The Yellow Sign & Other Stories

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Then I am not safe,” I smiled.

  “Yes you are, for I hold you in my arms. Shall I tell you more about the Xin? When the Xin is about to do to death a man, the Yethhounds gallop through the night—”

  “What are the Yeth-hounds, Ysonde?” “The Yeth-hounds are dogs without heads. They are the spirits of murdered children, which pass through the woods at night, making a wailing noise.”

  “Do you believe this?”

  “Yes, for I have worn the yellow lotus—”

  “The yellow lotus—”

  “Yellow is the symbol of faith—”

  “Where?”

  “In Yian,” she said faintly.

  After a while I said, “Ysonde, you know there is a God?” “God and Xangi are one.”

  “Have you ever heard of Christ?”

  “No,” she answered softly.

  The wind began again among the tree tops. I felt her hands closing in mine. “Ysonde,” I asked again, “do you believe in sorcerers?” “Yes, the Kuen-Yuin are sorcerers; Yue-Laou is a sorcerer. “Have you seen sorcery?”

  “Yes, the reptile satellite of the Xin—”

  “Anything else?”

  “My charm,—the golden ball, the symbol of the Kuen-Yuin. Have you seen it change,—have you seen the reptiles writhe—?” “Yes,” I said shortly, and then remained silent, for a sudden shiver of apprehension had seized me. Barris also had spoken gravely, ominously of the sorcerers, the Kuen-Yuin, and I had seen with my own eyes the graven reptiles turning and twisting on the glowing globe. “Still,” said I aloud, “God lives and sorcery is but a name.”

  “Ah,” murmured Ysonde, drawing closer no me, “they say, in Yian, the Kuen-Yuin live; God is but a name.”

  “They lie,” I whispered fiercely.

  “Be careful,” she pleaded, “they may hear you. Remember that you have the mark of the dragon’s claw on your brow.” “What of it?” I asked, thinking also of the white mark on Barris’ arm. “Ah don’t you know that those who are marked with the dragon’s claw are followed by Yue-Laou, for good or for evil,—and the evil means death if you offend him?”

  “Do you believe that!” I asked impatiently..”I know it,” she sighed.

  “Who told you all this? Your step-father? What in Heaven’s name is he then,—a Chinaman!” “I don’t know; he is not like you.”

  “Have—have you told him anything about me?”

  “He knows about you—no, I have told him nothing,—ah what is this—see—it is a cord, a cord of silk about your neck—and about mine!”

  “Where did that come from?” I asked astonished.

  “It must be—in must be Yue-Laou who binds me to you,—it is as my step-father said—he said Yue-Laou would bind us—” “Nonsense,” I said almost roughly, and seized the silken cord, but to my amazement it melted in my hand like smoke. “What is all this damnable jugglery!” I whispered angrily, but my anger vanished as the words were spoken, and a convulsive shudder shook me to the feet. Standing on the shone of the lake, a stone’s throw away, was a figure, twisted and bent,—a little old man, blow- ing sparks from a live coal which he held in his naked hand. The coal glowed with increasing radiance, lighting up the skull-like face above it, and threw a red glow oven the sands at his feet. But the face!—the ghastly Chinese face on which the light flickered,—and the snaky slitted eyes, sparkling as the coal glowed hotter. Coal! It was not a coal but a golden globe staining the night with crimson flames—it was the symbol of the Kuen-Yuin.

  “See! See!” gasped Ysonde, trembling violently, “see the moon rising from between his fingers! Oh I thought it was my step-father and it is Yue-Laou the Maker of Moons—no! no! it is my step-fa- ther—ah God! they are the same!”

  Frozen with terror I stumbled to my knees, groping for my revolver which bulged in my coat pocket; but something held me—some- thing which bound me like a web in a thousand strong silky meshes. I struggled and turned but the web grew tighter; it was over us—all around us, drawing, pressing us into each other’s arms until we lay side by side, bound hand and body and foot, palpitating, panting like a pair of netted pigeons.

  And the creature on the shore below! What was my horror to see a moon, huge, silvery, rise like a bubble from between his fingers, mount higher, higher into the still air and hang aloft in the midnight sky, while another moon rose from his fingers, and another and yet another until the vast span of Heaven was set with moons and the earth sparkled like a diamond in the white glare.

  A great wind began to blow from the east and it bore to our ears a long mournful howl,—a cry so unearthly that for a moment our hearts stopped.

  “The Yeth-hounds!” sobbed Ysonde, “do you hear!—they are passing through the forest! The Xin is near!” Then all around us in the dry sedge grasses came a rustle as if some small animals were creeping, and a damp acrid odor filled the air. I knew the smell, I saw the spidery crablike creatures swarm out around me and drag their soft yellow hairy bodies across the shrinking grasses. They passed, hundreds of them, poisoning the air, rumbling, writhing, crawling with their blind mouthless heads raised. Birds, half asleep and confused by the darkness, fluttered away be- fore them in helpless fright, rabbits sprang from their forms, weasels glided away like flying shadows. What remained of the forest crea- tures rose and fled from the loathsome invasion; I heard the squeak of a terrified hare, the snort of stampeding deer, and the lumbering gal- lop of a bear; and all the time I was choking, half suffocated by the poisoned air.

  Then, as I struggled no free myself from the silken snare about me, I cast a glance of deadly fear at the sorcerer below, and at the same moment I saw him turn in his tracks..”Halt!” cried a voice from the bushes.

  “Barris!” I shouted, half leaping up in my agony. I saw the sorcerer spring forward, I heard the bang! bang! bang! of a revolver, and, as the sorcerer fell on the water’s edge, I saw Barris jump out into the white glare and fire again, once, twice, three times, into the writhing figure at his feet.

  Then an awful thing occurred. Up out of the black lake reared a shadow, a nameless shapeless mass, headless, sightless, gigantic, gaping from end to end.

  A great wave struck Barris and he fell, another washed him up on the pebbles, another whirled him back into the water and then,—and then the thing fell over him,—and I fainted.

  * * * This, then, is all that I know concerning Yue-Laou and the Xin. I do not fear the ridicule of scientists or of the press for I have told the truth. Barris is gone and the thing that killed him is alive to-day in the Lake of the Stars while the spider-like satellites roam through the Cardinal Woods. The game has fled, the forests around the lake are empty of any living creatures save the reptiles than creep when the Xin moves in the depths of the lake.

  General Drummond knows what he has lost in Barris, and we, Pierpont and I, know what we have lost also. His will we found in the drawer, the key of which he had handed me. It was wrapped in a bit of paper on which was written:

  “Yue-Laou the sorcerer is here in the Cardinal Woods. I must kill him or he will kill me. He made and gave to me the woman I loved,— he made her,—I saw him,—he made her out of a white water-lotus bud. When our child was born, he came again before me and demanded from me the woman I loved. Then, when I refused, he went away, and that night my wife and child vanished from my side, and I found upon her pillow a white lotus bud. Roy, the woman of your dream, Ysonde, may be my child. God help you if you love her for Yue-Laou will give,—and take away, as though he were Xangi, which is God. I will kill Yue-Laou before I leave this forest,—or he will kill me.

  “FRANKLYN BARRIS.” Now the world knows what Barris thought of the Kuen-Yuin and of Yue-Laou. I see than the newspapers are just becoming excited over the glimpses that Li-Hung-Chang has afforded them of Black Cathay and the demons of the Kuen-Yuin. The Kuen-Yuin are on the move.

  Pierpont and I have dismantled the shooting box in the Cardinal Woods. We hold ourselves ready at a moment’s notice to join and lead
the first Government party to drag the Lake of Stars and cleanse the forest of the crab reptiles. But it will be necessary that a large force assembles, and a well-armed force, for we never have found the body of Yue-Laou, and, living or dead, I fear him. Is he living?

  Pierpont, who found Ysonde and myself lying unconscious on the lake shore, the morning after, saw no trace of corpse or blood on the sands. He may have fallen into the lake, but I fear and Ysonde fears than he is alive. We never were able to find either her dwelling place or the glade and the fountain again. The only thing that remains to her of her former life is the gold.serpent in the Metropolitan Museum and her golden globe, the symbol of the Kuen-Yuin; but the latter no longer changes color.

  David and the dogs are waiting for me in the count yard as I write. Pierpont is in the gun room loading shells, and Howlett brings him mug after mug of my ale from the wood. Ysonde bends oven my desk,—I feel her hand on my arm, and she is saying, “Don’t you think you have done enough to-day, dear? How can you write such silly nonsense without a shadow of truth or foundation?”

  The Purple Emperor

  Un souvenir heureux est peut-être, sure terre, Plus vrai que le bonheur. A. De Musset.

  I. The Purple Emperor watched me in silence. I cast again, spinning out six feet more of waterproof silk, and, as the line hissed through the air far across the pool, I saw my three flies fall on the wa- ter like drifting thistledown. The Purple Emperor sneered.

  “You see,” he said, “I am right. There is not a trout in Brittany that will rise to a tailed fly.” “They do in America,” I replied.

  “Zut! for America!” observed the Purple Emperor. “And the trout take a tailed fly in England,” I insisted sharply.

  “Now do I care what things or people do in England?” demanded the Purple Emperor.

  “You don’t care for anything except yourself and your wriggling caterpillars,” I said, more annoyed than I had yet been. The Purple Emperor sniffed. His broad, hairless, sunburnt features bore that obstinate expression which always irritates me. Perhaps that manner in which he wore his hat intensified the irritation, for the flapping brim rested on both ears, and the two little velvet rib- bons which hung fromt he silver buckle in front of wiggled and flut- tered with every trivial breeze. His cunning eyes and sharp-pointed nose were out of all keeping with his fat red face. When he met my eye, he chuckled.

  “I know more about insects than any man in Morbihan-or Finistére either, for that matter,” he said. “The Red Admiral knows as much as you do, “ I retorted. “He doesn’t,” replied the Purple Emperor angrily.

  “And his collection of butterflied is twice as large as yours,” I added, moving down the stream to a spot directly opposite him. “It is, is it?” sneered the Purple Emperor. “Well. let me tell you, Monsieur Darrel, in all his collection he hasn’t a specimen, a single specimen, of that magnificent butterfly, Apature Iris, commonly known as the ‘Purple Emperor.’”

  “Everybody in Brittany knows that,” I said, casting across the sparkling water; “but just because you happen to be the only man who ever captured a ‘Purple Emperor’ in Morbihan, it doesn’t follow that you are an authority on sea-trout flies. Why do you say that a Breton sea-trout won’t touch a tailed fly?”

  “It’s so,” he replied.

  “Why? There are plenty of May-flies about the stream,” “Let ‘em fly!” snarled the Purple Emperor, “you won’t see a trout touch ‘em.” My arm was aching, but I grasped my split bamboo more firm - ly, and half turning, waded out into the stream and began to whip the ripples at the head of the pool.Agreat green dragon-fly came drifting by on the summer breeze and hung a moment above the pool, glittering like an emerald.

  “There’s a chance! Where is your butterfly net??” I called across the stream. “What for? That dragon-fly? I’ve got dozens--Anax Junius, Drury, characteristic, anal angle of posterior wings, in male, round; thorax marked with--”

  “That will do,” I said fiercely. “Can’t I point out an insect in the air without this burst of erudition? Can you tell me, in simple everyday French, what this little fly is--this one, flittering across the eel grass here beside me? See, it has fallen on the water.”

  “Huh!” sneered the Purple Emperor, “that’s a Linnobia annulus.”

  “What’s that?” I demanded.

  Before he could answer there came a heavy splash in the pool, and the fly disappeared. “He! he! he!” tittered the Purple Emperor. “Didn’t I tell you the fish knew their business? That was a sea-trout. I hope you don’t get him.”

  He gathered up his butterfly net, collecting box, chloroform bottle, and cyanide jar. Then he rose, swung the box over his shoulder, stuffed the poison bottles into the pockets of his silver-buttoned velvet coat, and lighted his pipe. This latter operation was a demoralizing spectacle, for the Purple Emperor, like all Breton peasants, smoked one of those microscopical Breton pipes which requires ten minutes to find, ten minutes to fill, ten minutes to light, and ten sec- onds to finish. With true Breton stolidity he went though this solemn rite, blew three puffs of smoke into the air, scratched his pointed nose reflectively, and waddled away, calling back an ironical “Au revoir, and bad luck to all Yankees!”

  I watched him out of sight, thinking sadly of the young girl whose life he made a hell upon earth--Lys Trevec, his niece. She never admitted it, but we all knew what the black-and-blue marks meant on her soft, round arm, and it made me sick to see the look of fear come into her eyes when the Purple Emperor waddled into the café of the Groix Inn.

  It was commonly said that he half-starved her. This she denied. Marie Joseph and ‘Fine Lelocard had seen him strike her the day after the Pardon of the Birds because she had liberated three bullfinch- es which ha had limed the day before. There was nothing to do about it. If the Purple Emperor had not bee avaricious, I should never have seen Lys at all, but he could not resist the thirty francs a week which I offered him; and Lys posed for me all day long, happy as a linnet in a pink thorn hedge. Nevertheless, the Purple Emperor hated me, and constantly threatened to send Lys back to her dreary flax-spin- ning. He was suspicious, too, and when he had gulped down the single glass of cider which proves fatal to the sobriety of most Bretons, he would pound the long, discoloured oaken table and roar curses on me, on Yves Terrec, and on the Red Admiral. We were the three objects in the world which he most hated: me, because I was a foreigner, and didn’t care a rap for him and his butterflies; and the RedAdmiral, because, because he was a rival entomologist.

  He had other reasons for hating Terrec.

  The Red Admiral, a little wizened wretch, with a badly adjusted glass eye and a passion for brandy, too his name from a butterfly which predominated in his collection. This butterfly, common- ly known to amateurs as the “Red Admiral,” and to entomologists as Vanessa Atalanta, had been the occasion of scandal among the entomologists of France and Brittany. For the Red Admiral had taken one of these common insects, dyed it a brilliant yellow by the aid of chemicals, and palmed it off on a credulous collector as a South African species, absolutely unique. The fifty francs which he gained by this rascality were, however, absorbed in a suit for damages brought by the outraged amateur a month later; and when he had sat in the Quimperlé jail for a month, he reappeared in the little village of St. Gildas soured, thirsty, and burning for revenge. Of course we named him the Red Admiral, and he accepted the name with suppressed fury.

  The Purple Emperor, on the other hand, had gained his imperial title legitimately, for it was an undisputed fact that the only specimen of that beautiful butterfly, Apatura Iris, or the Purple Emperor, as it is called by amateurs--the only specimen that had ever been taken in Finistére or in Morbihan--was captured and brought home alive by Joseph Marie Gloanec, ever afterward to be known as the Purple Emperor.

  When the capture of this rare butterfly became known the Red Admiral nearly went crazy. Every day for a week he trotted over to the Groix Inn, where the Purple Emperor lived with his niece, and brought hi
s microscope to bear on the rare newly captured butterfly, in hope of detecting a fraud. But this specimen was genuine, and he leered through his microscope in vain.

  “No chemicals there, Admiral,” grinned the Purple Emperor; and the Red Admiral chattered with rage. To the scientific world of Brittany and France the capture of an Apatura Iris in Morbihan was of great importance. The Museum of Quimper offered to purchase the butterfly, but the Purple Emper- or, though a hoarder of gold, was a monomaniac on butterflies, and he jeered at the Curator of the Museum. From all parts of Brittany and France letters of inquiry and congratulation poured in upon him. The French Academy of Sciences awarded him a prize, and the Paris Entological Society made him an honorary member. Being a Breton peasant, and a more than commonly pig-headed one at that, these honours did not disturb his equanimity; but when the little hamlet of St. Gildas elected him mayor, and, as is the custom in Brittany under such circumstances, he left his thatched house to take up an official life in the little Groix Inn, his head became completely turned. To be mayor in a village of nearly one hundred and fifty people! It was an empire! So he became unbearable, drinking himself viciously drunk every night of his life, maltreating his niece, Lys Trevec, like the barbarous old wretch that he was, and driving the Red Admiral nearly frantic with his eternal harping on the capture of Apatura Iris. Of course he refused to tell where he had caught the butterfly. The Red Admiral stalked his footsteps, but in vain.

  “He! he! he!” nagged the Purple Emperor, cuddling his chin over a glass of cider; “I saw you sneaking about the St. Gildas spinny yesterday morning. So you think you can find anotherApatura Iris by running after me? It won’t do, Admiral, it won’t do, d’ye see?”

  The Red Admiral turned yellow with mortification and envy, but the next day he actually took to his bed, for the Purple Emperor had brought home not a butterfly but a live chrysalis, which, if suc- cessfully hatched, would become a perfect specimen of the invaluable Apatura Iris. This was the last straw. The Red Admiral shut himself up in his little stone cottage, and for weeks now he had been invisible to everybody except ‘Fine Lelocard who carried him a loaf of bread and a mullet or langouste every morning.