by Otto Penzler
The path bent a little uphill, shook itself out, stopped in a plot of trampled grass; and John Ranier reared up before an enormous phantom, the spirit of a gigantic gray tree formed suddenly before his eyes. A vast-trunked, elephanthided pillar, swooping skyward, its bearded upper limbs like the hanging gardens of Babylon drifting overhead, its gnarled outspread roots like tentacles feeding in the grass. Fog rolled in white surf through that forest of aerial limbs; swathed the trunk in groping pythons of steam. Man was small in the presence of that ancient jungle monarch. A search-light couldn’t have discovered its top. But Ranier’s flashlamp explored the bottom. Microscopic at the feet of this forest Druid were the crosses.
Even in that hour of extremity Ranier found a burr in his throat for that expatriated little squad who hadn’t gone home. They held the fort, even when the diplomats in Washington who’d sent them here had forgotten. Unremembered, they carried the flag, a weather-dimmed American flag someone had set in a flower pot under the tree. Their formation was military and their crosses erect, in line.
But the sergeant who should have been at the head of his company wasn’t there. The white circle of the flashlight fell suddenly into a black hole; leaped out of the fresh-cut trench to a mound of smoking earth; discovered a corroded longbox; its lid ripped off, thrown sideways across the dirt-pile. The flashlight shook as Ranier sent the scared ray torching to the head of the excavation, revealing the cross that stood there.
The German colonel was sitting beside the grave.
SERGEANT EDGAR O’GRADY
U.S.M.C.
WHEELING, W. VA.
DIED OF FEVER
No, the sergeant who should have been there was at the grave of the little old lady who was at the grave of Adolph Perl who looked like (he couldn’t be!) Haarman. And it wasn’t Adolph Perl at the grave of Sergeant O’Grady. Or anything that might be mistaken for an Adolph Perl.
At first Ranier thought there was nothing at that rifled grave. Then a sound from the unlidded coffin vitalized his hair. Grumph! Something slick and green looked over the coffin rim with terrified eyes; gave a leap to escape the white light-ray; flopped back on tethered legs. It was hobbled by a string to a rusty coffin nail, and John Ranier made a mental note never to eat frog’s legs again. There was nothing more than that bullfrog in Sergeant O’Grady’s coffin. There was, in that coffin, a handful of bones and a celluloid collar.
“The missionary!”
In the confused horror of the ensuing moment too many things happened at once. Afterwards, thinking back through the nightmare, Ranier could never quite sort the incidents in sequence. He could remember grabbing up a clod from the dirt-pile, breaking the earth in his fingers, shouting: “This sod wasn’t turned an hour ago!” He could remember turning his horrified flashlight at the great, ghostly tree as if expecting it to embrace him with its arms. He could remember Coolidge lumbering forward with matches; Kavanaugh striding around the grave, glaring, gesturing his automatic. Daisy May was somewhere in the fog with Professor Schlitz, both wailing like babes in the wood, and Laïs Engles cried out through babbling pandemonium.
“—but the missionary was buried at Morne Cuyamel! At the crossroads a kilometer from here! In the churchyard of the Anglican mission at Morne Cuyamel—!”
“Zombies!” Polypheme howled. “Cultedes morts! Zombies là!”
Kavanaugh skirted the grave, ran past Ranier with a roar. “To the churchyard, then! Get back to the car, all of you! We’ll go back to the grave of this missionary!”
Shadows raced about in the dark vapour, and Ranier wheeled on the girl with a low-voiced, “Wait! Don’t leave my sight for a second! I’ve found out something here—something that’s—” His voice stopped behind clenched teeth. The shadow before him was not the girl. His left hand swept out, gripped an arm. Silk tore in his steeled fingers.
“Doc!” Carpetsi’s guttural words were oil-coated, seeping out of the mist. “For God’s sake, don’t spot me with that flashlight.” He was there like a secret, gripping Ranier’s lapel with his free hand. “Gotta talk to you—alone—make a chance—”
“Now,” Ranier gritted. He could feel the Italian’s body quivering. The answer was scarcely audible to his ear; choked syllables and a scent of garlic.
“No, no—careful—I know, see? I know who killed Haarman, and I know who’s playin’ Goin’ to Jerusalem with these corpses. I’d be killed in a second if—”
The Italian’s whisper was bitten off short. Interrupted by a sound of hammerblows somewhere in the distance. Tonk-tonk-tonk! Metallic concussions somewhere far in the fog’s sceneless void.
Kavanaugh’s voice squalled, “Shots!” Laïs Engles cried, “Up the mountain somewhere! Up on Morne Cuyamel where the Anglican mission—!”
Everybody was running.
CHAPTER XVI
EAR TO EAR
Everybody was running, phantoms across that fog-smothered parade ground, but there was nothing phantom about those reports which had echoed down through the smothered stillness. Three shots Ranier had counted. Gunfire on Morne Cuyamel where the Anglican missionary who occupied the sergeant’s coffin had been buried. The sergeant was A.W.O.L. and that celluloid collar was occupying his place. But the bones of the missionary under that giant silk-cotton tree had told Ranier something that jelled the sweat on his forehead. When he learned Angelo Carpetsi’s version he might know the answer to this jabberwok graveyard relay, and meantime he mustn’t let Laïs Engles out of his sight.
In the dash for the car he caught up with the girl, but he had no chance to speak with the Italian. Tourists piled into the back like maniac firemen, aided by boots from the raging Kavanaugh and the howls of nerve-wracked Mr. Coolidge who knew everybody would be shot to hell before they got there. The firing on the morne had stopped with sinister abruptness, and there was no noise in the fogged dark now save the car’s clatterty-bang, the yowling of the passengers and the drums you couldn’t hear but knew were there.
Balancing on the swaying running board, Ranier interlaced his fingers with the girl’s; put his lips close to her damp blowing hair. “Stick close when we get there—! Dangerous, now—! If shooting starts, they’ll fire at the flashlight—! Drop to the ground—!”
“Oh, please.” Her fingers squeezed his in appeal. He stooped his head to hear. Above the rushing opaque wind and the gasoline-smelling roar of the car he could catch but a fragment of her entreaty. “If it is Unkle Doktor—Dr. Eberhardt—please do not kill—”
Two-wheeling at sixty around a fogbanked curve, the car rocked like a ship; and Ranier, almost thrown from his narrow footing, lost the girl’s voice. He muttered a word of assurance, something he did not feel, and concentrated on clinging to the invisible door. Foliage, sharpthorned, lashed at his legs. Wet wind tore at his cap. There was a narrow underpass with a glimpse of railroad girders overhead where the fenders struck sparks from the concrete sidewall and Ranier only saved himself from being sandpapered off his perch by flinging his head and shoulders into the car.
That black gnome under the Pancho Villa sombrero was driving as if the Legions of Eblis were hugging his exhaust pipe. “Faster! Faster!” That was Kavanaugh’s shouting. If Polypheme failed to comprehend the Irishman’s English, he understood the pistol-muzzle nudging his neck. Ranier weighed the advantages of being crash-piled on a hairpin turn or dying at the dank hands of some homicidal ghoul, and found neither to his exact taste. But it was no time to indulge twinged nerves. He could only hope the gunmen behind that fusillade had run out of ammunition, and he might discover from Carpetsi who it was. He hitched along the running board, cursing a corrugated stretch of macadam that loosened his teeth. Hands clutched his coat, pulling him inboard.
“Save me!” Professor Schlitz screeched. “Save me, Dr. Ranier! You’re an officer from the ship! Don’t let them go to this place! We’ll all be murdered in our tracks! Murdered in our tracks!”
Ranier fought the insectologist off, cuffing, slapping. “Pull yourself togeth
er! Nobody’s going to be hurt—!”
“Somebody’s going to be hurt,” Kavanaugh roared, “if they don’t stop kicking me in the face! By God, Daisy, if you don’t sit quiet I’ll throw you out of the car!”
No chance to sneak a word with the Italian in that jammed uproar of hysteria and back-seat driving. He could glimpse Angelo Carpetsi’s gray profile and glowing black eyes in the center of the crush, and those eyes radiated fear. Meeting his, they flashed a message of silence, an unmistakable warning to keep mum until an opportune time.
Ranier felt his way back to the windshield post, the Italian boy’s whispered confession echoing in his mind. “I know who killed Haarman, and I know who’s playin’ Goin’ to Jerusalem with these corpses—” Did the pink-shirted Dago really know? If so, why hadn’t he told Kavanaugh, Brown, Coolidge; revealed the murderer back there in the café? Why that strange verbal flare-up with Kavanaugh back there in the graveyard near the village? And why the clandestine confession to him, Ranier, in the burying ground deserted by the U.S. Marines? Did Angelo actually know anything, or was that another play in this underground game of vanishing corpses and scrambled graves?
SUDDEN APPLICATION OF the brakes put an end to these speculations. An end John Ranier could hardly have foreseen. Caromed off the front fender, he found himself in the road at the side of a low stone wall as unexpected on that jungled mountain as cocoanut palms would have been in Devonshire. Fog washed along the wall, obliterating lengths of its precise masonry, but when the white tide reached the iron gate it stopped, as if it realized its malarial breath did not belong there. The car’s headlamp traveled through the gate which was standing ajar, and advanced across a grassy churchyard to the steps of a white mission house that was certainly, with its gothic door and pointed steeple, a copy of something north of England.
An infiltration of moonlight soaked the scene in a pale blue gloaming, and John Ranier stared at that church in the wildwood with his mouth open a little. It opened a little farther when he saw a mud-caked car, twin of Polypheme’s job, parked in the rolling roadside smother beyond the gateway. The car was parked without lights, the driver’s door hanging open, no owner in sight. Someone visiting the mission? No light in any window of the church, and its yard of tombstones still as death. Mosquitoes buzzed, augmenting the silence; foliage steamed and dripped. Everybody peered; listened. Even the drums were inaudible in that hundred-ton hush.
But gunfire had echoed in that moon-soaked stillness and its memory remained like soundless thunder in the air. Any moment now, and the rector in nightcap and gaiters should come fussing out of the church door to know the trouble. Had he come he would have learned it soon enough.
Ranier learned it when, instinctively keeping his head below the line of the wall, he limped to the gate; looked in. There was a faint flavor of gunpowder in the mist that floated around the gatepost. Ranier shocked back from the entry with a yell.
The grave was two mounds distant inside the gateway; and he was sitting, that German officer, with his back against a shoulder of the tombstone, in a pose John Ranier had seen before. There was a familiar arrangement, a patterned design to the layout—pile of fresh-spaded sand, raw-lipped excavation, uprooted coffin turned turtle among the peaceful neighboring graves—that displayed a consistent technique in the artist’s veiled hand. The officer, himself, seemed familiar, almost expected in his shreds of a Potsdam uniform threadbare as gray moonshine, his tarnished buckles and moth-eaten tabs, mouldy boots outstretched in languor, green leather helmet like an inverted goblet lopped over one skullish ear. He was grinning like a Jolly Roger, and one might have believed him to be humming until one spied the cloud of midges that made black spots before his eyes. A German Kommandant on duty would not hum. The Iron Cross dangled from his skeleton throat, and stars on the bleached tunic collar proclaimed him a Stabsoffizier of high rank.
“Colonel Otto!”
But Laïs Engles’ hand-smothered cry was not a necessary introduction. He had suspected the name of that death’s head Hussar, even before his eyes discovered the tombstone legend which had nothing to do with the occupant of the lot. The headstone marking that violated grave was legible in misty moonlight; its epitaph singularly ominous.
REV. ARCHIBALD DAVIS
R.I.P.
DIED OF FEVER
3 JANUARY 1922
A Moment, Stranger, As You Pass By,
As You Are Now, So Once Was I.
As I Am Now, So You Will Be.
Prepare for Death, and Follow Me.
It was Coolidge who read the epitaph aloud, and it seemed nobody in the hugged crowd on that churchyard’s threshold was willing to take that sombre advice. They weren’t prepared for death, and the prospect of following the missionary left them cold. The blond woman uttered the sounds of a strangling parrot. Kavanaugh’s oaths were sulphurous. Professor Schlitz came, saw and was conquered—that was one limerick he didn’t like! He backed out of the gateway with nervous prostration on his scholarly visage; wheeling like a mare, and bolting for invisibility down the road.
Ranier said, “Hell! Hell!” and put out a sweaty arm to hold back the girl. He wasn’t prepared for death, either. At least, not in the form it had taken in this magic-lantern churchyard scene. The artist had not signed this picture with a bullfrog, but the object affixed to the skeleton’s hand was just as good.
RANIER STARED AT the automatic pistol in that knuckly fist of bones, and his blood ran thinner than the hint of powder-smoke in the air. The colonel was in no condition to have fired the weapon. But that pungence in the damp persisted; and the .45, balanced on his knee, was aimed into the trench beside him as if he’d lounged there idly pot-shooting at rats.
Ranier shuffled unwilling feet to the grave-edge, anxious to know what the bony marksman might have been sniping. Finding out, he damned his curiosity.
The Haitian gendarme had been shot through the head three times. On the sandy grave bottom he lay face up, mouth wide as a slice of watermelon, staring sightlessly at the obscured sky. A little landslide of sand had partly covered his legs, and there was a footprint clearly recorded on the breast of his khaki blouse. A glance at that shoe-shined black face told Ranier its wearer was dead. Horror bulging from those white-circled African eyes could only have been matched by the electric-light shock in his own.
“Murdered!” It was Kavanaugh at his elbow, and the Irishman’s eyes were hailstones. “A cop, by heaven! There’ll be holy hell breakin’ for this! That,” he pointed at the skeletal sharpshooter at ease against the tombstone, “—that couldn’ta done it! Can you match this, Ranier? Can you match it?”
Ranier said thickly, “Those shots we heard—killed this gendarme. Not ten minutes ago. Grave-robber who did this—that gendarme must’ve driven up and come on him at work. He fired at the Garde before the fellow had a chance—!”
“Brown,” Kavanaugh suggested hoarsely. “Brown and Marcelline got to the police in that village. That’s how it was. They reached the headquarters down there, and the fool police captain telephoned some post up in this neck of the woods. God! They sent one man! One man!”
“His car’s headed toward the hospital. Maybe you’re right. He was passing the churchyard. Saw this infernal—” Bringing his teeth together on an oath, Ranier clipped off the speculation; pointed a shaky finger at the reasty human residue across the grave. “The gun!”
“I seen it.”
“It’s not the German’s. He’d have carried a Lüger. It’s,” Ranier husked, “like yours. Colt .45.”
The Irishman nodded, white-faced. “These body snatchers or who’s doin’ this, they knocked over this cop, dumped him into the ground and left the cannon in that skeleton’s fist. Someone stepped on the cop, too.”
Ranier circled the grave, dog-legged. It wanted some resolution to relieve that officer of his pistol. Dropping it into his side pocket, he told Kavanaugh, “I’ll take it along; might be fingerprints. It’s a U.S. Army gun. That marine sergeant’s name
on the butt. Get it?”
“What the hell—”
“Yes,” John Ranier whispered fiercely, “what the hell.” He scrubbed clamminess from his forehead with a shaky palm, his eyes dry and hot on the Irishman’s haggard face. “I’ll tell you what the hell. Somebody robbed the dead topkick of his gun; fetched it here. The bloody thing jammed on the third shot or it wouldn’t have been discarded, you can bet on that. These ghouls are going to stop at nothing. Nothing. They—it—whatever it is, murdered Haarman. This gendarme. Any of us may be next. Adolph Perl, that old lady, the marine, the missionary, this German officer—do you see what’s happening? Those people who died of that mauve death fourteen years ago, one after another they’re being dug up. Know where we’ll find the next—?”
KAVANAUGH INTERRUPTED, “WHAT I wanta know is why they’re bein’ spaded up like this and shifted around. What’s anybody want with these corpses?”
“This thing isn’t as mad as it looks, Kavanaugh. It’s following some sort of plan, some devilish routine, but I’ve got a hunch there’s something screwy with the routine. Listen. The next episode’s going on right now, my life on it! In the cemetery where this Potsdam colonel ought to be.” He called toward shadows hovering at the gate, “Miss Engles? We want to know where you saw this colonel buried.”
“Bois Legone,” her answer came faintly. “The little village half way up the mountain beyond here. There is a fork in the road and one takes the dirt road to the right. It is near the market place, a big cathedral—”
He brushed hairs of mist from his eyes; ordering, “Tell Polypheme to crank the car. And send Mr. Carpetsi in here, will you? Before we leave—Mr. Kavanaugh and I want a word with him.”
