“When Monsieur Sorensen told us of his Madagascar interlude, I thought I smelled the odor of the rat. Madagascar, mon Dieu, what a place! A land of mystery more terrible than Africa, more subtle than China, more vengeful than India! When our forces overthrew the native government there in 1896 they incurred the never-dying hatred of the Andriana, or Malagasy nobility, and that hatred still crops up in strange and inexplicable murders of the French officials.
“You will recall Monsieur Sorensen referred to his native wife as Mamba, and called her a priestess of ‘the Fragrant One’? Very good. Mamba, my friends, is a native term for a terrible, strange black orchid said to infest the jungles of inland Madagascar. It is supposed to be a kind of vampire plant, or vegetable leech, and if it be placed upon an open wound it blossoms in the likeness of a human figure and nourishes itself upon the blood of its unfortunate host till he or she is dead. According to the stories I was told in Madagascar, the habitat of this strange plant is strictly guarded by the priesthood which serves ‘the Fragrant One,’ which is the native name for the more or less mythical man-eating tree of which such dreadful tales are told.
“Very well. What had we before us? A man who had incurred the hatred of a native noblewoman who was also a priestess of a dark, malevolent religion, a noted sorceress, a woman whose very name was identical with that of a strange and dreadful kind of parasitic plant. This man lived beneath a curse pronounced upon him by this woman, and in the curse she foretold that he should be stricken with a malady which should cause his blood to waste away like little brooks in summer. Also that before he died he should see the one whom he loved most slowly wilt away and die.
“And what else did we see? This man was wasting steadily away; his niece, the apple of his eye, was also sinking rapidly. Was it not apparent that the curse had found him out? It seemed entirely possible.
“But, if it were a curse which worked by magic, why had he grown better when you sent him off upon a cruise? And why did his malady return when he came home? Apparently, there was some connection between his house and his disease. What was this link? Ah, that was for me to find out.
“I have seen men die when stricken by a vampire—do not laugh, Monsieur Traherne, I tell you it is so!—but the vampire bites his victim on the throat; Monsieur Sorensen’s wound was from a knife or pin, not from a tooth, and a similar wound was on his niece’s breast.
“I looked around, I noticed things; it is a habit which I have.
“I saw this colored butler, Marshall. This Marshall is a black man, but he is not a Negro. Neither are the Malagasy. When they are pure-bloods, unmixed with Malay or Chinese or Hindoo stock, their skin is black, but their features are small and straight and fine-cut, without a negroid trace, their hair straight and uncurled, their bodies firmly made, but small.
“Again, this Marshall, as he called himself, spoke with an English accent. I knew he was not reared in this country, but when he said he was from Barbados I also knew he lied. Negroes from Jamaica speak like Englishmen; those from Barbados, for some strange reason, speak with a strong Irish brogue. ‘There is the smell of fish upon this business, Jules de Grandin,’ I inform me.
“Tonight we find Miss Tuthill drugged; it is apparent, yet the butler offers a good alibi. I will test him further,’ I decide, and so I send the other nurse away, ask him for coffee and pretend to fall into a drug-caused sleep. He rises to the bait. Mon Dieu, he rises nobly! He—”
“How did you manage to shake off the effects of the drug so quickly?” I interposed. “The nurse was absolutely paralyzed, yet you—”
“Tiens,” he broke in with a laugh, “those who would make the fool of Jules de Grandin need to rise early in the day, my friend. Did you think I drank that coffee? Quelle naiveté! Pah. Regardez!”
From his pocket he drew out a handkerchief, soaking with brown stickiness.
“When one knows how, the trick is simple,” he assured us. “Le mouchoir, I stuff him in my collar underneath my chin while my back is turned to Marshall, then pouf! I pour the coffee into him when I pretend to drink. Ah bah, it is hot, it is sticky, it is most damnably uncomfortable, but it leaves me in possession of my faculties. Yes, certainly; of course.
“Then, while he thinks I am asleep he does the thing he has done many times before, but tonight would have been the curtain for Mademoiselle Joyce. He was prepared to break Monsieur Sorensen’s heart by killing his niece before administering the coup de grâce to him.
“Ha, but I slept the sleep of the pussy-cat, me! When my small, black mouse was too far from his hole to make retreat I pounced upon him with the help of good friend Trowbridge, and thereafter he had many troubles.
“It took persuasion to make him tell his story, but he finally told it, though he finished with a broken arm. He was a nephew of this Mamba, this sorceress, this priestess of ‘the Fragrant One,’ this orchid-woman who had put a curse on Monsieur Sorensen. Through the years he watched his opportunity, finally coming to this country, taking service with Sorensen, gaining his full confidence, waiting for his chance to plant the strange, black orchid on his throat.
“‘You shall feel the kiss of Mamba,’ said the Malagasy woman, and it was in truth the kiss of Mamba—Mamba the black orchid, not Mamba the black woman—which had drained him of his blood and almost caused his death when you called us in the case, Monsieur Traherne.”
“Where’s that black orchid now?” asked Traherne.
“It was not safe to have around. I threw it in the furnace—morbleu, it writhed and twisted like a tortured living thing when the flames devoured it!” answered Jules de Grandin with a grimace. “The memory of it nauseates me. Await me here, my friends, I go for medicine.”
“I’ve some tablets in my bag—” Traherne began, but de Grandin made a gesture of dissent.
“Not that, mon brave,” he interrupted. “The medicine I seek is in a bottle on the sideboard down below. It bears the name of Messieurs Haig & Haig.”
The Dead-Alive Mummy
SHE CAME WALKING SLOWLY toward us past the rows of mummy-cases. Not tall, but very slim she was, sheathed in a low-cut evening gown of midnight velvet which set her creamy shoulders off in sharp relief. Her hair, blue-black and glossy, was stretched without a ripple to a knot behind her neck, and contrasted oddly with her eyes of peacock blue. There was contrast, too, between the small and slightly kestrel nose and the full and sensuous mouth which blossomed moist and brilliant-red against the unrouged pallor of her narrow face. One slender-fingered hand was toying with a rope of pearls, and as she stepped there was a glint of golden links beneath the gossamer silk encasing her left ankle. Clouded, but unconcealed, the jewel-red lacquer on her toenails shone through filmy stocking-tips exposed by toeless satin sandals.
“Mon Dieu, but she is vital as a flame!” de Grandin whispered. “Who is she, Friend Trowbridge?”
“Dolores Mendoza,” I answered, “the sister of the man who gave this collection of Egyptiana to the Harkness Museum. Old Aaron Mendoza, her father, was fanatical about ancient Egypt, and was said to have the third finest collection in the world, ranking next after the British Museum and the Musée des Antiques at Cairo.”
The little Frenchman nodded. “So we are here,” he murmured.
We were, as he had said, there for that very reason.
Aaron Mendoza, son and grandson of our city’s foremost merchants, had retired from commercial life at the relatively early age of sixty, turning active management of the Mendoza Department Store over to his son Carlos and devoting himself to Egyptology with an energy amounting to a passion. Honest in all his mercantile transactions with the rigid honesty of a Portuguese-Jewish family which traced its history unbroken past the days of the Crusades, he had not scrupled to resort to any practice which would further his ambition to acquire the finest private Egyptological collection in the world. Men noted for their learning, daring and “resourcefulness” had named what fees they wanted for their services to him, and one by one they brought to him the spoils of E
gypt’s sands and pyramids and hidden rock-tombs—bits of art-craft wrought in gold and silver, lapis-lazuli and celadon, things whose valuations sounded like the figures of a nation’s load of debt, papyri setting forth in picture-writing secrets never dreamt by modern man, desiccated bodies of kings and priests and priestesses whose intrigues shaped the destiny of nations in the days when history was an infant in its swaddling bands.
One morning they found Aaron sitting on his bed, a vacuous grin disfiguring his handsome face, both feet thrust into one trouser-leg. He babbled like a baby when they spoke to him, and smiled at me with child-like glee when I tried to ask him how he felt. His strong, fine brain had softened to a mass of cheesy waste while he was sleeping, and within a week the helplessness of paresis had settled on him. In six months he was dead.
Scarcely had the period of formal mourning ended when Carlos Mendoza announced the gift of all his father’s ancient treasures to the Harkness Museum. With antiques went a sum to build a wing for housing them and a fund for their maintenance. This evening the new wing was opened with due ceremony, and the city’s notables were gathered for the rites of dedication. Somehow—possibly because I had brought him and his sister into the world and steered them through the mumps and chicken-pox and other childish ills—Carlos had included me and de Grandin in the list of guests invited, and we had traversed miles of marbled corridors, viewing the exhibits with that awe which modern man displays before the relics of the older days. Tired of the flower-scent and chatter and repeated “ohs” and “ahs” of those assembled in the main hall, we had retired to the Gallery of Mummies for a moment’s respite, and stood beside the bronze-barred window at its farther end as Dolores entered.
“Would you like to meet her?” I asked as the Frenchman’s interested gaze stayed fixed upon the girl.
“Corbleu, does the heliotrope desire to face the sun?” he answered. “Yes, my friend, present me, if you will, and I shall call you blessed.
“Enchanté, Mademoiselle,” he assured her as he raised her fingers to his lips. “You are like a breath of life among these relics of mortality; a star which is reflected in the black tides of the Styx.”
The girl looked round her with a little shudder of repulsion.
“I hate these ancient things,” she told us. “Carlos wasn’t sure he wanted to part with them after Father spent so many years collecting them, but I urged him to present them to the museum. I hope I never have to look at them again. The jewels are ghastly—cold and dead as the people who once wore them, and the mummies—” She paused and looked distastefully at the upright mummy which faced us through the screen of dust-proof glass.
“Mummy and Coffin of Sit-ankh-hku, Priestess of Isis, from Hierakonpolis. Period XIXth Dynasty (circa. 1,200 B.C.)” she read aloud from the neatly lettered card. “Can you fancy living in the house with things like that? She might have been a girl about my age, judging by the portrait on the coffin top. Every time I looked at her it was as though I looked at my own body lying in that coffin.”
The mummy and its case were usual types. In the open casket stood the mummy, barely five feet tall, swathed in closely wrapped brown cerecloth, banded latitudinally and diagonally with retaining bandages, the head a mere conical hooded protuberance above the slanting shoulders, no trace of arms apparent, feet shown merely as a horizontal shelf beneath the upright body. On the lid, which stood beside the coffin proper, had been carved a face to represent the dead. The features were small, patrician, delicately hawk-nosed and full-lipped, with narrow brows of vivid black arched over eyes of peacock blue. The ancient artist had worked well. Here was no mere mortuary portrait, typical of race and era, but lacking personality. It was, I felt on looking at it, a faithful likeness of the girl who died three thousand years ago, personalized and individual.
De Grandin studied it a moment, then: “One understands, Mademoiselle,” he told her. “When one looks at that face it takes small imagination to conceive that it resembles you. She had rare beauty, that old one, just as you—sapristi, what is it, Mademoiselle?”
Dolores stood before the mummy-case, staring at the painted face with a set, unwinking gaze. Her countenance was mask-like, almost totally expressionless; yet something that was lurking terror lay within her eyes, rendering them glassy, shallow. It was as if a curtain had been drawn across them from within, hiding anything that might be seen by one who looked in them and leaving only a suggestion of sheer fright and horror printed on the retina.
“Mademoiselle Dolores!” he repeated sharply. “What is it?” Then, as she swayed unsteadily, “Catch her, my friend,” he ordered. “She swoons!”
Even as he cried his warning the girl oscillated dizzily, with a sort of circular motion, as though her feet were fast-pivoted upon the floor, then pitched forward toward the glass-framed mummy-case, and as she toppled forward her eyes were wide and staring, fixed in fascination on the painted face upon the coffin lid. My arm went round her as she swayed, and a gasp of wonder choked my words of sympathy unuttered. From sandal-sole to head she was rigid as a frozen thing; taut, hard, unyielding as a hypnotist’s assistant in a trance.
The rigor that affected her was such that we carried her across the room as though she had lain on a litter.
“What in heaven’s name is it?” I demanded as we laid her on a Theban couch of sycamore and ivory. We could not chafe her hands, for they were set so firmly that they might have been carved wood, and when I placed my hand upon her breast to feel her heart, the flesh beneath her velvet corsage met my touch unyieldingly. It might have been a lovely waxen tailor’s dummy over which we leant rather than the vibrant girl to whom we talked a moment since.
“Perhaps I’d better get some water,” I suggested, but de Grandin stayed me with a gesture.
“Non,” he advised. “Stay here and watch with me, my friend. This is—sssh, she is recovering!”
The set and horrified expression in Dolores’ eyes was giving way, and in its stead we saw what seemed to be a look of recognition, like that of one who comes upon an old and long-forgotten scene, and fails at first to place it in his memory. The rigid, hard lines faded from her cheeks and jaw, and her slender bosom fluttered with a gasp of inspiration as her lips fell open and a little sigh escaped them. The words she used I could not understand, for they were spoken in a mumbling undertone, strung together closely, like an invocation hurriedly pronounced, but it seemed to me they had a harsh and guttural sound, as though containing many consonants, unlike any tongue with which I was familiar.
She sang softly, in an eery, rising cadence, with a sharply accented note at the end of every measure, over and over the same meaningless jargon, a weird, uncanny tune, vaguely like a Gregorian chant. One single sound I recognized—or thought I did—though whether it really were a word or whether my mind broke its syllables apart and fitted them to the sound of a more or less familiar name I could not tell; but it seemed to me that constantly recurring through the rapid flow of mumbled invocation was a sibilant disyllable, much like our letter S said twice in quick succession.
“What’s she trying to say—‘Isis’?” I asked, raising my eyes from her fluttering lips.
De Grandin was watching her intently, with that fixed, unwinking stare which I had seen him hold for minutes at a time when we were in the amphitheater of a hospital and a work of unique surgery was in progress. He waved an irritated hand at me, but neither spoke nor shifted the intentness of his gaze.
The flow of senseless words grew slower, thinner, as though the force of breath behind the red and twitching lips were lessening. “Ah mon . . . sss-sss . . . se-rhus—” came the softly whispered slurring syllables; then, as the faint voice ceased entirely, a gleam of consciousness came into Dolores’ eyes, and she looked from Jules de Grandin to me with a puzzled frown. “Oh, did I faint?” she asked apologetically. “It was so terribly hot in there”—she gestured toward the crowded auditorium—“I thought it would be better here, but I suppose—” She raised her shoul
ders in the faint suggestion of a shrug, leaving her explanation uncompleted. Then, composedly, she swung her feet to the floor and placed her hand upon my arm.
“Will you take me to the coat room and call my car, please, Doctor?” she requested. “I think I’m about done in. Better be getting home before I have another fainting-fit.”
“THAT WAS ONE OF the most remarkable exhibitions of autosuggestion I’ve ever seen,” I declared as we drove home.
“U’m?” said Jules de Grandin.
“It was,” I answered firmly. “I’ll admit it was uncanny as the devil, but the explanation’s logical enough. That poor child had developed such a detestation of those mummies that it amounted almost to an obsession. Tonight, while she was staring at the face upon that coffin top—you’ll recall she said it looked like her?—she suddenly went rigid as a mummy herself. Hypnosis induced by a carefully self-built-up train of thought identifying herself with the mummy of that priestess, then the fatigue of the reception, finally the ideal combination of the polished glass case reflecting a bright light and the face upon the coffin lid to focus her gaze. And, did you notice, she even mumbled some sort of gibberish while she was unconscious? Absolute identification with the character of the priestess. I don’t think Carlos got those mummies out of his house one day too soon for his sister’s mental health.”
“I agree,” de Grandin answered heartily. “Perhaps he did not move as quickly as he should. Her case will bear our observation, I believe.”
“Oh, then you don’t agree with my theory of autosuggestion and self-hypnosis?”
“Eh bien, they are queer things, these minds of ours,” he returned evasively. “Hypnotism, what is it? No one rightly knows. Is it the ‘animal magnetism’ of Mesmer, or the substitution of the operator’s mind for that of his subject, or, as some have hinted, the domination of one soul and spirit by another? Me, I do not know; neither do you. But he who plays with it toys with something perilously akin to magic—not always good magic, by the way, my friend.”
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