Page:Weird Tales Volume 4 Number 3 (1924-11).djvu/61

60 saw it in its naked reality, he ran down the street, and stopped in front of the three-story frame building where dwelt the grand mogul of sedition. Up the stairs he went, three steps at a time, and burst into a small room where three colored men were engaged in excited conference, with their heads close together, speaking in agitated whispers. They leaped to their feet as George Washington rushed in.

The three men were robed in white garments, cowled like monks, with the hoods thrown back, revealing their heads. One was fat, and squinted at the intruder through puffy folds of flesh around his dull black eyes. The other two men were lean and malign. Their robes were spotted with dabs of fresh blood, and red crosses had been drawn in blood over the men's hearts.

George Washington shuddered as he confronted the sinister trio.

"I has a message fo' de Great Panjandrum," he panted. "Wich is him?"

The taller of the two lean men looked at him skeptically.

"The Great Panjandrum cannot be seen," he said. "From whom is the message?"

"F'um Doctah Elusha Jones, suh," replied George Washington.

The name proved a talisman, an "open sesame" to the inner temple of voodoo. The desperate colored man felt that sinister rites must be going on behind the heavy black curtain that covered one side of the room. This, curtain was now drawn back by unseen hands, revealing a small door, covered with weird and horrible symbols. A painted green serpent writhed malevolently across the paneling, crushing in its folds a white infant, and menaced by a charging black ram with short, sharp horns. George experienced acute nausea. A sensation of cold fear attacked the pit of his stomach, for he realized that he was about to stand in the presence of the high priest of voodoo.

The door swung slowly back. In George's disordered fancy the painted snake moved, drawing its folds tighter about the form of the child, and the black ram seemed to shake its sharp horns. The tall, lean man who had questioned him now shoved him forward, and the door swung shut behind him.

For a minute George could make out nothing, for a brilliant electric arc light dazzled his eyes. Then he saw, standing before him, a coal-black negro, scarcely more than five feet tall, wizened, and apparently very old. Fuzzy tufts of gray hair showed behind his ears. His face was carved by a thousand wrinkles. His thin hands, ending in carefully polished nails, clutched nervously at a tract that he had been reading when George Washington entered the chamber. He was loosely garbed in a white robe, dabbled in fresh blood, like the garments of his aids in the outer room. A tall stove-pipe hat sat on his thin temples.

The room was hung with heavy black curtains, which shut out all light from outside. It was illuminated solely by the arc light that had dazzled George when he first came into the room. On the table was a bowl filled with blood from a small black goat, freshly killed! The animal's carcass lay alongside on the table, and its heart was floating in the bowl. The table, like the walls, was shrouded in black cloth.

The cunning eyes of the wizened negro looked searchingly into the face of the intruder, as if seeking to read his errand there.

"Is you de Great Panjandrum!" asked George, struggling for words, and frightened nearly to death.

"I am he." replied the other.