Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 308 - The Seven Deadly Arts

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THE SEVEN DEADLY ARTS
by Maxwell Grant
As originally published in "The Shadow Magazine," October 1946.
A mysterious cult murmuring eerie incantations... death occurring in the
wake of an ancient curse. It was more than black magic and superstition - it
was the clever plot of mortal men - and only The Shadow sensed the danger.
CHAPTER I
He was broke, or the next thing to it. His last two weeks at twenty bucks
per were coming up. Twenty bucks a week. There weren't too many places he
could
have been as comfortable on that as he was here. He looked around him.
The hot sun beat down on him. Just a few paces away at the end of the
wharf, the muddy, dark yellow, completely uninspiring expanse of the
Mississippi spread out at the foot of New Orleans. He yawned and turned over
to
bake his back. Sprawled on a bale of cotton, in the bright southern sunshine
it
would have been hard to picture him on the beach at Salerno. He looked as if
it
would take a superhuman effort just to make him get to his feet. But it hadn't
been that way on the beach.
He turned his thoughts away from war and all it connoted. He yawned again
and incuriously looked at the paper that was riffling a trifle in the barest
suggestion of a breeze. It was open at the "Help Wanted" page, or he might
never have seen the ad.
Above him, around him, there came the steady beat of the stevedores as
they paced their strange walk down to the end of the wharf. Their voices would
occasionally boom out in a steady refrain that was almost not singing. It was
a
chant, heavy, slow, a work song. The kind of song they'd been singing for a
hundred years. It was theirs, all theirs. It made their burdens a little less
heavy. Made the endless time pass by a little quicker.
It made an obligatio to his restless thoughts as he ran a lazy eye down
the columns of ads. He thought to himself, 'Wanted, One veteran in pretty good
condition... Wanted, an artist who isn't much of an artist... Wanted...'
Suddenly his mind went into gear. There was an ad for an artist. It read:
"Calling All Artists! Five o'clock at 233 Dauphin Street. Five Positions Open.
Good Pay."
It didn't seem very hopeful on the surface. If they wanted real artists,
he was strictly out. But... he looked at his watch. Four-thirty. If he hurried
a bit, he could make it all right.
He cast a last look over his shoulder at the wharf. At the yellow vast
muck of the Mississippi. If he did get this job, good-bye to loafing in the
sun
and getting some fat on his nerve endings. Not that he'd had battle fatigue.
He
had just wanted long periods of doing nothing, a chance to re-evaluate himself
and what he wanted out of life. It wasn't much. Gone were the pre-war dreams
of
one-man shows and a great career. He could see himself more clearly now. He
was
a never-was. Not even a has-been like his old art teacher. He just didn't have
that one little extra bit of genius. Ability anyway.
He waved a good-bye to a handsome, sweating Negro who smiled back at him.
It was a real good-bye. He was never to return there...
Dauphin Street was in the Vieux Carre. He looked around at the old world
houses, at lace-like iron grill work that went up the outside of the lovely
old
houses. He looked particularly at a girl who went into a house across the
street
from the address in the paper. He thought he'd never seen a girl like that
before.
She carried her head proudly as though it were a beacon. Her black hair,
giving off a thousand reflections was alive in the warm sun. Her back was
straight, not stiff but straight, the way a queen's back would be made, he
thought.
Her skin was like - he groped for a word - old ivory? No that wasn't
flattering. A camellia? It had that quality of whiteness, but there was a glow
under the skin. Her body was as lovely as she.
He stood on the street, gawking like a child at a candy display. He
pulled
himself together long after the door of 230 Dauphin Street had closed on her.
It seemed to be a little darker. But no, that couldn't be. Perhaps it was
just that everything had seemed brighter while she was there. He grinned at
himself, shrugged, and walked up the steps to number 233. He yanked at a bell
pull. Far off, inside the old house, a tinkle told him that it had announced
his presence.
The door opened and a man stood there. He smiled and said, "Good
afternoon, have you come in response to my advertisement?"
"Yes. I don't quite know what you want, but for general boiler-room art
work, I'm not bad."
The man in the doorway matched the house. He was tall, lean, almost
saturnine looking. His face seemed to cry out for a dashing mustache, for
clothes of an older day. But even in the conventional clothes of this era, he
managed to look as though he were wearing a costume. He was dressed almost too
well. He made the saying about the bandbox seem possible.
There was even, and the ex-soldier smothered a smile at this, a
handkerchief tucked in his cuff. He spoke. "My name is Charlus. Pierre
Charlus." He paused and the answer came.
"Tommy Rondo. At your service." Tommy smothered a desire to bow as he
said
it. The man, the house, even the street seemed to have woven a spell around
him.
He felt as though he were in another day, a slower moving, more courtly day.
"Follow me, if you please. The others are waiting. I don't think I shall
need to examine any more."
Down a long hall, through an anteroom and into a room that was completely
out of character. It brought Tommy back to to-day with a start. The room was
empty but for some chairs, some easels, and a variety of daylight bulbs that
flared down from the ceiling with blue-white brilliance.
There were the others. They sat stiffly at their easels obviously as
curious as was Tommy. Paints, all the necessary equipment lay before each
easel. There were even studio palettes ready. At the end of the room facing
the
group, a large section of canvas covered part of the wall.
Charlus slowly paced his way till he was next to the canvas. He said,
"All
of you are curious, I have no doubt. Let me say that you will all be paid for
the time you spend here whether I can use you or not. Let us say fifty
dollars.
That should, I hope, remunerate you properly."
They looked at each other. If he was willing to pay that for finding out
if they would fit the job, how much would he pay if he hired them?
Tommy sat down in front of the one vacant easel and hoped against hope
that he'd come up to par. This looked like a good job. There were one, two,
three... ten men, all told. And the ad had said that five were necessary.
Pretty good odds.
Mr. Charlus pulled the canvas from the wall and revealed a not too good
painting in a baroque style. He said, "I'd like you all to see how fast and
accurately you can copy this."
Copy? Tommy wondered even while he was opening the tubes of paint what
Charlus thought this would prove. Lots of people can copy. He, himself, for
instance. You didn't have to be an artist for that!
The hour went by almost too quickly. Tommy looked up from the cartoon he
had made of the painting. He had just had time to lay out the cartoon and
begin
to paint in one detail when Charlus called time.
Just as well get ready for the disappointment he thought, looking at the
other nine easels in front of him. Two of the men were really cracker jacks.
They had caught a feeling in their roughs that showed they were artists and no
two ways about it. Those two were going to be hired ahead of him he thought.
Charlus bent over one of the men's easels. He looked for just a moment
and
said, "I am sorry."
The man looked surprised, but Charlus opened his wallet and gave him some
money. "I hope this will make up for your lost time."
Tommy scowled. 'Curiouser and curiouser.' There, Charlus was letting the
other real artist go. Now, he was in front of Tommy looking at one of the
other
men's work. He nodded. "Good. Would you mind waiting. I can use you."
Now he was standing behind Tommy looking at his work. He nodded. "Fine.
You can work for me."
There were four of them when he had finished. Four badly puzzled men. The
others had gone.
"There still remains a fifth. Well, another advertisement on the morrow
should take care of that. Thank you, gentlemen."
What now, Tommy wondered. Charlus had left the room. He was gone but a
moment. He returned with a carefully wrapped package about fourteen inches
long. He looked at them and for the first time seemed to realize that they
might be curious about their work. He smiled and said, "Gentlemen, please
relax. You all look so stiff, so unconvinced. Let me say that you will start
work right now. You will be paid two hundred dollars a week for your work.
Advancement will be rapid and up to you."
The four of them drew in their breaths. Two hundred a week!
"I deal in reproductions. Art reproductions. It is a fairly lucrative
business. I see no reason why my employees should not share in the profits.
You
will find me very easy to work for. That first test that all of you passed,
was
just that, the first test. The next one will be the way you reproduce this
painting. I can tell you that if I am satisfied with the way you do your work
on this, that you will go on my staff for good. Now then gentlemen, to work!"
He opened the package. It held a painting. A painting in sombre colors
and
of a sombre subject. Tommy stared at it. The surrealist of four hundred years
ago. The Dali of his day. Hieronymous Bosch.
He was a strange creature, Bosch. Full of god and the devil. This
painting
like most of his, was of hell and a most unpleasant corner of it at that.
Charlus left them as they got to work. Tommy sat at his easel and let his
hands work for him. He was confused. Factory line production of art
masterpieces? But Bosch was no Rembrandt. An original of his would bring a
couple of thousand. What would reproductions of it bring? Well, no time for
that. He got to work.
Against his will the subject matter of the painting began to intrigue
him.
Sombre reds and dark purples wove a pattern of fiends; demons that wriggled in
and out and around the painting. In the center, mercifully blurred by some
ascending smoke, the figure of a woman, bound to a crude stone table, was
being
tormented. Helter skelter, thrown madly as though by some insane hand, were
objects that had no relevance to the subject. Vegetables, animals, which when
observed closely were just that. But, if you looked at the picture as was
Tommy, through narrowed eyes, the animals and vegetables became fiends, imps,
figures of hate and evil!
He worked on, his mind becoming entangled in the mad painting. He was
grateful that things like those he stared at were no longer believed in, no
longer given credence. What a period that must have been when people who
believed in Satan and all his cohorts, worshipped and made obeisance to the
horned one.
The room was quiet. The painting seemed to have an effect on the other
men, too. For there was no small talk, all worked perseveringly and rapidly.
Running in and out of Tommy's mind like a cat after a mouse, were
thoughts
of the pay he was to receive. They became part of the work he was doing. Two
hundred a week. He smiled at the conceit. Was that his due for selling his
soul
to the devil?
If so, he was pretty well content with the bargain. One slightly soiled
soul in return for comfort and comparative luxury. It wasn't too bad a bargain
at that. It was precisely ten times what he had been getting. He shrugged off
the thoughts that followed this. There was a funny feeling about the whole
set-up that he didn't like. But this was no time to get fussy.
Back to the inferno he thought, as he delicately copied a face that
grinned in inhuman delight at the torture of a bound man. No devils, no Satan,
no Faust, no one was in the business of buying shop-worn souls... not in this
atomic age!
CHAPTER II
OUT past Lake Pontchartrain, in a parish that was contiguous to New
Orleans, out in the dark dank depths of a swamp, there was one who at that
moment would have questioned Tommy's thought!
It was dark. It was darker still where a shadow, unsubstantial as the
mist
that hazed sight - a figure, stock still in the sudden silence, watched with
unbelieving eyes. The drums, soft and in the background for a period, had come
to a crescendo and stopped with a suddenness that was more shocking than the
sound had been.
Fronds hung down from depressed looking trees. They made a frame for the
scene. In the silence there was the clatter of insect's wings rubbing on each
other. Outside of that, the silence was as complete as though eternal night
had
fallen.
The tableau was frozen. The figure of the woman, arms upraised, soft skin
glowing in the dark, was poised, her eyes, almost all of them hidden by a half
mask, glinted in the light from the fire. Her hand held a curious looking
knife.
Tied to a stake was a bleating lamb.
When the tableau broke it broke, with the sudden violence of a tropical
storm. The knife flashed down. There was a muffled sound from the animal and
then...
The watching figure looked away.
The final scene in the ceremony that had been going on for an hour was
over. The vagrant light from the fire, low and on the ground, cast strange
high-lights upwards. The harsh lights coming from below as they did, showed
the
bizarre masks as even more bizarre than they were.
Cheap, ten cent papier mache masks, there was nothing of the horrible in
them. They were just carnival masks. Halloween masks. Toys. But the use they
had been put to: hiding the faces of the skulking participants in a ritual
that
went back into the dreadful past, made the masks things of horror.
The shiny black of the cheap paint on the top of one of the masks caught
a
high light. It was worn by a burly figure, a man who had had a leading role in
the events just so dreadfully ended. He made his way around collecting the
little bags that the various figures held in their hands. He took the bags
from
them. They were small, perhaps three inches over all.
He took the bags and laid them on the ground in front of the now
bedraggled and old looking woman who had used the knife. She made motions with
her hands over the bags. Her voice, shrill and cracked intoned over the bags;
intoned words so old that they had long since lost their meaning. Only one
word
came clearly from her throat; that was "Damballah!"
The chant ended, the bags were returned to their owners. The masks
somehow
deprived them of all humanity. They looked like badly made marionettes as they
greedily took the bags back. They put them under their clothes, secretively,
slyly. Then, as the woman walked off into the frond enclosed distance, there
seemed to be a lifting of restraint. They spoke.
The meeting was breaking up. The big burly man watched as they banded
together. A skinny bent, female figure, next to him snarled to him, "Gumbo ya
ya!"
He laughed. "You're right, gran'mere, everybody talks at once!"
They walked off after the retreating backs of the others. There was
something noticeably unusual about the man's back. Something in the way he
carried himself. A loose sure-footed shuffle, graceful and lithe, unusual for
so big a man.
They were all gone. The insects repossessed the area that was theirs by
ancestral right. Then, and only then, the shadowy figure walked with swift
pace
off in the opposite direction from the way the others had gone.
It was a man. A man who, in his way, was as bizarrely dressed as had been
the actors in the ugly drama he had just watched. A man dressed in black.
Black
slouch hat, black cape, a more than black quality that made his form blend and
shift with every vagrant flickering spot of darkness.
It was The Shadow. And, if his walk meant anything, he was furious.
Witchcraft! Not the silly childish business of women riding on
broomsticks, but the out and out trafficking with evil that brought out the
worst elements of man's nature. The belief in a superstition so ingrained in
these parts that nothing had ever uprooted it.
The sale of charms, or love potions, fortune telling, none of these
things
would have upset The Shadow. But he was positive that the gibberish and
unclean
rites he had just watched were but the cover up for some more devilish
machinations.
Burbank had been right, as usual. There was work for The Shadow in New
Orleans. He made his way to the edge of the swamps where he had parked a car.
Before he came out into the open, he removed his briefcase from under his
cape.
Rapidly, he doffed the black hat and cape. They went into a secret zippered
compartment in Lamont Cranston's case.
It was as Cranston that he had driven out here and as Cranston that he
would return to his host's roof. He smiled as he thought of old Charles
Bouton.
A wonderful old man, seamed face, bent back and all, there was an
inextinguishable fire in him that shone from his faded blue eyes like a
beacon.
Back in Vieux Carre, Cranston slowed down in front of a house. He saw two
figures silhouetted against a curtained window. The figures were much too
close
for speech. Old Charles's niece and her fiance. He wondered where Tante was.
In
this old Creole society it was no easy task to duck a chaperone.
Far off he could hear a blaring trumpet sounding in the night. There were
not many of the old jazz players left in town, but the ones that were, were
all
old faithfuls who could work all day on the docks and then blow their lungs
out
all night.
He pulled the bell and waited. Padded feet approached the door. It opened
and a figure out of Dumas's day was there. It was Charles Bouton and he winked
at Cranston. "Shh... we can't have the servants knowing what a night owl we
have? Eh?"
Cranston grinned in reply and followed the bent figure of Bouton down the
hall. In the big, old, out-dated living room, he found how Veronica had
outwitted her chaperone. Tante was sound asleep in a straight-backed chair, in
front of a chess board.
Bouton nodded at the scene. "It is that I play alone when I play with
her,
n'est ce pas?"
"Feel like a real game?" asked Cranston knowing that as is the case with
the very old, his host required very little sleep.
"By all means... We will have to wake the aged one and send her to her
downy rest."
He wakened Tante who took one look at the clock and then pierced her
brother with an eagle eye. "Mon vieux, it is that you wish for your daughter
to
have a reputation?"
He shrugged and said, "Tcha, chase him home now."
She was furious and scuttled out of the room.
Bouton nodded at some brandy and said, "Will you join me?"
"Of course," Cranston nodded.
They sat at the chess board. Cranston made a queen's bishop's pawn lead
and waited.
"Bah! It is no use. We will have no peace till Tante has made herself
unpleasant!"
There were sounds of voices in the hall. The door opened and a man of
thirty-five came in. Out in the hall female voices joined in some kind of
harangue. He winked at Bouton.
"Don't make yourself strange - enter. You know my old friend, Lamont
Cranston, do you not?"
Cranston nodded to the question and said, "Good evening, M'sieu Charlus."
"Come, let us have none of this patronymic address. Pierre, to you, sir."
Charlus nodded and smiled at Cranston.
Cranston was as fascinated as ever by the brunette loveliness of Bouton's
niece as she entered the room leaving old Tante out in the hall still mumbling
to herself.
"And of course, my niece, Veronica, is known to you," said Bouton.
"She is indeed." Cranston returned the smile which Veronica bestowed on
him. She was more than lovely, she was not of this age, somehow. Modern women
with their glow of robust health don't have the kind of beauty that was
Veronica's. Cranston watched as Charlus eyed his fiancee greedily.
"M. Cranston," said Veronica and her voice was low, throaty, and vastly
disturbing, "can you somehow explain to Tante that this is the year of our
Lord, 1946 and not 1826?"
"I am afraid that nothing will ever make that penetrate through that so
thick skull," said Bouton. "She is as she was made and nought will change
her."
"I heard what you said!" Tante's voice, high pitched and irritated came
clearly through the door. "I am not one to stay where I am not wanted."
There was a pause. "I'll go away. I will not stay here."
Veronica said, "Oh dear, now I shall have to go and straighten out her
ruffled feathers." She left and as she did the room seemed to change. It was
no
longer a backdrop for beauty, but just an old room with three men in it.
"This is an affair that has been repeated again and again," said Charlus.
"It will no doubt continue till I am able to get my beloved away from her
dragon."
Bouton and Cranston sat down again and prepared to resume their
interrupted game.
"I will leave you to your game," said Charlus. "I have much to do on the
morrow."
"Oh yes, did you get the artists whom you needed?" asked Bouton.
"I did indeed. At least four of then. I may not need a fifth. These four
seem like good conscientious workers."
Cranston looked his question.
"You know of course that I am an art dealer of a rather peculiar sort?"
"No, I had no idea what sort of business you were in."
"It is too bad that he should have to engage in trade at all. But since
he
does, it is good that his business is a nice one," Bouton said.
Cranston well knew how horrid was commerce or any mention of it to these
old families. But it was a step that most of them had been forced to take. The
old fortunes were being dissipated, if not by the heirs, by taxes on unearned
increment that had spelled the end of the type of life for which the families
were prepared.
"It is a field that I have made pretty much my own. There is always a
market for good reproductions of old masterpieces. They are used in a variety
of ways. My best market is in Hollywood, of all places. The nouveau riche," he
made the words sound like a malediction, "find some sort of solace for their
lack of background by surrounding themselves with things that belong to the
past."
"It is better than selling bonds, or shoes, as have some of our people,"
said Bouton. "Much better."
"Yes, I have little to complain about." Charlus bowed and left them.
To Cranston the silence and the intellectual relaxation of the chess game
was like an oasis in the middle of a desert of crime and its perpetrators. For
the nonce, he was able to put into the back of his mind the worrying thoughts
that had been responsible for his expedition into the bayous.
There was some sort of connection between the horrid doings out in the
swamp and the fabled streets of the Vieux Carre. That he knew, and he was
dreading that which was to come. For, all he could see ahead for the people he
liked was heartbreak and sorrow, anger and violence, death and destruction.
CHAPTER III
TOMMY RONDO, ex-G.I., almost ex-artist, went home that night in a dream,
with swirling thoughts of fame of a sort, and success of a monetary kind for
which he had hardly dared to hope.
His shoulders were back and he carried his head high. A girl in a cab,
seeing him walk by, thought - "What a glamour job. Tall, broad-shouldered,
curly-haired..." She sighed as she turned from the window and looked at her
companion who was meticulously polishing his glasses with his handkerchief.
He probably never knew why she was so short-tempered with him that night.
Tommy strode on. His mind was so occupied that he didn't hear footsteps
that echoed his. Just ahead was the rooming house that was his home. As soon
as
he received his first week's salary that was going to be changed. He visioned
the kind of place that he'd get. A studio apartment with ceilings high enough
so as not to give him that trapped feeling that he had in his furnished room.
The cobble-stoned street faced onto an old, centuries old, cemetery. In
New Orleans most old streets lead at one time or another to a cemetery. During
that plague that had wreaked such havoc as late as sixty years ago, it was
necessary to bury the dead, and that, quickly, before their bodies perpetuated
the plague. The plague borne from the swamps and marshes that New Orleans is
built upon, both caused the deaths and then received the bodies of those whom
it had killed. A coffin buried in the marshy land went down, down, forever
down. Two months after burial in those unclean places the dead were forever
lost to sight.
The rich, the ones who could afford to escape the grasp of the
quicksand-like marshes, were buried in crypts that dotted the old cemeteries
like lighthouses of death. The ones not so rich could hire a crypt for varying
times. Sometimes they were able to afford to hire a crypt for six months or a
year... but at the end of that time, the coffins were removed from the crypts
and given to the un-tender mercies of the all-embracing swamps.
Tommy barely glanced at the cemetery. At first, he had woven strange
fancies around the flickering lights that he sometimes saw out in the middle
of
the burial ground. He'd thought that they might be some form of marsh light,
or
the moving forms of the long-dead. Tonight there was nothing to relieve the
unending pall of blackness that hung over the old place like a curtain.
He had his foot on the first step of his house when he finally heard the
sounds of the man who had been following him. He wondered about it for a
second
and then put it out of his mind. None of his business who came in here.
He stepped up onto the second step. It was then that the hoarse voice
stopped him in mid-step.
"Eh, come with me, little one."
He spun to see who could possibly call him "little one". The man he saw
was a nightmare figure out of the dawn of time. Taller by far than he, the man
had the jaw and crude facial construction of a cave creature. His huge
underlip
protruded Ubangi-wise. His sallow, pimpled skin was like a topographical map.
Huge pores glinted sweat in the feeble light that seeped out from one window
of
the house.
He made no threatening gestures. He was too sure of himself, of his
strength, for that. He needed no gun to reinforce his commands. An arm like a
hawser encircled Tommy's waist. He pulled Tommy off the step and said, "Not
one
tiny peep, mon brave, or..."
He didn't finish the threat. Was this some form of primitive hold up, a
mugging? Tommy could not decide. For instead of going through his pockets, Big
Lip gestured with a huge thumb back in the direction of the cemetery. "En
avant."
There was nothing to do but obey. Tommy didn't like if one bit. No man
would. But sense forbade any kind of a show-down. One clenching of that giant
fist could end the breath of life in Tommy. He followed orders and waited for
a
more propitious time in which to find out if the giant were as strong as he
looked.
Side by side, like old comrades, they walked away from the house, away
from safety and sanctuary, away from the ordered ways of life, into the menace
of the old cemetery.
Their feet made squishing sounds as they stepped off the grass into a
bypath that wove its way past a crypt.
"What goes on?" Tommy asked in exasperation.
"Tcha! I said that you were not to make with your mouth, did I not?"
Tommy found himself being shaken as one would shake a bad puppy. He
gasped
as he was dropped by the giant. It was an insult to his dignity as a man. Most
people in their adulthood have forgotten the torments that a child goes
through
when he is subjected to force. There was nothing in the giant of a man
fighting
another man. It was a stern father chastising an errant son. It was more than
Tommy could stand. He lashed out with the side of his hand as he'd been
taught.
If the side of his hand had connected with the giant's throat, it would have
stopped right there, for nothing can withstand the deadliness of that blow.
But casually, almost slowly, Big Lip snapped a hand up into position. The
side of Tommy's hand connected with the giant's arm with numbing force. The
giant laughed and that was worse than the chastisement had been.
"Eh, my little mosquito! Hah!" He roared with inward mirth. He pushed a
hand into the small of Tommy's back that sent him sprawling forward along the
path. "No more of that, my cabbage, or you will annoy me. Now proceed.
Rapidly."
It was no use. Nothing but a sub-machine gun would make any impression on
this creature. Tommy walked forward. The swamp was more gluey now. The houses
behind them were long gone. There was nothing to be seen but a miasma that
came
up from the swamp like a physical thing.
It had the nightmare dream quality of deep narcosis. There was no point
in
even thinking. This could not be happening and yet it was.
On through the night, through the swamp, the ill-matched pair made their
way. It seemed to have been going on forever, but it was little more than
twenty minutes between the time that Big Lip approached him and the time they
stumbled around a dilapidated crypt that seemed to have been forgotten for a
century, and saw before them the figure of a man. This was another big man,
that is, a trifle bigger than Tommy but not in the same epoch as Big Lip.
The man, relaxed and somehow giving the air of a giant cat, sat on a
slanting tombstone and looked at three other men. The men, and Tommy blinked
his eyes at this, were the artists - the other artists who had been chosen by
Pierre Charlus that afternoon. They looked as out of place as they felt. They
showed signs of having put up resistance. Their clothes were torn as though by
brambles or hands.
Behind them, almost unseen in the dark, were the hovering figures that
had
brought them to this eerie place. The man, the cat-like man, face hidden
behind
what Tommy realized was a papier mache mask, spoke.
And in that out of the way place, with fear as real a thing as the breath
of life, the man said, "Welcome."
He stood up and his walk was loose-limbed and graceful. From the rear he
looked like a dancer making his way through some intricate figure. He balanced
his weight on the balls of his feet. Tommy, enough of an artist to know that a
man is recognizable by his bearing as much as by his face, filed it away in
his
mind. He'd know that walk again, anywhere.
"I must beg a thousand pardons. I have no doubt that Bratser and Le
Cochon
and Big Lip, as well as little Rene, must have frightened you. But there was
no
other way to get you here. However, that is over and we will forget it." It
was
a command.
Tommy's eyes, a little more accustomed to the darkness now, saw what must
have been, could only have been, little Rene. He was small and compact and
evil. Tommy thought he had never seen so much evil in a human face before. It
was like a mask that separated the little man from the rest of humanity. He
was
grinning now as he flipped a coin in the air and caught it over and over
again.
There was silence.
"Look, this is all very jolly and I am sure there is some delightful
explanation for it, but what goes on here?" This was from one of the artists
and although the words were light, his tone was not. He was frightened, badly
frightened, and it is not good to see naked fear on a man's face.
Rene continued to flip his coin. The tiny sound of his nail ringing on
the
silver was the only sound at first. But then, the chorus of the night made a
background to it. Crickets, some kind of almost tropical insects, made a
chorus
behind them. There were little sounds all around them. Frogs, birds, life
rustled and went on as they stood and tried to prepare themselves for death.
"You have been selected," said the man in the mask, "as workers. You
still
do not know all of what your work will be. I tell you that when you do find
out,
there be some of you who will not be happy.
"You may even want to go to the police. You may want to leave our
organization. But I tell you..." His voice was deep and it boomed out like a
baritone bullfrog, "that if you do anything as indiscreet as that, I will not
like it. Neither, for that matter, will your guardians."
From his voice, he must have been grinning behind the false front of the
mask: "Your guardians, and they will be in constant attendance on you, are of
course, my pets. Big Lip and his confreres."
"Is that all you're going to tell us?" Tommy's voice, despite himself,
was
querulous with nervousness. The whole scene, the men, the menacing silences,
were too much. They were really getting on his nerves. He knew now that he had
not taken enough time to repair the damage of the war to his nervous system.
"Mmmmmmm, I will put myself in your power." Definitely now the man was
smirking behind the papier mache mask. "I will tell you that my superior, my
'boss', does not know of what I have done. The boss doesn't like what is
called
melodrama. The boss thinks that you can be made to do that which you will do
by
cleverness. But I know better. I know that the way to control men is through
fear!
"And you will live much longer if you fear me and your guardians! Listen
to the boss, follow his lead. But remember, no matter what you do, no matter
where you go, you will be followed. You will be under observation.
"The Fascists made a great discovery. They discovered that although fear
is a good control, fear of one's life, that sometimes there are people so
摘要：

THESEVENDEADLYARTSbyMaxwellGrantAsoriginallypublishedin"TheShadowMagazine,"October1946.Amysteriouscultmurmuringeerieincantations...deathoccurringinthewakeofanancientcurse.Itwasmorethanblackmagicandsuperstition-itwasthecleverplotofmortalmen-andonlyTheShadowsensedthedanger.CHAPTERIHewasbroke,orthenext...

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