Witch-House and Other Stories by Seabury Quinn

Book Details

Witch-House and Other Stories – three stories from the casebook of Dr. Jules de Grandin, Occult Detective. A mummy determined to come back to life, a woman haunting her widower’s new wife from beyond the grave, and a witches’ familiar exacting revenge three hundred years after the witch was drowned; these are three of the occult cases of Jules de Grandin.

The Dead-Alive Mummy (1935) An amazing and startling story about an ancient Egyptian mummy and a beautiful American girl—a tale of Jules de Grandin

Rival From the Grave (1936) A tale of creeping horror that rises to a climax of sheer terror— a story of Jules de Grandin

Witch-House (1936) A vivid, fascinating and gripping tale of the blight that fell upon a lovely and beautiful American girl—a tale of Jules de Grandin, ghost-breaker, occultist, and master of the supernatural

Seabury Grandin Quinn (1889–1969) was most famous for his stories of the occult detective Jules de Grandin. He wrote over 90 de Grandin stories from 1925 to 1951, published almost entirely in Weird Tales.

Witch-House and Other Stories contains 6 illustrations.

Files:

1. WitchHouse.epub

Excerpt: The Dead-Alive Mummy

SHE came walking slowly toward us past the rows of mummy-cases. Not tall, but very slim she was, sheathed in a low-cut evening gown of midnight velvet which set her creamy shoulders off in sharp relief. Her hair, blue-black and glossy, was stretched without a ripple to a knot behind her neck, and contrasted oddly with her eyes of peacock blue. There was contrast, too, between the small and slightly kestrel nose and the full and sensuous mouth which blossomed moist and brilliant-red against the unrouged pallor of her narrow face. One slender-fingered hand was toying with a rope of pearls, and as she stepped there was a glint of golden links beneath the gossamer silk encasing her left ankle. Clouded, but unconcealed, the jewel-red lacquer on her toenails shone through filmy stocking-tips exposed by toeless satin sandals.

“Mon Dieu, but she is vital as a flame!” de Grandin whispered. “Who is she, Friend Trowbridge?”

“Dolores Mendoza,” I answered, “the sister of the man who gave this collection of Egyptiana to the Harkness Museum. Old Aaron Mendoza, her father, was fanatical about ancient Egypt, and was said to have the third finest collection in the world, ranking next after the British Museum and the Musee des Antiques at Cairo.”

The little Frenchman nodded. “So we are here,” he murmured.

We were, as he had said, there for that very reason.

Aaron Mendoza, son and grandson of our city’s foremost merchants, had retired from commercial life at the relatively early age of sixty, turning active management of the Mendoza Department Store over to his son Carlos and devoting himself to Egyptology with an energy amounting to a passion. Honest in all his mercantile transactions with the rigid honesty of a Portuguese-Jewish family which traced its history unbroken past the days of the Crusades, he had not scrupled to resort to any practise which would further his ambition to acquire the finest private Egyptological collection in the world. Men noted for their learning, daring and “resourcefulness” had named what fees they wanted for their services to him, and one by one they brought to him the spoils of Egypt’s sands and pyramids and hidden rock-tombs—bits of art-craft wrought in gold and silver, lapis-lazuli and celadon, things whose valuations sounded like the figures of a nation’s load of debt, papyri setting forth in picture-writing secrets never dreamt by modern man, desiccated bodies of kings and priests and priestesses whose intrigues shaped the destiny of nations in the days when history was an infant in its swaddling bands.

One morning they found Aaron sitting on his bed, a vacuous grin disfiguring his handsome face, both feet thrust into one trouser-leg. He babbled like a baby when they spoke to him, and smiled at me with child-like glee when I tried to ask him how he felt. His strong, fine brain had softened to a mass of cheesy waste while he was sleeping, and within a week the helplessness of paresis had settled on him. In six months he was dead.

Scarcely had the period of formal mourning ended when Carlos Mendoza announced the gift of all his father’s ancient treasures to the Harkness Museum. With antiques went a sum to build a wing for housing them and a fund for their maintenance. This evening the new wing was opened with due ceremony, and the city’s notables were gathered for the rites of dedication. Somehow— possibly because I had brought him and his sister into the world and steered them through the mumps and chickenpox and other childish ills— Carlos had included me and de Grandin in the list of guests invited, and we had traversed miles of marbled corridors, viewing the exhibits with that awe which modern man displays before the relics of the older days. Tired of the flower-scent and chatter and repeated “ohs” and “ahs” of those assembled in the main hall, we had retired to the Gallery of Mummies for a moment’s respite, and stood beside the bronze-barred window at its farther end as Dolores entered.

“Would you like to meet her?” I asked as the Frenchman’s interested gaze stayed fixed upon the girl.

“Corbleu, does the heliotrope desire to face the sun?” he answered. “Yes, my friend, present me, if you will, and I shall call you blessed.

“Enchante, Mademoiselle,” he assured her as he raised her fingers to his lips. “You are like a breath of life among these relics of mortality; a star which is reflected in the black tides of the Styx.”

The girl looked round her with a little shudder of repulsion.

“I hate these ancient things,” she told us. “Carlos wasn’t sure he wanted to part with them after Father spent so many years collecting them, but I urged him to present them to the museum. I hope I never have to look at them again. The jewels are ghastly—cold and dead as the people who once wore them, and the mummies—” She paused and looked distastefully at the upright mummy which faced us through the screen of dust-proof glass.

“Mummy and Coffin of Sit-ankh-hku, Priestess of Isis, from Hierakonpolis. Period XIXth Dynasty (circa. 1,200 B.C.)” she read aloud from the neatly lettered card. “Can you fancy living in the house with things like that? She might have been a girl about my age, judging by the portrait on the coffin top. Every time I looked at her it was as though I looked at my own body lying in that coffin.”

Excerpt From: Seabury Quinn. “Witch-House and Other Stories.”