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

by E. Hoffmann Price

  My clothing still reeked from the foulness of that which had brought us here, although the stench was rapidly becoming less intense. I shivered from the memory of that repugnant contact.

  In the dim light of the room, I could distinguish hooded and robed figures. Some sat cross-legged, each on a bench scarcely larger than a coffee-table. Others, shadowy, ominous presences, conferred in low tones. A heavy haze of incense from several wrought-iron tripods clouded the room with its dizzying, breath-taking fumes. From another apartment, beyond the brocaded draperies, that concealed a doorway, I could hear the muttering of kettle-drums, and the whine of single-stringed kemenjahs, and the sobbing notes of pipes. The weird, minor harmony sent chills up my spine.

  Then a man garbed in formal evening attire emerged from the shadows not far from me. He was tall and aquiline-featured; his eyes were glittering and phosphorescent, like those of a great cat.

  This was the Master of the show, that necromancer who had defiled the very order of life in his attempt to gratify his ghastly whim; and those robed, hooded figures that moved through the spectral haze of the room were his acolytes, and his adepts in the devilish hierarchy which he had assembled.

  One of the adepts strode across the tile floor and halted within a few paces of the Master. He was lean, and cadaverous, and his bald head was bulbous and dome-like. He carried in his hand a long, carven staff on which he leaned as he rendered his report in halting French.

  “All is in readiness, Master,” he said. “We are waiting for your command.”

  “Then wait no longer,” replied the necromancer. “Bring her into the hall at once.”

  I had wondered for a moment as to my own fate. But as I heard the Master’s instruction, and saw that corpse-like fellow with the staff hurrying from one group to the next, issuing orders in a low, hoarse voice, my thoughts reverted to Madeleine. Some final ritual, some uttermost outrage seemed to be necessary before Madeleine would be utterly expelled from her body, and everlastingly cast into the darkness from which dead Balkis had been summoned.

  I heard the resonant clang of a brazen gong. A woodwind instrument breathed mellow, evil notes that bore a mocking semblance to the human voice. Then four litter-bearers, nude save for loincloths, strode across my field of vision. Despite my bonds, I contrived to wriggle to a sitting position, against the wall. I saw that it was Madeleine they were carrying to the dim shadows of the extremity of the hall. As they approached their destination, I saw a muffled figure flitting about, taper in hand, touching light to other tapers. Their glow was wan in that poisonous greenish phosphorescence; but the added illumination revealed an altar, and an arched shrine whose monstrous carvings leered horribly in the flickering, sickly flames.

  The acolytes laid Madeleine on the altar. Then with ceremonious gestures and obeisance, they retreated and took their posts at the left of the shrine.

  The Master, incongruous in his faultless costume de rigueur, then approached the shrine, and halting three paces distant, extended his arms.

  At his gesture, the gongs clanged again, and as their brazen thunder subsided in a hissing, rustling shiver, he raised his voice in a terrific invocation.

  “Balkis! Balkis! Balkis, Queen of Saba! I have descended into the shadows, and into the grave, and led you back to the morning! I have sifted the dust of forgotten centuries, and found for you a body lovelier than that before! Balkis, Queen of the Morning! Balkis, Queen of the Yaman! I will drive her into the shadows, Balkis, and you will rejoice in this body, and in this new life! I have faced the blacknesses of death, and the terror of the grave and the wrath beyond, for your sake, Balkis…”

  It was somber and magnificent and terrible, that deep-throated chant. I shuddered with an ecstasy of horror as I heard that resonant rich voice declaim full-throated above the wailing reeds and mocking mellow pipes. His words were a colossal blasphemy and a superhuman magnificence that echoed the voice of that arch-rebel, Lucifer, Son of the Morning, crying his defiance across the vastnesses of the gulf into which he had been hurled. And I knew that when he reached the climax of that awful invocation, Madeleine would be for ever damned to wander in unfathomable blacknesses; and resurrected Balkis would smile with new eyes and new lips at that mortal who had plunged into the shadows beyond the Border, and led her by the hand to greet once more the morning she had not seen for twenty-eight weary centuries of wasting her beauty among the cheerless dead.

  Acolytes stood by, prepared to do that which the ritual prescribed, and waiting for the signal of the Master. The strange utensils and the uncouth objects that they held in readiness hinted at further blasphemies to come.

  And then one from the farther shadows came running into the semicircular field of the tapers’ glow. His oiled skin shone dully in the flickering light. He bowed his shaven skull to the tiles, and lifted his arms in supplication.

  “Master, he is on the way! He knows!”

  “What?” thundered the Master. “Who?”

  “The enemy, Master!” replied the retainer. “And armed men are with him.”

  Pierre on the way! The necromancer’s spies had come to warn him that the avenger had found the trail, and was on the road to end this toying with the dead, and affronting the living. Pierre had heard. It had not been my fancy, that terrified yell of the Dankalis in the courtyard. Pierre had in some way found a clue which would lead him to this den of uttermost damnation.

  The Master stared at the white form on the altar before him, and at the acolytes ranged about him. He frowned, then clapped his hands. The bulbous-headed, cadaverous one advanced.

  “What say you?” demanded the Master.

  “Stop him at once,” came the reply. “Send It out again. There is yet time. They can form the circle, and It will crush the enemy—”

  “Set them to work!” commanded the Master; and then, perturbed, he strode up and down the expanse of tiles.

  At a signal from the chief of the acolytes, an attendant smote a brazen gong. He shouted a command. Robed figures emerged from the shadows, each bringing with him his own bench. They arranged themselves in a crescent in the center of the hall. I heard the purr of drums; and then the adepts of the crescent began murmuring in cadence to the rhythm. Lips drawn to thin lines, jaws clenched, they hummed in a droning monotone, as they swayed from the hips, and made serpentine passes and gestures. Their eyes stared glassily in that awful greenish light and their bronzed features were expressionless. They had become automatons, moving to the cadence of those whining pipes and muttering drums. They were like the evil fantasies of Indian sculpture set to a devilish music. And then the music ceased, so that nothing was audible but that damnable droning, like the buzz of monstrous flies. Finally they broke the unison that had marked their start, and each carried on his own peculiar humming, so that it seemed as though articulate voices were chanting as from a great distance, pronouncing words that I could almost understand.

  Then at the point on which their staring eyes were focused, I perceived a hazy, bluish vortex that spun, and expanded and contracted as it spiraled. It elongated, and began an axial spinning. That nebulous vapor expanded, and branched, growing in stature and becoming every instant more solid, until it evolved into a monstrous presence. It was neither human, nor reptile, nor beast, but a hideous travesty that was a blasphemy against created things. It was the counterpart of that which had seized Madeleine. It was even more horrible in that green luminescence than it had been in the moonlight of Madeleine’s room. It was a horror and an outrage conceived by those six adepts; and projected by the concentrated force of their wills exerted in unison, it had assumed physical substance. It fed on their will-emanations, and waxed momentarily more and more substantial.

  The Master contemplated the horror. He smiled thinly, as well he could, having marched into the grave and led Balkis by the hand to see the morning. He knew that it would waylay Pierre and his men, and crush them in its ir
resistible grasp, and sear their brains with the terror of its presence.

  The droning of the adepts ceased and with it the mutter of drums and whine of strings. They swayed in cadence to the rhythm that had been established. They stared fixedly at the spot from whence the monstrosity had materialized, and gestured with the slow precision of an intricate machine.

  The silence was absolute for a moment.

  And then I heard the faint, sibilant hiss of the monster’s limbs as it dragged them across the tiles. A choking, nauseous vapor exuded from its presence. As it advanced, it began to murmur, and flex its misshapen members as though to test their strength. It paused a moment, as if to receive its final instructions, and then it moved across the floor with a rapidity that belied its grotesquely deformed shape. I heard a door close behind it, and bolts slip into place as that foulness went out into the night to seek Pierre and waylay him. Nor could it miss, for it was guided by the fiendish intelligence of those entranced adepts, who were clairvoyant in that self-imposed hypnosis which enabled them to materialize their malignant thought-form. It would hunt him down. He could not by any chance avoid it; and he could not overcome it.

  Madeleine was doomed. In my despair, I became resigned to my bonds. Balkis would smile from her new body, and be untroubled by any lingering vestige of that lovely girl’s personality. The Master had but to resume his sonorous invocation, and weave again the spell, complete the ritual recitation of that which he had faced to woo her among the dead, then chant her back to the forgotten light of the morning.

  Pierre was doomed, and with him, stout Nureddin who had come across the desert and sailed a frail zaroug coastwise from the Red Sea to France. It would annihilate them all, Pierre, the darwish, and the Dankalis with their broad-bladed knives.

  A great rage then possessed me, and put to flight my resignation. I would burst my bonds, and bare-handed avenge as much of this infamy as I could until those adepts overwhelmed me. But as I strained at the cords that bound my ankles and wrists, I knew that even that was vanity.

  And then a cigar-lighter fell from my vest pocket to the tiles. The Master had not even glanced in my direction. He still paced up and down before the altar, disturbed by the interruption of his ritual. He was waiting to learn of the destruction of Pierre and his party.

  Arching my back like a measuring-worm, I placed myself over the cigar-lighter, and with the fingers of one hand, uncapped it, and whirled the milled wheel. The wick ignited. I could feel its tiny, fierce flame eating into my wrists; and above the fumes that rose from the tall wrought-iron tripod censers, I could smell the burning of the cord, and the singeing of hair and flesh. The pain was excruciating. I dared not move. The strain of keeping my body clear of the lighter, so that its flame would not be smothered, was intolerable. And then the cords yielded. Hands free! With my scorched fingers, I dug a penknife from my pocket and slashed the cords that bound me.

  The Master stood before the altar, contemplating Madeleine’s still body in the light of those flickering tapers. His hands were clasped behind his back, and his head bowed.

  The shaven heads of the six adepts seated crescent-wise behind the Master were weaving and nodding in cadence.

  And then I heard a shout, and cries of terror. Pierre’s voice. He had avoided It until almost within striking distance of the enemy.

  I leaped to my feet, and seized the wrought-iron tripod by its legs. I charged across the hall, scattering behind me a trail of incandescent coals. The Master heard me, and turned. He shouted a command. I saw emerging from the green shadows a file of short, muscular men, naked save for loin-cloths, and armed with short curved blades.

  With my feet planted firmly on the tiles, I swung my fire-charged weapon—not at them, but crashing down on the shaven skull of the first of the six adepts and showering the others with fire.

  That would break up their concentration!

  Crash! Another found his brains oozing across the tiles.

  They were almost upon me, those swordsmen. Their blades glittered as they advanced.

  A pistol cracked, and the impact of the Master’s shot whirled me back a pace. I recovered, and swung again as he fired a second time. And then I hurled the tripod full into the face of the leading swordsman. Their blades hacked and raked me as I stretched out in a lunge that carried me under their sweeping slashes. I clutched the second by the ankles and dragged him to the floor. They howled with pain as their bare feet trod on the live coals I had scattered.

  The Master no longer dared fire, lest he strike his own men.

  They were hacking and thrusting in that milling confusion of arms and legs and bodies, doing each other more harm than they did me. I salvaged a dagger, and stabbed blindly. But it was a hopeless melee. I was at the bottom of the heap.

  Those few seconds of close-packed confusion seemed ages. No one could last long against such odds. Any instant would bring the finishing thrust…

  I heard a splintering of glass, and shouts. The voice of Pierre! And Nureddin with his Dankalis!

  In an instant, the milling tangle leaped clear, leaving me lying among the dead. I saw the darwish, white beard streaming, sword in hand, leading his copper-colored Dankalis toward the altar, slaying-mad and howling as they slashed with their broad-bladed knives.

  One of them was about to cut down the Master.

  “Stop!” cried Pierre.

  The mad savage halted, and lowered his blade. I struggled to my feet, cut, blood-drenched, but not entirely dismembered.

  The hall was a madhouse of slaughter. Nureddin’s curved blade dripped bloodily. A Dankali lay on a heap of fallen swordsmen, still clutching his knife. Pierre’s pistol, empty and fuming, was in his hand, at his side.

  “Graf Istavan,” he said to that tall, somber Master, “it seems that you are the only survivor. But I propose to remedy that in a moment.”

  “So the redoubtable d’Artois will attack an unarmed man?” he murmured disdainfully.

  “By no means, monsieur,” said Pierre, “but wait and see.”

  “My lord,” said Nureddin, as he approached, “I will send Balkis back to the shadows.”

  And then he spoke to the Dankalis in their own language. They surrounded Graf Istavan with a circle of steel. The darwish picked from the floor a fragment of charcoal that had been spilled during the skirmish, and set about making good his promise to d’Artois. While he was marking upon the tiles the figure that was required, I turned to Pierre to inquire about the monstrosity that had been sent to waylay him.

  “It met us as we drew up in the grove outside the château,” he said. “Mon Dieu! A loathsome nightmare! The darwish slashed it with his scimitar. I fired at it, but the thing was invulnerable. The Dankalis were too frightened to run. So were we all, for that matter. It enveloped us in its limbs and was crushing us slowly but very surely, like some monstrous octopus, and stifling us with its poisonous exhalation.”

  D’Artois shuddered at the memory of the horror.

  “And then,” he resumed, “it suddenly became vague and shadowy. Now that I hear your side of it, it is all clear. You were right in bending that iron tripod over the heads of those adepts. The monster was their thought-form, projected into the physical plane, and when you so deftly addled the brains of two or three of them, the concentration was interrupted. As you describe the ritual, those adepts must have hypnotized themselves, each envisioning the same creature, bent on the same mission. The Yogis in Hindustan have a similar feat. The vortex of thought force became a physical entity with no motive but to annihilate us, just as the thing which took you and Madeleine had but one impulse, capturing her. Your device, my friend, in seizing her and being taken with her was shrewd strategy—”

  “I was too scared to do anything else,” I replied. “But where are we? How did you follow us? How—”

  “Tenez!” exclaimed d’Artois. “I will enlighten you. One o
f the Dankalis howled as though Satan had prodded him with his red-hot trident. He had seen It leaving with you and Madeleine.

  “Nureddin and I had been studying the case that evening. We carefully considered a list, as I told you, of all persons Madeleine had had any contact with while in Bayonne. I took the liberty of opening a letter addressed to her, from a friend in Marseilles, and there I found it. ‘You didn’t tell me about the séance at Graf Istavan’s château,’ the young lady wrote to Madeleine.

  “Voilà. There I had it. Why did she forget the handsome Graf Istavan, when she remembered all those shopkeepers and servants, and casual acquaintances? How could a girl reared in America, where a Hungarian count would be a sensation, forget an invitation to a soirée at his château? I inquired. It was simple. I knew then that she had forgotten because she had been commanded to remember that she was Balkis, and to forget that she had ever heard of Graf Istavan. It was obvious, simple, n’est-ce pas? And so when I found you two had vanished and heard of the afreet, as those excellent black fellows called the hideous thing, I set out on the trail. And the rest you know.”

  We glanced at the darwish. He had drawn a pentacle upon the tiled floor. In each of its five angles he was inscribing symbols, and characters in a script I did not recognize.

  “Look!” muttered Pierre. “Madeleine’s fate depends upon that darwish. When he arrived, he thought that it would be simple to expel Balkis. But she has taken such complete possession that it will be more than a simple exorcism. And the great danger is that Madeleine has been thrust so far into the shadows that there is no longer any bond between her and the body that once was hers.

  “My friend, you think that the evening behind you has been one of perils and encounters. À bas! That has been nothing. The conflict is yet to come. That white-bearded nomad holds the destiny of two women in his hands. And, if I mistake not, perhaps another destiny.”