The daughter of the dawn

by William Reginald Hodder

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.