The Craig Kennedy Scientific Detective MEGAPACK ®. Brander Matthews
was this, I asked myself breathlessly—a new transcendental toxicology?
Slowly, a strange mephitic vapor seemed to exhale into the room— or was it my heightened imagination?
CHAPTER XXIII
THE PSYCHIC CURSE
There came a sudden noise—nameless—striking terror, low, rattling. I stood rooted to the spot. What was it that held me? Was it an atavistic joy in the horrible or was it merely a blasphemous curiosity?
I scarcely dared to look.
At last I raised my eyes. There was a live snake, upraised, his fangs striking out viciously—a rattler!
I would have drawn back and fled, but Craig caught my arm.
“Caged,” he whispered monosyllabically.
I shuddered. This, at least, was no drawing-room diablerie.
“It is Ophis,” intoned Rapport, “the Serpent—the one active form in Nature that cannot be ungraceful!”
The appearance of the basilisk seemed to heighten the tension.
At last it broke loose and then followed the most terrible blasphemies. The disciples, now all frenzied, surrounded closer the priest, the gargoyle and the serpent.
They worshiped with howls and obscenities. Mad laughter mingled with pale fear and wild scorn in turns were written on the hectic faces about me.
They had risen—it became a dance, a reel.
The votaries seemed to spin about on their axes, as it were, uttering a low, moaning chant as they whirled. It was a mania, the spirit of demonism. Something unseen seemed to urge them on.
Disgusted and stifled at the surcharged atmosphere, I would have tried to leave, but I seemed frozen to the spot. I could think of nothing except Poe’s Masque of the Red Death.
Above all the rest whirled Seward Blair himself. The laugh of the fiend, for the moment, was in his mouth. An instant he stood—the oracle of the Demon—devil-possessed. Around whirled the frantic devotees, howling.
Shrilly he cried, “The Devil is in me!”
Forward staggered the devil dancer—tall, haggard, with deep sunken eyes and matted hair, face now smeared with dirt and blood-red with the reflection of the strange, unearthly phosphorescence.
He reeled slowly through the crowd, crooning a quatrain, in a low, monotonous voice, his eyelids drooping and his head forward on his breast:
If the Red Slayer think he slays,
Or the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep and pass and turn again!
Entranced the whirling crowd paused and watched. One of their number had received the “power.”
He was swaying slowly to and fro.
“Look!” whispered Kennedy.
His fingers twitched, his head wagged uncannily. Perspiration seemed to ooze from every pore. His breast heaved.
He gave a sudden yell—ear-piercing. Then followed a screech of hellish laughter.
The dance had ended, the dancers spellbound at the sight.
He was whirling slowly, eyes protruding now, mouth foaming, chest rising and falling like a bellows, muscles quivering.
Cries, vows, imprecations, prayers, all blended in an infernal hubbub.
With a burst of ghastly, guttural laughter, he shrieked, “I AM the Devil!”
His arms waved—cutting, sawing, hacking the air.
The votaries, trembling, scarcely moved, breathed, as he danced.
Suddenly he gave a great leap into the air—then fell, motionless. They crowded around him. The fiendish look was gone—the demoniac laughter stilled.
It was over.
The tension of the orgy had been too much for us. We parted, with scarcely a word, and yet I could feel that among the rest there was a sort of unholy companionship.
Silently, Kennedy and I drove away in the darkened cab, this time with Seward and Veda Blair and Mrs. Langhorne.
For several minutes not a word was said. I was, however, much occupied in watching the two women. It was not because of anything they said or did. That was not necessary. But I felt that there was a feud, something that set them against each other.
“How would Rapport use the death thought, I wonder?” asked Craig speculatively, breaking the silence.
Blair answered quickly. “Suppose some one tried to break away, to renounce the Lodge, expose its secrets. They would treat him so as to make him harmless—perhaps insane, confused, afraid to talk, paralyzed, or even to commit suicide or be killed in an accident. They would put the death thought on him!”
Even in the prosaic jolting of the cab, away from the terrible mysteries of the Red Lodge, one could feel the spell.
The cab stopped. Seward was on his feet in a moment and handing Mrs. Langhorne out at her home. For a moment they paused on the steps for an exchange of words.
In that moment I caught flitting over the face of Veda a look of hatred, more intense, more real, more awful than any that had been induced under the mysteries of the rites at the Lodge.
It was gone in an instant, and as Seward rejoined us I felt that, with Mrs. Langhorne gone, there was less restraint. I wondered whether it was she who had inspired the fear in Veda.
Although it was more comfortable, the rest of our journey was made in silence and the Blairs dropped us at our apartment with many expressions of cordiality as we left them to proceed to their own.
“Of one thing I’m sure,” I remarked, entering the room where only a few short hours before Mrs. Blair had related her strange tale. “Whatever the cause of it, the devil dancers don’t sham.”
Kennedy did not reply. He was apparently wrapped up in the consideration of the remarkable events of the evening.
As for myself, it was a state of affairs which, the day before, I should have pronounced utterly beyond the wildest bounds of the imagination of the most colorful writer. Yet here it was; I had seen it.
I glanced up to find Kennedy standing by the light examining something he had apparently picked up at the Red Lodge. I bent over to look at it, too. It was a little glass tube.
“An ampoule, I believe the technical name of such a container is,” he remarked, holding it closer to the light.
In it were the remains of a dried yellow substance, broken up minutely, resembling crystals.
“Who dropped it?” I asked.
“Vaughn, I think,” he replied. “At least, I saw him near Blair, stooping over him, at the end, and I imagine this is what I saw gleaming for an instant in the light.”
Kennedy said nothing more, and for my part I was thoroughly at sea and could make nothing out of it all.
“What object can such a man as Dr. Vaughn possibly have in frequenting such a place?” I asked at length, adding, “And there’s that Mrs. Langhorne—she was interesting, too.”
Kennedy made no direct reply. “I shall have them shadowed tomorrow,” he said briefly, “while I am at work in the laboratory over this ampoule.”
As usual, also, Craig had begun on his scientific studies long before I was able to shake myself loose from the nightmares that haunted me after our weird experience of the evening.
He had already given the order to an agency for the shadowing, and his next move was to start me out, also, looking into the history of those concerned in the case. As far as I was able to determine,