E. Hoffmann Price's Pierre d'Artois: Occult Detective & Associates

by E. Hoffmann Price

  “But your duel. Pierre, at St. Leon?”

  “Who knows? Illusion…a stranger from Kurdistan… I attempt no explanation. Santiago is dead, even as may be the marquis and some of his followers; but the Stranger still lives, and the Peacock’s shadow still hangs over us.”

  THE BRIDE OF THE PEACOCK

  Originally published in Weird Tales, August 1932.

  “Mademoiselle,” said Pierre d’Artois after a moment’s reflection, “there is really no reason for your being alarmed at repeatedly dreaming that you are opening a grave. After all, a dream…”

  “Monsieur,” she demanded, “does one in a dream break one’s fingernails? Just look!”

  She thrust her hands, fingers extended, squarely before our eyes. The nails were ragged and broken, and beneath them was a distinct trace of verdigris.

  “I left them just as they were this morning, verdigris and all, to show you how I’ve been pawing at that door again. My new slippers and gown were torn, and soiled with green mold from kneeling before it. It’s driving me mad!”

  In her eyes was a terrible, haunted look that made them a star-less, somber midnight.

  Pierre d’Artois studied first the slim white fingers with their marred nails, and then the dark, surpassing loveliness of Diane Livaudais. “But where do you walk?”

  She shrugged her faultless shoulders, and made a despairing gesture of the hand.

  “If I only knew! But I don’t. First there was someone talking to me in my sleep. Though I couldn’t ever recollect, exactly, what the voice said to me, I always had the impression when I awoke that there was a grave that I was to open. And somehow I felt that it was Etienne who called me. You know, Monsieur d’Artois. I was very fond of Etienne, and living in that house he gave me, it was only natural that I’d have him on my mind.”

  “When,” queried Pierre, “did Etienne give you that house on Rue Lachepaillet?”

  “It’s over two years ago. 1928. Several months after he disappeared, I received a letter from him, from Marrakesh, saying that he was seriously wounded, and that if he died, he wanted me to live in his house on Rue Lachepaillet. Then, a month or so later, I learned that he was dead. Just a clipping from a paper in Marrakesh—a French newspaper, you understand—and a note in Arabic, which I had Doctor Delaronde translate. It confirmed the clipping, saying that Etienne’s last words had been that he wanted me to have his house in Bayonne and the personal effects in it.

  “So,” she continued, “living in that legacy, and missing him terribly, I would easily dream of him, and wake with the sense of having heard his voice. I felt his presence, as though he were seeking to speak some final thought that his friend had not included in that scrap of Arabic script.”

  “By the way, have you those bits of paper?”

  And then, as Mademoiselle Livaudais took them from her handbag, d’Artois continued, “The voice became more insistent?”

  “Yes. Though it wasn’t really a voice. I would awake with the feeling that someone had given an order. An overpowering will forcing me to some vague task I couldn’t quite remember except for somehow associating it always with a grave. A task I couldn’t accomplish and couldn’t evade.”

  “And always Etienne’s presence?”

  “Yes and no,” she answered. “I don’t know. An oppressing confusion. A dominant, crushing will. Not like Etienne at all. He was domineering—you may have known him—but not in that remorseless way. He loved me. Almost as much as I loved him. But this is relentless, inhuman. Yet I sense Etienne in it.

  “And…” She again extended her fingers. “This proves that just last night I was trying to open the door of a vault. As on so many other nights. Gown tattered. Slippers soiled. Verdigris under my nails. I’m weary. Weary to death.”

  “You should have seen me sooner.”

  “It was so outrageous. So I kept it to myself. But now I want you to find out where I am going, and why, before I lose my mind entirely.”

  Pierre rose and from a drawer in his desk took a tiny vial, a part of whose amber-colored contents he poured into a small, stemmed glass.

  “Drink,” he suggested. “It is a sedative. It will make you relax. You must relax. Look me full in the eye…better yet, look intently at the ring on my finger…then think of nothing at all…”

  I noted then that Pierre had seated his visitor so that she faced a strong, glaring light.

  “You are weary from trying to remember… Cease trying, and it will come to you…”

  Pierre’s voice was droning monotonously. “Don’t try to remember…you are weary…weary…weary of trying…think of nothing…nothing…nothing at all,” he persisted in soporific accents.

  Her eyes were staring fixedly at the stone that flamed and pulsed dazzlingly on Pierre’s hand. I’d never known Pierre to wear a diamond of any kind, much less that obtrusive, massive clot of fire.

  Her lips half parted, and her breath came very slowly and rhythmically in cadence to Pierre’s measured, purring syllables.

  She was in a trance, induced by a drop of a hypnotic, and Pierre’s compelling will.

  Again he spoke, still with that murmuring monotony. “You are sleeping…soundly…deeply…so deeply that you won’t waken until I call you… Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” she murmured, “I won’t awaken…until…you call.”

  Then Pierre spoke in a voice of command. “It is now last night. The voice is speaking. Repeat it to me!”

  Pierre leaned forward. His long fingers gripped the carved arms of his chair. Perspiration cropped out on his brow, now cleft with a saber-slash of a frown. Diane stirred uneasily, made a gesture of protest.

  “You will speak and tell me. I command and you must obey!” he said solemnly and deeply as the chanted ritual of a high priest.

  I myself was ready to leap or yell from the terrific tension that moment by moment had been becoming more and more acute. I sensed a Power that was hammering at Pierre through Diane’s resistance.

  Then Pierre prevailed. The tension eased. She spoke in painfully clear-cut mechanical syllables: and in Persian! Not the colloquial Persian of which I knew a smattering, but the rich language of the old days.

  “Now, answer,” demanded Pierre, “as you have been answering.”

  “Etienne,” she began in French, but as mechanical as before, “I can’t find the spring. But I’ll return tomorrow night and try again… I can’t understand what you are saying…the drums are too loud, and they don’t want me to understand…”

  Etienne, Marquis de la Tour de Maracq, not dead in far-off Morocco, in some obscure tomb beyond the red walls of Marrakesh, but buried in one of the crypts that honeycomb the foundations of Bayonne. And she spent her nights answering him, and seeking him.

  “But it couldn’t be. The dead don’t chant from their graves. It must be the hysteria of a woman mourning a dead lover,” I insisted to myself as I heard those outrageous words.

  And then I looked at Pierre. My insistence mocked me. He trembled violently. His lips moved soundlessly, and he swayed slightly. He was exerting his supreme effort; but not another word could he drag from Diane. Pierre was beaten to a standstill.

  He relaxed, and sighed deeply.

  “Never to be too much damned revenant, I will meet you face-to-face, and you will speak to me!” he exclaimed.

  He smiled that grim cold smile I once saw on his face as he crossed blades one unforgotten night with one who on that night ceased to be the most deadly swordsman in France.

  Pierre struck his hands sharply together. “Enough! Awaken!” he ordered.

  And, as Diane started, and blinked, and looked confusedly about her: “Tell me, mademoiselle, do you understand Persian?”

  “Of course not,” replied Diane. “But why?”

  “You spoke Persian when I asked you to repeat…”

 
; “Oh, did I say anything?”

  “Mais, certainement! I commanded, and you spoke. And half the population of hell’s backyard fought to break my control. But you spoke. Listen!”

  Pierre repeated Diane’s words.

  “Did I say that?” she demanded incredulously.

  “Indeed you did, mademoiselle,” I assured her.

  “Why, whoever heard of such a thing?”

  “I, for one,” affirmed Pierre. “An illiterate servant girl, delirious from fever, chanted ancient Hebraic, to the mystification of the doctors. It developed, finally, that she had once lived with the family of a German savant, and used to hear him reciting Hebraic texts: and this was impressed upon her subconscious mind, which was released in her delirium.

  “Similarly someone has spoken Persian, either to your ear or to your mind at some time. Tell me, did you ever hear this, in any language?”

  And Pierre recited:

  “When I am dead, open my grave and see

  The smoke that curls about thy feet;

  In my dead heart the fire still burns for thee:

  Yea, the smoke rises from my winding sheet.”

  Diane shuddered. “Beautiful. But ghastly!”

  As for me, I had heard and often admired that macabre Persian conceit. Yet this time an evil lurked in the amorous fancy that Hafiz chanted to some girl in a garden of Shiraz nine hundred years ago.

  “And you replied, ‘I can’t find the spring.’ You said that the drums kept you from understanding. You did well to come to me. I will fight this to a finish, its or mine.”

  “Do you really think it’s Etienne calling from his grave?”

  Diane asked this question in a hesitant voice, abashed at her outlandish query.

  “Mademoiselle,” replied Pierre, “I am an old man, and I am none too positive about the impossibility of anything. Yet if he is speaking from Satan’s throne room I will find him and silence him, for no honest lover would haunt you this way.”

  Pierre rang for his man, Raoul.

  “My good friend, Landon, will join me in this campaign. We will be your guardians. Raoul will drive you home. And this evening we may see you, Landon and I!”

  Diane graciously offered her hand. “Monsieur d’Artois, and you, Monsieur Landon, have restored my courage. I feel ever so much better. And do call tonight if you wish. À bientôt!”

  With a wave of her hand, and a smile for the moment free from the shadow of the grave, she followed Raoul to the Issotta coupe.

  “Pierre,” I said as the door clicked behind Diane, “when she was in that trance, you might have commanded her to ignore the voice.”

  “Not at all! That would be like putting a plaster cast over an ulcer. I must rather find and exterminate the cause of this outrageous thing that talks to her and makes her sleep a wandering nightmare. Never think that she told us more than a fraction of what she does and hears and says in her sleep. Something fought me face-to-face as I commanded her to speak: and as she spoke, I suddenly lost control.”

  “The devil you say! I felt it myself… Do you believe…”

  “Anything is possible in Bayonne,” replied Pierre. “Anything may thunder and whisper from the ancient night of the passages and labyrinths that undermine Bayonne. Bayonne was founded by the Romans, whose legionaries worshipped Mithra and Cybele in subterranean crypts. The Saracens, the Spanish, the French, the Bearnais have made this the playground of armies, and have enriched the earth with dead. This is all soil well raked over, and alive with strange seeds. Apostate priests have chanted the terrible foulness of the Black Mass, and mediaeval necromancers and thaumaturgists have pursued their crafts in those unremembered red passages and vaults.

  “Sometimes the Church hounded them to the surface, and roasted them at the stake, good and evil alike: but more remained intact than ever were unearthed.

  “I myself once saw a vault opened up when builders excavated for the foundation of a house, many years ago…”

  Pierre shuddered.

  “It is not so much what I saw as the inferences I was compelled to draw. Now from behind some brazen gate a Presence commands Diane to enter. Her dead lover calls her to God knows what terrible festival among the dead. Or Something impersonates the dead Marquis, for some purpose beyond imagining, some lingering trace of an ancient force that has come to life and strengthened itself through feeding on her susceptible mind.

  “And now please dispense with my company while I study various things. Notably this clipping, and this scrap of a note. Those Partagas cigars are at your elbow, and there is a decanter of Armagnac.”

  So saying, Pierre left me to my own resources.

  I prowled about his study, peering at the titles of books ranged row after row on their shelves; scrutinizing the clustered scimitars, ripple-edged kreeses, keen tulwars, and the sheaves of lances and assegais standing in a corner. And here and there were epees, with their bell guards and slim, three-cornered blades: each a trophy of some encounter of Pierre’s younger days, when the duel was not the comic opera affair it is today in 193—

  Raoul entered, presented Pierre’s compliments, and left a tray of cold meats, cheese, and a bottle of thin, dry wine. Strange, how a fellow that keeps such excellent brandy would have such terrible sour wine! But it wasn’t so bad…and neither was Bayonne…with a quiet month or so the most of which was to be devoted to acting as Pierre’s second in fencing with a dead marquis who declaimed the Diwan of Hafiz from his grave in Marrakesh. But I didn’t blame the marquis. That girl would make any one turn over in his grave!

  And then Pierre reappeared. “I see that you have survived those sandwiches a l’americain which Raoul constructed. Good! But I have a task for you.

  “Lead on,” I replied.

  “Alors, my good Raoul will drive you to Mademoiselle Diane’s house, where you will take your post at the door of her bedroom. You will stand watch, and if she walks in her sleep, follow her, even to the fuming hinges of hell’s back door, but by no means wake her. And here,” he continued, “is a pistol and a clip of cartridges, and a flashlight.”

  I thrust the Luger into my hip-pocket, tested the flashlight and found it in good order. “It seems,” I commented, “that we are not dealing entirely with dead men muttering in their graves.”

  “From what I learned—possibly I should say, inferred—while you were absorbing the most of that decanter of Armagnac,” replied Pierre, “there is something in what you say. In the meanwhile, keep your mind strictly on your work, and do not be too free with that pistol. I will be on hand later to relive you, and I prefer not to have you riddle me in error.”

  “Shall we leave the door open?”

  “No,” answered Pierre, “I have a most accomplished pass key. A tantot!”

  And Pierre returned to his holy of holies to answer the telephone as I followed Raoul to the Isotta.

  “Monsieur Landon,” greeted the lovely Livaudais as she admitted me, “you don’t know how relieved I am that Monsieur d’Artois has taken things in hand. But what is he doing this evening?”

  “Lord alone knows, beyond busily studying that clipping and that note from the marquis’ unknown friend in Morocco. And his telephone rang continually. He’s hot on the trail of something, or he wouldn’t have sent me to stand guard at your door tonight.”

  “Good God! Am I then in such danger?”

  “By no means. I am here merely to follow you if you wander tonight.”

  “Splendid. Then I shall bid you goodnight. Surely you’ll forgive my being such an anything but gracious hostess? You know, it’s been a trying day. There on the table is a decanter of Grenache, and cigarettes.”

  “Perhaps you might show me the switches that control the lights,” I suggested. “I prefer to watch in the dark, but I may need light in a hurry.”

  After showing me the switch, Mademois
elle Livaudais bade me goodnight. I selected the most uncomfortable chair in the living-room: not such a difficult task, with that array of somber teak, carved by artisans who, since they sat cross-legged on the floor, had no conception of comfort as applied to chairs—and set it near the bedroom door. Then I took a length of heavy thread I’d brought for that purpose, and tied one end of it to the doorknob and the other to a heavy bronze ashtray which I set on a chair at the other side of the door. Thus if she opened the door, and caught me napping, the fall of the ashtray would arouse me. Not that I expected to doze; but rather that I didn’t want to take any chances.

  I settled down to watch. It wasn’t like military sentry duty, where a moment of drowsiness might cost the lives of an entire outpost. There was nothing to do but sit there in that exquisitely carved teak straitjacket, with my reflections for company.

  And I wasn’t the least bit drowsy. My mission effectively prevented that. I wondered if the dead marquis materialized and led her to a hidden panel, or called from the street, or tapped on her window-pane. The whole thing was outrageous: so much so that the marquis murmuring in his grave occupied a much smaller place in my thoughts than this exceedingly lovely Diane.

  In fact, I began to think with decided disapproval of the marquis; although, to be honest about it, he was handicapped, in a way.

  And thus and thus…

  Then I wondered at the sweetness that subtly pervaded the room. Strange I hadn’t noticed it before. Well, those Partagas cigars of Pierre’s had been heavy enough to dull my sense of smell for a while. Certainly I’d not notice that delicate perfume. Like the ghost of incense. The very ashes of an odor.

  I’m sure I wasn’t asleep, and hadn’t been even for a moment of that watch. And yet as I look back at it all, I couldn’t have been awake.

  Something was emerging from the darkness of Diane’s living room. I sat there, contemplating the shadow that materialized from the shadows, as though of all things in the world there was nothing more commonplace than that the blackness should coalesce into a shape.