A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Dark Melody of Madness

At four in the morning, a scarecrow of a man staggers dazedly into the New Orleans Police Headquarters building. Behind him at the curb, a lacquered Bugatti purrs like a drowsy cat, the swellest thing that ever parked out there. He weaves his way through the anteroom, deserted at that early hour, and goes in through the open doorway beyond. The sleepy desk-sergeant looks up; an idle detective scanning yesterday’s Times-Picayune tipped back on the two hind legs of a chair against the wall raises his head; and as the funnel of light from the cone overhead plays up their visitor like a flashlight-powder, their mouths drop open and their eyes bat a couple of times. The two front legs of the detective’s chair come down with a thump. The sergeant braces himself, eager, friendly, with the heels of both hands on his desk-top and his elbows up in the air. A patrolman comes in from the back room, wiping a drink of water from his mouth. His jaw also hangs when he sees who’s there. He sidles nearer the detective and says behind the back of his hand, “That’s Eddie Bloch, ain’t it?”

The detective doesn’t even take time off to answer. It’s like telling him what his own name is. The three stare at the figure under the conelight, interested, respectful, almost admiring. There’s nothing professional in their scrutiny, they’re not the police studying a suspect; they’re nobodies getting a look at a celebrity. They take in the rumpled tuxedo, the twig of gardenia that’s shed its petals, the tie hanging open in two loose ends. His topcoat was slung across his arm originally; now it trails along the dusty station-house floor behind him. He gives his hat the final, tortured push that dislodges it. It drops and rolls away behind him. The cop picks it up and brushes it off — he never was a bootlicker in his life, but this guy is Eddie Bloch.

Still it’s his face, more than who he is or how he’s dressed, that would draw stares anywhere. It’s the face of a dead man — the face of a dead man on a living body. The shadowy shape of the skull seems to peer through the transparent skin; you can make out its bone-structure as though an X-ray were playing it up. The eyes are stunned, shocked, haunted gleams, set in a vast hollow that bisects the face like a mask. No amount of drink or dissipation could do this to anyone, only long illness and the foreknowledge of death. You see faces like that looking up at you from hospital cots when all hope has been abandoned — when the grave is already waiting.

Yet strangely enough, they knew who he was just now. Instant recognition of who he had been came first — realization of the shape he’s in comes after that — more slowly. Possibly it’s because all three of them have been called to identify corpses in the morgue in their day. Their minds are trained along those lines. And this man’s face is known to hundreds of people. Not that he has ever broken or even fractured the most trivial law, but he has spread happiness around him — set a million feet to dancing in his time.

The desk sergeant’s expression changes. The patrolman mutters under his breath to the detective. “Looks like he just came out of a bad smash-up with his car.”

“More like a binge to me,” answers the detective. They’re simple men, capable, but those are the only explanations they can find for what they now see before them.

The desk sergeant speaks.

“Mr. Eddie Bloch, am I right?” He extends his hand across the desk in greeting.

The man can hardly seem to stand up. He nods, he doesn’t take the hand.

“Is there anything wrong, Mr. Bloch? Is there anything we can do for you?” The detective and the patrolman come over. “Run in and get him a drink of water, La tour,” the sergeant says anxiously. “Have an accident, Mr. Bloch? Been held up?”

The man steadies himself by stiff-arming himself against the edge of the sergeant’s desk. The detective extends an arm behind him in case he should go backwards. He keeps fumbling, continually fumbling in his clothes. The tuxedo swims on him as his movements shift it around. He’s down to about a hundred pounds, they notice. Out comes the gun, and he doesn’t even seem to have strength to lift it. He pushes it and it skids a little way across the desk-top, then spins around and faces back at him.

“I’ve killed a man. Just now. Little while ago. 3:30.” He speaks, and if the unburied dead ever spoke, this is the voice they’d use.

They’re completely floored. They almost don’t know how to handle the situation for a minute. They deal with killers every day, but killers have to be gone out after and dragged in. And when fame and wealth enter into it, as they do once in a great while, fancy lawyers and protective barriers spring up like wildfire to hedge them in on all sides. This man is one of the ten idols of America, or was until just lately. People like him don’t kill people. They don’t come in out of nowhere at four in the morning and stand before a simple desk sergeant and a simple detective, stripped to their naked souls, shorn of almost all resemblance to humanity.

There’s silence in the room — for just a minute — a silence you could cut with a knife. Then he speaks again, in agony. “I tell you I’ve killed a man! Don’t stand looking at me like that! I’ve k—!”

The sergeant speaks, gently, sympathetically. “What’s the matter, Mr. Bloch, been working too hard?” The sergeant comes out from behind the desk. “Come on inside with as. You stay here, Latour, and take the phone.”

And when they’ve taken him into the back room: “Get him a chair, Humphries. Here, drink some of this water, Mr. Bloch. Now what’s it all about?” The sergeant has brought the gun in with him. He passes it before his nose, then cracks it open. He looks at the detective. “He’s used it all right.”

“Was it an accident, Mr. Bloch?” the detective prompts respectfully. The man in the chair shakes his head. He’s started to shiver all over, although the New Orleans night outside is warm and mellow. “Who’d you do it to? Who was it?” the sergeant puts in.

“I don’t know his name,” Bloch mumbles. “I never have. They call him Papa Benjamin.”

His two interrogators exchange a puzzled look, “Sounds like—” The detective doesn’t finish it. Instead he turns to the seated figure and asks almost perfunctorily: “He was a white man, of course, wasn’t he?”

“He was colored,” is the unexpected answer.

The thing gets more crazy, more inexplicable, at every turn. How should a man like Eddie Bloch, one of the country’s ace bandsmen, pulling down his two-and-a-half grand every week for playing at the Bataclan, come to kill a nameless colored man — then be pulled all to pieces by it? These two men in their time have never seen anything like it; they have put suspects through forty-eight-hour grillings and yet compared to him now, those suspects were fresh as daisies when they got through with them.

He has said it was no accident and he has said it was no hold-up. They shower him with questions, not to break him down but rather to try and pull him together. “What’d he do, talk out of turn to you? Forget himself? Get wise?” This is the Southland, remember.

The man’s head goes from side to side like a pendulum.

“Did you go out of your head for a minute? Is that how it was?” Again a nodded no.

The man’s condition has suggested one angle to the detective’s mind. He looks around to make sure the patrolman outside isn’t listening. Then very discreetly: “Are you a needle-user, Mr. Bloch? Was he your source?”

The man looks up at them. “I’ve never touched a thing I shouldn’t. A doctor will tell you that in a minute.”

“Did he have something on you? Was it blackmail?”

Bloch fumbles some more in his clothes; again they dance around on his skeletonized frame. Suddenly he takes out a cube of money, as thick as it is wide, more money than these two men have ever seen before in their lives. “There’s three thousand dollars there,” he says simply, and tosses it down like he did the gun. “I took it with me tonight, tried to give it to him. He could have had twice as much, three times as much, if he’d said the word, if he’d only let up on me. He wouldn’t take it. That was when I had to kill him. That was all there was left for me to do.”

“What was he doing to you?” They both say it together.

“He was killing me.” He holds out his arm and shoots his cuff. The wristbone is about the size of the sergeant’s own thumb-joint. The expensive platinum wrist-watch that encircles it has been pulled in to the last possible notch and yet it still hangs almost like a bracelet. “See? I’m down to 102. When my shirt’s off, my heart’s so close to the surface you can see the skin right over it move like a pulse with each beat.”

They draw back a little, almost they wish he hadn’t come in here. That he had headed for some other precinct instead. From the very beginning they have sensed something here that is over their heads, that isn’t to be found in any of the instruction-books. Now they come out with it. “How?” Humphries asks. “How was he killing you?”

There’s a flare of torment from the man. “Don’t you suppose I would have told you long ago, if I could? Don’t you suppose I would have come in here weeks ago, months ago, and demanded protection, asked to be saved — if I could have told you what it was? If you would have believed me?”

“We’ll believe you, Mr. Bloch,” the sergeant says soothingly. “We’ll believe anything. Just tell us—”

But Bloch in turn shoots a question at them, for the first time since he has come in. “Answer me! Do you believe in anything you can’t see, can’t hear, can’t touch-?”

“Radio,” the sergeant suggests not very brightly, but Humphries answers more frankly: “No.”

The man slumps down again in his chair, shrugs apathetically. “If you don’t, how can I expect you to believe me? I’ve been to the biggest doctors, biggest scientists in the world. They wouldn’t believe me. How can I expect you to? You’ll simply say I’m cracked, and let it go at that. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in an asylum—” He breaks off and sobs. “And yet it’s true, it’s true!”

They’ve gotten into such a maze that Humphries decides it’s about time to snap out of it. He asks the one simple question that should have been asked long ago, and the hell with all this mumbo-jumbo. “Are you sure you killed him?” The man is broken physically and he’s about ready to crack mentally too. The whole thing may be an hallucination.

“I know I did. I’m sure of it,” the man answers calmly. “I’m already beginning to feel a little better. I felt it the minute he was gone.” If he is, he doesn’t show it. The sergeant catches Humphries’ eye and meaningfully taps his forehead in a sly gesture.

“Suppose you take us there and show us,” Humphries suggests. “Can you do that? Where’d it happen, at the Bataclan?”

“I told you he was colored,” Bloch answers reproachfully. Bataclan is tony. “It was in the Vieux Carr6. I can show you where, but I can’t drive any more. It was all I could do to get down here with my car.”

“I’ll put Desjardins on it with you,” the sergeant says, and calls through the door to the patrolman: “Ring Dij and tell him to meet Humphries at corner of Canal and Royal right away!” He turns and looks at the huddle on the chair. “Buy him a bracer on the way. It don’t look like he’ll last till he gets there.”

The man flushes a little — it would be a blush if he had any blood left in him. “I can’t touch alcohol any more. I’m on my last legs. It goes right through me like—” He hangs his head, then raises it again.

“But I’ll get better now, little by little, now that he’s—”

The sergeant takes Humphries out of earshot. “Pushover for a padded cell. If it’s on the up-and-up, and not just a pipe dream, call me right back. I’ll get the commissioner on the wire.”

“At this hour of the night?”

The sergeant motions toward the chair with his head. “He’s Eddie Bloch, isn’t he?”

Humphries takes him under the elbow, pries him up from the chair. Not roughly, but just briskly, energetically. Now that things are at last getting under way, he knows where he’s at; he can handle them. He’ll still be considerate, but he’s business-like now; he’s into his routine. “All right, come on, Mr. Bloch, let’s get up there.”

“Not a scratch goes down on the blotter until I’m sure what I’m doing,” the sergeant calls after Humphries. “I don’t want this whole town down on my neck tomorrow morning.”

Humphries almost has to hold him up on the way out and into the car. “This it?” he says. “Wow!” He just touches it with his nail and they’re off like velvet. “How’d you ever get this into the Vieux Carr6 without knocking over the houses?”

Two gleams deep in the skull jogging against the upholstery, dimmer than the dashboard lights, are the only sign that there’s life beside him. “Used to park it blocks away — go on foot.”

“Oh, you went there more than once?”

“Wouldn’t you — to beg for your life?”

More of that screwy stuff, Humphries thinks disgustedly. Why should a man like Eddie Bloch, star of the mike and the dance-floor, go to some colored man in the slums and beg for his life?

Royal Street comes whistling along. He swerves in toward the curb, shoves the door out, sees Desjardins land on the running-board with one foot. Then he veers out into the middle again without even having stopped. Desjardins moves in on the other side of Bloch, finishes dressing by knotting his necktie and buttoning his vest. “Where’d you get the Aquitania?” he wants to know, and then, with a look beside him: “Holy Kreisler, Eddie Bloch! We had you only

tonight on my Emerson—”

“Matter?” Humphries squelches. “Got a talking-jag?”

“Turn,” says a hollow sound between them, and three wheels take the Bugatti around into North Rampart Street. “Have to leave it here,” he says a little later, and they get out. Congo Square, the old stamping-ground of the slaves.

“Help him,” Humphries tells his mate tersely, and they each brace him by an elbow.

Staggering between them with the uneven gait of a punch-drunk pug, quick and then slow by turns, he leads them down a ways, and then suddenly cuts left into an alley that isn’t there at all until you’re smack in front of it. It’s just a crack between two houses, noisome as a sewer. They have to break into Indian file to get through at all. But Bloch can’t fall down; the walls almost scrape both his shoulders at once. One’s in front, one behind him. “You packed?” Humphries calls over his head to Desjardins, up front.

“Catch cold without it,” the other’s voice comes back out of the gloom.

A slit of orange shows up suddenly from under a windowsill and a shapely coffee-colored elbow scrapes the ribs of the three as they squirm by. “This far ’nough, honey,” a liquid voice murmurs.

“Bad girl! Wash y’mouth out with soap,” the unromantic Humphries warns over his shoulder without even looking around. The sliver of light vanishes as quickly as it came...”

The passage widens out in places into mouldering courtyards dating back to French or Spanish colonial days, and once it goes under an archway and becomes a tunnel for a short distance. Desjardins cracks his head and swears with talent and abandon.

“Y’left out—” the rearguard remarks dryly.

“Here,” pants Bloch weakly, and stops suddenly at a patch of blackness in the wall. Humphries washes it with his torch and crumbling mildewed stone steps show up inside it. Then he motions Bloch in, but the man hangs back, slips a notch or two lower down against the opposite wall that supports him. “Lemme stay down here! Don’t make me go up there again,” he pleads. “I don’t think I can make it any more. I’m afraid to go back in there.”

“Oh no!” Humphries says with quiet determination. “You’re showing us,” and scoops him away from the wall with his arm. Again, as before, he isn’t rough about it, just business-like. Dij keeps the lead, watering the place with his own torch. Humphries trains his on the band-leader’s forty-dollar custom-made patent-leathers jerking frightenedly upward before him. The stone steps turn to wood ones splintered with usage. They have to step over a huddled black drunk, empty bottle cradled in his arms. “Don’t light a match,” Dij warns, pinching his nose. “There’ll be an explosion.”

“Grow up,” snaps Humphries. The Cajun’s a good dick, but can’t he realize the man in the middle is roasting in hell-fire? “This is no time—”

“In here is where I did it. I closed the door again after me.” Bloch’s skull-face is all silver with his life-sweat as one of their torches flicks past it.

Humphries shoves open the sagging mahogany panel that was first hung up when a Louis was still king of France and owned this town. The light of a lamp far across a still, dim room flares up and dances crazily in the draught. They come in and look.

There’s an old broken-down bed, filthy with rags. Across it there’s a motionless figure, head hanging down toward the floor. Dij cups his hand under it and lifts it. It comes up limply toward him, like a small basketball. It bounces down again when he lets it go — even seems to bob slightly for a second or two after. It’s an old, old colored man, up in his eighties, even beyond. There’s a dark spot, darker than the weazened skin, just under one bleared eye, and another in the thin fringe of white wool that circles the back of the skull.

Humphries doesn’t wait to see any more. He turns, flips out, and down, and all the way back to wherever the nearest telephone can be found, to let headquarters know that it’s true after all and they can rouse the police commissioner. “Keep him there with you, Dij,” his voice trails back from the inky stairwell, “and no quizzing. Pull in your horns till we get our orders!” That scarecrow with them tries to stumble after him and get out of the place, groaning: “Don’t leave me here! Don’t make me stay here-!”

“I wouldn’t quiz you on my own, Mr. Bloch,” Dij tries to reassure him, nonchalantly sitting down on the edge of the bed next to the corpse and retying his shoelace. “I’ll never forget it was your playing Love in Bloom on the air one night in Baton Rouge two years ago gave me the courage to propose to my wife—”

But the Commissioner would, and does, in his office a couple hours later. He’s anything but eager about it, too. They’ve tried to shunt him, Bloch, off their hands in every possible legal way open to them. No go. He sticks to them like flypaper. The old colored man didn’t try to attack him, or rob him, or blackmail him, or kidnap him, or anything else. The gun didn’t go off accidentally, and he didn’t fire it on the spur of the moment either, without thinking twice, or in a flare of anger. The Commissioner almost beats his own head against the desk in his exasperation as he reiterates over and over: “But why? Why? Why?” And for the steenth time, he gets the same indigestible answer: “Because he was killing me.”

“Then you admit he did lay hands on you?” The first time the poor Commissioner asked this, he said it with a spark of hope. But this is the tenth or twelfth and the spark died out long ago.

“He never once came near me. I was the one looked him up each time to plead with him. Commissioner Oliver, tonight I went down on my knees to that old man and dragged myself around the floor of that dirty room after him, on my bended knees, like a sick cat — begging, crawling to him, offering him three thousand, ten, any amount, finally offering him my own gun, asking him to shoot me with it, to get it over with quickly, to be kind to me, not to drag it out by inches any longer! No, not even that little bit of mercy! Then I shot — and now I’m going to get better, now I’m going to live—”

He’s too weak to cry; crying takes strength. The Commissioner’s hair is about ready to stand on end. “Stop it, Mr. Bloch, stop it!” he shouts, and he steps over and grabs him by the shoulder in defense of his own nerves, and can almost feel the shoulder-bone cutting his hand. He takes his hand away again in a hurry. “I’m going to have you examined by an alienist!”

The bundle of bones rears from the chair. “You can’t do that! You can’t take my mind from me! Send to my hotel — I’ve got a trunkful of reports on my condition! I’ve been to the biggest minds in Europe! Can you produce anyone that would dare go against the findings of Buckholtz in Vienna, Reynolds in London? They had me under observation for months at a time! I’m not even on the borderline of insanity, not even a genius or musically talented. I don’t even write my own numbers, I’m mediocre, uninspired — in other words completely normal. I’m saner than you are at this minute, Mr. Oliver. My body’s gone, my soul’s gone, and all I’ve got left is my mind, but you can’t take that from me!”

The Commissioner’s face is beet-red. He’s about ready for a stroke, but he speaks softly, persuasively. “An eighty-odd-year-old colored man who is so feeble he can’t even go upstairs half the time, who has to have his food pulleyed up to him through the window in a basket, is killing — whom? A white stumble-bum his own age? No-o-o, Mr. Eddie Bloch, the premier bandsman of America, who can name his own price in any town, who’s heard every night in all our homes, who has about everything a man can want — that’s who!” He peers close, until their eyes are on a level. His voice is just a silky whisper. “Tell me just one thing, Mr. Bloch.” Then like the explosion of a giant firecracker, “How?” He roars it out, booms it out.

There’s a long-drawn intake of breath from Eddie Bloch. “By thinking thoughtwaves of death that reached me through the air.” The poor Commissioner practically goes all to pieces on his own rug. “And you don’t need a medical exam!” he wheezes weakly.

There’s a flutter, the popping of buttons, and Eddie Bloch’s coat, his vest, his shirt, undershirt, land one after another on the floor around his chair. He turns. “Look at my back! You can count every vertebra through the skin!” He turns back again. “Look at my ribs. Look at the pulsing where there’s not enough skin left to cover my heart!”

Oliver shuts his eyes and turns toward the window. He’s in a particularly unpleasant spot. New Orleans, out there, is stirring, and when it hears about this, he’s going to be the most unpopular man in town. On the other hand, if he doesn’t see the thing through now that it’s gone this far he’s guilty of a dereliction of duty, malfeasance in office.

Bloch, slowly dressing, knows what he’s thinking. “You want to get rid of me, don’t you? You’re trying to think of a way of covering this thing up. You’re afraid to bring me up before the Grand Jury on account of your own reputation, aren’t you?” His voice rises to a scream of panic. “Well, I want protection! I don’t want to go out there again — to my death! I won’t accept bail! If you turn me loose now, even on my own cognizance, you may be as guilty of my death as he is. How do I know my bullet stopped the thing? How does any of us know what becomes of the mind after death? Maybe his thoughts will still reach me, still try to get me. I tell you I want to be locked up, I want people around me day and night, I want to be where I’m safe—”

“Shh, for God’s sake, Mr. Bloch! They’ll think I’m beating you up—” The Commissioner drops his arms to his side and heaves a gigantic sigh. “That settles it! I’ll book you all right. You want that and you’re going to get it! I’ll book you for the murder of one Papa Benjamin, even if they laugh me out of office for it!”

For the first time since the whole thing has started, he casts a look of real anger, ill-will, at Eddie Bloch. He seizes a chair, swirls it around, and bangs it down in front of the man. He puts his foot on it and pokes his finger almost in Bloch’s eye. “I’m not two-faced. I’m not going to lock you up nice and cozy and then soft-pedal the whole thing. If it’s coming out at all, then all of it’s coming out. Now start in!

Tell me everything I want to know, and what I want to know is — everything!”

The strains of Goodnight Ladies die away; the dancers leave the floor; the lights start going out, and Eddie Bloch throws down his baton and mops the back of his neck with a handkerchief. He weighs about two hundred pounds, is in the pink, and is a good-looking brute. But his face is sour right now, dissatisfied. His outfit starts to case its instruments right and left, and Judy Jarvis steps up on the platform, in her street clothes, ready to go home. She’s Eddie’s torch singer, and also his wife. “Coming, Eddie? Let’s get out of here.” She looks a little disgusted herself. “I didn’t get a hand tonight, not even after my rumba number. Must be staling. If I wasn’t your wife, I’d be out of a job, I guess.”

Eddie pats her shoulder. “It isn’t you, honey. It’s us. We’re beginning to stink. Notice how the attendance has been dropping the past few weeks? There were more waiters than customers tonight. I’ll be hearing from the owner any minute now. He has the right to cancel my contract if the intake drops below five grand.” A waiter comes up to the edge of the platform. “Mr. Graham’d like to see you in his office before you go home, Mr. Bloch.”

Eddie and Judy look at each other. “This is it now, Judy. You go back to the hotel. Don’t wait for me. G’night, boys.” Eddie Bloch calls for his hat and knocks at the manager’s office.

Graham rustles a lot of accounts together. “We took in forty-five hundred this week, Eddie. They can get the same ginger ale and sandwiches any place, but they’ll go where the band has something to give ’em. I notice the few that do come in don’t even get up from the table any more when you tap your baton. Now, what’s wrong?” Eddie punches his hat a couple of times. “Don’t ask me. I’m getting the latest orchestrations from Broadway sent to me hot off the griddle. We sweat our bald heads off rehearsing—”

Graham swivels his cigar. “Don’t forget that jazz originated here in the South, you can’t show this town anything. They want something new.”

“When do I scram?” Eddie asks, smiling with the southwest comer of his mouth.

“Finish the week out. See if you can do something about it by Monday. If not, I’ll have to wire St. Louis to get Kruger’s crew. I’m sorry, Eddie.”

“That’s all right,” broadminded Eddie says. “You’re not running a charity bazaar.”

Eddie goes out into the dark danceroom. His crew has gone. The tables are stacked. A couple of old colored crones are down on hands and knees slopping water around on the parquet. Eddie steps up on the platform a minute to get some orchestrations he left on the piano. He feels something crunch under his shoe, reaches down, picks up a severed chicken’s claw lying there with a strip of red rag tied around it. How the hell did it get up there? If it had been under one of the tables, he’d have thought some diner had dropped it. He flushes a little. D’ye mean to say he and the boys were so rotten tonight that somebody deliberately threw it at them while they were playing?

One of the scrubwomen looks up. The next moment, she and her mate are on their feet, edging nearer, eyes big as saucers, until they get close enough to see what it is he’s holding. Then there’s a double yowl of animal fright, a tin pail goes rolling across the floor, and no two stout people, white or colored, ever got out of a place in such a hurry before. The door nearly comes off its hinges, and Eddie can hear their cackling all the way down the quiet street outside until it fades away into the night. “For gosh sake!” thinks the bewildered Eddie. “They must be using the wrong brand of gin.” He tosses the object out onto the floor and goes back to the piano for his music scores. A sheet or two has slipped down behind it and he squats to collect them. That way the piano hides him.

The door opens again and he sees Johnny Staats (traps and percussion) come in in quite a hurry. He thought Staats was home in bed by now. Staats is feeling himself all over like he was rehearsing the shim-sham and he’s scanning the ground as he goes along. Then suddenly he pounces — and it’s on the very scrap of garbage Eddie just now threw away! And as he straightens up with it, his breath comes out in such a sigh of relief that Eddie can hear it all the way across the still room. All this keeps him from hailing Staats as he was going to a minute ago and suggesting a cup of java. But — “Superstitious,” thinks broadminded Eddie. “It’s his good-luck charm, that’s all, like some people carry a rabbit’s foot. I’m a little that way myself, never walk under a ladder—”

Then again, why should those two mammies go into hysterics when they lamp the same object? And Eddie recalls now that some of the boys have always suspected Staats has colored blood, and tried to tell him so years ago when Staats first came in with them, but he wouldn’t listen to them.

Staats slinks out again as noiselessly as he came in, and Eddie decides he’ll catch up with him and kid him about his chicken-claw on their way home together. (They all roost in the same hotel.) So he takes his music-sheets, some of which are blank, and he leaves. Staats is way down the street — in the wrong direction, away from the hotel! Eddie hesitates for just a minute, and then he starts after Staats on a vague impulse, just to see where he’s going — just to see what he’s up to. Maybe the fright of the scrubwomen and the way Staats pounced on that chicken-claw just now have built up to this, without Eddie’s really knowing it.

And how many times afterward he’s going to pray to his God that he’d never turned down that other way this night — away from his hotel, his Judy, his boys — away from the sunlight and the white man’s world. Such a little thing to decide to do, and afterwards no turning back — ever...

He keeps Staats in sight, and they hit the Vieux Carr6. That’s all right. There are a lot of quaint places here a guy might like to drop in. Or maybe he has some Creole sweetie tucked away, and Eddie thinks: I’m lower than a ditch to spy like this. But then suddenly right before his eyes, halfway up the narrow lane he’s turned into — there isn’t any Staats any more! And no door opened and closed again either. Then when Eddie gets up to where it was, he sees the crevice between the old houses, hidden by an angle in the walls. So that’s where he went! Eddie almost has a peeve on by now at all this hocus-pocus. He slips in himself and feels his way along. He stops every once in awhile and can hear Staats’ quiet footfall somewhere way up in front. Then he goes on again. Once or twice the passage spreads out a little and lets a little green-blue moonlight part way down the walls. Then later, there’s a little flare of orange light from under a window and an elbow jogs him in the appendix. “You’d be happier here. Doan go the rest of the way,” a soft voice breathes. A prophecy if he only knew it!

But hardboiled Eddie just says: “G’wan to bed, y’dirty stay-up!” out of the corner of his mouth, and the light vanishes. Next a tunnel and he bangs the top of his head and his eyes water. But at the other end of it, Staats has finally come to a halt in a patch of clear light and seems to be looking up at a window or something, so Eddie stays where he is, inside the tunnel, and folds the lapels of his black jacket up over his white shirt-front so it won’t show.

Staats just stands there for a spell, with Eddie holding his breath inside the tunnel, and then finally he gives a peculiar, dismal whistle. There’s nothing carefree or casual about it. It’s a hollow swampland sound, not easy to get without practice. Then he just stands there waiting, until without warning, another figure joins him in the gloom. Eddie strains his eyes. A gorilla-like, Negro roustabout. Something passes from Staats’ hand to his — the chicken claw possibly — then they go in, into the house Staats has been facing. Eddie can hear the soft shuffle of feet going up stairs on the inside, and the groaning, squeaking of an old decayed door — and then silence—

— He edges forward to the mouth of the tunnel and peers up. No light shows from any window, the house appears to be untenanted, deserted.

Eddie hangs onto his coat collar with one hand and strokes his chin with the other. He doesn’t know just what to do. The vague impulse that has brought him this far after Staats begins to peter out now. Staats has some funny associates — something funny is going on in this out-of-the-way place at this unearthly hour of the morning — but after all, a man’s private life is his own. He wonders what made him do this, he wouldn’t want anyone to know he did it. He’ll turn around and go back to his hotel now and get some shut-eye; he’s got to think up some novelty for his routine at the Bataclan between now and Monday or he’ll be out on his ear.

Then just as one heel is off the ground to take the turn that will start him back, a vague, muffled wailing starts from somewhere inside that house. It’s toned down to a mere echo. It has to go through thick doors and wide, empty rooms and down a deep, hollow stairwell before it gets to him. Oh, some sort of a revival meeting, is it? So Staats has got religion, has he? But what a place to come and get it in!

A throbbing like a far-away engine in a machine-shop underscores the wailing, and every once in a while a boom like distant thunder across the bayou tops the whole works. It goes: Boom-putta-putta-boom-putta-putta-boom! And the wailing, way up high at the moon: Eeyah-eeyah-eeyah...

Eddie’s professional instincts suddenly come alive. He tries it out, beats time to it with his arm as if he were holding a baton. His fingers snap like a whip. “My God, that’s grand! That’s gorgeous! Just what I need! I gotta get up there!” So a chicken-foot does it, eh?

He turns and runs back, through the tunnel, through the courtyards, all the way back where he came from, stooping here, stooping there, lighting matches recklessly and throwing them away as he goes. Out in the Vieux Carre again, the refuse hasn’t been collected. He spots a can at the corner of two lanes, topples it over. The smell rises to heaven, but he wades into it ankle-deep like any levee-rat, digs into the stuff with both forearms, scattering it right and left. He’s lucky, finds a verminous carcass, tears off a claw, wipes it on some newspaper. Then he starts back. Wait a minute! The red rag, red strip around it! He feels himself all over, all his pockets. Nothing that color. Have to do without it, but maybe it won’t work without it. He turns and hurries back through the slit between the old houses, doesn’t care how much noise he makes. The flash of light from Old Faithful, the jogging elbow. Eddie stoops, he suddenly snatches in at the red kimono sleeve, his hand comes away with a strip of it. Bad language, words that even Eddie doesn’t know. A five-spot stops it on the syllable, and Eddie’s already way down the passage. If only they haven’t quit until he can get back there!

They haven’t. It was vague, smothered when he went away; it’s louder, more persistent, more frenzied now. He doesn’t bother about giving the whistle, probably couldn’t imitate it exactly anyhow. He dives into the black smudge that is the entrance to the house, feels greasy stone steps under him, takes one or two and then suddenly his collar is four sizes too small for him, gripped by a big ham of a hand at the back. A sharp something that might be anything from a pocket-knife blade to the business edge of a razor is creasing his throat just below the apple and drawing a preliminary drop or two of blood.

“Here it is, I’ve got it here!” gasps Eddie. What kind of religion is this, anyway? The sharp thing stays, but the hand lets go his collar and feels for the chicken-claw. Then the sharp thing goes away, too, but probably not very far away. “Why for you didn’t give the signal?” Eddie’s windpipe gives him the answer. “Sick here, couldn’t.”

“Light up, lemme see yo’ face.” Eddie strikes a match and holds it. “Yo’ face has never been here before.”

Eddie gestures upward. “My friend — up there — he’ll tell you!”

“Mr. Johnny you’ friend? He ax you to come?”

Eddie thinks quickly. The chicken-claw might carry more weight than Staats. “That told me to come.”

“Papa Benjamin sen’ you that?”

“Certainly,” says Eddie stoutly. Probably their deacon, but it’s a hell of a way to. The match stings his fingers and he whips it out.

Blackness and a moment’s uncertainty that might end either way. But a lot of savoir-faire — a thousand years of civilization are backing Eddie up. “You’ll make me late, Papa Benjamin wouldn’t like that!” He gropes his way on up in the pitch-blackness, thinking any minute he’ll feel his back slashed to ribbons. But it’s better than standing still and having it happen, and to back out now would bring it on twice as quickly. However, it works, nothing happens.

“Fust thing y’know, all N’yorleans be cornin’ by,” growls the African watchdog sulkily, and flounders down on the staircase with a sound like a tired seal. There was some other crack about “darkies lookin’ lak pinks,” and then a long period of scratching.

But Eddie’s already up on the landing above and so close to the boom-putta-boom now it drowns out every other sound. The whole framework of the decrepit house seems to shake with it. The door’s closed but the thread of orange that outlines it shows it up to him. Behind there. He leans against it, shoves a little. It gives. The squealings and the grindings it emits are lost in the torrent of noise that comes rushing out. He sees plenty, and what he sees only makes him want to see all the more. Something tells him the best thing to do is slip in quietly and close it behind him before he’s noticed, rather than stay there peeking in from the outside. Little Snowdrop might always come upstairs in back of him and catch him there. So he widens it just a little more, oozes in, and kicks it shut behind him with his heel — and immediately gets as far away from it as he can. Evidently no one has seen him.

Now, it’s a big shadowy room and it’s choked with people. It’s lit by a single oil-lamp and a hell of a whole lot of candles, which may have shone out brightly against the darkness outside but are pretty dim once you get inside with them. The long flickering shadows thrown on all the walls by those cavorting in the center are almost as much of a protection to Eddie as he crouches back amidst them as the darkness outside would be. He’s been around, and a single look is enough to tell him that whatever else it is, it’s no revival meeting. At first he takes it for just a gin or rent party with the lid off, but it isn’t that either. There’s no gin there, and there’s no pairing off of couples in the dancing — rather it’s a roomful of devils lifted bodily up out of hell. Plenty of them have passed out cold on the floor all around him and the others keep stepping over them as they prance back and forth, only they don’t always step over but sometimes on — on prostrate faces and chests and outstretched arms and hands. Then there are others who have gone off into a sort of still trance, seated on the floor with their backs to the wall, some of them rocking back and forth, some just staring glassy-eyed, foam drooling from their mouths. Eddie quickly slips down among them on his haunches and gets busy. He too starts rocking back and forth and pounding the flooring beside him with his knuckles, but he’s not in any trance, he’s getting a swell new number for his repertoire at the Bataclan. A sheet of blank score-paper is partly hidden under his body, and he keeps dropping one hand down to it every minute jotting down musical notes with the stub of pencil in his fingers. “Key of A,” he guesses. “I can decide that when I instrument it. Mi-re-do, mi-re-do. Then over again. Hope I didn’t miss any of it.”

Boom-putta-putta-boom! Young a id old, black and tawny, fat and thin, naked and clothed, they pass from right to left, from left to right, in two concentric circles, while the candle flames dance crazily and the shadows leap up and down on the walls. The hub of it all, within the innermost circle of dancers, is an old, old man, black skin and bones, only glimpsed now and then in a space between the packed bodies that surround him. An animal-pelt is banded about his middle; he wears a horrible juju mask over his face — a death’s-head. On one side of him, a squatting woman clacks two gourds together endlessly, that’s the “putta” of Eddie’s rhythm; on the other, another beats a drum, that’s the “boom.” In one upraised hand, he holds a squalling fowl, wings beating the air; in the other, a sharp-bladed knife. Something flashes in the air, but the dancers mercifully get between Eddie and the sight of it. Next glimpse he has, the fowl isn’t flapping any more. It’s hanging limply down and veins of blood are trickling down the old man’s shrivelled forearm.

“That part don’t go into my show,” Eddie thinks facetiously. The horrible old man has dropped the knife; he squeezes the life-blood from the dead bird with both hands now, still holding it in mid-air. He sprinkles the drops on those that cavort around him, flexing and unflexing his bony fingers in a nauseating travesty of the ceremony of baptism.

Drops spatter here and there about the room, on the walls. One lands near Eddie and he edges back. Revolting things go on all around him. He sees some of the crazed dancers drop to their hands and knees and bend low over these red polka-dots, licking them up from the floor with their tongues. Then they go about the room on all fours like animals, looking for others.

“Think I’ll go,” Eddie says to himself, tasting last night’s supper all over again. “They ought to have the cops on them.”

He maneuvers the score-sheet, filled now, out from under him and into his side-pocket; then he starts drawing his feet in toward him preparatory to standing up and slipping out of this hell-hole. Meanwhile a second fowl, black this time (the first was white), a squeaking suckling-pig, and a puppy-dog have gone the way of the first fowl. Nor do the carcasses go to waste when the old man has dropped them. Eddie sees things happening on the floor, in between the stomping feet of the dancers, and he guesses enough not to look twice.

Then suddenly, already reared a half-inch above the floor on his way up, he wonders where the wailing went. And the clacking of the gourds and the boom of the drum and the shuffling of the feet. He blinks, and everything has frozen still in the room around him. Not a move, not a sound. Straight out from the old man’s gnarled shoulder stretches a bony arm, the end dipped in red, pointing like an arrow at Eddie. Eddie sinks down again that half-inch. He couldn’t hold that position very long, and something tells him he’s not leaving right away after all. “White man,” says a bated breath, and they all start moving in on him. A gesture of the old man sweeps them into motionlessness again.

A cracked voice comes through the grinning mouth of the juju mask, rimmed with canine teeth. “Whut you do here?”

Eddie taps his pockets mentally. He has about fifty on him. Will that be enough to buy his way out? He has an uneasy feeling however that none of this lot is as interested in money as they should be — at least not right now. Before he has a chance to try it out, another voice speaks up. “I know this man, papaloi. Let me find out.”

Johnny Staats came in here tuxedoed, hair slicked back, a cog in New Orleans’ night life. Now he’s barefooted, coatless, shirtless — a tousled scarecrow. A drop of blood has caught him squarely on the forehead and been traced, by his own finger or someone else’s, into a red line from temple to temple. A chicken-feather or two clings to his upper lip. Eddie saw him dancing with the rest, groveling on the floor. His scalp crawls with repugnance as the man comes over and squats down before him. The rest of them hold back, tense, poised, ready to pounce.

The two men talk in low, hoarse voices. “It’s your only way, Eddie. I can’t save you—”

“Why, I’m in the very heart of New Orleans! They wouldn’t dare!” But sweat oozes out on Eddie’s face just the same. He’s no fool. Sure the police will come and sure they’ll mop this place up. But what will they find? His own remains along with that of the fowls, the pig and the dog.

“You’d better hurry up, Eddie. I can’t hold them back much longer. Unless you do, you’ll never get out of this place alive and you may as well know it! If I tried to stop them, I’d go too. You know what this is, don’t you? This is voodoo!”

“I knew that five minutes after I was in the room.” And Eddie thinks to himself, “You son-of-a-so-and-so! You better ask Mombo-jombo to get you a new job starting in tomorrow night!” Then he grins internally and, clown to the very end, says with a straight face: “Sure I’ll join. What d’ye suppose I came here for anyway?”

Knowing what he knows now, Staats is the last one he’d tell about the glorious new number he’s going to get out of this, the notes for which are nestled in his inside pocket right now. And he might even get more dope out of the initiation ceremonies if he pretends to go through with them. A song or dance for Judy to do with maybe a green spot focussed on her. Lastly, there’s no use denying there are too many razors, knives, and the like, in the room to hope to get out and all the way back where he started from without a scratch.

Staats’ face is grave though. “Now don’t kid about this thing. If you knew what I know about it, there’s a lot more to it than there seems to be. If you’re sincere, honest about it, all right. If not, it might be better to get cut to pieces right now than to tamper with it.”

“Never more serious in my life,” says Eddie. And deep down inside he’s braying like a jackass.

Staats turns to the old man. “His spirit wishes to join our spirits.” The papaloi bums some feathers and entrails at one of the candle-flames. Not a sound in the room. The majority of them squat down all at once. “It came out all right,” Staats breathes. “He reads them. The spirits are willing.”

“So far so good,” Eddie thinks. “I’ve fooled the guts and feathers.” The papaloi is pointing at him now. “Let him go now and be silent,” the voice behind the mask cackles. Then a second time he says it, and a third, with a long pause between.

Eddie looks hopefully at Staats. “Then I can go after all, as long as I don’t tell anyone what I’ve seen?”

Staats shakes his head grimly. “Just part of the ritual. If you went now, you’d eat something that disagreed with you tomorrow and be dead before the day was over.”

More sacrificial slaughtering, and the drum and gourds and wailing start over again, but very low and subdued now as at the beginning. A bowl of blood is prepared and Eddie is raised to his feet and led forward, Staats on one side of him, an anonymous colored man on the other. The papaloi dips his already caked hand into the bowl and traces a mark on Eddie’s forehead. The chanting and wailing grow louder behind him. The dancing begins again. He’s in the middle of all of them. He’s an island of sanity in a sea of jungle frenzy. The bowl is being held up before his face. He tries to draw back, his sponsors grip him firmly by the arms. “Drink!” whispers Staats. “Drink — or they’ll kill you where you stand!”

Even at this stage of the game, there’s still a wisecrack left in Eddie, though he keeps it to himself. He takes a deep breath. “Here’s where I get my vitamin A for today!”

Staats shows up at orchestra rehearsal next A.M. to find somebody else at drums and percussion. He doesn’t say much when Eddie shoves a two-week check at him. Spits on the floor at his feet and growls: “Beat it, you filthy—”

Staats only murmurs: “So you’re crossing them? I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes for all the fame and money in this world, guy!”

“If you mean that bad dream the other night,” says Eddie, “I haven’t told anybody and I don’t intend to. Why, I’d be laughed at. I’m only remembering what I can use of it. I’m a white man, see? The jungle is just trees to me; the Congo, just a river; the night-time, just a time for ’lectric-lights.” He whips out a couple of C’s. “Hand ’em these for me, will ya, and tell ’em I’ve paid up my dues from now until doomsday and I don’t want any receipt. And if they try putting rough-on-rats in my orange juice, they’ll find themselves stomping in a chain gang!”

The C’s fall where Eddie spat. “You’re one of us. You think you’re pink? Blood tells. You wouldn’t have gone there — you couldn’t have stood that induction — if you were. Look at your fingernails sometime, look in a mirror at the whites of your eyes. Goodbye, dead man.” Eddie says goodbye to him, too. He knocks out three of his teeth, breaks the bridge of his nose, and rolls all over the floor on top of him. But he can’t wipe out that wise, knowing smile that shows even through the gush of blood.

They pull Eddie off, pull him up, pull him together. Staats staggers away, smiling at what he knows. Eddie, heaving like a bellows, turns to his crew. “All right, boys. Altogether now!” Boom-putta-putta-boom-putta-putta-boom!

Graham shoots five C’s on promotion and all New Orleans jams its way into the Bataclan that Saturday night. They’re standing on each other’s shoulders and hanging from the chandeliers to get a look. “First time in America, the original VOODOO CHANT,” yowl the three-sheets on every billboard in town. And when Eddie taps his baton, the lights go down and a nasty green flood lights the platform from below and you can hear a pin drop. “Good evening, folks. This is Eddie Bloch and his Five Chips, playing to you from the Bataclan. You’re about to hear for the first time on the air the Voodoo Chant, the age-old ceremonial rhythm no white man has ever been permitted to listen to before. I can assure you this is an accurate transcription, not a note has been changed.” Then very soft and faraway it begins: Boom-putta-putta-boom!

Judy’s going to dance and wail to it, she’s standing there on the steps leading up to the platform, waiting to go on. She’s powdered orange, dressed in feathers, and has a small artificial bird fastened to one wrist and a thin knife in her other hand. She catches his eye, he looks over at her, and he sees she wants to tell him something. Still waving his baton he edges sideways until he’s within earshot. “Eddie, don’t! Stop them! Call it off, will you? I’m worried about you!”

“Too late now,” he answers under cover of the music. “We’ve started already. What’re you scared of?”

She passes him a crumpled piece of paper. “I found this under your dressing room door when I came out just now. It sounds like a warning. There’s somebody doesn’t want you to play that number!” Still swinging with his right hand, Eddie unrolls the thing under his left thumb and reads it:

You can summon the spirits but can you dismiss them again? Think well.

He crumples it up again and tosses it away. “Staats trying to scare me because I canned him.”

“It was tied to a little bunch of black feathers,” she tries to tell him. “I wouldn’t have paid any attention, but my maid pleaded with me not to dance this when she saw it. Then she ran out on me—”

“We’re on the air,” he reminds her between his teeth. “Are you with me or aren’t you?” And he eases back center again. Louder and louder the beat grows, just like it did two nights ago. Judy swirls on in a green spot and begins the unearthly wail Eddie’s coached her to do.

A waiter drops a tray of drinks in the silence of the room out there, and when the headwaiter goes to bawl him out he’s nowhere to be found. He has quit cold and a whole row of tables has been left without their orders. “Well, I’ll be—” says the captain, and scratches his head.

Eddie’s facing the crew, his back to Judy, and as he vibrates to the rhythm, some pin or other that he’s forgotten to take out of his shirt suddenly catches him and sticks into him. It’s a little below the collar, just between the shoulder-blades. He jumps a little, but doesn’t feel it any more after that...

Judy squalls, tears her tonsils out, screeches words that neither he nor she know the meaning of but that he managed to set down on paper phonetically the other night. Her little body goes through all the contortions, tamed down of course, that that brownskin she-devil greased with lard and wearing only earrings performed that night. She stabs the bird with her fake knife and sprinkles imaginary blood in the air. Nothing like this has ever been seen before. And in the silence that suddenly lands when it’s through, you can count twenty. That’s how it’s gotten under everyone’s skin.

Then the noise begins. It goes over like an avalanche. But just the same, more people are ordering strong drinks all at once than has ever happened before in the place, and the matron in the women’s restroom has her hands full of hysterical sob-sisters.

“Try to get away from me, just try!” Graham tells Eddie at curfew time. “I’ll have a new contract, gilt-edged, ready for you in the morning. We’ve already got six grand worth of reservations on our hands for the coming week — one of ’em by telegram all the way from Shreveport!”

Success! Eddie and Judy taxi back to their rooms at the hotel, tired but happy. “It’ll be good for years. We can use it for our signature on the air, like Whiteman does the Rhapsody.”

She goes into the bedroom first, snaps on the lights, calls to him a minute later. “Come here and look at this — the cutest little souvenir!” He finds her holding a little wax doll, finger high, in her hands. “Why, it’s you, Eddie, look! Small as it is, it has your features! Well isn’t that the clev—”

He takes it away from her and squints at it. It’s himself all right. It’s rigged out in two tiny patches of black cloth for a tuxedo, and the eyes and hair and features are inked onto the wax.

“Where’d you find it?”

“It was in your bed, up against the pillow.”

He’s fixing to grin about it, until he happens to turn it over. In the back, just a little below the collar between the shoulder blades, a short but venomous-looking black pin is sticking.

He goes a little white for a minute. He knows who it’s from now and what it’s trying to tell him. But that isn’t what makes him change color. He’s just remembered something. He throws off his coat, yanks at his collar, turns his back to her. “Judy, look down there, will you? I felt a pin stick me while we were doing that number. Put your hand down. Feel anything?”

“No, there’s nothing there,” she tells him.

“Musta dropped out.”

“It couldn’t have,” she says. “Your belt-line’s so tight it almost cuts into you. There couldn’t have been anything there or it’d still be there now. You must have imagined it.”

“Listen, I know a pin when I feel one. Any mark on my back, any scratch between the shoulders?”

“Not a thing.”

“Tired, I guess. Nervous.” He goes over to the open window and pitches the little doll out into the night with all his strength. Damn coincidence, that’s all it was. To think otherwise would be to give them their inning. But he wonders what makes him feel so tired just the same — Judy did all the exercising, not he — yet he’s felt all in ever since that number tonight.

Out go the lights and she drops off to sleep right with them. He lies very quiet for awhile. A little later he gets up, goes into the bathroom where the lights are whitest of all, and stands there looking at himself close to the glass. “Look at your fingernails sometime; look at the whites of your eyes,” Staats had said. Eddie does. There’s a bluish, purplish tinge to his nails that he never noticed before. The whites of his eyes are faintly yellow.

It’s warm in New Orleans that night but he shivers a little as he stands there. He doesn’t sleep any more that night...

In the morning his back aches as if he were sixty. But he knows that’s from not closing his eyes all night, and not from any magic pins.

“Oh, my God!” Judy says, from the other side of the bed, “look what you’ve done to him!” She shows him the second page of the Picayune. “John Staats, until recently a member of Eddie Bloch’s orchestra, committed suicide late yesterday afternoon in full view of dozens of people by rowing himself out into Lake Pontchartrain and jumping overboard. He was alone in the boat at the time. The body was recovered half an hour later.”

“I didn’t do that,” says Eddie grimly. “I’ve got a rough idea what did, though.” Late yesterday afternoon. The night was coming on, and he couldn’t face what was coming to him for sponsoring Eddie, for giving them all away. Late yesterday after — that meant he hadn’t left that warning at the dressing-room or left that death sentence on the bed. He’d been dead himself by then — not white, not black, just yellow.

Eddie waits until Judy’s in her shower, then he phones the morgue. “About Johnny Staats. He worked for me until yesterday, so if nobody’s claimed the body send it to a funeral parlor at my exp—”

“Somebody’s already claimed the remains, Mr. Bloch. First thing this morning. Just waited until the examiner had established suicide beyond a doubt. Some colored organization, old friends of his it seems—”

Judy comes in and remarks: “You look all green in the face.”

Eddie thinks: “I wouldn’t care if he was my worst enemy, I can’t let that happen to him! What horrors are going to take place tonight somewhere under the moon?” He wouldn’t even put cannibalism beyond them. The phone’s right at his fingertips, and yet he can’t denounce them to the police without involving himself, admitting that he was there, took part at least once. Once that comes out, bang! goes his reputation. He’ll never be able to live it down — especially now that he’s played the Voodoo chant and identified himself with it in the minds of the public.

So instead, alone in the room again, he calls the best-known private agency in New Orleans. “I want a bodyguard. Just for tonight. Have him meet me at closing-time at the Bataclan. Armed, of course.”

It’s Sunday and the banks are closed, but his credit’s good anywhere. He raises a G in cash. He arranges with a reliable crematorium for a body to be taken charge of late tonight or early in the morning. He’ll notify them just where to call for it. Yes, of course! He’ll produce the proper authorization from the police. Poor Johnny Staats couldn’t get away from them in life, but he’s going to get away from them in death, all right. That’s the least anyone could do for him.

Graham slaps a sawbuck cover on that night, more to give the waiters room to move around in than anything else, and still the place is choked to the roof. This Voodoo number is a natural, a wow.

But Eddie’s back is ready to cave in, while he stands there jogging with his stick. It’s all he can do to hold himself straight.

When the racket and the shuffling are over for the night, the private dick is there waiting for him. “Lee is the name.”

“Okay, Lee, come with me.” They go outside and get in Eddie’s Bugatti. They whizz down to the Vieux, scrounge to a stop in the middle of Congo Square, which will still be Congo Square when its official name of Beauregard is forgotten. “This way,” says Eddie, and his bodyguard squirms through the alley after him. “ ‘Lo, suga’ pie,” says the elbow-pusher, and for once, to her own surprise as much as anyone else’s, gets a tumble. “’Lo, Eglantine,” Eddie’s bodyguard remarks in passing, “so you moved?”

They stop in front of the house on the other side of the tunnel. “Now here’s what,” says Eddie. “We’re going to be stopped halfway up these stairs in here by a big ourangoutang. Your job is to clean him, tap him if you want, I don’t care. I’m going into a room up there, you’re going to wait for me at the door. You’re here to see that I get out of that room again. We may have to carry the body of a friend of mine down to the street between us. I don’t know. It depends on whether it’s in the house or not. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Light up. Keep your torch trained over my shoulder.”

A big, lowering figure looms over them, blocking the narrow stairs, ape-like arms and legs spread-eagled in a gesture of malignant embrace, receding skull, teeth showing, flashing steel in hand. Lee jams Eddie roughly to one side and shoves up past him. “Drop that, boy!” Lee says with slurring indifference, but then he doesn’t wait to see if the order’s carried out or not. After all, a weapon was raised to two white men. He fires three times, from two feet away and considerably below the obstacle, hits where he aimed to. The bullets shatter both knee-caps and the elbow-joint of the arm holding the knife. “Be a cripple for life now,” he remarks with quiet satisfaction. “I’ll put him out of his pain.” So he crashes the butt of his gun down on the skull of the writhing colossus, in a long arc like the overhand pitch of a baseball. The noise of the shots goes booming up the narrow stairwell to the roof, to mushroom out there in a vast rolling echo. “Come on, hurry up,” says Eddie, “before they have a chance to do away with—”

He lopes on up past the prostrate form, Lee at his heels. “Stand here. Better reload while you’re waiting. If I call your name, for Pete’s sake don’t count ten before you come in to me!”

There’s a scurrying back and forth and an excited but subdued jabbering going on on the other side of the door. Eddie swings it wide and crashes it closed behind him, leaving Lee on the outside. They all stand rooted to the spot when they see him. The papaloi is there and about six others, not so many as on the night of Eddie’s initiation. Probably the rest are waiting outside the city somewhere, in some secret spot, wherever the actual burial, or burning, or — feasting — is to take place.

Papa Benjamin has no juju mask on this time, no animal pelt. There are no gourds in the room, no drum, no transfixed figures ranged against the wall. They were about to move on elsewhere, he just got here in time. Maybe they were waiting for the dark of the moon. The ordinary kitchen chair on which the papaloi was to be carried on their shoulders stands prepared, padded with rags. A row of baskets covered with sacking is ranged in a row along the back wall.

“Where is the body of John Staats?” raps out Eddie. “You claimed it, took it away from the morgue this morning.” His eyes are on those baskets, on the bleared razor he catches sight of lying on the floor near them.

“Better far,” cackles the old man, “that you had followed him. The mark of doom is on yo’ even now—” A growl goes up all around.

“Lee,” grates Eddie, “in here!” Lee stands next to him, gun in hand. “Cover me while I take a look around.”

“All of you over in that corner there,” growls Lee, and kicks viciously at one who is too slow in moving. They huddle there, cower there, glaring, spitting like a band of apes. Eddie makes straight for those baskets, whips the covering off the first one. Charcoal. The next. Coffee-beans. The next. Rice. And so on.

Just small baskets that negro women balance on their heads to sell at the market-place. He looks at Papa Benjamin, takes out the wad of money he’s brought with him. “Where’ve you got him? Where’s he buried? Take us there, show us where it is.”

Not a sound, just burning, shriveling hate in waves that you can almost feel. He looks at that razor-blade lying there, bleared, not bloody, just matted, dulled, with shreds and threads of something clinging to it. Kicks it away with his foot. “Not here, I guess,” he mutters to Lee and moves toward the door. “What do we do now, boss?” his henchman wants to know. “Get the hell out of here, I guess, where we can breathe some air,” Eddie says, and moves on out to the stairs.

Lee is the sort of man who will get what he can out of any situation, no matter what it is. Before he follows Eddie out, he goes over to one of the baskets, stuffs an orange in each coat-pocket, and then prods and pries among them to select a particularly nice one for eating on the spot. There’s a thud and the orange goes rolling across the floor like a volleyball. “Mr. Bloch!” he shouts hoarsely. “I’ve found — him!” And he looks pretty sick.

A deep breath goes up from the comer where the negroes are. Eddie just stands and stares, and leans back weakly for a minute against the door-post. From out the layers of oranges in the basket, the five fingers of a hand thrust upward, a hand that ends abruptly, cleanly at the wrist.

“His signet,” says Eddie weakly, “there on the little finger — I know it.”

“Say the word! Should I shoot?” Lee wants to know.

Eddie shakes his head. “They didn’t — he committed suicide. Let’s do what — we have to — and get out of here!”

Lee turns over one basket after the other. The stuff in them spills and sifts and rolls out upon the floor. But in each there’s something else. Bloodless, pallid as fish-flesh. That razor, those shreds clinging to it, Eddie knows now what it was used for. They take one basket, they line it with a verminous blanket from the bed. Then with their bare hands they fill it with what they have found, and close the ends of the blanket over the top of it, and carry it between them out of the room and down the pitch-black stairs, Lee going down backwards with his gun in one hand to cover them from the rear. Lee’s swearing like a fiend. Eddie’s trying not to think what the purpose, the destination of all those baskets was. The watchdog is still out on the stairs, with a concussion.

Back through the lane they struggle, and finally put their burden down in the before-dawn stillness of Congo Square. Eddie goes up against a wall and is heartily sick. Then he comes back again and says: “The head — did you notice—?”

“No, we didn’t,” Lee answers. “Stay here, I’ll go back for it. I’m armed. I could stand anything now, after what I just been through.” Lee’s gone about five minutes. When he comes back, he’s in his shirt, coatless. His coat’s rolled up under one arm in a bulky bulge. He bends over the basket, lifts the blanket, replaces it again, and when he straightens up, the bulge in his folded coat is gone. Then he throws the coat away, kicks it away on the ground. “Hidden away in a cupboard,” he mutters. “Had to shoot one of ’em through the palm of the hand before they’d come clean. What were they up to?”

“Practice cannibalism maybe, I don’t know. I’d rather not think.”

“I brought your money back. It didn’t seem to square you with them.”

Eddie shoves it back at him. “Pay for your suit and your time.”

“Aren’t you going to tip off the squareheads?”

“I told you he jumped in the lake. I have a copy of the examiner’s report in my pocket.”

“I know, but isn’t there some ordinance against dissecting a body without permission?”

“I can’t afford to get mixed up with them, Lee. It would kill my career. We’ve got what we went there for. Now just forget everything you saw.”

The hearse from the crematorium contacts them there in Congo Square. The covered basket’s taken on, and what’s left of Johnny Staats heads away for a better finish than was coming to him.

“G’night, boss,” says Lee. “Anytime you need any other little thing—”

“No,” says Eddie. “I’m getting out of New Orleans.” His hand is like ice when they shake.

He does. He hands Graham back his contract, and a split week later he’s playing New York’s newest, in the frantic Fifties. With a white valet. The Chant, of course, is still featured. He has to; it’s his chief asset, his biggest draw. It introduces him and signs him off, and in between, Judy always dances it for a high-spot. But he can’t get rid of that backache that started the night he first played it. First he goes and tries having his back baked for a couple of hours a day under a violet-ray. No improvement.

Then he has himself examined by the biggest specialist in New York. “Nothing there,” says the big shot. “Absolutely nothing the matter with you: liver, kidneys, blood — everything perfect. It must be all in your own mind.”

“You’re losing weight, Eddie,” Judy says, “you look bad, darling.” His bathroom scales tell him the same thing. Down five pounds a week, sometimes seven, never up an ounce. More experts. X-rays this time, blood analysis, gland treatments, everything from soup to nuts.

Nothing doing. And the dull ache, the lassitude, spreads slowly, first to one arm, then to the other.

He takes specimens of everything he eats, not just one day, but every day for weeks, and has them chemically analyzed. Nothing. And he doesn’t have to be told that anyway. He knows that even in New Orleans, way back in the beginning, nothing was ever put into his food. Judy ate from the same tray, drank from the same coffee-pot he did. Nightly she dances herself into a lather, and yet she’s the picture of health.

So that leaves nothing but his mind, just as they all say. “But I don’t believe it!” he tells himself. “I don’t believe that just sticking pins into a wax doll can hurt me — me or anyone!”

So it isn’t his mind at all, but some other mind back there in New Orleans, some other mind thinking, wishing, ordering him dead, night and day.

“But it can’t be done!” says Eddie. “There’s no such thing!”

And yet it’s being done; it’s happening right under his own eyes. Which leaves only one answer. If going three thousand miles away on dry land didn’t help, then going three thousand miles away across the ocean will do the trick. So London next, and the Kit-Kat Club. Down, down, down go the bathroom scales, a little bit each week. The pains spread downward into his thighs. His ribs start showing up here and there. He’s dying on his feet. He finds it more comfortable now to walk with a stick — not to be swanky, not to be English — to rest on as he goes along. His shoulders ache each night just from waving that lightweight baton at his crew. He has a music-stand built for himself to lean on, keeps it in front of him, body out of sight of the audience while he’s conducting, and droops over it. Sometimes he finishes up a number with his head lower than his shoulders, as though he had a rubber spine.

Finally he goes to Reynolds, famous the world over, the biggest alienist in England. “I want to know whether I’m sane or insane.” He’s under observation for weeks, months; they put him through every known test, and plenty of unknown ones, mental, physical, metabolic. They flash lights in front of his face and watch the pupils of his eyes; they contract to pinheads. They touch the back of his throat with sandpaper; he nearly chokes.

They strap him to a chair that goes around and around and does somersaults at so many revolutions per minute, then ask him to walk across the room; he staggers. Reynolds takes plenty of pounds, hands him a report thick as a telephone book, sums it up for him. “You are as normal, Mr. Bloch, as anyone I have ever handled. You’re so well-balanced you haven’t even got the extra little touch of imagination most actors and musicians have.” So it’s not his own mind, it’s coming from the outside, is it?

The whole thing from beginning to end has taken eighteen months. Trying to outdistance death, with death gaining on him slowly, but surely, all the time. He’s emaciated. There’s only one thing left to do now, while he’s still able to crawl aboard a ship — that’s to get back to where the whole thing started. New York, London, Paris haven’t been able to save him. His only salvation, now, lies in the hands of a decrepit colored man skulking in the Vieux Carre of New Orleans.

He drags himself there, to that same half-ruined house, without a bodyguard, not caring now whether they kill him or not, almost wishing they would and get it over with. But that would be too easy an out, it seems. The gorilla that Lee crippled that night shuffles out to him between two sticks, recognizes him, breathes undying hate into his face, but doesn’t lift a finger to harm him. The spirits are doing that job better than he could ever hope to. Their mark is on this man, woe betide anyone who comes between them and their hellish satisfaction. Eddie Bloch totters up the stairs unopposed, his back as safe from a knife as if he wore steel armor. Behind him the negro sprawls upon the stairs to lubricate his long-awaited hour of satisfaction with rum — and oblivion.

He finds the old man alone there in the room. The Stone Age and the 20th Century face each other, and the Stone Age has won out. “Take it off me,” says Eddie brokenly. “Give me my life back — I’ll do anything, anything you say!”

“What has been done cannot be undone. Do you think the spirits of the earth and of the air, of fire and water, know the meaning of forgiveness?”

“Intercede for me then. You brought it about. Here’s money, I’ll give you twice as much, all I earn, all I ever hope to earn—”

“You have desecrated the obiah. Death has been on you from that night. All over the world and in the air above the earth you have mocked the spirits with the chant that summons them. Nightly your wife dances it. The only reason she has not shared your doom is because she does not know the meaning of what she does. You do. You were here among us.”

Eddie goes down on his knees, scrapes along the floor after the old man, tries to tug at the garments he wears. “Kill me right now, then, and be done with it. I can’t stand any more—” He bought the gun only that day, was going to do it himself at first, but found he couldn’t. A minute ago he pleaded for his life, now he’s pleading for death. “It’s loaded, all you have to do is shoot. Look! I’ll close my eyes — I’ll write a note and sign it, that I did it myself—”

He tries to thrust it into the witch-doctor’s hand, tries to close the bony, shriveled fingers around it, tries to point it at himself. The old man throws it down, away from him. Cackles gleefully, “Death will come, but differently — slowly, oh, so slowly!” Eddie just lies there flat on his face, sobbing dryly. The old man spits, kicks at him weakly. He pulls himself up somehow, stumbles toward the door. He isn’t even strong enough to get it open at the first try. It’s that little thing that brings it on. Something touches his foot, he looks, stoops for the gun, turns. Thought is quick but the old man’s mind is even quicker. Almost before the thought is there, the old man knows what’s coming. In a flash, scuttling like a crab, he has shifted around to the other side of the bed, to put something between them. Instantly the situation’s reversed, the fear has left Eddie and is on the old man now. He’s lost the aggressive. For a minute only, but that minute is all Eddie needs. His mind beams out like a diamond, like a lighthouse through a fog. The gun roars, jolting his weakened body down to his shoes. The old man falls flat across the bed, his head too far over, dangling down over the side of it like an overripe pear. The bed-frame sways gently with his weight for a minute, and then it’s over...

Eddie stands there, still off-balance from the kick-back. So it was as easy as all that! Where’s all his magic now? Strength, will-power flood back through him as if a faucet was suddenly turned on. The little smoke there was can’t get out of the sealed-up room, it hangs there in thin layers. Suddenly he’s shaking his fist at the dead thing on the bed. “I’m gonna live now! I’m gonna live, see?” He gets the door open, sways for a minute. Then he’s feeling his way down the stairs, past the unconscious watchdog, mumbling it over and over but low, “Gonna live now, gonna live!”

The Commissioner mops his face as if he was in the steam room of a Turkish bath. He exhales like an oxygen tank. “Judas, Joseph and Mary, Mr. Bloch, what a story! Wish I hadn’t asked you; I won’t sleep tonight.” Even after the accused has been led from the room, it takes him some time to get over it. The upper right-hand drawer of his desk helps some — just two fingers. So does opening the windows and letting in a lot of sunshine.

Finally he picks up the phone and gets down to business. “Who’ve you got out there that’s absolutely without a nerve in his body? I mean a guy with so little feeling he could sit on a hatpin and turn it into a paper-clip. Oh yeah, that Cajun, Desjardins, I know him. He’s the one goes around striking parlor-matches off the soles of stiffs. Well, send him in here.”

“No, stay outside,” wheezes Papa Benjamin through the partly-open door to his envoy. “I’se communin’ with the obiah and yo’ unclean, been drunk all last night and today. Deliver the summons. Reach yo’ hand in to me, once fo’ every token, yo’ knows how many to take.”

The crippled negro thrusts his huge paw through the aperture, and from behind the door the papaloi places a severed chicken-claw in his upturned palm. A claw bound with a red rag. The messenger disposes of it about his tattered clothing, thrusts his hand in for another. Twenty times the act is repeated, then he lets his arm hang stiffly at his side. The door starts closing slowly. “Papaloi,” whines the figure on the outside of it, “why you hide yo’ face from me, is the spirits angry?”

There’s a flicker of suspicion in his yellow eyeballs in the dimness, however. Instantly the opening of the door widens. Papa Benjamin’s familiar wrinkled face thrusts out at him, malignant eyes crackling like fuses. “Go!” shrills the old man, “ ’liver my summons. Is you want me to bring a spirit down on you?” The messenger totters back. The door slams.

The sun goes down and it’s night-time in New Orleans. The moon rises, midnight chimes from St. Louis Cathedral, and hardly has the last note died away than a gruesome swampland whistle sounds outside the deathly-still house. A fat Negress, basket on arm, comes trudging up the stairs a moment later, opens the door, goes in to the papaloi, closes it again, traces an invisible mark on it with her forefinger and kisses it. Then she turns and her eyes widen with surprise. Papa Benjamin is in bed, covered up to the neck with filthy rags. The familiar candles are all lit, the bowl for the blood, the sacrificial knife, the magic powders, all the paraphernalia of the ritual are laid out in readiness, but they are ranged about the bed instead of at the opposite end of the room as usual. The old man’s head, however, is held high above the encumbering rags, his beady eyes gaze back at her unflinchingly, the familiar semicircle of white wool rings his crown, his ceremonial mask is at his side. “I am a little tired, my daughter,” he tells her. His eyes stray to the tiny wax image of Eddie Bloch under the candles, hairy with pins, and hers follow them.

“A doomed one, nearing his end, came here last night thinking I could be killed like other men. He shot a bullet from a gun at me. I blew my breath at it, it stopped in the air, turned around, and went back in the gun again. But it tired me to blow so hard, strained my voice a little.”

A revengeful gleam lights up the woman’s broad face. “And he’ll die soon, papaloi?”

“Soon,” cackles the weazened figure in the bed. The woman gnashes her teeth and hugs herself delightedly. She opens the top of her basket and allows a black hen to escape and flutter about the room.

When all twenty have assembled, men and women, old and young, the drum and the gourds begin to beat, the low wailing starts, the orgy gets under way. Slowly they dance around the three sides of the bed at first, then faster, faster, lashing themselves to a frenzy, tearing at their own and each other’s clothes, drawing blood with knives and fingernails, eyes rolling in an ecstasy that colder races cannot know. The sacrifices, feathered and furred, that have been fastened to the two lower posts of the bed, squawk and flutter and fly vertically up and down in a barnyard panic. There is a small monkey among them tonight, clawing, biting, hiding his face in his hands like a frightened child. A bearded negro, nude torso glistening like patent-leather, seizes one of the frantic fowls, yanks it loose from its moorings, and holds it out toward the witch-doctor with both hands. “We’se thirsty, papaloi, we’se thirsty fo’ the blood of ou’ enemies.”

The others take up the cry. “We’se hung’y, papaloi, fo’ the bones of ou’ enemies!”

Papa Benjamin nods his head in time to the rhythm.

“Sac’fice, papaloi, sac’fice!”

Papa Benjamin doesn’t seem to hear them.

Then back go the rags in a gray wave and out comes the arm at last. Not the gnarled brown toothpick arm of Papa Benjamin, but a bulging arm thick as a piano-leg, cuffed in serge, white at the wrist, ending in a regulation police-revolver with the clip off. The erstwhile witch-doctor’s on his feet at a bound, standing erect atop the bed, back to the wall, slowly fanning his score of human devils with the mouth of his gun, left to right, then right to left again, evenly, unhurriedly. The resonant bellow of a bull comes from his weazened slit of a mouth instead of the papaloi’s cracked falsetto. “Back against that wall there, all of you! Throw down them knives and jiggers!” But they’re slow to react; the swift drop from ecstasy to stupefaction can’t register right away. None of them are overbright anyway or they wouldn’t be here. Mouths hang open, the wailing stops, the drums and gourds fall still, but they’re still packed close about this sudden changeling in their midst, with the familiar shriveled face of Papa Benjamin and the thick-set body, business-suit, of a white man — too close for comfort. Blood-lust and religious mania don’t know fear of a gun. It takes a cool head for that, and the only cool head in the room is the withered cocoanut atop the broad shoulders behind that gun. So he shoots twice, and a woman at one end of the semicircle, the drumbeater, and a man at the other end, the one still holding the sacrificial fowl, drop in their tracks with a double moan. Those in the middle slowly draw back step by step across the room, all eyes on the figure reared up on the bed. An instant’s carelessness, the wavering of an eye, and they’ll be on him in a body. He reaches with his free hand and rips the dead witch-doctor’s features from his face, to breathe better, see better. They dissolve into a crumpled rag before the blacks’ terrified eyes, like a stocking-cap coming off someone’s head — a mixture of paraffin and fiber, called moulage — a death-mask taken from the corpse’s own face, reproducing even the fine lines of the skin and its natural color. Moulage. So the 20th Century has won out after all. And behind them is the grinning, slightly-perspiring, lantern-jawed face of Detective Jacques Desjardins, who doesn’t believe in spirits unless they’re under a neat little label. And outside the house sounds the twenty-first whistle of the evening, but not a swampland sound this time; a long, cold, keen blast to bring figures out of the shadows and doorways that have waited there patiently all night.

Then the door bursts inward and the police are in the room. The survivors, three of them dangerously wounded, are pushed and carried downstairs to join the crippled door-guard, who has been in custody for the past hour, and single-file, tied together with ropes, they make their way through the long tortuous alley out into Congo Square.

In the early hours of that same morning, just a little more than twenty-four hours after Eddie Bloch first staggered into Police Headquarters with his strange story, the whole thing is cooked, washed and bottled. The Commissioner sits in his office listening attentively to Desjardins.

And spread out on his desk as strange an array of amulets, wax images, bunches of feathers, balsam leaves, ouangas (charms of nail parings, hair clippings, dried blood, powdered roots), green mildewed coins dug up from coffins in graveyards, as that room has ever seen before. All this is state’s evidence now, to be carefully labelled and docketed for the use of the prosecuting attorney when the proper time comes. “And this,” explains Desjardins, indicating a small dusty bottle, “is methylene blue, the chemist tells me. It’s the only modern thing we got out of the place, found it lying forgotten with a lot of rubbish in a corner that looked like it hadn’t been disturbed for years.

What it was doing there or what they wanted with it I don’t—”

“Wait a minute,” interrupts the commissioner eagerly. “That fits in with something poor Bloch told me last night. He noticed a bluish color under his fingernails and a yellowness to his eyeballs, but only after he’d been initiated that first night.

“This stuff probably has something to do with it, an injection of it must have been given him that night in some way without his knowing it. Don’t you get the idea? It floored him just the way they wanted it to. He mistook the signs of it for a give-away that he had colored blood. It was the opening wedge. It broke down his disbelief, started his mental resistance to crumbling. That was all they needed, just to get a foothold in his mind. Mental suggestion did the rest, has been doing it ever since. If you ask me, they pulled the same stunt on Staats originally. I don’t believe he had colored blood any more than Bloch has. And as a matter of fact the theory that it shows up in that way generations later is all the bunk anyway, they tell me.”

“Well,” says Dij, looking at his own grimy nails, “if you’re just going to judge by appearances that way, I’m full-blooded Zulu.”

His overlord just looks at him, and if he didn’t have such a poker face, one might be tempted to read admiration or at least approval into the look. “Must have been a pretty tight spot for a minute with all of them around while you put on your act!”

“Nah, I didn’t mind,” answers Dij.

Eddie Bloch, the murder charge against him quashed two months ago, and the population of the State Penitentiary increased only this past week by the admission of twenty-three ex-voodoo worshippers for terms varying from two to ten years, steps up on the platform of the Bataclan for a return engagement. Eddie’s pale and washed-out looking, but climbing slowly back up through the hundred-and-twenties again to his former weight. The ovation he gets ought to do anyone’s heart good, the way they clap and stamp and stand up and cheer. And at that, his name was kept out of the recently-concluded trial. Desjardins and his mates did all the states-witnessing necessary.

The theme he comes in on now is something sweet and harmless. Then a waiter comes up and hands him a request. Eddie shakes his head. “No, not in our repertoire any more.” He goes on leading. Another request comes, and another. Suddenly someone shouts it out at him, and in a second the whole place has taken up the cry. “The Voodoo Chant! Give us the Voodoo Chant!”

His face gets whiter than it is already, but he turns and tries to smile at them and shake his head. They won’t quit, the music can’t be heard, and he has to tap a lay-off. From all over the place, like a cheering-section at a football game, “We want the Voodoo Chant! We want-!”

Judy’s at his side. “What’s the matter with ’em anyway?” he asks. “Don’t they know what that thing’s done to me?”

“Play it, Eddie, don’t be foolish,” she urges. “Now’s the time, break the spell once and for all, prove to yourself that it can’t hurt you. If you don’t do it now, you’ll never get over the idea. It’ll stay with you all your life. Go ahead. I’ll dance it just like I am.”

“Okay,” he says.

He taps. It’s been quite some time, but he can rely on his outfit. Slow and low like thunder far away, coming nearer. Boom-putta-putta-boom! Judy whirls out behind him, lets out the first preliminary screech, Eeyaeeya!

She hears a commotion in back of her, and stops as suddenly as she began. Eddie Bloch’s fallen flat on his face and doesn’t move again after that.

They all know somehow. There’s an inertness, a finality about it that tells them. The dancers wait a minute, mill about, then melt away in a hush. Judy Jarvis doesn’t scream, doesn’t cry, just stands there staring, wondering. That last thought — did it come from inside his own mind just now — or outside? Was it two months on its way, from the other side of the grave, looking for him, looking for him, until it found him tonight when he played the Chant once more and laid his mind open to Africa? No policeman, no detective, no doctor, no scientist, will ever be able to tell her. Did it come from inside or from outside? All she says is: “Stand close to me, boys — real close to me, I’m afraid of the dark.”