With a mincing, shuffling step the old hag circled round the fire, clattering her rattle, flourishing her whip, pausing now and then, and each time she halted the men and women groveling before her shrank back in the shadows as though she menaced them with a live snake.
“Ouranga!” shrieked the crone again, and half a dozen men came struggling from the shadows, pushing three cowering wretches, two men and a woman. The luckless trio were flung face-downward on the ground, where they lay quaking, too terrified to utter pleas for mercy.
“Ouranga!” the witch cried furiously, leaping forward to bring down her whip on the prostrate victims’ backs. Repeatedly she cried the mystic word, accompanying each repetition with a cut of her cruel lash until dull scarlet stains showed through the groveling wretches’ scanty clothing.
“Back-sliders from the cult,” said Hiji in a whisper. “Not much inducement for ’em to leave the fold, eh what?”
The hag had ceased her flogging, more from weariness than mercy, and the chastened apostates crawled like beaten dogs to the ranks that hovered in the shadows. We saw the others draw away from them as from contagion as they found seats on the ground.
A long black shadow cut between the fire and us, and a tall, thin man came dancing out between the tombstones, pausing for a moment with uplifted hands, then falling prostrate on the sand before the voodoo priestess. In every detail he was like the man who had attacked me; painted like a leopard, hands armed with sharp, cruel iron claws, he might have been the same man raised from the dead by some unholy miracle.
The obi witch addressed him in a flood of cackling gibberish, and he responded in the same jargon. Finally, rising to his knees, he circled round the fire, half crawling, half dancing, waving clawed hands in the air as if he tore the life from an unseen victim. Graphically, in pantomime, we saw him re-enact the murder of Judge Scatterhorn. We saw him creep up to the quiet house, secrete himself among the shrubbery, lie in waiting for his victim. His eyes glared horribly, his teeth gleamed like the fangs of some wild thing as he arched his back and sprang. A leap, a scream like that of a demented fiend, and he swept in an arc through the air, striking with his iron-taloned hands straight at his quarry’s throat, then rolling thrashing on the ground, as if locked in a death-grip with some phantom adversary. At last he lay stretched out upon the dried grass, breathing hard from his exertions, then rolled upon his face before the hag, reaching out his gaffed hands till they almost touched her feet.
“Bon—bon!” The obi witch commended, and the leopard man leaped up and joined the circle. His work had won approval from the voodoo cult’s high priestess.
The bonfire had begun to burn itself to embers, and a moaning, low, almost a whimpering singsong, passed from lip to lip about the ring of squatting men and women. “Dhan ghi—dhan ghi!” we heard them cry. Two men staggered forward with a large pine packing-case between them. The box was reminiscent of the outside cases used to enclose caskets at cheap funerals, but was fitted with a hinged lid secured by heavy hasps and padlocks. With a sudden shock I realized that what I’d thought were painted spots were really holes bored through the planks. “De Grandin,” I whispered, “there’s something live inside there!”
“Mais oui, mais certainement,” he answered imperturbably. “These naughty followers of vaudois are worshippers of a great snake they call the ‘White Queen.’ Observe them, if you please.”
One of the bearers set his end of the case down and ran back to the shadows, returning in an instant with a squawking cockerel. The voodoo priestess snatched the fowl from him, drew a knife from her turban and slit its throat with a quick slash.
Now her dance was like the antics of a maniac. Laughing insanely, fiendishly, muttering unintelligible charms, shrieking and crying, she whirled and turned in the fast-waning firelight, waving the stiffening body of the slaughtered cock about her head till the spurting blood from its cut neck sprayed on the worshippers, who crouched together in an ectasy of shuddering fear. Twice she leaped upon the box with the hinged top, and each time the congregation shrieked in wild, ecstatic glee. Once she clawed at its locked lid until I thought that she would open it, but apparently she reconsidered, and the lid remained closed on the dread god of the obi people.
“I think the convocation will be ending soon,” de Grandin whispered. “Let us depart before they break their meeting up. We cannot hope to fight them single-handed, and if they should discover us—” It was not necessary for him to proceed; imagination more than supplied details missing from his statement.
Creeping flat to earth, we wriggled down the hill, reached an unplowed field and rose to run across it. “Hiji!” exclaimed de Grandin. “Where is he?”
Apparently he had dematerialized. A moment earlier he had lain beside us in our ambuscade; none of us had seen him leave, but—he was gone.
“We must go back,” the Frenchman announced firmly. “We cannot leave him in their hands, they would—mon Dieu! Down, down for your lives, my friends!”
Coming toward us through the gloom there bulked a monstrous form. It was like some giant spider walking on its two hind legs, but larger than a cow. We dropped down to the turf, not daring to draw breath lest our respirations betray us; then: “I say, de Grandin, is that you?” Low, but distinctly cheerful, Hiji’s voice came to us.
“Bien oui, it is I, and not another, but who in heaven’s name are you?” the Frenchman answered.
“Why, Frenchy, don’t you recognize your little playmate?” Hiji answered plaintively. “And I’ve brought our other little friend along, too. The cove who mauled Trowbridge this evenin’, don’t you know? While we were lyin’ there and watchin’ all the voodoo doin’s, I thought I could find work for him, so I hustled back and got him.”
I breathed more easily. What we had mistaken for a monster was the Englishman, walking upright with the dead leopard man across his shoulders.
“Just wait for me a mo’,” Hiji bade. “I’ll be comin’ back this way, and when I come you’d best be on your toes and ready to make distance.”
He trudged off in the darkness with his grisly burden. Ten minutes passed, fifteen, half an hour; then as if in response to a signal there rose such a pandemonium of shouts and screams and yells from the abandoned cemetery as might have waked the dead who slept there.
A moment later Hiji came abreast of us, running like an antelope. “Run, you blighters; cut and run for it, or you’ll not see tomorrow’s sunrise!” he cried pantingly. “Don’t let ’em sight you!”
We ran. My heart was pounding like a battering-ram against my ribs long before we reached the Sterling house, but, amazingly, there was no pursuit.
We faced each other in the lamplit parlor. “Tell me, mon beau sauvage, what was it that you did to them?” de Grandin ordered.
“Oh, just gave a demonstration of my kind of magic. The beggars were waitin’ a report from the feller who jumped Trowbridge, so I took care they jolly well got it. When I got back to their council fire I was put to it for a means of deliverin’ him, and a young tree gave me the idea. They were raisin’ such a bally row I could a sung God Save the King at top voice and never have been heard; so I had no trouble loppin’ off the sapling’s limbs, then climbin’ it and draggin’ my deceased friend after me. I lodged him in the tree-fork, then swung down, bringin’ the tree down with me, and let go. It straightened up, of course, when I released my weight, and shot him like a stone out of a catapult, right plump into the middle of their pow-wow, neat as wax. You should have heard ’em bellow when he landed at their hospitable fireside.”
“Parbleu, my friend, we did,” de Grandin answered. “We did, indeed, and—mordieu, why can we not?”
“Eh?” answered Hiji.
“You have given me the idea, the hunch, the inspiration. But certainly. These devil-doings we beheld tonight were but the dress rehearsal to the ceremonies they will hold tomorrow when the moon is in eclipse. Why should we not prepare more magic for tomorrow night? Why should we not frighten
them until they call upon the hills to fall upon them and hide them from the vengeance of our medicine?”
“All right, why should we not?” demanded Hiji. “If you’ve any ideas for a charade, spill ’em. Depend on me to rally round, old son.”
“By blue, my friend, I think that you can be of service. Tell me, can you recall the chants these Leopard People sang in Africa?”
“Er—yes, I think I can. They went something like this.” From half-closed lips he hummed a syncopated, wordless tune, an eery, eldritch thing resembling our swing music as the bitter scent of hydrocyanic acid gas resembles the perfume of crushed peach leaves, a wicked tune that made the listener think of pitchblack midnights and rifled graves and evil deeds done in the darkness of the moon. As he hummed he beat time with his finger on the table top, a sharp, staccato beat of broken rhythm.
De Grandin bent his gaze on Coralea as Hiji hummed. “What does the music make you think of, Mademoiselle?” he asked.
“Oh”—she shook her shoulders in disgust—“it stirs me all up. It makes me want to rend and tear and scratch, as if I were a savage cat. It rouses all the elemental brute in me.”
“Fine, excellent, superb!” he applauded. “I had hoped you would say something of the sort. Tomorrow night we do it. Yes, by blue, and you shall help us, for you are a psychic, Mademoiselle!”
“TROWBRIDGE, MON VIEUX, I have a task for you,” he told me as we rose next morning. “Be good enough to take a launch and go to Monsieur Townsend at Elizabeth City. Among other things he keeps a stock of fireworks, and I should greatly like to have one hundred rockets of the largest size available. You will kindly bring them back to me as soon as possible—”
“Rockets?” I echoed stupidly. “You mean skyrockets?”
“Nothing less, my wise one. Large, fine rockets, filled with balls of colored fire and powder which goes swis-s-s-sh! You comprehend?”
“No, can’t say that I do, but I’ll get ’em for you,” I replied as I finished shaving. “Anything else you’d like?”
“No, unless you wish to get some Roman candies, also.”
The afternoon was far spent when I returned with the fireworks, and my companions seemed on edge with excitement. We made a hurried, almost silent meal, and just before dusk Hiji and Coralea set out for some mysterious rendezvous. Looking grim as the governor of a prison on a hanging-day, the Englishman was back within an hour, and I decided that he must have taken her to some safe place while we faced the voodoo worshippers. A little later, he came into the parlor with a pair of odd contraptions. One was an ordinary rubber comb with an envelope of tissue paper pasted over it, the other a small copper kettle the flat lid of which had been clamped down and fastened with a rim of sealing-wax.
“You have tested them?” de Grandin asked.
“Absolutely. Everything’s as right as rain.”
“Très bon. Be ready when the signal comes.”
We waited nervously. Neither Hiji nor de Grandin seemed inclined to talk, and both seemed listening for some signal. The daylight faded slowly, and night came on with faltering, indecisive steps. Jays and sparrows put themselves to bed with noisy good-night chirpings. Every now and then de Grandin or the Englishman went out upon the porch and looked up at the sky as though they sought some portent there. At last: “It comes, my, friends, it comes!” de Grandin cried excitedly. “Behold him, if you please!”
Following his pointing finger we looked up to the zenith. The moon, as full and round and yellow as a disk of gold alloyed with silver, swam in a cloudless sky, but nicking the smooth margin of its circle there appeared a tiny sliver of black shadow. Slowly, slower than the minute hand of a run-down old clock, the shadow moved, spreading gradually across the glowing lunar disk.
“The time has come, mes amis,” de Grandin announced. “You know the part you are to play, my Hiji. May good fortune wait upon your work. À bientôt.”
“Carry on, old feller,” the Englishman tucked his paper-covered comb and kettle underneath his arm and gave us each a handclasp. “Keep your heads down, and if things go wrong and I get there first, I’ll tell the Devil that you’re on the way, and have him burn a sulfur-candle in the window for you. Cheerio.” He turned and stalked off in the darkness.
“We also have our work, my friend,” de Grandin told me as he bent and took a bundle of skyrockets in his arms, motioning me to take the sheaf which he had made of the remainder.
Quietly we walked across the fields while the shadow of the eclipse grew larger with each step we took. We bent double as we reached the hill range and step by cautious step began the ascent toward the wooded knoll that overlooked the voodoo meeting-place. Half-way up I paused for breath, and as I looked around I caught a flash of fluttering drapery in the gathering shadows of the road.
“Wha—what’s that?” I asked. Upon a night like this the age-old fears came crowding back, and the thing I saw was like a brooding, sheeted ghost that watched us as we mounted to our doom.
“Look farther, if you please, my friend,” he answered with a laugh, “and tell me what it is you see.”
I looked. Far down the road, as motionless as something carved of stone, there stood another sheeted figure, gigantic, menacing, immobile. And a little farther down the road another, and another—and another. Silent, sheeted sentinels of the night, grim specters from the olden times when dead men walked on moonless nights . . . my scalp began to prickle and my breath came faster. “What in heaven’s name are they?” I gasped.
“Night riders,” he replied. “A hundred of them, all in ghost-clothes, all with rifles, all ready for the signal we shall give, my friend.”
“Whatever do you mean—”
He eased his burden to the turf and bent toward me. “Today we have been busy while you were away, my friend. The local colored folk are good and honest men and women, but they are firmly bound by racial fears. When these sacré villains from the Caribbean came here they seduced them from their simple, peaceful ways, telling them that they would bring a government like that of Haiti in the days of Henri Christophe here. Every man should be a marquis or a duke or count, every woman have a title, too, and the white oppressor should be driven from the land. Moreover, those who doubted or refused to help them were intimidated, some were even killed. Such was the fate of James Collins, whom they tracked to Harlem and murdered. You saw the sway these voodooists have on the local blacks last night. It is a kind of superstitious awe they hold them in, and only by a greater magic can that hold be broken. The authorities could harry them and hunt them, perhaps they could convict them of the murders which they have committed, but I doubt it. For where could they find a colored man or woman who would dare to testify against them? Ha, but if we can put on a show which seems to overmatch the voodoo magic, if we can swoop down on them with all the dreaded panoply of the sheeted riders of the night, and take their voodoo priests and priestesses before their very eyes and hang them to convenient limbs—what then?”
“But that’s sheer terrorism—”
“And what is it these villains practice here? Philanthropy? I tell you, good Friend Trowbridge, only by a show of extra-legal might can we put this horror down. When we have done our part the sheeted riders will close in. They know the local blacks, and those they know will be allowed to escape. As for the voodoo men—such men as those who killed Judge Scatterhorn and Captain Sterling, and almost did the same to you—I damn think that the ropes are now all ready for their necks. Yes, certainly. Of course.”
I was about to protest, but the midnight calm was shattered by the sudden rumble of a drum: “Ro-o-om, ro-o-om; rum-rum-rum!” As on the night before, the devilish sound seemed welling from the very center of the earth, swelling and expanding till it filled the highest heavens with its maddening discord.
“Up, up, my friend, our work is waiting for us!”
With our rockets bundled in our arms we scrambled up the grassy slope and halted in the woods which fringed the hilltop. Quickly de Grandin se
t his rocket-sticks into the earth, sighting each one carefully, as though he were a battery commander about to launch a charge of grapeshot at advancing cavalry.
The voodoo fire was burning in the hollow of the hills, the dusky worshippers were crouched in fascinated terror at the shadows’ edge, the voodoo priestess danced and postured in the space between the tombstones. “Ouranga, ouranga; voodoo!” came the litany of the black rite as the priestess and her congregation worked themselves into a frenzy.
“Dhan ghi, dhan ghi!” the cry rose from the swaying audience. “The White Queen, show the White Queen to us. Let her testify!”
“Ouranga, ouranga!” shrieked the withered hag in red as she danced and leaped among the graves, twisting and writhing in an ecstasy of self-induced hypnosis. “Dhan ghi, dhan ghi!” She shook her claw-like hands up at the moon, which now was almost hidden in eclipse.
Now four men came shuffling forward, and between them they were bundling two more creatures, half-grown Negresses, poor, terrified, impotent things so utterly unnerved by fear that they could scarcely struggle in their captor’s hands. “Grand Dieu, les boucs; les boucs sans bois—the human sacrifices, goats without horns!” de Grandin whispered. “Have we made a mistake, will they reverse the ceremony, and have the feast before the White Queen testifies?”
The sacrifices were flung down before the fire and the voodoo witch bent over them, touching each with her gourd rattle, then dancing off again.
“Dhan ghi, dhan ghi!” the chant rose louder, more insistently, and another group of men came staggering out into the firelight; between them bumped the long, hole-decorated box we’d seen the night before.
“Ah?” murmured Jules de Grandin. “It seems that I was not mistaken, after all.”
The bearers dropped the box unceremoniously and scuttled off, racing back to join their fellows in the circle, for plainly their fear of the goddess in the box was greater than their faith in the high priestess’ magic to protect them when the great snake issued forth.
Black Moon Page 13
