Doors of the Night

by Frank L. Packard

Only a few hours before, turning his purloined authority to account, he had set the underworld the task of tracing the Ellsworth collection—and mysteriously there had appeared upon his table this single stone, ostentatiously identified by a piece cut from one of the original plush trays in which the stones had been kept. The bare possibility that it had been Red Vallon, or some of his breed, who had stumbled upon the stone in their search through the underground exchanges, and had left it there as evidence of a partial success for him to find on his return, had occurred to him; but a cautious probing of Red Vallon that morning had put a final and emphatic negative on that theory.

Who, then? And why? It had seemed like a ghastly jeer when he had seen that stone there on the table, and the prelude to some sinister act that he could not foresee, and against which therefore he could not prepare any defense. Did someone know that he was not the Rat, that, desperate, with no other thing to do, he had snatched at the rôle fate had thrust out to him, and was playing it now?

Who, then? Not the Woman in Black—her acceptance of him as the Rat had been altogether too genuine! Not the underworld—even a suspicion there would have been followed by a knife thrust long before this. Not the actual perpetrators of David Ellsworth’s murder, if they knew him to be Billy Kane—for their one aim had been to fasten the crime irrevocably upon him, all their hellish ingenuity had been centered on that one object, and they would certainly, therefore, have lost no time in giving the police, in some roundabout, guarded way, a tip as to his identity.

His brain whirled with the problem, and ached in an actual physical sense. It had been aching all day. He could minimize his peril, if he cared to make the wish father to the thought; he could not exaggerate it. It seemed impossible that his identity was known, but, even so, the question as to where that stone had come from, and why, still remained unanswered. Was it, then—another possibility—the murderers of David Ellsworth, who, while still believing him to be the Rat, and having discovered in some way that, as the Rat, he was working against them, had given him this ugly and significant warning to keep his hands off? Well, if that were so, he was still in no less danger, for he must go on. To turn aside was to fail, and to fail, quite equally, meant death.

The hard pressure of his lips curved the corners of his mouth downward in sharp lines. Nor was the question of that stone all! Since last night when the cloak of respectability had been stripped from Karlin, and the “man in the mask” had turned the tables on the crime coterie in the gambling hell run by Jerry, the ex-croupier of Monte Carlo, the underworld had been in a nasty mood, ugly, suspicious, in a ferment of unrest. It was another alias added to his rôle, another alias to safeguard even more zealously, if possible, than his unsought rôle of the Rat. He was the man in the mask. He shrugged his shoulders suddenly. Quite so! The mask was even at that moment in his inside coat pocket. If it were found there! He laughed harshly. It seemed as though he were being sucked in nearer and nearer to the center of some seething vortex that hungrily sought to engulf him. It seemed as though his brain ground and mulled around in a sort of ghastly cycle. When he tried to bring one thing into individual outline some other thing impinged, and all became a jumbled medley, like pieces of a puzzle, no one of which would fit into another.

The underworld looked askance and whispered through the corners of its mouth as it asked the question: Who was the man in the mask? And he, Billy Kane, who could answer that question, sitting here in Two-finger Tasker’s in the heart of that underworld, was asking himself another, a dozen others, whose answers were vital, life and death to him in the most literal sense. Who was the Woman in Black, who, like a Nemesis, hovered over the Rat? Where was the man whose personality had been so strangely thrust upon him, Billy Kane? When would the Rat return? Had he, Billy Kane, even the few hours at his disposal this evening that were necessary to enable him to run down the clue which he had discovered, and upon which he was banking his all now to clear himself, to bring to justice the murderers who had so craftily saddled their guilt upon him—had he even that much time before the inevitable crash came?

This evening! Yes, this evening! His fingers came from his vest pocket, and his hand clenched fiercely at his side. He would go the limit. His mind was made up to that. He had never thought that he would consider, calculate and weigh the pros and cons of taking another’s life, much less come to a deliberate decision to do so! But he had made that decision now; and, if it were necessary, he would carry it through. It seemed to affect him with an unnatural, cold indifference that surprised himself—that decision. It seemed to be only the result, the outcome that continued to concern him. If he had luck with him to-night he would win through. Red Vallon, Birdie Rose and the underworld had so far failed. He had kept prodding them on, and would continue to prod them on even now on the basis that he could not afford to let go of a single chance; but his hopes, that amounted now to a practical certainty of success, were almost wholly centered on his own efforts in the next few hours.

He stirred impulsively in his chair. The murderers of David Ellsworth had been too cunning, it seemed, had overstepped themselves at last in their anxiety to weave their net of evidence still more irrevocably around him. The affair of last night, the capture of Karlin by the police, and the social prominence of both Karlin and Merxler, had furnished the morning papers with material for glaring headlines and columns of sensational “story”; but, even so, all this had not by any means overshadowed the Ellsworth murder and robbery. The press was still alive with it, New York was still agog with the old millionaire-philanthropist’s assassination, and with what it believed to be the traitorous and abandoned act of, not only a trusted and confidential secretary, but of one who at the same time was the son of a lifelong friend.

The blood surged burning hot into Billy Kane’s face. From coast to coast they had heralded him as the vilest of his kind—he was a pariah, an outcast, a thing of loathing! Yes, the papers were still giving him and the Ellsworth murder prominence enough! But that prominence was not without its compensation, since it had furnished him with the clue now in his possession.

The inquest had been held late yesterday afternoon, too late for more than brief mention in the evening papers, but this morning the papers had carried a full and practically verbatim report of the proceedings. He had read the report, not daring at first to believe what he wanted to believe, afraid that his eyes were playing a mocking trick upon him—and then he had read it again in a sort of grim, unholy joy.