“This is hideux, my friend!” the little Frenchman whispered. “Observe him, if you please.”
I looked, and turned sick at the sight. The big countryman who had shared the seat with me was slumped down on the green-plush covered bench, his throat so deeply gashed the head sagged horribly upon one shoulder. A spate of blood from a severed jugular smeared clothing, seat and floor. The window beside which I’d sat was smashed to slivers, and bits of broken glass lay all around.
“How—what—” I stammered, and for answer Jules de Grandin pointed to the floor. Midway in the aisle lay something that gleamed dully, the counterpart of the lead-weighted blade which had been thrown at Pemberton as he left my house the night before.
“Good heavens!” I exclaimed; “if I hadn’t gone for water—”
“Mais oui,” de Grandin interrupted. “For the first time in a long and useful life I find that I can say a word for water as a beverage. Undoubtlessly that knife was meant for you, my friend.”
“But why?”
“Are you not a friend of Monsieur Pemberton’s?”
“Of course, but—”
“No buts, Friend Trowbridge. Consider. There were two of those assassins at your house last night; at least I judge so from the noise they made in flight. You stood directly in the light from the hall lamp when we bid our guest goodnight; they must have made a note of your appearance. Apparently we have been under surveillance since then, and it is highly probable they heard us say that we would visit him today. Voilà.”
We descended from the car and walked along the track. “Regardez-vous!” he ordered as we reached the window where I had been seated.
Upon the car-side was the crude outline of a grinning skull drawn in white crayon.
“Good Lord—those brown men at the station!” I jerked out. “They must have drawn this—it seemed to me they were not Negroes—”
“But no. But yes!” he nodded in agreement. “Indubitably they were not Africans, but Burmans. And very bad ones, too. This skull is the official signet of the goddess Kali, patron deity of thags, and the cult of thaggee makes its headquarters in Burma. It is useless to attempt to apprehend the thrower of the knife. By now he has had time to run half-way to Burma. But it behooves us to he careful how we step. We know not where to look for it, or when the blow will fall, but deadly peril walks with us from this time on. I do not think this task which we have undertaken is a very healthy one, my friend.”
DRESSED IN SHABBY OXFORD bags and a khaki shooting-coat, Pemberton was waiting for us at the little railway station.
“Cheerio!” he greeted as we joined him. “All quiet on the jolly old Potomac, what?”
“Decidedly,” de Grandin answered, then told him of the tragedy.
“By Jove!” our host exclaimed; “I’m shot if I don’t feel like cutting the whole rotten business. Taking chances is all right for me, just part of the game, but to lug my wife into this hornets’ nest—” he cranked the antiquated flivver standing by the platform, and we drove in moody silence through the groves of black-boughed, whispering pines that edged the roadway.
British genius for getting order out of chaos was evident as we arrived at Foxcroft. The straggling lawn was neatly trimmed, the raffish privet hedge was clipped, on the small grass plot were several wicker chairs with brightly colored sailcloth cushions. A line of lush green weeping willows formed a background for the weather-mellowed, ivy-covered house with its many gables, mullioned windows and projecting bays. As we chugged and wheezed between the tall posts of the gateless entranceway a young woman quit a gayly colored canvas hammock and walked toward us, waving cheerful greeting.
“Don’t say anything about what happened on the train, please,” begged Pemberton as he brought the coughing motor to a halt.
Though definitely brunette, Avis Pemberton was just as definitely British. She had wide-spaced, slightly slanting hazel eyes, straight, dark hair smoothly parted in the middle and drawn low across her ears, a broad, white forehead, a small straight nose set above a full-lipped rather wide and humorous mouth, and a small and pointed chin marked with the faint suspicion of a cleft. When she smiled, two dimples showed low in her cheeks, making a merrily incongruous combination with her exotic eyes. She was dressed in a twin sweater combination, a kilted skirt of Harris tweed, Shetland socks and a pair of Scotch grain brogues which, clumsy as they were, could not disguise the slimness of her feet. Every line of her was long, fine cut, and British as a breath of lavender.
“Hullo-hullo, old thing,” her husband greeted. “Anything untoward occur while the good old bread-winner was off?”
“Nothing, Lord and Master,” she answered smilingly as she acknowledged his quick introductions, but her hazel eyes were wide and thoughtful as the little Frenchman raised her fingers to his lips at presentation, and I thought I saw her cast a frightened glance across her shoulder as her husband turned to help us drag our duffle from the car.
Dinner was a rite at Foxcroft, as dinner always is with Britons. A flat bouquet of roses graced the table, four tall candles flickered in tall silver standards; the soup was cool and under-seasoned, the joint of mutton tough and underdone, the burgundy a little sour, the apple tart a sadly soggy thing which might have made a billy-goat have nightmares. But Pemberton looked spick and span in dinner clothes and his wife was a misty vision in rose lace. Appleby, the “bat man” who served Pemberton as servant through three army terms and quit the service to accompany him in civil life, served the meal with faultless technique and brought us something he called coffee when the meal was over and we congregated on the lawn beneath a spreading poplar tree. De Grandin’s air of gloom grew deeper by the minute. When the servant tendered him a Sèvres cup filled with the off-brown, faintly steaming mixture, I thought he would assault him. Instead, he managed something like a smile as he turned to our hostess.
“I have heard Monsieur Pemberton speak of your son, Madame; is he with you in America?” he asked.
“Oh, dear, no; he’s with my father at Lerwick-on-Tyne. You see, we didn’t know just what conditions here might be, and thought that he’d be safer at the vicarage.”
“Your father is a churchman, then?”
“Very much so. It was not till after we had Little Jim that he managed to forgive me; even now I’m not quite sure that he regards me as a proper person to have custody of a small boy.”
“Madame, I am confused. How is it you say—”
The girl laughed merrily. “Father’s terribly low church and mid-Victorian. He classes foreigners and Anglo-Catholics, heathens, actors and Theosophists together. When I joined a troupe of unit dancers at the Palace he said public prayers for me; when I went out to the colonies to dance he disowned me as a vagabond. I met Big Jim while dancing in Bombay, and when I wrote I’d married him the only answer Father sent was a note congratulating me on having found an officer and gentleman to make an honest woman of me. I almost died when Little Jim was born, and the doctors said I could not stand the Indian climate, so Big Jim gave up his commission and we all went back to England. Father wouldn’t see us for almost a year, but when we finally took our baby to him for baptism he capitulated utterly. He’s really an old dear, when you penetrate his shell, but if he ever saw me do an Indian dance—”
“You’d have to start from scratch again, old thing,” her husband chuckled as he lit his pipe.
“She used to sneak off every chance she got and take instructions from the native dancers. Got so perfect in the technique that if she’d been a little darker-skinned she could have passed in any temple as a deva-dasi—by Jove, I say!” He looked at her as though he saw her for the first time.
“What is it, jim?”
“I say, you know, I never noticed it before, but there’s a look about you like Sarastai. Fine and beautiful, and all that sort of—”
“Oh, Jim darling, stop it! Anyone would think—what’s that?”
“’elp, ’elp, somebody—’elp!” the shriek came from the hous
e behind us, each quavering syllable raw-edged with terror.
We rushed around the angle of the building, through the neatly planted kitchen garden and up the three low steps that reached the kitchen door.
“What is it—who is here?” cried de Grandin as we paused upon the big room’s threshold.
In the corner farthest from the door crouched an aged woman, or perhaps I should have said a creature with a woman’s body, but a face like nothing human. Seasoned and lined with countless wrinkles, yellowed teeth bared in a senseless grin, she squatted by an open casement, elbows stiffly bent, hands hanging loosely, as a begging terrier might hold its paws, and mouthed and gibbered at us as we stared.
“Good God!” our host ejaculated. “Annie—”
“Annie! Oh, my poor dear Annie!” cried our hostess as she rushed across the lamp-lit kitchen and threw her arms around the human caricature crouching in the angle of the wall. “What’s wrong with her?” she called across her shoulder as she hugged the mouthing crone against her bosom. “What’s—O God, she’s mad!”
The woman cringed away from the encircling arms. “You won’t ’urt ole Annie, will ’ee?” she whimpered. “You won’t let the black man get ’er? See”—she bared a skinny forearm—“’e ’urt me! ’e ’urt me with a shiny thing!”
De Grandin drew his breath in sharply as he examined the tiny wound which showed against the woman’s wrinkled skin. “Up to the elbow, mes amis,” he told us solemnly. “We have stepped in it up to the elbow. Me, I know this mark. But yes, I have seen him before. The devotees of Kali sometimes shoot a serum in a victim’s arm with such results. I know not what this serum is—and probably no white man does—but the Indian police know it. ‘Whom the gods destroy they first make mad’ is no idle proverb with the thags of Burma. Non. There is no antidote for it. This poor one will be gone by morning. Meantime”—he put his hands beneath the woman’s arms and raised her—“she might as well die in bed in Christian fashion. Will you lead us to her room, Friend Pemberton?”
De Grandin on one side, I on the other, we half led, half carried the chuckling, weeping crone along the passageway. A gust of wind swung the long casement open and I crossed to close it. From the night outside where thickly growing rhododendron shut the moonlight out there came a laugh like that the fiends of hell might give at the arrival of a new consignment of lost souls. “Ha-ha!—ha-ha-ha!—ha-ha!”
“Sacré nom, I’ll make you laugh upon the other side of your misshapen face!” de Grandin cried, dropping the old woman’s arm and rushing to the window where he leant across the sill and poured the contents of his automatic pistol at the shadows whence the ghostly laughter came.
A crash of twigs and the flapping-back of displaced branches answered, and from the further distance came an echo of the wild, malignant cachinnation: “Ha-ha!—ha-ha-ha!—ha-ha!”
“AND NOW, MY FRIENDS, it is for us to formulate our strategy,” de Grandin told us as we finished breakfast. “From the things which we have seen and heard I’d say we are beset by human and subhuman agencies; possibly working independently, more probably in concert. First of all I must go to the village to make some purchases and notify the coroner of your late lamented servant’s death. I shall return, but”—he cast the phantom of a wink at me—“not for luncheon.”
He was back a little after noon with a large, impressive bundle which clanked mysteriously each time he shifted it. When the papers were removed he showed a set of heavy padlocks, each complete with hasp and staple. Together we went round the big house, fixing locks at doors and windows, testing fastenings repeatedly; finally, when our task was done, repairing to the lawn where Appleby awaited us with a teacart-load of toasted muffins, strawberry preserve and steaming oolong.
“What was in that old beer bottle that you stood beside the bed?” I asked. “It looked like ordinary water.”
“Water, yes,” he answered with a grin, “but not ordinary, I assure you. I have the—what you call him?—hunch?—my friend. Tonight, perhaps tomorrow, we shall have use for what I brought out from the village.”
“But what—”
“Hullo, there, ready for a spot of tea?” called Pemberton. “I’m famished, and the little woman’s just about to haul her colors down.”
“You are distrait, Madame?” de Grandin asked, dropping into a willow chair and casting a suspicious glance upon the tray of muffins Appleby extended.
“Indeed, I am. I’ve been feeling devils all day long.” She smiled at him a little wearily above her teacup rim. “Something’s seemed to boil up in me—it’s the queerest thing, but I’ve had an urge to dance, an almost irresistible impulse to put an Indian costume on and do the Bramara—the Bee-dance. I know it’s dreadful to feel so, with poor old Annie’s body lying by the wall and this menace hanging over us, but something seems to urge me almost past resistance to put my costume on and dance—”
“Tiens, Madame, one comprehends,” he smiled agreement. “I, too, have felt these so queer urges. Regardez, s’il vous plaît: We are beset by mental stress, we look about us for escape and there seems none; then suddenly from somewhere comes an urge unbidden. Perhaps it is to take a drink of tea; maybe we feel impelled to walk out in the rain; quite possibly the urge comes to sit down and strum at the piano, or, as in your case, to dance. Reason is a makeshift thing, at best. We have used it but a scant half-million years; our instincts reach back to the days when we crawled in primeval ooze. Trust instinct, Madame. Something boils within you, you declare? Très bien. It is your ego seeking liberation. Permit the boiling to continue; then, when the effete matter rises to the top, we skim him off”—with his hand he made a gesture as of scooping something up—“and throw him out. Voilà. We have got rid of that which worries us!”
“You think I should give way to it?”
“But certainly, of course; why not? This evening after dinner, if you still have the urge to dance, we shall delight to watch you and applaud your art.”
TEA FINISHED, APPLEBY, DE Grandin and I set out on a reconnaissance. We walked across the grass plot to the copse of evergreens from which the weird laughter came the night before and searched the ground on hands and knees. Our search was fruitless, for pine needles lay so thick upon the ground that nothing like a footprint could be found.
Behind the house stood barn and hen-coops, the latter empty, Pemberton’s archaic flivver and two saddle-horses tenanting the former. “It’s queer the place should he so much run down, considering the family’s wealth,” I murmured as we neared the stable.
“The former howner was a most hexcentric man, sir,” Appleby supplied. “’e never seemed to care about the plyce, and didn’t live ’ere hany more than necess’ry. Hi’ve ’eard ’e honly used hit as a sort o’—my Gawd, wot’s that?” He pointed to a little mound of earth beside the barn foundation.
De Grandin took a step or two in the direction of the little hillock, then paused, his small nose wrinkled in disgust. “It has the perfume of corruption,” he remarked.
“W’y, hit’s pore hold Laird, the master’s dawg, sir,” Appleby returned excitedly. “Who’s done this thing to ’im? Hi dug ’is gryve meself, sir, w’en we found ’im dead, hand Hi took partic’lar pynes to myke hit deep hand strong. ’eaped a thumpin’ boulder hon ’im, sir, Hi did, but now—”
“One sees, and smells,” de Grandin interrupted. “He has been resurrected, but not restored to life.”
The cockney leant above the violated grave to push the earth back in. “Picked clean ’e is, sir,” he reported. “’e couldn’t be no cleaner hif a stinkin’ buzzard ’ad been hat ’im.”
The little Frenchman tweaked the needle-points of his wheat-blond mustache between a thoughtful thumb and forefinger. “It is possible—quite probable,” he murmured. “They have imported every other sort of devilment; why not this one?”
“What?” I demanded. “Who’s imported what—”
“Zut! We have work to do, my friend. Do you begin here at this spot and w
alk in ever-widening circles. Eventually, unless I miss my guess, you will come upon the tracks of a large dog. When you have found them, call me, if you please.”
I followed his instructions while he and Appleby walked toward the house.
In fifteen or twenty minutes I reached a patch of soft earth where pine needles did not lie too thick to cover tracks, and there, plain as the cannibals’ mark on the sands of Crusoe’s island, showed the paw-print of a giant dog.
“Hullo, de Grandin!” I began. “I’ve found—”
A crashing in the undergrowth near by cut short my hail, and I drew the pistol which de Grandin had insisted that I carry as the thing or person neared me.
The rhododendron branches parted as a pair of groping hands thrust forth, and Appleby came staggering out. “Th’ black ’un, sir,” he gasped in a hoarse voice. “Hi passed ’im ’fore I knew it, sir, then seen ’is turban shinin’ hin th’ leaves. I myde to shoot ’im, but ’e stuck me with a forked stick. Hi’m a-dyin’, sir, a-dy—”
He dropped upon the grass, the fatal word half uttered, made one or two convulsive efforts to regain his feet, then slumped down on his face.
“De Grandin!” I called frenziedly. “I say, de Grandin—”
He was beside me almost as I finished calling, and together we cut the poor chap’s trouser leg away, disclosing two small parallel pin-pricks in the calf of his left leg. A little spot of ecchymosis, like the bruise left by a blow, was round the wounds, and beyond it showed an area of swelled and reddened skin, almost like a scald. When de Grandin made a small incision with his knife in the bruised flesh, then pressed each side the wounds, the blood oozed thickly, almost like a semi-hardened gelatin.
“C’est fini,” he pronounced as he rose and brushed his knees. “He did not have a chance, that poor one. This settles it.”
“What settles what?”
“This, parbleu! If we needed further proof that we are menaced by a band of desperate dakaits we have it now. It is the mark and sign-manual of the criminal tribes of Burma. The man is dead of cobra venom—but these wounds were not made by a snake’s fangs.”
A Rival from the Grave Page 60
