Dinner, despite Ducoin’s easy cordiality, was a decided strain. Connell was wondering at the absence of the lovely girl who had warned him.
“Working many men?” he asked.
“A dozen or two,” Ducoin carelessly answered. “Haitians, mostly—sullen, stolid brutes, but good workers.”
He changed the subject. Connell was relieved when the woman served them night-black, chicory-tinctured coffee, and a pony of excellent brandy.
Ducoin remarked, “We turn in early here. Plantation hours begin before sunrise. Aunt Célie will show you your room. In the morning, you can make the rounds with me.”
Connell followed the grim-faced woman down the hallway. Her morose, stolid demeanor confirmed Ducoin’s comment on the temperament of his workers; yet Connell was distinctly perturbed. And as the door closed behind Aunt Célie, he received a distinct shock.
The moon was rising, casting a shimmering, silvery glow over the black expanse of open fields. Men were at work, digging and hoeing. Utterly unheard of, a night shift on a plantation. Connell heard the thudding blows of their implements, but not a murmur, not a spoken word.
There wasn’t an overseer, yet they toiled on, methodically, as though motor driven, never pausing to lean on their hoes for a breathing spell. They advanced in an unwavering line, grotesquely combining the precision of military drill with the uncouth, ungainly movements of dummies.
Connell shivered and shook his head. Questioning such unnatural creatures would be futile. One glimpse of them and Plato would have taken to his heels. He wondered if his servant might not have abandoned his flivver, frightened out of all reason by the uncanny spectacle of Africans working without song and chatter.
A soft, furtive stirring in the hall just outside of his room made him start violently. Something softly slinking down the hall had paused at his door. By the moon glow that penetrated the shadows, he saw the scarcely perceptible motion of the knob. Something was stealthily seeking him. A silent bound brought Connell to the fireplace, and out of the moonglow. His trembling fingers closed on a pair of massive tongs.
He watched the door soundlessly swing inward. A nebulous spindle of whiteness cleared the edge of the jamb: a spectral, shimmering whiteness that for an instant froze Connell’s blood. Then he saw the intruder was the girl who had warned him.
She paused to close the door, and as she turned from the threshold Connell for the first time realized how lovely she was. Her tiny feet were bare, and her shapely legs, gleaming like ivory exclamation marks through the sheer, gauzy fabric of her nightgown, blossomed into seductive curves that fascinated Connell.
The vagrant breeze shifted, drawing the misty fabric closer, revealing her perfections as though she were clad in no more than bare loveliness. The filmy silk clung to the inward curve of her waist, and caressed the firm, delicious roundness of her breast. She was a lovely unreality in the vague light that made her face a sweet, pallid mask, and her black hair a succession of gleaming highlights.
She advanced a pace before she saw Connell.
“Leave at once.” As she spoke, she caught his arm. She was trembling violently.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s not too late,” she whispered as Connell seated himself, and drew her to the arm of his chair. “My uncle is out putting the night shift to work. “I’m Madeline Ducoin.”
“I came here to get a man named Plato,” insisted Connell.
“He’s one of them now,” said Madeline, shuddering. “A walking corpse.”
“That’s absolute rot! How can a dead man walk?”
“You saw them, didn’t you?” Madeline countered, sighing and shaking her head.
As she leaned toward the window and gestured at the macabre figures that toiled in the moonlight, her dark hair caressed Connell’s cheek, and he felt the supple flex of her slender body. Madeline at least was real in the moon-haunted glamour. His arms closed about her, and drew her to his knee. She was still trembling, but at his touch, she snuggled up like a contented kitten.
Pillowing her head on his shoulder, she looked up and repeated, “Please leave, before it’s too late.”
Connell laughed softly and said, “Never had a better reason for staying.”
For a moment they crossed glances in the moonlight. His arms tightened about her, and she did not draw away. And then as though by common impulse, their lips met, and Connell felt the ecstatic shiver that rippled down her silk clad body. She tried to catch his wrist, brush aside the hand that caressed the gleaming curves of her thigh.
Her inarticulate murmur of protest, breathed in Connell’s ear, further inflamed his blood, and his possessive caresses for the moment brushed aside the hovering presence of mystery and horror. Each seemed to feel that the other was a haven of reality in the devil-haunted plantation.
The lacy hem of her gown was creeping clear of her knees. Connell’s kisses were stifling her murmured protests. Madeline’s breath came in ever quickening gasps. She was clinging to him, the pressure of her firm young breasts telling him that she really did not want him to desist.
If Ducoin was making the rounds of his spectral plantation where black automatons tilled the fields by moonlight, there was no hurry. Connelly’s ardent caresses were calling to the surface all the fire and passion of Madeline’s Latin blood. She was lonely and frightened, and his purposeful persistence thrilled and assured her. Her final protest ended in a sigh and a murmur and a silky embrace that became as possessive as Connell’s enfolding arms.
“We’ll soon leave, darling.” As he emerged from his chair, she still clung to him.
“Aunt Célie is asleep.” Her whisper was an invitation. “And Uncle Pierre won’t be back for quite a while.…”
She caught his hand.
“You’ll take me with you, won’t you?” Madeline murmured, flinging back her disarrayed dark hair, and extending alluring arms. “When we leave.…”
“I’ll take you away from here, forever and always,” he promised.
For a long time their murmurings mocked the horrors that marched blindly across the spreading fields of the moon flooded Delta. Finally Madeline slipped from Connell’s arms, and gestured toward the moon blot on the floor.
“It’s getting late, sweetheart,” she whispered. “We’ll go to New Orleans as soon as I can pack up.”
Connell followed her, and watched her hastily bundle together odds and ends selected from her wardrobe. A strange, mad night. Going in search of a man and finding this incredible armful of loveliness. It was all fantasy, but Connell’s lips still tingled from the fire of her kisses. Let Pierre Ducoin keep the secret of the uncanny walking dead men. Plato would eventually appear with some wild story accounting for his absence. It was utterly incredible that he would have lingered long enough to have left any clues. Amelia’s African guile had fairly bludgeoned Connell into this mad search.
He watched Madeline dressing in the moon glamour. Once he reached New Orleans with that delicious loveliness, he would pension Plato for life.
They stole through the shadows of the orange grove to Connell’s coupé. He took Madeline’s suitcase and raised the turtle back. Something was stirring in the baggage compartment.
“Mon Dieu!” gasped Madeline.
“Is that you, Mr. Walt?” whispered a familiar woman’s voice. Amelia Jones emerged. “Did you get Plato?”
Then she saw Madeline, and her voice trailed into reproachful indefiniteness. Connell was betraying his colored folks.
“What the devil are you doing here?”