‘Well?’ I demanded as he made no further effort to proceed.
‘Non, it is not well,’ he denied, ‘but it may be important. Do you observe the moon tonight?’
‘Why, yes.’
‘What quarter is it in?’
‘The last; it’s waning fast.’
‘Précisement. As I was saying, it may be that his powers to metamorphose himself were weakened because of the waning of the moon. Remember, if you please, his power for evil is at its height when the moon is at the full, and as it wanes, his powers become less and less. At the darkening of the moon, he is at his weakest, and then is the time for us to strike—if only we could find him. But he will lie well hidden at such times, never fear. He is clever with a devilish cunningness, that one.’
‘Oh, you’re fantastic!’ I burst out.
‘You say so, having seen what you have seen?’
‘Well, I’ll admit we’ve seen some things which are mighty hard to explain,’ I conceded, ‘but——’
‘But we are arrived at home; Monsieur and Madame Maxwell are safe upon the ocean, and I am vilely thirsty,’ he broke in. ‘Come, let us take a drink and go to bed, my friend.’
With midwinter came John and Sarah Maxwell, back from their honeymoon in Paris and on the Riviera. A week before their advent, notices in the society columns told of their homecoming, and a week after their return an engraved invitation apprised de Grandin and me that the honor of our presence was requested at a reception in the Leigh mansion, where they had taken residence. ‘. . . and please come early and stay late; there are a million things I want to talk about,’ Sarah pencilled at the bottom of our card.
Jules de Grandin was more than usually ornate on the night of the reception. His London-tailored evening clothes were knife-sharp in their creases; about his neck hung the insignia of the Legion d’Honneur; a row of miniature medals, including the French and Belgian war crosses, the Médaille Militaire, and the Italian Medal of Valor, decorated the left breast of his faultless evening coat; his little, wheat-blond mustache was waxed to needle-sharpness, and his sleek blond hair was brilliantined and brushed till it fitted flat upon his shapely little head as a skull-cap of beige satin.
Lights blazed from every window of the house as we drew up beneath the porte-cochère. Inside all was laughter, staccato conversation, and the odd, not unpleasant odor rising from the mingling of the hundred or more individual scents affected by the women guests. Summer was still near enough for the men to retain the tan of mountain and seashore on their faces and for a velvet vestige of veneer of painfully acquired sun-tan to show upon the women’s arms and shoulders.
We tendered our congratulations to the homing newlyweds; then de Grandin plucked me by the sleeve. ‘Come away, my friend,’ he whispered in an almost tragic voice. ‘Come quickly, or these thirsty ones will have drunk up all the punch containing rum and champagne and left us only lemonade!’
The evening passed with pleasant swiftness, and guests began to leave. ‘Where’s Sallie—seen her?’ asked John Maxwell, interrupting a rather Rabelaisian story which de Grandin was retailing with gusto to several appreciative young men in the conservatory. ‘The Carter-Brooks are leaving, and——’
De Grandin brought his story to a close with the suddenness of a descending theater curtain, and a look of something like consternation shone in his small, round eyes. ‘She is not here?’ he asked sharply. ‘When did you last see her?’
‘Oh,’ John answered vaguely, ‘just a little while ago; we danced the “Blue Danube” together, then she went upstairs for something, and——’
‘Quick, swiftly!’ de Grandin interrupted. ‘Pardon, Messieurs,’ he bowed to his late audience and, beckoning me, strode toward the stairs.
‘I say, what’s the rush——’ began John Maxwell, but:
‘Every reason under heaven,’ the Frenchman broke in shortly. To me: ‘Did you observe the night outside, Friend Trowbridge?’
‘Why, yes,’ I answered. ‘It’s a beautiful moonlit night, almost bright as day, and——’
‘And there you are, for the love of ten thousand pigs!’ he cut in. ‘Oh, I am the stupid-headed fool, me! Why did I let her from my sight?’
We followed in wondering silence as he climbed the stairs, hurried down the hall toward Sarah’s room, and paused before her door. He raised his hand to rap, but the portal swung away, and a girl stood staring at us from the threshold.
‘Did it pass you?’ she asked, regarding us in wide-eyed wonder.
‘Pardon, Mademoiselle?’ de Grandin countered. ‘What is it that you ask?’
‘Why, did you see that lovely collie, it——’
‘Cher Dieu,’ the words were like a groan upon the little Frenchman’s lips as he looked at her in horror. Then, recovering himself: ‘Proceed, Mademoiselle, it was of a dog you spoke?’
‘Yes,’ she returned. ‘I came upstairs to freshen up, and found I’d lost my compact somewhere, so I came to Sallie’s room to get some powder. She’d come up a few moments before, and I was positive I’d find her here, but——’ she paused in puzzlement a moment; then: ‘But when I came in there was no one here. Her dress was lying on the chaise-longue there, as though she’d slipped it off, and by the window, looking out with its paws up on the sill, was the loveliest silver collie.
‘I didn’t know you had a dog, John,’ she turned to Maxwell. ‘When did you get it? It’s the loveliest creature, but it seemed afraid of me; for when I went to pat it, it slunk away, and before I realized it had bolted through the door, which I’d left open. It ran down the hall.’
‘A dog?’ John Maxwell answered bewilderedly. ‘We haven’t any dog, Nell; it must have been——’
‘Never mind what it was,’ de Grandin interrupted as the girl went down the hall, and as she passed out of hearing he seized us by the elbows and fairly thrust us into Sarah’s room, closing the door quickly behind us.
‘What——’ began John Maxwell, but the Frenchman motioned him to silence.
‘Behold, regard each item carefully; stamp them upon your memories,’ he ordered, sweeping the charming chamber with his sharp, stock-taking glance.
A fire burned brightly in the open grate, parchment-shaded lamps diffused soft light. Upon the bed there lay a pair of rose-silk pajamas, with a sheer crêpe negligée beside them. A pair of satin mules were placed toes in upon the bedside rug. Across the chaise-longue was draped, as though discarded in the utmost haste, the white-satin evening gown that Sarah had worn. Upon the floor beside the lounge were crumpled wisps of ivory crêpe de Chine, her bandeau and trunks. Sarah, being wholly modern, had worn no stockings, but her white-and-silver evening sandals lay beside the lingerie, one on its sole, as though she had stepped out of it, the other on its side, gaping emptily, as though kicked from her little pink-and-white foot in panic haste. There was something ominous about that silent room; it was like a body from which the spirit had departed, still beautiful and warm, but lifeless.
‘Humph,’ Maxwell muttered, ‘the Devil knows where she’s gone——’
‘He knows very, exceedingly well, I have no doubt,’ de Grandin interrupted. ‘But we do not. Now—ah? Ah-ah-ah?’ his exclamation rose steadily, thinning to a sharpness like a razor’s cutting-edge. ‘What have we here?’
Like a hound upon the trail, guided by scent alone, he crossed the room and halted by the dressing-table. Before the mirror stood an uncorked flask of perfume, lovely thing of polished crystal decorated with silver basketwork. From its open neck there rose a thin but penetrating scent, not wholly sweet nor wholly acrid, but a not unpleasant combination of the two, as though musk and flower-scent had each lent it something of their savors.
The little Frenchman put it to his nose, then set it down with a grimace. ‘Name of an Indian pig, how comes this devil’s brew here?’ he asked.
‘Oh, that?’ Maxwell answered. ‘Hanged if I know. Some unknown admirer of Sallie’s sent it to her. It came today, all wrapped up like someth
ing from a jeweler’s. Rather pleasant-smelling, isn’t it?’
De Grandin looked at him as Torquemada might have looked at one accusing him of loving Martin Luther. ‘Did you by any chance make use of it, Monsieur?’ he asked in an almost soundless whisper.
‘I? Good Lord, do I look like the sort of he-thing who’d use perfume?’ the other asked.
‘Bien, I did but ask to know,’ de Grandin answered as he jammed the silver-mounted stopper in the bottle and thrust the flask into his trouser pocket.
‘But where the deuce is Sallie?’ the young husband persisted. ‘She’s changed her clothes, that’s certain; but what did she go out for, and if she didn’t go out, where is she?’
‘Ah, it may be that she had a sudden feeling of faintness, and decided to go out into the air,’ the Frenchman temporized. ‘Come, Monsieur, the guests are waiting to depart, and you must say adieu. Tell them that your lady is indisposed, make excuses, tell them anything, but get them out all quickly; we have work to do.’
John Maxwell lied gallantly, de Grandin and I standing at his side to prevent any officious dowager from mounting the stairs and administering home-made medical assistance. At last, when all were gone, the young man turned to Jules de Grandin, and:
‘Now, out with it,’ he ordered gruffly. ‘I can tell by your manner something serious has happened. What is it, man; what is it?’
De Grandin patted him upon the shoulder with a mixture of affection and commiseration in the gesture. ‘Be brave, mon vieux,’ he ordered softly. ‘It is the worst. He has her in his power; she has gone to join him, for—pitié de Dieu!—she has become like him.’
‘Wha—what?’ the husband quavered. ‘You mean she—that Sallie, my Sallie, has become a were——’ his voice balked at the final syllable, but de Grandin’s nod confirmed his guess.
‘Hélas, you have said it, my poor friend,’ he murmured pitifully.
‘But how?—when?—I thought surely we’d driven him off——’ the young man faltered, then stopped, horror choking the words back in his throat.
‘Unfortunately, no,’ de Grandin told him. ‘He was driven off, certainly, but not diverted from his purpose. Attend me.’
From his trousers pocket he produced the vial of perfume, uncorked it, and let its scent escape into the room. ‘You recognize it, hein?’ he asked.
‘No, I can’t say I do,’ Maxwell answered.
‘Do you, Friend Trowbridge?’
I shook my head.
‘Very well. I do, to my sorrow.’
He turned once more to me. ‘The night Monsieur and Madame Maxwell sailed upon the Ile de France, you may recall I was explaining how the innocent became werewolves at times?’ he reminded.
‘Yes, and I interrupted to ask about the different shapes that thing assumed,’ I nodded.
‘You interrupted then,’ he agreed soberly, ‘but you will not interrupt now. Oh, no. You will listen while I talk. I had told you of the haunted dells where travelers may unknowingly become werewolves, of the streams from which the drinker may receive contagion, but you did not wait to hear of les fleurs des loups, did you?’
‘Fleurs des loups—wolf-flowers?’ I asked.
‘Précisement, wolf-flowers. Upon those cursed mountains grows a kind of flower which, plucked and worn at the full of the moon, transforms the wearer into a loup-garou. Yes. One of these flowers, known popularly as the fleur de sang, or blood-flower, because of its red petals, resembles the marguerite, or daisy, in form; the other is a golden yellow, and is much like the snapdragon. But both have the same fell property, both have the same strong, sweet, fascinating scent.
‘This, my friends,’ he passed the opened flagon underneath our noses, ‘is a perfume made from the sap of those accursed flowers. It is the highly concentrated venom of their devilishness. One applying it to her person, anointing lips, ears, hair, and hands with it, as women wont, would as surely be translated into wolfish form as though she wore the cursed flower whence the perfume comes. Yes.
‘That silver collie of which the young girl spoke, Monsieur’—he turned a fixed, but pitying look upon John Maxwell—‘she was your wife, transformed into a wolf-thing by the power of this perfume.
‘Consider: Can you not see it all? Balked, but not defeated, the vile vrykolakas is left to perfect his revenge while you are on your honeymoon. He knows that you will come again to Harrisonville; he need not follow you. Accordingly, he sends to Europe for the essence of these flowers, prepares a philtre from it, and sends it to Madame Sarah today. Its scent is novel, rather pleasing; women like strange, exotic scents. She uses it. Anon, she feels a queerness. She does not realize that it is the metamorphosis which comes upon her, she only knows that she feels vaguely strange. She goes to her room. Perhaps she puts the perfume on her brow again, as women do when they feel faint; then, pardieu, then there comes the change all quickly, for the moon is full tonight, and the essence of the flowers very potent.
‘She doffed her clothes, you think? Mais non, they fell from her! A woman’s raiment does not fit a wolf; it falls off from her altered form, and we find it on the couch and on the floor.
‘That other girl comes to the room, and finds poor Madame Sarah, transformed to a wolf, gazing sadly from the window—la pauvre, she knew too well who waited outside in the moonlight for her, and she must go to him! Her friend puts out a hand to pet her, but she shrinks away. She feels she is “unclean”, a thing apart, one of “that multitudinous herd not yet made fast in hell”—les loups-garous! And so she flies through the open door of her room, flies where? Only le bon Dieu—and the Devil, who is master of all werewolves—know!’
‘But we must find her!’ Maxwell wailed. ‘We’ve got to find her!’
‘Where are we to look?’ de Grandin spread his hands and raised his shoulders. ‘The city is wide, and we have no idea where this wolf-man makes his lair. The werewolf travels fast, my friend; they may be miles away by now.’
‘I don’t care a damn what you say, I’m going out to look for her!’ Maxwell declared as he rose from his seat and strode to the library table, from the drawer of which he took a heavy pistol. ‘You shot him once and wounded him, so I know he’s vulnerable to bullets, and when I find him——’
‘But certainly,’ the Frenchman interrupted. ‘We heartily agree with you, my friend. But let us first go to Doctor Trowbridge’s house where we, too, may secure weapons. Then we shall be delighted to accompany you upon your hunt.’
As we started for my place he whispered in my ear: ‘Prepare the knock-out drops as soon as we are there, Friend Trowbridge. It would be suicide for him to seek that monster now. He can not hit a barn-side with a pistol, can not even draw it quickly from his pocket. His chances are not one in a million if he meets the wolf, and if we let him go we shall be playing right into the adversary’s hands.’
I nodded agreement as we drove along, and when I’d parked the car, I turned to Maxwell. ‘Better come in and have a drink before we start,’ I invited. ‘It’s cold tonight, and we may not get back soon.’
‘All right,’ agreed the unsuspecting youth. ‘But make it quick, I’m itching to catch sight of that damned fiend. When I meet him he won’t get off as easily as he did in his brush with Doctor de Grandin.’
Hastily I concocted a punch of Jamaica rum, hot water, lemon juice, and sugar, adding fifteen grains of chloral hydrate to John Maxwell’s and hoping the sugar and lemon would disguise its taste while the pungent rum would hide its odor. ‘To our successful quest,’ de Grandin proposed, raising his steaming glass and looking questioningly at me for assurance that the young man’s drink was drugged.
Maxwell raised his goblet, but ere he set it to his lips there came a sudden interruption. An oddly whining, whimpering noise it was, accompanied by a scratching at the door, as though a dog were outside in the night and importuning for admission.
‘Ah?’ de Grandin put his glass down on the hall table and reached beneath his left armpit where the small but deadl
y Belgian automatic pistol nestled in its shoulder-holster. ‘Ah-ha? We have a visitor, it seems.’ To me he bade:
‘Open the door, wide and quickly, Friend Trowbridge; then stand away, for I shall likely shoot with haste, and it is not your estimable self that I desire to kill.’
I followed his instructions, but instead of the gray horror I had expected at the door, I saw a slender canine form with hair so silver-gray that it was almost white, which bent its head and wagged its tail, and fairly fawned upon us as it slipped quickly through the opening, then looked at each of us in turn with great, expressive topaz eyes.
‘Ah, mon Dieu,’ exclaimed the Frenchman, sheathing his weapon and starting forward, ‘it is Madame Sarah!’
‘Sallie?’ cried John Maxwell incredulously, and at his voice the beast leaped toward him, rubbed against his knees, then rose upon its hind feet and strove to lick his face.
‘Ohé, quel dommage!’ de Grandin looked at them with tear-filled eyes; then:
‘Your pardon, Madame Sarah, but I do not think you came to us without a reason. Can you lead us to the place where he abides? If so we promise you shall be avenged within the hour.’
The silver wolf dropped to all fours again, and nodded its sleek head in answer to his question; then, as he hesitated, came slowly up to him, took the cuff of his evening coat in its teeth, and drew him toward the door.
‘Bravo, ma chère, lead on, we follow!’ he exclaimed; then, as we donned our coats, he thrust a pistol in my hand and cautioned: ‘Watch well, my friend, she seems all amiable, but wolves are treacherous, man-wolves a thousand times more so; it may be he has sent her to lead us to a trap. Should anything untoward transpire, shoot first and ask your foolish questions afterward. That way you shall increase your chances of dying peacefully in bed.’
Night Creatures Page 18