The Greatest Horror Books - Henry Kuttner Edition. Henry Kuttner

      CHAPTER I.

       CHEVALIER FUTAINE

       Table of Contents

      The party was dull. I had come too early. There was a preview that night at Grauman’s Chinese, and few of the important guests would arrive until it was over. Jack Hardy, ace director at Summit Pictures, where I worked as assistant director, hadn’t arrived—yet—and he was the host. But Hardy had never been noted for punctuality.

      I went out on the porch and leaned against a coctail and looking down at the lights of Hollywood. Hardy’s place was on the summit of a hill overlooking the film capital, near Falcon Lair, Valentino’s famous turreted castle. I shivered a little. Fog was sweeping in from Santa Monica, blotting out the lights to the west.

      Jean Hubbard, who was an ingenue at Summit, came up beside me and took the glass out of my hand.

      “Hello, Mart,” she said, sipping the liquor. “Where’ve you been?”

      “Down with the Murder Desert troupe, on location in the Mojave,” I said. “Miss me, honey?” I drew her close.

      She smiled up at me, her tilted eyebrows lending a touch of diablerie to the tanned, lovely face. I was going to marry Jean, but I wasn’t sure just when.

      “Missed you lots,” she said, and held up her lips. I responded.

      After a moment I said, “What’s this about the vampire man?”

      She chuckled. “Oh, the Chevalier Futaine. Didn’t you read Lolly Parsons’, write-up in Script'? Jack Hardy picked him up last month in Europe. Silly rot. Bill it’s good publicity.”

      “Three cheers for publicity,” I said. “Look what it did for Birth of a Nation. But where does the vampire angle come in?”

      “Mystery man. Nobody can take a picture of him, scarcely anybody can meet him. Weird tales are told about his former life in Paris. Going to play in Jack , Red Thirst. The kind of build-up Universal gave Karloff for Frankenstein. Our Chevalier Futaine”—she rolled out the words with amused relish—“is probably a singing waiter from a Paris cafe. I haven’t seen him—but the deuce with him, anyway. Mart, I want you to do something for me. For Deming.”

      “Hess Deming?” I raised my eyebrows in astonishment. Hess Deming, Summit’s biggest box-office star, whose wife, Sandra Colter, had died two day before. She, too, had been an actress, although never the great star her husband was. Hess loved her, I knew—and now I guessed what the trouble was. I said, “I noticed he was a bit wobbly.”

      “He’ll kill himself,” Jean said, looking worried. “I—I feel responsible for him somehow, Mart. After all, he gave me my start at Summit. And he’s due for the DTs any time now.”

      “Well, I’ll do what I can,” I told her. “But that isn’t a great deal. After all, getting tight is probably the best thing he could do. I know if I lost you, Jean—”

      I stopped. I didn’t like to think of it.

      Jean nodded. “Sec what you can do for him, anyway. Losing Sandra that way was—pretty terrible.”

      “What way?” I asked. “I’ve been away, remember. I read something aboul it, but—”

      “She just died,” Jean said. “Pernicious anemia, they said. But Hess told me the doctor really didn’t know what it was. She just seemed to grow weaker and weaker until—she passed away.”

      I nodded, gave Jean a hasty kiss, and went back into the house. I had just seen Hess Deming walk past, a glass in his hand. He turned as I tapped his shoulder.

      “Oh, Mart,” he said, his voice just a bit fuzzy. He could hold his liquor, but I could tell by his bloodshot eyes that he was almost at the end of his rope. He was a handsome devil, all right, well-built, strong-featured, with level gray eyes and a broad mouth that was usually smiling. It wasn’t smiling now. It was slack, and his face was bedewed with perspiration.

      “You know about Sandra?” he asked.

      “Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry, Hess.”

      He drank deeply from the glass, wiped his mouth with a grimace of distaste. “I'm drunk, Mart,” he confided. “I had to get drunk. It was awful—those last few days. I’ve got to burn her up.”

      I didn’t say anything.

      “Burn her up. Oh, my God, Mart—that beautiful body of hers, crumbling to • In i -and I’ve got to watch it! She made me promise I’d watch to make sure they burned her.”

      I said, “Cremation’s a clean ending, Hess. And Sandra was a clean girl, and a damned good actress.”

      He

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