“Mais oui,” he agreed, “and no one stops at this spot for any good until It has been conquered. Come, let us investigate.” He started forward, body bent, head advanced, like a motion picture conception of an Indian on the warpath.
Half a hundred stealthy steps brought us abreast of the parked car. Its occupant was sitting back on the driving seat, his hands resting listlessly on the steering wheel, his eyes upturned, as though he saw a vision in the trailing wisps of fog before him. I needed no second glance to recognize Alvin Spence, though the rapt look upon his white, set face transfigured it almost beyond recognition. He was like a poet beholding the beatific vision of his mistress or a medieval eremite gazing through the opened portals of Paradise.
“A-a-ah!” de Grandin’s whisper cut like a wire-edged knife through the silence of the fog-bound air, “do you behold it, Friend Trowbridge?”
“Wha—” I whispered back, but broke the syllable half uttered. Thin, tenuous, scarcely to be distinguished from the lazily drifting festoons of the fog itself, there was a something in midair before the car where Alvin Spence sat with his yearning soul looking from his eyes. I seemed to see clear through the thing, yet its outlines were plainly perceptible, and as I looked and looked again, I recognized the unmistakable features of Dorothy Spence, the young man’s dead wife. Her body—if the tenuous, ethereal mass of static vapor could be called such—was bare of clothing, and seemed imbued with a voluptuous grace and allure the living woman had never possessed, but her face was that of the young woman who had lain in Rosedale Cemetery for three-quarters of a year. If ever living man beheld the simulacrum of the dead, we three gazed on the wraith of Dorothy Spence that moment.
“Dorothy—my beloved, my dear, my dear!” the man half whispered, half sobbed, stretching forth his hands to the spirit-woman, then falling back on the seat as the vision seemed to elude his grasp when a sudden puff of breeze stirred the fog.
We could not catch the answer he received, close as we stood, but we could see the pale, curving lips frame the single word “Come!” and saw the transparent arms stretched out to beckon him forward.
The man half rose from his seat, then sank back, set his face in sudden resolution and plunged his hand into the pocket of his overcoat.
Beside me de Grandin had been fumbling with something in his inside pocket. As Alvin Spence drew forth his hand and the dull gleam of a polished revolver shone in the light from his dashboard lamp, the Frenchman leaped forward like a panther. “Stop him, Friend Trowbridge!” he called shrilly, and to the hovering vision:
“Avaunt, accursed one! Begone, thou exile from heaven! Away, snake-spawn!”
As he shouted he drew a tiny pellet from his inner pocket and hurled it point-blank through the vaporous body of the specter.
Even as I seized Spence’s hand and fought with him for possession of the pistol, I saw the transformation from the tail of my eye. As de Grandin’s missile tore through its unsubstantial substance, the vision-woman seemed to shrink in upon herself, to become suddenly more compact, thinner, scrawny. Her rounded bosom flattened to mere folds of leatherlike skin stretched drum-tight above staring ribs, her slender graceful hands were horrid, claw-tipped talons, and the yearning, enticing face of Dorothy Spence became a mask of hideous, implacable hate, great-eyed, thin-lipped, beak-nosed—such a face as the demons of hell might show after a million million years of burning in the infernal fires. A screech like the keening of all the owls in the world together split the fog-wrapped stillness of the night, and the monstrous thing before us seemed suddenly to shrivel, shrink to a mere spot of baleful, phosphorescent fire, and disappear like a snuffed-out candle’s flame.
Spence saw it, too. The pistol dropped from his nerveless fingers to the car’s floor with a soft thud, and his arm went limp in my grasp as he fell forward in a dead faint.
“Parbleu,” de Grandin swore softly as he climbed into the unconscious lad’s car. “Let us drive forward, Friend Trowbridge. We will take him home and administer a soporific. He must sleep, this poor one, or the memory of what we have shown him will rob him of his reason.”
So we carried Alvin Spence to his home, administered a hypnotic and left him in the care of his wondering mother with instructions to repeat the dose if he should wake.
IT WAS A MILE or more to the nearest bus station, and we set out at a brisk walk, our heels hitting sharply against the frosty concrete of the road.
“What in the world was it, de Grandin?” I asked as we marched in step down the darkened highway. “It was the most horrible—”
“Parbleu,” he interrupted, “someone comes this way in a monstrous hurry!”
His remark was no exaggeration. Driven as though pursued by all the furies from pandemonium, came a light motor car with plain black sides and a curving top. “Look out!” the driver warned as he recognized me and came to a bumping halt. “Look out, Dr. Trowbridge, it’s walking! It got out and walked!”
De Grandin regarded him with an expression of comic bewilderment. “Now what is it that walks, mon brave?” he demanded. “Mordieu, you chatter like a monkey with a handful of hot chestnuts! What is it that walks, and why must we look out for it, hein?”
“Sile Gregory,” the young man answered. “He died this mornin’ an’ Mr. Johnson took him to th’ parlors to fix ’im up, an’ sent me and Joe Williams out with him this evenin’. I was just drivin’ up to th’ house, an’ Joe hopped out to give me a lift with th’ casket, an’ old Silas got up an’ walked away! An’ Mr. Johnson embalmed ’im this mornin’ I tell you!”
“Nom d’un chou-fleur!” de Grandin shot back. “And where did this so remarkable demonstration take place, mon vieux? Also, what of the excellent Williams, your partner?”
“I don’t know, an’ I don’t care,” the other replied. “When a dead corpse I saw embalmed this mornin’ gets outa its casket an’ walks, I ain’t gonna wait for nobody. Jump up here, if you want to go with me; I ain’t gonna stay here no longer!”
“Bien,” de Grandin acquiesced. “Go your way, my excellent one. Should we encounter your truant corpse, we will direct him to his waiting bière.”
The young man waited no second invitation, but started his car down the road at a speed which would bring him into certain trouble if observed by a state trooper.
“Now, what the devil do you make of that?” I asked. “I know Johnson, the funeral director, well, and I always thought he had a pretty levelheaded crowd of boys about his place, but if that lad hasn’t been drinking some powerful liquor, I’ll be—”
“Not necessarily, my friend,” de Grandin interrupted. “I think it not at all impossible that he tells but the sober truth. It may well be that the dead do walk this road tonight.”
I shivered with something other than the night’s chill as he made the matter-of-fact assertion, but forbore pressing him for an explanation. There are times when ignorance is a happier portion than knowledge.
We had marched perhaps another quarter-mile in silence when de Grandin suddenly plucked my sleeve. “Have you noticed nothing, my friend?” he asked.
“What d’ye mean?” I demanded sharply, for my nerves were worn tender by the night’s events.
“I am not certain, but it seems to me we are followed.”
“Followed? Nonsense! Who would be following us?” I returned, unconsciously stressing the personal pronoun, for I had almost said, “What would follow us,” and the implication raised by the impersonal form sent tiny shivers racing along my back and neck.
De Grandin cast me a quick, appraising glance, and I saw the ends of his spiked mustache lift suddenly as his lips framed a sardonic smile, but instead of answering he swung round on his heel and faced the shadows behind us.
“Holà, Monsieur le Cadavre!” he called sharply. “Here we are, and—sang du diable!—here we shall stand.”
I looked at him in open-mouthed amazement, but his gaze was turned steadfastly on something half seen in the mist which lay along the road.
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Next instant my heart seemed pounding through my ribs and my breath came hot and choking in my throat, for a tall, gangling man suddenly emerged from the fog and made for us at a shambling gait.
He was clothed in a long, old-fashioned double-breasted frock coat and stiffly starched shirt topped by a standing collar and white, ministerial tie. His hair was neatly, though somewhat unnaturally, arranged in a central part above a face the color and smoothness of wax, and little flecks of talcum powder still clung here and there to his eyebrows. No mistaking it! Johnson, artist that he was, had arrayed the dead farmer in the manner of all his kind for their last public appearance before relatives and friends. One look told me the horrible, incredible truth. It was the body of old Silas Gregory which stumbled toward us through the fog. Dressed, greased and powdered for its last, long rest, the thing came toward us with faltering, uncertain strides, and I noticed, with the sudden ability for minute inventory fear sometimes lends our senses, that his old, sunburned skin showed more than one brand where the formaldehyde embalming fluid had burned it.
In one long, thin hand the horrible thing grasped the helve of a farmyard ax; the other hand lay stiffly folded across the midriff as the embalmer had placed it when his professional ministrations were finished that morning.
“My God!” I cried, shrinking back toward the roadside. But de Grandin ran forward to meet the charging horror with a cry which was almost like a welcome.
“Stand clear, Friend Trowbridge,” he warned, “we will fight this to a finish, I and It!” His little, round eyes were flashing with the zest of combat, his mouth was set in a straight, uncompromising line beneath the sharply waxed ends of his diminutive mustache, and his shoulders hunched forward like those of a practised wrestler before he comes to grips with his opponent.
With a quick, whipping motion, he ripped the razor-sharp blade of his sword-cane from its ebony sheath and swung the flashing steel in a whirring circle about his head, then sank to a defensive posture, one foot advanced, one retracted, the leg bent at the knee, the triple-edged sword dancing before him like the darting tongue of an angry serpent.
The dead thing never faltered in its stride. Three feet or so from Jules de Grandin it swung the heavy, rust-encrusted ax above its shoulder and brought it downward, its dull, lack-luster eyes staring straight before it with an impassivity more terrible than any glare of hate.
“Sa ha!” de Grandin’s blade flickered forward like a streak of storm lightning, and fleshed itself to the hilt in the corpse’s shoulder.
He might as well have struck his steel into a bag of meal.
The ax descended with a crushing, devastating blow.
De Grandin leaped nimbly aside, disengaging his blade and swinging it again before him, but an expression of surprise—almost of consternation—was on his face.
I felt my mouth go dry with excitement, and a queer, weak feeling hit me at the pit of the stomach. The Frenchman had driven his sword home with the skill of a practised fencer and the precision of a skilled anatomist. His blade had pierced the dead man’s body at the junction of the short head of the biceps and the great pectoral muscle, at the coracoid process, inflicting a wound which should have paralyzed the arm—yet the terrible ax rose for a second blow as though de Grandin’s steel had struck wide of the mark.
“Ah?” de Grandin nodded understandingly as he leaped backward, avoiding the ax-blade by the breadth of a hair. “Bien. À la fin!”
His defensive tactics changed instantly. Flickeringly his sword lashed forward, then came down and back with a sharp, whipping motion. The keen edge of the angular blade bit deeply into the corpse’s wrist, laying bare the bone. Still the ax rose and fell and rose again.
Slash after slash de Grandin gave, his slicing cuts falling with almost mathematical precision in the same spot, shearing deeper and deeper into his dreadful opponent’s wrist. At last, with a short, clucking exclamation, he drew his blade sharply back for the last time, severing the ax-hand from the arm.
The dead thing collapsed like a deflated balloon at his feet as hand and ax fell together to the cement roadway.
Quick as a mink, de Grandin. thrust his left hand within his coat, drew forth a pellet similar to that with which he had transformed the counterfeit of Dorothy Spence, and hurled it straight into the upturned ghastly-calm face of the mutilated body before him.
The dead lips did not part, for the embalmer’s sutures had closed them forever that morning, but the body writhed upward from the road, and a groan which was a muted scream came from its flat chest. It twisted back and forth a moment, like a mortally stricken serpent in its death agony, then lay still.
Seizing the corpse by its graveclothes, de Grandin dragged it through the line of roadside hazel bushes to the rim of the swamp, and busied himself cutting long, straight withes from the brushwood, then disappeared again behind the tangled branches. At last:
“It is finished,” he remarked, stepping back to the road. “Let us go.”
“Wha—what did you do?” I faltered.
“I did the needful, my friend. Morbleu, we had an evil, a very evil thing imprisoned in that dead man, and I took such precautions as were necessary to fix it in its prison. A stake through the heart, a severed head, and the whole firmly thrust into the ooze of the swamp—voilà. It will be long before other innocent ones are induced to destroy themselves by that.”
“But—” I began.
“Non, non,” he replied, half laughing. “En avant, mon ami! I would that we return home as quickly as possible. Much work creates much appetite, and I make small doubt that I shall consume the remainder of that so delicious apple pie which I could not eat at dinner.”
JULES DE GRANDIN REGARDED the empty plate before him with a look of comic tragedy. “May endless benisons rest upon your amiable cook, Friend Trowbridge,” he pronounced, “but may the curse of heaven forever pursue the villain who manufactures the woefully inadequate pans in which she bakes her pies.”
“Hang the pies, and the plate-makers, too!” I burst out. “You promised to explain all this hocus-pocus, and I’ve been patient long enough. Stop sitting there like a glutton, wailing for more pie, and tell me about it.”
“Oh, the mystery?” he replied, stifling a yawn and lighting a cigarette. “That is simple, my friend, but these so delicious pies—however, I do digress:
“When first I saw the accounts of so many strange suicides within one little week I was interested, but not greatly puzzled. People have slain themselves since the beginning of time, and yet”—he shrugged his shoulders deprecatingly—“what is it that makes the hound scent his quarry, the war-horse sniff the battle afar off? Who can tell?
“I said to me: ‘There is undoubtlessly more to these deaths than the newspapers have said. I shall investigate.’
“From the coroner’s to the undertakers’, and from the undertakers’ to the physicians’, yes, Parbleu! and to the family residences, as well, I did go, gleaning here a bit and there a bit of information which seemed to mean nothing, but which might mean much did I but have other information to add to it.
“One thing I ascertained early: In each instance the suicides had been to hear this Reverend Maundy the night before or the same night they did away with themselves. This was perhaps insignificant; perhaps it meant much. I determined to hear this Monsieur Maundy with my own two ears; but I would not hear him too close by.
“Forgive me, my friend, for I did make of you the guinea-pig for my laboratory experiment. You I left in a forward seat while the reverend gentleman preached; me, I stayed in the rear of the hall and used my eyes as well as my ears.
“What happened that night? Why, my good, kind Friend Trowbridge, who in all his life had done no greater wrong than thoughtlessly to kill a little, so harmless kitten, did almost seemingly commit suicide. But I was not asleep by the switch, my friend. Not Jules de Grandin! All the way home I saw you were distrait, and I did fear something would happen, and I did therefore watch besi
de your door with my eye and ear alternately glued to the keyhole. Parbleu, I entered the chamber not one little second too soon, either!
“‘This is truly strange,’ I tell me. ‘My friend hears this preacher and nearly destroys himself. Six others have heard him, and have quite killed themselves. If Friend Trowbridge were haunted by the ghost of a dead kitten, why should not those others, who also undoubtlessly possessed distressing memories, have been hounded to their graves by them?’
“‘There is no reason why they should not,’ I tell me.
“Next morning comes the summons to attend the young Mademoiselle Weaver. She, too, have heard the preacher; she, too, have attempted her life. And what does she tell us? That she fancied the voice of her dead friend urged her to kill herself.
“‘Ah, ha!’ I say to me. ‘This whatever-it-is which causes so much suicide may appeal by fear, or perhaps by love, or by whatever will most strongly affect the person who dies by his own hand. We must see this Monsieur Maundy. It is perhaps possible he can tell us much.’
“As yet I can see no light—I am still in darkness—but far ahead I already see the gleam of a promise of information. When we see Monsieur Everard Maundy and he tells us of his experience at that séance so many years ago—parbleu, I see it all, or almost all.
“Now, what was it acted as agent for that aged sorceress’ curse?”
He elevated one shoulder and looked questioningly at me.
“How should I know?” I answered.
“Correct,” he nodded, “how, indeed? Beyond doubt it were a spirit of some sort; what sort we do not know. Perhaps it were the spirit of some unfortunate who had destroyed himself and was earthbound as a consequence. There are such. And, as misery loves company in the proverb, so do these wretched ones seek to lure others to join them in their unhappy state. Or, maybe, it were an Elemental.”
“A what?” I demanded.
“An Elemental—a Neutrarian.”
The Horror on the Links Page 37