Weird Tales volume 24 number 03 (6 page)

"Why—-what the deuce?—it's nothing but a window-screen," I answered.

"Ah, but it is made of copper," he informed me, as though explaining something of inordinate importance.

"Well "

"Well? Pardieu, I shall say it is well; it is very exceedingly well, my friend. Observe him, how he works."

From his kit bag he produced a reel of insulated wire, an electrical transformer and a set of tools. Working quickly, he passe-partouted the screen's wooden frame with electrician's tape, then plugged a wire into a near-by lamp socket, connected it with the transformer, and from the latter led a double strand of cotton-wrapped wire to the screen. This he clipped firmly to the copper meshes and led a third wire to the metal grille of the heat register. Last of all, he filled a bulb-syringe with water and sprayed the screen from it, repeating the dousings till the woven copper sparkled like a cobweb in the morning sun. "Now, Monsieur le Revenant. I damn think we are ready for you," he announced, surveying his handiwork with every sign of satisfaction.

We waited quietly for something like an hour; then de Grandin rose and bent above the bed where Arabella slept.

"Madame!"

The girl stirred faintly, murmuring some half-audible response, and:

"In half an hour you will rise," he told her in a low, insistent voice. "You will put on your robe and stand before the window, but on no account will you go near it or lay hands on it. Should anyone address you from outside, you will reply, but you will not remember what you say or what is said to you."

He motioned me to follow him, and we left the room, taking station in the hallway just outside.

How long we waited I have no idea. Perhaps it was an hour, perhaps less; at any rate, the silent vigil seemed unending, and I raised my hand to stifle a tremendous yawn, when:

"Yes, Uncle Warburg, I can hear you," we heard Arabella saying softly in the room beyond the door.

We tiptoed to the entry: Arabella Tantavul stood before the window, looking fixedly at its darkened square, and beyond her, framed in the window-casing as a masterpiece of horror might be framed for exhibition, glared the face of Warburg Tantavul.

It was dead, there was no doubt about it. In the sunken cheeks, the pinched-in nose and the yellowish-gray skin there showed the evidence of death and early putrefaction, but dead though it was, it was also animated with a dreadful sort of life. The eyes were glaring horribly, as though illuminated with some inward phosphorescence, and they bulged forward in their sunken sockets as though a throttling hand were clutching at the dead thing's throat. The lips were red—■ red as rouge—but they were not red with life; they were dead, and painted with fresh blood.

"You hear me, do ye?" he demanded, and the ruddy, foam-flecked lips writhed across his yellow teeth. "Then listen, girl; you broke your bargain with me,

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now I'm come to keep my threat: Every time you kiss your husband"—a shriek of bitter laughter cut his words, and his staring, starting eyes half closed with hellish merriment—"or the child you love so well, my shadow will be on you. You've kept me out thus far, but some day I'll get in, and "

Once more the foam-dyed lips writhed across the gleaming teeth, and the lean, dead jaw dropped downward, then snapped up, as though it champed on living flesh; then, suddenly, the whole expression of the corpse-face changed. Surprize, incredulous delight, anticipation, as before a feast, were pictured on it. "Why"—its cachinnating laughter sent a chill down my spine—"why, you're window's open now! You've changed the screen, and I can enter!"

Slowly, like a child's balloon stirred by a vagrant wind, the dreadful face moved closer to the window, and I noted with a nauseated start that it was bodiless. Closer, closer to the screen it came, and Arabella Tantavul gave ground before it, shuddering with nameless dread, putting up her hands to shield her eyes from the laughing thing which menaced her.

"Sapristi," swore de Grandin softly, his fingers clenched about my elbow till they numbed my arm. "Come on, my old and evil one; come a little nearer; only one so little tiny step, and "

The dead thing floated closer. Now its mocking mouth and shriveled, pointed nose were pressing against the screen; now they seemed to filter through the copper meshes like a wisp of fog

There came a blinding flash of blue-white flame, the cracking, sputtering gush of fusing metal, a wild, despairing shriek which ended ere it fairly started in a sob of mortal torment, and the sharp and acrid odor of burned flesh!

"Arabella—darling—is she all right?"

Dennis Tantavul came charging up the stairs. "I thought I heard a scream "

"You did, Monsieur," de Grandin answered, "but I do not think that you will ever hear its repetition, unless you are so unfortunate as to go to hell when your earthly pilgrimage is ended."

"What was it?" began Dennis, but de Grandin stopped him with a smile.

"One who thought himself a clever jester pressed his jest a bit too far," he answered enigmatically. "Meantime, look to Madame your wife. See how peacefully she lies upon her bed. Her time for evil dreams is past, my friend. Be kind to her, do not forget that a woman loves to have a lover, even though he is her husband." He bent and kissed the sleeping girl upon the brow, and:

"Au 'voir, my little lovely one," he murmured. Then, to me:

"Come, Trowbrdige, my good friend. Our work is finished here; let us leave them to their happiness."

Jules de grandin poured an ounce or so of Couvoisier into a lotus-bud shaped brandy sniffer and passed the goblet back and forth beneath his nose, inhaling the rich fragrance of the brandy. "Morbleu, old Omar had it right," he told me with a grin; "what is it that the distillers buy one-half so precious as the stuff they sell?"

"And when you get through misquoting poetry, perhaps you'll deign to tell me what it's all about?" I countered.

"Perhaps I shall," he answered. "Attend me, if you please: You will recall that this annoying Monsieur Who Was Dead Yet Not Dead appeared several times and grinned most horribly through the window? Through the window, please remember. At the hospital, where he near-

THE JEST OF WARBURG TANTAVUI

315

ly caused the garde-malade to have a fit, he laughed and mouthed at her through the glass skylight, which was tightly closed. When he first appeared and threatened Madame Arabella, he also spoke to her through the window, and "

"But the window was open," I protested.

"Yes, but screened," he answered with a smile. "Screened with iron, if you please."

"What difference did that make? Tonight I saw him force his features partway through the screen "

"Precisement," he agreed. "But it was a screen of copper; I saw to that."

Then, seeing my bewilderment: "Iron is of all metals the most earthy," he explained. "It and its derivative, steel, are so instinct with the essence of the earth that creatures of the spirit world can not abide its presence. The legends tell us that when Solomon's Temple was constructed no tool of iron was employed, because even the friendly spirits whose help he had enlisted could not perform their tasks in close proximity to iron. The werewolf, a most unpleasant sort of creature which is half a demon, can be slain by a sword or spear of steel. The witch can be detected by the pricking of an iron pin—never by a pin of brass.

"Very well. When first I thought about this evil dead one's reappearances, I noted that each time he stared outside the window. Glass, apparently, he could not pass—and glass contains a modicum of iron. Iron window-wire stopped him. 'He are not a ghost, then,' I inform me. 'They are things of spirit only, they are thoughts made manifest. This one is a thing of hate, but also of some physical material as well; he is composed in part of the emanations from that body which lies in the tomb and for which the Devil of hell and the devils of decay fight, each

for their due shares. Voila, if he have physical properties, he can be destroyed by physical means.'

"And so I set my trap. I procure a screen of copper, through which he could make entrance to the house — but I charged it with electricity—-I increase the potential of the current with a step-up transformer, to make assurance doubly sure—and then I wait for him to try to enter, and electrocute himself."

"But is he really destroyed?" I asked dubiously.

"As the candle-flame when one has blown on it," he replied. "He was—how do you say it?—short-circuited. No convict in the chair at Sing Sing ever died more thoroughly than that one did tonight, my friend."

"It seems queer, though, he should have come back from the grave to haunt those two poor kids and break up their marriage, when he really wanted it," I murmured wonderingly.

"Wanted it?" he echoed. "Ha, yes, he wanted it as the hunter wants the bird to step within his snare."

"But he gave them such a handsome present when little Dennis was born "

"Oh, my good, kind, trusting friend, are you, too, deceived?" he laughed.

' 'Deceived "

"But certainly. That money which I gave to Madame Arabella was my own. I put it in that envelope."

"Then what was in the message which he really left?"

The little Frenchman sobered suddenly. "It was a dreadful thing, that wicked jest he played on them," he told me solemnly. "The night that Monsieur Dennis left that packet with me I determined that the old one meant him injury; so, when he went, I steamed the package open and destroyed Monsieur Warburg's

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message from it. In it he made plain the things which Dennis thought that he remembered.

"Long and long ago Monsieur Tanta-vul lived in San Francisco. His wife was seven years his junior, and a pretty, joyous thing she was. She bore him two fine children, a little boy and girl, and on them she bestowed the love which he could not appreciate. His business took him often from the city, but when he went away he set a watch on her.

"Ha, the eavesdropper seldom hears good tidings of himself, and he who spies on others often wishes that he did not so. His surliness, his evil temper, his reproaches without praise, had driven her to seek release. She met and loved another man, and though she shrank from seeking freedom in that way, at last she yielded to his importunities, and was feady to escape, when Master Bluebeard-Tantavul suddenly returned.

"Eh bien, but he had planned a pretty scheme of vengeance! His baby girl he spirited away, gave her for keeping to some Mexicans, then told his wife his plan: He would bring the children up as strangers to each other, and when they grew to full estate he would marry them and keep their consanguinity a secret till they had a child, then break the dreadful truth to them. Thereafter they would live on, bound together for their children's sake, and fearing the world's censure; their consciences would cause them ceaseless torment, and the very love which they had for each other would be like fetters forged of white-hot steel, binding them in a prison-house from which there offered no release.

"When he had told her this his wife went mad, and, heartless as a devil out of hell, he thrust her into an institution, left her there to die, and took his babies with him, moving to New Jersey, and

permitting them to grow to manhood and womanhood together, ceaselessly striving to guide them toward the altar, knowing always that his vengeance would be sated when his vile design had been accomplished."

"But, great heavens, man, they're brother and sister!" I exclaimed in horror.

"Perfectly," he answered coolly. "They are also husband and wife, and father and mother."

"But—but "T stammered, utterly

at a loss for words.

"But me no buts, good friend," he bade. "I know what you would say. Their child? Ah bah; consider: Did not the kings of ancient times repeatedly take their own sisters to wife, and were not their offspring sound and healthy? But certainly. Did not both Darwin and Wallace fail to find foundation for the doctrine that cross-breeding between healthy people with clean blood is productive of inferior offspring? Look at the little Monsieur Dennis. Were you not blinded by your silly training and tradition — did you not know his parents' near relationship — you would have no hesitation in pronouncing him an unusually fine and healthy child.

"Besides," he added earnestly, "they love each other, not as brother and sister, but as man and woman. He is her happiness, she is his, and little Monsieur Dennis is the happiness of both. Why destroy this joy— le bon Dieu knows they earned it by a joyless childhood!—when I can preserve it for them by simply keeping silent?" . "But "

"But what you have learned yout learned under the seal of your profession," he warned me solemnly. "You can not tell. I will not.

"Meantime" — he poured himself another drink—"I thirst."

"Twenty—thirty years ago*-a night in the Haitian jungle—when was it?"

V"ffxiirirCHi>'->f

aked Lady

By MINDRET LORD

this is not a sex story, but is an ingenious tale of West Indian voodoo and a millionaire's strange scheme for vengeance on the actress