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

by Henry S. Whitehead

  ‘I sat there, and just sweated. I remember putting my face between my hands, my elbows on the table, and feeling just plain sick at heart.

  ‘There was something hopeless, grim, really dreadful about it.

  ‘And then, down beside me on a chair dropped this fellow who had been glowering at me, and a big, thick, guttural voice, such as would go naturally with that gross body, was speaking to me.

  ‘He was civil enough. His name was Fernando Lopez. He was the first mate of the Bilbao, just arrived in Santander harbor, expecting to clear for Buenos Aires three or four days from then.

  ‘Lopez proposed that we, being the only persons of quality in the inn, should take our meals together. The man sickened me. His mere presence, the fact that he existed, had a most devastating effect upon a set of otherwise sound and untroubled nerves.

  ‘I told him that I was painting and required as much time to myself, including meal-times, as I could get, without social engagements or interruptions! I spoke, of course, with a civility equal, at least, to his. I imagined that any Latin would understand that refusal. They instinctively respect any kind of an artist, as everybody knows.

  ‘But it had no effect on Fernando Lopez! He was the grossest, the most thick-skinned individual you could possibly imagine. Nothing could daunt the fellow, put aside or deter the tremendous admiration my work – he had seen me painting on the wharves, he alleged; had looked more than once on tiptoes over my shoulder – had inspired in him. He would take no refusal.

  ‘There was no shaking him off, you see. Try it, literally, I mean, with a person entirely impervious to snubs, silence, direct statements of one’s unwillingness to associate with him and anything else you can think of to get him out from under one’s feet, and you’ll see what I mean.

  ‘In and out of season, this Old-Man-of-the-Sea hung on my flank, so to speak! He was always beseeching me to come on board his vessel to visit him. Well, I’ll make it short, as I said I would.

  ‘The morning of the day the Bilbao was to clear from Santander, about seven o’clock, I found my money-belt gone. Fernando Lopez, too, was gone. He would be on board very early, I figured, getting ready for the ship’s departure, and I had found out that she was to sail about eight o’clock. I suspected no one else. I hurried down to the docks and went on board.

  ‘There he was, waiting for me, his ugly grin which I had grown to hate and loathe, heavily in evidence. I charged him flatly with the theft. He made no bones about it, said he had taken the money-belt out of my room about five that morning, had it down in his cabin, was ready to give it back to me – no, not a joke – a device to get me to visit him; his last resort. He was quite frank about these statements.

  ‘I went down to his cabin with him, thoroughly disgusted. But, of course, I had to get that money-belt back. All I had with me was in it.

  ‘He stood aside at his cabin door with an elaborate gesture of courtesy which made me squirm internally, and I walked in and he after me, and the next thing I knew, after the blow which he struck me over the head with a blackjack or something of the sort, was coming to in a berth, my hands ironed, and a head that ached and throbbed so that I could barely move.

  ‘The rest of it is simple enough, until we came in sight of St Thomas three days ago. I was sweated and hazed through a period that is like a black nightmare. I was forced to sign on with two men – one of them Lopez – holding my hands. I was given extra watches.

  ‘The captain, an old man named Chico Perez, was Lopez’s uncle. He left everything to his nephew, who was cock of the walk on board the Bilbao.

  ‘They ironed me again the day we put into Buenos Aires. Lopez was taking no chances on my jumping the ship and reporting him, you see. And, two days after we had cleared from there, the old captain disappeared. I have no doubts in my own mind about what happened to him. Lopez probably broke his neck, or knifed him, and threw the body overboard.

  ‘That fact, I imagine, saved me. You see, the entire crew had sailed with the old man, who was a part owner of the ship, for voyage after voyage. Lopez, as I well knew from the conversations among the members of the crew, was strongly suspected of having made away with him. He commanded the Bilbao now, and he did not, I think, quite dare to risk something like a mutiny if another member of the ship’s company “disappeared” in the same manner. Otherwise, I haven’t the slightest doubt, I’d have had the same treatment.

  ‘We made four or five other South American ports, Cartagena last of all, and then we were to put in to St Thomas for coal. This was the first American port of the voyage. I plucked up a little hope. It wouldn’t have done very much good even if I could have made my escape in one of the other places. We Americans are anything but popular down below there, as you know. Here it would be different. I did some figuring and kept my own counsel.

  ‘We were actually in sight of St Thomas when I got my chance, according to what I had planned out.

  ‘It was about five o’clock in the evening, four days ago. I was on deck, and we had just made our landfall. Lopez, and a member of the crew carrying the irons, came towards me across the deck. I had always submitted before. This time I took him by surprise. I simply waited until the two of them had got within a few feet of me, and then without warning I landed as hard as I knew how on Lopez’ jaw.

  ‘It knocked him over flat on the deck, but what would have been a clean knockout for a normal man, had little effect on his brute vitality. He was up like a rubber ball, and at me, a knife in his hand and a look of deadly hatred on his beast-face such as I had only faced once before – back there in the Ludekta arena, Canevin, before Godbor.

  ‘I figured that it was all up with me now, and I was fixing to go over on my back and try to catch him amidships with a double-footed kick as my only possible chance, when I felt a knife-hilt thrust into my hand. It was the fellow who had been carrying the irons.

  ‘Then, enormously heartened, I crouched and met Lopez’ attack.

  ‘I’ve described two fights already this evening. I’m not going into the particulars of this one beyond saying that I got Lopez across the arms with my first slash, sideways as I ducked that first rush of his; and I must have severed a tendon, for he slowed and paused and shifted his knife into his other hand.

  ‘I was on him like a cat at this opportunity. I was fighting for my life, and I knew it, and knew besides that I could expect no quarter.

  ‘I simply plunged at him, and struck, and felt the long, keen knife go home in soft flesh, and I sliced with it, and felt his great brutal body relax and then – he was lying on his back, cut clean across the stomach, and a great ooze of blood spreading over the deck.

  ‘I stood there, looking down on the havoc I had made, and became conscious that four or five of the Bilbao’s crew were gathered nearby looking on. Neither of the remaining ship’s officers was in sight, one being on the bridge and the other probably asleep between watches. Then I began to be conscious of the comments from the crew members.

  ‘ “It was well and quickly done!” “He can ‘disappear’ like old Chico, as well as not.” “He is where he put old Chico – the sine verguenza!! Saco la mandonga!! The Gringo has cut the tripe out of him!!!”

  ‘I felt the knife being quietly withdrawn from my hand, and the fellow who had passed it to me remarked, in my ear – “As well that I take it back now, Señor, and clear it of that hog’s blood. You will not need it further, Señor!”

  ‘And then, with many a furtive glance for possible witnesses other than the five or six like-minded fellows who had seen the disposal of Fernando Lopez, that person’s hulking carcass was quietly heaved overboard, and a dozen pails of water effectually cleansed the deck of his coagulating blood.

  ‘Nothing whatever was done to me, or even said to me. I have no doubt the officer who automatically succeeded to the command of the Bilbao made some kind of innocuous entry in his logbook. There was no report, and no investigation after they reached their anchorage in St Thomas Harbor, so far as I
know.

  ‘I had gone straight down to Lopez’s cabin after the money-belt, got it, put it on, and come back on deck. I knew exactly where it was, you see, because Lopez had sent for me to his cabin half a dozen times, and taken it out, and gibed me about it during the past couple of months.

  ‘It was the easiest possible affair to come ashore here. No one stopped me or even questioned me. I imagine that that ship’s family was only too glad to get rid of the fellow who had relieved them of Fernando Lopez. The rest of it you know, Canevin. I might add that I haven’t the smallest possible regret over “removing” Lopez. If those “ancestral memories” of mine are authentic, I have killed before, but never in “this life”, certainly. There isn’t a single qualm! And if there’s any poetry in justice, as some imagine, it’s interesting to note that Lopez got the same wound that finished me there in the arena, delivered by his double, maybe twelve thousand years ago.’

  Joe Smith sat silent, and I sat across from him and looked at him. The only thing I could think of to say seemed an incongruity after what I had listened to that day! However, by some strange perversity, the question I had on the end of my tongue, however irrelevant, would not down. Almost desperately, I blurted it out.

  ‘What is your real name, Smith?’ I enquired.

  The fellow stared at me.

  ‘Joe Smith,’ said he.

  ‘O.K.,’ said I. ‘I’ll put your money in the safe and we’ll go to the bank with it in the morning.’

  ‘Good-night, Canevin, and thank you again,’ said my guest.

  I saw him out, and picked up the money-belt from the table and carried it over to my old-fashioned, wrought-iron West Indian house-safe which stands in the corner of my bedroom and opens and locks with an enormous key with elaborate filed wards.

  I opened the old safe and was about to lay the belt inside when I felt something rough against my hand. I turned it about and looked. A name was embossed upon the fine pigskin leather of the other side. I held it up to the light to read it. I read:

  ‘Josephus Troy Smith.’

  I put the belt inside and closed and locked the safe.

  Then I came back and sat down in the chair wherein I had listened to my guest’s recital of his recent adventures aboard the Spanish tramp steamer Bilbao.

  Josephus Troy Smith. It wasn’t so vastly different from ‘Joe Smith’, and yet what a different viewpoint that full name had given me! Josephus Troy Smith, as most of the cultivated world is aware, is America’s foremost landscapist. Josephus Troy Smith was a modest chap. I realized that, now. ‘I have only one polite accomplishment,’ he had said, when he was explaining what he was doing there in northern Spain. A polite accomplishment!

  Well, at any rate I had one on Pelletier, and I knew whom I was having the honor of entertaining here in my house on Denmark Hill, St Thomas, Virgin Islands of the U. S. A. Perhaps he would become interested in St Thomas, and stay awhile and make some paintings. Anyway, there were all the colors in the rainbow here, and there is no brighter sunlight in all the world.

  ‘ – In Case of Disaster Only’

  It was not Sir Austin Fynes, who occupied Suite A with his stout wife, a trained nurse who had given up the training, who told us the story. Sir Austin Fynes uses affairs like thought-transference every day in that ‘mental-and-nervous’ practice of his which had made him the light of Harley Street, that physician’s paradise of London. No, it was a quiet big fellow who, as so often happens in such cases, had sat over to one side of the ship’s smoking-room, at one of the separate, small tables beside a mug of beer which he had allowed to grow stale, listening to the rest of us. The big fellow was a native West Indian, with an accent you could cut with a knife, a Barbados brogue. He was ‘in sugar’; or, maybe – now that cane isn’t so good any more what with the Tariff and Beetroot, and the German bounty, ‘in mules’; or perhaps ‘in’ what is commercially known in the market as ‘Cuban beef’.

  That big fellow got off the ship early the next morning, and I, for one, never even learned his name. He got off at St John, Antigua, where, I dare say, he lived, and bossed his plantation-hands, and rode around his plantation early mornings, and ate fresh-killed tough meat and drank too-strong tea after noon, alternated with swizzels of antique rum.

  It had been the subject of telepathy on which our talk had turned towards midnight. It was about last-order time, when the smoking-room steward makes his final rounds to see what you’ll take before he locks up his little cubby-hole of a bar with its swizzel-stick and its green limes, and its staple of Prunier for the French-Island passengers and the even more numerous British calls for ‘B. & S.’s.’

  Sir Austin had contributed his bit, about the therapeutic use of ‘suggestion’ in mental-and-nervous and ‘borderline’ cases. The whole field had been pretty thoroughly covered, in fact. Even I had put in a word or two. I’m no scientist but I had read my Laws of Psychic Phenomena by Thompson W. Hudson, Ph.D. Some book, that one! Gives you pretty much all the dope. Shows, incidentally, what’s ‘Science’ and what’s just merely plain blah. Lot of people wouldn’t know the difference, I dare say, me for a good example! The big fellow hitched around in his chair when that midnight lull came, and started in in his big beefy, British voice.

  ‘Do any of you chaps by any chance know Reuter, in St Thomas – Clinton Reuter? No? Sorry. An exceedingly good chap, Reuter. In 1926 he was in the States, and was rather hastily summoned back to St Thomas. Took the first ship he could get – sailed that same afternoon in rather a rush. It was a tramp, carrying a few pasengers – the Bonaventure.’

  Then, the big fellow, having caught everybody’s attention, went on to tell what happened to Clinton Reuter on that voyage from New York to St Thomas, in the Virgin Islands. St Thomas is the first port of call going ‘down the Islands’ from New York. We had been there two days before. It’s about the best-looking town in the Lesser Antilles, way ahead of the rest of them, although Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados, and Port-of-Spain down on Trinidad are a lot bigger and a lot busier.

  It was some story, and the big fellow told it right: very simply. It was the only real story we had had that evening, although there had, of course, been a number of instances brought up, as there always are when people get together on a subject like telepathy.

  I’m not reproducing the English-West Indian’s yarn. It would be a dialect-story, for one thing, with that brogue of his, and besides, I didn’t believe the big fellow’s yarn for sour apples. I handed it to him for a well-told tale, coming in on that general conversation at precisely the right time to click and get a lot of plausibility in such a setting. It didn’t, to tell the truth, impress me, otherwise.

  And then, seven months afterwards, by a kind of dumb luck I came back on the Bonaventure myself.

  Mr Sills, who had been the Third Officer on Reuter’s voyage, was still with the ship. He was Number One now. That company operated a number of vessels, it seemed, and followed a policy of shifting its men around, Captain Sills told me.

  That wasn’t all the genial young Captain told me, however, sitting evenings in his pleasant cabin over a jugfull of mild Martinique rum swizzel with plenty of lime juice in it. Of course, I told him what the big West Indian had told us in that brogue of his, and Sills, one of the least superstitious seamen I have ever encountered, came back at me that the West Indian had not altered the facts in one single particular; had not stretched the plain truth; had not been pulling our leg that night in the smoking-room.

  Here, then, is the story.

  When Reuter stepped across the sill of his stateroom on the Bonaventure the first thing he saw was a sign, which read:

  Alarm-Bell – To Be Used In Case of Disaster Only

  When this Bell Rings, Go On Deck At Once

  Just above the sign was a gong, painted white with ship’s paint. Reuter had never seen just such an arrangement, and when the steward, just behind him with the hand-luggage, spoke, he had to repeat himself because Reuter had his eyes on the si
gn and had to pull them away, as it were!

  He had a large stateroom to himself. He stowed his luggage, put on a cap, and went up on deck. He took an overcoat, too, it was late October and chilly. He stood up on deck and watched the last of the lading.

  The stevedores, like bees, swarmed above and below the opened hatches. The winches creaked and groaned incessantly to the usual accompaniment of various bellowed directions, commands, and counter-commands. Both the forward hatches had already been closed because the lading forward had been finished. Now the First Officer, a chap named Pollard, was driving the work aft. A cold wind blew up the Hudson River where the ship was docked.

  Reuter looked on at all this, and, I dare say, anyone watching him might have supposed him immensely interested. But, as a matter of fact, he had been at sea a good bit and such affairs were an old story to him. His mind was really in St Thomas. He looked at the maneuvers of two tugboats which hovered out in the river off the Bonaventure’s stern, flannel-shirted captains with peaked caps aslant over their eyes leaning nonchalantly out of their respective pilot-houses, spinning the great wheels as though negligently, jockeying skillfully about among the thick and varied traffic of the river.

  Only that morning he had received Morrison’s letter from St Thomas. Morrison was his partner. When he had grasped its purport he had dropped everything else abruptly, hurriedly telephoned to the steamship office, and cabled Morrison of his sailing at once. It was his singular good fortune that there happened to be this vessel sailing late that afternoon. Because of that stroke of luck he would be able to arrive in St Thomas at the end of six days, even though the Bonaventure was no more than a slow tramp which carried passengers only incidentally. There had been no time to await a reply to his cabled message; cables had to be relayed through Porto Rico. Morrison should, of course, have cabled him in the first place instead of writing. The mails were very slow. Perhaps, though, poor old Morrison had not realized the gravity of his own condition. Reuter had been obliged to use his instinct over that letter. The information it contained and his knowledge of the tropics and of Morrison all had conspired to make him realize the necessity for this hastily undertaken voyage.