THE DARKNESS PUTS FORTH A TENTACLE.
That night, long after the house was quiet, I remained leaning on
the sill of my bedroom window, looking down on the peaceful garden
below and turning matters over in my mind. The night wind sighed and
died away in faint puffs upon the trees. A midnight hush was falling
upon everything--a midnight hush and something more: great black
clouds were banking up seaward, and the roses round my window were
sending out heavy odours, such as flowers do before a thunderstorm.
The air became sultry as the inky clouds banked higher and higher.
Then the land wind fell altogether and dead silence ensued, in which I
could hear the titoki-berries opening on their little hinges, and a
strange sound of a going in the high tops of the native trees in the
plantation, while always the leaves of the aspens tossed and turned in
sad unrest.
It may have been the oppressiveness of the air that weighed me down
with a vague presentiment of evil, though now I look back upon it I am
inclined to think my feelings were owing to a strong antipathy to an
evil thing. This antipathy must have been aroused and strengthened by
the discovery recorded in the last chapter. Crystal’s dream had filled
me with feelings even keener, I thought, than those which had taken
possession of Ngaraki, for he, so I reasoned in my ignorance, had to
do merely with inert stones, one sacred, others cursed; whereas I had
to do with flesh and blood. I had little doubt that Crystal’s dream
was one of those strange instances of second sight which sometimes
come to people who live pure lives in quiet places, where they are in
close touch with the nature they can see, and in closer touch with the
nature which they cannot see. The likeness of the face in the picture
to the face of Cazotl was no mere fancied resemblance. It was
striking. It was real. The details of the picture, too, were true to
life, and such as no amount of study from books could produce. This I
coupled with the knowledge that Crystal had never been away from home
except for seven successive years spent at school in Dunedin. I was
driven to the conclusion that there was something in this dream, and,
if something, why not everything? As I leaned over the window-sill I
pondered many things deeply. Whatever might have been the reason of
tracking us all the way from the Table Land the Mexican’s presence in
the Sound appeared to me to be the speedy carrying out of the threat
he had delivered in the dream. I could well understand that Crystal,
with her high ideals and living energy, was of those women whose very
existence is a nail in the coffin of the fiend in human shape whose
glance first strikes the lily from your hand, and then the truth from
beneath your feet. Consequently, on the one side deepened my love for
this perfect woman with the eyes of night, and on the other blazed a
terrible hate for her would-be destroyer.
With these feelings I entered into the spirit of the brooding
thunderstorm, and, knowing that sleep was impossible, I resolved to go
out of the house, and take my thunder and lightning in the garden. I
had always been fond of a thunderstorm--for in a land where there are
few isolated trees and many bold mountain tops, the danger from
lightning is very small--but on this occasion I welcomed it with a
kind of vivid pleasure, as it was in strict accordance with my mood.
Going downstairs, I found a mackintosh on the hat-stand in the hall
and put it on. Then, making my way quietly out of the house, I went
round the verandah to see if Tiki was asleep. I was not surprised to
find his mattress of straw unoccupied. He was on the war track.
Probably he had slept by day, and was not watching the yacht in the
interests of ‘the little maiden.’
As I found my way on to the lawn I heard the first rumble of the
thunder over the hills in the distance. The fan-like branches of the
cedars were moving restlessly, as if the terrified air did not know
which way to turn. I could just see their vague outlines against the
blacker sky.
While I stood listening to the ominous whispers of the cedar-branches,
a blinding flash lighted up the place, throwing the wall of pines
above the plantation into clear relief. Then, some miles away, the
thunder crashed and rattled among the hills. In the silence between
the lightning and the thunder, however, I heard what I took to be a
dog or a cat running softly on its four feet across the lawn from the
plantation. My mood of dark hate blinded my usual wariness, and it
never occurred to me that it might be something else. After the
thunder came silence, and then another flash scribbled down the indigo
sky into the hills, and, while it lighted my surroundings as clear as
noonday, my glance happened to fall upon some gnarled, twisted, and
charred remains of a patch of scrub which had lately been burnt, about
twenty yards distant, and just midway between the plantation and the
trees beneath which I stood. One of the grotesque fragments, a trifle
thicker than the others, was twisted in such a peculiar way that its
weirdness caught my attention, and when the flash had passed I
sauntered carelessly towards it and waited. The peal of thunder was
scarcely over when the vivid lightning streamed down again, and when I
looked for the weird effect of the charred patch, it seemed to me that
the grotesque-looking twist was gone. At the same instant something
struck my hat behind--something which I mistook for the first large
drop of the thunder-shower--and, dismissing the apparent change in the
burnt-out patch of scrub with the passing explanation that it was
owing to my change of position, I sauntered on towards the path that
led out beneath the wall of trees into the fields of the valley. As I
went I certainly thought it strange that one drop of rain should fall
alone, and wondered vaguely what it was that had struck my hat during
the vivid flash.
Passing through the plantation and the wall of pines, whose leaves
threw out a resinous odour in the sultry air, I turned and walked back
along the outside of the plantation, intending to re-enter the
enclosure by a small gap which led directly on to the lawn. As I drew
near this, and flash after flash lighted up the place, I saw from time
to time something, which at first I took for a post, standing in an
open space some thirty paces away from the plantation. When I came
nearer to it, however, the lightning’s glare brought out the object in
bold relief, and it looked more like a man standing bolt upright in
the open field. The thunder now followed sharp on the heels of the
lightning with a deafening crash right overhead, and the heavy rain
came down without warning. Buttoning the mackintosh close up under my
chin, I struck out into the field towards the spot where I had seen
the object that had aroused my curiosity.
When I calculated that I was fairly near it, I stood still and waited
for the flash, for in the darkness I could see nothing. The flash
came, and there, a few steps before me, with the rain dancing from his
hair and glistening shoulders, stood Tiki like a statue, gazing
fixedly at that part of the plantation where the gap led through on to
the lawn.
In the brief interval between the lightning and the thunder I called
his name:
“Tiki!”
The words left my lips as the darkness clapped down like the door of a
vault, and in the two seconds that ensued I listened and called again,
but there was only the ready reply of the thunder breaking like an
avalanche overhead.
The next moment I reached the Maori’s side in the darkness, touched
him, shook him, called him, but he made no answer. I could hear the
rain pattering on his bare shoulders; I could hear my own voice
against the final echo of the thunder; then, as the rain held up a
moment and a weird shuddering afterthought of the elements ricochetted
across the sky, I stood still, wondering what strange state the Maori
had fallen into that he stood there like a dead tree-trunk in the
field.
The next flash startled me. It showed Tiki with his teeth set and his
eyes fixed. He appeared like one in that strange cataleptic state in
which the mind and senses are more or less alive, but all volition is
gone. As my eyes rested upon him I detected on his shoulder a slight
stain of blood, which slowly trickled from a wound in which a small
reed dart of two or three inches in length was still sticking. All
this was imprinted upon my eye while the light lasted, but it was not
until darkness supervened that the picture was developed. I found the
dart and pulled it out. Then, as the heavy tread of Tawhaki again
shook the rafters on the House of Tane overhead, I came to the
horrible conclusion that this was the work of that wizard negro--that
the thing which had struck my hat by the cedars was a poisoned dart of
the same kind--that the gnarled and twisted fragment was the negro
himself, that----
A shudder ended my train of reasoning. The door of the house was
unbarred!
That wizard devil must have been on his way to the house when he
discharged that dart at me!
With terrible thoughts surging through my brain, with the phantom cry
of Cazotl, “Degrade the Pure One!” ringing in my inner ears, and the
passing conjecture that he was now waiting with a boat on the beach
for the return of his wizard minion with Crystal, bereft of all
volition like Tiki, I dashed across the space that separated me from
the gap which led towards the house. No helping flash favoured me on
the way, and when I reached the trees I had to grope about for the
opening. At last I found it and proceeded to make my way through, but,
just as I reached the centre of the plantation, the lightning forked
down right on to the lawn and ran along the ground. For quite five
seconds a dazzling light revealed the way on to the lawn, and in that
brief space of time things happened which five seconds will not
suffice to tell.
Straight before me on a narrow path between two pine trunks, was the
lithe figure of the hideous negro in the act of groping his way
through from the house as the lightning fell. In one hand he held a
reed tube several feet long, and with the other he was feeling for the
tree trunk on his right. Behind him I had a dim idea of a white-robed
figure; but I did not shift my eyes from the negro, for he saw me as
soon as I saw him, and the tube was moving towards his wizened lips.
With a spring I was on to him, and, catching the tube with one hand
just as he set it to his lips, I turned it aside, gave him a violent
thrust in the mouth with it, wrenched it away, and flung it on the
ground. Then I gripped him by the throat, and it was just as we rolled
back together into the bushes that the bright light went out, and our
brief struggle went on in the darkness.
It was brief, for I defy any man to hold a creature of that kind
unless his hand, like Kahikatea’s, could meet right round his neck. He
twisted and turned like an eely fiend, wrenched his throat out of my
grasp, and wriggled away, leaving me snatching at air and tree trunks.
The thunder rolled off in an angry growl. As it ceased the same wild
laugh that I had heard before came from somewhere far away.
Mistrusting that laugh, and thinking that the negro was in hiding near
by, waiting to make a dash to snatch up his deadly weapon, I quickly
scrambled towards the place where I had thrown it, and soon found it
among the leaves in the darkness.
Then I remembered the figure in white that I had seen following the
negro, and stood peering before me, listening and waiting for the next
flash. I would have called, “Who’s there?” but I knew it was best to
preserve perfect silence with that wizard thing, for there was no
telling what he might do with his infernal poisoned darts, even
without a tube. However, I could not resist throwing out a gentle hint
that I was prepared for him, and that his safest plan was to beat a
retreat. Taking my revolver from my hip pocket, where I always carried
one, I fired a shot up into the trees. It was answered by the hideous
laugh from far away down the Sound, but it followed so quickly on the
report that I knew the author of that laugh, now a confessed
ventriloquist, was near at hand. He was evidently waiting for the next
flash to recover his tube which I held in my hand.
The flash came, and the sight it revealed I shall never forget. There
stood Crystal in the path before me, draped in her night garments
soaked through and through. Her long black hair, in which flashed
countless diamonds of rain, fell loose about her like a veil. Her
mysterious eyes, now like polished obsidian, were fixed in a glassy
stare. Her face was set and pale, like a piece of beautiful marble.
She was in the same state as Tiki, conscious of much that was passing,
as I learned afterwards, but obedient only to impressions that had
been set upon her by the will of another, who had taken control of her
own. On her shoulder, showing through a rift of her hair, was a stain
of blood upon the white linen, but the dart had been withdrawn.
No sooner had the flash of light passed than that controlling will was
expressed by a voice, harsh and hollow, coming from a little distance
outside the plantation, and pronouncing a strange word in a
[image: images/img184.jpg
caption: “THE FLASH CAME, AND THE SIGHT IT REVEALED I SHALL NEVER
FORGET. THERE STOOD CRYSTAL IN THE PATH BEFORE ME, DRAPED IN HER NIGHT
GARMENTS.”]
language unknown to me. At the sound Crystal attempted to move past me
in the darkness, evidently impelled by the suggestion that she must
follow. But with one arm I caught her round the waist and held her
back. She struggled violently with all her strength to follow the
voice as it repeated the strange word from further in the field, and
it dawned upon me, from what little I knew of this old and new world
black magic of control by suggestion, that if I restrained her by
force the result might be some strange twist of the brain or
aberration of the nervous centres. So I let her move on, retaining one
of her hands and walking by her side for a short distance into the
field. A flash revealed a figure gliding ahead of us, and in order to
make him glide a little quicker, I fired four revolver shots in
succession after him. Then, acting upon an idea which had occurred to
me, I tried to imitate the voice and the strange word he had used.
After two or three attempts beneath my breath, I made the peculiar
sound, coming to a halt at the same time.
It was effective: Crystal stopped also and turned towards me.
Repeating the word I drew her gently back towards the plantation, and
she followed obediently. It was with the idea that her sense of sight
might contradict her sense of hearing that I pressed her eyelids down
and bound my handkerchief over her eyes, lest, when the lightning
flashed, she should see me and become aware of this deception within a
deception.
Thus reiterating the guiding sound which, by the bond of suggestion
placed upon her by the infernal negro wizard, represented his will, I
wrapped the mackintosh about her and led her through the plantation,
over the lawn, and into the house. There, obedient to my instructions,
given to her in the harsh voice of the negro, she remained in the care
of Grey and the servants, with whom I succeeded in placing her in
touch, while I, having hidden the reed tube in a safe place, hurried
out to look for Tiki.
The storm had passed over, and was grumbling itself out in the
distance. A bright star shone down through a break in the clouds, but
it was still too dark to see clearly, and it was with difficulty I
made my way to the place where Tiki had been standing.
After searching about for a long time and finding nothing, I was
favoured by the moon in its last quarter rising over the hills inland
and showing through the heavy cloud drift. By this pale light I
corrected my position and searched again. But there was no sign of
Tiki. Had he recovered and gone after the negro to kill him, or had he
followed obediently under the influence of the poison and the voice?