Black Moon

by Seabury Quinn

The drawing-room lights had been lowered again and the Swami was seated before a small table on which lay an ordinary lead pencil. He put his elbows on his knees and stared intently before him a long moment, then raised slender, ring-decked hands and moved them back and forth above the pencil. Faster and faster moved the undulating hands. It seemed, almost, they wove a pattern of invisible threads in the air. Then slowly, unbelievably, it happened. With a movement almost serpentine the pencil writhed a little, rose a full half-inch, then dropped back, the metallic band that held its rubber tip making a faint clicking sound against the polished table top. The Swami’s hands wove fresh patterns above it, came together with a soft clap, then separated slowly. And as they drew apart the pencil rose unsteadily, wavered drunkenly a moment at an acute angle and, almost against its will, it seemed, balanced on its sharpened point. The half-lit room seemed vibrant with something unseen and unholy. I had a sudden feeling of uncanny dread, as if I’d witnessed the raising of a dead and stiffened body. For a moment the insensate bit of rubber, wood and graphite stood upright as a toe-dancer executing a pirouette, then, falling drunkenly sidewise, rolled off the polished table to the floor.

  “How wonderful! Marvelous! Miraculous!” the whispered comments ran around the shadowed room.

  The Swami leant back in his chair, a look of physical exhaustion on his face. “Thought,” he murmured tiredly, “only thought is strong. What you have seen, my friends, is but a manifestation of the power of the will. That we call matter is of no consequence, no potency. The vaunted science of the West cannot explain such things; the stupid, cold religions of the West have nothing concrete to offer. Their storybooks are full of tales of miracles and wonders, all worked in the long-ago. But if you ask them for a miracle today—even such a little thing as that which I have done just now—they turn to vague excuses, saying that the age of miracles is past—”

  De Grandin had tiptoed to the hall now, as the Swami paused a moment, he came back into the drawing room, his silver-headed stick beneath his elbow. “Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur Swami,” he interrupted, “but here is one who does not subscribe to your thesis. In one of those story-books which you deride it is recorded how Pharaoh’s necromancers cast their rods upon the earth and they became live, hissing serpents. And when Aaron, Moses’ brother, cast his staff upon the ground, it likewise became a serpent and devoured those rod-serpents of Pharaoh’s sorcerers. Regardez-moi, s’il vous plaît—” He dropped into a chair opposite the Swami, braced his stick between his knees and began to make passes over it. “You vitalized a little, insignificant lead pencil, Monsieur Swami. Très bon. Me, I shall call a walking stick to life. Attendez!”

  He waved slim hands above the silver knob of the cane a moment, and the upright stick fell from between his knees, almost struck the floor, then, rallying with a wavering, uncertain movement, slowly rose until it stood upright upon its ferrule. For a moment it swayed gently, then rose clear of the floor and fell clattering to the polished boards at his feet.

  He rose and bowed to the assemblage as if he were an actor on a stage, but no applause greeted his exhibition. “What, is there none to show appreciation of my jonglerie?” he demanded. “For shame, messieurs et ’dames. Is it that you seek an explanation? Bien. I show you. Lights, if you will be so kind,” and as the lights snapped on, he took the cane up and showed them a three-foot length of black suture silk attached to it. “You see, I fasten this small thread to the stick, then I take the ends between my hands—so.” He drew the string taut, and the cane rose till it stood upon its ferrule. “Très bien. Then I loosen the thread, and the cane she leans from side to side. When I once more tighten the thread she comes back to the vertical. C’est très simple, n’est-ce-pas? It is an old, old juggler’s trick, one that I learned in boyhood. Yes, certainly.

  “‘Ah, but,’ you say, ‘the Monsieur Swami had no thread to make his pencil dance upon its tip. He are a really-truly supernatural someone.’ Ah, bah!” So quickly none of us divined his purpose, he lashed a hand out, thrust his fingers into the Swami’s waistcoat pocket and dragged out the pencil with which the miracle had been worked. From its upper end, close to the metal cap that held the rubber to the wood, there dangled eighteen inches of hair-fine black silk thread.

  A flush stained the Swami’s cheeks and brow, his great dark eyes suffused with tears of embarrassment. “It is a trick,” he almost shrieked. “A trick—”

  “But certainly, mon ami,” the Frenchman laughed delightedly. “A trick it is, and a most good one, too. Come now, confess that you did make the innocent joke tonight. They asked you for to perform some wonder, and you did do it for them. Very well you did it, too. I could not have done it better myself, and I am very clever. Let us make no hard feelings”—he clapped the Swami jovially upon the shoulder—“let us all be jolly friends together.”

  The amiability he sought to rouse was something less than hilarious, but at least the tension had been broken, and half an hour later we took our leave with a rather wintry good-bye from our hostess.

  “NAME OF A SMALL green man!” he chuckled delightedly as we drove to my house. “Did I not make a monkey out of him, Friend Trowbridge? I think that he will not try to make the dancing pencil very soon again; not before that audience, at any rate.”

  “H’m,” I rejoined. “You surely showed him up, but all the same I have a feeling everything was not as innocent as it seemed. There was an atmosphere of something evil—”

  “Parbleu, you felt it, too? I am delighted!”

  “Delighted!”

  “But certainly. I had a feeling of malaise, of something sinister and ugly, directly I went into that room where he drooled his senseless dribble, but I am the suspicious one. I have traveled much among the fakirs and seen the so-called holy men at their unholy monkey-business. I do not like or trust those ones. To me they have the odor of dead fish.

  “It was no parlor trick that he performed tonight, my friend. He was in deadly earnest, and would have let the imposition stand, had I not unmasked it. It was as false as his philosophy and his alleged religion, but—did you take note of that gathering?” he changed the subject abruptly.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Its composition. Did you notice the preponderance of women? And what sort of women? Not young, not old, but middle-aged.

  “A very dangerous age indeed, my friend. Too old for romance, yet too young for resignation, and obviously well supplied with cash. Such people make the ideal victims for the charlatan. I damn think I shall follow the investigation of this Monsieur Swami further in the morning. Yes, certainly.”

  HE WAS LATE FOR dinner the next evening, and when he came in there was that expression in his little round blue eyes that told me he had made an important discovery. “Well?” I demanded as we took our seats.

  “Non, my dear, good friend, I do not think that it is well,” he denied as he sipped his Martini. “Upon the contrary, I fear that it is very not-so-well. I have apologized to Monsieur Doniphan and agreed to take his case.”

  “You mean you’ll be a party to having Austine declared insane—”

  “Better temporarily insane than dead, mon vieux. Perhaps she will be both before this business has come to its end. Attend me, if you please,” he leveled his soup spoon at me. “This morning I went to the court house and asked to see the wills that have been probated in the last three months.”

  “Yes?”

  “Oui-da. Among them I did find the one I sought, that of the poor dear Mademoiselle Santho, of whom the lady of the several chins told us last night. Dear she may have been, but certainly she was not poor. She had a comfortable fortune, oh, a very comfortable one or two hundred thousand dollars. And what did she do with it, I ask you? Parbleu, she willed it to her dear friend the Swami Ramapali! What do you make from that?”

  “Undue influence?”

  “Indubitably. Damn yes. But there is something more, a something sinister that does not leap immediately to the eye. She died, if you reca
ll, of snake-bite.”

  “Yes, I remember hearing that.”

  “Very well, or, more precisely, very bad. She made her will upon a Wednesday. Upon the following day, Thursday, she was bitten fatally by a snake. Was it not a most accommodating serpent who dispatched her so conveniently and quickly?”

  “Good heavens, d’ye think—”

  “Not yet, my friend. I do not think. I am like a blind man in an unfamiliar place. I feel about me, grope for something which will show me where I am and how I should proceed, and what is it my searching fingers find? Nothing, pardieu! Nothing at all. It may be that I raise the shadow of a bugaboo unnecessarily, but—can you spare tomorrow morning to go out to Monsieur Swami’s colony where Mademoiselle Austine has taken residence? I should greatly like to see that place.”

  IT WAS EVIDENT THAT Swami Ramapali did not welcome visitors to the colony, for a cement wall some ten feet high surrounded the grounds, and the morning sunlight glinted on the raw edges of a triple row of broken bottles set in mortar on its top. The only entrance was a narrow door of heavy planking reinforced with iron straps and fitted at man’s height with a little wicket through which callers might be inspected.

  De Grandin struck a sharp, authoritative knock on the door, then, as no answer came to his hail, repeated the summons more loudly. The wicket in the door flew open abruptly and a dark face topped by a soiled white cotton turban scowled at us. “Go away,” the porter ordered. “Your noise annoys the silence of this holy place.”

  “Tiens, Monsieur Dirty-Hat, you will experience even more annoyance if you do not make your door open all soon. I am Dr. Jules de Grandin and this is Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, and we would talk with Mademoiselle Austine Doniphan. Conduct us to her quickly, if you please.”

  The panel snapped shut suddenly as it had opened, and we were left to view the door again in silence.

  “Queue d’un rat mort, they shall not shut their twenty-times-accursed door in our faces!” de Grandin swore. “They shall not—”

  The heavy door swung open slowly and the porter greeted us with a salaam. “Be pleased to enter through the Gateway to Peace,” he announced sonorously.

  “Ah, now, my friend, you use the gas for culinary purposes,” de Grandin complimented as we stepped across the threshold.

  We followed our guide down a long alley lined with little cement hutches no larger than good-sized dog houses and, like dog houses, having only one opening shaped like an inverted U and so low that whoever entered would have to crawl on hands and knees. Crossing the alleyway were other even narrower passages, apparently forming a series of concentric circles radiating from a low one-story structure of stucco with a pagoda-like roof and low porch surrounded by a series of interlaced trefoil arches. There was no sign of life in the street through which we passed, but in the transverse alleys we caught glimpses of white-robed figures kneeling before the kennel-like houses, heads bent, hands clasped in what seemed silent contemplation. Curiously enough, several of them seemed to combine cigarettes with their devotions, for we saw them raise the little paper tubes to their mouths, draw deeply at them, and blow smoke slowly from their nostrils.

  We reached the central structure, mounted the low single step that led to its veranda and paused before a curtained doorway. “Proceed into the presence of the Sublimity,” our guide bade, holding back the hanging of striped cotton goods that draped the doorway, and we stepped into the almost total darkness of a bare, unfurnished room. As my eyes became accustomed to the gloom I descried a seated figure at the far side of the apartment. He was squatting on a large pillow, legs crossed, feet folded sole-upward upon his calves, hands resting palm-up in his lap, with fingertips barely touching. As far as I could see his costume consisted of a sheet of saffron-yellow cotton loosely belted at the waist, leaving arms, chest, legs and feet uncovered. His head was bowed, nor did he look up as we entered, but:

  “You would speak with her who in the world was known as Austine Doniphan?” he asked in a low voice, and instantly I recognized the Swami Ramapali.

  But how changed! Where there had been luxuriant dark hair the night we saw him at the Tenbroeck house we now saw only naked scalp, for his head was shaven smooth as an egg, giving him at once a curiously infantile and aged appearance.

  De Grandin bent a sharp look on him “It seems that I was right, Monsieur Swami,” he announced. “I could have sworn that you were crowned with a wig. Your hair, apparently, is no more genuine than your magic—”

  “You would speak with her who in the world was known as Austine Doniphan?” the Swami interrupted in the same low, level voice.

  “By blue, we would, and quickly, if you please, Monsieur. My patience is no longer than my nose, and nature has not gifted me with a long proboscis.”

  The Swami struck his hands together with a sharp clap. “Bid Savatri to the presence,” he ordered as our late guide paused upon the threshold with a deep salaam.

  We waited for perhaps five minutes while de Grandin and the Swami seemed to be engaged in seeing who could stare the other down, then a shaft of sunlight stabbed the shadows as the doorway curtain was pulled back and a girl stepped soundlessly into the room.

  I had not seen Austine Doniphan for some time, and probably should not have recognized her if I’d passed her in the street. Certainly the odd figure which crept into our presence bore no resemblance to the girl I’d known. Her costume seemed to consist of some yards of soiled white cotton cloth wrapped round and round her body from bosom to ankles almost as tightly as mummy-bandages. Her arms and shoulders were uncovered, as were her feet and ankles, and so tightly was the cotton bound about her knees that she walked like a hobbled animal, setting one foot precisely before the other, and turning her hips with an exaggerated motion. A loose end of her winding sheet had been brought up to drape her head with a sort of veil, secured by a long wooden pin passed through cloth and hair. Her arms were held stiffly at her sides, hands at right angles to wrists, palms parallel to the floor. On her brow above the bridge of her nose a small daub of bright vermilion showed like a fresh wound against the skin.

  Her eyes were large and fine, with long, silky lashes, and though her face was thin with sunken-cheeked thinness, there was no evidence of ill-health. I recognized the symptom. Primary emaciation resulting from sudden diminution of diet.

  Looking neither right nor left, without so much as indicating by the lifting of an eyebrow that she saw us, she slipped forward with her oddly creeping walk and came to a halt before the Swami.

  A moment she paused thus, head bent demurely, hands clasped together palm to palm, the fingers pointing downward, then like a hinged dummy she sank to her knees, raised both hands above her head, bent forward, laying them upon the floor palm-upward, and dropped her forehead between them.

  “Name of a name!” de Grandin swore. “This is indecent, this! Arise, thou foolish one, stand on thy feet—”

  “Rise, follower of the Eternal Truth,” the Swami bade, and at the command the girl struggled to her knees, awkwardly, for the tightness of her winding-sheet was like a fetter, raised her hands above her head and joined them palm to palm, but kept her eyes downcast. “Look on these men,” he ordered. “Dost thou know them?”

  She cast a quick, almost frightened glance in our direction, then bent her head again. “I know one of them, Sublimity. He is a friend of my father—”

  The Swami struck his palms together sharply. “Remember thy oath, Savatri! Thou has no father nor mother, nor any friends or kin. Thy every thought is centered on the Infinite Eternal—”

  The girl lurched forward till she lay full-length before him and beat her forehead on the floor. “Forgive, forgive, Sublimity! Be patient with the dullest of thy pupils!” Her self-abasement was so complete that I felt almost sick with embarrassment for her.

  “Proceed, then, but be mindful of your vow,” he ordered.

  “One of them, Sublimity, was known to me in the house wherein I dwelt in the world of ignorance,” she r
eplied in a low, frightened voice as she once more struggled to her knees. “He was a doctor—a physician who in his ignorance pretended to have power to cure the ills of the flesh—”

  “Instruct him, Savatri,” the Swami nodded to her.

  “Dr. Trowbridge,” she turned her great eyes, large and gentle as a gazelle’s, full on me, “I pity you. You struggle in the dark, even as I did before the light of Truth Eternal fell on me. Do you not know, you foolish old man, that what we call the flesh, the body, all that we think material, are but the faintest shadows of shadows, and nothing real exists in the universe but thought? By treating what we call our bodies with contempt, by starving them, tormenting them, bringing them to utter and complete subjection, we weaken them but strengthen our souls. Anon we shall succeed in sloughing them away, flinging off the useless and undying—”

  “Cordieu, Mademoiselle, you interest me,” de Grandin broke in. “And the end of it is—”

  “Nothing,” she replied. “From the Infinite we came, and slowly toward the Infinite we struggle through countless incarnations. At last we shall attain perfection and be absorbed into the Infinite, all trace of self—of what you call the personality—forever lost and blotted out.”

  “Well said, my pupil,” the Swami commended softly. “But is not the Way of Truth too hard for you? I have thought sometimes you were not able to endure the task of bodily subjection—”

  “Sublimity!” Austine fell forward on her face and clasped her hands across her bowed neck. “Have gracious pity! Do not send me hence, I beg! If I have faltered in my duty it was not because I lacked the will; I had not strength to beat the flesh into complete subjection—”

  There was something subtle and beguiling in the soft tone of his voice as he broke in: “For those who have the courage there is a short way to Kailas. There is a long and toilsome way, and a short, easy path.

  “Omkar holds the door of Kailas open for those who would be reabsorbed into the Infinite without necessity for countless reincarnations—”