A Rival from the Grave

by Seabury Quinn

  “Precisely, Mademoiselle, one understands. Now tell us, if you please, what made you seek the gunroom in the first place?”

  “Give me a cigarette,” she begged, and he held his open case before her, then held his lighter forward. As she touched her cigarette tip to the fire she looked at him across the tiny flame that gleamed its echo fascinatingly in her brilliant eyes.

  “I’ve had devils ever since I came here,” she told us. Her voice was slurred and languorous, almost somnolent, yet strangely mechanical, as though an unseen hand played a gramophone on which her words had been recorded. “I don’t know what it was; ordinarily I’m not subject to nerves, even when I’m tired, but something in the very atmosphere of this house seemed to frighten me. Perhaps it was the eery half-light the place has even in the day, maybe the lamplight, so different from the bright glow of electricity to which I’m used. At any rate, I had the creeps from the moment I crossed the threshold; everywhere I went I seemed to feel eyes, dozens of pairs of eyes—evil, wicked, calculating eyes—boring right into my brain from behind. I’d turn around a dozen times in the process of crossing the room to see if someone really were staring at me, but it was no use, the eyes were quicker. No matter how fast I’d turn they’d get around behind me, and keep staring—leering—at me from the back.”

  She ground the fire of her cigarette out against the bottom of an ashtray. “Last year I visited a psycho-analyst in Hollywood, and he hypnotized me. I can remember how I fought against it just as I was going off to sleep. I kept shrieking to myself inside my brain: ‘No, no; I won’t give up my consciousness; I won’t let this man inside my secret soul!’ but by that time it had gone too far, and I fell asleep despite myself. That’s how it was here. Someone—some thing—seemed trying to creep inside my brain; to steal my mind—no, not quite that, rather, to crowd it out. I could feel the force of impact of an alien presence trying steadily to get inside me, and just as I fought against the hypnotist, so I fought against this threat here at Saint’s Rest. Only this time I was prepared; I was warned against the attack in time; I felt the subtle influence that probed and clawed and dug at my integrity. And I fought it—God, how I fought it!

  “It was through Wyndham Farraday that I met Mr. Classon. I’d known Wyndham out on the Coast when he was doing some writing for Cosmic Films, and looked him up when I came East. He told me of a friend of his who had this wonderful old house filled with the most astonishing old relics, and said the pride of the collection was a reliquary brought from Constantinople when the Crusaders under Baldwin sacked it in 1204.

  “I love old things. I’ve spent a fortune on them for my house in Beverly, and the thought of something like this fascinated me. Wyndham wanted Mr. Classon to take me to the gunroom right away, but he put us off with first one excuse and then another. We didn’t go in till he took the others to see it after dinner last night, and by that time I was almost frantic. I felt that if only I could get away from this awful place I’d have nothing more to ask.

  “The moment Mr. Classon took us in to see the ikon I knew. There, I realized, was the spider that sat in the center of the dreadful web which was entangling me. A spider—ugh! Spiders suck their victims’ blood, I’m told, and just so this—this thing—had been sucking at my soul and sanity. I looked at the horrible, lovely thing with the same feeling of repulsion I’d have felt while looking at some beautiful venomous reptile in its cage. Only this thing wasn’t caged. It was loose, and nothing stood between it and me. Then, as I looked, the colored stones in the mosaics all seemed to melt and run together, and form a sort of toneless gray. It seemed as though there were dull, lead-colored mirrors in the golden frames, and as I looked in them other pictures seemed to form. The dancing youths and maidens seemed to age before my eyes till they were dreadful dotards and hags, the little babies seemed to swell and puff to monstrous parodies of human children. The saint—” her voice trailed off and her eyes became lack-luster, dead as painted eyes in a wooden statue’s painted face.

  “Yes, Mademoiselle?” de Grandin prompted softly.

  “I—don’t—remember,” she said softly. “It was something terrible, some dreadful transformation that shook me like a chill, but I can’t describe it.”

  “One appreciates your difficulty,” the little Frenchman murmured. “And then?”

  “Like a voice in a dream I heard Mr. Classon telling us to go back to the drawing-room, and it seemed to awaken me from a sort of trance I’d fallen into. I drank more than I should last night, but if I could get drunk, I thought, I might be able to escape the memory of those frightful figures in the pictures. Finally, when we said good-night, I asked Doctor Trowbridge if I might ride up with you this morning.

  “I couldn’t sleep. The recollection of the things I’d seen—all the more terrifying because I couldn’t recall them clearly—kept torturing me, and I made up my mind to go down to the gunroom and have another look at the reliquary.”

  A faint smile raised the drooping comers of her mouth, and she looked at us diffidently, as though she begged for understanding.

  “When I was a little girl we had a picture-book that scared me dreadfully. It was the story of Strongheart and the Dragon, and I’d feel my breath all hot and sulfurous in my throat when I looked at some of the illustrations. But I kept going back to it. I’d creep into the library, take it down from its shelf and, beginning at the first page, slowly turn the pages back, leaf by leaf, till I came at last to the picture showing Strongheart grappling with the Monster. ‘It won’t frighten you so much this time, you’re getting used to it,’ I’d tell myself as I came nearer and nearer to the terrifying picture. But it always did. When at last I’d turned the final leaf and saw the awful, scaly thing with protruding, fiery eyes and forked red tongue and clutching claws staring at me, I’d seem to suffocate again, and run shrieking from the library to hide my face in Mother’s apron.

  “It was like that last night. I knew I’d be frightened almost past endurance if I looked at the ikon again, but I couldn’t resist the morbid urge to go downstairs. Finally I gave up the struggle and crept down, fighting with myself at every step, and losing the contest at each stride. I was fairly running when I reached the lower hall.

  “A light was burning in the gunroom, and it must have been set going recently, for the lamp was still swaying like a pendulum when I entered. I started for the picture, but before I reached it my foot struck something, and when I looked down there was poor Wyndham lying dead before me. I tried to scream, but the breath seemed to stick in my throat. I just stood there trembling, and in my brain a thought kept pounding: ‘The picture made him do it—the picture made him do it!’”

  “You say you knew he did it. One does not doubt your intuition, but how were you certain it was suicide, Mademoiselle?”

  “Because there was a smear of blood on the heel of his hand, as if it had spurted out when he drove the dagger through his heart. If someone else had stabbed him he’d have thrown his hand up to his heart or tried to pluck the dagger out; the blood would have been on his palm or on his fingers.”

  “Bravo, an excellent deduction. And then—”

  “I wiped the blood off his poor hand and wiped my own hands on my nightdress, then composed his limbs and laid him like a cross to bar his wandering spirit if it came back seeking company. Then I crept back upstairs without stopping even to extinguish the lamp.”

  An agony of entreaty was in her face, and she clasped her hands imploringly, not theatrically, but instinctively, as she begged: “Please, please believe me. I’ve told you nothing but the truth. You don’t think that I murdered Wyndham, do you?”

  “We believe you utterly, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin answered. “But what the police would think is something else again. It would be better if we kept our counsel, we three, and said nothing till we have had time to think.”

  “NOW WHAT?” I ASKED as we closed our interview with Karen Kirsten.

  “I think that I should like a word or several
with Monsieur Classon,” he replied. “His anxiety to test his guests’ reactions to that sacré picture was founded on no idle whim, my friend; there is something much decidedly more than meets the naked eye in all this business of the monkey, or I am vastly more mistaken than I think. Yes, of course.”

  But Philip Classon was nowhere to be found. We sought him in the drawing-room, the library, the little combination office and retreat which he had made above the ancient carriage house. Finally, all other places failing, we ventured to the gunroom. The night before we had observed that only a heavy Turkish tapestry closed off the gunroom from the wide central hall. Now, as we put the drapery back, we found our passage barred by a heavy sliding door which had been drawn and locked.

  “Sang du diable!” de Grandin muttered when neither repeated knockings nor calls could elicit a response; “this is more than merely strange! He cannot have gone out, the police will not permit that any leave the premises without a pass from Captain Chenevert; he is not in any of the other rooms; alors, he is in there. But who would go into that devil-haunted place, and why does he persist in keeping silent? Parbleu, but I should like to tweak him by the nose.”

  “Perhaps he doesn’t want to be disturbed,” I ventured. “Events of the last twelve hours have been enough to make him worry. If—”

  “If he does not answer our next summons I shall force the door,” the little Frenchman interrupted. “I do not trust that gunroom, me. No, it is an evil place, the very temple of the evil genius which has haunted Mademoiselle Kirsten since she came here. Holà, Monsieur Classon, are you within? We have important matters to discuss!”

  Utter silence answered him and with a sigh of vexation he went to seek the trooper who stood guard at the front door.

  The young state constable was diffident. His orders were to watch the house and see that no one left. Regulations forbade the injury of private property unless a crime had been committed.

  “Morbleu, a crime will be committed, that of assault and battery, if you refuse us aid,” the little Frenchman blazed. “Am I not in charge here in Captain Chenevert’s absence? But certainly. Are not Monsieur le Capitaine and I close friends, boon companions? Indubitably. Have we not been drunk together? It is entirely so. Break in the door, mon vieux; I will shoulder full responsibility.”

  Whoever built that door had understood his business, for it was not until de Grandin had added his weight to the stalwart young trooper’s that the lock gave way and the heavy oaken panels slid aside.

  “Good heavens!” I exclaimed as the gunroom stood revealed.

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” the trooper swore.

  “Dieu de Dieu de Dieu de Dieu!” said Jules de Grandin.

  No lamp was burning in the room, and the heavy, rep-bound curtains had been drawn across the windows to shut out the howling storm, but enough light filtered through to make large objects visible. Almost in the selfsame spot where Wyndham Farraday had stretched out cruciform in death something half leant, half knelt in the gloom, its outlines proclaiming it a man, but its attitude terrifyingly inhuman.

  It was—or rather had been—Philip Classon, and he leant obliquely forward with half-bent knees and dangling hands that almost touched the floor, and head bent oddly sidewise, mouth partly opened to permit a quarter-inch of livid, blood-empurpled tongue to find escape between the teeth displayed by curled-back upper lip and limply hanging, flaccid lower jaw. A strand of knotted rope was round his neck, its upper end made fast to the bronze ringbolt which secured the hanging lamp. The rope had been too long and Classon too tall to permit conventional suicide. It had been necessary for him to lean, almost kneel, in order to secure sufficient downward drag to strangle himself. Any time within the first few seconds after dropping forward he could have saved himself by merely standing upright, but unconsciousness follows swiftly on compression of the great blood-vessels of the neck. . . . He was grotesque but placid. There had been no death agony.

  DE GRANDIN AND I were regaling ourselves with black coffee liberally flavored with araq when Captain Chenevert stormed in after battling fifteen miles of snow-blocked roads.

  “Another one?” he shouted angrily. “In the same room—within twelve hours? God A’mighty, this things gettin’ to be a habit!”

  Functionaries filled the house with utter chaos the remainder of the day. Photographers and finger-print experts from the police barracks; a sheriff’s deputy, not quite clear as to either functions, rights or duties, but officiously anxious to impress us and the cynically polite state troopers with his own importance; the coroner, who being also the neighborhood mortician was wrung between the necessity of appearing appropriately grave and the difficultly suppressed delight at acquiring two cases from the same house in a single day. Finally the coroner’s physician, a superannuated quack whose knowledge of postmortem phenomena of suicide was plainly inferior to the state policemen’s expert training. But at last the grisly business finished, and Classon left his house feet-first upon a stretcher, his mortality concealed but not disguised beneath a not-too-fresh white sheet.

  Dinner was a dismal rite, its only spot of color Karen Kirsten’s golden hair and vivid, scarlet lips. No one strove for conversation, no one had much appetite for food, but when we went into the drawing-room for coffee and liqueurs the appetite for alcohol was something more than obvious. By nine o’clock the women were thick-tongued and maudlin, the men sunk in the utter taciturnity of saturnine intoxication.

  Karen Kirsten left us early, pleading headache, and de Grandin and I followed her as quickly as we could. There was too much of the solemnity and none of the jollity of a wake about that dim-lit drawing-room.

  “YOU’VE SOME THEORY,” I accused as we shut our bedroom door against the dismal crowd downstairs, “What is it?”

  “This afternoon I have been reading in the library of our late host,” de Grandin answered as he fit a cigarette, “and what I read may throw some light upon these self-destructions. Mademoiselle Kirsten furnished us the clue when she told us that accurséd picture came from Constantinople. You are familiar with the culture of Byzantium?”

  “Only vaguely.”

  “One assumed as much. Very well: The Greeks of that old city were an evil lot. For the most part they conformed to Christianity only outwardly, and conformity with them was largely but an overlaying of the ancient cults with a thin veneer of outward faith. At heart they never lost their paganism, and paganism, my friend, is far from being the sweet, pretty thing our pastoral poets would depict it.

  “Diana of the Ephesians, the All Mother, sometimes known as Magna Mater, was no prototype of the Blessèd Virgin; quite otherwise, I do assure you. There were dark mysteries in the groves of Aricia beside the lake men called the Mirror of Diana. Dionysos, who has been so celebrated by our neopagan poets that we commonly regard him as a hearty boon companion, was far from being so. True, he was the god of women, wine and song, but his women were harlots, his wine was drunkenness, his songs the ditties of the brothel. At his midnight festivals men and women cast their garments off and ran with staring eyes and unbound hair between the swaying trees, frenzied with the worship of their god, and his worship was unbridled lust. Little children were caught up by grown men and women, oftentimes their own parents, and forcibly initiated in the rites of drunkenness and carnal love. Aphrodite’s priestesses were mere strumpets, working openly in competition with the common women of the town. Adonis, that pale lovely boy so famed in poetry and picture, was worshiped with the sacrifice of boars. Ha, but there were places where his female votaries, anxious to assimilate their god through the intervention of his sacred animals, assumed the name and rôle of sows!

  “Such were the deities of paganism. They were not gods, but devils. Yet for hundreds of years they had been worshipped with revolting ceremonies. Would people long accustomed to a religion of drunkenness and lechery willingly forgo it for the gentle, simple rites of Christianity? Not willingly, but Constantine the Great gave them their choice of Cross o
r sword, and they chose the Cross. Yet ever the old and wicked faith persisted, always there were found some worshippers of the old ones in the secret places.

  “Bien. It was not safe to flaunt their heathen practises. The lictors of the Emperor were ever on the watch for those who frequented suspicious gatherings; so, like the gambling-houses in your puritanical communities where gaming is prohibited, they must perforce resort to subterfuge. They had chapels to all outward seeming dedicated to the holy saints, and in those chapels they had furniture which seemed devoted to the Christian worship. But as the witty Monsieur Gilbert says in his opera Pinafore, ‘Things are seldom what they seem.’ A quick change here, the drawing of a curtain or pressing of a hidden spring there, and the sacred Christian ikons become horrid instruments of evil, base scenes which pander to the passions like those which graced the obscene sanctuary of the goddess Aphrodite.

  “But in some instances these Christians-who-were-no-Christians did not depend on anything so crude as mere mechanical appliances. They had skilled workmen make the holy images, sacred pictures, sacerdotal vessels which by means of cunning spells and conjurations were endowed with power to change their aspect of their own accord when the concentrated thought of evil persons focused on them. Happily, we do not know just what these wicked old ones’ magic was; we do know that it comprehended human sacrifice and defilement of the sacred things of Christianity. We know also that periodically it was necessary that a victim be immolated, else the evil power of these Jekyll-Hyde things made of gold and stone and silver would be lost.

  “Now, Friend Trowbridge, thoughts are things. Who is it that is not unpleasantly impressed when standing in a dungeon of the bad old Middle Ages? Who can look upon the blade of that blood-thirsty guillotine with which so many brave and lovely necks were severed while the Terror raged in la belle France and forbear to shiver? Who can hold a hangman’s rope within his hands and not have feelings of a vague uneasiness? No one but the veriest clod, pardieu! For why? Because, I tell you, thoughts are things. The evil passions, the emotions of hatred, anger or despair which flowed so freely round these solid objects soaked into them as water penetrates a porous stone. And ever and anon those very thoughts are loosed—exhaled, if you prefer the term—upon the world again.