“What do you mean?” I snapped. “Hess was all right when I left him. A bit tight, that’s all.”
His face was glistening with sweat. “It’s awful—I’m not sure yet what happened. His wife—Sandra Colter—came to life while they were cremating her. They saw her through the window, you know—screaming and pounding at the glass while she was being burned alive. Hess got her out too late. He went stark, raving mad. Suspended animation, they say—I’ve got to get to a phone, Mr. Prescott!”
He tore himself away, sprinted in the direction of the administration buildings.
I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper. It was the note I had found in Hess Deming’s house. The words danced and wavered before my eyes. Over and over I was telling myself, “It can’t be true! Such things can’t happen!”
I didn’t mean Sandra Colter’s terrible resurrection during the cremation. That, alone, might be plausibly explained—catalepsy, perhaps. But taken in conjunction with certain other occurrences, it led to one definite conclusion—and it was a conclusion I dared not face.
What had poor Forrest said? That the chevalier was taking Jean to the Cocoanut Grove? Well—
The taxi was still waiting. I got in.
“The Ambassador,” I told the driver grimly. “Twenty bucks if you hit the green lights all the way.”
CHAPTER III.
THE BLACK COFFIN
All night I had been combing Hollywood—without success. Neither the Chevalier Futaine nor Jean had been to the Grove, I discovered. And no one knew the Chevalier’s address. A telephone call to the studio, now ablaze with the excitement over the Hess Dcming disaster and the Forrest killing, netted me exactly nothing. I went the rounds of Hollywood night life vainly. The Trocadero, Sardi’s, all three of the Brown Derbies, the smart, notorious clubs of the Sunset eighties—nowhere could I find my quarry. I telephoned Jack Hardy a dozen times, but got no answer. Finally, in a “private club” in Culver City, I met with my first stroke of good luck.
“Mr. Hardy’s upstairs,” the proprietor told me, looking anxious. “Nothin’ wrong, I hope, Mr. Prescott? I heard about Deming.”
“Nothing,” I said. “Take me up to him.”
“He’s sleeping it off,” the man admitted. “Tried to drink the place dry, and I put him upstairs where he’d be safe.”
“Not the first time, eh?” I said, with an assumption of lightness. “Well, bring up some coffee, will you? Black. I’ve got to—talk to him.”
But it was half an hour before Hardy was in any shape to understand what I was saying. At last he sat up on the couch, blinking, and a gleam of realization came into his sunken eyes.
“Prescott,” he said, “can’t you leave me alone?”
I leaned close to him, articulating carefully so he would be sure to understand me. “I know what the Chevalier Futaine is,” I said.
And I waited for the dreadful, impossible confirmation, or for the words which would convince me that I was an insane fool.
Hardy looked at me dully. “How did you find out?” he whispered.
An icy shock went through me. Up to that moment I had not really believed, in spite of all the evidence. But now Hardy was confirming the suspicions which I had not let myself believe.
I didn’t answer his question. Instead, I said, “Do you know about Hess?" He nodded, and at sight of the agony in his face I almost pitied him. Then the thought of Jean steadied me.
“Do you know where he is now?” I asked.
“No. What are you talking about?” he flared suddenly. “Are you mad, Mart? Do you—”
“I’m not mad. But Hess Deming is.”
He looked at me like a cowering, whipped dog.
I went on grimly: “Are you going to tell me the truth? How you got those marks on your throat? How you met this—creature? And where he’s taken Jean?”
“Jean!” He looked genuinely startled. “Has he got—I didn’t know that, Mart—I swear I didn’t. You—you’ve been a good friend to me, and—and I’ll tell you the truth—for your sake and Jean’s—although now it may be too late.” My involuntary movement made him glance at me quickly. Then he went on. “I met him in Paris. I was out after new sensations—but I didn’t expect anything like that. A Satanist club—devil-worshippers, they were. The ordinary stuff—cheap, furtive blasphemy. But it was there that I met—him.
“He can be a fascinating chap when he tries. He drew me out, made me tell him about Hollywood—about the women we have here. I bragged a little. He asked me about the stars, whether they were really as beautiful as they seemed. His eyes were hungry as he listened to me, Mart.
“Then one night I had a fearful nightmare. A monstrous, black horror crept in through the window and attacked me—bit me in the throat, I dreamed, or thought I did. After that—
“I was in his power. He told me the truth. He made me his slave, and I could do nothing. His powers—are not human.”
I licked dry lips.
Hardy continued: “He made me bring him here, introducing him as a new discovery to be starred in Red Thirst—I’d mentioned the picture to him, before I—knew. How he must have laughed at me! He made me serve him, keeping away photographers, making sure that there were no cameras, no mirrors near him. And for a reward—he let me live.”
I knew I should feel contempt for Hardy, panderer to such a loathsome evil. But somehow I couldn’t.
I said quietly, “What about Jean? Where does the chevalier live?”
He told me. “But you can’t do anything, Mart. There’s a vault under the house, where he stays during the day. It can’t be opened, except with a key he always keeps with him—a silver key. He had a door specially made, and then did something to it so that nothing can open it but that key. Even dynamite wouldn’t do it, he told me.”
I said, “Such things—can be killed.”
“Not easily. Sandra Colter was a victim of his. After death she, too, became a vampire, sleeping by day and living only at night. The fire destroyed her, but there’s no way to get into the vault under Futaine’s house.”
“I wasn’t thinking of fire,” I said. “A knife—”
“Through the heart,” Hardy interrupted almost eagerly. “Yes—and decapitation. I’ve thought of it myself, but I can do nothing. I—am his slave, Mart.”
I said nothing, but pressed the bell. Presently the proprietor appeared.
“Can you get me a butcher knife?” I measured with my hands. “About so long? A sharp one?”
Accustomed to strange requests, he nodded. “Right away, Mr. Prescott.” As I followed him out, Hardy said weakly, “Mart.”
I turned.
“Good luck,” he said. The look on his wrecked face robbed the words of their pathos.
“Thanks,” I forced myself to say. “I don’t blame you, Jack, for what’s happened. I—I’d have done the same.”
I left him there, slumped on the couch, staring after me with eyes that had looked into hell.
It was past daylight when I drove out of Culver City, a long, razor-edged