by Sax Rohmer
“Glad to see you, Mr. Searles,” he said. “You’ve had some experience of the outre, I believe, and where two constables, an imposing inspector, and a plain-clothes gentleman who looked like a horse, have merely upset my domestic arrangements, you may be able to make some intelligent suggestion.”
He conducted me to a large gloomy room in which relics, principally Egyptian, were arranged and ticketed with museum-like precision. Before a wooden sarcophagus containing the swathed figure of a mummy he stopped, pointing. He looked as though he had come out of a sarcophagus himself.
“Hor-ankhu,” he said, “a priestess of Sekhet; a very fine specimen, Mr. Searles. I was present when it was found. See — here is her head!”
Stooping, he picked up the head of the mummy. Very cleanly and scientifically it had been unwrapped and severed from the trunk. It smelt strongly of bitumen, and the shrivelled features reminded me of nothing so much as of Mr. Mark Pettigrew.
“Did you ever hear of a more senseless thing?” he asked. “Come over and look at the window where he got in.”
We crossed the dark apartment, and the collector drew my attention to a round hole which had been drilled in the glass of one of the French windows opening on a kind of miniature prairie which once had been a lawn.
“I am having shutters fitted,” he went on. “It is so easy to cut a hole in the glass and open the catch of these windows.”
“Very easy,” I agreed. “Was any one disturbed?”
“No one,” he replied excitedly; “that’s the insane part of the thing. The burglar, with all the night before him and with cases containing portable and really priceless objects about him, contented himself with decapitating the priestess. What on earth did he want her head for? Whatever he wanted it for, why the devil didn’t he take it.”
We stared at one another blankly.
“I fear,” said Pettigrew, “I have been guilty of injustice to my horsey visitor, the centaur. You look as stupid as the worst of us!”
“I feel stupid,” I said.
“You are!” Pettigrew assured me with cheerful impertinence. “So am I, so are the police; but the biggest fool of the lot is the fool who came here last night and cut off the head of my mummy.”
That, then, is all which I have occasion to relate regarding the first of these mysterious outrages. I was quite unable to propound any theory covering the facts, to Pettigrew’s evident annoyance; he assured me that I was very stupid, and insisted upon opening a magnum of champagne. I then returned to my rooms, and since reflection upon the subject promised to be unprofitable, had dismissed it from my mind, when some time during the evening Inspector Grimsby rang me up from the Yard.
“Hullo, Mr. Searles,” he said; “I hear you called on Mr. Pettigrew this morning?”
I replied in the affirmative.
“Did anything strike you’”
“No; were you on the case?”
“I wasn’t on the case then, but I’m on it now.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, there’s been another mummy beheaded in Sotheby’s auction rooms!”
II
I knew quite well what was expected of me.
“Where are you speaking from?” I asked.
“The auction-rooms.”
“I will meet you there in an hour,” I said, “and bring Moris Klaw if I can find him.”
“Good,” replied Grimsby, with much satisfaction in his voice; “this case ought to be right in his line.”
I chartered a taxi and proceeded without delay to the salubrious neighbourhood of Wapping Old Stairs. At the head of the blind alley which harbours the Klaw emporium I directed the man to wait. The gloom was very feebly dispelled by a wavering gaslight in the shed-like front of the shop. River noises were about me. Somewhere a drunken man was singing. An old lady who looked like a pantomime dame was critically examining a mahogany chair with only half a back, which formed one of the exhibits displayed before the establishment.
A dilapidated person whose nose chronically blushed for the excesses of its owner hovered about the prospective purchaser. This was William, whose exact position in the Klaw establishment I had never learned, but who apparently acted during his intervals of sobriety as a salesman.
“Good-evening,” I said. “Is Mr. Moris Klaw at home?”
“He is, sir,” husked the derelict; “but he’s very busy, sir, I believe, sir.”
“Tell him Mr. Searles has called.”
“Yes, sir,” said William; and, turning to the dame, “Was you thinking of buyin’ that chair, mum, after you’ve done muckin’ it about?”
He retired into the cavernous depths of the shop, and I followed him as far as the dimly seen counter.
“Moris Klaw, Moris Klaw! the devil’s come for you!”
Thus the invisible parrot hailed my entrance. Indescribable smells, zoo-like, with the fusty odour of old books and the unclassifiable perfume of half-rotten furniture, assailed my nostrils; and mingling with it was the distinct scent of reptile life. Scufflings and scratchings sounded continuously about me, punctuated with squeals. Then came the rumbling voice of Moris Klaw.
“Ah, Mr. Searles — good-evening, Mr. Searles! It is the Pettigrew mummy, is it not?”
He advanced through the shadows, his massive figure arrayed for travelling, in the caped coat, his toneless beard untidy as ever, his pince-nez glittering, his high bald brow yellow as that of a Chinaman.
“There has been a second outrage,” I said, “at Sotheby’s.”
“So?” said Moris Klaw, with interest; “another mummy is executed!”
“Yes, Inspector Grimsby has asked us to join him there.”
Moris Klaw stooped, and from beneath the counter took out his flat-topped brown bowler. From its lining he extracted a cylindrical scent-spray and mingled with the less pleasing perfumes that of verbena.
“A cooling Roman custom, Mr. Searles,” he rumbled, “so refreshing when one lives with rats. So it is Mr. Grimsby who is puzzled again? It is Mr. Grimsby who needs the poor old fool to hold the lantern for him, so that he, the clever Grimsby, can pick up the credit out of the darkness! And why not, Mr. Searles, and why not? It is his business; it is my pleasure.”
He raised his voice. “Isis! Isis!”
Out into the light of the fluttering gas-lamp, out from that nightmare abode, stepped Isis Klaw — looking more grotesque than a French fashion-plate in an ironmonger’s catalogue. She wore a costume of lettuce-green silk, absolutely plain and unrelieved by any ornament, which rendered it the more remarkable. It was cut low at the neck, and at the point of the V, suspended upon a thin gold chain, hung a big emerald. Her darkly beautiful face was one to inspire a painter seeking a model for the Queen of Sheba, but an ultra modern note was struck by a hat of some black, gauzy material which loudly proclaimed its Paris origin. She greeted me with her wonderful smile.
“What, then,” I said. “Were you about to go out?”
“When I hear who it is,” rumbled Moris Klaw, “I know that we are about to go out; and behold we are ready!”
He placed the quaint bowler on his head and passed through to the front of the shop.
“William,” he admonished the ripe-nosed salesman, “there is here a smell of fourpenny ale. It will be your ruin, William. You will close at half-past nine, and be sure you do not let the cat in the cupboard with the white mice. See that the goat does not get at the Dutch bulbs. They will kill him, that goat — those bulbs; he has for them a passion.”
The three of us entered the waiting cab; and within half-an-hour we arrived at the famous auction rooms. The doors were closed and barred, but a constable who was on duty there evidently had orders to admit us.
The thing we had come to see lay upon the table with an electric lamp burning directly over it. The effect was indescribably weird. All about in the shadows fantastic “lots” seemed to leer at us. A famous private collection was to be sold in the morning and a rank of mummies lined one wall, whil
st, from another, stony Pharaohs, gods and goddesses, scorned us through the gloom. We were a living group in a place of long-dead things. And yellow on the table beneath the white light, with partially unwrapt coils of discoloured linen hanging gruesomely from it, lay a headless mummy!
I heard the spurt of Moris Klaw’s scent-spray behind me, and a faint breath of verbena stole to my nostrils.
“Pah!” came the rumbling voice; “this air is full of deadness!”
“Good-evening, Mr. Klaw,” said Grimsby, appearing from somewhere out of the gloom. “I am so glad you have come.” He bowed to Isis. “How do you do, Miss Klaw?”
The bright green figure moved forward into the pool of light. I think I had never seen a more singular picture than that of Isis Klaw bending over the decapitated mummy. Indeed the whole scene had delighted Rembrandt.
“I am pleased to meet you, Mr. Klaw,” said a middle-aged gentleman, stepping up to the curio dealer; “the Inspector has been telling me about you.”
Moris Klaw bowed, and his daughter turned to him with a little nod of the head.
“It is the same period,” she said, “as Mr. Pettigrew’s mummy. Possibly this was a priest of the same temple. Certainly both are of the same dynasty.”
“It is instructive,” rumbled Moris Klaw, “but so confusing.”
“It’s amazing, Mr. Klaw,” said Grimsby. “If I understand Miss Klaw rightly, this is the mummy of some one who lived at the same period as the priestess whose mummy is in Mr. Pettigrew’s possession?”
“I do not trouble to look,” rumbled Moris Klaw, who, in fact, was staring all about the room. “If Isis has said so, it is so.”
“If I happened to be superstitious,” said Grimsby, “I should think this was a sort of curse being fulfilled, or some fantastic thing of that sort.”
“You should call a curse fantastic, eh, my friend?” said Moris Klaw. “Yet here in your own country you have seen a whole family that was cursed to be wiped out mysteriously. Am I with you?”
Grimsby looked very perplexed.
“There’s nothing very mysterious about how the thing was done,” he said. “Some madman got in here with a knife early in the evening. It’s always pretty dark even during the daytime. But the mystery is his object.”
“His object is a mystery, yes,” agreed Klaw. “I would sleep here in order to procure a mental negative of what he hoped or what he feared, this lunatic headsman, only that I know he is a man possessed.”
“Possessed!” I cried; and even Isis looked surprised.
“I said possessed,” continued Klaw, impressively. “He is some madman with a one idea. His mad brain will have charged the ether” — he waved his long arms right and left— “with mad thoughts. The room of Mr. Pettigrew also will be filled with these grotesque thought-forms. Certainly he is insane, this butcher of mummies. In this case I shall rely not upon the odic photography, not upon that great science the Cycle of Crime, but upon my library.”
None of us, I am sure, entirely understood his meaning; and following a brief silence, during which in a curiously muffled way the sounds of the traffic in Wellington Street came to us as we stood there around that modern bier with its 4000-year-old burden, Grimsby asked with hesitancy:
“Don’t you want to make any investigations, Mr. Klaw?”
Then Moris Klaw startled us all.
“I have a thought!” he cried, loudly. “Name of a dog! I have a thought!”
Grabbing his brown bowler, which he had laid on the table beside the headless mummy, “Come, Isis!” he cried, and grasped the girl by the arm. “I have yet another thought, most disturbing! Mr. Searles, would you be so good as also to come?”
Wondering greatly whence we were bound and upon what errand, I hastened down the room after them, leaving Inspector Grimsby staring blankly. I think he was rather disappointed with the result of Moris Klaw’s inquiry — if inquiry this hasty visit may be termed. He was disappointed, too, at having spent so short a time in the company of the charming Isis.
The middle-aged gentleman came running to let us out.
“Good-night, Inspector Grimsby!” called Moris Klaw.
“Good-night! good-night, Miss Klaw!”
“Good-night, Mr. Some One who has not been introduced!” said Klaw.
“My name is Welby,” smiled the other.
“Good-night, Mr. Welby!” said Moris Klaw.
III
During the whole of the journey back to Wapping, Moris Klaw regaled me with anecdotes of travels in the Yucatan Peninsula. I had never met a man before who had ventured fully to explore those deadly swamps; but Moris Klaw chatted about the Izamal temples as unconcernedly as another man might chat about the Paris boulevards. Isis took no part in the conversation, from which I gathered that, although she seemed to accompany her father everywhere, she had not accompanied him into the jungles of Yucatan.
“In the heart of those forests, Mr. Searles,” he whispered, “are stranger things than these headless mummies. Do you know that the secret of those great temples buried in the swamps and the jungles and guarded only by serpents and slimy, crawling things, is a door which science has yet to unlock? What people built them, and what god was worshipped in them? Suppose” — he bent to my ear— “I hold the key to that riddle; am I assured to be immortal? Yes? No?”
His conversation, although it often seemed to be studiously eccentric, was always that of a man of powerful and unusual mind, a man of vast and unique experience. I was rather sorry when we arrived at our destination.
As the cab drew up at the head of the court, I saw that the shop of Moris Klaw was in darkness; but again telling the man to wait, we walked down past the warehouse, beyond whose bulk tided muddy Thames, and, my eccentric companion producing a key from one of the bulging pockets of his caped coat, he inserted it into the lock of a door which looked less like a door than a section of a dilapidated hoarding.
The door swung open.
“Ah!” he hissed. “It was not locked!”
Klaw struck a match and peered into the odorous darkness.
“William!” he rumbled. “William!”
But there was no reply. Isis suddenly laid her hand upon my arm, and it occurred to me that for once her wonderful composure was shaken.
“Something has happened!” she whispered.
Her father lighted a gas-burner, and the yellow light flared up, reclaiming from the gloom, furniture, pictures, cages, glass cases, statuettes, heaps of cheap jewellery and false teeth, books, and a hundred-and-one other items of that weird stock-in-trade.
Then, under the littered counter we found William lying flat on his back with his arms spread widely.
“Ah! cochon!” muttered Klaw; “beer-swilling pig!”
He stooped to raise the head of the prostrate man, and then to my surprise dropped upon his knees beside him, stooped yet lower, and sniffed suspiciously. Again Isis Klaw seized my arm, and her dark eyes were opened very widely as she leaned forward watching her father. He stood up, holding a glass in his hand which yet contained some drops of what was apparently beer. At this, too, he sniffed. He walked over to the gaslight and examined the fluid closely, whilst Isis and I watched him, together. Finally Moris Klaw inserted a long white forefinger into the dirty glass and applied the tip to his tongue.
“Opium!” he said. “Many drops of pure opium were put in this beer.”
He turned to me with a curious expression upon his parchment coloured face.
“Mr. Searles,” he said, “my second idea was a good idea. I shall now surprise you.”
He led the way through that neat and businesslike office which opened out of the unutterably dirty and untidy shop. Although within the shop and in front of it, only gaslight was used, in the office he switched on an electric lamp. But we did not delay long in Moris Klaw’s sanctum, lined with its hundreds of books, its obscure works of criminology, its records of strange things: we proceeded through another door and up a thickly carpeted stair.
<
br /> I had never before penetrated thus far into the habitable portion of Moris Klaw’s establishment; the book-lined office hitherto had marked the limit of my explorations. But now as more electric lights were switched on, I saw that we stood upon a wide landing panelled in massive black oak. Armoured figures stood sentinel like against the walls, and several magnificent specimens of Chinese porcelain met my gaze. I might have thought myself in some old English baronial hall. Next we entered a big, rectangular room, which I wholly despair of describing. Apparently it was used as a study, a library, a laboratory, and a warehouse for all sorts of things, from marble Buddhas to innumerable pairs of boots. Also, there was in it a French stove; and upon a Persian coffee-table stood a frying-pan containing a cooked sausage solidified in its own fat. There was clear evidence, moreover, in the form of a rolled-up hammock, that the place served as a bedroom.
Altogether there were four mummies in the apartment. One of these, partly unwrapped, lay amongst the litter on the floor... headless!
“Mon Dieu!” cried Isis, clasping her hands; “it is uncanny, this!”
She was evidently excited, for her French accent suddenly asserted itself to a marked degree. Moris Klaw, from somewhere amongst the rubbish at his feet, picked up the severed head of the mummy and stared at it intently. In the stillness I could hear the river noises very distinctly, and a sort of subterranean lapping and creaking which suggested that at high tide the cellars of the establishment became flooded. Moris Klaw dropped the head from his hands. It fell with a dull thud to the floor.
From the lining of his hat he took out the inevitable scent-spray and moistened his brow with verbena.
“I need the cool brain, Mr. Searles,” he said. “I, the old cunning, the fox, the wily, am threatened with defeat. This slaughter of mummies it surpasses my experience. I am nonplussed; I am a stupid old fool. Let me think!”
Isis was looking about her in a startled way.
