“Mr. Harley, she was obeying the call of M’kombo!”
“The call of M’kombo? You refer to some kind of hypnotic suggestions?”
“I illustrate,” replied the Colonel, “to help to make clear something which I have to tell you. On the night when last the moon was full— on the night after someone had entered the house— I had retired early to bed. Suddenly I awoke, feeling very cold. I awoke, I say, and where do you suppose I found myself?”
“I am all anxiety to hear.”
“On the point of entering the Tudor garden— you call it Tudor garden?— which is visible from the window of your room!”
“Most extraordinary,” murmured Harley; “and you were in your night attire?”
“I was.”
“And what had awakened you?”
“An accident. I believe a lucky accident. I had cut my bare foot upon the gravel and the pain awakened me.”
“You had no recollection of any dream which had prompted you to go down into the garden?”
“None whatever.”
“Does your room face in that direction?”
“It does not. It faces the lake on the south of the house. I had descended to a side door, unbarred it, and walked entirely around the east wing before I awakened.”
“Your room faces the lake,” murmured Harley.
“Yes.”
Their glances met, and in Paul Harley’s expression there seemed to be a challenge.
“You have not yet told me,” said he, “the name of your neighbour.”
Colonel Menendez lighted his new cigarette.
“Mr. Harley,” he confessed, “I regret that I ever referred to this suspicion of mine. Indeed it is hardly a suspicion, it is what I may call a desperate doubt. Do you say that, a desperate doubt?”
“I think I follow you,” said Harley.
“The fact is this, I only know of one person within ten miles of Cray’s Folly who has ever visited Cuba.”
“Ah.”
“I have no other scrap of evidence to associate him I with my shadowy enemy. This being so, you will pardon me if I ask you to forget that I ever referred to his existence.”
He spoke the words with a sort of lofty finality, and accompanied them with a gesture of the hands which really left Harley no alternative but to drop the subject.
Again their glances met, and it was patent to me that underlying all this conversation was something beyond my ken. What it was that Harley suspected I could not imagine, nor what it was that Colonel Menendez desired to conceal; but tension was in the very air. The Spaniard was on the defensive, and Paul Harley was puzzled, irritated.
It was a strange interview, and one which in the light of after events I recognized to possess extraordinary significance. That sixth sense of Harley’s was awake, was prompting him, but to what extent he understood its promptings at that hour I did not know, and have never known to this day. Intuitively, I believe, as he sat there staring at Colonel Menendez, he began to perceive the shadow within a shadow which was the secret of Cray’s Folly, which was the thing called Bat Wing, which was the devilish force at that very hour alive and potent in our midst.
Chapter 9 OBEAH
This conversation in Colonel Menendez’s study produced a very unpleasant impression upon my mind. The atmosphere of Cray’s Folly seemed to become charged with unrest. Of Madame de Stämer and Miss Beverley I saw nothing up to the time that I retired to dress. Having dressed I walked into Harley’s room, anxious to learn if he had formed any theory to account for the singular business which had brought us to Surrey.
Harley had excused himself directly we had left the study, stating that he wished to get to the village post-office in time to send a telegram to London. Our host had suggested a messenger, but this, as well as the offer of a car, Harley had declined, saying that the exercise would aid reflection. Nevertheless, I was surprised to find his room empty, for I could not imagine why the sending of a telegram should have detained him so long.
Dusk was falling, and viewed from the open window the Tudor garden below looked very beautiful, part of it lying in a sort of purplish shadow and the rest being mystically lighted as though viewed through a golden veil. To the whole picture a sort of magic quality was added by a speck of high-light which rested upon the face of the old sun-dial.
I thought that here was a fit illustration for a fairy tale; then I remembered the Colonel’s account of how he had awakened in the act of entering this romantic plaisance, and I was touched anew by an unrestfulness, by a sense of the uncanny.
I observed a book lying upon the dressing table, and concluding that it was one which Harley had brought with him, I took it up, glancing at the title. It was “Negro Magic,” and switching on the light, for there was a private electric plant in Cray’s Folly, I opened the book at random and began to read.
“The religion of the negro,” said this authority, “is emotional, and more often than not associated with beliefs in witchcraft and in the rites known as Voodoo or Obi Mysteries. It has been endeavoured by some students to show that these are relics of the Fetish worship of equatorial Africa, but such a genealogy has never been satisfactorily demonstrated. The cannibalistic rituals, human sacrifices, and obscene ceremonies resembling those of the Black Sabbath of the Middle Ages, reported to prevail in Haiti and other of the islands, and by some among the negroes of the Southern States of America, may be said to rest on doubtful authority. Nevertheless, it is a fact beyond doubt that among the negroes both of the West Indies and the United States there is a widespread belief in the powers of the Obeah man. A native who believes himself to have come under the spell of such a sorcerer will sink into a kind of decline and sometimes die.”
At this point I discovered several paragraphs underlined in pencil, and concluding that the underlining had been done by Paul Harley, I read them with particular care. They were as follows: “According to Hesketh J. Bell, the term Obeah is most probably derived from the substantive Obi, a word used on the East coast of Africa to denote witchcraft, sorcery, and fetishism in general. The etymology of Obi has been traced to a very antique source, stretching far back into Egyptian mythology. A serpent in the Egyptian language was called Ob or Aub. Obion is still the Egyptian name for a serpent. Moses, in the name of God, forbade the Israelites ever to enquire of the demon, Ob, which is translated in our Bible: Charmer or wizard, divinator or sorcerer. The Witch of Endor is called Oub or Ob, translated Pythonissa; and Oubois was the name of the basilisk or royal serpent, emblem of the Sun and an ancient oracular deity of Africa.”
A paragraph followed which was doubly underlined, and pursuing my reading I made a discovery which literally caused me to hold my breath. This is what I read:
“In a recent contribution to the Occult Review, Mr. Colin Camber, the American authority, offered some very curious particulars in support of a theory to show that whereas snakes and scorpions have always been recognized as sacred by Voodoo worshippers, the real emblem of their unclean religion is the bat, especially the Vampire Bat of South America.
“He pointed out that the symptoms of one dying beneath the spell of an Obeah man are closely paralleled in the cases of men and animals who have suffered from nocturnal attacks of blood-sucking bats.”
I laid the open book down upon the bed. My brain was in a tumult. The several theories, or outlines of theories which hitherto I had entertained, were, by these simple paragraphs, cast into the utmost disorder. I thought of the Colonel’s covert references to a neighbour whom he feared, of his guarded statement that the devotees of Voodoo were not confined to the West Indies, of the attack upon him in Washington, of the bat wing pinned to the door of Cray’s Folly.