The Devil's Rosary

by Seabury Quinn

  “’Tis no laughin’ matter, Doctor,” he returned as he saw me smile. “’Tis th’ truth an’ nothin’ else I’m tellin’ ye—I’d ’a’ had a go at it meself if it warn’t that seafarin’ men don’t hold with disturbin’ th’ bones o’ th’ dead. But you, bein’ a landsman, an’ a doctor to boot, would most likely succeed where others have failed. I had it from my gran’ther, sir, an’ he was an old man an’ I but a lad when he gave it me, so ye can see ’tis no new thing I’m passin’ on. Where he got it I don’t know, but he guarded it like his eyes an’ would never talk about it, not even to me after he’d give it to me.”

  With that he asked me to go to his ditty-box and take out a packet done up in oiled silk, which he insisted I take as partial compensation for all I’d done for him.

  I tried to tell him the home paid my fee regularly, and that he was beholden to me for nothing, but he would not have it; so, to quiet the old man, I took the plan for my “everlastin’ fortune” before I left.

  9 Nov. 1898—Old John died last night, as I’d predicted, and probably went with the satisfied feeling that he had made a potential millionaire of the struggling country practitioner who tended him in his last illness. I must look into the mysterious packet by which he set such store. Probably it’s a chart for locating some long-sunk pirate ship or unburying the loot of Captain Kidd, Blackbeard, or some other old sea-robber. Sailormen a generation ago were full of such yarns, and recounted them so often they actually came to believe them.

  10 Nov. ’98—I was right in my surmise concerning old John’s legacy, though it’s rather different from the usual run of buried-treasure maps. Some day, when I’ve nothing else to do, I may go down to the old church in Harrisonville and actually have a try at the thing. It would be odd if poor Eric Balderson, struggling country practitioner, became a wealthy man overnight. What would I do first? Would a sealskin dolman for Astrid or a new side-bar buggy for me be the first purchase I’d make? I wonder.

  “H’m,” I remarked as I put down the book. “And this old seaman’s legacy, as your father called it—”

  “Is here,” Eric interrupted, handing me a square of ancient, crackling vellum on which a message of some kind had been laboriously scratched. The edges of the parchment were badly frayed, as though with much handling, though the indentures might have been the result of hasty tearing in the olden days. At any rate, it was a tattered and thoroughly decrepit sheet from which I read:

  in ye name of ye most Holie Trinitie

  I, Richard Thompson, being a right synfull manne and near unto mine ende do give greeting and warning to whoso shall rede herefrom. Ye booty which my master whose name no manne did rightly know, but who was surnamed by some ye Black Master and by somme Blackface ye Merciless, lyes hydden in divers places, but ye creame thereof is laid away in ye churchyard of St. Davides hard by Harrisons village. There, by daye and by nite do ye dedde stand guard over it for ye Master sealed its hydinge place both with cement and with a curse which he fondlie sware should be on them & on their children who violated ye sepulchre without his sanction. Yet if any there be who dare defye ye curse (as I should not) of hym who had neither pitie ne mercie ne lovingkindness at all, let hm go unto ye burrieing ground at dedde of nite at ye season of dies natalis invicti & obey ye direction. Further hint I dast not gyvve, for fear of him who lurks beyant ye portales of lyffe to hold to account such of hys servants as preceded him not in dethe. And of your charity, ye who rede this, I do charge and conjure ye that ye make goode and pieous use of ye Master hys treasure and that ye expend such part of ye same as may be fyttinge for masses for ye good estate of Richard Thompson, a synnfull man dieing in terror of his many iniquities & of ye tongueless one who waites himme across ye borderline

  When ye star shines from ye tree

  Be it as a sign to ye.

  Draw ye fourteen cubit line

  To ye entrance unto lyfe

  Whence across ye graveyard sod

  See spotte cursed by man & God.

  “It looks like a lot of childish nonsense to me,” I remarked with an impatient shrug as I tossed the parchment to de Grandin. “Those old fellows who had keys to buried treasure were everlastingly taking such care to obscure their meaning in a lot of senseless balderdash that no one can tell when they’re serious and when they’re perpetrating a hoax. If—”

  “Cordieu,” the little Frenchman whispered softly, examining the sheet of frayed vellum with wide eyes, holding it up to the lamplight, then crackling it softly between his fingers. “Is it possible? But yes, it must be—Jules de Grandin could not be mistaken.”

  “Whatever are you maundering about?” I interrupted impatiently. “The way you’re looking at that parchment anyone would think—”

  “Whatever anyone would think, he would be far from the truth,” de Grandin cut in, regarding us with the fixed, unwinking stare which meant deadly seriousness. “If this plat be a mauvaise plaisanterie—how do you call it? the practical joke?—it is a very grim one indeed, for the parchment on which it is engraved is human skin.”

  “What?” cried Eric and I in chorus.

  “Nothing less,” de Grandin responded. “Me, I have seen such parchments in the Paris musée; I have handled them, I have touched them. I could not be mistaken. Such things were done in the olden days, my friends. I think, perhaps, we should do well to investigate this business. Men do not set down confessions of a sinful life and implore the possible finders of treasure to buy masses for their souls on human hide when they would indulge in pleasantries. No, it is not so.”

  “But—” I began, when he shut me off with a quick gesture.

  “In the churchyard of Saint David’s this repentant Monsieur Richard Thompson did say. May I inquire, Friend Trowbridge, if there be such a church in the neighborhood? Assuredly there was once, for does he not say, ‘hard by Harrison’s village,’ and might that not have been the early designation of your present city of Harrisonville?”

  “U’m—why, yes, by George!” I exclaimed. “You’re right, de Grandin. There is a Saint David’s church down in the old East End—a Colonial parish, too; one of the first English churches built after the British took Jersey over from the Dutch. Harrisonville was something of a seaport in those days, and there was a bad reef a few miles offshore. I’ve been told the church was built and endowed with the funds derived from salvaging cargo from ships stranded on the reef. The parish dates back to 1670 or ’71, I believe.”

  “H’m-m.” De Grandin extracted a vile-smelling French cigarette from his black-leather case, applied a match to it and puffed furiously a moment, then slowly expelled a twin column of smoke from his nostrils. “And ‘dies natalis invicti’ our so scholarly Monsieur Richard wrote as the time for visiting this churchyard. What can that be but the time of Bonhomme Noël—the Christmas season? Parbleu, my friends, I think, perhaps, we shall go to that churchyard and acquire a most excellent Christmas gift for ourselves. Tonight is December 22, tomorrow should he near enough for us to begin our quest. We meet here tomorrow night to try our fortune, n’est-ce-pas?”

  Crazy and harebrained as the scheme sounded, both Eric and I were carried away by the little Frenchman’s enthusiasm, and nodded vigorous agreement.

  “Bon,” he cried, “très bon! One more drink, my friends, then let us go dream of the golden wheat awaiting our harvesting.”

  “But see here, Dr. de Grandin,” Eric Balderson remarked, “since you’ve told us what this message is written on this business looks more serious to me. Suppose there’s really something in this curse old Thompson speaks of? We won’t be doing ourselves much service by ignoring it, will we?”

  “Ah bah,” returned the little Frenchman above the rim of his half-drained glass. “A curse, you do say. Young Monsieur, I can plainly perceive you do not know Jules de Grandin, A worm-eaten fig for the curse! Me, I can curse as hard and as violently as any villainous old sea-robber who ever sank a ship or slit a throat!”

  2

  THE BLEAK
DECEMBER WIND which had been moaning like a disconsolate banshee all afternoon had brought its threatened freight of snow about nine o’clock and the factory- and warehouse-lined thoroughfares of the unfashionable part of town where old Saint David’s church stood were noiseless and white as ghost-streets in a dead city when de Grandin, Eric Balderson and I approached the churchyard pentice shortly before twelve the following night. The hurrying flakes had stopped before we left the house, however, and through the wind-driven pluvial clouds the chalk-white winter moon and a few stars shone frostily.

  “Cordieu, I might have guessed as much!” de Grandin exclaimed in exasperation as he tried the iron grille stopping the entrance to the church’s little close and turned away disgustedly. “Locked—locked fast as the gates of hell against escaping sinners, my friends,” he announced. “It would seem we must swarm over the walls, and—”

  “And get a charge of buckshot in us when the caretaker sees us,” Eric interrupted gloomily.

  “No fear, mon vieux,” de Grandin returned with a quick grin. “Me, I have not been idle this day. I did come here to reconnoiter during the afternoon—morbleu, but I did affect the devotion at evensong before I stepped outside to survey the terrain!—and many things I discovered. First, this church stands like a lonely outpost in a land whence the expeditionary force has been withdrawn. Around here are not half a dozen families enrolled on the parish register. Were it not for churchly pride and the fact that heavy endowments of the past make it possible to support this chapel as a mission, it would have been closed long ago. There is no resident sexton, no curé in residence here. Both functionaries dwell some little distance away. As for the cimetière, no interments have been permitted here for close on fifty years. The danger of grave-robbers is nil, so also is the danger of our finding a night watchman. Come, let us mount the wall.”

  It was no difficult feat scaling the six-foot stone barricade surrounding Saint David’s little God’s Acre, and we were standing ankle-deep in fresh snow within five minutes, bending our heads against the howling midwinter blast and casting about for some starting-point in our search.

  Sinking to his knees in the lee of an ancient holly tree, de Grandin drew out his pocket electric torch and scanned the copy of Richard Thompson’s cryptic directions. “H’m,” he murmured as he flattened the paper against the bare ground beneath the tree’s outspread, spiked branches, “what is it the estimable Monsieur Thompson says in his so execrable poetry? ‘When the star shines from the tree.’ Name of three hundred demented green monkeys, when does a star shine from a tree, Friend Trowbridge?”

  “Maybe he meant a Christmas tree,” I responded with a weak attempt at flippancy, but the little Frenchman was quick to adopt the suggestion.

  “Morbleu, I think you have right, good friend,” he agreed with a nod. “And what tree is more in the spirit of Noël than the holly? Come, let us take inventory.”

  Slowly, bending his head against the wind, yet thrusting it upward from the fur collar of his greatcoat like a turtle emerging from its shell every few seconds, he proceeded to circle every holly and yew tree in the grounds, observing them first from one angle, then another, going so near that he stood within their shadows, then retreating till he could observe them without withdrawing his chin from his collar. At last:

  “Nom d’un singe vert, but I think I have it!” he ejaculated. “Come and see.”

  Joining him, we gazed upward along the line indicated by his pointing finger. There, like a glass ornament attached to the tip of a Yuletide tree, shone and winked a big, bright star—the planet Saturn.

  “So far, thus good,” he murmured, again consulting the cryptogram. “‘Be it as a sign to ye,’ says our good Friend Thompson. Très bien, Monsieur, we have heeded the sign—now for the summons.

  “‘Draw ye fourteen cubit line’—about two hundred and fifty-two of your English inches, or, let us say, twenty-one feet,” he muttered. “Twenty-one feet, yes; but which way? ‘To the entrance unto life.’ U’m, what is the entrance to life in a burying-ground, par le mort d’un chat noir? A-a-ah? Perhaps yes; why not?”

  As he glanced quickly this way and that, his eyes had come to rest on a slender stone column, perhaps three feet high, topped by a wide, bowl-like capital. Running through the snow to the monument, de Grandin brushed the clinging flakes from the bowl’s lip and played the beam of his flashlight on it. “You see?” he asked with a delighted laugh.

  Running in a circle about the weathered stone was the inscription:

  SANCTVS, SANCTVS, SANCTVS

  Vnleff a man be borne again of VVater &

  Ye Holy Spirit he fhall in nowife …

  The rest of the lettering had withered away with the alternate frosts and thaws of more than two hundred winters.

  “Why, of course!” I exclaimed with a nod of understanding. “A baptismal font—‘the entrance unto life,’ as old Thompson called it.”

  “My friend,” de Grandin assured me solemnly, “there are times when I do not entirely despair of your intellect, but where shall we find that much-cursed spot of which Monsieur—”

  “Look, look, for God’s sake!” croaked Eric Balderson, grasping my arm in his powerful hand till I winced under the pressure. “Look there, Dr. Trowbridge—it’s opening!”

  The moon, momentarily released from a fetter of drifting clouds, shot her silver shafts down to the clutter of century-old monuments in the churchyard, and, twenty feet or so from us, stood one of the old-fashioned boxlike grave-markers of Colonial times. As we looked at it in compliance with Eric’s panic-stricken announcement, I saw the stone panel nearest us slowly slide back like a shutter withdrawn by an invisible hand.

  “Sa-ha, it lies this way, then?” de Grandin whispered fiercely, his small, white teeth fairly chattering with eagerness. “Let us go, my friends; let us investigate. Name of a cockroach, but this is the bonne aventure!

  “No, my friend,” he pushed me gently back as I started toward the tomb, “Jules de Grandin goes first.”

  It was not without a shudder of repulsion that I followed my little friend through the narrow opening in the tomb, for the air inside the little enclosure was black and terrible, and solid-looking as if formed of ebony. But there was no chance to draw back, for close behind me, almost as excited as the Frenchman, pressed Eric Balderson.

  The boxlike tomb was but the bulkhead above a narrow flight of stone stairs, steep-pitched as a ship’s accommodation ladder, I discovered almost as soon as I had crawled inside, and with some maneuvering I managed to turn about in the narrow space and back down the steps.

  Twenty steps, each about eight inches high, I counted as I descended to find myself in a narrow, stone-lined passageway which afforded barely room for us to walk in single file.

  Marching ahead as imperturbably as though strolling down one of his native boulevards, de Grandin led the way, flashing the ray from his lantern along the smoothly paved passage. At length:

  “We are arrived, I think,” he announced. “And, unless I am mistaken, as I hope I am, we are in a cul-de-sac, as well.”

  The passage had terminated abruptly in a blank wall, and there was nothing for us to do, apparently, but edge around and retrace our steps. I was about to suggest this when a joyous exclamation from de Grandin halted me.

  Feeling along the sandstone barrier, he had sunk to his knees, prodded the stone tentatively in several places, finally come upon a slight indentation, grooved as though to furnish hand-hold.

  “Do you hold the light, Friend Trowbridge,” he directed as he thrust the ferrule of his ebony cane into the depression and gave a mighty tug. “Ah, parbleu, it comes; it comes—we are not yet at the end of our tape!”

  Resisting only a moment, the apparently solid block of stone had slipped back almost as easily as a well-oiled trap-door, disclosing an opening some three and a half feet high by twenty inches wide.

  “The light, my friend—shine the light past me while I investigate,” de Grandin breathed, stoo
ping almost double to pass through the low doorway.

  I bent as far forward as I could and shot the beam of light over his head, and lucky for him it was I did so, for even as his head disappeared through the cleft he jerked back with an exclamation of dismay. “Ha, villain, would you so?” he rasped, snatching the keen blade from his sword cane and thrusting it through the aperture with quick, venomous stabs.

  At length, having satisfied himself that no further resistance offered beyond the wall, he sank once more to his bended knees and slipped through the hole. A moment later I heard him calling cheerfully, and, stooping quickly, I followed him, with Eric Balderson, making heavy work at jamming his great bulk through the narrow opening, bringing up the rear. De Grandin pointed dramatically at the wall we had just penetrated.

  “Morbleu, he was thorough, that one,” he remarked, inviting our attention to an odd-looking contrivance decorating the stones.

  It was a heavy ship’s boom, some six feet long, pivoted just above its center to the wall so that it swung back and forth like a gigantic pendulum. Its upper end was secured to a strand of heavily tarred cable, and fitted with a deep notch, while to its lower extremity was securely bolted what appeared to be the fluke from an old-fashioned ship’s anchor, weighing at least three stone and filed and ground to an axlike edge. An instant’s inspection of the apparatus showed us its simplicity and diabolical ingenuity. It was secured by a brace of wooden triggers in a horizontal position above the little doorway through which we had entered, and the raising of the stone-panel acted to withdraw the keepers till only a fraction of their tips supported the boom. Pressure on the sill of the doorway completed the operation, and sprung the triggers entirely back, permitting the timber with its sharpened iron tip to swing downward across the opening like a gigantic headsman’s ax, its knife-sharp blade sweeping an arc across the doorway’s top where the head of anyone entering was bound to be. But for the warning furnished by the beam of light preceding him, and the slowness of the machine’s operation after a century or more of inactivity, de Grandin would have been as cleanly decapitated by the descending blade as a convict lashed to the cradle of a guillotine.