Black Moon

by Seabury Quinn

  “Eh bien, he was stubborn, that one. He was not at all talkative. Rather than disclose his tribesmen’s plans he chose to die, which he did in circumstances of elaborate discomfort, and Jahanara was not only a prisoner, but an orphan as well.

  “Corbleu, my friends, romance is much like history in that the more it changes the more it is the same wherever it is found. Race, religion and the custom of blood-feud as old as the Lebanon Hills stood between them, but the captor had become the captive, and Monsieur le Colonel was eyebrow-deep in love with Lalla Aziza Jahanara. One wonders if she loved or hated him the more when they first kissed, whether she would not rather have drunk his heart’s blood than his eager, panting breath as he took her in his arms. Tiens, love conquers all, as Ovid says. In a little while she wed the man at whose command her father died in torment.

  “But though the prince had wed his Cinderella it was not to be his lot to live in peaceful happiness with her. Oh, no! The Druses are a prideful, stiff-necked people. Their ancient tribal law forbids their women marrying outside their race. They have a proverb, ‘No Druse girl mates with any but a Druse, and if she does, her father and her brothers track her down and slit her heart, though she be lying in the Sultan’s arms.’ The Druse maids understand this perfectly. Before they come of marriageable age they swear an oath to keep the ancient tribal law on pain of death—death by the knife of vengeance for themselves, and if, they have borne hybrid children—‘may they be the prey of centipedes.’

  “You apprehend, my friends? Cannot you understand why Colonel Gutierrez quit the Legion and with his Druse bride, and later with his half-blood children, lived a hunted, fugitive existence, seeing a threat in each strange face, starting frightfully at every vagrant shadow, never feeling safe in any one place very long? Yes, certainly.

  “Ordinarily only the unfaithful Druse woman and her children are the objects of the tribal Nemesis, but the hillmen had a long score to settle with the colonel. The memory of the missing hands and feet, the burnt-out eyes, the slit and speechless-babbling tongues of their blood brethren festered like a canker-sore in their minds. They owed him a long-standing debt of vengeance. Tiens, it seems they paid it.”

  “REGARD HIM, IF YOU please,” he ordered me at breakfast two days later, handing me a copy of the morning Journal.

  GUTIERREZ CHILDREN RETURN HOME

  the headline read, and under it a short item:

  Senorita Constancia Gutierrez and her brother Gregorio, who have been undergoing treatment at City Hospital for the past few days, are now fully recovered and have returned to their residence, 1502 Tuscarora Avenue, where they will hereafter be at home to their many friends.

  “Is it not magnificent?” he asked.

  “I don’t see anything magnificent about it,” I returned. “It doesn’t even seem like good make-up to me. How did they ever come to stick an unimportant little item like that on the first page instead of burying it in the Society column? Who cares whether Constancia and Gregorio have gone home or not?”

  “You and I do, by example,” he answered with a grin. “The good Costello does, but, most important of us all, several gentlemen from the Djebel Druse are greatly interested in their movements. As long as they were lodged in City Prison they were safe. Now that they are home again—”

  “Good heavens, d’ye mean that you’re deliberately exposing them to—”

  “Mais oui, my friend. We set the trap, we wait, we spring, parbleu! One might recast the old jingle to read:

  “Will you walk into my parlor?”

  Said de Grandin to the Druses.

  The cry came quivering down the hall, shrill, sharp, fright-freighted.

  For half an hour we had waited in the darkened room adjoining that in which Constancia and her brother were, ears strained to catch the slightest sound which might betray arrival of the Druses. Downstairs, patrolmen waited in the drawing-room and kitchen, two others lurked in ambush, in the back yard. Our baited trap seemed escape-proof, yet . . .

  The scream came once again, then stopped abruptly, like a radio-transmission when the dial is curtly turned.

  “Morbleu, they have won through!” de Grandin cried as he blew his police whistle and we tumbled through the door and dashed into Constancia’s room.

  From downstairs came the police guard, clattering and pounding on the steps. The bedroom fairly boiled with armed men, but nowhere was there any sign of the youngsters.

  “No one came through th’ front way,” a policeman told Costello, and:

  “Same wid th’ kitchen,” supplemented another. “A mouse couldn’t ’a’ got past us—”

  “The screen is out,” de Grandin interrupted, “and a drain pipe runs within a foot of the window. A moderately agile climber might have—”

  “Hey, youse down there!” Costello bawled to the patrolmen in the back yard, “seen anybody?”

  There was no answer. “Ah bah, we waste the time,” de Grandin snapped. “It is probable they knifed the guards as they did the servant when they killed the colonel and his lady. After them!”

  “They can’t ’a’ took ’em very far,” Costello panted as we rushed downstairs. “Th’ alley’s too narrow for a car; they’ll have to carry ’em.”

  The two patrolmen lay inert as corpses on the lawn, but a hurried glance assured us they were merely stunned, and we left them and rushed out into the alley.

  Where the luminance of a street lamp gleamed dully from the alley-head at the cross street we saw a group of hurrying figures, and de Grandin raised his pistol. “Canaille!” he rasped, and fired. One of the fugitives fell staggering, but the others hurried on, and as they neared the light we saw they struggled with two shrouded figures.

  They had perhaps two hundred feet start of us, and de Grandin did not dare to fire again for fear of injuring the captives. Though we raced at top speed they reached the cross street before we could close the gap sufficiently to fire with safety, and as we emerged from the alley we saw them scrambling into a car waiting at the curb with engine running. Next instant they roared past us and we caught a glimpse of Constancia’s blanched face as she peered through the tonneau window.

  Half a dozen blasts on Costello’s whistle brought two squad cars rushing round the corner, and the chase was on.

  Perhaps a quarter-mile away, but losing distance with each revolution of the wheels, our quarry sped. De Grandin hung upon our running-board, his pistol raised, waiting opportunity to send a telling shot into the fleeing car.

  Eight, ten, a dozen blocks we raced at breakneck speed, our sirens cleaving through the sultry darkness like lightning lances. We were less than half a block behind them when they swerved sharply to the right and darted down a cross street. When we reached the corner they had disappeared.

  Like hounds at fault we looked about us. To the left a creek cut through the town, and most streets ended at it, only one in each five being bridged. The two cross streets to the right were torn up for repaving; they could not have fled that way, and no glimmering tail light showed in the street in which we stood.

  Most of the houses in the block were deserted, and any of them might afford a refuge for the Druses and their prisoners, but nowhere, look sharply as we would, could we espy a sign of their old motor. From house to darkened house we went, looking in the back yards for some trace of the car. At last:

  “My friends, come quickly!” called de Grandin. He was standing at the creek bank, pointing to the shallow muddy water. Nose-foremost in the stream was a decrepit motor, its tail light still aglow. “Tiens, it seems to be a habit with them, throwing their equipage into the water,” he remarked; then: “En avant, mes enfants. A la maison!

  “No, be of the quietness,” he warned as Costello put his shoulder to the door. “Let me do it.” From his pocket he produced a thin strip of metal, worked at the lock for a moment; then, “Entrez!” he invited as the lock snapped back with a soft click.

  Down the narrow, dust-strewn hall we crept, tried several doors w
ithout result, then began to mount the stairway, treading on the extreme outer edges of the boards to avoid betraying creaks.

  An oblong of slate-gray against the darkness told us where a window opened from the upper hall, and toward it we stole silently, halting as de Grandin gave a low hiss. Thin as a honed razor-blade, but not to be mistaken in the gloom, a narrow line of faint light trickled from beneath a tight-closed door.

  “You are ready, mon sergent?”

  “Aye, sor.”

  Like twin battering-rams they launched themselves against the door. Its flimsy panels splintered as if they were matchwood, and in the subdued light of a single electric bulb pendant from the ceiling we saw three men facing two figures lashed to chairs.

  Constancia Gutierrez sat facing us, and beside her was her brother. Both were gagged with wide strips of adhesive tape across their lips; both had their shoes and stockings stripped away; more wide bands of adhesive tape bound their feet and ankles to the chair legs in such manner that they could not lift them from the floor.

  One of the men was emptying a small cage of woven wicker work as we crashed in, and as its little door flapped open we saw three writhing centipedes come tumbling out and strike the dusty floor beside the girl’s bare feet.

  A moan of terror—a scream of anguished horror muted by the gag across her lips—came from Constancia as the poisonous insects struck the floor; then her head fell forward as her senses failed.

  At the crashing of the door the three men wheeled upon us, and there was something almost military in the singleness of their gesture as they reached beneath their unkempt jackets, ripped out eighteen-inch knives and rushed at us. “Ya Rabaoiu!—O foreigners!” one cried, but his words were drowned out by the thunderous roar of pistols.

  De Grandin’s little automatic seemed to blaze a single stream of fire, Costello’s big revolver bellowed like a field gun. It was as if the three men walked into a wall. Like troops obeying a command they halted, wavered, stumbled. One hiccupped, gasped and slumped down slowly, bending at the knees. Another spun half around and fell full length upon his face. The third stood goggling at us, empty-eyed and open-mouthed, then stepped back shufflingly, seemed to trip on nothing and fell flat on his back.

  “Excellent, superb, magnificent!” de Grandin commented. “We be marksmen, thou and I, mon sergent.” With a leap he cleared the foremost body, bounded up into the air and came down heavily, flat-footed. His small feet banged on the bare floor like the metaled shoes of a tap-dancer as he ground the centipedes to unclean pulp beneath his heels.

  “HERE’S SUMPIN’ I CAN’T figure, sor,” admitted Costello as we proceeded with our search of the house.

  A surprising miscellany had turned up in the half-hour we’d been working since we sent Constancia and Gregorio under escort to the hospital. In the room adjoining we had found the Druses’ living-quarters, an evil-smelling, unkempt room with four bed-rolls, some cook-pots and valises filled with none too clean clothing. In the basement was a table like a carpenter’s work bench, two pressure tanks, an airpump, several airbrushes of varying sizes, and, plugged into an electric outlet, a large fan. The table and the floor were mottled with dried spots of what looked like shellac, some white stuff resembling plaster of Paris, and here and there dull-glowing patches like metallic paint.

  Now Costello handed us a filled-in printed form. It was a deed entitling José Gutierrez to full rights of burial in a six-grave plot in St. Rose’s Cemetery—“Lot No. 3, Range 37, Section M.”

  “St. Rose’s is a Cath’lic cemetery,” Costello reminded us; “what th’ divil were these haythens doin’ wid a deed from it?”

  De Grandin scarcely seemed to hear. His little eyes seemed all pupil, like those of a startled cat; his small blond mustache was fairly twitching with excitement. “The fan, the plaster, the blow-guns,” he murmured. “One blows the paint and plaster with the airbrush, one dries it quickly with the fan, one then—mais oui, it is entirely possible. Come, my friends, let us hasten with all speed to the cemetery of the sainted Rose. I think our trail ends there!”

  By no stretch of the imagination could the cemetery super-intendent’s greeting have been called cordial when, in response to Costello’s thunderous banging on his door, he finally let us into his small, cluttered office.

  “Sure, I sold a plot to Josie Gooteez,” he admitted. “He an’ his three brothers come to get it last Thursday. They wuz Mexicans or sumpin’, I think. Anyhow, they didn’t speak good English.”

  “And they made immediate interments?” asked de Grandin.

  “Naw, they ain’t buried nobody yet. But they stuck up a couple o’ monuments. Damndest-lookin’ things yuh ever seen, too. They come here yesterday wid two statoos in a truck, an’ set ’em up theirselves—’fore th’ cement bases wuz quite finished dryin’.”

  “Indeed? And of what were these so weird statues, if you please?”

  “Huh, your guess is good as mine about that. They looked as if they had been meant to represent a man an’ woman, but they ain’t so hot. Seemed to me as if they’d molded ’em in cement, then painted ’em with bronze paint, like a radiator. We hadn’t ought to let such things be put up here, but that plot’s in th’ cheapest section, an’ almost anything goes there. That’s where th’ haythens and such-like bury.”

  THE SUPERINTENDENT’S CRITICISM OF the effigies was entirely justified by all artistic canons. Standing on twin concrete bases, some eight feet apart, two statues faced each other. One was of a woman, one a man, and both were execrably executed.

  The woman’s costume seemed to be some sort of evening gown, but its folds were obscured by the clumsiness with which they had been reproduced. Of her features little could be discerned; the face had been so crudely shaped as to resemble a half-chiseled stone portrait. Only humps and hollows in appropriate places told where eyes and nose and mouth were.

  The male figure was as uncouth as the other. Only after looking at it for some time were we able to determine that its clothes were meant to represent a dinner suit. Like the woman’s, his face was little more suggestive of a human countenance than a poorly executed plaster mask.

  “Mordieu—quel imparfait!” muttered Jules de Grandin. “They must have been in hot haste, those ones. Me, I could do a better piece of work myself.”

  For a moment he stood staring at the concrete atrocities, then walked across the gravelly lawn to a partly opened grave. The diggers had left tools beside the trench when they knocked off working for the day, and he took up a pick-ax, weighed it in his hand a moment, then approached the woman’s statue.

  “My friends,” he announced, “here we end our search. Regardez!”

  The statue swayed upon its base as he struck it with the flat side of the pick, waited for a moment, then struck a second time.

  “Hey, what th’ devil do you think you’re doin’?” stormed the superintendent. “I’ll have th’ law on you—”

  “Take it aisy, feller,” soothed Costello. “I’m the law, an’ if he wants to bust that thing to pieces you’re not goin’ to sthop ’im. Git me?”

  The Frenchman drew his pick back once more and launched a battering smash against the statue’s knees. This time it shattered like a piece of broken crockery, and where a three-foot flake of cement dropped away there showed a stretch of something pale and almost colorless. No need to tell a doctor what it was. Every first-semester student of anatomy knows dead human flesh at sight.

  “Good Lord, sor, is it her?” Costello gasped.

  “Indubitably it is she, my friend,” de Grandin answered. “It is none other than Señora Gutierrez. And that monstrosity”—he pointed toward the other statue with his pick-ax—“conceals her husband. Call your men, mon sergent. Have them take these dreadful things away and break them up, then put the bodies in the city morgue.”

  “H’m, wonder what they did wid th’ other one?” the sergeant asked.

  “The servant?” The Frenchman pointed to the disturbed earth between the sta
tues’ bases. “I cannot say with certainty, but it is my guess that if you dig there you will find him.”

  “ONE RECONSTRUCTS THE CRIME,” he told us sometime later at my house. “I was as much at sea as you when first we went into that house where they had taken Señorita Gutierrez and her brother. Coupled with the disappearance of the bodies from the stolen hearse, the spots of paint and plaster on the cellar floor, the airbrushes and the drying-fan should have told me how the corpses had been hidden, but it was not till you found the burying-deed that I had the idea. Even then I thought that they had bought the burial plot and put the bodies in it after casing them in cement so the earth would not cave in upon them too soon and thus disclose their hiding-place.

  “But when the superintendent told us of the statues and we looked upon their dreadful crudity, the whole thing became clear to me.

  “Toutefois, the credit goes to you, mon sergent. It was you who put the riddle’s key into my hands when you showed me that burial-deed. Yes, it is unquestionably so.

  “Do not forget to tell them when you make your report to headquarters.”

  He helped himself to an enormous drink, and:

  “Quelle facétie monumentale!” he murmured with a wry face.

  “What’s a ‘monumental joke’?” I demanded.

  “Pardieu, the one those so abominable ones played on Colonel Gutierrez and his lady—to make them stand as monuments above their own graves!”

  Stoneman’s Memorial

  THE ADVENTURES OF THE FAMOUS LITTLE

  GHOST BREAKER SINCE HIS LAST

  ESCAPADE IN WEIRD TALES

  In answer to numerous inquiries concerning the whereabouts and activities of Dr. Jules de Grandin and Capt. Sir Haddingway Ingraham Jameson Ingraham (less formally known as Hiji) during the past three years I am happy to be able to supply the following data:

  De Grandin went to France immediately upon the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 and was serving in Syria when the truce was made with Germany and the French Republic abolished. The fiery little patriot at once repudiated Vichy and all its works, made his way to Africa and joined the Free French forces of Gen. Charles de Gaulle and became a captain in the corps de santé. A severe case of enteritis, contracted during the unsuccessful attack on Dakar, and the tardy realization of his superiors that he was far more valuable as an intelligence and liaison officer than as a military surgeon caused him to be sent to England and later to this country, where he at once went to see Dr. Samuel Trowbridge at Harrisonville, N.J.