The Horror on the Links

by Seabury Quinn

  “I don’t know,” I admitted, “but there must be some connection …”

  “Connection? Of course there is a connection,” de Grandin affirmed, rummaging deeper in the portfolio. “A-a-ah! What is this? Nom d’un nom, Friend Trowbridge, I think I smell the daylight! Look!”

  He held a full page story from one of the sensational New York dailies before him, his eyes glued to the flowing type and crude, coarse-screened half-tones of half a dozen young women which composed the article.

  “WHAT HAS BECOME OF THE MISSING GIRLS?” I read in boldfaced type across the top of the page.

  “Are sinister, unseen hands reaching out from the darkness to seize our girls from palace and hovel, shop, stage and office?” the article asked rhetorically. “Where are Ellen Munro and Dorothy Sawyer and Phyllis Bouchet and three other lovely, light-haired girls who have walked into oblivion during the past year?”

  I read to the end the sensational account of the girls’ disappearances. The cases seemed fairly similar; each of the vanished young women had failed to return to her home and had never been accounted for in any manner, and in no instance, according to the newspaper, had there been any assignable reason for voluntary departure.

  “Parbleu, but he was stupid, even for a journalist!” de Grandin asserted as I completed my inspection of the story. “Why, I wager even my good Friend Trowbridge has already noticed one important fact which this writer has treated as though it were as commonplace as the nose on his face.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, old chap,” I answered, “but looks to me as though the reporter had covered the case from every possible angle.”

  “Ah? So?” he replied sarcastically. “Morbleu, we shall have to consult the oculist in your behalf when we return home, my friend. Look, look I beseech you, upon the pictures of these so totally absent and unaccounted for young women, cher ami, and tell me if you do not observe a certain likeness among them, not only a resemblance to each other, but to that Mademoiselle Lee who jilted the son of Dr. Marston? Can you see it, now I have pointed it out?”

  “No—wh—why, yes—yes, of course!” I responded, running my eye over the pictures accompanying the story. “By the Lord Harry, de Grandin, you’re right; you might almost say there is a family resemblance between these girls! You’ve put your fingers on it, I do believe.”

  “Hélas, no!” he answered with a shrug. “I have put my finger on nothing as yet, my friend. I reach, I grope, I feel about me like a blind man tormented by a crowd of naughty little boys, but nothing do the poor fingers of my mind encounter. Pah! Jules de Grandin, you are one great fool! Think, think, stupid one!”

  He seated himself on the edge of the bed, cupping his face in his hands and leaning forward till his elbows rested on his knees.

  Suddenly he sprang erect, one of his elfish smiles passing across his small, regular features. “Nom d’un chatrouge, my friend, I have it—I have it!” he announced. “The pets—the pets that old stealer of motor cars spoke of! They are in the basement! Pardieu, we will see those pets, cher Trowbridge; with our four collective eyes we will see them. Did not that so execrable stealer declare she was to have been one of them? Now, in the name of Satan and brimstone, whom could he have meant by ‘she’ if not that unfortunate child with eyes like la grenouille? Eh?”

  “Why …” I began, but he waved me forward.

  “Come, come; let us go,” he urged. “I am impatient, I am restless, I am not to be restrained. We shall investigate and see for ourselves what sort of pets are kept by one who shows young girls their deformed faces in mirrors and—Parbleu!—steals motor cars from my friends.”

  HURRYING DOWN THE MAIN stairway, we hunted about for the cellar entrance, finally located the door and, holding above our heads a pair of candles from the hall, began descending a flight of rickety steps into a pitch-black basement, rock-walled and, judging by its damp, moldy odor, unfloored save by the bare, moist earth beneath the house.

  “Parbleu, the dungeons of the château at Carcassonne are more cheerful than this,” de Grandin commented as he paused at the stairs’ foot, holding his candle aloft to, make a better inspection of the dismal place.

  I suppressed a shudder of mingled chill and apprehension as I stared at the blank stone walls, unpierced by windows or other openings of any sort, and made ready to retrace my steps. “Nothing here,” I announced. “You can see that with half an eye. The place is as empty as …”

  “Perhaps, Friend Trowbridge,” he agreed, “but Jules de Grandin does not look with half an eye. He uses both eyes, and uses them more than once if his first glance does not prove sufficient. Behold that bit of wood on the earth yonder. What do you make of it?”

  “U’m—a piece of flooring, maybe,” I hazarded.

  “Maybe yes, maybe no,” he answered. “Let us see.”

  Crossing the cellar, he bent above the planks, then turned to me with a satisfied smile. “Flooring does not ordinarily have ringbolts in it, my friend,” he remarked bending to seize the iron ring which was made fast to the boards by a stout staple.

  “Ha!” As he heaved upward the planks came away from the black earth, disclosing a board-lined well about three feet square and of uncertain depth. An almost vertical ladder of two-by-four timbers led downward from the trap-door to the well’s impenetrable blackness.

  “Allons, we descend,” he commented, turning about and setting his foot on the topmost rung of the ladder.

  “Don’t be a fool,” I advised. “You don’t know what’s down there.”

  “True”—his head was level with the floor as he answered—“but I shall know, with luck, in a few moments. Do you come?”

  I sighed with vexation as I prepared to follow him.

  AT THE LADDER’S FOOT he paused, raising his candle and looking about inquiringly. Directly before us was a passageway through the earth, ceiled with heavy planks and shored up with timbers like the lateral workings of a primitive mine.

  “Ah, the plot shows complications,” he murmured, stepping briskly into the dark tunnel. “Do you come, Friend Trowbridge?”

  I followed, wondering what manner of thing might be at the end of the black, musty passage, but nothing but fungus-grown timbers and walls of moist, black earth met my questing gaze.

  De Grandin preceded me by some paces, and, I suppose, we had gone fifteen feet through the passage when a gasp of mingled surprise and horror from my companion brought me beside him in two long strides. Fastened with nails to the timbers at each side of the tunnel were a number of white, glistening objects, objects which, because of their very familiarity, denied their identity to my wondering eyes. There was no mistaking the things; even a layman could not have failed to recognize them for what they were. I, as a physician, knew them even better. To the right of the passage hung fourteen perfectly articulated skeletons of human legs, complete from foot to ilium, gleaming white and ghostly in the flickering light of the candles.

  “Good heavens!” I exclaimed.

  “Sang du diable!” Jules de Grandin commented. “Behold what is there, my friend,” he pointed to the opposite wall. Fourteen bony arms, complete from hand to shoulder-joint, hung pendulously from the tunnel’s upright timbers.

  “Pardieu,” de Grandin muttered, “I have known men who collected stuffed birds and dried insects; I have known those who stored away Egyptian mummies—even the skulls of men long dead—but never before have I seen a collection of arms and legs! Parbleu, he was caduc—mad as a hatter, this one, or I am much mistaken.”

  “So these were his pets?” I answered. “Yes, the man was undoubtedly mad to keep such a collection, and in a place like this. Poor fellow …”

  “Nom d’un canon!” de Grandin broke in; “what was that?”

  From the darkness before us there came a queer, inarticulate sound, such as a man might make attempting to speak with a mouth half-filled with food, and, as though the noise had wakened an echo slumbering in the cavern, the sound was repeated, multiplied again a
nd again till it resembled the babbling of half a dozen overgrown infants—or an equal number of full grown imbeciles.

  “Onward!” Responding to the challenge of the unknown like a warrior obeying the trumpet’s call to charge, de Grandin dashed toward the strange noise, swung about, flashing his candle this side and that, then:

  “Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!” he almost shrieked. “Look, Friend Trowbridge, look and say that you see what I see, or have I, too, gone mad?”

  Lined up against the wall was a series of seven small wooden boxes, each with a door composed of upright slats before it, similar in construction to the coops in which country folk pen brooding hens—and no larger. In each of the hutches huddled an object, the like of which I had never before seen, even in the terrors of nightmare.

  The things had the torsos of human beings, though hideously shrunken from starvation and encrusted with scales of filth, but there all resemblances to mankind ceased. From shoulders and waist there twisted flaccid tentacles of unsupported flesh, the upper ones terminating in flat, paddle-like flippers which had some remote resemblance to hands, the lower ones ending in almost shapeless stubs which resembled feet, only in that each had a fringe of five shriveled, unsupported protuberances of withered flesh.

  On scrawny necks were balanced caricatures of faces, flat, noseless chinless countenances with horrible crossed or divergent eyes, mouths widened almost beyond resemblance to buccal orifices and—horror of horrors!—elongated, split tongues protruding several inches from the lips and wagging impotently in vain efforts to form words.

  “Satan, thou art outdone!” de Grandin cried as he held his candle before a scrap of paper decorating one of the cages after the manner of a sign before an animal’s den at the zoo. “Observe!” he ordered, pointing a shaking finger at the notice.

  I looked, then recoiled, sick with horror. The paper bore the picture and name of Ellen Munro, one of the girls mentioned as missing in the newspaper article we had found in the dead man’s bedroom.

  Beneath the photograph was scribbled in an irregular hand: “Paid 1-25-97.”

  Sick at heart we walked down the line of pens. Each was labeled with the picture of a young and pretty girl with the notation, “Paid,” followed by a date. Every girl named as missing in the newspaper was represented in the cages.

  Last of all, in a coop somewhat smaller than the rest, we found a body more terribly mutilated than any. This was marked with the photograph and name of Dora Lee. Beneath her name was the date of her “payment,” written in bold red figures.

  “Parbleu, what are we to do, my friend?” de Grandin asked in an hysterical whisper. “We can not return these poor ones to the world, that would be the worst form of cruelty; yet—yet I shrink from the act of mercy I know they would ask me to perform if they could speak.”

  “Let’s go up,” I begged. “We must think this thing over, de Grandin, and if I stay here any longer I shall faint.”

  “Bien,” be agreed, and turned to follow me from the cavern of horrors.

  “It is to consider,” he began as we reached the upper hall once more. “If we give those so pitiful ones the stroke of mercy we are murderers before the law, yet what service could we render them by bringing them once more into the world? Our choice is a hard one, my friend.”

  I nodded.

  “Morbleu, but he was clever, that one,” the Frenchman continued, half to me, half to himself. “What a surgeon! Fourteen instances of Wyeth’s amputation of the hip and as many more of the shoulder—and every patient lived, lived to suffer the tortures of that hell-hole down there! But it is marvelous! None but a madman could have done it.

  “Bethink you, Friend Trowbridge. Think how the mighty man of medicine brooded over the suicide of his crippled son, meditating hatred and vengeance for the heartless woman who had jilted him. Then—snap! went his great mentality, and from hating one woman he fell to hating all, to plot vengeance against the many for the sin of the one. And, cordieu, what a vengeance! How he must have laid plans to secure his victims; how he must have worked to prepare that hell-under-the-earth to house those poor, broken bodies which were his handiwork, and how he must have drawn upon the great surgical skill which was his, even in his madness, to transform those once lovely ones into the visions of horror we have just beheld! Horror of horrors! To remove the bones and let the girls still live!”

  He rose, pacing impatiently across the hall. “What to do? What to do?” he demanded, striking his open hands against his forehead.

  I followed his nervous steps with my eyes, but my brain was too numbed by the hideous things I had just seen to be able to respond to his question.

  I looked hopelessly past him at the angle of the wall by the great fireplace, rubbed my eyes and looked again. Slowly, but surely, the wall was declining from the perpendicular.

  “De Grandin,” I shouted, glad of some new phenomenon to command my thoughts, “the wall—the wall’s leaning!”

  “Eh, the wall?” be queried. “Pardieu, yes! It is the rain; the foundations are undermined. Quick, quick, my friend! To the cellars, or those unfortunate ones are undone!”

  We scrambled down the stairs leading to the basement, but already the earth floor was sopping with water. The well leading to the madman’s sub-cellar was more than half full of bubbling, earthy ooze.

  “Mary, have pity!” de Grandin exclaimed. “Like rats in a trap, they did die. God rest their tired souls”—he shrugged his shoulders as he turned to retrace his steps—“it is better so. Now, Friend Trowbridge, do you hasten aloft and bring down that young girl from the room above. We must run for it if we do not wish to be crushed under the falling timbers of this house of abominations!”

  THE STORM HAD SPENT itself and a red, springtime sun was peeping over the horizon as de Grandin and I trudged up my front steps with the mutilated girl stumbling wearily between us. We had managed to flag a car when we got out.

  “Put her to bed, my excellent one,” de Grandin ordered Nora, my housekeeper, who came to meet us enveloped in righteous indignation and an outing flannel nightgown. “Parbleu, she has had many troubles!”

  In the study, a glass of steaming whisky and hot water in one hand, a vile-smelling French cigarette in the other, he faced me across the desk. “How was it you knew not that house, my friend?” he demanded.

  I grinned sheepishly. “I took the wrong turning at the detour,” I explained, “and got on the Yerbyville Road. It’s just recently been hard-surfaced, and I haven’t used it for years because it was always impassable. Thinking we were on the Andover Pike all the while, I never connected the place with the old Olmsted Mansion I’d seen hundreds of times from the road.”

  “Ah, yes,” he agreed, nodding thoughtfully, “a little turn from the right way, and—pouf!—what a distance we have to retrace.”

  “Now, about the girl upstairs,” I began, but he waved the question aside.

  “The mad one had but begun his devil’s work on her,” he replied. “I, Jules de Grandin, will operate on her eyes and make them as straight as before, nor will I accept one penny for my work. Meantime, we must find her kindred and notify them she is safe and in good hands.

  “And now”—he handed me his empty tumbler—“a little more whisky, if you please, Friend Trowbridge.”

  Ancient Fires

  “TIENS, FRIEND TROWBRIDGE, THIS is interesting.” Jules de Grandin passed the classified page of the Times across the breakfast table and indicated one of the small advertisements with the polished nail of his well-groomed forefinger. “Regard this avis, if you please, and say if I am not the man.”

  Fixing my reading glasses firmly on my nose, I perused the notice he pointed out:

  WANTED—A man of more than ordinary courage to undertake confidential and possibly dangerous mission. Great physical strength not essential, but indomitable bravery and absolute fearlessness in the face of seemingly supernatural manifestations are. This is a remarkable work and will require the services of a rem
arkable man. A fee up to $10,000 will be paid for the successful prosecution of the case.

  X.L. Selfridge, Attorney, Jennifer Building.

  De Grandin’s round blue eyes shone with elated anticipation as I put down the paper and regarded him across the cloth. “Morbleu, is it not an apple from the tree of Divine Providence?” he demanded, twisting the ends of his diminutive blond mustache ferociously. “A remarkable man for a remarkable work, do they say? Cordieu, but Jules de Grandin is that man, nor do I in any wise imply perhaps! You will drive me down to that so generous soliciteur, Friend Trowbridge, and we shall together collect from him this ten thousand dollars, or may I never hear the blackbirds whistle in the trees of St. Cloud again.”

  “Sounds like some bootlegger advertising for a first lieutenant,” I discouraged, but he would not be gainsaid.

  “We shall go, we shall most certainly go to see this remarkable lawyer who offers a remarkable fee to a remarkable man,” he, insisted, rising and dragging me from the table. “Morbleu, my friend, excitement is good, and gold is good, too; but gold and excitement together—la, la, they are a combination worthy of any man’s love! Come, we shall go right away, at once, immediately.”

  We went. Half an hour later we were seated across a flat-topped mahogany desk, staring at a thin, undersized little man with an oversized bald head and small, sharp, bird-like black eyes.

  “This seems incredibly good, gentlemen,” the little lawyer assured us when he had finished examining the credentials de Grandin showed. “I had hoped to get some ex-service man—some youngster who hadn’t gotten his fill of adventure in the great war, perhaps—or possibly some student of psychic phenomena—but—my dear sir!”—he beamed on my friend—“to secure a man of your standing is more than I had dared hope. Indeed, I did not suspect such characters existed outside book covers.”

  “Parbleu, Monsieur l’Avoué,” de Grandin replied with one of his impish smiles, “I have been in what you Americans call some tight places, but never have I been shut up in a book. Now, if you will be so good as to tell us something of this so remarkable mission you wish undertaken—” He paused, voice and eyebrows raised interrogatively.