The young trooper regarded him quizzically a moment, as though seeking to determine whether he were serious. At length: “No. I can’t say I do,” he confessed.
De Grandin turned interrogatively to me. “Do you, by any happy chance, see a connection in it?” he demanded.
“No,” I answered. “I can’t see it makes any difference whether the brick and iron came from an insane asylum or a chicken-coop.”
He nodded, a trifle sadly. “One should have anticipated some such answer from you,” he replied. Then: “Attend me, carefully, both of you,” he ordered. “We must begin with the premise that, though it is incapable of being seen or weighed or measured, a thought is a thing, no less than is a pound of butter, a flitch of bacon or a dozen sacerdotal candles. You follow me? Bien. Bien, whether you do or not.
“A madhouse is far from being a pleasant place. There human wreckage—the mentally dead whose bodies unfortunately survive them—is brought to be disposed of, imprisoned, cabined, cribbed, confined. Often, those we call ‘criminally insane’ are very criminal, indeed, though not medically insane. Their madness consists in their having given themselves, body, soul and spirit, to abysmal and unutterable evilness. Very well. From such there emanates—we do not know quite how, though psychical experiment has proved it to be a fact—an active, potent force of evil, and inanimate things, like stone and wood, brick and iron, are capable of absorbing it. Oh, yes.
“I have seen spirit-manifestations evoked from a chip taken from a rafter in a house where great wickedness had been indulged in; I have seen dreams of old, dead, evil days evoked in sensitive subjects doing no more than sleep in the room where some bit of torture-paraphernalia from he prisons of the Spanish Inquisition in Toledo had been placed all unbeknown to them. Yes. There, then, is our starting-point.
“What then? Last night three people saw a most remarkable manifestation on that lawn yonder. I saw it; the Negro butler’s wife beheld it; even Doctor Trowbridge, who most certainly can not be called a psychic, saw it. Voilà; that thing was no figment of the fancy, it was there. Of course. Whether Monsieur Goodlowe saw it, in the same sense that we beheld it we can not say. He has no recollection of it. But certainly he saw something—something which caused him to leave his house and walk across the grass plot exactly as did his brother, his kinsman and his female relative, presumably. Had I not been quick, I think we should have seen another tragedy, there, before our very eyes.”
“I say,” I interrupted, “just what was it you did last night, de Grandin? I have to admit, however much my better judgment tells me it was an optical illusion, that I saw—or thought I saw—a great snake materialize on the lawn; then, when you hypnotized Miss Goodlowe, the thing seemed to fade away. Did she have any connection with—”
“Ah bah,” he broke in with a nod. “Has the lens any connection with the burning of the concentrated sunlight? By damn-it, I think yes!”
“How—” I began, but:
“You have seen the working of the verre ardent—the how do you call him—burning-glass? Yes?”
“Of course,” Chenevert and I replied in chorus.
“Very good!” He nodded solemnly. “Very, exceedingly good. All about us, invisible, impalpable, but all about us none the less, are spiritual forces, some good, some evil, all emanations of generations of men who have lived and struggled, loved, hated and died long years agone. But this great force is, in the main, so widespread, so lacking in cohesion, that it can not manifest itself physically, except upon the rarest of occasions. At times it can make itself faintly felt, as sunshine can impart a coat of tan to the skin, but to inflict a quick and powerful burn the sunlight must be bound together in a single intense beam by the aid of the burning-lens. Just so with these spiritual forces, whether they be good or naughty. They are here already, as sunlight is abundant on a sunny day, but it needs the services of a medium to bring these forces into focus so they can become physically apparent. Yes; assuredly.
“Now, not all mediums reside in the stuffy back rooms of darkened houses, eking out precarious livelihoods by the contributions of the credulous who desire to consult the spirits of departed relatives. Hélas, no. There are many unconscious mediums who all innocently give force and potency to some evil spirit-entity which but for them would be unable to manifest itself at all. Such mediums are most often neurotic young women. They seem ideally fitted to supply the psychoplasm needed by the spirit for materialization, whether that manifestation be for the harmless purpose of ringing a tambourine, tooting a toy trumpet or—committing bloody murder.
“This, of course, I knew already. Also, I knew that on previous occasions when members of the Goodlowe family had been so tragically killed, Mademoiselle Nancy had suffered from strange seizures such as that she had last night. ‘It are a wicked thing—a spirit or an elemental—draining the physical energy from her in the form of psychoplasm with which to make itself material,’ I tell me. Accordingly, when I see that serpent forming out of nothingness, I turn at once to Mademoiselle Nancy as its source of power.
“She is unconscious, but her subconscious mind is active; she seeks to burst the bonds I put upon her, to what end? One wonders. But one thing I can do if only I can succeed in making her conscious for one little so small minute. I can hypnotize her—put her in a natural sleep in which the unconscious giving off of physio-psychical power will be halted. And so. I wake her, though I have great trouble doing it. I wake her and then I bid her sleep once more. She sleeps, and the building up of that so evil white snake-thing comes abruptly to a halt. Voilà. Très bien.”
“What’s next?” Chenevert demanded.
“First, a further test of that which summoned Monsieur Goodlowe from the house last night,” the little Frenchman answered. “I have taken means which will, I think, insure its harmlessness; but I am curious to see how it goes about its work. That done, we shall destroy the summer-house from which the evil emanation seems to come, and that accomplished, we shall seek for causes of these so strange deaths and for the source of the curse which seems to overhang this family. Logicians reason a posteriori, we shall seek to visualize in the same manner, from ultimate effect to primal cause. You understand?”
Captain Chenevert shook his head, but held his peace.
“I’m hanged if I do,” I declared.
“Very well, you shall, in time,” he promised with a smile, “but you shall not be hanged. You are too good a friend to lose by hanging, dear old silly Trowbridge of my heart.”
IT MUST HAVE BEEN near midnight when the Negro butler ran out on the terrace to summon us. “Ma’mselle is restless, M’sieu l’Médecin,” he announced. “My wife is with her, but—”
“Very good,” de Grandin cried. “Is all in readiness?”
“Oui, M’sieu.”
“Bon. Let us go.” He hastened toward the house, and:
“Look upon the lawn my friends,” he bade Chenevert and me. “What is it that you see, if anything?”
We turned toward the plot of grass before the summer-house, and I felt a prickling of my scalp and, despite midsummer heat, a sudden chill ran down my neck and back. A jet of whitish vapor was rising from the grass, and as we looked, it began to weave and wind and twist, simulating the contortions of a rearing serpent.
“Good God!” cried Captain Chenevert, reaching for his pistol, but:
“Desist!” de Grandin warned. “I have that ready which will prove more efficacious than your shot, mon capitaine, and I do not wish that you should make unnecessary noise. It is better that we do our work in silence. Await me here, but on no account go near it!”
In a moment he and Julius returned, each armed with what looked like those large tin atomizers used to spray insecticide on rose bushes.
They charged across the strip of lawn, their tin weapons held before them as soldiers might hold automatic rifles, deployed while still some distance from the whirling mist, then turned and faced each other, de Grandin running in a circle from left to right, th
e Negro circling toward him from right to left. Each aimed his atomizer at the earth and we heard the swish-swish of the things as they worked the plungers furiously. Although I could not tell what the “guns” held, it seemed to me they sprayed some dark-hued liquid on the grass.
“Fini!” the little Frenchman cried as he and Julius completed their circuit. “Now—ha? Ah-ha-ha?” He seemed to freeze and stiffen in his tracks as he looked toward the house.
Chenevert and I turned, too and I heard the captain give a muffled exclamation, even as I caught my breath in surprise. Walking with an undulating, swaying motion which was almost like that of a dance, came Nancy Goodlowe. Her flimsy night-dress fluttered lightly in the faint night breeze. In the moonlight, falling fine as dusted silver powder through the windbreak of Lombardy poplars, she was so wraith-like and ephemeral as to seem a phantom of the imagination. Her arms were raised before her, and bent sharply at the elbows, and again at the wrists, so that her hands thrust forward, for all the world like twin snake-heads, poised to strike. Abruptly she came to a halt, half turned toward the house from which she had come, as though awaiting the advent of a delayed companion, then, apparently reassured, began describing a wide circle on the lawn in a gliding, side-stepping dance. I saw her face distinctly as a moonbeam flashed upon it, a tense drawn face, devoid of all expression as a countenance carved of wood, eyes wide, staring and expressionless, mouth retracted so that a hard, white line of teeth showed behind the soft red line of lips.
And now the drawn, sardonically smiling lips were moving, and a soft contralto chant rose upon the midnight stillness. The words I could not understand. Vaguely, they reminded me of French; yet they were not truly French, resembling that language only as the jargon of a Yorkshireman or the patois of our canebrake Negroes simulated the English of an educated Londoner. One word, or phrase, alone I understood: “Ayida Oueddo—Ayida Oueddo!” intermixed with connectives of unintelligible gibberish which meant nothing to me.
“Quick, my friends, seize him, lay hands on him, hold him where he is!” de Grandin’s whispered order cut through Nancy Goodlowe’s chanting invocation, as he motioned us to turn around.
As we swung round we beheld Gordon Goodlowe. Like a wanderer in a dream he came, the night air stirring through his tousled hair, his eyes fast-set and staring with a look of blank, half-conscious horror. His mouth was partly opened, and from the corners there drooled two little streams of spittle. He was like a paralytic moving numbly in a state of quarter-consciousness, a condemned man marching to the gallows in an anesthesia of dread, volition gone from out his limbs and muscles working only through some reflex process entirely divorced from conscious guidance.
“Do not address him, only hold him fast!” de Grandin ordered sharply. “On no account permit him to overstep the line we drew; the other may not come to him; see you that he goes not to it!”
Obediently, Chenevert and I seized Goodlowe by the elbows and stopped him in his stride. He did not struggle with us, nor, indeed, did he seem aware we held him, but we could feel the dead-weight of his body as he leaned toward the twisting, writhing thing inside the circle which de Grandin and Black Julius had marked upon the lawn.
The mist had now solidified. It had become a great, white snake which turned and slid its folds like melting quicksilver, one upon another, rearing up its dreadful head, opening its fang-barbed mouth and hissing with a low, continuous sibilation like the sound of steam escaping from a broken pipe.
I shrank away as the awful thing drew itself into a knot and drove its scale-armored head forward in a sudden lunge toward us, but terror gave way to astonishment as I saw the driving battering-ram of scale and muscle stopped in midair, as though it had collided with an invisible, but impenetrable, barrier. Time and again the monster struck at us, hissing with a sort of venomous fury as each drive fell futilely against the unseen wall which seemed to stand between ourselves and it. Then—
From the little red-brick summerhouse there came a sudden spurt of flame. Unseen by us, de Grandin and the butler had drenched the place with gasoline until the very bricks reeked with it. Now, as they poured a fresh supply of petrol out, they set a match to it, and the orange flames leaped upward hungrily.
A startling change came over the imprisoned reptile. No longer did it seek to strike at Chenevert and Goodlowe and me; rather, its efforts seemed directed to regaining the protection of the blazing summer-house. But the invisible barrier which had held it back from us restrained its efforts to retreat. It struck and struck again, helplessly, at the empty air, then begin to twist and writhe in a new fashion, contorting on itself, swaying its head, shuddering its coils, as though in insupportable agony. And as the lapping tongues of flame leaped higher, the thing began to shrink and shrivel, as though the fire which burnt the roof and cracked the bricks and bent the iron grilles of the little house with its fierce heat, were consuming it.
It was a fearsome sight. To see a twenty-foot snake burned alive—consumed to crisping ashes—would have been enough to horrify us almost past endurance, but to see that mighty, writhing mass of bone and scale and iron-hard muscle cremated by a fire which blazed a half a hundred feet away—so far away that we could scarcely feel the least faint breath of heat—that was adding stark impossibility to nauseating horror.
“Fini—triomphe—achevé—parfait!” de Grandin cried triumphantly as he and Julius capered round the blazing summer-house like savages dancing round some sacrificial bonfire. “You were strong and cunning, Monsieur le Revenant, but Jules de Grandin, he was stronger and more cunning. Ha, but he tricked you cleverly, that one; he made a mock of all your wicked, vengeful plans; he caught you in a trap where you thought no trap was; he snared you in a snare from which there was no exit; he burned you in the fire and made you into nothing—he has consumed you utterly and finally!” Abruptly he ceased his frenzied dance and insane chant of triumph, and:
“See to Mademoiselle, mon brave,” he ordered Julius. “I think that she will rest the clock around when your wife has put her in her bed. Tomorrow we shall see the last act of this tragedy and then—eh bien, the curtain always falls upon the finished play, n’est-ce-pas?”
CANDLES BURNED WITH A soft, faintly shifting light in the tall seven-cupped candelabrum which graced the center of the polished mahogany table in the Goodlowe drawing-room. Full to repletion at the end of an exceptionally good dinner, Jules de Grandin was at once affable and talkative. “What was it you and Julius sprayed on the lawn last night?” I had asked as Gordon Goodlowe, his niece, Captain Chenevert and I found seats in the parlor and Julius, quiet-footed as a cat brought in coffee and liqueurs before setting the candles alight and drawing the gold-mesh curtains at the tall French windows.
The little Frenchman’s small blue eyes twinkled roguishly as he turned his gaze on me and brushed a wholly imaginary fleck of dust from the sleeve of his immaculate white-linen mess-jacket. “Chicken blood,” he answered with an elfin grin.
“What?” Chenevert and I demanded in incredulous chorus.
“Précisément, your hearing is quite altogether perfect, my friends!” he answered. “Chicken blood—sang des poulets, you comprehend?”
“But—” I began, when he checked me with an upraised hand.
“Did you ever stop to think why there are statues of the blessed saints upon the altars of the Catholic church?” he asked.
“Why there are—what the deuce are you driving at?” I demanded.
He drained his cup of brandied coffee almost at a gulp, and patted the needle-sharp ends of his diminutive wheat-blond mustache with affectionate concern. “The old schoolmen knew nothing of what we call ‘the new psychology’ today,” he answered with a chuckle, “but they had as good a working knowledge of it as any of our present-day professors. Consider: In the laboratory we employ rotating mirrors to induce a state of quick hypnosis when we would make experiments; before that we were wont to use gazing-crystals, for very long ago it was found that the person concentrating
his attention on a small, bright object was an excellent candidate for hypnotism. Very good, but that is not all. If one stares fixedly at anything, whatever be its size, he soon detects a feeling of detachment stealing over him—I have seen soldiers standing at attention become unconscious and fall fainting to the ground because they focused their gaze upon some object before them, and held it there too long.
“Very well, then. The olden fathers of the Church discovered, not by psychological formulæ, but empirically, that an image placed upon a shrine gave the kneeling worshipper something on which to concentrate his gaze and induced a state of mild semi-hypnosis which made it possible to exclude extrinsic thoughts. It enabled the worshipper, in fine, to coordinate his thought with the wording of his prayer—made the act of praying less like indulging in a conversation with himself. You apprehend? Good. The underlying psychology of the thing the fathers did not know, but they proved by successful experiment that the images fulfilled this important office.
“Similarly: In darkest Africa, where the Voodoo rites of the West Indies had their birth, worshippers of the unclean gods typified by the snake discovered that the blood of fowls, especially chickens, was a potent talisman against their deities, which might otherwise burst the boundaries of control. Every Voodoo rite, whatever its nature, is accompanied by the sacrifice of a fowl, preferably a rooster, and this blood is scattered in a circle between the worshippers and the altar of their gods. Why this is we do not know; we only know it is. But upon some ancient day, so long ago that no one knows its date, it was undoubtlessly discovered that the serpent-god of the Voodoo men could be controlled by spreading warm chicken blood across his path. This was a secret which the Haitien Blacks brought with them out of Africa.
“Very good. When Mademoiselle Nancy struggled on her bed the night we came, and we beheld something taking shape upon the lawn, something with a serpent’s form, which drew Monsieur Goodlowe from the house by some subtle fascination, what was it that Julius’ wife cried out? ‘Ayida Oueddo!’
The Dark Angel Page 54
