A silhouette appeared there--undoubtedly that of Isobel. She seemed to be endeavoring to pull the curtain aside ... when the shadow of a long arm reached out to her, and she was plucked irresistibly back. The sound of a m.u.f.fled scream reached my ears, and:

"Great heavens! _It_ has got in!" whispered Gatton.

He raised his hand and the shrill note of a police whistle split the silence.

The closed door was obviously too strong to be forced without the aid of implements for the purpose, and we began to run around the house, looking for some means of entrance. Suddenly:

"There's the way!" said Gatton, and pointed up to where the branches of an old elm tree stretched out before a window. The gla.s.s of the window was entirely shattered except for some few points which glittered like daggers around the edges of the frame.

"Can you do it?"

"In the circ.u.mstances--yes!" I said.

Without more ado I began to climb the elm, stimulated by memories of how I had entered Friar's Park. It afforded little foothold for the first six feet and proved an even tougher job than I had antic.i.p.ated, but at last I reached a projecting limb, the bulk of which had been sawn off. Gatton's agility was not so great as mine, but at the moment that I half staggered and half fell into the room, I heard him swinging himself onto the limb behind me so that as I leaped to the open door he came tumbling in through the window, and the pair of us raced side by side along the corridor towards an apartment facing front from which horrifying cries and sounds of conflict now arose.

Gaining the closed door of this room, I literally hurled myself upon it. It crashed open ... and I beheld a dreadful spectacle.

Isobel lay forced back upon a settee which occupied the window recess--and bending over her, having her back turned towards me, was a tall, lithe, black-clad woman who, so far as I could see, was clutching Isobel's throat and forcing her further backward--backward upon the cushions strewn upon the settee!

But instant upon the door's opening this horrible scene changed. With never a backward glance (so that neither Gatton nor I had even a momentary glimpse of her face) the black-robed woman sprang to the window, opened it in a moment, and to my dismay and astonishment sprang out into the darkness!

My first thought was for Isobel--but Gatton leaped across the room and craned out, peering on to the path below. Indeed, even as I dropped on my knees beside the swooning girl, I found myself listening for the thud of the falling body upon the gravel path. But no sound reached me. That uncanny creature must have alighted truly in the manner of a cat. Through the stillness of the house rang the flat note of a police-whistle. From some distant spot I heard a faint reply.

For long I failed to persuade myself that Isobel had not sustained some ghastly injury from the attack of the cat-woman. Memories uprose starkly before me of that _hlangkna_ and the other dreadful death-instruments of the mad Eurasian doctor. Not even the a.s.surances of the local medical man who had been summoned in haste could convince me. For I recognized how petty was his knowledge in comparison with that of Dr. Damar Greefe. But although I trembled to think what her fate might have been if we had arrived a few minutes later, the fact remained (and I returned thanks to Heaven) that she had escaped serious physical injury at the hands of her a.s.sailant.

But, alas, to this very hour she sometimes awakes shrieking in the night. And her terrified cry is always the same: "The green eyes of Bast!... the green-eyes of Bast!"

CHAPTER XXIX

AN AFTERWORD

I wish it lay in my power to satisfy the curiosity in all quarters expressed respecting the ident.i.ty of "Nahemah"--the cat-woman, or _psycho-hybrid_, who figured in Dr. Damar Greefe's statement. But it is my duty, as chronicler of the strange and awful occurrences which at this period disturbed the even tenor of my existence, to state that from the moment in which she leaped from the window of Mrs.

Wentworth's house to the path below, neither I nor any other witness who ever came forward _beheld her again_.

At the end of a quest which exercised the intricate machinery of New Scotland Yard throughout the length and breadth of the land, Inspector Gatton was compelled to admit himself defeated in this particular. And his explanation of the failure to apprehend the central figure of the tragedies which had exterminated the house of Coverly was a curious one.

"You know, Mr. Addison," he said to me one evening, "the more I think of this Nahemah the more I wonder if such a person ever really existed!"

"What do you mean, Gatton?" I asked.

"Well," he replied, "I mean that although you and I and others are prepared to testify to the existence of a woman in the case, what do we really know about her (leaving Damar Greefe's statement out of the question) except that she possessed very remarkable eyes?"

"And very remarkable agility," I interrupted.

"Yes, I'll grant you that," he said; "her agility was certainly phenomenal. But, still, as I was saying, except for this definite information we have no _proof_ outside the statement of Dr. Damar Greefe that such a person as Nahemah ever existed or at any rate that there ever was a creature possessing the attributes which he ascribed to her. The Laurels is an ordinary suburban house, which has been leased for a number of years by a 'Mr. and Miss da Costa'--Damar Greefe, no doubt, and a female companion. But of his 'great work' and so forth there's not a trace. There are a lot of Egyptian antiquities, I'll admit, but not a sc.r.a.p of evidence; and the rooms evidently used by the female inmate of the household are those of an ordinary cultured Englishwoman."

"But, good heavens, Gatton," I cried, "whatever explanation can you offer of a series of crimes which were palpably directed against the members of the Coverly family?"

"I don't say," continued Gatton, "that there wasn't a sort of feud or vendetta at the bottom of the business. I merely mention that we have no _evidence_ to show that the person responsible for it was any other than this Eurasian doctor."

"But what could have been his object?"

"I could suggest several; but my point at the moment is this: although I am prepared to grant that he had a woman a.s.sociate of some kind, I can't see that there is any evidence to prove that she was otherwise than an ordinary human being, except that I am disposed to think she was demented."

"You are probably right there, Gatton," I agreed; "and Dr. Damar Greefe was by no means normal; in fact I think he was a dangerous and very brilliant maniac."

"At any rate," added Gatton, "no trace of this Nahemah has been found--which, at the least, is very significant."

"Significant, if you like," I replied; "but for my own part I have no ambition whatever to see again those dreadful green eyes."

"I never did see them," said Gatton musingly; "therefore I can't speak upon the matter; but when we got Dr. Damar Greefe I think we had the head of the conspiracy. How much of his 'statement' is true and how much the product of a diseased mind is something we are never likely to know."

"Nor am I curious to know it," I a.s.sured him. "I only desire to forget the tragedies a.s.sociated with the green eyes of Bast and to leave the darkness of the past behind--"

"And," said Gatton, with a smile less grim than usual, "you have my best wishes for the future."

THE END