Moving nearer the light to examine the picture, de Grandin paused in midstride, his sensitive nostrils contracting as he glanced sharply at a corsage bouquet of pale-lavender orchids, occupying a silver vase on a side table. Cautiously, as though approaching some living thing of uncertain temper, he lowered his nose toward the fragile, fluted-edged blossoms, then drew back abruptly. “These flowers, Monsieur; they came from where, and when, if you please?” he demanded, regarding Thorndyke with one of his fixed, unwinking stares.
Our host smiled sadly. “We don’t know,” he returned. “Some unknown admirer sent them to Marrien this evening; they came just before dinner. Queer thing; there was no card or message with them, and nobody saw the messenger who delivered them. The bell rang, and when Parnell answered it, there was an unmarked flower-box waiting in the vestibule, but no sign of any messenger. That struck me as especially odd; those chaps usually hang around in hope of a tip.”
The little Frenchman’s shrewd eyes had lost their direct, challenging look. He was staring abstractedly toward the drawing-room wall with the expression of one attempting to recall a forgotten bar of music or a half-remembered line of verse. “It is,” he muttered to himself, “it is—parbleu, but certainly!” Of Thorndyke he demanded:
“You say Mademoiselle your daughter went to her chamber complaining of mal de tête shortly after dinner?”
“Yes; as a matter of fact we hadn’t quite finished when she excused herself. It struck me as strange at the time, too, for she hardly ever suffers with headache. I think—”
“Précisément, Monsieur; so do I. I think this whole business has the odor of deceased fish on it. Sergeant,”—he turned to Costello—“your suggestion concerning the difficulty of ascending that drain-pipe was well made.”
“How’s that, sor? D’ye mean—”
“I mean the yokel finding a rib buried here, a vertebra interred there, and a clavicle hidden elsewhere in the earth would say, ‘Behold, I have found some bones,’ while the skilled anatomist finding the same things would declare, “Here we have various parts of a skeleton. My friends”—he swept us with a quick, challenging stare—“we are come to the door of a most exceedingly dark closet in which there rattles a monstrous skeleton. No matter, Jules de Grandin is here; he will turn the light upon it; he will expose the loathsome thing. Parbleu, he will drag it forth and dismember it piece by piece, or may the devil serve him as mincemeat pie at next Thanksgiving dinner!
“Bon soir, Monsieur,” he bowed to Thorndyke, “I know not the location of your vanished daughter; but I can damnation guess the sort of place where she lies hidden.
“Come, my friends,” he motioned Costello and me before him, “there are thoughts to think, plans to make, and afterward, deeds to do. Let us be about them.”
ONCE MORE IN MY study, he fell to pacing the floor with long, silent strides, soft-footed and impatient as a prisoned panther. “Cordieu,” he murmured; and, “Morbleu, they were clever, those ones. They used the psychology in baiting their trap. Yes.”
“What the dickens are you talking about?” I demanded.
“Of Mademoiselle Marrien and her orchids,” he replied, pausing in his restless walk. “Consider, my friend: When Monsieur Thorndyke gave us his daughter’s picture and I moved to examine it beneath the light, my nose was assailed by a so faint, but reminiscent odor. I looked about for its source. Such a smell I have found upon the lips of those drugged that their houses might be robbed—once, even, I discerned it on certain fowls which had been stolen without making outcry. This was in Guiana. I recognized that smell, but at first I could not call it by name. Then I perceived the orchids, and bent to smell them. It was there. I am ‘warm,’ as the children say when they play their hide-away game. I ask to know concerning the bouquet. What do I learn? That they have come all mysteriously for Mademoiselle Marrien, none knows whence, or by whom brought. Thereupon I see everything, all quickly, like a flash in the dark. Being a woman, Mademoiselle Marrien can not help but thrust her nose into those flowers, even though she knows that orchids possess no perfume. It is a woman’s instinctive act. Very good. The ones who sent those orchids traded on this certainty, and dusted the petals of those flowers with a powder made from the seeds of the Datura stramonium. These seeds are rich in atropine and scopolamine. Taken internally, in sufficient quantity, they cause headache, giddiness, nausea, unconsciousness, finally death. Inhaled in the form of powder, they adhere to the mucous membrane of the nose and throat, and within a short time cause violent headache, even unconsciousness, perhaps. That is sufficient for the miscreants’ purposes. They would not slay Mademoiselle Marrien—yet. No. Beside roadway she must tread, the path into the grave would be a thoroughfare of joy.”
“You’re raving!” I assured him. “Granting your fantastic theory, how did Marrien Thorndyke manage to evaporate from her room and leave the door locked on the inside?”
For a long moment he stared at me; then: “How does the fledgling, which can not fly, manage to leave its nest when the serpent goes ravening among the tree-tops?” he returned as he pivoted on his heel and departed for bed.
5
IT WAS SOMETHING AFTER five o’clock next evening when my office telephone rang. “Trowbridge, mon vieux, come at once, immediately, this instant!” de Grandin’s excited voice commanded. “She is found, I have located her!”
“She? Who?”
“Who but Mademoiselle Marrien, par l’amour d’un bouc?” he returned. “Come, I await you at police headquarters.”
Quickly as possible I made my way to City Hall, wondering, meanwhile, what lay behind the little Frenchman’s excited announcement. All day he had been off on some mysterious business of his own, a note beside my plate informing me he could not wait for breakfast, and would not return “until I do arrive.”
In the guardroom at headquarters I found him, smoking furiously, talking excitedly, gesturing strenuously; obviously in his element. Beside him were Sergeant Costello, four plainclothes men and a dozen uniformed patrolmen, armed with an imposing assortment of gas bombs, riot guns and automatic rifles.
“Bienvenu, mon brave!” he greeted. “But now, I was telling the good Costello of my cleverness. Wait, you too shall hear: All day I have haunted the neighborhood of Paradise Street, searching, looking, seeking a sign. But an hour since I chanced to spy a conjun store, and—”
“A what?” I asked.
“A conjun shop—a place where charms are sold. By example, they had there powdered bones of black cats; they are esteemed most excellent for neutralizing an enemy’s curse. They had also preserved bat wings, love potions, medicines warranted to make an uncongenial wife or husband betake himself elsewhere with greatest celerity—all manner of such things they had.
“I engaged the proprietor in talk. I talked of many things, and all the while I looked about me. The street was well paved and cleanly swept before the shop, there was not patch of muddy earth about the neighborhood, yet the fellow’s boots and trouser-knees, even his hands, were stained with new, fresh clay. ‘Parbleu,’ I say to me, ‘this will bear investigating!’
“Forth from that shop I went, and walked quickly up the alley which runs behind it. The rear of the yard was fenced, but, grâce a Dieu, the fence contained a knothole, and to it I did glue my eye. Nor was my patience unrewarded. No. Anon I saw the dusky dispenser of charms come from his back door and scuttle across his paved back yard, entering a tiny shed of rough boards which stood near the rear of his lot. There was no chance for his feet to become muddied that way, my friend.
“I wait for him to emerge. My watch counts fifteen minutes, but still he does not come. ‘Has he died in there?’ I ask me. At last it is no longer to be endured. All silently I leap the fence and cross the yard, then peer into the little house. Pardieu, what do I see? A hole, my friend: a great, gaping hole, like the open top of a newly digged well, and leading into it there is a ladder. Nothing less.
“Into that hole I lower myself, and when I reac
h the bottom I find the end is not yet. No; by no means. From the hole there runs a tunnel through the earth, and Monsieur the Black Man, whom I have followed, is nowhere to be seen. ‘Very well,’ I tell me, ‘where he has gone, I, too, may go.’ And so I do.
“That tunnel, my friend, it leads me across the street to the cellar of an old, long-disused house, a house whose doors have been boarded up and which has apparently been so long unused that even the newest of the many ‘FOR SALE’ signs which decorate its façade is quite illegible.
“Tiens, I look into that cellar, but I do not long remain to see what is there, for to be surprised in that place is to bid a swift adieu to life, and I have no desire to die. But in the little while I squat there like a toad-frog I hear and see so much that I can guess much more.
“I do not wait, not I; instead I come here with all speed and gather reinforcements. Voilà.
“Sergeant, the sun has set, already there is that beginning to commence which needs our early intervention. Friend Trowbridge and I will go first—it is a matter for no gossip where doctors go—do you and several of your men come shortly afterward, and guard the exits to the old, dark house. Anon, let the machine-gunners come, and take position all round the premises. When I whistle, or you hear a shot, come, and come quickly, for there will be great need of you.”
“WE ARE ARRIVED, MY friend,” he whispered as he led the way up a particularly malodorous alley and paused before a rickety board fence. “Come, let us mount.”
We scaled the creaking barrier and dropped as quietly as possible to a brick-paved yard scarcely larger than an areaway. Guided entirely by memory, for we dared not show a light, de Grandin led the way to a wooden outhouse, paused a moment then began to descend a flimsy ladder reaching down a ten-foot hole in the earth.
For some distance we crept along a narrow, clay-floored tunnel, and finally came to a halt as the faint, reflected glow of a wavering light reached us. And with the light came the unmistakable acrid odor of crowded, sweating humanity, raw, pungent gin and another faint, indefinable stench, foul, nauseating, somehow menacing, as though, itself unrecognized, it knocked upon the long-forgotten door of a dim ancestral memory—and fear.
Inch by cautious inch we crept forward until at last we looked through a jagged opening into a low-ceiled, brick-walled cellar, illuminated by the smoke-dimmed rays of a single swinging oil lantern.
About the room in crescent-formation were ranged, four or five deep, eighty or more men and women. They differed from each other in both kind and degree, heavy-featured, black-skinned full-bloods crouching cheek by jowl with mulattoes, coarsely clothed laborers huddled beside dandified, oily-haired “sheiks,” working-women herded in with modishly dressed she-fops of the dance halls and restaurants. Only in the singleness of purpose, the fixed intentness of their concentrated stares, did they seem held together by any sort of bond.
At the far side of the cellar was erected a grotesque parody of an altar. On it were saucers containing meal, salt and whole grains of corn, a bottle of square-face gin, a roughly carved simulacrum of a half-coiled snake, several tin cups, a machete honed to a razor edge and, turned upside down, a heavy, beaten brass crucifix. With a start I recalled Costello’s story of the ravished church and the cross which had so strangely disappeared.
But I had no time for reflection, for my attention was quickly drawn to the group before the altar; two men and a woman squatting cross-legged before wide-topped kettle-drums, an aged and unbelievably wrinkled Negress arrayed in gaudy, tarnished finery resembling the make-up of a gipsy fortune-teller, and a young white woman, nude save for the short kilt of scarlet cloth belted about her waist, the turban of a bandanna tied round her head and the inane, frivolous bands of crimson ribbon, which circled her wrists and ankles.
She was squatted tailor-fashion facing the drums, and swayed slightly from the hips as the musicians kept up a constant thrumming rumble—a sort of sustained, endlessly long-drawn note—by beating lightly and with incredible quickness on the parchment drumheads with the padded drumsticks. There was something curiously unlifelike in the way her hands were folded in her scarlet lap, a sort of tired listlessness wholly out of keeping with the strained, taut look on her face.
The aged Negress was whispering to her with cracked, toothless sibilance, and, though I could not catch the words, I knew she urged some act which the girl stubbornly refused, for time and again the old hag wheedled, argued, cajoled, and as often the girl shook her head slightly but doggedly, as though her nerves and body were almost worn to the point of yielding, but her spirit struggled doggedly on.
But each time the crone repeated her request the drummers increased the volume of their racket ever so little, and, it seemed to me, the very persistence of sustained vibration was wearing the girl’s resistance down. Certainly she was already in a state bordering on hypnosis, or else bound fast in the thrall of some potent drug; every line of her flaccid, unresisting body, the droop of her bare white shoulders, the very passivity with which she crouched upon the chill, bare earth proclaimed it.
At length the tempo of the drums increased and the volume of the rumble rose till it shook back low yet deafening echoes from the walls. The girl gave one final stubborn headshake, then nodded slowly, indifferently, as though too tired to hold her chin up for another instant. Her head sank forward, as though she napped, and her sloping shoulders drooped still further. The concentrated thought of the circling audience, the ceaselessly repeated importunities of the hag and the never-ending rumble of the drums had worn down her resistance; her psychic strength was broken, and she was but a mute and helpless tool, a helpless, mindless instrument without conscience or volition.
A quick, sharp order from the aged hag, who now assumed the rôle of priestess or mistress of ceremonies, and the girl rose slowly to her feet, put forth her hand and lifted the hinged top of a small square box reposing underneath the altar. As she turned her profile toward us I felt my heart stand still, for she was the counterpart of Adelaide Truman, the girl from Martinique. More, she was the original of the picture Thorndyke showed us, the missing Marrien!
A frightened squawk sounded as her groping hands explored the opened box. Next instant she straightened to her fullest height, two game cocks, one black, the other red, held firmly by the feet in her outstretched hands. For a moment she swayed, like a reed shaken in the wind, then, with a sinuous, side-stepping, sliding motion, described a narrow circle before the altar.
From its place before the reversed cross the ancient Negress snatched the machete, the blade flashed once, twice, in the lantern light, and the fowls beat the air tumultuously with their wings as their heads fell to the earthen floor.
And now the girl whirled and pirouetted frenziedly, the flapping rooster in her hands showering her with blood from their severed necks, so that her white shoulders and breast, even her cheeks and lips, were red as the flaunting cloth of her scanty costume.
The old high priestess snatched the dying cockerels from her hierophant’s hands and held their spurting necks above a tin cup, pressing on their breasts and sides to force the flow of blood as one might press a leather water-bottle. When the last drop of blood was emptied in the cup, the gin bottle was uncorked and its fiery contents mingled with the chickens’ gore.
Then followed a sort of impious travesty of communion. From hand to hand the reeking cup was passed, men and women sucking at it eagerly, slopping its ruddy contents on their clothes, smearing their faces with the sanguine mixture.
The drink drove them to frenzy. White eyes rolled madly, jaws dropped, lips slavered, as they swayed drunkenly from side to side. “Coq blanc, le coq blanc—the white cock!” they screamed. A young girl half rose from her seat on the floor, clutched her dress with both hands and ripped the garment down the front, exposing her bronze bosom, then fell to the floor again, rolling over and over, gibbering inarticulately, foaming at the mouth like a rabid she-dog. The drums roared and thundered, men howled and shouted hoarsely
, women screamed or groaned in a perfect ecstasy of neuro-religious fervor—the bestial, unreasoning hysteria which sent the Sudanese fanatics fearlessly into Kitchener’s shrapnel barrages at Khartoum. “Coq blanc—coq blanc,” the cry rose insistently.
The blood-spattered girl ceased her rhythmic whirling a moment and reached once more into the covered box. Again she straightened before the lines of frantic blacks, and in her up-stretched hands she held displayed for all to see a trembling white rooster—the coq blanc for which they clamored.
Once more the machete flashed in the lantern light, and the poor bird struggled convulsively in its death spasm between her upraised hands, its blood douching her hair, brow and cheeks as she turned her face to bathe it in the gory cataract.
A pause fell on the crowd as she flung the cockerel’s corpse contemptuously behind her—and wheeled about until her outstretched finger tips all but touched the altar’s edge. So stiff it was that the labored nasal breathing of the audience rasped gratingly as we lay in our covert, wondering what new obscenity was next.
The drums halted their sullen muttering and the withered hag began a high-pitched, singsong chant of invocation.
From a door at the farther side of the cellar shambled the vilest thing I had ever seen in human form. Short, hardly more than five feet tall, he was, but with a depth of chest and breadth of shoulder like those of a gorilla. Like a giant ape’s too, were his abnormally long-toed feet and his monstrous arms, which hung so far below his knees that it seemed he might have touched his knuckles to the earth; yet he scarcely stooped an inch to do so. Slope-headed, great-mouthed, half beast, half human he seemed as he advanced with a rolling gait and paused before the altar, then, bending quickly, dragged forth a heavy wooden chest bound round with iron reinforcement. I did not need de Grandin’s nudge to call attention to the dozen or more augur-holes piercing the top and ends of the box; I saw them at first glance, and in the same moment my nostrils caught the strengthened odor of that stench which had first appalled me as we crept along the tunnel.
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