Now, it’s a big shadowy room and it’s choked with people. It’s lit by a single oil-lamp and a hell of a whole lot of candles, which may have shone out brightly against the darkness outside but are pretty dim once you get inside with them. The long flickering shadows thrown on all the walls by those cavorting in the center are almost as much of a protection to Eddie as he crouches back amidst them as the darkness outside would be. He’s been around, and a single look is enough to tell him that whatever else it is, it’s no revival meeting. At first he takes it for just a gin or rent party with the lid off, but it isn’t that either. There’s no gin there, and there’s no pairing off of couples in the dancing—rather it’s a roomful of devils lifted bodily up out of hell. Plenty of them have passed out cold on the floor all around him and the others keep stepping over them as they prance back and forth, only they don’t always step over but sometimes on —on prostrate faces and chests and outstretched arms and hands. Then there are others who have gone off into a sort of still trance, seated on the floor with their backs to the wall, some of them rocking back and forth, some just staring glassy-eyed, foam drooling from their mouths. Eddie quickly slips down among them on his haunches and gets busy. He too starts rocking back and forth and pounding the flooring beside him with his knuckles, but he’s not in any trance, he’s getting a swell new number for his repertoire at the Bataclan. A sheet of blank score-paper is partly hidden under his body, and he keeps dropping one hand down to it every minute jotting down musical notes with the stub of pencil in his fingers. “Key of A,” he guesses. “I can decide that when I instrument it. Mi-re-do, mi-re-do. Then over again. Hope I didn’t miss any of it.”
Boom-putta-putta-boom! Young a id old, black and tawny, fat and thin, naked and clothed, they pass from right to left, from left to right, in two concentric circles, while thf candle flames dance crazily and the shadows leap up and down on the walls. The hub of it all, within the innermost circle of dancers, is an old, old man, black skin and bones, only glimpsed now and then in a space between the packed bodies that surround him. An animal-pelt is banded about his middle; he wears a horrible jiyu mask over his face—a death’s-head. On one side of him, a squatting woman clacks two gourds together endlessly, that’s the “putta” of Eddie’s rh3^hm; on the other, another beats a drum, that’s the “boom.” In one upraised hand, he holds a squalling fowl, wings beating the air; in the other, a sharp-bladed knife. Something flashes in the air, but the dancers mercifully get between Eddie and the sight of it. Next glimpse he has, the fowl isn’t flapping any more. It’s hanging limply down and veins of blood are trickling down the old man’s shrivelled forearm.
“That part don’t go into my show,” Eddie thinks facetiously. The horrible old man has dropped the knife; he squeezes the life-blood from the dead bird with both hands now, still holding it in mid-air. He sprinkles the drops on those that cavort around him, flexing and unflexing his bony fingers in a nauseating travesty of the ceremony of baptism.
Drops spatter here and there about the room, on the walls. One lands near Eddie and he edges back. Revolting things go on all around him. He sees some of the crcized dancers drop to their hands and knees and bend low over these red polka-dots, licking them up from the floor with their tongues. Then they go about the room on all fours like animals, looking for others.
“Think I’ll go,” Eddie says to himself, tasting last night’s supper all over again. “They ought to have the cops on them.”
He maneuvers the score-sheet, filled now, out from under him and into his side-pocket; then he starts drawing his feet in toward him preparatory to standing up and slipping out of this hell-hole. Meanwhile a second fowl, black this time (the first was white), a squeaking suckling-pig, and a puppy-dog have gone the way of the first fowl. Nor do the carcasses go to waste when the old man has dropped them. Eddie sees things hapening on the floor, in between the stomping feet of the dancers, and he guesses enough not to look twice.
Then suddenly, already reared a half-inch above the floor on his way up, he wonders where the wailing went. And the clacking of the gourds and the boom of the drum and the shuffling of the feet. He blinks, and everything has frozen still in the room around him. Not a move, not a sound. Straight out from the old man’s gnarled shoulder stretches a bony arm, the end dipped in red, pointing like an arrow at Eddie. Eddie sinks down again that half-inch. He couldn’t hold that position very long, and something tells him he’s not leaving right away after all. “White man,” says a bated breath, and they all start moving in on him. A gesture of the old man sweeps them into motionlessness again.
A cracked voice comes through the grinning mouth of the jiyu mask, rimmed with canine teeth. “Whut you do here?”
Eddie taps his pockets mentally. He has about fifty on him. Will that be enough to buy his way out? He has an uneasy feeling however that none of this lot is as interested in money as they should be—at least not right now. Before he has a chance to try it out, another voice speaks up. “I know this man, papaloi. Let me find out.”
Johnny Staats came in here tuxedoed, hair slicked back, a cog in New Orleans’ night life. Now he’s barefooted, coatless, shirtless—a tousled scarecrow. A drop of blood has caught him squarely on the forehead and been traced, by his own finger or someone else’s, into a red line from temple to temple. A chicken-feather or two clings to his upper lip. Eddie saw him dancing with the rest, groveling on the floor. His scalp crawls with repugnance as the man comes over and squats down before him. The rest of them hold back, tense, poised, ready to pounce.
The two men talk in low, hoarse voices. “It’s your only way, Eddie. I can’t save you “
“Why, I’m in the very heart of New Orleans! They wouldn’t dare!” But sweat oozes out on Eddie’s face just the same. He’s no fool. Sure the police will come and sure they’ll mop this place up. But what will they find? His own remains along with that of the fowls, the pig and the dog.
“You’d better hurry up, Eddie. I can’t hold them back much longer. Unless you do, you’ll never get out of this place alive and you may as well know it! If I tried to stop them, I’d go too. You know what this is, don’t you? This is voodoo!”
“I knew that five minutes after I was in the room.” And Eddie thinks to himself, “You son-of-a-so-and-so! You better ask Mombo-jombo to get you a new job starting in tomorrow night!” Then he grins internally and, clown to the very end, says with a straight face: “Sure I’ll join. What d’ye suppose I came here for anyway?”
Knowing what he knows now, Staats is the last one he’d tell about the glorious new number he’s going to get out of this, the notes for which are nestled in his inside pocket right now. And he might even get more dope out of the initiation ceremonies if he pretends to go through with them. A song or dance for Judy to do with maybe a green spot focussed on her. Lastly, there’s no use denying there are too many razors, knives, and the like, in the room to hope to get out and all the way back where he started from without a scratch.
Staats’ face is grave though. “Now don’t kid about this thing. If you knew what I know about it, there’s a lot more to it than there seems to be. If you’re sincere, honest about it, all right. If not, it might be better to get cut to pieces right now than to tamper with it.”
“Never more serious in my life,” says Eddie. And deep down inside he’s braying like a jackass.
Staats turns to the old man. “His spirit wishes to join our spirits.”
The papaloi bums some feathers and entrails at one of the candle-flames. Not a sound in the room. The majority of them squat down all at once. “It came out all right,” Staats breathes. “He reads them. The spirits are willing.”
“So far so good,” Eddie thinks. “I’ve fooled the guts and feathers.”
The papaloi is pointing at him now. “Let him go now and be silent,” the voice behind the mask cackles. Then a second time he says it, and a third, with a long pause between.
Eddie looks hopefully at Staats. “Then I ca
n go after all, as long as I don’t tell anyone what I’ve seen?”
Staats shakes his head grimly. “Just part of the ritual. If you went now, you’d eat something that disagreed with you tomorrow and be dead before the day was over.”
More sacrificial slaughtering, and the drum and gourds and wailing start over again, but very low and subdued now as at the beginning. A bowl of blood is prepared and Eddie is raised to his feet and led forward, Staats on one side of him, an anonjmious colored man on the other. The papaloi dips his already caked hand into the bowl and traces a mark on Eddie’s forehead. The chanting and wailing grow louder behind him. The dancing begins again. He’s in the middle of all of them. He’s an island of sanity in a sea of jungle frenzy. The bowl is being held up before his face. He tries to draw back, his sponsors grip him firmly by the arms. “Drink!” whispers Staats. “Drink—or they’ll kill you where you stand!”
Even at this stage of the game, there’s still a wisecrack left in Eddie, though he keeps it to himself He takes a deep breath. “Here’s where I get my vitamin A for today!”
Staats shows up at orchestra rehearsal next A.M. to find somebody else at drums and percussion. He doesn’t say much when Eddie shoves a two-week check at him. Spits on the floor at his feet and growls: “Beat it, you filthy “
Staats only murmurs: “So you’re crossing them? I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes for all the fame and money in this world, guy!”
“If you mean that bad dream the other night,” says Eddie, “I haven’t told anybody and I don’t intend to. Why, I’d be laughed at. I’m only remembering what I can use of it. I’m a white man, see? The jungle is just trees to me; the Congo, just a river; the night-time, just a time for ‘lectric-lights.” He whips out a couple of C’s. “Hand ‘em these for me, will ya, and tell ‘em I’ve paid up my dues from now until doomsday and I don’t want any receipt. And if they try putting rough-on-rats in my orange juice, they’ll find themselves stomping in a chain gang!”
The C’s fall where Eddie spat. “You’re one of us. You think you’re pink? Blood tells. You wouldn’t have gone there—you couldn’t have stood that induction—if you were. Look at your fingernails sometime, look in a mirror at the whites of your eyes. Goodbye, dead man.”
Eddie says goodbye to him, too. He knocks out three of his teeth, breaks the bridge of his nose, and rolls all over the floor on top of him. But he can’t wipe out that wise, knowing smile that shows even through the gush of blood.
They pull Eddie off, pull him up, pull him together. Staats staggers away, smiling at what he knows. Eddie, heaving like a bellows, turns to his crew. “All right, boys. Altogether now!” Boom-putta-putta-boom-putta-putta-boom!
Graham shoots five C’s on promotion and all New Orleans jams its way into the Bataclan that Saturday night. They’re standing on each other’s shoulders and hanging from the chandeliers to get a look. “First time in America, the original VOODOO CHANT,” yowl the three-sheets on every billboard in town. And when Eddie taps his baton, the lights go down and a nasty green flood lights the platform from below and you can hear a pin drop. “Good evening, folks. This is Eddie Bloch and his Five Chips, playing to you from the Bataclan. You’re about to hear for the first time on the air the Voodoo Chant, the age-old ceremonial rhythm no white man has ever been permitted to listen to before. I can assure you this is an accurate transcription, not a note has been changed.” Then very soft and faraway it begins: Boom-putta-putta-boom!
Judy’s going to dance and wail to it, she’s standing there on the steps leading up to the platform, waiting to go on. She’s powdered orange, dressed in feathers, and has a small artificial bird fastened to one wrist and a thin knife in her other hand. She catches his eye, he looks over at her, and he sees she wants to tell him something. Still waving his baton he edges sideways until he’s within earshot. “Eddie, don’t! Stop them! Call it off, will you? I’m worried about you!”
“Too late now,” he answers under cover of the music. “We’ve stfiuiied already. What’re you scared of?”
She passes him a crumpled piece of paper. “I found this under your dressing room door when I came out just now. It sounds like a warning. There’s somebody doesn’t want you to play that number!” Still swinging with his right hand, Eddie unrolls the thing under his left thumb and reads it:
You can summon the spirits but can you dismiss them again? Think well.
He cnmiples it up again and tosses it away. “Staats trying to scare me because I canned him.”
“It was tied to a little bunch of black feathers,” she tries to tell him. “I wouldn’t have paid any attention, but my maid pleaded with me not to dance this when she saw it. Then she ran out on me—”
“We’re on the air,” he reminds her between his teeth. “Are you with me or aren’t you?” And he eases back center again. Louder and louder the beat grows, just hke it did two nights ago. Judy swirls on in a green spot and begins the unearthly wail Eddie’s coached her to do.
A waiter drops a tray of drinks in the silence of the room out there, and when the headwaiter goes to bawl him out he’s nowhere to be found. He has quit cold and a whole row of tables has been left without their orders. “Well, I’ll be—” says the captain, and scratches his head.
Eddie’s facing the crew, his back to Judy, and as he vibrates to the rhythm, some pin or other that he’s forgotten to take out of his shirt suddenly catches him and sticks into him. It’s a little below the collar, just between the shoulder-blades. He jumps a little, but doesn’t feel it any more after that ….
Judy squalls, tears her tonsils out, screeches words that neither he nor she know the meaning of but that he managed to set down on paper phonetically the other night. Her little body goes through all the contortions, tamed down of course, that that brownskin she-devil greased with lard and wearing only earrings performed that night. She stabs the bird with her fake knife and sprinkles imaginary blood in the air. Nothing like this has ever been seen before. And in the silence that suddenly lands when it’s through, you can count twenty. That’s how it’s gotten under everyone’s skin.
Then the noise begins. It goes over like an avalanche. But just the same, more people are ordering strong drinks all at once than has ever happened before in the place, and the matron in the women’s restroom has her hands full of hysterical sob-sisters.
“Try to get away from me, just try!” Graham tells Eddie at curfew time. “I’ll have a new contract, gilt-edged, ready for you in the morning. We’ve already got six grand worth of reservations on our hands for the coming week—one of ‘em by telegram all the way from Shreveport!”
Success! Eddie and Judy taxi back to their rooms at the hotel, tired but happy. “It’ll be good for years. We can use it for our signature on the air, like Whiteman does the Rhapsody.”
She goes into the bedroom first, snaps on the lights, calls to him a minute later. “Come here and look at this—the cutest little souvenir!” He finds her holding a little wax doll, finger high, in her hands. “Why, it’s you, Eddie, look! Small as it is, it has your features! Well isn’t that the clev “
He takes it away from her and squints at it. It’s himself all right. It’s rigged out in two tiny patches of black cloth for a tuxedo, and the eyes and hair and features are inked onto the wax.
“Where’d you find it?”
“It was in your bed, up against the pillow.”
He’s fixing to grin about it, until he happens to turn it over. In the back, just a little below the collar between the shoulder blades, a short but venomous-looking black pin is sticking.
He goes a little white for a minute. He knows who it’s from now and what it’s trying to tell him. But that isn’t what makes him change color. He’s just remembered something. He throws off his coat, yanks at his collar, turns his back to her. “Judy, look down there, will you? I felt a pin stick me while we were doing that number. Put your hand down. Feel anything?”
“No, there’s nothing there,” s
he tells him.
“Musta dropped out.”
“It couldn’t have,” she says. “Your belt-line’s so tight it almost cuts into you. There couldn’t have been anything there or it’d still be there now. You must have imagined it.”
“Listen, I know a pin when I feel one. Any mark on my back, any scratch between the shoulders?”
“Not a thing.”
“Tired, I guess. Nervous.” He goes over to the open window and pitches the little doll out into the night with all his strength. Damn coincidence, that’s all it was. To think otherwise would be to give them their inning. But he wonders what makes him feel so tired just the same—Judy did all the exercising, not he—^yet he’s felt all in ever since that number tonight.
Out go the lights and she drops off to sleep right with them. He lies very quiet for awhile. A little later he gets up, goes into the bathroom where the lights are whitest of all, and stands there looking at himself close to the glass. “Look at your fingernails sometime; look at the whites of your eyes,” Staats had said. Eddie does. There’s a bluish, purplish tinge to his nails that he never noticed before. The whites of his eyes are faintly yellow.
It’s warm in New Orleans that night but he shivers a little as he stands there. He doesn’t sleep any more that night ….
In the morning his back aches as if he were sixty. But he knows that’s from not closing his eyes all night, and not from any magic pins.
“Oh, my Grod!” Judy says, from the other side of the bed, “look what you’ve done to him!” She shows him the second page of the Picayune. “John Staats, until recently a member of Eddie Bloch’s orchestra, committed suicide late yesterday afternoon in full view of dozens of people by rowing himself out into Lake Pontchartrain and jumping overboard. He was alone in the boat at the time. The body was recovered half an hour later.”
Darkness at dawn : early suspense classics Page 21