The A. Merritt Megapack

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by Abraham Merritt


  I asked: “What was that?”

  “That they’re Dick’s murderers,” he answered.

  Before I could ask any more questions we were seated at the table. Dr. Lowell rang for coffee, then dismissed the butler. He tipped a full glass of brandy into his coffee, and drank it. He said:

  “I am shaken. Undeniably I am shaken. An experience, a dreadful experience, which I had thought ended forever, has been reopened. I have told Helen of that experience. She has a strong soul, a clear brain; she is a bright spirit. Am I to understand—” he addressed Bill—“that Helen was also in your confidence this evening; that she knew in advance the facts that so strongly surprised me?”

  Bill answered: “Partly, sir. She knew about the shadow, but she didn’t know that the Demoiselle de Keradel had an Ys pinned on her name. No more did I. Nor had I any cogent reason to suspect the de Keradels when they accepted your invitation. Before that, I did not go into the details of the Ralston case with you because, from the very first, I had the feeling that they would revive painful memories. And obviously, until de Keradel himself revealed it, I could have had no suspicion that he was so closely connected with the dark center of those memories.”

  Lowell asked: “Did Dr. Caranac know?”

  “No. I had determined, whether or not my suspicions seemed to be warranted, to spread Dick’s story before de Keradel. I had persuaded Dr. Caranac to anger him. I wanted to watch the reactions of himself and his daughter. I wanted to watch the reactions of Dr. Caranac and yourself. I hold myself entirely justified. I wanted de Keradel to show his hand. If I had laid my own hand before you, never would he have done so. You would have been on your guard, and de Keradel would have known it. He, also, would have been on guard. It was your palpable ignorance of my investigation, your involuntary betrayal of the horror you felt over some similar experience, that prompted him, contemptuous now of you, to reveal his association with the doll-maker and to deliver his threat and challenge. Of course, there is no doubt that some way, somehow, he had discovered the part you took in the matter of the doll-maker. He believes you are terrified to the core…that through fear of what may happen to Helen and me, you will force me to drop the Ralston matter. Unless he believed that, never would he have risked forearming us by forewarning.”

  Lowell nodded: “He is right. I am frightened. We are, the three of us, in unique peril. But, also, he is wrong. We must go on—”

  Helen said, sharply: “The three of us? I think Alan is in worse danger than any of us. The Demoiselle has her brand all ready to add him to her herd.”

  I said:

  “Try not to be so vulgar, darling.” I spoke to Lowell: “I am still in the dark, sir. Bill’s exposition of the Ralston case was luminously clear. But I know nothing of this doll-maker, and therefore cannot grasp the significance of de Keradel’s references to her. If I am to enlist in this cause, manifestly I should be in possession of all the facts to be truly effective, also, for my own protection.”

  Bill said, grimly:

  “You’re not only enlisted, you’re conscripted.”

  Dr. Lowell said:

  “I will sketch them for you, briefly. Later, William, you will put Dr. Caranac in possession of every detail, and answer all his questions. I encountered the doll-maker, a Mme. Mandilip, through a puzzling hospital case; the strange illness and subsequent stranger death of a lieutenant of a then notorious underworld leader, named Ricori. Whether this woman was what is popularly known as a witch, or whether she had knowledge of natural laws which to us, solely because of ignorance, seem supernatural, or whether she was simply a most extraordinary hypnotist—I am still not certain. She was, however, a murderess. Among the many deaths for which she was responsible were those of Dr. Braile, my associate, and a nurse with whom he was in love. This Mme. Mandilip was an extraordinary artist—whatever else she might be. She made dolls of astonishing beauty and naturalness. She kept a doll-shop where she selected her victims from those who came to buy. She killed by means of a poisonous salve which she found means to use after winning the confidence of her victims. She made effigies—dolls—of these, in their faithful image, in faithful likeness to them. These dolls—she then sent out on her errands of murder—animated, or at least so she implied, by something of the vital or, if you will, spiritual essence of those whose bodies they counterfeited; something that was wholly evil…little demons with slender stilettos…who went forth under care of a white-faced, terror-stricken girl whom she called her niece, subject so long to her hypnotic control that she had become, literally, another self of the doll-maker. But whether illusion or reality, of one thing there was no doubt—the dolls killed.

  “Ricori was one of her victims, but recovered under my care in this house. He was superstitious, believed Mme. Mandilip a witch, and vowed her execution. He kidnapped the niece, and in this house I placed her under my own hypnotic control to draw from her the secrets of the doll-maker. She died in this hypnosis, crying out that the doll-maker’s hands were round her heart—strangling it…”

  He paused, eyes haunted as though seeing again some dreadful picture, then went steadily on:

  “But before she died, she told us that Mme. Mandilip had possessed a lover in Prague to whom she had taught the secret of the living dolls. And that same night Ricori and some of his men went forth to—execute—the doll-maker. She was executed—by fire. I, though against my will, was a witness of that incredible scene—incredible still to me although I saw it…”

  He paused, then lifted his glass with steady hand:

  “Well, it seems that de Keradel was that lover. It seems that beside the secret of the dolls, he knows the secret of the shadows—or is it the Demoiselle who knows that, I wonder? And what else of the dark wisdom—who knows? Well, that is that—and now all is to be done again. But this will be more difficult—”

  He said, musingly: “I wish Ricori were here to help us. But he is in Italy. Nor could I reach him in time. But his ablest man, one who passed through the whole experience with us, who was there at the execution, he is here. McCann! I’ll get McCann!”

  He arose:

  “Dr. Caranac, you will excuse me? William—I leave things in your hands. I’m going to my study and then to bed—I am shaken. Helen, my dear, take care of Dr. Caranac.”

  He bowed and withdrew. Bill began: “Now, about the doll-maker—”

  It was close to midnight when he had finished that story, and I had found no more questions to ask. As I was going out, he said:

  “You bowled de Keradel almost clean out when you spoke of—what was it—the Alkar-Az and the Gatherer within the Cairn, Alan. What the hell were they?”

  I answered:

  “Bill, I don’t know. The words seemed to come to my lips without volition. Maybe they did come from the Demoiselle—as I told her father.”

  But deep within me I knew that wasn’t true—that I did know, had known, the Alkar-Az and its dread Gatherer—and that some day I would…remember.

  Helen said: “Bill, turn your head.”

  She threw her arms around my neck, and pressed her lips to mine, savagely; she whispered: “It makes my heart sing that you are here—and it breaks my heart that you are here. I’m afraid—I’m so afraid for you, Alan.”

  She leaned back, laughing a little: “I suppose you’re thinking this is the precipitancy of my generation, and its morals—and maybe vulgar, too. But it really isn’t as sudden as it seems, darling. Remember—I’ve loved you since the hornets and snakes.”

  I gave her back her kiss. The revelation that had begun when I had met her, had come to complete and affirmative conclusion.

  As I made my way to the club, all that was in my mind was the face of Helen, the burnished copper helmet of her hair and her eyes of golden amber. The face of the Demoiselle, if I saw it at all, was nothing but a mist of silver-gilt over two purple splotches in a featureless white mask. I was happy.

  I started to undress, whistling, Helen’s face still clear cut bef
ore me. I put my hand in my pocket and drew out the silver bracelet with the black stone. The face of Helen faded abruptly. In its place, as clearly cut, even more alive, was the face of the Demoiselle with her great eyes tender, her lips smiling—

  I threw the bracelet from me, as though it had been a snake.

  But when I went to sleep it was still the face of the Demoiselle and not the face of Helen that was back of my eyes.

  CHAPTER VIII

  IN DAHUT’S TOWER—NEW YORK

  I woke up next morning with a headache. Also, out of a dream which began with dolls holding foot-long needles in one hand dancing with pink shadows around circles of enormous standing stones, and with Helen and the Demoiselle alternately and rapidly embracing and kissing me. I mean that Helen would embrace and kiss me, and then she would fade into the Demoiselle; and then the Demoiselle would do the same and as quickly fade into Helen, and so on and so on.

  I remember thinking in that dream that this was quite like what occurred at a very unusual place of entertainment in Algiers named the “House of the Heart’s Desire.” It’s run by a Frenchman, a hashish eater and also a truly astonishing philosopher. He and I were great friends. I won his regard, I think, by unfolding to him that same scheme for “Heaven and Hell, Inc.” which had so interested the Demoiselle and de Keradel. He had quoted Omar:

  I sent my Soul out through the Invisible.

  Some letter of that after-life to spell:

  And after many days my Soul returned.

  And said, “Behold, Myself am Heav’n and Hell.”

  Then he had said my idea wasn’t so original; it was really a combination of that quatrain and what made his place so profitable. He had a couple of renegade Senussi in his house. The Senussi are truly astonishing magicians, masters of illusion. He had a dozen girls, physically the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, and they were white and yellow and black and brown and intermediate shades. When one wanted to embrace “the Heart’s Desire,” and that was a most expensive undertaking, these twelve girls would stand in a circle, naked; a big, wide circle in a big room, hands clasped in each other’s with their arms out at full length. The Senussi squatted in the center of the circle with their drums, while the aspirant for the “Heart’s Desire” stood beside them. The Senussi drummed and chanted and did this and that. The girls danced, intertwining. Ever faster and faster. Until at last white, brown, black and yellow and intermediate seemed to coalesce into one supernal damsel—the girl of his dreams, as the old sentimental songs so quaintly put it, with trimmings of Aphrodite, Cleopatra, Phryne, and what not—at any rate, the girl he had always wanted whether he had realized it or not. So he took her.

  “Was she what he thought her? How do I know?” shrugged this Frenchman. “To me—looking on—there were always eleven girls left. But if he thought so. Then, yes.”

  Helen and the Demoiselle melting so rapidly into each other made me wish that they would coalesce. Then I’d have no bother. The Demoiselle seemed to stay a moment or two longer. She kept her lips on mine…and suddenly I felt as though I had both water and fire in my brain, and the fire was a stake upon which a man was bound, and the flames rushed up and covered him like a garment before I could see his face.

  And the water was a surging sea…and out upon it, pale gold hair adrift, wave washed, was Dahut…eyes staring up to a sky less blue than they…and dead.

  It was then I woke up.

  After a cold shower I felt a lot better. While I ate breakfast, I marshaled the events of the night before into coherent order. First, Lowell’s experience with the doll-maker. I knew much about the magic of the animate doll, which is far ahead of the simple idea of the effigy into which one sticks pins, or roasts at a fire or what not. Nor was I so sure that the hypothesis of hypnotism could account for a belief of such ancient and wide-spread popularity. But more ancient still, and much more sinister, was the shadow magic that had slain Dick. The Germans might give it the more or less humorous twist of Peter Schliemel who sold his shadow to the Devil, and Barrie give it his own labored whimsicality of Peter Pan whose shadow was caught in a drawer and got torn—yet the fact remained that of all beliefs this of the sharing of his shadow with a man’s life, personality, soul—whatever one may term it—was, perhaps, the most ancient of all. And the sacrifices and rites connected with propitiation or safety from shadows could parallel any for downright devilishness. I determined to go up to the library and look up shadow lore. I went to my room and called up Helen.

  I said: “Darling, do you know that I love you desperately?”

  She said: “I know that if you don’t you’re going to.”

  I said: “I’m going to be tied up this afternoon—but there is tonight.”

  Helen said: “I’ll be waiting for you, darling. But you’re not going to see that white devil today are you?”

  I answered: “I am not. I’ve even forgotten what she looks like.”

  Helen laughed. My foot touched something and I looked down. It was the bracelet I had thrown away. Helen said: “Tonight then.”

  I picked up the bracelet and dropped it in my pocket. I answered, mechanically: “Tonight.”

  Instead of looking up shadow lore, I spent the afternoon at two unusual private libraries to which I have access, delving into old books and manuscripts upon ancient Brittany—or Armorica as it was called before the coming of the Romans and for five centuries thereafter. What I was looking for were references to Ys, and what I hoped for was to find some mention of the Alkar-Az and the Gatherer in the Cairn. Obviously, I must have read or heard those names somewhere, sometime. The only other reasonable explanation was that the Demoiselle had suggested them to me, and recalling the vividness of that vision of Carnac under the touch of her hand, I was not inclined to reject that. On the other hand she had denied it and I was as strongly disinclined to reject her denial. It had sounded like truth to me. Of the Alkar-Az I found no mention whatsoever. In a palimpsest of the 7th Century, one torn leaf, there were a few sentences that might or might not refer to the Gatherer. It read, translating freely the monkish Latin:

  “…is said that it was not because this people of Armorica took part in the Gaulish insurrection that the Romans treated them with such severity but because of certain cruel and wicked rites unparalleled in their evil by any tribe or people with whom the Romans had come in contact. There was one [several words illegible] the place of the standing stones called [two whole lines illegible] beating in their breasts first slowly [another lapse] until breast and even the heart were crushed and then when within the crypt of the center temple the Blackness began—”

  Here the fragment ended. Could this “place of the standing stones” have been Carnac, and the “Blackness” that began “within the crypt of the center temple” have been the Gatherer within the Cairn? It well might be. I knew, of course, that the Romans had practically exterminated the primitive population of Armorica after that insurrection of 52 A.D., and that the survivors had fled from their wrath, leaving the country unpopulated until the 5th Century, when numbers of Celtic inhabitants of Britain, driven out by the Anglos and Saxons, emigrated to Armorica and repopulated a great part of the peninsula. The Romans, taken all in all, were a broad-minded lot with the widest tolerance for the gods of those they conquered. Nor was it their custom to deal thus savagely with the conquered. What could have been these “cruel and wicked rites unparalleled in their evil” which had so shocked them that they had so ruthlessly stamped out those who practiced them?

  Of references to a great city which had sunk beneath the sea, I found many. In some it was named Ys, in others nameless. The accounts which placed its destruction within Christian times were clearly apocryphal. The city, whatever it was, belonged to prehistoric times. In almost all the references accent was put upon its wickedness; its prostitution to evil spirits; to sorcery. Largely, the legend clung closely to the resume I had given the night before. But there was one variant which interested me mightily. This said it was a Lord of C
arnac who had brought about the fall of Ys. That he had “beguiled Dahut the White, Daughter of the King, even as she had beguiled many men to their destruction.” It went on to say that “so great was the beauty of this sorceress that not for long could the Lord of Carnac summon resolution to destroy her and evil Ys; and she had borne a child, a daughter; and when he had opened the sea gates he had fled with this child, while the shadows of Ys thrust him on to safety even as they thrust on the waves to overwhelm Dahut and her father who pursued him.”

  That, in the light of de Keradel’s theory of ancestral memories, rather startled me. For one thing, it gave me a clearer angle upon the Demoiselle’s remarks about my “remembering.” And it gave another explanation, though seemingly a preposterous one, why I had spoken those two names. If this Dahut came straight down from that Dahut, maybe I came straight down from the Lord of Carnac who had so “beguiled” her. In that event, contact might have started one of the de Keradel disks in my brain to action. I thought that the Alkar-Az and the Gatherer must have made a very strong impression upon the ancient Lord of Carnac, my ancestor, to cause the particular disk which registered them to be the first to become articulate. I grinned at the idea, and thought of Helen. Whatever the other memories, I remembered I had a date with Helen that night, and I was damned glad. I had a date with Dahut, too, but what of it?

  I looked at my watch. It was five o’clock. I pulled out my handkerchief and something fell tinkling to the floor. It was the bracelet, and it lay with the black talisman staring up at me like an eye. I stared back at it with that uncanny feeling of recognition of its symbol growing stronger and stronger.

  I went to the Club to dress. I had ascertained where the de Keradels were stopping. I sent Helen a telegram:

  Sorry. Unexpectedly called out of town. No time to telephone. Call you up tomorrow. Love and kisses.

 

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