Black Moon

by Seabury Quinn

  “Repeatedly I found these ideographs,” he told us as he held the paper out for our inspection.

  “The first one signifies ‘arise,’ or, by extension, ‘I shall arise,’ and the second means almost, though not quite, the same thing. ‘Awake,’ or ‘I shall awake to life.’ And always, she repeats that she will do it by the power of the brain, which complicates the message still farther.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “Why, if she’s a mummy she can have no brain. One of the first steps of Egyptian embalming was to withdraw the brain by means of a metallic hook inserted through the nose.”

  “She surely must have known that,” I began, but before our host could answer we heard laughter on the porch, a key clicked in the front door, and Vella Taylor swept into the drawing room with an unusually good-looking young soldier in her wake. “Hullo, Daddy-Man,” she greeted as she planted a quick kiss on Taylor’s bald spot. “Good evening, Dr. Trowbridge—Dr. de Grandin. This is Harrock Hall, my most ’special-particular boy friend. Sorry, I couldn’t be here for dinner tonight, but Harrock’s ordered away to camp early tomorrow, so I ran around to his house. It wouldn’t have seemed fair to have taken him from his mother and father on his last night home, and I knew I wanted to be with him just as much as possible, so—what’re you folks drinking? Cognac?” She made a face suggestive of vinegar mixed with castor oil. “Vile stuff! Come on, treasure,” she linked her hand in the young soldier’s. “Let’s us see if we can promote some Benedictine and Spanish brandy. That’s got a scratch and tastes good, too.”

  “You will inform us of developments?” de Grandin asked as we prepared to go. “This so remarkable young lady who had courage to defy the priests who had condemned her and declared that in spite of their sentence to oblivion she would rise again, she interests me.”

  IT MUST HAVE BEEN toward three o’clock when the persistent ringing of the telephone awakened me. The voice that came across the wire was agonized, almost hysterical, but doctors get used to that. “This is Granville Taylor, Trowbridge. Can you come right over? It’s Vella—she’s had some sort of seizure. . . .”

  “What sort?” I interrupted. “Does she complain of pain?”

  “I don’t know if she’s in pain or not. She’s unconscious—perfectly rigid, and—”

  “I’ll be there just as fast as gasoline can bring me,” I assured him as I hung up and fished for the clothes which years of practice had taught me to keep folded on a bedside chair.

  “What makes, mon vieux?” de Grandin asked as he heard me stirring. “Is it that Monsieur Taylor has met with the accident he feared—”

  “No, it’s his daughter. She’s had some sort of seizure, he says—she’s rigid and unconscious.”

  “Pardieu, that pretty, happy creature? Let me go with you, my friend, if you please. Perhaps I can be of assistance.”

  Her father had not overstated her condition when he said that Vella was rigid. From head to foot she was as stiff as something frozen; taut, hard as a hypnotist’s assistant in a trance. We could not chafe her hands for they were set so stiffly that the flesh was absolutely unyielding. It might have been a lovely waxen tailor’s dummy over which we bent rather than the happy, vibrant, vital girl to whom we’d said goodnight a few hours before. Treatment was futile. She lay as hard and rigid as if petrified. As if she had been dead, her temperature was exactly that of the surrounding atmosphere, the uncanny hardness of the flesh persisted, and she was unresponsive to all stimuli, save that the pupils of her set and staring eyes showed slight contraction when we flashed a light in them. There was practically no pulse perceptible, and when we drove a hypodermic needle in her arm to administer a dose of strychnine, there was no reflex flinching of the skin, and the impression we had was more like thrusting a needle through some tough waxy substance than into living flesh. As far as we could see vital functions were suspended. Yet she was not paralyzed in the ordinary sense of the term. Of that much we were certain.

  “Is—is it epilepsy?” Dr. Taylor asked fearfully. “Her mother had a brother who—”

  “Non, calm yourself, my friend,” soothed de Grandin. “It is not the epilepsy, of that I can assure you.” To me he added in a whisper: “But what it is le bon Dieu only knows!”

  The dawn was brightening in the east when she began to show signs of recovery. The dreadful stiffness, so like rigor-mortis, gave way gradually, and the set and horrified expression of her eyes was replaced by a look of recognition. The rigid, hard lines faded from her cheeks and jaw, and her slender bosom fluttered with a gasp of respiration as a little sigh escaped her. The words she spoke I could not understand, for they were uttered in a mumbling undertone, strung together closely, like an invocation hurriedly pronounced, but it seemed to me they had a harsh and guttural sound, as though containing many consonants, utterly unlike any language I had ever heard before.

  Now the whisper gave way to a chant, sung softly in an eerie rising cadence with a sharply accented note at the end of every measure. Over and over, the same meaningless jargon, a weird and wavering tune vaguely like a Gregorian chant. One single word I recognized, or thought I did, though whether it really were a word or whether my mind broke its syllables apart and fitted them to the sound of a more or less familiar name I could not be sure; but it seemed to me that constantly recurring in the rapid flow of mumbled invocation was a sibilant disyllable, much like the letter s said twice in quick succession.

  “Is she trying to say ‘Isis’?” I asked, raising my eyes from her fluttering lips.

  De Grandin was regarding her intently with that fixed, unwinking stare which I had seen him hold for minutes when we were in the amphitheater of a hospital and a piece of unique surgery was in progress. He waved an irritated hand at me, but neither spoke nor shifted the intentness of his gaze.

  The flow of senseless words grew slower, thinner, as though the force behind the twitching red lips were lessening, but the weird soft chant continued its four soft minor notes slurred endlessly. Now her enunciation seemed more perfect, and almost without effort we could recognize a phrase that kept recurring: O Nefra-Kemmah nehes—Nehes, O Nefra-Kemmah!”

  “Good God!” exclaimed Dr. Taylor. “D’ye get it, gentlemen? She’s chanting, ‘Nefra-Kemmah, awake—Arise, O Nefra-Kemmah!’ Nefra-Kemmah was the name of that priestess of Isis I told you of last night, remember? In her delirium she’s identifying herself with the mummy!”

  “She probably heard you talking of it—”

  “I’m hanged if she did. You were the only two to whom I’ve mentioned it outside the Museum. I knew de Grandin has a taste for the occult, and you were to be relied on, Trowbridge, but as for mentioning that mummy to anybody else—no! D’ye think I’d want my daughter to think me a superstitious old fool, or would I court the pitying smiles of other outsiders? I tell you she never heard that cursed mummy’s name, yet—”

  “S-h-sh, she awakes,” de Grandin warned.

  Vella Taylor looked from Jules de Grandin to me, then past us to her father. “Daddy!” she exclaimed. “O, Daddy, dear, I’ve been so frightened!”

  “Frightened, dear? Of what?” Taylor dropped to his knees, beside the bed and took her hands in his. “Who’s been trying to scare my little girl?”

  She smiled a little ruefully. “I—I don’t quite know,” she confessed, “but whoever set out to do it surely got away with it. “I think it must have been those horrible old men.”

  “Old men, Mademoiselle?” de Grandin echoed. “Who and where were they, one asks to know? Tell me and I shall have great pleasure in kicking their false teeth out—”

  “Oh, they weren’t really men at all, just dream-images, I suppose. But they seemed terribly real, and oh, how dreadfully afraid of them I was!”

  “Tell us of it, if you please, ma belle. You have suffered a severe shock. Perhaps it was the result of nightmare, perhaps not; at any rate, if you can bring yourself to discuss the painful subject—”

  “Of course,
sir. Talking of it may help sweep my memory clear. Harrock left a little after you did, for he had to catch an early train this morning, and I came right upstairs and cried myself to sleep. Sometime this morning—I don’t quite know when, but it must have been a little before three, for the moon had risen late and it was very bright when I awakened—I woke up with a dreadful sense of thirst. It must have been that crying made me feel so, I can’t account for it otherwise; at any rate I was utterly dehydrated, and went to get a glass of water from the bathroom tap. When I came back to my room the first thing that I noticed was that a single shaft of moonlight was slanting through the window and striking full upon the mirror,” she gestured toward the full-length glass that stood against the farther wall. “Something, I don’t know what, seemed urging me to go and look into the glass. When I stopped before it, it seemed the moonlight had robbed it of its power of reflection. I couldn’t see myself in it at all.”

  “Ah?” de Grandin nodded. “You cast no shadow?”

  “None at all, sir. Instead, the mirror seemed to be glossed over with a layer of opaque silver—not quite opaque, either, but rather iridescent. I could see small points of light reflected in it, and somehow they seemed moving, whirling round and round each other like a swarm of luminous midges, and burning with an intense blue, cold flame. Gradually the glowing pinpoints of light changed from their spinning to a slow, weaving pattern. The luminous sheet they spread across the mirror seemed breaking up, forming a definite design of highlights and shadows. It was as if the mirror were a window and through it I looked out upon another world.

  “The place I looked into was bright with moonlight, almost as bright as day. It was a long, wide, lofty colonnaded building. I thought at first from what I’d heard Daddy say that it must be a temple of some sort, and in a moment I was sure of it, for I could hear the tinkling of sistra shaken in unison, and the low, sweet chanting of the priestesses. They knelt in a long double row, those sweet, slim girls, all gowned in robes of white linen, with bands of silver set with lapis lazuli bound about their brows. Their heads were bowed and their hands raised and held at stiff right angles to their wrists as they sang softly. Presently a young man came into the temple and walked slowly toward the altar-place. Despite the fact his head was shaven smooth, I thought him utterly beautiful, with full red lips, a firm, strong chin and great, soft, thoughtful eyes. He kept his gaze fixed on the tiles as he walked toward the altar, but just before he put aside the silver veil that hung before the face of Isis he glanced back and his eyes fell with a sort of sad reproachfulness upon the kneeling girl nearest him. I saw a flush mount up her throat and cheeks and brow, and she bent her head still lower as she sang, but somehow, though she gave no sign, I knew a thought-message had passed between them. Then slowly he passed beyond the veil and was gone.

  “Suddenly to the chanting of the priestesses was joined the heavier chant of men singing in a sort of harsh harmony. Instinctively I knew what was transpiring. The young man I had seen had gone into the sanctuary of Great Isis to become one of her priests. He was being initiated into her mysteries. She would flood him with her spirit, and he would be hers for eternity. He would put away the love of woman and the hope of children, and devote himself whole-heartedly to the service of the Great All-Mother. The priestess I had seen blush knew it, too, for I could see the tears fall from beneath her lowered lids, and her slender body shook with sobs which she could not control.

  “Then slowly, as if steam were forming on the mirror, everything became cloudy and in a moment the scene in the temple was completely hidden, but gradually the vapor cleared away and I was looking out into bright daylight. The sun shone almost dazzlingly on a temple’s painted pylon. In the forecourt the sacred birds were feeding, and jets of water glinted jewel-bright from a fountain. A woman walked across the courtyard toward the splashing fountain, the priestess I had seen before. She was robed in a white linen shift that left her bosom and her ankles bare. Sandals of papyrus shod her slender henna-reddened feet, and jewels were on her arms. A band of silver set with lapis lazuli crowned the hair which she wore cut in a shoulder-length bob. In one hand she held a lotus bud and with the other she balanced a painted water pot on her bare shoulder.

  “Suddenly, from the deep shadow cast by the high temple gate, an old man tottered. He was very feeble, but his rage and hatred seemed to impart power to his limbs as wires moved a marionette. By his red robe and blue turban and his flowing milk-white beard, no less than by his features, I knew him to be a Hebrew. He planted himself in the girl’s path and let forth a perfect spate of invective. Of their actual words I could hear nothing, but subjectively I seemed to know what passed between them. He was reviling her for proselyting his son from the worship of the Lord Jehovah, for the Jewish youth, it seemed, had seen her and gone mad with love of her, because her vows made it impossible for them to wed he had abjured his race and kin and God to take the vows of Isis, so that he might be near her in the temple and commune with her in common worship of the goddess.

  “The little priestess heard the old man through, then turned away contemptuously with a curt, ‘Jewish dog, thou snarlest fiercely, but wherewith hast thou teeth to bite?’ and the old man raised his hands to heaven and called a curse on her, declaring she should find no peace in life or death until atonement had been made; until she turned against the heathen gods she worshipped and bore testimony to their downfall through another’s lips.

  “‘How sayest thou, old dotard?’ asked the girl. ‘Our gods are powerful and everlasting. We rule the world by their favor. Is it likely that I should turn from them? And if I did, how could it be that I should speak through the lips of another? Shall I become as one of those magicians the Greeks call polyphonists, who make a stick or stone of brute beast seem to talk because they have the power of voice-throwing?’

  “Once more the scene shifted, and I looked out upon a moonlit night. The stars seemed almost within reach overhead, and there blew such a soft perfume on the moon-drenched air that you could almost see it take shape like dancing butterflies. In the deep blue shadow of the temple pylon crouched the priest and priestess, clinging to each other with the desperation of denied love. I saw her rest her curling shoulder-length-cut hair upon his shoulder, saw her turn her face up to his with eyes closed and lips a little parted, saw him kiss her brow, her closed eyes, her yearning, eager mouth, her pulsing throat, the gentle swell of her bare bosom . . . then like a pack of hounds that rush in for the kill, I saw the Hebrews pounce upon him. Knives flashed in the moonlight, curses hard and sharp as knife-blades spewed from their lips. ‘Apostate swine, turncoat, backslider, renegade!’ they called him, and with every bitter curse there was another biting stab. He fell and lay upon the sands, his life-blood spurting from a dozen mortal wounds, and as his murderers turned away I seemed to hear the patter of bare feet upon the tiles, and half a dozen shaven-headed priests of Isis came running. ‘What passes here?’ their leader, an old man, panted angrily. ‘Thou Jewish dogs, if thou hast—’

  “The leader of the assassins interrupted with a scornful laugh: ‘Naught passes here, old bare-poll, all is passed. We took one of your priests and priestesses red-handed in infidelity. The man we dealt with, for aforetime he had been one of us; the woman we leave to thy vengeance, ’tis said thou hast a way of treating such.’

  “I saw the priests seize the poor, stricken, trembling girl and lead her unresistingly away.

  “Then once again the mirror clouded, and when it cleared I was looking full into the little priestess’ face. She seemed to stand directly behind the glass, as close as my own reflection should have been, and she held out her hands beseechingly to me, begging me to help her. But my power of understanding was gone. Though I saw her lips move in appeal I could make nothing of the words she strove so desperately to pronounce, although she seemed repeating something with a deadly, terrible insistence.

  “Then suddenly I felt a dreadful cold come in the air, not the chill of the wind from the op
ened window, but one of those subjective chills we sometimes have that make us say, ‘Someone is walking over my grave.’ Instinctively I felt the presence of another person in my bedroom. Someone—no, something had come in while I watched the changing pictures in the mirror.

  “I turned to look across my shoulder—and there they were. I think that there were five of them, though possibly there were seven—old men in long white robes with dreadful masks upon their faces. One wore a bull’s head, another a mask like a jackal, another had a false-face like a giant hawk’s head, and still another wore a headdress like a lion’s face—”

  “If they were masked how did you know they were old men?” I asked.

  “I knew it. Their eyes were bright with a fierce, supernatural light, the kind of gleam that only those who are both old and wicked have in their eyes, and the flesh of their forearms had shrunk away from the muscles, leaving them to stand out like thick cords. Their hands and feet were knotty and misshapen with the ugliness of age, and the bones and tendons showed like painted lines against the skin.

  “They grouped behind me in a semi-circle staring at me menacingly, and though they made no sound I knew that they were threatening me with something dreadful if I acceded to the little priestess’ entreaty.

  “‘Vella Taylor, you are dreaming,’ I told myself, and closed my eyes and shook my head. When I opened them again the horrible old masked men still stood there, but it seemed to me they had come a step nearer.

  “The priestess in the mirror seemed to see them, too, for suddenly she threw her hands up as if to ward off a blow, made a frenzied gesture to me as if to warn me to escape, and turned away. Then she disappeared in vapor, and I was left alone with those terrific, silent shapes.