Black Moon

by Seabury Quinn

  DR. COIQUITT’S HOUSE IN Dahlonega Road loomed dark as Dolorous Garde against the smalt blue of the winter sky. In keeping with his bizarre personality its owner had had the place painted black, with no relieving spot of color, save for the silver nameplate on the door that bore the single word COIQUITT. No chink showed in the tightly drawn shutters, no ray or spot of light came from the house, but not to be deterred by the tomblike air of the place de Grandin beat a tattoo on the panels with the handle of his military swagger stick. “Nom d’un nom d’un nom d’un artichaut,” he promised savagely, “I shall stand here hammering until I bring the filthy place down on his ears, or till he answers me!”

  At last his persistence was rewarded. A shuffling step sounded beyond the portal and the door drew back on a crack, not swinging on hinges, but sliding in a groove on oiled bearings. It would have taken a battering-ram to force the place, I thought, as I noted the strong steel of the track in which the heavy oak door traveled.

  A Negro, heavy-set and obviously powerful, but dreadfully hunchbacked, peered at us through the aperture. “The doctaire is not seeing patients now,” he announced in an accent I could not quite place, but which sounded vaguely French.

  “Nevertheless, he will see us, mon vieux,” de Grandin promised, and launched into a torrent of words, speaking in a patois I could not make out, but which the other understood instantly.

  “One moment, if you please, M’sieu,” he begged as he drew back the door and stood aside for us to enter. “I shall be pleased to tell the doctaire—”

  “Non, by no means,” de Grandin denied. “Do not disturb him at his lucubrations. We shall go to him all quietly. I know that he will see us gladly.”

  “Bien, M’sieu. You will find him at the head of the stairway,” the servant answered as we stepped across a long hall carpeted in black, with black, lack-luster walls and ceilings.

  “He is a Haitian, that one,” de Grandin confided as we crept up the black-carpeted stairway. “He thinks that I am an initiate of voodoo, a papaloi. I did not tell him that I was—in just so many words—but neither did I deny it. And now”—he halted, braced himself as for a physical encounter, and struck the black-enameled door before us with his knuckles.

  “Entrez,” a deep voice answered, and we stepped across the threshold.

  The room was positively bewildering. It ran across the full width of the house, some thirty feet or more, and the floor above had been removed so that the vaulted ceiling was at least eight yards above us. The floor was of some black and shining composition, strewn with rugs of leopard skin with the heads and claws left on, and the glass eyes set in the beasts’ stuffed heads blazed at us with a threatening fury. The walls were dull black and emblazoned with a great gold dragon that seemed marching round and round the room, while across the farther end was built a divan upholstered in black silk and strewn with red and cloth-of-gold pillows. Here and there against the walls were cabinets of ebony or buhl containing large and strangely-bound books, scientific paraphernalia and bits of curiosa such as skeletons of small animals, stuffed gila monsters and serpents coiled as if forever in the act of striking, and baby crocodiles. A human skeleton, fully articulated, swung from a frame of ebony like a gallows, and in a tiled fireplace there stood a retort hissing over a great bunsen burner. Incongruously, on a book-strewn table in the center of the room, there was a massive silver vase containing a great bouquet of orchids.

  The man who sat at the table raised his eyes as we entered, and as I met his gaze I felt a sudden tingling in my spine—the sort of feeling one has when in the reptile house at the zoo he looks down into a pit filled with lizards and nameless crawling things.

  Coiquitt’s eyes were black as polished obsidian and strangely shiny, yet unchanging in their stare as those of one newly dead, and almost idly, as one takes minute note of such trifles at such times, I noticed that the lids above the odd, unchanging eyes had a faint greenish tinge and a luster like that of old silk. For a moment he raked us with a glance of cold, ophidian malignancy, then abruptly lowered his lids, as if he drew a curtain between us and his thoughts.

  “Good evening, gentlemen—dare I say colleagues?” There was suave mockery that threatened to become stark savagery at any moment in his voice. “To what am I indebted for the honor of this wholly unexpected and I’m sure quite undeserved visit?”

  The anger that had shown in Jules de Grandin’s face had given way to a puzzled frown, and beneath his sharply waxed, diminutive mustache his lips were pursed as if he were about to whistle. For a long moment he made no reply, and his silence seemed to goad the other into sudden fury. “Quoi?” he demanded almost shrilly. “Is it that you come to see a marvel, and are stricken speechless at the sight? I am not on display, my simple ones. Speak up and state your business and be off!”

  “Morbleu!” Surprise seemed to have forced the word from de Grandin.

  “What is it that you—” began the other, but de Grandin ignored him completely.

  “Not Coiquitt!” he almost shouted at me. “Not Coiquitt, Trowbridge, pour l’amour d’un porc louche! It is Dessiles, Pierre Dessiles, the apostate, false alike to his country and his Aesculapian oath as a physician! Dessiles the necromancer, the sale espion, dismissed from the faculté de médicine, convicted of conniving with the filthy Boche to sell his country’s secrets, and condemned to penal servitude for life on Devil’s Island!” He leveled his small swagger stick at the other as if it were a weapon and continued his denunciation: “I had heard he had escaped from confinement and made his way to Haiti and become a member of the voodooists, and when I first saw him at the hospital I was almost sure I recognized him, though when he turned to face me I was just as certain that I was mistaken, for in the olden days his eyes were gray, now they are black. I do not know how he has done it, but I know beyond a doubt now that he is Dessiles, despite the changed color of his eyes. I cannot be mistaken in that voice, that monstrous egotism of the ass who struts about in a lion’s skin. However much the leopard has succeeded in effacing his spots or Dessiles in changing his eye-color, the leopard still is but an overgrown, great pussy-cat and Dessiles remains a stinking charlatan and traitor!”

  “Touché!” the man behind the table laughed with a low hard raucousness like the crackling of crushed paper. “You are right on every count, my little droll one, and since your knowledge goes no farther than yourself, and you shall go no farther than this room, you might as well know all.” With an almost incredibly quick motion he flung open a drawer in the table and snatched a heavy automatic pistol from it, swinging it in a quick arc between de Grandin and me, steady as a pendulum and deadly as a serpent poised to strike. “Be seated, gentlemen,” he ordered rather than invited. “When the time has come to say au ’voir you may stand, if you wish, but until then I must insist that you sit—and keep your hands in plain sight.”

  I collapsed into the nearest chair, but de Grandin looked about him deliberately, chose a comfortable divan, and dropped on it, resting his short swagger stick across his knees and beating a tattoo on it with lean, nervous fingers. “And now,” he prompted, heedless alike of the menacing, blank stare in Coiquitt’s glassy eyes and the threat of the pointed pistol, “you were about to regale us with the story of your adventures, were you not, Monsieur?”

  “I was about to say that I survived the green hell of the Île du Diable. They penned me in like a brute beast, stabled me on stinking straw in a sty no pig with amour propre would consent to live in, made me drag a ball and chain behind me, starved me, beat me—but I survived. And I escaped. Through swamps that swarmed with crocodiles and poison snakes and reeked with pestilence and fever, I escaped. Through shark-infested waters and shores that swarmed with gendarmes on the watch for me, I escaped, and found safe sanctuary in the houmforts of the voudois.

  “They welcomed me for my learning, but, pardieu, they had much to teach me, too! I learned, by example, how to make a zombi, how to draw the soul from the body and leave only an automat
on that moves and breathes, but has no mind or reason. I learned from them how it is possible to cast the illness out of one and into another—even how to swerve the clutching hand of death from one to another. Poor little fool, do you know that in the mountain fastnesses of Haiti there are men and women still young and strong and virile who were old when Toussaint l’Ouverture and Henri Christophe raised the banner of revolt against the French? How? Because, parbleu, they know the secret I alone of all white men have learned from them—how to turn the hand of death from one man to another. But there must be a willing victim for the sacrifice.

  “There must be one who says that he will die in place of the other. Granted this, and granted the such power as I possess, the rest is easy. Life begins at forty, some Yankee has said fatuously. Pardieu, it can begin again at seventy or eighty or a hundred, or flow back strong and vibrant into one who lies on death’s doorsill, provided always there is one who will become the substitute of him whose time is almost sped.

  “That is the secret of the cures I’ve made, my silly little foolish one. I have not changed the score. Death still collects his forfeit, but he takes a different victim; that is all. Yet I grow rich upon the hope and the credulity of those who see only the credit columns of the ledger Death keeps. They do not realize, the fools! that every credit has its corresponding debit, and when Death finally strikes his balance, ‘Too bad,’ they say, ‘he had so much to live for, yet he died just as she regained health.’ Ha-ha, it is to laugh at human gullibility, mes enfants. You, by example, would never stoop of practicing such chicanery, I am certain. Oh, no! If you could not effect a cure you would permit the patient to die peacefully, and raise your hands and eyes to heaven in pious resignation. Me, I am different. As long as there are fools there will be those to prey on them, and I shall keep Death’s books, collect my stipend for my work, and be known as the great doctor who has never lost a case—”

  ”I fear you have lost this one, cher savant,” the ghost of an ironic grin appeared beneath the waxed ends of de Grandin’s small mustache. “We have heard all we desired, and—”

  “And now the time has come to say, ‘Adieu pour l’éternité!’” the other broke in savagely as he leveled the pistol, steadying his elbow on the table. “You think—”

  “Non, by blue, it is that I damn know!” de Grandin’s voice was hard and sharp as a razor as he raised one knee slightly, pressed his hand against the leather knob of his swagger stick and gave it a sharp half-turn.

  The report was no louder than the bursting of an electric light bulb, and there was no smoke from the detonation of the cartridge in the gun-barrel hidden in the cane, but the missile sped to its mark with the accuracy of an iron-filing flying to a magnet, and Coiquitt swayed a little in his chair, as if he had been struck by an unseen fist. Then, between the widow’s peak of the black hair that grew well down on his forehead and the sharply accented black brows above the glassy, unchanging black eyes, there came a spot of red no larger than a dime, but which spread till it reached the size of a quarter, a half-dollar, and finally splayed out in an irregular red splash that covered almost the entire forehead. There was a look of shocked surprise, almost of reproof, in the cold visage, and the black, lack-luster eyes kept staring fixedly at de Grandin.

  Then suddenly, appallingly, the man seemed to melt. The pistol dropped from his unnerved hand with a clatter and his head crashed down upon the table, jarring the great silver bowl of orchids till it nearly overturned, and dislodging a pile of books so they crashed to the floor.

  “And that, unless I am much more mistaken than I think, is that, my friend,” de Grandin rose and walked across the room to stand above the dead man slumped across the table. “The English, a most estimable people, have a proverb to the effect that the one who would take supper with the devil would be advised to bring with him a long spoon. Eh bien, I took that saying to heart before coming to this place, mon vieux. This little harmless-seeming cane, she is a very valuable companion in the tight fix, I do assure you. One never knows when he may find himself in a case where he cannot make use of his pistol, when to make a move to draw a weapon would be to sign one’s own death warrant; but he who would shoot quickly if he saw you reach for a weapon would never give a second thought or glance to this so little, harmless seeming stick of mine. No, certainly. Accordingly, when he had bidden us be seated and threatened us with his pistol, I took great care to seat myself where I could aim my cane at him as I held it across my knees, with nothing intervening to spoil the shot I knew I must take at him sooner or later. Tiens, am I not the clever one, mon vieux? But certainly, I should say yes.”

  “You certainly got us out of a tight fix,” I admitted. “Five minutes ago I shouldn’t have cared to offer a nickel for our chance of getting out of here alive.”

  He looked at me reproachfully. “While I was with you, Friend Trowbridge?”

  For a moment he bent over the man sprawled across the table, then, “Ah-ha!” he cried jubilantly. “Ah-ha-ha! Behold his stratagem, my friend!”

  I went a little sick as I looked, for it seemed to me he gouged the dead man’s eyes out of their sockets, but as I took a second glance I understood. Over his eyeballs, fitted neatly underneath the lids, Coiquitt had worn a pair of contact lenses that simulated natural eyes so well that only a fixed stare betrayed them, and they were made with black irides, entirely concealing the natural gray of his eyes.

  “He had the cunning, that one,” de Grandin grudgingly admitted as he dropped the little hemispheres of glass upon the table. “He made but one great mistake. He underestimated Jules de Grandin. It is not wise to do that, Friend Trowbridge.”

  “How will you explain his death,” I asked. “Of course, you shot in self-defense, but—”

  “But be stewed in sulphur and served hot with brimstone for Satan’s breakfast,” he broke in. “The man was an escaped convict, a traitor to France and a former agent of the Boche. I am an officer of the Republic, and had the right to apprehend him for the American authorities. He resisted arrest, and”—his shrug was a masterpiece, even for him—“he is no longer present. C’est tout simple, n’est-ce-pas?”

  The telephone began to ring with a shrill insistence and instinctively I reached for it, but he put out his hand to arrest me. “Let it ring, my friend. He is past all interest in such things, and as for us, we have more important business elsewhere. I would inspect Mademoiselle Camille—”

  “You think she may have—”

  “I do not know just what to think. I have the hope, but I cannot be sure. Come, hasten, rush, fly; I entreat you!”

  CAMILLA LAY UPON THE study sofa much as we had left her, and smiled wanly at us as he hurried into the room. “You did see him, didn’t you?” she asked with something akin to animation in her voice.

  “We did, indeed, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin assured her, “and what was much more to the point, he saw us.”

  “I knew you must have talked to him and made him relent, for just a little while ago—it couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen minutes—I had another dreadful attack, and just when I had given up all hope and knew that I was dying it stopped, and I found I could breathe freely again. Now I feel almost well once more. Perhaps”—hope struggled with fear in her eyes—“perhaps I shall recover?”

  “Perhaps you shall, indeed, Mademoiselle,” he nodded reassuringly. “Come into the examination room if you will be so kind. It is that we should like to see what we can see.”

  It was amazing, but it was true. The most minute examination failed to show a symptom of angina pectoris. There was no area of dullness, no faint suggestion of a heart murmur, and her pulse, though rather light and rapid, was quite steady.

  “Accept our most sincere congratulations, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin murmured as he helped her from the table. “It seems you are on the highway to complete recovery.”

  “Oh!” her exclamation was a small, sad sound, and there was an enmeshed, desperate look in her eyes. “Rick! If
I get well, he’ll—”

  De Grandin made a little deprecating sound with his tongue against his teeth. “It may be even as you say, ma chère. I would not give you the false hope. Again, it may be quite otherwise. Have you courage to go with us to the hospital and see?”

  THE SUPERVISOR OF THE third floor where young Bream’s room was met us at the elevator. “It’s really amazing,” she confided as we walked down the corridor. “Mr. Bream has been improving steadily these past six weeks, but shortly after ten o’clock tonight he had a dreadful paroxysm, and we thought it was the end. We had to get Dr. Carver the house physician, for all our efforts to get Dr. Coiquitt on the ’phone were useless. Dr. Carver gave us no hope, but suddenly—almost miraculously, it seemed to me—the spasm passed and Mr. Bream began to breathe freely. In a little while he fell asleep and has been resting ever since. I never knew a patient sick as he was with myocarditis to recover fully, but—”

  “Strange things are happening every day, Madame,” de Grandin reminded her. “Perhaps this is one of them.”

  I had not treated Bream, and so had no basis of comparison between his condition as I found him and his former state, but careful examination revealed nothing alarming.

  His pulse was weak and inclined to be thready, and his respiration not quite satisfactory, but there was no evidence of organic affection. With bed-rest and good nursing he should make an excellent prospect for some life insurance salesman in a year or less, I thought. De Grandin agreed with me, and turned to Camilla, eyes agleam with delight. “You may congratulate him on his impending recovery, Mademoiselle,” he whispered, “but do it softly—gently. The aching sweetness of a lover’s kiss—morbleu, but it can play the very devil with a normal heart, when one is not so strong—have the discretion, Mademoiselle.”

  “I’m hanged if I can understand it,” I confessed as we left the hospital. “First Bream is dying, then Coiquitt, or Dessiles, seems to cure him, but makes Camilla wilt and wither like a flower on the stem as he improves. Then, when you shoot him, she makes an amazing recovery and Bream seems practically well. If he had retrogressed as she recovered—”