Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 36, No. 4, October 20, 1928

I saw the beads of perspiration standing out on his forehead in big drops and a blue vein by his temple twitching. “It wasn’t me,” he moaned. “It was ’im what done it — Chanda-Lung!”

In the brief silence that followed I sat upright in my chair, listening. On the heels of the accusation, as it were, I thought I heard a sound of vague movement in the passage outside.

Pennington’s eyelids flickered.

“So it was Chanda-Lung himself who brought the Crimson Death here this morning?”

The other assented, but there was little conviction in his tone.

“Then how do you account for the fact that Inspector Parsons’s last words to Mr. Gray were — ‘It was in his scarf’?”

Mortimer did not answer.

“What did you do with the Crimson Death, Joe?”

Still no reply.

Pennington had crossed his legs and his long fingers were intertwined over his knee. He was speaking more slowly now, but every sentence he uttered carried a sting that went home.

“You didn’t take it away with you, did you?”

Joe Mortimer gulped again. Compelled to reflect upon the mysterious something that his fear of the master-crook had forced him to carry and liberate, he began to show traces of increasing uneasiness. His eyes wandered around the room as mine had done, as if seeking something which he knew to be there.

I glanced at Pennington. He had gone queerly rigid. His hands clutched the arms of his chair and he was staring fixedly at my bag of golf-clubs away behind Mortimer.

I bent forward uneasily. I could have sworn I saw the bag move convulsively!

Pennington rose to his feet. I saw him draw his automatic and hold it behind him, and the other hand reach out for the switch.

“You have never heard of the Scolopendra gigas, I suppose, Mortimer?” he muttered between his teeth, never for one instant losing sight of the phenomenon in the corner.

“It is a peculiar insect — and singularly dangerous to man! It hates the light, you know, and slips away from it into the first convenient hiding place. In the dark, however, it comes out — particularly when hungry. Supposing we turn out the light, Joe!”

Joe Mortimer writhed horribly.

“No, guv’nor, no!” he bleated. “For Gawd’s sake don’t do that! It’s ’ere, I tell you; it—”

The light went suddenly out. Pennington leaned across me, reaching down an electric torch from the mantelpiece. I heard him snick the catch with his thumbnail.

A pale circle of illumination fell upon the bag, and I caught my breath. Two long things, like feelers, were already waving above the leather binding. The waving ceased. Something long, glistening, infinitely revolting, writhed over the edge and dropped with a soft plop to the carpet.

I felt my heart pumping wildly. It was an enormous crimson centipede, fully a foot in length! For a moment it paused there, as if gaining its bearings — then shot forward with incredible rapidity toward Mortimer!

I clutched at the first thing that came to hand — a book — and darted across the room. It had swarmed up his trousers leg and the blood-curdling yell he had given when he saw it still echoed in my ears. He made a feeble effort to beat it off, then flopped against the wall, petrified with terror.

“Quick, Penn! The light!” I yelled. “It may drop!”

The light came on, flooding the room and revealing the final stage of one of the most ghastly examples of poetic justice that I ever remember.

Drawn there apparently by uncanny instinct, the crimson scorpion encircled Mortimer’s throat like the green scarf that had once contained it!

From that day onward I preserved a great respect for Sergeant Hodges. With bare fingers only he plucked the writhing horror clear of his prisoner, dropped it to the carpet and obliterated it calmly with his boot!

By a merciful stroke of chance he was not bitten. Grinning in that queer way men do when death has missed them by inches, he caught Joe as he crumpled up.

The head went back as he laid him on the chesterfield, and for the third time that day we saw the chain of vivid crimson marks.

“The aluminium box, Gray,” whispered Pennington in my ear. “On the chest-of-drawers in your bedroom.”

I hurried out, and the significance of those movements in the passage dawned on me. The box of antidotes was gone. In its place, pinned to the chest by a slender knife, I saw the grim sign of the scorpion!

In the Shadows of St. Roch by Cyrus Chapin

A True Story

She posed as an humble scrub woman, but she represented a ring of international smugglers who dealt in millions.

* * *

Every night I saw the old hag sitting in the window of Mine. Martin’s café, between five and six as I went to my boarding-house for dinner. Sometimes I had an aperitif in the little café, and one night I asked madame who she was.