CHAPTER 13 : The Sign Of The Investigators
“AND WHAT HAPPENED after the Blue Phantom
touched your shoulder, Bob?”
Jupiter was speaking. Inside Headquarters, The
Three Investigators were holding their first meeting in
three days. Pete had been away on a trip with his
father and mother, to visit relatives in San Francisco.
And Bob had been swamped with work at the library,
re-cataloguing all the books. One other helper was off
sick, so Bob had been working days and evenings too.
Meanwhile Jupiter had been stuck in bed, letting his
ankle heal, and reading books. This was the first
chance they had had to get together in private.
“Well?” Jupiter asked again.“What happened?”
“You mean after I yelled?” Bob sounded reluctant
to continue the conversation.
“Precisely ... After you yelled.”
“Why don’t you ask Pete?” Bob said, ducking the
question.“It happened to him, too.”
“Very well. You tell me what happened, Pete.”
Pete looked sheepish, but obeyed.
“I fell down,” he said.“Bob shouted so loudly
when I grabbed his shoulder that I was startled and
fell on top of him. Then he started to struggle and
yell. He kept yelling,‘Let go of me, Phantom. You
better go back inside where you belong if you know
what’s good for you.’ My arms were all bruised trying
to hold him until I could make him understand it was
me, come back to see what had happened to him.”
“Bob has the heart of a lion, despite his small
stature,” Jupiter said.“So you discovered he wasn’t
with you, and turned back to find him. He heard you
breathing hard and thought it was the Phantom when
you bent down to touch him. Correct?”
Bob nodded. He had felt rather foolish, there in the
leaves, when Pete and he finally got untangled. For a
minute he had really thought he was fighting the Blue
Phantom.
Jupiter pinched his lip together. He was looking
satisfied about something.
“And when you finally stopped fighting each other,
you discovered something else,” he said.“You
discovered, did you not, that the feeling of extreme
terror had disappeared?”
Pete and Bob looked at each other. How had Jupe
figured that out? They were saving it up to surprise
him.
“That’s right,” Pete said.“It had gone away.”
“So the sensation does not extend beyond the walls
of Terror Castle,” Jupiter said.“That is a very
significant discovery.”
“It is?” Bob asked.
“I’m positive of it,” Jupiter said.“The photographs
should be ready for examination now. Will you bring
them from the darkroom, Pete, while I shut the
ventilator? Uncle Titus is creating quite a racket
outside.”
He was right about his Uncle Titus. Mr. Jones had
finally managed to assemble the pipe organ he had
bought. While confined to bed, Jupiter had been
reading a library book about pipe organs, and he had
given his uncle a good deal of advice. Now Mr. Jones
was testing the reassembled organ. He was playing
“Asleep in the Deep”, a favourite piece of Hans and
Konrad’s, and he was giving full power to all the deep
bass notes, along with lots of quavery accompaniment
to go with the main tune.
The boys had the roof ventilator of Headquarters
open, so they were getting the full benefit of the
playing. When Mr. Jones really dug down into the low
notes, things inside Headquarters positively rattled.
Bob felt as if the music was trying to lift him right out
of his chair. It seemed to make him quiver all over.
By the time Jupiter had closed the ventilator,
shutting out some of the din, Pete came back from the
little darkroom with the prints of the photos Bob had
snapped in Terror Castle. They were damp, but could
be studied.
Jupiter examined them under a big reading glass.
Then he passed them on to Bob and Pete. He spent
the most time on the snapshots of Mr. Terrill’s library
and the suit of armour that had chased Bob.
“Very well done, Bob,” Jupiter said.“With one
exception. You failed to get a picture of the Blue
Phantom seated at the keys of the ruined pipe organ.”
“Did you expect me to walk down and photograph
a shimmering blob playing an organ that can’t be
played?” Bob sounded a little sarcastic.
“Nobody would have stopped to take a photo,”
Pete said.“There was too much extreme terror in the
atmosphere. Even you wouldn’t have done it, Jupe.”
“No, I suppose not,” Jupiter agreed.“It is hard to
act with composure when in the grip of fear. Still,
such a picture would have done much to solve our
problem.”
Pete and Bob waited. Jupiter had had three days in
bed to think, and he must have done a lot of thinking
he wasn’t telling them about yet.
“You see,” Jupe added,“your adventure was very
unusual in one respect. The Phantom of Terror Castle
actually appeared to you before sundown.”
“It was sundown inside,” Pete told him.“It was
darker than a black cat in a coal mine.”
“Nevertheless, the sun was still shining outside. No
one else has reported any manifestations before night-
time. Well, let’s see what the other pictures tell us.”
He picked up the one of the suit of armour.
“This armour,” he said.“It looks fairly shiny, not
rusty.”
“It wasn’t very rusty,” Bob told him.“Only in
spots.”
“And these books and pictures in Mr. Terrill’s
library. They don’t look very dusty.”
“They were a little dusty,” Pete said.“Not
smothered in it, though.”
“Mmm.” Jupiter took a long look at the skeleton in
the mummy case.“This skeleton. A most unusual
legacy.”
At that moment, the whole trailer that contained
Headquarters seemed to shiver. A piece of iron
stacked outside slipped and rattled against it. An extra
loud blast from Mr. Jones’s new pipe organ had
almost lifted them off the ground.
“Wow!” Pete exclaimed.“I thought it was an
earthquake!”
“Uncle Titus doesn’t know his own strength when it
comes to playing a pipe organ,” Jupiter commented.
“If he’s going to keep on like that, we might as well
break up this meeting. But before we do, here’s
something for you.”
He handed each of them a long piece of chalk. It
was like the chalk they used in school, except that
Pete’s piece was blue and Bob’s was green.
“What’s this for?” Pete asked.
“For marking trails with the signature of The Three
Investigators.” Jupiter took some white chalk and
drew a big ? on the wall.
“That means,” he said,“that one of The Three
Investigators has been here. The white colour tells
that it was the First Investigator. A blue question
mark would mean Pete, the Second Investigator, and
a green one would mean you, Bob. If I had thought of
this sooner, you wouldn’t have got lost in Terror
Castle. You could have marked your trail with
question marks and followed them back.”
“Gleeps, you’re right,” Pete said.
“Observe the simplicity of it,” Jupiter told them.
“The question mark is one of the commonest signs. If
someone sees a question mark chalked on a wall or a
doorway, he thinks some child has been playing, and
forgets it. Yet to us, the question mark will convey an
entire message. We can use it to mark a trail, indicate
a hiding place, or identify the home of a suspect.
From now on, never be without your special chalk.”
They promised they wouldn’t, and Jupiter got down
to the meat of the meeting.
“I telephoned Mr. Alfred Hitchcock’s office,” he
said.“Henrietta told me that tomorrow morning he is
meeting his staff to decide whether or not to go to
England to film his picture in a haunted mansion over
there. That means we have to make our report to him
by tomorrow morning. Which means――”
“No!” Pete yelled.“I won’t do it! As far as I’m
concerned, Terror Castle is haunted and can stay that
way. I don’t need any more proof.”
“While lying in bed thinking,” Jupiter went on,“I
have reached certain conclusions that must be tested.
And we have to work swiftly to report to Mr.
Hitchcock in time. Therefore, you must both get
permission to stay out late tonight. For tonight we
make our final assault upon the secret of Terror
Castle!”
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