Strange Conflict

by Dennis Wheatley

  Ten minutes later she rejoined de Richleau and together they went through to the big living-room. Doctor Saturday was waiting there for them and at once came forward to say that dinner would be ready at any moment. In the meantime he hoped that they would like the cocktail that he had just mixed.

  As they accepted, the Duke explained the non-appearance of the other two. He was a superb liar and told his story with such artistry that the Doctor did not appear to doubt for an instant his account of what had happened. De Richleau added smoothly that the others would have gone to the British Consulate immediately on their arrival in the town, owing to the urgency of their work, had they not been so exhausted and half-bemused as a result of their terrible experience and narrow escape from death. It was only when they had recovered a little that they had realised the gravity of their responsibilities.

  ‘And,’ he concluded brazenly, ‘they hunted for you everywhere to excuse themselves but failed to find you.’

  Doctor Saturday expressed mild surprise but said that he must have been in his bath at the time and that if the others returned they would still be most welcome; but, in view of the hour and the fact that they had lost all their luggage, he thought it probable that the British Consul would insist on putting them up for the night.

  A few moments later the head house-boy appeared. He did not announce dinner but merely bowed in the doorway and ushered them into the dining-room, which was on the far side of the big hall. As Doctor Saturday begged them to be seated he casually mentioned that all his servants were mutes whom he had taken on and trained out of pity. He then apologised for the fare about to be offered to them, saying that had he had more notice he would have procured something more suitable, but that for dinner that night he hoped they would not mind the local dishes.

  The repast consisted largely of fruits and vegetables, with one course of stewed meat, the strong flavour of which de Richleau recognised as goat; but it was so tender, and the island fruits so delicious, that both he and Marie Lou, who, having had no lunch, found themselves ravenously hungry, thoroughly enjoyed the meal.

  Afterwards they sat in the semi-darkness on the wide verandah outside the big lounge-room, and the Duke, wishing to keep Marie Lou’s thoughts occupied as much as possible before they retired to their night-long vigil, encouraged the Doctor to tell them more about the island.

  ‘Haiti is like nowhere else in the world,’ said the Doctor, ‘and although its history extends over only four hundred years I doubt if any other country could rival it for tales of bloodshed, treachery and massacre. I could talk to you about it for hours, but I fear to bore you.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Marie Lou. ‘Do please tell us about some of the revolutions and other exciting things that have happened here.’

  ‘Very well, then.’ The Doctor’s teeth flashed in a smile, and he began: ‘It’s almost as though there has been a curse on the island from the very beginning. Even when Columbus discovered it, the five separate tribes of Carib Indians who inhabited it were perpetually at war with each other. The Spaniards forced Christianity upon them at the point of the sword and endeavoured to enslave them, but the Carib is a strange creature and very different from the Negro. He is primitive but strongly independent and in most cases the Aborigines preferred to die rather than work under foreign masters. Consequently the Europeans were compelled to import great numbers of African slaves to work on their plantations.

  ‘Haiti was the native name for the island—meaning mountainous—but Columbus rechristened it Hispaniola and later, under the French, it was changed again, to Saint Domingue; and the larger, western part of the island, as you doubtless know, is a separate Republic which is called Santo Domingo to this day. By the middle of the seventeenth century it had become a favourite haunt of the pirates who roamed the Spanish Main, particularly the small island of Tortuga, which lies off the northern cape, as that has many sandy beaches which served them well for laying up and careening their ships.

  ‘For the best part of two hundred years the French were the masters here, and in the days when Louis XV and Louis XVI reigned in France many noble and wealthy families had great estates in the island; but the French Revolution put an end to that. L’Ouverture, Christophe, Dessalines and Petion, whom we regard as our national heroes, led a series of revolts and by 1804 the Europeans were finally driven out.

  ‘But, unhappily, little good came to Haiti from having secured her independence. A new internal war developed between the Negroes and the Mulattoes. The Mulattoes were richer and, therefore, better educated so they were able to hold their own against the far greater number of Negroes, but the hatred change to: between them still continues. This internal strife has been the downfall of our people. It meant that instead of working in amity together, and being able to enjoy the fine inheritance which the French had left us, we quarrelled and fought; so that nine-tenths of the cultivated land went back to virgin forest, and even the fine houses of the rich French Colonials became crowded tenements which it was nobody’s responsibility to keep in repair and therefore they gradually fell into decay.

  ‘An even worse curse has been the lack of honesty among our self-chosen rulers. Hardly one of them has ever given a thought to the welfare of the people. They have schemed and murdered to gain power, solely for the purpose of getting their hands on the exchequer. As each has succeeded in doing so he has found it empty, so for a few months he has sought to hold his rivals at bay by killing and imprisoning them until the meagre taxes that can be extracted from the people have amounted to a good round sum. They have then decamped overnight to Jamaica, en route for Paris, since the boulevards, with their bright lights and white women, are the Mecca of all Haitians.’

  ‘It’s surprising that none of them tried to make anything out of the place,’ remarked the Duke. ‘The soil is so rich that it could produce a huge profit with very little labour, and I’ve always understood that there is great mineral wealth in the island if only it were properly exploited.’

  ‘That is so,’ agreed the Doctor. ‘Gold, silver, copper, iron, antimony, tin, sulphur, coal, nickel, and many other things, are here for the taking, but such ventures require capital, and whenever a Haitian government has borrowed the money from one of the European Powers for such a purpose our Presidents have promptly decamped with it; leaving the unfortunate people that much worse off owing to the debt incurred.’

  ‘Surely your Government could have sold a concession to one of the big European or American mining syndicates?’ suggested the Duke.

  The Doctor shook his head. ‘No. That they refused to do—and, according to their lights, they were wise in their refusal. The granting of any such concession would have meant giving a permanent status to white engineers and business men in the island. If that had happened an end would have been put to the abuses of our Haitian politicians long ago. The white business men would have made official reports to their Government that murder, graft and every form of licence were rife here, and a very good case could soon have been made for the Power concerned to send a battleship to take us over. Negroes and Mulattoes, rich and poor, were all determined that whatever else might happen they were not going to have that, and for many years white people were definitely barred from even landing in the island.’

  ‘Yet in the end the Americans took possession,’ commented the Duke. ‘What led up to that?’

  ‘That was in 1915, when Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was President. General Bobo rose against him in the north that summer and marched upon the capital. According to convention, Sam should have emptied the Treasury and politely retired to Jamaica. No one would have attempted to stop him, because that had become the accepted end of all Presidents who escaped assassination. Perhaps there was not enough in the Treasury to satisfy his avarice—I do not know—but he refused to flee. When his army of Cacos— as they call the machete men—deserted to the enemy he sent his chief military officer, Charles Oscar Etienne, with the palace guard, to murder all his political rivals whom d
uring his presidency he had been able to catch and throw into prison. It was the most revolting butchery that you can imagine; even worse than the famous massacres of September which are made so much of in the history of the French Revolution. The prisoners were shot and then gutted with knives as they huddled, chained, against the walls, until the street outside the prison was literally a river of blood. Only three out of nearly two hundred escaped alive.’

  ‘How utterly horrible!’ Marie Lou whispered. ‘What happened then?’

  ‘The whole city rose against President Sam and he took refuge in the French Consulate, but the mob dragged him from his hiding-place, cut off his hands and tore him to pieces. It was the news of this terrible massacre which caused the United States Government to send Admiral Caperton with his American marines to take control of the island.’

  ‘Another of your Presidents blew up the palace with himself and all the people in it—did he not?’ said the Duke.

  Doctor Saturday inclined his snow-white head. ‘Yes. That was only a few years earlier—in 1912. It is President Lecomte of whom you speak, and it’s true that he is supposed to have been blown up; but I do not believe he was. There is considerable evidence to show that his successor, Tancred Auguste, lured him from his palace by a false message, and that he was murdered in his coach at night while crossing the Champ-de-Mars. But General Lecomte was a popular man and the conspirators feared the vengeance of his bosom friend, the Minister of the Interior, Sansarique. That was why, at the point of the pistol, they later that night compelled a young engineer to explode the great store of munitions which were kept in the cellars of the palace because no President of Haiti would trust the army—apart from his personal bodyguard—with live ammunition. The explosion rocked the whole city and as far as six miles away people were thrown out of their beds. Three hundred soldiers and officials were belched out by the terrific eruption, and very few of them survived.’

  They were silent for a moment, then Doctor Saturday went on:

  ‘But perhaps our most fantastic story is that in this, the twentieth century, we were for a time ruled by a goat.’

  ‘How on earth did that happen?’ laughed the Duke.

  ‘It was in 1908 that General François Antoine Simon became President. He was a crude peasant soldier, and was engineered into office by dishonest politicians who wished to rule through him. There was, of course, the usual civil war before he succeeded to the presidency, and he was such a stupid man that I very much doubt if he would have defeated his opponent had it not been for his daughter, Celestina, and her goat, Simalo. She was a Mambo—that is, a Voodoo priestess—of exceptional powers and the goat was her familiar; she had actually been married to the animal in a formal Petro ceremony. But Celestina, whatever her dark deeds, was a woman of considerable courage and ability. The people termed her “Our Black Joan of Arc”, since it was she who led the campaign for her brutish father, and the Cacos of the enemy fled in terror before Celestina and her goat.

  ‘Simon, Celestina and Simalo then installed themselves in the palace, and the dishonest politicians found that they had got more than they bargained for, as without consulting Simalo General Simon would never do what they required of him; and Simalo’s views were often very different from those of the politicians.

  ‘Their regime frequently resulted in extraordinary and very horrible situations. Upstairs in the big apartments of the palace the leading families in the island and the Europeans from the Consulates had to attend state receptions as the guests of a President who ate with his fingers and got disgustingly drunk, while downstairs they knew quite well that in Simalo’s apartments the most revolting Voodoo ceremonies were being practised. At the banquets they had to make a show of eating the rich foods that were placed before them but they never knew what filth might be concealed in the thick sauces, and it is said that in this way they were sometimes made to consume human blood.’

  ‘How disgusting!’ exclaimed Marie Lou.

  ‘Yes. It is not a pretty story, but the father and daughter brought about their downfall by their own ambition. Having become President, it occurred to General Simon that he might marry Celestina off to a wealthy husband, so they actually went to the lengths of arranging a legal divorce for her from her goat. The story given out was that Simalo was so heartbroken at the loss of his wife that he died; but the probability is that by General Simon’s order the beast was killed. In any case, it was buried with almost regal honours, and through a disgraceful piece of trickery they even succeeded in getting a Catholic priest to read the Christian burial service over it in the cathedral. They pretended that the coffin contained the body of a man. But even the most despicable among the rich men of Haiti would not take Celestina for a wife afterwards. With the death of the goat the luck of the Simons changed, and people said it was because she had broken her oath before the Voodoo Loa that Celestina’s power had deserted her. Soon afterwards General Lecomte led a revolt against President Simon, who fled to Jamaica; but Celestina is still living in the island to this very day, as an old woman whom nobody any longer fears or troubles about.’

  For another hour or more Doctor Saturday entertained his guests with other strange stories of the long tale of rapine and murder that make up Haiti’s troubled history. But he told them, too, that they must not form the impression that all Haitian politicians were murderous crooks or that the bulk of the population were ignorant, superstitious savages. Since the American occupation honest and enlightened Haitians had had a chance to better the lot of their countrymen and, though still in its initial stages, much good work was now being done. Health, agriculture, education, sanitation and welfare centres were all absorbing the energies of enthusiastic young men, most of whom had been to universities in the United States. He remarked modestly that owing to his own absorption in the scientific study of the island’s flora he was unable to give as much time as he would have liked to assisting the work of progress, but that as a small contribution he trained and found occupation for many dumb natives and had even succeeded in restoring to some their speech.

  Soon after midnight, feeling that they could not reasonably keep him up any longer, the Duke suggested bed; upon which the Doctor saw them to their rooms, where clean white cotton pyjamas, and two bath-robes to serve as dressing-gowns, had been laid out for them.

  When the Doctor had left them they undressed, finding it a great relief to get out of their clothes. In spite of their interest in their host’s stories, their burns had caused them so much pain during the whole evening that they had found it difficult to concentrate; but now that they were able to apply some more of the liniment which he had given them this slightly eased the constant smarting.

  Having got into her pyjamas and dressing-gown, Marie Lou slipped out of her room along the verandah to the Duke’s as it was there that they had arranged to pass the night together.

  She found that he had already pushed the furniture up against the walls and was sweeping clean the bare boards of the floor with the end of one of the woven-grass mats, which he had rolled into a bundle.

  ‘You’re going to attempt to make some sort of pentacle, then?’ she said in a whisper.

  ‘Yes. Anything’s better than nothing,’ he remarked, holding up a carafe of fresh water which he had just drawn from the bathroom tap. ‘I shall charge this, and providing that we remain awake it should prove sufficient to keep away from us any manifestation which may appear.’

  They had no chalk but Marie Lou produced a gold pencil from her dressing-case, and using one side of a pillow-slip as a measure she made little marks on the floor until she had plotted a five-pointed star in which all the sides would be exactly the same length.

  De Richleau meanwhile sat with the carafe of water before him and the first and second fingers of his right hand pointing at it from the level of his eye, while he drew down power which flowed invisibly from his mind, through his eye, along his fingers into the carafe. After a few moments he picked it up and, dipping his fingers
into it, drew a broad, wet line from one to another of the small crosses that Marie Lou had marked on the floor.

  As they put their pillows and clean bedding in the middle of the pentacle, he said: ‘It would be best if we did not discuss this business or make any mention of the others, so that when the enemy arrives—as he almost certainly will do when he thinks that we’ve had time to fall asleep—he will not gain any information through our conversation. I’ve never been in such a tricky position before, but I believe our best defence will be to endeavour absolutely to ignore as far as we possibly can anything that may happen. We’ll talk about the good old pre-war days, tell such amusing anecdotes as we can think of, and hold competitions like memory-tests to keep our minds occupied. The great thing is to keep on talking as though we’re completely unconscious that the enemy is trying to get at us.’

  They sat down, cross-legged and facing each other, on the bedding, immediately under the hanging oil-lamp that lit the room. The house had now fallen silent and the only sound which disturbed the stillness was the croaking of the tree-frogs. The first serious stage of the long ordeal which they were called upon to sustain had begun.

  17

  Battle Against Sleep

  ‘First of all,’ said the Duke, ‘while our minds are still fresh I think we’d better plot out our night, dividing it into hours in which we’re going to talk about certain subjects or play various word-games; then with each hour that passes we shall have something new to occupy our thoughts and not suddenly find ourselves stuck for ideas when our vitality is at its lowest ebb.’

  Accordingly they made out a short list. For the first hour they were to talk about their earliest memories. For the second, they would indulge in a battle of wits where each would write down a subject on a piece of paper, and without actually mentioning what they had written would see which of them could first lead the other into talking of the subject chosen. For the third, they were each to recount their recollections of their first love-affair; and so on, right up to six o’clock, soon after which dawn would come and release them from the pentacle.