The Horror on the Links

by Seabury Quinn

  Next morning I was at a loss what to think. Arriving at the orphanage well before daylight, de Grandin and I let ourselves into the little children’s dormitory, mounted the stairs to the second floor where the youngsters slept, and released the vicious dog which the Frenchman had tethered by a stout nail driven into the floor and a ten-foot length of stout steel chain. Inquiry among the building’s attendants elicited the information that no one had visited the sleeping apartment after we left, as there had been no occasion for anyone connected with the home to do so. Yet on the floor beside the dog there lay a ragged square of white linen, such as might have been ripped from a night-robe or a suit of pajamas, reduced almost to a pulp by the savage brute’s worrying, and—when Superintendent Gervaise entered the office to greet us, he was wearing his right arm in a sling.

  “You are injured, Monsieur?” de Grandin asked with mock solicitude, noting the superintendent’s bandaged hand with dancing eyes.

  “Yes,” the other replied, coughing apologetically, “yes, sir. I—I cut myself rather badly last night on a pane of broken glass in my quarters. The window must have been broken by a shutter being blown against it, and—”

  “Quite so,” the Frenchman agreed amiably. “They bite terrifically, these broken window-panes, is it not so?”

  “Bite?” Gervaise echoed, regarding the other with a surprised, somewhat frightened expression. “I hardly understand you—oh, yes, I see,” he smiled rather feebly. “You mean cut.”

  “Monsieur,” de Grandin assured him solemnly as he rose to leave, “I did mean exactly what I said; no more, and certainly no less.”

  “Now what?” I queried as we left the office and the gaping superintendent behind us.

  “Non, non,” he responded irritably. “I know not what to think, my friend. One thing, he points this way, another, he points elsewhere. Me, I am like a mariner in the midst of a fog. Go you to the car, Friend Trowbridge, and chaperone our so estimable ally. I shall pay a visit to the laundry, meantime.”

  None too pleased with my assignment, I re-entered my car and made myself as agreeable as possible to the dog, devoutly hoping that the hearty breakfast de Grandin had provided him had taken the edge off his appetite. I had no wish to have him stay his hunger on one of my limbs. The animal proved docile enough, however, and besides opening his mouth once or twice in prodigious yawns which gave me an unpleasantly close view of his excellent dentition, did nothing to cause me alarm.

  When de Grandin returned he was fuming with impatience and anger. “Sacré nom d’un grillon!” he swore. “It is beyond me. Undoubtlessly this Monsieur Gervaise is a liar, it was surely no glass which caused the wound in his arm last night; yet there is no suit of torn pajamas belonging to him in the laundry.”

  “Perhaps he didn’t send them to be washed,” I ventured with a grin. “If I’d been somewhere I was not supposed to be last night and found someone had posted a man-eating dog in my path, I’d not be in a hurry to send my torn clothing to the laundry where it might betray me.”

  “Tiens, you reason excellently, my friend,” he complimented, “but can you explain how it is that there is no torn night-clothing of Monsieur Gervaise at the washrooms today, yet two ladies’ night-robes—one of Mère Martin’s, one of Mademoiselle Bosworth’s—display exactly such rents as might have been made by having this bit of cloth torn from them?” He exhibited the relic we had found beside the dog that morning and stared gloomily at it.

  “H’m, it looks as if you hadn’t any facts which will stand the acid test just yet,” I replied flippantly; but the seriousness with which he received my commonplace rejoinder startled me.

  “Morbleu, the acid test, do you say?” he exclaimed. “Dieu de Dieu de Dieu de Dieu, it may easily be so! Why did I not think of it before? Perhaps. Possibly. Who knows! It may be so!”

  “What in the world—” I began, but he cut me short with a frantic gesture.

  “Non, non, my friend, not now,” he implored. “Me, I must think. I must make this empty head of mine do the work for which it is so poorly adapted. Let us see, let us consider, let us ratiocinate!

  “Parbleu, I have it!” He drew his hands downward from his forehead with a quick, impatient motion and turned to me. “Drive me to the nearest pharmacy, my friend. If we do not find what we wish there, we must search elsewhere, and elsewhere, until we discover it. Mordieu, Trowbridge, my friend, I thank you for mentioning that acid test! Many a wholesome truth is contained in words of idle jest, I do assure you.”

  FIVE MILES OUT OF Springville a gang of workmen were resurfacing the highway, and we were forced to detour over a back road. Half an hour’s slow driving along this brought us to a tiny Italian settlement where a number of laborers originally engaged on the Lackawanna’s right of way had bought up the swampy, low-lying lands along the creek and converted them into model track gardens. At the head of the single street composing the hamlet was a neatly whitewashed plank building bearing the sign Farmacia Italiana, together with a crudely painted representation of the Italian royal coat of arms.

  “Here, my friend,” de Grandin commanded, plucking me by the sleeve. “Let us stop here a moment and inquire of the estimable gentleman who conducts this establishment that which we would know.”

  “But what—?” I began, then stopped, noting the futility of my question. Jules de Grandin had already leaped from the car and entered the little drug store.

  Without preamble he addressed a flood of fluent Italian to the druggist, receiving monosyllabic replies which gradually expanded both in verbosity and volume, accompanied by much waving of hands and lifting of shoulders and eyebrows. What they said I had no means of knowing, since I understood no word of Italian, but I heard the word acido repeated several times by each of them during the three minutes’ heated conversation.

  When de Grandin finally turned to leave the store, with a grateful bow to the proprietor, he wore an expression as near complete mystification and surprise as I had ever seen him display. His little eyes were rounded with mingled thought and amazement, and his narrow red lips were pursed beneath the line of his slim blond moustache as though he were about to emit a low, soundless whistle.

  “Well?” I demanded—as we regained the car. “Did you find out what you were after?”

  “Eh?” he answered absently. “Did I find—Trowbridge, my friend, I know not what I found out, but this I know: Those who lighted the witch-fires in olden days were not such fools as we believe them. Parbleu, at this moment they are grinning at us from their graves, or I am much mistaken. Tonight, my friend, be ready to accompany me back to that orphans’ home where the devil nods approval to those who perform his business so skillfully.”

  THAT EVENING HE WAS like one in a muse, eating sparingly and seemingly without realizing what food he took, answering my questions absent-mindedly or not at all, even forgetting to light his customary cigarette between dinner and dessert. “Nom d’un champignon,” he muttered, staring abstractedly into his coffee cup, “it must be that it is so; but who would believe it?”

  I sighed in vexation. His habit of musing aloud but refusing to tell the trend of his thoughts while he arranged the factors of a case upon his mental chess-board was one which always annoyed me, but nothing I had been able to do had swerved him from his custom of withholding all information until he reached the climax of the mystery. “Non, non,” he replied when I pressed him to take me into his confidence, “the less I speak, the less danger I run of showing myself to be one great fool, my friend. Let me reason this business in my own way, I beseech you.” And there the matter rested.

  Toward midnight he rose impatiently and motioned toward the door. “Let us go,” he suggested. “It will be an hour or more before we reach our destination, and that should be the proper time for us to see what I fear we shall behold, Friend Trowbridge.”

  We drove across country to Springville through the early autumn night in silence, turned in at the orphanage gates and parked before the administra
tion building, where Superintendent Gervaise maintained his living quarters.

  “Monsieur,” de Grandin called softly as he rapped gently on the superintendent’s door, “it is I, Jules de Grandin. For all the wrong I have done you I humbly apologize, and now I would that you give me assistance.”

  Blinking with mingled sleep and surprise, the little, gray-haired official let us into his rooms and smiled rather fatuously at us. “What is it you’d like me to do for you, Dr. de Grandin?” he asked.

  “I would that you guide us to the sleeping apartments of Mère Martin. Are they in this building?”

  “No,” Gervaise replied wonderingly. “Mother Martin has a cottage of her own over at the south end of the grounds. She likes the privacy of a separate house, and we—”

  “Précisément,” the Frenchman agreed, nodding vigorously. “I well understand her love of privacy, I fear. Come, let us go. You will show us the way?”

  Mother Martin’s cottage stood by the southern wall of the orphanage compound. It was a neat little building of the semi-bungalow type, constructed of red brick, and furnished with a low, wide porch of white-painted wood. Only the chirping of a cricket in the long grass and the long-drawn, melancholy call of a crow in the near-by poplars broke the silence of the starlit night as we walked noiselessly up the brick path leading to the cottage door. Gervaise was about to raise the polished brass knocker which adorned the white panels when de Grandin grasped his arm, enjoining silence.

  Quietly as a shadow the little Frenchman crept from one of the wide, shutterless front windows to the other, looking intently into the darkened interior of the house, then, with upraised finger warning us to caution, he tiptoed from the porch and began making a circuit of the house, pausing to peer through each window as he passed it.

  At the rear of the cottage was a one-story addition which evidently housed the kitchen, and here the blinds were tightly drawn, though beneath their lower edges there crept a faint, narrow band of lamplight.

  “Ah—bien!” the Frenchman breathed, flattening his aquiline nose against the window-pane as though he would look through the shrouding curtain by virtue of the very intensity of his gaze.

  A moment we stood there in the darkness, de Grandin’s little waxed moustache twitching at the ends like the whiskers of an alert tomcat, Gervaise and I in total bewilderment, when the Frenchman’s next move filled us with mingled astonishment and alarm. Reaching into an inner pocket, he produced a small, diamond-set glass-cutter, moistened it with the tip of his tongue and applied it to the window, drawing it slowly downward, then horizontally, then upward again to meet the commencement of the first down-stroke, thus describing an equilateral triangle on the pane. Before the cutter’s circuit was entirely completed, he drew what appeared to be a square of thick paper from another pocket, hastily tore it apart and placed it face downward against the glass. It was only when the operation was complete that I realized how it was accomplished. The “plaster” he applied to the window was nothing more nor less than a square of fly-paper, and its sticky surface prevented any telltale tinkle from sounding as he finished cutting the triangle from the window-pane and carefully lifted it out by means of the gummed paper.

  Once he had completed his opening he drew forth a small, sharp-bladed penknife, and working very deliberately, lest the slightest sound betray him, proceeded to slit a peep-hole through the opaque window-blind.

  For a moment he stood there, gazing through his spy-hole, the expression on his narrow face changing from one of concentrated interest to almost incredulous horror, finally to fierce, implacable rage.

  “À moi, Trowbridge, à moi, Gervaise!” he shouted in a voice which was almost a shriek as he thrust his shoulder unceremoniously against the pane, bursting it into a dozen pieces, and leaped into the lighted room beyond.

  I scrambled after him as best I could, and the astounded superintendent followed me, mouthing mild protests against our burglarious entry of Mrs. Martin’s house.

  One glance at the scene before me took all thought of our trespass from my mind.

  Wheeled about to face us, her back to a fiercely glowing coal-burning kitchen range, stood the once placid Mother Martin, enveloped from throat to knees in a commodious apron. But all semblance of her placidity was gone as she regarded the trembling little Frenchman who extended an accusing finger at her. Across her florid, smooth-skinned face had come such a look of fiendish rage as no flight of my imagination could have painted. Her lips, seemingly shrunk to half their natural thickness, were drawn back in animal fury against her teeth, and her blue eyes seemed forced forward from her face with the pressure of hatred within her. At the corners of her twisting mouth were little flecks of white foam, and her jaw thrust forward like that of an infuriated ape. Never in my life, on any face, either bestial or human, had I seen such an expression. It was a revolting parody of humanity on which I looked, a thing so horrible, so incomparably cruel and devilish, I would have looked away if I could, yet felt my eyes compelled to turn again to the evil visage as a fascinated bird’s gaze may be held by the glitter in the serpent’s film-covered eye.

  But horrid as the sight of the woman’s transfigured features was, a greater horror showed behind her, for, protruding half its length from the fire-grate of the blazing range was something no medical man could mistake after even a split-second’s inspection. It was the unfleshed radius and ulna bones of a child’s forearm, the wrist process still intact where the flesh and periosteum had not been entirely removed in dissection. On the tile-topped kitchen table beside the stove stood a wide-mouthed glass bowl filled with some liquid about the shade of new vinegar, and in this there lay a score of small, glittering white objects—a child’s teeth. Neatly dressed, wound with cord like a roast, and, like a roast, placed in a wide, shallow pan, ready for cooking, was a piece of pale, veal-like meat.

  The horror of it fairly nauseated me. The thing in woman’s form before us was a cannibal, and the meat she had been preparing to bake was—my mind refused to form the words, even in the silence of my inner consciousness.

  “You—you,” the woman cried in a queer, throaty voice, so low it was scarcely audible, yet so intense in its vibrations that I was reminded of the rumbling of an infuriated cat’s cry. “How—did—you—find—?”

  “Eh bien, Madame,” de Grandin returned, struggling to speak with his customary cynical flippancy, but failing in the attempt, “how I did find out is of small moment. What I found, I think you will agree, is of the great import.”

  For an instant I thought the she-fiend would launch herself at him, but her intention lay elsewhere. Before any of us was aware of her move she had seized the glass vessel from the table, lifted it to her lips and all but emptied its contents down her throat in two frantic swallows. Next instant, frothing, writhing, contorting herself horribly, she lay on the tiled floor at our feet, her lips thickening and swelling with brownish blisters as the poison she had drunk regurgitated from her esophagus and welled up between her tightly set teeth.

  “Good heavens!” I cried, bending forward instinctively to aid her, but the Frenchman drew me back. “Let be, Friend Trowbridge,” he remarked. “It is useless. She has taken enough hydrochloric acid to kill three men, and those movements of hers are only mechanical. Already she is unconscious, and in another five minutes she will have opportunity to explain her so strange life to One far wiser than we.

  “Meantime,” he assumed the cold, matter-of-fact manner of a morgue attendant performing his duties, “let us gather up these relics of the poor one”—he indicated the partially cremated arm-bones and the meat in the shining aluminum pan—“and preserve them for decent interment. I—”

  A choking, gasping sound behind us turned our attention to the orphanage superintendent. Following more slowly through the window in de Grandin’s wake he had not at first grasped the significance of the horrors we had seen. The spectacle of the woman’s suicide had unnerved him, but when de Grandin pointed to the relics in the stov
e and on the table, the full meaning of our discovery had fallen on him. With an inarticulate cry he had dropped to the floor in a dead faint.

  “Pardieu,” the Frenchman exclaimed, crossing to the water-tap and filling a tumbler, “I think we had best bestow our services on the living before we undertake the care of the dead, Friend Trowbridge.”

  As he re-crossed the kitchen to minister to the unconscious superintendent there came an odd, muffled noise from the room beyond. “Qui vive?” he challenged sharply, placing the glass of water on the dresser and darting through the door, his right hand dropping into his jacket pocket where the ready pistol lay. I followed at his heels, and, as he stood hesitating at the threshold, felt along the wall, found the electric switch and pressed it, flooding the room with light. On the couch beneath the window, bound hand and foot with strips torn from a silk scarf and gagged with another length of silk wound about her face, lay little Betsy, the child who had informed us she feared being hurt when we made our pretended inspection of the home’s inmates the previous day.

  “Morbleu,” de Grandin muttered as he liberated the little one from her bonds, “another?”

  “Mother Martin came for Betsy and tied her up,” the child informed us as she raised herself to a sitting posture. “She told Betsy she would send her to heaven with her papa and mamma, but Betsy must be good and not make a fuss when her hands and feet were tied.”