CHAPTER IX.\
LONERGAN DESERTS
1
In my records of this encounter with a creature more than humanly terrible, in my memories of the part I played in, literally, saving the world from destruction, the following day—it was a Wednesday—forms a peak. It was destined to be memorable.
We had until midnight.…
Since our feeble subterfuges were plainly matter for laughter on the part of the Voice, we had agreed to breakfast together on the balcony of my apartment.
As I came out of the bathroom and stood for a moment looking across sunny lawns where gaily chattering holiday makers already hurried to their hotels from early constitutionals, I questioned, once again, the reality of it all.
Gaston Max’s story—what did it mean? That the presence of Mme. Yburg in that stricken village had been accidental was an explanation which reason rejected. Her visit to Hartford, Connecticut, at the time of the radio mystery, made it impossible to ignore the significance of what might otherwise have passed for a coincidence.
“A tremendous electrical discharge,” someone had said in speaking of the Pyrenees tragedy; and the American mystery was also one of unknown waves.… “Perhaps the high priestess of some new religion of destruction.” Mme. Yburg had been so described by Gaston Max.
At the time appointed, the latter gentleman joined me. He wore gray flannels and a blue reefer jacket. His socks, his shirt, and his tie harmonized pleasingly.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, coming up the steps, “our American friend is late!”
“Not yet,” said I, consulting my watch: “You are absolutely on time.”
He dropped into a chair and stared reflectively at the beautiful prospect. Presently:
“I have been watching trout down there in the stream,” he said.
“Inspiring idea. What about trout for breakfast?”
“Good,” he acknowledged; adding, characteristically, “I am all for it. Early breakfast is not in my line. But blue trout, toast, and a cup of coffee—yes, I could manage this! But”—he glanced aside at me—“it was not of breakfast I was thinking as I watched those trout.”
“No?”
“No! They head always upstream—watching the oncoming water. Any danger, they suppose, would approach on the current, which they can see. They do not realize—being fishes—that they are trapped; that it is only a question of somebody’s whim how soon they will be cooked and eaten!”
I stared at him curiously. He was not looking in my direction. Seen in profile he had a magnificent head.
“We are heading upstream,” he went on—“you and I and Mr. Lonergan. But we have this advantage over the trout: we do know when we are to be cooked!”
“At midnight?”
He shrugged.
“Say, rather, at any time after midnight. But where we share the ignorance of the fishes is in this: we do not know how we are going to be cooked—nor by whom we are going to be eaten!”
Following a short silence, during which I caught snatches of careless conversation from distant passers-by wafted to me over the song of the little stream:
“Having slept on the problem,” I said, “has any theory explaining the Voice occurred to you?”
“None.”
“Or one to account for the giant bat?”
He turned to me impulsively, and:
“I tell you,” he declared, “we are face to face with powers against which we are as helpless as those trout in the Oos are helpless against the net!”
A silence fell upon us, in which no doubt Gaston Max was thinking, as I was thinking, that Lonergan, usually a model of punctuality, had presumably overslept. When, after some aimless chat which mainly served to hide a mutual doubt, fifteen minutes passed and our American colleague still remained absent, I made a suggestion.
“Either Lonergan has forgotten the appointment,” I said, “or something is wrong with him. If you will excuse me for a moment, I will make inquiries.”
“I wish you would.”
I crossed to the telephone, and remembering only just in time the name in which Lonergan was registered at the hotel:
“Would you call Mr. Kluster’s room,” I said to the clerk who answered. “I don’t know his number.”
There was a silent interval, then:
“Mr. Woodville?” inquired another voice, that of an assistant manager whom I knew fairly well.
“Yes.”
“You are asking for Mr. Kluster? I am surprised he neglected to advise you. Mr. Kluster has gone. He left for Düsseldorf by an early train!”
2
“One wise fish has escaped the net,” said Gaston Max.
But, frankly, I regarded Lonergan’s desertion less lightly. If ever I had come upon a man whom obstacles stimulated and to whom danger was refreshment that man was surely John Lonergan. Besides, ignominious flight was childish—a plain defection from duty with two witnesses to testify against Washington’s special commissioner.
It was utterly incomprehensible.
“It is plain, is it not,” said Max, as we strolled through the gardens after breakfast, “that for us to attempt to hide our movements from M. the Voice is simply silly?”
“Quite plain.”
“Mr. Lonergan has recognized this. So—do not let us judge him hastily.”
I paused, staring at the speaker, but:
“You and I,” he went on smilingly, “have until midnight. Let us use this time to the best advantage. What line of inquiry had you intended to follow to-day?”
“I had planned to visit the Felsenweir mausoleum in the cemetery.”
“Curious,” Max murmured. “So had I. Let us go together.”
A sudden and oppressive darkness had fallen when, half an hour later, we set out. The hall porter proffered a word of advice:
“Don’t go too far, sir. When it rains in Baden at this season, it rains hard.”
Nevertheless, we risked it. I welcomed the Frenchman’s company, although his usual amusing chatter was absent during our walk up to the old cemetery. I could not reconcile Lonergan’s desertion with the character of the man; I believed that Gaston Max had a theory; and he remained silent. Perhaps I was a little bit resentful.
Some few parties returning to the town we met, driven by the threatening storm, but beyond where the steep path bent sharply to the left, offering a prospect of the roofs of Baden-Baden, we had the road to ourselves.
An awning of cloud hung over the green bowl which shelters the town. Its effect was queerly forbidding. Robbed of sunshine, Baden looked like a dead place—like the shell of a fly (why did the image suggest itself?) whose life had been sucked out by a spider. And, as the unpleasant thought came to my mind:
“Do you know,” said Gaston Max suddenly, “that up to the year 1449 or 1549—forgive my bad history—I am not sure which it is—there was a village of Felsenweir?”
“No.”
“There was. No trace of it remains, I am told. It was deserted by all its inhabitants, and now the forest has partly reclaimed the soil it occupied.”
“Why was it deserted?”
“Because of a plague.”
“You mean the Black Death—called in Germany, I believe, the ‘Basle Death’?”
“No, no, not at all. This was another kind of plague. One by one they died, the people of Felsenweir. They wasted away. And it was said—those were the dark ages, Mr. Woodville—that a vampire was visiting the village!”
“Good heavens!”
I pulled up shortly. The angry curtain drawn over the valley now touched with its eastern edge higher slopes of the hills. Premature night threatened us; and no fellow travellers followed the road. Cast back by Max’s words into a dim past haunted by witches and werewolves, I saw that old “plague” in operation… I saw again a gigantic bat alighting amid the tombs. The red mouth of Mme. Yburg smiled at me, and I heard the Voice.
“Does it surprise you?”
“No. But it seems to link up with more recent rumours. I must compliment you on your thoroughness. This story is new to me. Was anyone identified as the vampire?”
“But yes! Those superstitious peasants traced the trouble to Adelheid, Countess of Felsenweir. She was dead, you understand? They enlisted the authority of Mother Church and she was removed from the family vault and buried elsewhere, with a stake through her heart.”
“Then the Felsenweir tomb…”
“Has remained closed since the day that long dead lady was taken from it.”
And now we had reached the cemetery. Its gate was open, but the impending storm had deterred visitors. A phenomenal gloom lay over that place normally gloomy enough. It appeared deserted. Gaston Max looked up at the pall above, and:
“We are in for a drenching, I think,” he said. “But no matter. There is no one whose attention we are likely to attract.”
“No one that we can see.”
Max shrugged his shoulders.
“The Invisible we cannot hope to dodge. In the course of my professional duties, Mr. Woodville, I have of course come in contact with strange things, but never before have I been tracked by a disembodied Voice nor met with giant bats. Failing some new light on these mysteries, I must confess myself defeated. But until midnight we can go on hoping.”
“And after midnight? …”
“We may have nothing to hope for.”
He made a weary gesture, smiling lightly, but his manner—as did my own—concealed a deep unrest. In sunshine it had been possible to shake off the incubus of that invisible menace. Personally I am not ashamed to admit that now, surrounded by tombs, curtained by a lowering storm, a vast uneasiness was claiming me. What my feelings must be when midnight came I preferred not to imagine.
In silence we walked along the path, turning to the left, to the right, and to the left again, until in the oldest part of the cemetery we stood before the strangely conceived tomb of the Felsenweirs.
There was something barbaric in its form. It vaguely resembled a mosque. And I wondered if its builder had been influenced by the Crusades. A Felsenweir banner had flown in Palestine. Two ancient cypresses guarded the door, and this door was of some time-blackened wood, covered with iron scroll-work and seeming to have been unopened for generations. In fact, the queer, square building which palpably had not known a restorer’s hand, ordinarily, I thought, must have lain in ruin. There was something phenomenal in its solidity.
Set in worn stonework above this door, a device had been carved; but Time or the hand of man—I could not be sure which—had completely defaced it. No doubt it had represented the crest of the Felsenweirs, but none could have deciphered it now.
Gaston Max stepped forward and examined the mediæval fastenings. He tested the strength of the woodwork. He turned, smiled, and shrugged. Then, from an inner pocket he took out a lens. He examined the lock, the hinges, and the worn stonework below. He replaced the lens.
“This door has not been opened for many years,” he declared positively.
3
Vegetation grew close up to the mausoleum on two sides, rank and unkempt. There was an ancient, musty smell.
“Stay where you are on the path, please,” said Max. “There is something I wish to investigate.”
Stepping mincingly like a dancing master, he forced a delicate way through the undergrowth, stooping and peering at the soft ground. In this way he performed a circuit of the building. He rejoined me and again shrugged characteristically.
“Not a trace,” he reported. “No steps but mine have disturbed that smelly tangle for long enough. Name of a good little man! the vampire leaves no footprints. It is not from here, Mr. Woodville, that our charming friend Mme. Yburg was coming when you met her.”
The storm had gathered so blackly above us that I was anxious to commence the return journey, when:
“One thing more,” said Max softly.
He was gazing through ever growing darkness along the path, westward.
“What?”
He pointed, and I stared wonderingly in the direction indicated.
“Mysterious,” he murmured, “yet perhaps no more than a coincidence. But amid all these ancient tombs, most of them hundreds of years old, there is one yonder, you see, which has been renovated quite recently!”
To my mind the explanation was simple enough, but Max’s expression held a sudden triumph as we walked along the narrow mossy path and stood before that monument which had arrested his attention. It bore no inscription and was palpably of great age, but as he had said, signs of recent repair were evident.
As Max, drawing the lens again from his pocket, stooped and began to examine the crevices in the stonework, a blinding flash of lightning came. It whitely illuminated the prospect. It seemed like a reproach, a threat, to those who would disturb the dwellings of the dead. Max started upright; my own heart seemed to miss a beat. As he turned to me, although his face thus lighted looked unnaturally pale, he was smiling. And I thought there was triumph in his glance.
“I may be wrong,” he said enigmatically, “but I think I am right.”
My reply was drowned in a deafening crackle of thunder. In silence we turned and ran along the path as the first great drops of rain began to fall. We made for the lych-gate, the only shelter we knew.
What prompted me to look back from the corner on to the main path, I cannot say. But I did so.…
A tall cloaked figure was standing by the Felsenweir vault! … and I thought of the Countess Adelheid.…
“Max!” I cried.
He was five paces ahead of me, but he pulled up with a jerk and turned. Even as he did so, the figure vanished. There came another blinding flash of lightning followed by a torrent of rain.
“What?” impatiently.
“Nothing. I must have been mistaken.”
And we ran on side by side.