The red priest mounted quickly to the altar, genuflected with his back to it, and called out: “Introibo ad altare Dei—I will go up into the altar of God.”
Rapidly the rite proceeded. The fifty-second Psalm—quid gloriaris—was said, but blasphemously garbled, God’s name deleted and the Devil’s substituted, so that it read: “Why boastest thou thyself, thou tyrant, that thou canst do mischief, whereas the evilness of Satan endureth yet daily?”
Then came confession, and, as oremus te Domine was intoned the priest bowed and kissed the living altar as provided by the rubric. Again repeating Dominus vobiscum, he pressed a burning kiss upon the shrinking flesh.
The subdeacon took a massive black-bound book and bore it to the deacon, who swung the censer over it; then, while the other held it up before him, he read aloud:
“In the beginning God created seven spirits as a man lighteth one lamp from another, and of these Lucifer, whose true name is forbidden to pronounce, was chiefest. But he, offended by the way in which God treated His creations, rebelled against the Tyrant, but by treachery was overthrown.
“Therefore was he expelled from heaven, but seized dominion of the earth and air, which he retaineth to this day. And those who worship him and do him honor will have the joys of life all multiplied to them, and at the last shall dwell with him in that eternal place which is his own, where they shall have dominion over hosts of demons pledged to do their will.
“Choose ye, therefore, man; choose ye whether ye will have the things of earth added to an endless authority in hell, or whether ye will submit to the will of the Tyrant of the Skies, have sorrow upon earth and everlasting slavery in the world to come.”
The deacon and subdeacon put the book aside, crossing themselves in reverse, and the call came mockingly: “May our sins be multiplied through the words contained in this Gospel.”
The red priest raised the paten high above the living altar, intoning: “Suscipe sancte Pater hanc immaculatum hostiam—”
De Grandin fumbled underneath his robe. “Renouard, my friend,” he whispered, “do you go tell the good Costello to come quickly. These cursed curtains round the walls, I fear they will shut in my whistle’s sound, and we must have aid at once. Quickly, my friend, a life depends on it!”
Renouard slipped from his place and crept toward the door, put back the curtain with a stealthy hand, and started back dismayed. Across the doorway we had entered a barrier was drawn, an iron guard-door intended to hold back flames should the building catch afire.
What had occurred was obvious. Recovered from the blow de Grandin dealt him the seneschal had struggled from his bonds and barred the portal, then—could it be possible that he had gone, unseen behind the screen of curtains hanging from the walls and warned the others of our presence?
De Grandin and Renouard reached for their firearms, fumbling with the unfamiliar folds of their disguises….
Before a weapon could be drawn we were assaulted from behind, our elbows pinioned to our sides, lengths of coiling cords wound tightly around our bodies. In less than half a minute we were helpless, firmly bound and set once more in our places on the bench. Silently and swiftly as a serpent twines its coils about a luckless rabbit our assailants did their work, and only they and we, apparently, knew what occurred. Certainly the hellish ritual at the altar never faltered, nor did a member of the congregation turn round to see what passed behind.
Two women of the Scarlet Sisterhood had crept back of the curtains by the altar. Now they emerged, bearing between them a little, struggling boy, a naked, chubby little fellow who fought and kicked and offered such resistance as his puny strength allowed and called out to his “Daddy” and his “Mamma” to save him from his captors.
Down on the altar steps they flung the little boy; one woman seized his little, dimpled hands, the other took his feet, extending his small body to its greatest length. The deacon and subdeacon had stepped forward….
I shut my eyes and bowed my head, but my ears I could not stop, and so I heard the red priest chant: “Hic est enim calix sanguins mea—this is the chalice of my blood—” I smelled the perfume of the incense, strong, acrid, sweet yet bitterly revolting, mounting to my brain like some accursed Oriental drug; I heard the wail which slowly grew in volume, yet which had a curiously muffled quality about it, the wail which ended in a little strangling, suffocated bleat!
I knew! Though not a Catholic, I had attended mass with Catholic friends too often not to know. The priest had said the sacred words of intention, and in a church the deacon would pour wine, the subdeacon water in the chalice. But this was not a church; this was a temple dedicated to the Devil, and mingled with the red wine was not water…. A bitter memory of my childhood hurried back across the years: They’d given me a lamb when I was five years old, all summer I had made a pet of it. I ‘loved’ the gentle, woolly thing. The autumn came, and with it came the time for slaughter … that agonizing, strangling bleat! That blood-choken cry of utter anguish!
Another sound cut in. The red priest once again was chanting, this time in a language which I could not understand, a ringing, sonorous tongue, yet with something wrong about it. Syllables which should have been noble in their cadences were clipped and twisted in their endings.
And now another voice—an abominably guttural voice with a note of hellish chuckling laughter in it—was answering the priest, still in that unknown tongue. It rose and fell, gurgled and chuckled obscenely, and though its volume was not great it seemed to fill the place as rumbling thunder fills the summer sky. Sweat broke out on my forehead. Luckily for me I had been seated by my captors; otherwise I should have fallen where I stood. As surely as I knew my heart was hammering against my ribs, I knew the voice of incarnate evil was speaking in that curtained room—with my own ears I heard the Devil answering his votary!
Two red-robed priestesses advanced, one from either side of the altar. Each bore an ewer of heavy hammered brass, and even in the candles’ changing light I saw the figures on the vessels were of revolting nastiness, beasts, men and women in attitudes of unspeakable obscenity. The deacon and subdeacon took the vessels from the women’s hands and knelt before the priest, who dropped upon his knees with outspread hands and upturned face a moment, then rose and took the chalice from the human altar’s gently heaving breast and held it out before him as a third red nun came forward, bearing in her outstretched hands a queer, teapot-like silver vessel.
I say a teapot, for that is what it most resembled when I saw it first. Actually, it was a pitcher made of silver, very brightly polished, shaped to represent a strutting peacock with fanned-out tail and erected crest, its neck outstretched. The bird’s beak formed the spout of the strange pitcher, and a funnel-shaped opening in the back between the wings permitted liquids to be poured into it.
The contents of the chalice, augmented and diluted by ruby liquors from the ewers which the women brought, were poured into the peacock-pitcher—a quart or so, I estimated—and the red priest flung the chalice awy contemptuously and raised the new container high above his head, so that its polished sides and ruby eyes flung back the altar candles’ lights in myriad darting rays.
“Vile, detestable wretches—miscreants!” de Grandin whispered hoarsely. “They mingle blood of innocents, my friends; the wine which represents le precieux sang de Dieu and the lifeblood of that little baby boy whose throat they cut and drained a moment hence! Parbleu, they shall pay through the nose for this if Jules de Grandin—”
The red priest’s deep voice boomed an invitation: “Ye who do truly and earnestly repent you of all your good deeds, and intend to lead a new life of wickedness, draw nigh and take this unholy sacrament to your souls’ damnation, devoutly kneeling!”
The congregation rose and ranged themselves upon their knees in a semi-circle round the altar. From each to each the red priest strode, thrusting the peacock’s hollow beak into each opened mouth, decanting mingled wine and blood.
“You see?” de Grandin�
�s almost soundless whisper came to me. “They study to give insult to the end. They make the cross-sign in reverse, the crucifix they have turned upside-down; when they administer their sacrament of hell they give the wine before the wafer, mocking both the Anglican and Latin rites. Saligauds!”
The ceremony proceeded to “ite missa est,” when the celebrant suddenly seized a handful of red, triangular wafers from the paten and flung them broadcast out upon the floor. Pandemonium best describes the scene that followed. Those who have seen a group of urchins scrambling for coins tossed by some prankish tourist can vision how that audience of gowned and hooded worshippers of Satan clawed and fought for fragments of the host, groveled on the floor, snatching, scratching, grasping for the smallest morsel of the wafer, which, when obtained, they popped into their mouths and chewed with noisy mastication, then spat forth with exclamations of disgust and cries of foul insult.
As the guards who stood behind us joined the swinish scramble for the desecrated host, de Grandin suddenly lurched forward, hunched his shoulders, then straightened like a coiling spring released from tension. Supple as an eel—and as muscular—he needed but the opportunity to wriggle from the ligatures which lashed his elbows to his sides.
“Quick, my friends, the haste!” he whispered, drawing his sharp Gurkha knife and slashing at our bonds. “We must—”
“Les gendarmes—the police!”
The fire-door leading to the anteroom banged back as the hooded warder rushed into the hall, screaming his warnings. He turned, slammed the door behind him, then drew a heavy chain across it, snapping a padlock through its links. “They come—les gendarmes!” he repeated hysterically.
The red priest barked a sharp command, and like sailors trained to spring to quarters when the bugles sound alarm, some half-dozen Satanists rushed to the walls, upset the guttering votive lamps, then scuttled toward the altar. Their companions already had disappeared behind the curtains hanging round the shrine.
“Qui est—” Renouard began, but de Grandin cut him short.
“Quickly, for your lives!” he cried, seizing us by the elbows and forcing us before him.
Now we understood the heavy, sickening smell of kerosene which hovered in the room. From top to hem the shrouding curtains at the walls were soaked in it, requiring but the touch of fire to burst into inextinguishable flame. Already they were blazing fiercely where the upset lamps had lighted them, and the heavy, suffocating smoke of burning oil was spreading like mephitic vapor through the room. In a moment the place would be a raging hell of fire.
Beyond the heavy fire-door we heard Costello’s peremptory hail: “Open up here; open in th’ law’s name, or we’ll break th’ door!” Then the thunder of nightsticks on the steel-sheathed panels, finally the trap-drum staccato of machine-gun bullets rattling on the metal barricade.
Too late to look for help that way, we knew. The door was latched and bolted, and barred with a locked chain, and a geyser of live flame was spurting upward round it, for the wooden walls were now ablaze, outlining the fireproof door in a frame of death.
Now the oil-soaked carpet had begun to burn; red tongues of flame and curling snakes of smoke were darting hungrily about our feet.
“On!” cried de Grandin. “It is the only way! They must have planned this method of defense in case of raid; surely they have left a rathole for their own escape!”
His guess seemed right, for only round the altar were the flames held back, though even there they were beginning to make progress.
Sleeves held before our faces for such poor protection as they gave, we stumbled toward the altar through the choking smoke. A big, cowled man rose out of nowhere in my path, and aimed a blow at me. Scarce knowing what I did I struck at him, felt the sharp point of my hunting knife sink into the soft flesh of his axilla, felt the warm blood spurt upon my hand as his artery was severed, and—rushed on. I was no longer Samuel Trowbridge, staid, middle-aged practitioner of medicine, I was not even a man, I was a snarling, elemental beast, alive to only one desire, to save myself at any cost; to butcher anything that barred my path.
We lurched and stumbled up the stairway leading to the altar, for there the smoke was somewhat thinner, the flames a trifle less intense. “Succès,” de Grandin cried, “the way lies here, my friends—this is the exit from their sacré burrow! Follow on; I can already see—
“Qui diable?” He started back his pistol flashing in the firelight.
Behind the altar, looming dimly through the swirling smoke, a man’s shape bulked. One glance identified him. It was the big, young, white-haired man Costello had knocked unconscious to save Renouard an hour or so before.
In his arms he held the fainting form of Alice Hume.
16. Framed
“HANDS UP!” DE GRANDIN barked. “Elevate your hands or—”
“Don’t be an utter ass,” the other advised tartly. “Can’t you see my hands are full?” Displaying no more respect for the Frenchman’s pistol than if it had been a pointed finger, he turned on his heel, then flung across his shoulder as a sort of afterthought, “if you want to save your hides a scorching you’d best be coming this way. There’s a stairway here—at least, there was fifteen minutes ago.”
“Fanons d’un corbeau, he is cool, this one!” de Grandin muttered with grudging admiration, treading close upon the stranger’s heels.
Sandwiched between our building and the next was a narrow, spiral stairway, a type of covered fire escape long since declared illegal by the city. Down this the stranger led us, de Grandin close behind him, his pistol ready, his flashlight playing steadily on the other’s back. “One false step and I fire,” he warned as we descended the dark staircase.
“Oh be quiet,” snapped our guide. “One false step and I’ll break my silly neck! Don’t talk so much, you make me nervous.”
Two paces ahead of us, he paused at the stairway’s bottom, kicked a metal firedoor open, then drew aside to let us pass. We found ourselves in a narrow alleyway, darker than a moonless midnight, but with a single feeble spot of light diluting the blackness at its farther end, where the weak rays of a flickering gas street lamp battled with the gloom.
“Now what?” the little Frenchman asked. “Why do we stand here like a flock of silly sheep afraid to enter through a gate? Why—”
“S-s-st!” our guide’s sharp hiss shut him off. “I think they’re waiting for us out there, they—ha? I knew it!”
The faintly glowing reflection of the street lamp’s light was shut off momentarily as a man’s form bulked in the alley exit.
De Grandin tapped me on the arm. “Elle est nue—she has no protection from the chill,” he whispered with a nod toward Alice. “Will you not put your robe upon her? I shall require mine for disguise a little longer, or—”
“All right,” I answered, slipping off my scarlet cassock and draping it about the girl’s nude loveliness while the man who held her in his arms assisted me with quick, deft hands.
“Dimitri—Franz?” a voice called cautiously from the alley entrance. “Are you there? Have you brought the Bride?”
For a moment we were silent, then: “Yes,” our companion answered thickly, as though he spoke with something in his mouth, “she’s here, but—”
His answer broke abruptly, and I felt rather than saw him shift the girl’s weight to his left arm as he fumbled under his coat with his right hand.
“But what?” the hail came sharply. “Is she injured? You know the penalty if harm comes to her. Come here!”
“Here, take her,” the stranger whispered, thrusting Alice into my arms. To de Grandin: “How about that pistol you’ve been so jolly anxious to shoot off, got it ready?”
“Certainement. Et puis?” the Frenchman answered.
“All right; look lively—this way!”
Silently as shadows the three of them, de Grandin, the stranger and Renouard, crept down the alley, leaving me to follow with the fainting girl as best I could.
Just inside
the entrance to the passageway the stranger, spoke again: “The Bride is safe, but—” Once more his thick speech halted; then, “Franz is hurt; he can not walk well, and—”
“Then kill him, and be quick!” the sharp command came back. “None must fall into their hands alive. Quick; shoot him, and bring the Bride, the car is waiting!”
A muffled shot sounded, followed by a groan, then: “Bring the Prophetess at once!” came the angry command. “What are you waiting for—”
“Only for you, old thing!” With a booming shout of mingled exultation and hilarity, the strange man leaped suddenly from the shadow of the alley’s mouth, seized his interrogator in his arms and dragged him back to the shelter of the passageway’s arched entrance.
“Hold him, Frenchy!” he commanded. “Don’t let him get away; he’s—”
A spurting dart of flame stabbed through the darkness and a sharp report was followed by the viscious whin-n-ng! of a ricocheting bullet which glanced from the vaulted roof and whined past me in the dark.
I crouched to the cement pavement, involuntarily putting myself between the firing and the girl in my arms. A second report sounded, like an echo of the first, followed by a screaming cry which ended in a choking groan, then the sound of running feet.
“That’s one who’ll never slit another throat,” the stranger remarked casually.
I waited for a moment, then, as there seemed no further danger to my unconscious charge, rose and joined the others. “What happened?” I asked.
“Oh, as we were escaping from the fire up there this poor fellow came to help us, and this other one shot him,” the unknown man replied coolly. “Rankest piece of cold-blooded murder I ever saw. Positively revoltin’. Eh, Frenchy?”
The Dark Angel Page 30
