The Dark Secret of Josephine rb-5

by Dennis Wheatley

As Roger mused upon the matter it struck him as peculiarly grim that for a second time de Caylus should have stretched up a hand out of the grave to drag him down into it. In '89 Roger had put down to ill-chance his arrest for the unorthodox duel he had fought two years earlier, but this seemed more in the nature of a lingering malignity exercised by the restless spirit of the dead Count. In that first case Roger had narrowly escaped execution, but powerful friends and his own wits had saved him. He doubted if anything could save him now.

  His only hope lay in Dan. He knew that Dan would willingly risk - his own life in an attempt, if he thought it had the least possibility of succeeding; but there would be no chance of that unless he could get help and he could not be expected to make a martyr of himself to no purpose. His prospects of securing adequate aid seemed far

  from good, for as a new recruit among the pirates he had probably been accepted only on probation and was being watched. Even should he be unhampered by restrictions on his movements those whom he could risk asking to join him in a forlorn attempt were lamentably few. Tom was now free, as also was Monsieur Pirouet; but apart from them there could be no more than half a dozen of the Circe's crew who had joined the pirates with some reluctance whom he dare approach. Any of them might well betray him before the attempt could be made, and even if he succeeded in getting together a little band of stalwarts what hope could such a handful have against de Senlac's men, who must number well over fifty?

  In spite of all the obstacles with which Dan would be faced Roger had great confidence in the courage and resource of his henchman. In consequence he clung to this one ray of hope and, as he turned miserably from side to side on the hard stone, he kept listening for cautious footsteps outside which might herald his delivery.

  Gradually the dark hours passed, but no sounds broke the stillness. High up in the wall on the opposite side of the dungeon to the door two patches of greyness appeared. Within ten minutes they had taken on the sharp outlines of small heavily-barred windows. Dawn had come and with it Roger's last hopes vanished. If Dan had found the odds too high against pulling off a coup during the night, it was a certainty that nothing he could attempt would succeed in daylight.

  Although the floor of the dungeon was below ground, as Roger could now see, it was a lofty place and roomy enough to hold a score of prisoners without undue crowding; but its only furnishings were a crock of water and a big earthenware vessel half full of fruit. There were no sanitary arrangements and the place stank abominably.

  The windows were closed and, except where one small pane had been knocked out, were encrusted with the grime of ages, so they let in little light and he could still see only imperfectly. To quench his thirst he stretched out a hand to take a paw-paw. As he did so some­thing moved on the pile of fruit. Leaning nearer he saw that, half obscured by the rim of the vessel, a huge black spider was lurking there. Its body was as big as a duck's egg, and its hairy legs as long as those of a good-sized crab. From its face protruded what appeared to be four large teeth, set like those of a rabbit.

  At Roger's quick movement of retreat the others roused, and saw the venomous-looking brute at which he was staring. Unbuckling his belt Jennings made a swipe at the spider but missed, and as it scuttled away into a dark corner, he said:

  "They're not poisonous, but can give a chap a nasty bite. Lucky the fruit was there fer 'im ter feed on, else 'e might ha' tried ter make a meal orf one of us."

  "Oh, what's a spider's bite when we shall so soon have to face death," exclaimed the young Supercargo desperately, and burst into a flood of tears.

  They did what they could to comfort him, but his nerve had gone and he quietened down only after a fit of hysterics had reduced him to exhaustion. Then for a long time they sat in silence, being unwilling to talk of what lay in store for them yet unable to think of anything else.

  At an hour they judged to be about half-past eight, there came a trampling of footsteps in the passage, the key rasped in the lock and the door was flung open. Followed by five other men Cyrano came down the stone steps.

  Roger noticed that his left knee was bandaged and that he grimaced with pain every time he put any weight on the leg. But that was small compensation for what followed.

  With evident enjoyment he gave an appraising look at Jennings, Wells and Fergusson in turn, then said in a silky voice: "M. le Vicomte has now settled his programme. For the next three days one of you will provide an overture each morning for a vocal concert by the noble Governor of Martinique towards the latter part of the afternoon; and on the fourth day he will give us his final solo. As inducements to you to give full play to your lungs the first of you is to be keelhauled, the second rent apart from being tied by the hands and feet between two downward bent young palm trees, and the third fed to M. le Vicomte's crocodiles."

  Neither Jennings nor the Supercargo knew enough French to understand fully what Cyrano had said, but Fergusson did, and after a moment he gulped: "Which of us is to die today?"

  Cyrano pointed at Jennings. "He goes first. As a mate of the Circe he knows well the feel of her deck beneath his feet, and now we mean to make him kiss her bottom." With a glance at his men he added: "Come! What are you waiting for. Get hold of him."

  Jennings had grasped enough to realize that when they got him outside they meant to kill him. His eyes starting from their sockets he backed against the wall. Then, mouthing a stream of profanity, he suddenly hurled himself upon the nearest pirate. The man went down under the attack but the others grabbed the mate and dragged him towards the steps. Cursing and kicking he was lugged up them. For minutes afterwards his snouts echoed down the passage, until they gradually died away in the distance.

  Meanwhile one of the men had refilled the water jug and tipped a basket full of fresh fruit on to the remains of the old supply. Cyrano made a gesture towards his injured knee, bared his teeth at Roger, and said: "I shall take a special pleasure in watching you dance for M. le Vicomte's crocodiles later in the day." Then he limped up the steps, the door was locked, behind him and the three remaining prisoners were left to their terrifying reflections.

  During the rest of the morning, except for short intervals of violent coughing caused by his tubercular lung, Wells lay semi-comatose, but the other two could not free their minds from a series of mental pictures in which the unfortunate Jennings was the central figure. They saw him stripped to the waist, and round his body the knotted bight of a long rope, one end of which had already been passed beneath the Circe amidships. They saw him, fighting and yelling, thrown over the side to splash with whirling arms and legs into the water. They saw the rope now taut and being hauled upon by a mob of running men, so that

  Jennings should be dragged under the hull and up the far side of the ship before he could drown. They saw him again on deck, dripping, gasping and bleeding from a score of lacerations to his flesh, while with brutal jests his tormentors revived him with neat rum to undergo the second scraping—and the third, the fourth, the fifth, until they could revive him no more.

  Roger knew that there must be sharks in the bay and that they would be attracted by Jennings' blood. He prayed that one of them might get him during the first plunge, and so put an end to his agony swiftly. Yet the thought conjured up sickening visions of the ordeal to which the vengeance-crazed Vicomte intended to inflict upon him later that very day. There seemed little to choose between having one's feet gnawed off by sharks or crocodiles; and for him that would not be followed by a swift if painful end. Tomorrow that fiend in human form meant to burn his arms away, and the next to have the skin stripped from his back. Lastly there would come the excruciating agony of lying pegged out on an ant heap while the fire-ants ate away his vitals.

  If his torn legs were given prompt attention it seemed certain that he would survive the first day's unholy sport, but there was a chance that the shock of the burns on the second day would kill him. After the third, at least, he might die from the loss of blood and nervous exhaustion, or have become a ra
ving lunatic no longer capable of registering physical suffering with full consciousness. He could only pray that it would be so.

  During the heat of the day the atmosphere became stifling and the stench almost unbearable. Mosquitoes plagued them and the itch of the bites drove them to a frenzy. But gradually the afternoon dragged through its awful length. At last the door was thrown open again.

  Cyrano limped down the steps with his gang of butchers. They were carrying cords with which to tie the prisoners' hands behind their backs. The Supercargo, now nearly off his head with fear, screamed and fought but was seized with a desperate fit of coughing and soon overcome. Fergusson was white to the lips but had the fortitude to allow his wrists to be tied without a struggle. So did Roger. He knew that to resist or attempt to get away in this confined space was utterly hopeless. It could lead only to exhausting himself quite fruitlessly. He must husband every ounce of strength he had, just m case a chance offered for him to break away when he was in the open.

  But his hands were bound and he would be one against fifty, or more probably a hundred, as the Vicomte meant the slaves also to witness his ruthless revenge. Even if he could drag the end of the cord that now bit into his wrists from the man who held it, what chance would he have? Before he had covered ten yards recapture was certain.

  This was his third round with de Caylus. When he had set out upon the first he had expected to meet his death by a sword thrust. Bitterly, he wished now that he had. After all these years de Caylus had caught up with him. As he walked up the stone steps he faced the fact that this must be the end; but a lingering end, from which he could escape only after countless hours of torture.

  chapter XI

  THE CROCODILE POOL

  As Roger was led across the main hall of the house the bright sun­shine was still streaming through its rear windows, and he judged that there must be a good hour to go before brief twilight heralded the tropic night. Out on the veranda Amanda sat hunched in a chair, her head bowed in her hands. The other women were grouped round her and behind them stood four pirates who had evidently been set to keep watch on them. The sound of feet caused Amanda to lift her head. Immediately she saw Roger she jumped up to run to him but one of the men roughly pulled her back. The three prisoners were pushed past the women and down the steps; then each of the pirates took one of the women by the arm, and fell in with them behind Cyrano.

  The foreshore presented an animated scene. Boatloads of men from the two ships were landing on the beach; others, and with them a score of slatternly looking women of mixed nationality, were emerg­ing from the long low building which formed the south wing of the house, and little groups of slaves, ranging in colour from coal black to tanned whites, were leaving the lean-to's roofed with banana palm. The pirates and their molls were gaily dressed in looted silks and cottons; whereas the slaves had on only scanty, ragged garments; but nearly all had coloured handkerchiefs knotted about their heads, and a festive atmosphere prevailed. All were making their way across the front of the house towards the northern arm of the bay and laughing and joking as though they were setting out on a bean-feast.

  Cyrano now had water on the knee, but was evidently determined not to miss the fun. Muttering curses with every step he took, he led his seven captives and their escort along the strand to a path that - -wound up into the forest.

  As they entered it they passed into a new, fantastic, twilight world. Trees of enormous girth reared up two hundred feet in height, but their upper boughs could not be seen because they became lost in a smother of other vegetation. Out of their hollows and every cranny in them sprang ferns, many themselves as large as medium-sized trees. From their branches tangles of lianas and creepers cascaded down like green waterfalls. Some of their stems were as thick as a man's arm, and snaked upwards like green pythons, while countless others looped in all directions or hung down as straight as a weighted string. Between the giant acomas, candle-woods and palms, a vast variety of other trees struggled for room, their branches interlacing. Many were loaded with fruit: golden mangoes, green avocadoes, clusters of yellow paw-paws, prickly soursops looking like huge pears, custard apples, wild apricots, limes and citrons. Below them rioted bushes: and big tufts of coarse grasses half submerged under more tangles, of creeper with here and there the fallen limb of a great tree that,.

  even as it rotted, was giving birth to ferns, mosses, and other forms of the teeming life that sprouted everywhere with almost incredible abundance.

  The path wound upwards, and after ten minutes' hard trudging they emerged into an open space floored with an outcrop of rock, in the crevices of which only mosses and small plants could find enough soil to maintain a foothold. On the inland side of this clearing a tangle of great boulders sloped up to a twelve-feet-high cliff, over­lapped with verdure where the forest began again; at its far end the cliff continued, curving and rising to a sheer wall over fifty feet in height. Below this high cliff lay the pool, on the edge of which had been erected a long-armed gibbet. To the seaward side of the open ground trees again towered skyward and between them the dense jungle cut off any view of the bay below.

  Several score of people had already congregated to see the sport, and the prisoners were led through them to the pool's edge. It was roughly oval and lay in a deep hollow so that the water was some eight feet below the rocky floor of the clearing. Near the place where the boulders stopped a small waterfall tumbled down from the cliff to feed it, and the overflow was carried off, after passing through an iron grille by another that fell into a gully leading down to the sea. From the clearing the only exit, other than that by which they had entered it, was across the gully by a plank bridge, beyond which another track opened leading farther up into the forest.

  Men and women were still crowding into the clearing and jostling one another for the best places to sit up on the boulders, where they could get a good view of the proceedings. Some of the slaves had already secured good positions there, but were being roughly dis­possessed by the pirates and their molls and herded with their fellow slaves on the opposite side of the clearing. It was to that side, too, that the prisoners had been brought; and, with the exception of Roger, they were all thrust back by their escorts towards the gap in the rim of the pool where its water poured off down the deep gully. Hoping for a word with Amanda, Roger tried to follow them, but, on a harsh order from Cyrano, he was pulled up short by the man who held the cord tying his wrists. In the wide circle that had now been cleared about the gibbet, he stood between them with every eye in the eager, murmuring throng upon him.

  Staring back, he searched the great ring of cruel or indifferent faces for Dan's, still hoping against all reason that his old friend might yet make a last minute attempt at rescue, but he could not see him. That was hardly surprising as in some places the crowd was four deep. Neither could he see Tom, but he caught sight of Monsieur Pirouet. The plump Frenchman was standing a few feet behind Dr. Fergusson, but on meeting Roger's desperate glance, he looked quickly away.

  Roger was already suffering a minor torment from the bites mosquitoes had inflicted on him during his many hours in the dungeon, and never in his life had he cut so poor a figure. Gone was all semblance to the debonair Mr. Brook of White's Club or the elegant M. Le Chevalier de Breuc who in other days had supped and danced at the courts of half a dozen continental monarchs. His clothes were torn and stained, his stockings laddered; his hair was matted under a dirty bandage, his face mottled by stings and his eyes dull from sleepless­ness. Even when he had played the part of a sans-culotte> for all the filth of his apparel, his bearing singled him out as a man of vigour and determination; whereas now he stood with slack limbs and hunched shoulders, so that the pirates, fearing he would show them only poor sport, began to jeer at him for cowardice.

  Actually he was now endeavouring to close his mind against coherent thought, so that terror might not drive him to some desperate futile act which could only cause even greater distress to Amanda and the others than they
were already suffering. For their sakes, too, he wanted to conserve every atom of mental resistance he could muster; so that when the ordeal came, even if he could not manage to remain silent, at least he would not wring their hearts by screaming.

  A murmur of excitement and a few cheers heralded the approach of the Vicomte. The crowd parted, forming a ragged lane through which he advanced, a tall malacca cane in one hand, the other resting lightly on the arm of his blond mignon, who in the sunlight looked more than ever like a slightly negroid young Viking. As they came up beside Roger, de Senlac pointed at the long-armed gibbet and said:

  "You need fear no mishap, Monsieur, for you are not the first to afford us this type of entertainment, and practice has enabled us to perfect our arrangements. The harness dangling from the arm of the gibbet will be,strapped about your shoulders, and the main post turns upon a pivot so that you may be swung out over the pool. Then we shall lower you by inches until your feet are near enough to the water for my pets to snap off your toes."

  For the first time Roger forced himself to look at the water rippling eight feet below him. The sun had now gone down behind the hill and no reflected light flickered from it, but the splashing of the little waterfall kept it in perpetual motion so that he could not see beneath its surface. But on the far side of the pool a narrow sickle-shaped beach shelved up to the cliff-face and, half submerged in the water close in to it, there floated several long shapes whose rough texture gave them the appearance of rotting tree trunks.

  De Senlac pomted with his cane. "There are a few of my beauties. Although we talk of them as crocodiles they are, more strictly speaking, a type of alligator and in these parts called cayman. Let us rouse them up for the treat they are about to be given."

  Turning, he beckoned to the elder Herault, who was standing a few yards off with two negroes beside him, both of whom carried big wicker baskets on their heads. When the baskets were set down Roger saw that they contained pigs' trotters, cows' hocks and other offal. Selecting half a calf's head Herault pere threw it into the middle of the pool. It had scarcely touched the surface when the water was broken in a score of places. Snouts with knobbly ends were thrust up, long lean jaws gaped open showing rows of strong fang-like teeth, little eyes gleamed evilly, and scaly tails that could have knocked a man off his feet threshed the water into foam. In a moment the leaping and plunging of the ferocious creatures had churned the pool into a seething cauldron.