Black Moon

by Seabury Quinn

  A tremor like a spasm shook the girl’s bowed body. “Sublimity,” she panted, “say that I may take that way! Give me leave to go to Kailas through Kurban! Grant permission for my entry into the Ineffable Nothingness that brings rest and oblivion. I would be Kurban, Sublimity!”

  “Grand Dieu!” de Grandin breathed.

  “Ah,” the Swami let the syllable out slowly. “Thou hast made the choice thyself, Savatri. Remember, only thou canst make the choice—”

  “I know, I know!” the girl broke in, breath coming in quick, sobbing gasps. “None but I can make the choice, none in heaven or in earth can revoke it. Record the vow, Sublimity! Freely, fully, voluntarily, I have made the choice. I will be Kurban!”

  At a sign from the Swami she rose and turned to us. “I’m sorry, Dr. Trowbridge,” she said gently, every trace of the frenzy that had possessed her completely gone. “You can never understand, neither can the others. I have come here of my own free will, and here I shall remain. In this place I have found such peace as I had never hoped to find on earth. Thank you for coming, and good-bye. I go to greater joys than ever woman knew before.” She stretched a slender hand out, took mine in a firm clasp, and turned away with a murmured, “Peace be with you.”

  “See here,” I told the Swami as Austine slipped from the room, “I don’t know what all this nonsense is about, but it’s obvious to me Miss Doniphan is not sound mentally. I came here to observe her, and in my opinion she’s not responsible—”

  “You think so?” Ramapali interrupted sarcastically. “However unusual her actions may have seemed at first, you can hardly say she seemed irrational when she left, Dr. Trowbridge. Do you honestly believe any jury would commit her to an institution if she appeared as normal as she did a moment since? Perhaps you’ll see things in a different light when you have thought them over.”

  “Eh bien, Monsieur Swami, we have not yet begun our thinking, I assure you,” answered Jules de Grandin. “It may be we shall meet again—”

  “I greatly doubt it, Dr. de Grandin,” the Swami broke in. “Now, if you will excuse me—I would resume my contemplation.”

  “Au ’voir, Monsieur, but by no means adieu,” de Grandin answered as he turned on his heel.

  IT WAS SHORTLY AFTER three o’clock that afternoon when he called up to ask permission to bring a friend to dinner. “A most delightful person, Friend Trowbridge. An Indian gentleman named Ram Chitra Das who has been most kind and helpful, and will be more so. Yes.”

  Mr. Das proved a pleasant surprise. I had had visions of a sloe-eyed Oriental with a pink or green turban and an air of insufferable condescension. Had I not known his origin I should have mistaken the man de Grandin brought to dinner for a Spaniard or Italian. His dark eyes were alert and keen with more than a suggestion of humor in them, his features small and regular, his tailoring faultless and his accent reminiscent of Oxford. He was, it appeared, the son of the tenth son of a Nepalese princeling who had so far forgotten the conventions as to fall in love with and actually marry a nautchni—a solecism comparable to an American parson’s son marrying a burlesque strip-teaser. But because the old prince loved his son, and because the son was so far removed from the throne that the possibility of his succession was practically nil, the only punishment inflicted was banishment on a pension which equaled the income he would have enjoyed had he remained in the palace.

  Ram Chitra Das was born in British India and for his first ten years was educated by a queer mixture of Mission School and native gurus’ teaching. It was his father who insisted on his English education and his mother who saw that he received the training of a high-caste Hindu. “The dear old girl was frightfully keen on the princely blood, you know, even though the strain had begun to run pretty thin by the time it reached me.”

  When he was ten his father sent him to a good public school in England. He had been only fifteen when the World War broke out, but was given a commission as subaltern in an Indian regiment, fought in France, took his degree at Oxford after the war, and returned to India as a member of the Intelligence Section of the British Indian Police.

  “Lord, no, I’m no Brahmin,” he laughed when I commented on the ample justice he had done the roast beef at dinner. “The pater’s caste was broken when he married the mater, you know, and whatever caste I had was smashed to bits when I crossed the ocean to England. I hadn’t any desire to go through the disagreeable ceremony of having it restored. Sometimes I wonder what I really am. I was nurtured in the belief of the old gods of Hindi, and several English parsons, not to mention kind old ladies, labored manfully to make a Christian of me. The net result is that I try to follow St. Paul’s advice to prove all things, and hold fast to that which is good. I’ve found a lot of good—and some things not entirely to my liking—in all religions.”

  “But you recall your early training” de Grandin asked.

  “Oh, yes, just as a worldly Christian adult recalls the catechisms he learned as a child. Like this, you mean?” He looked about him, finally crossed the drawing room and took a tiny ivory figure from a curio cabinet. It was perhaps an inch high and represented a peacock with spread tail.

  Placing it on the coffee table, he stared fixedly at it, elbows on knees, hands interlaced beneath his chin. A moment—two—went by, and I experienced a slight chill along my spine as I saw the carved ivory rise half an inch from the table, circle round as if in flight, then settle down at least a foot from the spot where he had placed it.

  “Why, that’s the trick the Swami did!” I exclaimed, but Mr. Das shook his head.

  “No, Dr. Trowbridge, that’s the trick this fellow you call Ramapali pretended to do, and which Dr. de Grandin exposed so neatly. I assure you I had no strings tied to your peacock, and you saw that my hands were motionless and never nearer than my chin to the ivory.”

  “But—that’s magic. True magic.”

  Again he shook his head. “I wouldn’t call it that, sir, although there are many who would. I don’t pretend to understand it, any more than the dear old ladies who practice table tipping can explain why lifeless wood will vibrate and dance all round the parlor beneath their fingers. But just as I’m perfectly sure that spooks have nothing to do with the movements of the ladies’ tables, I’m certain that neither gods nor demons had anything to do with making that bit of ivory seem to defy gravity. It’s just one of those things for which we have no ready explanation—yet.”

  “Now,” his laughing eyes became suddenly serious, “I’m interested in this Swami Ramapali, as he calls himself. From what Dr. de Grandin tells me, I think I know him. Some twenty years ago a young man named Michael Quinault was sent to jail in Bombay for practicing Christian wiles on the heathen in his blindness. He had been some sort of confidence man in the States, I understand. He certainly lacked confidence that day in Bombay when the judge sahib sentenced him to five years penal servitude for fleecing a Parsee widow out of her insurance money.

  “He really should have thanked the judge, however, for jail proved just the thing he needed. No”—as I prepared a question—“it didn’t reform him. It opened up new vistas. In jail he made the acquaintance of our slickest native criminals, and they can be very slick, believe me. He got a smattering of Hindustani, and a fair working knowledge of Hindu philosophy and religion. Learned something about Yoga, too. In fine, when he came out he was equipped to palm himself off as a genuine guru—that means holy man, or teacher, sometimes miracle-worker—on anybody not too well acquainted with the genuine article. He also had another souvenir of imprisonment. A severe case of fever had made him totally and permanently bald as an egg. That might have proved a handicap to most; it was a valuable asset to him in his new role of religious teacher and revealer of the Truth. We hear of him occasionally—he’s swindled his way clear across the continent of Europe and the British Isles with his merry little masquerade, and done a handsome business in the States. His victims are nearly always women. There is a certain type of Western woman to whom anything ori
ental is simply resistless, just as there’s a type of oriental female who can’t resist a Western man. He’s an adept at picking his—what is it you chaps call ’em?—suckers?

  “If it were just a matter of separating credulous ladies from their cash I shouldn’t be so much concerned. That sort of thing’s been going on since time began, and will probably continue till eternity replaces time. But from what Dr. de Grandin tells me there’s something far more serious involved here.”

  “Indeed?” I answered. “What?”

  “Murder.”

  “Murder?” I echoed, horrified.

  “Murder, parbleu!” de Grandin seconded. “Consider, if you please: This Mademoiselle Santho who willed her whole estate to the Swami Ramapali-Quinault, then so conveniently shuffled off the mortal coil by snake-bite. I was greatly interested in her. So to the Bureau of Vital Statistics I went and looked at her death certificate. It was signed by Dr. William Macwhyte of Tunlaw Mills. You know him?”

  “No.”

  “So did I. But I made his acquaintance. According to his report he was roused from bed early in the morning to minister to a lady at the Swami’s colony who had been bitten by a serpent. ‘What sort of serpent?’ I ask him.

  “‘A rattlesnake,’ he tells me.

  “‘Indeed?’ I asked to know. ‘And did you satisfy yourself concerning this, cher collège?’

  “‘But certainly,’ he tells me. ‘She was bitten in the ankle. The venom was injected directly into the posterior tibial artery about four inches above the astragalus. Death must have supervened within a very short time. There were the characteristic punctures where the fangs had pierced the epidermis and the derma to the subcutaneous tissue; slight lividities around the wounds, and considerable coagulation of the blood.’

  “Does it not leap to the eye?”

  “Perhaps it leaps to yours. Not to mine.”

  “Forgive me, Friend Trowbridge. I do forget you are a general practitioner, and though a very skillful one, not familiar with reptile bites. The venom of the rattlesnake destroys the protoplasm of the blood, rendering it uncoagulable. It is about ninety-eight percent blood-destroying in its action. The venom of the cobra, tout le contraire, permits the blood to thicken, since its action is a swift paralysis, the poison attacking the nerve centers at once, and being only two to five percent blood-destroying. You see?”

  “Can’t say I do.”

  “Mordieu, I did forget. Perhaps you did not read him: Just two weeks prior to Estrella Santho’s death two cobras—king cobras, ophiophagus elaps—were secretly abstracted from the reptile house at the zoological garden. I remembered reading of it in le Journal and wondering who would be such a great fool as to steal two six-foot tubes of sudden death. Then, when I put the pieces of the so unfortunate lady’s death-puzzle together, ‘Jules de Grandin,’ I say to me, ‘we have something here, Jules de Grandin,’ and ‘It are indubitably as you say, Jules de Grandin,’ I reply to me, ‘just what it are we have I do not rightly know, but beyond the question of a doubt, we have something.’”

  He turned to Ram Chitra Das. “Tell him what Kurban means, if you will be so kind,” he ordered.

  “Kurban,” the Indian replied, “means self-immolation, the offering of oneself voluntarily as a human sacrifice. A Hindu woman may find quick access to Kailas—heavenly oblivion—by voluntarily offering herself as a sacrifice on the altar of Okmar, which is one of Siva’s less admirable attributes. Or a widow, who is doomed to countless incarnations for the sin of having permitted her husband to predecease her, may avert the curse by Kurban. Perfectly ridiculous, of course, yet it differs more in degree than kind from the Christian woman’s entering a convent or enlisting in the Salvation Army or going as a nurse in a lepersorium.”

  “Good heavens!” I exclaimed. “We heard her say she wanted to become Kurban—”

  “Précisément,” de Grandin agreed. “I, too, heard it. Therefore, my friends, in half an hour Captain Chenevert of the State gendarmerie will meet us on the Andover Road, and to that sixty-three-times damned colony we go to see what happens. Are you with us, mon vieux?” he turned to Mr. Das.

  “Oh, absolutely, old thing. This Quinault bloke led our police a merry chase. I’d like to be in at the death.”

  A HIGHWAY PATROL CAR waited for us a mile or so out on the Andover Road, and as we drew abreast, Captain Chenevert thrust his head from a window. “Good evening, Dr. de Grandin; evening, Dr. Trowbridge,” he greeted. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Das,” as de Grandin introduced our guest. “What’s all this hush-hush stuff about? If I hadn’t worked with you before, and didn’t know you’ve always got something on the ball I’d have said, ‘The hell with it,’ tonight. I’ve got a big day tomorrow—”

  “Parbleu, my worthy one, and you shall have a fine large night of it tonight, or Jules de Grandin is more greatly mistaken than he thinks! But yes.”

  Briefly he outlined the situation, and Chenevert’s lips pursed in a soundless whistle. “Baldy Quinault?” he murmured. “Masqueradin’ as a Hindu faker an’ bumpin’ women off with trick snakes. Well, what d’ye know? Let’s get going.”

  “Softly, my friends, be silent, I implore you!” de Grandin bade as we drew up before the entrance-way of the colony. “We must make no noise—”

  At his gestured command we flattened ourselves to the wall and he struck three peremptory knocks on the door. There was no answer, but after the third repetition of the summons the wicket shot back, and though we could not see from our positions, we knew the porter looked through the spy-hole.

  De Grandin crouched out of the warder’s line of vision, silent as a shadow, till the wicket slammed shut, then beat three thunderous blows upon the planking of the gate. This time the response was instantaneous. The wicket shot back violently, the porter took a second look, then, seeing nothing, slipped the heavy bar from its braces and swung the door back a few inches, thrusting his head out.

  “Merci bien; merci bien une mille fois—a thousand thanks, my friend!” de Grandin chuckled. His blackjack swung in a short arc, not downward where its impact would have been cushioned by the fellow’s turban, but sidewise, so that it took him squarely on the frontal bone and dropped him to his knees like a steer bludgeoned on the killing floor of a slaughter house.

  Chenevert took over momentarily. “Two of you stay here,” he ordered the four troopers who accompanied him. “If this bird comes out of it, see that he doesn’t raise a holler. McCarty, you and Hansen come with me. Have your riot guns ready; we’re apt to need ’em in a hurry. Okay, Dr. de Grandin. It’s your ball from here on.”

  Not a light showed anywhere, nor was there any sign of life among the little buildings of the colony, but from the central structure came a muted wailing of reed pipes played in tuneless unison and the muttering rhythm of a tom-tom. “Ah-ha?” the Frenchman whispered. “They have lost no time, these ones. Forward, mes enfants!”

  Stepping high to avoid unseen obstacles, breathing through our mouths lest our respiration betray us, we hastened toward the central building, mounted its low single step and paused a breathless moment at its curtained doorway. “Entrez, mais en silence!” ordered Jules de Grandin.

  Twin bronze braziers burned at the far side of the room, shedding a ruddy glow that stained rather than lightened the darkness of the place, and from them curled long spirals of heady incense as kneeling women fed handsful of aromatic powder on their glowing charcoal. The air was sickening with the mingled scents of aloes, sandalwood and cedar, and—even mixed with the perfumes of the aromatics its odor could not be disguised—cannabis indica, the bhang, or hashish of the East, the drugs of madness compared to which the marijuana of the West is as beer to brandy.

  About the darkened room, their robes of cotton shining ghostly, leprous white against the gloom, some thirty figures, mostly women, crouched in attitudes of abject prostration, humming a low, wailing chant and emphasizing its crescendos by rising to their knees, hands held aloft, and clapping them together softl
y.

  The mournful canticle came to a close, and from a farther doorway stepped the Swami Ramapali. His yellow robe had been replaced by a white gown of rhinestone-studded satin, a turban of white silk was bound about his head, and from its knot a brooch of brilliants caught the red reflection of the braziers’ glow. Jeweled sandals shod his feet, and in his hand he held a rod of polished wood tipped with a knob shaped like an acorn. At sight of him the congregation groveled on the floor, then as a brazen gong clanged ominously rose to their knees and raised their hands in salute.

  Two more deep, clanging strokes came from the unseen gong, and through the curtains of the door behind the Swami came Austine Doniphan. She, too, had changed her costume. Gone was her wrapped robe of soiled cotton, and in its place she wore a short bodice of purple satin and a full skirt of gold tissue bound about the waist and hips with a scarf of crimson silk. Silver anklets clinked and chimed with each step that she took, and band on band of silver circled wrists and arms. Her dark hair had been smoothly parted in the middle, and down the part there ran a streak of vivid red. As I glanced at her bare feet I saw their soles were painted red to match the part in her hair, and when she raised her hands in salute to the Swami I saw their palms were stained a brilliant yellow. Memory rang a horrifying bell in my mind: Years ago I had been told by a missionary that the colors daubed on Austine’s head, hands and feet were thus applied to the bodies of Hindu women whose husbands had not survived them, and were never smeared on till the time and place of cremation had been fixed.

  The girl bent in a deep salaam to the Swami, then as the gong boomed three full, brazen strokes, elevated hands above her head, pressed their yellow-painted palms together, and, rising on tiptoe, began gyrating rapidly. Faster and faster she whirled; the weighted hem of her gold-tissue dress rose slowly with centrifugal force until the garment stood out from her like a wheel and she was like a golden-petaled flower of which her white legs were the stem, the stiffly outstanding skirt the blades, and her body from the waist upward, the pistil.