The Judges of Hades

by Edward D. Hoch

  “Then, what killed her?” I asked. “Do you know?”

  “I’ve known since before she died,” Simon Ark replied unhappily. “It was one of the most difficult decisions I ever had to make, to let her die like that. But it was the only chance to save those college girls.”

  “You mean the spell will be lifted now that the witch is dead?”

  “Not exactly; but it’ll force a very clever killer into the open.”

  “Then Mother Fortune was murdered, and by natural means!”

  “She was murdered, but who is to say that any method of murder is natural? They are all weapons of the devil, in one way or another. Always remember that—every murder, every crime, is supernatural, in the sense that it was inspired by Satan.”

  The bartender switched off the television set, and we were alone with the constantly irregular crashes of thunder from the outside world.

  “Did Satan kill her, then?” I asked, and I knew that Simon Ark would not consider the question a foolish one. “The way all those other people were burned to death?”

  “Only indirectly. Perhaps the real killer is a man who’s been dead for nearly two thousand years. Because in a way, you see, Mother Fortune was killed by the ancient Roman emperor, Lucius—better known as Nero. …”

  Simon Ark would say no more on the subject of the old fortune teller’s mysterious death. He seemed to dismiss the subject from his mind and turned instead to questioning me about the activities of Hudsonville College.

  “Do they have any summer courses at all?” he wanted to know.

  “No, it’s closed up completely all summer. Most of these exclusive girls’ colleges are. Why do you want to know that?”

  “Just filling in bits of the picture. Now I must make an important telephone call to Washington. To the Atomic Energy Commission. Perhaps then we can return to the college.”

  He talked on the telephone for some time, and when he came out of the booth he seemed pleased. We left the bar and drove through the gentle rain toward the campus of Hudsonville College.

  It was almost dark by the time we arrived, and already the remains of the heat wave had given way to an autumn dampness that chilled our bones. We went first to Miss Bagly’s quarters, where Simon Ark inquired as to the girls’ condition.

  “It’s not good, Mr. Ark,” she told him. “Nearly all the girls in the college are sick in one way or another now. For some it’s probably all in the mind, but I’m really worried about a few of them. I do wish Dr. Lampton would allow us to call in outside help.”

  “That has all been taken care of, Miss Bagly,” he told her. “There will be doctors here within a few hours. But first I must discover the cause of the evil that lurks within your walls.”

  “I heard that the witch…Mother Fortune…was dead. Will that help the girls?”

  “In a way it will, Miss Bagly. But I fear we’ll be unable to completely save the good name of your school.” She started to say something else, but he held up his hand to silence her. “Are you certain, Miss Bagly, that none of your faculty has been affected by this sickness?”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Ark. Just the girls have been stricken. Except, of course, for our swimming instructor, who’s not really a …”

  But she never had a chance to finish her sentence. Simon Ark was already out of the room and hurrying down the steps. I ran after him, and I heard him mumble, “Of course! The swimming pool. Of course. …”

  And we ran through the night, toward the shadowy building that resembled the old Roman baths. Inside, all was darkness, and even the glistening waters of the pool itself were black. We were alone, and Simon Ark drew me into the deeper shadows.

  We waited, for what I did not know, and as we waited Simon Ark talked, in a voice so low it hardly reached my ears.

  “Suppose,” he began, “suppose you were an agent of a foreign power, or even of some private enterprise. Suppose you stole a quantity of radioactive mineral—cobalt or something similar—to use for your own illegal purposes. Suppose you found it necessary to hide it, safely, for a period of several weeks. Where…where could you safely hide a supply of illegal radioactive mineral for several weeks? Where would it be far enough away from people so as not to harm anyone with its dangerous rays?”

  And I answered him. “In the middle of a college campus closed for the summer vacation. With no one but an occasional watchman to be exposed briefly to its rays.”

  The darkness was very dark then, and the evil of the unknown hung heavy around us. “Exactly,” Simon Ark continued. “And when the school reopened for the Fall before you could get rid of the deadly metal, then what would you do? What would you do to explain the radioactivity that would begin to strike down the girls?”

  “You mean…?”

  “I mean that this building is full of low, but dangerous, amounts of radioactivity. That’s what’s wrong with those girls, and any doctor who’d been active in recent years would probably have recognized the symptoms. Unfortunately, Doctor Lampton did not, and his pride kept him from calling in assistance. I knew it almost from the beginning, which is why I suggested the blood tests. But I didn’t know until tonight just where the source of the dangerous rays was. It had to be some place that the girls used, but not the teachers. I never thought of the swimming pool until now.”

  “Then the witch business was all a blind!” I said. “The person who hid the uranium or cobalt found out about Mother Fortune’s past life and used it as an excuse for the radioactive sickness.”

  “Correct. A clever but devilish plot. Of course he couldn’t depend on the assistance of a crazed old woman forever, so he had to arrange for her death when he feared she might talk.”

  “But whom…?”

  The question was answered for me by a sudden movement on the far side of the black pool. We were no longer alone in the building.

  Simon Ark stepped out of the shadows and shouted across the width of the pool. “All right, Professor Westwood. We know all about your murderous activities. …”

  Professor Hugh Westwood looked at them from across the pool, and he might have been a demon conjured up by Satan himself. Even in the darkness I could feel the evil that seemed now to radiate from him, just as another evil radiated from a rock hidden somewhere in this building.

  “It’s too late to escape, Professor Westwood. I’ve already talked to Washington, and they confirmed the theft of the radioactive minerals from a testing lab in New York two months ago. There are doctors and F.B.I, agents on their way here right now. Of course your friends have already been arrested, which is why they never came for the rocks. Where is it, Professor? In the pool itself? In the drain pipe, possibly?”

  But Westwood let out a cry of rage, and a tongue of fire seemed to leap from his fingers into the pool. Instantly a wall of flame shot up between Westwood and ourselves. I had just a second to realize that the water in the swimming pool was somehow on fire, and then everything was a nightmare. …

  Of course we found out later that, in anticipation of danger, Westwood had poured oil on the waters of the pool and then thrown a match into it; but in that instant with the flames all around me it seemed as though the very gates of hell had opened to receive us.

  I’ll never forget those final seconds, as Simon Ark and Professor Westwood stalked each other around the blazing pool, with the flames leaping high and beating at the skylight until at last the glass burst and showered down upon us.

  This was hell, and here at last was Simon Ark, stalking a modern-day version of the devil himself, while the flames waited to consume them both. And then, finally, in a sudden clash of good and evil, their two bodies met and locked in deadly combat, and toppled together into the waiting flames. …

  The fire died as quickly as it had started, leaving only the steaming water beneath. The oil fire had burnt itself out just in time, for I doubt if even a man such as Simon Ark could have survived another minute in the heated water under those flames. As it was, we were too late to save Prof
essor Westwood. He was already dead when we pulled him from the water. …

  Later, much later, after the doctors and the police and the F.B.I., after the finding of the thin tube of radioactive cobalt in the swimming pool drain, after everybody had talked and listened and asked…

  “But how did he kill the woman, Simon? How did he kill Mother Fortune?”

  He looked at me with eyes that seemed tired, and he replied. “Remember yesterday in his office, when he tore a sheet from his pad. Remember a Latin phrase that was written on that sheet? It said ‘tunica molesta,’ and that told me the answer even before the crime was committed. ‘Tunica molesta’ was a name given to one of Nero’s particularly horrible devices for killing early Christians. It was a tunic or mantle embroidered with the finest gold. Early Christians and criminals were brought into public arenas dressed in these garments, which were made of a highly combustible cloth that burst into flames when touched with the slightest spark.”

  I remember the robe that had been hanging in Mother Fortune’s trailer. “You mean Westwood made one of these things and gave it to her?”

  “Exactly. He no doubt told her it was a reward for her part in the scheme, though I doubt if she ever realized the true nature of his plot to cover up the cache of radioactive cobalt. She was just a confused old woman who jumped at an opportunity of revenging herself upon the school that had once expelled her.”

  “But you said this garment needed a spark or something to ignite it. How did he get into the trailer to set the robe on fire?”

  “He didn’t. Once he’d given it to her, he didn’t have to worry about the outcome. Remember those cigarette burns we noticed on the sleeves of her old robe? He knew that sooner or later she would smoke a cigarette while wearing the ‘tunica molesta.’ And he knew that in her clumsy manner, she’d let a single deadly spark fall onto her robe. …”

  “And you knew this all the time?”

  “I suspected it. As a murder method it isn’t as strange as you might think, considering the fact that the killer was a professor of ancient history at a school that specialized in the early Roman Empire. The term ‘tunica molesta’ came easily to his mind, and his only mistake was in jotting it down on his pad one day. I knew, though, that once Mother Fortune was dead he’d have to get rid of the cobalt, or the whole idea of the hex would be exploded as a fake, and Doctor Lampton would start looking for some medical reason for the girls’ illness.”

  “It still seems so fantastic,” I said.

  “Life itself is fantastic, and death even more so. There are men in this world far more evil and far more clever than Professor Westwood, and as long as these men live the fantastic will be commonplace. …”

  He left me then, walking out through the night as suddenly as he’d come, but this time I was sure I’d not heard the last of Simon Ark. …

  SWORD FOR A SINNER

  THE HIGHLY DELICATE MISSION that brought Simon Ark and me to the tiny village of Santa Marta is a story in itself, and since it was to play such an important part in what followed I must start with it. Perhaps by starting with Father Hadden’s story I can at least delay for a time the setting down on paper of the horror that was to await us in the mountains. Perhaps I can wash it from my memory with a beautiful scene of Santa Marta as I first saw it, nestled on the valley floor in a sea of sunshine, a jewel unclaimed among the mountains.

  Santa Marta is a village of some fifty or sixty people, located almost on the state line between Colorado and New Mexico. It lies somewhat north of Questa, and east of Antonito—in the rugged foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. The journey from New York had taken us two full days by plane, train, and bus, but finally we arrived. It was early morning when the bus dropped us at our destination, with only a quizzical glance from the driver in farewell.

  “So this is Santa Marta,” I said, breathing in the warm, dry desert air. “Where is this priest we came to see?”

  Simon Ark frowned into the sun. “I see a church down there, a relic of happier days here. I imagine once this was a booming oasis in the desert. Perhaps Father Hadden can be found in his church.”

  The church, in stone architecture distinctly Spanish, was the last building on the street, a final resting place before the long climb into the mountains. As we approached, a few of the village people were drifting out, bound for their day of work after morning mass. This far north I was surprised to see so many Mexicans, and I was equally surprised to see Father Hadden, a rosy-cheeked man who might have been more at home in a big, sparkling church in Chicago.

  “Father Hadden? I’m Simon Ark. …”

  “I’m so glad you’ve come,” he said, and I could see he meant it. He had the type of personality that made him immediately an old and trusted friend.

  “This is a friend of mine,” Simon explained, gesturing toward me. “A New York publisher who sometimes assists me in my wanderings. He wants to write my biography someday—but that day is surely far off.”

  A hint of uncertainty crossed the priest’s face at these words. “I hope I can trust my story in your hands,” he said quietly. “It would not be the type of story that should appear in print.”

  “You can trust me,” I said. “If I ever write it at all, I’d change the names and the location.”

  “I admire your church,” Simon said. “It is large and fine for such a small village.”

  “Thank you,” Father Hadden said with a slight smile of gratitude. “I try to keep it well, even for such a small congregation as mine. The fine old church from a better day is one of the reasons why the bishop believes it necessary to keep a priest here in Santa Marta.”

  “Oh?” Simon said. “And what are the other reasons?”

  “One involves a place you might have passed on the way in—a den of sin or such called the Oasis. It’s been open only a year, but it already attracts people from a hundred miles around. The other reason…has to do with something up in the hills which need not concern us now.”

  “Your letter said you’d heard of my work,” Simon began, anxious to get to the matter at hand.

  The priest leaned back in his chair, brushing a sun-tanned hand through thick black hair. “I have a brother at the monastery of St. John of the Cross, in West Virginia. He told me that some two years ago you rendered them a great service.”

  “Oh, yes,” Simon nodded. “A case of diabolic possession. Both interesting and tragic, in a way.”

  Father Hadden nodded. “My brother spoke very highly of you, and when my own…problem came up I felt you were the man to help me. I went to my bishop and received his permission to consult you about it.”

  “I’m indeed gratified that your bishop ever heard of me.”

  “You’re much too modest, Mr. Ark. How many men are there in the world today doing actual, physical battle with the devil himself? And I understand that you yourself were once a priest?”

  It was a phase of Simon’s past he never spoke of. Now he simply brushed it aside with an impatient gesture. “In Egypt, long ago, I practiced in the Coptic rite. But let us get to your problem, Father. …”

  “My problem is simpler stated than solved, I fear. It seems I find myself equipped with the power of communication with the dead. In short, Mr. Ark, I am a medium. …”

  His face never changed expression as he made the statement. He might have been giving us a baseball score, or asking for an extra-large Sunday collection. He was still the friendly, smiling priest, but I thought I detected a slight chill in the warm spring air.

  “A medium?” Simon Ark repeated very slowly. “Of course, the term is only a bare hundred years old. It’s odd to hear the word spoken by a priest—one who certainly holds nothing in common with the Fox sisters and other American spiritualists.”

  “I use only the popular term for a somewhat unpopular gift, Mr. Ark. I believe even Margaret Fox finally admitted the presence of fraud in her little act. Still, I understand there’s a monument to her back in Rochester where much of it s
tarted.”

  Simon nodded. “But tell me of your strange power, whatever its name. This is most interesting.”

  The ringing of a telephone interrupted the conversation, and Father Hadden rose to answer it.

  “Hello? Father Hadden here. …” As he listened, his expression changed, ever so slightly. The smile faded and was replaced by a troubled, gray look. “I’ll come at once, of course.”

  “What is it, Father, trouble?” Simon asked as he hung up the phone.

  “I fear so. The very worst kind of trouble. A murder at the morada of Sangre de Cristo. In the mountains. I must go there at once.”

  “Could I be of service?” Simon asked. “I have had some slight experience in such matters. Perhaps on the way we could discuss your own problem further.”

  But the priest waved this aside. “You are welcome to come certainly, Mr. Ark, but this is far more important than any problem I might have. This is a tragedy that could be very bad for the Church.”

  “Then all the more reason for my assistance.” Simon motioned to me and we followed the priest outside to his car, a station wagon brown with dust from the plains.

  Father Hadden paused at the door and turned to me. “I must ask one promise from both of you. What you are to see up here is…well, it is a sight few men have witnessed. You must promise me never to speak of this to the outside world.”

  We gave him our promises, and I for one was wondering what strange world we were about to enter, what sights awaited us in these distant mountains. Before long we were bouncing over black roads, climbing ever north into the hills and valleys of the Rockies. It was beautiful country, but strange and silent too—almost menacing in the quiet calm of its mountains, in the yucca and cactus that were the only vegetation.

  “These mountains,” Simon began, breaking the silence which had hung over the car, “are called the Sangre de Cristo range? Blood of Christ?”

  The priest nodded. “An ironically tragic name in view of the circumstances. Have you ever heard of the Brotherhood of Penitentes, Mr. Ark?”