A Rival from the Grave

by Seabury Quinn

  “One evening as I shuffled home in my rag boots I heard a groan come from the shadows, and when I went to look I found an old man fallen by the way. He was pitifully thin and ragged, and his matted, unkempt beard was almost stiff with filth and slime. We who lived in utter poverty could recognize starvation when we saw it, and it needed but a single glance to see the man was famishing. He was taller by a head than I, but I had no trouble lifting him, for he weighed scarcely ninety pounds, and when I put my arm round him to steady him it was as if I held a rag-clothed skeleton.

  “Nikakova helped me get his ragged clothing off and wash away the clotted filth and vermin; then we laid him on a pile of straw, for we had no bedsteads, and fed him milk and brandy with a spoon. At first we thought him too far gone for rescue, but after we had worked with him an hour or so his eyes came open and he murmured, ‘Thank you, Gaspadin Aksakoff.’

  “‘Gaspadin!’ It was the first time I had heard that title of respect since the night the police dragged me from my bed almost a year before, and I burst out crying when the old man mumbled it. Then we fell to wondering. Who was this old rack of bones, clothed in stinking rags, filthy as a mujik and verminous as a mangy dog, who knew my name and addressed me with a courteous title? Exiles learn to suspect every change of light and shadow, and Nikakova and I spent a night of terror, starting at each footstep in the alley, almost fainting every time a creak came at our lockless door for fear it might be officers of the gendarmerie come to take us for affording shelter to a fugitive.

  “The starving stranger rallied in the night and by morning had sufficient strength to tell us he was Doctor Pavlovitch, seized by the Okhrana as a politically dangerous person and exiled for five years to Ekaterinburg. Less fortunate than we, he had been unable to obtain employment even as a manual laborer when the Government, preoccupied with war and threat of revolution, had turned him out to live or starve as fate decreed. For months he’d wandered through the streets like a stray animal, begging kopeks here and there, fighting ownerless dogs and cats for salvage from swill-barrels; finally he dropped exhausted in his tracks within a hundred yards of our poor cabin.

  “We had hardly food enough for two, and often less than the equivalent of a dime a week in cash, but somehow we contrived to keep our guest alive through the next winter, and when spring came he found work upon a farm.

  “The forces of revolt had passed to stronger hands than ours, and while we starved at Ekaterinburg Tsar Nicholas came there as an exile, too. But though the Bolsheviki ruled instead of Nicholas it only meant a change of masters for the three of us. Petrograd and all of Russia was in the hands of revolutionists so busy with their massacres and vengeances that they had no time or inclination to release us from our exile, and even if we had been freed we had no place to go. With the coming of the second revolution everything was communized; the Red Guards took whatever they desired with no thought of payment; tradesmen closed their shops and peasants planted just enough to keep themselves. We had been poor before; now we were destitute. Sometimes we had but one crust of black bread to share among us, often not even that. For a week we lived on Nikakova’s shoes, cutting them in little strips and boiling them for hours to make broth.

  “The Bolsheviks shot Nicholas and his family on July 17, and eight days later Kolchak and the Czechs moved into Ekaterinburg. Pavlovitch was recognized and retained to assist in the investigation of the murder of the royal family, and we acted as his secretaries. When the White Guards moved back toward Mongolia we went with them. Pavlovitch set up a laboratory and hospital at Tisingol, and Nikakova and I acted as assistants. We were very happy there.”

  “One rejoices in your happiness, Monsieur,” de Grandin murmured when the young man’s silence lengthened, “but how was it that Madame Aksakoff was frozen in this never quite sufficiently to be reprobated coffin?”

  Our visitor started from his revery. “There was fighting everywhere,” he answered. “Town after town changed hands as Red and White Guards moved like chessmen on the Mongol plains, but we seemed safe enough at Tisingol till Nikakova fell a victim to taiga fever. She hovered between life and death for weeks, and was still too weak to walk, or even stand, when word came that the Red horde was advancing and destroying everything before it. If we stayed our dooms were sealed; to attempt to move her meant sure death for Nikakova.

  “I told you Pavlovitch was one of Russia’s foremost scientists. In his work at Tisingol he had forestalled discoveries made at great universities of the outside world. The Leningrad physicians’ formula for keeping blood ionized and fluid, that it might be in readiness for instant use when transfusions were required, was an everyday occurrence at the Tisingol infirmary, and Carrell’s experiment of keeping life in chicken hearts after they were taken from the fowls had been surpassed by him. His greatest scientific feat, however, was to take a small warmblooded animal—a little cat or dog—drug it with an opiate, then freeze it solid with carbonic oxide snow, keep it in refrigeration for a month or two, then, after gently thawing it, release it, apparently no worse for its experience.

  “‘There is hope for Nikakova,’ he told me when the news came that the Bolsheviks were but two days away. ‘If you will let me treat her as I do my pets, she can be moved ten thousand miles in safety, and revived at any time we wish.’

  “I would not consent, but Nikakova did. ‘If Doctor Pavlovitch succeeds we shall be together once again,’ she told me, ‘but if we stay here we must surely die. If I do not live through the ordeal—nichevo, I am so near death already that the step is but a little one, and thou shalt live, my Serge. Let us try this one chance of escape.’

  “Pavlovitch secured a great Mongolian coffin and we set about our work. Nikakova was too weak to take me in her arms, but we kissed each other on the mouth before she drank ten drops of laudanum which sent her into a deep sleep within half an hour. The freezing process had to be immediate, so that animation would come to a halt at once; otherwise her little strength would be depleted by contending with the chill and she would really die, and not just halt her vital processes. We stripped her bedrobe off and set her hands in prayer and crossed her feet as though she came back from a pious pilgrimage, then sealed her lips with flexible collodion and stopped her nasal orifices; then, before she had a chance to suffocate, we laid her on a sheet stretched on carbonic oxide snow, spread another sheet above her and covered her with a sheet-copper dome into which we forced compressed carbonic oxide. The temperature inside her prison was so low her body stiffened with a spasm, every drop of blood and moisture in her system almost instantly congealing. Then we laid her in a shallow bath of distilled water which we froze as hard as steel with dry ice, and left her there while we prepared the coffin which was to be her home until we reached a place of safety.

  “Pavlovitch had made the coffin ready, putting tanks of liquefied carbonic oxide underneath the space reserved for the ice plinth and arranging vents so that the gas escaping from the liquid’s slow evaporation might circulate continuously about the icy tomb in which my darling lay. Around the ice block we set a hollow form of ice to catch and hold escaping gases, then wrapped the whole in layer on layer of yurta, or tent-felt, and put it in the coffin, which we sealed with several coats of Chinese lacquer. Thus my loved one lay as still as any sculptured saint, sealed in a tomb of ice as cold as those zaberegas, or ice mountains, that form along the banks of rivers in Siberia when the mercury goes down to eighty marks below the zero line.

  “We trekked across the Shamo desert till we came to Dolo Nor, then started down the Huang Ho, but just north of Chiangchun a band of Chahar bandits raided us. Me they carried off to hold for ransom, and it was three days before I made them understand I was a penniless White Russian for whom no one cared a kopek. They would have killed me out of hand had not an English prisoner offered them five pounds in ransom for me. Six months later I arrived at Shanghai with nothing but the rags I stood in.

  “White Russians have no status in the East, but this was he
lpful to me, for jobs no other foreigner would touch were offered me. I was in turn a ricksha boy, a German secret agent, a runner for a gambling-house, an opium smuggler and gun runner. At every turn my fortunes mounted. In ten years I was rich, the owner of concessions in Kalgan, Tientsin and Peiping, not much respected, but much catered to. Maskee”—he raised his shoulders in a shrug—“I’d have traded everything I owned for that red coffin that had vanished when the Chahars captured me.

  “Then at last I heard of Pavlovitch. He had been made the surgeon of the bandit party which co-operated with the one that captured me, and when they were incorporated in the Chinese army had become a colonel. When he saved a war lord’s life by transfusion of canned blood they presented him with half a City’s loot. Shortly afterward he emigrated to America. The coffin? When the Chahars first saw it they assumed that it was filled with treasure and were about to smash it open, but its unnatural coldness frightened them, and they buried it beneath the ice near Bouir Nor and scuttled off pell-mell in mortal fear of the ten thousand devils which Pavlovitch assured them were confined in it.

  “It cost me two years and a fortune to locate Nikakova’s burial-place, but finally we found it, and so deeply had they buried her beneath the zaberega’s never-melting ice that we had to blast to get my darling out. We wrapped the coffin in ten folds of tent-felt wet with ice-and-salt solution, and took it overland to Tientsin, where I put it in a ship’s refrigeration chamber and brought it to America. Yesterday I reached this city with it, having brought it here in a refrigeration car, and all arrangements had been made for Pavlovitch to revive Nikakova when—this afternoon I saw Proudhon and the Rimsky woman driving down the road toward Pavlovitch’s house and knew that we must hasten.”

  “Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur, but why should seeing your confrères of Russian days impress you with this need for desperate haste?” de Grandin asked.

  Aksakoff smiled bleakly. “Do you remember what befell the people who investigated the assassination of the Tsar?” he answered. “The assassins covered up their bloody work completely, so they thought; burned the bodies in a bonfire and threw the ashes down the shaft of an abandoned mine, but patient research under Sokoloff made all precautions useless. It was Pavlovitch whose work unearthed the evidence of crime. From the ashes in the old Isetsky mine he sifted little bits of evidence, the Emperor’s Maltese cross, six sets of steels from women’s corsets, a mixed assortment of charred buttons, buckles, parts of slippers, hooks and eyes, and a number of small dirty pebbles which, when cleaned and treated chemically, turned out to be pure diamonds. It was this evidence which proved the Bolsheviki’s guilt—after they bare-facedly denied all implication in the regicide, and all who helped to prove their guilt were marked for ‘execution’—even those who occupied the posts of clerks have been run down and murdered by their secret agents. There is no doubt Proudhon and the woman who was Pavlovitch’s mistress—and whose betrayal caused his exile in the Tsarist days—were sent here to assassinate him. It was unquestionably that female Judas who killed Pavlovitch, and after he was dead she and Proudhon rummaged through his papers. Their task is not only to stop oral testimony of their Government’s guilt, but to destroy incriminating documents, as well.”

  “One sees. And it is highly probable they found messages from you to him, advising him of your arrival. Tiens, I think that you were well advised to take this coffin from the house of death without delay.”

  “But in killing Pavlovitch they killed my darling, too!” sobbed Aksakoff. “The technique of his work was secret. No one else can bring belovèd Nikakova from her trance—”

  “I would not say as much,” denied the little Frenchman. “I am Jules de Grandin, and a devilish clever fellow. Let us see what we shall see, my friend.”

  “IT’S THE MOST FANTASTIC thing I ever heard!” I told him as we went to bed. “There’s no doubt the freezing process has preserved her wonderfully, but to hope to bring her back to life—that’s utterly absurd. When a person dies, he’s dead, and I’d stake my reputation that’s nothing but a lovely corpse in there,” I nodded toward the bathroom where the plinth of ice stood in the tub and Aksakoff stretched on a pallet by the bolted door, a pistol ready in his hand.

  De Grandin pursed his lips, then turned an impish grin on me. “You have logic and the background of experience to support your claims,” he nodded, “but as Monsieur Shakespeare says, heaven and earth contain things our philosophy has not yet dreamed of. As for logic, eh bien, what is it? A reasoning from collated data, from known facts, n’est-ce-pas? But certainly. Logically, therefore, wireless telegraphy was scientifically impossible before Marconi. Radio communication was logically an absurd dream till invention of the vacuum tube made former scientific logic asinine. Yet the principles that underlay these things were known to physicists for years; they simply had not been assembled in their proper order. Let us view this case:

  “Take, by example, hibernating animals, the tortoise of our northern climates, the frog, the snake; every autumn they put by their animation as a housewife folds up summer clothes for winter storage. They appear to die, yet in the spring they sally forth as active as they were before. One not versed in natural lore might come upon them in their state of hibernation and say as you just said, ‘This is a corpse.’ His experience would tell him so, yet he would be in error. Or take the fish who freezes in the ice. When spring dissolves his icy prison he swims off in search of food as hungrily as if he had not paused a moment in his quest. The toad encrusted in a block of slate, such as we see unearthed in coal mines now and then, may have been ‘dead’ le bon Dieu only knows how many centuries; yet once release him from encasement and he hops away in search of bugs to fill his little belly. Again—”

  “But these are all cold-blooded creatures,” I protested. “Mammals can’t suspend the vital process—”

  “Not even bears?” he interrupted with mock-mildness. “Or those Indians who when hypnotized fall into such deep trances that accredited physicians do not hesitate to call them dead, and are thereafter buried for so long a time that crops of grain are sown and harvested above them, then, disinterred, are reawakened at the hypnotist’s command?”

  “Humph,” I answered, nettled. “I’ve never seen such things.”

  “Précisément. I have. I do not know how they can be. I only know they are. When things exist we know that they are so, whether logic favors them or not.”

  “Then you think that this preposterous tale is true; that we can thaw this woman out and awaken her, after she’s lain dead and tombed in ice for almost twenty years?”

  “I did not say so—”

  “Why, you did, too!”

  “It was you, not I, who called her dead. Somatically she may be dead—clinically dead, in that her heart and lungs and brain have ceased to function, but that is not true death. You yourself have seen such cases revived, even when somatic death has lasted an appreciable time. She was not diseased when animation was suspended, and her body has been insulated from deteriorative changes. I think it possible the vital spark still slumbers dormant and can be revived to flame if we have care—and luck.”

  THE BATHROOM VIGIL LASTED five full days and nights. There seemed a steel-like quality to the icy catafalque that defied summer heat and gently dripping water from the shower alike, as if the ice had stored up extra chill in the long years it lay locked in the frost-bound earth of Outer Mongolia, and several times I saw it freeze the water they dropped on it instead of yielding to the liquid’s higher temperature. At last the casing melted off and they laid the stiff, marmoreal body in the tub, then ran a stream of water from the faucet. For ten hours this was cool, and the gelid body showed no signs of yielding to it. Time after time we felt the stone-hard arms and hands, the legs and feet that seemed for ever locked in algid rigor mortis, the little flower-like breasts that showed no promise of waking from their frigid unresponsiveness. Indeed, far from responding to the water’s thermal action, the frozen body seemed to chill its
bath, and we noticed little thread-like lines of ice take form upon the skin, standing stiffly out like oversized mold-spores and overlaying the white form with a coat of jewel-bright, quill-like pelage.

  “Excellent, parfait, splendide; magnifique!” de Grandin nodded in delight as the ice-fur coat took form. “The chill is coming forth; we are progressing splendidly.”

  When the tiny icicles cleared away, they raised the water’s temperature a little, gradually blending it from tepid to blood-warm, and fifteen hours of immersion in the warmer bath brought noticeable results. The skin became resilient to the touch, the flesh was firm but flexible, the folded hands relaxed and slipped down to the sides, slim ankles loosed their interlocking grip and the feet lay side by side.

  “Behold them, if you please, my friend,” de Grandin whispered tensely. “Her feet, see how they hold themselves!”

  “Well?” I responded, “What—”

  “Ah bah, has it been so long then since your student days that you do not remember the flaccidity of death? Think of the cadavers which you worked upon—were their feet like those ones yonder? By blue, they were not! They were prolapsed, they hung down on the ankles like extensions of the leg, for their flexor muscles had gone soft and inelastic. These feet stand out at obtuse angles to the legs.”

  “Well—”

  “Précisément; tu parles, mon ami. It is very well, I think. It may not be a sign of life, but certainly it negatives the flaccidness of death.”

  Periodically they pressed the thorax and abdomen, feeling for the hardness of deep-seated frozen organs. At length, “I think we can proceed, my friends,” de Grandin told us, and we lifted the limp body from the bath and dried it hurriedly with warm, soft towels. De Grandin drew the plugs of cotton from the nostrils and wiped the lips with ether to dissolve the seal of flexible collodion, and this done he and Aksakoff began to rub the skin with heated olive oil, kneading with firm gentleness, massaging downward toward the hands and feet, bending arms and legs, wrists, neck and ankles. Somehow, the process repulsed me. I had seen a similar technique used by embalmers when they broke up rigor mortis, and the certitude of death seemed emphasized by everything they did.