“I will not!” I returned hotly, stung to the quick by his suggestion. “I don’t know what’s down there, but if you go, I go, too!”
Before I realized what he was about, he had flung his arms about my neck and kissed me on both cheeks. “Onward, then, brave comrade!” he cried. “This night we fight such a fight as had not been waged since the sainted George slew the monster!”
VII
ROUND AND ROUND A steadily descending spiral, while I counted a hundred and seventy steps, we went, going deeper into inky blackness. Finally, when I had begun to grow giddy with the endless corkscrew turns, we arrived at a steeply sloping tunnel, floored with smooth black-and-white tiles. Down this we hastened, until we traversed a distance of a hundred feet; then for a similar length we trod a level path, and began an ascent as steep as the first decline.
“Careful—cautiously, my friend,” the Frenchman warned in a whisper.
Pausing a moment while he fumbled in the pocket of his jacket, my companion strode toward the barrier and laid his left hand on its heavy, wrought-iron latch.
The portal swung back almost as he touched it, and:
“Qui va la?” challenged a voice from the darkness.
De Grandin threw the ray of his torch across the doorway, disclosing a tall, spare form in gleaming black plate-armor over which was drawn the brown-serge habit of a monk. The sentry wore his hair in a sort of bob approximating the haircut affected by children today, and on his sallow immature face sprouted the rudiments of a straggling beard. It was a youthful face and a weak one which de Grandin’s light disclosed, but the face of youth already well schooled in viciousness.
“Qui vive?” the fellow called doubtfully in a rather high, effeminate voice, laying a hand on the hilt of a heavy broadsword dangling from the wide, brass-studded baldric looped over his cassock.
“Those on the service of the Most High God, petit bête!” returned de Grandin, drawing something (a pronged sprig of wood, I thought) from his jacket pocket and thrusting it toward the warder’s face.
“Ohé!” cried the other sharply, shrinking back. “Touch me not, good messires, I pray—I—”
“Ha—so?” de Grandin gritted between his teeth, and drew the branched stick downward across the sentry’s face.
Astonishingly, the youth seemed to shrink and shrivel in upon himself. Trembling as though with an ague, he bent forward, buckled at the knees, fell toward the floor, and—was gone! Sword, armor, cassock and the man who wore them dwindled to nothingness before our sight.
A hundred feet or so farther on, our way was barred by another door, wider, higher and heavier than the first. While no tiler guarded it, it was so firmly locked that all our efforts were powerless to budge it.
“Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin announced, “it seems we shall have to pick this lock, even as we did the other. Do you keep watch through yonder grille while I make the way open for us.” Reaching up, he moved aside a shutter covering a barred peephole in the door’s thick panels; then, dropping to his knees, drew forth his wires and began working at the lock.
Gazing through the tiny wicket, I beheld a chapel-like room of circular formation, cunningly floored with slabs of polished yellow stone, inlaid with occasional plaques of purple.
By the glow of a wavering vigil lamp and the flicker of several guttering ecclesiastical candles, I saw the place was roofed with a vaulted ceiling supported by a number of converging arches, and the pier of each arch was supported by the carved image of a huge human foot which rested on the crown of a hideous, half-human head, crushing it downward and causing it to grimace hellishly with mingled pain and fury.
Beyond the yellow sanctuary lamp loomed the altar, approached by three low steps, and on it was a tall wooden crucifix from which the corpus had been stripped and to which had been nailed, in obscure caricature, a huge black bat. The staples fastening the poor beast to the cross must have hurt unmercifully, for it strove hysterically to free itself.
Almost sickened at the sight, I described the scene to de Grandin as he worked at the lock, speaking in a muted whisper, for, though there was no sign of living thing save the tortured bat, I felt that there were listening ears concealed in the darkness.
“Good!” he grunted as he hastened with his task. “It may be we are yet in time, good friend.” Even as he spoke there came a sharp click, and the door’s heavy bolts slipped back under the pressure of his improvised picklock.
Slowly, inch by careful inch, we forced the great door back.
BUT EVEN AS WE did so, there came from the rear of th circular chamber the subdued measures of a softly intoned Gregorian chant, and something white moved forward through the shadows.
It was a man arrayed in black-steel armor over which was drawn a white surtout emblazoned with a reversed passion cross, and in his hands he bore a wide-mouthed brazen bowl like an alms-basin. In the tray rested a wicked-looking, curve-bladed knife.
With a mocking genuflection to the altar he strode up the steps and placed his burden on the second tread; then, with a coarse guffaw, he spat upon the pinioned bat and backed downward.
As a signal a double file of armored men came marching out of the gloom, ranged themselves in two ranks, one to right, one to left of the altar, and whipped their long swords from their sheaths, clashing them together, tip to tip, forming an arcade of flashing steel between them.
So softly that I felt rather than heard him, de Grandin sighed in suppressed fury as blade met blade and two more men-at-arms, each bearing a smoking censer, strode forward beneath the roof of steel. The perfume of the incense was strong, acrid, sweet, and it mounted to our brains like the fumes of some accursed drug. But even as we sniffed its seductive scent, our eyes widened at the sight of the form which paced slowly behind the mailed acolytes.
Ceremoniously, step by pausing step, she came, like a bride marching under the arbor of uplifted swords at a military wedding, and my eyes fairly ached at the beauty of her. Milk-white, lissom and pliant as a peeled willow wand, clad only in the jeweled loveliness of her own pearly whiteness, long, bronze hair sweeping in a cloven tide from her pale brow and cataracting over her tapering shoulders, came Dunroe O’Shane. Her eyes were closed, as though in sleep, and on her red, full lips lay the yearning half-smile of the bride who ascends the aisle to meet her bridegroom, or the novice who mounts the altar steps to make her full profession. And as she advanced, her supple, long-fingered hands waved slowly to and fro, weaving fantastic arabesques in the air.
“Hail, Cytherea, Queen and Priestess and Goddess; hail, She Who Confers Life and Being on Her Servants!” came the full-throated salutation of the double row of armored men as they clashed their blades together in martial salute, then dropped to one knee in greeting and adoration.
For a moment the undraped priestess paused below the altar stairs; then, as though forced downward by invincible pressure, she dropped, and we heard the smacking impact of soft flesh against the stone floor as she flung herself prostrate and beat her brow and hands against the floor in utter self-abasement before the marble altar and its defiled calvary.
“Is all prepared?” The question rang out sonorously as a cowled figure advanced from the shadows and strode with a swaggering step to the altar.
“All is prepared!” the congregation answered with one voice.
“Then bring the paschal lamb, even the lamb without fleece!” The deep-voiced command somehow sent shivers through me.
Two armored votaries slipped quietly away, returning in an instant with the struggling body of a little boy between them—a chubby child, naked, who fought and kicked and offered such resistance as his puny strength allowed while he called aloud to “Mamma” and “Grandma” to save him.
Down against the altar steps the butchers flung the little man; then one took his chubby, dimpled hands in relentless grip while the other drew backward at his ankles, suspending him above the wide-mouthed brazen bowl reposing on the second step.
“Take up the
knife, Priestess and Queen of goodly Salamis,” the hooded master of ceremonies commanded. “Take up the sacrificial knife, that the red blood may flow to our Goddess, and we hold high wassail in Her honor! O’er land and sea, o’er burning desert and heaving billow have we journeyed—”
“Villains—assassins—renegades!” Jules de Grandin bounded from his station in the shadow like a frenzied cat. “By the blood of all the blessed martyrs, you have journeyed altogether too far from hell, your home!”
“Ha? Interlopers?” rasped the hooded man. “So be it. Three hearts shall smoke upon our altar instead of one!”
“Parbleu, nothing shall smoke but the fires of your endless torture as your foul carcasses burn ceaselessly in hell!” de Grandin returned, leaping forward and drawing out the forked stick with which he had struck down the porter at the outer gate.
A burst of contemptuous laughter greeted him. “Thinkest thou to overcome me with such a toy?” the cowled one asked between shouts. “My warder at the gate succumbed to your charms—he was a poor weakling. Him you have passed, but not me. Now die!”
From beneath his cassock he snatched a long, two-handed sword, whirled its blade aloft in a triple flourish, and struck directly at de Grandin’s head.
Almost by a miracle, it seemed, the Frenchman avoided the blow, dropped his useless spring of thornwood and snatched a tiny, quill-like object from his pocket. Dodging the devastating thrusts of the enemy de Grandin toyed an instant with the capsule in his hand, unscrewed the cap and, suddenly changing his tactics, advanced directly on his foe.
“Ha, Monsieur from the Fires, here is fire you know not of!” he shouted, thrusting forward the queer-looking rod and advancing within reach of the other’s sword.
I stared in open-mouthed amazement. Poised for another slashing blow with his great sword, the armed man wavered momentarily, while an expression of astonishment, bewilderment, finally craven fear overspread his lean, predatory features. Lowering his sword, he thrust feebly with the point, but there was no force behind the stab; the deadly steel clattered to the floor before he could drive it into the little Frenchman’s breast.
The hooded man seemed growing thinner; his tall, spare form, which had bulked a full head taller than de Grandin a moment before, seemed losing substance—growing gradually transparent, like an early morning fog slowly dissolving before the strengthening rays of the rising sun. Behind him, through him, I could dimly espy the outlines of the violated altar and the prostrate woman before its steps. Now the objects in the background became plainer and plainer. The figure of the armored man was no longer a thing of flesh and blood and cold steel overspread with a monk’s habit, but an unsubstantial phantom, like an oddly shaped cloud. It was composed of trailing, rolling clouds of luminous vapor which gradually disintegrated into strands and floating webs of phosphorescence, and these, in turn, gave way to scores of little nebulae of light which glowed like cigarette-ends of intense blue radiance. Then, where the nebulae had been were only dancing, shifting specks of bright blue fire, finally nothing but a few pin-points of light; then—nothing.
Like shadows thrown of forest trees when the moon is at her zenith, the double row of men-at-arms stood at ease while de Grandin battled with their champion; now their leader gone, they turned and scuttled in panic toward the rearward shadows, but Jules de Grandin was after them like a speeding arrow.
“Ha, renegades,” he called mockingly, pressing closer and closer, “you who steal away helpless little boy-babies from the arms of their grand-mères and then would sacrifice, them on your altar, do you like the feast Jules de Grandin brings? You who would make wassail with the blood of babies—drink the draft I have prepared! Fools, mockers at God, where now is your deity? Call on her—call on Cytherea! Pardieu, I fear her not.”
As it was with the master, so it was with the underlings: Closer and closer de Grandin pressed against the struggling mass of demoralized men, before his advance like ice when pressed upon by red-hot iron. One moment they milled and struggled, shrieking for aid to some unclean deity; the next they were dissolved into nebulous vapor, drifting aimlessly a moment in the still air, then swept away to nothingness.
“And so, my friend, that is done,” announced de Grandin matter-of-factly as he might have mentioned the ending of a meal. “There crouches Mademoiselle O’Shane, Friend Trowbridge; come, let us seek her clothes—they should be somewhere here.”
Behind the altar we found Dunroe’s nightrobe and negligee lying in a ring, just as she had shrugged out of them before taking up her march between the upraised swords. Gently as a nurse attending a babe, the little Frenchman raised the swooning girl from her groveling posture before the altar, draped her robes about her, and took her in his arms.
A wailing cry, rising gradually to an incensed roar, echoed and reverberated through the vaulted chamber, and de Grandin thrust the unconscious girt into my hands. “Mon Dieu,” he exclaimed, “I did forget. Le petit garçon!”
Crouched as close to the wall as he could get, we found the little lad, tears of surprising size streaming down his fat cheeks as his little mouth opened wide and emitted wail after broken-hearted wail. “Holà, my little cabbage, mon brave soldat!” de Grandin soothed him, stretching out his hands to the weeping youngster. “Come with me. Come, we shall clothe you warmly against the cold and pop you into a bed of feathers, and tomorrow morning we return you to your mother’s arms.”
Panting under my burden, for she was no lightweight, I bore Dunroe O’Shane up the long, tortuous flight of steps.
“Morphine is indicated here, if I do not mistake,” de Grandin remarked as we laid the girl on her bed.
“But we haven’t any—” I began, only to be checked by his grin.
“Oh, but we have,” he contradicted. “I foresaw something like this was likely to come about, and abstracted a quantity of the drug, together with a syringe, from your surgery before we left home.”
When we had administered the narcotic, we set out for our own chamber, the little boy, warmly bundled in blankets, held tightly in de Grandin’s arms. At a nod from the Frenchman we paused at Dunroe’s studio, lighted several candles and inspected her work. Fairly spread upon her drawing-board was a pretty little scene—a dimpled little boy crowing and smiling in his mother’s lap, a proud and happy father leaning over them, and in the foreground a group of rough bucolics kneeling in smiling adoration. “Why, the influence, whatever it was, seems to have left her before we went down those secret stairs!” I exclaimed, looking admiringly at the drawing.
“Do you say so?” de Grandin asked as he bent closer to inspect the picture. “Look here, if you please, my friend.”
Bringing my eyes within a few inches of the board on which the Christmas scene was sketched, I saw, so faint it was hardly to be found unless the beholder looked for it another picture, lightly sketched in jerky, uneven lines, depicting another scene—a vaulted chapel with walls lined by armed men, two of whom held a child’s body horizontally before the altar, while a woman, clothed only in her long, trailing hair, plunged a wicked, curve-bladed knife into the little one’s body, piercing the heart.
“Good Lord!” I exclaimed, in horror.
“Precisely,” agreed Jules de Grandin. “The good Lord inspired talent in the poor girl’s hand, but the powers of darkness dictated that sketch. Perhaps—I can not say for sure—she drew both the picture we see here, and the good one was formerly the faint one, but when I overcame the wicked ones, the wicked scene faded to insignificance and the pleasing one became predominant. It is possible, and—nom d’un nom!”
“What now?” I demanded as he turned a conscience-smitten face toward me and thrust the sleeping child into my arms.
“La chauve-souris—the bat!” he exclaimed. “I did forget the poor one’s sufferings in the stress of greater things. Take the little man to our room, and soothe him, my friend. Me, I go down those ten-thousand-times-damned stairs to that never-enough-to-be-cursed chapel and put the poor brut
e out of its misery!”
“You mean you’re actually going into that horrible place again?” I demanded.
“Eh bien, why not?” he asked.
“Why—those terrible men—those—” I began, but he stopped me.
“My friend,” he asked as he extracted a cigarette from his dressing gown pocket and lighted it nonchalantly, “have you not yet learned that when Jules de Grandin kills a thing—be it man or be it devil—it is dead? There is nothing there which could harm a new-born fly, I do solemnly assure you.”
VIII
JULES DE GRANDIN POURED out a couple of tablespoonfuls of brandy into a wide-mouthed glass and passed the goblet under his nose, sniffing appreciatively. “Not at all, cher ami. From the first I did suspect there was something not altogether right about that house.
“To begin, you will recall that on the night Monsieur Van Riper took us from the station he told us his progenitor had imported the house, stone by single stone, to this country from Cyprus?”
“Yes,” I nodded.
“Very good. The stones of which it is erected were probably quarried from the ruins of some heathen temple, and like sponges soaked in water, they were full to overflowing with evil influences. This evil undoubtedly affected the old warrior knights who dwelt in that house, probably from 1191, when Richard of England sold Cyprus to their order, to 1308, when the French king and the Roman pope suppressed and destroyed the order—and shared its riches between them.
“That the souls of those old monks who had forsaken their vows to the God of Love to serve the Goddess of Lust with unclean rites and ceremonies could not find rest in peaceful graves there is little doubt. But that they were able to materialize and carry on the obscenities they had practiced in life, there is also much doubt. Some ghosts there are who can make themselves visible at will; others can materialize at certain times and in certain places only; others can show themselves only with the aid of a medium.
The Horror on the Links Page 71
