“La pauvre petite,” de Grandin exclaimed under his breath, his gaze fixed on her. “Grand Dieu, Friend Trowbridge, but she is beautiful! Why did I not come here before?”
Out of the empty air, apparently some six feet above the girl’s proudly poised head, a burst of mocking, maniacal laughter answered him, and from the thick-piled carpet suddenly rose again the clang-bang racket we had heard before she came into view.
“Hélas!” De Grandin turned a pitying glance on the girl’s father, then: “Nom de Dieu!” he cried, ducking his head suddenly and looking over his shoulder with rounded eyes. Against the wall of the apartment, some twenty feet distant, there hung a stand of arms, one or two swords, a spear and several bolos, trophies of the captain’s service in the Philippines. As though seized by an invisible hand, one of the bolos had detached itself from the wall, hurtled whistling through the air and embedded itself nearly an inch deep in the white wainscoting behind the little Frenchman, missing his cheek by the barest fraction of a centimeter as it flew whirring past.
The clanking tumult beneath the girl’s feet subsided as quickly as it commenced, she took an uncertain step forward and opened her eyes. They were unusually long, purple rather than blue in color, and held such an expression of changeless melancholy as I had never seen in one so young. It was the look of one foredoomed to inescapable death by an incurable disease.
“Why”—she began with the bewildered look of one suddenly roused from sleep—“why—Father! What am I doing here? I was in my room, lying down, when I thought I heard Robert’s voice. I tried to get up, but ‘It’ held me down, and I think I fell asleep. I—”
“Daughter,” Captain Loudon spoke gently, the sobs very near the surface, for all his iron self-control, “these gentlemen are Dr. de Grandin and Dr. Trowbridge. They’ve come to—”
“Oh,” the girl made an impatient gesture which yet seemed somewhat languid, as though even remonstrance were useless, “more doctors! Why did you bring them, Father? You know they’ll be just like all the rest. Nothing can help me—nothing seems any good!”
“Pardonnez-moi, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin bent forward in a formal, European bow, heels together, elbows stiffly at sides, “but I think you will find us most different from the rest. To begin, we come to cure you and give you back to the man you love; and in the second place, I have a personal interest in this case.”
“A personal interest?” she inquired, acknowledging his bow with a negligent nod.
“Morbleu, but I have. Did not the—the thing which troubles you, hurl a bolo-knife at me? Sacré nom, no fantôme, no lutin shall throw knives at Jules de Grandin, then boast of the exploit to his ghostly fellows. Nom d’un petit Chinois, I think we shall show them something before we are finished!”
“NOW, MADEMOISELLE, WE MUST ask your pardon for these questions,“ he began when he had reached the drawing room. “To you it is an old and much-told tale, but we are ignorant of your case, save for such information as your father has imparted. Tell us, if you please, when did these so strange manifestations begin?” The girl regarded him silently a moment, her brooding, plum-colored eyes staring almost resentfully into his agate-blue ones.
“It was about six months ago,” she began in a lifeless monotone, like a child reciting a rote-learned but distasteful lesson. ”I had come home from a dance in New York with Lieutenant Proudfit, and it must have been about three o’clock in the morning, for we had not left New York until midnight, and our train was delayed by a heavy sleet-storm. Lieutenant Proudfit was stopping overnight with us, for we are—we were—engaged, and I had said good-night to him and gone to my room when it seemed I heard something fluttering and tapping at my window, like a bird attracted by the light, or—I don’t know what made me think so, but I got the impression, somehow—a bat beating its wings against the panes.
“I remember being startled by the noise, at first, then I was overcome with pity for the poor thing, for it was bitter cold outside and the sleet was driving down like whiplashes with the force of the east wind. I went over to the window and opened it to see what was outside. I”—she hesitated a moment, then went forward with her narrative—“I was partly undressed by this time, and the cold wind blowing through the open window cut like a knife, but I looked out into the storm to see if I could find the bird, or whatever it was.”
“Ah?” de Grandin’s little eyes were sparkling with suppressed excitement, but there was neither humor nor warmth in their flash. Rather, they were like two tiny pools of clear, adamant-hard ice reflecting a cloudless winter sky and bright, cold winter sunshine. “Proceed, if you please,” he commanded, his voice utterly toneless. “You did open your window to the tapping which was outside. And what did you next?”
“I looked out and said, ‘Come in, you poor creature!’” the girl replied. “Even though I thought it was a bat at the pane, my reason told me it couldn’t be, for bats aren’t about in the dead of winter, and if it had been one, much as I hate the things, I couldn’t have slept with the thought of its being outside in my mind.”
“Ah!” de Grandin repeated, his voice raised slightly in interrogation. “And so you did invite what was outside to come in?” Level as his tone was, there was a certain pointedness in the way he spoke the words, almost as though they were uttered in faintly shocked protest.
“Of course,” she returned. “I know it was silly for me to speak to a bird that way, as if it could understand, but, you know, we often address animals in that way. At any rate, I might have saved myself the chilling I got, for there was nothing there. I waited several minutes till the cold wind almost set my teeth to chattering, but nothing was visible outside, and there were no further flutterings at the window.”
“Probably not,” the Frenchman commented dryly. “What then, please?”
“Why, nothing—right away. It seemed as though the room had become permanently chilled, though, for even after I’d closed the window the air was icy cold, and I had to wrap my dressing gown about me while I made ready for bed. Then—” She stopped with an involuntary shudder.
“Yes, and then?” he prompted, regarding her narrowly while his lean white fingers tapped a devil’s tattoo on his chair arm.
“Then the first strange thing happened. As I was slipping my gown off, I distinctly felt a hand grasp me about the upper arm—a long, thin, deathly cold hand!”
She looked up defiantly, as though expecting some skeptical protest, but: “Yes,” he nodded shortly. “And after that?”
The girl regarded him with a sort of wonder. “You believe me—believe I actually felt something grasp me?” she asked incredulously.
“Have you not said so, Mademoiselle?” he returned a thought irritably. “Proceed, please.”
“But every other doctor I’ve talked to has tried to tell me I didn’t—couldn’t have actually felt such a thing,” she persisted.
“Mademoiselle!” the little man’s annoyance cut through the habitual courtesy with which he treated members of the gentler sex as a flame cuts through wax. “We do waste time. We are discussing you and your case, not the other physicians or their methods. They have failed. We shall give them none of our valuable time. Bien. You were saying—”
“That I felt a long, cold hand grasp me about the arm, and a moment later, before I had a chance to cry out or even shrink away, something began scratching my skin. It was like a long, blunt fingernail—a human nail, not the claw of an animal, you understand. But it had considerable force behind it, and I could see the skin turning white in its wake. Dr. de Grandin”—she leaned forward, staring with wide, frightened eyes into his face—“the welts formed letters!”
“U’m?” he nodded unexcitedly. “You do recall what they spelled?”
“They didn’t spell anything. It was like the ramblings of a Ouija board when the little table seems wandering about from letter to letter without spelling any actual words. I made out a crude, printed D, then a smaller r, then an a, and finally a c and u—Dr-a-c-
u. That was all. You see, it wasn’t a word at all.”
De Grandin was sitting forward on the extreme edge of his chair, his hands grasping its arms as though he were about to leap from his seat. “Dracu,” he repeated softly to himself, then, still lower, “Dieu de Dieu! It is possible; but why?”
“Why, what is it?” the girl demanded, his tense attitude reflecting itself in her widened eyes and apprehensive expression.
He shook himself like a spaniel emerging from the water. “It is nothing, Mademoiselle,” he assured her with a resumption of his professionally impersonal manner. “I did think I recognized the word, but I fear I must have been mistaken. You are sure there were no other letters?”
“Positive. That was all; just those five, no more.”
“Quite yes. And after that?”
“After that all sorts of terrible things began happening to me. Father has told you how chairs and tables rise up when I come near them, and how little objects fly through the air?”
He nodded, smiling. “But of course,” he returned, “and I, myself, did see one little thing fly through the air. Parbleu, it did fly unpleasantly close to my head! And these so strange sleeps you have?”
“They come on me almost any time, mostly when I’m least expecting them. One time I was seized with one while on the train and”—her face flushed bright coral at the recollection—“and the conductor thought I was drunk!”
“Bête!” de Grandin murmured. “And you have not heard the voices—the noises which sometimes accompany you, Mademoiselle?”
“No, I’ve been told of them; but I know nothing of what occurs while I’m in one of these trances. I don’t even dream; at least, I have no dreams I can remember when I wake up. I only know that I am apt to fall asleep at any time, and frequently wander about while unconscious, waking up in some totally different place. Once I walked half-way to the city while asleep, and narrowly escaped being run down by a taxicab when I came to in the middle of the street.”
“But this is villainous!” he burst out. “This is infamous; this must not be allowed. Mordieu, I shall not permit it!”
Something of the girl’s weary manner returned as she asked, “How are you going to stop it? The others all said—”
“Chut! The others! We shall not discuss them, if you please, Mademoiselle. Me, I am not as the others; I am Jules de Grandin!
“First, my friend,” he turned to me, “I would that you obtain a competent nurse, one whose discretion is matched only by her ability. You know one such? Très bien. Hasten, rush, fly to procure her at once. Bid her come to us with all celerity and be prepared to serve until relieved.
“Next”—he seized a pad and scribbled a prescription—“I would that Monsieur le Capitaine has this filled and administers one dose dissolved in hot water at once. It is Somnol, a harmless mixture of drugs, pleasant to the taste and of undoubted efficacy in this case. It will act better than chloral.”
“But I don’t want to take chloral,” the girl protested. “I have enough trouble with sleep as it is; I want something to ward off sleep, not to induce it.”
“Mademoiselle,” he replied with something like a twinkle in his keen little eyes, “have you never heard of combating the devil with flames? Take the medicine as directed. Dr. Trowbridge and I shall return soon, and we shall not rest until we have produced a cure, never doubt it.”
“THIS IS THE STRANGEST case I ever saw,” I confided as we drove toward town. “The girl’s symptoms all point to hysteria of the most violent sort, but I’m hanged if I can account for those diabolical noises which accompanied her down the stairs, or that laugh we heard when she reached the hall, or—”
“Or the knife which nearly split the head of Jules de Grandin?” he supplied. “No, my friend, I fear medical science can not account for those things. Me, I, see part of it, but not all, parbleu, not near enough. Do you recall the ancient medical theory concerning icterus?”
“Jaundice?”
“But of course.”
“You mean it used to be considered a disease, rather than a symptom?”
“Precisely. One hundred, two hundred years ago the craft knew the yellow color of the patient’s skin was due to diffused bile in the system, but what caused the diffusion? Ah, that was a question left long unanswered. So it is with this poor girl’s case. Me, I recognize the symptoms, and some of their cause is plain to me, but—ten thousand little red devils!—why? Why should she be the object of this persecution? One does not open a window in the wintertime to bid a non-existent bat or bird enter one’s house, only to fall victim to such tricks as have plagued Mademoiselle Loudon since that winter’s night. No, morbleu, there was a reason for it, the thing which tapped at her pane, being outside that night, Friend Trowbridge, and the writing on her arm, that too, came not without cause!”
I listened in amazement to his tirade, but one of his statements struck a responsive chord in my memory. “You spoke of ‘writing’ on her arm, de Grandin,” I interposed. “When she described it I thought you seemed to recognize some connection between the incomplete word and her symptoms. Is ‘dakboo’ a complete word, or the beginning of one?”
“Dracu,” he corrected shortly. “Yes, my friend, it is a word. It is Rumanian for devil, or, more properly, demon. You begin to see the connection?”
“No, I’m hanged if I do,” I retorted.
“So am I,” he replied laconically, and lapsed into moody silence from which my best attempts at conversation failed to rouse him.
LULLED INTO COUNTERFEIT REST by the drug de Grandin prescribed, Julia Loudon passed the night comfortably enough, and seemed brighter and happier when we called to interview her next morning.
“Mademoiselle,” de Grandin announced, after the usual medical mummery of taking temperature and pulse had been completed, “the day is fine. I prescribe that you go for a drive this morning; indeed, I strongly urge that you accompany Dr. Trowbridge and me forthwith. He has a number of calls to make, and I would observe what effect the fresh air has upon you. I venture to say you have had little enough of it lately.”
“I haven’t,” the girl confessed. “You see, since that time when I wandered off in my sleep, I’ve been afraid to go anywhere by myself, and I’ve even shrunk from going out with Father or Rob—Lieutenant Proudfit. I’ve been afraid of embarrassing them by one of my seizures. But it will be all right for me to go if you and Dr. Trowbridge are along, I know,” she smiled wistfully at him.
“Of a surety,” he agreed, twisting the ends of his trim little blond moustache. “Have no fear, dear lady; I shall see no harm comes to you. Make haste, we would be off.”
Miss Loudon turned to mount the stairs, a suggestion of freedom and returning health in the spring of her walk, and de Grandin turned a puzzled countenance to Captain Loudon and me. “Your daughter’s case is far simpler than I had supposed, Monsieur le Capitaine,” he announced. “So much I have been accustomed to encountering what unthinking persons call the supernatural that I fear I have become what you Americans call ‘hipped’ on the subject. Now, when first Mademoiselle detailed her experiences to me, I was led to certain conclusions which, happily, have not seemed justified by what we have since observed. Medicine is helpful in most cases of the kind, but I had feared—”
A perfect pandemonium of cacophonous dissonances, like the braying of half a dozen jazz bands suddenly gone crazy, interrupted his speech. Clattering tin cans, jangling cowbells, the wailings of tortured fiddles and discordant shrieks of wood-wind instruments all seemed mingled with shouts of wild, demoniac laughter as a bizarre figure emerged in view at the turn of the stairs and half leaped, half fell to the hall.
For an instant I failed to recognize patrician Julia Loudon in the grotesque thing before us. Her luxuriant black hair had escaped from the Grecian coronel in which she habitually wore it and hung fantastically about her breast and shoulders, half veiling, half disclosing a face from which every vestige of serenity had disappeared and on which a leer�
��no other word expresses it—of mingled craft and cunning and idiotic stupidity sat like a toad enthroned upon a fungus. She was bare-armed and barelegged; indeed, the only garment covering her supple, white body was a Spanish shawl wound tightly about bust and torso, its fringed ends dragging over the floor behind her flying feet as she capered like a female satyr across the hall drugget to the bedlam accompaniment of infernal noises which seemed to hover over her like a swarm of poisonous flies above a wounded animal struggling through the mire of a swamp.
“Ai, ai, ai-ee!” she cried in a raucous voice, bending this way and that in time to the devilish racket. “Behold my work, foolish man, behold my mastery! Fool that you are, to try to take mine from me! Today I shall make this woman a scandal and disgrace, and tonight I shall require her life. Ai, ai, ai-ee!”
For a fleeting instant de Grandin turned an appalled face to me, and I met his flying glance with one no less surprised, for the voice issuing from the girl’s slender throat was not her own: No tone or inflection of it was reminiscent of Julia Loudon. Every shrilling syllable spoke of a different individual, a personality instinct with evil vivacity as hers seemed instinct with sweetness and melancholy.
“Cordieu!” de Grandin exclaimed between set teeth, springing toward the girl, then halting in horrified amazement as though congealed to ice in his tracks. From every side of the room, like flickering beams of light, tiny bits of metal flew toward the girl’s swaying body, and in an instant her arms, legs, throat, even her cheeks, were encrusted with glittering pins and needles buried point-deep in her creamy skin like the torture-implements driven into the bodies of the pain-defying fakirs of India. Almost it seemed as though the girl had suddenly become a powerful electro-magnet to which every particle of movable metal in the apartment had leaped.
The Horror on the Links Page 44