Finally, if Seabury Quinn is watching from above, and closely scrutinizing the shelves of bookstores, he would undoubtedly be pleased as punch, and proud as all get-out, to find his creation, Dr. Jules de Grandin, rising once again in the minds of readers around the world, battling the forces of darkness … wherever, whoever, or whatever the nature of their evil might be.
When the Jaws of Darkness Open,
Only Jules de Grandin Stands in Satan’s Way!
Robert E. Weinberg
Chicago, Illinois, USA
and
George A. Vanderburgh
Lake Eugenia, Ontario, Canada
23 September 2016
The Horror on the Links
IT MUST HAVE BEEN past midnight when the skirling of my bedside telephone awakened me, for I could see the moon well down toward the horizon as I looked through the window while reaching for the instrument.
“Dr. Trowbridge,” an excited voice bored through the receiver, “this is Mrs. Maitland. Can you come over right away? Something dreadful has happened to Paul!”
“Eh?” I answered half asleep. “What’s wrong?”
“We—we don’t know,” she replied jerkily. “He’s unconscious. You know, he’d been to the dance at the country dub with Gladys Phillips, and we’d been in bed for hours when we heard someone banging on the door. Mr. Maitland went down, and when he opened the door Paul fell into the hall. Oh, Doctor, he’s been hurt dreadfully. Won’t you please come right over?”
Physicians’ sleep is like a park—public property. With a sigh I climbed out of bed and into my clothes, teased my superannuated motor to life and set out for the Maitland house.
Young Maitland lay on his bed, eyes closed, teeth clenched, his face set in an expression of unutterable dread, even in his unconsciousness. Across his shoulders and on the backs of his arms I found several long incised wounds, as though the flesh had been raked by a sharp pronged instrument.
I sterilized and bandaged the cuts and applied restoratives, wondering what sort of encounter had produced such hurts.
“Help! Help! O, God, help!” the lad muttered thickly, like a person trying to call out in a nightmare. “Oh, oh, it’s got me; it’s”—his words drowned in a gurgling, inarticulate cry of fear and he sat bolt upright, staring round with vacant, fear-filmed eyes.
“Easy, easy on, young fellow,” I soothed. “Lie back, now; take it easy, you’re all right. You’re home in bed.”
He looked uncomprehendingly at me a moment, then fell to babbling inanely. “The ape-thing—the ape-thing! It’s got me! Open the door; for God’s sake, open the door!”
“Here,” I ordered gaffly as I drove my hypodermic into his arm, “none o’ that. You quiet down.”
The opiate took effect almost immediately, and I left him with his parents while I returned to catch up the raveled ends of my torn sleep.
HEADLINES SHRIEKED AT ME from the front page of the paper lying beside my breakfast grapefruit:
SUPER FIEND SOUGHT IN
GIRL’S SLAYING
Body of Young Woman Found Near Sedgemore
Country Club Mystifies Police—Criminal
Pervert Blamed for Killing—Arrest Imminent
Almost entirely denuded of clothing, marred by a score of terrible wounds, her face battered nearly past recognition and her neck broken, the body of pretty Sarah Humphreys, nineteen, a waitress in the employ of the Sedgemore Country Club, was found lying in one of the bunkers of the dub’s golf course this morning by John Burroughs, a greens keeper. Miss Humphreys, who had been employed at the clubhouse for three months, completed her duties shortly before midnight, and, according to statements of fellow workers, declared she was going to take a short cut across the links to the Andover Road, where she could get a late bus to the city. Her body, terribly mutilated, was found about twenty-five yards from the road on the golf course this morning.
Between the golf links and the Andover Road is a dense growth of trees, and it is thought the young woman was attacked while walking along the path through the woods to the road. Deputy Coroner Nesbett, who examined the body, gave his opinion that she had been dead about five hours when found. She had not been criminally assaulted.
Several suspicious characters have been seen in the neighborhood of the club’s grounds recently, and the police are checking up on their movements. An early arrest is expected.
“There’s two gintelmen to see ye, sor.” Nora McGinnis, my household factotum, interrupted my perusal of the paper. “’Tis Sergeant Costello an’ a Frinchman, or Eyetalian, or sumpin. They do be wantin’ ter ax ye questions about th’ murther of th’ pore little Humphreys gurl.”
“Ask me about the murder?” I protested. “Why, the first I knew of it was when I looked at this paper, and I’m not through reading the account of the crime yet.”
“That’s all right, Dr. Trowbridge,” Detective Sergeant Costello answered with a laugh as he entered the dining room. “We don’t figure on arrestin’ you, but there’s some questions we’ll be askin’, if you don’t mind. This is Professor de Grandin of the Paris police. He’s been doin’ some work for his department over here, an’ when this murder broke he offered th’ chief his help. We’ll be needin’ it, too, I’m thinkin’. Professor de Grandin, Dr. Trowbridge,” he waved an introductory hand from one of us to the other.
The professor bowed stiffly from the hips in continental fashion, then extended his hand with a friendly smile. He was a perfect example of the rare French blond type, rather under medium height, but with a military erectness of carriage that made him seem several inches taller than he actually was. His light blue eyes were small and exceedingly deep-set, and would have been humorous had it not been for the curiously cold directness of their gaze. With his blond mustache waxed at the ends in two perfectly horizontal points and those twinkling, stocktaking eyes, he reminded me of an alert tomcat. Like a cat’s, too, was his lithe, noiseless step as he crossed the room to shake hands.
“I fear Monsieur Costello gives you the misapprehension, doctor,” he said in a pleasant voice, almost devoid of accent. “It is entirely true I am connected with the Service de Sûreté, but not as a vocation. My principal work is at the University of Paris and St. Lazaire Hospital; at present I combine the vocation of savant with the avocation of criminologist. You see—”
“Why,” I interrupted as I grasped his slim, strong hand, “you’re Professor Jules de Grandin, the author of Accelerated Evolution?”
A quick, infectious grin swept across his mouth and was reflected in his eyes. “You know me, hein? Good, it is that I am among friends! However, at the moment our inquiries lie in quite another field. You have a patient, one Monsieur Paul Maitland, yes? He was set upon last night in the Andover Road, no?”
“I have a patient named Paul Maitland,” I admitted, “but I don’t know where he received his injuries.”
“Nor do we,” he answered with a smile, “but we shall inquire. You will go with us while we question him, no?”
“Why, yes,” I acquiesced. “I should be looking in on him this morning, anyhow.”
“AND NOW, YOUNG MONSIEUR,” Professor de Grandin began when introductions had been completed, “you will please tell us what happened last night to you. Yes?”
Paul looked uncomfortably from one of us to the other and swallowed nervously. “I don’t like to think of it,” he confessed, “much less talk about it; but here’s the truth, believe it or not:
“I took Gladys home from the club about eleven o’clock, for she had developed a headache. After I’d said good night to her I decided to go home and turn in, and had gotten nearly here when I reached in my pocket for a cigarette. My case was gone, and I remembered laying it on a window ledge just before my last dance.
“The Mater gave me that case last birthday, and I didn’t want to lose it, so, instead of telephoning the club and asking one of the fellows to slip it in his pocket, like a fool I decided to drive back for it.
“
You know—at least Dr. Trowbridge and Sergeant Costello do—the Andover Road dips down in a little valley and curves over by the edge of the golf course between the eighth and ninth holes. I’d just reached that part of the road nearest the links when I heard a woman scream twice—it really wasn’t two screams, more like one and a half, for her second cry was shut off almost before it started.
“I had a gun in my pocket, a little .22 automatic—good thing I did, too—so I yanked it out and drew up at the roadside, leaving my engine running. That was lucky, too, believe me.
“I ran into the woods, yelling at the top of my voice, and there I saw something dark, like a woman’s body, lying across the path. I started toward it when there was a rustling in the trees overhead and—plop!—something dropped right down in front of me.
“Gentlemen, I don’t know what it was, but I know it wasn’t human. It wasn’t quite as tall as I, but it looked about twice as wide, and its hands hung down. Clear down to the ground.
“I yelled, ‘What the hell goes on here?’ and pointed my gun at it, and it didn’t answer, just started jumping up and down, bouncing with its feet and hands on the ground at once. I tell you, it gave me the horrors.
“‘Snap out of it,’ I yelled again, ‘or I’ll blow your head off.’ Next moment—I was so nervous and excited I didn’t know what I was doing—I let fly with my pistol, right in the thing’s face.
“That came near bein’ my last shot, too. Believe me or not, that thing, whatever it was, reached out, snatched the gun out of my hand, and broke it. Yes, sir, snapped that pistol in two with its bare hands as easily as I could break a match.
“Then it was on me. I felt one of its hands go clear over my shoulder from breast to back in a single clutch, and it pulled me toward it. Ugh! It was hairy, sir. Hairy as an ape!”
“Morbleu! Yes? And then?” de Grandin prompted eagerly.
“Then I lunged out with all my might and kicked it on the shins. It released its grip a second, and I beat it. Ran as I never had on the quarter-mile track, jumped into my car and took off down the road with everything wide open. But I got these gashes in my back and arms before I got to the roadster. He made three or four grabs for me, and every one of ’em took the flesh away where his nails raked me. By the time I got home I was almost crazy with fright and pain and loss of blood. I remember kicking at the door and yelling for the folks to open, and then I went out like a light.”
The boy paused and regarded us seriously. “You think that I’m the biggest liar out of jail, most likely, but I’ve been telling you the absolute, straight truth, sirs.”
Costello looked skeptical, but de Grandin nodded eagerly, affirmatively. “But certainly you speak the truth, mon vieux,” he agreed. “Now, tell me, if you can, this poilu, this hairy one, how was he dressed?”
“Um,” Paul wrinkled his brow. “I can’t say surely, for it was dark in the woods and I was pretty rattled, but—I—think it was in evening clothes. Yes; I’d swear to it. I saw his white shirt bosom.”
“Ah?” de Grandin murmured. “A hairy thing, a fellow who leaps up and down like a mad monkey or a jumping-jack and wears the evening clothes? It is to think, mes amis.”
“I’ll say it is,” Costello agreed. “It is to think what sort o’ hooch they’re servin’ to th’ youngsters nowadays—or mebbe they can’t take it like us old vets o’ th’ first World War—”
“Dr. Trowbridge is wanted on the ’phone, please,” a maid’s announcement cut his ponderous irony. “You can take it on this one, if you wish, sir. It’s connected with the main line.”
“This is Mrs. Comstock, doctor,” a voice informed me. “Your cook told us you were at Mrs. Maitland’s. Can you come to my house when you leave there? Mr. Manly, my daughter’s fiancé, was hurt last night.”
“Hurt last night?” I repeated.
“Yes, out by the country club.”
“Very well, I’ll be right over,” I promised, and held out my hand to Professor de Grandin. “Sorry I have to run away,” I apologized, “but another man was hurt at the club last night.”
“Pardieu!” His little round blue eyes bored into mine. “That club, it are a most unhealthy place, n’est-ce-pas? May I accompany you? This other man may tell us something that we ought to know.”
YOUNG MANLY’S INJURY PROVED to be a gunshot wound inflicted by a small caliber weapon, and was located in the left shoulder. He was reticent concerning it, and neither de Grandin nor I felt inclined to press him insistently, for Mrs. Comstock hovered in the sick room from our entrance till the treatment was concluded.
“Nom d’un petit porc!” the little Frenchman muttered as we left the Comstock residence. “He is close-mouthed, that one. Almost, it would appear—pah! I talk the rot. Let us go to the morgue, cher collègue. You shall drive me there in your motor and tell me what it is you see. Oft times you gentlemen of general practice see things that we specialists cannot because we wear the blinders of our specialties, n’est-ce-pas?”
In the cold, uncharitable light of the city mortuary we viewed the remains of poor little Sarah Humphreys. As the newspaper had said, she was disfigured by a score or more of wounds, running, for the most part, down her shoulders and arms in a series of converging lines, and incised deeply enough to reveal the bone where skin and flesh had been shorn through in places. On throat and neck were five distinct livid patches, one some three inches in size, roughly square, the other four extending in parallel lines almost completely round her neck, terminating in deeply pitted scars, as though the talons of some predatory beast had sunk into her flesh. But the most terrifying item of the grisly sight was the poor girl’s face. Repeated blows had hammered her once-pretty features to a purpled level, and bits of sand and fine gravel still bedded in the cuticle told how her countenance must have been ground into the earth with terrific force. Never, since my days as emergency hospital interne, had I seen so sickening an array of injuries on a single body.
“And what is it you see, my friend?” the Frenchman asked in a low, raucous whisper. “You look, you meditate. You do think—what?”
“It’s terrible,” I began, but he cut me off impatiently.
“But certainly. One does not look to see the beautiful in the morgue. I ask for what you see, not for your aesthetic impressions. Parbleu!”
“If you want to know what interests me most,” I answered, “it is those wounds on her shoulder and arms. Except in degree, they’re exactly like those which I treated on Paul Maitland last night.”
“Ah-ha?” His small blue eyes were dancing with excitement, his cat’s-whiskers mustache was bristling more fiercely than ever. “Name of a little blue man! We begin to make the progress. Now,”—he touched the livid patches on the dead girl’s throat daintily with the tip of a well manicured nail—“these marks, do they tell you something?”
I shook my head. “Possibly the bruise left by some sort of garrote,” I hazarded. “They are too long and thick for fingerprints; besides, there’s no thumb mark.”
“Ha-ha.” His laugh was mirthless as that of an actor in a high school play. “No thumb mark, you say? My dear sir, had there been a thumb mark I should have been all at sea. These marks are the stigmata of the truth of young Monsieur Maitland’s story. When were you last at le jardin des plantes, the how do you say him?—zoölogical garden?”
“The zoo?” I echoed wonderingly.
“Précisément, the zoo, as you call him. Have you never noted how the quadrumana take hold of a thing? I tell you, cher collègue, it is not very much of an exaggeration to say the thumb is the difference between man and monkey. Man and the chimpanzee grasp objects with the fingers, using the thumb as a fulcrum. The gorilla, the orangutan, the gibbon are all fools, they know not how to use their thumbs. Now see”—again he indicated the bruises on the dead girl’s throat—“this large square patch, it is the mark of the heel of the hand, these circling lines, they are the fingers, and these wounds, they are nail prints. Name of an old and very wicked
tomcat! It was the truth young Maitland told. It was an ape that he met in the wood. An ape in evening clothes! What do you make of that, hein?”
“God knows,” I answered helplessly.
“Assuredly,” he nodded solemnly. “Le bon Dieu truly knows, but me, I am determined that I shall know, too.” Abruptly he turned from the dead girl and propelled me gently toward the door by the elbow. “No more, no more now,” he declared. “You have your mission of help to the sick to perform; I also have some work to do. If you will take me to police headquarters I shall be obliged to you, and, if the imposition is not too great, may I dwell at your house while I work upon this case? You consent? Good. Until tonight, then, au ’voir.”
IT WAS SOME TIME after eight o’clock that evening when he came to the house, laden with almost enough bundles to tax a motor truck. “Great Scott, professor,” I exclaimed as he laid his parcels on a convenient chair and gave me a grin which sent the waxed points of his mustache shooting upward like a pair of miniature horns, “have you been buying out the town?”
“Almost,” he answered as he dropped into an easy chair and lit an evil smelling French cigarette. “I have talked much with the grocer, the druggist, the garage man and the tobacconist, and at each place I made purchases. I am, for the time, a new resident of your so charming city of Harrisonville, eager to find out about my neighbors and my new home. I have talked like a garrulous old woman, I have milled over much wordy chaff, but from it I have sifted some good meal, grâce à Dieu!”
He fixed me with his curiously unwinking cat-stare as he asked: “You have a Monsieur Katmar as a neighbor, have you not?”
“Yes, I believe there’s such a person here,” I replied, “but I know very little about him.”
“Tell me that little, if you will be so kind.”
“H’m. He’s lived here just about a year, and kept very much to himself. As far as I know he’s made no friends and has been visited by no one but tradesmen. I understand he’s a scientist of some sort and took the old Means place out on the Andover Road so he could pursue his experiments in quiet.”
The Horror on the Links Page 2