“Hit it on the head! Crush its skull!” I advised, but:
“Non, this is better,” he replied as he drew a box of matches from his pocket and lighted one.
Now utter terror seized the limbless lich. With horrid little squeaking cries it redoubled its efforts to escape, but the Frenchman was inexorable. Bending forward, he applied the flaming match to the tinder-dry body, and held it close against the withered skin. The fire caught instantly. As though it were compounded of a mass of oil-soaked rags, the mummy’s body sent out little tongues of fire, surmounted by dense clouds of aromatic smoke, and in an instant was a blaze of glowing flame. De Grandin seized the severed arms and legs and piled them on the burning torso so that they, too, blazed and snapped and crackled like dry wood thrown on a roaring fire.
“And that, I damn think, denotes the end of that,” he told me as he watched the body sink from flames to embers, then to white and scarcely glowing ashes. “Fire is the universal solvent, the one true cleanser, my friend. It was not for nothing that the olden ones condemned their witches to be burned. This elemental force, this evil personality which inhabited that so unsavory mummy’s desiccated flesh, not only can it find no other place to rest now that we have destroyed its tenement, but the good, clean, clarifying flames have dissipated it entirely. Never again can it materialize, never more enter human form through the magic of such necromancers as that sacré Putnam person. It is gone, disposed of—pouf! it is no longer anything at all.
“What think you of my scheme, Mademoiselle?” he asked. “Was I not the clever one to match iron and fire against them? Was it not laughable to see—grand Dieu, Friend Trowbridge—where is she?”
He leant upon his billhook, looking questingly about the edges of the clearing while I played my searchlight’s beam among the trees. At length:
“One sees it perfectly,” he told me. “While we battled with that one, another of them set on her and we could not hear her cries because of our engagement. Now—”
“Do—do you suppose it killed her as it did her father?” I asked, sick with apprehension.
“We can not say; we can but look,” he answered. “Come.”
Together we searched the woodland in an ever-widening circle, but no trace of Audrey Hawkins could we find.
“Here’s her billhook,” I announced as we neared the house.
Sticking in the hole of a tree, almost buried in the wood, was the head of the girl’s weapon, some three inches of broken shaft adhering to it. On the ground twenty feet or more away lay the main portion of the helve, broken across as a match-stem might he broken by a man.
The earth was moist beneath the trees, and at that spot uncovered by fallen leaves or pine needles. As I bent to pick up Audrey’s broken billhook, I noticed tracks in the loam—big, barefoot tracks, heavy at the toe, as though their maker strained forward as he walked, and beside them a pair of wavy parallel lines—the toe-prints of Audrey’s boots as she was dragged through the woods and toward the Putnam house.
“What now?” I asked. “They’ve taken her there, dead or alive, and—”
He interrupted savagely: “What can we do but follow? Me, I shall go into that sacré house, and take it down, plank by single plank, until I find her; also I shall find those others, and when I do—”
NO LIGHTS SHOWED IN the Putnam mansion as we hurried across the weed-grown, ragged lawn, tiptoed up the veranda steps and softly tried the handle of the big front door. It gave beneath our pressure, and in a moment we were standing in a lightless hall, our weapons held in readiness as we strove to pierce the gloom with straining eyes and held our breaths as we listened for some sound betokening an enemy’s approach.
“Can you hear it, Trowbridge, mon ami?” he asked me in a whisper. “Is it not their so abominable squealing?”
I listened breathlessly, and from the passageway’s farther end it seemed there came a series of shrill skirking squeaks, as though an angry rat were prisoned there.
Treading carefully, we advanced along the corridor, pausing at length as a vague, greenish-blue glow appeared to filter out into the darkness, not exactly lightening into the darkness, making the gloom a little less abysmal.
We gazed incredulously at the scene presented in the room beyond. The windows were all closed and tightly shuttered, and in a semicircle on the floor there burned a set of seven little silver lamps which gave off a blue-green, phosphorescent glow, hardly sufficient to enable us to mark the actions of a group of figures gathered there. One was a man, old and white-haired, disgustingly unkempt, his deep-set dark eyes burning with a fanatical glow of adoration as he kept them fixed upon a figure seated in a high, carved chair which occupied a sort of dais beyond the row of glowing silver lamps. Beside the farther wall there stood a giant form, a great brown skinned man with bulging muscles like a wrestler’s and the knotted torso of a gladiator. One of his mighty hands was twined in Audrey Hawkins’ short, blond hair; with the other he was stripping off her clothes as a monkey skins a fruit. We heard the cloth rip as it parted underneath his wrenching fingers, saw the girl’s slim body show white and lissome as a new-peeled hazel wand, then saw her thrown birth-naked on the floor before the figure seated on the dais.
Bizarre and terrifying as the mummy-creatures we had seen had been, the seated figure was no less remarkable. No mummy, this, but a soft and sweetly rounded woman-shape, almost divine in bearing and adornment. Out of olden Egypt she had come, and with her she had brought the majesty that once had ruled the world. Upon her head the crown of Isis sat, the vulture cap with wings of beaten gold and blue enamel, and the vulture’s head with gem-set eyes, above it rearing upright horns of Hathor between which shone the polished-silver disk of the full moon, beneath them the uraeus, emblem of Osiris.
About her neck was hung a collar of beaten gold close-studded with emeralds and blue lapis lazuli, and round her wrists were wide, bright bands of gold which shone with figures worked in red and blue enamel. Her breasts were bare, but high beneath the pointed bosoms was clasped a belt of blue and gold from which there draped a robe of thin, transparent linen gathered in scores of tiny, narrow pleats and fringed about the hem with little balls of gleaming gold which hung an inch or so above the arching insteps of her long and narrow feet, on every toe of which there gleamed a jewel-set ring. In her left hand she held a golden instrument fashioned like a T-cross with a long loop at its top, while in her right she bore a three-lashed golden scourge, the emblem of Egyptian sovereignty.
All this I noted in a sort of wondering daze, but it was her glaring, implacable eyes which held me rooted to the spot. Like the eyes of a tigress or a leopardess they were, and glowing with a horrid, inward light as though illumined from behind by the phosphorescence of an all consuming, heatless flame.
Even as we halted spellbound at the turning of the corridor we saw her raise her golden scourge and point it like an aiming weapon at Audrey Hawkins. The girl lay huddled in a small white heap where the ruthless giant had thrown her, but as the golden scourge was leveled at her she half rose to a crouching posture and crept forward on her knees and elbows, whimpering softly, half in pleading, half in fear, it seemed.
The fixed, set stare of hatred never left the seated woman’s eyes as Audrey crawled across the bare plank floor, groveled for an instant at the dais’ lowest step, then raised her head and began to lick the other’s white, jeweled feet as though she were a beaten dog which sued for pardon from its mistress.
I saw de Grandin’s small white teeth flash in the lamps’ weird light as he bared them in a quick grimace. “I damn think we have had enough of this, by blue!” he whispered as he stepped out of the shadows.
While I had watched the tableau of Audrey’s degradation with a kind of sickened horror, the little Frenchman had been busy. From the pockets of his jacket and his breeches he extracted handkerchiefs and knotted them into a wad, then, drawing out a tin of lighter-fluid, he doused the knotted linen with the liquid. The scent of benzine mixed with ethe
r spread through the quiet air as, his drenched handkerchiefs on his billhook’s iron head, he left the shadows, paused an instant on the door-sill, then struck a match and set the cloth ablaze.
“Messieurs, Madame, I think this little comedy is ended,” he announced as he waved the fire-tipped weapon back and forth, causing the flames to leap and quicken with a ruddy, orange glow.
Mingled terror and surprise showed on the naked giant’s face as de Grandin crossed the threshold. He fell away a pace, then, with his back against the wall, crouched for a spring.
“You first, Monsieur,” the Frenchman told him almost affably, and with an agile leap cleared the few feet separating them and thrust the blazing torch against the other’s bare, brown breast.
I gasped with unbelief as I saw the virile, sun-tanned flesh take fire as though it had been tinder, blaze fiercely and crumble into ashes as the flames spread hungrily, eating up his chest and belly, neck and head, finally destroying writhing arms and legs.
The seated figure on the dais was cowering back in fright. Gone was her look of cold, contemptuous hatred; in its place a mask of wild, insensate fear had overspread her clear-cut, haughty features. Her red lips opened, showing needle-sharp white teeth, and I thought she would have screamed aloud in her terror, but all that issued from her gaping mouth was a little, squeaking sound, like the squealing of a mouse caught in a trap.
“And now, Madame, permit that I may serve you, also!” De Grandin turned his back upon the blazing man and faced the cringing woman on the throne.
She held up trembling hands to ward him off, and her frightened, squeaking cries redoubled, but inexorably as a mediæval executioner advancing to ignite the faggots round a condemned witch, the little Frenchman crossed the room, held out his blazing torch and forced the fire against her bosom.
The horrifying process of incineration was repeated. From rounded breast to soft, white throat, from omphalos to thighs, from chest to arms and from thighs to feet the all-devouring fire spread quickly, and the woman’s white and gleaming flesh blazed fiercely, as if it had been oil-soaked wood. Bones showed a moment as the flesh was burned away, then took the fire, blazed quickly for an instant, glowed to incandescence, and crumbled to white ash before our gaze. Last of all, it seemed, the fixed and staring eyes, still gleaming with a greenish inward light, were taken by the fire, blazed for a second with a mixture of despair and hatred, then dissolved to nothingness.
“Mademoiselle,” de Grandin laid his hand upon the girl’s bare shoulder, “they have gone.”
Audrey Hawkins raised her head and gazed at him, the puzzled, non-comprehending look of one who wakens quickly from sound sleep upon her face. There was a question in her eyes, but her lips were mute.
“Mademoiselle,” he repeated, “they have gone; I drove them out with fire. But he remains, my little one.” With a quick nod of his head he indicated Colonel Putnam, who crouched in a corner of the room, fluttering fingers at his bearded lips, his wild eyes roving restlessly about, as though he could not understand the quick destruction of the beings he had brought to life.
“He?” the girl responded dully.
“Précisément, Mademoiselle—he. The accursed one; the one who raised those mummies from the dead; who made this pleasant countryside a hell of death and horror; who made it possible for them to slay your father while he slept.”
One of those unpleasant smiles which seemed to change the entire character of his comely little face spread across his features as he leant above the naked girl and held his billhook toward her.
“The task is yours by right of bereavement, ma pauvre,” he told her, “but if you would that I do it for you—”
“No—no; let me!” she cried and leapt to her feet, snatching the heavy iron weapon from his hand. Not only was she stripped of clothing; she was stripped of all restraint, as well. Not Audrey Hawkins, civilized descendant of a line of prudishly respectable New England rustics, stood before us in the silver lamps’ blue light, but a primordial cave-woman, a creature of the dawn of time, wild with the lust for blood-vengeance; armed, furious, naked and unashamed.
“Come, Friend Trowbridge, we can safely leave the rest to her,” de Grandin told me as he took my elbow and forced me from the room.
“But, man, that’s murder!” I expostulated as he dragged me down the unlit hall. “That girl’s a maniac, and armed, and that poor, crazy old man—”
“Will soon be safe in hell, unless I miss my guess,” he broke in with a laugh. “Hark, is it not magnificent, my friend?”
A wild, high scream came to us from the room beyond, then a woman’s cachinnating laugh, hysterical, thin-edged, but gloating; and the thudding beat of murderous blows. Then a weak, thin moaning, more blows; finally a little, groaning gasp and the sound of quick breath drawn through fevered lips to laboring lungs.
“And now, my friend, I think we may go back,” said Jules de Grandin.
“ONE MOMENT, IF YOU please, I have a task to do,” he called as we paused on the portico. “Do you proceed with Mademoiselle Audrey. I shall join you in a minute.”
He disappeared inside the old, dark house, and I heard his boot-heels clicking on the bare boards of the hall as he sought the room where all that remained of Henry Putnam and the things he brought back from the dead were lying. The girl leaned weakly against a tall porch pillar, covering her face with trembling hands. She was a grotesque little figure, de Grandin’s jacket buttoned round her torso, mine tied kilt-fashion round her waist.
“Oh,” she whispered with a conscience-stricken moan, “I’m a murderess. I killed him—beat him to death. I’ve committed murder!”
I could think of nothing comforting to say, so merely patted her upon the shoulder, but de Grandin, hastening from the house, was just in time to hear her tearful self-arraignment.
“Pardonnez-moi, Mademoiselle,” he contradicted, “you are nothing of the kind. Me, once in war I had to head the firing-party which put a criminal to death. Was I then his murderer? But no. My conscience makes no accusation. So it is with you. This Putnam one, this rogue, this miscreant, this so vile necromancer who filled these pleasant woods with squeaking, gibbering horrors, was his life not forfeit? Did not he connive at the death of that poor boy and girl who perished in the midst of their vacation? But yes. Did not he advertise for laborers, that they might furnish sustenance for those evil things he summoned from the tomb? Certainly. Did not he loose his squeaking, laughing thing upon your father, to kill him in his sleep? Of course.
“Yet for these many crimes the law was powerless to punish him. We should have sent ourselves to lifelong confinement in a madhouse had we attempted to invoke the law’s processes. Alors, it was for one of us to give him his deserts, and you, my little one, as the one most greatly wronged, took precedence.
“Eh bien,” he added with a tug at his small, tightly waxed mustache, “you did make extremely satisfactory work of it.”
Since Audrey was in no condition to drive, I took the ancient flivver’s steering-wheel.
“Look well upon that bad old house, my friends,” de Grandin bade as we started on our homeward road. “Its time is done.”
“What d’ye mean?” I asked.
“Precisely what I say. When I went back I made a dozen little fires in different places. They should be spreading nicely by this time.”
“I CAN UNDERSTAND WHY THAT mummy we met in the woods caught fire so readily,” I told him as we drove through the woods, “but how was it that the man and woman in the house were so inflammable?”
“They, too, were mummies,” he replied.
“Mummies? Nonsense! The man was a magnificent physical specimen, and the woman—well, I’ll admit she was evil-looking, but she had one of the most beautiful bodies I’ve ever seen. If she were a mummy, I—”
“Do not say it, my friend,” he broke in with a laugh; “eaten words are bitter on the tongue. They were mummies—I say so. In the woods, in Monsieur Hawkins’ home, when they made unple
asant faces at us through the window of our cabin, they were mummies, you agree? Ha, but when they stood in the blue light of those seven silver lamps, the lights which first shone on them when they came to plague the world, they were to outward seeming the same as when they lived and moved beneath the sun of olden Egypt. I have heard such things.
“That necromancer, von Meyer, of whom Monsieur Putnam spoke, I know of him by reputation. I have been told by fellow occultists whose word I can not doubt that he has perfected a light which when shone on a corpse will give it every look of life, roll back the ravages of years and make it seem in youth and health once more. A very brilliant man is that von Meyer, but a very wicked one, as well. Some day when I have nothing else to do I shall seek him out and kill him to death for the safety of society.
“Can you drive a little faster?” he inquired as we left the woods behind.
“Cold without your jacket?” I asked.
“Cold? Mais non. But I would reach the village soon, my friend. Monsieur le juge who also acts as coroner has a keg of most delicious cider in his cellar, and this afternoon he bade me call on him whenever I felt thirsty. Morbleu, I feel most vilely thirsty now!
“Hurry, if you please, my friend.”
Red Gauntlets of Czerni
1. Revenant
OUR VISITOR LEANT FORWARD in his chair and fixed his oddly light colored eyes on Jules de Grandin with an almost pleading expression. “It is about my daughter that I come,” he said in a flat, accentless voice, only his sharp-cut, perfect enunciation disclosing that English had not been his mother tongue. “She is gravely ill, Monsieur.”
“But I do not practise medicine,” the little Frenchman answered. “There are thousands of good American practitioners to whom you could apply, Monsieur—”
“Szekler,” supplied the other with an inclination of his head. “Andor Szekler, sir.”
The Best of Jules de Grandin Page 54
