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

by E. Hoffmann Price

  Then Farrell conceived the desperate device of capturing Hassan and forcing him to recall the elemental monster that was drinking Antoinette’s life. He leaped forward, cutting and slashing his way through the few who interposed.

  “We meet in Paradise, ya mumineen!” Hassan shouted, seeing that the day was lost. And before Farrell could seize him, Hassan released the trap-door before the dais and dropped into the vault below.

  The last hope was gone. Pursuit through those subterranean mazes would be futile. As Farrell turned from the yawning trap that had allowed the arch-enemy to escape, the rage of slaughter left him. The crackle of pistols died out. He saw that the circular chamber was cleared of all but the dead and wounded Ismailians. The divers, handicapped by their heavy suits, could not carry out an effective pursuit of the survivors of their deadly fire.

  Weary and despairing, Farrell nerved himself to confront the diabolical creature that was drawing Antoinette across the Border. He turned—

  The Marquis des Islots was raising his hacked, bleeding body from a heap of slain. He tottered, swayed, then advanced toward the lambent flame-presence. Farrell stared in fascination as that gory wreck of a man advanced, making ritual gestures with his faltering hands, and muttering in a low voice.

  The Presence was shrinking and dimming, and that shimmering exhalation from Antoinette’s lips was being retracted. The Marquis sustained himself with will alone. He staggered, sank—Farrell’s heart sank with him—he recovered, stepped forward again, still gesticulating and murmuring. The Presence leaned forward to confront him, and menaced him with its remaining energy, seeking to outlive the dying adept.

  The Marquis’ bleeding, gashed face was drawn and white; his eyes were fixed and staring. He achieved another pass; then he collected himself, paused, and instead of murmuring, thundered a final phrase of command.

  The Presence vanished; and the last vestige of grayish, luminous haze disappeared between Antoinette’s lips.

  Farrell leaped forward in time to catch the Marquis as he collapsed.

  The divers, returning from the farther entrance at which the Ismailians had made their last stand, lifted one another’s domed helmets. Then, grimy and exultant, Pierre d’Artois and the two members of the Sûreté gathered about Farrell and the Marquis, who was regaining a little of his strength.

  “Messieurs,” he said, as he gestured toward Antoinette, “she is safe. She will presently awaken. It can not return. Jamais!… It was my fault…in the beginning…but this infamy was not my intent… I loved her, but she rejected me…persistently. And for revenge…and to break her spirit… I administered without her knowledge a compound…of hypnotic drugs…so that she and that Syrian girl would each night exchange bodies…then Hassan took a hand…”

  He regarded d’Artois for a moment.

  “You, monsieur, doubtless understand—” Then, to Farrell, “But this last infamy…was not mine—Shirkuh and Hassan—I tried to make…amends—”

  For an instant Farrell regarded the dying man with revulsion. Then he saw the remorse on the drawn, blood-splashed features, and thought of the Marquis’ last gallant stand, confronting and exorcising that diabolical presence from beyond the Border.

  “Stout fellow,” he muttered, as he grasped the Marquis’ hand.

  “C’est fini,” murmured d’Artois a moment later. “Magnificent in his death as he was misguided in his life…dying on his feet, he had the will to conquer, and make restitution.”

  Then d’Artois rose and glanced about him.

  “Do you know the way out of here?”

  “Through that door,” directed Farrell. “He told me, before we made our rush.”

  “Messieurs,” suggested d’Artois, “be ready with your pistols, should any of these assassins be lingering. I will take charge of the young lady, and you, my friend, lead the way. Monsieur le Marquis perhaps deserves greater courtesy, but we can not carry his body and take the risk of being caught without weapons drawn and ready.”

  Farrell led the way. Without much difficulty, he found the passage that opened into the vault where he had lain while regaining his consciousness preliminary to submitting to Hassan’s tests. And from there they finally emerged in the heart of the citadel. A few moments later Farrell and d’Artois, carrying Antoinette, met Raoul where he was waiting at the wheel of the Renault.

  CHAPTER 9

  D’Artois Is Envious

  Antoinette, an hour later, was entirely herself.

  “Oh, it’s wonderful to be out of that awful garden,” she said, and curled herself up in the depth of a large, upholstered chair. “And now that Monsieur le Médicin admits that I’m as good as new, you might satisfy my curiosity on a few points. How did you ever—”

  She glanced up at Farrell, who had seated himself on the arm of her chair. He was not yet through convincing himself that Satan’s Garden was a thing of the past, and insisted on keeping Antoinette within arm’s reach.

  “Suppose you ask Pierre,” he said.

  D’Artois laughed.

  “After all, mon vieux, you were responsible. We found two bodies floating down the Nive. One of them wore—oh, very becomingly, I assure you!—a knife in his stomach. The Sûreté informed me. I identified the knife. It was one of mine, which you had taken from my collection to wear while disguised as Ibrahim the Afghan ruffian.

  “‘Alors,’ said I, ‘Ibrahim Khan has given good account of himself. Perhaps, but God forbid, his own body will follow.’ I assure you that we watched with anxiety. But no further signs. At low tide, however—you know, the Nive rises and falls with the tide, since we’re so close to the sea—we found another body, mainly as the result of our continued close watch for yours. This one was wedged near the central of the seven bridges. We investigated, and found an uncharted drain of considerable diameter.

  “‘Mon dieu,’ said I to Monsieur the Prefect, ‘if bodies came out, bodies can also go in.’ We got diving-suits. The tide in the meanwhile rose, but we had the location well marked. We advanced up the drain until we came to a dead end.

  Even before we left the water we heard the clash and crackle of your skirmish—”

  “Massacre, you mean,” interpolated Farrell, grinning as much as his bandages permitted. “Not a second too soon.”

  “Eh bien, we shut our exhaust air-valves and thus rose to the surface. Our grappling-irons snagged to the coping helped us unaided over the top. Then we sliced our airlines and lifelines, opened our exhausts and—”

  “Scared them out of a week’s growth!” added Farrell as d’Artois paused to light a cigarette. “But that damnable thing all of quivering fire—good Lord!”

  “That,” submitted d’Artois, “is something that I can explain but vaguely, if at all. I called it some more mummery, and decided, rather hastily, perhaps, that you and the Marquis needed help first of all. On reflection, and in view of some of your remarks since we left, I am of the opinion that it was either an elemental conjured up by those devil-mongering adepts, or else a wandering and malignant astral that was energized by the vital essence of the adepts, or perhaps by the vibration concentration of their ritual. Monsieur le Marquis, God rest his erring soul, could doubtless explain what it was, since he used his last spark of will to combat it and thwart its attempt to convert Mademoiselle Antoinette into—what did you tell me?—a courier to call Shirkuh from the hell in which he now must be roasting.

  “I would very much relish,” continued d’Artois, “questioning Hassan, who devised all that deviltry. But alas! he escaped. And while you, both of you, were causing the good doctor a certain amount of concern, I heard that the Sûreté and a handful of gendarmes cleaned out the entire nest. Unhappily, two were taken alive of that crew of assassins. And of course, those lovely ladies of the garden.”

  Farrell sighed from weariness and contentment, then grimaced from the ache of his wounds.

&nb
sp; “The Marquis,” he observed, “didn’t have time to explain how that hypnotic drug enabled him to project Antoinette’s self into the body of the Syrian bride of the garden—Lord, it’s impossible to imagine how a brave fellow like him could have let his resentment and disappointment carry him to such lengths! Having her scourged by proxy, so to speak.”

  “Too much occultism and devil-mongering upset his brilliant mind,” replied d’Artois. “Sombre, gloomy, and drunk with his talents. And translating Antoinette into the body of a bride of the garden, whom he could flog at will, was his warped expression of denied affection. As to just how he accomplished it, we can but surmise. Strange drugs are compounded in the Orient. When I complete the analysis of the pastries they offered us that night at the château, I may further enlighten you.”

  “But the stripes and welts that appeared on Antoinette’s body?” wondered Farrell.

  “For once you ask me something simple,” retorted d’Artois. “Did you know that if a hypnotic is touched with a pencil, for example, and offered the suggestion that it is a red-hot iron, he will develop a blister, and all the symptoms of a burn at the spot touched? Moll and others concede that point with very little argument. It has often been experimentally demonstrated.

  “Alors, the body of the Syrian girl was scourged. Antoinette’s self, though in a borrowed body, retained what we can roughly call an astral connection with her own body; otherwise she could not have returned to it at the end of each ordeal. And through this connection, the body of Antoinette developed the same welts that were raised on the skin of the Syrian girl; just as, by rough analogy, the hypnotic subject through suggestion shows all outward signs of a burn. And the marks of the heavy anklets the Syrian bride of the garden wore were similarly branded on Antoinette’s ankles.

  “The Marquis during his unsuccessful courtship of Antoinette had ample opportunities to administer the hypnotic drug at which he hinted, so that his influence could have been gained without her knowledge. This, together with the objective symptoms, convinces me that if it was not the conventional hypnosis we know, it was at least a quasi-hypnosis. And as you know, there are vegetable compounds which, if properly administered, will effect a partial release of the astral counterpart of a body, or its spiritual essence. To pursue it to its origin would lead you to a study of Egyptian magic, and the nine traditional elements of every living human body.

  “I will leave all this to you, mon vieux, to study, this matter of stigmata resulting from suggestion and other psychic influences. Me, I am no lecturer.

  “And as to Antoinette’s Arabic remarks in her sleep: the bride of the garden, dispossessed of her body for the time, sought Antoinette’s. And by that astral connection which she retained with her own, she felt the scourgings administered in the garden, and expressed herself, through Antoinette’s lips, as you heard.”

  D’Artois emerged from his chair and bowed with formal precision.

  “I will therefore leave you here, my blundering Afghan, to have your wounds properly nursed while I go about doing all that an old man can do under the circumstances: envy you, and write a monograph on Messieurs les Assassins, and Satan’s Garden, from which you so happily emerged.”

  With a peremptory gesture, he cut short Antoinette’s insistence upon his pausing for at least a moment. Then, halting at the door, he concluded as he glanced at Farrell, “Mordieu, and to think that you enjoyed all that fine swordplay, while I, Pierre d’Artois, had to wear a diving-suit to find a fight, and then had to use a crowbar! In several ways I envy you.”

  QUEEN OF THE LILIN

  Originally published in Weird Tales, November 1934.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Lurking Menace

  “First a slater’s hammer slides from a roof and comes within a hair of braining me. The next day a bust of Napoleon falls from its pedestal and narrowly misses me—and then one of my brother’s collection of swords joins the conspiracy of inanimate things and—mon Dieu! It’s only a miracle that I wasn’t beheaded!”

  Diane Livaudais sighed wearily and made a despairing gesture. Glenn Farrell’s bronzed, rugged features contracted in a frown, and his gray eyes narrowed as he pondered on the sequence of accidents that had made Diane’s past few days a nightmare. He turned to his old friend and host, Pierre d’Artois, a retired soldier whose scholarly pursuits had not obliterated his military bearing.

  “That does seem to wrench the long arm of coincidence entirely out of joint,” Farrell admitted. He no longer marveled that Diane’s dark eyes were haunted, and that her gestures were abrupt and nervous; but her next remark was too much for Farrell’s practical mind to digest.

  “And the worst of it is,” d’Artois’ lovely visitor continued, “I’m certain that those weren’t accidents—”

  “Eh, comment?” demanded d’Artois, leaning forward and twisting his fierce gray mustache. “If I’m not mistaken, you just said—”

  “I’ve sensed a malicious presence lurking about me for the past week,” Diane resumed. Then, noting Farrell’s silent but unconcealed amazement, “Oh, I know it sounds insane! But I caught a glimpse of a shadowy figure which faded almost the instant I turned to confront it—and I know she’s responsible.”

  Diane paused, regarded them with a touch of defiance, challenging Farrell and his host to dispute her sanity. Farrell stroked his square chin and said nothing. He could not very well declare that Diane Livaudais was the victim of delusions and hallucinations; but such was his conviction, and he thus disposed, somewhat regretfully, of the most attractive girl he had met during his few weeks in southern France. D’Artois’ reply, however, caught Farrell like a hammer stroke.

  “And so there’s an apparition following you around, making heavy objects fall in your direction…hmmm…very well—I will summon this pestilential specter here and now!”

  “Good Lord!” was Farrell’s unspoken comment as he saw that d’Artois was serious. “He’s as bad as she is!”

  They were sitting in d’Artois’ study on the second floor of a Thirteenth Century tower that commanded the foot of rue Tour de Sault in the old city of Bayonne. The afternoon was young; but artificial illumination was needed to augment the sunlight that filtered feebly through the narrow casements that deft the yard-thick masonry walls of the restored and modernized ruin in which d’Artois lived.

  The old scholar snapped the switch of the tall Damascus brass floor-lamp, leaving the circular room a sombre depth of gloom unbroken save for the patch of sunlight that played on the wine-red Boukhara rug.

  “We will see what manner of phantom is following you around,” he continued. “Sit back in your chair, Mademoiselle…relax…forget your fear and your worry…do not fight it…it can not harm you… I am watching…”

  Diane’s dark eyes became fixed and staring as she relaxed in response to that soporific murmuring. Farrell noted with wonder that though but a moment ago Diane had been not only wide awake but with nerves keyed to the snapping-point, she was now almost asleep. She was breathing very slowly and regularly; her long lashes drooped, masking the lower eyelids.

  Such long lashes… Farrell himself felt the spell of that solemn, droning voice. He realized in a vague way that d’Artois was hypnotizing his distracted caller. Then Farrell frowned, shook his head perplexedly, glanced at d’Artois, and marveled…but only for a moment—and then Farrell perceived something which made him start violently, catch his breath with a gasp, and sit rigidly erect, hands clutching the arms of his chair.

  In the shadows of that ancient tower-room he saw what seemed to be a tenuous, wavering streak which despite its semblance to a wisp of smoke was throbbing and pulsing as though it were alive. Moment by moment it became more dense. Farrell knew that a fourth personality had entered the room; a newcomer whose presence he could feel more distinctly than he could see. A cold thrill raced up his spine, and he shivered as though an icy wind had displaced the blood
in his veins.

  D’Artois’ eyes were fixed, and his brow was furrowed with a frown of intense concentration. His lips moved inaudibly, and his lean hands gestured as to a slow, unheard rhythm.

  The presence was becoming a transparent, clearly defined feminine form of exquisite proportion. On her head was a tall diadem of archaic workmanship; and her smile was a curved menace as evilly alluring as the loveliness of her delicate, haughty features. She was colorless, a mere luminous form; yet Farrell sensed that her hair should be black, with bluish highlights, and that the slightly aquiline face and graciously curved shoulders and slender arms should be a warm, olive hue.

  Yet for all her loveliness, the presence was an evil brooding in the shadows. The tension in that sombre circular room moment by moment became more acute. Farrell felt perspiration trickling down his cheeks, and wondered how much longer he could endure the uncanny menace that had taken form before his eyes. But d’Artois broke the spell. He sharply clapped his hands.

  “Wake up!” he commanded bruskly.

  Diane started, regarded them both with eyes wide open and amazed. And when Farrell’s glance, for an instant distracted from the darkness behind Diane, shifted back toward the spot where the presence had appeared, he saw but a thin thread of silver mist which vanished even as he stared.

  “Oh! Did I fall asleep? I’m sorry—”

  Diane’s bewilderment was obvious. Farrell knew that she had been utterly unaware of the strange shadow-figure at her shoulder.

  “Now I remember,” she continued, collecting her wits. “We were discussing an apparition, and—”

  “It was here, and it left,” replied d’Artois. “But let us talk about something else. Tell me about those objects that came so near to killing you. What’s their history?”

  Diane closed her eyes for a moment, and frowned.

  “Well…really, I don’t know,” she said, speaking very slowly, “except that Graf Erich gave me the bust of Napoleon not long ago, and gave my brother that Moro kampilan. But—”