Fletcher Flora - The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™ - 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

“You’re on!” said Phillips. “I challenge you here and now to give such a demonstration.”

That’s the gist of it. I cannot, of course, after all these years, reproduce their conversation verbatim, but I can still see that demonstration as my stepfather performed it in our living room. Every claim he made was substantiated. The lawyer lay suspended between two chairs as rigid as a steel rod, and he did not bend a fraction under the weight of my stepfather on his stomach. I have seen the thing done since on the stage, but at that time it was the most incredible performance I had ever witnessed.

Phillips was brought out of his trance, and I immediately went on upstairs, still undetected. Lying in bed in the marginal state between waking and sleeping, I kept reviewing in my mind the remarkable show I had just seen. As I have said, I had known for years that my stepfather was a student of hypnosis, but I had not dreamed he was capable of anything so extraordinary.

I would have suspected a trick — collusion perhaps between the two men — but I had actually seen the thing done, and I knew that trickery was impossible. There is simply no way for a normal human body to sustain suspension under the circumstances I had witnessed. I could hear my stepfather’s voice repeating in the stillness and darkness of my room a word or a phrase or a sentence that I had heard from the hall, and suddenly I was listening intently.

You will have the appearance of a corpse, he was saying.

And then a strange thing happened. I was hearing all at once another voice in another time in another place. It came to me as a whisper over more than a decade of intervening years, and I was a boy again outside a door in a building that smelled of death.

Did you get my ticket and reservation? the voice had said.

It trailed away, a whisper diminishing to a sigh. After a silent interval of seconds or years, it came back.

Thanks, Ned. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your kindness.

When I had first heard those words, so long ago, I had assumed they were spoken by Dr. Crandall, the man who was later to become my stepfather. I had made this assumption, hardly thinking about it, simply because he was the only man, besides Uncle Ned, to be seen in that room when I was admitted. But another man had been there. A third man who had spoken with an irony that I had mistaken for simple gratitude.

My father had been there in his casket, and it was his voice I had heard.

Call this a revelation if you wish. Call it what you will. As for me, I prefer to believe that it was an instance of long-delayed insight, a tardy wakening of dormant truth that had been waiting in my subconscious all those years for the one missing fragment of knowledge that it needed to rouse it.

Whatever you call it, whatever it was, I did not reveal it to my mother and stepfather. I took it with me as my secret to the medical center where I was studying, and in the following week or two, between practice diagnosis and theoretical treatments, I reassessed the circumstances of my father’s death, and every odd circumstance fell into a new and startling pattern.

Let me itemize them, one by one.

In the first place, consider the cast. There was my father, a wastrel and an alcoholic and altogether a problem. There was my mother, who wanted to be rid of him. There was my Uncle Ned, who loved my mother and despised my father and practiced an essential trade. There was, finally, the man who became my stepfather, Dr. Crandall, who also loved my mother and also despised my father and also practiced an essential trade.

Consider the strange factors of my father’s death. Attended by Dr. Crandall, taken care of later by Uncle Ned personally, he was ill, he died, and he was prepared for the grave in what amounted to almost complete secrecy.

Then the funeral. Remember that the services were conducted with a closed casket. The two brief periods when my father had been exposed to the public view had been daring and brilliant strokes. Hypnotized, lying in the appearance of death with his breathing reduced to an indiscernible level, he had allayed all possible suspicions that might arise. Between the two periods — the night before and the morning after — he was revived and fed and rested in secrecy. After the second period — before the funeral in the afternoon — he was revived again and held in secrecy until Uncle Ned, that night, could take him to the city to catch the train to Chicago. There was very small risk in this. After all, my father had been observed in death by nearly a dozen people. Even if he had been seen later by someone who happened to know him, the slightest disguise would have been sufficient to maintain the deception.

Finally, consider the insurance policy. It had been arranged by my Uncle Ned, not as protection for my mother, but as a bribe to induce my father to participate in the conspiracy. No doubt Uncle Ned could have raised $50,000 if he had been forced to, but it was, after all, much less painful to have it paid by an insurance company. And no doubt my father, being what he was, was glad to leave with the money either in his pocket or soon to be delivered.

Shall I confess something? Once I had reassessed the circumstances and become convinced of the truth, I felt, far from shame or guilt, a kind of perverse pride. It was surely one of the most bizarre and daring conspiracies to commit fraud that had ever victimized an insurance company. Moreover, the fraud had been incidental. The primary purpose of the conspiracy had been to rid my mother of my father.

I did not know what happened to my father later, and I must say I had singularly little curiosity about it. Inasmuch as my mother had remarried two years after my father was last seen, I could assume that he had died, or had secured a quiet divorce in some remote place, or that my mother and Dr. Crandall, protected by father’s part in the conspiracy, had boldly committed bigamy. To me, it didn’t much matter. I loved my mother and respected my stepfather, and I was certainly not going to divulge anything to hurt them. Besides, you see, I had no tangible evidence. However much I knew, I could prove nothing.

And so I lived comfortably with my guilty knowledge until all the parties to the conspiracy were dead. Uncle Ned was the first to go, then my stepfather, and finally, my mother. Then, when all were beyond hurt or harm, my mental attitude changed. I was beset by a persistent and intolerable itch to know once and for all, and beyond any possible doubt, whether I was right or wrong. In brief, I simply had to know if my father had gone to heaven or to hell or to Chicago. Did his casket hold his bones or merely ballast?

I came back to find out. As I said in the beginning, I arranged to have the niche and the casket opened, and I employed competent workmen to do the job. I waited at the open door of the mausoleum, and remembered all these things, and smelled red clover in the sunlight following rain, and the work was eventually done.

The casket was laid out on the floor, and the lid was opened. The workmen, in deference to me, had gone outside.

I went over and kneeled beside the casket and looked in — and I wish I hadn’t. I would give anything now if only I hadn’t.

For, you see, my father’s bones were there, still wearing the blue suit that had, in the dry niche, survived the years that had made dust of his less durable flesh.

But that was not the horror.

The horror was peeping over the edge of his breast pocket, where he himself had put it so that it would be immediately available for use when he should awaken to a command that was never given.

Even before looking closer, I knew that it was a train ticket to Chicago.