The Master of the Day of Judgment Read Online Free PDF Page B

the raised ground floor. I couldn't find the way out, and I couldn't find the window or the electric-light switch. There was nothing but the wall everywhere, and I struck my brow painfully against something with a sharp edge. I groped about in the dark for some minutes getting angrier and angrier and more and more dismayed.
    Then I heard footsteps, a door opened, a match flared up in the darkness, and I found myself face to face with the engineer.
    "What was it? What happened?" I asked, full of alarm and fear, yet glad that there was light at last and that I was no longer alone. "What was it? What happened?" The idea of thieves breaking in that had formed in my mind hardened into a distinct vision I was convinced I had actually seen. I was now sure I had seen three of them. One of them, a short, bearded man, was clinging to the top of the fence, another was just rising from the ground while the third, using the bushes and tree-trunks as cover, ran towards the pavilion with long, loping strides.
    "What happened?" I asked yet again. The match went out, and the engineer's pale and distraught face disappeared in the darkness.
    "I'm looking for Dina," I heard him say. "We mustn't let her go to him. It's terrible. One of us must stay with her."
    "She's up on the veranda."
    "How could you leave her alone?" he exclaimed, and a moment later he was outside.
    I found the music room. It was empty, and outside the door a chair had been upset.
    I went down to the garden. I still remember the torment of impatience I felt for a brief moment because the garden path was so long and seemed never-ending.
    The pavilion door was open, and I went in.
    I knew at once, even before I looked into the room. I knew what had happened. I knew that there had been no struggle with intruders, but that Eugen Bischoff had committed suicide. Where my certainty came from I cannot say.
    He lay next to the desk with his face turned in my direction. His coat and waistcoat were unbuttoned, and he had a revolver in his stiffly outstretched right hand. In falling he had brought down two books, the inkstand and a small marble bust of Iffland. Dr Gorski was kneeling on the floor beside him.
    He was still alive when I got there. He opened his eyes, his hand trembled, his head moved. Or was that an illusion? His face was slightly distorted with pain, and when he recognised me, or so I thought, it assumed an expression of indescribable, overwhelming surprise.
    He tried to sit up, he wanted to speak, groaned, and fell back. Dr Gorski held his left hand. But that puzzling expression of infinite surprise lasted for only a brief moment. Then it turned into a grimace of blazing hatred.
    Those hate-filled eyes were directed at me, and so they remained and would not let me go. They were directed at me, at me alone, and I did not, could not understand what he was trying to say to me. Also I could not understand, it was utterly unintelligible to me that I, faced with a dying man, felt no awe or terror or shock, but merely a slight discomfort at the way he looked at me and a dread of coming into contact with the bloodstain on the carpet, which was getting bigger and bigger all the time.
    Dr Gorski rose to his feet. Eugen Bischoff's face, normally so mobile, had turned into a stiff, pale, silent mask.
    I heard Felix call out from the door:
    "She's coming, she's in the garden, doctor, what are we to do?"
    Dr Gorski had taken a mackintosh from the wall and spread it over Eugen Bischoff's lifeless body.
    "Go and meet her, doctor," Felix implored. "Talk to her, I can't."
    I saw Dina approaching the pavilion, and the engineer was with her, trying to stop her. I was suddenly overcome with an immense weariness, I found standing difficult, I wanted to fling myself down on the lawn to rest. It's nothing, I said to myself, just a passing weakness, perhaps because of the way I rushed through the garden just now.
    And, while Dina disappeared through the door of the pavilion I had a strange