Now the drummers ceased to hammer on their tom-toms; now the dancers ceased to pose and shuffle in the blood-red glare of torchlight; now the crowd gave back, and through the aisle of panting, crowding bronze-black bodies strode a figure. Her head was bound about with scarlet cloth, and a wisp of silk of the same color was wrapped about her loins, leaving the remainder of her body starkly naked, save for a heavy coating of white pigment. Straight from her shoulders, to right and left, she held her arms, and in each hand was clutched by the feet a cock, one white, the other black. With slow, gliding steps she paced on white-smeared, slim bare feet between the lines of crouching figures who watched her avidly in hot-eyed, slobbering passion.
Before a low and box-shaped altar she came to pause, her arms straight out before her. Her head bent low as an aged, wrinkle-bitten Negress leaped from the shadows and waved a gleaming butcher-knife twice in the lambent torchlight, decapitating a cockerel at each sweep of the steel. The fowls’ heads dropped to earth and the painted priestess lifted high the sacrifices, their wings fluttering, their cut necks spurting blood. Slowly she began to wheel and turn beneath the gory shower, then faster, faster, faster, until it seemed that she was spinning like a top. We saw her face a moment as, all dewed with blood, she turned it toward the altar. It was the girl whom we’d seen twice before.
And now the wrinkled crone who had slain the cocks leaped monkey-nimble to the box-like altar, snatched frenziedly at the strong lock and hasp which held the cover down, and flung the lid back from the chest. All eyes, save those of the girl who still spun whirlingly before the sanctuary, were intent upon the box. I watched it, too, wondering what fresh obscenity could be disclosed. Then, with a gasping intake of my breath, I saw.
Slowly, very slowly, there reared from the box the head, the neck, an eight-foot length of body of a great white snake! Ayida Oueddo, the White Serpent Goddess, the deity of Voodoo rites! Ayida Oueddo, the Goddess of Slaughter—this girl was a vowed priestess of her bloody cult!
The scene obscured once more, then slowly took new form. We stood within a crowded courtroom. Three judges, two in black, one in red, were seated on the dais; flanked by two gendarmes with muskets and fixed bayonets, the golden girl, now clothed in simple white, with a wide straw hat tied underneath her chin with satin ribbons, stood before the court, while the white man she had stabbed stood forward to accuse her.
We saw him hurl his accusation at her, we saw the spectators turn whispering to each other as the evidence was given; we saw her plead in her defense. At last we saw the center judge, the judge all gowned in red, address the girl, and saw her curtsey deeply as she made reply.
We saw the judges’ heads, two capped with black, one crowned with red, bow together as they took counsel of each other; then, though we heard no words, we saw the sentence of the court as the red-robed center figure delivered judgment in two syllables:
“À mort.”
Sentence of death was passed, and she took it smilingly, curtseying low as though to thank the judges for a courtesy bestowed.
We looked upon a public square, so hot beneath the tropic noonday sun that a constant flickering of heat-rays arose from off the kidney stones which formed the pavement. The square was lined with crowding men and women, rich townspeople, wealthy planters and their womenfolk, colored men of every shade from ebony to well-creamed coffee; a battalion of white infanterie de ligne in spotless uniforms, a company of mulatto chasseurs in their distinctive regalia. In the center, where the sun beat mercilessly, stood a scaffold with an X-shaped frame upon it.
The executioner, a burly, great-paunched brute whose sleeveless shirt disclosed gorilla muscles, was attended by two giant Negroes who looked as though they should have been head-butchers in an abattoir.
A rolling, long tattoo of drums was sounded by the troops’ field music as they led her from a house which faced the square, a nun upon her left, a black-frocked priest in shovel hat upon her right, head bowed, lips moving in a ceaseless, mumbled prayer. A youthful sous-lieutenant, his boyish mouth hard-set with loathing at the job he had to do, marched before; a squad of sweating gendarmes closed the file.
She was dressed in spotless linen, a straight and simple frock of the fashion which one sees in portraits of Empress Josephine, a wide straw hat bedecked with pink-silk roses and tied coquettishly with wide pink ribbons knotted underneath her chin. Satin shoes laced with narrow ribbons of black velvet round the ankles were upon her little feet, and she held a satin sunshade in her hand.
There was something of opera bouffe about it all, this gay parade of wealth and fashion and flashing military uniforms called out to witness one slim girl walk unconcernedly across the public square.
But the thread of comedy snapped quickly as she reached the scaffold’s foot. Closing her frivolous parasol, she gave it to the nun, then turned her back upon the executioner while her golden-flecked brown eyes searched the crowd which waited breathless at the margin of the square. At last she found the object which she sought, a tall, broad-shouldered white man in the costume of a planter, who lolled at ease beneath a palm-tree’s shade and watched the spectacle through half-closed eyes. Her hand went out, aiming like a pointed weapon, as she hurled a curse at him. We could not hear the words she spoke, but the slow articulation of the syllables enabled us to read her lips:
“As I am crushed this day, so shall you and yours be crushed by my ouanga.”
Then they stripped the linen garment off her, tore off her hat and little satin shoes, her silken stockings and daintily embroidered lingerie. Stark, utterly birth-naked, they bound her to the planks which formed a six-foot X and broke her fragile bones with a great bar of iron. We could not hear the piteous cries of agony which came each time the executioner beat on her arms and legs with his heavy iron cudgel, we only saw the velvet, gold-hued flesh give way beneath the blows, the slim and sweetly molded limbs go limp and formless as the bones within them broke beneath the flailings of the bar. At last we saw the writhing, childish mouth contort to a scream of final agonized petition: “Jésus!” Then the lovely head fell forward between her outstretched arms, and we knew that it was over. Her sufferings were done, and the justice which demanded that the black or mixed-blood who raised hand against a white must die by torment was appeased. The scene once more dissolved in swirling, hazy clouds of mist.
The last scene was the shortest. A maddened mob of shouting, blood-drunk blacks swarmed over the great house where first we saw the girl; they smashed the priceless furniture, hacked and chopped the walls and woodwork in wild, insensate rage, finally set the place afire. And from every hilltop, every smiling valley, every fruitful farm and bountiful plantation, rose the flames of devastation and the cries of slaughtered women, men and children. The blacks were in rebellion. Oppression brought its own reward, and those who killed and maimed and tortured and arrogantly wrought the blood and sweat of others into gold were killed and maimed and tortured, hounded, harassed, hunted in their turn. The reign of France upon Saint Domingue was ended, and that century-long saturnalia of savagery, that amazing mixture of Congo jungle and Paris salon called the Republic of Haiti, had begun.
THE CANDLELIGHT BURNED SOFTLY in Pierre’s select speakeasy. The omelette soufflé (made with Peychaud bitters) had been washed down with a bottle of tart vin blanc; now, cigars aglow and liqueurs poured, we waited for de Grandin to begin.
“Tiens, but it is simplicity’s own self,” he informed us. “Does not the whole thing leap all quickly to the eye? But certainly. Your remote kinsman, Monsieur Goodlowe, the one you told us first established family holdings in the Island of Saint Domingue, which now we know as Haiti, undoubtlessly found life wearisome in the tropics. Women of his race were rare—they were mostly married or ugly, or both, and, besides, white women pine away and fail beneath the tropic sun. Not so with the mixed-breeds, however. They, with tropic sunshine in their veins, flourish like the native vegetation in equatorial lands. Accordingly, Monsieur l’Ancêtre did as many others
did, and took a quarter-blooded beauty for his wife—without benefit of clergy or of wedding ring. Yes, it has been done before and since, my friends.
“Now, consider the condition on that island at that time: There were 40,000 whites, of all classes, 24,000 mulattoes and lesser mixed-bloods, whom the law declared to be free citizens, and over half a million barbarous black slaves. A very devil of a place. The free mulattoes were the greatest problem. Technically free as any Frenchman, they yet were scorned and hated by their white co-citizens, many of whom shared paternal ancestors with them. The affranchis—free mulattoes—were imposed upon in every way. They sat apart in church and at the theater; they were forbidden to wear certain cloths and colors decreed by fashion; their very regiments of soldiers wore a distinctive uniform. Moreover, they were made the butt of hatred in the courts. A white man killing a mulatto might be sentenced to the galleys, or be made to pay a fine. In a very flagrant case, he might even suffer the inconvenience of being put to death, but even then his comfort was infringed upon as little as was possible. He was hanged or shot. At any rate, he died with expedition, and without unnecessary delay. The mulatto who so far forgot himself as to kill or even to attempt the life of a white, was prejudged before he entered court, and inevitably perished miserably upon the torture frame, his bones smashed to splinters by the executioner’s iron bar. But no; it was not very pleasant to be a mulatto in Saint Domingue those days.
“Very well, let us start from there. When I beheld those West Indian Negroes in your service, and heard their talk of loogaroos, and when I learned an ancestor of yours had settled in Haiti in the olden days, I determined that the whole thing smelled of Voodoo. You know how Julius and I outwitted that white ghost-snake which had killed your relatives; you know my theory of its appearance on your lawn. Very good; we knew how it came there; the why was something else. But certainly.
“Mademoiselle Nancy was inextricably mixed up in the case. The evil genius resident in the fiber of the haunted summer-house drew strength and power to work material evil to your family from her. Therefore, having rendered the haunting demon powerless, I decided to have Mademoiselle Nancy act as our spirit-guide and open for us the door to yesterday.
“Bien. Accordingly, I asked her to ‘remember.’ There are many kinds of memory, my friends. Oh, yes. We remember, by example, what happened yesterday, or last year, or when we were very young. Ah-ha, but we remember other things, as well, although we do not know it. Take, for example, the common dream of falling through the air. That is a ‘memory,’ though the dreamer may never have fallen from a height. Ha, but his remote ancestors who dwelt in trees, they fell, or were in peril of falling, daily. To fall in those days meant injury, and injury meant inability to fight with or escape from an enemy. Therefore, not to fall was the greatest care the race had on its mind. Generations of fearing falls, taking care not to fall, produced a mass memory of the unpleasant results of failing. But naturally. Accordingly, one of today remembers in his dreams the horror of falling from the tree-tops.
“Consider further: Though everyone has dreamed he fell—and often wakened from such dreams with the sweat of terror on his brow—we never have this memory of falling while we are awake. Why so? Because our waking, conscious, modern personality knows no such danger. For that matter, we never have the sense of fleeing from a savage animal while we wake, but when we sleep—grand Diable, how often, in a nightmare, do we seek to flee some monstrous beast, and suffer horrors at our inability to run. Another racial memory—that of our remote cave-dwelling ancestors caught fast in a morass while some saber-toothed tiger or cave-bear hunted them for dinner! The answer, then, is that when we resign our waking, workaday consciousness to sleep we open the sealed doors to yesterday and all the different personalities the sum of which we are rise up to plague us. We suffer hunger, thirst or shipwreck which our ancestors survived, though we, as individuals never knew these things at all.
“Bien tout. These naughty dreams come to us unannounced. We can not call them up, we can not bid them stay away. But what if we are put to sleep hypnotically, then bidden to remember some specific incident in our long chain of ancestral memory? May not the subconscious mind walk straight to the cabinet in which that memory is filed and bring it to the light?
“That is the question which I asked myself when I considered sending Mademoiselle Nancy back along the trail of memory. It was only an experiment; but it was successful, as you saw.
“Mademoiselle Nancy is a psychic. Like the best of the professional mediums, she possesses that rare substance called psychoplasm in great abundance. Once she was en rapport with the olden days she did more than tell us of them, she showed them to us.
“Very well. This young lady of mixed blood whom your ancestor had taken for his light o’ love, Monsieur Goodlowe, was also a member of the inner circle of the Voodooists. She was a mamaloi, or priestess of the serpent-goddess Ayida Oueddo, the consort of the great snake-god Damballah.
“Voodoo was a species of Freemasonry from which the whites were barred; many mulattoes and even people with smaller degrees of African blood were active in it. When first we saw her, she was talking with a young mulatto soldier. He had evidently come to summon her to attend a meeting of the Voodooists, and she was unwilling. Perhaps she felt such savage orgies were beneath her; possibly she had put them behind her as a sincere Christian. In any event, she was unwilling to obey the summons and fulfil her duty as a priestess. Then came her master, who was also your ancestor.
“You saw how he abused the messenger of Voodoo. Like all the whites, he hated the dark mysteries of the Voodooists—probably his hatred was akin to that which normal men feel for the snake; one part hate, three parts fear. Most white men thus regarded the secret cult which was, at the end, to knit the slaves and free mulattoes into a single force and sweep the white men from the island.
“Perhaps all would have been well, had not your ancestor become intoxicated that night. But drunk he got, and in his drunken fury he abused her.
“She stabbed him in the back, and perhaps, as much to spite him as for any other reason, determined to act as priestess at the altar of Ayida Oueddo. But whatever her decision was, the matter was taken from her hands when the messenger reappeared outside her bedroom window and dropped the bat wing at her feet.
“That bat wing, he was to the Voodooist what the signal of distress is to the Master Mason or the fiery cross is to a member of a Scottish clan. It is a summons which could not be denied. By no means; no, indeed.
“We saw her serve Ayida Oueddo’s altar, we saw her when she had been apprehended, we saw her led to execution. Ha, and did we not also see her single out your ancestor and hurl her dying curse at him? Did not she say: ‘As I am crushed this day, so shall you and yours be crushed by my ouanga’? But certainly.
“Ouanga in their patois is a most elastic term. There is no literal translation for it; vaguely, it means the same as ‘medicine’ when used by the Red Indian, or ‘magic’ when spoken of by the Black African, or ‘devil-devil’ when used by natives of the South Sea islands. Define it accurately we can not; understand it we can. It is the working, as of a charm, through some unknown super-physical agency.
“Eh bien, did it not work? I shall say as much. Three of your family died horribly, with their bones crushed, even as were that poor young girl’s on that dreadful day of execution so long ago. Only by the mercy of heaven and the cleverness of Jules de Grandin are you alive tonight, and not all crushed to death, Monsieur.”
“But—” I began.
“But be grilled upon hell’s hottest griddle,” cut in Jules de Grandin. “I thirst. Cordieu, Sahara at its dryest is as the rolling billows of the great Atlantic compared to my poor throat, my friend.
“Garçon, quatre cognacs—tout vite; s’il vous plaît!”
A Gamble in Souls
WE CROSSED THE BIG, cement-floored room with its high-set, steel-barred windows and whitewashed walls, and paused before the heavy iron grille
stopping the entrance to a narrow, tunnel-like corridor. Our guide cast a sidelong, half-apologetic look in our direction. “Visitors aren’t—er—usually permitted past this point,” he told us. “This is the ‘jumping-off place,’ you know, and the fellows in there aren’t ordinary convicts, so—”
“Perfectly, Monsieur,” Jules de Grandin’s voice was muted to a whisper in deference to our surroundings, but had lost none of its authoritativeness with lessened volume. “One understands; but you will recall that we are not ordinary visitors. Me, I have credentials from the Service Sûreté, and in addition the note from Monsieur le Gouverneur, does it not say—”
“Quite so,” the warden’s secretary assented hastily. Distinguished foreign criminologists with credentials from the French Secret Police and letters of introduction from the governor of the state were not to be barred from the penitentiary’s anteroom of death, however irregular their presence might be. “Open the gate, Casey,” he ordered the uniformed guardian of the grille, standing aside politely to permit us to precede him.
The death house was L-shaped, the long bar consisting of a one-story corridor some sixteen feet in width, its south wall taken up by a row of ten cells, each separated from its neighbor by a twelve-inch brick wall and from the passageway by steel cage-doors. Through these the inmates looked upon a blank, bleak whitewashed wall of brick, pierced at intervals by small, barred windows set so high that even the pale north light could not strike directly into the cells. Each few feet, almost as immobile as sentries on fixed post, blue-uniformed guards backed against the northern wall, somnolent eyes checking every movement of the men caged in the little cells which lined the south wall. Straight before us at the passage end, terrifying in its very commonplaceness, was a solid metal door, wide enough for three to pass abreast, grained and painted in imitation of golden oak. SILENCE, proclaimed the legend on its lintel. This was the “one-way door” leading to the execution chamber which, with the autopsy room immediately adjoining, formed the foot-bar of the building’s L. The air was heavy with the scent peculiar to inefficient plumbing, poor ventilation and the stale smoke of cigarettes. The place seemed shadowed by the vulture-wings of hopelessness.
The Dark Angel Page 56