“What’s that?”
“It’s no dance contest he’s holding tonight. And Voodoo and me aren’t ballroom competition for a door prize or a trophy. This dance means something a helluva lot worse than that.”
She got worried in two seconds flat and Voodoo seemed to hang on my pearls of wisdom. She was hugging her knees to keep them from shaking.
Peg Temple wrinkled her nose. “What do you think the dance means?”
I shrugged. “Something sacrificial, I guess. Remember the Count is a big wheel on this square island. He has to keep his magic working. Hell, didn’t you ever read Tarzan or any jungle books at all?”
She swore under her breath. “You gotta keep it up, don’t you? Always jokes. And more jokes. Boy, if I were married to you I’d break you of that habit.”
I showed her all my teeth.
“Why, Miss Temple—if you were married to me—I’d let you.” I had her. I said it so honestly and so quietly she couldn’t take it. She blushed, right down to her toenails.
There was nothing more to say after that. I couldn’t tell them anything good and I couldn’t tell them anything bad. All I knew for sure was that the future didn’t look good. The cards had all been dealt and we weren’t holding anything that the Count couldn’t beat. I think the girls knew it too. They were far too sober, quiet and resigned.
Peg Temple suddenly blurted, “Ed—look!”
I looked. It was so gloomy in the pit I couldn’t see what she meant at first. Then when I saw what her finger was indicating, I jumped and looked for a stick, a rock, anything. I thought a long brown snake had bellied its way down the side of the pit.
But it wasn’t a long brown snake. It was a long brown rope, dropping slowly into the pit until it stopped just inches from the dirt floor. Voodoo got to her feet excitedly and crossed herself. I looked at Peg Temple. She was just as mystified as I was.
I reached for the rope and tugged it like a bell-cord, hanging on with all my weight. It held. The other end of it was anchored somewhere above our heads, outside the pit, on solid ground. I took the cord with both hands and yanked again. It felt as if it could support a ten-ton truck.
Electricity raced through my fingertips. New blood filled my body. I felt my heart race like a car motor. “Our fairy godmother is working overtime,” I said.
Peg Temple jumped around me. She was alive again too.
“First the clothes. Now this. You think that redhead is reforming, Ed?”
I took a tighter hold on the rope. “I don’t know what to think. All I know is This Way Out.” I watched them both. “Can either of you climb this thing by yourselves? If you can’t, I’ll go up first and pull you up from the top.”
Peg Temple and Voodoo looked at each other. Voodoo smiled. She went to the rope and took it from my hands. Her teeth flashed in a friendly smile.
“Child’s play, Mr. Noon, I can manage very well.”
“Good,” I said. “How about you, Peg?”
She grinned. “Just watch me make a monkey of myself.”
“Okay,” I said, the sergeant in me taking over. “But I’ll still go up first, just in case somebody happens along. I’ll do more good up there than down here. We may run into trouble.”
They both nodded and stepped back.
I winked at them, took the strong brown rope in my fingers and swung up. I got a real good grip and climbed. Hand over hand, adjusting my dangling legs to the swing and pitch of the hanging rope.
It wasn’t easy. Fifteen feet of traveling by hands alone never is.
The drums kept throbbing and the moon kept getting bigger and rounder as I drew closer to the rim of the pit.
I didn’t have the foggiest notion what I was climbing into. Neither did Peg Temple or Voodoo.
Nobody was in sight when I reached the rim of the pit. Nothing but the big moon, the trees and the sound of the drums. I called down to the girls to hurry. I waited to see how Voodoo was making out on the rope. The girl had legitimate muscle in her lithe body. She came up the rope smoothly and evenly. While she was making like a monkey, I looked around for a weapon. Anything besides my two hands would be an improvement. There was no telling what the drum-filled night held.
A bird made a racket somewhere in the trees. It was a weird sound. And there was smell too. Jungle smell. The dense undergrowth bordering the tree-lined area had a musk aura of naked bodies and animals. The fresh smell from the ocean was gone. Beyond the moon-washed clearing, it was darker than the inside of a bottle of Vat 69. I waited for Peg Temple to follow Voodoo up the rope. Meantime, I found a broken limb of a eucalyptus tree and tested it for heft. It was solid enough to starch an elephant in his tracks. It would do.
Peg Temple and Voodoo huddled next to me. They were like two wide-eyed kids on a cemetery caper. Scared, titillated and breathing hard. They might have been enjoying themselves, but I didn’t think so. But they both looked great in Bikinis. It would be a nice memory to die with.
“Which way do we go, George?” Peg Temple stage-whispered.
Voodoo suddenly pointed with a graceful ebony arm. “Come,” she said. “That path through the trees. I know it well. The other side of the island—”
She stopped talking and her fingernails pinched my arms. Her eyes had widened with fear. Peg Temple whistled. The reason was coming toward us fast. Off somewhere in the darkness, torches were burning like candles on a birthday cake, a steady procession of lights carried by men heading directly toward us. They were chanting something strange and low and musical, but the words weren’t clear. I made a rapid calculation. We were at least five hundred yards away from the men and the lights. What else I didn’t know. But I kind of figured that Count Calypso’s party was about to begin.
I gripped my club tighter. “Come on. The trees. Let’s get into the trees.”
Peg Temple didn’t need any urging, but I found myself dragging Voodoo. She was nearly paralyzed with fright. But the torchlight parade had made an impression on me, too. It brought back vividly a memory from childhood—that scene in Gunga Din when the thugs had moved down to the temple by just such a light while Cary Grant and Sam Jaffee huddled in the shadows.
We ran, Peg Temple leading the way on flying feet, with me, half-dragging, half-shoving Voodoo. Soon, we were buried in the undergrowth, the green fronds whipping at us as we bore on through. Peg Temple stumbled, righted herself and shoved on, a bramble tearing off part of her makeshift dress en route. She collapsed against the bole of a gnarled tree, breathing hard. She waited for Voodoo and me to reach her.
“Ed—Ed,” she puffed. “This is crazy! We don’t even know where we’re heading.”
She was right. Maybe out of the frying pan into the fire. I looked around. The trees were high, but the chanting of that ghoul’s parade was getting louder and the torches were getting uncomfortably nearer. We had about five seconds to decide on the lesser of two evils.
“We climb, or stay down here and wait for them,” I said, looking at both of them. “Which is it?” I didn’t really have to ask. Voodoo was hoisting her tan magnificence aloft already. All her agility wasn’t on a dance floor. She seized a low-hanging branch, swung like a pendulum and skinned-the-cat right over my head. She extended her hand down to Peg Temple and gave her an assist. I watched the long, lovely Temple legs disappear up the tree.
The chant of the marchers was almost upon us now.
I was starting to clamber up after them when somebody grabbed me from behind. Arms like boa constrictors enveloped me, dragging me back down. One of the girls shouted. I dropped my homemade club.
Hot breath scorched my neck like a steam engine. I grunted with the pressure of the arms and let myself sag. My added weight bore the monkey on my back to the ground. I heard him grunt and I jerked myself free and rolled, coming up to a standing position.
Just in time. He was rushing me and he was bigger than Coffee had been, and five times wider. He didn’t have a machete, but he was awesome. Only the abbreviated whites of
his clothes showed me where he was.
It was no time for the niceties of Marquis of Queens-bury. I was giving away eighty pounds and a lot of other things. I brought my foot up as hard as I could and kicked him right where he lived. His scream of agony drove every other noise out of town. He swayed like the giant he was. I closed in as he fell toward me and locked both my hands together and swung them in a slashing arc.
The blow nearly took his head off. He fell past me and crashed to the ground, pole-axed. I was breathing hard now. And the girls in the tree were yammering fearfully. Because the jig was up. And they had seen something I couldn’t. But I felt it. All the way down to the toes.
Even as the weight descended on the back of my head and the stars overhead blotted out in a brilliant darkness, I knew the jig was up.
My face burrowed into the hard ground. Somebody had laid me out for the count.
EIGHTEEN
The night was a madhouse when I opened my eyes again. A madhouse of lights, sights and the maddening sound of the drums. I fought hard, tried to come back to consciousness, to remember where I was, to piece together everything that happened. But all I could see and remember were voodoo dolls with pins sticking into them, and terrifying notes, and messages of doom. All those crazy things I remembered. Plus the faces of three people. Peg, Temple, Voodoo and the frightening caricature of a face that hung suspended on the crooked body of a crooked man named the Count Calypso.
Thucka-thucka thud. Thucka-thucka thud. Bingo, bango bongo went my sanity. The leathery rhythms filled my ears with cataracts of noise. The world reeled and danced to a bongo beat. And the drums played on.
A million flashing lights filled my eyes. The night was a burning terror leaded with dark, dire things in spite of the lights and the music. Grotesque shadows flickered and dissolved against a fiery background of ten million wooden safety matches burning all at once.
I batted my eyes and came alive slowly, before my mind took the next train out of town. I should have kept them closed. The condition I was in I had no business knowing what was going on all around me.
This was no Bacchanal. Not the one that Voodoo had told me about. This was the devil’s own playground. It was a scene from hell.
You’ve seen pictures of artist’s interpretations of Dante’s Inferno. This was something like that. And I had a ringside seat. Better than that—I was the ring.
My return to consciousness told me two things right away. I was lashed to a pole of some kind on a platform about four feet off the ground. Plus that, I was stark naked. They seemed to like their prisoners that way in this part of the world. Then other things started to fill out.
Peg Temple was lashed to a similar pole in a similar fashion a few feet to my left. I could have reached out and touched her if my hands weren’t tied. I knew then that we were part of the show. The customers were getting their money’s worth. Miss Temple had been stripped of the Bikini and everything that was left of her was an adventure in female flesh. I can’t say what the customers thought of me. I still retain some virginal modesty about flashing my weapons in front of strangers.
The customers contributed more to the scene than we did. And Count Calypso had staged a show for them that must have cost them their tents and donkeys. I tried to see it all together, tried to find the rhyme and reason, but there was none—yet.
The wide, cleared away area that we had fled from in such great haste-was now packed like Madison Square Garden for a Joe Louis fight. The noise, the excitement and the movement were there. The only thing missing was the popcorn and the beer.
The customers were a show in themselves. Men, women, all ages and sizes and shapes, dressed in gay, fantastically colored duds that were all Trinidad, all exotic splendor, all Mardi Gras. If this were the pre-Lenten festival known as the Bacchanal, they had certainly gotten into the spirit of things. The skirts on the dames were every color of the rainbow and the kerchiefs fastened around their black curls were studded with bouncing beads and glittering jewels. Between the skirts and kerchiefs was nothing but bare midriff and swinging, exposed breasts. And the women were dancing. Shouting, yelling, chanting, swinging and reeling, arms flung this way and that, eyes popping with rhythm and frenzy.
And the men standing with their torches held high, gleaming in the moonlight, added to the color and the confusion. The knee-long pants and sleeveless boleros and white shirts and plantation straw hats set them off like so many broken pickets in a long, wooden fence. Donkeys brayed and pawed the ground excitedly in a small corral somewhere behind the dancers and the men. And all the while the bongos and the congas beat out their infuriatingly happy and terrible rhythms. I didn’t see Count Calypso at all. Or Voodoo. Only the big moon overhead, the torches and mad dancers.
Nobody seemed to be paying any attention to us up on the platform yet. But I knew that every eye in the crowd was on us. It had to be. We were set off from the madhouse by the dais of the platform. Just Peg Temple and me. It was like something out of a Tarzan picture all right. For a second, I expected to hear his one-in-a-million yell and see Johnny Weismuller come swinging through the tall trees. I got a hold of myself and tried to move in my bonds.
It was no use. Harsh strands of sisal ran around my body in every advantageous position. I couldn’t have untied myself if my life depended on it. And it did.
The chanting and the dancing were accelerating. Calypso dominated the world, and my head was splitting.
Above the fury of the drums, I heard Peg Temple say:
“They’ll never believe this in New York.” Her voice was weak and low. But the vitamins were still there.
I twisted in my ropes and craned my neck. I got it around just enough to see her face a few feet away. Her blonde hair spilled around the oval of her face as if she’d forgot to comb it that morning. I smiled at her. She smiled back. Weak but brave.
“Forget what you’re thinking,” I said. “Nobody in his right mind would hurt a doll like you.”
She managed to shake her head. “Still jazzing, huh? I gotta admit—and I never thought I’d be telling you this—you’re a right guy, Ed.”
The light from the torches seemed to be burning my body. “Don’t second-guess the Count, Peg. He could have killed us hours ago. He must have something on his mind besides killing us.”
She laughed. With all our troubles, she laughed.
“Sure, sure. After the show, he’s going to fly us back to New York in his private plane.” Her head jerked meaningfully in the opposite direction. I craned some more and looked. She hadn’t been making a joke. Far off to the left of her, about three hundred yards past an opening in the border of trees surrounding the area, I saw something. It looked more like a mirage than an airplane, considering where we were. But it was a plane; I made out wings and the silver gleam of a fuselage way off in the darkness. A monoplane with a bullet nose. Looking high powered and ready to go. I started to think about runways and escape.
The dancers below us were working up to a feverish, flashing finale and the mob was agitated and ready. The tempo of the drums mounted to a crescendo. The donkeys brayed.
I whistled. “So that’s how we got to Trinidad so fast. The Count is one organized hombre.”
Peg Temple shivered in her bonds. The curved parts of her body moved enticingly. “Don’t, Ed. Don’t talk about him any more. He gives me the creeps. God, what a ghoul!”
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll both forget it. And let’s wait and see how this picture turns out. We still have to see the cartoon. This is only the trailer anyway.”
Some trailer. It would have cost a cool fifty thousand dollars to stage, and I’ve never seen so many extras. And they all had business, too. They danced and sang and created characterizations.
My tongue felt dry. My head was a quarry where a little man with tools was dynamiting. My whole carcass was used, abused and mis-used. I’ve never been in worse shape in my life. Peg Temple’s shape was great, of course, but I didn’t need a doctor to tell m
e she was one decimal point away from a complete breakdown.
The carnival had to end soon, or we’d both be a pair of jibbering idiots. We couldn’t take five minutes more of it.
We didn’t have to.
The drums stopped, the dancers halted. Every voice in the mob stilled. And the mob moved, surged back and split apart. Everyone backed off in two shifting sections, with hats off and heads lowered. In complete, submissive genuflection. And a gigantic hush fell over the crowd scene. A hush louder than the drums and the music had been.
This was Trinidad. But for that flying instant, it was China and Japan and Russia and every imperialist country since Adam put on the figleaf. This was Trinidad. And this was the stamping ground of the Count Calypso. The Count Calypso. Maker of black magic, maker of murder.
The crowd stopped, heads still bowed to the ground. The land between the two halves of people was now wide enough to drive through.
Count Calypso crawled down the lane in all his bent majesty. His arm was extended, his gnarled fingers clasped tightly to the hand of Voodoo, who walked by his side. Every inch a queen.
A naked Queen.
The King was naked too.
Back to nature—Calypso style. Count Calypso certainly didn’t indulge in half measures. He was all showman. And there is no showman better than the one who shows something to the customers.
And he knew how to be impressive. He took all of five minutes to lead Voodoo across three hundred yards of clearing to where he halted just before the platform where Peg Temple and I were on exhibit.
Then he raised his naked arm imperiously and bellowed something in a loud, mighty voice. Something like Hallelujuh or Awake and Sing. Whatever it was, then, and only then, the bowed heads raised and a thousand eyes gleamed in adulation.
Me—I couldn’t take my glims off either of them. They were both something you see only once in a lifetime. A naked old maniac and a naked, ebony woman whose figure was the artistic ideal of all time.
Count Calypso was old, spidery, ancient in the manner of withered, decaying trees. The lines of age on his small, impossible body were great humps and ridges of ugliness. The crooks and bows of his dwarfed physique were now almost brilliant and bold and magnificent in the light from his followers’ torches. He wore nothing. Unless you count an amulet of some kind on a dirty string that dangled from his scrawny neck to his ribbed, bony chest. He was ugly from his gnarled feet to his shining black dome.
The Voodoo Murders Page 10