A Rival from the Grave

by Seabury Quinn

  “A woman’s shrill scream, echoed by a man’s hoarse shout of terror, interrupted me. On the marble pavement of Canal Street, with half a thousand people bustling by, lay coiled a three-foot water moccasin. Here was proof. I’d seen it twice in my room at the hotel, but I’d been alone each time. Some form of weird hypnosis might have made me think I saw it, but the screaming woman and the shouting man, these panic-stricken people in Canal Street, couldn’t all be victims of a spell which had been cast on me. ‘All right, I’ll go,’ I almost shouted, and instantly, as though it had been but a puff of smoke, the snake was gone, the half-fainting woman and a crowd of curious bystanders asking what was wrong left to prove I had not been the victim of some strange delusion.

  “Old Saint Denis Cemetery lay drowsing in the blue, faint twilight. It has no graves as we know them, for when the city was laid out it was below sea-level and bodies were stored away in crypts set row on row like lines of pigeonholes in walls as thick as those of mediæval castles. Grass-grown aisles run between the rows of vaults, and the effect is a true city of the dead with narrow streets shut in by close-set houses. The rattle of a trolley car in Rampart Street came to me faintly as I walked between the rows of tombs; from the river came the mellow-throated bellow of a steamer’s whistle, but both sounds were muted as though heard from a great distance. The tomb-lined bastions of Saint Denis hold the present out as firmly as they hold the memories of the past within.

  “Down one aisle and up another I walked, the close-clipped turf deadening my footfalls so I might have been a ghost come back to haunt the ancient burial ground, but nowhere was there sign or trace of Julie. I made the circuit of the labyrinth and finally paused before one of the more pretentious tombs.

  “‘Looks as if she’d stood me up,’ murmured. ‘If she has, I have a good excuse to—’

  “‘But non, mon coeur, I have not disappointed you!’ a soft voice whispered in my ear. ‘See, I am here.’

  “I think I must have jumped at sound of her greeting, for she clapped her hands delightedly before she put them on my shoulders and turned her face up for a kiss. ‘Silly one,’ she chided, ‘did you think your Julie was unfaithful?’

  “I put her hands away as gently as I could, for her utter self-surrender was embarrassing. ‘Where were you?’ I asked, striving to make neutral conversation. ‘I’ve been prowling round this graveyard for the last half-hour, and came through this aisle not a minute ago, but I didn’t see you—’

  “‘Ah, but I saw you, chéri; I have watched you as you made your solemn rounds like a watchman of the night. Ohé, but it was hard to wait until the sun went down to greet you, mon petit!’

  “She laughed again, and her mirth was mellowly musical as the gurgle of cool water poured from a silver vase.

  “‘How could you have seen me?’ I demanded. ‘Where were you all this time?’

  “‘But here, of course,’ she answered naïvely, resting one hand against the graystone slab that scaled the tomb.

  “I shook my head bewilderedly. The tomb, like all the others in the deeply recessed wall, was of rough cement encrusted with small seashells, and its sides were straight and blank without a spear of ivy clinging to them. A sparrow could not have found cover there, yet . . .

  “Julie raised herself on tiptoe and stretched her arms out right and left while she looked at me through half-closed, smiling eyes. ‘Je suis engourdie—I am stiff with sleep,’ she told me, stifling a yawn. ‘But now that you are come, mon cher, I am wakeful as the pussy-cat that rouses at the scampering of the mouse. Come, let us walk in this garden of mine.’ She linked her arm through mine and started down the grassy, grave-lined path.

  “Tiny shivers—not of cold—were flickering through my cheeks and down my neck beneath my ears. I had to have an explanation . . . the snake, her declaration that she watched me as I searched the cemetery—and from a tomb where a beetle could not have found a hiding-place—her announcement she was still stiff from sleeping, now her reference to a half-forgotten graveyard as her garden.

  “‘See here, I want to know—’ I started, but she laid her hand across my lips.

  “‘Do not ask to know too soon, mon coeur,’ she bade. ‘Look at me, am I not veritably élégante?’ She stood back a step, gathered up her skirts and swept me a deep curtsy.

  “There was no denying she was beautiful. Her tightly curling hair had been combed high and tied back with a fillet of bright violet tissue which bound her brows like a diadem and at the front of which an aigret plume was set. In her ears were hung two beautifully matched cameos, outlined in gold and seed-pearls, and almost large as silver dollars; a necklace of antique dull-gold hung round her throat, and its pendant was a duplicate of her ear-cameos, while a bracelet of matte-gold set with a fourth matched anaglyph was clasped about her left arm just above the elbow. Her gown was sheer white muslin, low cut at front and back, with little puff-sleeves at the shoulders, fitted tightly at the bodice and flaring sharply from a high-set waist. Over it she wore a narrow scarf of violet silk, hung behind her neck and dropping down on either side in front like a clergyman’s stole. Her sandals were gilt leather, heel-less as a ballet dancer’s shoes and laced with violet ribbons. Her lovely, pearl-white hands were bare of rings, but on the second toe of her right foot there showed a little cameo which matched the others which she wore.

  “I could feel my heart begin to pound and my breath come quicker as I looked at her, but:

  “‘You look as if you’re going to a masquerade,’ I said.

  “A look of hurt surprise showed in her eyes. ‘A masquerade?’ she echoed. ‘But no, it is my best, my very finest, that I wear for you tonight, mon adoré. Do not you like it; do you not love me, Édouard?’

  “‘No,’ I answered shortly, ‘I do not. We might as well understand each other Julie. I’m not in love with you and never was. It’s been a pretty flirtation nothing more. I’m going home tomorrow, and—’

  “‘But you will come again? Surely you will come again?’ she pleaded. ‘You can not mean it when you say you do not love me, Édouard. Tell me that you spoke so but to tease me—’

  “A warning hiss sounded in the grass beside my foot, but I was too angry to be frightened. ‘Go ahead, set your devilish snake on me,’ I taunted. ‘Let it bite me. I’d as soon be dead as—’

  “The snake was quick, but Julie quicker. In the split-second required for the thing to drive at me she leaped across the grass-grown aisle and pushed me back. So violent was the shove she gave me that I fell against the tomb, struck my head against a small projecting stone and stumbled to my knees. As I fought for footing on the slippery grass I saw the deadly, wedge-shaped head strike full against the girl’s bare ankle and heard her gasp with pain. The snake recoiled and swung its head toward me, but Julie dropped down to her knees and spread her arms protectingly about me.

  “‘Non, non, grand’tante!’ she screamed; ‘not this one! Let me—’ Her voice broke on a little gasp and with a retching hiccup she sank limply to the grass.

  “I tried to rise, but my foot slipped on the grass and I fell back heavily against the tomb, crashing my brow against its shell-set cement wall. I saw Julie lying in a little huddled heap of white against the blackness of the sward, and, shadowy but clearly visible, an aged, wrinkled Negress with turbaned head and cambric apron bending over her, nursing her head against her bosom and rocking back and forth grotesquely while she crooned a wordless threnody. Where had she come from? I wondered idly. Where had the snake gone? Why did the moonlight seem to fade and flicker like a dying lamp? Once more I tried to rise, but slipped back to the grass before the tomb as everything went black before me.

  “The lavender light of early morning was streaming over the tomb-walls of the cemetery when I waked. I lay quiet for a little while, wondering sleepily how I came there. Then, just as the first rays of the sun shot through the thinning shadows, I remembered. Julie! The snake had bitten her when she flung herself before me. She was gone; the old N
egress—where had she come from?—was gone, too, and I was utterly alone in the old graveyard.

  “Stiff from lying on the ground, I got myself up awkwardly, grasping at the flower-shelf projecting from the tomb. As my eyes came level with the slab that scaled the crypt I felt the breath catch in my throat. The crypt, like all its fellows, looked for all the world like an old oven let into a brick wall overlaid with peeling plaster. The sealing-stone was probably once white, but years had stained it to a dirty gray, and time had all but rubbed its legend out. Still, I could see the faint inscription carved in quaint, old-fashioned letters, and disbelief gave way to incredulity, which was replaced by panic terror as I read:

  Ici repose malheureusement

  Julie Amélie Marie d’Ayen

  Nationale de Paris France

  Née le 29 Aout 1788

  Décédée a la N O le 2 Juillet 1807

  “Julie! Little Julie whom I’d held in my arms, whose mouth had lain on mine in eager kisses, was a corpse! Dead and in her grave more than a century!”

  The silence lengthened. Ned stared miserably before him, his outward eyes unseeing, but his mind’s eye turned upon that scene in old Saint Denis Cemetery. De Grandin tugged and tugged again at the ends of his mustache till I thought he’d drag the hairs out by the roots. I could think of nothing which might ease the tension till:

  “Of course, the name cut on the tombstone was a piece of pure coincidence,’ I hazarded. “Most likely the young woman deliberately assumed it to mislead you—”

  “And the snake which threatened our young friend, he was an assumption, also, one infers?” de Grandin interrupted.

  “N-o, but it could have been a trick. Ned saw an aged Negress in the cemetery, and those old Southern darkies have strange powers—”

  “I damn think that you hit the thumb upon the nail that time, my friend,” the little Frenchman nodded, “though you do not realize how accurate your diagnosis is.” To Ned:

  “Have you seen this snake again since coming North?”

  “Yes,” Ned replied. “I have. I was too stunned to speak when I read the epitaph, and I wandered back to the hotel in a sort of daze and packed my bags in silence. Possibly that’s why there was no further visitation there. I don’t know. I do know nothing further happened, though, and when several months had passed with nothing but my memories to remind me of the incident, I began to think I’d suffered from some sort of walking nightmare. Nella and I went ahead with preparations for our wedding, but three weeks ago the postman brought me this—”

  He reached into an inner pocket and drew out an envelope. It was of soft gray paper, edged with silver-gilt, and the address was in tiny, almost unreadable script:

  M. Édouard Minton,

  30 Rue Carteret 30,

  Harrisonville, N.J.

  “U’m?” de Grandin commented as he inspected it. “It is addressed à la française. And the letter, may one read it?”

  “Of course,” Ned answered. “I’d like you to.”

  Across de Grandin’s shoulder I made out the hastily scrawled missive:

  Adoré

  Remember your promise and the kiss of blood that sealed it. Soon I shall call and you must come.

  Pour le temps et pour l’éternité.

  Julie.

  “You recognize the writing?” de Grandin asked. “It is—”

  “Oh, yes,” Ned answered bitterly. “I recognize it; it’s the same the other note was written in.”

  “And then?”

  The boy smiled bleakly. “I crushed the thing into a ball and threw it on the floor and stamped on it. Swore I’d die before I’d keep another rendezvous with her, and—” He broke off, and put trembling hands up to his face.

  “The so mysterious serpent came again, one may assume?” de Grandin prompted.

  “But it’s only a phantom snake,” I interjected. “At worst it’s nothing more than a terrifying vision—”

  “Think so?” Ned broke in. “D’ye remember Rowdy, my Airedale terrier?”

  I nodded.

  “He was in the room when I opened this letter, and when the cottonmouth appeared beside me on the floor he made a dash for it. Whether it would have struck me I don’t know, but it struck at him as he leaped and caught him squarely in the throat, He thrashed and fought and the thing held on with locked jaw till I grabbed a fire-shovel and made for it; then, before I could strike, it vanished.

  “But its venom didn’t. Poor old Rowdy was dead before I could get him out of the house, but I took his corpse to Doctor Kirchoff, the veterinary, and told him Rowdy died suddenly and I wanted him to make an autopsy. He went back to his operating-room and stayed there half an hour. When he came back to the office he was wiping his glasses and wore the most astonished look I’ve ever seen on a human face. ‘You say your dog died suddenly—in the house?’ he asked.

  “‘Yes,’ I told him; ‘just rolled over and died.’

  “‘Well, bless my soul, that’s the most amazing thing I ever heard!’ he answered. ‘I can’t account for it. That dog died from snake-bite; copperhead, I’d say, and the marks of the fangs show plainly on his throat.’”

  “But I thought you said it was a water moccasin,” I objected. Now Doctor Kirchoff says it was a copperhead—”

  “Ah bah!” de Grandin laughed a thought unpleasantly. “Did no one ever tell you that the copperhead and moccasin are of close kind, my friend? Have not you heard some ophiologists maintain the moccasin is but a dark variety of copperhead?” He did not pause for my reply, but turned again to Ned:

  “One understands your chivalry, Monsieur. For yourself you have no fear, since after all at times life can be bought too dearly, but the death of your small dog has put a different aspect on the matter. If this never-to-be-sufficiently-anathematized serpent which comes and goes like the boîte à surprise the how do you call him? Jack from the box?—is enough a ghost thing to appear at any time and place it wills, but sufficiently physical to exude venom which will kill a strong and healthy terrier, you have the fear for Mademoiselle Nella, n’est-ce-pas?”

  “Precisely, you—”

  “And you are well advised to have the caution, my young friend. We face a serious condition.”

  “What do you advise?”

  The Frenchman teased his needlepoint mustache-tip with a thoughtful thumb and forefinger. “For the present, nothing,” he replied at length. “Let me look this situation over; let me view it from all angles. Whatever I might tell you now would probably be wrong. Suppose we meet again one week from now. By that time I should have my data well in hand.”

  “And in the meantime—”

  “Continue to be coy with Mademoiselle Nella. Perhaps it would be well if you recalled important business which requires that you leave town till you hear from me again. There is no need to put her life in peril at this time.”

  “IF IT WEREN’T FOR Kirchoff’s testimony I’d say Ned Minton had gone raving crazy,” I declared as the door closed on our visitors. “The whole thing’s wilder than an opium smoker’s dream—that meeting with the girl in New Orleans, the snake that comes and disappears, the assignation in the cemetery—it’s all too preposterous. But I know Kirchoff. He’s as unimaginative as a side of sole-leather, and as efficient as he is unimaginative. If he says Minton’s dog died of snake-bite that’s what it died of, but the whole affair’s so utterly fantastic—”

  “Agreed,” de Grandin nodded; “but what is fantasy but the appearance of mental images as such, severed from ordinary relations? The ‘ordinary relations’ of images are those to which we are accustomed, which conform to our experience. The wider that experience, the more ordinary will we find extraordinary relations. By example, take yourself: You sit in a dark auditorium and see a railway train come rushing at you. Now, it is not at all in ordinary experience for a locomotive to come dashing in a theater filled with people, it is quite otherwise; but you keep your seat, you do not flinch, you are not frightened. It is nothing but a motion
picture, which you understand. But if you were a savage from New Guinea you would rise and fly in panic from this steaming, shrieking iron monster which bears down on you. Tiens, it is a matter of experience, you see. To you it is an everyday event, to the savage it would be a new and terrifying thing.

  “Or, perhaps, you are at the hospital. You place a patient between you and the Crookes’ tube of an X-ray, you turn on the current, you observe him through the fluoroscope and pouf! his flesh all melts away and his bones spring out in sharp relief. Three hundred years ago you would have howled like a stoned dog at the sight, and prayed to be delivered from the witchcraft which produced it. Today you curse and swear like twenty drunken pirates if the Roentgenologist is but thirty seconds late in setting up the apparatus. These things are ‘scientific,’ you understand their underlying formulae, therefore they seem natural. But mention what you please to call the occult, and you scoff, and that is but admitting that you are opposed to something which you do not understand. The credible and believable is that to which we are accustomed, the fantastic and incredible is what we cannot explain in terms of previous experience. Voilà, c’est, très simple, n’est-ce-pas?”

  “You mean to say you understand all this?”

  “Not at all by any means; I am clever, me, but not that clever. No, my friend, I am as much in the dark as you, only I do not refuse to credit what our young friend tells us. I believe the things he has related happened, exactly as he has recounted them. I do not understand, but I believe. Accordingly, I must probe, I must sift, I must examine this matter. We see it now as a group of unrelated and irrelevant occurrences, but somewhere lies the key which will enable us to make harmony from this discord, to gather these stray, tangled threads into an ordered pattern. I go to seek that key.”

  “Where?”

  “To New Orleans, of course. Tonight I pack my portmanteaux, tomorrow I entrain. Just now”—he smothered a tremendous yawn—“now I do what every wise man does as often as he can. I take a drink.”