Black Moon

by Seabury Quinn

  “Look, for God’s sake!” rasped Chenevert in my ear, and I choked on a horror-stricken breath as something like a narrow streak of shadow rippled from the doorway just behind the madly whirling girl. It was about the thickness of a steamship’s hawser, and about its color, too, and bent and twisted sinuously in a series of conjoined W’s, then coiled upon itself until the circle of its body and upreared head were like a giant, obscene Q. Then it uncoiled once more, lay upon the floor in a long, twisted line, and reared its wedge-shaped head to thrust forth a forked tongue. Slowly the steely whip of elongated body crept across the floor, nearer the girl’s white, whirling feet, nearer—nearer.

  The breath stopped in my throat. What was it Dr. Macwhyte had told de Grandin? Estrella Santho had died of snake-venom injected directly into her posterior tibial artery, the great blood vessel that supplies the back of the foot—about four inches above the astragalus or ankle bone.

  A ripple of movement showed in the wavering light cast by the braziers and a second cobra joined the first, its sphenoid head raised inquiringly, its molasses-colored tongue flickering forward like a jet of flame.

  “Don’t shoot!” I heard Chenevert caution the troopers. “They’re too close. We’d be sure to hit her—”

  Beside me, coming unexpectedly as a clap of thunder on a clear day, there rose a sudden spiral of sound. Not strident, but soft, melodious, lilting, liquid as an ocarina played in middle register. With hands pressed tight against his lips, Ram Chitra Das was imitating the notes of an Indian flute. The music fluctuated from a slender spider-web of sound to a soft and throaty murmur like that of pigeons busy with their courtship. It was in a minor key, the mourning, sad lament that stamps all Oriental music, yet underneath its liquid, muted tones there was the faint suggestion of shrill, spiteful laughter.

  The cobras heard it, and halted their zigzagging course toward the madly whirling girl. One of them raised its head questioningly, then the other. Suspiciously they paused a moment, swaying slowly, uncertainly, then turned away from Austine and faced Ram Chitra Das. The foremost snake raised half a yard of mottled body from the floor, and as it reared itself the hood behind its head expanded slowly till it looked like a gigantic toadstool fastened to the sinuous barrel of its body just behind the head. The second cobra seemed to struggle for a moment, then, like the first, began to rise. Slowly, apparently unwillingly, they rose and rose; now they were balancing upon what seemed no more than half a foot of coiled tail, and their heads swayed slowly with a circular motion in time to the flute’s rhythm.

  “Get her to hell away from there!” Ram Chitra Das brought his cupped hands down from his lips an instant. “I’ll hold the snakes—be quick!”

  “Take her, Trowbridge, mon vieux,” de Grandin cried as he kicked his way through the groveling congregation toward the Swami. “Take her in your arms and bear her hence. This one is mine!”

  Avoiding the charmed snakes as widely as I could, I put my arms about Austine and drew her to me. She made no struggle as I lifted her, but lay as limp and helpless as a woman in a swoon.

  The little Frenchman’s fist shot out and cracked against the Swami’s chin with a sharp impact. “Hola, mon ami,” he cried, “here is company you did not expect at your party!” A second uppercut sent the Swami reeling back against the wall, and before he could regain his balance handcuffs snapped upon his wrists. “I make you arrested for the murder of Estrella Santho and the attempted murder of Austine Doniphan, Michael Quinault alias Ramapali,” de Grandin announced. “This time, par la barbe d’un babouin rouge, I think you will not beat the rap. No, not at all, by damn it!”

  Ram Chitra Das had followed us, and stood above the swaying cobras. “Hayah-hou!” he cried as he ceased humming the flute-tune. “The dance is ended, favored ones of Brahm. The time for rest has come!”

  Slowly, as if they had been lowered on invisible threads, the almost erect snakes sank to the floor and lay there inertly, quivering slightly, but giving no further sign of life. Unceremoniously as if he gathered up two lengths of rope Ram Chitra Das picked them up, seizing them carefully behind the head, and bore them, tails trailing flaccidly on the floor, through the doorway whence they had emerged.

  “Nobody move!” Chenevert’s voice rang like metal striking metal. “You’re all under arrest as material witnesses. Take ’em in charge, McCarty.”

  “MOST OF IT’S PLAIN,” I told de Grandin as he, Ram Chitra Das and I disposed of a bottle of champagne in my study some hours later. “I’m frank to admit, though, that what was plain as a pikestaff to you meant nothing to me until you’d pointed it out. But how d’ye account for Austine’s apparent desire to offer herself as a sacrifice? Self-preservation is one of the strongest instinctive urges—”

  “In normal people, yes,” he agreed. “But this young woman, like all too many of her generation, is definitely neurotic. We all have a queer streak in us somewhere, and if the streak becomes too wide we are thrown off our mental balance. Man’s innate impulse, as we know all too well, is to take, and woman’s is to give. It is this ‘give complex’—a series of emotionally accented impulses in a suppressed state—that fills our hospitals with nurses, that makes daughters devote their lives to selfish parents, keeps women true to undeserving husbands. But when this natural trend in woman gets out of hand it becomes pathological. We call it masochism, sometime algolagnia. Very well. Consider:

  “She is neurotically unbalanced, this Mademoiselle Austine. Guided in the proper channels her over-developed ‘give impulse’ might have made her a second Florence Nightingale. Alas, it had no guidance. It was left to run riot, and her inhibitions were naturally less strong than those of normal young women. When first we met her in the colony of the Swami I thought that I detected the scent of cannabis indica—hashish—on her hair and garments. This drug, as you know, has a powerful tendency to increase dormant, suppressed desires, to render them unnaturally—sometimes overwhelmingly—strong. When Captain Chenevert and I went through the Swami’s private rooms we found hundreds of drugged cigarettes—tobacco mixed with hashish—what you call reefers. These he had systematically led his followers to smoke until they had become addicts, living in an unreal world of drug-created fantasy, wholly free from the inhibitions which ordinary sane people possess as brakes upon their impulses, especially their unnatural or ‘queer’ impulses. Yes. Certainly. Of course.

  “Now, when one takes a sensitive, neurotic young woman and keeps her in a virtually continuous state of drug-intoxication for upward of three months she makes a fertile soil in which suggestion—either good or bad—may be implanted. Constantly, without remission, this so vile Quinault had dinned into her ears the suggestion that she give herself as a sacrifice—that she become Kurban. She had completely lost whatever inhibitions she once had. Her instinct for self-preservation was entirely blotted out, and her natural womanly instincts cried incessantly ‘give—give—give!’ with thousand-tongued insistence, until she felt the only way to happiness lay in offering herself as a sacrifice.

  “You remember when she told the Swami she would become Kurban? She hesitated for a long moment before she made the declaration, then, all at once she burst out with the offer of herself so frenziedly that she could scarcely make her words coherent. That was entirely symptomatic. So was the calm that followed when she had made the hard choice. They had so constantly suggested the act to her that her poor drugged brain had come to regard it as inevitable. Natural love of life had fought against the act, but when she’d finally given way and made the decision to become Kurban she felt a positive relief. The long, hard, losing struggle had come to an end.

  “The poor Mademoiselle Santho was less fortunate. Her they inveigled into making a will leaving her fortune to the unspeakable Quinault, then killed her ruthlessly. Mademoiselle Austine was next in line, and when we finish our investigation I am convinced that we shall find that every person in that colony is wealthy in his own right, and able to dispose of a neat fortune by will. Yes, I a
m certain.

  “Some they would have killed as they killed la Santho and attempted to kill Mademoiselle Austine. The others they would have blackmailed mercilessly, for all of them were parties to the murders in a way, and would have paid and paid to keep their part in them from being known. But of course—”

  “Why did you take those cobras up?” I asked Ram Chitra Das. “You could have killed them easily enough.”

  The Indian grinned amiably at me. “I didn’t serve with the police for nothing, sir. Those snakes alive will make good evidence against Quinault when they try him for the murder of Miss Santho and the attempted murder of Miss Doniphan. They’d have been no use to us if I had killed them.”

  “Mon brave,” the little Frenchman complimented. “My old wise one! Morbleu, but you do think of everything! Come, let us have another little so small drink”—he refilled our glasses and raised his toward the Indian—“to your cleverness, which is second only to de Grandin’s, my friend!”

  The Man in Crescent Terrace

  “BUT THIS IS MOST pleasant, vraiment,” Jules told me as we reached the corner where the black-and-orange sign announced a bus stop. “The moteur, he is a convenience. Yes, Whiz-pouf! he takes you where you wish to go all quickly, and sifflement! he brings you back all soon. But where there is no need for haste—non. It is that we grow soft and lazy substituting gasoline for walking-muscle, Friend Trowbridge. Is it not better that we walk on such a lovely evening?”

  The brief October dusk had deepened into dark as if a curtain had been drawn across the sky, and in the east a star sprang out and a cluster of little stars blinked after it. A little breeze came up and rustled faintly in the almost-leafless maples, but it seemed to me a faint sound of uneasiness came from them, not the comfortable cradle-song of evening, but a sort of restrained moaning.

  And with the sibilation of the wind there came the sound of running footsteps, high heels pounding in a sharp staccato on the sidewalk with a drumming-like panic made audible. The diffused glow of a street showed her to us as she ran, hurrying with the awkward, knock-kneed gait of a woman unused to sprinting, casting fearful looks across her shoulder each few steps, but never slackening her terror-goaded pace.

  It was not until she was almost within touching distance that she saw us, and gave vent to a gasp of relief mingled with fright.

  “Help!” she panted, then, almost fiercely, “run—run! He—it’s coming. . . .”

  “Tenez, who is it comes, Mademoiselle?” de Grandin asked. “Tell us who it is annoys you. I shall take pleasure in tweaking his nose—”

  “Run—run, you fool!” the girl broke in hysterically, clutching at my lapel as a drowning person might clutch at a floating plank. “If it catches me—” Her breathless words blurred out and the stiffness seemed to go from her knees as she slumped against me, flaccid as a rag-doll.

  I braced her slight weight in my arms, half turning as I did so, and felt the warm stickiness of fresh blood soak through my glove. “De Grandin,” I exclaimed, “she’s been hurt—bleeding—”

  “Hein?” he deflected the sharp gaze which he had leveled down the darkened street. “What is it that you say—mordieu, but you have right, Friend Trowbridge! We must see to her—hola, taxi, à moi, tout vite!” he waved imperatively at the rattletrap cab that providentially emerged from the tree-arched tunnel of the street.

  “Sorry, gents,” the driver slowed but did not halt his vehicle, “I’m off duty an’ got just enough gas to git back to the garage—”

  “Pardieu, then you must reassume the duty right away, at once, immediately!” de Grandin broke in. “We are physicians and this lady has been injured. We must convey her to the surgery for treatment, and I have five—non, three—dollars to offer as an incentive—”

  “I heard you the first time, chief,” the cabby interrupted. “For five dollars it’s a deal. Hop in. Where to?”

  OUR IMPROMPTU PATIENT HAD not regained consciousness when we reached my house, and while de Grandin concluded fiscal arrangements with the chauffeur I carried her up the front steps and into the surgery. She could not have weighed a hundred pounds, for she was slightly, almost boyishly built, and the impression of boyishness was heightened by the way in which her flaxen blond hair was cropped closely at back and sides and combed straight back from her forehead in short soft waves. Her costume added little to her weight. It was a dress of black watered silk consisting of a sleeveless blouse cut at the neckline in the Madame Chiang manner and a pleated skirt that barely reached her knees. She wore no hat, but semi-elbow length gloves of black suede fabric were on her hands and her slim, small, unstockinged feet were shod with black suede sandals criss-crossed with straps of gold. If she had had a handbag it had been lost or thrown away in her panic-stricken flight.

  “Ah—so, let us see what is to be done,” de Grandin ordered as I laid my pretty burden on the examination table. Deftly he undid the row of tiny jet buttons that fastened the girl’s blouse at the shoulder, and with a series of quick, gentle tweaks and twitches drew the garment over her head. She wore neither slip nor bandeau, only the briefest of sheer black-crêpe step-ins; we had only to turn her on her side to inspect her injury.

  This was not very extensive, being an incised wound some four inches long beginning just beneath the right scapula and slanting toward the vertebral aponeurosis at an angle of about sixty degrees. At its commencement it was quite deep, striking through the derma to subcutaneous tissue, but at termination it trailed off to a mere superficial skin wound. It was bleeding freely, and its clean-cut edges gaped widely owing to the elasticity of the skin and the retraction of the fibrous tissue. “H’m,” de Grandin murmured as he bent above the wound. “From the cleanness of its lips this cut was evidently inflicted by a razor or a knife that had been honed to razor-sharpness. Do not you agree, Friend Trowbridge?”

  I looked across his shoulder and nodded.

  “Précisément. And from the way it slants and from the fact that it is so much deeper at commencement than at termination, one may assume the miscreant who inflicted it stole up behind her, hoping to take her by surprise, but struck a split-second too late. The blow was probably directed with a slicing motion at her neck, but she was already in flight when her assailant struck. Tiens, as things are, she had luck with her, this little pretty poor one. A little deeper and the weapon might have struck into the rhomboideus, a little to the right, it might have sliced an artery. As it is—” He wiped the welling blood away, sponged the wound and surrounding epidermis with alcohol and pinched the gaping lips of the incision together in perfect apposition, then laid a pad of gauze on the closed wound and secured it with a length of adhesive plaster. “Voilà,” he looked up with an elfin grin. “She are almost good like new now I damn think, Friend Trowbridge. Her gown is still too wet with blood for wearing, but—” he paused a moment, eyes narrowed in thought, then: “Excuse me one small, little second, if you please,” he begged and rushed from the surgery.

  I could hear him rummaging about upstairs, and wondered what amazing notion might have taken possession of his active, unpredictable French brain, but before I had a chance to call to him he came back with a pleased smile on his lips and a Turkish towel from the linen closet draped across his arm. “Regard me, Friend Trowbridge,” he ordered. “See what a fellow of infinite resource I am.” He wrapped the soft, tufted fabric about the girl’s slim torso, covering her from armpits to knees, and fastened the loose end of the towel with a pair of safety pins. “Morbleu, I think perhaps a brilliant couturier was lost when I decided to become a physician,” he announced as he surveyed his handiwork. “Does she not look très chic in my creation? By damn it, I shall say she does!”

  “Humph,” I admitted, “she’s adequately covered, if that’s any satisfaction to you.”

  “I had expected more enthusiastic praise,” he told me as he drew the corners of his mouth down, “but—que voulez-vous?—the dress-designer like the prophet must expect to be unhonored in his own
country. Yes.” He nodded gloomily and lifted the girl from the table to an easy chair, taking care to turn her so her weight would not impinge upon her injured shoulder.

  He passed a bottle of ammonium carbonate beneath her nostrils, and as the pungent fumes made her nose wrinkle in the beginnings of a sneeze and her pale lids fluttered faintly: “So, Mademoiselle, you are all better now? But certainly. Drink this, if you will be so kind.” He held a glass of brandy to her lips. “Ah, that is good, n’est-ce-pas? Morbleu, I think it is so good that I shall have a small dose of the same!

  “And now,” with small fists on his hips and arms akimbo he took his stand before her, “will you have the kindness to tell us all about it?”

  She cowered back in the chair and we could see a pulse flutter in her throat. Her eyes were almost blank, but fear stared from them like a death’s head leering from a window. “Who are—where am I?” she begged piteously. “Where is it? Did you see it?” As her fingers twisted and untwisted themselves in near-hysteria, then came in contact with the towel swathed round her. They seemed to feel it unbelievingly, as if they had an intelligence separate from the rest of her. Then she looked down, gave a startled, gasping cry and leaped from the chair. “Where am I?” she demanded. “What has happened to me? Why am I dressed in—in this?”

  De Grandin pressed her gently back in the chair. “One question and one answer at a time, if you please, Mademoiselle. You are in the house of Dr. Samuel Trowbridge. This is he,” he bowed in my direction, “and I am Dr. Jules de Grandin. You have been injured, though not seriously, and that is why you were brought here when you swooned in the street. The garment you are wearing is fashioned from a bath towel. I am responsible for it, and thought it quite chic, though neither you nor Dr. Trowbridge seem to fancy it, which is a great pity and leaves your taste in dress open to question. You have it on because your gown was disfigured when you were hurt; also it is a little soiled at present. That can and will be remedied shortly.