Trespassing Souls

Mid-August was on us and Harrisonville sweltered under the merciless combination of heat and humidity as only communities in the North Atlantic States can suffer in such conditions. Jules de Grandin and I rocked listlessly back and forth in our willow chairs, too much exhausted for further conversation, unhappily aware that the clock had struck midnight half an hour before, but knowing bed meant only a continuation of discomfort and unwilling to make even the little effort involved in ascending the stairs and disrobing.

“Morbleu, Friend Trowbridge,” the little Frenchman murmured sleepily, “this day, it is infernal, no less. Were those three old Hebrews transported here, I damn think they would beseech us to take them back to the comforting coolness of Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace! If—”

The muffled drum-roll of my office telephone bell sounded a sleepy interruption to his comment, and I rose wearily to respond to the summons.

“Yes,” I answered as a frightened voice pronounced my name questioningly over the wire, “this is Dr. Trowbridge.”

“This is Aubrey Sattalea,” the caller told me. “Can you come over to 1346 Pavonia Avenue right away, please? My wife is very ill—heat prostration, I’m afraid. If she doesn’t get help soon, I fear—”

“All right,” I interrupted, making a note of the address and reaching for my hat, “fill a hot-water bottle and put it at her feet, and if you’ve any whisky that’s fit to drink, give her a little in water and repeat the dose every few minutes. I’ll be right along.”

In the surgery I procured a small flask of brandy, some strychnin and digitalis, two sterile syringes, alcohol and cotton sponges, then shoved a bottle of quinine tincture into the bag as an added precaution.

“Better run along to bed, old chap,” I advised de Grandin as I opened the front door. “I’ve been called to attend a woman with heat prostration, and mayn’t be back till morning. Just my luck to have the car laid up for repairs when there’s no possibility of getting a taxi,” I added gloomily, turning to descend the front steps.

The Frenchman rose languidly and retrieved his wide-brimmed Panama from the porch floor. “Me, I suffer so poignantly, it is of no moment where I am miserable,” he confided. “Permit me to come, too, my friend. I can be equally unhappy walking beside you in the street or working beside you in the sickroom.”

The Sattalea cottage was a pretty example of the Colonial bungalow type-modified Dutch architecture with a low porch covered by an extension of the sloping roof and all rooms on the ground floor. Set well back from the double row of plane-trees bordering the avenue’s sidewalks, its level lawn was bisected by a path of sunken flagstones leading to the three low steps of the veranda. Lights showed behind the French windows letting into a bedroom at the right end of the porch, and the gentle flutter of pongee curtains and the soft whining of an electric fan told us the activities of the household were centered there. Without the formality of knocking we stepped through the open window into the room where Vivian Sattalea lay breathing so lightly her slender bosom scarce seemed to move at all.

She lay upon the bed, uncovered by sheet or blanket, only the fashionably abbreviated green-voile nightrobe veiling her lissome body from the air. Her soft, copper-gold hair, worn in a shoulder bob, lay damply about her small head on the pillow, and her delicate, clean-cut features had the smooth, bloodless semi-transparence of a face cunningly molded in wax.

“La pauvre!” de Grandin murmured as I introduced myself to the frightened young man who hovered, hot-water bottle in hand, beside the unconscious woman, “La belle, pauvre enfant! Quick, Friend Trowbridge, her plight is worse than we supposed; haste is imperative!”

As I undid the fastenings of my emergency kit he advanced to the bed, took the girl’s wrist between his fingers and fixed his eyes intently on the dial of the diminutive watch strapped to the under side of her left wrist. “Seventy”—he counted slowly, staring at the little timepiece—“non, sixty-seven—sixty—”

Abruptly he dropped her hand and bent down till his slim, sensitive nostrils were but an inch or so from the girl’s gently parted lips.

“Sacré bleu, Monsieur, may I ask where you obtained the liquor with which you have stimulated your wife?” he demanded, staring with a sort of incredulous horror at Sattalea.

The young husband’s cheeks reddened. “Why—er—er,” he began, but de Grandin cut him short with an impatient gesture.

“No need,” he snapped, rising and regarding us with blazing eyes. “C’est la prohibition, pardieu! When this poor one was overcome by heat, it was Dr. Trowbridge’s order that you give her alcohol to sustain her, is it not so?”

“Yes, but—”

“‘But’ be everlastingly consigned to the flames of hell! The only stimulant which you could find was of the bootleg kind, is it not true?”

“Yes, sir,” the young man admitted. “Dr. Trowbridge told me to give her whisky in broken doses, if I had it. I didn’t, but I got a quart of gin a couple of weeks ago, and—”

“Name of a thousand small blue devils!” de Grandin half shrieked. “Stand not there like a paralyzed bullfrog and offer excuses. Hasten to the kitchen and bring mustard and hot water, quickly. In addition to heat prostration, this poor child lies poisoned to the point of death with wooden alcohol. Already her pulse has almost vanished. Quick, my friend; rush, fly; even now it may be too late!”

Our preparations were made with feverish haste, but the little Frenchman’s worst predictions were fulfilled. Even as I bent to administer the mixture of mustard and water which should empty the fainting woman’s system of the deadly wood alcohol, her breast fluttered convulsively, her pale lids drew half-way open, disclosing eyes so far rolled back that neither pupil nor iris was visible, and her blanched, bloodless lips fell flaccidly apart as her chin dropped toward the curve of her throat and the fatuous, insensible expression of the newly dead spread over her pallid countenance like a blight across a stricken flower.

“Hélas, it is finished!” de Grandin rasped in a furious whisper. “Let those who sponsor such laws as those which make poisonous liquor available accept responsibility for this poor one’s death!”

He was still swearing volubly in mingled French and English as we walked down the flagstone pathway from the house, and in the blindness of his fury all but collided with an undersized, stoop-shouldered man who paused speculatively on the sidewalk a moment, then turned in at the entrance to the yard and sauntered toward the cottage.

“Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur,” de Grandin apologized, stepping quickly aside, for the other made no move to avoid collision, “it is that I am greatly overwrought, and failed to—

“Morbleu, Friend Trowbridge, the ill-mannered canaille has not the grace to acknowledge my amends. It is not to be borne!” He wheeled in his tracks, took an angry step after the other, then stiffened abruptly to a halt and paused irresolute a second, like a bird-dog coming to a “point.” With an imperative, half-furtive gesture he bade me follow, and stepped silently over the grass in the wake of the discourteous stranger.

Silently we ascended the path and crept up the porch steps, tiptoeing across the veranda to the open window letting into the room of death. The Frenchman’s raised finger signaled me to halt just beyond the line of light shining through the midnight darkness, and we paused in breathless silence as a soft, suave voice inside addressed the stricken husband.

“Good evening, sir,” we heard the stranger say, “you seem in trouble. Perhaps I can assist you?”

A heart-wrenching, strangling sob from young Sattalea was the only answer.

“Things are seldom as bad as they seem,” the other pursued, his words, pronounced in a sort of silky monotone, carrying distinctly, despite the fact that he spoke with a slight lisp. “When ignorant quacks have failed, there are always others to whom you can turn, you know.”

Another sob from the prostrated husband was his sole reply.

“For instance, now,” the visitor murmured, almost as though speaking to himself, “two witless charlatans just told you that your love is dead—so she is, if you wish to accept their verdict, but—”

“Monsieur,” de Grandin stepped across the window-sill and fixed his level, unwinking stare on the intruder, “I do not know what game it is you play; but I make no doubt you seek an unfair advantage of this poor young man. It were better for you that you went your way in peace, and that immediately; else—”

“Indeed?” the other surveyed him with a sort of amused contempt. “Don’t you think it’s you who’d best be on his way? You’ve already broken his heart with your ignorant inability to tell the difference between life and death. Must you add insults to injury?”

De Grandin gasped in a sort of unbelieving horror as he grasped the import of the stranger’s accusation. On the bed before us, her pale features somewhat composed by the little Frenchman’s deft hands, lay the corpse of the woman we had seen die an hour before; after thirty years of general practise and a full term of hospital duty, I knew the signs of death as I knew the symptoms of chicken-pox, and de Grandin had vast experience in the hospitals of Paris, the military lazarets of the War and infirmaries throughout the world; yet this interloper told us to our faces we were mistaken.

Yet, despite the fellow’s impudence, I could not help a sudden twinge of doubt. He was unquestionably impressive, though not pleasantly so. Shorter, even, than the diminutive de Grandin, his height was further curtailed by the habitual stoop of his shoulders; indeed, there was about him the suggestion of a hunched back, though closer inspection showed no actual deformity. His face, narrow, pointed and unnaturally long of chin, was pale as the under side of a crawling reptile, and despite the sultriness of the night showed no more evidence of perspiration than if his skin possessed no sweat-glands. Clothed all in black he was from the tips of his dull-kid shoes to the wide-brimmed felt hat upon his sleek, black hair, and from his stooping shoulders there hung a knee-length cape of thin black silk which gave him the look of a hovering, unclean carrion bird which waited only the opportunity to swoop down and revel in an obscene feast. But his eyes attracted and repelled me more than anything. They were dark, not black, but of an indeterminate, slate-like shade, and glowed brightly in his toad-belly-white face like corpse lights flickering through the eye-holes of a death mask.

His thin, bloodless lips parted in a sardonic smile which was more than half snarl as he turned his cloaked shoulder on de Grandin, addressing young Sattalea directly. “Do you want to take the word of these ignoramuses,” he asked, “or will you take my assurance that she is not dead, but sleeping?”

A look of agonized hope flamed up in Sattalea’s face a moment. “You mean—” he choked, and the other’s soft rejoinder cut his incredulous question in two:

“Of course; it is but the work of a moment to call the wandering spirit to its tenant. May I try?”

“Do not heed him, my friend!” de Grandin cried. “Trust him not, I implore you! I know not what vile chicanery he purposes to practise, but—”

“Be still, you!” Sattalea commanded. “The man is right. You’ve had your chance, and the best you did was tell me my poor darling is dead. Give him a chance. Oh”—he stretched imploring hands to the sinister stranger—“I’ll give my soul, if you will—”

“Monsieur, for the love of the good God, think what it is you say!” de Grandin’s shouted injunction drowned out the desperate man’s wild offer. “Let this blood brother of Iscariot work his evil if you must; but offer not your soul for sale or barter as you hope one day to stand in spiritual communion with her who was your earthly love!”

The trembling, eager husband ignored the Frenchman’s admonition. “Do what you will,” he begged. “I’ll give you anything you ask!”

The stranger chuckled softly to himself, threw back the corners of his sable cloak as though fluttering unclean wings preparatory to flight, and leaned above the dead woman, pressing lightly on her folded eyelids with long, bony fingers which seemed never to have known the warmth of human blood in their veins. His pale, thin lips writhed and twisted over his gleaming animal-like teeth as he mouthed an incantation in some tongue I could not understand. Yet as he raised his voice in slight emphasis once or twice I saw de Grandin’s slim nostrils tighten with quickly indrawn breath, as though he caught a half-familiar syllable in the mutterings.

The stranger’s odd, nondescript eyes seemed fairly starting from their shallow sockets as he focused a gaze of demoniacal concentration on the still, dead face before him, and over and over again he droned his formula, so that even I caught the constant repetition of some word or name like Sathanas—Barran-Sathanas and Yod-Sathanas.

I saw de Grandin mop his forehead as he shook his head impatiently, clearing his eyes of the perspiration which trickled downward from his brow, and take a short half-step forward with extended hand, but next moment both he and I stood stone-still in our places, for, as a crumb of cochineal dropped into a glass of milk incarnadines the white fluid, so a faintest flush of pink seemed creeping and spreading slowly in the dead woman’s face. Higher and higher, like the strained shadow of a blush, the wave of color mounted, touched the pallid lips and cheeks, imparted a dim but unmistakable glow of life to the soft curving throat and delicate, cleft chin. A flutter, scarcely more than the merest hinted flicker of motion, animated the blue-veined lids, and a sudden spasmodic palpitation rippled through the corpse’s breast.

“It is not good—no good can come of it—” de Grandin began, but Sattalea cut him short.

“You may go!” he shouted, glaring at the little Frenchman across the resurrected body of his wife. “I don’t want to see you—either of you again. You damned quacks, you—”

De Grandin stiffened and his face went almost as pale as the mysterious stranger’s under the insult, but he controlled himself with an almost superhuman effort. “Monsieur,” he answered with frigid courtesy, “I congratulate you on your seeming good fortune. Pray God you need not call on us again!”

With a bow of punctilious formality he turned on his heel to leave the house, but the stranger sent a parting shaft of spiteful laughter flying after him. “No fear of that,” he promised. “Hereafter I shall minister to this house, and—”

“The Devil can quote Scripture for his evil ends,” the Frenchman interrupted sharply. “I make no doubt his servants sometimes simulate the holy miracles for purposes as sinister. Some day, perhaps, Monsieur, we shall match our powers.”

“For heaven’s sake,” I asked in bewilderment as we walked slowly through the tree-leafed avenue, “what was it we saw back there? I’ll stake my professional reputation we saw that woman die; yet that queer-looking fellow seemed to have no more trouble reviving her than a hypnotist has in waking his subject.”

The little Frenchman removed his red-banded Panama and fanned himself with its wide brim. “Le bon Dieu only knows,” he confessed. “Me, I do not like it. Undoubtlessly, the woman died—we saw her. Unquestionably, she was revived, we saw that, too; but how? The grip of death is too strong to be lightly loosed, and though I could not understand all the words he said, I most distinctly heard him pronounce the ancient Devil Worshipers’ term for Satan not once, but many times. I greatly fear, my friend—cordieu, have the care!” he broke off, leaping forward and flinging himself bodily on a short, stout man in clerical garb, hurling him backward to the sidewalk.

Walking with bowed head and mumbling lips the priest had descended from the curb into the path of a hurrying, noiseless motor-car, and but for the Frenchman’s timely intervention must inevitably have been run down.

“Mille pardons,” de Grandin apologized as he assisted the astonished cleric to his feet, “I am sorry to have startled you, but I think no damage has been done, whereas, had I not acted in time—”

“Say no more,” the clergyman interrupted in a rich, Irish brogue. “’Tis glad I am to be able to curse ye for your roughness, sir. Sure, ’tis time I was payin’ more attention to me feet, anyhow. It’s the Lord Himself, no less, provides protection for such as I. You, now, sir, were the instrument of heaven, and I’m not so sure I didn’t see an emissary from the other place not long ago.”

“Indeed?” returned de Grandin. “I greatly doubt he could have prevailed against you, Father.”

“Sure, and he did not,” the other replied, “but I was after thinkin’ of him as I walked along, and ’twas for that reason I so nearly stepped to me own destruction a moment hence. One o’ me parishioners down the street here was called to heaven a little time ago, and I got there almost too late to complete anointin’ her. As I was comin’ from the house, who should be strollin’ up the steps, as bold as brass, but the very divil himself, or at least one o’ his most trusted agents.

“‘Good evenin’, Father,’ says he to me, as civil as ye please.

“‘Good evenin’ to ye, sir,’ I replies.

“‘Are ye, by anny chance, comin’ from a house o’ death?’ he wants to know.

“‘I am that,’ I answers, ‘and, if I’m not bein’ too bold, what affair is it of yours?’

“‘Are ye sure the pore woman is dead?’ he demands, fixin’ me with a pair o’ eyes that niver changed expression anny more than a snake’s.

“‘Dead, is it?’ says I. ‘How ye know ’tis a woman who lies in her last sleep in yonder house I’ve no idea, and I don’t propose to inquire, but if ye’re wantin’ to know whether or not she’s dead, I can tell ye she is. Sure, ’tis meself that’s been ministerin’ to the dead and dyin’ for close to fifty years, and when the time comes that I can’t recognize those the hand o’ the Lord has touched, I’ll be wearin’ me vestments for the last long time, so I will.’

“‘Oh, but,’ he answers, cool as anny cucumber, ‘I think perhaps she’s still alive; perhaps she’s not dead, but sleepin’. I shall endeavor to awake her.’ And with that he makes to push past me into the house.

“‘Ye will not,’ I tells him, barrin’ his way. ‘I’ve no idea what sort o’ play-actin’ ye’re up to, young felly, but this I tell ye, Bernardine McGuffy lies dead in that house, and her soul (God rist it!) has gone where neither you nor anny mortal man can reach it. Stand away from that door, or I’ll forget I’m a man o’ peace and take me knuckles from the side o’ your face, so I will.’

“With that he turns away, sirs, but I’m tellin’ ye I’ve niver before seen a human face which more resembled the popular conception o’ the Prince o’ Darkness than his did that minute, with his long chin, his pale, corpse cheeks and the wicked, changeless expression in his starin’, snaky eyes. I—”

“Pardieu, do you say it?” de Grandin interpreted excitedly. “Tell me, Monsieur l’Abbé, did your so mysterious stranger dress all in black; with a silken cloak draping from his shoulders?”

“Indeed and he did!” the priest replied. “When first I saw him he was standin’ and starin’ at the house where poor Bernardine died as though debatin’ with himself whether or not to enter it, and it was the long black cloak o’ him—like the wings o’ some dirty buzzard who did but wait his time to flap up to the window o’ the room o’ death—which first made me mind him particularly.”

“U’m? and this was when, if you please?”

“An hour ago, I’d say. I was delayed on me way home by two sick calls—not that I had to make ’em, ye understand, but there I was in the neighborhood, and the pore children were sufferin’ with the heat, as were their mothers, also. What use are us old fellies who are childless for the sake o’ God if not to minister to all His sufferin’ little ones?”

“Precisely,” de Grandin agreed, raising his hat formally as he turned to leave. To me he murmured as we pursued our homeward way:

“Is it not redolent of the odor of fish, Friend Trowbridge? Half an hour before Madame Sattalea dies this cloaked man appears at another house hard on the tracks of the angel of death, and would have forced entrance had not the sturdy Irish priest barred his way. And did you also note the evil one used the same words to the good father that he addressed to the poor young Sattalea before he worked his devilish arts upon the dead woman—‘She is not dead, but sleeping’? Cordieu, I think perhaps I spoke more truly than I knew when I remarked the devil can quote Scripture for his purposes. I can not see far into this matter, but nothing I have seen so far looks good.”

A tall, rather good-looking young man with prematurely gray hair and the restrained though by no means cheerless manner of his profession rose from one of the rockers on my front porch as de Grandin and I approached the house. “Good evening, Dr. Trowbridge,” he greeted. “Old Mr. Eichelberger passed away a while ago, and the boss asked me to run over and get you to give us a certificate. There’s not much doing tonight, and I figured you’d probably be awake anyhow; I shouldn’t have minded if you couldn’t have seen me, though—I’d as lief be driving around as sitting in the office on a night like this.”

“Oh, good evening, McCrea,” I answered, recognizing the chief assistant to Coroner Martin, who is also the city’s leading funeral director. “Yes, I’ll sign the certificate for you. Dr. Renshaw helped me in the case, and was actually in attendance this evening, but I’ve been formally in charge, so the registrar will take my certificate, I suppose. We gave up hope for the poor old gentleman yesterday afternoon; can’t do much with interstitial nephritis when the patient’s over seventy, you know.”

“No, sir,” the young mortician agreed, accepting a cigarette from de Grandin’s proffered case.

As I returned from the office with the filled-in death certificate, the two of them were deeply immersed in shop talk. “Yes, sir,” McCrea was telling de Grandin, “we certainly run up against some queer things in our business. Take what happened this evening, for instance: Mr. and Mrs. Martin had gone out to see some friends, and Johnson, the regular night man, was out on a call, so I was alone in the office. A chap I knew when I was studying at Renouard’s called me up from Hackettstown, and I’d just run off when I noticed a shadow falling across the desk. I tell you, sir, I almost jumped out of my chair when I glanced up and saw the darndest-looking individual you ever saw not three feet away and smiling at me like a pussy-cat saying good evening to a canary. The screen door to the office was latched, though not locked, and anybody coming in would have been obliged to rattle the handle, you’d have thought, but there this fellow was, almost down my throat, and I hadn’t heard so much as a footstep till I saw him.

“He was an undersized little pip-squeak, bony as a shad and pale as a clown, with a funny-looking black cape, something like those trick overcoats the dukes wear in the European movies, hanging from his shoulders. Can you tie that—wearing a cape on a night like this?”

“A-a-ah?” de Grandin’s interjection was so low I could scarcely hear it, but so sharp it seemed to cut through the sultry summer darkness like a razor. “Say on, my friend; I am all attention.”

“Humph. I shouldn’t be much surprized if there’s somebody missing when they call the roll at the Secaucus asylum tomorrow morning, sir. What d’ye think this funny-looking chap wanted?”

“Cordieu, I can damn imagine,” de Grandin murmured, “but I would prefer that you tell me!”

“No, sir, you don’t,” the other replied with a chuckle. “You could sit there and guess for a month o’ Sundays, but you’d never suspect what he was up to. Listen:

“‘Good evening, sir,’ he said, grinning at me all the time as if he’d enjoy biting a hunk out of my neck; ‘are you interested in money?’

“‘Now, what’s this, a touch or a stock salesman working overtime?’ I asked myself as I looked him over. ‘Sure, I am,’ I answered. ‘Know anyone who isn’t?’

“With that he reaches down into his pocket and fishes out a roll of bills—most of ’em yellow, too—big enough to make a hippopotamus take two bites, and sort o’ ruffled ’em through his fingers, as a professional gambler might play with the cards before commencing to shuffle. ‘I have need of a woman’s corpse in my scientific work,’ he told me, still ruffling the loose ends of the bills against his thumb. ‘If you have such an one here, and it is as yet unembalmed, I will pay you any amount you ask for it.’

“He stopped and stared hard at me with those queer eyes of his, and I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck beginning to stand up like those on a tom-cat’s tail when he sees a bulldog coming toward him. Positively, Dr. de Grandin, the fellow had me almost groggy, just looking at me, and the harder I tried to look away the harder I seemed to have to stare at him.

“‘Money, much, much money,’ he kept repeating in a kind o’ solemn singsong whisper. ‘Money to buy liquor, fine clothes, motor-cars, the favors of beautiful women—all these shall be yours if you will let me have a woman’s corpse. See, I will give you—’

“‘You and who else?’ I yelled, jumping up and reaching into the drawer where we keep a pistol for emergencies. ‘Get to hell out o’ here before I fix you so’s they’ll have to hold an inquest on you!’

“I reckon I sort o’ flew off the handle, sir, for he was a harmless sort of nut, after all, but that funny get-up of his and the soft, sneaky way he had of speaking, and those devilish, unchanging eyes of his all together just about got my goat. Honestly, I believe I’d have let him have a bullet just for luck in another minute.

“And what time was this, if you please?” the Frenchman demanded sharply.

“Almost exactly twelve o’clock, sir. I can place it by the fact that the door had hardly shut on the lunatic when the call to take charge of Mr. Eichelberger’s remains came over the ’phone, and, of course, I entered the time up on the arrangement card. The boss came in a minute or so later and said he’d take the call himself while I came over here to get the death certificate.”

“Ah?” de Grandin breathed. Then, in a more natural tone he added: “You are doubtlessly right, my friend. Some poor one has made good his escape from the asylum, and wanders about under the delusion that he is a great scientist. Let us hope he startles no more members of your noble calling with his offers of princely bribes.”

“Not much fear of that,” the young man returned with a chuckle as he turned to descend the porch steps. “I think I put the fear o’ God into him when I flashed that gun. He may be crazy, but I don’t think he has any special craving to stop a bullet.”

“Trowbridge, mon vieux,” de Grandin almost wailed as the young embalmer entered his motor and drove off, “I shall go wild, caduc—crazy like a hatter. Behold the facts: This same damnation man in black goes first to an entrepreneur des pompes funèbres and attempts to buy a corpse; next he appears before the house where a woman lies newly dead, and would have forced an entrance. Foiled there, he crops up as if by unclean magic at the very door of Monsieur Sattalea’s house almost before we have composed poor, dead Madame Sattalea’s limbs. Mordieu, it is wicked, it is iniquitous, it is most devilishly depraved, no less! Like a carrion crow, scenting the corpse-odor from afar, he comes unerringly to the place of death, and always he asks for a female cadaver. Twice repulsed, at the third trial he meets success. What in the name of three thousand little blue devilkins does it portend?”

“If we hadn’t seen that uncanny show at Sattalea’s I’d say McCrea was right, and the fellow’s an escaped lunatic,” I answered, “but—”

“Ah, hélas, we have always that fearful ‘but’ making mock of us,” he rejoined. “When first I saw this Monsieur of the Black Cloak I liked his looks little. To one who has battled with the powers of evil as I have, there is a certain family resemblance among all those who connive with devilishness, my friend. Therefore, when I did behold that colorless, cadaverish face of his silhouetted against the evening air, I determined to follow him quietly into the Sattalea house and see what he would do. Dieu de Dieu, we did observe a very great plenty. I was wondering about him and the means he might conceivably have employed to bring about Madame Sattalea’s seeming revivement when we met the good curé and learned from him of the Black One’s attempt to break into another dead woman’s house; now, parbleu, after hearing Monsieur McCrea’s story, I am greatly afraid! What it is I fear I do not know. I am like a timid little boy who ventures into the darkened nursery; all about me are monstrous, dreadful things the nature of which I can not descry. I put forth my hand, there is nothing there; but always in the darkness, just beyond the reach of my groping fingers, leers and gibbers the undefined shadow of something terrible and formless. Cordieu, my friend, we must make a light and view this terror of the darkness face to face! It shall not play hide-and-go-seek with us. No!”

A mild epidemic of summer grippe kept me fully occupied for the succeeding two weeks, and de Grandin was left largely to his own devices. Whether he sought the key to the mystery of the man in black, and under what particular door-mat he looked for it I do not know, for the little Frenchman could be as secretive at some times as he was loquacious at others, and I had no wish to excite his acid comments by bringing the matter up unasked.

One Friday afternoon when August was slowly burning out with its own intensity, we were strolling leisurely toward the City Club, intent on a light luncheon to be followed by a round of golf at the Sedgemoor links when our attention was called to a little boy. Sturdy and straight as a young live-oak he was, his bright, fair hair innocent of covering, his smooth, fair skin tanned to the rich hue of ripened fruit, the sort of lad to give every middle-aged bachelor a twinge of regret and make him wonder if his freedom had been worth while, after all. I smiled involuntarily as my eyes rested on him, but the smile froze on my lips as I noticed the expression of abject misery and fright on his little, sunburned face.

De Grandin noted the lad’s affrighted look, too, and paused in quick sympathy. “Hold, my little cabbage,” he greeted, his small blue eyes taking in every detail of the obviously terrified child, “what is it troubles you? Surely affairs can not be so dreadful?”

The lad looked at him with the trustful gaze all children instinctively bestowed on one they felt to be their friend, and his red, babyish lips trembled pitifully as great tears welled up in his eyes. “I dropped the rice, sir,” he answered simply. “Mother sent me to the grocery for it, ’cause they forgot to send it with the rest of the order, and I dropped it. The—the bag broke, and I couldn’t gather it up, though I tried ever so hard, and—. she’ll beat me! She beats me every day, now.”

“Tiens, is it so?” the Frenchman replied. “Be of courage. I shall give you the price of another sack of rice, and your excellent mère shall be none the wiser.”

“But she told me to hurry,” the little chap protested, “and if I’m late I’ll be whipped anyway.”

“But this is infamous!” Sudden rage flamed in de Grandin’s small round eyes. “Come, we shall accompany you. I shall explain all to your maman, and all shall be well.”

With all the confidence in the world the little boy slipped his small, brown fist into de Grandin’s slim white hand and together we walked down the street and turned into the smoothly clipped front yard of—the Sattalea cottage.

Someone was playing the piano softly as we ascended the porch steps, the haunting, eery notes of Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre falling lightly on our ears as we crossed the porch. Fearfully, on tiptoe, the lad led us toward an open French window, then paused timorously. “If he’s with her I’ll surely catch it!” he whispered, hanging back that we might precede him into the house. “He holds me while she beats me, and laughs when I cry!”

De Grandin caught his breath sharply at the little boy’s announcement, and his small face was stern as he stepped softly into the semi-darkened drawing-room. Seated on the bancal before a baby grand piano, her body swaying gently with the rhythm of the music, was a woman—Vivian Sattalea. As I glanced at her delicate, clean-cut features framed in their aureole of rose-gold hair, the carmine of her parted lips blushing vividly against the milky whiteness of her face, I could not help feeling she had undergone some fundamental change since last I saw her. True, on the former occasion she had lain at the very door of death, whereas now she seemed in abundant health, but there was something more than the difference between sickness and health in her changed countenance. Despite her desperate condition when I saw her before, there had been a look of innate delicacy and refinement in the cameo-clear outline of her face. Today there was something theatrical—professional—in her beauty. The ruddy blondness and expert arrangement of her hair, the sophisticated look in her violet eyes, the lines about her full, too-red lips were those of the woman who lives by the exploitation of her charms. And in the flare of her nostrils, the odd tightness of the flesh above her cheek-bones and the hungry curves about her petulant, yearning mouth there was betrayed a burning greed for primal atavistic emotion scarcely to be slaked though every depth of passion be plumbed to the nadir.

Even as we halted at the window, undecided how best to announce our advent, the woman abruptly ceased playing and clutched at the keyboard before her with suddenly convulsed, clenching fingers, the long, polished nails fairly clawing at the polished ivory keys like the unsheathed talons of a feline. And as her hands clenched shut she leaned backward, turning her vivid, parted lips up in a voluptuous smile. From the shadow of the piano another shadow drifted quickly, halted beside the woman and bent downward swiftly to seize her in frenzied embrace.

I gasped in amazement. Holding Vivian Sattalea’s cheeks between his hands, kissing her ripe, scarlet lips, was the man in black, the mysterious stranger who had called her errant soul back from God only knew what mystic space the night de Grandin and I pronounced her dead.

“Cordieu,” I heard the Frenchman murmur, “c’est une affaire amoureuse!”

“Your pardon, sir and madame,” he apologized after a discreet pause, “I would not for the world disturb your innocent pastime, but on the street I did meet Madame’s little son, and—”

“That sneaking brat!” the woman rasped, freeing herself from her lover’s embrace and rising to face de Grandin with furious, flaming cheeks, “I’ll teach him to spy on me and drag strangers to the house to—”

“Excuse, please, Madame, you will do nothing whatever at all concerning the little man,” de Grandin denied in a level, almost toneless voice. “When first we did encounter him in the street he told us he greatly feared a beating at your hands, and I took it on myself to guarantee him immunity. I would not have it said I have failed him.”

“We’ll see about that!” She took a swift step toward the cowering child, the cold fire of murderous hate gleaming in her eyes, but de Grandin interrupted.

“Madame,” he reminded, “you forget what it is I have said.” Quick as a striking snake his hand shot out, grasping her wrist in a paralyzing grip and halting her in mid-stride.

“Oh!” she sobbed as his steely fingers bit cruelly into her yielding flesh. “Pontou,” she turned to the black-clothed man, “will you let this insolent—”

De Grandin released her, but kept his body between her and the frightened child as he regarded the livid-faced man with cold, menacing eyes, “Monsieur,” he promised, clipping his words with metallic hardness, “should you care to resent any affront you may conceive Madame has suffered, I am at your service at any time and place you wish to name.”

A moment he waited, his slender body braced for the assault he fully expected, then, as the other made no move, turned a contemptuous shoulder on the woman and her companion.

“Come, mon brave,” and he took the little boy’s hand in his; “let us go. These, they are unworthy to share the company of men like us. Come away. Friend Trowbridge and I shall feed you bonbons and chocolate till you are most gloriously ill, then nurse you back to health again. We shall take you to see the animals at the zoo; we shall—”

“But see here, de Grandin,” I expostulated as I followed him to the street, “you can’t do this. It’s against the law, and—”

“My friend,” he assured me, “I have already done it. As for the law, if it would be respected it must be respectable. Any statute which compels a little man like this to live with such an unnatural parent is beneath all honest men’s contempt.”

He was as good as his word. Little Aubrey Sattalea spent a glamorous afternoon with us at the zoological garden, stuffed himself to capacity with unwholesome sweetmeats and ate a dinner fit for a longshoreman that night.

The Frenchman was deep in the relation of a highly original version of the story of Cinderella as we sat on the veranda after dinner when quick, angry steps sounded on the front path. “Where’s that Frenchman, de Grandin?” a furious voice demanded as Aubrey Sattalea, senior, mounted the porch, his face working with rage. “Where’s the man who came to my house and stole my little boy—”

“Here, at your very good service, Monsieur,” de Grandin announced, rising from his chair and bowing formally, but holding his supple body poised to resist any attack the other made. “As for stealing your fine little man, I pride myself upon it. They shall no longer torture him, though you and a thousand others, seek to drag him back.”

“What d’ye mean?” Sattalea demanded, advancing menacingly on the diminutive Frenchman.

“Come and see,” de Grandin responded, backing slowly toward the hall. As Sattalea followed him into the house, he halted suddenly, snapped on the electric light and thrust his hand down the front of the child’s white-linen blouse, ripping the garment open and turning it down to display the lad’s slim, straight back. Sattalea and I gave simultaneous gasps of astonished horror. From shoulder to waist the child’s back was a mess of crisscrossed, livid wales, the unmistakable signs of recent cruel beatings with a whip or small cane.

“Did you do this?” the Frenchman demanded, taking a threatening half step toward the visitor. “Parbleu, if you did, though you be twenty times his father, I shall beat you insensible!”

“Good Lord!” the horrified parent exclaimed. “Who—what—”

“Mother did it, Daddy,” the little boy broke in sobbingly. “Since that night when she was so ill, that funny-looking man’s been coming to the house every day and she’s changed so. She says she doesn’t love me any more and she beats me for almost nothing—I didn’t mean to look in that day he kissed her—honestly, I didn’t—but she said I was spying on them and the two of them beat me till—”

“Aubrey! What are you saying?” his father cried.

“Morbleu, no more than all the neighbors know, Monsieur,” de Grandin returned impassively. “This afternoon, when Friend Trowbridge and I had returned from our outing with your son, I took some magazines, which I pretended to sell, and my most persuasive manner to the back doors of the houses of your block. In one small hour’s conversation with the domestic servants of the neighborhood I found that you alone are unaware of what goes on in your home.”

Sattalea faced the Frenchman with a look of incredulous horror; then, as the import of de Grandin’s words sank home, an expression of hopeless desolation spread over his face. “That explains it!” he sobbed. “She has changed since that night she di—you gentlemen gave her up for dead! She’s grown more beautiful every day, but—but she’s not my Vivian, not the girl I married. Sometimes I’ve felt as though some stranger had come to take her place, and—”

“Monsieur, I think it not unlikely,” de Grandin spoke softly as he laid his hand on the man’s shoulder with an almost fatherly gesture. “Believe me, I can appreciate your trouble. It were best that we did not make mock of Providence, my friend. It is better that we leave bad enough alone, lest it become worse. Alas, the olden days of happiness are gone forever; but we can at least repair the greater wrong before it has gone too far. Will you help me make your home a fit place for your little son to dwell, Monsieur?”

“Yes,” Sattalea agreed. “I’ll do anything you say. Sometimes I think it would have been better if Vivian really had died. She’s a changed woman. She used to be so sweet, so gentle, so loving, now she’s a very devil incarnate, she’s—”

“Let us not waste time,” de Grandin interrupted. “Tonight you will inform Madame your wife that you must leave town on business early in the morning. When all preparations are made for your seeming trip, you will come here, and remain hidden until I give the word. Then, parbleu, we shall show this species of a rat who would buy dead women’s bodies who holds the stronger cards—whose magic is more potent—may the Devil, his master, roast me if we do not so!”

Shortly before noon the following day a taxicab deposited Aubrey Sattalea and several pieces of luggage at my front door, and after seeing the guest secreted in an upstairs room de Grandin excused himself, saying he had several important missions to execute. “Remember, my friend,” he warned the visitor, “you are not to leave the house for any reason less urgent than fire, and you will refrain from so much as showing yourself at the window until I say otherwise. The secrecy of your whereabouts is greatly important, I assure you.”

Dinner was about to be served when he returned, his little eyes shining with elated excitement. “See, my friends,” he ordered as we finished dessert, “is it not a pretty thing which I obtained in New York this afternoon?” From his jacket pocket he drew a small case which he snapped open, displaying a tiny, shining instrument bedded in folds of cotton-wool.

It was a glass-and-nickel syringe of twenty-five minim size, with a short heavy slip-on needle attached. The piston was of ground glass, set on a metal plunger which led through a cap. On this plunger, instead of the usual metal set-screw, was a tiny, trigger-like safety lever which locked the piston so that the syringe could be carried full without danger of spilling its contents.

“H’m, I’ve never seen one quite like it,” I admitted, examining the instrument with interest.

“Probably not,” the Frenchman returned as he snapped the safety-catch on and off, testing its perfect response to the lightest pressure of his finger. “They are not widely known. For the average physician they are an unnecessary luxury, yet there are times when they are invaluable. In psychiatric work, for instance. The doctor who attends the mad often has need of a syringe which can carry quick unconsciousness, even as the soldier and gendarme has need of his pistol, and when he must draw and use his instrument at once there is no time to stop and fill it. Voilà, it is then this little tool becomes most handy, for it can be filled and carried about like a gun, rendered ready for action by the touch of the finger, and there has meantime been no danger of the drug it carries being lost. C’est adroit, n’est-ce-pas?”

“But what need have you for it?” I asked. “I don’t understand—”

“But of course not,” he agreed with a vigorous nod. “But if you will be so good as to wait a few hours—ah, I shall show you a tremendously clever trick, my friends. Meantime, I am wearied. I shall sleep four hours by the alarm clock; then, if you please, we shall perform our duty. Until then—”

Rising, he bowed formally to us in turn and ascended to his bedroom.

Midnight had sounded on the tall clock in the hall and twelve deep, vibrant strokes had echoed from the great gong in the courthouse tower before de Grandin rejoined us, refreshed by his four-hour nap and a cold shower. “Come, my friends,” he ordered, filling his new syringe with a twenty per cent solution of cannabis indica and thrusting it handily into his jacket pocket, “it is time we repaired to the rendezvous.”

“Where?” Sattalea and I demanded in chorus.

“Wait and see,” he returned enigmatically. “Quick, Friend Trowbridge, the car, if you please.”

Under his direction I drove to within a hundred feet or so of the Sattalea cottage, then parked the motor at the curb. Together we dismounted and stole softly toward the house.

All was quiet within the dwelling; not a light showed through the long, unshuttered windows, but de Grandin led the way unerringly across the porch, through the drawing-room and down the hall to the white-enameled door of the principal bedroom. There he paused, and in the flash of his pocket electric torch I saw his small, heart-shaped face twitching with excitement. “Are we ready?” he demanded, his narrow, black brows arched interrogatively.

I nodded, and he turned sharply, bearing his weight against the white panels of the door and forcing them inward. Next instant, de Grandin in the lead, Sattalea and I at his elbows, we entered the darkened room.

For a moment I saw nothing but the vague outlines of furniture, only dimly picked out by the moonlight filtering through the Venetian blinds which hung before the window, but as I paused, striving to accustom my eyes to the quarter-light, I made out the hazy, indistinct shape of something human, so still it seemed inanimate, yet somehow instinct with life and viciousness.

“Permettez-moi,” de Grandin exclaimed, feeling quickly along the wall for the electric switch, pressing the button and flooding the chamber with light. Beyond the bed, clad in pajamas and dressing-gown, crouched the white-faced, stoop-shouldered man who had proved such a mystery to us, his thin, evil features drawn in a snarling grimace of startled fury. Backed against the wall at the bedstead’s head, rigid in an attitude of mingled fear and defiance, stood Vivian Sattalea. Her slim, white body showed statuesquely through the silken tissue of her nightrobe, her supple, rounded limbs and torso rather emphasized than concealed by the diaphanous garment. Her arms were extended straight down beside her, her hands pressing the wall against which she leaned till the flesh around the long, brightly polished nails showed little half-moons of white. Her red, passionate mouth was twisted in an animal-snarl of rage, and out of her purple eyes looked something which had never belonged to the woman Aubrey Sattalea married five years before—some evil trespasser in possession, some depraved interloper holding high holiday behind the windows of her soul.

“Vivian!” Sattalea looked in agonized disbelief from the crouching, slinking intruder to his wife, and his honest, commonplace young face seemed fairly to crumble with the devastation of overwhelming disillusion. “Oh, Vivi, how could you—and I loved you so!”

“Well, you silly, fatuous fool!” the woman’s voice was thin and wire-edged as she spoke, and that evil, half-seen something seemed dodging back and forth in her wide-open eyes like a criminal lunatic playing hide-and-seek at the barred windows of his cell. “What did you think—did you expect me to put up with you? You—”

“Silence!” de Grandin’s command, sharp as a whip-crack, cut through her tirade. “The time for speech is past. It is to act!”

Agilely as a leopard he leaped across the bed, his left hand seizing the crouching, corpse-faced man by the collar of his gown and forcing him backward on the couch. There was a short, fierce struggle, the flash of something bright in the electric light, then a muffled, strangling cry as de Grandin sank the needle of his hypodermic in the other’s arm, released the safety-catch and shot the plunger downward.

“Stop—stop, you’re killing him!” the woman shrieked, leaping like an infuriated cat from her retreat against the wall and flinging herself on de Grandin, clawing at his face, gnashing at him with her teeth like a tigress fighting for her mate.

The Frenchman thrust his half-conscious antagonist from him with a vigorous shove of his foot, seized the woman’s right wrist in his left hand and jerked her forward, so that she lay prone across the bed. As she writhed and twisted in his grip, he shot the hypodermic needle into her rounded arm and forced the piston down, emptying the last dregs of the powerful hypnotic drug into her veins. I saw the white skin around the needle-point swell like an oversized blister as the sense-stealing hashish flooded into her system, saw her red mouth close convulsively, as though she swallowed with an effort, then watched fascinated as her taut, lithe muscles went slowly limp, her lips fell senselessly apart and her eyes slowly closed, the lids fighting fiercely to stay open, and murderous, insatiable hatred looking from her face as long as a flicker of her eyes remained unveiled by the lowering lids.

“Quick, my friends!” de Grandin ordered as her body went flaccid in complete anesthesia. “We must hasten; the drug will not control for long, and we must attack while the barrier of their physical consciousness is down.”

Under his directions we laid Vivian Sattalea and her paramour on the bedroom floor, and while Sattalea and I crossed their hands and feet after the manner of memorial effigies on mediæval tombs the Frenchman extracted four waxen candles from the inner pocket of his jacket, placed one at the head and another at the foot of each unconscious form.

Stooping quickly he traced a six-pointed figure in chalk on the bedroom rug, then snapped off the electric light and set the four candles aflame. “Do not step beyond the lines, my friends,” he warned, pushing Sattalea and me inside the design he had drawn; “there will soon be that outside which no mortal can look on unprotected and live!”

As the candle flames burned brightly in the hot, still room, I noticed a subtle, indefinable odor, strangely similar to ecclesiastical incense yet differing from it in some way I could not define. There was something soporific about it, and I felt my lids go heavy as I inhaled, but was brought back to attentive consciousness by de Grandin’s words. Bending ceremonially to the east, the south, finally, to the west, with a sort of jerky genuflection, he had begun a low, singsong chant. The words he used I could not understand, for they were in some outlandish tongue, but constantly, like the recurrence of the name of Deity in a litany, I caught the surname Amalik, and mingled with it that of Suliman ebn Dhoud and other Arabic and Hebrew titles till the half-dark room seemed fairly redolent with the chanted Oriental titles.

“Look, look, for God’s sake, look!” rasped Aubrey Sattalea in my ear, seizing my arm in a panic-strengthened grip and pointing toward the northwest corner of the room.

I looked, and caught my breath in a terrified sob.

Rearing nearly to the ceiling of the chamber, so indistinct that it was more like the fleeting, uncertain vision of an object behind us seen from the corner of the eye, there was a monstrous, fear-begetting form. When I gazed directly at it there was nothing but shadow to be seen, but the moment my eyes were partly averted it took sudden substance out of nothing, and its shape was like that of a mighty, black-robed man, and, despite the white beard which fell nearly to the hem of its garment, the being seemed not old as we are wont to consider men, but rather strong with the strength which mighty age gives to giant trees and hills and other things which endure forever. And from the being’s shadowy face looked forth a pair of terrifying, deep-set eyes which glowed like incandescent metal, and between its upraised, mighty hands there gleamed the wide blade of a sword which seemed to flicker with a cold, blue, phosphorescent light. Over all my body I could feel the rising of horripilation. The hairs upon my head and the shorter hairs of my hands and arms seemed rising stiffly, as though an electrical current ran through me, and despite my utmost efforts my teeth rattled together in the cachinnation of a chill; for the air about us had become suddenly gelid with that intense, numbing cold which means utter absence of vital heat.

“By the Three Known and One Unknown Elements; by the awful word whispered in the ears of the two Khirams by Shelomoh, the Temple-Builder”—de Grandin made the threefold signs of Apprentice, Fellow-craft and Master with flashing quickness—“by the mastery of Eternal Good over Evil, and by the righteousness of Him who planned the Universe, I bind you to my bidding, O Azra’il, dread Psychopompos and Bearer of the Sword!” De Grandin’s voice, usually a light tenor, had deepened to a powerful baritone as he pronounced the awful words of evocation. “Come to my aid, O Powers of Light and of Darkness,” he chanted. “To me are ye bound by the words of Power and Might, nor may ye depart hence till my will be done!”

A light wind, colder, if possible, than the freezing air of the room, seemed to emanate from the dreadful form in the darkened corner, making the candle flames flicker and the shadows flit and dance in arabesques across the walls and ceiling of the room. The unconscious man upon the floor moved slightly and groaned as though in nightmare, and the woman beside him shuddered as if the chilling wind had pierced even the barriers of her unconsciousness.

“Speak out, seducer of the dead, destroyer of the living!” de Grandin commanded, fixing his burning gaze on the groaning man. “I command you, declare to us your true name and nature!”

“Pontou,” the voice issuing from the supine, drug-bound man was faint as an echo of a whisper, but in that silent room it sounded like a shout.

“Pontou is my name, my birthplace Brittany.”

“And what did you there, Pontou?”

“I was clerk to Gilles de Laval, Sire de Retz, Marèchal of France, Chamberlain to His Majesty, the King, and cousin to the mighty Duke of Brittany.

“Aie, but there were brave doings in the château at Marchecoul when the Sire de Retz dwelt there! The castle chapel was gorgeous with painted windows and cloth of gold, the sacred vessels encrusted with gems, and churchly music sounded as the mass was celebrated thrice daily, but at night there was a different sort of mass, for with me as deacon and Henriet as subdeacon, before the desecrated altar of the Galilean Gilles de Retz celebrated la messe noire, and from the throats of little children we drew the ‘red milk’ wherewith to fill our chalices in honor of Barran-Sathanas, our Lord and Master. Aie, ’twas sweet to hear the helpless little ones plead for mercy as we bound them on the iron grille before the sanctuary, and sweeter still to hear their strangled moans as Henriet and I, or sometimes the great Gilles de Retz himself, passed the keen-edged knife across their upturned throats; but sweetest of all it was to quaff the beakers of fresh lifeblood, still warm from their veins and toss their quivering hearts into the brazier which burned so brightly before the throne of Barran-Sathanas!”

De Grandin’s small, white teeth were chattering, but he forced another question:

“Accursed of heaven, when came your career to an end? Speak, by the powers that bind you, I command it!”

“In 1440,” the answer came falteringly. “’Twas then Pierre de l’Hôpital came to Nantes with his power of men-at-arms and took us into custody. Aie, but the mean little folk who never dared look us in the face before flocked to the courtroom to testify how we had ravished away their brats from the cradle and sometimes from the breast, and made them sacrifices to our Lord and Master, the Prince of Evil!

“Our doom was sealed or ever we stood before the bench of justice, and in all the crowded hall there was none to look on me with pity save only Lizette, the notary’s daughter, whom I had taken to the castle and initiated into our mysteries and taught to love the ‘red milk’ even as I did.

“Five days our trial lasted, and À mort—to death,’ the court condemned us.

“They bore us to the meadow of Bisse, beyond the gates of Nantes, and hanged us by the neck. Henriet turned craven at the end, and made his sniveling peace with God, but the Sire De Retz and I stood stedfast to our master, Barran-Sathanas, and our souls went forth unshriven and unrepentant.

“My soul was earthbound, and for weeks I haunted the scenes I knew in life. The fourth month from my execution a butcher died, and as his spirit left his body I found that I could enter in. That very night, as his corpse awaited burial I draped it round me as a man may don a cloak, and went to Rouen, where later I was joined by my light o’ love, Lizette. We lived there twenty years, haunting cabarets, filching purses, cutting throats when money was not otherwise to be obtained.

“At length Lizette died, and I was left alone, and though I knew her spirit hovered near me, I could not teach her how to find the flesh to clothe herself. When my second body died, I entered into the cadaver of a headsman, and plied my trade of blood for nearly thirty years, yet always did I seek some way to seize a body for Lizette. The learning I absorbed with Gilles de Retz I added to by going to the East and studying under masters of black magic, but though I nearly succeeded several times, there was always something missing from the charm which was to open the gates to my love-light’s spirit into human flesh.

“Ten years ago, in Northern Africa, I came upon the missing words of the incantation, and practised it successfully, but only to have my triumph ravished from me, for the body we used was so weakened by disease that it could not stand the strains we put upon it, and once again Lizette’s spirit was discarnate.

“In this city I have searched the homes of the dying in quest of a body suitable to our purposes, and found one when Vivian Sattalea gave up her fleshly garb two weeks ago.

“Aie, what pleasures we have known, once more treading the good green earth together. What sins we have committed, what joy we took in torturing the brat the cuckold husband sired and thought my Lizette still mothered! In the dead of night we have broken into churches, defiled the holy elements and—”

“Enough—parbleu, too much!” de Grandin shouted. “Pontou, condemned of man, accursed of God, rejected by that very Devil to whom of old you bowed the knee, I charge and enjoin you, by the might, power and majesty of that God whom you have so dishonored, depart hence from this earthly body you have stolen, and enter not into flesh again. And you, Lizette, wanton mistress of a villainous paramour, depart you likewise to that place where spirits such as yours abide, and trouble not the living or the dead again with your uncleanly presence. Begone! In nomine Domini, be off, and come not hither any more again!”

As he concluded there sounded a dual groan from the bodies stretched before us on the floor, and from the left breast of the man and from the woman’s left bosom there rose what looked like little jets of slowly escaping steam. The twin columns rose slowly, steadily, spreading out and thinning like vapor from a kettle-spout coming in contact with cold air, and as they swirled and twisted they merged and coalesced and clung together for an instant. Then the hovering, indistinct shape in the corner seemed suddenly to swoop downward, enveloped them in its ghostly folds as a drooping cloth might have done, and a soft, swishing noise sounded, as of a gentle wind soughing through bare tree-limbs. That was all. The candle lights winged out as if an extinguisher had pressed on them, and the warm, sultry air of August replaced the frigid cold which had chilled us to the marrow.

“It is finished—all is done,” de Grandin’s matter-of-fact announcement sounded through the darkness. “Will you be good enough to examine Madame Sattalea, Friend Trowbridge?”

I knelt beside the woman as he snapped on the lights, putting my fingers to her wrist. “Why,” I exclaimed in bewilderment, “she’s dead, de Grandin!”

“Précisément,” he agreed with an almost casual nod, “and has been since that evening two weeks ago when you and I pronounced her so. It was but the spirit of the wicked Lizette which animated and defiled her poor, dead flesh. If you will be so good as to sign a certificate of death, I shall prepare for the disposal of this—” he touched the body of the man disdainfully with the polished toe of his dress shoe.

“Monsieur,” he turned to Sattalea, a look of sympathy on his face, “it were best that you said farewell to Madame, your wife, quickly. I go to call Monsieur Martin and bespeak his professional services for her.”

“Oh, Vivian, Vivian,” young Sattalea sobbed, dropping to his knees and pressing his lips to his wife’s lifeless mouth, “if only I could forget these last two weeks—if only I hadn’t let him desecrate your dead body with that—”

“Monsieur—attention—look at me!” de Grandin cried sharply.

For a moment he stared fixedly into Sattalea’s eyes, then slowly put his hands to the other’s forehead, stroked his brow gently, and:

“You will forget all that is past—you will not remember your wife’s seeming interval of life since the night Friend Trowbridge and I pronounced her dead. Your wife has died of heat-stroke, we have attempted to save her, and have failed—there has been no invasion of her flesh by foul things from beyond, you have no recollection of Pontou, or of anything he has said or done—do you understand? Sleep, now, and awaken in half an hour, not sooner.”

A dazed look in Sattalea’s eyes and a faint, almost imperceptible nod of his head was the only answer.

“Très bon!” de Grandin exclaimed. “Quick, Friend Trowbridge, help me place her on the bed. She must not be found thus when he awakens!”

Working with feverish haste, we clothed the dead man’s body in his black garments, bundled him into the tonneau of my car and drove slowly toward the river. At a darkened highway bridge we halted, and after looking about to make sure we were not observed, dropped the corpse into the dark waters. “Tomorrow or next day the police will find him,” de Grandin remarked. “Identification will not be difficult, for the young McCrea will testify of his visit to Monsieur Martin’s and his attempt to buy a corpse—the coroner’s jury will decide a harmless lunatic fell overboard while wandering through the town and came to his death by misadventure. Yes. It is much better so.”

“But see here,” I demanded as we turned homeward, “what was all that rigmarole that dead man told us? It isn’t possible such a monster as that Gilles de Retz ever lived, or—”

“It is unfortunately all too true,” de Grandin interrupted. “The judicial archives of the ancient Duchy of Brittany bear witness of the arrest, trial and execution of one of the greatest nobles of France, Gilles de Laval, Sire de Retz and marshal of the King’s armies, at a specially convoked ecclesiastical court at Nantes in 1440. Together with two servants, Pontou and Henriet, he was hanged and burned for murder of more than a hundred little children and young girls, and for indisputably proven sorcery and devil-worship. Yes.

“As for the possibility of Pontou’s spirit being earthbound, it is quite in line with what we know of evilly disposed souls. By reason of his intense wickedness and his vicious habits, he could not leave the earthly atmosphere, but must perforce hover about the sort of scenes which had pleased him in life. You remember how he was in turn a robber and a public executioner? Good.

“When we were called to attend Madame Sattalea and this so villainous Pontou first appeared on the scene, I was greatly puzzled. The magical formula he mouthed above the corpse of the poor dead lady I could not understand, for he spoke too quickly, but certain words I recognized, and knew them for the sign-words by which the necromancers of old called back the spirits of the dead. That was my first clue to how matters stood.

“When Monsieur McCrea told us of Pontou’s attempt to buy a corpse, and the good curé’s story of his effort to force entrance to a house of death coincided, I knew this evil man must have some special reason for desiring the body of a woman, and a woman only.

“When we met the little lad and went to Monsieur Sattalea’s and there beheld the love scene between his wife and the evil black-clothed one, I was certain he had called the evil spirit of some woman long dead to inhabit the body of poor Madame Vivian that he might have companionship of his own wicked kind, and when she called him by name—Pontou—I did remember at once that the evilest of the servants of that blasphemous monster, Gilles de Retz had been so named, and realized something like the story confessed to us tonight might have happened.

“Therefore, I made my plans. The air about us is filled with all sorts of invisible beings, my friend. Some are good, some are very evil indeed, and some are neither one nor the other. Wise old King Solomon was given dominion over them as one of the few mortals who could be trusted not to abuse so great a power. To marshal them to his assistance he did devise certain cabalistic words, and he who knows the ancient Hebrew formulae can call the invisible ones into visibility, but the risk is great, for the evil ones may come with those who are good, and work great injury. Nevertheless, I determined to make the experiment. By calling aloud the words of Solomon’s incantations I provided us with strong spiritual allies, which should force the rebellious spirit of Pontou to speak, whether he willed it or not. Too, when I had so bound Pontou’s spirit to answer my inquiries, I had him at a disadvantage—I could also call it forth from the body it had usurped. And once it was clear of that body the ghostly allies I had summoned made short work of it.”

“But that dreadful, half-seen thing which stood in the corner,” I persisted. “What was it? I couldn’t see it clearly; indeed, the more closely I looked at it, the vaguer it seemed, but when I looked away I thought I descried a tall, terrible old man with flashing red eyes and a naked sword between his hands. Was it—”

“Pontou the wicked one, who by his necromantic sorcery more than once escaped the bounds of death, had long cheated Azra’il, the Death Angel,” he replied. “The ancient lore is full of stories of the psychopompos, or spirit-leader, who takes the severed soul from the new-dead body and conducts it through the frontiers of the spirit world. Perhaps it was none other than Death’s own angel who stood among the shadows and waited patiently for the spirits which long had cheated him, my friend. I myself do remember the whispered gossip which went the rounds of St. Petersburg some twenty years and more ago. I was studying in the Imperial Hospital at the time, and servants of the Winter Palace whispered a strange story of a little duchess who accidentally ate some oysters intended for the Tsar, and fell fainting to the floor, and how her little cousin awoke screaming in the night to say a tall, bearded figure had come into their room, then trodden silently into the poisoned child’s apartments. Next instant, while still the frightened children’s screams rang out, the poisoned little one gave up her soul. I do not know, but—”

“But that’s absurd,” I cut in. “All this talk of death angels is a lot of old wives’ balderdash, de Grandin, you know as well as I. What we call death is nothing but a physiological fact—the breaking-down of the human mechanism for one reason or another. As to the spiritual phases of it, of course, I’m not prepared to say, but—”

“Of course not,” he agreed. “We know so little of the spirit world that he who would expound it stamps himself a fool thereby.

“But this I say without fear of denial, my friend, there is one sort of spirit who is no mystery, and with him I would hold immediate communion. In the lower left-hand drawer of your office desk reposes a bottle of Three-Star cognac, distilled in la belle France long years before Monsieur Volstead’s blighting legislation was thought of. This moment it is full. Parbleu, if I do not decrease its contents by half before I am an hour older may every fiend of lowest hell fly off with me!”