The Horror on the Links

by Seabury Quinn

  “True enough,” I agreed, “but the driveway out there would give room for the great Atlantic sea serpent himself to crawl about. You don’t contend he’s making use of it, though, do you?”

  He tapped his teeth thoughtfully with his forefinger, paying no attention to my sarcasm. “Let us go within,” he suggested, brushing the leaf-mold carefully from his knees as he rose.

  WE RE-ENTERED THE HOUSE and he led the way through one winding passage after another, unlocking a succession of nail-studded doors with the bunch of jangling iron keys he obtained from Bixby’s butler.

  “And here is the chapel,” he announced when half an hour’s steady walk brought us to a final age-stained door, “It was here they found that so unfortunate Monsieur Alvarez. A gloomy place in which to die, truly.”

  It was, indeed. The little sanctuary lay dungeon-deep, without windows or, apparently, any means of external ventilation. Its vaulted roof was composed of a series of equilateral arches whose stringers rose a scant six feet above the floor and rested on great blocks of flint carved in hideous designs of dragons’ and griffins’ heads. The low altar stood against the farther wall, its silver crucifix blackened with age and all but eaten away with erosion. Row on row, about the low upright walls, were lined the crypts containing the coffins of long dead de Broussacs, each closed with a marble slab engraved with the name and title of its occupant. A pall of cobwebs, almost as heavy as woven fabrics, festooned from vaulted ceiling to floor, intensifying the air of ghostly gloom which hung about the chamber like the acrid odor of ancient incense.

  My companion set the flickering candle-lantern upon the floor beside the doorway and broke open the package of flour. “See, Friend Trowbridge, do as I do,” he directed, dipping his hand into the flour and sprinkling the white powder lightly over the flagstone pavement of the chapel. “Back away toward the door,” he commanded, “and on no account leave a footprint in the meal. We must have a fair, unsoiled page for our records.”

  Wonderingly, but willingly, I helped him spread a film of flour over the chapel floor from altar-step to doorway, then turned upon him with a question: “What do you expect to find in this meal, de Grandin? Surely not footprints. No one who did not have to would come to this ghastly place.”

  He nodded seriously at me as he picked up his lantern and the remains of the package of flour. “Partly right and partly wrong you are, my friend. One may come who must, one may come who wants. Tomorrow, perhaps, we shall know more than we do today.”

  7

  I WAS IN THE MIDST of my toilet when he burst into my bedroom next morning, feline mustache bristling, his round eyes fairly snapping with excitement. “Come, mon vieux,” he urged, tugging at my arm as a nervous terrier might have urged his master to go for a romp, “come and see; right away, quick, at once, immediately!”

  We hastened through the château’s modern wing, passed the doors blocking the corridors of the fifteenth century buildings and came at last to the eleventh century chapel. De Grandin paused before the oak-and-iron door like a showman about to raise the curtain from an exhibit as he lit the candle in his lantern, and I heard his small, even teeth clicking together in a chill of suppressed excitement. “Behold, mon ami,” he commanded in a hoarse whisper more expressive of emotion than a shout, “behold what writings are on the page which we did prepare!”

  I looked through the arched doorway, then turned to him, dumb with surprise.

  Leading from the chapel entrance, and ending at the center of the floor, directly before the altar, was the unmistakable trail of little, naked feet. No woodcraft was needed to trace the walker’s course. She had entered the sanctuary, marched straight and unswervingly to a spot about fifteen feet from the altar, but directly before it, then turned about slowly in a tiny circle, no more than two feet in diameter, for at that point the footprints were so superimposed on each other that all individual traces were lost.

  But the other track which showed in the strewn flour was less easily explained. Beginning at a point directly opposite the place the footprints ceased, this other trail ran some three or four inches wide in a lazy zigzag, as though a single automobile wheel had been rolled in an uncertain course across the floor by someone staggeringly drunk. But no prints of feet followed the wheel-track. The thing had apparently traversed the floor of its own volition.

  “See,” de Grandin whispered, “flour-prints lead away from the door”—he pointed to a series of white prints, plainly describing bare heels and toes, leading up the passage from the chapel floor, diminishing in clearness with each step until they faded out some ten paces toward the modern part of the château. “And see,” he repeated, drawing me inside the chapel to the wall where the other, inexplicable, track began, “a trail leads outward here, too.”

  Following his pointing finger with my eye I saw what I had not noticed before, a cleft in the chapel wall some five inches wide, evidently the result of crumbling cement and gradually sinking foundation stones. At the entrance of the fissure a tiny pile of flour showed, as though some object previously dusted with the powder had been forced through the crevice.

  I blinked stupidly at him. “Wh-what is this track?” I asked in bewilderment.

  “Ah, bah!” he exclaimed disgustedly. “The blindest man is he who shuts his own eyes, my friend. Did you never, as a boy, come upon the trail of a serpent in the dusty road?”

  “A snake track”—my mind refused the evidence of my eyes—“but how can that be—here?”

  “The gamekeeper thought he saw a serpent in the garden exactly outside this chapel,” de Grandin replied in a low voice, “and it was where that besotted gamekeeper imagined he beheld a serpent that the body of Mijnheer Van Brundt was found crushed out of semblance to a human man. Tell me, Friend Trowbridge—you know something of zoology—what creature, besides the constrictor-snake, kills his prey by crushing each bone of his body till nothing but shapeless pulp remains? Hein?”

  “Bu—but …” I began, when he cut me short.

  “Go call on our patient,” he commanded. “If she sleeps, do not awaken her, but observe the drugget on her floor!”

  I HASTENED TO ADRIENNE BIXBY’S room, pushed unceremoniously past Roxanne, the maid, and tiptoed to the girl’s bedside. She lay on her side, one cheek pillowed on her arm, sleeping the sleep of utter exhaustion. I bent over her a moment, listening to her even breathing, then, nodding to the maid, turned and walked softly from the room, my eyes glued to the dark-red plush carpet which covered the chamber floor.

  Five minutes later I met the little Frenchman in the library, my excitement now as high as his own. “De Grandin,” I whispered, involuntarily lowering my voice, “I looked at her carpet. The thing’s made of red velvet and shows a spot of dust ten feet away. A trail of faint white footprints leads right up to her bed!”

  8

  “SACRé NOM D’UN PETIT bonhomme!” He reached for his green felt hat and turned toward the door. “The trail becomes clear; even my good, skeptical friend Trowbridge can follow it, I think. Come, cher ami, let us see what we can see.”

  He led me through the château park, between the rows of tall, trembling poplar trees, to a spot where black-boughed evergreens cast perpetual shade above a stonefenced area of a scant half acre. Rose bushes, long deteriorated from their cultivated state, ran riot over the ground, the whole enclosure had the gloomy aspect of a deserted cemetery. “Why,” I asked, “what place is this, de Grandin? It’s as different from the rest of the park as …”

  “As death is from life, n’est-ce-pas?” he interjected. “Yes, so it is, truly. Observe.” He parted a mass of intertwined brambles and pointed to a slab of stone, once white, but now brown and roughened with centuries of exposure. “Can you read the inscription?” he asked.

  The letters, once deeply cut in the stone, were almost obliterated, but I made out:

  CI GIT TOUJOURS RAIMOND

  SEIGNEUR DE BROUSSAC

  “What does it say?” he demanded.

&
nbsp; “‘Here lies Raimond, Lord of Broussac,’” I replied, translating as well as I could.

  “Non, non,” he contradicted. “It does not say, ‘Ci git,’ here lies; but ‘Ci git toujours’—here lies always, or forever. Eh, my friend, what do you make of that, if anything?”

  “Dead men usually lie permanently,” I countered.

  “Ah, so? Have I not heard your countrymen sing:

  John Brown’s body lies a-moldering

  in the grave,

  But his soul goes marching on.

  “What of the poor Seigneur de Broussac, is he to lie buried here toujours, or shall he, too, not rise once again?”

  “I’m not familiar with French idioms,” I defended. Perhaps the stonecutter merely intended to say the Seigneur de Broussac lies here for his last long sleep.”

  “Cher Trowbridge,” de Grandin replied, speaking with slow impressiveness, “when a man’s monument is carved the words are not chosen without due consideration. Who chose Raimond de Broussac’s epitaph thought long upon its wording, and when he dictated those words his wish was father to his thought.”

  He stared thoughtfully at the crumbling stone a moment, repeating softly to himself, “And Madame l’Abesse said, ‘Snake thou art, and …’” he shook his shoulders in an impatient shrug as though to throw off some oppressive train of thought. “Eh bien, but we waste time here, my friend; let us make an experiment.” Turning on his heel he led the way to the stables.

  “I would have some boards, a hammer and some sharp nails, if you please,” he informed the hostler who greeted us at the barn door. “My friend, the very learned Docteur Trowbridge, from America, and I desire to test an idea.”

  WHEN THE SERVANT BROUGHT the desired materials, de Grandin sawed the boards into two lengths, one about eighteen inches, the other about three feet, and through these he drove the sharp-pointed horseshoe nails at intervals of about three-quarters of an inch, so that, when he finished, he had what resembled two large combs of which the boards were the backs and the needle-pointed nails the teeth. “Now,” he announced, surveying his work critically, “I think we are prepared to give a little surprise party.”

  Taking up the hammer and two short pieces of boards in addition to his “combs,” he led the way to the spot outside the château walls where the tipsy gamekeeper claimed to have seen the great snake. Here he attached the two strips of wood at right angles to the shorter of the pieces of board through which he had driven the nails, then, using the lateral lengths of wood as stakes, attached the comblike contrivance he had made firmly to the earth, its back resting levelly in the ground, its sharp spikes pointing upward before the crevice in the château foundations. Any animal larger than an earthworm desiring to make use of the crack in the wall as a passageway would have to jump or crawl over the sharp, lancelike points of the nails. “Bien,” he commented, viewing his work with approval, “now to put your wise American maxim of ‘Safety First’ into practice.”

  We found our way to the ancient, gloomy chapel, and he wedged the longer of the nail-filled boards firmly between the jambs at the inner side of the doorway. “And now,” he announced, as we turned once more toward the inhabited part of the house, “I have the splendid appetite for dinner, and for sleep, too, when bedtime arrives.”

  “What on earth does all this child’s play mean, de Grandin?” I demanded, my curiosity getting the better of me.

  He winked roguishly by way of answer, whistled a snatch of tune, then remarked, irrelevantly, “If you have the desire to gamble, cher ami, I will lay you a wager of five francs that our fair patient will be improved tomorrow morning.”

  9

  HE WON THE BET. For the first time since we had been seen at Broussac, Adrienne Bixby was at the breakfast table the following day, and the healthy color in her cheeks and the clear sparkle of her lovely eyes told of a long, restful sleep.

  Two more days passed, each seeing a marked improvement in her spirits and appearance. The purple semicircles beneath her eyes faded to a wholesome pink, her laughter rippled like the sound of a purling brook among the shadows of the château’s gloomy halls.

  “I gotta hand it to you, Doc,” Bixby complimented me. “You’ve shore brought my little girl round in great, shape. Name your figger an’ I’ll pay the bill, an’ never paid one with a better heart, neither.”

  “Dr. Trowbridge,” Adrienne accosted me one morning as I was about to join de Grandin in the library. “Remember what you said about importing a little bit of Oklahoma to France the other day? Well, I’ve just received a letter—the dearest letter—from Ray. He’s coming over—he’ll be here day after tomorrow, I think, and no matter what Mother says or does, we’re going to be married, right away. I’ve been Mrs. Bixby’s daughter long enough; now I’m going to be Mr. Keefer’s wife. If Mother makes Dad refuse to give us any money, it won’t make the least little bit of difference. I taught school before Father got his money, and I know how to live as a poor man’s wife. I’m going to have my man—my own man—and no one—no one at all—shall keep him away from me one day longer!”

  “Good for you!” I applauded her rebellion. Without knowing young Keefer I was sure he must be a very desirable sort of person to have incurred the enmity of such a character as Bixby’s wife.

  BUT NEXT MORNING ADRIENNE was not at breakfast, and the downcast expression of her father’s face told his disappointment more eloquently than any words he could have summoned. “Reckon the girl’s had a little set-back, Doc,” he muttered, averting his eyes. His wife looked me fairly between the brows, and though she said never a word I felt she considered me a pretty poor specimen of medical practitioner.

  “Mais non, Monsieur le Docteur,” Roxanne demurred when I knocked at Adrienne’s door, “you shall not waken her. The poor lamb is sleeping, she exhaust this morning, and she shall have her sleep. I, Roxanne, say so.”

  Nevertheless, I shook Adrienne gently, rousing her from a sleep which seemed more stupor than slumber. “Come, come, my dear,” I scolded, “this won’t do, you know. You’ve got to brace up. You don’t want Ray to find you in this condition, do you? Remember, he’s due at Broussac tomorrow.”

  “Is he?” she answered indifferently. “I don’t care. Oh, doctor, I’m—so—tired.” She was asleep again, almost at the last word.

  I turned back the covers and lifted the collar of her robe. About her body, purple as the marks of a whiplash, lay the wide, circular bruise, fresher and more extensive than it had been the day I first noticed it.

  “Death of my life!” de Grandin swore when I found him in the library and told him what I had seen. “That sacré bruise again? Oh, it is too much! Come and see what else I have found this cursed day!” Seizing my hand he half led, half dragged me outdoors, halting at the clump of evergreens where he had fixed his nail-studded board beside the château wall.

  Ripped from its place and lying some ten feet away was the board, its nails turned upward in the morning sunlight and reminding me, somehow, of the malicious grin from a fleshless skull.

  “Why, how did this happen?” I asked.

  He pointed mutely to the moist earth in which the dwarf cedars grew, his hand shaking with excitement and rage. In the soft loam beside the place where the board had been fixed were the prints of two tiny, bare feet.

  “What’s it mean?” I demanded, exasperated at the way he withheld information from me, but his answer was no more enlightening than any of his former cryptic utterances.

  “The battle is joined, my friend,” he replied through set teeth. “Amuse yourself as you will—or can—this day. I go to Rouen right away, immediately, at once. There are weapons I must have for this fight besides those we now have. Eh, but it will be a fight to the death! Yes, par la croix, and we shall help Death reclaim his own too. Pardieu! Am I not Jules de Grandin? Am I to be made a monkey of by one who preys on women? Morbleu, we shall see!”

  And with that he left me, striding toward the stables in search of a motor car, his lit
tle yellow mustache bristling with fury, his blue eyes snapping, French oaths pouring from him like spray from a garden-sprinkler.

  10

  IT WAS DARK BEFORE he returned, his green hat set at a rakish angle over his right ear, a long, closely wrapped brown paper parcel under his arm. “Eh bien,” he confided to me with an elfish grin, “it required much argument to secure this. That old priest, he is a stubborn one and unbelieving, almost as skeptical as you, Friend Trowbridge.”

  “What on earth is it?” I demanded, looking curiously at the package. Except that it was too long, it might have been an umbrella, judging by its shape.

  He winked mysteriously as he led the way to his room, where, having glanced about furtively, as though he apprehended some secret watcher, he laid the bundle on the bed and began cutting the strings securing its brown paper swaddling clothes with his pocket knife. Laying back the final layer of paper he uncovered a long sword, such a weapon as I had never beheld outside a museum. The blade was about three and a half feet in length, tapering from almost four inches and a half at the tip, where, it terminated in a beveled point. Unlike modern weapons, this one was furnished with two sharpened edges, almost keen enough to do duty for a knife, and, instead of the usual groove found on the sides of sword blades, its center presented a distinct ridge where the steep bevels met at an obtuse angle as they sloped from the edges. The handle, made of ivory or some smoothly polished bone, was long enough to permit a two-handed grip, and the hilt which crossed the blade at a right angle turned downward toward the point, its ends terminating in rather clumsily carved cherubs’ heads. Along the blade, apparently carved, rather than etched, marched a procession of miscellaneous angels, demons and men at arms with a mythological monster, such as a griffin or dragon, thrown in for occasional good measure. Between the crudely carved figures I made out the letters of the motto: Dei Gratia—by the grace of God.