May 30—Today I had another talk with Heschler. He is pitiably anxious to begin the experiment. It was childishly simple. Ordering him to gaze steadfastly into my eyes through the bars of his cell, I soon had him completely hypnotized. “You will hereafter cease to dread your coming execution,” I told him. “From this time forth you will think of nothing but the opportunity of living on in another body which is to be afforded you. At the moment of execution you will concentrate all your will upon entering the body which will be waiting at my home to receive your soul.” He nodded as I gave each command, and I left him. It will not be necessary to repeat my orders. He was already half insane with the obsession of prolonging his life. My work was more than half done before I gave him the directions. I shall not see him again.
The next page bore a clipping from the Newark Call:
Adolph Heschler, confined in the penitentiary at Camden awaiting execution for the murder of State Trooper James Donovan on the night of March 20th last, seems resigned to his fate. When first taken to the state prison he seemed in deadly fear of death and spent most of his time in prayer. Prison officials say that he began to show signs of resignation following the memorial services on May 20th, and it is said he declares his conscience is cleared by the thought that he shall be allowed the opportunity of atoning for his misdeeds. Curiously enough, Heschler, who has heretofore shown the most devout appreciation of the ministrations of the prison’s Catholic chaplain, will have nothing further to do with the spiritual advisor, declaring “atonement for his sins has been arranged.” There is talk of having him examined by a lunacy commission before the date set for his execution.
Another translation of the diary followed:
August 30—Michel has come with the body. It is a mummy! When I expressed my astonishment, he told me it was the best possible corpse for the purpose. After hearing him, I realized he has the pseudo-logic of the mildly insane. The body of one who has died from natural causes or by violence would be unfitted for our purposes, he says, since some of its organs must inevitably be unable to function properly. This mummy is not a true mummy, but the body of an Egyptian guilty of sacrilege, who was sealed up alive in a tomb during the Hyksos dynasty. He died of asphyxia, in all probability, and his body is in perfect condition, except for the dehydration due to lying so many thousands of years in a perfectly dry atmosphere. Michel rescued the mummy during his last expedition to Egypt, and tells me there was evidence of the man’s having made a terrific struggle before death put an end to his sufferings. Other bodies, properly mummified, were found in the same tomb, and the dying man had overturned many of the cases and spilled their contents about the place. His body was so thoroughly impregnated with the odor of the spices and preservatives, absorbed from the mummies lying in the tomb, that it was not for some time his discoverers realized he had not been eviscerated and embalmed. Michel assures me the dead man will be perfectly able to act as an envelope for Heschler’s soul when the electrocution has been performed. Cousin Michel, if this body does but so much as wiggle its fingers or toes after the authorities have killed Heschler, I will believe—I will believe.
I laid down the final page of de Grandin’s translation and looked wonderingly at him. “Where’s the rest of it?” I demanded. “Couldn’t you do any more last night?”
“The rest,” he answered ironically, “is for us to find out, my friends. The journal stops with the entry you have just read. There was no more.”
“Humph,” Sergeant Costello commented, “crazy as a pair o’ fish out o’ water, weren’t they? Be gorry, gentlemen, I’m thinkin’ it’s a crazy man we’d best be lookin’ for. I can see it all plain, now. This here Cousin Michael o’ Professor Kolisko’s was a religious fy-nat-ic, as th’ felly says, an’ th’ pair o’ ’em got to fightin’ among themselves an’ th’ professor came out second best. That’s th’ answer, or my name ain’t—”
The sudden shrilling of the office telephone interrupted him. “Sergeant Costello, please,” a sharp voice demanded as I picked up the receiver.
“Yeah, this is Costello speakin’,” the detective announced, taking the instrument from me. “Yep. All right, go ahead. What? Just like th’ other one? My Gawd!”
“What is it?” de Grandin and I asked in chorus as he put down the receiver and turned a serious face to us.
“Miss Adkinson, an old lady livin’ by herself out by th’ cemetery, has been found murdered,” he replied slowly, “an’ th’ marks on her throat tally exactly wid those on Professor Kolisko’s!''
“ Cor dieu!” de Grandin shouted, leaping from his chair as if it had suddenly become white-hot. “We must hasten, we must rush, we must fly to that house, my friends! We must examine the body, we must assure ourselves before some bungling coroner’s physician spoils everything!”
Two minutes later we were smashing the speed ordinances in an effort to reach the Adkinson house before Coroner Martin arrived.
Stark tragedy repeated itself in the Adkinson cottage. The old lady, gaunt with the leanness of age to which time has not been over-kind, lay in a crumpled heap on her kitchen floor, and a moment’s examination disclosed the same livid marks on her throat and the same horrifying limberness of neck which we had observed when viewing Professor Kolisko’s body.
“By Gawd, gentlemen, this is terrible!” Costello swore as he turned from the grisly relic. “Here’s an old man kilt at night an’ a harmless old woman murdered in broad daylight, an’ no one to tell us anything certain about th’ murderer!”
“Ha, do you say so?” de Grandin responded sharply, his little eyes flashing with excitement. “Parbleu, my friend, but you are greatly wrong, as wrong as can be. There is one who can tell us, and tell us he shall, if 1 must wring the truth from him with my bare hands!”
“What d’ye mean—?” Sergeant Costello began, but the little Frenchman had already turned toward the door, dragging frantically at my elbow.
“Clutch everything, mes amis,” he commanded. “Retain all; me, I go to find him who can tell us what we need to know. Mordieu, I shall find him though he takes refuge in the nethermost subcellar of hell! Come, Trowbridge, my friend; I would that you drive me to the station where I can entrain for New York.”
Shortly after seven o’clock that evening I answered the furious ringing of my telephone to hear de Grandin’s excited voice come tumbling out of the receiver. “Come at once, my friend,” he ordered, fairly stuttering in his elation. “Rush with all speed to the Carmelite Fathers’ retreat in East Thirty-second Street. Bring the excellent Costello with you, too, for there is one here who can shed the light of intelligence on our ignorance.”
“Who is it—?” I began, but the sharp click of a receiver smashed into its hook cut short my query, and I turned in disgust from the unresponsive instrument to transmit the Frenchman’s message to Sergeant Costello.
Within sight of Bellevue’s grim mortuary, enshrouded by the folds of drab East River fog as a body is wrapped in its winding-sheet, the little religious community seemed as incongruously out of place in the heart of New York’s poverty-ridden East Side as a nun in a sweatshop. Striding up and down the polished floor of the bare, immaculately clean reception room was Jules de Grandin, a glowing cigarette between his fingers, his tiny, waxed mustache standing straight out from the corners of his mouth like the whiskers of an excited tomcat. “At last!” he breathed as Costello and I followed the porter from the front door to the public room. “Morbleu, I thought you had perished on the way!
"Monsieur," he paused in his restless pacing and stopped before the figure sitting motionless in the hard, straight-backed chair at the farther side of the room, “you will please tell these gentlemen what you have told me and be of haste in doing so. We have small time to waste.”
I glanced curiously at the seated man. His strong resemblance to the dead Kolisko was remarkable. He possessed a mop of untidy, iron-gray hair and a rather straggling gray beard; his forehead was high, narrow and startlingly white, almost tr
ansparent, and the skin of his face was puckered into hundreds of little wrinkles as though his skull had shrunk, leaving the epidermis without support. His eyes, however, differed radically from Kolisko’s, for even in death the professor’s orbs had shown a hard, implacable nature, whereas this man’s eyes, though shaded by beetling, overhanging brows, were soft and brown. Somehow, they reminded me of the eyes of an old and very gentle dog begging not to be beaten.
“I am Michel Kolisko,” he began, clearing his throat with a soft, deprecating cough. “Urban Kolisko was my cousin, son of my father’s brother. We grew up together in Poland, attended the same schools and colleges, and dreamed the same dreams of Polish independence. I was twenty, Urban was twenty-three when the Tsar’s officers swooped down on our fathers, carried them off to rot in Siberia, and confiscated most of our family’s fortune. Both of us were suspected of complicity in the revolutionary movement, and fled for our lives, Urban to Paris, I to Vienna. He matriculated at the Sorbonne and devoted himself to the study of psychology; I studied medicine in Vienna, then went to Rome, and finally took up Egyptology as my life’s work.
“Twenty years passed before I saw my cousin again. The Russian proscription had been raised, and he had gone to Warsaw, where he taught in the university. When I went there to visit him, I was shocked to learn he had abandoned God and taken to the worship of the material world. Kant, Spencer, Richet, Wundt—these were his prophets and his priests; the God of our fathers he disowned and denied. I argued with him, pleaded with him to return to his childhood’s belief, and he turned me out of his house.
“Once again he earned the displeasure of the Tsar and escaped arrest only by a matter of moments. Fleeing to this country, he took up residence in your city, and devoted himself to penning revolutionary propaganda and atheistic theses. Broken in health, but with sufficient money to insure me of a quiet old age, I followed him to America and made it the work of my declining years to convert him from his apostasy.
“This spring it seemed I was beginning to succeed, for he showed more patience with me than ever before; but he was a hardened sinner, his heart was steeled against the call of consciousness, even as was Pharoah’s of old. He challenged me to offer evidence of God’s truth, and promised he would turn again to religion if I could.”
For a moment the speaker paused in his monotonous, almost mumbled recitation, wrung his bloodless hands together in a gesture of despair, pressed his fingers to his forehead, as though to crowd back departing reason, then took up his story, never raising his voice, never stressing one word more than another, keeping his eyes fixed on vacancy. He reminded me of a child reciting a distasteful lesson by rote.
“I see we were both mad, now,” he confided drearily. “Mad, mad with the sense of our own importance, for Urban defied divine providence, and I forgot that it is not man’s right to attempt to prove God’s truth as revealed to us by his ordained ministers. It is ours to believe, and to question not. But I was carried away by the fervor of my mission. Tf I can shake Urban’s doubts, I shall surely win a crown of glory,’ I told myself, ‘for surely there is great joy in heaven over one sinner who repents.’ And so I went about the sacrilegious business of the test.
“Among the curios I had brought from Egypt was the body of a man sealed alive in a tomb during the Hyksos rule. It was not really a mummy, for no embalming had been performed, but the superheated atmosphere of the tomb in which he had been incarcerated had shriveled his tissues until it was difficult to tell him from a body mummified by artificial methods. Only three or four such bodies are known; one is the celebrated Flinders mummy, and the others are in French and British museums. I had intended leaving mine to the Metropolitan when I died.
“I brought this body to Urban’s house the night before Heschler, the condemned murderer, was to be executed, and we laid it on the library table. Urban viewed it with disgust and skepticism, but I prayed over it, begging God to work a miracle, to permit the body to move, if only very slightly, and so convince my poor, misguided cousin. You know, gentlemen”- he turned his sorrowful lackluster eyes on us with a melancholy smile—“such things are not entirely unknown. Sudden changes in temperature or in the moisture content of the atmosphere often lead to a movement as the dehydrated tissues take up water from the air. The mummy of Rameses the Great, for instance, moved its arm when first exposed to the outdoor air.
“A few minutes after midnight was the time set for Heschler’s electrocution, and as the town clocks began sounding the hour I felt as though the heavens must fall if no sign were manifested to
“Urban sat beside the mummy, smoking his pipe and sneering—part of the time reading an impious book by Freud. I bowed my head in silent prayer, asking for a miracle to save him despite his hardness of heart. The city hall clock struck the quarter-hour, then the half, and still there was no sound. Urban laid his pipe and book aside and looked at me with his familiar sneer, then turned as though to thrust the body of the Egyptian from the table—then it sat up!
“Like a sleeper waking from a dream, like a patient coming forth from the ether it was—the corpse that had been dead four thousand years rose from the table and looked at us. For a moment it seemed to smile with its fieshless lips, then it looked down at itself, and gave a scream of surprise and fury.
“ ‘So!’ it shrieked; ‘so this is the body you’ve given me to work out my salvation! This is the form in which I must walk the earth until my sins be wiped away, is it? You’ve tricked me, cheated me, but I’ll have vengeance. No one living can harm me, and I’ll take my toll of human kind before I finally go forth to stew and burn in Satan’s fires!”
“It was stiff and brittle, but somehow it managed to crawl from the table and make at Urban. He seized a heavy whip which hung on the wall and struck the thing on the head with its loaded butt. The blow would have killed an ordinary man—indeed, I saw the mummy’s dried-up skull cave in beneath the force of Urban’s flailings, but it never faltered in its attack, never missed a step in its pursuit of vengeance.
“Then I went mad. I fled from that accursed house and buried myself in this retreat, where I have spent every moment since, denying myself both food and sleep, deeming every second left me all too short to beg divine forgiveness for the terrible sacrilege I have committed.”
“So. my friends, you see?” de Grandin turned to Costello and me as the half-hysterical Pole concluded his preposterous narrative.
“Sure, I do,” the detective returned. “Didn’t th’ felly say he’s mad? Be dad, they say crazy folks tell th’ truth, an’ he ain’t stretchin’ it none when he says his steeple’s full o’ bats.”
“Ah bah!” de Grandin shot back. “You weary me, my friend.” To Kolisko he said: “Your story supplies the information which we so sorely needed, sir. Whatever the result of your experiment, your motives were good, nor do I think the good God will be too hard upon you. If you do truly wish forgiveness, pray that we shall be successful in destroying the monster before more harm is done. Cordieu, but we shall need all your prayers, and a vast deal of luck as well, I think; for killing that which is already dead is no small task.”
“Now what?” demanded Costello with a sidelong glance at de Grandin as we emerged from the religious house. “Got some more loonies for us to listen to?”
“Parbleu, if you will but give ear to your own prattle, you shall have all that sort of conversation you wish, I think, cher Sergentthe little Frenchman jerked back with a smile which took half the acid from his words. Then:
“Friend Trowbridge, convoy our good, unbelieving friend to Harrisonville and await my return. I have one or two things to attend to before I join you; but when I come I think I can promise you a show the like of which you have not before seen. Au re voir, mes enfants
Ten o’clock sounded on the city’s clocks; eleven; half-past. Costello and I consumed innumerable cigars and more than one potion of some excellent cognac I had stored in my cellar since the days before prohibition; still no sign of m
y little friend. The sergeant was on the point of taking his departure when a light step sounded on the porch and de Grandin came bounding into the consulting room, his face wreathed in smiles, a heavy-looking parcel gripped under his right arm.
“Bien, my friends, I find you in good time,” he greeted, poured himself a monstrous stoup of amber liquor, then helped himself to one of my cigars. “I think it high time we were on our way. There is that to do which may take considerable doing this night, but I would not that we delay our expedition because of difficulties in the road.”
“Be gorry, he’s caught it from th’ other nut!” Costello confided to the surrounding atmosphere with a serio-comic grimace. “Which crazy house are we goin’ to now, sor?”
“Where but to the house of Monsieur Kolisko?” returned the Frenchman with a grin. “I think there will be another there before long, and it is highly expedient that we be there first.” “Humph, if it’s Coroner Martin or his physician, you needn’t be worryin’ yourself anny,” Costello assured him. “They’ll be takin’ no more interest in th’ case till someone else gets kilt, I’m thinkin’.”
“Morbleu, then their days of interest are ended, or Jules de Grandin is a colossal liar,” was the response. “Come; allons vite!’’
The lowest workings of a coal mine were not darker than the Kolisko house when we let ourselves in some fifteen minutes later. Switching on the electric light, de Grandin proceeded to unpack his parcel, taking from it a folded black object which resembled a deflated association football. Next he produced a shining nickel-plated apparatus consisting of a thick upright cylinder and a transverse flat piece which opened in two on hinges, disclosing an interior resembling a waffle-iron with small, close-set knobs. Into a screw-stopped opening in the hollow cylinder of the contrivance he poured several ounces of gray-black powder; then, taking the flat rubber bag, he hurried from the house to my car, attached the valve of the bag to my tire pump and proceeded to inflate the rubber bladder almost to the bursting point. This done, he attached the bag to a valve in the nickeled cylinder by a two-foot length of rubber hose, poured some liquid over the corrugated “waffle-iron” at the top of the cylinder, and, with the inflated bag hugged under his arm, as a Highland piper might hold the bag of his pipes, he strode across the room, snapped off the light, and took his station near the open window.
Horrors Unknown Page 17