“Askra—she came here during the storm,” Persis said as he paused.
“Yes, Askra. She has the face of the Old Ones-knows a lot of their ‘magic’ if you want to call it that. The Seminoles are afraid of her powers. She comes here because the mounds are or were sacred to her people and I have allowed no interference with her. So far we have escaped any raids. But that does not mean we shall continue to do so. And the report I was given was a serious one.
“Unfortunately the Nonpareil as well as her master took a crippling beating in that storm.” His legs moved under the covers on the bed as if he were uncomfortable. “I’ve told Veering to keep off Verde, and I’ve sent Macmasters to do some recruiting in Key West—”
“You sent a ship to Key West! But I could have gone—”
“In a fishing smack, hardly better than a native dugout?” he asked. “I don’t think you would have chosen that form of transportation.”
He was probably very right, Persis thought gloomily. She had no relish to continue her trip by sea, and thought she could only bring herself to it on a larger ship.
“Yes, we have arms, powder, shot, and this house and the hotel have both been designed as forts. But it means that we must take every precaution, Miss Rooke. No more wandering along the shore alone—nor meeting with Grillon.”
“I did not and do not intend either of those,” she told him coldly. “But neither do I wish to remain here. If I carry out Uncle Augustin’s declared wishes I must have legal help—at Key West.”
“As soon as it can be arranged,” for the first time Crewe Leverett sounded tired, “you will be accommodated, Miss Rooke.”
Persis arose quickly from her chair. “I fear you are overtired, sir. Please let me summon Mrs. Pryor—”
His scowl became pronounced. “Summon the devil if you wish!” he snapped and turned his head from her.
The girl was only too glad to leave the room, meeting Mrs. Pryor and Dr. Veering coming up the front stairs.
She nodded to both, but they seemed so intent on a low murmur of conversation that she hardly believed they saw her. And inside her own chamber Molly was waiting, plainly excited about something.
“Miss Persis, that old Indian witch—she’s come back—and she talked to Mrs. Pryor—out in the yard where they couldn’t be overheard. She kept looking at the sea as if she expected another storm. Do you suppose she knows about something like that? They say they do—like animals—they can smell out a storm.”
“I don’t know.” Persis thought of her last ordeal by wind and wave and wondered how any rational being could abide living under such a threat. In spite of her long time abed this morning, she now felt sleep creeping up on her and was only too willing to yield to that now.
10
Persis awoke quickly, as if someone had called her name. There was the very fleeting memory of a dream and she was breathing hard, her body sweating so to dampen patches of her night rail. Pushing aside the light sheet she had pulled over her, she sat up to listen.
There was no sloughing of wind. But there was something else. A rise and fall of a voice chanting words she could not understand.
Moonlight lay in patches on the floor, bright enough to rival candle flame. Persis slid to the side of the wide bed. The sound—the threat from the dream she could not remember. She was fully awake now— not only awake but apprehensive. She felt out with one foot and her toes touched her slipper. Yet she did not bend forward to secure it on her foot. It was as if she must not move, must not allow herself to be noticed—
Noticed? By what—or who?
That same strange, awesome feeling which had come upon her on the night she had gone to retrieve the portfolio, hung in this chamber. There was moonlight enough, when her eyes adjusted to the half dark, to make sure that she was alone. But—
Fear choked her, such fear as she had never known. It was as if she drew this terror to her whether she would or not, and was a magnet for it. Her hands crumpled the edge of the sheet, pulled it up to her mouth and she bit down hard on the folds of herb-scented cloth, seeking so to stifle her terrible inclination to scream, to—to—move into what might be greater terror.
Persis tried to interpret those whispering sounds. Though she could not understand them, they played upon her so that she knew she was swaying, back and forth in a grotesque answer to their broken rhythm.
She wanted desperately to close her ears with her hands, but she found she could not. It was as if she were frozen, one foot off the bed, the other half-curled under her—searching the room—or what she could see of it—wildly—for what her inner sense told her was there and what her eyes and the remnants of her sensible confidence denied could be.
There was a dark shadow along the front of the bureau. One of the drawers had not been firmly closed, and now showed a noticeable gap. The portfolio? Had someone crept in during her period of sleep and searched for it again?
But—what she felt here—Persis slowly moved her head, it required a vast amount of energy and determination to break that strange apathy which held her to do that. There was no one in the room.
She forced herself to drag the wet linen self-applied gag out of her mouth. This was just the remnants of a bad dream—it had to be!
Only all her arguments could not expel the fear which still imprisoned her like an evil cage. And she stiffened, her hands clawing at the sheet.
The glimmer of light, flickering of sparks of light! That she had seen before! In the hallway. It was cold-cold. Something old, something which she could never understand and did not want to, was here, growing stronger and stronger—stronger—
With a little cry she could not stifle, for the first time in her life, Persis fainted. Or was she purposefully overcome by that thing which had nothing about it except dark purpose and overwhelming fear?
Dream—was it a dream which awaited her like a great beast in hiding? She could not have told. Save she was swept up into another time and place.
It was as if her body (though she was no longer aware of even having a body) floated in the sky. Though she had never remembered seeing colors in any dream before, such were all about her now, strident, cruel, threatening.
She was a prisoner of some force which willed her to look—to watch-
While what lay beneath her was so alien to all she knew that she felt totally lost.
This was not day, but night, and fires leaped high. Still the colors were there—the red of blood, the green of a poisonous vine, the yellow of a snake—all comparisons which flitted through her mind were those of wrongness, of evil. There seemed to be a stench composed of vile deeds and imaginings arising like the smoke from the torches, to taint her spirit as the smoke tainted the air.
And there were many of those torches, some borne by those in canoes who paddled purposefully toward what lay directly below Persis—or below that part of her which was caught in this dream. For what did stand there, the water of a small lake washing at its shell-armored sides, was a tall hillock of which the top was squared off after a fashion, though it angled inward toward the crest. While the crest itself was a platform with stone planted in its middle.
Up the side of the hillock were steps cut away and shell-paved, while on either side of those were planted more torches, even as there was also a veritable wall of them set around the outer edge of that top square.
Those in canoes did not move toward the stairs, rather their craft gathered in ranks around the outward skirts of the mound. But near the stone at the crest were others who waited. And, though their bodies were human, broad necklets upon their chests, their heads were encased in masks—with huge plumed crowns all in the forms of snarling visages of animals. One looked out from between the threatening teeth of a huge spotted cat. Another was snouted and fanged like an alligator.
And, very dim and far away, a thin chanting reached Persis. She felt that she was on the very edge of learning some mystery. But it was not a mystery of her kind and she had no desire—no right—to understand.
There came a last canoe, bearing at the bow a man who was not masked, but rather plumed and crowned, and about him there was the air of one who gave orders and was speedily thereafter obeyed. While behind him, between the two paddlers who maneuvered skillfully to bring their light craft to the beginning of that stairway of light, was another figure, but so draped in white that Persis could see neither face, nor hands.