The Dark Angel

by Seabury Quinn

  “But certainly,” de Grandin agreed. “He shot the noble fellow down à froid. Oh, yes; I saw it with my own two eyes.”

  “I, too,” Renouard supplemented.

  “Are you crazy?” I demanded. “I saw one of you grapple with this man, then when the other shot at you, you returned his fire, and—”

  A kick which nearly broke my tibia was delivered to my shin. “Ah bah, how could you see, my friend?” de Grandin asked me almost angrily. “You were back there with Mademoiselle Alice, and the night is dark. I tell you this so estimable, noble fellow would have aided us, had not this vile miscreant assassinated him. He would have killed us, too—all three of us—had not Monsieur—er—this gentleman, gallantly gone forth and pulled him down with his bare hands at peril of his life. Yes, of course. That is how it was. See, here is the weapon with which the wicked murder was committed.”

  “Right-o, and ain’t it unfortunate that it’s a German gun?” the stranger added. “They’ll never be able to trace it by its serial number, now. However, we’re all eyewitnesses, to the crime, and any ballistics expert will be able to match the bullet and the gun. So—”

  “But you fired that shot!” I accused.

  “I?” his tone was pregnant with injured innocence. “Why, I didn’t have a weapon—”

  “Mais certainement,” de Grandin, chimed in eagerly, “the sergeant took his weapon from him when they had their so unfortunate misunderstanding in the street.” In a fierce whisper he added: “Learn to hold your tongue in matters not concerning you, my friend. Regardez!” He turned his flashlight full upon the prisoner’s face.

  It was the red priest.

  The bellowing halloo of a fire engine’s siren sounded from the other street, followed by the furious clanging of a gong. “Come,” de Grandin ordered. “The fire brigade has come to fight the flames, and we must find Costello. I hope the noble fellow came to no harm as he tried to rescue us.”

  “Glory be, Doctor de Grandin, sor!” Costello cried as we rounded the corner and returned to the street from which we had entered the temple an hour or so earlier. “We waited for ye till we figgered ye’d been unable to signal, then went in to git ye; but th’ murtherin’ divils had barred th’ door an’ set th’ place afire—be gob, I thought ye’d ’a’ been cremated before this?”

  “Not I,” de Grandin answered with a chuckle. “It is far from so, I do assure you. But see, we have not come back empty-handed. Here, safe in good friend Trowbridge’s arms, is she whom we did seek, and here”—he pointed to the red priest who struggled futilely in the big stranger’s grasp—“here is one I wish you to lock up immediately. The charge is murder. Renouard and I, as well as this gentleman, will testify against him.”

  “Howly Moses! Who the divil let you out?” the sergeant demanded, as he caught sight of our strange ally. “I thought they put the bracelets on ye, an’—”

  “They did,” the other interrupted with a grin, “but I didn’t think such jewelry was becoming to my special brand of homeliness, so I slipped ’em off and went to take a walk—”

  “Oh, ye did, eh? Well, young felly, me lad, ye can be afther walkin’ right, straight back, or—”

  “But no!” de Grandin cut in quickly. “I shall be responsible for him, my sergeant. He is a noble fellow. It was he who guided us from the burning building, and at the great peril of his life seized this wicked one and wrenched his pistol from him when he would have killed us. Oh, yes: I can most confidently vouch for him.

  “Come to Doctor Trowbridge’s when you have put that so wicked man all safely in the jail,” he added as we made off toward my car. “We shall have much to tell you.”

  “BUT IT WAS THE only way, mon vieux,” de Grandin patiently explained as we drove homeward. “Their strategy was perfect—or almost so. But for good luck and this so admirable young man, we should have lost them altogether. Consider: When they set fire to that old building it burned like tinder; even now the fire brigade fights in vain to save it. With it will be utterly destroyed all evidences of their vile crimes, the paraphernalia of their secret worship—even the bones of their little victims.

  “When their leader fell into our hands we had no single shred of evidence to hold him; he had simply to deny all we said, and the authorities must let him go, for where was proof of what he did? Nowhere, parbleu—it was burned up! Of course. But circumstances so fell out that we killed one of his companions. Voilà, our chance had come! We had been wooden-heads not to have grasped it. So we conspire to forswear his life. As the good Costello would express it, we have put the frame around him. It is illegal, I admit, yet it is justice. You yourself know he did slay a little baby boy, yet you know we can not prove he did it; for none of us beheld the little corpse, and it is now but a pile of ashes mixed with other ashes. How many more like it there may be we do not surely know, but from what poor Mademoiselle Abigail told us, we know of one, at least.

  “And must they die all unavenged? Must we stand by and see that spawn of hell, that devil’s priest go free because as the lawyers say, the corpus deliciti of his crimes can not be established for want of the small corpses? Non, cordieu, I say it shall not be! While he may not suffer legally for the murders which he did, the law has seized him—and pardieu, the law will punish him for a crime he did not do. It may not be the law, my friend; but it is justice. Surely, you agree?”

  “I suppose so,” I replied, “but somehow it doesn’t seem—”

  “Of course it does,” he broke in smilingly, as though a simple matter had been settled. “Our next great task is to revive Mademoiselle Alice, make her as comfortable as may be, then notify her grieving fiancé that she is found. Parbleu, it will be like a tonic to see that young man’s face when we inform him we have found her!”

  17. “Hiji”

  ALICE WAS REGAINING CONSCIOUSNESS as de Grandin and I carried her upstairs and laid her on the guest-room bed. More accurately, she was no longer in a state of actual swoon, for her eyes were open, but her whole being seemed submerged in a state of lethargy so profound that she was scarcely able to move her eyes and gaze incuriously about the room.

  “Mademoiselle,” de Grandin, whispered soothingly, “you are with friends. Nothing can harm you now. No one may order you to do that which you do not wish to do. You are safe.”

  “Safe,” the girl repeated. It was not a query, not an assertion; merely a repetition, parrotwise, of de Grandin’s final word.

  She gazed at us with fixed, unquestioning eyes, like a newborn infant, or an imbecile. Her face was blank as an unwritten sheet.

  The little Frenchman gave her a quick, sharp glance, half surprised, half speculative. “But certainly,” he answered. “You know us, do you not? We are your friends, Doctor Trowbridge, Doctor de Grandin.”

  “Doctor Trowbridge, Doctor de Grandin.” Again that odd, phonographic repetition, incurious, disinterested, mechanical, meaningless.

  She lay before us on the bed, still as she had lain upon the devil’s altar, only the gentle motion of her breast and the half-light in her eyes telling us she was alive at all.

  The Frenchman put his hand out and brushed the hair back from her cheeks, exposing her ears. Both lobes had been bored to receive the golden loops of the earrings she had worn, and the holes pierced through the flesh were large enough to accommodate moderately thick knitting needles; yet the surrounding tissue was not inflamed, nor, save for a slight redness, was there any sign of granulation round the wounds. “Electrocautery,” he told me softly. “They are modern in their methods, those ones, at any rate. Observe here, also, if you please—”

  Following his tracing forefinger with my eyes, I saw a row of small, deep-pitted punctures in the white skin of her forearms. “Good heavens!” I exclaimed. “Morphine? Why, there are dozens of incisions! They must have given her enough to—”

  He raised his hand for silence, gazing intently at the girl’s expressionless, immobile face.

  “Mademoiselle,” he ordered sharply, �
��on the table yonder you will find matches. Rise, go to them, take one and light it; then hold your finger in the flame while you count three. When that is done, you may come back to bed. Allez!”

  She turned her oddly lifeless gaze on him as he pronounced his orders. Somehow, it seemed to me, reflected in her eyes his commands were like writing appearing supernaturally, a spirit-message on a medium’s blank slate. Recorded, somehow, in her intelligence—or, rather, perceptivity—they in nowise altered the paper-blankness of her face.

  Docilely, mechanically and unquestioningly, like one who walks in sleep, she rose from the bed, paced slowly across the room, took up the tray of matches and struck one.

  “Hold!” de Grandin cried abruptly as she thrust her finger in the flame, but the order came a thought too late.

  “One,” she counted deliberately as the cruel fire licked her ivory hand, then obedient to his latest order, removed her finger, already beginning to glow angry-red with exposure to the flame, blew out the match, turned slowly, and retraced her steps. Not a word or inarticulate expression, not even by involuntary wincing, did she betray rebellion at his orders or consciousness of the sharp pain she must have felt.

  “No, my friend,” he turned to me, as though answering an unspoken question, “it was not morphine—then. But it must be so now. Quick, prepare and give a hypodermic of three-quarters of a grain as soon as is convenient. In that way she will sleep, and not be able to respond to orders such as mine—or worse.”

  Wonderingly I mixed the opiate and administered it, and de Grandin prepared a soothing unguent to bandage her burned finger. “It was heroic treatment,” he apologized as he wound the surgical gauze deftly round her hand, “but something drastic was required to substantiate my theory. Otherwise I could not have rested.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked curiously.

  “Tell me, my friend,” he answered irrelevantly, fixing me with his level, unwinking stare, “have not you a feeling—have not you felt that Mademoiselle Alice, whatever might have been her provocation, was at least in some way partly guilty with those murderers who killed the little helpless babes in Satan’s worship? Have not you—”

  “Yes!” I interrupted. “I did feel so, although I hesitated to express it. You see, I’ve known her all her life, and was very fond of her, but—well, it seemed to me that though she were in fear of death, or even torture, the calm way in which she accepted everything, even the murder of that helpless child—confound it, that got under my skin! When we think how poor Abigail Kimble sacrificed her life rather than endure the sight of such a heartless crime, I can’t help but compare the way Alice has taken everything, and—”

  “Précisément,” he broke in with a laugh. “I, too, felt so, and so I did experiment to prove that we were wrong. Mademoiselle Abigail—the good God rest her soul!—was herself, in full possession of her faculties, while Mademoiselle Alice was the victim of scopolamine apomophia.”

  “Scopolamine apomophia?” I repeated blankly.

  “Mais certainement; I am sure of it.”

  “Isn’t that the so-called ‘truth serum’?”

  “Précisément.”

  “But I thought that had been discredited as a medical imposture—”

  “For the purpose for which it was originally advertised, yes.” he agreed. “Originally it was claimed that it could lead a criminal to confess his crimes when questioned by the officers, and in that it failed, but only because of its mechanical limitations.

  “Scopolamine apomophia has a tendency to so throw the nervous system out of gear that it greatly lessens what we call the inhibitions, tearing down the warning signs which nature puts along the road of action. Subjected to its action, the criminal’s caution, that cunning which warns him to refrain from talking lest he betray himself, is greatly lessened, for his volition is practically nullified. But that is not enough. No. Under scopolamine apomophia, if the injection be strong enough, he will repeat what is said to him, but that is not ‘confession’ as the law demands it. It is but parroting the accusation of the officers. So it has been discredited for judicial use.

  “But for the purpose which those evil ones desired it was perfect. With a large dose of scopolamine apomophia injected in her veins, Mademoiselle Alice became their unresisting tool. She had no will nor wish nor consciousness except as they desired. Her mind was but a waxen record on which they wrote directions, and as the record reproduces words when placed upon the phonograph, so she reacted blindly to their orders.

  “Par exemple: They dose her with the serum of scopolamine apomophia. They say to her, ‘You will array yourself in such a way, and when the word is given you will stand thus before the altar, you will abase yourself in this wise, you will cross yourself so. Then you will permit the women to disrobe you until you stand all nude before the people, but you will not feel embarrassed. No. You will thereon mount the altar and lay yourself upon it as it were a bed and stay there till we bid you rise.’

  “And as they have commanded, so she does. Did you not note the similarity of her walk and general bearing when she crossed the room a moment hence and when she stood before the altar of the devil?”

  “Yes,” I agreed, “I did.”

  “Très bon. I thought as much. Therefore, when I saw those marks upon her arms and recognized them as the trail of hypodermic needles, I said to me: ‘Jules de Grandin, it are highly probably that scopolamine apomophia has been used on her.’ And I replied, ‘It are wholly likely, Jules de Grandin.’

  “Very well, then. Let us experiment. It has been some time since she was dosed with this medicine which steals her volition, yet her look and bearing and the senseless manner she repeats our words back at us reminds me greatly of one whom I had seen in Paris when the gendarmes had administered scopolamine apomophia to him.

  “Bien alors, I did bid her rise and hurt herself. Only a person whose instinct of self-preservation has been blocked would go and put his hand in living flame merely because another told him to, n’est-ce-pas?

  “Yet she did do it, and without protest. As calmly as though I requested that she eat a bonbon, she rose and crossed the room and thrust her so sweet finger into searing flame. La pauvre! I did hate myself to see her do it, yet I knew that unless she did I must inevitably hate her. The case is proved, good Friend Trowbridge. We have no need to feel resentful toward her. The one we saw bow down before the devil’s altar, the one we saw take part in their vile rites, was not our Mademoiselle Alice. No, by no means, it was but her poor image, the flesh which she is clothed in. The real girl whom we sought, and whom we brought away with us, was absent, for her personality, her consciousness and volition were stolen by those evil men exactly as they stole the little boys they slew upon the altar of the devil.”

  I nodded, much relieved. His argument was convincing, and I was eager to be convinced.

  “Now we have sunk her in a sleep of morphine, she will rest easily,” he finished. “Later we shall see how she progresses, and if conditions warrant it, tomorrow young John Davisson shall once more hold his amoureuse against his heart. Yes. That will be a happy day for me.

  “Shall we rejoin the others? We have much to talk about; and that Renouard, how well I know him! The bottle will be empty if we do not hasten!”

  “SO I HANGED THE blighters out of hand,” the stranger was telling Renouard as de Grandin and I rejoined them in the study.

  “Admirable. Superb. I approve,” Renouard returned, then rose and bowed with jack-knife formality to the stranger, de Grandin and me in turn. “Jules, Doctor Trowbridge,” he announced, “permit that I make you acquaint with Monsieur le Baron Ingraham, late of His Majesty’s gendarmerie in Sierra Leone—Monsieur le Baron, Doctor Jules de Grandin, Doctor Trowbridge. I am Inspector Renouard of the Service-Sûreté.”

  Smilingly the stranger acknowledged the introductions, adding: “It ain’t quite as bad as the Inspector makes it out, gentlemen. My pater happened to leave me a baronetcy—with no money to support th
e title—but you’d hardly call me a baron, I fear. As to the gendarmerie, I was captain in the Sierra Leone Frontier Police, but—”

  “Exactly, precisely, quite so,” Renouard interjected. “It is as I said. Monsieur le Baron’s experiences strangely parallel my own. Tell them, if you please Monsieur le Bar—?”

  “Give over!” cried the other sharply. “I can’t have you Monsieur le Baroning me all over the place, you know—it gives me the hump! My sponsors in baptism named me Haddingway Ingraham Jameson Ingraham—H-I-J-I, you know—and I’m known in the service as ‘Hiji.’ Why not compromise on that—we’re all policemen here, I take it?”

  “All but Doctor Trowbridge, who has both the courage and the wit to qualify,” de Grandin answered. “Now, Monsieur Hiji, you were about to tell Inspector Renouard—” He paused with upraised eyebrows.

  The big Englishman produced a small, black pipe and a tin of Three Nuns, slowly tamped tobacco in the briar and eyed us quizzically. He was even bigger than I’d thought at first, and despite his prematurely whitened hair, much younger than I’d estimated. Thirty-one or -two at most, I guessed. “How strong is your credulity?” he asked at length.

  “Parbleu, it is marvelous, magnificent,” declared de Grandin. “We can believe that which we know is false, if you can prove it to us!”

  “It’ll take a lot of believing,” Ingraham answered, “but it’s all true, just the same.

  “A year or so ago, about the time Inspector Renouard was beginning to investigate the missing girls, queer rumors began trickling back to Freetown from the Reserved Forest Areas. We’ve always had leopard societies in the back country—gangs of cannibals who disguise themselves as leopards and go out stalking victims for their ritual feasts—of course, but this seemed something rather new. Someone was stirring up the natives to a poro—an oath-bound resistance to government. The victims of the latest leopard outrages were men who failed to subscribe to the rebellion. Several village headmen and sub-chiefs had been popped into the pot by the leopard men, and the whole area was getting in an awful state of funk.