A Rival from the Grave

by Seabury Quinn

  “Oh, well,” I answered wearily, “if you—good Lord!”

  Driven at road-burning speed a small, light car with no lamps burning came careening crazily around the elbow of the highway, missed our left fender by a hair and whizzed past us like a bullet from a rifle.

  “Is it any wonder our insurance rates are high with idiots like that out upon the public roads?” I stuttered, inarticulate with fury, but the whining signal of a motorcycle’s siren cut my protest short as a state policeman catapulted around the bend in hot pursuit of the wild driver.

  “D’ye see ‘um?” he inquired as he stopped beside us with a scream of brakes. “Which way did ’e go?”

  “Took the turn to the right,” I answered. “Running like a streak with no lights going, and—”

  “My friend mistakes,” de Grandin interrupted as he smiled at the policeman; “the wild one turned abruptly to the left, and should be nearly to the village by this time.”

  “Why, I’m positive he took the right-hand turn—” I began, when a vicious kick upon my shin served notice that de Grandin wished deliberately to send the trooper on a wild-goose chase. Accordingly: “Perhaps I was mistaken,” I amended lamely; then, as the officer set out:

  “What was your idea in that?” I asked.

  “The speeder whom the gendarme followed was Mademoiselle Greta,” he replied. “I recognized her in our headlights’ flash as she went by, and I suggest we follow her.”

  “Perhaps we’d better,” I conceded; “driving as she was, she’s likely to end up in a ditch before she reaches home.”

  “WHY, GREFA’S NOT BEEN out to-night,” said Mrs. Friebergh when we reached the house. “She went out walking in the afternoon and came home shortly after dinner and went directly to her room. I’m sure she’s sleeping.”

  “But may we see her anyway, Madame?” de Grandin asked. “If she sleeps we shall not waken her.”

  “Of course,” the mother answered as she led the way upstairs.

  It was dark and quiet as a tomb in Greta’s bedroom, and when we switched on the night-light we saw her sleeping peacefully, her head turned from us, the bedclothes drawn up close about her chin.

  “You see, the poor, dear child’s exhausted,” Mrs. Friebergh said as she paused upon the threshold.

  De Grandin nodded acquiescence as he tiptoed to the bed and bent an ear above the sleeping girl. For a moment he leant forward; then, “I regret that we should so intrude, Madame,” he apologized, “but in cases such as this—” An eloquently non-committal shrug completed the unfinished sentence.

  Outside, he ordered in a sharp-edged whisper: “This way, my friend, here, beneath this arbor!” In the vine-draped pergola which spanned the driveway running past the house, he pointed to a little single-seated roadster. “You recognize him?” he demanded.

  “Well, it looks like the car that passed us on the road—”

  “Feel him!” he commanded, taking my hand in his and pressing it against the radiator top.

  I drew away with a suppressed ejaculation. The metal was hot as a teakettle full of boiling water.

  “Not only that, mon vieux,” he added as we turned away; “when I pretended to be counting Mademoiselle Greta’s respiration I took occasion to turn back the covers of her bed. She was asleep, but most curiously, she was also fully dressed, even to her shoes. Her window was wide open, and a far less active one than she could climb from it to earth and back again.”

  “Then you think—”

  “Non, non, I do not think; I wish I did; I merely speculate, my friend. Her mother told us that she went out walking in the afternoon. That is what she thought. Plainly, that is what she was meant to think. Mademoiselle Greta walked out, met the young Monsieur Pettersen and drove with him, cut him with her ninety-six times cursed knife, then leaped from his car and walked back home. Anon, when all the house was quiet, she clambered from her window, drove away upon some secret errand, then returned in haste, re-entered her room as she had left it, and”—he pursed his lips and raised his shoulders in a shrug—“there we are, my friend, but just where is it that we are, I ask to know.”

  “On our way to home and bed,” I answered with a laugh. “After all this mystery and nonsense, I’m about ready for a drink and several hours’ sleep.”

  “An excellent idea,” he nodded, “but I should like to stop a moment at the cemetery, if you will be so kind. I desire to see if what I damn suspect is true.”

  Fifteen minutes’ drive sufficed to bring us to the lich-gate of the ancient burying-ground where generations of the county’s founders slept. Unerringly he led the way between the sentinel tombstones till, a little distance from the ivy-mantled wall which bordered on the highway, he pointed to a moss-grown marker.

  “There is Madame Kristina’s tomb,” he told me in a whisper. “It was there—by blue! Behold, my friend!”

  Following his indicating finger’s line I saw a little spot of white against the mossy grass about the tombstone’s base, and even as I looked, the little patch of lightness moved, took shape, and showed itself a small, white, fluffy kitten. The tiny animal uncoiled itself, raised to a sitting posture, and regarded us with round and shining eyes.

  “Why, the poor little thing!” I began, advancing toward it with extended hand. “It’s lost, de Grandin—”

  “Pardieu, I think that it is quite at home,” he interrupted as he stooped and snatched a piece of gravel from the grave beneath his feet. “Regardez, s’il vous plait!”

  In all the years I’d known him I had never seen him do an unkind thing to woman, child or animal; so it was with something like a gasp of consternation that I saw him hurl the stone straight at the little, inoffensive kitten. But great as my surprise had been at his unwonted cruelty, it was swallowed up in sheer astonishment as I saw the stone strike through the little body, drive against the granite tombstone at its back, then bounce against the grave-turf with a muffled thud. And all the while the little cat regarded him with a fixed and slightly amused stare, making no movement to evade his missile, showing not the slightest fear at his approach.

  “You see?” he asked me simply.

  “I—I thought—I could have sworn—” I stammered, and the laugh with which he greeted my discomfiture was far from mirthful.

  “You saw, my friend, nor is there any reason for you to forswear the testimony of your sight,” he assured me. “A hundred others have done just as I did. If all the missiles which have been directed at that small white cat-thing were gathered in a pile, I think that they would reach a tall man’s height; yet never one of them has caused it to forsake its vigil on this grave. It has visited this spot at will for the past two hundred years and more, and always it has meant disaster to some girl in the vicinity. Come, let us leave it to its brooding; we have plans to make and things to do. Of course.”

  “GRAND DIEU DES CHATS, c’est l’explication terrible!” de Grandin’s exclamation called me from perusal of the morning’s mail as we completed breakfast the next day.

  “What is it?” I demanded.

  “Parbleu, what is it not?” he answered as he passed a folded copy of the Journal to me, indicating the brief item with a well-groomed forefinger.

  TREASURE HUNTERS VIOLATE THE DEAD

  the headline read, followed by the short account:

  Shortly after eleven o’clock last night vandals entered the home of the late Timothy McCaffrey, Argyle Road near Scandia, and stole two of the candles which were burning by his casket while he lay awaiting burial. The body was reposing in the front room of the house, and several members of the family were in the room adjoining.

  Miss Monica McCaffrey, 17, daughter of the deceased, was sitting near the doorway leading to the front room where the body lay, and heard somebody softly opening the front door of the house. Thinking it was a neighbor come to pay respects to the dead, she did not rise immediately, not wishing to disturb the visitor at his devotions, but when she noticed an abrupt diminution of the light in the
room in which her father’s body lay, as though several of the candles had been extinguished, she rose to investigate.

  As she stepped through the communicating doorway she saw what she took to be a young man in a light tan sports coat running out the front door of the house. She followed the intruder to the porch and was in time to see him jump into a small sports roadster standing by the front gate with its engine running, and drive away at breakneck speed.

  Later, questioned by state troopers, she was undetermined whether the trespasser was a man or woman, as the overcoat worn by the intruder reached from neck to knees, and she could not definitely say whether the figure wore a skirt or knickerbockers underneath the coat.

  When Miss McCaffrey returned to the house she found that all the vigil lights standing by the coffin had been extinguished and two of the candles had been taken.

  Police believe the act of wanton vandalism was committed by some member of the fashionable summer colony at Scandia who were engaged in a “treasure hunt,” since nothing but two candles had been taken by the intruder.

  “For goodness’ sake!” I looked at de Grandin in blank amazement.

  His eyes, wide, round and challenging, were fixed on mine unwinkingly. “Non,” he answered shortly, “not for goodness’ sake, my friend; far from it, I assure you. The thief who stole these candles from the dead passed us on her homeward way last night.”

  “Her homeward way? You mean—”

  “But certainly. Mademoiselle Greta wore such a coat as that le journal mentions. Indubitably it was she returning from her gruesome foray.”

  “But what could she be wanting corpse-lights for?”

  “Those candles had been exorcised and blessed, my friend; they were, as one might say, spiritually antiseptic, and it was a law of the old witch covens that things stolen from the church be used to celebrate their unclean rites. All evidence points to a single horrid issue, and tonight we put it to the test.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Précisément. This is the twenty-third of June, Midsummer’s Eve. Tonight in half the world the bonfires spring in sudden flame on mountain and in valley, by rushing river and by quiet lake. In France and Norway, Hungary and Spain, Rumania and Sweden, you could see the flares stand out against the blackness of the night while people dance about them and chant charms against the powers of Evil. On Midsummer’s Eve the witches and the wizards wake to power; tonight, if ever, that which menaces our little friend will manifest itself. Let us be on hand to thwart it—if we can.”

  “GRETA’S DANCING AT THE Country Club,” said Mrs. Friebergh when we called to see our patient late that evening. “I didn’t want her to go, she’s seemed so feverish and nervous all day long, but she insisted she was well enough, so—”

  “Precisely, Madame,” Jules de Grandin nodded. “It is entirely probable that she will feel no ill effects, but for precaution’s sake we will look in at the dance and see how she sustains the strain of exercise.”

  “But I thought you said that we were going to the club,” I remonstrated as he touched my arm to signal a left turn. “But we are headed toward the cemetery—”

  “But naturally, my friend; there is the grave of Madame Kristina; there the small white cat-thing keeps its watch; there we must go to see the final act played to its final curtain.”

  He shifted the small bundle on his knees and began unfastening the knots which bound it.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  For answer he tore off the paper and displayed a twelve-gage shotgun, its double barrels sawed off short against the wood.

  “Good Lord!” I murmured; “whatever have you brought that for?”

  He smiled a trifle grimly as he answered, “To test the soundness of the advice which I bestowed upon myself this morning.”

  “Advice you gave yourself—good heavens, man, you’re raving!”

  “Perhapsly so,” he grinned. “There are those who would assure you that de Grandin’s cleverness is really madness, while others will maintain his madness is but cleverness disguised. We shall know more before we grow much older, I damn think.”

  THE AIR SEEMED THICK and heavy with a brooding menace as we made our way across the mounded graves. Silence, choking as the dust of ages in a mummy-tomb, seemed to bear down on us, and the chirping of a cricket in the grass seemed as loud and sharp as the scraping of metal against metal as we picked our path between the tombstones. The stars, caught in a web of overhanging cloud, were paling in the luminance which spread from the late-rising moon, and despite myself I felt the ripple of a chill run up my back and neck. The dead had lain here quietly two hundred years and more, they were harmless, powerless, but—reason plays no part when instinct holds the reins, and my heart beat faster and my breathing quickened as we halted by the tombstone which marked Kristina Friebergh’s grave.

  I cannot compute the time we waited. Perhaps it was an hour, perhaps several, but I felt as though we had crouched centuries among the moon-stained shrubbery and the halftones of the purple shadows when de Grandin’s fingers on my elbow brought me from my semi-dream to a sort of terrified alertness. Down by the ancient lich-gate through which ten generations of the village dead had come to their last resting-place, a shadow moved among the shadows. Now it lost itself a moment; now it stood in silhouette against the shifting highlights on the corpse-road where the laurel bushes swayed in the light breeze. Terror touched me like a blast of icy wind. I was like a little, frightened boy who finds himself deserted in the darkness.

  Now a tiny spot of lightness showed against the blackened background of the night; a second spot of orange light shone out, and I descried the form of Greta Friebergh coming slowly toward us. She was dressed in red, a bright-red evening dress of pleated net with surplice sleeves and fluted hem, fitted tightly, at the waistline, molding her slender, shapely hips, swirling about her toeless silver sandals. In each hand she bore a candle which licked hungrily against the shadows with its little, flickering tongue of orange flame. Just before her, at the outer fringe of candlelight, walked a little chalk-white kitten, stepping soundlessly on dainty paws, leading her unhurriedly toward the grave where Kristina Friebergh lay as a blind man’s poodle might escort its master.

  I would have spoken, but de Grandin’s warning pressure on my arm prevented utterance as he pointed silently across the graveyard to the entrance through which Greta had just come.

  Following cautiously, dodging back of tombstones, taking cover behind bushes, but keeping at an even distance from the slowly pacing girl, was another figure. At a second glance I recognized him. It was young Karl Pettersen.

  Straight across the churchyard Greta marched behind her strange conductor, halted by the tombstone at the head of Kristina’s grave, and set her feebly flaring candles in the earth as though upon an altar.

  For a moment she stood statue-still, profiled against the moon, and I saw her fingers interlace and writhe together as if she prayed for mercy from inexorable fate; then she raised her hands, undid snap-fasteners beneath her arms and shook her body with a sort of lazy undulation, like a figure in a slowed-down motion picture, freeing herself from the scarlet evening gown and letting it fall from her.

  Straight, white and slim she posed her ivory nakedness in silhouette against the moon, so still that she seemed the image of a woman rather than a thing of flesh and blood, and we saw her clasp her hands behind her, straining wrists and elbows pressed together as though they had been bound with knotted thongs, and on her features came a look of such excruciating pain that I was forcibly reminded of the pictures of the martyrs which the mediæval artists painted with such dreadful realism.

  She turned and writhed as though in deadly torment, her head swayed toward one shoulder, then the other; her eyes were staring, almost starting from their sockets; her lips showed ruddy froth where she gnashed them with her teeth; and on her sides and slim, white flanks, upon her satin-gleaming shoulders, her torture-corded neck and sweetly rounded breasts, there flowere
d sudden spots of red, cruel, blood-marked wounds which spouted little streams of ruby fluid as though a merciless, sharp skewer probed and stabbed and pierced the tender, wincing flesh.

  A wave of movement at the grave’s foot drew our glance away from the tormented girl. Karl Pettersen stood there at the outer zone of candlelight, his face agleam with perspiration, eyes bright and dilated as though they had been filled with belladonna. His mouth began to twist convulsively and his hands shook in a nervous frenzy.

  “Look—look,” he slobbered thickly, “she’s turning to the witch! She’s not my Greta, but the wicked witch they killed so long ago. They’re testing her to find the witch-mark; soon they’ll drown her in the bay—I know the story; every fifty years the witch-cat claims another victim to go through the needle-torture, then—”

  “You have right, mon vieux, but I damn think it has found its last one,” interrupted Jules de Grandin as he rested his shotgun in the crook of his left elbow and pulled both triggers with a jerk of his right hand.

  Through a smoky pompon flashed twin flares of flame, and the shotgun’s bellow was drowned out by a strangling scream of agony. Yet it was not so much a cry of pain as of wild anger, maniacal, frenzied with thwarted rage. It spouted up, a marrow-freezing geyser of terrifying sound, and the kitten which had crouched at Greta’s feet seemed literally to fly to pieces. Though the double charge of shotgun slugs had hit it squarely, it did not seem to me that it was ripped to shreds, but rather as though its tiny body had been filled with some form of high explosive, or a gas held at tremendous pressure, and that the penetrating slugs had liberated this and caused a detonation which annihilated every vestige of the small, white, furry form.

  As the kitten vanished, Greta dropped down to the ground unconscious, and, astoundingly, as though they had been wiped away by magic, every sign of pulsing, bleeding wounds was gone, leaving her pale skin unscarred and without blemish in the faintly gleaming candlelight.