ALTHOUGH THE GREAT PULP MAGAZINES of the 1920s and 1930s were noted for their fiction, Detective Fiction Weekly, one of the most successful of the mystery pulps, liked to run two or three true-crime stories in each issue. Easily one of the most popular series featured a female spy named Vivian Legrand, who was not identified as a heroine.
Beautiful, intelligent, and resourceful, she was also a liar, blackmailer, thief, and the murderer of her own father. Her exploits, which were reported by Eugene Thomas (1894–?), began to appear so regularly that doubt was cast upon their veracity—with good reason. Without apology, DFW continued to run stories about the woman dubbed “The Lady from Hell,” now acknowledging that the tales were fictional. Were any of the stories true? Was there really a woman named Vivian Legrand? There is little evidence either way, but only the most gullible would accept the notion that all the stories published as true had any genesis in reality.
Thomas, the author of five novels, created another series character, Chu-Seng, typical of many other fictional “Yellow Peril” villains. A Chinese deaf-mute with paranormal abilities, he works with the Japanese in their espionage activities against the United States in Death Rides the Dragon (1932), The Dancing Dead (1933), and Yellow Magic (1934). He is thwarted by Bob Nicholson, an American agent, Lai Chung, a Mongol prince, and a team of lamas who counteract Chu-Seng’s powers with their white magic.
“The Adventure of the Voodoo Moon” was originally published in the February 1, 1936, issue of Detective Fiction Weekly.
THE LADY FROM HELL was standing on the upper deck of the little inter-island steamer as it neared the coast of Haiti. Her crown of flaming red hair was beaten back from her smooth forehead and her white dress modeled tightly to her body by the strong trade wind.
She and her companion in crime, Adrian Wylie, had just completed one of the most amazing coups in their whole career, and were now on a vacation. The Lady from Hell had been emphatic on that point before leaving Havana.
“Nothing is to tempt us into mingling business with pleasure,” she had told Wylie. “Not even if we stumble across the vaults of a bank wide open and unguarded.”
Now, the second day out from Havana, the sun was just rising over the blue bubbles dreaming on the horizon that were the mountains of Haiti, and still she could not account for the vague sense of disquiet, the little feeling of apprehension that had been growing in her ever since the steamer passed between Morro Castle and its smaller counterpart on the other side of Havana harbor.
No one on the little steamer dreamed that she was the notorious Lady from Hell, whose fame had already filtered even to the West Indies. And if they had, it would have seemed incredible that this graceful, beautiful woman could have started her career by poisoning her own father; could have escaped from a Turkish prison—the only time in her career that the net of the law had closed about her—could have held up and robbed the Orient Express, a deed that had filled the press of the world, although her part in it had never even been suspected.
The daring coup in Havana that had added a large sum to the bank account of Adrian Wylie, her chief of staff, and herself had not been brought to the attention of the Cuban police. And, although the police of half a dozen European countries knew her well and swore when her name was mentioned, there was not a single thing with which she could be charged, so cleverly had her tracks been covered, so adroitly her coups planned.
She turned away and began to stride up and down the deck. More than one passenger turned to stare at her as she passed with a rippling grace of motion, a little lithe stride that told of perfect muscles and the agility of a cat.
A sound made her turn as a passenger came up behind her and fell into step with her.
“Good evening, Mrs. Legrand,” he said in English, with the faintest of accents. “You are up early.”
“I was eager to catch a sight of Haiti,” Vivian responded with a smile. “The mountains there are lovely.”
“They are lovely,” he responded, “even though Haiti is my home I never tire of seeing her mountains grow about the horizon line.” Then he added, “We dock in a few hours. See that headland there,” and he pointed to an amethyst bulk that thrust itself out into the sea. “That is Cap St. Feral. The port is just beyond it.”
There was an impression of power, perfectly controlled, about Carlos Benedetti that was perfectly evident to Vivian Legrand as she surveyed him for a fleeting instant through narrowed eyes. His face was unhealthily pale, the nose slightly crooked, the black eyes very sharp and alert, beneath the close-cropped and sleek black hair. He had the air of one to whom the world had been kind, and from it he had learned assurance and a kind of affability.
But behind his assurance—this affability—the Lady from Hell sensed something that was foreign to the face he presented to the world, something that made her cautious.
“Do we dock?” she queried. “I thought that we landed in small boats.”
“The word was incorrectly used,” he admitted. “I should have said that we arrive. Cap St. Feral is not modern enough to possess a dock for a ship of this size, small as the vessel is.” He hesitated a moment. “I assume that you are not familiar with Cap St. Feral.”
“No,” Vivian said. “This is my first visit to Haiti.”
The man’s oblique stare was annoying her. Not that she was unaccustomed to the bold stare that men give beautiful women. But this was different. Had the man been wiser he might have taken warning at the hard light that lay in the depths of her geenish eyes.
But he went on suavely:
“To those of us who know the island it offers little in the way of entertainment,” he said, “but to a stranger it might be interesting. If you care to have me, I should be glad to offer my services as a guide while you are in port.”
A casual enough courtesy offered to a stranger by a native of a place. Vivian thanked him and watched, with a calculating eye, as he bowed and walked on down the deck. The man was sleek, well groomed and obviously wealthy. His spotless Panama was of the type that cannot, ordinarily, even be bought in Equador, where they are woven. A hat so fine and silky that usually they are reserved as gifts to persons in high position. And the white suit that he wore had not come from an ordinary tailor.
It was made of heavy white silk—Habatui silk that in the East sells for its weight in gold, literally.
Adrian Wylie found Vivian on deck. In a few swift words she told him of the invitation and of the intuitive warning she had felt.
Wylie nodded slowly. “That explains something that had been puzzling me,” he said. “For an hour last night the purser insisted on buying me drinks in the smoking room and casually asking questions about the two of us. And hardly five minutes after he left me I saw him talking earnestly to Benedetti at the door of the purser’s office. Evidently the man hunted you up for the first thing this morning, after his talk with the purser.”
Benedetti, they knew from the ship’s gossip, was an exceedingly wealthy sugar planter, who owned the whole of an exceedingly fertile island called Ile de Feral, not far from the port of Cap St. Feral. The Haitian Sugar Centrals—actually the sugar trust, so ship gossip ran—had attempted to drive him out of business, and failed miserably. Despite a price war, he had managed to undersell the trust and still make a profit. Then he had been offered a staggering sum for the island, and had refused. The offer was still open, so she had been told, and any time he cared to sell the sugar trust would be only too eager to buy him out.
A little smile formed on Vivian’s lips. Benedetti, she suspected, was accustomed to having his own way where women were concerned. And the Lady from Hell knew full well her own attractiveness as a woman.
But even the Lady from Hell, astute as she was, could not have fathomed the dark reason that lay behind Benedetti’s advances.
The faint sound of drums somewhere in the distance; a regular, rhythmic beat, as though a gigantic heart, the heart of Black Haiti were beating in the stillness of the blazing moon, hung over the little city of Cap St. Feral as the Lady from Hell, Wylie, and Benedetti rode through the sun-washed streets.
The heat that hung about them like a tangible thing seemed to be intensified and crystalized by the monotonous beating of the lonely drums.
The Lady from Hell turned to Benedetti with a question, the brilliant sunlight through the trees overarching the road catching her hair and turning it into a halo of flame about her exquisitely lovely face.
“Voodoo drums,” he said. “The night of the Voodoo Moon is approaching. The drums will keep on sounding until the climax of the Snake Dance. They’re beating like this all over the island, even in Port-au-Prince. Worshipers in the cathedral can hear the sound of the drums from the hills outside the city drifting through the intoning of the mass. Then, almost as if they had been silenced by a gigantic hand, they will all stop at the same moment—the climax of the Snake Dance.”
Vivian stole another glance at the people along the roadside as their car passed. Voodoo. It was something out of a book to her, something a little unsettling to come so closely in contact with. And it seemed difficult to believe that the happy, smiling faces were the faces of people who had run mad through the streets of Port-au-Prince, so history said, tearing President Guillaume Sam to bloody bits while he still lived.
Benedetti caught the thought in her mind.
“You have not lived here, Mrs. Legrand,” he said quietly. “You cannot understand the place that Voodoo holds in these people’s lives; the grip it has upon them. And you are not familiar with the effect of rhythms upon the nerve centers. It does strange things to blacks, and to whites things stranger still.”
He leaned forward and flung a few words in Creole French at the driver—words that Vivian Legrand, fluent as her French was, could barely follow. The car stopped before a long, rambling structure, of gleaming white coquina, half hidden behind crimson hibiscus bushes.
“I brought you here for lunch,” he said. “It would be unbearably hot on the ship and there is no hotel at which you would want to eat, even if you could, in the town itself. This is a little house that I maintain, so that I may have a comfortable place to stay when necessity or business compels me to be in town. I took the liberty of assuming that Dr. Wylie and yourself would have lunch with me here.”
Vivian looked about her curiously as their host opened the little gate and ushered them into the flower garden that surrounded the house.
From the whitewashed, angular, stone walls of the old house, almost smothered in pink Flor de Amour, her eyes went to the table set beneath a flowering Y’lang-y’lang tree in the center of the close-cropped lawn. An old woman stood beside it, an ancient crone with more than a trace of white blood in her, one of those incredibly ancient people that only primitive races can produce. Her face was a myriad of tiny wrinkles and her parchment skin had the dull, leathery hue and look that is common in the aged of the Negro race.
The woman turned slowly as the trio approached and her eyes fastened on Vivian. In her cold, yellow eyes was a look almost of fear. Something that was like lurking terror coiled in the depths of those alert, flashing eyes and rendered them stony, glassy, shallow.
And then, as Benedetti and Wylie went on past her she made a gesture, an unmistakable gesture for Vivian to halt, and her voice, lowered until it was barely a sibilant whisper, came to Vivian’s ears in French.
“Do not stay here,” she said. “You must not stay.”
There was definite horror in her eyes, and fear also, as her glance flitted from Vivian toward Benedetti. Despite the whisper to which her voice had been lowered there was fear to be distinguished in her tones also.
Her face was impassive as she turned away. Only her eyes seemed alive. They were cold, deadly bits of emerald. The Lady from Hell abhorred the unknown. All through her criminal career the unsolved riddle, the unsolved personality, the unexplained situation, inflamed her imagination. She would worry over it as a dog worries a bone.
And how her mind hovered over this problem with relentless tenacity, her brain working swiftly, with smooth precision. Her intuition had been right, after all. The feeling of danger, of disquiet, of apprehension that had haunted her ever since the coast line of Haiti came in sight over the horizon had not been wrong. She knew now, beyond a shadow of doubt, that danger hovered over her like a vulture.
The fear that she had glimpsed in the old woman’s eyes, Vivian reasoned, was fear for herself should she be caught warning the white woman. But what was the danger against which she was warned, and why should this old woman, who had never seen her before, take what was obviously a risk to warn her against it?
Luncheon was just over when a long hoot sounded from the steamer.
“The warning whistle,” Benedetti told her. “A signal to the passengers that the steamer will sail in an hour.”
He turned to Vivian.
“My roses,” he said, “are so lovely that I took the liberty of requesting Lucilla to cut an armful of them for you to take back to the ship as a remembrance.”
There was a distinct warning in the old woman’s veiled eyes as Vivian stretched out her hands for the big bunch of pale yellow roses that Lucilla brought; not only warning, but that same terror and fear that had stood starkly in them a short time before. Instinctively Vivian stiffened and looked about her, her nerves tense. Was the danger, whatever it was, ready to spring? But the scene seemed peaceful enough.
“How lovely they are!” she exclaimed, and wondered if it could be her imagination that made the old woman seem reluctant to part with the flowers. Then she gave a little exclamation of pain as she took them from Lucilla. “Like many other lovely things, there are thorns,” she said ruefully, gazing at the long, thorny stems, still slightly damp from standing in water.
“That is true,” Benedetti said, and there seemed to be an expression of relief in his eyes. “Our Haitian roses are lovely, but they have longer and sharper thorns than any other roses I know.”
“Don’t you think we had better be leaving?” Vivian queried, glancing at her watch. The shimmering heat haze that covered everything seemed to have blurred her vision, and she had to peer closely at the little jewelled trinket to make out the time. “It’s a long drive back to the ship.”
“There is still plenty of time,” Benedetti assured her. “The warning whistle is supposed to sound an hour before sailing time, but it always is nearer two hours.” Then he gave a little exclamation of concern. “But you are ill,” he said as Vivian swayed a little.
“Just the heat,” she said. “I am not yet accustomed to it.”
The flowers she had been holding tumbled to the table and thence to the ground. The long-stemmed yellow blossoms gave no hint of the fact that from the moment Benedetti’s message had been delivered to the old woman until the moment before they had been placed in Vivian’s hands their stems and thorns had been soaking in a scum-covered fluid brewed by Lucilla herself.
“You must go inside for a few moments. You must rest,” Benedetti said sharply. “I should have realized that you were not accustomed to heat. It might be fatal for you to drive back to the ship in this sun without a rest.”
Wylie, a look of concern on his face, took Vivian’s arm and helped her to her feet. Even then, with her vision blurred and an overpowering drowsiness creeping over her, the Lady from Hell did not realize that she had been drugged. It was not until she reached the threshold of the room to which she had been guided that the truth burst upon her dulled senses with the force of a thunderbolt.
Stacked neatly against the whitewashed walls of the room was the baggage she had left in her cabin on the steamer!
Dizzily, clutching at the door for support, she turned…just in time to see a short heavy club descend with stunning force on Wylie’s head. And then, even as her companion crumpled to the stone flooring, blackness flooded her brain.
Dusk had fallen with tropic swiftness before Vivian awoke. She had not been conscious of her journey, wrapped in coco fiber matting from the house where she had been drugged, to Benedetti’s launch, nor of the subsequent trip to the man’s home on the Ille de Feral.
Now, anger smoldering in her greenish eyes, she faced him across the dining room table. In the dim room the table floated in a sea of amber candlelight. Barefooted black girls passed in and out, their voices keyed to the soft stillness, a thing of pauses and low voices. The whole thing, to Vivian, seemed to take on a character of unreality—a dream in which anything might happen.
She waited for Benedetti to speak after the slender black girl drew out her chair for her. But the man did not, so finally she broke the silence herself.
“What do you hope to gain by this?” she queried.
“Won’t you try your soup?” he said bitterly. “I am sure that you will find it very good.”
He halted as one of the girls stopped beside his chair and said something in Creole in a low voice. He rose to his feet.
“Will you pardon me?” he said. “There is someone outside, with a message. I shall be gone only a moment.”
He disappeared through the door beside the staircase, the door that Vivian imagined led to the rear of the house.
Swiftly she beckoned the black maid to her, slipped the glittering diamond from her finger, and folded the girl’s hand about it.
“Come to my room tonight,” she whispered tensely, “when it is safe. No one will ever know. And in Port-au-Prince or Cap St. Feral you can sell that ring for sufficient to live like a blanc millionaire for the rest of your days.”
The girl’s face paled to a dusky brown, she glanced furtively from the glittering jewel in her hand to the pale face of the woman who had given it to her. Vivian caught the hesitation.
“I have others in my room,” she urged desperately. “You shall choose from them what you want—two—three—when you sell them there will never have been another girl in Haiti as rich as you will be.”
“I will come,” the girl said in a whisper and stepped back against the wall. A moment later Benedetti returned.
“I regret to have been so poor a host as to leave you alone for even so short a time,” he said.
“Please,” Vivian said shortly, and there was in her manner no indication of the triumph that filled her breast. “Why dissemble. You’ve brought me here for a purpose. Why not tell me what it is?”
Already a scheme was forming in that agile mind of hers. When the girl came to her room that night she would persuade her to find weapons—guide Wylie and herself to a boat so that they might escape. But was Wylie still alive?
Benedetti’s answer interrupted her thoughts.
“It is not so much what I hope to gain, as what I hope to keep,” he said smoothly. He paused, and through the silence there came to her ears that queer rise and fall of notes from drums that had followed her ever since she arrived in Haiti—the drums of the Voodoo Moon, Benedetti had called it. He leaned forward.
“You might as well know now,” he said abruptly. “You have until tomorrow midnight to live.”
“Unless?” Vivian queried meaningly. She was very sure that she knew what the man meant.
Benedetti calmly placed the spoon in his plate and pushed it aside.
“There is no proviso. I know nothing of your personal life—of your finances. They are no concern of mine. You may be extremely rich, or completely poor—that does not enter into the matter at all. You have nothing that I care to buy. All I know is that you are young and extremely beautiful.” He studied her with a cold dispassionate interest, then sighed, a bit regretfully, it seemed. “That is the reason you must die tomorrow night.”
The thing was utterly fantastic. Vivian listened in amazed fascination. She could hardly bring herself to believe that she had heard correctly. So sure had she been that the man’s interest in her rose from the fact that he was attracted to her that the thought there might be another, more sinister motive behind the drugging and kidnaping had not occurred to her.
Her green eyes narrowed a trifle—only that, but there was the impression of a steel spring tightening. Then she said quietly:
“Why must I die?”
“Because,” he answered, “tomorrow night is the night of the Voodoo Moon—the night when the Papaloi and the Mamaloi present Ogoun Badagri, the Bloody One, with the Goat Without Horns.”
“The Goat Without Horns?” Vivian repeated, uncomprehendingly. “What is that?”
“You,” the man said tersely. “Tomorrow at midnight, when the Voodoo Moon is fullest, you will be offered as a sacrifice to Ogoun Badagri, the snake god.”
For a moment the Lady from Hell stared at him, a chill feeling clutching at her breast. Then an alert look came into her eyes, a look that she quickly veiled. She was listening intently.
“You’re not actually in earnest?” she asked quietly. Every nerve was strained to catch that sound again—the drone of an airplane engine that had come faintly to her ears. It was louder now. “You are trying to frighten me, to trap me into something. You will find that I am not easily frightened or trapped.”
The sound of the plane was louder now. She shot a furtive glance at Benedetti. Could aid be on the way? Could Benedetti’s plans have gone wrong, and a search be underway for them?
“I am very much in earnest,” the man opposite her said. “You see, that is the secret of my successful defiance of the sugar trust, the secret of why my laborers never leave me, the secret of why I can manufacture sugar at a cost that the sugar trust cannot possibly equal and still make a profit. Once a year I present the Papaloi and the Mamaloi, the high priest and priestess of Voodoo, with a human sacrifice—a white man or woman—and in turn these two guardians of the great snake see to it that my laborers do not leave, and are kept content with the lowest pay scale in the island of Haiti.”
He broke off and smiled.
“You may relax, Mrs. Legrand,” he said. “That plane that you hear will not land here. It is the marine mail plane that passes over the island every night between eleven thirty and twelve o’clock.”
Vivian looked at him blankly. “Plane?” she said vaguely. “Oh, yes, that is a plane, isn’t it? Quite honestly, I had not noticed the sound before you spoke.”
It was so well done that it fooled him. She picked up the slender silver fruit knife that lay on the table in front of her, twisting it so that it shone in her fingers, a pale, metallic splinter of light. She regarded him with eyes that had turned mysteriously dark, and leaned forward a little. Her voice, when she spoke, was very soft, and it held a quality of poignancy.
“You seem to live alone here,” she said, and her eyes regarded him warmly. “Don’t you ever become—lonely?”
There was a world of promise and invitation in the soft tone, in the alluring lips.
He looked at her and tightened his lips.
“That is useless,” he said. “You are beautiful, one of the most beautiful women that I have ever seen, but a dozen such women as you could not make up to me for the loss of my plantation. No, my dear, your charm is useless.”
“But you wouldn’t dare,” she said. “A woman cannot simply disappear from a steamer without inquiries being made. This is not the Haiti of twenty years ago. The Americans are in control—they are the police…”
Benedetti shook his head. “Do not raise false hopes. You sent the purser of the steamer a note saying that you had unexpectedly found friends in Cap St. Feral and were breaking your voyage here. The same man who brought the note took yours and your companion’s baggage off the ship. By now he has probably forgotten your existence.
“There is nothing to connect you with me, and if inquiries should be made it will simply be assumed that you either left the island or were murdered by a wandering Caco. And as for an Haitian, who might know something of your disappearance, aside from the fact that the secrets of Voodoo are something that are never discussed, there is an island saying: ‘Z affaires negres, pas z’z affaires blancs.’ And you will find that the affairs of the Negroes are not the affairs of the whites. And then,” his voice was bland as he made the significant statement, “there is rarely any proof—left—when the great green snake god has completed his sacrifice.”
“And my companion—Dr. Wylie—what have you done with him?” Vivian queried steadily. A bright spark glowed in her narrowed green eyes for a moment. It died slowly.
“He is safe, quite safe,” Benedetti assured her, “for the time being. He also will be a sacrifice to Ogoun Badagri.”
He said it with simple, sincere ruthlessness; undisguised, but neither vindictive nor cruel.
“You are quite sure of yourself,” Vivian said softly, and had Wylie been there he would have recognized the meaning of that tone; the threat of that greenish glow at the back of her eyes. He had seen that cold light in her eyes before. But Benedetti, even had he glimpsed it, would not have known that it was like the warning rattle of a snake before it strikes.
Now, with a swift movement she flung the silver fruit knife she held at the gleaming shirt front of the man opposite her. Her aim was deadly, for few people could throw a knife with the skill and precision of the Lady from Hell.
But Benedetti had caught the glitter of the candlelight on the metal a split second before she launched the knife. His agile mind perceived her intention and he flung himself to one side just in time. The knife thudded into the high back of the chair in which he had been sitting and rested there, quivering.
“You are a fool,” the man commented curtly. Striding to the French windows he flung them wide, letting moonlight stream into the room. The sound of the drums came in louder, a barbaric rhythm beating in strange tempo with the pulse in her wrist.
“Look at that,” he said, flinging out an arm.
At the edge of the veranda, which ran along the front of the house, lounged a white cotton-clad Haitian, a three-foot cane knife clasped in his fist. Further along, at the edge of the beach, another man leaned against the bole of a coconut tree, and the glitter of the moonlight on steel betrayed the fact that he also was armed with a cane knife.
“Even if you had killed me,” he said quietly, “you would have been no better off. You could not escape from the island. There are no boats here. Even the launch on which you arrived has been sent away and will not return until after the ceremony. And if you had attempted to swim, the sea swarms with sharks.”
It was after midnight when Vivian went upstairs to her room again. Benedetti escorted her to the door.
“I am locking you in,” he told her. “It is really quite useless to do so. You could not escape. There is absolutely no possibility of success. But it is a precaution I always take with my annual—visitors.”
Then he drew from his pocket the diamond ring that Vivian had, earlier in the evening, given to the little black maid.
“You will find,” he said with a smile, “that it is useless to attempt to bribe my servants. The fear of the Voodoo in them is greater than the greed for money.”
With a slight bow he closed the door, leaving her staring at the blank panels with a sinking feeling in her heart. She was a prisoner in a prison without walls, and yet the sea that girdled the land was a barrier as effective as stone ramparts and iron bars. Instead of one jailer she had dozens—perhaps hundreds—for she realized that every laborer on the island was a potential guard, alert to halt any attempt to escape. She did not attempt to deceive herself by thinking that every native of the place did not know of her presence and the fate for which she was destined.
She wondered what prompted the old woman—Benedetti’s servant—to take her life in hand and warn her, back there in Cap St. Feral? The woman had, of course, realized Benedetti’s purpose in bringing her here, since it had been she who had prepared the drugged rose stems. It was not for a long time, and then only by accident, that Vivian was to discover that in a Haitian the desire for revenge can transcend even the fear of Voodoo, and that it was to avenge what she considered a wrong that the old woman had warned her.
Vivian turned her thoughts back to her position. She believed she knew where Wylie was being held. On her way down to the dining room a little earlier she had encountered one of the black maids with a tray; had noted the door through which the girl had passed. That, she reasoned, must be the room in which Wylie was held prisoner, unless there were other prisoners in the house of whom she knew nothing.
She smiled a trifle grimly at the thought of being locked in her room. If Benedetti only knew of how little importance a lock—particularly an old-fashioned one such as this—was to her. Opening her suitcase she took out a hand mirror with a long handle. Unscrewing the handle, she removed from the hollow interior a long slender rod of thin steel. This she forced slowly into the thin opening between door and jamb. The rod scraped on metal. She worked it up and down, slowly pressing inward. Bit by bit the sloping tongue of the lock was forced back into its sheath, until the blade slipped through. A twist of the door handle and Vivian was peering out into the corridor.
Darkness hung before her eyes. It was as if a curtain of some impenetrable texture hung before her. She knew nothing of the floor plan of the big, rambling house, but she knew that the room she had seen the girl entering was the last on her side of the corridor, and accordingly she made her way cautiously in that direction, feeling her way, finger-tips trailing the wall, listening intently every step or so for some sound that might warn her of the presence of another person.
Her hand trailing along the wall touched a door—the fifth one she had passed. This was the door she sought. Gently she tried the knob. It was locked. A few minutes’ work with the thin steel rod and the door swung inward with only the faintest of sounds. But even that was sufficient to betray her presence to Wylie’s alert ears.
“Who is it?” he queried.
“Shhh,” she whispered warningly, and, closing the door, crossed swiftly toward the chair where he sat beside the window.
In low, tense whispers she told him of her conversation with Benedetti and of the fate that was in store for both of them.
“We’ve got to get away tonight,” she finished. “It’s our only chance. There must be some way—perhaps we can make a raft. At least we can try.”
With Wylie by her side she made her way to the door; peered cautiously outside. By diligent practice the Lady from Hell had long ago acquired the chatoyant eye—the cat’s—good for prowling about and seeing things in the dark, but here in the corridor the blackness was intense, with a tangible quality that was numbing to the senses. The utter opacity was tactile, half fluid, like fog. She crept down the hallway with feline assurance, passing her fingers delicately over objects that came into her path with a touch light enough to stroke a butterfly’s wing. The house was a sea of silence, and on its waves the slightest noise made long and screeching journeys.
To Vivian’s hearing, sandpapered by suspense, the slight give of the polished boards of the staircase beneath their slow steps produced a terrific noise. By making each step a thing of infinite slowness, they crept forward safely. Each downward step was a desperate and long-drawn-out achievement, involving an exactly calculated expenditure of muscular energy, an unceasing, muscular alertness.
Once, as they reached the bottom of the stairs, there came from the dining room in which they stood the rattle of a clock preparing to ring out a quarter hour. It struck Vivian’s tense nerves as a thing of abominable violence—like countless, swift hammer strokes on the innumerable frayed ends of her nerves. She had the sensation of being driven into the woodwork of the floor upon which she stood, of being crushed under an immense and lightning-like pressure.
After what seemed an eternity they reached the further side of the dining room. Under her careful manipulation the latch of the door slipped slowly back. The door moved silently, slowly. A brilliant line of moonlight appeared. Vivian caught her breath sharply.
Standing there in the open ground in front of the veranda stood a Haitian, alert, watchful, armed with a machete.
There was no escape that way. Weaponless, they were helpless before the menace of that shining three-foot length of steel, even if they could cross the moonlit space that lay between the veranda and the man without being detected.
“The back of the house,” Vivian whispered to Wylie, her voice barely perceptible.
She knew that the door to the kitchen was beside the staircase they had descended. That much she had observed during her interview with Benedetti earlier in the evening. By locating the staircase first in the blackness, she found the door she sought and opened it. A passageway opened before them, dimly illuminated by a shaft of silver that poured through a half opened door at its further end.
Silently they made their way down the passage and cautiously peered through the partly opened door. Another disappointment.
It was a small room, one wall covered with shelves, boxes and bags stacked high on the other side with a single window, half way up the wall, through which moonlight poured. A storeroom of some sort.
Vivian reached out and caught Wylie’s arm, drew him silently into the little room and closed the door.
“There may be weapons here,” she said. But she was mistaken. The nearest approach was a broken kitchen knife used, probably, to slash open the burlap bags which stood against the wall.
It was a poor substitute for a weapon, but Vivian took it thankfully. And then she gave a gasp. Her hand, exploring a shelf, had come in contact with something clammy and sticky that clung and would not be shaken off. Her first thought was that it was some monstrous tropical insect. It seemed alive, it clung so persistently, despite her efforts to shake it loose.
Then, as Wylie snapped his cigarette lighter into flame, the tiny glow illuminated an oblong of sticky fly paper fastened to her hand. There was a pile of the sheets upon the shelf. Despite the tenseness of the situation she almost laughed at the uncanny feeling the thing had given her there in the darkness.
In the dim flame of Wylie’s lighter they searched again for anything that might prove of assistance to them in their predicament. Bags of flour. Bags of potatoes. Kegs of pig tails and pig snouts in brine—evidently food for the laborers. A half-emptied case of bacale—dried codfish, a staple article of diet in the West Indies—and a can of phosphorescent paint. Also row after row of canned food. But nothing that might be of assistance to them.
Climbing upon a box Vivian peered through the window, then turned back to Wylie, excitement in her voice.
“We can get out this way,” she whispered. “There is the limb of a tree almost against the window and shrubbery around the tree.”
“Anybody in sight?” Wylie queried.
“No one,” Vivian said, and pried the latch of the window with her broken knife blade. It came open with a tearing shriek that sounded like thunder in the silence. Disregarding the noise Vivian slipped through the window and swung on to the limb of the tree. Wylie followed her, and in a moment they stood on the ground in the midst of dense shrubbery.
“We will have to keep in the shadow,” she said as they crept silently through the bushes, only an occasional rustling leaf marking their passage. “The moment we step in the moonlight we’ll be seen, if anyone is watching.”
Even there in the bushes the brilliant moonlight illuminated the ground about them. A faint drumming ebbed to them through the brilliance, faintly touching the dark membrane of the night as they emerged on what seemed to be a well-defined path leading toward the beach.
A sudden opening in the trail, a burst of moonlight, and they stood on a strip of white sand with breakers creaming softly in front of them.
“There,” Vivian said, still keeping her voice low. “See that pile of driftwood. We’ll make a raft of that. Drag it to the water’s edge while I cut vines to lash it together.”
Feverishly they worked, Wylie dragging the heavy logs into position, lashing them firmly together with the vines that Vivian cut from the jungle’s edge, until at last a crazy-looking affair bobbed up and down in the ripple at the edge of the beach. Makeshift, clumsy, but it would float and it was an avenue of escape, the only avenue that had presented itself.
Vivian returned from a final trip to the jungle, dragging behind her three bamboo poles.
“We can use two of these to shove the thing with, until we get into deep water,” she said. “The other we can lash upright as a mast and use my dress as a sail.”
At that instant, from the path behind them, came the sound of voices. Vivian flashed a frantic glance at the jungle rearing up behind them, and then leaped on board the raft. Wylie followed. It dipped and swayed, but held their weight. The voices came nearer. Desperately Vivian braced her pole against the sandy bottom and shoved. Wylie followed suit. Sluggishly the clumsy craft moved away from the shore—five feet—ten feet—and than half a dozen men poured through the opening in the jungle and raced across the sand, splashed through the shallow water and surrounded the little craft, gleaming machetes raised threateningly.
Vivian did not see Benedetti when they returned to the house with their captors that night, nor was he visible when she awoke the next morning after a night spent in futile speculation and planning, and descended to the dining room.
A black girl served them breakfast. Golden sunlight poured through the wide French windows, beyond which they could see the beach and the green cove. Nowhere was there evidence of the fate that hung over them. But both knew, and the fact of that knowledge was evident in their eyes, in their short jerky words, that Death’s wings were already casting their shadows across them.
The sun was well up when they went on to the veranda. There should have been the click of machetes in the cane fields and the low, lazy laughter of the workers. But everything was still, and that stillness held an ominous meaning.
Wylie was frankly without hope—more so as the day wore on, and Vivian, although she had never admitted defeat, admitted to herself that she saw no way out of the impasse. Benedetti, she saw now, had made no mistake when he told her that escape was impossible.
The day wore on, and still Benedetti did not put in an appearance. Once Vivian asked one of the maids where he could be found and received in answer a queer jumble of Creole French that held no meaning. Later, they essayed a walk to the Sugar Central, whose smokestacks rose on the other side of the cane fields, but one of the ever-present natives stepped slowly in their path, his machete openly in evidence. From the corner of her eyes Vivian could see others, alert, ready, at the edge of the jungle. Their captors were taking no chances.
On the far side of the cleared space Vivian could see a break in the jungle where a path ended. From this path men kept coming and going, and this, she surmised, must lead to the place where they were scheduled to die that night.
It was after dinner when Benedetti made his appearance, and with him stalked tragedy.
Vivian and Wylie were on the broad veranda, walking up and down. Something—some sixth sense—warned Vivian of danger, even before she heard the quick, catlike tread behind her. She made an attempt to swing around an instant too late. Someone leapt on her. A strong arm was locked about her throat. A hand was clamped over her mouth. A knee dug into the small of her back. She wrenched, tore at the gripping hands, even as she saw other hands seizing Wylie; she was aware of Benedetti’s face, his features hard as stone. In the same second something dropped over her head and blotted the world into darkness.
How long she was held there motionless on the veranda she did not know. Then came a quick gabble of Creole in Benedetti’s voice and the smothering hand was removed.
She flashed a glance around. The place was deserted save for herself, Benedetti and one tall native who stood beside the veranda steps, the ever-present machete in evidence. Obviously a guard.
The man interpreted her look.
“Your companion is gone. You will never see him again,” he said, and his voice was indifferent. He might have been speaking of some trivial object that had disappeared. He turned back toward the dining room, where candlelight made a soft glow. Vivian followed. The house seemed curiously still, as if all life had departed from it save these two.
“Gone—you mean—” she could not finish the sentence.
Benedetti nodded and selected a cigarette from a box on a little side table; lit it at one of the candles.
“He will be the first sacrifice to Ogoun Badagri. When the great green snake god has finished with him they will come for you. You will be the climax of the ceremony,” he told her brutally.
“You mean that you—a white man—will actually permit these men to make a sacrifice of us?” she queried. She knew, before she said it, that any appeal to him would be useless, but her mind was going around frantically, seeking a method of warding off the death that was imminent.
“What is your life and that of your companion to me?” he asked. “Nothing—not so much as the ash from the cigarette—compared with the fact that your death means that I keep my plantation a year longer. I refused close to half a million dollars from the sugar trust for the island. Do you think, then, that I would permit a little thing like your life to rob me of it?”
Vivian did not answer. Her eyes roamed around the room, although already every article in it had been photographed indelibly on her retina. A fly had alighted on the border of the sticky fly paper that lay in the center of the mahogany table. It tugged and buzzed, but the sticky mess held it too firmly.
“You may comfort yourself with the thought,” Benedetti went on, “if the fact is any comfort, that you are not the first. There have been others. The little dancing girl from the Port-au-Prince cabaret, a Spanish girl from Santo Domingo…”
He was not boastful, purely meditative as he sat there and smoked and talked, telling Vivian of the victims whose lives had paid for his hold on his sugar plantation. Vivian’s eyes were fastened on the feebly fluttering fly on the sticky paper. They, too, were caught like flies in a trap, and unless she could do something immediately—she faced the fact calmly; it would be the end.
Abruptly she leaned forward. There was a stillness in her pose, a stillness in her opaque eyes. Her hands coiled like springs. She found it difficult to keep her detached poise as the scheme began to unfold and take shape in her brain.
She smiled thinly. The air was suddenly electrical, filled with the portent of danger. Benedetti caught the feel of it, and peered at her suspiciously for a moment. The Lady from Hell knew that it was a thousand to one that she would lose. But, if her scheme worked, she could save Wylie’s live and her own, and Benedetti might be made to pay for the thing he had attempted—pay as he had never dreamed that he would have to pay.
Reaching out one hand she moved the candle in front of her, so that its glow fell more on Benedetti’s face than her own. Her voice, as she spoke, was quiet, almost meditative. But her eyes told a different story.
“How much time have I to live?” she said.
The man glanced at his watch.
“Roughly, two hours,” he said. He might have been estimating the departure time of a steamer, his voice was so calm. “It might be a trifle more or less—the time of my workers is not accurate. When the drums stop they will come for you. And when they start again—well, you will be there then.”
She rose to her feet, leaning lightly on the table.
“If I am to die,” she said hysterically, “I will die beautiful.” Then she added as an explanation, “My makeup is in my room.”
But he was on his feet too, alert, wary. “You must not leave my presence,” he said. “I cannot permit it. The sacrifice must go to the arms of Ogoun Badagri alive, not a corpse.”
His dark eyes held no recognition of the fact that she was a very beautiful woman. Vivian sensed, and rightly, that to him she was merely a woman who might thwart his plans. But she caught the implication in his last sentence.
“I shall not take poison,” she said. “You may come with me—watch me, if you wish.”
She took a step or two and groped blindly at the table for support. Instinctively he stretched out a hand to steady her.
That was the moment for which she had planned, the instant for which she had been waiting. Benedetti made the fatal mistake that many men had made with the Lady from Hell as an opponent—of underestimating her as an adversary.
Like a striking snake her hand darted to the table, seized one of the heavy candlesticks. Before Benedetti could interfere, had even divined her purpose, the heavy metal fell across his forehead with stunning force. He crumpled to the floor without a murmur.
Leaving him where he had fallen, Vivian ran to the door and peered out. The gigantic black on guard at the veranda steps had heard nothing. He was still standing there, unaware of the drama being enacted within the dining room.
Swiftly she turned back and her slender fingers searched the drawers of the carved mahogany sideboard against the wall until she found what she sought—a heavy, sharp carving knife. She balanced it speculatively in her hand. It would do, she decided.
The man was still standing there when she peered out the door again. He never saw the slender blade as it flew through the air, sped by a hand that had learned its cunning from the most expert knife thrower in Shanghai. The blade went through, sinking into the flesh at the base of his throat as though it had been butter. He died without an outcry.
Now she must work fast, if she were to escape and save Wylie too. Benedetti she bound and gagged and rolled against the sideboard where he was out of the way. But first she had taken his revolver from his side pocket.
Trip after trip she made, first to the flat tin roof of the house, and then to the front of the house. Finally she was satisfied with what she had done, and, snatching up a flashlight from the sideboard fled toward the path in the jungle that she knew led to the place of sacrifice.
A tropical squall was rising out of the sea beyond the little cove. A cloud, black in the light of the moon, was rising above the horizon. She glanced at it anxiously. Then she plunged into the jungle.
The valences of the palms were motionless against the moonlit sky. The atmosphere, as she pushed her way along, seemed saturated with mystery, dew dripping, bars of green moonlight between the trunks of the trees; the cry of night birds, the patter of something in the dark mystery of the tree roof overhead, the thudding of the drums that had never ceased. Out of that familiar hollow rhythm of drums that had begun to emerge a thread of actual melody—an untraditional rise and fall of notes—a tentative attack, as it were, on the chromatic scale of the beat. A tentative abandonment of Africa. It was a night of abandonment, anyhow, a night of betrayal and the peeling off of blanketing layers down to the raw.
Once she stopped short with a sudden emptiness in her chest at sight of what she thought was a man in the path ahead. But it was only a paint-daubed, grinning skull on a bamboo stake planted in the ground—a voodoo ouanga. Then she went ahead again. Evidently there were no guards posted. With every inhabitant of the island concerned in the ceremony in one way or another there would be no need for guards to be posted now.
The rapid sequence of events had edged Vivian’s nerves, and the boom of the drums—heavy, maddening, relentless, did nothing to soothe them. That passage through the jungle was galling, fraying the nerve ends like an approaching execution.
A red glow came to her through the trees, and seemed to spread and spread until it included the whole world about her in its malignancy. The drums, with that queer rise and fall of notes that it seemed impossible to achieve with taut skins stretched over drum heads, beat upon her senses, pounded until the air was filled with sounds that seemed to come from the earth, the sky, the forest; dominated the flow of blood with strange excitations.
She had formulated no plan for rescuing Wylie. She could not, until she reached the spot and saw what she had to contend with. She had the gun she had taken from Benedetti, but six cartridges against a horde of drum-maddened blacks—that was only a last resort.
And then she stood on the edge of a clearing that seemed sunk to the bottom of a translucent sea of opalescent flame.
Something that was age-old was happening in that crimson-bathed clearing, something old and dark, buried so deeply under the subtleties of civilization that most men go through life without ever knowing it is there, was blossoming and flowering under the stark madness of those thudding drums.
Coconut fibre torches, soaked in palm oil, flaring red in the blackness of the night lit up the space in front of her like a stage, the torchlight weaving strange scarlet and mauve shadows. Tall trees, lining the clearing opposite her, seemed to shelter masses of people, darker shadows against the red glow of the burning torches.
Two enormous drums, taut skins booming under the frenzied pounding of the palms of two drummers, stood on one side. A dozen, two dozen dancing black figures, male and female, spun and danced in the center of the clearing, movements graceful and obscene—animal gestures that were identical with similar dances of their ancestors hundreds of years before in Moko or the Congo.
And then she saw Wylie. He was tied to a post in the center of the clearing, and the dancers were milling about him. Beside him stood a woman whom Vivian instinctively knew must be the Mamaloi, the priestess of whom Benedetti had spoken.
Now and then the priestess gave vent to a sound that seemed to stir the dancers to greater activity—to spur the slowly humming throng of watchers to a point of frenzy; a sound such as Vivian had never heard before and never hoped to hear again. When she stopped, it would hang, incredibly high-pitched, small, like a black thrill in the shadow. It was shocking and upsetting out of that ancient thin figure.
Her eyes shifted from the aged figure to the sky line above the trees. The black cloud that, a short time before had been no larger than the palm of her hand on the horizon, was visible through the branches of the trees now. Even as she looked a faint flicker of heat lightning laced through it.
And then, as if at a conductor’s signal, more torches flowered on the edge of the clearing, and in their light the Lady from Hell saw half a dozen men staggering forward with an enormous thing of bamboo—a cage—and in that cage was a great snake; a boa constrictor, perhaps, or a python, although neither of them, she seemed to remember, was native to Haiti.
They placed the cage in the center of the clearing, and Vivian saw that it had been placed so that a small door in the cage was directly opposite Wylie’s bound figure. The significance of that fact went through her like a breath of cold wind. If she failed, she also would be bound to that stake. Mentally she could see the little door in the cage opening, the great triangular head of the snake gliding slowly…
Swiftly she bent over and caught up a handful of the black leaf mold underfoot, smeared it over her face, her arms, her neck, her shoulders. A section of the dress she was wearing was ripped off and made into a turban that hid the flaming crown of her hair. More earth was rubbed onto the white of her dress.
Then, with swift leaps, she was on the outer fringe of the dancers, and the chaos of moving arms and legs caught her up and swallowed her as a breaking wave on the beach swallows a grain of sand.
It was a mad thing to do, a desperate thing. She knew that, normally, her crude disguise would not have fooled the natives. The Haitian black seems to have the ability to almost smell the presence of a blanc, much as an animal can smell the presence of another. But, in that flickering torchlight, the crudeness of disguise would not be so apparent, and in that unceasing madness of drums that went on like a black echo of something reborn, she hoped that her alien presence would pass unnoticed long enough for her to accomplish her object.
Slowly she worked her way through the writhing, dancing mass of figures toward the center. She knew that her time was short—that the lesser ceremony was approaching its height. Even as she reached the inner ring of dancers she saw the ancient Mamaloi joining in the dance, while the others kept a respectful distance from her. Monotonously, maddeningly, the priestess twisted and turned and shivered, holding aloft a protesting fowl. Faster and faster she went, and while all eyes were fastened on that whirling figure Vivian managed to reach Wylie’s bound figure.
A swift slash with the knife she had hidden beneath her dress and his hands were free.
“Keep still…don’t let them see that you’re not bound,” she whispered. Another motion and the bonds that fastened his ankles to the post were free.
Vivian moved about Wylie with graceful motions, imitating the movements of the blacks about her, and her voice came to him in broken, desperate whispers:
“Signal…you’ll recognize it…don’t move until then…dead tree by the edge of the clearing…that’s the path…I’ll be waiting there…it’s only chance…”
Then she was gone, breasting her way through the black figures that danced like dead souls come back from Hell in the evil glow of the sputtering torches. And then came a great shout as the Mamaloi caught the chicken she held by the head and whirled it around and around.
Throom…throom…throom. The drums were like coalescing madness. A moan went up from the onlookers and a chill went through Vivian.
She knew from what Benedetti had told her that the chicken was the prelude of what would happen to Wylie. Next, the old woman would slash Wylie’s throat…let his life blood spurt into a bowl with which the dancers would be sprinkled. Then would come the lesser ceremony, while the guard at the house would start with her for the ceremony that would end with the door in the great snake’s cage being opened…
Vivian snatched a torch from the hands of one of the dancers. The man did not even seem to be aware of the fact that it had been taken away. From beneath her dress she took a stick of dynamite with fuse attached—part of her loot from the storeroom—and touched the fuse to the flame of the torch.
It sputtered and she hurled it with all her strength at her command toward the overhanging tree beneath which the drummers sat, then fled for the bare naked branches of the dead tree that stood where the path entered the clearing—the spot where she had told Wylie she would meet him.
She had barely reached the spot when there came a tremendous concussion that shook the earth, and a gush of flame. The thing was as startling, as hideously unexpected to the drum maddened Haitians as a striking snake. Scream after scream—long, jagged screams that ripped red gashes through the dark, were followed by a swift clacking of tongues, a terrified roar as dancers and onlookers milled about, black bodies writhing in the light of the remaining torches. A black tide, rising, filled the clearing with terrified clamor. A moment later there was the sound of running feet and Wylie was at her side.
“This way,” she whispered, and guided him into the path.
Both of them knew that it would be only a moment before the startled natives recovered their wits and discovered that their victim was gone. Then they would take up their trail again immediately.
“Where are we going?” Wylie asked her as he ran behind her along the winding jungle trail.
“The house,” she answered tersely.
“The house?” He almost halted in his amazement. “But Vivian—that’s the first place they’ll make for. Even if you’ve found weapons we can’t hold them off forever.”
“Wait,” she said. “No time to explain now…But if things work out, we’ll be off this island before morning, safe and sound.”
From behind them a quavering yell rose on the air and the two fugitives knew that Wylie’s escape had been discovered. It was a matter of yards and of minutes now. Then they burst from the shadow of the jungle into the moonlight clearing.
“Follow me,” she said quickly. “Don’t take the path,” and he followed her footsteps as she twisted and twined about the space toward the steps.
At the steps he halted a moment in wonder at what he saw there, and then, in spite of the gravity of the situation, a chuckle broke from his panting lips.
“So that’s it,” he said, and Vivian nodded.
“That’s it. Be careful. It’s a slim enough chance, but there is just a chance it’ll work—the only chance we’ve got.”
“But even that,” he said, a thought striking him, as he threaded his way carefully up the steps to the veranda, “will only be temporary. Even if it holds them at bay until dawn—when daylight comes…”
“I know,” she said a trifle impatiently, “but long before then…” She broke off suddenly as their pursuers appeared, breaking out from under the palms, just as a flash of lightning came.
“They’re here,” he whispered. “If the scheme won’t work, then it’s all up with us.”
“It will work,” Vivian said confidently.
But, although her tone was cool, confident, there was anxiety in her eyes as she watched the black figures pouring out of the jungle. Vivian knew that her own and Wylie’s lives were hanging by the slenderest margin in their criminal career.
The Papaloi, the giant negro with the white lines and scar ridges criss-crossing his muscular torso, was the first to see them as another flash of lightning illuminated the veranda where they stood. He uttered a single bellow, a stentorian cry, which seemed to shake the house, and bounded toward the stairs. Behind him came part of his followers, while others rushed for the other pair of stairs.
The Papaloi leaped for the steps, his men close behind him. His feet landed in something that slid quickly under him, that clung to his soles. He lost his balance, fell asprawl, his followers in a momentary confusion that quickly increased to panic—the panic of the primitive mind confronted with something unseen that it cannot understand.
The hands of the gigantic black Papaloi were glued now to squares of sticky fly paper that he could not shake off—the fly paper that The Lady from Hell had taken from the storeroom and spent so much precious time placing upon the steps and around the veranda without encountering it, save along the narrow, tortuous trail along which Vivian had led Wylie.
There was a square of fly paper on the Papaloi’s face now, clinging there, flapping a little as if alive, persistent as a vampire bat. There were more on the side of his body where he had slipped. He struck at them and accumulated more.
The Mamaloi, that ancient crone, was in trouble also. She had slipped and in falling, had a sheet of fly paper plastered squarely across her eyes. She was uttering shrill cries of distress as she pawed at her face with hands that were covered with sticky fly paper and glue. All about the two, men and women were struggling, shouting in alarm. The silent attack had materialized out of nothing with such appalling swiftness, and continued with such devastating persistence that it robbed them of every thought save alarm.
Robbed of their spiritual leaders, terror was striking at the hearts of the voodoo worshipers. At the edge of the veranda, black men writhed in horror, snatching at one another for support, tearing at the horrible things that clung as if with a million tiny sucking mouths. Their machetes, covered with glue and flapping fly paper, had been dropped, forgotten in the confusion. Torches had dropped underfoot, forgotten, so that the struggle was in darkness, illuminated only by the light of the moon through the clouds and the flashes of lightning. Flypaper in their hair, across their eyes, clinging, hampering, maddening them with the knowledge that some frightful voodoo, stronger than their Papaloi or Mamaloi, had laid hands upon them.
A flare of lightning slashed from the very center of the storm cloud that was now hanging overhead. Its brilliance illuminated, for a moment, the figure of The Lady from Hell, standing at the edge of the veranda, her arms uplifted as if calling down the wrath of the heavens upon them. A shattering blast of thunder followed and a gust of wind swept across the clearing.
That gust of wind was the crowning touch, the straw that was needed to break the camel’s back of resistance in that struggling, milling black throng. It set all the loose ends of the fly- paper fluttering, where it was not fastened to bodies. And, more than that, it caught up the sticky squares that were still unattached and sent them dancing through the air.
There rose a howl of fear. The demons of these blancs, not content with lying in wait and springing out upon them, were now flying through the air; attacking them from the heavens, sucking from their bodies all their strength.
What use to resist when even the magic of the Papaloi and the Mamaloi was not sufficient to fight off the demons.
They bolted headlong, flypaper sticking to every part of their anatomy. They fell, scaled with the awful things, and promptly acquired more. Women fell and shrieked as they were trampled upon, not from the pain of the trampling feet, but from the fear that they might be left behind at the mercy of the demons. Men, blinded by the sticky things, ran in circles and clutched at whatever they came in contact with.
Then came the low drone of an airplane engine in the distance, flying low because of the storm. Turning, Vivian ran back into the dining room, where Benedetti still lay, bound upon the floor, his eyes glaring hatred at her. Calmly she sat down and wrote upon one of his letterheads which she found in the desk there. Then she snatched off the gag that muffled his mouth.
“The danger is all over,” she told the man, “for us. But for you trouble is just beginning.”
“You can’t escape,” he raved at her viciously. “I don’t know what you’ve done, but you won’t be able to leave the island. In an hour, two hours—by daylight at least—they will return, and what they will do to you won’t be pleasant.”
Vivian smiled. The invisible plane seemed to be circling the house now. She waved the paper she had written to dry the ink.
“What the American authorities in Port-au-Prince do to you will not be pleasant, either,” she told Benedetti. “Voodoo is forbidden by law. You have not only aided and abetted voodoo ceremonies, but you have also procured human sacrifices for the ceremonial. There was the little French girl from the Port-au-Prince cabaret, and the girl from Santo Domingo—you should not have boasted. For you murdered them as surely as if you had driven a knife in their hearts, and the law will agree with me.”
“You’ll never live to tell the Americans, even if they believed the tale,” he scoffed.
“Oh, yes I will,” she mocked. Her voice was as dry and keen as a new ground sword. “Within an hour I shall be on my way to Cape Hatien. Hear that,” and she raised an admonitory hand. In the silence the plane could be heard. She threw open the French windows. From where he lay Benedetti could see a Marine plane slanting down toward the comparatively sheltered waters of the little cove.
“In less than ten minutes,” she said, “the plane will have taxied up to the beach and the Marine pilot and his observer will be in this room, asking if we need aid. You see,” and her smile was completely mocking and scornful now, “you yourself brought about your own downfall—planted the idea in my brain when you told me that the plane passed overhead every night at about this time. There was a can of luminous paint in your storeroom. I saw it, and there he is coming to see what it’s all about—and to take you to Cape Hatien—unless…”
“Unless what?” he queried eagerly.
“Unless you sign this memorandum. It deposes that I have purchased this plantation from you—that you have received the purchase price—and that proper legal transfer to it will be made later.”
There was a calculating gleam in the man’s eyes as he made assent. His gaze flickered out through the open door to where the plane had already landed on the surface of the cove.
Vivian had caught that gleam. “Of course,” she went on smoothly, “we will have the Marine officers sign it as witnesses in your presence. Then you can accompany us back to Cape Hatien in the plane, and the lawyers of the Haitian Sugar Central will be glad to see that memorandum is put in proper legal form before I, in turn, resell the plantation to them. I shall not refuse the price they are willing to pay—and it will not matter to the sugar trust whether you or I are the owner.” She gazed at him for a moment. “Well, do you agree?—or do you go to Cape Hatien a prisoner?”
Benedetti shot a glance at the trim, uniformed figure coming cautiously up from the beach. Feverishly he scribbled his name at the bottom of the memorandum.