A crowd of perfectly naked and bleeding men darted forward bearing in their midst an entirely nude girl, who in a perfect paroxysm of terror fought, writhed and struggled fearfully, yelling wildly all the time, in the grip of her merciless and insensate captors.
The men stretched the screaming wretch across the stump on which the snake had rested, pressed back the agonized girl’s head until her slender neck was drawn taut. Quick as the serpent’s darting tongue, Sybella’s bright, sharp blade descended, severing at one stroke the head almost from the quivering body.
A fiercer, wilder cry arose from the insane devotees as a great tub nearly full of fiery native rum was placed to catch the gushing stream that flowed in a crimson torrent from the still twitching body of the sacrifice to Voo Doo.
Sybella stirred the horrible mixture of blood and rum with a ladle, made of an infant’s skull affixed to a shin-bone of an adult human being, and having replaced the snake upon his throne, on the stump, in an abject posture presented to the serpent the ladle filled with the nauseating stuff. The re-incarnate Tu Konk thrust his head repeatedly into the skull-bowl and scattered drops of the scarlet liquid over his black and shining coils.
Then Sybella using the skull-ladle began filling enormous dippers made of gourds, that the eager, maddened crowd about the Voo Doo altar held expectantly forth, craving a portion in the libation to Tu Konk.
The maniacal host gorged themselves with the loathsome fluid, gulped down in frenzied haste, great draughts of that devilish brew, from the large calabashes that Sybella filled.
Now hell itself broke forth. No longer were the worshipers men and women. The lid was lifted from hell’s deepest, most fiendish caldron. A crew of damned demons was spewed out upon earth. With demoniac screams that rent the calmness of the night, they beat and gashed themselves, their slabbering, thick lips slapping together as they gibbered, like insane monkeys, sending flying showers of foam over their bare and bleeding bodies. Human imps of hell’s creation fell senseless to the ground or writhing in hideous, inhuman convulsions twined their distorted limbs about the furious dancers who stamped upon their hellish faces and brought the dancers shrieking to the earth.
In the midst of this pandemonium, redolent with the odor of inferno, a dark figure, that, crouched in the deep shade of the clustering palm plants, and covered with a dark mantle, had remained unnoticed a spectator of the scene, sprang up, hurled to one side the concealing cloak and bounded toward the stump whereon the serpent hissed defiance at his adorers.
With an unearthly yell, half-groan, half-moan, but all insane, frantic and wild, the neophyte leaped about in erratic gyrations of adoration before the snake, that embodiment of Tu Konk, the Voo Doo divinity.
As whirling and, in an ecstacy of emotion, waving aloft his hands the howling dancer turned and the light of the bonfire fell upon his face, the brutalized features of Walter Burton were revealed.