The daughter of the dawn

by William Reginald Hodder

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.