“I was there with Gallieni in 1895, serving as sous-lieutenant of chasseurs, later as commandant of a detail of native guides. It was while serving with my detachment that I met Mamba. She was the daughter of an Andriana, or noble, family, distantly related to Ranavalona, the native queen just deposed by the French. Her skin was black as a minorca’s wing, with a blue, almost iridescent sheen; her features were small and delicate, her body as beautiful as anything ever chiseled out of marble in the Periclean age. She had tremendous influence not only with the Hova, or middle-class natives, but with the Andriana as well; for she was reputedly a witch and priestess of ‘the Fragrant One’, and a word from her would bring any native, noble or commoner, from miles around crawling on his belly to lick her tiny, coal-black feet, or send him charging down upon French infantry, though he knew sure death awaited from our chassepots and Gatling guns.
“It was good politics to cultivate her friendship, and not at all unpleasant, I assure you. We were married in due state, and I was formally invested with all the rights and dignities of an Andriana noble of the highest caste. Things went smoothly at our outpost after that; till—” he paused, and for a moment closed his eyes as though in weariness.
“Yes, Monsieur, and then?” de Grandin prompted as the silence lengthened.
Sorensen seemed to wake up with a start. “Then I heard how things were going over in the Caribbean, and decided to resign my commission with the French and try my luck with Cuba Libre,” he returned.
“Mamba didn’t make a scene. Indeed, she took it more calmly than most civilized women would have done. It had never occurred to her that our little domestic arrangement wasn’t permanent; so when I told her I’d been ordered away she merely said that she would govern in my place till my return and take good care ‘our people’ gave no trouble to the French. Then, like a fool, I told her I was through.
“For a moment she looked as though she hadn’t understood me; then, when the meaning of my words sank in, she was awful in her anger. No tears, no wailing, just a long and dreadful stare, a stare that seemed to strike right through me and to shrivel everything it touched. Finally she raised both hands above her head and called down such a curse on me as no man has had heaped upon his head since Medea called the vengeance of the gods on Jason. She finished with the prophecy:
“‘At the last you shall feel Mamba’s kiss, and your blood shall waste and dry away as the little brooks in summer, yet no man shall see you bleed; your life shall slowly ebb away as the tide ebbs from the shore, and none shall give you help; flowers shall feed upon your body while you are still alive, and the thing you most adore shall waste and wither in your sight, yet you shall have no power to stay the doom which crushes her and which shall crush you, too, when she is gone. I have said.’”
Young Doctor Traherne coughed. His manner was discreet, but none too patient, as he asked, “And you think this black woman’s curse responsible for your condition, sir?”
“I don’t know,” Sorensen answered slowly. “In China they’ve a saying that the three things which age can’t soften are a sword, a stone and the hatred of a love-crossed woman. Mamba—”
“Has probably been dead for twenty years,” Traherne supplied. “Besides, there’s half the earth between you, and—”
“Listen, son,” Sorensen broke in, “I’ve been deluding myself into thinking it was a nightmare which I suffered from—possibly the prickings of a guilty conscience—and that my subsequent illness was merely a coincidence, but I’m far from certain, now. Here’s what happened just before we called you in:
“I’d been trap-shooting over at the Gun and Rod Club, and came home thoroughly tired out. Joyce and I had dinner early and I went off to bed almost as soon as the meal was over, falling asleep immediately. How long I slept I’ve no idea, but I remember waking with a feeling of suffocation—no pain, but utter weakness and prostration—to see something hovering above my throat and to smell a smell I hadn’t smelled in years, the hot, half-spicy, half-charnel odor of the Madagascar jungle. I can’t describe the thing that hovered over me, for the darkness of the room and its very nearness obscured my vision, but I had an unaccountable but powerful impression that it was a small, black, naked human figure, the figure of a nude black woman a scant four inches high, which poised in midair over me as a hummingbird poises above the flower from which it drains the nectar. How long I lay there in that helpless sort of lethargy I’ve no idea; but suddenly I became aware of a feeling like a pulling at my throat and Mamba’s prophecy came back to me across the years: ‘Your blood shall waste and dry up as the little brooks in summer!’
“Gentlemen, I assure you I was paralyzed. Fear held me more firmly than a chain. Move I could not, nor could I cry for help. Then I think I must have fainted, for the next thing I knew it was morning.
“Weakness almost overpowered me when I tried to rise, but finally I managed to crawl from bed and stagger over to the mirror. There was no blood on my pajamas, nor any on my flesh, but on my throat there was a little wound, no larger than a needle-jab or razor-nick would make, and—”
“Tell me, Monsieur,” de Grandin interrupted, “this wound of which you speak, was it singular or plural?”
“Eh? Oh, I see what you mean. It was a single little puncture, so small as to be barely noticeable, and with no area of inflammation or soreness round it. At any other time I should have failed to see it, I believe, but the vividness of my nightmare made me especially careful when I looked.”
“But this is most unusual,” the little Frenchman murmured. “Those punctures, they should be multiple.”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing of importance, I assure you. I did but indulge in a foolish habit and think with my lips rather than my brain, Monsieur. Please he so kind as to proceed.”
“I don’t remember a recurrence of the dream, but every morning for a week I rose from heavy sleep not only not refreshed by rest, but successively and progressively weaker. Finally we called Doctor Traherne. He’s probably outlined his treatment to you.”
“You agree I took the proper measures?” Traherne asked. “We had this condition entirely arrested; then—”
“Précisément,” de Grandin nodded, “that is a most unusual feature of the case, my friend; that and the nature of Monsieur Sorensen’s wound.”
“Oh, Lord!” young Traherne scoffed. “Are you finding a connection between that accidental scratch and this inexplicable pathological condition? What possible—”
“But the wound is constant, is it not?” de Grandin insisted. “It is still there? Either it or a freshly inflicted one remains, n’est-ce-pas?”
“Ye-es,” Traherne admitted grudgingly. “But I’ve never tried to heal it. Even if it is significant, it’s nothing but a symptom, and one doesn’t bother to treat symptoms.”
De Grandin faced Sorensen. “Your niece, Mademoiselle Joyce, she displays symptoms similar to those you first exhibited?” he asked.
“Yes,” the other answered. “I’ll send for her, if you wish.” He pressed a button, and when a small, exceedingly neat and almost startlingly black servant appeared in answer to the summons, ordered: “Ask Miss Joyce to come to the library, please, Marshall.”
“Would you object to showing us your throat while we are waiting for your niece to join us?” asked de Grandin.
“Not at all,” the other answered, and undoing the collar of his soft silk shirt laid bare a strongly modeled and well-muscled neck.
The little Frenchman leant forward, scanned the patient’s sunburned skin with a keen gaze, then, drawing a small lens from his pocket, held it before his eye as he pursued the examination.
“Here, Monsieur?” he asked, laying the tip of a small, well-manicured forefinger on Sorensen’s neck a little to the right and above the Adam’s apple. “Is this the place you first observed the wound?”
“Yes, and that’s the spot where it reappeared when I was taken ill again,” Sorensen answered.
�
��H’m,” the Frenchman murmured. “It is, as you have said, a single wound striking directly into the skin, not looping through it. It might he from a razor-cut or from a variety of other reasons—”
“Yes, and it wasn’t there before my first illness; it disappeared when I recovered, and it reappeared concurrently with my second attack,” Sorensen broke in.
“Precisely, exactly; quite so,” de Grandin agreed with a quick nod. “There is some connection between the puncture and your trouble, Monsieur, I am convinced of it, but the explanation does not leap to the eye. We shall have to think on this. If—”
A rustle at the doorway cut his conversation short as a young girl entered. She was tall and very slender, exceedingly fair-skinned, with a wealth of yellow hair which she wore coiled simply in a figure 8 at the nape of her neck. Her nose and mouth were small and very finely molded, and her brown eyes seemed out of all proportion to her other features, for they were almost startlingly enlarged by the deep violet semicircles which lay beneath them. She walked slowly, haltingly, as though the effort cost her almost every ounce of hoarded strength, and when she spoke her voice was low, partly from the natural softness of its timbre, but more, it seemed to me, from an extremity of fatigue.
“Will you tell Doctor de Grandin about your illness, dear?” Sorensen asked, his hard blue eyes softening with affection as he looked at her. “Doctor Traherne thinks possibly Doctor de Grandin and Doctor Trowbridge may have come across something like it in their practice.”
Joyce Sorensen shuddered as though a chilly wind had suddenly blown across her shoulders, and her thin hands clasped together in her lap in a gesture that seemed to entreat mercy from fate. “Everything, Uncle Oscar?” she asked softly.
“Of course.”
“I recall my uncle’s first attack perfectly,” she began, not looking at us, but fixing a half-vacant, half-pleading gaze upon a miniature of the Madonna which hung upon the farther wall. “He’d been out shooting that afternoon and went to bed almost immediately after dinner. I had a theater engagement, and went to the Pantoufle Dorée to dance afterward. It must have been about one o’clock, when I came home. Marshall, the butler, was in bed, of course, so I let myself in and went up to kiss Uncle Oscar good-night before going to my own room. Just as I reached his door I heard him cry out, not loudly, but terribly. It sounded something like the screaming laughs maniacs give in melodramatic motion pictures—it seemed to spout up like a dreadful geyser of insane fear, then died away to a kind of gurgling, choking murmur, like water running down a drain, or a man fighting desperately for breath.
“I tried his door and it was locked—I’m sure of that. Then in terror I ran up to Marshall’s room and beat upon his door, calling out that Uncle Oscar was dying; but he gave no answer, so I ran back to the library and snatched a sword down from the wall.” She nodded to a row of brackets where mementoes of Sorensen’s grim fighting years were displayed. “I was determined to force the lock with the blade,” she went on, “but when I reached my uncle’s room again the door was partly open!
“Uncle Oscar lay upon his bed, the covers pushed to the floor, his hands flexed and his fingers digging into the mattress. His pajama jacket was open at the throat, and on the white skin of his neck, just below the line of tan, there was a little spot of blood, no larger than a pin-head.
“I hurried back to Marshall’s room, and this time he heard me right away. Together we got my uncle back beneath the covers and made him comfortable. I spoke to him and he answered sleepily, assuring me he was all right; so I assumed he must have had a nightmare and thought no more about it. It wasn’t till progressive weakness made it impossible for him to rise that we became worried and called in Doctor Traherne.”
As she finished her recital de Grandin rose and leant above her. “Pardonnez-moi, Mademoiselle,” he begged, “but have you, too, by any chance, a stubborn so small wound which gives no pain, but which will not heal? You have noted something of the kind upon your throat?”
The quick blood dyed her face and forehead faintly as she turned startled eyes upon him. “Not on my throat, sir,” she answered softly, “here.”
She laid her hand upon her breast above the heart.
“Eh, death of the devil, do you say so?” he exclaimed; then, very gently: “And may we see, Mademoiselle?”
There was something pleading, frightened, timidly beseeching, in the eyes that never strayed from his as she undid the fastenings of her robe and bared a bosom slim as Shakespeare’s Juliet’s, pointing out a tiny depression which lay against the milk-white skin an inch or so below the gentle swelling of the small and pointed breast.
“Ah?” de Grandin murmured as he finished his inspection. “Trowbridge, if you please, come here and tell me what it is you see.”
He passed his glass to me and, obedient to his pointing finger, I fixed my glance upon the girl’s pale skin. Piercing directly downward was a tiny punctured wound, semilunar in shape and less than an eighth of an inch in length. There was no area of inflammation round it; indeed, the lips of the small aperture seemed wholly bloodless, like those of a stab-wound inflicted on a corpse.
“There is soreness?” asked the Frenchman, gently touching the skin above the wound.
“None at all,” the girl replied.
“And blood?”
“A little, sometimes. Some mornings I wake feeling really rested from my sleep. On these mornings the wound seems nearly healed. Other times I am so weak I can scarcely leave my bed, and I’ve noticed that at such times there is a little smear of blood—oh, not more than a single drop, and that a very small one—on my skin.”
“Thank you, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin nodded absently, his lips, beneath his trimly waxed mustache, slightly pursed, as though he were about to whistle. “Tell us, if you please, have you been troubled with unpleasant dreams, like that which plagued Monsieur your uncle?”
“Why, no; that is, I can’t remember any,” she replied. “Indeed, I’m perfectly all right, except for this great weakness. Do you know what the disease is, Doctor? Doctor Traherne thinks it may be caused by some strange germ—”
“I make no doubt that he is right,” the little Frenchman answered. “A most strange germ, Mademoiselle. A very strange germ, indeed.”
“WELL,” TRAHERNE ASKED AS we left the house after bidding Sorensen and his niece good-night, “what d’ye make of it, gentlemen? Have either of you ever seen anything resembling that condition, or—”
“I have,” de Grandin broke in shortly. “On several occasions I have seen such things, my friend, but never with the same accompanying circumstances. If those wounds were perforated, I should be convinced. As it is, I am in doubt, but—”
“But what?” Traherne demanded as the Frenchman failed to bring his statement to conclusion.
De Grandin’s voice was flat and absolutely toneless as he answered: “Monsieur, if I should tell you what it is I think that lies behind this so strange business of the monkey, you would scoff. You would not believe me. Your mind, pardieu, is far too logical. You would say to you, ‘Cordieu, I have never seen nor heard of anything like this, therefore it cannot be.’ Nevertheless, I am inclined to think the cause of Monsieur Sorensen’s illness, and that of his so charming niece, strikes back directly to that night in Madagascar when he pronounced divorcement on his native wife. It is, in fine, a thing which lies below the realms of logic, therefore something to be combated by perfectly illogical counter-measures.”
“Humph,” Traherne grunted.
“First I advise that you secure a corps of nurses, nurses you can trust implicitly. Have one in attendance on Monsieur Sorensen and another on his niece at every moment of the day and night.”
“O.K,” Traherne agreed, “I’ve been thinking of that. They’re both too weak to be about. Bed-rest is bound to help them. What next?”
“I suggest that you secure a generous supply of ail—how do you say him? garlic?—allium sativum in the pharmacopeia—and have it liberally
distributed at all entrances and exits of their rooms. See, too, that their windows are kept entirely closed, and that all animals are rigorously excluded from their presence.”
Traherne, I could see, was angry, but he kept his temper in control as he demanded: “Then, I suppose, you’d like to have me burn some incense in their rooms, and maybe bring in an Indian medicine man to sing to them? Really, Doctor, you’re amusing.”
A smile which had no mirth in it swept across de Grandin’s mobile lips. “Monsieur,” he answered acidly, “I regret my inability to reciprocate the compliment, but I do not find you amusing. No, not at all; by no means. I find you distinctly annoying. Your mind is literal as a problem in addition. You believe in something only if you know the cause of it; you have faith in remedies only if you know their application. Smallpox, diphtheria, scarlet fever? Yes, of course, you know them. Dementia præcox, yes, you know it, too. But subtle problems of the mind—a hate, which is malign thought made crystal—hard by concentration—morbleu, you will have none of it! ‘I have not seen it, therefore there is no such thing,’ you say.
“Attend me, mon petit bonhomme: When every button which you wore was but a safety-pin, I was studying the occult. ‘Ah,’ I hear you say, ‘occult—magic—balderdash!’ Yes, you think I speak in terms of witches riding broomsticks, but it is not so.
“On more than one occasion I have seen men sicken and die when their symptoms were strangely similar to those of Monsieur Sorensen and Mademoiselle Joyce. Yes, by blue, I have seen them die and be buried, then rise again in dreadful life-in-death. Do not laugh, Monsieur; I tell you that which I have seen.
“But regard me carefully: I did not say the symptoms were the same; I said that they were similar. Those little, so small wounds the patients show, those little wounds which you think unimportant, may be the key to this whole mystery. One thing disturbs me when I think of them. They are punctured, not perforated, by which I mean they strike down in the flesh but do not wholly pierce it. They have entrances but no exits. Also their form convinces me that they were made with knives or needles or some small cutting instrument, and not by teeth, as I at first suspected—”
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