A Thunder of Trumpets Page 3

  The light had faded to a faint red glow. The darkness seemed straining into them, creeping with black cat-feet. Buckner retreated, pushing Griswell stumbling behind him as he walked backward, pistol cocked and lifted, down the dark hall. In the growing darkness Griswell heard what sounded like the stealthy opening of a door. And suddenly the blackness about them was vibrant with menace. Griswell knew Buckner sensed it as well as he, for the sheriff’s hard body was tense and taut as a stalking panther’s.

  But without haste he worked his way to the stair and backed down it, Griswell preceding him, and fighting the panic that urged him to scream and burst into mad flight. A ghastly thought brought icy sweat out of his flesh. Suppose the dead man was creeping up the stair behind them in the dark, face frozen in the death-grin, blood-caked hatchet lifted to strike?

  This possibility so overpowered him that he was scarcely aware when his feet struck the level of the lower hallway, and he was only then aware that the light had grown brighter as they descended, until it now gleamed with its full power—but when Buckner turned it back up the stairway, it failed to illuminate the darkness that hung like a tangible fog at the head of the stair.

  “The damn thing was conjured,” muttered Buckner. “Nothin’ else. It couldn’t act like that naturally.”

  “Turn the light into the room,” begged Griswell. “See if John—if John is—”

  He could not put the ghastly thought into words, but Buckner understood.

  He swung the beam around, and Griswell had never dreamed that the sight of the gory body of a murdered man could bring such relief.

  “He’s still there,” grunted Buckner. “If he walked after he was killed, he hasn’t walked since. But that thing—”

  Again he turned the light up the stair, and stood chewing his lip and scowling. Three times he half-lifted his gun. Griswell read his mind. The sheriff was tempted to plunge back up that stair, take his chance with the unknown. But common sense held him back.

  “I wouldn’t have a chance in the dark,” he muttered. “And I’ve got a hunch the light would go out again.”

  He turned and faced Griswell squarely.

  “There’s no use dodgin’ the question. There’s somethin’ hellish in this house, and I believe I have an inklin’ of what it is. I don’t believe you killed Branner. Whatever killed him is up there—now. There’s a lot about your yarn that don’t sound sane; but there’s nothin’ sane about a flashlight goin’ out like this one did. I don’t believe that thing upstairs is human. I never met anything I was afraid to tackle in the dark before, but I’m not goin’ up there until daylight. It’s not long until dawn. We’ll wait for it out there on that gallery.”

  The stars were already paling when they came out on the broad porch. Buckner seated himself on the balustrade, facing the door, his pistol dangling in his fingers. Griswell sat down near him and leaned back against a crumbling pillar. He shut his eyes, grateful for the faint breeze that seemed to cool his throbbing brain. He experienced a dull sense of unreality. He was a stranger in a strange land, a land that had become suddenly imbued with black horror. The shadow of the noose hovered above him, and in that dark house lay John Branner, with his butchered head—like the figments of a dream these facts spun and eddied in his brain until all merged in a gray twilight as sleep came uninvited to his weary soul.

  He awoke to a cold white dawn and full memory of the horrors of the night. Mists curled about the stems of the pines, crawled in smoky wisps up the broken walk. Buckner was shaking him.

  “Wake up! It’s daylight.”

  Griswell rose, wincing at the stiffness of his limbs. His face was gray and old.

  “I’m ready. Let’s go upstairs.”

  “I’ve already been!” Buckner’s eyes burned in the early dawn. “I didn’t wake you up. I went as soon as it was light. I found nothin’.”

  “The tracks of the bare feet—”

  “Gone!”

  “Gone?”

  “Yes, gone! The dust had been disturbed all over the hall, from the point where Branner’s tracks ended; swept into corners. No chance of trackin’ anything there now. Something obliterated those tracks while we sat here, and I didn’t hear a sound. I’ve gone through the whole house. Not a sign of anything.”

  Griswell shuddered at the thought of himself sleeping alone on the porch while Buckner conducted his exploration.

  “What shall we do?” he asked listlessly. “With those tracks gone, there goes my only chance of proving my story.”

  “We’ll take Branner’s body into the county seat,” answered Buckner. “Let me do the talkin’. If the authorities knew the facts as they appear, they’d insist on you being confined and indicted. I don’t believe you killed Branner—but neither a district attorney, judge nor jury would believe what you told me, or what happened to us last night. I’m handlin’ this thing my own way. I’m not goin’ to arrest you until I’ve exhausted every other possibility.

  “Say nothin’ about what’s happened here, when we get to town. I’ll simply tell the district attorney that John Branner was killed by a party or parties unknown, and that I’m workin’ on the case.

  “Are you game to come back with me to this house and spend the night here, sleepin’ in that room as you and Branner slept last night?”

  Griswell went white, but answered as stoutly as his ancestors might have expressed their determination to hold their cabins in the teeth of the Pequots: “I’ll do it.”

  “Let’s go then; help me pack the body out to your auto.”

  Griswell’s soul revolted at the sight of John Branner’s bloodless face in the chill white dawn, and the feel of his clammy flesh. The gray fog wrapped wispy tentacles about their feet as they carried their grisly burden across the lawn.

  2. The Snake’s Brother

  Again the shadows were lengthening over the pinelands, and again two men came bumping along the old road in a car with a New England license plate.

  Buckner was driving. Griswell’s nerves were too shattered for him to trust himself at the wheel. He looked gaunt and haggard, and his face was still pallid. The strain of the day spent at the county seat was added to the horror that still rode his soul like the shadow of a black-winged vulture. He had not slept, had not tasted what he had eaten.

  “I told you I’d tell you about the Blassenvilles,” said Buckner. “They were proud folks, haughty, and pretty damn ruthless when they wanted their way. They didn’t treat their niggers as well as the other planters did—got their ideas in the West Indies, I reckon. There was a streak of cruelty in them—especially Miss Celia, the last one of the family to come to these parts. That was long after the slaves had been freed, but she used to whip her mulatto maid just like she was a slave, the old folks say . . . The niggers said when a Blassenville died, the devil was always waitin’ for him out in the black pines.

  “Well, after the Civil War they died off pretty fast, livin’ in poverty on the plantation which was allowed to go to ruin. Finally only four girls were left, sisters, livin’ in the old house and ekin’ out a bare livin’, with a few niggers livin’ in the old slave huts and workin’ the fields on the share. They kept to themselves, bein’ proud, and ashamed of their poverty. Folks wouldn’t see them for months at a time. When they needed supplies they sent a nigger to town after them.

  “But folks knew about it when Miss Celia came to live with them. She came from somewhere in the West Indies, where the whole family originally had its roots—a fine, handsome woman, they say, in the early thirties. But she didn’t mix with folks any more than the girls did. She brought a mulatto maid with her, and the Blassenville cruelty cropped out in her treatment of this maid. I knew an old nigger, years ago, who swore he saw Miss Celia tie this girl up to a tree, stark naked, and whip her with a horsewhip. Nobody was surprized when she disappeared. Everybody figured she’d run away, of course.

  “Well, one day in the spring of 1890, Miss Elizabeth, the youngest girl, came into town for the first
time in maybe a year. She came after supplies. Said the niggers had all left the place. Talked a little more, too, a bit wild. Said Miss Celia had gone, without leaving any word. Said her sisters thought she’d gone back to the West Indies, but she believed her aunt was still in the house. She didn’t say what she meant. Just got her supplies and pulled out for the Manor.

  “A month went past, and a nigger came into town and said that Miss Elizabeth was livin’ at the Manor alone. Said her three sisters weren’t there anymore, that they’d left one by one without givin’ any word or explanation. She didn’t know where they’d gone, and was afraid to stay there alone, but didn’t know where else to go. She’d never known anything but the Manor, and had neither relatives nor friends. But she was in mortal terror of something. The nigger said she locked herself in her room at night and kept candles burnin’ all night. . . .

  “It was a stormy spring night when Miss Elizabeth came tearin’ into town on the one horse she owned, nearly dead from fright. She fell from her horse in the square; when she could talk she said she’d found a secret room in the Manor that had been forgotten for a hundred years. And she said that there she found her three sisters, dead, and hangin’ by their necks from the ceilin’. She said something chased and nearly brained her with an ax as she ran out the front door, but somehow she got to the horse and got away. She was nearly crazy with fear, and didn’t know what it was that chased her—said it looked like a woman with a yellow face.

  “About a hundred men rode out there, right away. They searched the house from top to bottom, but they didn’t find any secret room, or the remains of the sisters. But they did find a hatchet stickin’ in the doorjamb downstairs, with some of Miss Elizabeth’s hairs stuck on it, just as she’d said. She wouldn’t go back there and show them how to find the secret door; almost went crazy when they suggested it.

  “When she was able to travel, the people made up some money and loaned it to her—she was still too proud to accept charity—and she went to California. She never came back, but later it was learned, when she sent back to repay the money they’d loaned her, that she’d married out there.

  “Nobody ever bought the house. It stood there just as she’d left it, and as the years passed folks stole all the furnishings out of it, poor white trash, I reckon. A nigger wouldn’t go about it. But they came after sunup and left long before sundown.”

  “What did the people think about Miss Elizabeth’s story?” asked Griswell.

  “Well, most folks thought she’d gone a little crazy, livin’ in that old house alone. But some people believe that mulatto girl, Joan, didn’t run away, after all. They believed she’d hidden in the woods, and glutted her hatred of the Blassenvilles by murderin’ Miss Celia and the three girls. They beat up the woods with bloodhounds, but never found a trace of her. If there was a secret room in the house, she might have been hidin’ there—if there was anything to that theory.”

  “She couldn’t have been hiding there all these years,” muttered Griswell. “Anyway, the thing in the house now isn’t human.”

  Buckner wrenched the wheel around and turned into a dim trace that left the main road and meandered off through the pines.

  “Where are you going?”

  “There’s an old nigger that lives off this way a few miles. I want to talk to him. We’re up against something that takes more than white man’s sense. The black people know more than we do about some things. This old man is nearly a hundred years old. His master educated him when he was a boy, and after he was freed he traveled more extensively than most white men do. They say he’s a voodoo man.”

  Griswell shivered at the phrase, staring uneasily at the green forest walls that shut them in. The scent of the pines was mingled with the odors of unfamiliar plants and blossoms. But underlying all was a reek of rot and decay. Again a sick abhorrence of these dark mysterious woodlands almost overpowered him.

  “Voodoo!” he muttered. “I’d forgotten about that—I never could think of black magic in connection with the South. To me witchcraft was always associated with old crooked streets in waterfront towns, overhung by gabled roofs that were old when they were hanging witches in Salem; dark musty alleys where black cats and other things might steal at night. Witchcraft always meant the old towns of New England, to me—but all this is more terrible than any New England legend—these somber pines, old deserted houses, lost plantations, mysterious black people, old tales of madness and horror—God, what frightful, ancient terrors there are on this continent fools call ‘young’!”

  “Here’s old Jacob’s hut,” announced Buckner, bringing the automobile to a halt.

  Griswell saw a clearing and a small cabin squatting under the shadows of the huge trees. There pines gave way to oaks and cypresses, bearded with gray trailing moss, and behind the cabin lay the edge of a swamp that ran away under the dimness of the trees, choked with rank vegetation. A thin wisp of blue smoke curled up from the stick-and-mud chimney.

  He followed Buckner to the tiny stoop, where the sheriff pushed open the leather-hinged door and strode in. Griswell blinked in the comparative dimness of the interior. A single small window let in a little daylight. An old Negro crouched beside the hearth, watching a pot stew over the open fire. He looked up as they entered, but did not rise. He seemed incredibly old. His face was a mass of wrinkles, and his eyes, dark and vital, were filmed momentarily at times as if his mind wandered.

  Buckner motioned Griswell to sit down in a string-bottomed chair, and himself took a rudely-made bench near the hearth, facing the old man.

  “Jacob,” he said bluntly, “the time’s come for you to talk. I know you know the secret of Blassenville Manor. I’ve never questioned you about it, because it wasn’t in my line. But a man was murdered there last night, and this man here may hang for it, unless you tell me what haunts that old house of the Blassenvilles.”

  The old man’s eyes gleamed, then grew misty as if clouds of extreme age drifted across his brittle mind.

  “The Blassenvilles,” he murmured, and his voice was mellow and rich, his speech not the patois of the piney woods darky. “They were proud people, sirs—proud and cruel. Some died in the war, some were killed in duels—the men-folks, sirs. Some died in the Manor—the old Manor—” His voice trailed off into unintelligible mumblings.

  “What of the Manor?” asked Buckner patiently.

  “Miss Celia was the proudest of them all,” the old man muttered. “The proudest and the cruelest. The black people hated her; Joan most of all. Joan had white blood in her, and she was proud, too. Miss Celia whipped her like a slave.”

  “What is the secret of Blassenville Manor?” persisted Buckner.

  The film faded from the old man’s eyes; they were dark as moonlit wells.

  “What secret, sir? I do not understand.”

  “Yes, you do. For years that old house has stood there with its mystery. You know the key to its riddle.”

  The old man stirred the stew. He seemed perfectly rational now.

  “Sir, life is sweet, even to an old black man.”

  “You mean somebody would kill you if you told me?”

  But the old man was mumbling again, his eyes clouded.

  “Not somebody. No human. No human being. The black gods of the swamps. My secret is inviolate, guarded by the Big Serpent, the god above all gods. He would send a little brother to kiss me with his cold lips—a little brother with a white crescent moon on his head. I sold my soul to the Big Serpent when he made me maker of zuvembies—”

  Buckner stiffened.

  “I heard that word once before,” he said softly, “from the lips of a dying black man, when I was a child. What does it mean?”

  Fear filled the eyes of old Jacob.

  “What have I said? No—no! I said nothing!”

  “Zuvembies,” prompted Buckner.

  “Zuvembies,” mechanically repeated the old man, his eyes vacant. “A zuvembie was once a woman—on the Slave Coast they know of them. The dr
ums that whisper by night in the hills of Haiti tell of them. The makers of zuvembies are honored of the people of Damballah. It is death to speak of it to a white man—it is one of the Snake God’s forbidden secrets.”

  “You speak of the zuvembies,” said Buckner softly.

  “I must not speak of it,” mumbled the old man, and Griswell realized that he was thinking aloud, too far gone in his dotage to be aware that he was speaking at all. “No white man must know that I danced in the Black Ceremony of the voodoo, and was made a maker of zombies and zuvembies. The Big Snake punishes loose tongues with death.”

  “A zuvembie is a woman?” prompted Buckner.

  “Was a woman,” the old Negro muttered. “She knew I was a maker of zuvembies—she came and stood in my hut and asked for the awful brew—the brew of ground snake-bones, and the blood of vampire bats, and the dew from a nighthawk’s wings, and other elements unnamable. She had danced in the Black Ceremony—she was ripe to become a zuvembie—the Black Brew was all that was needed—the other was beautiful—I could not refuse her.”

  “Who?” demanded Buckner tensely, but the old man’s head was sunk on his withered breast, and he did not reply. He seemed to slumber as he sat. Buckner shook him. “You gave a brew to make a woman a zuvembie—what is a zuvembie?”

  The old man stirred resentfully and muttered drowsily.

  “A zuvembie is no longer human. It knows neither relatives nor friends. It is one with the people of the Black World. It commands the natural demons—owls, bats, snakes and werewolves, and can fetch darkness to blot out a little light. It can be slain by lead or steel, but unless it is slain thus, it lives forever, and it eats no such food as humans eat. It dwells like a bat in a cave or an old house. Time means naught to the zuvembie; an hour, a day, a year, all is one. It cannot speak human words, nor think as a human thinks, but it can hypnotize the living by the sound of its voice, and when it slays a man, it can command his lifeless body until the flesh is cold. As long as the blood flows, the corpse is its slave. Its pleasure lies in the slaughter of human beings.”