Sam moskowitz ed, p.15
Sam Moskowitz (ed.), page 15
“Where’s the Green Bird?”
“You’re a Green Bird, or you wouldn’t lie there in the snow. Come, get up.”
In an instant I was awake. I saw it all. “What’s the time?” I asked.
“Just two!”
Could all that have happened in an hour! Yes. The Hotel de Coup d’OEil. The Blond Head. The Green Bird. The Count. The Blue Lake. The Hands. The Legs. The Eyes, the everything singular, were the creations of Pilgarlik’s Burgundy. I had slipped in the snow at the door, and was dreaming.
The cold had revived me, and I was now shivering. I arose. My
published by Selwyn & Blount, London, and edited by Christine Campbell Thomson, these books had to be imported if Americans desired them. The first Jules de Grandin story to appear in an American anthology was “The House Where Time Stood Still,” selected by Phil Stong for The Other Worlds (Wilfred Funk, 1941). There have been only a few other inclusions.
“Body and Soul” originally appeared in the September, 1928 Weird Tales and has never been reprinted. At the time of its publication Seabury Quinn resided at 34 Jefferson Ave., Brooklyn, N.Y., and received $115 for its 12,000 words. The rate of payment is an indication of his growing popularity, for his first story for Weird Tales, “The Phantom Farmhouse,” was 8,400 words long and brought him but $40, indicating a rate increase of more than double in three years.
“Body and Soul” is a typical Jules de Grandin story of good quality. All of the idiosyncracies of the occult detective and his unofficial aide Dr. Trowbridge are brought into focus. The menace is actually supernatural (not all of Jules de Grandin’s cases were), and the solution is a bit off-beat.
Seabury Quinn was actually a writer of above-average literary quality, but he wrote so much and at such odd hours that his work is uneven, sometimes within the story itself. This is true of “Body and Soul,” but all is forgotten in the movement of the plot.
Quinn himself could easily have masqueraded for either de Grandin or Trowbridge. Small, slim, dapper, sharp-featured, at one period in his life he had the ideal profession for a writer of the supernatural—the editorship of a trade journal for morticians, entitled Sunnyside and Casket!
BODY AND SOUL
by
SEABURY QUINN
I had a strenuous day, for the mild epidemic of summer grippe had lasted over into September, and my round of calls had been double the usual number. “Thank heaven, I can relax for seven or eight hours,” I murmured piously as I pulled the single blanket up around my chin and settled myself for the night. The hall clock had just struck twelve, and I had no appointments earlier than nine the following morning. “If only nobody is so inconsiderate as to break a leg or get the bellyache,” I mumbled drowsily, “I’ll not stir from this bed until—”
As if to demonstrate the futility of self-congratulation, there came a sudden thunderous clamor at the front door. Someone was beating the panels with both his fists, raining frenzied blows on the wood with his feet and shrieking at the top of his voice, “Let me in! Doctor—Dr. Trowbridge, let me in! For God’s sake, let me in!”
“The devil!” I ejaculated, rising resentfully and feeling for my slippers and dressing-gown. “Couldn’t he have had the decency to ring the bell?”
“Let me in, let me in, Dr. Trowbridge!” the frantic hail came again as I rounded the bed of the stairs. “Let me in—quick!”
“All right, all right!” I counseled testily, undoing the lock and chain-fastener. “Just a min—”
The caller ceased his battering-ram assault on the door as I swung it back and catapulted past me into the hall, almost carrying me off my feet as he did so. “Quick, shut it—shut the door!” he gasped, wheeling in his tracks to snatch the knob from my hand and force the door to. “It’s out there—it’s outside there, I tell you!”
“What the mischief—” I began, half puzzled, half angry, as I took quick stock of the intruder.
He was a young man, twenty-five or -six, I judged, dressed somewhat foppishly in a suit of mohair dinner clothes, his jacket and waistcoat badly rumpled, his once stiff evening shirt and collar reduced to a pulpy mass of sweat-soaked linen, and the foamy froth of drool disfiguring the corners of his flaccid mouth. As he turned on me to repeat his hysterical warning, I noticed that he caught his breath with considerable difficulty and that there was a strong hint of liquor in his speech.
“See here, young man, what do you mean?” I demanded sternly. “Haven’t you any better sense than to knock a man out of bed at this ungodly hour to tell him that—”
“Ssssh!” he interrupted with the exaggerated caution of the half-tipsy. “Ssssh, Dr. Trowbridge, I think I hear it coming up the steps. Is the door locked? Quick, in here!” Snatching me by the arm he dragged me unceremoniously into the surgery.
“Now see here, confound you!” I remonstrated. “This is going a bit too far. If you expect to get away with this sort of thing, I’ll mighty soon show you—”
“Trowbridge, mon vieux, what is it? What does the alarm portend?” Jules de Grandin, a delicate mauve-silk dressing-gown drawn over his lilac pajamas, slippers of violet snakeskin on his womanishly small feet, tiptoed into the room, his little blue eyes round with wonder and curiosity. “I thought I heard someone in extremity calling,” he continued, looking from the visitor to me, then back again with his quick, stock-taking glance. “Is it that someone dies and requires our assistance through the door to the better world, or—”
“It looks as if some drunken young fool is trying to play a practical joke on us,” I returned grimly, bending a stern look on the boy who cowered in the chair beside my desk. “I’ve half a mind to prescribe four ounces of castor oil and stand by while he takes it!”
De Grandin regarded . the young man with his steady, unwinking stare a moment, then: “What frightens you, mon brave?” he demanded, far too gently, I thought. “Parbleu, but you look as though you had been playing tag with Satan himself!”
“I have—I have!” the youth replied quaveringly. “I tell you, it jumped at me just as 1 came past the park entrance, and I wasn’t a hundred yards ahead when Dr. Trowbridge let me in!”
“U’m?” the Frenchman twisted the ends of his little blond mustache meditatively. “And this ‘It’ which pursued you, it is what?”
“I don’t know,” the other responded. “I was walking home from a dance at the Sigma Delta Tau house—been stagging it, you know—and stopped by the Victory Monument to light a cigarette when something—dam’ if I know what—jumped out o’ the bushes at me and made a grab at my throat. It missed my neck by a couple o’ inches, but snatched my hat, and I didn’t take any time to see what it would do next. I’d ‘a’ been going yet if my wind hadn’t given out, and I happened to think that Dr. Trowbridge lives in this block and that he’d most likely be up, or within call, anyhow, so I rushed up the steps and hammered on the door till he let me in.
“Will you let me stay here overnight?” he concluded, turning to me appealingly. “I’m Dick Ratliff—Henry Ratliffs nephew, you know—and honest, Doctor, I’m scared stiff to go out in that street again till daylight.”
“H’m,” I murmured judicially, surveying the young fool reflectively. He was not a bad-looking boy—quite otherwise—and I could well imagine he presented a personable enough appearance when his clothing was in better array and his head less fuddled with bad liquor. “How much have you had to drink tonight, young man?”
“Two drinks, sir,” he returned promptly, looking me squarely in the eye, and, though my better judgment told me he was lying like a witness at a Senate investigation, I believed him.
“I think you’re a damn fool,” I told him with more candor than courtesy. “You were probably so full of rotgut that your own shadow gave you a start back there by the park gate, and you’ve been trying to outrace it for the last four blocks. You’ll be heartily ashamed of yourself in the morning, but I’ve a spare bed, and you may as well sleep off your debauch here as in some police station, I suppose.”
“Thank you, sir,” he answered humbly. “I don’t blame you for thinking I’ve got the jimjams—I know my story sounds crazy—but I’m telling you the truth. Something did jump out at me, and almost succeeded in grabbing me by the throat. It wasn’t just imagination, and it wasn’t booze, either, but—my God, look!”
The exclamation ended in a shrill crescendo, and the lad half leaped from his chair, pointing with a shaking forefinger at the little window over the examination table, then slumped back as though black-jacked, his hands falling limply to the floor, his head lolling drunkenly forward on his breast.
Both de Grandin and I wheeled about, facing the window. “Good lord!” I exclaimed as my gaze penetrated the shining, night-backed panes.
“Grand Dieu-c’est le diable en personnel” the little Frenchman cried.
Staring into the dimly lighted room was such a visage as might bring shudders of horripilation to a bronze statue. It was a long, cadaverous face, black with the dusky hue of old and poorly cured rawhide, bony as a death’s-head, yet covered with a multitude of tiny horizontal wrinkles. The fleshless, leathery lips were drawn back from a set of broken and discolored teeth which reminded me somehow of the cruel dentition of a shark, and the corded, rugous neck supporting the withered face was scarcely thicker than a man’s wrist. From the bare, black scalp there hung a single lock of coarse, straggling hair. But terrible as the features were, terrifying as were the unfleshed lips and cheeks and brow, the tiny, deep-set eyes almost fallen backward from their sockets were even more horrible. Small as the eyes of a rodent, set, unwavering in their stare, they reminded me, as they gleamed with hellish malevolence in their settings of shrunken, wrinkled skin, of twin poisonous spiders awaiting the chance to pounce upon their prey. It might have been a trick of the lamplight, but to me it seemed that the organs shone with a diabolical luminance of their own as they regarded us with a sort of mirthless smile.
“Good heavens, what is it?” I choked, half turning to my companion, yet keeping most of my glance fixed on the baneful, hypnotic orbs glaring at me through the windowpane.
“God knows,” returned de Grandin, “but by the belly of Jonah’s whale, we shall see if he be proof against shot and powder!” Whipping a tiny Ortgies automatic from his dressing-gown pocket he brought its blunt muzzle in line with the window and pressed the trigger. Seven, eight shots rang out so quickly that the last seemed no more than the echo of the first; the plate glass pane was perforated like a sieve within an area of three square inches; and the sharp, acrid smell of smokeless powder bit the mucous membrane of my nostrils.
“After him, Friend Trowbridge!” de Grandin cried, flinging aside the empty pistol and bolting through the door, down the hallway and across the porch. “Barbe d’une oie, but we shall see how he liked the pills I dealt him!”
The September moon rode serenely in the dark-blue sky; a little vagrant breeze, coming from the bay, rustled the boughs of the curbside maple trees; and from the downtown section there came to us, faintly, the muted clangor of the all-night trolley cars and the occasional hoot of a cruising taxicab’s horn. After the bedlam of the Frenchman’s shots the early autumn night seemed possessed of a stillness which bore in on our eardrums like a tangible sound, and, like visitors in an empty church, we pursued our quest in silence, communicating only in low, breathless whispers. From house to hedge, over lawn and rosebed and tennis court we pushed our search, scanning, every square inch of land, peering under rosebushes and rhododendron plants, even turning over the galvanized iron trash-can which stood by my kitchen stoop. No covert large enough to have shielded a rat did we leave unexplored, yet of the awful thing which had gazed through the surgery window we found no sign or trace, though we hunted till the eastern sky began to pale with streaks of rose and pearl and amethyst and the rattling milk carts broke the nighttime quiet with their early-morning clatter.
“Good mornin’, Dr. de Grandin.”
Detective Sergeant Costello rose from his seat in the consulting room as de Grandin and I entered. “ ’Tis sorry I am to be disturbin’ ye so early in th’ mornin’, more especially as I know what store ye set by yer breakfast”—he grinned broadly at his sally—“but th’ fact is, sor, there’s been a tidy little murder committed up th’ street, an’ I’m wondering if ye’d be discommodin’ yerself to th’ extent o’ cornin’ up to Professor Kolisko’s house and takin’ a look around before th’ coroner’s physician messes everything up an’ carts th’ remains off to the morgue for an autopsy.”
“A murder?” de Grandin’s little eyes snapped with sudden excitement. “Do you say a murder? My friend, you delight me!”
“Yes, sor, I knew y’d be pleased to hear about it,” the Irishman answered soberly. “Will we be goin’ up to th’ house at once, sor?”
“But of course, by all means,” de Grandin assented. “Trowbridge, my friend, you will have the charity to convey us thither, will you not? Come, let us hasten to this Monsieur Kolisko’s house and observe what we can see. And”—his little eyes twinkled as he spoke—“I beseech you, implore the so excellent Nora to reserve sufficient breakfast against the time of our return. Mordieu, already I feel my appetite assuming giant proportions!”
Two minutes later the detective, de Grandin and I were speeding uptown toward the isolated cottage where Urban Kolisko, one-time professor of psychology at the University at Warsaw, had passed the declining years of his life as a political refugee.
“Tell me, Friend Costello,” the Frenchman demanded; “this Monsieur Kolisko, how did he die?”
“H’m, that’s just what’s puzzlin’ all of us,” the detective admitted. “All we know about th’ case is that Murphy, who has th’ beat where th’ old felly lived, wuz passin’ by there a little after midnight an’ heard th’ devil’s own row goin’ on inside. Th’ lights wuz all goin’ in th’ lower part o’ th’ house, which warn’t natural, an’ when Murphy stopped to hear what it wuz all about, he thought he heard someone shoutin’ an swearin’, an’ once or twice th’ crack o’ a whip, then nothin’ at all.
“Murphy’s a good lad, sor; I’ve knowed him, man an’ boy, these last eighteen years, an’ he did just what I’d expected o’ him. Went up an’ knocked on th’ door, an’ when he couldn’t get no response, broke it in. There was hell broke loose for certain, sor.”
“Ah?” returned de Grandin. “What did the excellent Murphy observe?”
“Plenty,” Costello replied laconically. “Ye’ll be seein’ it for yerself in a minute.”
Inside the Kolisko house was that peculiar hush which does reverence to the Grim Reaper’s visits. Acting on telephoned instructions, Officer Murphy mounted guard before the door, permitting no one to enter the place, and the scene in the small, poorly lighted livingroom was exactly as he had come upon it several hours earlier.
Like most dyed-in-the-wool students, Kolisko had regarded his home merely as a place to sleep, eat and store books. The room was lined from floor to ceiling on all sides with rough deal shelving which groaned and sagged under the weight of ponderous volumes in every language known to print. Piles of other books, unable to find accommodation on the shelves, were littered about the floor. The rough, benchlike table and the littered, untidy desk which stood between the two small windows were also piled high with books.
Between the desk and table, flat on its back, staring endlessly at the rough whitewashed ceiling with bulging, sightless eyes, lay the relic of Professor Kolisko. Clothed in a tattered bathrobe and soiled pajamas the body lay, and it was not a pretty sight even to a medical man to whom death in its unloveliest phases is no stranger. Kolisko had been thin to the point of emaciation, and his scrawniness was accentuated in death. His white-thatched head was thrown back and bent grotesquely to one side, his straggling white beard thrust upward truculently, and his lower jaw had fallen downward with the flaccidity of death, half an inch or so of tongue protruding beyond the line of his lower teeth. Any doctor, soldier or undertaker—any man whose business has to do habitually with death—could not fail to recognize the signs. The man was dead, and had been so for upward of seven hours.
“Howly-Mither!” Costello’s brogue came strongly to the surface as he blessed himself involuntarily. “Will ye be lookin’ at th’ awfulness o’ him, sors?”
“U’m,” murmured Jules de Grandin, sinking to one knee beside the corpse, raising the lolling head and fingering the back of the neck with quick, practiced hands, then brushing back the bristling beard to examine the scrawny throat attentively, “he had cause to be dead, this one. See, Friend Trowbridge”—taking my hand he guided my fingers slowly down the dead man’s neck, then pointed to the throat—“there is a clean fracture of the spine between the third and fourth dorsal vertebrae, probably involving a rupture of the cord, as well. The autopsy will disclose that. And here”—he tapped the throat with a well-manicured forefinger—“are the marks of strangulation. Mordieu, whatever gripped this poor one’s neck possessed a hold like Death himself, for he not only choked him, but broke his spine as well! If it were not for one thing, I should say such strength—such ferocity of grip—could only have been exerted by one of the great apes, but—”
He broke off, staring with preoccupied, unseeing eyes at the farther wall.
“But what, sor?” Costello prompted as the little man’s silence continued.
“Parbleu, it could not be an ape and leave such a thumb-mark, my friends,” de Grandin returned. “The gorilla, the orangutan, the chimpanzee, all have such strength of hand as to accomplish what we see here, but they are not human, no matter how much they parody mankind. Their thumbs are undeveloped; the thumb which closed on this one’s neck was long and thin, more like a finger than a thumb. See for yourselves, it closed about the throat, meeting the fingers which clasped it on the other side. Mordieu, if we are to find this murderer we must look for one with twice the length and five times the strength of hand of the average man. Bethink you—this one’s grip was great enough to snap Kolisko’s spine like a clay-pipe stem by merely squeezing his neck! Dieu de Dieu, but he will be an uncomfortable one to meet in the dark!”
“You’re a Green Bird, or you wouldn’t lie there in the snow. Come, get up.”
In an instant I was awake. I saw it all. “What’s the time?” I asked.
“Just two!”
Could all that have happened in an hour! Yes. The Hotel de Coup d’OEil. The Blond Head. The Green Bird. The Count. The Blue Lake. The Hands. The Legs. The Eyes, the everything singular, were the creations of Pilgarlik’s Burgundy. I had slipped in the snow at the door, and was dreaming.
The cold had revived me, and I was now shivering. I arose. My
published by Selwyn & Blount, London, and edited by Christine Campbell Thomson, these books had to be imported if Americans desired them. The first Jules de Grandin story to appear in an American anthology was “The House Where Time Stood Still,” selected by Phil Stong for The Other Worlds (Wilfred Funk, 1941). There have been only a few other inclusions.
“Body and Soul” originally appeared in the September, 1928 Weird Tales and has never been reprinted. At the time of its publication Seabury Quinn resided at 34 Jefferson Ave., Brooklyn, N.Y., and received $115 for its 12,000 words. The rate of payment is an indication of his growing popularity, for his first story for Weird Tales, “The Phantom Farmhouse,” was 8,400 words long and brought him but $40, indicating a rate increase of more than double in three years.
“Body and Soul” is a typical Jules de Grandin story of good quality. All of the idiosyncracies of the occult detective and his unofficial aide Dr. Trowbridge are brought into focus. The menace is actually supernatural (not all of Jules de Grandin’s cases were), and the solution is a bit off-beat.
Seabury Quinn was actually a writer of above-average literary quality, but he wrote so much and at such odd hours that his work is uneven, sometimes within the story itself. This is true of “Body and Soul,” but all is forgotten in the movement of the plot.
Quinn himself could easily have masqueraded for either de Grandin or Trowbridge. Small, slim, dapper, sharp-featured, at one period in his life he had the ideal profession for a writer of the supernatural—the editorship of a trade journal for morticians, entitled Sunnyside and Casket!
BODY AND SOUL
by
SEABURY QUINN
I had a strenuous day, for the mild epidemic of summer grippe had lasted over into September, and my round of calls had been double the usual number. “Thank heaven, I can relax for seven or eight hours,” I murmured piously as I pulled the single blanket up around my chin and settled myself for the night. The hall clock had just struck twelve, and I had no appointments earlier than nine the following morning. “If only nobody is so inconsiderate as to break a leg or get the bellyache,” I mumbled drowsily, “I’ll not stir from this bed until—”
As if to demonstrate the futility of self-congratulation, there came a sudden thunderous clamor at the front door. Someone was beating the panels with both his fists, raining frenzied blows on the wood with his feet and shrieking at the top of his voice, “Let me in! Doctor—Dr. Trowbridge, let me in! For God’s sake, let me in!”
“The devil!” I ejaculated, rising resentfully and feeling for my slippers and dressing-gown. “Couldn’t he have had the decency to ring the bell?”
“Let me in, let me in, Dr. Trowbridge!” the frantic hail came again as I rounded the bed of the stairs. “Let me in—quick!”
“All right, all right!” I counseled testily, undoing the lock and chain-fastener. “Just a min—”
The caller ceased his battering-ram assault on the door as I swung it back and catapulted past me into the hall, almost carrying me off my feet as he did so. “Quick, shut it—shut the door!” he gasped, wheeling in his tracks to snatch the knob from my hand and force the door to. “It’s out there—it’s outside there, I tell you!”
“What the mischief—” I began, half puzzled, half angry, as I took quick stock of the intruder.
He was a young man, twenty-five or -six, I judged, dressed somewhat foppishly in a suit of mohair dinner clothes, his jacket and waistcoat badly rumpled, his once stiff evening shirt and collar reduced to a pulpy mass of sweat-soaked linen, and the foamy froth of drool disfiguring the corners of his flaccid mouth. As he turned on me to repeat his hysterical warning, I noticed that he caught his breath with considerable difficulty and that there was a strong hint of liquor in his speech.
“See here, young man, what do you mean?” I demanded sternly. “Haven’t you any better sense than to knock a man out of bed at this ungodly hour to tell him that—”
“Ssssh!” he interrupted with the exaggerated caution of the half-tipsy. “Ssssh, Dr. Trowbridge, I think I hear it coming up the steps. Is the door locked? Quick, in here!” Snatching me by the arm he dragged me unceremoniously into the surgery.
“Now see here, confound you!” I remonstrated. “This is going a bit too far. If you expect to get away with this sort of thing, I’ll mighty soon show you—”
“Trowbridge, mon vieux, what is it? What does the alarm portend?” Jules de Grandin, a delicate mauve-silk dressing-gown drawn over his lilac pajamas, slippers of violet snakeskin on his womanishly small feet, tiptoed into the room, his little blue eyes round with wonder and curiosity. “I thought I heard someone in extremity calling,” he continued, looking from the visitor to me, then back again with his quick, stock-taking glance. “Is it that someone dies and requires our assistance through the door to the better world, or—”
“It looks as if some drunken young fool is trying to play a practical joke on us,” I returned grimly, bending a stern look on the boy who cowered in the chair beside my desk. “I’ve half a mind to prescribe four ounces of castor oil and stand by while he takes it!”
De Grandin regarded . the young man with his steady, unwinking stare a moment, then: “What frightens you, mon brave?” he demanded, far too gently, I thought. “Parbleu, but you look as though you had been playing tag with Satan himself!”
“I have—I have!” the youth replied quaveringly. “I tell you, it jumped at me just as 1 came past the park entrance, and I wasn’t a hundred yards ahead when Dr. Trowbridge let me in!”
“U’m?” the Frenchman twisted the ends of his little blond mustache meditatively. “And this ‘It’ which pursued you, it is what?”
“I don’t know,” the other responded. “I was walking home from a dance at the Sigma Delta Tau house—been stagging it, you know—and stopped by the Victory Monument to light a cigarette when something—dam’ if I know what—jumped out o’ the bushes at me and made a grab at my throat. It missed my neck by a couple o’ inches, but snatched my hat, and I didn’t take any time to see what it would do next. I’d ‘a’ been going yet if my wind hadn’t given out, and I happened to think that Dr. Trowbridge lives in this block and that he’d most likely be up, or within call, anyhow, so I rushed up the steps and hammered on the door till he let me in.
“Will you let me stay here overnight?” he concluded, turning to me appealingly. “I’m Dick Ratliff—Henry Ratliffs nephew, you know—and honest, Doctor, I’m scared stiff to go out in that street again till daylight.”
“H’m,” I murmured judicially, surveying the young fool reflectively. He was not a bad-looking boy—quite otherwise—and I could well imagine he presented a personable enough appearance when his clothing was in better array and his head less fuddled with bad liquor. “How much have you had to drink tonight, young man?”
“Two drinks, sir,” he returned promptly, looking me squarely in the eye, and, though my better judgment told me he was lying like a witness at a Senate investigation, I believed him.
“I think you’re a damn fool,” I told him with more candor than courtesy. “You were probably so full of rotgut that your own shadow gave you a start back there by the park gate, and you’ve been trying to outrace it for the last four blocks. You’ll be heartily ashamed of yourself in the morning, but I’ve a spare bed, and you may as well sleep off your debauch here as in some police station, I suppose.”
“Thank you, sir,” he answered humbly. “I don’t blame you for thinking I’ve got the jimjams—I know my story sounds crazy—but I’m telling you the truth. Something did jump out at me, and almost succeeded in grabbing me by the throat. It wasn’t just imagination, and it wasn’t booze, either, but—my God, look!”
The exclamation ended in a shrill crescendo, and the lad half leaped from his chair, pointing with a shaking forefinger at the little window over the examination table, then slumped back as though black-jacked, his hands falling limply to the floor, his head lolling drunkenly forward on his breast.
Both de Grandin and I wheeled about, facing the window. “Good lord!” I exclaimed as my gaze penetrated the shining, night-backed panes.
“Grand Dieu-c’est le diable en personnel” the little Frenchman cried.
Staring into the dimly lighted room was such a visage as might bring shudders of horripilation to a bronze statue. It was a long, cadaverous face, black with the dusky hue of old and poorly cured rawhide, bony as a death’s-head, yet covered with a multitude of tiny horizontal wrinkles. The fleshless, leathery lips were drawn back from a set of broken and discolored teeth which reminded me somehow of the cruel dentition of a shark, and the corded, rugous neck supporting the withered face was scarcely thicker than a man’s wrist. From the bare, black scalp there hung a single lock of coarse, straggling hair. But terrible as the features were, terrifying as were the unfleshed lips and cheeks and brow, the tiny, deep-set eyes almost fallen backward from their sockets were even more horrible. Small as the eyes of a rodent, set, unwavering in their stare, they reminded me, as they gleamed with hellish malevolence in their settings of shrunken, wrinkled skin, of twin poisonous spiders awaiting the chance to pounce upon their prey. It might have been a trick of the lamplight, but to me it seemed that the organs shone with a diabolical luminance of their own as they regarded us with a sort of mirthless smile.
“Good heavens, what is it?” I choked, half turning to my companion, yet keeping most of my glance fixed on the baneful, hypnotic orbs glaring at me through the windowpane.
“God knows,” returned de Grandin, “but by the belly of Jonah’s whale, we shall see if he be proof against shot and powder!” Whipping a tiny Ortgies automatic from his dressing-gown pocket he brought its blunt muzzle in line with the window and pressed the trigger. Seven, eight shots rang out so quickly that the last seemed no more than the echo of the first; the plate glass pane was perforated like a sieve within an area of three square inches; and the sharp, acrid smell of smokeless powder bit the mucous membrane of my nostrils.
“After him, Friend Trowbridge!” de Grandin cried, flinging aside the empty pistol and bolting through the door, down the hallway and across the porch. “Barbe d’une oie, but we shall see how he liked the pills I dealt him!”
The September moon rode serenely in the dark-blue sky; a little vagrant breeze, coming from the bay, rustled the boughs of the curbside maple trees; and from the downtown section there came to us, faintly, the muted clangor of the all-night trolley cars and the occasional hoot of a cruising taxicab’s horn. After the bedlam of the Frenchman’s shots the early autumn night seemed possessed of a stillness which bore in on our eardrums like a tangible sound, and, like visitors in an empty church, we pursued our quest in silence, communicating only in low, breathless whispers. From house to hedge, over lawn and rosebed and tennis court we pushed our search, scanning, every square inch of land, peering under rosebushes and rhododendron plants, even turning over the galvanized iron trash-can which stood by my kitchen stoop. No covert large enough to have shielded a rat did we leave unexplored, yet of the awful thing which had gazed through the surgery window we found no sign or trace, though we hunted till the eastern sky began to pale with streaks of rose and pearl and amethyst and the rattling milk carts broke the nighttime quiet with their early-morning clatter.
“Good mornin’, Dr. de Grandin.”
Detective Sergeant Costello rose from his seat in the consulting room as de Grandin and I entered. “ ’Tis sorry I am to be disturbin’ ye so early in th’ mornin’, more especially as I know what store ye set by yer breakfast”—he grinned broadly at his sally—“but th’ fact is, sor, there’s been a tidy little murder committed up th’ street, an’ I’m wondering if ye’d be discommodin’ yerself to th’ extent o’ cornin’ up to Professor Kolisko’s house and takin’ a look around before th’ coroner’s physician messes everything up an’ carts th’ remains off to the morgue for an autopsy.”
“A murder?” de Grandin’s little eyes snapped with sudden excitement. “Do you say a murder? My friend, you delight me!”
“Yes, sor, I knew y’d be pleased to hear about it,” the Irishman answered soberly. “Will we be goin’ up to th’ house at once, sor?”
“But of course, by all means,” de Grandin assented. “Trowbridge, my friend, you will have the charity to convey us thither, will you not? Come, let us hasten to this Monsieur Kolisko’s house and observe what we can see. And”—his little eyes twinkled as he spoke—“I beseech you, implore the so excellent Nora to reserve sufficient breakfast against the time of our return. Mordieu, already I feel my appetite assuming giant proportions!”
Two minutes later the detective, de Grandin and I were speeding uptown toward the isolated cottage where Urban Kolisko, one-time professor of psychology at the University at Warsaw, had passed the declining years of his life as a political refugee.
“Tell me, Friend Costello,” the Frenchman demanded; “this Monsieur Kolisko, how did he die?”
“H’m, that’s just what’s puzzlin’ all of us,” the detective admitted. “All we know about th’ case is that Murphy, who has th’ beat where th’ old felly lived, wuz passin’ by there a little after midnight an’ heard th’ devil’s own row goin’ on inside. Th’ lights wuz all goin’ in th’ lower part o’ th’ house, which warn’t natural, an’ when Murphy stopped to hear what it wuz all about, he thought he heard someone shoutin’ an swearin’, an’ once or twice th’ crack o’ a whip, then nothin’ at all.
“Murphy’s a good lad, sor; I’ve knowed him, man an’ boy, these last eighteen years, an’ he did just what I’d expected o’ him. Went up an’ knocked on th’ door, an’ when he couldn’t get no response, broke it in. There was hell broke loose for certain, sor.”
“Ah?” returned de Grandin. “What did the excellent Murphy observe?”
“Plenty,” Costello replied laconically. “Ye’ll be seein’ it for yerself in a minute.”
Inside the Kolisko house was that peculiar hush which does reverence to the Grim Reaper’s visits. Acting on telephoned instructions, Officer Murphy mounted guard before the door, permitting no one to enter the place, and the scene in the small, poorly lighted livingroom was exactly as he had come upon it several hours earlier.
Like most dyed-in-the-wool students, Kolisko had regarded his home merely as a place to sleep, eat and store books. The room was lined from floor to ceiling on all sides with rough deal shelving which groaned and sagged under the weight of ponderous volumes in every language known to print. Piles of other books, unable to find accommodation on the shelves, were littered about the floor. The rough, benchlike table and the littered, untidy desk which stood between the two small windows were also piled high with books.
Between the desk and table, flat on its back, staring endlessly at the rough whitewashed ceiling with bulging, sightless eyes, lay the relic of Professor Kolisko. Clothed in a tattered bathrobe and soiled pajamas the body lay, and it was not a pretty sight even to a medical man to whom death in its unloveliest phases is no stranger. Kolisko had been thin to the point of emaciation, and his scrawniness was accentuated in death. His white-thatched head was thrown back and bent grotesquely to one side, his straggling white beard thrust upward truculently, and his lower jaw had fallen downward with the flaccidity of death, half an inch or so of tongue protruding beyond the line of his lower teeth. Any doctor, soldier or undertaker—any man whose business has to do habitually with death—could not fail to recognize the signs. The man was dead, and had been so for upward of seven hours.
“Howly-Mither!” Costello’s brogue came strongly to the surface as he blessed himself involuntarily. “Will ye be lookin’ at th’ awfulness o’ him, sors?”
“U’m,” murmured Jules de Grandin, sinking to one knee beside the corpse, raising the lolling head and fingering the back of the neck with quick, practiced hands, then brushing back the bristling beard to examine the scrawny throat attentively, “he had cause to be dead, this one. See, Friend Trowbridge”—taking my hand he guided my fingers slowly down the dead man’s neck, then pointed to the throat—“there is a clean fracture of the spine between the third and fourth dorsal vertebrae, probably involving a rupture of the cord, as well. The autopsy will disclose that. And here”—he tapped the throat with a well-manicured forefinger—“are the marks of strangulation. Mordieu, whatever gripped this poor one’s neck possessed a hold like Death himself, for he not only choked him, but broke his spine as well! If it were not for one thing, I should say such strength—such ferocity of grip—could only have been exerted by one of the great apes, but—”
He broke off, staring with preoccupied, unseeing eyes at the farther wall.
“But what, sor?” Costello prompted as the little man’s silence continued.
“Parbleu, it could not be an ape and leave such a thumb-mark, my friends,” de Grandin returned. “The gorilla, the orangutan, the chimpanzee, all have such strength of hand as to accomplish what we see here, but they are not human, no matter how much they parody mankind. Their thumbs are undeveloped; the thumb which closed on this one’s neck was long and thin, more like a finger than a thumb. See for yourselves, it closed about the throat, meeting the fingers which clasped it on the other side. Mordieu, if we are to find this murderer we must look for one with twice the length and five times the strength of hand of the average man. Bethink you—this one’s grip was great enough to snap Kolisko’s spine like a clay-pipe stem by merely squeezing his neck! Dieu de Dieu, but he will be an uncomfortable one to meet in the dark!”
