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

by Henry S. Whitehead

  He stood there, holding the strange-looking thing that resulted for us to look at, and then as we stood, speechless, fascinated, with another motion of his hands, and putting forth some effort this time – a herculean heave which made the veins of his forehead stand out abruptly and the sweat start up on his face on which the mark of the big cockney’s hand now showed a bright crimson, Williamson Morley bent the gun-barrel back again into an approximate trueness and laid it down on Sankers’ hall table.

  ‘It’s better the way it is, don’t you think?’ he remarked, quietly, dusting his hands together, ‘rather than, probably to have killed that mucker out of Limehouse – maybe two or three of them, if they’d pitched in to help him.’ Then, in a somewhat altered tone, a faintly perceptible trace of vehemence present in it, he added: ‘I think you should agree with me, gentlemen!’

  I think we were all too stultified at the incredible feat of brute strength we had just witnessed to get our minds very quickly off that. Sankers, our host for the time-being, came-to the quickest.

  ‘Good God!’ he cried out, ‘of course – rather – Oh, very much so, Old Man! Good God! – Mere bones and cockney meat under those hands!’

  And then the rest of them chimed in. It was a complete, almost a painful revulsion on the part of all of them. I, who had known Morley most of my life, had caught his point almost, as it happened, before he had begun to demonstrate it; about the time he had reached up after the old musket on the wall. I merely caught his eye and winked, aligning myself with him as against any possible adverse conclusion of the others.

  This, of course, in the form of a choice story, was all over St Thomas, Black, White, and ‘Coloured’ St Thomas, within twenty-four hours, and people along the streets began to turn their heads to look after him, as the negroes had done since his arrival, whenever Morley passed among them.

  I could hardly fail to catch the way in which my own household reacted to this new information about the physical strength of the stranger within its gates so soon as the grapevine route had apprized its dark-skinned members of the fact. Stephen Penn, the house-man, almost never looked at Morley now, except by the method known among West Indian negroes as ‘cutting his eyes’, which means a sidewise glance. Esmerelda, my extremely pious cook, appeared to add to the volume of her crooned hymn-tunes and frequently muttered prayers with which she accompanied her work. And once when my washer’s pick’ny glimpsed him walking across the stone-flagged yard to the side entrance to the West gallery, that coal-black child’s single garment lay stiff against the breeze generated by his flight towards the kitchen door and safety!

  It was Esmerelda the cook who really brought about the set of conditions which solved the joint mysteries of Morley’s father’s attitude to him, his late wife’s obvious feeling of dread, and the uniform reaction of every St Thomas negro whom I had seen in contact with Morley. The dénouement happened not very long after Morley’s demonstration in Lieutenant Sankers’s house that morning of our encounter with the sailors.

  Esmerelda had been trying-out coconut oil, a process, as performed in the West Indies, involving the boiling of a huge kettle of water. This, arranged outdoors, and watchfully presided over by my cook, had been going on for a couple of days at intervals. Into the boiling water Esmerelda would throw several panfuls of copra, the white meat dug out of the matured nuts. After the oil had been boiled out and when it was floating, this crude product would be skimmed off, and more copra put into the pot. The final process was managed indoors, with a much smaller kettle, in which the skimmed oil was ‘boiled down’ in a local refining process.

  It was during this final stage in her preparation of the oil for the household that old Esmerelda, in some fashion of which I never, really heard the full account, permitted the oil to get on fire, and, in her endeavors to put out the blaze, got her dress afire. Her loud shrieks which expressed fright rather than pain, for the blazing oil did not actually reach the old soul’s skin, brought Morley, who was alone at the moment on the gallery reading, around the house and to the kitchen door on the dead run. He visualized at once what had happened, and, seizing an old rag-work floor mat which Esmerelda kept near the doorway, advanced upon her to put out the fire.

  At this she shrieked afresh, but Morley, not having the slightest idea that his abrupt answer to her yells for help had served to frighten the old woman almost into a fit, merely wrapped the floor-mat about her and smothered the flames. He got both hands badly burned in the process and Dr Pelletier dressed them with an immersion in more coconut oil and did them up in a pair of bandages about rubber tissue to keep them moist with the oil dressing inside, so that Morley’s hands looked like a prize-fighter’s with the gloves on. These pudding-like arrangements Dr Pelletier adjured his patient to leave on for at least forty-eight hours.

  We drove home and I declined a dinner engagement for the next evening for Morley on the ground that he could not feed himself! He managed a bowl of soup between his hands at home that evening, and as he had a couple of fingers free outside the bandage on his left hand, assured me that he could manage undressing quite easily. I forgot all about his probable problem that evening, and did not go to his room to give him a hand as I had fully intended doing.

  It was not until the next day at lunch that it dawned on me that Morley was fully dressed, although wearing pumps into which he could slip his feet, instead of shoes, and wondering how he had managed it. There were certain details, occurring to me, as quite out of the question for a man with hands muffled up all but the two outside fingers on the left hand as Morley was. Morley’s tie was knotted with his usual careful precision; his hair, as always, was brushed with a meticulous exactitude. His belt-buckle was fastened.

  I tried to imagine myself attending to all these details of dress with both thumbs and six of my eight fingers out of commission. I could not. It was too much for me.

  I said nothing to Morley, but after lunch I asked Stephen Penn if he had assisted Mr Morley to dress.

  Stephen said he had not. He had offered to do so, but Mr Morley had thanked him and replied it wasn’t going to be necessary.

  I was mystified.

  The thing would not leave my mind all that afternoon while Morley sat out there on the West gallery with the bulk of the house between himself and the sun and read various magazines. I went out at last merely to watch him turn the pages. He managed that very easily, holding the magazine across his right forearm and grasping the upper, right-hand corner of a finished page between the two free fingers and the bandage itself whenever it became necessary to turn it over.

  That comparatively simple affair, I saw, was no criterion.

  The thing got to ‘worrying’ me. I waited, biding my time.

  About ten minutes before dinner, carrying the silver swizzel-tray, with a clinking jug and a pair of tall, thin glasses, I proceeded to the door of Morley’s room, tapped, rather awkwardly turned the door’s handle, my other hand balancing the tray momentarily, and walked in on him. I had expected, you see, to catch him in the midst of dressing for dinner.

  I caught him.

  He was fully dressed, except for putting on his dinner jacket. He wore a silk soft shirt and his black tie was knotted beautifully, all his clothes adjusted with his accustomed careful attention to the detail of their precise fit.

  I have said he was fully dressed, save for the jacket. Dressed, yes, but not shod. His black silk socks and the shining patent-leather pumps which would go on over them lay on the floor beside him, where he sat, in front of his bureau mirror, at the moment of my entrance brushing his ruddy-brown, rather coarse, but highly decorative hair with a pair of ebony-backed military brushes. Morley’s hair had always been perhaps the best item of his general appearance. It was a magnificent crop, and of a sufficiently odd color to make it striking to look at without being grotesque or even especially conspicuous. Morley had managed a fine parting this evening in the usual place, a trifle to the right of the centre of his forehead. He was smoot
hing it down now, with the big, black-backed brushes with the long bristles, sitting, so to speak, on the small of his back in the chair.

  With those pumps and socks not yet put on I saw Morley’s feet for the first time in my life.

  And seeing them I understood those dry rubs in the gymnasium when we were schoolboys together – that curious peculiarity of Morley’s which caused him to take his rubs with his track shoes on! ‘Curious peculiarity,’ I have said. The phrase is fairly accurate, descriptive, I should be inclined to think, of those feet – feet with well-developed thumbs, like huge, broad hands – feet which he had left to clothe this evening until the last end of his dressing for dinner, because – well, because he had been using them to fasten his shirt at the neck, and tie that exquisite knot in his evening bow. He was using them now, in fact, as I looked dumbfounded, at him, to hold the big military brushes with which he was arranging that striking hair of his.

  He caught me, of course, my entrance with the tray – which I managed not to drop – and at first he looked annoyed, and then, true to his lifelong form, Williamson Morley grinned at me in the looking-glass.

  ‘O – good!’ said he. ‘That’s great, Gerald. But, Old Man, I think I’ll ask you to hold my glass for me, if you please. Brushing one’s hair, you see – er – this way, is one thing. Taking a cocktail is, really, quite another.’

  And then, quite suddenly, it dawned upon me, and very nearly made me drop that tray after all, why Morley’s father had named him ‘Williamson’.

  I set the tray down, very carefully, avoiding Morley’s embarrassed eyes, feeling abysmally ashamed of myself for what I, his host, had done – nothing, of course, farther from my mind than that I should run into any such oddment as this. I poured out the glasses. I wiped off a few drops I had spilled on the top of the table where I had set the tray. All this occupied some little time, and all through it I did not once glance in Morley’s direction.

  And when I did, at last, carry his glass over to him, and, looking at him, I am sure, with something like shame in my eyes wished him ‘Good Health’ after our West Indian fashion of taking a drink; Morley needed my hand with his glass in it at his mouth, for the black silk socks and the shining, patent-leather pumps were on his feet now, and the slight flush of his embarrassment had faded entirely from his honest, good-natured face.

  And, I thought down inside me, that, whatever his motive in his unique chagrin, Douglas Morley had honored him by naming him ‘Williamson!’ For Williamson Morley, as I had never doubted, and doubted just at that moment rather less than ever before, was a better man than his father – whichever way you care to take it.

  The Shut Room

  It was Sunday morning and I was coming out of All Saints’ Church, Margaret Street, along with the other members of the hushed and rev-erent congregation, when, near the entrance doors, a hand fell lightly on my shoulder. Turning, I perceived that it was the Earl of Carruth. I nodded, without speaking, for there is that in the atmosphere of this great church, especially after one of its magnificent services and heart-searching sermons, which precludes anything like the hum of conversation which one meets with in many places of worship.

  In these worldly and ‘scientific’ days it is unusual to meet with a person of Lord Carruth’s intellectual and scientific attainments who troubles very much about religion. As for me, Gerald Canevin, I have always been a church-going fellow.

  Carruth accompanied me in silence through the entrance doors and out into Margaret Street. Then, linking his arm in mine, he guided me, still in silence, to where his Rolls-Royce car stood at the curbstone.

  ‘Have you any luncheon engagement, Mr Canevin?’ he inquired, when we were just beside the car, the footman holding the door open.

  ‘None whatever,’ I replied.

  ‘Then do me the pleasure of lunching with me,’ invited Carruth.

  ‘I was planning on driving from church to your rooms,’ he explained, as soon as we were seated and the car whirling us noiselessly toward his town house in Mayfair. ‘A rather extraordinary matter has come up, and Sir John has asked me to look into it. Should you care to hear about it?’

  ‘Delighted,’ I acquiesced, and settled myself to listen.

  To my surprise, Lord Carruth began reciting a portion of the Nicene Creed, to which, sung very beautifully by All Saints’ choir, we had recently been listening.

  ‘Maker of Heaven and earth,’ quoted Carruth, musingly, ‘and of all things – visible and invisible.’ I started forward in my seat. He had given a peculiar emphasis to the last word, ‘invisible’.

  ‘A fact,’ I ejaculated, ‘constantly forgotten by the critics of religion! The Church has always recognized the existence of the invisible creation.’

  ‘Right, Mr Canevin. And – this invisible creation; it doesn’t mean merely angels!’

  ‘No one who has lived in the West Indies can doubt that,’ I replied.

  ‘Nor in India,’ countered Carruth. ‘The fact – that the Creed attributes to God the authorship of an invisible creation – is an interesting commentary on the much-quoted remark of Hamlet to Horatio: “There are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.” Apparently, Horatio’s philosophy, like that of the present day, took little account of the spiritual side of affairs; left out God and what He had made. Perhaps Horatio had recited the creed a thousand times, and never realized what that clause implies!’

  ‘I have thought of it often, myself,’ said I. ‘And now – I am all curiosity – what, please, is the application?’

  ‘It is an ocurrence in one of the old coaching inns,’ began Carruth, ‘on the Brighton Road; a very curious matter. It appears that the proprietor – a gentleman, by the way, Mr William Snow, purchased the inn for an investment just after the Armistice – has been having a rather unpleasant time of it. It has to do with shoes!’

  ‘Shoes?’ I inquired; ‘shoes!’ It seemed an abrupt transition from the Nicene Creed to shoes!

  ‘Yes,’ replied Carruth, ‘and not only shoes but all sorts of leather affairs. In fact, the last and chief difficulty was about the disappearance of a commercial traveler’s leather sample-case. But I perceive we are arriving home. We can continue the account at luncheon.’

  During lunch he gave me a rather full account, with details, of what had happened at ‘The Coach and Horses’ Inn on the Brighton Road, an account which I will briefly summarize as follows.

  Snow, the proprietor, had bought the old inn partly for business reasons, partly for sentimental. It had been a portion, up to about a century before, of his family’s landed property. He had repaired and enlarged it, modernized it in some ways, and in general restored a much rundown institution, making ‘The Coach and Horses’ into a paying investment. He had retained, so far as possible, the antique architectural features of the old coaching inn, and before very long had built up a motor clientèle of large proportions by sound and careful management.

  Everything, in fact, had prospered with the gentleman-innkeeper’s affairs until there began, some four months back, a series of unaccountable disappearances. The objects which had, as it were, vanished into thin air, were all – and this seemed to me the most curious and bizarre feature of Carruth’s recital – leather articles. Pair after pair of shoes or boots, left outside bedroom doors at night, would be gone the next morning. Naturally the ‘boots’ was suspected of theft. But the ‘boots’ had been able to prove his innocence easily enough. He was, it seemed, a rather intelligent broken-down jockey, of a keen wit. He had assured Mr Snow of his surprise as well as of his innocence, and suggested that he take a week’s holiday to visit his aged mother in Kent and that a substitute ‘boots’, chosen by the proprietor, should take his place. Snow had acquiesced, and the disappearance of guests’ footwear had continued, to the consternation of the substitute, a total stranger, obtained from a London agency.

  That exonerated Billings, the jockey, who came back to his duties at the end of his holida
y with his character as an honest servant intact. Moreover, the disappearances had not been confined to boots and shoes. Pocketbooks, leather luggage, bags, cigarette cases – all sorts of leather articles went the way of the earlier boots and shoes, and besides the expense and annoyance of replacing these, Mr Snow began to be seriously concerned about the reputation of his house. An inn in which one’s leather belongings are known to be unsafe would not be a very strong financial asset. The matter had come to a head through the disappearance of the commercial traveler’s sample-case, as noted by Carruth in his first brief account of this mystery. The main difficulty in this affair was that the traveler had been a salesman of jewelry, and Snow had been confronted with a bill for several hundred pounds, which he had felt constrained to pay. After that he had laid the mysterious matter before Sir John Scott, head of Scotland Yard, and Scott had called in Carruth because he recognized in Snow’s story certain elements which caused him to believe this was no case for mere criminal investigation.

  After lunch Carruth ordered the car again, and, after stopping at my rooms for some additional clothing and the other necessities for an over-night visit, we started along the Brighton Road for the scene of the difficulty.

  We arrived about four that Sunday afternoon, and immediately went into conference with the proprietor.

  Mr William Snow was a youngish middle-aged gentleman, very well dressed, and obviously a person of intelligence and natural attainments. He gave us all the information possible, repeating, with many details, the matters which I have already summarized, while we listened in silence. When he had finished: ‘I should like to ask some questions,’ said Carruth.

  ‘I am prepared to answer anything you wish to enquire about,’ Mr Snow assured us.

  ‘Well, then, about the sentimental element in your purchase of the inn, Mr Snow – tell us, if you please, what you may know of the more ancient history of this old hostelry. I have no doubt there is history connected with it, situated where it is. Undoubtedly, in the coaching days of the Four Georges, it must have been the scene of many notable gatherings.’