The Occult Detective Megapack

by J. Sheridan le Fanu

  “Hélas, it is love’s crucifixion!” whispered Jules de Grandin.

  * * * *

  Three months went by, and though we kept the search up unremittingly, no trace of Arabella could be found. Dennis Tantavul installed a full-time, highly trained and recommended nurse in his desolate house, and spent his time haunting police stations and newspaper offices. He aged a decade in the ninety days since Arabella left; his shoulders stooped, his footsteps lagged, and a look of never-ending misery dwelt within his eyes as he trod his daily Via Dolorosa, a prematurely old and broken man.

  “It’s the most uncanny thing I ever saw,” I said to Jules de Grandin as we walked through Forty-second Street toward the West Shore Ferry. We had gone over to New York for some surgical supplies, and I do not drive my car in the metropolis. Truck chauffeurs there are far too careless and repair bills for wrecked mudguards far too high. “How a full-grown woman could evaporate that way is something I can’t understand,” I added as we stepped briskly through the bracing autumn air. “If it had happened twenty years ago there might be some excuse for it, but today, with our radio police-call systems and all the other modern—”

  “S-s-st,” his sibilated admonition cut me short. “That woman there, my friend, observe her, if you please.” He nodded toward a female figure twenty feet ahead of us.

  I looked, and wondered at his sudden interest in the draggled hussy.

  She was dressed in tawdry finery much the worse for wear. Sleazy silken skirt was much too tight, cheap fur jaquette far too short and snug; high heels of her satin slippers shockingly run over, make-up plastered on her cheeks and lips and eyes, and her short black hair fairly bristled with untidiness beneath the rim of her abbreviated hat. Written unmistakably upon her was the nature of her calling, the oldest and least honorable profession known to womanhood.

  “Well?” I answered tartly. “What possible interest can you have in a—”

  “Do not walk so fast,” he whispered as his fingers closed upon my arm, “and do not raise your voice. I would that we should follow her, but I do not wish that she should know.”

  The neighborhood was far from savory, and I felt uncommonly conspicuous as we turned from Forty-second Street into Eleventh Avenue in the wake of the young strumpet, followed her provocatively swaying hips down two malodorous blocks, finally paused as she went in the doorway of a filthy, unkempt “rooming-house.”

  With de Grandin in the lead, stepping softly as a pair of cats, we trailed the woman through the dimly lighted, barren hall and up a flight of shadowy, uncarpeted stairs. We climbed two further flights, the last one letting into a sort of little oblong foyer bounded on one end by the stair-well, on the farther extremity by a barred and very dirty window, and on each side by two sets of sagging, paint-blistered doors. On each of these was pinned a card, handwritten with the many flourishes dear to the chirography of the professional card-writer who still does business in the poorer quarters of our great cities. The air was heavy with the odor of cheap whisky, stale bacon and fried onions.

  We made a hasty circuit of the hall, studying the cardboard labels. On the farthest door the notice read Miss Sieglinde.

  “Mon Dieu,” exclaimed de Grandin, “le mot propre!’”

  “Eh?” I answered, puzzled.

  “Sieglinde, do you not recall her?”

  “No-o, I can not say I do. The only Sieglinde I remember is the character in Wagner’s Die Walkure who unwittingly became her brother’s mistress and—”

  “Précisément. Let us enter, if you please.” Without pausing to knock, he turned the handle of the door and stepped across the threshold of the squalid room.

  The woman sat upon the bed, her hat pushed backward from her brow, a cracked and dirty tumbler in one hand, a whisky bottle poised above it. “Get out!” she ordered thickly. “Get out o’ here—I don’t want—” A gasp cut short her utterance, and she turned her head away. Then:

  “Get fell out o’ here, you lousy rummies!” she half screamed. “Who d’ye think you are, breakin’ into a lady’s room like this? Get out, or—”

  De Grandin eyed her steadily, and, as her strident order wavered:

  “Madame Arabella, we have come to take you home,” he told her softly.

  “Good Lord, man, you’re crazy!” I exclaimed. “Arabella? This—”

  “Precisely, my good friend; this is Madame Arabella Tantavul, whom we have sought these many months in vain.”

  Crossing the room in two quick strides he seized the cringing woman by the shoulders and turned her face up to the window. I looked, and felt a sudden swift attack of nausea.

  He was right. Thin to emaciation, her face already lined with the deep-bitten scars of dissipation, the woman on the bed was Arabella Tantavul, though the shocking change wrought in her features and the black dye in her hair had disguised her so I never would have recognized her.

  “We have come to take you home, ma pauvre,” he repeated. “Your husband—”

  “My husband?” Her reply was half a scream. “Oh, dear God, as if I had a husband—”

  “And a little one who needs you,” the Frenchman interrupted. “You can not leave him so, Madame—”

  “I can’t? Ah, that’s where you’re mistaken, Doctor. I can never see him again, in this world or the next. Please, please, go away and forget you found me, or I’ll have to drown myself—I’ve tried it twice already, but my courage failed. But if you try to take me back, or tell Dennis that you saw me—”

  “Tell me, Madame,” he broke in, “was not your flight caused by a visitation from the dead?”

  * * * *

  Her faded brown eyes widened. “How did you know?” she asked.

  “Tiens, one may make surmises,” he replied. “Will you not tell us just what happened? I think there is a way out of your difficulties.”

  “There isn’t any way,” she muttered dully, and her head sank listlessly upon her chest. “He planned his work too well; all that’s left for me is death—and damnation afterward.”

  “But if there were a way—if I could show it to you?”

  “Can you repeal the laws of God?”

  “I am a very clever person; perhaps I can discover an evasion, if not an absolute repeal. Now, tell me: how and when did Monsieur your late but not lamented uncle, come to you?”

  “The night before—before I went away. I woke up about midnight, thinking I heard a cry from Dennie’s nursery. I rose to go to him, and when I reached the room where he was sleeping I saw my uncle’s face glaring at me through the window. It seemed to be illuminated by a sort of inward, hellish light, for it stood out against the darkness like a jack-o’-lantern, and it smiled an awful smile at me. ‘Arabella,’ it said, and I could see its thin, dead lips writhe back as though its teeth were burning-hot, ‘I’ve come to tell you that your marriage is a mockery and a lie. The man you married is your brother, and the child you bore is doubly illegitimate. You can’t continue living with them, Arabella. That would be an even greater sin than the one you have committed. You must leave them; leave them right away, or’—once more his lips crept back until his teeth were bare—‘or I shall come to visit you each night, and when the baby has grown old enough to understand, I’ll tell him of his parents’ sin. Take your choice, my dear. Leave them and let me go back to my grave in peace, or stay and see me every night, and know that I will tell your son when he is old enough to understand. And if I do it he’ll loathe and hate you for the things you are, and curse the day you bore him.’

  “And you’ll promise never to come near Dennis or the baby if I go?’ I asked.

  “He promised, and I staggered back to bed, where I fell fainting.

  “Next morning when I wakened I was sure that it had been a dream, but when I looked at Dennis and my own reflection in the glass, I knew it was no dream, but a dreadful visitation from the dead.

  “It was then that I went mad. I tried to kill my baby, and when Dennis stopped me I watched my chance to run away, cam
e over to New York and took to this.” She looked significantly around the miserably furnished room. “I knew they’d never look for Arabella Tantavul among the sisters of the pavement; I was safer from pursuit right here than if I’d been in Europe or in China.”

  “But Madame”—de Grandin’s voice was vibrant with shocked reproof—“that which you saw was nothing but a dream; a most unpleasant dream, I grant, but still a dream. Look in my eyes, Madame!”

  She raised her eyes to his, and I saw his pupils widen, as a cat’s do in the dark, saw a line of white outline the cornea, and, responsive to his piercing gaze, beheld her brown eyes set in a fixed stare, first as though in fright, then with a glaze-almost like that of death.

  “Attend me, Madame Arabella,” he commanded softly. “You are tired—‘grand Dieu, how tired you are! You have suffered greatly, but you are about to rest. Your memory of that night is gone; so is all memory of all things which have occurred since. You will move and eat and sleep as you are bidden, but of what takes place until I bid you wake you will retain no recollection. Do you hear me, Madame Arabella?”

  “I hear,” she answered softly, in a small, tired voice.

  “Bien. Lie down, my little poor one. Lie down, rest and dream; dream happy dreams of love. Sleep, rest; dream and forget.

  “Will you be good enough to ’phone to Doctor Wyckoff?” he asked me. “We shall place her in his sanitarium, wash this sacré dye out of her hair and nurse her back to health; then, when all is ready, we can bear her home and have her take up life—and love—where she left off. None shall be the wiser. This chapter in her life is closed and sealed for ever.

  “Each day I’ll call upon her and renew hypnotic treatments that she may simulate the mild but curable mental case which we shall tell the good Wyckoff she is. When finally I release her from hypnosis, her mind will be entirely cleared of that bad dream which nearly wrecked her happiness.”

  7

  Arabella Tantavul lay upon the-sofa in her charming upstairs living-room, an orchid negligee trimmed in white marabou about her slender shoulders, an eiderdown rug tucked around her feet and knees. Her wedding ring was once more on her finger. Pale with a pallor not to be disguised by the most skilfully applied cosmetics, and with deep violet circles underneath her amber eyes, she lay back listlessly, drinking in the cheerful warmth which emanated from the fire of apple-logs that snapped and crackled on the hearth. Two months of rest in Doctor Wyckoff’s sanitarium had erased the marks of dissipation from her face; even as the skilled ministrations of beauticians had restored the yellow luster to her pale-gold hair, but the listlessness which followed her complete breakdown was still upon her like the weakness from a fever.

  “I can’t remember anything about my illness, Doctor Trowbridge,” she told me with a weary little smile, “but vaguely I connect it with some dreadful dream I had. And”—she wrinkled her smooth forehead in an effort at remembrance—“I think I had a rather dreadful dream last night, but—”

  “Ah-ha?” de Grandin leant abruptly forward in his chair, his little mustache twitching like the whiskers of an irritated tom-cat. “What was it that you dreamed?”

  “I—don’t—know,” she answered slowly. “Odd, isn’t it, how you can remember that a dream was so unpleasant, but can’t recall its details? Somehow, I connect Uncle Warburg with it, but—”

  “Parbleu, your uncle? Again? Ah bah, he makes me to be so mad, that one!”

  * * * *

  “It is time we went, my friend,” de Grandin told me as the tall clock in the hall beat out its tenth deliberate stroke; “we have important duties to perform.”

  “For goodness’ sake,” I protested, “where are you going at this time of night?”

  “Where but to Monsieur Tantavul’s?” he answered with a smile that had small humor in it. “I am expectant of a visitor tonight and—we must be ready for him.”

  When he was in a mood like this I knew that questioning would be a waste of breath; accordingly I drove him to the Tantavuls’ in silence, knowing he would have an explanation when he deemed the time had come.

  “Is Madame Arabella sleeping?” he asked as Dennis met us in the hall.

  “Yes, like a baby,” answered the young husband. “I’ve been sitting by her all evening, and I don’t believe she’s even turned in bed.”

  “And did you keep the window closed, as I requested?”

  “Yes, sir; closed and latched.”

  “Bien. Await us here, mon brave; we shall rejoin you presently.”

  He led the way to Arabella’s bedroom, removed the wrappings from a bulky parcel, and displayed the object thus disclosed with the air of a magician about to do a trick. “You see him?” he demanded proudly. “Is he not a beauty?”

  “Why—what the deuce?—it’s nothing but a window-screen,” I answered.

  “Ah, but it is made of copper,” he informed me, as though explaining something of inordinate importance.

  “Well—”

  “Well? Pardieu, I shall say it is well; it is very exceedingly well, my friend. Observe him, how he works.”

  From his kit bag he produced a reel of insulated wire, an electrical transformer and a set of tools. Working quickly, he passe-partouted the screen’s wooden frame with electrician’s tape, then plugged a wire into a near-by lamp socket, connected it with the transformer, and from the latter led a double strand of cotton-wrapped wire to the screen. This he clipped firmly to the copper meshes and led a third wire to the metal grille of the heat register. Last of all, he filled a bulb-syringe with water and sprayed the screen from it, repeating the dousings till the woven copper sparkled like a cobweb in the morning sun. “Now, Monsieur le Revenant. I damn think we are ready for you,” he announced, surveying his handiwork with every sign of satisfaction.

  We waited quietly for something like an hour; then de Grandin rose and bent above the bed where Arabella slept.

  “Madame!”

  The girl stirred faintly, murmuring some half-audible response, and:

  “In half an hour you will rise,” he told her in a low, insistent voice. “You will put on your robe and stand before the window, but on no account will you go near it or lay hands on it. Should anyone address you from outside, you will reply, but you will not remember what you say or what is said to you.”

  He motioned me to follow him, and we left the room, taking station in the hallway just outside.

  * * * *

  How long we waited I have no idea. Perhaps it was an hour, perhaps less; at any rate, the silent vigil seemed unending, and I raised my hand to stifle a tremendous yawn, when:

  “Yes, Uncle Warburg, I can hear you,” we heard Arabella saying softly in the room beyond the door.

  We tiptoed to the entry: Arabella Tantavul stood before the window, looking fixedly at its darkened square, and beyond her, framed in the window-casing as a masterpiece of horror might be framed for exhibition, glared the face of Warburg Tantavul.

  It was dead, there was no doubt about it. In the sunken cheeks, the pinched-in nose and the yellowish-gray skin there showed the evidence of death and early putrefaction, but dead though it was, it was also animated with a dreadful sort of life. The eyes were glaring horribly, as though illuminated with some inward phosphorescence, and they bulged forward in their sunken sockets as though a throttling hand were clutching at the dead thing’s throat. The lips were red—red as rouge—but they were not red with life; they were dead, and painted with fresh blood.

  “You hear me, do ye?” he demanded, and the ruddy, foam-flecked lips writhed across his yellow teeth. “Then listen, girl; you broke your bargain with me, now I’m come to keep my threat: Every time you kiss your husband”—a shriek of bitter laughter cut his words, and his staring, starting eyes half closed with hellish merriment—“or the child you love so well, my shadow will be on you. You’ve kept me out thus far, but some day I’ll get in, and—”

  Once more the foam-dyed lips writhed across the gleaming teeth, and the lean,
dead jaw dropped downward, then snapped up, as though it champed on living flesh; then, suddenly, the whole expression of the corpse-face changed. Surprize, incredulous delight, anticipation, as before a feast, were pictured on it. “Why”—its cachinnating laughter sent a chill down my spine—“why, you’re window’s open now! You’ve changed the screen, and I can enter!”

  Slowly, like a child’s balloon stirred by a vagrant wind, the dreadful face moved closer to the window, and I noted with a nauseated start that it was bodiless. Closer, closer to the screen it came, and Arabella Tantavul gave ground before it, shuddering with nameless dread, putting up her hands to shield her eyes from the laughing thing which menaced her.

  “Sapristi,” swore de Grandin softly, his fingers clenched about my elbow till they numbed my arm. “Come on, my old and evil one; come a little nearer; only one so little tiny step, and—”

  The dead thing floated closer. Now its mocking mouth and shriveled, pointed nose were pressing against the screen; now they seemed to filter through the copper meshes like a wisp of fog—

  There came a blinding flash of blue-white flame, the cracking, sputtering gush of fusing metal, a wild, despairing shriek which ended ere it fairly started in a sob of mortal torment, and the sharp and acrid odor of burned flesh!

  “Arabella—darling—is she all right?” Dennis Tantavul came charging up the stairs. “I thought I heard a scream—”

  “You did, Monsieur,” de Grandin answered, “but I do not think that you will ever hear its repetition, unless you are so unfortunate as to go to hell when your earthly pilgrimage is ended.”

  “What was it?” began Dennis, but de Grandin stopped him with a smile.

  “One who thought himself a clever jester pressed his jest a bit too far,” he answered enigmatically. “Meantime, look to Madame your wife. See how peacefully she lies upon her bed. Her time for evil dreams is past, my friend. Be kind to her, do not forget that a woman loves to have a lover, even though he is her husband.” He bent and kissed the sleeping girl upon the brow, and: