"No, Oi ain't deaf and dumb. Oi don't talk to the likes of yez, that's all. Now go back and lay down on yer slab and behave yerself, or oi'll kill yez deader than yez are already."
The corpse leered horribly. Then it laughed—a cackling, graveyard laugh that brought on a fit of coughing.
"Fooled you, too, did I?" it rasped. "Fooled 'em all. Fooled the old woman, Fooled the ash man. Fooled everybody."
"Go wan. You ain't foolin' nobody."
"Fooled 'em all, I tell you. She put chloroform in my hooch. Wanted to 'lope with the ash man. Don't care. Let her lope an good riddance. Damned she devil, anyhow. But I fooled 'em. They think I'm dead, but I ain't. No more dead 'n you are."
"The hell you ain't!" growled Ryan.
"Tell you I ain't," wheezed the corpse, testily. "Can't I walk? Can't I talk? Can't I do anything any live person can do?"
"Course yez can," agreed Ryan, who felt that he was beginning to see the light. "Anything can walk in a dream—even a corpse. Oi wance saw a kitchen table do the toddle with a grand piano in a nightmare."
"Who said anything about a dream? I'm not a dream and I can prove it."
"Yea'll have to show me," said Ryan. "Oi'm from St. Louis."
"All right. If I was a dream you could see and hear me, but I couldn't see or hear you. Am I right or wrong?"
"Right."
"F'r instance, I wouldn't know whether you was a bull or a ballet dancer. I wouldn't be able to tell if you was smooth-faced or wore a set of Patsies."
"Sure yez wouldn't, and yez don't."
"Don't I, though. Get this. You're a big, overgrown, dishfaced, bull-necked cop, with a long, loppy carrot-colored set of soup-strainers that makes you look like a seasick walrus."
Ryan tried to rise and smite the presumptuous one but the invisible bonds held him. He gritted his teeth.
"Yez'll suffer for this, dream or no dream, corpse or no corpse," he groaned.
The corpse stared glassily, unmoved by his threat.
"You know," he continued, "I've been in better jails than this. No heat—no blankets—nothing. The beds are cold as ice and hard as rocks, and the sheets are thin as paper."
Ryan was astounded. Could it be possible that this corpse didn't know it was in the morgue?
The thing yawned, disclosing its ghastly, blue-white tongue.
"Ho, hum. Gettin' sleepy again. Guess I'll crawl back in the old sheetrock bunk. G'night, bottle-nose."
This was too much for Ryan. His naturally florid countenance turned purple with anger as he watched the ghoulish figure stagger slowly toward the third slab. If he could only move! He concentrated his gaze on his little finger. Even it was incapable of motion, he thought. He tried to wiggle it, never the less, and lo, it wiggled. He essayed to lift his hand. It lifted. He was overcome with joy.
Rising carefully and noiselessly from the chair, he tiptoed stealthily after the corpse. First he thought to lay a heavy hand on its shoulder, but he could not bring himself to touch it. Revenge—sweet revenge was almost within his grasp, yet he dared not grasp it. Then came an inspiration. Shifting his bulk to his left foot, he poised his right and took careful aim at the tattered hip-pocket.
Somehow—perhaps because the pocket was moving, or mayhap because the amber liquid had befuddled his vision—he miscalculated the range. The heavy, hob-nailed boot traveled upward to where a solid target should have been but wasn't, and kept on traveling. It would probably have soared upward to the ceiling had it not been most intimately connected with Ryan's anatomy. As it was, it jerked his left foot from under him, the back of his head collided with the floor, and he caught a momentary glimpse of a hitherto unheard of, gloriously brilliant stellar constellation.
Then a curtain of dismal darkness descended around him, dragging him down to oblivion.
RYAN'S first approach to consciousness after that was a half-dreaming, half-waking state. He was under the impression that he was a corpse, lying on a cold, gray slab.
He put out his hand, then jerked it back hastily. He was lying on something cold and hard. This discovery quickly and thoroughly awakened him. He sat up and groaned, as a sharp pain shot through his head. Surely something had laid it wide open in the back. He felt it tenderly, and discovered a beautifully rounded contusion.
Suddenly he heard the hum of voices. One voice in particular sounded like that of Chief Howell.
He rose hastily, picked up his cap, and dusted his uniform. His watch told him it was six o'clock. He tried to recall how and why he was lying on the floor with a goose-egg on the back of his head. At length he remembered, and glanced suspiciously toward the third slab. It was occupied, nor had the corpse apparently been disturbed, for it lay just as he had seen it when he passed at one o'clock, with the sheet draping its angular figure.
The sound of voices grew more distinct. Someone had opened the office door. Chief Howell was holding it open while two attendants entered, bearing a litter on which lay the body of a coarse, thick-featured woman. Her face was horribly mutilated and her hair and clothing were stained and matted with blood.
The attendants, casting about for a vacant slab, noted that the fourth was unoccupied, and conveyed the body, thither.
Chief Howell called to someone who had just entered the office through the outer door.
"Come in, Coroner, I guess we've got this thing straightened out for you now."
Coroner Haynes entered, and the two walked over to the third slab. The chief drew a photograph from his pocket and raising the sheet, compared it with the features of the corpse.
"It's him, all right," said Howell.
"Who?"
"This woman's husband, Frank Merlin. She killed him night before last—put chloroform in a bottle of moonshine whisky he had so she could elope with the ash man. As soon as he was dead she called up her affinity, who carried the body out to his cart, wrapped in gunny sacks, and hauled it to another part of the city where he dumped it in a dark alley.
"Last night she and her sweetheart got into a drunken argument and he almost cut her to ribbons. Neighbors, hearing the rumpus, called the officer on the beat. When he arrived the woman was dead and the man, beastly drunk, had to be clubbed almost into insensibility before he would submit to arrest. When he was brought in I doused him with cold water and sobered him up. After a severe grilling he confessed all."
Ryan listened to the story with bulging eyes. He had regarded his experience of the night before as a dream. What if, after all, it was a reality?
He started for the office, when something arrested his attention—the mark of a human hand on the newly enameled wall, as if someone had leaned against it. He recalled the attitude of the corpse as it stood by that wall the night before, and curiosity drew him irresistibly to the third slab.
The left hand was palm downward, and he turned it with difficulty, for rigor mortis had set in. Then he cried out in amazement at what he saw.
The palm of the dead man was smeared with sticky, half-dried, white enamel!
