The crowned chieftain stepped easily to the small landing which lay at the foot of that stairway. Then he turned and held out his hand while the paddlers brought the canoe around a little so that the figure in white could also disembark.
Persis, though she could not tell why she knew, believed that this was a woman, a young woman. And from that swarthed figure there came a breath of fear as strong as if the sea wind buffeted Persis.
Up they went, step by step. The chieftain first, proud, his face one which teased Persis’ memory for it seemed she had seen its like before—with the jutting beak of nose, plugged on one side in the nostril with a disk of green stone. He made no move to urge on or aid his companion.
Yet that other climbed, step by step. And her fear arose with her like a sour breath of corruption. So they reached the top. Then two of the animal-masked men moved quickly to the side of the white-shrouded one. They wore gloves as Persis could see when they raised their hands, but the gloves were skillfully fashioned of skin, while talons set in them glistened in the light.
These ripped and tore. Rags of white fluttered to the pavement of shells. A girl stood there, her young brown body brought into life by the torches. She made no attempt to raise her limp arms. Her face was passive, her eyes staring straight ahead. They had drugged her, these priests. Persis did not know how she was certain of that. But the drug controlled only her body. Trapped inside the victim’s mind was alive, and fear was eating at her.
With the ease of long practice the cat-headed priest stooped to catch her ankles, the alligator already gripped her shoulders. Unresisting she was limp in their hands as they swung her up and across the stone.
No—she would not watch! Persis had no eyes to close—not in this dream. But her will arose with such a fury of revulsion that she struggled as the poor victim could not. There was a vast silence. The chant which had reached her faintly had stopped abruptly.
Away—Persis summoned all of her will. She would wake! She would!
It was like suddenly finding a way out of a prison, the falling to the floor of a bar across a door. She was— out!
Once more she opened her eyes, saw that she lay so close to the edge of the bed (her hands tightly gripping the rumpled sheet until her fingers ached) that she might have rolled to the floor. Still the nightmare held her for several breaths and she looked about her, eager to make sure of where she was—and when.
That had been unlike any dream she had ever had in her life. It was—real—even if she had had no part in it but was only an onlooker. She raised her head and was aware that that distant sound of chant was gone. It had not been of the dream. She had heard it before she had been caught in that nightmare.
Askra! The woman who might be the last of her tribe, who was credited with strange powers, and who was allowed to return to the Key to carry out communication with her dead (or so they said) because she could overawe in turn even the fierce Seminoles who had invaded and taken the lands of her people.
Had Persis this night somehow looked into Askra’s memories? Yet the girl had the feeling what she had witnessed had happened very long ago. The mound, the lake around it—those had stood clear, well tended. And there had been no house. Still she was certain that it had been the same mound as that on which the house now rested. What had Lydia said on that first day here—that this was blood-soaked ground with its own ghosts—the Old Ones Askra believed in—the Spanish—the pirates—the Spanish again—and now people of her own race. She sat up in bed and looked at the room with its bars of moon and its shadows. If evil was done—murder—over and over again in a place-then did that evil still hang like a dark cloud above it— perhaps forever?
There was, she drew a tentative breath, an odor in the room—some night-blooming flower? Perhaps—but she did not fancy it. And she felt queer and giddy. If only there was someone within reach she could go to now. Molly? No, it would be foolish to seek out the maid for no other reason than a bad dream.
However, she sought for her second slipper and firmly pushed her feet into them. She had to go to the window, to look out and reassure herself that the here and now was back. Without waiting to pick up her wrapper from the foot of the bed she did just that.
The moon shone on the causeway now uniting the mound and Key. There were no canoes, no torches. She wanted light within her room as well, though she knew the folly of sleeping with a candle aflame. Yet at the moment she did not feel as if she would ever truly sleep again.
Moving to the small side table she struck a spark from the tinderbox, and watched the welcome cone of fire answer on the wick. Then, she did not know why, she took up the candle, shielding the flame with her other hand, and moved to stand at the door—though she did not open that.
Instead, she listened. There were sounds out of the night—rustle of leaves, others made by insects. But nothing she could connect to either the chant or the uneasy feeling of the presence which had haunted her first awakening.
It was when she turned reluctantly once more to her bed, determined that she must fight sleep lest she somehow return into the world of nightmare, that Persis saw it.
A dark rod was lying at the foot of the bed, as if someone had twitched loose the netting there and laid it for her to see. She held the candle closer, until it nearly set aflame the netting before she jerked it back again.
The fan!
A glance toward the chest told her that the bottom drawer gaped open far enough. Someone had deliberately taken it from where Molly had put it and laid it here for her to find.
It cost her high resolution to touch it, draw it out into the full light of the candle. In her hold it was heavy, seemingly oddly balanced. And this was the one she had found buried! It could not be opened—as if it were a box made to resemble the fan Lydia had taken such malicious amusement in showing her. The opal eyes of the cats watched her, not with menace, but with the detachment of the furred kind. As if they were waiting for something—or for some action on her part. But how had it come here?
She had buried it, Persis knew that, she could even sense this moment the very feel of the earth and stones she had pressed with all her might down around the lead box which had held it. And then Molly had found it among her things. Yes, that was the drawer she had hidden it in for a space. And it would seem that it had been deliberately left in the open this time in mockery—to prove to her that she could not rid herself of her find.
Shivering, the girl collapsed on the edge of the bed. She would have given all she possessed, all Uncle Augustin had hoped to obtain to insure her future, to be safely back in New York. There was an uncanny shadow over this house—though she had never believed truly such things could honestly be. Now it would seem she was partially its victim.
She set down the candle carefully on the bedside table, wishing at that moment she possessed a dozen more to make a barrier of light around the bed. No— that made her think of those torches and the wall of light they had furnished for that very sinister crest of the mound!
If she could only hurl the fan away from her—out the window—into the vegetation where it might be lost forever. But though she willed fiercely to do just that, she could not move. This was like being caught in another dream. Was she? Could dreams be layered one upon the other so she might now think herself awake and yet not be?
But if anything was real in this suddenly frightening world it was this room, the bed—and what she held in her hand. Persis concentrated on the fingers which held the fan so tightly, loose—throw-
She brought up her other hand and began to straighten them one after another. Then she paused. There was something new stirring beneath the fear which was like a cloud of poison in this room. She—she had sat so before, and there had been—