Page:Weird Tales volume 11 number 02.pdf/55

198 trembling, the professor called upon the archfiend himself.

"The dreadful name had hardly passed his lips before the whole building shook with a terrible explosion, blinding flames shot to the ceiling, and I was half smothered by the fumes of sulfur and brimstone. Something hit me on the head, and I lost consciousness. The next thing I knew I was being rushed back to town in a speeding automobile with Frau Stoeger. When I tried to snuggle up to her for comfort, she drew away from me and bade me never touch her, or even look at her again. I was marked by the Devil for his own, and even my breath or glance brought misfortune to those they touched.

"My good, kind sir"—she regarded de Grandin with a stedfast, pleading stare, like a child striving desperately to convince a skeptical adult of the truth of a preposterous story—"I did not then believe. Much talk I had heard of devils in my childhood, for my nurse was a Hungarian woman, a peasant of the old Magyar stock, and as full of stories of vampires, demons and hobgoblins as a chestnut shell is of prickles, but never had I thought the tales of devils were more than fairy-lore. Alas! I was soon to learn the Devil is as real today as when he bought Faustus' soul from him.

"The very next day as I went for my regular walk in the park a little child—a pretty little girl playing with her colored nurse by the goldfish fountain—ran to me with out-stretched arms, and as I stooped to clasp her to my bosom she halted, looked at me in terror, then ran screaming to her nurse, crying out that the Devil stood behind me and reached over my shoulder for her. The negro nurse took one look at me, then made the sign of the evil eye, thus." She bent her thumb transversely across the palm of her hand, encircling it with the second and third fingers, permitting the fore- and little fingers to stand out like a pair of horns, and thrust them toward us. "And as the woman made the sign," the girl sobbed, "she bade me begone to hell, where Satan, my master, awaited me; then hurried from the square with the little girl."

De Grandin pinched his little, pointed chin between a thoughtful thumb and forefinger. "More than a thousand damns!" he exclaimed softly. "There is the monkey’s business here, of a surety. Proceed, Mademoiselle."

"I became a marked woman," she obeyed. "People turned to stare at me in the street, and all made the sign of the horns at me. Once, as I hurried through the park after sunset, I saw the Devil grinning at me from behind a bunch of rhododendrons!"

"Finally, I was ready to sell my soul for a moment’s peace. Then, by chance, I met Frau Stoeger again in the park. She blessed herself at sight of me, but did not run away, and when I spoke to her, she listened. I begged her on my bended knees to take me to Professor Martulus once more to see if he could break Satan's hold from off my wretched soul.

"That night I went to see the professor once more, and he told me there was one chance in a thousand of my regaining my freedom, but only at the cost of the most terrible sacrifice of humiliation and suffering. When he told me what I should have to do—oh, do not ask me to repeat it!—I was so horrified that I fainted, but there was no help for it. Either I must go through the ordeal he proposed or be forever devil-ridden. At last they said I might hire a substitute, but that I must pay her two thousand dollars. Where was I, a poor governess, almost a beggar, to obtain such a sum? It might as well have been a million!

"Frau Stoeger suggested that I