The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

But Benedetti had caught the glitter of the candlelight on the metal a split second before she launched the knife. His agile mind perceived her intention and he flung himself to one side just in time. The knife thudded into the high back of the chair in which he had been sitting and rested there, quivering.

“You are a fool,” the man commented curtly. Striding to the French windows he flung them wide, letting moonlight stream into the room. The sound of the drums came in louder, a barbaric rhythm beating in strange tempo with the pulse in her wrist.

“Look at that,” he said, flinging out an arm.

At the edge of the veranda, which ran along the front of the house, lounged a white cotton-clad Haitian, a three-foot cane knife clasped in his fist. Further along, at the edge of the beach, another man leaned against the bole of a coconut tree, and the glitter of the moonlight on steel betrayed the fact that he also was armed with a cane knife.

“Even if you had killed me,” he said quietly, “you would have been no better off. You could not escape from the island. There are no boats here. Even the launch on which you arrived has been sent away and will not return until after the ceremony. And if you had attempted to swim, the sea swarms with sharks.”

It was after midnight when Vivian went upstairs to her room again. Benedetti escorted her to the door.

“I am locking you in,” he told her. “It is really quite useless to do so. You could not escape. There is absolutely no possibility of success. But it is a precaution I always take with my annual — visitors.”

Then he drew from his pocket the diamond ring that Vivian had, earlier in the evening, given to the little black maid.

“You will find,” he said with a smile, “that it is useless to attempt to bribe my servants. The fear of the Voodoo in them is greater than the greed for money.”

With a slight bow he closed the door, leaving her staring at the blank panels with a sinking feeling in her heart. She was a prisoner in a prison without walls, and yet the sea that girdled the land was a barrier as effective as stone ramparts and iron bars. Instead of one jailer she had dozens — perhaps hundreds — for she realized that every laborer on the island was a potential guard, alert to halt any attempt to escape. She did not attempt to deceive herself by thinking that every native of the place did not know of her presence and the fate for which she was destined.

She wondered what prompted the old woman — Benedetti’s servant — to take her life in hand and warn her, back there in Cap St. Feral? The woman had, of course, realized Benedetti’s purpose in bringing her here, since it had been she who had prepared the drugged rose stems. It was not for a long time, and then only by accident, that Vivian was to discover that in a Haitian the desire for revenge can transcend even the fear of Voodoo, and that it was to avenge what she considered a wrong that the old woman had warned her.

Vivian turned her thoughts back to her position. She believed she knew where Wylie was being held. On her way down to the dining room a little earlier she had encountered one of the black maids with a tray; had noted the door through which the girl had passed. That, she reasoned, must be the room in which Wylie was held prisoner, unless there were other prisoners in the house of whom she knew nothing.