A Rival from the Grave

by Seabury Quinn

  It fluttered weavingly above the clustered curls of her coiffure a moment like a Pentecostal flame, then with a sudden dip descended on the cupric hair, spread about it like a halo for an instant, and vanished; not like a bursting bubble, but slowly, like a ponderable substance being sucked in, as milk in a tall goblet vanishes when imbibed through a straw.

  I do not think that anybody else observed the strange occurrence, for the dancers were too hypnotized by sensuous motion and the moaning rhythm of the music, while the diners were preoccupied with food; but the scream the girl emitted as the flickering flame sank through her high-dressed hair brought everyone up standing. It was, I thought, not so much a cry of pain as of insanity, of strange disease and maniacal excitement. It frothed and spouted from her tortured mouth like a geyser of unutterable anguish.

  “Mordieu, see to her, my friend, she swoons!” de Grandin cried as we dashed across the dance floor where the girl lay in a heap, like a lovely tailor’s dummy overturned and broken.

  With the assistance of two waiters, chaperoned by an assistant manager in near-hysterics, we took her to the ladies’ rest room and laid her on a couch. She was breathing stertorously, her hands were clenched, and as I reached to feel her pulse I noticed that her skin was cold and clammy as a frog’s, and little hummocks of horripilation showed upon her forearms. “Every symptom of lightning-stroke,” I murmured as I felt her feeble, fluttering pulse and turned her lids back to find pupils so dilated that they all but hid her irides; “is there any sign of burns?”

  “One moment, we will see,” de Grandin answered, stripping off her flaring-skirted frock of white organza and the clinging slip of primavera printed satin as one might turn a glove. We had no difficulty in examination, for except for a lace bandeau bound about her bosom and a pair of absolutely minimal gilt-leather sandals she was, as Jules de Grandin might have said, “as naked as his hand.” Her skin was white and fine and smooth, with that appearance of translucence seen so often in red-headed people, and nowhere did it show a trace of burn or blemish. But even as we finished our inspection a choking, rasping wheeze came in her throat, and her stiffened body fell back lax and flaccid.

  “Quickly,” cried de Grandin as he turned her on her face, knelt above her and began administering artificial respiration; “have warm blankets and some brandy brought, my friend. I will keep her heart and lungs in action till the stimulants arrive.”

  ALMOST AN HOUR HAD elapsed when the girl’s lids finally fluttered up, disclosing sea-green eyes that held a dreamy, slightly melancholy look. “Where am—I?” she asked feebly, voicing the almost universal question of the fainting. “Why—you’re men, aren’t you?”

  “We are so taken and considered, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin answered with a smile. “You had expected otherwise?”

  “I—don’t—know,” she answered listlessly; then, as she saw her badly frightened escort at the door: “Oh, George, I think I must have died for a few moments!”

  De Grandin motioned the young man to a chair beside the couch, tucked a blanket-end more snugly round the girl’s slim shoulders, and bent a smile of almost fatherly affection on the lovers. “Corbleu, Mademoiselle, we—Doctor Trowbridge and I—feared you were going to die permanently,” he assured her. “You were a very ill young woman.”

  “But what was it?” asked the young man. “One moment Sylvia and I were dancing peacefully, the next she screamed and fainted, and—”

  “Précisément, Monsieur, one is permitted to indulge in speculation as to what it was,” de Grandin nodded. “One wonders greatly. To all appearances le feu Saint Elme—the how do you call him? Saint Elmo’s light?—took form upon a flagstaff by the dancing-roof, but that should happen only during periods of storm when the air is charged with electricity. No matter, it appeared to form and dance about the pole-tops like a naughty little child who torments a wandering blind man, then pouf! the globe of fire, he did detach himself and fall like twenty thousand bricks on Mademoiselle. This should not be. Saint Elmo’s light is usually harmless as the gleaming of the firefly in the dark. Like good old wine, it is beautiful but mild. Yet there it is; it struck your lady’s head and struck her all unconscious at the selfsame time.

  “What was your sensation, Mademoiselle?” he added, turning from the young man to the girl.

  “I hardly know,” she answered in a voice so weak it seemed to be an echo. “I had no warning. I was dancing with George and thinking how nice it would be when the rumba finished and we could go back and get a drink, when suddenly something seemed to fall on me—no, that’s not quite right, I didn’t feel as if a falling object struck me, but rather as if I had received a heavy, stunning blow from a club or some such weapon, and as though every hair in my head was being pulled out by the roots at the same time. Then something seemed to spread and grow inside my head, pushing out against my skull and flesh and skin until the pain became so great I couldn’t stand it. Then my whole head seemed to burst apart, like an exploding bomb, and—”

  “And there you were,” the young man interrupted with a nervous laugh.

  She gave him a long, troubled look from heavily fringed eyes. “There I was,” she assented. “But where?”

  “Why, knocked all in a heap, my dear. We thought you were a goner. You would have been, too, if these two gentlemen hadn’t happened to be doctors, and dining at the table next to us.”

  “That isn’t what I mean,” she answered with a little, puzzled frown. “I was—I went somewhere while I was unconscious, dear. I—I half believe I died and had a glimpse of Paradise—only it wasn’t at all as I’d imagined it.”

  “Oh, nonsense, Syl,” her sweetheart chided. “Maybe you imagined you saw something while you were out cold, but—”

  “Tell us what it was you saw, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin interrupted in a soothing voice. “How did your vision differ from your preconceived idea of Paradise?”

  She lay in quiet thought a moment, her green eyes wide and dreamy, almost wistful. Finally: “I seemed to be in a great Oriental city. The buildings were of stone and towered like the Empire State and Chrysler buildings. Their tops were overlaid with gold leaf or sheet copper that shone so brilliantly that it fairly burned my eyes as the fierce sun beat down from a cloudless sky. I was on a portico or terrace of some sort, looking down a wide street reaching to a thick, high-gated wall, and through this gate came a procession. Hundreds of men on horseback carried lances from which silk flags fluttered, and after them came musicians with drums and flutes and tambourines and cymbals, and the music that they made was lovely. Then there were marching women, walking with a kind of dancing step and singing as they came. There were jewels and flowers in their straight, black hair, jewels in their ears and noses, necklaces of beaten gold and pearls and rubies and carved coral around their throats, and jeweled bands of gold around their arms and wrists. Bright gems flashed in the chain-gold belts that clasped their waists; around their ankles they had wire circlets hung with bells that chimed like laughter as they walked. They wore skirts of bright vermilion tied with girdles of blue silk, and their hands and toes and lips and nipples were all dyed brilliant red. Next came a great array of soldiers bearing shields and lances, then more musicians, and finally a herd of elephants which, like the women, wore belled bands of gold around their ankles. But while the women’s bells were sweet and clear and high, the gongs upon the elephants were deep and soft and mellow, like the deep notes of marimbas, and the bass and treble bell-notes blended in a harmony that set the pulses going like the beat of syncopated music.”

  “Eh bien, Mademoiselle, this Paradise you saw was colorful, however much it may have lacked in orthodoxy,” de Grandin smiled. But there was no answering gleam of humor in the girl’s green eyes as she looked at him almost beseechingly.

  “It thrilled me and elated me,” she said. “I seemed to understand it all, and to know that this procession was for me, and me alone; but it frightened me, as well.”

  “You were afraid? But wh
y?”

  “Because, although I knew what it was all about, I didn’t.”

  De Grandin cast a look of humorous entreaty at the young man seated by the couch. “Will you translate for me, Monsieur? Me, I have resided in your so splendid country but a scant twelve years, and I fear I do not understand the English fluently. I thought I heard her say she understood, yet failed to understand. But no, it cannot be. My ears or wits play the mauvaise farce with me.”

  “I don’t quite know how to express it,” the girl responded. “I seemed to be two people, myself and another. It was that other one who understood the pageant and who gloried in it, and that’s what frightened me, for that other one who knew that the procession was to honor him was a man, while I was still a woman, and—” She paused, and tears formed in her eyes, but whether she were weeping for lost womanhood or from vexation at her inability to find the words to frame her explanation I could not decide.

  “Come, come, young lady; that’s enough,” I ordered in my sternest bedside manner. “You’ve suffered from a heavy shock, and people in such cases often have queer visions. There’s nothing medically curious in your having seen this circus parade while you were unconscious, and that feeling of dual personality is quite in keeping, too. If you feel strong enough, I suggest you get your clothes on and let us take you home.”

  “QUEER WHAT ABERRATIONS PEOPLE have following electric shock,” I mused as we paused in the pantry for a final good-night drink. “I remember when I was an interne at City Hospital I had an ambulance case where a woman had been struck by a live wire fallen from a trolley pole. All the way back to the hospital she insisted that she was a cow, and lowed continuously. Now, take this Dearborn girl—”

  “Precisely, take her, if you please,” de Grandin nodded, his mouth half full of cheese and biscuit, a foaming mug of beer raised half-way to his lips. “Is hers not a case to marvel at? She is struck down all but dead by a ball of harmless feu Saint-Elme, and while unconscious sees the vision of a thing entirely outside her experience or background. She could not have dreamed it, for we dream only that of which we know at least a little, yet—” He drained his mug of beer, dusted off his fingers and raised his shoulders in a shrug. “Tenez,” he yawned, “let the devil worry with it. Me, I have the craving for ten hours’ sleep.”

  IT WAS SHORTLY AFTER dinner the next evening that my office telephone began a clangor which refused to be denied. When, worn down at last by the persistence of the caller, I barked a curt “Hullo?” into the instrument, a woman’s voice came tremblingly. “Doctor Trowbridge, this is Mrs. Henry Dearborn of 1216 Passaic Boulevard. You and Doctor de Grandin attended my daughter Sylvia when she fainted at Graystone Towers last night?”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “May I ask you to come over? Doctor Rusholt, our family physician, is out of town, and since you’re already familiar with Sylvia’s case—”

  “What seems to be the trouble?” I cut in. “Any evidence of burning? Sometimes that develops later in such cases, and—”

  “No, thank heaven, physically she seems all right, but a little while ago she complained of feeling nervous, and declared she couldn’t be comfortable in any position. She took some aromatic spirits of ammonia and lay down, thinking it would pass away, but found herself too much wrought up to rest. Then she started walking up and down, and suddenly she began muttering to herself, clasping and unclasping her hands and twitching her face like a person with Saint Vitus’ dance. A few minutes ago she fainted, and seems to be in some sort of delirium, for she’s still muttering and twitching her hands and feet—”

  “All right,” I cut the flow of symptoms short; “we’ll be right over.

  “Looks as if the Dearborn girl’s developing chorea following her shock last night,” I told de Grandin as we headed for the patient’s house. “Poor child, I’m afraid she’s in for a bad time.”

  “Agreed,” he nodded solemnly. “I fear that he has managed to break in—”

  “Whatever are you maundering about?—at your confounded ghost-hunting again?” I interrupted testily.

  “Not at all, by no means; quite the contrary,” he assured me. “This time, my friend, I damn think that the ghost has hunted us. He has, to use your quaint American expression, absconded with our garments while we bathed.”

  SYLVIA DEARBORN LAY UPON the high-dressed bed, her burnished-copper hair and milky skin a charming contrast to her apple-green percale pajamas. She was not conscious, but certainly she was not sleeping, for at times her eyes would open violently, as though they had been actuated by an unoiled mechanism, and her arms and legs would twitch with sharp, erratic gestures. Sometimes she moaned as though in frightful torment; again her lips would writhe and twist as though they had volition of their own, and once or twice she seemed about to speak, but only senseless jabber issued from her drooling mouth.

  De Grandin leant across the bed, listening intently to the gibberish she babbled, finally straightened with a shrug and turned to me. “La morphine?” he suggested.

  “I should think so,” I replied, preparing a half-grain injection. “We must control these spasms or she’ll wear herself out.”

  Deftly he swabbed her arm with alcohol, took a fold of skin between his thumb and forefinger and held it ready for the needle. I shot the mercy-bearing liquid home, and stood to wait results. Gradually her grotesque movements quieted, her moans became more feeble, and in a little while she slept.

  “Give her this three times a day, and see that she remains in bed,” I ordered, writing a prescription for Fowler’s solution. “I don’t think you’ll need us, but if any change occurs please don’t hesitate to call.”

  MRS. DEARBORN TOOK ME at my word. The blue, fading twilight of early dawn limned the windows of my chamber when the bedside telephone began its heartless, sleep-destroying stutter, and I groaned with something close akin to anguish as I reached for it.

  “Oh, Doctor Trowbridge, won’t you come at once?” the mother’s frightened voice implored. “Sylvia’s had another seizure, worse—much worse—this time. She’s talking almost constantly, but it seems she’s speaking in a foreign language, and somehow she seems changed!”

  Years of practise had made me adept at quick dressing, but de Grandin bettered my best efforts. He was waiting for me in the hall, debonair and well-groomed with his usual spruce immaculateness, and had even found time to select a flower for his buttonhole from the epergne in the dining-room.

  A single glance sufficed to tell us that our patient suffered something more than simple chorea. The pseudo-purposive gesticulations were no longer evident; indeed, she seemed as rigid as she had been the night before when we treated her for lightning-shock, and her skin was corpse-cold to the touch. But her lips were working constantly, and a steady flow of words ran from them. At first I thought it only senseless gabble, but a moment’s listening told me that the sounds were words, though of what language I could not determine. They were sing-songed, now high, now low, with irregularly stressed accents, and, somehow, reminded me of the jargon Chinese laundrymen are wont to use when talking to each other. Queerly, too, at times her voice assumed a different timbre, almost high falsetto, but definitely masculine. Constantly recurring through her mumbled gabble was the phrase: “Oom mani padme—oom mani padme! Hong!”

  “Do something for her, Doctor! Oh, for the love of heaven, help her!” Mrs. Dearborn begged as she ushered us into her daughter’s bedroom; then, as I laid my kit upon a chair: “Look—look at her face!”

  Whatever changes may be present in his patients’—or his patients’ relatives’—appearance, a doctor has to keep a poker face, but retaining even outward semblance of unruffled nerves was hard as I looked in Sylvia Dearborn’s countenance. A weird, uncanny metamorphosis seemed taking place. As though her features had been formed of plastic substance, and that substance was being worked by the unseen hands of some invisible modeler, her very cast of countenance was in process of transshaping. Somehow, the lips seemed
thickened, bulbous, and drooped at the comers like those of one whose facial muscles had been weakened by prolonged indulgence in the practise of all seven deadly sins, and as the mouth sagged, so the outer comers of the eyes appeared to lift, the cast of features was definitely Mongol; the slant-eyed, thick-lipped face of a Mongolian idiot was replacing Sylvia Dearborn’s cameo-clear countenance.

  “Oom mani padme—oom mani padme!” moaned the girl upon the bed, and at each repetition her voice rose till the chant became a wail and the wail became a scream; dry-throated, rasping, horrible in its intensity: “Oom mani padme—oom mani padme! Hong!”

  “Whatever—” I began, but de Grandin leaped across the room, staring as in fascination at the sick girl’s changing features, then turned to me with a low command:

  “Morphine; much more morphine, good Friend Trowbridge, if you please! Make the dose so strong that one more millionth of a grain would cause her death; but give it quickly. We must throw her speaking-apparatus out of gear, make it utterly impossible for her to go through the mechanics of repeating that vile invocation!”

  I hastened to comply, and as Sylvia sink into inertia from the drug:

  “Come, my friend, come away,” he bade. “We must go at once and get advice from one who knows whereof he speaks. She will be all right for a short time; the drug will not wear off for several hours.”

  “Where the dickens are we going?” I demanded as he urged me to make haste.

  “To New York, my friend, to that potpourri of intermixed humanity that they call Chinatown. Oh, make speed, my friend! We must hasten, we must rush; we must travel with the speed of light if we would be in time, believe me!”