Leslie Charteris - The Saint on the Spanish Main

Theron Netlord put a hand in his coat pocket and took out a small automatic. He leveled it at the Saint’s chest, resting his forearm on the table.

“It’s very simple,” he said calmly. “I could kill you now, and easily account for your disappearance. But I like the idea of having you work for me. As a zombie, you could retain many of your unusual abilities. So I could kill you, and, after I’ve learned a little more tonight, restore you to living death. But that would impair your usefulness in certain ways. So I’d rather apply what I know already, if I can, and make you my creature without harming you physically.”

“That’s certainly considerate of you,” Simon scoffed.

He didn’t know what unquenchable spark of defiance gave him the will to keep up the hopeless bluff. He seemed to have no contact with any muscles below his neck. But as long as he didn’t try to move, and fail, Netlord couldn’t be sure of that.

“The drug is only to relax you,” Netlord said. “Now look at this.”

He dipped his left hand in the ashtray beside him, and quickly began drawing a pattern with his fingertips on the white tablecloth — a design of crisscross diagonal lines with other vertical lines rising through the diamonds they formed, the verticals tipped with stars and curlicues, more than anything like the picture of an ornate wrought-iron gate. And as he drew it he intoned in a strange chanting voice:

“Par pouvoir St-Jacques Majeur, Ogoun Badagris nèg Baguidi, Bago, Ogoun Feraille nèg fer, nèg feraille, nèg tagnifer nago, Ogoun batala, nèg, nèg Ossagne malor, ossangne aquiquan, Ossangne agouelingui, Jupiter tonnerre, nèg blabla, nèg oloncoun, nèg vanté-m pas fie’m... Aocher nago, aocher nago, aocher nago!”

The voice had risen, ending on a kind of muted shout, and there was a blaze of fanatic excitement and something weirder than that in Netlord’s dilated eyes.

Simon wanted to laugh. He said, “What’s that — a sequel to the Hutsut Song?” Or he said, “I prefer ‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves.’  ” Or perhaps he said neither, for the thoughts and the ludicrousness and the laugh were suddenly chilled and empty, and it was like a hollowness and a darkness, like stepping into nothingness and a quicksand opening under his feet, sucking him down, only it was the mind that went down, the lines of the wrought-iron gate pattern shimmering and blinding before his eyes, and a black horror such as he had never known rising around him...

Out of some untouched reserve of will power he wrung the strength to clear his vision again for a moment, and to shape words that he knew came out, even though they came through stiff clumsy lips.

“Then I’ll have to kill you right now,” he said.

He tried to get up. He had to try now. He couldn’t pretend any longer that he was immobile from choice. His limbs felt like lead. His body was encased in invisible concrete. The triumphant fascinated face of Theron Netlord blurred in his sight.

The commands of his brain went out along nerves that swallowed them in enveloping numbness. His mind was drowning in the swelling dreadful dark. He thought, “Sibao, your Maîtresse Erzulie must be the weak sister in this league.”

And suddenly, he moved.

As if taut wires had snapped, he moved. He was on his feet. Uncertainly, like a thawing out, like a painful return of circulation, he felt connections with his body linking up again. He saw the exultation in Netlord’s face crumple into rage and incredulous terror.

“Fooled you, didn’t I?” said the Saint croakily. “You must still need some coaching on your hex technique.”

Netlord moved his hand a little, rather carefully, and his knuckle whitened on the trigger of the automatic. The range was point-blank.

Simon’s eardrums rang with the shot, and something struck him a stunning blinding blow over the heart. He had an impression of being hurled backwards as if by the blow of a giant fist, and then with no recollection of falling he knew that he was lying on the floor, half under the table, and he had no strength to move any more.

Theron Netlord rose from his chair and looked down, shaken by the pounding of his own heart. He had done many brutal things in his life, but he had never killed anyone before. It had been surprisingly easy to do, and he had been quite deliberate about it. It was only afterwards that the shock shook him, with his first understanding of the new loneliness into which he had irrevocably stepped, the apartness from all other men that only murderers know.

Then a whisper and a stir of movement caught his eye and ear together, and he turned his head and saw Sibao. She wore the white dress and the white handkerchief on her head, and the necklaces of threaded seeds and grain, that were prescribed for what was to be done that night.

“What are you doing here?” he snarled in Creole. “I said I would meet you at the houmfort .”

“I felt there was need for me.”

She knelt by the Saint, touching him with her sensitive hands. Netlord put the gun in his pocket and turned to the sideboard. He uncorked a bottle of rum, poured some into a glass, and drank.

Sibao stood before him again.

“Why did you want to kill him?”

“He was — he was a bad man. A thief.”

“He was good.”

“No, he was clever.” Netlord had had no time to prepare for questions. He was improvising wildly, aware of the hollowness of his invention and trying to bolster it with truculence. “He must have been waiting for a chance to meet you. If that had not happened, he would have found another way. He came to rob me.”

“What could he steal?”

Netlord pulled out his wallet, and took from it a thick pad of currency. He showed it to her.

“He knew that I had this. He would have killed me for it.” There were twenty-five crisp hundred-dollar bills, an incredible fortune by the standards of a Haitian peasant, but only the amount of pocket money that Netlord normally carried and would have felt undressed without. The girl’s dark velvet eyes rested on it, and he was quick to see more possibilities. “It was a present I was going to give to you and your father tonight.” Money was the strongest argument he had ever known. He went on with new-found confidence, “Here, take it now.”

She held the money submissively.

“But what about — him?”

“We must not risk trouble with the police. Later we will take care of him, in our own way... But we must go now, or we shall be late.”

He took her compellingly by the arm, but for a moment she still held back.

“You know that when you enter the sobagui to be cleansed, your loa , who sees all things, will know if there is any untruth in your heart.”

“I have nothing to fear.” He was sure of it now. There was nothing in voodoo that scared him. It was simply a craft that he had set out to master, as he had mastered everything else that he made up his mind to. He would use it on others, but it could do nothing to him. “Come along, they are waiting for us.”

Simon heard their voices before the last extinguishing wave of darkness rolled over him.

He woke up with a start, feeling cramped and bruised from lying on the floor. Memory came back to him in full flood as he sat up. He looked down at his shirt. There was a black-rimmed hole in it, and even a gray scorch of powder around that. But when he examined his chest, there was no hole and no blood, only a pronounced soreness over the ribs. From his breast pocket he drew out the metal plaque with the vêver of Erzulie. The bullet had scarred and bent it, but it had struck at an angle and glanced off without even scratching him, tearing another hole in the shirt under his arm.