“‘So far, so fine,’ I tell me. ‘But what of this Monsieur-with-the-Funny-Name? Who and what is he, and what has he done to be flung out of the club?’
“I made careful inquiry and found much. He has been an explorer of considerable note and has written some monographs which showed he understood the use of his eyes. Hélas, he knew also how to use wits, as many of his fellow members learned to their sorrow when they played cards with him. Furthermore, he had a most unpleasant stock of stories which he gloried to tell—stories of his doings in the far places which did not recommend him to the company of self-respecting gentlemen. And so he was removed from the club’s rolls, and vowed he would get level with Messieurs Evans, Clark and Wolkof if it took him fifty years to do so.
“Five years have passed since then, and Monsieur Wallagin seems to have prospered exceedingly. He has a large house in the suburbs where no one but himself and one servant—always a Chinese—lives, but the neighbors tell strange stories of the parties he holds, parties at which pretty ladies in strange attire appear, and once or twice strange-looking men as well.
“Eh bien, why should this rouse my suspicions? I do not know, unless it be that my nose scents the odor of the rodent farther than the average. At any rate, out to the house of Monsieur Wallagin I go, and at its gate I wait like a tramp in the hope of charity.
“My vigil is not unrewarded. But no. Before I have stood there an hour I behold one forcibly ejected from the house by a gross person who reminds me most unpleasantly of a pig. It is a small and elderly Chinese man, and he has suffered greatly in his amour propre. I join him in his walk to town, and sympathize with him in his misfortune.
“My friend”—his earnestness seemed out of all proportion to the simple statement—“he had been forcibly dismissed for putting salt in the food which he cooked for Monsieur Wallagin’s guests.”
“For salting their food?” I asked.
“One wonders why, indeed, Friend Trowbridge. Consider, if you please. Monsieur Wallagin has several guests, and feeds them thin gruel made of wheat or barley, and bread in which no salt is used. Nothing more. He personally tastes of it before it is presented to them, that he may make sure it is unsalted.”
“Perhaps they’re on some sort of special diet,” I hazarded as he waited for my comment. “They’re not obliged to stay and eat unseasoned food, are they?”
“I do not know,” he answered soberly. “I greatly fear they are, but we shall know before so very long. If what I damn suspect is true we shall see devilment beside which the worst produced by ancient Rome was mild. If I am wrong—alors, it is that I am wrong. I think I hear the good Costello coming; let us go with him.”
Evening had brought little surcease from the heat, and perspiration streamed down Costello’s face and mine as we drove toward Morrisdale, but de Grandin seemed in a chill of excitement, his little round blue eyes were alight with dancing elf-fires, his small white teeth fairly chattering with nervous excitation as he leant across the back of the seat, urging me to greater speed.
The house near which we parked was a massive stone affair, standing back from the road in a jungle of greenery, and seemed to me principally remarkable for the fact that it had neither front nor rear porches, but rose sheer-walled as a prison from its foundations.
Led by the Frenchman we made cautious way to the house, creeping to the only window showing a gleam of light and fastening our eyes to the narrow crack beneath its not-quite-drawn blind.
“Monsieur Wallagin acquired a new cook this afternoon,” de Grandin whispered. “I made it my especial business to see him and bribe him heavily to smuggle a tiny bit of beef into the soup he prepares for tonight. If he has been faithful in his treachery we may see something, if not—pah, my friends, what is it we have here?”
We looked into a room which must have been several degrees hotter than the stoke-hole of a steamer, for the window was shut tightly and a great log fire blazed on the wide hearth of the fireplace almost opposite our point of vantage. Its walls were smooth-dressed stone, the floor was paved with tile. Lolling on a sort of divan made of heaped up cushions sat the master of the house, a monstrous bulk of a man with enormous paunch, great fat-upholstered shoulders between which perched a hairless head like an owl’s in its feathers, and eyes as cold and grey as twin inlays of burnished agate.
About his shoulders draped a robe of Paisley pattern, belted at the loins but open to the waist, displaying his obese abdomen as he squatted like an evil parody of Mi-lei-Fo, China’s Laughing Buddha.
As we fixed our eyes to the gap under the curtain he beat his hands together, and as at a signal the door at the room’s farther end swung open to admit a file of women. All three were young and comely, and each a perfect foil for the others. First came a tall and statuesque brunette with flowing unbound black hair, sharp-hewn patrician features and a majesty of carriage like a youthful queen’s. The second was a petite blonde, fairylike in form and elfin in face, and behind her was a red-haired girl, plumply rounded as a little pullet. Last of all there came an undersized, stoop-shouldered man who bore what seemed an earthen vessel like a New England bean-pot and two short lengths of willow sticks.
“Jeeze!” breathed Costello. “Lookit him, Dr. de Grandin; ’tis Gyp Carson himself!”
“Silence!” the Frenchman whispered fiercely. “Observe, my friends; did I not say we should see something? Regardez-vous!”
At a signal from the seated man the women ranged themselves before him, arms uplifted, heads bent submissively, and the undersized man dropped down tailor-fashion in a corner of the room, nursing the clay pot between his crossed knees and poising his sticks over it.
The obese master of the revels struck his hands together again, and at their impact the man on the floor began to beat a rataplan upon his crock.
The women started a slow rigadoon, sliding their bare feet sidewise, stopping to stamp out a grotesque rhythm, then pirouetting languidly and taking up the sliding, sidling step again. Their arms were stretched straight out, as if they had been crucified against the air, and as they danced they shook and twitched their shoulders with a motion reminiscent of the Negroid shimmy of the early 1920s. Each wore a shift of silken netlike fabric that covered her from shoulder to instep, sleeveless and unbelted, and as they danced the garments clung in rippling, half-revealing, half-concealing folds about them.
They moved with a peculiar lack of verve, like marionettes actuated by unseen strings, sleep-walkers, or persons in hypnosis; only the drummer seemed to take an interest in his task. His hands shook as he plied his drumsticks, his shoulders jerked and twitched and writhed hysterically, and though his eyes were closed and his face masklike, it seemed instinct with avid longing, with prurient expectancy.
“Las aisselles—their axillae, Friend Trowbridge, observe them with care, if you please!” de Grandin breathed in my ear.
Sudden recognition came to me. With the raising of their hands in the performance of the dance the women exposed their armpits, and under each left arm I saw the mark of a deep wound, bloodless despite its depth, and closed with the familiar “baseball stitch.”
No surgeon leaves a wound like that, it was the mark of the embalmer’s bistoury made in cutting through the superficial tissue to raise the axillary artery for his injection.
“Good God!” I choked. The languidness of their movements … their pallor … their closed eyes … their fixed, unsmiling faces … now the unmistakable stigmata of embalming process! These were no living women, they were—
De Grandin’s fingers clutched my elbow fiercely. “Observe, my friend,” he ordered softly. “Now we shall see if my plan carried or miscarried.”
Shuffling into the room, as unconcerned as if he served coffee after a formal meal, came a Chinese bearing a tray on which were four small soup bowls and a plate of dry bread. He set the tray on the floor before the fat man and turned away, paying no attention to the dancing figures and the drummer squatting in the corner.
&n
bsp; An indolent motion of the master’s hand and the slaves fell on their provender like famished beasts at feeding time, drinking greedily from the coarse china bowls, wolfing down the unbuttered bread almost unchewed.
Such a look of dawning realization as spread over the four countenances as they drained the broth I have seen sometimes when half-conscious patients were revived with powerful restoratives. The man was first to show it, surging from his crouching position and turning his closed eyes this way and that, like a caged thing seeking escape from its prison. But before he could do more than wheel drunkenly in his tracks realization seemed to strike the women, too. There was a swirl of fluttering draperies, the soft thud of soft feet on the tiled floor of the room, and all rushed pell-mell to the door.
The sharp clutch of de Grandin’s hand roused me. “Quick, Friend Trowbridge,” he commanded. “To the cemetery; to the cemetery with all haste! Nom d’un sale charneau, we have yet to see the end of this!”
“Which cemetery?” I asked as we stumbled toward my parked car.
“N’importe,” he returned. “At Shadow Lawn or Mount Olivet we shall see that which will make us call ourselves three shameless liars!”
Mount Olivet was nearest of the three municipalities of the dead adjacent to Harrisonville, and toward it we made top speed. The driveway gates had closed at sunset, but the small gates each side the main entrance were still unlatched, and we raced through them and to the humble tomb we had seen violated that morning.
“Say, Dr. de Grandin,” panted Costello as he strove to keep pace with the agile little Frenchman, “just what’s th’ big idea? I know ye’ve some good reason, but—”
“Take cover!” interrupted the other. “Behold, my friends, he comes!”
Shuffling drunkenly, stumbling over mounded tops of sodded graves, a slouching figure came careening toward us, veered off as it neared the Carson grave and dropped to its knees beside it. A moment later it was scrabbling at the clay and gravel which had been disturbed by the grave-diggers that morning, seeking desperately to burrow its way into the sepulcher.
“Me God!” Costello breathed as he rose unsteadily. I could see the tiny globules of fear-sweat standing on his forehead, but his inbred sense of duty overmastered his fright. “Gyp Carson, I arrest you—” he laid a hand on the burrowing creature’s shoulder, and it was as if he touched a soap bubble. There was a frightened mouselike squeak, then a despairing groan, and the figure under his hand collapsed in a crumpled heap. When de Grandin and I reached them the pale, drawn face of a corpse grinned at us sardonically in the beam of Costello’s flashlight.
“Dr.—de—Grandin, Dr.—Trowbridge—for th’ love o’ God give me a drink o’ sumpin!” begged the big Irishman, clutching the diminutive Frenchman’s shoulder as a frightened child might clutch its mother’s skirts.
“Courage, my old one,” de Grandin patted the detective’s hand, “we have work before us tonight, remember. Tomorrow they will bury this poor one. The law has had its will of him; now let his body rest in peace. Tonight—sacré nom, the dead must tend the dead; it is with the living we have business. En avant to Wallagin’s, Friend Trowbridge!”
“YOUR SOLUTION OF THE case was sane,” he told Costello as we set out for the house we’d left a little while before, “but there are times when very sanity proves the falseness of a conclusion. That someone had unearthed the body of Gyp Carson to copy his fingerprints seemed most reasonable, but today I obtained information which led me up another road. A most unpleasant road, parbleu! I have already told you something of the history of the Wallagin person; how he was dismissed from the Rangers’ Club, and how he vowed a horrid vengeance on those voting his expulsion. That was of interest. I sought still further. I found that he resided long in Haiti, and that there he mingled with the Culte de Morts. We laugh at such things here, but in Haiti, that dark stepdaughter of mysterious Africa’s dark mysteries, they are no laughing matter. No. In Port-au-Prince and in the backlands of the jungle they will tell you of the zombie—who is neither ghost nor yet a living person resurrected, but only the spiritless corpse ravished from its grave, endowed with pseudo-life by black magic and made to serve the whim of the magician who has animated it. Sometimes wicked persons steal a corpse to make it commit crime while they stay far from the scene, thus furnishing themselves unbreakable alibis. More often they rob graves to secure slaves who labor ceaselessly for them at no wages at all. Yes, it is so; with my own eyes I have seen it.
“But there are certain limits which no sorcery can transcend. The poor dead zombie must be fed, for if he is not he cannot serve his so execrable master. But he must be fed only certain things. If he taste salt or meat, though but the tiniest soupçon of either be concealed in a great quantity of food, he at once realizes he is dead, and goes back to his grave, nor can the strongest magic of his owner stay him from returning for one little second. Furthermore, when he goes back he is dead forever after. He cannot be raised from the grave a second time, for Death which has been cheated for so long asserts itself, and the putrefaction which was stayed during the zombie’s period of servitude takes place all quickly, so the zombie dead six months, if it returns to its grave and so much as touches its hand to the earth, becomes at once like any other six-months-dead corpse—a mass of putrescence pleasant neither to the eye nor nose, but preferable to the dead-alive thing it was a moment before.
“Consider then: The steward of the Rangers’ Club related dreadful tales this Monsieur Wallagin had told all boastfully—how he had learned to be a zombie-maker, a corpse-master, in Haiti; how the mysteries of Papa Nebo, Gouédé Mazacca and Gouédé Oussou, those dread oracles of the dead, were opened books to him.
“‘Ah-ha, Monsieur Wallagin,’ I say, ‘I damn suspect you have been up to business of the monkey here in this so pleasant State of New Jersey. You have, it seems, brought here the mysteries of Haiti, and with them you wreak vengeance on those you hate, n’est-ce-pas?’
“Thereafter I go to his house, meet the little discharged Chinese man, and talk with him. For why was he discharged with violence? Because, by blue, he had put salt in the soup of the guests whom Monsieur Wallagin entertains.
“‘Four guests he has, you say?’ I remark. ‘I had not heard he had so many.’
“‘Nom d’un nom, yes,’ the excellent Chinois tells me. ‘There are one man and three so lovely women in that house, and all seem walking in their sleep. At night he has the women dance while the man makes music with the drum. Sometimes he sends the man out, but what to do I do not know. At night, also, he feeds them bread and soup with neither salt nor meat, food not fit for a mangy dog to lap.’
“‘Oh, excellent old man of China, oh, paragon of all Celestials,’ I reply, ‘behold, I give you money. Now, come with me and we shall hire another cook for your late master, and we shall bribe him well to smuggle meat into the soup he makes for those strange guests. Salt the monster might detect when he tastes the soup before it are served, but a little, tiny bit of beef-meat, non. Nevertheless, it will serve excellently for my purposes.’
“Voilà, my friends, there is the explanation of tonight’s so dreadful scenes.”
“But what are we to do?” I asked. “You can’t arrest this Wallagin. No court on earth would try him on such charges as you make.”
“Do you believe it, Friend Costello?” de Grandin asked the detective.
“Sure, I do, sir. Ain’t I seen it with me own two eyes?”
“And what should be this one’s punishment?”
“Och, Dr. de Grandin, are you kiddin’? What would we do if we saw a poison snake on th’ sidewalk, an’ us with a jolly bit o’ blackthorn in our hands?”
“Précisément, I think we understand each other perfectly, mon vieux.” He thrust his slender, womanishly small hand out and lost it in the depths of the detective’s great fist.
“Would you be good enough to wait for us here, Friend Trowbridge?” he asked as we came to a halt before the house. “There is a trifle of
unfinished business to attend to and—the night is fine, the view exquisite. I think that you would greatly enjoy it for a little while, my old and rare friend.”
IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN a quarter-hour later when they rejoined me. “What—” I began, but the perfectly expressionless expression on de Grandin’s face arrested my question.
“Hélas, my friend, it was unfortunate,” he told me. “The good Costello was about to arrest him, and he turned to flee. Straight up the long, steep stairs he fled, and at the topmost one, parbleu, he missed his footing and came tumbling down! I greatly fear—indeed, I know his neck was broken in the fall. Is it not so, mon sergent?” he turned to Costello for confirmation. “Did he not fall downstairs?”
“That he did, sir. Twice. The first time didn’t quite finish him.”
Trespassing Souls
1
MID-AUGUST WAS ON US and Harrisonville sweltered under the merciless combination of heat and humidity as only communities in the North Atlantic States can suffer in such conditions. Jules de Grandin and I rocked listlessly back and forth in our willow chairs, too much exhausted for further conversation, unhappily aware that the clock had struck midnight half an hour before, but knowing bed meant only a continuation of discomfort and unwilling to make even the little effort involved in ascending the stairs and disrobing.
“Morbleu, Friend Trowbridge,” the little Frenchman murmured sleepily, “this day, it is infernal, no less. Were those three old Hebrews transported here, I damn think they would beseech us to take them back to the comforting coolness of Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace! If—”
The muffled drum-roll of my office telephone bell sounded a sleepy interruption to his comment, and I rose wearily to respond to the summons.
“Yes,” I answered as a frightened voice pronounced my name questioningly over the wire, “this is Dr. Trowbridge.”
The Devil's Rosary Page 20
