When I had finished: ‘Canevin,’ said he, gravely, ‘we are in a very tight place.’ He looked up at me still gravely, as though to ascertain whether or not I realized the situation he had in mind. I nodded, glanced at my watch.
‘Yes,’ said I, ‘I realize that, of course. It is five minutes to three. Wilkes has been gone up there, three-quarters of an hour. That’s one thing, explain it as you may. Neither of us can pilot a plane; and, even if we were able to do so, Pelletier, we couldn’t, naturally, go back to Belize without Wilkes. We couldn’t account for his disappearance: “Yes, Mr Commissioner, he went up a tree and never came down!” We should be taken for idiots, or murderers! Then there’s that – er – horde of Indians, surrounding us. We are hemmed in, Pelletier, and there are, I’d say, thousands of them. The moment they make up their minds to rush us – well, we’re finished, Pelletier,’ I ended these remarks and found myself glancing apprehensively toward the rim of jungle.
‘Right enough, so far!’ said Pelletier, grimly. ‘We’re “hemmed in”, as you put it, Canevin, only perhaps a little differently from the way you mean. Those Indians’ – his long arm swept our horizon – ‘will never attack us. Put that quite out of your mind, my dear fellow. Except for the fact that there’s probably only food enough left for one scant meal, you’ve summed up the – er – material difficulties. However – ’
I interrupted.
‘That mob, Pelletier, I tell you, there are thousands of them. Why should they surround us if – ’
‘They won’t attack us. It isn’t us they’re surrounding, even though our being here is, in a way, the occasion for their assembly down there. They aren’t in any mood to attack anybody, Canevin – they’re frightened.’
‘Frightened?’ I barked out. ‘Frightened! About what, for God’s sake?’ This idea seemed to me so utterly far-fetched, so intrinsically absurd, at first hearing – after all, it was I who had watched them through the binoculars, not Pelletier who sat here so calmly and assured me of what seemed a basic improbability. ‘It doesn’t seem to make sense to me, Pelletier,’ I continued. ‘And besides, you spoke just now of the “material” difficulties. What others are there?’
Pelletier looked at me for quite a long time before answering, a period long enough for me to recapitulate those eerier matters which I had lost sight of in what seemed the imminent danger from those massed Indians. Then: ‘Where do you imagine Wilkes is?’ inquired Pelletier. ‘Can you – er – see him up there?’ He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb, as artists and surgeons point.
‘Good God, Pelletier, you don’t mean . . . ?’
‘Take a good look up into the tree,’ said Pelletier, calmly. ‘Shout up to him; see if he answers now. You heard me do it. Wilkes isn’t deaf!’
I stood and looked at my friend sitting there on the grass, his ungainly bulk sprawled awkwardly. I said nothing. I confess to a whole series of prickly small chills up and down my spine. At last I went over close to the enormous bole and looked up. I called: ‘Wilkes! Oh Wilkes!’ at the top of my voice, several times. I desisted just in time, I think, to keep an hysterical note out of that stentorian shouting.
For no human voice had answered from up there – only, as it seemed to me, a now clearly derisive rustle, a kind of thin cacophony, from those damnable fluttering leaves which moved without wind. Not a breath stirred anywhere. To that I can take oath. Yet those leaves . . .
The sweat induced by my slight exertions even in the tree’s shade, ran cold off my forehead into my eyes; down my body inside my white drill clothes. I had seen no trace of Wilkes in the tree, and yet the tree’s foliage for all its huge bulk was not so dense as to prevent seeing up into every part of it. Wilkes had been up there now for nearly an hour. It was as though he had disappeared from off the face of the earth. I knew now, clearly, what Pelletier had had in mind when he distinguished between our ‘material’ and other difficulties. I walked slowly back to him.
Pelletier had a somber look on his face.
‘Did you see him?’ he asked. ‘Did he answer you?’ But, it seemed, these were only rhetorical questions. Pelletier did not pause for any reply from me. Instead, he proceeded to ask more questions.
‘Did you see any ants on the trunk? You were quite close to it.’ Then, not pausing: ‘Have you been troubled by any insects since we came down here, Canevin? Notice any at lunch, or when you took the lunch basket back to the plane?’ Finally, with a sweeping, upward gesture: ‘Do you see any birds, Canevin?’
I shook my head in one composite reply to these questions. I had noticed no ants or any other insects. No bird was in flight. I could not recall, now that my attention had been drawn to the fact, seeing any living thing here besides ourselves. Pelletier broke in upon this momentary meditation.
‘The place is tabu, Canevin, and not only to those Indians down there in the trees – to everything living, man! – to the very birds, to the ground game, to the insects!’ He lowered his voice suddenly to a deep significant resonance which was purely tragic.
‘Canevin, this is a theater of very ancient Evil,’ said Dr Pelletier, ‘and we have intruded upon it.’
After that blunt statement, coming as it did from a man like Dr Pelletier, I felt, strange as it seems, better. That may appear the reverse of reason; yet, it is strictly, utterly true. For, after that, I knew where we stood. Those eery sensations which I have mentioned, and which I had well-nigh forgotten in the face of the supposed danger from that massed horde of semi-savages in the forest, crystallized now into the certainty that we stood confronted with some malign menace, not human, not of this world, something not to be gaged or measured by everyday standards of safety. And when I, Gerald Canevin, know where I stand in anything like a pinch, when I know to what I am opposed, when all doubt, in other words, is removed, I act!
But first I wanted to know rather more about what Pelletier had in that experienced head of his; Pelletier, who had looked all kinds of danger in the face in China, in Haiti, in this same Central American territory, in many other sections of the world.
‘Tell me what you think it is, Pelletier,’ I said, quietly, and stood there waiting for him to begin. He did not keep me waiting.
‘Before Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, Canevin, and so set anatomy on the road to its present modern status, the older anatomists said that the human body contained four humours. Do you remember that? They were called the Melancholic, the Sanguine, the Phlegmatic, and the Choleric Humours – imaginary fluids! These, or the supposed combination of them, in various proportions, were supposed to determine the state and disposition of the medical patient. That was “science” – in the days of Nicholas Culpepper, Canevin! Now, in the days of the Mayo Brothers, that sort of thing is merely archaic, historical, something to smile at! But, never forget, Canevin, it was modern science – once! And, notice how basically true it is! Even though there are no such definite fluids in the human body – speculative science it was, you know, not empirical, not based on observation like ours of today, not experimental – just notice how those four do actually correspond to the various human temperaments. We still say such-and-such a person is “sanguine” or “phlegmatic”, or even “choleric”! We attribute a lot of temperament today to the ductless glands with their equally obscure fluids; and, Canevin, one is just about as close to the truth as the other!
‘Now, an analogy! I reminded you of that old anatomy to compare it with something else. Long before modern natural science came into its own, the old-timers, Copernicus, Duns Scotus, Bacon, the scientists of their day, even Ptolemy, had their four elements: air, earth, water and fire. Those four are still elements, Canevin. The main difference between now and then is the so-called “elemental” behind each of them – a thing with intelligence, Canevin, a kind of demigod. It goes back, that idea, to the Gnostics of the second and third centuries; and the Gnostics went back for the origins of such speculations to the once modern science of Alexandria; of Sumer and Accad; to E
gypt, to Phrygia, to Pontus and Commagene! That gust of wind, Canevin – do you – ’
‘You think,’ I interrupted, ‘that an air-elemental is . . . ?’
‘What more probable, Canevin? Or, what the ancients meant by an air-elemental, a directing intelligence, let us say. You wouldn’t attribute all this, Wilkes’s disappearance, all the rest of it, so far – ’ Pelletier indicated in one comprehensive gesture the tree, the circle of short grass, even the insectless ground and the birdless air – ‘to everyday, modern, material causes; to things that Millikan and the rest could classify and measure, and compute about – would you, Canevin?’
I shook my head.
‘I’m going up that tree after Wilkes,’ I said, and dropped my drill coat on the grass beside Pelletier. I laid my own sun-helmet on the ground beside him. I tightened my belt a hole. Then I started for the tree. I expected some sort of protest or warning from Pelletier. He merely said: ‘Wilkes got caught, somehow, up there, because he was taken off his guard, I should surmise. You know, more or less, what to expect!’
I did not know what to expect, but I was quite sure there would be something, up there. I was prepared. This was not the first time Gerald Canevin had been called upon to face the Powers of Darkness, the preternatural. I sent up a brief and fervent prayer to the Author of this universe, to Him Who made all things, ‘visible and invisible’ as the Nicene Creed expresses it. He, Their Author, was more powerful than They. If He were on my side . . .
I jumped for the limb up to which I had boosted Wilkes, caught it, got both hands around it, hauled myself up, and then, taking a deep breath, I started up among those still dryly rustling leaves in an atmosphere of deep and heavy shade where no breath of air moved . . .
I perceive clearly enough that in case this account of what happened to Wilkes and Pelletier and me ever has a reader other than myself – and, of course, Pelletier if he should care to peruse what I have set down here; Wilkes, poor fellow, crashed over the Andes, less than three months ago as I write this – I perceive that, although the fore-going portion of this narrative does not wholly transcend ordinary strangeness, yet, that the portion which is now to follow will necessarily appear implausible; will, in other words, strain severely that same hypothetical reader’s credulity to the utmost.
For, what I found when I went up the tree after Wilkes – spiritually prepared, in a sense, but without any knowledge of what I might encounter – was – well, it is probable that some two millennia, two thousand years or thereabouts had rolled over the jungles since that background Power has been directly exorcised. And yet, the memory of It had persisted without lapse among those semi-savage inhabitants such as howled and leaped in their agitation down there at the jungle’s rim at that very moment; had so persisted for perhaps sixty generations.
I went up, I should estimate, about as far as the exact center of the great tree. Nothing whatever had happened so far. My mind, of course, was at least partly occupied by the purely physical affair of climbing. At about that point in my progress upward among the branches and leaves I paused and looked down. There stood Pelletier, looking up at me, a bulky, lonely figure. My heart went out to him. I could see him, oddly foreshortened, as I looked straight down; his contour somewhat obscured by the intervening foliage and branches. I waved, and called out to him, and Pelletier waved back to me reassuringly, saying nothing. I resumed my climb.
I had got myself perhaps some fifteen feet or more higher up the tree – I could see the blue vault above as I looked straight up – when, quite as abruptly as that inexplicable wind-clap which had scattered our lunch, the entire top of the tree began suddenly, yet as though with a sentient deliberation, to constrict itself, to close in on me. The best description of the process I can give is to say that those upper branches, from about the tree’s midst upward, suddenly squeezed themselves together. This movement coming up toward me from below, and catching up with me, and pressing me upon all sides, in a kind of vertical peristalsis, pushed me straight upward like a fragment of paste through a collapsible tube!
I slid along the cylinder formed by these upper branches as they yielded and turned themselves upward under the impact of some irresistible pressure. My pace upward under this mechanical compulsion was very rapidly accelerated, and, in much less time than is required to set it down, I flew straight up; almost literally burst out from among the slender topmost twigs and leaves as though propelled through the barrel of some monstrous air-gun; and, once clear of the tree’s hindering foliage and twigs, a column of upward-rushing air supporting me, I shot straight up into the blue empyrean.
I could feel my senses slipping from my control as the mad pace increased! I closed my eyes against the quick nausea which ensued, and fell into a kind of blank apathy which lasted I know not how long, but out of which I was abruptly snatched with a jar which seemed to wrench every bone and muscle and nerve and sinew in my body.
Unaccountably, as my metabolism slowly readjusted itself, I felt firm support beneath me. I opened my eyes.
I found myself in a sitting position, the wrenching sensations of the jar of landing rapidly dissipating themselves, no feeling of nausea, and, indeed, incongruous as such a word must sound under the circumstances being related, actually comfortable! Whatever substance supported me was comparatively soft and yielding, like thick turf, like a pneumatic cushion. Above me stretched a cloudless sky, the tropical sky of late afternoon, in these accustomed latitudes. Almost automatically I put down my hand to feel what I was resting upon. My eyes, as naturally, followed my hand’s motion. My hand encountered something that felt like roughly corrugated rubber, my eyes envisaged a buff-colored ground-surface entirely devoid of vegetation, a surface which, as I turned my head about curiously, stretched away in every direction to an irregular horizon at an immense distance. This ground was not precisely level, as a lawn is level. Yet it showed neither sharp elevations nor any marked depressions. Quite nearby, on my right as I sat there taking in my novel surroundings, two shallow ravines of considerable breadth crossed each other. In one direction, about due south I estimated from the sun’s position, three distant, vast, and rounded elevations or hummocks raised themselves against the horizon; and beyond them, dim in the far distance, there appeared to extend farther south vague heights upon four gradually rising plateaus, barely perceptible from where I sat. I was in the approximate center of an enormous plain the lowest point of which, the center of a saucer-like terrain, was my immediate environment; the reverse conformation, so to speak, of the great circle about the tree.
‘Good God!’ said a voice behind me. ‘It’s Canevin!’
I turned sharply to the one direction my few seconds’ scrutiny had failed to include. There, not twenty feet away, sat Wilkes the pilot. He had found his jacket! He was wearing it, in fact. That, queerly enough, was my first mental reaction to having a companion in this weird world to which I had been transported. I noted at that moment, simultaneously with seeing Wilkes, that from somewhere far beneath the surface of the ground there came at regular intervals a kind of throbbing resonance as though from some colossal engine or machine. This pulsing, rhythmical beat was not audible. It came to me – and to Wilkes, as I checked the matter over with him later – through the sense of feeling alone. It continued, I may as well record here, through our entire stay in this world of increasing strangeness.
‘I see you have recovered your coat,’ said I, as Wilkes rose and stepped toward me.
‘No doubt about it!’ returned Wilkes, and squared his angular shoulders as though to demonstrate how well the jacket fitted his slender figure.
‘And what do you make of – this?’ he asked, with a comprehensive gesture including the irregular, vegetationless, buff-colored terrain all about us.
‘Are we in the so-called “fourth dimension”, or what?’
‘Later,’ said I, ‘if you don’t mind, after I get a chance to think a bit. I’ve just been shot into this place, and I’m not quite oriented!’ Then
: ‘And how did you manage to get yourself up here? I suppose, of course, it’s up!’
There is no occasion to repeat here Wilkes’s account of his experience in the tree and later. It was identical with mine which I have already described. Of that fact I assured Wilkes as soon as he had ended describing it to me.
‘This – er – ground is queer enough,’ remarked Wilkes. ‘Look at this!’
He opened his clasp-knife, squatted down, jabbed the knife into the ground half an inch or so, and then cut a long gash in what he had referred to as the ‘ground’. In all conscience it was utterly different from anything forming a surface or topsoil that I had ever encountered. Certainly it was not earth as we know it. Wilkes cut another parallel gash, close beside his first incision, drew the two together with his knife at the cut’s end, and pried loose and then tore up a long narrow sliver. This, held by one thin end, hung from his hand much as a similarly shaped slice of fresh-cut kitchen linoleum might hang. It looked, indeed, much like linoleum, except that it was both more pliable and also translucent.
‘I have another sliver in my pocket,’ said Wilkes, handing this fresh one to me. I took the thing and looked at it closely.
‘May I see yours?’ I asked Wilkes.
Wilkes fished his strip out of a pocket in that soiled silk jacket and handed it to me. He had it rolled up, and it did not unroll easily. I stretched it out between my hands, holding it by both ends. I compared the two specimens. His was considerably dryer than mine, much less pliable. I said nothing. I merely rolled up Wilkes’s strip and handed it back to him.
‘I’ve stuck right here,’ remarked Wilkes, ‘ever since I landed in this Godforsaken place, if it is a place, because, well, because there simply didn’t seem to be anything else to do. The sun has been terrific. There’s no shade of any kind, you see, not a single spot, as far as you can see; not any at all on the entire damned planet – or whatever it is we’ve struck! Now that you’ve “joined up”, what say to a trek? I’d agree with anyone who insisted that anything at all beats standing here in one spot! How about it?’
Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) Page 36
