The Devil's Rosary

by Seabury Quinn

  “But what makes the thing work?” I asked curiously. “I should think that whoever set it in place would have been obliged to spring it when he made his exit. I can’t see—”

  “S-sst!” the Frenchman cut me off sharply, pointing to the deadly engine.

  Distinctly, as we listened, came the sound of tarred hawsers straining over pulley-wheels, and the iron-shod beam began to rise slowly, once more assuming a horizontal position.

  I could feel the short hairs at the back of my neck rising in company with the boom as I watched the infernal spectacle, but de Grandin, ever fearless, always curious, wasted no time in speculation. Advancing to the wall, he laid his hand upon the cable, tugging with might and main, but without visible effect on the gradually rising spar. Giving over his effort, he laid his ear to the stones, listened intently a moment, then turned to us with one of his quick, elfish smiles. “He was clever, as well as wicked, the old villain who invented this,” he informed us. “Behold, beyond this wall is some sort of a mechanism worked by running water, my friends. When the trigger retaining this death-dealer is released, water is also undoubtlessly permitted to run from a cask or tank attached to the other end of this rope. When the knife-ax has descended and made the unwelcome visitor shorter by a head, the flowing water once more fills the tank, hoists the ax again to its original position, and pouf! he are ready to behead the next uninvited guest who arrives. It are clever, yes. I much regret that we have not the time to investigate the mechanism, for I am convinced something similar opens the door through which we entered—perhaps once each year at the season of the ancient Saturnalia—but we did come here to investigate something entirely quite different, eh, Friend Balderson?”

  Recalled to our original purpose, we looked about the chamber. It was almost cubical in shape, perhaps sixteen feet long by as many wide, and slightly less in height. Save the devilish engine of destruction at the entrance, the only other fixture was a low coffin-like block of stone against the farther wall.

  Examining this, we found it fitted with hand-grips at the sides, and two or three tugs at these heaved the monolith up on end, disclosing a breast-high, narrow doorway into a second chamber, somewhat smaller than the first, and reached by a flight of some five or six stone steps.

  Quickly descending these, we found ourselves staring at a long stone sarcophagus, bare of all inscription and ornament, save the grisly emblem of the “Jolly Roger,” or piratical skull and thigh-bones, graven on the lid where ordinarily the name-plate would have rested, and a stick of dry, double-forked wood, something like a capital X in shape, which lay transversely across the pirate emblem.

  “Ah, what have we here?” inquired de Grandin coolly, approaching the coffin and prying at its lid with his cane-sword.

  To my surprise, the top came away with little or no effort on our part, and we stared in fascination at the unfleshed skeleton of a short, thick-set man with enormously long arms and remarkably short, bandy legs.

  “Queer,” I muttered, gazing at the relic of mortality. “You’d have thought anyone who went to such trouble about his tomb and its safeguards would have been buried in almost regal raiment, yet this fellow seems to have been laid away naked as the day he was born. This coffin has been almost airtight for goodness knows how many years, and there ought to be some evidence of cerements left, even if the flesh has moldered away.”

  De Grandin’s little blue eyes were shining with a sardonic light and his small, even teeth were bared beneath the line of his miniature golden mustache as he regarded me. “Naked, unclothed, without fitting cerements, do you say, Friend Trowbridge?” he asked. Prodding with his sword blade between the skeleton’s ribs a moment, he thrust the flashlight into my grip with an impatient gesture and put both hands elbow-deep into the charnel box, rummaging and stirring about in the mass of nondescript material on which the skeleton was couched. “What say you to this, and these—and these?” he demanded.

  My eyes fairly started from my face as the electric torch ray fell on the things which rippled and flashed and sparkled between the little Frenchman’s white fingers. There were chains of gold encrusted with rubies and diamonds and greenly glowing emeralds; there were crosses set with amethyst and garnet which any mitered prince of the church might have been proud to wear; there were ear- and finger-rings with brilliant settings in such profusion that I could not count them, while about the sides of the coffin were piled great stacks of broad gold pieces minted with the effigy of his most Catholic Majesty of Spain, and little hillocks of unset gems which sparkled and scintillated dazzlingly.

  “Regal raiment did you say, Friend Trowbridge?” de Grandin cried, his breath coming fast as he viewed the jewels with ecstasy. “Cordieu, where in all the world is there a monarch who takes his last repose on such a royal bed as this?”

  “It—it’s real!” Balderson breathed unbelievingly. “It wasn’t a pipe-dream, after all, then. We’re rich, men—rich! Oh, Marian, if it only weren’t too late!”

  De Grandin matter-of-factly scooped up a double handful of unset gems and deposited them in his overcoat pocket. “What use has this old drôle for all this wealth?” he demanded. “Mordieu, we shall find better use for it than bolstering up dead men’s bones! Come, my friends, bear a hand with the treasure; it is high time we were leaving this—Trowbridge, my friend, watch the light!”

  Even as he spoke I felt the flashlight slipping from my fingers, for something invisible had struck me a numbing blow across the knuckles. The little lantern fell with a faint musical tinkle into the stone coffin beside the grinning skull and we heard the soft plop as its airless bulb exploded at contact with some article of antique jewelry.

  “Matches—strike a light, someone, pour l’amour de Dieu!” de Grandin almost shrieked. “It is nécessaire that we have light to escape from this so abominable place without having our heads decapitated!”

  I felt for my own flashlight, but even as I did so there was a faint hissing sound, the sputter of a safety match against its box, and—the breath of a glowing furnace seemed suddenly to sweep the room as the heavy, oppressive air was filled with dancing sheets of many-colored flames and a furious detonation shook the place. As though seized in some giant fist, I felt myself lifted bodily from the floor and hurled with devastating force against the wall, from which I rebounded and fell forward senseless on the stone-paved floor.

  “TROWBRIDGE—TROWBRIDGE, GOOD, KIND FRIEND, tell us that you survive!” I heard de Grandin’s tremulous voice calling from what seemed a mile or more away as I felt the fiery trickle of brandy between my teeth.

  “Eh? Oh, I’m all right—I guess,” I replied as I sat up and forced the little Frenchman’s hip-flask from my lips. “What in the world happened? Was it—”

  “Morbleu,” laughed my friend, his spirits already recovered, “I thought old Bare-bones in the coffin yonder had returned from hell and brought his everlasting fires with him. We, my friends, are three great fools, but Jules de Grandin is the greatest. When first I entered this altogether detestable tomb, I thought I smelled the faint odor of escaping illuminating-gas, but so great was my curiosity before we forced the coffin, and so monstrous my cupidity afterward, that I dismissed the matter from my mind. Assuredly there passes close by here some main of the city’s gas pipes, and there is a so small leak in one of them. The vapor has penetrated the graveyard earth in small quantities and come into this underground chamber. Not strong enough to overpower us, it was none the less in sufficient concentration to explode with one great boom when Friend Balderson struck his match. Fortunately for us, the doors behind are open, thus providing expansion chambers for the exploding gas. Otherwise we should have been annihilated altogether entirely.

  “Come, the gas has blown away with its own force and we have found Friend Trowbridge’s flashlight. Mordieu, my ten fingers do itch most infernally to be at the pleasant task of counting this ill-gotten wealth!”

  SCRAMBLING OVER THE CEMETERY wall was no light task, since each of
us had filled his pockets with Spanish gold and jewels until he scaled almost twice his former weight, and it was necessary for Balderson and de Grandin to boost me to the wall crest, then for de Grandin to push from below while I lent a hand from above to help Balderson up, and finally for the pair of us to drag the little Frenchman up after us.

  “Lucky for us the wind has risen and the snow recommenced,” de Grandin congratulated as we made our way down the deserted street, walking with a rolling gait, like heavy-laden ships in a high sea; “within an hour the snow inside the cemetery will be so drifted that none will know we visited there tonight. Let us hail a taxi, mes amis; I grow weary bearing this great weight of wealth about.”

  3

  “NAME OF A SMALL green rooster,” Jules de Grandin exclaimed delightedly, his little blue eyes shining with elation in the light of the library lamp, “we are rich, my friends, rich beyond the wildest dreams of Monte Cristo! Me, I shall have a Parisian appartement which shall be the never-ending wonder of all beholders; a villa on the Riviera; a ducal palace in Venice—no less!—and—grand Dieu, what is that?”

  Above the wailing of the storm-wind, half obliterated by the keening blasts, there came to us from the street outside the scream of a woman in mortal terror: “Help—help—ah, help!” the last desperate appeal so thin and high with panic and horror that we could scarce distinguish it from the skirling of the gale.

  “Hold fast—courage—we come! we come!” de Grandin shouted, as he burst through the front door, cleared the snow-swept porch with a single bound and raced hatless into the white-swathed street. “Where are you Madame?” he cried, pausing at the curb and looking expectantly up and down the deserted highway. “Call out, we are here!” For another moment he searched the desolate street with his gaze; then, “Courage!” he cried, vaulting a knee-high drift and rushing toward a dark, huddled object lying in the shifting snow a hundred feet or so away.

  Balderson and I hurried after him but he had already raised the woman’s lolling head in the crook of his elbow and was preparing to administer stimulant from his ever-ready flask when we arrived.

  She was a young girl, somewhere between seventeen and twenty to judge by her face, neither pretty nor ill-favored, but with the clean, clear complexion of a well-brought-up daughter of lower middle-class people. About her flimsy party dress was draped a cloth coat, wholly inadequate to the chill of the night, trimmed with a collar of nondescript fur, and the hat which was pushed back from her blond bobbed hair was the sort to be bought for a few dollars at any department store.

  De Grandin bent above her with all the deference he would have shown a duchess in distress. “What was it, Mademoiselle?” he asked solicitously. “You did call for assistance—did you fall in the snow? Yes?”

  The girl looked at him from big, terrified eyes, swallowed once convulsively, then murmured in a low, hoarse whisper: “His eyes! Those terrible eyes—they—ah, Jesus! Mercy!” In the midst of a pitiful attempt to sign herself with the cross, her body stiffened suddenly, then went limp in the Frenchman’s arms; her slender bosom fluttered once, twice, then flattened, and her lower jaw fell slowly downward, as if in a half-stifled yawn. Balderson, layman that he was, mistook her senseless, imbecile expression for a bit of ill-timed horseplay and gave a half-amused titter. De Grandin and I, inured to vigils beside the moribund, recognized the trade mark stamped in those glazed, expressionless eyes and that drooping chin.

  “Ad te, Domine—” the Frenchman bent his blond head as he muttered the prayer. Then: “Come, my friends, help me take her up. We must bear her in from the storm, then notify the police. Ha, something foul has been abroad this night; it were better for him if he runs not crosswise of the path of Jules de Grandin, pardieu!”

  BREAKFAST WAS A BELATED meal next morning, for it was well after three o’clock before the coroner’s men and police officers had finished their interrogations and taken the poor, maimed clay that once was gay little Kathleen Burke to the morgue for official investigation. The shadow of the tragedy sat with us at table, and none cared to discuss future joyous plans for squandering the pirate treasure. It was de Grandin who waked us from our gloomy reveries with a half-shouted exclamation.

  “Nom d’un nom—another!” he cried. “Trowbridge, Balderson, my friends, give attention! Hear, this item from le journal, if you please:

  TWO GIRLS VICTIMS OF FIEND

  Early this morning the police were informed of two inexplicable murders in the streets of Harrisonville. Kathleen Burke, 19, of 17 Bonham Place, was returning from a party at a friend’s house when Drs. Trowbridge and de Grandin, of 993 Susquehanna Avenue, heard her screaming for help and rushed out to offer assistance, accompanied by Eric Balderson, their house guest. They found the girl in a dying condition, unable to give any account of her assailant further than to mumble something concerning his eyes. The body was taken to the city morgue for an inquest which will be held today.

  Rachel Müller, 26, of 445 Essex Avenue, a nurse in the operating-room at Mercy Hospital, was returning to her home after a term of special night duty a few minutes before 3 A.M. when she was set upon from behind by a masked man wearing a fantastic costume which she described to the police as consisting of a tight-fitting coat, loose, baggy pantaloons and high boots, turned down at the top, and a stocking-cap on his head. He seized her by the throat, and she managed to fight free, whereupon he attacked her with a dirk-knife, inflicting several wounds of a serious nature. Officer Timothy Dugan heard the woman’s outcries and hurried to her rescue, finding her bleeding profusely and in a serious condition. He administered first aid and rang for an ambulance in which she was removed to Casualty Hospital, where she was unable to give a more detailed description of her attacker. She died at 4:18 this morning. Her assailant escaped. The police, however, claim to be in possession of several reliable clues and an arrest is promised in the near future.

  “What say you to that, my friends?” the Frenchman demanded. “Me, I should say we would better consult—”

  “Sergeant Costello, sor,” Nora McGinnis, my household factotum, announced from the breakfast room door as she stood aside to permit the burly, red-haired Irishman to enter.

  “Ah, bonjour, Sergent,” de Grandin greeted with a quick smile. “Is it that you come to lay the clues to the assassin of those two unfortunate young women before us?”

  Detective Sergeant Jeremiah Costello’s broad, red face went a shade more rubescent as he regarded the diminutive Frenchman with an affectionate grin. “Sure, Dr. de Grandin, sor, ’tis yerself as knows when we’re handin’ out th’ straight goods an’ when we’re peddlin’ th’ bull,” he retorted. “Ain’t it th’ same wid th’ johnny darmes in Paree? Sure, it is. Be gorry, if we had so much as one little clue, rayliable or not, we’d be huggin’ an’ kissin’ ourselves all over th’ place, so we would. ’Tis fer that very reason, an’ no other, I’m after troublin’ ye at yer breakfast this marnin’. Wud ye be willin’ to listen to th’ case, as far as we know it, I dunno?”

  “Say on, mon vieux,” de Grandin returned, his eyes shining and sparkling with the joy of the born manhunter in the chase. “Tell us all that is in your mind, and we may together arrive at some solution. Meantime, may I not make free of Dr. Trowbridge’s hospitality to the extent of offering you a cup of coffee?”

  “Thanks, sor, don’t mind if I do,” the detective accepted, “it’s mortal cold outside today.

  “Now to begin wid, we don’t know no more about who committed these here murthers, or, why he done it, than a hog knows about a holiday, an’ that’s a fact. They tell me at headquarters that th’ little Burke gur-rl (God rest her soul!) said something about th’ felly’s eyes to you before she died, an’ Nurse Müller raved about th’ same thing, though she was able to give some little bit of dayscription of him, as well. But who th’ divil would be goin’ around th’ streets o’ nights murtherin’ pore, definseless young women—it’s cases like this as makes policemen into nervous wrecks, Dr. de Grandin, sor
. Crimes o’ passion an’ crimes committed fer gain, they’re meat an’ drink to me, sor—I can understand ’em—but it’s th’ divil’s own job runnin’ down a johnny who goes about committin’ murthers like this. Sure, ’tis almost always th’ sign of a loose screw in his steerin’ gear, sor, an’ who knows where to look fer ’im? He might be some tough mug, but ’tisn’t likely. More apt to be some soft-handed gentleman livin’ in a fine neighborhood an’ minglin’ wid th’ best society. There’s some queer, goin’s on among th’ swells, sor, an’ that’s gospel; but we can’t go up to every bur-rd that acts funny at times an’ say, ‘Come wid me, young felly me lad; it’s wanted fer th’ murther o’ Kathleen Burke an’ Rachel Müller ye are,’ now can we?”

  “Hélas, non,” the Frenchman agreed sympathetically. “But have you no clue of any sort to the identity of this foul miscreant?”

  “Well, sor, since ye mention it, we have one little thing,” the sergeant replied, delving into his inside pocket and bringing forth a folded bit of paper from which he extracted a shred of twisted yarn. “Would this be manin’ annything to ye?” he asked as he handed it to de Grandin.

  “U’m,” the little Frenchman murmured thoughtfully as he examined the object carefully. “Perhaps, I can not say at once. Where did you come by this?”

  “’Twas clutched in Nurse Müller’s hand as tight as be-damned when they brought her to th’ hospital, sor,” the detective replied. “We’re not sure ’twas from th’ murtherer’s fancy-dress costume, o’ course, but it’s better’n nothin’ to go on.”

  “But yes—most certainly,” de Grandin agreed as he rose and took the find to the surgery.

  For a few minutes he was busily engaged with jeweler’s loop and microscope; finally he returned with the shred of yarn partly unraveled at one end. “It would seem,” he declared as he returned the evidence to Costello, “that this is of Turkish manufacture, though not recent. It is a high grade of angora wool; the outer scales have smooth edges, which signifies the quality of the fleece. Also, interwoven with the thread is a fine golden wire. I have seen such yarn, the wool cunningly intermixed with golden threads, used for tarboosh tassels of wealthy Moslems. But the style has not prevailed for a hundred years and more. This is either a very old bit of wool, or a cunning simulation of the olden style—I am inclined to think the former. After all, though, this thread tells little more than that the slayer perhaps wore the headgear of a Mohammedan. The nurse described him as wearing a stocking-cap or toboggan, I believe. In her excitement and in the uncertain light of early morning a fez might easily be mistaken for such a piece of headgear.”