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

by E. Hoffmann Price

  “My friend, do we go and defy them, or shall we stay at home?”

  Farrell laughed.

  “Pierre, you’re comical at times! We’ll go, and be damned to them and their trap. We can shoot our way out of any handful of knife-artists they throw at us, what?”

  “Ha! Is it that you are informing me?” scoffed d’Artois with a fierce gleam in his steel-blue eyes. “Voilà—have your choice of my arsenal,” he said, gesturing at his collection of pistols, ranging from flintlocks and cap-and-ball antiques to heavy Colt revolvers and automatics. “And perhaps, since we shall be outnumbered, we might slip into those shirts of Persian chain-mail. They are not much heavier than a sweater, and so exquisitely forged as to be proof against knives and any but the heaviest pistols. Parbleu, we will attend that conclave!”

  After arraying themselves as d’Artois had suggested, they dressed for a formal evening affair.

  “Thaumaturgy…thaumaturgy…” muttered Farrell as they stepped into the Renault and d’Artois took the wheel. “Wonder, or miracle workers, what?”

  “Precisely,” agreed d’Artois. “Jugglery, sleight of hand, trickery, but withal, an underlying substratum of fact that can not be dismissed. I myself have seen unbelievable things done by the adepts of Tibet. A corpse, par exemple, animated and made to dance by some devilish magic. The fact of my having been admitted to their inner circles in Tibet has in time leaked out; and it is to this that they would expect us to attribute my receiving tonight’s invitation.”

  The chateau of the Marquis was out in the hills beyond the Mousserole Gate. It was perched on a knoll that commanded the surrounding country. Several cars were parked in a level space near the entrance.

  “It seems,” observed Farrell, “that there are other guests, although that may or may not mean anything.”

  D’Artois presented his invitation to the butler.

  “Monsieur le Chevalier Pierre d’Artois,” he intoned in impressive but oddly accented French. Then he glanced at Farrell.

  D’Artois interposed and instructed the butler, who then announced Farrell.

  They advanced through the vestibule and thence into the salon, a vast, high-ceiled chamber illuminated by a pulsing bluish glow. The walls were hung with black arras embroidered in silver to depict with unsavory realism the grotesque imagery of Asian mysteries. At the far end of the salon was a dais flanked by tall tripod-censers whose pungent, resinous fumes made the air thick.

  The assembled guests were in formal evening dress. There were Spaniards with black mustaches, and Frenchmen with spade-shaped beards; and here and there Farrell saw lean, hawk-faced Arabs, and several distinctly Mongolian faces.

  “More guests than the number of cars would indicate,” muttered Farrell, nudging d’Artois. “This is all very flossy, but I smell trouble.”

  “And no Marquis,” added d’Artois with a quick glance about the salon. Then he advanced to meet the man who seemed to be acting as host. After the exchange of a few words, d’Artois presented Farrell.

  In the course of the conventional courtesies, Farrell appraised the master of the show. He was lean as a beast of prey, and as sleek. His moves and gestures had a cat-like grace, and his speech had the indefinable blur of accent that marks one who speaks many languages with equal ease.

  “And thus I have the honor,” concluded the host, “of offering in the name of Monsieur le Marquis his regrets and the hospitality of his house.”

  He paused for a moment, regarding them with his intent, deep-set eyes; then with a gesture toward a row of chairs arranged before the dais, “Be pleased to seat yourselves, messieurs.”

  Farrell watched the broad shoulders and tall figure pass among the guests like a cat stalking through a jungle.

  “Shirkuh of the clan of Shadi,” muttered Farrell. “Ought to be an honest fighting-man, but—”

  “‘But’ is correct,” interrupted d’Artois. “There is nothing honest about that playmate of Satan. Mark my words, we shall see more of that gentleman, if we live long enough.”

  As they seated themselves there was a clang of bronze, and the faint, muffled wailing of pipes and the whine of single-stringed kemenjahs from an alcove behind the arras. As the guests took seats, an attendant passed up and down the rows of chairs, offering small glasses of wine, and triangular pastries iced in curious designs.

  “On your life, don’t eat it!” muttered d’Artois as he palmed a confection he had selected from the tray. “Drugged, there is no telling what may happen to your good sense. This is all damnably familiar.”

  Another peal of bronze; then, as Shirkuh sprang effortlessly to the dais, the music dimmed to a sighing whisper, a sinister murmuring from outer darkness.

  Six lean, brown men, nude save for loin-cloths that glowed like golden flames in the spectral bluish light, emerged from an entrance concealed by the silver-embroidered arras, and filed across the hall toward the dais. Following them came four others, likewise arrayed, but blacker than any negroes Farrell had ever seen. They bore a litter on which lay a form whose gracious feminine curves were not entirely concealed by the silken, metallically glistening shroud.

  “Good Lord!” muttered Farrell. “A woman!”

  The brown-skinned sextet ascended the dais. The blacks followed with their burden. As they halted, two others emerged from the back-drapes of the dais, bringing with them wrought bronze trestles on which the litter was placed.

  Shirkuh took his post behind the litter as the sextet of adepts from High Asia seated themselves cross-legged in front of it.

  “Fellow thaumaturges,” he began, “I, the least of your servants, beg leave to present a feat that has never been accomplished save in far-off Lhasa.”

  He paused, smiled, and stroked his mustache. Then he gestured toward the shrouded form on the litter. An attendant gathered the silken folds and drew them aside.

  Farrell barely suppressed a gasp of horrified amazement.

  The woman on the bier was La Dorada. Her copper-golden hair flamed like living fire in the bluish-purple, pulsing light of the room. The hands, folded across her breast, sparkled with jewels. She had no other adornment or dress. La Dorada, the Golden, dead not over ten hours, and stripped of all but her exquisite beauty, lay exposed to the gaze of that assemblage of devil-mongers. For one terrible instant Farrell had thought that Antoinette lay on that bier; then he remembered her resemblance to the dead actress, and assured himself that Antoinette was and must be in her apartment on rue Lachepaillet, awaiting another night of fantastic dreams of an assassin’s paradise, and the lashing of an invisible scourge.

  “Monsieur le Marquis,” continued Shirkuh with a smile that flashed satanic mockery, “is unable to be with us. But I trust that that which I offer will be worthy of your presence.”

  “Lord!” muttered Farrell. “I don’t know the Marquis, but exhibiting her dead body here in his house—I’ve half a notion to start the show right here!”

  D’Artois’ fingers closed about Farrell’s right wrist.

  “Imbécile! This infamy is none of your business. Tend to your own sheep.”

  Shirkuh nodded and made a gesture. The faint, whimpering music became louder. Among the plucked strings of sitar and oudh Farrell could distinguish the notes of a wind instrument that was a mockery of a woman’s voice. The drums muttered and purred in complex rhythm.

  The adepts were swaying from their hips, and making statuesque passes and gestures that resembled an animation of the figures of Egyptian sculpture. Their glassily staring eyes shifted in regular cadence to follow their darting finger tips. They were as revivified corpses that had not yet gained full control of their bodies.

  Then they lifted their voices in a chant like the wailing of ghouls imprisoned in a looted tomb: dead brazen faces chanting to the dead. And Shirkuh, arms extended, made antiphonal responses in a voice that surged and thundered like a dista
nt surf.

  The notes of that diabolical wind instrument behind the arras became more and more like the voice of a woman: a mellow sweetness against a background of sepulchral wailing and the solemn intonation of Shirkuh.

  “Good Lord, Pierre, that’s awful!” muttered Farrell.

  “Wait until it fairly starts,” countered d’Artois in a whisper. “This is primitive magic. Very primitive, but deadly. They are imitating that which they design to accomplish.

  “Pardieu, hear that damnable pipe—her very voice, now. They imitate in music and symbolize in their chant the triumph of the dead as they return from Beyond.”

  That satanically sweet voice was now almost articulate. Farrell strained his ears as he leaned forward, clutching the arms of his chair. He sought to distinguish the words that it spoke. And then another instrument came into play: a hoarse, reverberant roaring like the lustful bellowing of pre-Adamite monsters. The hall trembled with that terrific bestial blast.

  The fumes of the censers were swirling and twining like fantasmal serpents in the ghastly blueness, weaving arabesques, spiraling in vortices, gathering about that hellish sextet and its leader like shapes from beyond the border clamoring at the periphery of a necromancer’s pentacle.

  A luminous haze was gathering and drawing to itself the censer fumes. The nebulous iridescence pulsed and quivered like a sentient thing. It throbbed with the slow, persistent beat of a turtle’s heart after it has been removed from the body. It elongated; then as it slowly settled, that amorphous luminescence took shape: the graceful form of La Dorada.

  The pipe that mimicked a woman’s voice was articulating now in unison, joining the necromancer’s antiphonal answer to the chanting adepts and the minotaurean bellowing of that monstrous horn.

  The master had called her, and she was there.

  The phantom presence slowly merged with the nacreous body of La Dorada. The dead woman shivered for a moment, extended her shapely arms, sat erect on the bier. Her cry was a mingling of exultation and bewilderment; then she accepted the hand that Shirkuh offered her, and splendid in her unclad beauty, sprang gracefully to the dais.

  The music and the chanting and the bestial roaring of that terrific horn had ceased. The assembled thaumaturges sat fixed and staring as though their life and their spiritual essence had been torn from them and given to the dead who saluted them with a gesture and a bow.

  Shirkuh smiled triumphantly.

  “You have seen, Brethren. I called her and she came. And I am but Shirkuh, the least of the slaves. See, she is alive, with the warmth and beauty that at noon of this very day was a coldness, and a sister of the dust.”

  The red-gold head inclined in affirmation, and her smile was a slow, curved sorcery.

  “Good God, that’s the awfulest blasphemy!” muttered Farrell. “Or is it an illusion?”

  “It is all too real,” whispered d’Artois.

  And then she spoke: “I have come back from the shadows and from the blackness of death. I have come to greet you and to say that there is a Garden to which I must soon return. And those who meet me there need not ever think of farewell.

  “I came from across the narrow bridge, and back across it I must go. Yet not this time to any blackness, but to the Garden, to be the Bride and the reward and the welcome of those who believe. Oh, Fedawi… Devoted Ones…”

  La Dorada, lovely in death, and more alluring than ever in life: yet a cold horror clutched Farrell as he heard that dead woman’s caressing voice entrance the thaumaturges with promises that no human woman could fulfill or even imagine. Her voice was a poison sweetness, a full-throated richness that pronounced the beguilements of Lilith chanting to the Morning Star.

  “Death so loved me that he has allowed me to leave,” she said in that wondrous voice that had made her the darling of Paris. And then her exultant tones became a poignant sorrow as she continued, “But the beloved of death must return…”

  “Cordieu! That is a foulness beyond mention!” growled d’Artois. Then:

  “Let’s go! Before we go utterly mad—” He leaped to his feet and thrust back his chair. And as Farrell followed, he expected at any instant a fanatical outburst, the flash of blades, the crackle of pistols. But the thaumaturges sat like the ancient dead awaiting the newly died.

  La Dorada was ascending the bier. Her motions were graceful, but very slow, as though the animation was being drained from her body. She was dying a second time.

  This as they paused at the threshold for a backward glance; then, advancing, Farrell and d’Artois sighed deeply, and strode to the Renault. The hideous life-like unreality had dazed them.

  “Dieu de Dieu!” muttered d’Artois as he glanced at Farrell’s lean, drawn features, and shoulders drooping as though from the weight of the Persian mail they had so needlessly worn. “What did that blasphemous monster want with us? Did he hope to drive us to madness?”

  “No,” said Farrell wearily. “He was mocking us. Certainly he didn’t withhold his cutthroats because he was afraid to try.”

  The long beam of the headlights swept the château, then picked up the winding road as the car headed back toward the city. D’Artois sat hunched behind the wheel. Farrell shivered at the memory of that ghastly loveliness that had greeted them from the grave.

  “I know she was dead,” reiterated Farrell. “She couldn’t have been alive. Not with that dagger I saw jammed into her breast this afternoon. But why did he invite you? What everlastingly damned mummery—there’s something behind all this—she’s going to greet them in the Garden and there will be no farewell—was that all illusion, or—”

  Farrell slumped back against the cushions and made a gesture of bewilderment and futility.

  They left the river road, passed through the Mousserole Gate, and threaded their way through the unsavory quarters between there and the Nive. As they crossed the first of the seven bridges that span the river, d’Artois suddenly jerked back from his crouch behind the wheel.

  “Nom de Dieu!” he exclaimed.

  Farrell, aroused by the note of alarm, glanced at his companion and saw that the horror on his face was in keeping with the consternation in his voice.

  The car leaped forward as d’Artois stepped on the accelerator.

  “Death and damnation!” he shouted above the full-throated roar of the motor. “We sat there like dummies. That is what he wanted!”

  “What?” demanded Farrell, tense, and alarmed by d’Artois’ contagious excitement. A sudden fear seized him.

  “A trap. Not for your worthless head nor mine, but for her! Thaumaturgy! If there is but one greater damn fool than Glenn Farrell, it is Pierre d’Artois!”

  They passed the plaza, and with a screech of brakes slowed down enough to make the turn at rue Port Neuf. Then up rue d’Espagne, around the hairpin turn, and thence down the street along the city wall. Again the brake linings smoked their wrath and squealed their protest. Fuming and cursing in a high rage, d’Artois leaped to the curbing, dashed up the steps, and pounded Antoinette Delatour’s door with the butt of his pistol.

  “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?” cried the terrified, bewildered maid.

  “Flames and damnation! Open quick!” demanded d’Artois. “C’est moi!”

  “But she is sleeping,” protested the maid, still half asleep.

  “Hasten, then. If she sleeps, wake her—is she indeed—”

  And as the door yielded, d’Artois, pistol in hand, charged up the stairs, taking them three at a time. Farrell was but a jump behind him.

  They pounded on Antoinette’s door. No response.

  “The key—” began d’Artois.

  But Farrell stepped back, gathered himself, and charged the door. It resisted the shock; but a second assault burst it open, tearing the lock from its socket.

  The floor of Antoinette’s room was covered with fallen plaster. Her
bed was empty. A hole two feet square yawned in the ceiling. The turquoise and silver slippers mocked them.

  “Gone!” muttered Farrell.

  “While we sat there ready for an ambush that didn’t materialize,” added d’Artois.

  Farrell turned to the door. D’Artois seized him by the arm.

  “Tenez! If you are going to tear the château to pieces,” he said, “spare yourself the trouble. They have taken her elsewhere. No effort was made to detain us when we left because none was necessary. And they will not be at the château, not any of them.”

  Farrell’s eyes were cold as sword-points as they flashed back again to the empty, canopied bed. Then the slaying rage left him.

  “Right, Pierre,” he admitted. “It’s your move. With some head-work.”

  “Head-work, indeed!” retorted d’Artois with a bitter, mordant laugh. “It was my headwork that led to this. We should have watched her.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Ibrahim Khan

  “Now, where do we start?” demanded Farrell the following morning, as he tasted the strong coffee that was to banish the remains of the nightmarish sleep from which sunrise had awakened them. “You’ve got the Sûreté on the trail. But there’s a lot of this that no honest policeman could swallow.”

  “It is indeed a madhouse,” admitted d’Artois. “But let us sum up for a moment: Antoinette is evidently en rapport with some one in that Garden; some one with whom she identifies herself, and whose savage beatings in some way leave marks on Antoinette’s body.

  “By means of clairvoyance or other unusual perception, she recognized the Marquis in her dream garden, her description of which tallies closely with the traditional paradise devised by the higher Ismailians for the deluding of their fanatical assassins.

  “Assassins operating very much like the fedawi of five centuries ago murdered La Dorada, the sweetheart of the Marquis. La Dorada bears a marked resemblance to Antoinette, though far from enough to make her a double, except under the most favorable conditions.