“Bien. Très bien. Tout va bien. In Monsieur Classon’s books I read something of the history of this so hateful picture which he showed us. The Crusaders under Baldwin stole it from a place they thought to be a Christian chapel when they sacked Constantinople. Ha, but the one who brought it back to Venice soon discovered his mistake! He set it up upon the altar of a church, and straightway evil things began to happen. Good women praying at that altar turned to strumpets; mild, godly men were roused to deeds of lust and violence. At last the good priests exorcised the lovely, evil thing; then to make assurance doubly sure, got rid of it.
“But Italians were Italians then as now. Instead of throwing it away, destroying it, they sold it to a Frenchman!
“Piously, my guileless countryman took the vile thing home with him and made an offering of it to a house of Benedictines. Nom d’un rat, within a month all hell had broken loose in that community! The monks forgot their vows, and I regret to state the nuns did likewise. They mortified the flesh with mutton pie on Fridays, they drank sweet wines and sang some tunes which had a most unchurchly air, and other things they did which more befitted soldiers and women of the camp than sober-lifed conventuals. It was a gay and naughty time they had until the bishop heard of it.
“Came the Revolution. Tired of being trodden underfoot the people rose, and like a rabid, sightless beast struck right and left in frenzy, cutting down the just and unjust in their anger. The convents and religious houses were suppressed and sacred vessels melted down and turned to money to assist the Government in waging war against the foreign despots who would seat a king again upon the throne of France and place the tyrant’s heel once more upon the people’s neck. But not this one, hélas!
“An English milord bought it and took it to his triste and foggy little island. Eh bien, he was quite a fellow, that one! The things he did were shocking, even to a generation which was noted for its tolerance. If he coveted a neighbor’s wife that neighbor would have been advised to say his paternosters, for our gallant lord was skilled in sword-play and could crack a wine-glass stem at twenty paces with his pistol bullet. Also it appeared that Satan was a loving guardian of his own; for when the injured gentleman sent friends to wait on the seducer of his wife or fiancée or daughter, he might have saved his heirs much trouble if he had sent messengers to interview the clerk, the parson and the sexton, for he soon had need of all their offices.
“Tiens, the devil is a mocker, always. After many years of startlingly successful sin our noble lord was caught red-handed as a card cheat. His fortune had been wasted by extravagance, the Jews of Lombard Street refused to lend him further money on his lands, he became a bankrupt and perished miserably in debtor’s prison.
“Among the items seized by creditors was this same accursèd picture. For years it gathered dust in storage, then was put on sale at auction. Monsieur Classon’s uncle purchased it, but luckily for him he kept it in a safe deposit box, and not until a year ago was it brought out and placed among the treasures of the gunroom. Again his luck held good, for he was much away from home, and though there were some stories of some naughty intrigues in the servants’ quarters, who knows if these were influenced by the presence of the picture in this house or simply the result of poor, weak human nature?
“At any rate Monsieur the Senior Classon died and his nephew took possession of this house and all things in it. When did he first perceive this picture of the saint was not as other pictures? One wonders. Surely, he must have noticed it, for it had him greatly worried. A Frenchman, an Italian, an Irishman or Highland Scot, even a Spaniard, perhaps, would at once have recognized that there was something outré, other-worldly, in the way that picture seemed to change its scenes and in the feeling of repulsion yet attraction it engendered in him. But certainly. These people have imagination. But Americans and Englishmen? Non! ‘This thing is not in keeping with the general rule of things,’ they would tell themselves. ‘Me, I have seen things, things which most certainly are not there to be seen. Therefore it is my eyes which are at fault. I shall consult an oculist. I have felt things I never felt before; I have felt the power of utter, concentrated wickedness. I am not like that, me. No, I go to church five Sundays in the year, and pay my taxes and obey such laws as it is convenient to obey. I am a thoroughly good citizen, an Anglo-Saxon; I do not believe in fairies, Santa Claus or witchcraft, even if I do put credence in the literature that stock-promoters send me. This feeling of malaise I have whenever I am near that picture is due to indigestion. Voilà, I shall buy some pills next time I pass a pharmacy.’ Yes, my, friend, that is the way of it.
“But Monsieur Classon was not easy in his mind. He had seen things, he had felt things that neither spectacles nor patent medicines could cure. And so instead of seeking someone competent to give advice, he tried experiments upon his friends, asked them to the gunroom, bade them look upon this old Greek ikon and tell him what it was they saw. If they saw nothing strange he took their testimony as evidence that his feelings of discomfort and his visions of unpleasant things had come from his disordered faculties, not from some outside source. Tiens, that way madness lay.”
“But granting all you say, and it seems incredible, what induced Farraday to stab himself?” I asked.
He teased the needle-points of his mustache between a thoughtful thumb and forefinger. At length:
“Ecstasy is hard to reason with,” he answered slowly. “We see it manifest itself in various phases. The nun who kneels in breathless adoration at the altar feels no discomfort though the cold stones bite her knees till the flesh is almost separated from the bone. The Indian fakir and the Moslem dervish inflict unutterable tortures on themselves, yet feel no pain. Devotees of olden gods, Aphrodite, Moloch, Dionysos, Adonis, cut and hacked and cruelly mutilated their bodies while ecstatic fervor gripped them. Monsieur Farraday was a highly nervous, highly imaginative, highly organized man. Influences which would not affect the average person took tremendous hold on him. He had lived not long, but much. It is probable there was no sensation which he had not tasted sometime. The lure to self-destruction grows more potent as we deplete the possibility of fresh experience. That the evil influence of this picture swayed him we can hardly doubt. He had hidden it, but he induced Mademoiselle Kirsten to come and see it. Why? Merely because it was an ancient thing of lovely workmanship? I cannot think so. Deliberately, having felt the lure and terror and excitement which inevitably followed a period of gazing at that evil picture, he desired to initiate her into them. It was like the drug addict who seeks to corrupt others to his evil practises. Yes, that is so.”
“And Classon?”
“We cannot surely know. He has sealed his lips; but I think if he could talk he would tell a tale of slowly mounting terror, yet a fascination which would not let him leave off looking at the dreadful scenes he saw when the picture changed its aspect. Like Mademoiselle Kirsten and the book which terrified her so, he must needs go back and back to look and look again upon that which no human eye should see. It was like a siren-song luring him to sure destruction. When his friend Farraday had broken with the strain and sacrificed himself a votive offering to sin, the strain on Monsieur Classon was past beating. Perhaps his reason snapped, perhaps he felt an impulse to emulate his friend—any police officer knows that suicidal impulses are contagious. En tout cas, there it is. Farraday is dead, self-murdered, Classon is dead by his own hand—”
“And Miss Kirsten?” I broke in.
“Précisément, Mademoiselle Kirsten. I think we shall do well to watch that lovely one, both for her sake and ours.”
“Ours?”
“Perfectly. If we keep close watch on her we shall prevent her emulation of those other poor ones; also we may find that she will guide us to an explanation of this Christian-heathen ikon.”
“But good heavens, man! We’ve been chatting here for hours; she may have gone and—”
“No fear,” he interrupted with a smile. “Me, I took the care. The gunroom door I naile
d tight shut, for I was certain if she meant to harm herself it would be on the same spot where the others offered up their lives, and—mordieu—nom de nom de nom de nom! Why had I not thought of it before?”
“What in the world—”
“S-s-sh, my friend, keep still; be silent as the chauve-souris when she goes flitter-flitting in the twilight. Me, I have the inspiration, the idea, the—what you call him?—hunch. Yes.”
He tiptoed down the corridor till he stood outside Miss Kirsten’s door, then, almost in a shout, announced, “Yes, my friend, it is amazing. I cannot think how I forgot it. The gunroom door is nailed tight shut, but the windows are unfastened. I must have them nailed the first thing in the morning.”
Making more noise than the occasion seemed to warrant, he tramped back to our door and slammed it, shoved me unceremoniously aside and seized his woolen muffler from the dresser.
“Come,” he commanded as he wound the reefer round his neck, “I do not think we shall have long to wait.”
“What the dickens are you up to?” I demanded as he led me down the stairs, taking care to step on the innermost edges of the treads so that no telltale squeak should give warning of our descent.
“Cannot you see? I have given her the hint, shown her how the way is open. If she feels the mastering-urge to seek the gunroom, perhaps intent on suicide, she will surely do it now, and through the open window. We must be there first.”
IT WAS COLD AND quiet as a mausoleum in the empty gunroom as we clambered through the window. In accordance with custom a fire had been laid on the andirons, but no logs had burned there since the night before, and the eery chill which permeates all empty places filled the darkened chamber to its farthest corner. Stabbing through the darkness with his flashlight, de Grandin finally decided on the space behind a yellow-taffeta upholstered sofa as the spot to lay our ambush and we sank down to begin our vigil.
I had no way of telling time, for de Grandin had insisted that we leave our watches off lest their ticking warn our quarry of our presence. My feet grew cold, then stiff, then “full of pins and needles” as I crouched behind the couch. We dared not talk, we hardly dared to change position lest the creaking of a board betray us. At last, when I was willing to affirm on oath our vigil had endured a month, I felt the pressure of de Grandin’s fingers on my elbow. Slowly, soundlessly, but steadily, the window opposite to where we crouched was being raised. In the half-light shining from the snow outside we descried a figure almost shapeless in the gloom, but plainly feminine.
The rasping of a match, the little flare of orange flame against Egyptian darkness, the pale, clear glow of burning olive oil as the hanging lamps were lighted, showed us Karen Kirsten.
She had thrust her bare feet into fur-lined carriage boots, and with one hand she held her coat of priceless sable tight across her breast. Her eyes shone phosphorescent in the lamplight’s glow, like the eyes of an animal. Her lips’ moist crimson and the pearl-hard sheen of little teeth between them fascinated me. Unbidden came the thought of Clarimonde, of Margarita Hauffe and her victims.
She faced the ikon and we saw her bosom heave beneath its sheath of gleaming fur. Her breath came rasping, grindingly, almost like the labored breathing of a patient in extremis with nephritis. A little skirl of laughter stung her scarlet mouth, not loud, but terribly intense. I thought that never had I heard a cry more blasphemous than that light cachinnation.
Her eyes were straining toward the ikon which she had thrown open so its triple picture caught the full force of the ever-shifting beams which slanted downward from the swinging lamps. They were fixed, intense, half closed, as though the violence of her gaze was too annihilating to be loosed direct; it seemed as though the very substance of her soul and body would pour out of those set, staring eyes.
“Master,” came her thin-edged whisper, mordant as a storm-blast in December, “lord, possessor, ever-living conqueror of flesh and soul and spirit—I am here!”
She kicked the fur-topped boots from off her feet and put her hands up to the collar of her coat, throwing back the garment and permitting it to fall in coruscating brown-black coils upon the floor behind her. Then with a wrench she tore her marigold-hued negligée from throat to hem.
Whiter than a figure carved from Parian marble, whiter than an image fresh-cut from new ivory she stood before the altar-table with its golden-gleaming ikon in her pallid slenderness.
It was no wonder that two hundred million movie-fans were mad about her, for she was beautiful almost past describing. Her graciously turned arms, her slender, gently swelling hips, her tapering legs, her full, high, pointed breasts were utterly breath-taking in their loveliness. The Greeks had a word for her, chryselephantinos—formed of gold and ivory!
Strangely mystic she stood there; more mysterious, the odd thought came to me, in the starkness of her nudity, than when hidden in the swathe of clinging garments.
Statue-still she stood, only her left hand moving a little as it fluttered upward toward her breast, then forward, like a tower toppling when its cornerstone is wrenched away, like a silver-birch tree crashing when the axman’s final stroke cuts through its roots, she fell face-downward on the floor and lay there motionless.
The lamplight glimmered on the whiteness of her body and the bright gold of her hair, flecking, flowing shadows interchanging quickly with bright spots of light as she clasped her hands behind her neck and beat her forehead softly on the floor before the ikon.
“The pictures—mort d’un rat!—see the pictures, good Friend Trowbridge; do you see them now?” de Grandin whispered in my ear.
I saw, and a wave of retching nausea swept across me as I looked.
How it happened I know not, but the little bits of colored stone which formed the pictures in the ikon had rearranged themselves, leaving the compositions of the scenes unchanged, but the subject matter utterly transformed. Where the group of laughing youths and maidens had been dancing there was now a ring of naked, scrawny parodies of men and women holding hands and dancing back to back in the dreadful rigadoon which marked the witches’ sabbat. Where the pretty babes had crept in infantile delight was now a crowd of edematous, hideously bloated monsters, obscenely tumefied, their faces formless as the features of a creature molded out of dough, yet with enough resemblance to the human countenance to show the nightmare grins which stretched their livid mouths and creased their puffy cheeks. They crept and crawled and sprawled upon each other like sightless slugs which come to light when rotting logs are lifted, nor could I say if they were filled with loathing or obscene affection for each other as they intermingled all but formless bodies in a sort of fictive struggle.
But the center panel showed the greatest metamorphosis of all. The saint had shed his penitential garment of rough camel’s hair and in its place his loins were girded with a leopardskin. The cross-topped staff was now a spear with gleaming lance-head; rawhide clogs had turned to golden buskins laced up the leg with straps of scarlet leather; a wreath of wild wood-roses bound his hair. It was a figure of sheer beauty, slender, straight, white-limbed and white-bodied as a girl, with a face too delicate to be a man’s, not soft enough to be a woman’s. The stern, forbidding glance had vanished, yet the eyes had lost no whit of their compulsion. They seemed to catch and hold all other eyes, they burned and smoldered with an intolerable sadness, yet their brightness was so great that it was fairly dazzling.
“Mon Dieu, it is the Lord of Evil!” Jules de Grandin whispered. “Satanas, Lucifer, Adonis!”
A chill we had not felt before came through the room. It was not the hard bitterness of the storm wind thrusting through the partly opened window, nor the close, still cold of a place long empty and unheated; there was an otherworldliness to it, the utter gelidness of the freezing eternities of interstellar space, a cold which seemed to paralyze the soul and spirit even as it numbed the body. Perhaps it was a trick of shifting lights caused by the swaying of the swinging lamps, but I could swear that on the wall behind the
altar where the ikon stood there formed a patch of gloom, a shadow-shape which etched a figure in dull silhouette. And it was a figure of fear. Bat-winged it was, and horribly malformed, with slanting brow, protruding chin and great tusks jutting upward toward a nose which had the outline of a predatory vulture-beak. Great claw-armed hands attached to scaly arms seemed reaching outward through the semi-dark to fasten on the woman prostrate on the floor.
“Attendez-moi, my friend,” de Grandin whispered; “do exactly as I say, or we shall lose our lives, perhaps our souls as well. When I step forward, do you take up anything that comes to hand and with it strike that cursèd ikon from its place. When you have struck, strike on, and keep on striking till you have demolished it completely. Oh, do not stop to bandy silly questions, friend; three lives depend upon your doing as I say, believe it!”
Mystified, but willing to obey his orders, I nodded mute assent, and reached up for a double-bladed Tartar ax which hung clamped to the wall above us.
“Monsieur”—de Grandin stepped from his concealment and bent his body stiffly from the hips as though addressing someone formally—“Monsieur le Démon, we will fight you for her. We are but mortal men, but by the faith we hold and by the strength that faith imparts, we fling our gage into your face, and offer you wager of battle for this woman’s soul and body. More, if that is not enough, we will pledge our own, as well!”
It was not quite a laugh that answered him, indeed, it was not any sound which human ears can record; rather, it was as if a feeling, a subjective impression, of boundless and colossal scorn swept through the room, and like a dried leaf borne before the wind the little Frenchman was hurled back against the wall with an impact so terrific that I heard his bones crack as he struck the plaster-covered brick.
A Rival from the Grave Page 50
