The Occult Detective Megapack: 29 Classic Stories

by Fitz-James O'Brien

  “Au ’voir, my little lovely one,” he murmured. Then, to me:

  “Come, Trowbrdige, my good friend. Our work is finished here; let us leave them to their happiness.”

  8

  Jules de Grandin poured an ounce or so of Couvoisier into a lotus-bud shaped brandy sniffer and passed the goblet back and forth beneath his nose, inhaling the rich fragrance of the brandy. “Morbleu, old Omar had it right,” he told me with a grin; “what is it that the distillers buy one-half so precious as the stuff they sell?”

  “And when you get through misquoting poetry, perhaps you’ll deign to tell me what it’s all about?” I countered.

  “Perhaps I shall,” he answered. “Attend me, if you please: You will recall that this annoying Monsieur Who Was Dead Yet Not Dead appeared several times and grinned most horribly through the window? Through the window, please remember. At the hospital, where he nearly caused the garde-malade to have a fit, he laughed and mouthed at her through the glass skylight, which was tightly closed. When he first appeared and threatened Madame Arabella, he also spoke to her through the window, and—”

  “But the window was open,” I protested.

  “Yes, but screened,” he answered with a smile. “Screened with iron, if you please.”

  “What difference did that make? Tonight I saw him force his features partway through the screen—”

  “Préecisément,” he agreed. “But it was a screen of copper; I saw to that.”

  Then, seeing my bewilderment: “Iron is of all metals the most earthy,” he explained. “It and its derivative, steel, are so instinct with the essence of the earth that creatures of the spirit world can not abide its presence. The legends tell us that when Solomon’s Temple was constructed no tool of iron was employed, because even the friendly spirits whose help he had enlisted could not perform their tasks in close proximity to iron. The werewolf, a most unpleasant sort of creature which is half a demon, can be slain by a sword or spear of steel. The witch can be detected by the pricking of an iron pin—never by a pin of brass.

  “Very well. When first I thought about this evil dead one’s reappearances, I noted that each time he stared outside the window. Glass, apparently, he could not pass—and glass contains a modicum of iron. Iron window-wire stopped him. ‘He are not a ghost, then,’ I inform me. ‘They are things of spirit only, they are thoughts made manifest. This one is a thing of hate, but also of some physical material as well; he is composed in part of the emanations from that body which lies in the tomb and for which the Devil of hell and the devils of decay fight, each for their due shares. Voilà, if he have physical properties, he can be destroyed by physical means.’

  “And so I set my trap. I procure a screen of copper, through which he could make entrance to the house—but I charged it with electricity—I increase the potential of the current with a step-up transformer, to make assurance doubly sure—and then I wait for him to try to enter, and electrocute himself.”

  “But is he really destroyed?” I asked dubiously.

  “As the candle-flame when one has blown on it,” he replied. “He was—how do you say it?—short-circuited. No convict in the chair at Sing Sing ever died more thoroughly than that one did tonight, my friend.”

  “It seems queer, though, he should have come back from the grave to haunt those two poor kids and break up their marriage, when he really wanted it,” I murmured wonderingly.

  “Wanted it?” he echoed. “Ha, yes, he wanted it as the hunter wants the bird to step within his snare.”

  “But he gave them such a handsome present when little Dennis was born—”

  “Oh, my good, kind, trusting friend, are you, too, deceived?” he laughed.

  “Deceived—”

  “But certainly. That money which I gave to Madame Arabella was my own. I put it in that envelope.”

  “Then what was in the message which he really left?”

  The little Frenchman sobered suddenly. “It was a dreadful thing, that wicked jest he played on them,” he told me solemnly. “The night that Monsieur Dennis left that packet with me I determined that the old one meant him injury; so, when he went, I steamed the package open and destroyed Monsieur Warburg’s message from it. In it he made plain the things which Dennis thought that he remembered.

  “Long and long ago Monsieur Tantavul lived in San Francisco. His wife was seven years his junior, and a pretty, joyous thing she was. She bore him two fine children, a little boy and girl, and on them she bestowed the love which he could not appreciate. His business took him often from the city, but when he went away he set a watch on her.

  “Ha, the eavesdropper seldom hears good tidings of himself, and he who spies on others often wishes that he did not so. His surliness, his evil temper, his reproaches without praise, had driven her to seek release. She met and loved another man, and though she shrank from seeking freedom in that way, at last she yielded to his importunities, and was ready to escape, when Master Bluebeard-Tantavul suddenly returned.

  “Eh bien, but he had planned a pretty scheme of vengeance! His baby girl he spirited away, gave her for keeping to some Mexicans, then told his wife his plan: He would bring the children up as strangers to each other, and when they grew to full estate he would marry them and keep their consanguinity a secret till they had a child, then break the dreadful truth to them. Thereafter they would live on, bound together for their children’s sake, and fearing the world’s censure; their consciences would cause them ceaseless torment, and the very love which they had for each other would be like fetters forged of white-hot steel, binding them in a prison-house from which there offered no release.

  “When he had told her this his wife went mad, and, heartless as a devil out of hell, he thrust her into an institution, left her there to die, and took his babies with him, moving to New Jersey, and permitting them to grow to manhood and womanhood together, ceaselessly striving to guide them toward the altar, knowing always that his vengeance would be sated when his vile design had been accomplished.”

  “But, great heavens, man, they’re brother and sister!” I exclaimed in horror.

  “Perfectly,” he answered coolly. “They are also husband and wife, and father and mother.”

  “But—but—” I stammered, utterly at a loss for words.

  “But me no buts, good friend,” he bade. “I know what you would say. Their child? Ah bah; consider: Did not the kings of ancient times repeatedly take their own sisters to wife, and were not their offspring sound and healthy? But certainly. Did not both Darwin and Wallace fail to find foundation for the doctrine that cross-breeding between healthy people with clean blood is productive of inferior offspring? Look at the little Monsieur Dennis. Were you not blinded by your silly training and tradition—did you not know his parents’ near relationship—you would have no hesitation in pronouncing him an unusually fine and healthy child.

  “Besides,” he added earnestly, “they love each other, not as brother and sister, but as man and woman. He is her happiness, she is his, and little Monsieur Dennis is the happiness of both. Why destroy this joy—le bon Dieu knows they earned it by a joyless childhood!—when I can preserve it for them by simply keeping silent?”

  “But—”

  “But what you have learned your learned under the seal of your profession,” he warned me solemnly. “You can not tell. I will not.

  “Meantime”—he poured himself another drink—“I thirst.”

  Jules de Grandin in “PLEDGED TO THE DEAD,” by Seabury Quinn

  A Tale of Jules de Grandin

  The autumn dusk had stained the sky with shadows, and orange oblongs traced the windows in my neighbors’ homes, as Jules de Grandin and I sat sipping kaiserschmarrn and coffee in the study after dinner. “Mon Dieu,” the little Frenchman sighed, “I have the mal du pays, my friend. The little children run and play along the roadways at Saint Cloud, and on the Ile de France the pastry cooks set up their booths. Corbleu, it takes the strength of character not to stop
and buy those cakes of so much taste and fancy! The Napoleons, they are crisp and fragile as a coquette’s promise, the eclairs filled with cool, sweet cream, the cream-puffs all aglow with cherries. Just to see them is to love life better. They—”

  The shrilling of the doorbell startled me. The pressure on the button must have been that of one who leant against it.

  “Doctor Trowbridge; I must see him right away!” a woman’s voice demanded as Nora McGinnis, my household factotum, grudgingly responded to the hail.

  “Th’ docthor’s offiss hours is over, ma’am,” Nora answered frigidly. “Ha’f past nine ter eleven in th’ marnin’, an’ two ter four in th’ afthernoon is when he sees his patients. If it’s an urgent case ye have, there’s lots o’ good young docthors in th’ neighborhood, but Docthor Trowbridge—”

  “Is he here?” the visitor demanded sharply.

  “He is, an’ he’s afther digestin’ his dinner—an’ an illigant dinner it wuz, though I do say so as shouldn’t—an’ he can’t be disturbed—”

  “He’ll see me, all right. Tell him it’s Nella Bentley, and I’ve got to talk to him!”

  De Grandin raised an eyebrow eloquently. “The fish at the aquarium have greater privacy than we, my friend,” he murmured, but broke off as the visitor came clacking down the hall on high French heels and rushed into the study half a dozen paces in advance of my thoroughly disapproving and more than semi-scandalized Nora.

  “Doctor Trowbridge, won’t you help me?” cried the girl as she fairly leaped across the study and flung her arms about my shoulders. “I can’t tell Dad or Mother, they wouldn’t understand; so you’re the only one—oh, excuse me, I thought you were alone!” Her face went crimson as she saw de Grandin standing by the fire.

  “It’s quite all right, my dear,” I soothed, freeing myself from her almost hysterical clutch. “This is Doctor de Grandin, with whom I’ve been associated many times; I’d be glad to have the benefit of his advice, if you don’t mind.”

  She gave him her hand and a wan smile as I performed the introduction, but her eyes warmed quickly as he raised her fingers to his lips with a soft, “Enchanté, Mademoiselle.” Women, animals, and children took instinctively to Jules de Grandin.

  Nella dropped her coat of silky shaven lamb and sank down on the study couch, her slim young figure molded in her knitted dress of coral rayon as revealingly as though she had been cased in plastic cellulose. She had long, violet eyes and a long mouth; smooth, dark hair parted in the middle; a small straight nose, and a small pointed chin. Every line of her was long, but definitely feminine; breasts and hips and throat and legs all delicately curved, without a hint of angularity.

  “I’ve come to see you about Ned,” she volunteered as de Grandin lit her cigarette, and she sent a nervous smoke-stream gushing from between red, trembling lips. “He—he’s trying to run out on me!”

  “You mean Ned Minton?” I asked, wondering what a middle-aged physician could prescribe for wandering Romeos.

  “I certainly do mean Ned Minton,” she replied, “and I mean business, too. The darn, romantic fool!”

  De Grandin’s slender brows arched upward till they nearly met the beige-blond hair that slanted sleekly backward from his forehead. “Pardonnez-moi,” he murmured. “Did I understand correctly, Mademoiselle? Your amoureux—how do you say him?—sweetheart?—has shown a disposition toward unfaithfulness, yet you accuse him of romanticism?”

  “He’s not unfaithful, that’s the worst of it. He’s faithful as Tristan and the chevalier Bayard lumped together, sans peur et sans reproche, you know. Says we can’t get married, ’cause—”

  “Just a moment, dear,” I interrupted as I felt my indignation mounting. “D’ye mean the miserable young puppy cheated, and now wants to welch—”

  Her blue eyes widened, then the little laughter-wrinkles formed around them. “You dear old mid-Victorian!” she broke in. “No, he ain’t done wrong by our Nell, and I’m not asking you to take your shotgun down and force him to make me an honest woman. Suppose we start at the beginning; then we’ll get things straight.

  “You assisted at both our debuts, I’ve been told; you’ve known Ned and me since we were a second old apiece, haven’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “Know we’ve always been crazy about each other, too; in grammar school, high school, and college, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “All right. We’ve been engaged ever since our freshman year at Beaver. Ned just had his frat pin long enough to pin it on my shoulder-strap at the first freshman dance. Everything was set for us to stand up in the chapel and say ‘I do’ this June; then Ned’s company sent him to New Orleans last December.” She paused, drew deeply at her cigarette, crushed its fire out in an ashtray, and set a fresh one glowing.

  “That started it. While he was down there, it seemed that he got playful. Mixed up with some glamorous Creole gal.” Once more she lapsed into silence, and I could see the heartbreak showing through the armor of her flippant manner.

  “You mean he fell in love—”

  “I certainly do not! If he had, I’d have handed back his ring and said ‘Bless you, me children’, even if I had to bite my heart in two to do it; but this is no case of a new love crowding out the old. Ned still loves me; never stopped loving me. That’s what makes it all seem crazy as a hashish-eater’s dream. He was on the loose in New Orleans, doing the town with a crowd of local boys, and prob’bly had too many Ramos fizzes. Then he barged into this Creole dame’s place, and—” she broke off with a gallant effort at a smile. “I guess young fellows aren’t so different nowadays than they were when you were growing up, sir. Only today we don’t believe in sprinkling perfume in the family cesspool. Ned cheated, that’s the bald truth of it; he didn’t stop loving me, and he hasn’t stopped now, but I wasn’t there and that other girl was, and there were no conventions to be recognized. Now he’s fairly melting with remorse, says he’s not worthy of me—wants to break off our engagement, while he spends a lifetime doing penance for a moment’s folly.”

  “But good heavens,” I expostulated, “if you’re willing to forgive—”

  “You’re telling me!” she answered bitterly. “We’ve been over it a hundred times. This isn’t 1892; even nice girls know the facts of life today, and while I’m no more anxious than the next one to put through a deal in shopworn goods, I still love Ned, and I don’t intend to let a single indiscretion rob us of our happiness. I—” the hard exterior veneer of modernism melted from her like an autumn ice-glaze melting in the warm October sun, and the tears coursed down her cheeks, cutting little valleys in her carefully-applied makeup. “He’s my man, Doctor,” she sobbed bitterly. “I’ve loved him since we made mud-pies together; I’m hungry, thirsty for him. He’s everything to me, and if he follows out this fool renunciation he seems set on, it’ll kill me!”

  De Grandin tweaked a waxed mustache-end thoughtfully. “You exemplify the practicality of woman, Mademoiselle; I applaud your sound, hard, common sense,” he told her. “Bring this silly young romantic foolish one to me. I will tell him—”

  “But he won’t come,” I interrupted. “I know these hard-minded young asses. When a lad is set on being stubborn—”

  “Will you go to work on him if I can get him here?” interjected Nella.

  “Of a certitude, Mademoiselle.”

  “You won’t think me forward or unmaidenly?”

  “This is a medical consultation, Mademoiselle.”

  “All right; be in the office this time tomorrow night. I’ll have my wandering boyfriend here if I have to bring him in an ambulance.”

  * * * *

  Her performance matched her promise almost too closely for our comfort. We had just finished dinner next night when the frenzied shriek of tortured brakes, followed by a crash and the tinkling spatter of smashed glass, sounded in the street before the house, and in a moment feet dragged heavily across the porch. We were at the door before the bell
could buzz, and in the disk of brightness sent down by the porch light saw Nella bent half double, stumbling forward with a man’s arm draped across her shoulders. His feet scuffed blindly on the boards, as though they had forgotten the trick of walking, or as if all strength had left his knees. His head hung forward, lolling drunkenly; a spate of blood ran down his face and smeared his collar.

  “Good Lord!” I gasped. “What—”

  “Get him in the surgery—quick!” the girl commanded in a whisper. “I’m afraid I rather overdid it.”

  Examination showed the cut across Ned’s forehead was more bloody than extensive, while the scalp-wound which plowed backward from his hairline needed but a few quick stitches.

  Nella whispered to us as we worked. “I got him to go riding with me in my runabout. Just as we got here I let out a scream and swung the wheel hard over to the right. I was braced for it, but Ned was unprepared and went right through the windshield when I ran the car into the curb. Lord, I thought I’d killed him when I saw the blood—you do think he’ll come through all right, don’t you, Doctor?”

  “No thanks to you if he does, you little ninny!” I retorted angrily. “You might have cut his jugular with your confounded foolishness. If—”

  “Shh, he’s coming out of it!” she warned. “Start talking to him like a Dutch uncle; I’ll be waiting in the study if you want me,” and with a tattoo of high heels she left us with our patient.

  “Nella! Is she all right?” Ned cried as he half roused from the surgery table. “We had an accident—”

  “But certainly, Monsieur,” de Grandin soothed. “You were driving past our house when a child ran out before your car and Mademoiselle was forced to swerve aside to keep from hitting it. You were cut about the face, but she escaped all injury. Here”—he raised a glass of brandy to the patient’s lips—“drink this. Ah, so. That is better, n’est-ce-pas?”