The Mansion of Unholy Magic

“CAR, SIR? TAKE YOU anywhere you want to go.”

It was a quaint-looking figure which stood before us on the railway station platform, a figure difficult to classify as to age, status, or even sex. A man’s gray felt hat which had seen better days, though not recently, was perched upon a head of close-cropped, tightly, curling blond hair, surmounting a face liberally strewn with freckles. A pull-over sweater of gray cardigan sheathed boyishly broad shoulders and boyishly narrow hips and waist, while the straight, slim legs were encased in a pair of laundry-faded jodhpurs of cotton corduroy. A pair of bright pink coral ear-drops completed the ensemble.

Jules de Grandin eased the strap by which his triple-barreled Knaak combination gun swung from his left shoulder and favored the solicitor with a look denoting compound interest. “A car?” he echoed. “But no, I do not think we need one. The motor stage—”

“The bus isn’t running,” the other interrupted. “They had an accident this afternoon and the driver broke his arm; so I ran over to see if I could pick up any passengers. I’ve got my car here, and I’ll be glad to take you where you want to go—if you’ll hurry.”

“But certainly,” the Frenchman agreed with one of his quick smiles. “We go to Monsieur Sutter’s hunting-lodge. You know the way?”

A vaguely troubled look clouded the clear gray eyes regarding him as he announced our destination. “Sutter’s lodge?” the girl—by now I had determined that it was a girl—repeated as she cast a half-calculating, half-fearful glance at the lengthening lines of red and orange which streaked the western sky. “Oh, all right; I’ll take you there, but we’ll have to hurry. I don’t want to—come on, please.”

She led the way to a travel-stained Model T Ford touring-car, swung open the tonneau door and climbed nimbly to the driving-seat.

“All right?” she asked across her shoulder, and ere we had a chance to answer put the ancient vehicle in violent motion, charging down the unkempt country road as though she might be driving for a prize.

“Eh bien, my friend, this is a singularly unengaging bit of country,” de Grandin commented as our rattling chariot proceeded at breakneck speed along a road which became progressively worse. “At our present pace I estimate that we have come five miles, yet not one single habitation have we passed, not a ray of light or wreath of smoke have we seen, nor—” he broke off, grasping at his cap as the almost springless car catapulted itself across a particularly vicious hummock in the road.

“Desist, ma belle chauffeuse,” he cried. “We desire to sleep together in one piece tonight; but one more bump like that and—” he clutched at the car-side while the venerable flivver launched itself upon another aerial excursion.

“Mister,” our driver turned her serious, uncompromising face upon us while she drove her foot still harder down on the accelerator, “this is no place to take your time. We’ll all be lucky to sleep in bed tonight, I’m thinkin’, in one piece or several, if I don’t—”

“Look out, girl!” I shouted, for the car, released from her guiding hand while she answered de Grandin’s complaint, had lurched across the narrow roadway and was headed for a great, black-boled pine which grew beside the trail. With a wrench she brought the vehicle once more to the center of the road, putting on an extra burst of speed as she did so.

“If we ever get out of this,” I told de Grandin through chattering teeth, “I’ll never trust myself to one of these modern young fools’ driving, you may be—”

“If we emerge from this with nothing more than Mademoiselle’s driving to trouble us, I think we shall be more lucky than I think,” he cut in seriously.

“What d’ye mean?” I asked exasperated. “If—”

“If you will look behind us, perhaps you will be good enough to tell me what it is you see,” he interrupted, as he began unfastening the buckles of his gun-case.

“Why,” I answered as I glanced across the lurching car’s rear cushion, “it’s a man, de Grandin. A running man.”

“Eh, you are sure?” he answered, slipping a heavy cartridge into the rifle barrel of his gun. “A man who runs like that?”

The man was certainly running with remarkable speed. Tall, almost gigantic in height, and dressed in some sort of light-colored stuff which clung to his spare figure like a suit of tights, he covered the ground with long, effortless strides reminiscent of a hound upon the trail. There was something oddly furtive in his manner, too, for he did not keep to the center of the road, but dodged in a sort of zigzag, swerving now right, now left, keeping to the shadows as much as possible and running in such manner that only for the briefest intervals was he in direct line with us without some bush or tree-trunk intervening.

De Grandin nursed the forestock of his gun in the crook of his left elbow, his narrowed eyes intent upon the runner.

“When he comes within fifty yards I shall fire,” he told me softly. “Perhaps I should shoot now, but—”

“Good heavens, man; that’s murder!” I expostulated. “If—”

“Be still!” he told me in a low, sharp whisper. “I know what I am doing.”

The almost nighttime darkness of the dense pine woods through which we drove was thinning rapidly, and as we neared the open land the figure in our wake seemed to redouble its efforts. Now it no longer skulked along the edges of the road, but sprinted boldly down the center of the trail, arms flailing wildly, hands outstretched as though to grasp the rear of our car.

Amazingly the fellow ran. We were going at a pace exceeding forty miles an hour, but this long, thin woodsman seemed to be outdistancing us with ease. As we neared the margin of the wood and came into the dappled lights and shadows of the sunset, he put on a final burst of speed and rushed forward like a whirlwind, his feet scarce seeming to touch the ground.

Calmly, deliberately, de Grandin raised his gun and sighted down its gleaming blue-steel barrels.

“No!” I cried, striking the muzzle upward as he squeezed the trigger. “You can’t do that, de Grandin; it’s murder!”

My gesture was in time to spoil his aim, but not in time to stop the shot. With a roar the gun went off and I saw a tree-limb crack and hurtle downward as the heavy bullet sheared it off. And, as the shot reverberated through the autumn air, drowning the rattling of our rushing flivver, the figure in our wake dissolved. Astonishingly, inexplicably, but utterly, it vanished in the twinkling of an eye, gone completely—and as instantly—as a soap-bubble punctured with a pin.

The screeching grind of tortured brakes succeeded, and our car bumped to a stop within a dozen feet. “D-did you shoot?” our driver asked tremulously. Her fair and sunburned face had gone absolutely corpse-gray with terror, making the golden freckles stand out with greater prominence, and her lips were blue and cyanotic.

“Yes, Mademoiselle, I shot,” de Grandin answered in a low and even voice. “I shot, and had it not been for my kind and empty-headed friend, I should have scored a hit.” He paused; then, lower still, he added: “And now one understands why you were in a hurry, Mademoiselle.”

“Th-then, you saw—you saw—” she began through trembling lips, plucked feverishly at the steering-wheel with fear-numbed fingers for a moment, then, with a little, choking, gasping moan, slumped forward in her seat, unconscious.

“Parbleu, now one can sympathize with that Monsieur Crusoe,” the little Frenchman murmured as he looked upon the fainting girl. “Here we are, a dozen miles from anywhere, with most unpleasant neighbors all about, and none to show us to our destination.” Matter-of-factly he fell to chafing the girl’s wrists, slapping her cheeks softly from time to time, massaging her brow with deft, practised fingers.

“Ah, so, you are better now, n’est-ce-pas?” he asked as her eyelids fluttered upward. “You can show us where to go if my friend will drive the car?”

“Oh, I can drive all right, I think,” she answered shakily, “but I’d be glad if you would sit by me.”

Less speedily, but still traveling at a rate which seemed to me considerably in excess of that which our decrepit car could make with safety, we took up our journey, dipping into desolate, uninhabited valleys, mounting rocky elevations, finally skirting an extensive growth of evergreens and turning down a narrow, tree-lined lane until we reached the Sutter lodge, a squat, substantial log house with puncheon doors and a wide chimney of field stone. The sun had sunk below the western hills and long, purple-gray shadows were reaching across the little clearing round the cabin as we came to halt before the door.

“How much?” de Grandin asked as he clambered from the car and began unloading our gear.

“Oh, two dollars,” said the girl as she slid down from the driving-seat and bent to lift a cowskin bag. “The bus would have brought you over for a dollar, but they’d have let you down at the foot of the lane, and you’d have had to lug your duffle up here. Besides—”

“Perfectly, Mademoiselle,” he interrupted, “we are not disposed to dicker over price. Here is five dollars, and you need not trouble to make change; neither is it necessary that you help us with our gear; we are quite content to handle it ourselves, and—”

“Oh, but I want to help you,” she broke in, staggering toward the cabin with the heavy bag. “Then, if there’s anything I can do to make you comfortable—” She broke off, puffing with exertion, set the bag down on the door-sill and hastened to the car for another burden.

Our traps stored safely in the cabin, we turned once more to bid our guide adieu, but she shook her head. “It’s likely to be cold tonight,” she told us. “This fall weather’s right deceptive after dark. Better let me bring some wood in, and then you’ll be needing water for your coffee and washing in the morning. So—”

“No, Mademoiselle, you need not do it,” Jules de Grandin protested as she came in with an armful of cut wood. “We are able-bodied men, and if we find ourselves in need of wood or water we can—mordieu!”

Somewhere, faint and far-off seeming, but growing in intensity till it seemed to make our very eardrums ache, there rose the quavering, mournful howling of a dog, such a slowly rising and diminishing lament as hounds are wont to make at night when baying at the moon—or when bemoaning death in the family of their master. And, like an echo of the canine yowling, almost like an orchestrated part of some infernal symphony, there came from very near a little squeaking, skirking noise, like the squealing of a hollow rubber toy or the gibbering of an angry monkey. Not one small voice, but half a dozen, ten, a hundred of the chattering things seemed passing through the woodland at the clearing’s edge, marching in a sort of disorderly array, hurrying, tumbling, rushing toward some rendezvous, and gabbling as they went.

The firewood clattered to the cabin door, and once again the girl’s tanned face went pasty-gray.

“Mister,” she told de Grandin solemnly, “this is no place to leave your house o’ nights, for wood or water or anything else.”

The little Frenchman tweaked the needle-points of his mustache as he regarded her. Then: “One understands, Mademoiselle—in part, at least,” he answered. “We thank you for your kindness, but it is growing late; soon it will be dark. I do not think we need detain you longer.”

Slowly the girl walked toward the door, swung back the sturdy rough-hewn panels, and gazed into the night. The sun had sunk and deep-blue darkness spread across the hills and woods; here and there an early star winked down, but there was no hint of other light, for the moon was at the dark. A moment she stood thus upon the sill, then, seeming to take sudden resolution, slammed the door and turned to face us, jaw squared, but eyes suffused with hot tears of embarrassment.

“I can’t,” she announced; then, as de Grandin raised his brows interrogatively: “I’m afraid—scared to go out there. Will—will you let me spend the night here?”

“Here?” the Frenchman echoed.

“Yes, sir; here. I—I daren’t go out there among those gibbering things. I can’t. I can’t; I can’t!”

De Grandin laughed delightedly. “Morbleu, but prudery dies hard in you Americans, Mademoiselle,” he chuckled, “despite your boasted modernism and emancipation. No matter, you have asked our hospitality, and you shall have it. You did not really think that we would let you go among those—those whatever-they-may-bes, I hope? But no. Here you shall stay till daylight makes your going safe, and when you have eaten and rested you shall tell us all you know of this strange business of the monkey. Yes, of course.”

As he knelt to light the fire he threw me a delighted wink. “When that so kind Monsieur Sutter invited us to use his lodge for hunting we little suspected what game we were to hunt, n’est-ce-pas?” he asked.

COFFEE, FRIED BACON, PANCAKES and a tin of preserved peaches constituted dinner. De Grandin and I ate with the healthy appetite of tired men, but our guest was positively ravenous, passing her plate for replenishment again and again. At last, when we had filled the seemingly bottomless void within her and I had set my pipe aglow while she and Jules de Grandin lighted cigarettes, the little Frenchman prompted. “And now, Mademoiselle?”

“I’m glad you saw something in Putnam’s woods and heard those things squeaking in the dark outside tonight,” she answered. “It’ll make it easier for you to believe me.” She paused a moment, then:

“Did you notice the white house in the trees just before we came here?” she demanded.

We shook our heads, and she went on, without pausing for reply:

“That’s Colonel Putnam’s place, where it all started. My dad is postmaster and general storekeeper at Bartlesville, and Putnam’s mail used to be delivered through our office. I was graduated from high school last year, and went to help Dad in the store, sometimes giving him a lift with the letters, too. I remember, it was in the afternoon of the twenty-third of June a special delivery parcel came for Colonel Putnam, and Dad asked me if I’d like to drive him over to deliver it after supper. We could make the trip in an hour, and Dad and Colonel Putnam had been friends since boyhood; so he wanted to do him the favor of getting the package to him as soon as possible.

“Folks had started telling some queer tales about Colonel Putnam, even then, but Dad pooh-poohed ’em all. You see, the colonel was the richest man in the county, and lived pretty much to himself since he came back here from Germany. He’d gone to school in that country as a young man, and went back on trips every year or so until about twenty years ago, when he married a Bavarian lady and settled there. His wife, we heard, died two years after they were married, when their little girl was born; then, just before the War, the daughter was drowned in a boating accident and Colonel Putnam came back to his old ancestral home and shut himself in from everybody, an old, broken and embittered man. I’d never seen him, but Dad had been to call once, and said he seemed a little touched in the head. Anyway, I was glad of the chance to see the old fellow when Dad suggested we drive over with the parcel.

“There was something queer about the Putnam house—something I didn’t like, without actually knowing what it was. You know, just as you might be repelled by the odor of tuberoses, even though you didn’t realize their connection with funerals and death? The place seemed falling apart; the drive was overgrown with weeds, the lawns all gone to seed, and a general air of desolation everywhere.

“There didn’t seem to be any servants, and Colonel Putnam let us in himself. He was tall and spare, almost cadaverous, with white hair and beard, and wore a long, black, double-breasted frock coat and a stiff white-linen collar tied with a black stock. At first he hardly seemed to know Dad, but when he saw the parcel we brought, his eyes lighted up with what seemed to me a kind of fury.

“‘Come in, Hawkins,’ he invited; ‘you and your daughter are just in time to see a thing which no one living ever saw before.’

“He led us down a long and poorly lighted hall, furnished in old-fashioned walnut and haircloth, to a larger apartment overlooking his weed-grown back yard.

“‘Hawkins,’ he told my father, ‘you’re in time to witness a demonstration of the uncontrovertible truth of the Pythagorean doctrine—the doctrine of metempsychosis.’

“‘Good Lord, Henry, you don’t mean to say you believe such non—’ Dad began, but Colonel Putnam looked at him so fiercely that I thought he’d spring on him.

“‘Silence, impious fool!’ he shouted. ‘Be silent and witness the exemplification of the Truth!’ Then he calmed down a little, though he still continued walking up and down the room twitching his eyebrows, shrugging his shoulders and snapping his fingers every now and then.

“‘Just before I came back to this country,’ he went on, ‘I met a master of the occult, a Herr Doktor von Meyer, who is not only the seventh son of a seventh son, but a member of the forty-ninth generation in direct descent from the Master Magician, Simon of Tyre. He possesses the ability to remember incidents in his former incarnations as you and I recall last night’s dreams in the morning, Hawkins. Not only that: he has the power of reading other people’s pasts. I sat with him in his atelier in Leipzig and saw my whole existence, from the time I was an insensate amoeba crawling in the primordial slime to the minute of my birth in this life, pass before me like the episodes of a motion picture.’

“‘Did he tell you anything of this life; relate any incident of your youth known only to yourself, for instance, Henry?’ Father asked him.

“‘Be careful, scoffer, the Powers know how to deal with unbelievers such as you!’ Colonel Putnam answered, flushing with rage, then calmed down again and resumed pacing the floor.

“‘Back in the days when civilization was in the first flush of its youth,’ he told us, ‘I was a priest of Osiris in a temple by the Nile. And she, my darling, my dearest daughter, orphaned then as later, was a priestess in the temple of the Mother Goddess, Isis, across the river from my sanctuary.

“‘But even in that elder day the fate which followed us was merciless. Then as later, water was the medium which was to rob me of my darling, for one night when her service to the Divine Mother was ended and temple slaves were rowing her across the river to my house, an accident overturned her boat, and she, the apple of my doting eyes, was thrown from her couch and drowned in the waters of Nilus. Drowned, drowned in the Egyptian river even as her latest earthly body was drowned in the Rhine.’

“Colonel Putnam stopped before my father, and his eyes were fairly blazing as he shook his finger in Dad’s face and whispered:

“‘But von Meyer told me how to overcome my loss, Hawkins. By his supernatural powers he was able to project his memory backward through the ages to the rock-tomb where they had laid the body of my darling, the very flesh in which she walked the streets of hundred-gated Thebes when the world was young. I sought it out, together with the bodies of those who served her in that elder life, and brought them here to my desolated house. Behold—’

“With a sort of dancing step he crossed the room and swept aside a heavy curtain. There, in the angle of the wall, with vases of fresh-cut flowers before them, stood three Egyptian mummy-cases.

“‘It is she!’ Colonel Putnam whispered tensely. ‘It is she, my own little daughter, in her very flesh, and these’—he pointed to the other two—‘were her attendants in that former life.’

“‘Look!’ He lifted the lid from the center coffin and revealed a slender form closely wrapped in overlying layers of dust-colored linen. ‘There she stands, exactly as the priestly craftsmen wrapped her for her long, long rest, three thousand years ago! Now all is prepared for the great work I purpose; only the contents of that parcel you brought were needed to call the spirits of my daughter and her servants back to their earthly tenements, here, tonight, in this very room, Hawkins!’

“‘Henry Putnam,’ my father cried, ‘do you mean to say you intend to play with this Devil’s business? You’d really try to call back the spirit of one whose life on earth is done?’

“‘I would; by God, I will!’ Colonel Putnam shouted.

“‘You shan’t!’ Father told him. ‘That kind of thing is denounced by the laws of Moses, and mighty good sense he showed when he forbade it, too!’

“‘Fool!’ Colonel Putnam screamed at him. ‘Don’t you know Moses stole all his knowledge from the priesthood of Egypt, to which I belonged? Centuries before Moses was, we knew the white arts of life and the black arts of death. Moses! How dare you quote that ignorant charlatan and thief?’

“‘Well, I’ll have no part in any such Devil’s mummery,’ Father told him, but Colonel Putnam was like a madman.

“‘You shall!’ he answered, drawing a revolver from his pocket. ‘If either of you tries to leave this room I’ll shoot him dead!”

The girl stopped speaking and covered her face with her hands. “If we’d only let him shoot us!” she said wearily “Maybe we’d have been able to stop it.”

De Grandin regarded her compassionately. “Can you continue, Mademoiselle?” he asked gently. “Or would you, perhaps, wait till later?”

“No, I might as well get it over with,” she answered with a sigh. “Colonel Putnam ripped the cover off the package Father had brought and took out seven little silver vessels, each about as large as a hen’s egg, but shaped something like a pineapple—having a pointed top and a flat base. He set them in a semicircle before the three coffins and filled them from an earthenware jug which was fitted with a spout terminating in a knob fashioned like a woman’s head crowned with a diadem of hawks’ wings. Then he lighted a taper and blew out the oil-lamp which furnished the only illumination for the room.

“It was deathly still in the darkened room; outside we could hear the crickets cheeping, and their shrill little cries seemed to grow louder and louder, to come closer and closer to the window. Colonel Putnam’s shadow, cast by the flickering taper’s light, lay on the wall like one of those old-time pictures of the Evil One.

“‘The hour!’ he breathed. ‘The hour has come!’

Quickly he leaned forward, touching first one, then another of the little silver jars with the flame of his taper.

“The room’s darkness yielded to an eery, bluish glow. Wherever the fire came in contact with a vase a tiny, thin, blue flame sprang up.

“Suddenly the corner of the room where the mummy-cases stood seemed wavering and rocking, like a ship upon a troubled ocean. It was hot and sultry in the house, shut in as it was by the thick pine woods, but from somewhere a current of cold—freezing cold!—air began to blow. I could feel its chill on my ankles, then my knees, finally on my hands as I held them in my lap.

“‘Daughter, little daughter—daughter in all the ages past and all the ages yet to be, I call to you. Come, your father calls!’ Colonel Putnam intoned in a quavering voice. ‘Come. Come, I command it! Out of the illimitable void of eternity, come to me. In the name of Osiris, Dread Lord of the Spirit World, I command it. In the name of Isis, wife and sister of the Mighty One, I command it! In the names of Horus and Anubis, I command it!’

“Something—I don’t know what—seemed entering the room. The windows were tight-latched; yet we saw the dusty curtains flutter, as though in a sudden current of air, and a light, fine mist seemed to obscure the bright blue flames burning in the seven silver lamps. There was a creaking sound, as though an old and rusty-hinged door were being slowly opened, and the lids of the two mummy-cases to right and left of the central figure began to swing outward. And as they moved, the linen-bandaged thing in the center coffin seemed to writhe like a hibernating snake recovering life, and stepped out into the room!

“Colonel Putnam forgot Father and me completely. ‘Daughter—Gretchen, Isabella, Francesca, Musepa, T’ashamt, by whatever name or names you have been known throughout the ages, I charge you speak!’ he cried, sinking on his knees and stretching out his hands toward the moving mummy.

“There came a gentle, sighing noise, then a light, tittering laugh, musical, but hard and metallic, as a thin, high voice replied. ‘My father, you who loved and nurtured me in ages gone, I come to you at your command with those who served me in the elder world; but we are weak and worn from our long rest. Give us to eat, my father.’

“‘Aye, food shall ye have, and food in plenty,’ Colonel Putnam answered. ‘Tell me, what is it that ye crave?’

“‘Naught but the life-force of those strangers at your back,’ the voice replied with another light, squeaking laugh. ‘They must die if we would live—’ and the sheeted thing moved nearer to us in the silver lamps’ blue light.

“Before the Colonel could snatch up the pistol which had fallen from his hand, Father grabbed it, seized me with his free hand and dragged me from the house. Our car was waiting at the door, its engine still going, and we jumped in and started for the highroad at top speed.

“We were nearly out of the woods surrounding Putnam’s house—the same woods I drove you through this afternoon—I happened to look back. There, running like a rabbit, coming so fast that it was actually overtaking our speeding car, was a tall, thin man, almost fleshless as a skeleton, and aptly dressed in some dust-colored, close-fitting kind of tights.

“But I recognized it! It was one of those things from the mummy-cases we’d seen in Colonel Putnam’s parlor!

“Dad crowded on more speed, but the dreadful running mummy kept gaining on us. It had almost overtaken us when we reached the edge of the woods and I happened to remember Father still had Colonel Putnam’s pistol. I snatched the weapon from his pocket and emptied it at the thing that chased us, almost at pointblank range. I know I must have hit it several times, for I’m a pretty good shot and the distance was too short for a miss, even allowing for the way the car was lurching, but it kept right on; then, just as we ran out into the moonlight at the woodland’s edge, it stopped in its tracks, waved its arms at us and—vanished.”

De Grandin tweaked the sharply waxed ends of his little wheat-blond mustache. “There is more, Mademoiselle,” he said at length. “I can see it in your eyes. What else?”

Miss Hawkins cast a startled look at him, and it seemed to me she shuddered slightly, despite the warming glow of the fire.

“Yes,” she answered slowly, “there’s more. Three days after that a party of young folks came up here on a camping-trip from New York. They were at the Ormond cabin down by Pine Lake, six of ’em; a young man and his wife, who acted as chaperons, and two girls and two boys. The second night after they came, one of the girls and her boy friend went canoeing on the lake just at sundown. They paddled over to this side, where the Putnam farm comes down to the water, and came ashore to rest.”

There was an air of finality in the way she paused. It was as if she had announced, “Thus the tale endeth,” when she told us of the young folks’ beaching their canoe, and de Grandin realized it, for, instead of asking what the next occurrence was, he demanded simply:

“And when were they found, Mademoiselle?”

“Next day, just before noon. I wasn’t with the searching-party, but they told me it was pretty dreadful. The canoe paddles were smashed to splinters, as though they’d used them as clubs to defend themselves and broken them while doing so, and their bodies were literally torn limb from limb. If it hadn’t been there was no evidence of any of them being eaten, the searchers would have thought a pair of panthers had pounced on them, for their faces were clawed almost beyond recognition, practically every shred of clothing ripped off them, and their arms and legs and heads completely separated from their bodies.”

“U’m? And blood was scattered all around, one imagines?” de Grandin asked.

“No! Not a single drop of blood was anywhere in sight. Job Denham, the undertaker who received the bodies from the coroner, told me their flesh was pale and dry as veal. He said he couldn’t understand it, but I—”

She halted in her narrative, glancing apprehensively across her shoulder at the window; then, in a low, almost soundless whisper. “The Bible says the blood’s the life, doesn’t it?” she asked. “And that voice we heard in Colonel Putnam’s house told him those mummies wanted the vital force from Dad and me, didn’t it? Well, I think that’s the answer. Whatever it was Colonel Putnam brought to life in his house three days before was what set on that boy and girl in Putnam’s woods, and it—they—attacked them for their blood.”

“Have similar events occurred, Mademoiselle?”

“Did you notice the farm land hereabouts as we drove over?” she asked irrelevantly.

“Not particularly.”

“Well, it’s old land; sterile. You couldn’t raise so much as a mortgage on it. No one’s tried to farm it since I can remember, and I’ll be seventeen next January.”

“U’m; and so—”

“So you’d think it kind of funny for Colonel Putnam suddenly to decide to work his land, wouldn’t you?”

“Perhaps.”

“And with so many men out of work hereabouts, you’d think it queer for him to advertise for farmhands in the Boston papers, wouldn’t you?”

“Précisément, Mademoiselle.”

“And for him to pay their railway fare up here, and their bus fare over from the station, and then get dissatisfied with ’em all of a sudden, and discharge ’em in a day or two—and for ’em to leave without anybody’s knowing when they went, or where they went; then for him to hire a brand-new crew in the same way, and discharge them in the same way in a week or less?”

“Mademoiselle,” de Grandin answered in a level, almost toneless voice, “we consider these events somewhat more than merely queer. We think they have the smell of fish upon them. Tomorrow we shall call upon this estimable Putnam person, and he would be well advised to have a credible explanation in readiness.”

“Call on Colonel Putnam? Not I.” the girl rejoined. “I wouldn’t go near that house of his, even in daylight, for a million dollars!”

“Then I fear we must forego the pleasure of your charming company,” he returned with a smile, “for we shall visit him, most certainly. Yes, of course.

“Meantime,” he added, “we have had a trying day; is it agreeable that we retire? Doctor Trowbridge and I shall occupy the bunks in this room; you may have the inner room, Mademoiselle.”

“Please,” she pleaded, and a flush mantled her face to the brows, “please let me sleep out here with you. I’d—well, I’d be scared to death sleeping in there by myself, and I’ll be just as quiet—honestly, I won’t disturb you.”

She was unsupplied with sleeping-wear, of course; so de Grandin, who was about her stature, cheerfully donated a pair of lavender-and-scarlet striped silk pajamas, which she donned in the adjoining room, expending so little time in process that we had scarcely had time to doff our boots, jackets and cravats ere she rejoined us, looking far more like an adolescent lad than a young woman, save for those absurd pink-coral ear-studs.

“I wonder if you’d mind my using the ’phone?” she asked as she pattered across the rough-board floor on small and amazingly white bare feet. “I don’t think it’s been disconnected, and I’d like to call Dad and tell him I’m all right.”

“By all means, do so,” bade de Grandin as he hitched the blanket higher on his shoulder. “We can understand his apprehension for your safety in the circumstances.”

The girl raised the receiver from the old-fashioned wall fixture, took the magneto crank in her right hand and gave it three vigorous turns, then seven slow ones.

“Hello? Dad?” she called. “This is Audrey; I’m—oh!” The color drained from her cheeks as though a coat of liquid white were sprayed across her face. “Dad—Dad—what is it?” she cried shrilly; then slowly, like a marionette being lowered by its strings, she wavered totteringly a moment, let fall the telephone receiver and slumped in a pathetic little heap upon the cabin floor.

De Grandin and I were out of bed with a bound, the little Frenchman bending solicitously above the fainting girl, I snatching at the telephone receiver.

“Hullo, hullo?” I called through the transmitter. “Mr. Hawkins?”

“Huh—hoh—huh-hoh-huh!” the most fiendish, utterly diabolical chuckle I ever heard came to me across the wire. “Huh—hoh—huh-hoh-huh!”

Then click! the telephone connection broke, and though I repeated the three-seven ring I’d heard the girl give several times, I could obtain no answer, not even the faint buzzing which denotes an open wire.

“My father! Something dreadful has happened to him, I know!” moaned the girl as she recovered consciousness. “Did you hear it, too, Doctor Trowbridge?”

“I heard something, certainly; it sounded like a poor connection roaring in the wire,” I lied. Then, as hopeful disbelief lightened in her eyes: “Yes, I’m sure that’s what it was, for the instrument’s quite dead, now.”

Reluctantly reassured, Audrey Hawkins clambered into bed, and though she moaned once or twice with a little, whimpering sound, her buoyant youth and healthily tired young muscles stood her in good stead, and she was sleeping peacefully within an hour.

Several times, as de Grandin and I lay in silence, waiting for her to drop off, I fancied I heard the oddly terrifying squeaking sounds we’d noticed earlier in the evening, but I resolutely put all thought of what their probable origin might be from my mind, convinced myself they were the cries of nocturnal insects, and—lay broad awake, listening for their recurrence.

“What was it that you heard in the telephone, Friend Trowbridge?” the little Frenchman asked me in a whisper when her continued steady, even breathing had assured us that our youthful guest was sound asleep.

“A laugh,” I answered, “the most hideous, hellish chuckle I’ve ever listened to. You don’t suppose her father could have laughed like that, just to frighten—”

“I do not think Monsieur her father has either cause for laughter or ability to laugh,” he interrupted. “What it is that haunts these woods I do not surely know, my friend, though I suspect that the crack-brained Colonel Putnam let loose a horde of evil elementals when he went through that mummery at his house last summer. However that may be, there is no doubt that these things, whatever be their nature, are of a most unpleasant disposition, intent on killing any one they meet, either from pure lust for killing or in order to secure the vital forces of their victims and thus increase their strength in a material form. It is my fear that they may have a special grudge against Monsieur Hawkins and his daughter, for they were the first people whose lives they sought, and they escaped, however narrowly. Therefore, having failed in their second attempt to do the daughter mischief this afternoon, they may have wreaked vengeance on the father. Yes, it is entirely possible.”

“But it’s unlikely,” I protested. “He’s over in Bartlesville, ten miles away, while she’s right here; yet—”

“Yes, you were saying—” he prompted as a sudden unpleasant thought forced itself into my mind and stopped my speech.

“Why, if they’re determined to do mischief to either Hawkins or his daughter, haven’t they attempted to enter this house, which is so much nearer than her home?”

“Eh bien, I thought you might be thinking that,” he answered dryly. “And are you sure that they have made no attempt to enter here? Look at the door, if you will be so good, and tell me what it is you see.”

I glanced across the cabin toward the stout plank door and caught the ruddy reflection of the firelight on a small, bright object lying on the sill. “It looks like your hunting-knife,” I told him.

“Précisément, you have right; it is my hunting-knife,” he answered. “My hunting-knife, unsheathed, with its sharp point directed toward the door-sill. Yours is at the other entrance, while I have taken the precaution to place a pair of heavy shears on the window-ledge. I do not think I wasted preparations, either, as you will probably agree if you will cast your eyes toward the window.”

Obediently, I glanced at the single window of the room, then stifled an involuntary cry of horror; for there, outlined against the flickering illumination of the dying fire, stood an evil-looking, desiccated thing, skeleton-thin, dark, leather-colored skin stretched tightly as drum parchment on its skull, broken teeth protruding through retracted lips, tiny sparks of greenish light glowing malevolently in its cavernous, hollow eye-sockets. I recognized it at a glance; it was a mummy, an Egyptian mummy, such as I had seen scores of times while walking through the museums. And yet it was no mummy, either, for while it had the look of death and unnaturally delayed decay about it, it was also endued with some kind of dreadful life-in-death; for its little, glittering eyes were plainly capable of seeing, while its withered, leathery lips were drawn back in a grin of snarling fury, and even as I looked, they moved back from the stained and broken teeth in the framing of some phrase of hatred.

“Do not be afraid,” de Grandin bade. “He can look and glare and make his monkey-faces all he wishes, but he can not enter here. The shears and knives prevent him.”

“Y-you’re sure?” I asked, terror gripping at my throat.

“Sure? To be sure I’m sure, He and his unpleasant playfellows would have been inside the cabin, and at our throats, long since, could they have found a way to enter. The sharpened steel, my friend, is very painful to him. Iron and steel are the most earthly of all metals, and exercise a most uncomfortable influence on elementals. They can not handle it, they can not even approach it closely, and when it is sharpened to a point it seems to be still more efficient, for its pointed end appears to focus and concentrate radiations of psychic force from the human body, forces which are highly destructive to them. Knowing this, and suspecting what it is that we have to do with from the story Mademoiselle Hawkins told us, I took precautions to place these discouragers at doors and window before we went to bed. Tiens, I have lain here something like an hour, hearing them squeak and gibber as they prowled around the house; only a moment since I noticed that thin gentleman peering in the window, and thought you might he interested.”

Rising, he crossed the cabin on tiptoe, so as not to wake the sleeping girl, and drew the burlap curtain across the window. “Look at that until your ugly eyes are tired, Monsieur le Cadavre,” he bade. “My good Friend Trowbridge does not care to have you watch him while he sleeps.”

“Sleep!” I echoed. “D’ye think I could sleep knowing that’s outside?”

“Parbleu, he is much better outside than in, I think,” returned the Frenchman with a grin. “However. if you care to lie awake and think of him, I have no objections. But me, I am tired. I shall sleep; nor shall I sleep the worse for knowing that he is securely barred outside the house. No.”

REASSURED, I FINALLY FELL asleep, but my rest was broken by unpleasant dreams. Sometime toward morning I awoke, not from any consciousness of impending trouble nor from any outward stimulus; yet, once my eyes were open, I was as fully master of my faculties as though I had not slept at all. The pre-dawn chill was in the air, almost bitter in its penetrating quality; the fire which had blazed merrily when we said good-night now lay a heap of whitened ashes and feebly smoldering embers. Outside the cabin rose a furious chorus of light, swishing, squeaking noises, as though a number of those whistling rubber toys with which small children are amused were being rapidly squeezed together. At first I thought it was the twittering of birds, then realized that the little feathered friends had long since flown to southern quarters; besides, there was an eery unfamiliarity in this sound, totally unlike anything I had ever heard until the previous evening, and it rose and gathered in shrill tone and volume as I listened. Vaguely, for no conscious reason, I likened it to the clamoring of caged brutes when feeding-time approaches in the zoo.

Then, as I half rose in my bunk, I saw an indistinct form move across the cabin. Slowly, very slowly, and so softly that the rough, uneven floor forbore to creak beneath her lightly pressing feet, Audrey Hawkins tiptoed toward the cabin door, creeping with a kind of feline grace. Half stupefied, I saw her pause before the portal, sink stealthily to one knee, reach out a cautious hand—

“Non, non; dix mille fois non—you shall not do it!” de Grandin cried, emerging from his bunk and vaulting across the cabin, seemingly with a single movement, then grasping the girl by the shoulders with such force that he hurled her half across the room. “What business of the fool do you make here, Mademoiselle?” he asked her angrily. “Do not you know that once the barriers of steel have been removed we should be—mon Dieu, one understands!”

Audrey Hawkins’ hands were at her temples as she looked at him with innocent amazement while he raged at her. Clearly, she had wakened from a sound and dreamless sleep when she felt his hands upon her shoulders. Now she gazed at him in wonder mixed with consternation.

“Wh-what is it? What was I doing?” she asked.

“Ah, parbleu, you did nothing of your own volition, Mademoiselle,” he answered, “but those other ones, those very evil ones outside the house, in some way they reached you in your sleep and made you pliable to their desires. Ha, but they forgot de Grandin; he sleeps, yes, but he sleeps the sleep of the cat. They do not catch him napping. But no.”

We piled fresh wood upon the fire and, wrapped in blankets, sat before the blaze, smoking, drinking strong black coffee, talking with forced cheerfulness till the daylight came again, and when de Grandin put the curtain back and looked out in the clearing round the cabin, there was no sign of any visitants, nor were there any squeaking voices in the woods.

BREAKFAST FINISHED, WE CLIMBED into the ancient Ford and set out for Bartlesville, traveling at a speed I had not thought the ancient vehicle could make.

Hawkins’ general store was a facsimile of hundreds of like institutions to be found in typical American villages from Vermont to Vancouver. Square as a box, it faced the village main street. Shop windows, displaying a miscellany of tinned groceries, household appliances and light agricultural equipment, occupied its front elevation. Shuttered windows piercing the second-story walls denoted where the family living-quarters occupied the space above the business premises.

Audrey tried the red-painted door of the shop, found it locked securely, and led the way through a neat yard surrounded by a fence of white pickets, took a key from her trousers pockets and let us through the private family entrance.

Doctors and undertakers have a specialized sixth sense. No sooner had we crossed the threshold than I smelled death inside that house. De Grandin sensed it, too, and I saw his smooth brow pucker in a warning frown as he glanced at me across the girl’s shoulder.

“Perhaps it would be better if we went first, Mademoiselle,” he offered. “Monsieur your father may have had an accident, and—”

“Dad—oh, Dad, are you awake?” the girl’s call interrupted. “It’s I. I was caught in Putnam’s woods last evening and spent the night at Sutter’s camp, but I’m—Dad! Why don’t you answer me?”

For a moment she stood silent in an attitude of listening; then like a flash she darted down the little hall and up the winding stairs which led to the apartment overhead.

We followed her as best we could, cannoning into unseen furniture, barking our shins on the narrow stairs, but keeping close behind her as she raced down the upper passageway into the large bedroom which overlooked the village street.

The room was chaos. Chairs were overturned, the clothing had been wrenched from the big, old-fashioned bed and flung in a heap in the center of the floor, and from underneath the jumbled pile of comforter and sheets and blankets a man’s bare foot protruded.

I hesitated at the doorway, but the girl rushed forward, dropped to her knees and swept aside the veiling bedclothes. It was a man past early middle life, but looking older, she revealed. Thin, he was, with that starved-turkey kind of leanness characteristic of so many native New Englanders. His gray head was thrown back and his lean, hard-shaven chin thrust upward truculently. In pinched nostril, sunken eye and gaping open mouth his countenance bore the unmistakable seal of death. He lay on his back with arms and legs sprawled out at grotesque angles from the inadequate folds of his old-fashioned Canton flannel nightshirt, and at first glance I recognized the unnaturalness of his posture, for human anatomy does not alter much with death, and this man’s attitude would have been impossible for any but a practised contortionist.

Even as I bent my brows in wonder, de Grandin knelt beside the body. The cause of death was obvious, for in the throat, extending almost down to the left clavicle, there gaped a jagged wound, not made by any sharp, incising weapon, but rather, apparently, the result of some savage lancination, for the whole integument was ripped away, exposing the trachea to view—yet not a clot of blood lay round the ragged edges of the laceration, nor was there any sign of staining on the nightrobe. Indeed, to the ordinary pallor of the dead there seemed to be a different sort of pallor added, a queer, unnatural pallor which rendered the man’s weather-stained countenance not only absolutely colorless, but curiously transparent, as well.

“Good heavens—” I began, but:

“Friend Trowbridge, if you please, observe,” de Grandin ordered, lifting one of the dead man’s hands and rotating it back and forth. I grasped his meaning instantly. Even allowing for the passage of rigor mortis and ensuing post mortem flaccidity, it would have been impossible to move that hand in such a manner if the radius and ulna were intact. The man’s arm-bones had been fractured, probably in several places, and this, I realized, accounted for the posture of his hands and feet.

“Dad—oh, Daddy, Daddy!” cried the distracted girl as she took the dead man’s head in her arms and nursed it on her shoulder. “Oh, Daddy dear, I knew that something terrible had happened when—”

Her outburst ended in a storm of weeping as she rocked her body to and fro, moaning with the helpless, inarticulate piteousness of a dumb thing wounded unto death. Then, abruptly:

“You heard that laugh last night!” she challenged me. “You know you did, Doctor Trowbridge—and there’s where we heard it from,” she pointed with a shaking finger at the wall-telephone across the room.

As I followed the line of her gesture I saw that the instrument had been ripped clear from its retaining bolts, its wires, its mouthpiece and receiver broken as though by repeated hammer-blows.

“They—those dreadful things that tried to get at us last night came over here when they found they couldn’t reach me and murdered my poor father!” she continued in a low, sob-choked voice. “I know! The night Colonel Putnam raised those awful mummies from the dead the she-thing said they wanted our lives, and one of the others chased us through the woods. They’ve been hungering for us ever since, and last night they got Daddy. I—”

She paused, her slender bosom heaving, and we could see the tear drops dry away as fiery anger flared up in her eyes.

“Last night I said I wouldn’t go near Putnam’s house again for a million dollars,” she told de Grandin. “Now I say I wouldn’t stay away from there for all the money in the world. I’m going over now—this minute—and pay old Putnam off. I’ll face that villain with his guilt and make him pay for Daddy’s life if it’s the last thing I do!”

“It probably would be, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin answered dryly. “Consider, if you please: This so odious Monsieur Putnam is undoubtlessly responsible for loosing those evil things upon the countryside, but while his life is forfeit for his crimes of necromancy, merely to kill him would profit us—and the community—not at all. These most unpleasant pets of his have gotten out of hand. I make no doubt that he himself is in constant, deadly fear of them, and that they, who came as servants of his will, are now his undisputed masters. Were we to kill him, we should still have those evil ones to reckon with, and till they have been utterly destroyed the country will be haunted by them; and others—countless others, perhaps—will share the fate of your poor father and that unfortunate young man and woman who perished on their boating-trip, not to mention those misguided workingmen who answered Monsieur Putnam’s advertisements. You comprehend? This is a war of extermination on which we are embarked; we must destroy or be destroyed. Losing our lives in a gallant gesture would be a worthless undertaking. Victory, not speedy vengeance, must be our first and great consideration.”

“Well, then, what are we to do, sit here idly while they range the woods and kill more people?”

“By no means, Mademoiselle. First of all, we must see that your father has the proper care; next, we must plan the work which lies before us. That done, it is for us to work the plans which we have made.”

“All right, then, let’s call the coroner,” she agreed. “Judge Lindsay knows me, and he knew Dad all his life. When I tell him how old Putnam raised those mummies from the dead, and—”

“Mademoiselle!” the Frenchman expostulated. “You will tell him nothing about anything which Monsieur Putnam has done. It has been two hundred years, unfortunately, since your kin and neighbors ceased paying such creatures as this Putnam for their sins with rope and flame. To tell your truthful story to the coroner would be but signing your commitment to the madhouse. Then, doubly protected by your incarceration and public disbelief in their existence, Monsieur Putnam’s mummy-things could range the countryside at will. Indeed, it is altogether likely that the first place they would visit would be the madhouse where you were confined, and there, defenseless, you would be wholly at their mercy. Your screams for help would be regarded as the ravings of a lunatic, and the work of extirpation of your family which they began last night would be concluded. Your life, which they have sought since first they came, would be snuffed out, and, with none to fight against them, the countryside would fall an easy prey to their vile depredations. Eh bien, who can say how far the slaughter would go before the pig-ignorant authorities, at last convinced that you had told the sober truth when they thought you raving, would finally arouse themselves and take befitting action? You see why we must guard our tongues, Mademoiselle?”

NEWS OF THE MURDER spread like wildfire through the village. Zebulon Lindsay, justice of the peace, who also acted as coroner, empaneled a jury before noon; by three o’clock the inquisition had been held and a verdict of death by violence at the hands of some person or persons unknown was rendered.

Among the agricultural implements in Hawkins’ stock de Grandin noted a number of billhooks, pike-like instruments with long, curved blades resembling those of scythes fixed on the ends of their strong helves.

“These we can use tonight, my friends,” he told us as he laid three carefully aside.

“What for?” demanded Audrey.

“For those long, cadaverous things which run through Monsieur Putnam’s woods, by blue!” he answered with a rather sour smile. “You will recall that on the first occasion when you saw them you shot one of their number several times?”

“Yes.”

“And that notwithstanding you scored several hits, it continued its pursuit?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well. You know the reason? Your bullets tore clear through its desiccated flesh, but had not force to stop it. Tiens, could you have knocked its legs off at the knees, however, do you think that it could still have run?”

“Oh, you mean—”

“Precisely, exactly; quite so, ma chère, I purpose dividing them, anatomizing them, striking them limb from limb. What lead and powder would be powerless to do, these instruments of iron will accomplish very nicely. We shall go to their domain at nightfall; that way we shall be sure of meeting them. Were we to go by daylight, it is possible they would be hidden in some secret place, for like all their kind they wait the coming of darkness because their doings are evil.

“Should you see one of them, remember what he did to your poor father, Mademoiselle, and strike out with your iron. Strike and do not spare your blows. It is not as foeman unto foe we go tonight, but as executioners to criminals. You understand?”

WE SET OUT JUST at sundown, Audrey Hawkins driving, de Grandin and I, each armed with a stout billhook, in the rear seat.

“It were better that you stopped here, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin whispered as the big white pillars of the mansion’s antique portico came in view between the trees. “There is no need to advertise our advent; surprise is worth a thousand men in battle.”

We dismounted from the creaking vehicle and, our weapons on our shoulders, began a stealthy advance.

“S-s-st!” Audrey warned as we paused a moment by a little opening in the trees, our eyes intent upon the house. “Hear it?”

Very softly, like the murmur of a sleepy little bird, there came a subdued squeaking noise from a hemlock thicket twenty feet or so away. I felt the short hair on my neck begin to rise against my collar and a little chill of mingled hate and apprehension run rippling through my scalp and cheeks. It was like the sensation felt when one comes unexpectedly upon a serpent in the path.

“Softly, friends,” Jules de Grandin ordered, grasping the handle of his billhook like a quarterstaff and leaning toward the sound; “do you stand by me, good Friend Trowbridge, and have your flashlight ready. Play its beam on him the minute he emerges, and keep him visible for me to work on.”

Cautiously, quietly as a cat stalking a mouse, he stepped across the clearing, neared the clump of bushes whence the squeaking came, then leant forward, eyes narrowed, weapon ready.

It burst upon us like a charging beast, one moment hidden from our view by the screening boughs of evergreen, next instant leaping through the air, long arms flailing, skeleton-hands grasping for de Grandin’s throat, its withered, leather-like face a mask of hatred and ferocity.

I shot the flashlight’s beam full on it, but its terrifying aspect caused my hand to tremble so that I could scarcely hold the shaft of light in line with the leaping horror’s movements.

“Ça-ha, Monsieur le Cadavre, we meet again, it seems!” de Grandin greeted in a whisper, dodging nimbly to the left as the mummy-monster reached out scrawny hands to grapple with him. He held the billhook handle in the center, left hand upward, right hand down, and as the withered leather talons missed their grasp he whirled the iron-headed instrument overhand from left to right, turning it as he did so, so that the carefully whetted edge of the heavy blade crashed with devastating force upon the mummy’s withered biceps. The limb dropped helpless from the desiccated trunk, but, insensible to pain, the creature whirled and grasped out with its right hand.

Once more the billhook circled whistling through the air, this time reversed, striking downward from right to left. The keen-edged blade sheared through the lich’s other arm, cleaving it from the body at the shoulder.

And now the withered horror showed a trace of fear. Sustained by supernatural strength and swiftness, apparently devoid of any sense of pain, it had not entered what intelligence the thing possessed that a man could stand against it. Now it paused, irresolutely a moment, teetering on its spindle legs and broad, splay feet, and while it hesitated thus the little Frenchman swung his implement again, this time like an ax, striking through dry, brown flesh and aged, brittle bone, lopping off the mummy’s legs an inch or so above the knees.

Had it not been so horrible I could have laughed aloud to see the withered torso hurtle to the ground and lie there, flopping grotesquely on stumps of arms and legs, seeking to regain the shelter of the hemlock copse as it turned its fleshless head and gazed across its bony shoulder at de Grandin.

“Hit it on the head! Crush its skull!” I advised, but:

“Non, this is better,” he replied as he drew a box of matches from his pocket and lighted one.

Now utter terror seized the limbless lich. With horrid little squeaking cries it redoubled its efforts to escape, but the Frenchman was inexorable. Bending forward, he applied the flaming match to the tinder-dry body, and held it close against the withered skin. The fire caught instantly. As though it were compounded of a mass of oil-soaked rags, the mummy’s body sent out little tongues of fire, surmounted by dense clouds of aromatic smoke, and in an instant was a blaze of glowing flame. De Grandin seized the severed arms and legs and piled them on the burning torso so that they, too, blazed and snapped and crackled like dry wood thrown on a roaring fire.

“And that, I damn think, denotes the end of that,” he told me as he watched the body sink from flames to embers, then to white and scarcely glowing ashes. “Fire is the universal solvent, the one true cleanser, my friend. It was not for nothing that the olden ones condemned their witches to be burned. This elemental force, this evil personality which inhabited that so unsavory mummy’s desiccated flesh, not only can it find no other place to rest now that we have destroyed its tenement, but the good, clean, clarifying flames have dissipated it entirely. Never again can it materialize, never more enter human form through the magic of such necromancers as that sacré Putnam person. It is gone, disposed of—pouf! it is no longer anything at all.

“What think you of my scheme, Mademoiselle?” he asked. “Was I not the clever one to match iron and fire against them? Was it not laughable to see—grand Dieu, Friend Trowbridge—where is she?”

He leant upon his billhook, looking questingly about the edges of the clearing while I played my searchlight’s beam among the trees. At length:

“One sees it perfectly,” he told me. “While we battled with that one, another of them set on her and we could not hear her cries because of our engagement. Now—”

“Do—do you suppose it killed her as it did her father?” I asked, sick with apprehension.

“We can not say; we can but look,” he answered. “Come.”

Together we searched the woodland in an ever-widening circle, but no trace of Audrey Hawkins could we find.

“Here’s her billhook,” I announced as we neared the house.

Sticking in the hole of a tree, almost buried in the wood, was the head of the girl’s weapon, some three inches of broken shaft adhering to it. On the ground twenty feet or more away lay the main portion of the helve, broken across as a match-stem might he broken by a man.

The earth was moist beneath the trees, and at that spot uncovered by fallen leaves or pine needles. As I bent to pick up Audrey’s broken billhook, I noticed tracks in the loam—big, barefoot tracks, heavy at the toe, as though their maker strained forward as he walked, and beside them a pair of wavy parallel lines—the toe-prints of Audrey’s boots as she was dragged through the woods and toward the Putnam house.

“What now?” I asked. “They’ve taken her there, dead or alive, and—”

He interrupted savagely: “What can we do but follow? Me, I shall go into that sacré house, and take it down, plank by single plank, until I find her; also I shall find those others, and when I do—”

NO LIGHTS SHOWED IN the Putnam mansion as we hurried across the weed-grown, ragged lawn, tiptoed up the veranda steps and softly tried the handle of the big front door. It gave beneath our pressure, and in a moment we were standing in a lightless hall, our weapons held in readiness as we strove to pierce the gloom with straining eyes and held our breaths as we listened for some sound betokening an enemy’s approach.

“Can you hear it, Trowbridge, mon ami?” he asked me in a whisper. “Is it not their so abominable squealing?”

I listened breathlessly, and from the passageway’s farther end it seemed there came a series of shrill skirking squeaks, as though an angry rat were prisoned there.

Treading carefully, we advanced along the corridor, pausing at length as a vague, greenish-blue glow appeared to filter out into the darkness, not exactly lightening into the darkness, making the gloom a little less abysmal.

We gazed incredulously at the scene presented in the room beyond. The windows were all closed and tightly shuttered, and in a semicircle on the floor there burned a set of seven little silver lamps which gave off a blue-green, phosphorescent glow, hardly sufficient to enable us to mark the actions of a group of figures gathered there. One was a man, old and white-haired, disgustingly unkempt, his deep-set dark eyes burning with a fanatical glow of adoration as he kept them fixed upon a figure seated in a high, carved chair which occupied a sort of dais beyond the row of glowing silver lamps. Beside the farther wall there stood a giant form, a great brown skinned man with bulging muscles like a wrestler’s and the knotted torso of a gladiator. One of his mighty hands was twined in Audrey Hawkins’ short, blond hair; with the other he was stripping off her clothes as a monkey skins a fruit. We heard the cloth rip as it parted underneath his wrenching fingers, saw the girl’s slim body show white and lissome as a new-peeled hazel wand, then saw her thrown birth-naked on the floor before the figure seated on the dais.

Bizarre and terrifying as the mummy-creatures we had seen had been, the seated figure was no less remarkable. No mummy, this, but a soft and sweetly rounded woman-shape, almost divine in bearing and adornment. Out of olden Egypt she had come, and with her she had brought the majesty that once had ruled the world. Upon her head the crown of Isis sat, the vulture cap with wings of beaten gold and blue enamel, and the vulture’s head with gem-set eyes, above it rearing upright horns of Hathor between which shone the polished-silver disk of the full moon, beneath them the uraeus, emblem of Osiris.

About her neck was hung a collar of beaten gold close-studded with emeralds and blue lapis lazuli, and round her wrists were wide, bright bands of gold which shone with figures worked in red and blue enamel. Her breasts were bare, but high beneath the pointed bosoms was clasped a belt of blue and gold from which there draped a robe of thin, transparent linen gathered in scores of tiny, narrow pleats and fringed about the hem with little balls of gleaming gold which hung an inch or so above the arching insteps of her long and narrow feet, on every toe of which there gleamed a jewel-set ring. In her left hand she held a golden instrument fashioned like a T-cross with a long loop at its top, while in her right she bore a three-lashed golden scourge, the emblem of Egyptian sovereignty.

All this I noted in a sort of wondering daze, but it was her glaring, implacable eyes which held me rooted to the spot. Like the eyes of a tigress or a leopardess they were, and glowing with a horrid, inward light as though illumined from behind by the phosphorescence of an all consuming, heatless flame.

Even as we halted spellbound at the turning of the corridor we saw her raise her golden scourge and point it like an aiming weapon at Audrey Hawkins. The girl lay huddled in a small white heap where the ruthless giant had thrown her, but as the golden scourge was leveled at her she half rose to a crouching posture and crept forward on her knees and elbows, whimpering softly, half in pleading, half in fear, it seemed.

The fixed, set stare of hatred never left the seated woman’s eyes as Audrey crawled across the bare plank floor, groveled for an instant at the dais’ lowest step, then raised her head and began to lick the other’s white, jeweled feet as though she were a beaten dog which sued for pardon from its mistress.

I saw de Grandin’s small white teeth flash in the lamps’ weird light as he bared them in a quick grimace. “I damn think we have had enough of this, by blue!” he whispered as he stepped out of the shadows.

While I had watched the tableau of Audrey’s degradation with a kind of sickened horror, the little Frenchman had been busy. From the pockets of his jacket and his breeches he extracted handkerchiefs and knotted them into a wad, then, drawing out a tin of lighter-fluid, he doused the knotted linen with the liquid. The scent of benzine mixed with ether spread through the quiet air as, his drenched handkerchiefs on his billhook’s iron head, he left the shadows, paused an instant on the door-sill, then struck a match and set the cloth ablaze.

“Messieurs, Madame, I think this little comedy is ended,” he announced as he waved the fire-tipped weapon back and forth, causing the flames to leap and quicken with a ruddy, orange glow.

Mingled terror and surprise showed on the naked giant’s face as de Grandin crossed the threshold. He fell away a pace, then, with his back against the wall, crouched for a spring.

“You first, Monsieur,” the Frenchman told him almost affably, and with an agile leap cleared the few feet separating them and thrust the blazing torch against the other’s bare, brown breast.

I gasped with unbelief as I saw the virile, sun-tanned flesh take fire as though it had been tinder, blaze fiercely and crumble into ashes as the flames spread hungrily, eating up his chest and belly, neck and head, finally destroying writhing arms and legs.

The seated figure on the dais was cowering back in fright. Gone was her look of cold, contemptuous hatred; in its place a mask of wild, insensate fear had overspread her clear-cut, haughty features. Her red lips opened, showing needle-sharp white teeth, and I thought she would have screamed aloud in her terror, but all that issued from her gaping mouth was a little, squeaking sound, like the squealing of a mouse caught in a trap.

“And now, Madame, permit that I may serve you, also!” De Grandin turned his back upon the blazing man and faced the cringing woman on the throne.

She held up trembling hands to ward him off, and her frightened, squeaking cries redoubled, but inexorably as a mediæval executioner advancing to ignite the faggots round a condemned witch, the little Frenchman crossed the room, held out his blazing torch and forced the fire against her bosom.

The horrifying process of incineration was repeated. From rounded breast to soft, white throat, from omphalos to thighs, from chest to arms and from thighs to feet the all-devouring fire spread quickly, and the woman’s white and gleaming flesh blazed fiercely, as if it had been oil-soaked wood. Bones showed a moment as the flesh was burned away, then took the fire, blazed quickly for an instant, glowed to incandescence, and crumbled to white ash before our gaze. Last of all, it seemed, the fixed and staring eyes, still gleaming with a greenish inward light, were taken by the fire, blazed for a second with a mixture of despair and hatred, then dissolved to nothingness.

“Mademoiselle,” de Grandin laid his hand upon the girl’s bare shoulder, “they have gone.”

Audrey Hawkins raised her head and gazed at him, the puzzled, non-comprehending look of one who wakens quickly from sound sleep upon her face. There was a question in her eyes, but her lips were mute.

“Mademoiselle,” he repeated, “they have gone; I drove them out with fire. But he remains, my little one.” With a quick nod of his head he indicated Colonel Putnam, who crouched in a corner of the room, fluttering fingers at his bearded lips, his wild eyes roving restlessly about, as though he could not understand the quick destruction of the beings he had brought to life.

“He?” the girl responded dully.

“Précisément, Mademoiselle—he. The accursed one; the one who raised those mummies from the dead; who made this pleasant countryside a hell of death and horror; who made it possible for them to slay your father while he slept.”

One of those unpleasant smiles which seemed to change the entire character of his comely little face spread across his features as he leant above the naked girl and held his billhook toward her.

“The task is yours by right of bereavement, ma pauvre,” he told her, “but if you would that I do it for you—”

“No—no; let me!” she cried and leapt to her feet, snatching the heavy iron weapon from his hand. Not only was she stripped of clothing; she was stripped of all restraint, as well. Not Audrey Hawkins, civilized descendant of a line of prudishly respectable New England rustics, stood before us in the silver lamps’ blue light, but a primordial cave-woman, a creature of the dawn of time, wild with the lust for blood-vengeance; armed, furious, naked and unashamed.

“Come, Friend Trowbridge, we can safely leave the rest to her,” de Grandin told me as he took my elbow and forced me from the room.

“But, man, that’s murder!” I expostulated as he dragged me down the unlit hall. “That girl’s a maniac, and armed, and that poor, crazy old man—”

“Will soon be safe in hell, unless I miss my guess,” he broke in with a laugh. “Hark, is it not magnificent, my friend?”

A wild, high scream came to us from the room beyond, then a woman’s cachinnating laugh, hysterical, thin-edged, but gloating; and the thudding beat of murderous blows. Then a weak, thin moaning, more blows; finally a little, groaning gasp and the sound of quick breath drawn through fevered lips to laboring lungs.

“And now, my friend, I think we may go back,” said Jules de Grandin.

“ONE MOMENT, IF YOU please, I have a task to do,” he called as we paused on the portico. “Do you proceed with Mademoiselle Audrey. I shall join you in a minute.”

He disappeared inside the old, dark house, and I heard his boot-heels clicking on the bare boards of the hall as he sought the room where all that remained of Henry Putnam and the things he brought back from the dead were lying. The girl leaned weakly against a tall porch pillar, covering her face with trembling hands. She was a grotesque little figure, de Grandin’s jacket buttoned round her torso, mine tied kilt-fashion round her waist.

“Oh,” she whispered with a conscience-stricken moan, “I’m a murderess. I killed him—beat him to death. I’ve committed murder!”

I could think of nothing comforting to say, so merely patted her upon the shoulder, but de Grandin, hastening from the house, was just in time to hear her tearful self-arraignment.

“Pardonnez-moi, Mademoiselle,” he contradicted, “you are nothing of the kind. Me, once in war I had to head the firing-party which put a criminal to death. Was I then his murderer? But no. My conscience makes no accusation. So it is with you. This Putnam one, this rogue, this miscreant, this so vile necromancer who filled these pleasant woods with squeaking, gibbering horrors, was his life not forfeit? Did not he connive at the death of that poor boy and girl who perished in the midst of their vacation? But yes. Did not he advertise for laborers, that they might furnish sustenance for those evil things he summoned from the tomb? Certainly. Did not he loose his squeaking, laughing thing upon your father, to kill him in his sleep? Of course.

“Yet for these many crimes the law was powerless to punish him. We should have sent ourselves to lifelong confinement in a madhouse had we attempted to invoke the law’s processes. Alors, it was for one of us to give him his deserts, and you, my little one, as the one most greatly wronged, took precedence.

“Eh bien,” he added with a tug at his small, tightly waxed mustache, “you did make extremely satisfactory work of it.”

Since Audrey was in no condition to drive, I took the ancient flivver’s steering-wheel.

“Look well upon that bad old house, my friends,” de Grandin bade as we started on our homeward road. “Its time is done.”

“What d’ye mean?” I asked.

“Precisely what I say. When I went back I made a dozen little fires in different places. They should be spreading nicely by this time.”

“I CAN UNDERSTAND WHY THAT mummy we met in the woods caught fire so readily,” I told him as we drove through the woods, “but how was it that the man and woman in the house were so inflammable?”

“They, too, were mummies,” he replied.

“Mummies? Nonsense! The man was a magnificent physical specimen, and the woman—well, I’ll admit she was evil-looking, but she had one of the most beautiful bodies I’ve ever seen. If she were a mummy, I—”

“Do not say it, my friend,” he broke in with a laugh; “eaten words are bitter on the tongue. They were mummies—I say so. In the woods, in Monsieur Hawkins’ home, when they made unpleasant faces at us through the window of our cabin, they were mummies, you agree? Ha, but when they stood in the blue light of those seven silver lamps, the lights which first shone on them when they came to plague the world, they were to outward seeming the same as when they lived and moved beneath the sun of olden Egypt. I have heard such things.

“That necromancer, von Meyer, of whom Monsieur Putnam spoke, I know of him by reputation. I have been told by fellow occultists whose word I can not doubt that he has perfected a light which when shone on a corpse will give it every look of life, roll back the ravages of years and make it seem in youth and health once more. A very brilliant man is that von Meyer, but a very wicked one, as well. Some day when I have nothing else to do I shall seek him out and kill him to death for the safety of society.

“Can you drive a little faster?” he inquired as we left the woods behind.

“Cold without your jacket?” I asked.

“Cold? Mais non. But I would reach the village soon, my friend. Monsieur le juge who also acts as coroner has a keg of most delicious cider in his cellar, and this afternoon he bade me call on him whenever I felt thirsty. Morbleu, I feel most vilely thirsty now!

“Hurry, if you please, my friend.”