“Dhan ghi, dhan ghi!” The bag was stepping in a constantly accelerated pace about the box, her knees raised level with her waist, her scrawny, splay-boned feet extended straight in a continuation of her spindling shanks. “Dhan ghi, dhan ghi, dhan ghi!”
Now from between her tightly compressed lips there came a whining sing-song chant, a rising, quavering cry like that snake-charmers make before the serpents issue from their baskets. For a moment she paused by the box, then snatched the lid up in her claws, springing back two yards or so to avoid the great snake’s head in case it started out of the case suddenly.
De Grandin’s teeth were fairly chattering, and a flow of weirdly garbled French profanity came sprawling from his lips like sparks that sputter from a dampened fuse.
We waited breathless. A pall of silence fell upon the worshippers. We could hear a sudden hissing sizzle in the fire as a fresh stick fell into the flames.
“A-a-ah!” de Grandin let his breath out slowly. “She comes. Behold her, good Friend Trowbridge!”
No wicked, wedge-shaped, scale-mailed head arose from the voodoo tabernacle. No forked tongue darted menace at the posturing priestess and cowering congregation. Nothing at all came from the box.
Instead, high overhead, seemingly dropping from the zenith where the moon’s pale countenance was masked, there came the whiffing notes of a slow, syncopated, wordless chant, an eery thing that made the listener think of pitch-black midnights and graves from which the dead were torn, and evil deeds done in the darkness of the moon. And with the rasping, scobbing music came the sound of a tom-tom which beat in sharp staccato, its broken measures reaching to the very, marrow of our spines.
The obi woman looked up to the sky from which the eldritch music seemed to drip like venom from a manchineel tree. Nothing met her gaze. Only the insistent, buzzing, susurrating notes swooped downward as from some discarnate unclean spirit perched among the swaying pinetrees’ boughs.
The witch’s hideous old face took on a look of wonder, then of worry, finally of blind, unreasoning panic. But her terror was no more than the prelude to that which followed, for something slowly rose from the long box beyond the dying fire.
A tall, lean thing it was, brown-skinned, ash-smeared, a mop of matted white hair stringing round its skull-like face. Wisps of age-rotted cloth were loosely bound around it, like grave-clothes falling from a putrefying corpse, and where the rags left chocolate-colored body bare great patches of a leprous gray showed in a ghastly contrast.
Faster and faster dripped the ghost-tune from the treetops; louder and more menacing the phantom drum-beats came. The hideous thing leaped from its box, vaulted the fire and stood face to face with the old voodoo witch. The hag drew back her arm as if to strike the specter with her lash; the visitant reached suddenly into the fire, seized a blazing pine branch from the flames and felled the priestess with a single blow.
Before the obi woman could retain her feet the thing turned to the fire, striking it repeatedly with a green branch, flailing out the sinking blaze until it flickered lower, lower—finally died to a dull-glowing heap of coals.
And now a thing too terrible to credit happened. The spirit of the beaten fire seemed transferred to the body of the hideous creature from the box, for its limbs and face began to glow with horrifying, smoky luminance, a glow such as dead things give off in marshes in the darkness of the night.
Higher, shriller, rising to a keening wail that sent horripilations rippling through my skin, the ghostly music lifted, while the tom-tom’s tempo quickened till each plangent beat seemed driving deep into our vertebræ, and like a sulfurous silhouette against the background of the night the fiery thing danced and shuffled back and forth between the sunken-mounded graves, its glowing feet in measure with the skirl of spectral music, its smoldering body seeming hung midway between the earth and sky as it whirled and turned and leaped and bounded where the voodoo witch-fire had been burning. Now, rag by filthy, rotting rag it tore its moldering grave-clothes off, and as each fetid fragment fell upon the earth fresh horrors met our fascinated gaze. Ribs, pelvic bones and sternum seemed made of living fire which shone through the integument of chocolate-colored skin as marsh-fire might shine through the drifting brume of foul miasmal vapors.
A moaning, low but pregnant with unutterable dread, broke from the congregation as they saw their witch-priestess felled by this awful apparition which glowed with smoldering inward fire and summoned ghost-tunes from the moonless midnight sky.
“Men and women of the race,” a voice sang from the specter’s burning throat, “I bring you testimony. Daughter am I to Iblis, Chief of Devils; even of the bori of the jungle am I daughter.
“Voodoo is unclean; voodoo is forbidden those who would not feel the vengeance of the bori. Get ye to your homes, ye foolish ones; to your work go ye, for to labor is to praise the jungle people of your fathers.
“Where is your witch-woman now? Where is her magic? Could she stand before the power of the spirits of the jungle? Could her fire burn one who carries fumes of hell within her body, or can her magic save ye from my wrath?
“Back to your homes, before I call on you the curse of Mai-Aska, who brings scars and rashes. To your cabins, followers of false gods, or on you will I bring the wrath of Kuri-Yandu, who swells the joints with misery. See, ye fools who trust in voodoo, even now I call the stars down from the sky to crush you with their weight. On you I call the curse of Mai-Ja-Chikki, who will blind you for your sins. Behold!”
She reached her fire-gloved hands up toward the moonless sky and a swishing like the roar of flooding water when the rivers overflow their banks came from the pine trees, while curve on lambent curve of fire swept through the darkness as though a storm of meteors had been blown from hell by Satan’s all-destroying breath.
“Morbleu, but it is perfect, it is excellent, it is magnifique!” de Grandin whispered in delight as he raced along the line of rockets, setting fire to them and, as they soared roaring through the air, setting fresh ones in their places.
The rockets reached their apogees and hissed down to the earth, bursting into fiery constellations. It seemed as if the heavens were alive with falling, bursting stars; the wrath of fire and brimstone that burned Sodom and Gomorrah, the promised day of awful fate when earth should be consumed by fire seemed on us as the blazing, shattering missiles crashed down from the zenith.
Screams of terror, frenzied, hopeless pleas for mercy, sounded on all sides. “Oh, Lawd, Ah’s got it! Ah’s gone blind, mah eyes is out!” cried one man, clawing at his dazzled eyes. Another and another took the wail up, and in a moment rustlings in the bushes told where congregation members crawled away for sanctuary, deserting the outlanders who had held them captive in a thrall of superstition.
But now the clatter of shod hoofs came from the highway, and fresh shouts of dismay rose from the frightened fugitives as the sheeted riders of the night closed in upon the voodoo rendezvous. They were a fearsome sight—steeds and riders masked in fluttering white with fiery eyes aglare through peepholes in their draperies, torches blazing in their hands, guns or whips upraised in menace.
The ghostly riders opened ranks to let the fleeing voodoo worshippers scuttle off to safety, but with the voodoo leaders it was different. Within a moment six outlandishly dressed men and the old obi priestess had been corralled and bound with ropes. “I think our bag is full,” de Grandin murmured; “they have them all.”
“Wha—what will you do with them?” I faltered, wild stories of the condign justice meted out by night riders recurring to me.
“Do? Parbleu, what should they do with such ones? Have we not seen them taken as they gloated over the commission of a foul crime? Can we not testify against them from our own knowledge? Mais certainement, my friend. Within the hour they will lie all safe in la bastille. Tomorrow, at the latest, the juge d’instruction hears our evidence. After that—morbleu, one wishes one could be as sure of reaching heaven as one is that they will be convicted by the
county court and suffer condemnation for their crimes! Come, let us go. This evening’s work is finished, I damn think.”
AN HOUR LATER WE gathered in the Sterling parlor. Lamplight shone upon the tall, mint-garlanded tumblers, ice clinked pleasantly. The juleps were delicious.
“No,” Hiji laughed, “I didn’t have a bit of trouble. They were all so bally intent on the doin’s in the cemetery that I shinned up the tree without a single blighter spottin’ me. After that”—he took another long drink—“how do you Yankees say? It was in the bag.”
“Whatever—” I began, but de Grandin hastened to explain before I had a chance to frame my question.
“Mais; c’est tout simplement, mon vieux. One only needs to think things through, and voilà.” He turned as footsteps echoed in the hall and Coralea came in, her face and hands and arms aglow from recent vigorous scrubbing. “Messieurs, permit me to present la grande prêtresse de vomdois, the superwitch.” Coralea blushed rosily beneath her soap-and-water glow.
“The superwitch?” I echoed. “You mean—”
“Précisément. I had been wondering how we might turn the tables on those naughty people from the Caribbean, and when Hiji flung the body of their executed comrade into camp the idea came to me like that—pouf! ‘These so evil fellows have laid hold upon the superstition of the local colored folk by force of fear; they have worked on their imagination, they have convinced them that they, are all-powerful,’ I say to me.
“‘Exactly so, you have it right, my perspicacious self,’ I answer me. ‘Jules de Grandin, you and I must convince them that we have the greater power. We must induce them to go back to their homes and resume their simple, peaceful mode of life.’
“‘You have summed the situation up exactly, Jules de Grandin,’ I tell me, ‘But how are we to do these things?’
“Then I engage myself in deep conference. We have matériel at hand, it only waits our use. Hiji knows the demon music of the Africans, those bad, fierce Leopard Men of the West Coast beside whom these voodooists are but inept amateurs; he can reproduce it, but we must find a way to carry it to them and make them think it comes from superhuman agencies. Also, it is for us to make the magic of these voodoo people seem a weak and ineffective thing. We must put shame on them, as Moses shamed the magic-makers of the Pharaoh. How to do it? Then I recall Mademoiselle Coralea is a danseuse. She is clever, she is talented, she knows these people, and she has said the music of the Leopard Men arouses all her evil instincts. ‘Mademoiselle Coralea,’ I apostrophize her, ‘you shall be our superwitch. You shall dance before the voodoo council of fire. You shall put shame on their mamaloi.’
“So I approach her with my proposition. At first she is afraid, but she is the artiste, the rôle appeals to her dramatic nature, and so at last she gives consent. Thereupon we get our properties together. Hiji makes a tom-tom of an old kettle, and a pipe out of a piece of paper wrapped around a comb. Together in the barn we make the music, very softly, and Mademoiselle Coralea perfects her dance. We make a costume for her out of cheesecloth which we drag around the barnyard till it looks as old as sin’s own self. We smear her with a chocolate paste. We buy up all the matches at the village store and boil them; then with the sulfurous paste we paint a skeleton upon her so that her bones will seem to shine clear through her skin when it is dark.
“Then Hiji and I set forth to find the ‘White Queen.’ We find her lying in her box out in the cemetery, and—it took but two shots to dispatch her. Afterward we clean her box with disinfectant, and into it goes Mademoiselle Coralea. Parbleu, I think it took more courage to lie curled up in that snake’s ex-den than it took to face the voodoo people in the open!
“In a tree above the graveyard we hung a telephone transmitter with an amplifier attached to it. These we connected to a wire and a telephone receiver which were hidden in a near-by tree, and into this our Hiji sang his tune and beat upon his kettle-drum. Tiens, the effect was most realistic, n’est-ce-pas? When the music seemed to come from nowhere, when the voodoo priestess was struck down by the fiery visitant which leaped out of the snake box, when the stars began to fall from heaven as our rockets took their flight—parbleu, it was so good a piece of stagecraft that even I who knew the plot was half afraid, myself!”
Coralea’s pink cheeks were dimpled with a smile, “Doctor de Grandin, I think I owe you something for tonight,” she told him.
“How is that, Mademoiselle?”
“That dance I did tonight; if it was good enough to make those people think I was a demon from the jungle it ought to be successful in the theatre. I’ll get Sir Haddingway to play the Leopard People’s music on a record for me; then as soon as Papa’s estate has been settled I’ll go to New York. That dance should be good for a month’s engagement at the Irving Place Opera House. After that—well, other burlesque actresses have gone to Hollywood. Why shouldn’t l?”
“Why not, indeed, ma plus belle héroïne?” replied de Grandin. “À votre triomphe!”
We clinked our glasses on the toast.
The Poltergeist of Swan Upping
“DEAR TROWBRIDGE,” READ THE letter from Scott Thorowgood:
As you know, I bought the old house at Swan Upping on the Mullica last July and at once set out to renovate it. Restoration was completed in October and we moved in the middle of that month. Almost immediately things began to happen—unpleasant things. Servants swore they met with spectral persecutions in halls and on the stairs, bed-clothes were jerked of at night. Crockery and kitchenware fell from shelves and hooks without apparent reason, and last Wednesday morning a maid was set on as she went upstairs and thrown so violently that she sustained a broken collarbone. Neither my daughters nor I have seen anything nor been troubled in any way, and if it were not for the girl’s injury I should say the whole thing is attributable to some malicious gossip; but her hurts are real enough—as I who pay her hospital bills can testify—and she persists in saying she was the victim of assault and not of accident.
Thus far it’s been more annoying than frightening, but if things keep up this way we shall have to close the house for want of help, as we find it practically impossible to keep servants in the place. Do you think you can persuade Doctor de Grandin, of whose success with occult pests I’ve heard considerable, to come and “fumigate” Swan Upping for us? I shall, of course, be willing to pay whatever fee he asks.
“Well, can I persuade you?” I asked, passing the letter to de Grandin. “I know you’re not much interested in the fee, but—”
“Who says so?” he demanded as he laid the letter down. “Why should I not be?”
“Why, I know you’ve turned down cases time and time again when the fees offered were almost fantastic—”
“Précisément. You have right, my friend. I reserve the right to take such cases as appeal to me, and to decline others. But in such cases as I take the laborer is worthy of his hire, and I think that your friend Thorowgood is one who has respect for money, whether in himself or others. This letter has a tone of command in it. One assumes Monsieur Thorowgood is used to having what he pays for and paying well for what he gets. Bien. I shall serve him well, and he shall pay accordingly. I shall be interested in both the fee and this so snobbish ghost who gives attention only to the servants and leaves the master of the house alone. When do we leave?”
“He says to take the train to Upsam’s Station, then wait for him to pick us up. There’s only one train down a day in wintertime. We’ll have to pack immediately.”
JULES DE GRANDIN THRUST his small pointed chin another inch into the collar of his fur coat, drove his hand into his pockets till his elbows all but disappeared, and eyed me with a stare as icy as the fading winter afternoon. “Me,” he announced bitterly, “I am a fool of the first magnitude!”
“Indeed?” I replied. “I’m glad to hear you confess it. I’ve suspected something of the sort at times, but—”
“I am,” he insisted, “the prize zany of the winter’s crop. Five little
hours ago we were warm and comfortable in Harrisonville. Now, if you please, observe us—marooned here in a trackless wilderness, retreat cut off, progress impossible. Mon Dieu, I perish miserably!”
“Oh, it’s not that bad,” I comforted. “Thorowgood will surely be here in a little while. If he can’t come himself he’ll send somebody—”
“Mais oui, and they will find our stiffening dead corpses on the station platform—”
“Maybe that’s our man, now,” I interrupted as an ancient car of the model which made Detroit famous in the days before the war drew up beside the waiting-platform and an aged Negro wrapped almost to the eyes in a sheep-coat descended and ambled toward the stack of freight piled at the station’s farther end.
“At any rate, it is a sign of rescue,” de Grandin nodded and hurried toward the dusky motorist. “Holà, mon brave,” he greeted. “How much will it cost us to be conveyed to Swan Upping? You know the place, of course.”
“Yassuh, Ah knows hit,” the other answered with a marked lack of enthusiasm.
“Very well, my priceless Jehu. What is your price for transportation thither?”
The colored man spoke with a rich Virginia accent. Obviously, he was not indigenous to southern Jersey. Just as obviously, he was much impressed by the fur coat de Grandin wore. “Cap’n, suh,” he answered as he touched his battered hat, “mah bizness ain’t been good dese las’ two months.”
“Indeed? One grieves to hear it. But we shall pay you royally, reward you with a princeling’s ransom for taking us to Swan Upping. We are thoroughly disgusted with the scenery hereabouts, and would away to bright new scenes. Accordingly—”
The Negro gazed at him with something close akin to rapture. With the uneducated man’s love of large words he was entranced with Jules de Grandin’s eloquence, yet . . . Regretful resolution hardened in his wrinkled face. “Con’ol, suh,” he interrupted, “mah bizness has been pow’ful bad dis season. Folks ain’t haulin’ like dey uster.”
Black Moon Page 14