Black Moon

by Seabury Quinn

  “What are you so pleased about?” I asked. “You look like the cat that’s just dined on the canary.”

  “Not quite, my friend,” he answered with an impish grin. “Say rather that I look like one about to dine upon roast poltergeist.” He raised his hands before him and brought them slowly toward each other. “We have him in a vise. Why did he trouble no one but the servants? Why was it that he failed to annoy guests or family Until last night? Because he was a snob? Mais non. Because the servants’ quarters and the smoke house where the so unfortunate young Meadows met his death were built of olden brick and timber—”

  “What has that to do with it? The bricks and timbers of the main house are old as those they built the north wing and the smoke house with—”

  “Mais certainement, but of a different origin undoubtlessly. Regard me, if you please:

  “Thoughts are things. We cannot see or touch or weigh them, but they are things. They have the power to impress themselves upon inanimate objects, on sticks and stones and bricks, and like wheat buried with the mummy they may lie dormant for an age, then sprout to life when given new and favorable environment. The sorcerer who treasures earth from an unhallowed grave or the rope which hanged some master criminal is practising more than mere symbolism, I assure you.

  “Again: In every case of poltergeist activities we find that two things are essential, physical limits, as of walls, and some mediumistic person to transform the stored-up evil force from static to dynamic. Here we have the ideal combination, bricks and boards and timbers which undoubtlessly have been in contact with some evil-living, evil-thinking persons, and a source of psychoplasm—Daisy Mullins—to energize the accumulated force, to focus it and make it possible for it to have a physical and fulminant effect.”

  “Aren’t you taking a lot for granted?”

  He fairly glowered at me. “When you see a patient with high temperature, nose-bleed, abdominal tenderness and distension and an inclination toward profound lethargy, do you have to take a blood test, must you see the typhosus bacillus in your microscope before you decide he is suffering from enteric fever and begin appropriate treatment? Of course not. So in this case. So many diagnostic factors are apparent that I have no hesitancy in predicting what we shall learn when we speak with the peerless lumberman at Toms River.”

  “SURE, I REMEMBER THAT junk,” the Blakeley foreman said. “It lay around our yard ten years. I thought that we were stuck with it for keeps till Mr. Thorowgood saw it.”

  “Ah, yes, and could you tell us where it came from?”

  “Sure. Centermead, Doc Bouton’s sanitarium. The old man ran a private bughouse there for close on thirty years, and went crazy as a basketful o’ eels before he finally killed hisself. Say, how’d you ’a’ liked to be shut up in a nut college with the doctor loony as a chinch-bug, beatin’ up an’ torturin’ the patients, an’ even killin’ ’em, sometimes?”

  Jules de Grandin drew a deep breath. “By damn, I can inform the cross-eyed world such treatment would have driven off my goat,” he answered solemnly.

  The foreman was still gaping when we drove away.

  “You see, it matches perfectly,” he said triumphantly. “Every necessary element is present. The long association with the mad—the living dead—the lustful cruelty of a doctor who had yielded up his sanity through contact with the sick in mind, the suffering, the torture, the despair. . . . But yes, could these bricks and timbers speak they would relate a tale to give us nightmare of the soul for many years to come. It is small wonder that the haunting influence acts with low intelligence; it is the tincture, the very distillate of compressed madness with which these bricks are saturated to the overflowing point. All that was needed was the energizing force supplied by Daisy Mullins.”

  “And what do we do next?”

  “Mais cela parle tout seul—the thing speaks for itself. We have but to demolish that north wing and smoke house, remove the source of the infection, and the hauntings will be cured. My friend, this Jules de Grandin is one devilish clever fellow. Is he not?”

  “I’ve heard you say so,” I returned.

  A wrecking-crew was already at work when we caught the solitary eastbound train for Harrisonville next morning.

  “DOCTOR DE GRANDIN?” A Western Union messenger accosted us as we drew up before my house. “I have an urgent message for you.”

  The missive was brief with telegraph terseness, but imperative: “Men unable to continue work because of accidents stop need your advice immediately.”

  “Take the extension and listen as we talk, if you please,” he asked me as he rang up Thorowgood. “I should like to have you hear the conversation.

  “Allo?” as the connection was made. “It is I, de Grandin. What seems to be the matter, if you please?”

  “Plenty,” Thorowgood answered tersely. “You’d hardly left when things began to happen. A workman fell off the roof and broke his leg. He swore somebody pushed him, but I smelled liquor on his breath, so I can’t be sure o’ that. Then another man got a broken arm when half a dozen bricks fell on him; one of ’em hit his foot with a pick-ax and nearly cut it off. The place looked like a battlefield, and the men quit cold. Told me to go jump in the lake when I offered double time if they’d stay on the job. What’re we going to do?”

  “Eh bien, he is of the obduracy, this one. He does not take his ouster calmly.”

  “See here, this is no time to wisecrack. This thing has hurt a girl, killed a man and injured half a dozen others. Now it takes possession of my house. How’re we going to get rid of it?”

  “I would suggest you leave him in possession overnight. Move your entourage to an hotel, and come back tomorrow morning with a fresh crew of workingmen prepared to dynamite the walls. Also, bring back the young Mullins girl. I have need of her. Doctor Trowbridge and I will motor down and meet you I at Swan Upping in the morning. Au ’voir, my friend.

  “You will excuse me?” he asked as he put the monophone back in its cradle. “I have work to do. There are authorities to be consulted and matériel to be collected. I shall be back for dinner.”

  It was not until dessert that he spoke concerning his work of the afternoon. Then, irrelevantly: “You know the works of Judge Pursuivant?” he asked.

  “Who?”

  “The very learned, very able, very well-informed Keith Hilary Pursuivant. What a scholar, what a man! His book The Unknown that Terrifies is worth the ransom of an emperor to any occultist. I read him this afternoon, and in him I found comfort. Silver, says the learned Judge, is specific protection against every form of evil. You apprehend?”

  “Was that bundle you brought home some magic formula of his?”

  “Not precisely,” he grinned. “Monsieur le Juge supplied the thought, I follow his suggestion. I secured a supply of silver wire and netting.”

  “Silver wire—for goodness sake!”

  “Précisément, mon vieux. For goodness’ sake, no less.”

  “But why silver? Wouldn’t any other metal do as well?”

  “By no means. Silver, as the learned judge has pointed out, with a number of citations, is a potent force against all evil. Iron, most earthly of all metals, is abhorrent to the ghostly tribe, so much so that when Solomon King of Israel reared his temple to the Most High God with the help of Hiram King of Tyre and that great architect Hiram the Widow’s Son, no tool of iron was heard to ring throughout the building operation, since they were helped by friendly djinn who could not have abided in the neighborhood of sharpened iron. But for discarnate evil, evil vague and without definition, silver is the better metal. Ghostly foes incapable of being killed to death with leaden bullets, witches, werewolves and vampires, all are vulnerable to silver shot. Does not your own Monsieur Whittier, who was a very learned man as well as a great poet, mention it? But certainly. In his narrative of the garrison beleaguered by a phantom foe he relates:

  “Ghosts or witches,” said the captain, “thus I foil the Evil One!”

&nb
sp; And he rammed a silver button from his doublet down his gun.

  “And you expect to overcome this powerful thing with silver netting and some wire?” I asked incredulously.

  “I expect to overcome him in that manner,” he replied in a flat, toneless voice, fixing an unwinking stare of challenge on me.

  THE SCENE WHICH GREETED us at Swan Upping was reminiscent of a circus about to strike camp. Two trucks stood idling on the rear driveway; a crew of wreckers waited to commence work; back and to one side was a small red wagon with the word EXPLOSIVES lettered ominously on its sides and front.

  “Très bon. All is prepared, I see,” de Grandin smiled. “Where is the Mullins girl, if you please?”

  “Waiting there with the nurse,” Thorowgood waved toward a limousine.

  “Ah, yes. Will you excuse me while I persuade her?” For some five minutes he engaged her in a whispered conversation, then came hurrying back to us. “She has consented, it is well,” he told us as he cut the wrappings of his parcel.

  His preparations were made quickly. A bed of blankets was laid in the partially demolished smoke house and Daisy Mullins lay on it. Working deftly he enveloped her in length on length of silver-wire gauze, laminating each fold on the next until she was encased in the light netting like a mummy in its wrappings. Only at her mouth did he permit an opening, and over this he hinged a little door of netting and tied a length of thread to it.

  “Bien,” he patted her encouragingly. “I shall be but little longer, Mademoiselle.”

  With heavier silver wire he wove a basket-like covering for her, leaving something like six inches between her body and the cage.

  “You are quite comfortable?” he asked. She nodded, looking at him with wide eyes in which her confidence in him was struggling with abysmal fear. From the pocket of his jacket he drew a little mirror to which a string had been attached. This he twisted round his left forefinger, permitting the glass to hang pendulumwise. “Eyes upon the mirror, if you please,” he ordered, as he began to swing it slowly back and forth.

  “Tick—tock; tick—tock!” he recited in a monotone, keeping time to the slow oscillation of the glass. “The clock is ticking, Mademoiselle, slowly, slowly, ver-ry slowly. Tick—tock; tick—tock; you are ver-ry tired. You are so very weary you must sleep; sleep is the thing you most desire. Sleep and rest, rest and sleep. Tick—tock; tick—tock!”

  The girl’s eyes wavered back and forth, following the gleaming arc the mirror marked, but as he droned his monody they became heavy-lidded, finally closed. “Sleep—sleep,” he whispered. “Tick—tock; sleep—sleep!”

  “Now what—” I began, but he silenced me with a fierce gesture and stood looking at the sleeping girl intently.

  For perhaps two minutes he stood statue-still regarding her; then carefully, like one who tiptoes through a room where a restless sleeper lies, he bent down, took a length of silver wire in his right hand, and grabbed the thread attached to the hinged door above her mouth. “Regardez, s’il vous plaît!” he whispered almost soundlessly.

  I started, but kept silent. From between her lightly parted lips a little thread of vapor issued. “Breath,” I told myself. “It’s cold today . . .”

  But it was not breath. Scarcely thick enough for liquid, it was yet too ponderable to be called vapor, and seemed to have a semi-solid, gelatinous consistency. Too, it flowed in quasi-liquid fashion across her lower lip, but with a quivering instability, like quicksilver. Then it seemed to lighten and assume a gaseous buoyancy and hover in midair above her. It was taking form, too, of a sort, not definite, but shifting, changing, seeming to flow and melt upon itself and, ameba-like, to put forth gastropodal extensions of its substance. Like an animalculum in tainted water it floated driftingly above the girl’s lips, joined to her lightly opened mouth by a ligament of smoky-seeming semi-fluid; waxing larger every second. In the quarter light of the smoke house it gleamed and glistened with a putrid phosphorescent glow. Gradually, insensibly at first, but growing stronger every instant, the foul effluvium of its overpowering stench spread through the place, fulsome, nauseous, sickening.

  “I think that is enough, me,” de Grandin said, and gave the string he held a sharp pull. The hinged deadfall above the girl’s face-covering dropped, shearing through the foggy wisp that issued from her lips. The inchoate, amorphous thing that floated over her suddenly contracted, bent its finger-like extensions in upon itself, like a spider curling up when sprayed with an insecticide. Then it bounced toward de Grandin as surely and purposefully as though it saw him and intended to attack him.

  He raised his two-foot length of silver wire like a sword, but its protection was unneeded. The almost shapeless mass of foulness that rushed at him struck full against the silver cage that he had woven over Daisy, and, as if it struck a spring, bounced back again.

  There was something fascinating, and revolting, in its antics. It was like one of those toys of the physical laboratory called Cartesian devils which, as the membranes of their bottles are pressed down or released, rise, sink or float according to the pressure. Up it surged until it struck the wire cage; then down again it recoiled till it touched the silver netting which he had wrapped round the girl. Then up it rushed again, only to be driven back by contact with the silver cage.

  “Dans les mâchoires de l’étau! I have you in the vise, my most unpleasant one!” de Grandin cried triumphantly. “Take her up, Friend Trowbridge; help me with her, if you will.”

  Carefully we lifted the unconscious girl and bore her to the waiting car. As we came out into the light I noticed that the foul thing hovering over her became transparent, almost invisible. But its overpowering stench remained to tell us it was there.

  ELECTRIC DRILLS WORKED FURIOUSLY, dynamite was placed at proper intervals, and at a signal battery plungers were thrust down. There was a detonation and a rumbling roar, and walls and roofs of servants’ quarters and smoke house came toppling down in ruins.

  The wreckers worked with methodical speed. Load after load of shattered brick and timber was piled upon the trucks and hustled to the river, Humped into the turbid, frosty water, and replaced by other loads. By noon the wreckage had been cleared away, and only empty gaping cellars and a brash of broken bricks and mortar told where the structures had been.

  “Stand back, my friends!” de Grandin ordered. “I am about to liberate him!”

  Holding a lash of wire defensively, he bent and wrenched an opening in the cage above the sleeping girl.

  “Begone, avaunt, aroint thee, naughty thing!” he commanded, switching vigorously at the almost invisible globular shape that hovered in midair above her body.

  There was a flicker, as of unseen lightning, and a soughing whish! as if a sudden strong wind blew past us. In a moment the foul odor faded, growing fainter every instant. Before five minutes had elapsed it had disappeared.

  “And that, my friends,” he told us, “is indubitably that.”

  THE DINNER HAD BEEN perfect as only the inspired chef of the Reading Club could make it. Oysters and champagne, turtle soup with dry sherry, sole with chablis, partridge with Château Lafite . . . de Grandin passed a lotus-bud shaped brandy snifter back and forth beneath his nose and turned his eyes up to the ceiling with a look of ecstasy. “What is it that the vintners buy one-half so precious as the stuff they sell?” he misquoted Omar Khayyám.

  “Never mind the poetry,” Thorowgood commanded. “How’d you do it? I know you put it over, but—”

  “But it was so simple, Monsieur,” supplied Jules de Grandin. “Simple like the binomial theorem or the hypothesis of the Herr Professor Einstein. Yes.” He warmed the glass between his cupped palms, inhaled again, then drank as if it were a solemn rite he practised.

  “My friend Judge Pursuivant gave me the necessary hint,” he added. “Granted silver would repulse this thing, we were enabled to confine it while we wrecked the buildings from which it emanated. So we put the Mullins girl in his way, enabled him to half-materialize, and then
—eh bien, he was excessively annoyed when he found what we had done to him, n’est-ce-pas?

  “It required but a brief investigation to find that these bricks and timbers came from an old house where evil had run riot. Evil thoughts, evil sentiments, evil instincts, despair and violent death had washed those bricks like ocean waves. They were saturated with it. They were very reservoirs of wicked power, waiting only for some mediumistic help to bring them into focus, just as sunlight needs a burning-glass to enable it to start a fire. This focussing medium was supplied—all unconsciously—by the poor Mullins girl. The static power of evil became dynamic force by use of psychoplasm which it stole from her. You thwarted it when you removed her to the hospital, but it pursued her thither, renewed its strength killed the stable boy and almost took possession of the Bradley person’s body. When we removed her from the hospital its source of energy was weakened, but it still had strength enough to fight the wreckers off.

  “Then I took counsel with myself. We would bring the Mullins girl to it. We would place her in a deep, hypnotic sleep. There was its chance. It could not resist the opportunity of strengthening itself from her. Ha, but it did not take me into its calculations! I had made arrangements, me. Her I enclosed in silver netting, so it could not do her injury. Only her mouth did I leave unprotected, and as soon as it had partially materialized so we could see it, I dropped the trap across its source of energy, and left it high and dry, unable to retreat, unable to go forward, hemmed in on every side by silver. Then while we held him incommunicado we pulled down his nest about his ears. We robbed him of his power house, his source of potency.

  “Experience has taught us that a poltergeist cannot operate without material limits, such as walls, and neither can he operate without an energizing medium. We may compare him to gunpowder. Drop it loose upon the earth and nothing happens. Touch fire to it and it goes up in harmless flame and smoke. But confine it in a twist of paper, and touch fire to it, and pouf! we have the grand Fourth of July explosion. So with the poltergeist. The walls are to him as the paper covering is to the squib, le pétard, the—how do you call him?—the cracker-of-fire? Very well. It needs then but the medium to set him off, and there he is. Unconfined, he is harmless. Remember how those bricks lay for ten years in Monsieur Blakeley’s lumber yard and nothing untoward happened? That was because they lay in the open. But when you built them into solid walls—”