"She cannot quit the earth, but must wcmder cinong the scenes of her misspent Hie."

ncense of Abomination

By SEABURY QUINN

A daring story of Devil-worship, the Black Mass, strange suicides, and the

salvation of one who had sinned greatly, yet was truly

repentant — a tale of fides de Grandin

—haiab, 1, 13.

DETECTIVE SERGEANT COS-TELLO looked fixedly at the quarter-inch of ash on his cigar, as though he sought solution of his problem in its fire-cored grayness. " 'Tis th'

damndest mixed-up mess I've iver happened up against," he told us solemnly, "Here's this Eldridge felly, young an' rich an' idle, wid niver a care ter 'is name, savin' maybe, how he'd spend th' next month's income, then 20wie! he ups an' hangs hisself. We finds him swingin' 259

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from th' doorpost of his bedroom wid his bathrobe girdle knotted around 'is neck an' about a mile o' tongue sthickin' cut. Suicide? Sure, an' what else could it be wid a felly found sthrung up in a tight-locked flat like that?

"Then, widin a week there comes a call fer us to take it on th' lam up to th' house where Stanley Trivers lived. There he is, a-layin' on his bathroom floor wid a cut across 'is throat that ye could put yer foot into, a'most. In his pajammies he is, an' th' blood's run down an' spoilt 'em good an' proper. Suicide again? Well, maybe so an' maybe no, fer in all me time I've ruver seen a suicidal cut across a felly's throat that was as deep where it wound up as where it stharted. They mostly gits remorse afore th' cut is ended, as ye know, an' th* pressure on th' knife gits less an' less; so th' cut's a whole lot shallower at th' end than 'twas at th' begin-nin'. However, th' coroner says it's suicide, so suicide it is, as far as we're concerned. Anyhow, gintlemen, in both these cases th' dead men wuz locked in their houses, from th' inside, as wus plain by th* keys still bein' in th' locks.

"Now comes th' third one. 'Tis this Donald Atkins felly, over to th' Kensington Apartments. Sthretched on th' floor he is, wid a hole bored in 'is forehead an' th' blood a-runnin' over everything. He's on 'is back wid a pearl-stocked pistol in 'is hand. Suicide again, says Schultz, me partner, an' I'm not th* one ter say as how it ain't, all signs polntin' as they do, still

" He paused and puffed at his cigar

till its gray tip glowed with sullen rose,

Jules de Grandin tweaked a needle-sharp mustache tip. "Tell me, my sergeant," he commanded, "what is it you have withheld? Somewhere in the history of these cases is a factor you have not revealed, some denominator common to them all which makes your police instinct doubt your senses' -vidence "

"How'd ye guess it, sor?" the big Irishman looked at him admiringly. "Ye've

put yer finger right upon it, but "

He stifled an embarrassed cough, then, turning slightly red: " 'Tis th' perfume, sor, as makes me wonder."

"Perfume?" the little Frenchman echoed. "What in Satan's foul name "

'Well, sor, I ain't one o' them as sees a woman's skirts a-hidin' back of ivery crime, though you an' I both knows there's mighty few crimes committed that ain't concerned wid cash or women, savin* when they're done fer both. But these here cases have me worried. None o' these men wuz married, an', so far as I've found out, none o' them wuz kapin' steady company, yet—git this, sor; 'tis small, but maybe it's important—there wuz a smell o' perfume hangin' round each one of 'em, an' 'twas th' same in ivery case. No sooner had I got a look at this pore Eldridge felly hangin' like a joint o' beef from his own doorpost than me nose begins a-twitchin'. 'Wuz he a pansy, maybe?' I wonders when I smelt it first, for 'twas no shavin' lotion or toilet water, but a woman's heavy scent, strong an' swate an'—what's it that th' ads all say? — distinctive. Yis, sor, that's th' word fer it, distinctive. Not like anything I've smelt before, but kind o' like a mixin* up o' this here ether that they use ter put a man ter slape before they takes 'is leg off, an' kind o' like th' incense they use in church, an' maybe there wuz sumpin mixed wid it that wasn't perfume afther all, sumpin that smelt rank an' sickly-like, th' kind o' smell ye smell when they takes a floater from th' bay, sor.

"Well, I looks around ter see where it's a-comin' from, an' it's strongest in th' bedroom; but divil a sign o' any woman bein' there I find, 'ceptin' fer th' smell o' perfume.

"So when we runs in on th' Trivers suicide, an' I smells th' same perfume

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261

again, I say that this is sumpin more than mere coincidence, but th' same thing happens there. Th' smell is strongest in th' bedroom, but there ain't any sign that he'd had company th' night before; so just ter make sure I takes th' casin's off th' pillows an' has th' boys at th' crime lab'ra-tory look at 'em. Divil a trace o' rouge or powder do they find.

"Both these other fellies kilt their-selves at night or early in th' mornin', so, o' course, their beds wuz all unmade, but when we hustle over ter th' Kensington Apartments ter see about this Misther Atkins, 'tis just past three o'clock. Th' doctor says that he's been dead a hour or more; yet when I goes into his bedroom th' covers is pushed down, like he's been slapin' there an' got up in a hurry, an" th' perfume's strong enough ter knock ye down, a'most. Th' boys at th' crime lab say there's not a trace o' powder on th' linen, an' by th' time I gits th' pillows to 'em th' perfume's faded out."

He looked at us with vaguely troubled eyes and ran his hand across his mouth. " 'Tis meself that's goin' nuts about these suicides a-comin' one on top th' other, an* this perfume bobbin' up in every case!" he finished.

De Grandin pursed his lips. "You would know this so strange scent if you encountered it again?"

"Faith, sor, I'd know it in me slape!"

"And you have never met with it before?"

"Indade an' I had not, nayther before nor since, savin' in th' imayjate prisence o' them three dead corpses."

"One regrets it is so evanescent. Perhaps if I could smell it I might be able to identify it. I recall when I was serving with le surete we came upon a band of scoundrels making use of a strange Indian drug called by the Hindoos chhota maut, or little death. It was a subtle powder which made those inhaling it go mad, or

fall into a coma simulating death if they inspired enough. Those naughty fellows mixed the drug with incense which they caused to be burned in their victims' rooms. Some went mad and some appeared to die. One of those who went insane committed suicide "

"Howly Mither, an' ye think we may be up against a gang like that, sor?"

"One cannot say, mon vieux. Had I a chance to sniff this scent, perhaps I could have told you. Its odor is not one that is soon forgotten. As it is"—he raised his shoulders in a shrug—"what can one do?"

"Will ye be afther holdin' yerself in readiness ter come a-runnin' if they's another o' these suicides, sor?" the big detective asked as he rose to say good-night. "I'd take it kindly if ye would."

"You may count on me, my friend. A bientot," the little Frenchman answered with a smile.

The storm had blown itself out earlier in the evening, but the streets were still bright with the filmy remnant of the sleety rain and the moon was awash in a breaking surf of wind-clouds. It was longer by the north road, but with the pavements slick as burnished glass I preferred to take no chances and had throttled down my engine almost to a walk ; ng pace as we climbed the gradient leading to North Bridge. De Grandin sank his chin into the fur of his upturned coat collar and nodded sleepily. The party at the Merrivales had been not at all amusing, and we were due at City Hospital at seven in the morning. "Ah, bah," he murmured drowsily, "we were a pair of fools, my friend; we forgot a thing of great importance when w : e left the house tonight."

"U'm?" I grunted. "What?" "To stay there," he returned. "Had we but the sense le bon Dieu gives an un-

WEIRD TALES

fledged gosling, we should have— sapristi! Stop him, he is intent on self-destruction!"

At his shouted warning I looked toward the footwalk and descried a figure in a heavy ulster climbing up the guard rail. Shooting on my power, I jerked the car ahead, then cut the clutch and jammed the brakes down hard, swinging us against the curb abreast of the intending suicide. I kicked the door aside and raced around the engine-hood, but de Grandin disdained such delays and vaulted overside, half leaping, half sliding on the slippery pavement and cannoning full-tilt against the man who sought to climb the breast-high railing. "Parblete, you shall not!" he exclaimed as he grasped the other's legs with outflung arms. "It is wet down there. Monsieur, and most abominably cold. Wait for summer if you care to practise diving!"

The man kicked viciously, but the little Frenchman hung on doggedly, and as the other loosed his hold upon the rail they both came crashing to the pavement where they- rolled and thrashed like fighting dogs.

I hovered near the melee, intent on giving such assistance as I could, but my help was not required; for as I reached to snatch the stranger's collar, de Grandin gave a quick twist, arched his body upon neck and heels and with a blow as rapid as a striking snake's chopped his adversary on the Adam's apple with his stiffened hand. The result was instantaneous. The larger man collapsed as if he had been shot, and my little friend slipped out from underneath him, teeth flashing in an impish grin, small blue eyes agleam. "A knowledge of jiu-jutsu comes in handy now and then," he panted as he rearranged his clothing. "For a moment I had fears that he would take me with him to a watery bed."

"Well, what shall we do with him?" I asked. "He's out completely, and we

can't afford to leave him here. Hell surely try to kill himself again if "

''Parbleu! Atiendez, s'H vous plait!" he interrupted, "he parjum —do you smell him?" He paused with back-thrown head, narrow nostrils quivering as he sniffed the moist, cold air.

There was no doubt of it. Faint and growing quickly fainter, but plainly noticeable, the aura of a scent hung in the atmosphere. It was an odd aroma, not wholly pleasant, yet distinctly fascinating, seeming to combine the heavy sweetness of patchouli with the bitterness of frankincense and the penetrating qualities of musk and civet; yet underlying it there was a faint and slightly sickening odor of corruption.

"Why, I never smellcd " I began,

but de Grandin waved aside my observation.

"Nor I," he nodded shortly, "but unless I am at fault this is the perfume which the good Costello told us of. Cannot you see, my friend? We have here our laboratory specimen, an uncompleted suicide with the redolence of this mysterious scent upon it. Help me lift him in the car, won vieux; we have things to say to this one. We shall ask him, by example, why it was "

"Suppose that he won't talk?" I broke in.

"Ha, you suppose that! If your supposition proves correct and he is of the obstinacy, you shall see a beautiful example of the third degree. You shall see me turn him inside out as if he were a lady's glove. I shall creep into his mind, me. I shall— mordieu, before the night is done I damn think I shall have at least a partial answer to the good Costello's puzzle! Come, let us be of haste; en avant!"

Despite his height the salvaged man did not weigh much, and we had no trouble getting him inside the car. In

INCENSE OF ABOMINATION

265

fifteen minutes we were home, just as our rescued human flotsam showed signs of returning consciousness.

"Be careful," warned de Grandin as he helped the passenger alight, "If you behave we shall treat you with the kindness, but if you try the monkey's tricks I have in readiness a second portion of the dish I served you on the Pont du Nord.

"Here," he added as we led our captive to the study, "this is the medicine for those who feel at odds with life." He poured a gill of Scots into a tumbler and poised the siphon over it. "Will you have soda with your whisky," he inquired, "or do you like it unpolluted?"

"Soda, please," the other answered sulkily, drained his glass in two huge gulps and held it out again.

"Eh b'ten," the Frenchman chuckled, "your troubles have not dulled your appetite, it seems. Drink, my friend, drink all you wish, for the evening is still young and we have many things to talk of, thou and I."

The visitor eyed him sullenly as he took a sip from his fresh glass. "I suppose you think you've done your Boy Scout's good deed for today?" he muttered.

"Mais out, mats certainement," the Frenchman nodded vigorously. "We have saved you from irreparable wrong, my friend, he bon D'teu did not put us here to "

"That's comic!" the other burst out with a cackling laugh. " 'Lb bon Diet?— much use He has for me!"

De Grandin lowered his arching brows a little; the effect was a deceptively mild, thoughtful frown. "So-o," he murmured, "that is the way of it? You feel that you have been cast off, that "

"Why not? Didn't we—I—cast Him out? didn't I deny Him, take service with His enemies, mock at Him "

"Be not deceived, my friend"—the

double lines between the Frenchman's narrow brows was etched a little deeper as he answered in an even voice—"God is not mocked. It is easier to ■spit against the hurricane than jeer at Him. Besides, He is most merciful, He is compassionate, and His patience transcends understanding. Wicked we may be, but if we offer true repentance "

"Even if you've committed the unpardonable sin?"

"Ttens, this peche irremissible of which the theologians prate so learnedly, yet which none of them defines? You had a mother, one assumes; you may have sinned against her grievously, disappointed her high hopes in you, shown ingratitude as black as Satan's shadow, abused her trust or even done her bodily hurt. Yet if you went to her sincerely penitent and told her you were sorry, that you truly loved her and would sin no more, parbleu, she would forgive, you know it! Will the Heavenly Father be less merciful than earthly parents? Very well, then. Who can say that he has sinned past reconciliation?"

"I can; I did—we ail did! We cast

God out and embraced Satan "

Something that was lurking horror seemed to take form in his eyes, giving them a stony, glazed appearance. It was as if a filmy curtain were drawn down across them, hiding everything within, mirroring only a swift-mounting terror.

"Ah?" de Grandin murmured thoughtfully. "Now we begin to make the progress." Abruptly he demanded:

"You knew Messieurs Eldridge, Tri-vers and Atkins?" He flung the words more like a challenging accusation than a query.

"Yes!"

"And they, too, thought they had sinned past redemption; they saw in suicide the last hope of escape; they were concerned with you in this iniquity?"

WEIRD TALES

"They -were, but no interfering busybody stopped them. Let me out of here, I'm going to "

"Monsieur," de Grandin did not raise his voice, but the look he bent upon the other was as hard and merciless as though it were a leveled bayonet, "you are going to remain right here and tell us how it came about. You will tell of tills transgression which has caused three deaths already and almost caused a fourth. Do. not fear to speak, my friend. We arc physicians, and your confidence will be respected. On the other hand, if you persist in silence we shall surely place you in restraint. You would like to be lodged in a madhouse, have your every action v, .itched, be strapped in a straitjacket if you attempted self-destruction, hein?" Slowly spoken, his words had the impact of a bodily assault, and the other reeled as from a beating.

"Not that!'" he gasped. "O God, anything but that! I'll tell you everything if you will promise——"

"You have our word, Monsieur; say on."

THE visitor drew his chair up closer to the fire, as if a sudden cold had chilled his marrow. He was some fort)' years of age, slim and quite attractive, immaculately dressed, well groomed. His eyes were brown, deep-set and drawn, as if unutterably weary, with little pouches under them. His shoulders sagged as if the weight the}' bore was too much for them. His hair was almost wholly gray. "Beaten" was the only adjective to modify him.

"I think perhaps you knew my parents, Doctor Trowbridge," he began. "My father was James Balderson."

I nodded. Jim Balderson had been a senior when I entered college, and his escapades were bywords on the campus. Nothing but the tolerance which stamps

a rich youth's viciousness as merely indication of high spirits had kept him from dismissal since his freshman year, and faculty and townsfolk sighed with relief when he took his sheepskin and departed simultaneously. The Balderson and Aid-ridge fortunes were combined when he married Bronson Aldridge's sole heir and daughter, and though he settled down in the walnut-paneled office of the Farmers Loan & Trust Company, his sons had carried on his youthful zest for getting into trouble. Drunken driving, divorce cases, scandals which involved both criminal and civil courts, were their daily fare. Two of them had died by violence, one in a motor smash-up, one when an outraged husband showed better marksmanship than self-restraint One had died of poison liquor in the Prohibition era. We had just saved die sole survivor from attempted suicide. "Yes, I knew your father," I responded.

"Do you remember Horton Hall?" he asked.

I bent my brows a moment. "Wasn't that the school down by the Shrewsbury where they had a scandal?—something about the headmaster committing suicide, or "

"You're right. That's it. I was in die last class there. So were Eldridge, Trivers and Atkins.

"I was finishing my junior year when the war broke out in 'seventeen. Dad got bulletproof commissions for the older boys, but wouldn't hear of my enlisting in the Navy. 'You've a job to do right there at Horton,' he told me. 'Get your certificate; then we'll see about your joining up.' So back I went to finish out my senior year. Dad didn't know what he was doing to me. Things might have turned out differently if I'd gone in the service.

"Everyone who could was getting in the Army or the Navy. We'd lost most

INCENSE OF ABOMINATION

of our faculty when I went back in 'eighteen, and they'd put a new headmaster in, a Doctor Herbules. Fellows were leaving right and left, enlisting from the campus or being called by draft boards, and I was pretty miserable. One day as I was walking back from science lab., I ran full-tilt into old Herbules.

" 'What's the matter, Ba'derson?' he asked. You look as if you'd lost your last friend.*

" 'Well. I have, almost," I answered. "With so many fellows off at training-camp, having all kinds of excitement '

" 'You want excitement, eh?' he interrupted. 'I can give it to you; such excitement as you've never dreamed of. I can

make you ' He stopped abruptly, and

it seemed to me he looked ashamed of something, but he'd got my curiosity roused.

" 'You're on, sir,' I told him. What is it, a prize-fight?'

"Herbules was queer. Evcrybo so. He couldn't have been much past thirty; yet his hair was almost snow-white and there was a funny sort o' peaceful expression on his smooth face that reminded me of something that I couldn't cruite identify. He had the schoolmaster's trick of speaking with a sort of pedantic precision, and he never raised his voice; yet when he spoke in chapel we could understand him perfectly, no matter how far from the platform we were sitting. I'd never seen him show signs of excitement before, but now he was breathing hard and was in such deadly earnest that his lips were fairly trembling. 'What do you most want from life?' he asked me in a whisper.

" 'Why, I don't know, just now I'd

like best of all to get into the Army; I'd

go to France and bat around with

the mademoiselles, and get drunk any

time I wanted '

" 'You'd like that sort of thing?' he laughed. 'I can give it to you. and more; more than you ever imagined. Wine and song and gaytty and women—beautiful, lovely, cultured women, not the trulls that you'd meet in France—you can have aU this and more, if you want to, Balderson.'

" 'Lead me to it,' I replied 'When do we start?'

" Ah, my boy. nothing's given for nothing. There axe some things you'll have to do, some promises to make, something to be paid "

" 'All right; how much?' I asked. Dad was liberal with me. I had a hundred dollars every month for spending ; and I could always get as mud: from Mother if I worked it right.

" 'No, no; not money,' he almost laughed in my face. 'The price of all this can't be paid in money. All we ask is that you give the Master something which I greatly doubt you realize you have, my

■

"It sounded pretty cock-eyed to nit, but if tiic old boy really had something up his sleeve I wanted to know about it Count me in,' I told him. "What do I do next?"

"There was no one within fifty' yards of us, but he bent until his lips were almost in my ear before he whispered: "Next Wednesday at midnight, come to my house.'

" 'Private party, or could I bring a friend or two?'

"His features seemed to freeze. 'Who is the friend?' he asked.

" 'Well, I'd like to bring Eldrid Trivers, and maybe Atkins, too. They're all pretty good eggs, and I know they crave excitement '

" 'Oh, by all means, yes. Be sure to bring them. It's agreed, then? Next Wednesday night at twelve, at my house.'

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'TTerbules was waiting for us in a AA perfect fever of excitement when we tiptoed up his front-porch steps on Wednesday night He had a domino and mask for each of us. The dominoes were fiery red, with hoods that pulled up like monks' cowls; the masks were black, and hideous. They represented long, thin faces with out-jutting chins; the lips were purple and set in horrid grins; the eyebrows were bright scarlet wool and at the top there was another patch of bright red worsted curled and cut to simulate a fringe of hair. 'Good Lord,' said Atkins as he tried his on, 'I look just like the Devil!'

"I thought that Herbules would have a stroke when he heard Atkins speak. 'You'll use that name with more respect after tonight, my boy,' he said.

"After that we all got in his car and drove down toward Red Bank.

"We stopped about a mile outside of town and parked the car in a small patch of woods, walked some distance down the road, climbed a fence and cut across a field till we reached an old deserted house. I'd seen the place as I drove past, and had often wondered why it was unoccupied, for it stood up on a hill surrounded by tall trees and would have made an ideal summer home, but I'd been told its well was dry, and as there was no other source of water, nobody wanted it.

"We didn't go to the front door, but tiptoed round the back, where Herbules struck three quick raps, waited for a moment, then knocked four more. "We'd all put on our robes and masks white he was knocking, and when the door was opened on a crack we saw the porter was robed and masked as we were. Nobody said a word, and we walked through a basement entrance, down a long and narrow hall, and turned a corner where we met another door. Here Herbules went

through the same procedure, and the door swung back to let us in.

"We were in a big room, twenty by forty feet, I guess, and we knew it was a cellar by the smell—stiflingly close, but clammy as a tomb at once. Rows of folding chairs like those used at bridge games —or funerals—were arranged in double rows with a passage like an aisle between, and at the farther end of the big room we saw an altar.

"In all my life I don't believe I'd been to church ten times, but we were nominally Protestants, so what I saw had less effect on me than if I'd been a Catholic or Episcopalian; but I knew at once the altar wasn't regulation. Oh, it was sufficiently impressive, but it had a sort of comic—no, not comic, grotesque, rather —note about it. A reredos of black cloth was hung against the wall, and before it stood a heavy table more than eight feet long and at least six wide, covered by a black cloth edged with white. It reminded me of something, though I couldn't quite identify it for a moment; then I knew. I'd seen a Jewish funeral once, and this cloth was like the black-serge pall they used to hide the plain pine coffin! At each end of the altar stood a seven-branched candelabrum made of brass, each with a set of tall black candles in it. These were burning and gave off a pale blue glow. They seemed to be perfumed, too, and the odor which they burned with was pleasant—at first. Then, as I sniffed a second time it seemed to me there was a faint suspicion of a stench about it, something like the fetor that you smell if you're driving down the road and pass a dog or cat that's been run over and has lain a while out in the sun—just a momentary whiff, but nauseating, just the same. Between the candelabra, right exactly in the center of the altar, but back against the wall, was a yard-high crucifix of some black wood with an ivory figure

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on it, upside down. Before the cross there was a silver wine goblet and a box of gilt inlay about the size and shape of a lady's powder-puff box.

"I heard Atkins catch his breath and give a sort of groan. He'd been brought up an Episcopalian and knew about such things. He turned half round to leave, but I caught him by the sleeve.

" 'Come on, you fool, don't be a sissy!' I admonished, and next moment we were all so interested that he had no thought of leaving.

"There was a sort of congregation in the chapel; every scat was occupied by someone masked and robed just as we were, save three vacant places by the altar steps. These, we knew, were kept for us, but when we looked about for Herbules he was nowhere to be seen; so we went forward to our seats alone. We could hear a hum of whispering as we walked up the aisle, and we knew some of the voices were from women; but who was man and who was woman was impossible to tell, for each one looked just like his neighbor in his shrouding robe.

"*tt"1he whispering suddenly became in--i- tense, like the susurrus of a hive of swarming bees. Every neck seemed suddenly to crane, ever}' eye to look in one direction, and as we turned our glances toward the right side of the cellar we saw a woman entering through a curtained doorway. She wore a long, loose scarlet cape which she held together with one hand, her hair was very black, her eyes were large and luminously dark, seeming to have a glance of overbearing sensuousness and sweet humility at once. Her white, set face was an imponderable mask; her full red lips were fixed in an uneven, bitter line. Beneath the hem of her red cloak we saw the small feet in the golden, high-heeled slippers were un-stockinged. As she neared the altar she

sank low in genuflection, then wheeled about and faced us. For a moment she stood there, svelte, graceful, mysteriously beautiful with that thin white face and scarlet lips so like a mask; then with a sudden kicking motion she unshod her feet, opened wide her cloak and let it fall in scarlet billows on the dull-black carpet of the altar steps.

"She was so beautiful it almost hurt the eyes to look at her as she stood there in white silhouette against the ebon background of the black-draped altar, with her narrow, boy-like hips, slim thighs and full, high, pointed breasts. She was a thing of snow and fire, her body palely cool and virginal, her lips like flame, her eyes like embers blazing when a sudden wind stirs them to brightness.

"The modern strip-tease routine was unthought of in those days, and though I was sophisticated far beyond my eighteen years I had never seen a woman in the nude before. The flame of her raced in my blood and crashed against my brain with almost numbing impact. I felt myself go faint and sick with sudden weakness and desire.

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"A long-drawn sigh came from the audience; then the tableau was abruptly broken as the girl turned from us, mounted nimbly to the black-draped altar and stretched herself full length upon it, crossed her ankles and thrust her arms out right and left, so that her body made a white cross on the sable altar-cloth. Her eyes were closed as though in peaceful sleep, but her bosoms rose and fell with her tumultuous breathing. She had become the altar!

"Silence fell upon the congregation like a shadow, and next instant Herbules came in. He wore a priest's vestments, a long red cassock, over it the alb and stole, and in his hand he bore a small red book. Behind him came his acolyte, but it was not an altar-boy. It was a girl, slender, copper-haired, petite. She wore a short surcoat of scarlet, cut low around the shoulders, sleeveless, reaching just below the hips, like the tabards worn by medieval heralds. Over it she wore a lace-edged cotta. Otherwise she was unclothed. We could hear the softly-slapping patter of her small bare feet upon the altar-sill as she changed her place from side to side, genuflecting as she passed the reversed crucifix. She swung a brazen censer to and fro before her and the gray smoke curled in spurting puffs from it. filling the entire place with a perfume like that generated by the candles, but stronger, more intense, intoxicating.

"Herbules began the service with a muttered Latin prayer, and though he seemed to follow a set ritual even I could see it was not that prescribed, by any church, for when he knelt he did so widi his back turned toward the altar; when he crossed himself he did it with the thumb of his left hand, and made the sign beginning at the bottom, rather than the top. But even in this mummers' parody the service was majestic. I could feel its power and compulsion as it swept

on toward its climax. Herbules took up the silver chalice and held it high above his head, then rested it upon the living altar, placing it between her breasts, and we could see the flesh around her nails grow white as she grasped the black-palled altar table with her fingers. Her body, shining palely on the coffin-pall under the flickering candles' light, was arched up like a tauted bow, she shook as if a sudden chill had seized her, and from her tight-drawn, scarlet lips there issued little whimpering sounds, not cries nor yet quite groans, but something which partook of both, and at the same time made me think of the soft, whining sounds a new-born puppy makes.

"The kneeling acolyte chimed a sac-ring-bcll and the congregation bent and swayed like a wheat-field swept across by sudden wind.

"When all was finished we were bidden to come forward and kneel before the altar steps. Herbules came down and stood above us, and each of us was made to kiss the red book which he held and take a fearful oath, swearing that he would abstain from good and embrace evil, serve Satan faithfully and well, and do his best to bring fresh converts to the worship of the Devil. Should we in any manner break our oath, we all agreed that Satan might at once foreclose upon his mortgage on our souls, and bear us still alive to hell, and the sign that we were come for was to be the odor of the perfume which the candles and the censer gave that night.

"When this ritual was finished we were bidden name our dearest wish, and told it would be granted. I could hear the others mumble something, but could not understand their words. I don't know what possessed me when it came my turn to ask a boon of Satan—possibly he put the thought into my mind, maybe it was my longing to get out of school and go

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to France before the war was ended. At any rate, when Herbules bent over me I muttered, 'I wish the pater would bump

off:

"He leaned toward me with a smile and whispered, "You begin your posru-lancy well, my son,' then held his hand out to me, signifying that I should return his clasp with both of mine. As I put out my hands to take his I saw by my wrist-watch that it was exactly half-past twelve.

"What followed was the wildest party I had ever seen or dreamt of. The farmhouse windows had been boarded up and curtained, and inside the rooms were literally ablaze with light. Men and women, some draped in their red dominoes, some in evening dress, some naked as the moment that they first drew breath, mingled in a perfect saturnalia of unrestrained salacity. On tables stood ice-buckets with champagne, and beside them tall decanters of cut glass filled with port and sherry, tokay, madeira, muscatel and malaga. Also there was bottled brandy, vodka and whisky, trays of cigarettes, boxes of cigars, sandwiches, cake and sweetmeats. It was like the carnival at New Orleans, only ten times gayer, madder, more abandoned. I was grasped by naked men and women, whirled furiously around in a wild dance, then let go only to be seized by some new partner and spun around until I almost fell from dizziness. Between times I drank, mixing wine and spirits without thought, stuffed sandwiches and cake and candy in my mouth, then drank fresh drafts of chilled champagne or sharp-toned brandy.

"Staggering drunkenly about the table I was reaching for another glass when I felt a hand upon my shoulder. Turning, I beheld a pair of flashing eyes laughing at me through the peep-holes of n mask. 'Come with me, my neophyte,' the masked girl whispered; 'there is still a chalice you have left untasted.'

"She pulled me through the crowd, led me up the stairs and thrust a door ajar. The little room we entered was entirely oriental. A Persian lamp hung like a blazing ruby from the ceiling, on the floor were thick, soft rugs and piles of down-filled pillows. There was no other furniture.

"With a laugh she turned her back to me, motioning me to slip the knot which held the girdle of her domino; then she bent her head while I withdrew the pins that held her hair. It rippled in a cascade to her waist—below, nearly to her knees —black and glossy as the plumage of a grackle's throat, and as it cataracted down she swung around, shrugging her shoulders quickly, and let the scarlet domino fall from her. An upswing of her hand displaced the black-faced, purple, grinning mask, and I looked directly in the face of the pale girl who half an hour earlier had lain upon the altar of the Devil. 'Kiss me!' she commanded. 'Kiss me!' Her arms were tight about my neck, pulling my lips to hers, drawing her slender, unclothed body tight against me. Her lips clung to my mouth as though they were a pair of scarlet leeches; through her half-closed lids I saw the glimmer of her bright black eyes, burning like twin points of quenchless fire. . . .

* c Tt was daylight when we reached the •*- dorm next day, and all of us reported sick at chapel. Sometime about eleven, as I rose to get a drink of water, a knock came at my door. It was a telegram that stated;

Father dropped dead ia his study at twelve forty-five. Come. Mother.

"I hurried back to school as soon as possible. My father's death had startled —frightened—me, but I put it down to coincidence. He'd been suffering from Bright's disease for several years, and

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probably his number'cl just turned up, I told myself. Besides, the longing for the celebration of the sacrilegious Mass with its sensual stimulation, followed by the orgiastic parties, had me in a grip as strong as that which opium exerts upon its addicts.

"Twice a week, each Wednesday and Friday, my three friends and I attended the salacious services held in the old farmhouse cellar, followed by the revels in the upper rooms, and bit by bit we learned about our fellow cultists. Herbu-les, the head and center of the cult, was a priest stripped of his orders. Pastor of a parish in the suburbs of Vienna, he had dabbled in the Blade Art, seduced a number of his congregation from their faith, finally celebrated the Black Mass. The ecclesiastical authorities unfrocked him, the civil government jailed him on a morals charge, but disgrace could not impair his splendid education or his brilliant mind, and as soon as his imprisonment was over he emigrated to America and at once secured a post as teacher. Though his talents were unquestionable, his morals were not, and scandal followed every post he held. He was at the end of his string when he managed to worm his way into the Horton trustees' confidence and secured the post left vacant by the former headmaster's entrance in the Army.

"Our companion Devil-worshippers were mostly college and preparatory students looking for a thrill, now tangled in the net of fascination that the cult spun round its devotees, but a few of them were simply vicious, while others turned to demonolatry because they had lost faith in God.

"One of these was Marescha Nurmi, the girl who acted as the living altar. She was my constant partner at the orgies, and bit by bit I learned her history. Only nineteen, she was the victim of a heart

affection and the doctors gave her but a year to live. When they pronounced sentence she was almost prostrated; then in desperation she turned to religion,, going every day to church and spending hours on her knees in private prayer. But medical examination showed her illness was progressing, and when she chanced to hear of Herbules' devil-cult she came to it. 'I'm too young, too beautiful to die!' she told me as we lay locked in each others' arms one night. 'Why should God take my life? I never injured Him. All right, if He won't have me, Satan will. He'll give me life and happiness and power, let me live for years and years; keep me young and beautiful when all these snivelling Christian girls are old and faded. What do I care if I go to hell to pay for it? I'll take my heaven here on earth, and when the bill's presented I won't welch!'

"There's an old saying that each time God makes a beautiful woman the Devil opens a new page in his ledger. He must have had to put in a whole set of books when Marescha was converted to our cult. She was attractive as a witch, had no more conscience than a snake, and positively burned with ardor to do evil. Night after night she brought new converts to the cult, sometimes young men, sometimes girls. 'Come on, you little fool,' I heard her urge a giri who shrank from the wild orgy following initiation. Take off your robe; tint's what we're here for. This is our religion, the oldest in the world; it's revolt against the goody-goodies, revolt against the narrowness of God; we live for pleasure and unbridled passion instead of abnegation and renunciation—life and love and pleasure in a world of vivid scarlet, instead of fear and dreariness in a world all cold and gray. That's our creed and faith. We're set apart, we're marked for pleasure, we worshippers of Satan.' "

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"liens, the lady was a competent saleswoman," de Grandin murmured. "Did she realize her dreams?"

The laugh that prefaced Balderson's reply was like the echo of a chuckle in a vaulted tomb. "I don't know if she got her money's worth, but certainly she paid," he answered. "It was nearing graduation time, and the celebrations were about to stop until the fall, for it would be impossible to keep the farmhouse windows shuttered so they'd show no gleam of light, especially with so many people on the roads in summer. Herbules had just completed invocation, raised the chalice overhead and set it on Marescha's breast when we saw her twitch convulsively. The little whimpering animal-cries she always made when the climax of the obscene parody was reached gave way to a choked gasping, and we saw the hand that clutched the altar-table suddenly relax. She raised her head and stared around the chapel with a look that sent the chill of horror rippling through me, then cried out in a strangled voice: 'O Lord, be pitiful!' Then she fell back on the coffin-pall that draped the altar and her fingers dangled loosely on its edge, her feet uncrossed and lay beside each other.

"TT erbules was going on as if noth-H ing had happened, but the woman who sat next to me let out a sudden wail. 'Look at her,' she screamed. 'Look at her face!'

"Marescha's head had turned a little to one side, and we saw her features in the altar-candles' light. Her dark hair had come unbound and fell about her face as though it sought to hide it. Her eyes were not quite closed, nor fully open, for a thread of gray eyeball was visible between the long black lashes. Her mouth was partly open,, not as though she breathed through it, but lax, slack,

as though she were exhausted. Where a line of white defined the lower teeth we saw her tongue had fallen forward, lying level with the full, red lip.

"Somewhere in the rear of the chapel another woman's voice, shrilly pitched, but controlled, cried out: 'She's dead!'

"There was a wave of movement in the worshippers. Chairs were overturned, gowns rustled, whispered questions buzzed like angry bees. Then the woman sitting next me screamed again: 'This is no natural death, no illness killed her; she's been stricken dead for sacrilege, she's sacrificed for our sins—fly, fly before the wrath of God blasts all of us!'

"Herbules stood at the altar facing us. A mask as of some inner feeling, of strange, forbidden passions, of things that raced on scurrying feet within his brain, seemed to drop across his features. His face seemed old and ancient, yet at the same time ageless; his eyes took on a glaze like polished agate. He raised both hands above his head, the fingers flexed like talons, and laughed as if at some dark jest known only to himself. 'Whoso leaves the temple of his Lord without

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partaking of this most unholy sacrament, the same will Satan cast aside, defenseless from the vengeance of an outraged God!' he cried.

"Then I knew. Karl Erik Herbuies, renegade Christian priest, brilliant scholar, poisoner of souls and votary of Satan, was mad as any Tom o' Bedlam!

"He stood there by the Devil's altar hurling, curses at us, threatening us with Heaven's vengeance, casting an anathema upon us with such vile insults and filthy language as a fishwife would not dare to use.

"But panic had the congregation by the throat. They pushed and fought and scratched and bit like frenzied cats, clawing and slashing at one another till they gained the exit, then rushing pellmell down the hill to their parked cars without a backward look, leaving Herbuies alone beside the altar he had raised to Satan, with the dead girl stretched upon it

"There was no chance that Herbuies would help. He kept reciting passages from the Black Mass, genuflecting to the altar, filling and refilling the wine-cup and stuffing his mouth with the wafers meant to parody the Host. So Trivers, Eldridge, Atkins and I took Marescha's body to the river, weighted it with window-irons and dropped it in the water. But the knots we tied must have been loose, or else the weights were insufficient, for as we turned to leave, her body Boated almost to the surface and one white arm raised above the river's glassy face, as though to wave a mute farewell. It must have been a trick the current played as the tide bore her away, but to us it seemed that her dead hand pointed to us each in turn; certainly there was no doubt it bobbed four times above the river's surface before the swirling waters sucked it out of sight.

"You've probably heard garbled rumors of what happened afterward. The

farmhouse burned that night and because there was no water to be had, there was no salvage. Still, a few things were not utterly destroyed, and people in the neighborhood still wonder how those Persian lamps and brazen candlesticks came to be in that deserted house.

"Herbuies committed suicide that night, and when the auditors went over his accounts they found he'd practically wrecked Horton. There was hardly a cent left, for he'd financed his whole grisly farce of Devil worship with the money he embezzled. The trustees made the losses good and gave up in disgust. Ours was the last class graduated.

"They found Marescha's body floating in the Shrewsbury two days later, and at first the coroner was sure she'd been the victim of a murder; for while the window-weights had fallen off, the cords that tied them were still knotted round her ankles. When the autopsy disclosed she'd not been drowned, but had been put into the river after death from heart disease, the mystery was deepened, but until tonight only four people knew its answer. Now there are only three."

"Three, Monsieur?" de Grandin asked.

"That's fight. Trivers, Atkins and Eldridge are dead. I'm still here, and you and Doctor Trowbridge "

"Your figures are at fault, my friend. You forget we are physicians, and your narrative was given us in confidence."

"But see here," I asked as the silence lengthened, "what is there about all this to make you want to kill yourself? If you'd been grown men when you joined these Devibworshippers it would have been more serious, but college boys are always in some sort of mischief, and this all happened twenty years ago. You say you are sincerely sorry for it, and after all. the leaders in the movement died, so-

Balderson broke through my moralizing with a short, hard laugh. "Men die W. T—1

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more easily than memories, Doctor. Besides "

"Yes, Monsieur, besides?" de Grandin prompted as our guest stared silently into the study fire.

"Do you believe the spirits of the dead —die dead who are in Hell, or at least cut off from Heaven—can come back to plague the living?" he demanded.

DE grandin brushed the ends of his small waxed mustache with that gesture which always reminded me of a tomcat combing his whiskers. "You have experienced such a visitation?"

"I have. So did the others."

"Mordieu! How was it?"

"You may remember reading that Ted Eldridge hanged himself? Three days before it happened, he met me on the street, and I could see that he was almost frantic. 'I saw Marescha last night!' he told me in a frightened whisper.

" 'Marescha? You must be off your rocker, man! We put her in the Shrewsbury '

" 'And she's come back again. Remember the perfume of the candles and the incense Hcrbules used in celebrating the Black Mass? I'd come home from New York last night, and was getting ready for a drink before I went to bed, when I began to smell it. At first I thought it was some fool trick that my senses played on me, but the scent kept getting stronger. It seemed as if I were back in that dreadful chapel with the tall black candles burning and the hellish incense smoldering, Herbules in his red vestments and Marescha lying naked on the altar—I could almost hear the chanting of inverted prayers and the little whimpering noises that she made. I gulped my drink down in two swallows and turned round. She was standing there, with water on her face and W. T.- 2

ing from her hair, and her hands held out to me '

" 'You're crazy as a goat!' I told him. 'Come have a drink.'

"He looked at me a moment, then turned away, walking quickly down the street and muttering to himself.

"I'd not have thought so much about it if I hadn't read about his suicide next day, and if Stanley Trivers hadn't called me on the telephone. "Hear about Ted Eldridge?' he asked the moment 1 had said hello. When I told him I'd just read about it he demanded: 'Did you see him —recently?'

" 'Yes, ran into him in Broad Street yesterday,' I answered.

" 'Seemed worried, didn't he? Did he tell you anything about Marescha?*

" 'Say, what is this?' I asked. 'Did he say anything to you '

" 'Yes, he did, and I thought he had a belfry full o' bats.'

" 'There's not much doubt the poor old lad was cuckoo '

" 'That's where you're mistaken, Bal-derson. According to the paper he'd been dead for something like four hours when they found htm. That would have made it something like four o'clock when he died.'

" 'So what?'

" 'So this: I waked up at four o'clock this morning, and the room was positively stifling with the odor of the incense they used in the Black Chapel '

" 'Yeah? I suppose you saw Marescha, too?'

" 'I did! She was standing by my bed, with water streaming from her face and body, and tears were in her eyes,'

"I tried to talk him out of it, tell him that it was a trick of his imagination stimulated by Ted Eldridge's wild talk, but he insisted that he'd really seen her. Two days later he committed suicide.

"Don Atkins followed. I didn't talk

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with him before he shot himself, but I'll wager that he saw her, too, and smelled that Devil's incense."

De Grandin looked at me with upraised brows, then shook his head to caution silence ere he turned to face our guest. "And you, Monsieur?" he asked.

"Yes, I too. Don killed himself sometime in early afternoon, and I was home that day. I'd say that it was shortly after two, for I'd lunched at the City Club and come home to pack a bag and take a trip to Nantakee. I had the highboy open and was taking out some shirts when I began to notice a strange odor in the air. But it wasn't strange for long; as it grew stronger I recognized it as the scent of Herbules' incense. It grew so strong that it was almost overpowering. I stood there by the chest of drawers, smelling the increasing scent, and determined that I'd not turn round. You know how Coleridge puts it:

Like one, that on a lonesome road

Duth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round, walks on,

And turns no more his head;

Because he knows a frightful fiend

Dorh close behind him tread . . .

"The odor of the incense grew until I could have sworn somebody swung a censer right behind me. Then, suddenly, I heard the sound of falling water. 'Drip — drip — drip!' it fell upon the Boor, drop by deliberate drop. The suspense was more than I could bear, and I wheeled about.

"Marescha stood behind me, almost close enough to touch. Water trickled from the hair that hung in gleaming strands across her breast and shoulders, it hung in little gleaming globules on her pale, smooth skin, ran in little rivulets across her forehead, down her beautifully shaped legs, made tiny puddles on the polished floor beside each slim bare foot. I went almost sick with horror as I saw the knotted cords we'd used to tie the

window-weights on her still bound about her ankles, water oozing from their coils. She did not seem dead. Her lovely slender body seemed as vital as when I had held it in my arms, her full and mobile lips were red with rouge, her eyes were neither set and staring nor expressionless. But they were sad, immeasurably sad. They seemed to probe into my spirit's very depths, asking, beseeching, entreating. And to make their plea more eloquent, she slow'ly raised her lovely hands and held them out to me, palms upward, lingers slightly curled, as though she besought alms.

"There was a faint resemblance to her bitter, crooked smile upon her lips, but it was so sad, so hopelessly entreating, that it almost made me weep to see it.

" 'Mar ' I began, but the name

stuck in my throat. This couldn't be the body that I'd held against my heart, those lips were not the lips I'd kissed a thousand times; this was no girl of flesh and blood. Marescha lay deep in a grave in Shadow Lawns Cemetery; had lain there almost twenty years. Dust had filled those sad, entreating eyes long before the college freshmen of this year were born., The worms . . .

"Somewhere I had heard that if you called upon the Trinity a ghost would

vanish. 'In the name of the Father '

I began, but it seemed as if a clap of thunder sounded in my ears.

" 'What right have you to call upon the Triune God?' a mighty voice seemed asking. 'You who have mocked at Heaven, taken every sacred name in vain, made a jest of every holy thing—how dare you invoke Deity? Your sacrilegious lips cannot pronounce the sacred name!'

"And it was true. I tried again, but the words clogged in my throat; I tried to force them out, but only strangling inarticulacies sounded.

"Marescha's smile was almost pityingly

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tender, but still she stood there pleading, ■entreating, begging me, though what it was she wanted I could not divine. I threw my aim across my eyes to shut the vision out, but when I took it down she was still there, and still the water dripped from her entreating hands, ran in little courses from her dankly-hanging hair, fell drop by drop from the sopping cords that ringed her ankles,

"T stumbled blindly from the house -«■ and walked the streets for hours. Presently I bought a paper, and the headlines told me Donald Atkins had been found, a suicide, in his apartment.

"When I reached my house again the incense still hung in the air, but the vision of Marescha was not there. I drank almost a pint of brandy, neat, and fell across my bed. When I recovered from my alcoholic stupor Marescha stood beside me, her great eyes luminous with tears, her hands outstretched in mute entreaty.

"She's been with me almost every waking instant since that night. I drank myself into oblivion, but every time I sobered she was standing by me. I'd walk the streets for hours, but every time I halted she would be there, always silent, always with her hands held out, always with that look of supplication in her tear-filled eyes. I'd rush at her and try to drive her off with blows and kicks. She seemed to float away, staying just outside my reach, however savagely I ran at her, and though I cursed her, using every foul word I knew, she never changed expression, never showed resentment; just stood and looked at me with sad, imploring eyes, always seeming to be begging me for something.

"I can't endure it any longer, gentlemen. Tonight she stood beside me when I halted on-North Bridge, and I'd have been at peace by now if you'd not come along "

"Non, there you are mistaken, mon ami," de Grandin contradicted. "Had you carried your intention out and leaped into the river you would have sealed your doom irrevocably. Instead of leaving her you would have joined her for eternity."

"All right," Balderson asked rasping-ly, "I suppose you have a better plan?"

"I think I have," the little Frenchman answered. "First, I would suggest you let us give you sedatives. You will not be troubled while you sleep, and while you rest we shall be active."

"Qhakespeare was right," I said as O we left our patient sleeping from a dose of chloral hydrate. "Conscience does make cowards of us all. The memory of that early indiscretion has haunted that cjuartet of worthless youngsters twenty years. No wonder they kept seeing that poor girl after they'd thrown her so callously into the Shrewsbury. Of all the heartless, despicable things "

He emerged from a brown study long enough to interrupt: "And is your conscience clean, my friend?"

"What has my conscience to do with it? I didn't throw a dead girl in the river; I didn't "

"Prerisiment, neither did the good Costello, yet both of you described the odor of that Devil's incense: Costello when he went to view the bodies of the suicides, you when we halted Monsieur Balderson's attempt at self-destruction. Were you also haunted by that scent, or were you not?"

"I smelled it," I responded frigidly, "but I wasn't haunted by it. Just what is it you're driving at?"

"That the odor of that incense, or even the perception of the dead Marescha's te&enant, is no optical illusion caused by guilty conscience. It is my firm conviction that the apparition which appeared to these unfortunate young men was the

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earthbound spirit of a girl who begged a boon from them."

"Then you don't think that she haunted them because they'd thrown her body in the river?"

"Entirely no. I think she came to ask their help, and in their fear and horror at beholding her they could not understand her plea. First one and then another, lashed with the scorpion-whip of an accusing conscience, destroyed himself because he dared not look into her pleading eyes, thinking they accused him of mistreating her poor body, when all the pauvre belle creature asked was that they help her to secure release from her earth-bound condition."

"Why should she have appealed to them?"

"In al! that congregation of benighted worshippers of evil, she knew them best. They saw her die, they gave her body sepulture; one of them, at least, had been her lover, and was, presumably, bound to her by ties of mutual passion. She was most strongly in their minds and memories. It was but natural that she should appeal to them for succor. Did not you notice one outstanding fact in all the testimony—the poor Marescha appeared to them in turn, looking not reproachfully, but pleadingly? Her lips were held, jvhe might not put her plea in words. She could but come to them as they had last beheld her, entreat them by dumb show, and hope that they would understand. One by one they failed her; one by one they failed to understand "

"Well, is there anything that we can do about it?"

"I think there is. Come, let us be upon our way."

"Where the deuce "

"To the rectory of St. Chrysostom. I would interview the Reverend Doctor Bentley."

"At this time of night?"

"Mais certainemenl, clergymen and doctors, they have no privacy, my friend. Surely, you need not be told that."

The freshly lighted fire burned brightly in the Reverend Peter Bentley's study, the blue smoke spiraled upward from the tips of our cigars, the gray steam curled in fragrant clouds from the glasses of hot Scotch which stood upon the coffee-table. Looking anything but clerical in red-flannel bathrobe, black pajamas and red Turkish slippers, Doctor Bentley listened with surprizing tolerance to de Grandin's argument.

"But it seems the poor girl died in mortal sin," he murmured, obviously more in sorrow than in righteous indignation. "According to your statement, her last frantic words called on the Devil to fulfill his bargain: 'O Lord, be pitiful * "

"Prec/set/ient, mon pert, but who can say her prayer was made to Satan? True, those so bewildered, misled followers of evil were wont to call the Devil Lord and Master, but is it not entirely possible that she repented and addressed her dying prayer to the real Lord of the heaven and earth? Somewhere an English poet says of the last-minute prayer of a not-wholly-righteous fox-hunter who was unhorsed and broke his sinful neck:

Betwixt the stirrup and the ground I mercy asked; mercy 1 found.

"Me, I believe in all sincerity that her repentance was as true as that the thief upon the cross expressed; that in the last dread moment she perceived the grievous error of her ways and made at once confession of sin and prayer for pity with her dying breath.

"But she had bent the knee at Satan's shrine. With her fair body—that body which was given her to wear as if it were a garment to the greater glory of the Lord —she parodied the sacred faircloth of the

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altar. By such things she had cut herself adrift, she had put herself beyond communion with the righteous which is the blessed company of all the faithful. There was no priest to shrive her sin-encumbered soul, no one to read words of forgiveness and redemption above her lifeless clay. Until some one of her companions in iniquity will perform the service of contrition for her, until the office for the burial of Christian dead is read above her grave, she lies excommunicate and earthbound. She cannot even expiate her faults in Purgatory till forgiveness of sins has been formally pronounced. Sincerely repentant, hell is not for her; un-shrived, and with no formal statement of conditional forgiveness, she cannot quit the earth, but must wander here among the scenes of her brief and sadly misspent life. Do we dare withhold our hands to save her from a fate like that?"

Doctor Bentley sipped thoughtfully at his hot Scotch. "There may be something in your theory," he admitted. "I'm not especially strong on doctrine, but I can't believe the fathers of the early church were the crude nincompoops some of our modern theologians call them. They preached posthumous absolution, and there are instances recorded where excommunicated persons who had hovered round the scenes they'd known in life were given rest and peace when absolution was pronounced above their graves. Tell me, is this Balderson sincerely sorry for his misdeeds?"

"I could swear it, mon pere," "Then bring him to the chapel in the morning. If he will make confession and declare sincere repentance, then submit himself to holy baptism, 1*11 do what you request. It's rather mediaeval, but— I'd hate to think that I'm so modern that I would not take a chance to save two souls."

The penitential service in the Chapel of the Intercession was a brief but most impressive one. Only Balderson, I and de Grandin occupied the pews, with Doctor Bentley in his stole and cassock, but without his surplice, at the little altar:

". . . we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, we have offended against Thy holy laws . . . remember not, Lord, our offenses nor the offenses of our forefathers, neither take Thou vengeance of our sins ... we acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickednesses; the memory of them is grievous unto us, the burden of them is intolerable . . ."

After absolution followed the short service ordered for the baptism of adults; then we set out for Shadow Lawns.

Now Doctor Bentley wore his full canonicals, and his surplice glinted almost whiter than the snow that wrapped the mounded graves as he paused beside an unmarked hillock in the Nurmi family plot.

Slowly he began in that low, full voice with which he fills a great church to its farthest corner: "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. . . ."

It was one of those still winter days, quieter than an afternoon in August, for no chirp of bird or whir of insect sounded. no breath of breeze disturbed the evergreens; yet as he read the opening sentence of the office for the burial of the dead a low wail sounded in the copse of yew and hemlock on the hill, as though a sudden wind moaned in the branches, and I stiffened as a scent was borne across the snow-capped grave mounds. Incense! Yet not exactly incense, either. There was an undertone of fetor in it, a faint, distinctly charnel smell. Balderson was trembling, and despite myself I flinched,

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but Doctor Bentley and de Grandin gave no sign of recognition.

"Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts, shut not Thy merciful ears to our prayer, but spare us, Lord most holy . . ." intoned the clergyman, and,

"Amen," said Jules de Grandin firmly as the prayer concluded.

The JEolian wailing in the evergreens died to a sobbing, low damation as Doctor Bentley traced in sand a cross upon the snow-capped grave, declaring: "Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our departed sister, and we commit her body to the ground: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection into eternal life "

And now there was no odor of corruption in the ghostly perfume, but the clean, inspiring scent of frankincense, redolent of worship at a thousand consecrated altars.

As the last amen was said and Doctor Bentley turned away I could have sworn I heard a gentle slapping sound and saw the blond hairs of de Grandin's small mustache bend inward, as though a pair of lips invisible to me had kissed him on the mouth.

Doctor Bentley dined with us that night, and over coffee and liqueurs we discussed the case.

"It was a fine thing you did," the cleric told de Grandin, "Six men in seven

would have sent him packing and bid him work out his salvation— ot damnation—for himself. There's an essential nastiness in Devil-worship which is revolting to the average man, not to mention its abysmal wickedness "

"Tiens, who of us can judge another's wickedness?" the little Frenchman answered. "The young man was repentant, and repentance is the purchase price of heavenly forgiveness. Besides"—a look of strain, like a nostalgic longing, came into his eyes—"before the altar of a convent in la belle France kneels one whom I have loved as I can never love another in this life. Ceaselessly, except the little time she sleeps, she makes prayer and intercession for a sinful world. Could I hold fast the memory of our love if I refused to match in works the prayer she makes in faith? Eh bren, man [>ere, my inclination was to give him a smart kick in the posterior; to bid him go and sin no more, but sinfully or otherwise, to go. Ha, but I am strong, me. I overcame that inclination."

The earnestness of his expression faded and an impish grin replaced it as he poured a liberal potion of Napoleon 1811 in his brandy-sniffer. "Jules de Grandin," he apostrophized himself, "you have acted like a true man. You have overcome your natural desires; you have kept the faith.

"Jules de Grandin, my good and much-admired self — be pleased to take a drink!"

c/hing on the Floor

By THORP McCLUSKY

A strange story of an unscrupulous hypnotist and the frightful thing that he

called Stepan, who was immune to destruction while

his master lived

1. Charlatan or Miracle-Man?

"TpV ARLING," Mary Roberts told 1 her fiance, "I'm sorry, but I won't be able to go to the Lily Pons recital Thursday night. Helen Stacey-Forbes insists that I go with her to Dmitri's."

Across the spotless linen and gleaming silver that graced their luncheon table Charles Ethredge's gray eyes questioned.

"It's a subscription concert, Mary. I've had the tickets for months."

Her slender right hand reached across the table to him. "I'm terribly sorry, Charles. But Helen has been after me for weeks to go, and Dmitri's evenings are always Thursdays "

Ethredge grimaced. "I think it's rather silly of you two—this thrill visit to an obvious charlatan."

Mary shook her head. "Helen Stacey-Forbes doesn't think Dmitri a charlatan. She swears by the man—claims he's done wonders for Ronny."

Ethredge laughed. "Dmitri not a charlatan? With his half-baked parlor magic and that moving-picture brand of mysticism he exudes? I've heard all about him. Doc Hanlon says that if he isn't exposed pretty soon there'll be a major rabies epidemic among'our local psychiatry."

For a moment Mary Roberts did not reply, but sat quietly, her delicately oval face profiled, her wide-set, limpid eyes thoughtful as she gazed musingly through

the iron-grilled window at the row of dwarf evergreens in their stone window-box beneath the sill. Discreetly, from its palm-hidden sound shell on the mezzanine, the hotel's string quintet began to play a Strauss waltz. Abruptly Mary turned back to her nance, a strange little smile trembling on her lips.

"Oh, Charles, I wish that I could be so sure. Yes, you're probably right about Dmitri, darling. He's certainly theatrical enough—even Helen admits that. But you wouldn't want me to disappoint her, would you? And she does say he's saved Ronny's life."

"Lord," Ethredge grumbled, "I wish to heaven Dmitri didn't have that Vienna degree; we'd stop him so fast his teeth'd rattle. And by the way, where did Helen Stacey-Forbes get the crazy notion that he's helped Ronny? Good grief, that fellow's healthier than I am."

"Ronny's really been ill, Charles. It's not generally known, but he's a hemophiliac; he's had several severe hemorrhages within the past year. Dmitri's the only man who's been able to do anything for him."

Ethredge looked startled. "Why, I'd always thought hemophilia was hereditary; I've never heard of it in Ronny's family before. Two years ago, at the Wil-mot's hunt, he was thrown, and pretty badly bruised and cut, but he was up and limping around the same evening. He even danced."

THE THING ON THE FLOOR

281

Mary shook her head. "I don't know; I'm no medical authority, Charles, but it's hemophilia, all right. It's been diagnosed as such several times within the past year. Why "

But Charles Ethredge was not really listening. He was recalling some of the vague, ugly stories he had heard, in recent months, of Dmitri Vassilievitch Tu-lin—stories which could not all be put down to professional jealousy. And, curiously, he was thinking of the twenty-years-dead Tsarevitch, and of a mad monk named Gregori Rasputin. . . .

2, The Spider and the Flies

" and the man is a perfect ghoul

about money. You know most of the people here, Mary; you wouldn't say that any were really poor, would you?"

Mary Roberts looked about this room in which she sat. It was a long room, extending the full length of *:he second floor of a brownstone, solidly aristocratic house; obviously two interior walls had been demolished to provide the single large chamber. The wall to Mary's left, abutting the adjoining house, was blank; red velvet drapes covered the windows

"Mary knew that it was Dmitri's voice, yet it sounded millions oi miles away."

WEIRD TALES

at the ends of the room. Three doors, irregularly spaced along the right-hand wall, led into the second-floor corridor. A ponderous oaken table and chair stood dose to the drapes at one end of the room; about sixty folding-chairs were arranged in orderly rows facing these grimly utilitarian furnishings. Perhaps thirty persons, the great majority of whom were women, sat in small, self-conscious groups about the room, talking among themselves in low tones. Occasionally someone laughed — nervous laughter that was quickly suppressed.

Dmitri's evenings, Mary Roberts suspected, were not particularly pleasant affairs. . . .

Mary knew these people. One or two were really ill, several were suffering from neuroses, a few were crackpot faddists, but the majority were merely out for a thrill. And all were wealthy.

The man Dmitri, Mary decided as she looked about, must be, even if a charlatan, certainly a personality. . . .

She turned, with a wry smile, to her friend.

"This gathering surely makes me feel like a poor little church-mouse," she admitted ruefully. "Father was never a financial giant, you know, Helen."

Helen Stacey-Forbes smiled reassuringly.

"Money can't buy character and breeding, my dear. I see old Mortimer Dunlop up there in the second row; you are welcome in homes he's never seen and never will see—except from the street. Damned old bucket-shop pirate! Have you heard the rumor that he's full of carcinoma? They're giving him from six to nine months to live. That must be why he's here; someone's told him about Dmitri "

Mary gasped. "And people believe that Dmitri can cure carcinoma? Why, it's—Charles said only the other day that Dmitri was merely a half-cracked psychia-

trist who's had rather spectacular luck with a few rich patients' imaginary ailments. But carcinoma !"

Gravely Helen Stacey-Forbes shook her head. "Dmitri's far greater than his enemies will admit. They call him a super-psychologist, a faith-healer, and they laugh at him and threaten him, but the fact remains that his methods succeed. He achieves cures, impossible cures, miraculous cures. I know, because he's the only man who can stop Ronny's hemorrhages. At five thousand dollars a treatment."

"Five thousand dollars!"

Helen laughed, a dry, bitter little laugh. "Believe me, Dmitri is a monster, not a man. Mortimer Dunlop will have to pay dearly for his carcinoma cure!"

The words sent an odd little shudder racing along Mary's spine. For, obviously, Helen Stacey-Forbes believed, believed implicitly, that Dmitri could cure—cancer!

Suddenly, men, the room was silent. The door at the upper end of the chamber had opened, a man had entered.

IN the abrupt stillness the man, small, self-effacing, bearing in his hands a large lacquered tray, walked to the oaken table and arranged upon it several articles —a half-dollar, a pair of pliers, a penny box of matches, a small-caliber automatic pistol, a ten-ounce drinking-glass, a tinkling pitcher of ice-water, and a battered gasoline blow-torch. A curious, incomprehensible array. . . ,

The little man left the room. The babble of nervous voices began again, as suddenly stopped when the door reopened and a monstrosity entered.

The man was huge. At least six feet three inches tall, he was as tremendous horizontally as vertically. A mountain of flesh swathed in a silken lounging-robe, he slowly walked to the table, and settled, grunting, into the big oaken chair. In-

THE THING ON THE FLOOR

283

stantly immobile, he surveyed the room through small, coal-black eyes set close together in a pasty-white face. Obscene of body and countenance, his forehead was nevertheless magnificent, but his scalp, even to the sides of his head, was utterly bald. Beneath the table his pillarlike ankles showed whitely above Gargantuan house-slippers.

This— this, Mary Roberts knew, was Dmitri. . . .

Leisurely the monster poured a glass of water and took a tentative sip, the glass looking no larger than a jigger in his tremendous, flabby hand. An expression that might have been a smile—or a leer —rippled momentarily across his fat-engulfed features, revealed an instant's glimpse of startlingly white teeth. He began to speak

"I see a number of new faces before me today," he began in a voice incongruously, almost shockingly vibrant and beautiful; Enrico Caruso's speaking voice, Mary thought suddenly, must have sounded like that—"and for the benefit of those who are not already familiar with my theories I will repeat, briefly, my conception of the function of the Will in the treatment of disease."

He paused, sipped meagerly from his glass of ice-water. Then he went on, his speech only faintly stilted, only faintly revealing him a man to whom English was an acquired language:

"Speaking in the philosophical—not the chemical—sense, it is my belief that there is but one fundamental element-abstract mind. Of course, that which we term matter is, in the last analysis, energy; there is no such thing as matter except as a manifestation of energy. Yet it is quite obvious, or it should be obvious, at any rate, that mind—that attribute which we wrongfully confuse with consciousness^—is totally independent of matter. A man dies, but his atomic weight remains

unchanged; the strange force which activated him has found its material shell no longer tenable, and has taken its departure.

"We are all well acquainted with the axiomatic law of physics which deals with the conservation of energy. But here we reach a paradox—either energy must have been non-existent at one time, or it must be eternal—contradictory and utterly irreconcilable concepts. The logical and the only conclusion is plain: energy and matter do not and have never existed. They are but temporary conceptions of an infinite, timeless Mind, a Mind of which we are part "

There was a sudden snort from the second row, "Rubbish! What's all this jabber got to do with me? I came here to be cured, not to be preached at!"

The colossus slowly poured a glass of ice-water.

"Sir, you must understand—if you possess sufficient intelligence—that I can do nothing for you without your help." The bulbous lips writhed in a half-smile. "You have been rude, my friend—should I decide to treat your carcinoma I will leave you the poorer man by half your fortune before you are cured. That prospect, at least, you can understand."

Mortimer Dunlop, his seamed face livid with rage, got hastily to his feet and strode to the center door. He jerked the door open, slammed it behind him as he stormed from the room.

Unperturbed, Dmitri continued, "Mind came before matter; mind is the great motivator. Mind can conceive matter; matter cannot conceive anything, even itself.

"It is evident to any person who carefully considers these conclusions that in each one of us exists a spark, part and parcel of that great intangible Will which created all things. But this reasoning invariably leads to a conclusion so tremen-

WEIRD TALES

dous that the human consciousness, except in tare instances, rejects it.

"The conclusion is plain. The unfettered Will, by and of itself, can work miracles, move mountains, create and destroy!

"Listen carefully, for Coue and Pavlov and your own J. B. Watson were closer to the truth than they knew. . . .

"I pick up this coin, and I place it upon my wrist, so. Now I suggest to myself that it is very hot. But my conscious knows that it is not hot, and so I merely appear, to myself and to you all, a trifle foolish.

"Nevertheless, any hypnotist can suggest to a pre-hypnotized subject that the coin is indeed hot, and the subject's flesh will blister if touched with this same cold coin! . . .

"Now I will call my servant "

Placing his two enormous, shapeless hands on the table, Dmitri heaved himself to his feet, and a tremendous bellow issued from his barrel-like chest. That summons, though the words were Jost in a gulf of sound, was unmistakable, and presently the door opened and the little man, prim and neat and wholly a colorless personality, entered.

"Yes, Master."

Dmitri stood beside the table, his right hand resting heavily on the polished oak.

"Sit down, little Stepan."

The small man, the ghost of a pleased smile on his peasant face, sat down primly in the oaken chair and looked about the room with child-like pleasure. Obviously he was enjoying to the uttermost his small moment.

"You would prefer the sleep, little one? It is not necessary; we have been through this experiment many times together, you and I."

"I would prefer the sleep, Master," the little man said, with a slight shudder.

"Despite myself, my eyes flinch from the flame "

"Very well." Dmitri's voice was casual and low. "Relax, little one, and sleep. Sleep soundly "

He turned from his servant and picked up the fifty-cent piece. Turning it over and over in the fingers of his left hand he began to speak, slowly.

"I have told this subject's subconscious that its body is invulnerable to physical injury. Watch!"

The little man was sitting erect in the massive chair. His eyes were closed, his face immobile. Dmitri stooped, lifted an arm, let it fall.

"You are not yet sleeping soundly, Stepan. Relax and sleep—sleep "

Slowly the muscles in the little man's face loosened, slowly his mouth drooped, half open. Small bubbles of mucus appeared at the corners of his lips.

Dmitri seemed satisfied. Quietly, soothingly, he spoke.-

"Can you hear me?"

The man's lips moved. "I can hear you."

"Who am I?"

The answer came slowly, without inflection. "You are the Voice that Speaks from Beyond the Darkness."

Dmitri loomed above the chair. "You remember the truths that I have taught you?"

"Master, I remember."

"You believe?"

"Master, I believe. You have told me that you are infallible."

Dmitri straightened triumphantly and surveyed his silent audience. Suddenly, then, a roaring streamer of bluish flame lanced across the room. Dmitri had set the gasoline torch alight.

A woman was babbling hysterically. But above the steady moan of the flame Dmitri said loudly, "There is no cause for alarm. Now, observe closely. I am

THE THING ON THE FLOOR

285

going to go far beyond the ordinary hypnotist's procedure "

He carefully picked up, with the pliers, the fifty-cent piece. For a long moment he let the moaning flame play on the coin, until both coin and pher-tips glowed angrily.

Calmly, without warning, he dropped the burning coin on his servant's naked wrist!

A woman screamed. But, then, gasps of relief eddied from the tense audience. For, although the glowing whiteness of the coin had scarcely begun to fade into cherry-red, the man Stepan had shown no sign that he felt pain! There was no stench of burning flesh in the room. Even the fine hairs on the back of the servant's wrist, hairs that touched and curled delicately above the burning coin, showed not the slightest sign of singeing!

Dmitri's face was an obese smirk.

"In order that you may be convinced that this is neither illusion nor trickery," he grunted, "watch!" Carefully he tapped the coin with the pliers, knocking it from the man's wrist to the floor.

Around the coin's glowing rim smoke began to rise. ...

Still smirking, Dmitri poured a half-glass of ice-water on the red-hot coin, and the water hissed and fumed as it struck the incandescent metal. There was a little puff of thick smoke from the burning wood, and now the coin was cold —cold and black and seared.

No scar marked the servant's white wrist!

Dmitri rubbed his great; shapeless hands together. And, shuddering, Mary Roberts watched him, for she knew instinctively that this was, indeed, no trickery. . . .

Abruptly Dmitri lifted the roaring torch, thrust its fierce blast full in his

servant's face, held it there for a moment that seemed an eternity. Then he turned a valve, and the hot flame died.

Though the man Stepan* s face was streaked with carbon soot, the flesh was smooth and unharmed as though the blue flame had never been!

Dmitri looked at his guests, and chuckled!

"One more test," he boomed, tKen,, "and we will turn to more pleasant things. Believe me when I tell you that these horrors are necessary if you would have faith in me." He picked up the small automatic pistol. "Will someone examine this weapon, assure you all that it is fully-loaded ?"

No one offered to touch the gun. Dmitri shrugged. "Do not doubt me; the weapon is loaded, and with lethal ammunition." He wheeled, and for an instant the gun hammered rapidly, and on the breast of his servant's shirt, over the heart, there appeared suddenly a little cluster of black-edged holes, beneath which the white flesh gleamed unmarked. . . .

Dmitri put down the gun and rubbed his hands together affably.

"Should anyone care to examine the back of that chair, he will find all the bullets I have just fired, together with a great many others fired in previous experiments." He stooped over his still, pallid-faced servant. "You may awaken now, little one." Then, to the horror-ridden group before him, "There will be refreshments and music immediately, downstairs. I will mingle among you, and you may ask me any cjuestions you wish."

Stepan, the slight, wholly undistinguished-appearing servant, had risen from the chair and was holding wide the door. Slowly, regally, his master walked from the room. . . .

WEIRD TALES

3. The Hypnotic tamp

**\7" ou *eally must meet him, Mar}'.

X He's—he's such an overwhelming personality, and it would be rude, really, to avoid him now. See, he's looking toward us "

Casually Mary Roberts turned her head. Across the long expanse of this almost flamboyantly oriental downstairs room in which Dmitri's guests had assembled she saw the man. He was seated in a massive, ivory-armed, dragon-footed chair, and he was talking to a group of three or four women. But he was looking beyond them, speculatively, at Mary.

"Helen, I'm afraid of him. He's—he's evil—blasphemous!"

Helen Stacey-Forbes only laughed. "Blasphemous?" she echoed. "Nonsense! He's only years ahead of his time. Never fear—his interest in you will vanish as soon as he learns that you can't pay his outrageous fees." She was already— Mary's arm linked in her own—threading her way through the chatting throng, . . .

The colossus, as they approached, abruptly cut short his conversation with the group of admiring ladies and turned his flabby bulk toward them.

"They are thrill-seekers, Miss Stacey-Forbes," he exclaimed petulantly. "Still —I have made appointments with two of them. . . . But how is your brother, Ronald? And who is your friend?"

"Dmitri—Mary Roberts," Helen Stacey-Forbes said formally. "Miss Roberts is the daughter of the Honorable James Roberts. . . . Ronald is well; he is very careful not to endanger himself."

Dmitri chuckled. "Ronald is being very careful, eh? Well, well—but accidents sometimes happen—and then there is only Dimitri." He stared fixedly at Mary. "You are very beautiful, my child; our Police Commissioner Ethredge is a fortunate man—indeed he is."

Mary Roberts flushed. "I was impressed by your — demonstration," she said hastily. "It was—spectacular."

He lifted a monstrous, shapeless paw.

"Histrionics," he said flatly. "My real work does not deal with such fireworks. Would you be convinced? Are you in every respect sound and well?"

Mary tried to repress the shudder of aversion that crept through her as she looked at the man.

"I am in perfect health," she said firmly.

Dmitri looked down at his great soft hands. Then he spoke, as it were casually, to Helen Stacey-Forbes.

"I have wanted—since your brother came to me a year ago—to examine you, as well. You come from an old family; should you marry it is possible that you would transmit to your children the hemophilia from which he suffers. Today is a propitious day; your friend can accompany us while I interrogate you; then, should she need me at some future time she would not fear me — as she does now."

Helen Stacey-Forbes' face was grave. "I had thought—of coming to you," she admitted. "Perhaps—if Miss Roberts is willing ?"

Mary objected only faintly. She was wondering if perhaps Helen had not really brought her here because she feared to be alone with this man. . . .

"The—guests?"

Dmitri glanced about the room, heaved himself ponderously to his feet.

"The guests!" he exclaimed. "We will be but a few minutes. Those in need of me will wait; the others are better gone. Come."

THE chamber into which Dmitri ushered the two young women was a small room, almost monastically furnished. There was a large table and

THE THING ON THE FLOOR

287

Dmitri's usual massive chair; several other, smaller chairs were scattered haphazardly about. A faded strip of carpeting ran diagonally from the door toward the table. There were no pictures, no bookcases or books, no filing-cabinet or desk. A telephone rested at one end of the table, close beside an ambiguity that —save for its grotesquely large bulb, full of an uncommon multiplicity of filaments and several oddly shaped and curiously perforated metal vanes—looked like an unshaded desk-lamp.

Dmitri lowered himself into his tremendous chair. "Sit down," he directed abruptly. "Compose yourselves. You, Miss Roberts, may watch this experiment; it is in no way new, yet it is always fascinating. Notice this lamp; it is so designed that it emits whorls of multicolored light, which move according to a recurrent pattern, somewhat in the manner of a pin-wheel."

His hands, hidden beneath the table, touched a concealed switch, and the odd-looking lamp began to glow in all its many filaments, while simultaneously the complexity of tiny vanes began to revolve, slowly at first and then faster and faster, until they had attained a maximum velocity beyond which there was no further acceleration. And as the filaments within the lamp gradually warmed, Mary realized that they gave off light of many colors, as varied and as beautiful as the spectrum seen in rainbows, colors which moved and changed in a weirdly hypnotic sequence of patterns. . . .

"Observe the lamp, Miss Stacey-Forbes," Dmitri said, in a calm, conversational tone. "Do not trouble to think— merely observe the lamp—see how the colors melt and run together and repeat themselves again "

Abruptly the ceiling light was extinguished. And Mary Roberts gasped at the unearthly beauty of the whirling

lights; even beneath the cold glow of the Mazda lamp they had been a strange symphony, but now, glowing and whirling like a mighty nebula of spinning

suns ! Her eyes were riveted upon

them; the)' seemed to draw her toward

them, to suck her into themselves. . . .

"Observe the lights, Miss Stacey-

Forbes " Mary knew that it was

Dmitri's voice, yet it sounded billions of miles away. And, curiously, she believed for a fleeting instant that there was a new note in that slumbrous whisper—a hint of exultation. But the thought vanished in its second of birth, lost amid the maze of spinning lights—the lights that were too, too beautiful. . . .

4. The Stolen Jewels

MRS. Gregory luce stood surveying herself with pardonable satisfaction in the almost-complete circle of full-length, chromium-framed mirrors that glittered their utilitarian splendor in a corner of her bedroom. It was well, she was reflecting, that the electric-blue gown fitted her with wrinkleless perfection, that her hair was a miracle even Francois had seldom achieved; today was her tenth wedding anniversary, and tonight Gregory was taking her to hear Tristan and Isolde.

With sophisticated grace she returned to her dressing-table and seated herself. In her walk, languid and self-appreciative though it had been, there was nevertheless a vague essence reminiscent of Mary Roberts; Prisdlla Luce might almost have been a prophetic vision of Mary as she would some day be—their mothers were sisters. Only Priscilla was a little more the cautious type than was Mary: Priscilla had selected her husband with an eye to the future; she did not wholly approve of Charles Ethredge. Otherwise the two young women were very much alike. . . ,

:ss

WEIRD TALES

Slowly, then, Priscilla Luce smiled. Surprizingly, her marriage had turned out an emotional as well as a financial success; she was truly grateful to and in love with Gregory, now. There had been an unsuspected tinge of romanticism in him, after all; on their wedding day he had given her his grandmother's emerald brooch, set with its great, flawless, square-cut stone—and the ruby and emerald tiara. And today he had brought her a Cartier bracelet, also of cool green emeralds. . . .

Languidly she arose and walked to the south wall. Here, between the two windows, hung a single, exquisite little etching. Priscilla Luce reached up, swung the etching back on cleverly concealed hinges, twirled the combination of the blued-steel wall-safe. . . .

In the moment that she reached inside the tiny safe Priscilla Luce knew that someone other than herself had handled the little leather-bound jewel-cases within.

For a moment she stood stock-still. Then, carefully, she began to remove the jewel-cases, opening and examining each one.

When she had finished she walked to the dressing-table and sat down. She knew that she would not tell Gregory tonight; she would wear the Cartier bracelet, and he would not know; his evening would not be spoiled. But she would have to tell him, tomorrow, and they would have to decide what to do. . . .

The emerald brooch and the priceless old tiara were gone!

And very clearly Priscilla Luce realized that the thief was someone they knew

someone they trusted. . . .

She stared at herself in the mirror.

She was beginning to feel frightened,

beginning to feci a sick, anticipatory dread. . . .

5. Ethredge Hears Startling News

When Police Commissioner Charles B. Ethredge received Priscilla Luce's enigmatic and disturbingly urgent telephone call he lost no time in getting to the Vermont marble and Bethlehem steel palace the Luce millions had built, ten years before, for Gregory Luce's young bride. "It concerns Mary, terribly," his fiancee's cousin had said, her voice taut and strange, "but do not, under any circumstances, tell her that I have called you."

Priscilla Luce met him in the library. She greeted him with grave gratitude; as soon as they were seated she began almost bruskly to speak.

"I called you, Charles, because you are both influential and discreet, and because you are vitally concerned in what I have to say. Charles, do you know anything of a psychiatrist who came to town about fourteen months ago—a man who calls himself Dmitri?"

Ethredge nodded.

"Why, yes, I have heard of him; Mary attended one of his Thursday evenings a week or two ago with Helen Stacey-Forbes. Helen is enthusiastic about what he seems to have done for Ronald."

Priscilla Luce smiled thinly. "It seems strange that Ronald was never ill until after he met this Dmitri. Do you know anything more about the man?"

"Yes," Ethredge grunted, "I do. Dmitri is a sensationalist. The more conservative psychiatrists have tried to convict him of extortion, of making Messianic and un-fulfillable promises, of other unethical and even criminal practises. As he is still practising, their attempts, needless to say, have all failed."

Priscilla Luce nodded.

"What did Mary say about him?"

Ethredge grinned.

"Very little. Said that she was amused W. T.—2

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289

■—that perhaps, beneath all his stage trappings, the man might even be competent. That's all."

Nervously Priscilla Luce leaned forward.

"Charles, obviously you don't know that Mary has been after me these past two weeks to go to Dmitri's with her. She hasn't asked me merely a few times; asked me incessantly. I've always refused—Gregorj, as you know, would disapprove—and since last Friday she hasn't asked me once. But last Thursday evening she went again to Dmitri's. Did you know?"

Ethredge's mouth was grim. "I didn't. no."

Priscilla Luce leaned forward and put her hands pleadingly on Charles Eth-iean strong wrists.

"This is going to be hard, terribly hard, to tell you. And please, Charles, please understand that I have not come to you because you are Mary's fiance; I am not as despicable as that. I have come to you because you are the Commissioner of Police, because, if anyone can, you can help her "

"In God's name." Ethredge whispered, "what is wrong? Tell me "

The woman's face was drawn with miser)'.

"Between Thursday last and last night Grandma Luce's brooch and tiara were stolen from my wall-safe. Only two pcr-,ow the combination to that safe, and of those two persons Gregory is automatically absolved "

"You . It was not a

question; it was a statement—flat, lifeless. And in Ethredge's heart was a slow-growing horror, for this thing Mary could never have done; yet he knew, knew already that her hands had taken the jewels. . . .

"Yes. Oregon,' has had private detec-\V. T.— 3

tives—from Philadelphia. Mary's fingerprints "

There was silence in that room, then, while Ethredge stared at Priscilla Luce's slender, patrician hands, still clasping his wrists.

"It was not in Mar)' to do this thing, ' he said at last, quietly. "There must be some other explanation, however incredible. Mary could never steal."

The small hands touching his wrists trembled.

"Perhaps 1 was wrong about you, and Mar)'," Priscilla Luce said softly. "I was arrogant—and ambitious for her. I am sorry."

Suddenly her eyes welled with tears, the great drops falling like glistening diamonds on Ethredge's hands. . . .

6. Ethredge Asks Help

""pETERS, come to my apartment; I've JL got to talk to you."

Detective-Lieutenant Peters of the homicide squad, sitting with his square-toed boots outsplayed on the scarred top of his Detective-Bureau desk, listened, his face expressionless as stone, to the taut, nerve-racked voice of his chief. Calmly he spoke.

"O. K., Commissioner; I'll be right out." Carefully, leaning forward from his hips, he set the telephone down. For an instant he did not move; then he swung his feet to the floor and stood erect. His face, as he crossed the room toward the coat-rack, was still impassive.

Yet within his skull his thoughts were seething. Through an instinct born of long association and mutual trust he knew that the Commissioner had at last decided to confide in him; between the Commissioner and his subordinate there existed a peculiar—and by jnost persons unsuspected—friendship. . . .

WEIRD TALES

The distance to Ethredge's home was not great, and Peters, driving a police sedan, covered it quickly. The Commissioner, when he rang, let him in at once.

Definitely, Peters saw at once, Ethredge. looked ill. But Peters knew, too, that something far less easily defined than mere illness had kept the Commissioner away from his desk these past few days. . . .

"Drink?" Ethredge gestured toward a nest of bottles and an array of glasses conveniently at hand.

"Thanks." Peters helped himself to two ounces of whisky, downed it neat. The men sat down.

"Peters," Ethredge began abruptly, "I'm up against something that I can't jfight alone. And I can't use the police, because I've no case that would convince a jury; I'd be thought mad. Also, Mary is involved, and her connection with this affair must never become public knowledge."

Peters nodded. "Better tell me everything, Commissioner."

"Peters, can a hypnotist cure disease in another man through subconscious suggestion? Can an adept so control his subject's mind that that subject becomes his virtual slave, even to the extent of committing a theft? Can a hypnotist cause his subject to suffer and die from a disease which heretofore has not threatened him?"

Peters looked thoughtfully at the nest of bottles.

"Sounds like Dmitri."

"Yes," Ethredge exclaimed hoarsely, "it is Dmitri, damn him!"

Leisurely the Detective-Lieutenant rose, poured a half-drink of amber-colored whisky, sat down again.

"Commissioner, hypnosis, the powers of the will, the depths of the subconscious, are to a great extent unknowns— and limitless unknowns. I cannot say that

I would definitely disbelieve anything, anything at all, you might tell me concerning them. Dmitri? Certainly I believe the stories I've heard about Dmitri. Tales of men dying of loathsome diseases after willing him their money—tales of strange thefts and inexplicable gifts of which he seems invariably the beneficiary."

Ethredge leaned forward.

"Yet we can do nothing—legally."

Peters shook his head. "No, nothing— legally."

Ethredge spread out his hands and looked helplessly at them.

"Peters, I went to see the man. He has Mary under his control; I've been watching her, following her about for days. She doesn't know, and I'm tired, tired almost to death; I've had to do it all myself; I dared trust no one. Peters, a week ago Mary took her cousin Priscilla Luce's jewels, and brought them to Dmitri; God knows what he's done with them. Since then she's been trying to persuade Mrs. Leeds—Arthur Leeds' widow—to go to Dmitri's with her. God, I knoiv that the man's a monster, yet I'm helpless against him."

Ethredge paused, and slowly his hands knotted into fists, relaxed.

"Peters, when I went to see him he laughed at me. More, he said that so long as Mary had access to wealdiy homes he would continue to use her, and that if I so much as attempted to interfere with him he would make her suffer, horribly. She was my vulnerability, he told me, and she was his chattel."

Peters lifted his drink to his lips.

"A venomous fellow," he said softly, "and a strategist, as well."

"Yes," Ethredge muttered. "I'm afraid that he can do everything he says."

Peters set down the small glass, empty.

"You are right. Undoubtedly he can do everything he says. And yet we are

THE THING ON THE FLOOR

291

men, and when men meet a poisonous serpent they squash it, and we must squash Dmitri as pitilessly." He paused, then slowly continued, "There might even he a certain poetic justice in the method by which this may most safely be done. Yes, I think so. I think that on Thursday evening you and I will be included among Dmitri's guests, and then we shall see what we shall see."

The Spider's Lair

Charles ethredge sat, alone, in Dmitri's small, first-floor consulting-room. He sat poised tensely on the very edge of his hard, uncomfortable chair. As the minutes slowly passed his fingers drummed, now and again, with a nervous, jerky rhythm on the top of Dmitri's massive table. Occasionally he glanced swiftly about the barren room, but there was little to attract his attention -within that tiny chamber; even the cryptic lamp in the center of the table was dark and lifeless. And Ethredge was not really concerned with the room in which he sat; his whole attention was focussed on the room adjoining, the theatrically oriental reception chamber from which came, faintly, the sensuous sobbing of Dmitri's balalaika orchestra and the muffled murmuring of departing guests.

One by one the voices dwindled, and at last even the music of the orchestra ceased. There was the sound of brief confusion as the musicians packed (heir instruments and took their departure, and then utter silence.

The door opened, and Dmitri, wearing his invariable lounging-robe and slippers, entered. With slow, waddling shuffle he crossed behind the table to his personal chair, and carefully eased his flabby bulk into its capacious depths.

"Very well, Commissioner Ethredge; we are alone together, as you requested.

My guests have gone; my orchestra is already drinking vodka within some wineshop; only my servant remains within the house. You see that I am not afraid of you,"

Abruptly he paused. For the door behind Ethredge's shoulder had opened, and a man had stepped swiftly into the room, closing the door behind him.

Dmitri's cruel black eyes were suddenly war)-.

"Who are you? I recognize you; you were among those at my demonstration, but—you disappeared. What are you doing here?"

Peters grinned reassuringly at the Commissioner, spoke almost soothingly to Dmitri. "There is a narrow space between your orchestra dais and the wall, uncomfortable, yet a sufficient hiding-place. Who am I? He shrugged slightly. "1 am—of the police. Afraid that you might not agree to grant us a joint audience, I took the precaution of concealing myself."

For a moment Dmitri sat still. Then his fat shoulders heaved in a billowing shrug, and he spoke almost scornfully.

"One or two or a dozen of your kind; what does it matter? With your mujik here to lend you courage. Commissioner, what do you propose now?"

The words were goading, taunting, and swiftly Peters signed to Ethredge to remain silent. Almost gently he murmured, "What do we propose now? Well, Dmitri, we propose first that you release Mary Roberts from whatever enjoinments you have placed upon her subconscious."

He paused, for the obese colossus was smiling.

"Suppose that I refuse."

Peters literally purred his reply, "You are an intelligent man; I assure you that the police of this country have devised extremely piquant methods of making a

WEIRD TALES

man suffer, methods -which we would not hesitate to employ upon you."

For an instant the pupils of Dmitri's eyes dilated. Then, his voice blandly impassive, he said, "You forget that, even if I would, I could not, in her absence, release Mary Roberts' subconscious. I am not a story-book magician, and I cannot command her conscious to come here. She will not come here again, except of her own free will, unless she brings—another with her. And that will be only on a Thursday. She did not come tonight; would you wait here seven days for her to present herself?"

Slowly Peters smiled. "Mary Roberts, at Commissioner Ethredge's request, is waiting in a small restaurant not far from here. I will telephone her." He rose, took a step toward the table.

The colossus seemed to swell in his chair like an infuriated toad. "Stop!" His chest heaved, and from his cavernous interior there issued a half-shriek, half-bellow that beat in that small room like the scream of an ape. "Stepan! Stepan!"

Peters' hand flicked to his hip. But Dmitri only smiled, smiled and shook his monstrous head.

"Your weapon will be of no avail against my Stepan."

8. Stepan

ABRUPTLY the door opened, and the k- small, wholly self-effacing Stepan entered, glanced imperturbably about. He carried Dmitri's small automatic pistol in his right hand, and instinctively Peters' fingers moved, again, toward his hip, then paused helplessly as his mind recalled with sudden sharp vividness the incredible demonstration he had witnessed only a brief hour before. Too well he knew that his gun was, indeed, powerless to harm Stepan. . . . Dmitri was grinning broadly.

"Watch these men closely, Stepan, and usher them from my house. Should they attempt any tricks do not hesitate to shoot. After all, they are here against my will, and they have threatened me."

The servant Stepan, only a slight tinge of color in his cheeks revealing that he felt any interest whatever in the proceedings, gestured with the small automatic. And in that instant Peters whipped to the floor, his hands grasped the end of the strip of carpet on which Stepan stood, his body jerked backward.

His arms wildly flailing, Stepan plunged to his hands and- knees; the automatic skittered across the floor. And suddenly Dmitri, half lifting himself from his chair, was babbling unintelligible, fear-ridden words. Ethredge, as Peters rose to his feet, had pounced upon the outsplayed servant, pinioning him to the floor; Peters, his right hand at his hip, swung alertly toward Dmitri.

"I've — got him, Peters," Ethredge gasped, the little man beneath him no match for the Commissioner's sinewy strength. And chill, shuddery horror abruptly swept him as he realized that this man he touched, this squirming, writhing thing beneath his hands, was invulnerable to lead or to flame, a being that could be overpowered, but that could not be destroyed! "Wbat'H I do with him?"

Grimly Peters snarled, "Hold on to him. I'll handle this death-ridden diabetic!"

His service automatic a blue-steel menace in his right hand, Peters walked to the table. With his left hand he lifted the receiver from the telephone and dialed a number. Warily he stooped over the table as he spoke, presently, with Mary Roberts. Then he cradled the receiver and sat down, facing the colossus.

"She will come here, at once."

Seemingly, Dmitri had collapsed. His shapeless hands lay limply on the chair

THE THING ON THE FLOOR

293

arms, his great chest heaved gulpingly; only the snaky brightness in his darting ebon eyes warned Peters that his tremendous brain was thinking, planning, calculating with chain-lightning rapidity. The servant Stepan was only spasmodically struggling.

Peters spoke abruptly to Ethredge.

"When Mary comes someone will have to admit her. Can you keep this devil covered while I go to the door?"

Ethredge, crouching across the servant's chest, his knees crushing the man's shoulders against the floor, nodded. . . .

Silence, rolling on with interminable slowness, gripped the room. Gradually the rattle of Dmitri's breathing was growing quiet; he sat now in his chair like some obscene, waiting idol, his face an undecipherable mask.

From beyond the tight-closed door a bell faintly tinkled. Peters edged toward Ethredge, slipped his automatic into the Commissioner's outstretched hand. Then he was gone. . . .

Dmitri did not move. A minute passed; to Ethredge it seemed as though all the suspense of myriad ages was bound up in that brief span. Then the door re-opened and Peters, followed by Mary Roberts, re-entered the room. Mary's fair, oval face was a composite of bewilderment and apprehension; in the instant that she glimpsed the tableau within the room her slender body trembled violently and the color drained from her face, leaving it white as new paper. But then her straight, strong young spine stiffened and her firm little jaw set hard. Pale though she was, she glanced inquiringly at Ethredge.

"Charles " she whispered.

Shakily, Ethredge smiled. He nodded toward Dmitri, bloated, swollen, huddled inscrutably in his chair.

"I'll have to tell you—now, Mary," he said slowly. "Try to understand. On the

night that you came here with Helen Stacey-Forbes, Dmitri ensnared you. He cast a—spell over you. We have come here, we have asked you to come here—■ we are going to force him to release you."

Mary, staring at her sweetheart, was frowning. Almost musingly she spoke.

"I have had—terrible dreams," she said, her voice low, "dreams in which he told me to do—strange things; dreams in which I—obeyed him. But I believed that they were only nightmares. And yet, though I loathed him, I know that I have surrendered to the strangest impulse to ask others to come here with me —Mrs. Arthur Leeds -"

Ethredge's eyes, as he glanced at Dmitri, were suddenly cruel. Then, gently, he spoke again to Mary.

"We must free you now, free you from Dmitri—for ever. But Peters believes that you will have to go, once more, beneath his spell."

For a long moment Mary stood there quiet. Then, the words barely audible, she breathed, "Very well, Charles. I am ready."

Peters, who until this moment had been standing, hands in his jacket pockets, with his back against the door, advanced into the room, stooped for the automatic in Ethredge's outstretched hand, and dropped into one of the row of chairs that faced Dmitri's huge table.

"Very well, Dmitri," he said, gesturing significantly with the automatic, "let us waste no more time. Proceed, and understand clearly, that if you attempt to trick me I will certainly kill you."

Briefly the men's eyes met and clashed. Then, with surprizing suddenness, Dmitri rolled his flaccid shoulders in an expressive, acquiescent shrug; his loose lips split in a good-humored leer.

"Shall I confess that I am beaten, then?" he asked affably. "Yes, let it be so; I begin to believe that I have, in any

WEIRD TALES

case, overestimated Mary Roberts' value to me. If you will sit across from me, Miss Roberts, and look fixedly at the lamp "

Warningly Peters exclaimed, "Don't look directly at that thing, Commissioner!"

Did a flicker of disappointment cross Dmitri's face? Peters, as he moved from his chair to stand directly behind Dmitri, the mu2zle of the automatic inches from Dmitri's silk-swathed shoulders, never knew. . . .

9. The Spider Spins

Dmitri's fat fingers touched a small button set beneath the edge of the table. And instantly, though Peters forced himself not to look up, he felt, beating against his lowered eyelids, the incredibly soothing, incredibly beautiful monotony of whirling color produced by the fantastic lamp, Abruptly, then, the ceiling light went out. Except for the diabolically cadenced, leaping reiteration of pinwheel color dancing in the center of the table like some chromatic dervish, the room was dark. Grimly Peters kept his eyes averted, kept his gaze boring into Dmitri's black, pillar-like silhouette.

Slow seconds passed. Then Dmitri spoke, spoke in that vibrant, beautiful voice of his that was like the chanting of a cathedral organ.

"You are asleep, Mary Roberts?"

There was a moment's pause. Warn-ingly the police automatic in Peters' hand touched the sodden flesh at the base of Dmitri's neck.

Through the stillness came Mary's reply: "Master, I am asleep."

By not so much as a single, involuntary shudder had Dmitri betrayed even the slightest awareness of the cold gun-muzzle. Yet Peters knew that even now

the man was planning, calculating chance against chance. . . .

"Who am I?" The words boomed like great mellow bass notes.

Mary's answer came unhesitatingly: "You are the Voice that Speaks from Beyond the Darkness. You are the Infallible One."

Peculiarly, Peters sensed that in that instant Dmitri had reached a decision. . . .

The strong, resonant phrases rolled on, "You will forget the assignment that I have given you." There was a pause, and Peters realized with a curious, crawling anticipation that Dmitri was gathering himself together, concentrating himself upon himself, ominously.

Then the black words boomed, "Let your nerves go mad and your muscles tense and writhe until death releases you!"

"Damn you!" Peters snarled the curse; his gun-muz2le sloughed savagely into Dmitri's obese flesh. Yet the gun did not speak, and Dmitri, wincing beneath the torturing steel, chuckled. . . .

"I gambled that you would not fire," he gasped, his voice suddenly gloating. "And now we are no longer stalemated; before I will consent to release Mary Roberts from the agony she endures you will promise me immunity, and more than immunity—you will promise me protection, henceforth. Take that cannon from my neck "

The ceiling light flashed up, the whirling of the multicolored vanes slowed and died. And, as the eyes of Ethredge and Peters grew accustomed to the increased illumination within the room, the two men felt their bloodflow pause, then run like ice-water in their veins.

For Mary Roberts had toppled from her chair, and now lay weirdly, unnaturally sprawled on the naked floor beside Dmitri's table, her spine bent backward like a tight-drawn bow, the slender heels

295

of her tiny shoes nearly touching her chestnut hair beneath her chic little hat, her throat and jaw muscles stretched like oversharp violin strings, her teeth and pink gums bared in a ghastly grin. Her breasts were rising and falling spasmodically; she breathed in dioking, rattling gasps. The fair, pale flesh of her oval face was purpling.

"God!" Ethredge stumbled to his feet, stood swaying drunkenly, his hands outstretched; he had utterly forgotten the servant Stepan. For an instant the little man struggled to rise, then sank back weakly.

The obscene colossus grinned. "Do not fear; she will live a long time. Her nerves will tire; then she will relax for a moment. She will breathe more easily, then."

And, as though the prophecy were a command, Mary's body went suddenly, horribly limp, melted against the barren floor as though death had abruptly collapsed every straining muscle. Only her gulping, hurried breathing and the gradual fading of the terrible purple congestion from her face told that she was still alive. Mucus was beginning to run from her loosely open mouth.

Ethredge took a slow, uncertain step forward. "God!" he mumbled, again. Then he found words, babbling, pleading words. "You—devil! Free her, only free her, and "

"Commissioner!" It was Peters' voice,

harsh, rasping. "Commissioner "

With a sudden, gasping sob he paused, for, with the sharply reiterated exclamation Mary's body had once more tensed, knotted into a backward-bent bow more terrible to look upon than had she twisted and writhed.

"Dear God!" Ethredge moaned. He took a second, wavering step forward. And then Peters found speech.

"Commissioner!" His voice was im-

placable, steely. "Stop! Do you know what you are doing, in surrendering to this—beast of hell? You are dishonoring yourself for ever, you are promising him immunity to torture, and murder, and debase—yes, for he has done all of these things "

Ethredge's lips were a twisted snarl, "Peters, I would promise him my soul— to free Mary!"

Dmitri was grinning, grinning. . . .

Peters' words were like the flicking of a rapier, "Mary would loathe you—if she knew. Mary would never permit this —sacrifice of honor."

Ethredge took another step forward. He seemed not to have heard.

10. A Utile White Pellet

With sudden, grim determination Peters plunged his left hand deep in his breast pocket. His right hand dropped the gun to the floor, his right arm constricted about Dmitri's throat There w r as a small white pellet in the fingers of his left hand.

"Dmitri!" he snarled, "this tablet; can you guess what it is?—it smells of almonds!"

The powerful biceps of his right arm tightened. Caught in that strangling embrace, Dmitri writhed weakly, horribly, his pig-like eyes wildly staring.

Peters' face was inches above Dmitri's fear-maddened eyes. The pellet moved closer to Dmitri's slavering, gasping jaws.

"Just a touch against the tip of the tongue! You attempted trickery, Dmitri; had you not done that we might have drawn your fangs and let you live. But now "

Swiftly, then, he forced the bitter-smelling pellet into Dmitri's wide-distended mouth, crushed the man's jaws violently together,

WEIRD TALES

The taste of almond was strong on Dmitri's tongue.

For a split second his eyes seemed bursting from their sockets. A horrible, retching moan ■welled from his saliva-drenched mouth; blue veins leaped on his hairless temples. Then, like a pin-pricked balloon, he collapsed; his massive head rolled forward upon his flaccid chest; he huddled there, stilly, in his chair, . . .

"The end of you, Dmitri," Peters was whispering. "The end of you!"

And then he heard Ethredge's voice, dazed with the horror he had undergone, yet implacable, now, with heartbroken resolve.

"We must kill htm, Peters! You are right; Mary would not have us sell honor. even to save her!"

Ethredge, his eyes unseeing, his mind Dear-crazed by suffering, did not know that Dmitri was already dead. And yet

"Dmitri is dead," Peters said softly. His whole attention was focussed upon Mary, upon the small huddled figure that, in the instant of Dmitri's passing, had suddenly relaxed, lay now in semiconscious exhaustion. And in Peters' heart there leaped exultation; for in his mind had been, all along, the strange, weird conviction that the end of Dmitri would bring release to those he had enslaved. For Peters knew that Dmitri had instilled into the subconscious of his victims the belief that he was infallible, the belief that he was a kind of god, protecting them, shielding them, curing them of their ills. But now the man-god was dead, and, of necessity, in each of his dupes the blind, limitless sea of the subconscious was rejecting the theories he had taught, spewing out his broken image, obliterating him, in disillusionment. from the chasms of memory. Before Peters' eyes the unnatural tendency to

convulsion that Dmitri had instilled in Mary Roberts' subconscious, the cruel weapon he had implanted within the core of her being and goaded, in terror-ridden desperation, into life, had died in the instant her subconscious became aware of Dmitri's passing, had ceased as abruptly as though a circuit had been broken, as completely as though an evil light had been extinguished. . . .

Peters, stooping over Mary, now limply, weakly relaxed, slipped his strong right arm beneath her shoulders, murmured swift, soothing words. Sanity, he saw, was flooding back into her eyes. And then she looked toward and beyond Ethredge, and she screamed-—and screamed again.

Peters' eyes followed her rigid gaze, and as he looked at the servant Stepan his nerves crawled and the short hairs at the base of his neck bristled in an ecstasy of horror.

'Dear—God!"

In that second of unsurpassable horror there blazed across Peters' mind a strange kaleidoscope of tableaux, tableaux that were all the same, tableaux of the obese Dmitri and the small, self-effacing Stepan enacting a multitude of Dmitri's experiments, experiments in which invariably the small automatic hammered bullets into Stepan's chest, the blow-torch flamed in Stepan's face, hot coins were dropped with seeming harmlessness on Stepan's wrists! That horror on the floor, that horror that had been the servant Stepan. that horror that had. in the moment of Dmitri's passing, fha

"Dear—God!"

For the flesh-and-blood face of the servant Stepan had vanished, and in its place there remained only nightmare, only a flame-charred, crimson skull! The horror lay upon its back, its arms outfluni;, as it had lain while Ethredge pii it down. Its jacket was open,, and the

THE THING ON THE FLOOR

297

exposed expanse of shirt-front was a stick}' crimson smear.

"Dear—God!"

Those bullets, those hundreds of bullets, that Dmitri must have fired, during the months and years, through Stepan's chest! And somehow Peters knew, as he gazed through mercifully glazed eyes upon the horror outsplayed there, that beneath the red-drenched shirt there remained no shred of mortal flesh, but only a bleeding, bullet-blasted hole!

And on Stepan's wrists Peters saw the holes, the great fire-seared holes, the charred, circular holes the size of a half-dollar. . . .

"Dear—God!" Peters was babbling. over and over, inanely.

Dimly, while his brain reeled and his soul retched as he gazed upon the ghastly thing on the floor, he yet realized that the same release that had, in the instant of Dmitri's passing, loosed Mary Roberts" nerves and muscles from the death-laden throes of convulsion, had also, and in that same awful instant, freed Stepan's subconscious from the enjoin-ment that his body was invulnerable to physical injury. And with that release had come Stepan's doom—the long-delayed death that should have been his in the instant, now perhaps years in the past, that Dmitri had first blasted a bullet through his heart.

In that moment Peters was hardly a man—he was more an animal, terrified, near mad with horror. He realized only vaguely that his hands were clenched into rigid fists, that his heart was pounding with frantic rapidity. He could feel his spine crawl and bristle; sweat, reeking with adrenal secretions, leaped from his pores.

But warningly, through waves of horror, some tiny figment of his brain was reiterating the command, "Don't let go

of yourself! Don't let your nerve break!"

Slowly, then, he tore his gaze away from that horror on the floor. And, gradually, his vision cleared, his brain resumed its functioning. He had been close to madness. . . .

He saw Ethredge, then, standing close beside the table, gazing at the horror at his feet, swaying, tottering drunkenly. Just as the Commissioner would have reeled to the floor Peters stumbled to his feet, grasped the man, guided him like a shambling cretin to a chair, fumbled in the Commissioner's hip pocket for his whisky-flask.

"Dear Lord!" Peters whispered, as he forced whisky into Ethredge's trembling mouth. "Dear Lord! if this doesn't drive him—drive her—mad "

That horror—that horror on the floor!

But the hot, burning stimulant was bringing color back into Ethredge's face. Swiftly Peters turned to Mary, tilted her head back, poured a staggering draft down her throat. Gently he lifted her up, supported her to a chair, where she sat dazedly. Mercifully, she was in almost a comatose condition.

Ethredge was beginning to find words. "That thing—that—thing!" he was mumbling.

Incisively, then, Peters spoke.

"Commissioner, you've got to get hold of yourself. We must get the medical examiner here, get Hanlon and Delaney and men from the Medical Association; we must hush this affair up. Thank God we have influence; thank God the horrors Dmitri has perpetrated on this man have been witnessed by many persons. Perhaps the story will be—a private experiment that failed, and Dmitri dead— of heart-failure. Dmitri was, after all, diabetic, and his heart was untrustworthy. But—we cannot waft; we must call Hanlon at once," He moved toward the telephone.

WEIRD TALES

"But Dmitri!" Ethredge whispered. "Dmitri — dead of cyanide poisoning! The medical examiner will know. Dmitri —murdered!"

Peters turned. His face, as he slowly shook his head, was enigmatic.

"No, Commissioner. Remember that I once told you that there might even be a certain poetic justice in the manner by which Dmitri might be most safely— destroyed? That pellet was harmless, made of crushed almonds and flour; Dmitri was his own executioner. He believed that he was tasting cyanide, and so he died; his own weapon, the power of suggestion, killed him—justly."

He was lifting the telephone to his

ear. But before he dialed the well-remembered number he looked, thoughtfully, for a long moment, at Dmitri, at the bloated, repulsively hairless hulk that had once housed a brilliant, utterly evil soul.

"Poor, warped devil!" he softly mused; "he could treat and cure others by suggestion, but he could not treat himself. And now he is dead. Well "

The short, stubby fingers of his right hand were dialing the number. And, as he listened to the small, reiterated grating sound of the whirling dial, he realized, vaguely, that Ethredge had gone to Mary Roberts, that Ethredge was stooping over her comfortingly, soothing her within his strong, embracing arms.

Vhe

<2/ha

hadow on the Screen

By HENRY KUTTNER

A weird story of Hollywood, and the grisly horror that cast its dreadful

shadow across the stiver screen as an incredible

motion-picture was run off

rORTURE MASTER was being given a sneak preview at a Beverly Hills theatre. Somehow, when my credit line, "Directed by Peter Haviland," was flashed on the screen, a little chill of apprehension shook me, despite the applause that came from a receptive audience. When you've been in the picture game for a long time you get these hunches; I've often spotted a dud flicker before a hundred feet have been reeled off. Yet Torture Master was no worse than a dozen similar films I'd handled in the past few years.

But it was formula, box-office formula. 1 could see that. The star was all right; the make-up department had done a good job; the dialogue was unusually smooth. Yet the film was obviously box-office, and not the sort of film I'd have liked to direct.

After watching a reel unwind amid an encouraging scattering of applause, I got up and went to the lobby. Some of the gang from Summit Pictures were lounging there, smoking and commenting on the picture, Ann Howard, who played the heroine in Torture Master, noticed my scowl and pulled me into a corner. She was that rare type, a girl who will screen well without a lot of the yellow greasepaint that makes you look like an animated corpse. She was small, and her ha,ir and eyes and skin were brown—I'd like to have seen her play Peter Pan. That type, you know.

I had occasionally proposed to her, but she never took me seriously. As a matter

320

of fact, I myself didn't know how serious I was about it. Now she led me into the bar and ordered sidecars.

"Don't look so miserable, Pete," she said over the rim of her glass. "The picture's going over. It'll gross enough to suit the boss, and it won't hurt my reputation."

Well, that was right. Ann had a fat part, and she'd made the most of it. And the picture would be good box-office; Universale Night Key, with KarlofT, had been released a few months ago, and the audiences were ripe for another horror picture.

*"I know," I told her. signaling the bartender to refill my glass. "But I get tired of these damn hokumy pics. Lord, how I'd like to do another Cabinet of Doctor Caligari!"

"Or another Ape of God," Ann suggested.

I shrugged. "Even that, maybe. There's so much' chance for development of the weird on the screen, Ann—and no producer will stand for a genuinely good picture of that type. They call it arty, and say it'll flop. If I branched out on my own—well, Hecht and MacArthur tried it, and they're back on the Hollywood payroll now."

Someone Ann knew came up and engaged her in conversation. I saw a man beckoning, and with a hasty apology left Ann to join him. It was Andy Worth, Hollywood's dirtiest columnist. I knew him for a double-crosser and a skunk, but I also knew that he could get more inside W. T.—4

THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN

321

information than a brace of Winchells. He was a short, fat chap with a meticulously cultivated mustache and sleeky pomaded black hair. Worth fancied himself as a ladies' man, and spent a great deal of his time trying to blackmail actresses into having affairs with him.

That didn't make him a villain, of course. I like anybody who can carry on an intelligent conversation for ten minutes, and Worth could do that. He fingered his mustache and said, "I heard you talking about Ape of God, A coincidence, Pete."

"Yeah?" I was cautious. I had to be, with this walking scandal-sheet. "How's that?"

He took a deep breath. "Well, you understand that I haven't got the real lowdown, and it's all hearsay—but I've found a picture that'll make the weirdest flicker ever canned look side"

I suspected a gag. "Okay, what is it? Torture Muster?"

"Eh? No—though Blake's yarn deserved better adaptation than your boys gave it. No, Pete, the one I'm talking about isn't for general release—isn't com-

W. T.—5

"He vraz lifted through a welter of coiling, ropy tentacles."

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pleted, in fact. I saw a few rushes of it. A one-man affair; title's The Nameless. Arnold Keene's doing it."

Worth sat back and watched how I took that. And I must have shown my amazement. For it was Arnold Keene who had directed the notorious Ape of God, which had wrecked his promising career in films. The public doesn't know that picture. It never was released. Summit junked it. And they had good cause, although it was one of the most amazingly effective weird films I've ever seen. Keene had shot most of it down in Mexico, and he'd been able to assume virtual dictatorship of the location troupe. Several Mexicans had died at the time, and there had been some ugly rumors, but it had all been hushed up. I'd talked with several people who had been down near Taxco with Keene, and they spoke of the man with peculiar horror. He had been willing to sacrifice almost anything to make Ape of God a masterpiece of its type.

It was an unusual picture—there was no question about that. There's only one master print of the film, and it's kept in a locked vault at Summit. Very few have seen it. For what Machen had done in weird literature, Keene had done on the screen—and it was literally amazing.

I said to Worth, "Arnold Keene, eh? I've always had a sneaking sympathy for the man. But I thought he'd died long ago."

"Oh, no. He bought a place near Tu-junga and went into hiding. He didn't have much dough after the blow-up, you know, and it took him about five years to get together enough dinero to start his Nameless. He always said Ape of God was a failure, and that he intended to do a film that would be a masterpiece of weirdness. Well, he's done it. He's canned

a film that's—unearthly. I tell you it made my flesh creep."

"Who's the star?" I asked.

"Unknowns. Russian trick, you know. The real star is a—a shadow."

I stared at him.

"That's right, Pete. The shadow of something that's never shown on the screen. Doesn't sound like much, eh? But you ought to see it!"

"I'd like to," I told him. "In fact, I'll do just that. Maybe he'll release it through Summit."

Worth chuckled. "No chance. No studio would release that flicker. I'm not even going to play it up in my dirt sheet. This is the real McCoy, Pete."

"What's Keene's address?" I asked.

Worth gave it to me. "But don't go out till Wednesday night," he said. "The rough prints '11 be ready then, or most of them. And keep it under you hat, of course."

A group of autograph hunters came up just then, and Worth and I were separated. It didn't matter. I'd got all the information I needed. My mind was seething with fantastic surmises. Keene was one of the great geniuses of the screen, and his talent lay in the direction of the macabre. Unlike book publishers, the studios catered to no small, discriminating audiences. A film must suit everybody.

Finally I broke away and took Ann to a dance at Bel-Air. But I hadn't forgotten Keene, and the next night I was too impatient to wait. I telephoned Worth, but he was out. Oddly enough, I was unable to get in touch with him during the next few days; even his paper couldn't help me. A furious editor told me the Associated Press had been sending him hourly telegrams asking for Worth's copy; but the man had vanished completely. I had a hunch.

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323

IT WAS Tuesday night when I drove out of the studio and took a short cut through Griffith Park, past the Planetarium, to Glendale. From there I went on to Tujunga, to the address Worth had given me. Once or twice I had an uneasy suspicion that a black coupe was trailing me. but I couldn't be sure.

Arnold Keene's house was in a little canyon hidden back in the Tujunga mountains. I had to follow a winding dirt road for several miles, and ford a stream or two, before I readied it. The place was built against the side of the canyon, and a man stood on the porch and watched me as I braked my car to a stop.

It was Arnold Keene. I recognized him immediately. He was a slender man under middle height, with a closely cropped bristle of gray hair; his face was coldly austere. There had been a rumor that Keene had at one time been an officer in Prussia before he came to Hollywood and Americanized his name, and, scrutinizing him, I could well believe it. His eyes were like pale blue marbles, curiously shallow.

He said, "Peter Haviland? I did not expect you until tomorrow night."

I shook hands. "Sorry if I intrude," I apologized. "The fact is, I got impatient after what Worth told me about your film. He isn't here, by any chance?"

The shallow eyes were unreadable. "No. But come in. Luckily, the developing took less time than I had anticipated. I need only a few more shots to complete my task."

He ushered me into the house, which was thoroughly modern and comfortably furnished. Under the influence of good cognac my suspicions began to dissolve. I told Keene I had always admired his Ape of God.

He made a wry grimace. "Amateurish, Haviland. I depended too much on hokum in that film. Merely devil-worship,

a reincarnated Gilles de Rais, and sadism. That isn't true weirdness."

I was interested. "That's correct. But the film had genuine power V

"Man has nothing of the weird in him intrinsically. It is only the hints of the utterly abnormal and unhuman that give-one the true feeling of weirdness. That, and human reactions to such supernatural phenomena. Look at any great weird work— The Horla, which tells of a man's reaction to a creature utterly alien, Blackwood's Willows. Machen's Black Seal, Lovecraft's Color Out of Space —all these deal with the absolutely alien influencing normal lives, Sadism and death may contribute, but alone they cannot produce the true, intangible atmosphere of weirdness."

I had read all these tales. "But you can't film the indescribable. How could you show the invisible beings of The Willows?"

Keene hesitated. "I think 111 let my film answer that. I have a projection room downstairs "

The bell rang sharply. I could not help noticing the quick glance Keene darted at me. With an apologetic gesture he went out and presently returned with Ann Howard at his side. She was smiling rather shakily.

"Did you forget our date, Pete?" she asked me.

I blinked, and suddenly remembered. Two weeks ago I had promised to take Ann to an affair in Laguna Beach this evening, but in my preoccupation with Keene's picture the date had slipped my mind. I stammered apologies.

"Oh, that's all right," she broke in. "I'd much rather stay here—that is, if Mr. Keene doesn't mind. His picture "

"You know about it?"

"I told her," Keene said. "When she explained why she had come, I took the liberty of inviting her to stay to watch the

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film. I did not want her to drag you away, you see,'' he finished, smiling. "Some cognac for Miss—eh?"

I introduced them.

"For Miss Howard, and then The "Nameless,"

At his words a tiny warning note seemed to throb in my brain. I had been fingering a heavy metal paperweight, and now, as Keene's attention was momentarily diverted to the sideboard, I slipped it, on a sudden impulse, into my pocket. It would be no defense, though, against a gun.

What was wrong with me, I wondered? An atmosphere of distrust and suspicion seemed to have sprung out of nothing. As Keene ushered us down into his projection room, the skin of my back seemed to crawl with the expectation of attack. It was inexplicable, but definitely unpleasant.

Keene was busy for a time in the projection booth, and then he joined us.

"Modern machinery is a blessing," he said with heavy jocularity. "I can be as lazy as I wish. I needed no help with the shooting, once the automatic cameras were installed. The projector, too, is automatic."

I felt Ann move closer to me in the gloom. I put my arm around her and said, "It helps, yes. What about releasing the picture, Mr. Keene?"

There was a harsh note in his voice. "It will not be released. The world is uneducated, not ready for it. In a hundred years, perhaps, it will achieve the fame it deserves. I am doing it for posterity, and for the sake of creating a weird masterpiece on the screen."

With a muffled click the projector began to operate, and a title flashed on the screen: The Nameless.

Keene's voice came out of the darkness. "It's a silent film, except for one sequence

at the start. Sound adds nothing to weird-ness, and it helps to destroy the illusion of reality. Later, suitable music will be dubbed in."

I did not answer. For a book had flashed on the gray oblong before us— that amazing tour de force, The Circus of Doctor Lao. A hand opened it, and a long finger followed the lines as a toneless voice read:

"These are the sports, the ofTthrows of the universe instead of the species; these are the weird children of the lust of the spheres. Mysticism explains them where science cannot. Listen: when that great mysterious fecundity that peopled the worlds at the command of the gods had done with its birth-giving, when the celestial midwives all had left, when life had begun in the universe, the primal womb-thing found itself still unexhausted, its loins stiil potent. So that awful fertility tossed on its couch in a final fierce outbreak of life-giving and gave birth to these nightmare beings, these abortions of the world."

The voice ceased. The book faded, and there swam into view a mass of tumbled ruins. The ages had pitted the man-carved rocks with cracks and scars; the bas-relief figures were scarcely recognizable. I was reminded of certain ruins I had seen in Yucatan.

The camera swung down. The ruins seemed to grow larger. A yawning hole gaped in the earth.

Beside me Keene said, "The site of a ruined temple. Watch, now."

The effect was that of moving forward into the depths of a subterranean pit For a moment the screen was in darkness; then a stray beam of sunlight rested on an idol that stood in what was apparently an underground cavern. A narrow crack of light showed in the roof. The idol was starkly hideous.

I got only a flashing glimpse, but the

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325

impression on my mind was that of a bulky, ovoid shape like a pineapple or a pine-cone. The thing had certain doubtful features which lent it a definitely unpleasant appearance; but it was gone in a flash, dissolving into a brightly lighted drawing-room, thronged with gay couples.

The story proper began at that point. None of the actors or actresses was known to me; Keene must have hired them and worked secretly in his house. Most of the interiors and a few of the exteriors seemed to have been taken in this very canyon. The director had used the "parallel" trick which saves so much money for studios yearly. I'd often done it myself. It simply means that the story is tied in with real life as closely as possible; that is, when I had a troupe working up at Lake Arrowhead last winter, and an unexpected snowfall changed the scene, I had the continuity rewritten so that the necessary scenes could take place in snow. Similarly, Keene had paralleled his own experiences—sometimes almost too closely.

The Nameless told of a man, ostracized by his fellows because of his fanatical passion for the morbid and bizarre, who determined to create a work of art ■—a living masterpiece of sheer weirdness. He had experimented before by directing films that were sufficiently unusual to stir up considerable comment. But this did not satisfy him. It was acting—and he wanted something more than that. No one can convincingly fake reaction to horror, not even the most talented actor, he contended. The genuine emotion must be felt in order to be transferred to the screen.

It was here that The Nameless ceased to parallel Keene's own experiences, and branched out into sheer fantasy. The protagonist in the film was Keene himself, but this was not unusual, as directors often act in their own productions. And,

by deft montage shots, the audience learned that Keene in his search for authenticity had gone down into Mexico, and had, with the aid of an ancient scroll, found the site of a ruined Aztec temple. And here, as I say, reality was left behind as the film entered a morbid and extraordinary phase.

There was a god hidden beneath this ruined temple — a long-forgotten god, which had been worshipped even before the Aztecs had sprung from the womb of the centuries. At least, the natives had considered it a god, and had erected a temple in its honor, but Keene hinted that the thing was actually a survival, one of the "ofithrows of the universe," unique and baroque, which had come down through the eons in an existence totally alien to mankind. The creature was never actually seen on the screen, save for a few brief glimpses in the shadowed, underground temple. It was roughly barrel-shaped, and perhaps ten feet high, studded with odd spiky projections. The chief feature was a gem set in the thing's rounded apex—a smoothly polished jewel as large as a child's head. It was in this gem that the being's life was supposed to have its focus.

It was not dead, but neither was it alive, in the accepted sense of that term. When the Aztecs had filled the temple with the hot stench of blood the thing had lived, and the jewel had flamed with unearthly radiance. But with the passage of time the sacrifices had ceased, and the being had sunk into a state of coma akin to hibernation. In the picture Keene brought it to life.

He transported it secretly to his home, and there, in an underground room hollowed beneath the house, he placed the monster-god. The room was built with an eye for the purpose for whidi Keene intended it: automatic cameras and clever

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lighting features were installed, so that pictures could be shot from several different angles at once, and pieced together later as Keene cut the film. And now there entered something of the touch of genius which had made Keene famous.

He was clever, I had always realized that. Yet in the scenes that were next unfolded I admired not so much the technical tricks — which were familiar enough to me—as the marvelously clever way in which Keene had managed to inject realism into the acting. His characters did not act—they lived.

Or, rather, they died. For in the picture they were thrust into the underground room to die horribly as sacrifices to the monster-god from the Aztec temple. Sacrifice was supposed to bring the thing to life, to cause the jewel in which its existence was bound to flare with fantastic splendor. The first sacrifice was, I think, the most effective.

The underground room in which the god was hidden was large, but quite vacant, save for a curtained alcove which held the idol. A barred doorway led to the upper room, and here Keene appeared on the screen, revolver in hand, herding before him a man—overall-clad, with a stubble of black beard on his stolid face. Keene swung open the door, motioned his captive into the great room. He closed the barred door, and through the grating could be seen busy at a switchboard.

Light flared. The man stood near the bars, and then, at Keene's gesture with his weapon, moved forward slowly to the far wall, He stood there, staring around vaguely, dull apprehension in his face. Light threw his shadow in bold relief on the wall.

Then another shadow leaped into existence beside him.

It was barrel-shaped, gigantic, studded with blunt spikes, and capped by a round dark blob—the life-jewel. The shadow

of the monster god! The man saw it. He turned.

Stark horror sprang into his face, and at sight of that utterly ghastly and realistic expression a chill struck through me. This was almost too convincing. The man could not be merely acting.

But, if he was, his acting was superb, and so was Keene's direction. The shadow on the wall stirred, and a thrill of movement shook it. It rocked and seemed to rise, supported by a dozen tentacular appendages that uncoiled from beneath its base. The spikes—changed. They lengthened. They coiled and writhed, hideously worm-like.

It wasn't the metamorphosis of the shadow that held me motionless in my chair. Rather, it was the appalling expression of sheer horror on the man's face. He stood gaping as the shadow toppled and swayed on the wall, growing larger and larger. Then he fled, his mouth an open square of terror, The shadow paused, with an odd air of indecision, and slipped slowly along the wall out of range of the camera.

But there were other cameras, and Keene had used his cutting-shears deftly. The movements of the man were mirrored on the screen; the glaring lights swung and flared; and ever the grim shadow crawled hideously across the wall. The thing that cast it was never shown— just the shadow, and it was a dramatically effective trick. Too many directors, I knew, could not have resisted the temptation to show the monster, thus destroying the illusion—for papier-mache and rubber, no matter how cleverly constructed, cannot convincingly ape reality.

At last the shadows merged—the gigantic swaying thing with its coiling tentacles, and the black shadow of the man that was caught and lifted, struggling and kicking frantically. The shadows merged—and the man did not reappear.

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327

Only the dark blob capping the great shadow faded and flickered, as though strange light were streaming from it; the light that was fed by sacrifice, the jewel that was—life.

Beside me there came a rustle. I felt Ann stir and move closer in the gloom. Keene's voice came from some distance away.

"There were several more sacrifice scenes, Haviland, but I haven't patched them in yet, except for the one you'll see in a moment now. As I said, the film isn't finished."

I did not answer. My eyes were on the screen as the fantastic tale unfolded. The pictured Keene was bringing another victim to his cavern, a short, fat man with sleekly pomaded black hair. I did not see his face until he had been imprisoned in the cave, and then, abruptly, there came a close-up shot, probably done with a telescopic lens. His plump face, with its tiny mustache, leaped into gigantic visibility, and I recognized Andy Worth.

It was the missing columnist, but for the first time I saw his veneer of sophistication lacking. Naked fear crawled in his eyes, and I leaned forward in my seat as the ghastly barrel-shaped shadow sprang out on the wall. Worth saw it, and the expression on his face was shocking. I pushed back my chair and got up as the lights came on. The screen went blank.

Arnold Keene was staanding by the door, erect and military as ever. He had a gun in his hand, and its muzzle was aimed at my stomach.

"You had better sit down, Haviland," he said quietly. "You too, Miss Howard. I've something to tell you—and I don't wish to be melodramatic about it. This gun"—he glanced at it wryly—"is necessary. There are a few things you must

know, Haviland, for a reason you'll understand later."

I said, "There'll be some visitors here for you soon, Keene. You .don't think I'd neglect normal precautions!"

He shrugged. "You're lying, of course. Also you're unarmed, or you'd have had your gun out by now. I didn't expect you until tomorrow night, but I'm prepared. In a word, what I have to tell you is this: the film you just saw is a record of actual events."

Ann's teeth sank into her lip, but I didn't say anything. I waited, and Keene resumed.

"Whether you believe me or not doesn't matter, for you'll have to believe in a few minutes. I told you something of my motive, my desire to create a genuine masterpiece of weirdness. That's what I've done, or will have done before tomorrow. Quite a number of vagrants and laborers have disappeared, and the columnist, Worth, as well; but I took care to leave no clues. You'll be the last to vanish—you and this girl."

"You'll never be able to show the film," I told him.

"What of it? You're a hack, Haviland, and you can't understand what it means to create a masterpiece. Is a work of art any less beautiful because it's hidden? Ill see the picture—and after I'm dead the world will see it, and realize my genius even though they may fear and hate its expression. The reactions of my unwilling actors—that's the trick. As a director, you should know that there's no substitute for realism. The reactions were not faked — that was obvious enough. The first sacrifice was that of a clod—an unintelligent moron, whose fears were largely superstitious. The next sacrifice was of a higher type—a vagrant who came begging to my door some months ago. You will complete the group, for you'll know just what you're facing, and

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your attempt to rationalize your fear will lend an interesting touch. Both of you will stand up, with your hands in the air, and precede me into this passage."

All this came out tonelessly and swiftly, quite as though it were a rehearsed speech. His hand slid over the wall beside him, and a black oblong widened in the oak paneling. I stood up.

"Do as he says, Ann," I said. "Maybe I can "

"No, you can't," Keene interrupted, gesturing impatiently with his weapon. "You won't have the chance. Hurry up."

We went through the opening in the wall and Keene followed, touching a stud that flooded the passage with light. It was a narrow tunnel that slanted down through solid rock for perhaps ten feet to a steep stairway. He herded us down this, after sliding the panel shut.

"It's well hidden," he said, indicating metal sheathing—indeed, the entire corridor was lined with metal plates. "This lever opens it from within, but no one but me can find the spring which opens it from without. The police could wreck the house without discovering this passage."

That seemed worth remembering, but of little practical value at the moment. Ann and I went down the stairway until it ended in another short passage. Our way was blocked by a door of steel bars, which Keene unlocked with a key he took from his pocket. The passage where we stood was dimly lighted; there were several chairs here; and the space beyond the barred door was not lighted at all.