Mallory didn’t answer.
“It does sound like real drums, at that.” He tried to laugh a little, so that the other man would join him in it. “Fools you, doesn’t it?”
Mallory didn’t join him in it. “No, it doesn’t fool you.”
They stood a moment longer without saying anything more. Then Mallory glanced over his shoulder toward the lighted screen door. “Let’s go in. The kid’s getting nervous.”
They both re-entered with that pretended cheerfulness men are apt to overdo a little when they wish to keep women from becoming alarmed.
“Queer sort of sound, isn’t it?” Jones said lightly, drawing out his chair once more.
“It’ll quit before morning,” Mallory promised.
They gave one another a look.
“But there’s no one up there,” Chris protested, her voice a little high. “What can be making—”
“Who bids?” Jones said briskly.
Mitty turned over a card limply and looked at it. He could tell she didn’t know what was on it, even while she looked.
They went ahead with their game, tried to ignore it. Yet while they went through the motions of playing, each and every one of them knew that the other three were hearing it, thinking of it, just as he was.
It didn’t come any nearer, but it didn’t go any farther away. It didn’t grow any louder, but it didn’t grow any softer. Jones knew what there was about it that was getting them finally. They kept waiting for it to stop, all of them. And it didn’t, it never did. It was that principle of the second dropped shoe overhead carried out to its ultimate point of excruciation.
It was even, so it should have been more bearable than otherwise, but it was uneven within its evenness; it was that downbeat that did the damage. One thump high, the next low; one high, the next low again.
He saw that Mallory was smoking too much. Far too much. And he himself, he noticed, couldn’t seem to get his body adjusted right to the chair seat. He kept shifting every few minutes, crossing his legs and then recrossing them the other way around. Chris kept sweeping her hair back with one hand while she pored over her cards; hair that was not down over her brow at all, that was not out of place in the least. She’d look at him from time to time, and once or twice she’d smile; but it was a different sort of smile now, a fearful fleeting sort of thing that was more like a habit of the recent past lingering on than any warm greeting of the present. Her eyes remained large and bright.
And Mitty — Mitty still had that attitude of disembodied listening, of secret inner conjugation. Something about it annoyed him. She seemed to be trying to decipher it, make more out of it than — than there was to be made out of it. He tactfully turned his eyes away. He didn’t remember ever having been annoyed with her like this before, without any reason. Not even when they’d missed the ship at Puerto Santo on her account; at least not as intolerantly and as causelessly annoyed as now. He supposed that had something to do with the effect of the thing on his nerves.
“Think it would do any good to close up the windows and that main door over there?” he suggested.
Mallory said, “It would come in anyway. But try it if you want.”
Jones didn’t stir. Putting the burden of timidity on himself wasn’t what he’d intended; he’d been thinking of making the two women feel easier.
Suddenly Mallory dropped his cards and stiffened to attention so unexpectedly that it drew a half-stifled little cry of alarm from Chris before she could restrain it. The clopping sound of a horse’s hoofs had suddenly started up somewhere nearby outside, rapidly receding into the distance. A moment later another followed. Then a multiple stampede of five or six at one time, galloping off into the dark from the direction of the stables.
“They’ve heard it down at the jacales, and that’s the part I don’t like!” Mallory flung back his chair and bolted from the room. Jones got up and went after him.
An infant was wailing somewhere across the compound. Figures flitted in and out of the jacales, dimly visible by the wavering light of a number of pitch torches that hopped like crazed fireflies. Men were calling out to their women, and women were calling to whimpering children. A mass exodus was under way.
Mallory rushed into their midst, waving his arms, even striking at some of them, trying to stem the tide. Jones took a more passive part, contenting himself with trying to head them off by getting in their way. They simply darted around him, time after time, eluded him and continued their scampering desertion. It was useless to try to do anything with them. They were in the grip of a maddened, unreasoning panic. They went scuttling off into the dark, fleeing downcountry toward the sheltering jungle, safer for once than the barefaced uplands. Their shrill, frightened voices faded into the night, babbling over and over, “Que vienen los cocos! Que vienen los muertos!” The ghosts are coming! The dead are coming!
Silence descended on the empty shacks and barren compound in their wake, broken only by that pulsing that was a sound and yet not a sound, a tremor.
Mallory rejoined Jones from his useless pursuit of the hindmost ones, growling imprecations.
“They took the horses with them too,” he said. “Now we’re stuck here whether we want to be or not. You can’t do anything about it when that many people all get a single idea in their heads at one and the same time.”
“No,” Jones agreed bleakly. “I guess you can’t. You’d have to tie them all up, separately.”
“They’ll be back again in a day or two, when the cursed thing stops. I’ve seen this happen once or twice before. But they’re always a few hands short when they do come back.”
Jones pitched a thumb over his shoulder. “Is it that, each time?”
“No, I never heard that myself, until tonight. They may have, though. Usually someone claimed to have seen a line of ghostly figures outlined against the moonlit sky, up there on the heights. Something like that would start them off.”
He spat disgustedly. “Well, there’s no use just standing around out here listening to it. If it’s going to keep up, let it keep up. I’m going to bed.”
They started back toward the main house together, Mallory plowing his feet heavily over the ground in frustration.
Mitty came out of the lighted doorway just as they arrived in sight of it. To meet them, Jones thought at first; to join them and find out what had happened. But instead, as she came down off the veranda, she turned sharply up the opposite way, away from them, and glided off into the surrounding darkness like a sleepwalker. It was impossible that she hadn’t seen them coming toward her. They were near enough by then and there was enough light filtering from the door and windows of the house to have shown them to her. It was impossible, too, that she should mistake in which direction the native huts lay and in which the open uplands; the very tilt of the ground was there to tell her.
He called her name, and then called again, and when she didn’t answer, continued to recede into the gloom like a wraith, he left Mallory’s side and spurted after her.
She didn’t hurry at the sound his overtaking footsteps made behind her, but she didn’t stop either, or turn to him, even after he’d bellowed out her name a third time, in mid-pursuit. She paid no heed; it was as if her faculties were utterly unaware of him.
He only halted her finally by overtaking and pinning her against a stunted tree a considerable distance to the rear of the house. Even then, as he brought her around to him by main force, by the shoulders, her head remained stubbornly turned the other way, the way she had been going, the way in which the sound was coming from.
“What’s got into you? Have you lost your mind? Don’t go wandering off like this alone, in that direction, when all the rest of them are running the opposite way!”