Strange Conflict (34 page)

The reaction was so great that she almost fainted with relief. A strange little noise came from her throat. She staggered, then turned right round. He was standing there in the doorway, with Philippa just behind him.

He suddenly spoke again, this time with quick anxiety.
‘Good God! What's happened to you? You're looking simply ghastly.'

She swayed for a moment then ran towards him and grasped the lapels of his coat. ‘Simon,' she whispered hoarsely, ‘Simon! Oh God! You don't know. But we must get away from here—quick!—don't make a sound! I'll take you to Greyeyes. We must get away—we must get away!'

Simon put an arm round her shoulders and led her out on to the verandah. Seizing his hand, she pulled him down the nearest steps into the garden, and with Philippa following they made a long circuit through the shadowy patches until they came round to the house again and reached the Duke's room.

He was sitting just as Marie Lou had left him, hunched up and staring with dead eyes at the opposite wall. At the sound of their footsteps he roused himself and looked round.

‘Simon!' he exclaimed, rising to his feet. ‘My call for help is answered.'

A smile twitched Simon's wide mouth but his eyes were anxious. ‘What on earth have you been up to? You look like a death's-head. And where are the others?'

De Richleau sighed. ‘All my protective materials went down in the plane, and we dare not sleep until we can make ourselves a proper pentacle. Richard and Rex left for Jamaica yesterday evening to get new things, but they won't be back until morning. Marie Lou and I haven't slept since we left Miami—which is getting on for forty hours.'

Marie Lou broke in abruptly. ‘Never mind that now. Greyeyes, I've made an awful discovery. Doctor Saturday
is
our enemy.'

‘What! Are you certain?' De Richleau stared at her.

‘Yes; absolutely.' In a spate of words Marie Lou told them about the map in the Doctor's room and recalled the way in which, although he had been on the spot, he had refrained from coming to their assistance until the fishermen had made their rescue certain.

‘You're right,' the Duke said gravely. ‘It's just possible that people fishing might have been so occupied with a bite on their line that they wouldn't have noticed the plane crash, because it was all over so quickly; but the chart of the North Atlantic proves that the Doctor
is
the Adversary.
Any Haitian occultist working for the Nazis would have to have such a chart to register the results of his astral journeys, if he was to convey exact practical information to another occultist in Germany, and it's impossible to believe that there are two such maps in a place like Haiti. Anyone might have a war map of Europe or Africa pinned up on his wall, but not a great chart of the Western Approaches with flags stuck in it.'

‘We must leave—at once—this minute!' urged Marie Lou. ‘We should be mad to stay here a moment longer.'

De Richleau shook his head. ‘No, Princess. You're wrong there. In the first place, until we can make a proper pentacle, wherever we went we should be just as much at his mercy if we fell asleep. In the second, your discovery gives us an advantage. He's still under the impression that we believe him to be a cultured man who is not mixed up in any way with Voodoo. If we play our cards properly we ought to be able to use the fact that we've discovered his secret while he still believes us to be in ignorance of it. If we were to run away he'd immediately guess that somehow we'd found him out; whereas by staying on we may be able to trap him before he makes up his mind to strike at us.'

Simon nodded vigorously. ‘Um. After all, we've come thousands of miles to find him, so now that he's taken you into his house it would be silly to clear out.'

Marie Lou passed a hand over her eyes. ‘Perhaps you're right. I don't know. I'm so tired I can hardly think any longer, but you and Philippa look quite fresh apart from your sun-burns. You must have slept last night.'

‘Um,' Simon nodded again. ‘Can't say I had a good night; I was too worried about all of you. 'Fraid I'd never see any of you any more. But after it got too dark for us to look for you any longer out there in the bay, we found beds all right, in the house of a Roman Catholic missionary.'

De Richleau's face suddenly lit up and his grey eyes flashed with something of their old brilliance. ‘I've got it!' he cried. ‘You can give us details as to how you found us here, later. The fact that you slept last night is the one thing that matters at the moment. I'm now more certain than ever that you were sent to us in our extremity as the result of my call. Marie Lou and I are dead-beat. I doubt if we could have hung out till morning, but we'll be able to pull
through if we can get even a short spell. This is what you're to do;

‘You'll go out of the house again and enter it by the doors of the big living-room. If Doctor Saturday is still there— well and good; if not, you'll call out until one of the house-boys comes on the scene and gets him for you. You'll present yourselves to the Doctor as two people who were travelling with us in the wrecked plane but not actually in our party, and describe how you got ashore in the rubber-boat. You'll then say that having arrived in Port-au-Prince you heard that we were here and so came straight up to congratulate us on our escape. The Doctor will naturally send for us and we'll have a nice little formal reunion. You will intimate that you haven't arranged for any accommodation in the town and he'll offer you beds. Soon afterwards, Marie Lou and I will again excuse ourselves on account of the long day we've had, then it will be your job to keep the Doctor up for as long as you possibly can while we get a few hours' sleep.'

‘Splendid,' sighed Marie Lou, ‘oh, splendid!'

‘Talk to the Doctor about Haiti and its customs,' the Duke went on. ‘Get him on to Voodoo. Ask him about the
Cochon Gris,
cannibalism and Zombies. He enjoys talking about his pet subject so you ought to be able to keep him up until two or three o'clock in the morning, while we get a respite. You'll probably have to pull us out of bed to wake us when you do come to bed yourselves; but that doesn't matter. We'll have gained new vitality in the interval and be able to carry on until Richard and Rex turn up. By the by, I'm supposed to be a scientist who is interested in native customs, and Marie Lou is my niece who helps me with my notes. Rex and Richard are two British agents who, although they arrived here with us, had to leave almost at once because they had urgent business with the British Consul. The Doctor believes that they're staying with him. Is that all clear?'

‘Um,' said Simon. ‘I'll keep the swine up till three o'clock anyhow.'

Philippa had made no contribution to the swift discussion but she meekly followed Simon as he left the room by the window.

Marie Lou returned to her own bedroom, while de Richleau
waited in his, until some seven minutes later Doctor Saturday carne down the passage and called out to them that two friends of theirs, who had been wrecked with them in the plane, had just arrived.

In the interval the Duke had partially undressed, as though he was just about to go to bed. Opening his door he put out his head and showed himself as he expressed delight and said that he would be along in a minute. As soon as he had got his clothes on again, Marie Lou joined him and they hurried to the big living-room, where the sinisterly hospitable Doctor had already installed Simon and Philippa in comfortable chairs and was just mixing drinks for them.

Each party congratulated the other on its escape, and after saying how pleased they were at meeting again they began to tell each other what had happened to them since they had been separated.

It transpired that the coast of Gonave had not been as distant as Rex had imagined and that Philippa and Simon had reached it in less than two hours, but only to find themselves on a desolate shore along which they had had to plod under a blazing sun for an hour and a half until at last they had come to a fishing-village. There, with Philippa's help, Simon had raised among the natives a number of willing volunteers who had put out to hunt for the wreck in three fishing-boats, but although they had searched the channel until darkness had put an end to their anxious scanning of the waters they had been unable to find any trace of the wrecked plane.

The boat with Simon and Philippa had put back into a small port further along the coast, called Anse à Galets, which proved to be the principal town of the island, and the natives had taken them to the house of the Catholic Priest, who was the only white man resident there.

The Priest had done his best to console them for the tragic loss of their friends, as by that time they were quite convinced that the others had been drowned. All the same, Simon had insisted on conducting another search of the channel on the following morning and had not given up until late that afternoon, when another boat had landed them in Port-au-Prince. Feeling that there was still an outside chance that his friends had beeen picked up and taken there, he had made inquiries at some of the little cafés along
the harbour front. At the third he had learnt, to his great joy, that all four of his fellow-passengers had come ashore with Doctor Saturday on the previous afternoon and had gone up to his house with him; so, having obtained directions, he and Philippa had set off up the hill to join them.

‘You have not arranged for any accommodation in the town, then?' said the Doctor.

‘Ner,' Simon shook his head. ‘We only landed an hour ago and came straight here from the harbour. I do hope you don't mind our butting in on you like this?'

‘Not in the least,' replied the Doctor suavely. ‘It is a pleassure to receive you here, and I hope that you will not think of going down to the town again tonight. There are the two guest-rooms which your other friends were to have occupied, so you must please make use of them and stay as long as you like.'

‘Thanks most awfully. That's terribly good of you.' Simon's geniality almost outmatched the Doctor's.

It then occurred to the Doctor that his two new guests might not yet have eaten, and upon inquiry that proved to be the case; so in spite of their protests he insisted on going off to get his house-boys out of bed to serve some cold food.

While the Doctor was absent, de Richleau whispered his congratulations on the way in which Simon had handled the situation and told him that he and Marie Lou would slip away as soon as they could, so as to get as long a sleep as possible.

When the Doctor returned the Duke stood up at once, and as he and Marie Lou had already pleaded fatigue, nearly an hour before, their host did not seek to detain them. Having said how much they would look forward to seeing the others again in the morning, the two of them went to their rooms. No sooner were they in them than with a sigh of thankfulness they dropped, clothed as they were, upon their beds and fell into the deep sleep of exhaustion.

When the cold meats, flanked by dishes of mangoes, custard-apples, grape-fruit, sliced pineapple, papaws, bananas and avocado pears, were served, Simon noted with satisfaction that Philippa's healthy appetite had not been impaired by finding herself in such sinister company but he could spare her no special attention at the moment as his fertile brain was already working overtime.

While he ate he made polite conversation with the Doctor, but secretly he was also busy assessing in his mind what the Doctor's reactions would be to this new set-up. If he suspected the trick that was being played upon him he certainly showed no indication of it, as he had not betrayed the slightest sign of annoyance when the Duke and Marie Lou had said that they were going to bed. Yet if Marie Lou was right, and Doctor Saturday was indeed the enemy, he must know much of their hopes and fears.

He would certainly not have swallowed the tale that the Duke was Marie Lou's uncle and that Rex and Richard were two British agents who had come to Haiti on urgent business with the British Consul; or that the three couples were separate parties who had only joined up to make the trip in the plane from Miami to Port-au-Prince. He must be perfectly well aware that all six of them had set out from England together and that with the exception of Philippa they were the group who had already begun operations against him from Cardinals Folly.

In that case he would certainly have guessed that Richard and Rex were not staying with the British Consul but had been sent off by the Duke for some special purpose. There had then to be faced the grim possibility that the Satanist knew where they had gone and why, and would strive to bring about their death by another attack before they could get back to the island. If that occurred the remainder of the party would be permanently stranded in Haiti with no hope of receiving new supplies of the things that would give them proper astral protection.

Simon wondered if that was the Doctor's game—to let them hope on for the help that would never come, until they all dropped asleep from utter exhaustion. He wondered, too, why it was that having had the Duke and Marie Lou, all unsuspecting, in his house for over twenty-four hours he had not taken the opportunity to poison them by inserting something in their food, but he thought that he knew the answer to that question.

Doctor Saturday would kill his antagonists only as a last extremity, because by poisoning them he could only cut short their present incarnation; whereas if he waited until he could get the better of them on the astral he might be
able to capture their spirits and force them to work on his behalf.

Pondering such possibilities between swift, amiable snatches of conversation in which he gave a vague fake account of Philippa and himself, solely because he knew that he would be expected to do so, Simon could at first see no reason why the Doctor should not have drugged his guests in order swiftly and efficiently to overcome their resistance, but after a moment he thought that he knew the answer to that one too.