“Now that, my friends, is the designation of the wife and consort of Damballah Oueddo, the great serpent-god of the Voodoo men. She is a sort of Juno in their pantheon, second in power only to her dreadful husband, who in turn, of course, is their Jove.
“Alors, her involuntary cry gave me to think. I felt my way, step by careful step, like a blind man tap-tapping with his stick down some unfamiliar street. If that which we saw materialize on the lawn were indeed the form of Ayida Oueddo, then the charms used by the Haitien Voodoo men should prove effective here. It is the logic, n’est-ce-pas?
“Accordingly, I procured a plentiful supply of chickens’ blood from one who deals in poultry, and had it ready for emergency last night. The ‘reason why’ I can not tell you; I only know that I applied such knowledge as I had to conditions as I found them. I took the chance; I gambled and I won. Voilà tout.”
“But why’d you burn the summer-house?” Chenevert demanded.
“Pardieu, we ‘sterilized’ it,” de Grandin answered. “When we had burned it we put an end to those so evil hauntings which had caused three deaths and nearly caused a fourth. Fire kills all things, my friends: microbes, animals, even wicked spirit manifestations. Tear down a haunted house, and the earth, all soaked in evil emanations of the long-dead wicked, will still give forth its exhalations in the form of what we call ‘ghosts’ because we lack a better name for them. More: Incorporate one little portion of that haunted place in some new building, and the new structure may prove similarly haunted. But if you burn the place—pouf! The hauntings and the haunters cease, and cease forever. The wood or brick or iron of which the haunted house was made acts as a base of operations for the spirit manifestation, but when it is destroyed by fire, or even super-heated, it becomes ‘cleansed’ in the sense the exorcists use the term, and no longer can it harbor old, unclean and sinful things.”
Gordon Goodlowe, no longer skeptical, but frankly interested, put in: “Can you account for the apparition which undoubtedly caused these deaths and almost killed me, Doctor?”
De Grandin pursed his lips as he regarded the glowing end of his cigar intently. “Not altogether,” he replied. “Vaguely, as the wearer of a too-tight shoe feels the approach of a storm of rain, I have a feeling that your family’s connection with the former French possession of Haiti is involved, but why it should be I do not know.
“However”—he bowed ceremoniously to Nancy Goodlowe—“Mademoiselle, your niece has it in her power, I believe, to enlighten us.”
“I?” the girl asked incredulously.
“Précisément, Mademoiselle. Remember how in each former case you were stricken with a so strange illness, then the serpent-thing appeared. I do not know, of course, but I much suspect that the illnesses were caused by the slow withdrawal of the psycho-physical force which we call psychoplasm in order that it might be absorbed by the evil entity which could not otherwise attain physical force and kill your father and your kinsmen. Therefore, it would seem, you have some—all innocent, I assure you—connection with this so queer business. If that be so, you may remember something which will help us.”
“Remember?” the girl burst out. “Why, I’ve absolutely no recollection of anything. I only know that I’ve been ill, then lapsed into unconsciousness, and when I woke—”
“Memory is of many kinds, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin broke in gently. “There are certain ancestral experiences which, though we may have no conscious knowledge of them, are graven deeply on the records of our subconscious memory. Consider: Have you never, in your travels, come upon some old, historic place, and had a sudden feeling of ‘Why, I’ve been here before’? Consciously, and in this life, you have not, of course; yet you are greatly puzzled by the so strange familiarity of a scene which you are sure you have never seen before. Yes, of course. The explanation is presumed that some ancestor of yours underwent a deep emotional experience at that place. Incidents historically ancestral have made a deep impression on the family memory, and when proper stimuli are applied, this group memory will work its way up to the surface, as objects, long immersed in water and forgotten, will rise to the top if the pond is sufficiently agitated. You comprehend?”
“I—I don’t think I do,” she answered with a puzzled smile. “Do you mean that something which made a marked impression on my great-great-grandmother, for instance, and of which I’d never heard, might be ‘remembered’ by me if I were taken to the place where it occurred, or—”
“Precisely, exactly; quite so!” he cut in enthusiastically. “You have it, Mademoiselle. In each of us there is some vestige of the past; we are the sum of generations long since dead, even as we are the remote ancestors of generations yet unborn. I do not say that we can do it, but with your consent and assistance, I think it possible that we may probe the past tonight, and learn whence came this curse which has so sorely tried your family. Are you willing?”
“Why, yes, of course, if Uncle Gordon says so.”
“You won’t hurt her in any, way?” asked Mr. Goodlowe.
“Not in the slightest, Monsieur; upon my honor. Be very sure of that.”
“All right, then, I’ll agree,” our host returned.
NANCY GOODLOWE SEATED HERSELF in a big wing chair, hands folded demurely in her lap, head lolling back against the tapestry upholstery. Theretofore I had regarded her as a patient more than a woman—two very different things!—and the realization of her really splendid beauty, her smoldering dark eyes, her strong, white teeth, her alluring bosom and captivating turn of long, lithe limb, struck me suddenly as she lay back in her chair with just enough voluptuousness of attitude to make us realize that she knew she was a woman in a group of men, and as such the center of attraction which was not entirely scientific.
De Grandin took his stand before her, thrust his hand into the left-hand pocket of his cummerbund and drew forth the little gold note-pencil which hung upon the chain to the other end of which was fixed his clinical thermometer. “Mademoiselle,” he ordered softly, “you will be good enough to look at this—at its very tip, if you please. So? Good. Observe it closely.”
Deliberately, as one who beats time to a slow andante tune, he wove the little, gleaming pencil back and forth, describing arabesques and intricate, interlacing figures in the air. Nancy Goodlowe watched him languidly from under long, black eyelashes. Gradually, her attention fixed. We saw her eyes follow every motion of the pencil, finally converge toward each other until it seemed she made some sort of grotesque grimace; then the lids were lowered on her purple eyes, and her head, propped against the chair-back, moved slightly sidewise as the neck muscles relaxed. Her folded hands fell loosely open on her silk-clad knees, and she was, to all appearances, sleeping peacefully. Presently the regular, light heaving of her bosom and the softly sibilated, even breathing, told us she had, indeed, fallen asleep.
The little Frenchman put his pencil in his pocket, crossed the room on tiptoe and stroked her forehead and temples with a quick light touch. “Mademoiselle,” he whispered, “can you hear me?”
“I can hear you,” answered Nancy Goodlowe in a soft and drowsy voice.
“Bien, ma belle; you will please project your mental eye upon the screen of memory. Go back, Mademoiselle, until you reach the time when first your family crossed the trail of Ayida Oueddo, and tell us what it is you see. You hear?”
“I hear.”
“You will obey?”
“I will try.”
For something like five minutes we sat there, our eyes intent upon the sleeping girl. She rested easily in the big chair, her lips a little parted, her light, even breathing so faint that we could scarcely hear it, but no sign or token did she give that she had seen a thing of which she might tell.
“Ask her if—” Gordon Goodlowe began, but:
“S-s-s-st!” de Grandin cut him short. “Be quiet, stupid one, she is—grand Dieu, observe!”
As though the room had suddenly become chilled, Nancy Goodlowe’s breath was visible. Like
the steaming vapor seen upon a freezing winter day, a light, halitous cloud, faintly white, tangible as exhaled smoke from a cigarette, was issuing from between the young girl’s parted lips.
I felt a sudden shiver coursing down my spine; one of those causeless fits of nervous cold which, occurring independently of outside stimuli, make us say “someone is walking over my grave.” Then, definitely, the room grew colder. The humid, midsummer heat gave way to a chilliness which seemed to affect the soul as well as the body; a dull, biting hardness of cold suggestive of the limitless freezing eternities of interstellar space. I heard de Grandin’s small, strong teeth click together like a pair of castanets, but his gaze remained intently on the sleeping girl and the gray-white mist which floated from her mouth. “Psychoplasm!” I heard him mutter, half believingly.
The smoke-like cloud hung suspended in the dead-still atmosphere of the room a moment; then gently, as though wafted by a breeze, it eddied slowly toward the farther wall, hung motionless again, and gradually spread out, like the smoke-screen laid by a military airplane, a drifting, gently billowing, but thoroughly opaque curtain, obscuring the wall from ceiling to baseboard.
It is difficult to describe what happened next. Slowly, in the gray-white wreaths of vapor there seemed to generate little points of bluish light, mere tiny specks of phosphorescence scintillant in the still smoke-screen. Gradually, but with ever-quickening tempo, they thickened and multiplied till they floated like a maze of dancing midges, spinning their luminant dance until they seemed to coalesce into little nebulæ of light as large as glowing cigarette-ends, but burning all the while with an intense, blue, eery light. It was as if, in place of the smoke-vapor, the room was cut in twain by a curtain of solid, opaque moonlight.
Gradually the glowing nebulæ changed from their spinning movement to a slow, weaving motion. The luminous curtain was breaking up, forming a definite pattern of highlights and shadows; a picture, as when the acid etches deeply in the copper of a half-tone plate, was taking form before our eyes—we were looking, as through the proscenium of a theater, into another room.
It was a beautiful apartment, regal in its lavishness as though it formed some portion of a royal palace. Walls were spread with Flemish tapestries, chairs and couches were of carven walnut and dull-red mahogany, rare specimens of faience stood on gilt-legged, marble-topped tables. A massive clock, with dial of beaten silver and hands of hammered gold, swung its jeweled pendulum in a case of polished ebony.
Against a chaste white-marble mantelpiece there leaned a woman in a golden gown. She was a charming creature, scarce larger than a child, with small, delicate features of cameo clarity, soft, wavy hair cut rather short and clustering round her neck and ears in a multitude of tiny ringlets. Her eyes were large and dark, her lips full and red; her teeth, as she smiled sadly, were small and white as bits of shell-pearl. There was, too, a peculiar quality to her skin, not dark with sunburn, nor yet with the olive-darkness of the Spaniard or Italian, but rather golden-pink, in perfect complement to the golden tissue of her high-waisted, sleeveless gown. I looked at her in wonder for a moment; then—
“A quadroon!” I classified her, the product of a mixture of two races, a lovely mixed-caste offspring of miscegenation, more beautiful than ninety of each hundred whites, inheriting only the perfection of form and carriage of black ancestors from the Congo.
A door at the farther end of the apartment opened quickly, but soundlessly, and a young man hastened forward. He was in military dress, the uniform of a French officer of a hundred and fifty years ago, but the shoulders of his scarlet-faced white coat were decorated with knots of yarn instead of the more customary epaulets. He paused before the girl, booted heels together, and bowed stiffly from the waist above the pale-gold hand she gave him with the charming precise grace I had so often seen in Jules de Grandin. As he raised her fingers to his lips I saw that like hers, his skin was pale mat gold, and in his dark-brown, wavy hair there was the evidence of African descent.
His lips moved swiftly, but no sound came from them, nor did we hear what she replied. With a start I realized we were witnessing a pantomime, a picture charged with action and swift motion, but silent as the cinematograph before the “movies” became vocal.
What they said we could not tell, but that the young man bore some tidings of importance was evident; that he urged the girl to some course was equally apparent, and that she refused, although with great reluctance and distress, was obvious.
The entrance of the room was darkened momentarily as a third actor strode upon the scene. Clothed in white linen, booted and spurred, a heavy riding-whip in his hand, he fairly swaggered through the choicely furnished room. No quadroon this, no slightest hint of Africa was in his straight, dark hair or sunburned features; this was a member of the dominant, inevitably conquering white race, and, by his features, an American or Englishman. As he drew near the girl and the young officer I realized with a start of quick surprise that the latest comer might have been Gordon Goodlowe at thirty, or perhaps at thirty-five.
He looked with mingled anger and contempt upon the other two a moment, then shot a quick, imperious question at the woman. The girl made answer, wringing her slim hands in a very ecstasy of pleading, but the man turned from her and again addressed the youthful soldier. What answer he received I could not tell, but that it angered him was certain, for without a second’s warning he raised his riding-whip and cut the youth across the face with its plaited thong. Blow after blow be rained upon the unresisting boy, and finally, flinging away the scourge, he resorted to his fists, felled the trembling lad to the floor and kicked him as he might have kicked a dog.
I stared in horror at the exhibition of brutality, but even as I looked the picture was obscured, the moving figures faded in a blur of smoky haze, and once again we found ourselves staring at a wall of idly drifting vapor.
Again the little sparkling lights began to dance within the smoke, and now they spun and wove until another scene took form before us. It was a bedroom into which we looked. A tall, four-poster bedstead stood in the foreground, while bureaus and dressing-tables of carved apple-wood were in the corners. Light curtains of some cotton stuff swayed gently at the windows, and across the darkened chamber a shaft of moonlight cut a swath as clear and bright as a spotlight on a darkened stage.
Beside a toilet table stood the girl we’d seen before, more beautiful and winsome in her nightdress of sheer cambric than she had been when clothed in cloth-of-gold. Sadly she regarded her reflection in the oval, gold-framed mirror as she drew a comb of tortoise-shell through her curling, jet-black ringlets; then, as she saw another image in the glass, she straightened in an attitude of panic fear.
Across her creamy shoulders leered the face of the white man who had thrashed the soldier in the scene we had seen before, and now the shadow gave way to the substance as the man himself half walked, half staggered into the room. That he was drunk was evident; that he had drunk until the latent beast was raised in him was also patent as he lurched across the room unsteadily, grasped the trembling girl in his arms and crushed her to him, bruising her protesting lips with kisses which betrayed no trace of love, but were afire with blazing passion.
The girl’s slim form bent like a taut bow in his grasp, as she struggled futilely to break away; then, as her groping hands fluttered across the dressing-table’s marble top, we saw her slender fingers close upon a slim, thin-bladed dagger, The fine steel, no thicker than a knitting-needle, gleamed in the ray of moonlight as it flashed in an arc, then fleshed itself in the man’s back an inch or so beneath the shoulder-blade.
He let her go and fell back with a grimace of mingled rage and pain, a serio-comic expression of surprise spreading on his liquor-flushed and sunburned features. Then like a pouncing beast of prey, he leaped on her.
As a terrier might shake a rat or a savage tomcat maul a luckless mouse, he shook her, swaying her slim shoulders till her head bobbed giddily and her short hair waved flag-like back and f
orth. Protesting helplessly, she opened her mouth, and the force with which he shook her drove her teeth together on her tongue so that blood gushed from her mouth in a bright spate. Now, not content with shaking, he beat her with his doubled fists, striking her to the floor in a little, huddled heap, then raising her again so that he might once more knock her down.
The brutal beating lasted till I would have put my hand before my eyes to shut the cruel sight out, but quickly as it started it was done. A soundless cry came from the girl’s tormenter, and he raised his hand across his shoulder, attempting to assuage the flow of blood; then, half turning as he grasped at empty air, he fell face-forward to the floor. We saw a wide, red stain upon the linen of his shirt as he lay there twitching with convulsive spasms.
The white-gauze curtain at the chamber window fluttered with a sudden movement not caused by the midnight breeze, and a slim, brown hand was thrust across the sill. Between the parted folds of curtain we caught a glimpse of a scarred countenance, the lash-marked face of the young soldier whom we had seen the white man beat. For a moment the face was silhouetted against the background of the night; then the slim hand opened, letting fall some object at the trembling girl’s bare feet. It was the dried wing of a tropic vampire-bat.
Once more the scene dissolved in haze, and once again it formed, and now we looked upon a tableau of midnight jungle. Resinous torches, some thrust into the earth, some fastened to the trunks of palm-trees, cast a glow of ruddy light upon the scene. A cloud of heavy smoke ascended from the torches, forming an inky canopy which blotted out the stars. Seated on the ground in a great circle was a vast concourse of blacks, men and women in macabre silhouette against the flickering torchlight, some beating wildly on small, double-headed drums, others, circling in and out in the mazes of a shuffling, grotesque dance. Lewd, lecherous, lascivious, the postures of the dancers melted quickly from one to another, each more instinct with lechery than the one preceding. Some semi-naked, so nude as at the instant of their birth, they danced, and we knew that something devilish was toward, for though we could not catch the tempo of the drums, we felt the tension of the atmosphere.
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