Panic

by Helen McCloy

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries; Thrillers

Synopsis

When Uncle Felix dies of a suspected overdose of digitalis, his niece Alison accepts the offer of a remote mountain lodge for the summer to get away from the tragedy.

But there are strange noises in the night and sinister visitors - and she discovers that the previous tenant was driven insane. What also transpires is that Uncle Felix had devised what he claimed to be an unbreakable cypher. The Pentagon is interested in this claim, and Alison has a fragment of a clue found beside her uncle's bed. In the mountains she wrestles with the puzzle. But solving it will put her life in grave danger ...

Release date: March 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

This story, written in 1943, has never been published in England before. The original version has been brought up to date by cutting out all incidental references to World War
II, as it was in 1943. The task proved less difficult than I anticipated. As we are now living in the state of perpetual warfare foreseen by George Orwell, any war story can be brought up to date
simply by changing the name of the enemy.

The biggest changes were the smallest: the change in the emotional and moral attitude towards war itself, the omission of all references to submarine warfare and all mention of the rationing of
food, clothes and gasoline. How many Americans today remember the great national highways empty of cars for mile after mile because there was no petrol? Or the word “love” solemnly cut
out of war telegrams because it was “non-essential to the war effort”?

Modern wars do not come as close to home as that, perhaps that is one reason they last longer.

The story itself is largely concerned with a field cipher. There is hardly any reference to cipher machines, new in those days, and no reference to the use of computers in cryptanalysis, a
practice unknown in 1943. Yet I doubt if these omissions date the story. A cipher machine is simply a mechanized Saint Cyr ruler and even a cipher computer is only the Vignère principle of
double substitution raised to the nth degree.

Even today no one can comfortably lug a computer around a battlefield, so it is doubtful if a computer will ever play an important role in the devising and using of a mobile field cipher,
however useful computers may be in breaking such ciphers.

Perhaps I am reckless in assuming that there is no new, top secret information on this subject to which I do not have access. After all on Vietnam Moratorium Day, October 15th, 1969, General
Westmoreland predicted the “automated battlefield” where “we can destroy anything we locate through instant communication and almost instantaneous application of highly lethal
fire-power . . . with first-round kill probabilities approaching certainty. . .”

Let us leave to the unfortunate fiction writers of 1984 the curious problem of trying to turn such a military situation into literary art. Homer himself might find it difficult.

When Panic was first published in America, a reviewer for the now defunct New York Herald Tribune paid me the unusual compliment of writing a brief review of the book in the field
cipher which plays such an important role in the story. To oblige me, two Intelligence officers, one in the Army and one in the Navy, tried to break the cipher in their spare time before
publication, but were unable to do so. It must be remembered that they did not have a lot of spare time in 1943. With more time, I am sure they could have broken it.

American book clubs rejected Panic unanimously as being too technical and intricate. Oddly enough it was snapped up at once by the American Government for the Armed Services Edition of
reprints, though those editions were catering to a cross-section of the whole population in the Armed Forces and not just to branches concerned with ciphers, Intelligence and Signal Corps. These
unpredictable reactions of publishers are one of the things that make a writer’s life always adventurous and often precarious.

 

HELEN MCCLOY

1

THE TRILL OF the telephone wakened her.

Hands groped in the dark for the switch of a bedside lamp. Eyes squinted against the sudden, bright flare of light. The clock had stopped at five minutes past one. It must be some time between
two and six. Before two, New York would not be wrapped in this deathly stillness. By six, the darkness would have begun to fade.

The bell stuttered again. It was one of those moments when the future seemed to be something already created, waiting in ambush. Theoretically, she could create her own future by not answering
the telephone. Practically, that was impossible. Alarm, curiosity, a sense of responsibility—all three compelled her to answer a call that came in the middle of the night.

“Hello?” Her voice quavered.

“Alison?” It was Ronnie on the house telephone. “You’d better come at once. I think he’s . . . gone.”

“He. . .?” She was cut short by a cough deep in the chest, shaking her whole body.

“Uncle Felix.”

“But his work isn’t done.” She brushed away tangled hair that clung to her forehead, sticky with perspiration. “Are you sure?”

“You’d better come over and see what you make of it.”

“Where are you?”

“In his room.”

Not a breath of air came from the sultry night beyond the open windows. Even the leather lining of her slippers was warm against her bare feet, and the thin, light silk of her dressing gown felt
hot and heavy across her shoulders.

A single night light burned high in the hall, throwing shadows on the pale ceiling, leaving the dull walls in darkness. Something moved in the shadows. She stopped with a gasp. Startled brown
eyes stared at her from a thin, white face under a tangle of light hair. Seconds passed before she recognized her own face reflected in a wall mirror half-hidden in the shadows. She turned. Another
mirror caught the reflection of the first and multiplied it. Half a hundred small girls in apple green seemed to pause at the head of a dark stair. There was no light in the lower hall. To reach
Felix Mulholland’s room, she had to go down this flight and up the one opposite. From their common landing, she saw a patch of pale grey in the darkness below—the glass panel in the
front door. Dawn already?

She mounted the flight opposite and turned into the railed gallery that ran around the stair well on both sides of the house. A thin wedge of light sliced the darkness where a door stood ajar.
She pushed it open.

Ronnie was standing in the middle of the room, fully dressed, his hat, gloves, and briefcase on the table beside him. His smooth young face was like the faintly aquiline mask of archaic Greek
sculpture. Uncle Felix, who could be trusted to find a Greek allusion anywhere, had said that Ronnie was not an Athenian Apollo, but a Mycenean Dionysus, with a hint of the god’s Syrian
origin in his almond eyes. The eyes were wide with shock now, but bright and tearless under fine, dark brows tilted sharply as wings in flight. It was those opposing diagonals that gave the face
its look of the impetuous, the fugitive and elusive, for in all static arts the diagonal is the line of flight.

Ronnie took a step towards her. The illusion of impetuous fluency was destroyed. The god had a foot of clay. Ronnie had been born lame. His childhood was a weary round of specialists in London,
Paris and Vienna. Still, at twenty-eight, he could not take a step without hobbling like an old man. Even surgery had failed in his case.

He was repeating what he had said on the telephone. “I think he’s . . . gone.” When Ronnie’s voice faltered he sounded younger than he really was.

Alison always felt herself more mature than her cousin though actually the younger by five years. “You may be mistaken.” Her voice was soothing, maternal. She nerved herself and
moved past him.

Uncle Felix was sitting motionless in the great walnut bed where he had been born seventy-three years ago. His back rested against a pile of pillows. A camel’s hair dressing gown was
draped loosely around his shoulders, over white linen pyjamas. His knees were drawn up and across them lay an open book—the Plutarch he usually read to put himself to sleep. The white hair
above the high, noble brow looked thin and misty as thistledown. His eyes were closed; his lips, parted. He might have been asleep.

“Uncle Felix.” Alison touched the frail, still hand that curled like a claw on the counterpane. The moment she felt that inhuman coldness she knew that this was not sleep.

Why don’t I feel something? Shock or grief or, at least, anxiety? Where has he gone—the Uncle Felix we knew and loved? The thing in the bed is no more Uncle Felix than a discarded
glove is the hand that has given it shape.

She turned.

Ronnie saw her eyes. “He is gone.” It was no longer a question.

“Have you called his doctor?”

“No. I suppose I should.” Ronnie went to the telephone.

The pyjama jacket was unbuttoned exposing the pallid, hairless chest of an old man. Resenting the indignity of death, Alison drew the edges decently together. It was a mistake. Her touch
dislodged the fortuitous equilibrium of the body. It lurched horribly and would have fallen if she had not caught and thrust it back against the pillows. The open pages of the book fluttered. A
folded sheet of paper sifted between them to the floor. Without looking at the paper, she stuffed it in the pocket of her dressing gown.

“Dr Denby?” Ronnie was saying. “It’s I—Ronnie Mulholland. I’m sorry to disturb you so early, but Uncle Felix. . . . Yes, we think so. . . . Thank you.
Good-bye.” The receiver clicked. “He’ll be here in a minute.”

Suddenly Alison felt tired as if she had done a long day’s typing. She sat down on the chair farthest from the bed. Something cold thrust against her fingers. She started, but it was only
Argos nuzzling her fingers with his cold nose—Argos, the fat, senile, black spaniel who usually slept at the foot of Uncle Felix’s bed.

“Poor Argos!” she whispered. “You and I have survived our Odysseus. What will become of us now?”

The old dog lifted eyes clouded by cataract and whimpered with a rising inflection, an echo of human interrogation never heard in a dog that has lived all its life in kennels with other dogs.
For a moment, she had the uncanny illusion that Argos was really asking her a question. Then he lumbered across the hearth rug, bumped blindly into a typewriter table that sent him sprawling,
recovered and sank into a crouching position that was all dog. Ronnie’s bright eyes followed him with faint surprise. “He smells death.”

Alison shuddered. “How did it happen?”

“I don’t know.” Ronnie prowled around the room, quick and restless, in spite of the club-foot that broke the rhythm of his gait. “My train was late. I let myself in with
a latch key, and came upstairs on tiptoe so I wouldn’t wake Uncle Felix. This door was ajar, light streaming into the hall. I thought he might have waked early and I came in to say good
morning and . . . I found him like this. Then I called you. I wonder if he tried to ring for Hannah when he felt the end coming?”

“Maybe he didn’t feel it coming,” said Alison. “Maybe he lowered his book and leaned back against the pillows and just . . . stopped breathing before he knew what was
happening to him. Maybe he’s been lying here this way ever since nine or ten o’clock.”

“Isn’t there . . . wouldn’t there be . . . rigor and all that?”

Alison shrugged. Were they really holding this fantastic conversation about Uncle Felix who had been so witty and urbane only last night at dinner?

“What was his work?”

“Work?”

“Uncle Felix’s work.” Ronnie was impatient. “When I called, you said: His work isn’t done.”

Alison hesitated. Out of the past came the ghost of Uncle Felix’s voice: If anyone asks you about this, Alison, you don’t know anything about it. Understand?

She bent her head, eyes on the carpet. “Oh, I don’t know. Something confidential. He never talked about it.”

“But you must know!” exclaimed Ronnie. “You were his secretary. You were working with him all the time. Was it something for the Pentagon?”

Alison was glad a veil of tangled hair shadowed her face. “What would a retired professor of Greek literature do for the Pentagon? Surely the Army and Navy aren’t looking for a lost
particle or the exact number of the tragic chorus?”

They heard the doorbell.

“Denby,” said Ronnie. “I’ll go.”

The sound of his halting step diminished in the distance. Alison had an instant of ignoble, primitive fear as she found herself alone with the dead. She heard the front door open and close;
footfalls on the stair.

“You were in Washington?” The strange voice must be Dr Denby’s.

“Yes, I’m with the O.S.E.” Ronnie’s voice was pitched a shade too high. “I shuttle between the Washington office and the one in New York. I have a house of my own
in Washington. When I’m in New York, I stay with Uncle Felix.”

“O.S.E.?”

“Office of Strategic Economy.”

“Oh, yes. And then?”

“He just sat there without moving, eyes shut, mouth open. I spoke to him from the door, but he didn’t answer. I crossed the room and touched his hand and . . . it was cold. On a
night like this.”

Dr Denby was old. Before long he, too, would be as still as the figure on the bed. He lifted an eyelid, felt for a pulse, shook his head. It was almost perfunctory. He had met death too often
not to recognize such an old acquaintance at sight. His inquiring glance flicked Alison.

She started to speak. A cough stopped her.

“I called Alison on the house telephone the moment I thought Uncle Felix was . . . gone and . . . well, that’s all.” It was not like Ronnie to flounder. “Of course we
should have been prepared for something like this after that heart attack two years ago, but I suppose no one is ever prepared for death. You had no idea the end was so near, had you?”

“No.” Again Dr Denby shook his head. “But with a heart like his, you never can tell. He came to my office only two days ago. He seemed well enough then. He only came to inquire
about the digitalis I prescribed some time ago. He had trouble regulating the dose. Most patients do. I told him frankly he’d just have to use common sense. Let up on the digitalis for a day
or so whenever nausea threatened, and then resume with a smaller dose. That’s all you can do with a medicine that’s a cumulative drug. Too bad I haven’t seen him in the last
twenty-four hours . . . I wonder . . .” The doctor glanced at his watch. “I’ll call up the medical examiner and find out how he wants this handled. He’s an old friend of
mine and I know he’s usually awake by six.”

Ronnie showed the doctor how to get an outside line and he dialled a number. “Dr Erickson, please . . . Hello, George? This is Lewis. I have a sudden death on my hands. . . . Felix
Mulholland, the author of that book on the Oresteia of Aeschylus. . . . This morning around four or five, I should say. His nephew came in early from Washington and found him in bed with the
light on and a book on his knees. Evidently woke up and decided to read a little before breakfast and stopped breathing quietly before he could reach his bedside telephone. . . . Heart condition
for the last two years. He was under my care taking digitalis. . . . Well, no, but he came to my office two days ago. . . . Roughly, say, thirty-six hours. He was there late in the evening. . . . I
don’t? Good. That’s why I called you so early. I wasn’t sure. . . . All right. Thanks. Good-bye.” He set down the telephone with a sigh of relief. “I was afraid there
might have to be an . . . er . . . inquiry since I hadn’t actually seen Mr Mulholland within twenty-four hours of his death; but George—the medical examiner—says it’s all
right for me to go ahead and sign a certificate.”

“That’s fortunate,” said Ronnie.

“Very.” The doctor answered dryly.

The upper hall was quite light now—too light for the single bulb that still burned there to cast any shadows.

“Can you recommend anyone to—to take charge of the funeral?” stammered Ronnie.

“Merion is the nearest—Lexington Avenue. They’re all pretty much alike. It’s a business to them.” He paused, fumbling with hat and gloves. “I can’t tell
you how sorry I am. Mr Mulholland was a friend as well as a patient.”

“Thank you, we—” Alison began to cough.

The doctor looked at her keenly. “That’s a bad cough, Miss Tracey.”

“Not serious.” She managed a watery smile. “I had flu in May.”

“And this is August. Have you been in town all summer?”

She nodded.

“You should get away to the mountains where the air is dry and cool. This humidity at sea level is bad for a chronic cough.”

They had reached the front door. Oblique rays from a new-born sun gilded the empty street thinly. The sky above the East River was flushed a hot pink.

“It’s going to be another scorching day.” Dr Denby sighed. “You should get away from the city for the rest of the summer, Miss Tracey. You don’t need medicine. You
need fresh country air, ten hours’ sleep every night, and three full meals a day. Especially after the shock of this death.”

The door closed. Alison turned to face Ronnie. He was standing at the foot of the stairs. For a long moment they looked into each other’s eyes, unsmiling. It was Alison who broke the
silence, blurting out a vagrant thought she could not suppress.

“Do you suppose it really is . . . all right?”

“All right?” His voice snapped like a whip. “What do you mean?”

“Not having any . . . inquiry. After all . . . we don’t know just how he died, do we?”

“Don’t talk like that!” All the Mulholland horror of scandal rang in Ronnie’s voice. “People don’t have ‘inquiries’ when old men die peacefully in
their beds! It’s purely a technicality that Dr Denby hadn’t seen Uncle Felix within twenty-four hours of his death. Thank God the medical examiner has common sense enough to realize
that. In Washington some of those dime-a-dozen bureaucrats—”

The telephone in the hall interrupted him.

Alison picked up the receiver.

“Mr Felix Mulholland’s residence? This is Occidental News Service. We’ve just had a report that Mr Mulholland died this morning of heart failure. Can you give us some
particulars about his death to use in our obituary?”

Ronnie was right, thought Alison. Any hint of an “inquiry”, however innocent, would be raw meat for these ghouls.

She heard her own voice speaking mechanically: “Mr Mulholland was found early this morning by his nephew, Mr Ronald Mulholland of the Office of Strategic Economy.”

“Are you Mr Felix Mulholland’s secretary?”

“I’ve been acting as his secretary the last few months. I’m his niece by marriage, Alison Tracey.”

“I wonder if you’d mind checking the material we have on Mr Mulholland?” The voice hurried on without waiting for assent. “Born 1891, went to Harvard and Heidelberg,
taught Greek literature at Harvard, became professor of Greek literature at Columbia, married Deborah Tracey in 1921, lived in the old Mulholland house on Lexington Avenue until 1930, moved to
present home on East 62nd Street, published sixteen books, the most famous being his . . . er . . .” A rustle of paper. “Oh, yes, his Oresteia Considered as Evidence of Matrilinear
Inheritance in the Mycenean Age. The book was attacked in 1936 by Dr Gottfried Baumgartner of Leipzig University as ‘impudent transatlantic nonsense’ because it refuted Dr
Baumgartner’s own theory that Homer’s use of the adjective xanthe or blonde to describe the goddess Demeter proves that the ancient Greeks were not Greeks at all but really
Germans.”

Alison fought an hysterical desire to giggle as she visualized Pericles and Plato waving steins of Pilsner and singing Ach, du lieber Augustin.

“ ‘Aryan’ and ‘Indo-Germanic’ were the terms Dr Baumgartner used. Otherwise, I believe that’s all correct.”

“Did Mr Mulholland have any hobbies?”

“I don’t recall any.” But Alison frowned. Hadn’t Uncle Felix said something about some hobby a few years ago? Chess? Crossword puzzles? Not that it mattered now. . .
.

“Is it true that he was doing research for the Pentagon at the time of his death?”

“Certainly not!” Irritation brought on another coughing spell. As soon as she could speak she went on. “He had nothing to do with the Pentagon in any way.”

“Thank you, Miss Tracey.” The note of scepticism was unmistakeable. “Good-bye.”

She dropped the telephone in its cradle, looked up to meet Ronnie’s quizzical gaze.

“Was it as confidential as all that?”

“What?”

“Uncle Felix’s work for the Pentagon.”

“But I told you—”

Ronnie smiled at her vehemence. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much! You haven’t learned how to lie, Alison dear.”

Neither of them had heard the door to the backstairs open at the farther end of the upper hall. It was Alison who caught the whisper of a starched apron. She looked up. Hannah, Uncle
Felix’s elderly housekeeper, was standing in the upper hall at the foot of t. . .