The Dark Angel Read online

  “These Yezidees are a mysterious sect scattered throughout the Orient from Manchuria to the Near East, but strongest in North Arabia, and feared and loathed alike by Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Taoist and Moslem, for they are worshippers of Satan.

  “Their sacred mountain, Lalesh, stands north of Baghdad on the Kurdish border near Mosul, and on it is their holy and forbidden city which no stranger is allowed to enter, and there they have a temple, reared on terraces hewn from the living rock, in which they pay homage to the image of a serpent as the beguiler of man from pristine innocence. Beneath the temple are gloomy caverns, and there, at dead of night, they perform strange and bloody rites before an idol fashioned like a peacock, whom they call Malek Taos, the viceroy of Shaitan—the Devil—upon earth.

  “According to the dictates of the Khitab Asward, or Black Scripture, their Mir, or pope, has brought to him as often as he may desire the fairest daughters of the sect, and these are his to do with as he chooses. When the young virgin is prepared for the sacrifice she dons a silver girdle, like the one we saw on Mademoiselle Alice tonight. I saw one on Mount Lalesh. Its front is hammered silver, set with semi-precious stones of red and yellow—never blue, for blue is heaven’s color, and therefore is accursed among the Yezidees who worship the Arch-Demon. The belt’s back is of leather, sometimes from the skin of a lamb untimely taken from its mother, sometimes of a kid’s skin, but in exceptional cases, where the woman to be offered is of noble birth and notable lineage, it is made of tanned and carefully prepared human skin—a murdered babe’s by preference. Such was the leather of Mademoiselle Alice’s girdle. I recognized it instantly. When one has examined a human hide tanned into leather he can not forget its feel and texture, my friend.”

  “But this is dreadful—unthinkable!” I protested. “Why should Alice wear a girdle made of human skin?”

  “That is precisely what we have to ascertain tonight, if possible,” he told me. “I do not say Madame Hume can give us any direct information, but she may perchance let drop some hint that will set us on the proper track. No,” be added as he saw protest forming on my lips, “I do not intimate she has wilfully withheld anything she knows. But in cases such as this there are no such things as trifles. Some bit of knowledge which she thinks of no importance may easily prove the key to this so irritating mystery. One can but hope.”

  ANOTHER CAR, A LITTLE roadster of modish lines, opulent with gleaming chromium, drew abreast of us as we halted at the gateway of the Hume house. Its driver was a woman, elegantly dressed, sophisticated, chic from the crown of her tightly fitting black felt hat to the tips of her black leather gloves. As she slackened speed and leaned toward us, our headlights’ rays struck her face, illuminating it as an actor’s features are picked out by the spotlight on a darkened stage. Although a black lace veil was drawn across her chin and cheeks after the manner of a Western desperado’s handkerchief mask, so filmy was the tissue that her countenance was alluringly shadowed rather than obscured. A beautiful face it was, but not a lovely one. Skin light and clear as any blond’s was complemented by hair as black and bright as polished basalt, black brows circumflexed superciliously over eyes of almost startling blueness. Her small, petulant mouth had full, ardent lips of brilliant red.

  There was a slightly amused, faintly scornful smile on her somewhat vixenish mouth, and her small teeth, gleaming like white coral behind the vivid carmine of her lips, seemed sharp as little sabers as she called to us in a rich contralto: “Good evening, gentlemen. If you’re looking for someone, you’ll save time and trouble by abandoning the search and going home.”

  The echo of a cynical, disdainful laugh floated back to us as she set speed to her car and vanished in the dark.

  Jules de Grandin stared after her, his hand still halfway to the hat he had politely touched when she first addressed us. Astonishingly, he burst into a laugh. “Tiens, my friend,” he exclaimed when he regained his breath, “it seems there are more locks than one for which we seek the keys tonight.”

  3. “David Hume Hys Journal”

  ARABELLA HUME CAME QUICKLY toward us as we entered the hall. Sorrow and hope—or the entreaty of hope—was in the gaze she turned on us. Also, it seemed to me, there lay deep in her eyes some latent, nameless fear, vague and indefinable as a child’s dread of the dark, and as terrifying.

  “Oh, Doctor Trowbridge—Doctor de Grandin—have you found out anything? Do you know anything?” she quavered. “It’s all so dreadful, so—so impossible! Can you—have you any explanation?”

  De Grandin bent stiffly from the hips as he took her hand in his and raised it to his lips. “Courage, Madame,” he exhorted. “We shall find her, never fear.”

  “Oh, yes, yes,” she answered almost breathlessly, “she will be found. She must be found, with you and Doctor Trowbridge looking for her, I know it. Don’t you think a mother who has been as close to her child as I have been to Alice since Ronald was killed may have a sixth sense where she is concerned? I have such a sense. I tell you—I know—Alice is near.”

  The little Frenchman regarded her somberly. “I, too, have a feeling she is not far distant,” he declared. “It is as if she were near us—in an adjoining room, by example—but a room with sound-proof walls and a cleverly hidden door. It is for you to help us find that door—and the key which will unlock it—Madame Hume.”

  “I’ll do everything I can,” she promised.

  “Very good. You can tell us, to begin, all that you know, all you have heard, of David Hume, the founder of this family.”

  Arabella gave him a half-startled, half-disbelieving glance, almost as though he had requested her to state her views of the Einstein hypothesis or some similarly recondite and irrelevant matter. “I really don’t know anything about him,” she returned somewhat coldly. “He seems to have been a sort of Melchizedek, appearing from nowhere and without any antecedents.”

  “U’m?” De Grandin stroked his little wheat-blond mustache with affectionate thoughtfulness. “There are then no records—no family records of any kind—which one can consult? No deeds or wills or leases, by example?”

  “Only the family Bible, and that—”

  “Eh bien, Madame, we may do worse than consult the Scriptures in our present difficulty. By all means, lead us to it,” he broke in.

  The records of ten generations of Humes were spread upon the sheets bound between the Book of Malachi and the Apocrypha. Of succeeding members of the family there was extensive register, their births, their baptisms, their progeny and deaths, as well as matrimonial alliances being catalogued with painstaking detail. Of David Hume the only entry read: “Dyed in ye hope of gloryous Resurection aet yrs 81, mos 7, dys 20, ye 29th Sept. MDCLVII.”

  “Nom d’un bouc, and is that all?” De Grandin tugged so viciously at the waxed ends of his mustache that I felt sure the hairs would be wrenched loose from his lip. “Satan bake the fellow for a pusillanimous rogue! Even though he had small pride of ancestry, he should have considered future generations. He should have had a thought for my convenience, pardieu!”

  He closed the great, cedar-bound book with a resounding bang and thrust it angrily back into the case. But as he shoved the heavy volume from him a hammered brass corner reinforcing the cover caught against the shelf edge, wrenching the tome from his hands, and the Bible fell crashing to the floor.

  “Oh, mille pardons!” he cried contritely, stooping to retrieve the fallen book. “I did lose my temper, Madame, and—Dieu de Dieu, what have we here?”

  The impact of the fall had split the brittle, age-worn cedar slabs with which the Bible had been bound, and where the wood had buckled gable-wise the glazed-leather inner binding had cracked in a long, vertical fissure, and from this opening protruded a sheaf of folded paper. Even as we leaned forward to inspect it we saw that it was covered with fine, crabbed writing in all but totally faded ink.

  Bearing the manuscript to the reading-table de Grandin switched on all the lights in the electrolier and bent ov
er the faded, time-obliterated sheets. For a moment he knit his brows in concentration; then:

  “Ah-ha,” he exclaimed exultantly, “ah-ha-ha, my friends, we have at last flushed old Monsieur David’s secret from its covert! Come close and look, if you will be so good.”

  He spread the sheets upon the polished table top and tapped the uppermost with the tip of a small, well-manicured forefinger. “You see?” he asked.

  Although the passage of three hundred years had dimmed the ink with which the old scribe wrote, enough remained to let us read across the yellowed paper’s top: “David Hume hys Journal” and below: “Inscrybed at hys house at Twelvetrees in ye colonie of New—”

  The rest had faded out, but enough was there to tell us that some secret archive of the family had been brought to light and that the scrivener had been that mysterious ancestor of whom no more was known than that he once lived at Twelvetrees.

  “May one trespass on your hospitality for pen and paper, Madame?” de Grandin asked, his little, round blue eyes shining with suppressed excitement, the twin needles of his waxed mustache points twitching like the whiskers of an agitated tomcat. “This writing is so faint it would greatly tax one to attempt reading it aloud, and by tomorrow it may be fainter with exposure to the air; but if you will give leave that I transcribe it while I yet may read, I will endeavor to prepare a copy and read you the results of my work when it is done.”

  Arabella Hume, scarcely less excited than we, nodded hasty assent, and de Grandin shut himself in the Ancestors’ Room with pen and paper and a tray of cigarettes to perform his task.

  Twice while we waited in the hall we saw the butler tiptoe into the closed room in answer to the little Frenchman’s summons. His first trip was accompanied by a bowl of ice, a glass and a decanter of brandy. “He’ll drink himself into a stupor,” Arabella told me when the second consignment of liquor was borne in.

  “Not he,” I assured her with a laugh. “Alcohol’s only a febrifuge with him. He drinks it like water when he’s working intensively, and it never seems to affect him.”

  “Oh,” she answered somewhat doubtfully. “Well, I hope he’ll manage to stay sober till he’s finished.”

  “Wait and see,” I told her. “If he’s unsteady on his feet, I’ll—”

  De Grandin’s entrance cut my promise short. His face was flushed, his little round blue eyes were shining as though with unshed tears, and his mustache fairly bristling with excitement and elation; but of alcoholic intoxication there was no slightest sign.

  “Voyez,” he ordered, flourishing a sheaf of rustling papers. “Although the writing was so faded that I did perforce miss much of the story of Monsieur the Old One, enough remained to give us information of the great importance. But yes. Your closest attention, if you please.”

  Seating himself on the table edge and swinging one small, patent leather shod foot in rhythm with his reading, he began:

  … and now my case was truly worser than before, for though my Moslem captors had been followers of Mahound, these that had taken me from them were worshippers of Satan’s self, and nightly bowed the knee to Beelzebub, whom they worshipped in the image of a peacock highte Melek Taos, whose favor they are wont to invoke with every sort of wickedness. For their black scriptures teach that God is good and merciful, and slow to take offense, while Shaitan, as they name the Devil, is ever near and ever watchful to do hurt to mankind, wherefore he must be propitiated by all who would not feel his malice. And so they work all manner of evil, accounting that as virtue which would be deemed most villainous by us, and confessing and repenting of good acts as though they were the deadliest of sins.

  Their chief priest is yclept the Mir, and of all their wicked tribe he is the wickedest, scrupling not at murder and finding great delight in such vile acts as caused the Lord aforetimes to rain down fire and brimstone on the evil cities of the plain.

  Once as I stood without their temple gate by night I did espy a great procession entering with the light of torches and with every sound of minstrels and mirth, but in the middle of the revelers there walked a group of maidens, and these did weep continually. And when I asked the meaning of this sight they told me that these girls, the very flower of the tribe, had been selected by the Mir for his delight and for the lust and cruelty of those who acted as his counsellors, for such is their religion that the pontifex may choose from out their womanhood as many as he pleases, and do unto them even according to the dictates of his evil will, nor may any say him nay. And as I looked upon these woeful women I beheld that each was clasped about the middle by a stomacher of cunningly wrought silver, and this, they told me, was the girdle of a bride, for their women don such girdles when they are ready to engage in wedlock, or when they tread the path of sorrow which leads them to the Mir and degradation. For he who gives his daughter voluntarily to be devoured by the Mir acquires merit in the eyes of Satan, and to lie as paramour to the Devil’s viceroy on earth is accounted honorable for any woman, yea, even greater than to enter into matrimony.

  The little Frenchman laid his paper down and turned his quick, bird-like glance upon us. “Is it now clear?” he asked. “This old Monsieur David was undoubtlessly sold as slave unto the Yezidees by Moslems who had in some way captured him. It is, of Sheik-Adi, the sacred city of the Satanists, he writes, and his reference to the silver girdles of the brides is most illuminating. N’est-ce-pas? Consider what he has to say a little later.”

  Shuffling through the pile of manuscript, he selected a fresh sheet and resumed:

  Yet she, who was the daughter of this man of blood and sin, was fair and good as any Christian maid. Moreover, her heart was inclined toward me, and many a kind act she did for me, the Christian slave, who sadly lacked for kindness in that evil mountain city. And so, as it has ever been ’twixt man and maid, we loved, and loving knew that we could not be happy till our fates joined forever. And so it was arranged that we should fly to freedom in the south, where I could take her to wife, for she had agreed to renounce Satan and all his ways to follow in the pathway of the true religion.

  Now, in the falling of the year, when crops were gathered and the husbandry was through, these people were wont to gather in their temple of the peacock and make a feast wherewith they praised the power of evil, and on the altar would be offered beasts, birds and women devoted to the service of the arch-fiend. And thus did Kudejah and I arrange the manner of our flight:

  When all within the temple was prepared and we could hear the sound of drums and trumpets offering praise unto the Devil, we slipped quickly down the mountain pass, she closely veiled like any Moslem woman, I disguised as a man of Kurdistan, and with us were two mules well laden with gold and jewels of precious stones which she had filched from the treasury of the Mir her sire. Nor did we loiter on the way, but hastened ever till we came to the border of the land of evil and were safe among the Moslems, who treated us right kindly, believing us co-religionists who were fleeing from the worshippers of Satan. And so we came at last to Busra, and thence by ship to Muskat, from whence we sailed again and finally came once more to England.

  But ere we breathed the English air again we had been wed with Christian rite; and Kudejah had dropped her heathen name and taken that of Mary, which had also been my mother’s. And sure a sweeter bride or truer wife has no man ever had, e’en though she saw the light of day beneath the shadow of the Devil’s temple. Yet, though she had accepted Christ and put behind her Lucifer and all his works, when we did stand before the parson to be wed my Mary wore about her the great silver belt which had been fashioned for her marriage when she dwelt on Satan’s mountain, and this we have unto this day, as a marriage portion for the women of our house.

  Most crafty are those devil men from whom we fled, and well were we aware of it, and so we came to this new land, where I did leave my olden name behind and take the name of Hume, that those who might come seeking us might the better be befooled; and yet, though leagues of ocean toss between us and the worshippe
rs of Satan, a thought still plagues us as a naughty dream may vex a frightened child. The office of high priest to Melek Taos is hereditary in the family of the Mir. The eldest son ascends the altar to perform the rites of blood the moment that his sire has breathed his last, and if there be no son, then must the eldest daughter of the line be wedded unto Satan with formal ceremony and silver girdle, and serve as priestess in her father’s stead until a son is born, whereupon she is led forth with all solemnity and put to death with horrid torment, for her sufferings are a libation unto Beelzebub. And thereupon a regency of under-priests must serve the King of Evil till the son is grown to man’s estate.

  Wherefore, O ye who may come after me in this the family I have founded, I do adjure ye to make choice of death rather than submit unto the demands of the worshippers of Satan, for in the years to come it well may happen that the Mir his line may be exhausted, and then those crafty men of magic who do dwell on Mount Lalesh may seek ye out and summon ye to serve the altar of the Devil. And so I warn ye, if the time should come when ye receive a message from ye know not where, bidding ye simply to come home, that this shall be the sign, and straightway shall ye flee with utmost haste or if ye can not flee then take your life with your own hand, for better far is it to face an outraged God with the bloodstains of self-murder on your hands than to stand before the Seat of Judgment with your soul foredoomed for that ye were a priest and server of the Arch-Fiend in your days on earth.

  I have—

  “Well?” I prompted as the silence lengthened. “What else?”

  “There is no ‘else,’ my friend,” he answered. “As I told you, the ink with which Monsieur l’Ancêtre wrote was faded as an old belle’s charms; the remainder of his message is but the shadow of a shadow, an angel out of Paradise could not decipher it.”

  We sat in silence for a moment, and it was Arabella Hume who framed our common thought in words: “He said, ‘if the time should come when ye receive a message from ye know not where, bidding ye simply to come home, this shall be the sign’—the message Alice got on the ouija board today—you remember? You saw it repeated yourselves before we went to church!”