Cocktail hour had just struck as we passed through the wide entrance to the main hall, and a party of sleek-haired gentlemen and ladies in fashionably scanty attire were gathered before the cavernous fireplace, chatting and laughing as they imbibed the appetite-whetting amber drinks.
It was an enormous apartment, that hall, clear fifty feet from tiled floor to vaulted ceiling, and the darkness was scarcely more than stained by the flickering glow of blazing logs in the fireplace and the yellow beams of the tall, ecclesiastical candles which stood, singly, in high, wrought-iron standards at intervals along the walls. Draped down the bare stone sides of the hall hung a pair of prodigious tapestries, companion pieces, I thought, depicting particularly gory battle scenes, and I caught a fugitive glimpse of a black-armored knight with a cross-emblazoned surtout hacking the turbaned head from a Saracen, and the tag end of the Latin legend beneath—“ad Majorem De Gloriam.” Piloted by our host we mounted the wide, balustraded staircase to the second of three balconies which ran round three sides of the long hall, found the big, barnlike room assigned us, changed quickly to dinner clothes, and joined the other guests in time to file through a high archway to the oak-paneled apartment where dinner was served by candle-light on a long refectory table set with the richest silver and most opulent linen I had ever seen.
Greatly to his chagrin de Grandin drew a kittenish, elderly spinster with gleaming and palpably false dentition. I was paired off with a Miss O’Shane, a tall, tawny-haired girl with tapering, statuesque limbs and long, smooth-jointed fingers, milk-white skin of the pure-bred Celt and smoldering, rebellious eyes of indeterminate color.
During the soup and fish courses she was taciturn to the point of churlishness, responding to my attempts at conversation with curt, unisyllabic replies, but as the claret glasses were filled for the roast, she turned her strange, half-resentful gaze directly on me and demanded: “Dr. Trowbridge, what do you think of this house?”
“Why—er,” I temporized, scarcely knowing what to reply, “it seems rather gorgeous, but—”
“Yes,” she interrupted as I paused at a loss for an exact expression, “but what?”
“Well, rather depressing—too massive and mediaeval for present-day people, if you get what I mean.”
“I do,” she nodded almost angrily, “I most certainly do. It’s beastly. I’m a painter—a painter of sorts,” she hurried on as my eyes opened in astonishment at her vehemence—“and I brought along some gear to work with between times during the party. Van told me this is liberty hall, and I could do exactly as I pleased, and gave me a big room on the north side for a workshop. I’ve a commission I’ve simply got to finish in two weeks, and I began some preliminary sketches yesterday, but—” She paused taking a sip of burgundy and looking at me from the corners of her long, brooding eyes as though speculating whether or not to take me further into her confidence.
“Yes?” I prompted, assuming an air of interest.
“It’s no go. Do you remember the Red King in Through the Looking Glass?”
“The Red King?” I echoed. “I’m afraid I don’t quite.”
“Don’t you remember how Alice took the end of his pencil in her hand when he was attempting to enter a note in his diary and made him write, ‘The White Knight is sliding down the poker. He balances very badly’?”
I must have looked my bewilderment, for she laughed aloud, a deep, gurgling laugh in keeping with her rich, contralto speaking voice. “Oh, I’m not a psychopathic case—I hope,” she assured me, “but I’m certainly in a position to sympathize with the poor king. It’s a Christmas card I’m doing—a nice, frosty, sugar-sweet Christmas card—and I’m supposed to have a Noel scene with oxen and asses and sheep standing around the manager of a chubby little naked boy, you know—quite the conventional sort of thing.” She paused again and refreshed herself with a sip of wine, and I noticed that her strong, white-fingered hand trembled as she raised the glass to her lips.
My professional interest was roused. The girl was a splendid, vital animal, lean and strong as Artemis, and the pallor of her pale skin was natural, not unhealthy; yet it required no special training to see she labored under an almost crushing burden of suppressed nervousness.
“Won’t it work out?” I asked soothingly.
“No!” her reply was almost explosive. “No, it won’t! I can block in the interior, all right, though it doesn’t look much like a stable; but when it comes to the figures, something outside me—behind me, like Alice behind the Red King, you know, and just as invisible—seems to snatch the end of my charcoal and guide it. I keep drawing—”
Another pause broke her recital.
“Drawing what, if you please, Mademoiselle?” De Grandin turned from his partner who was in the midst of recounting a risqué anecdote and leaned forward, his narrow eyebrows elevated in twin arches, his little, round blue eyes fixed and unwinking in a direct, questioning stare.
The girl started at his query. “Oh, all manner of things,” she began, then broke off with a sharp, half-hysterical laugh. “Just what the Red King said when his pencil wouldn’t work!” she shrilled.
For a moment I thought the little Frenchman would strike her, so fierce was the uncompromising gaze he bent on her; then: “Ah, bah, let us not think too much of fairy tales, pleasant or grim, if you please, Mademoiselle,” he returned. “After dinner, if you will be so good, Dr. Trowbridge and I shall do ourselves the honor of inspecting these so mysterious self-dictated drawings of yours. Until then, let us consider this excellent food which the good Monsieur Van Riper has provided for us.” Abruptly he turned to his neglected partner. “Yes, Mademoiselle,” he murmured in his deferential, flattering manner, “and then the bishop said to the rector—?”
II
DINNER COMPLETED, WE TROOPED into the high, balconied hall for coffee, tobacco and liqueurs. A radio, artfully disguised as a mediaeval Flemish console, squawked jazz with a sputtering obligato of static, and some of the guests danced, while the rest gathered at the rim of the pool of firelight and talked in muted voices. Somehow, the great stone house seemed to discourage frivolity by the sheer weight of its antiquity.
“Trowbridge, my friend,” de Grandin whispered almost fiercely in my ear as he plucked me by the sleeve, “Mademoiselle O’Shane awaits our pleasure. Come, let us go to her studio at once before old Mère l’Oie tells me another of her so detestable stories of unvirtuous clergymen!”
Grinning as I wondered how the little Frenchman’s late dinner partner would have enjoyed hearing herself referred to as Mother Goose, I followed him up the first flight of stairs, crossed the lower balcony and ascended a second stairway, narrow and steeper than the first, to the upper gallery where Miss O’Shane waited before the heavily carved door of a great, cavelike room paneled from flagstone floor to beamed ceiling with age-blackened oak wainscot. Candles seemed the only mode of illumination available in the house, and our hostess had lighted half a dozen tapers which stood so that their luminance fell directly on an oblong of eggshell bristol board anchored to her easel by thumbtacks.
“Now, here’s what I started to do,” she began, indicating the sketch with a long, beautifully manicured forefinger. “This was supposed to be the inside of the stable at Bethlehem, and—oh?” The short, half-choked exclamation, uttered with a puzzled, questioning rising inflection, cut short her sentence, and she stared at her handiwork as though it were something she had never seen before.
Leaning forward, I examined the embryonic picture curiously. As she had said at dinner, the interior, rough and elementary as it was, did not resemble a stable. Crude and rough it undoubtedly was, but with a rudeness unlike that of a barn. Cubic, rough-hewn stones composed the walls, and the vaulting of the concatenated roof was supported by a series of converging arches with piers based on blocks of oddly carved stone representing wide, naked feet, toes forward, standing on the crowns of hideous, gargoylish heads with half-human, half-reptilian faces which leered hellishly in mingled torment
and rage beneath the pressure. In the middle foreground was a raised rectangular object which reminded me of a flat-topped sarcophagus, and beside it, slightly to the rear, there loomed the faint, spectral outline of a sinister, cowled figure with menacing, upraised hand, while in the lower foreground crouched, or rather groveled, a second figure, a long, boldly sketched female form with outstretched supplicating hands and face concealed by a cascade of downward sweeping hair. Back of the hooded, monkish form were faint outlines of what had apparently first been meant to represent domestic animals, but I could see where later, heavier pencil strokes had changed them into human shapes resembling the cowled and hooded figure.
I shuddered involuntarily as I turned from the drawing, for not only in half-completed line and suggestive curve, but also in the intangible spirit of the thing was the suggestion of something bestial and unhallowed. Somehow, the thing seemed to suggest something revolting, something pregnant with the disgusting incongruity of a ribald song bawled in church when the Kyrie should be sung, or of rose-water sprinkled on putrefying offal.
De Grandin’s slender dark brown eyebrows elevated till they almost met the shoreline of his sleekly combed fair hair, and the waxed points of his diminutive blond mustache reared upward like a pair of horns as he pursed his thin lips, but he made no verbal comment.
Not so Miss O’Shane. As though a sudden draft of air had blown through the room, she shivered, and I could see the horror with which she stared wide-eyed, at her own creation. “It wasn’t like that!” she exclaimed in a thin, rasping whisper like the ghost of a scream. “I didn’t do that!”
“Eh, how do you say, Mademoiselle?” de Grandin challenged, regarding her with his unwinking cat-stare. “You would have us to understand that—”
“Yes!” She still spoke in a sort of awed, wondering whisper. “I didn’t draw it that way! I blocked in the interior and made it of stone, for I was pretty sure the Holy Land stables were masonry, but I didn’t draw those beastly arch-supports! They were just plain blocks of stone when I made them. I did put in the arches—not that I wanted to, but because I felt compelled to do it, but this—this is all different!” Her words trailed off till we could scarcely catch them, not because of lowered tone, but because they came higher, thinner, with each syllable. Stark, unreasoning terror had her by the throat, and it was with the utmost difficulty that she managed to breathe.
“H’m,” de Grandin tweaked the pointed ends of his mustache. “Let us recapitulate, if you please, Mademoiselle: Yesterday and today you worked on this sketch? Yes? You drew what you conceived to be a Jewish stable in the days of Caesar Augustus—and what else, if you recall?”
“Just the stable and the bare outlines of the manger, then a half-completed figure which was to have been Joseph, and the faintest outlines of the animals and a kneeling figure before the cradle—I hadn’t determined whether it would be male or female, or whether it would be full-draped or not, for I wasn’t sure whether I’d have the Magi or the shepherds or just some of the village folk adoring the Infant, you see. I gave up working about four this afternoon, because the light was beginning to fail and because—”
“Eh bien, because of what, if you please, Mademoiselle?” the Frenchman prompted sharply as the girl dropped her recital.
“Because there seemed to be an actual physical opposition to my work—almost as if an invisible hand were gently but insistently forcing my pencil to draw things I hadn’t conceived—things I was afraid to draw! Now, do you think I’m crazy?”
She paused again, breathing audibly through slightly parted lips, and I could see the swelling of her throat as she swallowed convulsively once or twice.
Ignoring her question, the little Frenchman regarded her thoughtfully a moment, then examined the drawing once more. “This who was to have been the good Saint Joseph, now,” he asked softly, “was he robed after this fashion when you limned him?”
“No, I’d only roughed out the body. He had no face when I quit work.”
“U’m, Mademoiselle, he is still without a face,” de Grandin replied.
“Yes, but there’s a place for his face in the opening of his hood, and if you look closely you can almost see his features—his eyes, especially. I can feel them on me, and they’re not good. They’re bad, wicked, cruel—like a snake’s or a devil’s. See, he’s robed like a monk; I didn’t draw him that way!”
De Grandin took up one of the candelabra and held it close to the picture, scanning the obscene thing with an unhurried, critical stare, then turned to us with a half-impatient shrug. “Tenez, my friends,” he remarked. “I fear we make ourselves most wretchedly unhappy over a matter of small moment. Let us join the others.”
III
MIDNIGHT HAD STRUCK AND de Grandin and I had managed to lose something like thirty dollars at the bridge tables before the company broke up for the evening.
“Do you really think that poor O’Shane girl is a little off her rocker?” I asked as we made ready for bed.
“I doubt it,” he replied, as he fastened the sash of his pale lavender pajama jacket with a nervous tug; “indeed, I am inclined to believe all that she told us—and something more.”
“You think it possible she could have been in a sort of day-dream while she drew those awful things, thinking all the while she was drawing a Christmas card?” I asked incredulously.
“Ah bah,” he returned, as he kicked off his purple lizardskin slippers and leaped into bed, “what matters it what we think? Unless I am more mistaken than I think, we shall know with certitude before very long.” And turning his back upon me, he dropped off to sleep.
I might have slept an hour, perhaps only a few minutes, when the sharp impact of an elbow against my ribs aroused me. “Eh?” I demanded, sitting up in bed and rubbing my eyes sleepily.
“Trowbridge, my friend,” de Grandin’s sharp whisper came through the darkness, “Listen! Do you hear it?”
“Huh?” I responded, but:
“Ps-s-st!” he shut me off with a minatory hiss, and I held my peace, straining my ears through the chill November night.
At first I heard nothing but the skirling of the wind-fiends racing past the turreted walls, and the occasional creak of a rusty hinge as some door or shutter swung loose from its fastenings; then, very faint and faraway seeming, but growing in clarity as my ears became attuned to it, I caught the subdued notes of a piano played very softly.
“Come!” de Grandin breathed, slipping from the bed and donning a mauve-silk gown.
Obeying his summons, I rose and followed him on tiptoe across the balcony and down the stairs. As we descended, the music became clearer, more distinct. Someone was in the music room, touching the keys of the big grand piano with a delicate harpsichord touch. Liebestraum the composition was, and the gently struck notes fell, one after another, like drops of limpid water dripping from a moss-covered ledge into a quiet woodland pool.
“Why, it’s exquisite,” I began, but de Grandin’s upraised hand cut short my commendation as he motioned me forward.
Seated before the piano was Dunroe O’Shane, her long, ivory fingers flitting over the ivory keys, her loosened tawny hair flowing over her uncovered white shoulders like molten bronze. From gently swelling breast to curving instep she was draped in a clinging shift of black-silk tissues which revealed the gracious curves of her pale body.
As we paused at the doorway the dulcet German air came to an abrupt ending, the girl’s fingers began weaving sinuous patterns over the keys, as though she would conjure up some nether-world spirit from their pallid smoothness, and the room was suddenly filled with a libidinous, macabre theme in B minor, beautiful and seductive, but at the same time revolting. Swaying gently to the rhythm of the frenetic music, she turned her face toward us, and I saw her eyes were closed, long lashes sweeping against white cheeks, pale fine-veined lids calmly lowered.
“Why,” I exclaimed softly, “why, de Grandin, she’s asleep, she’s—”
A quick movement o
f his hand stayed my words, as he stole softly across the rug-strewn floor, bent forward till his face was but a few inches from hers, and stared intently into veiled eyes. I could see the small blue veins in his temples swell and throb, and muscles of his throat bunch and contract with the physical effort he made to project his will into her consciousness. His thin, firm lips moved, forming soundless words, and one of his small, white hands rose slowly, finger-tips together, as though reeling thread from an invisible skein, paused a moment before her face, then moved slowly back, with a gliding, stroking motion.
Gradually, with a slow diminuendo, the wicked, salacious tune came to a pause, died to a thin, vibrating echo, ceased. Still with lowered lids and gently parted lips, the girl rose from the piano, wavered uncertainly a moment, then walked from the room with a slow, gliding step, her slim, naked feet passing soundlessly as a drift of air, as slowly she mounted the stairs.
Silently, in a sort of breathless wonder, I watched her disappear around the curve of the stone stairway, and was about to hazard a wandering opinion when a sharp exclamation from the Frenchman silenced me.
“Quick, my friend,” he ordered, extinguishing the tall twin candles which burned beside the piano, “let us go up. Unless I am more badly mistaken than I think, there is that up there which is worth seeing!”
The Horror on the Links Page 68
