“You brought the things?” she asked de Grandin when introductions were completed.
Nodding, he placed the relics on the oaken table beside which she was seated. “These were discovered—” he began, but she raised her hand in warning.
“Please don’t tell me anything about them,” she requested. “I’d rather my controls did all that, for one never can be sure how much information secured while one is conscious may be carried over into the subconscious while the trance is on, you know.”
Opening a drawer in the table she took out a hinged double slate and a box of thin, white chalk.
“Will you hold this, Doctor Trowbridge?” she asked, handing me the slate. “Take it in both hands, please, and hold it in your lap. Please don’t move it or attempt to speak to me until I tell you.”
Awkwardly I took the blank-faced slate and balanced it on my knees while Mrs. Creighton drew a small crystal ball from a little green-felt bag, placed it on the table between the broken arm-bone and the fractured rib, then, with a snap of the switch, set an electric light in a gooseneck fixture standing on the table aglow. The luminance from the glowing bulb shone directly on the crystal sphere, causing it to glow as though with inward fire.
For a little time—two minutes, perhaps—she gazed intently at the glass ball; then her eyes closed and her head, resting easily against the crocheted doily on the back of her rocking-chair, moved a little sidewise as her neck muscles relaxed. For a moment she rested thus, her regular breathing only slightly audible.
Suddenly, astonishingly, I heard a movement of the chalk between the slates. I had not moved or tilted them, there was no chance the little pencil could have rolled, yet unquestionably the thing was moving. Now, I distinctly felt it as it traveled slowly back and forth across the tightly folded leaves of the slate, gradually increasing its speed till it seemed like a panic-stricken prisoned thing rushing wildly round its dungeon in search of escape.
I had a momentary wild, unreasoning desire to fling that haunted slate away from me and rush out of that stuffy room, but pride held me in my chair, pride made me grip those slates as a drowning man might grip a rope; pride kept my gaze resolutely on Mrs. Creighton and off of the uncanny thing which balanced on my knees.
I could hear de Grandin breathing quickly, hear Hodgson moving restlessly in his chair, clearing his throat and (I knew this without looking) buttoning and unbuttoning his coat.
Mrs. Creighton’s sleep became troubled. Her head rolled slowly, fretfully from side to side, and her breathing became stertorous; once or twice she gave vent to a feeble moan; finally the groaning, choking cry of a sleeper in a nightmare. Her smooth, plump hands clenched nervously and doubled into fists, her arms and legs twitched tremblingly; at length she straightened stiffly in her chair, rigid as though shocked by a galvanic battery, and from her parted lips there came a muffled, strangling cry of horror. Little flecks of foam formed at the corners of her mouth, she arched her body upward, then sank back with a low, despairing whimper, and her firm chin sagged down toward her breast—I knew the symptoms! No medical practitioner can fail to recognize those signs.
“Madame!” de Grandin cried, rising from his chair and rushing to her side. “You are unwell—you suffer?”
She struggled to a sitting posture, her brown eyes bulging as though a savage hand were on her throat, her face contorted with some dreadful fear. For a moment she sat thus; then, with a shake of her head, she straightened, smoothed her hair, and asked matter-of-factly: “Did I say anything?”
“No, Madame, you said nothing articulate, but you seemed in pain, so I awakened you.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” she answered with a smile. “They tell me I often act that way when in a trance, but I never remember anything when I wake up, and I never seem any the worse because of anything I dream while I’m unconscious. If you had only waited we might have had a message on the slate.”
“We have!” I interrupted. “I heard the pencil writing like mad, and nearly threw the thing away!”
“Oh, I’m so glad,” responded Mrs. Creighton. “Bring it over, and we’ll see what it says.”
The slate was covered with fine writing, the minute characters, distinct as script etched on a copper plate, running from margin to margin, spaces between the lines so narrow as to be hardly recognizable.
For a moment we studied the calligraphy in puzzled silence; then.
“Mort de ma vie, we have triumphed over Death and Time, my friends!” de Grandin cried excitedly. “Attendez, si’l vous plait.” Opening the slates before him like a book he read:
Revered and awful judges of the world, ye awful ones who sit upon the parapets of hell, I answer guilty to the charge ye bring against me. Aye, Atoua, who now stands on the brink of deathless death, whose body waits the crushing stones of doom, whose spirit, robbed for ever of the hope of fleshly tegument, must wander in Amenti till the end of time has come, confesses that the fault was hers, and hers alone.
Behold me, awesome judges of the living and the dead, am I not a woman, and a woman shaped for love? Are not my members beautiful to see, my lips like apricots and pomegranates, my eyes like milk and beryl, my breasts like ivory set with coral? Yea, mighty ones, I am a woman, and a woman formed for joy.
Was it my fault or my volition that I was pledged to serve the great All-Mother, Isis, or ever I had left the shelter of my mother’s flesh? Did I abjure the blissful agony of love and seek a life of sterile chastity, or was the promise spoken for me by another’s lips?
I gave all that a woman has to give, and gave it freely, knowing that the pains of death and after death the torment of the gods awaited me, nor do I deem the price too great to pay.
Ye frown? Ye shake your dreadful heads upon which rest the crowns of Amun and of Kneph, of Seb and Tem, of Suti and Osiris’ mighty self? Ye say that I speak sacrilege? Then hear me yet awhile: She who stands in chains before ye, shorn of reverence as a priestess of Great Mother Isis, shorn of all honor as a woman, tells ye these things to your teeth, knowing that ye can not do her greater hurt than that she stands already judged to undergo. Your reign and that of those ye serve draws near its end. A little while ye yet may strut and preen yourselves and mouth the judgments of your gods, but in the days that wait your very names shall be forgot, save when some stranger delves into your tombs and drags your violated bodies forth for men to make a show of. Aye, and the very gods ye serve shall be forgotten—they shall sink so low that none shall call their names, not even as a curse, and in their ruined temples none shall do them reverence, and no living thing be found, save only the white-bellied lizard and the fearful jackal.
And who shall do this thing? An offspring of the Hebrews! Yea, from the people ye despise a child shall spring, and great shall be His glory. He shall put down your gods beneath his feet and spoil them of all glory and respect; they shall become but shadow-gods of a forgotten past.
My name ye’ve stricken from the roll of priestesses, no writing shall be graven on my tomb, and I shall be forgotten for all time by gods and men. So reads your judgment. I give ye, then, the lie. Upon a day far in the future strange men from a land across the sea shall open wide my tomb and take my body from it, nor shall my flesh taste of corruption until those strangers look upon my face and see my broken bones, and seeing, wonder how I died. And I shall tell them. Yea, by Osiris’ self I swear that though I have been dead for centuries, I shall relate the manner of my judgment and my death, and they shall know my name and weep for me, and on your heads they shall heap curses for this thing ye do to me.
Pile now your stones of doom upon my breast, break my bones and still the fevered beating of my heart. I go to death, but not from out the memory of men as ye shall go. I have spoken.
Below the writing was a little scrawl of drawing, as crudely executed as a child’s rough chalk-sketch on a wall; yet as we looked at it we seemed to see the outline of a woman held upon the ground by kneeling slaves while a man above her poised a heavy rock
to crush her exposed breast and another stood in readiness to aid the executioner:
“Cordieu!” de Grandin exclaimed as we gazed upon the drawing. “I shall say she told the truth, my friends. She was a priestess of the goddess Isis, and as such was sworn to lifelong chastity, with awful death by torture as the penalty for violation of her vow. Undoubtlessly she loved not wisely, but too well, as women have been wont to love since time began, and upon discovery she was sentenced to the death decreed for those who did forget their obligations to the goddess. Her chest was broken in with stones, and without benefit of mummification her mutilated body was put in a casket void of any writing which might give a clue to her identity. Without a single invocation to the gods who held the fate of her poor spirit in their hands, they buried her. But did she triumph? Who says otherwise? We know her name, Atoua, we know the reason and the manner of her death. But those old priests who judged her and decreed her doom—who knows their names, yes, parbleu, who knows or cares a single, solitary damn where their vile mummies lie? They are assuredly gone into oblivion, while she—tiens, at least she is a personality to us, and we are very much alive.”
“Excuse me, gentlemen, if you’re quite finished with these relics, I’ll take them, now,” Professor Hodgson interrupted. “This little séance has been interesting, but you must admit nothing sufficiently authentic to be incorporated in our archives has been developed here. I fear we shall have to label these bones and ornaments as belonging to an unidentified body found by Doctor Larson at Naga-ed-dêr. Now, if you don’t mind I shall get—”
“Get anywhere you wish, Monsieur, and get there quickly,” de Grandin broke in furiously. “You have presided over relics of the dead so long your brain is clogged with mummy-dust. As for your heart—mort d’un rat mort, I do not think you have one!
“As for me,” he added with a sudden smile, “I return at once to Doctor Trowbridge’s. This poor young lady’s tragic fate affects me deeply, and unless some urgent business interferes, I plan to drown my sorrow—morbleu, I shall do more. Within the hour I shall be most happily intoxicated!”
The Thing in the Fog
“Tiens, on such a night as this the Devil must congratulate himself!” Jules de Grandin forced his chin still deeper in the upturned collar of his trench-coat, and bent his head against the whorls of chilling mist which eddied upward from the bay in token that autumn was dead and winter come at last.
“Congratulate himself?” I asked in amusement as I felt before me for the curbstone with the ferrule of my stick. “Why?”
“Why? Pardieu, because he sits at ease beside the cozy fires of hell, and does not have to feel his way through this eternally-to-be-execrated fog! If we had but the sense—
“Pardon, Monsieur, one of us is very clumsy, and I do not think that it is I!” he broke off sharply as a big young man, evidently carrying a heavier cargo of ardent spirits than he could safely manage, lurched against him in the smothering mist, then caromed off at an unsteady angle to lose himself once more in the enshrouding fog.
“Dolt!” the little Frenchman muttered peevishly. “If he can not carry liquor he should abstain from it. Me, I have no patience with these—grand Dieu, what is that?”
Somewhere behind us, hidden in the curtains of the thick, gray vapor, there came a muffled exclamation, half of fright, half of anger, the sound of something fighting threshingly with something else, and a growling, snarling noise, as though a savage dog had leapt upon its prey, and, having fleshed its teeth, was worrying it; then: “Help!” The cry was muffled, strangled, but laden with a weight of helpless terror.
“Hold fast, my friend, we come!” de Grandin cried, and, guided by the sounds of struggle, breasted through the fog as if it had been water, brandishing his silver-headed sword-stick before him as a guide and a defense.
A score of quick steps brought us to the conflict. Dim and indistinct as shadows on a moonless night, two forms were struggling on the sidewalk, a large one lying underneath, while over it, snarling savagely, was a thing I took for a police dog which snapped and champed and worried at the other’s throat.
“Help!” called the man again, straining futilely to hold the snarling beast away and turning on his side the better to protect his menaced face and neck.
“Cordieu, a war-dog!” exclaimed the Frenchman. “Stand aside, Friend Trowbridge, he is savage, this one; mad, perhaps, as well.” With a quick, whipping motion he ripped the chilled-steel blade from the barrel of his stick and, point advanced, circled round the struggling man and beast, approaching with a cautious, cat-like step as he sought an opportunity to drive home the sword.
By some uncanny sense the snarling brute divined his purpose, raised its muzzle from its victim’s throat and backed away a step or two, regarding de Grandin with a stare of utter hatred. For a moment I caught the smoldering glare of a pair of fire-red eyes, burning through the fogfolds as incandescent charcoal might burn through a cloth, and:
“A dog? Non, pardieu, it is—” began the little Frenchman, then checked himself abruptly as he lunged out swiftly with his blade, straight for the glaring, fiery eyes which glowered at him through the mist.
The great beast backed away with no apparent haste, yet quickly enough to avoid the needle-point of Jules de Grandin’s blade, and for an instant I beheld a row of gleaming teeth bared savagely beneath the red eyes’ glare; then, with a snarling growl which held more defiance than surrender in its throaty rumble, the brute turned lithely, dodged and made off through the fog, disappearing from sight before the clicking of its nails against the pavement had been lost to hearing.
“Look to him, Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin ordered, casting a final glance about us in the mist before he put his sword back in its sheath. “Does he survive, or is he killed to death?”
“He’s alive, all right,” I answered as I sank to my knees beside the supine man, “but he’s been considerably chewed up. Bleeding badly. We’d best get him to the office and patch him up before—”
“Wha—what was it?” our mangled patient asked abruptly, rising on his elbow and staring wildly round him. “Did you kill it—did it get away? D’ye think it had hydrophobia?”
“Easy on, son,” I soothed, locking my hands beneath his arms and helping him to rise. “It bit you several times, but you’ll be all right as soon as we can stop the bleeding. Here”—I snatched a handkerchief from the breast pocket of my dinner coat and pressed it into his hand—“hold this against the wound while we’re walking. No use trying to get a taxi tonight, the driver’d never find his way about. I live only a little way from here and we’ll make it nicely if you’ll lean on me. So! That’s it!”
The young man leaned heavily upon my shoulder and almost bore me down, for he weighed a good fourteen stone, as we made our way along the vapor-shrouded street.
“I say, I’m sorry I bumped into you, sir,” the youngster apologized as de Grandin took his other arm and eased me somewhat of my burden. “Fact is, I’d taken a trifle too much and was walkin’ on a side hill when I passed you.” He pressed the already-reddened handkerchief closer to his lacerated neck as he continued with a chuckle: “Maybe it’s a good thing I did, at that, for you were within hearing when I called because you’d stopped to cuss me out.”
“You may have right, my friend,” de Grandin answered with a laugh. “A little drunkenness is not to be deplored, and I doubt not you had reason for your drinking—not that one needs a reason, but—”
A sudden shrill, sharp cry for help cut through his words, followed by another call which stopped half uttered on a strangled, agonizing note; then, in a moment, the muffled echo of a shot, another, and, immediately afterward, the shrilling signal of a police whistle.
“Tête bleu, this night is full of action as a pepper-pot is full of spice!” exclaimed de Grandin, turning toward the summons of the whistle. “Can you manage him, Friend Trowbridge? If so I—”
Pounding of heavy boots on the sidewalk straight ahead told us tha
t the officer approached, and a moment later his form, bulking gigantically in the fog, hove into view. “Did anny o’ yez see—” he started, then raised his hand in half-formal salute to the vizor of his cap as he recognized de Grandin.
“I don’t suppose ye saw a dar-rg come runnin’ by this way, sor?” he asked. “I wuz walkin’ up th’ street a moment since, gettin’ ready to report at th’ box, when I heard a felly callin’ for help, an’ what should I see next but th’ biggest, ugliest baste of a dar-rg ye iver clapped yer eyes upon, a-worryin’ at th’ pore lad’s throat. I wus close to it as I’m standin’ to you, sor, pretty near, an’ I shot at it twict, but I’m damned if I didn’t miss both times, slick as a whistle—an’ me holdin’ a pistol expert’s medal from th’ department, too!”
“U’m?” de Grandin murmured. “And the unfortunate man beset by this great beast your bullets failed to hit, what of him?”
“Glory be to God; I plumb forgot ’im!” the policeman confessed. “Ye see, sor, I wuz that overcome wid shame, as th’ felly says, whin I realized I’d missed th’ baste that I run afther it, hopin’ I’d find it agin an’ maybe put a slug into it this time, so—”
“Quite so, one understands,” de Grandin interrupted, “but let us give attention to the man; the beast can wait until we find him, and—mon Dieu! It is as well you did not stay to give him the first aid, my friend, your efforts would have been without avail. His case demands the coroner’s attention.”
He did not understate the facts. Stretched on his back, hands clenched to fists, legs slightly spread, one doubled partly under him, a man lay on the sidewalk; across the white expanse of evening shirt his opened coat displayed there spread a ruddy stickiness, while his starched white-linen collar was already sopping with the blood which oozed from his torn and mangled throat. Both external and anterior jugulars had been ripped away by the savagery which had torn the integument of the neck to shreds, and so deeply had the ragged wound gone that a portion of the hyoid bone had been exposed. A spate of blood had driveled from the mouth, staining lips and chin, and the eyes, forced out between the lids, were globular and fixed and staring, though the film of death had hardly yet had time to set upon them.
The Best of Jules de Grandin Page 41
