by Mike Ashley
“Hélas, it is love’s crucifixion!” whispered Jules de Grandin.
THREE MONTHS WENT BY, AND THOUGH THE SEARCH KEPT UP UNREMITTINGLY, no trace of Arabella could be found. Dennis Tantavul installed a fulltime highly trained and recommended nurse in his desolate house, and spent his time haunting police stations and newspaper offices. He aged a decade in the ninety days since Arabella left; his shoulders stooped, his footsteps lagged, and a look of constant misery lay in his eyes. He was a prematurely old and broken man.
“It’s the most uncanny thing I ever saw,” I told de Grandin as we walked through West Forty-Second Street toward the West Shore Ferry. We had gone over to New York for some surgical supplies, and I do not drive my car in the metropolis. Truck drivers there are far too careless and repair bills for wrecked mudguards far too high. “How a full-grown woman would evaporate this way is something I can’t understand. Of course, she may have done away with herself, dropped off a ferry, or—”
“S-s-st,” his sibilated admonition cut me short. “That woman there, my friend, observe her, if you please.” He nodded toward a female figure twenty feet or so ahead of us.
I looked, and wondered at his sudden interest at the draggled hussy. She was dressed in tawdry finery much the worse for wear. The sleazy silken skirt was much too tight, the cheap fur jaquette far too short and snug, and the high heels of her satin shoes were shockingly run over. Makeup was fairly plastered on her cheeks and lips and eyes, and short black hair bristled untidily beneath the brim of her abbreviated hat. Written unmistakably upon her was the nature of her calling, the oldest and least honorable profession known to womanhood.
“Well,” I answered tartly, “what possible interest can you have in a—”
“Do not walk so fast,” he whispered as his fingers closed upon my arm, “and do not raise your voice. I would that we should follow her, but I do not wish that she should know.”
The neighborhood was far from savory, and I felt uncomfortably conspicuous as we turned from Forty-Second Street into Eleventh Avenue in the wake of the young strumpet, followed her provocatively swaying hips down two malodorous blocks, finally pausing as she slipped furtively into the doorway of a filthy, unkempt “rooming house.”
We trailed her through a dimly lighted barren hall and up a flight of shadowy stairs, then up two further flights until we reached a sort of oblong foyer bounded on one end by the stair-well, on the farther extremity by a barred and very dirty window, and on each side by sagging, paint-blistered doors. On each of these was pinned a card, handwritten with the many flourishes dear to the chirography of the professional card-writer who still does business in the poorer quarters of our great cities. The air was heavy with the odor of cheap whisky, bacon rind and fried onions.
We made a hasty circuit of the hill, studying the cardboard labels. On the farthest door the notice read Miss Sieglinde.
“Mon Dieu,” he exclaimed as he read it, “c’est le mot propre!”
“Eh?” I returned.
“Sieglinde, do not you recall her?”
“No-o, can’t say I do. The only Sieglinde I remember is the character in Wagner’s Die Walkure who unwittingly became her brother’s paramour and bore him a son—”
“Précisément. Let us enter, if you please.” Without pausing to knock he turned the handle of the door and stepped into the squalid room.
The woman sat upon the unkempt bed, her hat pushed back from her brow. In one hand she held a cracked teacup, with the other she poised a whisky bottle over it. She had kicked her scuffed and broken shoes off; we saw that she was stockingless, and her bare feet were dark with long-accumulated dirt and black-nailed as a miner’s hands. “Get out!” she ordered thickly. “Get out o’ here, I ain’t receivin’—” a gasp broke her utterance, and she turned her head away quickly. Then: “Get out o’ here, you lousy bums!” she screamed. “Who d’ye think you are, breakin’ into a lady’s room like this? Get out, or—”
De Grandin eyed her steadily, and as her strident command wavered: “Madame Arabella, we have come to take you home,” he announced softly.
“Good God, man, you’re crazy” I exclaimed. “Arabella? This—”
“Precisely, my old one; this is Madame Arabella Tantavul whom we have sought these many months in vain.” Crossing the room in two quick strides he seized the cringing woman by the shoulders and turned her face up to the light. I looked, and felt a sudden swift attack of nausea.
He was right. Thin to emaciation, her face already lined with the deep-bitten scars of evil living, the woman on the bed was Arabella Tantavul, though the shocking change wrought in her features and the black dye in her hair had disguised her so effectively that I should not have known her.
“We have come to take you home, ma pauvre,” he repeated. “Your husband—”
“My husband!” her reply was half a scream. “Dear God, as if I had a husband—”
“And the little one who needs you,” he continued. “You cannot leave them thus, Madame.”
“I can’t? Ah, that’s where you’re wrong, Doctor. I can never see my baby again, in this world or the next. Please go away and forget you’ve see me, or I shall have to drown myself—I’ve tried it twice already, but the first time I was rescued, and the second time my courage failed. But if you try to take me back, or if you tell Dennis you saw me—”
“Tell me, Madame,” he broke in, “was not your flight caused by a visitation from the dead?”
Her faded brown eyes—eyes that had been such a startling contrast to her pale-gold hair—widened. “How did you know?” she whispered.
“Tiens, one may make surmises. Will not you tell us just what happened? I think there is a way out of your difficulties.”
“No, no, there isn’t; there can’t be!” Her head drooped listlessly. “He planned his work too well; all that’s left for me is death—and damnation afterward.”
“But if there were a way—if I could show it to you?”
“Can you repeal the laws of God?”
“I am a very clever person, Madame. Perhaps I can accomplish an evasion, if not an absolute repeal. Now tell us, how and when did Monsieur your late but not at all lamented uncle come to you?”
“The night before—before I went away. I woke about midnight, thinking I heard a cry from Dennie’s nursery. When I reached the room where he was sleeping I saw my uncle’s face glaring at me through the window. It seemed to be illuminated by a sort of inward hellish light, for it stood out against the darkness like a jack-o’-lantern, and it smiled an awful smile at me. ‘Arabella,’ it said, and I could see its dun dead lips writhe back as if the teeth were burning-hot, ‘I’ve come to tell you that your marriage is a mockery and a lie. The man you married is your brother, and the child you bore is doubly illegitimate. You can’t continue living with them, Arabella. That would be an even greater sin. You must leave them right away, or’—Once more his lips crept back until his teeth were bare—’or I shall come to visit you each night, and when the baby has grown old enough to understand I’ll tell him who his parents really are. Take your choice, my daughter. Leave them and let me go back to the grave, or stay and see me every night and know that I will tell your son when he is old enough to understand. If I do it he will loathe and hate you; curse the day you bore him.’
“‘And you’ll promise never to come near Dennis or the baby if I go?’ I asked.
“He promised, and I staggered back to bed, where I fell fainting.
“Next morning when I wakened I was sure it had been a bad dream, but when I looked at Dennis and my own reflection in the glass I knew it was no dream, but a dreadful visitation from the dead.
“Then I went mad. I tried to kill my baby, and when Dennis stopped me I watched my chance to run away, came over to New York and took to this.” She looked significantly around the miserable room. “I knew they’d never look for Arabella Tantavul among the city’s whores; I was safer from pursuit right here than if I’d been in Europe or C
hina.”
“But, Madame,” de Grandin’s voice was jubilant with shocked reproof, “that which you saw was nothing but a dream; a most unpleasant dream, I grant, but still a dream. Look in my eyes, if you please!”
She raised her eyes to his, and I saw his pupils widen as a cat’s do in the dark, saw a line of white outline the cornea, and, responsive to his piercing gaze, beheld her brown eyes set in a fixed stare, first as if in fright, then with a glaze almost like that of death.
“Attend me, Madame Arabella,” he commanded softly. “You are tired—grand Dieu, how tired you are! You have suffered greatly, but you are about to rest. Your memory of that night is gone; so is all memory of the things which have transpired since. You will move and eat and sleep as you are bidden, but of what takes place around you till I bid you wake you will retain no recollection. Do you hear me, Madame Arabella?”
“I hear,” she answered softly in a small tired voice.
“Très bon. Lie down, my little poor one. Lie down to rest and dreams of love. Sleep, rest, dream and forget.
“Will you be good enough to ’phone to Dr. Wyckoff?” he asked me. “We shall place her in his sanitarium, wash this sacré dye from her hair and nurse her back to health; then when all is ready we can bear her home and have her take up life and love where she left off. No one shall be the wiser. This chapter of her life is closed and sealed for ever.
“Each day I’ll call upon her and renew hypnotic treatments that she may simulate the mild but curable mental case which we shall tell the good Wyckoff she is. When finally I release her from hypnosis her mind will be entirely cleared of that bad dream that nearly wrecked her happiness.”
ARABELLA TANTAVUL LAY ON THE SOFA IN HER CHARMING BOUDOIR, an orchid negligee about her slender shoulders, an eiderdown rug tucked round her feet and knees. Her wedding ring was once more on her finger. Pale with a pallor not to be disguised by the most skillfully applied cosmetics, and with deep violet crescents underneath her amber eyes, she lay back listlessly, drinking in the cheerful warmth that emanated from the fire of apple-logs that snapped and crackled on the hearth. Two months of rest at Dr. Wyckoff’s sanitarium had cleansed the marks of dissipation from her face, and the ministrations of beauticians had restored the pale-gold luster to her hair, but the listlessness that followed her complete breakdown was still upon her like the weakness from a fever.
“I can’t remember anything about my illness, Dr. Trowbridge,” she told me with a weary little smile, “but vaguely I connect it with some dreadful dream I had. And”—she wrinkled her smooth forehead in an effort at remembering—“I think I had a rather dreadful dream last night, but—”
“Ah-ha?” de Grandin leant abruptly forward in his chair. “What was it that you dreamed, Madame?”
“I—don’t—know,” she answered slowly. “Odd, isn’t it, how you can remember that a dream was so unpleasant, yet not recall its details? Somehow, I connect it with Uncle Warburg; but—”
“Parbleu, do you say so? Has he returned? Ah hah, he makes me to be so mad, that one!”
“IT IS TIME WE WENT, MY FRIEND,” DE GRANDIN TOLD ME AS THE tall clock in the hall beat out its tenth deliberate stroke; “we have important duties to perform.”
“For goodness’ sake,” I protested, “at this hour o’ night?”
“Precisely. At Monsieur Tantavul’s I shall expect a visitor tonight, and—we must be ready for him.
“Is Madame Arabella sleeping?” he asked Dennis as he answered our ring at the door.
“Like a baby,” answered the young husband. “I’ve been sitting by her all evening, and I don’t believe she even turned in bed.”
“And you did keep the window closed, as I requested?”
“Yes, sir; closed and latched.”
“Bien. Await us here, mon brave; we shall rejoin you presently.”
He led the way to Arabella’s bedroom, removed the wrappings from a bulky parcel he had lugged from our house, and displayed the object thus disclosed with an air of inordinate pride. “Behold him,” he commanded gleefully. “Is he not magnificent?”
“Why—what the devil?—it’s nothing but an ordinary window screen,” I answered.
“A window screen, I grant, my friend; but not an ordinary one. Can not you see it is of copper?”
“Well—”
“Parbleu, but I should say it is well,” he grinned. “Observe him, how he works.”
From his kit bag he produced a roll of insulated wire, an electrical transformer, and some tools. Working quickly he passe-partouted the screen’s wooden frame with electrician’s tape, then plugged a wire in a nearby lamp socket, connected it with the transformer, and from the latter led a double strand of cotton-wrapped wire to the screen. This he clipped firmly to the copper meshes and led a third strand to the metal grille of the heat register. Last of all he filled a bulb-syringe with water and sprayed the screen, repeating the performance till it sparkled like a cobweb in the morning sun. “And now, Monsieur le Revenant,” he chuckled as he finished, “I damn think all is ready for your warm reception!”
For something like an hour we waited, then he tiptoed to the bed and bent above Arabella.
“Madame!”
The girl stirred slightly, murmuring some half-audible response, and:
“In half an hour you will rise,” he told her. “You will put your robe on and stand by the window, but on no account will you go near it or lay hands on it. Should anyone address you from outside you will reply, but you will not remember what you say or what is said to you.”
He motioned me to follow, and we left the room, taking station in the hallway just outside.
HOW LONG WE WAITED I HAVE NO ACCURATE IDEA. PERHAPS IT WAS an hour, perhaps less; at any rate the silent vigil seemed unending, and I raised my hand to stifle back a yawn when:
“Yes, Uncle Warburg, I can hear you,” we heard Arabella saying softly in the room beyond the door.
We tiptoed to the entry: Arabella stood before the window, and from beyond it glared the face of Warburg Tantavul.
It was dead, there was no doubt about that. In sunken cheek and pinched-in nose and yellowish-grey skin there showed the evidence of death and early putrefaction, but dead through it was, it was also animated with a dreadful sort of life. The eyes were glaring horribly, the lips were red as though they had been painted with fresh blood.
“You hear me, do you?” it demanded. “Then listen, girl; you broke your bargain with me, now I’m come to keep my threat: every time you kiss your husband”—a shriek of bitter laughter cut his words, and his staring eyes half closed with hellish merriment—“or the child you love so well, my shadow will be on you. You’ve kept me out thus far, but some night I’ll get in, and—”
The lean dead jaw dropped, then snapped up as if lifted by sheer will-power, and the whole expression of the corpse-face changed. Surprise, incredulous delight, anticipation as before a feast were pictured on it. “Why”—its cachinnating laughter sent a chill up my spine—“why your window’s open! You’ve changed the screen and I can enter!”
Slowly, like a child’s balloon stirred by a vagrant wind, the awful thing moved closer to the window. Closer to the screen it came, and Arabella gave ground before it and put up her hands to shield her eyes from the sight of its hellish grin of triumph.
“Sapristi,” swore de Grandin softly. “Come on, my old and evil one, come but a little nearer—”
The dead thing floated nearer. Now its mocking mouth and shriveled, pointed nose were almost pressed against the copper meshes of the screen; now they began to filter through the meshes like a wisp of fog—
There was a blinding flash of blue-white flame, the sputtering gush of fusing metal, a wild, despairing shriek that ended ere it fairly started in a sob of mortal torment, and the sharp and acrid odor of burned flesh!
“Arabella—darling—is she all right?” Dennis Tantavul came charging up the stairs. “I thought I heard a scream—”
“You
did, my friend,” de Grandin answered, “but I do not think that you will hear its repetition unless you are unfortunate enough to go to hell when you have died.”
“What was it?”
“Eh bien, one who thought himself a clever jester pressed his jest too far. Meantime, look to Madame your wife. See how peacefully she lies upon her bed. Her time for evil dreams is past. Be kind to her, mon jeune. Do not forget, a woman loves to have a lover, even though he is her husband.” He bent and kissed the sleeping girl upon the brow. “Au ’voir, my little lovely one,” he murmured. Then, to me:
“Come, Trowbridge, my good friend. Our work is finished here. Let us leave them to their happiness.”
AN HOUR LATER IN THE STUDY HE FACED ME ACROSS THE FIRE. “Perhaps you’ll deign to tell me what it’s all about now?” I asked sarcastically.
“Perhaps I shall,” he answered with a grin. “You will recall that this annoying Monsieur Who Was Dead Yet Not Dead, appeared and grinned most horrifyingly through windows several times? Always from the outside, please remember. At the hospital, where he nearly caused the garde-malade to have a fit, he laughed and mouthed at her through the glass skylight. When he first appeared and threatened Madame Arabella he spoke to her through the window—”
“But her window was open,” I protested.
“Yes, but screened,” he answered with a smile. “Screened with iron wire, if you please.”
“What difference did that make? Tonight I saw him almost force his features through—”
“A copper screen,” he supplied. “Tonight the screen was copper; me, I saw to that.”
Then, seeing my bewilderment: “Iron is the most earthy of all metals,” he explained. “It and its derivative, steel, are so instinct with the earth’s essence that creatures of the spirit cannot stand its nearness. The legends tell us that when Solomon’s Temple was constructed no tool of iron was employed, because even the friendly jinn whose help he had enlisted could not perform their tasks in close proximity to iron. The witch can be detected by the pricking of an iron pin—never by a pin of brass.