The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

by Achmed Abdullah

  He had paused; then had continued gently, so very, very gently: “Yes. A slow death, depending entirely upon the vitality of the one of you two who will be sacrificed to the juju. There will be little knives. There will be the flying insects which follow the smell of blood and festering flesh. Too, there will be many crimson-headed ants, many, ants—and a thin river of honey to show them the trail.”

  He had yawned. Then he had gone on: “Consider. The juju is just. He only wants the sacrifice of one of you, and you yourselves must decide which one shall go, and which one shall stay. And—remember the little, little knives. Be pleased to remember the many ants which follow the honey trail. I shall return shortly and hear your choice.”

  He had bowed and, with his silent warriors, had stepped back into the jungle that had closed behind them like a curtain.

  Even in that moment of stark, enormous horror, horror too great to be grasped, horror that swept over and beyond the barriers of fear—even in that moment Stuart McGregor had realized that, by leaving the choice to them, the Bakoto had committed a refined cruelty worthy of a more civilized race, and had added a psychic torture fully as dreadful as the physical torture of the little knives.

  Too, in that moment of ghastly, lecherous expectancy, he had known that it was Farragut Hutchison who would be sacrificed to the juju—Farragut Hutchison who sat there, staring into the camp fire, making queer little, funny noises in his throat.

  Suddenly, Stuart McGregor had laughed—he remembered that laugh to his dying day—and had thrown a greasy pack of playing cards into the circle of meager, indifferent light.

  “Let the cards decide, old boy,” he had shouted. “One hand of poker—and no drawing to your hand. Showdown! That’s square, isn’t it?”

  “Sure!” the other had replied, still staring straight ahead of him. “Go ahead and deal—”

  His voice had drifted into a mumble while Stuart McGregor had picked up the deck, had shuffled, slowly, mechanically.

  As he shuffled, it had seemed to him as if his brain was frantically telegraphing to his fingers, as if all those delicate little nerves that ran from the back of his skull down to his fingertips were throbbing a clicking little chorus:

  “Do—it—Mac! Do—it—Mac! Do—it—Mac!” with a maddening, syncopated rhythm.

  And he had kept on shuffling, had kept on watching the motions of his fingers—and had seen that his thumb and second finger had shuffled the ace of hearts to the bottom of the deck.

  Had he done it on purpose? He did not know then. He never found out—though, in his memory, he lived through the scene a thousand times.

  But there were the little knives. There were the ants. There was the honey trail. There was his own, hard decision to live. And, years earlier, he had been a professional faro dealer at Silver City.

  Another ace had joined the first at the bottom of the deck. The third. The fourth.

  And then Farragut Hutchison’s violent: “Deal, man, deal! You’re driving me crazy. Get it over with.”

  The sweat had been pouring from Stuart McGregor’s face. His blood had throbbed in his veins. Something like a sledgehammer had drummed at the base of his skull.

  “Cut, won’t you?” he had said, his voice coming as if from very far away.

  The other had waved a trembling hand, “No, no! Deal ’em as they lie. You won’t cheat me.”

  Stuart McGregor had cleared a little space on the ground with the point of his shoe.

  He remembered the motion. He remembered how the dead leaves had stirred with a dry, rasping, tragic sound, how something slimy and phosphorous-green had squirmed through the tufted jungle grass, how a little furry scorpion had scurried away with a clicking tchk-tchk-tchk.

  He had dealt.

  Mechanically, even as he was watching them, his fingers had given himself five cards from the bottom of the deck. Four aces—and the queen of diamonds. And, the next second, in answer to Farragut Hutchison’s choked: “Show-down! I have two pair—kings—and jacks!” his own well simulated shriek of joy and triumph:

  “I win! I’ve four aces! Every ace in the pack!”

  And then Farragut Hutchison’s weak, ridiculous exclamation—ridiculous considering the dreadful fate that awaited him:

  “Geewhittaker! You’re some lucky guy, aren’t you, Mac?”

  At the same moment, the Bakoto chief had stepped out of the jungle, followed by half a dozen warriors.

  Then the final scene—that ghastly, ironic moon squinting down, just as Farragut Hutchison had walked away between the giant, plumed, ochre-smeared Bakoto negroes, and bringing into stark relief the tattoo mark on his back where the shirt had been torn to tatters—and the leering, evil wink in the eagle’s eye as Farragut Hutchison twitched his shoulder blades with absurd, nervous resignation.

  Stuart McGregor remembered it every day of his life.

  He spoke of it to many. But only to Father Aloysius O’Donnell, the priest who officiated in the little Gothic church around the corner, on Ninth Avenue, did he tell the whole truth—did he confess that he had cheated.

  “Of course I cheated!” he said. “Of course!” And, with a sort of mocking bravado: “What would you have done, padre?”

  The priest, who was old and wise and gentle, thus not at all sure of himself, shook his head.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “I don’t know.”

  “Well—I do know. You would have done what I did. You wouldn’t have been able to help yourself.” Then, in a low voice: “And you would have paid! As I pay—every day, every minute, every second of my life.”

  “Regret, repentance,” murmured the priest, but the other cut him short.

  “Repentance—nothing. I regret nothing! I repent nothing! I’d do the same tomorrow. It isn’t that—oh—that—what d’ye call it—sting of conscience, that’s driving me crazy. It’s fear!”

  “Fear of what?” asked Father O’Donnell.

  “Fear of Farragut Hutchison—who is dead!”

  Ten years ago!

  And he knew that Farragut Hutchison had died. For not long afterward a British trader had come upon certain gruesome but unmistakable remains and had brought the tale to the coast. Yet was there fear in Stuart McGregor’s soul, fear worse than the fear of the little knives. Fear of Farragut Hutchison, who was dead?

  No. He did not believe that the man was dead. He did not believe it, could not believe it.

  “And even suppose he’s dead,” he used to say to the priest, “he’ll get me. He’ll get me as sure as you’re born. I saw it in the eye of that eagle—the squinting eye of that infernal, tattooed eagle!”

  Then he would turn a grayish yellow, his whole body would tremble with a terrible palsy and, in a sort of whine, which was both ridiculous and pathetic, given his size and bulk, given the crimson, twisted adventures through which he had passed, he would exclaim:

  “He’ll get me. He’ll get me. He’ll get me even from beyond the grave.”

  And then Father O’Donnell would cross himself rapidly, just a little guiltily.

  It is said that there is a morbid curiosity which forces the murderer to view the place of his crime.

  Some psychic reason of the same kind may have caused Stuart McGregor to decorate the walls and corners of his sitting room with the memories of that Africa which he feared and hated, and which, daily, he was trying to forget—with a shimmering, cruel mass of jungle curios, sjamboks and assegais, signal drums and daggers, knobkerries and rhino shields and what not.

  Steadily, he added to his collection, buying in auction rooms, in little shops on the waterfront, from sailors and ship pursers and collectors who had duplicates for sale.

  He became a well-known figure in the row of antique stores in back of Madison Square Garden, and was so liberal when it came to payment that Morris Newman, who specialized in African curios, would send the pick of all the new stuff he bought to his house.

  * * * *

  It was on a day in August—one of those t
ropical New York days when the very birds gasp for air, when orange-flaming sun rays drop from the brazen sky like crackling spears and the melting asphalt picks them up again and tosses them high—that Stuart McGregor, returning from a short walk, found a large, round package in his sitting room.

  “Mr. Newman sent it,” his servant explained. “He said it’s a rare curio, and he’s sure you’ll like it.”

  “All right.”

  The servant bowed, left, and closed the door, while Stuart McGregor cut the twine, unwrapped the paper, looked.

  And then, suddenly, he screamed with fear; and, just as suddenly, the scream of fear turned into a scream of maniacal joy.

  For the thing which Newman had sent him was an African signal drum, covered with tightly stretched skin-human skin—white skin! And square in the center there was a tattoo mark—an eagle in red and blue, surmounted by a lopsided crown, and surrounded by a wavy design.

  Here was the final proof that Farragut Hutchison was dead, that, forever, he was rid of his fear. In a paroxysm of joy, he picked up the drum and clutched it to his heart.

  And then he gave a cry of pain. His lips quivered, frothed. His hands dropped the drum and fanned the air, and he looked at the thing that had fastened itself to his right wrist.

  It seemed like a short length of rope, grayish in color, spotted with dull red. Even as Stuart McGregor dropped to the floor, dying, he knew what had happened.

  A little venomous snake, an African fer-de-lance, that had been curled up in the inside of the drum, been numbed by the cold, and had been revived by the splintering heat of New York.

  Yes—even as he died he knew what had happened. Even as he died, he saw that malign, obscene squint in the eagle’s eye. Even as he died, he knew that Farragut Hutchison had killed him—from beyond the grave!

  THE CHARMED LIFE

  From a letter dated September the eleventh, 1917, by Captain Achmed Abdullah to the Editor of the All-Story Weekly:

  …and as to that, you are, of course, perfectly right. Magazine readers want to be entertained—that’s what they plunk down their little dimes for—and take them all around, they prefer a story which is full of action, of things daring, with some love and a fair dose of adventure thrown in, and yet, as you put it, they do not want their credulity strained to the breaking point. They like to say to themselves—well, not exactly “This did happen” but rather, “This might have happened”; and as an afterthought, chiefly if they’re young (by which I mean the sunny side of seventy-three) they often add the two tiny words “to me.”

  An adventurous and slightly fantastic love story—yet substantially a true story—that’s the dope: and the only thing which remains is to catch your hare, to quote Mrs. Glass’s famous Cookery Book. I heard such a story not so very long ago, when on my way home to Afghanistan, I stopped for a few weeks at Calcutta.

  The name of the man who told me the story—his own story—was—[name deleted by the editor]. You may known some of his people in Boston. And when you come to the end of the tale, remember one thing, the hero—though I hate the appellation—is happy; and that, perhaps, is the final aim and object of man’s life—to achieve happiness without making others unhappy.

  I hope your readers will like the tale. At least it is a true tale; as true as all India; as true as the fact that before there was a Europe, India worshiped the Trimurti, the triple deity composed of Brahma the Creator, Vishnu, the Sustainer, Shiva the Destroyer, and—to believe certain Hindus—will continue to worship this triple image long after Europe has ceased to exist; as true, finally as the facts that never there lived, nor will live, American or European who can get below the skin of India without doing what the Boston man did in his little house in Calcutta, not far from the Chitpore Road

  Best Regards,

  Achmed Abdullah.

  [Note by the editors—Captain Abdullah’s manuscript contained the real names of the people and localities whom this story concerns. We changed them—for obvious reasons.]

  On the day when death will knock at thy door, what wilt thou offer him?

  Oh, I will set before my guest the full vessel of my life—I will never let him go with empty hands.

  —Rarindranath Tagore

  CHAPTER I.

  THE MEETING.

  Kiss happiness with lips

  That seek beyond the lips.

  —from the Love Song of Yar Ali

  * * * *

  I met him in that careless, haphazard and thoroughly human way in which one meets people in Calcutta, in all parts of India for that matter. He and I laughed simultaneously at the same street scene. I don’t remember if it was the sight of a portly, grey-bearded native dressed incongruously in a brown-and-grey striped camel’s-hair dressing-gown, an extravagantly embroidered skull-cap, gorgeous open-work silk socks showing the bulging calves, and cloth-topped patent leather shoes of an ultra-Viennese cut, or if it was perhaps the sight of Donald McIntyre, the Eurasian tobacco merchant in the Sealdah, abusing his Babu partner in a splendid linguistic mixture of his father’s broad, twangy Glasgow Scots and of his mother’s soft, gliding Behari.

  At all events something struck me as funny. I laughed. So did the other man. And there you are.

  Nice-looking chap he was—of good length of limbs and width of shoulders, clean-shaven, strong-jawed, and with close-cropped curly brown hair, and eyes the keenest, jolliest shade of blue imaginable. And—he was an American. You could tell by his clothes, chiefly by his neat shoes. They were of a vintage of perhaps two or three years before, but still they bore the national mark; they smacked, somehow, of ice water and clanking overhead trains and hustle and hat-check boys—and his nationality, too, was a point in his favor, since I had spent the preceding three years in New York and America had become home to me, in a way.

  So we talked. I forgot who spoke first. It really doesn’t matter—in India. Nor did we exchange cards nor names, that not being the custom of negligent India, but we conversed with that easy, we-might-as-well-be-friends familiarity with which strangers talk to each other aboard a transatlantic liner or in a Pullman car—west of Chicago. Presently we decided that we were obstructing the thoroughfare—at least a tiny, white bullock was trying his best to push us out of the way with his soft, ridiculous muzzle—we decided, furthermore, that we had several things to talk over. Quite important things they seemed at the time, and tremendously varied: the home policy of the ancient Peruvians, the truth of the Elohistic theory in the study of the Pentateuch, and the difference between Lahore and Lucknow chutney. In other words, we felt that strange human phenomenon: a sudden warm wave of friendship, of interest, of sympathy for each other.

  So we adjourned to a native café which was a mass of violet and gold—slightly fly-specked—of smells honey-sweet and gall-bitter, of carved and painted things supremely beautiful and supremely hideous—since the East goes to the extreme in both cases.

  We sipped our coffee and smiled at each other and talked. We discovered that we had likings in common—better still, prejudices and mad theories in common, and presently, since with the bunching, splintering noon heat the shops and the bazaar were clearing of buyers and sellers and since the café was filling with all sorts of strong-scented low-castes, kunjris and sansis and what-not, chewing betel and expectorating vastly after the manner of their kind, he proposed that we should continue our conversation in his house.

  I accepted, and leaving the tavern I turned automatically to the left fully expecting him to lead toward Park Street or perhaps, since he was so obviously an American, toward one of the big cosmopolitan hotels on the other side of the Howrah Bridge. But instead he led me to the right, straight toward Chitpore Road, straight into the heart of the ancestral tenements of the Ghoses and Raos and Kumars—the respectable native quarter, in other words.

  That was my first surprise. My second came when we reached his home—a two-storied house of typical extravagant bulbous Hindu architecture, surrounded by a flaunting garden, orange a
nd vermilion with peach and pomegranate and peepul trees and with a thousand nodding flowers. For, as soon as he had ushered me into the great reception hall which stretched across the whole ground floor from front to back veranda, he excused himself. He did not wait to see me comfortably seated nor to offer me drink and tobacco, after the pleasant Anglo-Indian, and, for that matter, American habit. But he dropped hat and stick on the first handy chair, left the room with a hurried “be back in a jiffy, old man,” and, a moment later I heard somewhere in the upper story of the house his deep mellow voice, quickly followed by a tinkling, silvery burst of laughter—the unmistakable, low-pitched laughter of the native woman which starts on a minor key and is accompanied by strange melodious appoggiatures an infinitesimal sixteenth below the harmonic tones to which the Western ear is attuned.

  So I felt surprised, also disappointed and a little disgusted. The usual sordid shop-worn romance—I said to myself—the usual, useless pinchbeck tale of passion of some fool of a young, rich American and a scheming native woman, doubtless aided and abetted by a swarm of scheming, greasy, needy relations—the old story; the sort of thing that used to be notorious in Japan and in the Philippines.

  Impatient, rather soured with my new-found friend, I looked about the room—and my surprise grew, but in another direction.

  For the room was not furnished in the quick, tawdry, thrown-together manner of a man who lives and loves and nests with the impulses of a bird of passage. That I could have understood. It would have been in keeping with the tinkly laugher which had drifted down the stairs. Too, I could have understood if the appointments had been straight European or American, a sort of cheap, sentimental link with the home self-respect which he had discarded—temporarily—when he started light housekeeping with his native-born wife.

  The room, complete from the ceiling to the floor and from window to door, was furnished in the native style; not in the nasty, showy, ornate native style of the bazaars which cater to tourists—and it is in India’s favor that the “Oriental wares” sold there are mostly made in Birmingham, Berlin and Newark, New Jersey—but in that solid, heavy, rather somber native style of the well-to-do high-caste Hindu to whom every piece—each chair and table and screen—is somehow fraught with eternal, racial tradition. It was a real home, in other words, and a native home; and there was nothing—if I except a rack of bier pipes and a humidor filled with a certain much-advertised brand of Kentucky burley tobacco—which spoke of America.