The New Adventures of Ellery Queen by Ellery Queen Read Free Book Online Page A

countenance. Beside him crouched Nicholas Keith, only half-dressed; the young man’s jaws gaped foolishly and his eyes were enormous glaring discs.
    Dr. Reinach shoved Ellery roughly aside and growled: “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?” The fat man’s feet were encased in carpet slippers and he had pulled a raccoon coat over his nightshirt, so that he looked like a particularly obese bear.
    Thorne’s Adam’s apple bobbed nervously. The ground, the trees, the world were blanketed with snow of a peculiarly unreal texture; and the air was saturated with warm woolen flakes, falling softly. Deep drifts curved upwards to clamp the boles of trees.
    â€œDon’t move,” croaked Thorne as Ellery and the fat man stirred. “Don’t move, for the love of God. Stay where you are.” Ellery’s grip tightened on the revolver and he tried perversely to get past the doctor; but he might have been trying to budge a stone wall. Thorne stumbled through the snow to the porch, paler than his background, leaving two deep ruts behind him. “Look at me,” he shouted. “ Look at me . Do I seem all right? Have I gone mad?”
    â€œPull yourself together, Thorne,” said Ellery sharply. “What’s the matter with you? I don’t see anything wrong.”
    â€œNick!” bellowed Dr. Reinach. “Have you gone crazy, too?”
    The young man covered his sunburned face suddenly with his hands; then he dropped his hands and looked again.
    He said in a strangled voice: “Maybe we all have. This is the most—Take a look yourself.”
    Reinach moved then, and Ellery squirmed by him to land in the soft snow beside Thorne, who was trembling violently. Dr. Reinach came lurching after. They plowed through the snow toward Keith, squinting, straining to see.
    They need not have strained. What was to be seen was plain for any seeing eye to see. Ellery felt his scalp crawl as he looked; and at the same instant he was aware of the sharp conviction that this was inevitable, this was the only possible climax to the insane events of the previous day. The world had turned topsy-turvy. Nothing in it meant anything reasonable or sane.
    Dr. Reinach gasped once; and then he stood blinking like a huge owl. A window rattled on the second floor of the White House. None of them looked up. It was Alice Mayhew in a wrapper, staring from the window of her bedroom, which was on the side of the house facing the driveway. She screamed once; and then she, too fell silent.
    There was the house from which they had just emerged, the house Dr. Reinach had dubbed the White House, with its front door quietly swinging open and Alice Mayhew at an upper side window. Substantial, solid, an edifice of stone and wood and plaster and glass and the patina of age. It was everything a house should be. That much was real, a thing to be grasped.
    But beyond it, beyond the driveway and the garage, where the Black House had stood, the house in which Ellery himself had set foot only the afternoon before, the house of the filth and the stench, the house of the equally stone walls, wooden facings, glass windows, chimneys, gargoyles, porch; the house of the blackened look; the old Victorian house built during the Civil War where Sylvester Mayhew had died, where Thorne had barricaded himself with a cutlass for a week; the house which they had all seen, touched, smelled … there, there stood nothing .
    No walls. No chimney. No roof. No ruins. No débris. No house. Nothing.
    Nothing but empty space covered smoothly and warmly with snow.
    The house had vanished during the night.
    II
    â€œThere’s even,” thought Mr. Ellery Queen dully, “a character named Alice.”
    He looked again. The only reason he did not rub his eyes was that it would have made him feel ridiculous; besides, his sight, all his senses, had never been keener.
    He simply stood there in the snow and looked and looked and