Page:Weird Tales volume 33 number 04.djvu/37

 red, and the pistol grasped in his hand with cadaveric rigor told the story.

"Morbleu, un suicide!" the intendant murmured. "Eh bien, he chose a good place for it."

Unconcernedly as if he moved a bale of merchandise he prized the dead man from the grave-mound with his spade. The candle-lantern shed its gleam into the face of Macrin Henriot.

"C'est ça, that is that. Shall we begin, Citizen? Hold the lamp, if you please."

The sexton struck his spade into the grave, tossed back the clinging clay, and dug again. In a few minutes he had laid the coffin bare and with the flat end of his pick began to wrench the lid away.

Mordecai leaned forward, lantern raised. In the coffin lay Susette, rigid as if petrified. Her hands were tightly clenched, nails driven into palms, with little streams of drying blood running from each self-inflicted wound. Her eyes were closed, but on her slightly-parted lips there lay a double line of bloody froth.

"Saint Vierge"—terror drove long-cultivated atheism from the intendant—"Blessèd Mary, pity us! Come, Citizen, and quickly. It is a vampire lying there! Behold the life-like countenance, the opened lips all bloody from the devil's breakfast, the hands all stained with gore!"

His teeth were chattering, but he was no coward. "Stand back, Citizen, and let me deal with it. I will strike it to the foul heart with my pickax, sever its unhallowed head with my spade, and we shall fill the grave again"

"Non, non!" cried Mordecai as the sexton raised his pick to carry out his threat. Bending over the coffin he whispered, "Susette, little sweet Susette, did they do this to thee" An impulse he could not explain moved him to lay his hand against her cheek. Her flesh was warm.

He thrust the sexton back so violently he landed sitting in a pool of muddy water, where he squatted like an elderly and nervous duck, squawking pleas for Mordecai to "come away all quickly."

But Mordecai did not come. Sinking to his knees beside the grave he laid his hand on Susette's heart. There was no doubt of it. Faint as the fluttering of a fledgling dropped from its nest and almost perished with exposure, but still perceptible, a feeble pulse was beating.

"Here"—he tossed a fistful of assignats at the sexton—"close the grave, and keep the mouth closed, also, mon vieux."

Next moment he had bundled Susette in his cloak and started for the graveyard wall.

alleyway behind the cemetery was lined with mews upon its farther side and almost dark as a tunnel. The sky. cloud-shrouded, pressed down on roofs and chimneys, but where the alley joined a cross-street a feeble patch of luminance coned down from an oil lantern fixed against a house wall. Slogging through the mud and filth that smeared the cobbles, Mordecai saw a cat dart from the shelter of the cemetery wall, pause in mid-step, one foot upraised, then shrink into invisibility against the miry roadway. It had seen something he could not, and with never-failing feline instinct distrusted it. Now from somewhere in the street beyond the turning came a footfall, then another. Flowing through the gloom that waited just outside the circle of the lantern's infirm beams he saw shadows darker than the shadows that