Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts

by Dennis Wheatley

  It was one of those still summer evenings with the scent of the flowers drifting in through the open wind-dows, and the peace of it all makes you think for the moment that the city, on Monday morning, is nothing but a rotten bad dream.

  I think I did know in a vague way that Carstairs had made his money mining, but when, or where, I hadn’t an idea. Anyhow, he and young Jackson were soon in it up to the neck, talking technicalities. That never has been my end of the business; I was content to lend them half an ear while I drank in the hush of the scented twilight; a little feller was piping away to his mate for all he was worth in the trees at the bottom of the garden.

  It was the bat started it; you know how they flit in on a summer’s night through the open windows, absolutely silently, before you are aware of them. How they’re here one moment—and there the next, in and out of the shadows while you flap about with a newspaper like a helpless fool. They’re unclean things, of course, but harmless enough, yet never in my life have I seen a big man so scared as Carstairs.

  ‘Get it out!’ he yelled. ‘Get it out,’ and he buried his bald head in the sofa cushions.

  I think I laughed, anyhow I told him it was nothing to make a fuss about, and switched out the light.

  The bat zigzagged from side to side once or twice, and then flitted out into the open as silently as it had come.

  Carstairs’s big red face had gone quite white when he peeped out from beneath his cushions. ‘Has it gone?’ he asked in a frightened whisper.

  ‘Of course it has,’ I assured him. ‘Don’t be silly—it might have been the Devil himself from the fuss you made!’

  ‘Perhaps it was,’ he said seriously. As he sat up I could see the whites of his rather prominent eyes surrounding the blue pupils—I should have laughed if the man hadn’t been in such an obvious funk.

  ‘Shut the windows,’ he said sharply, as he moved over to the whisky and mixed himself a pretty stiff drink. It seemed a sin on a night like that, but it was his house, so Jackson drew them to.

  Carstairs apologised in a half-hearted sort of way for making such a scene, then we settled down again.

  In the circumstances it wasn’t unnatural that the talk should turn to witchcraft and things like that.

  Young Jackson said he’d heard some pretty queer stories in the forests of Brazil, but that didn’t impress me, because he looked a good half-dago himself, for all his English name, and dagoes always believe in that sort of thing.

  Carstairs was a different matter; he was as British as could be, and when he asked me seriously if I believed in Black Magic I didn’t laugh, but told him just as seriously that I did not.

  ‘You’re wrong, then,’ he declared firmly, ‘and I’ll tell you this, I shouldn’t be sitting here if it wasn’t for Black Magic.’

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ I protested.

  ‘I am,’ he said. ‘For thirteen years I roamed the Union of South Africa on my uppers, a “poor white”, if you know what that means. If you don’t—well, it’s hell on earth. One rotten job after another with barely enough pay to keep body and soul together, and between jobs not even that, so that at times you’d even lower yourself to chum up to a black for the sake of a drink or a bit of a meal. Never a chance to get up in the world, and despised by natives and whites alike—well, I suppose I’d be at it still but that I came up against the Black Art, and that brought me big money. Once I had money I went into business. That’s twenty-two years ago—I’m a rich man now, and I’ve come home to take my rest.’

  Carstairs evidently meant every word he said, and I must confess I was impressed. There was nothing neurotic about him, he was sixteen stone of solid, prosaic Anglo-Saxon ; in fact, he looked just the sort of chap you’d like to have with you in a tight corner. That’s why I’d been so surprised when he got in such a blue funk about the bat.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m rather an unbeliever,’ I admitted, ‘but perhaps that’s because I’ve never come up against the real thing—won’t you tell us some more about it?’

  He looked at me steadily for a moment with his round, blue eyes. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘if you like; help yourself to another peg, and your friend too.’

  We refilled our glasses and he went on: ‘When I as good as said just now, “that bat may be the Devil in person”, I didn’t mean quite that. Maybe there are people who can raise the Devil—I don’t know, anyhow I’ve never seen it done; but there is a power for evil drifting about the world—suffused in the atmosphere, as you might say, and certain types of animals seem to be sensitive to it—they pick it up out of the ether just like a wireless receiving set.

  ‘Take cats—they’re uncanny beasts; look at the way they can see in the dark; and they can do more than that; they can see things that we can’t in broad day. You must have seen them before now, walk carefully round an object in a room that simply wasn’t there.

  ‘These animals are harmless enough in themselves, of course, but where the trouble starts is when they become used as a focus by a malignant human will. However, that’s all by the way. As I was telling you, I’d hiked it up and down the Union for thirteen years, though it wasn’t the Union in those days. From Durban to Damaraland, and from the Orange River to Matabel, fruit farmer, miner, salesman, wagoner, clerk—I took every job that offered, but for all the good I’d done myself I might as well have spent my time on the Break-water instead.

  ‘I haven’t even made up my mind today which is the tougher master—the Bible-punching Dutchman, with his little piping voice, or the whisky-sodden South African Scot.

  ‘At last I drifted into Swaziland; that’s on the borders of Portuguese East, near Lourenço Marques and DelagoaBay. As lovely a country as you could wish to see; it’s all been turned into native reserve now, but in those days there was a handful of white settlers scattered here and there.

  ‘Anyhow, it was there in a saloon at Mbabane that I met old Benny Isaacsohn, and he offered me a job. I was down and out, so I took it, though he was one of the toughest-looking nuts that I’d ever come across. He was a bigger man than I am, with greasy black curls and a great big hook of a nose. His face was as red as a turkey cock, and his wicked black eyes were as shifty as sin. He said his store-keeper had died on him sudden, and the way he said it made me wonder just what had happened to that man.

  ‘But it was Benny or picking up scraps from a native kraal—so I went along with him there and then.

  ‘He took me miles up country to his famous store—two tins of sardines and a dead rat were about all he had in it, and of course I soon tumbled to it that trading honest wasn’t Benny’s real business. I don’t doubt he’d sized me up and reckoned I wouldn’t be particular. I was careful not to be too curious, because I had a sort of idea that that was what my predecessor had died of.

  ‘After a bit he seemed to get settled in his mind about me, and didn’t take much trouble to conceal his little games. He was doing a bit of gun-running for the natives from over the Portuguese border and a handsome traffic in illicit booze. Of course all our customers were blacks; there wasn’t another white in a day’s march except for Rebecca—Benny’s old woman.

  ‘I kept his books for him; they were all fake, of course. Brown sugar meant two dummy bullets out of five, and white, three. I remember; the dummies were cardboard painted to look like lead—cartridges come cheaper that way! Anyhow, Benny knew his ledger code all right.

  ‘He didn’t treat me badly on the whole; we had a shindy one hot night soon after I got there, and he knocked me flat with one blow from his big red fist. After that I used to go and walk it off if I felt my temper getting the best of me—and it did at times when I saw the way he used to treat those niggers. I’m not exactly squeamish myself, but the things he used to do would make you sick.

  ‘When I got into the game, I found that gun-running and liquor weren’t the end of it. Benny was a moneylender as well—that’s where he over-reached himself and came up against the Black Art.

  ‘Of the begi
nnings of Benny’s dealing with Umtonga, the witch-doctor, I know nothing. The old heathen would come to us now and again all decked out in his cowrie shells and strings of leopards’ teeth, and Benny always received him in state. They’d sit drinking glass for glass of neat spirit for hours on end until Umtonga was carried away dead drunk by his men. The old villain used to sell off all the surplus virgins of his tribe to Benny, and Benny used to market them in Portuguese East, together with the wives of the poor devils who were in his clutches and couldn’t pay the interest on their debts.

  ‘The trouble started about nine months after I’d settled there; old Umtonga was a spender in his way, and there began to be a shortage of virgins in the tribe, so he started to borrow on his own account and then he couldn’t pay. The interviews weren’t so funny then—he began to go away sober and shaking his big black stick.

  ‘That didn’t worry Benny. He’d been threatened by people before, and he told Umtonga that if he couldn’t raise enough virgins to meet his bill he’d better sell off a few of his wives himself.

  ‘I was never present at the meetings, but I gathered a bit from what old Benny said in his more expansive moments, and I’d picked up enough Swazi to gather the gist of Umtonga’s views when he aired them at parting on the stoep.

  ‘Then one day Umtonga came with three women—it seemed that they were the equivalent of the orginal debt, but Benny had a special system with regard to his loans. Repayment of capital was nothing like enough—and the longer the debt was outstanding the greater the rate of interest became. By that time he wanted about thirty women, and good ones at that, to clear Umtonga off his books.

  ‘The old witch-doctor was calm and quiet; contrary to custom, he came in the evening and he did not stay more than twenty minutes. The walls were thin, so I heard most of what went on—he offered Benny the three women—or death before the morning.

  ‘If Benny had been wise he would have taken the women, but he wasn’t. He told Umtonga to go to the Devil—and Umtonga went.

  ‘His people were waiting for him outside, about a dozen of them, and he proceeded to make a magic. They handed him a live black cock and a live white cock, and Umtonga sat down before the stoep and he killed them in a curious way.

  ‘He examined their livers carefully, and then he began to rock backwards and forwards on his haunches, and in his old cracked voice he sang a weird, monotonous chant. The others lay down flat on the ground and wriggled round him one after the other on their bellies. They kept that up for about half an hour, and then the old wizard began to dance. I can see his belt of monkey tails swirling about him now, as he leapt and spun. You wouldn’t have thought that lean old savage had the strength in him to dance like that.

  ‘Then all of a sudden he seemed to have a fit—he went absolutely rigid and fell down flat. He dropped on his face, and when his people turned him over we could see he was frothing at the mouth. They picked him up and carried him away.

  ‘You know how the night comes down almost at once in the tropics. Umtonga started his incantation in broad daylight, and it didn’t take so very long, but by the time he’d finished it was as dark as pitch, with nothing but the Southern Gross and the Milky Way to light the hidden world.

  ‘In those places most people still act by Nature’s clock. We had the evening meal, old Rebecca, Benny, and I; he seemed a bit preoccupied, but that was no more than I would have been in the circumstances. Afterwards he went into his office room to see what he’d made on the day, as he always did, and I went off to bed.

  ‘It was the old woman roused me about two o’clock-it seems she’d dropped off to sleep, and awoke to find that Benny had not come up to bed.

  ‘We went along through the shanty, and there he was with his eyes wide and staring, gripping the arms of his office chair and all hunched up as though cowering away from something.

  ‘He had never been a pretty sight to look at, but now there was something fiendish in the horror on his blackened face, and of course he’d been dead some hours.

  ‘Rebecca flung her skirts over her head, and began to wail fit to bring the house down. After I’d got her out of the room, I went back to investigate—what could have killed Benny Isaacsohn? I was like you in those days—I didn’t believe for a second that that toothless old fool Umtonga had the power to kill from a distance.

  ‘I made a thorough examination of the room, but there was no trace of anybody having broken in, or even having been there. I had a good look at Benny—it seemed to me he’d died of apoplexy or some sort of fit, but what had brought it on? He’d seen something, and it must have been something pretty ghastly.

  ‘I didn’t know then that a week or two later I was to see the same thing myself.

  ‘Well, we buried Benny the next day—there was the usual kind of primitive wake, with the women howling and the men getting free drinks—half Africa seemed to have turned up; you know how mysteriously news travels in the black man’s country.

  ‘Umtonga put in an appearance; he expressed neither regret nor pleasure, but stood looking on. I didn’t know what to make of it. The only evidence against him was the mumbo-jumbo of the night before, and no sane European could count that as proof of murder. I was inclined to think that the whole thing was an amazing coincidence.

  ‘When the burying was over he came up to me. “Why you no kill house-boys attend Big Boss before throne of Great Spirit?” he wanted to know.

  ‘I explained that one killing in the house was quite enough at a time. Then he demanded his stick, said he had left it behind in Benny’s office the night before.

  ‘I was pretty short with him, as you can imagine, but I knew the old ruffian’s stick as well as I knew my own hairbrush; so I went in to get it.

  ‘There it was lying on the floor—a four-foot snake stick. I dare say you’ve seen the sort of thing I mean; they make them shorter for Europeans. They are carved out of heavy wood, the snake’s head is the handle the tail the ferrule. Between, there are from five to a dozen bands; little markings are carved all down it to represent the scales. Umtonga’s was a fine one—quite thin, but as heavy as lead. It was black, and carved out of ebony, I imagine. Not an ounce of give in it, but it would have made a splendid weapon. I picked it up and gave it to him without a word.

  ‘For about ten days I saw no more of him. Old Rebecca stopped her wailing, and got down to business. Benny must have told her about most of his deals that mattered, for I found that she knew pretty much how things stood. It was agreed that I should carry on as a sort of manager for her, and after a bit we came to the question of Umtonga. I suggested that the interest was pretty hot, and that the man might be really dangerous. Wouldn’t it be better to settle with him for what we could get? But she wouldn’t have it; you would have thought I was trying to draw her eye-teeth when I suggested forgoing the interest! She fairly glared at me.

  ‘ “What is it to do with you?” she screamed. “I need money, I have the future of my—er—myself to think of. Send a boy with a message that you want to see him, and when he comes—make him pay.”

  ‘Well, there was nothing to do but to agree; the old shrew was worse than Benny in some ways. I sent a boy the following morning, and the day after Umtonga turned up.

  ‘I saw him in Benny’s office while his retinue waited outside; I was sitting in Benny’s chair—the chair he’d died in—and I came to the point at once.

  ‘He sat there for a few minutes just looking at me; his wizened old face was like a dried-up fruit that had gone bad. His black boot-button eyes shone with a strange, malignant fire, then he said very slowly, “You—very brave young Baas.”

  ‘ “No,” I said, “just business-like, that’s all.”

  ‘ “You know what happen to old Baas—he die—you want to go Great Spirit yet?”

  ‘There was something evil and powerful in his steady stare; it was horribly disconcerting, but I wouldn’t give in to it, and I told him I didn’t want anything except his cash that was due, or its equival
ent.

  ‘ “You forget business with Umtonga?” he suggested. “You do much good business, other mens. You no forget, Umtonga make bad magic—you die.”

  ‘Well, it wasn’t my business—it was the old woman’s. I couldn’t have let him out if I’d wanted to—so there was only one reply, the same as he’d got from Benny.

  ‘I showed him Benny’s gun, and told him that if there were any monkey tricks I’d shoot on sight. His only answer was one of the most disdainful smiles I’ve ever seen on a human face. With that he left me and joined his bodyguard outside.

  ‘They then went through the same abracadabra with another black cock and another white cock—wriggled about on their bellies, and the old man danced till he had another fit and was carried away.

  ‘Night had fallen in the meantime, and I was none too easy in my mind. I thought of Benny’s purple face and staring eyes.

  ‘I had supper with the old hag, and then I went to Benny’s room. I like my tot, but I’d been careful not to take it; I meant to remain stone cold sober and wideawake that night.

  ‘I had the idea that one of Umtonga’s people had done something to Benny, poisoned his drink perhaps.

  ‘I went over his room minutely, and after I’d done, there wasn’t a place you could have hidden a marmoset. Then I shut the windows carefully, and tipped up a chair against each so that no one could get in without knocking it down. If I did drop off, I was bound to wake at that. I turned out the light so that they should have no target for a spear or an arrow, and then I sat down to wait.

  ‘I never want another night like that as long as I live; you know how you can imagine things in the darkness—well, what I didn’t imagine in those hours isn’t worth the telling.

  ‘The little noises of the veldt came to me as the creepings of the enemy—half a dozen times I nearly lost my nerve and put a bullet into the blacker masses of the shadows that seemed to take on curious forms, but I was pretty tough in those days and I stuck it out.