Page:Weird Tales Volume 10 Issue 03 (1927-09).djvu/75

 white objects—a child's teeth. Neatly dressed, wound with cord like a roast, and, like a roast, placed in a wide, shallow pan, ready for cooking, was a piece of pale, veal-like meat.

The horror of it fairly nauseated me. The thing in woman's form before us was a cannibal, and the meat she had been preparing to bake was—my mind refused to form the words, even in the silence of my inner consciousness.

"You—you," the woman cried in a queer, throaty voice, so low it was scarcely audible, yet so intense in its vibrations that I was reminded of the rumbling of an infuriated cat's cry. "How—did—you—find?"

"Eh bien, Madame," de Grandin returned, struggling to speak with his customary cynical flippancy, but failing in the attempt, "how I did find out is of small moment. What I found, I think you will agree, is of the great import."

For an instant I thought the she-fiend would launch herself at him, but her intention lay elsewhere. Before any of us was aware of her move she had seized the glass vessel from the table, lifted it to her lips and all but emptied its contents down her throat in two frantic swallows. Next instant, frothing, writhing, contorting herself horribly, she lay on the tiled floor at our feet, her lips thickening and swelling with brownish blisters as the poison she had drunk regurgitated from her esophagus and welled up between her tightly set teeth.

"Good heavens!" I cried, bending forward instinctively to aid her, but the Frenchman drew me back. "Let be, Friend Trowbridge," he remarked. "It is useless. She has taken enough hydrochloric acid to kill three men, and those movements of hers are only mechanical. Already she is unconscious, and in another five minutes she will have opportunity to explain her so strange life to One far wiser than we.

"Meantime," he assumed the cold, matter-of-fact manner of a morgue attendant performing his duties, "let us gather up these relies of the poor one"—he indicated the partially cremated arm-bones and the meat in the shining aluminum pan—"and preserve them for decent interment. I"

A choking, gasping sound behind us turned our attention to the orphanage superintendent. Following more slowly through the window in de Grandin's wake, he had not at first grasped the significance of the horrors we had seen. The spectacle of the woman's suicide had nnnerved him, but when de Grandin pointed to the relics in the stove and on the table, the full meaning of our discovery had fallen on him. With an inarticulate cry he had dropped to the floor in a dead faint.

"Pardieu," the Frenchman exclaimed, crossing to the water-tap and filling a tumbler, "I think we had best bestow our services on the living before we undertake the care of the dead, Friend Trowbridge."

As he recrossed the kitchen to minister to the unconscious superintendent there came an odd, muffled noise from the room beyond. "Qui vive?" he challenged sharply, placing the glass of water on the dresser and darting through the door, his right hand dropping into his jacket pocket where the ready pistol lay. I followed at his heels, and, as he stood hesitating at the threshold, felt along the wall, found the eleetrie switch and pressed it, flooding the room with light. On the couch beneath the window, bound hand and foot with strips torn from a silk searf and gagged with another length of silk wound about her face, lay little Betsy, the child who had informed us she feared being hurt when we made our pre-