E. Hoffmann Price's Pierre d'Artois: Occult Detective & Associates

by E. Hoffmann Price

  “Look, damn it, look!”

  As Farrell switched on the lights, he pointed at the woman who lay face down on the broad, canopied bed. She was writhing and moaning. At regular intervals she flinched as from a blow, then shuddered, and relaxed.

  “Lord! I can almost hear the whip,” muttered Farrell. He leaped forward and thrust out his arm as if to ward off blows that flailed the girl’s bare shoulders. Then he retreated, shaking his head.

  “If we can’t see it, how can we stop it?” he muttered despairingly.

  They stood, fascinated and horrified, watching a lovely girl being flayed by an invisible scourge. They saw the red welts rising, crossing and recrossing her shoulders, and cropping up under the filmy silken folds of her nightgown.

  “Look at it! Her gown didn’t move a hair’s breadth, but the whip raised another welt! Pierre, it’s impossible! That gown ought to be cut to pieces by that flogging. Or else nothing’s really hitting her. Or else”—Farrell shook his head in bewildered despair—“or else we’re both crazy as hoot-owls!”

  “Tenez donc,” said the old Frenchman, taking his friend by the arm. Though he himself shrank in sympathy with the girl who writhed under the invisible lash, his voice was calmer than Farrell’s. “Let us study this thing. And man or devil, in the end we will have his hide!”

  “You take the devils, Pierre, and give me a handful of whatever men you think are messed up in it! I’ll—eh, what’s that?”

  He knelt beside the bed, gestured to d’Artois.

  “Listen to that, Pierre!” he said in a tense whisper.

  “Junayn’ ash-Shaytan…” they heard her say.

  “Holy smoke!” gasped Farrell. “Junayn’ ash-Shaytan…and did you get what she said after that?” Then, before d’Artois could reply, “It’s over now.” The sleeping girl had ceased writhing and tossing. Her cries had subsided to a drowsy murmuring. The two watchers stared at each other for a moment.

  “But yes,” said d’Artois finally. “I heard it, though it has been several years since I heard any one use such villainous language. It would do credit to one of the dancing-girls in Abu Aswad’s dive in Cairo. But this junayn’ ash-Shaytan, that puzzles me.”

  “Simple!” said Farrell. “Satan’s garden.”

  “Mais oui!” agreed d’Artois with a touch of impatience. “Only, what is the point?”

  He frowned fiercely and twisted his mustache.

  “Mon vieux,” he said after a moment’s reflection, “in this first articulate speech in her sleep we may find a clue to the invisible scourge that leaves her back crossed with welts.”

  Farrell shook his head.

  “Crazier and crazier,” he muttered. “We’re all nutty. I am, you are, she is—all of us! Now she’s talking Arabic! I’m beginning to wonder whether her back is really beaten or whether we’re both suffering the same delusion she is.”

  D’Artois led the way to the door. Farrell followed.

  “I have been expecting that,” he said as he reached for a brief-case lying on the table. He opened it and withdrew a photograph. “Look.”

  Farrell scrutinized the glossy print.

  “That proves your point,” he admitted. “The camera isn’t subject to hallucinations or delusions of persecution. Antoinette has been beaten. Severely. The old black-and-blue marks photographed darker than the new, red welts. No argument. I’m not, she isn’t, you’re not bughouse. That is, not yet. But if this doesn’t stop soon—”

  He bit the tip off a fresh cigar, chewed it for a moment, struck light.

  “Let us be impersonal about it for a moment,” suggested d’Artois, “and consider what we have.

  “First, she tells us that her dreams have become so real that she is confused and wonders during the day which is dream, and which is reality. She dreams that she is in an outlandishly beautiful garden, dim as by moonlight, yet warm as the glow of morning sun. The plants are strange, and the flowers have an unnatural, poison sweetness.

  “And strangest of all, she herself has a different body, brown-skinned, with blue-black hair, and very large, dark eyes. The other girls, her companions, are also dark,” summarized d’Artois. “Now do you see how her first speech in this troubled sleep begins to lend a touch of rationality?”

  Farrell pondered for a moment, then replied.

  “Yes. Those few words she spoke in Arabic tonight suggest a dual personality, give us a bit more background. But on the other hand, didn’t she tell us that she couldn’t understand the language of the other girls, and of the guests: lean, swarthy fellows with staring, dilated eyes? If she couldn’t understand them, how the devil is she talking the fluent, unsavory Arabic of a dancing-girl in a Port Said dive?”

  “That sudden gift of tongues can be resolved,” said d’Artois. “There is something else, which is perhaps more relevant: the veiled Master, whom the guests of the garden regard with great reverence. Does that suggest anything?”

  “It does, and it doesn’t,” replied Farrell. “’Way back in my mind it’s there, but I can’t express it. And you, I fancy, are in about the same fix?”

  “I am,” admitted d’Artois. “But before many days pass, we will pick up the trail. We will have this invisible wielder of an unseen scourge. Him, or his hide. But now get yourself some sleep, mon ami.”

  Farrell glanced at the door at his left.

  “She’ll be all right,” assured d’Artois. “The ordeal is over. And what purpose did we serve, after all?”

  “Guess you’re right, Pierre,” assented Farrell. “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 2

  La Dorada

  Glenn Farrell was up at dawn. His carefully tiptoeing down the winding stairway of Pierre d’Artois’ house, however, was wasted consideration. He found that gray-haired ferrailleur hunched over the littered desk of his study, fuming and muttering in a thick, foul cloud of smoke that momentarily became more dense as the cigarette between d’Artois’ fingers added its stench of burning rags. The shining brass pot of Syrian workmanship, and half a dozen tiny cups, each with a thick residue of pulverized coffee grounds and cigarette stumps, indicated that the old man had been at work ever since they had left Antoinette Delatour some six hours ago.

  In the clear space in front of d’Artois was an open book whose pages were in illuminated Arabic script. Beside it were a pad of note-paper and a half-dozen loose sheets closely scribbled.

  “Pierre, why didn’t you tell me you were going to carry on?” reproached Farrell as he drew up a chair. “This is really more my funeral than yours, getting Antoinette out of this terrible mess.”

  “Mordieu!” exclaimed d’Artois. “This is work for a scholar, not a towering blockhead like yourself.”

  “Oh, all right, all right,” said Farrell with a smile that for a moment cleared his features of the dismay and wrath of the preceding night. “Only, I can read that stuff myself, almost as well as you can.” He scrutinized the book for a moment; then, indicating the title, he said, “Siret al Haken—how’s that for a blockhead?”

  “Very good,” approved d’Artois. Then, with a wink and a grin, “And after all, perhaps I should not call you a blockhead, even though I do exceed you in intelligence and in skill with the sword.”

  He paused a moment after that time-honored raillery in which each reviled the other’s talents, then continued, “But seriously, I have been pursuing some exceedingly roundabout speculations, and before I inflicted them on you, I wanted to study them out myself.”

  “Oh, all right, then,” agreed Farrell as he found a clean demitasse and poured some of the lukewarm, syrupy Turkish coffee with which d’Artois drugged himself during his midnight studies. “But I see no connection with the Memoirs of Haken and Antoinette’s terrible predicament.”

  “Listen then, I will enlighten you!” began d’Artois. “Mademoiselle Antoinette has been dreaming of
a garden rich with roses, and lilies, and jasmine. It is alive with strangely colored birds. In fact, she described the very garden”—d’Artois indicated the page of Arabic script before him—“that Haken has so glowingly described: lovely girls playing the sitar and the oudh, and entertaining the guests of paradise with song and wine. And a veiled master who ruled the garden.”

  “But what,” demanded Farrell, “has that to do with those unmerciful beatings? How about it?”

  “Did I not say that I was working indirectly?” countered d’Artois. “The scourgings, you understand, did not come until later, after the dreams had recurred for some time. Therefore they must be but an indication of the gradual increase—”

  “Of the undoubted insanity of all three of us!” interpolated Farrell.

  “Mademoiselle Antoinette,” declared d’Artois, ignoring his friend’s outburst, “is not dreaming. She actually spends her nights in that devil’s paradise. She awakes and tells us that she had another body; but her self retained its identity. I conclude then that her personality, her spiritual essence, whatever you will, is wandering, driven by some damnable compulsion to inhabit that garden, and a strange body.”

  Farrell sighed wearily and shook his head.

  “This scrambling of selves and personalities is enough to drive one nutty. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Ah, say you so?” murmured d’Artois as he reached for another cigarette. “My logic is scrambled, in that I have not attempted to show how this can be; but by assuming that it is, I get to the next point.

  “Listen somewhat further, yes? We have but to find that place which Antoinette’s physical body, speaking like a Syrian dancing-girl, so graphically damned and called junayn’ ash-Shaytan, Satan’s garden.

  “There is such a garden at this moment in physical existence; or else there is one which, reaching out of the dimness of nine hundred departed years, is en rapport with Antoinette.”

  “Hell’s fire!” muttered Farrell. “The ghost of a garden haunting a woman in Bayonne, in 1933!”

  D’Artois tapped the cover of Siret al Haken.

  “The author,” he said, “tells of Hassan al Sabbah. Shaykh al Djibal, the Chief of the Mountains. The lord of the Hashisheen—”

  “I get it!” exclaimed Farrell. “The garden paradise into which hasheesh-drugged devotees were tossed while unconscious, so that when they awoke they would believe themselves to be in the Moslem heaven of cool water, beautiful women, and forbidden wine?”

  “Precisely, my excellent blockhead! I drink to your wit!” said d’Artois with a smile that flashed over the edge of his cup of cold coffee. “And your Antoinette is bedeviled in some way by a garden like that of Hassan al Sabbah, the master of those assassins who terrorized all Syria and Persia, centuries ago.”

  Farrell grimaced.

  “Worse and worse yet! Hasn’t this old city of Bayonne got enough ghosts and devils in its own right, lurking under the blood-soaked foundations of the citadel, without importing them from Asia?” His eyes shifted to the clustered scimitars and yataghans, kreeses and kampilans, darts and assegais that adorned the walls of the study. “Now if they were men, we might do something about it!”

  “Have no fear on that score,” assured d’Artois. “We find that every phantom as malignantly directed as this ghostly garden has a man pulling the strings—a flesh-and-blood man you can neatly riddle with bullets, or slice asunder with some of those toys up there on the wall.”

  Farrell smiled grimly and took heart.

  “Reasonable, at that. And now, suppose that we drop in and see what Antoinette has to say about her newly acquired gift of Arabic speech. It took me several years to learn that fluently.”

  “Barbarian!” scoffed d’Artois. “It is too early. You with your military hours—”

  “And you’re another,” countered Farrell. “Working the clock around. But see if you can persuade Félice to scramble some eggs, at least a pound of bacon, and perhaps a stack of waffles.”

  “Magnifique!” agreed d’Artois. “Some of those barbarous American customs of yours are not utterly vile. And since you so kindly sent me an electric waffle-iron, à I’Américain—but as a lover, you are most unconvincing! At six of the morning, you howl for food—utterly out of keeping! Romance is dead, slain by such as you.”

  “Ghosts,” submitted Farrell, “can not be fought on an empty stomach.”

  Breakfast stemmed Farrell’s impatience for a while; but as they lingered over the brandy-laden coffee, he proposed again that they set out at once to call on Antoinette Delatour.

  “Or at least, let’s stretch our legs and get the air. I’ll be turning flip-flops if I don’t get going.”

  “The air, then,” agreed d’Artois. “Look! It is but little past eight.”

  So saying, d’Artois selected one of his collection of canes and led the way down the stairs of the restored ruin which served as his town house. The circular donjon dated back to the Thirteenth Century; the remainder, though not so ancient, was old when Columbus set sail; and the narrow street on which it faced was in accord with those far-off days, crooked, dingy, and paved with cobblestones. Yet, being in the heart of that colorful city which he loved so well, d’Artois was content, and with the modernization of the interior, he contrived to be comfortable.

  They strolled along the quai that follows the Nive to its junction with the Adour, then turned to the left toward Place du Théâtre. Before crossing the street that skirted the plaza, d’Artois paused a moment at the curbing to give the right of way to the glittering, costly Italian car which was approaching, presumably from the Biarritz road. The chauffeur and footman were in livery; and the crest on the door was one that d’Artois recognized as that of the Marquis des Islots. Farrell, however, being ignorant of heraldry, had eyes only for the passenger in the back seat: a dazzlingly beautiful girl whose costly furs and sparkling jewels betokened a background as golden as her hair. Her lovely features were drawn and weary, and her eyes haggard and blue-ringed.

  “Good Lord, Pierre!” he exclaimed as he clutched his friend by the arm. “Did you see—for a moment I thought—”

  He blinked, passed his hand over his eyes, then sought to catch another glimpse of the beauty in the back seat.

  “And what did you for a moment think?” wondered d’Artois, as the car rolled majestically toward the Mayou bridge. His voice was grave, but his blue eyes twinkled.

  “I thought it was Antoinette,” said Farrell, still perplexed. “Or else I’m seeing things!”

  “My friend,” said d’Artois reprovingly, as they crossed the street, “let Antoinette ever hear that you mistook La Dorada for her!” He shook his head in solemn warning. “Blasphemy, you understand. Lèse majesté.”

  “But doesn’t she—” began Farrell, his gray eyes still narrowed with perplexity.

  “Truly! She does just that,” admitted d’Artois. “Antoinette has often been accosted at Biarritz and Santander by admirers of La Dorada. But on second glance, their error becomes apparent, unless they are strangers. A similarity of coloring, perhaps a likeness of posture or mannerism that would deceive one only for a moment, if one knew either woman well. Had you been able to look again—anyway, La Dorada is the current playmate of Monsieur the Marquis des Islots. She was in his car, and on her way to his château where she is spending the season. Doubtless she is returning from a night of baccarat or roulette at Biarritz.”

  “Returning? At this hour?” wondered Farrell.

  D’Artois smiled and nodded.

  “You do not know La Dorada. She got the name in Madrid, where she was discovered by a café proprietor and sponsored by a grandee of Spain. La Dorada, the gilded, the golden.”

  As they passed along the broad plaza, then to the left and up the slope of rue Port Neuf, d’Artois held forth at length concerning the colorful career of La Dorada who at first glance
so strikingly resembled Antoinette Delatour.

  At the head of rue Port Neuf they turned to the left, past the old cathedral whose tall spires tower like silver lanceheads into the morning light, and ascended the incline to the broad drive that follows the parapet of the Lachepaillet wall.

  Despite the barbarity of the hour, they found that Antoinette had disposed of her morning chocolate and rolls. She wore a negligée of jade chiffon whose curled ostrich trimming fluffed up about her ears and caressed the copper-golden hair that enhanced her resemblance to La Dorada. Her lips smiled, but her dark blue eyes were sombre and haunted as she greeted Farrell and d’Artois.

  “Hélas! It was worse than ever, last night,” she replied, with a despairing gesture, to Farrell’s solicitous inquiry. “But be seated, and I will tell you.”

  She shifted her feet to make room for Farrell at the foot of the chaise-longue on which she reclined; then, as d’Artois drew up a chair, Antoinette continued, “It was terribly clear! Just fancy: my hair was jet-black, and so were my eyes. And my skin was as dark as an Arab’s! They beat me most unmercifully…as usual.”

  She shuddered at the memory of the dream. D’Artois stared at the dainty feet and their turquoise and silver mules. As Antoinette was about to resume her remarks, he said abruptly, “In your dream, what have you been wearing? On your ankles, I mean.”

  Antoinette closed her eyes for a moment to visualize her dream.

  “Heavy golden anklets set with massive uncut stones,” she replied. “Emeralds, I think. But why?”

  “Were they very heavy?” persisted d’Artois.

  Farrell regarded him curiously, wondering how adornments could be relevant to the case.

  “Terribly so!” assured Antoinette. Then, with a wan smile, “Only, I’ve become used to them.”

  “Look!” commanded d’Artois, indicating the girl’s ankles.

  “Well I’ll be damned!” exclaimed Farrell, and frowned perplexedly. Then he glanced at his left hand and shifted the heavy signet on his finger. “Her ankles are marked just as my finger is by this heavy slug of a ring!”