Ellery Queen - The Lamp of God

And there was the Black House again. Not a wraith. A solid house, a strong dirty time-encrusted house, looking as if it would never dream of taking wing and flying off into space. It stood on the other side of the driveway, where it had always stood.

They saw it even as they turned into the drive from the drift-covered road, its bulk looming black against the brilliant moon, as substantial a house as could be found in the world of sane things.

Thorne and the girl were incapable of speech; they could only gape, dumb witnesses of a miracle even greater than the disappearance of the house in the first place.

As for Ellery, he stopped the car, sprang to the ground, signaled to the car snuffling up behind, and darted across the snowy clearing to the White House, whose windows were bright with lamp-and fire-light. Out of the police car swarmed men, and they ran after Ellery like hounds. Thorne and Alice followed in a daze.

Ellery kicked open the White House door. There was a revolver in his hand and there was no doubt, from the way he gripped it, that its cylinder had been replenished.

“Hello again,” he said, stalking into the living-room. “Not a ghost; Inspector Queen’s little boy in the too, too solid flesh. Nemesis, perhaps. I bid you good evening. What — no welcoming smile, Dr. Reinach?”

The fat man had paused in the act of lifting a glass of Scotch to his lips. It was wonderful how the color seeped out of his pouchy cheeks, leaving them gray. Mrs. Reinach whimpered in a corner, and Mrs. Fell stared stupidly. Only Nick Keith showed no great astonishment. He was standing by a window, muffled to the ears; and on his face there was bitterness and admiration and, strangely, a sort of relief.

“Shut the door.” The detectives behind Ellery spread out silently. Alice stumbled to a chair, her eyes wild, studying Dr. Reinach with a fierce intensity... There was a sighing little sound and one of the detectives lunged toward the window at which Keith had been standing. But Keith was no longer there. He was bounding through the snow toward the woods like a huge deer.

“Don’t let him get away!” cried Ellery. Three men dived through the window after the giant, their guns out. Shots began to sputter. The night outside was streaked with orange lightning.

Ellery went to the fire and warmed his hands. Dr. Reinach slowly, very slowly, sat down in the armchair. Thorne sank into a chair, too, putting his hands to his head.

Ellery turned around and said: “I’ve told you, Captain, enough of what’s happened since our arrival to allow you an intelligent understanding of what I’m about to say.” A stocky man in uniform nodded curtly.

“Thorne, last night for the first time in my career,” continued Ellery whimsically, “I acknowledged the assistance of... Well, I tell you, who are implicated in this extraordinary crime, that had it not been for the good God above you would have succeeded in your plot against Alice Mayhew’s inheritance.”

“I’m disappointed in you,” said the fat man from the depths of the chair.

“A loss I keenly feel.” Ellery looked at him, smiling. “Let me show you, skeptic. When Mr. Thorne, Miss Mayhew and I arrived the other day, it was late afternoon. Upstairs, in the room you so thoughtfully provided, I looked out the window and saw the sun setting. This was nothing and meant nothing, surely: sunset. Mere sunset. A trivial thing, interesting only to poets, meteorologists, and astronomers. But this was one time when the sun was vital to a man seeking truth... a veritable lamp of God shining in the darkness.

“For, see. Miss Mayhew’s bedroom that first day was on the opposite side of the house from mine. If the sun set in my window, then I faced west and she faced east. So far, so good. We talked, we retired. The next morning I awoke at seven — shortly after sunrise in this winter month — and what did I see? I saw the sun streaming into my window.”

A knot hissed in the fire behind him. The stocky man in the blue uniform stirred uneasily.

“Don’t you understand?” cried Ellery. “The sun had set in my window, and now it was rising in my window!”

Dr. Reinach was regarding him with a mild ruefulness. The color had come back to his fat cheeks. He raised the glass he was holding in a gesture curiously like a salute. Then he drank, deeply.

And Ellery said: “The significance of this unearthly reminder did not strike me at once. But much later it came back to me; and I dimly saw that chance, cosmos, God, whatever you may choose to call it, had given me the instrument for understanding the colossal, the mind-staggering phenomenon of a house which vanished overnight from the face of the earth.”

“Good lord,” muttered Thorne.

“But I was not sure; I did not trust my memory. I needed another demonstration from heaven, a bulwark to bolster my own suspicions. And so, as it snowed and snowed and snowed, the snow drawing a blanket across the face of the sun through which it could not shine, I waited. I waited for the snow to stop, and for the sun to shine again.”

He sighed. “When it shone again, there could no longer be any doubt. It appeared first to me in Miss Mayhew’s room, which had faced east the afternoon of our arrival. But what was it I saw in Miss Mayhew’s room late this afternoon? I saw the sun set.”

“Good lord,” said Thorne again; he seemed incapable of saying anything else.

“Then her room faced west today. How could her room face west today when it had faced east the day of our arrival? How could my room face west the day of our arrival and face east today? Had the sun stood still? Had the world gone mad? Or was there another explanation — one so extraordinarily simple that it staggered the imagination?”

Thorne muttered: “Queen, this is the most—”

“Please,” said Ellery, “let me finish. The only logical conclusion, the only conclusion that did not fly in the face of natural law, of science itself, was that while the house we were in today, the rooms we occupied, seemed to be identical with the house and the rooms we had occupied on the day of our arrival, they were not. Unless this solid structure had been turned about on its foundation like a toy on a stick, which was palpably absurd, then it was not the same house. It looked the same inside and out, it had identical furniture, identical carpeting, identical decorations... but it was not the same house. It was another house. It was another house exactly like the first in every detail except one: and that was its terrestrial position in relation to the sun.”

A detective outside shouted a message of failure, a shout carried away by the wind under the bright cold moon.

“See,” said Ellery softly, “how everything fell into place. If this White House we were in was not the same White House in which we had slept that first night, but was a twin house in a different position in relation to the sun, then the Black House, which apparently had vanished, had not vanished at all. It was where it had always been. It was not the Black House which had vanished, but we who had vanished. It was not the Black House which had moved away, but we who had moved away. We had been transferred during that first night to a new location, where the surrounding woods looked similar, where there was a similar driveway with a similar garage at its terminus, where the road outside was similarly old and pitted, where everything was similar except that there was no Black House, only an empty clearing.

“So we must have been moved, body and baggage, to this twin White House during the time we retired the first night and the time we awoke the next morning. We, Miss Mayhew’s chromo on the mantel, the holes in our doors where locks had been, even the fragments of a brandy decanter which had been shattered the night before in a cleverly staged scene against the brick wall of the fireplace at the original house... all, all transferred to the twin house to further the illusion that we were still in the original house the next morning.”