Black Moon

by Seabury Quinn

  “When she finished her turn, she saw me watching her and came over to my table. I don’t know just how to describe it; it seemed as if we were two chemicals that needed only to be brought together to explode with a heat like a bursting atom bomb. A thrill that was as sharp as a pang of pain shot through me as she dropped into the chair opposite, it nearly lifted the hair on my head; I know it made me positively dizzy. It wasn’t what you could call love at first sight; it wasn’t love at all. It was something terrifying, like bewitchment, and I knew as I looked into her eyes she had it, too.

  “For almost an hour we sat there drinking champagne mixed with cognac, and I don’t believe in all that time either of us took his eyes off the other’s. It was as if our gaze was magnetized. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to look away; we couldn’t. When she finally rose to leave I followed her, walking like a drunken man, or one who has been hypnotized.

  “Of course, we teamed up. Her contract at the Rixdorfer was about to finish the night I met her, and she joined me at the Café Zur Nekke.”

  Young Fogarty took a deep, trembling breath and shivered like a man on whom a sudden chilling wind has blown. “Have you ever been possessed, sir? I mean that literally. Most likely you haven’t, so I can’t hope to make you understand how utterly I became enslaved. Lottë dominated me as completely—more so—as she did her pet dachshund Fritz. To say that I had no more privacy than a goldfish would be understating it. I had to be with her constantly—every moment. Even when I went to shave or wash my hands I had to leave the bathroom door open that she might see me; I had to give up having my hair cut at the Adlon barber shop and have one of the male coiffeurs at the beauty shop she patronized cut it, so she could be with me, and watch me the whole time. If a woman, no matter how old, smiled at me or spoke she was vixenishly jealous; she even resented my exchanging a word with another man or a child, and had to be present while I talked our routines over with the bandleader.

  “I couldn’t stand it, no man could. It was worse than being in prison. It was like being sewn up in a strait-jacket and gradually strangled. I loved her—if you want to call the fierce, unreasoning enchantment I was under love—but at the same time I hated her, and the hate was growing stronger than the love.

  “It wasn’t long before she felt the same way about me. We’d be lying side by side, sometimes kissing, sometimes in each other’s arms, sometimes only hand in hand, when suddenly she’d jump up, call me ‘dumkopf’ or ‘schlemmiel’ and give me a contemptuous kick, or spit on me and slap my face. And when I’d leap up in a rage she’d fairly fling herself on me, twine both arms about me so I was helpless—for she was strong as a man in spite of her slenderness—and smother me with kisses.

  “One of us surely would have killed the other if it had gone on much longer, but in 1940 the draft came and my number was one of the first called. ‘I have to go,’ I told her. ‘If I don’t I’ll be an outlaw.’

  “She stormed and screamed hysterically, went to her knees before me. ‘Do anything you want with me,’ she begged. ‘Do you want to beat me? I’ll fetch the dog whip that I use on Fritz. Tear my skin with your teeth. Slash me with your razor—anything. Drink my blood; do whatever you care to, only don’t leave me. Let them take the others to make war on the Führer. Stay with me. We can fly together to the mountains where no one will ever find us. I’ll cook your food and wash your clothes and keep your house—be your servant, your slave—only don’t leave me, liebchen!’

  “But this was my chance for escape, and I wasn’t letting it go by. ‘I’ve got to go,’ I repeated. ‘This is more than either—or both—of us, Lottë. It’s my country.’

  “She threw her arms about my knees and pressed her cheeks against them, begging me to beat her, torture her, kill her, but not leave her, and when I finally managed to break free she fell face-forward on the floor and beat her forehead on it. The last I saw of her she lay full-length on the rug with her unbound red hair about her like a pool of blood, beating both fists on the carpet and screaming, ‘You shall not leave me, I’ll never let you go—never—never—never!’

  “I was inducted as soon as I reached New York and went at once to training camp. Just before we sailed for England I met Frances at the USO. She was an entertainer, one of the best dancers I had ever seen, and when she heard I’d been a professional in civil life we were drawn together by our mutual interests.

  “This time it was love, the real thing, not an unholy fascination.

  “The entertainers weren’t allowed to date with soldiers, but she gave me her address, and we corresponded regularly. We were married the day after my discharge and formed a team, using the Spanish form of our names—Pablo and Francesca. Fran hasn’t been very well lately, and we’re planning a vacation as soon as we’ve saved enough. I was stone-broke after almost six years in the army, and it cost my separation pay plus the few war bonds I’d managed to accumulate to outfit us. Costumes are expensive and don’t wear very long.”

  De Grandin nodded smiling. “I congratulate you on the thoroughness of your report, Monsieur Paul, but what of Fraulein Lottë? You said that you suspected her.”

  “So I do, sir. Listen: I wanted to forget Lottë as I’d forget a bad dream, but she kept a constant stream of letters flowing to me till Pearl Harbor and our entrance into the war. They were all in the same tone, how she loved me, idolized me, worshiped me, how she counted every heartbeat till we were together again, and every one ended with, ‘You are mine and mine alone. I shall never let you go!’

  “After we got in the war I lost touch with her, thank the Lord, and when I next heard of her it was through the Army scuttlebutt. The British had swooped down on Geirstein and caught the Jerries in the act of trying to liquidate three hundred prisoners before they could be freed to testify. From all accounts Geirstein was worse than either Buchenwald or Dachau, but like them it had both he- and she-devils in charge. The leader of the female schwartzstaffelkorps was a tall, red-headed woman said to be as beautiful as Helen of Troy and crueler than Countess Bathory. They laid more than two hundred deaths of helpless Jews and Poles and Czechs to her, but none of them had died outright, all died under torture supervised or actually inflicted by her. I was shocked but not too much surprised when I heard her name was Lottë Dalberg. Her father had been a scharfrichter or headsman, and I supposed she took naturally to the bloody work.

  “She was tried and found guilty with the other members of the Geirstein staff. Two months ago we read she had been hanged.” Young Fogarty paused, swallowed twice and reached for the now-empty brandy glass.

  “Mais certainement, but of course,” de Grandin volunteered and poured out a fresh potion of cognac. “And then?”

  “Then it began. Fran and I were practicing a new routine. Come to think of it, it was the very day they hanged Lottë, but, of course, we didn’t know about that then. Suddenly the stool was jerked from under Tony. Anthony Nusbaum is pianist in the band at the Gold Room and plays for our rehearsals. It couldn’t have slipped. It was standing on a rug, not the bare floor, and Tony weighs at least two hundred pounds. If anything would hold that stool down as if it had been nailed he would, but there it was, halfway across the room, with Tony sitting on his fanny and looking surprised as a kid who’d just sat down on a pin put in his school seat.

  “In a moment every pane of glass in the windows began rattling as if a gale were blowing, though we could see the trees dead still outside, and the light bulbs in the chandelier all popped. They didn’t go out, they burst and shattered, as if they’d been squeezed by an unseen hand.

  “Fran was wearing rayon slacks with deep cuffs for practice, and had caught her heel in one of them, giving it a nasty rip. She’d had her sewing basket out to mend the tear and left a needle sticking in the spool of thread and there were half a dozen more in a paper packet. Not loose, but stuck in the black paper, the way they come, you know. Just as the light bulbs popped those needles detached themselves and came darting through the air, every one
of ’em sticking in my face. Six of ’em stuck half an inch into my cheeks and the threaded one thrust itself into my nose, trailing half a yard of linen string. You won’t believe that, I know, but it’s absolutely true.”

  “Monsieur,” de Grandin assured him, “I believe you implicitly. Proceed with your précis, if you please.”

  “We haven’t had much peace since, sir. Several times a day, and most especially at night, something like that occurs. Chairs, books, tables and even such heavy pieces of furniture as a piano are moved about, sometimes slowly, sometimes fairly thrown, and jewelry and other small objects are hurled through the air. The blankets are jerked off our beds while we’re sleeping, our clothes are snatched off hangers and wadded on the wardrobe floor or tossed into the corners of the room, food is snatched off the table before us. Only yesterday the whole tablecloth was jerked away as we were eating breakfast, spilling food and dishes over us and the floor.”

  “Bien oui,” de Grandin murmured. “Thus far it runs entirely true to pattern. What else, if you please?”

  “Last night I wakened at the sound of something scratching. When I got up and lit the light I saw a sentence taking form upon the wall of the bedroom. There was no pencil—nothing that could make the letters visible—but the scratching kept up steadily as words were spelled out against the paint.”

  “You could read them? They were not cryptic, like those showing on the palace wall at the feast of Belshazzar?”

  “Yes, sir, I could read them, all right,” he said grimly. “I recognized the writing, too. I’d seen it often enough.”

  “Ah, and it said—”

  “Just what I’d read in half a hundred letters from Lottë, the sentence with which she always ended: ‘You are mine and mine alone. I shall never let you go.’”

  “Parbleu,” de Grandin began, but got no farther, for, apparently from the floor of the consulting room there came a deafening, clanging, banging racket, like a tin can bumping over cobbles at the tail of some luckless mongrel, and out of empty air, apparently some six feet overhead, burst a mocking, maniacal laugh.

  The silence fairly beat upon our ears as the unholy racket stopped abruptly as it had begun, and Fogarty smiled bleakly. “You get used to it in time,” he said wearily. “You saw that broken prism from the chandelier hit me tonight. You know it didn’t fall on me; you know that it was thrown.”

  “I do, indeed, Monsieur.”

  “Then look at this.” The boy stripped back his jacket cuff and shirt sleeve. On his bared forearm, apparently scratched with some sharp instrument, was an intricately wrought, but easily decipherable, monogram: “L.D.” “Tonight she put her brand on me. Now see this.” From his jacket pocket he drew out a folded handkerchief and spread it on the table before us. Smeared on the linen, apparently with lipstick, was a seventeen-word message: “Pablo you are mine to torment and to kill. I shall do both in my good time.” The writing was bold, ill-formed, angular, the sort of writing one accustomed to use German script might use to write English.

  “And this came—?” de Grandin arched the slim black brows which were such a vivid contrast to his blond hair and mustache.

  “Tonight, after we’d done our last turn. Fran was making up her mouth when the lipstick was snatched out of her hand and the handkerchief from my breast pocket. Next instant handkerchief and lipstick were flung into the far corner of the dressing room. When we picked ’em up we found this.”

  “Tiens,” the little Frenchman began, then, “Sacré nom!” as he ducked his head. With a sharp click the key had turned in the lock of the instrument case that stood by the farther wall, the glass door swung open and from the upper shelf a lancet rose, shot like an arrow from a bow in low parabola and sped whirring past his head, missing his cheek by the bare fraction of a centimeter as it flashed across the room to bury itself a full inch in the wall.

  “Nom de nom de nom de nom de sacré nom!” he swore savagely. “No twenty-times-accursed fantôme, no never-quite-to-be-sufficiently-anathematized lutin shall throw a knife at Jules de Grandin and boast of the exploit. Mademoiselle la Revenante, I am annoyed with you. I take your gauntlet up. I accept your challenge, me. Parbleu, but we shall see who makes a monkey out of whom before this business is finished!”

  He looked from one of us to the other, the sharp vertical wrinkles of a frown of concentration etched between his brows. “My friends, I think I have the diagnosis, but as to treatment, tenez, that is another matter. Friend Trowbridge, have you not noted one constant factor in these so untoward happenings?”

  “Why—” I temporized. “Why—”

  “Not why, but what,” he corrected with a quick grin. “Think, concentrate, meditate, if you will be so kind.”

  “H’m. The only condition common to all these occurrences as Mr. Fogarty has related them seems to be that he and his wife have been together—”

  “Bravo! Bravissimo!”

  “But of course, that could have no earthly bearing on—”

  “Name of a small blue man, has it not so? I tell you it is diagnostic, my friend.”

  “I fail to see—”

  “Précisément, exactement; quite so. Permit that I instruct you. Across the Rhine in that dark country which has spewed war twice upon the world in one generation they have some words which are most expressive. Among them is poltergeist, which signifies a pelting ghost, a ghost which flings things round the house and plays the stupid, childish tricks. More often he is not a ghost at all in the true sense, he is some evil entity which plagues a man or more often a woman. Not for nothing did the old ones call the Devil Prince of the Powers of the Air, for there are very many evil things in the air which we can no more see than we can see the micro-organisms of disease. Yes, it is so.” He nodded solemn affirmation.

  “This one, I damn think, however, are a true ghost, the earthbound spirit of a human creature tainted with the deadly sins of lust and murder. Also, it are a poltergeist of the first water.

  “For why? Why should it not come back as an ordinary specter, sighing, weeping, wailing, crying, manifesting itself through the apperceptive senses rather than as a poltergeist, a pelter, a mover-around-of-furniture?

  “You ask it? Pardieu, I shall tell you! The usual, ordinary haunting-ghost may make a noise, often a most unpleasant noise, and sometimes, with or without the aid of a medium, manifest itself visually. It may raise the hair upon the head of the beholder, frighten him until he is well-nigh witless, but that appears to be about the limit of its powers. It does not fling crockery, it does not move the furniture about, it does not exercise the physical force. The poltergeist does so. You apprehend? You follow me? Of course.

  “This Lottë Dalberg was a very wicked woman. She was a bloodstained wanton who paid with her life for her crimes. And death has not reformed her. She would torment, injure, perhaps kill the man who had escaped her in life. And in order that she may have power to exercise the violence physique she comes back as a poltergeist. Yes, certainly; of course.

  “Very well, then. Experience with such things shows some agent is essential for the poltergeist’s activities. The agent, who may be, and usually is entirely innocent of all evil intent, is almost always one possessing some physical or mental abnormality. She are often a young girl in her teens, less often a boy of the same age, sometimes an old or sick person, perhaps a cripple whose vitality is low.

  “You begin to comprehend? Monsieur Fogarty has told us that Madame his wife is unwell, that they wait only to accumulate a little money before they take a long vacation. Madame,” he bowed to the girl, “you have consulted a physician? He has diagnosed your illness?”

  “Yes,” tremulously, “he said I’m suffering from anemia. Things had gotten pretty bad for me before the war. Vaudeville had just about disappeared, there weren’t enough floor shows to give employment to a tenth of the dancers ‘at liberty.’ I had to take what I could get. I was a taxi dancer at the Posieland Dance Hall—five cents a dance and a ten percent commission o
n the drinks I vamped the patrons into buying. For more than a year I ate ten-cent breakfasts and luncheons; if I had enough to dine at the steam table at the Automat I thought I was in luck. Something has to give way when you starve all day and dance all night, you know, sir.”

  “Mordieu, tu parles, ma petite pauvre,” he answered with a gleam of sympathy in his eyes. “You have said it, truly. But so it is. The so unpleasant workings of this naughty poltergeist undoubtedly are conditioned by your presence.”

  “You mean—” there was stark panic in the girl’s cry—“you mean that I’m responsible—”

  “Not at all, by no means, Madame. I mean the poltergeist works through, not with you. The movement of objects and the application of violence without the use of any physical force known to science is technically known as telekinesis. The poltergeist accomplishes it by means of in imponderable substance called teleplasm, which is akin to, though not the same as the ectoplasm or psychoplasm exuded by the medium at a spiritualistic séance. Now, neither the mind nor that discarnate entity we call a ghost for want of more exact terminology can affect matter without the influence of a human intermediary. You, Madame, are that. It is from you that this entirely detestable spirit-thing derives the necessary teleplasm. Yes.

  “But should you blame yourself? Bien non. No more than the unfortunate householder whose home has been ravaged by a burglar. Indeed, the simile is apt. You have not given her the teleplasm; she has stolen it from you.”