Black Moon

by Seabury Quinn

  “And now, Monsieur?” de Grandin poured an ounce or so of brandy into an inhaler, filled a demi-tasse and placed them at the stranger’s elbow, motioning toward the cigars as he did so. “You are, one takes it, the husband of Madame Northrop who called on us this after—”

  “Nancy’s been here?” Our caller’s face, already nearly colorless, went absolutely corpse-gray, and the hand that held his brandy glass shook with something more than the slight senile tremor I had noticed. “What did she tell you?”

  “Tiens, the story was not pretty, Monsieur. She told us that you had deserted her; that you fought with some strange man for the favors of a strange woman; that then you went with your new charmer without so much as one small backward look by way of valedictory.”

  The caller seemed to shrink in on himself. The wrinkled skin around his mouth and on his neck seemed trembling like the dewlaps of a hound, and tears came in his small black eyes. “Please, gentlemen,” he begged, “be kind enough to hear me through. Before I’m half done you’ll call me a damned liar, and when I’ve finished you will think I’m drunk or crazy, maybe both; but what I have to say is true, every word of it.

  “Nancy must have told you how we went to Lakerim Monday night. We had the first three dances together, and just as the band began playing for the fourth I saw Bob Eastman beckoning. Bob was on the committee, though why they put him there Lord only knows. If there’s any way of snafuing a deal he’ll find it. We’d gone all out on the refreshments, and Braunstein’s were to furnish baked Alaskas for dessert. They hadn’t come, and Bob was in a hissy. He’d called the caterer’s, and they’d told him their wagon had left half an hour before. What should we do about it?

  “I got Braunstein’s on the ’phone and found that Bob had given orders for the desserts to be delivered to the Lake View Club instead of the Lakerim. Lake View is over by Morristown, you know, and Bob had belonged there before transferring to Lakerim. I suppose it was a pardonable slip of the tongue, but it had certainly snarled our party up. After several minutes’ conversation I got ’em to promise to send another wagon out to Lakerim, and was hurrying to rejoin Nancy when I bumped into a girl.

  “I mean that literally. The floor outside the steward’s office was slippery. She was hurrying one way! I was barging through the door, and we collided like a pair of kids on roller skates. Both our feet went out from under us, and there we sat on our respective fannies, not hurt but with the wind knocked out of us. For a moment we grinned at each other, then I helped her up and apologized.

  “She seemed to be taking inventory. ‘I’m not hurt,’ she told me, ‘but I seem to have broken something. Will you take me to the powder room where I can make a few repairs, please?’

  “The quickest way to the powder room was across the dance floor, and the quickest way to cross the dance floor was to dance rather than trying to dodge between the couples. So we danced.

  “She was a superb dancer; you’d have thought the music ran through her nerves like wind through an Æolian harp.

  “Just as we reached the far side of the ballroom her hand tightened on mine ‘Don’t look now,’ she whispered, ‘but I’m being pursued by the Big Bad Wolf. He’s been trailing me all evening.’ She didn’t seem frightened, just a little nervous and annoyed, and I didn’t think much of it.

  “‘Let’s circle round the floor again,’ she suggested. ‘Maybe he’ll get discouraged and go back to the bar.’ So we waltzed around the floor again, and she went on ‘He’s an old friend of my father’s, a widower who’s looking for a replacement. Honestly, he persecutes me! If he catches us he’ll want to cut in, and I suppose you’ll have to let him, but if you want to do your Boy Scout’s daily good deed please follow us. He’ll head for the conservatory—that’s his technique—and all you’ll have to do is wait a moment, then come barging in and say, “This is our dance, I believe,” or something similarly original. Can do?’

  “‘Can do,’ I promised, and, as she predicted, there was her aged Lothario lying in ambush by the entrance to the conservatory.

  “‘May I cut in?’ he asked as he tapped me on the shoulder, and as I resigned my partner to him she whispered, ‘Remember, Perseus, Andromeda’ll be waiting to be rescued!’

  “I watched them circle the ballroom and noticed that though he danced quite well he dragged his right foot. Sure enough, he guided her into the greenhouse, and in a moment I followed.

  “I don’t know just what I’d expected to find, but I was certainly unprepared for the tableau on which I stumbled. The little man had backed her up against the wall, and stood threatening her with one of those case-knives—those things that snap an eight-inch blade out when you press a spring, you know. ‘If I can’t have you, no one else shall,’ I heard him say as I entered the conservatory.

  “I knew I had to do something, and do it in a hurry. The man was little, scarcely larger than a half-grown boy, but a crazy man armed with an eight-inch dirk is not a pleasant customer to deal with, and for a moment I was at a loss. Then the girl’s appeal sparked me to action. ‘Please, please!’ she begged. ‘He’s crazy—mad as a hatter—’

  “‘Put that knife up,’ I told him. ‘You’re acting like a—’

  “He turned from her and came at me, and I knew I really had a maniac to deal with, for there was no light of sanity in his eyes, and at the corners of his mouth I could see little flecks of foam. ‘So you’re the favored swain tonight?’ he rasped in a hard, gritty voice.

  “‘Hit him; knock him senseless!’ the girl begged. ‘He’ll kill us if you don’t—’

  “I hit as hard as I could, bringing my fist up from the hip and pivoting on my right foot to put my weight behind the blow. He went down like a pole-axed ox, but something seemed to go wrong with me at the same time. A paralyzing tingling, like the pins and needles we feel when a foot has gone to sleep, went up my arm as my fist struck his chin, and in a moment every nerve in my body seemed shrieking in agony.

  “The pain was almost unendurable, but I couldn’t make a move, just stood there, trembling as with a galvanic shock and saw the girl go up to him, take his left hand in her right, then felt her grasp my right in her left. The man got up and put his free hand over mine, so in a moment we had formed a circle, and they were moving slowly round and round, dragging me after them.

  “I don’t know what it was they said, or rather sang in a monotonous crooning tune, the words seemed meaningless—perhaps they were in some foreign tongue, perhaps they were just doggerel—but they kept repeating over and over, as near as I can remember:

  “‘Aristeas, Kartaphilos,Ahasverus, Buttadaeus.’”

  “Morbleu!” ejaculated Jules de Grandin. “Are you sure that is what they said, Monsieur?”

  “No, sir, I’m not. But that’s as near as can come to it.”

  “Très bon, my friend. Continue.” The little Frenchman had leant forward, his small blue eyes fixed on our caller’s face intently as a cat pins its gaze on a rat-hole. “Say on, Monsieur,” he ordered. “We are listening.”

  “Well, in a moment it seemed that the greenhouse was in motion, too; turning in reverse to the way we moved. That is, we moved from right to left, counter-clockwise, while it seemed to revolve from left to right, and somehow I was being twisted mentally.

  “It’s hard to put in words, but somehow—don’t ask me how, I don’t know!—I seemed to be becoming someone else. The first thing that I noticed was that my right foot was dragging, and somehow I seemed smaller. I had to look up at the tall girl holding my right hand, and in a moment I seemed looking at myself—as if I saw my own reflection in a mirror, yet held the hand of the man in the looking-glass. All images were rather blurred, like things seen under water. Then suddenly I felt a dull ache at the back of my head as my knees sagged under me.”

  The caller stopped his narrative and looked at us in turn, as though expecting us to finish the story.

  “And then, Monsieur?” de Grandin prompted when the silence had lasted at least a
minute.

  “The next thing I knew I was lying in a bed. The bed was white, the walls of the room were white, everything around me was white and sterile. It was a hospital bedroom, I realized, but how I’d gotten there I had no idea. For a moment I lay there, trying to gather my wits, then I put out my hand for the call-bell. That was the first shock I got. The hand I moved wasn’t mine. I’m thirty-two years old, as you know, Dr. Trowbridge. The hand that moved when I reached for the bell was that of an old man, thin, bony, high-veined, speckled with liver-spots.

  “I lay there for a moment, wondering if I were delirious, then called, ‘Anybody around?’ and that was the second shock. The voice that sounded when I formed the words in my mind wasn’t mine. It was the thin, rasping treble of an old man. I recognized it! I had heard it in the conservatory when I found the old man threatening the girl.

  “I don’t know how long I lay there after that, and the more I tried to make sense of the senseless business the less sense it seemed to make. At last a nurse came in and greeted me with that false cheeriness they always use on patients. ‘Good morning! Feeling better? That was a nasty crack on the head you had.’

  “‘Nurse,’ I begged, and my fear grew into absolute panic as I heard the senile piping of the voice with which I spoke, ‘Please get me a mirror.’

  “‘Oh, you’re not disfigured, gran’paw,’ she assured me as she took a hand-glass from the dresser and gave it to me. ‘You’ll be right as rain in a day or two.’

  “There’s not much use in trying to describe my feelings as I looked into the glass. The face that gazed back at me was not mine, but that of the old man whom I had knocked out in the conservatory.

  “‘That’s not—that isn’t I!’ I screamed. ‘That’s not my face—’

  “The nurse took the mirror away. ‘Take it easy, gran’paw,’ she advised. ‘Who’d you expect to see, Charles Boyer, or maybe Mickey Mouse?’ She stepped out to the corridor and in a moment a young interne hurried in.

  “‘Still pretty bad, eh?’ I heard him whisper. He swabbed my arm with alcohol and drove a hypo into it. The anesthetic acted almost immediately, and I was out almost before I had a chance to protest.

  “When I woke up the sun was slanting in the window and there were shadows in the corners of the room that hadn’t been there when I first regained consciousness. My first thought was to ring the bell and ask to see the superintendent. Then I reconsidered. How I came to be in this old body I had no idea. It was like one of those dreadful things you read about in fairy-story books—or books of witchcraft and black magic—but one thing was sure: If I attempted to disclaim the body into which I seemed to have been thrust I’d get nowhere, except into the psychopathic ward. They’d given me a shot of dope that morning when they thought that I was still delirious from the blow on the head. Now, when I’d regained full consciousness, if I still insisted I was someone else—what would you have done if a patient acted that way, Dr. Trowbridge?”

  “I’d be inclined to certify him—” I began, but he cut in sharply:

  “Exactly. And you, Dr. de Grandin?”

  Jules de Grandin pursed his lips as if he were about to whistle, and tweaked the ends of his small blond mustache. “I do not know, my friend,” he answered. “What you have told us sounds incredible. Such things just do not happen, as Dr. Trowbridge—or any jury of a lunacy commission—will assure you; but I withhold the judgment. Will you proceed?”

  Our caller drew a deep, quick breath, whether of relief or excitement I could not determine. Then: “I realized that I had to ‘go along with the gag,’ so to speak,” he said. “If I continued to deny my body I was headed straight for the padded cell; the only chance I had to gain my liberty was to keep silent, get out of the hospital as quickly as I could, and get in touch with Nancy. I wasn’t sure that I could make her believe me, or that I could convince anybody, but it was worth a trial, while I was sure to be incarcerated if I fought against the form that had been thrust on me.

  “So when the house physician came to see me I was meek as the proverbial Moses, making up a name and address for myself, answering all questions that he asked as promptly and with as much show of reason as I could. At four o’clock this afternoon they signed my release and I left Mercy Hospital.

  “The only clothes I had were those I wore when I came to the hospital, of course, and they were a dinner kit. I couldn’t very well go marching round in that, but fortunately there had been considerable money in the pockets, so when all charges had been paid at the hospital I still had better than a hundred dollars left. I called a cab and had him drive me to South Second Street, where the second-hand clothing stores are, you know. In one of those I got a pretty good outfit for fifty dollars, and the dealer allowed me twenty in trade for the clothes I wore, so I was not completely destitute.

  “Next, I tried to get in touch with Nancy. I ’phoned her several times and got no answer, and when I went to the house it was closed and dark. I waited outside for a while, then when no one came, I thought of you and Dr. de Grandin, and—here I am.”

  The look he turned on us was that sick, apprehensive, slightly hopeful glance I’d seen so many patients wear when they were waiting for a diagnosis in suspected carcinoma. Despite myself I felt a pang of pity. This was a clean-cut case of organic dementia, probably consequent upon a head injury. What the hospital authorities were thinking of to turn a man in his condition out of doors was more than I could imagine. The patient seemed in a bland humor, but—

  De Grandin’s level voice broke through my thoughts. “I do not understand your case, Monsieur,” he told the caller, “but I believe what you have said. What we can do about it I am not certain, but what we can do will be done, I assure you. You say you have sufficient money to provide for your immediate wants?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Very good. I would suggest that you find yourself lodgings and let us know where we can get in touch with you. Meantime, I shall make such investigations as seem necessary at the moment, and consult with you when I have completed them. Shall we say tomorrow afternoon at half-past four? Very well. Till then, Monsieur.”

  “That was the cruelest thing I’ve ever seen you do,” I accused as the door closed behind the caller. “You know as well as I that he’s a dement, probably suffering organic dementia as the result of a head wound, possibly complicated by senile dementia. To pretend belief in his delusions—”

  “Can you remember what it was he said the man and woman chanted in the conservatory?” he broke in irrelevantly.

  “Remember what they chanted—what in the world—”

  “There are so many things in the world, my friend, not all of them to be found in the medical textbooks. Attend me. Did he not say they repeated:

  “‘Aristeas, Kartaphilos, Ahasverus, Buttadaeus’?

  “Do those words mean anything to you?”

  “No more than hickory, dickory, dock, or eenie, meenie, mini mo,” I answered rather tartly.

  “U’m? Are you familiar with the legend of the Wandering Jew.”

  “You mean the character of whom Eugene Sue wrote?”

  “Monsieur le Général, among others. In Greek tradition he is known as Aristeas, the Jewish folklore calls him Kartaphilos, another legend names him Ahasverus, while in the German lore he is called John Buttadaeus.

  “Le bon Dieu only knows where the old legend started. It has been current throughout Europe for almost two thousand years, and has gathered many accretions in retelling, but one thing all the folk-tales have in common, whether they be Greek or Jewish, German, French or Italian: At the end of every century, or a cycle of approximately that length of time, the wretched man, accursed with immortality, falls into a stupor of some kind and wakes up as a young man of somewhere in the vicinity of thirty.”

  “Are you suggesting that this man who calls himself Norman Northrop might be—”

  “I am suggesting nothing, my old one. What I have tried to point out is the possible connection betw
een the names of one who had his youth miraculously restored and this species of possession which we seem to have here. It is not likely, I admit, but it is possible that by some kind of black magic the man who wore the body of the one who just left us was able to exchange his aging frame for the young, vigorous body worn by Monsieur Northrop, much as a tramp might steal the garments of a swimmer and leave his own rags in their place. You comprehend?”

  “I should say not!” I jerked back. “This is the most fantastic, incredible sort of nonsense—”

  “Forrester!” he exclaimed. “Morbleu, I do remember now! Pour la barbe d’un bouc vert, that is it!”

  “Whatever are you raving about?” I demanded.

  “Her name, pardieu; I had forgotten it, now it is that I remember!”

  SHORTLY AFTER LUNCHEON THE next day he came into the office, pleased as Punch with himself. “Observe, peruse, read him, if you will be so kind, my friend,” he ordered, holding out a paper. “Does he not answer some, at least, of our so vexing, questions?”

  AGED WOMAN COMMITTED

  the headline read, and under it:

  A jury in Judge Anslem’s court today ruled that an unidentified old woman was insane. The respondent in the lunacy inquiry had claimed to be Margaret Forrester, nationally known swimming champion, who disappeared near Port of Spain, Trinidad, while bathing in the sea some time ago. The respondent had a fixed delusion that the missing young woman’s soul had entered her body at the moment she was lost in the sea, and insisted that she be addressed as Miss Forrester, that the bank in which the missing swimmer’s account was honor her checks, and that all property of the vanished young woman was hers.

  Miss Forrester, it will be remembered, was an orphan without near kin, and her estate has been in the hands of a conservator since her disappearance.

  “Well?” I asked as I laid down the photostat.

  He shook his head. “I do not think that it is well, Friend Trowbridge. That one person should suffer such obsessions is no matter for remark, but when two—a man and woman—suffer from identical delusions there is a smell of fish upon the business. Nor is that all. Not by any means. On my way from the office of le journal I called at Madame Northrop’s and showed her a newspaper picture of the missing Margaret Forrester. What do you think she said?”