The Occult Detective Megapack

by J. Sheridan le Fanu

  “Then I knew. Karl Erik Herbules, renegade Christian priest, brilliant scholar, poisoner of souls and votary of Satan, was mad as any Tom o’ Bedlam!

  “He stood there by the Devil’s altar hurling, curses at us, threatening us with Heaven’s vengeance, casting an anathema upon us with such vile insults and filthy language as a fishwife would not dare to use.

  “But panic had the congregation by the throat. They pushed and fought and scratched and bit like frenzied cats, clawing and slashing at one another till they gained the exit, then rushing pellmell down the hill to their parked cars without a backward look, leaving Herbules alone beside the altar he had raised to Satan, with the dead girl stretched upon it.

  “There was no chance that Herbules would help. He kept reciting passages from the Black Mass, genuflecting to the altar, filling and refilling the wine-cup and stuffing his mouth with the wafers meant to parody the Host. So Trivers, Eldridge, Atkins and I took Marescha’s body to the river, weighted it with window-irons and dropped it in the water. But the knots we tied must have been loose, or else the weights were insufficient, for as we turned to leave, her body Boated almost to the surface and one white arm raised above the river’s glassy face, as though to wave a mute farewell. It must have been a trick the current played as the tide bore her away, but to us it seemed that her dead hand pointed to us each in turn; certainly there was no doubt it bobbed four times above the river’s surface before the swirling waters sucked it out of sight.

  “You’ve probably heard garbled rumors of what happened afterward. The farmhouse burned that night and because there was no water to be had, there was no salvage. Still, a few things were not utterly destroyed, and people in the neighborhood still wonder how those Persian lamps and brazen candlesticks came to be in that deserted house.

  “Herbules committed suicide that night, and when the auditors went over his accounts they found he’d practically wrecked Horton. There was hardly a cent left, for he’d financed his whole grisly farce of Devil worship with the money he embezzled. The trustees made the losses good and gave up in disgust. Ours was the last class graduated.

  “They found Marescha’s body floating in the Shrewsbury two days later, and at first the coroner was sure she’d been the victim of a murder; for while the window-weights had fallen off, the cords that tied them were still knotted round her ankles. When the autopsy disclosed she’d not been drowned, but had been put into the river after death from heart disease, the mystery was deepened, but until tonight only four people knew its answer. Now there are only three.”

  “Three, Monsieur?” de Grandin asked.

  “That’s fight. Trivers, Atkins and Eldridge are dead. I’m still here, and you and Doctor Trowbridge—”

  “Your figures are at fault, my friend. You forget we are physicians, and your narrative was given us in confidence.”

  “But see here,” I asked as the silence lengthened, “what is there about all this to make you want to kill yourself? If you’d been grown men when you joined these Devil-worshippers it would have been more serious, but college boys are always in some sort of mischief, and this all happened twenty years ago. You say you are sincerely sorry for it, and after all, the leaders in the movement died, so—”

  Balderson broke through my moralizing with a short, hard laugh. “Men die more easily than memories, Doctor. Besides—”

  “Yes, Monsieur, besides?” de Grandin prompted as our guest stared silently into the study fire.

  “Do you believe the spirits of the dead—the dead who are in Hell, or at least cut off from Heaven—can come back to plague the living?” he demanded.

  De Grandin brushed the ends of his small waxed mustache with that gesture which always reminded me of a tomcat combing his whiskers. “You have experienced such a visitation?”

  “I have. So did the others.”

  “Mordieu! How was it?”

  “You may remember reading that Ted Eldridge hanged himself? Three days before it happened, he met me on the street, and I could see that he was almost frantic. ‘I saw Marescha last night!’ he told me in a frightened whisper.

  “Marescha? You must be off your rocker, man! We put her in the Shrewsbury—’

  “‘And she’s come back again. Remember the perfume of the candles and the incense Herbules used in celebrating the Black Mass? I’d come home from New York last night, and was getting ready for a drink before I went to bed, when I began to smell it. At first I thought it was some fool trick that my senses played on me, but the scent kept getting stronger. It seemed as if I were back in that dreadful chapel with the tall black candles burning and the hellish incense smoldering, Herbules in his red vestments and Marescha lying naked on the altar—I could almost hear the chanting of inverted prayers and the little whimpering noises that she made. I gulped my drink down in two swallows and turned round. She was standing there, with water on her face and streaming from her hair, and her hands held out to me—’

  “‘You’re crazy as a goat!’ I told him. ‘Come have a drink.’

  “He looked at me a moment, then turned away, walking quickly down the street and muttering to himself.

  “I’d not have thought so much about it if I hadn’t read about his suicide next day, and if Stanley Trivers hadn’t called me on the telephone. “Hear about Ted Eldridge?’ he asked the moment 1 had said hello. When I told him I’d just read about it he demanded: ‘Did you see him—recently?’

  “‘Yes, ran into him in Broad Street yesterday,’ I answered.

  “‘Seemed worried, didn’t he? Did he tell you anything about Marescha?’

  “‘Say, what is this?’ I asked. ‘Did he say anything to you—’

  “‘Yes, he did, and I thought he had a belfry full o’ bats.’

  “‘There’s not much doubt the poor old lad was cuckoo—’

  “‘That’s where you’re mistaken, Balderson. According to the paper he’d been dead for something like four hours when they found htm. That would have made it something like four o’clock when he died.’

  “‘So what?’

  “‘So this: I waked up at four o’clock this morning, and the room was positively stifling with the odor of the incense they used in the Black Chapel—’

  “‘Yeah? I suppose you saw Marescha, too?’

  “‘I did! She was standing by my bed, with water streaming from her face and body, and tears were in her eyes,’

  “I tried to talk him out of it, tell him that it was a trick of his imagination stimulated by Ted Eldridge’s wild talk, but he insisted that he’d really seen her. Two days later he committed suicide.

  “Don Atkins followed. I didn’t talk with him before he shot himself, but I’ll wager that he saw her, too, and smelled that Devil’s incense.”

  De Grandin looked at me with upraised brows, then shook his head to caution silence ere he turned to face our guest. “And you, Monsieur?” he asked.

  “Yes, I too. Don killed himself sometime in early afternoon, and I was home that day. I’d say that it was shortly after two, for I’d lunched at the City Club and come home to pack a bag and take a trip to Nantakee. I had the highboy open and was taking out some shirts when I began to notice a strange odor in the air. But it wasn’t strange for long; as it grew stronger I recognized it as the scent of Herbules’ incense. It grew so strong that it was almost overpowering. I stood there by the chest of drawers, smelling the increasing scent, and determined that I’d not turn round. You know how Coleridge puts it:

  Like one, that on a lonesome road

  Doth walk in fear and dread,

  And having once turned round, walks on,

  And turns no more his head;

  Because he knows a frightful fiend

  Doth close behind him tread…

  “The odor of the incense grew until I could have sworn somebody swung a censer right behind me. Then, suddenly, I heard the sound of falling water. ‘Drip—drip—drip!’ it fell upon the floor, drop by deliberate drop. The suspense w
as more than I could bear, and I wheeled about.

  “Marescha stood behind me, almost close enough to touch. Water trickled from the hair that hung in gleaming strands across her breast and shoulders, it hung in little gleaming globules on her pale, smooth skin, ran in little rivulets across her forehead, down her beautifully shaped legs, made tiny puddles on the polished floor beside each slim bare foot. I went almost sick with horror as I saw the knotted cords we’d used to tie the window-weights on her still bound about her ankles, water oozing from their coils. She did not seem dead. Her lovely slender body seemed as vital as when I had held it in my arms, her full and mobile lips were red with rouge, her eyes were neither set and staring nor expressionless. But they were sad, immeasurably sad. They seemed to probe into my spirit’s very depths, asking, beseeching, entreating. And to make their plea more eloquent, she slowly raised her lovely hands and held them out to me, palms upward, lingers slightly curled, as though she besought alms.

  “There was a faint resemblance to her bitter, crooked smile upon her lips, but it was so sad, so hopelessly entreating, that it almost made me weep to see it.

  “‘Mar—’ I began, but the name stuck in my throat. This couldn’t be the body that I’d held against my heart, those lips were not the lips I’d kissed a thousand times; this was no girl of flesh and blood. Marescha lay deep in a grave in Shadow Lawns Cemetery; had lain there almost twenty years. Dust had filled those sad, entreating eyes long before the college freshmen of this year were born. The worms…

  “Somewhere I had heard that if you called upon the Trinity a ghost would vanish. ‘In the name of the Father—’ I began, but it seemed as if a clap of thunder sounded in my ears.

  “‘What right have you to call upon the Triune God?’ a mighty voice seemed asking. ‘You who have mocked at Heaven, taken every sacred name in vain, made a jest of every holy thing—how dare you invoke Deity? Your sacrilegious lips cannot pronounce the sacred name!’

  “And it was true. I tried again, but the words clogged in my throat; I tried to force them out, but only strangling inarticulacies sounded.

  “Marescha’s smile was almost pityingly tender, but still she stood there pleading, entreating, begging me, though what it was she wanted I could not divine. I threw my aim across my eyes to shut the vision out, but when I took it down she was still there, and still the water dripped from her entreating hands, ran in little courses from her dankly-hanging hair, fell drop by drop from the sopping cords that ringed her ankles.

  * * * *

  “I stumbled blindly from the house and walked the streets for hours. Presently I bought a paper, and the headlines told me Donald Atkins had been found, a suicide, in his apartment.

  “When I reached my house again the incense still hung in the air, but the vision of Marescha was not there. I drank almost a pint of brandy, neat, and fell across my bed. When I recovered from my alcoholic stupor Marescha stood beside me, her great eyes luminous with tears, her hands outstretched in mute entreaty.

  “She’s been with me almost every waking instant since that night. I drank myself into oblivion, but every time I sobered she was standing by me. I’d walk the streets for hours, but every time I halted she would be there, always silent, always with her hands held out, always with that look of supplication in her tear-filled eyes. I’d rush at her and try to drive her off with blows and kicks. She seemed to float away, staying just outside my reach, however savagely I ran at her, and though I cursed her, using every foul word I knew, she never changed expression, never showed resentment; just stood and looked at me with sad, imploring eyes, always seeming to be begging me for something.

  “I can’t endure it any longer, gentlemen. Tonight she stood beside me when I halted on North Bridge, and I’d have been at peace by now if you’d not come along—”

  “Non, there you are mistaken, mon ami,” de Grandin contradicted. “Had you carried your intention out and leaped into the river you would have sealed your doom irrevocably. Instead of leaving her you would have joined her for eternity.”

  “All right,” Balderson asked raspingly, “I suppose you have a better plan?”

  “I think I have,” the little Frenchman answered. “First, I would suggest you let us give you sedatives. You will not be troubled while you sleep, and while you rest we shall be active.”

  * * * *

  “Shakespeare was right,” I said as we left our patient sleeping from a dose of chloral hydrate. “Conscience does make cowards of us all. The memory of that early indiscretion has haunted that quartet of worthless youngsters twenty years. No wonder they kept seeing that poor girl after they’d thrown her so callously into the Shrewsbury. Of all the heartless, despicable things—”

  He emerged from a brown study long enough to interrupt: “And is your conscience clean, my friend?”

  “What has my conscience to do with it? I didn’t throw a dead girl in the river; I didn’t—”

  “Précisément, neither did the good Costello, yet both of you described the odor of that Devil’s incense: Costello when he went to view the bodies of the suicides, you when we halted Monsieur Balderson’s attempt at self-destruction. Were you also haunted by that scent, or were you not?”

  “I smelled it,” I responded frigidly, “but I wasn’t haunted by it. Just what is it you’re driving at?”

  “That the odor of that incense, or even the perception of the dead Marescha’s revenant, is no optical illusion caused by guilty conscience. It is my firm conviction that the apparition which appeared to these unfortunate young men was the earthbound spirit of a girl who begged a boon from them.”

  “Then you don’t think that she haunted them because they’d thrown her body in the river?”

  “Entirely no. I think she came to ask their help, and in their fear and horror at beholding her they could not understand her plea. First one and then another, lashed with the scorpion-whip of an accusing conscience, destroyed himself because he dared not look into her pleading eyes, thinking they accused him of mistreating her poor body, when all the pauvre belle créature asked was that they help her to secure release from her earthbound condition.”

  “Why should she have appealed to them?”

  “In all that congregation of benighted worshippers of evil, she knew them best. They saw her die, they gave her body sepulture; one of them, at least, had been her lover, and was, presumably, bound to her by ties of mutual passion. She was most strongly in their minds and memories. It was but natural that she should appeal to them for succor. Did not you notice one outstanding fact in all the testimony—the poor Marescha appeared to them in turn, looking not reproachfully, but pleadingly? Her lips were held, she might not put her plea in words. She could but come to them as they had last beheld her, entreat them by dumb show, and hope that they would understand. One by one they failed her; one by one they failed to understand—”

  “Well, is there anything that we can do about it?”

  “I think there is. Come, let us be upon our way.”

  “Where the deuce—”

  “To the rectory of St. Chrysostom. I would interview the Reverend Doctor Bentley.”

  “At this time of night?”

  “Mais certainement, clergymen and doctors, they have no privacy, my friend. Surely, you need not be told that.”

  * * * *

  The freshly lighted fire burned brightly in the Reverend Peter Bentley’s study, the blue smoke spiraled upward from the tips of our cigars, the gray steam curled in fragrant clouds from the glasses of hot Scotch which stood upon the coffee-table. Looking anything but clerical in red-flannel bathrobe, black pajamas and red Turkish slippers, Doctor Bentley listened with surprizing tolerance to de Grandin’s argument.

  “But it seems the poor girl died in mortal sin,” he murmured, obviously more in sorrow than in righteous indignation. “According to your statement, her last frantic words called on the Devil to fulfill his bargain: ‘O Lord, be pitiful—’”

  “Précisément, m
on père, but who can say her prayer was made to Satan? True, those so bewildered, misled followers of evil were wont to call the Devil Lord and Master, but is it not entirely possible that she repented and addressed her dying prayer to the real Lord of the heaven and earth? Somewhere an English poet says of the last-minute prayer of a not-wholly-righteous fox-hunter who was unhorsed and broke his sinful neck:

  Betwixt the stirrup and the ground

  I mercy asked; mercy I found.

  “Me, I believe in all sincerity that her repentance was as true as that the thief upon the cross expressed; that in the last dread moment she perceived the grievous error of her ways and made at once confession of sin and prayer for pity with her dying breath.

  “But she had bent the knee at Satan’s shrine. With her fair body—that body which was given her to wear as if it were a garment to the greater glory of the Lord—she parodied the sacred faircloth of the altar. By such things she had cut herself adrift, she had put herself beyond communion with the righteous which is the blessed company of all the faithful. There was no priest to shrive her sin-encumbered soul, no one to read words of forgiveness and redemption above her lifeless clay. Until some one of her companions in iniquity will perform the service of contrition for her, until the office for the burial of Christian dead is read above her grave, she lies excommunicate and earthbound. She cannot even expiate her faults in Purgatory till forgiveness of sins has been formally pronounced. Sincerely repentant, hell is not for her; unshrived, and with no formal statement of conditional forgiveness, she cannot quit the earth, but must wander here among the scenes of her brief and sadly misspent life. Do we dare withhold our hands to save her from a fate like that?”

  Doctor Bentley sipped thoughtfully at his hot Scotch. “There may be something in your theory,” he admitted. “I’m not especially strong on doctrine, but I can’t believe the fathers of the early church were the crude nincompoops some of our modern theologians call them. They preached posthumous absolution, and there are instances recorded where excommunicated persons who had hovered round the scenes they’d known in life were given rest and peace when absolution was pronounced above their graves. Tell me, is this Balderson sincerely sorry for his misdeeds?”