Page:Weird Tales Volume 10 Number 4 (1927-10).djvu/86

 she's my daughter, I state it as a fact—and was to have been married this fall, and now this—this disorder has taken complete possession of her and it's wrecking her life. Robert—Lieutenant Proudfit, her fiancé—and I are almost beside ourselves, and as for my daughter, I fear her mind will give way and she'll destroy herself unless somebody can do something!"

"Ah?" the little Frenchman arched the narrow black brows which were such a vivid contrast to his blond hair and mustache. "Why did not you say so before, Monsieur le Capitaine? It is not merely the curing of one nervous young lady that you would have me undertake, but the fruition of a romance I should bring about? Bien, good, very well; I accept. If you will also retain my good friend Dr. Trowbridge, so that there shall be a locally licensed and respected physician in the case, my powers which you have been kind enough to call remarkable are entirely at your disposal."

"Splendid!" Captain Loudon agreed, rising. 'Then it's all arranged. I can expect you to"

"One moment, if you please," de Grandin interrupted, raising his slender, womanishly small hand for silence. "Suppose we make a précis of the case before we go further." He drew a pad of note-paper and a pencil toward him as he continued:

"Your daughter, Mademoiselle Julie, how old is she?"

"Twenty-nine."

"A most charming age," the little Frenchman commented, scribbling a note. "And she is your only child?"

"Yes."

"Now, these manifestations of the outré, these so unusual happenings, they began to take place about six months ago?"

"Just about; I can't place the time exactly."

"No matter. They have assumed various mystifying forms? She has refused food, she has had visions, she shouts, she sings uncontrollably, she speaks in a voice which is strange to her—at times she goes into a death-like trance and from her throat issue strange voices, voices of men, or other women, even of little children?"

"Yes."

"And other apparently inexplicable things occur. Chairs, books, tables, even such heavy pieces of furniture as a piano, move from their accustomed places when she is near, and bits of jewelry and other small objects are hurled through the air?"

"Yes, and worse than that, I've seen pins and needles fly from her work-basket and bury themselves in her cheeks and arms," the captain interrupted, "and lately she's been persecuted by scars—scars from some invisible source. Great weals, like the claw-marks from some beast, have appeared on her arms and face, right while I looked on, and I've been wakened at night by her screams, and when I rush into her room I find the marks of long, thin fingers on her throat. It's maddening, sir; terrifying. I'd say it was a case of demoniacal possession, if I didn’t disbelieve all that sort of supernaturalism."

"U'm," de Grandin looked up from the pad on which he had been industriously scribbling. "There is nothing in the world, or out of it, which is supernatural, my friend; the wisest man today can not say where the powers and possibilities of nature begin or end. We say, 'Thus and so is beyond the bounds of our experience,' but does that therefore put it beyond the bounds of nature? I think not. Myself, I have seen such things as no man can hear me relate without calling me a liar, and my good, unimaginative friend Trowbridge has witnessed such wonders as no writer of fiction would dare set down on paper, yet I do declare we have never yet seen that which I would call supernatural.