Black Moon

by Seabury Quinn

  “I’m not convinced,” I told him, “but even if we grant your argument, what are you going to do about it? You don’t think any jury would convict him on such testimony, do you?”

  “I’m afraid he’s got us in a forked stick,” Ram Chitra Das admitted. “He couldn’t work his hypnotism on Nairini or me, of course. We’re too well versed in such things; but there are other little tricks he might try on us. I’d feel a lot more comfortable if he were out of the way. By Minakshi—”

  The little Frenchman’s short laugh broke through his sentence. “Cordieu, my friend, you have supplied the answer, I damn think!”

  “What d’ye mean—”

  “Your mention of Minakshi, the Fish-Eyed Goddess. Once when I was at Pondicherry I made the pilgrimage to Madura to witness the annual nuptials of Siva and Minakshi of the amethyst and emerald eyes—‘The Fish-Eyed One’ as she is known throughout India. I saw her image carried in a splendid bridal car, observed the great jeweled eyes in her serene face and said to me, ‘Jules de Grandin, there is danger in those eyes of hers. A man might gaze too long at them and lose himself completely; become hypnotized. Does not the legend say even great Siva is enmeshed when he looks into them? There may be factual foundation for that legend, Jules de Grandin.’ And so I looked away. I am a brave man, me, but I take no unnecessary chances. No.”

  Ram Chitra Das raised puzzled brows, but Costello was more forthright. “Is it completely daft ye’ve gone, sor?” he demanded.

  “Daft—crazy?” answered Jules de Grandin with one of his quick elfin grins. “But yes, completely crazy, mon Lieutenant—crazy like the fox. Await me here, if you will be so kind.” He hurried from the room and Costello turned to us with a Lord-save-my-sanity expression.

  “What’re ye goin’ to do wid a leprechaun like that?” he asked helplessly. “Sometimes I think he’s nutty as a fruitcake, then zowie! up he comes wid a idee that knocks ye for a loop.”

  THE PATTER OF DE Grandin’s feet came from the hall and he bounced into the room with upraised hands. “Observe them, if you please, mes enfants!” he commanded. “Are they not superb?” Between the thumb and finger of each hand he held a disc of colored glass, its periphery marked by a zone of greenish-brown, its center by a dot of black. I recognized them as the glass eyes from a white bear rug that I had purchased in a thoughtless moment years before and relegated to the attic long since.

  “What—” I began, but he cut me off with such a smug grin that I could have kicked him.

  “Regardez-moi,” he ordered. From his jacket pocket he produced a lead tube which I recognized as the container of some luminous paint with which I’d had the house number marked some time before in order that late-calling patients could see it more easily. Squeezing a bit of the paint paste on the tip of a match he proceeded to overlay the cornea of the glass eyes with it, working with that neat, swift precision which distinguished everything he did.

  “Turn out the lights, if you please,” he directed, and as I complied we were plunged in Stygian darkness, for the lamps had been extinguished in the dining room and no moonlight filtered through the windows. “Observe me, closely, if you please,” his command came through the dark, and as we watched twin spots of luminance began to glow, at first faintly, then with sharper definition, finally with a greenish-toned infernal blaze that seemed to give off wisps of smoke as if its fire fed on itself and needed no other fuel.

  “Howly Moses!” exclaimed Costello. “Who’d ’a’ thought it?”

  The lights blazed on again and I let my breath out with a jerk, nor was it till then that I realized I’d been holding it. “You see?” he asked. “Are they not truly fascinating?”

  “Call it that if ye wish, sor,” answered Costello: “I got another name for it.”

  “Precisely, mon lieutenant. So will he.”

  “He, sor? Who?”

  “That wicked old man now incarcerated in Friend Trowbridge’s garage. The one who tried to stab me with a poisoned dagger. Tonight we perform a most interesting experiment. We shall see how wickedness is turned against itself, how the power of suggestion may be made to rebound on him who exercises it for evil. Yes.

  “Will you be kind enough to bring him from the garage?” he asked Costello and Ram Chitra Das.

  “And now my old and very wicked one,” he told the fakir when they had brought him into the drawing room, “you killed Monsieur the Snapper and his little pretty lady companion by the power of the eye. Is it not so?”

  “It is so,” replied the old man with a smile of such supreme self-satisfaction that it was little less than a smirk. “Moreover, I am safe from any harm your laws can do me. No judge sahib in your country would believe I have the power—”

  “Précisément, mon vieux et mangé des vers, but we believe—and so do you. Anon we put you in a sure, safe place, and presently there comes another who will share the darkness with you. Think on her and be afraid. Remember into whose eyes even great Siva may not look without loss of his will. Bid the blood run slow and slower in your veins, the heart beat weak and weaker in your breast until it beats no more.”

  He turned abruptly on his heel and left the room, but in a moment he returned and whispered to Costello and Ram Chitra Das, “Take him all quickly into the garage, my friends, and bind him so his face is toward the window. I have fixed the eyes against the wall beneath the sill.”

  “S’pose he won’t look at ’em, sor?” Costello asked when he and the Indian returned from securing the prisoner. “He might shut his eyes or turn his head away—”

  “We need not make ourselves uneasy on that score,” de Grandin replied. “Human nature being what it is, a man can no more help turning his eyes toward a point of light in a dark room than he can keep from snapping his lids shut when someone pokes a finger at his face. Also, you recall how you were fascinated by the glow of those eyes in the dark. You knew what they were, yet you felt fear; he has no warning. He was told only, ‘Presently another comes.’ When he has been in the dark a few moments the eyes will begin glowing, it will be as if one came from outside—whether from outside the garage or from another world he will not know.

  “But do you seriously think a man can command himself to stop living?” I asked.

  “Perfectly,” de Grandin cut in “This Ajeit Swami may be a wise man, he may think he understands a great variety of things, but also he is very superstitious. He believes in magic. His is no coldly scientific mind. I planted the seed in his brain before they took him out. Fear—fear of the unknown, which is the greatest fear of all—will do the rest. We know the ju-ju of the African witch-doctor is powerless against the European because he does not believe in it, but even the educated native has active or latent superstitious dread of witchcraft, and in consequence, when he is told a spell has been put on him, he weakens, wastes away and dies, purely through the power of suggestion and the working of ingrained belief and fear. Yes, it is so.”

  Somewhat later he glanced at his watch and put down his glass. “An hour. It is time, I think, my friends. Come, let us go all quietly to the garage and observe what we shall observe.”

  SHORTLY AFTER NOON NEXT day we ran into Dr. Parnell. “Hey, you fellers been up to some more monkey-business?” he demanded.

  “Business of the monkey?” Jules de Grandin’s face was blank as a brick wall. “How do you mean, cher collègue?”

  Parnell eyed us suspiciously. “Well, I wouldn’t put it past you two. The police found a dead man in the street not far from Trowbridge’s this morning about three o’clock, and—”

  “Yes, and—” de Grandin prompted as Parnell came to a pause.

  “And I’d say he died of heart failure except for one thing.”

  “And what is that one so small thing, if you please?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with his heart. It’s sound as a dollar.”

  “Tenez,” de Grandin tweaked the ends o his mustache, “perhaps he auto-hypnotized himself to death, cher collègue. Will not you jo
in us in a drink? You look as if you could use one, as le bon Dieu knows I can and shall.”

  Clair de Lune

  MY FRIEND DE GRANDIN turned to me, brows raised, lips pursed as if about to whistle. “Comment?” he demanded. “What is that you say?”

  “You understand me perfectly,” I grinned back. “I said that if I didn’t know you for a case-hardened misogynist I’d think you contemplated an affaire with that woman. You’ve hardly taken your eyes off her since we came here.”

  The laugh lights gleamed in his small, round, blue eyes and he tweaked the ends of his diminutive wheat-blond mustache like a tomcat combing his whiskers after an especially toothsome meal. “Eh, bien, my old and rare, she interests me—”

  “So I gathered—”

  “And is she not one bonne bouchée to merit anybody’s interest, I demand to know?”

  “She is,” I admitted. “She’s utterly exquisite, but the way you’ve ogled her, like a moonstruck calf—”

  “Oh, Dr. Trowbridge, Dr. de Grandin!” Miss Templeton, the resort’s hostess and all ’round promoter of good times, came fairly dancing toward us across the hotel veranda, “I’m so thrilled!”

  “Indeed, Mademoiselle?” de Grandin rose and gave her a particularly engaging smile. “One is rejoiced to hear it. What is the cause of your so happy quivering?”

  “It’s Madelon Leroy!” In ordinary conversation thrilled, delighted laughter seemed about to break through everything Dot Templeton said, and her sentences were punctuated exclusively with exclamation points. Now she positively talked in italics. “She’s coming to our dance tonight! You know, she’s been so frightfully exclusive since she came here—said she came down to the shore to rest and didn’t want to meet a soul. But’s she’s relented, and will hold an informal reception just before the hop—”

  “Tiens, but this is of the interest, truly,” he cut in. “You may count upon our presence at the soirée, Mademoiselle. But of course.”

  As Dot danced off to spread glad tidings of great joy to other guests he glanced down at his wrist. “Mon Dieu, friend Trowbridge,” he exclaimed, “it is almost one o’clock, and we have not yet lunched. Come, let us hasten to the dining room. Me, I am almost starved. I faint, I perish! I am vilely hungry.”

  TWO TABLES AWAY FROM us, where a gentle breeze fanned through a long window facing the ocean, Madelon Leroy sat at luncheon, cool, almost contemptuous of the looks leveled at her. She was, as Jules de Grandin had remarked, a bonne bouchée deserving anyone’s attention. Her first performance in the name part of Eric Maxwell’s Clair de Lune had set the critics raving, not only over her talent as an actress, but over her exquisite, faery beauty, her delicate fragility that seemed almost other-worldly. When, after a phenomenally long run on Broadway she refused flatly to consider Hollywood’s most tempting offers, she stirred up a maelstrom of publicity that set theatrical press agents raving mad. Artists were permitted to sketch her, but she steadfastly refused to be photographed, and to thwart ambitious camera fiends and newsmen she went veiled demurely as a nun or odalisk when she appeared in public. Clair de Lune had closed for the summer, and its mysterious, lovely star was resting by the sea when Jules de Grandin and I checked in at the Adlon.

  Covertly I studied her above the margin of my menu; de Grandin made no pretense of detachment, but stared at her as no one but a Frenchman can stare without giving offense. She was a lovely thing to look at, with her dead-white, almost transparent skin, her spun-gold hair, unbobbed, that made a halo of glory around her small head, and great, trustful-seeming eyes of soft, cerulean blue. There was a sort of fairylike, almost angelic fragility about her arching, slender neck and delicately cut profile, and though she was not really small she seemed so, for she was slender and small-boned, not like a Watteau shepherdess, but like a little girl, and every move she made was graceful and unhurried as grain bending in the wind. With her fragile fairness outlined against the window she was like some princess from a fairy tale come wondrously to life, the very spirit and epitome of all the fair, frail heroines of poetry.

  “Une belle créature, n’est-ce-pas?” de Grandin asked as the waiter appeared to take our order, and he lost all interest in our fair neighbor. Women to him were blossoms brightening the pathway of life, but food—and drink—“mon Dieu,” as he was wont to say, “they are that without which life is impossible!”

  MISS LEROY HELD COURT like a princess at the reception preceding the ball that evening. If she had seemed captivating in the shadowed recess of the dining room, or on the wide veranda of the hotel, or emerging from the ocean in white satin bathing suit, dripping and lovely as a naiad, she was positively ravishing that night. More than ever she seemed like a being from another world in a sleeveless gown of clinging, white silk jersey that followed every curve and small roundness of her daintily moulded figure. It was belted at the waist with a gold cord whose tasselled ends hung almost to the floor, and as its hem swept back occasionally we caught fleeting glimpses of the little gilded sandals strapped to her bare feet.

  Her pale-gold hair was done in a loose knot and tied with a fillet of narrow, white ribbon. About her left arm, just above the elbow, was a broad, gold bracelet chased with a Grecian motif, otherwise she wore no jewelry or ornaments.

  She should have been completely charming, altogether lovely, but there was something vaguely repellent about her. Perhaps it was her slow and rather condescending smile that held no trace of warmth or human friendliness, perhaps it was the odd expression of her eyes—knowing, weary, rather sad, as if from their first opening they had seen people were a tiresome race, and hardly worth the effort of a second glance. Or possibly it might have been the eyes themselves, for despite her skillful makeup and the pains obviously taken with her by beauticians there was a fine lacework of wrinkles at their outer corners, and the lids were rubbed to the sheen of old silk with a faintly greenish eye-shadow; certainly not the lids of a woman in her twenties, or even in her middle thirties.

  “Dr. Trowbridge,” she extended a hand small and slender as a child’s, rosy-tipped and fragile as a white iris, and, “Dr. de Grandin,” as the little Frenchman clicked his heels before her.

  “Enchanté, Mademoiselle,” he bowed above the little hand and raised it to his lips, “mais je suis très heureux de vous voir!—but I am fortunate to meet you!”

  There is no way of putting it in words, but as de Grandin straightened, he and Madelon Leroy looked squarely in each other’s eyes, and while nothing moved in either of their faces something vague, intangible as air, yet perceptible as a chill, seemed forming round them like an envelope of cold vapor. For just an instant each took stock of the other, wary as a fencer measuring his opponent or a boxer feeling out his adversary, and I had the feeling they were like two chemicals that waited only the addition of a catalytic agent to explode them in a devastating detonation. Then the next guest was presented and we passed on, but I felt as if we had stepped back into normal summer temperature from a chilled refrigerator.

  “Whatever—” I began, but the advent of Mazie Schaeffer interrupted my query.

  “Oh, Dr. Trowbridge, isn’t she adorable?” asked Mazie. “She’s the most beautiful, the most wonderful actress in the world! There never was another like her. I’ve heard Dad and Mumsie talk about Maude Adams and Bernhardt and Duse, but Madelon Leroy—she’s really tops! D’ye remember her in the last scene of Clair de Lune, where she says goodbye to her lover at the convent gate, then stands there—just stands there in the moonlight, saying nothing, but you can fairly see her heart breaking?”

  De Grandin grinned engagingly at Mazie. “Perhaps it is that she has had much time to perfect her art, Mademoiselle—”

  “Time?” Mazie echoed almost shrilly. “How could she have had time? She’s just a girl—hardly more than a child. I’m twenty-one in August, and I’ll bet she’s two years my junior. It isn’t time or talent, Dr. de Grandin, it’s genius, sheer genius. Only one woman in a generation has it, and she has it—in sp
ades!—for hers.”

  The little Frenchman studied her attentively. “You have perhaps met her?”

  “Met her?” Mazie seemed upon the point of swooning, and her hands went to her bosom as if she would quiet a tumultuous heart. “Oh, yes. She was lovely to me—told me I might come to her suite for tea tomorrow—”

  “Mon Dieu!” de Grandin exploded. “So soon? Do you mean it, Mademoiselle?”

  “Yes, isn’t it too wonderful? Much, much too fearfully wonderful to have happened to anyone like me!”

  “You speak correctly,” he agreed with a nod. “Fearfully wonderful is right. Bon soir, Mademoiselle.”

  “Now,” I demanded as we left the crowded ballroom and went out on the wide, breeze-swept veranda, “what’s it all mean?”

  “I only wish I knew,” he answered somberly.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” I was nettled and made no attempt to hide it, “don’t be so devilishly mysterious! I know there’s something between you and that woman—I could fairly feel it when you met. But what—”

  “I only wish I knew,” he repeated almost morosely. “To suspect is one thing, to know is something else again, and I, hélas! have no more thin a naked suspicion. To say what gnaws my mind like a maggot might do a grave injustice to an innocent one. Au contraire, to keep silent may cause great and lasting injury to another. Parbleu, my friend, I know not what to do. I am entirely miserable.”

  I glanced at my watch. “We might try going to bed. It’s after eleven, and we go back tomorrow morning. This will be our last sure chance of a night’s sleep. No patients to rouse us at all sorts of unholy hours—”