by Harold Ward
But the swamp was quiet—ominously so. It was the silence that comes with the death of day, unbroken save for the mysterious sucking noises of the quicksand and the occasional, almost indistinguishable, splash of the alligators as they slid into the tepid water.
It was already dark under the trees at the edge of the great quagmire. The tangled mass of vines, creepers, and leaves, with their drapery of Spanish moss, admitted not a hint of the light left by the dying day. The bank of the swamp was fringed with vegetation, coarse, dank and unwholesome-looking.
At the point where the morass was closest to the narrow trail—eating into the dry land like a festering ulcer—great branches, festooned with moss, overhung the pathway on either side, forming a long, narrow tunnel filled with solid blackness.
In one of these tunnels of gloom lurked the hulking figure of a black man. It was Nebo, his eyes bulging from their sockets with fright like those of a gigantic frog as he visioned the many wonders of civilization going on about him. His malformed, ebony body was unclothed save for a loin cloth made of pleated grasses that hung, dripping with slime of the swamp, about the middle.
He leaned forward, peering through the tangle of vegetation down the narrow trail, his eyes gleaming balefully as he noted the two figures that were approaching.
One of them was a girl. Never in his life had Nebo seen such a woman. She was white—much whiter than Classinia had been—white with the creamy whiteness of milk that has been left standing. And, too, she was tall and willowy, with long dark hair tied up in a long braid about her magnificently formed head. Here was a woman, Nebo decided, who would make an impression on his followers. When he returned with her, they would forget Classinia.
Beside the woman walked a white man.
All through the long afternoon Nebo had lurked in the shadows watching, waiting, fearful of showing himself closer to the cluster of houses which marked the village. He had been tempted to turn and rush back into the swamps. The thought of the vengeance of his people had stayed him, however.
Nina Fererra sensed the presence of danger, for she shuddered as she neared the darkened spot. She hesitated, gazing fearfully from side to side.
“Ugh! The swamp! It gives me the horrors,” she said half turning to her escort. “We should have started home earlier.”
“That’s right,” he agreed. “But how were we to know that the infernal car would break down, leaving us to walk? We’ll be up against it if we can’t rent one here in the village.”
They were almost even with the skulking figure now. He leaned forward, his stubby fingers twisting and untwisting around the gnarled club he carried as if yearning to wrap themselves about the smooth, white throat of the girl.
Suddenly he leaped forward, tearing aside the fringe of vegetation, his weapon upraised. Nina screamed. His left hand grasped her by the shoulder, the fingers sinking into the soft, white flesh until they almost met. She shrieked again. The white man leaped to her assistance. Nebo struck at him with the club. The blow was a glancing one. It drove him back, but he plunged forward again, his shouts mingling with the screams of the frightened woman. He drew his revolver. Nebo knocked it from his hand.
For a moment the sounds in the village were silenced. Then came an answering shout. The clamor of excited voices. Paying no more attention to the blows of the Secret Service man than if they had been the stings of a mosquito, the squat man’s fingers shifted suddenly and encircled the firm white throat. There was a momentary pressure. The girl was limp when he pulled her to him, his great arm holding her against his own black body.
The Secret Service man was fighting like a demon. Nebo’s club rose. It crashed against the unprotected head of the other with a sickening force. His legs buckled. He sank to his knees. The club descended again. He pitched forward on his face, arms outstretched. He pulled himself half erect, twisted, then sank back and was quiet.
FROM the direction of the village came the chatter of excited voices and the patter of running feet. The squat negro glared through the gathering darkness at the approaching rescuers as if minded to stand and give battle. Then, with a peculiar twist of his broad shoulders, he picked up the unconscious girl from where he had dropped her beside a tree and plunged into the swamp.
The Secret Service man dragged himself to his feet and staggered a dozen paces after them.
“Miss Nina!” he cried.
His voice was dry and husky and rasping. The blood was streaming from a score of wounds. He stopped and would have fallen had he not seized a tree for support. Then he slowly slid to the ground again, just as the first of the rescue party plunged through the gathering darkness, Constable Le Grand in the lead.
“Miss Nina!” the dying man wheezed again as they rolled him over, plying him with questions. “A black... devil...”
His body stiffened... twisted... then went suddenly limp.
Someone struck a match, the better to gaze upon the contorted features of the man.
“He ees dead!” Pierre Le Grand said in an awed whisper, crossing himself.
“Listen!” one of the others exclaimed.
From the swamp, where silence had reigned, came the sound of someone floundering about. Turning, they plunged through the rank growth to the very edge of the morass. Far out in the darkness they saw a shape, indistinct at first, wavering and blurred. Then, as their eyes became more accustomed to the gathering darkness, they saw the malformed black, the unconscious girl across his shoulders.
“Stop!” Le Grand shouted. “Stop, or I shoot!”
His pistol was out. Yet in the indistinct light, he dared not fire for fear of hitting the girl. At the sound of his voice; the big black whirled. The great club flew through the air, missing the constable’s head by inches. Le Grand leaped nimbly aside, his face white with horror as the others dogged back.
“Mon Dieu!” he ejaculated. “As he said, he is ze devil!”
He dropped to his knees and crept forward again, his gun cocked and ready.
“Eet ees better zat I shoot, even zo I keel ze girl, zan to let heem keep her,” he whispered back over his shoulder.
He reached the edge of the morass. The monster had disappeared.
For a moment there was an awed silence. Then, from far out in the swamp came a shriek of laughter, deep, guttural, devilish.
“Ho! ho! ho!” it came to them. “Ho! ho! ho!”
And from a dozen directions came the answering echo: “Ho! ho! ho!”
Chapter VII
Journey of Horror
JIMMY HOLM plodded through muck ankle deep and inwardly cursed the luck that had brought him into the swamp. He was sick. His body ached in every joint. His face was swollen from the bites of mosquitoes and other insects. His teeth chattered from the malaria that he had gathered into his body, while the fever racked him from head to foot. Yet, the indomitable courage that had carried him to the head of the Secret Twelve kept his eyes doggedly ahead.
In the beginning Ricks had been with him. Alarmed at the prolonged absence of Nina Fererra, reported to them immediately upon arrival, Holm had hastily commandeered one of the fleet little army planes and, the grizzled Inspector in the observer’s seat, taken flight immediately to La Foubelle.
It was Constable Pierre Le Grand who had broken the news to them—Le Grand, who, knowing nothing of the presence of the pseudo scientists and their followers on the rocky island off the coast, had been unable to understand Nina’s and the operative’s presence. There had been no identifying papers upon the Secret Service operative; the woman had been kidnaped.
The two had apparently dropped from the skies, only to disappear again, the one into the swamp across the shoulders of a squat black devil, the other to find a place on the slab in the dingy “funeral home” of the local undertaker.
The day had been a series of disasters with Jimmy Holm. There was the absence of Nina Fererra from the fortress. Then, flying close to the ground in search of a landing place near La Foubelle, he had, for the first
time in his flying career, lost control of the plane. He had crashed into a tree. From it both he and the Inspector had emerged bruised, but unhurt; the plane a wreck.
“Into ze swamp I weel not go,” Le Grand said excitedly, when he had told them his story. “Zere ees an island far within which ees the dwelling place of a great body of blacks—how many I do not know, Zey are ze descendants of runaway slaves brought here before ze war.”
He rolled his eyes wildly and fervently crossed himself.
“Zey are devil worshipers,” he went on, lowering his voice almost to a whisper. “Zey practice black magic—sorcery. Even ze negroes hereabouts will not enter ze swamp. Zese people, zey say, are members of ze culte des mortes—followers of ze dead. Eet is one of zem who steal zis girl. She ees as good as dead, m’sieus.”
There was no time to be lost. Jimmy insisted upon striking into the swamp immediately, arguing that Ricks should return to the fortress for help. But the Inspector had doggedly refused.
“You young ass, I think as much of that girl as you do!” he had growled.
And in the end they had compromised by sending Constable Le Grand back to the shore with a message addressed to Blake, instructing him to send planes and additional help as speedily as possible and to pick up guides if they could be secured.
“Zat weel be hard—verr’ hard,” Le Grand told them. “Zese men hereabouts, as I have said, zey are fearful of w’at zey might find in ze swamp.”
Le Grand had furnished them a bateau. Then, as they were about to push off, he halted them with a gesture.
“Ze feet, zey are not equip’ for ze swamp,” he exclaimed. “Nor do you know how long you will be in zere. Wait.”
Turning, he ran back up the path to his little shack. In a moment he returned, several pairs of rubber boots under his arm; upon his back was a knapsack, while a battered canteen swung from his shoulders.
“Try ze boots,” he commanded. “And in ze knapsack ze good wife have put ze corn pone. Ze fishermen come here sometime and leave ze boots in my care.”
He accompanied them to the swamp’s edge again and instructed them as best he could, watching them don the rubber boots. In the collection Holm found a pair that fitted him. None, however, was large enough for Ricks’ huge feet.
“I’ll go barefooted, if necessary,” he growled.
Le Grand pointed toward the southeast.
“Sometime’ in clear weather, zere is what looks like a low mountain range over in zat direction,” he said. “It may, perhaps, be only ze mirage. I have always been of ze idea zat it eez ze island. Yet I do not know.”
He crossed himself fervently.
“I have a wife,” he explained apologetically. “Zis girl, perhaps, as you say, ees an angel—a saint. Yet, m’sieus, I would not follow you for all ze wor’l!”
Waving his hand in a sad farewell, he had stood on the bank and watched the detectives until their boat was lost in the tangle of trees and rush grass that came up almost to the shore.
They had pushed the flat bottomed scow as far as it would go, always steering in the direction of the low mountain range that Le Grand had indicated. Finally, the water had given way to a muddy, oozy, dense, poisonous jungle, carpeted with a decaying vegetation into which their feet sank deeply and from which arose a vaporous stench.
Then had come the culminating tragedy. As he leaped out to pull the bateau onto the sodden shore, Ricks suddenly sprang back with an exclamation, a look of pain upon his rugged face.
“A snake!” he said, pointing down at the vicious little moccasin that had darted away through the dirty water.
It took Jimmy Holm but an instant to drop to his knee and roll up his friend’s trouser leg. An angry red spot the size of a dime showed where the vicious fangs had penetrated. Jerking his knife from his pocket, he slit the flesh, and, pressing his lips to the wound, sucked the poison out as best he could.
“We must get back,” he said, a look of despair on his face. “To a doctor.”
“And leave that girl in this swamp alone with those niggers?” Ricks snarled. “Not by a damned sight, Jimmy. You can go in and I’ll get out alone—I’m not crazy enough to discount the possible effects of this bite. Then, when it is cauterized, I’ll come back in. Meanwhile—”
Jimmy Holm whirled on Ricks.
“You’re not fit to go alone!” he snapped. “It may mean your death.”
Then it was that Ricks showed the stuff that was in him—the courage that had carried him from humble patrolman to the command of the homicide bureau of the world’s greatest organization against crime. With the virulent poison pumping through his veins, his head spinning like a gyroscope and barely able to walk, he had staggered to the bateau and gotten aboard as if to follow his companion’s instructions.
Holm started to follow. Seizing an oar, Ricks put his last remaining ounce of strength into the effort, giving the boat a push that sent it a dozen feet from the shore.
Stooping with an effort, fighting himself to keep from falling, he had retrieved Holm’s knapsack and canteen from the thwart and hurled them onto the bank.
“Damn it, man! Forget me and keep going after that girl!” he snarled. “It’s up to you, boy, to carry on until I can get back with help or until old Le Grand gets through to Blake.”
Jimmy Holm picked up the knapsack and adjusted it to his shoulders.
“God bless you, old timer!” he called huskily.
But Ricks was already past hearing. He had slumped into the bottom of the boat and was allowing the current to carry him along. The poison had taken effect.
IT had been an eternity since that tragic moment. Darkness had fallen and daylight had come again and Holm was still floundering through the infernal mud and ooze. Now darkness had come again.
During the past few minutes he had been hearing strange sounds. Again and again he stopped, wondering if the mysterious noises were real or merely the delusions of his fevered and aching brain. He strove to analyze them—fading, dying—dimming into a confusion of groans and babblings and lamentations. Sometimes it was a sob—a weird, low animal whimpering of pain, dwindling down into a ghost of a voice, rising, falling—the crying of a woman in mortal agony.
The thought of Death brought him to his senses. He gritted his teeth and plunged on. He must live to rescue Nina and carry on his fight against Death. Occasionally the ground was slightly elevated, affording him fairly good footing; for the most part it was all alike—oozy, spongy—a morass.
He was hopelessly lost. The vegetation was too thick and tropical to allow him a glimpse outside; it kept him from orienting himself with the low mountain range that Le Grand had mentioned.
The last two hours had been a little more than a nightmare. The mosquitoes assailed him on every side. The wood was too soggy to start a fire. He could only keep going, hoping against hope that, sooner or later, he would come to a spot high enough to afford dry fuel for a smudge.
Yet, had the opportunity offered itself, he would not turn back.
At the same time, babbling deliriously, Inspector John Ricks floated with the current. He lay in the bottom of the bateau, not knowing where he was, the snake venom surging through his veins. Occasionally the boat drifted up against some shore, lodged in among the willows... floated out again. Mosquitoes and flies hovered over the swollen face...
By the side of the little road that led from La Foubelle to the seashore lay the body of Constable Pierre Le Grand. His sightless eyes stared up at the sky. His arms were outstretched, his legs drawn up grotesquely. Between his eyes was a round, black hole where a second slug had been fired at close range. The letter to Blake was still in his pocket.
A poacher whom he had once arrested and convicted had shot him from ambush.
Again Jimmy Holm heard the weird wailing. It was closer now. Once more he stopped and listened. Then he plunged forward, only to come to a sudden stop, his swollen face blanched with horror, his flashlight hovering over a figure at his feet.
&nb
sp; In the mud close to the bank lay a girl. She was almost naked, her yellow skin covered with vermin, her body bloated to almost double its size from the bites of insects. Her head had been cut open with a machete; yet she had lived to crawl out of the swamp into which she had been thrown. The trail she had made in the mud of the bank proved that.
She had evidently been dying thus for days. Her lips were puffed and cracked. Her tongue protruded from her mouth.
Yet a speck of life still lingered in her body. She gazed up into the flashlight with eyes that were filled with horror.
Holm pressed his canteen to her lips, giving up the last of his precious water. She tried to swallow. The effort was too great; the fluid trickled down over her chin.
She gave a convulsive shudder and he knew that she was dead.
Yet her presence told him that he was close to the end of his journey. He laid her back where he had found her and used his flash cautiously again. Although he had used the light sparingly, the battery was almost exhausted. The dying beam showed him a break in the foliage atop a tiny rise in the ground a little distance away. On it were the marks of bare feet leading in the opposite direction.
Then the flashlight burned out.
Shifting his gun to where he could more easily bring it into play, he plunged forward again.
He knew now with what manner of men he had to deal and was prepared.
The dead girl was Classinia, murdered by Nebo, papaloi of the blacks. And Nebo, frightened by his followers, had gone to the mainland to steal a white woman to act as maman to take the place of the woman he had killed. It was fate that caused him to pick, out of all the world of women, the one who could swerve Jimmy Holm from the path that he had cut out for himself—the pursuit of Doctor Death.
Chapter VIII
Lust for Pain
AGAIN the huge drums took up their tireless refrain Boom... Boom... Boom... Boom!