A Rival from the Grave

by Seabury Quinn

  Friebergh paused and drew reflectively at his cigar. “I don’t suppose you’d know what happened in New England in 1692?” he asked de Grandin.

  The Frenchman answered with a vigorous double nod. “Parbleu, I do, indeed, Monsieur. That year, in Salem, Massachusetts, there were many witchcraft trials, and—”

  “Quite so,” our host broke in. “Parish and the Mathers set the northern colonies afire with their witchcraft persecutions. Fortunately, not much of the contagion spread outside New England, but:

  “Old Oscar Friebergh had been failing steadily, and though they cupped and leeched him and fed him mixtures of burnt toads, bezoar stone, cloves, and even moss scraped from the skull of a pirate who had been hanged in chains, he died in a coma following a violent seizure of delirium in which he cursed the day that he had taken the witch’s brat to his bosom.

  “Oscar had sworn his crew to secrecy concerning Kristina’s origin, and it seems that they respected the vow while he lived; but some few of them, grown old and garrulous, found their memories suddenly quickened over their glasses of grog after the sexton had set the sods above old Oscar’s grave, and evinced a desire to serve gossip and scandal rather than the memory of a master no longer able to reproach them for oath-breaking. There were those who recollected perfectly how the girl Kristina had passed unharmed through the flames and bid her burning parents fond farewell, then came again straight through the flames to put her hand in Oscar Friebergh’s and bid him carry her beyond the seas. Others recalled how she had calmed a storm by standing at the ship’s rail and reciting incantations in a language not of human origin, and still others told with bated breath how the water of baptism had scalded her as though it had been boiling when Oscar Friebergh poured it on her brow.

  “The whole township knew her singing, too. When she was about her household tasks or sewing by the window, or merely sitting idly, she would sing, not loudly, but in a sort of crooning voice; yet people passing in the road before the house would pause to listen, and even children stopped their noisy play to hear her as she sang those fascinating songs in a strange tongue which the far-voyaged sailor folk had never heard and which were set to tunes the like of which were never played on flute or violin or spinet, yet for all their softness seemed to fill the air with melody as the woods are filled with bird-songs in late April. People shook their heads at recollection of those songs, remembering how witches spoke a jargon of their own, known only to each other and their master, Satan, and recalling further that the music used in praise of God was somber as befitted solemn thoughts of death and judgment and the agonies of hell.

  “Her kitten caused much comment, too. The townsfolk recollected how she bore a tiny white cat beneath her arm when first she tripped ashore, and though a score of years had passed, the kitten had not grown into a cat, but still as small as when it first touched land, frisked and frolicked in the Friebergh house, and played and purred and still persisted in perpetual, supernatural youth.

  “Among the villagers was a young man named Karl Pettersen, who had wooed Kristina when she first came, and took the disappointment of refusal of his marriage offer bitterly. He had married in the intervening years, but a smallpox epidemic had robbed his wife of such good looks as she originally had, and continued business failures had conspired to rob him of his patrimony and his wife’s dowry as well; so when Oscar Friebergh died he held Karl’s notes of hand for upward of five hundred pounds, secured by mortgages upon his goods and chattels and some farming-land which had come to him at marriage.

  “When the executors of Oscar’s will made inventory they found these documents which virtually made the widow mistress of the Pettersen estate, and notified the debtor that he must arrange for payment. Karl went to see Kristina late one evening, and what took place at the interview we do not know, though her servants later testified that he shrieked and shouted and cried out as though in torment, and that she replied by laughing at his agony. However that might be, the records show that he was stricken with a fit as he disrobed for bed that night, that he frothed and foamed at the mouth like a mad dog, and made queer, growling noises in his throat. It is recorded further that he lay in semi-consciousness for several days, recovering only long enough to eat his meals, then lapsing back again into delirium. Finally, weak but fully conscious, he sat up in bed, sent for the sheriff, the minister and the magistrate, and formally denounced Kristina as a witch.

  “I’ve said that we escaped the general horror of witch persecution which visited New England, but if old records are to be believed we made up in ferocity what we lacked in quantity. Kristina’s old and influential friends were dead, the Swedish Lutheran church had been taken over by the Episcopacy and the incumbent was an Englishman whose youth had been indelibly impressed by Matthew Hopkins’ witch-findings. Practically every important man in the community was a former disappointed suitor, and while they might have forgotten this, their wives did not. Moreover, while care and illness and multiple maternity had left their traces on these women, Kristina was more charmingly seductive in the ripeness of maturity than she had been in youth, What chance had she?

  “She met their accusations haughtily, and refused to answer vague and rambling statements made against her. It seemed the case against her would break down for want of evidence until Karl Pettersen’s wife remembered her familiar. Uncontradicted testimony showed this same small animal, still a kitten, romped and played about the house, though twenty years had passed since it first came ashore. No natural cat could live so long; nothing but a devil’s imp disguised in feline shape could have retained its youth so marvelously. This, the village wise ones held, was proof sufficient that Kristina was a witch and harbored a familiar spirit. The clergyman preached a sermon on the circumstance, taking for his text the twenty-seventh verse of the twentieth chapter of Leviticus: ‘A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death.’

  “They held her trial on the village green. The records say she wore a shift of scarlet silk, which is all her persecutors would allow her from her wardrobe. Preliminary search had failed to find the devil’s mark or witch-teat through which her familiar was supposed to nourish itself by sucking her blood; so at her own request Mistress Pettersen was appointed to the task of hunting for it coram judice.

  “She had supplied herself with pricking-pins, and at a signal from the magistrate ripped the scarlet mantle from Kristina, leaving her stark naked in the center of a ring of cruel and lustful eyes. A wave of smothering shame swept over her, and she would have raised her hands to shield her bosom from the lecherous stares of loafers congregated on the green, but her wrists were firmly bound behind her. As she bent her head in a paroxysm of mortification, the four-inch bodkin in the Pettersen woman’s hand fleshed itself first in her thigh, then her side, her shoulder, her neck and her breast, and she writhed in agonizing postures as her tender flesh was stabbed now here, now there, while the rabble roared and shouted in delight.

  “The theory, you know, was that at initiation into witch-hood the devil marked his new disciple with a bite, and from this spot the imp by which the witch worked her black magic drew its sustenance by sucking her blood. This devil’s mark, or witch-teat was said to be insensible to pain, but as it often failed to differ in appearance from the rest of the body’s surface, it was necessary for the searcher to spear and stab the witch repeatedly until a spot insensible to pain was found. The nervous system can endure a limited amount of shock, after which it takes refuge in defensive anesthesia. This seems to have been the case with poor Kristina; for after several minutes of torment she ceased to writhe and scream, and her torturer announced the mark found. It was a little area of flesh beneath the swell of her left breast, roughly square in shape and marked off by four small scars which looked like needle-wounds set about three-quarters of an inch apart.

  “But the finding of the mark was inconclusive. While a witch would surely have it, an innocent person might possess something
simulating it; so there remained the test of swimming. Water was supposed to reject a witch’s body; so if she were tied and thrown into a pond or stream, proof of guilt was deemed established if she floated.

  They cross-tied her, making her sit tailor-fashion and binding the thumb of her right hand so tightly to the great toe of her left foot that the digits soon turned blue for lack of circulation, then doing the same with her left thumb and right great toe, after which she was bundled in a bed-sheet which was tied at the corners above her head, and the parcel was attached to a three-fathom length of rope and towed behind a rowboat for a distance of three-quarters of a mile in Raritan Bay.

  “At first the air within the sheet buoyed up the bundle and its contents, and the crowd gave vent to yells of execration. ‘She floats, she floats, the water will have none of her; bring the filthy witch ashore and burn her!’ they shouted, but in a little while the air escaped from the wet sheet, and though Kristina sank as far down in the water as the length of rope permitted, there was no effort made to draw her up until the boat had beached. She was dead when finally they dragged her out upon the shingle.

  “Karl Pettersen confessed his error and declared the devil had misled him into making a false accusation, and, her innocence proved by her drowning, Kristina was accorded Christian burial in consecrated ground, and her husband’s property, in which she had a life estate, reverted to my ancestor. One of the first things he did was to sell this house, and it went through a succession of ownerships till I bought it at auction last autumn and had it reconditioned as a summer home. We found the old barn filled with household goods, and had them reconditioned, too. This furniture was once Kristina Friebergh’s.”

  I looked around the big, low-ceilinged room with interest. Old-fashioned chintz, patterned with quaint bouquets of roses, hung at the long windows. Deep chairs and sofas were covered with a warm rose-red that went well with the gray woodwork and pale green walls. A low coffee table of pear wood, waxed to a satin finish, stood before a couch; an ancient mirror framed in gilt hung against one wall, while against another stood a tall buhl cabinet and a chest of drawers of ancient Chinese nanmu wood, brown as withered oak leaves and still exhaling a subtly faint perfume. Above the open fireplace hung an ancient painting framed in a narrow strip of gold.

  “That’s Kristina,” volunteered our host as he nodded toward the portrait.

  The picture was of a woman not young, not at all old; slender, mysterious, black hair shining smoothly back, deep blue eyes holding a far-off vision, as though they sensed the sufferings of the hidden places of the world and brooded on them; a keen, intelligent face of a clear pallor with small, straight nose, short upper lip and a mouth which would have been quite lovely had it not been so serious. She held a tiny kitten, a mere ball of white fluffiness, at her breast, and the hand supporting the small animal was the hand of one in whom the blood of ancient races ran, with long and slimly pointed fingers tipped with rosy nails. There was something to arrest attention in that face. The woman had the cold knowledge of death, ominous and ever present, on her.

  “La pauvre!” de Grandin murmured as he gazed with interest at the portrait. “And what became of Monsieur Pettersen and his so highly unattractive wife?”

  Friebergh laughed, almost delightedly. “History seems to parallel itself in this case,” he answered. “Perhaps you’ve heard how the feud resulting from the Salem persecutions was resolved when descendants of accusers and accused were married? Well . . . it seems that after Kristina drowned, executors of Oscar Friebergh’s will could not find clue or trace of the notes and mortgages which Pettersen had signed. Everybody had suspicions how they came to disappear, for Mistress Pettersen was among the most earnest searchers of Kristina’s private papers when they sought a copy of the compact she had signed with Satan, but—in any event, Karl Pettersen began to prosper from the moment that Kristina died. Every venture which he undertook met with success. His descendants prospered, too. Two years ago the last male member of his line met Greta at a Christmas dance, and”—he broke off with a chuckle—“and they’ve been that way about each other from the first. I’m thinking they’ll be standing side by side beneath a floral bell and saying ‘I do’ before the ink on their diplomas has had much chance to dry.”

  “All of which brings us back three centuries, and down to date—and Greta,” I responded somewhat sharply. “If I remember, you’d begun to tell us something about her hysterical condition and the effect this house had on her, when you detoured to that ancient family romance.”

  “Précisément, Monsieur, the house,” de Grandin prompted. “I think that I anticipate you, but I should like to hear your statement—” He paused with interrogatively raised brows.

  “Just so,” our host returned. “Greta has never heard the story of Kristina, and Karl Pettersen, I’m sure, for I didn’t know it very well myself till I bought this house and started digging up the ancient records. She’d certainly never been in the house, nor even seen the plans, since the work of restoration was done while she was off to school; yet the moment she arrived she went directly to her room, as if she knew the way by heart. Incidentally, her room is the same one—”

  “Occupied by Madame Kristina in the olden days!” supplied de Grandin.

  “Good Lord! How’d you guess?”

  “I did not guess, Monsieur,” the little Frenchman answered levelly; “I knew.”

  “Humph. Well, the child has seemed to hate the place from the moment she first entered it. She’s been moody and distrait, complaining of a constant feeling of malaise and troubled sleep, and most of the time she’s been so irritable that there’s scarcely any living with her. D’ye suppose there’s something psychic in the place—something that the rest of us don’t feel, that’s worked upon her nerves until she had this fainting-fit tonight?”

  “Not at all,” I answered positively. “The child’s been working hard at school, and—”

  “Very likely,” Jules de Grandin interrupted, “Women are more finely attuned to such influences than men, and it is entirely possible that the tragedy these walls have witnessed has been felt subconsciously by your daughter, Monsieur Friebergh.”

  “DOCTOR TROWBRIDGE, I DON’T like this place,” Greta Friebergh told me when we called on her next day. “It—there’s something about it that terrifies me; makes me feel as though I were somebody else.”

  She raised her eyes to mine, half frightened, half wondering, and for a moment I had the eery sensation of being confronted with the suffering ghost of a girl in the flesh.

  “Like someone else?” I echoed. “How d’ye mean, my dear?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t quite say, sir. Something queer, a kind of feeling of vague uneasiness coupled with a sort of ‘I’ve been here before’ sensation came to me the moment I stepped across the threshold. Everything, the house, the furniture, the very atmosphere, seemed to combine to oppress me. It was as if something old and infinitely evil—like the wiped-over memory of some terrifying childhood nightmare—were trying to break through to my consciousness. I kept reaching for it mentally, as one reaches for a half-remembered tune or a forgotten name; yet I seemed to realize that if I ever drew aside the veil of memory my sanity would crack. Do you understand me, Doctor?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t, quite, child,” I answered. “You’ve had a trying time at school, and with your social program speeded up—”

  Something like a grimace, the parody of a smile, froze upon de Grandin’s face as he leant toward the girl. “Tell us, Mademoiselle,” he begged, “was there something more, some tangibility, which matched this feeling of malaise?”

  “Yes, there was!” responded Greta.

  “And that—”

  “Last night I came in rather late, all tired and out of sorts. Karl Pettersen and I had been playing tennis in the afternoon, and drove over to Keyport for dinner afterward. Karl’s a sweet lad, and the moonlight was simply divine on the homeward drive, but—” The quick blood stained her
face and throat as she broke off her narrative.

  “Yes, Mademoiselle, but?” de Grandin prompted.

  She smiled, half bashfully, at him, and she was quite lovely when she smiled. It brightened the faintly sad expression of her mouth and raised her eyes, ever so little, at the corners. “It can’t have been so long since you were young, Doctor,” she returned. “What did you do on moonlight summer nights when you were alone with someone you loved terribly?”

  “Morbleu,” the little Frenchman chuckled, “the same as you, petite, no more, I think, and certainly no less!”

  She smiled again, a trifle sadly, this time. “That’s just the trouble,” she lamented. “I couldn’t.”

  “Hein, how is it you say, Mademoiselle?”

  “I wanted to, Lord knows my lips were hungry and my arms were aching for him, but something seemed to come between us. It was as if I’d had a dish of food before me and hadn’t eaten for a long, long time, then, just before I tasted it, a whisper came, ‘It’s poisoned!’

  “Karl was hurt and puzzled, naturally, and I tried my best to overcome my feeling of aversion, but for a moment when his lips were pressed to mine I had a positive sensation of revulsion. I felt I couldn’t bear his touch, his kisses seemed to stifle me; if he hadn’t let me go I think that I’d have fainted.

  “I ran right in the house when we got home, just flinging a good-night to Karl across my shoulder, and rushed up to my room. ‘Perhaps a shower will pull me out of it,’ I thought, and so I started to disrobe, when—” Once more she paused, and now there was no doubt of it: the girl was terrified.

  “Yes, Mademoiselle, and then?” the Frenchman prompted softly.

  “I’d slipped my jumper and culottes off, and let down my hair, preparatory to knotting it up to fit inside my shower cap, when I chanced to look into the mirror. I hadn’t turned the light on, but the moonlight slanted through the window and struck right on the glass; so I could see myself as a sort of silhouette, only”—again she paused, and her narrow nostrils dilated—“only it wasn’t I!”