“In the kindness of his heart he offered her a ride to Harrisonville. Next morning he was found dead in his motor. Apparently he had collided with a roadside tree, for his windshield was smashed to fragments, and through the broken glass his head protruded. But nowhere was there any blood. Neither on the car nor on his clothing was there any stain, yet he had bled to death. Also, I who am at once a physician and an observer of facts, examined his poor, severed throat. Such tears as marred his flesh might have been made by teeth, perhaps by claws; but by splintered glass, never. What happened in that young man’s car we cannot know for certain, but we can surmise much. We can surmise, by example, that a thing that dotes on human flesh and blood had been thwarted of its prey and hunted for it in those roadside woods. We can surmise that when the young man, thinking her alone upon the highroad, offered her a ride, she saw an opportunity. Into his car she went, and when they were come to a lonely spot she set upon him. There was a sudden shrill, inhuman scream, the glare of beast-eyes in the dark, the stifling weight of a body hurled on unsuspecting shoulders, and the rending of shrinking flesh by bestial teeth and claws. The car is stopped, then started; it is run against a tree; a head, already almost severed from its body, is thrust through the broken windshield, and—the nameless horror which wears woman’s shape returns to its den, its lips red from the feast, its gorge replenished.”
“De Grandin!” I expostulated. “You’re raving. Such things can’t be!”
“Ha, can they not, parbleu?” he tweaked the ends of his diminutive mustache, gazing pensively at the fire a moment, then:
“Regard me, my friend. Listen, pay attention: Where, if you please, is Tunis?”
“In northwest Africa.”
“Précisément. And Egypt is where, if you please?”
“In Africa, of course, but—”
“No buts, if you please. Both lie on the same dark continent, that darksome mother of dark mysteries whose veil no man has ever completely lifted. Now, regard me: In lower Egypt, near Zagazig, are the great ruins of Tell Besta. They mark the site of the ancient, wicked city of Bubastis, own sister of Sodom and Gomorrah of accursèd memory. It was there, in the days of the third Rameses, thirteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, that men and women worshiped the cat-headed one, she who was called Ubasti, sometimes known as Bast. Yes. With phallic emblems and obscenities that would shock present-day Montmartre, they worshipped her. Today her temples lie in ruins, and only the hardest stones of her many monuments endure.
“But there are things much more enduring than granite and brass. The olden legends tell us of a race apart, a race descended from the loins of this cat-headed one of Bubastis, who shared her evil feline nature even though they wore the guise of women, or, less often, men.
“The fellaheen of Egypt are poor, wretchedly poor, and what the bare necessities of living do not snatch from them the tax-collector does; yet not for all the English gold that clings and jingles at Shepard’s Hotel in Cairo could one bribe a fella to venture into the ruins of Tell Besta after sunset. No, it is a fact; I myself have seen it.
“For why? Because, by blue, that cursèd spot is ghoul-haunted. Do not laugh; it is no laughing matter; it is so.
“The ancient gods are dust, and dust are all their worshippers, but their memories and their evil lives after them. The fellaheen will tell you of strange, terrible things which dwell amid the ruins of Bubastis; things formed like human creatures, but which are, as your own so magnificent Monsieur Poe has stated,
‘… neither man nor woman,
… neither brute nor human
They are ghouls!’
“Yes, certainly. Like a man’s or woman’s, their faces are, so too are their bodies to some extent; but they see in the dark, like her from whom they are whelped, they wear long nails to seize their prey and have beast-teeth to tear it, and the flesh and blood of living men—or dead, if live be not available—they make their food and drink.
“Not only at Tell Besta are they found, for they are quick to multiply, and their numbers have spread. In the ruined tombs of all North Africa they make their lairs, awaiting the unwary traveler. Mostly they are nocturnal, but they have been known to spring on the lone voyager by day. The Arabs hate and fear them also, and speak of them by indirection. ‘That people,’ they call them, nor does one who has traveled in North Africa need ask a second time what the term connotes.
“Very well, then. When our friend Arif Pasha first showed fright, like a restive horse in the presence of hidden danger, at sight of those we know as Monsieur and Madame Bera, I was astonished. Such things might be in darker Africa, perhaps in Persia, or Asiatic Turkey, but in America—New Jersey—non!
“However, Jules de Grandin has the open mind. I made it a duty to meet this so strange couple, to observe their queer catlike eyes, to note the odd, clawlike nails of their hands, but most of all to watch their white, gleaming teeth and hear the soft, purring intonation of their words.
“‘These are queer folk, Jules de Grandin,’ I say to me. ‘They are not like others.’
“That very night we visited the City Hospital and listened to our little Trula tell her fearsome story. What she had to say of those who hired her and would have hunted her to death convinced me of much I should otherwise not have believed.
“Then came Sergeant Costello’s report of the four girls hired by this Madame d’Afrique, whom we now know to be also Madame Bera—girls who went but did not return. Then comes the information of the strange woman who rode with the young Cableson the night he met his death.
“‘Jules de Grandin,’ I tell me, ‘your dear America, the place in which you have decided to remain, is invaded. The very neighborhood of good Friend Trowbridge’s house, where you are to reside until you find yourself a house of your own, is peopled by strange night-seeing things.’
“‘It is, hélas, as you have said, Jules de Grandin,’ I reply.
“‘Very well, then, Jules de Grandin,’ I ask me, ‘what are we to do about it?’
“‘Mordieu,’ I answer me, ‘we shall exterminate the invaders. Of course.’
“‘Bravo, it are agreed.’
“Now, all is prepared. Mademoiselle Trula, my little pretty one, my small half orange, I need your help. Will you not do this thing for me?”
“I—I’m terribly afraid,” the girl stammered, “but I—I’ll do it, sir.”
“Bravely spoken, my pigeon. Have no fear. Your guardian angel is with you. Jules de Grandin will also be there.
“Come. Let us make ready, the doorbell sounds.”
ARIF PASHA AND COSTELLO waited on the porch, and de Grandin gave a hand to each. “I haven’t any more idea what th’ pitch is than what th’ King o’ Siam had for breakfast this mornin’,” Costello confessed with a grin when introductions had been made, “but I’m bankin’ on you to pay off, Dr. de Grandin.”
“I hope your confidence is not misplaced, my friend,” the Frenchman answered. “I hope to show you that which killed the poor young Cableson before we’re many hours older.”
“What’s that?” asked the detective. “Did you say ‘that,’ sir. Wasn’t it a person, then? Sure, after all our bother, you’re not goin’ to tell me it was an accident after all?”
De Grandin shrugged. “Let us not quibble over pronouns, my old one. Wait till you have seen, then say if it be man or woman, beast or fiend from hell.”
Led by de Grandin as ceremoniously as though he were escorting her to the dance floor, Trula Petersen ascended the stairs to don the ragged bedgown she wore the night she fled for life through the shattered window. She returned in a few moments, her pale childish face suffused with blushes as she sought to cover the inadequate attire by wrapping de Grandin’s fur-lined overcoat more tightly about her slim form. Above the fleece-lined bedroom slippers on her feet I caught a glimpse of slender bare ankle, and mentally revolted against the Frenchman’s penchant for realism which would send her virtually unclothed into the cold autumn night.
>
But there was no time to voice my protest, for de Grandin followed close behind her with the corrugated cardboard carton he had received from Ridgeway’s in his arms. “Behold, my friends,” he ordered jubilantly displaying its contents—four magazine shotguns—“are these not lovely? Pardieu, with them we are equipped for any contingency!”
The guns were twelve-gauge models of the unsportsmanlike “pump” variety, and the barrels had been cut off with a hack-saw close to the wood, shortening them by almost half their length.
“What’s th’ armament for, sir?” inquired Costello, examining the weapon de Grandin handed him. “Is it a riot we’re goin’ out to quell?”
The little Frenchman’s only answer was a grin as he handed guns to Arif Pasha and me, retaining the fourth one for himself. “You will drive, Friend Trowbridge?” he asked.
Obediently, I slipped into a leather windbreaker and led the way to the garage. A minute later we were on the road to Mooreston.
He had evidently made a reconnaissance that afternoon, for he directed me unerringly to a large greystone structure on the outskirts of the suburb. On the north was the dense patch of second-growth pine through which the autumn wind soughed mournfully. To east and west lay fallow fields, evidently reservations awaiting the surveyor’s stake and the enthusiastic cultivation of glib-tongued real estate salesmen. The house itself faced south on the Pike, on the farther side of which lay the grove of oak and chestnut into which Trula had escaped.
“Quiet, my friends, pour l’amour d’un rat mort!” de Grandin begged. “Stop the motor, Friend Trowbridge. Attendez, mes braves. Allons au feu!
“Now, my little lovely one!” With such courtesy as he might have shown in assisting a marchioness to shed her cloak, he lifted the overcoat from Trula Petersen’s shivering shoulders, bent quickly and plucked the wool-lined slippers from her feet, then lifted her in his arms and bore her across the roadway intervening between us and the lawn, that gravel might not bruise her unshod soles. “Quick, toward the house, petite!” he ordered. “Stagger, play the drunken one—cry out!”
The girl clung trembling to him a moment, but he shook her off and thrust her almost roughly toward the house.
There was no simulation in the terror she showed as she ran unsteadily across the frost-burnt lawn, nor was the deadly fear that sounded in her wailing, thin-edged cry a matter of acting. “Help, help—please help me!” she screamed.
“Excellent; très excellent,” applauded from his covert behind a rhododendron bush. “Make ready, mes amis, I damn think they come!”
A momentary flash of light showed on the dark background of the house as he spoke, and something a bare shade darker than the surrounding darkness detached itself from the building and sped with pitiless quickness toward the tottering, half-swooning girl.
Trula saw it even as we did, and wheeled in her tracks with a shriek of sheer mortal terror. “Save me, save me, it’s he!” she cried wildly.
Half a dozen frenzied, flying steps she took, crashed blindly into a stunted cedar, and fell sprawling on the frosty grass.
A wild, triumphant yell, a noise half human, half bestial, came from her pursuer. With a single long leap it was on its quarry.
“Mordieu, Monsieur le Démon, we are well met!” de Grandin announced, rising from his ambush and leveling his sawed-off shotgun.
The leaping form seemed to pause in midair, to retrieve itself in the midst of its spring like a surprised cat. For an instant it turned its eyes on de Grandin, and they gleamed against the darkness like twin spheres of phosphorus. Next instant it pounced.
There was a sharp click, but no answering bellow of the gun. The cartridge had misfired.
“Secours, Friend Trowbridge; je suis perdu!” the little Frenchman cried as he went down beneath an avalanche of flailing arms and legs. And as he fought off his assailant I saw the flare of gleaming green eyes, the flash of cruel strong teeth, and heard the snarling beastlike growl of the thing tearing at his throat.
Nearer than the other two, I leaped to my friend’s rescue, but as I moved a second shadowy form seemed to materialize from nothingness beside me, a battle-cry of feline rage shrilled deafeningly in my cars, and a clawing, screaming fury launched itself upon me.
I felt the tough oiled leather of my windbreaker rip to shreds beneath the scoring talons that struck at me, looked for an instant into round, infuriated phosphorescent eyes, then went down helpless under furious assault.
“There is no power nor might nor majesty save in Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate!” Arif Pasha chanted close beside me. “In the glorious name of Allah I take refuge from Shaitan, the stoned and rejected!” A charge of BB shot sufficient to have felled a bear tore through the clawing thing above me, there was a sharp snapping of metal, and a second blaze of searing light as the riot gun roared again.
The ear-piercing scream of my assailant diminished to a growl, and the growl sank to a low, piteous moan as the form above me went limp, rolled from my chest and lay twitching on the frosted earth.
I fought unsteadily to my knees and went faint at the warm stickiness that smeared the front of my jerkin. No need to tell a doctor the feel of blood; he learns it soon enough in his grim trade.
Costello was battering with his gunstock at the infernal thing that clung to de Grandin, not daring to fire for fear of hitting the struggling Frenchman.
“Thanks, friend,” the little fellow panted, wriggling from beneath his adversary and jumping nimbly to his feet. “Your help was very welcome, even though I had already slit his gizzard with this—” He raised the murderous double-edged hunting knife with which he had been systematically slashing his opponent from the moment they grappled.
“Good Lord o’ Moses!” Costello gasped as de Grandin’s flashlight played on the two forms quivering on the grass. “’Tis Mr. an’ Mrs. Bera! Who’d ’a’ thought swell folks like them would—”
“Folks? Parbleu, my friend, I damnation think you call them out of their proper name!” de Grandin interrupted sharply. “Look at this, if you please, and this, also!”
Savagely he tore the black-silk negligee in which the woman had been clothed, displaying her naked torso to his light. From clavicle to pubis the body was covered with coarse yellowish hair, curled and kinky as a bushman’s wool, and where the breasts should have been was scarcely a perceptible swelling. Instead, protruding through the woolly covering was a double row of mammillae, unhuman as the dugs of a multiparous beast.
“For the suckling of her whelps, had she borne any, which the good God forbid,” he explained in a low voice. He turned the shot-riddled body over. Like the front, the back was encased in yellowish short hair, beginning just below the line of the scapulae and extending well down the thighs.
A quick examination of the male showed similar pelage, but in its case the hair was coarser, and an ugly dirty grey shade. Beneath the wool on its front side we found twin rows of rudimentary teats, the secondary sexual characteristics of a member of the multiparæ.
“You see?” he asked simply.
“No, I’m damned if I do,” I denied as the others held silence. “These are dreadful malformations, and their brains were probably as far from normal as their bodies, but—”
“Ah bah,” he interrupted. “Here is no abnormality, my friend. These creatures are true to type. Have I not already rehearsed their history? From the tumuli of Africa they come, for there they were pursued with gun and dog like the beast-things they are. In this new land where their kind is unknown they did assume the garb and manners of man. With razor or depilatories they stripped off the hair from their arms and legs, and other places where it would have been noticeable. Then they lived the life of the community outwardly. Treasure from ravished tombs gave them much money; they had been educated like human beings in the schools conducted by well-meaning but thickheaded American missionaries, and all was prepared for their invasion. America is tolerant—too tolerant—of foreigners. More than due allowance is m
ade for their strangeness by those who seek to make them feel at home, and unsuspected, unmolested, these vile ones plied their dreadful trade of death among us. Had the she-thing not capitulated to her appetite for blood when she slew young Cableson, they might have gone for years without the danger of suspicion. As it was”—he raised his shoulders in a shrug—“their inborn savageness and Jules de Grandin wrought their undoing. Yes, certainly; of course.
“Come, our work is finished. Let us go.”
The Curse of the House of Phipps
JULES DE GRANDIN DREW a final long puff from his cigarette, ground its butt against the bottom of the ash tray and emitted a tapering cone of smoke from his pursed lips, regarding our visitor with narrowed eyes. “And your gran’père, also, Monsieur?” he asked.
“Yes, sir; and my great-great-grandfather, and his father. Not a man of my branch of the family since old Joshua Phipps has lived to see his children. Joshua fell dead across the threshold of his wife’s room ten minutes after she became a mother. Elijah, the son whom Joshua never saw, died in the last assault on Cornwallis’s works at Yorktown. News travelled slowly those days, but when the company returned to Massachusetts they told his widow of their captain’s death. All agreed he was shot through the lungs a little after ten in the morning. Half an hour earlier his wife had given birth to a son. That son died at Buena Vista the same day his son was born, and that son, my great-grandfather, was shot in the draft riots in New York during the Civil War. His twin children, a son and daughter, were born the same night. My grandfather died at San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt the same day my father was born. I was born June 6, 1918—”
“Mordieu, the day that your so glorious Marines met the boche at Château-Thierry—”
“Precisely, sir. I was born a little after noon. My father went down shortly after one o’clock, full o’ machine gun bullets as a pudding is of plums.
“Call it superstition, coincidence—anything you like—but I can’t shake off the thought of it—”
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