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The Problems of Professor Forrester

In The Fog

A Story of Bizarre Mystery

By SEABURY QUINN

All of us know the square-jawed dick, the gumshoe officer, the deductive sleuth, the infallible

investigator, for those are the types we are accustomed to meet, in fiction and in life; but in these

series of mystery stories Seabury Quinn acquaints us with a detective of a new and quite

different sort — Professor Harvey Forrester, of the School of Anthropology of Benjamin Franklin

University — whose methods of solving crime riddles place him apart in a single class. We think

you will like the bookish Professor. We believe you will admire his cool self-possession when

confronting desperate enterprise, his scholarly poise in the midst of stirring adventure. And we

know you will find him unique. E. B.

CHAPTER ONE

The Girl in the Limousine

surrounding cloud bank.

“I might have known it,” he muttered to

himself. “Of course, there’s no more chance of

getting a taxicab than there is of meeting a

gigantosaurus in the Congressional Library. What a

fool I was to come out tonight!”

He crossed the strip of puddle-dotted sidewalk

and paused irresolute at the curb, tapping the ferrule

of his walking stick against the stone and peering

into the enshrouding vapor for some possible

evidence of a cab.

“I’d give ten dollars for a taxi—” the Professor,

who had an ingrown habit of conversing with

himself, began, then paused, open-mouthed with

surprise. Like a leviathan emerging from the deep, a

long, dark-hued automobile slipped silently out of

the fog, coming to a stop immediately before him.

“Well,” the Professor congratulated himself,

“this is luck. To think—”

For the second time in forty seconds the little

scientist interrupted his self-addressed remarks. A

curtain was suddenly flipped upward behind the

glass of the motor’s tonneau, and the Professor

looked straight into a pair of wide, appealing eyes.

For eight seconds, perhaps, a woman’s face,

intensely pale, crowned with a mass of pale yellow

ASHINGTON lay cowled beneath a pall

of gloom. The heavy fog, which had

obscured the city’s vistas all day, began

dripping rain about nine o’clock, and the dense

clouds of soft coal smoke, consequent of the annual

strike in the anthracite fields, did their best to make

the city on the Potomac as murky as the city on the

Thames. Wisps of sticky sulphur-colored haze

invaded the houses, felt their way haltingly, like

blinded ghosts, between the bare-limbed trees,

magnified and distorted commonplace objects into

spectral monstrosities and drew curtains of

impenetrable vapor from sky to earth. Here and

there a motor’s headlight glowed dully a moment,

only to disappear like a firefly gobbled by a toad as

the fog’s draperies closed about it. Street lamps

were mere points of cross-shaped luminance.

Professor Harvey Forrester, of the School of

Anthropology of Benjamin Franklin University,

nodded a curt good night to the doorman of the Far

Corners Club, paused a moment in the feeble light

shining through the plate glass doors of the club

house, and scowled disconsolately at the

Seabury Quinn

In the Fog

Real Detective Tales, February, 1927

hair and muffled about the chin with the curling

collar of a white fur wrap, was within six inches of

Professor Forrester’s. He saw her wide eyes grow

wider still, as though dilated with horror, saw her

red, well-formed lips part to frame an anguished

appeal, caught the momentary flutter of a slender,

pale hand raised in an imploring gesture, then, as

abruptly as it had appeared, the face was blotted out.

The curtain at the car’s window was snatched

downward with the quickness of a winking eyelid,

and the big car slipped away into the fog, with

scarcely more noise than an otter diving into a

stream.

Too astonished to do more than gape, Professor

Forrester turned his gaze after the disappearing

motor, saw its red tail light blink mockingly at him

from the obscurity of the thickening mist, then

dissolve into nothingness.

“My word!” Forrester half turned in the

direction the mysterious car had taken, even took a

step or two into the street, then halted, shaking his

head in bewilderment. “Did I really see it?” he

asked himself, pausing in his stride and tapping his

cane against the curbstone.

“Cab, sir?” the hail cut through his

ruminations. “Taxi, sir?”

“Yes!” The Professor whirled about to the

providentially-sent conveyance. “Yes, of course.

See that car ahead?” he pointed vaguely down the

street. “Follow it. Don’t let it get out of sight! Catch

it!” He leaped into the cab and banged the door

behind him.

The taxi driver had seen no such car. He had

seen nothing but the prospect of a fare. But he was

at no loss what to do. He had been ordered to follow

a car ahead, and one car was very like another in

such a fog. Pressing his foot down on the

accelerator, he urged his vehicle smartly forward,

caught the red tail light of another motor’s tail light

and proceeded to maintain a discrete distance of

four yards from it, slowing when the other slowed,

putting on speed when the other did, through an

endless succession of tunnel-like streets and

avenues vaulted with billowing festoons of fog.

“What’s next, boss?” The driver had brought

his cab to a bumping halt. “The other bird’s

stopped. Want me to wait here?”

“No.” Forrester extracted a bill from his pocket

and flung it to the driver, without pausing for

change. He lowered his head and launched himself

into the intervening haze like a channel swimmer

entering the water for a record-breaking dash,

cleared the distance in a dozen hurried steps, and

seized the knob of the parked motor’s door.

“I beg your pardon,” he apologized,

remembering his breeding in the midst of his haste.

“You seemed to be in trouble. Is there anything I

could—”

His voice trailed off into silence. There was no

reply from the car’s dark interior. The car was

empty; not even a laprobe or cushion relieved the

bareness of its luxurious mohair upholstery.

Professor Forrester gazed blankly into the

deserted cabin of the motor, then at the rows of

dark, ghostly houses standing behind their iron

fences, then once more at the empty car. His own

taximan had obeyed his order not to wait and was

already three-quarters of a block away, though the

Professor had no more idea where he was than he

had concerning the winner of the current season’s

baseball pennant. Standing beside a dark, deserted

automobile in a dark, deserted street, he was

completely marooned.

“Confound it!” he exclaimed. “This is really

very annoying!”

A moment he stood stock-still, striving to catch

some hint of his locality by gazing at the blank-

faced houses, then uttered a suppressed sigh of

relief. Above the transom of the nearest house there

struggled a faint, flickering ray of light, not more

than a flicker, but sufficient to indicate the place

was habited, and to give reasonable assurance that

somebody able to inform him where he was might

be found within.

Fumbling with the sagging gate in the cast-iron

fence, Professor Forrester let himself into the

shallow yard, felt his way carefully, step by step,

along the uneven brick walk, mounted the three low

steps of the porch and felt for the bell-pull. Nothing

but hard, wet bricks met his questing fingers.

The Professor reached inside his overcoat,

produced a pack of paper matches, and struck one to

aid him in his search. As the little spurt of flame

leaped up from the paper torch, a splash of water

from the door’s narrow pediment dropped with the

accuracy of a well-directed shot, extinguishing the

light and wetting the heads of all the matches in the

book.

“Drat it!” flinging the ruined matches from him

in disgust. He drew back his walking stick and

Seabury Quinn

In the Fog

Real Detective Tales, February, 1927

struck a reverberating blow on the panel before him.

Bang, bang, bang, the heavy cane pounded on

the wood. No response.

Louder, more insistently, he played his tattoo.

Still no answer.

“Confound them! Are they all dead?” he

muttered testily, and pushed sharply against the

panel with his fist, hammering loudly with his cane

at the same time.

Squeaking a little on rain-dampened hinges, the

door gave way, and a flood of subdued red light

rushed out to meet him, almost like the warmth from

a suddenly opened furnace door. At the same

moment another drop of chilled water disengaged

itself from the little shelf above the doorway and

dropped with mathematical precision down the back

of his neck. With an involuntary movement, he

leaped forward as the frigid water touched his skin.

The door swung to behind him, and he heard a sharp

click from a spring lock.

All unconsciously, Professor Forrester had

entered a strange dwelling and locked himself in.

something which gleamed ominously slithered past

his cheek and struck the door with a smashing

impact a scant half-inch from his head.

It was a knife, about eight inches in length,

double-edged and razor-sharp, the blade widening

out from the hilt and ending in a wicked, parrot’s-

beak hook at the tip. The handle, of polished bone

and cunningly wrought brass, was elaborately

damascened, and the steel blade itself was decorated

with a delicate tracery of inlaid bronze. Forrester,

who had been in nearly every quarter of the globe

on scientific quests, recognized the thing instantly

for what it was—a cheray knife from Afghanistan,

deadly alike as a weapon or missile, and a favorite

implement in a land where murder is cultivated both

as a fine art and an exceedingly desirable

profession.

“Good heavens!” he ejaculated softly, and

wheeled about to face his assailant.

The sight of a scowling, swart-faced Afghan, a

ferocious, bewhiskered Patan, poising a second

knife for the throw—any of the host of menacing

figures conjured up by the dagger—might have

brought the blood rushing to the Professor’s throat

and sucked the breath from his lungs, but what he

actually beheld left him speechless with horror,

while tiny ripples of cold chased each other up his

spine and across his cheeks. The big, dimly-lit hall

was empty. Nowhere was there the slightest

evidence of any person, though the knife, still

quivering in the door behind him, bore mute

testimony of the proximity of some murderously

inclined foe.

Straight away from the Professor’s feet ran the

hall, fully thirty feet long by twelve wide. In its

center a big, red-globed lamp, like the vigil light

before a church altar, swung from the ceiling by

three chains of hammered brass. Over the highly-

polished floor were strewn oriental rugs of every

hue, from the deep, midnight blue of Persia to the

lighter reds and shell pink of Turkey and India.

Other rugs, riotous in color and design as a hashish-

eater’s dream, were draped along the walls from

ceiling to floor, with here and there the more

intricate pattern of an Indian shawl. Beside the rugs,

the hall contained only three articles of furniture, a

small chair and taboret of dark wood inlaid with

mother-of-pearl, and a large tchibuk , or water pipe,

with a pot-bellied bowl of red glass. None of these

was large enough to afford ambush for a six-weeks-

CHAPTER TWO

The House of Mysteries

EALIZING his plight, he turned to seize the

door-knob, as intent now on letting himself out

as he had been on getting in a moment before; but

his hand paused in midair, and his eyes blinked

rapidly with surprise behind the lenses of his neat,

rimless nose-glasses.

The door, apparently a single slab of dark,

highly-polished wood, was wholly without knob or

bolt of any sort. The lock he had heard snap was

cunningly concealed inside the wood, and unless

there was some secret and artfully hidden keyhole in

the panel, the Professor was a helpless prisoner.

Groping feverishly for some hidden spring

which might unlock the door, he ran his hands up

and down the smooth wood, breathing in short,

excited puffs, wondering how he might phrase a

logical-sounding excuse to anyone who might find

him.

“They’d be furious—” he began, then stopped

abruptly, for an emphatic expression of the

predicted fury came with startling suddenness.

A whizzing, whirring sound, like the whine of

a ricocheting bullet, sounded over his left shoulder,

Seabury Quinn

In the Fog

Real Detective Tales, February, 1927

old child, much less a man capable of hurling the

heavy knife which had all but split his head.

Professor Forrester looked long at the bizarre

place into which he had come so unceremoniously,

taking stock of it as he would have inspected a

location for archaeological excavations. Then, still

keeping his gaze on the room before him, he

reached his right hand up and backward, found the

hilt of the knife, and withdrew the weapon from the

door. Who or where the assailant was the Professor

did not know, but he was determined not to be

caught unarmed if the unknown manifested himself

a second time.

The knife was a beautifully balanced

mechanism of death. As his long, white fingers

closed about the hilt, Professor Forrester felt

something of the savagery of the hillmen, for whom

the dagger had been made, surging through him.

Dagger advanced like a sword, he took a

careful step toward the end of the hall, watching

warily for any sign of an enemy, then paused

suddenly as one of the hanging rugs bellied out as

though stirred by a breath of air.

“Who’s there?” he demanded sharply,

forgetting that it was he who trespassed. “Come out

of there, or I’ll come in after you!”

The drapery swayed again, swung back like the

curtain of a tent, and a man slipped quickly into the

hall, facing the Professor.

He was an ugly-looking customer, almost a

dwarf, for his turbaned head came scarcely to a

level with Forrester’s shoulder, and his short, heavy

legs were as bent as a split barrel-hoop. His

forehead was low and narrow, sloping backward

like a gorilla’s, and the long, undershot jaw, tufted

with a two-pronged wisp of beard, added to his

apelike appearance. From head to ankles, he was

clothed in dirty white linen, his head swathed in a

twisted rag of fabric, loose-sleeved jacket and tight-

fitting trousers of the same material completing the

costume. His broad, splay feet with long, prehensile

toes—another monkey like feature—were bare.

These things the Professor noticed with the

first glance of a man who is trained to observe

whatever comes before him with scientific

precision. The last item of the fellow’s equipment,

however, excited more interest than his wardrobe. It

was a Himalayan cutlass, three feet long and four

inches wide, pointed as a needle, and so heavy that a

well-directed thrust could detach a limb as easily as

a carving knife dismembers a roast fowl.

The heavy, bandy-legged man faced the

Professor with a scowl of murderous hatred, swung

his cutlass over his head, brought it downward with

a rotary motion and advanced in a menacing

manner.

The Professor was fairly proficient in

Hindustani as he was in nearly every other tongue,

ancient and modern, and in other circumstances he

would have explained his presence in the house with

all the flowery ornamentation demanded by the best

oriental etiquette. As it was, his knowledge of the

language enabled him to understand that his

monkey-faced assailant was declaring him to be a

“fetid hyena, a stinking he-goat and the offspring of

a mangy she-camel and an unmentionable disease.”

Whatever was to be done had to be done

quickly. Professor Forrester reversed his knife,

seizing it by the curved tip of its blade, and dashed

the weapon, heavy brass hilt foremost, straight at his

bellowing adversary’s face.

Amazingly, the knife somersaulted in the air,

almost as if it were a living thing, and flashed blade-

foremost at the charging Oriental. Had Professor

Forrester but known, his sportsmanship in trying to

knock his opponent unconscious with the handle of

the throwing knife had led him to adopt the

technique followed by the most skillful knife

throwers of the East. The curved blade, shaped

specially for the purpose, whirled in midair,

reversing the manner of the Professor’s throw, and

buried itself three-quarters in length in the chest of

the charging Indian.

The expression on the fellow’s face was almost

comical. His eyes widened, his brows raised and

contracted in a grimace of pained surprise, and his

mouth drew downward at the corners as though he

would utter some droll protest at the trick the

Professor had played him. Next instant a spate of

blood welled gurgling to his lips, he uttered a single

choking sound, halfway between a hiccough and a

gargle, the heavy cutlass fell from his hand with a

thud, and he reared suddenly backward as if tripped,

wavered unsteadily a moment, then measured his

length supine on the floor, only the compulsive

twitching of his hands and feet telling he had

possessed life an instant before.

The sharp, wide blade of the heavy throwing

dagger had cleft his heart as a huckster’s knife splits

an apple.

Seabury Quinn

In the Fog

Real Detective Tales, February, 1927

knuckle. On each great and little toe of her naked

ivory-white feet was set a golden ring bearing a

huge flashing green stone, so that with each mincing

step her feet suggested the gliding of green-eyes

serpents. Around her slender bare ankles were

looped circles of exquisitely-colored glass discs,

strung on golden wires, which clashed together

musically with each movement of her feet. It was

these, the Professor realized, which had made the

chiming sound that warned him of her approach.

For a moment she regarded the Professor and

his victim in wide-eyed surprise, then a smile,

trustful and friendly as a child’s, parted her vividly

rouged lips.

“Why,” she said, framing the words carefully,

as though they were in an unfamiliar tongue,

“you’re American, aren’t you?”

Professor Forrester returned her look with

compound interest. “Young woman,” he replied

acidly, “is there anything about me which leads you

to suspect I’m a Fiji Islander?”

“Oh, no-o-o,” she assured him earnestly, his

sarcasm as lost on her as it would have been on a

child, “you look like an American. But—” she

glanced from the dead man to him and back again

wonderingly—”what are you doing here?”

“U’m,” Prof. Forrester’s free hand caressed his

hard shaven chin in irritated puzzlement. “What are

you doing here?”

“Oh, I belong here; I belong to—”

“Stuff! Nonsense!” Forrester cut in testily.

“You’re no more Indian than I am.”

His denial was justified, for, despite the

elaborate orientalism of her costume, the girl was a

pronounced blonde, with white, creamy skin, hair

the color of well-pulled taffy and eyes of pale topaz

brown. Every thread of her clothing, every glittering

item of her ornaments, cried “East” aloud; while her

face, her complexion, her smoothly combed and

parted fair hair and the rounded slenderness of her

figure pronounced “West.”

“Of course not,” she agreed, nodding her small

head till the golden ornaments in her little ears

jingled musically. “I’m American too.”

“Then how in—” the Professor began, but she

cut his question in two with her explanation.

“I am called Mumtaz Banjjan, the Lady

Moonflower, because I am so fair,” she told him,

“but when I was baptized they called me Rosalie—

Rosalie Osterhaut.”

CHAPTER THREE

Mumtaz Banjjan—

Or Rosalie Osterhaut?

ROFESSOR Forrester viewed his handiwork

with an odd, sinking feeling at the pit of his

stomach. Death by violence was not entirely strange

to him—he had been in too many semi-civilized and

savage places not to have seen it—but sudden death

as the record of a kindly act (for he had intended

only to stun his opponent) brought him up with a

jolt.

“My goodness!” he murmured, bending above

the man’s bleeding corpse. “This is really too bad.

This is dreadful!”

Somewhere in the dim, unseen recesses of the

house, behind that mysterious, rug-swathed wall,

there sounded a quick, subdued tinkle-tinkle like the

clatter of chimes from a Japanese wind-gong, only

softer and more musical.

What the ringing portended Forrester had no

idea, but within the space of three minutes he had

been locked in this house of mystery, and had been

murderously assaulted and compelled to kill a man

in self defense. Taking chances was decidedly not in

order.

Leaning forward, he possessed himself of his

late adversary’s sword and assumed a truculent

attitude.

“Come out,” he commanded. “Come out o’ that

and fight like a man, or I’ll—”

The threat died half formed on his lips. A

curtain of resplendent Bokhara tapestry swung back,

and a girl stepped— glided would be a more

accurate term—into the rug strewn hall.

She was a little under medium height, though

she appeared taller because of her extreme

slenderness. From breast to ankles she was

enveloped in a close-fitting gown of clinging,

shimmering terra-cotta colored silk, heavily fringed

at the bottom with silver bullion. Over her head, like

a nun’s veil, but falling to the metal-fringed hem of

her robe, was a mantle of black lace, bordered with

a wide strip of intricately worked golden wires as

fine and soft as hair. About her arms were broad

bands of hammered gold and silver wires, while

every finger of each hand, including the thumbs,

was decked with jeweled rings to the second

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