Black Moon

by Seabury Quinn

  “Well, sor, like I wuz tellin’ ye, Looie’d done a bit o’ stoolin’ now an’ then, but it wuz mostly small-fry, unimportant stuff puttin’ th’ finger on dips an’ dope-peddlers, or tippin’ th’ department off when a pawnbroker acted as a fence; sometimes slippin’ us th’ office when a loft burglary wuz cookin’, an’ th’ like o’ that. We hadn’t heard that he’d been mixed up with any of these now black-handers, so when he turns up dead an’ all butchered like I said, we’re kind o’ wondering who kilt him, an’ why.”

  “I have the answer to one part of your question, mon lieutenant,” de Grandin informed him with a grave nod.

  “An’ have ye, now, sor? That’s just grand. Would ye be afther tellin’ me who done it, just for old times’ sake? That is, if it’s not a military secret.”

  “Mais non. Point du tout. He was killed by a mummy.”

  “A—glory be to God!” Costello drained his glass of whiskey at a gulp. “Th’ man says he wuz kilt be a mummy! Sure, Dr. de Grandin, sor, ye wuz always a great one for kiddin’, but this is business.”

  De Grandin’s little round blue eyes were hard and cold as ice as they looked into Costello’s. “I am entirely serious, my friend. I who speak to you say he was slain by a mummy.”

  “O.K., sor. If ye say so, I s’pose it’s so. I’ve never known ye to give me a bum steer, but sayin’ a gink’s been kilt be a mummy is pretty close to tryin’ to tell me that pigs fly an’ tomcats sing grand op’ry. Now, th’ question is, ‘How’re we gonna find this murderin’ mummy?’ Do they kape him in a museum, or does he run loose in th’ streets?”

  “Le bon Dieu only knows,” the little Frenchman answered with a shrug, “but perhaps we can narrow down our search. Tomorrow I shall go to the morgue and inspect the corpse of Monsieur Joseph-Louis. Meantime there is something you can do to aid the search. This Crescent Terrace, as I recall it, is a little street. Secure the names of every householder and compile as complete a dossier on each as is possible: what his habits are, whence he comes, how long he has lived there—everything. The smallest little detail is important. There are no unimportant things in such a case as this. You comprehend?”

  “I do, sor.”

  “Très bon.” He cast a speculative look at the decanter of whiskey. “There is at least three-quarters of a quart left in the bottle, my friends. Let us do a little serious drinking.”

  THE STREET LIGHTS WERE coming on and the afterglow was faint in the west under the first cold stars when we gathered in my study for a council of war next evening. De Grandin tapped a sheaf of neatly piled pages lying on the table before him. This Monsieur Grafton Loftus is our most likely suspect,” he announced. “This is the dossier compiled on him by your department, Friend Costello:

  No. 18 Crescent Terrace—Loftus, Grafton. Unmarried, about fifty. Born in England. Came to this country from London four years ago. No occupation, maintains fair account in the Clifton Trust Co., periodically replenished by foreign bank drafts. Pays all bills promptly. Goes out very little, has no intercourse with neighbors. Few visitors. Nothing known of personal habits, hobbies, etc. No pets. Neighbors on each side speak of having heard low, peculiar whistle, no tune, coming from his home at night, sometimes continuing for half hour at a time, have also noted strong smell like that of Chinese incense coming from his house at times.

  “Perhaps I am a trifle dull,” I said sarcastically, “but I fail to see where anything in that dossier gives ground for suspicion. We haven’t any personal description of Mr. Loftus. Does he look like a mummy?”

  “I would not say so,” de Grandin replied. “I took occasion to call on him this afternoon, pretending to ask direction to the house of an entirely mythical Monsieur John Garfield. Monsieur Loftus came to the door—after I had rung his doorbell unremittingly for half an hour—and seemed considerably annoyed. He is a big man, most decidedly stout, bald-headed, with a red face and fat cheeks threatening to engulf his small eyes. His lips are very red, his mouth is small, and pouts like that of a petulant child. Also, he was distressingly uncivil when I asked most courteously for the non-existent Monsieur Garfield’s address. I did not like his looks. I do not like him. No. Not at all.”

  “All the same, there’s nothing in what you’ve told us to indicate he goes around disguised as a mummy and murdering inoffensive bums,” I persisted.

  “Ah bah!” he answered. “You vex me, Friend Trowbridge. Attend me, if you please. When I had seen this Monsieur Loftus I called New Scotland Yard on Transatlantic telephone, and talked with my friend Inspector Grayson, formerly of the British Intelligence. He told me much I wished to know. By example: Monsieur Loftus served with the British troops in Egypt and Mesopotamia during the first World War. While there he forgathered with decidedly unsavory characters, and was three times court-martialed for being absent without leave when native pow-wows were in progress. Of no importance, you say? Very, well, to continue: When he returned to England he became identified with several malodorous secret societies. The first of these was the Gorgons, ostensibly a nature-worship cult, but actually concerned with diabolism. He appears to have grown tired of these and joined the cult of Lokapala, which comprised as sinister a company of blackguards as could be found anywhere. They were known to have sacrificed animals with revolting cruelties, and were suspected of having indulged in human sacrifice at least on one occasion. The police broke this gang up and Loftus, with several others, was sentenced to a short term in the workhouse.

  “We next hear of him as a member of the gang known as Los Leopardos, the Human Leopards, whose headquarters in the Shooter’s Hill locality of Blackheath was raided by the police in 1938. Again the estimable Monsieur Loftus served a short term in jail. He was also implicated in the deviltries of Rowely Thorne, whose nemesis our mutual friend John Thunstone is. Now,” he swept us with a cold, challenging stare, “you will admit the company he kept was something less than desirable.”

  “That may be so,” I conceded, “but all the same—”

  “But all the same he was a member of the Esoteric Society of the Resurrection. You comprehend?”

  “I can’t say that I do. Was that society one of those half-baked religious organizations?”

  “Neither half-baked nor religious, in the true sense of the term, my friend. They were drawn from every stratum of society, from every country, every race. Scientists some of them were, men and women who had perverted their knowledge to base ends. Others were true mystics, Indian, Egyptian, Syrian, Druse, Chinese, English, French, Italian, even some Americans. They brought together the wisdom—all the secret, buried knowledge—of the East, and mated—not married—it to the science of the West. The offspring was a dreadful, illegitimate monster. Here, let me read you a transcription of an eyewitness’ account of a convocation of the society:

  The members of the cult, all robed in flowing white draperies, gathered in the courtyard of the society’s headquarters around the replica of an Egyptian tomb with heavy doors like those of an ice box held fast with triple locks and bolts of solid silver. After a brief ceremony of worship four members of the society wearing black and purple draperies came out of the house, led by the Grand Hierophant robed in red vestments. They halted before the tomb and at a sign from the High Priest all members of the congregation stopped their ears with their fingers while the Hierophant and his acolytes mumbled the secret formula while the silver locks and bolts were being unfastened. Then the High Priest cried the Secret Word of Power while his assistants threw incense on the brazier burning before the tomb.

  In a moment they emerged bearing a black-painted bier or stretcher on which lay the unwrapped body of an Egyptian mummy. Three times they bore the embalmed corpse around the courtyard that every member of the congregation might look on it and know that it was dead. Then they went back into the tomb.

  More incense was burned while everybody knelt on the bare earth and stared fixedly at the entrance of the tomb. Minutes passed, then at the gaping doorway of the tomb appeared the
mummy, standing upright and moving slowly and mechanically, like a marionette moved by invisible wires. In its right hand it held a short spear tipped with the tempered copper that only the ancient Egyptians knew how to make.

  The Chief Hierophant walked before the mummy, blowing softly on a silver whistle each few steps, and the revivified lich seemed to bear and follow the sound of the whistle. Three times the mummy followed the High Priest in a circuit of the courtyard, then priest and living corpse went back into the tomb. The priest came out in a few moments and quickly fastened the silver locks of the tomb door. He was perspiring profusely, although the night was cold.

  The strictest silence was enjoined during the entire ceremony, and instant dismissal from the society was the penalty decreed for any member making even the slightest sound while the mummy was out of the tomb. Once, it was said, a woman member became hysterical when the mummy emerged from the tumulus, and burst into a fit of weeping. The lich leaped on her in an instant and struck her down with its spear, then hacked her body to ribbons as she lay writhing on the earth. It was only by the shrilling of the High Hierophant’s whistle that the thing was finally persuaded to give over its bloody work and lured back to the tomb.

  “What do you think from that, hein?” he demanded as he finished reading.

  “It sounds like the ravings of a hashish-eater, or the recollection of a most unpleasant dream,” I volunteered.

  There was no hint of impatience in the smile he turned on me. “I agree, Friend Trowbridge. It are assuredly extra ordinem—outside things’ usual and accepted order—as the lawyers say; but most of us make the mistake of drawing the line of the possible too close. When I read this transcription over the ’phone to our friend Monsieur Manly Wade Wellman this afternoon he agreed it was entirely possible for such things to be.

  “Now,” once more he swept us with his fixed, unwinking cat-stare, “me, I have evolved an hypothesis: This so odious Loftus, who had been a member of this altogether detestable society, has made use of opportunity to cheat. While others stopped their ears as the Hierophant pronounced the secret invocation—the Word of Power as the witness to the ceremony calls it—he listened and became familiar with it. He anticipated making similar experiments, I have no doubt, but the onset of the war and the bombings of London interfered most seriously with his plans. Alors, he came to this country, took up residence in the quietly respectable Crescent Terrace, and proceeded with his so unholy trials. That would account for the incense his neighbors smelled at night, also for the whistlings they heard. Do not you agree?”

  “I don’t agree,” I answered, “but if we grant your premises I see the logic of your conclusions.”

  “Triomphe!” he exclaimed with a grin. “At last good skeptical Friend Trowbridge agrees with me, even though he qualifies his agreement. We make the progress.

  “And now, my friends,” he turned from me to Costello, Dogherty and Schmelz, “if we are ready, let us go. The darkness comes and with it—eh bien, who shall say what will eventuate?”

  CRESCENT TERRACE WAS A short semilunar by way connecting Clinton Avenue and Dorondo Street built up on the west side with neat houses. There were only twenty of them in the block, and their numbers ran consecutively, since a small park faced the east curb of the street.

  We drew up at the far side of the park and walked across its neatly clipped lawns between beds of coleus and scarlet sage. At the sidewalk we halted and scanned the blank-faced houses opposite. “The second building from the end is Number 18,” Jules de Grandin whispered. “Do you take station behind yonder clump of shrubs, Friend Costello, and Sergeants Dogherty and Schmelz will form an ambuscade just behind that hedge of hemlock. Friend Trowbridge, it is best that you remain with the Lieutenant, so that we shall have two parties of two each for reserves.”

  “An’ where will you be, sor?” Costello asked.

  “Me, I shall be the lure, the bait, the stalking-horse. I shall parade as innocently as an unborn lamb before his lair.”

  “But we can’t let ye take th’ risk all by yerself, sor,” Costello objected, only to be cut short by de Grandin’s sharp:

  “Zut! You will do exactly as I say, mon ami. Me, I have worked this strategy out mathematically and know what I am doing. Also, I was not born yesterday, or even day before. A bientôt, mes amis.” He slipped into the shadows silently as a bather letting himself down into dark water. In a moment we saw him emerge from the far side of the park into Clinton Avenue, turn left and enter Crescent Terrace. Somehow, as he strode along the footway with an air of elaborate unconcern, his silver-headed ebony stick tucked beneath his left elbow, he reminded me of a major strutting before a band, and heard him humming to himself as if he had not a care in the world.

  He had almost traversed the three hundred yards of the short half-moon of the Terrace, walking slower and more slowly as he approached Dorondo Street. “Nothin’ doin’ yet,” breathed Dogherty. “I been lookin’ like a tomcat at a mouse-hole, an’ don’t see nothin’—”

  “Zat so?” whispered Costello sharply. “If ye’d kape yer eyes on th’ street an’ not on Dr. de Grandin, maybe ye’d see more than ye have. What’s that yonder in th’ doorway o’ Number 18, I dunno?”

  Dogherty, Schmelz and I turned at his sharp question. We had, as he said, been watching Jules de Grandin, not the street behind him. Now, as we shifted our glances, we saw something stirring in the shadow that obscured the doorway of Number 18. At first it seemed to be no more than a chance ray of light beamed into the vestibule by the shifting of a tree-bough between house and street lamp, but as we kept our eyes glued to it we saw that it was a form—a tall, attenuated, skeletally-thin form moving stealthily in the shadow.

  Slowly the thing emerged from the gloom of the doorway, and despite the warning I had had, I felt a prickling sensation at the back of my neck just above my collar, and a feeling as of sudden chill ran through my forearms. It was tall, as we had been told, fully six feet from its bare-boned feet to hairless, parchment-covered skull, and the articulation of its skeleton could be seen plainly through the leathery skin that clung to the gaunt, staring bones. The nose was large, high-bridged and haughty, like the beak of a falcon or eagle, and the chin was prominent beneath the sheath of skin that stretched across it. The eyes were closed and showed only as twin depressions in the skull-like countenance, but the mummified lips had retracted to show a double line of teeth in a mirthless grin. Its movements were irregular and stiff, like the movements of some monstrous mechanical doll or, as Edina Laurace had expressed it, like a marionette worked by unseen wires. But once it had emerged from the doorway it moved with shocking quickness. Jerkily, and with exaggeratedly high knee-action, it crossed the lawn, came to the sidewalk, turned on its parchment-soled feet as if on a pivot, and started after de Grandin.

  The luckless bum it had pursued the night before had run from it. De Grandin waited till the scraping of its fleshless feet against the flagstones was almost at his elbow, then wheeled to face it, little round blue eyes ablaze, small teeth showing in a grin as mirthless and menacing as the mummy’s own. “Sa-ha, Monsieur le Cadavre,” he spoke almost pleasantly, “it seems we meet to try conclusions, hein? Monsieur Joe-Louis the Louse you killed, but me you shall not kill. Oh, no!”

  Glinting like a flash of silver lightning in the street lamp’s glow the blade of his sword cane ripped from its sheath, and he fell into guard position.

  The mummy paid no more attention to his sword than if it had been a straw. It never faltered in its advance, but pressed upon him, broad-bladed spear raised like an axe. Down came the chopping spearhead, up went de Grandin’s rapier, and for a moment steel and spear-shaft locked in an impasse. Then nimbly as an eel escaping from a gloved hand the Frenchman’s weapon disengaged and he leaped back beyond the reach of the spear.

  But the mummy came on relentlessly or, more exactly, insensately, with the utter lack of caution of an automaton. The rapier played lightning-like, weaving glittering patterns in
the pale light of the street lamps; de Grandin danced as agilely as the shadow of a wind-blown leaf, avoiding heavy slash and devastating lunge, then closed in quickly as a winking eye, thrusting, stabbing, driving with a blade that seemed more quicksilver than steel. Once, twice, three times we saw his rapier pass clear through the lich, its point emerging four full inches from the leather-skinned back, but for all the effect his thrusts had, he might have been driving a pin into a pincushion.

  The mummy could not have weighed much more than fifty pounds, and the little Frenchman’s devastating thrusts drove it back on its heels like blows from a fist, rocking it from perpendicular until it leant at an angle of forty degrees to the earth, but it seemed endowed with devilish equilibrium and righted itself like a gyroscope each time he all but forced it off its balance.

  “Mais c’est l’enfantillage—this is childishness!” we heard de Grandin pant as we closed in and sought a chance to seize his skeleton-like antagonist. “He who fights an imp of Satan as if he were human is a fool!

  “Stand back, my friends,” he called to us as we approached, “this is my task, and I will finish it, by blue!” He dodged back from the chopping of the mummy’s spear, fumbling in his pocket with his left hand, then once more drove in savagely, his rapier slipping past the weapon of his adversary to pierce clear through the bony body.

  And as the sword hilt struck against the mummy’s ribs and swayed it backward, he thrust forward with his left hand. There was a click, a spurt of sparks, and the blue point of a little cone of flame as the wick of his cigarette lighter kindled.

  The tiny blue flame touched the mummy’s wrinkled skin, a flickering tongue of yellow fire bloomed like a golden blossom from the point of contact, and in an instant the whole bony, bitumen-smeared body of the lich was ablaze. If it had been composed of oil-soaked cotton waste it could not have caught fire more quickly or blazed more fiercely. The flame licked up its wasted torso, seized greedily upon emaciated limbs, burned scrawny neck and scraggy, parchment-covered head as if they had been tinder. The stiffness went from thigh- and shin-bones as they crumbled into ashes, and the blazing torso fell with a horrifying thud to the flagstones, flame crackling through its dryness.