Abraham Merritt - Burn, Witch, Burn!

He nodded. His face softened and I saw the dangerous tenseness relax.

"I've no argument, Doc. Not on that or nothing else you've said. But I'm thanking you for your high opinion of my brains. It'd certainly take a pretty clever man to work all this out this–a–way. Sort of like one of them cartoons that shows seventy–five gimcracks set up to drop a brick on a man's head at exactly twenty minutes, sixteen seconds after two in the afternoon. Yeah, I must be clever!"

I winced at this broad sarcasm, but did not answer. McCann took up the Peters doll and began to examine it. I went to the 'phone to ask Ricori's condition. I was halted by an exclamation from the gunman. He beckoned me, and handing me the doll, pointed to the collar of its coat. I felt about it. My fingers touched what seemed to be the round head of a large pin. I pulled out as though from a dagger sheath a slender piece of metal nine inches long. It was thinner than an average hat–pin, rigid and needle–pointed.

Instantly I knew that I was looking upon the instrument that had pierced Ricori's heart!

"Another outrage!" McCann drawled. "Maybe I put it there, Doc!"

"You could have, McCann."

He laughed. I studied the queer blade—for blade it surely was. It appeared to be of finest steel, although I was not sure it was that metal. Its rigidity was like none I knew. The little knob at the head was half an inch in diameter and less like a pinhead than the haft of a poniard. Under the magnifying glass it showed small grooves upon it …as though to make sure the grip of a hand…a doll's hand a doll's dagger! There were stains upon it.

I shook my head impatiently, and put the thing aside, determining to test those stains later. They were bloodstains, I knew that, but I must make sure. And yet, if they were, it would not be certain proof of the incredible—that a doll's hand had used this deadly thing.

I picked up the Peters doll and began to study it minutely. I could not determine of what it was made. It was not of wood, like the other doll. More than anything else, the material resembled a fusion of gum and wax. I knew of no such composition. I stripped it of the clothing. The undamaged part of the doll was anatomically perfect. The hair was human hair, carefully planted in the scalp. The eyes were blue crystals of some kind. The clothing showed the same extraordinary skill in the making as the clothes of Diana's doll.

I saw now that the dangling leg was not held by a thread. It was held by a wire. Evidently the doll had been molded upon a wire frame– work. I walked over to my instrument cabinet, and selected a surgical saw and knives.

"Wait a minute, Doc." McCann had been following my movements. "You going to cut this thing apart?"

I nodded. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a heavy hunting knife. Before I could stop him, he had brought its blade down like an ax across the neck of the Peters doll. It cut through it cleanly. He took the head and twisted it. A wire snapped. He dropped the head on the table, and tossed the body to me. The head rolled. It came to rest against the cord he had called the witch's ladder.

The head seemed to twist and to look up at us. I thought for an instant the eyes flared redly, the features to contort, the malignancy intensify—as I had seen it intensify upon Peters' living face…I caught myself up, angrily a trick of the light, of course.

I turned to McCann and swore.

"Why did you do that?"

"You're worth more to the boss than I am," he said, cryptically.

I did not answer. I cut open the decapitated body of the doll. As I had suspected, it had been built upon a wire framework. As I cut away the encasing material, I found this framework was a single wire, or a single metal strand, and that as cunningly as the doll's body had been shaped, just as cunningly had this wire been twisted into an outline of the human skeleton!

Not, of course, with minute fidelity, but still with amazing accuracy…there were no joints nor articulations…the substance of which the doll was made was astonishingly pliant…the little hands flexible…it was more like dissecting some living mannikin than a doll…And it was rather dreadful…

I glanced toward the severed head.

McCann was bending over it, staring down into its eyes, his own not more than a few inches away from the glinting blue crystals. His hands clutched the table edge and I saw that they were strained and tense as though he were making a violent effort to push himself away. When he had tossed the head upon the table it had come to rest against the knotted cord—but now that cord was twisted around the doll's severed neck and around its forehead as though it were a small serpent!

And distinctly I saw that McCann's face was moving closer… slowly closer…to that tiny one…as though it were being drawn to it…and that in the little face a living evil was concentrated and that McCann's face was a mask of horror.

"McCann!" I cried, and thrust an arm under his chin, jerking back his head. And as I did this I could have sworn the doll's eyes turned to me, and that its lips writhed.

McCann staggered back. He stared at me for a moment, and then leaped to the table. He picked up the doll's head, dashed it to the floor and brought his heel down upon it again and again, like one stamping out the life of a venomous spider. Before he ceased, the head was a shapeless blotch, all semblance of humanity or anything else crushed out of it—but within it the two blue crystals that had been its eyes still glinted, and the knotted cord of the witch's ladder still wound through it.

"God! It was…was drawing me down to it…"

McCann lighted a cigarette with shaking hand, tossed the match away. The match fell upon what had been the doll's head.

There followed, simultaneously, a brilliant flash, a disconcerting sobbing sound and a wave of intense heat. Where the crushed head had been there was now only an irregularly charred spot upon the polished wood. Within it lay the blue crystals that had been the eyes of the doll—lusterless and blackened. The knotted cord had vanished.

And the body of the doll had disappeared. Upon the table was a nauseous puddle of black waxy liquid out of which lifted the ribs of the wire skeleton!

The Annex 'phone rang; mechanically I answered it.

"Yes," I said. "What is it?"

"Mr. Ricori, sir. He's out of the coma. He's awake!"

I turned to McCann.

"Ricori's come through!"

He gripped my shoulders—then drew a step away, a touch of awe on his face.

"Yeah?" whispered McCann. "Yeah—he came through when the knots burned! It freed him! It's you an' me that's got to watch our step now!"

I took McCann up with me to Ricori's bedside. Confrontation with his chief would be the supreme test, I felt, resolving one way or another all my doubts as to his sincerity. For I realized, almost immediately, that bizarre as had been the occurrences I have just narrated, each and all of them could have been a part of the elaborate hocus–pocus with which I had tentatively charged the gunman. The cutting off of the doll's head could have been a dramatic gesture designed to impress my imagination. It was he who had called my attention to the sinister reputation of the knotted cord. It was McCann who had found the pin. His fascination by the severed head might have been assumed. And the tossing of the match a calculated action designed to destroy evidence. I did not feel that I could trust my own peculiar reactions as valid.

And yet it was difficult to credit McCann with being so consummate an actor, so subtle a plotter. Ah, but he could be following the instructions of another mind capable of such subtleties. I wanted to trust McCann. I hoped that he would pass the test. Very earnestly I hoped it.