Fighters of Fear

by Mike Ashley

  WARBURG TANTAVUL WAS NEITHER WIDELY KNOWN NOR POPULAR, but the solitude in which he had lived had invested him with mystery; now the bars of reticence were down and the walls of isolation broken, upward of a hundred neighbors, mostly women, gathered in the Martin funeral chapel as the services began. The afternoon sun beat softly through the stained-glass windows and glinted on the polished mahogany of the casket. Here and there it touched upon bright spots of color that marked a woman’s hat or a man’s tie. The solemn hush was broken by occasional whispers: “What’d he die of? Did he leave much? Were the two young folks his only heirs?”

  Then the burial office: “Lord, Thou hast been our refuge from one generation to another . . . for a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday . . . Oh teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom . . .”

  As the final Amen sounded one of Mr. Martin’s frock-coated young men glided forward, paused beside the casket, and made the stereotyped announcement: “Those who wish to say good-bye to Mr. Tantavul may do so at this time.”

  The grisly rite of passing by the bier dragged on. I would have left the place; I had no wish to look upon the man’s dead face and folded hands; but de Grandin took me firmly by the elbow, held me till the final curiosity-impelled female had filed past the body, then steered me quickly toward the casket.

  He paused a moment at the bier, and it seemed to me there was a hint of irony in the smile that touched the corners of his mouth as he leant forward. “Eh bien, my old one; we know a secret, thou and I, n’est-ce-pas?” he asked the silent form before us.

  I swallowed back an exclamation of dismay. Perhaps it was a trick of the uncertain light, perhaps one of those ghastly, inexplicable things which every doctor and embalmer meets with sometimes in his practice—the effect of desiccation from formaldehyde, the pressure of some tissue gas within the body, or something of the sort—at any rate, as Jules de Grandin spoke the corpse’s upper lids drew back the fraction of an inch, revealing slits of yellow eye which seemed to glare at us with mingled hate and fury.

  “Good heavens; come away!” I begged. “It seemed as if he looked at us, de Grandin!”

  “Et puis—and if he did? I damn think I can trade him look for look, my friend. He was clever, that one, I admit it; but do not be mistaken, Jules de Grandin is nobody’s imbecile.”

  THE WEDDING TOOK PLACE IN THE RECTORY OF ST. CHRYSOSTOM’S. Robed in stole and surplice, Dr. Bentley glanced benignly from Dennis to Arabella, then to de Grandin and me as he began: “Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God and in the face of this company to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony. . . .” His round and ruddy face grew slightly stern as he admonished, “If any man can show just cause why they should not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak or else hereafter for ever hold his peace.”

  He paused the customary short, dramatic moment, and I thought I saw a hard, grim look spread on de Grandin’s face. Very faint and far off seeming, so faint that we could scarcely hear it, but gaining steadily in strength, there came a high, thin, screaming sound. Curiously, it seemed to me to resemble the long-drawn, wailing shriek of a freight train’s whistle heard miles away upon a still and sultry summer night, weird, wavering and ghastly. Now it seemed to grow in shrillness, though its volume was no greater.

  I saw a look of haunted fright leap into Arabella’s eyes, saw Dennis’ pale face go paler as the strident whistle sounded shriller and more shrill; then, as it seemed I could endure the stabbing of that needle-sound no longer, it ceased abruptly, giving way to blessed, comforting silence. But through the silence came a burst of chuckling laughter, half breathless, half hysterical, wholly devilish: Huh—hu-u-uh—hu-u-u-uh! the final syllable drawn out until it seemed almost a groan.

  “The wind, Monsieur le Curé; it was nothing but the wind,” de Grandin told the clergyman sharply. “Proceed to marry them, if you will be so kind.”

  “Wind?” Dr. Bentley echoed. “I could have sworn I heard somebody laugh, but—”

  “It is the wind, Monsieur; it plays strange tricks at times,” the little Frenchman insisted, his small blue eyes as hard as frozen iron. “Proceed, if you will be so kind. We wait on you.”

  “Forasmuch as Dennis and Arabella have consented to be joined together in holy wedlock . . . I pronounce them man and wife,” concluded Dr. Bentley, and de Grandin, ever gallant, kissed the bride upon the lips, and before we could restrain him, planted kisses on both Dennis’ cheeks.

  “Cordieu, I thought that we might have the trouble, for a time,” he told me as we left the rectory.

  “What was that awful shrieking noise we heard?” I asked.

  “It was the wind, my friend,” he answered in a hard, flat, toneless voice. “The ten times damned, but wholly ineffectual wind.”

  “SO, THEN, LITTLE SINNER, WEEP AND WAIL FOR THE BURDEN OF mortality you have assumed. Weep, wail, cry and breathe, my small and wrinkled one! Ha, you will not? Pardieu, I say you shall!”

  Gently, but smartly, he spanked the small red infant’s small red posterior with the end of a towel wrung out in hot water, and as the smacking impact sounded the tiny toothless mouth opened and a thin, high, piping squall of protest sounded. “Ah, that is better, mon petit ami,” he chuckled. “One cannot learn too soon that one must do as one is told, not as one wishes, in this world which you have just entered. Look to him, Mademoiselle,” he passed the wriggling, bawling morsel of humanity to the nurse and turned to me as I bent over the table where Arabella lay. “How does the little mother, Friend Trowbridge?” he asked.

  “U’m’mp,” I answered noncommittally. “Bear a hand, here, will you? The perineum’s pretty badly torn—have to do a quick repair job . . .”

  “But in the morning she will have forgotten all the pain,” laughed de Grandin as Arabella, swathed in blankets, was trundled from the delivery room. “She will gaze upon the little monkey-thing which I just caused to breathe the breath of life and vow it is the loveliest of all God’s lovely creatures. She will hold it at her tender breast and smile on it, she will—Sacré nom d’un rat vert, what is that?”

  From the nursery where, ensconced in wire trays, a score of newborn fragments of humanity slept or squalled, there came a sudden frightened scream—a woman’s cry of terror.

  We raced along the corridor, reached the glass-walled room and thrust the door back, taking care to open it no wider than was necessary, lest a draft disturb the carefully conditioned air of the place.

  Backed against the farther wall, her face gone grey with fright, the nurse in charge was staring at the skylight with terror-widened eyes, and even as we entered she opened her lips to emit another scream.

  “Desist, ma bonne, you are disturbing your small charges!” de Grandin seized the horrified girl’s shoulder and administered a shake. Then: “What is it, Mademoiselle?” he whispered. “Do not be afraid to speak; we shall respect your confidence—but speak softly.”

  “It—it was up there!” she pointed with a shaking finger toward the black square of the skylight. “They’d just brought Baby Tantavul in, and I had laid him in his crib when I thought I heard somebody laughing. Oh”—she shuddered at the recollection—“it was awful! Not really a laugh, but something more like a long-drawn-out hysterical groan. Did you ever hear a child tickled to exhaustion—you know how he moans and gasps for breath, and laughs, all at once? I think the fiends in hell must laugh like that!”

  “Yes, yes, we understand,” de Grandin nodded, “but tell us what occurred next.”

  “I looked around the nursery, but I was all alone here with the babies. Then it came again, louder, this time, and seemingly right above me. I looked up at the skylight, and—there it was!

  “It was a face, sir—just a face, with no body to it, and it seemed to float above the glass, then dip down to it, like a child’s balloon drifting in the wind, and it looked right past me, down at Baby Tantavul, and laughed again.”

 
“A face, you say, Mademoiselle—”

  “Yes, sir, yes! The most awful face I’ve ever seen. It was thin and wrinkled—all shrivelled like a monkey—and as it looked at Baby Tantavul its eyes stretched open till their whites glared all around the irises, and the mouth opened, not widely, but as if it were chewing something it relished—and it gave that dreadful, cackling, jubilating laugh again. That’s it! I couldn’t think before, but it seemed as if that bodiless head were laughing with a sort of evil triumph, Dr. de Grandin!”

  “H’m,” he tweaked his tightly waxed mustache, “I should not wonder if it did, Mademoiselle,” To me he whispered, “Stay with her, if you will, my friend, I’ll see the supervisor and have her send another nurse to keep her company. I shall request a special watch for the small Tantavul. At present I do not think the danger is great, but—mice do not play where cats are wakeful.”

  “ISN’T HE JUST LOVELY?” ARABELLA LOOKED UP FROM THE SMALL bald head that rested on her breast, and ecstasy was in her eyes. “I don’t believe I ever saw so beautiful a baby!”

  “Tiens, Madame, his voice is excellent, at any rate,” de Grandin answered with a grin, “and from what one may observe his appetite is excellent, at well.”

  Arabella smiled and patted the small creature’s back. “You know, I never had a doll in my life,” she confided. “Now I’ve got this dear little mite, and I’m going to be so happy with him. Oh, I wish Uncle Warburg were alive. I know this darling baby would soften even his hard heart.

  “But I mustn’t say such things about him, must I? He really wanted me to marry Dennis, didn’t he? His will proved that. You think he wanted us to marry, Doctor?”

  “I am persuaded that he did, Madame. Your marriage was his dearest wish, his fondest hope,” the Frenchman answered solemnly.

  “I felt that way, too. He was harsh and cruel to us when we were growing up, and kept his stony-hearted attitude to the end, but underneath it all there must have been some hidden stratum of kindness, some lingering affection for Dennis and me, or he’d never have put that clause in his will—”

  “Nor have left this memorandum for you,” de Grandin interrupted, drawing from an inner pocket the parchment envelope Dennis had entrusted to him the day before his father’s funeral.

  She started back as if he menaced her with a live scorpion, and instinctively her arms closed protectively around the baby at her bosom. “The—that—letter?” she faltered, her breath coming in short, smothered gasps. “I’d forgotten all about it. Oh, Dr. de Grandin, burn it. Don’t let me see what’s in it. I’m afraid!”

  It was a bright May morning, without sufficient breeze to stir the leaflets on the maple trees outside the window, but as de Grandin held the letter out I thought I heard a sudden sweep of wind around the angle of the hospital, not loud, but shrewd and keen, like wind among the graveyard evergreens in autumn, and, curiously, there seemed a note of soft malicious laughter mingled with it.

  The little Frenchman heard it, too, and for an instant he looked toward the window, and I thought I saw the flicker of an ugly sneer take form beneath the waxed ends of his mustache.

  “Open it, Madame,” he bade. “It is for you and Monsieur Dennis, and the little Monsieur Bébé here.”

  “I—I daren’t—”

  “Tenez, then Jules de Grandin does!” with his penknife he slit the heavy envelope, pressed suddenly against its ends so that its sides bulged, and dumped its contents on the counterpane. Ten fifty-dollar bills dropped on the coverlet. And nothing else.

  “Five hundred dollars!” Arabella gasped. “Why—”

  “A birthday gift for petit Monsieur Bébé, one surmises,” laughed de Grandin. “Eh bien, the old one had a sense of humour underneath his ugly outward shell, it seems. He kept you on the tenterhooks lest the message in this envelope contained dire things, while all the time it was a present of congratulation.”

  “But such a gift from Uncle Warburg—I can’t understand it!”

  “Perhaps that is as well, too, Madame. Be happy in the gift and give your ancient uncle credit for at least one act of kindness. Au ’voir.”

  “HANGED IF I CAN UNDERSTAND IT, EITHER,” I CONFESSED AS WE left the hospital. “If that old curmudgeon had left a message berating them for fools for having offspring, or even a new will that disinherited them both, it would have been in character, but such a gift—well, I’m surprised.”

  Amazingly, he halted in midstep and laughed until the tears rolled down his face. “You are surprised!” he told me when he managed to regain his breath, “Cordieu, my friend, I do not drink that you are half as much surprised as Monsieur Warburg Tantavul!”

  DENNIS TANTAVUL REGARDED ME WITH MISERY-HAUNTED EYES. “I just can’t understand it,” he admitted. “It’s all so sudden, so utterly—”

  “Pardonnez-moi,” de Grandin interrupted from the door of the consulting room, “I could not help but hear your voice, and if it is not an intrusion—”

  “Not at all, sir,” the young man answered. “I’d like the benefit of your advice. It’s Arabella, and I’m terribly afraid she’s—”

  “Non, do not try it, mon ami,” de Grandin warned. “Do you give us the symptoms, let us make the diagnosis. He who acts as his own doctor has a fool for a patient, you know.”

  “Well, then, here are the facts: This morning Arabella woke me up, crying as if her heart would break. I asked her what the trouble was, and she looked at me as if I were a stranger—no, not exactly that, rather as if I were some dreadful thing she’d suddenly found at her side. Her eyes were positively round with horror, and when I tried to take her in my arms to comfort her she shrank away as if I were infected with the plague.

  “‘Oh, Dennie, don’t!’ she begged and positively cringed away from me. Then she sprang out of bed and drew her kimono around her as if she were ashamed to have me see her in her pyjamas, and ran out of the room.

  “Presently I heard her crying in the nursery, and when I followed her in there—” He paused and tears came to his eyes. “She was standing by the crib where little Dennis lay, and in her hand she held a long sharp steel letter-opener. ‘Poor little mite, poor little flower of unpardonable sin,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to go, Baby darling; you to limbo, I to hell—oh, God wouldn’t, couldn’t be so cruel as to damn you for our sin!—but we’ll all three suffer torment endlessly, because we didn’t know!’

  “She raised the knife to plunge it in the little fellow’s heart, and he stretched out his hands and laughed and cooed as the sunlight shone on the steel. I was on her in an instant, wrenching the knife from her with one hand and holding her against me with the other, but she fought me off.

  “‘Don’t touch me, Dennie, please, please don’t,’ she begged. I know it’s mortal sin, but I love you so, my dear, that I just can’t resist you if I let you put your arms about me.’

  “I tried to kiss her, but she hid her face against my shoulder and moaned as if in pain when she felt my lips against her neck. Then she went limp in my arms, and I carried her, unconscious but still moaning piteously, into her sitting room and laid her on the couch. I left Sarah the nurse-maid with her, with strict orders not to let her leave the room. Can’t you come over right away?”

  De Grandin’s cigarette had burned down till it threatened his mustache, and in his little round blue eyes there was a look of murderous rage. “Bête!” he murmured savagely. “Sale chameau, species of a stinking goat! This is his doing, undoubtedly. Come, my friends, let us rush, hasten, fly. I would talk with Madame Arabella.”

  “NAW, SUH, SHE’S DONE GONE,” THE PORTLY COLORED NURSEMAID told us when we asked for Arabella. “Th’ baby started squealin’ sumpin awful right after Mistu Dennis lef’, an’ Ah knowed it wuz time fo’ his breakfas’, so Mis’ Arabella wuz layin’ nice an’ still on the’ sofa, an’ Ah says ter her, Ah says, ‘Yuh lay still dere, honey, whilst Ah goes an’ sees after yo’ baby;’ so Ah goes ter th’ nursery, an’ fixes him all up, an’ carries him back ter th’ settin’-
room where Mis’ Arabella wuz, an’ she ain’t there no more. Naw, suh.”

  “I thought I told you—” Dennis began furiously, but de Grandin laid a hand upon his arm.

  “Do not upbraid her, mon ami, she did wisely, though she knew it not; she was with the small one all the while, so no harm came to him. Was it not better so, after what you witnessed in the morning?”

  “Ye-es,” the other grudgingly admitted, “I suppose so. But Arabella—”

  “Let us see if we can find a trace of her,” the Frenchman interrupted. “Look carefully, do you miss any of her clothing?”

  Dennis looked about the pretty chintz-hung room. “Yes,” he decided as he finished his inspection, “her dress was on that lounge and her shoes and stockings on the floor beneath it. They’re all gone.”

  “So,” de Grandin nodded. “Distracted as she seemed, it is unlikely she would have stopped to dress had she not planned on going out. Friend Trowbridge, will you kindly call police headquarters and inform them of the situation? Ask to have all exits to the city watched.”

  As I picked up the telephone he and Dennis started on a room-by-room inspection of the house.

  “Find anything?” I asked as I hung up the ’phone after talking with the missing persons bureau.

  “Corbleu, but I should damn say yes!” de Grandin answered as I joined them in the upstairs living room. “Look yonder, if you please, my friend.”

  The room was obviously the intimate apartment of the house. Electric lamps under painted shades were placed beside deep leather-covered easy chairs, ivory-enamelled bookshelves lined the walls to a height of four feet or so, upon their tops was a litter of gay, unconsidered trifles—cinnabar cigarette boxes, bits of hammered brass. Old china, blue and red and purple, glowed mellowly from open spaces on the shelves, its colors catching up and accenting the muted blues and reds of antique Hamadan carpet. A Paisley shawl was draped scarfwise across the baby grand piano in one corner.

  Directly opposite the door a carven crucifix was standing on the bookcase top. It was an exquisite bit of Italian work, the cross of ebony, the corpus of old ivory, and so perfectly executed that though it was a scant six inches high, one could note the tense, tortured muscles of the pendent body, the straining throat which overfilled with groans of agony, the brow all knotted and bedewed with the cold sweat of torment. Upon the statue’s thorn-crowned head, where it made a bright iridescent halo, was a band of gem-encrusted platinum, a woman’s diamond-studded wedding ring.