THE BRIDE OF THE PEACOCK

Originally published in Weird Tales, August 1932.

“Mademoiselle,” said Pierre d’Artois after a moment’s reflection, “there is really no reason for your being alarmed at repeatedly dreaming that you are opening a grave. After all, a dream…”

“Monsieur,” she demanded, “does one in a dream break one’s fingernails? Just look!”

She thrust her hands, fingers extended, squarely before our eyes. The nails were ragged and broken, and beneath them was a distinct trace of verdigris.

“I left them just as they were this morning, verdigris and all, to show you how I’ve been pawing at that door again. My new slippers and gown were torn, and soiled with green mold from kneeling before it. It’s driving me mad!”

In her eyes was a terrible, haunted look that made them a star-less, somber midnight.

Pierre d’Artois studied first the slim white fingers with their marred nails, and then the dark, surpassing loveliness of Diane Livaudais. “But where do you walk?”

She shrugged her faultless shoulders, and made a despairing gesture of the hand.

“If I only knew! But I don’t. First there was someone talking to me in my sleep. Though I couldn’t ever recollect, exactly, what the voice said to me, I always had the impression when I awoke that there was a grave that I was to open. And somehow I felt that it was Etienne who called me. You know, Monsieur d’Artois. I was very fond of Etienne, and living in that house he gave me, it was only natural that I’d have him on my mind.”

“When,” queried Pierre, “did Etienne give you that house on Rue Lachepaillet?”

“It’s over two years ago. 1928. Several months after he disappeared, I received a letter from him, from Marrakesh, saying that he was seriously wounded, and that if he died, he wanted me to live in his house on Rue Lachepaillet. Then, a month or so later, I learned that he was dead. Just a clipping from a paper in Marrakesh—a French newspaper, you understand—and a note in Arabic, which I had Doctor Delaronde translate. It confirmed the clipping, saying that Etienne’s last words had been that he wanted me to have his house in Bayonne and the personal effects in it.

“So,” she continued, “living in that legacy, and missing him terribly, I would easily dream of him, and wake with the sense of having heard his voice. I felt his presence, as though he were seeking to speak some final thought that his friend had not included in that scrap of Arabic script.”

“By the way, have you those bits of paper?”

And then, as Mademoiselle Livaudais took them from her handbag, d’Artois continued, “The voice became more insistent?”

“Yes. Though it wasn’t really a voice. I would awake with the feeling that someone had given an order. An overpowering will forcing me to some vague task I couldn’t quite remember except for somehow associating it always with a grave. A task I couldn’t accomplish and couldn’t evade.”

“And always Etienne’s presence?”

“Yes and no,” she answered. “I don’t know. An oppressing confusion. A dominant, crushing will. Not like Etienne at all. He was domineering—you may have known him—but not in that remorseless way. He loved me. Almost as much as I loved him. But this is relentless, inhuman. Yet I sense Etienne in it.

“And…” She again extended her fingers. “This proves that just last night I was trying to open the door of a vault. As on so many other nights. Gown tattered. Slippers soiled. Verdigris under my nails. I’m weary. Weary to death.”

“You should have seen me sooner.”

“It was so outrageous. So I kept it to myself. But now I want you to find out where I am going, and why, before I lose my mind entirely.”

Pierre rose and from a drawer in his desk took a tiny vial, a part of whose amber-colored contents he poured into a small, stemmed glass.

“Drink,” he suggested. “It is a sedative. It will make you relax. You must relax. Look me full in the eye…better yet, look intently at the ring on my finger…then think of nothing at all…”

I noted then that Pierre had seated his visitor so that she faced a strong, glaring light.

“You are weary from trying to remember… Cease trying, and it will come to you…”

Pierre’s voice was droning monotonously. “Don’t try to remember…you are weary…weary…weary of trying…think of nothing…nothing…nothing at all,” he persisted in soporific accents.

Her eyes were staring fixedly at the stone that flamed and pulsed dazzlingly on Pierre’s hand. I’d never known Pierre to wear a diamond of any kind, much less that obtrusive, massive clot of fire.

Her lips half parted, and her breath came very slowly and rhythmically in cadence to Pierre’s measured, purring syllables.

She was in a trance, induced by a drop of a hypnotic, and Pierre’s compelling will.

Again he spoke, still with that murmuring monotony. “You are sleeping…soundly…deeply…so deeply that you won’t waken until I call you… Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she murmured, “I won’t awaken…until…you call.”

Then Pierre spoke in a voice of command. “It is now last night. The voice is speaking. Repeat it to me!”

Pierre leaned forward. His long fingers gripped the carved arms of his chair. Perspiration cropped out on his brow, now cleft with a saber-slash of a frown. Diane stirred uneasily, made a gesture of protest.

“You will speak and tell me. I command and you must obey!” he said solemnly and deeply as the chanted ritual of a high priest.

I myself was ready to leap or yell from the terrific tension that moment by moment had been becoming more and more acute. I sensed a Power that was hammering at Pierre through Diane’s resistance.

Then Pierre prevailed. The tension eased. She spoke in painfully clear-cut mechanical syllables: and in Persian! Not the colloquial Persian of which I knew a smattering, but the rich language of the old days.

“Now, answer,” demanded Pierre, “as you have been answering.”

“Etienne,” she began in French, but as mechanical as before, “I can’t find the spring. But I’ll return tomorrow night and try again… I can’t understand what you are saying…the drums are too loud, and they don’t want me to understand…”

Etienne, Marquis de la Tour de Maracq, not dead in far-off Morocco, in some obscure tomb beyond the red walls of Marrakesh, but buried in one of the crypts that honeycomb the foundations of Bayonne. And she spent her nights answering him, and seeking him.

“But it couldn’t be. The dead don’t chant from their graves. It must be the hysteria of a woman mourning a dead lover,” I insisted to myself as I heard those outrageous words.

And then I looked at Pierre. My insistence mocked me. He trembled violently. His lips moved soundlessly, and he swayed slightly. He was exerting his supreme effort; but not another word could he drag from Diane. Pierre was beaten to a standstill.

He relaxed, and sighed deeply.

“Never to be too much damned revenant, I will meet you face-to-face, and you will speak to me!” he exclaimed.

He smiled that grim cold smile I once saw on his face as he crossed blades one unforgotten night with one who on that night ceased to be the most deadly swordsman in France.

Pierre struck his hands sharply together. “Enough! Awaken!” he ordered.

And, as Diane started, and blinked, and looked confusedly about her: “Tell me, mademoiselle, do you understand Persian?”

“Of course not,” replied Diane. “But why?”

“You spoke Persian when I asked you to repeat…”

“Oh, did I say anything?”

“Mais, certainement! I commanded, and you spoke. And half the population of hell’s backyard fought to break my control. But you spoke. Listen!”

Pierre repeated Diane’s words.

“Did I say that?” she demanded incredulously.

“Indeed you did, mademoiselle,” I assured her.

“Why, whoever heard of such a thing?”

“I, for one,” affirmed Pierre. “An illiterate servant girl, delirious from fever, chanted ancient Hebraic, to the mystification of the doctors. It developed, finally, that she had once lived with the family of a German savant, and used to hear him reciting Hebraic texts: and this was impressed upon her subconscious mind, which was released in her delirium.

“Similarly someone has spoken Persian, either to your ear or to your mind at some time. Tell me, did you ever hear this, in any language?”

And Pierre recited:

“When I am dead, open my grave and see

The smoke that curls about thy feet;

In my dead heart the fire still burns for thee:

Yea, the smoke rises from my winding sheet.”

Diane shuddered. “Beautiful. But ghastly!”

As for me, I had heard and often admired that macabre Persian conceit. Yet this time an evil lurked in the amorous fancy that Hafiz chanted to some girl in a garden of Shiraz nine hundred years ago.

“And you replied, ‘I can’t find the spring.’ You said that the drums kept you from understanding. You did well to come to me. I will fight this to a finish, its or mine.”

“Do you really think it’s Etienne calling from his grave?”

Diane asked this question in a hesitant voice, abashed at her outlandish query.

“Mademoiselle,” replied Pierre, “I am an old man, and I am none too positive about the impossibility of anything. Yet if he is speaking from Satan’s throne room I will find him and silence him, for no honest lover would haunt you this way.”

Pierre rang for his man, Raoul.

“My good friend, Landon, will join me in this campaign. We will be your guardians. Raoul will drive you home. And this evening we may see you, Landon and I!”

Diane graciously offered her hand. “Monsieur d’Artois, and you, Monsieur Landon, have restored my courage. I feel ever so much better. And do call tonight if you wish. À bientôt!”

With a wave of her hand, and a smile for the moment free from the shadow of the grave, she followed Raoul to the Issotta coupe.

“Pierre,” I said as the door clicked behind Diane, “when she was in that trance, you might have commanded her to ignore the voice.”

“Not at all! That would be like putting a plaster cast over an ulcer. I must rather find and exterminate the cause of this outrageous thing that talks to her and makes her sleep a wandering nightmare. Never think that she told us more than a fraction of what she does and hears and says in her sleep. Something fought me face-to-face as I commanded her to speak: and as she spoke, I suddenly lost control.”

“The devil you say! I felt it myself… Do you believe…”

“Anything is possible in Bayonne,” replied Pierre. “Anything may thunder and whisper from the ancient night of the passages and labyrinths that undermine Bayonne. Bayonne was founded by the Romans, whose legionaries worshipped Mithra and Cybele in subterranean crypts. The Saracens, the Spanish, the French, the Bearnais have made this the playground of armies, and have enriched the earth with dead. This is all soil well raked over, and alive with strange seeds. Apostate priests have chanted the terrible foulness of the Black Mass, and mediaeval necromancers and thaumaturgists have pursued their crafts in those unremembered red passages and vaults.

“Sometimes the Church hounded them to the surface, and roasted them at the stake, good and evil alike: but more remained intact than ever were unearthed.

“I myself once saw a vault opened up when builders excavated for the foundation of a house, many years ago…”

Pierre shuddered.

“It is not so much what I saw as the inferences I was compelled to draw. Now from behind some brazen gate a Presence commands Diane to enter. Her dead lover calls her to God knows what terrible festival among the dead. Or Something impersonates the dead Marquis, for some purpose beyond imagining, some lingering trace of an ancient force that has come to life and strengthened itself through feeding on her susceptible mind.

“And now please dispense with my company while I study various things. Notably this clipping, and this scrap of a note. Those Partagas cigars are at your elbow, and there is a decanter of Armagnac.”

So saying, Pierre left me to my own resources.

I prowled about his study, peering at the titles of books ranged row after row on their shelves; scrutinizing the clustered scimitars, ripple-edged kreeses, keen tulwars, and the sheaves of lances and assegais standing in a corner. And here and there were epees, with their bell guards and slim, three-cornered blades: each a trophy of some encounter of Pierre’s younger days, when the duel was not the comic opera affair it is today in 193—

Raoul entered, presented Pierre’s compliments, and left a tray of cold meats, cheese, and a bottle of thin, dry wine. Strange, how a fellow that keeps such excellent brandy would have such terrible sour wine! But it wasn’t so bad…and neither was Bayonne…with a quiet month or so the most of which was to be devoted to acting as Pierre’s second in fencing with a dead marquis who declaimed the Diwan of Hafiz from his grave in Marrakesh. But I didn’t blame the marquis. That girl would make any one turn over in his grave!

And then Pierre reappeared. “I see that you have survived those sandwiches a l’americain which Raoul constructed. Good! But I have a task for you.

“Lead on,” I replied.

“Alors, my good Raoul will drive you to Mademoiselle Diane’s house, where you will take your post at the door of her bedroom. You will stand watch, and if she walks in her sleep, follow her, even to the fuming hinges of hell’s back door, but by no means wake her. And here,” he continued, “is a pistol and a clip of cartridges, and a flashlight.”

I thrust the Luger into my hip-pocket, tested the flashlight and found it in good order. “It seems,” I commented, “that we are not dealing entirely with dead men muttering in their graves.”

“From what I learned—possibly I should say, inferred—while you were absorbing the most of that decanter of Armagnac,” replied Pierre, “there is something in what you say. In the meanwhile, keep your mind strictly on your work, and do not be too free with that pistol. I will be on hand later to relive you, and I prefer not to have you riddle me in error.”

“Shall we leave the door open?”

“No,” answered Pierre, “I have a most accomplished pass key. A tantot!”

And Pierre returned to his holy of holies to answer the telephone as I followed Raoul to the Isotta.

“Monsieur Landon,” greeted the lovely Livaudais as she admitted me, “you don’t know how relieved I am that Monsieur d’Artois has taken things in hand. But what is he doing this evening?”

“Lord alone knows, beyond busily studying that clipping and that note from the marquis’ unknown friend in Morocco. And his telephone rang continually. He’s hot on the trail of something, or he wouldn’t have sent me to stand guard at your door tonight.”

“Good God! Am I then in such danger?”

“By no means. I am here merely to follow you if you wander tonight.”

“Splendid. Then I shall bid you goodnight. Surely you’ll forgive my being such an anything but gracious hostess? You know, it’s been a trying day. There on the table is a decanter of Grenache, and cigarettes.”

“Perhaps you might show me the switches that control the lights,” I suggested. “I prefer to watch in the dark, but I may need light in a hurry.”

After showing me the switch, Mademoiselle Livaudais bade me goodnight. I selected the most uncomfortable chair in the living-room: not such a difficult task, with that array of somber teak, carved by artisans who, since they sat cross-legged on the floor, had no conception of comfort as applied to chairs—and set it near the bedroom door. Then I took a length of heavy thread I’d brought for that purpose, and tied one end of it to the doorknob and the other to a heavy bronze ashtray which I set on a chair at the other side of the door. Thus if she opened the door, and caught me napping, the fall of the ashtray would arouse me. Not that I expected to doze; but rather that I didn’t want to take any chances.

I settled down to watch. It wasn’t like military sentry duty, where a moment of drowsiness might cost the lives of an entire outpost. There was nothing to do but sit there in that exquisitely carved teak straitjacket, with my reflections for company.

And I wasn’t the least bit drowsy. My mission effectively prevented that. I wondered if the dead marquis materialized and led her to a hidden panel, or called from the street, or tapped on her window-pane. The whole thing was outrageous: so much so that the marquis murmuring in his grave occupied a much smaller place in my thoughts than this exceedingly lovely Diane.

In fact, I began to think with decided disapproval of the marquis; although, to be honest about it, he was handicapped, in a way.

And thus and thus…

Then I wondered at the sweetness that subtly pervaded the room. Strange I hadn’t noticed it before. Well, those Partagas cigars of Pierre’s had been heavy enough to dull my sense of smell for a while. Certainly I’d not notice that delicate perfume. Like the ghost of incense. The very ashes of an odor.

I’m sure I wasn’t asleep, and hadn’t been even for a moment of that watch. And yet as I look back at it all, I couldn’t have been awake.

Something was emerging from the darkness of Diane’s living room. I sat there, contemplating the shadow that materialized from the shadows, as though of all things in the world there was nothing more commonplace than that the blackness should coalesce into a shape.

I regarded with mild curiosity the silvery gleam that deliberately drew closer. I wondered what mummery was in progress. It might of course be a knife. Perhaps I should really shift a bit to one side, or else it would pin me to the back of my chair. It came nearer…

Then something within me snapped. I knew that I had been sleeping, with my eyes open and fully conscious. With a terrific start I moved, just in time to evade the stroke.

The intruder instinctively sought for an instant to wrench his dagger free from the unyielding hardwood which held it fast: so that I had him well by the throat before he abandoned his weapon and met me hand to hand.

He was lean as a serpent and long-armed as an ape. But I eluded his clutch, and drove a fast one to his jaw that sent him reeling back into the darkness. It shook him. It should have laid him out cold. But he came back for more.

As he recovered and closed in, a fresh poniard in hand, I drew my pistol and fired.

I saw him sag in the middle and crumple, riddled by that hail of lead at close range; saw another shape emerge from the darkness at my left. But before I could shift my fire, there was a heavy impact behind my ear: and then I saw nothing at all save abysmal blackness shot with livid streaks and dazzling flashes.

“Where’s Pierre?” was my last thought as I met the floor, still clutching the pistol.

* * * *

I don’t know how long I was out. My head was spinning crazily as I opened my eyes and saw Pierre regarding me with mingled solicitude and amusement.

“So,” he railed, “I leave you on guard and here I find you, flat on your face. No matter! Your stout skull seems none the worse.”

“But what happened to the corpse?” queried d’Artois, as I clambered to my feet and dropped into a chair.

“What corpse?”

He indicated the pistol lying on the floor where it had slipped from my fingers when my grip had relaxed, and pointed at the empty cartridge-cases glittering on the rug.

“Someone…how would you say it?…was polished off. You never miss.”

Flattering, but true.

That dark splash that stained the polished hardwood floor at the edge of the rug did indicate some one seriously riddled.

It all came back to me.

“They crept up on me. I was asleep with my eyes open. I came to in the nick of time. And number two slugged me just as I accounted for number one.”

I wrenched the poniard from the chair.

“Lucky I snapped out of it,” I continued. “Good Lord, but I can’t understand how I watched that fellow slip up on me without my moving until it was almost too late. I wonder if it could have been that perfume…”

“What perfume?” queried Pierre.

I sniffed, twice, thrice. “Be damned, Pierre, but it’s gone. That must have been it.”

But d’Artois was looking at the poniard, and had nothing to say about vanished doors. “Mais regardez donc! Here! Take the slant!”

He pointed at the inlay in delicate hair-lines of pale gold that decorated the slim, curved blade.

“Very pretty job of inlaying,” I admitted. “Never saw a peacock more beautifully drawn.”

“Imbecile!” fumed Pierre. “So it’s only a pretty bit of engraving to you, this peacock! But it’s a wonder Mademoiselle Diane hasn’t been disturbed with all the rioting and shooting. Could she have walked out before our very eyes?”

“No. Look at that string knotted to the doorknob and the ashtray. It’s not been disturbed. She’s still asleep.”

“Nevertheless, I must look.” Pierre opened the door. “Death and damnation! She’s gone!” he exclaimed. “Walked right out before your eyes!”

Gone she was. Not through the door I had watched. And not through the windows, between whose bars nothing larger than a cat could have crept.

“No, and not up the chimney,” announced Pierre. “Then where?”

“Through the floor or the wall, perhaps,” I hinted.

D’Artois took me at my word. On hands and knees he explored the floor and the tiled hearth, poking and thrusting about with the blade of his penknife, seeking for some trace of a catch or spring which would release a trapdoor or sliding panel. And then he devoted his attention to the paneled walls; but in vain. If there was any secret exit, secret indeed it was.

But Pierre was by no means discouraged. “Let this rest for the moment,” he directed, “and we will search the rest of the apartment.”

“But,” I protested, “that isn’t finding Diane.”

“Finding Diane,” he replied, “may not be the most important thing at present. She has been carrying on her nocturnal wanderings for some time, and from each trip she has returned. It is likely that she will return this time also.”

“How about trailing those assassins that nearly polished me off?”

“Eminently sensible,” admitted d’Artois. “If we could follow them the trail would doubtless lead to the source of the deviltry. Your letting moonlight through one of them must have been most disconcerting. Look! They left through the door, and none too deliberately.”

“But this will have to be investigated by daylight,” he continued. “And that would advertise our moves to the enemy. Finally, I suspect that the trail would be lost very soon after it is picked up in the street. Let us rather inspect this house of the dead marquis.”

And while Pierre did the serious inspecting, I prowled about, admiring the antique Feraghan carpet that shimmered silkily under my feet, the floor lamp of saw-pierced damascene brasswork, the oddly carved teak statuettes from Tibet, curious bits of jade and lacquer: and on the mantel was a silver peacock with outspread fan.

“Look!” exclaimed Pierre, interrupting my contemplation of the rare and strange adornments of the room. “Behold! Unusual, n’est-ce pas?”

I took the book he offered me, thumbed its pages. “What’s so unusual about that? Looks like Arabic or Persian… Good God, Pierre, it’s bound…damned if it isn’t! Human skin!”

“I saw that also. But I referred to the title.”

“But that’s the back cover.”

“Que voulez-vous? Where would you have it in such language? But look at the title itself.”

“You forget that I can’t read this scratching,” I reminded Pierre. “Try it yourself.”

“Pardon! Well then, it is entitled, Kitab ul Aswad.”

“Of course. The Black Book. Manifestly appropriate. Title matches the color of the cover. Now this one,” I continued, indicating a red-bound American best seller, “should be called Kitab ul Abbmar.”

“Idiot!” growled Pierre. “Have you ever heard of THE Black Book?”

And to forestall any further irrelevant replies, Pierre opened the book and read aloud in sonorous Arabic:

“Which is to say,” he translated, knowing that the old, literary Arabic is too much for any but a scholar, “God created of fire seven bright spirits, even as a man lights seven tapers one after the other: and the chief of these was Malik Tawus, to whom he gave the dominion of the world and all that therein is: so that God sleeps dreamlessly while his viceroy rules as seemeth good to him.”

“Odd enough,” I admitted, “but what of it? Except that the evening is superabundant with peacocks. First they try to ream me out with a blade inlaid with a peacock; and then I stand here, admiring the silver image of a peacock on the mantel, and now you read me of Malik Tawus. Say, now, was that malik or malaak?”

“Malik,” replied Pierre. “Although he has been called Malaak as well.”

“And you end,” I resumed, “by favoring me with a rich passage about the King, Lord, or Angel Peacock, according as the scribe splashed his reed or the tradition garbled the story…”

“I heard something in her room,” Pierre interrupted. And Pierre, who had preceded me, halted and whirled to face me at Diane’s door. “She has returned. While we babbled of black books.”

“Impossible!”

“Then take a look,” challenged Pierre.

I looked, and I saw.

Diane lay curled up in her great canopied bed, sound asleep. On her feet were satin boudoir slippers, torn and scarred and soiled.

“She went, and she returned, before our eyes.”

And then Diane spoke: but not to us.

“I found the spring, Etienne. But I couldn’t move the panel. I’ll return tomorrow night…”

“Good Lord, it’s got her!”

“Don’t wake her,” commanded Pierre. “Let her sleep. We’ve been outmaneuvered. Alors, we will retire in confusion, get ourselves some sleep, and tomorrow—we shall see what we shall see.”

* * * *

After a later breakfast, Pierre and I drove across the river to the Third Guard’s Cemetery, turned back to town and then through the Mousserole Gate, across the drawbridge, and into the hills. D’Artois apparently was idling away his time; but having seen him open and smoke his way through the second pack of Bastos, which smelled no less of burning rags than the first pack, I knew that he was far from loafing. Whenever we passed the obsolete gun emplacements, casemates, or lunettes in the surrounding hills, Pierre would slow up, stare a moment, refer to a sketch, mutter to himself, and step on the gas again.

“Vauban built that…and that also was erected by Vauban…” was the sum of his comments.

We were retracing our course. The jovial, bearded and mitered statue of Cardinal Lavigerie welcomed us to Place de Theatre.

“Doubtless we should pause for a drink.”

“The anis del oso is not so bad,” I seconded.

But in vain.

Pierre drew away from the curb, and thence to the left, skirting the park that lies outside the walls and moat on the side toward the Biarritz road. Again to the left, turning our backs to Biarritz, we headed into Porte d’Espagne and the old guard house, driving across the causeway that at this point blocks the moat.

“Vauban, it seems, built the whole works,” I remarked. And then, “Hello! What’s this? Stop a moment…”

But d’Artois cleared the breach in the wall, utterly ignoring my desire to pause and look.

And then he spoke: “Jackass! Do you fancy that I didn’t see those several men roaming about the green between the edge of the moat and the Spring of St. Leon with surveyor’s instruments and the like? And need I impress upon you that they are by no means surveying, and that those instruments are by no means transits and levels? Alors, why need we pause and stare at those good men?”

All of which suggested that Pierre knew more about the goings on at the Spring of St. Leon than he cared to publish in the papers.

“Well, perhaps Vauban didn’t build the whole works,” I began, seeing that surveyors had been definitely dismissed. “I would imagine that we’d find the entrance somewhere near the ancient part of the city, not far from the cathedral. Possibly near that fountain…”

“Erected on the site of the castle of the Hastingues, taken by assault in the Eleventh Century by the Bayonnais,” quoted Pierre mockingly from the guide book.

I ignored the jibe, and continued, “And to find it, we’ll have to cover the ground stone by stone.”

But Pierre was taking no hints that afternoon. “Impossible!” he exclaimed. “It would take weeks. And then we’d be too late.”

“Very much what I say, mon vieux. In a word…”

Pierre’s gesture was painfully expressive.

“Well,” said I, “The whole thing sounds like a Chinese dream. All of it.”

Un reve chinois, do you say? Comment? Was it a Mongolian vision that came so close to pinning you to the back of your chair after you, an old campaigner, went to sleep with your eyes open an hour after taking your post? An Asiatic dream that you shot to ribbons when you awoke from your unaccountable sleep? We must work fast. And this time there shall be no jugglery of taking her away and returning her under our very eyes.”

“What do you propose?”

“We will both stand watch in her room.”

“After what happened last night,” I objected, “They may get both of us with some devil’s trick. Like that whiff of perfume.”

“I have considered that,” replied d’Artois. “And we will see. There was never a peacock hatched who can twice in the same way outwit Pierre d’Artois. Nor is it likely that the enemy would repeat that same device. They have too many tricks.”

* * * *

Raoul admitted us. “Monsieur,” he began, “a visitor is waiting for you in the study.”

“Magnifique! And is she handsome?”

“Mais, monsieur, he is a foreign dignitary. An emir.”

“Then offer him a drink, and assure him that in but one moment I will have the honor of greeting him.”

In Pierre’s study we found the guest, a lean, wiry fellow with a predatory nose and the keen eye of a bird of prey. A broad, seamed scar ran from his right eye to the point of his chin; and another stretched diagonally across his forehead. Strangely familiar mustaches fringed his lip. And then I remembered that during the past few days I had fancied seeing foreign faces in Bayonne, where scarcely any face is foreign. Yet those were lean and swarthy in a different manner, and were set off with mustaches whose droop and cut were decidedly outlandish. And just this afternoon I intercepted a glance that was too casual to be convincingly casual.

There was nothing after all remarkably strange about those fellows. Only—well, they didn’t wear coat and trousers with the manner of those born to our stupid costume.

“Your servant,” began our visitor after a pause that was just long enough to be as impressive as his bow, “doubtless announced me as Nureddin Zenghi, an emir from Kurdistan.”

He glanced sharply about him, stared at me for a moment, and found my presence acceptable: all this while d’Artois returned the emir’s bow with one of equal profundity and rigidity.

“But in all fairness,” he continued, picking his words with just the suggestion of an effort, “I must confess that I am somewhat more than an emir. The fact of it is that I am…”

He lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “I am the Keeper of the Sanctuary.”

“Ah… Monseigneur le…” D’Artois paused to select a suitable title. Propriety above all else, was Pierre.

“Emir, if you must be formal, Monsieur d’Artois. Although I am incognito. Extremely so, in fact.”

“A votre service, monsieur l’emir,” acknowledged Pierre, and again bowed in his inimitable fashion, which I endeavored to duplicate as he presented me.

It is difficult to bow elegantly while seeking to keep a couple of fingers near the butt of a pistol in one’s hip pocket.

“As I said,” resumed our visitor, “I am Keeper of the Sanctuary at Djeb el Ahhmar, in Kurdistan, the center of the Faith. Viceroy, so to speak, of Malik Tawus.”

Peacocks, I thought, were becoming monotonous. I thought of that dagger I had barely escaped last night, and that book in Diane’s parlor.

“Moreover,” continued the emir, “I am a friend of France.”

The emir was impressive, but not excessively coherent, I thought. But Pierre was equal to waiting without committing himself.

“All of which I appreciate and respect. But pray continue, my Lord Keeper.”

I wondered just what ax the emir wished to grind on the friendliness to France.

“Therefore,” continued the emir, “I am here to seek your aid in doing France a signal service, and at the same time overthrow a malignant impostor.”

“A pretender, I fancy, to the custody of the Sanctuary?” suggested Pierre, fencing like the master swordsman that he was, with word and steel alike.

“Precisely. And it will be very much to your interest to help me, Monsieur d’Artois. Indeed, the welfare of your protégée, Mademoiselle Diane Livaudais, is closely linked with my own success.”

Pierre essayed a feint. “You mean, monseigneur, that you will lead me to the hidden vault where Mademoiselle Diane spends her nights seeking to enter the presence that asks her to open his grave?”

The emir’s brows rose in saracenic arches. “That is interesting, of course, but most obscure,” evaded the emir. “In fact, I am by no means certain that I understand what you have in mind.

“But,” continued the emir, “this is what I have in mind: Abdul Malaak, who came from Kurdistan three years ago to seize the local sanctuary—yes, as you surely have learned from the events of the past few days, the servants of Malik Tawus gather in conclave here in Bayonne—Abdul Malaak has succeeded in using his occult science to gain control of the mind and will of your protégée, Mademoiselle Livaudais. And when his control is complete, he will use her as an outside agent to operate in his cause in France, as a spy, unearthing information from various prominent persons he will designate. She will to all intents and purposes be a charming, gifted woman, acceptable and accepted in the best circles; but in fact she will be no more than an automaton, her every thought and word dictated by Abdul Malaak, who sits in a solitarium behind the throne in the hall where the conclave meets.”

“Ah…indeed…most interesting, monsieur l’emir,” replied d’Artois. “And is it presumptuous to inquire as to the nature of Abdul Malaak’s plans?”

“By no means,” assured the emir. “I am a friend of France.”

There was a stone. Now for the ax he wished to grind thereon.

“Abdul Malaak has assembled a circle of adepts in occult science,” explained the emir. “Some from Hindustan. Others from Tibet and High Asia. Many from Kurdistan and Armenia, and Azerbaijan, the land of fire. And each a master in the science of fundamental vibration.

“To give you a crude example—though to a mind like yours, an example is scarcely needed—a company of troops on foot marching in cadence can wreck a bridge. The note of a violin string which is attuned to the fundamental vibration of a goblet will cause the goblet to shiver to fragments.”

“Precisely,” agreed d’Artois.

“And going from the physical to the mental, let one man in a theater rise and shout Fire! there will be a panic.

“Thus these adepts will concentrate in unison on whatever thought they wish to project: so that through the principle of resonance they will uncork the vast reservoir of hidden discontent with society, religion, and politics that exists in France as in every country, and in the end effect the overthrow of established rule.”

“As in Russia,” I interposed.

“Exactly,” assented the emir. “You also are a person of rare comprehension. And, to bring us up to date, I was not amazed at what happened in Spain not long ago to the Bourbons. And being a friend of France, I am here to seek your aid in thwarting this powerful engine of destruction. Single-handed, I would be hopelessly outnumbered, for while I have friends in the circle, they have been corrupted by Abdul Malaak and turned against me.”

“Very well, monsieur l’emir, I am with you, heart and soul. But tell me, is it true that the Marquis de la Tour de Maracq is dead?”

“Who says that he is dead?” countered the emir.

“It has been written,” replied Pierre.

“What is written may be history, or prophecy. Who can say?”

Score one for the emir. He didn’t know whether Pierre was for or against the marquis. He was sure of Pierre’s interest in Diane, and in friends of France.

“May I ask—and I trust again that I do not presume,” said Pierre, “—why it is that you are so anxious to thwart Abdul Mallak’s plans? I mean, you comprehend, aside from your friendship for France.”

“That is simple. Our cult is divided by a schism. There are those who seek temporal power, and those who care only for peaceful spreading of the cult of Malik Tawus, the Lord of the World. We believe that He has no need of or desire for political machinations in His behalf, and that in due course, the Lord of the Painted Fan will Himself assume the throne of the world, and exalt those who believe in Him—just as your early Christians said of the Nazarene.

“Now be pleased to give me a pencil and paper. I will make you a sketch.”

The emir hitched his chair up to Pierre’s desk.

This was a bit too good to be true. I remembered that saying about Greeks bearing gifts. The events of the past two days had likewise made me wary of altruistic Kurds. I loosened my pistol.

D’Artois caught the move from the side of his eye, and shrugged negligently.

“Start at Porte d’Espagne,” began the emir, as he traced a line. “Then…”

But he spoke no further. Something flickered through the open window the emir faced. He pitched forward, clawing at his chest. I drew and fired, then leaped to the window, and fired again, not with any hope of hitting the figure that was disappearing around the first turn of the alley just as I pressed the trigger, but at least to give him my blessing.

“Give me a hand,” said d’Artois.

The hilt of a dagger projected from the emir’s chest. He shuddered, coughed blood which joined the stain on his shirtfront.

“Porte d’Espagne…to the left…great peril…take…many…armed…men…”

He clutched the hilt of the dagger, tore open the front of his shirt, and with a final effort, snatched from about his throat a thin golden chain from which depended a tiny amulet: a silver peacock with tail fanned out and jeweled with emeralds.

Neither d’Artois nor I could understand the utterance that was cut off by another gush of blood.

“Tout fini!” exclaimed Pierre. “He offered us this when he knew he couldn’t give us even another scrap of information. This glittering fowl must be a token of admittance.”

“Draw the shades!” commanded d’Artois. “And get away from that window. Likewise, stand guard until I return. On your life, admit no one. Not any one.”

“The police?” I suggested. “I fired two shots.”

“I will handle the police. No one must know that the Keeper of the Sanctuary is dead. As long as they are in doubt, we have a weapon against them: for they thought him important enough to kill him before he could tell his story.”

As d’Artois dashed out, I barred the door after him.

I could hardly share Pierre’s optimism about the police. Here we had a stranger in the house, neatly harpooned with a knife. And what a story we’d have to tell! Someone tossed a dagger through the open window just as the Keeper of the Sanctuary was to explain where Diane wandered every night to claw at the door of a vault whose occupant commanded her to open his grave. Even an American jury would choke at a tale like that!

I picked up one of the drab little things which in France pass as magazines, and came across an article on the prevalence of murder in the United States.

“This is good,” I reflected. “Now here in law-abiding Bayonne, I sit peacefully at the door of a lady’s bedroom, and some one tries to dissect me with a nicely decorated dagger. The next day, a visitor has his conversation punctuated by a knife thrown through the window by parties unknown…”

I shifted a bit more out of range of the window, and checked up on the cartridges in the Luger.

“To crown it, I’ll get buck fever and let daylight through Raoul or Pierre when they enter. Or maybe they’ll find me here, deftly disemboweled and marked, ‘opened by mistake.’”

“Open my grave and see the smoke that curls about thy feet!…”

I was developing a marked dislike for Hafiz. That old Persian was distinctly macabre. Then this one:

“If the scent of her hair were to blow over the place where I had lain dead an hundred years, my bones would come dancing forth from their grave…”

Then I wondered how Diane’s phantom lover tied into the psychic-vibration scheme of turning France upside down. Now that I’d mulled over the felonious assaults and successful assassination, I couldn’t help but have several thoughts concerning this exceptionally lovely Diane.

The click-clack of the knocker startled me. “Aui vive?” I demanded.

“It is I. Pierre,” came the reply.

“Enter with your hands in the air.”

But I recognized the voice, and returned my pistol.

“Eh bien, she is fixed. Monsieur le Prefet was reasonable.”

Do you mean that he swallowed that wild tale?”

“Mais, certainement. Though there was of course some talk of what in your charming country one calls a lunacy commission; but in the end I prevailed.”

* * * *

That evening Pierre and I called on the lovely Livaudais.

“Mademoiselle,” began Pierre after acknowledging Diane’s greeting, “you eluded us last night. But this time we will be more vigilant.”

D’Artois deposited a large and very heavy suitcase on the floor.

“Oh, but you must be planning an extended visit, with all that luggage!” laughed Diane.

“And why not? Monsieur Landon and I keeping you under surveillance all the way around the clock, n’est-ce pas? But tell me, did we disturb you last night? Am I forgiven…”

“And so it was you that broke my cut-glass decanter and spilled wine all over the rug. But no, I didn’t hear a sound.”

“’Tis well!” exclaimed Pierre. “I would have been desolate had we awakened you. And I shall send you a new decanter, all filled with my own Oporto.”

“Monsieur d’Artois, you’re a darling. But how in the world am I to sleep tonight, with the both of you standing guard, staring at me as though I were a dodo come to life?”

“Simple enough. Take a bit of this sedative. It won’t drug you so that you won’t hear the voice.”

“Well, why not give her a heavy shot of it,” I suggested, “so that she won’t hear the voice at all, and leave that devil behind his sepulcher door chanting in vain.”

“Not at all!” objected Pierre. “She must find the way to open the door, and pass through and fulfill that which has been impressed upon her subconscious mind. Then, after she has done that, we shall land like a ton of those bricks. I, Pierre d’Artois, will land in person; and henceforth, Mademoiselle will see no tombs by night.”

Then, to Diane: “It is now passably late. Suppose that when you have arrayed yourself in…should I most appropriately say, walking-costume?…take a bit of this sedative. And then we will stand guard, we two.”

As the door of Diane’s bedroom closed, I turned to d’Artois. “Why that suitcase? It’s heavy as a locomotive.”

“That you will understand before the evening is over. I have there various things which I may need on a moment’s notice: though I can not say at what moment.

“We are fighting an organization that has infiltrated its members into every stratum of society. And by this time you have no doubt that you and I are marked and sentenced on account of our association with Diane.

“We are not only contending with enemies skilled in armed encounter, but equally gifted in psychic conflicts. Witness, for example, how this so lovely Mademoiselle Diane…”

“Taking my name in vain again?”

Diane opened the door and revealed herself in a negligee of blue silk curiously shot with gold. I wondered that Etienne hadn’t bequeathed her his chateau as well as his house in Bayonne.

“But I assure you it was complimentary,” replied Pierre. “And here is your potion.”

She accepted the glass, sampled its contents, drained it, stood there, the smile slowly fading from her features. Then she shuddered. “These engagements with the dead… I’m so glad I won’t be alone tonight… Goodnight, Messieurs!”

Vainly enough, we wished her a goodnight also, this incredible girl who could still, at times, smile.

Then d’Artois took from his suitcase a coil of flexible insulated wire, very much like the extension cord they use to increase the range of a vacuum cleaner. In addition to the lamp and reflector at one end, there was a small portable snap-switch, and a tiny globe scarcely larger than those used as Christmas tree decorations. This layout Pierre plugged in at a baseboard outlet, a convenience which is most unusual in Bayonne.

As Pierre uncoiled the wire and pulled it along the wall, I glanced again at the chair I had occupied the night before. Diane had accepted Pierre’s myth about the shattered decanter, and hadn’t noticed the scar in the back of the chair. But that one look was enough to bring out a sweat on me.

Then I thought of the hurled knife which had cut short the remarks of Nureddin.

“Mademoiselle from Bar le Duc, parlez vous…” I hummed as I fidgeted about.

“Tais-toi, imbecile!” snapped d’Artois. “Bawdy to the last.”

Which of course was unjust in the extreme, as I’d spent hours trying to teach Pierre the rendition of that classic.

“Surely, she is asleep by now,” he continued. “And like you, I likewise would whistle to keep up my courage. But give me your pistol,” said d’Artois.

“How come?” I demanded as quietly as I could at that outrageous order.

“You are no less on edge than I am. And you shoot damnable straight. If by mistake you pointed that siege gun at me or Diane, you would have long regrets. And anyway, we want no disturbance or shooting. The enemy can’t see us, though they must know we are here; and they must not hear us.”

I surrendered the pistol. Pierre was right, of course, but with the start I made last night, I had begun to take an interest in that excellent gun.

“Eh bien, let us take our posts,” directed Pierre.

I followed him into Diane’s room, where he set up the reflector and lamp in a corner so that if the circuit were completed, the entire room would be illuminated.

“Take that chair and draw it up. Thus. Now mark well the position of mine.”

Pierre stood at the wall switch.

“Should you catch a glimpse of a very faint bluish light, don’t dive for it. It’s just the pilot light of this lamp I’ve set up in the corner. As long as it glows, I’ll know that the…what do you call her?…the juice is on, and that I can depend on light when I need it.

“Ready? Good!”

The wall switch clicked us into darkness. The sinister watch was on.

* * * *

Sitting in a lady’s bedroom in Bayonne does not sound so terrifying. But when the lady is awaiting summons from the dead, and when the dead sends living envoys with keen knives, it is yet again something else.

I wondered whether I‘d fall asleep with my eyes open, and whether d’Artois could resist that damnable influence, whatever it had been.

Have you ever been in Morocco and heard the drums thump-thumping in the hills, calling the tribesmen to revolt? My heart was giving a perfect imitation.

Diane’s breathing was soft and quiet and normal.

Silence from Pierre’s post. Once in a while I caught a passing glance of the bluish-green pilot light, as he noiselessly shifted in his chair. Lucky he told me about that light! And once I heard him draw a deep breath. Just a deep breath. But infinitely expressive!

It was getting d’Artois too. Not a comforting thought.

The clock in the cathedral chimed twelve. And then the quarter, ages later. Then the tension eased. It is born in us to place all diablerie at midnight: and that having passed uneventfully, I felt that nothing would happen until tomorrow night, when I’d be in a much better frame of mind. Thoughts would be so much more collected…

My relief was premature.

I felt rather than heard a vibration pulsing through the room. It was as though I watched some one beating a kettle-drum at great distance, getting the rhythm by seeing the drummer’s body sway to the cadence instead of actually hearing it.

Then, finally, the pitch increased into the lower limits of audible vibration. I could hear it. Tum-tumpa-tumtum-tumpa-tum…low and massive thundering from across the wastes of space. The drumming of Abaddon of the Black Hands.

It filled the room. It was an earthquake set to a cadence.

I heard a soft, sulfurous cursing from Pierre’s side of the room.

Then a hand on my shoulder.

“It is I. The pilot light is out. They have cut the house wires. We are watched. And there will be someone sent for us.”

The drumming was reaching a more resonant pitch, so that the walls of the room amplified it.

Diane stirred in her bed. The voice was calling her to the hidden tomb.

“When I am dead, open my grave and see…”

I could almost hear that sweet, rich Persian verse as an overtone of that sonorous drumming.

“They are here!” whispered d’Artois. “I can feel them.”

“And we’re in the dark.”

“Here, take this flashlight.” Pierre thrust it into my hand. “Quick, toward the window!”

The circle of light revealed a white-robed intruder armed with a drawn scimitar.

“Shoot him!” I whispered to Pierre.

“No. Hold the light! And stand clear!”

The intruder stared full and unblinking into the brilliant flashlight. His eyes were sightless and staring. He advanced with the fluent, slinking motion of a panther, straight toward us.

Then it all happened in an instant.

D’Artois with his chair parried the sweeping cut of his adversary’s scimitar, and as he parried, he sank, squatting on his left heel and simultaneously kicking upward with his right foot.

Perfect, and deadly.

The enemy dropped in his tracks. His blade fell ringing to the floor, and in a flash d’Artois had the scimitar.

“Keep the light on the window!” cried Pierre.

The companion of the first invader dropped fully into the circle of light. After him came a second. Both were robed like the first, and armed with scimitars. And both stared sightlessly; yet as certainly as though they saw, they poised themselves like great cats, gathered for the final leap to overwhelm us.

Great God! Noise or no noise, why didn’t d’Artois fire?

“Use your gun!” I croaked, trying to yell and whisper at the same time.

Facing those blades, empty-handed…

Christ! Was Pierre asleep with his eyes open, as I had been the night before?

Then a glittering streak from the darkness at my side, and the first one dropped, shorn half asunder by Pierre’s scimitar stroke.

“Two!” grunted d’Artois, and drew back on his guard for an instant, just out of the beam of the light.

But before he could advance, the third leaped forward, covered in his charge by a circle of flaming, hissing steel…

Clack-clack-clack!

Pierre was parrying that blind assault, cut for cut. Parrying a desperate, reckless whirlwind of steel, stroke after stroke.

Then he slipped through the mill, and sank forward in a lunge.

I saw Pierre’s blade projecting a foot beyond his opponent’s back. The enemy was too close to use his scimitar. I picked up a blade and struck his weapon from his grasp, lest he maul Pierre to a pulp with it, since he couldn’t slice him to pieces.

But that didn’t stop him. He gripped Pierre’s shoulder and drew himself forward, pulling Pierre’s blade still further through his own body in order to close in.

I hacked again and again, in a frenzy lest that madman tear d’Artois to pieces with his bare hands.

“Tenez!” gasped d’Artois. “C’est fini.”

He disentangled himself from the slashed, hacked body. As a surgeon or butcher, I’d never qualify, the way I mangle things when I hurry.

“Quick! That first one…”

D’Artois snatched the red blade from my hand, and with a single stroke decapitated the one who was rising to his knees and groping for his blade.

“Look!” exclaimed Pierre.

Diane, sitting on the edge of her bed, was slipping her feet into a pair of satin mules. It had seemed several lifetimes to me, from the time that d’Artois had advanced, armed with a chair, against the first intruder, until he had finished the third; but so swiftly had he worked that Diane had scarcely time to get out of bed, and find and don her robe and slippers.

“She’s on the way.”

“But where?”

“Idiot! She will leave the same way our three visitors entered. Look!”

We followed Diane with the beam of the flashlight.

She went straight toward the window, grasped the bars, and pulled herself to the sill.

“Follow her!” commanded Pierre. “Strip this one—his robe isn’t bloody.”

I stripped the one cleanly decapitated.

Those fellows didn’t drop from the ceiling, but came down a shaft through the wall, whose opening was concealed by the window-casing.

“How about a turban?”

“This one will do. Wind it with the stained end in. Quick, now! Follow her. Put that damned turban on as you go. Allez!”

Diane had pulled herself up. A glimpse of her heels, and she was out of sight.

“Now my pistol.”

“Take it. But hurry. I’ll be busy here…”

“What?”

“Va-t-en!” commanded Pierre. “Have I ever failed? Go!”

I leaped to the window-sill, felt, and found a void over my head, grasped the edge, and pulled myself up. In spite of our knowledge of the thick walls of these old houses, the existence of such a shaft would never have been suspected. The flashlight revealed a narrow passage not over ten feet long. At its end was a shaft leading down. I ventured a flash down its depth, and saw a ladder leading to a level that was well below the first floor of the house. At the bottom I turned, and faced a low archway which opened into a passage lead-straight ahead.

Some twenty paces ahead of me was Diane. I slopped along as fast as I could in the loose red slippers of the enemy, and as I advanced, I wound my turban as well as I could on the march.

Diane was walking, with a slow, almost mechanical stride, or she would have been quite out of sight. As it was, I quickly overtook her, and then snapped out the flashlight. Diane, deep in her trance, was utterly unaware of my seizing her robe so that she could guide me through the darkness.

She was stepping to the cadence of those drums.

I could distinguish now that the sound was of many drums: the roll and purr and sputter of tiny tom-toms against a background of solemn booming that made the masonry quiver beneath my feet. Yet the source of the sound was still far away.

Although the incline was not steep, it was perceptibly downgrade. We were turning ever so slowly to the left. The air was becoming damp and musty and cool. Our descent must now be taking us far beneath the uttermost foundations of Bayonne. Somewhere, below and to the left, was the brazen door that guarded the one who chanted in Persian and invited Diane to a conclave of the dead that were lonely in their deep vaults.

Ahead of us was a faint glow. I halted to let Diane gain a few paces, and then, hugging the left wall so as to gain the maximum protection from the door-jamb in case there should be a reception committee waiting, I crept forward as silently as possible.

Then it occurred to me that unseeing automatons like those that Pierre had stopped only by hacking them to pieces would hardly be susceptible to surprise. And if more swordsmen, bound in a deep trance and directed by some master mind to overwhelm me, were waiting, I’d have my hands full. I wondered if a pistol would stop them…the Moro jurmentados down in Sulu, riddled with dum-dum bullets, continue their charge until they hack to fragments the enemy who hoped to stop them with rifle fire.

Well, at least those three swordsmen had been alive, and their blood was like any other blood when spilled.

I ventured a peep around the doorjamb. The passage opened into a small alcove which was illuminated by the red flames of a pair of tall black candles set one at each side of a brazen door. Diane was alone before the door.

She hesitated, half swaying on her feet for a moment, then knelt on the second of the three steps that led to the door. Where her fingers traced the arabesques and scrolls embossed on the bronze, the verdigris had been worn away.

How many hours had she spent in wearing the seasoned bronze to its original color? Or were there then others who sought the same doorway? And if there were, when might they appear?

Evidently she was seeking the hidden catch which would open the door; the gateway of the tomb.

Surely Diane needed no light to further her quest. Then why these lurid candles? Had they a ritualistic significance, or were they for sentries, or acolytes that served the Presence behind the panel? I knew not what cross-passages I had unknowingly passed in the dark, and what swordsmen might be marching from any of them. Swordsmen, or worse…

Then Diane spoke; not to me, but to the dead behind the door. “I’m trying, Etienne, but I can’t find the spring.”

She rose from her task and retreated, turning away. Her eyes stared sightlessly at me. Then she wavered, tottered, and retraced her steps. Some compelling power was forcing her to resume her task.

I followed her, and looking over her shoulder, studied the embossing her fingers traced. Each curve, each figure, each floral and foliate form that could conceal the hidden catch she tapped, fingered, dug with her nails: but there was one she did not touch. And that one of all others seemed the only one that could control the lock: the center of a lotus blossom, close to the left edge. Even in that dim red light I could clearly distinguish a line of demarcation that separated the substance of the lotus center from the surrounding metal. Then why didn’t Diane press it? Why had she avoided it, night after night?

But had she avoided it?

It was smooth and polished. Someone had fingered and touched it.

Diane herself. It all came to me: door would not open until the Presence was ready for her arrival.

I watched her fingers working their way back and forth over the traceries of bronze, toward the center of the lotus blossom. She was touching it…

I took a hitch in my belt, slid the scimitar and its scabbard back toward my hip, shifted the Luger.

Click!

The door yielded, swinging inward on silent hinges. The drums boomed and roared and thundered. Their vibrations smote me in the face like the blast of a typhoon. An overwhelming perfume surged forth, stifling me with its heavy sweetness.

I leaped in ahead of Diane, advanced a pace toward the blank wall before me then wheeled to my right, and saw him who made a madness of Diane’s nights.

He sat cross-legged on a pedestal of carven stone. His arms were crossed on his breast. He was nude, save for a yellow loin-cloth that flamed like golden fire in the purple light of the vault. His face was emaciated and his ribs were hideously prominent. If he breathed, it was not deeply enough to be perceptible.

The drumming thunder ceased abruptly: and the silence was more terrific than the savage roaring pulse that had halted.

Dead?

Dead, save for those fixed, glittering eyes that stared through and past me. But they lived, fiercely, with a smoldering, piercing intentness.

Then someone stepped in between me and the Presence.

Diane had followed me, and standing in front of me, faced him.

Like him, she crossed her arms on her breast. Then she advanced with slow steps, not halting until within a few paces of the Presence. She knelt on the tiles, and bowed. Then she spoke in the expressionless voice of one who recites by rote a speech in a foreign language he does not understand.

“Etienne, I am here. I heard you from across the Border, and I have obeyed. I have opened your grave.”

I stood there like a wooden image, neither drawing my scimitar to cleave that living mummy asunder, nor my pistol to riddle him to ribbons. This couldn’t be the Marquis de la Tour de Maracq; not this blasphemy from somewhere in High Asia, that might have followed the Golden Horde, ages ago. Yet she had called him Etienne. Then he spoke:

“Landon, it is not good that you have meddled and entered the solitarium behind the throne. Even the elect dare not enter here. But since you are here…”

He smiled a slow, sinister smile. His long lean arm extended like the undulant advance of a serpent. “Look!”

I followed his compelling gesture with my eyes, and saw the brazen door swing slowly shut. It closed with a click of ominous finality.

I stared for a moment too long, held by the voice and the gesture. Just a moment too long. There was someone behind me. But before I could move, strong hands, gripped my arms.

The Presence murmured a command. My scimitar and pistol and flashlight were taken from me. The hands released me: and all with such incredible swiftness that I turned just in time to see my four momentary captors filing into an exit that pierced the wall, carrying with them my blade and pistol. As the last one cleared the threshold, a panel slid silently into place.

I had been a splendid guardian of the lovely girl who knelt at the feet of that creature on the throne!

“That door,” resumed the Presence, speaking so deliberately that the moment of my disarming was scarcely an interruption, “is easily opened from the outside, by those we wish to admit.”

Again he smiled that slow, curved smile of menace.

He looked down at Diane, and spoke to her in purring syllables. She rose from the tiles, and stood there, vacantly regarding us, Diane’s body devoid of Diane’s spirit.

“This girl and I,” said the Presence, “have a few things to discuss. You will therefore be pleased to excuse us…”

He inclined his head, and smiled his reptilian smile.

I saw his fingers caress the carvings near the top of the pedestal on which he sat. I leaped, but too late. The floor opened beneath me. As I dropped into the abysmal blacknesses below, I caught a glimpse of the purple light above being cut off by the trap-door lifting back into place.

I landed on my feet with force enough to give me fallen arches, and pitched forward on my face. The stones were cold and damp and slippery. I rose to my hands and knees, and crept cautiously along, feeling for openings in the floor, and hoping to locate a wall which I could follow to anywhere at all. A corner, or an angle, anywhere to get out of the heavy blackness and near something that would give me a sense of direction. Here there was only up and down, and neither north, south, east, nor west.

Caged in the sub-cellar of this subterranean vault; locked in the basement of hell’s private office. And Diane in the hands of that animated mummy!

Finally I butted head-first into a wall. The stars unfortunately weren’t of sufficient duration to let me see where I was. So I crept along, following the cold, moist stones.

My fingers touched a vertical bar: one member of a grillwork which blocked my advance. I reached forward with my other hand and grasped another bar, felt my way along, right and left. It was a gate, hinged to the masonry at one side, and chained shut at the other.

Something tangible at last. Something to grip and struggle with. The gate yielded protestingly for a few inches until the chain drew taut. I could feel the heavy scale of rust and corrosion on the links. I tugged and pulled and pushed, but in vain.

Then I removed my borrowed robe, folded it into a compact pad which I applied to my shoulder. I backed off, carefully measuring my retreat, gathered myself, and with a running leap, charged the gate. The chain snapped. The gate opened. I pitched headlong ahead of me, amid a clatter of links and the clang of the gate’s crashing against the wall.

Before I could regain my feet, someone landed on me.

Clean, manly fighting may have its place in the prize ring, and possibly even the wrestling arena: but in hell’s basement it is a needless grace. I shifted just in time to avoid the unknown’s knee fouling me. Not to be outdone in courtesy, I closed in, and located his eyes, but before I could apply my thumbs to the best advantage, he broke my attack. Finally I back-heeled him, and we both crashed to the paving. Luckily, he absorbed the shock, but it didn’t stop him. He lacked the simian strength and terrible arms of the assassin of the night before, but he made up for it in agility and devastating rage. We both were approaching exhaustion from the fury of attack, defense, and counter-attack.

I yielded suddenly, to throw him off his balance; but I tripped on the loose piece of chain, lost my own balance, and failed to nail him as he pitched forward.

And I couldn’t locate him. My own heavy breathing kept me from hearing him. I was trembling violently, and my mouth was dry as cotton. And if my heart pounded any more heavily, I’d burst wide open. Well, he must be in the same shape. So I sank to the floor, hoping to catch him with a low tackle, or to thwart him in a similar maneuver on his part.

But I couldn’t find him.

“Come here, damn your hide!” I frothed, finally getting enough breath to relieve my wrath.

“Thank God, a Christian!” panted a voice not far from me. “And by your speech, an American. Let us be allies, what is left of us.”

“And who might you be?” I demanded.

“A prisoner like yourself. Let’s declare a truce, and if we must fight, follow me to where there is enough light.”

The fellow sounded convincing enough. His English was the meticulously correct speech of an educated foreigner.

“Done. Lead on.”

“Then put your hand on my shoulder, and I will lead the way,” he continued. “To show my good faith, I will let you follow. Keep your head down. The masonry here is low, and very hard.”

My enemy chuckled.

“Mordieu! but I have been deceived about American sportsmanship. You would have gouged my eyes out. You bit a nice morsel from my throat—apropos, I’ll show you the right way to do that some day, if we get out of here alive… Steady, now! On your hands and knees…here we are.”

I followed him through a low, narrow opening that had been made by prying a few blocks of masonry out of place, and into a tiny cell illuminated with a slim taper. The ceiling was vaulted, and over a dozen feet above the floor.

“This has been my grave for some time.” He indicated the brazen panel in the wall.

“There has been entirely too much talk of graves in the past few days,” I replied. “Graves with living occupants.”

He started at me curiously, almost replied. Then, seeing me eyeing the brazen panel: “Mais non! Even with your bulk and hard head, you couldn’t budge that bronze. It doesn’t corrode and waste away like the iron in this devil’s nest.”

“Well then,” said I, “how do they feed you?”

“They let food down through a trap in the ceiling. Look!”

I looked up, and saw the outline of a trap-door.

“You look strangely familiar,” I began. “I’ve never seen you, but somehow it is as though I had seen a portrait, or photograph, or heard you compared for likeness to some one I did once see, somewhere.”

“No one has seen me for two years or more. But how did you run afoul of Abdul Malaak? Are you also an aspirant to the custody of the Sanctuary?”

He made a curious, fleeting gesture with his left hand.

“Hell’s fire, monsieur,” I replied, “how many custodians, aspirant and actual, does this devil-haunted town hold?”

Then, without pausing for an answer, I threw it at him:

“When l am dead, open my grave and see

The smoke that curls about thy feet.”

“Comment?” he exclaimed.

A home run! I continued:

In my dead heart the fire still burns for thee,

Yea, the smoke rises from my winding-sheet.”

He stared. I met his stare.

“Que diable!” he finally exclaimed. “Who or what you are, I don’t know. But you know who I am: de la Tour de Maracq.”

“And I am Davis Landon. This meeting with the gentleman who has chanted Mademoiselle Diane to the edge of madness is certainly a pleasure.”

The marquis smiled wearily. “Chanted, and to what end? From your quotation of Hafiz, I know that she must have heard me, but she couldn’t get my thought. Certainly not thus far, at least. So I am buried here, and awaiting the bowstring, or the fire, or the saw and plank: whatever Abdul Malaak in his kindness orders when he has sufficiently poisoned my friends against me. I thought a while ago that they had discovered my loophole and were trying to stop my private explorations. So I gave you a good fight…”

For just an instant a fierce light flamed in his eye; and then that thin, weary smile again.

“This is puzzling,” I protested. “I happen to know that she did get your message which you ‘willed’ or projected, or whatever means you used. Every night she wanders in her sleep to obey a summons, and claws at a brazen panel…”

“What’s that you say?” demanded the marquis. “Wanders in obedience to my summons? Wanders?”

“Yes. From your house which you willed to her on your deathbed in Marrakesh.”

“But, monsieur, I never died in Marrakesh.”

“That I can readily believe,” I admitted. “But she showed me that letter from you, and a newspaper clipping announcing your death, and a note in Arabic from the companion of your last hours. And thus she accepted your legacy, the house on Remparts de Lachepaillet, where she was very conveniently situated to leave by a secret passageway to hell’s front door.”

Throughout my speech, the marquis stared at me, bewildered.

“I, dying in Marrakesh, willed her that house?…”

“Yes, damn it, and hoodooed her with strange dreams of graves to be opened, and voice chanting in Persian. And tonight I followed her through the gateway…”

“How’s that? Followed her? Is she there?”

“Yes. And that devil touched a spring and dropped me into that dungeon before I could say aye, yes, or no. So you might tell me what started her wanderings.”

“Helas, monsieur, what can I tell…”

“When I quoted Hafiz you seemed to hear familiar words.”

“Certainly. I did chant them. I also am an adept. And I chanted the verse of Hafiz for the sake of the rhythm; not to give her a command to come and release me, which she couldn’t possibly do, but to ask her to communicate with Nureddin Zenghi, in Kurdistan.”

“Why the verse, did you say? What has it to do with Nureddin? That is dense to me.”

“Pardon. You are not an adept. But to put it simply, it acted merely as a carrier wave, as your radio experts would put it. It gave me a rhythm on which to impress my thought. I can’t explain it briefly. But go into Tibet, and High Asia; to Hindustan, among the fakirs. Study at the feet of one who might still be found sitting at the foot of a column in the vast ruins of incredible Ankor Wat. Speak with the priests of the Eightfold Path. Piece all your gleanings together; and you will finally be able to project your thoughts to one with whom you are en rapport—if you have the strength of will. The knowledge is jealously guarded. But I found it.

“Had I gone further with the art, I could have projected myself from my body, and spoken to her. But I couldn’t. Can’t yet. And shan’t live long enough to learn how.

“When I was reported dead, I was actually in this cell. My enemy tricked me in a contest of occult arts, and here I am. Abdul Malaak… Servant of the Angel, as he calls himself. I see it all now. He forged that letter and clipping to get her into my house from which he could summon her to make the trip unobserved. And his concentrated thought aided by the circle of adepts in the great hall, overpowered my message.”

“But Nureddin did come to town.”

“Magnifique! Maybe she did send for him. And he will take the place by assault. He will not fail…”

“Nureddin has failed.”

And I told what had happened in Pierre’s study.

“Then we are doomed,” said the marquis.

“Doomed, hell!” I said. “You suggested that we be allies. Now let me take command. Is it near your feeding-time?”

“Yes, So says my stomach,” replied the marquis. And then, as he saw me glance once more at the trap-door in the crown of the vault: “Even if I leaped to your shoulders, I couldn’t reach it.”

“Who said you had to reach it?” I queried.

“How then?” demanded the marquis. “They don’t get close enough for you to take the guard by surprise as he gives me my food. If they only passed it through that door there!”

“I have an idea. Stand close to the wall, out of sight. Better yet, back out through that hole in the wall…”

“But…”

“Be damned! Ask no questions, monsieur, or my inspiration will leave me. I have a hunch. Are you with me?”

“To the death and to the uttermost.”

I accepted the hand he extended. “And there is another,” I added: “Pierre D’Artois.”

None better,” admitted the marquis. “There is no love lost between us, but he will not begrudge me any help given you and Diane. But even that d’Artois risks his head if he dares enter.”

“Never fear about d’Artois,” I reassured the marquis, “but while we have time, tell me this: who has the hold over Diane’s mind? Is it you, or that dried-up thing on the pedestal?”

“Both, it seems. Though he is aided by his circle of adepts. With them broken up, his power would be comparatively little.”

“But would that release her, breaking them up, and him also?

“Yes. And I will die happy if I personally attend his breaking up. Into small bits, Monsieur Landon. If we get out of here alive, I will dismember him with my bare hands! And since she has obeyed the command, she can be awakened from the influence of the Power…”

“There they are now!”

The marquis beckoned me to be silent.

In my turn, I motioned him to crawl out of sight of trap, and followed him.

“Qu‘ est-cequec’ est?” muttered the marquis, obedient, but puzzled.

“Wait and see.”

* * * *

We heard the trap open. A basket was descending at the end of a slim cord.

“Pull that basket up and let down a rope. That isn’t heavy enough,” I directed in Arabic.

“Why not, ya marqees?” queried the voice, somewhat taken aback.

“This isn’t el marqees, ya bu!”

I shouted. “Let down that rope and pull him up. He’s still breathing, but he won’t be when you come back with a rope.”

From above I heard a mutter of voices.

“And who are you?” demanded the spokesman.

I heard the clank of arms. My unusual request had been passed along to the guard, doubtless. But as Pierre said, toujours audace!

“Come down and see, O heap of offal! One of the master’s guests, O eater of pork! Would you argue with me?”

And then, aside to the marquis, “I’ve got ’em going.”

The marquis grinned, and the fire returned to his eyes.

“Give me your rags,” I continued, “and we’ll fool ’em proper.”

“Just a moment, ya sidi,” resumed the voice, “while we get a strong rope.”

“Make haste then, eater of un-clean food! I have much else to do than to butcher Feringhi swine, down here in the cellar.”

“Patience, master,” said the voice.

I dug up from my memory a few epithets collected in Mindanao, and growled them in return. They couldn’t understand it, and were duly impressed with my importance. By the subdued and respectful murmurings, they must by that time have identified me as one of the master’s pet assassins.

But the occasional tinkle of accoutrements and soft note of steel didn’t reassure me. The death of the marquis and the lifting up of his body doubtless was of sufficient importance to detain a part of the guard.

A heavy rope, several centimeters in diameter, was let down.

“Give me more slack! Pigs and fathers of many little pigs, how can I tie this fellow’s carcass with that little? And anchor it firmly up there. When you get him up, I’m coming after.”

Then to the marquis: “I’ll go first, and you follow.”

“No, let them haul me up. I can’t climb a rope,” he whispered.

“You’re a damned liar, but since you want the first crack at them, go ahead. But remember you’re dead. Don’t start the show until I get there.”

I tied a running noose and drew it up beneath his arms.

“All right up there! Heave away! And wait for me. I’ll tell you what to do with him.”

They heaved away.

“Well,” I reflected. “I’ll be in a pretty jam if something goes haywire and that rope doesn’t come down again. That hothead…”

By the time the marquis reached the trap, I was in a sweat and a fidget.

“Hurry up there!” I roared. “And let that rope down. Drop him anywhere. He won’t hurt you.”

“Shall we hoist you, ya sahib?”

“Let that rope down, and silence, ya humar!”

So far, so good. I had them buffaloed.

I leaped at the rope, and hand over hand, pulled myself up. As I approached the opening, I gripped its edge with one hand, heaved myself through, and sprawled face down on the floor.

“He still breathes, master,” said one.

“I forgot my scimitar. Give me yours and I’ll tend to that.”

And as I was solicitously assisted to my knees, the hilt of a blade was thrust into my hand.

I leaped and slashed.

“Give ’em hell, Etienne!” I shouted.

And I laid about me, right and left.

The marquis closed in on the one nearest him, lifted him over his head, and dashed him head-first to the tiles. Then he snatched a blade from the floor, and came on guard.

The four survivors faced us, dazed by the swift turn. And then they charged. I hacked and slashed clumsily and desperately. Parried, and missed my riposte. Lashed out again, and had my blade dashed from my hand by a sweeping cut. Etienne, crouched on guard behind his whirlwind, of steel, faced half to his right saw my peril, and with a dazzling snick of his blade, sliced my adversary’s sword arm half off: and back again to his party.

As I booted my disabled enemy into insensibility, I marveled at the incredible skill with which he held those three fierce Kurds at bay.

I gave my opponent’s head one farewell bounce against the paving, picked up his blade, and joined Etienne.

“Gardez-vous!” he snapped. “I have him!”

He slipped forward in a lunge, blade slicing upward to disembowel his adversary; and back on guard again, with but two to face him.

They were too dazzled by that terrific attack to be aware of my presence. Thus my neck-cut to the one on the right was most creditable.

“Tenez!” commanded Etienne, as he confronted the survivor. “I need him.”

Standing as though his feet were spiked to the floor, he waved me aside, engaged his enemy, parrying cut after desperate cut as coolly and effortlessly as though fencing with a blunt foil instead of with blades that sheared from shoulder to hip with one stroke.

The Kurd fought with the savagery of one whose doom stares him in the face. But in vain. He could not crowd or break through the hedge of steel that Etienne built with his leaping, flashing scimitar.

Then the Kurd stood there, blinking and bewildered, staring at his empty hand. His blade clanged against the tiles a dozen feet away.

“Now, son of a disease, throw this refuse into the pit. And you, Landon, strip this fellow you kicked senseless. I need his clothes.”

The survivor complied without a murmur, and one by one thrust the dead and dismembered down the trap-door.

“Tie that pig!” snapped the marquis.

I obeyed, using a coil of the rope with which we had been hoisted up.

“And now,” said the marquis, “Tell us several things, or I will dismember you slice by slice.”

The fellow growled.

“What! Tongue-tied? Well, then…but no, I will not slice you to pieces…

“Landon, pass me that torch.”

I plucked the flaming torch from its socket in the wall. Etienne applied it to the Kurd’s feet.

“Where is the girl, and what is the master doing?”

The Kurd writhed, and groaned.

“Speak up, dung heap, or I’ll roast you alive!”

The smell of flesh roasted before it is dead is not pleasant.

“I will speak, sahib!”

“Very well. What is happening in the Throne Room, and what of the girl?”

“The master sits on the high throne. The girl is as one dead, awaiting the command to pass through the veils of fire to become the Bride of the Peacock. It is the night of power.”

“The night of power…and here we are, two against a company. Landon, will you join me in dying like a man?”

“I don’t relish this dying stuff any too damned much, Etienne,” I confessed. “But I’ll go any reasonable length with you. So lead on.”

“Magnifique! Let us go…”

And then he turned. “This roasted pig here will spread no alarm,” he growled as his blade descended.

We thrust this last body down the trap-door.

The marquis wiped his scimitar, and led the way. Torches illuminated the passage until the first turn, and thereafter it was lighted by an indirect glow, emanating from a molding along the arched ceiling.

“Your Arabic is acceptable. A lot of these fellows speak only Kurdish or dialects of Turki, but stick to your own, and all will be well. And very few will recognize me in that purple light. None, in fact. They’ve not seen me for better than two years, and my very existence has been forgotten except by a few jailers.”

“There was one who evidently had not forgotten you.”

I felt for the little peacock amulet, and found it still about my throat.

“Nureddin was speechless. Handed it to me, and coughed his life out. Since he was your friend, take it.”

“Another vengeance to exact. But remember: on your life speak not the Arabic word Satan. Whoever inadvertently pronounces it must then and there be torn to pieces. Nor say any word resembling it. That would be fatal to you, and would draw attention to me.”

“What is your plan?”

“I have none. Even as I had none but an urge to explore when I wandered into the darkness and found you. This labyrinth is not entirely known to me, Keeper of the Sanctuary before Abdul Malaak. But this part of it I know well enough, and our wits will do the rest.”

The marquis led the way, down winding passages, up stairways, down others, curving and twisting, never once hesitating at a branch or cross passage. Sentries posted at intersections saluted us perfunctorily; and the marquis negligently returned their salutes.

As we advanced, I picked up the deep booming of the drums. Mingled with it was the wail of reed pipes, and the whines of single-stringed kemenjahs.

“Fight it,” said the marquis. “Don’t let it get a hold on you. Abdul Malaak sits nodding there on that tall throne, impressing his will on the circle of adepts. They receive and amplify it a thousandfold, and on that a thousandfold more, increasing in geometrical progression. They have but to attune their minds to the vibration frequency.

“Once I saw them project their thought to take material form.”

“Juggler!” I scoffed.

“Jugglery if you will. But I saw what I saw: a material entity formed in the vortex of that resonating, countlessly amplified thought.

“But,” continued the marquis, “if you resist it from the beginning, you may hold your own. We may break it up. Tonight’s conclave deals with Diane, and thus our escape may not be noted.”

As we turned a corner, crossed scimitars barred our progress.

Etienne made a curious, fleeting gesture with his left hand.

The sentries raised their blades in salute and advanced us. As we entered the arched doorway of the Throne Room, their blades clicked behind us.

A smoldering somber mist, red as the embers of a plundered city, hung in the air of that great domed hall. A heavy sweetness surged about us, wave on wave. Bearded adepts sat cross legged beneath three-decked, gilded parasols, and caressed with knuckles and finger tips and the heels of their hands the drums of varying sizes which they balanced on their knees. As they played, they swayed in cadence. Their eyes stared fixedly to the front. They were dead men driven by a terrific will.

Against the wall of the circular hall towered a pyramid terraced in steps of glistening black. Tongues of flame quivered up from orifices along the stairway that led to the dais at the apex. The dais was canopied with gold threaded damask, and crowned with the monstrous effigy of a peacock, tail fanned out, and enameled in natural colors.

On the dais sat the cadaverous Abdul Malaak, that animated mummy that was to smite all France with the devastating thought waves of his adepts. He sat there like a high god. He nodded to the colossal thunder of the drums, and the whining strings, and the wind instruments that moaned of the blacknesses across the Border.

We took our places near the foot of the pyramid, so that we could see the entrance which faced Abdul Malaak. Through it filed a steady stream of devotees, all robed in white, with scarlet girdles from which hung scimitars. As they took their places on the cinnabar-powdered floor, they caught the cadence of the music and swayed to its rhythm. From their ranks row after row in a crescent facing the throne, came a hoarse whispering which grew to a solemn chant.

Acolytes marched up and down through the ranks of the communicants, swinging fuming censers. Others, robed in crimson, followed them, bearing copper trays laden with small, curiously shaped lozenges and wafers which they offered the followers of the Peacock.

The stones beneath us quivered. I could feel the world rocking on its foundations. That maddening music finally spoke in a wordless language of riot and pillage and chaos. And high above the adepts arms crossed on his breast, sat Abdul Malaak, directing the doom.

I thought of the violin note that would shiver a wine-glass; of the ram’s-horn trumpets that leveled the walls of Jericho. It wasn’t the sound. It was the thought that was in resonance, the mind of each individual hammering relentlessly in cadence, doubling and redoubling the sum whenever another of the circle put himself completely in tune. Resonance; perfect timing; until the hatred of one shriveled adept from High Asia would be magnified a millionfold and on that yet again as much more.

The air was tenanted with presences called from over the Border by that demon on his tall black terraced throne. Distinctly above that deep, world-shaking roll and thunder I began to hear twitterings and chirpings and murmurings. They were gathering, drawn by the master’s resistless vortex of power. We were being hemmed in by a congress of evil infinitely greater than all humanity working with one thought could of itself devise.

The puny blasphemies and petty filthinesses of medieval devil-worship were childish against this monumental array of Satanism from Kurdistan.

“Fight it, Landon, fight it!” whispered the marquis. “Don’t let it get you or you’ll join them. Malik Tawus devised no such evil; not in Kurdistan and Armenia, where I learned the true faith to bring it to France.”

An acolyte approached with a tray of wafers. The marquis and I both accepted.

“On your life, don’t swallow it,” he cautioned. “Palm it. With that music you couldn’t stand the drug it contains.

“And to think that I brought all this into France,” he continued. “Not this, tonight, but paved the way for that devil up there to get his hold. His death is more important than your life, or mine, or hers, even.

“If Nureddin were alive…”

And then, “Look!” exclaimed Etienne. “Over there!”

Diane, arrayed in wisps of scarlet and silver, and crowned with a strange, tall head-dress that flamed and smoldered with rubies and frosty diamonds, and glowed with great pearls lurid in that sultry light, was escorted by acolytes toward the steps of the pyramid.

Tongues of flame now spurted waist high along the dais and encircled it; and the jets of flame rose taller along the steps.

Pace by pace Diane approached the steep ascent of the pyramid.

“She is to pass through the veil of fire and become the Bride of the Peacock,” whispered Etienne. “The flames will not hurt her body, but she will be enslaved beyond all redemption.”

“Maybe we can make a fast break and charge up the steps and finish Abdul Malaak before these fellows come out of their trance,” I suggested. “Do you know of any way of getting away after we’ve done that?”

“Yes. A door behind the throne opens into the solitarium where he sits, most of time, in meditation on his pedestal.”

“Well, then…”

“The flames won’t hurt her body,” resumed the marquis. “But if one of us starts up there, all he has to do is to press a small catch, and the nature of the flame will change entirely. There are those who have passed through the veil unbidden, but they didn’t live long.”

Diane had begun the ascent.

Then Abdul Malaak spoke in a great voice, incongruously deep for that emaciated frame.

“Servants of Malik Tawus, I have summoned you to witness the Night of Power. Thus far we have failed because your lips served me while your hearts betrayed me. Some of you still think of El Marques who would not honor me and the message I carried from across the border.

“Others think of Nureddin, who would have kept you in Kurdistan, oppressed by the Moslem, and worshipping the Bright Angel as fugitives hidden in caverns.

“But Nureddin was slain in the act of betraying us to the Ferringhi so that he could liberate El Marqees. But I have devised a doom for El Marqees; I Abdul Malaak, have thwarted his power, and behold she is seeking me instead of him. Behold; and believe, and give him freely to his doom, even as his comrade in treason was doomed.”

“We see and we believe, and we give freely!” came the deep response!

Etienne clutched my arm.

“There is but one chance. I will go first, and settle with Abdul Malaak, and extinguish the flames. You follow, and when the flames subside, take Diane through the door behind the throne.”

Etienne leaped to his feet, and three steps up the terrace.

I followed him, drawing my blade.

A murmur rose from the devotees.

Abdul Malaak stared, for once disconcerted. Then he shouted a command. The swordsmen stirred in their trance. Abdul Malaak smote a brazen gong at the side of the dais. Its deep clang touched them to life. They rose. Blades flashed.

Two against that host of madmen. Pierre had failed me. And I was glad that he had failed. Why should he also die in this butchery?

Abdul Malaak leaned forward in his throne. His fingers found and touched a knob: and the flames rose high about the dais, fierce, consuming fire.

“Hold them until I get Abdul Malaak. Then take her away while I cover your retreat!” shouted Etienne as he passed Diane on the stairs.

He leaped through that deadly, blinding flame and at Abdul Malaak on his throne.

Then came a voice loud and clear above the roar of the swordsmen: “Nureddin has returned! Nureddin with the assassin’s knife in his chest!”

I turned, just two leaps from the flame-girt dais, where I had overtaken Diane and caught her in my free arm.

And Nureddin it was, drooping mustaches, scar-seamed cheek and forehead: a Kurd from Kurdistan. He flung aside his robe. A jeweled hilt gleamed from his chest: the very dagger I had seen impale him in Pierre’s study!

“Who will exact blood indemnity for the death of Nureddin?”

He strode through the milling throng that parted wide for him.

“What? O dogs and sons of dogs, have you forgotten the bread and salt of Nureddin?”

And the wave of steel that was to overtake and overwhelm us subsided. There was an instant of silence. Then at the feet of the terrace the apparition halted, faced about, clutched at his chest, and wrenched the dagger free.

There came a low murmur from the crowd.

Nureddin hurled the dagger among the dazed swordsmen. “Take it and avenge Nureddin!”

“Ya Nureddin!” shouted one.

“He is our father and grandfather!”

“Nureddin has come from the dead!”

“Fraud and trickery!” shouted another.

“That’s no dead man!”

“Kill the impostor!”

“It’s Nureddin himself!”

The adherents of Nureddin were forming in a cluster. A scimitar rose and flashed swiftly down. Another, and another. The friends of Nureddin, shoulder to shoulder, were cutting their way into the company. Their number was growing every instant; but still they were outnumbered ten to one.

Nureddin was ascending the terrace, three steps at a time. He halted where I stood, scimitar in my sword hand, and my free arm supporting Diane.

The battle at the foot of the terrace was waxing hotter every moment. The friends of Nureddin were being forced back toward the wall. A dozen or twenty of the enemy were charging up the terrace to cut down the impostor, and me also.

Nureddin thrust at me a pair of Boukhara saddle-bags.

I dropped my blade, and took them.

Each of his hands emerged with an object a little larger than a goose egg. Then he tossed them one with each hand: grenades! They burst full among the enemy, halting the charge with their deadly, flaming phosphorous. Another grenade. And yet another. The assault broke and fled, howling and aflame.

And then Nureddin rained his grenades into the mob below.

Even in this damned place of madness, I knew now that this was no dead man.

“We’re out of fire!” he growled in guttural Arabic. “Some high explosive!”

And that fierce Kurd, withdrawing the safety pins and holding the grenades to the last split second, hurled them so that they burst as they landed, rending and blasting the enemy.

The friends of Nureddin were now advancing, slaying-mad and frenzied by the fire and explosive that dead Nureddin had hurled at the enemy.

“Ya Nureddin!” they shouted. “Nureddin has returned with the fires of Jehannum! Ya Nureddin!”

I glanced at the throne. The terrific, searing heat had subsided; and flames were scarcely ankle-high. Etienne was clambering to his feet. He reeled, and tottered. Blood streamed from his mouth. His smile was terrible.

Then he stooped, picked an armful from the throne, and advanced down the terrace toward us.

“I told you I’d do it. Sorry you couldn’t watch and take your lesson.” He laughed as he wiped his lips. “Look!”

I saw from the torn throat of his burden that he had made good his boast.

Then Etienne with a supreme effort pitched the remains of Abdul Malaak headlong into the bedlam below.

The Kurd was hurling his last grenade.

One last detonation, muffled by the bodies it blasted and seared.

“Etienne,” I demanded, “before we get into that butchery, release her so that her mind will be free.”

“Tres bien!”

He turned to Diane, stroked her cheeks, whispered in her ear, shook her sharply, whispered again, tapped her here and there with his knuckles.

Her scream was piercingly natural and feminine. Diane the automaton had become a woman again.

“Oh, Etienne, I did find you! You weren’t dead after all!”

“Found me, but not for long. Follow Landon out of here. Quick! I’m a dead man. Breathed too much of that flame. I’m following Nureddin.”

He kissed her and broke away from her arms.

“Well, if you’re following Nureddin, you’re going in the wrong direction,” said a calm voice at our side, not in guttural Arabic, but in French. “And here’s your pistol, Landon.”

Nureddin, nothing! Pierre d’Artois!

“Stand fast, fool!” he shouted, seizing Etienne’s shoulder. “Nureddin’s friends are winning. And dead Nureddin is avenged.”

“Then,” retorted Etienne, as he recognized Pierre, “take Diane out of here. This time I won’t return to haunt her.”

Etienne saluted us with his blade. “Swear not to follow me! The last will of the dead. I don’t want to waste what little life is left…”

Pierre stared at him for a moment, and saw that Etienne spoke the truth. “You have my word.”

Pierre’s blade rose in salute; and then he turned the throne.

“Oh, Etienne!” cried Diane, at that moment realizing his intentions.

But Etienne did not hear her.

As I followed Pierre, I glanced over her shoulder and saw Etienne, blade flaming in a great arc, charge headlong into the melee. His scimitar rose and fell, shearing slashing. His voice rang exultant with slaughter. Then we heard his voice no more.

I half carried, half dragged Diane through the panel behind the throne into the solitarium of Abdul Malaak, and thence, finally, through the winding passages to Diane’s apartment.

* * * *

“Tell me,” I demanded of d’Artois the next day, “why you ordered me to follow Diane into the den of madness?”

“That was an error which I didn’t recognize until after it was all over,” admitted Pierre. “But since you acquitted yourself as you did, I claim a free pardon for having unwittingly sent you to face the Keeper of the Sanctuary instead of going myself.

“I had what you call the hunch,” he continued. “It came to me in a flash that my idea of impersonating Nureddin would succeed. You understand, I had toyed with the notion from the day of his death. I knew that Nureddin would have enough of a following to divide the conclave if he suddenly appeared, risen from the grave.

“The disguise was easy. My nose is about right by nature. Those scars on the cheek and forehead, and the mustaches, and the eyebrows were simple. Just a few touches, and the essentials were there. And that dagger—well, that was one of those flexible-bladed weapons used on the stage, in sword-swallowing acts. But convincing, bien?”

“Finding my way into that den was not so difficult. Nureddin before his death mentioned Porte d’Espagne. I checked against Vauban’s plans, and then made soundings with instruments such as prospectors use in your country to locate those oil domes. My men—you saw them, and remarked, that afternoon as we drove by—found considerable subterranean cavities where the plans showed none.

“And since I knew enough of the ritual of Malik Tawus, my detection as an impostor was very improbable.”

“But what set you on the trail, originally?” I asked.

“Etienne’s letter,” replied Pierre. “I knew it for a forgery the moment I noticed that it had been written by someone who, being used to Arabic, which is written from right to left, forgot in his careful forging that Etienne would cross his t’s from left to right.

“Alors, that sufficed. Then I telephoned Paris headquarters, where they have a file of every newspaper in the world. There was no such article in any paper printed in Morocco as the one Diane gave me.

“Thus I knew that someone was using Etienne’s alleged death as a means of getting Diane into Etienne’s house, where memories of him would make her an easy victim to the psychic influences that were directed toward her.

“And according to his remarks before you two escaped from his cell, the marquis had also been seeking to project a thought to her. And between the two forces…”

“Just a moment, “I interrupted. “Why did Abdul Malaak go to all the trouble of projecting his thought to Diane when a couple of his men could have seized and dragged her down there?

“Why bother to prepare the stage setting of Etienne’s death? Just oriental indirectness?”

“Not at all! Don’t you see,” explained Pierre, “that they wanted not merely Diane in person; they wanted her as a slave of the will of Abdul Malaak. And when she had succumbed to his will sufficiently to begin her nocturnal wanderings and pick her way to the door, he would know that she was truly in his power, and ready for the next step, becoming an automaton whose activities as a spy could be controlled no matter where she went.

“But, grace a Dieu—with certain credit to Pierre d’Artois—Mademoiselle Diane’s mind is freed, not only by the death of Etienne and Abdul Malaak, but also by having obeyed the command which had been impressed so firmly on her subconscious mind.

“And therefore, mon vieux,” he continued, “since she is done for ever with opening graves in her sleep, you must during the remainder of your stay in Bayonne divert her mind from those gruesome memories. So out of my sight for the evening. I have work to attend to. Allez!” And thus on that, and on other evenings, I sought Diane with more confidence than I had any right to have.

* * * *

“Somehow,” said Diane one night as we sat on the tall gray wall of Lachepaillet, watching the moon-silvered mists rise from the most and roll into the park, far below, “that moment’s meeting with Etienne was so unreal. It was as if he’d appeared from the dead to put my mind at rest rather than that he was actually alive. In a way, he died two years ago, instead of on that made, terrible night…not a fresh grief, but the calming of an old sorrow…if you know what I mean…”

And then and there, as Pierre would put it, I had the hunch.

“You mean,” said I, “that the Bride of the Peacock could be pleased with a much less colorful bird?”

Which was precisely what Diane had in mind.