The Devil's Rosary

by Seabury Quinn

  “Can you recall what she said when she looked from the window?”

  “Lawd, no suh! Ah don’t speak no language ’ceptin’ English.”

  “Think, if you please. Much depends on it. Can not you say what the words sounded like, even though they had no meaning for you?”

  “Well, suh, it sounded like she said ‘jer raven.’ Not egg-zackly ‘raven’, suh, but that’s th’ nearest Ah can come to it.”

  “Jer raven; jer raven?” de Grandin muttered musingly. “Jer—Barbe d’un bouc vert, I have it! Je reviens—I return—I come back!”

  “That’s jest what she done said!” Nancy agreed. “Jest like ah told yuh, suh.”

  He cast a swift, triumphant glance at me. “What have you now to say, my old one?”

  “Nothing, only—”

  “Très bien. Say the ‘nothing’ now and let the ‘only’ wait. At present we must seek for Madame Hildegarde.”

  A hurry call was put in to police headquarters, and for upward of three hours we patrolled the cold, deserted streets, but neither sight nor information of Hildegarde could we obtain. At last, cold, discouraged and almost exhausted, we turned back, dreading Norval’s tragic eyes when we reported failure.

  We paused a moment at the front portico of the house while I spread my lap-robe over the engine-hood. As I turned toward the steps a feeble whimpering moan came to me from the dwarf spruce bordering the porch. A moment later we had parted the evergreens, and de Grandin flashed his pocket torch into the shadow under them.

  Hildegarde crouched huddled in an angle of the wall, her flimsy black-crepe negligée in tatters, one black-satin mule hanging to her delicate unstockinged foot by its heel-strap, the other only heaven knew where. Beneath the rents in her diaphanous gown cancelli of deep, angry scratches showed, her feet were bruised and bleeding, and stained with clayey mud above the ankles, other scratches and earth-soil were on her knees and hands and arms, and the nail of every carefully-cared-for finger was grimy with fresh earth and broken to the quick. There were earth-stains on her face and hair, too, as if she might have wiped her countenance and put back the veil of her unbound tresses with muddy hands while she performed some arduous task.

  “Good God!” I exclaimed, stooping to gather the all but frozen girl in my arms and bear her up the steps.

  De Grandin nodded grimly. “You do the proper thing to call upon the Lord, my friend,” he murmured, holding back the door for me. “We shall have need of His help before we finish—and of Jules de Grandin’s help, too.”

  I shook my head despondently as we drove toward my house. “This case is much more serious than I’d thought at first,” I confessed.

  “Much,” de Grandin agreed. “Very damn much, I assure you.”

  “MORBLEU, MY WORST FEARS are confirmed!” he exclaimed as he perused the Morning Journal next day at breakfast. “Read him, my friend,” he thrust the paper at me, “read him and weep!” He pointed to an item in the upper right hand angle of the first page:

  GHOULS OPEN GIRL’S GRAVE

  Remove Body from Casket,

  Steal Lily from Dead Hands

  and Leave Remains Uncovered

  Police Seek Woman in Black

  Who Called at Cemetery Earlier

  in Night and Frightened Sexton

  Ghouls, working in the silence of St. Rose’s R.C. Cemetery, on the Andover Rd. two miles north of Harrisonville, it became known early today, dug up from a freshly-made grave the body of Miss Monica Doyle, 16, daughter of Patrick Doyle, 163 Willow Ave., Harrisonville, who died last Wednesday and was buried yesterday morning.

  From the slender hands crossed on the dead girl’s breast, clasping a rosary and the stem of a white lily, the ghouls stole the flower and carried it away.

  The corpse, with its shroud and burial clothing disordered and torn, was thrown back face down in the casket, and the lid replaced and grave left open.

  The crime, with its weird settings and the added mystery of the visit to the cemetery earlier in the night of a strange black-robed woman accompanied by a monstrous white dog, who frightened the sexton, Andrew Fischer, was disclosed early this morning when Ronald Flander, 25, and Jacob Rupert, 31, grave-diggers, going to prepare a grave for an early morning funeral, noticed the fresh earth heaped up by the Doyle girl’s violated grave and, going nearer, discovered the unearthed casket and corpse.

  Desecration of Miss Doyle’s grave forms one of the most remarkable crimes in the annals of New Jersey since the murder of Sarah Humphreys five years ago, the scene of which was the golf links of the Sedgemore Country Club which is slightly more than two miles distant from the cemetery and also abuts on the Andover Rd.

  One theory advanced is that a person possessed of religious fanaticism, swayed by the superstition that a lily buried with a body will thrive on the corpse, committed the deed to remove the flower.

  The police are now running down scores of clues in an effort to solve the mystery and an arrest is promised within 24 hours.

  I finished the grisly account, then stared in wide-eyed horror at the Frenchman. “This is terrible—devilish—as you say,” I admitted. “Who—”

  “Ah hah, who asks what overturned the cream-jug when the cat emerges from the salle à manger with whitened whiskers?” he shot back. “Come, let us go. There is no time to lose.”

  “Go? Where?”

  “To the cemetery of St. Rose, parbleu! Come, quick, make haste, my friend. The police, in pursuit of the score of clues they run down, may already have obliterated that which will be useful to us. Nous verrons!”

  “D’ye think they’ll really make an arrest?”

  “God forbid,” he shot back. “Come, for heaven’s kindly sake, make hurrying, my old one!”

  A SMALL EGG-SHAPED STOVE, CRAMMED to capacity with mixed soft coal and coke, heated the little cement-block office of St. Rose’s Cemetery to mid-August temperature. Mr. Fischer, a round-faced blue-eyed man in early middle age who looked as if he would have been more at home in a white jacket behind the counter of a delicatessen, nodded us a casual greeting from behind a copy of the Morgen Zeitung he was perusing with interest. “From th’ newspapers?” he asked. “Can’t tell you nothin’ more’n you already know. Can’t you fellers leave me have a little peace? I’m busy this mornin’—”

  “So much is obvious,” de Grandin cut in with a quick smile that took the edge from his irony, “but we will take but a moment of your time. Meanwhile, since your minutes are precious, perhaps you would accept a small remuneration—” There was a flash of green and a bank note changed hands with the rapidity of a prestidigitator’s card disappearing.

  “Sure, what can I do for you gents?” Mr. Fischer asked amiably.

  “Can you tell us of the strange lady in black whose appearance has been mentioned in the papers?”

  “Sure can. It was about half-past nine or ten o’clock last night when she liked to scared a lung outer me. We close th’ main gate at eight an’ th’ footpath gates at half-past nine, an’ I’d just locked th’ small gates an’ got ready to hit th’ sack when I heard ’em flappin’ an’ banging in th’ wind. It was pretty bad last night, you know. I went out to see what th’ matter was, an’ darned if th’ lock hadn’t been broke. It was kinder old an’ rusty anyhow, but it hadn’t ought to of broken in an ordinary wind-storm. I tinkered with it for a while, but couldn’t get it fixed, so I went back for a bit o’ rope or wire or sumpin to tie it.

  “There’s a tool shed over th’ other side o’ the priest lines, an’ I thought I’d find what I was lookin’ for there. Th’ men dumps everything they don’t happen to be usin’ in it. Well, sir, just as I was cuttin’ across to th’ shed, who should jump up outer nowhere but a great, long, tall woman with th’ biggest, ugliest brute of a dog you ever seen standin’ right alongside her. Gott im Himmel!”—he dropped his idiomatic American for the language of his forefathers—“was I scared!”

  De Grandin flicked a bit of ash from his cigarette. “And you can
describe her, perhaps?”

  Mr. Fischer considered the question. “I ain’t sure. It was so sudden, th’ way she bobbed up outer nowhere, an’ I don’t mind admittin’ I was more anxious to run than stand there an’ took at her. She was pretty tall, a good head taller’n the average woman, I’d say, an’ well, I s’pose you’d call her pretty, too. Kinder thin an’ straight, with great long hair all blowin’ round her face an’ shoulders, dressed in some sort o’ black robe with no sleeves, an’—an’ kinder—I don’t know just how to say it—sorter devilish-lookin’, you might say.”

  “Devilish? How?”

  “Well, she was smilin’ like she was pleased to meet me there—an’ even better pleased I was alone, if you get me. It was more like a snarl than a smile, I’d say; kinder pleased an’ savage-lookin’ at th’ same time.

  “An’ that dog! Mein Gott! Big as a calf an’ with a long, pointed snout an’ great big mouth hangin’ open, an’ sorter funny, slantin’ eyes, like a Chinaman’s or sumpin’ an’ they was flashin’ in th’ dark like a cat’s!”

  “U’m, did they move to attack you?”

  “No-o, can’t say they did, actually. They just stood there, th’ dog with one foot raised, like he was ready to jump me, an’ th’ woman standin’ beside him with her hair all blowin’ round her an’ her hand on th’ beast’s back—an’ both of ’em growled at me! So help me, th’ dog growled first, an’ th’ woman did th’ same. I din’t waste no time gettin’ away from there, I tell you!”

  “And you have no idea whence they came?”

  “None whatever.”

  “Nor where they went thereafter?”

  “Not me. I got back here fast as I could, an’ locked th’ door an’ moved th’ desk against it!”

  “U’m. And may one see the grave of the unfortunate Mademoiselle Doyle?”

  Racial antipathy flared in Fischer’s eyes as de Grandin used the French title, but memory of recent largess and hope of future honoraria was more potent than inherited hatred. “Sure,” he agreed with markedly lessened cordiality, and slipped a stained sheepskin reefer over his shoulders. “Come on; this way.”

  Casket and earth had been replaced in the violated sepulchre, but the raw red earth showed like a bleeding wound against the sod.

  De Grandin knelt to take a closer view of the trampled mud about the refilled grave, then rose with a nod. “Now, if you will be so good as to show us where you met the woman and her dog?” he asked.

  THE CEMETERY WAS A small one and obviously catered to a far from wealthy clientele. Few graves were properly mounded, and more briars than flowers evidently grew there in summer. Bare and desolate as the better portions of the park were, however, the section set aside for indigents and those who died without the pale was infinitely worse. No turf save weed crab-grass hid the bare red clay from view, the graves were fallen in, and those which sported markers were more pathetic than those unmarked, for mere white-painted boards or stones so crudely carved that any beggar might have scorned to own one were all the monuments. “Right here it was,” the superintendent halted in the rutted cinder path.

  Once more the Frenchman surveyed the terrain. Sinking to his knees he looked minutely at the red and sticky clay, then rose and with a queer abbreviated stride moved toward the line of leafless Lombardy poplars which served as wind-break by the rear fence of the graveyard.

  “Hey, I can’t wait no longer!” Fischer called. “See me in my office if you want to ask me anything.”

  “Sale caboche,” de Grandin cast a level stare of cold hatred at the sexton’s retreating back. “No matter, you have served your purpose; your absence is the best gift you can give us. Quick, Friend Trowbridge, stand before me, if you please.”

  From his waistcoat pocket he produced a cigarette lighter and set it flaring, and from the pocket of his topcoat drew a short length of candle. “I thought we might have need of this,” he explained as he proceeded to melt the grease and pour it carefully into the imprint of a slender shoe which showed in the clay.

  “Whatever are you doing?” I demanded, standing before him to shield him from the wind and the glance of any curious passers-by.

  He looked up, vacant-faced as a stone image, then gave me a long wink. “Perhaps I do construct a house in which to store your senseless questions, Friend Trowbridge.”

  As soon as the grease hardened in the footprint he wrapped it in two sheets of thick paper, then proceeded to pace across the graveyard, methodically obliterating every feminine footprint he could find.

  As we drove from the cemetery, “Slowly, my friend, slowly, if you please,” he bade as he scanned the scrub-pine growing by the roadway. Once or twice at his request I stopped while he made forays into the undergrowth. Finally, when we had consumed the better part of an hour traversing a mile, he returned from an investigative trip with a smile of satisfaction. “Triomphe!” he announced, holding his find up for inspection. It was a dainty black-satin bedroom mule, the strap designed to hold it to its wearer’s foot torn loose from its stitching at one end, and the whole smeared with sticky red-clay mud.

  “And now if you will put me down, I shall be very grateful,” he told me as we reached the central part of town.

  SOMETHING LIKE AN HOUR later he joined me in the consulting room. “Behold, my friend,” he told me. “You ask for evidence; I bring you proof. This”—he carefully unwrapped a parcel and laid its contents on the desk—“is the impression of the dainty footprint I took at the cemetery. This”—from his pocket he produced the satin mule he had salvaged at the roadside—“is what we found upon our homeward trip. And this”—from another pocket he drew the first slipper’s satin mate—“is Madame Hildegarde’s shoe which I procured from her maid just a little while ago. It is the shoe she wore when you discovered her unconscious by her house. Now, attend me:

  “The shoes are identical, save one is broken, one is whole; both are stained with red-clay mud, mud from St. Rose’s Cemetery. See, each one fits the impression I took among the graves. Enfin, they are not only Madame Hildegarde’s, they are the shoes she wore last night when she and the wolf-thing dug up the corpse of Mademoiselle Doyle. She and none other, Friend Trowbridge, was the mysterious ‘woman in black,’ and her companion was the revenant of Gilles Garnier, the werewolf of Saint Bonnot, which slipped into the world through the door opened by Mademoiselle Noyer at her never-to-be-enough-reprobated séance that Sunday night at Twelvetrees!

  “Laugh, snicker, grin like a dog! I tell you it is so! Plût à Dieu it were otherwise!”

  “I’m not laughing,” I denied. “At first I thought that you were at your favorite game of phantom-fighting; but developments in the case have been so strange and dreadful I don’t know what to say or think. But tell me—”

  “Anything I can,” he cut in impetuously, holding out both hands. “What would you know?”

  “If Hildegarde’s companion really were a werewolf why did they unearth the body of the Doyle girl? I’ve always heard werewolves attacked the living—”

  “Also the dead, my friend. There are different grades among them; some kill dogs and sheep, but fight mankind only when attacked, some are like hyenas and prey on the dead, others—the worst—lust after living human flesh and blood, and quest and kill men, women and children. It may be that the vile Garnier chose the helpless dead as victim of their raid because—”

  “Their raid?” I echoed. “Their—”

  “Alas, yes. It is all too true. Poor unfortunate Madame Hildegarde has become even as her conqueror and master, Gilles Garnier. She, too, is loup-garou. She, too, is of that multitudinous host not yet made fast in hell. Remember how she cried, ‘I will not come!’ last night, then told her maid, ‘It is no use, he has me?’ Also how she charged her femme de chambre with a farewell message of love to her husband ere she ran howling forth to join her ghostly master? Remember, too, how her nails were all mud-stained and broken when you found her. Assuredly she had been digging in the grave beside that other
one. Yes, hélas, it is so.”

  “Then why didn’t they—” I began, but the question stuck in my throat. “Why didn’t they—eat—” I stopped again, nauseated.

  “Because of what the dead girl’s hands clasped, my old and rare. The lily they could steal away and tear to bits—I found the shreds of it embedded in the mud beside the grave, though the police had overlooked it—but the blessèd rosary and the body assoiled with prayer and holy water and incense—ha, pardieu, those defied them, and they could do no more then vent their futile, baffled rage upon the corpse and offer it gross insult and cast it back into its casket. No.”

  He snatched a cigarette from his case and set it aglow with savage energy. “You are acquainted with the so-called ‘new psychology’ of Freud and Jung, at least you have a working knowledge of it; from it you learn there is no such thing as true forgetfulness. Every gross desire—every hatred, every passion, every lust the conscious, waking mind experienced is indexed and pigeon-holed in the recesses of the subliminal mind. Those whose conscious recollection is free from every vestige of envy, malice, hatred or lust may go to a séance, and there liberate all the repressed—all the ‘forgotten’—evil desires they have had since infancy without being anywise aware of it. We know from our study of psychology that fixed immutable laws govern mental processes. There is, by example, the law of similarity which evokes the association of ideas; there is the law of integration which splits mental images into integral fragments, and the law of reintegration which enables the subconscious mind to rearrange these split images into one completed picture of a past event or scene as one fits together the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle.

  “Very well. Ten or a dozen people seat themselves in silence round a table, every condition for light hypnosis is present—lack of external distractions of the attention, darkness, a common focusing of thought upon a single objective, that of attracting spirits. In such conditions the sitters may be said to ‘pool their consciousness’—the normal inhibitions of the conscious mind are relieved of duty. The sentry sleeps and the fortress gates are open. Conditions for invasion are ideal.