Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts
Page 29
‘About eleven o’clock the moon came up; you would have thought that made it better, but it didn’t. It added a new sort of terror—that was all. You know how eerie moonlight can be; it is unnatural somehow, and I believe there’s a lot in what they say about there being evil in the moon. Bright bars of it stood out in rows on the floor, where it streamed in silent and baleful through the slats in the jalousies. I found myself counting them over and over again. It seemed as if I were becoming mesmerised by that cold, uncanny light. I pulled myself up with a jerk.
‘Then I noticed that something was different about the desk in front of me. I couldn’t think what it could be—but there was something missing that had been there a moment before.
‘All at once I realised what it was, and the palms of my hands became clammy with sweat. Umtonga had left his stick behind again—I had picked it up off the floor when I searched the office and leant it against the front of the desk; the top of it had been there before my eyes for the last three hours in the semi-darkness—standing up stiff and straight—and now it had disappeared.
‘It couldn’t have fallen, I should have heard it—my eyes must have been starting out of my head. A ghastly thought had come to me—just supposing that stick was not a stick?
‘And then I saw it—the thing was lying straight and still in the moonlight, with its eight to ten wavy bands, just as I’d seen it a dozen times before; I must have dreamed I propped it against the desk—it must have been on the floor all the time, and yet I knew deep down in me that I was fooling myself and that it had moved of its own accord.
‘My eyes never left it—I watched, holding my breath to see if it moved—but I was straining so that I couldn’t trust my eyesight. The bright bars of moonlight on the floor began to waver ever so slightly, and I knew that my sight was playing me tricks; I shut my eyes for a moment—it was the only thing to do—and when I opened them again the snake had raised its head.
‘My vest was sticking to me, and my face was dripping wet. I knew now what had killed old Benny—I knew, too, why his face had gone black. Umtonga’s stick was no stick at all, but the deadliest snake in all Africa—a thing that can move like lightning, can overtake a galloping horse, and kill its rider, so deadly that you’re stiff within four minutes of its bite—I was up against a black mamba.
‘I had my revolver in my hand, but it seemed a stupid, useless thing—there wasn’t a chance in a hundred that I could hit it. A shot-gun’s the only thing that’s any good; with that I might have blown its head off, but the guns weren’t kept in Benny’s room, and like a fool I’d locked myself in.
‘The brute moved again as I watched it; it drew up its tail with a long slithering movement. There could be no doubt now; Umtonga was a super snake-charmer, and he’d left this foul thing behind to do his evil work.
‘I sat there petrified, just as poor Benny must have done, wondering what in Heaven’s name I could do to save myself, but my brain simply wouldn’t work.
‘It was an accident that saved me. As it rose to strike, I slipped in my attempt to get to my feet and kicked over Benny’s wicker waste-paper basket; the brute went for that instead of me. The force with which they strike is tremendous—it’s like the blow from a hammer or the kick of a mule. Its head went clean through the side of the basket and there it got stuck; it couldn’t get its head out again.
‘As luck would have it, I had been clearing out some of Benny’s drawers that day, and I’d thrown away a whole lot of samples of quartz; the basket was about a third full of them and they weigh pretty heavy; a few had fallen out when it fell over, but the rest were enough to keep the mamba down.
‘It thrashed about like a gigantic whiplash, but it couldn’t free its head, and I didn’t waste a second; I started heaving ledgers on its tail. That was the end of the business as far as the mamba was concerned—I’d got it pinned down in half the time it took you to drive out that bat. Then I took up my gun again. “Now, my beauty,” I thought, “I’ve got you where I want you, and I’ll just quietly blow your head off—I’m going to have a damn fine pair of shoes out of your skin.”
‘I knelt down to the job and levelled my revolver; the snake struck twice, viciously, in my direction, but it couldn’t get within a foot of me and it no more than jerked the basket either time.
‘I looked down the barrel of the pistol within eighteen inches of its head, and then a very strange thing happened—and this is where the Black Magic comes in.
‘The moonlit room seemed to grow dark about me, so that the baleful light faded before my eyes—the snake’s head disappeared from view—the walls seemed to be expanding and the queer, acrid odour of the native filled my nostrils.
‘I knew that I was standing in Umtonga’s hut, and where the snake had been a moment before I saw Umtonga sleeping—or in a trance, if you prefer it. He was lying with his head on the belly of one of his women as is the custom of the country, and I stretched out a hand towards him in greeting. It seemed that, although there was nothing there, I had touched something—and then I realised with an appalling fear that my left hand was holding the waste-paper basket in which was the head of the snake.
‘There was a prickling sensation on my scalp, and I felt my hair lifting—stiff with the electricity that was streaming from my body. With a tremendous effort of will-power I jerked back my hand. Umtonga shuddered in his trance—there was a thud, and I knew that the snake had struck in the place where my hand had been a moment before.
‘I was half-crazy with fear, my teeth began to chatter, and it came to me suddenly that there was an icy wind blowing steadily upon me. I shivered with the deadly cold—although in reality it was a still, hot night. The wind was coming from the nostrils of the sleeping Umtonga full upon me; the bitter coldness of it was numbing me where I stood. I knew that in another moment I should fall forward on the snake.
‘I concentrated every ounce of will-power in my hand that held the gun—I could not see the snake, but my eyes seemed to be focussed upon Umtonga’s forehead. If only my frozen finger could pull the trigger—I made a supreme effort, and then there happened a very curious thing.
‘Umtonga began to talk to me in his sleep—not in words, you understand, but as spirit talks to spirit. He turned and groaned and twisted where he lay. A terrible sweat broke out on his forehead and round his skinny neck. I could see him as clearly as I can see you—he was pleading with me not to kill him, and in that deep, silent night, where space and time had ceased to exist, I knew that Umtonga and the snake were one.
‘If I killed the snake, I killed Umtonga. In some strange fashion he had suborned the powers of evil, so that when at the end of the incantation he fell into a fit, his malignant spirit passed into the body of his dread familiar.
‘I suppose I ought to have killed that snake and Umtonga too, but I didn’t Just as it is said that a drowning man sees his whole life pass before him at the moment of death—so I saw my own. Scene after scene out of my thirteen years of disappointment and failure flashed before me—but I saw more than that.
‘I saw a clean, tidy office in Jo’burg, and I was sitting there in decent clothes. I saw this very house as you see it from the drive—although I’d never seen it in my life before—and I saw other things as well.
‘At that moment I had Umtonga in my power, and he was saying as clearly as could be—“All these things will I give unto you—if only you will spare my life.”
‘Then the features of Umtonga faded. The darkness lightened and I saw again the moonlight streaming through the slats of old Benny’s office—and the mamba’s head!
‘I put my revolver in my pocket, unlocked the door, and locking it again behind me, went up to bed.
‘I slept as though I’d been on a ten-day forced march, I was so exhausted; I woke late, but everything that had happened in the night was clear in my memory—I knew I hadn’t dreamed it. I loaded a shot-gun and went straight to Benny’s office.
‘There was the serpent still be
side the desk—its head thrust through the wicker basket and the heavy ledgers pinning down its body. It seemed to have straightened out, though, into its usual form, and when I knocked it lightly with the barrel of the gun it remained absolutely rigid. I could hardly believe it to be anything more than a, harmless piece of highly polished wood, and yet I knew that it had a hideous, hidden life, and after that I left it very carefully alone.
‘Umtonga turned up a little later, as I felt sure he would; he seemed very bent and old. He didn’t say very much, but he spoke again about his debt, and asked if I would not forgo some part of it—he would pay the whole if he must, but it would ruin him if he did. To sell his wives would be to lose authority with his tribe.
‘I explained that it wasn’t my affair, but Rebecca’s; she owned everything now that Benny was dead.
‘He seemed surprised at that; natives don’t hold with women owning property. He said he’d thought that the business was mine and all I had to do was to feed Rebecca till she died.
‘Then he wanted to know if I would have helped him had that been the case. I told him that extortion wasn’t my idea of business, and with that he seemed satisfied; he picked up his terrible familiar and stumped away without another word.
‘The following week I had to go into Mbabane for stores. I was away a couple of nights and when I got back Rebecca was dead and buried; I heard the story from the house-boys. Umtonga had been to see her on the evening that I left. He’d made his magic again before the stoep, and they’d found her dead and black in the morning. I asked if by any chance he’d left his stick behind him, although I knew the answer before I got it—“Yes, he’d come back for it the following day.”
‘I started in to clear up Benny’s affairs, and board by board to pull the shanty down. Benny didn’t believe in banks and I knew there was a hoard hidden somewhere. It took me three weeks, but I found it. With that, and a reasonable realisation of what was outstanding, I cleared up a cool ten thousand. I’ve turned that into a hundred thousand since, and so you see that it was through the Black Art that I come to be sitting here.’
As Carstairs came to the end of the story, something made me turn and look at Jackson; he was glaring at the elder man, and his dark eyes shone with a fierce light in his sallow face.
‘Your name’s not Carstairs,’ he cried suddenly in a harsh voice. ‘It’s Thompson—and mine is Isaacsohn. I am the child that you robbed and abandoned.’
Before I could grasp the full significance of the thing he was on his feet—I saw the knife flash as it went home in Carstairs’s chest, and the young Jew shrieked, ‘You fiend—you paid that devil to kill my mother.’
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A Note on the Author
DENNIS WHEATLEY Dennis Wheatley (1897–1977) was an English author whose prolific output of stylish thrillers and occult novels made him one of the world’s best-selling writers from the 1930s through the 1960s.
Wheatley was the eldest of three children, and his parents were the owners of Wheatley & Son of Mayfair, a wine business. He admitted to little aptitude for schooling, and was expelled from Dulwich College, London. In 1919 he assumed management of the family wine business but in 1931, after a decline in business due to the depression, he began writing.
His first book, The Forbidden Territory, became a bestseller overnight, and since then his books have sold over 50 million copies worldwide. During the 1960s, his publishers sold one million copies of Wheatley titles per year, and his Gregory Sallust series was one of the main inspirations for Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories.
During the Second World War, Wheatley was a member of the London Controlling Section, which secretly coordinated strategic military deception and cover plans. His literary talents gained him employment with planning staffs for the War Office. He wrote numerous papers for the War Office, including suggestions for dealing with a German invasion of Britain.
Dennis Wheatley died on 11th November 1977. During his life he wrote over 70 books and sold over 50 million copies.
Discover books by Dennis Wheatley published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/DennisWheatley
Duke de Richleau
The Forbidden Territory
The Devil Rides Out
The Golden Spaniard
Three Inquisitive People
Strange Conflict
Codeword Golden Fleece
The Second Seal
The Prisoner in the Mask
Vendetta in Spain
Dangerous Inheritance
Gateway to Hell
Gregory Sallust
Black August
Contraband
The Scarlet Impostor
Faked Passports
The Black Baroness
V for Vengeance
Come into My Parlour
The Island Where Time Stands Still
Traitors’ Gate
They Used Dark Forces
The White Witch of the South Seas
Julian Day
The Quest of Julian Day
The Sword of Fate
Bill for the Use of a Body
Roger Brook
The Launching of Roger Brook
The Shadow of Tyburn Tree
The Rising Storm
The Man Who Killed the King
The Dark Secret of Josephine
The Rape of Venice
The Sultan’s Daughter
The Wanton Princess
Evil in a Mask
The Ravishing of Lady Mary Ware
The Irish Witch
Desperate Measures
Molly Fountain
To the Devil a Daughter
The Satanist
Lost World
They Found Atlantis
Uncharted Seas
The Man Who Missed the War
Espionage
Mayhem in Greece
The Eunuch of Stamboul
The Fabulous Valley
The Strange Story of Linda Lee
Such Power is Dangerous
The Secret War
Science Fiction
Sixty Days to Live
Star of Ill-Omen
Black Magic
The Haunting of Toby Jugg
The KA of Gifford Hillary
Unholy Crusade
Short Stories
Mediterranean Nights
Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts
This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Reader
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First published in 1943 by Hutchinson & Co. Ltd.
Copyright © 1943 Dennis Wheatley
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eISBN: 9781448213849
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