Fiendish Schemes Read Online Free PDF Page B

such lever, the largest and most prominently situated behind the pistol’s rotating cylinder, swung through its arc to a position unobtained on previous occasions. Other novelties seemed to ensue thereby: the pistol’s ticking and whirring grew louder, as might a small captured animal’s heart beat faster and breath pant with more avidity, perhaps upon spying some route of escape. I instinctively tightened my grip upon the device, some fanciful part of me apprehending that it would indeed bolt from my hand.
    “Yes!” These developments gratified me enormously. I continued my addled soliloquy. “You haven’t taken the better of me this time.” Though my words might better be considered as a dialogue, in that I seemed to be addressing my dead father. “Now I’ve got you!”
    I have no surety that all suicides experience the same emotions I did, those having succeeded in their attempts being no longer available for interview, and the failures hardly reliable in this regard. But excitement surged in my breast as I sensed the opening of that escape I had imagined for some trembling hypothetical creature. I raised the pistol, now the most gratefully received portion of my father’s estate, and brought its cold circular snout to my temple—
    Just then, someone knocked at the room’s door.
    An expletive escaped from my lips, which I immediately regretted. Not that I feared any lapse in polite vocabulary might offend the overhearing party, but that the mere act of speaking would confirm my presence to this unfortunate visitor. At times such as these, one values one’s privacy—understandably, given the delicacy of the procedure at hand. There’s precious little opportunity to acquire practice at killing oneself, at least if one is serious about it.
    If the person on the other side of the door’s thin panels were the inn’s landlord, arisen from his own bed and re-trousered for the mere purpose of demanding his payment, I could hardly put him off—if for no other reason than that he could unlock the door and enter at his pleasure. In such a situation, waving about a pistol— however remarkable its design—would scarcely improve my prospects. If he snatched it from my hand—and he was thug enough to do so—I would have little recourse for carrying out my self-destructive intent, other than rushing from the inn and casting myself from the nearest cliff. The prospect of drowning in Cornwall’s cold and mucky waters filled me with justifiable distaste.
    With my mind racing from corner to corner of my hemmed-in thoughts, I found it difficult to conjecture who else might be at the door of the shabby, slant-floored room. Whatever business I might have had with Lord Fusible and his Phototrope Limited associates, which had brought me to this terminal extension of the British Isles, had come to a conclusion once their lighthouse’s launch party had ended. Fusible was hardly more likely to have considered offering me a position with his firm when he was sober than when drunk— and in either state, the chances of his sending for me in the middle of the night were virtually nil.
    As I pondered, the knock sounded again. “Mr. Dower? Are you there?”
    So not the landlord, as the person enquiring had sufficient teeth to enunciate consonants and diphthongs, a dental condition not often encountered outside London, and rarely enough there. I decided to accept a temporary hiatus in the course of the project upon which I had embarked and slid the clockwork pistol beneath the bedpillow.
    “A moment, please.” The room was so cramped that I had but to stand in order to reach the door. I shifted the latch and pulled it toward me—
    At that moment, the past surged over me. As though I had indeed wandered down to the moonlit shore, and one of those tidal monsters that the Japanese term tsunami had towered above me like a shimmering wall, then struck me full force.
    So many trials I had endured! Abyss of violence and deceit, so