“Lou potoa,” moaned one of the papaloi, a venerable looking aged debauchee who wore a poetic-looking white beard. Then a pretty creole maid ran forward, and, severing the ropes which were round the two coffins, removed the lids. Nothing seemed too strange to occur that night as Clensy and Biglow stared in astonishment—the inmates of the two coffins sat up, were gazing on the assemblage with glazed, vacant looking eyes, their jaw-bindings still on! Clensy noticed that their hands were tied behind them.
“God!” was all that the young Englishman could mutter, but it sufficiently expressed his feelings at that moment when God seemed so far away.
“They’re sick men or women who have been buried alive, drugged, and hurriedly buried.”
“Good heavens! what do you mean?” gasped Clensy.
“I simply mean that those two men (one was a man and the other a woman) have been sold to the papaloi while they were sick, and after being drugged and buried have been dug up by the vaudoux thugs, stolen from the cemeteries by night, coffins and all!”
“Are they going to kill them, do—” Clensy said no more. A tall negro had stepped forward, and had dragged the coffins with their inmates back into the shadows. It was the sight of the terrible papaloi priest who had suddenly stepped forward, and had placed a large basket down on the stage that had startled Clensy. This individual was the sacred executioner, and he wore the horns of a goat on his bald, polished skull, which gave him a demoniacal appearance. The rows of creole and mulatto girls prostrated themselves before the executioner.
The whole assemblage of that cavern chamber stood in perfect silence when the negro priest stooped and raised the lid of the basket, revealing the enclosed victim, trussed, ready for the sacrificial altar—a terror-stricken mulatto girl! The girl’s eyes gazed in vacant terror at the stern chiselled-like faces of the papaloi who at once surrounded her. No mercy shone in the eyes of those hungry looking fanatics of the most bloodthirsty creed that has ever sent cries of anguish to God. The girl’s mute appeal, for her mouth was gagged, made no impression on the hearts of the hot-blooded African and Haytian men and women who witnessed that sight. The greater her grief, the more terrifying her convulsive throes, the more glory to the fetish deities whom they worshipped. The wretched victim was the Goat Without Horns; her living blood the anticipated libation that must be drunk with white rum when those terrible fetish men and women knelt before the vaudoux altars. No Marquesan, no Fijian cannibalistic orgy of the old pre-Christian times ever approached in cruelty and lingering terror the torture that those semi-civilised Haytians meted out to their victims. The Goat Without Horns was the chosen of the dark powers, the honoured of their people, and so why should their hearts be touched by the victim’s anguish?
Undoing the sennet thongs that bound the girl’s legs together, they made her stand on the vaudoux altar. Her terror was so great that her limbs trembled like blown leaves, her fingers moving convulsively.
“Savoot, garou!” wailed a hoarse voice. That voice and those dreadful words sent a death-like silence and chill into Clensy’s soul. Even Biglow’s bosom gave a half-stifled sigh as he quietly drew his revolver from his pocket. A tall, handsome man had suddenly stepped forward; he removed his cloak.
“Good heavens! impossible!” murmured Clensy. But it wasn’t impossible at all, for there, as real as Clensy’s surprise, stood President Gravelot, Sestrina’s father. The fear of Clensy’s heart over the risk he was running through being in that place, was extinguished as his whole soul became centred with an intense curiosity on the scene before him. His eyes began to scan eagerly the rows of robed women and girls, many in their teens, who made up the strangely assorted audience of that terrible seraglio of bloodthirsty superstition and indiscribable lust that was sanctified by the presence of the vaudoux priests. A great fear had begun to haunt Clensy’s brain—was Sestrina among that crew? Why were some of the female adherents as well as the men, wearing masks that only revealed their burning eyes? Already the frenzy of drink and superstition had seized those fetish devotees. The hot-blooded negro and Haytian priests were already lifting their hands as they chanted the weird vaudoux melodies. They were wonderful strains that they chanted, inasmuch as they suggested the indescribable debauchery of the men and women who sang. Some of the young mulatto and creole girls were already lying in postures of stupefied abandonment on the couches and settees of that sumptiously furnished subterreanean temple chamber, some weeping and laughing in the hysteria and religious fervour which had seized them. Others stood as though transfixed by a terrible curiosity, yes, as they watched in fiendish anticipation to see the coming torture of the sacrificial victim.