“Her progress has been satisfactory so far,” de Grandin took refuge in that vagueness which physicians have used since the days of Hippocrates. “I see no reason why she should not make a quick, complete recovery.”
“What’s it all about?” I demanded as we reached the street. “You seem to see some connection between that ring and Jobina Houston’s seizure, but—”
“Your guess is good as mine, perhaps a little better,” he admitted as he held his stick up to signal a taxi. “My recollections of the cults of Bastet and Pasht are somewhat hazy. I must put on the toque de pensée—the how do you call him—thinking-hat?—before I can give you an opinion. At present I am stumbling in the dark like a blind man in a strange neighborhood.”
IT MUST HAVE BEEN sometime past midnight, for the moon which had come out with the cessation of the storm had nearly set, when the ringing of the bedside telephone woke me. “Dr. Trowbridge speaking,” I announced as I lifted the instrument.
The voice that answered me was high and thin with incipient hysteria. “This is Hazel Armstrong, Doctor—the girl you left with Jobina Houston, you know.”
“Oh?”
“I’ll say it’s, Oh! She’s gone.”
“Eh? How’s that?”
“She’s gone, I tell you. Walked right out in her nightgown, and in this cold, too.” Her voice broke like a smashing cup, and I could hear the sound of high-pitched sobbing over the wire.
“Stop crying!” I commanded sharply. “Stop it at once and tell me just what happened.”
“I—I don’t know, sir. I think she’s gone crazy, and I’m scared. I did just as you told me, kept her covered up and kept the water bottles hot, but after a while I fell asleep. About ten minutes ago—maybe fifteen—I heard a noise and when I woke up I saw her standing by the door, about to go out. She’d pulled her nightgown down off the shoulders, and had a perfectly terrible look on her face. I said, ‘Jobina, what in the world are you doing?’ and then I stopped talking, for she looked at me and growled—growled like an animal, sir. I thought she was going to spring at me, and held a pillow up for a shield, but finally she turned away and went out the door. I didn’t try to stop her—I was afraid!”
“Do not be frightened, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin’s voice came soothingly over the extension. “We shall go seeking her at once. Be good enough to leave the door unlocked.”
“Unlocked? With a crazy woman on the rampage? Not me, sir. If you find her you knock three times on the door like this”—three sharp taps sounded as she struck the telephone with her nail—“I’ll let you in, but—”
“Very well,” he agreed. “Have it that way, if you wish, Mademoiselle. We go in search of her at once.”
“She can’t have gone far in her night-clothes in such weather as this,” I volunteered as we set out. “I only hope she doesn’t develop pneumonia—”
“I greatly doubt she will,” he comforted. “The inward fire—”
“The what—”
“No matter, I was only thinking aloud. To the right, if you please.”
“But she lives in Raleigh Street, down that way—”
“We shall not find her there, my friend. She will be at Monsieur Driggs’ unless I am far more mistaken than I think. When the cat goes mousing one goes to the mousehole to find her, n’est-ce-pas?”
I shook my head. This talk of cats and mice seemed utterly irrelevant.
THE AUTOMATIC ELEVATOR TOOK us up to the floor where Scott Driggs lived, and the heavy carpets on the hall floor made our footsteps noiseless as we hurried down the corridor. “Ah?” de Grandin murmured as we turned the corner and came in view of his apartment entrance. “Ah-ha?” The door hung open and a little stream of pallid lamplight dribbled out into the corridor.
Through the door leading to Scott’s bedroom, which stood ajar, we saw them like the figures in a tableau. Scott lay motionless upon the bed, and standing by him, seeming more a phantom than a person, stood Jobina Houston.
But how changed! She wore a night-gown of sheer silver-blue crêpe, knife-pleated from the bosom, and flaring like an inverted lily-cup from the waist, but she had torn the bodice of the robe, or turned it down, so bust and shoulders were exposed, and she was clothed only from waist to insteps. Her straight-cut uncurled black hair hung about her face like that of some Egyptian woman pictured on the frescoes of a Pharaoh’s tomb, and as we stepped across the sill she turned her face toward us.
Involuntarily I shrank back, for never on a human countenance had I seen such a look of savage hatred. Although her lids were lowered it seemed her eyes glared through the palpebrae, and the muscles round her mouth had stretched until the very contours of her face were altered. There was something feline—bestial—about it, and bestial was the humming, growling sound that issued from her throat through tight-closed lips.
The glance—if you could call it that—she threw in our direction lasted but a second, then she turned toward the man on the bed. She moved with a peculiar gliding step, so silently, so furtively that it seemed that she hardly stepped at all, but rather as if she were drawn along by some force outside herself. I’d seen a cat move that way as it rushed in for the kill when it had finished stalking a bird.
I opened my mouth to shout a warning—or a protest, I don’t know which—and de Grandin clapped his hand across my lips. “Be silent, species of an elephant!” he hissed, then stepped across the room as silently as the form moving toward the bed.
“Jobina Houston,” he called softly, yet in a voice so cold and distinct it might have been the tinkle of a breaking icicle. “Jobina Houston, attend me! Do not be deceived, Jobina, God is not mocked. The Lord God overcame Osiris, threw down Memnon’s altars and made desolate the temples of Bastet and Sechmet. Those Olden Ones, they have no being; they are but myths. The fires upon their altars have been cold a thousand years and more; no worshippers bow at their shrines, their priests and priestesses have shuddered into dust—”
The woman faltered, half turned toward him, seemed uncertain of her next step, and he walked quickly up to her, holding out his hand imperatively. “The ring!” he ordered sharply. “Give me the ring thou wearest without right, O maiden of the latter world!”
Slowly, like a subject under hypnosis, or a sleep-walker making an unconscious gesture, she raised her left hand, and I could have sworn the green stone of her ring glowed in the lamplight as if it were the living eye of a cat.
He drew the heavy circlet from the girl’s slim finger and dropped it into his pocket. “Quick, Friend Trowbridge,” he ordered, “take a blanket from the bed, envelope her in it as in a camisole de force—what you call the strait-jacket! Quickly, while her indecision lasts!”
I obeyed him mechanically, expecting every moment she would resist me ferociously, but to my astonishment she stood quiescent as a well trained horse when the groom puts the harness on it.
“Bien,” he ordered, “let us take her home and see that she is rendered docile with an opiate.”
Half an hour later Jobina lay tucked in bed, sleeping under an injection of a half-grain of morphine. Hazel Armstrong had gone home, the city’s noises had sunk to a low, muted hum, and in the east the stars were paling in the light of coming day.
“NOW MAYBE YOU’LL CONDESCEND to tell me what it’s all about?” I asked sarcastically as we drove home after turning Jobina over to the nurse for whom we’d telephoned the agency.
He raised his narrow shoulders in the sort of shrug that no one but a Frenchman can achieve and made one of those half-grunting, half-whinnying noises no one but a Frenchman can make. “To tell the plain, ungilded truth, I am not sure I know, myself,” he confessed.
“But you must have had some idea—some relevant clue to it all,” I protested.
“Yes and no. When Mademoiselle Jobina first showed signs of being overcome last night I thought as you did, that she had been taken ill, but the more I examined her the farther from a diagnosis I found myself. The sudden onset of her symptoms did no
t seem to match any disease I knew. Then when she told us about seeing the cat-thing almost at the moment Monsieur Scott put the ring on her finger I was till more puzzled. As you were at such pains to point out, no one else had seen the thing; the vision, if it may be called such, had been entirely subjective, something visible to her alone. It did not seem to me that she had drunk enough to see nonexistent animals, yet. . . . Then I observed the ring, and suddenly, something clicked in my memory. ‘Where have you seen a ring like that, Jules de Grandin?’ I asked me, and, ‘At Le Musée des Antiques in Cairo,’ I replied to me.
“‘Bien, and what about that ring, Jules de Grandin?’ I asked me.
“I searched my memory, trying to recall all that I knew about it as one struggles to recall the tune of a forgotten song.
“Eh, then I had it! It had been a priest’s ring from Bubastis, the city of Ubasti or Bastet, the cat-headed goddess!
“Now Bastet, or Ubasti, was the sister and the wife of Ptah, who shaped the world and had his shrine at Memphis. She typified the benign influence of heat, the warming sun that made the grain to grow, the fire that gave men comfort. She was a mild and rather playful goddess, and therefore was depicted as a woman with a cat’s head—the kind, affectionate and gentle pussy-cat we like to have about the house.
“Eh bien, she had a sister variously known as Sechmet and Merienptha who was her antithesis. That one represented the cruel principle of heat—the blazing sun that parched the fields and threw men down with sunstroke, the fire that ravaged and consumed, more, the blazing heat of savage, maddened passion. Now, strangely, though they represented bane and blessing to be had from the same thing, the sisters were depicted exactly alike—a woman swathed in mummy-clothes with a cat’s head and wearing an uræus topped by the sun’s disc. Their temples stood nearby each other in the city of Bubastis, on the site of which the modern mud-village of Tel Basta stands.
“Good. When the Persians under Cambyses swarmed over Egypt in 525 B.C., the city of Bubastis was among the first they took. Parbleu, they were the boches of their day, those Persians; all that they could not steal they destroyed. So when the priests of Bastet and Sechmet heard they were about to come they hid their temples’ treasures. Some they sunk in the Nile, some they buried, some few they took with them.
“As part of his ecclesiastical vesture the priest of Bastet and Sechmet wore a gold ring set with a green stone like a cat’s eye. Many of these they enclosed in capsules of balsam resin, which was also an ingredient of their embalming. The rings thus held in their protective envelopes were buried in the earth—it was much easier to find a sphere larger than a golf ball than to hunt for a ring buried in the shifting sand.
“And then what happened I ask you? Mordieu, the Persians came, they pulled the city’s walls down, razed the temples to the ground, killed all the people they could find, then went upon their way of conquest.
“The years went by, the Romans came, and after them the Arabs, and still those priestly rings lay buried in their envelopes of hardened balsam. Explorers delved among the ruins of the once great temple-city and dug these rings up and took them to museums. Young Driggs’s father was one such. He brought back three rings of Bastet, two for his museum, one for himself, remember?”
“Yes,” I nodded, “but what connection is there between the ring and Jobina’s seizure, and—”
“Be patient, if you please,” he interrupted. “I shall explain if you will give me time. Like priests of every cult and faith, the priests of ancient Egypt were a class apart. They were vowed to their gods, none others might serve at the altar, none others invoke divine aid, none others wear the priestly vestments. You comprehend?”
“I can’t say that I do.”
“Eh, then I must make the blueprint for you. As far as can be ascertained, such priestly rings as came to light were either melted down for their gold or taken to museums; none were ever worn. Jobina Houston seems to be the first one not initiated into the priesthood to wear a ring of Bastet on her finger.
“Tiens, those olden gods were jealous. They took offense at her wearing that ring. Bastet, or possibly Sechmet, appeared to her as in a vision, paralyzed her with fright, and finally took possession of her mind and body, driving her to make a makeshift imitation of an Egyptian priestess’s costume and go to young Drigg’s house to wreak vengeance on him for the sacrilege he had committed when he put the sacerdotal ring on a profane finger.”
“Oh, pshaw!” I scoffed. “You really believe that?”
“I do, indeed, my friend. Jobina Houston had a morbid fear of cats, therefore she was doubly sensitive to the influence of the cat-headed goddess. In ancient days that ring had soaked up influences of the old temples when it adorned the finger of some priest of Bastet or Sechmet; it had lain sealed in resin for a full thousand years and more. Those influences could not be dissipated because of the hermetic sealing of the balsam envelope that held them. Then when they had been released from their integument those forces—those psychic influences with which the ring was saturated—were released from it as water is released from a squeezed sponge. The malefic forces took possession of Jobina like a tangible mephitic vapor. She was helpless under their influence.”
“U’m-h’m,” I agreed doubtfully. “I’ve heard of such things, but how was it you managed to arrest their working? When you called to her in Scott Driggs’ flat she seemed like a sleep-walker and made no effort to resist when you demanded the ring. How was that?”
“Ah, there I took the chance, my friend. I played the hunch, as you would say. I knew that girl had been brought up religiously. She believed firmly in the power of God—of good. She was like a person in light hypnosis, unable to control herself or her movements, but able to hear outside voices. So I called to her, reminding her of the great power of God—reminded her how He had overcome the heathen world and made a mock of all the pantheon of heathen gods and goddesses. In effect I said to her, ‘What are you, a Christian woman, doing when you listen to the blandishments of heathen deities? Don’t you know that they are powerless before the might of the Lord God?’ A child may dread its shadow, but when its father tells it that the shadow has no substance, pouf! that fear is gone. I told her that the forces that enthralled her had no being, that they were but myths and memories—just the shadows of old dreams that vanished in the brightness of the face of God. And so it was. For just a little moment she rebelled against their malign power, and in that moment I took off the ring. Then paf! the charm was broken, the spell dissolved, the powerhouse of their influence put out of commission. Voilà.”
“What about the ring?” I asked. “Will you give it back to Scott?”
“Of course,” he answered, “but only when he promises to give it to some museum. That thing is far too dangerous to be left where unwary young women may slip it on their fingers. Yes.”
Dawn came, heralded by an ever-widening crimson glow, as we turned into the driveway. “Tiens,” he raised a hand to pat back a great yawn. “I am a tired old man, me. I think I need a tonic before I climb into bed. Yes, certainly; of course.”
“A tonic?” I echoed.
“But yes. I prescribe him. Four ounces of brandy, the dose to be repeated at five-minute intervals for the next quarter-hour.”
The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin by Seabury Quinnis collected by Night Shade Books in the following volumes:
The Horror on the Links
The Devil’s Rosary
The Dark Angel
A Rival from the Grave
Black Moon
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