“Trowbridge, my friend,” de Grandin announced matter-of-factly, “observe the evil effects of stealing motor cars.”
WE LIFTED THE HEAVY bough from the prostrate man and turned him over on his back. De Grandin on one side, I on the other, we made a hasty examination, arriving at the same finding simultaneously. His spinal column was snapped like a pipestem.
“You have some last statement to make, Monsieur?” de Grandin asked curtly. “If so, you had best be about it, your time is short.”
“Y—yes,” the stricken man replied weakly. “I—I meant to kill you, for you might have hit upon my secret. As it is, you may publish it to the world, that all may know what it meant to offend a Marston. In my room you will find the documents. My—my pets—are—in—the—cellar. She—was—to—have—been—one—of—them.”
The pauses between his words became longer and longer, his voice grew weaker with each labored syllable. As he whispered the last sentence painfully there was a gurgling sound, and a tiny stream of blood welled up at the corner of his mouth. His narrow chest rose and fell once with a convulsive movement, then his jaw dropped limply. He was dead.
“Oh ho,” de Grandin remarked, “it is a hemorrhage which finished him. A broken rib piercing his lung. U’m? I should have guessed it. Come, my friend, let us carry him to the house, then see what it was he meant by that talk of documents and pets. A pest upon the fellow for dying with his riddle half explained! Did he not know that Jules de Grandin can not resist the challenge of a riddle? Parbleu, we will solve this mystery, Monsieur le Mort, if we have to hold an autopsy to do so!”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, hush, de Grandin,” I besought, shocked at his heartlessness. “The man is dead.”
“Ah bah!” he returned scornfully. “Dead or not, did he not steal your motor car?”
WE LAID OUR GRUESOME burden on the hall couch and mounted the stairs to the second floor. With de Grandin in the lead we found the dead man’s room and began a systematic search for the papers he had mentioned, almost with his last breath. After some time my companion unearthed a thick, leather-bound portfolio from the lower drawer of a beautiful old mahogany highboy, and spread its wide leaves open on the white-counterpaned bed.
“Ah,” he drew forth several papers and held them to the light, “we begin to make the progress, Friend Trowbridge. What is this?”
He held out a newspaper clipping cracked from long folding and yellowed with age. It read:
ACTRESS JILTS SURGEON’S CRIPPLED
SON ON EVE OF WEDDING
Declaring she could not stand the sight of his deformity, and that she had engaged herself to him only in a moment of thoughtless pity, Dora Lee, well-known variety actress, last night repudiated her promise to marry John Biersfield Marston, Jr., hopelessly crippled son of Dr. John Biersfield Marston, the well-known surgeon and expert osteologist. Neither the abandoned bridegroom nor his father could be seen by reporters from the Planet last night.
“Very good,” de Grandin nodded, “we need go no farther with that account. A young woman, it would seem, once broke her promise to marry a cripple, and, judging from this paper’s date, that was in 1896. Here is another, what do you make of it?”
The clipping he handed me read as follows:
SURGEON’S SON A SUICIDE
Still sitting in the wheel-chair from which he has not moved during his waking hours since he was hopelessly crippled while playing polo in England ten years ago, John Biersfield Marston, son of the famous surgeon of the same name, was found in his bedroom this morning by his valet. A rubber hose was connected with a gas jet, the other end being held in the young man’s mouth.
Young Marston was jilted by Dora Lee, well-known vaudeville actress, on the day before the date set for their wedding, one month ago. He is reported to have been extremely low-spirited since his desertion by his fiancée.
Dr. Marston, the bereaved father, when seen by reporters from the Planet this morning, declared the actress was responsible for his son’s death and announced his intention of holding her accountable. When asked if legal proceedings were contemplated, he declined further information.
“So?” de Grandin nodded shortly. “Now this one, if you please.” The third clipping was brief to the point of curtness:
WELL-KNOWN SURGEON RETIRES
Dr. John Biersfield Marston, widely known throughout this section of the country as an expert in operations concerning the bones, has announced his intention of retiring from practice. His house has been sold, and he will move from the city.
“The record is clear so far,” de Grandin asserted, studying the first clipping with raised eyebrows, “but—morbleu, my friend, look, look at this picture. This Dora Lee, of whom does she remind you? Eh?”
I took the clipping again and looked intently at the illustration of the article announcing young Marston’s broken engagement. The woman in the picture was young and inclined to be overdressed in the voluminous, fluffy mode of the days before the Spanish-American War.
“U’m, no one whom I know …” I began, but halted abruptly as a sudden likeness struck me. Despite the towering pompadour arrangement of her blonde hair and the unbecoming straw sailor hat above the coiffure, the woman in the picture bore a certain resemblance to the disfigured girl we had seen a half-hour before.
The Frenchman saw recognition dawn in my face, and nodded agreement. “But of course,” he said. “Now, the question is, is this young girl whose eyes are so out of alignment a relative of this Dora Lee, or is the resemblance a coincidence, and if so, what lies behind it? Hein?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted, “but there must be some connection …”
“Connection? Of course there is a connection,” de Grandin affirmed, rummaging deeper in the portfolio. “A-a-ah! What is this? Nom d’un nom, Friend Trowbridge, I think I smell the daylight! Look!”
He held a full page story from one of the sensational New York dailies before him, his eyes glued to the flowing type and crude, coarse-screened half-tones of half a dozen young women which composed the article.
“WHAT HAS BECOME OF THE MISSING GIRLS?” I read in boldfaced type across the top of the page.
“Are sinister, unseen hands reaching out from the darkness to seize our girls from palace and hovel, shop, stage and office?” the article asked rhetorically. “Where are Ellen Munro and Dorothy Sawyer and Phyllis Bouchet and three other lovely, light-haired girls who have walked into oblivion during the past year?”
I read to the end the sensational account of the girls’ disappearances. The cases seemed fairly similar; each of the vanished young women had failed to return to her home and had never been accounted for in any manner, and in no instance, according to the newspaper, had there been any assignable reason for voluntary departure.
“Parbleu, but he was stupid, even for a journalist!” de Grandin asserted as I completed my inspection of the story. “Why, I wager even my good Friend Trowbridge has already noticed one important fact which this writer has treated as though it were as commonplace as the nose on his face.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, old chap,” I answered, “but looks to me as though the reporter had covered the case from every possible angle.”
“Ah? So?” he replied sarcastically. “Morbleu, we shall have to consult the oculist in your behalf when we return home, my friend. Look, look I beseech you, upon the pictures of these so totally absent and unaccounted for young women, cher ami, and tell me if you do not observe a certain likeness among them, not only a resemblance to each other, but to that Mademoiselle Lee who jilted the son of Dr. Marston? Can you see it, now I have pointed it out?”
“No—wh—why, yes—yes, of course!” I responded, running my eye over the pictures accompanying the story. “By the Lord Harry, de Grandin, you’re right; you might almost say there is a family resemblance between these girls! You’ve put your fingers on it, I do believe.”
“Hélas, no!” he answered with a shrug. “I have put my finger on
nothing as yet, my friend. I reach, I grope, I feel about me like a blind man tormented by a crowd of naughty little boys, but nothing do the poor fingers of my mind encounter. Pah! Jules de Grandin, you are one great fool! Think, think, stupid one!”
He seated himself on the edge of the bed, cupping his face in his hands and leaning forward till his elbows rested on his knees.
Suddenly he sprang erect, one of his elfish smiles passing across his small, regular features. “Nom d’un chatrouge, my friend, I have it—I have it!” he announced. “The pets—the pets that old stealer of motor cars spoke of! They are in the basement! Pardieu, we will see those pets, cher Trowbridge; with our four collective eyes we will see them. Did not that so execrable stealer declare she was to have been one of them? Now, in the name of Satan and brimstone, whom could he have meant by ‘she’ if not that unfortunate child with eyes like la grenouille? Eh?”
“Why …” I began, but he waved me forward.
“Come, come; let us go,” he urged. “I am impatient, I am restless, I am not to be restrained. We shall investigate and see for ourselves what sort of pets are kept by one who shows young girls their deformed faces in mirrors and—Parbleu!—steals motor cars from my friends.”
HURRYING DOWN THE MAIN stairway, we hunted about for the cellar entrance, finally located the door and, holding above our heads a pair of candles from the hall, began descending a flight of rickety steps into a pitch-black basement, rock-walled and, judging by its damp, moldy odor, unfloored save by the bare, moist earth beneath the house.
“Parbleu, the dungeons of the château at Carcassonne are more cheerful than this,” de Grandin commented as he paused at the stairs’ foot, holding his candle aloft to, make a better inspection of the dismal place.
I suppressed a shudder of mingled chill and apprehension as I stared at the blank stone walls, unpierced by windows or other openings of any sort, and made ready to retrace my steps. “Nothing here,” I announced. “You can see that with half an eye. The place is as empty as …”
“Perhaps, Friend Trowbridge,” he agreed, “but Jules de Grandin does not look with half an eye. He uses both eyes, and uses them more than once if his first glance does not prove sufficient. Behold that bit of wood on the earth yonder. What do you make of it?”
“U’m—a piece of flooring, maybe,” I hazarded.
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” he answered. “Let us see.”
Crossing the cellar, he bent above the planks, then turned to me with a satisfied smile. “Flooring does not ordinarily have ringbolts in it, my friend,” he remarked bending to seize the iron ring which was made fast to the boards by a stout staple.
“Ha!” As he heaved upward the planks came away from the black earth, disclosing a board-lined well about three feet square and of uncertain depth. An almost vertical ladder of two-by-four timbers led downward from the trap-door to the well’s impenetrable blackness.
“Allons, we descend,” he commented, turning about and setting his foot on the topmost rung of the ladder.
“Don’t be a fool,” I advised. “You don’t know what’s down there.”
“True”—his head was level with the floor as he answered—“but I shall know, with luck, in a few moments. Do you come?”
I sighed with vexation as I prepared to follow him.
AT THE LADDER’S FOOT he paused, raising his candle and looking about inquiringly. Directly before us was a passageway through the earth, ceiled with heavy planks and shored up with timbers like the lateral workings of a primitive mine.
“Ah, the plot shows complications,” he murmured, stepping briskly into the dark tunnel. “Do you come, Friend Trowbridge?”
I followed, wondering what manner of thing might be at the end of the black, musty passage, but nothing but fungus-grown timbers and walls of moist, black earth met my questing gaze.
De Grandin preceded me by some paces, and, I suppose, we had gone fifteen feet through the passage when a gasp of mingled surprise and horror from my companion brought me beside him in two long strides. Fastened with nails to the timbers at each side of the tunnel were a number of white, glistening objects, objects which, because of their very familiarity, denied their identity to my wondering eyes. There was no mistaking the things; even a layman could not have failed to recognize them for what they were. I, as a physician, knew them even better. To the right of the passage hung fourteen perfectly articulated skeletons of human legs, complete from foot to ilium, gleaming white and ghostly in the flickering light of the candles.
“Good heavens!” I exclaimed.
“Sang du diable!” Jules de Grandin commented. “Behold what is there, my friend,” he pointed to the opposite wall. Fourteen bony arms, complete from hand to shoulder-joint, hung pendulously from the tunnel’s upright timbers.
“Pardieu,” de Grandin muttered, “I have known men who collected stuffed birds and dried insects; I have known those who stored away Egyptian mummies—even the skulls of men long dead—but never before have I seen a collection of arms and legs! Parbleu, he was caduc—mad as a hatter, this one, or I am much mistaken.”
“So these were his pets?” I answered. “Yes, the man was undoubtedly mad to keep such a collection, and in a place like this. Poor fellow …”
“Nom d’un canon!” de Grandin broke in; “what was that?”
From the darkness before us there came a queer, inarticulate sound, such as a man might make attempting to speak with a mouth half-filled with food, and, as though the noise had wakened an echo slumbering in the cavern, the sound was repeated, multiplied again and again till it resembled the babbling of half a dozen overgrown infants—or an equal number of full grown imbeciles.
“Onward!” Responding to the challenge of the unknown like a warrior obeying the trumpet’s call to charge, de Grandin dashed toward the strange noise, swung about, flashing his candle this side and that, then:
“Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!” he almost shrieked. “Look, Friend Trowbridge, look and say that you see what I see, or have I, too, gone mad?”
Lined up against the wall was a series of seven small wooden boxes, each with a door composed of upright slats before it, similar in construction to the coops in which country folk pen brooding hens—and no larger. In each of the hutches huddled an object, the like of which I had never before seen, even in the terrors of nightmare.
The things had the torsos of human beings, though hideously shrunken from starvation and encrusted with scales of filth, but there all resemblances to mankind ceased. From shoulders and waist there twisted flaccid tentacles of unsupported flesh, the upper ones terminating in flat, paddle-like flippers which had some remote resemblance to hands, the lower ones ending in almost shapeless stubs which resembled feet, only in that each had a fringe of five shriveled, unsupported protuberances of withered flesh.
On scrawny necks were balanced caricatures of faces, flat, noseless chinless countenances with horrible crossed or divergent eyes, mouths widened almost beyond resemblance to buccal orifices and—horror of horrors!—elongated, split tongues protruding several inches from the lips and wagging impotently in vain efforts to form words.
“Satan, thou art outdone!” de Grandin cried as he held his candle before a scrap of paper decorating one of the cages after the manner of a sign before an animal’s den at the zoo. “Observe!” he ordered, pointing a shaking finger at the notice.
I looked, then recoiled, sick with horror. The paper bore the picture and name of Ellen Munro, one of the girls mentioned as missing in the newspaper article we had found in the dead man’s bedroom.
Beneath the photograph was scribbled in an irregular hand: “Paid 1-25-97.”
Sick at heart we walked down the line of pens. Each was labeled with the picture of a young and pretty girl with the notation, “Paid,” followed by a date. Every girl named as missing in the newspaper was represented in the cages.
Last of all, in a coop somewhat smaller than the rest, we found a body more terribly mutilated
than any. This was marked with the photograph and name of Dora Lee. Beneath her name was the date of her “payment,” written in bold red figures.
“Parbleu, what are we to do, my friend?” de Grandin asked in an hysterical whisper. “We can not return these poor ones to the world, that would be the worst form of cruelty; yet—yet I shrink from the act of mercy I know they would ask me to perform if they could speak.”
“Let’s go up,” I begged. “We must think this thing over, de Grandin, and if I stay here any longer I shall faint.”
“Bien,” be agreed, and turned to follow me from the cavern of horrors.
“It is to consider,” he began as we reached the upper hall once more. “If we give those so pitiful ones the stroke of mercy we are murderers before the law, yet what service could we render them by bringing them once more into the world? Our choice is a hard one, my friend.”
I nodded.
“Morbleu, but he was clever, that one,” the Frenchman continued, half to me, half to himself. “What a surgeon! Fourteen instances of Wyeth’s amputation of the hip and as many more of the shoulder—and every patient lived, lived to suffer the tortures of that hell-hole down there! But it is marvelous! None but a madman could have done it.
“Bethink you, Friend Trowbridge. Think how the mighty man of medicine brooded over the suicide of his crippled son, meditating hatred and vengeance for the heartless woman who had jilted him. Then—snap! went his great mentality, and from hating one woman he fell to hating all, to plot vengeance against the many for the sin of the one. And, cordieu, what a vengeance! How he must have laid plans to secure his victims; how he must have worked to prepare that hell-under-the-earth to house those poor, broken bodies which were his handiwork, and how he must have drawn upon the great surgical skill which was his, even in his madness, to transform those once lovely ones into the visions of horror we have just beheld! Horror of horrors! To remove the bones and let the girls still live!”
The Best of Jules de Grandin Page 8
