I thought of giving a poisoned rabbit to our nightmare assassin. But then I’d never know where he was or if he really existed. Finnegan would die unseen in his monstrous closet, and I never the wiser. This way, for one victorious moment, I will know Fear for me. Envy me. Pray for me. Sorry to abandon you without farewells. Dear friend, carry on.
I folded the letter and wept.
No more was ever heard of him.
Some say Sir Robert killed himself, an actor in his own melodrama, and that one day we shall unearth his brooding, lost, and Gothic body and that it was he who killed the children and that his preoccupation with doors and hinges, and more doors, led him, crazed, to study this one species of spider, and wildly plan and build the most amazing door in history, an insane burrow into which he popped to die, before my eyes, thus hoping to perpetuate the incredible Finnegan.
But I have found no burrow. I do not believe a man could construct such a pit, even given Sir Robert’s overwhelming passion for doors.
I can only ask, would a man murder, draw his victims’ blood, build an earthen vault? For what motive? Create the finest secret exit in all time? Madness. And what of those large grayish balls of earth supposedly tossed forth from the spider’s lair?
Somewhere, Finnegan and Sir Robert lie clasped in a velvet-lined unmarked crypt, deep under. Whether one is the paranoiac alter ego of the other, I cannot say. But the murders have ceased, the rabbits once more rush in Chatham Forest, and its bushes teem with butterflies and birds. It is another spring, and the children run again through a loud glade, no longer silent.
Finnegan and Sir Robert, requiescat in pace.
On the Orient, North
It was on the orient express heading north from Venice to Paris to Calais that the old woman noticed the ghastly passenger.
He was a traveler obviously dying of some dread disease.
He occupied compartment 22 on the third car back, and had his meals sent in and only at twilight did he rouse to come sit in the dining car surrounded by the false electric lights and the sound of crystal and women’s laughter.
He arrived this night, moving with a terrible slowness to sit across the aisle from this woman of some years, her bosom like a fortress, her brow serene, her eyes with a kindness that had mellowed with time.
There was a black medical bag at her side, and a thermometer tucked in her mannish lapel pocket.
The ghastly man’s paleness caused her left hand to crawl up along her lapel to touch the thermometer.
“Oh, dear,” whispered Miss Minerva Halliday.
The maître d’ was passing. She touched his elbow and nodded across the aisle.
“Pardon, but where is that poor man going?”
“Calais and London, madame. If God is willing.”
And he hurried off.
Minerva Halliday, her appetite gone, stared across at that skeleton made of snow.
The man and the cutlery laid before him seemed one. The knives, forks and spoons jingled with a silvery cold sound. He listened, fascinated, as if to the sound of his inner soul as the cutlery crept, touched, chimed; a tintinnabulation from another sphere. His hands lay in his lap like lonely pets, and when the train swerved around a long curve his body, mindless, swayed now this way, now that, toppling.
At which moment the train took a greater curve and knocked the silverware, chittering. A woman at a far table, laughing, cried out:
“I don’t believe it!”
To which a man with a louder laugh shouted:
“Nor do I!”
The coincidence caused, in the ghastly passenger, a terrible melting. The doubting laughter had pierced his ears.
He visibly shrank. His eyes hollowed and one could almost imagine a cold vapor gasped from his mouth.
Miss Minerva Halliday, shocked, leaned forward and put out one hand. She heard herself whisper:
“I believe!”
The effect was instantaneous.
The ghastly passenger sat up. Color returned to his white cheeks. His eyes glowed with a rebirth of fire. His head swiveled and he stared across the aisle at this miraculous woman with words that cured.
Blushing furiously, the old nurse with the great warm bosom caught hold, rose, and hurried off.
Not five minutes later, Miss Minerva Halliday heard the maître d’ hurrying along the corridor, tapping on doors, whispering. As he passed her open door, he glanced at her.
“Could it be that you are—”
“No,” she guessed, “not a doctor. But a registered nurse. Is it that old man in the dining car?”
“Yes, yes! Please, madame, this way!”
The ghastly man had been carried back to his own compartment.
Reaching it, Miss Minerva Halliday peered within.
And there the strange man lay strewn, his eyes wilted shut, his mouth a bloodless wound, the only life in him the joggle of his head as the train swerved.
My God, she thought, he’s dead!
Out loud she said, “I’ll call if I need you.”
The maître d’ went away.
Miss Minerva Halliday quietly shut the sliding door and turned to examine the dead man—for surely he was dead. And yet. . . .
But at last she dared to reach out and touch the wrists in which so much ice-water ran. She pulled back, as if her fingers had been burned by dry ice. Then she leaned forward to whisper into the pale man’s face.
“Listen very carefully. Yes?”
For answer, she thought she heard the coldest throb of a single heartbeat.
She continued. “I do not know how I guess this. I know who you are, and what you are sick of—”
The train curved. His head lolled as if his neck had been broken.
“I’ll tell you what you’re dying from!” she whispered. “You suffer a disease—of people!”
His eyes popped wide, as if he had been shot through the heart. She said:
“The people on this train are killing you. They are your affliction.”
Something like a breath stirred behind the shut wound of the man’s mouth.
“Yesssss . . . ssss.”
Her grip tightened on his wrist, probing for some pulse:
“You are from some middle European country, yes? Somewhere where the nights are long and when the wind blows, people listen? But now things have changed, and you have tried to escape by travel, but . . .”
Just then, a party of young, wine-filled tourists bustled along the outer corridor, firing off their laughter.
The ghastly passenger withered.
“How do . . . you . . .” he whispered, “. . . know . . . thissss?”
“I am a special nurse with a special memory. I saw, I met, someone like you when I was six—”
“Saw?” the pale man exhaled.
“In Ireland, near Kileshandra. My uncle’s house, a hundred years old, full of rain and fog and there was walking on the roof late at night, and sounds in the hall as if the storm had come in, and then at last this shadow entered my room. It sat on my bed and the cold from his body made me cold. I remember and know it was no dream, for the shadow who came to sit on my bed and whisper . . .was much . . . like you.”
Eyes shut, from the depths of his arctic soul, the old sick man mourned in response:
“And who . . . and what . . .am I?”
“You are not sick. And you are not dying. . . .You are—”
The whistle on the Orient Express wailed a long way off.
“—a ghost,” she said.
“Yesssss!” he cried.
It was a vast shout of need, recognition, assurance. He almost bolted upright.
“Yes!”
At which moment there arrived in the doorway a young priest, eager to perform. Eyes bright, lips moist, one hand clutching his crucifix, he stared at the collapsed figure of the ghastly passenger and cried, “May I—?”
“Last rites?” The ancient passenger opened one eye like the lid on a silver box. “From you? No.” His eye shifted to the nurse. “Her!”
“Sir!” cried the young priest.
He stepped back, seized his crucifix as if it were a parachute ripcord, spun, and scurried off.
Leaving the old nurse to sit examining her now even more strange patient until at last he said:
“How,” he gasped, “can you nurse me?”
“Why—” she gave a small self-deprecating laugh. “We must find a way.”
With yet another wail, the Orient Express encountered more mileages of night, fog, mist, and cut through it with a shriek.
“You are going to Calais?” she said.
“And beyond, to Dover, London, and perhaps a castle outside Edinburgh, where I will be safe—”
“That’s almost impossible—” She might as well have shot him through the heart. “No, no, wait, wait!” she cried. “Impossible . . . without me! I will travel with you to Calais and across to Dover.”
“But you do not know me!”
“Oh, but I dreamed you as a child, long before I met someone like you, in the mists and rains of Ireland. At age nine I searched the moors for the Baskerville Hound.”
“Yes,” said the ghastly passenger. “You are English and the English believe!”
“True. Better than Americans, who doubt. French? Cynics! English is best. There is hardly an old London house that does not have its sad lady of mists crying before dawn.”
At which moment the compartment door, shaken by a long curve of track, sprang wide. An onslaught of poisonous talk, of delirious chatter, of what could only be irreligious laughter poured in from the corridor. The ghastly passenger wilted.
Springing to her feet, Minerva Halliday slammed the door and turned to look with the familiarity of a lifetime of sleep-tossed encounters at her traveling companion.
“You, now,” she asked, “who exactly are you?”
The ghastly passenger, seeing in her face the face of a sad child he might have encountered
