The Best of Jules de Grandin

by Seabury Quinn

  “Yes—and no,” he answered enigmatically. “From such information as we have I am inclined to think the verdict rendered in Madame Kristina’s witch trial was a false one. While not an ill-intentioned one—unknowingly, indeed, perhaps—I think the lady was what we might call a witch; one who had power, whether she chose to exercise it or not, of working good or bad to fellow humans by means of supernatural agencies. It seems this little kitten which never grew to cathood, which lay in mourning on her grave and which afflicted four unfortunate young women with insanity, was her familiar—a beast-formed demon through whose aid she might accomplish magic.”

  “But that’s too utterly absurd!” I scoffed. “Kristina Friebergh died three centuries ago, while this kitten—”

  “Did not necessarily die with her,” he interjected. “Indeed, my friend, there are many instances in witch-lore where the familiar has outlived its witch.”

  “But why should it seek out other girls—”

  “Précisément,” he answered soberly. “That, I damn think, is most significant. Witches’ imps, though they may be ambassadors from hell, are clothed in pseudo-natural bodies. Thus they have need of sustenance. This the witch supplies with her blood. It is at the insensitive spot known as the witch-mark or witch’s teat that the familiar is suckled. When Monsieur Friebergh told us of Madame Kristina’s trial, you will recall that he described the spot in which she felt no pain as an area roughly square in shape marked off by four small scars which looked like needle-wounds set about three-quarters of an inch apart? Consider, my friend—think carefully—where have you seen a cicatrix like that within the last few days?” His eyes, round and unwinking as those of a thoughtfully inclined tom-cat, never left mine as he asked the question.

  “Why”—I temporized—“oh, it’s too absurd, de Grandin!”

  “You do not answer, but I see you recognize the similarity,” he returned. “Those little ‘needle-wounds,’ mon vieux, were made by little kitten-teeth which pierced the white and tender skin of Mademoiselle Greta just before she swooned. She exhibited the signs of hemorrhage, that you will agree; yet we found no blood. Pourquoi? Because the little fluffy kitten which she took into her arms, the little beast which licked her with its tongue a moment before she lost consciousness, sucked it from her body. This cat-thing seems immortal, but it is not truly so. Once in so many years it must have sustenance, the only kind of sustenance which will enable it to mock at time, the blood of a young woman. Sarah Spotswood gave it nourishment, and lost her reason in the process, becoming, apparently, identified with the unfortunate Madame Kristina, even to showing the stigmata of the needle-wounds which that poor creature suffered at her trial. The manner of her death—by drowning—paralleled Kristina’s, also, as did those of the other three who followed her in madness—after having been accosted by a small white kitten.”

  “Then what d’ye suggest?” I asked him somewhat irritably, but the cachinnation of the telephone cut in upon the question.

  “Good Lord!” I told him as I hung up the receiver. “Now it’s young Karl Pettersen! His mother ’phoned to tell me he’s been hurt, and—”

  “Right away, at once; immediately,” he broke in. “Let us hasten to him with all speed. Unless I make a sad mistake, his is no ordinary hurt, but one which casts a challenge in our faces. Yes, assuredly!”

  I DO NOT THINK I ever saw a man more utterly unstrung than young Karl Pettersen. His injury was trivial, amounting to scarcely more than a briar-scratch across his throat, but the agony of grief and horror showing in his face was truly pitiful, and when we asked him how the accident occurred his only answer was a wild-eyed stare and a sob-torn sentence he reiterated endlessly: “Greta, oh, Greta, how could you?”

  “I think that there is something devilish here, Friend Trowbridge,” whispered Jules de Grandin.

  “So do I,” I answered grimly. “From that wound I’d say the little fool has tried to kill himself after a puppy-lovers’ quarrel. See how the cut starts underneath the condyle of the jaw, and tapers off and loses depth as it nears the median line? I’ve seen such cuts a hundred times, and—”

  “But no,” he interrupted sharply. “Unless the young Monsieur is left-handed he would have made the cut across the left side of his throat; this wound describes a slant across the right side. It was made by someone else—someone seated on his right, as, by example, in a motorcar.

  “Monsieur!” he seized the boy by both his shoulders and shook him roughly. “Stop this childish weeping. Your wound is but a skin-scratch. It will heal almost with one night’s sleep, but its cause is of importance. How did you get it, if you please?”

  “Oh, Greta—” Karl began again, but the smacking impact of de Grandin’s hand against his cheek cut short his wail.

  “Nom d’un coq, you make me to lose patience with you!” cried the Frenchman. “Here, take a dose of this!” From his jacket pocket he produced a flask of cognac, poured a liberal portion out into a cup and thrust it into Karl’s unsteady hand. “Ah, so; that is better,” he pronounced as the lad gulped down the liquor. “Now, take more, mon vieux; we need the truth, and quickly, and never have I seen a better application of the proverb that in alcohol dwells truth.”

  Within five minutes he had forced the better portion of a pint of brandy down the young man’s throat, and as the potent draft began to work, his incoherent babbling gave way to a melancholy but considered gravity which in other circumstances would have appeared comic.

  “Now, man to man, compagnon de débauche, inform us what took place,” the Frenchman ordered solemnly.

  “Greta and I were out driving after dinner,” answered Karl. “We’ve been nuts about each other ever since we met, and today I asked her if she’d marry me. She’d been actin’ sort o’ queer and distant lately, so I thought that maybe she’d been fallin’ for another bird, and I’d better hurry up and get my brand on her. Catch on?”

  De Grandin nodded somewhat doubtfully. “I think I apprehend your meaning,” he replied, “though the language which you use is slightly strange to me. And when you had completed your proposal—”

  “She didn’t say a word, but just pointed to the sky, as though she’d seen some object up there that astonished her.”

  “Quite so. One understands; and then?”

  “Naturally, I looked up, and before I realized what was happening she slashed a penknife across my throat and jumped out of the car screaming with laughter. I wasn’t very badly hurt, but—” He paused, and we could fairly see his alcoholic aplomb melt and a look of infantile distress spread on his features. “O-o-o!” he wailed disconsolately. “Greta, my dear, why did you—”

  “The needle, if you please, Friend Trowbridge,” Jules de Grandin whispered. “There is nothing further to be learned, and the opiate will give him merciful oblivion. Half a grain of morphine should be more than ample.”

  “THIS IS POSITIVELY THE craziest piece of business I ever heard of!” I exclaimed as we left the house. “Only the other night she told us that she loved the lad so much that her heart ached with it; this afternoon she interrupts his declaration by slashing at his throat. I never heard of anything so utterly fantastic—”

  “Except, perhaps, the case of Sarah Spotswood and the other three unfortunates who followed her to madness and the grave?” he interrupted in a level voice. “I grant the little demoiselle has acted in a most demented manner. Ha, but is she crazier than—”

  “Oh, for the love of mercy, stop it!” I commanded querulously. “Those cases were most likely mere coincidences. There’s not a grain of proof—”

  “If a thing exists we must believe it, whether it is susceptible of proof or not,” he told me seriously. “As for coincidence—had only one girl graduated into death from madness after encountering a kitten such as that which figures in each of these occurrences, we might apply the term; but when three young women are so similarly stricken, parbleu, to fall back on coincidence is but to shut your eyes against the facts, mon vieux
. One case, yes; two cases, perhaps; three cases—non, it is to pull the long arm of coincidence completely out of joint, by blue!”

  “Oh, well,” I answered wearily, “if you—good Lord!”

  Driven at road-burning speed a small, light car with no lamps burning came careening crazily around the elbow of the highway, missed our left fender by a hair and whizzed past us like a bullet from a rifle.

  “Is it any wonder our insurance rates are high with idiots like that out upon the public roads?” I stuttered, inarticulate with fury, but the whining signal of a motorcycle’s siren cut my protest short as a state policeman catapulted around the bend in hot pursuit of the wild driver.

  “D’ye see ‘um?” he inquired as he stopped beside us with a scream of brakes. “Which way did ’e go?”

  “Took the turn to the right,” I answered. “Running like a streak with no lights going, and—”

  “My friend mistakes,” de Grandin interrupted as he smiled at the policeman; “the wild one turned abruptly to the left, and should be nearly to the village by this time.”

  “Why, I’m positive he took the right-hand turn—” I began, when a vicious kick upon my shin served notice that de Grandin wished deliberately to send the trooper on a wild-goose chase. Accordingly: “Perhaps I was mistaken,” I amended lamely; then, as the officer set out:

  “What was your idea in that?” I asked.

  “The speeder whom the gendarme followed was Mademoiselle Greta,” he replied. “I recognized her in our headlights’ flash as she went by, and I suggest we follow her.”

  “Perhaps we’d better,” I conceded; “driving as she was, she’s likely to end up in a ditch before she reaches home.”

  “WHY, GREFA’S NOT BEEN out to-night,” said Mrs. Friebergh when we reached the house. “She went out walking in the afternoon and came home shortly after dinner and went directly to her room. I’m sure she’s sleeping.”

  “But may we see her anyway, Madame?” de Grandin asked. “If she sleeps we shall not waken her.”

  “Of course,” the mother answered as she led the way upstairs.

  It was dark and quiet as a tomb in Greta’s bedroom, and when we switched on the night-light we saw her sleeping peacefully, her head turned from us, the bedclothes drawn up close about her chin.

  “You see, the poor, dear child’s exhausted,” Mrs. Friebergh said as she paused upon the threshold.

  De Grandin nodded acquiescence as he tiptoed to the bed and bent an ear above the sleeping girl. For a moment he leant forward; then, “I regret that we should so intrude, Madame,” he apologized, “but in cases such as this—” An eloquently non-committal shrug completed the unfinished sentence.

  Outside, he ordered in a sharp-edged whisper: “This way, my friend, here, beneath this arbor!” In the vine-draped pergola which spanned the driveway running past the house, he pointed to a little single-seated roadster. “You recognize him?” he demanded.

  “Well, it looks like the car that passed us on the road—”

  “Feel him!” he commanded, taking my hand in his and pressing it against the radiator top.

  I drew away with a suppressed ejaculation. The metal was hot as a teakettle full of boiling water.

  “Not only that, mon vieux,” he added as we turned away; “when I pretended to be counting Mademoiselle Greta’s respiration I took occasion to turn back the covers of her bed. She was asleep, but most curiously, she was also fully dressed, even to her shoes. Her window was wide open, and a far less active one than she could climb from it to earth and back again.”

  “Then you think—”

  “Non, non, I do not think; I wish I did; I merely speculate, my friend. Her mother told us that she went out walking in the afternoon. That is what she thought. Plainly, that is what she was meant to think. Mademoiselle Greta walked out, met the young Monsieur Pettersen and drove with him, cut him with her ninety-six times cursed knife, then leaped from his car and walked back home. Anon, when all the house was quiet, she clambered from her window, drove away upon some secret errand, then returned in haste, re-entered her room as she had left it, and”—he pursed his lips and raised his shoulders in a shrug—“there we are, my friend, but just where is it that we are, I ask to know.”

  “On our way to home and bed,” I answered with a laugh. “After all this mystery and nonsense, I’m about ready for a drink and several hours’ sleep.”

  “An excellent idea,” he nodded, “but I should like to stop a moment at the cemetery, if you will be so kind. I desire to see if what I damn suspect is true.”

  Fifteen minutes’ drive sufficed to bring us to the lich-gate of the ancient burying-ground where generations of the county’s founders slept. Unerringly he led the way between the sentinel tombstones till, a little distance from the ivy-mantled wall which bordered on the highway, he pointed to a moss-grown marker.

  “There is Madame Kristina’s tomb,” he told me in a whisper. “It was there—by blue! Behold, my friend!”

  Following his indicating finger’s line I saw a little spot of white against the mossy grass about the tombstone’s base, and even as I looked, the little patch of lightness moved, took shape, and showed itself a small, white, fluffy kitten. The tiny animal uncoiled itself, raised to a sitting posture, and regarded us with round and shining eyes.

  “Why, the poor little thing!” I began, advancing toward it with extended hand. “It’s lost, de Grandin—”

  “Pardieu, I think that it is quite at home,” he interrupted as he stooped and snatched a piece of gravel from the grave beneath his feet. “Regardez, s’il vous plait!”

  In all the years I’d known him I had never seen him do an unkind thing to woman, child or animal; so it was with something like a gasp of consternation that I saw him hurl the stone straight at the little, inoffensive kitten. But great as my surprise had been at his unwonted cruelty, it was swallowed up in sheer astonishment as I saw the stone strike through the little body, drive against the granite tombstone at its back, then bounce against the grave-turf with a muffled thud. And all the while the little cat regarded him with a fixed and slightly amused stare, making no movement to evade his missile, showing not the slightest fear at his approach.

  “You see?” he asked me simply.

  “I—I thought—I could have sworn—” I stammered, and the laugh with which he greeted my discomfiture was far from mirthful.

  “You saw, my friend, nor is there any reason for you to forswear the testimony of your sight,” he assured me. “A hundred others have done just as I did. If all the missiles which have been directed at that small white cat-thing were gathered in a pile, I think that they would reach a tall man’s height; yet never one of them has caused it to forsake its vigil on this grave. It has visited this spot at will for the past two hundred years and more, and always it has meant disaster to some girl in the vicinity. Come, let us leave it to its brooding; we have plans to make and things to do. Of course.”

  “GRAND DIEU DES CHATS, c’est l’explication terrible!” de Grandin’s exclamation called me from perusal of the morning’s mail as we completed breakfast the next day.

  “What is it?” I demanded.

  “Parbleu, what is it not?” he answered as he passed a folded copy of the Journal to me, indicating the brief item with a well-groomed forefinger.

  TREASURE HUNTERS VIOLATE THE DEAD

  the headline read, followed by the short account:

  Shortly after eleven o’clock last night vandals entered the home of the late Timothy McCaffrey, Argyle Road near Scandia, and stole two of the candles which were burning by his casket while he lay awaiting burial. The body was reposing in the front room of the house, and several members of the family were in the room adjoining.

  Miss Monica McCaffrey, 17, daughter of the deceased, was sitting near the doorway leading to the front room where the body lay, and heard somebody softly opening the front door of the house. Thinking it was a neighbor come to pay respects to the dead, she did no
t rise immediately, not wishing to disturb the visitor at his devotions, but when she noticed an abrupt diminution of the light in the room in which her father’s body lay, as though several of the candles had been extinguished, she rose to investigate.

  As she stepped through the communicating doorway she saw what she took to be a young man in a light tan sports coat running out the front door of the house. She followed the intruder to the porch and was in time to see him jump into a small sports roadster standing by the front gate with its engine running, and drive away at breakneck speed.

  Later, questioned by state troopers, she was undetermined whether the trespasser was a man or woman, as the overcoat worn by the intruder reached from neck to knees, and she could not definitely say whether the figure wore a skirt or knickerbockers underneath the coat.

  When Miss McCaffrey returned to the house she found that all the vigil lights standing by the coffin had been extinguished and two of the candles had been taken.

  Police believe the act of wanton vandalism was committed by some member of the fashionable summer colony at Scandia who were engaged in a “treasure hunt,” since nothing but two candles had been taken by the intruder.

  “For goodness’ sake!” I looked at de Grandin in blank amazement.

  His eyes, wide, round and challenging, were fixed on mine unwinkingly. “Non,” he answered shortly, “not for goodness’ sake, my friend; far from it, I assure you. The thief who stole these candles from the dead passed us on her homeward way last night.”

  “Her homeward way? You mean—”

  “But certainly. Mademoiselle Greta wore such a coat as that le journal mentions. Indubitably it was she returning from her gruesome foray.”

  “But what could she be wanting corpse-lights for?”

  “Those candles had been exorcised and blessed, my friend; they were, as one might say, spiritually antiseptic, and it was a law of the old witch covens that things stolen from the church be used to celebrate their unclean rites. All evidence points to a single horrid issue, and tonight we put it to the test.”