A Rival from the Grave Read online

  “Is it absolutely necessary—must they operate?” Colonel Szekler asked with a sharp intake of his breath.

  “Good Lord, yes!” the young man answered. “It’s dreadful, sir; I never saw anything like it. Doctor Teach will have to take both hands off above the carpus, he says—”

  “Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur, but who will take what off above the which?” de Grandin interrupted. His voice was soft but there was murderous fury flashing in his small blue eyes.

  “Doctor Teach, sir; the chief surgeon. He’s in the operating-room now, and as soon as Colonel Szekler signs this authorization—”

  “Par la barbe d’un poisson, your youngest grandchild will have grown a long white beard before that happens!” the Frenchman cried. “Give me that cursed damned, abominable, execrable paper, if you please!” He snatched the form from the young doctor’s hand and tore it into shreds. “Go tell Doctor Teach that I shall do likewise to him if he so much as lays a finger on her,” he added.

  “But you don’t understand, this is an emergency case,” the intern swallowed his anger, for Jules de Grandin’s reputation as a surgeon, had become a byword in the city’s clinics, and my thirty years and more of practise had lent respectability, if nothing more, to my professional standing. “Just look at her card!”

  From his pocket he produced a duplicate of the reception record, and I read across de Grandin’s shoulder:

  Right hand—Multiple fractures of carpus and metacarpus; compound comminutive fractures of first, second and third phalanges; rupture of flexor and reflexor muscles; short abductor muscle severed; multiple contusions of thenar eminence; multiple ecchymoses . . .

  “Good heavens!” I exclaimed as the detailed catalogue of injuries burned itself into my brain; “he’s right, de Grandin: her hands are practically destroyed.”

  “Parbleu, so will that sacré Doctor Teach be if he presumes to lay a hand on her!” he shot back fiercely; then, to Colonel Szekler:

  “Retract your order of employment, Monsieur, I implore you. Tell them that they may not operate, at least until Doctor Trowbridge and I have had an opportunity to treat her. Do you realize what it means if that sale butcher is allowed to take her hands away?”

  Colonel Szekler eyed him coldly. “I came to you in the hope of freeing her from the incubus that rested on her,” he replied. “They told me you were skilled in such things, and had helped others. You failed me. Czerni’s ghost took no more notice of your boasted powers than he did of the efforts of those medical fakers I’d called in. Now she is deformed, crippled past all hope of healing, and you ask another chance. You’d cure her? You haven’t even seen her poor, crushed hands. What assurance have I that—”

  “Monsieur,” the little Frenchman broke in challengingly, “you are a soldier, are you not?”

  “Eh? Yes, of course, but—”

  “And you put the miscreant Czerni to death, n’est-ce-pas?”

  “I did, but—”

  “And you would not shrink from taking life again?”

  “What—”

  “Very good. I put my life in pawn for my success, Monsieur!” Reaching underneath his jacket he drew out the vicious little Ortgies automatic pistol cradled in its holster below his armpit and handed it to Colonel Szekler. “There are nine shots in it, Monsieur,” he said. “One will be enough to finish Jules de Grandin if he fails.”

  “BUT THERE ISN’T A chance; not a ghost of a chance, Trowbridge!” stormed Doctor Teach when we told him that the colonel had withheld permission for the operation. “I’ve seen de Grandin do some clever tricks in surgery—he’s a good workman, I’ll give him that—but anyone who holds out hope of saving that girl’s hands is a liar or a fool or both. I tell you, it’s hopeless; utterly hopeless.”

  “Do you drink, Monsieur?” de Grandin interjected mildly, apropos of nothing.

  Doctor Teach favored him with a stare beside which that bestowed by Cotton Mather on a Salem witch would have been a lover’s ardent glance. “I don’t quite see it’s any of your business,” he answered coldly, “but as a matter of fact I do sometimes indulge.”

  “Ah, bon, meilleur; mieux. Let us wager. When all is done, let us drink glass for glass till one of us can drink no more, and if I save her hands you pay the score; if not, I shall. You agree?”

  “You’ve an odd sense of humor, sir, jesting at a time like this.”

  “Ah, mon Dieu, hear him!” de Grandin cried as he rolled his eyes toward heaven. “As if good brandy could ever be a cause for jest!”

  “WELL, YOU’VE GOT YOURSELF into a nice fix, I must say!” I chided as we sat beside the cot where Zita Szekler lay, still drugged with morphine. “You’ve no more chance of saving this poor child’s hands than I have of flying to the moon, and if I know anything of human nature, Colonel Szekler will take you at your word when he finds you can’t make good your promise, and shoot you like a dog. Besides, you’ve made me look ridiculous by seeming to back you in your insane—”

  “S-s-st!” his sharp hiss shut me off. “Be quiet, if you please. I would think, and can not do so for your ceaseless jabbering.”

  He rose, went to the wall telephone and called the office. “Is all in readiness, exactly as I ordered?” he demanded. A pause; then: “Bon, très bon, Mademoiselle; have them bring the sweeper to this floor immediately, and have the saline solution all in readiness in the operating-room.

  “What the deuce—” I began, but he waved me silent.

  “I arranged for my matériel de siège while they were transporting her,” he answered with a smile. “Now, if Monsieur le Revenant will only put in his appearance—ah, parbleu, what have we here? By damn, I think he does!”

  The drugged girl on the bed began to stir and moan as though she suffered an unpleasant dream, and I became aware of a faint, unpleasant smell which cut through the mingled aroma of disinfectant and anesthetic permeating the hospital atmosphere. For a moment I was at a loss to place it; then, suddenly, I knew. Across the span of years my memory flew to the days of my internship, when I had to make my periodic visits to the city mortuary. That odor of decaying human flesh once smelled can never be forgotten, nor can all the deodorants under heaven quite drive it from the air.

  And now the girl’s soft breast was heaving tremulously, and her features were distorted by a faint grimace of suffering. Her brows drew downward, and along her cheeks deep lines were cut, as though she were about to weep.

  “She’s coming out of anesthesia,” I warned; “shall I ring for a—”

  “S-s-sst! Be quiet!” de Grandin commanded, leaning toward the writhing girl, his little eyes agleam, lips drawn back from his small, white teeth in a smile which was more than half a snarl.

  Slowly, almost tentatively, a little puff of gray-white, smoke-like substance issued from the moaning girl’s left side, grew larger and denser, whirled spirally above her, seemed to blossom into something globular—a big and iridescent bubble-thing in which the pale malignant features of the incubus took form.

  “Now for the test, by blue!” de Grandin murmured fiercely.

  With a leap he crossed the room, swung back the door and jumped across the threshold to the corridor, reappearing in the twinkling of an eye with—of all things!—a vacuum sweeper in his hand. He set the mechanism going with a quick flick of the trigger, and as the sharp, irritable whine of the motor sounded, sprang across the room, paused a moment by the bed and thrusting his hand beneath his jacket drew forth his heavy Kukri knife and passed it with a slashing motion above the girl’s stiff, quivering form. The steel sheared through the ligament of tenuous, smoke-like matter connecting the gleaming bubble-globe to Zita’s side, and as the sphere raised itself, like a toy balloon released from its tether, he brought the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner up, caught the trailing, gray-white wisp of gelatinous substance which swung pendent in the air and—sucked it in.

  The droning motor halted in its vicious hornet-whine, as though the burden he had placed on it were more than it could
cope with; then, sharply, spitefully, began to whir again, and, bit by struggling bit, the trail of pale, pellucid stuff was sucked into the bellows of the vacuum pump.

  A look of ghastly fright and horror shone upon the face within the bubble. The wide mouth opened gaspingly, the heavy-lidded eyes popped staringly, as though a throttling hand had been laid on the creature’s unseen throat, and we heard a little whimpering sound, so faint that it was scarcely audible, but loud enough to be identified. It was like the shrieking of someone in mortal torment heard across a stretch of miles.

  “Ha—so? And you would laugh at Jules de Grandin’s face, Monsieur?” the little Frenchman cried exultantly. “You would make of him one louse-infested monkey? Yes? Parbleu, I damn think we shall see who makes a monkey out of whom before our little game is played out to a finish. But certainly!

  “Ring the bell, Friend Trowbridge,” he commanded me. “Bid them take her to the operating room and infuse a quart of artificial serum by hypodermoclysis. Doctor Brundage is in readiness; he knows what to do.

  “Now, come with me, if you would see what you shall see,” he ordered as I made the call. “Leave Mademoiselle with them; they have their orders.”

  Twisting the connecting hose of the vacuum cleaner into a sharp V, he shut the current off; then, always the urbane Parisian, he motioned me to precede him through the door.

  Down to the basement we hastened, and paused by the great furnace which kept the building well supplied with boiling water. He thrust the cleaner’s plug into an electric wall fixture and: “Will you be kind enough to open up that door?” he asked, nodding toward the furnace and switching on the power in his motor.

  As the machine once more began to hum he pressed the trigger sharply downward, reversing the motor and forcing air from the cleaner’s bellows. There was a short, sharp, sputtering cough, as though the mechanism halted in its task, then a labored, angry groaning of the motor as it pumped and pumped against some stubborn obstacle. Abruptly, the motor started racing, and like a puff of smoke discharging from a gun, a great gray ring shot from the cleaner’s nozzle into the superheated air of the furnace firebox. For an instant it hovered just above the gleaming, incandescent coals; then with an oddly splashing sound it dropped upon the fire-bed, and a sharp hissing followed while a cloud of heavy steam arose and spiraled toward the flue. I sickened as I smelled the acrid odor of incinerating flesh.

  “Très bien. That, it appears, is that,” announced de Grandin as he shut the motor off and closed the furnace door with a well-directed kick. “Come, let us go and see how Mademoiselle Zita does. They should be through with the infusion by this time.”

  5. Release

  ZITA SZEKLER LAY UPON her bed, her bandaged hands upon her bosom. Whether she was still under anesthesia or not I could not tell, but she seemed to be resting easily. Also, strangely, there was not the dreadful pallor that had marked her when we left; instead, her cheeks were faintly, though by no means feverishly, flushed and her lips were healthy pink.

  “Why, this is incredible,” I told him. “She’s been through an experience fit to make a nervous wreck of her, the pain she suffered must have been exquisite, she’s had extensive hemorrhages; yet—”

  “Yet you forget that Doctor Brundage pumped a thousand cubic centimeters of synthetic serum into her, and that such heroic measures are almost sovereign in case of shock, collapse, hemorrhage or coma. No, my friend, she lost but little blood, and what she lost was more than compensated by the saline infusion. It was against the loss of life-force I desired to insure her, and it seems the treatment was effective.”

  “Life-force? How do you mean?”

  He grinned his quick, infectious elfin grin and, regardless of institutional prohibitions, produced a rank-smelling Maryland and set it glowing. “Ectoplasm,” he replied laconically.

  “Ec—what in the world—”

  “Précisément, exactement, quite so,” he answered with another grin. “Regard me, if you please: This Czerni person’s soul was earthbound, as we know. It hung about the Szekler house, ever seeking opportunity for mischief, but it could accomplish little; for immaterial spirits, lacking physical co-operation of some sort, can not accomplish physical results. At last there came the chance when Madame Szekler induced her husband and child to attend that séance. Mademoiselle Zita was ill, nervous, run down, not able to withstand her assaults. Not only was he able to force himself into her mind to make her do his bidding, but he was able to withdraw from her the ectoplasmic force which supplied him with a body of a kind.

  “This ectoplasm, what is it? We do not surely know, any more than we know what electricity is. But in a vague way we know that it is a solidification of the body’s emanations. How? Puff out your breath. You can not see it, but you know that something vital has gone out of you. Ah, but if the temperature were low enough, you could not only feel your breath, you could see it, as well. So, when conditions are favorable, the ectoplasm, at other times unseen, becomes visible. Not only that, by a blending of the spiritual entity with its physical properties, it can become an almost-physical body. A materialization, we should call it, a ‘manifestation’ the Spiritists denominate it.

  “Why did he do this? For two reasons. First, he craved a body of some sort again; by materializing, he could make himself seen by Colonel Szekler, whom he desired to plague. He had become a sort of semi-human once again, so far physical that physical means had to be taken to combat him.

  “Last night, when I flung the holy water on him, and nothing happened, I said, ‘Mon Dieu, I am lost!’ Then I counseled me, ‘Jules de Grandin, do not be dismayed. If holy things are unavailing, it is because he has become physical, though not corporeal, and you must use physical weapons to combat him.’

  “‘Very good, Jules de Grandin, it shall be that way,’ I say to me.

  “Thereupon I planned my scheme of warfare. He was too vague, too subtle, too incorporeal to be killed to death with a sword or pistol. The weapons would cut through him but do him little harm. ‘Ah, but there is always one thing that will deal with such as he,’ I remind me. ‘Fire, the cleansing fire, regarded by the ancients as an element, known by the moderns as the universal solvent.’

  “But how to get him to the fire? I could not bring the fire to him, for fear of hurting Mademoiselle Zita. I could not take him to the fire, for he would take refuge in her body if I attempted to seize him. Then I remembered: When he materialized in her room the bubble which enclosed his evil face wavered in the air.

  “‘Ah-ha, my evil one,’ I say, ‘I have you at the disadvantage. If you can be blown by the wind you can be sucked by in air-current. It is the vacuum sweeper which shall be your hearse to take you to the crematory. Oh, yes.’

  “So then I know that we must lie in wait for him with our vacuum sweeper all in readiness. It may take months to catch him, but catch him we shall, eventually. But there is another risk. We must sever his materialized form from Mademoiselle Zita’s body, and we can not put the ectoplasm back. And so I decide that we must have some saline solution ready to revive her from the shock of losing all that life-force. This seemed a condition which could not be overcome, but this wicked Czerni, by his very wickedness, provided us with the solution of our problem. By injuring Mademoiselle Zita, he made them bring her to this hospital, the one place where we should have everything ready to our hand—the sweeper, the fire which should consume him utterly, the saline solution and facilities for its quick administration. Eh bien, my friend, but he did us the favor, that one.

  “But her hands, man, her hands,” I broke in. “How—”

  “It is a stigma,” he replied.

  “A stigma—how—what—”

  “Perfectly. You understand the phenomenon of stigmata? It is akin to hypnotism. In the psychological laboratory you have seen it, but by a different name. The hypnotist can bid his subject’s blood run from his hand, and the hand becomes pale and anemic; you have seen the blood transferred from one arm to another; you have
seen what appears to be a wound take form upon the skin without external violence, merely the command of the hypnotist.

  “Now, this Czerni had complete possession of Mademoiselle Zita’s mind while she slept. He could make her do all manner of things, think of all manner of things, feel all manner of things. He had only to give her the command: ‘Your hands have been beaten to a pulp, smashed by merciless mauls upon a chopping-block—you are wearing the red gauntlets!’ and, to all intents, what he said became a fact. Just as the scientific hypnotist makes his subject’s blood reverse itself against the course of nature, just as he makes what appears to be a bleeding cut appear upon uninjured skin—then heals it with a word—so could Czerni make Mademoiselle Zita’s hands take on the appearance of wearing the red gauntlets without the use of outside force. Only a strong will, animated by a frightful hate, and operating on another will whose resistance had completely broken down could do these things; but do them he did. Yes.

  “When Colonel Szekler told me how his daughter became red-gauntleted while lying in her bed, where she could not possibly have been injured by external force, I knew that this was what had happened, and so sure was I of my diagnosis that I staked my life upon it. Now—”

  “You’re crazy!” I broke in.

  “We shall see,” he answered with a smile, crossed to the bed and placed a second pillow under Zita’s head, so that she was almost in a sitting posture.

  “Mademoiselle,” he called softly while he stroked her forehead gently, “Mademoiselle Zita, can you hear me?” He pressed his thumbs transversely on her brow, drawing them slowly outward with a stroking motion, then, with fingers on her temples, bore his thumbs against her throat below the ears. “Mademoiselle,” he ordered in a low, insistent voice, “it is I, Jules de Grandin. I am the master of your thought, you can not think or act or move without my permission. Do you hear?”

  “I hear,” she answered in a sleepy voice.

  “And you obey?”

  “And I obey.”

  “Très bon. I bid you to forget all which the evil Czerni told you; to unlock your mind from the prison of his dominance—to restore your hands to their accustomed shape. Your hands are normal, unharmed in any way; they have never been scarred or hurt, not even scratched.