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 More Praise for The Art of Dying Well

“In plain English and with plenty of true stories to illustrate her advice, Katy
Butler provides a brilliant map for living well through old age and getting from
the health system what you want and need, while avoiding what you don’t.
Armed with this superb book, you can take back control of how you live before
you die.”
—Diane E. Meier, MD, director,
Center to Advance Palliative Care

“Katy Butler has given us a much-needed GPS for navigating aging and death.
The Art of Dying Well is a warm, wise, and straight-forward guide, hugely
helpful to anyone—everyone—who will go through the complex journey to the
end of life.”
—Ellen Goodman, founder, The
Conversation Project

“I wish every one of my patients would read this book—it is like having a wise
friend explaining exactly what you need to know about coping with aging or
living with a serious illness. It’s not only about dying—it’s about getting what
you need from your medical care, including all the insider stuff your doctors and
nurses don’t always want to say. We can all learn from Katy Butler—especially
doctors—about how to talk to each other more clearly and kindly about
decisions that matter.”
—Anthony Back, MD, Medical
Oncology and Palliative Medicine,
codirector, Cambia Palliative Care
Center of Excellence, University of
Washington
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 Contents

INTRODUCTION
The Lost Art of Dying

CHAPTER 1
Resilience
The Wake-Up Call • Building Reserves • Finding Allies in
Preventive Medicine • Weighing Medical Risks • Getting to
Know the Neighbors • Knowing Your Medical Rights • Caring
for the Soul

CHAPTER 2
Slowing Down
When Less Is More • Simplifying Daily Life • Finding Allies in
Slow Medicine, Geriatrics, and a Good HMO • Reviewing
Medications • Reducing Screenings • Making Peace with Loss

CHAPTER 3
Adaptation
A Moment of Truth • Mapping the Future and Making Plans •
Finding Allies in Occupational and Physical Therapy • Disaster-
Proofing Daily Life • Making a Move • Practicing
Interdependence • Being an Example
 CHAPTER 4
Awareness of Mortality
The Art of Honest Hope • Talking to Your Doctor •
Understanding the Trajectory of Your Illness • Preparing the
Family • Finding Allies in Palliative Care • Reflecting on What
Gives Your Life Meaning • Staying in Charge • Thinking
Creatively • Redefining Hope

CHAPTER 5
House of Cards
If Only Someone Had Warned Us • Recognizing Frailty •
Avoiding the Hospital • Finding Allies in House Call Programs
• Upgrading Advance Directives • Coping with Dementia •
Shifting to Comfort Care • Enjoying Your Red Velvet Cake

CHAPTER 6
Preparing for a Good Death
Making Good Use of the Time You Have Left • Finding Allies
in Hospice • Next Steps • Settling Your Affairs • Choosing the
Time of Death • Loving, Thanking, and Forgiving • Getting
Help from Your Tribe

CHAPTER 7
Active Dying
The Tree Needs to Come Down • This Is What Dying Looks
Like • Preparing for a Home Death • Preparing in a Nursing
Home • Giving Care • The Final Hours • Humanizing a
Hospital Death • Improvising Rites of Passage • Welcoming
Mystery • Saying Goodbye

CONCLUSION
Toward a New Art of Dying

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Glossary

Resources

Notes

Permissions

Index
TO BRIAN DONOHUE
anam cara
 Author’s Note

This is a work of nonfiction and its stories are based primarily on interviews with
direct participants. There are no composite characters, rejiggered timelines,
made up quotes, or invented scenes. When names have been changed, it is
disclosed in the notes.
I Worried

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers

flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,

can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows

can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,

am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.

And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.
—MARY OLIVER
 —INTRODUCTION—

The Lost Art of Dying

To our ancestors, death was no secret. They knew what dying looked like. They
knew how to sit at a deathbed. They had customs and books to guide them—
and a great deal of practice.
Consider, for instance, death’s presence in the lives of my great-great-great-
grandparents, Philippa Norman, a household servant, and John Butler, a brush-
and bellows-maker. Poor Quakers, they married in Bristol, England, in 1820 and
had four children, two of whom died before their second birthdays.
In hopes of starting a new life, John sailed to New York in 1827 on the ship
Cosmo; Philippa and their surviving son and daughter followed the next year. In
their rented rooms there, Philippa gave birth to a stillborn son and later sat at
John’s bedside as he died of tuberculosis, now preventable with vaccines and
treatable with antibiotics.
Widowed at thirty-six, Philippa sailed back to Bristol. There she nursed her
beloved daughter Harriet as she, too, died of tuberculosis, in her early twenties.
Only one of Philippa’s five children—her son Philip—would live long enough
to marry and have children of his own. And one of those children, Philip’s
favorite daughter Mary, died in 1869 at the age of thirteen when typhoid fever
swept through her Quaker boarding school.
If you look closely at your own family tree, you will probably discover similar
stories.
People in developed countries now inhabit a changed world, one in which
dying has largely been pushed into the upper reaches of the life span. There it
awaits us, often in shapes our ancestors would not recognize. To have postponed
it so long often means we meet it—as my family did—unprepared.
My father enjoyed a vigorous old age until he was seventy-nine. Then one fall
morning, he came up from his basement study, put on the kettle, had a
devastating stroke, and began a process of slow-motion dying. My mother and I,
who would become his caregivers, had little sense of the terrain ahead, and even
less familiarity with the bewildering subculture of modern medicine.
As I described in my prior book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a
Better Way of Death, we were ignorant of medicine’s limits, and the harm it can
do, when it approaches an aging human being in the same way as it does the
bodies of the young.
Two years later, my father was given a pacemaker to correct his slow
heartbeat. This tiny electronic device made him, as he put it, “live too long” by
forcing his heart to outlive his brain. He spent his last six and a half years
dependent on my exhausted mother, descending step-by-step into deafness,
near-blindness, dementia, and misery. Close to the end, my mother and I
embarked on a modern rite of passage: asking his doctors to deactivate a medical
technology capable of preventing his death without restoring him to a decent
life. His doctors refused.
My father finally died quietly, over the course of five days, in a hospice bed,
with his pacemaker still ticking. My mother and I had quite consciously decided
not to allow his pneumonia (once called “the old man’s friend”) to be treated
with antibiotics. I was fifty-nine then, and had never before sat at a deathbed.
Perhaps it was my great good luck to have been shielded for so long. But it was
also my burden. During my father’s last days, I sat alone for hours in that clean
but generic hospice room, holding his hand, bereft of the “habits of the heart,”
long practiced by my ancestors, that could have made his dying a more bearable
and sacred rite of passage.
We live in a time when advanced medicine wards off death far better than it
helps us prepare for peaceful ones. We feel the loss. Many of us hunger to restore
a sense of ceremony, community, and yes, even beauty, to our final passage. We
want more than pain control and a clean bed. We hope to die well.
 TOWARD A NEW ART OF DYING
In the mid-1400s, when the Black Death was still fresh in cultural memory, an
unnamed Catholic monk wrote a medieval death manual called Ars Moriendi,
or The Art of Dying. Written in Latin and illustrated with woodcuts, it taught
the dying, and those who loved them, how to navigate the physical and spiritual
trials of the deathbed. One of the West’s first self-help books, it went through
sixty-five editions before 1500, and it was translated into all the major languages
of Europe.
In each woodcut, a dying man or woman lies in bed, attended by friends,
spouses, angels, and sometimes a doctor, servant, or favorite hound. Beneath the
bed are demons, urging the gravely ill person to give in to one of five
“temptations” standing in the way of dying in peace. Those were lack of faith,
despair, impatience, spiritual pride, and what the monk called “avarice”—not
wanting to say goodbye to the cherished things and people of the world. We no
longer call them “temptations,” but these emotions—fear, remorse, wanting to
die quickly, and not wanting to die at all—are familiar to most who have sat at a
deathbed.
The antidote, counseled the Ars Moriendi, was not to fight bodily death by
medical means, but to care for the soul. The manuals encouraged the dying to
confess their regrets and fears to their friends, and even provided scripts for
attendants to recite, to reassure dying people of God’s forgiveness and mercy.
The dying were then invited to “commend their souls” into the hands of God
and to relax into a state of grace. The soul, pictured in the woodcuts as a tiny
human being, would leave the body and fly to heaven in the company of an army
of angels. Sometimes a roof tile would be loosened to ease its escape.
In the Ars Moriendi, the dying were not passive patients, but the lead actors
in their lives’ final, most important drama. Even on their deathbed, even in pain,
they had choices and moral agency. Their dying was domestic and communal, as
sacred and as familiar as a baptism or a wedding.
Over the next four centuries, emerging religions wrote their own versions of The
Art of Dying. Anglicans consulted The Waye of Dying Well, while Quakers like
my ancestors studied accounts of the stoic deaths of their devout fellows in Piety
Promoted: In Brief Memorials and Dying Expressions of Some of the Society of
Friends, Commonly Called Quakers. That book, repeatedly updated with new
death stories, was still in print in 1828 when my ancestor John Butler died in
New York.
In those days, dying happened at home under the care of family and friends.
It usually took days or weeks—not years. Children, dogs, and even neighbors
would gather at the bedside to say their farewells. Prayers were spoken. A priest
might visit. Candles were lit. When death came, the local church bell would toll,
informing the entire neighborhood.
After the final breath, relatives or volunteers would ceremonially wash and
dress the body, a tradition observed in nearly all cultures and religions. In
Ireland, a wake, a party blending the holy and the worldly, would be held over
the coffin to celebrate and say goodbye to the dead and to help the living make
the transition back toward life.
In America today, church bells no longer toll when someone dies. In
hospitals and nursing homes, the dead are usually zipped into body bags and
gurneyed out back elevators, as if death itself was a frightening and shameful
failure.
The demons under the bed have taken new forms.
Even though more than three-quarters of Americans still hope to die at
home, fewer than a third of us do so; the rest of us die in hospitals, nursing
homes, or other institutions. Nearly a third spend time in an intensive care unit
in the month before they die, and 17 percent of Americans die in an ICU.
In antiseptic rooms, hospital protocols replace ancient rites. The dying often
can’t say their last words, because they’re sunk in chemical twilights or have
tubes down their throats. Relatives pace the halls, drinking bad coffee from
vending machines, often shocked to hear for the first time, in a drab conference
room, that someone they love is so close to dying. Nurses and doctors sometimes
use the word “torture” to describe what happens in the ICU when a member of
the medical team, or of the family, refuses to accept the coming of death.
Treatment doesn’t stop until someone gathers the courage to say “no.”
The modern custom of reducing dying to a medical procedure, and stripping
it of dignity and humanity, is intensifying in most parts of the United States.
Resistance—inside and outside hospitals—is growing in equal measure. Many
people yearn to reclaim the power to shape how they (and those they love) die,
but aren’t sure how to go about it.

There is a way to a peaceful, empowered, humane death, even in an era of high-

technology medicine. It begins long before the final panicked trip to the
emergency room. It requires navigating—over years, not days—a medical system
poorly structured to meet the needs of aging people, and of people of any age
coping with a prolonged or incurable illness.
That system pours its money, energy, and time into saving lives, curing the
curable, and fixing the fixable. In its division of labor, it looks much like an auto
assembly line. Each specialist works on a single vital organ and puts the body
back on the conveyor belt. Every year, this “fast medicine” track saves countless
victims of violence, car accidents, and heart attacks. In a crisis, it works very well.
But when people confront an incurable condition that can be managed, but
not fixed, the conveyor belt offers more and more procedures that pose greater
and greater risks. The body becomes globally fragile. Now, fixing things organ by
organ, and assuming that living as long as possible is every person’s paramount
goal, can create obstacles to living well despite imperfect health, and to dying in
peace.
Prolonging the life of the body is only one of medicine’s traditional missions.
The others are: preventing disease; restoring and preserving function; relieving
suffering; and attending the dying. As we age, these “quality of life” goals grow in
importance. But conveyor belt medicine, which absorbs the bulk of our
insurance dollars, has largely forgotten how to address them. It rewards cure far
better than care. It often does things to people, not for them, and turns them
into passive bystanders to their own health. It shuttles the sick and fragile from
specialist to specialist, and from doctor’s office to emergency room and back
again. The older or frailer we get, the wider the gap is likely to grow between the
treatments fast medicine offers and the thoughtful, time-consuming gentle,
coordinated care we need most.
In the years I’ve spent listening to hundreds of people’s stories of good and
difficult declines and deaths, I’ve learned one thing: people who are willing to
contemplate their aging, vulnerability, and mortality often live better lives in old
age and illness, and experience better deaths, than those who don’t.
They keep shaping lives of comfort, joy, and meaning, even as their bodies
decline. They get clear-eyed about the trajectory of their illnesses, so they can
plan. They regard their doctors as their consultants, not their bosses. They seek
out medical allies who help them thrive, even in the face of disappointment and
adversity, and they prepare for a good death. They enroll in hospice earlier, and
often feel and function better—and sometimes even live longer—than those
who pursue maximum treatment. They make peace with the coming of death,
and seize the time to forgive, to apologize, and to thank those they love. They
rethink the meaning of “hope.” And they often die with less physical suffering,
and just as much attention to the sacred, as our ancestors did.
But those who give up their power, hoping only to postpone death and never
facing where things are heading, often ride the conveyor belt to its ultimate
destination: a high-tech hospital room. And there, in a place where success is
defined as not dying, they die.

This is not what most of us want. A 2017 poll, asking people to think about the
ends of their lives, found that only one-quarter wanted to live as long as possible,
no matter what. The rest cared much more about the quality of their lives and
deaths: not burdening their families, being at peace spiritually, dying at home,
and dying comfortably. If you are among those three-quarters, this book is for
you. It is intended to help you remain your life’s lead actor from the first inklings
of old age or serious diagnosis, all the way to the end. It can be done.
There is a reform movement dedicated to restoring meaning and dignity to
end-of-life care. Outside medicine, it is reflected in the grassroots meetups called
“Death Cafes” and in the success of best-sellers like Atul Gawande’s Being
Mortal, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Natural Causes, and Paul Kalanithi’s When
Breath Becomes Air. Each book, each meeting, each honest conversation is
ripping away the shame and secrecy that has, in the past century, made us more
terrified of death, and more unequipped for it, than we need be. Within the
health care system, this budding movement goes by many names, including
value-based medicine, shared medical decision-making, Slow Medicine, and
patient-centered care. Its pioneers include many brave, emotionally skilled
oncologists and nurses who have never forgotten that their patients’ needs and
desires should come first, and others trained in primary care, geriatrics,
occupational and physical therapy, palliative care, and hospice. All can coach you
in the art of living well long before they help you die well.

HOW THIS BOOK IS ORGANIZED

This is a step-by-step guide to remaining as healthy and happy as possible, and as
medically informed and unafraid, through the predictable health stages of later
life, from vigorous old age to final breath. I have devoted one chapter to each
stage: Resilience, Slowing Down, Adaptation, Awareness of Mortality, House of
Cards, Preparing for a Good Death, and Active Dying. The goal of each chapter
is to help you thrive and keep you on a path to a good end of life—however you
define it.
Each chapter will suggest ways to step off the conveyor belt of fast medicine
when it no longer serves you, and to find medical allies focused on what matters
most to you, be it staying functional, controlling your physical pain, or
emotionally supporting you and those whom you love. I hope its true stories will
help you understand where each medical choice is likely to lead. Stage by stage,
year by year, and decade by decade, you will probably lean more and more on
gentle approaches that support a good quality of life, even as it winds down. The
balance you strike, and how and when you shift, is up to you.
This book will, I hope, wherever you are on the journey from birth to death,
give a rough sense of the time that remains, and empower you to stay in charge
of a changing relationship to medicine. This is the best way I know to make
room for your own versions of the rites of passage that our ancestors so prized.
The temple of the sacred will be built upon a foundation of the mundane.
It is my deep hope that you will be peaceful and at ease at the moment of
your death. That you may be safe, well supported, and free from fear long before
that day comes. That you have what you need—emotionally, medically,
spiritually, and practically—to live fully until your last breath. That you and
those who love you may be held in the arms of a loving community and a
competent medical team.
That is my desire. I wish this book could guarantee you a vigorous old age, a
short decline, and a swift, painless death at home, surrounded by those who love
you. But as the eighteenth-century German physician Zacharias Schultz wrote,
people have long wished for “a gentle, mild and sweet” death, and feared one
that is “arduous, terrible and hard.” This, he said, had long been the focus of
people’s pious prayers, as well as their pleas to their doctors. Now more than
ever, the way we die can be uncertain, ambiguous, attenuated, and prolonged.
No matter how bravely we adapt to loss and how cannily we navigate our
fragmented health system, things will not always go as we imagine. And yet if we
want to keep shaping our lives all the way to the end, it helps to imagine, to
choose, and to plan.
I am not suggesting we create a new Art of Dying to make death somehow
perfect. Perfection is not a goal of art; it is an ambition of technology and
science. Arts are improvised out of the limited, imperfect materials at hand. A
modern Art of Dying will not make the end of every life painless, but it can
make it bearable, shared, and even, in its own way, beautiful. Here is a compass
and the beginnings of a map.
 —CHAPTER 1—

Resilience
The Wake-Up Call • Building Reserves • Finding Allies in Preventive
Medicine • Weighing Medical Risks • Getting to Know the Neighbors •
Knowing Your Medical Rights • Caring for the Soul
 The River Grows Wider

Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death. . . . The best way to overcome it
is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the
walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal
life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly
contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls.
Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and
in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly
lose their individual being. [Those] who can see life in this way will not suffer from
the fear of death, since the things [they care] for will continue.
—BERTRAND RUSSELL
You may find this chapter useful if you recognize yourself in some of the
following statements:

• You easily blew out all the candles on your fiftieth or sixtieth birthday
cake.
• Aches, pains, and health problems are annoying but not limiting. You
pay your own bills, make your own medical decisions, and generally
enjoy life.
• You wonder why they make the numbers on credit cards so small and
fuzzy.
• Your hair is thinning in familiar places and sprouting in strange ones.
• You misplace keys—and names. You’re not crazy about technology
updates.
• A late night blows a hole in the next day. Sometimes you’re in bed by
nine. You’ve discovered naps.
• Getting in shape takes longer, and the results are less impressive. You
injure more easily and recover more slowly.
• Some friends have died. You find obituaries interesting.
• You sometimes sense that your time on earth is limited and precious.
 THE WAKE-UP CALL
Doug von Koss was born in the Depression and raised on the banks of the
Mississippi River in a houseboat his father built from salvaged lumber. In the
1960s he settled in San Francisco, where he and his wife, Clydene, raised their
son and daughter. He made his living as a stagehand, theater carpenter, light
board operator, and set dresser for films like George Lucas’s Return of the Jedi.
He’s now eighty-five, tall, elegant, and commanding. Widowed for a decade, he
lived in a neat, rented bungalow on a hilly San Francisco street.
In his fifties, while he was working as prop master for the San Francisco
Opera, he led a workshop in mask making at a men’s conference in the redwoods
of northern California. The men, who’d just met, nervously labored over their
masks in silence, with pinched faces and little joy. The poet Robert Bly, one of
the conference organizers, nudged Doug’s arm and said, “Get them singing.”
Doug drew the men outside. After twenty minutes of belting out camp songs
under the redwoods, the men loosened up, started talking with each other, and
returned to sculpting their masks with abandon. Ever since, Doug has been
flying around the country, helping groups build community by leading them in
traditional songs, chants, and poems that he’s gathered from cultures around the
world.
Not long after his seventy-ninth birthday, Doug found the steps up to his
front door growing steeper by the day. At first, he brushed off his fatigue and
breathlessness as normal aging. Then one midsummer afternoon, as he was
pushing a shopping cart through the supermarket, he felt light-headed, dizzy,
and short of breath. He trundled over to the one place where he could sit down:
the do-it-yourself blood pressure machine near the pharmacy. He doesn’t
remember now whether his reading was too high or too low, only that it wasn’t
good.
The next morning in a medical building downtown, his doctor stopped in
the middle of recording Doug’s electrocardiogram and called an ambulance.
EMTs took Doug down the elevator on a gurney. Twenty-four hours later, in a
cardiac lab at a nearby hospital, doctors inserted a small tubular metal cage called
a stent into an artery leading to the heart’s largest blood vessel. “One of the main
vessels was plugged,” Doug said. “I could have gone belly up.” He’d been
millimeters from a heart attack.
The stent pushed aside a clump of fatty plaque, propped open the artery
walls, and increased the flow of oxygen-rich blood to Doug’s heart, body, and
brain. He found it almost instantly easier to climb his front stairs. “Life became
incredibly sweet,” he remembered. “I could stop and look at a tree, look at a
flower, and really see it. I felt really alive, and at the same time very fragile.”
The stent, he sensed, was a temporary reprieve. Why, he wondered, had fat,
cholesterol, and calcium congealed in his arteries? He didn’t smoke or drink,
never touched bacon, and rode his bike in Golden Gate Park three times a week.
“But I got the message,” he said. “Pay more attention, Doug. There’s a line
between disease and optimum wellness, and you’re sliding into disease.”
His hospital offered a four-month program of intensive cardiac
rehabilitation, paid for by Medicare. Three times a week at a rehab center, he
strapped on a heart monitor and pedaled a stationary bicycle while a physical
therapist helped him gradually increase his heart rate. A dietician nudged him
toward the Mediterranean Diet—less meat, dairy, sugar, and packaged foods;
more vegetables, whole grains, olive oil, fish, and fruit. That, combined with
more strenuous exercise, halved Doug’s risk of having a heart attack or dying
within five years—and more importantly, it substantially extended the years he
will probably spend thriving.
When the cardiac program ended, Doug joined a Y and started running on a
treadmill three times a week. At eighty-two, he began lifting weights. “I looked
around the gym and saw men and women, whom I knew were as old as I was,
walking very vigorously,” he said. “I wanted that, too.” He built muscle and
improved his balance—crucial capacities, given that muscles naturally wither
with age, agility lessens, bones grow brittle, and independence can be devastated
by a fall. “It started a great wellness loop,” Doug said. “More exercise, healthier
eating, better sleep, and an improved sense of well-being.” At a recent checkup,
his doctor said, “Don’t change a thing.”
The health stage I call Resilience, sometimes called “young” or healthy old
age, is a time when you still have the physical capacity to reverse
substantial health problems. Most people in the Resilience stage are in
their fifties, sixties, and early seventies, but some are exceptionally athletic
older people, like Doug von Koss. Length of life is impossible to predict
precisely, but people at this stage usually have at least another decade left
to live.
This is the time to take inventory, build reserves, and assess what needs
shoring up. The major threats to your future well-being will be: physical
weakness, isolation, heart disease, lung disease, diabetes, and dementia.
You can build bulwarks against them—and prolong your time in
Resilience—by exercising, eating better, and widening your circle of
friends and passionate interests. Lifestyle habits—especially smoking,
being sedentary, eating poorly, and drinking too much alcohol—are
responsible for 70 percent of the degenerative diseases that make later life
difficult. Change these habits, even after the age of fifty-five, and you can
cut your health risks as much as sevenfold—a better payoff than almost all
drugs.
I don’t mean to suggest that food asceticism and strenuous exercise will
ward off death and decline forever. They won’t really make you younger
next year, though they may keep you happier, stronger, and more
functional. Given that our bodies age at the cellular level in more than five
thousand specific ways, there’s little point in strengthening physical
muscles without developing the spiritual and social strength to cope with
the inevitable loss of powers, and with death itself. But before you must
accept the things you cannot change, you can seize the time to prepare for
what’s ahead, and to change the things you can.
 BUILDING RESERVES
In developed countries, few people die of disease in the first half of life. Most
early deaths result from accidents, violence, drug overdoses, and suicide. In late
midlife, the picture changes. Cancer becomes a major cause of death in the mid-
forties and continues to climb throughout the fifties and sixties. Deaths from
heart disease rise in the sixties and seventies, from lung disease in the eighties,
and from dementia in the nineties. All cause physical suffering long before they
kill, and all are profoundly shaped by how you live.
I suggest you begin by doing what requires the most of you and the least of
medicine. The most effective first step (other than quitting smoking) is to walk
energetically every day. People over sixty-five who do so increase their lung
capacities, get more oxygen to the brain, and expand the size of the
hippocampus, a brain organ crucial to memory. As a side benefit, walking
around malls, Farmers Markets, and to downtown coffee shops amplifies social
connections, another delightful way of improving health, brain function, and
happiness. Most of this is not news. But if you’ve forgotten the deep pleasure
and self-confidence that can follow half an hour or more of aerobic exercise,
especially in nature or with a friend, consider reacquainting yourself. Even late in
the game, getting more active has huge health benefits.
Exercise becomes more challenging as joints grow creaky and minor injuries
heal more slowly. Improvise, adapt, and overcome: get moving in any way that
makes you break a sweat and gives you joy. Many people find delight in ballroom
dancing, biking, or swimming; others find it easier to get started—and to keep
going—by scheduling a regular exercise date with a friend. If your feet or knees
hurt, consider upgrading shoes or improving your posture or gait with the help
of a podiatrist, a physical therapist, or a practitioner of an alternative approach,
like Feldenkrais or the Alexander Technique. Stay flexible and be willing to
substitute a new activity whenever one falls by the wayside: if you can’t run
anymore, try water aerobics; if you lose your partner, explore group activities like
Greek or country line dancing. No matter what happens, keep going.
The body’s capacity to heal, even at this relatively late date, is astounding. Tom
Murphy, a former Associated Press journalist who’d once run a marathon, was
sixty-two when he was diagnosed with diabetes. He’d been working a stressful
and unsatisfying job and, he said, had “fallen into my mom’s habit of eating
mostly cookies and ice cream, frozen pizzas, Danishes, and lots of bread.”
He took a new job and moved from the San Francisco suburbs to rural
Mendocino county. By the time he met his new primary care doctor, he weighed
225 pounds and had a trifecta of late-life warning flags: high cholesterol, high
blood pressure, and high blood sugar. His alarmed physician recommended he
see a cardiologist immediately and start taking a cholesterol-lowering statin, a
blood pressure–reducing diuretic, and the blood sugar–lowering drug
metformin.
Tom looked at his friends and family, many of whom were already on these
drugs, and saw his own future. “I have a friend who went blind from diabetes,
another who can’t walk, and a third who died of a heart attack,” he said. “All
could have changed their diets in their fifties, but waited too long. I wasn’t going
to make the same mistake.”
He took blood pressure medication to lower his stroke risk, but asked for a
grace period before adding other medications. What followed was, he said, “a
very emotional three months. Changing how I lived and ate became more
important than work, friends, reading, even my marriage.” He jogged a mile and
a quarter every morning, starting at a snail’s pace and gradually increasing his
speed and distance. He stopped eating all foods with added sugar, and other
“things that had made my life ‘richer.’ ”
He struggled to change his sleep patterns. He experienced the highs of
exercise and the lows of accompanying muscle pain. He wrestled with the drug-
like withdrawal effects of quitting sugar, and, as he put it, “the stress of facing
multiple life-threatening diseases.” To keep going he kept a diary of what he ate
and when he exercised, and turned for support to his wife and to a friend who
successfully managed her Type 1 diabetes without medication.
Three months later, his cholesterol level was normal for the first time in his
life, and so was his blood pressure. His blood sugar levels have fallen more than a
third and are now just a hair above normal. His diet is based on fresh vegetables
from his wife’s garden and smaller amounts of lean turkey, cheese, brown rice,
whole wheat bread, and sugar-free jam. Every day he jogs two miles and rides his
bike. He weighs 170 pounds and takes no medications. “Yes, it was hard,” he
said. “It’s still hard. But my doctor is very happy and I’m never going back.”

FINDING ALLIES IN PREVENTIVE MEDICINE

The most helpful physician at this stage is a good primary care doctor who will
coach you to prevent disease. It’s not enough to get a yearly lecture on smoking,
drinking, or your weight. You want someone who will enthusiastically refer you
to physical therapy, or to an effective support group, such as Alcoholics
Anonymous, a smoking cessation group, or the diabetes prevention classes
offered at many local Ys and covered by Medicare. If your blood pressure,
cholesterol, or blood sugar remain high despite lifestyle changes, talk to your
doctor about medication: the payoffs are significant for people with a decade or
more of life ahead.
The need for a geriatrician—a physician who specializes in the aging body—
may not yet seem urgent. But one way or another, it’s crucial to find a doctor
who cares about you as a whole person long before a health crisis. Many fine
doctors who refuse new Medicare patients will continue to treat older people
with whom they have established relationships. Look for someone who
genuinely cares about his or her patients—and if you’re not happy, switch. Now
is the time to find someone who will be with you for the long haul.
If your primary care doctor is older than you are, consider finding someone
younger who won’t retire before you die and has an office close by. (The same
goes for dentists, hairdressers, and car mechanics: a twenty-mile drive that is easy
today may be harder tomorrow.)
Take advantage of every opportunity to establish rapport with a single doctor
who will act as your point person in the world of fragmented medicine that
most of us encounter. Ask your doctor to look up from the computer, and to
give you a full physical examination. Medicare and some private insurance now
reimburse for various “wellness” appointments, including an introductory visit,
yearly cognitive assessments, and advance care planning. Use them to help your
doctor get to know you well, and to make sure that you share the same goals.

WEIGHING MEDICAL RISKS

Taking advantage of what he calls Medicare’s “bumper-to-bumper warranty,”
Doug von Koss has had cataract surgery and two knee replacements. They were
great moves, postponing further disability, reducing pain, and keeping him
happily driving and exercising. But with age, the risks of many procedures rise.
“The physiology of the aging body is different: more vulnerable, and more
susceptible to the adverse effects of drugs, tests, and operations,” cautions Iona
Heath, MD, a former president of the Royal College of General Practitioners in
the United Kingdom. “This is not ageism; it is person-centered care.” Make sure
you understand the goal of any proposed treatment: Will it improve how you
function day to day, or, in exchange for the hope of more time on earth, are you
risking making an existing disability worse? Some people end up with worse pain
after back surgery, an outcome common enough to have earned the name “failed
back surgery syndrome.” Get a second opinion from a physiatrist or other
informed non-surgeon, and before agreeing to surgery, try a year of intense
physical therapy or a back pain management program.
Just as it’s a gamble to buy the first year of a new car model, it is dangerous to
be a guinea pig for a medical innovation. Many new medical devices targeted at
aging people enter the marketplace with little vetting, thanks to a loophole in
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations. Some of these
grandfathered-in devices, like metal-on-metal hip implants that crippled patients
by shedding metal shavings into their tissues, pose “great safety risks,” three
eminent doctors warned in the New England Journal of Medicine. “Implanted
body parts,” they noted, “cannot be recalled as easily as defective auto parts.”
Above all, guard your brain. It is the keystone of continued independence
and freedom. People over sixty are much more vulnerable to “postoperative
cognitive impairment” immediately after surgery, and are more likely to still be
coping with confusion and memory difficulties three months later. Open-heart
Another random document with
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 Inspector Druet glanced uncertainly at McCarty and the latter
nodded, a world of mingled demand and entreaty in the slight
gesture. The inspector hesitated for a moment and then drew a deep
breath.
“You are!” he replied. “I arrest you, Henry Orbit, for the murders of
Alfred Hughes, Horace Goddard and Lucette Guerin!”
The two other officials after a startled glance between them
advanced one on each side of Orbit, but he shrugged and took a
step forward.
“That being the case, I shall not say another word. Now you may
play on this ridiculous farce for the moment. In the meantime, may I
ask your indulgence for a few minutes? I desire merely to seat
myself at that desk over there and write a short note to the one
person in the world most interested, besides myself, in this
extraordinary situation. I shall seal and address the envelope and
leave it upon the desk, for you to deliver at your discretion. Lock the
drawers of the desk if you will; I can assure you, however, that I have
no intention of taking any weapon from them to defend myself or
attempt assault upon you!”
The contempt in his tone was galling and even the inspector
winced beneath it, so compelling and dominant was the personality
of the man before him. He nodded.
“Write your note, Mr. Orbit, only make it short. If the news of this
gets out before we can take you downtown all the reserves in the city
couldn’t protect you!”
Dennis turned in stupefied amazement to McCarty, but the latter
was watching Orbit who had seated himself at the desk. He wrote,
not hurriedly but without hesitation; a faintly amused smile curved his
mobile lips, and when he had finished he sealed the envelope with a
steady hand, wrote a name and a single line beneath it, propped it
against the inkwell and rose.
“Now, gentlemen, I am at your disposal,” he said. “I am ready to
accompany you—if you can find me!”
 The last words were uttered in a tone of ringing challenge and his
hand slipped beneath the edge of the desk. On the instant, before
the five men grouped before him could move or draw a breath the
room was filled with rolling billows of black, foul smoke which
belched forth in clouds from around the wainscoting of the wall as
from the mouth of a volcano, obliterating everything about them.
Startled, warning exclamations came from the two officials and a
cry from the inspector:
“To the windows! Look out for poison gas!”
McCarty had groped grimly forward but Dennis was more
thoroughly at home in the crisis than he had been at any time since
the inception of the affair. He shouted directions and
encouragement, darting about as unconcernedly and with as much
certitude as though his eyes could penetrate the murky, opaque
gloom which enveloped him.
The sound of their own rushing footsteps and the successive
crash of furniture as the officials lunged against it drowned out all
others until close at hand a door slammed and a mocking chuckle of
laughter seemed to drift back to them.
“He’s gone!” One of the officials gasped, as he found a window at
last and flung it open.
“He won’t go far!” the inspector retorted grimly. “Find all the
windows and doors and let’s get a draught through! I want that letter
he wrote!”
In the rush of fresh air which came swirling in, the room rapidly
cleared and they saw that it was indeed empty of any presence save
their own but the white square of the envelope tilted against the
inkwell was plainly discernible and the inspector seized upon it.
Choking, strangling, with smarting, streaming eyes, he peered
closely at the inscription and then threw up his head.
“Great guns! It’s addressed to McCarty!”
 CHAPTER XXII
ANNIHILATION

M CCARTY stumbled forward and took the envelope held out to

him, turning to the window where he bent forward for the rush
of cool air to play over his face. It was addressed simply to: “Ex-
Roundsman McCarty” and the second line read: “Delivered by hand.”
Slitting it open he glanced quickly down the few lines it contained
and then at his companions.
“’Tis for all of us, I’m thinking,” he said. “Listen!
“‘My dear McCarty. It has been a pleasure to meet such a man as
you and we part with regret, at least on my side. You are quite correct
in your deductions as far as you have expounded them and I regret
that I cannot wait to hear you reconstruct your complete case but time
presses. The last drawer of this desk at which I write has a false
bottom; remove it and you will find a portion of my diary for the past
fortnight, placed there in readiness for this eventuality. I bequeath it to
you for your further information and in most sincere admiration, for
where I go I may take nothing material with me, although I shall not
leave my body behind. I am not going to death but to annihilation.
Checkmate!
“‘Henry Orbit.’”
“What does he mean?” the inspector demanded. “What kind of an
escape has he planned? Not take his body with him and yet not
leave it behind? What’s that about ‘annihilation’?”
“We may know for ourselves if we stand here guessing about it
instead of stopping him!” McCarty thrust the letter into his pocket and
made for the door beyond which the two French servants and the
Chinese one had halted. “He’s planned to destroy himself entirely,
body and all, and if it’s by blowing the whole house up I’d not be
surprised! Come on!”
 The others hurried after him but in the hall he paused to confront
Ching Lee.
“’Twas the man you worked for, Orbit, who was the murderer!” he
announced. “You knew that, though; you suspected it from the first,
after the queer way Hughes took sick from drinking the medicine
Orbit mixed for him before dinner! That’s why you went next morning
dressed like a Chinese laborer down to the quarter where Hughes
died, to get what dope you could about it! If you don’t want to get
pinched for being accessory, you come clean! Which way did he go
just now?”
“I did not see.” Ching Lee’s face had betrayed no slightest flicker
of emotion and his tone was perfectly composed. “I came upstairs
only when the shouts and the odor of smoke led me to think that the
house was on fire. I saw no one, nothing.”
“Where is his laboratory? Where is it that he locks himself away
sometimes, a place that none of the rest of you enters?” McCarty
rapped out the questions like shots from an automatic. “There’s not a
minute to spare! Is it upstairs or down?”
Ching Lee was silent, but Jean with chattering teeth spoke up
suddenly:
“It is upstairs! I see him when I reach the head of the staircase. He
rush’ from that room through all the smoke and he is laughing! Then
he mount to the next floor and on above, and in the attic there is a
room which none but he may enter, which he guards with a heavy
steel door—!”
“Show us where it is!” McCarty ordered. “That’s where I fell down. I
might have figured that a guy with his brains would have looked out
for everything, even failure, and planned a way out for himself!”
He started on a shambling trot for the back stairs, with the others
crowding after, but Jean slipped past him and leaped up three steps
at a time. Past the guest rooms and servants’ quarters to the
storerooms and the attic above the searchers hurried, pausing only
before a small wooden door.
 “I thought you said ’twas made of steel!” McCarty turned the
handle and then put his shoulder to a panel. “We’ll have to break
through.”
“It is but the false one, the cover,” explained Jean. “Just beyond is
the real door of steel.”
“You’re sure he came this way? There’s nowhere else he could be
hiding?” McCarty glanced at the Frenchman and then turned to his
companions. “Stand back! We’ll have this down!”
But the small door was stouter than it looked and it required the
combined efforts of Dennis and one of the officials as well before it
yielded and crashed inward, only to lean, as Jean had said, against
a second door a foot or two beyond, which presented to their
impatient gaze a solid sheet of tempered steel.
“We’d never get through that except with soup and God knows
what’s beyond it that would blow us all into the next world!” McCarty
exclaimed. “Inspector, will you ’phone for an expert from
headquarters? There’s nothing to do but wait. We know where he is,
though; that’s some comfort!”
The inspector hurried downstairs and the others grouped
themselves before the wall of steel separating them from that which
lay on the other side, after clearing away the débris of the wrecked
door.
“There’s not a sound from in there!” Dennis moved over to
McCarty. “What’s he doing, do you suppose? Fixing a train of
powder, belike?”
“He is not!” McCarty responded. “If he’d meant to blow us up he’d
have done it down in his sitting-room instead of turning that infernal
smoke on us. He must have had that all fixed and ready to blind us,
so that he could make whatever kind of a getaway he’d arranged.
You couldn’t hear a cannon go off behind that solid steel, but
whatever he’s doing, ’tis only to himself; you’ll mind the letter he
wrote me? He wouldn’t have spoke of his diary unless he intended
us to read it and it’s all part and parcel of his character, Denny. He
couldn’t bear to go without the world knowing how clever he was!”
 “‘Clever!’” Dennis shuddered. “But what did he do it all for, Mac?
You asked him that when you accused him and he didn’t answer.
He’d no reason and yet he wasn’t crazy! He’d such a grand manner
and a way of making you feel like the scum of the earth in his
presence without even trying to, that I would never have suspected
him in the world! How you came to guess it is beyond me!”
“I’d the key to it all right from the start, only I didn’t know it!”
McCarty responded as the inspector bounded up the stairs. “I’m only
disgusted that the truth didn’t come to me sooner, and maybe the
little lad and the nurse Lucette would have been spared.”
“Two of the best men in the department are on their way!” the
inspector announced. “I had to stop to send in a second call for
reserves to hold back the crowd that’s trying to storm the gates, for
the news has got out somehow! Martin and Yost sent in the first call
but the boys who responded can do no more with that mob than a
one-armed sheriff in a riot!—Any sign from in there?”
The officials shook their heads and Jean remarked:
“I have seen once, when he goes in and does not know that I am
near to him. Before he close the door I think that I see others still
beyond this, but they are open and at the end is a room with shelves
covered with bottles and glass tubes of a strange shape. On the floor
is a great round tank of some metal higher than one’s head! I think
then that he is perhaps a scientist, a great man! It is only after
Hughes die and then the little Horace disappear that I begin to think
he is a demon!—Here is André.”
The stout chef had labored up the stairs and behind him the
flowing robes of Ching Lee moved like a shadow.
“You shall get him?” the former demanded. “You shall put him in
that chair of electricity? Parbleu! When I think of the little Lucette so
pretty and good, and the little Horace, I could run my knives through
his heart! It is I who give him with these hands the glass of milk with
which he drugs the little Horace and then I watch while that mountain
of coal descend into the chute and I suspect nothing! It is only when
my countrywoman die there before him and they say it is the poison
gas that I think of this room and the so horrible odors which come
from it when he open the door!”
“When did you see him come here last?” McCarty asked.
“On the afternoon of Wednesday, but a half hour before he cry out
for help from the conservatory where Lucette dies!” He spread out
his small fat hands in an expressive gesture. “I think it is to this room
that he comes for I am in mine with the door a little open and he
pass quickly and without sound; going up the stairs. He carries
something round and blue on the end of a stick and I think that I
must be mistake’ for it appears like the toy balloon of a child!
Nevertheless I watch and in a so short time, a few minutes, he
comes down again, still carrying the balloon. I tell of it to Ching Lee
later but he has not seen it in the conservatory and he does not
believe.”
“Look here, Ching Lee, why didn’t you tell somebody what you
knew?” McCarty addressed the Chinaman who stood aside, silent
and seemingly impassive. “Why did you let Orbit go on with his
crimes when a word to us would have put him where he could do no
more harm?”
“Mr. Orbit is rich, of a great family and power in high places, and—
he is a white man.” Ching Lee responded in his unemotional
singsong tones. “I too am of high degree and not without honor in my
own land but I was forced to leave it and here I am a poor man, a
servant without friends or influence—and I am yellow. Who would
believe my word against his when I had no proof? I would have been
cast into your prison but even there Mr. Orbit would have reached
me and silenced my tongue. There was the little Fu Moy to consider,
my nephew who is to be educated and go back with much to teach
my people; I could not leave him without protection. I could only wait
for you, who are white men, too, to see what lay before your eyes.”
“There’s something in that!” McCarty conceded. “Isn’t that the bell?
If it’s the men we’ve sent for bring them right up.”
“It is possible that he have shoot himself before we arrive here,”
remarked Jean. “There is a pistol which he keeps always in a drawer
of the little table beside his bed and to-day when he thrust me aside
at the door of the card-room to rush out and learn why all those men
with shovels have come I feel it in his hip pocket as he pushes his
way past. It is loaded always; that I know, for more than once I have
looked at it.”
Dennis glanced questioningly at McCarty who shook his head.
“He’s taking his body with him where he’s gone,” he reminded the
other in an undertone. “He’ll not do that with the shot of a gun!”
Ching Lee reappeared with the two experts armed with tools and
bags. After a cursory examination of the steel door one of the latter
turned to the inspector.
“Can’t be done in less than an hour unless we take a chance and
blow it off, and you said there might be explosives behind it that
would wreck the block,” he announced. “I don’t promise to do it in
that time but we’ll work as fast as we can.”
“Let’s go and have a look at that diary in the meantime,”
suggested McCarty. “Jean thinks there are more doors beyond like
this one and it may be night before they’re open! The boys can let us
know when they’ve got through.”
“All right.” The inspector turned, addressing the two officials. “Want
to come along? If it really is his diary, it ought to be about the
strangest document that ever fell into the hands of the department.”
With a few minor directions to the rest he led the way back to the
sitting-room and closed the door. The air was now quite clear of
smoke and only a faint, noisome odor lingered behind.
McCarty seated himself in the chair lately occupied by Orbit
himself and drew out the last drawer of the desk. It was filled with
open envelopes bearing cancelled stamps and he scattered them on
the floor in his haste to empty it.
“He told the truth about the false bottom,” he announced. “I can
feel it give but I wonder how does it open?”
One of the officials stepped forward.
 “Shall I try, Mac?” he asked. “I was a custom house inspector
years ago and there isn’t a smuggler’s dodge I’m not on to; that
either lifts or slides and there may be a spring.”
“Go to it,” McCarty acquiesced briefly, and the other complied.
“Look here, Mac!” The inspector looked up suddenly. “Who
chloroformed Orbit the other night?”
McCarty chuckled.
“He did, himself! I got that the minute I saw the bottle, for there
wasn’t enough gone from it to put a kitten out! The towel was
soaked, but with water, and he’d just sprinkled enough chloroform on
it to smell. He didn’t want to lose his wits, you see, only to make us
think he was unconscious so he could get a line on what we were
after and hear our talk. He must have heard us coming up the stairs
and looked out or else doped out that it would be us, for it was
Denny and me that broke in that night. He paid me a return call the
next and rigged up a gun to shoot me in the dark, but I found it first
and fired it through the roof!”
“’Twas that I heard!” Dennis exclaimed. “Glory be! Well I knew you
were too old a hand to let it go off accidental, like you told me, but
little I thought you’d been near murdered, or I’d not have left you,
duty or no duty—!”
“There you are!” The detective lieutenant rose from his knees with
the false bottom of the drawer in his hand. “It was a new one on me
after all, but I managed to work it. There’s a lot of papers underneath
that look as though they’d been torn from a blankbook and they’re
covered with writing.”
“It’s Orbit’s!” McCarty gathered the loose sheets up and spread
them on the desk before him. “Do you mind when he wrote that list
for me here in this very room, of the guests he’d had during the last
few months? The writing is the same, and ’tis dated; it looks like the
diary, all right! Do you want to read it, inspector? I’m not much good
at it, and if he uses as big words as he talks with—!”
Inspector Druet took the pages from him and seated himself near
the window. For a long moment he sat silent glancing over the
papers and as he read his face darkened and then paled. Then with
a sudden start he looked over to McCarty.
“My God, this is frightful! The man was the greatest wretch that
ever lived! He must have been mad, of course, but listen! This is
dated the thirteenth; that would be a week ago last Monday.—‘I
succeeded in making it to-day from the formula and tried it on the
white kitten from next door. The result was amazing! If it had been
known a few years ago the history of the war would have been
changed! If I could only experiment with it on a human, what a
magnificent way it would be for me to learn the thrill of that last
experience that awaits me! To take the place of providence, to play
at fate, to make destiny! The longing haunts me, I cannot rest, I must
know that ultimate sensation of power! I can’t use the gas, though; I
don’t need to see the death I bring about and it must come far from
the house. It will have to be the Calabar bean after all, but whom
shall I choose? Not André, his soufflées are admirable, and Jean is
the only servant who ever dusted my room and left things where I
could find them; not Fu Moy or Ching Lee, for one never knows with
these silent, yellow people when revenge will come. Hughes’
services are invaluable to me but he is a dead loss to society, it
might even be benefited by his removal. I must decide!’”
“That was it!” McCarty nodded. “The longing for power, to feel that
he was the biggest man in the world; ambition with a warped turn to
it! ’Twas nothing but the lust of killing born in him that he wouldn’t
admit even to himself!—But go on, sir. What’s the next?”
“Two days later, the fifteenth; that was Wednesday. He says: ‘It
must be Hughes. The neighbors are still amusing after their fashion
and I could not be sure they would go outside of the Mall
immediately. Physostigmine is soluble in alcohol; I could put a grain
or two in wine and leave it about but that will not do. I must give it to
Hughes with my own hand. I shall have to await my opportunity, then
give him a drink and send him on an errand to a strange part of
town. I cannot wait!’—That’s all of that entry and the next one is
midnight after the murder.—‘It is done! Hughes is dead and I have
killed him! I could shout, sing, dance as wildly as a savage about a
pyre and yet I am strangely calm, like a god! I am a god, for I hold
the power of life and death, I know what it is at last! The only
drawback was that it was too easy; Hughes has been dissipating
lately and it gave me an idea to-night. I mixed some bitters together
with a dash of absinthe—just enough for one dose—added two
grains of the powdered bean and put it in an old tonic bottle. When
Hughes came to lay out my things for dinner I told him he looked
badly, needed more air and exercise and persuaded him to go out
and take a long walk, breathing deeply. Then I gave him the drink I
had prepared,—poured it out for him myself and watched it pass with
a gurgle down his gross, fat neck! I looked at him when he put down
the glass and could not realize that it was actually accomplished!
The man standing there before me was a dead man even though he
still moved and talked and probably thought of his dinner, and it was
I who had done this! It had rested in my hands whether he should
live or die and I had condemned and executed him! I shall never
forget that moment of exquisite exhilaration, the ecstasy of
omnipotence! But I was discreet, I controlled myself. I warned
Hughes that the medicine might make him feel a trifle ill, might even
restrict his breathing but he must walk it off and he would be greatly
benefited. He actually thanked me—thanked me for bringing death
upon him! All the evening while Goddard and the Sloanes were here,
I kept my triumph to myself but nothing could withstand my sense of
power. My bridge was unsurpassed—I knew that—and I played the
organ as I never have played before!—And then it came, that for
which I had been waiting. Three blockheads from the police arrived
to tell me of Hughes’ death!’”
McCarty chuckled grimly.
“Fu Moy overheard that conversation and told me about it only to-
day—between Orbit and Hughes, I mean, about the medicine. He
don’t say anything about the fire after, does he?”
Dennis looked up quickly as the inspector glanced ahead and
nodded:
“Here it is.—‘There was only one flaw in this magic evening. I used
the powdered bean from the smaller box and it was just enough. I
did not open the other, forgetting how long it had been since its
contents had been exposed to the air, but thrust it down in a seam of
the cushioned chair and almost immediately after I had gone
downstairs spontaneous combustion occurred.’”
“What-t!” Dennis sat forward tensely, and McCarty chuckled again.
“I tried to read you that about Calabar bean in that article we had
at the fire house yesterday afternoon but you wouldn’t listen!” he
said. “I didn’t know what was this spontaneous combustion at all, till
you happened to explain this morning, little thinking what was on my
mind!... But what else does Orbit say about it?”
“He goes on: ‘Fu Moy discovered it and Ching Lee put it out.
Fortunately they did not find the box of Calabar bean.’—He raves on
again about his feeling of power, glorying in it, but that is all.” The
inspector slipped the page aside and glanced at the next. “This is
dated Sunday, the nineteenth. ‘The police were active yesterday but
they are quite at sea. I have no fear that they will discover anything,
although the one called McCarty seems to be possessed of a certain
amount of native shrewdness and logic. No uproarious comedy has
ever been so excruciatingly amusing as this investigation but I am
maintaining my pose of regretful employer of a worthy servant. I only
wish that I could have used the gas; I made a fresh supply to-day
only to be compelled to dissipate it unused. It is maddening! The
death of Hughes has not satisfied this craving but intensified it.
Death by violence, death that I may experience the sensation of
having caused it, while it is taking place—I hunger for it!’”
The shadows were lengthening in the room and the cries of the
mob outside the gates had subsided to a sullen murmur. In the
moment of silence that followed the inspector’s reading of the
paragraph, soft, slippered feet padded along the hall and Ching Lee
stood before them.
“The door has been opened,” he announced. “There is a second
steel one behind it, even stronger than the first, but the men are
trying a different acid and drill.”
“Very well, Ching Lee. Turn on the lights, will you?” The inspector
motioned toward the switch and in an instant the room was flooded
with a brilliant glow from the low lamps scattered all about. “Tell the
men to be as quick as they can, and let me know when they have
finished; no one is to enter that room until we come.”
The butler bowed and turning went up the stairs again. McCarty
eyed the papers still remaining in the inspector’s hands.
“Is there any entry in the diary for Monday?”
“Only this, but it means a lot, considering what came later: ‘Ching
Lee reminded me that the coal has not been ordered this season.
The dust from it is horrible, defiling my flowers and soiling
everything. I shall not arrange for it until frost has come. Yet there is
something fascinating, relentless, about the way it rushes down the
chute like a miniature, sable avalanche. If we were pigmies, what
death it could deal!’—Oh, there’s no doubt about it, Mac; the man is
unquestionably mad!”
“His ancestors weren’t; not all of them, at any rate!” McCarty
responded grimly. “If the next that he’s written is on Tuesday night,
it’ll be after Horace was killed.”
“It is!” Inspector Druet’s voice shook with loathing. “This is the
most damnable thing, Mac! He must have sat in that very chair
where you are now, gloating over it as he wrote!—‘Once more I have
usurped the prerogative of providence! I have taken a useless, sickly
life, foredoomed to failure because it lacked the stamina to combat
difficulties. Weakness! the only sin in the world! Had Horace
Goddard lived he would have profaned art with mediocrity and as I
look at the masterpieces about me I rejoice that his poor efforts are
destined never to see the light,—destined because I so willed it, I am
destiny! It was the luminal that put the thought into my mind,
although I had no idea then whom I should remove. I forgot I
possessed any till I looked over the store in my laboratory this
morning. Two grains of that innocent looking coal tar product would
bring oblivion in twenty minutes and the coma would last for two or
three hours, during which time death might be brought about in a
dozen different ways! I played with the thought, it fascinated me, and
I could fix my mind on nothing else, although Giambattista was
coming to play this afternoon. If I could only know once more those
intoxicating moments of last Friday night!
“‘It was, then, just after lunch, that Horace slipped over to ask if he
might study my Fragonard for a little while. He came by way of the
side door and none of the servants had seen him. I realized this and
as I looked at him it came to me what a really unnecessary life his
was, except in the fatuous eyes of his parents! What a subject for
that coal tar product—and then I thought of the coal itself, that Ching
Lee had spoken about yesterday. How easy it would be to render
Horace insensible and bury him under an avalanche of coal!
“‘I could not resist the idea, it took possession of me! I coaxed the
boy up to my sitting-room, induced him to drink a glass of milk in
which I dropped two miraculous grains of luminal, and then I went
and telephoned the coal-dealer. If he could not deliver, the boy would
wake none the worse and my plan would only be deferred, but the
order went through and when I rejoined him Horace was already
drowsy. I shall never forget the exquisite agony of suspense during
that half-hour. Horace slept at last and although I had to call the coal-
dealer twice more my plan succeeded! I carried Horace to the cellar
unseen and just in time, for the coal arrived and the crash of it
tumbling down the chute was like the roll of maddening drums! To
hear it was enough, I did not want to see, and I was again in my
sitting-room spraying the black dust from my flowers when the man
McCarty and his associate were ushered in. I am not quite sure
about McCarty; I have not underrated him, he is the type of the one-
time policeman, elemental, phlegmatic, devoted to routine and
without initiative, and yet he seemed to-day to be studying me!’”
“He had me right!” McCarty grinned. “’Twas what I went there for!”
“And me thinking you were stalling, and not getting it at all!”
Dennis shook his head. “He’d a grand opinion of himself, all right, but
a poorly-read one of you, Mac!”
“Orbit goes on to mention Trafford’s call to inquire for Horace while
you were here.” The inspector had been reading ahead. “Then he
starts on to rave about the musicale and how he felt with the lad’s
body under his very feet; he says that at the organ he surpassed
Giambattista on the violin and he was drunk with what he had pulled
off all the evening.”
“He played all by himself later,” McCarty observed. “A funny,
childish little tune and yet with something threatening and malicious
about it, and whilst Denny was getting shaved this morning I found
out what it was—a witch’s song from an opera called ‘Hansel and
Gretel,’ after the crone has lured children to her house and made
away with them! That ought to have told me something if I’d known
what it was!”
“He says nothing of planning another murder, does he?” Dennis
asked. “He must have run wild when he committed one the very next
day—!”
“The laboratory is open now, sir.” Ching Lee had reappeared so
noiselessly that he seemed to have sprung into being on the
threshold. “No one is there.”
“No one!” The inspector started up with a cry, cramming the
papers into his pocket. “My God, he has escaped, after all!”
“I don’t think so, sir,” McCarty demurred gravely. “Perhaps the men
didn’t see him, but—we’d better lose no time!”
They sprang up the stairs and passed the two great steel doors
swinging idly on twisted hinges, into a long, low room, looking very
much as Jean had described it. The closed cupboards below the
shelving were too small to have held a human body and there was
no other hiding place nor any way of egress save the door by which
they had entered.
“We’ve been done, Mac!” the inspector exclaimed again, ruefully.
“Unless the boys outside caught him, we’ll have a long chase on our
hands!”
“No.” McCarty stood looking up meditatively at the huge circular
vat which occupied the center of the floor and rose for six or seven
feet like a miniature gas tank. “Give me that step-ladder, will you,
Denny? I want to see is this empty.”
 “By the smell of it, it’s not!” Dennis commented. “’Tis worse than
asafœtida!”
He brought the ladder and McCarty ascended cautiously and
peered over the top. The vat appeared to be almost filled with some
thick, murky liquid with an oily film floating on the surface. When he
had stared down into it for some minutes he descended, his ruddy
face pale and tinged with greenish shadows.
“Mac!” Dennis caught him solicitously as he reeled. “It’s sick you
are! Come away out of this! Orbit’s not here!”
“If I’m sick it’s from my own thoughts, Denny!” McCarty replied
shakily. “Where does that pipe lead to from the bottom of the vat?”
“To that huge receptacle over there.” It was the detective
lieutenant who answered, pointing. “It’s to draw off whatever might
be in there, I guess.”
“Turn the cock, then, will you?” McCarty sat down suddenly and
held his head in his hands. “I want to see the bottom of that vat!”
The inspector looked startled and Dennis stared but they made no
comment and one official mounted the ladder while the other turned
the cock. There was a gurgle and then a swishing rush as the liquid
poured into the slender, solid pipe.
“It’s going down,” the man on the ladder announced. “Whatever
this greasy stuff is, it’s slipping through the pipe, all right! What do
you think is at the bottom of it, Mac?”
“I’m not wanting to think of it till I have to!” McCarty groaned. “Sing
out if—if it stops running out before the vat’s empty.”
But the official, did not “sing out” and the waiting seemed
interminable. At last, after the longest half-hour that any of them had
known, he announced:
“Vat’s quite empty, Mac! Except for scum it’s as clean as the floor!
There’s six little things that look like pebbles rolling around in it,
though; shall I climb down and get them?”
 “For heaven’s sake, no!” McCarty sprang to his feet. “’Tis sudden
death and a horrible one, if you so much as touch the stuff that’s left
there! Go and ask André for a lead spoon from the kitchen, and mind
it’s lead!”
The man obeyed and McCarty threw off his coat, climbed the
ladder, and perched on the rim of the vat, while Dennis uttered
agonized warnings from below. Then he drew up the ladder, planted
it firmly inside the vat and when the detective returned with the
required spoon he descended carefully to the lowest rung and
scooped up the six gray pellets from the slime of the bottom.
When he had climbed over and down once more, guarding his find
with the utmost caution the others gathered around him and he
shuddered as he addressed the inspector.
“That vat is lined with lead, sir; nothing else but lead could hold
that stuff for it eats everything away as if it hadn’t even been! You
notice that ladder was purposely fixed with lead tips to the feet of it
or it would have melted under me! I’ve heard of it but I never saw it
before. It’s hydrofluoric acid. ’Twill go through steel and rock and—
and flesh and bone, and leave no sign! Do you get me?”
“I do, but it’s horrible!” The inspector shivered. “You mean that
Orbit—! Was that what he meant by ‘annihilation’?”
McCarty nodded.
“You’ll mind there’s only one thing can resist it and that’s lead. This
is all that is left of Henry Orbit—the six bullets from his revolver!”
 CHAPTER XXIII
THE ADVICE OF EX-ROUNDSMAN MCCARTY

“S HALL we go on?” the inspector asked. It was nearly midnight

and the intervening time since that dreadful twilight hour in the
laboratory had been taken up with the formalities necessarily
resultant upon the final tragedy. He, McCarty and Dennis were alone
in Orbit’s sitting-room once more, for the two other officials had
returned to headquarters. As he spoke he took from his pocket the
remaining pages of the diary.
“That’s what Orbit wanted,” McCarty replied in a subdued tone.
“He’s left the soul of him, such as it was, in those papers and though
’tis not a thing I’d like to let loose on the world, we know the worst of
him and we ought to know the rest.”
Dennis was still benumbed from the successive shocks of the day.
He said nothing but his eyes, as the inspector sorted the papers,
followed the movements of his hands in awed fascination.
“‘Wednesday night.’” The other settled himself to read. “‘For the
third time in a week I have taken life, but the reaction is not the
same. The mental exhilaration came but the thrill is gone, or rather it
has changed into another sensation I have never known before. Is it
fear? I honestly do not know. To-day I finished generating the gas for
the third time and then, sure that I had the formula by heart, I
destroyed it so that my knowledge should be absolute, mine alone.
The longing for a worthwhile experiment with it became an
obsession and in actual agony, torment, I seated myself at the organ
to seek peace.
“‘But for the first time music brought no relief to my mind and I felt
stifling. I went to one of the windows to open it, and saw the French
maid, Lucette, from next door, with little Maude Bellamy. The child
had a new blue balloon and the thought came to me that if it were
filled with the poison gas and they were in a closed room—! I invited
them in to hear the organ and gave Maude some candy. As I had
hoped she forgot her toy and dropped it. I picked it up and excused
myself for a moment—only a moment, just long enough to hasten to
my laboratory, deflate the balloon and fill it again with the gas.
“‘When I returned to the conservatory Lucette and the baby were
still occupied with the candy. I handed the balloon to the child and
then seated myself once more before the organ. Handel’s “Largo”
came to me and how I played! The thought that at any instant that
toy might burst tingled in my brain and I found myself listening for it,
tortured with suspense because it did not come. I stole a glance at
my guests finally. They were seated side by side on the marble
bench with the towering cactus just behind them, its spikes reaching
out over their shoulders. If the balloon were to float toward one of
them, if a breath of air should waft it against one of those gigantic
thorns, as the child was holding it now, straight up into the air—!
“‘A louder, almost crescendo movement came just then in the
music and I touched the swell pedal with my foot, urging the keys
beneath my fingers. The shutters of the swell-box were forced open,
the current of air rushed out with the swift volume of sound. But
rising even above that glorious harmony there came a sudden, sharp
report! I dared not cease playing lest others in the house might have
heard it, I did not even dare to look around. Never has the “Largo”
seemed so interminable, but at last, just as I came to the end, I
heard—the patter of Maude’s feet! The baby had escaped me!
“‘I whirled around then and saw her playing about several feet
away but Lucette was lying back dead, the remnants of the balloon
at her feet! I rushed then to open the windows that the deadly vapors
might not hang upon the air to betray me and after the room was
quite clear of them I raised the alarm.
“‘McCarty and his associate were passing and in supreme
confidence I had them called in, glorifying in their mystification. But
the balloon disappeared! After the doctor and the medical
examiner’s assistant had gone, after the body had been removed
and the baby sent home the balloon was missing and somehow I
feel, I know that McCarty has it! That he suspects!
 “‘Sir Philip has come but he is writing an important letter and I
have taken the time to jot this down. I am going out. I have
McCarty’s address. I must know!
“‘Later. McCarty did have the balloon. He and his associate went
out leaving the entrance door unlatched and one of the keys I took
with me fitted the door of his apartment. I found the remnant of the
balloon and brought it home, but that is of comparatively little
importance now. With the knowledge that he actually suspects, this
strange, new sensation came to me. Before, mine was the supreme
power, I killed at will, but now I must kill to save myself! From being
master I am become slave—but slave of what?—I shall have use
once more for that key!’”
“Sure, he did!” McCarty nodded. “I told you about the revolver
waiting for me on a pulley the next night, but I’d like to know how
ever he got hold of a police positive!”
“He tells that on the next page,” the inspector remarked. “Here it
is: ‘I have just laid a trap for him in his rooms and he will blunder into
it, but it has cost me the service revolver I picked up in one of my
solitary walks down on the East Side, when a young policeman had
been killed by gangsters and the body just removed. There is a
retributive justice about my work to-night, for last night McCarty and
his associate broke in here. I pretended to chloroform myself, hoping
to hear from their conversation why they had come and how strong
were their suspicions against me, but the man McCarty opened my
windows and hurried his associate away. Can he have realized my
ruse?
“‘I am afraid, I know it now, but not of McCarty personally.
Individual to individual he is infinitely my inferior and yet there is
about him a suggestion of strength which takes from me my sense of
power. Is it because of what he represents? I am above the law and
beyond its reach, but is it because he stands for the law, for the
cumulative will of society, that my own will seems almost puny?’”
“Grand words!” McCarty grunted. “He was getting cold feet, that’s
what! He’d let his craze for murder run away with him, after all, and
then lost his nerve when he found he wasn’t putting it over!”