“Monsieur Rochester—do you hear me?” he spoke sharply, for the young man’s face was taking on the greyness of impending death.
“Ye-es. She loves me—she loves me. Alice!” With the name sighing on his lips his facial muscles loosened and his eyes took on the glazed, unwinking stare of eyes that see no more.
De Grandin gently drew the lids across the sightless eyes and raised the fallen jaw, then set about straightening the room with methodical haste. “As a licensed practitioner you will sign the death certificate,” he announced matter-of-factly. “Our young friend suffered from angina pectoris. This morning he had an attack, and after calling us fell from the chair on which he stood to reach his medicine, thereby fracturing several bones. He told us this when we arrived to find him dying. You understand?”
“I’m hanged if I do,” I denied. “You know as well as I—”
“That the police would have awkward questions to address to us,” he reminded me. “We were the last ones to see him alive. Do you conceive that they would credit what we said if we told them the truth?”
Much as I disliked it, I followed his orders to the letter and the poor boy’s body was turned over to the ministrations of Mortician Martin within an hour.
As Rochester had been an orphan without known family de Grandin assumed the role of next friend, made all arrangements for the funeral, and gave orders that the remains be cremated without delay, the ashes to be turned over to him for final disposition.
Most of the day was taken up in making these arrangements and in my round of professional calls. I was thoroughly exhausted by four o’clock in the afternoon, but de Grandin, hustling, indefatigable, seemed fresh as he had been at daybreak.
“Not yet, my friend,” he denied as I would have sunk into the embrace of an easy chair, “there is yet something to be done. Did not you hear my promise to the never-quite-to-be-sufficiently-anathematized Palenzeke last night?”
“Eh, your promise?”
“Précisément. We have one great surprise in store for that one.”
Grumbling, but with curiosity that overrode my fatigue, I drove him to the little Greek Orthodox parsonage. Parked at the door was the severely plain black service wagon of a funeral director, its chauffeur yawning audibly at the delay in getting through his errand.
De Grandin ran lightly up the steps, gained admission and returned in a few minutes with the venerable priest arrayed in full canonicals. “Allons mon enfant,” he told the chauffeur, “be on your way; we follow.”
Even when the imposing granite walls of the North Hudson Crematory loomed before us I failed to understand his hardly suppressed glee.
All arrangements had apparently been made. In the little chapel over the retort Father Apostolakos recited the orthodox burial office, and the casket sank slowly from view on the concealed elevator provided for conveying it to the incineration chamber below.
The aged priest bowed courteously to us and left the building, seating himself in my car, and I was about to follow when de Grandin motioned to me imperatively. “Not yet, Friend Trowbridge,” he told me. “Come below and I will show you something.”
We made our way to the subterranean chamber where incineration took place. The casket rested on a low wheeled track before the yawning cavern of the retort, but de Grandin stopped the attendants as they were about to roll it into place. Tiptoeing across the tiled floor he bent above the casket, motioning me to join him.
As I paused beside him I recognized the heavy, evil features of the man we had first seen with Alice, the same bestial, furious face which had mouthed curses at us from outside Rochester’s window the night before. I would have drawn back, but the Frenchman clutched me firmly by the elbow, drawing me still nearer the body.
“Tiens, Monsieur le Cadavre,” he whispered as he bent above the dead thing, “what think you of this, hein? You who would be king and emperor of the dead, you who boasted that no power on earth could balk you—did not Jules de Grandin promise you that you should have nothing, not even one poor plot of earth to call a grave? Pah, murderer and ravisher of women, man-killer, where is now your power? Go—go through the furnace fire to hell-fire, and take this with you!” He pursed his lips and spat full in the cold upturned visage of the corpse.
It might have been a trick of overwrought nerves or an optical illusion produced by the electric lights, but I still believe I saw the dead, long-buried body writhe in its casket and a look of terrible, unutterable hate disfigure the waxen features.
He stepped back, nodding to the attendants, and the casket slid noiselessly into the retort. A whirring sounded as the pressure pump was started, and in a moment came the subdued roar of oil-flames shooting from the burners.
He raised his narrow shoulders in a shrug. “C’est une affaire finie.”
IT WAS SOMEWHAT AFTER midnight when we made our way once more to Shadow Lawn Cemetery. Unerringly as though going to an appointment, de Grandin led the way to the Heatherton family mausoleum, let himself through the massive bronze gates with a key he had procured somewhere, and ordered me to stand guard outside.
Lighted by the flash of his electric torch he entered the tomb, a long cloth-covered parcel clasped under his arm. A moment later I heard the clink of metal on metal the sound of some heavy object being drawn across the floor; then, as I grew half hysterical at the long continued silence, there came the short, half-stifled sound of a gasping cry, the sort of cry a patient in the dental chair gives when a tooth is extracted without anaesthetic.
Another period of silence, broken by the rasp of heavy objects being moved, and the Frenchman emerged from the tomb, tears streaming down his face. “Peace,” he announced chokingly. “I brought her peace, Friend Trowbridge, but oh! how pitiful it was to hear her moan, and still more pitiful to see the lovely, live-seeming body shudder in the embrace of relentless death. It is not hard to see the living die, my old one, but the dead! Mordieu, my soul will be in torment every time I think of what I had to do tonight for mercy’s sake!”
JULES DE GRANDIN CHOSE a cigar from the humidor and set it glowing with the precision that distinguished his every movement. “I grant you the events of the last three days have been decidedly queer,” he agreed as he sent a cloud of fragrant smoke ceilingward. “But what would you? All that lies outside our everyday experience is queer. To one who has not studied biology the sight of an amoeba beneath the microscope is queer; the Eskimos undoubtlessly thought Monsieur Byrd’s airplane queer; we think the sights which we have seen these nights queer. It is our luck—and all mankind’s—that they are.
“To begin: Just as there exist today certain protozoa which are probably identical with the earliest forms of life on earth, so there are still, though constantly diminishing in numbers, certain holdovers of ancient evil. Time was when earth swarmed with them—devils and devilkins, imps, satyrs and demons, elementals, werewolves and vampires. All once were numerous; all, perhaps, exist in considerable numbers to this day, though we know them not, and most of us never so much as hear of them. It is with the vampire that we had to deal this time. You know him, no?
“Strictly, he is an earthbound soul, a spirit which because of manifold sins and wickedness is bound to the world wherein it once worked evil and cannot take itself to its proper place. He is in India in considerable numbers, also in Russia, Hungary, Romania and throughout the Balkans—wherever civilization is very old and decadent, there he seems to find a favorable soil. Sometimes he steals the body of one already dead; sometimes he remains in the body which he had in life, and then he is most terrible of all, for he needs nourishment for that body, but not such nourishment as you or I take. No, he subsists on the life force of the living, imbibed through their blood, for the blood is the life. He must suck the breath from those who live, or he cannot breathe; he must drink their blood, or he dies of starvation. And here is where the danger rises: a suicide, one who dies under a curse, or one who has been inoculated with the vampire virus by having his blood suck
ed by a vampire, becomes a vampire after death. Innocent of all wrong he may be, often is, yet he is doomed to tread the earth by night, preying ceaselessly upon the living, ever recruiting the grisly ranks of his tribe. You apprehend?
“Consider this case: This sacré Palenzeke, because of his murder and suicide, perhaps partly because of his Slavic ancestry, maybe also because of his many other sins, became a vampire when he killed himself to death. Madame Heatherton’s informant was correct, he had destroyed himself; but his evil body and more evil soul remained in partnership, ten thousand times a greater menace to mankind than when they had been partners in their natural life.
“Enjoying the supernatural power of his life-in-death, he rose from the swamplands, waylaid Mademoiselle Alice, assaulted her chauffeur, then dragged her off into the bog to work his evil will on her, gratifying at once his bestial lust, his vampire’s thirst for blood and his revenge for her rejection of his wooing. When he had killed her, he had made her such a thing as he was. More, he had gained dominion over her. She was his toy, his plaything, his automaton, without will or volition of her own. What he commanded she must do, however much she hated doing it. You will recall, perhaps, how she told the young Rochester that she must go out with the villain, although she hated him? Also, how she bade him enter the apartment where she and her beloved lay in love’s embrace, although his entrance meant her lover’s undoing?
“Now, if the vampire added all the powers of living men to his dead powers we should have no defense, but fortunately he is subject to unbreakable laws. He can not independently cross the thread of a running stream, he must be carried; he can not enter any house or dwelling until invited by someone therein; he can fly through the air, enter at keyholes and window-chinks, or through the crack of the door, but he can move about only at night—between sunset and cock-crow. From sunrise to dark he is only a corpse, helpless as any other, and must lie corpse-dead in his tomb. At such times he can easily be slain, but only in certain ways. First, if his heart be pierced by a stake of ash and—his head severed from his body, he is dead in good earnest, and can no more rise to plague us. Second, if he can be completely burned to ashes he is no more, for fire cleanses all things.
“Now, with this information, fit together the puzzle that so mystifies you: the other night at the Café Bacchanale I liked the looks of that one not at all. He had the face of a dead man and the look of a born villain, as well as the eye of a fish. Of his companion I thoroughly approved, though she, too, had an other-worldly look. Wondering about them, I watched them from my eye’s tail, and when I observed that they ate nothing I thought it not only strange, but menacing. Normal people do not do such things; abnormal people usually are dangerous.
“When Palenzeke left the young woman, after indicating she might flirt with the young Rochester, I liked the look of things a little less. My first thought was that it might be a game of decoy and robbery—how do you call him?—the game of the badger? Accordingly, I thought it best to follow them to see what we should see. Eh bien, my friend, we saw a plenty, n’est-ce-pas?
“You will recall young Rochester’s experience in the cemetery. As he related it to us I saw at once what manner of foeman we must grapple with, though at that time I did not know how innocent Mademoiselle Alice was. Our information from Madame Heatherton confirmed my worst fears. What we beheld at Rochester’s apartment that night proved all I had imagined, and more.
“But me, I had not been idle meantime. Oh, no. I had seen the good Father Apostolakos and told him what I had learned. He understood at once, and made immediate arrangements to have Palenzeke’s foul body exhumed and taken to the crematory for incineration. He also lent me a sacred ikon, the blessèd image of a saint whose potency to repel demons had more than once been proved. Perhaps you noticed how Mademoiselle Alice shrank from me when I approached her with the relic in my pocket? And how the restless soul of Palenzeke flinched from it as flesh recoils from white-hot iron?
“Very well. Rochester loved this woman already dead. He himself was moribund. Why not let him taste of love with the shade of the woman who returned his passion for the few days he had yet to live? When he died, as die he must, I was prepared to treat his poor clay so that, though he were already half a vampire from the vampire’s kisses on his throat, he could yet do no harm. You know I have done so. The cleansing fire has rendered Palenzeke impotent. Also, I had pledged myself to do as much for the poor, lovely, sinned-against Alice when her brief aftermath of earthly happiness should have expired. You heard me promise her, and I have kept my word.
“I could not bear to hurt her needlessly, so when I went to her with stake and knife tonight I took also a syringe loaded with five grains of morphine and gave her an injection before I began my work. I do not think she suffered greatly. Her moan of dissolution and the portion of her poor body as the stake pierced through her heart, they were but reflex acts, not signs of conscious misery.”
“But look here,” I objected, “if Alice were a vampire, as you say, and able to float about after dark, how comes it that she lay in her casket when you went there tonight?”
“Oh, my friend,” tears welled up in his eyes, “she waited for me.
“We had a definite engagement; the poor one lay in her casket, awaiting the knife and stake which should set her free from bondage. She—she smiled at me and pressed my hand when I had dragged her from the tomb!”
He wiped his eyes and poured an ounce or so of cognac into a bud-shaped inhaler. “To you, young Rochester, and to your lovely lady,” he said as he raised the glass in salute. “Though there be neither marrying nor giving in marriage where you are, may your restless souls find peace and rest eternally—together.”
The fragile goblet shattered as he tossed it, emptied, into the fireplace.
The Chapel of Mystic Horror
I
THE WIND WAS BLOWING half a gale and little spits of sudden snow were whirling through the gray November twilight as we alighted from the accommodation train and looked expectantly up and down the uncovered way-station platform. “Seasonable weather for Thanksgiving,” I murmured, setting my face against the howling blast and making for the glowing disk of the station-master’s light.
“Barbe d’un pelican, yes!” assented Jules de Grandin, sinking his chin an inch or so lower in the fur collar of his overcoat. “A polar bear might give thanks for a warm fireside on such a night!”
“Trowbridge—I say there—Trowbridge!” a voice hailed from the lee side of the little red-brick depot as my friend Tandy Van Riper stepped forward, waving a welcoming hand. “This way, old-timer; the car’s waiting—so’s dinner.
“Glad to meet you, Dr. de Grandin,” he acknowledged as I presented the little Frenchman; “it was mighty good of you to come out with Trowbridge and help us light the hearth fires at the Cloisters.”
“Ah, then it is a new house that you have, Monsieur?” de Grandin asked as he dropped into a seat in Van Riper’s luxurious roadster and tucked the bearskin rug snugly about his knees.
“Well, yes and no,” our host replied. “The house has been up—in America—for something like eight years, I believe, but it’s new to us. We’ve been in residence just a little over a month, and we’re giving a regular old-fashioned Thanksgiving party by way of housewarming.”
“U’m,” the Frenchman nodded thoughtfully. “Your pardon, Monsieur, it is perhaps that I do not speak the American well, but did you not say the new house had been up in this country for only eight years? I fear I do not apprehend. Is it that the house stood elsewhere before being erected here?”
“Precisely,” Van Riper agreed with a laugh. “The Cloisters were built or rebuilt, I suppose you’d say—by Miles Batterman shortly after the close of the World War. Batterman made a potful of money during the war, and a lot more in lucky speculations between the Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles. I reckon he didn’t know just what to do with it all, so he blew in a couple of hundred thousand on an old Cyprian villa, ha
d it taken down stone by stone, shipped over here, and re-erected. The building was a sort of remodeled monastery, I believe, and took Batterman’s eye while he was cruising about the Mediterranean in ’20. He went to a lot of trouble having it moved here and put up, and everything about the place is exactly as it was in Cyprus, except the heating and plumbing, which he added as a sort of afterthought. Quaint idea, wasn’t it?”
“Decidedly,” the Frenchman agreed. “And this Monsieur Batterman, did he so soon tire of his expensive toy?”
“Humph, not exactly. I got it from the administrators. I couldn’t have afforded to pay a quarter the price Batterman spent on the place, let alone give him a profit on the transaction, but the fact is the old boy dropped off suddenly a year or so ago—so did his wife and daughter. The doctors said they died from eating toadstools by mistake for mushrooms. Whatever the cause was, the whole family died in a single night and the property would have gone to the State by escheat if the lawyers hadn’t dug up some ninety-second cousins in Omaha. We bought the house at public auction for about a tenth its value, and I’m figuring on holding it for a while. It’ll be novel, living in a place the Knights Templar once occupied, eh?”
“Very novel—very novel, indeed, Monsieur,” de Grandin replied in a queer, flat voice. “You say the Knights of the Temple once occupied this house?”
“So they tell me—some of their old furniture’s still in it.”
De Grandin made an odd sound in his throat, and I turned quickly to look at him, but his face was as set and expressionless as the features of a Japanese Buddha, and if the half-smothered exclamation had been meant for conversation, he had evidently thought better of it, for he sat in stony silence during the rest of the drive.
The snow squalls had stopped by the time we drew up at the house, but the wind had increased in velocity, and in the zenith we could see the gibbous moon buffeted about in a surf of windblown clouds. Against the background of the winter sky the irregular outline of the Cloisters loomed in a forbidding silhouette. It was a high, rambling pile of gray masonry in which the characteristics of Romanesque, Gothic and Byzantine architecture were oddly blended. The walls were strengthened by a series of buttresses, crenelated with battlements and punctuated here and there with small, cylindrical watch-towers; the windows were mere slits between the great stones, and the massive entrance-way seemed fitted for a portcullis, yet a great, hemispherical dome rose from the center of the building, and a wide, shallow portico with graceful, fluted columns topped by Doric capitals stood before the gateway.
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