The Horror on the Links

by Seabury Quinn

  “Take her upstairs, my friend,” he motioned almost frantically to Bennett. “Take her upstairs and lay her in my bed. Watch beside her, and, if you have not forgotten how, pray; pray as you did when a lad beside your mother’s knee. Meanwhile I—Grand Dieu, I shall do what I can!”

  As Bennett bore his swooning bride up the stairs the little Frenchman seated himself beside the surgery desk, put both elbows down upon its polished surface and cupped his pointed chin in his palms, staring straight before him with a fixed, unseeing stare of utter abstraction.

  At last: “Parbleu, it is desperate but so are we. We shall try it!” he announced. For a moment his gaze wandered wildly about the room, passing rapidly over the floor, walls and ceiling. At last it came to rest on a sepia print of Rembrandt’s Study in Anatomy.

  “I know not whether it will serve,” he muttered, rising quickly and detaching the picture from its hook, “but, parbleu, it must!

  “Go, Friend Trowbridge,” he ordered over his shoulder while he worked feverishly at the screw-eyes to which the picture’s wire was attached. “Do you go upstairs and see how it is with our friends. Me, I shall follow anon.”

  “Everything all right?” I asked as cheerfully as I could as I entered the room where Peligia lay as silent as though in a trance.

  “I—don’t know,” Bennett faltered. “I put her to bed, as you ordered, and before I could even begin to pray I fell asleep. I just woke up a moment ago. I don’t think she’s—oh; o-o-oh!” The exclamation was wrung from him as a scream might come from a culprit undergoing the torture. His wife’s head, pillowed against the bed linen, was white as the snowy cloth itself, and already there was a look of impending death upon her features. Too often I had seen that look on a patient’s face as the clock hands neared the hour of two. Unless I was much mistaken, Peligia Bennett would never see the morning’s sun.

  “Ha, it seems I come none too soon,” de Grandin’s voice came in a strident whisper from the door behind us.

  “My friends,” he announced, facing each of us in turn, his little eyes dilated with excitement, “this night I enter the lists against a foe whose strength I know not, and I do greatly fear my own weapons are but feeble things. Trowbridge, dear old friend”—his slender, strong hand clasped mine in a quick pressure—“should it so happen that I return no more, see that they write upon my tomb: ‘He died serving his friends.’”

  “But, my dear chap, surely you’re not going to leave us now,” I began, only to have my protest drowned by his shout:

  “Priest Kaku, server of false gods, persecutor of women, I charge thee, come forth; manifest thyself, if thou darest. I, Jules de Grandin, challenge thee!”

  I shook my head, and rubbed my eyes in amazement. Was it the swirl of snowflakes, driven through the partly opened window by the howling January blast, or the fluttering of the scrim curtain, that patch of white at the farther end of the room? Again I looked, and amazement gave way to something akin to incredulity, and that, in turn, to horror. In the empty air beside the window-place there was taking form, like a motion-picture projected on a darkened screen, the shadowy form of a man. Tall, cadaverous, as though long dead and buried, he was clothed in a straight-hanging one-piece garment of grayish-green linen, with shaven head and face, protruding, curling beard, and eyes the like of which I had never seen in human face, eyes which glowed and smoldered with a fiery glint like the red reflection of the glory-hole of lowest hell.

  For an instant he seemed to waver, half-way between floor and ceiling, regarding the little Frenchman with a look of incomparable fury, then his burning, glowing orbs fixed themselves intently on the sleeping woman on the bed.

  Peligia gave a short, stifled gasp, her lids fluttered open, but her eyes stared straight before her sightlessly. Her slender, blue-veined hands rose slowly from the counterpane, stretched out, toward the hovering phantom in the corner of the room, and slowly, laboriously, like a woman in a hypnotic trance, she rose, put forth one foot from the bed, and made as if to walk to the beckoning, compelling eyes burning in the livid face of the—there was no doubt about it—priest of Sebek who stood, now fully materialized, beside the window of my bedroom.

  “Back!” de Grandin screamed, thrusting out one hand and forcing her once more into the bed.

  He wheeled about, facing the green-robed priest of Egypt with a smile more fierce than any frown. “Monsieur from hell,” he challenged, “long years ago you did make wager of battle against him who should lift thy spell, and the spell of Sebek, thy unclean god, from off this woman. He who submits to ordeal by battle may fight for himself or engage a champion. Behold in me the champion of this man and this woman. Say, wilt thou battle against me for their lives and happiness, or art thou the filthy coward which I do believe thee?”

  It was monstrous, it was impossible; it could not be; my reason told me that flesh and blood could not enter the lists against intangible phantoms and hope to win; yet there, in the quiet of my bedroom, Jules de Grandin flung aside jacket and waistcoat, bent his supple body nearly double, and charged headlong into the twining embrace of a thing which had materialized out of the air.

  As he leaped across the room the Frenchman snatched something from his pocket and whirled it about his head like a whiplash. With a gasp of amazement I recognized it for a four foot strand of soft-iron picture wire—the wire he had taken from the print in my surgery.

  The phantom arms swept forward to engulf my little friend, the phantom face lit up with a smile as diabolical as that of Satan at the arrival of a newly damned soul, yet it was but a moment ere I realized the battle was not hopelessly to the ghost-thing and against his mortal opponent.

  De Grandin seemed to make no attempt to grapple with the priest of Sebek or to snare him in the loop of wire. Rather his sole attention seemed directed to avoiding the long-bladed copper knife with which the priest was armed.

  Again and again the wraith stabbed savagely at de Grandin’s face, throat or chest. Each time the Frenchman avoided the lunging knife and brought his loop of woven iron down upon the ghost-thing’s arms, shoulders or shaven pate, and I noticed with elation that the specter writhed at each contact with the iron as though it had been white-hot.

  How long the struggle lasted I do not know. De Grandin was panting like a spent runner, and great streams of perspiration ran down his pale face. The other made no sound of breathing, nor did his sandaled feet scuff against the carpet as he struggled with the Frenchman. Bennett and I stood as silent as two graven images, and only the short, labored breathing of the little Frenchman broke the stillness of the room as the combat waxed and waned.

  At last it seemed the phantom foeman was growing lighter, thinner, less solid. Where formerly he had seemed as much a thing of flesh and bone as his antagonist, I could now distinctly descry the outlines of pieces of furniture when he stood between them and me. He was once more assuming his ghostly transparency.

  Time and again he sought to strike through de Grandin’s guard. Time and again the Frenchman flailed him with the iron scourge, avoiding his knife by the barest fraction of an inch.

  At length: “In nomine Domini!” de Grandin shrieked, leaping forward and showering a perfect hailstorm of whip-lashes on his opponent.

  The green-clad priest of Sebek seemed to wilt like a wisp of grass thrown into the fire, to trail upward like a puff of smoke, to vanish and dissolve in the encircling air. “Triomphe, it is finished!” sobbed de Grandin, stumbling across the room and half falling across the bed where Peligia Bennett lay. “It is finished, and—mon Dieu—I am broken!” Burying his face in the coverlet, he fell to sobbing like a child tired past the point of endurance.

  “IT WAS MAGNIFICENT,” I told him as we sat in my study, a box of cigars and one of my few remaining bottles of cognac between us. “You fought that ghost bare-handed, and conquered him, but I don’t understand any of it. Do you feel up to explaining?”

  He stretched luxuriously, lighted a fresh cigar and flashed one of his
quick, impish smiles at me through the smoke wreaths. “Have you studied much of ancient Egypt?” he asked, irrelevantly.

  “Mighty little,” I confessed.

  “Then you are, perhaps, not aware of the absence of iron in their ruins? You do not know their mummy-cases are put together with glue and wooden dowels, and such instruments of metal as are found in their temples are of copper or bronze, never of iron or steel?”

  “I’ve heard something like that,” I replied, “but I don’t quite get the significance of it. It’s a fact that they didn’t understand the art of making steel, isn’t it, and used tempered copper instead?”

  “I doubt it,” he answered. “The arts of old Egypt were highly developed, and they most assuredly had means of acquiring iron, or even steel, had they so desired. No, my friend, the absence of iron is due to a cause other than ignorance. Iron, you must know, is the most earthly of all metals. Spirits, even of the good, find it repugnant, and as for the evil ones, they abhor it. Do you begin to see?”

  “No, I can’t say I do. You mean—”

  “I mean that, more than any other country, Egypt was absorbed with the spiritual side of life. Men’s days there were passed in communing with the souls of the departed or spirits of another sort, elemental spirits, which had never worn the clothing of the flesh.

  “The mummification of their dead was not due to any horror of putrefaction, but to their belief that a physical resurrection would take place at the end of seven ages—roughly, seven thousand years. During that time, according to their religion, the body would lie in its tomb, and at the end of the period the soul, or ka, would return and reanimate it. Meantime, the ka kept watch beside the mummy. Do you now see why no iron entered into their coffins?”

  “Because the spirit, watching beside the body, would find the iron’s proximity uncomfortable?”

  “Precisely, my friend, you have said it. There have been authenticated instances of ghosts being barred from haunted houses by no greater barrier than an iron wire stretched across the door. In Ireland the little people are ofttimes kept from a cottage by nothing more than a pair of steel shears opened with their points toward the entrance. So it was that I determined to put it to a test and attack that shade of Kaku with naught but a scourge of iron. Eh bien, it was a desperate chance, but it was successful.”

  The flame of his match flared flickeringly as he set fire to a fresh cigar and continued: “Now, as to that jewel of seven stones with which Madame Bennett’s fate is interwoven. That, my friend, is a talisman—an outward and visible sign of an invisible and spiritual force. In his hypnotic command to her to sleep until awakened by someone in a later age, or else to die completely at the end of seven thousand years, Kaku the priest had firmly planted in her mind the thought that if the seven stones of that jewel were destroyed, her second life should also wane. The seven stones were to her a constant reminder of the fate which overshadowed her like—like, by example, the string you tie about your finger to remind you to buy fresh razor-blades or tooth-powder next time you go past the drug store.” He grinned delightedly at his homely example.

  “But how could Kaku know when Peligia had been awakened, and how could he come back to fight for her?” I demanded.

  “Kaku, my friend, is dead,” he replied seriously, “but like your own Monsieur John Brown, his soul goes—or, at least, went—marching on. And because it was not a good soul, but one which dwelt within its body in constant companionship with the ugly thought of jealousy, it was not permitted to continue its journey toward perfection, but was chained to the earth it had aforetime walked. Always in Kaku’s consciousness, even after he had ceased to possess a body, was the thought of his unrequited love for Peligia and the fear that she should be awakened from her trance by a man whom she would love. Not more swiftly does the fireman respond to the alarm than did the restless, earthbound spirit of Kaku answer the knowledge that Peligia had returned to consciousness. In the guise of a cat he came at first, for cats were familiar things in old Egypt. Again, in the form of a crocodile he did all but kill the young Bennett and his bride as they motored to dine with us. Once more—and how he did it we do not know—he appeared and set fire to their house, and all but encompassed her death when he caused the rope to part as Peligia escaped the flames.

  “This night he came to call her by strength of will from out her fleshly body to join his wandering spirit, but—thanks be to God!—we thwarted him by the use of so simple a thing as a length of iron wire, from which his spirit, earthbound as it was, did shrink.”

  “But see here,” I persisted, “do you mean to tell me Kaku will never return to plague Peligia, and Ellsworth again?”

  “Yes,” he said, with an elfish grin, “I think I may truthfully say that Kaku will never again return. Parbleu, this night the iron literally entered into his soul!

  “You saw me contend with him; you saw him vanish like the shadows of night before the rising sun. Draw your own happy conclusions. Meantime”—he reached for the shining green bottle in which the cognac glowed with a ruby iridescence—“to your very good health, my friend, and the equally good health of Monsieur and Madame Bennett.”

  The Serpent Woman

  “GRAND DIEU, FRIEND TROWBRIDGE, have a care!” Jules de Grandin clutched excitedly at my elbow with his left hand, while with the other he pointed dramatically toward the figure which suddenly emerged from the shadowy evergreens bordering the road and flitted like a windblown leaf through the zone of luminance cast by my headlights. “Pardieu, but she will succeed in destroying herself if she does that once too—” he continued; then interrupted himself with a shout as he flung both feet over the side of the car and dashed down the highway to grapple with the woman whose sudden appearance had almost sent us skidding into the wayside ditch.

  Nor was his intervention a second too soon, for even as he reached her side the mysterious woman had run to the center of the highway bridge, and was drawing herself up, preparatory to leaping over the parapet into the rushing stream fifty feet below.

  “Stop it, Mademoiselle! Desist!” he commanded sharply, seizing her shoulders in his small, strong hands and dragging her backward to the dusty planks of the bridge by main force.

  She fought like a cornered wildcat. “Let me go!” she raged, struggling in the little Frenchman’s embrace; then, finding her efforts unavailing, twisting suddenly round to face him and clawing at his cheeks with desperate, fear-stiffened fingers. “Let me go; I want to die; I must die; I will die, I tell you!” she screamed. “Let me go!”

  De Grandin shifted his grasp from her shoulders to her wrists and shook her roughly, as a terrier might shake a rat. “Be still, Mademoiselle!” he ordered curtly. “Cease this business of the fool, or, parbleu”—he administered another shake—“I shall be forced to tie you!”

  I added my efforts to his, grasping the raging woman by the elbows and forcing her into the twin shafts of light thrown by the car’s driving-lamps.

  Leaning forward, de Grandin retrieved her hat and placed it on her dark head at a decidedly rakish angle; then regarded her meditatively in the headlights’ glare. “Will you restrain yourself, if we loose you, Mademoiselle?” he asked after a few seconds’ silent inspection.

  The young woman regarded him sullenly a moment, then broke into a sharp, cachinnating laugh. “You’ve only postponed the inevitable,” she announced with a fatalistic shrug of her shoulders. “I’ll kill myself as soon as you leave me, anyway. You might as well have saved yourself the trouble.”

  “U’m?” the Frenchman murmured. “Precisely, exactly, quite so, Mademoiselle; and for that reason we shall take pains not to abandon you. Nom d’un parapluie, are we murderers? We shall not leave you to your fate. Tell us where you live, and we shall take you there.”

  She faced us with quivering nostrils and heaving, tumultuous breast, anger flashing from her eyes, a diatribe of invective seemingly ready to spill from her lips. She had a rather pretty, high-bred face; unnaturally large, dar
k eyes, seeming larger still because of the deep violet circles under them; death-pale skin contrasting strongly with the little tendrils of dark, curling hair which hung about her cheeks beneath the rim of her wide leghorn hat.

  “Mademoiselle,” de Grandin announced with a bow, “you are beautiful. There is no reason for you to wish to die. Come with us; Dr. Trowbridge and I shall do ourselves the honor of escorting you to your home.”

  “I’m Mrs. Candace,” she replied simply, as though the name would explain everything.

  “Madame,” de Grandin assured her, bowing formally from the hips, as though acknowledging an introduction, “the very great honor is ours. I am Jules de Grandin, and this is Dr. Samuel Trowbridge. May we have the honor of your company—”

  “But—but,” the girl broke in, half-believingly, “you mean you don’t know who I am?”

  “Until a moment ago we have been denied the happiness of your acquaintance, Madame,” rejoined the Frenchman with another bow. “You are now ready to accompany us!” he added, glancing toward the car.

  Something like gratitude shone in the young woman’s eyes as she answered: “I live in College Grove Park; you may take me there, if you wish, but—”

  “Tiens, Madame,” he interrupted, “let us but no buts, if you please.”

  Taking her hand in his he led her to the waiting car and assisted her to a seat.

  “IT’S KIND OF YOU to do this for me,” our passenger murmured as I turned the motor eastward. “I didn’t think there was anyone who’d trouble to keep me from dying.”

  De Grandin shot her a glance of swift inquiry. “Why?” he demanded with Gallic directness.

  “Because everyone—everyone but Iring—wants to see me hanged, and sometimes he looks at me so strangely. I think perhaps he’s turning against me, too!”

  “Ah?” de Grandin responded. “And why should that be?”