Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural)

by Henry S. Whitehead

  The boy sat up, still stupidly, the thin blanket drawn about him, on the side of the bed.

  ‘We may as well drive back now,’ said Father Richardson, picking up his black bag in a business-like manner.

  As I turned my car to the right just outside the estate-village stone gateway, I glanced back toward the village. It swarmed with Blacks, all crowding about the cabin of Elizabeth Aagaard. Beside me, I heard the rather monotonous voice of Father Richardson. He seemed to be talking to himself; thinking aloud, perhaps.

  ‘Creator – of all things – visible and invisible.’

  I drove slowly to avoid the ducks, fowls, small pigs, pickaninnies and burro-carts between the edge of town and the rectory.

  ‘It was,’ said I, as I held his hand at parting, ‘an experience – that.’

  ‘Oh – that! Yes, yes, quite! I was thinking – you’ll excuse me, Mr Canevin – of my afternon sick-calls. My curate isn’t quite over that last attack of dengue fever. I have a full afternoon. Come in and have tea with us – any afternoon, about five.’

  I drove home slowly. A West Indian priest! That sudden wind – the little wooden snake – the abject fear in the eyes of the Black boy! All that had been merely in the day’s work for Father Richardson, in those rather awkward, large, square hands, the hands which held the Sacrament every morning. Sometimes I would get up early and go to church myself on a weekday morning, along the soft roads through the pre-dawn dusk along with scores of soft-stepping, barefooted Blacks, plodding to church in the early dawn, going to get strength, power, to fight the age-long battle between God and Satan – the Snake – here where the sons of Ham tremble beneath the lingering fears of that primeval curse which came upon their ancestor because he dared to laugh at his father Noah.

  West India Lights

  I had engaged Melbourne House, a fine old mansion on the hill back of Fredericksted on the West India Island of Santa Cruz, for the winter. And I found when I arrived one November day that I was to have one more room at my disposal than I had bargained for. This was, really, an end of the second-floor passageway, which had been made into a room by a slat-partition.

  My landlady, Old Mistress James Desmond, had had moved out certain articles of decrepit furniture for the housing of which I had agreed to give up the use of that ‘room’, which looked like an old-fashioned wine-closet.

  I bestowed my trunks and packing cases on its floor and had Esmerelda, my coal-black servant, clear off the shelves for hand-luggage and odds and ends.

  In order to do so Esmerelda had to move several discarded belongings which had been left there, and among these was a large, old-fashioned picture in a heavy wooden frame which had escaped the ravages of wood-worms for countless decades. I noticed the old picture when I was bestowing some of my own odds and ends near where it stood, and carried it into my workroom to have a look at it.

  At first I had thought it was a chromo. But this was no chromo, olio, nor anything mechanically produced. It was paint.

  I looked at it closely, with interest. The composition was amateurish. The coloring was too faded with the dimness of years for me to make much of it.

  I carried the painting into the bathroom, made a lather and, after taking the ancient and brittle canvas out of its frame, began to clean it with soap and water. I dried it, and then used a little typewriter oil on it.

  The colors began to jump out at me. The artist had been, plainly, a lover of color. My restoration accentuated the amateurishness of the thing, but I forgave the artist much because of the subject he – or she – had chosen.

  My imaginary young lady in her flowered muslin dress of a century ago had chosen to depict the execution of a pirate, and – the pirate could have been none other than Fawcett.

  There could be no doubt about it whatever. That bloody villain was the only pirate that had been executed at St Thomas – except his own two mates who had paid the penalty of their murderous rascality at the same time – and this was a picture of St Thomas, painted photographically, apparently from the deck of some vessel conveniently anchored offshore.

  The costumes, too, were of Fawcett’s period. His execution had taken place in September, 1824, and that, too, fixed the period of the painting.

  High as the colors were pitched, stilted as were the many characters, there was something convincingly lifelike about the thing. Apparently this picture had been painted from actual observation.

  The colors too, on reflection, were not so much exaggerated. Did not one do well here to wear smoked glasses in the middle of the day? Was not the glowing indigo of the Caribbean incredible – the scarlet of the hibiscus painful to the unaccustomed eye?

  I fastened up the canvas with carpet tacks on the wall of my workroom where it would catch the north light. I began at its upper corners, pressing tacks along its upper edge, and then, pulling it down flat, inserted others along the lower edge and up the sides.

  The last tack went through the arm of one of Fawcett’s lieutenants, just where he had hurtled through the air at the end of his rope over at the extreme lefthand of the picture. A little, trailing ‘C. L.’ was the signature.

  That afternoon at Estate Montparnasse, where I had been invited hospitably for tea, I told my kind hosts, the Maclanes, about my find. And I made it an excuse – though none was needed – to ask them to drive in for tea with me the following afternoon.

  When they saw it I think it made the same impression on them that it had upon me, at first. I imagine that only their impeccable courtesy prevented their telling me that I had been gloating over something very like a chromo!

  It was Miss Gertrude Maclane who first began to get the real charm of it. I noticed her leaning close and examining it very carefully.

  Suddenly, as I talked with Mr and Mrs Maclane, there came from Miss Gertrude a little, smothered cry – an exclamation almost like a sigh – but so poignant, though subdued, that her mother turned quickly toward her on hearing it. We both stepped toward her.

  ‘What is it, Miss Gertrude?’ I inquired.

  ‘What is it, my dear?’ echoed her mother.

  ‘It’s this poor creature,’ replied Miss Gertrude Maclane, indicating the fellow whose arm I had transfixed.

  ‘Why – he’s in agony! It’s dreadful, I think! It’s wonderfully done. It quite startled me, in fact. The little figures are wonderfully done, if you look at them closely. I think they must – some of them, anyhow – be portraits, just as you said yesterday, Mr Canevin. This one, certainly, is almost uncanny.’

  We all looked at the dangling fellow. I had not seen him since yesterday. Curious! He was not, as I had supposed, dangling. He was hurtling through the air; had not quite reached the end of that fatal fall from the drop where stood the hangman, a terrible, fierce fellow.

  No – the rope was not yet wholly taut. That knot of seven turns had not broken the poor devil’s neck. He was as alive as any of the spectators.

  But it was not this new interpretation of the artist’s skill, not the look of tortured horror, which had so moved Miss Gertrude. No!

  What caused me to close my eyes in a spasmodic, futile effort to shut out a deeper horror, caused me to lean heavily against the table, fighting to retain some measure of my composure, was the fact that the man’s expression had changed since yesterday. Now out of his horror-shot, protruding, agonized eyes came straight at me a look of strange reproachfulness.

  And down his little, painted arm, from the place where I had driven the carpet tack through it, were running little drops of bright red blood . . .

  I opened my eyes and turned to my guests. I had pulled myself together with an effort which was like a wrench. I bowed to Mrs Maclane.

  ‘Shall we go down for tea?’ I inquired.

  Miss Gertrude lingered behind after the rest had passed out of the room. She took my arm and I could feel her slim white hand trembling.

  ‘I think it is very dreadful, somehow, that picture,’ she whispered confidingly, ‘but oh, Mr Canevin
, it’s fascinating. I wonder if “C. L.” really was a girl. Perhaps we can find out!’

  ‘We’ll see what can be done,’ I replied with an attempt at lightness, and she smiled up at me most charmingly in a way she has. A lively young girl is Miss Gertrude Maclane, daughter of Old Scottish Gentry-Planters, people who had come to the island in the old days.

  When the Maclanes had gone after tea, I went upstairs and pulled out that tack. I will admit that I almost expected to see fresh blood flow from the wound. Nothing of the sort happened, of course.

  I looked closely at the place. Red paint, put on a hundred years ago. The reproachful expression I had imagined was, too, wholly absent from the man’s face. I was looking at the picture now by electric light.

  The marked differences in light-effects that we get in the West Indies might well be expected to play queer optical tricks. They are a land of imagination, the islands. Some of the original crudity, too, seemed, somehow, to have got back into the picture.

  After breakfast the next morning I went straight in to the picture. In this clear, raw, morning light there remained only that look of apprehension which the artist had painted in.

  No agony. Certainly no reproach. Queer tricks, strange illusions, those begotten of our tropical sun!

  I examined the tiny hole left by the carpet tack under a magnifying glass. The ‘bloodstains’ of my aroused imagination of yesterday were stains of century-old, brittle paint – probably a slip of the brush just after touching-in those flamboyant trees or a scarlet head-turban or so – mere little meaningless, incidental dabs they were, and nothing more that I was able to discover.

  That afternoon I called upon old Mrs Desmond, who owns Melbourne House. She is a little, faded lady of the Old Irish Gentry; of a family which has been in the West Indies since early in the eighteenth century.

  She was dressed, as usual, in hot-looking black silk, with a little lace around the edges. There is about her a penumbra of veils and a suggestion of quaint, leather reticules. She has, too, that dead-white, colorless complexion of the West Indian Caucasian lady who has spent the bulk of a long lifetime avoiding the direct rays of the sun.

  I told Mrs Desmond about finding the picture, and our curiosity about the identity of the artist. She smiled at me kindly, rocking herself back and forth in an enormous Copenhagen mahogany rocking-chair the while, and fanning herself with a regularity which suggested doom.

  ‘It was painted by my aunt, Mr Canevin,’ said Mrs Desmond, ‘who was Camilla Lanigan, my mother’s elder sister. She died before I was born, about 1841 – I’ll not be positive. ’Tis said she was a remarkable woman in her day, and if you’ll wait till I’m dead and gone, I’ll tell you what’s known about her.’

  ‘With pleasure, Mistress Desmond, and may that day be a long way off; as long as you care to have it yourself!’

  ‘What I can tell you is indeed no credit to the Lanigans and their gentry, you’ll understand,’ continued Mrs Desmond. ‘She was of a very inquiring disposition and I dare say she learned much that she would have done better to leave alone – about the doings of the blacks and all! My grandfather, Cornelius Lanigan that was, and her father, was a gentleman-merchant there in St Thomas.

  ‘It was from St Thomas that James Desmond took me when we were married to live here on Santa Cruz, and I no more than a child of eighteen, Mr Canevin. It was in ’sixty-four I was married, and all I know of my Aunt Camilla Lanigan I learned from the sayings of my mother before that year when I was a girl at home.

  ‘There was little she did not know about the Obeah of the black people, so ’tis said – nor, indeed, of the voodoo as well, belike! Their mother being long dead and my own mother the younger of the two sisters, there was no one to stop my Aunt Camilla from doing much as she liked. The black people held her in great respect, so ’twas said.

  ‘As to the picture itself, I can tell you but little about it. It was in the house when I was born, in ’forty-six that was, and my mother had a great dislike for it. ’Twas I who would be taking it out of an old dust-box where it was kept, now and again, and frightening myself, as a child would, with the queer little figures and the hanging!

  ‘When I was married I begged for it, and I think my mother was glad to be rid of it, for the memory of my Aunt Camilla was still in the house there in St Thomas.

  ‘James Desmond, my husband, would never allow it to be hung on the wall, saying that it was indelicate of a lady to have painted such a scene. And I believe he was in the right of it, Mr Canevin, with all respect to my Aunt Camilla!’

  I thanked the dear old lady for her information as I bowed over her withered hand at parting. Her last remark was cryptic and somewhat startling: ‘ ’Twas more than paint, belike, went into the composition of that picture, Mr Canevin!’

  I called up Miss Gertrude as soon as I was back at Melbourne House.

  ‘I have some information about the picture and the artist,’ said I.

  ‘Come as early as you can manage it,’ said Miss Gertrude, and after dinner I started.

  ‘Oh, Mr Canevin,’ said she eagerly, when I had recounted what Mrs Desmond had told me. ‘How I wish I might see it again now at once!’

  ‘I had anticipated that,’ said I. ‘It lies on the table in the entryway.’

  We laid it out on the mahogany centre-table and looked down at it together in silence. At last Miss Gertrude spoke.

  ‘What do you see now in his expression, Mr Canevin?’

  I did not need inquire in whose expression.

  A baffling, elusive change appeared to have taken place now that we were looking down at him under the electric light.

  ‘Expectation,’ said I slowly.

  I hesitated. It was not quite expectation. Interest? Not quite that, either. I pondered the matter, the bizarre whimsicality of it making its natural appeal to my mind the while.

  ‘Hope!’ I cried at last. ‘And, coming through the hope, a wish!’

  ‘Yes, yes!’ cried Miss Gertrude, clasping her hands excitedly. ‘It – it seemed to me almost as though there were something – something he wanted to tell us!’

  She hurried over these hesitating words and, now that they were spoken, there was a look of relief on her lovely face.

  ‘Your moral courage is better than mine, Miss Gertrude,’ said I. ‘For that is what was really in the back of my mind. It seemed to me too – well, too preposterous to put into words.’

  Her eyes glowed with an enthusiasm almost childish. She placed her hand upon my arm.

  ‘Do you suppose we could find out what it is?’

  Her voice was very low.

  ‘We could try,’ said I.

  The whimsicality of the proposal had intrigued me.

  ‘But how?’ cried Miss Gertrude.

  ‘That’s what I’m puzzling my poor brains about,’ I answered. ‘One cannot converse with a little figure two and one-half inches high and made of paint!

  ‘No! We cannot just talk to him – and expect him to answer. He hasn’t the – the apparatus. He’s only a brittle little manikin fastened down flat on some very tender old canvas. He can’t speak and he can’t write. But, somehow, he does seem able to change his expression.

  ‘If there really is something in him – something besides paint, as old Mrs Desmond hinted – at least we’re not meddling with that for any wicked purpose, whatever Mrs Desmond’s Aunt Camilla Lanigan may have had in mind.’

  ‘Do you remember that paralyzed old man in Monte Cristo?’ inquired Miss Gertrude eagerly. ‘Noirtier, de Villefort’s father; you remember?’

  ‘He was one of the friends of my childhood,’ said I. ‘What about him?’

  ‘He could move only his eyes, and yet his granddaughter “talked” with him. She asked him questions that could be answered by “yes” or “no”, and he closed the right eye for one and the left for the other!’

  ‘Yes?’ said I dubiously.

  ‘Well!’ said she, looking down at the picture, ‘shall we try him?�
��

  I stepped over and looked at the manikin closely.

  ‘I’m looking to see if Mrs Desmond’s Aunt Camilla gave him ears,’ said I lightly. ‘Apparently she put “blood” in him.’

  And I proceeded to tell Miss Gertrude the incident of the carpet tack.

  ‘We’ll have to work out the questions very carefully,’ said she.

  I looked at her in amazement.

  ‘Can you seriously mean it?’ I asked.

  ‘Look at him!’ cried Miss Gertrude and put her hands over her eyes and sank down upon the sofa.

  I stepped quickly toward her, alarmed.

  ‘No, no!’ she cried. ‘I’m all right – only startled a little. Look for yourself, if you please, Mr Canevin.’

  I looked, and for the life of me I could not escape the conviction that there was a wry smile on the manikin’s face.

  ‘My God!’ said I, and did not apologize.

  I almost hesitate to proceed.

  Well, we sat down together after that and worked the thing out. The evening was before us. The rest of the family were dining with friends and would not be home before eleven.

  It was plain to us that ‘he’ could move, although he had not done so while anyone was actually looking at him. The fact that this last ‘change’ had come upon his countenance in the briefest of intervals would indicate, somehow, that he could also ‘hear’.

  For it seemed plain to us in our eerie mood of that strange evening that the smile was one of satisfaction, induced by our conversation. He wanted us to try to talk to him!

  We decided to formulate certain questions, ask them, then turn away and, after a short interval, look at the manikin again. The method of communication we derived from ‘Noirtier’, as the simplest possible.

  Miss Gertrude asked the first question.

  ‘We think you wish to communicate with us,’ said she, in a still small voice. ‘We shall ask you questions, and you are to close your right eye if the answer is “yes”, and your left if it is “no”. Will you answer?’