by Harold Ward
DEPUTY COMMISSIONER GILROY stood in the doorway, a blunt, snub-nosed gun in either hand.
“Make no outcry, gentlemen,” he snapped. “Remember, these death rays of mine work fast!”
“Death!” Holm gasped.
The other nodded.
“I killed Gilroy and changed bodies with him in order to get at this man who defied me,” he said. “My other, and longer range, apparatus is broken, as you are well aware, but I still have these little pocket guns for close work. They will do what they are intended to do at a dozen paces,” he added nonchalantly.
“Your turn will come next, Jimmy,” he continued. “Meanwhile, Commissioner, this second ray-gun is covering you. I would suggest that you order your men outside to leave at once. You can lean out of the window and issue the command. Otherwise—”
He shrugged his shoulders, leaning against the side of the door while Commissioner Quigley, his face white and blanched, opened the window and shouted the order that sent his men, wondering, back to their quarters.
He turned back to Edgeworth. Like the Secretary of State, whose death they had witnessed only the night before, the young scientist’s body seemed to be shrinking to nothing. His clothes had dropped from his form. He was doll-sized—sprawled upon the pile of garments.
The man in the doorway chuckled sinisterly.
“He has gone the way of all scientists,” he said. “Meanwhile, Jimmy—”
Holm leaped. He felt the heat of the rays of the gun near his arm as he sprang forward, bending low like a football tackle. He shrieked involuntarily as he felt the heat of the death-ray getting closer. Then he was under the other’s guard, grappling with Death for the vicious little ray-pistol in the madman’s hand.
Ricks, bellowing like a bull, charged forward. Behind him came Quigley and David and Blake, with Tony Caminetti only a pace in the rear.
Death saw his peril and leaped backward, the second ray-gun covering them menacingly.
“Back!” he snarled.
For an instant they hesitated. It was long enough. He dodged down the hallway and through the door.
They charged after him, Holm in the lead. But he had disappeared in the darkness.
Next morning the body of Deputy Commissioner Gilroy was found in a distant field where Death had discarded it when he resumed his own form.
Again Death had resorted to metempsychosis in order to carry out his hellish designs.
That night an airplane left the city under cover of the darkness. In it sat a tall, gaunt man, his sunken eyes gleaming with maniacal frenzy. Beside him sat a beautiful girl. From time to time he gazed at her admiringly.
“Together we will rule the world, Charmion,” he said, patting her fresh young hand with his long, bony digits.
“Yes, doctaire, togethair we weel rule the worl’,” she answered gayly. “Yours is the great brain.”
“I am omnipotent—greater even than Anubis, then Hatasu or the others who ruled your ancient Set,” he nodded gravely.
The machine in which they rode was steered by a dead man—an animated corpse whose thoughts were the thoughts of the grim old man in the passenger compartment. The plane was kept on an even keel by a gyroscope, the invention of the same sinister old man.
Seated in the same compartment were other men who stared straight ahead with dead, glassy eyes and who, when they moved, did so jerkily like automatons. They, too, were Zombi—dead men whose veins, filled with a metallic solution, caused them to respond to the thought waves of the man who had restored them to this semblance of life.
On the second night another plane left New York under cover of the night. It was a huge cabin ship. In it were Holm, Ricks, Blake, David and Caminetti. They, too, flew south—almost over the same route that had been taken by their quarry, had they but known it. They were headed for the fortress on the rocky island off the Louisiana shore. A hasty conference had been held. Death had suddenly disappeared. Nor could their best men find a trace of him. Again it was thought advisable, in view of his attack on Edgeworth and his reiteration that he intended wiping all scientists off the map, to attract his attention to the group of heroes on the island.
Somewhere he would have a second range-finding apparatus similar to the one that he had destroyed in his retreat from the old church. With it he would be watching Holm. And Jimmy, for the nonce, would serve as a red herring to keep his attention diverted from the real issue—the great men of science who were in hiding.
Chapter V
Sacrifice to the Devil
ON the same night and almost at the same hour that Jimmy Holm and his associates were leaving New York, another and weirder scene was being enacted on a little island set down in the midst of the fetid swamp which lined the ocean shore only a few score miles from where the little group of pseudo-scientists were undergoing their voluntary imprisonment.
In a gloomy cave a half-naked group of blood-maddened, sex-inflamed blacks danced their dark saturnalia around a sacrificial fire. Voodoo drums rolled out their incessant boom... boom... boom! Conch shell trumpets added their stridulous screeches to the horrible discord. It was the loiloichi, most degraded of all devil dances.
The slit in the rocks in which they performed their rites was more like a tunnel than a cave. It was shaped like the letter “V,” the entrance wide and low, opening onto a level compound around which was a great cluster of bark huts thatched with long, coarse grass from the swamp.
The floor slanted slightly upward, ending in a narrow exit at the rear, backed by low, thick-trunked trees with overhanging branches like the back drop of a theatre. Before this narrow exit was the altar—a huge rock upon which the great fire burned, lighting up the whole of the cave’s vast interior.
In front of the altar the sweating savages shrieked and cavorted, howling a weird, ungodly chant, the leaping flames casting grotesque shadows against the rocky walls of the cavern. They whirled, springing high into the air, their black bodies glistening as they worked themselves into a wild, uncontrollable frenzy.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
The huge drums rumbled in cacophonous babel.
The conch shells replied in rasping, raucous answer.
O-o-o-o! O-o-o-o!
Shriller and shriller grew the shrieks of the dancers as the mysteres—the spirits from above—descended and entered the ebony bodies of the orgiasts. The barriere—the mythical dividing line which separated the so-called spiritual from the physical—was let down, inflaming the blood, maddening the senses. An old woman, frothing at the mouth, howled lustily, announcing that the gods had arrived. For an instant the pandemonium increased. She dropped to the stone floor, her body twitching and jerking, her eyes rolling until only the whites showed.
“Les lois! Les lois! Les lois!” they clamoured in welcome to the gods.
Into the lust-maddened circle a black bull was dragged. His horns were decorated with lighted candles; around his neck were garlands of leaves.
“Mender au pardon!” shrieked the frenzied dancers. They dropped to their knees, arms extended to the lowing animal, then plunged into their wild revelry with fresh abandon.
From before the altar where he had been standing leaped the papaloi—a short, broad-shouldered, bandy-legged monstrosity with huge, malformed head and wild, protruding eyes. In his hand was a great knife. Stooping, he picked up a kid, its four feet tied together. Holding it with his left hand so that all might see, he drew the sharp blade across the quivering throat. The goat bleated pitifully... then was still. A woman caught the blood in a huge wooden bowl.
The bull bellowed and pawed at the smell of the blood. A dozen shouting men held him in place in front of the sacrificial stone. The squat monstrosity shoved the gory bowl in front of the maddened animal’s nose. It bellowed and pawed the more. Lifting the vessel to his lips, the malformed black drank lustily. Whirling, he handed the bowl back to the woman and seized a sharp-pointed sword from the altar. Shrieking like a maniac, he plunged the weapon into the animal�
�s heart.
“Les lois! Les lois! Les lois!”
The maddened dancers howled with joy as the blood spurted like red water from a tiny fountain. The woman caught the crimson flood until the bowl was filled. She carried it to her lips and drank greedily. From behind the great altar a larger, coffin-shaped vessel was dragged. The woman emptied the blood into it. Again and again she filled her bowl and emptied it into the larger vessel until it was overflowing.
Then, handing it to the papaloi, she leaped into the midst of the frenzied throng and took the lead in the pandemonium. There was a wild break for the coffin-shaped receptacle. They dropped to their knees before it, plunging their faces into the gory mess, fighting for places before it. Cavorting like a whirling dervish, the papaloi sprinkled the blood from his bowl over the heads and shoulders of the lust-filled throng.
“Lei lois! Les lois! Les lois!” the dancers shrieked.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! the voodoo drums rolled their deep-throated answer.
THE bull, bellowing feebly, was on its knees in spite of the efforts of the men who surrounded it to hold it erect. Again and again the malformed high priest of the devilish rites filled the coffin-shaped bowl and exorted his followers to drink of the gory fluid.
They were wild, demoniac, fighting, screaming, tearing in an effort to reach the ungodly mess. The blood covered their faces, ran down over their sweating bodies. One by one, worn out, they dropped to the ground writhing, twitching like epileptics.
The conch shells had ceased their weird bellowings as their players rushed to join the maddened throng. Now the boula drum alone kept up its senseless, hypnotic beat...
Zi-boom! Zi-boom! Zi-boom!
Then it, too, suddenly stopped. The drummer looked up at the gaunt, cadaverous figure with the skull-like face who had silently entered the cave from the rear and now stood gazing down upon him.
“Baron Samedi!” he shrieked. “The spirit of the tombs!”
Pandemonium broke loose. From their places on the floor the worshippers leaped, falling over each other in their wild scramble to get away.
Baron Samedi! Baron Samedi!
Death chuckled. This was the effect that he wished to convey. He had long before established his base upon this island. Then he had been able to work unobserved. But now certain shipments of materials were coming soon—great airships filled with mechanical devices and chemicals—hundreds of Zombi from other retreats, trained to certain work.
FOR here, in the midst of this morass, far from the haunts of men, he intended to launch his campaign against the world of science and invention. The blacks—
He shrugged his shoulders. He would use them to experiment on later. Now he must keep them in fear.
The squat papaloi, caught between the gaunt figure on one side and the milling throng on the other, had been the last to leave the cave. For a moment it seemed as if he would stand his ground. Then, with a despairing shriek, he leaped forward, only to halt in his tracks, an agonized look on his face.
He whirled and crept forward on all fours like a dog, impelled by the hypnotic force of the gaunt, sinister old man who faced him.
“I am Baron Samedi!” Death snarled, his face twisted into a sardonic grin. “I am Death.”
The black shuddered as if a cold wind had suddenly swept over his body.
“For the time being I have established my quarters in the hills,” Death went on. “They are taboo. Unless my orders are obeyed, you will certainly die. Tell your people.”
The black shuddered again and crept away.
Chuckling to himself, Doctor Death turned and disappeared into the darkness of the night.
Nebo, the papaloi, was, like all superstitious people, psychic. Thus, as he wandered about the next day, he sensed a feeling of restlessness among his followers that had not been entirely brought about by the appearance of the supposed “spirit of the tombs.”
Though they were presumed to be sleeping off the effects of the horrible orgy of the night, he knew that there was something else—that his people were about to revolt and demand something of him—something that he could not grant. He had a feeling of being spied upon. Yet when he peered furtively through the door of his thatched hut, no one was in view. Even the children were sleeping, for they, like their elders had joined in the debauch.
The compound was quiet all day—ominously so. Once, a baby whimpered. Its cries were stifled by its mother, frantic lest it bring down upon her head the wrath of the horrible god who was still presumed to be lingering somewhere in the vicinity.
Nebo, having a guilty conscience, believed that he sensed the reason for the tension.
There was blood upon his soul. In a moment of jealousy a few days before, he had killed a woman and thrown her body into the swamp. Her name was Classinia and she was a yellow girl—a throwback. She had been the mamaloi of the little group on the island.
Almost inaccessible though the island was in the midst of the morass, Nebo had seen enough of the occasional white men who had found their way there—usually to escape the law—to know right from wrong. And, knowing, his conscience troubled him.
THE coming of midday brought no rest to Nebo. Sitting in front of his thatched hut absorbing the sun, he saw the better part of the little village gathering, edging toward him in small groups. He thought rapidly, wishing for the moral support of some one. Then he sent for Ti-Marie, his wife, scurrying for Hasco his assistant. The latter was bound to back him.
The villagers assembled around his hut, all talking at once. The din was prodigious.
“Papa Nebo,” said the oldest man when he could make himself heard, “Maman Classinia ees still gone. She ees not been seen since ze last Petro.”
“She ees dead! She ees dead! I know she ees dead!” a woman wailed. She was the black girl’s mother.
“We are seek!” said a third, pointing trembling fingers toward his face. It was mottled and spotted and he shook as from the ague.
“We ask for ze charms lest our children die,” the first man shouted. “Many of zem are seek today. Baron Samedi ees striking at us.”
Nebo nodded comprehendingly.
“Maman Classinia ees gone to visit Baron Samedi, ze spirit of ze tombs, to intercede for you,” Nebo told them, thinking rapidly. “I tried to restrain her, but she insisted.”
For a moment there was silence as this speech struck in. Then a wailing went up from the women.
“When will she return?” the old man demanded.
Nebo shrugged his shoulders.
“Who can tell?” he answered.
“We must have a mamaloi,” someone shouted. The cry was taken up until the forest reverberated with it.
Nebo held up a restraining hand.
“I have already arranged,” he told them. “Ti-Marie, my wife, will be your mamaloi. I have taught her many charms. I will teach her more. Meanwhile, I will make ze charms and prepare ouagas against zis seekness that is creeping over us.”
There was a minute’s consultation. Then the old man shook his head.
“Ti-Marie will not do,” he said stubbornly. “She must be white like Maman Classinia. No ozzer will do. On zat we are agree.”
Nebo rocked to and fro on his haunches. His people were growing restive. They were likely to turn on him and dethrone him in their anger. In desperation he turned to Hasco.
Hasco, like all prime ministers, whether of large countries or small, was a crafty plotter.
“I have heard zat on the mainland zere are many white people,” he answered. “Why do you not go zere and steal a maman? One will not be missed from so many. She would soon learn our ways and she could be taught to work wiz us. If she refused, we could whip her,” he added naïvely.
“But I do not know ze white people,” Nebo answered. “If zey are all as bold and cruel as those few we have seen zey may keel me.”
“Zen I will take your place,” Hasco answered frankly. “Already I know many of your charms and secrets.”
Neb
o pondered deeply, his forehead furrowed in frowns. Then, as his assembled people commenced milling again, angry, like children, of being kept waiting, he decided to take Hasco’s advice.
“I will, myself, go to Baron Samedi,” he told them with a judicial nod of the head. “I will tell him zat he must furnish us wiz anozzer white maman until he sees fit to allow Classinia to return. I may be several days—until I can get zat for which I seek. Eez zat satisfactory?”
A roar of joy told him that his bold plan had succeeded.
“An ze hills, zey are taboo,” he went on. “Ze Baron Samedi have so tol’ me.”
They nodded their head in confirmation.
Chapter VI
Clutch of the Swamp
FOR the first time in her life Nina Fererra disobeyed orders. Her instructions from Jimmy had been to remain on the island under guard at all times. But the village of La Foubelle was only a short distance away and she had heard many stories of its quaintness and rural simplicity. Woman-like, she conceived an idea of going to La Foubelle.
Over her the commandant had no jurisdiction. So, when she announced her intention, there was but one thing left for him to do. She was given a launch to take her to the mainland. In a little fishing hamlet near the shore, she could rent a tumbledown Ford for a few dollars to carry her on her way.
Assigning a Secret Service man to act as her escort, the commanding officer, like Pilate, washed his hands of the affair.
The sun was dropping like a great ball of red behind the horizon, casting grotesque shadows toward the east where lay the slimy, green-coated network of swamps and bayous. Over the stagnant water rose a thin vapor as the heat of the day decreased; it formed a curtain which hid from view the feculent horrors of the fetid morass.
In the distance the little cluster of shacks that formed the village of La Foubelle had awakened from its siesta. The shrill laughter of children mingled with the hoarser tones of their elders as the women prepared the evening meal and the men gossiped with each other in the gathering twilight.