“When the rich Monsieur Profiteer took up the old house and brought it to America, he doubtless imported all its evil influences intact; but they were latent.
“Then, only one little week ago, that which was needful came to the house. It was nothing less than Mademoiselle O’Shane’s so beautiful self. She, my friend, is what the spiritualists call a sensitive, a psychic. She is attuned to the fine vibrations which affect the ordinary person not at all. She was the innocent medium through which the wicked knights were able to effect a reincarnation.
“The air may be filled with the ethereal waves from a thousand broadcasting stations, but if you have not a radio machine to entrap and consolidate those waves into sound, you are helpless to hear so much as a single squeal of static. Is it not so? Very good. Mademoiselle Dunroe was the radio set—the condenser and the amplifying agent needed to release the invisible wickedness which came from Cytherea’s wicked altar—the discarnate intelligences which were once bad men. Do you not recall how she was greeted in the chapel of the Black Lodge: ‘Hail, Priestess and Queen—She Who Gives Her Servants Life and Being?’ Those wicked things which once were men admitted their debt to her in that salutation, my friend.
“Remember how Mademoiselle Dunroe told you of her inability to draw what she wished? The evil influences were already beginning to steal her brain and make her pliable to their base desires. They were beginning to lay plans to feed upon her vitality to clothe themselves in the semblance of humanity, and as they possessed her, she saw with her inward eye the scenes so many times heretofore enacted in that chapel.
“From the first I liked not the house, and when the poor Mademoiselle Dunroe told us of her troubles with her drawings, I liked it still less. How long it would have taken those old secret worshippers of evil to make themselves visible by the use of Mademoiselle Dunroe’s vitality, I do not know. Perhaps they might never have succeeded. Perhaps she would have gone away and nothing more would have been heard of them, but that flap-eared she-ass of a Mademoiselle Prettybridge played the precise game the long-dead villains desired. When she held her so absurd séance in the dining-room that night, she furnished them just the atmosphere they needed to place their silent command in Mademoiselle O’Shane’s mind. Her attention was fixed on ghostly things; ‘Ah-ha,’ says the master of the Black Lodge, ‘now we shall steal her mind. Now we shall make her go into a trance like a medium, and she shall materialize us, and la, la, what deviltry we shall do!’ And so they did. While they sent one of their number to thump upon the table and hold us spellbound listening to his nonsense rimes, the rest of them became material and rode forth upon their phantom steeds to steal them a little child. Oh, my friend, I dare not think what would have been had they carried through that dreadful blood-sacrifice. Warm blood acts upon the wicked spirits as tonic acts on humans. They might have become so strong, no power on earth could have stayed them! As it was, the ancient evil could be killed, but it died very, very hard.”
“Was Dunroe under their influence when we saw her at the piano that night?” I asked.
“Undoubtedly. Already they had made her draw things she did not consciously understand; then, when they had roused her from her bed and guided her to the instrument, she played first a composition of beauty, for she is a good girl at heart, but they wished her to play something evil. No doubt the wicked, lecherous tune she played under their guidance that night helped mightily to make good, Godfearing Dunroe O’Shane forget herself and serve as heathen priestess before the heathen altar of a band of forsworn renegade priests.”
“H’m,” I murmured dubiously. “Granting your premises, I can see the logic of your conclusions, but how was it you put those terrible ghosts to flight so easily?”
“I waited for that question,” he answered. “Have you not yet learned Jules de Grandin is a very clever fellow?
“Attend me, for what I say is worth hearing. When those evil men went forth in search of prey and killed the poor policeman, I said to me, ‘Jules de Grandin, you have here a tough nut, indeed!’
“‘I know it,’ I reply.
“‘Very well, then,’ I ask me, ‘who are these goblin child-stealers?’
“‘Ghosts—or the evil representations of wicked men who died long years ago in mortal sin,’ I return.
“‘Now,’ I say, ‘you are sure these men are materialized by Mademoiselle O’Shane—her strange playing, her unwitting drawings. What, then, is such a materialization composed of?’
“‘Of what some call ectoplasm, others psychoplasm,’ I reply.
“‘But certainly’—I will not give myself peace till I have talked this matter over completely—‘but what is that psychoplasm, or ectoplasm? Tell me that?’
“And then, as I think, and think some more, I come to the conclusion it is but a very fine form of vibration given off by the medium, just as the ether-waves are given off by the broadcasting station. When it combines with the thin, unpowerful vibration set up by the evil entity to be materialized, it makes the outward seeming of a man—what we call a ghost.
“I decided to try a desperate experiment. A sprig of the Holy Thorn of Glastonbury may be efficacious as a charm, but charms are of no avail against an evil which is very old and very powerful. Nevertheless, I will try the Holy Thorn-bush. If it fail, I must have a second line of defense. What shall it be?
“Why not radium salt? Radium does wonderful things. In its presence non-conductors of electricity become conductors; Leyden jars cannot retain their charges of electricity in its presence. For why? Because of its tremendous vibration. If I uncover a bit of radium bromide from its lead box in that small, enclosed chapel, the terrific bombardment of the Alpha, Tau and Gamma rays it gives off as its atoms disintegrate will shiver those thin-vibration ghosts to nothingness even as the Boche shells crushed the forts of Liege!
“I think I have an idea—but I am not sure it will work. At any rate, it is worth trying. So, while Mademoiselle O’Shane lies unconscious under the influence of evil, I rush here with you, borrow a tiny little tube of radium bromide from the City Hospital, and make ready to fight the evil ones. Then, when we follow Mademoiselle Dunroe into that accursed chapel under the earth, I am ready to make the experiment.
“At the first door stands the boy, who was not so steeped in evil as his elders, and he succumbed to the Holy Thorn sprig. But once inside the chapel, I see we need something which will batter those evil spirits to shreds, so I unseal my tube of radium, and—pouf! I shake them to nothing in no time!”
“But won’t they ever haunt the Cloisters again?” I persisted.
“Ah bah, have I not said I have destroyed them—utterly?” he demanded. “Let us speak of them no more.”
And with a single prodigious gulp he emptied his goblet of brandy.
The Horror on the Links Page 72
