Black Canaan | Page 7

again I
stopped short, with one foot on the tiny stoop, and a hand half
advanced to pull open the door. A chill shivering swept over me, a
sensation like that which shakes a man to whom a flicker of lightning
has revealed the black abyss into which another blind step would have
hurled him. For the first time in my life I knew the meaning of fear; I
knew that black horror lurked in that sullen cabin under the
moss-bearded cypresses-a horror against which every primitive instinct
that was my heritage cried out in panic.
And that insistent half-memory woke suddenly. It was the memory of a
story of how voodoo men leave their huts guarded in their absence by a
powerful ju-ju spirit to deal madness and death to the intruder. White
men ascribed such deaths to superstitious fright and hypnotic
suggestion. But in that instant I understood my sense of lurking peril; I
comprehended the horror that breathed like an invisible mist from that
accursed hut. I sensed the reality of the ju-ju, of which the grotesque
wooden images which voodoo men place in their huts are only a
symbol.
Saul Stark was gone; but he had left a Presence to guard his hut.
I backed away, sweat beading the backs of my hands. Not for a bag of
gold would I have peered into the shuttered windows or touched that
unbolted door. My pistol hung in my hand, useless I knew against the
Thing in that cabin. What it was I could not know, but I knew it was
some brutish, soulless entity drawn from the black swamps by the
spells of voodoo. Man and the natural animals are not the only sentient
beings that haunt this planet. There are invisible Things-black spirits of
the deep swamps and the slimes of the river beds-the Negroes know of
them...
My horse was trembling like a leaf and he shouldered close to me as if
seeking security in bodily contact. I mounted and reined away, fighting
a panicky urge to strike in the spurs and bolt madly down the trail.
I breathed an involuntary sigh of relief as the somber clearing fell away
behind me and was lost from sight. I did not, as soon as I was out of

sight of the cabin, revile myself for a silly fool. My experience was too
vivid in my mind. It was not cowardice that prompted my retreat from
that empty hut; it was the natural instinct of self-preservation, such as
keeps a squirrel from entering the lair of a rattlesnake.
My horse snorted and shied violently. A gun was in my hand before I
saw what had startled me. Again a rich musical laugh taunted me.
She was leaning against a bent tree-trunk, her hands clasped behind her
sleek head, insolently posing her sensuous figure. The barbaric
fascination of her was not dispelled by daylight; if anything, the glow
of the lowhanging sun enhanced it.
"Why did you not go into the ju-ju cabin, Kirby Buckner?" she mocked,
lowering her arms and moving insolently out from the tree.
She was clad as I had never seen a swamp woman, or any other woman,
dressed. Snakeskin sandals were on her feet, sewn with tiny sea-shells
that were never gathered on this continent. A short silken skirt of
flaming crimson molded her full hips, and was upheld by a broad
beadworked girdle. Barbaric anklets and armlets clashed as she moved,
heavy ornaments of crudely hammered gold that were as African as her
loftily piled coiffure. Nothing else she wore, and on her bosom,
between her arching breasts, I glimpsed the faint lines of tattooing on
her brown skin.
She posed derisively before me, not in allure, but in mockery.
Triumphant malice blazed in her dark eyes; her red lips curled with
cruel mirth. Looking at her then I found it easy to believe all the tales I
had heard of torture and mutilations inflicted by the women of savage
races on wounded enemies. She was alien, even in this primitive setting;
she needed a grimmer, more bestial background, a background of
steaming jungle, reeking black swamps, flaring fires and cannibal feasts,
and the bloody altars of abysmal tribal gods.
"Kirby Buckner!" She seemed to caress the syllables with her red
tongue, yet the very intonation was an obscene insult. "Why did you
not enter Saul Stark's cabin? It was not locked! Did you fear what you

might see there? Did you fear you might come out with your hair white
like an old man's, and the drooling lips of an imbecile?"
"What's in that but?" I demanded.
She laughed in my face, and snapped her fingers with a peculiar
gesture.
"One of the ones which come oozing like black mist out of the