The Chapel of Mystic Horror

The wind was blowing half a gale and little spits of sudden snow were whirling through the gray November twilight as we alighted from the accommodation train and looked expectantly up and down the uncovered way-station platform. “Seasonable weather for Thanksgiving,” I murmured, setting my face against the howling blast and making for the glowing disk of the station-master’s light.

“Barbe d’un pélican, yes!” assented Jules de Grandin, sinking his chin an inch or so lower in the fur collar of his overcoat. “A polar bear might give thanks for a warm fireside on such a night!”

“Trowbridge—I say there—Trowbridge!” a voice hailed from the lee side of the little red-brick depot as my friend Tandy Van Riper stepped forward, waving a welcoming hand. “This way, old-timer; the car’s waiting—so’s dinner.

“Glad to meet you, Dr. de Grandin,” he acknowledged as I presented the little Frenchman; “it was mighty good of you to come out with Trowbridge and help us light the hearth fires at the Cloisters.”

“Ah, then it is a new house that you have, Monsieur?” de Grandin asked as he dropped into a seat in Van Riper’s luxurious Daimler landau and tucked the bearskin carriage rug snugly about his knees.

“Well, yes and no,” our host replied. “The house has been up—in America—for something like eight years, I believe, but it’s new to us. We’ve been in residence just a little over a month, and we’re giving a regular old-fashioned Thanksgiving party by way of housewarming.”

“U’m,” the Frenchman nodded thoughtfully. “Your pardon, Monsieur, it is perhaps that I do not speak the American well, but did you not say the new house has been up in this country for only eight years? I fear I do not apprehend. Is it that the house stood elsewhere before being erected here?”

“Precisely,” Van Riper agreed with a laugh. “The Cloisters were built—or rebuilt, I suppose you’d say—by Miles Batterman shortly after the close of the World War. Batterman made a potful of money during the war, and a lot more in lucky speculations between the Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles. I reckon he didn’t know just what to do with it all, so he blew in a couple of hundred thousand on an old Cyprian villa, had it taken down stone by stone, shipped over here, and re-erected. The building was a sort of remodeled monastery, I believe, and took Batterman’s eye while he was cruising about the Mediterranean in ’20. He went to a lot of trouble having it moved here and put up, and everything about the place is exactly as it was in Cyprus, except the heating and plumbing, which he added as a sort of afterthought. Quaint idea, wasn’t it?”

“Decidedly,” the Frenchman agreed. “And this Monsieur Batterman, did he so soon tire of his expensive toy?”

“Humph, not exactly. I got it from the administrators. I couldn’t have afforded to pay a quarter the price Batterman spent on the place, let alone give him a profit on the transaction, but the fact is the old boy dropped off suddenly a year or so ago—so did his wife and daughter. The doctors said they died from eating toadstools by mistake for mushrooms. Whatever the cause was, the whole family died in a single night and the property would have gone to the State by escheat if the lawyers hadn’t dug up some ninety-second cousins out in Omaha. We bought the house at public auction for about a tenth its value, and I’m figuring on holding it for a while. It’ll be a novel sensation, living in a place the Knights Templars once occupied, eh?”

“Very novel—very novel, indeed, Monsieur,” de Grandin replied in a queer, flat voice. “You say the Knights of the Temple once occupied this house?”

“So they tell me—some of their old furniture’s still in it.”

De Grandin made an odd sound in his throat, and I turned quickly to look at him, but his face was as set and expressionless as the features of a Japanese Buddha, and if the half-smothered exclamation had been meant for conversation, he had evidently thought better of it, for he sat in stony silence during the rest of the drive.

The snow squalls had stopped by the time we drew up at the house, but the wind had increased in velocity, and in the zenith we could see the gibbous moon buffeted about in a surf of windblown clouds. Against the background of the winter sky the irregular outline of the Cloisters loomed in a forbidding silhouette. It was a high, rambling pile of gray masonry in which the characteristics of Romanesque, Gothic and Byzantine architecture were oddly blended. The walls were strengthened by a series of buttresses, crenelated with battlements and punctuated here and there with small, cylindrical watch-towers; the windows were mere slits between the great stones, and the massive entranceway seemed fitted for a portcullis, yet a great, hemispherical dome rose from the center of the building, and a wide, shallow portico with graceful, fluted columns topped by Doric capitals stood before the gateway.

Cocktail hour had just struck as we passed through the wide entrance to the main hall, and a party of sleek-haired gentlemen and ladies in fashionably scanty attire were gathered before the cavernous fireplace, chatting and laughing as they imbibed the appetite-whetting amber drinks.

It was an enormous apartment, that hall, clear fifty feet from tiled floor to vaulted ceiling, and the darkness was scarcely more than stained by the flickering glow of blazing logs in the fireplace and the yellow beams of the tall, ecclesiastical candles which stood, singly, in high, wrought-iron standards at intervals along the walls. Draped down the bare stone sides of the hall hung a pair of prodigious tapestries, companion pieces, I thought, depicting particularly gory battle scenes, and I caught a fugitive glimpse of a black-armored knight with a cross-emblazoned surtout hacking the turbaned head from a saracen, and the tag end of the Latin legend beneath—“ad Majorem Dei Gloriam.”

Piloted by our host we mounted the wide, balustraded staircase to the second of three balconies which ran round three sides of the long hall, found the big, barnlike room assigned us, changed quickly to dinner clothes, and joined the other guests in time to file through a high archway to the oak-paneled apartment where dinner was served by candle-light on a long refectory table set with the richest silver and most opulent linen I had ever seen.

Greatly to his chagrin de Grandin drew a kittenish, elderly spinster with gleaming and palpably false dentition. I was paired off with a Miss O’Shane, a tall, tawny-haired girl with tapering, statuesque limbs and long, smooth-jointed fingers, the milk-white skin of the pure-bred Celt and smoldering, rebellious eyes of indeterminate color.

During the soup and fish courses she was taciturn to the point of churlishness, responding to my attempts at conversation with curt, unisyllabic replies, but as the claret glasses were filled for the roast, she turned her strange, half-resentful gaze directly on me and demanded: “Dr. Trowbridge, what do you think of this house?”

“Why—er,” I temporized, scarcely knowing what to reply, “it seems rather gorgeous, but—”

“Yes,” she interrupted as I paused at a loss for an exact expression, “but what?”

“Well, rather depressing—too massive and mediaeval for present-day people, if you get what I mean.”

“I do,” she nodded almost angrily. “I most certainly do. It’s beastly. I’m a painter—a painter of sorts,” she hurried on as my eyes opened in astonishment at her vehemence, “and I brought along some gear to work with between times during the party. Van told me this is liberty hall, and I could do exactly as I pleased, and gave me a big room on the north side for a workshop. I’ve a commission I’ve simply got to finish in two weeks, and I began some preliminary sketches yesterday, but—” She paused, taking a sip of burgundy and looking at me from the corners of her long, brooding eyes as though speculating whether or not to take me further into her confidence.

“Yes?” I prompted, assuming an air of interest.

“It’s no go. Do you remember the Red King in Through the Looking-Glass?”

“The Red King?” I echoed. “I’m afraid I don’t, quite.”

“Don’t you remember how Alice took the end of his pencil in her hand when he was attempting to enter a note in his diary and made him write, ‘The White Knight is sliding down the poker. He balances very badly’?”

I must have looked my bewilderment, for she laughed aloud, a deep, gurgling laugh in keeping with her rich, contralto speaking voice. “Oh, I’m not a psychopathic case—I hope,” she assured me, “but I’m certainly in a position to sympathize with the poor king. It’s a Christmas card I’m doing—a nice, frosty, sugar-sweet Christmas card—and I’m supposed to have a Noël scene with oxen and asses and sheep standing around the manger of a chubby little naked boy, you know—quite the conventional sort of thing.” She paused again and refreshed herself with a sip of wine, and I noticed that her strong, white-fingered hand trembled as she raised the etched glass to her lips.

My professional interest was roused. The girl was a splendid, vital animal, lean and strong as Artemis, and the pallor of her pale skin was natural, not unhealthy; yet it required no special training to see she labored under an almost crushing burden of suppressed nervousness.

“Won’t it work out?” I asked soothingly.

“No!” her reply was almost explosive. “No, it won’t! I can block in the interior, all right, though it doesn’t look much like a stable; but when it comes to the figures, something outside me—behind me, like Alice behind the Red King, you know, and just as invisible—seems to snatch the end of my charcoal and guide it. I keep drawing—” Another pause, longer, this time, broke her recital.

“Drawing what, if you please, Mademoiselle?” De Grandin turned from his partner who was in the midst of recounting a risqué anecdote and leaned forward, his narrow eyebrows elevated in twin arches, his little, round blue eyes fixed and unwinking in a direct, questioning stare.

The girl stalled at his query. “Oh, all manner of things,” she began, then broke off with a sharp, cachinnating laugh, half hysterical. “Just what the Red King said when his pencil wouldn’t work!” she shrilled.

For a moment I thought the little Frenchman would strike her, so fierce was the uncompromising gaze he bent on her; then: “Ah bah, let us not think too much of fairy-tales, pleasant or grim, if you please, Mademoiselle,” he returned. “After dinner, if you will be so good, Dr. Trowbridge and I shall do ourselves the honor of inspecting these so mysterious self-dictated drawings of yours. Until then, let us consider this excellent food which the good Monsieur Van Riper has provided for us.” Abruptly he turned to his neglected partner. “Yes, Mademoiselle,” he murmured in his deferential, flattering manner, “and then the bishop said to the rector?”

2

Dinner completed, we trooped into the high, balconied hall for coffee, tobacco and liqueurs. A radio, artfully disguised as a mediaeval Flemish console, squawked jazz with a sputtering obbligato of static, and some of the guests danced, while the rest gathered at the rim of the pool of firelight and talked in muted voices. Somehow, the great stone house seemed to discourage frivolity by the sheer weight of its antiquity.

“Trowbridge, my friend,” de Grandin whispered almost fiercely in my ear as he plucked me by the sleeve, “Mademoiselle O’Shane awaits our pleasure. Come, let us go to her studio at once before old Mère l’Oie tells me another of her so detestable stories of unvirtuous clergymen!”

Grinning as I wondered how the little Frenchman’s late dinner partner would have enjoyed hearing herself referred to as Mother Goose, I followed him up the first flight of stairs, crossed the lower balcony and ascended a second stairway, narrow and steeper than the first, to the upper gallery where Miss O’Shane waited before the heavily carved door of a great, cavelike room paneled from flagstone floor to beamed ceiling with age-blackened oak wainscot. Candles seemed the only mode of illumination available in the house, and our hostess had lighted half a dozen tapers which stood in two antique girandoles so that their luminance fell directly on an oblong of eggshell bristol board anchored to her easel by thumbtacks.

“Now, here’s what I started to do,” she began, indicating the sketch with a long, beautifully manicured forefinger. “This was supposed to be the inside of the stable at Bethlehem, and—oh?” The short, half-choked exclamation, uttered with a puzzled, questioning rising inflection, cut short her sentence, and she stared at her handiwork as though it were something she had never seen before.

Leaning forward, I examined the embryonic picture curiously. As she had said at dinner, the interior, rough and elementary as it was, did not resemble a stable. Crude and rough it undoubtedly was, but with a rudeness unlike that of a barn. Cubic, rough-hewn stones composed the walls, and the vaulting of the concamerated roof was supported by a series of converging arches with piers based on blocks of oddly carved stone representing wide, naked feet, toes forward, standing on the crowns of hideous, gargoylish heads with half-human, half-reptilian faces which leered hellishly in mingled torment and rage beneath the pressure. In the middle foreground was a raised rectangular object which reminded me of a flat-topped sarcophagus, and beside it, slightly to the rear, there loomed the faint, spectral outline of a sinister, cowled figure with menacing, upraised hand, while in the lower foreground crouched, or rather groveled, a second figure, a long, boldly sketched female form with outstretched, supplicating hands and face concealed by a cascade of downward-sweeping hair. Back of the hooded, monkish form were faint outlines of what had apparently first been meant to represent domestic animals, but I could see where later, heavier pencil strokes had changed them into human shapes resembling the cowled and hooded figure.

I shuddered involuntarily as I turned from the drawing, for not only in half-completed line and suggestive curve, but also in the intangible spirit of the thing was the suggestion of something bestial and unhallowed. Somehow, the thing seemed to suggest something revolting, something pregnant with the disgusting incongruity of a ribald song bawled in church when the Kyrie should be sung, or of rose-water sprinkled on putrefying offal.

De Grandin’s slender dark brown eyebrows elevated till they almost met the shoreline of his sleekly combed fair hair, and the waxed points of his diminutive blond mustache reared upward like a pair of horns as he pursed his thin lips, but he made no verbal comment.

Not so Miss O’Shane. As though a sudden draft of air had blown through the room, she shivered, and I could see the tiny hummocks of horripilation rise on her forearms as she stared, wide-eyed, at her own creation. “It wasn’t like that!” she exclaimed in a thin, rasping whisper like the ghost of a scream. “I didn’t do that!”

“Eh, how do you say, Mademoiselle?” de Grandin challenged, regarding her with his unwinking cat-stare. “You would have us to understand that—”

“Yes!” She still spoke in a sort of awed, wondering whisper. “I didn’t draw it that way! I blocked in the interior and made it of stone, for I was pretty sure the Holy Land stables were masonry, but I didn’t draw those beastly arch-supports! They were just plain blocks of stone when I made them. I did put in the arches—not that I wanted to, but because I felt compelled to do it, but this—this is all different!” Her words trailed off till we could scarcely catch them, not because of lowered tone, but because they came higher, thinner, with each syllable. Stark, unreasoning terror had her by the throat, I could see, and it was with the utmost difficulty that she managed to breathe.

“H’m,” de Grandin tweaked the pointed ends of his mustache. “Let us recapitulate, if you please, Mademoiselle: Yesterday and today you worked on this sketch? Yes? You drew what you conceived to be a Jewish stable in the days of Cæsar Augustus—and what else, if you recall?”

“Just the stable and the bare outlines of the manger, then a half-completed figure which was to have been Joseph, and the faintest outlines of the animals and a kneeling figure before the cradle—I hadn’t determined whether it would be male or female, or whether it would be full-draped or not, for I wasn’t sure whether I’d have the Magi or the shepherds or just some of the village folk adoring the Infant, you see. I gave up working about 4 this afternoon, because the light was beginning to fail and because—”

“Eh bien, because of what, if you please, Mademoiselle?” the Frenchman prompted sharply as the girl dropped her recital.

“Because there seemed to be an actual physical opposition to my work—almost as if an invisible hand were gently but insistently forcing my pencil to draw things I hadn’t conceived—things I was afraid to draw! Now, do you think I’m crazy?”

She paused again, breathing audibly through slightly parted lips, and I could see the swelling of her throat as she swallowed convulsively once or twice.

Ignoring her question, the little Frenchman regarded her thoughtfully a moment, then examined the drawing once more. “This who was to have been the good Saint Joseph, now,” he asked softly, “was he robed after this fashion when you limned him?”

“No, I’d only roughed out the body, He had no face when I quit work.”

“U’m, Mademoiselle, he is still without a face,” de Grandin replied.

“Yes, but there’s a place for his face in the opening of his hood, and if you look closely you can almost see his features—his eyes, especially. I can feel them on me, and they’re not good. They’re bad, wicked, cruel—like a snake’s or a devil’s. See, he’s robed like a monk; I didn’t draw him that way!”

De Grandin took up one of the candelabra and held it close to the picture, scanning the obscene thing with an unhurried, critical stare, then turned to us with a half-impatient shrug. “Tenez, my friends,” he remarked, “I fear we make ourselves most wretchedly unhappy over a matter of small moment. Come, let us join the others.”

3

Midnight had struck and de Grandin and I had managed to lose something like thirty dollars at the bridge tables before the company broke up for the evening.

“Do you really think that poor O’Shane girl is a little off her rocker?” I asked as we made ready for bed.

“I doubt it,” he replied as he fastened the sash of his pale lavender pajama jacket with a nervous tug; “indeed, I am inclined to believe all that she told us—and something more.”

“You think it possible she could have been in a sort of day-dream while she drew those awful things, thinking all the while she was drawing a Christmas card?” I asked incredulously.

“Ah hah,” he returned as he kicked off his purple lizardskin slippers and leaped into bed, “what matters it what we think? Unless I am more mistaken than I think, we shall know with certitude before very long.” And turning his back upon me, he buried his face in the pillow and dropped off to sleep.

I might have slept an hour, perhaps only a few minutes, when the sharp impact of an elbow against my ribs roused me. “Eh?” I demanded, sitting up in bed and rubbing my eyes sleepily.

“Trowbridge, my friend,” de Grandin’s sharp whisper came through the darkness, “listen! Do you hear it?”

“Huh?” I responded, but:

“Ps-s-st!” he shut me off with a minatory hiss, and I held my peace, straining my ears through the chill November night.

At first, I heard nothing but the skirling of the wind-fiends racing past the turreted walls, and the occasional creak of a rusty hinge as some door or shutter swung loose from its fastenings; then, very faint and far-away seeming, but growing in clarity as my ears became attuned to it, I caught the subdued notes of a piano played very softly.

“Come!” de Grandin breathed, slipping from the bed and donning a mauve-silk gown.

Obeying his summons, I rose and followed him on tiptoe across the balcony and down the stairs. As we descended, the music became clearer, more distinct. Someone was in the music room, touching the keys of the big grand piano with a delicate harpsichord touch. Liebestraum the composition was, and the gently struck notes fell, one after another, like drops of limpid water dripping from a moss-covered ledge into a quiet woodland pool.

“Why, it’s exquisite,” I began, but de Grandin’s upraised hand cut short my commendation as he motioned me forward.

Seated on the bancal before the piano was Dunroe O’Shane, her long, ivory fingers flitting over the ivory keys, her loosened tawny hair flowing over her uncovered white shoulders like a spilth of molten bronze from a blast-furnace runner. From gently swelling breast to curving instep she was draped in a clinging shift of black-silk tissue which revealed the gracious curves of her pale body with a subtle glow, like a winter moon half seen through veils of banking storm-clouds.

As we paused at the doorway the dulcet German air came to an abrupt ending, the girl’s fingers began weaving sinuous patterns over the keys, as though she would conjure up some nether-world spirit from their pallid smoothness, and the room was suddenly filled with a libidinous, macabre theme in B minor, beautiful and seductive, but revolting as a painted-face corpse already touched by the hand of putrefaction. Swaying gently to the rhythm of the frenetic music, she turned her face toward us, and I saw her eyes were closed, long lashes sweeping against white cheeks, pale, fine-veined lids calmly louvered.

“Why,” I exclaimed softly, “why, de Grandin, she’s asleep, she’s—”

A quick movement of his hand stayed my words, as he stole softly across the rug-strewn floor, bent forward till his face was but a few inches from hers, and stared intently into her veiled eyes. I could see the small blue veins in his temples swell and throb, and the muscles of his throat bunch and contract with the physical effort he made to project his will into her consciousness. His thin, firm lips moved, forming soundless words, and one of his small, white hands rose slowly, finger-tips together, as though reeling thread from an invisible skein, paused a moment before her face, then moved slowly back, with a gliding, stroking motion.

Gradually, with a slow diminuendo, the wicked, salacious tune came to a pause, died to a thin, vibrating echo, ceased. Still with lowered lids and gently parted lips, the girl rose from the piano, wavered uncertainly a moment, then walked from the room with a slow, gliding step, her slim, naked feet passing soundless as a drift of air over the tessellated floor. Slowly she mounted the stairs, one hand trailing gently on the carved baluster, the other raised with a sort of humble reverence to her bosom.

Silently, in a sort of breathless wonder, I watched her disappear around the curve of the stone stairway, and was about to hazard a wandering opinion when a sharp exclamation from the Frenchman silenced me.

“Quick, my friend,” he ordered, extinguishing the tall twin candles which burned beside the piano, “let us go up. Unless I am more badly mistaken than I think, there is that up there which is worth seeing!”

I followed him up the stairs, down the first gallery to the second flight, and down the upper balcony to the bare, forbidding room Miss O’Shane used as studio. “Ah,” he breathed as he struck a wax match and ignited the candles before the drawing-board, “did I not say it? Parbleu, Friend Trowbridge, Mademoiselle O’Shane has indulged in more than one sort of unconscious art this night, or Jules de Grandin is a liar!”

As the candle flames leaped to burning points in the still air of the room I started forward, then shrank back from the sketch their radiance revealed. Progress had been made on the picture since we had viewed it earlier in the evening. The hooded figure in the foreground was now clearly drawn, and it was no monk, but a steel-clad warrior with long white surtout drawn over his armor and a white hood pulled forward, half concealing his thin, bearded face. But there was a face there, where there had been none before—a thin, vulpine, wicked face with set, cruel eyes which gloated on the prostrate figure before him. The upraised arm which had no hand when Miss O’Shane showed us the drawing after dinner now terminated in a mailed fist, and between the steel-sheathed fingers it held the stem of a chalice, a lovely, tulip-shaped cup of crystal, as though it would scatter its contents to the polished stone with which the pictured room was paved. One other thing I noted before my glance shifted to the female figure—the long, red passion cross upon the white surtout was reversed, its long arm pointing upward, its transverse bar lowered, and even as I saw this I remembered vaguely that when knightly orders flourished it was the custom of heraldic courts thus to reverse a sir-knight’s coat of arms when he was degraded from his chivalry as unworthy to maintain its traditions.

What had been the rough outlines of the manger were now firmly drawn into the representation of an altar, complete with crucifix and tabernacle, but veiling the cross, so lightly sketched that, stare as I would, I could not make it out, was an odd-shaped, winged form, somewhat resembling a bat with outstretched wings.

Before the altar’s lowest step the female figure, now drawn with the detail of an engraving, groveled starkly, chin and breasts, knees and elbows, instep and wrists pressed tightly to the stones; open, suppliant hands stretched forward, palms upward; rippling masses of hair flowing forward, like a plume of smoke blown in the wind, and obscuring the face.

And what was that upon the second step leading to the sanctuary? At first I thought it an alms-basin, but a second glance showed me it was a wide, shallow dish, and in it rested a long, curve-bladed knife, such as I had seen French butchers wear in their belts while enjoying a noonday smoke and resting for a space from their gory trade before the entrance of an abattoir.

“Good heavens!” I gasped, turning from the grisly scene with a feeling of physical sickness. “This is terrible, de Grandin! What are we going to do?”

“Barbe et tête de Saint Denis, we do this!” he replied in a furious hissing voice. “Parbleu, shall Jules de Grandin be made a fool of twice in one night? Not if he knows it!”

Seizing a soap-rubber from the tray, he bent forward, and with half a dozen vigorous strokes reduced the picture to a meaningless smear of black and gray smudges.

“And now,” he dusted his hands one against the other, as though to cleanse them of something foul, “let us to bed once more, my friend. I think we shall find something interesting to talk of tomorrow.”

Shortly after breakfast next morning he found an excuse for separating Dunroe O’Shane from the rest of the company. “Will you not have pity on our loneliness, Mademoiselle?” he asked. “Here we lie, imprisoned in this great jail of a house, without so much as a radio program to cheer us through the morning hours. May we not trespass on your kindness and beg that you play for our delectation?”

“I play?” the girl answered with a half-incredulous smile. “Why, Dr. de Grandin, I don’t know one note from another. I never played the piano in my life!”

“U’m?” He looked polite doubt as he twisted the ends of his mustache. “It is perhaps that I do not plead our cause fervently enough, Mademoiselle?”

“But truly, I can’t play,” she persisted.

“That’s right, Dr. de Grandin,” one of the young men chimed in. “Dunroe’s a whiz at drawing, but she’s absolutely tone-deaf. Can’t carry a tune in a basket. I used to go to school with her, and they always used to give her a job passing out programs or selling tickets when the class chorus sang.”

De Grandin shot me a quick glance and shook his head warningly.

“What does it mean?” I asked as soon as we were together once more. “She declares she can’t play, and her friends corroborate her, but—”

“But stranger things have happened, and, mordieu, still stranger ones will happen again, or the presentiment which I have is nothing more than the consequences of a too-hearty breakfast!” he broke in with one of his quick, elfin smiles. “Let us play the silly fool, Friend Trowbridge; let us pretend to believe that the moon is composed entirely of green cheese and that mice terrorize the pussy-cat. So doing we shall learn more than if we attempt to appear filled with wisdom which we do not possess.”

4

“Oh, I know what let’s do!” Miss Prettybridge, the lady of the scintillating teeth, whom de Grandin had squired to dinner the previous evening, exclaimed shortly after 10 o’clock that night. “This is such a wonderful, romantic old house—I’m sure it’s just full of memories. Let’s have a séance!”

“Fine, splendid, capital!” chorused a dozen voices. “Who’ll be the medium? Anybody got a ouija board or a planchette table?”

“Order, order, please!” the self-constituted chairwoman rapped peremptorily on a bridge table with her lorgnette. “I know how to do it! We’ll go into the dining-room and gather about the table. Then, when we’ve formed the mystic circle, if there are any spirits about we’ll make ’em talk to us by rapping. Come on, everybody!”

“I don’t think I like this,” Miss O’Shane murmured as she laid her hand on my arm. Her usually pale face was paler still, and there was an expression of haunted fear in her big, gray-green eyes as she hesitated at the doorway.

“I don’t care much for such nonsense myself,” I admitted as we followed the others reluctantly into the refectory.

“Be close to me while this progresses, Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin whispered as he guided me to a seat beside him. “I care not much for this business of the monkey, but it may be the old she-fool yonder will serve our purpose unwittingly. The greatest danger is to Mademoiselle Dunroe. Keep watch on her.”

The candles in the dining-room wall sconces were extinguished, and with Miss Prettybridge at the head of the table, the entire company was seated at the board, each one with his hands outspread on the dark, polished oak before him, his thumbs touching lightly, his little fingers in contact with those of his neighbors to right and left.

“Spirits,” Miss Prettybridge, in her role of priestess, threw out the customary challenge, “spirits, if you are here tonight, signify your presence by rapping once on the table.”

Thirty seconds or so elapsed without an answer to the lady’s invitation. A woman half-way down the board tittered in half-hysterical embarrassment, and her neighbor silenced her with an impatient sh-s-s-sh! Then, distinctly as though thumped with a knuckle, the ancient table gave forth a resounding crack.

“If the spirit is a man, rap once; if a woman, twice,” instructed Miss Prettybridge.

Another pause, somewhat longer, this time, then slowly, distinctly, two soft knocks from the very center of the table.

“Oh, a woman!” trilled one of the girls. “How perfectly thrilling!”

“And your name is—what?” demanded the mistress of ceremonies in a voice which trembled slightly in spite of her effort at control.

Thirteen slow, clear strokes sounded on the table, followed by one, then by eighteen, then others in series until nine distinct groups of blows were recorded.

“M-a-r-i-e-a-n-n-e—Marie Anne—a French girl!” exclaimed Miss Prettybridge. “Whom do you wish to speak with, Marie Anne? Rap when I come to the name as I call the roll. Dr. Trowbridge?”

No response.

“Dr. de Grandin?”

A sharp, affirmative knock answered her, and the visitant was bidden spell out her message.

Followed a rapid, telegraphic series of blows on the table, sometimes coming so quickly that it was impossible for us to decode them.

I listened as attentively as I could; so did everyone else, except Jules de Grandin. After a moment, during which his sleek blond head was thrust forward inquiringly, he turned his attention to Dunroe O’Shane.

The logs were burning low in the fireplace, but a shifting, flickering glow soaked through the darkness now and again, its red reflection lighting up the girl’s face with a strange, unearthly illumination like the nimbus about the head of a saint in a medieval painting.

I felt the Frenchman’s fingers stiffen against mine, and realized the cause of his tenseness as I stole a fleeting glance at Miss O’Shane. Her eyes had closed, and her red, petulant lips were lightly parted, as though in sleep. Over her small, regular features had crept a look of longing ecstasy, like that of an hieromartyr breathless with adoration.

Even my limited experience with psychotherapy was sufficient to tell me she was in a condition verging on hypnosis, if not actually over the borderline of consciousness, and I was about to leap from my seat with an offer of assistance when the insistent pressure of de Grandin’s finger on mine held me back. Turning toward him, I saw his head nod sharply toward the doorway behind the girl, and following his silent bidding, I cast my glance into the passageway in time to see someone slip quickly and noiselessly down the hall.

For a moment I sat in wondering silence, debating whether I had seen one of the servants creep past or whether I was the victim of an optical illusion, when my attention was suddenly compelled to a second figure, then a third, a fourth and a fifth passing the archway’s opening like flashes of light against a darkened wall. My reason told me my eyes were playing pranks, for the gliding, soundless figures filing in quick procession past the proscenium of the dining-room door were tall, bearded men encased in gleaming black steel, armed cap-à-pie, and shrouded from shoulder to spurs in voluminous sable cloaks.

I blinked my eyes and shook my head in bewilderment, wondering if I had fallen into a momentary doze and dreamed the vision, but sharply, with theatrical suddenness, there sounded the raucous, brazen bray of a bugle, the skirling squeal of an unoiled windlass reeling out rope, the thud of a drawbridge falling into place; then, above the whistling November wind there winded another trumpet flourish and the clatter of iron-shod hooves against stone paving-blocks.

“Why, what was that?” Miss Prettybridge forgot the spirit message still being thumped out on the table and threw back her head in momentary alarm.

“Sounds like a troop of scouts out for an evening’s lark,” put in our host, rising from the table. “Queer they should come out here to toot their bugles, though.”

“Ha, parbleu, you say rightly, my friend,” de Grandin broke in, rising so suddenly that his chair tilted back and fell to the floor with a resounding crash. “It is queer, most damnably queer. ‘Boy Scouts’ did you say? Prie Dieu they be not scouts of evil in search of some hapless little lad while a company of empty-headed fools sit idly by listening to the chatter of their decoy!

“Did none of you recognize the message the spirit had for me?”

We looked at him in silent astonishment as he lighted the wall-candles one after another and faced us with a countenance gone livid with fury.

“Ah bah, it is scarcely worth troubling to tell you,” he cried, “but the important message the spirit had for me was a silly little nursery rime:

“Great A, little a,
 Bouncing B.
The cat’s in the cupboard,
 And can’t see me!

“No, mordieu, the cats might not see that accursed decoy spirit, but Jules de Grandin could see the others as they slunk past the door upon their devil’s work! Trowbridge, mon vieux, look to Mademoiselle O’Shane, if you will.”

Startled by his command, I turned round. Dunroe O’Shane had fallen forward across the table, her long, tawny hair freed from its restraining pins and lying about her head like a pool of liquid bronze. Her eyes were still closed, but the peaceful, longing expression had gone from her face, and in its stead was a look of unutterable fear and loathing.

“Take her up, some of you,” de Grandin almost shrieked. “Bear her to her chamber and Dr. Trowbridge and I will attend to her. Then, Monsieur Van Riper, if you will be so good, I shall ask you to lend us one of your swiftest motor cars.”

“A motor car—now?” Van Riper’s incredulous tone showed he doubted his ears.

“Précisément, Monsieur, permit that I compliment you on the excellence of your hearing,” the Frenchman replied. “A swift motor car with plenty of fuel, if you please. There are certain medicines needed to attend this sickness of body and soul, and to strike directly at its cause, and we must have them without delay. Dr. Trowbridge will drive; you need not trouble your chauffeur to leave his bed.”

Ten minutes later, having no more idea of our destination than I had of the underlying causes of the last half hour’s strange events, I sped down the turnpike, Van Riper’s powerful motor warming up with every revolution, and gaining speed with every foot we traveled.

“Faster, faster, pour l’amour de Dieu, my friend,” the little Frenchman besought as we whirled madly around a banked curve in the road and started down the two-mile straightaway with the speedometer registering sixty-five miles an hour.

Twin disks of lurid flame rose above the crest of the gradient before us, growing larger and brighter every second, and the pounding staccato of high-powered motorcycles driven at top speed came to us through the shrieking wind.

I throttled down our engine to a legal speed as the State Troopers neared, but instead of rushing past they came to a halt, one on each side of us. “Where you from?” demanded the one to our left, on whose arm a sergeant’s chevrons showed.

“From Mr. Van Riper’s house—the Cloisters,” I answered. “I’m Dr. Trowbridge, of Harrisonville, and this is Dr. de Grandin. A young lady at the house has been taken ill, and we’re rushing home for medicine.”

“Ump?” the sergeant grunted. “Come from th’ Cloisters, do you? Don’t suppose you passed anyone on the road?”

“No—” I began, but de Grandin leaned past me, peering intently into the constable’s face.

“For whom do you seek, mon sergent?” he demanded.

“Night riders!” the words fairly spat from the policeman’s lips. “Lot o’ dam’ kidnapers, sir. Old lady down th’ road about five miles—name o’ Stebbens—was walkin’ home from a neighbor’s with her grandson, a cute little lad about three years old, when a crowd o’ bums came riding hell-bent for election past her, knocked her for a loop an’ grabbed up the kid. Masqueraders they was—wore long black gowns, she said, an’ rode on black horses. Went away whoopin’ an’ yellin’ to each other in some foreign language, an’ laughin’ like a pack o’ dogs. Be God, they’ll laugh outer th’ other side o’ their dirty mouths if we ketch ’em!

“Come on, Shoup, let’s roll,” he ordered his companion.

The roar of their motorcycles grew fainter and fainter as they swept down the road, and in another moment we were pursuing our way toward the city, gathering speed with every turn of the wheels.

5

We had gone scarcely another mile before the slate-colored clouds which the wind had been piling together in the upper sky ripped apart and great clouds of soft, feathery snowflakes came tumbling down, blotting out the road ahead and cutting our speed to a snail’s pace. It was almost graylight before we arrived at the outskirts of Harrisonville, and the snow was falling harder than ever as we headed up the main thoroughfare.

“Hélas, my friend, there is not the chance of the Chinaman that we can return to the Cloisters before noon, be our luck of the best,” de Grandin muttered disconsolately; “therefore I suggest that we go to your house and obtain a few hours’ rest. Me, I am almost frozen, and a warm bed will be welcome as a kiss to a love-sick lad.”

“But how about the medicine you wanted?” I objected. “Hadn’t we better see about getting that first?”

“Non,” he returned. “It will keep. The medicine I seek could not be administered before tonight—if that soon—and we can secure it later as well as now.”

Rather surprized at our unheralded return, but used to the vagaries of a bachelor physician and his eccentric friend, Nora McGinnis, my housekeeper and general factotum, prepared a toothsome breakfast for us next morning, and we had completed the meal, lingering over coffee and cigarettes a little longer than usual, when de Grandin’s face suddenly went livid as he thrust the folded newspaper he had been reading into my hand.

“Look, mon ami,” he whispered raspingly. “Read what is there. Mordieu, they wait not long to be about their deviltry!”

“STATE COP DEAD IN MYSTERY KILLING” announced the headline to which he had directed my attention. Below was a brief dispatch, evidently a bit of last-minute news, sandwiched between the announcement of a sheriff’s sale and a patent medicine advertisement:

Johnskill—Sergeant Rosswell of the state constabulary is dead and Private Shoup in a serious condition as the result of a battle with a mysterious band of masked ruffians near this place early this morning. Shortly after 10 o’clock last night Matilda Stebbens, of Osmondville, who was returning from a visit to a neighbor’s with her three-year-old grandson, George, was attacked by a company of men mounted on black or dark-colored horses and enveloped in long black gowns, according to her story to the troopers. The leader of the gang struck her a heavy blow with a club or blackjack, evidently with the intention of stunning her, and seized the little boy, lifting him to his saddle. Had it not been for the fact that Mrs. Stebbens still affects long hair and was wearing a stiff felt hat, the blow would undoubtedly have rendered her unconscious, but as it was she was merely knocked into the roadside ditch without losing consciousness, and as she lay there, half stunned from the blow, she heard the kidnapers exchange several words in some foreign language, Italian, she thought, before they set out at a breakneck pace, giving vent to wild whoops and yells. The direction of their flight was toward this place, and as soon as she was able to walk, Mrs. Stebbens hobbled to the nearest telephone and communicated with the state police.

Sergeant Rosswell and Private Shoup were detailed to the case and started in pursuit of the abductors on their motor-cycles, encountering no one along the road who would admit having seen the company of mysterious mounted gangsters. About two miles this side of the Cloisters, palatial country place of Tandy Van Riper, well-known New York financier, according to Trooper Shoup, he and his companion came upon the kidnapers, riding at almost incredible speed. Drawing their pistols, the state policemen called on the fleeing men to halt, and receiving no reply, opened fire. Their bullets, though fired at almost point-blank range, seemed to take no effect, Trooper Shoup declares, and the leader of the criminal band turned about and charged him and his companion, deliberately riding Sergeant Rosswell down. According to Shoup, a shot fired by Rosswell directly at the horse which was about to trample him took no effect, though the pistol was less than three feet from the beast’s breast. Shoup is suffering from a broken arm, three fractured ribs and a severe bruise on the head, which, he alleges, was dealt him when one of the thugs struck him with the flat of a sword.

Physicians at Mercy Hospital believe Shoup’s description of the criminals and the fight to be colored by the beating he received and intimate that he is not wholly responsible for his statements, as he positively declares that every member of the band of criminals was fully arrayed in black armor and armed with a long sword.

Working on the theory that the kidnapers are a band of Italian desperadoes who assumed this fantastic disguise, strong posses of state police are scouring the neighborhood. It is thought the little Stebbens boy was abducted by mistake, as the family are known to be in very moderate circumstances and the chances of obtaining a ransom for the lad are slight.

“You see?” de Grandin asked as I put the paper down with an exclamation of dismay.

“No, I’m hanged if I do,” I shot back. “The whole gruesome business is beyond me. Is there any connection between what we saw at the Cloisters last night and—”

“Mort d’un rat noir, is there connection between the serpent and his venom—the Devil and the flames of hell?” he cried. “Yes, my friend, there is such a connection as will take all our skill and courage to break, I fear. Meantime, let us hasten, let us fly to the City Hospital. There is that there which shall prove more than a surprize to those vile miscreants, those forsworn servants of the Lord, when next we see them, mon vieux.”

“What in the world are you talking about?” I demanded. “Whom do you mean by ‘forsworn servants of the Lord’?”

“Ha, good friend,” he returned, his face working with emotion, “you will know in due time, if what I suspect is true. If not—” He raised his narrow shoulders in a fatalistic shrug as he snatched his overcoat from the hall rack.

For upward of half an hour I cooled my heels in the frosty winter air while de Grandin was closeted in conference with the superintendent of the City Hospital, but when he came out he was wearing such a smile of serene happiness that I had not the heart to berate him for leaving me outside so long.

“And now, kind friend, if you will take me so far as the pro-cathedral, I shall have done the last of my errands, and we may begin our journey to the Cloisters,” he announced as he leaped nimbly into the seat beside me.

The Right Reverend De Motte Gregory, suffragan bishop of our diocese, was seated at his desk in the synod house as de Grandin and I were announced, and graciously consented to see us at once. He had been a more than ordinarily successful railway executive, a licensed legal practitioner and a certified public accountant before he assumed the cloth, and his worldly training had taught him the value of time and words, both his own and others’, and rarely did he waste either.

“Monsieur l’Évêque,” de Grandin began after he had greeted the gray-haired cleric with a rigidly formal European bow, “in the garden of your beautiful church there grows a bush raised from a sprig of the Holy Thorn of Glastonbury—the tree which sprang from the staff of the blessed Joseph of Arimathea when he landed in Britain after his voyage and travail. Monseigneur, we are come to beg a so little spray of that shrub from you.”

The bishop’s eyes opened wide with surprize, but de Grandin gave him no time for reflection.

“Monseigneur,” he hurried on, “it is not that we wish to adorn our own gardens, nor yet to put it to a shameful commercial use, but we need it—need it most urgently in a matter of great importance which is toward—”

Leaving his chair he leaned across the bishop’s wide rosewood desk and began whispering rapidly in the churchman’s ear.

The slightly annoyed frown which mounted to the bishop’s face as the little Frenchman took the liberty changed slowly to a look of incredulity, then to an expression of amazement. “You really believe this?” he asked at length.

“More, Monseigneur, I almost know it,” de Grandin assured him earnestly, “and if I am mistaken, as I hope I am but fear I am not, the holy thorn can do no harm, while it may—” He paused, waving his hand in an expressive gesture.

Bishop Gregory touched one of the row of call-buttons on his desk. “You shall have the cutting from the tree, and be very welcome,” he assured my friend, “but I join with you in the hope you are mistaken.”

“Grand merci, Monseigneur!” de Grandin acknowledged with another bow. “Mordieu, but your great heart is equaled only by your massive intellect! Half the clergy would have said I raved had I told them one small quarter of what I related to you.”

The bishop smiled a little wearily as he put the sprig of thorn-bush into de Grandin’s hand. “Half the clergy, like half the laity, know so much that they know next to nothing,” he replied.

“Name of a name,” de Grandin swore enthusiastically as we turned toward the Cloisters, “and they say he is a worldly man! Pardieu, when will the foolish ones learn that the man who dedicates worldly wisdom to heaven’s service is the most valuable servant of all?”

6

Dunroe O’Shane was attired in a long, brown-linen smock and hard at work on her drawing when we arrived at the Cloisters shortly before luncheon. She seemed none the worse for her fainting fit of the previous night, and the company were rather inclined to rally de Grandin on the serious diagnosis he had made before rushing wildly away to secure medicine for her.

I was amazed at the good-natured manner in which he took their chaffing, but a hasty whisper in my ear explained his self-control. “Apes’ anger and fools’ laughter are alike to be treated with scorn, my friend,” he told me. “We—you and I—have work to do here, and we must not let the hum of pestilent gnats drive us from our purpose.”

Bridge and dancing filled the evening from dinner to midnight, and the party broke up shortly after 12 with the understanding that all were to be ready to attend Thanksgiving services in the near-by parish church at 11 o’clock next morning.

“Ts-s-st, Friend Trowbridge, do not disrobe,” de Grandin ordered as I was about to shed my dinner clothes and prepare for bed; “we must be ready for an instant sortie from now until cockcrow tomorrow, I fear.”

“What’s this all about, anyhow?” I demanded a little irritably, as I dropped on the bed and wrapped myself in a blanket. “There’s been more confounded mystery here than I ever saw in a harmless old house, what with Miss O’Shane making funny drawings and throwing fainting-fits, and bugles sounding in the courtyard, and—”

“Ha, harmless, did you say?” he cut in with a grim smile. “My friend, if this house be harmless, then prussic acid is a healthful drink. Attend me with care, if you please. Do you know what this place is?”

“Certainly I do,” I responded with some heat. “It’s an old Cypriote villa brought to America and—”

“It was once a chapter house of the Knights of the Temple,” he interrupted shortly, “and a Cyprian chapter house, at that. Does that mean nothing to you? Do you not know the Knights Templars, my friend?”

“I ought to,” I replied. “I’ve been one for the last fifteen years.”

“Oh, la, la!” he laughed. “You will surely slay me, my friend. You good, kind American gentlemen who dress in pretty uniforms and carry swords are no more like the old Knights of the Temple of Solomon than are these other good men who wear red tarbooshes and call themselves Nobles of the Mystic Shrine like the woman-stealing, pilgrim-murdering Arabs of the desert!

“Listen: The history of the Templars’ order is a long one, but we can touch its high spots in a few words. Formed originally for the purpose of fighting the Infidel in Palestine and aiding poor pilgrims to the Holy City, they did yeomen service in the cause of God; but when Europe forsook its crusades and the Saracens took Jerusalem, the knights, whose work was done, did not disband. Not they. Instead they clung to their various houses in Europe, and grew fat, lazy and wicked in a life of leisure, supported by the vast wealth they had amassed from gifts from grateful pilgrims and the spoils of battle. In 1191 they bought the Isle of Cyprus from Richard I of England and established several chapter houses there, and it was in those houses that unspeakable things were done. Cyprus is one of the most ancient dwelling-places of religion, and of her illegitimate sister, superstition. It was there that the worshipers of Cytherea, goddess of beauty and of love—and other things less pleasant—had their stronghold. Before the Romans held the land it was drenched with unspeakable orgies. The very name of the island has passed into an invidious adjective in your language—do you not say a thing is Cyprian when you would signify it is lascivious? Certainly.”

“But—”

“Hear me,” he persisted, waving aside my interruption. “This Cytherea was but another form of Aphrodite, and Aphrodite, in turn, was but another name for the Eastern Goddess Astarte or Istar. You begin to comprehend? Her rites were celebrated with obscene debaucheries, but her worshipers became such human swine that only the most revolting inversions of natural things would satisfy them. The flaunting and sacrifices of virtue were not enough; they must needs sacrifice—literally—those things which impersonated virtue—little, innocent children and chaste young maidens. Their foul altars must run red with the blood of innocence. These things were traditions in Cyprus long before the Knights Templars took up their abode there, and, as one can not sleep among dogs without acquiring fleas, so the knights, grown slothful and lazy, with nothing to do but think up ways of spending their time and wealth, became addicts to the evils of the earlier, heathen ways of their new home. Thoughts are things, my friend, and the evil thoughts of the old Cyprians took root and flourished in the brains of those unfortunate old warrior-monks whose hands were no longer busy with the sword and whose lips no longer did service to the Most High God.

“You doubt it? Consider: Though Philip IV and Clement V undoubtlessly did Jacques de Molay to death for no better reason than that they might cast lots for his raiment, the fact remains that many of the knights confessed to dreadful sacrileges committed in the chapter houses—to children slain on the altars once dedicated to God, to young virgins done to death amid horrid ceremonies, all in the name of the heathen goddess Cytherea.

“This very house wherein we sit was once the scene of such terrible things as those. About its stones must linger the presence of the evil men, the renegade priests of God, who once did them. These discarnate intelligences have lain dormant since the Fourteenth Century, but for some reason, which we will not now discuss, I believe they have wakened into physical beings once more. It was their reincarnated spirits we saw flitting past the door last night while Mademoiselle Dunroe lay in a trance; it was they who took the little boy from his grandmother’s arms; it was they who slew the brave policeman; it is they who will soon attempt to perform the hideous inversion of the mass, unless I am mistaken.”

“See here, de Grandin,” I expostulated, “there have been some deucedly queer goings-on here, I’ll admit, but when you try to tell me that a lot of old soldier-monks have come to life again and are traipsing around the countryside stealing children, you’re piling it on a bit too thick, you know. Now, if there were any evidence to prove that—”

“Silence!” his sharp whisper brought me up with a start as he rose from his chair and crept, cat-like, toward the door, opening it a crack and glancing down the darkened corridor outside. Then:

“Come, my friend,” he bade in a low breath, “come and see what I behold.”

As he swung the door back I glanced down the long, stone-paved gallery, dark as Erebus save as cancellated bars of moonlight shot obliquely down from the tiny mullioned windows piercing the dome, and made out a gliding, wraithlike figure in trailing white garments.

“Dunroe O’Shane!” I murmured dazedly, watching the retreating form slipping soundlessly down the dark balcony. The wavering light of the candle she bore in her upraised hand cast gigantic shadows against the carved balustrade and the sculptured uprights of the interlaced arches supporting the gallery above, and hobgoblin shades seemed to march along beside her like an escort of unclean genii from the legions of Eblis. I watched open-mouthed with amazement as she slipped down the passage, her feet, obscured in a haze of trailing draperies, treading noiselessly, her free hand stretched outward toward the balcony rail. Next moment the gallery was deserted; abruptly as a motion picture fades from the screen when the projecting light winks out, Dunroe O’Shane and her flickering rushlight vanished from our sight.

“Quick, Friend Trowbridge,” the Frenchman whispered, “after her—it was through that further door she went!”

Quietly as possible we ran down the gallery, paused before a high, pointed-topped door and wrenched at its wrought-iron handle. The stout oaken panels held firm, for the door was latched on the farther side.

“Ten thousand little red devils!” de Grandin cried in vexation. “We are stalemated!”

For a moment I thought he would hurl himself against the four-inch planks of the door in impotent fury, but he collected himself with an effort, and drawing a flashlight from his jacket pocket, handed it to me with the command, “Hold the light steady on the keyhole, my friend.” The next instant he sank to his knees, produced two short lengths of thin steel wire and began methodically picking the lock.

“Ha,” he exclaimed as he rose and dusted the knees of his trousers, “those old ones built for strength, Friend Trowbridge, but they knew little of subtlety. Little did that ancient locksmith dream his handiwork would one day meet with Jules de Grandin.”

The unbarred door swung inward beneath his touch, and we stepped across the stone sill of a vast, dungeon-dark apartment.

“Mademoiselle?” he called softly. “Mademoiselle Dunroe—are you here?”

He shot the searching beam of his flashlight hither and yon about the big room, disclosing high walls of heavy carved oak, massive pieces of mediaeval furniture—a great canopy-bed, several cathedral chairs and one or two massive, iron-bound chests—but found no living thing.

“Mordieu, but this is strange!” he muttered, sinking to his knees to flash his light beneath the high-carved bed. “Into this room she did most certainly come but a few little minutes ago, gliding like a spirit,” he insisted, “and now, pouf, out of this same room she does vanish like a ghost! C’est très étrange!”

Though somewhat larger, the room was similar to most other bedchambers in the house, paneled with rather crudely carved, age-blackened wood for the entire height of its walls, ceiled with great beams which still bore the marks of the adz, and floored with octagonal marble tiles of alternate black and white. We went over every inch of it, searching for some secret exit, for, save the one by which we had entered, there was no door in the place, and the two great windows were of crude, semi-transparent glass let into metal frames securely cemented to the surrounding stones. Plainly, nobody had left the room that way.

At the farther end of the apartment stood a tall wardrobe, elaborately decorated with carved scenes of chase and battle. Opening one of the double doors letting into the press, de Grandin inspected the interior, which, like the outside, was carved in every available place. “U’m?” he commented, surveying the walls carefully under his flashlight. “It may be that this is but the anteroom to—ha!”

He broke off, pointing dramatically to a carved group in the center of one of the back panels. It represented a procession of hunters returning from their sport, deer, boar and other animals lashed to long poles which the huntsmen bore shoulder-high. The men were filing through the arched entrance to a castle, the great doors of which swung back to receive them. One of the door-leaves, apparently, had warped loose from the body of the plank from which it was carved, for it swung loose a full quarter-inch.

“C’est très adroit, n’est-ce-pas?” my companion asked with a delighted grin. “Had I not seen such things before, it might have imposed on me. As it is—”

Reaching forward, he gave the loosened door a sharp, quick push, and the entire back of the wardrobe slipped upward like a sliding window-sash, revealing a narrow opening.

“And what have we here?” de Grandin asked, playing his spotlight through the secret doorway.

Straight ahead for three or four feet ran a flagstone sill, worn smooth in the center, as though with the shuffling tread of many feet. Beyond that began a flight of narrow, stone stairs which spiraled steeply down a shaft like the flue of a monster chimney.

De Grandin turned to me, and his little, heart-shaped face was graver than I had ever seen it. Though his tightly waxed mustache twitched and quivered at the points like the whiskers of an irritable tom-cat, his eyes were without the customary glitter which illuminated them when he was excited. “Trowbridge, dear, kind friend,” he said in a voice so low and hoarse I could scarcely make out his words, “we have faced many perils together—perils of spirit and perils of flesh—and always we have triumphed. This time we may not. If I do not mistake rightly, there lies below these steps an evil more ancient and potent than any we have hitherto met. I have armed us against it with the weapons of religion and of science, but—I do not know that they will avail. Say, then, will you turn back now and go to your bed? I shall think no less of you, for no man should be compelled to face this thing unknowingly, and there is now no time to explain. If I survive, I shall return and tell you all. If I come not back with daylight, know that I have perished in my failure, and think kindly of me as one who loved you deeply. Will you not now say adieu, old friend?” He extended his hand, and though it was steady at the wrist, I saw the long, smooth-jointed fingers were trembling with suppressed nervousness.

“I will not!” I returned hotly, stung to the quick by his suggestion. “I don’t know what’s down there, but if you go, I go too!”

“Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!” he swore exultantly, and before I realized what he was about, he had flung his arms about my neck and kissed me on both cheeks. “Onward, then, brave comrade!” he cried. “This night we fight such a fight as has not been waged since the sainted George slew the monster!”

7

Round and round a steadily descending spiral, while I counted a hundred and seventy steps, we went, going deeper and deeper through inky blackness. Finally, when I had begun to grow giddy with the endless cork-screw turns, we arrived at a steeply sloping tunnel, floored with smooth black-and-white tiles. Down this we hastened, the pitch of the floor adding to our speed, until we had traversed a distance of perhaps a hundred feet; then for a similar length we trod a level path, and at last began an ascent as steep as the first decline had been.

“Careful—cautiously, my friend,” the Frenchman warned in a whisper as the darting beam of his searchlight disclosed a heavy, iron-bound door before us.

Pausing a moment while he fumbled in the pocket of his jacket, my companion strode toward the barrier and laid his left hand on its heavy, wrought-iron latch.

The portal swung back almost as he touched it, and:

“Qui va là?” challenged a voice from the darkness.

De Grandin threw the ray of his torch across the doorway, disclosing a tall, spare form in gleaming black plate-armor over which was drawn the brown-serge habit of a monk. The sentry wore his hair in a sort of bob approximating the haircut affected by children today, and on his sallow immature face sprouted the rudiments of a straggling beard. It was a youthful face and a weak one which de Grandin’s light disclosed, but the face of a youth already well schooled in viciousness—such a face as I had seen on juvenile gang-recruits during a brief term of duty as relief to the physician of our city prison.

“Qui vive?” the fellow called doubtfully in a rather high, effeminate voice, laying a hand on the hilt of a heavy broadsword dangling from the wide, brass-studded baldric looped over his cassock.

“Those on the service of the Most High God, petit bête!” returned de Grandin, drawing something (a pronged sprig of wood, I thought) from his jacket pocket and thrusting it toward the warder’s face.

“Ohé!” cried the other sharply, shrinking back as though from contact with a white-hot iron. “Touch me not, good messires, I pray—I—”

“Ha—so?” de Grandin gritted between his teeth, and drew the branched stick downward across the sentry’s face.

Astonishingly, the youth seemed to shrink and shrivel in upon himself. Trembling as though with an ague, he bent forward, buckled at the knees, fell toward the floor, and—was gone! Sword, armor, cassock and the man who wore them dwindled to nothingness before our sight like a fleck of carbon dioxide snow melting away and leaving neither smudge of dampness nor grain of residue in the place where it had been.

A hundred feet or so farther on, our way was barred by another door, wider, higher and heavier than the first. While no tiler guarded it, it was so firmly locked that all our efforts were powerless to budge it.

“Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin announced, “it seems we shall have to pick this lock, even as we did the other. Do you keep watch through yonder grille while I make the way open for us.” Reaching up, he moved aside a shutter covering a barred peep-hole in the door’s thick panels; then, dropping to his knees, drew forth his wires and began working at the lock which held the barrier in place.

Gazing through the tiny wicket, I beheld a chapel-like room of circular formation, cunningly floored with slabs of polished yellow stone, inlaid with occasional plaques of purple, so that the pavement appeared splashed with coagulated blood.

By the glow of a wavering vigil lamp and the flicker of several guttering ecclesiastical candles, I saw the place was roofed with a vaulted ceiling supported by a number of converging arches, and the pier of each arch was supported by the carved image of a huge human foot which rested on the crown of a hideous, half-human head, crushing it downward and causing it to grimace hellishly with mingled pain and fury.

Beyond the yellow sanctuary lamp loomed the altar, approached by three low steps, and on it was a tall wooden crucifix from which the corpus had been stripped and to which had been nailed, in obscure caricature, a huge black bat. The staples fastening the poor beast to the cross must have hurt unmercifully, for it strove hysterically to free itself, fluttering its pinioned wings and whimpering and gibbering piteously.

Almost sickened at the sight, I described the scene to de Grandin as he worked at the lock, speaking in a muted whisper, for, though there was no sign of living thing save the tortured bat, I felt instinctively that there were listening ears concealed in the darkness beyond the violated altar.

“Good—très bon!” he grunted as he hastened with his task. “It may be we are yet in time, good friend.” Even as he spoke there came a sharp click, and the door’s heavy bolts slipped back under the pressure of his improvised picklock.

Slowly, inch by careful inch, lest the squeak of an unoiled hinge betray us, we forced the great door back.

But even as we did so, there came from the rear of the circular chamber the subdued measures of a softly intoned Gregorian chant, and something white moved forward through the shadows.

It was a man arrayed in black-steel armor over which was drawn a white surtout emblazoned with a reversed passion cross, and in his hands he bore a wide-mouthed brazen bowl like an alms-basin. In the tray rested a wicked-looking, curve-bladed knife.

With a mocking genuflection to the altar he strode up the steps and placed his burden on the second tread; then, with a coarse guffaw, he spat upon the pinioned bat and backed downward, taking station to the left of the sanctuary and looking expectantly over his shoulder into the shadows beyond.

As at a signal a double file of armored men came marching out of the gloom, ranged themselves in two ranks, one to right, one to left of the altar, and whipped their long swords from their sheaths, clashing them together, tip to tip, forming an arcade of flashing steel between them.

So softly that I felt, rather than heard him, de Grandin sighed in suppressed fury as blade met blade and two more men-at-arms, each bearing a smoking censer, strode forward beneath the roof of steel. The perfume of the incense was strong, acrid, sweet, yet bitterly revolting at the same time, and it mounted to our brains like the fumes of some accursed Oriental drug. But even as we sniffed its seductive scent, our eyes widened at sight of the form which paced slowly behind the mailed acolytes.

Ceremoniously, step by pausing step, she came, like a bride marching under the arbor of uplifted swords at a military wedding, and my eyes fairly ached at the beauty of her. Milk-white, lissom and pliant as a peeled willow wand, clad only in the jeweled loveliness of her own pearly whiteness, long, bronze hair sweeping in a cloven tide from her pale brow and cataracting over her tapering shoulders, came Dunroe O’Shane. Her eyes were closed, as though in sleep, and on her red, full lips lay the yearning half-smile of the bride who ascends the aisle to meet her bridegroom, or the novice who mounts the altar steps to make her full profession. And as she advanced, her supple, long-fingered hands waved slowly to and fro, weaving fantastic arabesques in the air like the sinuous patterns woven out of nothingness by Eastern fakirs when they would lay a charm on their beholders.

“Hail, Cytherea, Queen and Priestess and Goddess; hail, She Who Confers Life and Being on Her Servants!” came the full-throated salutation of the double row of armored men as they clashed their blades together in martial salute, then dropped to one knee in greeting and adoration.

For a moment the undraped priestess paused below the altar stairs; then, as though forced downward by invincible pressure, she dropped, and we heard the smacking impact of soft, white flesh against the stone floor as she flung herself prostrate and beat her brow and hands against the floor in utter self-abasement before the marble altar and its defiled calvary.

“Is all prepared?” The question rang out sonorously as a cowled figure advanced from the shadows and strode with a swaggering step to the altar.

“All is prepared!” the congregation answered with one voice.

“Then bring the paschal lamb, even the lamb without fleece!” The deep-voiced command somehow sent shivers of horror racing down my spine.

Two armored votaries slipped quietly away, returning in an instant with the struggling body of a little boy between them—a chubby little baby boy, naked as when his mother first saw him, who fought and kicked and offered such resistance as his puny strength allowed while he called aloud to “Mamma” and “Grandma” to save him from his captors.

Down against the altar steps the butchers flung the little man; then one took his chubby, dimpled hands in relentless grip while the other drew backward at his ankles, suspending him above the wide-mouthed brazen bowl reposing on the second step.

“Take up the knife, Priestess and Queen of goodly Salamis,” the hooded master of ceremonies commanded. “Take up the sacrificial knife, that the red blood may flow to our Goddess, and we hold high wassail in Her honor! O’er land and sea, o’er burning desert and heaving billow have we journeyed—”

“Villains—assassins—renegades!” Jules de Grandin bounded from his station in the shadow like a frenzied cat springing to the attack and faced them in snarling defiance. “By the blood of all the blessed martyrs, you have journeyed altogether too far from hell, your home!”

“Ha? Interlopers?” rasped the hooded man. “So be it. Three hearts shall smoke upon our altar instead of one!”

“Parbleu, nothing shall smoke but the fires of your endless torture as your foul carcasses burn ceaselessly in hell!” de Grandin returned, leaping forward and drawing out the forked stick with which he had struck down the porter at the outer gate.

A burst of contemptuous laughter greeted him. “Thinkest thou to overcome me with such a toy?” the cowled one asked between shouts. “My warder at the gate succumbed to your charms—he was a poor weakling, unschooled in the service of the olden ones. Him you have passed, but not me. Now die!”

From beneath his cassock he snatched a long, two-handed sword, whirled its blade aloft in a triple flourish, and struck directly at de Grandin’s head.

Almost by a miracle, it seemed, the Frenchman avoided the blow, dropped his useless sprig of thornwood and snatched a tiny, quill-like object from his pocket. Dodging the devastating thrusts of the enemy with the nimbleness of a panther, de Grandin toyed an instant with the capsule in his hand, unscrewed the cap from its end, and, suddenly changing his tactics, advanced directly on his foe.

“Ha, Monsieur from the Fires, here is fire you know not of!” he shouted, thrusting forward the queer-looking rod and advancing fearlessly within reach of the other’s flashing sword.

I stared in open-mouthed amazement. Poised for another slashing blow with his great sword, the armed man wavered momentarily, while an expression of astonishment, bewilderment, finally craven fear overspread his lean, predatory features. Lowering his sword, he thrust feebly with the point, but there was no force behind the stab; the deadly steel seemed to drop of its own weight in his hands and fell with a jangling clatter to the floor before he could drive it into the little Frenchman’s breast.

The hooded man seemed growing thinner; his tall, spare form, which had bulked a full head taller than de Grandin a moment before, seemed losing substance—growing gradually transparent, like an early-morning fog slowly dissolving before the strengthening rays of the rising sun. Behind him, through him, I could dimly espy the outlines of the violated altar and the prostrate woman before its steps. Now the objects in the background became plainer and plainer. The figure of the armored man was no longer a thing of flesh and blood and cold steel overspread with a monk’s habit, but an unsubstantial phantom, like an oddly shaped cloud. It was composed of trailing, lolling clouds of luminous vapor which gradually disintegrated into strands and floating webs of phosphorescence, and these, in turn, gave way to scores of little nebulae of light which glowed like cigarette-ends of intense blue radiance. Then, where the nebulae had been were only dancing, shifting specks of bright blue fire, finally nothing but a few pin-points of light; then—nothing.

Like shadows thrown by forest trees when the moon is at her zenith, the double row of men-at-arms stood at ease while de Grandin battled with their champion; now, their leader gone, they turned with one accord and scuttled in panic flight toward the rearward shadows, but Jules de Grandin was after them like a hawk harrying a flight of sparrows.

“Ha, Messieurs les Renégats,” he called mockingly, pressing closer and closer, “you who steal away helpless little boy-babies from the arms of their grand’mères and then would sacrifice them on your altar, do you like the feast Jules de Grandin brings? You who would make wassail with the blood of babes—drink the draft I have prepared! Fools, mockers at God, where now is your deity? Call on her—call on Cytherea! Pardieu, I fear her not, neither her nor the forsworn servants of the Lord who kiss her feet in homage!”

As it was with the master, so it was with the underlings: Closer and closer de Grandin pressed against the struggling mass of demoralized men, and their very bodies seemed to melt before his advance like ice when pressed upon by red-hot iron. One moment they milled and struggled, shrieking and mouthing obscene prayers for aid to some unclean deity; the next they were dissolved into nebulous vapor, drifting aimlessly a moment in the still air of the chapel, then swept away to nothingness.

“And so, my friend, that is done,” announced de Grandin matter-of-factly as he might have mentioned the ending of a meal. “There crouches Mademoiselle O’Shane, Friend Trowbridge; come, let us seek her clothes—they should be somewhere here.”

Behind the altar we found Dunroe’s nightrobe and negligée lying in a ring, just as she had shrugged out of them before taking up her march between the upraised swords. Gently as a nurse attending a babe, the little Frenchman raised the swooning girl from her groveling posture before the altar, draped her robes about her, and took her in his arms.

A wailing cry, rising gradually to an incensed roar, echoed and reverberated through the vaulted chamber, and de Grandin thrust the unconscious girl into my hands. “Mon Dieu!” he exclaimed with a serio-comic expression of dismay, “I did forget. Le petit garçon!”

Crouched as close to the wall as he could get, we found the little lad, tears of surprizing size streaming down his fat cheeks as his little mouth opened wide and emitted wail after broken-hearted wail. “Hold, my little cabbage, mon brave soldat!” de Grandin soothed him, stretching out his hands to the weeping youngster. “Come with me. Come, we shall clothe you warmly against the cold and pop you into a bed of feathers, and tomorrow morning, ere we return you to your mother’s arms, we shall fill your little belly to the bursting-point with bonbons—may the devil roast me on a spit if we do not so!”

Panting under my burden, for she was no light weight, I bore Dunroe O’Shane up the long, tortuous flight of steps down which de Grandin and I had come a short half-hour before, pausing every now and again to regain my breath.

“Morphine is indicated here, if I do not mistake,” de Grandin remarked as we laid the girl on her bed and drew the covers up about her chin.

“But we haven’t any—” I began, only to be checked by his grin.

“Oh, but we have,” he contradicted. “I foresaw something like this was likely to come about, and abstracted a quantity of the drug, together with a syringe, from your surgery before we left home.”

When we had administered the narcotic, we set out for our own chamber, the little boy, warmly bundled in blankets, held tightly in de Grandin’s arms. At a nod from the Frenchman we paused at Dunroe’s studio, lighted several candles and inspected her work. Fairly spread upon her drawing-board was a pretty little scene—a dimpled little boy crowing and smiling in his mother’s lap, a proud and happy father leaning over them, and in the foreground a group of rough bucolics kneeling in smiling adoration. “Why, the influence, whatever it was, seems to have left her before we went down those secret stairs!” I exclaimed, looking admiringly at the drawing.

“Do you say so?” de Grandin asked in an odd voice as he bent closer to inspect the picture. “Look here, if you please, my friend.”

Bringing my eyes within a few inches of the board on which the Christmas scene was sketched, I saw, so faint it was hardly to be found unless the beholder looked for it, another picture, lightly sketched in jerky, uneven lines, depicting another scene—a vaulted chapel with walls lined by armed men, two of whom held a child’s body horizontally before the altar, while a woman, clothed only in her long, trailing hair, plunged a wicked, curve-bladed knife into the little one’s body, piercing the heart, and the blood dripped into a wide-mouthed brazen bowl beneath.

“Good Lord!” I exclaimed, starting back in horror.

“Precisely,” agreed Jules de Grandin. “The good Lord inspired talent in the poor girl’s hand, but the powers of darkness dictated that sketch. Perhaps—I can not say for sure—she drew both the pictures we see here, and the good one was formerly the faint one, but when I overcame the wicked ones, the wicked scene faded to insignificance and the pleasing one became predominant. It is possible, and—nom d’un nom!”

“What now?” I demanded as he turned a conscience-smitten face toward me and thrust the sleeping child into my arms.

“La chauve-souris—the bat!” he exclaimed. “I did forget the poor one’s sufferings in the stress of greater things. Take the little man to our room, and soothe him, my friend. Me, I go down those ten-thousand-times-damned stairs to that never-enough-to-be-cursed chapel and put the poor brute out of its misery!”

“You mean you’re actually going into that horrible place again?” I demanded incredulously.

“Eh bien, why not?” he asked.

“Why—those terrible men—those—” I began, but he stopped me with upraised hand.

“My friend,” he asked as he extracted a cigarette from his dressing-gown pocket and lighted it nonchalantly, “have you not yet learned that when Jules de Grandin kills a thing—be it man or be it devil—it is dead? There is nothing there which could harm a new-born fly, I do solemnly assure you.”

8

Jules de Grandin poured out a couple of tablespoonfuls of brandy into a wide-mouthed glass and passed the goblet under his nose, sniffing appreciatively at the liquor’s rich bouquet. “Not at all, cher ami,” he denied with a wave of his slender, womanish hand. “From the first I did suspect there was something not altogether right about that house.

“To begin, you will recall that on the night Monsieur Van Riper took us from the station he told us his progenitor had imported the house, stone by single stone, to this country from Cyprus?”

“Yes,” I nodded.

“Very good. The stones of which it is erected were probably quarried from the ruins of some heathen temple, and like sponges soaked in water, they were full to overflowing with evil influences. This evil undoubtlessly affected the old warrior knights who dwelt in that house, probably from 1191, when Richard of England sold Cyprus to their order, to 1308, when the French king and the Roman pope suppressed and destroyed the order—and shared its riches between them.

“That the souls of those old monks who had forsaken their vows to the God of Love to serve the Goddess of Lust with unclean rites and ceremonies could not find rest in peaceful graves there is little doubt. But that they were able to materialize and carry on the obscenities they had practised in life, there is also much doubt. Some ghosts there are who can make themselves visible at will; others can materialize at certain times and in certain places only; others can show themselves only with the aid of a medium.

“When the rich Monsieur Profiteer took up the old house and brought it to America, he doubtless imported all its evil influences intact; but they were latent.

“Then, only one little week ago, that which was needful came to the house. It was nothing less than Mademoiselle O’Shane’s so beautiful self. She, my friend, is what the spiritualists call a sensitive, a psychic. She is attuned to the fine vibrations which affect the ordinary person not at all. And she was the innocent medium through which the wicked old knights were able to effect a reincarnation.

“The air may be filled with the ethereal waves from a thousand broadcasting stations, but if you have not a radio machine to entrap and consolidate those waves into sound, you are helpless to hear so much as a single squeal of static. Is it not so? Very good. Mademoiselle Dunroe was the radio set—the condenser and the amplifying agent needed to release the invisible wickedness which came from Cytherea’s wicked altar—the discarnate intelligences which were once bad men. Do you not recall how she was greeted in the chapel of the Black Lodge: ‘Hail, Priestess and Queen—She Who Gives Her Servants Life and Being’? Those wicked things which once were men admitted their debt to her in that salutation, my friend.

“Remember how Mademoiselle Dunroe told you of her inability to draw what she wished? The evil influences were already beginning to steal her brain and make her pliable to their base desires. They were beginning to lay plans to feed upon her vitality to clothe themselves in the semblance of Humanity, and as they possessed her, she saw with her inward eye the scenes so many times heretofore enacted in that terrible underground chapel.

“From the first I liked not the house, and when the poor Mademoiselle Dunroe told us of her troubles with her drawings, I liked it still less. How long it would have taken those old secret worshipers of evil to make themselves visible by the use of Mademoiselle Dunroe’s vitality, I do not know. Perhaps they might never have succeeded. Perhaps she would have gone away and nothing more would have been heard of them, but that flap-eared she-ass of a Mademoiselle Prettybridge played the precise game the long-dead villains desired. When she held her so absurd séance in the dining-room that night, she furnished them just the atmosphere they needed to place their silent command in Mademoiselle O’Shane’s mind. Her attention was fixed on ghostly things; ‘Ah-ha,’ says the master of the Black Lodge, ‘now we shall steal her mind. Now we shall make her go into a trance like a medium, and she shall materialize us, and là, là, what deviltry we shall do!’ And so they did. While they sent one of their number to thump upon the table and hold us spellbound listening to his nonsense rimes, the rest of them became material and rode forth upon their phantom steeds to steal them a little child. Oh, my friend, I dare not think what would have been had they carried through that dreadful blood-sacrifice. Warm blood acts upon the wicked spirits as tonic acts on humans. They might have become so strong no power on earth could have stayed them! As it was, the ancient evil could be killed, but it died very, very hard.”

“Was Dunroe under their influence when we saw her at the piano that night?” I asked.

“Undoubtlessly. Already they had made her draw things she did not consciously understand; then, when they had roused her from her bed and guided her to the instrument, she played first a composition of beauty, for she is a good girl at heart, but they wished her to play something evil. Music hath charms to do more than soothe the savage breast, my friend. The drums drive the African black to frenzy; the sound of the bugle gives courage to the soldier; myself, I cry like a babe when I hear the band play La Marseillaise. No doubt the wicked, lecherous tune she played under their guidance that night helped mightily to make good, God-fearing Dunroe O’Shane forget herself and serve as heathen priestess before the heathen altar of a band of forsworn renegade priests.”

“H’m,” I murmured dubiously. “Granting your premises, I can see the logic of your conclusions, but how was it you put those terrible ghosts to flight so easily?”

“I waited for that question,” he answered with a laugh. “Have you not yet learned Jules de Grandin is a very clever fellow, Friend Trowbridge? Parbleu, I have known it for years!

“Attend me, for what I say is worth hearing. When those evil men went forth in search of prey and killed the poor policeman, I said to me, ‘Jules de Grandin, you have here a tough nut to crack; mordieu, a very tough nut, indeed!’

“‘I know it,’ I reply.

“‘Very well, then,’ I ask me, ‘who are these goblin child-stealers?’

“‘Ghosts—or the evil representations of wicked men who died long years ago in mortal sin,’ I return.

“‘Now,’ I say, ‘you are sure these men are materialized by Mademoiselle O’Shane—her strange playing, her unwitting drawings, her trance at the so odious Mademoiselle Prettybridge’s table-tapping party, they all prove it. What, then, is such a materialization composed of?’

“‘Of what some call ectoplasm, others psychoplasm,’ I reply.

“‘But certainly’—I will not give myself peace till I have talked this matter over completely—‘but what is that psychoplasm, or ectoplasm? Tell me that?’

“And then, as I think, and think some more, I come to the conclusion it is but a very fine form of vibration given off by the medium, just as the ether-waves are given off by the broadcasting station. When it combines with the thin-unpowerful vibration set up by the evil entity to be materialized, it makes the outward seeming of a man—what we call a ghost.

“I decided to try a desperate experiment. A sprig of the Holy Thorn of Glastonbury may be efficacious as a charm, but charms are of no avail against an evil which is very old and very powerful. Nevertheless, I will try the Holy Thorn-bush. If it fail, I must have a second line of defense. What shall it be?

“Why not radium salt? Radium does wonderful things. In its presence non-conductors of electricity become conductors; Leyden jars can not retain their charges of electricity in its presence. For why? Because of its tremendous vibration. If I uncover a bit of radium bromide from its lead box in that small, enclosed chapel, the terrific bombardment of the Alpha, Tau and Gamma rays it gives off as its atoms disintegrate will shiver those thin-vibration ghosts to nothingness even as the Boche shells crushed the forts of Liége!

“I think I have an idea—but I am not sure it will work. At any rate, it is worth trying. So, while Mademoiselle O’Shane lies unconscious under the influence of evil, I rush here with you, borrow a tiny little tube of radium bromide from the City Hospital, and make ready to fight the evil ones. Then, when we follow Mademoiselle Dunroe into that accursed chapel under the earth, I am ready to make the experiment.

“At the first door stands the boy, who was not so steeped in evil as his elders, and he succumbed to the Holy Thorn sprig. But once inside the chapel, I see we need something which will batter those evil spirits to shreds, so I unseal my tube of radium, and—pouf! I shake them to nothing in no time!”

“But won’t they ever haunt the Cloisters again?” I persisted.

“Ah hah, have I not said I have destroyed them—utterly?” he demanded. “Let us speak of them no more. The mention of them gives me a bad taste in the mouth. I must wash it away!”

And with a single prodigious gulp he emptied his goblet of brandy.