The Best of Jules de Grandin

by Seabury Quinn

  “Good heavens!” I exclaimed, panic grasping at my throat. “Why, it’s directly overhead—in the study, where we left the mummy and—”

  “Impossible!” Professor Ellis contradicted. “Nobody could have gotten past us to that room, and—”

  “Impossible or not, Friend Trowbridge speaks the truth, by damn!” the little Frenchman shouted, springing from his chair and racing toward the stairs. “En avant, mes enfants—follow me!”

  Three steps at a stride he mounted headlong up the stairway, paused a moment at the closed door of the study while he whipped a pistol from his pocket, then his weapon swinging in a circle before him, advanced with a quick leap, snapped on the lights and:

  “Hands up!” he shouted warningly. “A single offer of resistance and you breakfast with the devil in the morning—grand Dieu, my friends, behold!”

  Save that one or two chairs had been overset, the room was just as we had left it. Upon the table lay the supine, bandaged mummy, its spice-filled case uncovered by its side; the thing which had been Larson crouched shoulders-to-the wall, as though stricken in an attempt to turn a somersault; the window-blind flapped cracklingly in the chilling winter wind.

  “The window—it’s open!” cried Professor Ellis. “It was closed when we were here, but—”

  “Dieu de Dieu de Dieu de Dieu—does not one know it?” de Grandin interrupted angrily, striding toward the open casement. “Parbleu, the way in which you pounce upon the obvious is greatly trying to my nerves, Friend Ellis, and—ah? A-a-a-ah? One sees, one perceives, one understands—almost!”

  Abreast of him, we gazed across the sill, and obedient to the mute command of his pointing finger, looked at the snow-encrusted roof of the first floor bay-window which joined the house-wall something like two feet below the study window. Gouged in the dead-white veneer of snow were four long, parallel streaks, exposing the slate beneath. “U’m,” he murmured, lowering the sash and turning toward the door, “the mystery is in part explained, my friends.

  “That window, it would be the logical place for a burglar to force entry,” he added as we trooped down the stairs. “The roof of the bay-window has but very little slope, and stands directly underneath the window of Professor Larson’s study. One bent on burglary could hardly fail to note its possibilities as an aid to crime, and the fact that we had light going only in the downstairs room was notice to the world that the upper story was untenanted. So—”

  “Quite so, but there wasn’t any burglar there,” Ellis interrupted practically.

  De Grandin favored him with such a stare as a teacher might bestow on a more than ordinarily dull pupil. “One quite agrees, mon ami,” he replied. “However, if you will have the exceeding goodness to restrain your curiosity—and conversation—for a time, it may be we shall find that which we seek.”

  The dark, hunched-up object showed with startling vividness against the background of the snow-powdered lawn as we descended from the porch. De Grandin knelt beside it and struck a match to aid in his inspection. It was a ragged, unkempt figure, unwashed, unshaven; a typical low-class sneak-thief who had varied his customary sorry trade with an excursion into the higher profession of housebreaking with disastrous results to himself. He crouched as he had fallen from the bay-window’s sloping roof, one arm twisted underneath him, his head bent oddly to one side, his battered, age-discolored hat mashed in at the crown and driven comically down upon his head till his ears were bent beneath it. Little lodes of sleety snow had lodged within the wrinkles of his ragged coat, and tiny threads of icicles had formed on his mustache.

  The man was dead, no doubt of it. No one, not even the most accomplished contortionist, could twist his neck at that sharp angle. And the manner of his death was obvious. Frightened at sight of the mummy, the poor fellow had endeavored to effect a hasty exit by the open window, had slipped upon the sleet-glazed roof of the bay-window and fallen to the ground, striking head-first and skidding forward with his full weight on his twisted neck.

  I voiced my conclusions hastily, but de Grandin shook a puzzled head. “One understands the manner of his death,” he answered thoughtfully. “But the reason, that is something else again. We can well think that such a creature would have a paralyzing fear when he beheld the mummy stretched upon the table, but that does not explain the antics he went through before he fell or jumped back through the window he had forced. We heard him thrash about; we heard him kick the furniture; we heard him scream with mirthless laughter. For why? Frightened men may scream, they sometimes even laugh hysterically, but what was there for him to wrestle with?”

  “That’s just what Larson did!” Professor Ellis put in hastily. “Don’t you remember—”

  “Exactement,” the Frenchman answered with a puzzled frown. “Professor Larson cries aloud and fights with nothing; this luckless burglar breaks into the very room where Monsieur Larson died so strange a death, and he, too, wrestles with the empty air and falls to death while laughing hideously. There is something very devilish here, my friends.”

  When we had gone back in the house young Ellis looked at us with something very near to panic in his eyes. “You say that we must leave that mummy as it is until the coroner has seen it?” he demanded.

  “Your understanding is correct, my friend,” de Grandin answered.

  “All right, we’ll leave the dam’ thing there, but just as soon as Mr. Martin has finished with it, I think we’d better take it out and burn it.”

  “Eh, what is it that you say? Burn it, Monsieur?” de Grandin asked.

  “Just that. It’s what the Egyptologists call an ‘unlucky’ mummy, and the sooner we get rid of it the healthier it’ll be for all of us, I’m thinking. See here”—he glanced quickly upward, as though fearing a renewed outbreak in the room above, then turned again to us—“do you recall the series of fatalities following Tutankhamen’s exhumation?”

  De Grandin made no answer, but the fixed, unwinking stare he leveled on the speaker, and the nervous way his trimly waxed mustache quivered at the corners of his mouth betrayed his interest.

  Ellis hurried on: “Call it nonsense if you will—and you probably will—but the fact is there seems something in this talk of the ancient gods of Egypt having power to curse those disturbing the mummies of people dying in apostasy. You know, I assume, that there are certain mummies known as ‘unlucky’—unlucky for those who find them, or have anything to do with them? Tutankhamen is probably the latest, as well as the most outstanding example of this class. He was a heretic in his day, and had offended the ‘old ones’ or their priests, which amounted to the same thing. So, when he died, they buried him with elaborate ceremonies, but set no image of Amen-Ra at the bow of the boat which carried him across the lake of the dead, and the plaques of Tem, Seb, Nephthys, Osiris and Isis were not prepared to go with him into the tomb. Tutankhamen, notwithstanding his belated efforts at reconciliation with the priesthood, was little better than an atheist according to contemporary Egyptian belief, and the wrath of the gods went into the tomb with him. It was not their wish that his name be preserved to posterity or that any of his relics be brought to light again.

  “Now, think what happened: When Lord Carnarvon located the tomb, he had four associates. Carnarvon and three of his helpers are dead today. Colonel Herbert and Doctor Evelyn-White were among the first to go into Tut’s tomb. Both died within a year. Sir Archibald Douglas was engaged to make an X-ray—he died almost before the plates could be developed. Six out of seven French journalists who went into the tomb shortly after it was opened died in less than a year, and almost every workman engaged in the excavations died before he had a chance to spend his pay. Some of these men died one way, some another, but the point is: they all died.

  “Not only that; even minor articles taken from the tomb seem to exercise a malign influence. There is absolute proof that attendants in the Cairo Museum whose duties keep them near the Tutankhamen relics sicken and die for no apparent reason. D’ye wonder they call him
an ‘unlucky’ mummy?”

  “Very good, Monsieur; what then?” de Grandin prompted as the other lapsed into a moody silence.

  “Just this: That mummy-case upstairs is bare of painting as the palm of your hand, and the orthodox Egyptians of the Fifth Dynasty would no more have thought of putting a body away without suitable biographical and religious writings on the coffin than the average American family today would think of holding a funeral without religious services of some sort. Further than that, the evidence points to that body’s never having been embalmed at all—apparently it was merely wrapped and put into a coffin with a layer of spices around it. Embalming had religious significance in ancient Egypt. If the flesh corrupted, the spirit could not return at the end of the prescribed cycle and reanimate it, and to be buried unembalmed was tantamount to a denial of immortality. This body had only the poorest makeshift attempt at preservation. It looks as though this person, whoever he was, died outside the religious pale, doesn’t it?”

  “You make out a strong case, Monsieur,” de Grandin nodded, “but—”

  “All right, then look at the thing’s history so far: Larson’s workmen died while working in the tomb. How? By tomb-spider bite!

  “Bosh! A tomb-spider is hardly more poisonous than our own garden spiders. I know; I’ve been bitten by the things, and suffered less inconvenience than when a scorpion stung me in Yucatan.

  “Then, on the passage down the Nile most of the boat crew sickened, and some of ’em died, with a strange fever; yet they were hardy devils, used to the climate and in all probability immune to anything in the way of illness the country could produce. Then Foster, Larson’s assistant, pegged out just as they were setting sail from Egypt. Looks as though some evil influence were working, doesn’t it?

  “Now, tonight: Larson was all ready to unwrap the mummy, but never got past taking it from the box. He’s dead—‘dead like a herring,’ as you put it—and only God knows how he died. Right while we’re waiting for the coroner to come, this poor devil of a burglar breaks into the house, fights with some unseen thing, just as Larson did, and dies. Say what you will”—his voice rose almost to a scream—“there’s an aura of terrible misfortune round that mummy, and death is waiting for whoever ventures near it!”

  De Grandin patted the waxed ends of his diminutive mustache affectionately. “What you say may all be true, Monsieur,” he conceded, “but the fact remains that both Doctor Trowbridge and I have been near the mummy; yet we were never better in our lives—though I could do nicely with a gulp or so of brandy at this time. Not only that, Professor Larson spent nearly his entire fortune and a considerable portion of the Museum’s funds in finding this so remarkable cadaver. It would be larceny, no less, for us to burn it as you suggest.”

  “All right,” Ellis answered with a note of finality in his voice. “Have it your own way. As soon as the coroner’s through with me I’m going home. I wouldn’t go near that cursed mummy again for a fortune.”

  “Hullo, Doctor de Grandin,” Coroner Martin greeted, stamping his feet and shaking the snow from his coat. “Bad business, this, isn’t it? Any idea as to the cause of death?”

  “The one outside unquestionably died from a broken neck,” the Frenchman answered. “As for Professor Larson’s—”

  “Eh, the one outside?” Mr. Martin interrupted. “Are there two of ’em?”

  “Humph, we’re lucky there aren’t five,” Ellis cut in bitterly. “They have been dying so fast we can’t keep track of ’em since Larson started to unwrap that—”

  “One moment, if you please, Monsieur,” de Grandin interrupted as he raised a deprecating hand. “Monsieur the Coroner is a busy man and has his duties to perform. When they have been completed I make no doubt he will be glad to listen to your interesting theories. At present”—he bowed politely to the coroner—“ will you come with us, Monsieur?” he asked.

  “Count me out,” said Ellis. “I’ll wait down here, and I want to warn you that—”

  We never heard the warning he had for us; for, de Grandin in the lead, we mounted the stairs to the study where Professor Larson and the mummy lay.

  “H’m,” Mr. Martin, who in addition to being coroner was also the city’s leading funeral director, surveyed the room with a quick, practised glance, “this looks almost as if—” he strode across the room toward Larson’s hunched-up body and extended one hand, but:

  “Grand Dieu des cochons—stand back, Monsieur!” de Grandin’s shouted admonition halted Mr. Martin in mid-stride. “Back, Monsieur; back, Friend Trowbridge—for your lives!” Snatching me by the elbow and Mr. Martin by the skirt of his coat, he fairly dragged us from the room.

  “What on earth—” I began as we reached the hall, but he pushed us toward the stairway.

  “Do not stand and parley!” he commanded shortly. “Out—out into the friendly cold, while there is still time, my friends! Pardieu, I see it now—Monsieur Ellis has right; that mummy—”

  “Oh—oh—o-o-o-oh!” The sudden cry came to us from the floor below, followed by the sound of scuffling, as though Ellis and another were struggling madly. Then came an awful, marrow-freezing laugh, shrill, mirthless, sardonic.

  “Sang du diable—it has him!” de Grandin shouted, as he rushed madly toward the stair, leaped to the balustrade and shot downward like a meteor.

  Coroner Martin and I followed sedately, and found the Frenchman standing mute and breathless at the entrance of the drawing-room, his thin, red lips pursed as though emitting a soundless whistle. Professor Larson’s parlor was furnished in the formal, stilted style so popular in the late years of the last century, light chairs and couches of gilded wood upholstered in apple-green satin, a glass-doored cabinet for bric-à-brac, a pair of delicate spindle-legged tables adorned with bits of Dresden china. The furniture had been tossed about the room, the light-gray velvet rug turned up, the china-cabinet smashed and flung upon its side. In the midst of the confusion Ellis lay, his hands clenched at his sides, his knees drawn up, his lips retracted in a grim, sardonic grin.

  “Good God!” Coroner Martin viewed the poor, tensed body with staring eyes. “This is dreadful—”

  “Cordieu, it will he more so if we linger here!” de Grandin cried. “Outside, my friends. Do not wait to take your coats or hats—come out at once! I tell you death is lurking in each shadow of this cursed place!”

  He herded us before him from the house, and bade us stand a moment, hatless and coatless, in the chilling wind. “I say,” I protested through chattering teeth, “this is carrying a joke too far, de Grandin. There’s no need to—”

  “Joke?” he echoed sharply. “Do you consider it a joke that Professor Larson died the way he did tonight; that the misguided burglar perished in the same way; that even now the poor young Ellis lies all stiff and dead inside that cursed hellhole of a house? Your sense of humor is peculiar, my friend.”

  “What was it?” Coroner Martin asked practically. “Was there some infection in the house that made Professor Ellis scream like that before he died, or was it—”

  “Tell me, Monsieur,” de Grandin interrupted, “have you facilities for fumigation at your mortuary?”

  “Of course,” the coroner returned wonderingly. “We’ve apparatus for making both formaldehyde and cyanogen gas, depending on the class of fumigation required, but—”

  “Very good. Be so good as to hasten to your place of business and return as quickly as may be with materiel for cyanogen fumigation. I shall await you here. Make haste, Monsieur, this matter is of utmost urgency, I assure you.”

  While Mr. Martin was obtaining the apparatus for fumigation, de Grandin and I hastened to my house, procured fresh outdoor clothing and retraced our steps. Though I made several attempts to discover what he had found at Larson’s, his only answers were impatient shrugs and half-articulate exclamations, and I finally gave over the attempt, knowing he would explain in detail when he thought it proper. Hands deep in pockets, heads drawn well down into our collars
, we waited for the coroner’s return.

  With the deftness of long practise Mr. Martin’s assistants set the tanks of mercuric cyanide in place at the front and back doors of the Larson house, ran rubber hose from them to the keyholes and lighted spirit lamps beneath them. When Mr. Martin suggested that the bodies be removed before fumigation began, de Grandin shook his head decidedly. “It would be death—or most unnecessary risk of death, at best—to permit your men to enter till the gas has had at least a day to work within the house,” he answered.

  “But those bodies should be cared for,” the coroner contended, speaking from the professional knowledge of one who had practised mortuary science for more than twenty years.

  “They will undergo no putrefactive changes worthy of account,” the Frenchman answered. “The gas will act to some extent as a preservative, and the risk to be avoided is worth the trouble.”

  As Coroner Martin was about to counter, he continued: “Demonstration outweighs explanation ten to one, my friend. Permit that I should have my way, and by this time tomorrow night you will be convinced of the good foundation for my seeming stubbornness.”

  Shortly after eight o’clock the following evening we met once more at Larson’s house, and as calmly as though such crazy actions were an everyday affair with him, de Grandin smashed window after window with his walking-stick, and bade us wait outside for upward of a quarter-hour. At last:

  “I think that it is safe to enter now,” he said. “The gas should be dispelled. Come, let us go in.”

  We tiptoed down the hall to the drawing-room where Professor Ellis lay, and de Grandin turned on every available light before entering the room. Beside the young man’s rigid body he went to his knees, and seemed to be examining the floor with minutest care. “Whatever are you doing—” I began, when:

  “Triomphe, I have found him!” he announced. “Come and see.”