The Day the World Ended Read online

  Several villas I passed, perched fascinatingly above the paths upon rocky foundations. But in none did any light show.

  I wondered if this was the road by which M. Paul had come.

  Once, some time before I reached the long, low wall of the cemetery, I paused to light my pipe. In the act of striking a match I hesitated . . . and listened.

  An echo, I told myself.

  Stock still I stood for thirty seconds or more. Then I determined that unhealthy memories had been responsible for the idea that someone was following me.

  At last I reached my goal. I could see the guardian trees. A strain of deathless but deathful music, Poe’s “Through an alley Titanic of cypress,” swept eerily across my brain. Beyond a low wall, below me lay the white tenements, pure in moonlight; some stately as perhaps befitted their occupants, others simple, but of equal dignity. The whole quiet acre was mantled lovingly in those gay flowers which make this valley a poet’s garden.

  By the gate I paused.

  It was locked. But it offered no barrier to an active man.

  I was on the point of climbing over—for in this nocturnal expedition I had a definite plan—when I observed, plainly visible in the moonlight, a cigarette lying at my feet.

  Perhaps the fact may seem insignificant. Nevertheless I picked it up. It was a common French caporal, and it had not been lighted. Again, perhaps not extraordinary. Such cigarettes could be bought in the town. I slipped it into the pocket of my dinner jacket.

  Resting my hands on the gate, I was again about to scale it, when a second circumstance arrested me.

  From high above my head, out of the deep blue, came a rhythmic whirring; not that of a flight of birds nor that of an airplane propeller: rather the amplified hum of a mosquito.

  I stood still, and stared upward.

  For a long time I could detect nothing. The sound had ceased, abruptly. Then ... I saw it.

  Descending with a hawklike motion was a gigantic bat!

  Literally, horror froze me to the spot. Yard by yard the thing swooped down, silently, effortlessly.

  It had a sort of vague luminosity. The incredibly long body as well as the extended wings were of a gleaming purplish-gray colour: I can only liken it to that of a meat fly or common “bluebottle.”

  The wing span, I was prepared to swear, was no less than four yards; the legless body of the thing, which, as it descended, resembled less a bat than a monstrous dragon fly, was close upon six feet!

  Somewhere among the tombs it settled. I heard, or thought I heard, a dim, muffled rumbling. . . .

  I removed my hands from the gate. I had been clutching it grimly. My palms were clammy.

  “Merciful heaven!” I whispered. “What does it all mean?”

  CHAPTER II - MME. YBURG

  1

  I cannot pretend to say how long I stood at the gate, nor what were my thoughts as I stood there.

  Doubtless after the episode of the disincarnate Voice, I was prepared in a degree for things outside the normal. In lieu of supposing myself insane, I had to accept as a fact that there are laws, once called “supernatural,” in the scheme of Providence which are not outside human control. Many of the devices which we are used to nowadays would have earned their inventor the title of magician two hundred years ago.

  Powers ascribed by classic poets to their gods of old come within compass of latter-day science. All myths have some basis in fact. Earlier inquirers simply conserved their knowledge. To-day, discoveries are broadcasted.

  Thus, I suppose, I argued . . . fighting, fighting to defeat a white panic.

  Did the thing I had just seen conform to any cycle of laws known to me?

  I listened intently.

  The breeze had dropped. There was no sound.

  As the creature had descended I had seen that it possessed a pair of enormous eyes. But, more horrible, I had not failed to note that its purplish gleaming body resembled that of a human being—or of a chrysalis encasing one—or of a mummy!

  Now, the silence confounded me. The stirring of a leaf set my heart leaping. At any moment I expected to hear again a cold, merciless voice calling me by name.

  Nine persons out of ten would have bolted—nor should I have been the man to blame them. That I didn’t, I count not a jot or tittle to my credit. I merely knew from experience that to fly from peril, of body, mind, or soul, is to invite pursuit.

  Again grasping the bars of the gate, I sprang up, and climbing over the top, dropped upon the further side.

  But the first step forward from the gate in that cold moonlight demanded an effort of will I can never forget. The step taken, I proceeded with growing confidence. This is the way of things. But it’s a way hard to learn and harder to follow.

  What I found in the shape of a clue to explain the sight I had seen can be very briefly expressed, I found nothing.

  At about the spot where I thought that incredible nocturnal thing had alighted I came upon an ancient mausoleum. Two cypresses mounted guard, one on either side of the door, and because of their dense shadows I could not make out to whom the tomb belonged.

  But my left fist and my teeth were tightly clenched when I turned my back on those shadows—because I wanted to run! How I wanted to run!

  Further on, in a new part of the burial ground, I saw a number of “new graves” as described by George. They seemed to be for the most part those of peasants and members of the working classes. I could not perceive any special significance in the fact that certain inhabitants of Baden-Baden had died recently. People die everywhere.

  By the time that I had completed my tour, courage was slowly returning. My exercise had achieved its object. Courage, unused, becomes flabby even quicker than muscle.

  No sound had disturbed me—excepting the soft flutter of a startled owl at one point—and the resulting throb in my ears caused by a sudden acceleration of pulse. It was touch and go. My finger trembled on the trigger.

  That first cold panic was conquered however when I reclimbed the gate and found myself once more in the narrow, tree-bordered road. I don’t claim that I was entirely my own man; but mainly a great amazement remained.

  Failing its possession of those gruesome properties ascribed to the vampire by mediaeval superstition, what had become of the great creature which I had watched alighting among the tombs? In my exploration, and it had been fairly thorough, I had met with no living thing except the owl.

  I tried to picture it when not on the wing. Did it go on all fours? Did it crawl? . . . Did it walk erect in ghastly parody of humanity?

  And then, as I turned and set out on my homeward journey to the town, came the crowning terror of that night.

  I heard footsteps in the cemetery!

  Nothing in my experience had prepared me for this. The steps, which were light, suggesting a woman’s, and leisurely, plainly were those of someone, or of some thing, coming along the path which led to the gateway. Soon, It would be out in the road behind me!

  To take to my heels—to run for my life, for sanity, salvation—was the only thing I wanted to do. And I wanted to do it desperately.

  But I had won one victory. And it was to inquire into just these horrors that I had come to Baden.

  A rough cart track broke the bushes to left of the road. I tip-toed along it, turned right, and threw myself prone at the edge of a plum orchard where I could see through the hedge.

  I was no more than in time.

  As I reached my look-out I heard the sound of a grating lock. It was the lock of the cemetery gate. Moonlight flooded that part of the road visible to me. Merciful shadow draped the margin of the orchard. I was afraid to breathe. Despite the warmth of the night, I was cold—with a sort of spiritual coldness.

  The gate closed. Again I heard the sound of the lock.

  Came—light footsteps, drawing nearer.

  I had thought I was prepared for anything. But for that which now appeared I was not prepared.

  Gracefully indolent, the flame-c
oloured scarf thrown carelessly over her white shoulders, Mme. Yburg walked toward me! . . .

  2

  Watching, all but breathlessly, as she passed my hiding place, my first feeling was one of intense relief. It was almost immediately succeeded, however, by another, by a mood of horrible doubt. Taking all the facts into consideration, what was this woman doing in such a place, at night? Where had she been hidden during my tour of inspection? Above all— why did she hold the cemetery keys ?

  Ghastly theories, belonging to the realm of black magic, flocked to my brain. Had she been to meet, in Coleridge’s words, “her demon lover”? Or was she, herself. . .

  These ideas were insane. I shook my mind free of them.

  When the sound of Madame’s footsteps was no longer audible, and I judged that she had passed a bend in the steep road which I remembered, I came out from the sheltering orchard and followed, very slowly.

  An owl hooted, high up in a tree. But no other sound disturbed the serene night.

  By a bend in the path where a flight of steps offered a short cut to the town, there was a seat. Owing to the position of the moon and the screening trees, this seat was mantled in darkness.

  But as I passed it, intent upon descending the steps:

  “Good-evening, Mr. Woodville,,, said a voice out of the shadows.

  I knew the voice—nor was it unmusical. But its music turned me cold. I stopped dead in my tracks, as though Medusa’s head had been thrust in front of me. I twisted about, staring.

  Mme. Yburg rose from the seat and came toward me!

  Conflicting emotions threatened to make me dumb. But I forced a remark.

  “Why!” said I—“this is a surprise! Are you, also, addicted to lonely rambles?”

  “I am,” she replied simply, and walked out into the moonlight.

  She wore a frock of some material which appeared black except where moonrays touched it, when it displayed a serpentine sheen. Dark eyes regarded me sombrely. Her slender body was grotesquely, horribly like the body of that flying thing which had alighted in the cemetery. Or so it seemed to me at this moment.

  “A taste,” I went on, desperately forcing conversation, “which one can't share. Were you returning, or have I broken in on the journey?”

  “I’m going back," she answered, resting her hand on my arm. “Those steps are so steep.”

  I found myself clenching my teeth. Mme. Yburg’s long, psychic hand looked waxen white in the moonlight, which also lent the narrow, burnished nails an unnatural purple tint. She wore a large emerald, which I had noticed before. Against the black of my sleeve it gleamed evilly—like the eye of a nocturnal thing. . . . Silently I cursed myself for a coward and a fool. There was—there must be—a rational explanation of her presence in the cemetery that night. And, as if she had read my thoughts:

  “My lonely ramble was not without an object,” she said as we went down the steps. “It may sound odd, but I had been up to the cemetery on the hill.” Her English was faultless, her poise perfect. If my ghastly theories had any foundation in fact, she was a great actress. The pressure of her thin white fingers was intensely vital.

  “Good heavens! Very odd—at night!”

  “Yes, I know it is.” We were on a straight highroad, now, and Mme. Yburg removed her hand and adjusted the scarf which she wore. “But someone lies there, you see—a member of my family; and in the middle of all the gaiety I suddenly thought of him, and it seemed quite natural to go.”

  Her composure, which made me think of snow on a sleeping volcano, was more exciting than some women’s hysteria. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask her if she spoke of husband, father, brother, when those former, uncanny ideas came flooding back to my mind.

  Was she, secretly, laughing at me? Had she seen me from the first? Had she waited there knowing I must presently come that way? And why did she hold the keys of the cemetery gate? So my thoughts ran, wildly, feverishly. The night was perfect, lacking those treacherous chills of the Riviera and reminding one of nights in the Canary Islands.

  She had a manner of walking which must have marked her anywhere. She seemed to glide along beside me. There was a deep note in her voice, strangely like sincerity; and indeed she was undeniably a very charming companion.

  Presently, we were among the trees of Lichtenthaler Allee, the little stream bubbling beside us, lights dancing over the water from the hotels and the Casino.

  We walked across to the Regal. And there on the steps stood Mr. Kluster.

  “Oh, dear!” Madame whispered to me. “There was a party tonight, and I had promised to go!”

  Then, as we came up:

  “I had such a dreadful headache and I hoped that the night air would cure it. Mr. Woodville found me wandering.”

  “Cured?” said Kluster.

  “Quite,” Madame replied, and an amused smile, which softened the line of her thin lips, was oddly fascinating.

  I saw white, glittering teeth against the blood-red of her mouth . . . and I remembered . . .

  “Here’s the French boy-friend,” remarked Kluster, “Now we’re all set.”

  M. Paul came bounding down the steps. “Bounding” is the only word to describe his animated approach.

  “My dear Mme. Yburg!” he exclaimed, and grasped both her hands. “Ah! but I have been inconsolable! So also”—he turned to the American —“has poor Mr. Kluster! We have cried together, Mr. Woodville”—he now included me in his oration —“until the bar has nearly run dry!”

  Then he laughed, and we all laughed with him— Kluster excepted—for he was indeed a joyous creature.

  “Very true,” said Kluster. “Suppose we start.” He nodded to me. “I wish you good-night, sir.”

  The others having also bidden me good-night, the party set out, M. Paul waving farewell in his gay fashion. I recalled that the M. Paul who had passed me earlier in the evening had been far from gay.

  3

  Here was the first copyworthy material which had come to my hand. But how could I use it? To send a thousand-word report to the Daily World covering my visit to the cemetery and my sight of a giant bat was simple enough—and good copy, if editor or readers could believe it. But where the story touched upon Mme. Yburg I must perforce be silent. There is a law of libel in England.

  Furthermore, I did not know who Mme. Yburg was.

  A mediaeval observer would have declared, unconditionally, that she was a vampire, and that Kluster and Paul were her present victims.

  I placed the caporal picked up at the cemetery gate in a drawer of my table. I sat staring at a blank writing block. And, consulting my wrist watch, I noted that nearly twenty hours had passed since I had received “the first warning.” What were the-links between that inexplicable happening and later events? Why should I obey the warning? . . . and what would result if I ignored it?

  The unknown dangers of my commission became painfully apparent. Despatches were out of the question. A considered account—after I had left the Black Forest—was the only possible course.

  I drafted a telegram, copied it on one of the forms provided in my apartment, and personally took it to the hall porter’s desk for dispatch.

  Equipped with two bottles of beer, for an hour and a half, perhaps two hours, I wrote. The dance band at the Casino had stopped. I had not noted the fact consciously: I only realized it when I had finished. My notes brought up to date, I looked at the time.

  Half-past one.

  Of the first of my three days only an hour and a half remained!

  My quarters in the Regal consisted of a long alcove on the ground floor. There was a balcony overlooking the gardens on which I usually took breakfast. Sun shutters, with narrow oblique slats, closed the centre opening. The outer room, in which were writing table, telephone, and other appurtenances, was divided from the bedroom only by a heavy curtain, which during the day was open.

  In my case it was open at night as well. I like fresh air. For the same reason I had hitherto raised the shutt
ers, before turning in, not wholly but partly. (They were religiously closed by the chambermaid some time after dusk, to exclude nocturnal insects.)

  To-night I left them closed, whilst I searched every foot of the apartment and also the adjoining bathroom. My tour of inspection was completed within a few minutes of two o’clock.

  One hour!

  As my investigations will have indicated, I had a theory touching the Voice. If it challenged me again —as I half expected—I proposed to test this theory.

  Having had little more than two hours’ rest in the past twenty-four, I was desperately sleepy. Nevertheless, until 3 a.m. had come and gone, further sleep was out of the question. I mixed a stiff peg of whisky, lighted my pipe, and settled down in an armchair with Stevenson’s Treasure Island. I knew whole passages by heart; but five minutes in the company of Long John Silver unfailingly brings the tang of the sea to my nostrils. “Here you comes and tells me of it plain. . . . You’re a lad, you are, but you’re as smart as paint. . .

  The silence had grown so deep when at last I took leave of the Hispaniola and glanced at my wrist watch that the song of the tiny stream beyond my windows was magnified to that of a considerable torrent. Twice I had heard regular footsteps on the gravel path outside: a night watchman, I had concluded. But no other sound had disturbed me.

  Laying my book down, I stood up. My pipe had burned out. . . .

  Five minutes to three.

  I crossed the room, went into the lobby, and opened my outer door. Beyond, lay a sort of inner hallway, corridors branching off from it. It was empty. A lamp stood on the floor clerk’s table and afforded the only light.

  Going over to this table, I stooped to the lamp and fixed my eyes on the minute finger of my watch as it crept to the hour —

  Three o’clock!

  “Brian Woodville!” said the Voice.

  My heart was not beating quite normally. But this time I was certainly prepared for the phenomenon; and I had learned something.

  The Voice was not connected with any hidden apparatus in my rooms. It had spoken at my elbow.