Black Moon

by Seabury Quinn

  I drew bow at a venture, making as absurd a guess as seemed possible. “That the picture of Miss Forrester was that of the young woman with whom Norman went away?”

  “Mon Dieu!” he almost shouted. “How did you know it, my friend? Has Madame Northrop been here?”

  “Of course not. I was merely trying to be as crazy as you seem.”

  “Crazy or not, I am convinced,” he answered in a level voice. “Me, I shall investigate this business of the monkey, and see what is to be seen.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” I replied as I rose. “Run along and see what’s to be seen. I’ve got some calls to make.”

  HE WAS ALMOST AS ebullient as a freshly mixed Seidlitz powder when he came bouncing in a few minutes before dinner. “Pardieu, my old, we make the progress!” he told me as he sipped his third Martini. “That Madame Nancy, she is superb, so is her brother, Monsieur Wilfred. They are most cooperative.”

  “How’s that?” I asked as we went in to dinner.

  He sampled the pottage Bellevue approvingly took a sip of sherry before he replied. “It seems that Monsieur Norman’s watch was in a state of disrepair last Monday night, and so he borrowed Monsieur Wilfred’s for the evening. It was a fine timepiece, that; a fine Swiss watch which cost four hundred dollars.”

  I looked at him in amazement. “I fail to see what connection there is between the value of a watch and—”

  “Of course, you do, mon ami. I should have fallen in a swoon if you had. But listen, pay attention, regard me: When Monsieur Norman’s body walked off with the strange young woman it wore Monsieur Wilfred’s watch upon its wrist. To take away another’s property without so much as by-your-leave is larceny, at least such actions will support a charge of theft. And so we have a police lookout broadcast for them, the one as principal, the other as accessory. I do not doubt that they will be arrested, and when they are I shall be ready for them with the party of surprise. Yes, of course.”

  “You speak of Norman’s body as if it were a thing apart from him,” I said. “Am I to understand that you believe that crazy man’s story—the dement who was here last night and claimed to be Norman? Is it your theory that both Norman and the aging man are victims of some sort of possession?”

  He gave me a long, serious look. “It are entirely possible, Friend Trowbridge. Today we make fun of the old belief in demoniacal possession, and of the possibility of spirit-transference. But can we say with certainty that the old ones were wrong and we are right? We call it epilepsy, or manic-depressive insanity, or sometimes dementia. They called conditions which exhibited the same symptoms possession. The Biblical accounts are far from complete, but any modern psychiatrist examining a patient having symptoms similar to those of King Saul would have no hesitancy in pronouncing him a manic-depressive. Remember how Saul brooded in black melancholy, then flew into a sudden rage and flung a spear at David? Or take the story of the Gadarene demoniac who flew into such frenzies that no chain could restrain him. Has not that the earmarks of what we call acute mania? It may be that the old ones were not foolish, after all.”

  “But that all happened long ago—”

  “Et puis? The ancients died of carcinoma and tuberculosis and nephritis, just as we do, why should not we be subject to possession just as they were? Do not mistake me, my friend. I do not say possession explains every case of so-called mental aberration, or even many of them. But in a proper case what we call lunacy might be possession in the strict Biblical meaning of the term. Remember, if you please, possession was no common thing, even in those days. The instances of it that have come down to us have been preserved in the records precisely because they are so unusual. Why should it not be met with occasionally today? Every psychiatrist will tell you he’s had cases which defied both diagnosis and treatment, cases not to be explained by anything but the modernly rejected belief in demoniacal possession.”

  “Well—er—” I temporized, “I suppose it’s barely possible, but hardly probable—”

  “Précisément, exactement, quite so,” he nodded vigorously. “It is possibilities, not probabilities, with which we must deal here, my friend. Now—”

  “Excuse me, sor, but Lieutenant Costello’s on th’ ’phone,” Nora McGinnis interrupted. “He says as how th’ pair ye wanted has been took up near Lake Owassa, an’ th’ sthate troopers is bringin’ ’em down. They should be here in half a hour or so.”

  “Morbleu, but it is magnificent, it is superb!” he exclaimed jubilantly. “Come, Friend Trowbridge, let us hasten dinner, even at the peril to digestion. Either I am more mistaken than I think, or I shall show you something, me!”

  LIEUTENANT COSTELLO HAD ASSIGNED a room to de Grandin, one of those bare, ascetic cells that characterize police headquarters, and implemented it according to the little Frenchman’s orders. Two comfortable chairs had been placed in the center of the floor, and above them hung a powerful electric bulb whose coned-down light was enhanced by a powerful reflector-shade. The rest of the apartment seemed pitch-dark in contrast to the almost dazzling pyramid of light. At the far end of the room, hidden in the shadows, was a large metal clock that ticked with a sound like the beating of a hammer on an anvil and a deliberation like the surging of the surf upon the beach. Tick—tock; tick—tock, it told the seconds off slowly, and somehow, as absurd things sometimes pop into our minds, I was reminded of the clock inside the crocodile which followed Captain Hook in Peter Pan.

  De Grandin looked about the bleak apartment with a smile of grim satisfaction. “All is in readiness, I damn think,” he told us. “Bring them to me as soon as they arrive, mon lieutenant.”

  It might have been fifteen minutes later when the errant pair were ushered in by a patrolman and seated in the chairs beneath the light.

  I recognized young Northrop at a glance, and saw the woman with him fitted Nancy’s description exactly. A “gorgeous hussy,” Nancy had called her, and she lived up to the term in every particular. Boldly but beautifully formed, she was, with long slim legs, a flat back, high, firm breasts, and a proud head set superbly on a full round throat.

  “Bon soir, Monsieur, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin greeted pleasantly. “I take it that you know why you have been made arrested?”

  Norman Northrop cleared his throat a little nervously. “Some absurd charge of larceny! Bring the complainant here; I’ll make good any loss he claims to have suffered—”

  “Monsieur!” de Grandin’s urbane voice had just the proper tone of incredulity. “Are you so utterly naïf? Could you not guess the charge of larceny was but an attrape, a hoax?”

  “Then what—” Norman began, seemed to think better of the question, and lapsed into silence.

  De Grandin made no answer, and the metal clock in its corner ticked loudly, deliberately. Tick—tock; tick—tock!

  The little Frenchman reached into his waistcoat pocket, and took out his slim gold watch and swung it by its chain. Back and forth, pendulum-like, in perfect accord to the clock’s deliberate ticking the watch swung, its brightly polished surface shining like a dazzling disc of radiance in the cruel white light from the electric bulb.

  Tick—tock—swing—swing! I felt my head begin to move from side to side in rhythm with the ticking clock and swaying watch. There was an almost overwhelming fascination in the synchronized sound and movement. I saw Norman and the girl look away, turn their gaze upon the floor, even close their eyes, but in a moment they again looked at the blindingly-bright watch as it swayed in time to the clock’s slow tick.

  “Would it astonish you to learn that the statute against witchcraft has never been repealed in this state?” de Grandin asked in an almost gentle voice. “It was an oversight on the part of the legislature, of course, but”—the watch swayed slowly and the clock ticked loudly—“but it is still entirely possible for one—or two—to be convicted of the crime today, and made to undergo the ancient penalty. The stake, the fire—” His soft voice paused, but still the clock ticked loudly, slowly; still the blindin
gly-bright watch swung in long, sweeping arcs.

  The prisoners watched the swaying golden disc in fascination. First their heads turned slowly as it swung before them, then only their eyes moved in their motionless faces, finally the woman’s chin fell downward to her chest. The man held out a few minutes longer, but finally his eyes closed and his head inclined toward one shoulder.

  “Quickly, my friend,” de Grandin thrust the watch back in his pocket as he rose. “Bid Costello have the cots brought in.”

  The lieutenant was ready, and as I opened the door two policemen trundled in a pair of wheeled stretchers of the kind used for emergency cases, lifted the unconscious man and woman on them and stood awaiting further orders.

  “Non, not that way, mes braves,” de Grandin told them. “Their heads should be to the west and their feet to the east, that the magnetic currents of the earth may flow through them. Ah, so! Très bon.”

  For a minute or so he stood at the foot of the cots, then, “Aristeas, Kartaphilos, Ahasverus, Buttadaeus, or by whatever name you are known, I order you to quit these bodies!” he whispered sharply. “Go, seek thy proper place, wherever that may be, but trouble Norman Northrop and Margaret Forrester no more! Begone!” He struck the unconscious man a sharp blow in the face, then to the woman he ordered, “Go thou, too, female counterpart of yon male wanderer. Go, get thee hence, ere I call down the ancient judgments on thee—the rack, the thumbscrews, the stake, the fire—” A sharp slap sounded. He had struck the woman in the face.

  A silence we could fairly hear succeeded, for he had stopped the clock, and even the street noises outside were insulated from the little basement cell. There came a faint moan from the man on the wheeled litter. “Nancy!” he whimpered. “Nancy, dear, please try to believe me. I know you cannot recognize me, but this is I, your husband Norman—”

  “Who says you are not recognizable, Monsieur,” de Grandin cut in jubilantly. “Come, rise; get on thy feet”—he held his hand out to Norman. Madame your wife is waiting in the corridor outside. She has been told much of your story, and while she does not understand—eh bien, did not the good St. Paul say it? ‘Love believeth all things.’ Go to her, take her in your arms and tell her that you love her, and her only.”

  He fairly pushed the young man from the room and tiptoed to the bier on which the woman lay. “Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle Forrester!” he called softly.

  “Wh—what?” The girl half rose, dropped back upon the litter and gave a small mewling cry. “Oh, don’t—I tell you I am Margaret Forrester—”

  “Of course you are, and who says otherwise is an unconscionable liar!” the little Frenchman chuckled. “You are indeed none other. Mademoiselle, and you are in proper person, too!”

  The girl sat up and looked about the barren room half fearfully. Then she looked down at her hands. “O-o-oh!” the exclamation was a squeal of ecstasy. “They are my hands—my hands; my very own!” She raised her long, slim feet and looked at them and at the shapely legs and ankles to which they were attached as if she’d never seen anything so beautiful. “My feet my legs—”

  “And very pretty feet and legs they are, too,” Jules de Grandin broke in gallantly. “Come, there is one outside who will be much surprised to see you. Monsieur Horace Hendry from the bank, who has been nursing your estate in your absence.” He smiled and put a finger to his lips. “We shall not tell him everything we know, shall we? When he asks where you were—tenez, is it not woman’s right to be mysterious?”

  “Oh,” the girl exclaimed, as she put both feet to the floor, took de Grandin’s face between her large and well formed hands and kissed him first on one cheek, then on the other, and finally on the mouth. “Oh, you wonderful, wonderful little man! It’s as if you’d brought me back from the dead! When you told me that you’d try this afternoon I hadn’t any faith, but—”

  “Mademoiselle!” his voice was filled with shocked reproof. “Remember, I am Jules de Grandin!”

  “NO, I SHALL NOT try to tell you it was simple,” he assured me as we drove home. “It was most damnably complicated, and I was not at all certain of the outcome till the end. Two and two is always four, but what if one mistakes a 3 for a 2? Pardieu, the sum will not meet the requirements, n’est-ce-pas?

  “I went about my adding thus: When Monsieur Norman came to us last night I thought at first as you did. ‘We have here a dement, bursting with delusions,’ I tell me. But as he talked and I observed the youthful ardor of his speech in such strange contrast to his aged body, I began to wonder. And then all of a suddenly a memory came to me. The journal’s story of the strange old woman who insisted she was Mademoiselle Forrester, and kept insisting what was obviously not so till they clapped her into durance in the lunatic asylum.

  “‘Jules de Grandin,’ I ask me, ‘are it not odd that a man and a woman should have the same delusions, and at approximately the same time?’

  “‘It are entirely extraordinary, Jules de Grandin,’ I agree with me.

  “So I go to the newspaper to refresh my memory, and there I borrow a picture of the disappeared young lady. I take it to Madame Nancy for her inspection, and without a moment’s hesitation she identifies it as that of the woman who had gone away with her husband.

  “Then, I ask you, what was it I did? Parbleu, I went to the asylum where they had that aged woman in confinement and talked with her. Nom d’une barbe d’un chameau vert, the story that she tells is strangely like that told by the old man who claims to be Monsieur Northrop!”

  “She had been swimming in the sea near Port of Spain in Trinidad when she was accosted by an aged woman who met her as she emerged from the water and heaped insults and abuse on her. At last she could endure no more and struck her tormentor, whereat her whole arm seemed to be paralyzed, and she stood helpless on the sand.

  “Then up there came a man, a man of sixty years or more, who took the woman by the hand and raised her, then seized the helpless young woman’s hand and started to move round and round. And as they circled round upon the sand they crooned a song about Aristeas, and Kartaphilos and the rest of those queer names by which le juif errant has been known in different lands.

  “Now I was sure that it was two and two and not some other figures that I added, and the answer must be four!

  “Apparently their technique was unvarying. They induced someone previously chosen for his physical appearance to strike one of them, rendering him unconscious for a moment. Then they began their chant, their dance, their witches’ incantation, and when the chant and dance were ended the stricken one had moved into the victim’s body, leaving his old form to house the victim’s soul or spirit or ego—whatever you may care to call it.

  “Mademoiselle Forrester had been chosen as the new ‘house’ for the female of the pair; they left her in the old body and came to this country, where they settled on Monsieur Northrop as a suitable dwelling-place for the male member of this pair of body-snatchers.

  “You know the rest, or nearly all of it. You know how we sent out police alarms, how we had them arrested and brought here, how I induced hypnosis by the ticking of the clock and swinging of my watch, having put the fear of prosecution for witchcraft in them, thereby focusing their attention—forcing it into a single channel, as one might say.

  “Apparently unconsciousness was a prerequisite to their leaving the bodies they occupied. I induced it by hypnosis, then, since they were unable to work their charm, they took their flight to le bon Dieu only knows where when I ordered them to depart. And when they left, the spirits of Monsieur Norman and Mademoiselle Margaret returned to their proper bodies.”

  “What became of the—er—old bodies?” I asked as we turned into my driveway.

  He chuckled. “They will not be used again, my friend. I called the Avondale asylum before we left police headquarters, and was told the aged woman who had claimed to be Miss Forrester had died at just 8:55, which was the moment when I called la Forrester from her swoon. Another call I made also. To the roomi
ng house to which Monsieur Northrop went when he left us. The landlady informed me she had found her latest lodger dead in bed a few minutes before. Voilà tout.”

  “But see here,” I demanded, “who were these things, or demons, or whatever they were, who went around snatching bodies, living in them till they’d passed the climacteric, then trading them for others?”

  He raised his shoulders in a shrug. “Who knows? Perhaps they were a wicked witch and wizard who had learned to make those vile exchanges, and thus acquire a pseudo-immortality. Perhaps they were a pair of elementals, that is, preadamite spirits who had never lived in human bodies, but somehow managed to get into them and liked them so well that they continued to tenant them, moving from one to another as a man may change his rented residence as it deteriorates or as he finds a more desirable dwelling.

  “Who can say with certainty? Not I, the problem is too much for me.”

  He paused with a quick elfin grin as we entered the hall. “Is it not possible the ice box contains apple pie and beer to which we can give a more fitting home before we go to bed, Friend Trowbridge?”

  The Ring of Bastet

  IT HAD SNOWED EARLIER, then rained until the snow had melted into muddy slush; now a shrewish wind came scolding up from the Bay, and the sad black puddles that were the dregs of the storm began to glaze and shine with a thin film of ice beneath the street lamps’ glare. Walking became hazardous, with the outcome of each step in doubt.

  “Parbleu, mon ami,” Jules de Grandin muttered as he dug his pointed chin two inches deeper into the fur collar of his coat, “I do not like this weather. Nom d’un poisson!” his feet slipped on the icy pavement and he caromed into me. “Let us seek the shelter. I do not wish to nurse a broken arm; also I am villainously hungry.”