The Devil-Worshipers

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ARTHUR B. REEVES

THE DEVIL-WORSHIPERS

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First published in Cosmopolitan, October 1914

This e-book edition: Roy Glashan's Library, 2020
Version Date: 2022-06-24

Produced by Matthias Kaether and Roy Glashan
Proofread by Gordon Hobley

All content added by RGL is proprietary and protected by copyright.

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Cosmopolitan, October 1914, with "The Devil-Worshipers"

The death-thought, the charms, all the weird rites of the black art—what a jumble here of fascination for the frivolous and deep appeal to the intellectual and spiritual persons gathered strangely together in the Temple of the Occult! No wonder Craig Kennedy has to delve deep and long into science when Mrs. Blair appeals to him to save her from that malicious psychic attack which, she says, is driving her to death. How this wizard of Truth triumphs over that other wizard of Sham and Falsehood forms one of the most ingenious tales of this series, which is declared by Cosmopolitan readers to possess surpassing interest and to convey up-to-the-minute information in a most attractive fashion....

The words rang out as the cry of a lost soul. A terrible look of inexpressible anguish and fear was written on the face of Craig's visitor as she uttered them and then sank back, trembling, in the easy chair, mentally and physically convulsed.

As nearly as I had been able to follow, Mrs. Veda Blair's story had dealt mostly with a Professor and Madame Rapport and something she called the "Red Lodge of the Temple of the Occult."

She was not exactly a young woman, although she was a very attractive one. She was of an age that is, perhaps, even more interesting than youth.

Veda Blair, I knew, had been, before her recent marriage to Seward Blair, a Treacy, of an old though somewhat unfortunate family. Both the Blairs and the Treacys had been intimate, and old Seward Blair, when he had died about a year before, had left his fortune to his son on condition that he marry Veda Treacy.

"Sometimes," faltered Mrs. Blair, "it is as though I had two souls. One of them is dispossessed of its body and the use of its organs, and is frantic at the sight of the other that has crept in."

She ended her rambling story, sobbing the terrible words: "Oh, I have committed the unpardonable sin! I am anathema—I am damned—damned!"

She said nothing of what terrible thing she had done, and Kennedy, for the present, did not try to lead the conversation. But of all the stories that I have heard poured forth in the confessional of the detective's office, hers, I think, was the wildest.

Was she insane? At least I felt that she was sincere. Still, I wondered what sort of hallucination Craig had to deal with, as Veda Blair repeated the incoherent tale of her spiritual vagaries. Almost, I had begun to fancy that this was a case for a doctor, not for a detective, when suddenly she asked a most peculiar question.

"Can people affect you for good or evil merely by thinking about you?" she queried. Then a shudder passed over her. "They may be thinking about me now," she murmured in terror.

Her fear was so real and her physical distress so evident that Kennedy, who had been listening silently for the most part, rose and hastened to reassure her.

"Not unless you make your own fears affect yourself, and so play into their hands," he said earnestly.

"I have seen Doctor Vaughn," she said slowly. (Doctor Gilbert Vaughn, I recollected, was a well-known alienist in the city.) "He tried to tell me the same thing," she resumed doubtfully. "But—oh—I know what I know! I have felt the death-thought—and he knows it!"

"The death-thought," she repeated, "a malicious psychic attack. Some one is driving me to death by it. I thought I could fight it off. I went away to escape it. Now I have come back—and I have not escaped. There is always that disturbing influence—always—directed against me. I know it will—kill me!"

"What do you mean?" inquired Kennedy, leaning forward
keenly. "The death-thought," she repeated, "a malicious
psychic attack. Some one is driving me to death by it."

I listened, startled. The death-thought! What did it mean? What terrible power was it?

"You see," she went on, heroically trying to control herself, "I have always been interested in the mysterious, the strange, the occult. In fact, my father and my husband's father met through their common interest. So I come naturally by it.

"Not long ago I heard of Professor and Madame Rapport and their new Temple of the Occult. I went to it, and, later, Seward became interested, too. We have been taken into a sort of inner circle," she continued, fearfully, as though there were some evil power in the very words themselves, "the Red Lodge."

"You have told Doctor Vaughn?" shot out Kennedy suddenly, his eyes fixed on her face to see what it would betray.

Veda leaned forward, as if to tell a secret, then whispered in a low voice: "He knows. Like us—he—he is a—devil-worshiper!"

"P-perhaps," she hesitated, in a half-frightened tone. "I—I'll try to get you in to-night."

"You—poor girl!" blurted out Kennedy, his sympathies getting the upper hand for the moment as he took the hand she extended mutely. "Trust me. I will do all in my power, all in the power of modern science to help you fight off this—influence."

Personally, I cannot say that I liked the idea of spying. It is not usually clean and wholesome. But I realized that occasionally it was necessary.

"We are in for it, now," remarked Kennedy half humorously, half seriously, "to see the devil in the twentieth century."

WE said nothing more about it, but I thought much about it, and the more I thought the more incomprehensible the thing seemed. I had heard of devil-worship, but had always associated it with far-off India and other heathen lands—in fact never among Caucasians in modern times, except possibly in Paris. Was there such a cult here in my own city? I felt skeptical.

That night, however, promptly at the appointed time, a cab called for us, and in it was Veda Blair, nervous but determined.

"Seward has gone ahead," she explained. "I told him that a friend had introduced you, that you had studied the occult abroad. I trust you to carry it out."

The curtains were drawn and we could see nothing outside, though we must have been driven several miles, far out into the suburbs.

At last the cab stopped. As we left it, we could see nothing of the building, for the cab had entered a closed courtyard.

"Who enters the Red Lodge?" challenged a sepulchral voice at the porte-cochère. "Give the password!"

IT was a large room into which we were first ushered, to be inducted into the rites of Satan. There seemed to be both men and women, perhaps half a dozen votaries. Seward Blair was present. As I met him, I did not like the look in his eye; it was too staring. Doctor Vaughn was there, too, talking in a low tone to Madame Rapport. He shot a quick look at us. His were not eyes but gimlets that tried to bore into one's very soul. Chatting with Seward Blair was a Mrs. Langhorne, a very beautiful woman. To-night she seemed to be unnaturally excited.

All seemed to be on most intimate terms, and, as we waited a few minutes, I could not help recalling some words of Huysmans: "The worship of the devil is no more insane than the worship of God. The worshipers of Satan are mystics—mystics of an unclean sort, it is true, but mystics none the less."

I did not agree with this and did not repeat it, of course, but a moment later I overheard Doctor Vaughn saying to Kennedy: "Hoffmann brought the devil into modern life. Poe foregoes the aid of demons and works patiently and precisely by the scientific method. But the result is the same."

"Yes," agreed Kennedy, for the sake of appearances, "in a sense, I suppose, we are all devil-worshipers in modern society— always have been. It is fear that rules, and we fear the bad—not the good."

As we waited, I felt more and more the sense of the mysterious, the secret, the unknown, which have always exercised a powerful attraction on the human mind.

In it, I felt, there was fascination for the frivolous and deep appeal to the intellectual and spiritual. The Temple of the Occult had evidently been designed to appeal to both types. I wondered how, like Lucifer, it had fallen. The prime requisite, I could guess already, however, was—money. Was it in its worship of the root of all evil that it had fallen?

We passed soon into another room, hung entirely in red, with weird, cabalistic signs all about on the walls. It was uncanny.

A huge reproduction in plaster of one of the most sardonic of Notre Dame's gargoyles seemed to preside over everything—a terrible figure in such an atmosphere.

As we entered, we were struck by the blinding glare of the light, in contrast with the darkened room in which we had passed our brief novitiate, if it might be called such.

A door opened, and there appeared the veritable priest of the devil—pale of face, nose sharp, mouth bitter, eyes glassy.

Without a word, he raised his long, lean forefinger and began to single them out impressively. As he did so, each spoke, as if imploring aid. He came to Mrs. Langhorne.

"I have tried the charm," she cried earnestly, "and the one whom I love still hates me, while the one I hate loves me!"

"Concentrate!" replied the priest. "Concentrate! Think always: 'I love him. He must love me. I want him to love me. I love him. He must love me.' Over and over again you must think it. Then the other side: 'I hate him. He must leave me. I want him to leave me. I hate him—hate him.'"

At last his lean finger was outstretched at Veda. It seemed as if some imp of the perverse were compelling her unwilling tongue to unlock its secrets.

At last his lean finger was outstretched at Veda.

"Sometimes," she cried, in a low, tremulous voice, "something seems to seize me, as if by the hand, and urge me onward. I cannot flee from it."

"Defend yourself!" answered the priest subtly. "When you know that some one is trying to kill you mentally, defend yourself! Work against it! Discourage! Intimidate! Destroy!"

I marveled at these cryptic utterances. They shadowed a modern black art of which I had had no conception—a recrudescence, in other language, of the age-old dualism of good and evil.

"Over and over again," he went on, speaking to her, "the same thought is to be repeated against an enemy. 'You know you are going to die! You know you are going to die!' Do it an hour, two hours, at a time. Others can help you, all thinking in unison the same thought."

Slowly a strange mephitic vapor seemed to exhale into the room—or was it my heightened imagination?

There came a sudden noise—nameless—striking terror, low, rattling. I stood rooted to the spot. What was it that held me? Was it an atavistic joy in the horrible, or was it merely a blasphemous curiosity? I scarcely dared to look.

At last I raised my eyes. There was a live snake, upraised, his fangs striking out viciously—a rattler!

"It is Ophis," intoned Rapport, "the serpent—the one active form in nature that cannot be ungraceful!"

At last it broke loose, and then followed the most terrible blasphemies. The disciples, now all frenzied, surrounded closer the priest, the gargoyle, and the serpent.

They worshiped with howls and obscenities. Mad laughter mingled with pale fear and wild scorn, in turn, was written on the hectic faces about me. They had risen. It became a dance, a reel.

The votaries seemed to spin about on their axes, as it were, uttering a low, moaning chant as they whirled. It was a mania, the spirit of demonism. Something unseen seemed to urge them on. Disgusted and stifled at the surcharged atmosphere, I would have tried to leave, but I seemed frozen to the spot. I could think of nothing except Poe's "Masque of the Red Death."

Above all the rest whirled Seward Blair himself. The laugh of the fiend, for the moment, was in his mouth. An instant he stood—the oracle of the demon—devil-possessed. Around whirled the frantic devotees, howling.

He reeled slowly through the crowd, crooning a quatrain in a low, monotonous voice, his eyelids drooping, and his head forward on his breast:

"If the Red Slayer think he slays,
Or the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep and pass and turn again!"

Entranced, the whirling crowd paused and watched. One of their number had received the "power."

The man's fingers twitched; his head wagged uncannily. Perspiration seemed to ooze from every pore. His breast heaved.

He gave a sudden yell—ear-piercing. Then followed a screech of hellish laughter.

He was whirling slowly, eyes protruding now, mouth foaming, chest rising and falling like a bellows, muscles quivering. Cries, vows, imprecations, prayers—all blended in an infernal hubbub.

His arms waved—cutting, sawing, hacking the air. The votaries, trembling, scarcely moved, breathed, as he danced.

Suddenly he gave a great leap into the air—then fell, motionless. They crowded around him. The fiendish look was gone—the demoniac laughter stilled. It was over.

The tension of the orgy had been too much for us. We parted with scarcely a word, and yet I could feel that among the rest there was a sort of unholy companionship.

SILENTLY Kennedy and I drove away in the darkened cab, this time with Seward and Veda Blair and Mrs. Langhorne.

For several minutes not a word was said. I was, however, much occupied in watching the two women. It was not because of anything they said or did. That was not necessary. But I felt that there was a feud, something that set them against each other.

"How would Rapport use the death-thought, I wonder?" asked Craig speculatively, breaking the silence.

Blair answered quickly. "Suppose some one tried to break away, to renounce the lodge, expose its secrets. They would treat him so as to make him harmless—perhaps insane, confused, afraid to talk, paralyzed, or even to commit suicide or be killed in an accident. They would put the death-thought on him."

Even in the prosaic jolting of the cab, away from the terrible mysteries of the Red Lodge, one could feel the spell.

The cab stopped. Seward was on his feet and handed Mrs. Langhorne out at her home. For a moment they paused on the steps for an exchange of words.

In that moment I caught flitting over the face of Veda a look of hatred, more intense, more real, more awful than any that had been induced under the mysteries of the rites at the lodge.

It was gone in an instant, and as Seward rejoined us, I felt that, with Mrs. Langhorne gone, there was less restraint.

Although it was more comfortable, the rest of our journey was made in silence, and the Blairs dropped us at our apartment with many expressions of cordiality as we left them to proceed to their own.

"Of one thing I'm sure," I remarked, entering the room where, only a few short hours before, Mrs. Blair had related her strange tale. "Whatever the cause of it, the devil-dancers don't sham."

Kennedy did not reply. He was apparently wrapped up in the consideration of the remarkable events of the evening. As for myself, it was a state of affairs which, the day before, I should have pronounced utterly beyond the wildest bounds of the imagination of the most colorful writer.

I glanced up to find Kennedy standing by the light, examining something he had apparently picked up at the Red Lodge. I bent over to look at it, too. It was a little glass tube.

"An ampulla, I believe the technical name of such a container is," he remarked, holding it closer to the light. In it were the remains of a dried yellow substance, broken up minutely, resembling crystals.

"Vaughn, I think," he replied. "At least, I saw him near Blair, stooping over him, at the end, and I imagine this is what I saw gleaming for an instant in the light."

Kennedy said nothing more, and, for my part, I was thoroughly at sea and could make nothing out of it all.

"What object can such a man as Doctor Vaughn possibly have in frequenting such a place?" I asked, at length, adding, "And there's that Mrs. Langhorne—she was interesting, too."

Kennedy made no direct reply. "I shall have them shadowed to-morrow," he said briefly, "while I am at work in the laboratory over this ampulla."

AS usual, also, Craig had begun on his scientific studies long before I was able to shake myself loose from the nightmares that haunted me after our weird experience.

He had already given the order to an agency for the shadowing, and his next move was to start me out, also, looking into the history of those concerned in the case. As far as I was able to determine, Doctor Vaughn had an excellent reputation, and I could find no reason whatever for his connection with anything of the nature of the Red Lodge. The Rapports seemed to be nearly unknown in New York, although it was reported that they had come from Paris lately. Mrs. Langhorne was a divorcee from one of the Western states, but little was known about her except that she always seemed to be well supplied with money. It seemed to be well known in the circle in which Seward Blair moved that he was friendly with her, and I had about reached the conclusion that she was unscrupulously making use of his friendship, perhaps was not above such a thing as blackmail.

THUS the day passed, and we heard no word from Veda Blair, although that was explained by the shadows, whose trails crossed in a most unexpected manner.

Their reports showed that there was a meeting at the Red Lodge during the late afternoon, at which all had been present except Doctor Vaughn. We learned, also, from them the exact location of the lodge, in an old house just across the line in Westchester County.

It was evidently a long and troublesome analysis that Craig was engaged in at the laboratory, for it was some hours after dinner, that night, when he came into the apartment, and even then he said nothing but buried himself in some of the technical works with which his library was stocked. He said little, but I gathered that he was in great doubt about something.

It was growing late, and Kennedy was still steeped in his books when the door of the apartment was suddenly thrown open and Seward Blair burst in on us, wildly excited.

Kennedy was still steeped in his books when Seward Blair burst in on us, wildly excited.

"Veda is gone!" he cried, before either of us could ask him what was the matter.

"I don't know," Blair blurted out breathlessly. "We had been together this afternoon and I returned with her. Then I went out to the club after dinner for a while, and when I got back I missed her—not a quarter of an hour ago. I burst into her room—and there I found this note. Read it. I don't know what to do. No one seems to know what has become of her. I've called up all over and then thought perhaps you might help me, might know some friend of hers that I don't know, with whom she might have gone out."

Blair was plainly eager for us to help him. Kennedy took the paper. On it, in a trembling hand, were scrawled some words, evidently addressed to Blair himself:

When I refused to yield my will to the will of the lodge, I suppose I aroused the enmity of the lodge.

To-night, as I lay in bed, I felt that my hour had come, that mental forces that were almost irresistible were being directed against me.

But during those hours, some one, I won't say who, seemed to have developed such psychic faculties of penetration that they were able to make their bodies pass through the walls of my room.

The writing broke off abruptly. "What does that mean?" asked Kennedy, "the 'will of the lodge'?"

Blair looked at us keenly. I fancied that there was even something accusatory in the look.

"Perhaps it was some mental reservation on her part," he suggested. "You do not know yourself of any reason why she should fear anything, do you?" he asked.

Kennedy did not betray, even by the motion of an eyelash, that he knew more than we should ostensibly.

There was a tap at the door. I sprang to open it, thinking perhaps, after all, it was Veda herself. Instead, a man—a stranger—stood there.

"I am from the psychopathic ward of the City Hospital—an orderly, sir," the man introduced.

"A Mrs. Blair has just been brought in, sir, and we can't find her husband. She's calling for you, now."

"What do you suppose it is?" I asked, as we sped across-town in a taxi-cab. "Is it the curse that she dreaded?"

Kennedy said nothing, and Blair appeared to hear nothing. His face was drawn in tense lines.

THE psychopathic ward is at once one of the most interesting and one of the most depressing departments of a large city hospital, harboring, as it does, all from the more-or-less harmless insane to violent alcoholics and wrecked drug fiends.

Mrs. Blair had been found hatless, without money, dazed, having fallen, after an apparently aimless wandering, in the street.

For the moment she lay exhausted on the white bed of the ward, eyes glazed, pupils contracted, pulse now quick, now almost evanescent, face drawn, breathing difficult, moaning now and then in physical and mental agony. Until she spoke, it was impossible to tell what had happened, but the ambulance surgeon had found a little red mark on her white forearm and had pointed it out, evidently with the idea that she was suffering from a drug.

At the mere sight of the mark, Blair stared as though hypnotized. Leaning over to Kennedy, so that the others could not hear, he whispered, "It is the mark of the serpent!"

Our arrival had been announced to the hospital physician, who entered and stood for a moment looking at the patient.

"Whatever it is," he said slowly, "it is closely allied to the cyanide groups in its rapacious activity. I haven't the slightest idea of its true nature, but it seems to have a powerful affinity for important nerve-centers of respiration and muscular coordination, as well as for disorganizing the blood. I should say that it produces death by respiratory paralysis and convulsions. To my mind it is an exact, though perhaps less active, counterpart of hydrocyanic acid."

Kennedy had been listening intently at the start, but before the physician had finished, he had bent over and made a ligature quickly with his handkerchief.

Then he despatched a messenger with a note. Next he cut about the minute wound on her arm until the blood flowed, cupping it to increase the flow. Now and then he had them administer a little stimulant.

"Get Doctor Vaughn," ordered Craig, as soon as he had a breathing-spell after his quick work, adding, "and Professor and Madame Rapport. Walter, attend to that, will you? I think you will find an officer outside. You'll have to compel them to come, if they won't come otherwise," he added, giving the address of the lodge.

Blair shot a quick look at him, as though Craig in his knowledge were uncanny. Apparently, the address had been a secret which he thought we did not know.

I managed to find an officer and despatch him for the Rapports. A hospital orderly, I thought, would serve to get Vaughn.

I had scarcely returned to the ward, when, suddenly, an unnatural strength seemed to be infused into Veda. She had risen in bed.

"It shall not catch me!" she cried, in a new paroxysm of nameless terror. "No—no—it is pursuing me! I am never out of its grasp! I have been thought six feet underground—I know it! There it is again—still driving me—still driving me! Will it never stop? Will no one stop it? Save me! It—is the death-thought!"

She had risen convulsively and had drawn back in abject, cowering terror. What was it she saw? It was very real and very awful. It pursued her relentlessly.

As she lay there, rolling her eyes about, she caught sight of us and recognized us for the first time, although she had been calling for us.

"They had the thought on you, too, Professor Kennedy," she almost screamed. "Hour after hour, Rapport and the rest repeated over and over again, 'Why does not some one kill him? Why does he not die?' They knew you—even when I brought you to the Red Lodge. They thought you were a spy."

I turned to Kennedy. He had advanced, and was leaning over to catch every word. Blair was standing behind me, and she had not seen her husband yet. A quick glance showed me that he was trembling from head to foot like a leaf, as though he, too, were pursued by the nameless terror.

Fearfully, gripping the bars of the iron bed, as though they were some tangible support for her mind, she answered: "They would get together. 'Now, all of you,' they said, 'unite yourselves in thought against our enemy, against Kennedy, that he must leave off persecuting us. He is ripe for destruction!'"

"God grant," she implored, "that none haunt me for what I have done in my ignorance!"

Just then the door opened and my messenger entered, accompanied by Doctor Vaughn. I had turned to catch the expression on Blair's face just in time. It was a look of abject appeal.

Before Doctor Vaughn could ask a question or fairly take in the situation, Kennedy had faced him.

"What was the purpose of all that elaborate mummery out at the Red Lodge?" asked Kennedy, pointblank.

I think I looked at Craig in no less amazement than Vaughn. In spite of the dramatic scenes through which we had passed, the spell of the occult had not fallen on him for an instant.

"Mummery?" repeated Doctor Vaughn, bending his penetrating eyes on Kennedy, as if he would force him to betray himself first.

"Yes," reiterated Craig; "you know as well as I do that it has been said that it is a well-established fact that the world wants to be deceived and is willing to pay for the privilege."

"You know what I mean," persisted Kennedy, "the mumbo-jumbo—just as the Haitian obi-man sticks pins in a doll or melts a wax figure of his enemy. That is supposed to be an outward sign. But back of this terrible power that people believe moves in darkness and mystery is something tangible—something real."

Doctor Vaughn looked up sharply at him, I think mistaking Kennedy's meaning. If he did, all doubt that Kennedy attributed anything to the supernatural was removed as he went on, "At first I had no explanation of the curious events I have just witnessed, and the more I thought about them, the more obscure they seemed.

"I have tried to reason the thing out," he continued thoughtfully. "Did autosuggestion, self-hypnotism, explain what I have seen? Has Veda Blair been driven almost to death by her own fears only?"

No one interrupted, and he answered his own question. "Somehow, the idea that it was purely fear that had driven her on did not satisfy me. As I said, I wanted something more tangible. I could not help thinking that it was not merely subjective. There was something objective, some force at work, something more than psychic in the result achieved by this criminal mental marauder, whoever it is."

I was following Kennedy's reasoning closely. As he proceeded, the point that he was making seemed more clear to me.

Persons of a certain type of mind could be really mentally unbalanced by such methods as we had heard outlined, where the mere fact of another trying to exert power over them became known to them. They would, as a matter of fact, unbalance themselves, thinking about and fighting off imaginary terrors.

Such people, I could readily see, might be quickly controlled, and in the wake of such control would follow stifled love, wrecked homes, ruined fortunes, suicide, and even death.

"What did you conclude, then, was the explanation of what you saw last night?" he asked sharply.

Kennedy met his question squarely, without flinching. "It looks to me," he replied quietly, "like a sort of hysteroepilepsy. It is well known, I believe, to demonologists—those who have studied this sort of thing. They have recognized the contortions, the screams, the wild, blasphemous talk, the cataleptic rigidity. They are epileptiform."

Vaughn said nothing but continued to weigh Kennedy as if in a balance. I, who knew him, knew that it would take a greater than Vaughn to find him wanting, once Kennedy chose to speak. As for Vaughn, was he trying to hide behind some technicality in medical ethics?

"Doctor Vaughn," continued Craig, as if goading him to the point of breaking down his calm silence, "you are specialist enough to know these things as well, better than I do. You must know that epilepsy is one of the most peculiar diseases.

"The victim may be in good physical condition, apparently. In fact, some hardly know that they have it. But it is something more than merely the fits. Always there is something wrong mentally. It is not the motor disturbance so much as the disturbance of consciousness."

Kennedy was talking slowly, deliberately, so that none could drop a link in the reasoning.

"Perhaps one in ten epileptics has insane periods, more or less," he went on, "and there is no more dangerous form of insanity. Self-consciousness is lost, and in this state of automatism the worst of crimes have been committed without the subsequent knowledge of the patient. In that state, they are no more responsible than are the actors in one's dreams."

The hospital physician entered, accompanied by Craig's messenger, breathless. Craig almost seized the package from his hands and broke the seal.

"Ah, this is what I wanted!" he exclaimed with an air of relief, forgetting, for the time, the exposition of the case that he was engaged in. "Here I have some anticrotalus venin, of Doctors Flexner and Noguchi. Fortunately, in the city it is within easy reach."

"Of all substances in nature," he remarked, still at work over the unfortunate woman, "none is so little known as the venom of serpents."

It was a startling idea which the sentence had raised in my mind. All at once I recalled the first remark of Seward Blair, in which he had repeated the password that had admitted us into the Red Lodge—"the serpent's tooth." Could it have been that she had really been bitten at some of the orgies by the serpent which they worshiped hideously hissing in its cage? I was sure that, at least until they were compelled, none would say anything about it. Was that the interpretation of the almost hynotized look on Blair's face?

"We know next to nothing of the composition of the protein bodies in the venoms which have such terrific, quick physiological effects," Kennedy was saying. "They have been studied, it is true, but we cannot really say that they are understood—or even that there are any adequate tests by which they can be recognized. The fact is, that snake venoms are about the safest of poisons for the criminal."

KENNEDY had scarcely propounded this startling idea when a car was heard outside. The Rapports had arrived, with the officer I had sent after them, protesting and threatening. They quieted down a bit as they entered and, after a quick glance around, saw who was present.

Professor Rapport gave one glance at the victim lying exhausted on the bed, then drew back melodramatically and cried, "The serpent—the mark of the serpent!"

"Was it a snake-bite?" he asked slowly; then, turning to Mrs. Blair, after a quick glance, he went on rapidly, "The first thing to ascertain is whether the mark consists of two isolated punctures, from the poison-conducting teeth, or fangs, of the snake, which are constructed like a hypodermic needle."

The hospital physician had bent over her at the words, and, before Kennedy could go on, interrupted, "This was not a snake-bite; it was more likely from an all-glass hypodermic syringe with a platinum-indium needle."

Professor Rapport, priest of the devil, advanced a step, menacingly, toward Kennedy.

"Remember," he said in a low, angry tone, "remember—you are pledged to keep the secrets of the Red Lodge!"

Craig brushed aside the sophistry with a sentence. "I do not recognize any secrets that I have to keep about the meeting this afternoon to which you summoned the Blairs and Mrs. Langhorne, according to reports from the shadows I had placed on Mrs. Langhorne and Doctor Vaughn."

If there is such a thing as the evil eye, Rapport's must have been a pair of them, as he realized that Kennedy had resorted to the simple device of shadowing the devotees.

A CRY, almost a shriek, startled us. Kennedy's encounter with Rapport had had an effect which none of us had considered. The step or two in advance which the prophet had taken had brought him into the line of vision of the still half-stupefied Veda lying back of Kennedy on the hospital cot.

The mere sight of him, the sound of his voice, and the mention of the Red Lodge had been sufficient to penetrate that stupor. She was sitting bolt upright, a ghastly, trembling specter. Slowly a smile seemed to creep over the cruel face of the mystic. Was it not a recognition of his hypnotic power?

Kennedy turned and laid a gentle hand on the quaking, convulsed figure of the woman. One could feel the electric tension in the air, the battle of two powers for good or evil. Which would win—the old fascination of the occult or the new power of science?

It was a dramatic moment. Yet not so dramatic as the outcome. To my surprise, neither won.

Suddenly Veda caught sight of her husband. Her face changed. All the prehistoric jealousy of which woman is capable seemed to blaze forth.

"I will defend myself!" she cried. "I will fight back! She shall not win—she shall not have you—no—she shall not—never!"

I recalled the strained feeling between the two women that I had noticed in the cab. Was it Mrs. Langhorne who had been the disturbing influence, whose power she feared, over herself and over her husband?

"Here!" challenged Craig, facing the group and drawing from his pocket the glass ampulla, "I picked this up at the Red Lodge, last night."

He held it out in his hand before the Rapports so that they could not help but see it. Were they merely good actors? They betrayed nothing, at least by face or action.

"It is crotalin," he announced, "the venom of the rattlesnake—crotalus horridus. It has been noticed that persons suffering from certain diseases, of which epilepsy is one, after having been bitten by a rattlesnake, if they recover from the snake-bite, are cured of the disease."

Kennedy was forging straight ahead, now, in his exposure. "Crotalin," he continued, "is one of the new drugs used in the treatment of epilepsy. But it is a powerful, two-edged instrument. Some one who knew the drug, who perhaps had used it, has tried an artificial bite of a rattler on Veda Blair, not for epilepsy but for another, diabolical purpose, thinking to cover up the crime, either as the result of the so-called death-thought of the lodge or as the bite of the real rattler at the lodge."

Kennedy had at last got under Doctor Vaughn's guard. All his reticence was gone.

"I joined the cult," he confessed. "I did it in order to observe and treat one of my patients for epilepsy. I justified myself. I said, 'I will be the exposer, not the accomplice, of this modern Satanism.' I joined it, and—"

"There is no use trying to shield anyone, Vaughn," rapped out Kennedy, scarcely taking time to listen. "An epileptic of the most dangerous criminal type has arranged this whole elaborate setting as a plot to get rid of the wife who brought him his fortune and now stands in the way of his unholy love for Mrs. Langhorne. He used you to get the poison with which you treated him. He used the Rapports with money to play on her mysticism by their so-called death-thought, while he watched his opportunity to inject the fatal crotalin."

Craig faced the criminal, whose eyes now showed more plainly than words his deranged mental condition, and in a low tone, added, "The devil is in you, Seward Blair!"

THE END