A Rival from the Grave Read online

  NEWS OF THE MURDER spread like wildfire through the village. Zebulon Lindsay, justice of the peace, who also acted as coroner, empaneled a jury before noon; by three o’clock the inquisition had been held and a verdict of death by violence at the hands of some person or persons unknown was rendered.

  Among the agricultural implements in Hawkins’ stock de Grandin noted a number of billhooks, pike-like instruments with long, curved blades resembling those of scythes fixed on the ends of their strong helves.

  “These we can use tonight, my friends,” he told us as he laid three carefully aside.

  “What for?” demanded Audrey.

  “For those long, cadaverous things which run through Monsieur Putnam’s woods, by blue!” he answered with a rather sour smile. “You will recall that on the first occasion when you saw them you shot one of their number several times?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that notwithstanding you scored several hits, it continued its pursuit?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Very well. You know the reason? Your bullets tore clear through its desiccated flesh, but had not force to stop it. Tiens, could you have knocked its legs off at the knees, however, do you think that it could still have run?”

  “Oh, you mean—”

  “Precisely, exactly; quite so, ma chère, I purpose dividing them, anatomizing them, striking them limb from limb. What lead and powder would be powerless to do, these instruments of iron will accomplish very nicely. We shall go to their domain at nightfall; that way we shall be sure of meeting them. Were we to go by daylight, it is possible they would be hidden in some secret place, for like all their kind they wait the coming of darkness because their doings are evil.

  “Should you see one of them, remember what he did to your poor father, Mademoiselle, and strike out with your iron. Strike and do not spare your blows. It is not as foeman unto foe we go tonight, but as executioners to criminals. You understand?”

  WE SET OUT JUST at sundown, Audrey Hawkins driving, de Grandin and I, each armed with a stout billhook, in the rear seat.

  “It were better that you stopped here, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin whispered as the big white pillars of the mansion’s antique portico came in view between the trees. “There is no need to advertise our advent; surprise is worth a thousand men in battle.”

  We dismounted from the creaking vehicle and, our weapons on our shoulders, began a stealthy advance.

  “S-s-st!” Audrey warned as we paused a moment by a little opening in the trees, our eyes intent upon the house. “Hear it?”

  Very softly, like the murmur of a sleepy little bird, there came a subdued squeaking noise from a hemlock thicket twenty feet or so away. I felt the short hair on my neck begin to rise against my collar and a little chill of mingled hate and apprehension run rippling through my scalp and cheeks. It was like the sensation felt when one comes unexpectedly upon a serpent in the path.

  “Softly, friends,” Jules de Grandin ordered, grasping the handle of his billhook like a quarterstaff and leaning toward the sound; “do you stand by me, good Friend Trowbridge, and have your flashlight ready. Play its beam on him the minute he emerges, and keep him visible for me to work on.”

  Cautiously, quietly as a cat stalking a mouse, he stepped across the clearing, neared the clump of bushes whence the squeaking came, then leant forward, eyes narrowed, weapon ready.

  It burst upon us like a charging beast, one moment hidden from our view by the screening boughs of evergreen, next instant leaping through the air, long arms flailing, skeleton-hands grasping for de Grandin’s throat, its withered, leather-like face a mask of hatred and ferocity.

  I shot the flashlight’s beam full on it, but its terrifying aspect caused my hand to tremble so that I could scarcely hold the shaft of light in line with the leaping horror’s movements.

  “Ça-ha, Monsieur le Cadavre, we meet again, it seems!” de Grandin greeted in a whisper, dodging nimbly to the left as the mummy-monster reached out scrawny hands to grapple with him. He held the billhook handle in the center, left hand upward, right hand down, and as the withered leather talons missed their grasp he whirled the iron-headed instrument overhand from left to right, turning it as he did so, so that the carefully whetted edge of the heavy blade crashed with devastating force upon the mummy’s withered biceps. The limb dropped helpless from the desiccated trunk, but, insensible to pain, the creature whirled and grasped out with its right hand.

  Once more the billhook circled whistling through the air, this time reversed, striking downward from right to left. The keen-edged blade sheared through the lich’s other arm, cleaving it from the body at the shoulder.

  And now the withered horror showed a trace of fear. Sustained by supernatural strength and swiftness, apparently devoid of any sense of pain, it had not entered what intelligence the thing possessed that a man could stand against it. Now it paused, irresolutely a moment, teetering on its spindle legs and broad, splay feet, and while it hesitated thus the little Frenchman swung his implement again, this time like an ax, striking through dry, brown flesh and aged, brittle bone, lopping off the mummy’s legs an inch or so above the knees.

  Had it not been so horrible I could have laughed aloud to see the withered torso hurtle to the ground and lie there, flopping grotesquely on stumps of arms and legs, seeking to regain the shelter of the hemlock copse as it turned its fleshless head and gazed across its bony shoulder at de Grandin.

  “Hit it on the head! Crush its skull!” I advised, but:

  “Non, this is better,” he replied as he drew a box of matches from his pocket and lighted one.

  Now utter terror seized the limbless lich. With horrid little squeaking cries it redoubled its efforts to escape, but the Frenchman was inexorable. Bending forward, he applied the flaming match to the tinder-dry body, and held it close against the withered skin. The fire caught instantly. As though it were compounded of a mass of oil-soaked rags, the mummy’s body sent out little tongues of fire, surmounted by dense clouds of aromatic smoke, and in an instant was a blaze of glowing flame. De Grandin seized the severed arms and legs and piled them on the burning torso so that they, too, blazed and snapped and crackled like dry wood thrown on a roaring fire.

  “And that, I damn think, denotes the end of that,” he told me as he watched the body sink from flames to embers, then to white and scarcely glowing ashes. “Fire is the universal solvent, the one true cleanser, my friend. It was not for nothing that the olden ones condemned their witches to be burned. This elemental force, this evil personality which inhabited that so unsavory mummy’s desiccated flesh, not only can it find no other place to rest now that we have destroyed its tenement, but the good, clean, clarifying flames have dissipated it entirely. Never again can it materialize, never more enter human form through the magic of such necromancers as that sacré Putnam person. It is gone, disposed of—pouf! it is no longer anything at all.

  “What think you of my scheme, Mademoiselle?” he asked. “Was I not the clever one to match iron and fire against them? Was it not laughable to see—grand Dieu, Friend Trowbridge—where is she?”

  He leant upon his billhook, looking questingly about the edges of the clearing while I played my searchlight’s beam among the trees. At length:

  “One sees it perfectly,” he told me. “While we battled with that one, another of them set on her and we could not hear her cries because of our engagement. Now—”

  “Do—do you suppose it killed her as it did her father?” I asked, sick with apprehension.

  “We can not say; we can but look,” he answered. “Come.”

  Together we searched the woodland in an ever-widening circle, but no trace of Audrey Hawkins could we find.

  “Here’s her billhook,” I announced as we neared the house.

  Sticking in the hole of a tree, almost buried in the wood, was the head of the girl’s weapon, some three inches of broken shaft adhering to it. On the ground twenty feet or more away lay the main porti
on of the helve, broken across as a match-stem might he broken by a man.

  The earth was moist beneath the trees, and at that spot uncovered by fallen leaves or pine needles. As I bent to pick up Audrey’s broken billhook, I noticed tracks in the loam—big, barefoot tracks, heavy at the toe, as though their maker strained forward as he walked, and beside them a pair of wavy parallel lines—the toe-prints of Audrey’s boots as she was dragged through the woods and toward the Putnam house.

  “What now?” I asked. “They’ve taken her there, dead or alive, and—”

  He interrupted savagely: “What can we do but follow? Me, I shall go into that sacré house, and take it down, plank by single plank, until I find her; also I shall find those others, and when I do—”

  NO LIGHTS SHOWED IN the Putnam mansion as we hurried across the weed-grown, ragged lawn, tiptoed up the veranda steps and softly tried the handle of the big front door. It gave beneath our pressure, and in a moment we were standing in a lightless hall, our weapons held in readiness as we strove to pierce the gloom with straining eyes and held our breaths as we listened for some sound betokening an enemy’s approach.

  “Can you hear it, Trowbridge, mon ami?” he asked me in a whisper. “Is it not their so abominable squealing?”

  I listened breathlessly, and from the passageway’s farther end it seemed there came a series of shrill skirking squeaks, as though an angry rat were prisoned there.

  Treading carefully, we advanced along the corridor, pausing at length as a vague, greenish-blue glow appeared to filter out into the darkness, not exactly lightening into the darkness, making the gloom a little less abysmal.

  We gazed incredulously at the scene presented in the room beyond. The windows were all closed and tightly shuttered, and in a semicircle on the floor there burned a set of seven little silver lamps which gave off a blue-green, phosphorescent glow, hardly sufficient to enable us to mark the actions of a group of figures gathered there. One was a man, old and white-haired, disgustingly unkempt, his deep-set dark eyes burning with a fanatical glow of adoration as he kept them fixed upon a figure seated in a high, carved chair which occupied a sort of dais beyond the row of glowing silver lamps. Beside the farther wall there stood a giant form, a great brown skinned man with bulging muscles like a wrestler’s and the knotted torso of a gladiator. One of his mighty hands was twined in Audrey Hawkins’ short, blond hair; with the other he was stripping off her clothes as a monkey skins a fruit. We heard the cloth rip as it parted underneath his wrenching fingers, saw the girl’s slim body show white and lissome as a new-peeled hazel wand, then saw her thrown birth-naked on the floor before the figure seated on the dais.

  Bizarre and terrifying as the mummy-creatures we had seen had been, the seated figure was no less remarkable. No mummy, this, but a soft and sweetly rounded woman-shape, almost divine in bearing and adornment. Out of olden Egypt she had come, and with her she had brought the majesty that once had ruled the world. Upon her head the crown of Isis sat, the vulture cap with wings of beaten gold and blue enamel, and the vulture’s head with gem-set eyes, above it rearing upright horns of Hathor between which shone the polished-silver disk of the full moon, beneath them the uraeus, emblem of Osiris.

  About her neck was hung a collar of beaten gold close-studded with emeralds and blue lapis lazuli, and round her wrists were wide, bright bands of gold which shone with figures worked in red and blue enamel. Her breasts were bare, but high beneath the pointed bosoms was clasped a belt of blue and gold from which there draped a robe of thin, transparent linen gathered in scores of tiny, narrow pleats and fringed about the hem with little balls of gleaming gold which hung an inch or so above the arching insteps of her long and narrow feet, on every toe of which there gleamed a jewel-set ring. In her left hand she held a golden instrument fashioned like a T-cross with a long loop at its top, while in her right she bore a three-lashed golden scourge, the emblem of Egyptian sovereignty.

  All this I noted in a sort of wondering daze, but it was her glaring, implacable eyes which held me rooted to the spot. Like the eyes of a tigress or a leopardess they were, and glowing with a horrid, inward light as though illumined from behind by the phosphorescence of an all consuming, heatless flame.

  Even as we halted spellbound at the turning of the corridor we saw her raise her golden scourge and point it like an aiming weapon at Audrey Hawkins. The girl lay huddled in a small white heap where the ruthless giant had thrown her, but as the golden scourge was leveled at her she half rose to a crouching posture and crept forward on her knees and elbows, whimpering softly, half in pleading, half in fear, it seemed.

  The fixed, set stare of hatred never left the seated woman’s eyes as Audrey crawled across the bare plank floor, groveled for an instant at the dais’ lowest step, then raised her head and began to lick the other’s white, jeweled feet as though she were a beaten dog which sued for pardon from its mistress.

  I saw de Grandin’s small white teeth flash in the lamps’ weird light as he bared them in a quick grimace. “I damn think we have had enough of this, by blue!” he whispered as he stepped out of the shadows.

  While I had watched the tableau of Audrey’s degradation with a kind of sickened horror, the little Frenchman had been busy. From the pockets of his jacket and his breeches he extracted handkerchiefs and knotted them into a wad, then, drawing out a tin of lighter-fluid, he doused the knotted linen with the liquid. The scent of benzine mixed with ether spread through the quiet air as, his drenched handkerchiefs on his billhook’s iron head, he left the shadows, paused an instant on the door-sill, then struck a match and set the cloth ablaze.

  “Messieurs, Madame, I think this little comedy is ended,” he announced as he waved the fire-tipped weapon back and forth, causing the flames to leap and quicken with a ruddy, orange glow.

  Mingled terror and surprise showed on the naked giant’s face as de Grandin crossed the threshold. He fell away a pace, then, with his back against the wall, crouched for a spring.

  “You first, Monsieur,” the Frenchman told him almost affably, and with an agile leap cleared the few feet separating them and thrust the blazing torch against the other’s bare, brown breast.

  I gasped with unbelief as I saw the virile, sun-tanned flesh take fire as though it had been tinder, blaze fiercely and crumble into ashes as the flames spread hungrily, eating up his chest and belly, neck and head, finally destroying writhing arms and legs.

  The seated figure on the dais was cowering back in fright. Gone was her look of cold, contemptuous hatred; in its place a mask of wild, insensate fear had overspread her clear-cut, haughty features. Her red lips opened, showing needle-sharp white teeth, and I thought she would have screamed aloud in her terror, but all that issued from her gaping mouth was a little, squeaking sound, like the squealing of a mouse caught in a trap.

  “And now, Madame, permit that I may serve you, also!” De Grandin turned his back upon the blazing man and faced the cringing woman on the throne.

  She held up trembling hands to ward him off, and her frightened, squeaking cries redoubled, but inexorably as a mediæval executioner advancing to ignite the faggots round a condemned witch, the little Frenchman crossed the room, held out his blazing torch and forced the fire against her bosom.

  The horrifying process of incineration was repeated. From rounded breast to soft, white throat, from omphalos to thighs, from chest to arms and from thighs to feet the all-devouring fire spread quickly, and the woman’s white and gleaming flesh blazed fiercely, as if it had been oil-soaked wood. Bones showed a moment as the flesh was burned away, then took the fire, blazed quickly for an instant, glowed to incandescence, and crumbled to white ash before our gaze. Last of all, it seemed, the fixed and staring eyes, still gleaming with a greenish inward light, were taken by the fire, blazed for a second with a mixture of despair and hatred, then dissolved to nothingness.

  “Mademoiselle,” de Grandin laid his hand upon the girl’s bare shoulder, “they have gone.”

&
nbsp; Audrey Hawkins raised her head and gazed at him, the puzzled, non-comprehending look of one who wakens quickly from sound sleep upon her face. There was a question in her eyes, but her lips were mute.

  “Mademoiselle,” he repeated, “they have gone; I drove them out with fire. But he remains, my little one.” With a quick nod of his head he indicated Colonel Putnam, who crouched in a corner of the room, fluttering fingers at his bearded lips, his wild eyes roving restlessly about, as though he could not understand the quick destruction of the beings he had brought to life.

  “He?” the girl responded dully.

  “Précisément, Mademoiselle—he. The accursed one; the one who raised those mummies from the dead; who made this pleasant countryside a hell of death and horror; who made it possible for them to slay your father while he slept.”

  One of those unpleasant smiles which seemed to change the entire character of his comely little face spread across his features as he leant above the naked girl and held his billhook toward her.

  “The task is yours by right of bereavement, ma pauvre,” he told her, “but if you would that I do it for you—”