Strange Conflict (41 page)

When he and his men had withdrawn, the prisoners halfheartedly set about the meal. None of them liked the look of the cornmeal-mush but they ate a few bananas and, the stuffy heat having made them all extremely thirsty, eagerly drank up most of the water.

While they were eating, they spoke in low voices of Philippa. Marie Lou said that she wondered how the girl could have been planted upon Sir Pellinore, and the Duke replied wearily:

‘How can one say? It may have been managed in a dozen different ways. Evidently our adversary is much more powerful than I imagined. He must have found out that we intended to come to Haiti. Perhaps his astral plane was present and listening to our conversation on the day that Pellinore came down to lunch with us at Cardinals Folly. If it was, he'd have learnt in one brief session all our plans for our journey and have had ample time to make his own arrangements.'

‘Still, it must have been pretty difficult for him to foist the girl on us at such sort notice,' remarked Richard.

The Duke shrugged. ‘Not necessarily. Through his astral he may be able to communicate with a number of occultists in Europe, and just because he is working for the Nazis it doesn't at all follow that they are all in Germany. He may have given instructions in a dream to some Fifth Columnist in London who is under his orders. How Philippa reached England from Marseilles I don't pretend even to guess; but quite possibly she was brought over from her convent, with other refugees, at the time of the French collapse. Once he knew that the French were going out of the war, that fiend, Saturday, may have decided that she would be more useful to him in London and had her shipped over. If she was ready to hand you can see for yourselves that it wouldn't have been difficult for German agents in London to fix it with Ricardi—who is either one of them or under their thumb—that she should pose as his daughter and that he should get in touch with Pellinore, mention casually the problem of getting the girl to the West Indies and, when Pellinore said he had friends proceeding there, ask him to get us to take her.'

They sank into miserable silence again, not caring to talk of the unpleasant possibilities which lay ahead of them that evening and the coming night; but Simon was now so tired that after a time he said that he doubted if he could hang out without sleep much longer, and the rest of them were terribly somnolent from the heat of the stuffy, smelly cabin.

It was Marie Lou who suggested that since charged water had served to protect the Duke and herself when awake, through those long hours of darkness two nights before, surely it must be a strong enough barrier to protect them while asleep during the full bright light of day; therefore why should he not charge the remaining water in the jug and draw a pentacle on the floor of the cabin with it, so that they could snatch a few hours' blessed oblivion during the sultry afternoon?

He agreed that, although there might be some risk in doing so, their extremity was such that it should be taken, and he was just about to pick up the jug when the door opened again. Doctor Saturday stood on the threshold.

Simon roused himself sufficiently to notice with a vague satisfaction that the Doctor was bearing heavily upon a stick and limping badly. He came in, closed the door behind him and leaned against it.

‘Well? So your little hour of freedom has ended,' he said, his white teeth flashing in a smile that was now full of cruel, unrestrained malevolence. ‘I must congratulate
Monsieur
de Richleau upon his resource and courage as a body-snatcher. It is only by a miracle that you're not all lying in the local morgue; torn and bleeding victims of the frenzied mob. However, since you have survived, it will give me great pleasure to settle your business personally.'

He paused for a moment, then went on: ‘You need not imagine that the British or American Consuls will come to your assistance. I have considerable powers in this country as well as on the astral, so I at once took steps to see to it that neither of those gentlemen will be informed officially or unofficially of the plight into which you have got yourselves. If you have any apprehensions as to what may happen to you when you are brought before a Haitian court I can relieve you of them. You will not appear before any court, because you will all be dead before this evening.'

‘Aw, go to hell! Get to blazes out of here!' snarled Rex.

But the Doctor continued, quite unperturbed.

‘In the war that is being waged across the water Britain will be defeated, and the British race will be for ever broken. Some of you may have heard what the Nazis have done in Poland: how they have transported the Polish men by the thousands in cattle-trucks to work in chain-gangs in their mines: how they have injected the whole of the virile population so as to make them incapable of producing children: how they have sent the Polish women by the thousands into brothels for the amusement of the German soldiery.

‘Well—that is nothing compared with what Hitler intends to do to the British people in the hour of his victory. They will be enslaved in the fullest meaning of the word, and the arrogant British upper-class will be set to the meanest labours. The Nazis understand that there can be no permanent mastery of the world for them until the British race has ceased to exist. There is never to be another generation. Your men will be made eunuchs and your women rendered sterile. The old and useless will be slaughtered like cattle, then the British Isles will be depopulated by wholesome shipments of her remaining men and women to toil as beasts of burden for their masters on the Continent until death brings them release.'

‘First catch your hare, then cook it,' Richard sneered. ‘Every man and woman of British blood would rather die than surrender, and we'll paste blue hell out of those Nazi swine before we're much older.'

‘You and your friends are already in the net,' the Doctor replied smoothly, ‘and by your own folly you have all brought upon themselves an even worse fate than which will befall your countrymen. I have told you what the Nazis will do to them. And now I will tell you why I am giving Germany my aid; so that you, as representatives of your race, may for once understand the hatred it has inspired by its greed and arrogance.

‘My father was an Englishman, my mother was a Mulatto girl of good parentage; but he did not think her good enough to marry, so her family, feeling that she had disgraced them, turned her out into the streets. Having taken his pleasure with her he had no more use for her at
all, and returned to his own country leaving her destitute. She was just another “coloured girl” who had served to amuse him during his travels. My youth was hard, but I had brains and a strong will. When I was eighteen I worked my way to England, and although I could speak very little of the language, I sought out my father. He not only refused to acknowledge me because a coloured bastard would have shamed him before his friends, but he drove me from his house; and when I persisted he had me prosecuted for creating a nuisance. Then the English police deported me as an undesirable alien.'

‘Judging by what we know of your more recent history, they were probably right,' said de Richleau acidly.

The Doctor's face became a mask of fury. ‘So you persist in your defiance!' he almost screamed. ‘But I will break your pride—and break your will—even more thoroughly than the Nazis will break the spirit of the British people. You thought you were so clever today when you robbed me of that girl whom I had made into a Zombie. But a life for a life is not enough, and there is no escape for you from this place. The seed of death has already been planted in you. It is my will that all of you shall die within the next two hours, and out of you I will make five Zombies for the one that you have taken from me.'

Without another word he turned on his heel and, slamming the door behind him, relocked it.

‘Temper, temper!' said Richard, trying to make light of what they all felt to be no empty threat but one with real and deadly purpose behind it.

‘What did he mean when he said that he had already planted the seed of death in us?' asked Marie Lou.

‘I've no idea,' replied the Duke; ‘unless he arranged to have some subtle poison inserted into the food we were given for our midday meal. His authority here seems to be absolute. The Haitians evidently know that he's a powerful Bocor and consequently are scared stiff of him. But in any case he can't make Zombies out of us until we're actually dead.

‘If he did have poison put in the food,' said Rex, ‘it's a hundred bucks to a peanut that it was mixed up in the cornmeal-mush, and none of us ate any of that. We'd
surely have noticed if the bananas had been tampered with, and we drank only plain water.'

It comforted them considerably to think that if the Doctor
had
put poison in their food they had escaped once more. But the cabin was like an oven, and apart from their anxious, gloomy thoughts they had nothing at all to occupy them. They were all literally drooping with fatigue, and Simon, who had been awake far longer than any of the others, could hardly keep his eyes open, so the project of making a pentacle with charged water was revivied.

De Richleau set the earthenware jugs before him, and, pointing at it with the first and second fingers of his right hand, on a level with his right eye, began to call down power, which passed in an invisible stream through him and into the jug.

To his surprise and extreme perturbation, the clear, tepid water suddenly began to bubble, and with a bitter grimace he lowered his hand.

‘What's the matter?' asked Marie Lou.

He sighed as he looked round at the anxious faces of his friends. ‘I'm afraid we're up against it. The water cannot be charged, because it is not pure. That spawn of Hell has got the better of us—he mixed some tasteless and colour-less poison with the water, and we all drank a mug or more of it over an hour ago. It's too late now for us to make ourselves sick, as the poison must already be working in our veins. That's what he meant when he said that the seed of death was already in us.'

The minutes that followed seemed like an eternity as they sat contemplating the terrible fate with which their enemy had threatened them, and now that they knew they had been poisoned they almost at once began to believe that they could feel the symptoms of the noxious drug.

The intense heat from the tropical sun beating down on the deck above their heads and the stale smell of the airless cabin were calculated to induce drowsiness in anyone, but Richard and Rex had slept long and well returning from Jamaica in the launch the previous night, and both felt that the extreme torpidity which afflicted them must be partially attributable to some cause other than their surroundings.

Marie Lou had been sitting for a long time in one position and when she moved her leg she found that she had pins-and-needles in her foot, which with a sudden feeling of panic she put down to the first effects of the poison.

Simon was now conscious that in addition to his utter weariness he had a splitting headache; and this he could not help regarding, with a slight quickening of the heart, as a first sign of his approaching death.

The instinct of all of them was to
do
something—to get up and try to break their way out of the cabin—but they knew that, even if they succeeded, that would not save them.

The Negro guards outside were armed, so could kill them or force them back. In spite of the gruelling heat,
on the dock beyond the side of the ship a considerable crowd was still mustered, patiently waiting to learn what was to be done with the body-snatchers. They might perhaps bribe the guards, but if they attempted to leave the ship they would only be pulled to pieces, as at the first sight of them another wave of furious animosity would be certain to surge through the mob. Even if by some miracle they could escape from their guards and avoid a lynching, they had not the least idea what kind of toxin had been used to poison them, so they had no means of knowing what antidote they ought to take, quite apart from the fact that it might be exceedingly difficult to procure.

There was nothing that they could do but await events, and when they felt death creeping over them commend their spirits to the Lords of Light in the hope that those Timeless Ones might afford some protection in their extremity when they reached the astral.

Yet even that seemed a slender hope, because all of them knew sufficient of the Law to realise that any human who elects to wage war upon the Powers of Darkness does so at his own peril. In the great accounting he will receive due credit for the effort, but failure to emerge triumphant from such a conflict brings penalties which must be borne without complaint, so great suffering may have to be endured before the account is balanced and, in the end, the due reward obtained.

They had also learnt quite enough about Zombies in the last few hours to know that when they died their spirits would not be free to pass on until their bodies had ceased to be animated by the power that held them enslaved, and that those spirits would feel all the tribulations which might be inflicted upon their earthly clay.

De Richleau knew that there was one way out. Richard's pistol had not been taken from him and he still had about two dozen rounds of ammunition for it. If they used the pistol to kill one another, and the last to survive among them committed suicide, they might escape—providing that the killing was done in such a manner as to render their bodies useless. A shot apiece through the back of the neck, breaking the spinal cord where it joins the skull, would serve, since there would be no way of repairing the
blasted bone after death, and no corpse with a shattered spine could labour in the fields as a Zombie.

But that was a way out which he would not even contemplate. To kill the others, except by surprise, would mean obtaining their consent; as it was obviously impossible for him to borrow Richard's pistol and catch even one of them napping, without running the risk of bungling the job. If they agreed to let him kill them that would be tantamount to suicide; and afterwards he would have to commit suicide himself.