ST. BENEDICT’S CHURCHYARD LAY stark and ghastly in the night-light as I parked my car beside the dilapidated fence separating the little God’s Acre from the road. Discolored tombstones reared themselves from the dead winter grass like bones long dried upon some ancient battlefield, patches of hoar-frost showed leprous against the sod, and, mingling with the moaning of the night wind in the poplar boughs, the shrill, eery cry of a screech-owl came to us like the lament of an earth-bound spirit.
“Have a care, my friend,” de Grandin warned in a low breath as he clambered over the fence and made his way between the graves, “the ground is treacherous here. One false step, and pouf! your leg is broken against some of these mementoes of mortality.”
I followed him as quickly as I could till his upraised hand signaled a halt. “It is here we shall see what we shall see, if, indeed, we see it at all,” he promised, sinking to the moss at the foot of a great pine tree. “Observe that monument yonder? Bien, it is to it we must give our particular attention this night.”
I recognized the gravestone he indicated as standing in the Drigos’ burial plot. It was one of the cemetery’s oldest monuments, a low, table-like box of stone consisting of a flat horizontal slab about the size of a grave’s ground dimensions, supported by four upright pieces of marble, the name and vital dates of the family which first owned the plot being engraved on the tomb’s top. I recalled having heard the grave space originally belonged to the Bouvier family, but the last of the line had gone to his eternal rest long before I was born.
Fixing my eyes steadily on the old monument, I wondered what my companion meant by his assertion, wondered again, and turned to look over my shoulder toward the road where the clatter of a passing vehicle sounded on the macadam.
Somewhere in the town a tower clock began telling midnight. Bong, bong, bong, the sixteen-note chime sounded the full hour, followed by the deep resonant boom of the bell as it began its twelve strokes. One—two—three—
“Regardez!” de Grandin’s slim fingers bit into my arm as he hissed the command. A shiver, not due to the raw March air, raced up my spine and through my scalp, raising the short hairs above my greatcoat collar as a current of electricity might have done.
Beyond the Bouvier tomb, like a column of mist, too strong to be dissipated by the wind, yet almost too impalpable to be seen, a slender white form was rising, taking shape—coming toward us.
“Good God!” I cried in a choking voice, shrinking against de Grandin with the involuntary, unreasoning fear of the living for the dead. “What is it?”
“Zut!” he shook off my restraining clutch as an adult might brush aside a child in time of emergency. “Attendez, mon ami!” With a catlike leap he cleared the intervening graves and planted himself square in the path of the advancing wraith. Click! His pocket electric flash shot a beam of dazzling light straight into the specter’s face. I went sick with horror as I recognized the drawn features and staring, death-glazed eyes of—
“Ramalha Drigo, look at me,—I command it!” De Grandin’s voice sounded shrill and rasping with the intensity of purpose which was behind it. Coming abreast of him, I saw his little blue eyes were fairly starting from his face as he bent an unwinking stare on the dead face before him. The waxed ends of his small, blond mustache started upward, like the horns of an inverted crescent, as his lips drew themselves about his words. “Look—at—me—Ramalha Drigo,—I—command—it!”
Something like a tremor passed through the dead girl’s flaccid cheeks. For an instant her film-coated eye flickered with a look of lifelike intelligence. Then the face went limp with the flaccidity of death once more, the lids half dropped before the staring eyes, and her whole body crumpled like a wax figure suddenly exposed to a blast of heat.
“Catch her, Trowbridge, my friend!” de Grandin ordered excitedly. “Bear her to her father’s house and put her to bed. I come as soon as possible; meantime I have work to do.”
Thrusting the flashlight into his pocket he jerked out a small whistle and blew three quick, shrilling blasts. “À moi, sergent; à moi, mes enfants!” he called as the whistle fell clinking and bouncing to the gravestone beneath his feet.
As I carried the light, crumpled body of Ramalha Drigo toward the cemetery gate I heard the crash of booted feet against the graveyard shrubs mingling with hoarsely shouted commands and the savage, eager baying of police dogs straining at the leash. A hulking shape brushed past me at a run, and I made out the form of a state trooper rushing toward de Grandin, swinging a riot stick as he ran.
Something cold as clay touched my face. It was one of Ramalha’s little hands lying against my cheek as her arm had bent between her body and my shoulder when I caught her as she fell. Shifting her weight to one arm I took the poor dead hand in my free hand and lowered it to her side, then froze like a statue in my tracks. Faint, so faint it could scarcely be recognized, but perceptible, nevertheless, a feeble pulse was beating in her wrist.
“Good Lord!” I almost shouted to the unheeding night. “Merciful heaven, the child is alive!”
Rushing as I had not rushed since my cub days as an ambulance surgeon, I carried her to my waiting car, bundled the motor rug about her and drove to her father’s house at a pace which took account of no speed limit save my engine’s greatest capacity.
Kicking at the door, I roused the Drigo family from their beds, carried the senseless girl upstairs and placed her between woolen blankets with every available water-bottle and hot-pack in the house at her feet and spine.
Ten, fifteen minutes I watched beside her, administering a hypodermic injection of strychnine each five minutes. Gradually, like the shadow of the dawn breaking against a winter horizon, the faint flush of circulating blood appeared in her pallid lips and cheeks.
Standing at my elbow, Ricardo Drigo watched first apathetically, then wonderingly, finally in a fever of incredulous hope and fear. As a faint respiration fluttered in the girl’s breast, he fell to his knees beside the bed, burying his face in his hands and sobbing aloud in hysterical joy. “Oh, Lord of heaven,” he prayed between sobs, “reward, I beseech you, this Dr. de Grandin, for surely he is not as other men!”
“Tiens, my friend, you do speak truth!” agreed a complacent voice from the doorway behind us. “Of a certainty Jules de Grandin is a very remarkable fellow; but if you seek some necromancer, you would better look elsewhere. This de Grandin, he is a scientist; no more. Cordieu! Is that not enough!”
“PAR LA BARBE D’UN corbeau, Monsieur, but this port is exquisite!” de Grandin assured Drigo three hours later as he passed his tumbler across the table for replenishment. “And these so divine cigars”—he raised both hands in mute admiration,—“parbleu, I could smoke three of them at once and mourn because my mouth would not accommodate a fourth!
“But I see our good friend Trowbridge grows restless. He would have the whole story, from the beginning. Very well, then, to begin:
“As I told Friend Trowbridge, I had but come from Rio when I arrived in New York the other day. While I was in that so superb city of Brazil I became acquainted with more than one delegado of police, and from them I heard many strange things. For example”—he fixed his penetrating gaze on Drigo for a moment—“I heard the mystery of a Portuguese gentleman who came to Brazil from East Africa and took a beautiful house in the Praia Botafogo, only to relinquish it before his furniture was fairly settled in it. Before this gentleman lived in Africa he had dwelt in India. He was born there, in fact.
“Why he left that so beautiful city of Rio, the police did not know; but they had a story from one of their detectives that that gentleman came suddenly face to face with a Hindoo sailor from one of the ships in the harbor while he and his daughter were shopping in the Ouvidor. The Hindoo, it was said, had but looked at the daughter and laughed in the father’s face; but it was enough. He departed from Rio the next day, that gentleman; both he and his family and all his servants. To the United States he went, though none knew to what part, or w
hy.
“Eh bien, it was one of the fragments of mystery which we of the Service de Sûreté do constantly encounter—a little incident of life without beginning or end, without ancestry or posterity. Never mind, I stored it in my brain for future reference. Sooner or later all things we remember come to have a use, n’est-ce-pas?
“When next I see my dear friend Trowbridge he is looking very long in the face. One of his patients, a Brazilian lady, have died that very day, and he can not account for her death. But his story sounds interesting, and I think, perhaps—maybe, I find out something of some new disease, so I ask him to let me investigate.
“When we come to the house where this dead lady lay I am struck with—with something about her look, and I remember most American dead are embalmed almost instantly for their burial. I touch her face, it has not the hardness of flesh preserved with formaldehyde. Then I feel for the wounds where the embalmer would have cut; but I find none. One thing more I find. While her face were cold, it were not cold as the surrounding air. ‘How does this come?’ asks Jules de Grandin of Jules de Grandin; but answer there was none at all.
“As my dear Trowbridge and I leave that house of death I see the portrait of a gentleman who much resembled our host, but who wore a uniform such as the British army once wore. Yet not quite. There was a difference there, but what it was I can not say then.
“I ask Monsieur Drigo who the painted gentleman was, and he say, ‘He are my grandfather.’
“That night I do much thinking; finally I believe I have the thread of this mystery in my hands. I put together my knowledge and this is what I have:
“The uniform that painted gentleman wore are not of the British army, but of the British India Company. So. Now, he was a man in early middle life, this painted gentleman who wear the insignia of an artilleryman on his uniform, and, judging by his grandson’s apparent age, he should have lived about the time of the American Civil War. Very good, what was happening in India, where this painted gentleman lived, then? I think some more; then, ‘Ah,’ Jules de Grandin tell Jules de Grandin, ‘Jules de Grandin, you are one great stupid head; it was in 1857 that the Sepoy troops revolted against the English in India.’
“Yes? And what then? For once in history those English did act with sense. They meted to those Indian rebels with such measure as the rebels gave to them. For the atrocities of Nana Sahib they took logical vengeance by tying those rebels to the mouths of cannon and—pouf! it was soon over when the cannoneers fired their guns.
“So far, so good. What then? Those Indians are a vengeful race. They harbor hatred through many generations. This much I know. Something else I know, too. In India they sometimes, for money, will hypnotize a man—or, perchance, a woman—and bury him, to all appearances dead, in the earth for so long a time that corn planted above his grave will take root and grow several inches high. I have seen that with my own two eyes. Also I remember how one Colonel Ainsworth, an English gentleman who commanded some of the cannon from which those mutineers were blown to death, had apparently died in his English home in 1875, but came to life in the family vault ten days later.
“Almost he went crazy from that experience, though he was at length rescued. Two years later he suffered the same terrible fate. He was buried for dead, and came back to life again. And each time, before he had his seeming death, he had encountered a Hindoo in the road. At last he could stand the strain no more; but shot himself really dead rather than face the terror of a third living burial.
“Now, the people who wrote down the strange case of Colonel Ainsworth did but note that he had met Hindoos before he seemingly died; but, apparently, they attached no importance to these meetings. I do otherwise; for when I search my memory I find that of the officers who commanded the British guns at the Sepoys’ executions, nearly all died violent or sudden deaths. How do we know how many of them were buried alive, but not rescued as Colonel Ainsworth was? Eh? Also I remember from the records that many of the descendants of those officers had died mysteriously or suddenly, sometimes both.
“‘Morbleu,’ I tell myself, ‘Jules de Grandin, I think maybe—perhaps we have discover something!’
“I bet with myself, therefore, that this poor dead lady will not rest easy in her grave. Dead she may be, cher Trowbridge has so certified; but if she were not first dead in fact—the Brazilians do not believe in embalming their dead, and the embalmer’s instruments not therefore have made certain that she is dead altogether. Very well, then; wait and see.
“Next day my friend Trowbridge tell me her grave was robbed. I go to watch them open it, and find the tombs in that cemetery are old passages underground. She is not in her grave, I see that; but she might be somewhere in the cemetery, nevertheless. I learn, by asking what my friend Trowbridge would call silly questions, that the grave space where this lady was buried once belonged to a family called Bouvier. Old Monsieur Bouvier, who live and die many years ago, had a morbid fear of being buried alive, so he had a special tomb constructed in such manner that if he come to life underground he can slide back a panel of stone as you would open a door, and walk home to his family. This old tomb is still standing above the spot where this unfortunate dead lady have been buried. ‘Maybe,’ I tell myself, ‘maybe something have happen in that cemetery while no one was watching.’
“Already I have made inquiries and find that two strange Negroes have been in town since some days before this poor lady died. But though they lived in the Negro quarter they had nothing to do with the other colored people. Query: Were they Negroes or were they not Negroes, and if not, what were they? Hindoo, perhaps? I think yes.
“What then? The girl’s mantilla has been found above ground; her body has not been found below. Perhaps they play cat-and-mouse with her, sending her forth from her grave at night like a very vampire, perhaps to injure her father or others whom she had loved in life. I decide I will see.
“I seek out that Monsieur Lesterton, who is the juge d’instruction—how do you say? county prosecutor?—and tell him all.
“He is a lawyer in a million, that one. Instead of saying, ‘Talk to the Marines about it,’ he nod his head and tell me I may have as many gendarmes as I wish to help me with my plan.
“Tonight I go with friend Trowbridge and watch beside that old Monsieur Bouvier’s tomb. Presently that poor girl who is found fast in the death which is not death comes forth, walking over her own grave.
“Jules de Grandin is no fool. He, too, can hypnotize, and what a man can do he can undo, likewise, if he be clever. I order her to wake up. I flash my light in her eyes and I bring her to consciousness, then to natural sleep, as she was before the Hindoos’ power make her appear dead. I turn her over to Friend Trowbridge to make all well while I and the gendarmes search for those men who are the masters of death.
“We find them hidden in an old tomb, far underground. One of them I have the felicity of killing when he would resist arrest. The other is shot by a trooper when he would fly, but ere his life ran out with his blood he tells me he and his companion have followed Monsieur Drigo from India to Africa and from Africa to America. Two days before she ‘died’ Mademoiselle Ramalha is met by these men as she walks in the country. They hypnotize her and order her to ‘die’ in forty-eight hours—to die and be buried, then come forth from her grave each night at midnight and visit her father’s house. Voilà, that fellow, he too, died; but not before I had the truth.”
“But how did you make him confess, de Grandin?” I asked. “Surely his conscience did not trouble him, and if he knew he was dying he had nothing to fear from you.”
“Eh, did he not?” de Grandin answered with an elfish grin. “Ah, but he did! The pig is unclean to those people. If they do but so much as touch a porc they do lose their caste. I did promise that fellow that if he did not tell me all, and tell the truth, right away, immediately, at once, I would see he was buried in the same coffin with a pig’s carcass and that his grave should be wet with the blood of a slaughtered swine ev
ery full moon. Pardieu, you should have seen him make haste to tell me all before he died!”
He turned toward Drigo; “Mademoiselle Ramalha has little to fear in the future, Monsieur,” he promised. “The agents of vengeance have failed, and I do not think they will make another attempt upon her.
“Meanwhile, Friend Trowbridge, the morning breaks and the shadows flee away. Let us bid Monsieur Drigo good-night and hasten home.
“Cordieu!” he chuckled as we climbed into my waiting motor, “had I stayed beside Monsieur Drigo’s wine a half-hour longer I should not have been able to leave at all. As it is, Trowbridge, my friend, I see two of you sitting beside me!”
The Dead Hand
JULES DE GRANDIN PASSED his coffee cup across the breakfast table for its third replenishment. “It seems, my friend,” he told me with a serio-comic grimace, “as if I exercise some sort of malign influence upon your patients. Here I have been your guest but two short weeks and you all but lose Mademoiselle Drigo and the so excellent Madame Richards is dead altogether.”
“I’d hardly blame you for Mrs. Richards’ death,” I comforted as I refilled his cup. “She’d suffered from mitral stenosis for the past two years, and the last time I examined her I was able to detect a diastolic murmur without my stethoscope. No, her trouble dated back some time before your advent, de Grandin.”
“You relieve my conscience,” he replied. “And now you go to offer your condolences to the family? May I accompany you? Always, I have found, there is opportunity for those who will to learn something.”
“NOM D’UN NOM, BUT it is the good Sergeant Costello!” he exclaimed as a heavy-set man closed the door of the Richards mansion and strode across the wide veranda. “Eh bien, my friend, do not you remember me?” He stretched both slender, well kept hands to the big Irishman. “Surely, you have not forgotten—”
“I’ll say I ain’t,” the big detective denied with a welcoming grin. “You sure showed us some tricks in the Kalmar case, sir. Belike you’d like to give us a lift with this one?” He jerked a thumb toward the house he had just quit. “It’s a bughouse in there, Dr. de Grandin.”
The Horror on the Links Page 14
