The Horror on the Links

by Seabury Quinn

  Mephistopheles and Company, Ltd.

  1

  “MESSIEURS LES AMERICAINS DEAD on the field of honor, I salute you!” Jules de Grandin drew himself rigidly to attention and raised his cupped hand to his right temple in a smart military salute before the Victory Monument in our city park.

  The act was so typical of the little Frenchman that I could not forbear a smile as I glanced covertly at him. Ten thousand times a day friends and neighbors—even relatives—of the gold-starred names on the honor roll of that monument passed through the park, yet of all the passers-by Jules de Grandin was the only one who habitually rendered military honors to the cenotaph each time his steps led past it.

  His sharp little blue eyes caught the flicker of my smile as we turned from the memorial, and the heat-lightning flash of resentment rose in them. “Ha, do you laugh at my face, Friend Trowbridge?” he demanded sharply. “Cordieu, I tell you, it would be well for your country if more persons paid honor to the brave lads who watered the fields of France with their blood that Freedom might survive! So busy you are in this peaceful land that you have no time to remember the wounds and blood and broken bodies which bought that peace; no time to remember how the sale boche—

  “Misère de Dieu, what have we here?” One of his white, womanish hands grasped me so sharply by the arm that I winced under the pressure. His free hand pointed dramatically down the curving, shrub-bordered path before us.

  “Eh?” I demanded. “What the deuce—?” I swallowed the remainder of my question as my gaze followed the line of his pointing finger.

  A young woman in evening dress, tear-stains on her cheeks and stark, abject terror in her eyes, was running stumblingly toward us.

  “Lieber Gott!” she cried in a horrified whisper, shrill and thin-edged as a scream, then struggled for breath in a paroxysm of sobs and glanced frightenedly behind her. “Ach, lieber Himmel!”

  “Favoris d’un rat,” murmured de Grandin wonderingly, “a woman of the boche?”

  “Enschuldige mich, Fräulein,” he began, making a wry face, as though the German words were quinine on his tongue, “bitte—”

  The result of his salutation was as forceful as it was unexpected. Throwing her hands before her eyes, as though to shut out a vision too terrible for mortal sight, the girl uttered a terrified, despairing shriek, swerved sharply away and dashed past him with a bound like that of a rabbit startled by a hound. Half a dozen fear-spurred steps farther down the path her knees seemed to melt under her, she wavered uncertainly a moment, then collapsed to the pavement with a pitiful little moan, huddled in a lovely heap of disordered dark hair and disarranged costume, shuddered tremblingly, then lay still.

  “Pardonnez-moi, Mademoiselle”—de Grandin flung the girl’s native tongue aside—“you seem in trouble. Is there anything—?” He felt her wrists for a feebly fluttering pulse, then laid a tentative hand on her left breast. “Morbleu Trowbridge, my friend,” he exclaimed, “she has fainted unconscious! Assist me, we must take her home for treatment. I think—”

  “Exguse me, zur,” a thick-toned voice cut through his words as a big young man in dinner clothes emerged from behind a clump of shrubs with the suddenness of a Jack-in-the-box popping from its case, “exguse me, zur, but I know the young lady, und I zhall be ver-ee gladt her to dake home if you will so kind be as to call me a cab. I—”

  “Ha, do you say so?” The little Frenchman dropped the swooning girl’s wrist and bounded to his feet, glaring up into the other’s face with a fierce, unwinking stare. “Perhaps, then, Monsieur, you can tell us why Mademoiselle is running through the park at this hour of night, and why she becomes unconscious on our hands. N’est-ce-pas?”

  The stranger drew himself up with an air of sudden hauteur. “I am not obliged to you exblanations make,” he began. “I dell you I know the young lady, und vill—”

  “Nom, d’un chat, this is too much!” de Grandin blazed. “I make no doubt you know her entirely too well for her comfort, Monsieur, and that you should demand that we turn her over to you—parbleu, it is the insult to our intelligence; it is—”

  “Look out, de Grandin!” I cried, springing forward to intercept the sudden thrust the other aimed at my friend’s face with a queer-looking, shining instrument. My move was a split-second too late, but my warning shout came in time. Even as I called, the little Frenchman wrenched himself back as though preparing to turn a reversed handspring, both his feet flew upward, and his assailant collapsed to the grass with an agonized grunt as de Grandin’s right heel caught him a devastating blow in the solar plexus.

  “Trowbridge, mon vieux,” he remarked matter-of-factly as he regarded his fallen foeman, “behold the advantage of la savate. At handgrips I should have been as nothing against this miscreant. In the foot-boxing”—he paused, and his little round eyes shone with a momentary flash of amusement—“there he lies. Come, let us convey Mademoiselle to your office. I doubt not she can tell us something of much interest.”

  TOGETHER WE ASSISTED THE still fainting girl to the cross street and signaled a passing taxicab. As the vehicle started toward my house I demanded: “Why in the world did you knock that fellow out, de Grandin? He really might have been a friend of this young lady’s, and—”

  “The good God protect us from such friends,” the little Frenchman cut in. “Attend me, if you please. As we turned away from the monument in the park I did first see this woman. She was running in a zigzag course, like a hare seeking to elude the pack, and I greatly wondered at her antics. All Americans are a little mad, I think, but”—he gave a short chuckle—“there is usually method behind their madness. That a young lady of fashionable appearance should run thus through the public park at a quarter to midnight seemed to be beyond the bounds of reason, but what I saw next gave me to think violently. Before she had gone a dozen steps, a man appeared from behind a patch of bushes and took off his hat to her, speaking words which seemed to cause her fright. She turned and ran toward the other side of the park, and another man arose from behind a bench, removed his hat and said something, whereat she flung up her hands and turned again, running toward us, and going faster with each step. A moment before I invited your attention to her, a third man—morbleu, it was the same one I later caressed with my heel!—addressed her. It was immediately afterward, as she came toward us with a great fear upon her, that I called your attention.”

  “H’m,” I muttered, “he—flirts?”

  “Non,” he negatived. “I do not think they were making the—how do you say it? mash?—on her. No, it was something more serious, my friend. Listen: I did behold the faces of the men who accosted her, and each face was as it had been aflame with fire!”

  “Wha—what?” I shot back. “Aflame with—whatever are you talking about?”

  “I tell you no more than what I saw,” he returned equably. “Each man’s face glowed with a light like that of a long-dead carcass which shines and stinks in the swamps at night. Also, my friend, I did perceive that each man reached out and touched her with a wand like that with which the so detestable rogue would have struck me, had I not spoiled his plan with my boot.”

  “My dear chap, you’re surely dreaming!” I scoffed. “Men with fiery faces accosting young women in the public park, and touching them with magic wands! This is the State of New Jersey in the Twentieth Century, not Baghdad in the days of the Calif Haroun!”

  “U’m,” he returned noncommittally. The flame of his match flared lambently as he set a cigarette alight. “Perhaps, my friend. Let us see what the young lady has to say when we have restored her to consciousness. Pardieu, I shall be greatly surprised if we are not astounded at her story!”

  2

  “A LITTLE ETHER, IF YOU please, Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin ordered when we had carried the swooning girl into my surgery and laid her on the examination table. “Her heart action is very slow, and the ether will stimulate—”

  A deep-drawn, shuddering moan from our patient interrupted him.
“Ach, lieber Himmel!” she exclaimed feebly, throwing out her arms with a convulsive movement as her lids fluttered a moment before unveiling a pair of cornflower-blue eyes. “Oh, God of Heaven, I am lost—destroyed—hopelessly damned! Have mercy, Mary!” Her lovely eyes, wide and shining with terror, gazed wildly about the room a moment, came to rest on de Grandin as he bent over her, and closed in sharp nictitation. “Ach—” she began again hysterically, but the Frenchman broke in, speaking slowly and mouthing the German words as though they had been morsels of overheated food on his tongue.

  “Fräulein, you are with friends. We found you in trouble in the park a short time ago, and when you fainted we brought you here. If you will tell us where you live, or where you wish to go, we shall be very glad—”

  “Ach, ja, ja, take me”—the girl burst out wildly—“take me away; take me where he can not get me. Almighty God, what do I say? How can I, the hopelessly damned, escape him, either in life or death? Oh, woe me; woe me!” She knit her slender, nervous fingers together with a wringing, hopeless movement, turning her face to the wall and weeping bitterly.

  De Grandin regarded her speculatively a moment, twisting first one, then the other end of his little blond mustache. “I think you would best be securing the restorative, Friend Trowbridge,” he remarked; “she seems in great distress.

  “Now, Mademoiselle,” he held the tumbler of chilled water and ether to the sobbing girl’s lips and patted her shoulder reassuringly, “you will have the kindness to drink this and compose yourself. Undoubtlessly you have had many troubles, but here you are safe—”

  “Safe, safe?” she echoed with a hysterical laugh. “I safe? There is no safety for me—no spot on earth or in hell where he can not find me, and since heaven is forever barred against me, how can I find safety anywhere?”

  “Morbleu, Mademoiselle, I fear you distress yourself needlessly,” the Frenchman exclaimed. “Who is this so mysterious ‘he’ who pursues you?”

  “Mephistopheles!” So softly did she breathe the name that we could scarcely recognize the syllables.

  “Eh? What is it you say?” de Grandin demanded.

  “Mephistopheles—the Devil—Satan! I am possessed by him, sold and bound to him irrevocably through time and all eternity. Oh, miserable me! Alas, that ever I was born!”

  She sobbed hysterically a moment, then regarded him with wide, piteous eyes. “You don’t believe me,” she wailed. “No one believes me, they think I’m crazy, but—”

  “Mademoiselle,” de Grandin interrupted, speaking with the sharp, incisive enunciation of a physician addressing a patient who refuses to control her nerves, “we have not said so. Only fools refuse to believe that which they do not understand, and Jules de Grandin is no fool. I have said it. If there is anything you would have us know, speak on, for we listen.” He drew a chair up to the couch where the girl lay, and leaned toward her. “Proceed, Mademoiselle.”

  “My name is Mueller, Bertha Mueller,” the girl answered, dabbing at her eyes with a wisp of lace and cambric. “I am from Vienna. A year ago I came here to accept a post as instructress to the children of Herr Andreas Hopfer, who represents the Deutsche-Rotofabrik Verein.”

  “U’m,” de Grandin commented.

  “This new country was so strange to me,” she continued, growing calmer with her recital; “nowhere, outside the house of my employer and a few of his friends, could I find anyone who spoke my mother tongue. I was lonesome. For comfort I used to sit in the park and watch the pigeons while I thought of Vienna—the old Vienna of the empire, not the poverty-stricken city of the mongrel republic. An old lady, a beautiful, white-haired lady, came to sit on a bench near mine. She seemed sad and thoughtful, too, and one day when she addressed me, my heart nearly burst with joy. She was a Frau Stoeger, and like me she came from Vienna; like me, she had lost her nearest ones in the war our envious foes forced upon us.”

  De Grandin twisted fiercely at the waxed ends of his little mustache and something very like a snort of contempt escaped him, but he controlled himself with a visible effort and nodded for her to proceed.

  “One afternoon, when I had told her how my noble brothers died gloriously at the Piave,” the girl went on, “she suggested that we go to a spiritualistic friend of hers and see if it were possible for us to converse with the beloved dead. I shrank from the suggestion at first, for Holy Church frowns on such attempts to pierce the veil heaven hangs between us and the blessed ones who sleep in the Lord, but she finally persuaded me, and we went to see the medium.”

  “Ah?” de Grandin nodded understandingly. “I suppose this Madame Medium told you most remarkable things?”

  “Nein, mein Herr,” the girl negatived eagerly. “That she did not. Me she would have no intercourse with. ‘Out of my sight and out of my house!’ she cried the moment I entered the room where she sat. ‘Begone, accursed woman, you are possessed of devils!’ she told me, and moaned and screamed until I had left the building.”

  “Parbleu, this is of the strange unusualness!” de Grandin muttered. “Proceed, Mademoiselle, I listen.”

  “Frau Stoeger was almost as embarrassed as I at the strange reception,” the girl replied, “but she told me not to lose hope. Too late she confided that when she first went to the medium’s she, too, was bidden to depart because a minor imp had fastened on her; yet she went to a learned man who could cast out devils and had the spirit exorcized without trouble or expense, for the Herr Doktor Martulus will take no fees for his work. Now she is one of the most intimate members of the circle over which Laïla, the Medium, presides.”

  “Yes? And then?” the Frenchman prompted.

  “That very night we drove into the country and met the professor. He listened sympathetically to my case and gave me a little box of pills which I was to take. I followed his directions to the letter, but the pills made me very sick, so I stopped them.

  “Next time I met Frau Stoeger she questioned me concerning the medicine, and when she learned it had made me ill, she said it was a very evil sign, and begged me with tears to go for another consultation.

  “The moment Professor Martulus saw me he seemed greatly alarmed and called a council of his associates, telling them he was certain I was possessed by one of the major fiends, since the medicine he had given me had never before failed to drive the lesser demons from their victims. But they all assured me there was no need to fear, since Belial, Mammon and even dread Milchim could be thrown from their possession by their spells. Only one demon was proof against them, and that one was Mephistopheles, the Fiend of Fiends, Satan’s other self. If he claimed me for his own, my case was well-nigh hopeless.

  “They took me to an inner chamber where the mystic rites began, and by their magic they sought the name of the fiend possessing me. All efforts were vain, and no response came to their questions until, in fear and trembling, the professor called upon the archfiend himself.

  “The dreadful name had hardly passed his lips before the whole building shook with a terrible explosion, blinding flames shot to the ceiling, and I was half smothered by the fumes of sulfur and brimstone. Something hit me on the head, and I lost consciousness. The next thing I knew I was being rushed back to town in a speeding automobile with Frau Stoeger. When I tried to snuggle up to her for comfort, she drew away from me and bade me never touch her, or even look at her again. I was marked by the Devil for his own, and even my breath or glance brought misfortune to those they touched.

  “My good, kind sir,”—she regarded de Grandin with a steadfast, pleading stare, like a child striving desperately to convince a skeptical adult of the truth of a preposterous story—“I did not then believe. Much talk I had heard of devils in my childhood, for my nurse was a Hungarian woman, a peasant of the old Magyar stock, and as full of stories of vampires, demons and hobgoblins as a chestnut shell is of prickles, but never had I thought the tales of devils were more than fairy lore. Alas! I was soon to learn the Devil is as real today as when he bought Faustus’ soul from
him.

  “The very next day as I went for my regular walk in the park a little child—a pretty little girl playing with her colored nurse by the goldfish fountain—ran to me with outstretched arms, and as I stooped to clasp her to my bosom she halted, looked at me in terror, then ran screaming to her nurse, crying out that the Devil stood behind me and reached over my shoulder for her. The Negro nurse took one look at me, then made the sign of the evil eye, thus.” She bent her thumb transversely across the palm of her hand, encircling it with the second and third fingers, permitting the fore- and little fingers to stand out like a pair of horns, and thrust them toward us. “And as the woman made the sign,” the girl sobbed, “she bade me begone to hell, where Satan, my master, awaited me; then hurried from the square with the little girl.”

  De Grandin pinched his little, pointed chin between a thoughtful thumb and forefinger. “More than a thousand damns!” he exclaimed softly. “There is the monkey’s business here, of a surety. Proceed, Mademoiselle.”

  “I became a marked woman,” she obeyed. “People turned to stare at me in the street, and all made the sign of the horns at me, Once, as I hurried through the park after sunset, I saw the Devil grinning at me from behind a bunch of rhododendrons!

  “Finally, I was ready to sell my soul for a moment’s peace. Then, by chance, I met Frau Stoeger again in the park. She blessed herself at sight of me, but did not run away, and when I spoke to her, she listened. I begged her on my bended knees to take me to Professor Martulus once more to see if he could break Satan’s hold from off my wretched soul.

  “That night I went to see the professor once more, and he told me there was one chance in a thousand of my regaining my freedom, but only at the cost of the most terrible sacrifice of humiliation and suffering. When he told me what I should have to do—oh, do not ask me to repeat it!—I was so horrified that I fainted, but there was no help for it. Either I must go through the ordeal he proposed or be forever devil-ridden. At last they said I might hire a substitute, but that I must pay her two thousand dollars. Where was I, a poor governess, almost a beggar, to obtain such a sum? It might as well have been a million!