by Otto Penzler
The sun was well up when they went on to the veranda. There should have been the click of machetes in the cane fields and the low, lazy laughter of the workers. But everything was still, and that stillness held an ominous meaning.
Wylie was frankly without hope—more so as the day wore on, and Vivian, although she had never admitted defeat, admitted to herself that she saw no way out of the impasse. Benedetti, she saw now, had made no mistake when he told her that escape was impossible.
The day wore on, and still Benedetti did not put in an appearance. Once Vivian asked one of the maids where he could be found and received in answer a queer jumble of Creole French that held no meaning. Later, they essayed a walk to the Sugar Central, whose smokestacks rose on the other side of the cane fields, but one of the ever-present natives stepped slowly in their path, his machete openly in evidence. From the corner of her eyes Vivian could see others, alert, ready, at the edge of the jungle. Their captors were taking no chances.
On the far side of the cleared space Vivian could see a break in the jungle where a path ended. From this path men kept coming and going, and this, she surmised, must lead to the place where they were scheduled to die that night.
It was after dinner when Benedetti made his appearance, and with him stalked tragedy.
Vivian and Wylie were on the broad veranda, walking up and down. Something—some sixth sense—warned Vivian of danger, even before she heard the quick, catlike tread behind her. She made an attempt to swing around an instant too late. Someone leapt on her. A strong arm was locked about her throat. A hand was clamped over her mouth. A knee dug into the small of her back. She wrenched, tore at the gripping hands, even as she saw other hands seizing Wylie; she was aware of Benedetti’s face, his features hard as stone. In the same second something dropped over her head and blotted the world into darkness.
How long she was held there motionless on the veranda she did not know. Then came a quick gabble of Creole in Benedetti’s voice and the smothering hand was removed.
She flashed a glance around. The place was deserted save for herself, Benedetti and one tall native who stood beside the veranda steps, the ever-present machete in evidence. Obviously a guard.
The man interpreted her look.
“Your companion is gone. You will never see him again,” he said, and his voice was indifferent. He might have been speaking of some trivial object that had disappeared. He turned back toward the dining room, where candlelight made a soft glow. Vivian followed. The house seemed curiously still, as if all life had departed from it save these two.
“Gone—you mean—” She could not finish the sentence.
Benedetti nodded and selected a cigarette from a box on a little side table; lit it at one of the candles.
“He will be the first sacrifice to Ogoun Bada-gri. When the great green snake god has finished with him they will come for you. You will be the climax of the ceremony,” he told her brutally.
“You mean that you—a white man—will actually permit these men to make a sacrifice of us?” she queried. She knew, before she said it, that any appeal to him would be useless, but her mind was going around frantically, seeking a method of warding off the death that was imminent.
“What is your life and that of your companion to me?” he asked. “Nothing—not so much as the ash from the cigarette—compared with the fact that your death means that I keep my plantation a year longer. I refused close to half a million dollars from the sugar trust for the island. Do you think, then, that I would permit a little thing like your life to rob me of it?”
CHAPTER V
VOODOO DEATH
Vivian did not answer. Her eyes roamed around the room, although already every article in it had been photographed indelibly on her retina. A fly had alighted on the border of the sticky fly paper that lay in the center of the mahogany table. It tugged and buzzed, but the sticky mess held it too firmly.
“You may comfort yourself with the thought,” Benedetti went on, “if the fact is any comfort, that you are not the first. There have been others. The little dancing girl from the Port-au-Prince cabaret, a Spanish girl from Santo Domingo …”
He was not boastful, purely meditative as he sat there and smoked and talked, telling Vivian of the victims whose lives had paid for his hold on his sugar plantation. Vivian’s eyes were fastened on the feebly fluttering fly on the sticky paper. They, too, were caught like flies in a trap, and unless she could do something immediately—she faced the fact calmly—it would be the end.
Abruptly she leaned forward. There was a stillness in her pose, a stillness in her opaque eyes. Her hands coiled like springs. She found it difficult to keep her detached poise as the scheme began to unfold and take shape in her brain.
She smiled thinly. The air was suddenly electrical, filled with the portent of danger. Benedetti caught the feel of it, and peered at her suspiciously for a moment. The Lady from Hell knew that it was a thousand to one that she would lose. But, if her scheme worked, she could save Wylie’s life and her own, and Benedetti might be made to pay for the thing he had attempted— pay as he had never dreamed that he would have to pay.
Reaching out one hand she moved the candle in front of her, so that its glow fell more on Benedetti’s face than her own. Her voice, as she spoke, was quiet, almost meditative. But her eyes told a different story.
“How much time have I to live?” she said.
The man glanced at his watch.
“Roughly, two hours,” he said. He might have been estimating the departure time of a steamer, his voice was so calm. “It might be a trifle more or less—the time of my workers is not accurate. When the drums stop they will come for you. And when they start again—well, you will be there then.”
She rose to her feet, leaning lightly on the table.
“If I am to die,” she said hysterically, “I will die beautiful.” Then she added as an explanation, “My makeup is in my room.”
But he was on his feet too, alert, wary. “You must not leave my presence,” he said. “I cannot permit it. The sacrifice must go to the arms of Ogoun Badagri alive, not a corpse.”
His dark eyes held no recognition of the fact that she was a very beautiful woman. Vivian sensed, and rightly, that to him she was merely a woman who might thwart his plans. But she caught the implication in his last sentence.
“I shall not take poison,” she said. “You may come with me—watch me, if you wish.”
She took a step or two and groped blindly at the table for support. Instinctively he stretched out a hand to steady her.
That was the moment for which she had planned, the instant for which she had been waiting. Benedetti made the fatal mistake that many men had made with the Lady from Hell as an opponent—of underestimating her as an adversary.
Like a striking snake her hand darted to the table, seized one of the heavy candlesticks. Before Benedetti could interfere, had even divined her purpose, the heavy metal fell across his forehead with stunning force. He crumpled to the floor without a murmur.
Leaving him where he had fallen, Vivian ran to the door and peered out. The gigantic black on guard at the veranda steps had heard nothing. He was still standing there, unaware of the drama being enacted within the dining room.
Swiftly she turned back and her slender fingers searched the drawers of the carved mahogany sideboard against the wall until she found what she sought—a heavy, sharp carving knife. She balanced it speculatively in her hand. It would do, she decided.
The man was still standing there when she peered out the door again. He never saw the slender blade as it flew through the air, sped by a hand that had learned its cunning from the most expert knife thrower in Shanghai. The blade went through, sinking into the flesh at the base of his throat as though it had been butter. He died without an outcry.
Now she must work fast, if she were to escape and save Wylie too. Benedetti she bound and gagged and rolled against the sideboard where he was out of the way. But first she had
taken his revolver from his side pocket.
Trip after trip she made, first to the flat tin roof of the house, and then to the front of the house. Finally she was satisfied with what she had done, and, snatching up a flashlight from the sideboard, fled toward the path in the jungle that she knew led to the place of sacrifice.
A tropical squall was rising out of the sea beyond the little cove. A cloud, black in the light of the moon, was rising above the horizon. She glanced at it anxiously. Then she plunged into the jungle.
The valences of the palms were motionless against the moonlit sky. The atmosphere, as she pushed her way along, seemed saturated with mystery, dew dripping, bars of green moonlight between the trunks of the trees; the cry of night birds, the patter of something in the dark mystery of the tree roof overhead, the thudding of the drums that had never ceased. Out of that familiar hollow rhythm of drums that had begun to emerge a thread of actual melody—an untra-ditional rise and fall of notes—a tentative attack, as it were, on the chromatic scale of the beat. A tentative abandonment of Africa. It was a night of abandonment, anyhow, a night of betrayal and the peeling off of blanketing layers down to the raw.
Once she stopped short with a sudden emptiness in her chest at sight of what she thought was a man in the path ahead. But it was only a paint-daubed, grinning skull on a bamboo stake planted in the ground—a voodoo ouanga. Then she went ahead again. Evidently there were no guards posted. With every inhabitant of the island concerned in the ceremony in one way or another there would be no need for guards to be posted now.
The rapid sequence of events had edged Vivian’s nerves, and the boom of the drums—heavy, maddening, relentless—did nothing to soothe them. That passage through the jungle was galling, fraying the nerve ends like an approaching execution.
A red glow came to her through the trees, and seemed to spread and spread until it included the whole world about her in its malignancy. The drums, with that queer rise and fall of notes that it seemed impossible to achieve with taut skins stretched over drum heads, beat upon her senses, pounded until the air was filled with sounds that seemed to come from the earth, the sky, the forest; dominated the flow of blood with strange excitations.
She had formulated no plan for rescuing Wylie. She could not, until she reached the spot and saw what she had to contend with. She had the gun she had taken from Benedetti, but six cartridges against a horde of drum-maddened blacks—that was only a last resort.
And then she stood on the edge of a clearing that seemed sunk to the bottom of a translucent sea of opalescent flame.
Something that was age-old was happening in that crimson-bathed clearing, something old and dark, buried so deeply under the subtleties of civilization that most men go through life without ever knowing it is there, was blossoming and flowering under the stark madness of those thudding drums.
Coconut fiber torches, soaked in palm oil, flaring red in the blackness of the night lit up the space in front of her like a stage, the torchlight weaving strange scarlet and mauve shadows. Tall trees, lining the clearing opposite her, seemed to shelter masses of people, darker shadows against the red glow of the burning torches.
Two enormous drums, taut skins booming under the frenzied pounding of the palms of two drummers, stood on one side. A dozen, two dozen dancing black figures, male and female,
spun and danced in the center of the clearing, movements graceful and obscene—animal gestures that were identical with similar dances of their ancestors hundreds of years before in Moko or the Congo.
And then she saw Wylie. He was tied to a post in the center of the clearing, and the dancers were milling about him. Beside him stood a woman whom Vivian instinctively knew must be the Mamaloi, the priestess of whom Benedetti had spoken.
Now and then the priestess gave vent to a sound that seemed to stir the dancers to greater activity—to spur the slowly humming throng of watchers to a point of frenzy; a sound such as Vivian had never heard before and never hoped to hear again. When she stopped, it would hang, incredibly high-pitched, small, like a black thrill in the shadow. It was shocking and upsetting out of that ancient thin figure.
Her eyes shifted from the aged figure to the sky line above the trees. The black cloud that, a short time before had been no larger than the palm of her hand on the horizon, was visible through the branches of the trees now. Even as she looked a faint flicker of heat lightning laced through it.
And then, as if at a conductor’s signal, more torches flowered on the edge of the clearing, and in their light the Lady from Hell saw half a dozen men staggering forward with an enormous thing of bamboo—a cage—and in that cage was a great snake; a boa constrictor, perhaps, or a python, although neither of them, she seemed to remember, was native to Haiti.
CHAPTER VI
WHITE MAN’S VOODOO
They placed the cage in the center of the clearing, and Vivian saw that it had been placed so that a small door in the cage was directly opposite Wylie’s bound figure. The significance of that fact went through her like a breath of cold wind. If she failed, she also would be bound to that stake. Mentally she could see the little door in the cage opening, the great triangular head of the snake gliding slowly …
Swiftly she bent over and caught up a handful of the black leaf mold underfoot, smeared it over her face, her arms, her neck, her shoulders. A section of the dress she was wearing was ripped off and made into a turban that hid the flaming crown of her hair. More earth was rubbed onto the white of her dress.
Then, with swift leaps, she was on the outer fringe of the dancers, and the chaos of moving arms and legs caught her up and swallowed her as a breaking wave on the beach swallows a grain of sand.
It was a mad thing to do, a desperate thing. She knew that, normally, her crude disguise would not have fooled the natives. The Haitian black seems to have the ability to almost smell the presence of a blanc, much as an animal can smell the presence of another. But, in that flickering torchlight, the crudeness of disguise would not be so apparent, and in that unceasing madness of drums that went on like a black echo of something reborn, she hoped that her alien presence would pass unnoticed long enough for her to accomplish her object.
Slowly she worked her way through the writhing, dancing mass of figures toward the center. She knew that her time was short—that the lesser ceremony was approaching its height. Even as she reached the inner ring of dancers she saw the ancient Mamaloi joining in the dance, while the others kept a respectful distance from her. Monotonously, maddeningly, the priestess twisted and turned and shivered, holding aloft a protesting fowl. Faster and faster she went, and while all eyes were fastened on that whirling figure Vivian managed to reach Wylie’s bound figure.
A swift slash with the knife she had hidden beneath her dress and his hands were free.
“Keep still … don’t let them see that you’re not bound,” she whispered. Another motion and the bonds that fastened his ankles to the post were free.
Vivian moved about Wylie with graceful motions, imitating the movements of the blacks about her, and her voice came to him in broken, desperate whispers:
“Signal … you’ll recognize it… don’t move until then … dead tree by the edge of the clearing … that’s the path … I’ll be waiting there … it’s only chance …”
Then she was gone, breasting her way through the black figures that danced like dead souls come back from Hell in the evil glow of the sputtering torches. And then came a great shout as the Mamaloi caught the chicken she held by the head and whirled it around and around.
Throom … throom … throom. The drums were like coalescing madness. A moan went up from the onlookers and a chill went through Vivian.
She knew from what Benedetti had told her that the chicken was the prelude of what would happen to Wylie. Next, the old woman would slash Wylie’s throat … let his life blood spurt into a bowl with which the dancers would be sprinkled. Then would come the lesser ceremony, while the guard at the house would start wi
th her for the ceremony that would end with the door in the great snake’s cage being opened …
Vivian snatched a torch from the hands of one of the dancers. The man did not even seem to be aware of the fact that it had been taken away. From beneath her dress she took a stick of dynamite with fuse attached—part of her loot from the storeroom—and touched the fuse to the flame of the torch.
It sputtered and she hurled it with all her strength at her command toward the overhanging tree beneath which the drummers sat, then fled for the bare naked branches of the dead tree that stood where the path entered the clearing— the spot where she had told Wylie she would meet him.
She had barely reached the spot when there came a tremendous concussion that shook the earth, and a gush of flame. The thing was as startling, as hideously unexpected to the drum, maddened Haitians as a striking snake. Scream after scream—long, jagged screams that ripped red gashes through the dark, were followed by a swift clacking of tongues, a terrified roar as dancers and onlookers milled about, black bodies writhing in the light of the remaining torches. A black tide, rising, filled the clearing with terrified clamor. A moment later there was the sound of running feet and Wylie was at her side.
“This way,” she whispered, and guided him into the path.
Both of them knew that it would be only a moment before the startled natives recovered their wits and discovered that their victim was gone. Then they would take up their trail again immediately.
“Where are we going?” Wylie asked her as he ran behind her along the winding jungle trail.
“The house,” she answered tersely.
“The house?” He almost halted in his amazement. “But Vivian—that’s the first place they’ll make for. Even if you’ve found weapons we can’t hold them off forever.”
“Wait,” she said. “No time to explain now … But if things work out, we’ll be off this island before morning, safe and sound.”