A Rival from the Grave Page 16

  Colonel Szekler flushed. “Yes,” he answered. “Once. Though Stephan died a hero, and our loss was years ago, the wound has never healed in his mother’s heart. Indeed, her sorrow seems increasing as the years go by. She has been leaning more and more toward spiritism of late years, and though we knew the Church forbids such things, my daughter and I could not bring ourselves to dissuade her, since she seemed to get some solace from the mediums’ mummery. A month ago, when the first symptoms of Zita’s returning illness were beginning to make their appearance, she prevailed on us to attend a séance with her.

  “The sitting was held at the house of a medium who calls herself Madame Claire. The psychic sat at the end of a long table on which a gramophone’s tin trumpet had been placed, and her wrists were fastened to the back of her chair with tape which was sewed, not tied. Her ankles were similarly secured to the front legs of the chair, and a blindfold was tied about her eyes. Then the lights were turned off and we sat with our hands upon the table, staring out into the darkness.

  “We had waited some time without any manifestation, and I felt myself growing sleepy with the monotony of it, when a sharp rap sounded suddenly from the tin cone lying on the table. Rat-tat-tat, it came with a quick, clicking beat, then ended with a heavier blow, which caused a distinct metallic clang. No sooner had this ceased than the table began to move, as though pushed by the medium’s feet; yet we had seen her ankles lashed securely to her chair and the knots sewed with thick linen thread.

  “Next instant we heard the tin horn scraping slowly across the table-top, as though being lifted with an effort, only to fall back again. This kept up several minutes; then a voice came to us, rather weakly, but still strong enough to be understood:

  A, B, C, D, E, F, G,

  All good people hark to me,

  Where you sit there, one two, three—

  “The senseless doggerel was spouted at us through the trumpet which had risen and floated through the air to the far corner of the room. I was about to rise in anger at the childishness of it all when something happened which arrested my attention. The room in which we sat was closed up tightly. We had seen the medium shut and lock the door, and all the windows were latched and heavy curtains hung before them. The place was intolerably hot, and the air had begun to grow stale and flat; but as I made a move to rise, there was a sudden chilling of the atmosphere, as though a draft of winter wind had blown into the room. No, that is not quite accurate. There was no wind nor any stirring of the air; rather, it was as though we had all been put into some vast refrigerator where the temperature was absolute zero. What gave me the impression of an air-current was an odd, whistling sound which accompanied the sudden change of temperature—something like the whirring which one hears when wind blows through telegraph wires in wintertime.

  “And as the chilling cold replaced the sultry heat, the piping, mincing voice reciting its inane drivel through the trumpet was replaced by another, a stronger voice, which laughed a cackling, spiteful laugh, then choked and retched and strangled, as though the throat from which it came were suddenly filled up with blood. The words it spoke were almost unintelligible, but not quite. I’d heard them fifteen years before, but they came back to me clearly, as though it had been yesterday:

  “‘Pig-dog, I’ll have her yet. Next time, I’ll come in such a way that you can not prevail against me!’

  “They broke off with in awful, gurgling rattle, and I recognized them. It was the threat that Tibor Czerni spewed at me that day in Buda-Pest when I ran my rapier through his throat and he lay choking in his blood upon the sidewalk of Maria Valeria Street!

  “Just then the trumpet fell crashing to the floor, and where it had been floating in the air there showed a spot of something luminous, like a monster bubble rising from some foul, miasmic swamp, and inside it, outlined by a sort of phosphorescence, showed the grinning, malignant face of Tibor Czerni.

  “The medium woke up shrieking from her trance. ‘Lights! For God’s sake, turn on the lights!’ she screamed. Then, as the lamps were lighted: ‘I’m a trumpet psychic; my controls never materialize, yet—’ she struggled with the bonds that held her to the chair in a perfect ecstasy of terror, crying, groaning, begging to be released, and it was not till we had cut the tapes that she could talk coherently. Then she ordered: ‘Get out; get out, all of you—someone here is followed by an evil spirit; one of you must have done it a great wrong when it was in the flesh—one of you is a murderer! Out of my house, the lot of you, and take your Nemesis with you!’”

  De Grandin tweaked the needle-points of his tightly waxed, diminutive mustache. “And the luminous globe, the one with Monsieur the Dead Man’s face in it, did it disappear when the lights went up?” he asked.

  “Yes,” responded Colonel Szekler, “but—”

  “But what, if you please, Monsieur?”

  “There was a distinct odor in the room, an odor which had not been present before Czerni’s cursed face appeared—it was the faint but unmistakable odor of decomposing flesh. Trust a soldier who has seen a hundred battlefield cemeteries plowed up by shell-fire weeks after the dead have been buried to recognize that smell!”

  For a long moment there was silence. Colonel Szekler looked at Jules de Grandin expectantly. Jules de Grandin turned a speculative eye on Colonel Szekler. At length: “Very well, Monsieur,” he agreed with a nod. “The case intrigues me. Let us go and see Mademoiselle your daughter.”

  2. Zita

  COLONEL SZEKLER’S HOUSE FACED the Albemarle Road, a mile or so outside of town. It was a big house, bowered in Norway spruce and English holly and flowering rhododendron, well back from the highway, with a stretch of smoothly mown lawn before and a well-tended rose garden on each side. There was no hallway, and we stepped directly into a big room which seemed to combine the functions of library, music room and living-room. And as a mirror gives back the image of the face which looks in it, so this single room reflected the character of the family we had come to serve. Books, piano, easy-chairs and sofas loomed in the dim light filtering through the close-drawn silken curtains. An easel with a partly finished water color on it stood by a north window; beside it was a table of age-mellowed cherry laden with porcelain dishes, tubes of color and scattered badger-hair brushes.

  Beside the concert-grand piano was a music-stand on which a violin rested, and the polished barrel of a cello showed beyond the music-bench. A bunch of snowballs nodded from a crystal vase upon a table, a spray of mimosa let its saffron grains fall in a graceful shower across a violet lampshade. Satsuma ash-trays stood on little tables beside long cigarette boxes of cedar cased in silver. Everywhere were books; books in French, German, Italian and English, some few in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian.

  De Grandin took the room in with a quick, appraising glance. “Pardieu, they live with happy richness, these ones,” he advised me in a whisper. “If Mademoiselle makes good one-tenth the promise of this room, cordieu, it will have been a privilege to have served her!”

  “Mademoiselle” did. When she came in answer to her father’s call she proved to be a slender, straight young thing of middle height, blond like her sire, betraying her Tartar ancestry, as he did, in her high cheek-bones and slightly slanting eyes. Her face, despite the hallmark of non-Aryan stock, was sweet and delicate as the blossom of an almond tree—“but a wilting blossom,” I told myself as I noted white, transparent skin through which showed veins in fine blue lines. There was no flush upon her cheek, no light of fever in her eyes, but had she been my patient I should have ordered her to bed at once, and then to Saranac or Colorado.

  “Mother’s gone downtown,” she told her father in a soft and gentle voice. “I know that she’ll be sorry when she hears these gentlemen have called while she was out.”

  “Perhaps it’s just as well she’s out,” the colonel answered. “Doctor de Grandin is a very famous occultist, as well as a physician, and I’ve called him into consultation because I am convinced that something more than bodily f
atigue is responsible for your condition, dear. Will you be kind enough to tell him everything he wants to know?”

  “Of course,” she answered with a faint and rather wistful smile. “What is it that you’d like to hear about, Doctor? My illness? I’m not really ill, you know, just terribly, terribly tired. Rest and sleep don’t seem to do me any good, for I rise as exhausted as when I go to bed, and the tonics they have given me”—she pulled a little face, half comic, half pathetic—“all they do is make my stomach ache.”

  “Ah bah, those tonics, those noisome medicines!” the little Frenchman nodded in agreement. “I know them. They pucker up the mouth, they make the tongue feel rough and sore—mon Dieu, what must they do to the poor stomach!”

  Abruptly he sobered, and: “Let us have the physical examination first,” he ordered.

  At the end of half an hour I was more than puzzled, I was utterly bewildered. Her temperature and pulse were normal, her skin was neither dry nor moist, but exactly as a healthy person’s skin should be; fremitus was in nowise more than usual; upon percussion there was no indication of impaired resonance, and the stethoscope could find no trace of mucous rales. Whatever else the young girl suffered from, I was prepared to stake my reputation it was not tuberculosis.

  “Now, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin asked as he completed jotting down our findings in his notebook, “do you recall the night that you and your parents attended Madame Claire’s séance?”

  “Of course; perfectly.”

  “Tell us, if you please, when first you saw the face within the globe of light. How did it look to you? Describe it, if you will.”

  “I didn’t see it, sir.”

  “Morbleu, you did not see it? How was that?”

  A faint flush crept across the girl’s pale cheeks, then she laughed a soft, low, gurgling laugh, half embarrassment, half amusement. “I was asleep,” she confessed. “Somehow, I’d been very tired that day—not as tired as I am now, but far more tired than my usual wont, and the air in Madame Claire’s drawing-room seemed close and stuffy. Almost as soon as the lights were shut off I began to feel drowsy, and I closed my eyes—just for a minute, as I thought. The next thing I knew the lights were up and Madame Claire was trying to shriek and talk and cry, all at the same time. I couldn’t make out what it was about, and it was several days before I heard about the face; the only way I know about it now is from piecing scraps of conversation together, for I didn’t like to ask. It would have hurt poor Mother dreadfully if she knew I’d gone to sleep at one of her precious sittings with the spirits.”

  “Ah? So she has attended these séances often?”

  “Gracious, yes! She pretended to Father that the one we went to was her first, but she’d been going to Madame Claire for over a year before she plucked up courage to ask Dad to go with her.”

  “And had you ever gone with her before?”

  “No, sir.”

  “U’m. Now tell me: have you been subject to unusual dreams since that night at Madame Claire’s?”

  The blush which mantled her pale face and throat and mounted to her brow was startling in its vividness. Her long, pansy-blue eyes were suddenly suffused with tears, and she cast her glance demurely down until it rested on the silver cross-straps of her boudoir sandals. “Y-yes,” she answered hesitantly. “I—I’ve had dreams.”

  “And they are—?” he paused with lifted brows, and I could see the sudden flicker in his little, round blue eyes which presaged keen excitement or sudden, murderous rage.

  “I’d rather not describe them, sir,” her answer was a muted whisper, but the deep flush stained her face and throat and brow again.

  “No matter, Mademoiselle, you need not do so,” he told her with a quick and reassuring smile. “Some things are better left unsaid, even in the medical consulting-room or the confessional.”

  “INVITE US OUT TO dinner, if you please,” he told the colonel as we parted on the porch. “Already I have formed a theory of the case, and if I am not right, parbleu, I am much more mistaken than I think.”

  “DON’T YOU THINK YOU should have pushed the examination further?” I demanded as we drove back to town. “If Zita Szekler’s trouble is psychic, or spiritual, if you prefer, an analysis of her dreams should prove helpful. You know Freud says—”

  “Ah bah,” he interrupted with a laugh, “who in Satan’s naughty name cares what that old one says? Was it necessary that she should tell her secret dreams to me? Cordieu, I should say otherwise! That melting eye, that lowered glance, that quick, face-burning blush, do they mean nothing in your life, my friend, or is it that you grow so old and chilly-blooded that the sweet and subtle memories—”

  “Confound you, be quiet!” I cut in. “If externals are any indication, I’d say the girl’s in love; madly, infatuatedly in love, and—by George”—I broke off with a sudden inspiration—“that may be it! ‘Love sickness’ isn’t just a jesting term; I’ve seen adolescents actually made ill by the thwarting of suppressed desire, and Zita Szekler’s an Hungarian. They’re different from the colder-blooded Nordics; like the Turks and Greeks and even the Italians and Spaniards, they actually suffer from an excess of pent-up emotion and—”

  “Oh là, là—hear him spout!” the little Frenchman cut in with a chuckle. “You are positively droll, my olden one. And yet,” he sobered suddenly, “you have arrived at half—no, a quarter—of the truth in your so awkward, blundering fashion. She is in love; sick—drunk—exhausted with it, mon ami; but not the kind of love you think of.

  “Consider all the facts, if you will be so kind: What do we discover? This very devil of a fellow, Tibor Czerni, has made overtures to Madame Szekler while her husband is away. For that the colonel kills him, very properly. But what does Czerni say while he is dying on the sidewalk? He promises to come back, to have the object of his black and evil heart’s desire, and to come in such a way that all resistance to his coming shall be unavailing. N’est-ce-pas?

  “Very well, then. What next? The years have come and gone. Madame Szekler has grown older. Doubtless she is charming still, but Time has little pity on a woman. She has grown older. Ah, but her little, infant daughter, she has ripened with the passing of the seasons. She has grown to sweet and blooming womanhood. Have we not seen her? But certainly. And”—he put his gathered fingers to his lips and wafted an ecstatic kiss up toward the evening sky—“she is the very blossom of the peach, the flower of the jasmine; she is the morning dew upon the rose—mordieu, she is not trying on the eyes!

  “Now, what turned Madame Szekler’s thoughts to spiritism? One does not surely know, but one may guess. Was it only the preying thought of her loneliness at the loss of her first child, or was it not, perhaps, the evil influence of that wicked one who was constantly hovering over the house of Szekler like the shadow of a pestilence; ever dwelling on the threshold of their lives with intent to do them evil?”

  “You mean to intimate—” I started, but:

  “Be quiet,” he commanded sharply. “I am thinking.

  “At any rate his opportunity arrived at last. Poor Madame Szekler sought out the medium and let her guard be lowered. There was the opening through which this evil, discarnate entity could inject himself, the doorway, all unguarded, through which he might proceed to spoil the very treasure-house of Szekler. Yes.

  “You realize, my friend, that a spiritualistic séance is as unsafe to the spirit as a smallpox case is to the body?”

  “How’s that?”

  “Because there are low-grade discarnate entities, just as there are low-grade mortals, spirits which have never inhabited human form—but which would like to—and the lowest and most vicious spirits whose human lives have been but cycles of wickedness and debauchery. These invariably infest the sittings of the spiritists, ever seeking for an opening through which they may once more regain the world and work their wicked wills. You know the mediums work through ‘controls’? Ha, I tell you the line of demarcation between innocent ‘control’ by some benevol
ently-minded spirit and possession by an evil entity is a very, very narrow one. Sometimes there is no line at all.

  “Now, how can an evil spirit enter in a human body—gain possession of it? Chiefly by dominating that body’s human will. It is this will-dominance, which is akin to hypnotism, that is the starting, the danger-point from which all evil things work forward. You have been to séances; you know their technique. The dual state of mental concentration and muscular relaxation which is necessary on the part of everyone for the evocation of the medium’s control is closely analogous to that state of passive consent which the hypnotist demands of his subject. If a person attending a séance chances to be in delicate health, so much the worse for him—or her. The evil spirit, striving for control of mortal flesh, can force his way into that body more easily than if it were a vigorous one, precisely as the germ of a physical disease can find a favorable place to incubate where the phagocytic army of defense is weak.

  “Now, consider Mademoiselle Zita’s condition on the evening of that so abominable séance. She was ‘tired’, she said, so tired that when she ‘closed her eyes just for a moment’ she fell into instant slumber. Was her sleep a natural one, or was it but a state of trance induced by the wicked spirit of the wicked Czerni? Who can say?

  “At any rate, we know that Czerni’s spirit materialized, though Madame Claire declared no spirits ever did so in her séances before. Moreover, while the innocuous control of Madame Claire was making a fool of itself by reciting that so silly verse, it was roughly shouldered from the way, and Czerni’s dying threat was bellowed through the trumpet, after which the trumpet tumbled to the floor and Czerni showed his wicked face.

  “He has come back, even as he promised, my friend. The materialization which the colonel witnessed in his home the other day establishes the fact. And he has come back to fulfill his threat; only, instead of possessing the mother, as he swore to do when he was dying, he has transferred his vile attentions to the young and lovely daughter. Yes, of course.