The Horror on the Links

by Seabury Quinn

  “And here is still another account, this one from tonight’s paper,” he continued, unfolding the sheet which had caused his original protest:

  HIGH SCHOOL CO-ED TAKES LIFE IN ATTIC

  The family and friends of Edna May McCarty, fifteen-year-old co-ed of Harrisonville High School, are at a loss to assign a cause for her suicide early this morning. The girl had no love affairs, as far as is known, and had not failed in her examinations. On the contrary, she had passed the school’s latest test with flying colors. Her mother told investigating police officials that overstudy might have temporarily unbalanced the child’s mind. Miss McCarty’s body was found suspended from the rafters of her father’s attic by her mother this morning when the young woman did not respond to a call for breakfast and could not be found in her room on the second floor of the house. A clothes line, used to hang clothes which were dried inside the house in rainy weather, was used to form the fatal noose.

  “Now then, my friend,” de Grandin reseated himself and lighted a vile-smelling French cigarette, puffing furiously, till the smoke surrounded his sleek, blond head like a mephitic nimbus, “what have you to say to those reports? Am I not right! Are there not too many—mordieu entirely too many!—suicides in our city?”

  “All of them weren’t committed here,” I objected practically, “and besides, there couldn’t very well be any connection between them. Mrs. Westerfelt and her daughters carried out a suicide pact, it appears, but they certainly could have had no understanding with the two men and the young girl—”

  “Perhaps, maybe, possibly,” he agreed, nodding his head so vigorously that a little column of ash detached itself from his cigarette and dropped unnoticed on the bosom of his stiffly starched evening shirt. “You may be right, Friend Trowbridge, but then, as is so often the case, you may be entirely wrong. One thing I know: I, Jules de Grandin, shall investigate these cases myself personally. Cordieu, they do interest me! I shall ascertain what is the what here.”

  “Go ahead,” I encouraged. “The investigation will keep you out of mischief,” and I returned to the second chapter of Haggard’s The Wanderer’s Necklace, a book which I have read at least half a dozen times, yet find as fascinating at each rereading as when I first perused its pages.

  THE MATTER OF THE six suicides still bothered him next morning. “Trowbridge, my friend,” he asked abruptly as he disposed of his second helping of coffee and passed his cup for replenishment, “why is it that people destroy themselves?”

  “Oh,” I answered evasively, “different reasons, I suppose. Some are crossed in love, some meet financial reverses and some do it while temporarily deranged.”

  “Yes,” he agreed thoughtfully, “yet every self-murderer has a real or fancied reason for quitting the world, and there is apparently no reason why any of these six poor ones who hurled themselves into outer darkness during the past week should have done so. All, apparently, were well provided for, none of them, as far as is known, had any reason to regret the past or fear the future; yet”—he shrugged his narrow shoulders significantly—“voilà, they are gone!

  “Another thing: At the Faculté de Médicine Légal and the Sûreté in Paris we keep most careful statistics, not only on the number, but on the manner of suicides. I do not think your Frenchman differs radically from your American when it comes to taking his life, so the figures for one nation may well be a signpost for the other. These self-inflicted deaths, they are not right. They do not follow the rules. Men prefer to hang, slash or shoot themselves; women favor drowning, poison or gas; yet here we have one of the men taking poison, one of the women hanging herself, and three of them jumping to death. Nom d’un canard, I am not satisfied with it!”

  “H’m, neither are the unfortunate parties who killed themselves, if the theologians are to be believed,” I returned.

  “You speak right,” he returned, then muttered dreamily to himself: “Destruction—destruction of body and imperilment of soul—mordieu, it is strange, it is not righteous!” He disposed of his coffee at a gulp and leaped from his chair. “I go!” he declared dramatically turning toward the door.

  “Where?”

  “Where? Where should I go, if not to secure the history of these so puzzling cases? I shall not rest nor sleep nor eat until I have the string of the mystery’s skein in my hands.” He paused at the door, a quick, elfin smile playing across his usually stern features. “And should I return before my work is complete,” he suggested, “I pray you, have the excellent Nora prepare another of her so magnificent apple pies for dinner.”

  Forty seconds later the front door clicked shut, and from the dining room’s oriel window I saw his neat little figure, trimly encased in blue chinchilla and gray worsted, pass quickly down the sidewalk, his ebony cane hammering a rapid tattoo on the stones as it kept time to the thoughts racing through his active brain.

  “I AM DESOLATED THAT MY capacity is exhausted,” he announced that evening as he finished his third portion of deep-dish apple pie smothered in pungent rum sauce and regarded his empty plate sadly. “Eh bien, perhaps it is as well. Did I eat more I might not be able to think clearly, and clear thought is what I shall need this night, my friend. Come; we must be going.”

  “Going where?” I demanded.

  “To hear the reverend and estimable Monsieur Maundy deliver his sermon.”

  “Who? Everard Maundy?”

  “But of course, who else?”

  “But—but,” I stammered, looking at him incredulously, “why should we go to the tabernacle to hear this man? I can’t say I’m particularly impressed with his system, and—aren’t you a Catholic, de Grandin?”

  “Who can say?” he replied as he lighted a cigarette and stared thoughtfully at his coffee cup. “My father was a Huguenot of the Huguenots; a several times great-grandsire of his cut his way to freedom through the Paris streets on the fateful night of August 24, 1572. My mother was convent-bred, and as pious as anyone with a sense of humor and the gift of thinking for herself could well be. One of my uncles—he for whom I am named—was like a blood brother to Darwin the magnificent, and Huxley the scarcely less magnificent, also. Me, I am”—he elevated his eyebrows and shoulders at once and pursed his lips comically—“what should a man with such a heritage be, my friend? But come, we delay, we tarry, we lose time. Let us hasten. I have a fancy to bear what this Monsieur Maundy has to say, and to observe him. See, I have here tickets for the fourth row of the hall.”

  Very much puzzled, but never doubting that something more than the idle wish to hear a sensational evangelist urged the little Frenchman toward the tabernacle, I rose and accompanied him.

  “Parbleu, what a day!” he sighed as I turned my car toward the downtown section. “From coroner’s office to undertakers’ I have run; and from undertakers’ to hospitals. I have interviewed everyone who could shed the smallest light on these strange deaths, yet I seem no further advanced than when I began. What I have found out serves only to whet my curiosity; what I have not discovered—” He spread his hands in a world-embracing gesture and lapsed into silence.

  The Jachin Tabernacle, where the Rev. Everard Maundy was holding his series of non-sectarian revival meetings, was crowded to overflowing when we arrived, but our tickets passed us through the jostling crowd of half-skeptical, half-believing people who thronged the lobby, and we were soon ensconced in seats where every word the preacher uttered could be heard with ease.

  Before the introductory hymn had been finished, de Grandin mumbled a wholly unintelligible excuse in my ear and disappeared up the aisle, and I settled myself in my seat to enjoy the service as best I might.

  The Rev. Mr. Maundy was a tall, hatchet-faced man in early middle life, a little inclined to rant and make use of worked-over platitudes, but obviously sincere in the message he had for his congregation. From the half-cynical attitude of a regularly enrolled church member who looks on revivals with a certain disdain, I found myself taking keener and keener interest in the story of reg
eneration the preacher had to tell, my attention compelled not so much by his words as by the earnestness of his manner and the wonderful stage presence the man possessed. When the ushers had taken up the collection and the final hymn was sung, I was surprised to find we had been two hours in the tabernacle. If anyone had asked me, I should have said half an hour would have been nearer the time consumed by the service.

  “Eh, my friend, did you find it interesting?” de Grandin asked as he joined me in the lobby and linked his arm in mine.

  “Yes, very,” I admitted, then, somewhat sulkily: “I thought you wanted to hear him, too—it was your idea that we came here—what made you run away?”

  “I am sorry,” he replied with a chuckle which belied his words, “but it was necessaire that I fry other fish while you listened to the reverend gentleman’s discourse. Will you drive me home?”

  The March wind cut shrewdly through my overcoat after the superheated atmosphere of the tabernacle, and I felt myself shivering involuntarily more than once as we drove through the quiet streets. Strangely, too, I felt rather sleepy and ill at ease. By the time we reached the wide, tree-bordered avenue before my house I was conscious of a distinctly unpleasant sensation, a constantly-growing feeling of malaise, a sort of baseless, irritating uneasiness. Thoughts of years long forgotten seemed summoned to my memory without rime or reason. An incident of an unfair advantage I had taken of a younger boy while at public school, recollections of petty, useless lies and bits of naughtiness committed when I could not have been more than three came flooding back on my consciousness, finally an episode of my early youth which I had forgotten some forty years.

  My father had brought a little stray kitten into the house, and I, with the tiny lad’s unconscious cruelty, had fallen to teasing the wretched bundle of bedraggled fur, finally tossing it nearly to the ceiling to test the tale I had so often heard that a cat always lands on its feet. My experiment was the exception which demonstrated the rule, it seemed, for the poor, half-starved feline hit the hardwood floor squarely on its back, struggled feebly a moment, then yielded up its entire ninefold expectancy of life.

  Long after the smart of the whipping I received in consequence had been forgotten, the memory of that unintentional murder had plagued my boyish conscience, and many were the times I had awakened at dead of night, weeping bitter repentance out upon my pillow.

  Now, some forty years later, the thought of that kitten’s death came back as clearly as the night the unkempt little thing thrashed out its life upon our kitchen floor. Strive as I would, I could not drive the memory from me, and it seemed as though the unwitting crime of my childhood was assuming an enormity out of all proportion to its true importance.

  I shook my head and passed my hand across my brow, as a sleeper suddenly wakened does to drive away the lingering memory of an unpleasant dream, but the kitten’s ghost, like Banquo’s, would not down.

  “What is it, Friend Trowbridge?” de Grandin asked as he eyed me shrewdly.

  “Oh, nothing,” I replied as I parked the car before our door and leaped to the curb, “I was just thinking.”

  “Ah?” he responded on a rising accent. “And of what do you think, my friend? Something unpleasant?”

  “Oh, no; nothing important enough to dignify by that term,” I answered shortly, and led the way to the house, keeping well ahead of him, lest he push his inquiries farther.

  In this, however, I did him wrong. Tactful women and Jules de Grandin have the talent of feeling without being told when conversation is unwelcome, and besides wishing me a pleasant good-night, he spoke not a word until we had gone upstairs to bed. As I was opening my door, he called down the hall, “Should you want me, remember, you have but to call.”

  “Humph!” I muttered ungraciously as I shut the door. “Want him? What the devil should I want him for?” And so I pulled off my clothes and climbed into bed, the thought of the murdered kitten still with me and annoying me more by its persistence than by the faint sting of remorse it evoked.

  HOW LONG I HAD slept I do not know, but I do know I was wide awake in a single second, sitting up in bed and staring through the darkened chamber with eyes which strove desperately to pierce the gloom.

  Somewhere—whether far or near I could not tell—a cat had raised its voice in a long-drawn, wailing cry, kept silence a moment, then given tongue again with increased volume.

  There are few sounds more eery to hear in the dead of night than the cry of a prowling feline, and this one was of a particularly sad, almost reproachful tone.

  “Confound the beast!” I exclaimed angrily, and lay back on my pillow, striving vainly to recapture my broken sleep.

  Again the wail sounded, indefinite as to location, but louder, more prolonged, even, it seemed, fiercer in its timbre than when I first heard it in my sleep.

  I glanced toward the window with the vague thought of hurling a book or boot or other handy missile at the disturber, then held my breath in sudden affright. Staring through the aperture between the scrim curtains was the biggest, most ferocious-looking tomcat I had ever seen. Its eyes, seemingly as large as butter dishes, glared at me with the green phosphorescence of its tribe, and with an added demoniacal glow the like of which I had never seen. Its red mouth, opened to full compass in a venomous, soundless “spit,” seemed almost as large as that of a lion, and the wicked, pointed ears above its rounded face were laid back against its head, as though it were crouching for combat.

  “Get out! Scat!” I called feebly, but making no move toward the thing.

  “S-s-s-sssh!” a hiss of incomparable fury answered me, and the creature put one heavy, padded paw tentatively over the window-sill, still regarding me with its unchanging, hateful stare.

  “Get!” I repeated, and stopped abruptly. Before my eyes the great beast was growing, increasing in size till its chest and shoulders completely blocked the window. Should it attack me I would be as helpless in its claws as a Hindoo under the paws of a Bengal tiger.

  Slowly, stealthily, its cushioned feet making no sound as it set them down daintily, the monstrous creature advanced into the room, crouched on its haunches and regarded me steadily, wickedly, malevolently.

  I rose a little higher on my elbow. The great brute twitched the tip of its sable tail warningly, half lifted one of its forepaws from the floor, and set it down again, never shifting its sulfurous eyes from my face.

  Inch by inch I moved my farther foot from the bed, felt the floor beneath it, and pivoted slowly in a sitting position until my other foot was free of the bedclothes. Apparently the cat did not notice my strategy, for it made no menacing move till I flexed my muscles for a leap, suddenly flung myself from the bedstead, and leaped toward the door.

  With a snarl, white teeth flashing, green eyes glaring, ears laid back, the beast moved between me and the exit, and began slowly advancing on me, hate and menace in every line of its giant body.

  I gave ground before it, retreating step by step and striving desperately to hold its eyes with mine, as I had heard hunters sometimes do when suddenly confronted by wild animals.

  Back, back I crept, the ogreish visitant keeping pace with my retreat, never suffering me to increase the distance between us.

  I felt the cold draft of the window on my back; the pressure of the sill against me; behind me, from the waist up, was the open night, before me the slowly advancing monster.

  It was a thirty-foot drop to a cemented roadway, but death on the pavement was preferable to the slashing claws and grinding teeth of the terrible thing creeping toward me.

  I threw one leg over the sill, watching constantly, lest the cat-thing leap on me before I could cheat it by dashing myself to the ground—

  “Trowbridge, mon Dieu, Trowbridge, my friend! What is it you would do?” The frenzied hail of Jules de Grandin cut through the dark and a flood of light from the hallway swept into the room as he flung the door violently open and raced across the room, seizing my arm in both hands and dragging me from t
he window.

  “Look out, de Grandin!” I screamed. “The cat! It’ll get you!”

  “Cat?” he echoed, looking about him uncomprehendingly. “Do you say ‘cat’, my friend? A cat will get me? Mort d’un chou, the cat which can make a mouse of Jules de Grandin is not yet whelped! Where is it, this cat of yours?”

  “There! Th—” I began, then stopped, rubbing my eyes. The room was empty. Save for de Grandin and me there was nothing animate in the place.

  “But it was here,” I insisted. “I tell you, I saw it; a great, black cat, as big as a lion. It came in the window and crouched right over there, and was driving me to jump to the ground when you came—”

  “Nom d’un porc! Do you say so?” he exclaimed, seizing my arm again and shaking me. “Tell me of this cat, my friend. I would learn more of this puss-puss who comes into Friend Trowbridge’s house, grows great as a lion and drives him to his death on the stones below. Ha, I think maybe the trail of these mysterious deaths is not altogether lost! Tell me more, mon ami; I would know all—all!”

  “OF COURSE, IT WAS just a bad dream,” I concluded as I finished the recital of my midnight visitation, “but it seemed terribly real to me while it lasted.”

  “I doubt it not,” he agreed with a quick, nervous nod. “And on our way from the tabernacle tonight, my friend, I noticed you were much distrait. Were you, perhaps, feeling ill at the time?”

  “Not at all,” I replied. “The truth is, I was remembering something which occurred when I was a lad four or five years old; something which had to do with a kitten I killed,” and I told him the whole wretched business.

  “U’m?” he commented when I had done. “You are a good man, Trowbridge, my friend. In all your life, since you attained to years of discretion, I do not believe you have done a wicked or ignoble act.”