The Ka of Gifford Hillary Read online

  ‘Naturally, Sir Gifford, it would be too much to expect you to understand a detailed description of the processes that I’m proposing to demonstrate to you this evening; but you might get the broad principle of the thing—that is if I use simple language.’

  ‘It will have to be very simple,’ I smiled, ‘but I’ll do my best to follow you.’

  He launched out then into a maze of technicalities, in which I endeavoured to show intelligent interest but was soon completely lost. His lecture lasted for a good twenty minutes, but all I had really gathered at the end of it was that he had been playing around with radio-active forms of various elements, and that these isotopes, as they were called, could be used to bring about important changes in the physical properties of both inanimate materials, such as plastics, and living bodies. As far as the latter were concerned, he claimed that at short range his machine, if directed on an animal, would have the effect of stopping its heart.

  When he had said his say he, literally, produced the rabbit. It was a nice fat Belgian hare, in a fair-sized cage, happily chewing away at some leaves of lettuce. Lifting the cage from the floor, he set it on a broad shelf which ran along the end wall of the laboratory and was about on a level with the table.

  Beckoning me forward, he asked me to stand up against the table, so that by looking straight over his apparatus I had the best possible view of the rabbit. Standing on the left of the table he made some final adjustments to the machine. While he was doing so I heard the old clock over the stables strike ten. Then he made a sign to me to look at the rabbit, and pressed a button.

  Instantly I felt a fierce pain pierce my heart. Next moment my whole body was contorted with agony. It was so excruciating that it paralysed all thought and movement so that I could not even let out a shout. But the torture ceased almost as swiftly as it had begun. My nerves refused to register further and my mind became a blank.

  After what cannot have been more than a few seconds, my brain began to function again; but I no longer felt even a suggestion of pain, or the breathlessness that should normally have been its aftermath. In fact I felt no physical sensations at all.

  I was still standing up against the table with Evans’s apparatus just in front of me. Staring straight over the top of it I saw the rabbit in its cage still happily nibbling away at the lettuce leaves. Then, without any particular reason for doing so, I glanced down towards my feet. My mind positively reeled at what I saw.

  Where my feet should have been a body sprawled upon the floor. And it was mine. I had not a shadow of doubt about that. The face was half hidden by an outflung arm, but it had my neatly-brushed brown hair, the burgundy-coloured velvet smoking jacket I had been wearing, and the evening trousers with the double braid stripe, which should correctly have been worn only with tails, but were a pair that, as one wears tails so rarely these days, I was knocking out.

  It flashed upon me then that I must be dead. Evidently, through some frightful oversight, Evans had got his apparatus reversed, so that its ray had been focused on myself instead of on the rabbit. Looking up at him I expected to see his face distraught with consternation, and that in a moment he would fling himself down on his knees beside my body in a wild effort to revive it.

  But that wasn’t how things were at all. He had not moved from beside the table, and he was looking down upon what had been me. On his lean face there was no trace of panic or distress, but a faint smile of elation. I knew then that I really was dead, and that he had deliberately murdered me.

  * * * *

  My feelings were extraordinarily mixed. Shock, horror, amazement and dismay jostled one another in my whirling mind. It was still striving to grasp the idea that it had suddenly become disembodied; yet no other explanation fitted the facts. Although I no longer had feeling in any part of myself the conscious ‘me’ was still standing beside the table, while sprawled on the floor lay my corpse.

  Evans’s reactions to my collapse showed beyond doubt that he had planned to make me the victim of his infernal machine. Why, I had not the faintest idea. The most likely explanation seemed to be that, all unsuspecting, I had been employing a madman; but in these frantic moments my distraught brain was far more concerned with the implications of being dead.

  Like most people, I had never been afraid of death; only of the pain which is generally inseparable from it, or, worse, the failure of some vital faculty by which a man may be reduced to an unlovely caricature of his former self and must suffer a long drawn out dependence on others before his end. I had often expressed the hope that I might escape such agonies or ignominy by a sudden death. Now, apparently, my wish had been granted; yet I was very far from being happy about that.

  As a healthy man only just entering on middle age I had expected to live for a long time to come. There was still a lot of things I wanted to do and places I wanted to see. I had, of course, made a will, but there were many matters that I would have tidied up had I only had a little warning. Absurdly enough, two quite trivial things flitted across my mind—a begging letter from an old friend fallen on evil times that I had left unanswered, and my intention to increase the pension of Annie Hawkins, the long-since retired nurse of my childhood.

  Then it was suddenly borne in upon me that I would never now read Grey’s Elegy, or see that masterpiece of Moorish architecture, the Alhambra at Granada, or witness from Stonehenge the sunrise on a midsummer’s morning—all things that I had vaguely meant to do at some time or other. I had left it too late. Yes, ‘too late’, the saddest words, as someone once remarked, in the English language.

  These thoughts all raced through my mind in a fraction of the time it takes to set them down, and I was still staring at Owen Evans. As I watched him with mingled bewilderment and anger the smug little smile of self-congratulation faded from his face, and he began to tremble.

  After all, it is one thing to contemplate killing a man—even if obsessed with the desire to secure the final proof of the effectiveness of a new scientific weapon—and quite another actually to do it. Apparently, the realisation that he had allowed his disordered imagination to lead him into committing a terrible crime had suddenly come home to him. His face went as white as a sheet and, although he was quite well shaved, the incipient stubble on his chin showed blue in sharp contrast with it.

  For a moment I thought he was going to be sick; but he got hold of himself, stooped down, grasped my body by the shoulder, and shook it. As he let go, the rolling head became still again and the arm flopped back, without a quiver, into immobility. Drawing a sharp breath he turned and walked towards the door of the laboratory.

  It was then, for the first time since the ray had exerted its deadly effect on me, that I attempted any form of movement. Naturally I supposed that, as a disembodied spirit, I should be able to flit from place to place without effort and, having no weight, I—or rather the mind of which I now solely consisted—could remain poised high up in the air or sink to any more convenient level as I desired. But it did not prove quite like that.

  Although I could not feel the floor the force of gravity apparently still operated sufficiently to keep me in a normal relationship to it unless I exerted my will to impel myself forward. Then I rose slightly and drifted in the direction I wished to go, but only for a few yards, after which I became static again till I once more made a conscious effort to advance. The movement can best be likened to that of a toy balloon which, having been thrown with some force, bounces in slow graceful arcs across the floor. It was a most pleasant sensation and I recalled having on rare occasions experienced it in dreams.

  I was, obviously, invisible to myself and also to Evans; for had my spirit been clothed with the tenuous outline of a ghost it is quite certain that he would have seen it and fled in terror.

  He had already reached the door and was about to close it as I came up behind him. For a moment I feared that he would shut me in, but the next second I became aware that no material object was a barrier to me. My last quick forward impulse c
arried me through both the half-shut door and his forearm as he pulled it to.

  While he locked it behind him I waited in his little office, wondering what he was about to do. My guess was that he would go down the back stairs to Silvers and tell the old boy that I had died as a result of a terrible accident; then they would telephone the police. As Evans had no apparent motive for murdering me there seemed quite a good chance that if he kept his head under cross-examination he would get away with an accident story, anyhow as far as a capital charge was concerned; but he would have to stand his trial for manslaughter and, as such an accident could have taken place only owing to crass carelessness on his part, the probability was that he would be sent to prison for a couple of years.

  The cold-blooded little rat deserved far worse than that and, while I am not normally vindictive, had I had the power to do so I would have seen to it that he paid the full price for his unscrupulous experiment. As it was I could be neither seen nor heard; so far as I could judge for the time being there were no means by which I could any longer influence the future of anyone.

  However, it soon transpired that my speculations were right off the mark. Instead of making for the servants’ quarters, or down the main staircase to telephone the police, he walked straight across the landing to the door of the bedroom that I shared with Ankaret. Without even knocking, he flung it open and marched in.

  As I followed, I saw that Ankaret was sitting up reading in her side of our big double bed. Sometimes she wore a little fluffy bed-jacket, but the night being warm she had on only a semi-transparent night-dress of pale blue chiffon. Its delicate colour was well chosen to throw up her Titian hair, big grey eyes and milk and roses skin. It was not to be wondered at that as Evans halted a few feet from the bed he gave a sudden gasp at the picture that she made.

  I jumped to the conclusion that the little brute, lacking as he was in the finer feelings, intended to blurt out a story about my accidental death, instead of giving Mrs. Silvers a chance to break it to Ankaret gently. But again I was quite wrong. Next second he flung himself upon her, bearing her backwards and kissing her violently on the mouth.

  Ankaret’s slender limbs concealed a surprising strength, and she was as supple as an eel. In a moment she had wriggled free and was thrusting him off. Her voice was tense with anger, but deliberately kept low, as she exclaimed:

  ‘Have you gone mad, Owen? Where’s Giff? If the two of you have finished in the laboratory he may come in at any minute. Should he find you here he’ll half kill you.’

  Her words and tone shocked me profoundly. They had a conspiratorial air about them which conveyed as clearly as anything could that she was having an affair with Evans. She was angry with him not for having invaded her room and forced his kisses on her, but because she believed that he had taken an unwarrantable risk in coming there at a time when I might easily appear on the scene and catch them in flagrante delicto.

  It flashed upon me then that Evans’s motive for killing me had little, if anything, to do with his desire to prove the capabilities of the scientific device he had invented. He had evidently been inspired to the crime by madness of quite a different kind—an insane jealousy of me as Ankaret’s husband.

  That he should have fallen for her I could well understand; but what she could see in him passed my comprehension. It seemed utterly unnatural that so lovely a creature as Ankaret should willingly submit to, let alone welcome, the caresses of this little dark, morose, uncultured runt of a man. Yet in such matters women are incomprehensible, and I could only assume it to be a case of beauty fascinated by the beast.

  Urgently, angrily, but still keeping her voice low, she repeated her command that he should leave her; then she endeavoured to scare him into doing so by swift graphic phrases depicting the explosion which was certain to take place if I came in and found them together.

  After she had thrown Evans off he made no further attempt to grapple with her, but neither did he make any move to leave the room. Instead, pouting slightly, he perched himself at her feet, near the end of the bed, end, as soon as he could get a word in, said in his lilting Welsh voice:

  ‘That will do, now. No need to be fearing any more that Giff will surprise us. The job is done, look you. Worked like a charm, it did: could not have gone better.’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ she asked in a puzzled voice.

  ‘Why, of the plan we made to be rid of him.’

  Ankaret jerked erect in the bed as though she had received an electric shock. Her mouth fell open, her big eyes widened to their fullest extent, her voice came in a hoarse whisper:

  ‘You … you don’t mean … you can’t mean that you’ve killed Giff?’

  He nodded; then they exchanged a few swift sentences which gave me the key to what had been going on. It was not so much what they said, and Ankaret made no admission of the game she had been playing; but knowing her so well enabled me to fill in the blanks and reconstruct the psychological processes of the two of them which had led up to my murder.

  Having been confined to the house for several weeks, owing to her injured leg, Ankaret had become so bored that she had encouraged Evans in his violent passion for her; but evidently she had not been attracted to him physically so had played a role which had enabled her to continue to amuse herself with him without giving way to his attempts to seduce her.

  As he could have known nothing of her past amours, it had been easy for her to pretend to be a virtuous and faithful wife who was unappreciated and misunderstood; so might, in certain circumstances, be willing to leave her husband for a man she loved.

  What those circumstances were did not emerge. She might have told him that I would never consent to divorce her and that she could not face the furtive life of living with him ‘in sin’. Or perhaps she had spoken sorrowfully of his inability to support an extravagant and idle wife. Anyway, she had evidently raised some such obstacle as a counter to his pressing her to run away with him; and it must have been this, coupled with his obsession to possess her whatever the cost, that had put into his head the idea of resorting to desperate measures.

  To murder me provided a solution to whatever obstacle Ankaret might have raised. Not only would it free her without the difficulties and delays of a divorce, but he could be reasonably certain that she would inherit a large enough share of my considerable fortune to keep them both in comfort.

  It seems that he must have first mooted his idea to Ankaret as a sort of day-dream. Possibly on some such line as ‘What a stroke of luck it would be for us if Giff met with a fatal accident. He might, you know, if some time he came into my laboratory and monkeyed about with some of the things I’ve got there. As a matter of fact, I was thinking only this morning that if I were in there with him I’d only have to give him a push in the right direction to send him marching up the Golden Stairs. I suppose that sounds pretty frightful, but I love you so terribly that there are few things I’d stick at to make you my own.’

  That Ankaret had not taken him seriously was beyond question but, horrible as murder may be in actual fact, there are few women who could help their most primitive emotions being stirred by the thought of a man loving them so desperately that he would even toy with the idea of killing another in order to get them for himself.

  Together they had worked out how the job could be done and made watertight against suspicion even, as transpired shortly afterwards, to my apparently not having met my death in the laboratory but in quite different circumstances.

  While they planned the crime Ankaret, I am convinced, was thinking of it as an entirely hypothetical case, and had not for one moment visualised myself as the victim. The horror and distress she now displayed were ample evidence of that. But she had played with fire once too often. The passion-crazed little Welshman had assumed that she was willing to become his accomplice and, without warning her that he was about to do so, staged the ‘accident’ that had so abruptly terminated my life.

  While I was swiftly pi
ecing this background of the crime together, the couple on the bed were hurling useless recriminations at one another.

  Amazed and appalled at Evans’s deed, Ankaret gave free vent to her horror at it, and swore that she had not had the faintest idea that he really intended to carry out the role he had cast for himself in the nonsense they had talked together one afternoon a fortnight or so ago.

  He, with equal intensity, declared that she was lying, and now attempting to back out of giving him the help she had promised in disposing of my body.

  At that she cried: ‘I’ll see you damned before I do anything of the kind! In fact I mean to ring up the police.’

  As she stretched out a hand for the bed-side telephone, he grabbed her wrist, and snapped: ‘Is it mad you are, woman? Indeed now, and you do that, we’ll both be in the dock; and like as not to hang, see?’

  ‘You may,’ she retorted. ‘I will not, for I am innocent, and no one can prove me otherwise.’

  ‘Don’t be too sure of that,’ he warned her. ‘You’re in this thing with me up to your lovely neck, see. Too late to job backwards now. Spare you I would, if I could. But your help I’ve got to have. Big man he was too! I cannot shift him alone. Do you come down now to give me a hand. Get him into the wheelbarrow we will. Then we’ll tip him into the Solent as we planned.’

  ‘I won’t. I won’t.’ Her voice rose to an hysterical note.

  ‘Do you listen, lovey,’ he strove to calm her by adopting a gentler tone. ‘We daren’t leave him in the lab, see; you know that. Didn’t we agree that if we said he’d had it through monkeying with some of my gear then the police would insist on my explaining just how? Clever lot of devils they are these days. For sure they’d call in one of their tame scientists to check up. And there is only one way, look you, he could have caused his own death in the lab: my Death Ray Machine.’