The Devil's Rosary

by Seabury Quinn

  “Now, while Christianity still struggled with the remnant of the olden faiths there lived in Alexandria a certain priest named Cyril, a very holy man, who by virtue of his piety wrought many miracles. Also, when more than once the women of his congregation declared themselves spellbound by the ancient Goddess Aset, he was wont to cast the spell from off them by the use of a certain sacred amulet, a little cross of gold supposed to hold a tiny remnant of the True Cross within itself. This very sacred reliquary is in the present custody of the Papa of the Greek Orthodox Church in Harrisonville. Often have I heard the old man speak of it.

  “Accordingly, when we came here to ‘Journey’s End’ to try conclusions with the ancient gods of Egypt, I begged the use of that same relic from its custodian and brought it with me.

  “And, as I have said, thoughts have power. It was the thought of Priest Sepa’s ancient curse which worked the death of your uncle and all but caused your own; yet here was a little, so small piece of gold which also carried the concentrated thought of centuries. Adored as a caster-out-of spells by generations of pious Christians, once regarded as efficacious against the same old goddess by whom your house was so beset, it was ideally suited to my purpose. I did fight thought with counter-thought; against the evil thought-concepts of Aset and of Sepa her priest I set the defensive thought-power of Cyril, the Alexandrian monk, who once cast Aset forth from out the bodies of his bewitched parishioners. The tiny relic in my hand focused, so to speak, the thoughts which negatived the harmful power of Aset and her followers, and—Aset and her ghostly worshiper are gone. If—”

  “I—don’t—believe—a—word—of—it!” Monteith interrupted slowly. “You’re saying all this to shield Louella. She’s bad—wicked clear through, and I don’t ever want to see her again. I—”

  “Monsieur!” de Grandin’s voice was sharp-edged as a razor. “Look at this!”

  Once more he drew the little golden cross of Cyril from his pocket, holding it before the young man’s eyes. As young Monteith gazed wonderingly at it, the Frenchman continued in a low, earnest voice: “You will hear and obey. You will sleep for half an hour, at which time you will awake, completely forgetting all which occurred last night, remembering only that the thing which menaced your family and household has forever departed. Sleep. Sleep and forget. I command it!

  “And that, my friend, is that,” he announced matter-of-factly as Monteith’s eyelids lowered in compliance with his order.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “I think we would better burn the mummy of Priest Sepa and the translation of his curse-stone,” he responded. “The uncle’s will absolved his legatees from burying the mummy if it became physically impossible—I propose rendering it so. Come, let us cremate the old one,”

  Together we dismembered the desiccated corpse of the Egyptian, casting the pieces on the glowing coals of the furnace, where they burned with sharp, fierce spurts of flame and quickly turned to light, gray ashes which wafted, upward through the draft of the firebox.

  “What about the uncanny feeling Louella complained of, de Grandin?” I asked as we pursued our grisly task. “You know, she said she felt as though someone were staring at her from behind?”

  “Mais oui,” he chuckled as he fed a mummified forearm to the flames. “I shall say she had good cause to feel so. Did not the excellent Maggie and her husband stare her out of countenance from the rear, always seeking to see her take a third helping of food or wine? Parbleu, Mademoiselle Louella desired the boyish figure, therefore she eats sparingly, therefore she is tried and condemned by the so excellent Irish couple on the charge of being a fairy! C’est drôle, n’est-ce-pas?”

  When we returned to the upper floor, David Monteith was up and disposing of an excellent breakfast.

  “Good old Lou,” we heard him tell his sister, “of course I wasn’t ill last night. I slept like a top—overslept, in fact; aren’t I an hour late to breakfast?” He smiled and patted his sister’s hand reassuringly.

  “Ah, parbleu, Jules de Grandin, you are clever!” the little Frenchman murmured delightedly. “You have removed all danger from these young people and assured their happiness by exorcizing the devil of bad memories. Yes. Come with me, Jules de Grandin; I shall take you to the library and give you a magnificent-great drink of whisky.”

  The Brain-Thief

  1

  “TIENS, MONSIEUR, YOU AMAZE me, you astound me; I am astonished, I assure you. Say on, if you please; I am entirely attentive.” Jules de Grandin’s voice, vibrant with interest, came to me as I closed the front door and walked down the hall toward my consulting room.

  “Holà, Friend Trowbridge,” he hailed as his quick ear caught my step outside, “come here, if you please; there is something I would have you hear, if you can spare the time.”

  The tall young man, prematurely gray at the temples, seated opposite de Grandin rose as I entered the study and greeted me with an air of restraint.

  “Oh, how d’ye do?” I growled grudgingly, then turned my back on the visitor as I looked inquiringly at de Grandin. If there was one person more than another whom I did not desire my roof to shelter, it was Christopher Norton. I’d known the cub since his first second of life, had tended him for measles, whooping-cough and chickenpox, had seen him safely through adolescence, and was among the first to wish him luck when he married Isabel Littlewood. Now, like every decent man in the city, I had no desire to see any of him, except his back, and that at as great a distance as possible. “If you’ll excuse me—” I began, turning toward the door.

  “Parbleu, that is exactly what I shall not!” de Grandin denied. “I know what you think, my friend; I know what everyone thinks, but I shall make you and all of them change your minds; yes, by damn, I swear it! Come, good friend, be reasonable. Sit and listen to the story I have heard, suspending your judgment meantime.

  “Say it again, young Monsieur,” he ordered the visitor. “Relate your so pitiful tale from the beginning, that Dr. Trowbridge may know as much as I.”

  There was such a look of distress on young Norton’s face as he looked half-pleadingly, half-fearfully at me that, had he been anything but the thoroughgoing scoundrel he was, I could have found it in my heart to be sorry for him. “It seems Isabel and I have been divorced,” he began, almost tentatively. “I—I suppose I wasn’t as good to her as I might have been—”

  “You suppose, you confounded young whelp!” I burst out. “You know you treated that girl as no decent man would treat a dog! You know perfectly well you broke her heart and every promise you made her at the altar—you smashed her life and betrayed her confidence and the confidence of every misguided friend who trusted you—” I choked with anger, and wheeled furiously on de Grandin. “Listen to me,” I ordered. “I don’t know what this good-for-nothing young reprobate has been telling you, but I tell you whatever he’s said is a pack of lies—lies from beginning to end. I’ve known him all his life—helped him begin breathing thirty years ago by slapping his two-seconds-old posterior with a wet towel—and I’ve known the girl he married all her life, too. He and she were born within a city block of each other, less than a month apart. Their parents were friends, they went to school together and played together, and were boy and girl sweethearts. When they finally married, all us old fools who’d watched them grow from childhood swarmed round and gave them our blessing. Then, by George, before they’d been married a year, this young jackanapes showed himself in his true colors. He abused her, beat her, finally deserted her and ran off with his best friends wife. If that’s the sort of story you’ve listened to, I’m surprised—”

  “Cordieu, surprised you most assuredly shall be, my friend, but not as you think,” de Grandin interrupted. “Be good enough to seize your tongue-tip between thumb and forefinger while the young Monsieur concludes his story.”

  “I don’t expect you to believe me, sir,” young Norton began again; “I don’t know I’d believe such a story if it were told me—but it’s true, all the
same. As far as I can remember, the last time I saw Isabel was this morning when I left for the office. We’d had a little misunderstanding—nothing serious, but enough to put us both in a huff—and I stopped at Caminelli’s and bought some roses as a peace-offering on my way home tonight.

  “I fairly ran the last half-block to the house, and didn’t wait for the maid to let me in. It was when I got in the hall I first noticed changes. Most of the old furniture was gone, and what remained was standing in different places. I thought, ‘She’s been doing a lot of house-cleaning since this morning,’ but that was all. I was too anxious to find her and make up, you see.

  “I called, ‘Isabel, Isabel!’ once or twice, but no one answered. Then I ran upstairs.”

  He paused, looking pleadingly at me, and the half-puzzled, half-frightened look which had been on his face throughout his recital deepened.

  “There was a nurse—a nurse in hospital uniform leaving the room as I ran down the upper hall,” he continued slowly. “She looked at me and smiled, and said, ‘Why, how nice of you to bring the flowers, Mr. Norton. I’m sure they’ll be delighted.’

  “That ‘they’ didn’t mean anything to me then, but a moment later it did. On the bed, with a little, new baby cuddled in the curve of her elbow, lay Betty Baintree! Try and realize that, Dr. Trowbridge; Betty, Jack Baintree’s wife, whom I’d last seen at the Colony Country Club dance last Thursday night, was lying in bed in my house, a young baby in her arms!

  “She greeted me familiarly, ‘Why, Kit, dear,’ she said ‘I didn’t expect you so soon. Thanks for the flowers, honey.’ Then: ‘Come kiss baby; she’s been restless for her daddy the last half-hour.’

  “It was then she seemed to notice the look of blank amazement on my face for the first time. ‘Kit, boy, whatever is the matter?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you—’

  “‘Wha—what are you doing here, Betty?’ I managed to gasp. ‘Isabel—where is she?’

  “‘Isabel?’ she echoed incredulously. ‘What’s got into you, dear—what makes you look so strangely? Haven’t you any greeting for your wife and baby?’

  “‘My—wife—and—baby?’ I stammered. ‘But—’

  “I don’t know just what happened next, sir. I’ve a confused recollection of staggering from that accursed room, stumbling down the stairs and meeting the nurse, who looked at me as though she’d seen a ghost, then tottering toward the door and running, hatless and coatless, to my mother’s house in Auburndale Avenue. I ran up the steps, tried the door and found it locked. Then I almost beat in the panels with my fists. A strange maid, not old Sadie, answered my frantic summons and looked at me as though she suspected my reason. The family occupying the house was named Bronson, she told me. They’d lived there for the past two years—‘since shortly after the widow Norton’s death.’

  “‘Am I mad, or is this all some horrible nightmare?’ I asked myself as I turned once more toward my home, or rather toward the house which had been my home this morning.

  “It wasn’t a dream, as I assured myself when I returned and found Betty crying hysterically in bed with the nurse trying to comfort her and looking poisoned daggers at me as I came in the door.

  “I got my hat and coat and wandered about town looking for someone I knew—someone who might offer me a ray of comforting light to guide me through the terrible fog into which I seemed to have plunged. Half a block from home I met Dr. Raymond, of the Presbyterian Church, whom I’d known since I was a lad in his Sunday School’s infant class. I spoke to him, tried to stop him, but he passed me without a sign of recognition. Either he cut me dead or failed to see me, as though I’d been a disembodied spirit.

  “Finally, I managed to locate Freddy Myers. He and I were in high school and college together, and had always been good friends. He let me in, but that was about all. Not a word of greeting, save a chilly ‘How do you do?’ Not a smile, not even a handshake did he offer me, and he remained standing after I’d come into the hall and made no move to take my hat and coat or invite me to be seated.

  “I put the proposition squarely up to him; told him what I’d just been through, and asked him for God’s sake to tell me where Isabel was. The news of my mother’s death two years before was shock enough, but Isabel’s disappearance—Betty Baintree in my house, and the baby—I was like an earthman suddenly set down on the moon.

  “For a while Fred listened to me as he might have listened to the ravings of a drunken man; then he asked me if I were trying to kid him. When I assured him I was sincere in my questions, he grew angry and told me, just as you have, Dr. Trowbridge, how I’d abused Isabel, how my disgraceful amours with other women had finally forced her to divorce me, and how I was ostracized by every decent man who’d known me in the old days. Finally, he ordered me out and told me he’d punch my face if I ever spoke to him again.

  “I don’t know what to think, sir. Freddy’s abuse was so genuine, his anger so manifestly sincere and his scorn so patently righteous that I knew it couldn’t all be some ghastly practical joke of which I was the victim. Besides, there was the strange maid in Mother’s house and the news of Mother’s death—that couldn’t have been arranged, even if Isabel and Betty and Freddy had joined in a conspiracy to punish me for the burst of nasty temper I showed this morning.

  “For a little while I thought I’d gone crazy and all the astonishing things which seemed to have happened were only the vagaries of a lunatic. Indeed, sir, I’m not sure I’m sane, even yet—I hope to God I’m not! But what am I to do? Can’t anybody explain the situation to me? Suppose you found yourself in my place, sir.” He turned appealing, haunted eyes on me.

  “Then I remembered hearing someone tell of the wonderful things Dr. de Grandin did,” he concluded. “I’d been told he’d corrected maladjusted destinies as though by magic sometimes; so I’ve come here as a last resort.

  “You’re my last hope, Dr. de Grandin,” he finished tragically. “I don’t know, except by inference and such reconstruction of events as I can make from the crazy, meaningless things I’ve seen and heard tonight, what’s happened, but one thing seems certain: For the last two years time has stood still for me. There’s been a slice of two years carved right out of my memory, and all the terrible things which have occurred during that period are a sealed book to me. Can’t you do something for me, sir? If you can’t, for God’s sake, send me to a lunatic asylum. I don’t know just what sins I’ve committed, but even though I’ve committed them unconsciously, the uncertainty of it all is driving me to madness and an asylum seems the only refuge left.”

  Jules de Grandin brushed the tightly waxed ends of his small blond mustache with the tip of a well-manicured forefinger. “I think we need not consider the padded cell as yet, my friend,” he encouraged. “At present I am inclined to prescribe a stiff dose of Dr. Trowbridge’s best brandy for you—and a like potion for myself.

  “And now, Monsieur,” he continued as he drained the final drop of cognac from his goblet, “I would suggest that you take the medicine I shall prepare, then go to bed—Friend Trowbridge has a spare chamber for your accommodation.”

  For a few moments he busied himself in the surgery, returning with a beaker of grayish, cloudy liquid, which young Norton tossed off at a gulp.

  TEN MINUTES LATER, WITH my unwelcome guest soundly sleeping in my spare bedroom de Grandin took up a pencil and pad of note-paper and turned to me. “Tell me, mon vieux,” he ordered, “all you can of this so unfortunate young man’s domestic tragedy.”

  “Humph,” I retorted, still smarting at the generous use he had made of my hospitality, “there’s precious little to tell. Kit Norton is a rotter from the backbone out; there’s not an ounce of decency in his whole makeup. The girl he married was one of the finest young women in the city, absolutely above reproach in every way, and they seemed ideally happy for a little time; then, without a moment’s warning, his whole nature seemed to change. He became an utter sot, found fault with everything she did and blamed her for his busines
s reverses—he had plenty of ’em, too, for he began to neglect his real estate office at the same time he began neglecting his wife—and it wasn’t long before his affairs with other women became the scandal of the town. The climax came when he and Betty Baintree eloped.

  “Norton and Frank Baintree had been inseparable friends from boyhood. Frank married Betty a short time after Kit and Isabel were married, and the couples continued the friendship. When Kit and Betty ran off, of course, the lid blew off the whole rotten mess. It was then we all realized Kit’s contemptible conduct toward Isabel was all part of a deliberately planned scheme to force her to divorce him—and the proof of it was that Betty had acted toward Frank just as Kit had acted toward Isabel for about the same period. There’s no doubt of it, the brazen pair had conspired to force a divorce so they could be free to marry, and when their plans failed to work, they had the effrontery to elope, leaving identical notes with their deserted partners. It’s an unsavory business from start to finish, de Grandin, and I wish you hadn’t gotten mixed up in it, for—”

  “Non, let us not be too hasty, Friend Trowbridge,” the little Frenchman interrupted. “See, you have already given me much of importance to think of. Had not Madame Betty’s conduct been identical with that of Monsieur Christopher, I might have seen a reason for it all; as it is—eh bien, I know not quite what to think. Such cases, however, are not altogether unknown. Once before I have seen something like this. A certain tradesman in Lyons—a draper, he was—left his home for the shop one morning, and was heard from no more. Five years passed, and he was thought dead by all who knew him, when pouf! where should he be found but living in Marseilles, happy and respectable as could be, with another wife and a family of fine, healthy children? In Lyons he had been a draper; in Marseilles he was a bricklayer—a trade, by the way, for which he had no apparent ability in his former life. Maurice Simon, his name was, but in Marseilles he knew himself only as Jean Dufour. Every test was made to prove him a malingerer, but it seemed established beyond all reasonable doubt that the unfortunate man was actually suffering a split consciousness—all memory of his former life in Lyons was completely obliterated from his mind, and his wife and children were utter strangers to him. Reproaches and argument alike left him unmoved. ‘I am Jean Dufour, bricklayer, of Marseilles,’ he repeated stubbornly. At last they managed to convince him of his identity. The realization of what he had done, how he had wrecked two women’s lives and the lives of his children, drove him mad. He died raving in a hospital for the insane.”