Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 2 (1925-02).djvu/47
dence. It is presumed that chemicals of a combustible nature may have exploded while he was at work on some experiment, for he was a chemist as well as mathematician of high standing. Or it may have been spontaneous combustion. The cause of the blaze and the fire itself sink into relative unimportance beside the fact that Carrington has vanished completely. He was not a victim of the fire, for no trace of human remains can be found in the debris of the second floor. Except for one servant, Carrington has lived alone for years. This man, William Dennel, almost as old as his employer, who is about sixty, was away last night at the home of a sick relative. When he returned early in the morning he could give no explanation of the affair.
It is believed that Carrington is without living relations, and both he and Dennel ate at a near-by restaurant. A domestic who came by the day cared for the house.
Dennel said in answer to questions by the police:
"I left the house at 6 o'clock last night. He [Carrington] never goes out at night and told me he intended working in his laboratory until late. He has no enemies that I know of. I have no idea where he can have gone."
It developed that Dennel had never been in this laboratory and study combined, Professor Carrington having absolutely forbidden anyone's entrance. The woman never cleaned there.
The house was searched from cellar to garret without a single trace being found of the missing man. The most startling feature developing from the search, however, is that every possible means of entrance from without or exit from within was barred, locked or otherwise fastened. The firemen had been obliged to break a plate-glass window to gain entrance when the fire was reported.
How, then, did Carrington leave the house—and where has he gone?
After the usual follow-up stories, containing nothing in the nature of an explanation of the disappearance, the public lost interest and the affair was relegated to the category of unsolved mysteries. The house was ordered closed pending the search for the scientist's will, which a firm of attorneys had drawn some years before and which it was believed might have been consumed in the fire.
Meantime, Chief Conrad had given up as fruitless the effort to locate "Professor" Parkes. And then, one day, came a letter which explained much of the Carrington mystery—explained, yet failed to explain. It was only when the tin dispatch box (hidden in a recess of the professor's study, hitherto undiscovered and untouched by the flames) was unearthed that the mystery surrounding both disappearances was in a measure cleared away and the gateway to the unknown opened—and closed.
The box contained the missing will, which left most of the estate of Carrington to scientific bodies, and also a diary with random notes in the professor's crabbed chirography.
But first, the letter to the chief from Sydney Fox. formerly a close pal of "Professor" Parkes.
Dear Chief: I don't often take my pen in hand to write to a flycop, but I'm going straight now and haven't anything to be afraid of. I've done my bit and I'm as respectable as you, now. A pigeon was asking me about Parkes the other day but I wasn't able to tell him anything about my old pal. A few days later I got a letter from Parkes which he had left with a—well, never mind. It was written two days before that scientific bloke, Carrington, disappeared and his house burned. Well—this letter is too much for yours truly. I guess it won't do Parkes any harm, for as near as I can figure he and Carrington are both where not even a flycop can get 'em. Anyhow, here's the dope—and maybe you can get more out of it than I did, which I doubt.Yours truly,
SYD FOX.
A somewhat bulky enclosure the chief, after reading, decided was the raving of a dope fiend, particularly as it was known that Parkes had occasionally used drugs. But when the diary in Carrington's dispatch box came to light, Conrad decided to submit the whole thing to the commissioners, who in turn handed it to the university, after which it became public property through the enterprize of an energetic reporter. So here it is. First a note from Parkes to Fox: