“What d’ye mean?” Sattalea demanded, advancing menacingly on the diminutive Frenchman.
“Come and see,” de Grandin responded, backing slowly toward the hall. As Sattalea followed him into the house, he halted suddenly, snapped on the electric light and thrust his hand down the front of the child’s white-linen blouse, ripping the garment open and turning it down to display the lad’s slim, straight back. Sattalea and I gave simultaneous gasps of astonished horror. From shoulder to waist the child’s back was a mess of crisscrossed, livid wales, the unmistakable signs of recent cruel beatings with a whip or small cane.
“Did you do this?” the Frenchman demanded, taking a threatening half step toward the visitor. “Parbleu, if you did, though you be twenty times his father, I shall beat you insensible!”
“Good Lord!” the horrified parent exclaimed. “Who—what—”
“Mother did it, Daddy,” the little boy broke in sobbingly. “Since that night when she was so ill, that funny-looking man’s been coming to the house every day and she’s changed so. She says she doesn’t love me any more and she beats me for almost nothing—I didn’t mean to look in that day he kissed her—honestly, I didn’t—but she said I was spying on them and the two of them beat me till—”
“Aubrey! What are you saying?” his father cried.
“Morbleu, no more than all the neighbors know, Monsieur,” de Grandin returned impassively. “This afternoon, when Friend Trowbridge and I had returned from our outing with your son, I took some magazines, which I pretended to sell, and my most persuasive manner to the back doors of the houses of your block. In one small hour’s conversation with the domestic servants of the neighborhood I found that you alone are unaware of what goes on in your home.”
Sattalea faced the Frenchman with a look of incredulous horror; then, as the import of de Grandin’s words sank home, an expression of hopeless desolation spread over his face. “That explains it!” he sobbed. “She has changed since that night she di— you gentlemen gave her up for dead! She’s grown more beautiful every day, but—but she’s not my Vivian, not the girl I married. Sometimes I’ve felt as though some stranger had come to take her place, and—”
“Monsieur, I think it not unlikely,” de Grandin spoke softly as he laid his hand on the man’s shoulder with an almost fatherly gesture. “Believe me, I can appreciate your trouble. It were best that we did not make mock of Providence, my friend. It is better that we leave bad enough alone, lest it become worse. Alas, the olden days of happiness are gone forever; but we can at least repair the greater wrong before it has gone too far. Will you help me make your home a fit place for your little son to dwell, Monsieur?”
“Yes,” Sattalea agreed. “I’ll do anything you say. Sometimes I think it would have been better if Vivian really had died. She’s a changed woman. She used to be so sweet, so gentle, so loving, now she’s a very devil incarnate, she’s—”
“Let us not waste time,” de Grandin interrupted. “Tonight you will inform Madame your wife that you must leave town on business early in the morning. When all preparations are made for your seeming trip, you will come here, and remain hidden until I give the word. Then, parbleu, we shall show this species of a rat who would buy dead women’s bodies who holds the stronger cards—whose magic is more potent—may the Devil, his master, roast me if we do not so!”
4
SHORTLY BEFORE NOON THE following day a taxicab deposited Aubrey Sattalea and several pieces of luggage at my front door, and after seeing the guest secreted in an upstairs room de Grandin excused himself, saying he had several important missions to execute. “Remember, my friend,” he warned the visitor, “you are not to leave the house for any reason less urgent than fire, and you will refrain from so much as showing yourself at the window until I say otherwise. The secrecy of your whereabouts is greatly important, I assure you.”
Dinner was about to be served when he returned, his little eyes shining with elated excitement. “See, my friends, he ordered as we finished dessert, is it not a pretty thing which I obtained in New York this afternoon?” From his jacket pocket he drew a small case which he snapped open, displaying a tiny, shining instrument bedded in folds of cotton wool.
It was a glass-and-nickel syringe of twenty-five minim size, with a short heavy slip-on needle attached. The piston was of ground glass, set on a metal plunger which led through a cap. On this plunger, instead of the usual metal set-screw, was a tiny, trigger-like, safety lever which locked the piston so that the syringe could be carried full without danger of spilling its contents.
“H’m, I’ve never seen one quite like it,” I admitted, examining the instrument with interest.
“Probably not,” the Frenchman returned as he snapped the safety-catch on and off, testing its perfect response to the lightest pressure of his finger. “They are not widely known. For the average physician they are an unnecessary luxury, yet there are times when they are invaluable. In psychiatric work, for instance. The doctor who attends the mad often has need of a syringe which can carry quick unconsciousness, even as the soldier and gendarme has need of his pistol, and when he must draw and use his instrument at one there is no time to stop and fill it. Voilà, it is then this little tool becomes most handy, for it can be filled and carried about like a gun, rendered ready for action by the touch of the finger, and there has meantime been no danger of the drug it carries being lost. C’est adroit, n’est-ce-pas?”
“But what need have you for it?” I asked. “I don’t understand—”
“But of course not,” he agreed with a vigorous nod. “But if you will be so good as to wait a few hours—ah, I shall show you a tremendously clever trick, my friends. Meantime, I am wearied. I shall sleep four hours by the alarm clock; then, if you please, we shall perform our duty. Until then—”
Rising, he bowed formally to us in turn and ascended to his bedroom.
MIDNIGHT HAD SOUNDED ON the tall clock in the hall and twelve deep, vibrant strokes had echoed from the great gong in the courthouse tower before de Grandin rejoined us, refreshed by his four-hour nap and a cold shower. “Come, my friends,” he ordered, filling his new syringe with a twenty per cent solution of cannabis indica and thrusting it handily into his jacket pocket, “it is time we repaired to the rendezvous.”
“Where?” Sattalea and I demanded in chorus.
“Wait and see,” he returned enigmatically. “Quick, Friend Trowbridge, the car, if you please.”
Under his direction I drove to within a hundred feet or so of the Sattalea cottage, then parked the motor at the curb. Together we dismounted and stole softly toward the house.
All was quiet within the dwelling; not a light showed through the long, unshuttered windows, but de Grandin led the way unerringly across the porch, through the drawing-room and down the hall to the white-enameled door of the principal bedroom. There he paused, and in the flash of his pocket electric torch I saw his small, heart-shaped face twitching with excitement. “Are we ready?” he demanded, his narrow, black brows arched interrogatively.
I nodded, and he turned sharply, bearing his weight against the white panels of the door and forcing them inward. Next instant, de Grandin in the lead, Sattalea and I at his elbows, we entered the darkened room.
For a moment I saw nothing but the vague outlines of furniture, only dimly picked out by the moonlight filtering through the Venetian blinds which hung before the window, but as I paused, striving to accustom my eyes to the quarter-light, I made out the hazy, indistinct shape of something human, so still it seemed inanimate, yet somehow instinct with life and viciousness.
“Permettez-moi,” de Grandin exclaimed, feeling quickly along the wall for the electric switch, pressing the button and flooding the chamber with light. Beyond the bed, clad in pajamas and dressing-gown, crouched the white-faced, stoop-shouldered man who had proved such a mystery to us, his thin, evil features drawn in a snarling grimace of startled fury. Backed against the wall at the bedstead’s head, rigid in an
attitude of mingled fear and defiance, stood Vivian Sattalea. Her slim, white body showed statuesquely through the silken tissue of her nightrobe, her supple, rounded limbs and torso rather emphasized than concealed by the diaphanous garment. Her arms were extended straight down beside her, her hands pressing the wall against which she leaned till the flesh around the long, brightly polished nails showed little half-moons of white. Her red, passionate mouth was twisted in an animal-snarl of rage, and out of her purple eyes looked something which had never belonged to the woman Aubrey Sattalea married five years before—some evil trespasser in possession, some depraved interloper holding high holiday behind the windows of her soul.
“Vivian!” Sattalea looked in agonized disbelief from the crouching, slinking intruder to his wife, and his honest, commonplace young face seemed fairly to crumble with the devastation of overwhelming disillusion. “Oh, Vivi, how could you—and I loved you so!”
“Well, you silly, fatuous fool!” the woman’s voice was thin and wire-edged as she spoke, and that evil, half-seen something seemed dodging back and forth in her wide-open eyes like a criminal lunatic playing hide-and-seek at the barred windows of his cell. “What did you think—did you expect me to put up with you? You—”
“Silence!” de Grandin’s command, sharp as a whip-crack, cut through her tirade. “The time for speech is past. It is time to act!”
Agilely as a leopard he leaped across the bed, his left hand seizing the crouching, corpse-faced man by the collar of his gown and forcing him backward on the couch. There was a short, fierce struggle, the flash of something bright in the electric light, then a muffled, strangling cry as de Grandin sank the needle of his hypodermic in the other’s arm, released the safety-catch and shot the plunger downward.
“Stop—stop, you’re killing him!” the woman shrieked, leaping like an infuriated cat from her retreat against the wall and flinging herself on de Grandin, clawing at his face, gnashing at him with her teeth like a tigress fighting for her mate.
The Frenchman thrust his half-conscious antagonist from him with a vigorous shove of his foot, seized the woman’s right wrist in his left hand and jerked her forward, so that she lay prone across the bed. As she writhed and twisted in his grip, he shot the hypodermic needle into her rounded arm and forced the piston down, emptying the last dregs of the powerful hypnotic drug into her veins. I saw the white skin around the needle-point swell like an oversized blister as the sense-stealing hashish flooded into her system, saw her red mouth close convulsively, as though she swallowed with an effort, then watched fascinated as her taut, lithe muscles went slowly limp, her lips fell senselessly apart and her eyes slowly closed, the lids fighting fiercely to stay open, and murderous, insatiable hatred looking from her face as long as a flicker of her eyes remained unveiled by the lowering lids.
“Quick, my friends!” de Grandin ordered as her body went flaccid in complete anesthesia. “We must hasten; the drug will not control for long, and we must attack while the barrier of their physical consciousness is down.”
Under his directions we laid Vivian Sattalea and her paramour on the bedroom floor, and while Sattalea and I crossed their hands and feet after the manner of memorial effigies on mediæval tombs the Frenchman extracted four waxen candles from the inner pocket of his jacket, placed one at the head and another at the foot of each unconscious form.
Stooping quickly he traced a six-pointed figure in chalk on the bedroom rug, then snapped off the electric light and set the four candles aflame. “Do not step beyond the lines, my friends,” he warned, pushing Sattalea and me inside the design he had drawn; “there will soon be that outside which no mortal can look on unprotected and live!”
As the candle flames burned brightly in the hot, still room, I noticed a subtle, indefinable odor, strangely similar to ecclesiastical incense yet differing from it in some way I could not define. There was something soporific about it, and I felt my lids go heavy as I inhaled, but was brought back to attentive consciousness by de Grandin’s words. Bending ceremonially to the east, the south, finally to the west, with a sort of jerky genuflection, he had begun a low, singsong chant. The words he used I could not understand, for they were in some outlandish tongue, but constantly, like the recurrence of the name of Deity in a litany, I caught the surname Amalik, and mingled with it that of Suliman ebn Dhoud and other Arabic and Hebrew titles till the half-dark room seemed fairly redolent with the chanted Oriental titles.
“Look, look, for God’s sake, look!” rasped Aubrey Sattalea in my ear, seizing my arm in a panic-strengthened grip and pointing toward the northwest corner of the room.
I looked, and caught my breath in a terrified sob.
Rearing nearly to the ceiling of the chamber, so indistinct that it was more like the fleeting, uncertain vision of an object behind us seen from the corner of the eye, there was a monstrous, fear-begetting form. When I gazed directly at it there was nothing but shadow to be seen, but the moment my eyes were partly averted it took sudden substance out of nothing, and its shape was like that of a mighty, black-robed man, and, despite the white beard which fell nearly to the hem of its garment, the being seemed not old as we are wont to consider men, but rather strong with the strength which mighty age gives to giant trees and hills and other things which endure forever. And from the being’s shadowy face looked forth a pair of terrifying, deep-set eyes which glowed like incandescent metal, and between its upraised, mighty hands there gleamed the wide blade of a sword which seemed to flicker with a cold, blue, phosphorescent light. Over all my body I could feel the rising of horripilation. The hairs upon my head and the shorter hairs of my hands and arms seemed rising stiffly, as though an electrical current ran through me, and despite my utmost efforts my teeth rattled together in the cachinnation of a chill; for the air about us had become suddenly gelid with that intense, numbing cold which means utter absence of vital heat.
“By the Three Known and One Unknown Elements; by the awful word whispered in the ears of the two Khirams by Shelomoh, the Temple-Builder”—de Grandin made the threefold signs of Apprentice, Fellowcraft and Master with flashing quickness—“by the mastery of Eternal Good over Evil, and by the righteousness of Him who planned the Universe, I bind you to my bidding, O Azra’il, dread Psychopompos and Bearer of the Sword!” De Grandin’s voice, usually a light tenor, had deepened to a powerful baritone as he pronounced the awful words of evocation. “Come to my aid, O Powers of Light and of Darkness,” he chanted. “To me are ye bound by the words of Power and Might, nor may ye depart hence till my will be done!”
A light wind, colder, if possible, than the freezing air of the room, seemed to emanate from the dreadful form in the darkened corner, making the candle flames flicker and the shadows flit and dance in arabesques across the walls and ceiling of the room. The unconscious man upon the floor moved slightly and groaned as though in nightmare, and the woman beside him shuddered as if the chilling wind had pierced even the barriers of her unconsciousness.
“Speak out, seducer of the dead, destroyer of the living!” de Grandin commanded, fixing his burning gaze on the groaning man. “I command you, declare to us your true name and nature!”
“Pontou,” the voice issuing from the supine, drug-bound man was faint as an echo of a whisper, but in that silent room it sounded like a shout.
“Pontou is my name, my birthplace Brittany.”
“And what did you there, Pontou?”
“I was clerk to Gilles de Laval, Sire de Retz, Marèchal of France, Chamberlain to His Majesty, the King, and cousin to the mighty Duke of Brittany.
“Aie, but there were brave doings in the château at Marchecoul when the Sire de Retz dwelt there! The castle chapel was gorgeous with painted windows and cloth of gold, the sacred vessels encrusted with gems, and churchly music sounded as the mass was celebrated thrice daily, but at night there was a different sort of mass, for with me as deacon and Henriet as subdeacon, before the desecrated altar of the Galilean Gilles de Retz celebrated
la messe noire, and from the throats of little children we drew the ‘red milk’ wherewith to fill our chalices in honor of Barran-Sathanas, our Lord and Master. Aie, ’twas sweet to hear the helpless little ones plead for mercy as we bound them on the iron grille before the sanctuary, and sweeter still to hear their strangled moans as Henriet and I, or sometimes the great Gilles de Retz himself, passed the keen-edged knife across their upturned throats; but sweetest of all it was to quaff the beakers of fresh lifeblood, still warm from their veins and toss their quivering hearts into the brazier which burned so brightly before the throne of Barran-Sathanas!”
De Grandin’s small, white teeth were chattering, but he forced another question:
“Accursed of heaven, when came your career to an end? Speak, by the powers that bind you, I command it!”
“In 1440,” the answer came falteringly. “’Twas then Pierre de l’Hôpital came to Nantes with his power of men-at-arms and took us into custody. Aie, but the mean little folk who never dared look us in the face before flocked to the courtroom to testify how we had ravished away their brats from the cradle and sometimes from the breast, and made them sacrifices to our Lord and Master, the Prince of Evil!
“Our doom was sealed or ever we stood before the bench of justice, and in all the crowded hall there was none to look on me with pity save only Lizette, the notary’s daughter, whom I had taken to the castle and initiated into our mysteries and taught to love the ‘red milk’ even as I did.
“Five days our trial lasted, and À mort—to death, the court condemned us.
“They bore us to the meadow of Bisse beyond the gates of Nantes, and hanged us by the neck. Henriet turned craven at the end, and made his sniveling peace with God, but the Sire De Retz and I stood steadfast to our master, Barran-Sathanas, and our souls went forth unshriven and unrepentant.
“My soul was earthbound, and for weeks I haunted the scenes I knew in life. The fourth month from my execution a butcher died, and as his spirit left his body I found that I could enter in. That very night, as his corpse awaited burial I draped it round me as a man may don a cloak, and went to Rouen, where later I was joined by my light o’ love, Lizette. We lived there twenty years, haunting cabarets, filching purses, cutting throats when money was not otherwise to be obtained.
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