Gary Alexander - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 86, No. 6. Whole No. 511, December 1985

“Ah, but there’s more.” insisted Prattmann quickly. “I urged Mr. Swaffham to come here as soon as his affairs would permit. And he promised me my share should his visit prove profitable. I thought no more about it until a week ago when he appeared at my hotel in Paris in a state of great excitement. He told me he had just come back from San Sebastiano where he’d stood on the bridge at high noon as instructed by his dream. At last a man whom he’d noticed watching him curiously for several days from a shop doorway approached to ask in labored English why Swaffham came to stand there every day. When the Englishman explained his reason for traveling all the way from England, the man began to laugh.

“ ‘Dreams are all the rage, my dear sir,’ he smiled. ‘But how can a man make a living chasing across Europe after chimeras? I dream, too. In fact, last night I dreamed I found myself on a knoll where there were six tall stones erected in a circle. At the bottom of the knoll was a seventh stone as tall as the others, standing on the bank of a small river. And somehow I knew that if I dug at the foot of that seventh stone I would find a treasure.’ The man chuckled. ‘But even if I knew where those stones were, I assure you I would not close up shop on the say-so of a dream.’ Here the man gave Swaffham a look that was half pity and half amusement and, turning on his heels, went back into his shop.

“Now Mr. Swaffham stood there dumbfounded, for just outside of his own village of Briggston was a knoll with a circle of six stones called the Whispering Knights because they were canted toward the center like conspirators. And there was a seventh stone called the Dry Knight because it looked like he’d come down to the river Wye for a drink. Mr. Swaffham was on his way back home to dig for treasure when he stopped to give me the good news.”

Prattmann paused to add weight to what he was about to say. “My theory of buried memory cannot account for this meeting of two men — of two dreams, if you wish. I was hoping you might be able to provide a down-to-earth explanation for this extraordinary incident.” Prattmann waited for a moment as though expecting the detective to speak. But Ganelon had no explanation to give. His face clouded over, his ears began to redden, and his fingers drummed on the table like the ominous tattoo of an approaching army.

Prattmann gave a self-satisfied little smile. “Well, then, perhaps there is more to dreams than meets the eye,” he said at last. “What, for example, of the story of the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu, who, dreaming himself a butterfly, woke to wonder: was he dreaming himself the butterfly or was the butterfly dreaming himself to be Chuang Tzu?”

Ganelon came around the table with the dark look that had earned him the nickname the Ghengis Khan of detection. Without a word, he plucked the cigar from his startled guest’s lips and the brandy glass from his fingers and threw them into the fireplace. “Claptrap, sir. Utter, utter claptrap,” he growled. Then he indicated the direction to the front door with a toss of his head. “I bid you good evening.”

That night Ganelon sat up late in bed, eating a nightcap wedge of deliquescent cheese and mourning the loss of the cherished oboe. Still, a civilized man can only put up with a certain amount of drivel without bursting out. Butterflies and Chinamen, Chinamen and butterflies, and one man’s dream that fits neatly into another. Ganelon snorted sourly. Then he looked over quickly to see if he had disturbed Madame, the large shape asleep beneath the covers at his side. It was not an unfriendly glance. They had married for reasons other than love — she afraid of becoming an old maid, he because Prince Faustus was pressing for an heir to carry on the work of the detective agency. But a kind of affection had grown up between them.

Ganelon turned back to his cheese for a moment. Then, with a final sigh for the lost Black Emperor, he slipped the plate and its remains into the drawer of the bedside table, blew out the candle, and went to sleep.

And he dreamed. He found himself in total darkness on enemy ground, for he sensed danger all around him. Even the darkness was the enemy’s. He could not pierce it, yet he felt visible. Suddenly, two small pale-blue globes set close together appeared ahead of him. When Ganelon moved toward them, the blue globes winked out — to reappear again farther off in the black night. Ganelon allowed himself to be led in this fashion, his reluctance to go on increasing with each step. Then ahead of him stood a circle of tree trunks lit red by the flames of a fire he could not yet see and somehow feared to see. When he tried to stop his progress, he could not — the two blue lights pulled him irresistibly. Finally he cried out — and woke with a start, sitting up in his bed and his own darkness.

For the next several nights, the dream returned. And each time the dream ended with Ganelon closer to the fire than the time before.

But if the dream returned, so did Prattmann.

One afternoon about ten days after the disastrous dinner, old Simon, Ganelon’s clerk, ushered Prattmann into the inner office. The young dream dowser was accompanied by a nondescript little Englishman with a short moustache on a long upper lip all atremble with indignation. “You wanted your part of the treasure, sir,” Prattmann’s companion was saying. “Then come along and share the gallows with me.”

“Mr. Ganelon, allow me to introduce Mr. Swaffham,” said Prattmann. “I spoke of his case at our recent dinner from which I was so abruptly, ah, called away.”

Ganelon gave what was for him a cordial bow. “Please be seated, gentlemen,” said the detective, who always took a particular pleasure in shaping his mouth to speak the English tongue, the only language in which he had uttered words of love. “You are a railroad station master, Mr. Swaffham,” he observed, sitting back down behind his heavy black desk — whose legs were gilt replicas of the Place Vendome column topped at desk level by miniature Napoleons.

“As Mr. Prattmann no doubt told you, sir.”

“He neglected to do so,” said the detective. “But the leather-edged watch pocket in your vest and the sturdy steel chain suggests a professional preoccupation with time. The scorched patch on the underside of your shirtcuff announces that you carry a kerosene lantern in your work. A railroad man is not too great a leap. And your white shirt leads me to station master.”

The Englishman was visibly impressed.

Prattmann said, “A complication’s arisen in the matter of Mr. Swaffham’s dream. I have advised him to place the matter in your capable hands.” An impatient noise from the Englishman prompted him to add, “I, of course, will pay your fee myself.”

Ganelon almost smiled. “I’m sure we can work out a satisfactory price,” he said smoothly. Then he turned to the station master. “Now, sir, what’s all this talk about the gallows?”

Without any more prompting, the station master told how he had arrived back at Briggston by a late-afternoon train and curbed his curiosity about the treasure under the Dry Knight until nightfall. Then, with a small shovel and a lantern concealed in a sack, he set out for the Wye as if on an innocent evening stroll. (“Some who saw me said I skulked,” said Swaffham. “But they lie. I strolled. I whistled.”)

By the time he reached the river, the air had taken on the water’s coolness and the fireflies were haunting the grass. Beneath the tall rock, the ground was sunbaked and weedy. He lit the lantern and set about his task. Two feet down, the shovel struck something. But what he hoped to be a moneybag turned out to be a jacket. He had uncovered the remains of a man long dead.

Suddenly, a basset voice said, “Evening, Mr. Swaffham. And what might you be up to?” Twigg, the village constable, stepped out of the bushes along the shore with two twitching fish on a string. “Here, now,” he growled, peering down into the hole at the corpse of Captain Amos Pendry of Pendry Hall, who had vanished from the district three years before. The next thing Swaffham knew, he was being led away with talk of murder in the air.