CHAPTER XV.

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?