The Dark Man and Others, page 7
‘No, no! How can it be? She is dead—or gone away. Yet—she was born and raised in the West Indies, and from hints she let fall in the past, I know she delved into the mysteries of the voodoo. I believe she even danced in one of their horrible ceremonies—how could she have been such a beast? And this—this horror. God, can such things be? I know not what to think. If it is she who roams the house at night, who fumbles at my door, who whistles so weirdly and sweetly—no, no, I must be going mad. If I stay here alone I shall die as hideously as my sisters must have died. Of that I am convinced.*”
The incoherent chronicle ended as abruptly as it had begun. Griswell was so engrossed in deciphering the scraps that he was not aware that darkness had stolen upon them, hardly aware that Buckner was holding his electric torch for him to read by. Waking from his abstraction he started and darted a quick glance at the black hallway.
“What do you make of it?”
“What I’ve suspected all the time,” answered Buckner. “That mulatto maid Joan turned zuvembie to avenge herself on Miss Celia. Probably hated the whole family as much as she did her mistress. She’d taken part in voodoo ceremonies on her native island until she was ‘ripe/ as old Jacob said. All she needed was the Black Brew—he supplied that She killed Miss Celia and the three older girls, and would have gotten Elizabeth but for chance. She’s been lurkin’ in this old house all these years, like a snake in a ruin.”
“But why should she murder a stranger?”
“You heard what old Jacob said,” reminded Buckner. “A zuvembie finds satisfaction in the slaughter of humans. She called Branner up the stair and split his head and stuck the hatchet in his hand, and sent him downstairs to murder you. No court will ever believe that, but if we can produce her body, that will be evidence enough to prove your innocence. My word will be taken, that she murdered Branner. Jacob said a zuvembie could be killed…in reporting this affair I don’t have to be too accurate in detail.”
“She came and peered over the balustrade of the stair at us,” muttered GRISWELL. “But why didn’t we find her tracks on the stair?”
“Maybe you dreamed it. Maybe a zuvembie can project her spirit—hell! why try to rationalize something that’s outside the bounds of rationality? Let’s begin our watch.”
“Don’t turn out the light!” exclaimed Griswell involuntarily. Then he added: “Of course. Turn it out. We must be in the dark as”—he gagged a bit—“as Branner and I were.”
But fear like a physical sickness assailed him when the room was plunged in darkness. He lay trembling and his heart beat so heavily he felt as if he would suffocate.
“The West Indies must be the plague spot of the world,’* muttered Buckner, a blur on his blankets. “I’ve heard of zombies. Never knew before what a zuvembie was. Evidently some drug concocted by the voodoo-men to induce madness in women. That doesn’t explain the other things, though: the hypnotic powers, the abnormal longevity, the ability to control corpses—no, a zuvembie can’t be merely a madwoman. It’s a monster, something more and less than a human being, created by the magic that spawns in black swamps and jungles—well, we’ll see.”
His voice ceased, and in the silence Griswell heard the pounding of his own heart Outside in the black woods a wolf howled eerily, and owls hooted. Then silence fell again like a black fog.
Griswell forced himself to lie still on his blankets. Time seemed at a standstill. He felt as if he were choking. The suspense was growing unendurable; the effort he made to control his crumbling nerves bathed his limbs in sweat. He’ clenched his teeth until his jaws ached and almost locked, and the nails of his fingers bit deeply into his palms.
He did not know what he was expecting. The fiend would strike again—but how? Would it be a horrible, sweet whistling, bare feet stealing down the creaking steps, or a sudden hatchet-stroke in the dark? Would it choose him or Buckner? Was Buckner already dead? He could see nothing in the blackness, but he heard the man’s steady breathing. The southerner must have nerves of steel. Or was that Buckner breathing beside him, separated by a narrow strip of darkness? Had the fiend already struck in silence, and taken the sheriff’s place, there to lie in ghoulish glee until it was ready to strike?—a thousand hideous fancies assailed Griswell -tooth and claw.
He began to feel that he would go mad if he did not leap to his feet, screaming, and burst frenziedly out of that accursed house—not even the fear of the gallows could keep him lying there in the darkness any longer—the rhythm of Buckner’s breathing was suddenly broken, and Griswell felt as if a bucket of ice-water had been poured over him. From somewhere above them rose a sound of weird, sweet whistling…
Griswell’s control snapped, plunging his brain into darkness deeper than the physical blackness which engulfed him. There was a period of absolute blankness, in which a realization of motion was his first sensation of awakening consciousness. He was running, madly, stumbling over an incredibly rough road. All was darkness about him, and he ran blindly. Vaguely he realized that he must have bolted from the house, and fled for perhaps miles before his overwrought brain began to function. He did not care; dying on the gallows for a murder he never committed did not terrify him half as much as the thought of returning to that house of horror. He was overpowered by the urge to run—run—run as he was running now, blindly, until he reached the end of his endurance. The mist had not yet fully lifted from his brain, but he was aware of a dull wonder that he could not see the stars through the black branches. He wished vaguely that he could see where he was going. He believed he must be climbing a hill, and that was strange, for he knew there were no hills within miles of the Manor. Then above and ahead of him a dim glow began.
He scrambled toward it, over ledge-like projections that were more and more and more taking on a disquieting symmetry. Then he was horror-stricken to realize that a sound was impacting on his ears—a weird mocking whistle. The sound swept the mists away. Why, what was this? Where was he? Awakening and realization came like the stunning stroke of a butcher’s maul. He was not fleeing along a road, or climbing a hill; he was mounting a stair. He was still in Blassenville Manor! And he was climbing the stair!
An inhuman scream burst from his lips. Above it the mad whistling rose in a ghoulish piping of demoniac triumph. He tried to stop—to turn back—even to fling himself over the balustrade. His shrieking rang unbearably in his own ears. But his willpower was shattered to bits. It did not exist. He had no will. He had dropped his flashlight, and he had forgotten the gun in his pocket. He could not command his own body. His legs, moving stiffly, worked like pieces of mechanism detached from his brain,’obeying an outside will. Clumping methodically they carried him shrieking up the stair toward the witch-fire glow shimmering above him.
“Buckner!” he screamed. “Buckner! Help, for God’s sake!”
His voice strangled in his throat He had reached the upper landing. He was tottering down the hallway. The whistling sank and ceased, but its impulsion still drove him on. He could not see from what source the dim glow came. It seemed to emanate from no central focus. But he saw a vague figure shambling toward him. It looked like a woman, but no human woman ever walked with that skulking gait, and no human woman ever had that face of horror, that leering yellow blur of lunacy—he tried to scream at the sight of that face, at the glint of keen steel in the uplifted claw-like hand—but his tongue was frozen.
Then something crashed deafeningly behind him; the shadows were split by a tongue of flame which lit a hideous figure falling backward. Hard on the heels of the report rang an inhuman squawk.
In the darkness that followed the flash Griswell fell to his knees and covered his face with his hands. He did not hear Buckners voice. The Southerners hand on his shoulder shook him out of his swoon.
A light in his eyes blinded him. He blinked, shaded his eyes, looked up into Buckner*s face, bending at the rim of the circle of light. The sheriff was pale.
“Are you hurt? God, man, are you hurt? There’s a butcher knife there on the floor—”
“I’m not hurt,” mumbled GRISWELL “You fired just in time—the fiend! Where is it? Where did it go?”
“Listen!”
Somewhere in the house there sounded a sickening flopping and flapping as of something that thrashed and struggled in its death convulsions.
“Jacob was right,” said Buckner grimly. “Lead can kill them. I hit her, all right Didn’t dare use my flashlight, but there was enough light. When that whistlin’ started you almost walked over me gettin* out I knew you were hypnotized, or whatever it is. I followed you up the stairs. I was right behind you, but crouchin* low so she wouldn’t see me, and maybe get away again: I almost waited too long be-v fore I fired—but the sight of her almost paralyzed me. Look!”
He flashed his light down the hall, and now it shone bright and clear. And it shone on an aperture gaping in the wall where no door had showed before.
“The secret panel Miss Elizabeth found!” Buckner snapped. “Come on!”
He ran across the hallway and Griswell followed him dazedly. The flopping and thrashing came from beyond that mysterious door, and now the sounds had ceased.
The light revealed a narrow, tunnel-like corridor that evidendy led through one of the thick walls. Buckner plunged into it without hesitation.
“Maybe it couldn’t think like a human,” he muttered, shining his light ahead of him. “But it had sense enough to erase its tracks last night so we couldn’t trail it to that point in the wall and maybe find the secret panel There’s a room ahead—the secret room on the Blassenvilles!
And Griswell cried out: “My God! It’s the windowless chamber I saw in my dream, with the three bodies hanging—ahhhhh!”
Buckner’s light playing about the circular chamber became suddenly motionless. In that wide ring of light three figures appeared, three dried, shriveled, mummy-like shapes, still clad in the moldering garments of the last century. Their slippers were clear of the floor as they hung by their withered necks from chains suspended from the ceiling.
“The three Blassenville sisters!” muttered Buckner. “Miss Elizabeth wasn’t crazy, after all.”
“Look!” Griswell could barely make his voice intelligible. ’
“There—over there in the comer!”
The light moved, halted.
“Was that thing a woman once?” whispered Griswell. “God, look at that face, even in death. Look at those claw-like hands, with black talons like those of a beast Yes, it was human, though—even the rags of an old ballroom gown. Why should a mulatto maid wear such a dress, I wonder?”
“This has been her lair for over forty years,” muttered Buckner, brooding over the grinning grisly thing sprawling in the comer. “This clears you, Griswell—a crazy woman with a hatchet—that’s all the authorities need to know. God, what a revenge!—what a foul revenge! Yet what a bestial nature she must have had, in the beginnin’, to delve into voodoo as she must have done-”
“The mulatto woman?” whispered Griswell, dimly sensing * a horror that overshadowed all the rest of the tenor.
Buckner shook his head. “We misunderstood old Jacob’s maunderin’s, and the things Miss Elizabeth wrote—she must have known, but family pride sealed her lips. Griswell, I understand now; the mulatto woman had her revenge, but not as we’d supposed. She didn’t drink the Black Brew old Jacob fixed for her. It was for somebody else, to be given secretly in her food, or coffee, no doubt Then Joan ran away, leavin* the seeds of the hell she’d sowed to grow.”
“That—that’s not the mulatto woman?” whispered Griswell.
“When I saw her out there in the hallway I knew she was no mulatto. And those distorted features still reflect a family likeness. I’ve seen her portrait, and I can’t be mistaken. There lies the creature that was once Celia Blassenville.”
The Dark Man
“For this is the night of the drawing of swords, And the painted tower of the heathen hordes
Leans to our hammers, fires and cords, Leans a little and falls.”
—Chesterton.
A biting wind drifted the snow as it fell. The surf snarled along the rugged shore and farther out the long leaden combers moaned ceaselessly. Through the gray dawn that was stealing over the coast of Connacht a fisherman came trudging, a man rugged as the land that bore him. His feet were wrapped in rough cured leather; a single garment of deerskin scantily sheltered his body. He wore no other clothing. As he strode stolidly along the shore, as heedless of the bitter cold as if he were the shaggy beast he appeared at first glance, he halted. Another man loomed up out of the veil of falling snow and drifting sea-mist Turlogh Dubh stood before him.
This man was nearly a head taller than the stocky fisherman, and he had the bearing of a fighting man. No single glance would suffice, but any man or woman whose eyes fell on Turlogh Dubh would look long. Six feet and one inch he stood, and the first impression of slimness faded on closer inspection. He was big but trimly molded; a magnificent sweep of shoulder and depth of chest. Rangy he was, but compact, combining the strength of a bull with the the quickness of a panther. The slightest movement he made showed that steel trap coordination that makes the super-fighter. Turlogh Dubh—Black Turlogh, once of the Clan na O’Brien- And black he was as to hair, and dark of complexion. From under heavy black brows gleamed eyes of a hot volcanic blue. And in his clean-shaven face there was something of the somberness of dark mountains, of the ocean at midnight Like the fisherman, he was a part of this fierce western land.
On his head he wore a plain vizorless helmet without crest or symbol. From neck to mid-thigh he was protected by a close-fitting shirt of black chain mail. The kilt he wore below his armor and which reached to his knees, was of plain drab material. His legs were wrapped with hard leather that might turn a sword edge, and the shoes on his feet were worn with much traveling.
A broad belt encircled his lean waist, holding a long dirk in a leather sheath. On his left arm he carried a small round shield of hide-covered wood, hard as iron, braced and reinforced with steel, and having a short, heavy spike in the center. An ax hung from his right wrist, and it was to this feature that the fisherman’s eyes wandered. The weapon with its three-foot handle and graceful lines looked slim and light when the fisherman mentally compared it to the great axes carried by the Norsemen. Yet scarcely three years had passed, as the fisherman knew, since such axes as these had shattered the northern hosts into red defeat and broken the pagan power forever.
There was individuality about the ax as about its owner. It was not like any other the fisherman had ever seen. Single-edged it was, with a short three-edged spike on the back and another on the top of the head. Like the wielder, it was heavier than it looked. With its slightly curved shaft and the graceful artistry of the blade, it looked the weapon of an expert—swift, lethal, deadly, cobra like. The head was of finest Irish workmanship, which meant, at that day, the finest in the world. The handle, cut from the heart of a century-old oak, specially fire-hardened and braced with steel, was as unbreakable as an iron bar.
“Who are you?” asked the fisherman with the bluntness of the west
“Who are you to ask?” answered the other.
The fisherman’s eyes roved to the single ornament the warrior wore—a heavy golden armlet on his left arm.
“Clean-shaven and dose-cropped in the Norman fashion,” he muttered. “And dark—you’d be Black Turlogh, the outlaw of Clan na O’Brien. You range far; I heard of you last in the Wicklow hills preying off the O’Reillys and the Oastmen alike.”
“A man must eat, outcast or not,” growled the Dalcassian.
The fisherman shrugged his shoulders. A masterless man—it was a hard road. In those days of clans, when a man s own kin cast him out he became a son of Ishmael with a vengeance. All men’s hands were against him. The fisherman had heard of Turlogh Dubh—a strange, bitter man, a terrible warrior and a crafty strategist, but one whom sudden bursts of strange madness made a marked man even in that land and age of madmen.
“It’s a bitter day,” said the fisherman apropos of nothing. Turlogh stared somberly at his tangled beard and wild matted hair. “Have you a boat?”
The other nodded toward a small sheltered cove where lay snugly anchored a trim craft built with the skill of a hundred generations of men who had tom their livelihood from the stubborn sea.
“It scarce looks seaworthy,” said Turlogh.
“Seaworthy? You who were born and bred on the western coast should know better. I’ve sailed her alone to Drumcliff Bay and back, and all the devils in the wind ripping at her.”
“You can’t take fish in such a sea.”
“Do ye think it’s only you chiefs that take sport in risking their hides? By the saints, I’ve sailed to Ballinskellings in a storm—and back too—just for the fun of the thing.”
“Good enough,” said Turlogh. “HI take your boat.”
“Ye’ll take the devil! What kind of talk is this? If you want to leave Erin, go to Dublin and take ship with your Dane friends.”
A black scowl made Turlogh’s face a mask of menace. “Men have died for less than that.”
“Did you not intrigue with the Danes?—and is that not why your clan drove you out to starve in the heather?”
“The jealousy of a cousin and the spite of a woman,” growled Turlogh. “Lies—all lies. But enough. Have you seen a long serpent beating up from the south in the last few days?”
“Aye—three days ago we sighted a dragon-beaked gallery before the scud. But she didn’t put in—faith, the pirates get naught from the western fishers but hard blows.”
“That would be Thorfel the Fair,” muttered Turlogh, swaying his ax by its wriststrap. “I knew it.”
“There has been a ship-harrying in the south?”
“A band of reavers fell by night on the castle on Kilbaha. There was a sword-quenching—and the pirates took Moira, daughter of Murtagh, a chief of the Dalcassians.”
