“Graf Erich?” interrupted d’Artois. “Mordieu! Your choice of playmates!”
“Why, what’s wrong with him?” wondered Diane. “He’s perfectly fascinating, and he’s been ever so attentive.”
D’Artois nodded, and pondered for a moment. Farrell saw that while his friend had apparently gathered another loose end, the riddle had at the same time become more complex.
“Suppose,” suggested d’Artois, “that you ask Graf Erich to invite me and Monsieur Farrell to his château this evening at almost any convenient hour after dinner. Offer him any plausible pretext. And you will of course accompany us.”
“Why…but yes, certainly,” Diane agreed, although she was as puzzled as Farrell. “But did you really see—do tell me—”
D’Artois smiled and shook his head.
“Before I commit myself, I prefer to see Graf Erich. And now run along and leave me to my studies. In the meanwhile, do be careful of falling objects. We don’t want a tile or coping-stone to drop and kill you before I can get to the bottom of this riddle.”
Diane knew the futility of persistence. Acknowledging Farrell’s bow with a smile, she allowed d’Artois to escort her to the door at the ground floor.
Farrell perforce restrained his curiosity until d’Artois returned.
“How did you predict the appearance of that phantom?” he demanded.
D’Artois chuckled as he seated himself and struck light to a cigarette.
“I didn’t predict it—and neither did I conjure it up. It follows Diane around—”
“Good Lord!” exclaimed Farrell. “Why—that’s worse than if you’d actually evoked it. Do you mean that the girl is actually haunted?”
“In a way, yes,” replied the old man. “And the evidence of our eyes is corroborated by those unusual accidents. Some personal, directed intelligence is working against Diane.
“By hypnotizing Diane, I subdued her conscious resistance and thus allowed the spectral companion to materialize by appropriating some of Diane’s etheric double. A glance at any work on occultism will explain that to you.”
Farrell shuddered, then resumed, “But where does Graf What’s-His-Name come in?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” admitted d’Artois. “But consider for a moment: Graf Erich gave her the bronze bust. He gave her brother, who is a collector of arms, a Moro kampilan. And every object which has featured in these uncanny accidents—excepting the slater’s hammer—has passed through Graf Erich’s hands. Simple, n’est-ce pas?”
“Yes, certainly—very simple indeed!” admitted Farrell with elaborate irony. “And so, very logically, a heathenish, Queen of Sheba sort of female ghost follows Diane around and makes a personal appearance when you do your hocus-pocus. Exceedingly clear, Pierre. I get it perfectly.”
“Let it go at that,” chuckled d’Artois. “I already begin to see a light; and tonight we may learn why all inanimate creation is conspiring to kill Diane.”
CHAPTER 2
A Twisted Wire
Graf Erich’s château was not much more than two kilometers beyond the Mousserole Gate. It crowned one of the knolls that were the advance guard of the Pyrenees. The salon, with its tapestried walls, its beamed ceiling and its ornate, massive chandeliers, reminded Farrell of a miniature of the dining-room of Henri IV at Pau.
Graf Erich received his guests in person. He made no reference to the lack of servants, and left it to his callers to decide whether poverty or eccentricity accounted for the absence of the servitors that should second the sombre richness of the appointments.
“A fighting man,” was Farrell’s first thought as he grasped the Count’s extended hand and met the unwavering regard of his dark eyes. And then Farrell shifted his gaze. He was disconcerted as at an unintentional eavesdropping, or spying. Graf Erich’s eyes were too expressive for Farrell’s entire comfort. In them he saw misery and regret, and an iron will that was equal to the terrific struggle that was branded in deep lines on his lean cheeks, and the droop of his mouth.
“He spends his time in the shadow of the ax,” was Farrell’s thought.
“Good God, what has he on his mind?…”
Diane, the first to acknowledge Graf Erich’s greeting, had insisted that she would be quite content to leave her hat and coat in the Count’s study, which was at the end of a low, vaulted passage that led from the salon.
“The light is just as good, and I have my own mirror,” she assured him, as she declined his offer to escort her to a dressing-room. “And it’s a day’s journey from any one to any other part of this house.”
Diane was in higher spirits than she had been that afternoon. Her laugh was light, and her eyes sparkled as she went on with her comments concerning architects who design a château that is a place of magnificent distances. Then she turned to step toward the study.
Farrell saw that a cluster of heavy Persian maces and battle-axes adorned the crown of the archway through which she proposed passing, and knew that Diane was stepping into line with peril from overhead. An instant later he caught her eye.
The mirth was gone. She also had seen. Farrell, while replying to Graf Erich’s courtesies, shook his head. Diane’s change of expression showed how plainly she had read his thought. She paused for an instant, then advanced.
“Going to fight it, eh? That’s the spirit!” was his unspoken thought; but Farrell could barely resist his impulse to detain her.
“Er…beg your pardon, Count,” he said, seeking to palm off his moment of inattention as a lapse in his actually excellent understanding of French. “My ear’s a shade thick, you know—just landed on this side a week ago…”
Even as he spoke, his eyes shifted to follow Diane’s advance. Then he saw it happening, and could no longer doubt.
Nervous tension brings an abnormal sharpness of the senses, and an accompanying illusion of the cessation of time.
The flexible picture-wire that bound the cluster of heavy weapons together had parted. He plainly saw that the ends of the stranded wire were separating, knew that their deadly burden was about to fall. But there was plenty of time. Those heavy, skull-crushing weapons had to drop three feet before they struck her…and they had not yet started falling…but they would, soon—now, they were dropping…and faster…
Farrell’s fingers closed about Diane’s shoulder and yanked her backward just a split instant before the burnished steel flashed down and rang crashing against the tiles.
“Oh-h-h! Mon Dieu, again!” cried Diane.
Graf Erich’s dark face had become paper-white as he and d’Artois leaped forward.
“Look, Monsieur!” commanded d’Artois. His finger pointed accusingly at the ends of the stranded wire.
Graf Erich started violently. “Was für Teufelei!” he exclaimed in wrathful dismay. “That wire has been broken!”
“Broken? Are you sure it wasn’t cut?” demanded Farrell.
“Mais non!” exclaimed d’Artois as he drew forward a chair and leaped to the seat. “Look! You can see how each strand has a sharp bend. That wire was broken by repeated twisting, not by cutting.”
“Oh, good Lord!” interposed Diane, who now trembled violently from the reaction of the shock. “Did you say someone broke the wires that secured those weapons to the wall? How—but what do you—it just couldn’t—”
“Someone, or something,” said d’Artois, regarding Graf Erich with stern, unwavering eyes.
The Count started. His swarthy features darkened.
“Just what do you mean by saying someone?”
“That wire,” countered d’Artois, “could not have kinked itself. My meaning should be quite obvious.”
Wrath and dismay struggled for the supremacy of Graf Erich’s features.
“Impossible! How could any person have timed the breaking of that wire?—who, for that matter, knew that she wou
ld pass through that door, instead of going to the rear of the building, and up a flight? How—”
“Do not misunderstand me,” interrupted d’Artois. “This is not a personal accusation. Nevertheless, Monsieur le Compte,” he continued with a hard glitter in his blue eyes, “be pleased to correct me if I am wrong in saying that you might, with careful study, account for this fourth member of a series of coincidences.”
Farrell saw Graf Erich’s eyes suddenly drop before d’Artois’ cold, unblinking gaze.
“Oh, what ever can you be hinting?” exclaimed Diane.
“Do not misunderstand me,” repeated d’Artois. “I do not mean that you are consciously concealing anything. But ponder on this succession of busts, and kampilans and Persian maces and battle-axes that have dropped for no reason at all. And now, Monsieur, with your permission, I will escort Mademoiselle Diane back to the city. Later, perhaps, we can discuss this at greater length.”
Graf Erich regarded d’Artois for an interval that was becoming perilously close to a painful silence. Then he bent over Diane’s hand, and bowed formally to d’Artois and Farrell.
They drove in silence from the château. Farrell was communing with a growing conviction that Graf Erich could have explained why that heavy ax and heavier mace had dropped from their support; yet he was equally certain that Graf Erich was on the verge of desperation.
“Naturally, he’d be shaken,” reasoned Farrell as they approached the Mousserole Gate. “Sure. But he looked as if he’d seen a ghost that he was expecting to see.”
D’Artois presently brought the Daimler to a smooth halt at the door of Diane’s apartment on rue Lachepaillet.
Diane waved farewell as d’Artois headed the long car down the incline toward the old guardhouse at the Gate of Spain. Then, passing rue d’Espagne on the left, he skirted the city wall and drove toward the Nive and the little, square courtyard on which the d’Artois tower faced.
D’Artois pounded the massive brazen knocker that adorned the iron-bound and iron-studded oaken door to summon his man Raoul, who admitted them, then took the wheel of the Daimler and drove it to the garage.
“Now that we can speak our minds freely,” began d’Artois as he led the way to the study, “what do you make of this last accident?”
“Someone twisted that wire and broke it,” replied Farrell. “But how could anyone time the trap so that it would spring at the very instant? Why, it just doesn’t make any sense!”
“I am not so sure of that,” maintained d’Artois. “You heard Graf Erich’s exclamation—was für Teufelei! That may have been nothing but an expression of wrath; but I believe he meant it literally. Deviltry. Graf Erich has been up to something that is now kicking back at him. That harassed look of his could not have been so deeply branded in a week.
“And just to give you food for thought,” continued d’Artois, “I will now mention something which I withheld to avoid prematurely influencing you. Graf Erich is and has for several years been noted as a dabbler in thaumaturgy.”
“Thaumaturgy…thaumaturgy…” muttered Farrell. “Miracle or wonder worker, eh? Or is that just an impressive word for fakery?”
“Your first definition is correct,” said d’Artois. “Although thaumaturgy at times descends well into the last named, surprising results often flash forth from the quackery that clouds occult research. Graf Erich has started something he’s lost control of. But, mordieu, what is it that he has started? To wipe out that interrogation is our present problem. And in the meanwhile, I am certain that our charming young friend, Diane, is in much graver peril than she realizes.”
CHAPTER 3
Lilith
Graf Erich, immediately upon the departure of his guests, stalked toward the great fireplace at the far end of the salon. He halted at the hearthstone, glanced sharply about him—an instinctive precaution that had not yet given way to the security resulting from the absence of servants—and then knelt just clear of its edge. He fingered a tile which was nearest the foot of the andiron he faced. The hearth-slab swung silently on pivots, exposing a narrow flight of stairs that led into cavernous depths far below.
Graf Erich took from his pocket a small flashlamp and by its slender pencil of light illuminated his descent into the subterranean blackness. At the foot of the stairs he pressed a button. The click of the wall switch was followed by a glow of bluish-violet, wavering light.
He was standing in an alcove in the wall of a circular vault not more than five yards in diameter. Seated cross-legged about the curved wall were five men, each with his arms crossed on his breast; and the head of each was inclined as in sleep, or profound meditation. Their eyes were open, but they stared as though fixed in the contemplation of something that was beyond the sight of normal, human eyes. The posture and the drape of their robes suggested adepts from High Asia.
They sat at the vertices of a pentacle inscribed in cinnabar, whose orange streak glowed fiery-golden in the violet light. Each squatted in a small circle whose center coincided with the vertex which he commanded; and in the center of the pentacle was another circle, this one scarcely more than a yard in diameter.
“It’s there…always there, now,” muttered Graf Erich, as he stared somberly at the phosphorescent haze that throbbed and pulsed with rhythmical beat in the center of the cabalistic pentacle. “I’ll never get rid of her. It’s too late…”
He shook his head wearily, and sighed. Then he stepped from the alcove into which the staircase opened, and passed along the wall until he came to a station marked on the periphery that was circumscribed about the interlaced triangles of the pentacle. He halted there, facing the prime vertex; then, extending his arms, he bowed his head for a moment.
At first he spoke in low, hurried syllables, his voice scarcely more than a murmur, but as he warmed up to his recital, he assumed a more commanding tone until at last he was intoning a resonant mantra that rolled and thundered as though, besides reverberating through the vault, it also surged through caverns and passages that reached into the uttermost depths of the earth.
In response to Graf Erich’s chanting came the low, sweet voice of a woman who basks in a perfumed garden and purrs contentedly as a cat before the luxury of a fire. It was an amorous, caressing voice in whose suave, mellow murmur was the quintessential sweetness of all women who had ever been, and who ever would be: it was the voice of not any one woman, but rather a hierarchy of women, from dusky slave-girls to diademed queens.
“Baali,” said that sighing, luminous mist, “Lord and Master, I warned you, but you would not heed. I have failed four times, now, but the Power is increasing. Baali—”
The voice addressed Graf Erich by that Semitic word which signified lord and implied husband.
“Abandon your attempts!” interrupted Graf Erich in a low, hoarse voice. “And from now on—from this very moment—I will never see her. I promise that as the price of her life.”
The laughter of that shimmering, sentient haze was bitter and mocking and poison-sweet; and a breath of perfume heavier than jasmine and the roses of Shiraz was exhaled through the crypt.
“Too late,” murmured the voice as the laughter subsided. “With your dark magic, and your knowledge of the True Name, and your command of Powers and Presences, you called me from the forgotten blacknesses of Time’s beginning. You lured me from oblivion. And ears that for uncounted centuries had not heard the voice of adoration again thrilled to those solemn words which mocked Time and the higher gods and the laws that were ordained.
“Baali, I rose from the perished memories of uncounted lovers. From the dust of their dead brains and from the lingering traces of their time-bleached souls—bleached gray in the home of the cheerless dead—there came once more a memory of me, and I lived.
“You chanted like Lucifer singing to the Morning Star on the crest of Zagros. You sang like Lucifer crying his defiance across the vast gulf.
And now that I am here, you are seeking her in preference to me…”
She laughed, that woman’s voice, with ominous sweetness.
“I am here. Even I, Lilith—Daughter of the Dancer, the Queen of the Lilin—and you thought that I would stand aside for any earth-woman? Whoever summons me must have thought for no other.”
“You devil! I’ll send you back—” Graf Erich choked with wrath.
The phosphorescent presence in the center of the mist column laughed again: low, musical, and withal, a bitter laugh.
“You can not send me back, Baali.” The voice enunciated that appellation of respect with a finely modulated note of defiance.
Graf Erich’s dark eyes flashed somberly, and shifted from the shadow presence to the bronzed, inscrutable faces of the five who, squatting at the vertices of the pentacle, stared with their fixed gaze beyond the Border.
“You dare not,” murmured the voice of the iridescent mist. “You know that you dare not use that weapon against me,” reiterated the softly speaking doom. “Even you would stop short of such infamy. They are your disciples in dark magic. Even to save her, you would lack the courage to attempt that hideous treason. And you know that!”
The mist presence was becoming momentarily more substantial, until finally at the middle of the pentacle a woman of incredible loveliness stood in the place of the luminous haze-column. And from the half-parted lips of the solemn-faced hierophants came faint wisps of vapor that were drawn toward the center, even as cigarette smoke is drawn to an air-vent by the draft of an exhaust fan. The Presence—Queen of the Lilin—was now transparent…now translucent…finally opaque, solid, and despite her fantasmal origin, seemingly of flesh and blood. Her exquisite, exotic features were lovely with a beauty that the world has not dreamed or fancied for uncounted years. Lilith who smiled from the pentacle was a loveliness too long forgotten even to exist as a remote memory; Lilith, the everlasting Queen of all moonlit nights, the Queen of the Lilin, who danced before Suleiman, upon whom be prayer, and the peace!
E. Hoffmann Price's Pierre d'Artois: Occult Detective & Associates Page 31
