“Are you frightfully, frightfully, frightened?” asked the evening’s host. “Oh, frightfully so,” the girl shrieked. Around the table, laid in glittering silver, seven places were set, each one without yet a plate. There were only seven egg cups, whose inlaid covers the diners were just removing. Inside each, the head of a kitten bobbed in its own blood. Mr. Maltraven stood at the head of the table and clapped his calfskin hands. “Then our soiree is off to a splendid beginning.” A country gentleman, he wore tweed. He was extremely tall, and spoke from a great height. His gray hair and hound’s long face were up away from the gleam of the chandelier’s light on the white tablecloth. The taut linen below him was marked with a spray of sharp crimson dots. Miss Stokes, in her horror, had spilt her kitten head. She sat at his left hand, wearing a gauzy, Grecian sort of gown. Her auburn hair was pinned up in a soft pile, with a few wisps lightly trailing her white neck and the lobes of her ears. M. Tranche, beside her, remarked to himself that she had gotten considerably prettier since the last time he had seen her, an ill-behaved, ill-favored little girl screeching about in Cannes. But that had been years ago. How old was she now? He was glad to feel as dashing as ever. The lacquer stroke of hair atop his round head was still jet black; he still had the face of a china doll. He was short and rotund, with small soft fingers, but had never felt this a disadvantage. Beside him was the stranger, Madame Strasky, the mystic. It had been quite a coup on Maltraven’s part, inducing her to attend in person. She was a tall woman, with black hair, mannish hands and lips like raw meat. As befitting someone who spent her days in a veiled chamber, probing the ether for thoughts of human violence, she was dreadfully pale. Across from her, young Mr Hakes, the idiot, stared slack jawed into the rapier slash of white skin behind the diving collar line of her black silk oriental robe. There was about him a certain sense of being stitched together wrong, of being off balance, of a sick distraction in his eyes that signaled, no matter how well his mother made him up, that he was dispossessed of certain sensitivities. She, Lady Hakes, was of a sturdy, bulldog build and had long ago taken to crusting over her lost delicacy with coral reefs of jewelry. It was Maltraven’s turn to look horrified. “No, no, Doctor Colonel, you weren’t meant to eat it!” Doctor Colonel Sir Agravaine Bloom was quite thoroughly drunk – red faced and rimey-eyed. It very well might be, after all, the last evening of his mortal life. He put back the head, leaving vermilion droplets of kitten blood on the fringe of his white walrus moustache. Miss Stokes recoiled. “You must understand, my dear niece,” remarked the host, having recovered his cool. “The good Colonel Doctor Bloom has been everywhere, and eaten everything. Monkey brains in the court of Peking, I’m sure. This little flourish of mine is nothing to him.” The doomed man nodded. “But it was his last venture, I fear, that was his most exotic, his most sinister. It is the reason I have gathered all of you here. The explorer himself could tell the tale better, I am sure, but tonight, you will understand, other things weigh heavily on his mind. So you will have to hear it from me.” The was a patter of applause. Not for nothing was Peregrin Maltraven a well known author of mysteries and chilling tales. He began:
Egypt, the ancient, surely all of you know. Civilization was birthed in the Nile, and grew there, its germ feeding like a seed in fallen fruit, on the rotting corpses of the Pharaohs. You are all familiar with the Afric deserts, the sweltering sands, the tawny stone flanks of the Sphinx entombed in drifting dunes. But south of that, up against the currents of the mighty river, where jungle infests the land, there lie regions of which you might know less. Milk drunk by great Ramses, by the ancient architects of Giza, by the scholars of Alexandria, by the lighthouse-keepers of Pharos, the Nile yet flows from a savage teat, the bosom of darkest Africa. It was there that our intrepid dinner-guest last ventured, tracing up that great river, as old as time. The strangeness, he has told me, is not that the place seems wild and undiscovered, but that he felt there that he was following the track of many men who had all been that way before him, who had all looked, and all seen, and yet all been forgotten. For naturally, one must assume that among the intelligent old Egyptians there were men who pondered the source of the Nile, and again the Greek, the Roman, the Arab, and the Turk. It weighed on him, he says, that sense that for every step he took, his foot fell in the print of a dead man’s. He did not know then, as he walked, but discovered later, what I tell you now. Long ago, when the Sphinx was but a kitten, a certain procession had passed that way before. Who knows if it was the first, but surely, it was very, very old. It was a funeral, of sorts. A sarcophagus was carried by manslaves. Blinded, they were lead by a train of priestesses whose tongues had been cut out so that they could not speak but only wail in mourning. But in this casket was no mummy of a Pharaoh, only a jewel, the heart of an unnamed and evil god. Every record of their former worship of him has been obliterated. He was destroyed utterly by a new pantheon, old to us, of Horus and Osirus and Ra, and the highest of the priests of Egypt determined that he must be taken away and hidden. For though he would never die, he must be forgotten. And so it was, that he was taken up the Nile, and the way made taboo behind him. Into the jungle the dark procession trekked, to a secret tributary that enters where even that river seems young. And there they built for the unnamed and defeated god his own underworld. A city of the dead it was, for they who walked took a journey past the bounds of life, like the poison draught drunk by the slaves and concubines buried with their Pharaohs. But these walked over the edge alive, the dumb priestesses and the blind pallbearers. Unknown to the world for ages, they and their descendants lived on in the nameless city. The women, they say, were the Watchers, and the men the Keepers, for with every generation, the eyes of the male infants were put out, and tongues of the girl babies cut. And so they kept their secret. Kept, I say, as an action, for they did not merely hide. They could not, if the secret was to remain. Through the millennia, the mystery of the Nile beckoned many. Of the many, but few survived the crocodiles, the fevers, the thousand lurking deaths that await man in those two unforgiving mediums, desert and jungle. But still, there must have been those who made it through, who reached the fork in the river and saw the Nameless City in all its sarcophageal splendor. And yet no word of this, not a whisper reached ears in living civilization. Of the last of these lost explorers, I know, but only from what the good Doctor Colonel has told me. This man, the one before him, came to the place a little over a century ago, in 1811. And how do we know this? Because this man, one Hassan, was of the ancient Mameluke warrior caste. These men, once soldier slaves, had centuries before driven both the Crusader and the Tartar out of Palestine. For a time, they had set themselves up as the Sultans of Egypt. But since, they had fallen into apathy and corruption. In the spring of that year, 1811, Hassan and all the rest were violently betrayed by the Ottoman governor of Cairo, ambushed while on parade in the narrow streets. Six hundred of them were ensnared there; the dusty alleyways of that city were turned into a slaughterhouse and the Ottoman soldiers hacked the Mamelukes to pieces. A roiling mass of limbs and steel and blood it must have been, and only Hassan was able to cut his way through the horrid press and escape from Cairo. Murderously pursued, he spurred his horse to the very brink of a great precipice, and leapt, never to be heard of in Egypt again. Not until last month was his final resting place found, by accident, as our intrepid Colonel Doctor Bloom explored the headwaters of the Nile. It seems Hassan fled up that ancient artery, up nearly to Mr Conrad’s heart of darkness. Seeking to be forgotten, he too found the tributary taken by the mourners of the nameless god, and he came upon their sepulchural city. I have said the traditions of this ancient deity were tinged with evil. Our friend the Doctor Colonel tells me he was aware there, always, of sullen and oppressive presence, a frowning of the rain-choked sky. But also, he saw evidence of the doings of this Hassan. The Mameluke, he says, brought with him into this place his own vices and had brewed in this tropic cauldron the old and smoldering cruelty of a primeval god with the decadent corruption of Eastern pashas. The leavings of this long dead Turk littered the place. It seemed he had established some new order, or disorder, among the Watchers and the Keepers. Glowering jackal-headed statues were cast down and piled with skins and rushes to make divans and thrones. The men lounged about the place. Their empty sockets stared, but so also they would have stared with eyes of flesh, consumed as they were with opium. The women with their tongue-less mouths who for millennia had lived in painful mourning and vigilance, now writhed sybaritic on the ruined stones and did not weep, but moan. Even the stolid Colonel Doctor admits, he was for a time lulled into the debauchery of the place. But though diminished, he did not entirely stop investigating the place. He spent a hour or so every day puzzling over the hieroglyphics he found, and pieced together the ancient story of the place. He occasionally slapped a couple of the opium eating men to their senses and learned about Hassan. He deciphered the hand-language of the women and learned a little more. But every day, he says, his desire to move and to discover became a little less. It was fear that drove him out of the place. They had told him that Hassan, that many others, coming, had simply never left, had died happy. He believed it with Hassan. They were so lethargic, the inhabitants of the place, in the ways the Mameluke had left them, that the dire warnings he found among the ancient hieroglyphs seemed absurd. But one night, in a torchlight jungle tryst, he stumbled upon a withered corpse. The corpse wore a silk robe and a Mameluke turban. It lay on its face and from its back protruded the ebony handle of a dagger. Somewhere nearby, one of the tongue-less women gurgled for him, and he dropped to the ground in fear, beside the corpse. Beset by curiosity, he prodded the turbaned head. It tore off the shoulders with a sound like dead leaves. It was not one of the men of the nameless city, for both of its dead and wilted eyes looked back at him. It was Hassan. From the rent flesh of the neck there came a horrid smell, of pitch and vinegar and alcohol and the burning of India rubber. The blade, he realized, had been poisoned, not simply with kerari, but with some extremely potent embalming fluid. Thus had the corpse of the Mameluke lain for decades, noxious and unpalatable to the jungle scavengers, even to the worms.
“Later, perhaps,” finished Mr. Maltraven, “Doctor Colonel Sir Agravaine Bloom may tell you the harrowing tale of his evasion in the jungle of the dagger wielding Watcher-women. But just now, in truth, he has not yet fully made good his escape. You see, among the hieroglyphs he found the name of the nameless god, and beside it, a mortal curse upon any who speak it beyond the bounds of the nameless city. He has not yet spoken it to anyone, but tonight, he will speak it to us.” The old explorer tipped his large and world-weary head at this, smiling a little in his watery, drunken eyes. “You know, perhaps,” continued the author of popular mysteries, “That though I have written many tales involving the occult, I do not myself believe in such rubbish. Nevertheless, Sir Bloom’s situation intrigues me. I feel that if ever there were dark and deadly magics in this world, it was back then, in the prehistoric times supposedly ruled by this nameless god. Now that our friend has made his way back here, safe, we hope, to England, I wish to perform a little experiment. He will reveal the name, and if this deity of ancient nightmare does not strike him down, then, well, so much for legend. “You will note that I have given superstition every benefit of the doubt. I have brought us all here, to my country house, some fifty miles from the outskirts of London. I haven’t a telephone here. And I have instructed all of your chauffeurs to take your automobiles back to the city. It is of course, raining outside.” Here, thunder broke, simultaneous with a flare of lighting that lit the windows of the hall with blue electric heat. “There are some who say that the powers of the old religions drink from human fear. I hope these preparations have filled the cup. It is in this interest, in particular, that I have brought my niece, Miss Stokes along.” The girl sat wide-eyed. “The rest of you I cannot count on for the normal human allotment of fear, as you are all brave souls. I am counting on you for something else – cool-headed observation. I could, of course, have gone the simple route and gotten a Marple or a Poirot, but I felt this occasion need more than an amateur, more than an inquisitive spinster or an aging Belgian dandy. You all, I know from the research for my serials, have tread both sides of the law. “M. Tranche, in addition to your work with the Gendarmerie in your native Toulon, you broke the case of the Bournemouth Drowner, with insight and deduction that flabbergasted Scotland Yard. Sixteen of seventeen water-related deaths of elderly female pensioners were tied squarely to Mr Archibald Kane, though with the last, there is still a certain… feeling… in some circles, that it was the work of a copy-cat killer who… remains at large.” “Never worry, ma petite,” smiled M. Tranche to Miss Stokes. “Mr Kane’s motive was actually euthanasia, and we’re quite a long way from the sea-shore.” “Lady Hakes, your second son here, so well endowed in mathematics and strength of arm, yet so tragically deficient socially, was entirely responsible for unmasking the perpetrators of the Exchange Fraud Murders, a ring of ruthless speculators who murdered your husband in Threadneedle Street. In particular, he replicated and then predicted the calculations of the deaf and dumb hat check girl the cabal was using to mathematically inform their moves. “Strangely, your son’s subsequent romance with said savant hat-check girl ended tragically only a few months later. Officially, it is said a horse kicked her into that well. But others think perhaps that a certain simple young man did not know his own strength, or that his mother knew it all too well.” “The avaricious little trollops,” growled Lady Hakes. “The ring wasn’t using her – she was using them. Muddle-headed police inspectors, to fall for her golden little curls and simpleton curtsies, and let her go with a nothing of a trial.” “And of course,” said Maltraven, “The mysterious Madame Strasky. I am so pleased you could make it here from Vienna, and also so very thankful that you were able to look beyond that little misunderstanding I had with your acolyte at the Bavarian Spiritualiztifest last year. Really, it was not you personally that my pamphlet was attacking, but those of your imitators who are so patently bogus as to throw discredit on the whole of your Movement. I am sure, that if the young man had let me in to speak with you face to face, we two could have come to understand each other more gracefully.” Madame Strasky bowed and raised her face with perfect, silent serenity. “You too, of course, have solved your crimes, sorting out with perfect clarity the true events of a night in 1271 when a noble family of Mantua was murdered, not by the Ghibellines, but by their own mad cook. I particularly admire that you also located the six and a half century old murder weapon to provide material proof of your more mystic assertions. “I am less impressed perhaps, by your failure to whisk that other young acolyte of yours away to a spiritual plane and out of the barrel in which he was submerged beneath Lake Geneva before he asphyxiated. But of course, you have always maintained that it was his own lack of faith that obstructed your efforts, nothing to do with a physically impossible stunt dreamed up for him three days after he was discovered sleeping with a Portuguese girl who had seen Christ in a haystack, had very pretty eyes, and was thirty years your junior.” Madame Strasky hummed imperturbed. “So you see, you all have a very special affinity for murder, in all its aspects. I need your detective insight to probe out the intricacies of this evening we are about to have. I need also your dark side, your callousness to human life. We can’t have any of you blanching at blood. If this is to be taken as a serious experiment we must provide for the possibility that either outcome may occur. So, while my hypothesis is that our man shall tell his tale and we shall all go home tomorrow, there always remains the possibility that he might, before your eyes, die in some horrific manner. And you must all stay cool and alert if it happens. “So what of it old chap? Ready to tell?” Bloom sloshed his glass of brandy to the table. Caramel swirls of kitten blood from his moustache reeled downward through the amber liquor. “Shant. Nest of murderers. Don’t associate with their kind.” The table fell to silence. Peregrine Maltraven, seated now, drummed soft fingertips on the tablecloth, his eyes flicking back and forth between the windows on either side of the long dining room. “Hail.” he said. “You can tell it from the rain when it hits the glass. A scratchier sound.” Silence. “I realize,” said M. Tranche, “You … suspect … that I drowned someone’s grand-mere simply because I was overcome with curiosity about Archibald Kane’s particular methods, but really mon vieux, beheading kittens is quite extreme.” “Ambience,” smiled Maltraven. “As I say, I am trying to create a conducive atmosphere.” “Is there some specific link to the Nile?” asked Lady Hakes. “Oh, cats, I suppose. The Egyptians were quite taken by them.” “Revered them.” said Tranche. “I think they never performed such a ritual as this. This is from your own macabre imagination, no? I have always enjoyed your stories.” The author of mysteries and chilling tales tilted his head slightly and opened his hands. “Alas, you have me. Where indeed does the fictive thrill diverge from the evil inspiration? When does musing become intent?” “Philosophy can be a warm coat on a night like this,” said Tranche, rather coldly. Maltraven snapped his long fingers and his butler appeared. “Jennings,” barked the master, “Clear out these trifles at once and serve the real dinner. My guests are famished.” The footmen filed in, collected the kitten-head cups and filed out. “You do keep an orderly house,” said Lady Hakes. “What wonderfully quiet help. I had no idea they were even here.” “Jennings is excellent,” said Maltraven. “Very severe.” “Uncle Peregrine likes everything just so,” giggled Miss Stokes. “I know I never misbehave.” “Silence is essential to my work,” he explained. “I’m no dime-novel hack, you know. I believe as Poe did. Every word I use must agree with the story’s tone, not only in meaning, but in sound. I can’t have a racket while I’m writing.” Just then, from the door to the kitchen, came a crash and a very ugly oath. “Jennings! What the devil is going on in there?” The butler reappeared, on