Black Moon

by Seabury Quinn

  “You mean you think that Anastasia is possessed by a demon?” I asked incredulously.

  “Not necessarily. It would be sufficient if she thought herself possessed.”

  “If she thought—good Lord, man, what are you driving at?”

  “Just this, my old one: Thoughts are very potent things. The African witch-doctor tells the native of the Congo, ‘I have put a spell on you,’ and straightway the poor fellow sickens, grows weak and dies. In Polynesia the same thing occurs. We have innumerable instances of natives being ‘prayed to death’ by pagan priests despite the efforts of the missionaries to prevent it. Have not our doctors borne repeated testimony of the potency of voodoo magic in Haiti, and does not the Pennsylvania farmer believe that a hex put on him can cause illness, even death? But of course.

  “Very well, then. Let us assume Mademoiselle Anna believes herself possessed, believes that she, as the old saying has it, is ‘called;’ that she must surely fade away and die, and nothing can be done about it. Why should she not die in such circumstances? It is not difficult to think yourself into an illness, even a fatal one, as you know from experience with hypochondriacs in your practice.”

  “That’s so,” I admitted, “but why should she think herself possessed?”

  “Because of Monsieur Timon the Deceased. He cursed her, then committed suicide. In many parts of Greece it is still thought that suicides become vrykolakas at death, and you will recall he swore she should be destroyed by such an one.”

  “What the devil is a vrykolakas?”

  “He is a species of vampire, not a true one, but something quite similar. The vampire is an animated corpse who steals forth from his grave to suck the blood of his victims. The vrykolakas is a disembodied spirit who subtly drains his victim of vitality, and he, my friend, is said to be the cause of gusel vereni.

  “Très bon, let us review the evidence: First, we have a long and intimate association between a boy and girl. The boy is cruel and arrogant, almost, if not quite, sadistic in his attitude toward the girl. He dominates her completely, ordering her about as a harsh master might a dog. All this predisposes her to subservience and docility and makes her malleable to his will. At last she revolts, but her self-assertion is a shallow thing; deep down she feels that he is master. No matter, he hurls a curse at her, then destroys himself.

  “She is extremely suggestible—did not you notice how quickly she sank into hypnosis this evening? Bien. Bon. The thought—the gnawing fear—of his curse has been planted in her mind like the seed of some malignant plant. Perhaps it does not germinate at once; perhaps it lies there in her mental soil awaiting circumstances favorable to gestation.

  “Then what occurs, I ask to know? She visits his grave on All Souls’ Day, she calls him to remembrance, perhaps she feels responsible for his self-murder, reproaches herself, thinks of him— How does she think of him, one wonders? Is it pityingly, as for one who died for love of her, or is it fearfully, as of one who placed a curse on her? A curse is very dreadful to the Greeks, my friend, and not a thing to be lightly regarded.

  “And then what happens? Thinking of her almost-lifelong servitude to him she goes home, broods upon his tragic, violent death and on the curse he put upon her—that she should die a victim to a vrykolakas. Barbe d’un poisson, it has been said, ‘As a man thinketh so is he;’ it can be said with even greater truth of a woman. Our poor young Mademoiselle Anna goes to bed and slowly pines away, and nothing medicine can do will help her.” He sat back, crossed his hands upon the knob of his stick and looked at me with the air of a man who has propounded an unanswerable proposition.

  As always, I rose to the bait. “You say her case is hopeless—”

  “Non, non, mon vieux, I said that nothing medicine can do will help her, not that Jules de Grandin is impotent.”

  “Then what do you propose doing—”

  He glanced at his watch. “First I shall ask you to set me down here. I go to collect matériel de siège. In half an hour I shall join you, then”—he grinned one of his quick elfin grins—“we shall see what we shall see, if anything.”

  HE WAS PUNCTUAL TO the minute, and immensely pleased with himself as he laid a miscellany of packages on the study table. “These,” he announced as he held up two small silver censers, “are for your use, and the young McCormick’s, my old one.”

  “Our use?” I echoed. “What’re we to do with ’em?”

  “Swing them, par la barbe d’un singe jaune. I have filled them full of Mandragora autumnalis, which was esteemed a very potent drug by the old ones, for it is said that Solomon the Wise made use of it to compel djinn and devil to obey him. And Josephus Flavius declares that at the smell of it the demons which possess a man take flight—”

  “Surely,” I scoffed, “you don’t believe such utter nonsense!”

  From another parcel he drew a wide-mouthed bottle of what seemed like black or very dark amethyst glass, stoppered with a wax disc on which were impressed the letters I.X.N. “It is the prison into which I mean to drive him,” he explained.

  “Eh? The prison—”

  “Précisément. La Bastille. In the Levant, where such things are, they believe evil spirits can be forced or lured into a bottle, and—”

  “You’re amazing!” I guffawed. “To think of grown men going through such mummery. I’ll have trouble keeping a straight face—”

  “Perhaps,” he agreed, and the flatness of his voice might have betokened embarrassment or irony, “and then again, you may not. Are we ready? Très bien, Allons-vous-en.”

  ANASTASIA WAS SLEEPING AS we tiptoed into her sick room. “How is she?” de Grandin whispered. “Is there any change, any indication of nightmare?”

  “Not yet,” McCormick answered. “I don’t think the morphia has worn off yet.”

  “Good. Attend me, both of you, if you please.” He drew the little silver censers from his portmanteau and laid them on the bedside table. “Anon the visitant will come, and we must be prepared for him. When I give the signal strike matches and ignite the incense in these thuribles, then march about the room while you swing them toward Mademoiselle Anna. Friend Trowbridge, you will march clockwise, from left to right; Friend McCormick, you will proceed counter-clockwise. It would be better if you maintained complete silence, but if you must speak do not raise your voices. Comprenez-vous?”

  “You spoke of a visitant,” I whispered. “D’ye mean when and if Anna has a nightmare?”

  “Peut-être que oui, peut-être que non—perhaps yes; perhaps no,” he responded. “In such a case as this—tonnerre de Dieu, regard her, if you please!”

  The sleeping girl stirred restlessly and turned her head upon the pillow with a small protesting moan like that a sleepy child gives when wakened. “Quick, mes amis, set your censers glowing, commence the promenade!” he ordered.

  Our matches bared in unison, and the powder in the censers took fire instantly, glowing redly and emitting pungent clouds of bitter-sweet smoke.

  De Grandin laid the wide-mouthed bottle on the dressing table, set its wax cork beside it, and took his station near the girl’s bed, gazing earnestly into her face.

  She moaned again, made a small whimpering sound; then her lips parted and she raised her hands and thrust her head forward, as if she saw an ecstatic vision through her fast-closed lids. Her pale cheeks flushed, she moved her hands gently downward, as if stroking the face of one who bent above her, and a tremor shook her slender form as her slim bosom rose and fell with avid, quick breathing. Her lips opened and closed slowly, in a pantomime of blissful kissing, and a deep sigh issued from between her milk-white teeth; her breath came short and jerkily in quick exhausted gasps.

  “Grand Dieu, l’incube!” de Grandin whispered almost wonderingly.

  “Yes, it’s an incubus, a nightmare!” I agreed. “Quick, waken her, de Grandin, this sort of thing can lead to erotomania!”

  “Be silent!” he commanded sharply. “I did not say an incubus, but the incubus. This
is no nightmare, my friend, no mere erotic boiling-up of the unconscious in a dream. It is la séduction—the wooing of a living woman by a thing from beyond—”

  “Dr. de Grandin, look behind you, man, for God’s sake!” McCormick’s warning came in a thick, strangled voice. “It—it’s—”

  A ripping, tearing sound came from the window at the far end of the room, and from its rod one of the scrim curtains came fluttering, not as if falling of its own weight, nor yet as if wafted by a wind, but purposefully, sentiently, consciously, as if it were imbued with a life of its own.

  We saw the flimsy fabric take on curves and form, as if it were a cerecloth draped loosely on a lich—there was the outline of the head, a sacklike rounded protuberance above the line of the shoulders, and from the right and left drooped fluttering wings of cloth as if they swayed downward from outspread arms, while as the thing came forward with a stealthy, creeping motion we saw its lower portion swirl and advance and retreat alternately, as if it fluttered against moving legs. Yet there was nothing—absolutely nothing—under it. Through the loosely-woven scrim we saw the light shine; when it moved between us and the dresser we could see the furniture through the meshes.

  “Grande cornes de Satan, have you come to try conclusions with me, Monsieur Sans Visage?” asked Jules de Grandin in a hard, gritty voice. He stood upon his toes, his body bent as if he were about to take off in a run or spring upon the fluttering horror that came oscillating toward him, thrust a hand into his jacket pocket and drew out a small, shining object.

  It was a little golden thing, a tiny reliquary of old hammered gold set with amethyst, so small a man could hide it like a coin in the hollow of his hand, and to it was attached a slender chain of golden links scarce thicker than a thread. He paid the gold chain out until the ikon hung from it like a pendulum, and with a quick move of his hand swung it toward the advancing form. “Accursed of God,” his voice, though low, was harsh and strident as a battle-cry, “rejected of the earth, I bid thee stand, in nomine Domini!”

  The ghastly, fluttering thing seemed to give back a step, as if it had encountered a quick blast of wind, and we could see its folds stretch tightly over something—though we knew that there was nothing there.

  “Conjuro, te,” the little Frenchman whispered. “Conjuro te, sclerastissime, retro—retro! Abire ad locum tuum!”

  The sheet-formed thing seemed hesitating, fluttered back a step, lost height and seeming-substance. As de Grandin advanced on it we could see it shrink. The curtain-hem which had been clear six inches from the floor when it first started forward now almost swept the broadloom carpet.

  “Back, foul emanation from the tomb—back, revenant of the self-slain, into the place appointed for thee!” His command was harsh, inexorable, and the imponderable sheeted thing gave ground before him.

  Perhaps it was a minute, perhaps ten—or an hour—that they dueled thus, but the little Frenchman’s fiercely repeated injunction seemed resistless, inch by fractions of an inch the ceremented horror retreated, losing stature as it fled. By the time it reached the dressing table where the blackglass bottle lay it might have draped upon a two-year-old child instead of on a giant as at first.

  There was a sudden swishing sound, like that made by a sword whipped through the air, and all at once the curtain fell upon the floor in an innocuous heap, while inside the darkly purple glass of the bottle showed something thicker than a vapor but less substantial than a liquid, something an obscene toad-belly gray that squirmed and writhed and pullulated like a knot of captive worms.

  “Misère de Dieu, I have thee, naughty fellow!” Holding the small reliquary at the bottle’s mouth with his left hand, de Grandin forced the wax stopper in place with his right, stepped back, restored the ikon to his pocket and mopped his brow with a silk handkerchief. “Pardieu, but it was touch and go, my friends,” he told us with a relieved sigh. “I was not certain I could master him when we began our combat.” He took a deep breath, wiped his forehead again, then grinned at us, a little wearily. “Morbleu, but I am tired, me,” he confessed. “Like the horse of the plough at sunset. Yes.” He leant against the dresser, and for a moment I thought he would fall, but he recovered himself with a visible effort and smiled at McCormick.

  “Look to your sweetheart, mon brave,” he ordered. “She will have need of you, both as a lover and physician, but—she will get well. Do not doubt it.”

  Anastasia lay upon her back, her arms outstretched to right and left as if she had been crucified upon the bed, her breath coming in hot, fevered gasps, tears welling from beneath her closed lids. “Go to her, mon jeune,” the Frenchman bade. “Bend over her; pardieu, awaken her with kisses as the Prince did wake the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood! Yes, certainly. A man is young but once, and youth and love come back no more; you cannot hoard them as a miser does his gold.”

  He plucked me by the sleeve. “Come, let us go, my friend,” he whispered. “What have we to do with such things? Besides, there is a final duty to perform.”

  With the dark-glass bottle underneath his arm he led the way down to the basement. “Will you be good enough to open the furnace?” he asked, and as I complied he heaved the bottle into the firebox. It landed on the bed of glowing coals and rolled an inch or so, then burst with a report like that of a smashed electric light bulb, and a sharp hissing followed while a cloud of milky vapor spiraled toward the flue. I sickened as the acrid odor of incinerating flesh assailed my nostrils.

  “IT WAS THIS WAY, my friend,” he told me some two hours later in the study. “I was of two minds concerning Mademoiselle Anna’s illness; you of only one.”

  “Say that again,” I ordered. “I don’t think I quite understand.”

  He took a deep breath, swallowed once, and began again, speaking slowly “You were sure she suffered a psychoneurotic condition; I was not convinced of it. Undoubtlessly a good case could be made for either hypothesis, or both. She was neurotic, beyond question, she was extremely suggestible; she had been dominated since infancy by the naughty Kokinis person. Also, she had been brought up on Greek folklore, and knew the legends of the vrykolakas as English children know the rhymes of Mother Goose or French children their contes de fées. She might have scorned and derided them, but what we learn to believe in childhood we never quite succeed in disbelieving. Bien. Très bon. It were entirely plausible that she should have been impressed by his self-murder and the curse he put upon her, that she should be haunted and deprived of life by a vrykolakas. Yes, of course.

  “In a neurasthenic state of hypochondria she might indeed have wasted away and finally perished. That she should have dreams of the lover she had spurned, dreams in which he wooed her and she had not power to withstand his importunities, is likewise possible. Even nice young people have erotic dreams, and a highly nervous state is conducive to them.

  “You recall she would not tell us what she dreamed? How she blushed when questioned concerning her nightmares? That was clear proof that she did in dreamland what she would not think of doing in a conscious state.

  “Very well. The spasm she suffered when she was about to tell us of this Kokinis person was another link in the chain of evidence. It was a nervous blocking of consciousness, a refusal to talk on a painful subject—what the psychiatrists refer to as a complex; a sort of mental traffic jam caused by a series of highly emotionally accented ideas in a repressed state.

  “So far a good case for psychopathological illness has been made out; but as yet we lack complete proof. And what disproved it, or at least gave reason for suspecting that some super-physical agent—something you would call the supernatural—intervened?

  “Listen, I shall tell you: When she was seized with that spasm there came a sound of knocking on the ceiling of her room. Her nerves—her disturbed psyche—could have caused the spasm, but not the knocking on the ceiling. Not at all, by no means. That was caused by something else, something outside her.

  “What was the something that had caused it? Qui sait
—who knows? Ghosts and spirits, all kinds of discarnate entities, are notoriously fond of announcing their presence by rappings on the walls and furniture. Hence the knocking might have been the visiting-card of such an one; again it might not.

  “Accordingly I drew my line of battle up in two ranks. If what you assumed were true, and her illness was caused by psychic disturbance, we had a chance to master it by going through the show of exorcising the entity she thought possessed her, and making her believe she was cleansed of it.

  “So far, so good. But what if it were a real ghostly thing that persecuted her? We should need more than a dumb-show to conquer that, n’est-ce-pas? So I prepared for him, also. I had a long talk with Father Zaimis, pastor of the Greek Church of St. Basil. He is a native-born Greek, and knew what I was talking of when I told him I suspected Mademoiselle Anna was the victim of a vrykolakas. He did not think I was outside my head when I requested that he lend me two small censers and a reliquary of St. Cyril, who was so justly famous for his conflicts with unholy spirits. Also, he prepared with his own hands the stopper for my bottle, and in it put a tiny filing from the reliquary. Thus armed, I was prepared for all eventualities.”

  “But whatever gave you the idea of imprisoning the vry—the whatever-you-call-it—in a bottle?” I demanded. “I never heard of that before.”

  “Parbleu, my friend, I fear that there are many things of which you have not heard,” he grinned at me. “Have the goodness to attend me for one little so small minute.”