“Come quickly, good Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin plucked me by the arm. “I, too, would dream.”
“Dream? Of what?” I asked him.
“Perchance of youth and love and springtime, and the joys that might have been,” he answered, something like a tremble in his voice. “And then, again, perchance of snakes and toads and elephants, all of most unauthentic color—such things as one may see when he has drunk himself into the blissful state of delirium tremens. I do not surely know that I can drink that much, but may the Devil bake me if I do not try!”
The Hand of Glory
1. The Shrieking Woman
“Th’ tip o’ th’ marnin’ to yez, gintlemen.” Officer Collins touched the vizor of his cap as Jules de Grandin and I rounded the corner with none too steady steps. The night was cold, and our host’s rum punch had a potency peculiarly its own, which accounted for our decision to walk the mile or so which stretched between us and home.
“Holà, mon brave,” responded my companion, now as ever ready to stop and chat with any member of the gendarmerie. “It is morning, you say? Ma foi, I had not thought it much past ten o’clock.”
Collins grinned appreciatively. “Arrah, Doctor de Grandin, sor,” he answered, “wid a bit o’ th’ crayter th’ likes o’ that ye’ve had, ’tis meself as wouldn’t be bodderin’ wid th’ time o’ night, ayther, fer—”
His witticism died birth-strangled, for, even as he paused to guffaw at the intended thrust, there came stabbing through the pre-dawn calm a cry of such thin-edged, unspeakable anguish as I had not heard since the days when as an intern I rode an ambulance’s tail and amputations often had to be performed without the aid of anesthesia.
“Bon Dieu!” de Grandin cried, dropping my elbow and straightening with the suddenness of a coiled spring released from its tension. “What is that, in pity’s gracious name?”
His answer followed fast upon his question as a pistol’s crack succeeds the powder-flash, for round the shoulder of the corner building came a girl on stumbling, fear-hobbled feet, arms spread, eyes wide, mouth opened for a scream which would not come, a perfect fantasm of terror.
“Here, here, now, phwat’s up?” demanded Collins gruffly, involuntary fright lending harshness to his tones. “’Tis a foin thing ye’re afther doin’, runnin’ through th’ strates in yer nighties, scarin’ folks out o’ their sivin senses, an’—”
The woman paid him no more heed than if he’d been a shadow, for her dilated eyes were blinded by extremity of fear, as we could see at a glance, and had de Grandin not seized her by the shoulder she would have passed us in her headlong, stumbling flight. At the touch of the Frenchman’s hand she halted suddenly, swayed uncertainly a moment; then, like a marionette whose strings are cut, she buckled suddenly, fell half kneeling, I half sprawling to the sidewalk and lifted trembling hands to him beseechingly.
“It was afire!” she babbled thickly. “Afire—blazing, I tell you—and the door flew open when they held it out. They—they—aw-wah-wah!—” her words degenerated into unintelligible syllables as the tautened muscles of her throat contracted with a nervous spasm, leaving her speechless as an infant, her thin face a white wedge of sheer terror.
“D.T.’s, sor?” asked Collins cynically, bending for a better view of the trembling woman.
“Hysteria,” denied de Grandin shortly. Then, to me:
“Assist me, Friend Trowbridge, she goes into the paroxysmal stage.” As he uttered the sharp warning the woman sank face-downward to the pavement, lay motionless a moment, then trembled with convulsive shudders, the shudders becoming twitches and the twitches going into wild, abandoned gestures, horribly reminiscent of the reflex contortions of a decapitated fowl.
“Good Lord, I’ll call the wagon,” Collins offered; but:
“A cab, and quickly, if you please,” de Grandin countermanded. “This is no time for making of arrests, my friend; this poor one’s sanity may depend upon our ministrations.”
Luckily, a cruising taxi hove in sight even as he spoke, and with a hasty promise to inform police headquarters of the progress of the case, we bundled our patient into the vehicle and rushed at breakneck speed toward my office.
“Morphine, quickly, if you please,” de Grandin ordered as he bore the struggling woman to my surgery, thrust her violently upon the examination table and drew up the sleeve of her georgette pajama jacket, baring the white flesh for the caress of the mercy-bearing needle.
Swabbing the skin with alcohol, I pinched the woman’s trembling arm, inserted the hypo point in the folded skin and thrust the plunger home, driving a full three-quarter grain dose into her system; then, with refilled syringe, stood in readiness to repeat the treatment if necessary.
But the opiate took effect immediately. Almost instantly the clownish convulsions ceased, within a minute the movements of her arms and legs had subsided to mere tremblings, and the choking, anguished moans which had proceeded from her throat died to little, childish whimpers.
“Ah, so,” de Grandin viewed the patient with satisfaction. “She will be better now, I think. Meantime, let us prepare some stimulant for the time of her awakening. She has been exposed, and we must see that she does not take cold.”
Working with the speed and precision of one made expert by long service in the war’s field hospitals, he draped a steamer rug across the back of an easy-chair in the study, mixed a stiff dose of brandy and hot water and set it by the open fire; then, calm-eyed but curious, resumed his station beside the unconscious girl upon the table.
We had not long to wait. The opiate had done its work quickly, but almost as quickly had found its antidote in the intensely excited nervous system of the patient. Within five minutes her eyelids fluttered, and her head rolled from side to side, like that of a troubled sleeper. A little moan, half of discomfort, half involuntary protest at returning consciousness, escaped from her.
“You are in the office of Doctor Samuel Trowbridge, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin announced in a low, calm voice, anticipating the question which nine patients out of ten propound when recovering from a swoon. “We found you in the street in a most deplorable condition and brought you here for treatment. You are better now? Good. Permettez-moi.”
Taking her hands in his, he raised her from the table, eased her to the floor and, his arms about her waist, guided her gently to the study, where, with the adeptness of a deck steward, he tucked the steamer rug about her feet and knees, placed a cushion at her back and before she had a chance to speak, held the glass of steaming toddy to her lips.
She drank the torrid liquid greedily, like a starving child gulping at a goblet of warm milk; then, as the potent draft raced through her, leaving a faint flush on her dead-pale cheeks, gave back the glass and viewed us with a pathetic, drowsy little smile.
“Thank you,” she murmured. “I—oh, I remember now!” Abruptly her half-somnolent manner vanished and her hands clutched claw-like at the chair-arms. “It was afire!” she told us in a hushed, choking voice. “It was blazing, and—”
“Mademoiselle! You will drink this, if you please!” Sharply, incisively, the Frenchman’s command cut through her fearful utterance as he held forward a cordial glass half full of cloudy liquid.
Startled but docile, she obeyed, and a look of swift bewilderment swept across her pale, peaked features as she finished drinking. “Why”—she exclaimed—“why—” Her voice sank lower, her lids closed softly and her head fell back against the cushion at her shoulders.
“Voilà, I feared that recollection might unsettle her and had it ready,” he announced. “Do you go up to bed, my friend. Me, I shall watch beside her, and should I need you I shall call. I am inured to sleeplessness and shall not mind the vigil, but it is well that one of us has rest, for tomorrow—eh bien, this poor one’s case has the smell of herring on it and I damn think that we shall have more sleepless nights than one before we see the end of it.”
Murmuring, I obeyed. Delightful companion, thoughtful fri
end, indefatigable co-worker that he was, Jules de Grandin possessed a streak of stubbornness beside which the most refractory mule ever sired in the State of Missouri was docility personified, and I knew better than to spend the few remaining hours of darkness in fruitless argument.
2. The Hand of Glory
A gentle murmur of voices sounded from the study when I descended from my room after something like four hours’ sleep. Our patient of the night before still sat swathed in rugs in the big wing chair, but something approximating normal color had returned to her lips and cheeks, and though her hands fluttered now and again in tremulous gesticulation as she talked, it required no second glance to tell me that her condition was far from bordering on nervous collapse. “Taut, but not stretched dangerously near the snapping-point,” I diagnosed as I joined them. De Grandin reclined at ease across the fire from her, a pile of burned-out cigarettes in the ash-tray beside him, smoke from a freshly lighted Maryland slowly spiraling upward as he waved his hand back and forth to emphasize his words.
“What you tell is truly interesting, Mademoiselle,” he was assuring her as I entered the study.
“‘Trowbridge, mon vieux, this is Mademoiselle Wickwire. Mademoiselle, my friend and colleague, Doctor Samuel Trowbridge. Will you have the goodness to repeat your story to him? I would rather that he had it from your own lips.”
The girl turned a wan smile toward me, and I was struck by her extreme slenderness. Had her bones been larger, she would have been distressfully thin; as it was the covering of her slight skeletal structure was so scanty as to make her almost as ethereal as a sprite. Her hair was fair, her eyes of an indeterminate shade somewhere between true blue and amethyst, and their odd coloration was picked up and accentuated by a chaplet of purple stones about her slender throat and the purple settings of the rings she wore upon the third finger of each hand. Limbs and extremities were fine-drawn as silver wire and elongated to an extent which was just short of grotesque, while her profile was robbed of true beauty by its excessive clarity of line. Somehow, she reminded me more of a statuette carved from crystal than of a flesh-and-blood woman, while the georgette pajamas of sea-green trimmed with amethyst and the absurd little boudoir cap which perched on one side of her fair head helped lend her an air of tailor’s-dummy unreality.
I bowed acknowledgment of de Grandin’s introduction and waited expectantly for her narrative, prepared to cancel ninety percent of all she told me as the vagary of an hysterical young woman.
“Doctor de Grandin tells me I was screaming that ‘it was burning’ when you found me in the street last night,” she began without preamble. “It was.”
“Eh?” I ejaculated, turning a quick glance of inquiry on de Grandin. “What?”
“The hand.”
“Bless my soul! The what?”
“The hand,” she returned with perfect aplomb. Then: “My father is Joseph Wickwire, former Horner Professor of Orientology and Ancient Religion at De Puy University. You know his book, The Cult of the Witch in Assyria?”
I shook my head, but the girl, as though anticipating my confession of ignorance, went on without pause:
“I don’t understand much about it, for Father never troubled to discuss his studies with me, but from some things he’s told me, he became convinced of the reality of ancient witchcraft—or magic—some years ago, and gave up his chair at De Puy to devote himself to private research. While I was at school he made several trips to the Near East and last year spent four months in Mesopotamia, supervising some excavations. He came home with two big cases—they looked more like casket-boxes than anything else—which he took to his study, and since then no one’s been allowed in the room, not even I or Fanny, our maid. Father won’t permit anything, not even so much as a grain of dust, to be taken from that room; and one of the first things he did after receiving those boxes was to have an iron-plated door made for the study and have heavy iron bars fitted to all the windows.
“Lately he’s been spending practically all his time at work in the study, sometimes remaining there for two or three days at a time, refusing to answer when called to meals or to come out for rest or sleep. About a month ago something happened which upset him terribly. I think it was a letter he received, though I’m not sure, for he wouldn’t tell me what it was; but he seemed distracted, muttering constantly to himself and looking over his shoulder every now and then as though he expected some one, or something, to attack him from behind. Last week he had some workmen come and reinforce all the doors with inch-wide strips of cast iron. Then he had special combination locks fitted to the outside doors and Yale locks to all the inside ones, and every night, just at dusk, he sets the combinations, and no one may enter or leave the house till morning. It’s been rather like living in prison.”
“More like a madhouse,” I commented mentally, looking at the girl’s thin face with renewed interest. “Delusions of persecution on the part of the parent might explain abnormal behavior on the part of the offspring, if—”
The girl’s recital broke in on my mental diagnosis: “Last night I couldn’t sleep. I’d gone to bed about eleven and slept soundly for an hour or so; then suddenly I sat up, broad awake, and nothing I could do would get me back to sleep. I tried bathing the back of my neck with cologne, turning my pillows, even taking ten grains of allonal; nothing was any good, so finally I gave up trying and went down to the library. There was a copy of Hallam’s Constitutional History of England there, and I picked that out as being the dullest reading I could find, but I read over a hundred pages without the slightest sign of drowsiness. Then I decided to take the book upstairs. Possibly, I thought, if I tried reading it in bed I might drop off without realizing it.
“I’d gotten as far as the second floor—my room’s on the third—and was almost in front of Father’s study when I heard a noise at the front door. ‘Any burglar who tries breaking into this house will be wasting his talents,’ I remember saying to myself, when, just as though they were being turned by an invisible hand, the dials of the combination lock started to spin. I could see them in the light of the hall ceiling-lamp, which Father insists always be kept burning, and they were turned not slowly, but swiftly, as though being worked by one who knew the combination perfectly.
“At the same time the queerest feeling came over me. It was like one of those dreadful nightmares people sometimes have, when they’re being attacked or pursued by some awful monster, and can’t run or cry out, or even move. There I stood, still as a marble image, every faculty alert, but utterly unable to make a sound or move a finger—or even wink an eye.
“And as I watched in helpless stillness, the front door swung back silently and two men entered the hall. One carried a satchel or suitcase of some sort, the other”—she paused and caught her breath like a runner nearly spent, and her voice sank to a thin, harsh whisper—“the other was holding a blazing hand in front of him!”
“A what?” I demanded incredulously. There was no question in my mind that the delusions of the sire were ably matched by the hallucinations of the daughter.
“A blazing hand,” she answered, and again I saw the shudder of a nervous chill run through her slender frame. “He held it forward, like a candle, as though to light his way; but there was no need of it for light, for the hall lamp has a hundred-watt bulb, and its luminance reached up the stairs and made everything in the upper passage plainly visible. Besides, the thing burned with more fire than light. There seemed to be some sort of wick attached to each of the fanned-out fingers, and these burned with a clear, steady blue flame, like blazing alcohol. It—”
“But my dear young lady,” I expostulated, “that’s impossible.”
“Of course it is,” she agreed with unexpected calmness. “So is this: As the man with the blazing hand mounted the stairs and paused before my father’s study, I heard a distinct click, and the door swung open, unlocked. Through the opening I could see Father standing in the middle of the room, the light from an unshaded ceiling-lamp
making everything as clear as day. On a long table was some sort of object which reminded me of one of those little marble stones they put over soldiers’ graves in national cemeteries, only it was gray instead of white, and a great roll of manuscript lay beside it. Father had risen and stood facing the door with one hand resting on the table, the other reaching toward a sawed-off shotgun which lay beside the stone and manuscript. But he was paralyzed—frozen in the act of reaching for the gun as I had been in the act of walking down the hall. His eyes were wide and set with surprise—no, not quite that, they were more like the painted eyes of a window-figure in a store, utterly expressionless—and I remember wondering, in that odd way people have of thinking of inconsequential things in moments of intense excitement, whether mine looked the same.
“I saw it all. I saw them go through the study’s open door, lift the stone off the table, bundle up Father’s manuscript and stuff everything into the bag. Then, the man with the burning hand going last, walking backward and holding the thing before him, they left as silently as they came. The doors swung to behind them without being touched. The study door had a Yale snap-lock in addition to its combination fastenings, so it was fastened when it closed, but the bolts of the safe lock on the front door didn’t fly back in place when it closed.
“I don’t know how long that strange paralysis held me after the men with the hand had gone; but I remember suddenly regaining my power of motion and finding myself with one foot raised—I’d been overcome in the act of stepping and had remained helpless, balanced on one foot, the entire time. My first act, of course, was to call Father, but I could get no response, even when I beat and kicked on the door.
“Then panic seized me. I didn’t quite know what I was doing, but something seemed urging me to get away from that house as though it had been haunted, and the horrifying memory of that blazing hand with those combination-locked doors flying open before it came down on me like a cloud of strangling, smothering gas. The front door was still unfastened, as I’ve told you, and I flung it open, fighting for a breath of fresh outdoors air, and—ran screaming into the street. You know the rest.”
The Best of Jules de Grandin Page 47