A Rival from the Grave

by Seabury Quinn

  He paused a moment, drumming on the silver knob of his ebony opera stick with restless fingers; then, abruptly: “Do me a favor, my friend,” he begged. “Arrange that we may continue our acquaintance with Monsieur Mendoza and his so charming sister. I would observe her further, if such a thing is possible. I do not like the prospect of the future for that little lovely one.”

  MENDOZA’S DINNER WAS PERFECTION; oysters with champagne brut, dry sherry with the turtle soup, pheasant with ripe Conti, Madeira with dessert and ’47 cognac with the coffee. De Grandin had been gay throughout the meal brimming with high spirits, recounting anecdote on anecdote of humorous adventure in the tropics, in the war, of student days in Paris and Vienna. When books were mentioned he was equally at home in French and English literature discussing Villon, Huysmans, Verlaine, Lamartine and Francis Thompson with impartial intimacy.

  Another guest was with us, a Doktorprofessor Grafensburg whose huge square head topped with close-cut, bristling hair, square spectacles and sweeping handle-bar mustache, no less than his ponderous manner and poorly fitting dinner clothes, labeled him unmistakably a scientist of the Viennese school. He seemed quite lost among the small talk of the table, and occasionally when de Grandin let fly a particularly witty sally he would look up helplessly, as though he sought to mark the flight of some swift-moving insect through the air. Now, cigar between the pudgy fingers of one hand, liqueur glass grasped firmly in the other, he sat foursquare before the fire of blazing apple logs and looked at Mendoza with something like pathetic appeal in his protuberant blue eyes.

  “Doktor Grafensburg has consented to go over some of my—some of the mummies in the Harkness Museum,” Carlos volunteered with a smile at the big Austrian. “Many of them have never been properly classified, and there’s a mass of data to be translated and catalogued.”

  “Ach, yes,” replied the savant, his infantile eyes beaming at this chance to take the center of the stage, “there are some most unusual things which your father’s curators had completely overlooked, Herr Carlos. That little, small one, for example, the one they call the Priestess Sit-ankh-hku, she had never even been unwrapped, yet in her bandages I found a something truly startling.”

  “Ah?” breathed Jules de Grandin softly, as a momentary glitter shone in his small blue eyes. “What, by example, Herr Doktor?”

  Grafensburg rose ponderously and stood before the Frenchman, legs apart, great head thrust forward between his bulging shoulders. “You are, perhaps, familiar with Egyptian beliefs?” he asked challengingly.

  “I would not presume to discuss them with the Herr Doktorprofessor Grafensburg,” replied the Frenchman diplomatically. “Would you not be kind enough to tell us—”

  “Ja wohl,” the Austrian broke in discourteously. “They had no idea of the things we know today, those ancient ones. They thought the arteries were full of air, the seat of the emotions was the heart, that anger generated in the spleen, nicht wahr?”

  “So we have been told,” de Grandin nodded.

  “I tell you the same, also,” rumbled Grafensburg. “Also I tell you that they had partly grasped the truth when they said that reason resided in the brain. Now, in the wrappings of this Priestess Sit-ankh-hku, I found the customary mortuary tablet, the golden plate on which her name and titles were engraved, with the usual pious invocation to the gods, and the pious hope of final resurrection in the flesh, only it was different. You know the reason for the mummification of Egyptian dead, yes? They believed that when three thousand years had passed the soul returned to claim its body, and without a habitation of the flesh would have nowhere to go. It would have to wander bodiless and nameless in Amenti, the realm of the damned. As the little lady lived about the time of the Oppression, she should now be ready for reanimation—”

  “Perfectly, Herr Doktor,” de Grandin nodded, “one understands, but—”

  “Ha, little man, but you do not understand!” the Austrian thrust his cigar forward as though it had been a weapon. “Usually the tablets prayed the gods to guide the ka, or vital principle, back to the waiting body. This one does nothing of the kind. It asserts—asserts, if you please, asserts with positiveness—that Sit-ankh-hku will rise again with the help of one who lives, and by the power of the brain. That is most unusual; it is extraordinary. Never before in the annals of all Egyptology have we found an instance where the deceased will rise otherwise than by the help of the gods. This one will rise by the assistance of a man who lives, or perhaps of a woman, the text is not quite clear. But rise she will, by human assistance and by strength of brain. Donnerwetter, it is droll, nicht wahr? She will reanimate herself by the power of her brain, and that brain was flung into the Nile three thousand years ago, together with her blood!” he finished with a rumbling laugh.

  “I do not think that it is droll, Herr Doktor,” de Grandin answered in a level voice. “I rather think that it is devilish. That statement which you read may go far to explain what—grand Dieu, look to Mademoiselle Dolores, Friend Trowbridge!”

  At his shouted warning I wheeled round. Dolores stood beside the grand piano, a straight, slim silhouette in lettuce green, pearl-pale and rigid as an image. Even as I leaped to aid her the thought flashed through my mind that she was like a gallant little tree whose roots were severed by the woodsman’s ax. She swayed uncertainly a moment, then leant from the perpendicular like a toppling tower. Had I not seized her in my arms she would have fallen flat upon her face, for every nerve and muscle of her slender body had been petrified in the same awful way as on that night at the museum, and as my hands closed round her I was shaken by a feeling of repulsion at the hardness of her flesh.

  “Dolores dear, what is it?” Carlos cried as he placed his sister on a sofa.

  “Is—is it epilepsy?” he asked fearfully, as he saw the girl’s pale skin and set and staring eyes.

  De Grandin’s face was almost totally expressionless, but anger-lightning flashed in his small eyes as he responded tonelessly: “Monsieur Mendoza, one cannot be quite sure, but I think she is suffering from an attack of the Herr Doktor’s cursed drôlerie.”

  Treatment was futile. All night Dolores lay as rigid as if petrified. As though she had been dead, her temperature was exactly that of the surrounding atmosphere, the uncanny hardness of the flesh persisted, and she was unresponsive to all stimuli, save that the pupils of her set and staring eyes showed a slight contraction when we flashed a light in them. There was practically no pulse perceptible, and when we drove a hypodermic needle in her arm to administer a dose of strychnine there was no reflex flinching of the skin, and the impression we had was more like that of thrusting a pin through some tough ceraceous substance than through yielding flesh. As far as we could see, every vital function was suspended. Yet she was not dead. Of that much we were certain.

  Toward morning the dreadful stiffness, so like rigor-mortis, passed, and as at the museum, she began to hum a chant, a weird and oddly accented tune composed of four soft minor notes. This time enunciation seemed more perfect, and we could recognize a phrase which constantly recurred throughout the chant like an imperative refrain repeated endlessly: “O Sit-ankh-hku, nehes—O Sit-ankh-hku, nehes!”

  “Morbleu!” exclaimed de Grandin as a light of recognition flashed in his eyes. “Par la barbe d’un bouc vert, do you apprehend the burden of her song, Friend Trowbridge?”

  “Of course not,” I replied. “This gibberish hasn’t any meaning, has it?”

  “Has it not, ha?” he shot back. “Me, I shall say it has. It is the tongue of ancient Egypt that she chants, my friend, and that phrase she constantly repeats means: ‘Awake, O Sit-ankh-hku; O Sitankh-hku, awake!’”

  “Good Lord, identification with that devilish mummy again!” I exclaimed. “Confound that Grafensburg and his childish talk about the thing, he—”

  “He is a species of a camel,” cut in Jules de Grandin. “May the fires of hell consume him living—he called me ‘little man’!”

  DESPITE OUR EVERY EFFO
RT, Dolores failed to show improvement. Cold compresses on the head, caustics on brow and neck, and repeated stimulants alike seemed powerless to rouse her from her lethargy. Occasionally the delirium in which she chanted thick-tongued invocations lightened the profound coma of absolute unconsciousness; but these spells came unbidden and unheralded, and we were powerless to lift her into consciousness or strike the slightest note of response from her, however much we tried.

  “Dieu de Dieu!” de Grandin swore when three days of unavailing work had brought us close to nervous breakdown; “me, I am slowly going crazy. This sacré coma which has taken hold on her, I do not like it.”

  “D’ye think there’s any chance of her recovering?” I asked, more for the sake of making conversation than from any hope of favorable response.

  “Tiens; le bon Dieu and the devil know, not I,” he answered somberly, his speculative gaze upon the patient. For a space of several minutes he continued his inspection, then plucked me by the sleeve. “Do you observe it, mon ami?” he asked.

  “Eh?”

  “Her face, her hands—the whole of her?”

  “I don’t think—” I began, but:

  “Look at her carefully,” he ordered. “We have forced the vital functions artificially. Elimination we have had, and nourishment by forcible feeding; moreover, she has lain this way for a scant three days, but observe her if you will. Is she not more than normally emaciated?”

  He was right. While some loss of weight was normally to have been expected, emaciation had progressed far past the normal point. The subcutaneous tissue seemed to have dissolved, leaving little more than unfilled skin upon the staring bones. Paper-thin, her cheeks seemed plastered to the jaw-joints of her skull, lips thin as tight-stretched parchment showed the outlines of her teeth, and her very eyeballs seemed deflated, so that the eyes were merely empty pits in a cadaverous face. Wrist processes and radii showed almost as plainly through the drum-tight skin of forearms as though they had no covering at all.

  “Good heavens, yes, you’re right,” I told de Grandin. “Why, she’s desiccated as a mummy!”

  “Tu parles, mon vieux,” he responded grimly. “Like a mummy—yes, by blue, you have put your finger on the word! Come.”

  “Come?” I echoed. “What d’ye mean? Surely, you’ll not leave her—”

  “But yes, of course,” he interrupted. “The garde-malade can watch by her. She can at least report her death, which is all that we could do if we remained. Meanwhile, there is a chance . . . yes, my friend, I think there is a little so small chance. . . .”

  “TO THE HARKNESS MUSEUM,” he ordered the taxi driver, “and hurry, if you please. There is five dollars extra for you if you get us there within ten minutes.”

  “I’m afraid Doctor Grafensburg can’t see you now, sir,” said the attendant when de Grandin panted his demand that we be taken to the Austrian at once. “He’s very busy in his office, and left strict orders—”

  “Ah bah,” the little Frenchman cut in. “You tell me that when we are come upon an errand that may mean the saving of a life? Where is this pig-dog’s utterly, unmentionable office? Me, I will go to him without announcement. Only show us where he hibernates, my friend, and I shall take the full responsibility for disturbing him. Yes, certainly; of course.”

  “Kreuzsakrament! Did I not strict orders leave that I should not be bothered?” Doktor Grafensburg’s big face turned toward us with a snarl of almost bestial fury as we wrenched aside his office door and hastened toward him. He was gowned in linen, as for an autopsy, and glared at us across a porcelain operating-table on which there lay a partly unbandaged mummy. A shiver of repulsion ran through me. With his great head hunched forward, mouth disfigured by the stream of curses which he hurled at us, he reminded me of some foul ghoul disturbed at its repast. The furious scowl lightened somewhat as he recognized us, but his effort at cordiality was plainly forced as he drew a sheet across the mummy on the table and came forward.

  “So? Is it you, little man?” he asked with ponderous jocularity. “I had thought that you were busy taking temperatures and mixing pills!”

  “Sale bête!” de Grandin murmured underneath his breath; then, aloud:

  “We have just come from Mademoiselle Mendoza’s sickroom,” he explained. “Something has happened which has made our presence here imperative. Is it the mummy of the Priestess Sit-ankh-hku. you are working on, Herr Doktor?”

  Grafensburg glared at him suspiciously. “And if it is?” he countered.

  “Précisément, if it is, we should greatly like to see what you have found, if anything. Her physical condition, the extent of preservation of her body, is of great importance to us. May we inspect it?”

  “Nein!” the other spread his arms in a protective gesture, as though de Grandin made a threat against the mummy on the table. “She is mine, and only I may look at her. When I have my investigation made and my notes arranged, you may read what I have found; meantime—”

  There was the menace of cold hatred in de Grandin’s voice as he cut in—”Meantime, mon cher collègue, you will kindly stand aside and let me look at that ten-thousand-times-accursed mummy, or I shall give myself the great felicity of sending your fat soul to hell.” From his shoulder holster he snatched out a pistol and aimed it steadily at the Austrian’s protruding paunch.

  “Allez—en avant,” he ordered as the other stared at him with dilated eyes. “I do not feel inclined to argue with you, my pig-ugly one.”

  Muttering thick-throated curses, Grafensburg gave ground, and de Grandin reached his free hand toward the sheet, twitching it from the half-stripped mummy on the operating-table.

  “Ah?” he breathed as the cotton covering came fluttering off. “Ah-ha? Ah-ha-ha?”

  I stared in blank amazement.

  The form upon the table was no mummy. Denuded of their centuries-old bandages, the head and shoulders were exposed, and from the face Herr Grafensburg had lifted the gold mummy-mask. A pale, exquisite countenance looked up at us, clear-cut as cameo. The brow was low and broad, framed in a mass of fine, dark hair bound round the temples with a diadem of woven silver set with lapis-lazuli. The nose was small and delicately aquiline, the mouth a trifle wide and rather thin-lipped, a willful, proud and somewhat cruel mouth, I thought. Long, curling lashes rested on the youthful, rounded cheeks. Bare, creamy shoulders gleamed beneath the little pointed chin, and from the torn and powdered wrappings, still crossed on the breast, a pair of slender, red-tipped hands peeped out like fragile lilies blooming in corruption. I gazed upon the lovely face in awed amazement, realizing that these silk-fringed eyes had looked upon the world three thousand years ago. How many men had lived and died since those pale lips had drawn the breath of life and those closed eyes had looked upon the sun-gilt, star-jeweled skies of ancient Egypt!

  De Grandin drew his breath in with a sort of whistling gasp. “Mon Dieu,” he whispered softly, “cannot you see it, good Friend Trowbridge? Does not the likeness strike you?”

  “Yes—yes!” I breathed. “You’re right; she does resemble poor Dolores. One could swear that they are sisters, though they lived three thousand years apart.”

  “Himmelskreuzsakrament!” raged Doktor Grafensburg. “You come in here, you crazy, brainless schmetterling, and point pistols at me; you interrupt me at my work, you take from me my beautiful, incomparable one, and—”

  “Calm yourself, mon collègue,” broke in Jules de Grandin with a smile. “We would not for the world disturb you at your work, but we desire certain information which only you can give. This is truly an amazing piece of body preservation. I have seen many mummies in my time, but never one like this. Tell me, if you will; have you some theory of the method they employed to keep her as we see her now?”

  The Austrian’s pale eyes blazed with enthusiasm.

  “Nein, nein,” he answered huskily. “I was unwrapping her when you came in. I was about to make a set of careful measurements and note them down; then I would make an autopsy t
o find how they performed the work to her preserve this way. By heaven, it is a marvel! It is something never seen before. Herr Gott, it is—”

  “One agrees entirely,” de Grandin nodded, “but—”

  “Nein, lieber Gott—you do not understand!” the Austrian cut in. “You have seen mummies, ja? You know they are deprived of moisture-content, left with nothing but the husk of bone and tissue, ja? But—Donnerwetter!—did you ever see a mummy which could take up moisture from the air and resume the look of life it had before the old embalmers pickled it, hein?”

  The little Frenchman’s small blue eyes were dancing with excitement, his tightly waxed wheat-blond mustache seemed fairly quivering as he faced the fleshy Austrian. “Herr Doktor,” he asked half tremulously, “do you tell me that this mummy-thing has seemed revived—”

  “Sehr wohl,” the Austrian broke in, “have I not told you so? When first I took that mummy from its case it was a mummy, nothing more. All moisture had been from it dried; it weighed not more than thirty pounds. I the outer layer of bindings stripped away, then stopped to read and translate the inscription on the pectoral tablet. Three days it lay here partially unwrapped. Today—Herr Gott!—I start to take the other bindings off, and what do I discover? Not the mummy I had left three days before, but the lovely, life-like body of a lovely woman! Herr Gott, she has begun to blossom like a flower in the moisture of the air! She enchants me; I love her as I never loved a woman in my life; I can scarcely wait to cut her open!”

  De Grandin looked at Grafensburg a moment; then: “Meinherr,” he asked, “does human life mean anything to you?”

  The big man stared at him as though he had been something he had never seen before, then raised his shoulders in a ponderous shrug.

  “If it does,” resumed the Frenchman, “you have now the chance to aid us. This body, this lovely, evil thing must be destroyed, and quickly. Believe me, life depends on it.”

  “Nein!” cried the other in a voice gone thin with sudden panic. “I cannot have it so. Not for a hundred human lives shall you lay hands upon my liebes liebchen till I have the autopsy performed on her. Men have died and worms have eaten them ten thousand thousand times since the embalmers of old Egypt finished with their labors on this body. Men will die until the end of time, but here we have a miracle of science. What is one paltry life compared with the disclosures an autopsy on this body will give us? Bah, you little pill-peddler, you tinkerer of broken bones, you set your stupid trade above the cause of science? You would hold the clock-hands back that you might spare some little, worthless life a few years longer? By heaven! I say you shall not touch this body with your little finger! Out, out of my cabinet, out, before I throw you!” Pop-eyes blazing, heavy lips drawn backward in a snarl, he advanced on Jules de Grandin, heedless of the latter’s pistol as though it had been but a pointed finger.