A Rival from the Grave Page 12

  “I’m glad you saw something in Putnam’s woods and heard those things squeaking in the dark outside tonight,” she answered. “It’ll make it easier for you to believe me.” She paused a moment, then:

  “Did you notice the white house in the trees just before we came here?” she demanded.

  We shook our heads, and she went on, without pausing for reply:

  “That’s Colonel Putnam’s place, where it all started. My dad is postmaster and general storekeeper at Bartlesville, and Putnam’s mail used to be delivered through our office. I was graduated from high school last year, and went to help Dad in the store, sometimes giving him a lift with the letters, too. I remember, it was in the afternoon of the twenty-third of June a special delivery parcel came for Colonel Putnam, and Dad asked me if I’d like to drive him over to deliver it after supper. We could make the trip in an hour, and Dad and Colonel Putnam had been friends since boyhood; so he wanted to do him the favor of getting the package to him as soon as possible.

  “Folks had started telling some queer tales about Colonel Putnam, even then, but Dad pooh-poohed ’em all. You see, the colonel was the richest man in the county, and lived pretty much to himself since he came back here from Germany. He’d gone to school in that country as a young man, and went back on trips every year or so until about twenty years ago, when he married a Bavarian lady and settled there. His wife, we heard, died two years after they were married, when their little girl was born; then, just before the War, the daughter was drowned in a boating accident and Colonel Putnam came back to his old ancestral home and shut himself in from everybody, an old, broken and embittered man. I’d never seen him, but Dad had been to call once, and said he seemed a little touched in the head. Anyway, I was glad of the chance to see the old fellow when Dad suggested we drive over with the parcel.

  “There was something queer about the Putnam house—something I didn’t like, without actually knowing what it was. You know, just as you might be repelled by the odor of tuberoses, even though you didn’t realize their connection with funerals and death? The place seemed falling apart; the drive was overgrown with weeds, the lawns all gone to seed, and a general air of desolation everywhere.

  “There didn’t seem to be any servants, and Colonel Putnam let us in himself. He was tall and spare, almost cadaverous, with white hair and beard, and wore a long, black, double-breasted frock coat and a stiff white-linen collar tied with a black stock. At first he hardly seemed to know Dad, but when he saw the parcel we brought, his eyes lighted up with what seemed to me a kind of fury.

  “‘Come in, Hawkins,’ he invited; ‘you and your daughter are just in time to see a thing which no one living ever saw before.’

  “He led us down a long and poorly lighted hall, furnished in old-fashioned walnut and haircloth, to a larger apartment overlooking his weed-grown back yard.

  “‘Hawkins,’ he told my father, ‘you’re in time to witness a demonstration of the uncontrovertible truth of the Pythagorean doctrine—the doctrine of metempsychosis.’

  “‘Good Lord, Henry, you don’t mean to say you believe such non—’ Dad began, but Colonel Putnam looked at him so fiercely that I thought he’d spring on him.

  “‘Silence, impious fool!’ he shouted. ‘Be silent and witness the exemplification of the Truth!’ Then he calmed down a little, though he still continued walking up and down the room twitching his eyebrows, shrugging his shoulders and snapping his fingers every now and then.

  “‘Just before I came back to this country,’ he went on, ‘I met a master of the occult, a Herr Doktor von Meyer, who is not only the seventh son of a seventh son, but a member of the forty-ninth generation in direct descent from the Master Magician, Simon of Tyre. He possesses the ability to remember incidents in his former incarnations as you and I recall last night’s dreams in the morning, Hawkins. Not only that: he has the power of reading other people’s pasts. I sat with him in his atelier in Leipzig and saw my whole existence, from the time I was an insensate amoeba crawling in the primordial slime to the minute of my birth in this life, pass before me like the episodes of a motion picture.’

  “‘Did he tell you anything of this life; relate any incident of your youth known only to yourself, for instance, Henry?’ Father asked him.

  “‘Be careful, scoffer, the Powers know how to deal with unbelievers such as you!’ Colonel Putnam answered, flushing with rage, then calmed down again and resumed pacing the floor.

  “‘Back in the days when civilization was in the first flush of its youth,’ he told us, ‘I was a priest of Osiris in a temple by the Nile. And she, my darling, my dearest daughter, orphaned then as later, was a priestess in the temple of the Mother Goddess, Isis, across the river from my sanctuary.

  “‘But even in that elder day the fate which followed us was merciless. Then as later, water was the medium which was to rob me of my darling, for one night when her service to the Divine Mother was ended and temple slaves were rowing her across the river to my house, an accident overturned her boat, and she, the apple of my doting eyes, was thrown from her couch and drowned in the waters of Nilus. Drowned, drowned in the Egyptian river even as her latest earthly body was drowned in the Rhine.’

  “Colonel Putnam stopped before my father, and his eyes were fairly blazing as he shook his finger in Dad’s face and whispered:

  “‘But von Meyer told me how to overcome my loss, Hawkins. By his supernatural powers he was able to project his memory backward through the ages to the rock-tomb where they had laid the body of my darling, the very flesh in which she walked the streets of hundred-gated Thebes when the world was young. I sought it out, together with the bodies of those who served her in that elder life, and brought them here to my desolated house. Behold—’

  “With a sort of dancing step he crossed the room and swept aside a heavy curtain. There, in the angle of the wall, with vases of fresh-cut flowers before them, stood three Egyptian mummy-cases.

  “‘It is she!’ Colonel Putnam whispered tensely. ‘It is she, my own little daughter, in her very flesh, and these’—he pointed to the other two—‘were her attendants in that former life.’

  “‘Look!’ He lifted the lid from the center coffin and revealed a slender form closely wrapped in overlying layers of dust-colored linen. ‘There she stands, exactly as the priestly craftsmen wrapped her for her long, long rest, three thousand years ago! Now all is prepared for the great work I purpose; only the contents of that parcel you brought were needed to call the spirits of my daughter and her servants back to their earthly tenements, here, tonight, in this very room, Hawkins!’

  “‘Henry Putnam,’ my father cried, ‘do you mean to say you intend to play with this Devil’s business? You’d really try to call back the spirit of one whose life on earth is done?’

  “‘I would; by God, I will!’ Colonel Putnam shouted.

  “‘You shan’t!’ Father told him. ‘That kind of thing is denounced by the laws of Moses, and mighty good sense he showed when he forbade it, too!’

  “‘Fool!’ Colonel Putnam screamed at him. ‘Don’t you know Moses stole all his knowledge from the priesthood of Egypt, to which I belonged? Centuries before Moses was, we knew the white arts of life and the black arts of death. Moses! How dare you quote that ignorant charlatan and thief?’

  “‘Well, I’ll have no part in any such Devil’s mummery,’ Father told him, but Colonel Putnam was like a madman.

  “‘You shall!’ he answered, drawing a revolver from his pocket. ‘If either of you tries to leave this room I’ll shoot him dead!”

  The girl stopped speaking and covered her face with her hands. “If we’d only let him shoot us!” she said wearily “Maybe we’d have been able to stop it.”

  De Grandin regarded her compassionately. “Can you continue, Mademoiselle?” he asked gently. “Or would you, perhaps, wait till later?”

  “No, I might as well get it over with,” she answered with a sigh. “Colonel Putnam ripped the cover off the
package Father had brought and took out seven little silver vessels, each about as large as a hen’s egg, but shaped something like a pineapple—having a pointed top and a flat base. He set them in a semicircle before the three coffins and filled them from an earthenware jug which was fitted with a spout terminating in a knob fashioned like a woman’s head crowned with a diadem of hawks’ wings. Then he lighted a taper and blew out the oil-lamp which furnished the only illumination for the room.

  “It was deathly still in the darkened room; outside we could hear the crickets cheeping, and their shrill little cries seemed to grow louder and louder, to come closer and closer to the window. Colonel Putnam’s shadow, cast by the flickering taper’s light, lay on the wall like one of those old-time pictures of the Evil One.

  “‘The hour!’ he breathed. ‘The hour has come!’

  Quickly he leaned forward, touching first one, then another of the little silver jars with the flame of his taper.

  “The room’s darkness yielded to an eery, bluish glow. Wherever the fire came in contact with a vase a tiny, thin, blue flame sprang up.

  “Suddenly the corner of the room where the mummy-cases stood seemed wavering and rocking, like a ship upon a troubled ocean. It was hot and sultry in the house, shut in as it was by the thick pine woods, but from somewhere a current of cold—freezing cold!—air began to blow. I could feel its chill on my ankles, then my knees, finally on my hands as I held them in my lap.

  “‘Daughter, little daughter—daughter in all the ages past and all the ages yet to be, I call to you. Come, your father calls!’ Colonel Putnam intoned in a quavering voice. ‘Come. Come, I command it! Out of the illimitable void of eternity, come to me. In the name of Osiris, Dread Lord of the Spirit World, I command it. In the name of Isis, wife and sister of the Mighty One, I command it! In the names of Horus and Anubis, I command it!’

  “Something—I don’t know what—seemed entering the room. The windows were tight-latched; yet we saw the dusty curtains flutter, as though in a sudden current of air, and a light, fine mist seemed to obscure the bright blue flames burning in the seven silver lamps. There was a creaking sound, as though an old and rusty-hinged door were being slowly opened, and the lids of the two mummy-cases to right and left of the central figure began to swing outward. And as they moved, the linen-bandaged thing in the center coffin seemed to writhe like a hibernating snake recovering life, and stepped out into the room!

  “Colonel Putnam forgot Father and me completely. ‘Daughter—Gretchen, Isabella, Francesca, Musepa, T’ashamt, by whatever name or names you have been known throughout the ages, I charge you speak!’ he cried, sinking on his knees and stretching out his hands toward the moving mummy.

  “There came a gentle, sighing noise, then a light, tittering laugh, musical, but hard and metallic, as a thin, high voice replied. ‘My father, you who loved and nurtured me in ages gone, I come to you at your command with those who served me in the elder world; but we are weak and worn from our long rest. Give us to eat, my father.’

  “‘Aye, food shall ye have, and food in plenty,’ Colonel Putnam answered. ‘Tell me, what is it that ye crave?’

  “‘Naught but the life-force of those strangers at your back,’ the voice replied with another light, squeaking laugh. ‘They must die if we would live—’ and the sheeted thing moved nearer to us in the silver lamps’ blue light.

  “Before the Colonel could snatch up the pistol which had fallen from his hand, Father grabbed it, seized me with his free hand and dragged me from the house. Our car was waiting at the door, its engine still going, and we jumped in and started for the highroad at top speed.

  “We were nearly out of the woods surrounding Putnam’s house—the same woods I drove you through this afternoon—I happened to look back. There, running like a rabbit, coming so fast that it was actually overtaking our speeding car, was a tall, thin man, almost fleshless as a skeleton, and aptly dressed in some dust-colored, close-fitting kind of tights.

  “But I recognized it! It was one of those things from the mummy-cases we’d seen in Colonel Putnam’s parlor!

  “Dad crowded on more speed, but the dreadful running mummy kept gaining on us. It had almost overtaken us when we reached the edge of the woods and I happened to remember Father still had Colonel Putnam’s pistol. I snatched the weapon from his pocket and emptied it at the thing that chased us, almost at pointblank range. I know I must have hit it several times, for I’m a pretty good shot and the distance was too short for a miss, even allowing for the way the car was lurching, but it kept right on; then, just as we ran out into the moonlight at the woodland’s edge, it stopped in its tracks, waved its arms at us and—vanished.”

  De Grandin tweaked the sharply waxed ends of his little wheat-blond mustache. “There is more, Mademoiselle,” he said at length. “I can see it in your eyes. What else?”

  Miss Hawkins cast a startled look at him, and it seemed to me she shuddered slightly, despite the warming glow of the fire.

  “Yes,” she answered slowly, “there’s more. Three days after that a party of young folks came up here on a camping-trip from New York. They were at the Ormond cabin down by Pine Lake, six of ’em; a young man and his wife, who acted as chaperons, and two girls and two boys. The second night after they came, one of the girls and her boy friend went canoeing on the lake just at sundown. They paddled over to this side, where the Putnam farm comes down to the water, and came ashore to rest.”

  There was an air of finality in the way she paused. It was as if she had announced, “Thus the tale endeth,” when she told us of the young folks’ beaching their canoe, and de Grandin realized it, for, instead of asking what the next occurrence was, he demanded simply:

  “And when were they found, Mademoiselle?”

  “Next day, just before noon. I wasn’t with the searching-party, but they told me it was pretty dreadful. The canoe paddles were smashed to splinters, as though they’d used them as clubs to defend themselves and broken them while doing so, and their bodies were literally torn limb from limb. If it hadn’t been there was no evidence of any of them being eaten, the searchers would have thought a pair of panthers had pounced on them, for their faces were clawed almost beyond recognition, practically every shred of clothing ripped off them, and their arms and legs and heads completely separated from their bodies.”

  “U’m? And blood was scattered all around, one imagines?” de Grandin asked.

  “No! Not a single drop of blood was anywhere in sight. Job Denham, the undertaker who received the bodies from the coroner, told me their flesh was pale and dry as veal. He said he couldn’t understand it, but I—”

  She halted in her narrative, glancing apprehensively across her shoulder at the window; then, in a low, almost soundless whisper. “The Bible says the blood’s the life, doesn’t it?” she asked. “And that voice we heard in Colonel Putnam’s house told him those mummies wanted the vital force from Dad and me, didn’t it? Well, I think that’s the answer. Whatever it was Colonel Putnam brought to life in his house three days before was what set on that boy and girl in Putnam’s woods, and it—they—attacked them for their blood.”

  “Have similar events occurred, Mademoiselle?”

  “Did you notice the farm land hereabouts as we drove over?” she asked irrelevantly.

  “Not particularly.”

  “Well, it’s old land; sterile. You couldn’t raise so much as a mortgage on it. No one’s tried to farm it since I can remember, and I’ll be seventeen next January.”

  “U’m; and so—”

  “So you’d think it kind of funny for Colonel Putnam suddenly to decide to work his land, wouldn’t you?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And with so many men out of work hereabouts, you’d think it queer for him to advertise for farmhands in the Boston papers, wouldn’t you?”

  “Précisément, Mademoiselle.”

  “And for him to pay their railway fare up here, and their bus fare over from the station, and
then get dissatisfied with ’em all of a sudden, and discharge ’em in a day or two—and for ’em to leave without anybody’s knowing when they went, or where they went; then for him to hire a brand-new crew in the same way, and discharge them in the same way in a week or less?”

  “Mademoiselle,” de Grandin answered in a level, almost toneless voice, “we consider these events somewhat more than merely queer. We think they have the smell of fish upon them. Tomorrow we shall call upon this estimable Putnam person, and he would be well advised to have a credible explanation in readiness.”

  “Call on Colonel Putnam? Not I.” the girl rejoined. “I wouldn’t go near that house of his, even in daylight, for a million dollars!”

  “Then I fear we must forego the pleasure of your charming company,” he returned with a smile, “for we shall visit him, most certainly. Yes, of course.

  “Meantime,” he added, “we have had a trying day; is it agreeable that we retire? Doctor Trowbridge and I shall occupy the bunks in this room; you may have the inner room, Mademoiselle.”

  “Please,” she pleaded, and a flush mantled her face to the brows, “please let me sleep out here with you. I’d—well, I’d be scared to death sleeping in there by myself, and I’ll be just as quiet—honestly, I won’t disturb you.”

  She was unsupplied with sleeping-wear, of course; so de Grandin, who was about her stature, cheerfully donated a pair of lavender-and-scarlet striped silk pajamas, which she donned in the adjoining room, expending so little time in process that we had scarcely had time to doff our boots, jackets and cravats ere she rejoined us, looking far more like an adolescent lad than a young woman, save for those absurd pink-coral ear-studs.

  “I wonder if you’d mind my using the ’phone?” she asked as she pattered across the rough-board floor on small and amazingly white bare feet. “I don’t think it’s been disconnected, and I’d like to call Dad and tell him I’m all right.”