“But I can’t think that Southerby would have stopped to take a drink, much less get drunk,” objected Ingraham, as we hastened toward the point the young Italian indicated. “He knew how devilishly important those things were—”
“Perhaps he was not drunk,” the Frenchman cut in cryptically as we walked toward the little copse of evergreens which lay back from the road.
An earth cart-track, deeply rutted with the winter rains, ran through the unkempt field which fringed the road and wound into the heart of the small wood lot, stopping at the edge of a creek which ran clattering between abrupt banks of yellow clay.
“Be gob,” Costello looked down at the swirling ochre water, “if yer little friend ran inter this, he shure got one good duckin’, Hiji.”
“Eh bien, someone has run into it, and not so long ago,” de Grandin answered, pointing to a double row of tire tracks. “Observe them, if you will. They run right down the bank, and there is nothing showing that the car was stopped or that its occupant alighted.”
“By Jove, you’re right, Frenchy,” Ingraham admitted. “See here”—he indicated a pair of notches in the bank—“here’s where he went down. Last night’s storm has almost washed ’em away, but there the tracks are. The blighted little fool! Wonder how deep, it is?”
“That is easily determined,” de Grandin drew his knife and began hacking down a sapling growing at the water’s edge. “Now”—he probed experimentally—“one may surmise that—morbleu!”
“What is it?” we exclaimed in chorus.
“The depth, my friends. See, I have thrust this stick six feet beneath the surface, but I have not yet felt bottom. Let us see how it is here.” He poked his staff into the stream some ten feet beyond his original soundings and began to switch it tentatively back and forth. “Ah, here the bottom is, I think—non, it is a log or—mon Dieu, attend me, mes amis!”
We clustered around him as he probed the turbulent yellow water. Slowly he angled with his pole, swishing it back and forth, now with, now against the rushing current, then twirled it between his hands as if to entangle something in the protruding stubs of the roughly hacked-off boughs.
“Ha!” he heaved quickly upward, and as the stick came clear we saw some dark, sodden object clinging to its tip, rising sluggishly to the surface for a moment, then breaking free and sinking slowly back again.
“You saw it?” he demanded.
“Yes,” I answered, and despite myself I felt my breath come quicker. “It looked like a coat or something.”
“Indubitably it was something,” he agreed. “But what?”
“An old overcoat?” I hazarded, leaning over his shoulder to watch.
“Or undercoat,” he replied, panting with exertion as he fished and fished again for the elusive object. “Me, I think it was an—ah, here it is!” With a quick tug he brought up a large oblong length of checkered cloth and dragged it out upon the bank.
“Look at him, my Hiji,” he commanded. “Do you recognize him?”
“I think I do,” the Englishman responded gravely. “It’s the tartan of the clan MacFergis. Southerby had some Scottish blood and claimed alliance with the clan. He used that tartan for a motor rug—”
“Exactement. Nor is that all, my friend. The minute I began exploring with this stick I knew it was not bottom that I touched. I could feel the outlines of some object, and feel something roll and give beneath my pressure every now and then. I am certain that a motor car lies hidden in this stream. What else is there we cannot surely say, but—”
“Why not make sure, sor?” Costello broke in. “We’ve found th’ car, an’ if young Misther Southerby is drownded there’s nothin’ to be hid. Why not git a tow-line an’ drag whativer’s in there out?”
“Your advice is excellent,” de Grandin nodded. “Do you stay here and watch the spot, my sergeant. Hiji and I will go out to the road and see if we can hail a passing truck to drag whatever lies beneath that water out. Trowbridge, my friend, will you be kind enough to go to yonder house”—he pointed to a big building set among. a knot of pines that crowned a hill which swept up from the road—“and ask them if they have a car and tow-line we may borrow?”
THE STORM WHICH HAD been threatening for hours burst with berserk fury as I plodded up the unkempt, winding road that scaled the hill on which the old house stood enshrouded in a knot of black-boughed pine trees writhing in the wind. The nearer I drew to the place the less inviting it appeared. At the turning of the driveway from which almost all the gravel had been washed long since, a giant evergreen bent wrestling with the gale, its great arms creaking, groaning, shaken but invincible against the storm. Rain lashed against the walls of weathered brick; heavy shutters swung and banged and crashed, wrenched loose from their turn-buckles by the fury of the wind; the blast tore at the vines that masked the house-front till they writhed and shuddered as in torment; even the shadowy glimmer of dim light glowing through the transom set above the door seemed less an invitation than a portent, as if warning me that something dark and stealthy moved behind the panels. I pulled my hat down farther on my brow and pushed the collar of my greatcoat higher up around my ears.
“Someone’s up and stirring,” I told myself aloud as I glanced up at the feeble glow above the door. “They can’t very well refuse to help us.” Thus for the bolstering of my morale. Actually, I was almost shaking with a sort of evil prescience, and wanted more than anything to turn and run until I reached the roadway where my friends were waiting.
“Come, man, don’t be a blithering fool!” I bade myself, and seized the rusty iron knocker stapled to the weather-blasted door.
There was something reassuring in the shock of iron upon iron. Here was reality; just a commonplace old farmhouse, run down and ruinous, but natural and earthy. I struck the knocker twice more, making it sound sharply through the moaning wind and hissing rain, waited for a moment, then struck again.
What sort of response I’d expected I had no accurate idea. From the ruinous appearance of the place I had surmised it had been used as a multiple dwelling, housing several families of day-laborers, perhaps a little colony of squatters washed up by the rising tide of unemployment which engulfed our centers of industry. Perhaps a family of discouraged farmer folk used a portion of it and closed off the rest. Had a Negro or Italian answered my impatient knock I should not have been startled, but when the door swung open and a tall man in semi-military uniform looked at me with polite inquiry I was fairly breathless with surprise. A liveried chauffeur opening the door of the old ruin seemed somehow as utterly incongruous as a Zulu chieftain donning dinner-clothes for tribal ceremonies.
His expression of inquiry deepened as I told my errand. It was not until I had exhausted five minutes in futile repetitions that I realized he understood no word I spoke.
“See here,” I finally exclaimed, “if you don’t understand English, is there anybody here who does? I’m in a hurry, and—”
“In-gliss?” he repeated, shaking his head doubtfully. “No In-gliss ’ere.”
“No,” I responded tartly, “and I don’t suppose you’ve any Eskimos or Sioux here, either. I don’t want an Englishman. I have one already, and a Frenchman and an Irishman, to boot. What I want is someone who can help me haul a motor car out of the brook. Understand? Motor car—sunk—brook—pull out!” I went through an elaborate pantomime of raising a submerged vehicle from the muddy little stream.
His sallow, rat-like countenance lit up with a sudden gleam as I completed my dumb-show, and he motioned me to enter.
The door had seemed so old and weather-weakened that I’d feared my knocking might shake loose a panel, but it swung behind me with a solid bang, and the clicking of the lock that sounded as the portal closed struck a highly modern and efficient note.
Barely over the threshold, I came to a full stop. Something faintly irritating, like a swarm of small black ants, seemed crawling up my neck and on my scalp. Instinct, untrammeled and unverbalized, was giving warning:
“Here is peril!” But reason scoffed at instinct: “What peril can there be in an old farmhouse burdened with decrepitude, almost on the verge of falling in upon itself?”
But as I stared about me I realized the look of desolation and decay was but a shell of camouflage about a wholly different condition. New the place might not have been, but its interior repair was perfect. The air was heavy, scented like the atmosphere that permeates cathedrals after celebration of the Mass—the sharp and sweet, yet heavy, scent of incense borne from censers swung by priests.
The floor was brightly waxed and polished, the walls encrusted with a terra-cotta colored lacquer and, as church walls are embossed with stations of the Cross, were pitted with two rows of little niches framed in polished black wood. Before each framed recess there burned a little lamp, something like a sanctus light, which shed a wavering fulgent spot upon the image nested in the cavity. Each statuette was wrought in gleaming white stone, and though each differed from the others, all had one thing in common: they were uncompleted. Scarcely human, yet not exactly bestial, were the beings portrayed. Here a creature which seemed part ape, part man, was struggling with strained muscles to emerge from the rough ashlar from which the sculptor had but partly hewn it; there a female figure, perfect as to head and throat, seemed melting at the shoulders into a vague amorphousness as misshapen and unsymmetrical as the bloated body of an octopus shorn of tentacles, and hid her grief and horror-stricken face behind an arm clipped off at the elbow. Here was a head as bald of crown as any shaven-pated mediæval monk, but with a face obscured by long and matted hair, waving wildly as a harpy’s tresses whipped by tempest-winds. Beyond it was a niche in which a scarcely-started group of statuary rested. Vague and almost formless as a wisp of shifting cloud, it still showed outlines of a pair of figures, obviously masculine and feminine, as far as faces were concerned, but with bodies bulbous as the barrel of a squid, staring at each other with a look of surprised consternation, of terror mixed with loathing, as if each saw in the other a mirroring of his deformity, and abhorred his vis-à-vis as a reminder of his hideousness.
“Nightmare sculpture, hewn from dreams of madness . . .” the quotation flashed across my mind as I followed the tall man in livery down the hallway.
My guide rapped at a door set at the rear of the corridor, waited for a moment, then stood aside to let me enter. Facing me across a flat-topped desk sat a small, stoop-shouldered man, reading from a large book through a pair of Crookes’-lens spectacles.
“Doctor,” my conductor introduced in perfect English, “this gentleman came knocking at our door a few moments ago, going through some most extraordinary antics and mumbling something about a motor car sunk in our brook.”
I looked from one of them to the other in utter, stupefied amazement, but my astonishment increased tenfold at the seated man’s reply. “Stravinsky,” he said sternly, looking at me through the purplish-black of his thick glasses, “how dare you leave your quarters without permission? Go upstairs with Mishkin at once.”
“I beg your pardon,” I stammered, “my name’s not Stravinsky. I’m Doctor Samuel Trowbridge of Harrisonville, and some friends of mine and I need help in raising a sunken motor car from the brook that runs between the highway and your place. If you’ll be kind enough to tell your chauffeur to—”
“That will do,” he broke in sharply. “We’ve heard all that before. Go to your room at once, or I shall have to order you into a strait-waistcoat again.”
“See here,” I began in a rage, “I don’t know what this nonsense means, but if you think for one moment—”
My protest died half uttered. A pair of sinewy hands seized me by the elbows, drawing my arms sharply to my sides, a wide strap of woven webbing was thrown about my body, like a lasso, pinioning both elbows, drawn tightly through a buckle and snapped into position. I was securely bound and helpless as ever captive was.
“Confound you!” I cried. “Take this devilish harness off me! What d’ye mean—”
Something smooth and soft and smothering, like a piece of wadded silk, was thrust against my face, shutting out the light, covering mouth and nose; a sickly-sweet, pungent odor assailed my nostrils, the floor seemed suddenly to heave and billow like a sea lashed by the wind, and I felt my knees give way beneath me slowly.
“FEELING BETTER, NOW, STRAVINSKY?” the suave, low voice of the round-shouldered man woke me from a troubled sleep.
I sat up, staring round me stupidly. I lay upon a narrow iron cot of the sort used in the free wards of hospitals, uncovered except for a thin cotton blanket. The bed stood in a little cubbyhole not more than six feet square, and was the only article of furniture in the apartment. A small window, heavily barred, let in a little light and a great quantity of cold air together with occasional spatterings of rain. Directly facing me was a stout wooden door made without panels but fitted with a barred wicket through which my captor looked at me with a rather gentle, pitying smile. Close behind him, grinning with what seemed to be sadistic malice, was the liveried man who’d let me in.
“You’ll be sorry for this!” I threatened, leaping from the cot. “I don’t know who you are, but you’ll know who I am before you’re done with me—”
“Oh, yes, I know perfectly who you are,” he corrected in a gentle, soothing voice. “You are Abraham Stravinsky, sixty-five years old, once in business as a cotton converter but adjudged a lunatic by the orphans’ court three weeks ago and placed in my care by your relatives. Poor fellow”—he turned sorrowfully to his companion—“he still thinks he’s a physician, Mishkin. Sad case, isn’t it?”
He regarded me again, and I thought I saw a glimmer of amusement in his solicitous expression as he asked: “Wouldn’t you like some breakfast? You’ve been sleeping here since we had to use harsh measures day before yesterday. You must be hungry, now. A little toast, some eggs, a cup of coffee—”
“I’m not hungry,” I cut in, “and you know I’m not Stravinsky. Let me out of here at once, or—”
“Now, isn’t that too bad?” he asked, again addressing his companion. “He doesn’t want his breakfast. Never mind, he will, in time.” To me:
“The treatment we pursue in cases such as yours is an unique one, Stravinsky. It inhibits the administration of food, or even water, for considerable periods of time. Indeed, I often find it necessary to withhold nourishment indefinitely. Sometimes the patient succumbs under treatment, to be sure; but then his insanity is cured, and we can’t have everything, can we? After all, Stravinsky, the mission of the sanitarium is to cure the disease from which the patient suffers, isn’t it, Stravinsky?
“Make yourself comfortable, Stravinsky. Your trouble will be over in a little while. If it were only food you are required to forgo your period of waiting might be longer, but prohibition of water shortens it materially—Stravinsky.”
The constant repetition of the name he’d forced upon me was like caustic rubbed in a raw wound. “Damn you,” I screamed, as I dashed myself against the door, “my name’s not Stravinsky, and you know it! You know it—you know it!”
“Dear, dear, Stravinsky,” he reproved, smiling gently at my futile rage. “You mustn’t overtax yourself. You can’t last long if you permit yourself to fly into such frenzies. Of course, your name’s Stravinsky. Isn’t it, Mishkin?” He turned for confirmation to the other.
“Of course,” his partner echoed. “Shall we look in on the others?”
They turned away, chuckling delightedly, and I heard their footsteps clatter down the bare floor toward the other end of the corridor on which my room faced.
In a few minutes I heard voices raised in heated argument, seemingly from a room almost directly underneath my cell. Then a door slammed and there came the sound of dully, rhythmically repeated blows, as if a strap were being struck across a bed’s footboard. Finally, a wail, hopeless and agonized as if wrung from tortured flesh against the protest of an undefeated spirit: “Yes, yes, anything—anything!”
The comm
otion ceased abruptly, and in a little while I heard the clack of boot heels as they went upon their rounds.
THE HOURS PASSED LIKE eons clipped from Hell’s eternity. There was absolutely no way to amuse myself, for the room—cell would be a better term for it—contained no furniture except the bed. The window, unglazed, small and high-set, faced an L of the house; so there was neither sky nor scenery to be looked at, and the February wind drove gusts of gelid rain into the place until I cowered in the corner to escape its chilling wetness as though it were a live, malignant thing. I had been stripped to shirt and trousers, even shoes and stockings taken from me, and in a little while my teeth were chattering with cold. The anesthetic they had used to render me unconscious still stung the mucous membranes of my mouth and nose, and my tongue was roughened by a searing thirst. I wrenched a metal button from my trousers, thrust it in my mouth and sucked at it, gaining some slight measure of relief, and so, huddled in the sleazy blanket, shivering with cold and almost mad with thirst, I huddled on the bed for hour after endless hour till I finally fell into a doze.
How long I crouched there trembling I have no idea, nor could I guess how long I’d slept when a hand fell on my shoulder and a light flashed blindingly into my face.
“Get up!” I recognized the voice as coming from the man called Mishkin, and as I struggled to a sitting posture, still blinking from the powerful flashlight’s glare, I felt a broad web strap, similar to the one with which I had at first been pinioned, dropped deftly on my arms and drawn taut with a jerk.
“Come,” my jailer seized the loose end of my bond and half dragged, half led me from my cell, down the stairs and through a lower hall until we paused before a door which had been lacquered brilliant red. He thrust the panels back with one hand, seized me by the shoulder with the other, and shoved me through the opening so violently that, bound as I was, I almost sprawled upon my face.
The apartment into which I stumbled was in strong contrast to the cell in which I’d lain. It was a large room, dimly lighted and luxurious. The walls were gumwood, unvarnished but rubbed down with oil until their surface gleamed like satin. The floor of polished yellow pine was scattered with bright Cossack rugs, barbarian with primary colors. A sofa and deep easy-chairs were done in brick-red crushed leather. A log fire blazed and hissed beneath the gumwood over-mantel and the blood-orange of its light washed out across the varnished floor and ebbed and flowed like rising and receding wavelets on the dark-red walls. A parchment-shaded lamp was on the table at the center of the room, making it a sort of island in the shadows, and by its light I looked into the face of the presiding genius of this house of mystery.
Black Moon Page 20
