THE FACE FROM THE DARK
SEVERAL days had passed since the strange death of Stephen Laird, passenger on the Mountain Limited. The case had created a wide sensation at first. Now, with no solution toward the mystery, it had dropped into prompt oblivion.
It was evening, in San Francisco. A tall, well-dressed man entered the lobby of the Aldebaran Hotel, carrying a light suitcase. He stepped up to the desk to register. The clerk noted the name which the writer fashioned in a clear, sweeping hand.
The new guest’s name was Henry Arnaud.
“What kind of a room would you like, Mr. Arnaud?” questioned the clerk.
“I should prefer one on the top floor,” was the reply.
The clerk looked over the list of vacant rooms. The Aldebaran was a second-rate hostelry, and was never filled with guests. But due to its location on one of the noisy streets that angle northward from Market, the rooms on the upper floors were always occupied. At present, there was just one vacancy on the eighth floor, the highest story in the house. The clerk passed it by.
“I can give you something on the seventh—”
“No,” said Arnaud, shaking his head emphatically. “I want to be as high up as possible. If I can’t get a room on the top floor, I shall go somewhere else.”
“Wait a moment!” The clerk pretended to make a sudden discovery. “Here you are, sir — Room 806. A very nice room, Mr. Arnaud.”
The guest seemed highly pleased, and turned his bag over to the waiting bell boy. The clerk called out the number of the room, and Henry Arnaud started to the elevator. The clerk shrugged his shoulders.
There was a very definite reason why Room 806 was vacant. Until a few nights ago, it had been occupied by Stephen Laird. That guest had left the Aldebaran one evening to take the Mountain Limited for Chicago.
The police at Truckee had discovered an envelope in Laird’s pocket, marked with the number of the room and the name of the hotel at which he had stopped in San Francisco.
So, on the following morning, the police of the coast city had called at the Aldebaran to search the room for clews that might lead to a solution of the murder of Stephen Laird. The room had been bare of evidence, and the clerk had been instructed to keep it vacant for a few days.
There was no ban now; but 806 was not to be offered to a guest without good excuse for so doing. The excuse had worked excellently tonight. Henry Arnaud had insisted upon an eighth-story room; he had received the only one available.
The clerk’s eyes scanned the lobby. He wanted to be sure that the issuing of Room 806 had caused no comments. Many of the guests at the Aldebaran were permanents who might talk about the fact that Laird had lived there almost until the time of his murder.
One man who had been reading a newspaper was strolling from the lobby; no others showed any sign of activity.
MEANWHILE, Henry Arnaud had reached Room 806. The room occupied a corner of the hotel. One window opened on the front street; the other covered a vacant lot.
The room was small. It had no bath. A large wardrobe stood in the corner, in lieu of a closet. The only modern touch to this room was a reading lamp on a small table beside the single bed.
Yet Arnaud did not appear dissatisfied with his quarters. He tipped the bell boy and carefully locked the door after the attendant had left the room. He seated himself in a chair beside the bed. He took an old newspaper from the pocket of his light overcoat.
As Arnaud spread the paper, his eyes rested upon a paragraph relating to the death of Stephen Laird. It was an exact account of the man’s demise, and gave the conductor’s version of everything he had heard the dying man say.
What was the meaning of the statement, “Tag A,” the last message that Laird had tried to give? That was a mystery. The newspaper paragraph also stated that the envelope scrawled with 806, Aldebaran Hotel, had been found in the dead man’s pocket.
Henry Arnaud smiled as he scanned that notice. It explained his presence here tonight. He had chosen this room by design, not by accident.
The light that shone upon Henry Arnaud’s face revealed a countenance that was both distinctive and unusual. Henry Arnaud was possessed of firmly molded features that appeared almost as if they had been chiseled by a human hand. They gave a quiet, motionless expression to his countenance.
One could not have told the age of this man. Forty years might have been a fair estimate, but its accuracy could not have been more than speculative.
He was a being with a human mask, whose face became more inscrutable as it was examined closer. In the proximity of the light, it was even more impressive than in the poorly illuminated lobby. Arnaud’s eyes were an amazing factor. They sparkled with a glow that boded mystery.
Slowly, Henry Arnaud raised his hand and extinguished the light beside the bed. The room was now in total darkness. No sign existed of its human occupant.
Henry Arnaud had not stirred from his chair. But now, his eyes were turned toward the window.
Blocks away, they saw the glow of an illuminated district. Henry Arnaud was looking toward the strangest and most fascinating district of America — San Francisco’s Chinatown.
The lights from that cluster of steep-pitched streets betokened a merging of Occidental invention with the glamour of the Orient. There, within sight of this hotel, dwelt the largest settlement of Chinese outside of China itself.
Electric signs glowed with Chinese characters. These were accompanied by English words. It was upon one such sign that Henry Arnaud’s eyes were focused. This sign bore the large words:
MUKDEN THEATER.
The sign itself was a bizarre Oriental creation. Rows of colored lights crawled dragonlike from the lower corners until they reached a glittering ball of resplendent incandescents near the top of the sign.
Above these was a small circle of yellow lights that did not move. From the center of the circle shone two lights of green, placed side by side. They seemed a challenge to the man who watched them from the window of the hotel.
An imaginative person — had Henry Arnaud been such — might have sworn that those lights were staring back at him.
Click! The lamp came on in the room. Henry Arnaud arose from his chair and walked about. He doffed his coat and vest. He removed his collar and necktie. He went to the telephone and ordered ice water.
When the bell boy arrived, Arnaud opened the door and stepped into the hall to receive the pitcher. He yawned as he tipped the servitor.
“Leave a call at the desk for me,” he said. “Tell them seven thirty — and to keep on ringing until I wake up. I’m dead tired. I’ll be sleeping soundly ten minutes from now, and it takes lots of noise to arouse me.”
“Yes, sir,” responded the bell boy.
The door closed. The lock clicked. The bell boy returned to the elevator and stood waiting in the deep silence of the hall.
The Aldebaran was a gloomy hotel. When the bell boy had gone down in the elevator, the place was as still and as morbid as a morgue.
ACROSS the hall from Arnaud’s room, a door was ajar. Eyes were peering through the crack of that door — eyes that stared with a sinister purpose. They were glued upon the single exit from Arnaud’s room. They were waiting and watching, making sure that the guest in 806 did not leave.
Now a figure appeared from the door. It was a grotesque, crouching figure that crept slowly forward, making no noise as it advanced. The clothes that it wore were dark; but the face above them bore a yellow tinge.
In action, although not in guise, this creature bore the semblance of a Chinaman. His hands were close against his breast.
He listened outside the door of 806, his face now hidden from the light. This was a secluded portion of the hall. Yet the crouched man seemed ready to slide back to the other room at the first sign of an approaching person.
Within the room, Henry Arnaud again stood in darkness. The only indications of his presence that reached the man outside were the sounds that he made.
The clasps of the bag clicked as Arnaud undid them. He coughed slightly as he removed articles of apparel from the bag. The door of the wardrobe banged dully as he pushed it shut. Then the bed creaked as Arnaud flung himself upon it.
The noise of his breathing was interrupted occasionally by a slight cough. Then those sounds decreased, and there were steady minutes of prolonged silence.
The man outside the door was listening intently. With the subsidence of all sound, he moved, surely, but cautiously.
One hand came from his body. Deftly, he inserted a pass key in the lock of the door. The key turned. The other hand was upon the knob.
Softly, steadily, the door of Henry Arnaud’s room opened until it was ajar like that of the room across the way.
In this end of the hall, the light was dim and obscure. Even so, the filtering rays might have attracted the attention of a man awake upon the bed. But there was no sign to show that Henry Arnaud had stirred.
The sinister approacher took this as a good sign. He stepped softly into the room, and closed the door behind him.
He crept around the foot of the bed, and passed slowly by the half-opened window. He was close to the floor; the dim, reflected glow from Chinatown was not sufficient to betray the presence of the sneaking native who had come from that section of the city, to be here tonight.
But those vague rays of light did tell something of the man’s purpose. Something gleamed in one of the creeper’s hands. It was the blade of a long, vicious knife — the silent weapon of a noiseless assassin.
The crawling Chinaman stopped at the table by the head of the bed. He listened there; then loomed upward. His body extended over the bed. His knife was in his right hand, ready to deliver a well-aimed thrust. His left hand gripped the cord of the table lamp.
The hovering creature was one who planned his purpose well. He was ready to perform two operations simultaneously. That hand toying with the cord was prepared for its duty.
When the light came on, the knife blade would descend swiftly toward a vital spot before the sleeping victim could become cognizant of danger.
Click! The light was on. Its sudden glare revealed the face from the dark — the yellow, leering face whose peering eyes were seeking the helpless form of the man in the bed.
The knife blade gleamed beside that sinister countenance. But it remained suspended — motionless.
The bed was empty! Not only empty, but the covers were unturned.
Henry Arnaud was not there!
THE lean, leering face of the Chinaman became a hideous, glaring monstrosity. The stooping man wheeled quickly, looking for his prey.
With the lamp still lighted, he dropped beside the bed, and his peering eyes glared beneath. Arnaud was not hiding there.
Writhing serpentlike along the floor, the man approached the wardrobe — the only spot in the lighted room that afforded a hiding place.
The big door of the upright chest was latched — a sign that no one could be within. But the Chinaman intended to make sure. He was willing to rely upon his blade, even though his intended victim might be on the alert.
His clawlike hand clutched the little knob of the wardrobe. It drew the door open, and the Chinaman leaped into the space behind it, his knife blade launching for a thrust.
That deadly arm stopped midway. The wardrobe, like the bed, was empty!
Revolting though the yellow face had become, the look of perplexity now upon it was ludicrous. The man stood momentarily thwarted, but his bewilderment did not last. He sprang back across the room and extinguished the table lamp.
The sinister face from the dark had returned to the dark. But those insidious eyes were still searching. They peered from the front window of the room.
The head extended through the opening, and turned downward toward the street below, a drop of sixty feet. It appeared again at the side window. Here, too, it inspected a sheer drop of more than sixty feet.
The wicked face turned its gaze toward the distant glow of Chinatown. There, the sign of the Mukden Theater still displayed its roving change of lights. But the luminous circle at the top now presented a blank center. The two glaring spots of green had disappeared.
The Chinaman turned his eyes back into the room. His hands were buried against his body. The knife was there, waiting.
Ten minutes went by; then the crouching figure went back across the room and tiptoed to the other side of the hall. The door of 806 was closed and locked. But the tricked assassin waited, wondering.
Within the room, the dim glare of the distant lights was totally obscured by a black shadow in the window. Henry Arnaud had returned. He went noiselessly to his suitcase and took it with him to the window. He affixed the handle of the bag to a thin, suspended rope.
His body — virtually invisible — swung from the window. Long arms, reaching upward gripped a protruding row of bricks below the roof. With amazing agility, the man ascended and drew himself to safety. His bag came, up as he pulled the slender rope.
Across the roof he strode, toward the rear of the hotel. He slid down a wall to a lower building. His form seemed to dwindle away and disappear. His further descent was an action unseen.
Henry Arnaud had gone. He did not reappear. But in his stead, a tall, black-clad man arrived at the end of a narrow street, a block from the Aldebaran Hotel.
Stooping in the gloom, he compressed his suitcase into a small, compact bundle that disappeared beneath the flowing cloak that he wore. From beneath his slouch hat, this man peered forward with shrewd, gleaming eyes.
There, in the silence, hidden lips laughed, and their low, throbbing mockery made an eerie sound on the night air.
In the guise of Henry Arnaud, The Shadow had come to San Francisco! The Shadow — dread avenger, who menaced evildoers of the East — had come to the Pacific coast!
What was his purpose here? Did it concern the strange death of Stephen Laird? Had that event declared the existence of criminal hands whose actions could be ended only by the power of this one man who waged relentless war on evil?
Only The Shadow knew! Tonight he had thwarted the first of his hidden enemies. He had walked into a trap. He had tricked the assassin, the man whose hideous face had come from the dark.
Back in the hotel, that evil face was still on watch — its wicked eyes staring across the hall toward a room that was deserted.
The Shadow, strange wizard of the night, had learned why Stephen Laird had occupied that room. With that knowledge gained, The Shadow was gone. Only the echo of a weird, mocking laugh remained.