“Cordieu, my excellent one,” de Grandin assured him, “we do take it, nor do we require salt upon it, either. This alligator, now, this so abominable saurian who did cause you to collide with the roadside tree, was he in the locality when the ambulance arrived.”
“Sa-ay, you tryin’ to kid me?” demanded the injured man.
“By no means. We believe all you have told us. Can you not be equally frank with us and reply to our queries?”
“Well,” returned the patient, mollified by de Grandin’s evident credence, “that’s th’ funny part o’ th’ joke, sir. When th’ ding-dong came for me an’ me fares, I told th’ sawbones about th’ ’gator, an’ he ups an’ says to th’ murderer ’at runs, th’ business end o’ th’ rattler, ‘This here guy’s been drinkin’ more hootch ’an Ol’ Man Volstead ever prohibited.’ That’s what he says, sir, an’ me as sober as a court-house full o’ judges, too!”
“Infamous!” de Grandin pronounced, “But the sine qua non of your accident, this monster alligator, where was he?”
“Say,” the driver confided, “you know what? He wuzn’t no place. If I hadn’t seen ’im wid me own eyes I’d a’ believed th’ sawbones when he said I had th’ heebie-jeebies; but I tell you I hadn’t had nuttin’ to drink, an’ I ain’t so nutty as to mistake a shadder for a real, live ’gator, ’specially a baby th’ size o’ that one. It’d be different if I wuz a bozo ’at hadn’t been around much; but I been to Florida, an’ I knows a ’gator when I sees one—git me?”
“Mais oui, my friend,” the Frenchman nodded, “your story has the veritable ring of verisimilitude.”
“It has, has it? It’s th’ truth, an’ nuttin’ else but!” the offended chauffeur exclaimed as de Grandin rose and with another friendly nod tip-toed from the room.
“That explains it,” I jubilated as we walked slowly down the corridor. The uncanniness of the night’s happenings had gotten on my nerves, and I had been on the point of believing my friend’s mishap might be traceable to the ancient curse, but here was a perfectly natural explanation of the whole affair. “If that man wasn’t drunk or half insane with cocaine I’m much mistaken. Of course, he imagined he saw an alligator crossing his path! I’m only surprised that he didn’t insist it was pink or baby blue instead of the conventional shade. These taxi-drivers—”
“This particular one told the truth,” de Grandin cut in, speaking softly, as though more to himself than to me. “When he assured me he was no longer drinking there was the indubitable ring of truth in his words. Moreover—”
“Yes? Moreover?” I prompted, as he strode a dozen or so paces in thoughtful silence.
“Tiens, it is most strange, but not impossible,” he replied. “This Sebek, I know him.”
“You know him? Sebek? What in the world—” I stammered incredulously.
“Perfectly, my friend. Sebek, the god whom the priest Kaku worshiped, was the typification of the sun’s harmful powers. To him the waters of the Nile, when at their lowest ebb, were parceled off as his particular domain. He was represented as a crocodile-headed deity, even as Anubis possessed the head of a jackal, and in all his phases he was evil—very evil, indeed. Granted that the priest’s powers were effective—and did he not so hypnotize Madame Bennett that she slept like one dead for more than a thousand years?—what would be more natural than that this god should appear in his traditional form to aid his votary? Bethink you of the wording of the curse, my friend: ‘My shadow, and the shadow of Sebek which is my god, is upon her.’”
“Nonsense!” I scoffed.
“Perhaps,” he conceded, as though the point were scarcely worth debating. “You may be right, but then, again—”
“Right? Of course I’m right! The old priest might have been able to suspend Peligia’s vital processes by some sort of super-hypnosis unknown to us, but how could he call down on her the curse of a god that never existed? You’ll scarcely assert that the heathen gods of ancient Egypt had actual existence, I suppose?”
“There is a difference between an individual entity and an abstract force, whether it be for good or evil,” he began, but ceased abruptly at the sudden sound which tore the hospital’s sepulchral quiet into shreds.
It was not the wail of tortured flesh giving tongue to insupportable pain as the blessed unconsciousness of the anesthetic waned. No surgeon whose apprenticeship was served at the rear end of an ambulance can fail to recognize the cry of returning consciousness from an etherized patient. This was the horrified, piercing scream of a woman in deadly terror long-drawn, breathless, the reflex outcry of normal nerves suddenly strained past their limit of endurance. And it came from the room where Peligia Bennett lay, still immersed in anesthesia.
“Mon Dieu,” de Grandin gasped, “the garde-malade!” Grasping my arm, he rushed pell-mell down the hall.
The buxom young woman to whose care Peligia had been entrusted when de Grandin finished mending her broken body crouched at the far corner of the room, and her normally florid face was chalky-white under the shaded bedside lamp. “It came out of the wall!” she gasped as we swung the door back. “Out of the wall, I tell you, and there was no body to it!”
“Eh, what do you say?” de Grandin snapped. “What came out of the wall, Mademoiselle? What had no body, if you please?”
“The hand—the hand that snatched at her throat!” The nurse groveled closer in the angle of the wall, as though to shield herself from attack from side and rear.
“The hand? Her throat? Grand Dieu!” de Grandin leaped across the little room like a cat pouncing on a luckless sparrow and turned back the chaste white sheet enshrouding Peligia’s supine body.
“Trowbridge, Trowbridge, my friend,” he commanded, and his voice was hoarse as a croaking frog’s, “behold!”
I joined him at the bedside and cast my glance where his shaking forefinger pointed.
A fifth pendant had disappeared from the necklace round Peligia’s throat. Of the seven stones there remained but two.
6. Catastrophe
A FLURRY OF SNOWFLAKES, WIND-DRIVEN by the January tempest, assaulted de Grandin and me as we alighted from the late New York train. “Cordieu,” the Frenchman laughed as he snuggled into the farther corner of the station taxicab, “to attend the play in the metropolis is good, Friend Trowbridge, but we pay a heavy price in chilled feet and frosted noses when we return in such a storm as this!”
“Yes, getting chilblains is one of the favorite winter sports among us suburbanites,” I replied, lighting a cigar and puffing mingled smoke and vaporized breath from my nostrils.
“U’m,” he remarked thoughtfully, “your mention of winter sports reminds me that our friends the Bennetts are at Lake Placid. I wonder much how it is with them?”
“They’re not there now,” I answered. “Ellsworth wrote me that both he and Peligia are completely recovered and he expects to reopen his home this week. We’ll have to look in on them later. I wonder if they’ve had any more visitations from—what was his name?—the old Egyptian priest, you know.” I could not forbear the sly dig at my friend, for his stubborn insistence that the series of mishaps befalling Ellsworth Bennett and his wife were due to the malign influence of a man dead and buried more than a thousand years struck me as droll.
“Prie Dieu they have not,” he responded seriously. “As you have been at great pains to assure me many times, my friend, all has seemed well with them since the night of their motor accident, but”—he paused a moment—“as yet I am unconvinced we have heard the last of that so wicked Kaku and his abominable god.”
“We certainly have not, if you insist on raving about them,” I returned rather testily as the taxi swung into our block. “If I were you, I’d—”
Clang! Clang! clang-clang-a-lang! Rushing like the wind, its siren shrieking like the tempest, and its bells sounding clamorous warning, a fire-engine swept past us, its uproar cutting short my utterance.
“Mordieu, what a night for a fire!” the Frenchman murmured as we
ascended my front steps.
The office telephone was shrilling wildly as I fitted my latchkey to the door.
“Hello—hello, Dr. Trowbridge?” an agonized voice hailed as I lifted the receiver.
“Yes.”
“Bennett, Ellsworth Bennett, talking. Our house is on fire, and Peligia is—I’m bringing her right over to your place.” The sharp click of his receiver smashed into its hook and closed his announcement like an exclamation point.
“The Bennetts are still pursued by Kaku, it seems,” I remarked sarcastically, turning to de Grandin. “That was Ellsworth on the ’phone. It was his house the engines were going to. He wasn’t very coherent, but I gathered that Peligia is injured, and he’s bringing her here.”
“Eh, do you say so?” the little Frenchman replied, his small eyes widening with sudden concern. “Perhaps, my friend, you will now believe—” He lapsed into silence, striding nervously up and down the office, lighting one cigarette from the glowing stump of another, answering my attempts at conversation with short, monosyllabic grunts.
Ten minutes later when I answered the insistent clatter of the front doorbell, Ellsworth Bennett stood in the vestibule, a long bundle, swathed in rugs and blankets, in his arms. A wave of sudden pity swept over me as I noted his appearance.
The light-hearted, easy-going boy who had taken his strange bride’s hand in his before the altar of the Greek Orthodox church a short four months ago was gone, and in his place stood a man prematurely aged. Lines, deep-etched by care and trouble, showed about his mouth and at the corners of his eyes, and his long, loosely articulated frame bent beneath something more than the weight of the object he clasped to his breast.
“Ellsworth, boy, whatever is the matter?” I exclaimed sympathetically as I seized his shoulder and fairly dragged him across the threshold.
“God knows,” he answered wearily, laying his inert burden on the surgery table and turning a miserable countenance to us. “I brought her here because”—he seemed to struggle with himself a moment, then continued—“I brought her here because I didn’t know where else to take her. I thought she’d be safer here—with you, sir,” he turned directly to de Grandin with an imploring look.
“Ohé la pauvre—” the Frenchman leaned forward and put back the coverings from Peligia’s pale face tenderly. “Tell me, mon enfant,” he glanced up at the distracted husband, “what was it this time?”
“God knows,” the wretched youngster repeated. “We got back from the lake on Tuesday, and Peligia seemed so well and so”—a sob choked him, but he went bravely on—“and so happy, and we thought we’d managed to escape from the nemesis which pursues us.
“We went to bed early this evening, and I don’t know how long we’d slept when we awakened together, smelling smoke in the room.
“Flames were darting and creeping under the door like so many serpents when we realized what was happening, and I grabbed the bedside ’phone to call the fire department, but the wires must have burned already, for I couldn’t get any response from central.
“When I opened the door the whole hallway was a mass of flames, and there was no possibility of anything human going through; so I made a rope by tearing the bed sheets in strips and prepared to escape by the window. After I’d knotted the sheets together I tossed the other bedclothes out to act as a cushion when we landed, and slid down, then stood waiting to catch Peligia in my arms. I’d managed to slip on some clothes, but her things had been lying on a chair near the door, and had caught fire before she could put ’em on, so there was nothing for her to do but brave the storm in her nightclothes.
“I was standing, waiting to catch her in my arms, and she had already begun to slide down the knotted sheets when—” He paused, and a shudder ran through him, as though the chill of his midnight escape still clung to him, despite my surgery’s warmth.
“Yes, what then?” de Grandin prompted.
“I saw him! I tell you, I saw him!” the boy blazed out, as though we had already denied his word.
“Dieu de tous les poissons!” de Grandin almost screamed. “Proceed. What, or whom, did you see?”
“I don’t know who it was, but I suspect,” the other responded. “Just as Peligia was slipping down the sheets, a man looked out of the window, above her and tried to choke her!
“Mind you, not forty seconds before, we’d been driven from that bedroom by the fire which was raging in the hall, and there was no chance for anything living to pass through that flaming hell, and no one in the room when we quit it, but there was a man at our window as my wife began her descent. He leaned over the sill and snatched at her throat, as if trying to strangle her. I heard her scream above the hiss of the fire as he missed his clutch at her throat and drew back a moment; then he whipped out a knife and slashed the sheet in two, six inches below the level of the sill.
“I couldn’t have been mistaken, gentlemen,” he turned a challenging glance from one of us to the other. “I tell you, I saw him; saw him as plainly as I see you now. The fire was at his back and he stood out like a silhouette against its light.
“God!” he shuddered. “I’ll never forget the look of hellish hate and triumph on his face as he hacked that sheet in two and my poor darling came crashing down—he was a tall, cadaverous fellow, dressed in a sort of smock of gray-green linen, and his head was shaven—not bald, but shaven—and so was his entire face, except for a narrow, six-inch beard on his chin. That was waxed to a point and turned up like a fish-hook.”
“A-a-ah?” de Grandin remarked on a rising note. His level, unwinking gaze caught and held Bennett’s, and horrified understanding and agreement showed in the eyes of each.
De Grandin shook his narrow shoulders in a quick, impatient shrug. “We must not let him terrify us, or all is lost,” he declared. “Meantime, let us look to Madame, your wife.” He cast back the covers from Peligia and ran deft, skillful fingers over her form from neck to feet.
“Here it is,” he announced, pausing in his examination to finger her rounded left ankle. “A dislocation; no more, let us give thanks. It will be painful, but not serious, I think.
“Come, Friend Trowbridge, the bandages, if you please,” he turned peremptorily to me, raising the girl’s small, uncovered foot in his hand and gently kneading the displaced bones back into position. “Ah, that is better,” he announced, as he completed fastening the gauze about the injured member.
“Now, Bennett, my friend, if you will bear Madame your lady upstairs and put her in my bed, I think we can promise—nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu—look!” he broke off, pointing a trembling finger at the open throat of Peligia’s flimsy muslin night-dress.
Against the white bosom where the ancient necklace reposed, a single ruddy pendant glowed. Six of the seven stones were missing.
7. Wager of Battle
JULES DE GRANDIN STARED at Ellsworth Bennett, and Ellsworth Bennett stared at Jules de Grandin, and in the eyes of each was gathering terror, hopelessness, defeat.
“What to do—Mon Dieu!—what to do?” muttered the little Frenchman, and his voice was almost a wail.
“My friend,” he stared fixedly at Ellsworth, “did you do as I suggested?”
“Go to the priest?” the other replied. “Yes. He gave us some sort of little charm—I suppose you’d call it an ikon. See, here it is.” Reaching inside his wife’s gown he drew out a fine silken cord to the end of which was attached a tiny scapular of painted silk showing the device of a mailed champion encountering a dragon. “It’s supposed to be a relic of St. George,” he explained, “and Father Demitri assured us no harm could come to her while she wore it. God in heaven—if there is one!” he burst into a peal of chattering laughter. “He told us it would protect her! See how it worked!” With another laugh he pointed to the necklace and at its single remaining stone which seemed to wink sardonically at us as it rose and fell with the regular movement of Peligia’s breast.
“Non, non,” the Frenchman muttered, “new charms are val
ueless against ancient evils. We must combat that which is old and bad by that which is equally old, but good. But how—nom d’un canard!—how?
The Horror on the Links Page 56
