Dark Angel

“TH’ TIP O’ TH’ marnin’ to yez, gintlemen.” Officer Collins touched the vizor of his cap as Jules de Grandin and I rounded the corner with none too steady steps. The night was cold, and our host’s rum punch had a potency peculiarly its own, which accounted for our decision to walk the mile or so which stretched between us and home.

“Holà, mon brave,” responded my companion, now as ever ready to stop and chat with any member of the gendarmerie. “It is morning, you say? Ma foi, I had not thought it much past ten o’clock.”

Collins grinned appreciatively. “Arrah, Doctor de Grandin, sor,” he answered, “wid a bit o’ th’ crayter th’ likes o’ that ye’ve had, ’tis meself as wouldn’t be bodderin’ wid th’ time o’ night, ayther, fer—”

His witticism died birth-strangled, for, even as he paused to guffaw at the intended thrust, there came stabbing through the pre-dawn calm a cry of such thin-edged, unspeakable anguish as I had not heard since the days when as an intern I rode an ambulance’s tail and amputations often had to be performed without the aid of anesthesia.

“Bon Dieu!” de Grandin cried, dropping my elbow and straightening with the suddenness of a coiled spring released from its tension. “What is that, in pity’s gracious name?”

His answer followed fast upon his question as a pistol’s crack succeeds the powder-flash, for round the shoulder of the corner building came a girl on stumbling, fear-hobbled feet, arms spread, eyes wide, mouth opened for a scream which would not come, a perfect fantasm of terror.

“Here, here, now, phwat’s up?” demanded Collins gruffly, involuntary fright lending harshness to his tones. “’Tis a foin thing ye’re afther doin’, runnin’ through th’ strates in yer nighties, scarin’ folks out o’ their sivin senses, an’—”

The woman paid him no more heed than if he’d been a shadow, for her dilated eyes were blinded by extremity of fear, as we could see at a glance, and had de Grandin not seized her by the shoulder she would have passed us in her headlong, stumbling flight. At the touch of the Frenchman’s hand she halted suddenly, swayed uncertainly a moment; then, like a marionette whose strings are cut, she buckled suddenly, fell half kneeling, I half sprawling to the sidewalk and lifted trembling hands to him beseechingly.

“It was afire!” she babbled thickly. “Afire—blazing, I tell you—and the door flew open when they held it out. They—they—aw-wah-wah!—” her words degenerated into unintelligible syllables as the tautened muscles of her throat contracted with a nervous spasm, leaving her speechless as an infant, her thin face a white wedge of sheer terror.

“D.T.’s, sor?” asked Collins cynically, bending for a better view of the trembling woman.

“Assist me, Friend Trowbridge, she goes into the paroxysmal stage.” As he uttered the sharp warning the woman sank face-downward to the pavement, lay motionless a moment, then trembled with convulsive shudders, the shudders becoming twitches and the twitches going into wild, abandoned gestures, horribly reminiscent of the reflex contortions of a decapitated fowl.

“A cab, and quickly, if you please,” de Grandin countermanded. “This is no time for making of arrests, my friend; this poor one’s sanity may depend upon our ministrations.”

Luckily, a cruising taxi hove in sight even as he spoke, and with a hasty promise to inform police headquarters of the progress of the case, we bundled our patient into the vehicle and rushed at breakneck speed toward my office.

“MORPHINE, QUICKLY, IF YOU please,” de Grandin ordered as he bore the struggling woman to my surgery, thrust her violently upon the examination table and drew up the sleeve of her georgette pajama jacket, baring the white flesh for the caress of the mercy-bearing needle.

Swabbing the skin with alcohol, I pinched the woman’s trembling arm, inserted the hypo point in the folded skin and thrust the plunger home, driving a full three-quarter grain dose into her system; then, with refilled syringe, stood in readiness to repeat the treatment if necessary.

But the opiate took effect immediately. Almost instantly the clownish convulsions ceased, within a minute the movements of her arms and legs had subsided to mere tremblings, and the choking, anguished moans which had proceeded from her throat died to little, childish whimpers.

“Ah, so,” de Grandin viewed the patient with satisfaction. “She will be better now, I think. Meantime, let us prepare some stimulant for the time of her awakening. She has been exposed, and we must see that she does not take cold.”

Working with the speed and precision of one made expert by long service in the war’s field hospitals, he draped a steamer rug across the back of an easy-chair in the study, mixed a stiff dose of brandy and hot water and set it by the open fire; then, calm-eyed but curious, resumed his station beside the unconscious girl upon the table.

We had not long to wait. The opiate had done its work quickly, but almost as quickly had found its antidote in the intensely excited nervous system of the patient. Within five minutes her eyelids fluttered, and her head rolled from side to side, like that of a troubled sleeper. A little moan, half of discomfort, half involuntary protest at returning consciousness, escaped from her.

“You are in the office of Doctor Samuel Trowbridge, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin announced in a low, calm voice, anticipating the question which nine patients out of ten propound when recovering from a swoon. “We found you in the street in a most deplorable condition and brought you here for treatment. You are better now? Good. Permettez-moi.”

Taking her hands in his, he raised her from the table, eased her to the floor and, his arms about her waist, guided her gently to the study, where, with the adeptness of a deck steward, he tucked the steamer rug about her feet and knees, placed a cushion at her back and before she had a chance to speak, held the glass of steaming toddy to her lips.

She drank the torrid liquid greedily, like a starving child gulping at a goblet of warm milk; then, as the potent draft raced through her, leaving a faint flush on her dead-pale cheeks, gave back the glass and viewed us with a pathetic, drowsy little smile.

“Thank you,” she murmured. “I—oh, I remember now!” Abruptly her half-somnolent manner vanished and her hands clutched claw-like at the chair-arms. “It was afire!” she told us in a hushed, choking voice. “It was blazing, and—”

“Mademoiselle! You will drink this, if you please!” Sharply, incisively, the Frenchman’s command cut through her fearful utterance as he held forward a cordial glass half full of cloudy liquid.

Startled but docile, she obeyed, and a look of swift bewilderment swept across her pale, peaked features as she finished drinking. “Why”—she exclaimed—“why—” Her voice sank lower, her lids closed softly and her head fell back against the cushion at her shoulders.

“Voilà, I feared that recollection might unsettle her and had it ready,” he announced. “Do you go up to bed, my friend. Me, I shall watch beside her, and should I need you I shall call. I am inured to sleeplessness and shall not mind the vigil, but it is well that one of us has rest, for tomorrow—eh bien, this poor one’s case has the smell of herring on it and I damn think that we shall have more sleepless nights than one before we see the end of it.”

Murmuring, I obeyed. Delightful companion, thoughtful friend, indefatigable co-worker that he was, Jules de Grandin possessed a streak of stubbornness beside which the most refractory mule ever sired in the State of Missouri was docility personified, and I knew better than to spend the few remaining hours of darkness in fruitless argument.

A GENTLE MURMUR OF VOICES sounded from the study when I descended from my room after something like four hours’ sleep. Our patient of the night before still sat swathed in rugs in the big wing chair, but something approximating normal color had returned to her lips and cheeks, and though her hands fluttered now and again in tremulous gesticulation as she talked, it required no second glance to tell me that her condition was far from bordering on nervous collapse. “Taut, but not stretched dangerously near the snapping-point,” I diagnosed as I joined them. De Grandin reclined at ease across the fire from her, a pile of burned-out cigarettes in the ash-tray beside him, smoke from a freshly lighted Maryland slowly spiraling upward as he waved his hand back and forth to emphasize his words.

“What you tell is truly interesting, Mademoiselle,” he was assuring her as I entered the study.

“‘Trowbridge, mon vieux, this is Mademoiselle Wickwire. Mademoiselle, my friend and colleague, Doctor Samuel Trowbridge. Will you have the goodness to repeat your story to him? I would rather that he had it from your own lips.”

The girl turned a wan smile toward me, and I was struck by her extreme slenderness. Had her bones been larger, she would have been distressfully thin; as it was the covering of her slight skeletal structure was so scanty as to make her almost as ethereal as a sprite. Her hair was fair, her eyes of an indeterminate shade somewhere between true blue and amethyst, and their odd coloration was picked up and accentuated by a chaplet of purple stones about her slender throat and the purple settings of the rings she wore upon the third finger of each hand. Limbs and extremities were fine-drawn as silver wire and elongated to an extent which was just short of grotesque, while her profile was robbed of true beauty by its excessive clarity of line. Somehow, she reminded me more of a statuette carved from crystal than of a flesh-and-blood woman, while the georgette pajamas of sea-green trimmed with amethyst and the absurd little boudoir cap which perched on one side of her fair head helped lend her an air of tailor’s-dummy unreality.

I bowed acknowledgment of de Grandin’s introduction and waited expectantly for her narrative, prepared to cancel ninety percent of all she told me as the vagary of an hysterical young woman.

“Doctor de Grandin tells me I was screaming that ‘it was burning’ when you found me in the street last night,” she began without preamble. “It was.”

“Eh?” I ejaculated, turning a quick glance of inquiry on de Grandin. “What?”

“The hand,” she returned with perfect aplomb. Then: “My father is Joseph Wickwire, former Horner Professor of Orientology and Ancient Religion at De Puy University. You know his book, The Cult of the Witch in Assyria?”

I shook my head, but the girl, as though anticipating my confession of ignorance, went on without pause:

“I don’t understand much about it, for Father never troubled to discuss his studies with me, but from some things he’s told me, he became convinced of the reality of ancient witchcraft—or magic—some years ago, and gave up his chair at De Puy to devote himself to private research. While I was at school he made several trips to the Near East and last year spent four months in Mesopotamia, supervising some excavations. He came home with two big cases—they looked more like casket-boxes than anything else—which he took to his study, and since then no one’s been allowed in the room, not even I or Fanny, our maid. Father won’t permit anything, not even so much as a grain of dust, to be taken from that room; and one of the first things he did after receiving those boxes was to have an iron-plated door made for the study and have heavy iron bars fitted to all the windows.

“Lately he’s been spending practically all his time at work in the study, sometimes remaining there for two or three days at a time, refusing to answer when called to meals or to come out for rest or sleep. About a month ago something happened which upset him terribly. I think it was a letter he received, though I’m not sure, for he wouldn’t tell me what it was; but he seemed distracted, muttering constantly to himself and looking over his shoulder every now and then as though he expected some one, or something, to attack him from behind. Last week he had some workmen come and reinforce all the doors with inch-wide strips of cast iron. Then he had special combination locks fitted to the outside doors and Yale locks to all the inside ones, and every night, just at dusk, he sets the combinations, and no one may enter or leave the house till morning. It’s been rather like living in prison.”

“More like a madhouse,” I commented mentally, looking at the girl’s thin face with renewed interest. “Delusions of persecution on the part of the parent might explain abnormal behavior on the part of the offspring, if—”

The girl’s recital broke in on my mental diagnosis: “Last night I couldn’t sleep. I’d gone to bed about eleven and slept soundly for an hour or so; then suddenly I sat up, broad awake, and nothing I could do would get me back to sleep. I tried bathing the back of my neck with cologne, turning my pillows, even taking ten grains of allonal; nothing was any good, so finally I gave up trying and went down to the library. There was a copy of Hallam’s Constitutional History of England there, and I picked that out as being the dullest reading I could find, but I read over a hundred pages without the slightest sign of drowsiness. Then I decided to take the book upstairs. Possibly, I thought, if I tried reading it in bed I might drop off without realizing it.

“I’d gotten as far as the second floor—my room’s on the third—and was almost in front of Father’s study when I heard a noise at the front door. ‘Any burglar who tries breaking into this house will be wasting his talents,’ I remember saying to myself, when, just as though they were being turned by an invisible hand, the dials of the combination lock started to spin. I could see them in the light of the hall ceiling-lamp, which Father insists always be kept burning, and they were turned not slowly, but swiftly, as though being worked by one who knew the combination perfectly.

“At the same time the queerest feeling came over me. It was like one of those dreadful nightmares people sometimes have, when they’re being attacked or pursued by some awful monster, and can’t run or cry out, or even move. There I stood, still as a marble image, every faculty alert, but utterly unable to make a sound or move a finger—or even wink an eye.

“And as I watched in helpless stillness, the front door swung back silently and two men entered the hall. One carried a satchel or suitcase of some sort, the other”—she paused and caught her breath like a runner nearly spent, and her voice sank to a thin, harsh whisper—“the other was holding a blazing hand in front of him!”

“A what?” I demanded incredulously. There was no question in my mind that the delusions of the sire were ably matched by the hallucinations of the daughter.

“A blazing hand,” she answered, and again I saw the shudder of a nervous chill run through her slender frame. “He held it forward, like a candle, as though to light his way; but there was no need of it for light, for the hall lamp has a hundred-watt bulb, and its luminance reached up the stairs and made everything in the upper passage plainly visible. Besides, the thing burned with more fire than light. There seemed to be some sort of wick attached to each of the fanned-out fingers, and these burned with a clear, steady blue flame, like blazing alcohol. It—”

“Of course it is,” she agreed with unexpected calmness. “So is this: As the man with the blazing hand mounted the stairs and paused before my father’s study, I heard a distinct click, and the door swung open, unlocked. Through the opening I could see Father standing in the middle of the room, the light from an unshaded ceiling-lamp making everything as clear as day. On a long table was some sort of object which reminded me of one of those little marble stones they put over soldiers’ graves in national cemeteries, only it was gray instead of white, and a great roll of manuscript lay beside it. Father had risen and stood facing the door with one hand resting on the table, the other reaching toward a sawed-off shotgun which lay beside the stone and manuscript. But he was paralyzed—frozen in the act of reaching for the gun as I had been in the act of walking down the hall. His eyes were wide and set with surprise—no, not quite that, they were more like the painted eyes of a window-figure in a store, utterly expressionless—and I remember wondering, in that odd way people have of thinking of inconsequential things in moments of intense excitement, whether mine looked the same.

“I saw it all. I saw them go through the study’s open door, lift the stone off the table, bundle up Father’s manuscript and stuff everything into the bag. Then, the man with the burning hand going last, walking backward and holding the thing before him, they left as silently as they came. The doors swung to behind them without being touched. The study door had a Yale snap-lock in addition to its combination fastenings, so it was fastened when it closed, but the bolts of the safe lock on the front door didn’t fly back in place when it closed.

“I don’t know how long that strange paralysis held me after the men with the hand had gone; but I remember suddenly regaining my power of motion and finding myself with one foot raised—I’d been overcome in the act of stepping and had remained helpless, balanced on one foot, the entire time. My first act, of course, was to call Father, but I could get no response, even when I beat and kicked on the door.

“Then panic seized me. I didn’t quite know what I was doing, but something seemed urging me to get away from that house as though it had been haunted, and the horrifying memory of that blazing hand with those combination-locked doors flying open before it came down on me like a cloud of strangling, smothering gas. The front door was still unfastened, as I’ve told you, and I flung it open, fighting for a breath of fresh outdoors air, and—ran screaming into the street. You know the rest.”

I nodded understandingly. I saw only too well. A better symptomatized case of dementia praecox it had never been my evil fortune to encounter.

There was a long moment of silence, broken by de Grandin. “Eh bien, mes amis, we make no progress here,” he announced. “Grant me fifteen small minutes for my toilette, Mademoiselle, and we shall repair to the house of your father. There, I make no doubt, we shall learn something of interest concerning last night’s so curious events.”

He was as good as his promise, and within the stipulated time had rejoined us, freshly shaved, washed and brushed, a most agreeable odor of bath salts and dusting-powder emanating from his spruce, diminutive person.

“Come, let us go,” he urged, assisting our patient to her feet and wrapping the steamer rug about her after the manner of an Indian’s blanket.

THE FRONT ENTRANCE OF Professor Wickwire’s house was closed, but unfastened, when we reached our destination, and I looked with interest at the formidable iron reinforcements and combination locks upon the door. Thus far the girl’s absurd story was borne out by facts, I was forced to admit, as we mounted the stairs to the upper floor where Wickwire had his barricaded sanctum.

No answer coming to de Grandin’s peremptory summons, Miss Wickwire tapped lightly on the iron-bound panels. “Father, it is I, Diane,” she called.

Somewhere beyond the door we heard a shuffling step and a murmuring voice, then a listless fumbling at the locks which held the portal fast.

The man who stood revealed as the heavy door swung back looked like a Fundamentalist cartoonist’s caricature of Charles Darwin. The pate was bald, the jaw bearded, the brows heavy and prominent, but where the great evolutionist’s forehead bulged with an intellectual swell, this man’s skull slanted back obliquely, and the temples were flat, rather than concave. Also, it required no second glance to tell us that the full beard covered a soft, receding chin, and the eyes beneath the shaggy brows were weak with a weakness due to more than mere poor vision. He looked to me more like the sort of person who would spend spare time reading books on development of willpower and personality than poring over ponderous tomes on Assyriology. And though he seemed possessed of full dentition, he mumbled like a toothless ancient as he stared at us, feeble eyes blinking owlishly behind the pebbles of his horn-rimmed spectacles.

“Magna Mater … trismegistus … salve …” we caught the almost unintelligible Latin of his mumbled incantation.

The man’s head rocked insanely from side to side, as though his neck had been a flaccid cord, and: “Magna Mater …” he began again with a whimpering persistence.

“Monsieur! Stop it. I command it, and I am Jules de Grandin!” Sharply the little Frenchman’s command rang out; then, as the other goggled at him and began his muttered prayer anew, de Grandin raised his small gloved hand and dealt him a stinging blow across the face. “Parbleu, I will be obeyed, me!” he snorted wrathfully. “Save your conjurations for another time, Monsieur; at present we would talk with you.”

Brutal as his treatment was, it was efficacious. The blow acted like a douche of cold water on a swooning person, and Wickwire seemed for the first time to realize we were present.

“These gentlemen are Doctors Trowbridge and de Grandin,” his daughter introduced. “I met them when I ran for help last night, and they took me with them. Now, they are here to help you—”

Wickwire stopped her with uplifted hand. “I fear there’s no help for me—or you, my child,” he interrupted sadly. “They have the Sacred Meteorite, and it is only a matter of time till they find the Word of Power, then—”

“Nom d’un coq, Monsieur, let us have things logically and in decent order, if you please,” de Grandin broke in sharply. “This sacred meteorite, this word of powerfulness, this so mysterious ‘they’ who have the one and are about to have the other, in Satan’s name, who and what are they? Tell us from the start of the beginning. We are intrigued, we are interested; parbleu, we are consumed with the curiosity of a dying cat!”

Professor Wickwire smiled at him, the weary smile a tired adult might give a curious child. “I fear you wouldn’t understand,” he answered softly.

“By blue, you do insult my credulity, Monsieur!” the Frenchman rejoined hotly. “Tell us your tale, all—every little so small bit of it—and let us be the judges of what we shall believe. Me, I am an occultist of no small ability, and this so strange adventure of last night assuredly has the flavor of the superphysical. Yes, certainly.”

Wickwire brightened at the other’s words. “An occultist?” he echoed. “Then perhaps you can assist me. Listen carefully, if you please, and ask me anything which you may not understand:

“Ten years ago, while assembling data for my book on witchcraft in the ancient world, I became convinced of the reality of sorcery. If you know anything at all of mediæval witchcraft, you realize that Diana was the patroness of the witches, even in that comparatively late day, Burchard, Bishop of Worms, writing of sorcery, heresy and witchcraft in Germany in the year 1000 says: ‘Certain wretched women, seduced by the sorcery of demons, affirm that during the night they ride with Diana, goddess of the heathens, and a host of other women, and that they traverse immense spaces.’

“Now, Diana, whom most moderns look upon as a clean-limbed goddess of chastity, was only one name for the great Female Principle among the pantheon of ancient days. Artemis, or Diana, is typified by the moon, but there is also Hecate, goddess of the black and fearful night, queen of magic, sorcery and witchcraft, deity of goblins and the underworld and guardian of crossroads; she was another attribute of the same night-goddess whom we know best today as Diana.

“But back of all the goddesses of night, whether they be styled Diana, Artemis, Hecate, Rhea, Astarte or Ishtar, is the Great Mother—Magna Mater. The origin of her cult is so ancient that recorded history does not even touch it, and even oral tradition tells of it only by indirection. Her worship is so old that the Anatolian meteorite brought to Rome in 204 B.C. compares to it as Christian Science or New Thought compare in age with Buddhism.

“Piece by piece I traced back the chain of evidence of her worship and finally became convinced that it was not in Anatolia at all that her mother-shrine was located, but in some obscure spot, so many centuries forgotten as to be no longer named, near the site of the ancient city of Uruck. An obscure Roman legionary mentions the temple where the goddess he refers to by the Syro-Phœnician name of Astarte was worshipped by a select coterie of adepts, both men and women, to whom she gave dominion over earth and sea and sky—power to raise tempests or to quiet them, to cause earthquakes, to cause fertility or sterility in men and beasts, or cause the illness or death of an enemy. They were also said to have the power of levitation, or flying through the air for great distances, or even to be seen in several places at the same time. This, you see, is about the sum total of all the powers claimed for witches and wizards in mediæval times. In fine, this obscure goddess of our nameless centurion is the earliest ascertainable manifestation of the female divinity who governed witchcraft in the ancient world, and whose place has been usurped by the Devil in Christian theology.

“But this was only the beginning: The Roman chronicler stated definitely that her idol was a ‘stone from heaven, wrapped in an envelope of earth,’ and that no man durst break the tegument of the celestial stone for fear of rousing Astarte’s wrath; yet to him who had the courage to do so would be given the Verbum Magnum, or Word of Power—an incantation whereby all majesty, might, power and dominion of all things visible and invisible would be put into his hands, so that he who knew the word would be, literally, Emperor of the Universe.

“As I said before, I became convinced of the reality of witchcraft, both ancient and modern, and the deeper I delved into the records of the past the more convinced I was that the greatest claims made by latter-day witches were mere childish nonsense compared to the mighty powers actually possessed by the wizards of olden times. I spent my health and bankrupted myself seeking that nameless temple of Astarte—but at last I found it. I found the very stone of which the Roman wrote and brought it back to America—here.”

Wickwire paused, breathing in labored gasps, and his pale eyes shone with the quenchless ardor of the enthusiast as he looked triumphantly from one of us to the other.

“Bien, Monsieur, this stone of the old one is brought here; what then?” de Grandin asked as the professor showed no sign of proceeding further with his narrative.

“Eh? Oh, yes.” Once more Wickwire lapsed into semisomnolence. “Yes, I brought it back, and was preparing to unwrap it, studying my way carefully, of course, in order to avoid being blasted by the goddess’ infernal powers when I broke the envelope, but—but they came last night and stole it.”

“Bon sang d’un bon poisson, must we drag information from you bit by little bit, Monsieur?” blazed the exasperated Jules de Grandin. “Who was it pilfered your unmentionable stone?”

“Kraus and Steinert stole it,” Wickwire answered tonelessly. “They are German illuminati, Hanoverians whose researches paralleled mine in almost every particular, and who discovered the approximate location of the mystic meteorite shortly after I did. Fortunately for me their data were not so complete as mine, and they lost some time trying to locate the ancient temple. I had dug up the stone and was on my way home when they finally found the place.

“Can you imagine what it would mean to any mortal man to be suddenly translated into godhood, to sway the destinies of nations—of all mankind—as a wind sways a wheatfield? If you can, you can imagine what those two adepts in black magic felt when they arrived and found the key to power gone and on its way to America in the possession of a rival. They sent astral messengers after me, first offering partnership, then, when I laughed at them, making all manner of threats. Several times they attempted my life, but my magic was stronger than theirs, and each time I beat their spirit-messengers off.

“Lately, though, their emissaries have been getting stronger. I began to realize this when I found myself weaker and weaker after each encounter. Whether they have found new sources of strength, or whether it is because two of them work against me I do not know, but I began to realize we were becoming more evenly matched and it was only a matter of time before they would master me. Yet there was much to be done before I dared remove the envelope from that stone; to attempt it unprepared would be fool-hardy. Such forces as would be unleashed by the cracking of that wrapping are beyond the scope of human imagining, and every precaution had go be taken. Any dunce can blow himself up handling gunpowder carelessly; only the skilled artillerist can harness the explosive and make it drive a projectile to a given target.

“While I was perfecting my spiritual defenses I took all physical precautions, also, barring my windows and so securing my doors that if my enemies gave up the battle of magic in disgust and fell back upon physical force, I should be more than a match for them. Then, because I thought myself secure, for a little time at least, I overlooked one of the most elementary forms of sorcery, and last night they entered my house as though there had been no barriers and took away the magic stone. With that in their possession I shall be no match for them; they will work their will on me, then overwhelm the world with the forces of their wizardry. If only—”

“Excuse me, Professor,” I broke in, for, wild as his story was, I had become interested despite myself; “what was the sorcery these men resorted to in order to force entrance? Your daughter told us something of a blazing hand, but—”

“It was a hand of glory,” he returned, regarding me with something of the look a teacher might bestow upon a backward schoolboy, “one of the oldest, simplest bits of magic known to adepts. A hand—preferably the sinister—is cut from the body of an executed murderer, and five locks of hair are clipped from his head. The hand is smoked over a fire of juniper wood until it becomes dry and mummified; after this the hair is twisted into wicks which are affixed to the finger tips. If the proper invocations are recited while the hand and wicks are being prepared and the words of power pronounced when the wicks are lighted, no lock can withstand the light cast by the blazing glory hand, and—”

“Ha, I remember him,” de Grandin interrupted delightedly. “Your so droll Abbé Barham tells of him in his exquisitely humorous poem:

Now open lock to the dead man’s knock,

Fly bolt and bar and band;

Nor move nor swerve joint, muscle or nerve,

At the spell of the dead man’s hand.

Sleep all who sleep, wake all who wake,

But be as the dead for the dead man’s sake.

Wickwire nodded grimly. “There’s a lot of truth in those doggerel rimes,” he answered. “We laugh at the fairy-story of Bluebeard today, but it was no joke in fifteenth century France when Bluebeard was alive and making black magic.”

“Excuse me, but you’ve spoken several times of removing the envelope from this stone, Professor,” I broke in again. “Do you mean that literally, or—”

“Literally,” Wickwire responded. “In Babylonia and Assyria, you know, all ‘documents’ were clay tablets on which the cuneiform characters were cut while they were still moist and soft, and which were afterward baked in a kiln. Tablets of special importance, after having been once written upon and baked, were covered with a thin coating of clay upon which an identical inscription was impressed, and the tablets were once more baked. If the outer writing were then defaced by accident or altered by design, the removal of the outer coating would at once show the true text. Such a clay coating has been wrapped about the mystic meteorite of the Great Mother-Goddess, but even in the days of the Roman historian most of the inscription had been obliterated by time. When I found it I could distinguish only one or two characters, such as the double triangle, signifying the moon, and the eight-pointed asterisks meaning the lord of lords and god of gods, or lady of ladies and goddess of goddesses. These, I may add, were not in the Assyrian cuneiforms of 700 B.C. or even the archaic characters dating back to 2500, but the early, primitive cuneiform, which was certainly not used later than 4500 B.C., probably several centuries earlier.”

“And how did you propose removing the clay integument without hurt to yourself, Monsieur?” de Grandin asked.

Wickwire smiled, and there was something devilish, callous, in his expression as be did so. “Will you be good enough to examine my daughter’s rings?” he asked.

Obedient to his nodded command, the girl stretched forth her thin, frail hands, displaying the purple settings of the circlets which adorned the third finger of each. The stones were smoothly polished, though not very bright, and each was deeply incised with this inscription:

“It’s the ancient symbol of the Mother-Goddess,” Wickwire explained, “and signifies ‘Royal Lady of the Night, Ruler of the Lights of Heaven, Mother of Gods, Men and Demons.’ Diane would have racked the envelope for me, for only the hands of a virgin adorned with rings of amethyst bearing the Mother-Goddess’ signet can wield the hammer which can break that clay—and the maid must do the act without fear or hesitation; otherwise she will be powerless.”

“U’m?” de Grandin twisted fiercely at his little blond mustache. “And what becomes of this ring-decorated virgin, Monsieur?”

Again that smile of fiendish indifference transformed Wickwire’s weak face into a mask of horror. “She would die,” he answered calmly. “That, of course, is certain, but”—some lingering light of parental sanity broke through the look of wild fanaticism—“unless she were utterly consumed by the tremendous forces liberated when the envelope was cracked, I should have power to restore her to life, for all power, might, dominion and majesty in the world would have been mine; death should bow before me, and life should exist only by my sanction. I—”

“You are a scoundrel and a villain and a most unpleasant species of a malodorous camel,” cut in Jules de Grandin.

“Mademoiselle, you will kindly pack a portmanteau and come with us. We shall esteem it a privilege to protect you till danger from those sales bêtes who invaded your house last night is past.”

Without a word, or even a glance at the man who would have sacrificed her to his ambition, Diane Wickwire left the room, and we heard the clack-clack of her bedroom mules as she ascended to her chamber to procure a change of clothing.

Professor Wickwire turned a puzzled look from de Grandin to me, then back to the Frenchman. That we could not understand and sympathize with his ambition and condone his willingness to sacrifice his daughter’s life never seemed to enter his mad brain. “But me—what’s to become of me?” he whimpered.

“Eh bien, one wonders,” answered Jules de Grandin. “As far as I am concerned, Monsieur, you may go to the Devil, nor need you delay your departure in anywise out of consideration for my feelings.”

“MAD,” I DIAGNOSED. “MAD as hatters, both of ’em. The man’s a potential homicidal maniac; only heaven knows how long it will be before we have to put the girl under restraint.”

De Grandin looked cautiously about; then, satisfied that Diane Wickwire was still in the chamber to which she had been conducted by Nora McGinnis, my efficient household factotum, he replied: “You think that story of the glory hand was madness, hein?”

“Le bon Dieu knows, not I,” he countered; “but I would that you read this item in today’s Journal before consigning her to the madhouse.” Picking up a copy of the morning paper he indicated a boxed item in the center of the first page:

Police are seeking the ghouls who broke into James Gibson’s funeral parlor, 1037 Ludlow St., early last night and stole the left hand from the body of José Sanchez, which was lying in the place awaiting burial today. Sanchez had been executed Monday night at Trenton for the murder of Robert Knight, caretaker in the closed Steptens iron foundry, last summer, and relatives had commissioned Gibson to bring the body to Harrisonville for interment.

Gibson was absent on a call in the suburbs last night, and as his assistant, William Lowndes, was confined to bed at home by unexpected illness, had left the funeral parlor unattended, having arranged to have any telephone calls switched to his residence in Winthrop St. On his return he found a rear door of his establishment had been jimmied and the left hand of the executed murderer severed at the wrist.

Strangely enough, the burglars had also shorn a considerable amount of hair from the corpse’s head. A careful search of the premises failed to disclose anything else had been taken, and a quantity of money lying in the unlocked safe was untouched.

“Non,” he denied shortly. “It is not at all well, my friend, it is most exceedingly otherwise. It is fiendish, it is diabolical: it is devilish. There are determined miscreants against whom we have set ourselves, and I damn think that we shall lose some sleep ere all is done. Yes.”

HOWEVER FORMIDABLE PROFESSOR WICKWIRE’S rivals might have been, they gave no evidence of ferocity that I could see. Diane settled down comfortably in our midst, fitting perfectly into the quiet routine of the household, giving no trouble and making herself so generally agreeable that I was heartily glad of her presence. There is something comforting about the pastel shades of filmy dresses and white arms and shoulders gleaming softly in the candle-light at dinner. The melody of a well-modulated feminine voice, punctuated now and again with little rippling notes of quiet laughter, is more than vaguely pleasant to the bachelor ear, and as the time of our companionship lengthened I often found myself wondering if I should have had a daughter such as this to sit at table or before the fire with me if fate had willed it otherwise and my sole romance had ended elsewhere than an ivy-covered grave with low white headstone in St. Stephen’s churchyard. One night I said as much to Jules de Grandin, and the pressure of his hand on mine was good to feel.

“Bien, my friend,” he whispered, “who are we to judge the ways of heaven? The grass grows green above the lips you used to kiss—me, I do not know if she I loved is in the world or gone away. I only know that never may I stand beside her grave and look at it, for in that cloistered cemetery no man may come, and—eh, what is that? Un chaton?” Outside the window of the drawing-room, scarce heard above the shrieking of the boisterous April wind, there sounded a plaintive mew, as though some feline Wanderer begged entrance and a place before our fire.

Crossing the room, I drew aside the casement curtain, staining my eyes against the murky darkness. Almost level with my own, two eyes of glowing green looked through the pane, and another pleading miaul implored my charity.

“All right, Pussy, come in,” I invited, drawing back the sash to permit an entrance for the little waif, and through the opening jumped a plump, soft-haired angora cat, black as Erebus, jade-eyed, velvet-pawed. For a moment it stood at gaze, as though doubtful of the worthiness of my abode to house one of its distinction; then, with a satisfied little cat-chuckle, it crossed the room, furry tail waving jauntily, came to halt before the fire and curled up on the hearth rug, where, with paws tucked demurely in and tail curled about its body, it lay blinking contentedly at the leaping flames and purring softly. A saucer of warm milk further cemented cordial relations, and another member was added to our household personnel.

The little cat, on which we had bestowed the name of Eric Brighteyes, at once attached himself to Diane Wickwire, and could hardly be separated from her. Toward de Grandin and me it showed disdainful tolerance. For Nora McGinnis it had supreme contempt.

IT WAS THE TWENTY-NINTH of April, a raw, wet night when the thermometer gave the lie to the calendars assertion that spring had come. Three of us, de Grandin, Diane and I sat in the drawing-room. The girl seemed vaguely nervous and distraught, toying with her coffee cup, puffing at her cigarette, grinding out its fire against the ash-tray, then lighting another almost instantly. Finally she went to the piano and began to play. For a time she improvised softly, white fingers straying at random over the white keys; then, as though led by some subconscious urge for the solace of ecclesiastical music, she began the opening bars of Gounod’s Sanctus:

Holy, Holy, Holy,

Lord God of Hosts,

Heaven and earth are full of Thy Glory …

The music ended on a sharply dissonant note and a gasp of horrified surprise broke the echoing silence as the player lifted startled fingers from the keys. We turned toward the piano, and:

The cat, which had been contentedly curled up on the piano’s polished top, had risen and stood with arched back, bristling tail and gaping, blood-red mouth, gazing from blazing ice-green eyes at Diane with such a look of murderous hate as made the chills of sudden blind, unreasoning fear run rippling down my spine.

“Eric—Eric Brighteyes!” Diane extended a shaking hand to soothe the menacing beast, and in a moment it was its natural, gentle self again, its back still arched, but arched in seeming playfulness, rubbing its fluffy head against her fingers and purring softly with contented friendliness. “And did the horrid music hurt its eardrums? Well, Diane won’t play it any more,” the girl promised, taking the jet-black ball of fur into her arms and nursing it against her shoulder. Shortly afterward she said goodnight, and, the cat still cuddled in her arms, went up to bed.

“I hardly like the idea of her taking that brute up with her,” I told de Grandin. “It’s always seemed so kind and gentle, but—well”—I laughed uneasily—“when I saw it snarling at her just now I was heartily glad it wasn’t any bigger.”

“U’m,” returned the Frenchman, looking up from his silent study of the fire, “one wonders.”

De Grandin in the lead, we tiptoed to the upper floor and paused before the entrance to Diane’s chamber. From behind the white-enameled panels came the sound of something like a sob; then, in a halting, faltering voice:

“Amen. Evil from us deliver but temptation into not us lead, and us against trespass who those forgive we as …”

“Grand Dieu—la prière renversée!” de Grandin cried, snatching savagely at the knob and dashing back the door.

Diane Wickwire knelt beside her bed, purple-ringed hands clasped before her, tears streaming down her cheeks, while slowly, haltingly, like one wrestling with the vocables of an unfamiliar tongue, she painfully repeated the Lord’s Prayer backward.

And on the counterpane, it’s black muzzle almost forced against her face, crouched the black cat. But now its eyes were not the cool jade-green which we had known; they were red as embers of a dying fire when blown to life by some swift draft of air, and on its feline face, in hellish parody of humanity, there was a grin, a smile as cold and menacing, yet wicked and triumphant as any mediæval artist ever painted on the lips of Satan!

We stood immovable a moment, taking in the tableau with a quickening gaze of horror, then:

“Say it, Mademoiselle, say it after me—properly!” commanded Jules de Grandin, raising his right hand to sign the cross above the girl’s bowed head and beginning slowly and distinctly: “Our Father, which art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name …”

A terrifying screech, a scream of unsupportable agony, as though it had been plunged into a blazing fire, broke from the cowering cat-thing on the bed. Its reddened eyes flashed savagely, and its gaping mouth showed gleaming, knife-sharp teeth as it turned its gaze from Diane Wickwire and fixed it on de Grandin. But the Frenchman paid no heed.

“… and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen,” he finished the petition.

And Diane prayed with him. Catching her cue from his slowly spoken syllables, she repeated the prayer word by painful word, and at the end collapsed, a whimpering, flaccid thing, against the bedstead.

But the cat? It was gone. As the girl and Frenchman reached “Amen” the beast snarled savagely, gave a final spiteful hiss, and whirled about and bolted through the open window, vanishing into the night from which it had come a week before, leaving but the echo of its menacing sibilation and the memory of its dreadful transformation as mementoes of its visit.

“A spy,” he answered. “It was a sending, my old one, an emissary from those evil ones to whom we stand opposed.”

The girl was sobbing bitterly, trembling like a wind-shaken reed, but not hysterical, and a mild sedative was sufficient to enable her to sleep. Then, as we once more took our seats before the fire, de Grandin offered:

“I did not have suspicion of the cat, my friend. He seemed a natural animal, and as I like cats, I was his friend from the first. Indeed, it was not until tonight when he showed aversion for the sacred music that I first began to realize what I should have known from the beginning. He was a sending.”

“Yes, you’ve said that before,” I reminded him, “but what the devil is a ‘sending’?”

“The crystallized, physicalized desires and passions of a sorcerer or wizard,” he returned. “Somewhat—as the medium builds a semi-physical, semi-spiritual body out of that impalpability which we call psychoplasm or ectoplasm, so the skilled adept in magic can evoke a physical-seeming entity out of his wicked thoughts and send it where he will, to do his bidding and work his evil purposes. These ones against whom we are pitted, these burglar-thieves who entered Monsieur Wickwire’s house with their accursed glory hand and stole away his unnamable stone of power are no good, my friend. No, certainly. On the contrary, they are all bad. They are drunk with lust for the power which they think will come into their hands when they have stripped the wrapping off that unmentionable stone. They know also, I should say, that Wickwire—may he eat turnips and drink water throughout eternity!—had ordained his daughter for the sacrifice, had chosen her for the rôle of envelope-stripper-off for that stone, and they accordingly desire to avail themselves of her services. To that end they evoke that seeming-cat and send it here, and it did work their will—conveyed their evil suggestions to the young girl’s mind. She, who is all innocent of any knowledge of witchery or magic-mongering, was to be perverted; and right well the work was done, for tonight when she knelt to say her prayers she could not frame to pronounce them aright, but, was obliged perforce to pray witch-fashion.”

“But certainly. Of course. Those who have taken the vows of witchhood and signed their names in Satan’s book of blackness are unable to pray like Christians from that time forward; they must repeat the holy words in reverse. Mademoiselle Diane, she is no professed witch, but I greatly fear she is infected by the virus. Already she was unable to pray like others, though when I said the prayer aright, she was still able to repeat it after me. Now—”

“Is there any way we can find these scoundrels and free Diane?” I interrupted. Not for a moment did I grant his premises, but that the girl was suffering some delusion I was convinced; possibly it was long-distance hypnotic suggestion, but whatever its nature, I was determined to seek out the instigators and break the spell.

For a moment he was silent, pinching his little pointed chin between a thoughtful thumb and forefinger and gazing pensively into the fire. At length: “Yes,” he answered. “We can find the place where they lair, my friend; she will lead us to them.”

“Exactement. Tomorrow is May Eve, Witch-Night—Walpurgis-Nacht. Of all the nights which go to make the year, they are most likely to try their deviltry then. It was not for nothing that they sent their spy into this house and established rapport with Mademoiselle Diane. Oh, no. They need her in their business, and I think that all unconsciously she will go to them some time tomorrow evening. Me, I shall make it my especial duty to keep in touch with her, and where she goes, there will I go also.”

COVERTLY, BUT CAREFULLY, WE noted every movement the girl made next day. Shortly after luncheon de Grandin looked in at the consulting-room and nodded significantly. “She goes; so do I,” he whispered, and was off.

It was nearly time for the evening meal when Diane returned, and a moment after she had gone upstairs to change for dinner I heard de Grandin’s soft step in the hall.

“Name of a name,” he ejaculated, dropping into the desk-side chair and lighting a cigarette, “but it is a merry chase on which she has led me today, that one!”

“From pharmacy to pharmacy she has gone, like a hypochondriac seeking for a cure. Consider what she bought”—he checked the items off upon his fanned-out fingers—“aconitum, belladonna, solanin, mandragora officinalis. Not in any one, or even any two places did she buy these things. No, she was shrewd, she was clever, by blue, but she was subtle! Here she bought a flaçon of perfume, there a box of powder, again, a cake of scented soap, but mingled with her usual purchases would be occasionally one of these strange things which no young lady can possibly be supposed to want or need. What think you of it, my friend?”

“H’m, it sounds like some prescription from the mediæval pharmacopœia,” I returned.

“Well said, my old astute one!” he answered. “You have hit the thumb upon the nail, my Trowbridge. That is exactly what it is, a prescription from the Pharmacopœia Maleficorum—the witches’ book of recipes. Every one of those ingredients is stipulated as a necessary part of the witch’s ointment—”

“The unguent with which those about to attend a sabbat, or meeting of a coven of witches, anointed themselves. If you will stop and think a moment, you will realize that nearly every one of those ingredients is a hypnotic or sedative. One thoroughly rubbed with a concoction of them would to a great degree lose consciousness, or, at the least, a sense of true responsibility.”

“Quite yes. Today foolish people think of witches as rather amiable, sadly misunderstood and badly persecuted old females. That is quite as silly as the vapid modern belief that fairies, elves and goblins are a set of well-intentioned folk. The truth is that a witch or wizard was—and is—one who by compact with the powers of darkness attains to power not given to the ordinary man, and uses that power for malevolent purposes; for a part of the compact is that he shall love evil and hate good. Very well. Et puis? Just as your modern gunmen of America and the apaches of Paris drug themselves with cocaine in order to stifle any flickering remnant of morality and remorse before committing some crime of monstrous ruthlessness, so did—and do—the witch and wizard drug themselves with this accursed ointment that they might utterly forget the still small voice of conscience urging them to hold their hands from evil unalloyed. It was not merely magic which called for this anointing, it was practical psychology and physic which prescribed it, my friend.”

“By damn,” he hurried on, heedless of my interruption, “I think that we have congratulated ourselves all too soon. Mademoiselle Diane is not free from the wicked influence of those so evil men; she is very far from free, and tonight, unconsciously and unwillingly, perhaps, but nevertheless surely, she will anoint herself with this witch prescription, and, her body shining like something long dead and decomposing, will go to them.”

“But yes; of course. You will please remain here, as close as may be to her door, and if she leaves the house, you follow her. Me, I have important duties to perform, and I shall do them quickly. Anon I shall return, and if she has not gone by then, I shall join you in your watch. If—”

“Yes, that’s just it. Suppose she leaves while you’re away,” I broke in. “How am I to get in touch with you? How will you know where to come?”

“Call this number on the ’phone,” he answered, scratching a memorandum on a card. “Say but ‘She is gone and I go with her,’ and I shall come at once. For safety’s sake I would suggest that you take a double pocketful of rice, and scatter it along your way. I shall see the small white grains and follow hard upon your trail as though you were a hare and I a hound.”

OBEDIENT TO HIS ORDERS, I mounted to the second floor and took my station where I could see the door of Diane’s room. Half an hour or more I waited in silence, feeling decidedly foolish, yet fearing to ignore his urgent request. At length the soft creaking of hinges brought me alert as a fine pencil of light cut through the darkened hall. Walking so softly that her steps were scarcely audible, Diane Wickwire came from her room. From throat to insteps she was muffled in a purple cloak, while a veil or scarf of some dark-colored stuff was bound about her head, concealing the bright beacon of her glowing golden hair. Hoping desperately that I should not lose her in the delay, I dialed the number which de Grandin had given me and as a man’s voice challenged “Hello?” repeated the formula he had stipulated:

Then, without waiting for reply, I clashed the monophone back into its hooks, snatched up my hat and topcoat, seized a heavy blackthorn cane and crept as silently as possible down the stairs behind the girl.

She was fumbling at the front door lock as I reached the stairway’s turn, and I flattened myself against the wall, lest she descry me; then, as she let herself through the portal, I dashed down the stairs, stepped soft-footedly across the porch, and took up the pursuit.

She hastened onward through the thickening dusk, her muffled figure but a faint shade darker than the surrounding gloom, led me through one side street to another, gradually bending her way toward the old East End of town where ramshackle huts of squatters, abandoned factories, unofficial dumping-grounds and occasional tumbledown and long-vacated dwellings of the better sort disputed for possession of the neighborhood with weed-choked fields of yellow clay and partly inundated swamp land—the desolate backwash of the tide of urban growth which every city has as a memento of its early settlers’ bad judgment of the path of progress.

Where field and swamp and desolate tin-can-and-ash-strewn dumping-ground met in dreary confluence, there stood the ruins of a long-abandoned church. Immediately after the Civil War, when rising Irish immigration had populated an extensive shantytown down on the flats, a young priest, more ambitious than practical, had planted a Catholic parish, built a brick chapel with funds advanced by sympathetic co-religionists from the richer part of town, and attempted to minister to the spiritual needs of the newcomers. But prosperity had depopulated the mean dwellings of his flock who, offered jobs on the railway or police force, or employment in the mills then being built on the other side of town, had moved their humble household gods to new locations, leaving him a shepherd without sheep. Soon he, too, had gone and the church stood vacant for two-score years or more, time and weather and ruthless vandalism taking toll of it till now it stood amid the desolation which surrounded it like a lich amid a company of sprawling skeletons, its windows broken out, its doors unhinged, its roof decayed and fallen in, naught but its crumbling walls and topless spire remaining to bear witness that it once had been a house of prayer.

The final grains of rice were trickling through my fingers as I paused before the barren ruin, wondering what my next move was to be. Diane had entered through the doorless portal at the building’s front, and the darkness of the black interior had swallowed her completely. I had a box of matches in my pocket, but they, I knew, would scarcely give me light enough to find my way about the ruined building. The floors were broken in a dozen places, I was sure, and where they were not actually displaced they were certain to be so weakened with decay that to step on them would be courting swift disaster. I had no wish to break a leg and spend the night, and perhaps the next day and the next, in an abandoned ruin where the chances were that anyone responding to my cries for help would only come to knock me on the head and rob me.

But there was no way out but forward. I had promised Jules de Grandin that I’d keep Diane in sight, and so, with a sigh which was half a prayer to the God of Foolish Men, I grasped my stick more firmly and stepped across the threshold of the old, abandoned church.

Stygian darkness closed about me as waters close above the head of one who dives, and like foul, greasy water, so it seemed to me, the darkness pressed upon me, clogging eyes and nose and throat, leaving only the sense of hearing—and of apprehension—unimpaired. The wind soughed dolefully through the broken arches of the nave and whistled with a sort of mocking ululation among the rotted cross-beams of the transept. Drops of moisture accumulated on the studdings of the broken roof fell dismally from time to time. The choir and sanctuary were invisible, but I realized they must be at the farther end of the building, and set a cautious foot forward, but drew it quickly back, for only empty air responded to the pressure of my probing boot. “Where was the girl? Had she fallen through an opening in the floor, to be precipitated on the rubble in the basement?” I asked myself.

I struck a match and held the little torch aloft, its feeble light barely staining the surrounding blackness with the faintest touch of orange, then gasped involuntarily.

Just for a second, as the match-head kindled into flame, I saw a vision. Vision, perhaps, is not the word for it; rather, it was like one of those phosphenes or subjective sensations of light which we experience when we press our fingers on our lowered eyelids, not quite perceived, vague, dancing and elusive, yet, somehow, definitely felt. The molding beams and uprights of the church, long denuded of their pristine coat of paint and plaster, seemed to put on new habiliments, or to have been mysteriously metamorphosed; the bare brick walls were sheathed in stone, and I was gazing down a long and narrow colonnaded corridor, agleam with glowing torches, which terminated in a broad, low flight of steps leading to a marble platform. A giant statue dominated all, a figure hewn from stone and representing a tall and bearded being with high, virgin female breasts, clothed below the waist in woman’s robes, a scepter tipped with an acornlike ornament in the right hand, a new-born infant cradled in the crook of the left elbow. Music, not heard, but rather felt, filled the air until the senses swooned beneath its overpowering pressure, and a line of girls, birth-nude, save for the veilings of their long and flowing hair, entered from the right and left, formed twos and stepped with measured, mincing tread in the direction of the statue. With them walked shaven-headed priests in female garb, their weak and beardless faces smirking evilly.

Brow-down upon the tessellated pavement dropped the maiden priestesses, their hands, palms forward, clasped above their heads while they beat their foreheads softly on the floor and the eunuch priests stood by impatiently.

And now the groveling women rose and formed a circle where they stood, hands crossed above their breasts, eyes cast demurely down, and four shaven-pated priests, came marching in, a gilded litter on their shoulders. On it, garlanded in flowers, but otherwise unclothed, lay a young girl, eyes closed, hands clasped as if in prayer, slim ankles crossed. They put the litter on the floor before the statue of the monstrous hermaphroditic god-thing; the circling maidens clustered round; a priest picked up a golden knife and touched the supine girl upon the insteps. There was neither fear nor apprehension on the face of her upon the litter, but rather an expression of ecstatic longing and anticipation as she uncrossed her feet. The flaccid-faced, emasculated priest leaned over her, gloating …

As quickly as it came the vision vanished. A drop of gelid moisture fell from a rafter overhead, extinguishing the quivering flame of my match, and once more I stood in the abandoned church, my head whirling, my senses all but gone, as I realized that through some awful power of suggestion I had seen a tableau of the worship of the great All-Mother, the initiation of a virgin priestess to the ranks of those love-slaves who served the worshippers of the goddess of fertility, Diana, Milidath, Astarte, Cobar or by whatever name men knew her in differing times and places.

But there was naught of vision in the flickering lights which now showed in the ruined sanctuary-place. Those spots of luminance were torches in the hands of living, mortal men, men who moved soft-footedly across the broken floor and set up certain things—a tripod with a brazen bowl upon its top, a row of tiny brazen lamps which flickered weakly in the darkness, as though they had been votive lamps before a Christian altar. And by their faint illumination I saw an odd-appearing thing stretched east and west upon the spot where the tabernacle had been housed, a gray-white, leprous-looking thing which might have been a sheeted corpse or lichened tombstone, and before it the torch-bearers made low obeisance, genuflecting deeply, and the murmur of their chant rose above the whispering reproaches of the wind.

It was an obscene invocation. Although I could not understand the words, or even classify the language which was used, I felt that there was something wrong about it. It was something like a phonographic record played in reverse. Syllables which I knew instinctively should be sonorously noble were oddly turned and twisted in pronunciation … “diuq sirairolg.” With a start I found the key. It was Latin—spoke backward. They were intoning the fifty-second Psalm: “Quid gloriaris … why boastest thou thyself … whereas the goodness of God endureth yet daily?”

A stench, as of burning offal, stole through the building as the incense pot upon the tripod began to belch black smoke into the air.

And now another voice was chanting. A woman’s rich contralto. “Oitanimulli sunimod …” I strained my ears and bent my brows in concentration, and at last I had the key. It was the twenty-seventh Psalm recited in reverse Latin: “The Lord is my light and my salvation …”

From the shadows Diane Wickwire came, straight and supple as a willow wand, unclothed as for the bath, but smeared from soles to hair-line with some luminous concoction, so that her slim, nude form stood out against the blackness like a spirit out of Purgatory visiting the earth with the incandescence of the purging fires still clinging to it.

Silently, on soft-soled naked feet, she stepped across the long-deserted sanctuary and passed before the object lying there. And as her voice mingled with the chanting of the men I seemed to see a monstrous form take shape against the darkness. A towering, obscene, freakish form, bearded like a hero of the Odyssey, its pectoral region thick-hung with multiple mammae, its nether limbs encased in a man’s chiton, a lingam-headed scepter and a child held in its hands.

I shuddered. A chill not of the storm-swept night, but colder than any physical cold, seemed creeping through the air, as the ghostly, half-defined form seemed taking solidarity from the empty atmosphere. Diane Wickwire paused a moment, then stepped forward, a silver hammer gleaming in the lambent light rays of the little brazen lamps.

But suddenly, like a draft of clear, fresh mountain breeze cutting through the thick, mephitic vapors of swamp, there came another sound. Out of the darkness it came, yet not long was it in darkness, for, his face picked out by candlelight, a priest arrayed in full canonicals stepped from the shadows, while beside him, clothed in cassock and surplice, a lighted taper in his hand, walked Jules de Grandin.

They were intoning the office of exorcism. “Remember not, Lord, our offenses nor the offenses of our forefathers, neither take Thou vengeance of our sins….”

As though struck dumb by the singing of the holy chant, the evocators ceased their sacrilegious intonation and stared amazed as de Grandin and the cleric approacbed. Abreast of them, the priest raised the aspergillum which be bore and sprinkled holy water on the men, the woman and the object of their veneration.

The result was cataclysmic. Out went the light of every brazen lamp, vanished was the hovering horror from the air above the stone, the luminance on Diane’s body faded as though wiped away, and from the sky’s dark vault there came the rushing of a mighty wind.

It shook the ancient ruined church, broke joists and timbers from their places, toppled tattered edges of brick walls into the darkened body of the rotting pile. I felt the floor swaying underneath my feet, heard a woman’s wild, despairing scream, and the choking, suffocated roar of something in death-agony, as though a monster strangled in its blood; then:

“Trowbridge, mon brave; Trowbridge, mon cher, do you survive? Are you still breathing?” I heard de Grandin’s hail, as though from a great distance.

I sat up gingerly, his arm behind my shoulders. “Yes, I think so,” I answered doubtfully. “What was it, an earthquake?”

“It might have been coincidence—though I do not think it was—but a great wind came from nowhere and completed the destruction which time began. That ruined church will never more give sanctuary to wanderers of the night. It is only debris, now.”

“She is yonder,” he responded, nodding toward an indistinct figure lying on the ground a little distance off. “She is still unconscious, and I think her arm is broken, but otherwise she is quite well. Can you stand?”

With his assistance I rose and took a few tottering steps, then, my strength returning, helped him lift the swooning girl and bear her to a decrepit Ford which was parked in the muddy apology for a road beside the marshy field. “Mon Père,” de Grandin introduced, “this is the good physician, Doctor Trowbridge, of whom I told you, he who led us to this place. Friend Trowbridge, this is Father Ribet of the French Mission, without whom we should—eh bien, who can say what we should have done?”

The priest, who, like most members of his calling, drove well but furiously, took us home, but declined to stay for refreshment, saying he had much to do the next day.

We put Diane to bed, her fractured arm carefully set and bandaged. De Grandin sponged her with a Turkish cloth, drying her as deftly as any trained hospital nurse could have done; then, when we’d put her night-clothes on her and tucked her in between the sheets, he bore the basin of bath-water to the sink, poured it out and followed it with a liberal libation of carbolic antiseptic. “See can you withstand that, vile essence of the old one?” he demanded as the strong scent of phenol filled the room.

“WELL, I’M LISTENING,” I informed him as we lighted our cigars. “What’s the explanation, if any?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Who can say?” he answered. “You know from what I told you that Mademoiselle Diane prepared to go to them; from what you did observe yourself, you know she went.

“To meet their magic with a stronger counter-agent, I had recourse to the good Père Ribet. He is a Frenchman, therefore he was sympathetic when I laid the case before him, and readily agreed to go with me and perform an exorcism of the evil spirit which possessed our dear Diane and was ruled by those vile miscreants. It was his number which I bade you call, and fast we followed on your message, tracing you by the trail of rice you left and making ready to perform our office when all was ready. We waited till the last safe minute; then, while they were chanting their so blasphemous inverted Psalms, we broke in on them and—”

“What was that awful, monstrous thing I saw forming in the air just before you and Father Ribet came in?” I interrupted.

“Tiens, who can say?” he answered with another shrug. “Some have called it one thing, some another. Me, I think it was the visible embodiment of the evil thing which man worshipped in the olden days and called the Mother Principle. These things, you know, my friend, were really demons, but their strength was great, for they drew form and substance from the throngs which worshipped them. But demons they were and are, and so are subject to the rite of exorcism, and accordingly, when good Père Ribet did sprinkle—”

“D’ye mean you actually believe a few phrases of ecclesiastical Latin and a few drops of holy water could dissipate that dreadful thing?” I asked incredulously.

He puffed slowly at his cigar; then: “Have it this way, if you prefer,” he answered. “The power of evil which this thing we call the Magna Mater for want of a better name possesses comes from her—or its—worshippers. Generation after superstitious generation of men worshipped it, pouring out daily praise and prayer to it, believing in it. Thereby they built up a very great psychological power, a very exceedingly great power, indeed; make no doubt about that.

“But the olden gods died when Christianity came. Their worshippers fell off; they were weakened for very lack of psychic nourishment. Christianity, the new virile faith, upon the other hand, grew strong apace. The office of exorcism was developed by the time-honored method of trial and error, and finally it was perfected. Certain words—certain sounds, if you prefer—pronounced in certain ways, produced certain ascertainable effects, precisely as a note played upon a violin produces a responsive note from a piano. You have the physical explanation of that? Good; this is a spiritual analogy. Besides, generations of faithful Christians have believed, firmly believed, that exorcism is effective. Voilà; it is, therefore, effective. A psychological force of invincible potency has been built up for it.

“And so, when Père Ribet exorcised the demon goddess in that old and ruined church tonight—tiens, you saw what happened.”

“One wonders,” he responded. “Their bodies I can vouch for. They are broken and buried under tons of fallen masonry. Tomorrow the police emergency squad will dig them out, and speculation as to who they were, and how they met their fate, will be a nine days’ wonder in the newspapers.”

“Crushed, my friend. Utterly crushed and broken. Père Ribet and I beheld it, smashed into a dozen fragments. It was all clay, not clay surrounding a meteorite, as the poor, deluded Wickwire believed. Also—”

“But look here, man,” I broke in. “This is all the most fantastic lot of balderdash I’ve ever heard. D’ye think I’m satisfied with any such explanation as this? I’m willing to concede part of it, of course, but when it comes to all that stuff about the Magna Mater and—”

“Ah hah,” he cut me off, “as for those explanations, they satisfy me no more than they do you. There is no explanation for these happenings which will meet a scientific or even logical analysis, my friend. Let us not be too greatly concerned with whys and wherefores. The hour grows late and I grow very thirsty. Come, let us take a drink and go to bed.”