A Rival from the Grave Page 13

  “By all means, do so,” bade de Grandin as he hitched the blanket higher on his shoulder. “We can understand his apprehension for your safety in the circumstances.”

  The girl raised the receiver from the old-fashioned wall fixture, took the magneto crank in her right hand and gave it three vigorous turns, then seven slow ones.

  “Hello? Dad?” she called. “This is Audrey; I’m—oh!” The color drained from her cheeks as though a coat of liquid white were sprayed across her face. “Dad—Dad—what is it?” she cried shrilly; then slowly, like a marionette being lowered by its strings, she wavered totteringly a moment, let fall the telephone receiver and slumped in a pathetic little heap upon the cabin floor.

  De Grandin and I were out of bed with a bound, the little Frenchman bending solicitously above the fainting girl, I snatching at the telephone receiver.

  “Hullo, hullo?” I called through the transmitter. “Mr. Hawkins?”

  “Huh—hoh—huh-hoh-huh!” the most fiendish, utterly diabolical chuckle I ever heard came to me across the wire. “Huh—hoh—huh-hoh-huh!”

  Then click! the telephone connection broke, and though I repeated the three-seven ring I’d heard the girl give several times, I could obtain no answer, not even the faint buzzing which denotes an open wire.

  “My father! Something dreadful has happened to him, I know!” moaned the girl as she recovered consciousness. “Did you hear it, too, Doctor Trowbridge?”

  “I heard something, certainly; it sounded like a poor connection roaring in the wire,” I lied. Then, as hopeful disbelief lightened in her eyes: “Yes, I’m sure that’s what it was, for the instrument’s quite dead, now.”

  Reluctantly reassured, Audrey Hawkins clambered into bed, and though she moaned once or twice with a little, whimpering sound, her buoyant youth and healthily tired young muscles stood her in good stead, and she was sleeping peacefully within an hour.

  Several times, as de Grandin and I lay in silence, waiting for her to drop off, I fancied I heard the oddly terrifying squeaking sounds we’d noticed earlier in the evening, but I resolutely put all thought of what their probable origin might be from my mind, convinced myself they were the cries of nocturnal insects, and—lay broad awake, listening for their recurrence.

  “What was it that you heard in the telephone, Friend Trowbridge?” the little Frenchman asked me in a whisper when her continued steady, even breathing had assured us that our youthful guest was sound asleep.

  “A laugh,” I answered, “the most hideous, hellish chuckle I’ve ever listened to. You don’t suppose her father could have laughed like that, just to frighten—”

  “I do not think Monsieur her father has either cause for laughter or ability to laugh,” he interrupted. “What it is that haunts these woods I do not surely know, my friend, though I suspect that the crack-brained Colonel Putnam let loose a horde of evil elementals when he went through that mummery at his house last summer. However that may be, there is no doubt that these things, whatever be their nature, are of a most unpleasant disposition, intent on killing any one they meet, either from pure lust for killing or in order to secure the vital forces of their victims and thus increase their strength in a material form. It is my fear that they may have a special grudge against Monsieur Hawkins and his daughter, for they were the first people whose lives they sought, and they escaped, however narrowly. Therefore, having failed in their second attempt to do the daughter mischief this afternoon, they may have wreaked vengeance on the father. Yes, it is entirely possible.”

  “But it’s unlikely,” I protested. “He’s over in Bartlesville, ten miles away, while she’s right here; yet—”

  “Yes, you were saying—” he prompted as a sudden unpleasant thought forced itself into my mind and stopped my speech.

  “Why, if they’re determined to do mischief to either Hawkins or his daughter, haven’t they attempted to enter this house, which is so much nearer than her home?”

  “Eh bien, I thought you might be thinking that,” he answered dryly. “And are you sure that they have made no attempt to enter here? Look at the door, if you will be so good, and tell me what it is you see.”

  I glanced across the cabin toward the stout plank door and caught the ruddy reflection of the firelight on a small, bright object lying on the sill. “It looks like your hunting-knife,” I told him.

  “Précisément, you have right; it is my hunting-knife,” he answered. “My hunting-knife, unsheathed, with its sharp point directed toward the door-sill. Yours is at the other entrance, while I have taken the precaution to place a pair of heavy shears on the window-ledge. I do not think I wasted preparations, either, as you will probably agree if you will cast your eyes toward the window.”

  Obediently, I glanced at the single window of the room, then stifled an involuntary cry of horror; for there, outlined against the flickering illumination of the dying fire, stood an evil-looking, desiccated thing, skeleton-thin, dark, leather-colored skin stretched tightly as drum parchment on its skull, broken teeth protruding through retracted lips, tiny sparks of greenish light glowing malevolently in its cavernous, hollow eye-sockets. I recognized it at a glance; it was a mummy, an Egyptian mummy, such as I had seen scores of times while walking through the museums. And yet it was no mummy, either, for while it had the look of death and unnaturally delayed decay about it, it was also endued with some kind of dreadful life-in-death; for its little, glittering eyes were plainly capable of seeing, while its withered, leathery lips were drawn back in a grin of snarling fury, and even as I looked, they moved back from the stained and broken teeth in the framing of some phrase of hatred.

  “Do not be afraid,” de Grandin bade. “He can look and glare and make his monkey-faces all he wishes, but he can not enter here. The shears and knives prevent him.”

  “Y-you’re sure?” I asked, terror gripping at my throat.

  “Sure? To be sure I’m sure, He and his unpleasant playfellows would have been inside the cabin, and at our throats, long since, could they have found a way to enter. The sharpened steel, my friend, is very painful to him. Iron and steel are the most earthly of all metals, and exercise a most uncomfortable influence on elementals. They can not handle it, they can not even approach it closely, and when it is sharpened to a point it seems to be still more efficient, for its pointed end appears to focus and concentrate radiations of psychic force from the human body, forces which are highly destructive to them. Knowing this, and suspecting what it is that we have to do with from the story Mademoiselle Hawkins told us, I took precautions to place these discouragers at doors and window before we went to bed. Tiens, I have lain here something like an hour, hearing them squeak and gibber as they prowled around the house; only a moment since I noticed that thin gentleman peering in the window, and thought you might he interested.”

  Rising, he crossed the cabin on tiptoe, so as not to wake the sleeping girl, and drew the burlap curtain across the window. “Look at that until your ugly eyes are tired, Monsieur le Cadavre,” he bade. “My good Friend Trowbridge does not care to have you watch him while he sleeps.”

  “Sleep!” I echoed. “D’ye think I could sleep knowing that’s outside?”

  “Parbleu, he is much better outside than in, I think,” returned the Frenchman with a grin. “However. if you care to lie awake and think of him, I have no objections. But me, I am tired. I shall sleep; nor shall I sleep the worse for knowing that he is securely barred outside the house. No.”

  REASSURED, I FINALLY FELL asleep, but my rest was broken by unpleasant dreams. Sometime toward morning I awoke, not from any consciousness of impending trouble nor from any outward stimulus; yet, once my eyes were open, I was as fully master of my faculties as though I had not slept at all. The pre-dawn chill was in the air, almost bitter in its penetrating quality; the fire which had blazed merrily when we said good-night now lay a heap of whitened ashes and feebly smoldering embers. Outside the cabin rose a furious chorus of light, swishing, squeaking noises, as
though a number of those whistling rubber toys with which small children are amused were being rapidly squeezed together. At first I thought it was the twittering of birds, then realized that the little feathered friends had long since flown to southern quarters; besides, there was an eery unfamiliarity in this sound, totally unlike anything I had ever heard until the previous evening, and it rose and gathered in shrill tone and volume as I listened. Vaguely, for no conscious reason, I likened it to the clamoring of caged brutes when feeding-time approaches in the zoo.

  Then, as I half rose in my bunk, I saw an indistinct form move across the cabin. Slowly, very slowly, and so softly that the rough, uneven floor forbore to creak beneath her lightly pressing feet, Audrey Hawkins tiptoed toward the cabin door, creeping with a kind of feline grace. Half stupefied, I saw her pause before the portal, sink stealthily to one knee, reach out a cautious hand—

  “Non, non; dix mille fois non—you shall not do it!” de Grandin cried, emerging from his bunk and vaulting across the cabin, seemingly with a single movement, then grasping the girl by the shoulders with such force that he hurled her half across the room. “What business of the fool do you make here, Mademoiselle?” he asked her angrily. “Do not you know that once the barriers of steel have been removed we should be—mon Dieu, one understands!”

  Audrey Hawkins’ hands were at her temples as she looked at him with innocent amazement while he raged at her. Clearly, she had wakened from a sound and dreamless sleep when she felt his hands upon her shoulders. Now she gazed at him in wonder mixed with consternation.

  “Wh-what is it? What was I doing?” she asked.

  “Ah, parbleu, you did nothing of your own volition, Mademoiselle,” he answered, “but those other ones, those very evil ones outside the house, in some way they reached you in your sleep and made you pliable to their desires. Ha, but they forgot de Grandin; he sleeps, yes, but he sleeps the sleep of the cat. They do not catch him napping. But no.”

  We piled fresh wood upon the fire and, wrapped in blankets, sat before the blaze, smoking, drinking strong black coffee, talking with forced cheerfulness till the daylight came again, and when de Grandin put the curtain back and looked out in the clearing round the cabin, there was no sign of any visitants, nor were there any squeaking voices in the woods.

  BREAKFAST FINISHED, WE CLIMBED into the ancient Ford and set out for Bartlesville, traveling at a speed I had not thought the ancient vehicle could make.

  Hawkins’ general store was a facsimile of hundreds of like institutions to be found in typical American villages from Vermont to Vancouver. Square as a box, it faced the village main street. Shop windows, displaying a miscellany of tinned groceries, household appliances and light agricultural equipment, occupied its front elevation. Shuttered windows piercing the second-story walls denoted where the family living-quarters occupied the space above the business premises.

  Audrey tried the red-painted door of the shop, found it locked securely, and led the way through a neat yard surrounded by a fence of white pickets, took a key from her trousers pockets and let us through the private family entrance.

  Doctors and undertakers have a specialized sixth sense. No sooner had we crossed the threshold than I smelled death inside that house. De Grandin sensed it, too, and I saw his smooth brow pucker in a warning frown as he glanced at me across the girl’s shoulder.

  “Perhaps it would be better if we went first, Mademoiselle,” he offered. “Monsieur your father may have had an accident, and—”

  “Dad—oh, Dad, are you awake?” the girl’s call interrupted. “It’s I. I was caught in Putnam’s woods last evening and spent the night at Sutter’s camp, but I’m—Dad! Why don’t you answer me?”

  For a moment she stood silent in an attitude of listening; then like a flash she darted down the little hall and up the winding stairs which led to the apartment overhead.

  We followed her as best we could, cannoning into unseen furniture, barking our shins on the narrow stairs, but keeping close behind her as she raced down the upper passageway into the large bedroom which overlooked the village street.

  The room was chaos. Chairs were overturned, the clothing had been wrenched from the big, old-fashioned bed and flung in a heap in the center of the floor, and from underneath the jumbled pile of comforter and sheets and blankets a man’s bare foot protruded.

  I hesitated at the doorway, but the girl rushed forward, dropped to her knees and swept aside the veiling bedclothes. It was a man past early middle life, but looking older, she revealed. Thin, he was, with that starved-turkey kind of leanness characteristic of so many native New Englanders. His gray head was thrown back and his lean, hard-shaven chin thrust upward truculently. In pinched nostril, sunken eye and gaping open mouth his countenance bore the unmistakable seal of death. He lay on his back with arms and legs sprawled out at grotesque angles from the inadequate folds of his old-fashioned Canton flannel nightshirt, and at first glance I recognized the unnaturalness of his posture, for human anatomy does not alter much with death, and this man’s attitude would have been impossible for any but a practised contortionist.

  Even as I bent my brows in wonder, de Grandin knelt beside the body. The cause of death was obvious, for in the throat, extending almost down to the left clavicle, there gaped a jagged wound, not made by any sharp, incising weapon, but rather, apparently, the result of some savage lancination, for the whole integument was ripped away, exposing the trachea to view—yet not a clot of blood lay round the ragged edges of the laceration, nor was there any sign of staining on the nightrobe. Indeed, to the ordinary pallor of the dead there seemed to be a different sort of pallor added, a queer, unnatural pallor which rendered the man’s weather-stained countenance not only absolutely colorless, but curiously transparent, as well.

  “Good heavens—” I began, but:

  “Friend Trowbridge, if you please, observe,” de Grandin ordered, lifting one of the dead man’s hands and rotating it back and forth. I grasped his meaning instantly. Even allowing for the passage of rigor mortis and ensuing post mortem flaccidity, it would have been impossible to move that hand in such a manner if the radius and ulna were intact. The man’s arm-bones had been fractured, probably in several places, and this, I realized, accounted for the posture of his hands and feet.

  “Dad—oh, Daddy, Daddy!” cried the distracted girl as she took the dead man’s head in her arms and nursed it on her shoulder. “Oh, Daddy dear, I knew that something terrible had happened when—”

  Her outburst ended in a storm of weeping as she rocked her body to and fro, moaning with the helpless, inarticulate piteousness of a dumb thing wounded unto death. Then, abruptly:

  “You heard that laugh last night!” she challenged me. “You know you did, Doctor Trowbridge—and there’s where we heard it from,” she pointed with a shaking finger at the wall-telephone across the room.

  As I followed the line of her gesture I saw that the instrument had been ripped clear from its retaining bolts, its wires, its mouthpiece and receiver broken as though by repeated hammer-blows.

  “They—those dreadful things that tried to get at us last night came over here when they found they couldn’t reach me and murdered my poor father!” she continued in a low, sob-choked voice. “I know! The night Colonel Putnam raised those awful mummies from the dead the she-thing said they wanted our lives, and one of the others chased us through the woods. They’ve been hungering for us ever since, and last night they got Daddy. I—”

  She paused, her slender bosom heaving, and we could see the tear drops dry away as fiery anger flared up in her eyes.

  “Last night I said I wouldn’t go near Putnam’s house again for a million dollars,” she told de Grandin. “Now I say I wouldn’t stay away from there for all the money in the world. I’m going over now—this minute—and pay old Putnam off. I’ll face that villain with his guilt and make him pay for Daddy’s life if it’s the last thing I do!”

  “It probably would be, Mademoiselle,” de
Grandin answered dryly. “Consider, if you please: This so odious Monsieur Putnam is undoubtlessly responsible for loosing those evil things upon the countryside, but while his life is forfeit for his crimes of necromancy, merely to kill him would profit us—and the community—not at all. These most unpleasant pets of his have gotten out of hand. I make no doubt that he himself is in constant, deadly fear of them, and that they, who came as servants of his will, are now his undisputed masters. Were we to kill him, we should still have those evil ones to reckon with, and till they have been utterly destroyed the country will be haunted by them; and others—countless others, perhaps—will share the fate of your poor father and that unfortunate young man and woman who perished on their boating-trip, not to mention those misguided workingmen who answered Monsieur Putnam’s advertisements. You comprehend? This is a war of extermination on which we are embarked; we must destroy or be destroyed. Losing our lives in a gallant gesture would be a worthless undertaking. Victory, not speedy vengeance, must be our first and great consideration.”

  “Well, then, what are we to do, sit here idly while they range the woods and kill more people?”

  “By no means, Mademoiselle. First of all, we must see that your father has the proper care; next, we must plan the work which lies before us. That done, it is for us to work the plans which we have made.”

  “All right, then, let’s call the coroner,” she agreed. “Judge Lindsay knows me, and he knew Dad all his life. When I tell him how old Putnam raised those mummies from the dead, and—”

  “Mademoiselle!” the Frenchman expostulated. “You will tell him nothing about anything which Monsieur Putnam has done. It has been two hundred years, unfortunately, since your kin and neighbors ceased paying such creatures as this Putnam for their sins with rope and flame. To tell your truthful story to the coroner would be but signing your commitment to the madhouse. Then, doubly protected by your incarceration and public disbelief in their existence, Monsieur Putnam’s mummy-things could range the countryside at will. Indeed, it is altogether likely that the first place they would visit would be the madhouse where you were confined, and there, defenseless, you would be wholly at their mercy. Your screams for help would be regarded as the ravings of a lunatic, and the work of extirpation of your family which they began last night would be concluded. Your life, which they have sought since first they came, would be snuffed out, and, with none to fight against them, the countryside would fall an easy prey to their vile depredations. Eh bien, who can say how far the slaughter would go before the pig-ignorant authorities, at last convinced that you had told the sober truth when they thought you raving, would finally arouse themselves and take befitting action? You see why we must guard our tongues, Mademoiselle?”