A Rival from the Grave Page 15

  “No—no; let me!” she cried and leapt to her feet, snatching the heavy iron weapon from his hand. Not only was she stripped of clothing; she was stripped of all restraint, as well. Not Audrey Hawkins, civilized descendant of a line of prudishly respectable New England rustics, stood before us in the silver lamps’ blue light, but a primordial cave-woman, a creature of the dawn of time, wild with the lust for blood-vengeance; armed, furious, naked and unashamed.

  “Come, Friend Trowbridge, we can safely leave the rest to her,” de Grandin told me as he took my elbow and forced me from the room.

  “But, man, that’s murder!” I expostulated as he dragged me down the unlit hall. “That girl’s a maniac, and armed, and that poor, crazy old man—”

  “Will soon be safe in hell, unless I miss my guess,” he broke in with a laugh. “Hark, is it not magnificent, my friend?”

  A wild, high scream came to us from the room beyond, then a woman’s cachinnating laugh, hysterical, thin-edged, but gloating; and the thudding beat of murderous blows. Then a weak, thin moaning, more blows; finally a little, groaning gasp and the sound of quick breath drawn through fevered lips to laboring lungs.

  “And now, my friend, I think we may go back,” said Jules de Grandin.

  “ONE MOMENT, IF YOU please, I have a task to do,” he called as we paused on the portico. “Do you proceed with Mademoiselle Audrey. I shall join you in a minute.”

  He disappeared inside the old, dark house, and I heard his boot-heels clicking on the bare boards of the hall as he sought the room where all that remained of Henry Putnam and the things he brought back from the dead were lying. The girl leaned weakly against a tall porch pillar, covering her face with trembling hands. She was a grotesque little figure, de Grandin’s jacket buttoned round her torso, mine tied kilt-fashion round her waist.

  “Oh,” she whispered with a conscience-stricken moan, “I’m a murderess. I killed him—beat him to death. I’ve committed murder!”

  I could think of nothing comforting to say, so merely patted her upon the shoulder, but de Grandin, hastening from the house, was just in time to hear her tearful self-arraignment.

  “Pardonnez-moi, Mademoiselle,” he contradicted, “you are nothing of the kind. Me, once in war I had to head the firing-party which put a criminal to death. Was I then his murderer? But no. My conscience makes no accusation. So it is with you. This Putnam one, this rogue, this miscreant, this so vile necromancer who filled these pleasant woods with squeaking, gibbering horrors, was his life not forfeit? Did not he connive at the death of that poor boy and girl who perished in the midst of their vacation? But yes. Did not he advertise for laborers, that they might furnish sustenance for those evil things he summoned from the tomb? Certainly. Did not he loose his squeaking, laughing thing upon your father, to kill him in his sleep? Of course.

  “Yet for these many crimes the law was powerless to punish him. We should have sent ourselves to lifelong confinement in a madhouse had we attempted to invoke the law’s processes. Alors, it was for one of us to give him his deserts, and you, my little one, as the one most greatly wronged, took precedence.

  “Eh bien,” he added with a tug at his small, tightly waxed mustache, “you did make extremely satisfactory work of it.”

  Since Audrey was in no condition to drive, I took the ancient flivver’s steering-wheel.

  “Look well upon that bad old house, my friends,” de Grandin bade as we started on our homeward road. “Its time is done.”

  “What d’ye mean?” I asked.

  “Precisely what I say. When I went back I made a dozen little fires in different places. They should be spreading nicely by this time.”

  “I CAN UNDERSTAND WHY THAT mummy we met in the woods caught fire so readily,” I told him as we drove through the woods, “but how was it that the man and woman in the house were so inflammable?”

  “They, too, were mummies,” he replied.

  “Mummies? Nonsense! The man was a magnificent physical specimen, and the woman—well, I’ll admit she was evil-looking, but she had one of the most beautiful bodies I’ve ever seen. If she were a mummy, I—”

  “Do not say it, my friend,” he broke in with a laugh; “eaten words are bitter on the tongue. They were mummies—I say so. In the woods, in Monsieur Hawkins’ home, when they made unpleasant faces at us through the window of our cabin, they were mummies, you agree? Ha, but when they stood in the blue light of those seven silver lamps, the lights which first shone on them when they came to plague the world, they were to outward seeming the same as when they lived and moved beneath the sun of olden Egypt. I have heard such things.

  “That necromancer, von Meyer, of whom Monsieur Putnam spoke, I know of him by reputation. I have been told by fellow occultists whose word I can not doubt that he has perfected a light which when shone on a corpse will give it every look of life, roll back the ravages of years and make it seem in youth and health once more. A very brilliant man is that von Meyer, but a very wicked one, as well. Some day when I have nothing else to do I shall seek him out and kill him to death for the safety of society.

  “Can you drive a little faster?” he inquired as we left the woods behind.

  “Cold without your jacket?” I asked.

  “Cold? Mais non. But I would reach the village soon, my friend. Monsieur le juge who also acts as coroner has a keg of most delicious cider in his cellar, and this afternoon he bade me call on him whenever I felt thirsty. Morbleu, I feel most vilely thirsty now!

  “Hurry, if you please, my friend.”

  Red Gauntlets of Czerni

  1. Revenant

  OUR VISITOR LEANT FORWARD in his chair and fixed his oddly light colored eyes on Jules de Grandin with an almost pleading expression. “It is about my daughter that I come,” he said in a flat, accentless voice, only his sharp-cut, perfect enunciation disclosing that English had not been his mother tongue. “She is gravely ill, Monsieur.”

  “But I do not practise medicine,” the little Frenchman answered. “There are thousands of good American practitioners to whom you could apply, Monsieur—”

  “Szekler,” supplied the other with an inclination of his head. “Andor Szekler, sir.”

  “Very well, Monsieur Szekler; as I say, I am not a practitioner of medicine, and—”

  “But no, it is not a medical practitioner whom I seek,” the other interrupted eagerly. “My daughter, her illness is more of the spirit than the body, and I have heard of your abilities to fight back those who dwell upon the threshold of the door between our world and theirs, to conquer such ills as now afflict my child. Say that you will take the case, I beg, Monsieur.”

  “Eh bien, you put a different aspect upon things,” de Grandin answered. “What are the symptoms of Mademoiselle your daughter, it you please?”

  Our visitor sucked the breath between his large and firm white teeth with a sort of hissing sigh, and a look of relief, something almost like a gleam of secret triumph, flashed in his narrow eyes. He was a man in late middle life, not fat, but heavily built, blond, regular of features save that his cheek-bones were set so high that they seemed to crowd his light, indefinitely colored eyes, making them seem narrow, and pushing them into a slight slant. Dry-skinned, clean-shaven save for a heavy cavalry mustache waxed into twin uprearing horns, he had that peculiarly well-groomed aspect that denotes the professional soldier, even out of uniform, and though his forehead was broad and benevolent, his queerly narrowed slanting eyes modified its kindliness, and the large, firm mouth, with its almost wolfishly white teeth, lent his face a slightly sinister expression. Now, however, it was the father, not the soldier trained in Old World traditions of blood and iron, who spoke.

  “We are Hungarian,” he began, then paused a moment, as though at a loss how to proceed.

  “One surmised as much,” de Grandin murmured politely. “One also assumed you are a soldier, Monsieur. Now, as to Mademoiselle your daughter, you were about to say—?” He raised his brows and bent a questioning
look upon the visitor.

  “You are correct, Monsieur,” responded Szekler. “I am—I was—a soldier; a colonel of hussars in the army of the old monarchy. You know what happened when the war was done, how Margyarország and Austria separated when the poltroon Charles gave up his birthright, and how our poor land, bereft of Transylvania, Croatia and Slavonia was racked by civil war and revolution. Things went badly for our caste. Reduced to virtual beggary, we were harried through the streets like beasts, for to have worn the Emperor’s uniform was sufficient cause to send a man before the execution squad. With what little of our fortune that remained I took my wife and little daughter and fled for sanctuary to America.

  “The new land has been good to us; in the years which I have spent here I have recouped the fortune which I lost, and added to it. We were very happy here until—”

  He paused and once more drew in his breath with that peculiar, eager sound, then passed his tongue-tip across his lower lip. The sight affected me unpleasantly. His tongue was red and pointed like an animal’s, and in his oddly oblique eyes there shone a look of scarcely veiled desire.

  De Grandin watched him narrowly, his little, round blue eyes intent upon the stranger’s face, recording every movement, every feature with photographic fidelity. His air of unsuspecting innocence, it seemed to me, was a piece of superb acting as he prompted gently: “Yes, Monsieur, and what occurred to spoil the happiness you found here?”

  “Zita, my daughter, was always delicate,” Colonel Szekler answered. “For a long time we feared she might be marked by that disease the Turks call gusel vereni, which is akin to the consumption of the Western world, except that the patient loses nothing of her looks and often seems to grow more beautiful as the end approaches. It is painless, progressive and incurable, so—”

  “One understands, Monsieur,” de Grandin nodded; “I have seen it in the Turkish hospitals. Et puis?”

  “Our Magyar girls attain the bloom of womanhood early,” answered Colonel Szekler. “When Zita was fourteen she was mature as any American girl four years her senior, and for a time her delicacy seemed to pass away. We sent her off to school, and each season she came home more strengthened, more robust, more like the Zita we would have her be. A month ago, however, her old malady returned. She shows profound lassitude, often complaining of being too tired to rise. Doctors we have had, five, eight of them; all said there is no trace of physical illness, yet there she is, growing weaker day by day. Two days ago I think I found the cause!”

  Again that whistling, eager sigh as he drew in his breath before proceeding: “Zita was lying on the chaise-longue in her room, and I went upstairs to ask if she felt well enough to come to luncheon. She was asleep. She was wearing purple-silk pajamas, and a shawl of purple silk was draped across her knees, which enabled me to see it more distinctly.

  “As I opened the door to her chamber I saw a patch of white, cloud-like substance, becoming denser and bigger as I watched, issuing from her left side just below the breast. I say it was like cloud, but that is not quite accurate; it had more substance than a cloud, it was more like some ponderable gas, or a great bubble of some gelatinous substance being gradually inflated, and as it grew, it seemed to thicken and become more opaque, or opalescent. Then, taking form as though modeled out of wax by the clever hands of an unseen sculptor, a face took shape and looked at me out of the bubble. It was a living face, Monsieur de Grandin, normal in size, with skin as white as the scraped bone of a fleshless skull, and thick, red lips and rolling, glaring eyes that made my blood run cold.

  “I stood there horror-frozen for a moment, repeating to myself: ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph have pity on us!’ and then, just as it had come, that cursed, milky cloud began to disappear. Slowly at first, but with ever-increasing speed, as though it were being sucked back into Zita’s body, the great, cloudy bubble shrank, the dreadful, leering face flattened out and elongated, melting imperceptibly into its frame of hazy, gleaming cloudiness; finally the whole mass vanished through the fabric of the purple garment which my daughter wore.

  “She still continued sleeping peacefully, apparently, and I shook her gently by the shoulder. She wakened and smiled at me and told me she had had a lovely dream. She—”

  “Tell me, Monsieur,” de Grandin interrupted, “you say you saw a face inside this so strange bubble emanating from Mademoiselle Zita’s side. Did you by any chance recognize it? Was it just a face, or was it, possibly, the countenance of someone whom you know?”

  Colonel Szekler started violently, and a look of frightened surprise swept across his face. “Why should I have recognized it?” he demanded in a dry, harsh voice.

  “Tiens, why should crockery show cracks, or knives dismember chickens, or table legs be built without knees?” de Grandin countered irritably. “I asked you if you recognized the face, not why.”

  Szekler seemed to age visibly, to put on ten more years, as he bent his head as though in tortured thought. “Yes, I recognized him,” he answered slowly. “It was the face of Red-gauntlet Czerni.”

  “Ah, and one infers that your relations with this Monsieur Czerni were not always of the pleasantest?”

  “I killed him.”

  De Grandin pursed his lips and raised inquiring brows. “Doubtless he was immeasurably improved by killing,” he returned, “but why, specifically, did you bestow the happy dispatch on him, Monsieur?”

  Colonel Szekler flicked his tongue across his nether lip again, and again I caught myself comparing him to something lupine.

  “The vermin!” he gritted. “While I and my son—eternal rest grant him, O Lord!—were fighting at the front for Emperor and country, that toad-creature was skulking in the backwaters of Pest, evading military service. At last they caught him; shipped him off with other conscripts to the Eastern front. Two days later he deserted and went over to the Russians. An avowed Communist, he and Bela Kun and other traitors were hired by the Russians to foment Bolshevist cells among Hungarian prisoners of war.

  The colonel’s breath was coming fast, and his odd, light eyes were glazed as though a film had dropped over them, as he fairly hurled a question at us:

  “Do you know—have you heard how two hundred loyal Hungarian officer-prisoners—prisoners of war, mind you, entitled to protection and respect by the law of nations—were butchered by the Russians and their traitorous Hungarian accomplices, because they could not be corrupted?”

  De Grandin nodded shortly. “I was with the French Intelligence, Monsieur,” he answered.

  “My son Stephan was one of those whom Tibor Czerni helped to massacre—the swine boasted of it later!

  “Back he came when war was done, led home to Hungary by the instinct that leads the vulture to the helpless, dying beast; and when the puppet-republic fell and bolshevism rose up in its place this vermin, this slacker and deserter, this traitor and murderer, was given the post of Commissar of the Tribunal of Summary Jurisdiction in Buda-Pest. You know what that meant, hein? That anyone whom he accused was doomed, that he was lord of life and death, a court from whose decisions there was no appeal throughout the city.

  “You heard me call him ‘Red-gauntlet’. You know why? Because, when it did not suit his whim to order unfortunate members of the bourgeoisie or gentry to be shot or hanged, he ‘put the red gauntlets on them’—had his company of butchers take them out and beat their hands to bloody pulp with mauls upon a chopping-block. Then, crippled hopelessly, suffering torment almost unendurable, they were given liberty to serve as warning to others of their kind whose only crime was that they loved their country and were loyal to their king.

  “One day the wretch conceived another scheme. He had been pampered, fawned upon and flattered since his rise to power till he thought himself omnipotent. Even women of our class—more shame to them!—had not withheld their favors to purchase safety for their men or the right to retain what little property they had. My wife—the Countess Szekler she was then—was noted for her beauty, and this slug, this toad,
this monstrous parody of humankind determined to have her. This Galician cur presumed to raise his eyes to Irina Szekler—kreuzsakrament, he who was not fit to lap the water which had laved her feet!

  “Out to our villa in the hills beyond Buda he went, forced himself into our house and made his vile proposals, telling my wife that he had captured me and only her complaisance could buy me immunity from the Red Gauntlets. But Szeklers do not buy immunity at such a price, and well she knew it. She ordered the vile creature from her presence as though she still were Countess Szekler and he but Tibor Czerni, son of a Galician money-lender and police court journalist of Pest.

  “He left her, vowing dreadful vengeance. Only the fact that he had not brought his bullies with him saved her from immediate arrest, for an hour later a squadron of ‘Lenin Boys’ drove up to the house, looted it of everything which they could carry, then burned it to the ground.

  “But we escaped. I came home almost as the scoundrel left, and we fled to friends in Buda who concealed us till I had time to grow a beard and so alter my appearance that I dared to venture on the street without certainty of summary arrest.

  “Then I began my hunt. Systematically, day by day, I dogged the villain’s steps, seeking for the chance to wash away the insult he had offered in his blood. Finally we met face to face in a side street just off Franz Joseph Square. He was armed, as always, but without his bodyguard of cutthroats. Despite my beard and shabby clothes he recognized me instantly and bawled out frantically for help, dragging at his pistol as he did so.

  “But to draw the rapier from my sword-stick and run him through the throat was but an instant’s work. He strangled in his blood before he could repeat his hail for help; so I dispatched the monster and escaped, for no one witnessed our encounter. Next day I fled with my wife and little daughter, and through a miracle we were able to cross the border to freedom.”

  “And had you ever seen this revenant—this materialization—before the painful incident in Mademoiselle’s boudoir?” de Grandin asked.