by Otto Penzler
A dagger, missing both of them, lodged quivering in wallpaper beside Ranier’s head. Black hands reached over the bannisters, pinning Dr. Eberhardt’s oilskins to the steps with a pitchfork.
“Go on! Go on!” the yellow gnome screamed. “Himmel! do not wait for me!”
Ranier tore the man loose with an arm-sweep, the raincoat ripping on pitchfork tines. Reminded of a skull with a bit of oilskin in its teeth, he laughed savagely, boosting the little man up the steps ahead of him, four at a time. Turning to fling a venomous pint of ammonia at a ragged Cacao. Pursuing his climb with yells and a blood-thirsty sickle. Laughing fury at something he could see to combat, something he could hit with fists, something he could revenge on.
The black man fell downstairs, caterwauling, but his twin loomed wraith-like in the smoked murk at the stairhead, beckoning them up with a butcher knife, daring their ascent. Ranier wiped the grin from that smoky countenance with nitric acid. The enemy came down in a tumbling acrobatic, head under arm, knees to belly, bouncing by like a Roman chariot wheel with outthrust blade. Ranier spurred the descent, kicking lustily; had all his limbs at the stair-top. He yelled when he saw the balcony unpopulated, the laboratory door closed on the upper gloom. Yelled and attacked the panels with frantic fists, pounding, crying the girl’s name.
“Open up! Let us in! For God’s sake—!”
He was beating on the door, and a Cape Cod little figure crouched at the balcony rail pouring driblets of liquid fire on fiend-faces raging below. Tan smoke piled up the stairway; embers geysered from tossing pine-knots; in the demoniac bedlam, torchlight on his cheeks, whiskers as if fire, red coals for eyes, Dr. Eberhardt made a small Mephisto measuring out penalties on mutineers in a hell-well. Ranier tore his throat to be heard.
“Laïs! Miss Engles! It’s Ranier and Dr. Eberhardt! For God’s sake, Laïs, if you’re in there—!”
“M’sieu—!”
IT WAS POLYPHEME. More goatish. More overwhelmed by the sombrero. Polypheme, gray as terror, who plucked back a bolt, turned a key, opened the door. Behind his electric-bulb eyes and crow-like shadow, the room was a cavern. Light flashed with sound in this blackness, filling the room with a thunder-crack and a bluish, instantaneous flash that showed John Ranier the girl.
She was standing by the window, pressed close to the wall beside the upright frame. Shooting at an angle and a little downward at enemies somewhere below the gallery under the fire-reddened foliage of the sablier tree. She had changed to a nurse’s costume; a play of flickering crimson colored the smoke-haze in the window, illumined her profile, found bright gleams in looped hair under the nurse’s cap. Her face, too, might have been starched. She fired again, giving Ranier a gun-flash glimpse of her white shadow-figure, tense marble face. But she looked calm, soldierly. Firing, ejecting the shell, drawing aim, firing; handling the Winchester with the workmanship of a man.
“Laïs—!” Ranier plunged through the door.
“Laïs! Liebcs Fräulein! Ach, du lieber Gott in Himmel!” The undersized gnome in yellow romped forward with open arms. “Aber, you are safe. We are in time—!”
Ranier slammed the door against the assault mounting the stairs; fought to fasten lock and bolt. He could hear the girl crying, “Unkle Doktor! Unkle Doktor! Wir warten schon den ganzen die Nacht! Oh, I thought you would never, never come! It is terrible! They broke in the contagion ward. I saw them kill the patients—terrible things have happened. Oh, God, where have you been—?”
“Been? Been?” It was the querulous voice Ranier had heard on that path in the forest. “Didn’t you see my message? Where do you think I would go and stay all the night? That black Maman Celestine did not have twins, but five. I must wash. Scrub floors. Borrow a horse to get back. As if quintuplets are not enough, I am seized by this ruffian on the path—”
Ranier shouted, “John Ranier. Ship’s doctor. S.S. Cacique, Atlantic-Caribbean Line.” At the girl, “Have you seen those people—Brown, Kavanaugh, the big lug, the woman—?”
She cried, “No one! I have been trapped up here since—”
“People? People?” Dr. Eberhardt’s voice rose shrill, that of a peevish child quarreling over a doll in an earthquake. “A ship’s doctor! People! Laïs, why did you not get my message? You know I always leave one on the table, here, when I—”
There was a ping like a violin string snapping in the darkness; glass smashed on the wall to Ranier’s right, releasing an aromatic smell. Polypheme, hiding in a corner, howled; and the Winchester flashed bang-bang-bang! in the girl’s hands.
She cried, “Keep back, Unkle Doktor! Do not come near the window! They are throwing knives, rocks—!”
“My laboratory!” The small physician came back into the situation with a yell. In the gun-flash Ranier saw him standing hands to forehead, wild-eyed. “My experiment! Himmel herr Gott! it is ruined. My cultures! And my papers, my writings, my documents, my records—!”
He was on the floor, pawing desperately in rubbish and blowing papers. Ranier shouted, “Records?” and the wailed reply was, “Ja, ja, ja, of all my life work, my case histories, the births, the deaths—!” and Ranier almost forgot to hold the door. Objects broke to pieces all around him, but pieces fitted a puzzle on his mind. Another answer! Death records!
He stood as if something had hit him; then something did. A stone from the window. A despairing cry from the girl:
“They come up the gallery! Dear God! they are climbing the tree!”
A CRASH ON the door behind him threw him to his knees. Wood quivered under a triphammer pounding, and a long sliver splintered out of the panels, admitting a thin axe-blade and a ribbon of scarlet light. The window! The door! No place for slackers. Somehow he pummeled Polypheme out of hiding; made the terrified little Negro understand about the desk. Wrenching at weight, they shoved the desk against the cracking portal while the girl sniped from the window, Dr. Eberhardt wailed, missles whined into the laboratory with the velocity of hornets, banging and bouncing on floor and shelves, shattering glass.
“The chemicals!” Ranier dodged to Dr. Eberhardt’s side. “Quick, quick! Before they break in! Which bottles—”
“These shelves, these above the laboratory sink. But the potent ones were in the emergency room. A little acid here. Gott in der Höhe! Give it to the ungrateful, ignorant, witch-burning devils—!”
Here, there the little man raced, pillaging cabinets and cupboards, heaping ammunition on the center table. Precious little, and they’d need it from the sound. Ranier’s heart sickened when he heard the girl cry after a shot, “The rifle—all the cartridges are gone!”
Promptly the door burst to pieces. Ranier swept Laïs Engles into a corner; yelled, “Dr. Eberhardt, take the window!” spun to peg a bottle at a face coming in from the hall balcony. Breaking glass, a screech from the window sill told him Dr. Eberhardt had simultaneously scored. From then on he was busy with his own sector of defense, fighting to hold the door.
They came, fled, reappeared. Attacked and counter-attacked. Ebony devil-masks, tar-barrel torsos framed against torch glare in the jagged door-jambs. Not the educated Haitian of the cities, but the mountaineers, peasants, hugger-mugger mobsters who can be summoned for any vandalism or riot—this crowd the black equivalent of European book-burners or American lynch gangs, without so far back to go. Like barbarians they charged; superstition-maddened, drum-maddened, primitives with the darkness of the Ivory Coast and Dahomey in their veins; souls untamed by four generations in coats and pants, undomesticated by life in the Caribbean jungles.
They’d kept their gods, Damballa, Papa Legba, Gbeji-Nibu, Ayida-Wedo. Kept them behind a thin lip-service of Christianity—as white men keep their dark gods—hidden in grass-roofed outhouses, secret temples, tucked in the blacker corners of their hearts. Kept them for just such a night as this when white men stabbed their brothers with invisible knives in waterfront cafés, when the dead left their graves to walk in cerements of fog.
“Damballa! Vini ’gider nous
!”—“Papa Legba, connais moon par ou!”—“Damballa queddo! Lé-lé sang!”
Brayed from thick chocolate throats those invocations put an icicle up Ranier’s spine. Damballa, guide us! Legba, know your worshippers! Damballa, this is the hour for blood!
Drums roaring, throats roaring, fire roaring behind them, they charged the doorway, battled to get over the barricade. John Ranier drove them back. Drove them, scorched and yowling, back from the desk with throws of astringent liquid, jets of watery flame. Crouching at the table in mid-room, he uncorked the bottles with his teeth; hurled the contents as if the desk were an Argonne parapet, the bottles hand grenades. Behind him Laïs Engles sobbed over an empty gun; Polypheme was under the sink; Dr. Eberhardt bouncing in frenzy between table and window to hold his side of the fort.
The room shook to the crackle of glass, clang of thrown knives, snap of sticks, smash of crockery. There was a time while the overhead dimness was thicker with missiles than a remembered twilight over Belleau Wood. Sappers might have been under the floor. Smoke, turgid with the smell of burning varnish and fried wood, clouded the hall balcony, swirled in through the door. Puffs of chemical in colored tint and stifling acid fumes choked the doorframe. Another charge was coming.
“Damballa! Damballa Oueddo!”
Ranier met the assault with liquid fire. Showered the breach with uncorked bottles of flame. Nitric acid. Deadly sulphuric. Household ammonia. Try a drink of that! Here’s an eye-opener! Something to remember us by!
A shower of hydrochloric cleared the doorway. Not the first time in history the primitive warrior was stopped by a judicious use of chemistry. But it couldn’t last. The charge was coming again. Those assorted vials of concentrated pain were giving out. Heat burned the air to bronze. The floor was blistering, becoming untenable. A cry from Dr. Eberhardt’s whiskers flung Ranier around to see the tree beyond the window monkey-jammed; Negroes shinning up the trunk, lizarding out on the gallery-touching limbs, hanging in the bright foliage like clusters of monstrous fruit.
He scoured the doorway with a throw of carbolic; pressed a last bottle into Laïs Engles’ hand. A Negro had thumped down on the outside gallery, trotted to the window, put one leg and a shining steel machete over the sill. Scowling, he drove Dr. Eberhardt aside with a vengeful slash, swung in the other leg, dropped lightly into the room. His scowl watched Dr. Eberhardt and his teeth grinned.
His silhouette blocked the window, and his Congo presence filled the room with a lion-like breathing and a fetor of black grease. A dented top hat was tilted Ted Lewis fashion over his brows; around his naked shoulders a circlet of pig’s-hoofs dangled; ragged pink trousers were belted by a dead snake from which hung an apron of gourd-rattles. Knife aloft, sweaty sinews glistening, he stood with his nostrils opening and shutting like gills while his rocking-horse eyeballs measured the scene as if it were a feast.
STARING AT THIS dreary master of ceremonies, Ranier couldn’t believe Dr. Eberhardt’s cry:
“Hyacinth Lucien! Aber, you Schweinhund, I will see you killed for this. When the police find out you are not a bartender, but a dirty hougan priest, a bocor—!”
The black man rumbled, “Pas capab’! Gendarmes too late. You bad witch doctor, chauché, de culte des morts. Dig zombies; raise dead. We know.” His scowl saw Ranier; deepened to a thundercloud. Saw Laïs Engles and beamed delight. “You witch doctor, too. Talk with zombie. Zombie friend of mademoiselle!”
Running thumb across knife-blade, he crouched for the spring. John Ranier swung the girl behind him in sick suspense. The black man’s feet were noiseless on the floor. Ranier broke from fascination to meet him half way. His fist started from his shoe-tops; flush on the point he caught that grinning jaw. He didn’t miss because he couldn’t. All the pent desperation, all the power in his being, the last ounce of dynamite went into the blow, as if that shining black jaw were the focal point of the whole night’s evil.
Crack! It should have felled an ox. It did not so much as alter the black man’s facial expression. The jaw never turned. Ranier felt as if he had punched an anvil. The Negro was on him; the knife a guillotine poised to whack. It was coming down—
It stopped!
Stopped as if that upraised arm had jammed at the shoulder socket. A convulsion scribbled the minstrel face under the tophat. Eyes jerked sideways as if fish hooks had caught them. Breath gushed through the teeth, blubbering the black rubber lips. Ffffffffaaaaaaa!
A backward leap for the window. Somersault over the sill. Dive off the gallery rail, crash in shrubbery below, scream to curdle the night. In a vertigo of astonishment, John Ranier was gaping at the vacuum where the champion had stood. Knife and executioner were gone!
Laïs Engles screamed, “Frogs!”
A bullfrog, making a green streak out of shadow, landed bellywhacker on a mat of firelight where those black feet had fled. The frog was followed by another. A third. Two more. Ranier saw the floor was alive with green mites. Bouncing and flipflopping, squat-tag over the heating boards, looking up at him with the bulged, indignant eyes of United States Senators routed from a Lilliputian election hall. An amphibian stampede escaping that aquarium smashed on the laboratory table.
A sentence went through his mind; Marcelline’s alto words in a café setting nine hours or nine thousand years ago? “I give you my words, messieurs, if you dropped a live bullfrog through the skylight of our government buildings, every soldier in the place would jump out of the windows—”
Frogs! It went with “Quintuplets!” With Haarman’s webbed foot, Professor Schlitz’s spectacles, that cracked skull with a string of pearls in its teeth. He captured and held up one of the slippery creatures by a jumbo leg. Black faces looking in through the window screeched and vanished as if exorcised. Ranier spun to see dark savages mounting the doorway barricade. The leader gestured a meat-axe. He spied the thing in Ranier’s clutch.
“Waaaaah!”
• • •
RANIER TIGHTENED HIS fingers, and the frog shot from his squeeze like a cake of wet green soap. The frog lit on the balcony; the balcony was cleared by magic. Dr. Eberhardt sailed a greenback out of the window. Chorused terror, a wild stampede in the branches of the sablier tree—
To his last day Ranier knew he would remember that escape from that abominable laboratory; that frog-fusillade across the smoking upper balcony; that charge behind a barrage of croaking swamp-mites. They carried the broken tank to the stairhead; Ranier threw. Fat frogs and lank. Frogs that went like green arrows through the smoke, sailed like speckled bats in the stifling haze. In the cinnamon smudge below an Ethiopian riot milled, clawed and fought to get through the front door and evacuate the hall. Where hydrochloric acid had failed, where bayonets would have failed and the Charge of the Light Brigade been barbecued, a plague of green amphibians turned the tide.
Ranier would always remember that. Old Testament deliverance in 1936. Himself, at the stairhead, pelting those black backs with bullfrogs. Dr. Eberhardt yanking greenbacks from the pockets of his yellow rainslicker and ten-word German oaths from his throat, hurling both with raging accuracy at terrified Negro skulls. Doctors gone back to witchcraft! Medicine failing, resorting to a remedy in Voodoo!
And he would always remember Laïs Engles flying down the stairway in her nurse’s costume, fierce-eyed, hair a loose golden shawl, chin up to the last, racing to snatch a gray tabby from the smoke below, hugging the cat in her arms. And the sight of Polypheme, the house-boy, lavender with fear, slipping on a frog that was spread like a banana peel on the bottom step and floundering on greased heels across the hall. Like a roller-skater he hit the sidewall, head on, grabbing for equilibrium.
The night must disgorge another horror before they could get out of there. For the house-boy’s grabbing hand caught a knob, and the knob yanked open a cupboard door. That closet in the wall! There had been a moment engraved on Ranier’s memory when an Angelo Carpetsi hooked high-waisted suspenders on that same door in the wall, fetching to light an umbrell
a and sun helmet which might have been (and wasn’t) Dr. Eberhardt.
What spilled from the cupboard this time—the door springing open like a jack-in-a-box at Polypheme’s touch—was something that might have been (and at one time was) Mr. Haarman.
He had not been waiting for a street car. Not in that baking hotbox, with one shoe in his pocket and his webbed foot bare; his eyes two staring zeros, mouth agawp; hands stiff at his side and palms outward, the right palm showing a scar in remembrance of an Indian at Para, Brazil.
Ranier shouted, “Haarman!” and he came out of the cubicle, bowing. He bowed too far. Bowed off balance and toppled, mouth baked open, eyes front, throwing affectionate arms around Polypheme’s neck to drag the squalling house-boy to the floor.
It cleared the last superstitious Haitian from the verandah outside and the last Haitian superstition from John Ranier’s head.
The girl was crying, “He was alive, Unkle Doktor! Only dying when they brought him to the hospital tonight. You remember the Kronprinz Albrecht, the plague, the funerals? It is the mate who died—Adolph Perl—!”
Outside the mob was a fleeing elephant herd; a dragon-tongue of fire burst from the cupboard door. In that blast of incandescence Dr. Eberhardt bawled: “Adolph Perl! Ja, it is! How? How?”
Match flares of fire were exploding around the little man’s rooted feet; Ranier saw in alarm that his own trouser-cuffs were smoking. He screamed, “I’ll tell you how!” and kicked. Kicked out with his lame foot and gave that taffy-haired dead body a boot that made his bad foot ache!
CHAPTER XXIV
EN ROUTE
Five A.M.
Port-au-Prince—69 Km, said the sign.
Flat miles of coastal highway Ranier had not seen before. The road smooth as glimpses of obsidian gulf. The Model T settling into a rhythmic hum. The grayness thinning ahead where presently the city would be seen. The night charred black behind where a conflagration, long visible in the sky, had burned to carbon. Behind him in the car—Laïs Engles, Dr. Eberhardt, and Professor Schlitz . . .