The Horror on the Links

by Seabury Quinn

  “Good evening, Monsieur Bixby,” de Grandin greeted as we followed the servant into the great hallway. “I have taken the liberty to bring a compatriot of yours, Dr. Trowbridge, with me to aid in my researches.” He shot me a meaning glance as he hurried on. “Your kindness in permitting me the facilities of the château library is greatly appreciated, I do assure you.”

  Bixby, a big, full-fleshed man with ruddy face and drooping mustache, smiled amiably. “Oh, that’s all right, Monsoor,” he answered. “There must be a couple o’ million books stacked up in there, and I can’t read a one of ’em. But I’ve got to pay rent on ’em, just the same, so I’m mighty glad you, or someone who savvies the lingo, can put ’em to use.”

  “And Madame Bixby, she is well, and the so charming Mademoiselle, she, too, is in good health, I trust?”

  Our host looked worried. “To tell you the truth, she ain’t,” he replied. “Mother and I had reckoned a stay in one of these old houses here in France would be just the thing for her, but it seems like she ain’t doin’ so well as we’d hoped. Maybe we’d better try Switzerland for a spell; they say the mountain air there …”

  De Grandin bent forward eagerly. “What is the nature of Mademoiselle’s indisposition?” he asked. “Dr. Trowbridge is one of your America’s most famous physicians, perhaps he …” He paused significantly.

  “That so?” Bixby beamed on me. “I’d kind o’ figured you was one of them doctors of philosophy we see so many of round here, ’stead of a regular doctor. Now, if you’d be so good as to look at Adrienne, Doc, I’d take it right kindly. Will you come this way? I’ll see supper’s ready by the time you get through with her.”

  He led us up a magnificent stairway of ancient carved oak, down a corridor paneled in priceless wainscot, and knocked gently at a high-arched door of age-blackened wood. “Adrienne, darlin’,” he called in a huskily tender voice, “here’s a doctor to see you—an American doctor, honey. Can you see him?”

  “Yes,” came the reply from beyond the door, and we entered a bedroom as large as a barrack, furnished with articles of antique design worth their weight in gold to any museum rich enough to buy them.

  Fair-haired and violet-eyed, slender to the borderline of emaciation, and with too high flush on her cheeks, Bixby’s daughter lay propped among a heap of real-lace pillows on the great carved bed, the white of her thin throat and arms only a shade warmer than the white of her silk nightdress.

  Her father tiptoed from the room with clumsy care and I began my examination, observing her heart and lung action by auscultation and palpation, taking her pulse and estimating her temperature as accurately as possible without my clinical thermometer. Though she appeared suffering from fatigue, there was no evidence of functional or organic weakness in any of her organs.

  “Hm,” I muttered, looking as professionally wise as possible, “just how long have you felt ill, Miss Bixby?”

  The girl burst into a storm of tears. “I’m not ill,” she denied hotly. “I’m not—oh, why won’t you all go away and leave me alone? I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I—I just want to be let alone!” She buried her face in a pillow and her narrow shoulders shook with sobs.

  “Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin whispered, “a tonic—something simple, like a glass of sherry with meals—is indicated, I think. Meantime, let us repair to the so excellent supper which waits below.”

  We repaired. There was nothing else to do. His advice was sound, I knew, for all the physician’s skill is powerless to cheer a young woman who craves the luxury of being miserable.

  3

  “FIND ANYTHING SERIOUS, DOC?” Bixby asked as de Grandin and I seated ourselves in the paneled dining hall of the château.

  “No,” I reassured him. “She seems a little run down, but there’s certainly nothing wrong which can’t be corrected by a light tonic, some judicious exercise and plenty of rest.”

  “Uh-huh?” he nodded, brightening. “I’ve been right smart worried over her, lately.

  “You know, we wasn’t always rich. Up to a couple o’ years ago we was poor as church mice—land poor, in the bargain. Then, when they begun findin’ oil all round our place, Mother kept at me till I started some drillin’, too, and darned if we didn’t bring in a gusher first crack outa the box.

  “Adrienne used to teach school when we was ranchin’ it—tryin’ to, rather—an’ she an’ a young lawyer, name o’ Ray Keefer, had it all fixed up to get married.

  “Ray was a good, upstandin’ boy, too. Had a considerable practice worked up over Bartlesville way, took his own company overseas durin’ the war, an’ would a’ been ran for the legislature in a little while, like as not. But when we started takin’ royalties on our leases at the rate of about three hundred dollars a week, Mother, she ups and says he warn’t no fittin’ match for our daughter.

  “Then she and Adrienne had it hot an’ heavy, with me stayin’ outa the fuss an’ bein’ neutral, as far as possible. Mother was all for breakin’ the engagement off short, Adrienne was set on gettin’ married right away, an’ they finally compromised by agreein’ to call a truce for a year while Ray stayed home an’ looked after his practice an’ Adrienne come over here to Europe with Mother an’ me to see the world an’ ‘have her mind broadened by travel,’ as Mother says.

  “She’s been gettin’ a letter from Ray at every stop we made since we left home, an’ sendin’ back answers just as regular, till we come here. Lately she ain’t seemed to care nothin’ about Ray, one way or the other. Don’t answer his letters—half the time don’t trouble to open ’em, even, an’ goes around the place as if she was sleep-walkin’. Seems kind o’ peaked an’ run down, like, too. We’ve been right worried over her. You’re sure it ain’t consumption, or nothin’ like that, Doc?” He looked anxiously at me again.

  “Have no fear, Monsieur,” de Grandin answered for me. “Dr. Trowbridge and I will give the young lady our greatest care; rest assured, we shall effect a complete cure. We …”

  Two shots, following each other in quick succession, sounded from the grounds outside, cutting short his words. We rushed to the entrance, meeting a breathless gamekeeper in the corridor. “Le serpent, le serpent!” he exclaimed excitedly, rushing up to Bixby. “Ohé, Monsieur, un serpent monstrueux, dans le jardin!”

  “What is it you say?” de Grandin demanded. “A serpent in the garden? Where, when; how big?”

  The fellow spread his arms to their fullest reach, extending his fingers to increase the space compassed. “A great, a tremendous serpent, Monsieur,” he panted. “Greater than the boa constrictor in the Paris menagerie—ten meters long, at the shortest!”

  “Pardieu, a snake thirty feet long?” de Grandin breathed incredulously. “Come, mon enfant, take us to the spot where you saw this so great zoological wonder.”

  “Here, ’twas here I saw him, with my own two eyes,” the man almost screamed in his excitement, pointing to a small copse of evergreens growing close beside the château wall. “See, it’s here the shots I fired at him cut the bushes”—he pointed to several broken limbs where buckshot from his fowling piece had crashed through the shrubs.

  “Here? Mon Dieu!” muttered de Grandin.

  “Huh!” Bixby produced a plug of tobacco and bit off a generous mouthful. “If you don’t lay off that brandy they sell down at the village you’ll be seein’ pink elephants roostin’ in the trees pretty soon. A thirty-foot snake! In this country? Why, we don’t grow ’em that big in Oklahoma! Come on, gentlemen, let’s get to bed; this feller’s snake didn’t come out o’ no hole in the wall, he came outa a bottle!”

  4

  MRS. BIXBY, A BUXOM woman with pale eyes and tinted hair, had small courtesy to waste on us next morning at breakfast. A physician from America who obviously did not enjoy an ultra fashionable practice at home, and an undersized foreigner with a passion for old books, bulked of small importance in her price-marked world. Bixby was taciturn with the embarrassed silence of a wife-ridden man be
fore strangers, and de Grandin and I went into the library immediately following the meal without any attempt at making table talk.

  My work consisted, for the most part, of lugging ancient volumes in scuffed bindings from the high shelves and piling them on the table before my colleague. After one or two attempts I gave over the effort to read them, since those not in archaic French were in monkish Latin, both of which were as unintelligible to me as Choctaw.

  The little Frenchman, however, dived into the moldering tomes like a gourmet attacking a feast, making voluminous notes, nodding his head furiously as statement after statement in the books seemed to confirm some theory of his, or muttering an occasional approving “Morbleu!” or “Pardieu!”

  “Friend Trowbridge,” he looked up from the dusty book spread before him and fixed me with his unwinking stare, “is it not time you saw our fair patient? Go to her, my friend, and whether she approves or whether she objects, apply the stethoscope to her breast, and, while you do so, examine her torso for bruises.”

  “Bruises?” I echoed.

  “Precisely, exactly, quite so!” he shot back. “Bruises, I have said it. They may be of the significance, they may not, but if they are present I desire to know it. I have an hypothesis.”

  “Oh, very well,” I agreed, and went to find my stethoscope.

  Though she had not been present at breakfast, I scarcely expected to find Adrienne Bixby in bed, for it was nearly noon when I rapped at her door.

  “S-s-s-sh, Monsieur le Docteur,” cautioned the maid who answered my summons. “Mademoiselle is still asleep. She is exhausted, the poor, pretty one.”

  “Who is it, Roxanne?” Adrienne demanded in a sleepy, querulous voice. “Tell them to go away.”

  I inserted my foot in the door and spoke softly to the maid. “Mademoiselle is more seriously ill than she realizes; it is necessary that I make an examination.”

  “Oh, good morning, doctor,” the girl said as I pushed past the maid and approached the bed. Her eyes widened with concern as she saw the stethoscope dangling from my hand. “Is—is there anything the matter—seriously the matter with me?” she asked. “My heart? My lungs?”

  “We don’t know yet,” I evaded. “Very often, you know, symptoms which seem of no importance prove of the greatest importance; then, again, we often find that signs which seem serious at first mean nothing at all. That’s it, just lie back, it will be over in a moment.”

  I placed the instrument against her thin chest, and, as I listened to the accelerated beating of her healthy young heart, glanced quickly down along the line of her ribs beneath the low neckband of her night robe.

  “Oh, oh, doctor, what is it?” the girl cried in alarm, for I had started back so violently that one of the earphones was shaken from my head. Around the young girl’s body, over the ribs, was an ascending livid spiral, definitely marked, as though a heavy rope had been wound about her, then drawn taut.

  “How did you get that bruise?” I demanded, tucking my stethoscope into my pocket.

  A quick flush mantled her neck and cheeks, but her eyes were honest as she answered simply, “I don’t know, doctor. It’s something I can’t explain. When we first came here to Broussac I was as well as could be; we’d only been here about three weeks when I began to feel all used up in the morning. I’d go to bed early and sleep late and spend most of the day lying around, but I never seemed to get enough rest. I began to notice these bruises about that time, too. First they were on my arm, about the wrist or above the elbow—several times all the way up. Lately they’ve been around my waist and body, sometimes on my shoulders, too, and every morning I feel tireder than the day before. Then—then”—she turned her face from me and tears welled in her eyes—“I don’t seem to be interested in th-things the way I used to be. Oh, doctor, I wish I were dead! I’m no earthly good, and …”

  “Now, now,” I soothed. “I know what you mean when you say you’ve lost interest in ‘things.’ There’ll be plenty of interest when you get back to Oklahoma again, young lady.”

  “Oh, doctor, are we going back, really? I asked Mother if we mightn’t yesterday and she said Dad had leased this place for a year and we’d have to stay until the lease expired. Do you mean she’s changed her mind?”

  “M’m, well,” I temporized, “perhaps you won’t leave Broussac right away; but you remember that old saying about Mohammed and the mountain? Suppose we were to import a little bit of Oklahoma to France, what then?”

  “No!” She shook her head vigorously and her eyes filled with tears again. “I don’t want Ray to come here. This is an evil place, doctor. It makes people forget all they ever loved and cherished. If he came here he might forget me …” as the sentence dissolved in a fresh flood of tears.

  “Well, well,” I comforted, “we’ll see if we can’t get Mother to listen to medical advice.”

  “Mother never listened to anybody’s advice,” she sobbed as I closed the door softly and hurried downstairs to tell de Grandin my discovery.

  5

  “CORDIEU!” DE GRANDIN SWORE excitedly as I concluded my recitation. “A bruise? A bruise about her so white body, and before that on her arms? Non d’un nom! My friend, this plot, it acquires the thickness. What do you think?”

  “M’m.” I searched my memory for long-forgotten articles in the Medical Times. “I’ve read of these stigmata appearing on patients’ bodies. They were usually connected with the presence of some wasting disease and an abnormal state of mind, such as extreme religious fervor, or …”

  “Ah, bah!” he cut in. “Friend Trowbridge, you can not measure the wind with a yardstick nor weigh a thought on the scales. We deal with something not referable to clinical experiments in this case, or I am much mistaken.”

  “Why, how do you mean … ?” I began, but he turned away with an impatient shrug.

  “I mean nothing, now,” he answered. “The wise judge is he who gives no decision until he has heard all the testimony.” Again, he commenced reading from the huge volume open before him, making notations on a slip of paper as his eyes traveled rapidly down the lines of faded type.

  Mrs. Bixby did not join us at dinner that evening, and, as a consequence, the conversation was much less restrained. Coffee was served in the small corridor connecting the wide entrance hall with the library, and, under the influence of a hearty meal, three kinds of wine and several glasses of liqueur, our host expanded like a flower in the sun.

  “They tell me Joan of Arc was burned to death in Ruin,” he commented as he bit the end from a cigar and elevated one knee over the arm of his chair. “Queer way to treat a girl who’d done so much for ’em, seems to me. The guide told us she’s been made a saint or somethin’ since then, though.”

  “Yes,” I assented idly, “having burned her body and anathematized her soul, the ecclesiastical authorities later decided the poor child’s spirit was unjustly condemned. Too bad a little of their sense of justice wasn’t felt by the court which tried her in Rouen.”

  De Grandin looked quizzically at me as he pulled his waxed mustaches alternately, for all the world like a tomcat combing his whiskers. “Throw not too many stones, my friend,” he cautioned. “Nearly five hundred years have passed since the Maid of Orleans was burned as a heretic. Today your American courts convict high school-teachers for heresy far less grave than that charged against our Jeanne. We may yet see the bones of your so estimable Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin exhumed from their graves and publicly burned by your heretic-baiters of this today. No, no, my friend, it is not for us of today to sneer at the heretic-burners of yesterday. Torquemada’s body lies in the tomb these many years, but his spirit still lives. Mon Dieu! What is it that I say? ‘His spirit still lives’? Sacré nom d’une souris! That may be the answer!” And, as if propelled by a spring, he bounded from his seat and rushed madly down the corridor into the library.

  “De Grandin, what’s the matter?” I asked as I followed him into the book-lined room.

 
“Non, non, go away, take a walk, go to the devil!” he shot back, staring wildly around the room, his eager eyes searching feverishly for a particular volume. “You vex me, you annoy me, you harass me; I would be alone at this time. Get out!”

  Puzzled and angered by his bruskness, I turned to leave, but he called over his shoulder as I reached the door: “Friend Trowbridge, please interview Monsieur Bixby’s chef—and obtain from him a sack of flour. Bring it here to me in not less than an hour, please.”

  6

  “FORGIVE MY RUDENESS, FRIEND Trowbridge,” he apologized when I re-entered the library an hour or so later, a parcel of flour from Bixby’s pantry under my arm. “I had a thought which required all my concentration at the time, and any disturbing influence—even your own always welcome presence—would have distracted my attention. I am sorry and ashamed I spoke so.”

  “Oh, never mind that,” I replied. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  He nodded emphatically. “Mais oui,” he assured me. “All which I sought—and more. Now let us to work. First I would have you go with me into the garden where that gamekeeper saw the serpent last night.”

  “But he couldn’t have seen such a snake,” I protested as we left the library. “We all agreed the fellow was drunk.”

  “Surely, exactly; of course,” he conceded, nodding vigorously. “Undoubtedly the man had drunk brandy. Do you recall, by any chance, the wise old Latin proverb, ‘In vino veritas’?”

  “‘In wine is truth’?” I translated tentatively. “How could the fact that the man was drunk when he imagined he saw a thirty-foot snake in a French garden make the snake exist when we know perfectly well such a thing could not be?”

  “Oh la, la,” he chuckled. “What a sober-sided one you are, cher ami. It was here the fellow declared Monsieur le Serpent emerged, was it not? See, here are the shot-marks on the shrubs.”

  He bent, parting the bushes carefully, and crawled toward the château’s stone foundation. “Observe,” he commanded in a whisper, “between these stones the cement has weathered away, the opening is great enough to permit passage of a sixty-foot serpent, did one desire to come this way. No?”