The Dark Angel

by Seabury Quinn

  I turned to glance at our companion, and a startled exclamation leaped involuntarily to my lips. The big Semitic-featured face had undergone a startling transformation. The complexion had altered from swarthy tan to pasty gray, the eyes had started from their sockets, white, globular, expressionless as peeled onions. I had seen such horrible protrusion of the optics in corpses far gone in putrefaction when tissue-gas was bloating features out of human semblance, but never had I seen a thing like this in a living countenance. Doctor Obeyid’s lips were moving, but what he said I could not understand. It was a low, monotonous, sing-song chant in some harsh and guttural language, rising and falling alternately with a majesty and power like the surging of a wind-swept sea upon the sands.

  How long he chanted I have no idea. It might have been a minute, it might have been an hour, for the clock of eternity seemed stopped as the sonorous voice boomed out the harsh, compelling syllables. But finally it was finished, and I felt de Grandin’s hand upon my arm.

  “Come away, my friend,” he whispered in an awe-struck tone. “The cards are dealt and on the table. The first part of our game of souls is started. Prie Dieu that we shall win!”

  ALONZO CARDENER WAS SITTING at the little table in his cell, not playing cards, although a pack rested beside the Bible on the clean-scrubbed wood, but merely sitting as though lost in thought, his elbow on his knee, head propped upon his hand. He did not look up as we came abreast of him, but just sat there, staring straight ahead.

  “Monsieur,” de Grandin hailed. “Monsieur Lonny!” The prisoner looked up, but there was no change of expression in his dull and apathetic face. “We are come from her, from Madame Beth,” the Frenchman added softly.

  The change which overspread the prisoner’s face was like a miracle. It was young again, and bright with eagerness, like a lad in love when some one brings him tidings of his sweetheart. “You’ve come from her?” he asked incredulously. “Tell me, is she well? Is she—”

  “She is well, mon pauvre, and happier, since she has told her story to us. We came upon her yesternight by chance, and she has told us all. Now, she asks that we should come to you and bid you be of cheer.”

  Cardener laughed shortly, with harsh mirthlessness. “Rather difficult, that, for a man in my position,” he rejoined, “but—”

  “My brother,” Doctor Obeyid’s deep voice, lowered to a whisper, but still powerful as the muted rumbling of an organ’s bass, broke in upon his bitter speech, “you must not despair. Are you afraid to die?”

  “Die?” A spasm as of pain twitched across the convict’s face. “No, sir; I don’t think so. I’ve faced death many times before, and never was afraid of it; but leaving Beth, now, when I’ve just found her again, is what hurts most. It’s impossible, of course, but if I could only see her once again—”

  “You shall,” Hussein Obeyid promised. “Little brother, be confident. That door through which you go tonight is the entrance to reunion with the one you love. It is the portal to a new and larger life, and beyond it waits your loved one.”

  Gray-faced horror spread across the prisoner’s countenance. “You—you mean she is already dead?” he faltered. “Oh, Beth, my girl; my dear, my dearest dear—”

  “She is not dead; she is alive and well, and waiting for you,” Obeyid’s deep, compelling voice cut in. “Just beyond that door she waits, my little one. Keep up your courage; you shall surely find her there.”

  “Oh?” Light seemed to dawn upon the prisoner. “You mean that she’ll destroy herself to be with me. No—no; she mustn’t do it! Suicide’s a sin, a deadly sin. I’m going innocent to death; God will judge my innocence, for He knows all, but if she were to kill herself perhaps we should be separated for ever. Tell her that she mustn’t do it; tell her that I beg that she will live until her time has come, and that she’ll not forget me while she’s waiting; for I’ll be waiting, too.”

  “Look at me,” commanded Obeyid suddenly, so suddenly that the frantic man forgot his fears and stopped his protestations short to look with wonder-widened eyes at Hussein Obeyid.

  The Oriental raised his staff and held it toward the wire screen the guards had placed before the cell. And as he held it out, it moved. Before our eyes that staff of carven wood and ivory became a living, moving thing, twining itself about the doctor’s wrist, rearing its head and darting forth its bifurcated tongue. “Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim—in the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate—” murmured Hussein Obeyid, then launched into a low-voiced, vibrant cantillation while the vivified staff writhed and turned its scaly head in cadence to the chant. He did not distort his features as when he cast a spell upon the prisoner’s brother; but his face was pale as chiseled marble, and down his high, wide, sloping forehead ran rivulets of sweat as he put the whole force of his soul and mighty body behind the invocation which he chanted.

  The look upon the convict’s face was mystifying. Twin fires, as of a fever, burned in the depths of his cavernous eyes and his features writhed and twisted as though his soul were racked by the travail of spiritual childbirth. “Beth!” he whispered hoarsely. “Beth!”

  I turned apprehensively toward the prison guard who sat immediately behind us. That he had not cried out at the animation of Obeyid’s staff and the low-toned invocation of the Oriental ere this surprised me. What I saw surprised me more. The man lounged in his chair, his features dull and disinterested, a look of utter boredom on his face. He saw nothing, heard nothing, noticed nothing!

  “… until tonight, then, little brother,” Hussein Obeyid was saying softly. “Remember, and be brave. She will be awaiting you.”

  “Come,” ordered Jules de Grandin, tugging at my sleeve. “The dice are cast. We must wait to read the spots before we can know surely whether we have won.”

  THEY LED HIM IN to die at twenty minutes after ten. Permission to attend the execution had been difficult to get; but Jules de Grandin with his tireless energy and infinite resource had obtained it. Hussein Obeyid, the little Frenchman and I accepted seats at the far end of the stiffbacked church-like pew reserved for witnesses, and I felt a shiver of sick apprehension ripple down my spine as we took our places. To watch beside the bed of one who dies when medical science has exhausted its resources is heart-breaking, but to sit and watch a life snuffed out, to see a strong and healthy body turned to so much clay within the twinkling of an eye—that is horrifying.

  The executioner, a lean, cadaverous man who somehow reminded me of a disillusioned evangelist, stood in a tiny alcove to the left of the electric chair, a heavy piece of oaken furniture raised one low step above the tiled floor of the chamber; the assistant warden and the prison doctor stood between the chair and entrance to the death-room, and although this was no novelty to him, I saw the medic finger nervously at the stethoscope which hung about his neck as though it were a badge of office. A partly folded screen at the farther corner of the room obscured another doorway, but as we took our seats I caught a glimpse of a wheeled stretcher with a cotton sheet lying neatly folded on it. Beyond, I knew, waited the autopsy table and the surgeon’s knife when the prison doctor had pronounced the execution a success.

  I breathed a strangling, gasping sigh as a single short, imperative tap sounded on the panels of the painted door which led to the death chamber.

  Silently, on well-oiled hinges, the door swung back, and Alonzo Cardener stood in readiness to meet the great adventure. His cotton shirt was open at the throat, the right leg of his trousers had been slit up to the knee; as the pitiless white light struck on his head, I saw a little spot was shaved upon his scalp. To right and left were prison guards who held his elbows lightly. Another guard brought up the rear. The chaplain walked before, his Prayer Book open. “… yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me …”

  Cardener’s eyes were wide and rapt. The fingers of his right hand closed, not convulsively, but tenderly, as though he took and held another’s hand in his. His
lips moved slightly, and though no sound came from them, we saw them form a name: “Beth!”

  They led him to the chair, but he did not seem to see it; they had to help him up the one low step—his last step in the world—or he would have stumbled on it; for his eyes were gazing down an endless vista where he walked at peace with his beloved, hand in hand.

  But as they snapped the heavy straps about his waist and wrists and ankles and set the leather helmet on his head, a sudden change came over him. He struggled fiercely at the bonds which held him in the chair, and although his face was almost hidden by the deadly headgear clamped upon his skull, his lips were unobscured, and from them came a wailing cry of horrified astonishment. “Not me!” he screamed. “Not me—Lonny! I’m—”

  Notebook open, and pencil poised, as though to make a memorandum, the prison doctor stood before the chair. Now, as the convict screamed in frenzied fear, the pencil tilted forward, as though the doctor wrote. A sudden, sharp, strange whining sounded, something throbbed and palpitated agonizingly, like stifled heart-beats. The ghastly, pleading cry was checked abruptly as the prisoner’s body started up and forward, as though it sought to burst the leathern bonds which held it. The chin and lips went from pale gray to dusky red, like the face of one who holds his breath too long. The hands, fluttering futilely a moment since, were taut and rigid on the chair arms.

  A moment—or eternity!—of this, then the grating jar of metal against metal as the switch was thrown and the current was shut off. The straining body dropped back limply in the chair.

  Again the doctor’s pencil tilted forward, again the whining whir, and the flaccid body started forward, all but bursting through the broad, strong straps which harnessed it into the chair. Then absolute flaccidity as the current was withdrawn again.

  The doctor put his book and pencil by and stepped up quickly to the chair. Putting back the prisoner’s open shirt—he wore no undershirt—he pressed his stethoscope against the reddened chest exposed to view, listened silently, then, crisp and business-like, announced his verdict:

  “I pronounce this man dead.”

  White-uniformed attendants took the limp form from the chair, wrapped it quickly in a sheet and wheeled it off to the autopsy table.

  We signed the roll of witnesses and hurried from the prison, and:

  “Drive, my friend, drive as though the fiends of fury rode the wind behind us!” ordered Jules de Grandin. “We must arrive at Madame Cardener’s without delay. Right away, immediately; at once!”

  BETH CARDENER MET US at the door, the pallor of her face intensified by the sable hue of the black-velvet pajamas which she wore. “It happened at twenty minutes after ten,” she told us as we filed silently into the hall.

  De Grandin’s small eyes rounded with astonishment as he looked at her. “Précisément, Madame,” he acknowledged, “but how is it you know?”

  A puzzled look spread on her face as she replied: “Of course, I couldn’t sleep—who could, in such circumstances?—and I kept looking at the clock and saying to myself, ‘What are they doing to my poor boy now? Is he still in the same world with me?’ when I seemed to hear a sort of drumming, whirring noise—something like the deafening vibration you sometimes hear when riding in a motorcar—and then a sudden sharp, agonizing pain shot through me from my head to feet. It was like fire rushing through my veins, burning me to ashes as it ran, and everything went red, then inky-black before my eyes. I felt as if I stifled—no, not that, rather as though every nerve and muscle in my body were suddenly cramping into knots—and at the same time there was a terrible sensation of something from inside me being snatched away in one cruel wrench, as though my heart were dragged out of my breast with a pair of dreadful tongs that burned and seared, even as they tore my quivering body open. If it had lasted, I’d have died, but it left as quickly as it came, and there I was, faint, weak and numb, but suffering no pain, staggering to the window and gasping for breath. As I reached the window I looked up, and a shooting-star fell across the sky. I knew, then; Lonny was no longer in the same world with me. I was lonely, so utterly, devastatingly lonely, that I thought my heart would break. I’ve never had a child, but if I had one, and it died, I think that I’d feel as I felt the instant that I saw that falling star.

  “Then”—she paused, and again that puzzled, wondering look crept into her eyes—“then something, something inside me, like a voice heard in a dream, seemed to say insistently: ‘Go to Larry; go to Larry!’

  “I didn’t want to go; I didn’t want to see him or be near him—I loathed the very thought of him, but that strange, compelling voice kept ordering me to go. So I went.

  “Larry was sitting in the big chair he always uses in the library. His head had fallen back, and his hands were gripping the arms till the finger-tips bit into the upholstery. His mouth was slightly open and his face was pale as death. I noticed, as I crossed the room, that his feet were well apart, but both flat to the floor. It was”—her voice sank to a husky, frightened whisper—“it was as if he were sitting in the death-chair, and had just been executed!”

  “U’m, and did you touch him, Madame?” de Grandin asked.

  “Yes, I did, and his hands were cold—clammy. He was dead. Oh, thank God, he was dead! He murdered his poor brother, just as surely as he killed his father, but he’ll never live to boast of it. He died, just as Lonny did, in ‘the chair,’ only it wasn’t human injustice that took his perjured life away; it was the even-handed judgment of just Heaven, and I’m glad. I’m glad, do you hear me! I’m glad enough to rush out in the street and tell it to the world; to shout it from the house-tops!”

  De Grandin cast a sidelong glance at Hussein Obeyid, who nodded silently. “Perfectly, Madame, one understands,” the Frenchman answered. “Will you go with us and show us the body? It would be of interest—”

  “Yes, yes; I’ll show you—I’ll be glad, to show you!” she broke in shrilly. “Come; this way, please.”

  Gray-faced, hang-jawed, pale and flaccid as only the dead can be, Lawrence Cardener sat slumped in the big chair beside the book-strewn-table. I glanced at him and nodded briefly. No use to make a further examination. No doctor, soldier or embalmer need be introduced to death. He knows it at a glance.

  But Hussein Obeyid was not so easily assured. Crossing the room, he bent above the corpse, staring straight into the glazed and sightless eyes and murmuring a sort of chanting invocation. “Bismillah alrahman al-rahman—in the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate; in the name of the One True God—” He drew a little packet from his waistcoat pocket, broke the seal which closed it and dusted a pinch of whitish powder into the palm of his right hand, then rubbed both hands together quickly, as though laving them with soap. In the shadow where he stood we saw his hands begin to glow, as though they had been smeared with phosphorus, but gradually the glow became a quick and flickering faint-blue light which grew and grew in power till it darted wisps of bluish flame from palms and finger-tips.

  He grasped his serpent-headed staff between his glowing hands, and instantly the thing became alive, waving slowly to and fro, darting forth its lambent tongue to touch the dead man’s eyes and lips and nostrils. He threw the staff upon the floor, and instantly it was a thing of wood and ivory once again.

  Now he pressed fire-framed hands upon the corpse’s brow, then bent and ran them up and down the length of the slack limbs, finally poising them above the dead man’s omphalos. The flame which flickered from his hands curved downward like a blue-green waterfall of fire which seemed to be absorbed by the dead body as water would be soaked in thirsty soil.

  And now the flaccid, flabby limbs seemed to tighten, to stretch out jerkily, uneasily, as though awaking from a long, uncomfortable sleep. The lolling head began to oscillate upon the neck, the slack jaw closed, the eyes, a moment since glassy with the vacant stare of death, gave signs of unmistakable vitality.

  A shrill, sharp cry broke from Beth Cardener. “He’s alive,” she screamed, horror
and heart-sick disappointment in her voice. “O-oh, he’s alive!” She turned reproachful, tear-dimmed eyes on Hussein Obeyid. “Why did you revive him?” she asked accusingly. “He might have died, if you hadn’t—”

  Her voice broke, smothered in a storm of sobs. Thus far the vibrant hatred of the murderer and her exultation over the swift retribution which had overtaken him had kept her nerve from snapping. Now, the realization that the man whose perfidy had betrayed her trust and her lover’s life was still alive broke down her resistance, and she fell, half-fainting, on the couch, buried her face in a pillow and gave herself up bodily to retching lamentation.

  “Madame,” de Grandin’s voice was sharp, peremptory; “Madame Beth, come here!”

  The woman raised her tear-scarred face and looked at him in wonder. “Come here, quickly, if you please, and tell me what it is you see,” he ordered again.

  She rose, mechanically, like one who walks in sleep, and approached the semiconscious man who slouched in the big chair.

  “Behold, observe; voilà!” the Frenchman ordered, leaning down and bending Cardener’s left ear forward. There, plainly marked and unmistakable, imprinted on the skin above the retrahens aurem, was a small white cicatrix, a quarter-inch or so in length.

  “Oh?” It was a strangling, gasping cry, such as a patient undergoing unanesthetized edentation might give; wonder was in it, and something like fright, as well.

  The little Frenchman raised his hand for silence. “He is coming to, Madame,” he warned in a soft whisper.

  Life, indeed, had come back to the shell above which Doctor Obeyid had chanted. Little by little the dread contours of death had receded, and as the hands lost their rigor and lay, half open, on the chair arms, we saw the fingers flexing and extending in an easier, more lifelike motion.