“So, then, Jules de Grandin is the fool, the imbécile, the simpleton, the ninny, the chaser-after-shadows, hein?” he demanded. “Come, let us follow through our quest.”
Th’ place seems empty, sor,” Costello said as, following the wall, we worked our way toward the building’s front. “If there wuz anny body here—Howly Mither!”
Across our path, like a doll cast aside by a peevish child there lay a grotesque object. The breath stopped in my throat, for the thing was gruesomely suggestive of a human body, but as de Grandin played his flashlight on it we saw it was a life-sized dummy of a woman. It was some five feet tall, the head was decorated by a blond bobbed wig, and it was clothed in well-made sports clothes—knit pull-over, a kilted skirt of rough tweed, Shetland socks, tan heelless shoes—the sort of costume worn by eight in ten high school and college girls. As we bent to look at it the cloyingly sweet scent of musk assailed our nostrils.
“Is not all plain?—does it not leap to meet the eye?” de Grandin asked. “This was the implement of training. That hairy one out yonder had been trained for years to seek and bring back this musk-scented dummy. When he was letter-perfect in discovering and bringing back this lifeless simulacrum, his master sent him to the harder task of seeking out and stealing living girls who had the scent of musk upon them. Ha, one can see it plainly—the great ape leaping through the shadowed trees, scaling the school roof as easily as you or I could walk the streets, sniffing, searching, playing at this game of hide-and-seek he had been taught. Then from the open window comes the perfume which shall tell him that his quest is finished; there in the lighted room he sees the animated version of the dummy he has learned to seize and carry to this sacré place. He enters. There is a scream of terror from his victim. His great hand closes on her throat and her cry dies out before it is half uttered; then through the treetops he comes to the chapel of the suicides, and underneath his arm there is—morbleu, and what in Satan’s name is that?”
As he lectured us he swung his flashlight in an arc, and as it pointed toward the ladder-hole that led up to the ruined belfry its darting ray picked up another form which lay half bathed in shadows, like a drowned body at the water’s edge.
It was—or had been—a man, but it lay across our path as awkwardly as the first dummy. Its arms and legs protruded at unnatural angles from its trunk, and though it lay breast down the head was turned, completely round so that the face looked up, and I went sick with disgust as I looked on what had once been human features, but were now so battered, flattened and blood-smeared that only staring, bulging eyes and broken teeth protruding through smashed lips told life had once pulsed underneath the hideous, shattered mask. Close beside one of the open, flaccid hands a heavy whip-stock lay, the sort of whip that animal trainers use to cow their savage pupils. A foot or so of plaited rawhide lash frayed from the weighted stock, for the long, cruel whip of braided leather had been ripped and pulled apart as though it had been made of thread.
“God rest ’is sinful soul!” Costello groaned. “Th’ gorilly musta turned on ’im an’ smashed ’im to a pulp. Looks like he’d tried to make a getaway, an’ got pulled down from them stheps, sor, don’t it?”
“By blue, it does; it most indubitably does,” de Grandin agreed. “He was a cruel one, this, but the whip he used to beat his ape into submission was powerless at the last. One can find it in his heart to understand the monster’s anger and desire for revenge. But pity for this one? Non! He was deserving of his fate, I damn think.”
“All th’ same, sor—Howly Saint Patrick, what’s that?” Almost overhead, so faint and weak as to be scarcely audible, there sounded a weak, whimpering moan.
“Up, up, my friends, it may be that we are in time to save her!” the little Frenchman cried, leaping up the palsied ladder like a seaman swarming up the ratlines.
We followed him as best we could and halted at the nest of crossbeams marking the old belfry. For a moment we stood silent, then simultaneously flashed our torches. The little spears of light stabbed through the shrouding darkness for a moment, and picked up a splash of brilliant orange in the opening where the bell had hung. Lashed to the bell-wheel was a girl’s slim form, arms and feet drawn back and tied with cruel knots to the spokes, her body bowed back in an arc against the wheel’s periphery. Her weight had drawn the wooden cycle down so that she hung dead-center at its bottom, but the fresh, strong rope spliced to the wheel-crank bore testimony to the torment she had been subjected to, the whirling-swinging torture of the mediæval bullwheel.
“Oh, please—please kill me!” she besought as the converging light beams played upon her pain-racked face. “Don’t swing me any more—I can’t—stand—” her plea trailed off in a thin whimpering mewl and her head fell forward.
“Courage, Mademoiselle,” the small Frenchman comforted. “We are come to take you home.”
“BUT NO, MON SERGENT,” Jules de Grandin shook his head in deprecation as he watched the ice cube slowly melting in his highball glass, “I have a great appreciation of myself, and am not at all averse to advertising, but in this case I must be anonymous. You it was who did it all, who figured out the African connection, and who found the hideaway to which the so unfortunate Miss Lefètre was conveyed. Friend Trowbridge and I did but go along to give you help; the credit must be yours. We shall show those fools down at headquarters if you are past your prime. We shall show them if you are unfit for crime detection. This case will make your reputation firm, and that you also found what happened to the Cogswell girl will add materially to your fame. Is it not so?”
“I only wish to God I did know what happened to poor Margaret Cogswell,” the big detective answered.
De Grandin’s smiling face went serious. “I have the fear that her fate was the same as that of Monsieur Cogswell’s first wife. You recall how she was mauled to death by a gorilla? I should not be surprized if that ten-times-cursed Everton gave the poor girl to his great ape for sport when he had tired of torturing her. Tomorrow you would be advised to take a squad of diggers to that chapel of the suicides and have them search for her remains. I doubt not you will find them.”
“An’ would ye tell me one thing more, sor?”
“A hundred, if you wish.”
“Why did th’ gorilly kill th’ Sidlo gur-rl instead o’ carryin’ her away?”
“The human mind is difficult enough to plumb; I fear I cannot look into an ape’s mentality and see the thoughts he thinks, mon vieux. When he had stolen Mademoiselle Lefètre and borne her to the ruined chapel of the suicides the ape turned rebel. He did not go back to his cage as he was wont to do, but set out on another expedition. His small mind worked in circles. Twice he had taken women from the Shelton School, he seems to have enjoyed the pastime, so went back for more. He paused upon the roof-ledge, wondering where he should seek next for victims, and to him through the damp night air the pungent scent the Sidlo girl affected came. Voilà, down into the room he dropped, intent on seizing her. She was well built and strongly muscled. Also she was very frightened. She did not swoon, nor struggle in his grasp, but fought him valiantly. Perhaps she hurt him with her pointed fingernails. En tout cas, she angered him, and so he broke her neck in peevish anger, as a child might break its doll, and, again child-like, he flung the broken toy away.
“It was a pity, too. She was so young, so beautiful, so vital. That she should die before she knew the joys of love—morbleu, it saddens me. Trowbridge, my friend, can you sit there thus and see me suffer so? Refill my glass, I beg you!”
The Venomed Breath of Vengeance
I SHOOK MY HEAD reprovingly as Jules de Grandin decanted half an ounce of cream into his breakfast coffee and dropped two sugar lumps into the mucilaginous concoction.
“You’re sending out an invitation to gastritis,” I said warningly. “Don’t you realize that mixing two such active ferments as cream and sugar in your coffee—”
He leveled an unwinking stare at me. “Am I to have no pleasure?” he deman
ded truculently. “May I not have the doubtful joy of getting sick without your interference? How do you amuse yourself while you preach of creamless sugar, I ask to know?”
“All right, how do I?” I responded as he paused for comment.
“By reading the obituary columns of le journal, to see how many of the poor misguided ones who follow your advice have gone to their long rest, where doctors prate no more of cream and sugar—”
“These don’t happen to have been my patients,” I cut in laughing, “but there’s something queer about the way they died. Listen:
THIRD SHERVERS DIES MYSTERIOUSLY
Truman Shervers, 25, son of the late Robert Shervers, well known importer, and brother of the late Jepson Shervers, yachtsman, of Larchmont, N.Y., was found dead in bed at the family residence in Tuscarora Avenue yesterday morning by Mazie O’Brien, a maid in the household, when she went to his room to ascertain why he had not come down to breakfast with the family, as was his usual custom. Doctors MacLeod and William Lucas, hastily summoned, pronounced him dead of heart failure. The deceased had never been heard to complain of illness of that character, and seemed in perfect health when he went to bed the night before.
An air of gruesome mystery is lent to the occurrence by the fact that Mr. Shervers is the third member of his family to suffer sudden death within a month. His father, the late Robert Shervers, noted as an authority on Oriental art, was found dead in the library of the family home about a month ago, while his brother Jepson was discovered in a dying condition when a New York state trooper found his car crashed against a tree beside Pelham Park Boulevard, Mount Vernon, N.Y., two weeks later. He died without regaining consciousness. Members of the family when interviewed by Journal reporters declared all three deaths were ascribed to heart failure.
“What do you make of it?” I asked as I laid the paper by and helped myself to salted mackerel.
“Tiens, what does one ever make of death? The gentlemen appear to have been afflicted with a cardiac condition which they did not know about, and down they went, like dominoes in line, when it attacked them.”
“Humph,” I nodded, unconvinced. “I knew Jepson Shervers rather well, and saw him only three days before he died. He was feeling tiptop at the time and jubilant because he’d just received reports from his insurance broker that his application for fifty thousand increase in his policies had been approved. Insurance doctors don’t usually overlook such things as cardiac conditions, especially where fifty thousand dollars is involved. Truman’s death is even harder to explain. I saw him at the Racquet Club last Monday, and he’d just completed half an hour’s work-out on the squash courts. That’s pretty strenuous exercise for a cardiac.”
“No autopsy was held?”
“Apparently not. The doctors all seemed satisfied.”
“Then who are we to find fault with their diagnoses?” He drained a fresh cup of unsweetened coffee and rose. “Luncheon at half-past one, as usual? Good. I shall be here. Meantime, I have some matters to attend to at the library.”
“THIS WAY, GENTLEMEN,” THE frock-coated young man with smooth brushed hair, perfectly arranged cravat and mild, sympathetic manners met us at the door and ushered us to the back parlor of the Shervers house, where folding chairs had been set out in concentric semicircles with the casket as their focal point.
Nothing in the way of mortuary service had been omitted by the Martin Funeral Home. Behind a bank of palms a music reproducing device played the Largo from the New World Symphony so softly that its notes were scarcely audible:
Going home, going home,
I’m just going home ...
A linen runner spanned the scatter rugs that strewed the polished floors, making it impossible for anyone to trip or stumble as he passed from door to sitting-room. When folding chairs were broken out for late arrivals they opened with the softest clicks instead of sharp reports. We followed soundlessly in our conductor’s wake, but as he paused beside the archway to permit us to precede him, I halted involuntarily. “Comment?” demanded Jules de Grandin in a whisper.
“That youngster,” I returned, nodding toward the young mortician; “he’s enough like Truman Shervers to have been his twin.”
“I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth . . .” Doctor Bentley began the office for the burial of the dead. A subdued flutter of fans, the soft swish-swish of unaccustomed black silk garments being adjusted by their wearers in the semi-hysteria women always show at funerals, the faint, muted murmurings of late arrivals at the front door, occasional low, distance-softened noises from the street outside accompanied the words.
“. . . We brought nothing into the world and it is certain we can carry nothing out . . . the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away . . .” the solemn words of the liturgy proceeded. De Grandin raised his hand and thrust his forefinger between his neck and collar. It was hot as only August in a rainy spell can be, and with Gallic worship of convention he had donned his cutaway and stiff-starched linen, disdainfully refusing to put on a mohair jacket and soft shirt as I did. The air was almost unsupportable in the close-packed room. The heavy, cloyingly sweet perfume of tuberoses fell upon our senses like a sickening drug. Next to us a woman swayed upon her chair and turned imploring eyes upon the tight-shut window. Why hadn’t they availed themselves of Mr. Martin’s chapel? I wondered. His rooms were large and air-conditioned; people need not sit and stifle in them, but . . . The lady on my left moaned softly. In a moment, I knew, she’d be sick or fainting.
Softly, treading noiselessly on feet accustomed to step without sound, the young mortician who had ushered us into the parlor tiptoed to the window, raised the lace-bordered blind and took the sash knobs in his hands. Watching idly, I saw him straighten with the effort of forcing up a sash warped in its casings by the spell of humid weather, and heard the faint squeak as the sash gave way and slid slowly upward. Something like this always happened when they had a funeral in the home, I ruminated. If only they had used the Martin chapel . . .
Like a flash de Grandin left his seat and dashed across the room, clasping arms about the young man’s shoulders. In the act of opening the window the youngster had swayed back, almost as from a blow in the chest, and was sagging to the floor, sinking with a look of almost comical surprise upon his small, well modeled features.
“Courage, mon brave,” de Grandin whispered, closing ready arms about the fainting man. “Lean on me, it is the heat.”
I rose and joined them hurriedly, for despite his reassuring words I knew that it was neither the humidity nor temperature which had stricken the young undertaker. His face was pale with a blue tinge, his lips were almost purple, as though he stood beneath the neon light in a quick-picture photographer’s. “Easy, son,” I comforted as we helped him down the hall; “we can’t afford to have folks getting all excited at a time like this.”
We reached the passage leading to the kitchen and eased our charge down to the floor while de Grandin bent to loose the black and white cravat which bound his stiffly starched wing collar.
“Ah—so. Is not that better?” he asked as he bent above the gasping youth. “You will be all well in just one little minute—”
“My God, sir, he popped up right in my face!” the boy cut in, his words mouthed difficultly, as though something soft and hot lay upon his tongue. “It was as if he waited there for me, and when I put the window up—” Thicker and thicker, softer and more soft his utterance came; finally it died away in a soft, choking gurgle. His head fell back against my arm, and I saw his jaw relax.
“Lord, let me know my end, and the number of my days; that I may be certified how long I have to live. . . .” Doctor Bentley’s voice came smoothly, sonorously, from the room beyond. “O spare me a little that I may recover my strength before I go hence. . . .”
Despite the almost suffocating heat I shuddered. There was something horrifyingly appropriate in the service being read beyond that archway.
&nb
sp; The young funeral director lay dead at our feet.
DE GRANDIN DRUMMED A tattoo on the silver head of his black walking-stick as we drove homeward from the funeral. “My friend,” he announced, suddenly, “I do not like that house.”
“Eh?” I responded. “You don’t like—”
“By blue, I do not. It is an evil place. it has the smell of death and tragedy upon it. I noticed it the moment that I entered, and—”
“Oh, come, now,” I derided. “Don’t tell me you had a psychic spell and foresaw tragedy—”
“Indeed, I did. Not that poor young man’s deplorable decease, but—”
“I understand,” I interrupted, “but I don’t believe there’s anything partaking of the super-physical about it. Just one of those coincidences that make life seem so curiously unreal at times. The average person finds something faintly grotesque in an undertaker’s death—just as there’s something faintly comic in a doctor’s being ill—and the fact that he happened to die so tragically during the funeral service, when so much emotional energy was focussed on the thought of death—”
He squeezed my elbow with a quick grip of affection. “My good friend!” he exclaimed. “I understand you. You will not scoff at me, and so you rationalize the entirely illogical death of that poor young man to let me down without hurt feelings. I wish I could agree with you, but I cannot. When I declare there is an aura of misfortune, tragedy and death about that house I speak no more than simple truth. Some things there are we see without beholding, or hear without sound. Attend me carefully: As a spider lurks in secret at the center of her web, so death waited in that place. And just as many flies pass by the spider’s snare unharmed, yet some eventually are caught, just so I knew the moment that I crossed the threshold that death would strike again, and soon, inside those portals. I think that we are lucky to have come away with whole skins.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” I murmured. “It was certainly a most uncanny—”
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