. Rodman. She fell plenty. They took her for one of her apartment buildings, and she also footed the remodeling bill. The stage mechanic Fink was in charge of the remodeling, and did a neat job. They didn’t need the kitchens that were dotted, one to an apartment, through the building, and Fink knew how to use part of that scattered kitchen-space for concealed rooms and cabinets; and he knew how to adapt the gas and water pipes, and the electric wiring, to his hocus-pocus.

“I can’t give you the mechanical details now; not till we’ve had time to take the joint apart. It’s going to be interesting. I saw some of their work—mingled right in with it—a ghost made by an arrangement of lights thrown up on steam rising from a padded pipe that had been pushed into a dark room through a concealed opening in the wainscoating under a bed. The part of the steam that wasn’t lighted was invisible in the darkness, showing only a man-shape that quivered and writhed, and that was damp and real to the touch, without any solidity. You can take my word for its being a weird stunt, especially when you’ve been filled up with the stuff they pumped into the room before they turned their spook loose on you. I don’t know whether they used ether or chloroform or what: its odor was nicely disguised with some sort of flower perfume. This spook—I fought with it, on the level, and even thought I had it bleeding, not knowing I had cut my hand breaking a window to let air in. It was a beaut: it made a few minutes seem like a lot of hours to me.

“Till the very last, when Haldorn went wild, there wasn’t anything crude about their work. They kept the services—the whole public end of the cult—as dignified and orderly and restrained as possible. The hocus-pocusing was all done in the privacy of the victim’s bedroom. First the perfumed gas was pumped in. Then the illuminated steam spook was sicked on him, with a voice coming out of the same pipe—or maybe there was another arrangement for that—to give him his orders, or whatever was to be given. The gas kept him from being too sharp-eyed and suspicious, and also weakened his will, so he’d be more likely to do what he was told. It was slick enough; and I imagine they squeezed themselves out a lot of pennies that way.

“Happening in the victim’s room, when he was alone, these visions had a lot of authority, and the Haldorns gave them more by the attitude they took towards them. Discussion of these visions was not absolutely prohibited, but was discouraged. They were supposed—these spook sessions—to be confidential between the victim and his God, to be too sacred to be bragged about. Mentioning them, even to Joseph, unless there was some special reason for having to mention them, was considered in bad taste, indelicate. See how nicely that would work out? The Haldorns seemed to be not trying to capitalize on these spook sessions, seemed not to know what took place in them, and therefore to have no interest in whether the victim carried out his spook-given instructions or not. Their stand was that that was simply and strictly a concern of the victim’s and his God’s.”

“That’s very good,” Fitzstephan said, smiling delightedly, “a neat reversal of the usual cult’s—the usual sect’s, for that matter—insistence on confession, public testimony, or some other form of advertising the mysteries. Go on.”

I tried to eat. He said:

“What of the members, the customers? How do they like their cult now? You’ve talked to some of them, haven’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said; “but what can you do with people like them? Half of them are still willing to string along with Aaronia Haldorn. I showed Mrs. Rodman one of the pipes that the spooks came out of. When she had gasped once and gulped twice she offered to take us to the cathedral and show us that the images there, including the one on the cross, were made out of even more solid and earthly materials than steam; and asked us if we would arrest the bishop on proof that no actual flesh and blood—whether divine or not—was in the monstrance. I thought O’Gar, who’s a good Catholic, would blackjack her.”

“The Colemans weren’t there, were they? The Ralph Colemans?”

“No.”

“Too bad,” he said, grinning. “I must look Ralph up and question him. He’ll be in hiding by now, of course, but he’s worth hunting out. He always has the most consistently logical and creditable reasons for having done the most idiotic things. He is”—as if that explained it—“an advertising man.” Fitzstephan frowned at the discovery that I was eating again, and said impatiently: “Talk, my boy, talk.”

“You’ve met Haldorn,” I said. “What did you think of him?”

“I saw him twice, I think. He was, undoubtedly, impressive.”

“He was,” I agreed. “He had what he needed. Ever talk to him?”

“No; that is, not except to exchange the polite equivalents of ‘pleased to meet you.’ ”

“Well, he looked at you and spoke to you, and things happened inside you. I’m not the easiest guy in the world to dazzle, I hope; but he had me going. I came damned near to believing he was God toward the last. He was quite young—in his thirties: they’d had the coloring—the pigment—in his hair and beard killed to give him that Father Joseph front. His wife says she used to hypnotize him before he went into action, and that without being hypnotized he wasn’t so effective on people. Later he got so that he could hypnotize himself without her help, and toward the last it became a permanent condition with him.

“She didn’t know her husband had fallen for Gabrielle till after the girl had come to stay in the Temple. Until then she thought that Gabrielle was to him, as to her, just another customer—one whose recent troubles made her a very likely prospect. But Joseph had fallen for her, and wanted her. I don’t know how far he had worked on her, nor even how he had worked on her, but I suppose he was sewing her up by using his hocus-pocus against her fear of the Dain curse. Anyway, Doctor Riese finally discovered that everything wasn’t going well with her. Yesterday morning he told me he was coming back to see her that evening, and he did come back, but he didn’t see her; and I didn’t see him—not then.

“He went back to see Joseph before he came up to the girl’s room, and managed to overhear Joseph giving instructions to the Finks. That should have been fine, but wasn’t. Riese was foolish enough to let Joseph know he had overheard him. Joseph locked Riese up—a prisoner.

“They had cut loose on Minnie from the very beginning. She was a mulatto, and therefore susceptible to that sort of game, and she was devoted to Gabrielle Leggett. They had chucked visions and voices at the poor girl until she was dizzy. Now they decided to make her kill Riese. They drugged him and put him on the altar. They ghosted her into thinking that he was Satan—this is serious: they did this—come up from hell to carry Gabrielle down and keep her from becoming a saint. Minnie was ripe for it—poor boogie—and when the spirit told her that she had been selected to save her mistress, that she’d find the anointed weapon on her table, she followed the instructions the spirit gave her. She got out of bed, picked up the dagger that had been put on her table, went down to the altar, and killed Riese.

“To play safe, they pumped some of the gas into my room, to keep me slumbering while Minnie was at work. But I had been nervous, jumpy, and was sleeping in a chair in the center of the room, instead of on the bed, close to the gas-pipe; so I came out of the dope before the night was far gone.

“By this time, Aaronia Haldorn had made a couple of discoveries: first, that her husband’s interest in the girl wasn’t altogether financial; and second, that he had gone off center, was a dangerous maniac. Going around hypnotized all the time, what brains he had—not a whole lot to start with, she says—had become completely scrambled. His success in flimflamming his followers had gone to his head. He thought he could do anything, get away with anything. He had dreams, she says, of the entire world deluded into belief in his divinity: he didn’t see why that would be any—or much—more difficult than fooling the handful that he had fooled. She thinks he actually had insane notions of his own divinity. I don’t go that far. I think he knew well enough that he wasn’t divine, but thought he could kid the rest of the world. These details don’t make much difference: the thing is that he was a nut who saw no limit to his power.

“Aaronia Haldorn had, she says, no knowledge of Riese’s murder until after it was done. Joseph, using the vision-and-voice trick, sent Gabrielle down to see the corpse on the altar step. That would fit in, you see, with his original scheme to tie her to him by playing his divinity against her curse. Apparently, he intended joining her there, and putting on an act of some sort for her. But Collinson and I interrupted that. Joseph and Gabrielle heard us talking at the door, so Joseph held back, not joining her at the altar, and she came to meet us. Joseph’s plan was successful this far: the girl actually believed the curse had been responsible for Riese’s death. She told us she had killed him and ought to be hanged for it.

“As soon as I saw Riese’s body I knew she hadn’t killed him. He was lying in an orderly position. It was plain he had been doped before being killed. Then the door leading to the altar, which I imagined was kept locked, was open, and she didn’t know anything about the key. There was a chance that she had been in on the killing, but none that she had done it alone as she confessed.

“The place was scientifically equipped for eavesdropping: both of the Haldorns heard her confession. Aaronia got busy manufacturing evidence to fit the confession. She went up to Gabrielle’s room and got her dressing-gown; got the bloody dagger from where I had dropped it beside the body after taking it from the girl; wrapped the dagger in the dressing-gown, and stuck them in a corner where the police could find them easy enough. Meanwhile, Joseph is working in another direction. He doesn’t—as his wife does—want Gabrielle carried off to jail or the booby-hatch. He wants her. He wants her belief in her guilt and responsibility to tie her to him, not take her away. He removes Riese’s remains—tucking them in one of the concealed cabinets—and has the Finks clean up the mess. He’s overheard Collinson trying to persuade me to hush up the doings, and so he knows he can count on the boy—the only other exactly sane witness—to keep quiet if I’m taken care of.

“Kill yourself into a hole, and the chances are a time comes when you have to kill yourself out. To this nut Joseph now, ‘taking care of’ me is simply a matter of another murder. He and the Finks—though I don’t think we’re going to prove their part—went to work on Minnie with the spooks again. She had killed Riese docilely enough: why not me? You see, they were handicapped by not being equipped for this wholesale murdering into which they had all of a sudden plunged. For instance, except for my gun and one of the maids’—which they didn’t know anything about—there wasn’t a firearm in the place; and the dagger was the only other weapon—until they got to dragging in carving sets and plumber’s helpers. Then, too, I suppose, there were the sleeping customers to consider—Mrs. Rodman’s probable dislike for being roused by the noise of her spiritual guides ganging up on a roughneck sleuth. Anyway, the idea was that Minnie could be induced to walk up to me and stick the dagger into me in a quiet way.

“They had found the dagger again, in the dressing-gown, where Aaronia had stuck it; and Joseph began suspecting that his wife was double-crossing him. When he caught her in the acting of turning on the dead-flower stuff so strong in Minnie’s room that it knocked her completely out—put her so soundly asleep that a dozen ghosts couldn’t have stirred her into action—he was sure of her treachery; and, up to his neck now, decided to kill her.”

“His wife?” Fitzstephan asked.

“Yeah, but what difference does that make? It might as well have been anybody else for all the sense it makes. I hope you’re not trying to keep this nonsense straight in your mind. You know damned well all this didn’t happen.”

“Then what,” he asked, looking puzzled, “did happen?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows. I’m telling you what I saw plus the part of what Aaronia Haldorn told me which fits in with what I saw. To fit in with what I saw, most of it must have happened very nearly as I’ve told you. If you want to believe that it did, all right. I don’t. I’d rather believe I saw things that weren’t there.”

“Not now,” he pleaded. “Later, after you’ve finished the story, you can attach your ifs and buts to it, distorting and twisting it, making it as cloudy and confusing and generally hopeless as you like. But first please finish it, so I’ll see it at least once in its original state before you start improving it.”

“You actually believe what I’ve told you so far?” I asked.

He nodded, grinning, and said that he not only believed it but liked it.

“What a childish mind you’ve got,” I said. “Let me tell you the story about the wolf that went to the little girl’s grandmother’s house and—”

“I always liked that one, too; but finish this one now. Joseph had decided to kill his wife.”

“All right. There’s not much more. While Minnie was being worked on, I popped into her room, intending to rouse her and send her for help. Before I did any rousing, I was needing some myself: I had a couple of lungfuls of the gas. The Finks must have turned the ghost loose on me, because Joseph was probably on his way downstairs with his wife at that time. He had faith enough in his divinity-shield, or he was nutty enough, to take her down and tie her on the altar before he carved her. Or maybe he had a way of fitting that stunt into his scheme, or maybe he simply had a liking for bloody theatricals. Anyway, he probably took her down there while I was up in Minnie’s room going around and around with the ghost.

“The ghost had me sweating ink, and when I finally left him and tottered out into the corridor, the Finks jumped me. I say they did, and know it; but it was too dark for me to see them. I beat them off, got a gun, and went downstairs. Collinson and Gabrielle were gone from where I had left them. I found Collinson: Gabrielle had put him outside and shut the door on him. The Haldorns’ son—a kid of thirteen or so—came to us with the news that Papa was about to kill Mama, and that Gabrielle was with them. I killed Haldorn, but I almost didn’t. I put seven bullets in him. Hard-coated .32’s go in clean, without much of a thump, true enough; but I put seven of them in him—in his face and body—standing close and firing pointblank—and he didn’t even know it. That’s how completely he had himself hypnotized. I finally got him down by driving the dagger through his neck.”

I stopped. Fitzstephan asked: “Well?”

“Well what?”

“What happened after that?”

“Nothing,” I said. “That’s the kind of a story it is. I warned you there was no sense to it.”

“But what was Gabrielle doing there?”

“Crouching beside the altar, looking up at the pretty spotlight.”

“But why was she there? What was her reason for being there? Had she been called there again? Or was she there of her own free will? How did she come to be there? What was she there for?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t know. I asked her. She didn’t know she was there.”

“But surely you could learn something from the others?”

“Yeah,” I said; “what I’ve told you, chiefly from Aaronia Haldorn. She and her husband ran a cult, and he went crazy and began murdering people, and how could she help it? Fink won’t talk. He’s a mechanic, yes; and he put in his trick-machinery for the Haldorns and operated it; but he doesn’t know what happened last night. He heard a lot of noises, but it was none of his business to go poking his nose out to see what it was: the first he knew anything was wrong was when some police came and started giving him hell. Mrs. Fink’s gone. The other employes probably don’t really know anything, though it’s a gut they could make some good guesses. Manuel, the little boy, is too frightened to talk—and will be sure to know nothing when he gets over his fright. What we’re up against is this: if Joseph went crazy and committed some murders on his own hook, the others, even though they unknowingly helped him, are in the clear. The worst any of them can draw is a light sentence for taking part in the cult swindle. But if any of them admits knowing anything, then he lets himself in for trouble as an accomplice in the murder. Nobody’s likely to do that.”

“I see,” Fitzstephan said slowly. “Joseph is dead, so Joseph did everything. How will you get around that?”

“I won’t,” I said; “though the police will at least try to. My end’s done, so Madison Andrews told me a couple of hours ago.”

“But if, as you say, you aren’t satisfied that you’ve learned the whole truth of the affair, I should think you—”

“It’s not me,” I said. “There’s a lot I’d like to do yet, but I was hired, this time, by Andrews, to guard her while she was in the Temple. She isn’t there now, and Andrews doesn’t think there’s anything further to be learned about what happened there. And, as far as guarding her is necessary, her husband ought to be able to do that.”

“Her what?”

“Husband.”

Fitzstephan thumped his stein down on the table so that beer sloshed over the sides.

“Now there you are,” he said accusingly. “You didn’t tell me anything about that. God only knows how much else there is that you’ve not told me.”

“Collinson took advantage of the confusion to carry her off to Reno, where they won’t have to wait the Californian three days for their license. I didn’t know they’d gone till Andrews jumped on my neck three or four hours later. He was kind of unpleasant about it, which is one of the ways we came to stop being client and operative.”

“I didn’t know he was opposed to Collinson as a husband for her.”

“I don’t know that he is, but he didn’t think this the time, nor that the way, for their wedding.”

“I can understand that,” he said as we got up from the table. “Andrews likes to have his way in most things.”