Part 3

The following day we viewed the vacant flat, but found, upon inquiry of the agent, that it had already been let. However, as our own rooms suited us very well, we were not greatly concerned. Just as we finished dinner the same evening, Halesowen came in, and, without preamble, plunged into a surprising tale of uncanny happenings at his place.

“Take it slow,” said Lesty. “You say it was after we came away?”

“About an hour after,” replied Halesowen. “I had brought out the potsherd, and had it in the wooden stand on the table before me. I was copying the hieroglyphics, which are unusual, and had my reading lamp burning only, the rest of the room being consequently in shadow. I was sitting with my back to the windows, facing the door, so no one could possibly have entered the room unseen by me. It was as I bent down to scrutinize a badly defaced character that I felt a queer sensation stealing over me, as though someone were standing close behind my chair, watching me!”

“Very common,” explained Lesty; “merely nerves.”

“Yes, I know; but not what followed. The sensation became so pronounced that I stood up. No one was in the room. I determined to take a stroll, concluding that the fresh air would clear these uncanny cobwebs out of my brain. Accordingly, I extinguished the lamp and went out. I was just putting my cap on when something prompted me to return and lock up the potsherd.”

He fixed his eyes upon us with an expression of doubt.

“There was someone, or something, in the room!”

“What do you mean?” asked Lesty, incredulously.

“I quite distinctly saw a hand and bare white arm pass away from the table--and vanish! It was dark in the room, remember; but I could see the arm well enough. I switched on the reading lamp. Not a thing was to be seen. There was no one in the room and no one but myself in the flat, for I searched it thoroughly!”

Some moments of silence followed this remarkable story, and I sat watching Lesty, who, in turn, was regarding Halesowen with the stolid, vacant stare which sometimes served to conceal the working of his keen brain.

“Pity you didn’t let us know sooner,” he said, rising slowly to his feet. “This is interesting.”

II

Halesowen’s nerves evidently had been shaken by the inexplicable incident. As the three of us strode across the corner of the Common, he informed us that the new tenant of the adjoining flat had moved in. “I have been away all day,” he said; “but the stuff was bundled in some time during the afternoon.”

We proceeded upstairs and into the cosy room which had been the scene of the remarkable occurrence related. As it was growing dark, Halesowen turned on the electric light, and, indicating a chair by the writing table, explained that it was there he had been seated at the time.

“Did you have the windows open?” asked Lesty.

“Yes,” was the reply. “I left the chairs and the awning out, too, as it was a fine night; in fact, you can see that they still remain practically as you left them.”

“When you returned, and saw, or thought you saw, the hand and arm--you would have to pass around to this side of the table in order to reach the lamp?”

“Yes.”

Apparently Lesty was about to make some observation, when an interruption occurred in the form of a ringing on the door bell, followed by a discreet fandango on the knocker.

“Who the deuce have we here!” muttered Halesowen. “I saw no one go in below.”

As our host passed through the lighted room and into the hall, my friend and I both leant forward in our chairs, the better to hear what should pass; nor were we kept long in suspense, for, as we heard the outer door opened, an odd, rumbling voice came, with a queer accent:

“Ah, my dear Mr. Halesowen, it is indeed an intrusion of me! But when I find how we are neighbours I cannot resist to make the call and renew a so pleasant acquaintance!”

“Doctor Zeda!” we heard Halesowen exclaim, with little cordiality.

“Ever your devoted servant!” replied the courteous foreigner.

I glanced at Lesty, and we rose together and stepped through the open window in time to see a truly remarkable personage enter.

This was a large-framed man, with snow-white hair cut close to his skull, French fashion. He had a high and very wrinkled brow and wore gold-rimmed pince-nez. Jet-black and heavy eyebrows were his, and his waxed moustache, his neat imperial, were likewise of the hue of coal. His complexion was pallid; and in his well-cut frock coat, with a loose black tie overhanging his vest, he made a striking picture, standing bowing profoundly in the doorway.

Halesowen rapidly muttered the usual formalities; in fact, I remember mentally contrasting our friend’s unceremonious manners with the courtly deportment of Doctor Zeda.

The latter explained that he had taken the adjacent flat, only learning, that evening, whom he had for a neighbour, and, despite the lateness of the hour, he said, he could not resist the desire to see Halesowen, of whose company in Egypt he retained such pleasant memories. Allowing for his effusiveness, there was nothing one could take exception to in his behaviour, and I rather wondered at the brusque responses of our usually polite host.

When, after a brief chat, the foreign gentleman rose to take his leave, he extended an invitation to all of us to lunch with him on the following day. “My place is in somewhat disorder,” he said, smiling, “but you are Bohemian, like myself, and will not care!”

Though I half expected that Halesowen would decline, he did not do so; I, therefore, also accepted, as did Lesty. Whereupon, Zeda departed.

Halesowen, returning to the chair which he had vacated to usher out his visitor, lighted a cigarette, regarded it for a moment, meditatively, and then frankly expressed his doubts.

“He’s been watching me!” he said; “and when he saw the next flat vacant he jumped at the chance.”

“My dear chap,” I retorted, “he must be very keen on securing your potsherd if he is prepared to take and furnish a flat next door to you simply with a view to keeping an eye on it!”

“You have no idea how anxious he is,” he assured me. “If you had seen his face, in Cairo, when I flatly declined to sell, you would be better able to understand.”

“Why not sell, then?”

“I’m dashed if I do!” said Halesowen, stubbornly.

On the following day we lunched with Doctor Zeda and were surprised at the orderly state of his establishment. Everything, from floor to ceiling, was in its proper place.

“It hasn’t taken you long to get things straight,” commented Lesty.

“Ah, no,” replied the other. “These big firms, they do it all in a day if you insist--and I insist, see?”

I thoroughly enjoyed my visit, for he proved an excellent host, and I think even Lesty grew less suspicious of him. During the weeks that followed, the doctor came several times to our rooms, and we frequently met at Halesowen’s. The latter, who boldly had submitted photographs and drawings of the sherd to the British Museum, experienced no repetition of the mysterious phenomenon already described. Then, about seven o’clock one morning, when the mists hung low over the Common in promise of a hot day, a boy came for Lesty and myself with news of a fresh development. He was a lad who did odd jobs for Halesowen, and he brought word of an attempted burglary, together with a request that we should go over without delay.

Our curiosity keenly aroused, we were soon with our friend, and found him seated in the familiar room, before a large cabinet, with double glass doors, which, as was clearly evident, had been hastily ransacked. Other cases in which he kept various curios were also opened, and the place was in general disorder.

“What’s gone?” asked Lesty, quickly.

“Nothing!” was the answer. “The potsherd is in the safe, and the safe is in my bedroom--or perhaps something might have gone!”

“You lock it up at night, then? I thought you kept it in the cabinet.”

“Only during the day. It goes in the safe, with one or two other trifles, at night; but _everybody_ doesn’t know that!”

We looked at one another, silently; but the name that was on all our lips remained unspoken--for we were startled by a loud knocking and ringing at the door. Carter opening it, into the room ran Doctor Zeda!

“Oh, my dear friends!” he cried, in his hoarse, rumbling voice, “there has been to my flat a midnight robber! He has turned completely upside-down all my collections!”

Lesty coughed loudly; but, as I turned my head to look at him, his face was quite expressionless. Halesowen seemed stricken dumb by surprise; whilst, for my own part, as I watched the foreigner staring about the disordered room, and noted the growing look of bewilderment creeping over his pallid countenance, I was compelled to admit to myself that here was either a consummate actor or a man of whom we hastily had formed a most unwarrantable opinion.

“But, my friend--my good Halesowen,” he exclaimed, with widely opened eyes and extended palms, “what is it that I see? You are as disordered as myself!”

Halesowen nodded. “The burglar gave me a call, too!” he said, grimly.

“My dear sir!” gasped Zeda, seizing the speaker’s arm, “tell me quickly--you have lost nothing?”

Halesowen glanced at him rather hard. “No,” he answered.

“Ah! what a relief! I feared,” rumbled the doctor. “But perhaps you wonder for what it is they came?”

“I can guess!”

“You need no longer to guess; I will tell you. It is for your fragment of the sacred vase, and to me they come for mine!”

We were even more astonished by this assertion than we had been by the doctor’s first. “_Your_ fragment!” said Halesowen, slowly, with his eyes fixed on Zeda; “to what fragment do you refer?”

“To that which, together with your potsherd, makes up the complete vase! But you doubt?” he suggested, shrugging his shoulders. “Wait but a moment and I will prove!”

He moved from the room; his gait had a mincing awkwardness, quite indescribable; and we heard his retreating, heavy footsteps as he passed downstairs. Then we stood and gaped at one another. “His confounded ingenuity,” rapped Halesowen, “has completely tied my hands.”

Being interrupted, at this moment, by the re-entrance of the gentleman in question, further discussion of the subject was precluded. Zeda carried a small iron box which he placed carefully upon the table and unlocked. A second box of polished ebony was revealed within, and this, being unlocked in turn, was proved to contain, reposing in a nest of blue velvet, a fragment of antique pottery. Taking the fragment in his hand, the doctor begged that the potsherd be produced.

Halesowen, after a momentary hesitation, retired from the room, to return almost immediately with the broken vase in its wooden frame. Doctor Zeda, placing the portion which he held in his hand against that in the frame, but not so closely as to bring the parts in contact, turned to us with a triumphant smile. “They correspond, gentlemen, to a smallest fraction!” he declared; which, indeed, was perfectly true.

“And now,” continued Zeda, evidently gratified by the surprise which we could not conceal, “I will relate to you a story. I do not ask that you shall credit it; I only say that I have given up my life to such studies, and that I am willing, as matters have so arrived, that you shall join me to prove false or true what I think of the potsherd of Anubis.”

“Good!” said Lesty, and settled himself to listen, an example that was followed by Halesowen and myself. Zeda paused for a moment, evidently to collect his ideas, a pause upon which my stolid friend placed a dubious interpretation, for he cleared his throat, significantly.

III

“The date is no matter,” said Doctor Zeda, “but there was at Gîzeh, to the north of the Sphinx, a temple dedicated to Isis, but wherein the worship was different. We only know of this shrine by the monuments, but they prove it to have been--eh, Mr. Halesowen?”

Halesowen nodded.

“Here, then, the gods of the dead were adored--but the worship of Anubis took precedence, and was conducted at a shrine apart. Here, locked within three-and-thirty doors, having each its separate janitor who held the key, reposed a sacred symbol--a symbol, my friends, upon which was based the occult knowledge of the initiated; a symbol more precious than the lives of a hundred-hundred warriors--for so it is written!”

“I have never met with the inscription!” said Halesowen, drily.

Doctor Zeda smiled.

“You never are likely to meet it!” he responded. “Your Belzoni and Lepsius, your Birch, Renouf, Brugsch and Petrie, is a mere unseeing vandal, blinded to the great truth--to the ultimate secret that Egypt holds for him who has eyes to see and a brain to realize!”

The mysterious foreign gentleman looked about him with a sort of challenge in his glance; then he quietly resumed his story.

“At the change of the moon in the sacred month, Methori, a maiden selected from a noble house for her beauty and purity, and for a whole year dedicated to the service of the gods, held in her hands the sacred thing--held it aloft that the initiated might worship, until the first white beam lit up the receptacle, when all bowed down their heads and chanted the ‘Hymn of the Souls Who Are Passing.’ Then was it locked again within the three-and-thirty doors, there to remain for another year. None saw the symbol itself but the high priest, who looked upon it when he was so ordained--for any other that gazed upon it died! It was contained in a holy vase!”

He paused impressively. We had all fallen under the peculiar fascination of the speaker’s personality; we felt as though he spoke of matters wherein he had had personal concern. I could almost believe him to have witnessed the strange rites that he told of with such conviction.

“In a year so long ago,” he softly resumed, his voice now a kind of jagged whisper, “that to speak of its date were to convey nothing to you, the high-born virgin on whom the exalted office was conferred closed upon her unhappy soul the gates of paradise for ages unnumbered; called down upon her head the curse of the high priest and the anger of the most high gods; was rejected of Set himself!

“She let fall from her hands the sacred vase, and the holy symbol was lost to the children of earth for evermore! Lost was the key to the book of wisdom; closed was that book to man for all time!”

“Go on!” said Halesowen, harshly, for Zeda had paused again.

“You do not grasp?” asked the doctor. “Well, then, know that the sentence was ‘Until the parts of this vase be made whole again.’ Five fragments there were: a large one, which is your potsherd, and four smaller. The four smaller, after twenty years of untiring search, I have recovered and joined together. What if we now make whole that which was broken? May I not, by the exercise of such poor shreds of the lost wisdom as I have gathered up, summon before me that wandering spirit ere it return again to plead for rest at the judgment seat of Amenti?”

When I say that the man’s words proved electrical, I do not exaggerate the effect which this astounding proposition had upon us. Halesowen was fairly startled out of his chair, and stood with his eyes fixed on the other in a fascinated gaze.

Zeda, entirely returning to his customary urbanity, shrugged and smiled. “You believe my story?”

Lesty was the first to recover himself, and his reply was characteristic. “Can’t say I do,” he drawled, frankly. “I don’t say that _you_ may not, though,” he added.

“Then do you not owe it to assist in proving my words? A little séance? You are sceptical, quite? Very well; I try to show you. If I fail, then it is unfortunate, but--I bow to an inevitable!”

We looked at each other, interrogatively, and then Halesowen answered, “All right. It’s a queer yarn, but we leave the matter entirely in your hands.”

The doctor bowed. “Shall we say to-night to begin?” he said, tentatively.

“By all means.”

The doctor expressed himself delighted, and, carefully relocking the fragment of the vase in its double case, he was about to depart, when a point occurred to me.

“Might I ask whom you suspect of the attempted burglary?” I said.

He turned, in the door, and fixed a strange glance upon me. “There are others,” he replied, “who seek as I seek, and who do not scruple to gain their ends how they may. Of them we shall beware, my friends, for we know they design upon us!”

With that and a low bow he retired.

Little of interest occurred during the day, until about four in the afternoon, when Halesowen aroused us out of a lazy doze to show a letter just received from the British Museum.

It was in reply to one asking why he had received no acknowledgment of the photographs and drawings submitted; and it informed him that no such photographs and drawings had come to hand!

We usually took tea in the afternoon, and Halesowen joined us on this occasion, whilst, at about five o’clock, Doctor Zeda also looked in. He remained until it began to grow dusk, when we all went over to Halesowen’s to arrange the first “sitting”--for so the doctor referred to the projected séance. Retiring, for a few minutes, to his own establishment, Zeda returned with the iron box and explained what he proposed to do.

“Around this small table we sit, as at séance,” he said; “but no medium--only the potsherd. With these flexible bands I will attach, temporarily, the parts, and stand the vase in Mr. Halesowen’s frame, here by the window--so. Beside it we will place the lamp, shaded thus--so that a dim light is upon it. We can just see from where we sit in the dark. We will now wait until it is more dusk.”

Accordingly, we went out on to the balcony and smoked for an hour, Zeda polluting the clean air with the fumes of the long, black cigars he affected. They had an appearance as of dried twigs and an odour so wholly original as to defy simile. Between eight and nine o’clock he expressed himself satisfied with the light--or, rather, lack of it--and we all gathered around the table in the gloom, spreading our hands as he directed. For close upon an hour we sat in tense silence, the room seeming to be very hot. A slight breeze off the Common had wafted the fumes of Zeda’s cigar in through the open windows, which he had afterward closed, and the reek filled the air as with something palpable--and nauseous. I was growing very weary of the business, and Lesty, despite the doctor’s warning against disturbing the silence, had begun to cough and fidget irritably, when the rumbling foreign voice came, so unexpectedly as to startle us all: “It is useless to-night; something is not propitious. Turn up the lights.”

From the celerity with which Halesowen complied, I divined that he, too, had been growing impatient.

“There is some not suitable condition,” said Zeda, relocking his portion of the vase in its case. “To-morrow we shall make some changes in the order.”

He seemed not at all disappointed, being apparently as confident as ever in the ultimate success of the séances. One of the windows, he suggested, should be left open on the following evening during our sitting; and this we were only too glad to agree upon, since it would possibly serve to clear the atmosphere, somewhat, of the odour emanating from the doctor’s cigars. Several other points he also mentioned as being conceivably responsible for our initial failure--such as our positions around the table, and the relative distance of the potsherd. “We shall see to-morrow,” were his last words as he left us.

“A perfect monument of mendacity!” muttered Lesty, as we heard the retiring footsteps of our foreign friend on the gravel below; “and I think his accent is assumed. I don’t know why we even seem to credit such an incredible fable.”

“I don’t know, either,” said Halesowen, reflectively. “But he certainly possesses the missing part of the vase, and if he does not believe the story himself, what earthly object can he hope to serve by these séances?”

“Give it up!” replied Lesty, promptly; and that, I think, rather aptly expressed the mental attitude of all three.

We saw nothing of Zeda throughout the following day, but he duly put in an appearance in the evening, and placed us around the table again, but in different order. One of the French windows was left open, and the potsherd, with the lamp beside it, placed somewhat to the left.

After persevering for about forty minutes, we were rewarded by a rather conventional phenomenon. The table rocked and gave forth cracking sounds. There was no other manifestation, and, at about half-past ten, the doctor again terminated the séance.

“Excellent!” said Zeda, enthusiastically, “excellent! We were _en rapport_, and within the circle there was power. To-morrow we shall triumph, my friends, but there is again an alteration that occurs to me. You, Mr. Clifford, shall sit next to Mr. Lesty on the left, Mr. Halesowen shall be upon his right, and I, facing Mr. Lesty between. Also, there is too much light from the lamps in the road. It is good, I think, to have open the windows, but this Japanese screen will keep out that too much light and shelter the vase. To-morrow we will observe these things.”

This, then, concluded our second sitting, and brings me to the final episode of that affair which, strange enough in its several developments, was stranger still in its dénouement.

IV

Zeda, on the following day, entertained us to luncheon in town, followed by an afternoon concert, for which he had procured seats, being interested, or professing to be, in a certain fiddler who figured largely in the programme. We had arranged that Halesowen and the doctor should dine with us in the evening, before we went to the former’s flat for the séance, and we accordingly returned direct to our rooms and chatted over the doings of the day until dinner was served. Zeda surpassed himself in brilliant conversation. He must, I remember thinking, have led a strange and eventful life.

At about nine o’clock, we walked over, in the dark, to our friend’s flat, where we had to grope for and light an oil lamp which he had, Zeda declaring that something in the atmosphere was propitious and that the electric light would tend to disturb these favourable conditions. He seemed to be strung to high tension, perhaps with expectancy, but was not so preoccupied as to forget his black cigars, one of which he lighted as he was about to go out for the iron box. He borrowed my matches for the purpose and forgot to return them.