The Eight Strokes of the Clock

Hortense Daniel pushed her window ajar and whispered:

“Are you there, Rossigny?”

“I am here,” replied a voice from the shrubbery at the front of the house.

Leaning forward, she saw a rather fat man looking up at her out of a gross red face with its cheeks and chin set in unpleasantly fair whiskers.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well, I had a great argument with my uncle and aunt last night. They absolutely refuse to sign the document of which my lawyer sent them the draft, or to restore the dowry squandered by my husband.”

“But your uncle is responsible by the terms of the marriage-settlement.”

“No matter. He refuses.”

“Well, what do you propose to do?”

“Are you still determined to run away with me?” she asked, with a laugh.

“More so than ever.”

“Your intentions are strictly honourable, remember!”

“Just as you please. You know that I am madly in love with you.”

“Unfortunately I am not madly in love with you!”

“Then what made you choose me?”

“Chance. I was bored. I was growing tired of my humdrum existence. So I’m ready to run risks.⁠ ⁠… Here’s my luggage: catch!”

They heard, not far from where they were standing, a sharp sound, the sound of a light tap recurring at regular intervals; and they had only to listen attentively to recognise the ticking of a clock. Yes, it was this and nothing else that broke the profound silence of the dark room; it was indeed the deliberate ticking, rhythmical as the beat of a metronome, produced by a heavy brass pendulum. That was it! And nothing could be more impressive than the measured pulsation of this trivial mechanism, which by some miracle, some inexplicable phenomenon, had continued to live in the heart of the dead château.

“And yet,” stammered Hortense, without daring to raise her voice, “no one has entered the house?”

“No one.”

“And it is quite impossible for that clock to have kept going for twenty years without being wound up?”

“Quite impossible.”

“Then⁠ ⁠… ?”

Serge Rénine opened the three windows and threw back the shutters.

He and Hortense were in a drawing-room, as he had thought; and the room showed not the least sign of disorder. The chairs were in their places. Not a piece of furniture was missing. The people who had lived there and who had made it the most individual room in their house had gone away leaving everything just as it was, the books which they used to read, the knickknacks on the tables and consoles.

Rénine examined the old grandfather’s clock, contained in its tall carved case which showed the disk of the pendulum through an oval pane of glass. He opened the door of the clock. The weights hanging from the cords were at their lowest point.

“Look.”

She bent down but the image was not clear to her and the telescope had to be focused to suit her sight. The next moment she shuddered and said:

“It’s two scarecrows, isn’t it, both stuck up on the top? But why?”

“Look again,” he said. “Look more carefully under the hats⁠ ⁠… the faces.⁠ ⁠…”

“Oh!” she cried, turning faint with horror, “how awful!”

The field of the telescope, like the circular picture shown by a magic lantern, presented this spectacle: the platform of a broken tower, the walls of which were higher in the more distant part and formed as it were a backdrop, over which surged waves of ivy. In front, amid a cluster of bushes, were two human beings, a man and a woman, leaning back against a heap of fallen stones.

But the words man and woman could hardly be applied to these two forms, these two sinister puppets, which, it is true, wore clothes and hats⁠—or rather shreds of clothes and remnants of hats⁠—but had lost their eyes, their cheeks, their chins, every particle of flesh, until they were actually and positively nothing more than two skeletons.

“Two skeletons,” stammered Hortense. “Two skeletons with clothes on. Who carried them up there?”

There were shouts of dismay. M. d’Ormeval was lying flat on his face, clutching his jacket and his newspaper in his hands. Blood was flowing from his back and staining his shirt.

“Oh!” said someone. “He has killed himself!”

“How can he have killed himself?” said Rénine. “The wound is right in the middle of the back, at a place which the hand can’t reach. And, besides, there’s not a knife in the cabin.”

The others protested:

“If so, he has been murdered. But that’s impossible! There has been nobody here. We should have seen, if there had been. Nobody could have passed us without our seeing.⁠ ⁠…”

The other men, all the ladies and the children paddling in the sea had come running up. Rénine allowed no one to enter the cabin, except a doctor who was present. But the doctor could only say that M. d’Ormeval was dead, stabbed with a dagger.

At that moment, the mayor and the policeman arrived, together with some people of the village. After the usual enquiries, they carried away the body.

A few persons went on ahead to break the news to Thérèse d’Ormeval, who was once more to be seen on her balcony.

And so the tragedy had taken place without any clue to explain how a man, protected by a closed door with an uninjured lock,

One of the most incomprehensible incidents that preceded the great war was certainly the one which was known as the episode of the lady with the hatchet. The solution of the mystery was unknown and would never have been known, had not circumstances in the cruellest fashion obliged Prince Rénine⁠—or should I say, Arsène Lupin?⁠—to take up the matter and had I not been able today to tell the true story from the details supplied by him.

Let me recite the facts. In a space of eighteen months, five women disappeared, five women of different stations in life, all between twenty and thirty years of age and living in Paris or the Paris district.

I will give their names: Madame Ladoue, the wife of a doctor; Mlle. Ardant, the daughter of a banker; Mlle. Covereau, a washerwoman of Courbevoie; Mlle. Honorine Vernisset, a dressmaker; and Madame Grollinger, an artist. These five women disappeared without the possibility of discovering a single particular to explain why they had left their homes, why they did not return to them, who had enticed them away, and where and how they were detained.

Each of these women, a week after her departure, was found somewhere or other in the western outskirts of Paris; and each time it was a dead body that was found, the dead body of a woman who had been killed by a blow on the head from a hatchet.