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

by E. Hoffmann Price

  Damn those experts with their omniscient microscopes! Their chemical tests which would detect the faintest trace of blood on his clothing.

  And someone, watching from some darkened window of a house on the wall, might observe him as he left the moat, might already have heard and noted the encounter.

  Only one move for Crane: find that girl, dead or alive. Hit first before the merciless Sûreté Générate connected him with the work of night-roving ghouls. And find the man whose decoration she had clutched.

  As he hastened down the moat, he followed the girl’s small, shapely footprints along the sand. Wrath burned him as his first fear left. Though that gaudy shawl branded her, she was still a woman, and the victim of something monstrous and deadly; something too eager for her torn flesh to bother with Crane beyond hammering him out of action.

  Or had the two spectral assailants already arranged to frame him?

  Half way to the sombre Lachepaillet Gate he noted the spot where her bare feet first marked the moat-bottom sand. He entered the walled city and hastened to his room at the Panier-Fleuri. The concièrge regarded him with bleary eyes that suddenly sharpened. But she said nothing.

  Once in his room, he cleaned up, then stretched long legs toward rue Lachepaillet. He should report to the police; but who would believe such a story, told by an insane American, trying to implicate one who wore that coveted purple decoration the size of an A.E.F. campaign badge?

  Crane jabbed a pushbutton. A trim, sharp-eyed girl in black admitted him and led the way to a spacious hall whose walls and ceiling were a solid expanse of mirror.

  A bell tinkled, and a half a dozen girls lounging on upholstered benches lined up on parade as several others emerged from a rear apartment to join them.

  They wore satin slippers and knee length silk hosiery. Their professional smiles, and the flimsy chiffon shawls draped from right breast to left hip completed their costume. Not a bad array; though some had over-plump legs, and breasts that would have been the better for a brassiere. A few were lovely in face and body, but there was something infinitely repulsive about that grotesque multiplication of bare flesh in those mirrored panels whose angles probed the concealment of chiffon shawls and made the glaring room a patchwork of feminine curves.

  Crane caught a freshly mirrored whiteness and turned toward the door. The shock for an instant numbed him. A full moment elapsed before he realized that he was not looking at the girl who had vanished from the moat.

  She had the same gracious inward dip at the waist, the same heart-warming flare of the hips, and one lovely breast peeped alluringly through the heavy strands of hair that trailed down over her left shoulder. Her blue eyes were almost black. Their troubled darkness matched the sombre droop of her lips.

  Tears had smudged the mascara of her lashes and a trace of redness lingered. Crane perceived the tensity of her body and saw her fingers twisting the trailing fringe of her shawl.

  Why had she been reserved from the lineup? Why that startling resemblance to that savagely mutilated girl in the moat? Why that black fear in her eyes?

  The girl’s fingers sank insistently into his wrist, and he felt the firm pressure of her hip and shoulder against him as she paused in the doorway.

  More than her resemblance to the girl in the moat told Crane that this was the one who could give him the most help—or damn him soonest. He followed his hunch.

  “Allons!” he whispered. “Let’s go.”

  He tossed the three hundred pound keeper of the house a purple Banque de France note, and followed the girl in the scarlet shawl up a flight of stairs and into a sombrely furnished room.

  Her name was Madeline, but all the coquetry of the game was missing, though she contrived a friendly smile as her fingers plucked the shoulder knot of her shawl.

  Crane checked her.

  “What’s wrong?” he demanded.

  “Diane—my sister,” she answered. “I’m terribly worried. She hasn’t come back. That awful Arab—or Turk—”

  Crane frowned. That was an odd touch. Who ever heard of an Algerian wearing that decoration?

  As she spoke, she abstractedly kicked off her slippers and leaned back among the cushions. She regarded Crane curiously, seeing that his face was gray and grim.

  “What’s the matter…don’t you like me?”

  “That will keep!” His voice was harsh and low. “Tell me about that Arab. What was wrong with him?”

  “Some of the things he did, the first night he was here. Before he took Diane—wherever he’s taken her. It was in the room next door, No, he didn’t hurt her at all—I mean the other girl, not Diane. But he frightened her terribly. I saw him leave. His pupils were like black saucers. Mon Dieu! Such eyes. Like Satan eating opium.”

  She was wrong. Opium contracted the pupils, but her very intensity gave Crane the picture.

  “Are you sure he didn’t wear the Order of Saint Léon?”

  “Mumm…no, of course not! But he dropped something in her room, and she showed it to me, and left it here.” Madeline slid to her feet and stepped to the dresser. She returned with a small silver watch charm. It was a tiny peacock with ruby eyes; an exquisitely tooled bit of metal.

  “A soldier who’d served in Syria once told me,” explained Madeline, “that that is a symbol of the devil-worshipers. That’s what’s been worrying me. If I’d known in time, I’d never have let her go. But why should you care?”

  “I’m a damn’ fool who can’t mind his business,” Crane smiled grimly. “I’ve got to find your sister.” She sceptically eyed him.

  “Then you don’t want me? But you paid—”

  Crane shrugged. “If you knew, you’d understand.”

  “Oh…” Very slowly, like a dying echo. She caught him by the shoulders, stared him full in the face; and bit by bit she read that the sombre riddle in his gray eyes concerned her missing sister.

  “I didn’t realize you knew Diane…” Her arm slipped about his neck and she drew closer as she continued, “I’ll go with you. I’ll help.”

  She had guts. Crane’s smile lost his bleakness. For a long moment their glances blended. She sighed, and her breasts crept through their screen of dark curls. Her smile was a revelation, and suddenly Crane’s blood quickened from the soft caress of her arm and the warmth of her body.

  “Tenez!” protested Crane. “Stop it, you damn’ little fool. I’ve got some business to attend to—”

  “You wouldn’t buy me,” she whispered. “Somehow, that’s rather wonderful…but you like me just a little, don’t you? Wouldn’t that make it different?”

  Somehow, it did; and Crane’s sensible effort to break away failed. She was lonely and worried. He couldn’t repulse her friendliness.

  “Cut it out!” he growled, though his protest was weakening. He laughed harshly, thinking of the one about the mail-carrier who hiked on Sundays; but Madeline seemed no longer one of those who lined up in that mirrored hell glare. She had become a bright flame in the foulness that crept through the mists of that fiend-haunted gray city.

  Those were not bought lips that clung thirstily to Crane’s mouth, and the shudder that rippled down her throbbing body was instinctive…and as her arms closed about him, Crane defied the peril that was gathering outside. He could not repulse the first glow of friendliness in that drab lupanar…

  Madeline’s eyes were tear-sparkling when she slipped from Crane’s arms and said, “I know now that she is dead.”

  “The devil you do!”he snapped, feeling decidedly stupid about the interlude that might in the end cost him all but his head—literally, as they use the guillotine in France.

  “Yes. Or you’d not have lingered, with that wrath in your eyes. So I know you can’t find her alive.”

  No use explaining his true motives. He took a key from his pocket.

  “Go to the Panier-Fleuri. S
tay under cover. What you told me about an Arab has entirely upset my assumption. I thought you could tell me about someone wearing the Order of Saint Léon. But no matter—I’ve got a fresh hunch. Now run along.”

  They waited for the cessation of laughter and footsteps in the hall. A latch click. Silence, except metallic voices from the reception room on the ground floor.

  Crane watched Madeline slip toward the further stairway. A moment later, looking from the window that overlooked the narrow black alley that skirted the rear of the house, he saw the white blur of her face, and caught the gesture of her hand.

  She was on her way. He slammed the door and strode down the main stairway. He forced a laugh at the doorkeeper’s vulgar farewell; but as he crossed the threshold, he began to see that his investigation, despite the delay, had gained him an ally if the police should catch up with him.

  But that silver peacock was an ominous hint. Devil worship…some damnable Asiatic cult. He’d heard it existed in the mountains of Kurdistan.

  Yet for all that thickening menace, the riddle in some respects was less baffling in the light of reflection.

  Diane had been headed off by the monsters that had swooped down on Crane from the lip of the moat. They must have held to a straight line across the parkway. That gave him a start toward tracing the point from which she had made her futile break.

  The mist was thinning, yet enough remained to envelop Crane in a spectral veil that protected and at the same time hampered him. He was unarmed; but he paused long enough to remove his socks, stuff one inside the other, and then slip in a rock the size of his fist. Very pleasant, if he got the edge on the two who had laid him out.

  For half an hour he circled, trying to pick a course that the two monsters would have used to head off the mangled fugitive.

  “Her instinct would drive her to the closest route to safety,” he reasoned. “To her sister. Then if the Gate of Spain was the closest, her direction must have been more to my left. Otherwise she’d have gone through the Lachepaillet Gate.”

  Half an hour search vindicated the hunch. A shred of scarlet chiffon. A splash of blood.

  He looped left. He found footprints heading toward the Gate of Spain—her pursuers, eager to cut off a flight that would betray their rendezvous.

  Ahead of him a masonry lunette loomed low in the mist. One of the outer defenses erected by Vauban—or perhaps something much more ancient, and conceived by no honest engineer.

  Crane now crept through the mists until a whiff of stale tobacco warned him of a watcher’s presence.

  He rose and boldly stalked toward the lunette. A jet of light flared in his face, blinding him. He was challenged in French.

  “I’ve got to see the émir at once!” Crane bluffed, using a plausible Arabic title that would flatter anyone of lower rank.

  The sentry protested. The émir was not to be disturbed. The ceremony had started. Crane shrugged and offered him the silver peacock.

  “Hurry, idiot!” growled Crane. “Tell him I’m here!”

  The flash shifted toward the silver token. The drawn pistol was holstered and an empty hand reached for the symbol. And then Crane’s bludgeon cracked down. The guardian collapsed. Crane caught him and the flashlight.

  The fellow was wearing a gown, and a hood from which hung a mask to conceal his face. Crane donned the disguise. This was no time for qualms.

  The memory of that mangled girl nerved his arm. He raised the pistol, smashed down with the barrel. Then he picked his way down a narrow casemate inclining sharply into the earth.

  Furtive flashes of his light guided Crane. He descended a stairway of archaic masonry, crumbled treads whose rubbish litter had been swept against the walls. A splash of fresh blood guided him.

  Finally there was an indirect glow ahead. Drums were thumping, and voices muttered in eerie rhythm. Some satanic ritual was in progress.

  Reasonably, Crane should now notify the police; but that brained sentry left him with no retreat. More than ever, his story had to be good.

  He halted at the jamb of an arch opening into a vaulted chamber illuminated by flickering wax tapers. Its circular walls were pierced with other arches that led to further and darker crypts.

  Upward of a score of scarlet-robed and hooded figures were informally gathered in groups. They sat on low wooden tripods the size of coffee tables. Their muttered conversation was low-voiced and unintelligible, but Crane sensed the tension that gripped them, felt their awe and soul-stabbing anticipation.

  There was one, tall and commanding, who strode from group to group. Red-masked faces jerked abruptly upward at his approach.

  But most revealing of all was the blank arch opposite Crane. Stretched out on a massive block of stone lay a woman, bound hand and foot: Diane, recaptured for the ritual from which she had escaped. Her body was to serve as an altar, perhaps to feel the thrust of a sacrificial knife. Black candles burned about her, diffusing acrid fumes which half obscured her; but Crane saw that she breathed. The tourniquet with his initials, however, had been removed.

  Since Diane was alive; he need not find that damning handkerchief, provided that he could extricate her. But though he was armed with the sentry’s pistol, the odds were far too great for open attack.

  Then he saw that the figure on the two foot, brazen crucifix behind that altar of bare, lacerated flesh was inverted. That final detail sent frost racing through his blood. Those hooded figures had gathered for the Black Mass, the evil ritual of modern satanism, utterly different from the oriental devil-worship. Crane wondered how that silver peacock fitted into the tangle.

  From one of the passages at the left came bestial snarls and half human mutterings: some monster held in reserve for the ultimate horror of that mad gathering.

  The lordly figure in black clapped his hands. The devotees shifted into crescent formation. Crane joined them as they moved toward the altar.

  The Black Monster was donning a priest’s stole and cope. Six red-robed acolytes filed from a passageway. Three carried thuribles from which poured blue-black, pungent fumes; the others had trays of hammered copper, all heaped with diamond shaped lozenges. They passed among the gathering, swinging their thuribles and offering wafers to the devotees.

  Crane tasted one of the confections; but instead of swallowing, he palmed it. It reeked with hasheesh and datura, blended with other oriental drugs he could not identify; but the two he recognized warned him. Both were brain-searing aphrodisiacs. Those wafers of illusion would make the partaker a crazed beast gnawed by outrageous fancies and delusions. That would give Crane his chance to act.

  And all the while that bestial mumbling and groaning and the vibration of pounded iron echoed from the further crypt.

  Crane watched the high priest of Satan make a foul mockery of the genuflections of the Mass, saw him spit upon the reversed crucifix, heard him chanting in a high, malignant voice.

  Crane could scarcely understand the ritual, but some phrases of ultimate blasphemy were all too clearly burned into his reeling brain.

  “Satan, Lord of the World, defend us against an unjust god who created only to damn…defend us against hypocrisy that mocks with the lure of redemption…hear the voice of the damned, O Lucifer, Son of the Morning! Satan, to you we make our prayer, Just and Logical God…”

  Finally, the priest faced about and mocked the caricatured crucifix.

  “And You, O Thief of Homage and Deceiver of Mankind, I compel you to become incarnate in this bread…by the mockery you have ordained, I who am ordained command you and you will obey…yea, while we draw blood anew from your wounds…and press fresh thorns of vengeance on your brow…this I can and this I will do… Accursed Nazarene… Traitor Son of a Traitor God…”

  A low rumbling mutter drowned his amen; then with an inverse gesture of his left hand, the priest blessed the gathering and in mocking accents completed th
e blasphemy: “Hoc est enim corpus meum!”

  He spat upon the consecrated bread, stolen from some consecrated altar; he scattered the fragments among the frothing, slavering devotees. They closed in, maddened with blasphemy and Asiatic drugs. They groveled, clawing and growling as they fought for the fragments.

  Crane joined them. It was too early for a break. He had to outwit the un-drugged acolytes.

  First voices, then the tearing of the scarlet robes told him that women were among those who writhed and panted and grappled on the floor. Hoods and masks yielded to clawing fingers. Soon they forgot blasphemy. The Asiatic drugs were biting deep.

  In a moment the vault had become an animation of the bestial carvings of a Tantric temple, Women in jewels and costly gowns, and men in formal evening dress were clawing each other with a fury that stripped clothing to shreds.

  A golden-haired fiend with crazed eyes and hungry red mouth emerged unpaired from the tangle and twined eager arms about Crane. A few scraps that glittered with green sequins trailed from her hips and what remained of a brassiere clung to breasts that throbbed from her fierce, drugged passion. Her legs were white serpents and her quivering body was a multitude of consuming flames, and her loose hair blinded and choked Crane as he swallowed his horror of that uncontrollable madness.

  Yet he had to play his part. That black-robed demon’s eyes glittered fiercely from behind his mask as he circled the arena, watching their ever fouler fancies cropping out…

  That golden-haired woman’s madness was cleaner than what was on every side. And despite his qualms, Crane’s blood surged in irrepressible response to her savage frenzy…

  Yet even as he yielded to that vortex of passion, a remote corner of his brain remained untainted. He plied her with answering kisses, felt the shudder of her hot flesh, but that one sane morsel was wondering. And at times he saw what was about him.

  He recognized a black-bearded man whose face had appeared in every major newspaper of the world…another, who had led a victorious army…and one who from the sidelines told premiers what to say…

  The Master gestured, and an acolyte dashed to the passageway at the left.