V.
“Mother Sybella, Mother Sybella! May I approach?” yelled every few minutes the man seated on a rock half way up the hill that rose steep from the Port au Prince highway.
The neglected and broken pavement of the road that remained as a monument to the long-departed French governors of Haiti was almost hidden by the rank, luxurious growth of tropical plants on either side of it. As seen from the hillside, where the man was sitting, it seemed an impracticable path for even the slowly moving donkeys which here and there crawled between the overhanging vegetation.
The man looked neither to the right nor to the left, but throwing back his head, at intervals of possibly fifteen minutes, as if addressing the blazing sun above, bawled out at the top of his voice:
“Mother Sybella! Mother Sybella! May I approach?”
The man was a mulatto, though with features markedly of the negro type; around his head he wore a much soiled white handkerchief. His body was fairly bursting out of a tight-fitting blue coat of military fashion, adorned with immense brass buttons. His bare feet and long thin shanks appeared below dirty duck trousers that once had been white.
There evidently was something awe-inspiring about the name that he shouted even though the rest of the words were unintelligible to the natives. The man shouted his request in the English language; the natives of Haiti used a jargon of French, English and native dialect difficult to understand and impossible to describe or reproduce in writing.
If, when the man called, a native were passing along the highway, as sometimes happened, he would spring forward so violently as to endanger the safety of the huge basket of fruit or vegetables that he carried upon his head, and glancing over his shoulder with dread in his distended, white and rolling eyes, would break into a run and speed forward as if in mortal terror.
The man had just given utterance to a louder howl than usual when he felt the grip of bony claw-like fingers on his shoulder; with one unearthly yell he sprang to his feet, turned and fell upon his knees before the figure that so silently had stolen to his side.
“Has the yellow dog brought a bone to his mother?” The words were spoken in the patois of the native Haitians with which the man was familiar.
The speaker was a living, animated but mummified black crone of a woman. She leaned upon a staff made of three human thigh bones, joined firmly together by wire. Her fleshless fingers looked like the talons of a vulture as she gripped the top of her horrid prop and bent forward toward the man.
Her age seemed incalculable in decades; centuries appeared to have passed since she was born. The wrinkles in her face were as gashes in black and aged parchment, so deep were they. The skin over her toothless jaws was so drawn and stretched by untold time that the very hinges of the jaw were plainly traced; in cavernous, inky holes dug deep beneath the retreating forehead sparkled, like points of flame, eyes so bright and glittering that sparks of electric fire shot forth in the gaze by which she transfixed the groveling wretch at her feet.
“Answer, Manuel; what have you brought for Mother Sybella?”
Finally the startled and fearful Manuel found courage to reply:
“The coffee, sugar, ham and calico are in that bundle lying over there, Mother Sybella,” and the man pointed to a roll of matting near him.
“And I told you to gather all the gossip and news of Port au Prince. Have you done so?” queried the hag with a menacing gesture.
“Yes! yes! Mother; every command has been obeyed. I have learned what people are talking of, and, too, I have brought some printed talk from among the Yankees,” cried the mulatto quickly, anxious to propitiate the crone.
“Fool, you know I can’t make out the Yankee printed talk,” snarled the sunken lips.
“I can though, Mother Sybella; I lived among the Yankees many years. I will tell you what they talk of concerning our country,” said the man rising from his knees.
“I will listen here in the sun’s rays; I am cold. Sit there at my feet,” mumbled the hag, crouching down on the rock that had been occupied by Manuel.
“Begin,” she commanded fiercely, fixing her keen gaze upon the yellow face below her.
“Dictator Dupree is unable to obtain money to pay the army; the Yankees and English will not make a loan unless concessions be made to the whites.”
“What says Dupree?” muttered the old woman.
“Dupree fears an insurrection of the people if he make concessions to the whites, and an outbreak by the army if he fail to pay the arrears due to it. He is distracted and knows not which move to make,” answered the yellow man at the hag’s feet.
“Dupree is a coward! Let him come to me and see how quickly his difficulties disappear! The army is worthless, the people powerful,” cried Sybella.
“Go on! Squash-head,” she ordered.
“Twenty priests, with a Bishop at their head, have come from France, and go among the people urging them to attend the churches, and threatening them with awful punishment hereafter if they fail to heed the commands of the priests,” continued Manuel.
“Much good may it do the black-gowns,” chuckled the old creature, making a horrible grimace in so doing.
“My children fear Sybella more than the black-gowns’ hell,” she cackled exultantly.
“The priests are trying to persuade the Dictator to give them permission to re-open those schools that have been closed so long, but Dupree has not consented yet. He seems to fear the anger of the black party in Haiti,” said the witch’s newsman.
“He does well to hesitate!” exclaimed Sybella.
“If he consent, I shall set up my altar, call my children around me and then! and then! No matter, he is a coward; he will never dare consent,” she added. The mulatto here drew from his bosom a newspaper. Shading his eyes from the sun’s glare, he began searching for any item of news in the Boston paper that he had secured in Port au Prince, which might interest his terrifying auditor.
“Do you wish to know about the Yankee President and Congress?” he asked humbly, pausing as he turned the sheet of the newspaper.
“No! you ape, unless they mention our island,” replied the woman, her watchful eyes looking curiously at the printed paper that the man held.
“About the ships coming and going between the United States and Haiti?” he asked anxiously, as if fearing that he might miss something of importance to the black seeress.
“No! That is an old story; the accursed Yankees are ever coming and going, restless fools,” said the woman.
“Here is a long account of a grand wedding of a wealthy Haitien that has just taken place in Boston. He married the granddaughter and heiress of J. Dunlap, who is largely interested in our island,” remarked Manuel interrogatively.
“His name! fool, his name!” almost screamed the hag, springing to her feet with an agility fearful to contemplate in one so decrepit, suggesting supernatural power to the beholder. Manuel, with trembling lip, cried, as she fastened him in the shoulder with her claws:
“Burton! Walter Burton!”
Without changing, by even a line her fingers from the place where she had first fixed them in the flesh of the frightened man, she dragged him, bulky as he was, to his feet, and up the steep, pathless hillside with a celerity that was awful to the frightened mulatto.
A deep ravine cutting into the back of the hill formed a precipice. Along the face of the rocky wall thus formed a narrow, ill-defined footway ran, almost unsafe for a mountain goat. Nearly a thousand feet below, dark and forbidding in the gloom of jungle and spectral moss-festooned trees, roared the sullen mutterings of a mountain torrent.
When near the top of the hill, with a quick whirl the black crone darted aside and around the elbow of the hill, dragging Manuel along at a furious pace, she dashed down the precipitous path with the swiftness and confidence of an Alpine chamois.
Half way down the cliff, a ledge of rock made scanty foundation for a hut of roughly hewn saplings, thatched with the palm plants of the ravine below. So scarce was room for the hovel that but one step was necessary to reach the brink of the declivity.
As the excited hag reached the aperture that served as the doorway of her den, a hideous, blear-eyed owl, who like an evil spirit kept watch and ward at the witch’s castle, gave forth a ghostly “Hoot! Hoot!” of welcome to his mistress. At the unexpected sound the mulatto’s quivering knees collapsed and he sank down, nearly rolling over the edge of the precipice.
Sybella seemed not to feel the weight of the prostrate man whom she still clutched and hauled into the dark interior of her lair.
Dropping the almost senseless man, she threw some resinous dry brush upon a fire that was smouldering in the center of the hut. As the flame shot up Manuel opened his eyes. With a shriek he sprang to his feet, terror shaking his every limb as he stared about him.
Two giant rats were tugging at some bone, most human in shape; each trying to tear it from the teeth of the other, as squealing they circled around the fire. In corners toads blinked their bead-like eyes, while darting lizards flashed across the floor. Slowly crawling along between the unplastered logs of the walls snakes of many colors moved about or coiled in the thatch of the roof hung head downward and hissed as they waved their heads from side to side.
Along the wall a bark shelf stood. On it were two small skulls with handles made of cane. These ghastly vessels were filled with milk. Conch shells and utensils made of dried gourds were scattered on the shelf, among which a huge and ugly buzzard stalked about.
An immense red drum hung from a pole fixed in a crevice of the rock and by its side dangled a long and shining knife. A curtain of woven grass hanging at the rear of the hovel seemed to conceal the entrance to some cavern within the hill’s rock-ribbed breast.
When the blaze of the burning fagots cast a glow over the grewsome interior of this temple of Voo Doo, Sybella, the High Priestess, turned upon the cowering man, upon whose ashy-hued face stood great drops of ice-cold sweat, tearing from her head the scarlet turban that had hidden her bare, deathly skull, and beckoning him with her skeleton hand to approach, in guttural, hissing voice commanded:
“Say over what you told me on the hill! Say, if you dare, you dog, here in my lair where Tu Konk dwells, that my daughter’s grandson, the last of my blood, has mated with a white cow.”
Benumbed by the dazzling light that poured from the black pits in her naked, fleshless skull, the mulatto could not walk, but falling on his hands and knees he moved toward her; prostrate at her feet, overcome by fear, he whined faintly:
“Burton, Walter Burton, married a white woman in Boston the twentieth of last month.”
The hag grasping his ears drew his head up toward her face, and thrusting her terrible head forward she plunged her gaze like sword points down into the man’s very soul.
With a cry like that of a wounded wild-cat, she jumped back and throwing her skinny arms up in the air began waving them above her head, screaming:
“He does not lie! It is true! It is true!”
In impotent rage she dug the sharp nails of her fingers into the skin of her bald head and tore long ridges across its smooth bare surface.
Suddenly she seized the mulatto, now half-dead from terror, crying:
“Come! Goat without horns, let us tell Tu Konk.”
Manuel, limp, scarcely breathing, staggered to his feet. The hag held him by the bleeding ears that she had half torn from his head. Pushing him before her they passed behind the curtain suspended against the rock wall at the rear of the room.
The cave they entered was of small dimensions. It was illuminated by four large candles, which stood at each of the four corners of a baby’s cradle. This misplaced article occupied the center of the space walled in by the rocky sides of the apartment. The place otherwise was bare.
Sybella as soon as the curtain fell behind her began a monotonous chant. Moving slowly with shuffling side-long steps around the cradle, sang:
“Awake, my Tu Konk, awake and listen;
Hear my story;
My blood long gone to white dogs;
Daughter, granddaughter, all gone to white dogs;
One drop left to me now gone to white cow;
Tu Konk, Tu Konk, awake and avenge me.”
Manuel saw something move beneath the covering in the cradle.
“Awake, Oh! my Tu Konk;
Awake and avenge me!”
Manuel saw a black head thrust itself from below the cover, and rest upon the dainty pillow in the cradle. The head was covered by an infant’s lacy cap.
Sybella saw the head appear. Dashing under the curtain and seizing one of the skull-cups she returned and filled a nursing bottle that lay in the cradle.
The head covered with its cap of lace rose from the pillow. Sybella, on her knees, with bowed head and adoring gestures, crept to the side of the cradle and extended the bottle. King of terrors! By all that is Horrible!
The nipple disappeared in the scarlet flaming mouth of an immense, fiery eyed, hissing black-snake. It was Tu Konk!
“Drink, my Tu Konk.”
“Bring back my black blood.”
“Leave me not childless.”
“Curse then the white cow.”
“Send her the black goat.”
“Give her black kids.”
“Black kids and white teats.”
“Serve thus the white cow.”
Chanting these words, the Voo Doo priestess struck her head repeatedly upon the hard surface of the floor of the cave. Blood ran down her face to mingle with the froth that dropped from her shriveled and distorted lips.
The mulatto with bursting, straining eye-balls and chattering teeth gasped for breath. The hideous grotesqueness of the scene had frozen the very life-blood in his veins. The vestments of an angel adorning a fiend! Paralyzed by fear, with bulging eyes nearly popping from their sockets, the man stared at the horrible head surrounded by those trappings most closely associated with innocence.
Human nature could stand no more! With one frenzied shriek Manuel broke the spell that held him helpless. Tearing aside the curtain he leaped out of this Temple of Terrors; heedless of the danger of plunging over the precipice he raced along the treacherous path nor paused for breath until miles intervened between Tu Konk, Sybella and himself.