Weird Tales volume 31 number 03 Read Online Free PDF Page B

o'clock when he died.'
    " 'So what?'
    " 'So this: I waked up at four o'clock this morning, and the room was positively stifling with the odor of the incense they used in the Black Chapel '
    " 'Yeah? I suppose you saw Marescha, too?'
    " 'I did! She was standing by my bed, with water streaming from her face and body, and tears were in her eyes,'
    "I tried to talk him out of it, tell him that it was a trick of his imagination stimulated by Ted Eldridge's wild talk, but he insisted that he'd really seen her. Two days later he committed suicide.
    "Don Atkins followed. I didn't talk
    WEIRD TALES
    with him before he shot himself, but I'll wager that he saw her, too, and smelled that Devil's incense."
    De Grandin looked at me with upraised brows, then shook his head to caution silence ere he turned to face our guest. "And you, Monsieur?" he asked.
    "Yes, I too. Don killed himself sometime in early afternoon, and I was home that day. I'd say that it was shortly after two, for I'd lunched at the City Club and come home to pack a bag and take a trip to Nantakee. I had the highboy open and was taking out some shirts when I began to notice a strange odor in the air. But it wasn't strange for long; as it grew stronger I recognized it as the scent of Herbules' incense. It grew so strong that it was almost overpowering. I stood there by the chest of drawers, smelling the increasing scent, and determined that I'd not turn round. You know how Coleridge puts it:
    Like one, that on a lonesome road
    Duth walk in fear and dread,
    And having once turned round, walks on,
    And turns no more his head;
    Because he knows a frightful fiend
    Dorh close behind him tread . . .
    "The odor of the incense grew until I could have sworn somebody swung a censer right behind me. Then, suddenly, I heard the sound of falling water. 'Drip — drip — drip!' it fell upon the Boor, drop by deliberate drop. The suspense was more than I could bear, and I wheeled about.
    "Marescha stood behind me, almost close enough to touch. Water trickled from the hair that hung in gleaming strands across her breast and shoulders, it hung in little gleaming globules on her pale, smooth skin, ran in little rivulets across her forehead, down her beautifully shaped legs, made tiny puddles on the polished floor beside each slim bare foot. I went almost sick with horror as I saw the knotted cords we'd used to tie the
    window-weights on her still bound about her ankles, water oozing from their coils. She did not seem dead. Her lovely slender body seemed as vital as when I had held it in my arms, her full and mobile lips were red with rouge, her eyes were neither set and staring nor expressionless. But they were sad, immeasurably sad. They seemed to probe into my spirit's very depths, asking, beseeching, entreating. And to make their plea more eloquent, she slow'ly raised her lovely hands and held them out to me, palms upward, lingers slightly curled, as though she besought alms.
    "There was a faint resemblance to her bitter, crooked smile upon her lips, but it was so sad, so hopelessly entreating, that it almost made me weep to see it.
    " 'Mar ' I began, but the name
    stuck in my throat. This couldn't be the body that I'd held against my heart, those lips were not the lips I'd kissed a thousand times; this was no girl of flesh and blood. Marescha lay deep in a grave in Shadow Lawns Cemetery; had lain there almost twenty years. Dust had filled those sad, entreating eyes long before the college freshmen of this year were born., The worms . . .
    "Somewhere I had heard that if you called upon the Trinity a ghost would
    vanish. 'In the name of the Father '
    I began, but it seemed as if a clap of thunder sounded in my ears.
    " 'What right have you to call upon the Triune God?' a mighty voice seemed asking. 'You who have mocked at Heaven, taken every sacred name in vain, made a jest of every holy thing—how dare you invoke Deity? Your sacrilegious lips cannot pronounce the sacred name!'
    "And it