The Horror on the Links

by Seabury Quinn

  An amazing scene greeted us. The room was a tastefully furnished bedchamber, pieces of mahogany, well chosen rugs and shaded lamps giving it the air of intimacy such apartments have at their best. Against the farther wall, opposite the dressing table, stood a pair of twin beds, and on the nearer one lay the pajama-clad form of the young man we had seen driving in the park a few days before. Obviously, he was asleep, and, quite as obviously his sleep was troubled, for he tossed and moaned restlessly, turning his head from side to side on the pillow, and once or twice attempting to rise to a sitting posture.

  In the niche beside the windows, beside the telephone table, crouched Mrs. Penneman, clad in a negligée of orchid silk, her frightened eyes turning now on her sleeping husband, now on something which occupied the center of the room.

  I followed her gaze as it swerved from the man on the bed and gasped in astonishment, then rubbed my eyes in wonder and gasped again. A circle of holly leaves, some six feet in diameter, lay upon the rug, and within it, half nebulous, like a ghost, but plainly visible, cowered the form of Madame Naîra, the Veiled Prophetess. She was clad as we had first seen her, in a diaphanous one-piece garment of midnight blue silk encrusted with tiny bright metal plates, and on her head was the crown of Egypt’s royalty. But the veil was gone from her face, and if ever I beheld loathsome, inhuman hatred on human countenance, it sat upon the beautiful features of the fortune-teller. Her green eyes were no longer narrow, but opened to their greatest compass, round and flashing with fury, and her red mouth was squared like the grimacing of an old Greek tragic mask or those hideous carved heads made by the natives of Fiji. Now she extended her hands, long, slender and red-nailed, and now she beat her breasts with clenched fists. Again she opened her vivid lips and emitted gurgling sounds like the moanings of an enraged cat, or hissed with a sibilant, spitting noise, as though she were in very truth a cat and no woman at all.

  “Très bien, Madame,” de Grandin bowed to Mrs. Penneman, “I see you have caught the marauder.”

  He turned nonchalantly to the hissing fury inside the circle of holly leaves. “I believe you did warn me not to pit my strength—my puny strength—against one who drew her power from the goddess of Bubastis?” he asked mockingly. “You have some further warnings to give, n’est-ce-pas, Madame?”

  “Let me go; let me go!” she begged, stretching her hands out to him supplicatingly.

  “Eh, what is this? You do beg deliverance of me?” he replied in mock misunderstanding. “Were you not about to forfeit my so worthless life if I continued to espouse the cause of the wife who had been put away? Eh bien, Madame Cat, you purr a different tune tonight, it would seem.”

  “Benjamin, Benjamin,” the prisoned woman screamed. “Help me, my husband, my lover! See, by the ring I hold you with, I implore your aid!”

  The man on the bed stirred uneasily and moaned in his sleep, but did not wake or rise.

  “I fear my puny science has bested you, Madame Cat,” de Grandin put in. “Your husband-lover is bound in a spell which I did conjure up from a bottle, and not all your magic can overcome it. Seek no help from him. I, Jules de Grandin, rule here!”

  With that his cloak of sarcasm fell from him, and he faced her with a visage as savage and implacable as her own. “You—you would come into honest women’s houses and take their men!” he fairly spat at her. “You would thrust your unclean magic between a man and the mother-to-be of his child! You—mordieu—you would steal the hat and coat of Jules de Grandin! Look not for mercy from me. Till cock-crow I shall hold you here, and then—” He elevated his shoulders in an expressive shrug.

  “No, no; not that!” she begged, and her voice sank from a wail to a whimper. “See, I will give back his ring. I will release him from my charm—only let me go; let me go!”

  “I make no promises to such as you,” he responded, but the self-satisfied twinkle in his little blue eyes, and the half-checked gesture of his right hand as it rose to caress his trimly waxed blond mustache betrayed him.

  The woman redoubled her entreaties. She sank to her knees and lowered her forehead to the floor. “Master!” she exclaimed. “I am your slave, your conquest. You have won. Show me mercy, and I will swear by the head of Bast, my mother, never to trouble this man or this woman again!”

  “Tiens,” this time his hand would not be denied. It rose automatically to his mustache and tweaked the waxed end viciously. “Give back the ring, then, and go in peace. And make sure that you send us those hats and those overcoats which you did so unwisely steal from us.”

  She tossed a heavy gold seal ring across the intervening hedge of holly, and de Grandin bent forward, retrieving the trinket, before he displaced one of the green twigs with the toe of his boot.

  There was a noise like steam escaping from an overheated teakettle, and the woman on the floor seemed suddenly to elongate, to draw out into a vapory nothingness, and vanish like a puff of smoke before a freshening breeze.

  “Here, Madame,” de Grandin bowed gallantly, French fashion, from the hips, as he extended the seal to Mrs. Penneman. “Do you place this upon your husband’s finger and bid him be more careful in future. He will wake anon, and have no memory of the thralldom in which he has been held. Blame him not. He signed himself into slavery to a thing which was old—and very wicked—when time was still a youth.”

  Mrs. Penneman bent above her husband and slipped the golden circlet on the little finger of his left hand, then leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth. “My boy, my poor, sweet boy,” she murmured, as gently as a mother might croon above her babe.

  “Isn’t he wonderful?” she asked de Grandin.

  “Undoubtlessly, Madame,” the Frenchman agreed with a quick bow. “Did he not have the rare judgment to pick you for a helpmeet? But me, I think I am a little wonderful, too.” He twisted first one, then the other end of his mustache till the waxed points stood out from his lips like the whiskers of a belligerent tomcat.

  “Of course you are—you’re a darling!” she agreed enthusiastically, and before he was aware of her intention, she put her hands upon his shoulders and kissed him soundly first on one cheek, then the other, finally upon the lips.

  “Pardieu, Friend Trowbridge, I think it is high time we did leave these reunited lovers together!” he exclaimed, his little eyes dancing like sunlight reflected on running water. “Come, my friend, let us go. Allez-vous-en!

  “Bonne, nuit, Madame!”

  “FOR THE LOVE OF heaven, de Grandin.” I demanded as we drove home, “what have I been seeing, or have I dreamed it all? Was that really Madame Naîra in the Pennemans’ bedroom, and if it were—?”

  “Ha!” he gave a short, delighted laugh. “Did I not tell you you should see what you should see, and that it would be worth seeing?”

  “Never mind the showmanship,” I cut in. “Just explain all this crazy business—if you can.”

  “Eh bien, that can also be arranged,” he replied. “Listen, my friend. The average man will tell you there are no such things as witches, and he will, perhaps, be right in the main, but he will also be wrong. From the very birth of time there have been forces—evil forces, parbleu!—which the generality of men wisely forbore to understand or to know, but which a few sought out and allied themselves with for their own wicked advantage.

  “These gods of ancient times, now—what were they but such forces? Nothing. Zeus, Apollo, Osiris, Ptah, Isis, Bast—such things are but names; they describe certain vaguely understood, but nonetheless potent forces. Pardieu, there is, no God but God, my friend; the rest are—who knows what?

  “Now, when your countrymen hanged each other in Salem town in the winter of 1692, they undoubtlessly killed many innocent persons, but their basic idea was right. There were then, there have always been, and there still are certain servants of that evil entity, or combination of entities, which we call Satan.

  “This Madame Naîra, she was one. Cordieu, she was a very great one, indeed.

  “In some way, I know n
ot how, she had become adept in using certain principles of evil for her ends, and set up in business as a fortune-teller in the world’s richest city. Before our time there were thousands such in Thebes, Babylon, Ilium and Rome. Always these evil ones follow the course of the river of gold.”

  “And you mean to tell me Penneman actually married her when he put his ring on that statue’s hand?” I asked, incredulously.

  “Mais non, he did not wed her, for true marriage is a spiritual linking of the souls, my friend, but he did put himself in her power, for when he had gone she took the ring he left and kept it, and having such an intimately personal possession of his, she also acquired a powerful hold on its owner.

  “The first clue I had to the true state of affairs was when Madame Penneman related the incident of the strange woman’s appearance in her chamber. Already she had told of the incident of the missing ring, and when she declared her husband exclaimed, ‘Second, Second!’ in his sleep as the sorceress bent above him, at once I knew that what he said was not ‘Second,’ but ‘Sechet,’ which is another name for Bast, the cat-headed goddess.

  “‘Very good,’ I tell me, ‘we have here a votary of that cruel half woman, half cat, which reigned in olden times along the banks of the Nile. We shall see how we can defeat her.’

  “I then undertook to ascertain what the young Penneman did while he neglected his wife. Parbleu, his time and money were lavished like water on that veiled woman for whose smile he forsook her he had sworn to love and cherish!”

  “Then there really was a liaison between him and Madame Naîra?” I asked.

  “Yes—yes, and no,” he replied ambiguously. “For the touch of her lower lip he would have walked barefoot over miles of broken glass, yet he knew not what he did while doing it. His state was something akin to that of one under hypnosis—conscious of his acts and deeds while doing them, entirely unaware of them afterward. A sort of externally induced amnesia, it was.

  “These things puzzled me much, but still I was unwilling to concede the woman possessed more than ordinary powers. ‘We shall see this Veiled Prophetess,’ I tell me. ‘Friend Trowbridge and I shall interview her under assumed names, and prove to ourselves that she is but a charlatan.’

  “Eh bien, we did see much. We did see the loss of our hats and overcoats!”

  “But if Madame Naîra knew at once who you were and that you were fighting her, how was it she could not avoid the trap—and, by the way, what was that trap?” I demanded.

  “I can not say,” he responded. “Perhaps there are limitations on her powers of divination. It may well be that she could read my thoughts even to my name, when we were face to face, yet could not project herself through space to observe what I planned while away from her. Were not those other witches of olden times unable to say when the officers of the law were descending on them, and so were taken to perish at the stake?

  “As for the trap we set, my friend, it was simple. That was not the Veiled Prophetess herself you did behold in Madame Penneman’s room, but her simulacrum—her projection. It is possible for those people, by taking thought, to project their likenesses at great distances, but always they must be where there is sympathetic atmosphere. This the witch woman already had, because she had bound Benjamin Penneman in her spell. At will she could assume the likeness of herself in his room, or anywhere he happened to be, while her living body lay, as though locked in sleep, miles away. That explains how it is she vanished so mysteriously after warning Madame Penneman on her previous visits.

  “But, grâce à Dieu, for all ill there is a remedy, if we can but find it. I bethought me. ‘Is it not likely,’ I ask me, ‘that the things which charm away those other evil people, the werewolves and the vampires, will also prevent the free movement of the projection of a witch?’

  “‘Morbleu, but it is most probable,’ I reply to me, and so I set about my work.

  “First I did give to Madame Penneman a harmless drug—a hypnotic—to mix with the food and drink of her husband. That will induce a seemingly natural sleep, and hold him fast away from the wicked Madame Naîra. Very good. The first night the plan did work well, the second and third, also.

  “Heretofore this woman have come in her spiritual likeness to charm her lover back when he have returned to his wife. I make sure she will do so again, and I have prepared a barrier which I think she can not pass. It is made of the wicks of blessed candles and on it are strung many leaves and twigs of holly—holly, the Christmas bloom, the touch of which is intolerable to evil spirits and over which they can not pass.

  “When the projection of Madame Naîra comes to Penneman’s house to-night, Madame Penneman does surround it suddenly with the ring of holly. Then she calls me. Had it been the real Naîra in the flesh, she could have stepped over the holly, but her projection, being spirit—and evil spirit, at that—was powerless to move. Also, my friend, I well knew that if I did but keep that spiritual seeming of the real Naîra away from her body until the crowing of the cock it might have great difficulty in returning to its habitation, and would, perhaps, be forced to wander forever through space. The flesh of Madame Naîra would, as we say, die, for there would be no spirit to animate it.

  “Therefore, I was in position to bargain with her, to force her to give back the ring she stole by trick from the young Penneman and to quit the house and the lives of those young people forevermore.”

  “But why didn’t you keep her in the holly circle, if what you say is true?” I asked. “Surely, she would be better dead.”

  “What!” he demanded. “And leave her evil spirit, freed from the bonds of flesh, to walk the earth by night? Not I, my friend. In the flesh she had certain restrictions; dying a natural death she shall probably return to that unpleasant place from whence she came; but had I torn her from her body by force, she would have still held the young Penneman beneath her spell, and that would have meant death, or worse, for him. No, my friend, I did act for the best, I assure you.

  “Br-r-r-r!” he shivered and pulled a comic face as I brought the car to a stop before my door. “I do still shake like a little wet dog from that experience when she stole my coat, Friend Trowbridge,” he announced. “Come, a long drink of your so excellent sherry before we go to bed! It will start the blood to flowing through my frozen veins once more.”

  The Curse of Everard Maundy

  “MORT D’UN CHAT! I do not like this!” Jules de Grandin slammed the evening paper down upon the table and stared ferociously at me through the lamplight.

  “What’s up now?” I asked, wondering vaguely what the cause of his latest grievance was. “Some reporter say something personal about you?”

  “Parbleu, non, he would better try,” the little Frenchman replied, his round blue eyes flashing ominously. “Me, I would pull his nose and tweak his ears. But it is not of the reporter’s insolence I speak, my friend; I do not like these suicides; there are too many of them.”

  “Of course there are,” I conceded soothingly, “one suicide is that much too many; people have no right to—”

  “Ah bah!” he cut in. “You do misapprehend me, mon vieux. Excuse me one moment, if you please.” He rose hurriedly from his chair and left the room. A moment later I heard him rummaging about in the cellar.

  In a few minutes he returned, the week’s supply of discarded newspapers salvaged from the dust bin in his arms.

  “Now, attend me,” he ordered as he spread the sheets out before him and began scanning the columns hastily. “Here is an item from Monday’s Journal:

  TWO MOTORISTS DIE WHILE DRIVING CARS

  The impulse to end their lives apparently attacked two automobile drivers on the Albemarle turnpike near Lonesome Swamp, two miles out of Harrisonville, last night. Carl Planz, thirty-one years old, of Martins Falls, took his own life by shooting himself in the head with a shotgun while seated in his automobile, which he had parked at the roadside where the pike passes nearest the swamp. His remains were identified by two letters, one addressed
to his wife, the other to his father, Joseph Planz, with whom he was associated in the real estate business at Martins Falls. A check for three hundred dollars and several other papers found in his pockets completed identification. The letters, which merely declared his intention to kill himself, failed to establish any motive for the act.

  Almost at the same time, and within a hundred yards of the spot where Planz’s body was found by State Trooper Henry Anderson this morning, the body of Henry William Nixon, of New Rochelle, N.Y., was discovered partly sitting, partly lying on the rear seat of his automobile, an empty bottle of windshield cleaner lying on the floor beside him. It is thought this liquid, which contained a small amount of cyanide of potassium, was used to inflict death. Police Surgeon Stevens, who examined both bodies, declared that the men had been dead approximately the same length of time when brought to the station house.

  “What think you of that, my friend, hein?” de Grandin demanded, looking up from the paper with one of his direct, challenging stares.

  “Why—er—” I began, but he interrupted.

  “Hear this,” he commanded, taking up a second paper, “this is from the News of Tuesday:

  MOTHER AND DAUGHTERS DIE IN DEATH PACT

  Police and heartbroken relatives are today trying to trace a motive for the triple suicide of Mrs. Ruby Westerfelt and her daughters, Joan and Elizabeth, who perished by leaping from the eighth floor of the Hotel Dolores, Newark, late yesterday afternoon. The women registered at the hotel under assumed names, went immediately to the room assigned them, and ten minutes later Miss Gladys Walsh, who occupied a room on the fourth floor, was startled to see a dark form hurtle past her window. A moment later a second body flashed past on its downward flight, and as Miss Walsh, horrified, rushed toward the window, a loud crash sounded outside. Looking out, Miss Walsh saw the body of a third woman partly impaled on the spikes of a balcony rail.

  Miss Walsh sought to aid the woman. As she leaned from her window and reached out with a trembling arm she was greeted by a scream: “Don’t try! I won’t be saved; I must go with Mother and Sister!” A moment later the woman had managed to free herself from the restraining iron spikes and fell to the cement area-way four floors below.