Tears were streaming down her face. Connell was saddled with a problem. Being adopted by a negro entails responsibilities: the colored man brings tribute of game, fish, and vegetables; the white patron reciprocates with old clothes and by bailing the negro out of jail at reasonable intervals.
“That no good man of yours probably drank my orange wine and now is afraid to come back,” Connell accused.
“No suh, no suh!” Amelia protested. “Plato don’t drink nuthin’!”
“Well, maybe I can help,” Connell temporized.
“Yass, suh, Mistah Walt!” Amelia beamed through her tears. “Ah knew you’d take care of yo’ah cullud folks.”
She thrust into his hands a paper-wrapped parcel.
“Ah don’ baked yo’all a chocolate cake for yo’ lunch when you go to get dat no good niggah! And ah fixed up some salted cashew nuts, too.”
African guile had caught him totally off guard. He had accepted the present. Nothing to do but resign himself to a sixty-mile drive down the Mississippi Delta where the Cajuns convert undersized oranges into fragrant, blasting wine; a no-man’s land, where a century or more ago, Lafitte’s pirates found refuge.
* * * *
The next morning Connell thrust Amelia’s gift of chocolate cake and cashew nuts into the parcel compartment and headed down the west bank. He spent the forenoon searching small town jails as he worked his way down the Delta, but no news of Plato. His last chance was Venice, at the end of the highway.
Venice was half a dozen shacks plus a general store not much larger than a piano box. The girl behind the counter was uncommonly attractive. One of those substantial Cajun women, with luxurious curves, and plump, firm breasts as inviting as her amiable smile. Connell, however, managed to shift his glance to her dark eyes and began his oft repeated query concerning Plato and his red flivver.
Marie shook her head. Her eyes suddenly became somber as she said, “You’re too late.”
“What do you mean?” Connell, catching her by the wrist, felt her tremble.
“I didn’t have any orange wine,” she began, lowering her voice almost to a whisper. “So he went back.”
Something was distinctly salty.
“You’d better tell me,” he said in a quiet voice that impelled her attention.
Marie was wavering, but she was afraid. Finally she compromised, “We can talk better in back here.”
Connell followed her to the rear of the tiny store. The crude, primitive room contained an oil stove, a small wooden table. In the further corner was a bed.
“You won’t never see your nigger again,” began Marie, drawing up a chair for Connell. “Not with walking dead men like they got at Ducoin’s plantation.”
“Walking dead men!” he echoed, leaping to his feet. “Who’s Ducoin? What—”
But Connell’s query was cut short. The Cajun girl’s hand closed about his arm, drawing him to her side.
“I’ll tell you later,” she whispered. Her dark, smouldering eyes were still haunted, but her lips suggested reasons for delay.
Under other circumstances, Connell would have welcomed the hint, but something about her furtive glance and unnatural eagerness combined with her sinister remarks to repel him. But Connell made little progress. As he drew away, her arm slipped about his neck and her ripe, voluptuous curves pressed him closely as she pleaded, “Don’t go…I’m terribly scared…”
She was. But Connell wasn’t. And that warm, plump body was as inflaming as orange wine. He drew her to him, stroked her black hair, caressed firm flesh that trembled at his touch, and tried to entice her further remarks about walking dead men.
However, it did not work as he intended. His presence did reassure her, but the contact made his pulse pound like like a rivetting hammer, and the sudden rise and fall of her breasts showed that it was becoming mutual.…
Marie’s dark eyes were no longer haunted by anything but a desire to get closer. Presently she forgot to brush away an exploring hand, and yielded her eager lips.
And then Connell learned that the Delta offers more than orange wine.…
* * * *
It was close to sunset before he remembered Plato and renewed his queries.
“Honest, I couldn’t help it,” Marie protested. “I didn’t have any wine left and just as the nigger was going to leave, in comes Ducoin with a load. And he tells the nigger to come along, he’d fix him up. And I didn’t dare warn him.”
“Wait till I get at Ducoin!”
“Don’t!” implored Marie. “He’ll know I told you. And you can’t do nothing. Plato’s a walking corpse by now—and I’ll be one, if Ducoin finds out—”
She tried to detain Connell, but he broke clear before her full-blown fascinations could conspire with her sinister hints. She had merely delayed the quest; and Connell headed up the river, toward that mysterious plantation.
Ducoin’s house loomed up above the surrounding orange groves, nearly a quarter of a mile from the highway. Its remnants of white paint made it resemble a gaunt, ancient tomb. As Connell pulled up, he saw a Model T parked in a clump of shrubbery. Plato’s decrepit red Lizzie!
And then Connell received a shock. A file of negroes emerged from the orange groves. Their black faces were vacant. They shambled toward the left wing of the house with the grotesque gait of animated dummies.
The sodden, lifeless clump, clump, clump of their feet sounded like clods of earth dropping on a coffin. Their arms dangled limp as rags.
Connell shuddered. No wonder that the ignorant Cajuns considered them walking dead men.
Clump, clump, clump. The most poverty stricken and oppressed negro laborers jest and chatter at the end of a day’s work; but these black men stalked in silence broken only by the shuffling crunch of their flat feet.
Following the file came a white man who wore boots and riding breeches. His heartless, handsome face was tanned and deeply lined. Intelligent but relentless. His dark eyes were as cryptic as his smile as he confronted Connell.
“Looking for someone?”
“Yes. A nigger named Plato,” answered Connell. “Are you Pierre Ducoin?”
“That’s the name,” admitted the taskmaster. “But there’s no strange nigger on the plantation.”
The more Connell saw of Ducoin the less he liked him. There was something uncanny about the man.
As Connell hesitated, something compelled him to glance towards the veranda that ran the full length of the house, some ten feet above the ground level. Framed by a French window was a girl whose dark eyes and lovely, delicate features for an instant made him forget that she was clad only in a chiffon robe which, half parted, revealed enticing glimpses of silken legs, and a body to which clung the caressing haze of sheer fabric that betrayed slender, olive-tinted curves…the amorous inward sweep of her waist…pert breasts that any hand larger than her own could conceal.…
Her lips were silently moving, and she was gesturing for him to leave at once. But she had overlooked her own loveliness. Connell was staying.
“I’m Walt Connell, and I think you’re mistaken,” was the retort. “Let me talk to your niggers. Someone of them might know about him.”
That play was better than making a liar of Ducoin by mentioning Plato’s flivver, half concealed in the shadows.
For a moment Ducoin’s eyes flared with a light that Connell was certain could not be the reddish sunset glow; his qquiline features tightened, then suddenly he smiled and amiably agreed, “Do that in the morning. Too late now. This plantation reaches all the way out to the bay, and most of my crew is quartered at the further end. Take us an hour or more to go out, and it’s getting dark. Make yourself at home—there is plenty of room here, and you can look in the morning.”
A grim-faced negress served dinner in a vast, high-ceiled
room facing the west. Fried chicken, Creole gumbo, rice, and corn bread. All tastily seasoned, except for an utter lack of salt. Connell, reaching for the only shaker on the table, noted that it contained pepper.
“Sorry,” apologized Ducoin, “but we’ve run all out of salt. It’s rather primitive down here on the Delta. We shop only once a week.”
Dinner, despite Ducoin’s easy cordiality, was a decided strain. Connell was wondering at the absence of the lovely girl who had warned him.
“Working many niggers?” he queried.
“A dozen or two,” Ducoin carelessly answered. “Haitians: part of an odd lot brought to the West Indies a century or more ago. Sullen, stolid brutes, but good workers.”
He changed the subject. Connell was relieved when the colored woman served night-black, chicory-tinctured coffee, and a pony of excellent brandy. Ducoin remarked, “We turn in early here. Plantation hours begin before sunrise. Aunt Célie will show you your room. In the morning you can make the rounds with me.”
Connell followed the grim negress down the hallway. Her morose, stolid demeanor confirmed Ducoin’s comment on the temperament of his negroes; yet Connell was distinctly perturbed. And as the door closed behind Aunt Célie, he received a distinct shock.
The moon was rising, casting a shimmering, silvery glow over the black expanse of open fields. Men were at work, digging and hoeing. Utterly unheard of, a night shift on a plantation. Connell heard the thudding blows of their implements, but not a murmur, not a spoken word.
There wasn’t an overseer, yet they toiled on, methodically, as though motor driven, never pausing to lean on their hoes for a breathing spell. They advanced in an unwavering line, grotesquely combining the precision of military drill with the uncouth, ungainly movements of dummies.
Connell shivered and shook his head. Questioning such unnatural creatures would be futile. One glimpse of them and Plato would have taken to his heels. He wondered if his negro might not have abandoned his flivver, frightened out of all reason by the uncanny spectacle of Africans working without song and chatter.
A soft, furtive stirring in the hall just outside of his room made him start violently. Something softly slinking down the hall had paused at his door. By the moon glow that penetrated the shadows, he saw the scarcely perceptible motion of the knob. Something was stealthily seeking him. A silent bound brought Connell to the fireplace, and out of the moonglow. His trembling fingers closed on a pair of massive tongs.
He watched the door soundlessly swing inward. A nebulous spindle of whiteness cleared the edge of the jamb: a spectral, shimmering whiteness that for an instant froze Connell’s blood. Then he saw the intruder was the girl who had warned him.
She paused to close the door, and as she turned from the threshold Connell for the first time realized how lovely she was. Her tiny feet were bare, and her shapely legs, gleaming like ivory exclamation marks through the sheer, gauzy fabric of her nightgown, blossomed into seductive curves that fascinated Connell.
The vagrant breeze shifted, drawing the misty fabric closer, revealing her perfections as though she were clad in no more than bare loveliness. The filmy silk clung to the inward curve of her waist, and caressed the firm, delicious roundness of her breast. She was a lovely unreality in the vague light that made her face a sweet, pallid mask, and her black hair a succession of gleaming highlights.
She advanced a pace before she saw Connell.
“Leave at once.” As she spoke, she caught his arm. She was trembling violently.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s not too late,” she whispered as Connell seated himself, and drew her to the arm of his chair. “My uncle is out putting the night shift to work. “I’m Madeline Ducoin.”
“I came here to get my nigger,” insisted Connell.
“He’s one of them now,” said Madeline, shuddering. “A walking corpse.”
“That’s absolute rot! How can a dead man walk?”
“You saw them, didn’t you?” Madeline countered, sighing and helplessly shaking her head.
As she leaned toward the window and gestured at the macabre figures that toiled in the moonlight, her dark hair caressed Connell’s cheek, and he felt the supple flexion of her slender body. Madeline at least was real in the moon-haunted glamour. His arms closed about her, and drew her to his knee. She was still trembling, but at his touch, she snuggled up like a contented kitten.
Pillowing her head on his shoulder, she looked up and repeated, “Please leave, before it’s too late.”
Connell laughed softly and said, “Never had a better reason for staying.”
For a moment they crossed glances in the moonlight. His arms tightened about her, and she did not draw away. And then as though by common impulse, their lips met, and Connell felt the ecstatic shiver that rippled down her silk clad body. She tried to catch his wrist, brush aside the hand that caressed the gleaming curves of her thigh.
Her inarticulate murmur of protest, breathed in Connell’s ear, further inflamed his blood, and his possessive caresses for the moment brushed aside the hovering presence of mystery and horror. Each seemed to feel that the other was a haven of reality in the devil-haunted plantation.
The lacy hem of her gown was creeping clear of her knees. Connell’s kisses were stifling her murmured protests. Madeline’s breath came in ever quickening gasps. She was clinging to him, the pressure of her firm young breasts telling him that she really did not want him to desist.
If Ducoin was making the rounds of his spectral plantation where black automatons tilled the fields by moonlight, there was no hurry. Connelly’s ardent caresses were calling to the surface all the fire and passion of Madeline’s Latin blood. She was lonely and frightened, and his purposeful persistence thrilled and assured her. Her final protest ended in a sigh and a murmur and a silky embrace that became as possessive as Connell’s enfolding arms.
“We’ll soon leave, darling.” As he emerged from his chair, she still clung to him.
“Aunt Célie is asleep.” Her whisper was an invitation. “And Uncle Pierre won’t be back for quite a while.…”
She caught his hand.
“You’ll take me with you, won’t you?” Madeline murmured, flinging back her disarrayed dark hair, and extending alluring arms. “When we leave.…”
“I’ll take you away from here, forever and always,” he promised.
* * * *
For a long time their murmurings mocked the horrors that marched blindly across the spreading fields of the moon flooded Delta. Finally Madeline slipped from Connell’s arms, and gestured toward the moon blot on the floor.
“It’s getting late, sweetheart,” she whispered. “We’ll go to New Orleans as soon as I can pack up.”
Connell followed her, and watched her hastily bundle together odds and ends selected from her wardrobe. A strange, mad night. Going in search of a stray nigger, and finding this incredible armful of loveliness. It was all fantasy, but Connell’s lips still tingled from the fire of her kisses. Let Pierre Ducoin keep the secret of the uncanny walking dead men. Plato would eventually appear with some wild story accounting for his absence. It was utterly incredible that he would have lingered long enough to have left any clues. Amelia’s African guile had fairly bludgeoned Connell into this mad search.
He watched Madeline dressing in the moon glamour. Once he reached New Orleans with that delicious loveliness, he would pension Plato for life.
They stole through the shadows of the orange grove to Connell’s coupé. He took Madeline’s suitcase and raised the turtle back. Something was stirring in the baggage compartment.
“Mon Dieu!” gasped Madeline.
“Is dat you, Mistah Walt?” whispered an African voice. Amelia Jones emerged. “Is yo’ got mah Plato?”
Then she saw Madeline, and her voice tr
ailed into reproachful indefiniteness. Connell was betraying his colored folks.
“What the devil are you doing here?” he sternly demanded.
“Ah jes’ followed,” said Amelia. “In case that no good niggah didn’t want to come home.”
Her plump, comely face was agleam with perspiration. It was a wonder she had not suffocated in the stuffy baggage compartment during that long search down the Delta. Connell helplessly glanced at Madeline who was nervously fingering his arm. Amelia painfully clambered out of the turtle back.
“Get back in there, Amelia,” Connell abruptly ordered. “I’ll fix the top.”
But the negress shook her head.
“No, suh, Mistah Walt. I’se gwine to find him mah self. Ah knows yo’ is too busy, and Ah’s much obliged fo’ de ride.” Her glance shifted, and she saw the familiar model T. “Dat’s Plato’s Fohd. Ah’ll git him. Don’t yo’ wait heah no longah, Mistah Walt.”
Amelia’s contradictory blend of stubbornness and humility got under Connell’s skin. He couldn’t sell his niggers down the river that way; neither could he leave Madeline another night in that fiend-haunted plantation house. But his indecision was costly.
Dark forms slipping from the shadows closed in on them. Ducoin’s black laborers! Their eyes were not blind, but staring, unfocused and unseeing. Their faces were utterly devoid of expression. Walking dead men, moving with the slow, horrible motion of animated corpses.
“Get back, you black devils!” snarled Connell, thrusting aside a clutching hand and driving home with his fist; but it was like hammering the trunk of a tree. Not a gasp, not a grunt, not a change of expression. Madeline screamed as other hands clutched her.
Though Connell’s fists crunched against bony faces, and chunked wrist deep into leathery stomachs, he made no more impression than on tackling dummies. Kicking, slugging, and gouging as the tangle of voiceless black men overwhelmed him, Connell’s brain became a vortex of horror. He knew now why the Cajuns called them walking corpses.
The E. Hoffmann Price Spice Adventure MEGAPACK ™ Page 6
