Satan's garden
Date: 2025-03-15T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy fiction; Paranormal fiction

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Satan's garden

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Title: Satan's garden

Author: E. Hoffmann Price

Illustrator: Margaret Brundage

H. R. Hammond

Release date: March 15, 2025 [eBook #75619]

Language: English

Original publication: Indianapolis, IN: Popular Fiction Publishing Company, 1934

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SATAN'S GARDEN ***

Satan's Garden

By E. HOFFMANN PRICE

The story of a terrific adventure in Bayonne, two
ravishingly beautiful girls, occult evil and sudden
death in the lair of the hasheesh-eaters.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales April and May 1934.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Since the publication of "The Rajah's Gift" in WEIRD TALES nine years ago, followed by "The Stranger from Kurdistan," E. Hoffmann Price has been acclaimed one of the masters of quality fiction; yet his superb artistry has not interfered in any way with the vividness and thrilling power of his fascinating stories. West Point graduate, expert swordsman, orientalist and former soldier of fortune, his life itself is a thrilling tale of adventure. Endowed with a natural gift for narrative, he possesses also a warm imagination and unsurpassed literary craftsmanship. All these qualities are woven into the strange weird tale presented herewith: "Satan's Garden."

Contents

1. Invisible Scourge
2. La Dorada
3. The Hand of Hassan
4. Shirkuh Makes Magic
5. Ibrahim Khan
6. Satan's Garden
7. A Left-Handed Kurd
8. Monsters of the Pool
9. D'Artois Is Envious

1. Invisible Scourge

It was long past the hour of tinkling glass, and song to the guitar, and crowded tables at the Café du Théâtre. The gray-walled city of Bayonne slept in the moonlight like an odalisque overcome with wine and lying bejewelled in a garden whence the musicians had departed. It is thus that Bayonne has slept each night of the full moon for more than nineteen centuries at the junction of the Nive and the Adour, guarding the road to Spain.

There were two who sat in a room on the second floor of a house that faced the street running along the city wall. One was old and leathery, with fierce, upturned gray mustaches, and eyes that smoldered beneath shaggy brows; the other was not more than half his age, a lean, broad-shouldered man whose bronzed features were rugged as the masonry of the fortress, and seamed with a saber slash that ran from his cheek-bone almost to the chin.

The younger emerged from the depths of his chair like a panther leaving his cage. He paced the length of the room and paused at the window to stare out into the dazzling moon-brightness that slowly marched from the rolling, tree-clustered parkway and invaded the shadows cast by the city wall across the dry moat that skirted it. Then, as he retraced his steps, he glanced at his watch.

"Later than usual tonight, Pierre," he observed. His voice was weary from baffled wrath. "Do you suppose that It may skip a night?"

Pierre d'Artois shook his gray head and sighed.

"Why should It fail to torment her? We sit here like dummies, you and I. And to what purpose? Look!" He indicated the seals on the door at his left. "It could get through neither door nor window without breaking those seals——"

"But It did, by heaven!" exclaimed the younger. And Glenn Farrell resumed his pacing the length of the Boukhara rug that carpeted the room. He made a gesture of futile rage, then resumed, "But how, Pierre—and why?"

Pierre d'Artois twisted his mustache, shook his head again, and struck light to a cigarette. Farrell sank into the depths of his chair and retrieved the cigar butt he had laid on its arm.

"We couldn't have slept on post without one of us being aware of it," resumed Farrell. His voice was monotonous from repetition of a statement so often made that he himself had begun to doubt it. "And if we had——"

He regarded the waxen seals on the door.

"Those seals couldn't have been duplicated, with your die locked in a bank vault each night. And she couldn't have escaped."

"No, she could not," agreed d'Artois. "But some one—some thing—got in."

"A weasel, a cat, a snake," enumerated Farrell, "might slip through those bars. Nothing larger. Certainly nothing large enough to—good God! Listen!"

Grim and trembling they stood at the sealed door. They heard a moaning and a sobbing, then the screams of a woman seeking to stifle her outcry.

"Give me that key!" demanded Farrell.

He unlocked the door and flung it open, shattering the seals and breaking the cord that ran from panel to jamb. D'Artois followed him. They halted a few paces past the threshold.

"Look, damn it, look!"

As Farrell switched on the lights, he pointed at the woman who lay face down on the broad, canopied bed. She was writhing and moaning. At regular intervals she flinched as from a blow, then shuddered, and relaxed.

"Lord! I can almost hear the whip," muttered Farrell. He leaped forward and thrust out his arm as if to ward off blows that flailed the girl's bare shoulders. Then he retreated, shaking his head.

"If we can't see it, how can we stop it?" he muttered despairingly.

They stood, fascinated and horrified, watching a lovely girl being flayed by an invisible scourge. They saw the red welts rising, crossing and recrossing her shoulders, and cropping up under the filmy silken folds of her nightgown.

"Look at it! Her gown didn't move a hair's breadth, but the whip raised another welt! Pierre, it's impossible! That gown ought to be cut to pieces by that flogging. Or else nothing's really hitting her. Or else"—Farrell shook his head in bewildered despair—"or else we're both crazy as hoot-owls!"

"Tenez donc," said the old Frenchman, taking his friend by the arm. Though he himself shrank in sympathy with the girl who writhed under the invisible lash, his voice was calmer than Farrell's. "Let us study this thing. And man or devil, in the end we will have his hide!"

"You take the devils, Pierre, and give me a handful of whatever men you think are messed up in it! I'll—eh, what's that?"

He knelt beside the bed, gestured to d'Artois.

"Listen to that, Pierre!" he said in a tense whisper.

"Junayn' ash-Shaytan ..." they heard her say.

"Holy smoke!" gasped Farrell. "Junayn' ash-Shaytan ... and did you get what she said after that?" Then, before d'Artois could reply, "It's over now."

The sleeping girl had ceased writhing and tossing. Her cries had subsided to a drowsy murmuring. The two watchers stared at each other for a moment.

"But yes," said d'Artois finally. "I heard it, though it has been several years since I heard any one use such villainous language. It would do credit to one of the dancing-girls in Abu Aswad's dive in Cairo. But this junayn' ash-Shaytan, that puzzles me."

"Simple!" said Farrell. "Satan's garden."

"Mais oui!" agreed d'Artois with a touch of impatience. "Only, what is the point?"

He frowned fiercely and twisted his mustache.

"Mon vieux," he said after a moment's reflection, "in this first articulate speech in her sleep we may find a clue to the invisible scourge that leaves her back crossed with welts."

Farrell shook his head.

"Crazier and crazier," he muttered. "We're all nutty. I am, you are, she is—all of us! Now she's talking Arabic! I'm beginning to wonder whether her back is really beaten or whether we're both suffering the same delusion she is."

D'Artois led the way to the door. Farrell followed.

"I have been expecting that," he said as he reached for a brief-case lying on the table. He opened it and withdrew a photograph. "Look."

Farrell scrutinized the glossy print.

"That proves your point," he admitted. "The camera isn't subject to hallucinations or delusions of persecution. Antoinette has been beaten. Severely. The old black-and-blue marks photographed darker than the new, red welts. No argument. I'm not, she isn't, you're not bug-house. That is, not yet. But if this doesn't stop soon——"

He bit the tip off a fresh cigar, chewed it for a moment, struck light.

"Let us be impersonal about it for a moment," suggested d'Artois, "and consider what we have.

"First, she tells us that her dreams have become so real that she is confused and wonders during the day which is dream, and which is reality. She dreams that she is in an outlandishly beautiful garden, dim as by moonlight, yet warm as the glow of morning sun. The plants are strange, and the flowers have an unnatural, poison sweetness.

"And strangest of all, she herself has a different body, brown-skinned, with blue-black hair, and very large, dark eyes. The other girls, her companions, are also dark," summarized d'Artois. "Now do you see how her first speech in this troubled sleep begins to lend a touch of rationality?"

Farrell pondered for a moment, then replied.

"Yes. Those few words she spoke in Arabic tonight suggest a dual personality, give us a bit more background. But on the other hand, didn't she tell us that she couldn't understand the language of the other girls, and of the guests: lean, swarthy fellows with staring, dilated eyes? If she couldn't understand them, how the devil is she talking the fluent, unsavory Arabic of a dancing-girl in a Port Said dive?"

"That sudden gift of tongues can be resolved," said d'Artois. "There is something else, which is perhaps more relevant: the veiled Master, whom the guests of the garden regard with great reverence. Does that suggest anything?"

"It does, and it doesn't," replied Farrell, "'Way back in my mind it's there, but I can't express it. And you, I fancy, are in about the same fix?"

"I am," admitted d'Artois. "But before many days pass, we will pick up the trail. We will have this invisible wielder of an unseen scourge. Him, or his hide. But now get yourself some sleep, mon ami."

Farrell glanced at the door at his left.

"She'll be all right," assured d'Artois. "The ordeal is over. And what purpose did we serve, after all?"

"Guess you're right, Pierre," assented Farrell. "Let's go."

2. La Dorada

Glenn Farrell was up at dawn. His carefully tiptoeing down the winding stairway of Pierre d'Artois' house, however, was wasted consideration. He found that gray-haired ferrailleur hunched over the littered desk of his study, fuming and muttering in a thick, foul cloud of smoke that momentarily became more dense as the cigarette between d'Artois' fingers added its stench of burning rags. The shining brass pot of Syrian workmanship, and half a dozen tiny cups, each with a thick residue of pulverized coffee grounds and cigarette stumps, indicated that the old man had been at work ever since they had left Antoinette Delatour some six hours ago.

In the clear space in front of d'Artois was an open book whose pages were in illuminated Arabic script. Beside it were a pad of note-paper and a half-dozen loose sheets closely scribbled.

"Pierre, why didn't you tell me you were going to carry on?" reproached Farrell as he drew up a chair. "This is really more my funeral than yours, getting Antoinette out of this terrible mess."

"Mordieu!" exclaimed d'Artois. "This is work for a scholar, not a towering blockhead like yourself."

"Oh, all right, all right," said Farrell with a smile that for a moment cleared his features of the dismay and wrath of the preceding night. "Only, I can read that stuff myself, almost as well as you can." He scrutinized the book for a moment; then, indicating the title, he said, "Siret al Haken—how's that for a blockhead?"

"Very good," approved d'Artois. Then, with a wink and a grin, "And after all, perhaps I should not call you a blockhead, even though I do exceed you in intelligence and in skill with the sword."

He paused a moment after that time-honored raillery in which each reviled the other's talents, then continued, "But seriously, I have been pursuing some exceedingly roundabout speculations, and before I inflicted them on you, I wanted to study them out myself."

"Oh, all right, then," agreed Farrell as he found a clean demi-tasse and poured some of the lukewarm, sirupy Turkish coffee with which d'Artois drugged himself during his midnight studies. "But I see no connection with the Memoirs of Haken and Antoinette's terrible predicament."

"Listen then, I will enlighten you!" began d'Artois. "Mademoiselle Antoinette has been dreaming of a garden rich with roses, and lilies, and jasmine. It is alive with strangely colored birds. In fact, she described the very garden"—d'Artois indicated the page of Arabic script before him—"that Haken has so glowingly described: lovely girls playing the sitar and the oudh, and entertaining the guests of paradise with song and wine. And a veiled master who ruled the garden."

"But what," demanded Farrell, "has that to do with those unmerciful beatings? How about it?"

"Did I not say that I was working indirectly?" countered d'Artois. "The scourgings, you understand, did not come until later, after the dreams had recurred for some time. Therefore they must be but an indication of the gradual increase——"

"Of the undoubted insanity of all three of us!" interpolated Farrell.

"Mademoiselle Antoinette," declared d'Artois, ignoring his friend's outburst, "is not dreaming. She actually spends her nights in that devil's paradise. She awakes and tells us that she had another body; but her self retained its identity. I conclude then that her personality, her spiritual essence, whatever you will, is wandering, driven by some damnable compulsion to inhabit that garden, and a strange body."

Farrell sighed wearily and shook his head.

"This scrambling of selves and personalities is enough to drive one nutty. It doesn't make any sense."

"Ah, say you so?" murmured d'Artois as he reached for another cigarette. "My logic is scrambled, in that I have not attempted to show how this can be; but by assuming that it is, I get to the next point.

"Listen somewhat further, yes? We have but to find that place which Antoinette's physical body, speaking like a Syrian dancing-girl, so graphically damned and called junayn' ash-Shaytan, Satan's garden.

"There is such a garden at this moment in physical existence; or else there is one which, reaching out of the dimness of nine hundred departed years, is en rapport with Antoinette."

"Hell's fire!" muttered Farrell. "The ghost of a garden haunting a woman in Bayonne, in 1933!"

D'Artois tapped the cover of Siret al Haken.

"The author," he said, "tells of Hassan al Sabbah. Shaykh al Djibal, the Chief of the Mountains. The lord of the Hashisheen——"

"I get it!" exclaimed Farrell. "The garden paradise into which hasheesh-drugged devotees were tossed while unconscious, so that when they awoke they would believe themselves to be in the Moslem heaven of cool water, beautiful women, and forbidden wine?"

"Precisely, my excellent blockhead! I drink to your wit!" said d'Artois with a smile that flashed over the edge of his cup of cold coffee. "And your Antoinette is bedeviled in some way by a garden like that of Hassan al Sabbah, the master of those assassins who terrorized all Syria and Persia, centuries ago."

Farrell grimaced.

"Worse and worse yet! Hasn't this old city of Bayonne got enough ghosts and devils in its own right, lurking under the blood-soaked foundations of the citadel, without importing them from Asia?" His eyes shifted to the clustered simitars and yataghans, kreeses and kampilans, darts and assegais that adorned the walls of the study. "Now if they were men, we might do something about it!"

"Have no fear on that score," assured d'Artois. "We find that every phantom as malignantly directed as this ghostly garden has a man pulling the strings—a flesh-and-blood man you can neatly riddle with bullets, or slice asunder with some of those toys up there on the wall."

Farrell smiled grimly and took heart.

"Reasonable, at that. And now, suppose that we drop in and see what Antoinette has to say about her newly acquired gift of Arabic speech. It took me several years to learn that fluently."

"Barbarian!" scoffed d'Artois. "It is too early. You with your military hours——"

"And you're another," countered Farrell. "Working the clock around. But see if you can persuade Félice to scramble some eggs, at least a pound of bacon, and perhaps a stack of waffles."

"Magnifique!" agreed d'Artois. "Some of those barbarous American customs of yours are not utterly vile. And since you so kindly sent me an electric waffle-iron, à l'Américain—but as a lover, you are most unconvincing! At six of the morning, you howl for food—utterly out of keeping! Romance is dead, slain by such as you."

"Ghosts," submitted Farrell, "can not be fought on an empty stomach."

Breakfast stemmed Farrell's impatience for a while; but as they lingered over the brandy-laden coffee, he proposed again that they set out at once to call on Antoinette Delatour.

"Or at least, let's stretch our legs and get the air. I'll be turning flip-flops if I don't get going."

"The air, then," agreed d'Artois. "Look! It is but little past eight."

So saying, d'Artois selected one of his collection of canes and led the way down the stairs of the restored ruin which served as his town house. The circular donjon dated back to the Thirteenth Century; the remainder, though not so ancient, was old when Columbus set sail; and the narrow street on which it faced was in accord with those far-off days, crooked, dingy, and paved with cobblestones. Yet, being in the heart of that colorful city which he loved so well, d'Artois was content, and with the modernization of the interior, he contrived to be comfortable.

They strolled along the quai that follows the Nive to its junction with the Adour, then turned to the left toward Place du Théâtre. Before crossing the street that skirted the plaza, d'Artois paused a moment at the curbing to give the right of way to the glittering, costly Italian car which was approaching, presumably from the Biarritz road. The chauffeur and footman were in livery; and the crest on the door was one that d'Artois recognized as that of the Marquis des Islots. Farrell, however, being ignorant of heraldry, had eyes only for the passenger in the back seat: a dazzlingly beautiful girl whose costly furs and sparkling jewels betokened a background as golden as her hair. Her lovely features were drawn and weary, and her eyes haggard and blue-ringed.

"Good Lord, Pierre!" he exclaimed as he clutched his friend by the arm. "Did you see—for a moment I thought——"

He blinked, passed his hand over his eyes, then sought to catch another glimpse of the beauty in the back seat.

"And what did you for a moment think?" wondered d'Artois, as the car rolled majestically toward the Mayou bridge. His voice was grave, but his blue eyes twinkled.

"I thought it was Antoinette," said Farrell, still perplexed. "Or else I'm seeing things!"

"My friend," said d'Artois reprovingly, as they crossed the street, "let Antoinette ever hear that you mistook La Dorada for her!" He shook his head in solemn warning. "Blasphemy, you understand. Lèse majesté."

"But doesn't she——" began Farrell, his gray eyes still narrowed with perplexity.

"Truly! She does just that," admitted d'Artois. "Antoinette has often been accosted at Biarritz and Santander by admirers of La Dorada. But on second glance, their error becomes apparent, unless they are strangers. A similarity of coloring, perhaps a likeness of posture or mannerism that would deceive one only for a moment, if one knew either woman well. Had you been able to look again—anyway, La Dorada is the current playmate of Monsieur the Marquis des Islots. She was in his car, and on her way to his château where she is spending the season. Doubtless she is returning from a night of baccarat or roulette at Biarritz."

"Returning? At this hour?" wondered Farrell.

D'Artois smiled and nodded.

"You do not know La Dorada. She got the name in Madrid, where she was discovered by a café proprietor and sponsored by a grandee of Spain. La Dorada, the gilded, the golden."

As they passed along the broad plaza, then to the left and up the slope of rue Port Neuf, d'Artois held forth at length concerning the colorful career of La Dorada who at first glance so strikingly resembled Antoinette Delatour.

At the head of rue Port Neuf they turned to the left, past the old cathedral whose tall spires tower like silver lance-heads into the morning light, and ascended the incline to the broad drive that follows the parapet of the Lachepaillet wall.

Despite the barbarity of the hour, they found that Antoinette had disposed of her morning chocolate and rolls. She wore a negligée of jade chiffon whose curled ostrich trimming fluffed up about her ears and caressed the copper-golden hair that enhanced her resemblance to La Dorada. Her lips smiled, but her dark blue eyes were somber and haunted as she greeted Farrell and d'Artois.

"Hélas! It was worse than ever, last night," she replied, with a despairing gesture, to Farrell's solicitous inquiry. "But be seated, and I will tell you."

She shifted her feet to make room for Farrell at the foot of the chaise-longue on which she reclined; then, as d'Artois drew up a chair, Antoinette continued, "It was terribly clear! Just fancy: my hair was jet-black, and so were my eyes. And my skin was as dark as an Arab's! They beat me most unmercifully ... as usual."

She shuddered at the memory of the dream. D'Artois stared at the dainty feet and their turquoise and silver mules. As Antoinette was about to resume her remarks, he said abruptly, "In your dream, what have you been wearing? On your ankles, I mean."

Antoinette closed her eyes for a moment to visualize her dream.

"Heavy golden anklets set with massive uncut stones," she replied. "Emeralds, I think. But why?"

"Were they very heavy?" persisted d'Artois.

Farrell regarded him curiously, wondering how adornments could be relevant to the case.

"Terribly so!" assured Antoinette. Then, with a wan smile, "Only, I've become used to them."

"Look!" commanded d'Artois, indicating the girl's ankles.

"Well I'll be damned!" exclaimed Farrell, and frowned perplexedly. Then he glanced at his left hand and shifted the heavy signet on his finger. "Her ankles are marked just as my finger is by this heavy slug of a ring!"

"Voilà! That further indicates an interchange of bodies during the night!" declared d'Artois. "As a Syrian dancing-girl you are beaten, and the welts appear on the body of Antoinette Delatour. And the heavy anklets of the Syrian girl mark your daytime body just as they leave prints on her.

"Now what else do you remember, ma petite? Your impressions become more distinct each time, n'est-ce pas? Your recollections——"

"Exactly," she assented. "And last night—oh, I know I'm becoming utterly mad!—the veiled Master was accompanied by a man who walked through the garden with him."

"And how," wondered d'Artois, "is that more peculiar than the rest of the dream?"

"The Master's companion," replied Antoinette, "is the Marquis des Islots! Mon Dieu, is the whole city of Bayonne bound for this devil's garden?"

"What?" D'Artois started and glanced sharply at Antoinette, then at Farrell. "Monsieur le Marquis has been added to her dream. Do you see any connection?"

"I don't," confessed Farrell. "After all this madhouse she's been through, might it not be a fancied recognition? Pure imagination?"

"Cordieu!" exclaimed d'Artois. "Would she not sooner imagine that she saw ibn Saoud, or Saladin? That would be more in keeping. Diable! Her seeing Monsieur le Marquis is so wide of any fancy that I am now convinced that she is not dreaming."

"Eh, what's that?" demanded Farrell, aghast at the wildness of d'Artois' implication. "That it wasn't a dream? Good Lord, man——"

The recurrent nightmare had driven Antoinette Delatour to the verge of distraction, so that d'Artois' contention did not amaze her as much as it did Farrell.

"Mon Dieu," she sighed wearily, and took Farrell's hand. "It's all become such a terrific confusion ... I don't know who I am. Oh, how my poor back aches from that beating!"

"Courage, my dear!" reassured d'Artois. "The enemy has slipped." Then, to Farrell, "Allons! Let us get to work at once. I have several of those hunches."

"The quicker the better, Pierre," agreed Farrell. And as Antoinette's slender arms released him, he followed d'Artois down the stairs to the street.

3. The Hand of Hassan

"Your task, my friend," began d'Artois as, back again at his house, they sat down to plan their campaign against the phantom garden, "will be to watch at the plaza. You will loaf, and drink an occasional apéritif, and smoke your way into the day. You may see nothing; but with time and patience your watch will have results. All of Bayonne passes the plaza, sooner or later."

"But what," wondered Farrell, "am I to look for?"

"People who show signs of hasheesh intoxication, particularly Arabs or other Orientals," answered d'Artois. "You know the symptoms. You have seen enough hasheeshin in Egypt and Syria. I need not describe their manner, or peculiar stare. We are in search of addicts who in addition are fanatic Moslems. A slender clue at best, but while you pursue that, something else may happen.

"And I, in the meanwhile, will be doing some private snooping of my own. This Monsieur the Marquis des Islots is due for an investigation. That one has an open reputation for dabbling in obscure arts, and not such a savory reputation either."

"But," protested Farrell, "how do hasheesh addicts come into this?"

"Listen, I will enlighten you," began d'Artois. "We mentioned the Assassins, the followers of Hassan al Sabbah, the terrible Chief of the Mountains, n'est-ce pas? Those Assassins were of the fanatic Ismailian sect of Moslems. Those guests of the garden mentioned in this book"—d'Artois indicated Siret al Haken, lying open on the desk—"actually believed that their master had the power of admitting them to paradise for brief visits, at the end of which they were drugged, and dragged forth to awaken once more on earth, and ready for any infamy that might be demanded as the price of returning to the garden."

"I have all that," admitted Farrell. "All right, then?"

"The sect of the Ismailians," continued d'Artois, "was more than religious. It was political. Its members did not content themselves with theory. And if, as Antoinette's strange dreams indicate, we have a nest of Ismailians—that is, hasheeshin—to contend with, sooner or later one or more of them will be noted about town.

"As for Antoinette, it is quite possible that she is, without being aware of it, clairvoyante. And thus Monsieur le Marquis will bear investigation. Do you therefore stand watch as I directed, while I pursue some private snooping. À bientôt!"

Whereat d'Artois turned to his desk, leaving Farrell to go to the plaza and seek a table under the striped awning of the café.

Farrell was none too optimistic, but upon his arrival at Café du Théâtre he assumed an indolence that in any place but southern France would have seemed a pose. But in Bayonne the enjoyment of placid idleness is an ancient art: and thus it was eminently suitable for him to sit and watch the smoke spiralling from the cigarette that smoldered between his fingers.

All of the Bayonnais, and all visitors, eventually pass the plaza: Portuguese and Spanish and Italian sailors, Arabs from Algiers and Morocco, Basques from the hills; English tourists on their way to the arcades of rue Port Neuf, where they found the only épiceries in Bayonne where they could buy Scotch whisky; peasants, loafers, soldiers on leave; quietly dressed and unpainted girls who had left behind them, in their rooms beyond the Nive, all the gauds and garniture of their profession. Costly imported cars flashed by, to cross Pont Mayou and Pont de Saint Esprit; ox-carts lumbered past, the drivers, arrayed in dingy smocks, trudging along and reviling their placid beasts. Bayonne marched by in review; and Farrell watched the parade.

But despite his apparent idleness, Farrell's gray eyes were occupied with more than wisps of smoke, and the tall glass of anis del oso that sat on the marble-topped table before him. Without in the least shifting his slightly bowed head, he was peering between his drooping eye-lashes at the passers-by, and at the boulevardiers who like himself sat sipping the meridional apéritif.

He was particularly interested in the trio that sat two tables to his right, where they could command a view of rue Port Neuf as well as the street that led to the Mayou bridge. They were swarthy and aquiline-featured. Two were Syrian Arabs; but the third, despite his dark skin and foreign air, was no Semite, but an Aryan: a Kurd from Kurdistan, one of those fierce mountaineers who in their native land are the terror of Turk and Persian alike. Yet the trio had kinship in at least one feature: the dilated pupils and the staring glassiness of their eyes.

As Farrell raised his glass and sniffed the odor of the cloudy drink, he smelled trouble as well as anis del oso. D'Artois' somber hints were having substantial realization. Farrell's first reaction was to loosen the pistol in his shoulder holster. The peculiar stare of their eyes convinced Farrell that he had picked up the trail of that which d'Artois felt would lead to the source of the bedevilment of Antoinette's nights.

Farrell continued his apparent enjoyment of idleness. His broad shoulders slumped. He languidly passed his fingers through his sandy hair; but for all his efforts to maintain his poise, his long, lean frame was tense, and chills raced up and down his spine, despite the warmth of the day.

He summoned the waiter and called for brandy.

Then he noted that an exotic, imported car was coming to a smooth halt at the curbing. A footman in livery opened the door and stood at attention as a woman emerged from the rich upholstery and silver and cut glass of the town car that bore the crest of the Marquis des Islots.

Farrell recognized the woman as La Dorada. He wondered, as he saw her step to the curbing, why a carpet had not been unrolled to keep her feet from the contamination of the paving. The scarcely perceptible breeze wafted a breath of perfume whose cost rumor had for once fallen short of exaggerating.

La Dorada was passing the table of the trio from Asia. The one facing the Mayou bridge made a gesture. His lips moved. At that distance, Farrell could not hear what he said. La Dorada apparently paid no attention to the murmur. She was accustomed to whispered admiration.

Farrell ignored the warning of his intuition: it was too unbelievable and outrageous.

Then it happened. The Kurd, who faced Farrell, leaped cat-like to his feet. A knife flashed in his hand. La Dorada started at Farrell's warning cry, and added her own note of dismay as she saw his hand with an incredibly swift gesture seek his armpit.

"Smack-smack-smack!" roared the heavy automatic.

The Kurd pitched backward to the paving, groaning and clutching his stomach.

But even as Farrell drew and fired, the Syrian whose back had been turned to Farrell leaped from his place. And the knife he held found its mark, full in the breast of La Dorada.

The pistol spoke, but too late. Even as the impact of the heavy slug bowled the Syrian over in a heap, his blade sank home.

La Dorada screamed, reeled, and collapsed, clutching the dagger whose hilt projected beyond the blood-splashed fur collar of her coat.

As he leaped forward, pistol in hand, Farrell knew that she would be beyond assistance. A shot at the survivor of the trio was impossible, and pursuit was futile. Waiters, patrons of the café, and passers-by clustered about the dying beauty. In the confusion Farrell heard the clash of gears and caught a glimpse of a car tearing madly down toward the road leading to Maracq.

La Dorada moaned, and shuddered.

"Hassan——" she articulated with an effort. Then she coughed, and gasped. A red foam flecked her red lips.

The arrival of a pair of gendarmes, and, a few minutes later, a passing doctor, scattered the dense cluster of frantically gesticulating citizens.

"Monsieur," said one of the gendarmes, who had seen Farrell holster his automatic, "be pleased to accompany us. Purely as a matter of form, you understand. It is plainly evident that that one——"

He indicated the second of the assassins that Farrell's pistol fire had bowled over.

Farrell shrugged. It would be awkward for a stranger in town to be dragged into the formalities of a police investigation; and doubly annoying in view of his having a serious problem of his own to handle.

"Very well, monsieur," agreed Farrell with a wry grimace.

Then he saw d'Artois emerge from the fringe of the crowd that still persisted, at a distance of several paces. He whispered in the ear of the gendarme—only a few words, but they sufficed.

The gendarme turned from d'Artois to Farrell.

"Your pardon, monsieur. You may call on us at your leisure. It was routine, you comprehend."

Farrell in his turn bowed, and followed d'Artois to his car, eager to be clear of the plaza. And as they drove past the parkway that lies between the road to Maracq and the wall of Lachepaillet, Farrell gave his companion an account of the assassination.

"Sacré nom d'un nom!" swore d'Artois at the conclusion of the narrative. "That is the technique of the Fifth Order of the Ismailians. They worked in threes, so that if the first and second were cut down, the third would nevertheless slay the victim.

"They hunted Saladin seven hundred years ago. They slew Nizam ul Mulk. The Sultan of Cairo, Baibars the Panther, barely escaped them. They terrorized the Near East until Tamerlane in his wrath took by assault their almost impregnable castle of Alamut, tore it down stone by stone, and put to the sword 12,000 Ismailians. But the order persisted, though its power has been broken for these past five centuries, thanks to the savage efficiency of Tamerlane.

"And I am thoroughly convinced," continued d'Artois, "that you witnessed a recrudescence of that plague which ate at the heart of the Moslem world for several centuries. They seem to be branching out again. Even as during the Crusades they assassinated Conrad of Montferrat, so are they again carrying secret war against the infidel."

"But why," demanded Farrell, "did they strike La Dorada in the public square? They could have killed her stealthily. Even though they could not foresee that I would shoot two of them down in their tracks, the other spectators or the police might have killed or captured them."

"You miss the point," declared d'Artois, "which is pardonable, since even your extensive travels in the Orient would not of necessity bring you into contact with the Ismailians. They killed her in public as an example to instill terror in others. It is a matter of history that Ismailian assassins were often ordered to slay a dignitary and to make no attempt at escape. In one case the slayer struck, then sat down and began eating his travel rations of bread and dates, calmly awaiting the guard that would drag him to the executioner and impalement on a sharpened stake. The besotted hasheeshin faced a horrible doom for the sake of re-entrance to the paradise with which their master duped them. The utter fearlessness and indifference to death and torture aroused more terror than the assassinations they perpetrated.

"So much for the fedawi, or Devoted Ones, Ismailians of the Fifth Order. The first four orders were the Grand Master, the Grand Priors, and simple priors, or initiates; and then a grade known as rafiqs, or associates. These upper grades were intelligent persons who after sufficient study in the free-thinking, heretical doctrines of the Ismailians would be eligible for the highest offices in the Order.

"The Ismailians became a state within a state; they undermined Persia and Syria, and for several centuries exacted tribute from sultans and emirs, with summary vengeance as the penalty of non-payment, very much," concluded d'Artois, with a malicious grin, "like those racketeers they have in your United States. That should make it clear!"

"But how," wondered Farrell, "does Antoinette fit into all this?"

"The companions and initiates of the Ismailians," replied d'Artois, "were adepts in alchemy, magic, conjuring, and occult arts. They used Islam as a mask for all manner of forbidden heresies and as bait to attract the pious oafs and religious fanatics who did the actual slaying and—how does one say it, à l'Américain?—and took the rap!

"Maymun the Persian founded the order. A free-thinker, heretic, and magician, he fled from the wrath of the Khalif Mansur, with his son Abdallah, to whom he imparted all his vast knowledge of medicine, conjuring, and occultism. And Abdallah built up on this start by promising the return of the vanished Seventh Imam, who had never died, but who was waiting for the day to return and rule all Islam. They still wait for the return of Ismail, the Seventh Imam. And in the meanwhile, behold the deviltry with which they amuse themselves, bewitching Antoinette, slaying La Dorada—le bon Dieu can only say what will come next."

They drew up at d'Artois' house as he concluded his refreshing of Farrell's memory on the origin of the menace that had taken root in Bayonne.

"How about my watching the plaza?" wondered Farrell as Raoul admitted them.

"You have watched enough," declared d'Artois. "In fact, you have made yourself so painfully conspicuous that from now on I will have to watch you more closely than Mademoiselle Antoinette, or you will be found full of daggers yourself."

"Nuts, Pierre!" protested Farrell. "I've been away from home before, and I'm used to being hunted."

"Nevertheless, be on your guard," cautioned the old man.

4. Shirkuh Makes Magic

That evening, after dinner, d'Artois' man, Raoul, entered the study with a large envelope that had just been delivered by a messenger.

D'Artois glanced at the large waxen seal that secured the flap.

"The crest of Monsieur le Marquis," he observed. Then, with a wink and a grin at Farrell, he continued, "Like Satan in the first lines of the Book of Job, I wandered up and down the world, and in it, particularly at Biarritz, and somewhat about the estate of our good Marquis. But need I assure you that if my presence was noted, it was also amply accounted for? Mais oui, of a verity!"

He slit the envelope and withdrew an engraved invitation.

"Hmmm ... Monsieur le Marquis requests the honor of my presence at a soirée at his château. The Thaumaturgical Order of Thoth is meeting in open conclave."

"Wait a minute," interrupted Farrell. "There's something fishy about this. La Dorada, his sweetheart, is murdered around noon. And now he sends you an invitation to—what was it?—some kind of juggler's convention. Anyway, it's utterly out of keeping. Not only inhumanly callous, but damned poor form; no matter what his private morals may be, a man of his station would have better manners!"

"Granted," acquiesced d'Artois. "But consider: this thaumaturgical society may be depending upon the meeting-place designated, and can not postpone it for the sake of one man's grief. That there is such an order has been for some time an open secret. Then, he himself may be absent from the conclave, even though it assembled in his name. Or again," continued d'Artois, "it is even possible that Monsieur the Marquis does not know of La Dorada's death."

"Absurd!" objected Farrell. "In a town this small——"

"Wait!" interrupted d'Artois. "Remember Antoinette's dream: the Marquis walked through the garden with the veiled Master. He may still be in that garden, not to emerge until the hour of the soirée."

"By the rod, that's possible," agreed Farrell. "Since La Dorada was presumably killed by the Ismailians, the Marquis may be in their hands, dead, or a prisoner."

"Now, as to this invitation," continued d'Artois, "it may be a device to exact vengeance for your excellent pistol practise. Their espionage would inform them that you, my friend and guest, would surely accompany me to the soirée.

"But mark you this: they can scarcely know that your Antoinette could tell you of seeing the Marquis in the garden. That, you comprehend, is the information that ties the scattered ends together, and makes their otherwise subtle trap seem obvious to us.

"My friend, do we go and defy them, or shall we stay at home?"

Farrell laughed.

"Pierre, you're comical at times! We'll go, and be damned to them and their trap. We can shoot our way out of any handful of knife-artists they throw at us, what?"

"Ha! Is it that you are informing me?" scoffed d'Artois with a fierce gleam in his steel-blue eyes. "Voilà—have your choice of my arsenal," he said, gesturing at his collection of pistols, ranging from flintlocks and cap-and-ball antiques to heavy Colt revolvers and automatics. "And perhaps, since we shall be outnumbered, we might slip into those shirts of Persian chain-mail. They are not much heavier than a sweater, and so exquisitely forged as to be proof against knives and any but the heaviest pistols. Parbleu, we will attend that conclave!"

After arraying themselves as d'Artois had suggested, they dressed for a formal evening affair.

"Thaumaturgy ... thaumaturgy ..." muttered Farrell as they stepped into the Renault and d'Artois took the wheel. "Wonder, or miracle workers, what?"

"Precisely," agreed d'Artois. "Jugglery, sleight of hand, trickery, but withal, an underlying substratum of fact that can not be dismissed. I myself have seen unbelievable things done by the adepts of Tibet. A corpse, par exemple, animated and made to dance by some devilish magic. The fact of my having been admitted to their inner circles in Tibet has in time leaked out; and it is to this that they would expect us to attribute my receiving tonight's invitation."

The château of the Marquis was out in the hills beyond the Mousserole Gate. It was perched on a knoll that commanded the surrounding country. Several cars were parked in a level space near the entrance.

"It seems," observed Farrell, "that there are other guests, although that may or may not mean anything."

D'Artois presented his invitation to the butler.

"Monsieur le Chevalier Pierre d'Artois," he intoned in impressive but oddly accented French. Then he glanced at Farrell.

D'Artois interposed and instructed the butler, who then announced Farrell.

They advanced through the vestibule and thence into the salon, a vast, high-ceiled chamber illuminated by a pulsing bluish glow. The walls were hung with black arras embroidered in silver to depict with unsavory realism the grotesque imagery of Asian mysteries. At the far end of the salon was a dais flanked by tall tripod-censers whose pungent, resinous fumes made the air thick.

The assembled guests were in formal evening dress. There were Spaniards with black mustaches, and Frenchmen with spade-shaped beards; and here and there Farrell saw lean, hawk-faced Arabs, and several distinctly Mongolian faces.

"More guests than the number of cars would indicate," muttered Farrell, nudging d'Artois. "This is all very flossy, but I smell trouble."

"And no Marquis," added d'Artois with a quick glance about the salon. Then he advanced to meet the man who seemed to be acting as host. After the exchange of a few words, d'Artois presented Farrell.

In the course of the conventional courtesies, Farrell appraised the master of the show. He was lean as a beast of prey, and as sleek. His moves and gestures had a cat-like grace, and his speech had the indefinable blur of accent that marks one who speaks many languages with equal ease.

"And thus I have the honor," concluded the host, "of offering in the name of Monsieur le Marquis his regrets and the hospitality of his house."

He paused for a moment, regarding them with his intent, deep-set eyes; then with a gesture toward a row of chairs arranged before the dais, "Be pleased to seat yourselves, messieurs."

Farrell watched the broad shoulders and tall figure pass among the guests like a cat stalking through a jungle.

"Shirkuh of the clan of Shadi," muttered Farrell. "Ought to be an honest fighting-man, but——"

"'But' is correct," interrupted d'Artois. "There is nothing honest about that playmate of Satan. Mark my words, we shall see more of that gentleman, if we live long enough."

As they seated themselves there was a clang of bronze, and the faint, muffled wailing of pipes and the whine of single-stringed kemenjahs from an alcove behind the arras. As the guests took seats, an attendant passed up and down the rows of chairs, offering small glasses of wine, and triangular pastries iced in curious designs.

"On your life, don't eat it!" muttered d'Artois as he palmed a confection he had selected from the tray. "Drugged, there is no telling what may happen to your good sense. This is all damnably familiar."

Another peal of bronze; then, as Shirkuh sprang effortlessly to the dais, the music dimmed to a sighing whisper, a sinister murmuring from outer darkness.

Six lean, brown men, nude save for loin-cloths that glowed like golden flames in the spectral bluish light, emerged from an entrance concealed by the silver-embroidered arras, and filed across the hall toward the dais. Following them came four others, likewise arrayed, but blacker than any negroes Farrell had ever seen. They bore a litter on which lay a form whose gracious feminine curves were not entirely concealed by the silken, metallically glistening shroud.

"Good Lord!" muttered Farrell. "A woman!"

The brown-skinned sextet ascended the dais. The blacks followed with their burden. As they halted, two others emerged from the back-drapes of the dais, bringing with them wrought bronze trestles on which the litter was placed.

Shirkuh took his post behind the litter as the sextet of adepts from High Asia seated themselves cross-legged in front of it.

"Fellow thaumaturges," he began, "I, the least of your servants, beg leave to present a feat that has never been accomplished save in far-off Lhasa."

He paused, smiled, and stroked his mustache. Then he gestured toward the shrouded form on the litter. An attendant gathered the silken folds and drew them aside.

Farrell barely suppressed a gasp of horrified amazement.

The woman on the bier was La Dorada. Her copper-golden hair flamed like living fire in the bluish-purple, pulsing light of the room. The hands, folded across her breast, sparkled with jewels. She had no other adornment or dress. La Dorada, the Golden, dead not over ten hours, and stripped of all but her exquisite beauty, lay exposed to the gaze of that assemblage of devil-mongers. For one terrible instant Farrell had thought that Antoinette lay on that bier; then he remembered her resemblance to the dead actress, and assured himself that Antoinette was and must be in her apartment on rue Lachepaillet, awaiting another night of fantastic dreams of an assassin's paradise, and the lashing of an invisible scourge.

"Monsieur le Marquis," continued Shirkuh with a smile that flashed satanic mockery, "is unable to be with us. But I trust that that which I offer will be worthy of your presence."

"Lord!" muttered Farrell. "I don't know the Marquis, but exhibiting her dead body here in his house—I've half a notion to start the show right here!"

D'Artois' fingers closed about Farrell's right wrist.

"Imbécile! This infamy is none of your business. Tend to your own sheep."

Shirkuh nodded and made a gesture. The faint, whimpering music became louder. Among the plucked strings of sitar and oudh Farrell could distinguish the notes of a wind instrument that was a mockery of a woman's voice. The drums muttered and purred in complex rhythm.

The adepts were swaying from their hips, and making statuesque passes and gestures that resembled an animation of the figures of Egyptian sculpture. Their glassily staring eyes shifted in regular cadence to follow their darting finger tips. They were as revivified corpses that had not yet gained full control of their bodies.

Then they lifted their voices in a chant like the wailing of ghouls imprisoned in a looted tomb; dead brazen faces chanting to the dead. And Shirkuh, arms extended, made antiphonal responses in a voice that surged and thundered like a distant surf.

The notes of that diabolical wind instrument behind the arras became more and more like the voice of a woman: a mellow sweetness against a background of sepulchral wailing and the solemn intonation of Shirkuh.

"Good Lord, Pierre, that's awful!" muttered Farrell.

"Wait until it fairly starts," countered d'Artois in a whisper. "This is primitive magic. Very primitive, but deadly. They are imitating that which they design to accomplish.

"Pardieu, hear that damnable pipe—her very voice, now. They imitate in music and symbolize in their chant the triumph of the dead as they return from Beyond."

That satanically sweet voice was now almost articulate. Farrell strained his ears as he leaned forward, clutching the arms of his chair. He sought to distinguish the words that it spoke. And then another instrument came into play: a hoarse, reverberant roaring like the lustful bellowing of pre-Adamite monsters. The hall trembled with that terrific bestial blast.

The fumes of the censers were swirling and twining like fantasmal serpents in the ghastly blueness, weaving arabesques, spiralling in vortices, gathering about that hellish sextet and its leader like shapes from beyond the border clamoring at the periphery of a necromancer's pentacle.

A luminous haze was gathering and drawing to itself the censer fumes. The nebulous iridescence pulsed and quivered like a sentient thing. It throbbed with the slow, persistent beat of a turtle's heart after it has been removed from the body. It elongated; then as it slowly settled, that amorphous luminescence took shape: the graceful form of La Dorada.

The pipe that mimicked a woman's voice was articulating now in unison, joining the necromancer's antiphonal answer to the chanting adepts and the minotaurean bellowing of that monstrous horn.

The master had called her, and she was there.

The phantom presence slowly merged with the nacreous body of La Dorada. The dead woman shivered for a moment, extended her shapely arms, sat erect on the bier. Her cry was a mingling of exultation and bewilderment; then she accepted the hand that Shirkuh offered her, and splendid in her unclad beauty, sprang gracefully to the dais.

"The dead woman shivered for a moment, then sat erect on the bier."

The music and the chanting and the bestial roaring of that terrific horn had ceased. The assembled thaumaturges sat fixed and staring as though their life and their spiritual essence had been torn from them and given to the dead who saluted them with a gesture and a bow.

Shirkuh smiled triumphantly.

"You have seen, Brethren. I called her and she came. And I am but Shirkuh, the least of the slaves. See, she is alive, with the warmth and beauty that at noon of this very day was a coldness, and a sister of the dust."

The red-gold head inclined in affirmation, and her smile was a slow, curved sorcery.

"Good God, that's the awfulest blasphemy!" muttered Farrell. "Or is it an illusion?"

"It is all too real," whispered d'Artois.

And then she spoke: "I have come back from the shadows and from the blackness of death. I have come to greet you and to say that there is a Garden to which I must soon return. And those who meet me there need not ever think of farewell.

"I came from across the narrow bridge, and back across it I must go. Yet not this time to any blackness, but to the Garden, to be the Bride and the reward and the welcome of those who believe. Oh, Fedawi ... Devoted Ones...."

La Dorada, lovely in death, and more alluring than ever in life: yet a cold horror clutched Farrell as he heard that dead woman's caressing voice entrance the thaumaturges with promises that no human woman could fulfill or even imagine. Her voice was a poison sweetness, a full-throated richness that pronounced the beguilements of Lilith chanting to the Morning Star.

"Death so loved me that he has allowed me to leave," she said in that wondrous voice that had made her the darling of Paris. And then her exultant tones became a poignant sorrow as she continued, "But the beloved of death must return...."

"Cordieu! That is a foulness beyond mention!" growled d'Artois. Then:

"Let's go! Before we go utterly mad——"

He leaped to his feet and thrust back his chair. And as Farrell followed, he expected at any instant a fanatical outburst, the flash of blades, the crackle of pistols. But the thaumaturges sat like the ancient dead awaiting the newly died.

La Dorada was ascending the bier. Her motions were graceful, but very slow, as though the animation was being drained from her body. She was dying a second time.

This as they paused at the threshold for a backward glance; then, advancing, Farrell and d'Artois sighed deeply, and strode to the Renault. The hideous life-like unreality had dazed them.

"Dieu de Dieu!" muttered d'Artois as he glanced at Farrell's lean, drawn features, and shoulders drooping as though from the weight of the Persian mail they had so needlessly worn. "What did that blasphemous monster want with us? Did he hope to drive us to madness?"

"No," said Farrell wearily. "He was mocking us. Certainly he didn't withhold his cutthroats because he was afraid to try."

The long beam of the headlights swept the château, then picked up the winding road as the car headed back toward the city. D'Artois sat hunched behind the wheel. Farrell shivered at the memory of that ghastly loveliness that had greeted them from the grave.

"I know she was dead," reiterated Farrell. "She couldn't have been alive. Not with that dagger I saw jammed into her breast this afternoon. But why did he invite you? What everlastingly damned mummery—there's something behind all this—she's going to greet them in the Garden and there will be no farewell—was that all illusion, or——"

Farrell slumped back against the cushions and made a gesture of bewilderment and futility.

They left the river road, passed through the Mousserole Gate, and threaded their way through the unsavory quarters between there and the Nive. As they crossed the first of the seven bridges that span the river, d'Artois suddenly jerked back from his crouch behind the wheel.

"Nom de Dieu!" he exclaimed.

Farrell, aroused by the note of alarm, glanced at his companion and saw that the horror on his face was in keeping with the consternation in his voice.

The car leaped forward as d'Artois stepped on the accelerator.

"Death and damnation!" he shouted above the full-throated roar of the motor. "We sat there like dummies. That is what he wanted!"

"What?" demanded Farrell, tense, and alarmed by d'Artois' contagious excitement. A sudden fear seized him.

"A trap. Not for your worthless head nor mine, but for her! Thaumaturgy! If there is but one greater damn fool than Glenn Farrell, it is Pierre d'Artois!"

They passed the plaza, and with a screech of brakes slowed down enough to make the turn at rue Port Neuf. Then up rue d'Espagne, around the hairpin turn, and thence down the street along the city wall. Again the brake linings smoked their wrath and squealed their protest. Fuming and cursing in a high rage, d'Artois leaped to the curbing, dashed up the steps, and pounded Antoinette Delatour's door with the butt of his pistol.

"Qu'est-ce qu'il y a?" cried the terrified, bewildered maid.

"Flames and damnation! Open, quick!" demanded d'Artois. "C'est moi!"

"But she is sleeping," protested the maid, still half asleep.

"Hasten, then. If she sleeps, wake her—is she indeed——"

And as the door yielded, d'Artois, pistol in hand, charged up the stairs, taking them three at a time. Farrell was but a jump behind him.

They pounded on Antoinette's door. No response.

"The key——" began d'Artois.

But Farrell stepped back, gathered himself, and charged the door. It resisted the shock; but a second assault burst it open, tearing the lock from its socket.

The floor of Antoinette's room was covered with fallen plaster. Her bed was empty. A hole two feet square yawned in the ceiling. The turquoise and silver slippers mocked them.

"Gone!" muttered Farrell.

"While we sat there ready for an ambush that didn't materialize," added d'Artois.

Farrell turned to the door. D'Artois seized him by the arm.

"Tenez! If you are going to tear the château to pieces," he said, "spare yourself the trouble. They have taken her elsewhere. No effort was made to detain us when we left because none was necessary. And they will not be at the château, not any of them."

Farrell's eyes were cold as sword-points as they flashed back again to the empty, canopied bed. Then the slaying rage left him.

"Right, Pierre," he admitted. "It's your move. With some head-work."

"Head-work, indeed!" retorted d'Artois with a bitter, mordant laugh. "It was my head-work that led to this. We should have watched her."

5. Ibrahim Khan

"Now, where do we start?" demanded Farrell the following morning, as he tasted the strong coffee that was to banish the remains of the nightmarish sleep from which sunrise had awakened them. "You've got the Sûreté—that's what you call your detective bureau, isn't it?—on the trail. But there's a lot of this that no honest policeman could swallow."

"It is indeed a madhouse," admitted d'Artois. "But let us sum up for a moment: Antoinette is evidently en rapport with some one in that Garden; some one with whom she identifies herself, and whose savage beatings in some way leave marks on Antoinette's body.

"By means of clairvoyance or other unusual perception, she recognized the Marquis in her dream garden, her description of which tallies closely with the traditional paradise devised by the higher Ismailians for the deluding of their fanatical assassins.

"Assassins operating very much like the fedawi of five centuries ago murdered La Dorada, the sweetheart of the Marquis. La Dorada bears a marked resemblance to Antoinette, though far from enough to make her a double, except under the most favorable conditions.

"The terribly resurrected La Dorada last night spoke of a Garden. And the dying La Dorada pronounced the name Hassan just before she expired in the plaza. Through the whole chain of horror and deviltry, we see a continuous linkage of the Ismailians and the hasheeshin of accursed memory.

"Antoinette," continued d'Artois, "must in some way be involved in a mesh of necromancy and murder that hinges on her resemblance to La Dorada. It is not impossible that she was kidnapped to double for La Dorada in that accursed Garden.

"And finally," concluded d'Artois, "this society of thaumaturges, which has made such overgrown fools of us, is obviously allied to or even an integral part of the society of Ismailians and its higher orders, adepts, occultists, necromancers, and devil-mongers of all degrees."

"Now that you've summed it up, what are we going to do?" reiterated Farrell.

"You will take the trail at once," replied d'Artois.

Farrell brightened perceptibly at the hint of direct action.

"Shoot," he said bruskly.

"Mais non," countered d'Artois, "it is you who will shoot if my plan is right. You are deft at disguise, and you speak several Oriental languages like a native."

D'Artois paused, intently studied the lean, bronzed features of his friend, and his cold gray eyes.

"An Arab," he muttered. "Possible, but not so good. A Kurd ... yes, that would be better."

"Wrong!" contradicted Farrell. "There were some Kurds at the château last night, notably that hell-hound of a Shirkuh. And the first of the assassins I shot down in the plaza was a Kurd. Too many of them in the picture. I might be tripped on their dialect."

"An Afghan, then," compromised d'Artois. "They are Aryans, and our blood brothers, those Afghans. You will loiter around the waterfront. I will warn the Sûreté to arrest you at times, but to release you for lack of evidence; so be careful not to be too brazen in building up a local background of feuds and slayings to substantiate your supposed reason for having left your native hills.

"It is a slim chance; but it is possible that you will stumble across some Ismailian who will favorably mark your possibilities. In the meanwhile, I will keep in touch with you as much as possible.

"But remember, one false move will betray your mission. And the first warning you will receive will be a dagger jammed very deeply into your back. You are flirting with sudden death the moment you leave this house."

That afternoon Farrell lurched from a doorway that the most vivid imagination could not have associated with the house of Pierre d'Artois. The shape of his eyebrows had been changed by judicious plucking. His hair had been dyed, and the cut of his mustaches altered. Tenacious, finely powdered pigments had been rubbed into his eyelids and about his eyes so as to change their expression: all trifles, yet the total effect, aided by the drunken swagger, the gestures, the reek of 'araki and foreign tobacco, was that Glenn Farrell had disappeared, and that a hard, haggard, quarrelsome Afghan sobering up from a spree strode muttering down rue Saint Augustin, and thence toward the quai along the Adour.

He found fishing-vessels, tramps from Algiers, and a zaroug that had sailed all the way from the Red Sea with its crew of stout Danakils. Husayn, its nakhoda, was a lean, grizzled Arab whose manner suggested pearl-poaching, smuggling, or slave-running from the Somali Coast to Arabia, with piracy thrown in for good measure.... Husayn spoke of his health, which forbade further traffic on the Red Sea....

There was a Levantin, oily and cringing, who peddled narcotics....

There were brawls along the waterfront. No true Afghan would or could abstain. A fight was a fight.

Very soon the waterfront boasted a new character, a quarrelsome Afghan, drunken, bawdy, stranded, swearing loudly by the honor of the Durani clan, and ready for any skulduggery. Ibrahim Khan, they called him.

Once in a while some whining cadger of drinks would mutter as Ibrahim Khan reviled him and tossed him a franc. That was a member of the Sûreté giving, and receiving, the lack of news that is falsely said to be good news. Sometimes it was warning, but never encouragement.

The quarter of the city that lies between the Nive and the Mousserole Wall is so disreputable that during the war it was out of bounds for soldiers. It is a district of narrow, dingy streets, dirty cafés, bawdy-houses of the lowest order; it abounds in cheap wine, cheaper women, and all the scum and riffraff of a polyglot border-and-seaport town.

While the upper stratum of the enemy was doubtless of high degree, the foundation layer would be in the mire. The underworld of France would furnish its quota for the lower order of assassins. The master mind needed dirty tools for dirty work; and here, among the thieves, pimps, cutthroats of beyond the river, the trail might be picked up.

Ibrahim Khan sat in one of the dingiest of those unsavory resorts, muttering in Pushtu and Arabic and broken French, alternately gross and poetic as he courted the attention of Marcelle, the barmaid whose coarse, buxom loveliness drew trade for all departments of the house.

"Tie your husband to a rope, Bimbar,
Tie the rope to a tree;
Throw the tree in the river, Bimbar,
And come to your lover."

Thus he chanted in amorous, wine-muddled accents, the whole stanza in one breath, and, in the Afghan fashion, ending in a high-pitched, gasping cry, a full octave higher.

The girl did not understand the words; but there was one sitting in the corner who did.

"Oh, my brother," he murmured, and spat contemptuously, "are such as that sister of pigs fit for the pride of the Durani clan?"

Ibrahim Khan's hand flashed to the hilt of one of the knives that bristled in his belt. But before he could draw, the thin-faced man smiled.

"Put that knife away, brother," he said. "I have news for you."

"Well?" interrogated Ibrahim Khan a little less belligerently. "Out with it."

"Softly, softly," murmured the stranger. Ibrahim Khan had never seen him along the waterfront, or in the Mousserole quarter. "I am Nureddin. I have been interested in your handiness in certain matters ... and Husayn, the nakhoda, speaks well of you——"

"He should, Allah blacken him!" admitted Ibrahim Khan, who under his layer of grime was Glenn Farrell, trembling with eagerness to follow up what he sensed was the first open move to take the bait he had so patiently and thus far vainly offered the enemy.

"There are women," continued Nureddin, "lovelier than the brides of paradise."

Farrell laughed contemptuously, and made an insulting remark that left little doubt as to his opinion of Nureddin's profession: but that was to play his part as a truculent Afghan.

"Nay, by Allah!" protested Nureddin with a good-humored laugh. "It is not what you think. Follow me, if you have courage."

Farrell scrutinized Nureddin for an instant. Whatever game Nureddin might be playing, it would certainly not be for small counters. Then Farrell, still feigning skepticism, drew from the pocket of his grimy, ill-fitting suit a small pouch, hefted it so that the gold it contained clinked softly. He tossed the money to Marcelle.

"Ya Nureddin, I will fight as eagerly for my naked hide as for a pouch of gold. Now if you still want me to meet your friends, I will entertain them royally, inshallah!"

Nureddin smiled and stroked his chin.

"By Allah, O Afghan, you are suspicious. Follow me."

"Lead on," agreed Farrell.

He followed Nureddin to the street and thence to an alley so narrow that with his outstretched arms he could at the same time touch the buildings on both sides: and the narrowness was exceeded only by the stench. Nureddin halted at the end of the alley. A heavy, iron-bound door barred further progress.

"From here you must go blindfolded," said Nureddin.

"By your beard!" mocked Farrell as his hand flashed into view with a pistol whose cavernous muzzle gaped ominously. "Perhaps you would like to bind my hands also? Now, forward! Or I will blow thy teeth right and left ... if it so please Allah," he concluded piously.

"Fire!" retorted Nureddin. "The Master would give me a less pleasant death for disobeying his orders."

In the moonlight Farrell could see the perspiration that glittered on Nureddin's forehead; but he did not flinch.

"La, billahi!" ejaculated Farrell after a moment. "Were there a blood feud between us, I would. But as it is——" He shrugged, holstered his pistol, and turned, to stalk down the narrow alley.

Farrell was certain, now, that he was on the right trail. But since spies are notoriously eager to agree to anything and everything to gain admittance to forbidden doors, Farrell had to play the blustering, alternately suspicious and fool-hardy Afghan. He swaggered away in his lordly fashion, presenting his back as a fair target for hurled knife, or pistol fire.

"Ya Ibrahim!" protested Nureddin. "Be reasonable. He ordered. It is on my head——"

"He, whoever he is," retorted Farrell, "may then seek me himself and I will induce him to change his rules. Wallah! And your head, that is no more than a ball to play with!"

"Oh, well, have it your own way," agreed Nureddin resignedly as Farrell again turned. Then he clapped his hands sharply.

Farrell sensed his danger; but before he could whirl and draw, something soft and clinging enveloped him. It was a net whose fine, stout silken cords bound his limbs and entangled him.

"God, by the Very God, by the One True God!" he swore, struggling with the soft, relentless thing that enmeshed him like a monstrous spider-web, and seeking to draw a knife. "Pig and father of pigs!"

Something emerged from the shadow of the pilaster that buttressed the wall. Farrell dropped flat, still striving to extricate himself and tackle his enemy. He secured a footing and leaped up, butting his shoulder with a terrific jolt into his enemy's stomach.

A grunt and a gasped curse. A warning cry from Nureddin. The knife in Farrell's hand slashed a dozen meshes in the net. Then, before he could follow up and extricate himself, a form dropped from a window directly above, driving him flat against the paving. His knife dug vainly between the cobblestones. He recovered, thrust upward....

Smack! Something hard and heavy and swiftly moving swept his senses away as he felt his blade bite home.

6. Satan's Garden

The slow, steady drip-drip-drip of water dropping against stones crept into Farrell's consciousness and finally became an impression distinct from the trip-hammer throbbing of his battered head. He stirred, and found that he was not bound. The holster under his left arm was empty. One of his knives, however, remained.

"If they wanted my hide, they could have taken it in the alley," he reflected as he pieced together his recollections of the encounter. "So far, it looks as if I've got 'em fooled."

Then, in Arabic, "Aie ... my head! O dogs and sons of dogs, come out and fight! Ya Nureddin, thou son of a strumpet, thou uncle of camels! Thou eater of unclean food!"

The cell echoed with his bellowing. As he paused for breath, he reeled, clutched at the wall from whose base he had arisen, and supported himself. A torch flared smokily in the distance, from its sconce in the wall of the passage that opened into his cell.

"Father of many pigs!" he stormed as he kicked the iron grillework that barred his advance, and rattled the chain and lock that secured the door.

The clattering and jangling finally drew a protest from beyond Farrell's field of vision. Then a fat, white-bearded fellow with bleary eyes and a bloated, sottish face emerged from a cross passage.

"Silence a moment!" he croaked as he took the torch from its sconce and advanced toward the grille.

"Bring me that dog of a Nureddin!" raged Farrell.

"One thing at a time," replied the warden. "Calm down and I'll promise you action."

"Oh, very well, then," agreed Farrell. "Lead on, Uncle."

Uncle drew a pistol and, keeping Farrell covered, unlocked the door.

"Now, wild man, forward!" he ordered. "And no false moves."

The slimy, glistening sides of the passage indicated that they were far beneath the surface of the city; perhaps in that labyrinth of vaults and connecting tunnels of which local tradition has murmured darkly and vaguely. Although his head ached from contact with material weapons wielded by physical enemies, Farrell shuddered at the evil that brooded about that archaic masonry and muttered of that which had emerged to defile the dead with obscene necromancies, and torment the living with monstrous hallucinations that came in the guise of dreams. The aura of age-old menace overpowered the terror of the Ismailian assassins.

"To your left," commanded the warden.

As Farrell rounded the turn, he saw ahead of him a glow of light and smelled the heavy, lingering fumes of incense. An Arab, and a bearded man whose race he could not determine, stood watch at the farther archway. Their hands rested on their belts, ready to draw knife or pistol. Their eyes stared fixedly from immobile features. They were drugged, or entranced: and Farrell shivered at the necessity of convincing himself that they were not dead.

"Pass on," commanded the warden as Farrell hesitated at the threshold. "The Master, our lord Hassan, will receive you."

The lord Hassan—the one whose name the dying La Dorada had with her last breath pronounced. She had known who had ordered her death.

A thrill of exultation was mingled with the flash of dread that assailed Farrell as he stepped into the reception hall of Hassan, that slayer of women and master of necromancers.

The room was long and narrow, and sweltering in a red glow of light. A Persian carpet ran down the center toward the divan in an arched alcove at the farther end. A man wearing a silken kaftan sat cross-legged among heaped cushions. His face was veiled, but his fierce eyes, smoldering in their deep sockets, were more menacing for being all that was visible.

Farrell halted midway between the alcove and the entrance. From the corner of his eye he saw a row of men, dressed in European clothes, sitting cross-legged along the wall on either side of him. Their arms were crossed on their breasts, and their eyes stared as glassily as those of the guards at the entrance. They were drugged, or deep in a hypnotic trance.

Farrell offered the peace.

"No peace and no protection, ya Ibrahim," responded Hassan, "until we have made a test of you."

"Tawil ul 'Umr," demanded Farrell with a touch of respect such as even a blustering Afghan would concede an old man; "Prolonged of Life, how am I to be tested?"

The old man reflected for a moment. His glittering eyes narrowed to slits.

"Tell me, can you obey as well as slay?"

"How should I know, Prolonged of Life?" proposed Farrell. "By your beard, I have never tried obedience. I am of the Durani clan."

"You will learn," said Hassan. "I will set you an example." He glanced to his left and clapped his hands. "Asad!" he called sharply.

One of the staring figures rose from his place along the wall. He moved as one receiving will and animation from some external source.

"Harkening and obedience, ya sidi!" he acknowledged as he halted before the dais.

"Your canjiar," murmured Hassan.

The curved blade flashed from its sheath.

"That knife is your gate to Paradise, ya Asad," said Hassan in his gentle, purring voice. Yet beneath its suggestion Farrell sensed a relentless command.

Asad inclined his head as he touched his fingertips to his forehead, his lips, and his breast. A pause—the blade flashed again as Asad thrust it full into his own chest. He stood for a moment fingering the hilt; then he tottered and sank to the tiles, to relax and lie sprawled face down in the dark pool that slowly spread across the paving.

Farrell knew that beneath his grimy skin his cheeks were bloodless. It was horrible to see even a hasheeshin spill his life carelessly as a glass of wine to humor that old man who peered over the edge of his veil.

"There, ya Ibrahim, is obedience."

Farrell collected his courage and demanded boldly, "And why should any man yield such obedience?"

"Because," came the reply, "I am the keeper of the gateway. He is even now in Paradise, and exempt from any recall."

Farrell grimaced.

"No more than any true believer gains for slaying an infidel," he retorted.

"You will enter the Garden, ya Ibrahim," murmured Hassan, "and see for yourself. Then you may accept or reject."

To the Garden! There, unless all d'Artois' deductions were wrong, he would find Antoinette. But Farrell restrained his eagerness, and pondered a moment, as became the rôle he played.

"I am ready, Prolonged of Life," he finally replied, as he advanced a pace.

"Softly, softly," said Hassan. "Are you armed?"

"Ay, wallah!" replied Farrell, drawing his remaining knife.

Hassan again clapped his hands.

"Ya Suleiman! Yusuf!"

Two rose from the ranks and approached.

"Harkening and obedience, my lord," they said as they bowed.

"This one claims to be a man of valor, O Devoted Ones!" said Hassan. "Draw!"

Their blades were drawn as one. The slayers stood like panthers poised and ready to close in on their prey. Their eyes glowed in the red glare like beasts lurking in the shadows beyond a fire. Slaves to the mesmeric power of Hassan, and to the hypnotic hasheesh, they were men in form only.

Hassan glanced at Farrell.

"You may decline without penalty or dishonor," said the old man. "You are free, and owe us no obedience."

"They are your men, ya sidi," replied Farrell with a shrug. "If you can spare them."

The old man chuckled, and his eyes for a moment smiled.

"Strike!" he commanded.

They paused for an instant before closing in. One of them, Farrell was certain, would go down before his first thrust, but the other would slay him. Farrell's success depended upon finesse. He shifted his feet as if to test the footing. He glanced over his shoulder as if to assure himself that he had room to retreat. All in a flash: and then they sprang, blades thirsty and a-glitter.

Farrell's leap took him to the left instead of to the rear. He dropped his knife and snatched the wrist of the nearest enemy, who, missing his quarry, plunged forward abreast of his comrade.

His own momentum was his ruin. There was the snap of a breaking bone, and Yusuf pitched in a heap before the dais. And Farrell, picking his knife from the tiles, confronted Suleiman, who despite his fanatic frenzy was profiting by Yusuf's mishap.

They circled, feinting and thrusting, seeking to shake each other's guard. Suleiman avoided Farrell's efforts to close in to make it a test of strength. Nor would rushing in to exchange thrusts suffice: for if they slew each other, the Master would still not have the test he ordered. They wove in and out, shifting and side-stepping, each seeking an opening in the other's defense.

Then Farrell made a desperate feint at his enemy's throat. As Suleiman's blade rose to parry, Farrell evaded, and stretched out in a full lunge, point forward and arm extended as with a rapier. The unexpected play caught Suleiman off guard. His downward thrust came an instant too late: Farrell's knife sank to the hilt in the enemy's stomach, ripping upward.

Farrell, bleeding from the cut on his shoulder, emerged from the engagement empty-handed as Suleiman collapsed.

"Well done, ya Ibrahim!" approved Hassan. Then he smote a gong beside the dais.

"Ya Musa! Abbas! Khalil!" he shouted.

A panel opened at right of the dais, and three tall negroes entered. They made no expressions of obedience; only the inarticulate gurglings of those whose tongues have been removed.

Hassan indicated the two dead, and the one whose arm was snapped.

"To the black pool with them. All three!" Then, as two stepped forward to execute the command, Hassan spoke to the third: "Take our new aspirant, Ibrahim, to the Garden."

Musa bowed, and at the Master's gesture of dismissal, led Farrell into a dimly lighted room which was arranged after the fashion of a majlis, or reception hall of an Arabian house.

A narrow divan extended the full length of the wall. At the end farthest from the entrance were the customary coffee hearth and polished brass pots. And save for those, and the cushions and rugs with which the divan was covered, there were no furnishings.

Farrell noted that he was not alone. Those who lay sprawled on the divan were, apparently, likewise to visit the Garden.

"Dead-drunk ... drugged ... or spies to watch me," reflected Farrell.

Musa, who after indicating that Farrell was to seat himself, had left, presently returned with a tray on which was a goblet and flagon. These he set on a small tabouret, bowed, and left Farrell to refresh himself.

The proof of hand-to-hand fighting had been severe enough; but the flagon of wine, fragrant but reeking of hasheesh, represented a more subtle and dangerous test. If under the influence of the drug Farrell made one remark or gesture that would betray his imposture, the awakening would be death, either swift, or else by torture administered to find out how much the outside world knew of the Ismailians. Nevertheless, Farrell dared not abstain from the drugged wine. He knew not what eyes might be regarding him through loopholes in the wall.

"Bismillahi!" he ejaculated, and seized the flagon, draining it at a draft. He hoped that despite the insidious drug, his years of wandering in the forbidden places of Asia had impressed upon him enough of his assumed character to insure him against a fatal slip.

Farrell wondered at the suicide ordered by Hassan. The value of Ibrahim Khan as a fedawi could scarcely balance the self-slain and the two killed in action. He reconciled this point, however, when he considered the probability of the slain being offenders against the discipline of the order....

The intoxication of hasheesh was gripping him. Then an artifice occurred to Farrell. He might still save the day and avoid complete intoxication.

"Ya Musa! Shewayya' khamr!" he bawled drunkenly. "More wine!"

The slave came hurrying with a full flagon. Farrell's chance was to drink so much of the drugged liquor that his stomach would rebel, and expel it; and such sottishness would be quite in character. He seized the flagon with unfeigned eagerness.

But the saving thought had come too late.

His heart-beat became terrifyingly slow. His arm seemed so long that the weight of the flagon, already the size of a cask, and momentarily becoming larger, would exert a leverage that would upset him. The room was expanding to allow for the abnormal length of the arm that sought to raise the wine to his lips.

Farrell became aware of a duality of identity. Half of him was struggling fiercely to assert itself and overcome the confusion of his senses; the other half was yielding to a languorous drowsiness, and a soporific humming which pervaded the room.

There came finally a rustling of wings, and a piping, haunting music that sighed amorously. All sense of time had ceased. Farrell did not know whether he was being carried through an archway into a vast domed vault, or whether he had floated in on clouds of overwhelming sweetness.

A fountain was bubbling, and splashing him with its spray. He stared up at the ceiling. Its luminous blue was dusted with stars that were arranged in unfamiliar constellations.

Drums muttered somewhere in the shifting, warm fragrance. He heard the silvery clink-clinking of anklets. He rolled over on his side, and as he glanced along the rose-hued tiles, he saw dainty feet with hennaed nails stepping in cadence to the whining notes of a kemenjah, and the moan of pipes.

As he made an effort to sit erect, a warm, soft arm supported his head, and slender, golden-brown hands offered him a bowl of cold, aromatic liquid. He drank it, and found that his reeling senses became more stable. The girl who smiled at him had great dark eyes with kohl-blackened lids.

Another heaped cushions behind him.

Paradise indeed; al jannat, temporarily offered as the reward of whatever infamy the lord Hassan demanded, and promised for all eternity to the fanatic fedawi who died executing his commands.

There were other guests scattered about the jasmine and rose clustered garden, and the brides of al jannat were reviving them with flagons, cold drinks, and warm caresses.

Farrell made an effort to fight the illusion of distorted time and distance, and the sensuous allure of the music and hasheesh. He rose, and ignoring his amorous companions, set about exploring the garden. Strange birds flitted about among the orange and pomegranate trees and mocked him with their almost articulate cries. A parrot mimicked in a loud voice the endearments that a Malay girl murmured in the ear of one of the Devoted Ones.

"Where is the Golden One?" he heard a swarthy Kurd demand as he thrust aside his slant-eyed Eurasian companion.

The last of Farrell's intoxication left him. The Golden One—Antoinette!

The girl laughed.

"She'll scratch your eyes out! Let her alone!"

"But the Master, our Lord Hassan, promised she'd greet us in Paradise," protested the Kurd.

Farrell knew now beyond any doubt that Antoinette had been kidnapped to double in this satanic garden for the murdered La Dorada, to prove to the hasheeshin that the Lord Hassan indeed held the keys to the garden of resurrection.

"Al Asfarani, the Golden One——" Farrell seconded the Kurd's inquiry.

"Snarling and spitting in her alcove, O Strong Man!" smiled the girl.

Farrell left her to entertain the Kurd, and wandered past the rows of potted trees that paralleled the walls of the garden. The walls were pierced with deep niches that formed small rooms whose arched entrances were scarcely shoulder-high. As he glanced into each in succession, he noted the trinkets and cosmetics and perfumes, and articles of feminine apparel. Each bride of al jannat seemed to have her own lupanar; but they apparently preferred to lounge among the fountains and arbors.

Finally, however, Farrell found an occupied alcove. A woman lay face down among a heap of cushions. Her hair was copper-golden, and her bare shoulders were latticed with long, bluish stripes.

Farrell knelt at her side.

"Antoinette!" he whispered.

At the touch of his fingers on her shoulder, she started and with a quick motion drew away. Her hand emerged from the cushions clutching a long sharp steel skewer used in Syria for grilling meat.

It was Antoinette, wide-eyed with terror. She cried out, and stabbed at Farrell with the skewer. The point raked his cheek as he seized her wrist.

"'Toinette! Don't you recognize me?" he whispered hoarsely.

She regarded him for a moment, puzzled and incredulous. The skewer dropped from her fingers. But before she could cry out in amazement, Farrell continued, "Not a word! If any one passes by, start raising the devil! Don't seem to recognize me ... understand?"

She nodded, but he saw that she did not grasp the point that might make the difference between life and death. She was still bewildered.

"Oh, Glenn...." She stroked his cheek and regarded him, still incredulously. "Are you—isn't this—my dear, this is that awful garden I dreamed of. Only, now I have my own body, and I don't wake up——"

"Pipe down!" he commanded in a low, tense voice. "I'm supposed to be one of these devils! You're not dreaming. Pull yourself together——"

He heard footsteps approaching. They were steady, not the jerky lurchings of wine and hasheesh intoxication. Whoever it was, was for Farrell a death sentence if Antoinette in her hysteria spoke one false word.

"Scream! Claw me! As you treated the others!"

Then he seized her in his arms and murmured drunken endearments in her ear.

But Antoinette was too dazed by the meeting to play her part. She clung to Farrell as the one fragment of reality in all that unending nightmare of hasheesh-drugged assassins who courted her favor, and pawed her, and abandoned their advances only at the suggestion of more amiable brides of al jannat. Instead of clawing and defying Farrell, she clung to him, sobbing hysterically.

That deliberate tread of doom, soft slipper shod, drew nearer, paused.

Farrell trembled like a trapped animal. He sought with his own feigned drunken, amorous approaches to drown her betraying sobs and murmurs.

The swish-slap of slippers ... another halt. Farrell felt the intentness of the gaze at his back.

He broke from Antoinette's embrace and turned. Standing just within the entrance of the tiny room was Shirkuh the necromancer. He had seen Farrell at the château, face to face. And he had heard. He knew.

"Ah ... La Dorada has lured you to the Garden?" he murmured with deadly emphasis on the dead woman's name.

The smile was slow and mocking; the relentless eyes burned with a fanatical hatred. For a moment Farrell was paralyzed with terror, and horror at the doom from which Antoinette had no further chance of escape.

Shirkuh relished the encounter, and gloated—but just an instant too long.

Farrell sprang from his crouched position in one swift, fluent motion. Shirkuh, taken cold-footed, could not draw his knife. They crashed to the floor. But once Shirkuh recovered from the surprize of the assault, he was more than a match for Farrell, who was battered, weary from combat, and shaken by the drugged wine. The iron fingers of the Kurd sank into his throat and throttled him. Shirkuh whipped his lithe body aside, avoiding Farrell's frenzied efforts to drive home with his knee. As Farrell's struggles subsided to a futile gasping for breath, the Kurd's hand flashed to his belt and drew a knife——

But before the stroke descended, there was a crash and a splintering of glass. Shirkuh toppled over, felled by a decanter that Antoinette had broken across his head. Farrell gasped, and caught his breath, then slowly dragged himself clear of his enemy.

Antoinette, still clutching the neck of the broken decanter, regarded him with terror-widened eyes. Then she gestured toward Shirkuh, who muttered and stirred.

Farrell's fingers closed about the hilt of the knife the Kurd had dropped.

"Me or him," muttered Farrell. "If you don't want to see it, look the other way."

The blade flashed thrice.

Farrell wiped the red steel and slipped it into his empty scabbard. Then he sighed wearily and despairingly.

"Finish anyway ... they'll miss him ... and no place we can hide him."

Antoinette stared at the dark pool that spread across the silken rug.

"Can't cut my way out," muttered Farrell. "But you have a chance. Pierre and the Sûreté are on the job—is there any place we could hide that fellow?"

Antoinette shook her head.

"Nowhere. The pool of the fountain isn't deep enough——"

"Never mind the fountain!" interrupted Farrell, as he leaped to his feet. "I have a hunch. We're not quite ready to hang old man Farrell's youngest son!"

At the entrance Farrell turned, reassured Antoinette with a gesture, then stalked out into the Garden, chanting a bawdy song in Turki.

Beside the fountain he found the object of his search: a bemuddled Kurd, and the Eurasian girl who had finally convinced him that the Golden One was best left to the blustering Afghan.

"Get us more wine, O Moon of Loveliness," said Farrell with his most engaging smile. He nudged the Kurd.

The girl laughed softly.

"You look as though she gave you your fill of clawing!"

"Ay, wallah!" agreed Farrell with a broad grin. Then, as the girl picked up an empty flagon, he said in a low voice to the Kurd, "Brother, you fellows didn't approach al Asfarani the right way."

He winked and beckoned.

The Kurd clambered to his feet and followed Farrell. They paused at the arched entrance of Antoinette's alcove.

"She's in there now," whispered Farrell. "She'll not claw you."

Thus encouraged, the Kurd stepped in, Farrell following.

"Ya sitti," he began, addressing Antoinette. Then he started, seeing the body of Shirkuh.

Farrell slipped past, and toward Antoinette's divan.

"Out of my way, O shamelessly Besotted!" growled the Kurd, pausing to nudge the body with his toe.

During that instant Farrell found what he sought; and as the Kurd decided to ignore the supposed sot, the steel skewer drove home, its point projecting beyond his shoulders.

"Sorry, old man," muttered Farrell as he regarded the Kurd twitching and coughing his life out in a bloody foam. Then he rapidly searched the body.

He found no weapons.

"Disarm 'em when they come in here ... leaves me handicapped...."

He thrust Shirkuh's knife into the hand of the dying Kurd and closed the fingers about it. Then he guided the hand of Shirkuh and clenched it about the blunt end of the skewer.

"This may save the day," he explained to Antoinette. "Remember, they fought and killed each other. That may give me a long enough lease on life to come back and get you out of this hell's hole, or get word to Pierre. Now I've got to go out into the Garden and do some quick thinking. Something else may turn up ... no, I can't stay here with you ... and I've got to leave the bodies where they are."

Then, as he kissed her, "Hang on. There's still a chance for you. Maybe for us."

He strode out into the Garden, and washed his blood-stained hands at the fountain. The Eurasian girl had not yet returned with the replenished flagon. And as Farrell glanced about, looking for her, and preparing to divert her from any thought of her former companion, Musa the mute negro approached with a jar on his shoulder and a cup in his hand.

This, Farrell surmised, would be the end of the visit to Paradise. The negro would administer a sleeping-potion; the devoted ones would drink, and upon awakening would find themselves lying in the majlis, mysteriously translated from the empyrean realm of the Lord Hassan, and ready for whatever butcheries he could assign them.

As Musa offered him the cup, Farrell extended his own flagon, saying, "Fill this one, Father of Blackness. That cup of yours is too small."

The negro grinned, emptied the cup into the larger vessel, and went his way to minister to the other guests.

The Eurasian beauty, who returned at that moment, was easily diverted, so that Farrell contrived to spill most of the drugged wine over his shirt-front and into the fountain. Then, as he saw the fedawi succumb to the effects of the drug, he himself lurched forward, feigning unconsciousness.

"No chance to look around ... no chance of cutting my way out," he reflected as he thought of Antoinette and her ghastly companions. "And maybe the Shirkuh versus drunken Kurd formation will hold water long enough to give me time to qualify as an assassin and be sent out to do a bit of slaying!"

The negro was making the rounds, taking the fedawi one by one from the Garden. He picked Farrell from the paving as though he were a bag of meal, shouldered him, and deposited him on the divan in the anteroom, beside his drugged companions.

And from sheer weariness and the futility of further thought, Farrell fell asleep.

7. A Left-Handed Kurd

When a cold sponge on his forehead and the rim of a copper bowl pressed to his lips awoke Farrell, he had no idea as to the length of his sleep.

Musa helped him to his feet and led the way down a narrow passage whose floor sloped perceptibly upward. The negro halted before a panel and tapped thrice. As the panel slid aside, he gestured and flattened himself against the wall so that Farrell could pass him and enter the chamber ahead.

Farrell stepped into a circular vault fully twenty yards in diameter. In its center was a pool, likewise circular, and surrounded by a coping about a foot high. A dark splash on the tiles near the pool convinced Farrell that this must be the place into which the bodies of the victims of his test before Hassan had been tossed.

Farrell wondered if as a matter of convenience he had been conducted to the vault before the master cut him down. One slip would suffice....

Directly opposite Farrell was an arched niche in which sat an old man whose head was bowed in contemplation. Suspended from the crown of the arch was a cluster of crystalline prisms that slowly rotated, giving the effect of a glowing, coruscating ball of light.

As Farrell advanced, the door behind him slid silently into place. He skirted the edge of the pool in the center, and wondered from what abyss its black, untroubled waters emerged; what creatures lurked in its darkness to devour the bodies tossed into their pit. Then, leaving the pool, Farrell continued toward the bearded sage who still ignored his approach.

"At thy command, ya shaykh!" said Farrell as he halted some five paces from the Presence.

"Step forward," directed the ancient one, looking up and indicating a small hearth-rug that lay at the foot of the steps that ascended to the niche. "Look, ya Ibrahim: hast thou seen me before?"

As the smoldering eyes narrowed, Farrell recognized Hassan, now unveiled. He returned the old man's unblinking stare, and strove to remain unperturbed by its intent concentration; but his effort was vain. He felt a sense of futility and weakness creeping over him.

The rotating cluster of prisms now flamed and flashed with an adamantine fire that expanded and contracted and pulsed like a living thing. It seemed now to be glowing between the eyes of Hassan. An overwhelming weariness assailed Farrell.

The old man's voice intoned sonorously, and as from a great distance.

"I am the keeper of the gateway ... even in the hollow of my hand I hold al jannat and its coolness to the eyes.... Yea, behold my hand...."

Farrell regarded the outstretched hand of Hassan.

"In the hollow of my hand, even in this hand I hold al jannat...."

A mistiness was gathering about Hassan, and his features became obscured so that only his glittering eyes peered through. The outstretched hand was expanding; and strangely enough, it seemed fitting to Farrell that this should be so, and that there should be hazy figures, and clots of greenness appearing in the blankness above the hand. Trees were taking root. Their outlines were hazy, and through their immaterial substance he could just distinguish the jambs of the niche, and the swirling mists that veiled Hassan.

The voice was now murmuring softly and compellingly.

"Even in this hand I hold the Garden.... I am the keeper and the warden.... I accept and I reject...."

Then that which in the back of his brain had kept Farrell from utterly succumbing to the sorcery of that murmuring voice and those burning eyes asserted itself, and he knew that it was illusion. As he sought to resist and deny, he felt a terrific impact as of a physical substance. A mighty, implacable will bludgeoned him as with hammer blows. He knew that if he continued assenting he would be for ever enslaved.

"There is no Garden. It is illusion," he asserted to himself, and forced his lips to move and silently enunciate the negation. He trembled with an all-compelling fear, the awful fear of losing his very identity. That devastating will behind the cloud-veil was crushing him. How easy to assent, and end the agony!

Great beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. His face was drawn and haggard with the torment of his battered will. But to surrender would betray Antoinette into the hands of the enemy.

"There is no Garden," he persisted. "His hand is empty. EMPTY. EMPTY!"

He forced his last vestige of strength into that final declaration. The trees dwindled to pin-heads of green, and with them vanished the gray mists. The hand was empty!

Farrell sighed from mortal weariness and relief. Then he smiled triumphantly. He had withstood the terrific psychic assault that would have made him a slave, and a vassal of that old man and the murderous heritage of Asia.

Hassan smiled as at an ancient jest.

"You have withstood my will as no man before you," he said. "There was one who resisted to the uttermost, but he dropped dead."

Hassan, the heir of Maymun the magician, the sorcerer, the heretic, took his defeat gracefully. Then his smile became ominous and mocking.

"Who but you would have had the wit to slay Shirkuh, the chief of my servants, then so arrange the body of another you slew, that it would seem that they had died quarrelling over Al Asfarani? Subtle serpent, you erred in putting the dagger in the right hand. That Kurd was left-handed."

As those words hammered home, Farrell wondered if his heart would ever again start beating. He was lost, and with him, Antoinette. Doomed by his own cunning.

But thus far, no word about his imposture; therefore Farrell laughed full in Hassan's face, as became the honor of the Durani clan.

"Wallah, you put a premium on slayers! Now what award do you give me, seeing that I was unarmed when I slew Shirkuh?"

Hassan regarded him admiringly for a moment.

"Billahi, but you do belong to us! Not as a hasheesh-besotted fool to slay and be slain, but as an Associate, and finally, an Initiate. It is such as you that we seek, and seek in vain."

A fierce light flamed in Hassan's eyes.

"Yet your victory over my will is your doom. In the fullness of your effort to deny the illusion, you finally spoke your negation aloud. And you spoke in English!"

For an instant Farrell was dazed by the horror that had been heaped on the soul-racking triumph he had just won. Doom was at hand—doom inescapable, else that old man would not dare confront him alone.

With a cry of rage, Farrell sprang to throttle Hassan despite what unseen allies he might have. But the floor sank beneath his feet as Hassan, smiling and unmoved, fingered a knob near the jamb of the arch. Farrell clutched at the edge of the opening through which he was dropping. His fingers sustained him for a moment, but the momentum of his body swinging free into vacancy broke his slender hold. He fell into the impenetrable blackness below.

8. Monsters of the Pool

Instead of an interminable drop to the bottom of an abyss, Farrell landed in less than a second, and feet foremost, on slippery flags. He noted that the air was not as stagnant as one would expect in an oubliette.

"Plenty of circulation ... just put me in temporary storage until they get around to organizing a committee to finish me with pomp and ceremony," he muttered as he struck a match.

Farrell saw that the walls of the dungeon were curved. He strode toward the center, and by the light of a second match saw a massive column of masonry which rose from floor to ceiling. He remembered the pool he had seen on the floor above, and concluded that the pillar before him was a hollow shaft which led to some subterranean spring in the heart of the knoll on which Bayonne was built.

"All in one piece, unhurt, and no enemy in sight—yet!" he reflected as he skirted the column.

Among the inevitable rubbish with which the dungeon would be littered Farrell hoped to find some fragment of rock, scrap of wood, anything, in fact, which would give him the means of meeting the enemy with more than bare hands. But before he could strike his next match, Farrell saw a glow of light at a considerable distance to his right. It faintly outlined a low archway, and suggested possible escape from the dungeon into which he had been dropped by Hassan. That same light, however, betokened the immediate presence of the enemy, and perhaps an armed sentry. Farrell therefore crept on in darkness until he was well out of line with the source of light, then left the column and progressed toward the wall.

His knee came into contact with something hard and metallic. He struck a match, and saw that he had found a chain, one end of which was attached to a massive leg-iron, and the other secured to an eye-bolt sunk into the wall. The shank of the eye-bolt was badly corroded where it entered the masonry. A few minutes of wrenching and tugging sufficed to separate the chain from its anchorage. The result was a crude flail which in a strong hand could shatter whatever skull it struck.

Farrell was armed again, and his spirits rose accordingly.

He retraced his course and crept down the passageway toward the light. As he halted in the shelter of a jamb he saw that the vault ahead of him was illuminated by a glowing brazier; and the scene gave him a foretaste of what his own fate might be.

The black, oily form of a muscular negro crouched beside the brazier. The bellows in his hands wheezed from his vigorous efforts to fan the charcoal fire to a white heat. Tongs or other long-handled implements projected from the incandescent mass.

Limned in harsh highlight and black shadows Farrell saw two white-robed Ismailians whose predatory, Semitic features were stern from the contemplation of their task. Both were armed with simitars and pistols. The object of their scrutiny was a man who sat crouched by a pilaster. Farrell could distinguish no features beyond the aquiline curve of his nose, and the black, spade-shaped beard. The hands, clasped about the knees, were fettered at the wrists.

"God!" muttered Farrell as the red glow became a dazzling whiteness. "That lad sitting there looks for all the world like an innocent bystander. Either that party isn't for him, or he has more guts than any ten men I've ever seen.... I've not been here long enough for that to be my reception committee...."

Farrell appraised the situation, and gaged the distance between his lurking-place and the group at the brazier.

"Too far! They'd get wise before I got within striking distance ... now if this piece of chain were only a solid bar so that I could slug, swat, and parry instead of having to use it like a whip ... now what?"

The taller of the Ismailians glanced up, and with a gesture indicated the ceiling. Farrell could not distinguish his words, but it was evident that he had addressed the negro, who set aside his bellows, picked up a length of thin rope, and rose.

Then Farrell understood. They were going to slip the cord through a ring in the low ceiling, lash the prisoner's ankles, and suspend him so that the white-hot irons could be applied without interference from the victim's agonized writhing.

"Missed my chance!" growled Farrell. "They were all off guard, and I could have cold-calked them! Too late, now."

The Ismailian on the right addressed the prisoner; but the other was looking in Farrell's direction, though not directly at his lurking-place. The negro was shifting the implements that projected from the bed of coals.

Then Farrell tested the idea that came to him an instant after his expression of disgust. He reached into his pocket and found a large silver coin the size of an American dollar. He sent it spinning across the vault. It struck the opposite wall and tinkled to the floor.

As the Ismailian at the left of the group started, caught the gleam of silver, and stooped to pick it up, Farrell, whirling his flail, leaped from cover and charged.

The startled cry of the crouching negro was simultaneous with the impact of the swinging fetter against the skull of the stooping enemy. The massive circlet of iron crunched home as the other white-robed enemy whirled from confronting his prisoner and drew a pistol. Farrell knew that he could not lash out with a second blow of his flail. He ducked as the pistol flashed, gripped the Ismailian's wrist as the pistol cracked again, and back-heeled him. They crashed to the flags, Farrell striving to keep the pistol out of effective action and to disable his enemy before the giant negro recovered his wits enough to overwhelm him.

With a fierce wrench, Farrell disarmed the Ismailian and sent the pistol flying against the wall. And then the negro took a hand. They pounded and crushed Farrell as they sought to drive home with knife-thrusts which he evaded in his struggles to drive in with boot or knee. He finally, thrashing about, seized the shackle end of his flail; and as the Ismailian's knife darted in, Farrell jabbed the ponderous iron to the enemy's jaw with a crushing blow.

Then the negro crushed Farrell to the paving. Farrell's struggles were futile; the cumulative effect of previous combats was telling. In another moment his breath would be completely cut off by those relentless black hands....

Then an agonized yell, and the stench of burning hair and flesh. The pressure relaxed as a shower of white-hot charcoal rained from the frenzied enemy and seared Farrell's hands and face. But the respite, though brief, sufficed. Farrell's boot laid the enemy out flat.

Then he rose, recovered the pistol that lay against the wall, and turned to confront the fettered prisoner.

"Fortunately," said the prisoner, "I was able to reach the tongs and flip that brazier into the party."

The mutual benefactors regarded each other a moment.

"Monsieur," began Farrell, recognizing the prisoner as a Frenchman, "I am more interested in getting out of here than exchanging compliments. Judging from the preparations I interrupted, you were in for a pleasant evening, morning, or whatever it may be."

"Unfortunately," came the reply, "these fetters are rivetted, and none of the tools they brought——"

"I'll tend to that," assured Farrell. He turned and set the brazier right side up, then with the tongs collected the still glowing charcoal, and fanned it once more to a white heat. "Get your chains hot enough," he explained, "and we can break them by hand."

"Magnifique!" Then, regarding Farrell more intently, "But I don't recognize you as any of the Brethren who might be kindly disposed—though those fellows lying on the floor prove the case."

"I'm not quite what I seem," admitted Farrell as he arranged the chains so that they could get the full heat of the brazier. Then, staring for an instant at the prisoner and at the device engraved on the emerald set in his massive ring, Farrell hazarded a guess that seemed warranted by the absence of the host who had issued the invitations to the soirée at the château.

"Are you by any chance the Marquis——"

"C'est moi! Des Islots, and everlastingly at your service!" The saturnine features brightened for a moment.

As Farrell pumped the bellows, he wondered at the fortuitous meeting.

"Did Hassan put you in here?"

"No. Shirkuh, his second in command, arranged this. Hassan is too busy to bother with details——"

"He had plenty of time for me," countered Farrell.

"Hmmm ... then Shirkuh must be occupied with some important mission," began the Marquis.

"The late Shirkuh," corrected Farrell with a grim smile.

"Sacré bleu!" ejaculated the Marquis. "Did you——"

"I have the honor—and pleasure," admitted Farrell.

"Thank God! He was my evil genius. Years ago, in Syria, I joined the Ismailians as an Associate. I was a student of the occult, you understand. Their aim at the time was harmless enough: the overthrow of Islam, and the pursuit of mystic speculations. For centuries the order has had no secular significance, you comprehend.

"I advanced to the rank of Initiate, then returned to France and organized a thaumaturgical society which was to carry on with the researches I had made in Syria, and in High Asia. And this was all well until fellow Ismailians came to Bayonne, one by one, and ended by converting the thaumaturgical society into a chapter of Ismailians.

"Shirkuh was the chief of these, a prior. And then they reverted to the tactics of the Twelfth Century. To augment the hasheeshin that they sent over, they recruited cutthroats from the underworld of Paris. Various actresses and women of the demi-monde were led to believe that they had been admitted as Associates, and were set to work as spies.

"There is a plot even now under way which, if successful, will upset the French colonial empire and end in a jihad that will stir up the entire Moslem world.

"Another chapter has been organized in Lyons, with a prior in charge; and Hassan is Grand Prior of France, acknowledging only the supreme chief in Damascus.

"At all events, when I saw the political aspect of the Ismailians who had gained their foothold through my thaumaturgical society, I protested to Shirkuh—and here I am. Hot irons and other pleasant devices were to make my end most colorful."

"Where," wondered Farrell, "does La Dorada fit into the picture?"

"Eh? La Dorada? Why, a sort of chief female spy—she is friendly with many high officers and civilian dignitaries, you comprehend. She is——"

"Was," interrupted Farrell. "Three assassins finished her."

"Diable!" exclaimed the Marquis. He was amazed rather than grieved.

"You take it calmly, for a lover," remarked Farrell.

"Lover?" The Marquis laughed sourly. "I, her lover? Camouflage, to account for her presence down here, and along the Riviera. As to her being assassinated, that is easily explained: her mission must have been completed. So she was killed to insure her continued secrecy, and also to warn her dupes that they would follow suit if they relented or weakened in the course dictated by Hassan. And that move makes it all the more conclusive that France is due for an explosion."

The confusion was being untangled. Farrell wondered at Antoinette Delatour's connection, and the source of the dreams that had haunted her; but the chains that bound the Marquis were white-hot and ready to break, so that conversation would have to wait.

"All right, heave!" directed Farrell.

The chains parted.

They stripped the bodies of the white-robed Ismailians, and armed themselves with their simitars and pistols, as well as taking the extra cartridges that studded one of the belts. And the keys that had admitted the executioners completed the equipment. As the hot ends of the chain cooled, the Marquis bound them to his limbs so that they would not clank.

"I wonder," said Farrell as they turned toward the iron-bound door, "if those lads are completely out."

"Cordieu! But I am absent-minded!" growled the Marquis. He drew the simitar at his side.

As Farrell unlocked the door, he heard the sword-strokes that assured beyond all doubt that three more had entered al jannat.

"Wait a minute!" exclaimed Farrell as the door closed behind them. "We may run into a detachment on the way down here to finish me. Do you know of any other way except the passage used by your executioners?"

The Marquis reflected for a moment as he wiped and sheathed his blade.

"I do," he replied. "But we'd stand a good chance of getting lost and perishing in a labyrinth. This network is older than the Roman occupation. We have reclaimed but a fraction of it. It is the sanctuary of some awful, prehistoric past. And there were living proofs...." The Marquis shuddered at the recollection of what he had seen. "We killed most of them. But—as for me, I prefer to face men like ourselves! Anyway, if Shirkuh is dead, Hassan will be busy until another Prior is appointed. Shirkuh was an adept who studied in Tibet. A necromancer——"

Farrell shivered, and as they advanced up the passageway, told the Marquis what he had seen at the château.

"Canaille!" muttered the Marquis. "The night I was imprisoned! Just like him. And as you suspect, enough assassins in the crowd to spread the rumor of his miracle.

"Our best chance," he resumed, "is to go to the vault where you saw Hassan unveiled, thence to the assembly hall of the assassins. Then cut our way out—if we can! The chances are slender——"

"How about passing by the Garden?" wondered Farrell.

"Out of our way," protested the Marquis. "But why?"

"A ... friend," replied Farrell. "Mademoiselle Delatour——"

"What?" exclaimed the Marquis with a start. "Dieu de Dieu! How——"

Then he controlled his agitation, beckoned for silence.

They emerged from the darkness and turned into an upward-sloping branch passage illuminated by torches thrust into sconces on the wall. Ahead of them they heard the measured tread of a sentry walking his post.

"Hang back," whispered the Marquis as he fingered the hilt of the broad-bladed knife that kept his simitar company. "I know the passwords. And he may not know I'm a prisoner—but be ready for trouble if he does!"

The sentry challenged the Marquis. There was an exchange of sign and countersign. Then as the sentry saluted, the Marquis' right hand flashed to the right; his body jerked forward. As Farrell advanced, he saw the sentry collapse and sprawl across the tiles in a grotesque heap.

"So far, so good," muttered the Marquis as he wiped his blade, and led the way.

A barred door yielded to the Marquis' touch on a concealed lever. They continued on their upward march. They halted finally before a door whose panels were of heavy and elaborately carved woodwork.

"Diable!" growled the Marquis as he tried the door. "Barred from the other side. The release this side does not help us."

The mutter of drums and the plucked strings of a sitar were plainly audible.

"Better wait until the place is vacant," whispered the Marquis. "And in the meanwhile, let's cut a loophole and see what's happening."

They drew their knives and set to work.

Peering through the loophole, Farrell could see the arched niche from whose foot he had been precipitated into the dungeon below. Hassan was again, or perhaps still, at his post. He was veiled, but there was no mistaking the posture and the expression of the eyes.

Sitting cross-legged along the curved wall of the vault were a score of Ismailians in white ceremonial robes. They wore white turbans, scarlet slippers, and belts of the same color: and all were armed with the richly adorned simitars suitable to a formal assembly.

A group of musicians squatted on the floor, along the coping of the circular pool, whose dark water reflected the spectral glow that pervaded the vault. The wind instruments joined the music with a demoniac sobbing and moaning, and a brazen gong clanged.

Four litter-bearers emerged from an entrance. Attendants followed them, bearing tripods of bronze. Farrell shuddered at the similarity of that scene to the horrible beauty of the resurrection of La Dorada. Then he noted that the figure on the litter was that of a man.

As the shroud was lifted, he recognized Shirkuh of the clan of Shadi. The Prior of the Ismailians was to receive the final homage of his subordinates. The pipes wailed mournfully in honor of that desecrator of the dead. Farrell sighed with relief, and glanced at the Marquis.

He peered once more through the loophole.

"Good God!" he gasped in dismay.

Four more litter-bearers were filing into the vault, and after them came attendants with tripods. The tiny feet and the feminine curves that the shroud revealed unmistakably betokened a woman's body.

Farrell's cheeks whitened beneath their stain as he caught the glint of red-gold hair.

An attendant stripped the brocaded shroud from the body.

Antoinette Delatour, sleeping—or dead.

With an inarticulate growl of rage, Farrell gathered himself to charge the door with his shoulder. But the hand of the Marquis gripping his arm restrained him.

"Wait!" whispered the Marquis. "It is hopeless, now. But later—stand fast. I will tell you—you see, I am acquainted——"

Farrell stared somberly at his companion. He saw that the Marquis' face was white and that his eyes flamed with wrath. The hand on Farrell's arm trembled.

"All right," he conceded. He wondered at the Marquis' incoherence and agitation in excess of what he would expect of a right-minded gentleman. He gained assurance from the Marquis' apparent knowledge of what was to be; but with it came the dread of some new peak of horror.

"Great God!" muttered Farrell, remembering once more the necromantic ritual at the château. "Is she——" Then, in a flare of rage and grief, "I'm going through!"

"Restrain yourself!" commanded the Marquis. "I know."

Farrell shook his head, and turned to the loophole.

The attendants and the litter-bearers were filing out of the vault.

The Grand Prior, Hassan, rose from his cushions.

"Brethren and servants of the Seventh Imam," he began, "your Prior, the learned Shirkuh, has crossed the Border. He who could raise the dead can not resurrect himself. But we, inshallah, can send a courier to lead him back to us."

As his upraised hand dropped to his side, a monstrous peal of bronze echoed and reverberated through the vault. The assembled Ismailians stirred, and corrected their posture, so that their feet and hands were placed with ritual precision. Even their features assumed a oneness of expression: an intent, solemn stare. The silence became absolute. The musicians sat motionless, awaiting the signal to sound off.

The Grand Prior nodded.

The single-stringed violins, the moaning pipes and the purring drums wove a harmony that sighed and sobbed like a fallen angel bewailing his lost estate. The great gong pealed with mighty, brazen reverberations. Acolytes filed into the vault, and paced in cadence to the music, and rhythmically swung fuming censers as they passed thrice in procession about the dead, and the exquisite unclad beauty of the living woman. And as the acolytes retreated, Hassan descended from his dais.

He drew on the floor with a piece of chalk a circle several paces in diameter, and within it a pentacle. Each of the five points he marked with cabalistical symbols. Then with a ceremonious gesture he summoned three Initiates from among those who sat waiting beside the dais. Each Initiate took his post at his assigned station; then all four bowed to the fifth vertex and the Presence that was to be summoned.

Hassan intoned a sentence; and the Initiates, beginning at his left, each in turn chanted a line of the invocation. Those without the circle solemnly pronounced a fifth sonorous phrase.

"For the vacant corner," whispered the Marquis to Farrell. "They are representing the One they are calling to occupy the fifth angle."

And thus they continued their prodigious utterances, four verses riming in succession, with the surge and thunder of the unrimed, antiphonal response from without. Each time the circle was completed, the riming syllable changed; and from the Arabic with which they had started, they shifted to Himyaric, and then to obscure, antique tongues whose sound was an elemental roar of deep gutturals. Then finally came a primal, bestial murmuring and muttering, a chirping and clucking of the tongues that were spoken by those who wandered through the Void before the first man walked the earth. And recurring through the entire progression was a portentous name that is seldom pronounced above a whisper.

The very features of the Initiates changed as they pronounced those rustling, shivering syllables. They were achieving a unity with that which crept and crawled and loathsomely slunk through chaos and reviled the unborn stars, and mocked the light that was to be....

Farrell, staring now with a dread that obliterated every other emotion, saw that a Presence was materializing at the fifth vertex. A vibrant glow like the luminous vapor of a mercury arc was momentarily becoming more dense and substantial. Lambent flames played about the brows of the Initiates in the pentacle. A terrific tension pervaded the vault. The bluish glow became deeper, and was shot with flashes of crimson and yellowish green. Each drawn face was now a ghastly slate-gray: the Presence at the fifth vertex was drawing the living essence from the swaying, gesturing bodies of Hassan and his trio of Initiates.

The Presence took human form: a lordly, satanic visage and a magnificently muscled body that quivered and throbbed to the droning chant. Then, rich and clear as a god calling across the wastes of space, the Presence began declaiming:

"Al Asfarani! Al Asfarani! Al Asfarani! I come from the realm of fire to command you! I have come out of the depths! Harken! Harken! Harken! Al Asfarani! Golden One! Step forth from your body and walk into the darkness among those whose bread is dust! Walk among the lonely dead and seek Shirkuh! Call him by his name and take him by the hand! Guide him from the shadows and into the morning!"

"A terrific tension pervaded the tumult. The Presence took human form!"

The unconscious woman shuddered at the sound of that mighty voice. She made a despairing gesture as if to resist the command that came from the fifth vertex. Then she relaxed.

The Presence continued his prodigious chant. Even the brazen reverberation of the gongs was drowned by his awful utterance.

A thin streamer, like the thread of smoke rising from an almost-quenched altar flame, rose from Antoinette Delatour's half-parted lips.

"Cordieu!" shouted the Marquis in Farrell's ear. "They're doing it!"

His gestures rather than his voice stirred Farrell to action. They retreated, then charged crashing against the door. It resisted the shock. Farrell drew his simitar and hacked at the tropical hardwood. A carven panel splintered.

"Good God! Look!" he yelled in despair.

The Presence was now towering toward the ceiling. It was bending over like a monstrous serpent in human form, arching and writhing, reaching as though over some invisible wall, making passes and gestures over the silver-white body of Antoinette.

The Initiates in the pentacle were paper-white. They swayed to the cadence of that great voice whose concussion was now making the very vault tremble.

The train of smoke-like vapor that emerged from Antoinette's lips was becoming more dense, and hovered over her body like a veil.

"Quick!" shouted the Marquis, as they frantically hacked the stout wood. "Hold them, while I exorcise the Presence!"

The door was reinforced with iron rods that bound it together. Their blades were nicked and saw-toothed from the fierce assault.

"Again!" cried the Marquis as his simitar flashed home.

A chunk of the hardwood tore loose from its severed reinforcement. They shouldered through, torn and cut by the splinters and the ragged ends of the rods they had hacked.

A musician cried out and sprang to his feet. And then one of the Initiates who sat beside the dais saw Farrell and the Marquis as they dashed across the circular vault. He aroused his comrades from their fascinated contemplation of the invocation of which they were now accessories rather than principals. They started as from a deep sleep, stared for an instant, then drew their simitars and charged to meet the intruders, and to protect the left flank of the pentacle, from which the Presence still leaned over the unconscious girl, intoning the mighty commands that would send her across the Border.

Shoulder to shoulder, Farrell and the Marquis met the assault with deliberate, deadly pistol fire. The attack was checked; but the enemy stood fast and firm, protecting the pentacle. And despite the hail of lead they had poured into the ranks of the Ismailians, Farrell and his ally were still outnumbered ten to one.

The musicians were salvaging weapons.

There was not enough time to reload the pistols. The Ismailians had recovered from the shock of their murderous reception, and seeing their advantage, leaped forward, blades ready.

Then a clash of steel, and a red mill of slaughter. The Marquis fought with vengeful desperation. He wove in and out, side-stepping and parrying, shearing and slaying. And Farrell, keeping at his side, carved a gory path into the enemy. He fought with a blind, unreasoning fury, seeking to hack his way through the press and clear a road for the Marquis who could cope with that monstrous Presence that was in thunderous tones chanting the life and vital essence from Antoinette.

The enemy, sensing that the Marquis was the keystone of the arch, concentrated their attack on him; and despite his exquisite swordsmanship, he was being slashed to pieces by a desperation and force that discounted his skill.

He sank once beneath a whirlwind of blades, and recovered under the shelter of Farrell's blade; but he was coughing blood from a deep wound.

And Hassan and his trio had left the pentacle. The Presence, now endowed with the power borrowed from all that the Initiates had conjured from across the Border, was self-sustaining and no longer needed its portion of human vitality.

Hassan, behind the line of the assault, directed his Initiates in the attack.

"Cut him down, O sons of flat-nosed mothers!" he cried, as he saw the Marquis recover and press forward.

But that magnificent last effort burned out. With a cry of mortal rage, the Marquis lashed out with a final, devastating stroke, then collapsed on a heap of slain.

"Finish!" despaired Farrell. He was doomed, and Antoinette also—even though he could cut his way out. An adept was required to exorcise that terrific Presence that was drawing her from her body.

But the enemy, instead of closing in to hew him to pieces, gaped stupidly, then yelled in terror. They were staring at something at his right, and to the rear. He glanced over his shoulder, compelled by the consternation that stopped them where they stood.

Farrell lowered his own point, himself struck with awe. He recalled what the Marquis had said about the denizens of that labyrinth of passages.

A monstrous, amorphous thing had emerged from the circular pool into which Hassan had ordered the dead fedawi to be flung. It was misshapen, and grotesque in its vague semblance to humanity. Its bulbous head had a single, circular eye the size of a saucer. It glittered glassily in the bluish, spectral light. The limbs were shapeless and ponderous, and it lumbered, dripping wet, across the tiles. Its feet fell with a metallic clank, and its breath hissed and wheezed.

A second and similar creature was emerging from the water, even as the first advanced with slow, laborious pace. The hand clutched a short iron bar.

The bar rose in a sweeping arc and crunched down on the skull of an Ismailian, spattering blood and brain in a shower. The second monster clambered over the coping, unlimbered a bludgeon, and with gruesome deliberation picked a victim and struck.

There was a moment of silence unbroken save for the wheezing breath of the creatures from the pit. Then the Ismailians yelled in mortal terror. They forgot Farrell with his dripping blade and bewildered eyes; they forgot the Marquis, who stirred, and strove to lash out once more with his red scimitar; they forgot the golden-haired girl, and the malevolent Presence that, now silent, throbbed and pulsed, an aggregate of quivering, electric-bluish cold fire.

They broke and fled toward the splintered door.

At the height of their panic, Farrell understood. The monsters were men in diving-suits.

The Marquis was down. Farrell could not himself thwart that monster that was drinking Antoinette's vital essence and taking her across the Border beyond recall; but he could slay until he dropped from wounds, or from weariness of slaughter. He hurdled the hedge of fallen Ismailians and with a cry of rage and grief joined his allies to exact vengeance.

A third diver was at that moment emerging from the pool and joining the assault against the frenzied enemy, striking them down with remorseless precision as they struggled to crowd through the splintered panel of the door that had given Farrell admittance.

Farrell, however, was not the only one whose wits had recovered from the terror inspired by the apparitions from the black pool.

"Back and face them, ya mumineen!" shouted Hassan. "They are men like ourselves!"

But his attempt to rally his men was vain. Those who abandoned their efforts to crowd through the jammed door, and circled around to escape by way of the opposite entrance, were blocked by the arrival of a file of fedawi who, knives drawn, had come running from the assembly hall.

The dripping revolvers that the divers drew as they discarded their grappling-irons crackled and flamed, pouring a deadly fire into the new center of action.

Then Farrell conceived the desperate device of capturing Hassan and forcing him to recall the elemental monster that was drinking Antoinette's life. He leaped forward, cutting and slashing his way through the few who interposed.

"We meet in Paradise, ya mumineen!" Hassan shouted, seeing that the day was lost. And before Farrell could seize him, Hassan released the trap-door before the dais and dropped into the vault below.

The last hope was gone. Pursuit through those subterranean mazes would be futile. As Farrell turned from the yawning trap that had allowed the arch-enemy to escape, the rage of slaughter left him. The crackle of pistols died out. He saw that the circular chamber was cleared of all but the dead and wounded Ismailians. The divers, handicapped by their heavy suits, could not carry out an effective pursuit of the survivors of their deadly fire.

Weary and despairing, Farrell nerved himself to confront the diabolical creature that was drawing Antoinette across the border. He turned——

The Marquis des Islots was raising his hacked, bleeding body from a heap of slain. He tottered, swayed, then advanced toward the lambent flame-presence. Farrell stared in fascination as that gory wreck of a man advanced, making ritual gestures with his faltering hands, and muttering in a low voice.

The Presence was shrinking and dimming, and that shimmering exhalation from Antoinette's lips was being retracted. The Marquis sustained himself with will alone. He staggered, sank—Farrell's heart sank with him—he recovered, stepped forward again, still gesticulating and murmuring. The Presence leaned forward to confront him, and menaced him with its remaining energy, seeking to outlive the dying adept.

The Marquis' bleeding, gashed face was drawn and white; his eyes were fixed and staring. He achieved another pass; then he collected himself, paused, and instead of murmuring, thundered a final phrase of command.

The Presence vanished; and the last vestige of grayish, luminous haze disappeared between Antoinette's lips.

Farrell leaped forward in time to catch the Marquis as he collapsed.

The divers, returning from the farther entrance at which the Ismailians had made their last stand, lifted one another's domed helmets. Then, grimy and exultant, Pierre d'Artois and the two members of the Sûreté gathered about Farrell and the Marquis, who was regaining a little of his strength.

"Messieurs," he said, as he gestured toward Antoinette, "she is safe. She will presently awaken. It can not return. Jamais!... It was my fault ... in the beginning ... but this infamy was not my intent.... I loved her, but she rejected me ... persistently. And for revenge ... and to break her spirit ... I administered without her knowledge a compound ... of hypnotic drugs ... so that she and that Syrian girl would each night exchange bodies ... then Hassan took a hand...."

He regarded d'Artois for a moment.

"You, monsieur, doubtless understand——" Then, to Farrell, "But this last infamy ... was not mine—Shirkuh and Hassan—I tried to make ... amends——"

For an instant Farrell regarded the dying man with revulsion. Then he saw the remorse on the drawn, blood-splashed features, and thought of the Marquis' last gallant stand, confronting and exorcising that diabolical presence from beyond the Border.

"Stout fellow," he muttered, as he grasped the Marquis' hand.

"C'est fini," murmured d'Artois a moment later. "Magnificent in his death as he was misguided in his life ... dying on his feet, he had the will to conquer, and make restitution."

Then d'Artois rose and glanced about him.

"Do you know the way out of here?"

"Through that door," directed Farrell. "He told me, before we made our rush."

"Messieurs," suggested d'Artois, "be ready with your pistols, should any of these assassins be lingering. I will take charge of the young lady, and you, my friend, lead the way. Monsieur le Marquis perhaps deserves greater courtesy, but we can not carry his body and take the risk of being caught without weapons drawn and ready."

Farrell led the way. Without much difficulty, he found the passage that opened into the vault where he had lain while regaining his consciousness preliminary to submitting to Hassan's tests. And from there they finally emerged in the heart of the citadel. A few moments later Farrell and d'Artois, carrying Antoinette, met Raoul where he was waiting at the wheel of the Renault.

9. D'Artois Is Envious

Antoinette, an hour later, was entirely herself.

"Oh, it's wonderful to be out of that awful garden," she said, and curled herself up in the depth of a large, upholstered chair. "And now that Monsieur le Médicin admits that I'm as good as new, you might satisfy my curiosity on a few points. How did you ever——"

She glanced up at Farrell, who had seated himself on the arm of her chair. He was not yet through convincing himself that Satan's Garden was a thing of the past, and insisted on keeping Antoinette within arm's reach.

"Suppose you ask Pierre," he said.

D'Artois laughed.

"After all, mon vieux, you were responsible. We found two bodies floating down the Nive. One of them wore—oh, very becomingly, I assure you!—a knife in his stomach. The Sûreté informed me. I identified the knife. It was one of mine, which you had taken from my collection to wear while disguised as Ibrahim the Afghan ruffian.

"'Alors,' said I, 'Ibrahim Khan has given good account of himself. Perhaps, but God forbid, his own body will follow. I assure you that we watched with anxiety. But no further signs. At low tide, however—you know, the Nive rises and falls with the tide, since we're so close to the sea—we found another body, mainly as the result of our continued close watch for yours. This one was wedged near the central of the seven bridges. We investigated, and found an uncharted drain of considerable diameter.

"'Mordieu,' said I to Monsieur the Prefect, 'if bodies came out, bodies can also go in.' We got diving-suits. The tide in the meanwhile rose, but we had the location well marked. We advanced up the drain until we came to a dead end. Even before we left the water we heard the clash and crackle of your skirmish——"

"Massacre, you mean," interpolated Farrell, grinning as much as his bandages permitted. "Not a second too soon."

"Eh bien, we shut our exhaust air-valves and thus rose to the surface. Our grappling-irons snagged to the coping helped us unaided over the top. Then we sliced our airlines and lifelines, opened our exhausts and——"

"Scared them out of a week's growth!" added Farrell as d'Artois paused to light a cigarette. "But that damnable thing all of quivering fire—good Lord!"

"That," submitted d'Artois, "is something that I can explain but vaguely, if at all. I called it some more mummery, and decided, rather hastily, perhaps, that you and the Marquis needed help first of all. On reflection, and in view of some of your remarks since we left, I am of the opinion that it was either an elemental conjured up by those devil-mongering adepts, or else a wandering and malignant astral that was energized by the vital essence of the adepts, or perhaps by the vibration concentration of their ritual. Monsieur le Marquis, God rest his erring soul, could doubtless explain what it was, since he used his last spark of will to combat it and thwart its attempt to convert Mademoiselle Antoinette into—what did you tell me?—a courier to call Shirkuh from the hell in which he now must be roasting.

"I would very much relish," continued d'Artois, "questioning Hassan, who devised all that deviltry. But alas! he escaped. And while you, both of you, were causing the good doctor a certain amount of concern, I heard that the Sûreté and a handful of gendarmes cleaned out the entire nest. Unhappily, two were taken alive of that crew of assassins. And of course, those lovely ladies of the garden."

Farrell sighed from weariness and contentment, then grimaced from the ache of his wounds.

"The Marquis," he observed, "didn't have time to explain how that hypnotic drug enabled him to project Antoinette's self into the body of the Syrian bride of the garden—Lord, it's impossible to imagine how a brave fellow like him could have let his resentment and disappointment carry him to such lengths! Having her scourged by proxy, so to speak."

"Too much occultism and devil-mongering upset his brilliant mind," replied d'Artois. "Somber, gloomy, and drunk with his talents. And translating Antoinette into the body of a bride of the garden, whom he could flog at will, was his warped expression of denied affection. As to just how he accomplished it, we can but surmise. Strange drugs are compounded in the Orient. When I complete the analysis of the pastries they offered us that night at the château, I may further enlighten you."

"But the stripes and welts that appeared on Antoinette's body?" wondered Farrell.

"For once you ask me something simple," retorted d'Artois. "Did you know that if a hypnotic is touched with a pencil, for example, and offered the suggestion that it is a red-hot iron, he will develop a blister, and all the symptoms of a burn at the spot touched? Moll and others concede that point with very little argument. It has often been experimentally demonstrated.

"Alors, the body of the Syrian girl was scourged. Antoinette's self, though in a borrowed body, retained what we can roughly call an astral connection with her own body; otherwise she could not have returned to it at the end of each ordeal. And through this connection, the body of Antoinette developed the same welts that were raised on the skin of the Syrian girl; just as, by rough analogy, the hypnotic subject through suggestion shows all outward signs of a burn. And the marks of the heavy anklets the Syrian bride of the garden wore were similarly branded on Antoinette's ankles.

"The Marquis during his unsuccessful courtship of Antoinette had ample opportunities to administer the hypnotic drug at which he hinted, so that his influence could have been gained without her knowledge. This, together with the objective symptoms, convinces me that if it was not the conventional hypnosis we know, it was at least a quasi-hypnosis. And as you know, there are vegetable compounds which, if properly administered, will effect a partial release of the astral counterpart of a body, or its spiritual essence. To pursue it to its origin would lead you to a study of Egyptian magic, and the nine traditional elements of every living human body.

"I will leave all this to you, mon vieux, to study, this matter of stigmata resulting from suggestion and other psychic influences. Me, I am no lecturer.

"And as to Antoinette's Arabic remarks in her sleep: the bride of the garden, dispossessed of her body for the time, sought Antoinette's. And by that astral connection which she retained with her own, she felt the scourgings administered in the garden, and expressed herself, through Antoinette's lips, as you heard."

D'Artois emerged from his chair and bowed with formal precision.

"I will therefore leave you here, my blundering Afghan, to have your wounds properly nursed while I go about doing all that an old man can do under the circumstances: envy you, and write a monograph on Messieurs les Assassins, and Satan's Garden, from which you so happily emerged."

With a peremptory gesture, he cut short Antoinette's insistence upon his pausing for at least a moment. Then, halting at the door, he concluded as he glanced at Farrell, "Mordieu, and to think that you enjoyed all that fine sword-play, while I, Pierre d'Artois, had to wear a diving-suit to find a fight, and then had to use a crowbar! In several ways I envy you."

THE END

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Table of Contents

- Satan's Garden
- Contents
- 1. Invisible Scourge
- 2. La Dorada
- 3. The Hand of Hassan
- 4. Shirkuh Makes Magic
- 5. Ibrahim Khan
- 6. Satan's Garden
- 7. A Left-Handed Kurd
- 8. Monsters of the Pool
- 9. D'Artois Is Envious
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE