“Meanwhile, this Professor Mysterio, he who was the woman’s partner, has retired from the stage and lives here in New Jersey on the fortune he has amassed.
“‘New Jersey, New Jersey,’ I say to me when I hear this. ‘Why, this is New Jersey!’
“So the good Sergeant Costello and I make a survey. We find that this ci-devant professor lives out on the Andover Road where he does nothing for a livelihood but smoke a pipe and drink whisky. ‘Come, let us take him in,’ the Sergeant says to me.
“Now, while we ride out to the professor’s house I do much thinking. Hypnotism is thought, and thought is a thing—a thing which does not die. If this deceased woman had been habituated to obeying mental commands of this Professor Mysterio—had been accustomed to obey those orders with all parts of her body as soon as they were given—had she not formed a habit-pattern of obedience? Trowbridge, my friend, you are a physician, you have seen men die. You know that the suddenly killed man falls in an attitude which had been characteristic in life, is it not so?”
I nodded agreement.
“Very well, then. I ask me if it is not possible that the hand this professor had commanded so many times in life can not be made to do his bidding after death? Mon Dieu, the idea is novel, but not impossible for that reason! Did not that so superb Monsieur Poe hint at some such thing in his story of the dying man who remained alive because he was hypnotized? Assuredly.
“So, when we get to the professor’s house Costello points his pistol at the gentleman and says, ‘I make you arrested,’ and meanwhile I search the place.
“In it I find Monsieur Richards’ jewellery and certificates, also the cup of Monsieur le Marquis de Lafayette. I also find much else, including this hand of a dead woman which is not itself dead. Dieu de Dieu! When I go to take it from its case it attack me like a living thing, and Costello have to promise he will punch Professor Mysterio in the nose before he order it to be quiet. And it obeyed his voice! Mordieu, when I see that I have the flesh of geese all over me!”
“Rot!” Richards flung the comment like a missile. “I don’t know what sort o’ hocus-pocus made that hand move, but if you expect me to believe any such nonsense as this stuff you’ve been telling you’ve got the wrong pig by the ear. I shouldn’t be surprised if you and this Professor What’s-His-Name were in cahoots, and you got cold feet and left him holding the bag!”
I stared aghast at the man. De Grandin’s vanity was as colossal as his ability, and though he was as gentle as a woman in ordinary circumstances, like a woman he was capable of sudden flares of vixenish temper in which his regard for human life became no greater than his concern for a troublesome fly.
The little Frenchman turned to me, his face as pale as a dead man’s, the muscles of his jaws working. “Friend Trowbridge you will act for me, of course?” he asked in a low, husky voice. “You will—ha!”
With the ejaculation he dodged suddenly, almost falling to the floor in his haste to avoid the flashing white object that dashed at his face.
Nor was his dodge a split-second too soon. Like the lid of a boiling kettle, the top of the shoe box had lifted, and the slim quiescent hand that lay within leaped through the opening and hurtled across intervening space like a quarrel from a crossbow. All delicate, firm-muscled fingers outspread, it swooped like a hawk, missed de Grandin by the barest fraction of in inch, and fastened itself, snapping like a strong springed steel trap, in the puffy flesh of Willis Richards’ neck.
“Ah—ulp!” The startled financier gasped as he stumbled backward, tearing futilely at the eldritch thing which sank its long and pointed nails into his purpling skin. “Ah—God, it’s choking me!”
Costello rushed to him and strove with all his strength to drag the clutching hand away. He might as well have tried to wrench apart the clasp of a chrome-steel handcuff.
“Non, non,” De Grandin shouted, “not that way, Sergeant. It is useless!”
Leaping to my instrument case he jerked out an autopsy knife and dashed his shoulder against the burly detective, almost sending him sprawling. Next instant, with the speed and precision of an expert surgeon, he was dissecting the deadly white fingers fastened in Richards’ dewlap.
“C’est complete,” he announced matter-of-factly as he finished his grisly task. “A restorative, if you please, Friend Trowbridge, and an antiseptic dressing for his wounds. The nails may not have been sterile.”
Wheeling, he seized the telephone and dialed police headquarters. “Allo, Monsieur le Geôlier,” he greeted when his call was put through. “You have one Professor Mysterio in confinement there, yes? But certainly, he is booked upon the suspicion—the what you call him? open charge? How is he, what is it he does?”
A pause, then: “Ah, you say so? I thought as much. Many thanks, Monsieur.”
He put the telephone back in its cradle, and faced us again. “My friends,” he announced, “the professor is no more. Two minutes ago he was heard to cry out in a loud, distinct voice, ‘Katie, kill the Frenchman; I command you. Kill him!’ When they rushed to his cell they found him hanging from the grating of the door by his waist-belt. The fall had snapped his neck, and he was dead as a herring.
“Eh bien,” he shook himself like a spaniel emerging from the water, “it was a lucky thing for me I saw that box lid lift itself when the dead hand obeyed its dying master’s last command. None of you would have thought of the knife, I fear, before the thing had strangled my life away. As it is, I acted none too soon for Monsieur Richards’ good.”
Still red in the face, but regaining his self-possession under my ministrations, Mr. Richards sat up in his chair. “If you’ll give me my property I’ll be getting out o’ this hell-house,” he announced gruffly, reaching for the jewels and securities de Grandin had placed on the desk.
“Assuredly, Monsieur,” the Frenchman agreed. “But first you will comply with the law, n’est-ce-pas? You have offered a reward of five thousand dollars for your property’s return. Make out two checks, if you will be so kind, one for half the amount to Sergeant Costello, the other half for me.”
“I’m hanged if I do,” Richards demurred. “Why should a man have to buy back his own stuff?”
Sergeant Costello rose ponderously to his feet and gathered the parcels containing Mr. Richards’ belongings into his capacious hands. “Law’s law,” he announced decisively. “There’ll be no bonds or jools returned till that reward is paid, sir.”
“All right, all right,” Richards agreed, reaching for his checkbook. “I’ll pay it, but it’s the damndest hold-up I’ve ever had pulled on me.”
“H’m,” growled Costello as the door banged to behind the banker, “if I ever catch that bird parkin’ by a fireplug or exceedin’ the speed limit, he’ll see a hold-up that is a hold-up. I’ll give him every summons in me book an’ holler for a fresh pad.”
“Tenez, my friends, think of the swine no more,” de Grandin ordered. “In France, had a man so insulted me, I should have called him out and run him through the body. But that one? Pouf! Gold is his life’s blood. I hurt him far more by forcing the reward from him than if I had punctured his fat skin a dozen times.
“Meanwhile, Friend Trowbridge”—his small blue eyes snapped with the heat-lightning of his sudden smile—“there waits in the pantry that delicious apple tart prepared by your so amiable cook. Sergeant, Monsieur Kinnan, will you not join us? A wedge of apple tart and a cold mug of beer—morbleu, it makes a feast fit for an emperor!”
The House of Horror
“MORBLEU, FRIEND TROWBRIDGE, HAVE a care,” Jules de Grandin warned as my lurching motor car almost ran into the brimming ditch beside the rain-soaked road.
I wrenched the steering wheel viciously and swore softly under my breath as I leaned forward, striving vainly to pierce the curtains of rain which shut us in.
“No use, old fellow,” I confessed, turning to my companion, “We’re lost; that’s all there is to it.”
“Ha,” he laughed shortly, “do you
just begin to discover that fact, my friend? Parbleu, I have known it this last half-hour.”
Throttling my engine down, I crept along the concrete roadway, peering through my streaming windshield and storm curtains for some familiar landmark, but nothing but blackness, wet and impenetrable, met my eyes.
Two hours before, that stormy evening in 192–, answering an insistent ’phone call, de Grandin and I had left the security of my warm office to administer a dose of toxin anti-toxin to an Italian laborer’s child who lay, choking with diphtheria, in a hut at the workmen’s settlement where the new branch of the railroad was being put through. The cold, driving rain and the Stygian darkness of the night had misled me when I made the detour around the railway cut, and for the past hour and a half I had been feeling my way over unfamiliar roads as futilely as a lost child wandering in the woods.
“Grace à Dieu,” de Grandin exclaimed, seizing my arm with both his small, strong hands, “a light! See, there it shines in the night. Come, let us go to it. Even the meanest hovel is preferable to this so villainous rain.”
I peeped through a joint in the curtains and saw a faint, intermittent light flickering through the driving rain some two hundred yards away.
“All right,” I acquiesced, climbing from the car, “we’ve lost so much time already we probably couldn’t do anything for the Vivianti child, and maybe these people can put us on the right road, anyway.”
Plunging through puddles like miniature lakes, soaked by the wind-driven rain, barking our shins again and again on invisible obstacles, we made for the light, finally drawing up to a large, square house of red brick fronted by an imposing white-pillared porch. Light streamed out through the fanlight over the white door and from the two tall windows flanking the portal.
“Parbleu, a house of circumstance, this,” de Grandin commented, mounting the porch and banging lustily at the polished brass knocker.
I wrinkled my forehead in thought while he rattled the knocker a second time. “Strange, I can’t remember this place,” I muttered. “I thought I knew every building within thirty miles, but this is a new one …”
“Ah bah!” de Grandin interrupted. “Always you must be casting a wet blanket on the parade, Friend Trowbridge. First you insist on losing us in the midst of a sacré rainstorm, then when I, Jules de Grandin, find us a shelter from the weather, you must needs waste time in wondering why it is you know not the place. Morbleu, you will refuse shelter because you have never been presented to the master of the house, if I do not watch you, I fear.”
“But I ought to know the place, de Grandin,” I protested. “It’s certainly imposing enough to …”
My defense was cut short by the sharp click of a lock, and the wide, white door swung inward before us.
We strode over the threshold, removing our dripping hats as we did so, and turned to address the person who opened the door.
“Why …” I began, and stared about me in open-mouthed surprise.
“Name of a little blue man!” said Jules de Grandin, and added his incredulous stare to mine.
AS FAR AS WE could see, we were alone in the mansion’s imposing hall. Straight before us, perhaps for forty feet, ran a corridor of parquetry flooring, covered here and there by rich-hued Oriental rugs. White-paneled walls, adorned with oil paintings of imposing-looking individuals, rose for eighteen feet or so to a beautifully frescoed ceiling, and a graceful curving staircase swept upward from the farther end of the room. Candles in cut glass sconces lighted the high-ceilinged apartment, the hospitable glow from a log fire burning under the high white marble mantel lent an air of homely coziness to the place, but of anything living, human or animal, there was no faintest trace or sign.
Click! Behind us, the heavy outer door swung to silently on well-oiled hinges and the automatic lock latched firmly.
“Death of my life!” de Grandin murmured, reaching for the door’s silver-plated knob and giving it a vigorous twist. “Par la moustache du diable, Friend Trowbridge, it is locked! Truly, perhaps it had been better if we had remained outside in the rain!”
“Not at all, I assure you, my dear sir,” a rich mellow voice answered him from the curve of the stairs. “Your arrival was nothing less than providential, gentlemen.”
Coming toward us, walking heavily with the aid of a stout cane, was an unusually handsome man attired in pajamas and dressing gown, a sort of nightcap of flowered silk on his white head, slippers of softest morocco on his feet.
“You are a physician, sir?” he asked, glancing inquiringly at the medicine case in my hand.
“Yes,” I answered. “I am Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, from Harrisonville, and this is Dr. Jules de Grandin, of Paris, who is my guest.”
“Ah,” replied our host, “I am very, very glad to welcome you to Marston Hall, gentlemen. It so happens that one—er—my daughter, is quite ill, and I have been unable to obtain medical aid for her on account of my infirmities and the lack of a telephone. If I may trespass on your charity to attend my poor child, I shall be delighted to have you as my guests for the night. If you will lay aside your coats”—he paused expectantly. “Ah, thank you”—as we hung our dripping garments over a chair—“you will come this way, please?”
We followed him up the broad stairs and down an upper corridor to a tastefully furnished chamber where a young girl—fifteen years of age, perhaps—lay propped up with a pile of diminutive pillows.
“Anabel, Anabel, my love, here are two doctors to see you,” the old gentleman called softly.
The girl moved her fair head with a weary, peevish motion and whimpered softly in her sleep, but gave no further recognition of our presence.
“And what have been her symptoms, if you please, Monsieur?” de Grandin asked as he rolled back the cuffs of his jacket and prepared to make an examination.
“Sleep,” replied our host, “just sleep. Some time ago she suffered from influenza; lately she has been given to fits of protracted slumber from which I can not waken her. I fear she may have contracted sleeping sickness, sir. I am told it sometimes follows influenza.”
“H’m.” De Grandin passed his small, pliable hands rapidly over the girl’s cheeks in the region of the ears, felt rapidly along her neck over the jugular vein, then raised a puzzled glance to me. “Have you some laudanum and aconite in your bag, Friend Trowbridge?” he asked.
“There’s some morphine,” I answered, “and aconite; but no laudanum.”
“No matter,” he waved his hand impatiently, bustling over to the medicine case and extracting two small phials from it. “No matter, this will do as well. Some water, if you please, Monsieur,” he turned to the father, a medicine bottle in each hand.
“But, de Grandin”—I began, when a sudden kick from one of his slender, heavily-shod feet nearly broke my shin—“de Grandin, do you think that’s the proper medication?” I finished lamely.
“Oh, mais oui, undoubtedly,” he replied. “Nothing else would do in this case. Water, if you please, Monsieur,” he repeated, again addressing the father.
I STARED AT HIM IN ill-disguised amazement as he extracted a pellet from each of the bottles and quickly ground them to powder while the old gentleman filled a tumbler with water from the porcelain pitcher which stood on the chintz-draped wash-stand in the corner of the chamber. He was as familiar with the arrangement of my medicine case as I was, I knew, and knew that my phials were arranged by numbers instead of being labeled. Deliberately, I saw, he had passed over the morphine and aconite, and had chosen two bottles of plain, unmedicated sugar of milk pills. What his object was I had no idea, but I watched him measure out four teaspoonfuls of water, dissolve the powder in it, and pour the sham medication down the unconscious girl’s throat.
“Good,” he proclaimed as he washed the glass with meticulous care. “She will rest easily until the morning, Monsieur. When daylight comes we shall decide on further treatment. Will you now permit that we retire?” He bowed politely to the master of the house, who returned his
courtesy and led us to a comfortably furnished room farther down the corridor.
“SEE HERE, DE GRANDIN,” I demanded when our host had wished us a pleasant good-night and closed the door upon us, “what was your idea in giving that child an impotent dose like that … ?”
“S-s-sh!” he cut me short with a fierce whisper. “That young girl, mon ami, is no more suffering from encephalitis than you or I. There is no characteristic swelling of the face or neck, no diagnostic hardening of the jugular vein. Her temperature was a bit subnormal, it is true—but upon her breath I detected the odor of chloral hydrate. For some reason, good I hope, but bad I fear, she is drugged, and I thought it best to play the fool and pretend I believed the man’s statements. Pardieu, the fool who knows himself no fool has an immense advantage over the fool who believes him one, my friend.”
“But …”
“But me no buts, Friend Trowbridge; remember how the door of this house opened with none to touch it, recall how it closed behind us in the same way, and observe this, if you will.” Stepping softly, he crossed the room, pulled aside the chintz curtains at the window and tapped lightly on the frame which held the thick plate glass panes. “Regardez vous,” he ordered, tapping the frame a second time.
Like every other window I had seen in the house, this one was of the casement type, small panes of heavy glass being sunk into latticelike frames. Under de Grandin’s directions I tapped the latter, and found them not painted wood, as I had supposed, but stoutly welded and bolted metal. Also, to my surprise, I found the turnbuckles for opening the casement were only dummies, the metal frames being actually securely bolted to the stone sills. To all intents, we were as firmly incarcerated as though serving a sentence in the state penitentiary.
“The door …” I began, but he shook his head.
Obeying his gesture, I crossed the room and turned the handle lightly. It twisted under the pressure of my fingers, but, though we had heard no warning click of lock or bolt, the door itself was as firmly fastened as though nailed shut.
The Horror on the Links Page 16