It was a landsman’s notion, a mere whimsy. A seaman would have scoffed at it, but, queerly enough, it seemed to work. He climbed back into the swinging boat and settled down in its bottom beside Marian.
The boat was, of course, swung inboard, and being small compared to the larger boats, both of which were chocked firmly, it swung free. Renwick felt that since the boat had been condemned they might make free with it, and he pulled some old cork life-preservers out from under the thwarts and arranged them under Marian’s head and his own. It was a weird sensation, lying there side by side looking up into the clear, moonlight sky, relatively motionless as the swinging boat accommodated itself to the rolling and pitching of the Kestrel.
They lay there and listened to the roar of the wind and sea. Both were dozing, fitfully, when the Kestrel struck.
Without warning there came a fearful, grinding crash forward. The Kestrel shivered and then appeared to crumple, her deck tilting to an abrupt angle. In the boat the impact was greatly modified, yet it would have been enough without that shattering crash ahead to have awakened people much more soundly asleep than Renwick and his wife. The masts snapped like pipestems.
The deck stayed on its perilous slant as the vessel hung on the teeth of the barrier reef on which she had struck bow on, while the great following waves roared over her in cascades. They lifted the small boat and tore it loose from its frayed tackle and carried it far forward, as with a tremendous and irresistible heave a huge following wave, overtopping its fellows, lifted the Kestrel’s hull and heaved her forward for more than her own length and crushed her down upon the rocks. She parted like rotten cloth as she turned turtle and was engulfed in a mighty whirlpool of maddened water.
The small boat with two helpless wisps of humanity lying side by side upon her bottom, riding free, was borne forward on the resistless force of the rushing water.
2
When Edward Renwick’s mother died he had the satisfaction of realizing that she passed out of the world forgetful of a remembered terror that had colored her thoughts as long as he could remember. His mother, left alone early in his life, had never once relaxed her vigilance over him. Now with her death he realized rather abruptly that no one remained to share the secret of what he knew.
Renwick himself knew it only as a matter of hearsay. His own memory did not extend to what they had called the Terrible Time, because then he had been little more than an infant.
His earliest days, he had been told, were like those of any other young child. It was not until he was two years old that The Change had begun.
He had always, since birth, slept more soundly than other children. Always his mother had been obliged to awaken him from a deep sleep like the inveterate slumbers of some young, hibernating animal. His growth had been regular, but slow.
They had always spent their summers at the ranch in those days. When he was two, just after they had arrived at the ranch, The Change began.
The child first lost his power of speech. His utterance became thicker, constantly, and less intelligible. Soon there remained only a few vague mutterings. Meantime he slept more and more soundly. It became correspondingly harder and harder to awaken him. His face began to grow expressionless, then repulsive. His skin became roughened and dry, and a waxy pallor overspread it. Wrinkles appeared on his forehead. The eyelids swelled. The nostrils flattened out, the ears thickened, and the fine baby hair, which had become harsh, like rough tow, fell out, leaving little pitiful bald patches. Then the child’s teeth, which were small and irregular, blackened rapidly.
Finally, before the eyes of the distracted young parents, many miles distant from any center of even crude civilization, the child seemed to be shrinking in size, and his hands and feet to be turning in.
Nothing comparable to this shattering affliction lay within the utmost bounds of their understanding or experience. For several weeks their changeling continued to deteriorate. Then, at the end of their resources, in despair the father rode the thirty miles to the nearest telegraph office and sent an urgent message to their New York physician. The urgency of the message assured the doctor of an unusual need. He arranged his practise and journeyed to his friend.
The doctor spent several days, greatly puzzled, watching the child, now grotesquely deformed. He no longer recognized his mother. No longer had he the energy to sit upright.
Then the doctor, armed with photographs and other results of his investigations, went back to New York to consult specialists.
He did not return to the ranch, but he explained at length the findings of those whom he had consulted. The child, they said, had become a cretin. This, explained Dr Sturgis, meant that there had occurred one of those mystifying cases of failure of a gland. It was one of the ductless glands, probably the thyroid, in the lower portion of the throat. All the ductless glands were connected in some mysterious way. They operated in a human being somewhat like an interlocking directorate in business. One was dependent upon another. When anything like this silent, internal cataclysm occurred, the nicely adjusted balance was disturbed, and the victim became a monster.
What were the chances? The doctors were of the opinion that the case was not, necessarily, hopeless. He sent a preparation of the thyroid glands of sheep with directions for their administration and for the child’s care. It was, further, the opinion of the specialists that so long as the child, if he recovered this time, continued to take thyroid, so long, in all probability, would he continue to grow and be normal. But they believed (all but one) that if the supply should be cut off, then that devastating process would repeat itself; and if the medication should be stopped, then the child would degenerate again until he had become a vegetative idiot. One doctor had been skeptical, Dr Sturgis wrote. He had approved the medication but had said that there was a possibility that the wasted gland might re-establish itself.
Confronted with the terrible alternative the doctor had described, it was no wonder that the young parents had made the daily capsule young Renwick’s first duty, had impressed this upon him in season and out of season. The treatment worked. Within a few days the child’s hands and feet were less cold. Other slight changes showed themselves daily. When three weeks had passed Edward was again noticing his surroundings. Gradually, through days and nights of anguished fears and a tentative, dawning hope, the young parents watched the return to normality. The child smiled, and attempted to play. He recognized his mother and father.
His growth became rapid. The remaining early teeth appeared and were firm, even, and white. A new growth of hair came in. By the end of summer the little boy was not only as well as he had ever been, but it was as though he had, in some magical fashion, been renewed. A new soul seemed to his mother to be looking out of his clear eyes.
In October, tremulous with thankfulness, they returned to their home in New York. Their friends commented freely on the child’s remarkable growth.
When his mother died, he was twenty-five, alone in the world; alone with his queer secret. He had health and strength, a keen mind and a vigorous body. He was indistinguishable from any normal person – from any other normal person, as he liked to phrase the matter to himself. He could do precisely what anyone else might do. He might even marry, provided that he never omitted his daily capsule!
There was no reason, even of ordinary convenience, why he should ever omit it. Thyroid was easily procurable in these days. One could buy it in tablet form in any good drug store.
It was less than a year after his mother’s death; he was twenty-six, when he became engaged to Marian. They were married five months later.
They had been drawn together by a community of tastes and interests. They possessed that indefinable happiness of being at ease with each other.
Among their common tastes was one that amounted to a positive longing – a yearning nostalgia for the sea. They discovered this very early in their acquaintance. They found that each had for long spent many hours on the Battery, smelling the smells of shipping,
watching the ships as they faded serenely into the mists of the lower bay on their way to the varied ports of the outer world.
The peculiar glamors of Joseph Conrad, and of old Samuel Baker; Kipling’s eery power to evoke a longing in his readers to go and join a ship’s crew – these and many other glimpses of sea-things had laid their several holds upon their imaginations. They envisaged in their day-dreams tropic moons and palm-ringed atolls. Creaming blue surf, and white beaches blazing against turquoise sea had, somehow, got into his blood.
Palms on blue sea’s edge of coral,
Driving gust and shrieking gale;
Scudding, spindrift, decks a-creaking,
Simoon’s breath on baking sands,
Buccaneers, and mission-compounds,
Wrecks, and death in distant lands.
It was little wonder that, with their imaginations so hugely intrigued by the sea’s fascination and its everlasting mystery, they had for their wedding journey engaged passage on the Kestrel. That was why they were in the South Pacific.
They satisfied each other profoundly, in a perfection of companionship for which the stanch old windjammer had proved to be the perfect setting. It was almost as though they had been born again, once their feet knew the swing of a deck. It seemed to them, like city-bred children drinking in the first invigorating, elusive breath of the salt sea, that it would always be impossible to encompass enough of that atmosphere. And if it was true that each felt this profound yearning for the breath of the salt winds stiffly glowing, it was true also that there ran through the fine fabric of their association something like a thin thread of somberness, almost of apprehension. It seemed to them too splendid and soul-filling to be true, or otherwise than the gossamer stuff of which dreams are made.
3
Not even a periodic missionary ever came to the tiny atoll. Most of its forty-four Polynesian inhabitants had had a hand at one time or another on the gunwales of the skiff when it was dragged through the surf of the inner reefs.
The ‘unseaworthy’ boat, the boat condemned as useless, had served Renwick and Marian well. Unconscious after that first mad ride away from the devils on the crest of a mountain of water, they had lain motionless, side by side in the boat’s bottom, and so kept her trimmed as wave after great wave had successively carried them on and on through the torn waters of the reefs to the shallows within reach of the islanders.
Renwick’s first half-conscious act when, from that fearful dream of grinding and hoarse cries of despair, and being smothered and hurled helplessly about, he awoke upon a pile of coco mats, was to reach into his pocket for the little metal box in which he carried his capsules. Then he thought of Marian, realizing dimly that he was, somehow, safe, and with a shudder, he reassured himself of her safety. She was sleeping peacefully, the sleep of utter exhaustion, on another pile of mats, near by. They were in a wattled hut. An intolerably bright sun was streaming through a low doorway and in at the lacelike interstices of the palm fronds that formed the roof.
He rose painfully to his feet, swaying with weakness, and took the little metal box out of his pocket and looked into it. There were eight of the capsules in the box.
Marian was safe. God be thanked! God was good, good, unbelievably good! Aching in every joint, Renwick stooped and passed out through the low doorway into the full, blinding glitter of the pouring sunlight.
A chirping mutter of many soft voices greeted him. The kindly islanders approached from every quarter. He saw them, bewilderedly, his hand shading his eyes from the glare.
A smiling woman placed a hat of plaited split grass upon his head. A fine, upstanding, elderly man addressed him in a strange parody of English, making him welcome. This native had been, it appeared, in the Paumotus. It was he who told what had happened: how they had come ashore; how the islanders had gone out through the surf to salvage an empty ship’s boat, driving in through the jagged reefs; how he and his vahine had been found in the boat’s bottom, ‘asleep’ side by side . . .
The rest of the Kestrel’s company had found their ‘death in distant lands’. Timber enough for several hut foundations was all that had come ashore.
Somewhere, out there beyond the distant farther reefs, lay the broken hull of the Kestrel; and somewhere within her submerged, inaccessible cabins, were the capsules that meant life . . .
He had eight. For one week and one day, then, he was safe. After that . . . A cold horror closed down upon him. He suddenly felt faint. Groping, overwhelmed, he re-entered the little hut. He threw himself down on the pile of mats. He covered his eyes with his hands. He tried to visualize what must happen. It had been dinned into his ears for a lifetime.
For a few days, perhaps even for a week or two, after he had taken all his tablets, there would probably be no perceptible change. Then he would begin gradually to slow down. He would find it harder and harder to awaken mornings. Then all that ghastly horror of degeneration would set in again. The new course of The Change would affect him, too, even more blastingly, if less rapidly, now that its victim was to be his adult and not his infant personality.
Marian! He groaned aloud, a groan choked suddenly by main force lest it disturb her sleeping peacefully over there on the mats in her corner of the little hut. He drew himself painfully to his feet and stood looking down upon her as she slept. It was like a farewell.
It was too much, this ravaging of all his hopes! This terrible fulfilment, in the very midst of his happiness, of all his life’s direst dreads! But he wasted little time in anything like self-pity. It was Marian who filled his thoughts. He could not tell her! In his present weakened state he visualized a frightful purgatory, stretching out before him, and before Marian, when that change of Hell should set in here on a stage from which he might not so much as step for respite into the wings; a stage upon which he must otherwise play out the part of his incredible degradation before her horror-stricken eyes. Better, far better, to destroy himself . . .
A fresh aspect of the horror loomed before him, blackly. As the terrible spell wrought itself out, his own mind’s powers would weaken, his faculties become numbed, and he would himself fail to understand the course of the disintegration that would be taking place within him. Then Marian, if unwarned beforehand, must witness with the same helpless terror that had set its mark on the lives of his young parents in those black days, his gradual and sickening change into Caliban . . .
4
Day by day he watched his capsules diminish. At the end of the sixth day, when only two were left, he suffered a revulsion. He would save these until some indications of the change appeared! When these came he would know of them before anyone else because he would be expecting them. In this way he would extend the period of his normality as long as possible, and then . . .
After that, life would be one growing terror concealed from Marian so long as his self-control should be left to him to exercise. Marian was occupied in alternations of sorrow over the loss of their shipmates and the eager happiness of a child confronted unexpectedly with an imagined paradise.
He went through one day without the thyroid: the first day within his recollection. The next day, at noon, engrained habit prevailing over his resolution, he took a tablet. The day following, after reasoning the problem out afresh, he swallowed his last tablet and flung the metal box far out among the creaming breakers of the nearest reef.
He stood, looking after it out to sea. Far beyond the breakers, beyond the great expanse of blue ocean which was their background, there swam into the scope of his vision the clear-cut outline of a spar. He lost it. He shaded his eyes with both hands against the intolerable glare. Again he picked it out standing up against the horizon. He wondered why he had not noticed it before. This was because, he reasoned, occupied with his introspections, he had glanced only indifferently out to sea. Besides, he had probably, he told himself, not looked in that precise direction. One looked out to sea from any spot on the tiny, almost circular, coral island.
Down under tha
t spar, if chance had been only reasonably kind, lay the hull which supported it, and in the hull reposed in small, watertight cartons the thyroids which meant life, sanity, Marian!
Then, as he looked, his heart bounding with hope, all his young instincts stimulated to vigorous action, he saw, very faintly and indistinctly at that great distance, the unmistakable sign of the sea-wolves of the South Pacific – the rakish dorsal fins of great sharks. He looked long at them as they moved about in the vicinity of the spar, and shuddering, he turned inland and walked back to the hut.
Here on the island there was no means of procuring even crude thyroid. There were no animals. The atoll was utterly self-contained. Its simple inhabitants subsisted on fruit and fish. There was no settlement within hundreds of miles.
He interviewed the English-speaking islander. It had been the chance of a ship’s crew putting in for water that had taken this man on his travels. Did such crews ever put in nowadays? Very seldom. Once in a year, perhaps, or two years – who could tell? The lull was a long chance. The sharks would go away when they had cleared up what was edible from the wreckage out there. At any rate there was the possibility of a solution out there; a solution first vaguely imagined, horrifically rejected, then avidly taken up again as Renwick tossed through the interminable tropic night on his coco matting, the night of the day on which he had taken his last capsule.
There was no help to be procured. He had sounded his friend the islander on the subject of summoning the men of the settlement with their primitive outriggers to go out there and loot the wreck. But the islander had said, indifferently, that there was no hurry about that. Some of it might come in anyway, as Renwick and Marian had come in, almost miraculously, through the jagged reefs. The sharks were thick out there now, and they would remain for some time. Time enough to go out there when they had dispersed and made it possible to dive! They might remain a week or a month. Who could explain the avidity or the patience of a shark? They would follow ships day after day in these seas, apparently subsisting on nothing, waiting! There was something in that wreck they were waiting for now, and they would remain until they got it. Besides, it was far, almost too far for outriggers!
Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) Page 21
