A Rival from the Grave Read online

  “Trowbridge, mon vieux,” de Grandin’s soft, insistent whisper sounded from the door, “are you awake?”

  “Yes,” instinctively I lowered my voice in answer. “What is that—”

  “S-s-st,” he warned. “No noise, if you please; for the dear God’s sake bump into nothing when you rise. Come at once, and walk softly, if you please.”

  Wondering, I obeyed, and we hastened down the hall to the chamber we had assigned to Mr. and Mrs. Anspacher.

  Again I shuddered, for no known reason, as we stopped silently before the door. Unmistakably the whining, droning hum proceeded from the guest room, and the sharp vibrance of it grated on my ears like the cacophony of a buzzing July locust.

  De Grandin’s lifted finger enjoined silence as he laid one hand on the knob and slowly, deliberately as the minute hand travels round the clock dial, began to twist the handle. The keeper slipped back with the faintest of faint clicks, and with the same slow care he pushed the white door open.

  Despite his plea for silence, I could not forbear a gasp of horror and astonishment at the scene revealed. In bed lay Edward and Madeline Anspacher, not sleeping, but very still. Twin bodies in the slumber room of a funeral home could not have lain more quietly upon their biers than these two underneath the silken coverlet; yet their eyes were open wide and both were waking—waking to a horror which was like the insupportable suspense of the poor wretch on the gallows while he waits the springing of the drop. For upon the bed’s foot, its dreadful, flattened head backed by a bloated, outspread hood, coiled a great cobra, three feet or so of scale-shod body looped upon the comforter, and three feet more upreared in the air, its forked tongue darting lambently between its thin, cruel lips, its narrow, death-charged head swinging to and fro as it bobbed and swayed and undulated to the measure of the wavering, whining, almost tuneless chant which Madeline Anspacher repeated endlessly, forcing the four quavering notes between stiffened, fear-grayed lips.

  Nearly inaudible as our advent was, the sensitive ears of the serpent warned it we had come, and for an instant it turned questioning, threatening eyes in our direction; then, as though it knew that we were there to rob it of its prey, a sort of ripple ran down its body as it flexed itself for a stroke, and we saw the wicked head draw back an inch or so, heard Madeline’s despairing scream as her chant broke off, and—

  Bang! So swiftly Jules de Grandin fired that though the first shot struck the striking cobra’s head even as it darted forward, the second bullet hit the scaly neck less than a half-inch from the wound made by the first; but the taut-drawn body of the reptile did not topple over. Instead it bent deliberately, slowly, toward the far side of the room, as though it had been pushed by an invisible prod, and the Frenchman had time to leap across the floor, draw his heavy hunting-knife and slash the gleaming body clear in two before the supple, coiling thing had fallen to the floor.

  “Parbleu, I was not sure that I had hit him for a moment,” he explained. “These small-bore steel-tipped bullets, they have not the striking power of the leaden ones.”

  I nodded absently, for my full attention was directed toward the pair upon the bed. Madeline had fainted, and her husband lay half conscious by her side, his lips agape, his tongue against his lower teeth, a smile of semi-idiocy on his face.

  “Mon Dieu,” de Grandin cried, “quick, my friend! Stimulants—ether, brandy, strychnine. They are in a pitiable state!”

  They were, indeed. Hot applications and normal stimulants failing, we were forced to resort to intravenous saline infusions before our efforts were successful, and even then our patients’ state was not entirely satisfactory.

  “Good thing neither of ’em had a weak heart,” I muttered grimly as we worked. “We’d surely have had a coroner’s case on our hands if they weren’t both so young and strong.”

  “U’m,” de Grandin answered as he mixed the saline solution, “there will be a case for the coroner when I lay hands upon the miscreant who inserted that sacré snake into this house, you may bet yourself anything you please.”

  “I DON’T KNOW HOW IT happened,” Madeline told us later in the day when, somewhat recovered from their profound shock, she and her husband were able to drink some broth and sit up in bed. “We didn’t go to sleep at once, for both of us were badly frightened. Karowli Singh meant mischief, we were sure. We’d seen the tiger phantom which his guru sent against us, and Doctor de Grandin had told us of the attempt on his life. He’d been checked in every move so far, but a man with his capacity for hate and his determination to get revenge wouldn’t be stopped so easily, we were certain.

  “Finally, we managed to drop off, for it seemed impossible he could harm us so long as we were here; then—” She paused a moment, and de Grandin helped her to a sip of sherry. “I woke up feeling something on my feet. At first I thought it might be the bed clothes tucked in too tightly, and I was about to sit up and loosen them when I felt the weight move. It wasn’t quite dawn, but it was light enough for me to make out the shape of the cobra coiling for a stroke.

  “For an instant I thought I should die with fright, but one born and reared in India knows snakes, and one reared in a temple as I was knows something of snake-charming, too. I’d seen the fakirs with their dancing snakes a thousand times, and knew the tune they played to lull the venomous things into temporary harmlessness. If I could imitate a fakir’s pipe I might be able to keep it from striking long enough for help to come, I thought, and so I began singing. It really wasn’t very much of a trick, for I knew the pipe-music as American children know popular jazz songs, and I’d imitated the jugglers’ pipes for my own amusement a hundred times.

  “I don’t know how long I sang. Edward woke at the first note and I was terrified for fear he’d move and break the spell, but fortunately he understood I meant him to lie quiet when I squeezed his hand; so we lay there for what seemed years while I held the snake’s attention with my singing. Then when you finally came to help us, the sound of your entrance seemed to break the spell, and the cobra was about to strike when Doctor de Grandin shot it. Oh”—she covered her face with trembling hands—“I can still feel those dreadful coils harden on my feet as it contracted its muscles and braced its tail to strike!”

  “Perfectly, Madame,” de Grandin nodded. “It was a terrible experience you had. One understands.”

  “WELL, WHATEVER THE TIGER was, that snake was certainly no imaginary thing conjured up by a magician,” I remarked as we left the patients and went to seek a bite of luncheon.

  “Tu parles, petit,” he agreed with a grin. “I cremated him in the furnace this morning, and he burned as beautifully as who sent him will eventually roast in hell, I assure you.”

  “Karowli Singh?” I asked.

  “Who else, pardieu? Who else would have snakes ready to his hand, and introduce them through your second-story windows, my friend? Me, I think I shall enjoy tweaking that one’s nose most heartily. But yes.”

  A DAY IN BED WORKED wonders for our patients and by evening they were ready to go home, though de Grandin urged them to remain with us a little longer so that he might be prepared to ward off any fresh attempt upon their lives. “He is a clever fellow, that one,” he declared, “but Jules de Grandin is cleverer. Consider: I have made a monkey out of him at every turn, and I can continue so to do. Will you not stay with us?”

  “Much obliged, sir,” young Anspacher answered, “but I think Madeline and I will go home and pack. There’s a steamer leaving for Bermuda tomorrow night, and we can make it if we hurry. I’ll feel a lot more normal when we’ve put several thousand miles of ocean between us and Karowli Singh. We may not be as lucky next time as we were last night.”

  “Tiens, if you go away from me you may have no luck at all,” the little Frenchman answered with a smile. “You can not have de Grandin at your elbow in Bermuda.”

  “Guess we’ll have to take a chance on that,” the young man replied, and so it was arranged.

  Shortly after dinner I drove
them to their apartment in the Durham Court, and we left them with their doors fast locked and windows tightly bolted. “We shall hope to see you at the ship,” de Grandin said at parting. “In any event, call us on the telephone tomorrow morning, and tell us how it is with you.”

  He was silent through the evening, smoking cigarette after cigarette, staring abstractedly before him into the fire, muttering vague incoherencies to himself from time to time. Once or twice I sought to draw him into conversation, but met with only monosyllabic answers. At ten o’clock I rose and went to bed, for the night before had been a hard one and I felt the need of sleep acutely.

  Sometime after midnight the irritable stutter of my bedside ’phone wrenched me from the embrace of a dreamless sleep, and:

  “Doctor Trowbridge, can you come right over? This is Mrs. Frierson speaking,” an agitated voice announced.

  “Mrs. Frierson of the Durham Court Apartments?” I asked, feeling mechanically for the clothes which lay ready folded on the bedside chair.

  “Yes—it’s Eleanor. Something dreadful’s happened.”

  “Eh? What?” I answered professionally. “Something dreadful,” I well knew from past experience with half-hysterical mothers, might mean anything from a wrenched ankle to a case of acute appendicitis, and it was well to have the proper kit assembled ere I set out.

  “Yes, yes; she’s—they tried to kidnap her, and she’s in a dreadful state!”

  “All right, keep her in bed with hot water bottles or an electric pad, and give her twenty drops of aromatic ammonia in a wine-glass of chilled water,” I prescribed, and I hung up the ’phone and finished dressing.

  “Is it Madame Anspacher perhaps?” de Grandin asked, appearing abruptly at the bedroom door. “I heard the night ’phone ringing, and—”

  “No, but it’s a girl living in the same apartment,” I answered wearily. “Somebody tried to kidnap her, and she’s in ‘a state,’ her mother tells me. Want to come along?”

  “Assuredly,” he agreed. “These midnight calls are often of much greater interest than at first seems likely. Await me downstairs. I shall join you immediately. “

  “Queer how cases seem to run in series,” I commented as we drove toward Durham Court. “We’ve just finished treating the Anspachers for shock; now here’s another girl, living in the same house with them, needing treatment for the same condition. They usually run in groups of three; wonder who the next one will be?”

  “Parbleu, if what I damn suspect is true, perhaps it is I who shall need your kindly services,” he responded with a smile.

  MISS FRIERSON’S CONDITION WAS not serious, and I found that simple treatment would suffice. Plainly, she had been badly frightened, and just as plainly she desired an appreciative audience to admire her filmy crêpe nightclothes, and listen to her story.

  “I went out to Idlewild with Jack Sperry, Mabel Trumbull and Fred Spicer,” she told us, “but the place was lousy; nothing doing there and nothing fit to drink, so we decided to cut it and come in town to Joe’s place. They always have good liquor there. Know the dump? Hot-cha, it’s a regular joint!

  “Well, I’d noticed another car trailing us all the way from Idlewild, keeping about the same distance from us whether we went fast or slow, and it got my Billy. Too much of this holdup stuff on the country roads these nights, and though I didn’t have anything ’specially valuable in the way of jewelry, I didn’t hanker to be mauled around by a gang o’ bandits. It’s bad enough to have to stand that sort o’ thing from your boy friend.

  “Everything was jake till we got almost to town; then our left front tire went haywire, and Jack and Fred got out to change it. Mabel and I climbed down to stretch our legs and give the boys moral support, and while we stood there the other car came roaring up like an engine going to a three-alarm fire. They stopped so short the gravel shot in all directions from their wheels, and some of it hit me in the face. Next thing I knew they’d grabbed me and dragged me into their car and were off again, starting in high and running like a streak of greased lightning.

  “One of ’em threw a bag or something over my head, so I couldn’t see who had me or which way we were going, but I managed to struggle till I could look down under the folds of cloth around my head and catch a glimpse of the hands that held me. It was a colored man.”

  “Mordieu, a colored man, you say, Mademoiselle?” de Grandin asked softly.

  “Yes,” she replied, “and all the rest of ’em were colored, too.”

  “The rest?”

  “Yes. They drove like Lord-knows-what for half an hour or so—we must have covered twenty miles at least—and finally brought up at an old and apparently deserted house. I was peeping between the folds of the cloth over my head as much as I could, and my brain was fairly active, noting all the landmarks, for I was bound I’d make my getaway at the first opportunity, and I wanted to know which way to run.

  “They hustled me down a dark hall and flung me into a little room not much bigger than a closet. I felt around the walls and made sure there was no window in the place, then sat down on the floor to think things over. Almost before I realized it they were back—three of ’em—and I saw I’d been mistaken in my first guess. They weren’t Negroes, but some sort of dark-skinned foreigners—Turks or something.”

  “Eh, Turks, you say, Mademoiselle?” de Grandin interjected. “How is it that you—”

  “Well, maybe they weren’t Turks, they might have been Arabs or something like that. All I know is that they were almost as dark as colored men, except that they were more coffee-colored than chocolate-tinted, and they all wore turbans, and when they talked to each other it sounded like smashing china.

  “Two of ’em grabbed me and the other one put his nose almost against mine and said something that sounded like ‘carbarn,’ or—”

  “Dieu de Dieu!” de Grandin ejaculated. “Kurban!”

  “Maybe that was it,” the girl conceded. “I wasn’t paying much attention to exact pronunciation right then; I had other things to think of.

  “‘Look here, you,’ I told the man who spoke to me, ‘if you think you can get away with this you’re mighty much mistaken. My uncle’s an alderman, and you’ll have the whole Harrisonville police force on your necks before morning if you don’t turn me loose at once!’

  “That seemed to sober him, all right, for he looked surprised and said something to the fellows who had hold of me. I guess he was asking ’em if they thought I told the truth, and I guess they said they did, for they weren’t so rough with me after that, though they didn’t let me go. Instead they took me down the hall to a room where a little, undersized pip squeak was sitting cross-legged on a pile of pillows. He looked as though he’d just come off second best in a bout with a first-class scrapper, too, for his lips were cut and both eyes blackened, and there were two or three bruises on his cheeks.

  “Just the same, there was something terrifying about him. I can’t remember being really scared of anything since I was a little girl and lay awake in the nursery waiting for the goblins to come and grab me, and—I had just that sort of all-hot-and-weak-inside feeling when I looked into that little dark-skinned fellow’s eyes. They were a sort of agate-gray, like the eyes of a bad white man set in an evil mulatto’s face, and something seemed to chill me to the bone. It seemed as though his two eyes melted into one, and that one grew and grew till it was as big as the ocean, and the more I tried to look away the more I had to stare at them. All of a sudden I felt myself on my knees—can you imagine? Me on my knees to a little half-portion brown-faced man, sobbing and trembling and so scared I couldn’t speak!

  “He looked at me for what seemed like a year, got up and came over to me and put my hair back, examining my ears, looking at ’em and feeling ’em—as if I were a horse or something—then he turned and laced it into those three fellows who had brought me. I couldn’t understand a word he said, of course, but from his tone I knew he was giving ’em the cussing of their lives, and they crouched ther
e and took it like whipped dogs.

  “After that they took me out, put me in the car again and blindfolded me, and the next thing I knew I was out on the sidewalk, right before my own door. Can you imagine?”

  “Eh bien, Mademoiselle, one can imagine very well indeed; exceedingly, well,” de Grandin assured her. “You are a most fortunate young lady.”

  AS WE DROVE HOME he asked suddenly, apropos of nothing: “Does Mademoiselle Frierson remind you of any one you know, by any chance, my friend?”

  “H’m, can’t say she—by George, yes!” I answered. “There’s a slight resemblance between her and Madeline Anspacher. They’re about of a size, and both pronounced brunettes, and—”

  “Assuredly,” he acquiesced. “One might easily mistake one for the other if one knew neither of them well, especially if the light were indifferent.”

  “Then you think Karowli Singh’s servants abducted Eleanor Frierson by mistake, thinking she was Madeline?”

  “Perfectly. One suspects the fox when his poultry disappears, my friend.”

  “Well, then, why did the rajah, for I suppose it was he to whom she was taken, examine her ears?”

  “Tiens, to see if they were, or ever had been pierced, of course,” he answered in a tone of patient resignation. “Madame Anspacher has lived some time in America; time and different environment and Western clothes might make a big difference in her looks, but the earring holes bored in her lobes, the holes in which great loops of gold hung for nearly all her life, could not be hidden, neither could they have healed. Indeed, she still wears studs in her ears, as I observed last night. Mademoiselle Eleanor’s ears have never been pierced for rings. I satisfied myself of that while we interviewed her.”