In a mean neighborhood in New York City dwelt Mary Bosanti, the “Cat
Woman.” The neighbors gave her that name because of her excessive love
for cats. All the cats in that part of town seemed to be attracted
to her house. Every day she went to the corner grocery and bought
six quarts of milk, which she carried back to her room. Twenty or
more cats always tagged at her heels, and when she spoke to them in a
lowered tone they seemed to know what she said. They obeyed her every
command. Then, one morning, a neighbor heard groans issuing from the
“Cat Woman’s” room and called the other tenants of the house. They
broke the door in--and found the “Cat Woman” starving, surrounded by a
great swarm of cats and more than 200 empty milk bottles.
_Here’s a “Creepy” Tale That
Ends In a Shuddering,
Breath-taking Way_
_The_ Return _of_
Paul Slavsky
_By_ Capt. George Warburton Lewis
_Author of_ “Trailing the Jungle Man,” “Wine of the Wilderness,” Etc.
From Petrograd came Paul Slavsky, with what his Nihilist associates
might have styled a clean record and no bungled jobs, but what Larry
Brandon classified as a criminal record _de luxe_.
It was natural that such a record should bring about Slavsky’s early
acquaintance with Inspector Brandon, of the Central Office and it
followed, as day follows dawn, that the Terrorist should become the
object of the shrewdest surveillance the Chief Inspector could design.
Whether Paul Slavsky actually discovered, or merely suspected, that
he was being shadowed, matters little. A notation on an old blotter
shows that he boldly attempted to pave the way for future criminal
enterprises by calling at the Central Office in the role of a
persecuted citizen, who had journeyed here from his native land to
escape the hell which he declared the Russian Secret Police had made
his life.
It took three months of intensive investigation to convince Larry
Brandon that Slavsky was all the Secret Police had painted him and
more, and that the Terrorist had not emigrated to America with even the
remotest intention of reforming. It took the detective three months
more to satisfy himself beyond all doubt that Slavsky had, marvelously
enough, established an active branch of his old order and was
undoubtedly spreading the doctrine of Gorgias and Fichte under the very
noses of the Central Office experts. However, the evidence necessary to
a conviction was lacking, so nothing could be done.
A little later the men of the same nationality as the Nihilist, whom
Brandon had used to great advantage on the case, began, one by one, to
drop quietly out of existence. This was not only mysterious--it was
uncanny. Finally the decomposed bodies of some of these operatives were
found and unmistakably identified.
In each instance _the head had been completely severed from the trunk_.
Recollecting that the Terrorist order, to which Paul Slavsky had
belonged, had signalized its outrages by decapitating its victims,
Brandon was enabled to initiate definite plans which, in due course,
culminated in his running his man to earth.
But Paul Slavsky never beheld the fatal Chair nor served time. He chose
the other route. He had elected to live in rebellion against man’s
orderly institutions, and in this same unreasoning revolt he resolved
to die. Like most of his ilk, the Terrorist in physical combat was a
hard man, and he really fought a great fight, but he fought it with a
master craftsman in the conquering of such as he, and inevitably he
lost, with many of Larry Brandon’s bullets in his great body and only
life enough left in him to greet--and almost at once to take final
leave of--his favorite sister, Olga, who had arrived in Europe a little
late as it transpired, to join her brother in his sinister calling.
Olga Slavsky, years younger than her lamented brother, was as pretty a
little specimen of dark-eyed femininity as ever enchanted fastidious
masculine eye. Yet so is the tigress beautiful.
Still, that is not quite the idea I wish to convey. If you can think of
a woman in repose being as beautiful as a tigress and, in smoldering
hate and loathing as repulsive, as hideous as a preying vampire, then
you will get nearer my meaning. Olga, like her brother, was a staunch
exponent of the Terrorist doctrine.
What Brandon expected soon came to pass. The strange girl, whom
men called beautiful and women envied, was promptly elected to her
brother’s place in what was known in the underworld of unlawful secret
orders as the “League.” In this way she immediately crossed swords with
the man who had ended the career of her brother Paul, and ere long she
became aware, through members of the League detailed as spies, that
still another noted criminologist, Joe Seagraves, was unpleasantly hot
on her trail.
But Olga was undaunted. For daring and ingenuity, she by far eclipsed
her cunning and resourceful brother, who had blazed the path of her
iconoclastic pilgrimage.
Since little could thus far be proved against Olga, Seagraves believed
that it might be better to declare a sort of armistice and, if
possible, gradually win her over to the side of law and order. To
this end, he openly called and laid his ideas before her. She frankly
flouted his implied interest in her well-being, but showed a spirit of
compromise by offering the crime specialist a cigarette.
In such a mood Olga became a docile and purring tiger kitten, only one
never quite forgot her claws. She was highly superstitious, Seagraves
discovered; but then her whole character was so anomalous and so
replete with unexpectedly outcropping traits and wildly illogical
beliefs that it was almost to be expected she would believe in ghosts.
She clung tenaciously to the belief, so Brandon told Seagraves, that
some day Paul would _return_ and end the life of the man who--the
Terrorist had told his sister shortly before his death--had done him to
death.
“Do you still believe, Olga, that Paul is going to come back one day
and carry Brandon away with him into the Unknown?” asked Seagraves.
Olga’s dark eyes grew suddenly darker as she slowly removed a cigarette
from between her too red lips.
“Not only is he coming,” she answered, “but he is coming _soon_. Only
night before last I talk with him. I tell him hurry. You see his spirit
cannot rest until his murder is--ah, my very bad English!--avenge’.”
“You’re a very foolish woman, Olga,” admonished Seagraves. “If you
refuse to listen to my warning you’re going to find yourself in lots of
trouble. I want you to understand that.”
Then the drowsing tigress put out her claws.
“You threaten me!” she fairly hissed, tossing away her cigarette and
rising. “I am a free woman. You are, after all, like my own people. You
would make slaves of all who cannot buy their freedom of--of thought
and action.”
She glanced about queerly before she concluded:
“Don’t interest yourself too far. You may be great, but remember--I am
no longer to be despised. You have waited too long. Should I choose,
for example, I could have shot you where you sit.”
Joe Seagraves leaped out of his chair, an automatic in his experienced
hand and menacing the mysterious woman steadily.
But already the allegorical vampire, which the detective had seen
reflected in Olga’s piercing eyes and heard in her studied but crisp
and stinging words, had spread its skinny wings and flown. Olga was
laughing in such sincere, or well-feigned, mockery at his alarm that
the dignified detective momentarily felt abashed.
He put his weapon away, nevertheless, only after a searching glance
about the very ordinary little room in which the extraordinary woman
had received him. He recalled that the last victim of Olga’s brother,
mutilated, headless and repellent, had been found in this same
neighborhood, if not in this same house.
“Please--_please_ forgive me,” the strange girl was pleading. “You
see, I forgot that you are not like--like Brandon. For him there is no
forgiveness. He must perish. But we--you and I--why must we be enemies?”
“There’s but one reason, Olga,” replied Seagraves seriously, “and that
is a strong one. It is simply the nature of our respective callings.”
“Then I can only be sorry,” she said in a low voice. “Still, my
principles are more--what word?--more sacred than your friendship.”
As the woman paused, Seagraves could have taken an oath that he caught
the sound of whispering voices through a door standing slightly ajar
not three paces from his elbow. Of a sudden, he stepped forward and
flung the door wide with a resounding _bang_.
A gray-walled room, quite empty, was all that rewarded his examination.
He turned and found Olga smiling again.
“Did you surprise them?” she inquired sweetly.
“Surprise whom?” demanded the detective.
“The rats,” she said ingenuously, still smiling.
“I’ve seen but one rat here,” murmured Seagraves in an impersonal tone:
“I see it now. It has wings that fold up like an umbrella. It is called
a vampire.”
Olga smiled on placidly, even after Joe Seagraves had closed the door
on her and was gone.
* * * * *
In the language of the man who knotted the noose, Olga, as her kind are
certain to do, came at last to the end of her rope.
Conspiracy, blackmail and extortion were at last brought home to her;
and it chanced that the same eminent crime expert who had hurried the
career of her brother to an inglorious finish was likewise destined to
be the instrument of fate in the undoing of Olga.
In time the pursuit narrowed down to the end of a most imperfect day
for both quarry and hunters. Then all night, as Brandon and Seagraves
gradually drew their web closer and ever closer about the elusive
Terrorist, she tricked them at every angle and turn with the cunning of
a fox, and it was not until three sleepless days and nights that the
two renowned sleuths effected her capture more than five hundred miles
distant from the field of her long-continued operations.
“She’ll be as slippery as an eel,” Brandon warned Seagraves, when they
were ready to start back with their prisoner. “I’ll never consent to
any Pullman for _her_, even though we ignore the law and handcuff
her to the seat. One of us is going to have to keep his eyes on her
constantly.”
“Only one of us could sleep at a time, anyhow,” said Seagraves; “and
surely we can stand it one more night, don’t you think? Suppose we both
sit it out with her.”
They at length did decide to “sit it out” with their prisoner, and with
that understanding they took her aboard the train.
At the moment of entering the train, a telegram was handed to Brandon,
and as soon as the three were comfortably seated in their section the
inspector read it with lips compressed and eyes oddly squinted. Then he
handed the message to Seagraves, who read:
“Police record Olga Slavsky arrived. Wanted in three countries for
complicity in murder nine counts. Escaped Russian Secret Police three
times. At present fugitive from justice. Keep close watch on her.
Renfrow, Chief Inspector.”
Seagraves returned the telegram to Brandon, winking an eye
disparagingly and smiling at what the Chief Inspector had evidently
considered a necessary precaution.
The afternoon waned. Early evening found the train three-quarters of an
hour behind time. If this kept up they would not arrive before two in
the morning.
Olga sat besides Seagraves facing Brandon.
“I would give much for a cigarette,” she announced out of a long
silence at ten o’clock, addressing herself to Seagraves.
“This isn’t a smoker,” observed the crime specialist, glancing around,
“but there are only two other passengers in the car. Try it.”
He offered her his box, and she took one and lighted it. Filling her
lungs with the comforting smoke, she exhaled it in a great cloud and,
after a meditative pause, murmured:
“At last I am to see poor Paul.”
She looked Seagraves steadily in the eye and added in a queer tone that
she felt her brother was very near tonight.
It was a mixed train, and the day coaches appeared to have much the
better of the sleepers as to occupancy. Seagraves noted casually that,
besides themselves, their car boasted but two other passengers, and
though they might have been snugly asleep in their respective berths,
they had apparently elected to sit out the short run, evidently
preferring reclining to rising and dressing at 1:30 or 2 o’clock A. M.
“Do you see the man sitting all alone in the last seat with the
handkerchief over his face, to keep the light out of his eyes?” Olga’s
ruminant voice finally broke in upon the monotonous _clackety-clack_ of
wheels upon rail-joints.
“Yes--what about him?” asked Seagraves.
“Nothing, only he--he looks like Paul,” she answered in a guarded
voice, as though she feared Brandon, cat-napping now, might overhear
her strange language.
“Olga!” ridiculed the detective, “get a grip on yourself.”
Having thus counseled the prisoner, Seagraves was thoughtful for a long
space; then he looked over at Olga, saw an odd, uneasy expression on
her pretty face and quickly said:
“Here--have another cigarette, Olga. Burn ’em up!”
* * * * *
At midnight the conductor passed through the car.
“We’ll make the city a little before two o’clock,” he said in answer to
a sleepy-voiced interrogation from Brandon, who seemed to have banished
sleep and was blinking about the car.
“What--we all alone?” he asked Seagraves. Then he caught sight of the
two lonely passengers at the far end of the car. “No; two others,” he
murmured, answering his own question.
He was turning his gaze away from the man with the handkerchief over
his face when something, Seagraves noted, drew his eyes inquiringly
back to the sleeper’s hunched figure. The movement caused Seagraves to
follow Brandon’s scrutiny. He marked the fact that the handkerchief
had fallen from their fellow-passenger’s face, and--was it because
of Olga’s suggestion, or was it merely a silly midnight fancy?--he
assuredly seemed to trace a certain vague resemblance between the
solitary sleeper and the notorious Paul Slavsky, long ago dead.
The idea brought with it a queer, though distinct, sense of
unpleasantness. The booming voice of Brandon, breaking in upon his
wholly disagreeable train of thought, was highly reassuring.
“Huh!” laughed the Inspector, “I thought I recognized that chap.”
At a quarter to one, Seagraves shook Brandon out of a doze and said,
“Keep the lady company for a few minutes. I’m going into the smoker.”
“All right, Joe,” drawled Brandon opening his slightly reddened eyes
and seeming to be perfectly wide awake.
Seagraves disappeared into the smoking-room, returning some ten or
fifteen minutes later. To his surprise he noted that Brandon, evidently
not caring to take a chance on Olga’s diving out of the open window,
had handcuffed her fast to the seat and had once more fallen asleep.
Olga herself appeared a trifle more cheerful. She even smiled, though
somewhat wearily, as Seagraves resumed his seat beside her.
“I told you it would be Paul,” the woman whispered to Seagraves, as
though determined to share no part of her secret with the despised
Brandon. “See,” she insisted, growing almost jubilant, “it is my
brother Paul--come back to me at last!”
“For God’s sake, Olga,” cried Seagraves disgustedly, “stop that
foolishness. It gets on my nerves.”
Stillness then for several minutes.
Of a sudden Seagraves felt cold. He turned up his coat collar and,
somehow rather depressed, sat looking across at the muffled figure of
Brandon who, also evidently having felt the night chill, had wound a
great muffler about his neck and pulled his ample Stetson low over his
face. Seagraves reflected that this would be a fitting case with which
to crown a long list of his old friend’s successes. Tomorrow he would
congratulate him.
A long wild shriek from the locomotive startled Seagraves like an
unexpected blow.
“Ha!” he said, “I must be developing nerves after all these years.
Anyhow, we’re getting in.”
Then he raised his eyes and saw that the man, who, he had imagined,
resembled Paul Slavsky, had disappeared. So had the only other
passenger who had occupied a seat near him. It struck Seagraves as
singular.
Another long wail from the locomotive blent dissonantly with the dreary
_clackety-clack, clackety-clack_ of the car-wheels, and at the same
instant the vestibule door was smashed open. Through it came stumbling,
covered with blood, clothing torn to tatters, the identical man who had
resembled Paul Slavsky.
His hands were securely cuffed, and he was being partly shoved and
partly dragged forward along the aisle for all the world as though he
were a wax dummy. His captor was no other than the traveler whom the
detective had seen sitting near the dead Terrorist’s double.
“He fought like a tiger, Mr. Seagraves, but I finally got him. He’s one
of Olga’s bunch--a second brother of hers, in fact. He heard that she
was hard pressed and just landed from Europe to help her escape.”
Joe Seagraves sat like one stupefied. Jim McLean, of the Central
Office, cleverly disguised as an innocent-looking rustic, had captured
a third Slavsky, but how--where?
“It’s all right,” McLean was explaining. “You see, Renfrow got wind of
this fellow’s game, got hold of a picture of him and sent me out to
ride back with you and Brandon and the lady. I fell asleep in earnest,
while pretending to be, and waked up just as my man was slipping out of
the car. I got a good look at his face then and, recognizing him, made
the first move in a scrap that lasted through six coaches and clear up
to the coal-tender.”
“Why was the man slipping out?” demanded Seagraves, perplexedly.
“Ah! that’s it. I missed you from the car and suspected something
wrong. Brandon seemed to be asleep and the woman was laughing. That was
enough. I collared my man.”
Joe Seagraves reached over and gently shook Brandon, who, still
sleeping like a rock, had slumped low down in the angle formed by the
seat and the window.
“Come out of it!” the detective bawled at his companion, “we’re getting
in.”
But Brandon slept on. Seagraves waited a moment, then shook him again,
almost violently.
“Come on, Larry!” he said, himself rising.
But Brandon did not stir, and Seagraves darted a questioning glance at
Olga, still handcuffed fast to the seat. To his amazement and alarm the
woman was smiling, triumphantly, terribly. A vague surmise, which had
come into Seagraves head hours before, was now confirmed.
There was no doubting that leering and awful smile. She had bitten the
blood from her carmine lips. Olga Slavsky had gone stark mad!
In all the years that followed, Joe Seagraves was never able to free
his memory from the haunting horror of the thing he beheld when,
Brandon not reacting to violent shakes, he grew suspicious and lifted
his unresponsive friend’s big hat off his head--or rather off--_a
vacant-eyed and staring dummy head_!
* * * * *
Paul Slavsky had not _returned_ as Olga had predicted he would, but a
last gruesome reminder of his own hideous handiwork was nevertheless
present.
When the first shock of horror had passed, and Seagraves and McLean
again focused their incredulous eyes on Olga Slavsky, they knew that
the woman, though handcuffed, had herself participated in this last
act of terrorism in America. It was incredible, but there, before the
detectives’ eyes, were the facts themselves.
The blood from her bitten lips streaking her Patrician chin, Olga sat
composedly folding and unfolding her daintily-patterned hands, quite
as a vampire folds and unfolds its repellent wings; toying, as might
a child, with the polished handcuffs which supposedly had held her a
prisoner, and--before the amazed eyes of her beholders--_slipping the
locked manacles on and off over her tiny, flexible hands_!