Murder On the Way!

by Theodore Roscoe

  “Say, you’re not going alone to your room.”

  “Of course I am. I’ve been to a funeral, a murder and an inquest, and I want a chance to let down my hair and smudge beauty cream under my eyes and cry a little, and that’s something no artist model does in front of her employer. I rather imagine those brutes downstairs will be snoring like cherubs the rest of the night, and Hallowe’en is over. Cart, do get some rest. You’re losing weight.” She smiled and patted my cheek. “Like a good boy.”

  I took her to her rooms; made a survey to see that the blinds were locked, the door would bolt on the inside and there weren’t any skeletons in the closet. After all, I was in the next room; and I planned to leave my door ajar and mount guard in the crack. Probably no soldier in the Allied Armies missed as many of the enemy as I did, but my mind was made up this time. Man or boy, the first individual who came up those stairs unannounced was going to get shot where it mattered.

  “Don’t think I’ll go to sleep,” I complained sternly. (And then, to my undying shame, I slept like a Congressman.)

  I left my door open five inches, pulled up a horsehair chair and sat with a view down into the hall. I could hear Lieutenant Narcisse poking about, saying something about the scuttled telephone. A mysterious grinding, as if he were working the call-handle in a final attempt to wake up central. I’d glimpsed the phone on the wall at the foot of the stairs, one of those rural affairs with a wooden box under the mouthpiece and a little crank on the side. Apparently the local phone service had been put on the spot with the same neat dispatch which had finished Dr. Sevestre.

  Lieutenant Narcisse abandoned his tinkering; went through a door somewhere. The sentry on the landing leaned on his rifle and yawned. Pete was right about the cherubic guest-list; the snoring from the rooms under the gallery sounded like a Pullman car made up at Buffalo. The house took on the drear complexion of any place late at night with the lights left on. Humid. A smell like wet shingles. A bannister creaking. Rain guttering and draining, guttering and draining. And faint through the walls that constant tumpy-bum-bum, as if from drums at the bottom of a flooded mine.

  My eyelashes were sticks. I uncorked the Scotch; tried to locate the soft spot in the chair; wished the drunmiing would stop and the woodwork in the big square room behind me would quit sneaking around. With the shutters closed the room was dopy, airless. Now and then a warped timber would crack, and the sound would lift me out of the chair by my hair.

  I patched my unraveling nerves with another tug on the bottle; and then got to thinking about Uncle Eli’s last rites. Easy to understand how an old man could get Voodoo-minded living in a boneyard like Morne Noir. One could even believe the house had driven him to suicide; though why he had surrounded himself with such a batch of abnormals, invited them to his entombment and remembered them in his will, I couldn’t fancy. Had one of those heirs-apparent murdered the old man, then taken his doctor for a ride? I didn’t put it past any of those seven.

  Sir Duffin Wilburforce with his master’s degree in homicide from Dartmoor. There wasn’t a grain of truth in those triangular little eyes; and he stood to inherit the estate. Ti Pedro with an equally sinister record, not quite as dumb as his maimed mouth made him appear. The tattooed En-sign? A navy deserter with a Jack-the-Ripper chuckle; and the others, somehow, were afraid of the merry-eyed seaman. Toadstool and his one-armed mother looked capable of anything from torch murders to cannibalism. As for Ambrose, I had made up my mind the minute I saw him never to let him get behind my back; while the pickled Manfred with his Prussian uniform and marred cheek was an exiled Bluebeard too sanguine, even, for the Nazi stomach.

  I tried to get my mind off those rogue-gallery faces, and every time I did I saw the funeral procession on that bald hill, the Voodoo priest with the diadem of daisies on his brow waltzing up to hang a dead goat in the tree. Mules were dragging a stone angel up the slope, and black gravediggers hammered an iron stake into spaded earth. The room creaked, and another stitch came out of my nerves.

  I sampled the Haig and Haig [whiskey]. My spine wanted rubbing. It was 4:28 by my wrist dial. The gendarme on the landing yawned. I yawned. That wouldn’t do. Better take a turn around the room. If I had something to read — There was a solitary book on the table by the bed. I took it back to the door-crack, sat down, knuckled a sandy eye. The book was old,vellum-bound, and left a brownish dust on my fingers. I blinked at the French title.

  Histoire de Culte Vodu, par Hugo Catraville.

  “History of the Cult Voodoo by Hugo Catraville.” Published 1848. Just the title one would expect in such a house. In the mysterious way books have, the volume opened by itself in my hand. Bookworms had stenciled little crescents on the page, but I could dimly fumble through the French, and it wasn’t my idea of a bedtime story.

  “Although, as we have noted, the religion of Haiti is nominally Catholic, Voodoo is practised by the majority of natives, and Africa still casts its shadow across the Caribbean. Macandals, ouanga charms, talismans are common among the Haitian Negro; drums sound nightly in the hills. Contrary to popular belief, Voodoo is an established religion with a highly organized theology and priesthood. Priests are known as papaloi, priestesses as mamaloi; there is also a higher priest called the houngan.

  “The Voodoo religion, in a manner somewhat slimilar to Christianity, is divided into two distinct branches or creeds, Service Petro and Service Legba, which in no circumstance must be confused with the Culte des Morts, that dreadful Society of the Dead which claims to sorcerous power over corpses and is feared by Voodoo and Christian worshippers alike. The extraordinary machinations of this sinister cult have frightened not only natives of Haiti, but men of science who have studied the island’s history. The sorcerors, known as bocors, hold secret meetings in the jungle, feast on human hearts, cast magic spells, and, it is claimed, have been known to raise the dead from their graves and enslave them in their power. These living corpses, called zombies, pass year after year in hopeless slavery, victims of their inhuman masters, lost souls robbed of either life or death.

  “White men who have seen zombies tell with terror of their sluggish, obedient movements, their mute mouths, their glazed, sad eyes. Haitians live in constant fear of the Culte des Morts. So it is we see in Haiti graves by the roadside, on the hill, in the open where no sorcerer may dig for the body. So it is we see relatives of the dead on guard for twenty-four hours in the cemetery. It is also believed that the beating of rada drums, the suspension of a dead goat in a near-by tree or the driving of a stake through the body in the grave (a custom not unlike that employed by the peasants of Rumania, Russia and Transylvania to ward off werewolves) serves to frustrate the evil Death Cult.

  “But the question of zombies is not to be taken lightly. No less an authority than General Galrileaun, who campaigned on the island at the time of Napoleon, tells of a soldier who died of scourge, was buried with honors, only to be seen months later wandering darkly in the woods, his face — ”

  But that was in 1848.

  Or was it?

  I didn’t know. I was asleep. I was asleep and dreaming. I was painting a picture of Pete on that hill under the withered tree. No matter how wildly I brushed, I could only paint a filthy red smear on the canvas, and Pete was calling to me, telling me to hurry. I wanted to cry out and warn her about a horrid gray shape that was rising like steam from the earth behind her, but it seemed I couldn’t tell her until the painting was finished, and the oils were smearing red. All the time the gray figure was getting closer, a monstrous seven-headed thing wearing a stovepipe hat and its arms outstretched like a cross. It had seven faces, yet I knew it was Uncle Eli and I was getting smaller and smaller and farther and farther away, and the gray arms had closed around Pete and she was screaming and screaming. “Cart, Cart, Cart — ”

  Whoo! I bolted upright in the chair, icicles starting from my pores, those screams freezing cold in my ears.

  “Cart! Help! In here — ”

  Good God! Tha
t wasn’t a dream. Those were real screams and the voice was Pete’s and it seemed to come from Uncle Eli’s room.

  There wasn’t any time to wonder where the gendarme on the landing had gone to. In my confusion I left my pistol in the chair and dashed out with the book; then had to make a flying leap back for the pistol. Pete’s voice had stopped when I got to the door at gallery’s end, and I hit the knob with a yell. The door flew open and I pitched headlong into a scene I will remember until the day I’m dust! To this hour the smell of a room that has been too-long closed starts a melting sensation under my ribs. To this minute I can see that bedchamber with its curtained Napoleonic bed standing like a catafalque against one wall, its ghostly coterie of shrouded chairs sitting around in the blue dark like old ladies holding a veiled seance, the wakeful window blinds chattering, the corners black as caves.

  Pete was standing backed against the wall, ivory white in an ivory white negligée, her hair a luminous shawl about her shoulders, rigid with shock. In her hand there was a nickel-plated revolver about the size of a toy. She was aiming the gun at a gaunt, walnut wardrobe that loomed like an up-ended coffin at the end of the room. The wardrobe door hung open, and a figure stood in the frame with a candle in its fist.

  Darkness enveloped the lower part of the figure, but the flittering candle-glow traveled upward to illumine a face as gaseous, misty-featured and spectral as something just summoned from the Astral plane, forty degrees north of Death. The face was all mouth, and the mouth was one nose-bleed red wound.

  The vision in that wardrobe would have made the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari an Easter gift-box by comparison. I saw it, and stood. A faint clamor in another quarter of the château seemed twelve thousand miles away. Pete was whispering, “Don’t move or I’ll — shoot!” and the mouth in the wardrobe door smeared with a smile like an incision for appendicitis.

  “Do not remain in Morne Noir,” it said in a belly-deep undertone that hung the hot darkness with icicles, “go straight away. I am the ghost — the ghost of the wronged — the ghost who returned and killed your Uncle Eli — ”

  At that instant a soggy wind soughed from the wardrobe like an exhalation from an opened tomb. The candle went out and the face went with it. The hall door slammed on the draught, extinguishing the room with midnight. There was a piccolo screech, and a single shot that thundered in the black like a charge of dynamite. When that was gone, something whacked the floor. Then the hall door crashed open, releasing a dam of light, noise, faces and Lieutenant Nemo Narcisse.

  I stopped my hysterical shadow-boxing and found the light switch beside the door. Pete lay on the carpet, having fainted, and across the room a body was spilled out of the wardrobe, face to the floor, shoulders crumpled, a broken candle smoking in one vulturous hand. The body said, “Don’t!” twice, in a whisper muffled by the carpet; then stiffened like a tightened spring. I swung Pete to a stand, and she came around with her head on my shoulder and asked me if it were gone, while I glared stupidly at the faces strung across the doorway like so many wind-tossed Benda masks.

  The En-sign’s blue eyes twinkled at me; Toadstool and Ambrose and Ti Pedro were there; Maître Tousellines burlesquing in a nightcap and lilac pajamas, and the Widow Gladys cackling and colossal in a gruesome salmon-pink wrapper too short to hide vast, greasy black-and-brown bare feet. I was too sick to take in much of this and glad when the gendarmes herded that crew aside with shouts and bayonets. I remember picking up Pete’s nickel revolver, pocketing my own gun and dully watching Lieutenant Narcisse overturn the body of the ghost who claimed to have killed Uncle Eli. There was a big, red hole blown under the ghost’s left shoulder-blade, and it wasn’t a ghost in the glare of the electric lights.

  It had been my imagination and something I hadn’t eaten and the man’s dramatic ability and something later determined as paint from my box of oil paints. An illusion dispelled by the lamps overhead, and the nimble black eye of Lieutenant Nemo Narcisse.

  “Sir Duffin Wilburforce!”

  The Englishman, beginning his rigor mortis on the floor, could not open his painted old maid’s mouth to answer.

  I yawped at the body on the carpet, wondering where my nightmare had left off and reality begun. The entire night was assuming the chameleon quality of a dream. In fact, one of those brittle little lizards was upside down on the ceiling over the dead man, watching the room with bright inquiry in its wee eyes and changing color with a sorcery all its own. I glared at this diminutive bogle, expecting to learn that the present scene was a mesmeric mirage emanating from its lizard’s mind.

  Sixty seconds ago somebody’s ghost had spoken from the otherwise empty wardrobe. A candle blows out, gunfire explodes, and an Englishman lies dumped on the floor by a bullet in his back — Sir Duffin Wilburforce, apparently, but not the Sir Duffin of the wake, the funeral, the three o’clock inquest. Not by a long shot or (for that matter) a short one! Narcisse, stooped in puzzlement over that Tory face, turned with amaze-lifted eyebrows.

  “He has cut short the hair and shaved off the mustache! Red paint is smeared over his mouth. What devilment goes on here?” Hand on sabre-hilt, Narcisse paced and ranted with the fury of a stock company actor. “Another murder. Do not move, any of you! Blanc!” He spun on me and snapped: “Drop both of the guns — ”

  I tossed the nickeled revolver and my automatic into a chair. Narcisse made a snatch for them. “How did you come by these weapons?”

  “The Luger belongs to me,” I said, wishing sweat-beads wouldn’t sprout on my upper lip, “and I don’t know where the revolver —”

  “It’s mine,” Pete said.

  “Why did my men not take these from you in the library?”

  “I left mine up in my room,” Pete said. “Nobody asked me.”

  “Mine was hidden in my suitcase,” I said honestly, “and by God if I’d known what we were getting into I’d have brought a cannon!”

  Narcisse narrowed his eyes to Chinese slits. “You have brought quite enough, my American friend. Will you be kind enough to tell us what you and ma’mselle are doing in this room with the dead Englishman?”

  Pete stepped in front of me, shading confused eyes with a hand and pointing at the thing on the floor. “I was here first. I came in the room and saw — saw him standing in that wardrobe! I — I was too frightened to run or scream. I — I guess I did scream, though. Then Mr. Cartershall came.”

  Narcisse looked steadily at her, picking the handkerchief from his cuff and scrubbing his pink palms. “Why did you come to this room?”

  Pete’s head-shake was bewildered. “Honestly I don’t seem to remember — yes, I do! After I went to my room tonight I couldn’t sleep. I got to thinking about all that had happened — tonight — and I was so tired — I just sat up for a while. I thought I’d give myself a manicure to see if it would make me sleepy, and while I was doing that 1 had a feeling — I heard something — ”

  “Something, ma’mselle?”

  “I’m not sure what. This house, noises on the stairway, as if the whole horrible place were alive and tiptoeing. Anyway, I — I took my gun and walked out on to the balcony — ”

  I asked her hoarsely: “Why didn’t you call me?” She gave me a wry smile. “You were snoring so, and I didn’t want to wake you. I thought it was just nerves. Then I saw the policeman who had been on the halfway landing was gone — ”

  Narcisse rolled black pupils at the harelipped gendarme. The harelipped gendarme took off his broad-brim and ploughed up his forehead with uneasy wrinkles.

  “Hones’ to de Saint, I t’ink I hear noise same as white ma’mselle,” he mumbled huskily in guttural English. “Little noise maybe rat in wall along stair. Maybe like somebody walk, too, creak, creak.”

  “In the wall?” Narcisse shot at him, between gritted teeth.

  “Oui, m’sieu lieutenant. Maybe rat, maybe non! I go down hall below look for you in library. You not there. I’m in library when hear screams and shot.”

  “I was huntin
g the outside verandah for exploded shells,” the officer said furiously. “Nom de Marie! but the next man to leave his post will find a most hard one in the guard room. Go on, ma’mselle.”

  “I was going back to my room,” Pete went on in a colorless tone, “when I was sure I heard a door open in Uncle Eli’s room, here. Not the hall door. A door inside. I opened the hall door and came in. The squeak I heard was that wardrobe door swinging open and — and candle-light came creeping out. I — I was petrified. The wardrobe opened up and — and that man was standing there with a candle. Then — Mr. Cartershall heard me.”

  Narcisse examined me with a thin smile, wet-lipped. “Ma’mselle made an outcry that woke you from sleep, eh?”

  “Yes,” I ground out. “I’d been sitting by my door, reading.”

  The lizard came skating down the wainscoting to hear better. The onlookers jostled in the doorway, muttering.

  “Alors, you rushed to this room and saw ma’mselle confronting the Englishman, painted as he is, in the wardrobe.” The officer stuck out a thumb. “With his mustache barbered and that rouge on his mouth.”

  “That’s a fact.”

  “Undoubtedly you know the reason for this Mardi Gras and why Sir Duffin should be standing in this cupboard with a candle?”

  “For all I know he was waiting for a street cart!” I snarled, sudden nausea reeling through my head. “I’m telling you, I ran in and saw it like Miss Dale tells it. Pete— Miss Dale — said not to move or she’d shoot, and that masquerading son of contamination said for us to go away from Morne Noir because he was the ghost of the wronged who had killed Uncle Eli — ”

  “M’sieu! Do you mean to tell me Sir Duffin said that?”

  “Word for word,” Pete cried.

  “Then it went black as pitch,” I shouted. “A lousy wind came out of the wardrobe, doused the candle and blew shut the hall door. I was too pop-eyed to move, or I’d have shot that skylarking English fiend, myself.”