Page:Weird Tales volume 11 number 02.pdf/56

Rh borrow it from my employer. He is wealthy, and she knew I had the combination to his safe and access to a book of signed checks which he keeps in his library desk. When I refused she laughed and said, 'You'll be glad to do worse things than forge a check or steal some paltry jewelry before you're free, my dear.'

"That was a week ago. Since then my life has been an earthly hell. Everywhere I have seen reminders of my dreadful fate. Children scream at sight of me, women cross the street to avoid me, men turn and sneer as I pass by. Tonight I attended a party at my employer's house, though I felt little enough like dancing. Finally, when I knew I must be alone or go mad, I went for a walk in the park.

"Mein Herr—believe me; oh, please believe what I say!—as I entered the square the Devil stepped from behind a patch of bushes and raised his hat to me, saying, 'When are you coming to dwell in hell with me!' As he finished speaking he stretched out his hand and touched me, and it burned like a white-hot iron!

"I was terrified at the apparition, but thought my nerves had played a trick on me, so I began to run. Fifty feet farther on, the Devil rose up again, doffed his hat as before, and asked me the same question. And again he touched me with his fiery claw. I screamed and ran like a frightened cat from a pursuing hound, and just before I met you the Devil appeared to me a third time, asked me the same question, and added, 'I have put my mark on you three times tonight, so all who see you shall know you for mine.' At that I went quite mad, mein Herr, and ran as I had never run before. When you stepped forward with your offer of help, I thought you were the fiend accosting me for a fourth time, and I must have fainted, for I know nothing more until I found myself here."

"And how did the Devil appear, Mademoiselle?" asked de Grandin, edging slightly forward on his chair, his slender hands twitching with excitement.

"Very like a man, mein Herr. His body was like that of a man in evening dress, but his face was the face of the foul fiend and the horns which grew from his brows and the beard and mustache on his face were all aglow with the fires of hell. When he spoke, he spoke in German."

"I doubt it not!" de Grandin acquiesced, sotto voce, then aloud: "And you say he touched you with his claw? Where?"

"Here!" the girl returned in a stifled whisper, laying a trembling hand on one bare shoulder. "Here and here and here!" In quick succession her pointed finger touched her shoulder, her upper arm and the white half-moon of her bosom where the top of her bodice curved below her slender throat.

"Sang d'un poisson!—one thousand pale blue roosters!" de Grandin exclaimed between gasps of incredulity. At each place the girl indicated on her white skin there showed, red and angry, the seared, scorched soreness of a newly made burn; the crude design of a countenance of incomparable evil — a horned, bearded face, surmounted by the device of an inverted passion-cross.

Jules de Grandin regarded the brands on the girl's tender flesh with a wondering, speculative gaze, his lips pursed in a soundless whistle beneath the uprearing ends of his waxed mustache; his little, round blue eyes seemed to snap and sparkle with flashes of light.

At length: "Name of an old and very immoral cockroach, this is abominable!" he flared. "Who and where is this medium of spirits?"